Accessibility and centrality for sustainable mobility: Regional planning case study

Accessibility is a widely discussed theme, approached by several disciplines, such as geography, urban and land-use planning, and transportation. This study assesses the relevance of accessibility for sustainable mobility planning and examines the existing analogies with the concept of centrality-a consolidated issue in social science, geographic and land-use modeling, and, more recently, intensively used in social-network analysis and transport-network analysis. Centrality measures the relative importance of nodes in a network, but it can be evaluated from different perspectives. In fact, different indexes are available to measure different ways for a node to be central. This paper also examines recent innovations in accessibility modeling and suggests improvement by proposing a new accessibility measure. This paper uses both traditional and lesser-known measures to analyze a case study, considering both accessibility and centrality indexes with the aim of investigating their potential correlation, efficacy, and suitability to support an integrated land-use and transport-planning approach.