Zihao Zhou

Given that there are no practical quantitative indicators of traffic conditions for facility location selection in the process of urbanization, this article proposes a comprehensive accessibility index of location and its measurement method. Urban land is rasterized using GIS to obtain the grids, and the road network data are used to calculate the external accessibility and internal accessibility of the grids. The external accessibility and the internal accessibility of a grid are combined to obtain the comprehensive accessibility of the location. The comprehensive accessibilities of grids are measured for Zhicheng, an urban area in China. The results show that the pattern of gradual spatial changes in the comprehensive accessibility of the grids in Zhicheng is highly consistent with the urban land’s spatial development trend, which verifies the feasibility and accuracy of the comprehensive accessibility measurement method. On one hand, the comprehensive accessibility of the grid is more portable than the accessibility of a single point and can be calculated in batches. On the other hand, it is more specific than the regional accessibility and better guides the location selection of urban facilities.

Urbanization has been a flourishing process in a wide range of developing countries. The planning and construction of public service facilities is a crucial component of this process. Existing planning methods of public service facilities focused on macroscopic indicators like population and GDP. In this way, accessibility and transportation conditions were neglected. Four typical counties in China were selected as samples where travel surveys and questionnaire surveys on public service facilities were conducted. Taking education and medical care as representative public service facilities, this study used geographic information processing to connect the locations of public service facilities at all levels with the urban land accessibility. Then, analysis of variance was used to obtain correlations between the level of public service facilities and the urban land accessibility. The results showed that the urban land accessibility of locations of public service facilities follows a normal distribution. Categories of facilities showed significant difference on urban land accessibility. Therefore, intervals of urban land accessibility of locations of public service facilities within one standard deviation from the mean were constructed by category. These intervals built a connection between transportation conditions with locations of public service facilities. Corresponding relation of carbon emission of facility-related trips and urban land accessibility was established as an example of an application. Carbon emissions caused by facility-related trips can be reduced by locating facilities at locations with appropriate urban land accessibility.