New Publication

“Who is the X-minute city for? An E2SFCA assessment of wheelchair accessibility in Zurich City Center” published in the Journal of Urban Mobility, led by Chiara Ballinari, with Alexandra Ioana Georgescu and Hoda Allahbakhshi.

The 15-minute city aims for everyone to reach what they need close to home by walking, cycling, or taking public transport. But “close” only means something if you can actually get there. For wheelchair users, the same 15-minute trip can become a route with steep slopes, missing curb ramps, and impassable crossings.
This study asks a simple but important question: How equitably does Zurich’s city center really deliver on the X-minute city promise?
Some key findings include:

• Wheelchair users experience significantly lower spatial accessibility than the general population across nearly all facility types (e.g., educational, administrative, and leisure), even within a compact, service-rich urban district.
• The disparities are particularly pronounced in Zurich’s historic old town, where stairs, narrow sidewalks, and surface problems fragment the network. Areas that appear “well-served” for the general population are not necessarily equally reachable for wheelchair users.
• A single travel-time threshold cannot be equitable across groups with different mobility capacities. The study highlights the need for accessibility measures that go beyond proximity and account for infrastructure quality as well.

This study builds directly on the ZuriACT dataset and the volunteers who helped collect it; another great example of how citizen science and participatory approaches can contribute to planning-relevant accessibility research.

Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urbmob.2026.100259