The relationship between the level of socioeconomic development and the level of transportation activity in rural areas is examined for developing countries. Because access to roads is the most essential element of a transportation system, the degree of accessibility of rural areas is considered a good indicator of the level of development of the transportation system. Degrees of access to rural roadscould be determined according to two simple criteria--proximity of the village to the nearest vehicle road and its distance to the nearest town. Villages with identical degrees of accessibility could be arranged in a group, forming access areas, regardless of the geographical location of the component villages. Four access area categories may be created by the proper choice of distance intervals in the application of accessibility criteria. In the order of increasing accessibility, these four access areas may be described as hardly accessible, poorly accessible, fairly accessible, and easily accessible. Each access area would be assigned an access value proportional to some measurable transportation activity (e.G., The number of daily trips per household in that area). The concepts and data used were developed by surveying households in the philippines in 1983. The survey included 1, 002 households with a total of 5, 228 individuals livingin 25 different villages in five different municipalities of cebu island. Study variables obtained from survey responses were divided into (a) major components of socioeconomic development, (b) those variables that determined the transportation pattern and ownership of the means of transport, and (c) those variables that described the agricultural situation. Analysis of study variables as functions of access value revealed that the major elements of socioeconomic development varied sharply with a change in access value and were strongly associated with it. The analysis also found that both the income from the sale of cash crops and the efficiency of agricultural production increased considerably as access value increased. This paper appears in transportation research record no. 1274, Transportation and economic development 1990: proceedings of a conference, williamsburg, virginia, november 5-8, 1989.
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