This website contains links to resources which are used in measuring and monitoring access to services in the UK. It also provides links to international resources describing best practice in planning accessibility
- What is accessibility
- How accessibility is measured
- Audit changes in accessibility to ensure fairness with links to reports and maps
What is Accessibility?
Accessibility is the ability of people to reach places and services and the ability of places to be reached by people and goods.
Separate planning for people, places or transport and connections will not necessarily ensure good access. A combined approach is needed to ensure that all of the barriers to access are overcome. Good planning of accessibility checks that everyone has the ability to reach the services and closes all identified gaps. These approaches are used by:
- Service providers, who plan access to ensure that customers and service users can reach their locations.
- Transport operators and digital service providers, who plan access to ensure that their networks cover as many people as possible.
- Government, who ensure that everyone in society can reach essential services and enable action to protect everyone’s needs.
The three main components of access are affected by many factors:
- People: Ensuring there are opportunities for all people. Do people know where things are? Do they feel safe? Do they have the skills to travel?
- Transport and other connections: All of the types of transport needed to make a door to door journey and digital connections enabling access to opportunities.
- Places: All of the places where services are located with land use planning often being used by government to ensure all needs are being met. Services placed at locations the local population can reach are often described as accessible.
When people, services and transport have been interacting well together then access has usually been improving. Digital connections have been expanding rapidly also improving access to selected services. However for too many people in too many places access has been declining. Without action to challenge many growing trends in the economy and society access will continue to decline, harming quality of life for many people and widening inequity.
How Accessibility is Measured
The simplest measure of accessibility is travel time to the nearest location of a service. Travel time is also often used as a proxy for travel cost, but for trips including bus, tram and rail or where there are road tolls then travel cost also needs to be considered separately
- Travel time indicates the general convenience of making a journey. Calculations vary in complexity, from applying a set speed to the shortest path through a network, to the use of public transport timetables.
- Other factors may be relevant to access such as physical barriers crossing roads, the safety of the journeys and the availability of information in affecting an individual’s perception of journey difficulty.
- For access to comparable services the nearest location can be used to represent choice. However, hospitals do not all offer the same treatments, and shops do not all offer the same quality of product. Choice can be represented by weighting the opportunities available and factoring by the travel cost and time.
Accessibility analysis is commonly broken down into three types of measure:
- Access for people to services such as retail, healthcare, education and employment.
- Access of places to ensure that destinations are attractive with well planned connections.
- Connections between people and places which can be by physical journeys or electronic virtual connections. The physical journeys are considered door to door and can use any combination of modes of transport relevant to the capabilities of the traveller. Key distinctions in measurement of accessibility are: between people with and without a car available, physical capabilities, and safety.
There can be no one single measure of accessibility. The population is diverse and all people’s needs are important. In practice a basket of commonly used accessibility measures is used to identify the most important accessibility problems.
Accessibility Audits
From the mid-2000s, central government departments in Britain in Scotland, England and Wales started to check changes in accessibility over time using digital mapping. Initially this was delivered through the accessibility domains of the Scottish and Welsh indices of multiple deprivation and the English core national accessibility indicators. As the range and choice of digital mapping techniques has evolved, a growing range of indicators have been published to measure different aspects of accessibility aims. The most widely used metrics continue to be the journey times to destinations, measured using various route choice software solutions.
The use of accessibility data is now mandated in every policy and planning decision in the UK from planning a new coffee shop to a major new health facility. Accessibility data is also widely used by people and across commerce and industry including:
- Helping people choose where to live to ensure good access to jobs and services:
- Guiding house builders where to build new homes to ensure high quality lifestyles with good access.
- Informing specialist public service providers about where to locate services such a hospitals and colleges.
- Helping retailers to ensure opportunities for customers to their services.
There are many requirements in law and guidance that require consideration of accessibility:
- Local authority development planning decisions must report what accessibility changes would occur with requirements for developers to demonstrate improvements in access.
- Health authorities must report on the equity of access to their services to demonstrate a comprehensive service to all of society.
- Education authorities must monitor changes in access to ensure that all people can access education.
For further details of the raw data data available, previous published analysis, and how to obtain custom accessibility analysis, see:
Who We Are
This website is written and maintained by the team at DHC – Loop Connections.
We undertook the bulk of the accessibility data processing and analysis for Department for Transport, Welsh and Scottish Governments between 2000 and 2010 and as the analysis tools became widely available, helped these government departments to develop their in-house monitoring arrangements.
About DHC projects Where our technologies have been deployed Loop Connections Contact Us.