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Transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing the Bay Area today. To build good transit, the discussion needs to focus on what matters -- quality of service, a range of transit riders, the role of buildings, streets and sidewalks, and, above all, getting transit in the right places.

Evidence from the public health sector demonstrates that health care is only one of the determinants of health, which also include genes, behavior, social factors, and the built environment. These contextual elements are key to understanding why health care organizations are motivated to focus beyond their walls and to consider and respond in unprecedented ways to the social needs of patients, including transportation needs. In June 2016 the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a joint workshop to explore partnerships, data, and measurement at the intersection of the health care and transportation sectors. This publication summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

The issue of access is at the forefront of the practical challenges facing people with learning difficulties and people working with or supporting them. This engaging text brings together evidence, narratives and discussions that question and advance our understanding of the concept of access for people with learning difficulties. Seale and Nind draw on their expertise to analyse a wide range of situations, including access to public spaces, citizenship education, community participation, and employment. Through a series of related chapters, key researchers in the field of inclusion and learning difficulties enrich the access debate by: considering what kind of access people with learning difficulties want; identifying effective practice in relation to facilitating and promoting access; revealing the capability of people with learning difficulties to seek and achieve access to potentially exclusionary communities; providing a space for a wide range of people to share access stories. With contributions from a variety of stakeholders including people with learning difficulties, Understanding and Promoting Access for People with Learning Difficulties clarifies the concept of access without over-simplifying what is involved. Through rigorous critique, this book provides a unique rationale for a new multi-dimensional model of access and ways of promoting it. Proposing a reconceptualisation of the risk associated with promoting access for people with learning difficulties, this book will be of immense interest to students, researchers and professionals involved in inclusion and disability issues. Selected Contents :1. Why the interest in access and learning disability? (Melanie Nind and Jane Seale) ACCESS TOOLS AND PROCESSES 2. Access in mind: a review of approaches to making ideas and information accessible (Jan Walmsley) 3. Creativity, Control and Communication: the use of life-story work as a tool to facilitate access (Ann Aspinall and Kate Gascoyne) 4. Access all areas: The use of symbols in public spaces (Chris Abbott and Cate Detheridge) ACCESS ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES 5. Building bridges and bonds: Promoting social inclusion (Roy McConkey) 6. It’s my heritage too: Developing participatory methods for promoting access to heritage sites (Jonathan Rix) 7. No Looking back (Gary Butler) ACCESS EXPERIENCES 8. Taking a leap of faith (Mary Waight and members of the Bracknell advocacy group) 9. We don’t need protecting (Darren Grant, Wayne Taylor and Drew Bradley from Choice Advocacy, supported by Judith Clayton and Claire Royall) QUESTIONS OF ACCESS 10. Promoting access to community and participation: What role can citizenship education play? (Hazel Lawson) Jane Seale and Melanie Nind both work in the School of Education at the University of Southampton. Both Jane and Melanie have a strong track record of publishing in the area of inclusion and learning disabilities and of publishing edited works with Routledge and other publishers.

Addis Ababa is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, yet is constrained by poor accessibility of city bus services. This paper examines the factors affecting the accessibility of Anbessa City bus service in Addis Ababa through an analysis of the stakeholders' opinions. An exploratory research approach was taken, using in-depth interviews with the city bus transport regulators and Anbessa city bus transport service enterprise. The study found that inadequate infrastructure, poor transport operation and ineffective performance of stakeholders have resulted in inaccessible service to the users. Addressing the expectations of users necessitates engagement of modern public transport operation; strengthening the regulatory mechanisms and (traffic) law enforcement system; acquisition of skilled human, technology and materials resources; and attraction of private operators through different incentive mechanisms.

Background It is estimated that nearly five billion people worldwide do not have access to safe surgery. This access gap disproportionately affects low-and middle-income countries (LMICs). One of the barriers to healthcare in LMICs is access to transport to a healthcare facility. Both availability and affordability of transport can be issues delaying access to health care. This study aimed to describe the main transportation factors affecting access and delay in reaching a facility for health care in Malawi. Methods This was a multi-stage, clustered, probability sampling with systematic sampling of households for transportation access to general health and surgical care. Malawi has an estimated population of nearly 18 million people, with a total of 48,233 registered settlements spread over 28 administrative districts. 55 settlements per district were randomly selected for data collection, and 2–4 households were selected, depending on the size. Two persons per household were interviewed. The Surgeons Overseas Assessment of Surgical need (SOSAS) tool was used by trained personnel to collect data during the months of July and August 2016. Analysis of data from 1479 households and 2958 interviewees was by univariate and multivariate methods. Results Analysis showed that 90.1% were rural inhabitants, and 40% were farmers. No formal employment was reported for 24.9% persons. Animal drawn carts prevailed as the most common mode of transport from home to the primary health facility - normally a health centre. Travel to secondary and tertiary level health facilities was mostly by public transport, 31.5 and 43.4% respectively. Median travel time from home to a health centre was 1 h, and 2.5 h to a central hospital. Thirty nine percent of male and 59% of female head of households reported lack financial resources to go to a hospital. Conclusion In Malawi, lack of suitable transport, finances and prolonged travel time to a health care centre, all pose barriers to timely access of health care. Improving the availability of transport between rural health centres and district hospitals, and between the district and central hospitals, could help overcome the transportation barriers to health care.

