Journal of Transport Geography 74 (2019) 321–332

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Transport Geography

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jtrangeo

Future accessibility impacts of transport policy scenarios: Equity and T

sensitivity to travel time thresholds for Bus Rapid Transit expansion in Rio
de Janeiro
⁎
Rafael H.M. Pereira
Transport Studies Unit (TSU) – Oxford University, UK
Institute for Applied Economic Research – Ipea, Brazil

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The accessibility impacts of transport projects ex-post implementation are generally evaluated using cumulative
Equity opportunity measures based on a single travel time threshold. Fewer studies have explored how accessibility
Accessibility appraisal of transport plans can be used to evaluate policy scenarios and their impacts for different social groups
BRT or examined whether the results of project appraisals are sensitive to the time threshold of choice. This paper
Rio de Janeiro
analyzes how different scenarios of full and partial implementation of the TransBrasil BRT project in Rio de
Distributive justice
Transport policy
Janeiro (Brazil) will likely impact the number of jobs accessible to the population of different income levels. The
Scenario analysis is conducted under various travel time thresholds of 30, 60, 90 and 120 min to test whether the results
MTUP are sensitive to the boundary effect of the modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP). Compared to a partial
operation scenario, the full implementation of TransBrasil that extends this corridor into the city center would
lead to higher accessibility gains due to network effects of connecting this BRT to other transport modes.
Nonetheless, the size of the accessibility impacts of the proposed BRT as well as its distribution across income
classes would significantly change depending on the time threshold chosen for the accessibility analysis.
Considering cut-off times of 30 or 60 min, both scenarios of TransBrasil would lead to higher accessibility im-
pacts in general and particularly for low-income groups, moving Rio towards a more equitable transportation
system. However, under longer thresholds of 90 and 120 min, an evaluation of this project would find much
smaller accessibility gains more evenly distributed by income levels. The paper highlights how time threshold
choice in cumulative opportunity measures can have important but overlooked implications for policy evalua-
tion and it calls for further research on the MTUP in future transport and mobility studies.

1. Introduction travel time threshold of say 60 min (Geurs & van Wee, 2004). As a rule,
however, these studies only consider a single cutoff time value and have
Over the past decade, there has been growing concern over the thus far overlooked whether the conclusions/results are sensitive to
equity impacts of public transport investments (Ciommo & Shiftan, different travel time thresholds. This issue is directly related to the
2017; Lucas, 2012), particularly of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) projects, modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP) (Cheng & Adepeju, 2014),
which are increasingly being adopted worldwide (Delmelle & Casas, which has been largely overlooked in the transportation literature (see
2012; Venter et al., 2017). This is largely reflected in the growing Section 2).
number of academic studies and transport agency reports assessing how Moreover, most of these studies focus on the ex-post assessment of
projects impact local communities and particularly vulnerable groups the accessibility impacts of transport investments, i.e. after the projects
in terms of their access to out-of-home activities, such as employment are implemented. Nonetheless, there is a growing need to understand
and educational opportunities (Karner & Niemeier, 2013; Manaugh how researchers and policymakers can estimate the likely accessibility
et al., 2015). Most of these studies measure accessibility levels using impacts of transport plans before they are implemented and evaluate
cumulative opportunity measures of accessibility (Boisjoly & El- how their accessibility gains are distributed across different social
Geneidy, 2017; Papa et al., 2015), which allow estimating, for example, groups (Guthrie et al., 2017; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). The dearth of this
the number of jobs accessible to a population group under an ad-hoc kind of evaluation is particularly significant in developing countries,

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rafael.pereira@ipea.gov.br.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2018.12.005
Received 23 March 2018; Received in revised form 15 October 2018; Accepted 14 December 2018
Available online 28 December 2018
0966-6923/ © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R.H.M. Pereira Journal of Transport Geography 74 (2019) 321–332

