Road and railway accessibility atlas of Spain

Abstract Please click here to download the map associated with this article. This article presents accessibility maps for road and railway on the Spanish peninsular for 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005 and 2007. Accessibility is defined as the ability of reaching a particular destination using the transport network. To calculate accessibility, a network efficiency indicator was used to measure the speed with which the distance between the starting point and the destination is actually covered. The process consisted of first configuring the Spanish road and railway networks by establishing their connectivity and identifying their typology, with a precision of 500 metres, for each of the years studied. The current road networks and the various railway networks (high speed, conventional…) were considered separately. Another process involved creating a map showing all the municipal districts in the Spanish part of the Iberian Peninsula (8,176), and then assigning to each one an economic variable to calculate its accessibility. The indicators were calculated by computing the minimum paths, where the cost is the travel time determined according to the type of section of the route. An accessibility value was obtained for each node (urban agglomeration) and was then interpolated in order to provide a graphic representation of the results.