Specified by the Department for Transport

Accession has been developed according to the UK Department for Transport's specifications and is designed to meet the guidelines for local transport plans in the UK and worldwide. Click here for the DfT's latest draft guidance on accessibility planning.

The most complete package for accessibility analysis and travel time analysis

Accession is the first software package to fully address all aspects of travel time and cost mapping using digital road networks, public transport timetable data and flexible, on-demand transport. It is able to deliver key performance indicators through the analysis of any geo-demographic data using travel time, cost or distance.

Suitable for your business

Accession is ideally suited to a wide range of organisations concerned with the accessibility of services to customers or employees. It can be used for retail location and catchment analysis, school catchment planning, public transport service planning, measurement of key performance indicators for accessibility levels; planning control enforcement of accessibility, health service provision planning, employment planning, company transport plans, planning application development and public safety planning.

Low total cost of ownership

Accession will run on standard desktop or laptop PCs (>512Mb RAM, a Pentium IV or above processor, 20Gb hard drive, 17inch colour monitor with a standard graphics card, operating under Windows NT/2000/XP). It uses a Microsoft Access 2000 database. Ease of use and the ability to import a wide range of data formats, including public transport data as ATCO CIF or TransXchange means that the total cost of ownership is surprisingly low. The product licence structure is designed to favour organisations wishing to work within a partnership.

Quality of training and support

Citilabs is able to offer training and support that is based in in-depth technical expertise and substantial experience of both your business, data and the technology that you would like to use.

The power of GIS

Accession has been developed using Geomedia Objects, from Intergraph. It will work with most leading GIS data formats with no need to import or translate to other formats. Accession is therefore a fully functional GIS with all the expected features including layer control, zoom settings (scale dependence) and layer fit, a selection tool, thematic mapping, raster and vector mapping, legend and scale bar, a wide variety of line styles and shading, text labelling and layouts with templates.

Accession has an extremely powerful query builder for table or map-based queries that offers dynamic buffering, operators such as inside, outside, intersecting or touching. Accession queries are dynamic and can be mapped or saved for re-use.

Designed with partnerships in mind

The effectiveness of accessibility planning will rely on the partnerships that are developed between local authority transport planners, land use planners, representatives of the key local service providers (Primary Care Trusts, Jobcentre Plus, Local Education Authorities etc) and other local bodies. For example solutions such as co-ordination of opening times, or relocation of services might prove to be a more effective solution than the alteration of bus-routes and time tables. Accession software will help you answer these questions. Accession is designed so that data can be shared within partnerships.

Built by transport modelling experts

Accession is developed and supported by transportation planners and engineers, experts in the areas of passenger demand forecasting, commodity forecasting, microsimulation and environmental impacts. The programming staff from Citilabs are all senior computer scientists but many have worked as consultants in transportation planning and/or GIS.

Ease of Use

In order to undertake meaningful, in-depth and reliable analysis of accessibility there is a minimum requirement in terms of knowledge and capability. Accession has been developed to guide users at all levels of skill through the overall process, from data importing through editing, analysis and reporting through the use of wizards and a comprehensive help system.

Based on industry standards

Accession will read most leading GIS formats and background mapping can remain in its native format with no need to import. Accession also will read Ordnance Survey of Great Britain's Mastermap data (delivered in GML) and public transport data in either TransXchange or ATCO-CIF. Data are stored in an MSAccess database, even for large cities.

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