where the accessibility and equity impacts of transport plans are often Roeser, 2013) and official transport authorities (Karner & Niemeier,
overlooked by local authorities (Blanco et al., 2018; Vasconcellos, 2013; Manaugh et al., 2015). According to this view, a ‘fair’ transport
2001, 2014) and where the challenges of transportation are likely to policy prioritizes improving the accessibility conditions of people from
grow due to rapid urbanization under conditions of inadequate trans- disadvantaged groups. These include various social groups whose cap-
port infrastructure (UN-HABITAT, 2010). abilities to use a transport system to access out-of-home activities and
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it examines a major BRT participate in society (or develop a fulfilling life) are systematically
project in a developing country to illustrate how future scenario ana- undermined by morally arbitrary factors such as being born in a poor
lysis can be used to anticipate the likely accessibility impacts of family, having a disability, or belonging to a particular gender or ra-
transport plans for different income groups across space; second, it cial/ethnic category (Pereira, Schwanen, et al., 2017b).
investigates whether the conclusions of the equity analysis of transport There are various methods of measuring accessibility to discuss
projects are robust when using cumulative opportunity measure of ac- equity impacts of transport policies (Martens & Golub, 2012; Neutens
cessibility based on different travel time thresholds. The study analyzes et al., 2010; van Wee & Geurs, 2011). Cumulative opportunity measures
the TransBrasil project in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), a 32-km long BRT are among the most commonly used among academic researchers (Fan
corridor that was planned alongside other major public transport in- et al., 2012; Golub & Martens, 2014; Manaugh & El-Geneidy, 2012),
vestments in preparation for the 2016 Olympic Games. Despite its funding agencies (Scholl et al., 2016) and transport agencies (Boisjoly &
strategic role in integrating Rio's public transport system and con- El-Geneidy, 2017) to analyze the accessibility and social impacts of
necting high-density low-income neighborhoods to the city center, the transportation investments. Some advantages of this type of accessi-
TransBrasil BRT remains unfinished because of legal disputes and fiscal bility measure are that it does not require prior information about
issues. Only a part of the project is currently under construction and a people's travel behavior, is computationally inexpensive and produces
fiscal crisis that recently hit the local government has raised serious results that are easy to communicate to policymakers and stakeholders.
uncertainties about whether this BRT is ever going to be finished (see This makes it a particularly attractive measure to inform decision-
Section 3). making. It also has limitations, however, since it assumes that all op-
This paper estimates the likely future impacts of the TransBrasil portunities are equally desirable, regardless of the time spent traveling;
corridor on the number of jobs accessible to the population via public it does not take competition effects into account; it accounts neither for
transport, measuring how accessibility gains vary across space and in- the space-time constraints on people activity-travel behavior nor the
come classes and to what extent these are affected by the choice of possibility of trip-chaining; and it involves the selection of an arbitrary
travel time threshold (30, 60, 90 and 120 min from door to door). cutoff travel time (Geurs & van Wee, 2004; Neutens et al., 2010). An-
Combining population census and land use data with geolocated other known limitation of cumulative opportunity metrics of accessi-
timetables of Rio's public transport network, the paper assesses how bility is that they involve the selection of an arbitrary cutoff travel time,
two scenarios of the BRT plan – full and partial implementation of the but the implications of this shortcoming for the appraisal of transport
project – will increase the number of formal jobs that people from projects has been overlooked in the literature thus far.
different income levels and areas of the city can reach from their homes
via public transport and walking. The study investigates how accessi- 3. Modifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP)
bility gains brought by the proposed BRT project will be distributed
across income groups and whether the results are robust to boundary As a rule, researchers and practitioners evaluate the accessibility
effect of MTUP (see Section 3). impacts of transport investments and devise policy recommendations
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: the next section based on accessibility analyses that consider a single cutoff time value
presents a short review of the literature on transportation equity and (e.g. Boisjoly & El-Geneidy, 2016; Fan et al., 2012; Golub & Martens,
accessibility. Section three presents the study area of Rio de Janeiro and 2014; Manaugh & El-Geneidy, 2012). By doing this, these studies dis-
its unfinished BRT project. Data and methods are presented in section regard how the evaluation of transport projects and subsequent policy
four and results presented in section five. Section six presents the recommendations could vary depending on an ad-hoc choice of time
conclusions. thresholds. This issue relates to the boundary effect in the modifiable
temporal unit problem (MTUP) (Cheng & Adepeju, 2014; Huang &
2. Transportation equity and accessibility Wong, 2015), which is the temporal analog of the modifiable areal unit
problem (MAUP). The MAUP effect has been extensively explored in the
There is extensive literature on how transport investments can re- geographical literature (Apparicio et al., 2008; Tan & Samsudin, 2017)
shape people's access to out-of-home activities and improve wellbeing and it draws attention to how the conclusions of spatial analysis are
(Banister & Hickman, 2006; Lucas, 2012). Previous studies have con- often sensitive to the ad-hoc ways in which spatial data are aggregated
ducted accessibility analysis to examine how people's access to jobs by according to different geographical scales and zonal schemes. Various
car or public transport can be affected by future transport and land-use studies have examined how transport accessibility estimates can be
scenarios (Anderson et al., 2013; Geurs & va Eck, 2003; Tilahun & Fan, sensitive to the MAUP (Kwan & Weber, 2008; Omer, 2006; Ortega et al.,
2014). Some studies have also focused specifically on different sce- 2012; Pereira, Banister, et al., 2017; Zhang & Kukadia, 2005). None-
narios of alternative public transport projects, looking at their acces- theless, the literature has generally overlooked the effects of MTUP and
sibility impacts across racial/ethnic and income groups (El-Geneidy whether the arbitrary choice of cutoff time values has any influence on
et al., 2011; Farber & Grandez, 2017; Manaugh & El-Geneidy, 2012; estimates of accessibility inequalities and on the equity assessment of
Niehaus et al., 2016). In recent decades, transport authorities, mainly in transport projects.
European and North American cities, have started using this type of The MTUP is one manifestation of a broader issue of frame depen-
accessibility analysis to evaluate their policies (Boisjoly & El-Geneidy, dence in geographical analysis (Kwan, 2018). The MTUP refers more
2017; Papa et al., 2015) with particular concerns regarding the dif- specifically to how the results of a given analysis can be affected by how
ferent social impacts of their projects on population groups (Karner & the data are organized with respect to its temporal dimension. One of
Niemeier, 2013; Manaugh et al., 2015). the first studies to systematically articulate the MTUP is a paper by
While there is no consensus among transport authorities or aca- Cheng and Adepeju (2014), who proposes that MTUP consists of three
demics about what makes a transport investment equitable, an egali- components: aggregation, segmentation and boundary.
tarian-prioritarian view of justice like the one developed by John Rawls Temporal aggregation is a process of grouping data points in a
(1999, 2001) is increasingly influential among academics (Lucas et al., temporal window. When estimating the cumulative accessibility level at
2015; Martens, 2012; Pereira, Schwanen, et al., 2017a; van Wee & a given location, for example, there will be a different accessibility

