This document summarizes Naomi Stein's presentation on assessing accessibility in Appalachia. It discusses defining accessibility, identifying the key aspects of accessibility that matter most for economic development based on interviews, and developing a framework to measure core types of accessibility for businesses and people. The framework focuses on accessibility to jobs, education, healthcare and other destinations using different transportation modes. It also discusses accounting for broadband access and the needs of multimodal and carless users. The document concludes by discussing next steps, including developing maps and tables of accessibility metrics and getting feedback on how this data could support stakeholders' work.
Thank you for that introduction. I’m happy to be here today to discuss one of my favorite topics, accessibility. Specifically, I’ll be sharing with you the research done to date in a project called Access in Appalachia that EDR Group, my firm, is conducting in cooperation with the Appalachian regional commission.
First, I want to acknowledge Ryan Brumfield at ARC along with his colleagues for recognizing the importance of accessibility to the long term success of communities across Appalachia.
I also want to acknowledge the research team on this project who have worked alongside me.
So my goals for today –At the end of this presentation, I’d like you to be able to answer these questions
What is accessibility, why does it matter
How can it be defined in such as way as to be responsive to the needs of different user groups
We’re going to offer a framework for defining and measuring access, and a vision for how to implement that
We are in Phase I of this research, so I’ll talk about where we are but also critically, where do we go from here.
So let’s start at the beginning – what is accessibility? It’s a word that gets thrown around quite a bit
And it’s both attractive and elusive because it means many things to many people
A few quotes up there---
It’s about opportunities for interaction
The ability to reach activities
Matching individual capacities with the physical environments to make sure people and businesses can do the things they need to do
Fundamentally, it’s a way of asking – []
Now as I said, it’s a lot of things to a lot of people, so how do we get concrete about this?
Up here are the three fundamental dimensions that comprise any accessibility definition
The user group – access for whom, and implicitly from where in space. Embedded there is if you are trying to understand aggregate access for all, or would like to analyze specific subgroups of businesses or populations – we’ll talk more about that later.
Next and this is what most people think about most – the attractions or destinations that are important.
And finally, the performance of the transportation network – can you get there? By what mode? How easy or hard is it? Are there thresholds beyond which things are just too far away?
This is an illustration of three common measurement approaches used to implement accessibility
Contour measures count al the activities reachable within a given threshold – say jobs within 30 minutes. Contour measures are easy to explain, visualize, and communicate, but they can be very sensitive to how you define your boundaries and could cause you to ignore far away but still relevant opportunities – this can be an issue in rural areas in particular
Next are potential or gravity type measures. They still count relevant opportunities, but now closer ones are given more weight than those that are far away. This is usually defined by a decay function related to observed behavior showing how far people are willing to go for different trip purposes
Third are what we’ve called nearest destination or sufficiency metrics. This can be useful for destinations where you really only need 1 – that is, more options don’t deliver more value. Trauma centers are a good example of this.
We’ve talked about what access, now let’s talk about why we want to measure it
This table is specific to the Access in Appalachia project, but there would be a similar logic in most places
Evaluating access can help you see deficits or look at comparative performance of different places which can help prioritize where resources go
As a concept, it can help to better align economic and transportation prioritizies
In Appalachia in particular, it is important to highlight a perspective that looks beyond just access to jobs to other key inputs to economic development, as well as beyond just access by car – this is particularly true for those with very limited resources and for the rapidly aging population of much of Appalachia
Here we start the process or trying to define – if it’s not just about jobs, what is most important for economic development?
I don’t expect you to read this chart in detail. It’s here so I can describe our process which was to start with an inventory of kinds of access that come up, particularly in the economic development literature
Next we went right to the source – to assess which of those types of access are regarded as most important by practitioners with on-the-ground knowledge of the needs of people and businesses across Appalachia
We did a series of interviews and then classified what we heard into a structure that gave us direction on relative priorities
From there, we narrowed down to some core perspectives that we and ARC are taking forward
Businesses rely on access to labor, access up and down supply chains (considering good movement between buyers and suppliers, as well as the potential for firm to firm interactions on the passenger side). Some businesses also depend on their ability to ship goods directly to end consumers. Finally, in an increasingly globalized economy, intermodal connectivity is key to maintaining long-distance connects, particularly rail, ports, and airports
Most people also depend on job access to support themselves and their families. Education is not only a right, but an important enabler of economic participation. Similarly with health care. You’ll done that in the current context, we’ve added a particular focus on addiction treatment, in response to what we heard in our interviews. Town centers on this list is serving as a proxy for a variety of retail and services that are important to everyday living. Finally, tourist destinations are economic generators in their own right and so merit special consideration.
At the end we have broadband internet as something that is increasingly important to businesses and people, which we’ll talk a bit more about later.
The other important decision of this project was to focus first on things that matter the most while still providing the room or framework to recognize complementary metrics that might also be useful
The core metrics are designed to best pair destinations or types of access with the user groups that rely most on that access – in this example access to jobs for the primary working ages of 18 to 65
I’m going to walk you through definitions of these core metrics
So core access for business – that categories in the middle are the same as before, but now we flesh out which types of businesses rely most on a particular type of access– recognizing that different industries need different things
And also getting more specific about the kind of data that should be used to describe the destinations.
Labor is important to all industries, and we are suggesting a focus on those with an associate’s degree or higher
Supply chain connections – access to other businesses – is represented by employment counts. There are two core metrics – one for manufacturing businesses specifically which addresses the need for freight connectivity up and down the supply chain, and one for all industries, that is more focused on firm-to-firm collaboration potential through passenger travel.
Trade & warehousing industries care most about access to end consumers
Freight rail and coastal ports are key for freight-oriented industries
And airports provide both passenger and freight connectivity and thus are important to all industries
Similarly on the population side
Some things like education access to retail and services in town centers are universal
Others are most relevant to certain age groups
How this is implemented is for example if you evaluate a region’s accessibility to colleges, that score can be given greater weight when comparing to other regions if there are more people between the ages of 18-24 in that location.
The other important piece per ARC’s priorities is the suggestion to include in the framework complementary measures for each of these where access is analyzed specifically for those in poverty. Mapping results in that case would show areas of need both on the level of access, and the # of people living in poverty who encounter that access.
Finally, the framework incudes broadband access as an additional dimension that can help bridge gaps where physical access is poor. While telework, telehealth, and remote education do not meet all needs, they are not even possible without a minimum level of broadband connectivity speed, as outlined in this table.
The other core dimension of our approach is to consider both car access and access for those without cars
The default in Appalachia still starts with the car for most people
But then it’s key that we look into the distribution of carless or carpoor households – by that I mean households who have fewer cars than driving adults
And so there is a population for whom non-car accessibility is critical
Transit availability is still a challenge in terms of data availability, but it’s something ARC is working on
Let me end with where we go from here
We’re wrapping up Phase 1 of Access in Appalachia which is meant to define what is worthwhile to analyze and how you could get to a vision of an interactive mapping and accessibility metric system like that shown on the screen
That vision, would then have to be implemented in a Phase 2
For the audience – let me first say that we absolutely want to hear from you. If something caught your attention today or if there is a way this kind of data could help your work, we want to hear about it
Second, if all of this just made you impatient to get started on accessibility evaluation within your own region or state, I have put up a few possible starting points – in particular, there’s a lot of good work being done by states and MPOs, and I’m happy to share some of the information we’ve collected on the state of practice, just reach out to me. Also, don’t be afraid to just start somewhere. Want to focus on understanding a specific type of access, or access for a particular group? Start where the need is most in your community, but keep in mind the multifaceted nature of how access relate to economic development that we’ve discussed today.