Brikan Erguc (Turkish Statistical Institute)
Measuring the access to public services is of importance not only for the organizations that provide these services but also for households looking for the right place to live, for enterprises particularly in real estate business and for statistical institutes that are in search of consistent and comparable indicators. Furthermore, accessibility to public services is an important parameter for assessing the value of a property. For these reasons accessibility concept gains increasing attention from both statistical and geospatial communities. However, published studies are limited and conducted mostly for small regions. In this study we offered a country-wide scoring system based on the accessibility to (i) primary health care facilities, (ii) primary and secondary schools, and (iii) airports and national railway stations. System utilizes 1 km2 gridded disaggregated population density data, point data of health, education and transportation facilities. First, isochrone maps of public service points created based on travel time by car or on foot. Second, intersection analysis conducted between isochrones and population grids in order to obtain shortest travel time for each grid cell. Third, three separate score-points assigned to each grid cell based on the travel time for health, education and transportation. Last, population-weighted scores aggregated to LAU and NUTS3 levels. Also, Web-based visualization tool developed for dissemination in which users can reach accessibility scores along with some demographic data at levels of NUTS3, LAU and 1km2 grids. Open source software and free services used throughout the project.