funded by

Accessibility & User Needs in Transport for Sustainable Urban Environmentsaunt

sue www.aunt-sue.info

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AMELIA A Methodology for Enhancing Life by Increasing Accessibility

Introduction Many of the needs of everyday life are met through accessing local services such as shops, health facilities and visiting friends. The level of access to them can have a significant impact on the quality of life. The barriers to access may be related to micro-level infrastructure, cost or distance. Local authorities need to be able to demonstrate that their policies are helping to increase social inclusion. AMELIA (A Methodology for Enhancing Life by Increasing Accessibility) is a software tool that will enable planners to test explicitly that their policies do increase social inclusion.

What is AMELIA? AMELIA is a user-friendly policy-oriented interface to a GIS (Geographical Information System). It includes availability of modes of travel (car, bicycle, walk, and public transport), trip purpose, socio-economic differentiation, travel time and travel cost. The tool can be used to establish how many people meet accessibility benchmarks, defined elsewhere in the AUNT-SUE project, with and without policy interventions.

Walking distance (m)

100

200300

funded by

auntsue

January 2010AMELIA

Who is AMELIA for? AMELIA has been developed in co-operation with the Environment Department of Hertfordshire County Council to ensure that its design meets the needs of transport planners, and that it can address the sorts of questions that they need to answer in formulating their plans and setting up policies. AMELIA has also been applied to Tower Hamlets, London, and discussions have been held with other local transport authorities to ensure that the tool transfers to other areas.

How is AMELIA used? The user chooses the policy objective being considered from a series of menus and then selects appropriate actions that may help to achieve that objective. For example, it might be to increase the accessibility of a certain area for elderly people. Actions to achieve this could include installing dropped kerbs at all crossing points and placing benches at regular intervals throughout the area. In this example, the tool would then determine how many elderly people are consequently able to

access the area in terms of the benchmarks. These specify the amounts of time or money that are regarded as ‘reasonable’ for reaching a particular type of destination. In determining the effect of a policy, the tool makes use of a data base containing information about the population of the area with their various characteristics, and information on the pedestrian and other transport networks. The data base also includes information on the local area in terms of the opportunities available (shops, health facilities, leisure facilities, etc). AMELIA reports the number of people with the characteristics specified who are able to reach the opportunity within the benchmark in the form of table or map. The key elements are shown below.

What next?We intend to make AMELIA available to local authorities and others. Before this can happen, some further work is required to refine the user interface and ensure that the tool is bug free. We also need to identify the best mechanism for doing this.

For further details www.aunt-sue.info rlm@transport.ucl.ac.uk

Policy objective

Data on the population in a socially excluded group

Data on the local area (transport networks, opportunities, etc)

Policy actions to achieve the objective

Analysis of the impact of the actions

Changes in the number of socially excluded people meeting the benchmarks

The elements of the policy analysis tool, AMELIA

Benchmarks