Evaluating the accessibility and availability of public services to reduce inequalities in everyday mobility

Mapping job accessibility and sociospatial inequalities is a crucial task to support the design and evaluation of public policies and services. Although the concept of accessibility encompasses similar dimensions across studies, which involve the interaction between transport systems and land use, its implementation varies substantially depending on the research or policy need, mode of transport, and data availability. In this paper, we employ the optimization-based accessibility metric, adapted from the optimum accessibility landscapes measure, to the analysis of the accessibility and availability of public services that are essential to everyday mobility in the cities of São Paulo and Curitiba, in Brazil. Since it simultaneously captures supply and demand as endogenous variables in an optimization algorithm, without losing communicability, we argue that the metric may be particularly useful to public policies that involve decisions at multiple territorial scales and government levels, such as schools, healthcare facilities, and greenspaces. By identifying locations with no access to public services due to lack of proximity and service capacity, locations with low access to public services due to long distances and spatial barriers, and locations with access to poor quality services, it is possible to better inform the formulation and prioritization of public policies aiming at reducing inequalities in everyday mobility, with differential effects according to social class, race, and gender.