A Crash Course on Urban Accessibility with R

Free workshop, open for anyone, on open source R tools for accessibility analysis, led by Rafael H. M. Pereira (Ipea, Brazil).
About this Event

Routing and accessibility analyses are increasingly used in urban and transport research and planning. In this workshop, you will learn how to estimate travel time matrices and perform accessibility analyzes in multimodal transport networks using the R programming language.

The workshop will also illustrate how to calculate different measures of inequality of access to opportunities and accessibility poverty, which are crucial to assess the accessibility impacts of transportation projects from an equity perspective.

The course is based on the book “Introduction to urban accessibility: a practical guide with R”, available online at https://ipeagit.github.io/intro_access_book/

Cover image: Pereira, Rafael H. M. & Herszenhut, Daniel. (2023) Introduction to urban accessibility: a practical guide with R. Ipea - Institute of Applied Economic Research.

Computational requirements:

To follow the workshop, you should have the following programs installed on your computer. More information here.

• R and RStudio
• Java Development Kit (JDK) 21

These should be installed *before* the workshop

Reading material:

• Online book “Introduction to urban accessibility a practical guide with R” https://ipeagit.github.io/intro_access_book/ (Chapters 3 and 6)
• Paper of the {r5r} package https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.21262
• Website and documentation of the {r5r} package https://ipeagit.github.io/r5r/
• Website and documentation of the {accessibility} package https://ipeagit.github.io/accessibility/

Instructor:

Rafael H. M. Pereira

Head of Data Science

Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), Brazil

Rafael H. M. Pereira is a senior researcher in the fields of urban analytics, spatial data science and transport studies at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea), Brazil, where he leads the Data Science team and the Access to Opportunities Lab (AOP-Lab). He was recently a visiting professor at the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto (2024-2025). His research examines how urban policies shape the spatial organization of cities, human mobility, and their impact on social and health inequalities. He develops methods and open-source tools for studying urban systems and transportation networks, with a focus on social justice, sustainable mobility, and access to opportunities. His work has been recognized with the Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship, the Young Researcher of the Year Award from the OECD's International Transport Forum (ITF), and awards for his PhD thesis and contributions to transport research. With a background in Sociology and Demography, Dr. Pereira obtained his PhD in Geography from the Transport Studies Unit at Oxford University.

Personal website: https://www.urbandemographics.org/about/