Assessing the accessibility of activity centres and their prioritisation: a case study for Perth Metropolitan Area

The primary objective of this study was to ascertain, through analysis of accessibility and development potential, which activity centres should be prioritised to support decentralisation of jobs, encourage better integration of transport and land use and ultimately aid the evaluation of a more compact, consolidation and connected city. In doing so, this study evaluated and compared the existing accessibility of different geographic units across the city, including the 34 activity centres identified by the Government of Australia, by the two most frequently use transport modes, namely – public transport and car. The analysis of this study has two parts. Firstly, an isochrone-based measure of accessibility was used for an accessibility modelling across the Perth Metropolitan Area in Western Australia. Secondly, using six node-place based indicators, this paper also endeavoured to prioritise the geographic units that are already better served by public transport, as indicated by the accessibility analysis. Multi-criteria weighed scoring method was applied to calculate a score out of 100 for each of the geographic units. The results of this analysis could help to identify activity centre(s) and other areas in Perth, if any, with higher potentials of being a Transit Oriented Development (TOD) supportive activity centre.