CoAXs: A Collaborative Accessibility-based Stakeholder Engagement System for communicating transport impacts

When evaluating transport projects, locational accessibility measures, which connect land use and transport systems, provide insights into the potential for wider economic benefits. Emerging evidence also suggests that accessibility measures may effectively distill complex technical analyses into representations more easily understood and discussed by stakeholders with a range of expertise. A consolidated class of accessibility measures could thus potentially be the foundation for co-creative planning in which diverse stakeholders and experts work actively with transport planners to evaluate impacts of transport alternatives, especially wider impacts beyond individual travel time savings. This paper describes the development and initial testing of CoAXs (short for Collaborative Accessibility-based Stakeholder Engagement System), an open-source stakeholder engagement tool that seeks to support co-creative transport planning. Preliminary development and focus group testing using example bus rapid transit corridors in Boston, Massachusetts, suggest that interactive mapping tools can operationalize accessibility measures as a basis for engaging stakeholders in discussing the regional value and wider impacts of transport investment.