Papers of the Applied Geography Conferences (2008) 31: 234-243

CHANGING ACCESSIBILITY AND COMMUTING COSTS IN METRO

LOUISVILLE: ANALYSIS OF THE HYPOTHETICAL DISRUPTION
OF SHERMAN MINTON BRIDGE

Wei Song
Andrew McKinney
Department of Geography and Geosciences
University of Louisville
Louisville, KY 40292

1. INTRODUCTION

Transportation networks, composed of links connecting geographically dispersed

communities, towns and cities, are an indispensable component of everyday life in modern
society. Much of modern society has become dependent on mobility and the accessibility of
important activities on the daily basis. When transportation systems operate as designed, they
form the foundation upon which commerce, trade and the serviced communities’ well-being
can flourish. But when the availability of these systems is jeopardized by gradual deterioration
(e.g., corrosion induced deterioration) or natural hazards (e.g., earthquake induced link failure),
the communities they service can likewise suffer (Birdsall et al., 2007). Thus, transportation
networks, along with other physical and virtual networks (e.g., power lines, the Internet) are
referred to as crucial lifelines in modern society (Miller, 2003).
The August 2007 collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minnesota has significantly
impacted road-users and the Minnesota economy. The disruption in the transport system forced
about 140,000 daily vehicles relying on this link to reroute. A model created by REMI
Consulting and the Minnesota Department of Transportation estimated that costs to road-users
due to the detours would total $400,000 per day. The daily loss of $247,000 of auto travel time
was projected for commuters due to prolonged journeys to and from the work. This economic
loss also has the potential to cost the state jobs throughout the economy (DEED, 2007).
Many approaches have been used to measure transportation network vulnerability,
but most can be grouped into two major categories (Miller, 2003). One is focused on
performance-based indicators (e.g., network reliability and network performance), while the
other explores user-based indicators, primarily accessibility. Network vulnerability can be
viewed as its susceptibility to disruptions and the consequence of potential link degradation or
complete failure (Miller, 2003; Nicholson et al., 2003). For instance, vulnerability can be
measured by the increase in cost of one or more of the links between nodes. The higher the
generalized cost due to the failure or degradation of the link, the higher the vulnerability of the
network (Taylor and D’Este, 2007). A transportation network that concentrates flow through a
small number of links (e.g., bridges and tunnels) is more vulnerable than a more fully
connected network if one or more of the critical links fail.
Accessibility measures the ability of individuals to participate in activities in other
physical locations within a specified region using an available transportation network. The
concept of accessibility recognizes that transportation is a derived demand and exists not for its
own sake, but to help people accomplish other activities in space and time. Loss of accessibility
greatly impacts abilities to earn a living, access critical services, or maintain social relations
(Miller, 2003). Methods for analyzing network accessibility have been applied to examine
infrastructure vulnerability (Chang, 2003; Chen et al., 2007; Jenelius and Mattsson, 2006;
Taylor et al., 2003).

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 The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of a hypothetical network
disruption on the accessibility and commuting expenditure in Metro Louisville, Kentucky.
Changing accessibility for census tracts was evaluated under normal network and disrupted
network conditions, with failure of the Sherman Minton Bridge. Potential economic or
monetary consequences for commuters were also assessed at the level of census tracts and
commuting routes.

