Abstract
As an important component of urban disaster prevention and mitigation systems, the balance and equity of emergency shelter distribution can be measured based on spatial accessibility utilizing the two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method. However, there are some issues in previous studies on emergency shelter accessibility evaluated by the 2SFCA method: (1) the high discretization of population distribution data and the travel cost being measured base on Euclidean distance; (2) ignoring the difference between shelter and population catchment sizes. To address these issues, we propose an improved 2SFCA method that computes the shelter and population catchments respectively to evaluate the emergency shelter accessibility in Changchun, China. We compare the proposed improved 2SFCA method to the original 2SFCA method. The results indicate that the catchment size and shelter accessibility calculated by the proposed method are more realistic and objective. The improved 2SFCA method is applicable method for evaluating the shelter accessibility and can provide advice for the planning and management of emergency shelters in the future.
Highlights
When the sudden disasters occur in urban areas with high population and building density, a large number of evacuees are required to travel to the nearest emergency shelters immediately
We reviewed studies on measuring emergency shelter accessibility and found advantages and limitations to evaluating shelter accessibility utilizing the 2SFCA method
In order to handle various issues in previous studies, we proposed an improved 2SFCA method that optimizes the catchment sizes of shelters and populations separately and integrates the network analysis method and high-resolution grid data of populations
Summary
When the sudden disasters occur in urban areas with high population and building density, a large number of evacuees are required to travel to the nearest emergency shelters immediately. Spatial accessibility is one of the most important indicators for measuring the equity and rationality of the spatial distribution of public facilities, such as primary healthcare facilities and urban parks [8,9]. It is defined by utilizing a specific method to represent the systematic relationship between the points of departure and destination with the consideration for travel cost [8,9,10,11]. The spatial accessibility of urban emergency shelters can be utilized to measure the balance and equity between the shelter service and population demand [12]
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