Rafael H. M. Pereira

Yuan Liao, Rafael H. M. Pereira, Jorge Gil et al.

Understanding how accessibility shapes participation in leisure activities is central to promoting inclusive and vibrant urban life. Conventional accessibility measures often focus on potential access from fixed home locations, overlooking the constraints and opportunities embedded in daily routines. In this study, we apply a space-time accessibility (STA) metric rooted in the capability approach, capturing feasible leisure opportunities between home and work given a certain time budget, individual transport modes, and urban infrastructure. Using high-resolution GPS data from 2,415 working residents in the Paris region, we assess how STA influences leisure participation during weekdays, measured as the diversity of leisure locations visited and activity duration. Observed destination choices confirm that most individuals select leisure locations within their STA-defined opportunity sets, validating the metric as a proxy for capability sets. Structural equation modeling shows that STA exerts a significant positive total effect on leisure participation ($β= 0.14$, $p < .001$), driven by a significant direct effect ($β= 0.18$, $p < .001$) that is only modestly offset by an indirect pathway through reduced travel time ($β= -0.04$, $p < .01$). Individual attributes also directly shape participation: active mode use and higher education promote leisure engagement, while local poverty and caregiving responsibilities constrain it. These findings highlight the value of person-centered, capability-informed accessibility metrics for understanding inequalities in urban mobility and informing transport planning strategies that expand real freedoms to participate in social life across diverse population groups.

Felix Wagner, Florian Nachtigall, Lukas Franken et al.

Climate change mitigation in urban mobility requires policies reconfiguring urban form to increase accessibility and facilitate low-carbon modes of transport. However, current policy research has insufficiently assessed urban form effects on car travel at three levels: (1) Causality -- Can causality be established beyond theoretical and correlation-based analyses? (2) Generalizability -- Do relationships hold across different cities and world regions? (3) Context specificity -- How do relationships vary across neighborhoods of a city? Here, we address all three gaps via causal graph discovery and explainable machine learning to detect urban form effects on intra-city car travel, based on mobility data of six cities across three continents. We find significant causal effects of urban form on trip emissions and inter-feature effects, which had been neglected in previous work. Our results demonstrate that destination accessibility matters most overall, while low density and low connectivity also sharply increase CO$_2$ emissions. These general trends are similar across cities but we find idiosyncratic effects that can lead to substantially different recommendations. In more monocentric cities, we identify spatial corridors -- about 10--50 km from the city center -- where subcenter-oriented development is more relevant than increased access to the main center. Our work demonstrates a novel application of machine learning that enables new research addressing the needs of causality, generalizability, and contextual specificity for scaling evidence-based urban climate solutions.