2. STUDY AREA, DATA AND METHODS

Metro Louisville, comprising Kentucky and Indiana counties on opposite sides of the
Ohio River, is integrated by three main bridges (Figure 1). The CBD of Louisville is close to
the intersection of Interstate I-65 and the Ohio River. The seven-lane John F. Kennedy (JFK)
Bridge, the most heavily traveled transportation artery, allows access from Clark County,
Indiana, via I-65 to downtown Louisville. Also allowing access from the north via Clark
County is the least traveled route, four-lane Clark Memorial Bridge. The six-lane Sherman
Minton Bridge carries I-64 and US 150 over the river, connecting the west side of Louisville to
downtown New Albany in Floyd County, Indiana. The bridge is used for through-traffic, as
well as commuters who depend on the bridge for job accessibility. On average, 93,210 cars
utilize the bridge on a daily basis (Green, 2007). In a recent re-evaluation by the State of
Kentucky in the aftermath of the collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minnesota, the Sherman
Minton Bridge was rated serious in deck condition and fair in the condition of superstructure
and substructure. The JFK Bridge was assigned similar ratings (Green, 2007). Since the JFK
and the Clark Memorial Bridges are in close proximity, about half of a mile apart, if one were
to be disrupted the other could help accommodate some of the load, although with unavoidable
delays and congestions. The Sherman Minton Bridge, however, is approximately 5 miles
upriver. Its failure would have considerable impacts on the commuting patterns in Metro
Louisville in forms of the road-user transportation detours, especially for Floyd County
commuters.

FIGURE 1
A CLOSE VIEW OF THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGES IN METRO LOUISVILLE

This research is focused on commuting impacts of the disruption of the Sherman

Minton Bridge. Jefferson County, Kentucky, where the City of Louisville is located, and two
Indiana counties immediately across the Ohio River−Floyd and Clark−were included in the
study area. Jefferson County (population 693,604 in 2000) includes major employment centers

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of the metropolitan area, such as Humana and UPS within the city, GE Appliance Park,
Bluegrass Industrial & Research Park, and Ford Motor Company Truck Plant. In 2000, about
84 percent of the metropolitan area’s population, 86 percent of the total households, and 84
percent of the total employed persons, were concentrated in the three counties. According to
the 2006 American Community Survey, nearly 40 percent of the workers in Clark County and
34 percent of the workers in Floyd County commuted across the Ohio River to Jefferson
County (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2006).
Commuting data in this study were retrieved from Part 3 database of the Census
Transportation Planning Package 2000 (BTS, 2000), which contains worker commuting flows
(in persons) between areas at the selected geographic level, such as county, census tract, and
traffic analysis zone (TAZ). Census tract, instead of more disaggregate TAZ, was used as the
spatial unit for analysis. This is because upon analyzing changing commuting patterns and
economic vulnerabilities, key demographic, social and economic variables, which are not all
available at the TAZ level, were explored to uncover subsequent social and spatial inequities
for population across the study area. Recent average gasoline price was obtained from the
Environmental Information Administration (EIA, 2008), while fuel efficiency ratings for
vehicles were gathered from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS, 2007).
A linear, distance-based measure of accessibility was adopted in this study. Distance
measures, in the context of commuting, view accessibility as exclusively a function of the
spatial separation between two places, typically home or workplaces. Overcoming physical
separation is onerous to individual commuters. Thus greater separation implies lower
accessibility (Miller, 2005). Here, the accessibility of a census tract defined as the aggregate
distance from its centroid to those of all other tracts along the transportation network, can be
formulated as:
A i
= ∑D
j
ij for j ≠ i

where Ai = the measure of accessibility for census tract i, Dij = the shortest-path network
distance from the centroid of census tract i to that of census tract j. This measure was once
examined by Ingram (1971) to explore integral accessibility. Subsequent modified measures
were used in the analysis of accessibility for metropolitan areas at various scales (Allen, et al.,
1993; Berquin, 1998). The smaller the value of Ai, the more accessible a tract is in the network;
the larger the value of Ai, the less accessible a tract will be.
Using the centroid of each census tract as a node in the transportation network of
Metro Louisville, the distance of the shortest path along the road network between tracts (Dij)
were calculated with ArcGIS Network Analyst, which generated an Origin-Destination cost
(i.e., distance) matrix. This O-D cost matrix is a valued graph or L-Matrix (Taaffe, Gauthier
and O’Kelly, 1996). The row sum in the matrix represents the level of accessibility for each
census tract. The sum of the row sums provides a single-number measure of the overall
accessibility involving all the tracts in the study area along the transportation network. Two
levels of accessibility were calculated for each tract, one with the normal network and the other
with a disrupted network where barriers were set at each end of the Sherman Minton Bridge
causing paths using the bridge/link to be rerouted.
Since the majority of Jefferson County’s workers work within the county with less
than 4 percent commuting outside state of Kentucky, economic impacts of the Sherman Minton
Bridge’s disruption were evaluated only for commuters driving across the river from Indiana
counties of Clark and Floyd to Jefferson County. The number of commuters from the tract
where they lived was combined with the shortest-path network distances to the tracts where
they worked, using the normal and disrupted networks separately. This process of assigning
commuting flows to the network is essentially “all or nothing” (Taaffe, Gauthier and O’Kelly,
1996), which assumes that commuters choose the shortest path between a given O-D pair.
Although not entirely realistic, this approach is practical and acceptable due to the fact that
specific capacity restriction and performance curve corresponding to each network link are not
available in the study area. The difference in total person-miles between the normal and

