Comparative accessibility for mobility management: The structural accessibility layer

Urban mobility problems, such as congestion, have been threatening the quality of life and the competitiveness of urban areas as well as their sustainable development. The need to integrate land use and transport policies has been widely recognised as an important approach within the 'predict and prevent' paradigm for mobility management. Nevertheless, such integration is seldom put into practice. The lack of design support tools is pointed out as one of the reasons for this fact. The accessibility concept is believed to provide a useful framework to support the design of integrated land use and transport policies. This thesis hypothesises that measures of comparative accessibility by transport mode can operationalise the accessibility concept for this purpose. In order to test this hypothesis, a design support tool was developed, based on a measure of comparative accessibility -- the Structural Accessibility Layer (SAL). The usefulness of the tool, and thereby of comparative accessibility, was tested. The testbed is composed of the application of the tool to a case study and of expert interviews evaluating that application. The case study provides insight into its potentials as design support tool for integrated land use and transport policies. Expert interviews enable the assessment of the robustness, usefulness and applicability of the tool. The results of the testbed suggest that the SAL provides a useful operational form of the accessibility concept for design support. The use of comparative accessibility has clearly a key role in the ease of understanding and design support abilities of the SAL. This research concludes that measures of comparative accessibility by transport mode seem to provide a useful design support framework for integrated land use and transport policy, shedding light on the sustainability of potential mobility enabled by land use and transport conditions.