PTV Group has launched a new dashboard to visualize the accessibility and mobility potential of cities. PTV Access is the first tool in a new product line of data-driven, lightweight, sofware-as-a-service (SaaS)-tools for mobility analysis, management, and operation. More will be released in the near future as part of the company’s goal to deliver easy, accessible mobility insights.
PTV Access gives insights into the quality of transport infrastructure, and which modes work best for the people. The dashboard is already available for the 50 largest German cities and will be gradually expanded to include cities worldwide.
PTV’s latest tool is powered by PTV Model2Go, a smart technology to automatize the building of standardized transport models. Basic models can be automatically set up for any city or region worldwide with just a few steps – a process that traditionally takes several months. On this basis, multimodal accessibility analyses can be carried out. In PTV Access, results are visualized on an interactive dashboard.
To demonstrate the many possibilities of the dashboard, PTV experts prepared an accessibility score for the 50 largest cities in Germany, which can be explored online.
The accessibility score indicates how well people can reach a set of common points of interest (POIs) such as schools, hospitals and shopping areas, by different modes of transport. An additional ranking shows which cities perform best in terms of walkability, biking, public transit, and driving: Munich is at the top of the ranking for all modes of transport, with Berlin and Frankfurt in the second and third spot depending on the mode.
In addition to discovering the city’s overall result, users can dive deeper into the modal accessibility of different areas of the city and compare different cities on the interactive map. Further mobility insights, such as the road network density and the proximity to public transport stops, are also available.
“Access to mobility, means access to society – to education, to jobs, to leisure,” says Christian U. Haas, CEO of PTV Group. “Thus, improving accessibility also means empowering people to move forward. Tools for data visualization like PTV Access are incredibly valuable here. They empower city stakeholders to shape sustainable and inclusive urban environments focused on the citizen’s needs.”
The dashboard of PTV Access is being further developed and expanded – not only to include the accessibility scores for other countries and cities worldwide, but also to include new use cases. Additional uses for traffic flow and safety analysis, both well understood by PTV, are under consideration. The same applies to options like customization of the data and embedding of results via an API.
Main image: Adobe Stock
