The construction and operation of an important transport axis of the scale of Egnatia Motorway, with the improved accessibility that provides, undoubtedly has direct and indirect impact to the spatial development of Northern Greece and more generally of the Greek territory. Aim of this paper is to present a system of indices, that have been developed in the framework of the Observatory for the Spatial Impacts of Egnatia Motorway, the use of which is an important tool for assessing the impacts from the operation of Egnatia, with the presumption of a diachronic monitoring and an effort to identify the relations between them. Broadly, the research on which this paper is based develops a system of indices, which concerns three topics: transport sector, socio-economic sector and environmental sector, assessing the impact on issues like the access to markets of goods and services, the location of the settlings network and the environmental protection. For the topic of transport sector, twenty-two (22) indices have been developed out of the total forty-five (45), which characterized as "Road Network Operation Indices". These indices categorized as Basic, Framework and Special Indices and a number of them (nine out of the total twenty), have been considered in depth during a pilot implementation, which took place in the framework of this research. Therefore, the present paper focuses on the basic transportation indices and their characteristics, the main parameters that influence them and the proposed methodology for their estimation. In addition, some preliminary results of the pilot implementation are given. For the covering abstract see ITRD E128239.
Abstract