Development of a Gis Tool for Studying Territorial Impacts of Road Corridors

Abstract

In this paper a Geographical Information System programme has been built to analyse and present the territorial impacts of P.A.TH.E (Patra-Athens-Thessalonica-Eyzonoi) international road in the area around it, in Greece, using social, economic and transport indicators. Using the Visual Basic programming and MapObjects components, an intelligent GIS programme is developed which everyone, with no knowledge to geodatabases, has the ability to use it. It has the capability to retrieve, interpret and render the statistical and cartographical features on the map, applying functions and provide suitable tools such as add layer (shapefile, grid, cad, image, coverage, etc.), zoom in, zoom out, pan, full extent, buffer, overlay, intersection, dot density patterns for polygons, calculation of statistics, identify, printing, copy and features classification. These tools are needed in order to generate specialized solutions for desktop mapping and spatial analysis. Moreover the application is enhanced with simple and useful interfaces to everyone who wants to correlate geographical and statistical information. The developed GIS has been used to study the territorial impacts in six hundred and four municipalities (ninety-three of them are crossed by the road) which are contained in twenty - three counties around the P.A.TH.E road. The administrative division NUTS V (municipality) has been selected as geographical level for the analysis. All the municipalities have been separated in three categories: • the first contains the municipalities which the road crosses, • the second includes the municipalities which are included in the same county with the municipalities in the first category but the road does not pass through them, • in the third belongs municipalities that are in neighbour counties of the second. Nine indicators (total and by sex population changes, population density, employment and unemployment rates, net migration, mobility, road density and land use) in four different time periods (1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001) have been used to study the spatial impacts of P.A.TH.E.