Thinking bigger... and smaller... in the world of accessibility planning

Accessibility planning software used to be a relatively crude tool to assist policy-makers, not least because good quality, affordable datasets to feed into the software was often very hard to find. But that has all now changed, according to Basemap’s Simon Court.

Rik Thomas

04 April 2014

Visography TRACC enables the DfT, for example, to plot the accessibility of every primary school in England...

Accessibility planning software can, amongst many other things, tell people which areas of London and the South--East will benefit from the Crossrail development

... or give detailed data on bus frequencies in the centre of a city such as Cardiff

Basemap has compared travel times before Crossrail (above) with after Crossrail

What is the biggest change in the field of accessibility planning in the past few years? According to Simon Court, projects director at Basemap and a man who has been involved in the development of accessibility planning software for well over a decade, it’s the arrival of the ‘open data’ revolution. “Datasets used to be a bit of a cash cow for us, where it would often cost of thousands of pounds to buy the data, but we could then on-sell it to our customers. Then open...