Analysing the Role of Accessibility in Contemporary Urban Development

Accessibility is an important spatial characteristic and a significant link between transportation and land-use. Accordingly, accessibility plays in important role in urban and regional planning, spatial policy development, and urban land-use modelling. Accessibility is usually estimated by means of infrastructure based measures, which describes the performance of the road network. The aim of the current research project has been to analyse the relationship between accessibility and contemporary urban development to support urban land-use modelling efforts. Traditionally, accessibility analysis has been performed using network analysis software, but in order to create spatially continuous accessibility surfaces we have used a raster based approach to accessibility analysis. We have applied two different kinds of destinations for the accessibility calculations. Besides the towns and city centres, which are the usual choice of destination points, we decided also to calculate an accessibility surface for motorway junctions, due the fact that they are crucial for many location decisions. The results of the analysis indicate that the usual way of handling accessibility in land-use modelling is insufficient, and significant improvement can be obtained by incorporating 'real' accessibility in urban land-use models.