My space or your space? Towards a measure of joint accessibility

Research on space–time accessibility is usually concerned with determining and assessing the opportunities for individual activity participation. However, a significant part of everyday activities is conducted jointly with others, implying that the feasibility of potential locations for activity engagement depends on the accumulation of conditions related to the spatiotemporal setting of each participant. In this paper, we put forward a method to gauge the accessibility of places to a particular group of people willing to engage in a joint activity. The method calculates locational benefits by taking into account network-based travel times, individual activity schedules, and the attractiveness and temporal availability of facilities. The applicability of the method extends towards situations with multiple facilities and participants, being available for multiple periods of time. As a possible output of our model, maps of joint accessibility are created which can be used to evaluate different rendezvous scenarios.