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disrupted networks then indicates the total increased commuting distances for all the workers
from each tract. Using the increase in person-miles, fuel efficiency ratings for U.S. passenger
vehicles, and the average U.S. gas price per gallon in late March 2008, increasing commuting
expenditure due to the disruption in the road network was assessed. To a large extent, it
represents the lower bound of the potential excess commuting expenditure, a useful benchmark,
in a condition when commuters have knowledge of and choose the shortest paths to their
destinations, and there is no restriction on the traffic that can be handled by the network link at
any time.

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1. ACCESSIBILITY OF CENSUS TRACTS

Accessibility, in miles, for each census tract under normal road network conditions is
shown in Figure 2. In terms of the overall accessibility of the entire study area, the total
distance traveling from the centroid of every census tract to that of every other tract along the
shortest network paths would be 493,816 miles.

FIGURE 2
CENSUS TRACT ACCESSIBILITY UNDER NORMAL NETWORK

Not surprisingly, the most accessible area is located in Jefferson County, where the I-
65 and 2nd Street bridges connect near downtown Louisville. Census tract 0062 is the most
accessible, with a total of 1481.63 miles to all the other tracts. Accessibility decreases roughly
in bands radiating from downtown Louisville to the outer edges of all three counties especially
northern Floyd and Clark counties. As to the least accessible tracts, Clark County has five,
including the top three. Jefferson County contains three, while Floyd County holds two. The
central location of those most accessible census tracts within the study area is clearly behind

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this observed spatial pattern of accessibility. As early as 1960, Garrison portrayed Louisville as
the most accessible city due to it’s centrality to the U.S. highway network. Evidently, this
network centrality also works in favor of downtown Louisville at the metropolitan scale. The
least accessible census tracts are on the outer edge of the network, leading to much longer
distances to all other census tracts. The least accessible census tract is Tract 0510 in Clark
County with an aggregate distance of nearly 5800 miles to all the other tracts in the three-
county area.
Figure 3 depicts census tract accessibilities under the disrupted network in which the
Sherman Minton Bridge was blocked. Figure 4 illustrates changing accessibility in miles for
each tract. Under the disrupted road network, the level of total network accessibility for the
entire study area is 505,007 miles, marking a rise of 11,191 miles or 2.27 percent over that
when the Sherman Minton Bridge is intact. Measured by the loss of accessibility (i.e., increase
in aggregate mileage) for census tracts, Floyd County is most vulnerable to the hypothetical
failure of the bridge, while the east side of Clark County is least vulnerable. The ten most
vulnerable census tracts are all located in Floyd County, with each adding over 250 miles in the
measure of accessibility. The worst case is Tract 0706 of Floyd County, whose total distance
traveled to all the destinations in the study area would climb by more than 500 miles. This
spatial pattern of vulnerability is largely due to the fact that people in western Floyd County
rely on the Sherman Minton Bridge for commuting to destinations in Jefferson County along
the shortest network paths. Rerouting through the John F. Kennedy Bridge or Clark Memorial
Bridge would incur significant extra commuting distances. On the contrary, due to geographical
proximity to the other two bridges, Clark County commuters would use the Sherman Minton
Bridge least frequently. As a result, Clark County has some least vulnerable census tracts from

FIGURE 3
CENSUS TRACT ACCESSIBILITY UNDER DISRUPTED NETWORK

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the hypothetical disruption of the network. There are eight Clark County census tracts that are
not affected by the loss of the Sherman Minton Bridge, and many others are barely impacted by
small increments in the aggregate travel distance. Jefferson County has varying levels of
vulnerability, with the most vulnerable tracts on the west side of the county and a lessening
degree toward the eastern edge of the county.

