Accessibility and Public Facility Location

The concept of accessibility of service facilities to target populations is an inadequate criterion for public facility location problems, since it overemphasizes dispersed facilities as location solutions. Without consideration of interactions and linkages between services in public facility systems, the complete range of facility location patterns that can be observed in urban settings cannot be characterized. Through techniques of spatial pattern analysis, different degrees of facility concentration are demonstrated to exist for human service systems in selected urban areas. A method for co-locational analysis is also introduced in order to examine the nature of locational interdependence and its role in describing the structure of public facility concentrations. Given the empirical evidence and a theoretical basis, it is argued that the criterion of facility accessibility should be considered along with a criterion of facility linkage or agglomeration in any comprehensive locational analysis of public...