Przestrzenne zróżnicowanie potencjalnej dostępności głównych węzłów sieci drogowej województwa łódzkiego
Spatial diversity of potential accessibility to main road network nodes in Łódź province

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of spatial differentiation of access to the road network in the Lodz region in Poland. The basic research unit here is the municipality. The population of each of the municipalities studied was established based on Poland’s Local Data Bank, run by the Central Statistical Office of Poland, for the end of 2014. The second part of the research consisted of road junctions and street intersections located in the study area. The study was conducted in two variants. Assuming the current layout of nodal transport network elements and future layout that will be produced via new investment, which is currently under GDDKiA development or at the planning stage. The entire research procedure was divided into three main stages. The first two consisted of the use of a two-step method of analysis of market areas. The first part of the two-step method is based on the definition of the impact of each node/intersection, assuming certain boundary values of automobile travel time. Each studied node/intersection was also assigned a weight corresponding to its importance in the regional road network. The second part of the study focused on municipalities and indicated the level of road access for each of them to the regional road network. The third and last stage of the study served to indicate, based on earlier results obtained, areas of the Lodz region that are moving distinctively upward or downward in terms of road accessibility. The significance of the spatial relationships within a certain radius was calculated using local spatial data on autocorrelation as proposed by Getis and Ord (1995).Research has shown significant differences in the level of accessibility of citizens in individual municipalities to point elements of the road transport network. Despite ongoing and planned investments in this area, they highlight specific areas lagging behind in terms of user accessibility to the road network. At the same time, it is important to pay close attention to the potential of the four different areas of the province. An above-average level of availability of the municipalities constituting these geographic areas can serve as a competitive advantage in the area of potential locations for investment activity

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