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Drawing on examples from poor, rich, and middle-income cities, this paper examines the importance, theoretical understanding, and empirical measurement of urban accessibility. The authors argue that accessibility is the main quantity to consider from an urban resource allocation standpoint, since it links land use and transportation, the two primary urban consumption goods. Throughout this paper are two basic recommendations. The first is to put accessibility more squarely at the center of the study of urban development. The second is to focus urban policymaking more directly on specific problems, such as congestion, pollution, and traffic fatalities. This paper proceeds as follows. First some facts about housing, transportation, and accessibility are provided to highlight that accessibility is an issue of first-order importance. Then the authors highlight the basic urban trade-off between proximity and housing prices and show how adding further realism to the theoretical framework generates a lot of complexity. Section 4 presents the difficulties of making the notion of accessibility operational and the complications associated with empirically defining and measuring accessibility. Section 5 shows how policymakers often ignore, misuse, and misunderstand accessibility. The result is the inequitable and inefficient misallocation of the two most important urban consumption goods, housing and transportation.