Mapping cost distance using air traffic data

Gábor Dudás,Lajos Boros,Viktor Pál,Péter Pernyész

doi:10.1080/17445647.2015.1061463

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent trends in transport and communication infrastructures have had a profound impact on the spatial organization of the world city network, which have long been of interest to geographers. Considering the former issue, our study is based on previous works on air transport geography and world city network studies. We introduce a new method to map the gap between geographical distance and cost distance by using air traffic data. In this paper, we created an international database for a large number of world cities and developed a way to map cost distance using conventional and Geographic Information System-based mapping techniques. The main result of this work is a set of maps showing the cost distances of world cities, which can be used as a significant source of information by world city network analysis.

Highlights

From the second half of the twentieth century, the development of transportation and information technologies has had a profound impact on the spatial organization of an increasingly globalized society and facilitated integration by allowing the flows of people, goods, and information through various systems (Dicken, 2007; Rodrigue, Comtois, & Slack, 2006)
This research presents a method to map the gap between cost distance and geographical distance by using air traffic data
We created an international database for large number of world cities and developed a way to map cost distance using conventional and Geographic Information System (GIS)-based mapping techniques

Summary

Introduction

From the second half of the twentieth century, the development of transportation and information technologies (the so-called time–space shrinking technologies) has had a profound impact on the spatial organization of an increasingly globalized society and facilitated integration by allowing the flows of people, goods, and information through various systems (Dicken, 2007; Rodrigue, Comtois, & Slack, 2006). The world has shrunk in relative terms – the absolute distance between two points did not change, but relative distances decreased (Warf, 2006) – but this shrinkage is highly uneven (Dicken, 2011). This is partly because air transport that facilitates the flows and changes in the world is unevenly distributed in space and is concentrated in certain nodes (world cities), these nodes remain hierarchically organized at global and national levels (Beaverstock, Smith, & Taylor, 2000; Knox & Taylor, 1995; Sassen, 2001; Taylor, Catalano, & Walker, 2002a). The question may arise: How far is it from point A to point B in relative terms?

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