Methodologies and Tools to Evaluate Issues Relating to Land-Use and / or Social Aspects of Urban Transportation Policies: An accessibility Concept Linked Approach

Transportation policy issues are important in urban areas since they try to answer growing preoccupations. Nevertheless, do assessment tools enable the evaluation of social equity? In the French case, assessment methodologies - cost-benefit analysis - have been developed to make allowance for more elements. Even if economic and environment aspects could be evaluated for each urban transport system user, analysis does not linger over individual impacts. The question of social equity is either in the background or is not analysed, in both transportation policies and methodologies assessment. However, literature review and decision-maker's speeches on equality show us a re-emergence of the social field in transportation policies. This appears with values of individual "rights" and "chance". By consequence, we interpret the equal opportunity between individuals by the accessibility concept. Accessibility is one of the basic approaches to the question of the social aspects in transportation policies. In order to take into account for social field and to answer accessibility to what, for whom and how?" indicators based on a "differentiated accessibility" could be established. These indicators would propose a tool that would make it possible to light the decision makers and to account for individual inequalities, considered in terms of chances to profit from the amenities of an urban area that they need to achieve their goals.