Improvements in transport infrastructure are usually judged on financial and/or social grounds. The majority of schemes, however, cannot be justified purely on financial grounds alone and so the value of acessibility improvements to the community needs to be considered. Improvements in overall accessibility can only be part of the issue, and so consideration must be given to how these changes affect people's lives, in terms of job and recreational opportunities, development potential and social and economic well-being. These factors were assessed in the context of the proposed Woolwich Rail Tunnel, with a GIS being central to the data integration and analysis process. London Transport provided travel time information from two sources, these being from Railplan and the Intermediate Modes Study (which had zones disaggregated down to bus stop level). They were combined spatially and a matrix of travel time changes from each zone to all other zones in London produced. Other information was placed onto the GIS which included: unemployment and employment and job vacancy data; shopping centre size; social and economic deprivation (via composite measures based on census data); and potential sites for redevelopment. The data listed above was linked to the travel time information and a series of gravity type models produced. These quantified the impacts of the scheme on deprived areas, employment opportunities to the unemployed, redevelopment opportunities, and changes in the distribution of spending within the retail centres of East London. This study furnishes the London Borough of Greenwich with the necessary information to determine whether the scheme has a sufficiently positive effect on its residents to warrant supporting the proposal.
Abstract