The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is an open standard format for recording transit information, utilized by thousands of transit agencies worldwide. In this study, a new tool named GTFS2STN for converting GTFS data into the spatiotemporal networks is introduced. To analyze the travel time variability, it is important to transform a transit network to a spatiotemporal network to enable a comprehensive analysis of transit system accessibility. GTFS2STN is a new tool that converts General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data into spatiotemporal networks, addressing the lack of open-source solutions for transit analysis. The tool includes a web application that generates isochrone maps and calculates travel time variability between locations. Validation against Google Maps APIs shows that journey time (i.e., the summation of the transit time, walking time, and waiting time) differences in the Mean Absolute Percentage Error are typically within 12%. A before–after analysis shows that for the transit journey time in 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee, 8 out of 10 pivotal bus stops showed a significantly decreased journey time compared with the case of 2019. A further set of before–after analyses shows that although journey time between transit sites significantly dropped on May 2020 during COVID-19 emergencies, the journey time almost totally recovered to the before-COVID-19 level by November 2020. By supporting any valid GTFS schedule, GTFS2STN enables the analysis of historical and planned transit systems, making it valuable for long-term accessibility assessment and travel time variability studies.

Since ride-hailing has become an important travel alternative in many cities worldwide, a fervent debate is underway on whether it competes with or complements public transport services. We use Uber trip data in six cities in the United States and Europe to identify the most attractive public transport alternative for each ride. We then address the following questions: (i) How does ride-hailing travel time and cost compare to the fastest public transport alternative? (ii) What proportion of ride-hailing trips do not have a viable public transport alternative? (iii) How does ride-hailing change overall service accessibility? (iv) What is the relation between demand share and relative competition between the two alternatives? Our findings suggest that the dichotomy—competing with or complementing—is false. Though the vast majority of ride-hailing trips have a viable public transport alternative, between 20% and 40% of them have no viable public transport alternative. The increased service accessibility attributed to the inclusion of ride-hailing is greater in our US cities than in their European counterparts. Demand split is directly related to the relative competitiveness of travel times i.e. when public transport travel times are competitive ride-hailing demand share is low and vice-versa.

The 15-minute city concept has gained momentum as an urban planning strategy to enhance livability, inclusiveness, and sustainability by ensuring that essential services are within a short walk or bike ride from home. However, while hyper-proximity is often promoted as desirable, its potential side effects on spatial segregation and social exclusion remain underexplored. In this paper, we propose a network-based analytical framework to investigate whether hyper-proximity models — such as the 15-minute city — may inadvertently reinforce spatial segregation by shaping service accessibility and urban transport connectivity. We model cities as complex spatial networks, quantify accessibility using the distribution of relevant Points of Interest (PoIs) and employ closeness centrality as a proxy for connectivity across multiple scales, from residential addresses to network-derived clusters and entire cities. Our results show that areas with better access to services generally exhibit higher connectivity and vice versa. However, this tendency is uneven when looking at socio-demographic factors. Some neighborhoods, particularly lower-income ones, experience both lower accessibility and weaker connectivity. In contrast, certain higher-income neighborhoods display low accessibility and limited connectivity, suggesting patterns of voluntary isolation. These findings indicate that hyper-proximity alone does not guarantee inclusiveness and may mask underlying socio-economic inequalities.

Rapid urbanization and car dependency have transformed Riyadh into a sprawling metropolis, straining mobility, sustainability, and land use efficiency. Investments in metro and Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems present an opportunity to shift toward transit-oriented development (TOD), making strategic urban planning essential. This study assesses Riyadh’s TOD potential by analyzing its urban structure, transport accessibility, and regulatory framework while drawing lessons from successful global models. This study applies GIS-based spatial analysis, policy review, and AI-driven clustering techniques (e.g., DBSCAN, K-Means) to evaluate TOD readiness and inform actionable strategies for Riyadh. The findings indicate that transit investments alone are insufficient due to gaps in zoning policies, pedestrian connectivity, and urban density. Enhancing compact, mixed-use developments, improving first- and last-mile accessibility, and leveraging AI-driven planning can reshape the city’s mobility ecosystem and foster sustainable urban growth. Vision 2030 provides a pivotal opportunity to align infrastructure investments with urban planning policies, ensuring Riyadh evolves into a modern, efficient, and transit-friendly city.