The impact of urban road congestion on territorial accessibility in the largest Spanish urban zones

Abstract

Road congestion is one of the most common daily problems in large urban zones. Their effects are considered an inefficiency of the transports – land use – people system. Previous attempts to fix this problem tend to fail since they are usually transport-based, because of the results of the interrelationships facets of system studies are blurry and their data could not be enough to get into issue. Nowadays, we can set over those limits now that the new ITs allows us to catch big data from reality (traffic, individual behavior, economic flows…). In this paper, we are interested in knowing how congestion can change the territorial accessibility values for the largest urban zones in Spain during whole regular weekdays, by using TomTom® historical Speed Profile data and GIS software (ESRI® ArcGIS). Our results seem to show that the interaction between land use and transport network is a fundamental piece to understand congestion. Despite the identical main morning peak in both areas and space-time distribution of congestion, the evolution of affected population per times shows that Madrid more congestion resilient than Barcelona.