Abstract: Transportation is the lifeblood of a modern metropolis. Accessibility generally refers to the interconnection between nodes in a regional traffic network. The purpose of the paper is to obtain more realistic and accurate measures of travel speed and to study the road traffic accessibility potential in cities. This study proposes a method for analyzing road traffic accessibility potential which is based on the average travel speed to city centers in off-peak times and which ranks 80 cities around the world. Based on the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite’s visible-infrared imaging radiometer suite (NPP-VIIRS) night-time light data, urban built-up areas and city centers were extracted. Further, with the aid of the Google Maps application programming interface (API) network crawling technique, travel times and travel distances for several optimal routes to city centers by car were obtained. Feasible proposals for improving road traffic accessibility and planning urban transportation in different cities are presented. The proposed method offers a new possibility of analyzing traffic accessibility using internet data and geo-spatial methods.

Key words: Traffic accessibility; Google Maps application programming interface (API); Travel speed; Road traffic network; Geographic information system (GIS)

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