Evaluating the accessibility of social housing by sustainable travel modes: a study in Poznań, Poland

Keywords: Accessibility, Sustainable transport, Social housing
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

A shortcoming of many public housing programs is a lack of quality standards ensuring an equitable level of access to opportunities. Public housing projects tend to be driven by the minimum cost principle, resulting in constrained location choices. Improving the integration of transport and land use planning is particularly important in such cases. Poor accessibility may push lower-income residents to choose cars instead of travel means with lower environmental impact, undermining the sustainability objectives central to many cities' transport agendas.
The paper proposes an approach to evaluating affordable housing projects based on accessibility by sustainable travel modes. The approach relies on the following three criteria: (1) versatility: it should be possible to include multiple travel modes and multiple destination types, (2) comparability: it should be possible to compare the accessibility of public housing projects to the accessibility of housing units sold on the market, (3) replicability: there should be a replicable framework, including the use of open data and open-source software whenever possible. The proposed framework is applied to evaluate social housing projects in Poznań, the fifth-largest city in Poland (532,048 residents).
Results show accessibility gaps between low-income social housing and market-rate housing in all four investigated scenarios. Further, gaps tended to be wider when assuming less-than-optimal conditions of the transport systems (i.e., off-peak public transport frequency or cycling only on streets with a low level of cycling stress). Thus, it is crucial to identify such conditions considering the context of a transport system under investigation and include corresponding scenarios.