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Accessibility measures are usually designed to be objective representations of the ‘real’ conditions to provide a baseline for planning decisions and to track change over time. A wide range of approaches to measuring accessibility have been developed, usually based largely on quantifiable factors such as journey time. The simplest of these are based on the time taken to reach the nearest destination from an origin point. Destinations might include healthcare, education, employment or supermarkets, amongst others.

This paper posits that people’s perceptions and experiences may differ from objectively measured conditions and crucially may be more important for understanding behaviour. An understanding of the difference between objective and subjective measures, and how they relate to each other is therefore vital before using either measure to inform policy decisions. This paper compares two approaches to …