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point estimate depending on when a person departs relative to when a mega-events. According to local authorities, the new transport projects
public transport vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated would collectively help the city overcome its socially fragmented urban
given a service timetable. To take this variation into account, some development and reduce commute times, particularly to and from the
studies consider the average or mean accessibility level across a sample poorest marginalized neighborhoods (Brazil, 2009). According to data
of various departure times during a certain time interval (Fan et al., of the 2013 household travel survey of Rio, commute trips by public
2012; Owen & Levinson, 2015; Pereira, Banister, et al., 2017b). The transport and walking within the city used to take 57 min on average.
MTUP aggregation effect relates to scale or the size of the time window The TransBrasil BRT (red line in Fig. 1) is perhaps one of the most
used to aggregate the data, which could be a one-hour period or a three- important pieces of infrastructure amid this promised transport legacy
hour period for example. A related aspect refers to sample size in terms of mega-events in Rio. At a cost of approximately US$ 500 million, the
of the number of departure times considered, which gives higher or project has 26 stations and length of 32 km, running from the city
lower frequency/resolution to the data analysis. Conway et al. (2018) center where most of the employment opportunities are concentrated to
propose new methods to estimate probabilistic accessibility levels that one of the most densely populated regions with lowest income levels in
account for uncertainties in service schedules and which could possibly the city. It was proposed with a crucial role of integrating the city's
help address the MTUP aggregation effect in future research. The ag- public transport network. The TransBrasil corridor is planned to have
gregation effect is out of the scope of this study. two terminals where it integrates with city and metropolitan bus lines,
The segmentation effect relates to the selection of the starting point and it should have integrated stations with the Transolímpica BRT as
of that time window. In the previous example, this could mean calcu- well as the commuter rail and subway systems. According to official
lating average accessibility for a sample of departure times over a estimates, TransBrasil is expected to be the BRT corridor with the
period between 7 am–9 am during peak time, or between 9 pm–11 pm highest demand in the city, carrying 800 thousand passengers per day
during off-peak hours. Previous studies have demonstrated how the (Logit, 2014).
selection of this starting time influences accessibility estimates because However, while all the other mega-event related investments in
of the variation in service levels across the day (Fan et al., 2012; Farber Rio's transport network were fully or partially operational before the
et al., 2014) and in different days of the week (Neutens et al., 2012). 2016 Olympic Games, the TransBrasil BRT remains unfinished (2018).
Although these studies do not explicitly articulate the MTUP, they de- The construction work on TransBrasil was suspended for over nine
monstrate how the segmentation choice can have important equity ef- months between 2016 and 2017 because of legal disputes with con-
fects. The segmentation effect is not addressed in this study because of struction companies. Although contractors have restarted building a
the lack of information on how the TransBrasil BRT will operate in off section of the project (between Deodoro and Caju stations - Fig. 2),
peak hours and in the weekends. there is no perspective for when this section is going to be finished.
Finally, the third effect of MTUP is the boundary effect, which re- Local authorities have recognized there is even greater uncertainty
lates to the temporal length of a space-time process. In the example of whether the full project (reaching downtown) will ever become fully
calculating a cumulative opportunity accessibility measure at a given operational (Candida, 2017; Lisboa, 2017), and this would create a
location, this effect refers to selection of the maximum temporal extent first/last-mile problem for people moving in and out of the city center
or duration of the trip. As a rule, previous studies analyzed transport (Givoni, 2016). Moreover, the city of Rio has been hit by a severe
accessibility using a single travel time threshold that commonly varies economic crisis since 2016, which has led to a 70% cut in the municipal
between 30 and 60 min (Boisjoly & El-Geneidy, 2017; Papa et al., transport agency's budget (Magalhães & Rodrigues, 2017) and a sig-
2015). One exception is the study of Palmateer et al. (2016), who nificant drop in passenger demand due to rising unemployment rates
analyzed the accessibility impacts of an arterial bus rapid transit service (França, 2016; Rodrigues, 2017). Because of this situation, various bus
in Minneapolis–Saint Paul (USA) under cutoff time values of 10, 20, 30, companies claim they are facing a difficult fiscal situation. Indeed,
40, 50 and 60 min. The authors found that average accessibility benefits seven companies went bankrupt between 2015 and 2017 and 12 others
gradually increase up to thresholds between 30 and 40 min and then are threatening to do so, which could affect feeder lines and undermine
decline, what reflect the extent of the geographical and temporal in- people's access to the BRT services (Zarur, 2017; Zuazo et al., 2017).
fluence of the transport project analyzed. The present study advances There is a high level of uncertainty about whether the TransBrasil
previous research by investigating whether and to what extent the corridor will be completed. A prospective study that assesses the likely
boundary effect of MTUP can influence the evaluation of the accessi- accessibility impacts of this BRT can offer additional information about
bility impacts of transport projects and its distributional effects across the relevance of this project to the city's transport system. To the best of
income groups. my knowledge, however, no study has thus far estimated the accessi-
bility benefits of TransBrasil or its differential effects for various income
4. Study area: Rio de Janeiro groups. From a transportation equity point of view, it is very important
to understand who will ripe the accessibility benefits of this BRT project
The city of Rio Janeiro has approximately 6 million inhabitants, just funded by the government, and whether the answer to this question is
over half of the population residing in its metropolitan region. Like robust to time threshold choice in the accessibility analysis. The next
many other cities in the Global South, Rio is the result of decades of section describes the data and methods used to address these questions.
rapid population growth and fragmented urban development (UN-
HABITAT, 2010). This gave rise to a city with high levels of urban
segregation (Ribeiro et al., 2010), uneven provision of infrastructure 5. Methodology
(Câmara & Banister, 1993; Ribeiro, 2010) and poor transport conditions
(Motte-Baumvol et al., 2016; Pereira & Schwanen, 2013). A cumulative opportunity measure is used to estimate the likely
Since the late 1990s, local authorities have incorporated into the impact of the TransBrasil BRT project on the number of formal jobs
city's urban plans the goal of making Rio a stage for international mega- accessible by the population of different income levels via public
events, having successfully hosted the 2007 Pan American Games, 2014 transport and walking within various time-thresholds. Accessibility le-
FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games (Gaffney, 2010; Kassens- vels are estimated under a business-as-usual baseline without the
Noor et al., 2016). This event-led planning agenda has triggered sub- TransBrasil corridor and then compared to two scenarios of partial and
stantial investments in the city's transport system, particularly between full operation of the BRT. The data sources and methods used in this
2012 and 2017, including a subway extension, a light rail system in the study as detailed below.
city center and four new BRT corridors (Fig. 1). These transport in-
vestments were promoted as one of the main legacies of recent sports

