Twenty years of accessibility improvements. The case of the Spanish motorway building programme

This paper presents an exploratory spatial data analysis of accessibility impacts of a large-scale national motorway building programme. Accessibility is calculated for Spanish municipalities from 1980 to 2000 using two indicators: motorway network access and market potential accessibility. The average distance from municipalities to their nearest motorway has been reduced markedly over this period. Market potential accessibility maps show that there have been gains in all locations, but some of the highest gains occurred in some of the more peripheral regions. A review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impacts of transport investments indicates important implications for regional development.