The City Public Transport Overlooked: Analysis of Effective Distances

Abstract

Jerusalem is holy to the three main monotheistic religions. Hence Jerusalem is, from a touristic perspective, a world city. Jerusalem is also a highly segmented city. While Jerusalem may seem as an extreme case, it is not unique. Many cities attract large number of tourists to various widely renowned sites within them, in many cases with religious facets. Public transport systems are largely designed to address the demand of local residents. Yet, tourist flows often differ from the travel patterns of local residents, both temporally and spatially. This paper evaluates how Jerusalem's public transport system serves the global tourist city. To this end, the study focuses on independent tourists, not package-tour tourists. Specifically, we analyze to what extent are the main tourist sites served by the public transportation system. To evaluate accessibility to tourist destinations we use GIS to conduct Least-Cost-Modeling. This methodology measures the effective, rather than the Euclidian distance to tourist destination. We find that the accessibility by public transportation to tourist destinations with high global importance, specifically Christian-religious sites is relatively low. In the final part of the paper we propose a number of explanations for that.