Intro to Accessibility Calculator
Go to the Accessibility Calculator
This calculator contains a database of the “accessibility” of over 1400 Bay Area neighborhoods. Accessibility refers to the number of destinations – jobs, schools, medical facilities, etc – which can be reached from a neighborhood in a given amount of time. Accessibility is affected by the location of a neighborhood, the quality of the various transportation connections (roads, highways, buses, trains) to and from it, as well as the location of the various destinations.
This calculator allows the user to choose a neighborhood or group of neighborhoods to see how many destinations can be reached in 15, 30, or 45 minutes by automobile and public transit from those neighborhoods. It also calculates a composite number, based on the automobile ownership in the chosen neighborhoods. For example, for a neighborhood where all households have automobiles, the composite would equal the number of reachable destinations by automobile, while for a neighborhood where half of households have automobiles, the composite would be an average of the number of reachable destinations by automobile and by public transit.
After these numbers are presented, a statistical test is performed to see if the group of neighborhoods of interest to the user is significantly different from all of the neighborhoods in the Bay Area. The T-score is the result of the test, and a larger absolute T-score (positive or negative) means the difference is more significant.
The user can choose neighborhoods to analyze in three ways: 1. by choosing a specific neighborhood, 2. by choosing all neighborhoods with a specific racial/ethnic composition, or 3. by choosing all neighborhoods with a specific poverty level or share of households with no vehicles.