Joint Accessibility Design

In both the scientific and the professional communities, the need to integrate transport and land use policies to achieve more sustainable mobility patterns is widely recognized. Three challenges to attaining integrated strategies are identified. The first challenge is to find a common language and concepts that stimulate communication between disciplines. The second challenge is to create more explicit links between broader economic, social, and environmental goals and transport policies. The third challenge is to put more emphasis on policy design, the phase in the planning process in which opportunities for policy integration are maximal but which is poorly supported by current transport planning approaches. Accessibility is a concept that can address all three challenges. It relates to features of the transport system (speed, travel costs) as well as the land use system (densities, opportunities) and can be related to wider goals within society (for example, access to jobs). A well-known and well-studied concept within the scientific literature, accessibility is nonetheless not often used. This paper develops a framework to stimulate the joint design of accessibility-enhancing strategies, and the framework is then tested and developed in cooperation with practitioners in two case studies in the Netherlands.