The potential accessibility to workplaces and working-age population by means of public and private car transport in Szczecin

Abstract

Commuting to work is one of the key motivations for people to move around cities or other regions. For the purpose of this study, the city of Szczecin in Poland has been selected, where the modal division of transport includes public transport (bus, tram) and private transport (car). The maps present the spatial distribution of citizens within a working area as well as precise locations of workplaces registered in the REGON database. The main objective of this study is to analyse the potential accessibility of workplaces and the working-age population of the city using the abovementioned modes of transport, and to indicate the places less accessible by public transport and car for commuting purposes. The study presented herein is based on data from 2018. The calculated average accessibility by different means of public and private transport as well as the potential accessibility quotient are presented in the form of box plots.

Private car transport or public transport? The study of daily accessibility in Szczecin

“…Finally, the application allows the map generation and creates data on travel times between selected Origin and Destinations. Google Maps® API data has been assigned to particular sections of the urban road network (Goliszek 2021). The only restriction limiting the free-of-charge use of Google Maps® API is that it can generate not more than 2 500 map loads per day per API (Schwartz 2010, Calabrese et al 2011and Wang and Xu 2011.…”

“…The average speed in 15 -minute time profiles for all analysed roads and streets in Szczecin is presented in Fig. 3 (Goliszek 2021). Assigning the data on travel times to the road network has made it possible to connect all destinations within the city and perform time calculations (Calabrese et al 2011).…”

“…The author of this article has created an original model of the road transport system in Szczecin using Google Maps® API data (Wang and Xu 2011) downloaded with an application written in Python 2.7. (Goliszek 2021 and2022).…”

“…The values added as the parking time equal the walking time between the centre of a particular census area and the nearest road/street. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to measure parking time due to its variability in different cities in Poland (Goliszek 2021). Therefore, it may be random values.…”

Accessibility to various destinations by public and private transport in Szczecin

“…In this study, the average travel time for means of public transport in Szczecin was approximately 30 min. The adopted value of the spatial resistance function parameter for the period of 30 min is −0.023105 (Goliszek, 2021;Goliszek, 2022b;Rosik et al, 2020).…”