NYU Urban Seminar: Tatiana Peralta-Quirós on Urban Accessibility

On September 1st, the NYU Urban Seminar series, co-hosted by the NYU Furman Center and the Marron Institute, kicked off with a presentation by Tatiana Peralta-Quirós, an urban mobility and technology specialist with the World Bank. She presented her work on urban mobility, employment accessibility, and spatial analytics, as well as the new ways the World Bank has been using data to understand urban transportation projects. 

The World Bank is currently exploring the potential benefits of transportation improvements for people around the world with incomes at the bottom 40 percent. Since people who earn the lowest incomes tend to live in cities that do not have standard data collection systems in place, these data limitations pose a research challenge. Peralta-Quirós’ work focuses on operationalizing an accessibility measure envisioned in Alain Bertaud’s earlier work: The share of jobs the average person can access in a city within a specified travel time.

For a number of cities in developing countries, the World Bank has worked to collect data characterizing the public transit infrastructure, which can be merged with existing data on road networks, residential locations, and employment centers. Where transit network information is not well-documented, or where informal transportation is common, students are hired to ride around on buses, using the GPS on their phones to record the locations of all stops.

Peralta-Quirós provided a demonstration of the open source software that she and her colleagues use to measure employment accessibility by transportation mode in a number of cities around the world. Users can click on a point on a city map, specify a travel time, and see the number of jobs that would be accessible from that point. Because this is an open source tool, users can upload and overlay their own maps and data together with the data that the World Bank has already collected, using their underlying engine to do quick computations of tailored accessibility measures. The tool can be found online at https://analyst.conveyal.com.

A video of Tatiana Peralta-Quirós’ NYU Urban Seminar presentation can be viewed here.

The NYU Urban Seminar series is co-hosted by the NYU Furman Center and the Marron Institute. The speaker series is focused on research with implications for urban policy, and features a variety of researchers from across the U.S. discussing their work. Sign up for future talks here: http://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events

Additional resources:

How does this investment help accessibility for this metropolitan area’s poorest 40 percent? (World Bank Blog)

How does accessibility re-frame our projects? (World Bank Blog)

Accessibility analysis of growth patterns in Buenos Aires, density, employment and spatial form (Transportation Research Journal)