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Fig. 1. Medium and large capacity transport corridors. Rio de Janeiro, 2017.

5.1. Data sources which nearest neighborhood and connectivity are important (Birch
et al., 2007). The resident population in each grid cell was categorized
Population count data comes from the 2010 Brazilian Census (IBGE, according to income decile based on the average household income per
2016) and were organized in a hexagonal grid of 500 by 500 m with capita of each grid cell. This was imputed from census data organized
5520 cells. The choice of 500 m allows a high-resolution accessibility into 1136 relatively homogeneous socioeconomic polygons known as
analysis without compromising computational tractability. A hexagon Human Development Units (Ipea et al., 2015). The data on household
grid was used to reduce sampling bias from edge effects and because it income per capita collected in the census account for all members of the
is more suitable than rectangular grid to analyze spatial phenomena in household and all their sources of income (including formal and

Fig. 2. Detail of the TransBrasil BRT corridor. Rio de Janeiro, 2017.

Note: As of the writing of this paper, the BRT section between Deodoro and Caju stations is under construction and expected to be completed by October 2018 (RJTV,
2018). Local authorities have not given any estimate of when construction work of the section between Caju and Presidente Vargas will start.

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informal jobs, unemployment benefits, pensions, social transfers, etc.). plan of the project, however, only brings information on service levels
Although the census has some limitations in terms of capturing the during peak time, what prevented estimating accessibility during off-
upper extreme of income distribution (Souza, 2015), it is still the best peak hours including the night-time period. These characteristics were
data source to account for income distribution in Brazil. These data on also used to create a GTFS representation of the project and they are
income needs to be used with caution because it incurs ecological fal- summarized in Appendix II.
lacies by disregarding socioeconomic heterogeneity within Human Following this 2014 revised plan of TransBrasil (Logit, 2014), eight
Development Units. regular bus routes would have significant overlap with the new BRT
Data on formal jobs come from RAIS, a national register organized and the intention was to cease their operation. Five of these routes were
by the Ministry of Labor and Employment that has full addresses of all still present in GTFS files of May 2017 and removed from the analysis in
public and private establishments and the socioeconomic character- this study. Moreover, the plan also identified 77 regular bus routes in
istics of their employees working in the formal labor market – i.e. with a the city of Rio to have partial overlap with the proposed BRT, re-
formal labor contract and social security contributions. In 2015, there commending these routes to be shortened and turned into feeder lines.
were 2,914,238 formal workers employed in 227,362 establishments in The document, however, does not provide enough information on how
Rio. In this database, workers are associated with the address of their these routes should be modified, so they were kept unchanged for the
respective workplaces. Exceptionally, some institutions with multiple purpose of this study. This means that the final GTFS dataset used still
offices/branches (such as outsourcing firms or public entities - police, presents partial overlap between TransBrasil BRT and existing bus
health and education) report all their employees to be working from the routes, which may have resulted in inflated accessibility estimates. This
institutional headquarters. Among the 50 largest employers in Rio, 17 limitation deserves more attention and is discussed in the results sec-
entities were found to do this and were removed from the analysis. The tion.
location of 83,589 employees working for the municipal education se-
cretariat could be recovered from the school census. In the end, a da-
5.3. Accessibility analysis
tabase covering 92.3% of all formal workers in the city was used. This
procedure should not substantially change the results of this study be-
Accessibility levels have been estimated using a cumulative oppor-
cause the jobs excluded from the database are distributed in different
tunity measure that indicates the number of formal jobs accessible by
locations in Rio and correspond to only a small fraction of formal jobs in
the population of different income levels via public transport and
the city.
walking under a certain cutoff travel time. This type of accessibility
Due to the unavailability of a data source with the addresses of jobs
measure requires setting a travel time threshold. There is however no
in the informal labor market, this study does not consider informal jobs.
consensus on how a sensible threshold should be selected. While the
Although a significant share of workers in Rio self-declared to work in
average commute time of the area under study is a good reference,
the informal labor market (approximately 36% in January 20161), the
average measures conceal important variations in the data. In the case
2003 household travel survey of Rio shows that the numbers of formal
of the city of Rio, 46% of the population has a commute longer than the
and informal jobs in each traffic zone are correlated at 0.78 (Pearson
average of 57 min, and close to 20% of the population commutes longer
correlation, statistically significant at 0.001). This suggests that the
than 90 min. It is also reasonable to assume that the selection of an
spatial distribution of formal and informal jobs in the city is not radi-
appropriate time threshold should consider the type and size of the
cally different, so that the lack of data on informal jobs should not
transport project, for example if it is a subway or a light-rail and the
radically change the relative distribution of accessibility estimates
extension of the project. Or one could argue that such appropriate
using cumulative opportunity measures.
threshold should be defined based on a normative idea of what a
Spatial information on road network and pedestrian infrastructure
maximum acceptable commute time should be. In summary, the se-
comes from OpenStreetMap. Finally, data on the public transport net-
lection of a sensible cut-off travel time is context-specific, and it is not
work was provided by Fetranspor (Federation of Passenger Transport
as straightforward as it seems. A legitimate concern here is to prevent
Companies in Rio de Janeiro). The dataset is organized in General
advocates of a certain position from opportunistically choosing the
Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format and it provides a snapshot of
results that support their arguments. The analysis in the paper is con-
the scheduled services for May 2017, with detailed geolocated in-
ducted using various travel time thresholds (30, 60, 90 and 120 min) for
formation of routes, stops and timetables of the public transport system.
the sake of sensitivity analysis and it does not claim that all of these
thresholds are equally appropriate for this case-study.
5.2. Simulating the TransBrasil BRT project The study estimates the number of jobs accessible from every hex-
agonal grid cell of 500 m via public transport and walking.
In order to analyze the future accessibility impacts of the OpenTripPlanner2 was used to estimate travel time matrices by public
TransBrasil corridor, a GTFS data feed representing the scheduled ser- transport and/or walking between every pair of centroids of hexagonal
vices of this BRT was created using the official data presented in the cells. Population-weighted centroids of each polygon have been used as
latest revised operational plan of the project (Logit, 2014). According to origins and destinations in order to minimize aggregation errors
this plan, 12 services would run in the TransBrasil corridor and 7 ser- (Stępniak & Jacobs-Crisioni, 2017). The study of Boisjoly & El-Geneidy
vices would run between the TransBrasil and Transcarioca BRT corri- (2016) has found that accessibility levels measured at 8 am are re-
dors, including both regular routes that stop at various stations and presentative of the relative accessibility at other time periods the day in
express routes that only stop at a few stations. The sequence of stops in Toronto. In this paper, though, various travel time matrices have been
each of these services is presented in Appendix I. In the accessibility calculated for a typical business day, departing every 15 min between
analysis, the full operation scenario considered all stops in Appendix I, 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. in order to take into account possible variations in
while the partial operation scenario only considered the stops between accessibility due to temporal variations in service levels and departure
Deodoro and Caju stations, which is the section of the project currently times. These travel time matrices contain door-to-door estimates that
under construction. The plan also presents some operational char- consider walking time from the point of origin to the public transport
acteristics of these services during the morning peak time, including stop, waiting time for the vehicle, actual travel time through the
total length, travel time, average speed, frequency and headways. The transport network, waiting time during transfers, and the walking time

