THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE CHARACTERISTIC AND ROAD TRAFFIC ACCESSIBILITY EVALUATION OF A-LEVEL TOURIST ATTRACTIONS WITHIN WUHAN URBAN AGGLOMERATION IN CHINA

Against the backdrop of the post-pandemic COVID-19, regional short-distance tourism has become more prevalent. This paper used Wuhan Urban Agglomeration (WUA) as the research area and explored spatial structure characteristics and road traffic accessibility issues of A-level tourist attractions within WUA. The geospatial analysis methods of Average Nearest Neighbour (ANN) and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) were used to identify the spatial structure distribution of A-level tourist attractions. Constructing Weighted Network Analysis to measure the traffic access time between tourist attractions and traveler origin and further using Network Analysis to measure the traffic access time between different tourist attractions. The traffic access time results were spatially visualized using Inverse Distance Weight (IDW). The study results were as follows. (1) The spatial structure of A-level tourist attractions in WUA indicated a core-periphery distribution in general. All tourist attractions showed clustering characteristics of the spatial distribution pattern. The spatial clustering degree was highest for human tourist attractions and lowest for nature tourist attractions. (2) Traffic access time results exhibited significant centrality with Wuhan as the core and regional differences in WUA. The road traffic accessibility of human tourist attractions was better than that of natural tourist attractions. (3) The spatial distribution and road traffic accessibility of tourist attractions in WUA indicated a circle structure centered on Wuhan, which aligned with the general rule of regional development. The accessibility of the north-south direction was weaker than the east west direction in WUA. (4) Human tourist attractions were mainly concentrated in urban areas with high connectivity and intensive road networks. But natural tourist attractions were separated from traveler origin and other different tourist attractions. Most were in mountainous and hilly areas with poor accessibility, which could attract more tourists with better road networks and traffic infrastructure.