From Sustainable Transportation to Sustainable Accessibility: Can We Avoid a New Tragedy of the Commons?

Accessibility is the geographic definition of opportunity. The opportunity individuals have to participate in necessary or desired activities, or to explore new ones, is contingent upon their ability to reach the right places at the appropriate times and with reasonable expenditure of resources and effort. Up until recently the history of the increase in accessibility at local, regional, and global scales has largely been the history of improvements in transportation. With the advent, spread, and now merging of telecommunications and digital information technologies there exist for the first time viable and often preferable alternatives to physical movement for accessing and engaging in economic, social, or cultural activities. These developments combine with advances in the design and management of physical transportation to create substantially altered forms of accessibility landscapes reflecting profound changes in the meaning of that term itself and its implications for urban and regional structure and function.