Quantification of Transportation Disadvantage Using GIS—A Case Study
摘要
Transport is considerably a spatial activity of which the essence is to connect certain areas or people. Transportation disadvantage refers to the limitations or barriers to participation in daily socioeconomic and political life due to reduced physical access to services and opportunities. Such groups of people face greater exclusion and much greater exposure to a diversity of social as well as environmental threats. Rural residents, including the elderly, low-income, or people with language or physical mobility challenges, may experience transportation disadvantages when the circumstances fail to meet their mobility needs. It is reviewed from various literature that the transportation disadvantage (TD) can be quantified using various methods using ArcGIS and QGIS software. Moreover, maps showing areas of the theoretical risk of transportation disadvantage can be constructed by overlying layers of readily available data, to generate composite maps where the increasing intensity of shading denotes a population with multiple risk factors. The GIS map approach was used to carry out the entire analysis as it supports the high spatial resolution, computation, and measure of indicators, using readily available data, to identify locations within the geography where the risk of being affected by the transport disadvantage is higher. The study area chosen for the project is the Kazhakoottam ward in Trivandrum Corporation, in South Kerala. The aim of the study was to map transportation disadvantaged populations in the study area using valid TD indicators and to compare them in pre-covid and post-covid scenarios, so as to identify the changes in the level of disadvantage due to the pandemic. The resulting composite maps showed the areas with high and low levels of TD. A zonal transport need has been computed and an analysis of different dimensions of transport disadvantage has been carried out in order to evaluate the strength of disadvantage due to the pandemic hit.