Measurement of coastal accessibility: Methodological trials GIS environment

The concept of accessibility is one of the important elements that determine the quality of life. Accessibility analyzes, which can be performed with different purposes and techniques at urban and regional scale, help to define the problems encountered especially in the field of transportation and accessibility, provide decision support to users and decision makers, and determine priorities and urgency in transportation planning. Accessibility measurement and modeling can be done successfully in many areas with the support of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). When the literature on accessibility modeling is examined, it is seen that there are many studies used to measure different types of accessibility. Although there are many studies measuring the accessibility of point type reinforcement areas such as education, health, safety, etc., it is observed that the studies on the accessibility of linear reinforcement areas, which are very important for daily use on an urban or regional scale, such as lake shores, river shores, sea shores, etc., are extremely limited. Based on this gap in the literature, it is aimed to conduct scenario-based methodological trials in order to measure how the accessibility of coastal areas, which are linear reinforcement areas, can be measured comparatively in the GIS environment. The cities of Antalya and Mersin on a large scale and Kaş on a small scale were chosen as the study area. Antalya and Mersin are two upper-scale neighboring cities that host important coastal tourism and coastal use in Turkey. However, with the awareness of being a small-scale coastal city, the city of Kaş was also chosen in order to discuss how the same methodological trials yielded results on a smaller scale. The results of different accessibility analyzes for the cities selected as the study area were compared to better understand the differences between accessibility levels. It is thought that the results obtained from the study will make an important contribution to the relevant literature in order to quantitatively measure the accessibility of coastal areas which are linear reinforcement areas, to provide a comparable structure, and to form a basis for similar studies in the future.