Abstract Manager

Introduction

L’ Autorité Régionale de Transport Métropolitain (ARTM), is finalizing its Strategic Development Plan (PSD), which establishes a vision for sustainable mobility for 2050. This vision is materialized by a set of quantitative indicators based on a variety of data, facilitating the definition of clear planning objectives. ARTM, like many other metropolitan planning organizations, face challenges in planning for accessibility due to the absence of suitable tools that can effectively tackle the transportation network design problem.

One of the guiding principles of the PSD is the necessity to focus each action on people’s specific mobility needs with a spatial and socio-economic lens to reduce social inequities.

Producing quantitative indicators to pursue this guiding principle is a sizeable challenge. Indeed, such indicators must simultaneously be substantial enough to measure the complex reality of socio-economic vulnerability, but they must also be easy to interpret and comparable in time. Classical indicators such as the Canadian Index of Multiple Deprivation offer only partially satisfactory solutions because they do not have an absolute or meaningful measurement scale.

We are presenting an innovative indicator of socio-economic vulnerability that can be easily used in urban planning. We are also presenting a joint analysis including two recently developed indicators of spatial accessibility to public transit and jobs, and stress the valuable insights obtained by these indicators for planning purposes.

Methodology

The socio-economic vulnerability indicator is an estimation of the number of potentially vulnerable people in the cells of a grid determined by a 250m resolution. It is obtained by constructing a synthetic potentially vulnerable population at the dissemination area level, followed by a spatial desegregation step. The accessibility indicators are calculated using the same spatial scale. They measure the quantity of public transit service closely accessible in space and time as well as the competitivity of public transit versus car-to-jobs. The presented indicators rely solely on open data and software and can be easily applied to every Canadian metropolitan area.

Results

The joint analysis of the three indicators gives a multi-scale assessment of the distribution of public transit service to the general and potentially vulnerable population. The results can be used to identify areas needing priority attention but also to evaluate the impacts of future projects (new infrastructure, higher frequencies, bus network redesign, etc.). Moreover, they are easy to interpret and time-comparable, making them practical tools for planning and target monitoring.