1 2
Source: National Household Sample Survey (PNAD/IBGE), available at OpenTripPlanner is an open-source multimodal trip planner available at
http://www.ipeadata.gov.br/. https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner.

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R.H.M. Pereira Journal of Transport Geography 74 (2019) 321–332

from the transport stop to the final destination. employment opportunities under various time thresholds. These results
These travel time matrices have been combined with the geolocated suggest, for example, that the full construction of this BRT could benefit
data on population and jobs. Based on Eq. (1), the median number of approximately 800 thousand people (13.7% of Rio's population), with
jobs that can be accessed from each grid cell via public transport and an average increase of 13.3% in job accessibility under a travel time of
walking across the various travel time matrices have been calculated for 30 min. Under 60 min, 3.6 million people (58.5% of the city's popula-
the business-as-usual baseline and for both partial and full operation tion) would be able to reach on average 11.3% more jobs under the full-
scenarios. In an attempt to reduce qualitative mismatch between construction scenario than in the business-as-usual baseline.
workers' socioeconomic position and job positions, job accessibility The results show that the accessibility impacts of TransBrasil be-
levels were adjusted on the basis of household income per grid cell and come consistently smaller for longer time thresholds in both scenarios.
educational qualifications of jobs. For residents in grid cells above the This is because the BRT becomes accessible to increasingly distant areas
5th income decile, accessibility estimates only considered employment as longer cutoff times are considered. The population living in distant
opportunities that required high or secondary education, while for grid areas, however, would need to spend a larger portion of their travel
cells below the 5th income decile only jobs that required secondary or time budget to reach a BRT station, which leaves less time to travel
primary education were considered. This assumption needs to be taken inside the BRT corridor and benefit from its speed and connectivity. It is
with caution because it incurs in ecological fallacy since it assumes all thus expected that people living in areas further away from the new
individuals in the same grid cell will to have the same income level. The project will have smaller benefits. Consequently, when the accessibility
conclusions of the paper remained the same when the empirical ana- impact of a project is measured using longer time thresholds, the results
lysis was conducted disregarding the qualitative match between include areas further afield, which lowers the overall average gain in
workers' income level and educational qualification of jobs positions. accessibility.
n
A counterintuitive result in Table 1 is that the number of people
⎛ ⎞ who would have any accessibility gain due to the new BRT gradually
Ao, i, T = median ⎜ ∑ Pd f (todr ) ⎟
⎝ o=1 ⎠ (1) increases when considering longer time thresholds up to 90 min but
then declines for 120 min. This happens because cumulative opportu-
1 if todr ≤ T nity measures only grasp accessibility changes when travel times be-
f (todr ) = ⎧
⎩ 0 if todr > T
⎨ tween origin-destination pairs are pushed across the time threshold in
question. This happened to some locations that are colored in the 90-
Where: min map but not in the 120-min maps of Fig. 3 (below). The population
living in those areas was already relatively well served by the public
Ao i T is the accessibility level at origin o for population of income i transport network, so the proposed BRT would only marginally improve
within time threshold T; their accessibility under a 90-min cutoff time but it would bring no
Pd is the number of formal jobs in location d; accessibility again with a 120-min threshold.
to d r is the travel time in minutes between origin o and destination d Accessibility gains brought about by TransBrasil will be higher in
at departure time r; and. the surrounding areas of the new corridor but will not be limited to
f(to d r) is a time threshold function that varies between one and zero, them due to network connectivity effects. Fig. 3 illustrates the spatial
depending on whether travel time (to d r) is longer or shorter than distribution of accessibility gains promoted by TransBrasil in its partial
time threshold T. and full scenarios. Under shorter travel times, accessibility gains are, as
expected, larger along the new BRT. In some of these areas, the number
Previous studies have shown that people's ability to use public of jobs accessible under 60 min would more than double compared to
transportation and hence their accessibility levels are dependent on the business-as-usual baseline. Nonetheless, the accessibility impacts of
affordability (El-Geneidy et al., 2016), disability (Casas, 2007), age TransBrasil are more than local. When longer time thresholds are
(Ryan et al., 2015) or gender (Akyelken, 2017). The accessibility ana- considered, accessibility gains become smaller and more spatially dis-
lysis conducted in this study did not consider these issues due to data tributed towards the west of Rio, which is generally less populated and
availability constraints and is thus likely to underestimate accessibility economically developed. Fig. 3 also shows how accessibility gains
inequalities (Neutens et al., 2010). Another limitation of this analysis is spread further along other major transport corridors, illustrating an
that is does not consider the long-term effect that the new BRT project important network effect of how future BRT will connect to Rio's public
might have on the relocation of job opportunities and population. Such transport network.
land-use impacts of a transportation investment are difficult to model For every cutoff time, the full construction of TransBrasil can bring
and take time to materialize. If the accessibility gains brought about by higher accessibility impacts to a larger share of the population than the
construction of TransBrasil attract more jobs to locate closer to the BRT partial operation scenario. This will happen in part because the com-
stations, it is likely that the results of this study will underestimate the plete construction of TransBrasil will make it easier for people living in
long-term accessibility benefits of this proposed BRT corridor. Because the north region to reach the city center, where most of the job op-
this paper seeks to isolate the short-term impact of the BRT project on portunities are concentrated. This final stretch into the city center will
accessibility levels, data on the spatial distribution of jobs and popu- significantly increase the connectivity of the proposed BRT to the rest of
lation have been kept constant in the analysis. Moreover, previous Rio's transport network via the light-rail, commuter rail and subway
studies have shown that the spatial distribution of jobs in socio- systems. This will also benefit people living in the southern part of the
economic groups has remained fairly stable over the past two decades city, who will be able to connect to the new BRT in the city center and
in Rio (Lago, 2000; Ribeiro, 2010). thus more easily access the job opportunities along the TransBrasil
corridor towards the north.
6. Results Due to limitations of data availability, it was not possible to measure
the accessibility impacts of TransBrasil outside the boundaries of the
Constructing the TransBrasil project either partially or in full will city of Rio (shown in dark gray in Figs. 3 and 4). Nonetheless, the
generate moderate to substantial average gains in accessibility, al- figures suggest that accessibility gains from this BRT will likely extend
though the magnitude of these gains and the number of people who to neighboring municipalities, which have relatively poorer populations
benefits from them differs depending on the travel time threshold se- and lower availability of transport services. This suggests that the
lected for the accessibility analysis. Table 1 below summarizes the TransBrasil BRT would have had even more progressive effects had
impact the TransBrasil BRT could have on people's access to these municipalities been incorporated into the analysis.

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Table 1
Summary of the impact of the TransBrasil BRT project on people's access to job opportunities within various travel time thresholds under partial and full operation
scenarios. Rio de Janeiro.
Scenario Travel time threshold (minutes)

30 60 90 120

Full operation Average accessibility changea 13.3% 11.3% 4.2% 2.4%

Population who gained access to jobs Absolute (in millions) 0.8 3.6 4.8 4.3
% relative to city population 13.7% 58.5% 78.5% 71.0%
Partial operation Average accessibility changea 10.8% 4.9% 2.3% 2.0%
Population who gained access to jobs Absolute (in millions) 0.7 3.2 4.6 3.8
% relative to city population 12.0% 52.0% 76.1% 62.2%

a
Population-weighted mean increase in the number of jobs accessible via public transport and walking within specified travel time threshold.

Fig. 3. Variation in the proportion of formal jobs accessible within various travel time thresholds via public transport and walking under full (A) and partial (B)
operation scenarios of the TransBrasil BRT project. Rio de Janeiro.

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Fig. 4. Distribution of gains in job accessibility via public transport and walking by income groups under partial and full operation scenarios given various travel time
thresholds. Rio de Janeiro.
Note: Chart only considers the grid cells where there will be a change in accessibility levels caused by the partial and full implementation of the BRT project.