FIGURE 4
NETWORK VULNERABILITY OF CENSUS TRACTS, MEASURED BY CHANGING
ACCESSIBILITY BETWEEN THE NORMAL AND DISRUPTED NETWORKS

3.2. ECONOMIC IMPACT OF NETWORK DISRUPTION ON COMMUTERS

The failure or disruption of a transportation network implies significant changes in
people’s lives. In addition to exploring the physical vulnerability measured by the loss of
accessibility, monetary or economic impacts the disruption imposes on individuals or
communities were also analyzed. The economic impacts of commuters’ network detours were
examined for a presumably extended period of time, say a year. Specifically, we focused on
valuing how the unavailability of the river crossing through the Sherman Minton Bridge affects
commuters, and estimated additional fuel costs incurred by the rerouting/detours for census
tracts in Clark and Floyd counties where a significant share of workers commutes to Jefferson
County.
Network vulnerability (i.e., increase in commuting mileage between the disrupted
and normal networks) along the shortest path from each census tract in Floyd (or Clark) County
to a tract in Jefferson County was multiplied by the number of commuters between them to
evaluate the economic vulnerability (i.e., additional fuel cost incurred) of a specific O-D
commuting route or flow. The economic vulnerability of a census tract is then measured as the
yearly total extra fuel costs for all the commuters from the tract. An average of 250 working

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days (U.S. Census Bureau, 2004), an average passenger vehicle fuel efficiency of 22.9 miles
per gallon of gasoline (BTS, 2007), as well as the average price per gallon of gasoline of $3.21
in March 2008 (EIA, 2008) were used in the assessment.
The twenty most economically vulnerable commuting flows, measured by the total
yearly fuel cost increase, are depicted in Figure 5. All these flows originate from Floyd County,
15 of which are from three census tracts, 0711.02, 0711.01 and 0710.04. They are destined
toward major employment clusters in Jefferson County, including downtown Louisville,
Enterprise Zone and Riverport Industrial Park in western Jefferson, and UPS/Louisville
International Airport roughly in the middle of the county. Some of these flows reveal high level
of economic vulnerability due to a large number of commuters in the flow and a relatively
small increment in commuting distance from the detour. For instance, the flow from Tract
0711.02 to downtown Louisville (Tract 0049) involves 325 commuters and an increase in two-
way commuting distance of 4.4 miles, resulting in a largest total yearly increase in fuel costs of
almost $48,000. On the other hand, flow from the same tract to the West End of Louisville
(Tract 0003) involves only 25 commuters and an escalation in two-way distance of 16 miles,
leading to a $13,352 increase in total yearly fuel costs. Thus, either a large number of
commuters affected, or a significantly prolonged commuting distance, or both, makes these
twenty flows the most costly, in response to the hypothetical failure of the Sherman Minton
Bridge.

FIGURE 5
TWENTY MOST ECONOMICALLY-AFFECTED COMMUTING FLOWS

In aggregate, commuters from Floyd County would be most vulnerable economically

(Figure 6). They would potentially have to cope with a large financial burden, reflected by an
additional one million dollars in fuel costs for one year, if the Sherman Bridge were no longer
available for travel. Not surprisingly, the census tract in Floyd County that would be hit the

