Accessibility Planning Partnership
What is accessibility planning?- Accessibility is the product of the relationship between: the location of key facilities, services and opportunities; the means and characteristics of the population that needs or desires to access them; and the travel options available to facilitate this.
- Accessibility planning is a way of local authorities working with other organisations to find and solve local accessibility problems, checking whether people can reach the services they need, such as employment, education, healthcare, food shopping and leisure facilities, and identifying action to take if they cannot. The development of this work is set out in an Accessibility Strategy document.
- The concept of accessibility planning was introduced in the Social Exclusion Unit’s report Making the Connections (Feb 2003) which sets out the relationship between transport, accessibility and social exclusion and puts forward a cross government strategy for improving access to essential services.
- Accessibility planning aims to promote social inclusion by tackling accessibility problems experienced by those in disadvantaged groups and areas by focusing on access to those opportunities that are likely to have the most impact on life chances.
- Improving accessibility to jobs and essential services helps to meet national and local objectives including promoting social inclusion, economic regeneration and welfare to work, reducing health inequalities, and improving participation and attendance in education.
Nottingham City and Nottinghamshire County Councils are now hosting the results of accessibility analysis as mapped travel-time contours on NOMAD and as travel-time performance indicators on NOMAD+. As well as feeding into the Councils’ planning decisions and policy documents - such as the Accessibility Strategy for Greater Nottingham it should also inform partnership work and provide a resource base for other interested parties.
- This Partnership Zone features journey-time accesibility mapping, performance indicators and associated information and data relating to the following key themes:
- Access to employment
- Access to education
- Access to healthcare
- Access to shops
- Access to leisure facilities
- These maps and indicators provide a snapshot of access to key services in Greater Nottingham. Accessibility mapping and analysis can also be tailored to meet your specific needs and can help to plan more effective service delivery and better co-ordination of resources
- For more information about accessibility analysis and how this could be used to inform the development of your projects from strategic decision-making through to the detailed planning stage, please contact us
- Analysing the accessibility of service locations can help to evidence decisions relating to service planning, provision and development, by providing indicators of how quickly and easily defined destinations can be reached, by what travel modes and by whom. This can assist in the appraisal, planning and implementation of service and facilities provision wherever locational accessibility is a consideration.
- Geographical Information Systems (GIS) software can play a vital role in this analysis, drawing on transport, land use and socio-economic data to enable levels and differences of accessibility to be calculated. Analysis results can be mapped as journey time, distance or cost contours around a service location (or locations), enabling areas of high or low accessibility to be seen at a glance. Geodemographic information such as Census data can also be incorporated to produce statistics and performance indicators relating to various population sectors.
- Accessibility can be analysed using GIS at varying levels of sophistication. Analysis using data on available transport networks (roads for walking, cycling and driving; and public transport services data) allows close replication of the journeys that people will make from their homes (origins) to service locations such as healthcare, education, employment, retail, leisure and other key facilities, services and opportunities (destinations).
- Accessibility analysis can be carried out for past, present or proposed combinations of origin(s), destination(s) and transport network(s). Various parameters can also be set within the GIS software to better replicate ‘real life’ journeys: this can include the time of day or day of the week that a journey is to be undertaken, the mode of transport, or how far an individual should be required to walk (e.g. to a bus stop) as part of their journey.