Active Mobility Accessibility Index – Assessing Local Transport Competitiveness

Active Mobility Accessibility Index (AMAI) quantifies the competitiveness of walking and cycling relative to driving using travel-time and distance ratios on identical sampled origin-destination pairs, reflecting network structure rather than destination choice. AMAI combines time parity and distance parity in a simple diagnostic score, using equal weights as a default specification for interpretation and policy use. Applied across the five Tyne and Wear local authorities, it demonstrates that cycling is more competitive than walking against driving. The median origin-level cycling AMAI is 0.820 and the median walking AMAI is 0.645. Parity remains limited where the share of origins at or above parity is 10.0% for cycling and 1.7% for walking. Initial API-based tests suggested that time-of-day effects are limited for the short local trips studied here, supporting development of a scalable in-house routing workflow for the main analysis. Validation against OA-level Census 2021 mode shares, with controls for terrain gradient and commute-distance composition, suggests that AMAI captures a relevant behavioural signal, while its main value lies in diagnosing local network competitiveness for policy and planning.