Wpływ granic administracyjnych na dostępność usług na przykładzie szkolnictwa ponadpodstawowego Węgier
Influence of administrative boundaries on service availability, the case of public education in Hungary

Summary/Abstract: The structure of the service infrastructure in Hungary is changing due to the country’s ongoing demographic shift. This affects commercial and social services alike. This paper presents a GIS-aided analysis of service availability via the estimation of shortest commuting times to three different kind of secondary level educational facilities. The official Hungarian database of the Information System of Public Education containing the addresses of institutions was utilized as a source of input data. Geocoding all the schools taken into account at the scale of this research does not require a high level of accuracy. It was sufficient to assign all the educational facilities to geographic centroids. Commuting time was estimated only for geographic locations where a given kind of school is not present. The paper provides a detailed description of the applied methodology. Regional government services, such as tax processing centres, are usually organized based on counties – units of public administration. The accessibility calculation vas performed for a second time, computing the shortest commuting time to the nearest school, without crossing county lines. Comparing the calculations, that the nearest service centres are located in the neighboring administrative unit. Differences in accessibility measurements are shown on maps (Fig. 2–6). Four study areas were selected in order to study local government service accessibility (Fig. 1). The main conclusion is that simply shifting county lines in order to improve access to key services such as public education is not a sufficient solution and a more complex analysis of each individual region is needed.

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