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Title:

Using Urban Commuting Data to Calculate a Spatiotemporal Accessibility Measure for Healthy Food Environment Studies

Accession Number:

01472701

Record Type:

Component

Availability:

Transportation Research Board Business Office

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Abstract:

Improving spatial access to healthy foods in urban regions in the U.S. is recognized as an important component of reducing the prevalence of chronic illness and achieving better health outcomes. Previously, researchers exploring this domain have calculated accessibility measures derived from the travel cost from home locations to nearby healthy food stores. While there are valid arguments for making home-based healthy food store accessibility measures, this approach disregards additional opportunities that present themselves to residents as they move throughout the city during the day. In this paper, a time-geographic accessibility measure is utilized to explore how single occupancy automobile commuting affords access to supermarkets. The study builds on recent research by analyzing the time available for grocery shopping given people’s intracity commuting trips. The paper focuses on how single occupancy automobile travel, the dominant form of commuting in the U.S., changes the picture of access to supermarkets in Cincinnati, OH, a city with a number of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) designated food deserts. Time-geographic accessibility measures are reported at the transportation analysis zone (TAZ)-level and compared with an analogous home-based metric. Results show residents in some TAZs have more access when accounting for their commuting behavior than when measuring access from their home. This finding suggests that more nuanced calculations of accessibility are necessary to fully understand which urban populations have greater access to healthy food.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD50(1) Health and Transportation

Monograph Accession #:

01470560

Report/Paper Numbers:

13-0825

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Widener, Michael John
Farber, Steven
Neutens, Tijs
Horner, Mark W

Pagination:

16p

Publication Date:

2013

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2013-1-13 to 2013-1-17
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Maps; References

Uncontrolled Terms:

Spatiotemporal analysis; Supermarkets

Geographic Terms:

Cincinnati (Ohio)

Subject Areas:

Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Society; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-0825

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Feb 5 2013 12:16PM