| Abstract: | Access to certain types of facilities can promote health and well‐being. When population and facilities are not uniformly distributed across the landscape, inequities in accessibility may occur. Current research into GIS‐based accessibility measures has focused primarily on spatial inequities between different geographic locations but not directly on differences in accessibility between subgroups of the population. The research presented here develops a new method for measuring differential accessibility to facilities between various segments of the population. The method extends concepts and techniques in spatial point pattern analysis that account for the spatial structure of demand and its relationship to supply. In this approach, the traditional Lorenz curve and its associated indices, the Gini coefficient and the dissimilarity index, which are used to measure inequality, are recast in spatial terms for measuring differences in accessibility between population subgroups. An analysis of spatial accessibility to grocery stores in Akron, OH illustrates the value of the spatial Lorenz curve and its associated indices compared to other methods. |
