It’s unfortunate we’re all having to live through the worries and woes of the novel coronavirus pandemic, but it is providing an important proof point of the theory underlying accessibility. What’s interesting is that we will be able to both prove and quantify the relationships behind the theory once the pandemic passes.
And here it is.
Point 1: The world’s economy is driven by connections. The current slow down in the economy is directly caused by our inability to physically connect. Thank goodness we can connect virtually and will likely rely on those connections even more moving forward, but they have not nor cannot overcome the loss of physical connections.
Point 2: Physical connections require travel (mobility). Given daily time budgets, we can only spend a portion of our time traveling to make physical connections. We rely on two strategies to stay within our travel time budgets, proximity (getting destinations closer) or speed (overcoming distances to destinations).
If you can think of theory behind accessibility in economic terms – the ability to physically connect as foundational to our economy – then you can appreciate the importance of the concept and measure. Our livelihoods and well being literally depend on and are shaped by those connections. If you can think of multimodal system productivity as a measure of both the productivity and efficiency of travel needed to physically connect, regardless of proximity or speed strategy used, then you can appreciate its importance as a concept and measure.
There certainly more to this story, but this is it in a nutshell. We now have the evidence of how physical connections influence the economy.