A central question to consider from a transportation equity point of improves their connection to areas of high job concentration, particu-
view is to what extent the implementation of the proposed transport larly in the city center. Fig. 4 also shows how the magnitude of the
investment will contribute to reducing inequality of access to oppor- accessibility impacts promoted by TransBrasil gradually declines for
tunities, particularly by improving the access of lower-income groups. longer travel time thresholds, and this decline is particularly noticeable
The results show that both partial and full scenarios will have pro- for lower income deciles. The TransBrasil corridor will have more
gressive effects – i.e. they will bring larger accessibility benefits to progressive effects when considering a threshold of 30 min. It gradually
lower- than to higher-income areas, particularly under shorter travel becomes more neutral when longer travel times are considered but it is
time thresholds. Fig. 4 uses box plots to show how of job accessibility still slightly progressive at a threshold of 120 min. In other words, the
gains vary income deciles at travel time limits of 30, 60, 90 and progressive redistribution of accessibility brought about by the Trans-
120 min. It indicates that TransBrasil will bring higher accessibility Brasil project cannot be considered in isolation from the cutoff time
gains to lower income classes, but also that the magnitude of these value that is used in the cumulative opportunity analysis.
gains differs considerably depending on the travel time limit. With a 60- The boxplots also illustrate how, compared to the partial im-
min threshold, for example, the complete implementation of the BRT plementation of the TransBrasil corridor, the full implementation would
will increase job accessibility in the city by 11.3% on average, while bring relatively higher accessibility gains to larger numbers of people.
areas in the two poorest income deciles will experience a 23% average This can be seen in the rise of average accessibility – indicated by the
rise in their accessibility to employment opportunities. To a large ex- colored dots – which would be particularly more pronounced for lower-
tent, this is because of the layout of this corridor, which cuts across income classes once the project is fully implemented. The horizontal
various low-income neighborhoods with high population density and bar inside the boxplots of Fig. 4 represents the median accessibility

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gains within each income decile. Median accessibility levels would It is important to ask whether analyses using various time thresholds
generally decrease from partial to full operation scenario. This is be- lead to differences in results that would be sufficiently large to suggest
cause under the full operation scenario, the accessibility impacts of the substantial modifications in the transport policy proposed. In the case
new BRT would extend to a larger number of people in areas further of the TransBrasil BRT, the size of average accessibility gains could vary
afield, as seen in Fig. 3. However, because these areas have relatively five-fold and the impact of the project changes from progressive to
smaller accessibility gains, the expansion of the BRT's area of influence neutral depending on the cutoff time considered. This can have im-
increases the number of beneficiaries at the same time as it drives the portant implications for decision making if these results are in-
median gains in accessibility down. corporated in some sort of cost benefit analysis or multi-criteria ana-
Overall, these results suggest that the implementation of the lysis. This, however, is a study of a particular project and city. It is
TransBrasil BRT can significantly improve the access to job opportu- reasonable to expect that the sensitivity of results to cutoff time varies
nities for a large share of Rio's population, and particularly for lower- according to the characteristics of the transport intervention and the
income areas. However, these results vary substantially depending on city under analysis. The findings of this paper suggest that future re-
what time threshold is chosen for the analysis. While the implementa- search on the equity appraisal of transportation projects should pay
tion of this new BRT would have more progressive and higher acces- attention to the modifiable temporal unit problem and include sensi-
sibility impacts under shorter travel times (30 and 60 min), it will have tivity analysis and look more carefully at distributional effects.
more neutral effects with smaller impact with longer time thresholds There is currently no standard approach to overcome the boundary
(90 and 120 min). Moreover, the full implementation of the TransBrasil effect in MTUP. One way to minimize MTUP when working with cu-
corridor will promote greater accessibility gains compared to its partial mulative opportunity measures could be to estimate accessibility levels
construction, and extending this BRT into the city center will make this under various time thresholds and then calculate the weighted average
project slightly more progressive from a distributional point of view. accessibility across all thresholds. Although this approach would avoid
Finally, the TransBrasil corridor stands out as a far more equitable in- the arbitrariness of choosing a single time threshold, it still requires
vestment that promotes larger accessibility gains for lower-income some ad-hoc decision on which and how many cut-off points should be
areas when compared to the accessibility impacts of the other recent considered. Another alternative would be to use other accessibility
