Dostępność obszarów wiejskich do miast powiatowych w Polsce transportem publicznym w 2019 r = The 2019 level of accessibility of Poland’s county cities by public transport from rural areas

Abstract

Spatial accessibility by public transport is an important component of quality of life and an important factor undermining the development of rural areas. It is also a key element of a sustainable mobility system. The capitals of the powiat (county-level tier of administration in Poland) represent the level of the country’s urban hierarchy at which most-important public services are provided. Yet previously only rather few accessibility studies had been carried out, to consider how accessible the rural localities (villages) in the countries different province-regions might be. To fill that gap, the research presented in this paper sought to assess the 2019 level of accessibility via public transport to their own county cities (powiat capitals) that characterized no fewer than 14,271 rural localities in 6 of Poland’s 16 province-regions (i.e. Łódzkie, Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Małopolskie, Pomorskie, Warmińsko-Mazurskie and Zachodniopomorskie). The work also investigated factors shaping this accessibility, with a contribution thereby made to the ongoing debate as to the suitability of the current administrative division of Poland at county (powiat) level. The main findings and principal patterns as regards spatial accessibility could be summarised as follows: a. 1181 (8% of the studied) rural localities, with 215,000 inhabitants overall (or 4% of the rural population) had effectively no access to public transport at all; given that the nearest bus stop/railway station was beyond the acceptable distance of 4 km. b. Province-regions were found to differ markedly in terms of the measured accessibility, with Małopolskie province-region faring much better overall than the others (Figs. 1‑2, 10). c. Nevertheless, internal differentiation in levels of accessibility was greater within province-regions than between them. The best-observed accessibility characterised the environs of larger cities, and especially the Metropolitan Areas of Kraków (Małopolskie), Łódź (Łódzkie) and Gdańsk (Pomorskie), as well as the main transport corridors. Only poor accessibility characterised peripheral areas of most of the counties, while the worst accessibility of all applied in places where powiat-level peripheries were simultaneously peripheries of entire province-regions. d. An important factor determining accessibility was the type and size of rural locality. The larger the village, the better the accessibility (Fig. 19). This also linked up with the way in which size anyway correlated positively with distance to county city. This is to say that villages close to county cities had populations 30‑40% larger than those located on peripheries. e. Size of a county city also correlated positively with that city’s accessibility (Fig. 18). That was especially true of cities with 20,000 or fewer inhabitants. These have less-developed public transport and, as a consequence, far lower accessibility in their environs. Taken together, these patterns sustain a conclusion that the deregulation of public transport in Poland, which took place in the 1990s and ushered in a competitive market model, has had a serious impact on accessibility, ensuring further polarisation and growth in disparities. While better-developed areas (those in which population density is higher and villages larger) continue to furnish enough demand for commercially-viable public transport to be sustained, most of the peripheral, low-population areas are now at risk of transport-related exclusion. In most cases, there is poor public transport in such areas solely because some lines connecting cities or leading to certain tourist destinations remain in place and cross peripheries.