Urban Transport Community of Practice

Blog » April 20, 2015 - Operationalizing Accessibility.pptx

April 20, 2015 - Operationalizing Accessibility.pptx

Created May 07 2015, 8:35 AM by Rodica Tomescu-Olariu
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How Does Your Project Serve the Urban Poor

April 20, 2015

Event presentation
We present a series of talks that highlight the use of data in innovative ways that support transport planning. Tatiana and Holly will present open source tools the Bank has developed that make sure of open data standards and provide insight on transit service levels and consequent impacts on accessibility.  Results of initial analysis from Ulan Bator, China, Cairo, Nairobi and across Latin America will be used to frame a discussion of how the practice can incorporate geospatial data on poverty, jobs and transport into project planning and implementation. Professor Marta Gonzales will present analysis of mobile phone data in the case of Rio de Janeiro. 
Talks will include:
Holly Krambeck: *Open Transit Indicators*
92% of the world's 25 largest low and low-middle income cities do not have complete maps of their transit networks. As the Bank works with these cities to overcome this substantial barrier to meaningful transit planning and service provision, a new challenge arises: in resource-constrained cities that do not have a tradition of using maps to plan transit, once they receive these maps, what they do with them? Traditional GIS and transport planning software packages cost thousands of dollars and require substantial technical expertise to use. To help cities understand how effectively their systems are meeting accessibility needs and how their service provision compares to services in other cities, the Bank team has been developing a free, user-friendly tool -- Open Transit Indicators -- which can be quickly deployed and used by Bank counterparts as they take their first steps towards modern transit network planning.
Tatiana Peralta Quiros: * The accessibility tool*
Accessibility analysis is an essential element of understanding cities and public service delivery. In urban transportation, 'accessibility' refers to the ease with which an individual can access opportunities (e.g. employment, health or education services), given the spatial distribution of the city (land use), the transportation infrastructure and services available (transportation supply), the temporal constraints of individuals and activities, and the individual characteristics of people. Accessibility offers a powerful lens to assess how a mobility system is serving an urban area, but until recently had been extremely hard to calculate. The Open Trip Planner Analyst (OTPA) Accessibility tool now allows us to easily calculate this metric. This tool utilizes the road network (from OpenStreetMap), and transit attributes (structured as a General Transit Feed Specification ), to calculate the travel times from every origin destination pair in the city. Comparing this measure across parts of a region allows a powerful visualization of the extent of spatial inequality; and it also serves as a benchmark to assess the impacts of an intervention such as a mass transit investment and to compare urban areas.
Professor Marta Gonzales:  *Using Mobile Phone data for transport planning*
Mobile phone call detailed records (CDR) data are emerging as a potentially transformative data source to support a range of planning and management analysis.  Marta will show the results of analysis in Rio de Janeiro based on open protocols  that use CDRs to create an origin destination matrix as well and use this as the basis for analysis that focus on the travel patterns of the poor.
Presenters/Speakers
Moderator:
Shomik Mehndiratta, Lead Urban Transport Specialist/Urban Mobility GSG's Lead, GTIDR
Chair and Discussant:
Jose Luis Irigoyen, Director, Transport and ICT GP
Speakers:
Marta Gonzalez is Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She works in the area of urban computing, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal to design urban mobility solutions and to enable the sustainable development of smart cities. Prof. González has injected new tools into transportation research and is a leader in the emergent field of urban computing.  She received a licentiate in physics from Universidad Simon Bolivar. She holds a magister scientiarum in physics from the Central University of Venezuela in 2001 and a Ph.D. in physics (Dr. rer. nat) from Stuttgart Univarsität.
Holly Krambeck is a Senior Transportation Economist working in the East Asia & Pacific region, where she leads a diverse investment portfolio of urban and rural transport projects. She also leads the region's Open Transport initiative, leveraging low-cost ICT solutions to increase the planning and management capacity of resource-constrained transport agencies. Prior to joining the Bank, Holly worked as an infrastructure economics and finance specialist with Parsons Brinckerhoff, an international civil and environmental engineering firm, where she was task lead and project manager for transport infrastructure projects in the US, East and Southeast Asia, and in Central America. Holly holds a Master of Science degree in Transportation and a Master's degree in City Planning, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Tatiana Peralta-Quiros is a Junior Professional Associate in the Global Urban Unit. In the Bank, Tatiana has been working in urban mobility and sustainable cities, as well as big data and spatial analytics.  Tatiana graduated from MIT's Civil and Environmental Engineering School Master program in Transportation. While pursuing her Master's Degree, she worked in the Transit Lab, focusing in the urban systems, and land use and transport models. Tatiana also has a BA in Applied Mathematics in Urban Planning from Harvard University. Most of her work in the Bank and prior has been focused in Latin America, East Africa, Europe and North America.