Inclusive cities: Transportation and accessibility

Adie Tomer, fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program, and Jeffrey Gutman, senior fellow in Global Economy and Development, discuss how to transform transportation policy with a focus on accessibility and how cities around the world are grappling with improving infrastructure and increasing access for people of all incomes.

“Access thinking is all about how can we connect people better to those critical destinations they need to get to, and do so in a way ideally that works for everyone with different ranges of incomes, that does so in a way that doesn’t endlessly consume all of the land that’s available, and doing it in a way that maintaining all that infrastructure, that it’s fiscally sustainable,” Tomer explains.

“Because of technology, because of being able to deal with metadata now,” Gutman says, “we’re actually able to measure and report much more inexpensively than we had in the past. I think that’s really a major breakthrough. Now is the time to be able to do this, because we have the instruments and the modeling at hand to be able to move in a very big way toward a measure of accessibility.”

Related links:

Moving to access

Urban equality and access: Will Habitat III rise to the challenge?

Shifting gears to a new transportation model

Building smart cities in India

With thanks to audio engineer Mark Hoelscher, Vanessa Sauter, Fred Dews, and Richard Fawal.

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