China: urban accessibility planning support systems with a case study in Wuhan

Increasing accessibility bringing people, opportunities and goods within easy reach of each other has always been the fundamental role of cities. In the past, policy makers often analyzed the transport system using metrics that focused on mobility the ease of movement in a city. The most prominent of these metrics is congestion, often expressed as the ratio of road speeds between congested and uncongested conditions.

A recent Brookings Institution report on accessibility aptly summarizes the shortcomings of this metric in analyzing the performance of the urban transport-land use system. Clearly, using mobility metrics that focus on travel speeds alone tends to exclude a crucial component of urban system dynamics the interactions between the land use functions and the transport systems in a city. Several policy scenarios along these lines of particular pertinence for the pilot city of Wuhan were analyzed as part of this study.

Accessibility metrics that consider both the ease of movement on the transport system and the corresponding number of destinations reached are not entirely new. This project is the latest in a series of research efforts that the Bank has supported in recent years that focus on measuring accessibility in Chinese cities. First, the World Bank supported analytical work that compares pedestrian access to jobs and commercial opportunities in the central business districts of Beijing, London and New York. This document is a brief summary of the latest work completed in this series.

The document provides a description of a pilot project in Wuhan, China to demonstrate the value of accessibility metrics in the urban planning decision making process, including a description of the tools used and policy lessons generated. The primary purpose of the exercise was to demonstrate the practical applications of these tools for use in understanding transport/land use dynamics in World Bank client cities.

World Bank.Document Date 2011/11/16. Document Type ESMAP Paper.Report Number 65620. Volume No 1 of 1

Urban accessibility planning support systems with a case study in Wuhan, China