Space-Time Accessibility Measures for Evaluating Mobility-Related Social Exclusion of the Elderly

Abstract

Towards aged society, it is important to provide better mobility and accessibility for the elderly and disabled people, so that they can live their independent lives in community. The elderly have a wide range of constraints on participating in out-of-home activities; for example, physical disadvantages, keeping regular lifestyles for their health and entrenched habits, limited space-time areas of activity engagement for both safety problems and limited ability of information acquisition, and monetary budget constraint. In addition, people who cannot drive a car depend more on public transport service and need their household members’ help when they go out. Therefore, their choice sets of feasible activity-travel patterns are strongly restricted by these constraints. This is regarded as one of the mobility-related “social exclusion” problems. It should be useful to analyze the feasibility of activity participation of the elderly under personal and environmental constraints they face in their daily lives. The objectives of this study are (1) to propose and validate a method for evaluating mobility-related social exclusion based on the concept of space-time accessibility and (2) to investigate the elderly people’s constraints in their activity schedules by examining how they adjust activity schedules when participating in out-of-home activities. Space-time accessibility measures represent the ease to participate in out-of-home activities, considering possibility of activity engagement under space-time constraints. Data required for the analysis consist of activity schedules of individuals, transportation network, and locations and opening hours of activity opportunities. In December 2005, we conducted a questionnaire survey to collect information on activity diaries and scheduling adjustment for participating in a medical care activity at two general hospitals. The respondents were people of 65 years and over who came to either of the two hospitals in Akita city. The number of samples was 70. Based on space-time constraints of daily in-home mandatory and maintenance activities, space-time accessibility measures to participating in a medical care activity at the hospitals were calculated. Information on spatial distribution of the elderly population from the Population Census data was used for analysis of accessibility evaluation in urban scale. Geographic information system (GIS) was used for data management and representation of the results. From a series of analyses, we identified a considerable gap in accessibility between individuals with and without car, and between urban and suburban areas. It was also found that the elderly adjusted their activity schedules (adjustment in start time, duration of activities) to participate in a medical care activity as compared to their daily regular schedules. The proposed method makes it possible to evaluate the impacts of policy measures for mitigating mobility-related social exclusion, which incorporate not only the improvement of transportation services, but also the improvement of activity opportunities and household activity schedules.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.