Abstract

High urban accessibility, measured in terms of easy and fast to reach public and private services, such as schools, parks and shops, is considered an important indicator for quality of life. We developed a web-based platform to measure urban accessibility for transportation planning. Several cities that we aim to study are in Chile where data on urban services is scarce. We evaluated if OpenStreetMap (OSM) can be used as a source of Points of Interest (POI) to evaluate urban accessibility. Based on a field survey in Santiago de Chile, we found that completeness of the OSM POI database is geographical very diverse (7% - 73%) and therefore accessibility scores change significantly. However, scores in some areas did not change much when POIs were added to the OSM database. Given the lack of alternative data sources we recommend using OSM, but suggest evaluating POI completeness in areas with average and low accessibility scores.