Public service such as libraries, swimming pools and leisure centres are funded by local government to provide facilities to the public. 

However, a service provided at a specific location but serving a population which is spread across a wide geographic area inevitably suffers from inequalities in the  level of supply of service received depending on the degree of spatial separation between the point of supply and the location of potential demand.  In other words, the level of service provided will diminish as travel time increases.

Accessibility to facility locations is therefore a vital issue for planners and policy makers and is key to understanding how effectively the service has been delivered.

Journey times to public services in Sunderland

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Accessibility is usually measured in either straight line distance between the grid coordinates of  the facility and each residential area (ward or Output Area) or using drive times measured along the road network.  However, whilst drive times may be an improvement over straight line distance they run the risk of ignoring key sections of the population who are unlikely to have access to a private car such as  teenagers , elderly single person households and those living in deprived neighbourhoods.

In the past, attempts to measure access by public transport have been hampered by both lack of data and the inability of most routing software to handle the vagaries of timetable information.   The Wendover Group are now able to address this shortcoming and provide equivalent data for public transport travel times to that which can be obtained for travel by car.

Given a set of locations representing service supply points such as leisure centres, we can supply the travel time taken by public transport to every output area, ward or postcode within a specified area or specified travel time.  Furthermore, these can be refined based on assumptions and criteria which are considered relevant such as the time of day or day of the week in which it is possible to make the journey, the speed of walking between home and transport interchange, the number of changes that can be made.

Output can be either in mapped format or a raw matrix of travel times.