A GIS Analysis on Service Oriented Accessibility and Road Development Potentials of Northern Sri Lanka

摘要

Since the urban-rural linkage mainly depends on the availability of the transportation facilities, any project oninfrastructure development should concern the level of accessibility through the existing roads which should bedeveloped. Most of the regional development programs in post conflict Sri Lanka, particularly in the NorthernProvince have not reached the expected deliverables due to several reasons. Particular system has been not usedyet to prioritize the regions with less access to the services because of insufficient road networks. Even after adecade of war ended, most of the roads in rural areas in the Jaffna District are still in wretched condition. Therefore,this paper has aimed to formulae a systematic approach based on the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) toidentify the level of development of sub regions and to classify the regions based on level of accessibility and finallyto prioritize the road networks which should be developed by any road development project. In order to achievethese aims, the present research selected the Jaffna District using the judgment sampling method for datacollection. Most of the data were from secondary sources such as government bodies and open sources and fourmethods of spatial analysis; distance, density, reclass and weighted overlay were used in data analysis. One of thefindings of this paper is the possibility of dividing the region into five key development clusters based on theaccessibility to 15 services. It was revealed that, the development level of each Divisional Secretariat Division (DSD)of Jaffna District totally depends on the quality of road network and the accessibility to the services. Out of fivedevelopment based regions in Jaffna District, there are two marginal divisions; Delft and Vadamarchi East whichconsists less than 30% of accessibility and neither A nor B class roads connected to the urban centers. Furthermore,lack of connectivity to the main roads and poor condition of rural roads have adversely affected to the regionaldevelopment of Jaffna District. It is recommended that the method introduced by this paper can be applied to theregional physical planning.