transport investments in Rio de Janeiro (Pereira, 2018; Pereira, measures that require selecting a single time threshold – e.g., log-sum
Banister, et al., 2017b). or gravitational metrics. Nonetheless, these measures also rely on
parameters that are defined ad-hoc, such as distance/time decay factors
7. Conclusion which greatly influence accessibility estimates (Stępniak & Rosik,
2017). According to Kwan & Weber (2008), space-time accessibility
This study evaluated of how different scenarios of a major BRT measures are not sensitive to the spatial MAUP, but further investiga-
project currently under development in Rio de Janeiro may impact tion will be necessary to examine whether this type of metric can also
employment accessibility of different income groups and how these overcome MTUP. In any case, these alternative accessibility measures
results vary when using different travel time thresholds. The findings have other limitations, such as being data-hungry and less transparent/
indicate that the full implementation of the TransBrasil corridor will easy to communicate to policymakers. Just as there is no single best
promote greater accessibility gains and make this project slightly more method to measure accessibility (Neutens et al., 2010; van Wee &
progressive from a distributional point of view than its partial con- Geurs, 2011), there is no single universal threshold that is appropriate
struction. From a Rawlsian perspective, both scenarios would move Rio for every transportation project, trip purpose, social group and urban
towards a more equitable transportation system because they increase context. This case study of the city of Rio illustrates why simple sen-
accessibility across areas of all income levels, but they prioritize im- sitivity analysis should be incorporated more often in future research.
proving accessibility for areas with low average income. While it would A limitation of this study is that it was circumscribed to the city of
be unrealistic to expect every neighborhood in a city to have the same Rio de Janeiro due to lack of data for neighboring municipalities.
level of access to job opportunities, the results of this paper suggest that Nonetheless, the accessibility benefits of the TransBrasil project are
the construction of this BRT would at least reduce inequalities in access likely to spill over to nearby municipalities and thus benefit relatively
to opportunities by increasing accessibility levels of poorer commu- poorer populations and people with lower availability of transport
nities that are more transit-dependent. From this angle, any of the services. This issue raises questions related to the planning and finan-
scenarios of the TransBrasil corridor will stand out as a far more cing of transport projects that are under the responsibility of a single
equitable investment than the other recent transport investments in Rio municipality but which have wider accessibility impacts that cross
(Pereira, 2018; Pereira, Banister, et al., 2017b). borders in urban agglomerations lacking metropolitan governance.
The results also reveal that the size of the accessibility impacts of Another limitation of this paper is that it focuses on the short-term
the TransBrasil project as well as its distribution by income level vary impacts of the BRT project. It thus overlooks the long-term feedback
substantially depending on the time threshold chosen for the cumula- between transport investments and reorganization of land use patterns.
tive opportunity accessibility analysis. While the implementation of this Further research is necessary to understand the long-term equity effects
BRT will have more progressive and higher accessibility impacts under of transport investments on real estate values (Jun, 2012; Stokenberga,
shorter travel times (30 and 60 min), it will have more neutral effects 2014) and gentrification processes (Gaffney, 2016). Other research
and smaller impact with longer time thresholds (90 and 120 min). This questions that deserve careful attention from future studies include the
result draws attention to a broader question about the extent to which long-term health effects transport projects and issues of governance and
the equity appraisal of transportation projects is sensitive to the mod- participatory decision-making which are also of key importance for the
ifiable temporal unit problem (MTUP). Looking specifically at the co-production of fair transport policies (Boisjoly & Yengoh, 2017;
boundary effect of MTUP, this study shows that conclusions of equity Fainstein, 2010).
assessments of transportation projects are dependent on time threshold Finally, this study has only considered the boundary effect of MTUP.
choice. It points to how some methodological choices such as this one The segmentation effect has received more attention in previous studies
can have important but little discussed implications for policy evalua- which have shown that the variation of public transport service levels
tion. More importantly, it suggests that the most common practice across the day and in different days of the week can have important
adopted by academic studies and transport agencies when evaluating equity implications (Fan et al., 2012; Farber et al., 2014). Both the
the accessibility impacts of transportation projects can lead to mis- boundary and the aggregation effects, on the other hand, have been
leading or partial conclusions if these methodological choices are made largely overlooked in the literature thus far. This paper has shown how
uncritically. the boundary effect of choosing a travel time threshold has important

