Isochronic Singapore: Hawker Centre Accessibility Index
Keeping score.
Introduction
· A Gentle Introduction to Isochrone Maps
Analysis
· Tuas West Extension
· Downtown Line Failure
· Hypothetical Line Failures
Appendix
· Hawker Centre Accessibility Index
Demo
· Isochronic Singapore
Inspired by Conveyal’s work on assessing accessibility within cities, I thought that I would have a look at accessibility in Singapore. Conveyal’s approach is to focus on accessibility of jobs via public transportation, referencing Alain Bertaud’s paper “Cities as Labor Markets.”
Take One: Area Accessibility Index
Since this is an exercise to look at assessing accessibility, I started with the very naïve approach of assessing accessibility by aggregating the total area accessible via public transport within an arbitrary amount of time. An easy task since we have already done the legwork in calculating isochrones from before.
The results were rubbish.
Whilst aggregating the areas accessible is a start, not all places are equal. Some places are more important than other places, hence the suggested approach of weighting them towards locations of jobs.
Take Two: Hawker Centre Accessibility Index
Lacking a reliable source of the geographic distribution of jobs in Singapore, I looked online for an alternative proxy dataset. I found this dataset on hawker centres.
Whilst it is definitely not as representative as job locations as a measure of accessibility and suffers from a hint of reflexivity, but for a toy index like this, this would suffice. It also helps that there is a dense concentration of hawker centres located in the downtown core of Singapore (near the southern tip of the island) which weights our index towards the city core as well.
Do check out this analysis of the Downtown Line failure where we utilise this toy index to calculate the reach of the failure’s effects. Or this other analysis where we introduce hypothetical line failures to Singapore’s land transport system.
Originally published at swarm.is.
