Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
confers
choice
. In the case of clothes shops, their
absence outside towns means that rural non-car owners
have to get lifts or use the bus, travelling very rarely, or
doing without.
The common assumption that mobility is a desirable
attribute leads to a belief that people who make few trips
are suffering isolation or hardship. Travel frequencies can
be converted to mean trip rates (Table 35.2). Overall
rates vary surprisingly little among the population groups
extracted here, while excluding walking produces the
expected relationships according to car ownership levels
and symptoms of disadvantage. The greater number of
trips made by car owners is compensated for by more
trips on foot made by problematic social groups. The
latter have more localised circulation patterns, reflecting
lack of choice, and this might reasonably be regarded as
a 'problem'.
Table 35.2
Estimated trip rates (work and school excluded), County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 1988.
Source:
Nutley and Thomas 1992.
As far as techniques are concerned, it will be
noticed that the methods illustrated above are by
no means new, deriving from the 1970s or even
earlier. This reflects their basic simplicity. It is
unlikely that any more sophisticated techniques are
necessary; simple methods are frequently found to
be the most effective. There might be a place for
subjective approaches to discern the nature of social
and cultural barriers to accessibility, for example in
Third World countries. Otherwise, the most
promising development would be the application
of geographical information systems, which are
ideally suited (e.g. Higgs andWhite 1997).
While public transport in low-density
environments will always be problematic, new
topics emerging at present stem from contemporary
'car dependency' culture in Western countries. The
car-using majority cannot be ignored and, as in
North America, many social problems are
attributable to the costs of car use by relatively poor
people (Farrington
et al
. 1997). Environmentally
motivated transport and energy policies might
CONCLUSIONS
The geographer's contribution to this issue has
been directed not so much towards solving
problems through specific policy initiatives but
towards elucidating concepts and encouraging a
people-centred view. It is realistic to say, at least in
the UK, that these efforts have succeeded in
communicating to planners the importance of
accessibility. Action on the ground, however, such
as the maintenance of adequate bus and rail
services, cannot escape from economic imperatives
and will always be subject to commercial and
political decisions at a higher level. Similarly, the
rationalisation of consumer services, such as
hospitals, continues apace with little thought given
to the implications for accessibility of people in
low-density areas. Current trends in Western
countries towards deregulation and privatisation
in the transport sector make appropriate local-
scale action considerably more difficult.
