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Due to a change in capital funding formula, many school boards across the Province of Ontario engaged in Accommodation Reviews to rationalize the supply of school capacity. This process led to numerous school closures and raised important policy questions regarding the economic value of a school in terms of its capitalization into property values and, by extension, how the closure of a school might affect local neighborhoods. To explore these questions, this research uses spatial hedonic methods to estimate the implicit value of accessibility to schools in the City of Hamilton, Ontario. Spatial Durbin model results provide evidence of a significant negative correlation between distance to schools and housing prices in the Canadian context. This suggests that accessibility to schools is capitalized into property values and that the closure of a neighborhood school may result in potentially significant losses of economic value in communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessibility indicators are widely used in transportation, urban and healthcare planning, among many other applications. These measures are weighted sums of reachable opportunities from a given origin, conditional on the cost of movement, and are estimates of the potential for spatial interaction. Over time, various proposals have been forwarded to improve their interpretability: one of those methodological additions have been the introduction of competition. In this paper we focus on competition, but first demonstrate how a widely used measure of accessibility with congestion fails to properly match the opportunity-seeking population. We then propose an alternative formulation of accessibility with competition, a measure we call spatial availability. This measure relies on proportional allocation balancing factors (friction of distance and population competition) that are equivalent to imposing a single constraint on conventional gravity-based accessibility. In other words, the proportional allocation of opportunities results in a spatially available opportunities value which is assigned to each origin that, when all origin values are summed, equals the total number of opportunities in the region. We also demonstrate how Two-Stage Floating Catchment Area (2SFCA) methods are equivalent to spatial availability and can be reconceptualized as singly-constrained accessibility. To illustrate the application of spatial availability and compare it to other relevant measures, we use data from the 2016 Transportation Tomorrow Survey of the Greater Golden Horseshoe area in southern Ontario, Canada. Spatial availability is an important contribution since it clarifies the interpretation of accessibility with competition and paves the way for future applications in equity analysis (e.g., spatial mismatch, opportunity benchmarking, policy intervention scenario analysis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Floating Catchment Area (FCA) methods are a popular tool to investigate accessibility to public facilities, in particular health care services. FCA approaches are attractive because, unlike other accessibility measures, they take into account the potential for congestion of facilities. This is done by 1) considering the population within the catchment area of a facility to calculate a variable that measures level of service, and then 2) aggregating the level of service by population centers subject to catchment area constraints. In this paper we discuss an effect of FCA approaches, an artifact that we term demand and level of service inflation. These artifacts are present in previous implementations of FCA methods. We argue that inflation makes interpretation of estimates of accessibility difficult, which has possible deleterious consequences for decision making. Next, we propose a simple and intuitive approach to proportionally allocate demandand and level of service in FCA calculations. The approach is based on a standardization of the impedance matrix, similar to approaches popular in the spatial statistics and econometrics literature. The result is a more intiuitive measure of accessibility that 1) provides a local version of the provider-to-population ratio; and 2) preserves the level of demand and the level of supply in a system. We illustrate the relevant issues with some examples, and then empirically by means of a case study of accessibility to family physicians in the Hamilton Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), in Ontario, Canada. Results indicate that demand and supply inflation/deflation affect the interpretation of accessibility analysis using existing FCA methods, and that the proposed adjustment can lead to more intuitive results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public bicycle share programs (PBSPs) can play a role in advancing transportation equity if they make bicycling more accessible to disadvantaged populations. In Ontario, Hamilton Bike Share expanded their program in 2018 by adding twelve "equity" stations with the explicit objective of increasing access for under-serviced neighborhoods. In this case study, we investigate differentials in accessibility to stations using a balanced floating catchment area approach and compare accessibility with and without the equity stations. We analyze population interpolated to small cells to better reflect walking to a station and conduct a sensitivity analysis at several walking time thresholds. We then reaggregate the estimated accessibility by income groups for further analysis. Our findings indicate that equity stations increased accessibility for the serviced population at every threshold examined, but the increase was relatively modest especially for population in the bottom 20% of median total household income. • Balanced floating catchment area method applied to measure accessibility to bike share. • Contribution of stations added to increase equity assessed at different thresholds. • Added stations increased accessibility and reduced inequities, albeit only modestly. • Lowest income group has low levels of accessibility, even with "equity" stations. • Location and size of docking stations matters for increasing equity in accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the changes in accessibility to emergency and community food services before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in the City of Hamilton, Ontario. Many of these food services are the last line of support for households facing food insecurity; as such, their relevance cannot be ignored in the midst of the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic. Our analysis is based on the application of balanced floating catchment areas and concentrates on households with lower incomes (