Assessment of the comprehensive accessibility of regional road network on towhship scale

Abstract

Regional comprehensive accessibility is the proximity of all locations to other specified locations in a region. Studies of regional accessibility have been primarily performed on a city or county scale. As the nerve ending of a road network, rural roads are distributed throughout a region. However, rural roads were rarely considered in previous studies. In this study, we focus on the scale of townships and include rural roads in the road network to measure accessibility. Using the GIS grid analysis method, we assessed the comprehensive accessibilities of Kaifeng City in China on a township scale. The regional accessibility analysis method on a city or county scale cannot be completely applied to township scale studies, which is reflected in the buffering area processing of closed roads. The accessibility of the townships in Kaifeng are characterized as irregular distributions in circular layers and primarily influenced by road network. Meanwhile, the spatial distribution of the medium and high accessibility values exhibits clustering, the low values are dispersed.