Adequate access to goods and services for daily needs, as well as access to recreation sites such as lakesides or forests, is of major importance for the quality of life. Measuring the accessibility of these services is one way to assess this phenomenon. To measure accessibility, the distance travelled on the road network between the place of residence and the location of the nearest service provider or recreation site is calculated.
Places of residence are not considered individually, but are aggregated by inhabited hectares. Populated hectares are defined according to the population and household statistics STATPOP. The services are grouped into 35 categories and their data are taken from the structural business statistics STATENT, the MAS structural data, the ARE geodata set 'ÖV-Güteklassen', the Swiss museum statistics and the swissTLM3D.
The distances between the populated hectares and the nearest settlement are calculated between the centre of each populated hectare and the metric coordinate of the respective service provider, using the road network of the swissTLM3D. The distance value is assigned to the hectare.