Formulation of a Quantitative Method to Evaluate the Accessibility to Food Facilities Based on the Load of the Facility Utilization for Analysis of Population Distribution

This paper aims to formulate a quantitative method of evaluating accessibility to the various food facilities, which share the same purpose as meal suppliers but different characteristics, by a common index, for analysis of population distribution. In this study, food facilities are classified into Facility Group I where food facilities cook meals and provide customers with a space to eat meals and Facility Group II where food facilities cook meals but provide no space for eating. By comparing the transportation and initial loads, this approach models the zone where residents find that one facility is more advantageous to the others. This article also compares the loads of facilities between the case where a user makes a round trip to a facility and the case where the user stops by a facility on the way from/to his/her home. The proposed model theoretically explains the zones obtained in the preceding empirical analysis. Analysis on the locations of facilities and the population distribution around a station shows that the facilities of low initial load were located near the station to promote users to stop by, and that areas with small loads tend to have a large share of single-person households.