Some Notes on Interconnectivity in Transport Networks

Peripherality and isolation of a region (or a country) have often been analyzed from the viewpoint of physical distance to the geographical centre of a country (or a continent). Much less attention has been given to the qualitative aspects of connectivity between peripheral areas and the entire country. This means essentially that the issue of interconnectivity — in a broad sense the potential access to all relevant nodes in a network — is much more complicated than just the notion of physical distance friction: the quality and structure of an entire network is at stake here, so that one has to investigate the features of both nodes and their connecting links.