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Passyunk Square Neighborhood Accessibility Character Map

Welcome to the Neighborhood Accessibility Character Map, a project developed for MUSA 5500: Spatial Analytics.
This site documents the full analytical workflow used to build a multi-dimensional accessibility index for Philadelphia neighborhoods, with a focus on Passyunk Square as a case study.

The project integrates four major accessibility domains:

  • Mobility — walkability, bikeability, pedestrian infrastructure, transit-adjacent conditions
  • Land Use / Amenities — proximity to essential services such as healthcare and daily goods
  • Environmental Quality — vegetation health, park access, and urban tree canopy
  • Social/Demographic Conditions — demographic and socioeconomic indicators that shape lived accessibility

These domains are normalized, aggregated, and combined using a weighted composite scoring system to produce a final Accessibility Score for each neighborhood.

What You’ll Find on This Site

Use the navigation bar above to explore each part of the project:

Project Overview

A summary of the research question, motivation, and conceptual framing of accessibility in urban environments.

Data Sources

A curated list of all spatial datasets used—OpenStreetMap, OpenDataPhilly, GEE remote sensing, Census ACS—and justification for each variable.

Methodology

Details on spatial processing, normalization, kernel distances, KDTree calculations, zonal statistics, aggregation to neighborhoods, and weighted scoring.

Domain Score Construction

Breakdowns for: - Mobility Score
- Land Use Score
- Environmental Score
- Social Score
- Final Accessibility Score

Each section includes formulas, maps, and domain-specific interpretation.

Results & Interpretation

Citywide patterns, Passyunk Square’s relative performance, rank comparisons, and multi-domain insights.

Includes:
- Component maps
- Distribution plots
- PSQ’s percentile placement

Limitations

Reflections on data gaps, scale issues, representation limits, and opportunities for refinement.

Conclusion

What this index reveals about Philadelphia’s accessibility landscape and its implications for planning practice.

Project Purpose

This project demonstrates how spatial analytics, remote sensing, and geoprocessing workflows can combine to produce a meaningful, multidimensional understanding of accessibility beyond simple proximity metrics. The goal is not only to assess Passyunk Square, but to illustrate a generalizable method for neighborhood-scale accessibility evaluation.

You can now navigate the tabs above to dive deeper into each part of the analysis.