Accessibility as an indicator to estimate social exclusion in public transport

Accessibility is one of the key measures of urban transportation planning, which quantify how easy is the access to a facility. Public transport accessibility concerns of the access level of geographical locations to public transport. In this paper, accessibility is used as an indicator to estimate social exclusion based on the maximum distance that someone has to walk to reach the public transport. The concept of the 6-minute walking distance (6MWD) is applied to measure accurately the walking ability for different groups of the population. A real life case study is conducted to get insight into the transportation network of the Porto Metropolitan Area, Portugal. For this purpose, geographic, demographic and infrastructure data were collected and integrated. Also, webservices are used to measure walking distances between locations. The results of this study allowed to characterize regions by different levels of accessibility, providing insight into the social exclusion in public transport. This assessment is used not only to identify inequities but also to get an overview of the service quality of public transport.