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hardest is Tract 0711.02. It shows the largest yearly increase in fuel cost of $256,226.59 due to
the detour in daily commuting. Comparatively, Clark County would be less impacted by the
bridge failure. As shown in Table 1, the total potential economic impact on Clark County
workers commuting to Jefferson County would be $31,959.50, almost $950,000 less than that
on Floyd County workers. The most affected census tract in Clark County is the westernmost
(0508.01), which records a climb in annual fuel cost by $8,454.97 for its commuters. In sum, a
rise of 28,852 person-miles per day (or over 7,213,000 person-miles per year) and a
corresponding $1,011,082 in yearly fuel costs, which may represent only the lower limit, is a
considerable economic burden to workers in the two counties who rely on the bridge to
commute to major employment centers in Jefferson County. With more workers commuting to
Louisville and the gasoline price soaring, potential excess commuting expenses people have to
bear due to the bridge failure would be even more troublesome.

FIGURE 6
ECONOMIC VULNERABILITY OF CENSUS TRACTS IN FLOYD AND CLARK
COUNTIES, MEASURED BY YEARLY EXTRA FUEL COSTS

4. CONCLUSIONS

Transportation networks are critical infrastructure elements and face various potential
threats. The vulnerability of society to the disruption; the social, economic and environmental
costs of the disruption; and many other variables must be examined to correctly prioritize
resource allocation for modification, response, and recovery. Using the measure of
accessibility based on physical road network and origin-destination commuting data, the focus
of this paper is on highlighting the spatial disparities in the loss of accessibility, and measuring
the economic impacts on daily commuters, if a crucial bridge connecting counties across the

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Ohio River in Metro Louisville were to fail for an extended period of time. Nonetheless, the
purpose of this study is not to determine a rigid estimate of the excess commuting and the
corresponding monetary costs. Rather, by examining the hypothetically disrupted network
from the perspective of changing accessibility, this analysis offers a practical approach to
assess user-oriented network vulnerabilities and helps reveal potential burdens imposed upon
individual commuters or communities, which are of importance for urban transportation
research, planning, and policy making.
TABLE 1
ANNUAL EXTRA FUEL COSTS FOR WORKERS IN FLOYD AND CLARK COUNTIES
Floyd County, IN Clark County, IN
Census Tract Annual Extra Fuel Cost Census Tract Annual Extra Fuel Cost
0711.02 $256,226.59 0508.01 $8,454.97
0711.01 $151,384.22 0507.02 $6,111.34
0710.04 $75,964.72 0504.02 $4,936.44
0712 $72,532.14 0509.01 $2,945.02
0706 $71,676.33 0508.02 $2,255.94
0710.03 $69,378.13 0505.03 $1,817.42
0708.02 $52,288.64 0503.03 $1,668.44
0710.01 $44,584.78 0509.02 $1,028.66
0707 $41,666.72 0506.04 $716.58
0708.01 $37,848.47 0503.04 $601.59
0705 $27,633.45 0506.03 $412.53
0709.01 $24,223.97 0503.06 $334.06
0704 $13,714.68 0510 $0.00
0709.02 $13,024.24 0507.01 $0.00
0703.02 $12,581.61 0506.01 $0.00
0703.01 $9,824.81 0505.04 $0.00
0702 $4,569.27 0504.01 $0.00
0503.05 $0.00
0502 $0.00
0501 $0.00
County Total $979,122.78 County Total $31,959.50

We didn’t assign monetary values to other traffic, such as heavy commercial trucks, as well as
to variable operating costs due to increased travel distance. Also, some of the dollars spending
on extra fuel would have been spent on other local goods and services without this change in
travel patterns. So, through multiplier effects, the costs to the local economy as a result of an
extended disruption in transportation network would be even more overwhelming.
This study suggests some future refinements. Travel time, instead of physical
distance, can be used to derive accessibility measures for census tracts. Meanwhile, with
reliable network link performance data, a more realistic traffic assignment procedure, such as
user equilibrium that accounts for congestion effects can be employed to better estimate
commuters’ route choices. Furthermore, levels of network and economic vulnerabilities can be
examined in the context of demographic, social, and economic status of the population in a
census tract, such that vulnerability in a more general sense highlighting social and spatial
inequities can be pursued.

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