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implications for transportation equity analysis. Much more research is and constructive comments. The author would like to thank David
needed to understand how and to what extent other methodological Banister and Tim Schwanen for their thoughtful comments on previous
decisions related to MTUP could influence the conclusions of transport versions of this paper. This work was supported by Capes Foundation,
project appraisals. Ministry of Education, Brazil [Grant Number BEX 1397/13-3], the
Brazilian Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and the Lee
Acknowledgments Schipper Memorial Scholarship.

The author would like to thank the editor and reviewers for useful

Appendix A

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Appendix B

# Route service name Total length Travel time (min- Average speed (Km/ Frequency (morning Headway (min′
(Km) * utes)* h) * peak) sec″)

1 Terminal Deorodo – I.N.T.O. (Parador) 50.0 98 30.6 72 0′45″

2 Terminal Deorodo – Terminal Gasômetro (Semi-Direto/ 51.5 94 32.8 12 5′00″
Direto)
3 Terminal Deorodo – Terminal Américo Fontenelle (Semi- 56.5 104 32.6 6 10′00″
Direto/ Direto)
4 Terminal Deorodo – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Semi-Direto/ 62.0 115 32.3 36 1′50″
Direto)
5 Terminal Margaridas – I.N.T.O. (Parador) 32.8 72 27.3 60 1′00″
6 Terminal Margaridas – Terminal Gasômetro (Semi-Direto/ 35.6 70 30.5 12 5′00″
Direto)
7 Terminal Margaridas – Terminal Américo Fontenelle (Semi- 40.6 80 30.5 5 12′00″
Direto)
8 Terminal Margaridas – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Semi- 46.1 90 30.7 30 2′00″
Direto/ Direto)
9 Terminal Missões – I.N.T.O. (Parador) 26.4 60 26.4 53 1′10″
10 Terminal Missões – Terminal Gasômetro (Semi-Direto/ Direto) 28.5 60 28.5 15 4′00″
11 Terminal Missões – Terminal Américo Fontenelle (Semi- 33.5 70 28.7 10 6′00″
Direto)
12 Terminal Missões – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Semi-Direto/ 39.0 80 29.3 40 1′30"
Direto)
13 Terminal Fundão – Terminal Gasômetro (Parador) 19.8 54 22.0 12 5′00″
14 Terminal Fundão – Terminal Américo Fontenelle (Parador) 24.8 64 23.3 11 5′30″
15 Terminal Fundão – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Parador) 30.8 78 23.7 25 2′25″
16 Terminal Fundão – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Direto) 30.8 72 25.7 4 15′00″
17 Terminal Penha – I.N.T.O. (Parador) 23.2 62 22.4 50 1′15"
18 Terminal Penha – Terminal Gasômetro (Direto) 25.2 64 23.6 8 7′30″
19 Terminal Penha – Terminal Presidente Vargas (Direto) 35.8 88 24.4 24 2′30″

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