Accessibility and Centrality for Sustainable Mobility: Regional Planning Case Study

Abstract

Accessibility is a widely discussed theme, approached by several disciplines, such as geography, urban and land-use planning, and transportation. This study assesses the relevance of accessibility for sustainable mobility planning and examines the existing analogies with the concept of centrality—a consolidated issue in social science, geographic and land-use modeling, and, more recently, intensively used in social-network analysis and transport-network analysis. Centrality measures the relative importance of nodes in a network, but it can be evaluated from different perspectives. In fact, different indexes are available to measure different ways for a node to be central. This paper also examines recent innovations in accessibility modeling and suggests improvement by proposing a new accessibility measure. This paper uses both traditional and lesser-known measures to analyze a case study, considering both accessibility and centrality indexes with the aim of investigating their potential correlation, efficacy, and suitability to support an integrated land-use and transport-planning approach.