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Urban land use and transportation planning policies rely on accessibility metrics to determine where to locate public transit and urban services. However, most accessibility measures are built on static assumptions that people start their trip from homes, they are free all day, businesses are always open, and public transportation is always running. This talk introduces a dynamic, people-based approach that measures when and where essential services are actually reachable in daily life. Using Los Angeles County as a case study, this study integrates millions of anonymized smartphone GPS records (Dewey GWS), multimodal travel networks (OpenStreetMap and GTFS), and essential-service POIs with operating hours (SafeGraph) to compare static and dynamic accessibility measures. Results show that static models systematically overestimate real-world access, especially for time-limited services such as food, healthcare, and groceries, highlighting the importance of time-sensitive accessibility measures in planning practice.

Speaker Bio: 

Yuquan (Wendy) Zhou is a PhD Candidate in Urban Planning and Development at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, specializing in geospatial analytics. Advised by Dr. Geoff Boeing, her dissertation focuses on dynamic accessibility and develops a new framework to measure spatiotemporal accessibility to essential services. This work has won the 40th Annual Charles M. Tiebout Prize in Regional Science.