SECTION 2: How to measure urban accessibility

The purpose of this section is to show how to calculate urban accessibility estimates in R using the {r5r} and {accessibility} packages.

Calculating accessibility levels in a study area involves two major steps: first, we need to calculate a travel cost matrix between the origins and destinations of this area; next, we calculate the accessibility from each origin, taking into consideration the transport costs between origin-destination pairs and the number of opportunities in each destination. In this section, we will learn how to execute both of these steps using the R programming language. We will also learn about the data required in each step and the pros and cons of the different methods that can be used to generate accessibility estimates.