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Active Mobility Accessibility Index - Assessing Local Transport Competitiveness

Lookup NU author(s): Tom Komar, Professor Philip JamesORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

© 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.

Publication metadata

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

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