Page 149 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 2

CPS1485 Pasi P.
In this paper the concept of accessibility refers to distance metrics and
travel time itself between points: pair of points, group of points, “service
areas” around points.
It should be noted that at the global level United Nations’ actions form a
base for the estimation of accessibility to services. Statistics Finland is also
cooperating with other public administration institutions in order to make
production of some of the most challenging indicators of the sustainable
development goals (SDG) possible, especially the indicator 11.2.1 Proportion
of population that has convenient access to public transport, by sex, age and
persons with disabilities. It is obvious that people with disabilities have
individual burdens that would require high quality data in order to measure
accessibility correctly. This kind of application is passed in this paper.
SDG perspective on the other hand is presented in specific examples
of sustainable commuting and cultural accessibility.

2. Data sources
These applications extensively use the Population Statistics Data
Warehouse of Statistics Finland and other registers that are constructed from
several administrative datasets and statistical data files (Statistics Finland,
1/2016 and 2/2016).
These are integrated with many other datasets such as the extensive
National Road and Street Database, Digiroad (Digiroad.fi), produced by The
Finnish Transport Agency. Agency’s data from automatic traffic measuring
devices are also applied (Piela, P. 1/2016) having obvious big data features.
Specifically, the public transport accessibility requires open public
transport web service platforms (Pasila, A. 2016).
Some applications even require customers’ own “service point” data due
to limits of the Business Register, either surveyed or register-type of data.

3. Remoteness index estimation
The Municipal remoteness index of Finland (in Finnish: syrjäisyysluku, in
Swedish: kommunernas fjärrortstal) has been decreed with the Government
decree on statutory government transfers to municipalities for basic services
1446/2014. It defines a simplified system based on certain relative population
counts within 25 kilometres and 50 kilometres (Euclidean) circle buffers around
municipal (statistical) population centres, by applying one square kilometre
population grids.
The Ministry of Finance has supported studies on enrichment proposals
for the remoteness index. The most popular is the one that simply replaces
linear distances by route network based ones. It is obvious that such measure
takes better into account geographical differences especially in a sparsely
populated country.

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