Abstract
Equitable access to sports services has drawn much attention from policymakers and planners in China, as rapid urbanization and lifestyle changes have caused the pandemic of inactivity. An accurate measure of accessibility will enable the spatial equity of public facility allocation. Existing approaches to measure the spatial accessibility of sports facilities tend to ignore the heterogeneity in potential users’ preferences for facilities, thereby causing a bias in the measurement of accessibility. This paper proposes a multi-preference Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (MG2SFCA) method to measure the spatial accessibility of sports facilities, taking into account different travel modes, catchment sizes, and facility preferences among different age groups. Empirically, we adopted the MG2SFCA method in examining the spatial accessibility of sports facilities among children, young working-age population, old working-age population, and elderly population under walking, cycling, and driving modes in Dongguan. The results indicated a significant spatial disparity in the accessibility to sports facilities, with better accessibility in the north and poorer accessibility in the south. Children have the best access to sports facilities, followed by old working-age population, young working-age population, and older population. In the comparison among different transport modes, the accessibility distribution of sports facilities in walking mode showed the greatest spatial variation, while accessibility in driving mode was the most balanced. The MG2SFCA method is superior to the traditional Gaussian 2SFCA method because the former can capture disadvantaged people’s actual needs for sports facilities more accurately than the latter.
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This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41871140 and No. 41971194) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 20lgzd10).
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TX and YL developed the research idea and completed the study design. TX conducted basic processing on the real population data. TD and XZ conducted basic processing on the data of sports facilities. TX, TD and XZ carried out the statistical analysis and wrote the manuscript. TX, YL and ZT revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Xiao, T., Ding, T., Zhang, X. et al. Spatial Accessibility to Sports Facilities in Dongguan, China: a Multi-Preference Gaussian Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Method. Appl. Spatial Analysis 15, 1093–1114 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-022-09436-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12061-022-09436-4