Alexa Hinves

Developing a Methodology for Measuring Access to Services: A Case Study of Access to Food Retail Services in the City of Toronto ©2015

The use of transit accessibility models was investigated to create a methodology to effectively measure the temporal and spatial relationship between origins and destinations. Various accessibility models and measurements were analyzed in this paper and an enhanced methodology was created to develop an accessibility index which was applied to a particular case study. Food retail services and access to food retail was used as the case study in the City of Toronto to assess the geographical disparities in supplying the demand for grocery retail. The analysis looked at access to food services by public transit, by car and by foot using TransCAD. In addition, a quality of service (QoS) measurement was incorporated into the accessibility measurement to not only address access to food services but to emphasize access to high quality food services. Various scenarios were tested to understand a person’s perceptions of quality when defining a particular weight for QoS for each grocery store. The outcome of this research found that accessibility index scores drastically changed across various modes based on the spatial and temporal range of each mode. Furthermore the various weighted scenarios drastically affected accessibility scores but were also highly dependent on the overall count of accessible grocery stores from a specified origin.