Legacy edition

About the Explorer

The Metropolitan Chicago Accessibility Explorer shows access to jobs and everyday destinations by driving, transit, bicycle, and walking. This legacy edition preserves the results distributed with the original site. Its maps and browser software have been updated; the historical accessibility values, travel times, and boundaries have been retained.

Geographic coverage

Job accessibility and travel times cover 5,914 Census block groups in the Chicago metropolitan area. Accessibility to parks, libraries, fire stations, schools, hospitals, and grocery stores covers 2,195 Chicago block groups. The original grocery inventory contains 506 stores. These inventories belong to the legacy release and are separate from the 2026 Explorer.

Release and data years

The Explorer was released in 2016; the original report is dated January 12, 2016. Census block groups follow the 2010 geography. The report identifies January 2014 transit schedules and an April 16, 2014 pedestrian network for transit job accessibility supplied by the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

For the remaining calculations, the report records access to OpenStreetMap and transit schedule sources in January 2015, and to LEHD employment and Chicago Data Portal sources in February 2015. These are retrieval dates, not necessarily the years the data describe. The report does not specify an observation year for every employment or destination dataset, so the legacy results should not be interpreted as a uniform 2015 or 2016 data inventory.

Data and methods

Employment data came from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program. Other destination inventories came from county GIS departments and the City of Chicago Data Portal. Travel-time calculations used OpenStreetMap networks, agency GTFS schedules, and OpenTripPlanner. The original report describes which sources were used for each part of the study.

The archive contains precomputed results for four travel modes, with 24 hourly departure options for transit. Accessibility thresholds range from 5 to 60 minutes. Job results retain the original age, earnings, industry, race, ethnicity, education, and gender categories.

The map colors show the share of the original destination inventory reachable within the selected time. Popups also show the stored counts. Park area is measured in square miles. Job category percentages use the corresponding category total.

Natural-break classes are calculated from the displayed values. Fixed classes use the original percentage thresholds. Travel-time classes retain the original time thresholds; an unavailable journey has its own neutral color.

The street basemap comes from current OpenStreetMap data. Block groups, rail lines, community areas, ward boundaries, and analysis results come from the archived application. The basemap date therefore differs from the analysis period. Changes to transit service, streets, jobs, and establishments since the original study are not reflected in these results.

For the original data sources, source years, and study methods, see the original technical report (PDF).

Project and credits

The original Explorer was developed by the Travel Behavior & Urban Systems Research Group at the University of Illinois Chicago. The report authors are Nebiyou Tilahun, Shi Yin, and Moyin Li. Shi Yin developed and maintained the original website. The legacy site is maintained by the Mobility & Urban Systems Lab at UIC.

The original project was funded by the Metropolitan Transportation Support Initiative (METSI) and the National Center for Transit Research (NCTR-USF), through UIC's Urban Transportation Center.

Original report

Tilahun, N., Yin, S., & Li, M. (2016). The Metropolitan Chicago Accessibility Explorer: Final Report. Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Questions: ntilahun@uic.edu