Accessibility is a concept that has become central to physical planning during the last 50 years; improving accessibility is an aim which has now made its way into mainstream transport planning and policy-making worldwide.Batty (2009) traces the origins of the concept back to the 1920s.It was used in location theory and regional economic planning, becoming important once transport planning began, mainly in North America where it was associated with transport networks and trip distribution patterns.Its conceptual basis dates back further.Hansen (1959), in his classic and much cited exposé, 'How accessibility shapes land use', rolled out our fi rst real defi nition: the potential for interaction (based on the notion of potential traced back to the social physics school in the nineteenth century).In recent decades, the term 'accessibility' has marshalled renewed interest from civil engineering, geography, spatial economics and other academic fi elds to uncover a variety of new measures.This book's purpose is relatively straightforward.It marries advancing approaches in accessibility research and modelling with best practices in accessibility planning and evaluation -to better support integrated transport and land-use policy-making in Europe and the United States.In the 2000s considerable progress has been made along these fronts.These advances have taken diff erent directions.First, there is a continuing trend of more complex and disaggregated accessibility measures, largely in response to recognizing that aggregate measures fail to account for the wide variation in individual behaviour and population groups at diff erent spatial scales.These trends partly result from improvements in techniques to construct location-based accessibility indicators.These techniques have evolved from simple calculations to complex and detailed methods that use algorithms within a geographic information system (GIS) platform to extract and assemble data from multiple spatial databases at fi ne levels of spatial resolution (e.g., see
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