Exploring mobility of care with measures of accessibility

Abstract

Accessibility, the ease of interacting with potential opportunities, is an increasingly important tool among transport planners aiming to foster equitable and sustainable cities. However, in accessibility research there is a historical focus on employment destinations that is shaped by a masculinist transportation planning tradition. This paper aims to counter this gendered bias by connecting the Mobility of Care framework, a gender-aware transport planning conceptualisation to an empirical accessibility analysis of care destinations in the City of Hamilton, Canada. Care destinations are all the places one must visit to sustain household needs such shopping, errands, and caring for others. This paper considers access to care across different modes of transport at two travel time thresholds (trips shorter than 15-min and 30-min) using a curated care destination dataset. The accessibility methods used includes the cumulative opportunities measure and a competitive and singly-constrained accessibility measure (spatial availability) for different modes. Overall, results indicate that accessibility by car is exceptionally high across the city, while access by public transit, cycling and foot is relatively low with some exceptions in the inner city. Notably, there are distinctions between both methods: cumulative opportunities illustrates a more optimistic potential interaction landscape for non-car modes, while the spatial availability measure demonstrates a theoretically more realistic spatial distribution of care destination availability of potential interaction. Neighbourhoods with both low spatial availability to care and a high proportion of low-income households are also identified and discussed as areas in need of intervention. The manuscript and analysis is computationally reproducible and openly available. The presented analysis demonstrates methods planners can use to apply a gender-aware lens to accessibility analysis. Further, results can inform policies aiming to encourage sustainable mobility.