Page | 1 Spatial Patterns of Walking, Cycling, and Public Transport Mobility and Associated Neighbourhood Characteristics in Dublin, Ireland Kevin Credit*1 1National Centre for Geocomputation, Maynooth University December 7, 2022 Summary This paper explores the spatial patterns of walking, cycling, and public transport mobility in Dublin using a novel methodology that queries all neighbourhood-to-neighbourhood travel times within the region (by mode). These travel times are converted to travel costs and divided by Euclidean distance to create relative measures of mobility (cost-distance ratios). Analysing the neighbourhood characteristics of the origins and destinations for these ratios shows that racial/ethnic diversity, low socioeconomic status, and poor health are all related to relatively more costly (i.e., slow) public transit service. However, some of these neighbourhoods are relatively well-served by walking and cycling infrastructure. KEYWORDS: public transport, mobility, travel times, spatial modeling, cycling 1. Introduction Transportation mobility – the ability of an individual to travel through space on a given transportation network – is an important component of economic opportunity, public health, and overall quality of life (Ong & Houston, 2002; Yi, 2006; Lindstrom, 2008; Frank et al., 2006). This is particularly true for non-automobile modes, such as walking, cycling, and public transport, since these modes are less expensive than automobile ownership and tend to increase physical activity rates. However, a growing body of research has shown that the provision of transportation infrastructure – and thus individual mobility – is often unequally distributed in urban areas. In the North American context, processes of suburbanisation and ‘white flight’ in the post-WWII period were driven by transportation investment patterns that focused almost exclusively on automobile infrastructure in suburban and exurban areas (Vojnovic & Darden, 2013). The implicit (and sometimes explicit) goal of these investments was to enable the decentralisation of higher income, white populations. The resulting ‘sprawling’ development patterns make effective public transport service difficult to deliver at a regional scale; but even within dense cities, minoritized neighbourhoods still tend to be less well- served by public transport, walking, and cycling infrastructure (Lee et al. 2018; Credit et al. 2021). While European countries have experienced broadly similar trends in auto-centric development patterns over the past 70 years, the underlying socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and built environment dynamics are much different (and less well-studied) than in North America. In Ireland, the onset of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy in the early 1990s fostered massive growth in suburban and exurban Dublin (McManus, 2018). By 2000 the effective Dublin “commuting belt” measured 90km, with new development occurring in a dispersed pattern across both larger commuter towns and smaller villages (Willams & Shiels, 2000). Despite the downturn in construction caused by the 2008 financial crisis, the auto-orientation of new development in Ireland continues to persist, with a 2014 study (Caulfield & Ahern) showing that those living in housing built after 2006 have significantly longer commute times and a much higher likelihood of commuting by automobile. * kevin.credit@mu.ie