Revista de teledetección y SIG

Abstracto

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

Pinnawala Sangasumana and Sivarasa Sivaruban

Since the urban-rural linkage mainly depends on the availability of the transportation facilities, any project on
infrastructure development should concern the level of accessibility through the existing roads which should be
developed. Most of the regional development programs in post conflict Sri Lanka, particularly in the Northern
Province have not reached the expected deliverables due to several reasons. Particular system has been not used
yet to prioritize the regions with less access to the services because of insufficient road networks. Even after a
decade 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) to
identify the level of development of sub regions and to classify the regions based on level of accessibility and finally
to prioritize the road networks which should be developed by any road development project. In order to achieve
these aims, the present research selected the Jaffna District using the judgment sampling method for data
collection. Most of the data were from secondary sources such as government bodies and open sources and four
methods of spatial analysis; distance, density, reclass and weighted overlay were used in data analysis. One of the
findings of this paper is the possibility of dividing the region into five key development clusters based on the
accessibility 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 five
development based regions in Jaffna District, there are two marginal divisions; Delft and Vadamarchi East which
consists 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 regional
development of Jaffna District. It is recommended that the method introduced by this paper can be applied to the
regional physical planning.