Application of GIS to assess the accessibility of urban streets in Baghdad city

Abstract

Accessibility has an important impact on shaping human activity patterns on all of the spatial scales. This study presented an evaluation of accessibility levels with private to commercial centers for three selected routes in Baghdad city. The study involved more than 45 days transport survey for private vehicles in Baghdad city using Global Positioning System (GPS) probe for recording indicators of traffic performance. Gravity model was used to measure accessibility index as an implementation of GIS-based model by using link geography and the spatial boundary of analysis in order to build route networks at three routes in Baghdad City, Bayaa intersection - Bab Al-Muatham intersection (Route 1), Bayaa intersection - Bab Al-Muatham intersection (Route 2) and 14 Ramadan Street - Bab Al-Muatham intersection (Route 3). It was found that Route 1 has the high accessibility index with 0.67 in compare with Route 2 and 3 (0.58 and 0.59), respectively. The reason that Route 1 had the highest accessibility index due to the high access point and low traffic volume as compared with the other two routes.