Chapter 17: Accessibility and Spatial Development in Switzerland during the Last 50 Years

Transport systems have been built primarily to expand the reach of both people and industry. One measure of the resulting spatial impacts is the change in accessibility, which measures what can be reached with what effort. Accessibility is both the primary service provided by transport infrastructure and the link between transport infrastructure and land use. It can measure the spatial impact of newly built transport infrastructure and show the attractiveness of a region’s location.

The link between accessibility improvement and economic and population growth, at least change, is a key tenet of regional science, transport and planning, while the literature acknowledges that accessibility is only a sufficient and not necessary condition for growth (Vicker-man, 1992 or Banister and Berechman, 2000). The previous empirical work trying to document this link (see for example Lutter, 1980; Kesselring, Halbherr and Maggi, 1982; Seimetz, 1987; Aschauer, 1989; Fernald, 1998; Holtz-Eakin, 1994; Munnell, 1990; Nadiri, 1998; Boar-net and Haughwant, 2000; Shirley and Winston, 2004) suffers a number of short comings: the use of large spatial units, such as US states or UK counties; the reliance on short study periods, typically ten to twenty years; omission of railway services and finally in most cases the approximation of the services delivered by the transport system by the value of the public capital stock (See Axhausen, 2004 for a detailed critique).