Regional accessibility of land traffic network in the Yangtze River Delta

In a given district, the accessibility of any point should be the synthetically evalua-tion of the internal and external accessibilities. Using MapX component and Delphi, the author presents an information system to calculate and analyze regional accessibility according to the shortest travel time, generating thus a mark diffusing figure. Based on land traffic network, this paper assesses the present and the future regional accessibilities of sixteen major cities in the Yangtze River Delta. The result shows that the regional accessibility of the Yangtze River Delta presents a fan with Shanghai as its core. The top two most accessible cities are Shanghai and Jiaxing, and the bottom two ones are Taizhou (Zhejiang province) and Nantong. With the construction of Sutong Bridge, Hangzhouwan Bridge and Zhoushan Bridge, the re-gional internal accessibility of all cities will be improved. Especially for Shaoxing, Ningbo and Taizhou (Jiangsu province), the regional internal accessibility will be decreased by one hour, and other cities will be shortened by about 25 minutes averagely. As the construction of Yangkou Harbor in Nantong, the regional external accessibility of the harbor cities in Jiangsu province will be speeded up by about one hour.