Evaluation of Public Transport-Based Accessibility to Health Facilities considering Spatial Heterogeneity

Yuliang Zhang,Wenxiang Li,Ye Li,Haopeng Deng

doi:10.1155/2020/7645153

Abstract

Ensuring adequate public transport-based accessibility to health facilities in different regions is a major concern of social equity and public health for government. However, the imbalanced spatial distribution of health facilities may lead to an inaccurate evaluation of the accessibility, which is shaped by both land use and transportation. To address this problem, this study proposed a new approach to evaluate the adequacy of public transport-based accessibility to health facilities considering the spatial heterogeneity. First, we obtained the spatial distribution of health facilities based on POI data, calculated the population centroids of census tract-based mobile phone positioning data, and estimated travel times from population centroids to every health facility based on web map services. Second, the public transport-based accessibility to health facilities was measured by the isochrone approach. Then, the spatial heterogeneity of the health facilities was quantified by a spatial proximity index based on the gravity model. At last, a benchmark curve of accessibility vs. spatial proximity was established to evaluate the public transport-based accessibility to health facilities in different areas with spatial heterogeneity. A case study of 218 census tracts in Shanghai was conducted to verify this method. Consequently, we successfully identified the census tracts where the public transport-based accessibility to health facilities is insufficient. It shows that even some census tracts within the central city areas are still short of public transport-based accessibility to health facilities, whereas some tracts in the urban periphery may have adequate public transport-based accessibility even though there are limited health facilities nearby.

Highlights

Because health and treatment are critical to our daily lives, sufficient accessibility to health facilities should be ensured in different regions and for different groups of people
Land use factor can be regarded as the spatial proximity of the health facilities, whereas the transportation factor is the level of public transport services
Because of the aggregation effects of urban populations and resources, spatial differentiation between central urban areas and suburban areas of the city is an inevitable economic trend, which is referred to as spatial heterogeneity. erefore, the land use factor resulting in the imbalanced distribution of health facilities may have a more significant impact on the accessibility than the development of public transport

Summary

Introduction

Because health and treatment are critical to our daily lives, sufficient accessibility to health facilities should be ensured in different regions and for different groups of people. The accessibility is shaped by two factors, namely, the land use and transportation [1]. Land use factor can be regarded as the spatial proximity of the health facilities, whereas the transportation factor is the level of public transport services. Erefore, the land use factor resulting in the imbalanced distribution of health facilities may have a more significant impact on the accessibility than the development of public transport. The regions surrounded by many health facilities may have high public transport-based accessibility to health facilities even though the level of public transport service is poor. The public transport-based accessibility in regions with few health facilities around can never reach a high level even though the public transport system is well developed

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