(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024-04-28)
Moss, David
“Food deserts” are areas of an urban environment that are judged to have no
accessibility to a nearby grocery store. Traditionally, this accessibility is based on a simple
measure of Euclidean distance, i.e. a circle of a given radius drawn around the nearest grocery
store, thus ignoring the actual road network used to travel to said store. This paper proposes a
measure based on isochrones, polygons which both incorporate the actual distance travelled to
reach a given grocery store, as well as the time it takes to traverse said distance via a variety of
different modes. Doing so dramatically changes the estimated coverage area of a given grocery
store, and helps visualize the inequities inherent in using distance-based measures of
accessibility without accounting for the mode taken to travel that distance, which particularly
harms individuals without access to cars or bikes. This same methodology is then utilized to
demonstrate why the issue of food deserts cannot be solved by simply building more grocery
stores, and proposes an alternative solution that is both cost-efficient and scalable.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-07-28)
Moss, David
“Food deserts” are areas of an urban environment that are judged to have no
accessibility to a nearby grocery store. Traditionally, this accessibility is based on a simple
measure of Euclidean distance, i.e. a circle of a given radius drawn around the nearest grocery
store, thus ignoring the actual road network used to travel to said store. This paper proposes a
methodology for constructing isochrones, polygons which both incorporate the actual distance
travelled to reach a given grocery store, as well as the time it takes to traverse said distance via
a variety of different modes. Doing so dramatically reduces the estimated coverage area of a
given grocery store, and helps visualize the inequities inherent in using distance-based measures
of accessibility without accounting for the mode taken to travel that distance, which particularly
harms individuals without access to cars or bikes.