# Urban–rural transportation accessibility: A novel geographical indicator for characterizing urban–rural integration

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a new geographic indicator to measure urban-rural integration by analyzing transportation accessibility in rural areas of Yunnan, China.

## Contribution

The novel URTA model integrates geographical and transportation data to assess urban-rural integration disparities.

## Key findings

- Significant travel time differences between developed and impoverished counties highlight urban-rural integration disparities.
- Average travel time to county centers decreased from 2.13 hours in 2015 to 1.46 hours in 2023.
- URTA improved in central and northwest Yunnan but remained stagnant in the southwest.

## Abstract

The literature on urban–rural integration lacks not only a geographic indicator that incorporates geographical characteristics (e.g., location, topography, and road infrastructure) to characterize urban–rural integration but also methods of measuring the access costs of planning rural transportation infrastructure and individual village settlements (VSs). In response, our urban–rural transportation accessibility (URTA) model, using VSs as the unit of transportation accessibility, offers a new indicator to guide local transportation infrastructure planning and to capture the provincial-level heterogeneity of urban–rural access costs based on geographical characteristics. The model is constructed with data from over 140,000 VSs in the Chinese province of Yunnan and multilevel road network data for Yunnan from 2015 and 2023 based on GIS analysis. Moreover, because mountainous VSs may lack paved roads to connect to the road network, our model integrates results from the minimum cumulative resistance model to simulate least cost paths through the network. Using origin–destination analysis, we also calculated the travel time from each VS to its county center as a measure of URTA reflecting urban–rural integration. Among our findings, significant differences in travel time and path length between developed and impoverished counties reflect disparity in urban–rural integration. Longer travel times indicate less integration, and though times were consistently under 2.5 h in Guandu District, they ranged from 2 to more than 10 h in Gongshan County. Furthermore, on average, reaching county centers from the VSs took 2.13 h in 2015 and 1.46 h in 2023. Although URTA expanded in central Yunnan and improved considerably in the northwest, the southwest showed little change, which highlights significant disparity in urban–rural integration. Those results suggest that our method and indicator, by elucidating urban–rural integration in regions with high geographic spatial heterogeneity, can guide transportation planning in mountainous rural areas worldwide.