Estimating the effect of turn penalties and traffic congestion on measuring spatial accessibility to primary health care

Geographic variations in spatial accessibility to public resources, such as health care services, raise important questions about the efficiencies and inequities of the processes that determine where these services are located. Spatial accessibility can be measured many different ways, but many of methods in use today involve some measure of travel cost (in time or distance). In this study we explore a simple methodological question: how much are models of spatial accessibility influenced by the precise metric of travel cost? We address this question by comparing spatial accessibility to primary care physicians for two different methods of calculating travel cost (in time) on a street network: free-flow travel time and congested with turn penalties travel time—which augments free-flow travel times with the burden of traffic congestion and traffic intersection controls. We consider the effect of these two metrics of travel cost on a gravity-based measure of spatial accessibility to primary health care services in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Our results suggest that while travel times between locations of demand and locations of primary care providers greatly differ based on how travel cost is calculated, the gravity-based measure of spatial accessibility provides similar information for both travel cost metrics. Using congested with turn penalties travel time can be an onerous addition to the analysis of spatial accessibility, and is more useful for measuring absolute travel time rather than modeling relative spatial accessibility.

► The effects of traffic congestion and stops at intersections are rarely considered in spatial accessibility research.
► Travel time to primary health care services differs depending on the method of calculating network travel cost.
► Simple measures of free-flow network travel time may be adequate for understanding spatial accessibility.