Friday, April 29, 2011

Social exclusion and transportation in Peachtree City Georgia

by Ruth Conroy Dalton

This paper will discuss how, in a small American city, Peachtree City (43km south of Atlanta), the flexibility and relative affordability of electric golf carts, as a viable alternative to the automobile, means that the level at which families and individuals are disadvantaged through their lack of access to public/private transport is effectively lowered. Economic access to golf carts, in of itself, would not be sufficient if it were not for the extensive, highly penetrative and ‘ringy’ spatial structure of the cart path system, a mostly-segregated, 150 kilometre network. A spatial analysis of this dual transportation system is presented and its implications discussed. The conclusion of this paper is that the duality of the effective spatial structure of the cart path network and the relative low cost and inherent flexibility of the golf carts combine to reduce transportation-linked social exclusion in Peachtree City. This argument is substantiated, in the final section of the paper, through the evidence of a questionnaire distributed to a random sampling of 1,038 property owners and renters in the city.


more Space Syntax papers:

Evaluated Model of Pedestrian Movement Based on Space Syntax, Performance Measures and Artificial Neural Nets

Compact Sprawl Experiments Four Strategic Densification Scenarios for Two Modernist Suburbs in Stockholm

THE STREETS OF INNOVATION: an exploratory analysis of knowledge transfer in the public realm

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