Can freeway traffic volume information facilitate urban accessibility assessment?: Case study of the city of St. Louis

• A relationship between traffic volume differences and accessibility can be found.
• A model is developed to investigate the relationship between traffic volume difference and accessibility.
• Freeway traffic volume data shows its potential to measure accessibility to replace conventional traffic survey data.
• Traffic volume difference increases with the number of facilities opportunities increasing.

In urban contexts, accessibility measures are often utilized to represent the interactions among land use, transport and people’s trips to services and other facilities. Accessibility is generally evaluated using conventional traffic measures such as travel time and distance, but traffic volume, which is a product of the travel trips induced by people’s needs, may also be positively related to accessibility. This study tests the hypothesis “can freeway traffic volume information facilitate urban accessibility assessment?” Traffic volume based accessibility models are proposed to investigate this relationship and test the hypothesis. The results indicate that the answer to this question is a qualified “yes”, as there is a statistically significant relationship between traffic volume differences and accessibility. The coefficients of the models can potentially be used as a reference to guide the urban planning process. The limitations of the proposed models can be addressed by deploying Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) traffic sensors on ramps and arterial roadways.