The aim of this article is to examine the development of transport infrastructure (modernisation of railway tracks and development of the motorway and expressway network) and its possible effects on regional development in Slovakia. Accessible transport infrastructure (mainly the motorway network) has influenced many decisions concerning the location of industrial investments. The impact of transport infrastructure on the reduction of regional disparities in Slovakia is limited mainly due to the concentration of transport infrastructure investment in the more developed regions of Slovakia. Poorer regions in eastern Slovakia and the southern part of Central Slovakia are still affected by the unfavourable level of accessibility to the transport infrastructure that creates important conditions affecting their development.

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The project ILUMASS (Integrated Land-Use Modelling and Transportation System Simulation) aims at embedding a microscopic dynamic simulation model of urban traffic flows into a comprehensive model system incorporating changes of land use, the resulting changes in transport demand, and the impacts of transport on the environment. The land-use component of ILUMASS will be based on the land-use parts of an existing urban simulation model, but is to be microscopic like the transport parts of ILUMASS. Microsimulation modules will include models of demographic development, household formation, firm lifecycles, residential and non-residential construction, labour mobility on the regional labour market and household mobility on the regional housing market. These modules will be closely linked with the models of daily activity patterns and travel and goods movements modelled in the transport parts of ILUMASS developed by other partners of the project team. The design of the land-use model takes into account that the collection of individual micro data (i.e. data which because of their micro location can be associated with individual buildings or small groups of buildings) or the retrieval of individual micro data from administrative registers for planning purposes is neither possible nor, for privacy reasons, desirable. The land-use model therefore works with synthetic micro data which can be retrieved from generally accessible aggregate data.

Abstract:The accessibility patterns in the West Mediterranean region follow the geographic constraints of the region closely. Being a narrow coastal corridor for most of the territory, most of the population and activities are concentrated along the sea shore. The backcountry is substantially less populated, especially in mountain areas, and infrastructure endowment is more limited, yielding poorer accessibility patterns in comparison. The case of the Balearic Islands shows the effect of insularity on accessibility patterns. The influence of the Barcelona agglomeration reaches approximately all NUTS-3 capitals in Catalonia, and in some cases even Perpignan in France. The metropolitan agglomerations of Valencia and Alacant tend to merge with each other in most of the accessibility indicators, despite the fact that mountainous topography in the areas in between both agglomerations provides locally some areas of low accessibility. The new high speed rail lines planned in the region increase the opportunities of medium cities located in between large agglomerations as they are in the position to offer high live standards while allowing for daily commuting onto large labour markets, yet now only on paper. All over the region, accessibility of public services is more homogenous than accessibility of the population and jobs as public services are relatively decentralized.

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