María Henar Salas-Olmedo

In the European context, medium sized cities play a key role in organizing the territory at the regional level. Studies on commuting and travel behaviour often refer to large metropolitan areas, but results are not directly transferable because of differences in resources and processes. In addition, data availability is typically reduced to national datasets, thus most studies cannot be replicated. This paper analyses spatial commuting trends in two English medium sized cities with different spatial patterns. Locally disaggregated nationwide available census data and registry of planning applications were analysed with multiple linkage analysis and complementary indices. Results indicate that commuting trips to the city centre dominate in both monocentric and dispersed urban areas regardless of the presence of motorways. However, differences were found in the distance and number of trips as well as in the relationship between mode of transport and type of accommodation.

El fenómeno de la dispersión urbana está modificando el modelo de ocupación del suelo de las ciudades españolas propiciando así que ciudades tradicionalmente compactas hayan experimentado un crecimiento disperso, que a la larga resultará ser poco sostenible. Como solución a esta problemática se consideran los sistemas policéntricos.
Se realiza una comparación basada en el índice de Nelson de la jerarquía urbana de Cantabria a partir de servicios y centros de trabajo, y de las relaciones de dependencia intermunicipal para acceder al comercio y servicios. Los resultados han servido para proponer un sistema territorial equilibrado rompiendo la progresiva tendencia de litoralización de la población y actividades.
Finalmente se plantean medidas que fomenten la  integración de las políticas de transporte, de planificación urbanística y de ordenación del territorio, basándose en la coordinación y cooperación administrativa y de los agentes sociales, y en la definición de estrategias a medio y largo plazo.

In this paper we have provided a brief examination of the relationship between land use and transport in order to help clarify the role that land use and transport integrated policies can play specifically in peripheral areas.

The research takes Cantabria (Spain) as an example of a peripheral EU region, whose study has shown two main characteristics of peripheral areas that make land use and transport policies particularly necessary. Firstly, peripheral areas have a high degree of polarization, with great differences between the main city (and its sprawled surroundings) and rural areas. They also have a clear scarcity of intermediate towns. Secondly, main transport investments have been made in infrastructure construction, but there is a shortage of investment in transport management of intraregional connections.

Considering these as the main constraints for sustainable and balanced development, land use and transport integrated policies should be implemented by the Regional Government, or with its coordination, following three key objectives: making intermediate towns more attractive for people and firms location; making urban development more efficient - in order to reduce the need to travel and land consumption; and improving transport sustainability through a more efficient use of the means of transport.

However, there are some serious obstacles that make the implementation of these policies difficult. In Cantabria, and probably extensively in most peripheral areas, the most significant obstacles are:  public acceptance; institutional co-operation, both horizontally and vertically; disparities between the long term of some policies and the short term of politicians; and the absence of a regional strategy.

Further research is needed to achieve the involvement of both politicians and citizens, and it is also necessary to monitor the impact of the policies suggested to be able to adapt them to each particular area and current situation.

This paper exposes the methodology and main outputs of the project ‘Análisis y Gestión del Patrimonio Regional de Suelo’ (Regional Land Heritage Analysis and Management), submitted by the Regional Ministry of Public Works of the Government of Cantabria (Spain) with the objective of identifying and describing the above mentioned public heritage. The key issue of this project consists on the design and implementation of a Geographic Information System and the development of a specific methodology, required mainly because of the barely and low quality of the data provided. The paper especially focuses on the methodology, which have the three following steps: data search and analysis; information management; and production of results. Our aim is to spread this specific process that can result particularly useful in similar circumstances of non-consistent data.

Land use changes related to the spatial impacts of roads are larger in those places with a higher increase in accessibil-ity. The transport and land-use connection implies that high capacity roads are able to favour or limit the development of an area, which also depends on it socioeconomic situation and other factors. In peripheral areas, frequently polarized, a new road has a greater impact on land uses over the most accessible urban fringes. This fact needs to be incorporated in an integrated planning policy of land use and transport. New and more precise and elaborated data sources developed recently help quantifying this process, but more research is needed in relation to the techniques used in the analysis. This paper, after a short introduction to the relationship between spatial impact and transport infrastructures, studies the ad-vantages and disadvantages of modern data sources. Finally, some GIS tools will be recommended in order to favour the spatial analysis and comparisons.

The globalization of population and trade flows yielded an increase of interactions within the international framework. Accessibility indicators are especially suited to represent spatial interaction since they capture two basic factors that determine the amount of flows between a set of places: the opportunities available and the infrastructure used to move those flows. While globalization trends contributed to the weakening of borders, several studies confirm that borders still matter in international trade, and play a significant role in the form of home bias, i.e. a marked preference for domestic products. Still, most studies of international accessibility ignore this fact, thus failing to show realistic results.
This paper makes use of gravity equations to calibrate the distance decay parameter as well as a new coefficient to control for the border effect in the market potential indicator. We used official trade data at the country level in the European Union and evaluated different distance metrics in order to obtain a realistic measure of the border effect within the EU.
Our results suggest that the border effect in Europe was previously underestimated due to an excessive simplification when measuring distances. While our preliminary results were similar to previous research, once we applied realistic measures of transports cost (either travel time or generalized transport costs) and removed those countries that are highly affected by the Rotterdam effect, we found that European countries trade 15 times more within themselves than with any other European country. Consequently, integrating the effects of borders in accessibility analysis of international scope evidences that the gap between central and peripheral countries is even larger than expected.