Accessibility and Network Structures in the German Commuting

Abstract

A great deal of attention has recently been paid to the analysis of the structure and evolution of (complex) networks, starting from pioneering contributions in the physical and social sciences-and more recently in the regional and transportation sciences-mainly concerning the relevance of highly connected nodes (hubs). The presence of hubs identifies a network as Scale-Free (SF), because of its intrinsic characteristic of exhibiting power-law distributions in its connectivity structure, and thus highly heterogeneous patterns. The focus of this paper is to explore the homogeneous vs. heterogeneous characteristics of the German commuting network, by focusing on the role of accessibility. The concept of accessibility has a long tradition in the transport economics literature, starting with the fundamental works by Hansen in the 1950's and later on by Weibull in the 1980's. These authors defined accessibility as the potential of opportunities for spatial interaction. Accessibility conceived in this manner should also capture spatial structure effects and thus the network configuration properties, such as connectivity. This conventional accessibility function-in the light of the related economic activities-is be used as a suitable instrument to identify the major German hub/attraction nodes. As the functional form in this potential accessibility, the powerdecay function will be considered-in addition to the negative exponential function-in order to explore the spatial configuration patterns, i.e. whether people perceive commuting cost in log-like way. The connectivity network analysis will then be developed as a benchmark to testing the results emerging from the spatial-economic

Higher Education in Italy: Spatial Accessibility, Participation and Drop-outs

“…In this paper, distance is modelled in a power specification. Indeed, the power-decay function has been found to be more suitable for long distance interactions owing to the log-cost perception (Fotheringham and Webber, 1980;Reggiani et al, 2011). Moreover, the geo-referenced information as to where the student lives is at province scale (NUTS3 level regions) but university locations are exact (the largest campuses).…”

Accessibility of Cities in the Digital Economy

“…Contrary to the above function, the power form better represents accessibility for long-distance patterns due to its long tail (Reggiani et al, 2011b), and, in general, more heterogeneous interactions (Fotheringham & O'Kelly, 1989). Furthermore, the power form supplies scaleindependent parameter estimates.…”

“…Following Newman (2005), the estimation of the degree distribution curve is based on the cumulative degree distribution derived from an inverse rank-plot graph and OLS (Faloutsos et al, 1999;Gorman & Kulkarni, 2004;Patuelli et al, 2007;Schintler et al, 2004;Tranos, 2011;Reggiani et al, 2011b). The plots can be found in the Appendix ( Figure A2) and the results of OLS are presented in Table 4.…”

“…Starting in the late 1940s, scholars studied the way individuals and aggregates of individuals respond to the constraints of cost, time, and effort to access places, individuals, and other spatially-distributed opportunities (Couclelis & Getis, 2000;Couclelis, 2000). A common component of the various different accessibility concepts is the easiness to reach opportunities: while Hansen (1959) defines accessibility as the potential of opportunities for interaction, Morris et al (1979) approach accessibility as the ease with which activities can be reached from a certain location; in a more general way, Couclelis (2000) reinforces the concept of accessibility as the geographic definition of opportunity, while Reggiani et al (2011aReggiani et al ( , 2011b link it with spatial structure effects and notions such as network connectivity.…”

Análisis de Cobertura Urbana de los Nodos de Actividad Primaria Mediante un Estudio de Accesibilidad Territorial en Quibdó (Colombia)

“…Es importante comprender la accesibilidad como una necesidad primaria (Halden, 2011) no percibida, ya que por medio de ésta se pueden explicar las posibilidades existentes para llegar a diversas actividades como el empleo, conociéndose análisis en Holanda (Geurs y Ritsema, 2003), Alemania (Patuelli, et al, 2007;Reggiani, et al, 2010;Reggiani, et al, 2011), entre otros; así mismo, a nivel urbano, se conocen algunas investigaciones que se han ejecutado con el fin de conocer la cobertura que ofrecen algunos NAP, de forma agregada o por separado, como los nodos de actividad salud (Oppong y Hodgson, 1994;Tanser et al, 2006;Xia et al, 2008;Muñoz y Kallestal, 2012) y educativos (Pacione, 1989;Apparicio y Séguin, 2006;Foley y Pang, 2006;Younes et al, 2016). Vale la pena resaltar que el concepto se ha aplicado en variados campos de estudio, como: desarrollo económico regional (Rietveld y Nijkamp, 1993;Vickerman et al, 1999;Mackinnion et al, 2008), demografía (Kotavaara, 2011), cohesión social (López et al, 2008), sostenibilidad (Vega, 2011;Escobar et al, 2015a), turismo (Kastenholz et al, 2012), contaminación (Escobar et al, 2016), localización de servicios (Park, 2012;Higgs, 2013;), operatividad de modos de transporte (Botero et al, 2011;Escobar et al, 2012, Escobar et al, 2015b, entre otras.…”