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Lookup NU author(s): Tom Komar, Professor Philip JamesORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2026 Copernicus GmbH. All rights reserved.Active Mobility Accessibility Index (AMAI) quantifies the competitiveness of walking and cycling relative to driving using travel-time and distance ratios on identical sampled origin-destination pairs, reflecting network structure rather than destination choice. AMAI combines time parity and distance parity in a simple diagnostic score, using equal weights as a default specification for interpretation and policy use. Applied across the five Tyne and Wear local authorities, it demonstrates that cycling is more competitive than walking against driving. The median origin-level cycling AMAI is 0.820 and the median walking AMAI is 0.645. Parity remains limited where the share of origins at or above parity is 10.0% for cycling and 1.7% for walking. Initial API-based tests suggested that time-of-day effects are limited for the short local trips studied here, supporting development of a scalable in-house routing workflow for the main analysis. Validation against OA-level Census 2021 mode shares, with controls for terrain gradient and commute-distance composition, suggests that AMAI captures a relevant behavioural signal, while its main value lies in diagnosing local network competitiveness for policy and planning.
Author(s): Komar T, James P
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Year of Conference: 2026
Pages: 259-266
Online publication date: 10/07/2026
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 03/08/2026
ISSN: 2194-9042
Publisher: Copernicus Publications
URL: https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-4-2026-259-2026
DOI: 10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-4-2026-259-2026