Land Use as a Motivation for Railway Trespassing: Experience from the Czech Republic

Abstract

Railway trespassing is a very risky but common behaviour, resulting in about 200 casualties annually in the Czech Republic. This study describes the formation of 27 selected risk localities with frequent occurrence of trespassing in the regions of southern, central and northern Moravia. To be able to describe the process, an evaluation of the development of land use was conducted within a wide spatial context of each spot. The evaluation was focused on functional use of built-up areas (collective and individual housing, industrial areas, shopping and services, recreational areas, etc.). In the sample of investigated localities were places of two kinds: (1) localities where the railway intersected existing settlement structures, and relationships and links within the area were radically disturbed and severed. A lack of legal possibilities for crossing restricts the movement of inhabitants at these localities; (2) localities where the railway originally passed through open landscape and was later surrounded by built-up areas with various land-use functions. Here, trespassing is the consequence of gaps in the urban-planning process, wherein the needs of pedestrians and cyclists were not sufficiently considered. The analysis of the development of land use since 1836 showed how the motivations of trespassing were gradually intensified with more and more complex structures of functional division of areas. The percentage of built-up areas increased in all monitored localities overall from 6.28% during 1836-1852 to 52.15% during 2014-2015.

Mapping Cultural Ecosystem Services Enables Better Informed Nature Protection and Landscape Management

“…Recent scientific developments have also acknowledged social media potential for collecting data on recreation activities and landscape aesthetic beauty. Here, photographs uploaded to image-sharing websites provide information on the visited sites' spatial distribution, visitor appreciation and locations of the most accessible sites [46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53]. This information can be used in modeling the density of infrastructure for recreation and valuable aesthetic sites.…”

Attitudes of inhabitants living in the vicinity of railroads on the matter of trespassing on the railway

“…Specifically, it was investigated to what extent the inhabitants know about an illegal shortcut in their vicinity and use it personally, what circumstances make a case for trespassing, and, on the other hand, what dissuades them from using shortcuts, how they perceive risks, and whether they realize this to be a legal violation. The questionnaire was constructed, consisting of 15 questions, on the basis of knowledge from previous researches (Skládaná, 2017(Skládaná, , 2018 and foreign studies (Silla, Luoma 2012).…”

“…Various mechanisms give rise to high-risk locations. Studies of historic map documents in the NEOS project (Skládaná et al, 2018) demonstrated that the issue of railway trespassing is often closely related to development of the functional use of the land (collective and individual housing, industrial areas, commerce and services, recreational areas, etc.). In the sample of studied locations, there both were places where the railroad had cut through previously existing residential structures and locations where the railway led through originally open landscape and subsequently attracted further urban development with various functional uses.…”

The Relationship among Precipitation, Application of Salt in Winter Road Maintenance and the Quality of Waterways and Soil around Motorway

“…However, the evaluation of long-term changes depends on the possibility of detailed mapping of the habitats forming the land cover [5]. Such evaluation has only become possible in the post-WW2 era by applying modern remote sensing methods using aerial images; nowadays, such methods are used frequently [6][7][8][9]. For evaluation of historically older periods, the land cover mapping often uses historical topographic maps [10,11], but these maps do not provide sufficient detail to make it possible to evaluate the retention potential of the landscape.…”