Historical models of least cost paths, travel times and accessibilities of road-based transport in Western Europe 1500 to today

Abstract

This research deals with methods to capture, spatially model and quantify changes in the European transport system over the last couple of centuries. Rather than examining one particular region or focusing on a travel pattern of a particular person, the approach captures the changes as a whole and considers transport as a system and as a network. The aim is to obtain a geographic information system (GIS), that includes historical transport infrastructure (h-tGIS = historical transport-GIS). The method is based on what I call Universe of Paths. A further model defines for each year and each territory maximum values of the travel system speed for both, the matrix in between the network as well as for the network and its single categories and links. This maximum value is corrected by the effect of the slope. By overlying the network with the matrix, a graph is constructed that allows to generate least cost surfaces. Finally, if the shortest path is calculated from every cell to every other cell, the resulting list of shortest paths from every cell to every other cell could be summarised using accessibility metrics.