The Assessment of Access to Local Shopping Opportunities: A Comparison of Accessibility Measures

In this paper the author describes an application of certain accessibility measures in the assessment of access to local shopping opportunities. The measures used here include one developed by the author to represent access to immediately local convenience shopping outlets (‘shortest distance’), and three which have been suggested by other authors in connection with more general transport policy evaluation exercises (‘cumulative opportunity’, ‘gravity’ and ‘Gaussian’). These measures are applied to the assessment of access to local shopping opportunities in part of Reading, Berkshire, using data collected by the author in 1974. Access is measured on a point-to-point basis (between shops and a systematic sample of homes). Considerable contrasts are shown to exist between sets of access measures. Changes in accessibility between 1974 and 1978 in the study area are then briefly considered, and it is shown again that different accessibility measures suggest somewhat different conclusions.