2. Accessibility through time: Building historical travel-time friction grids for the Netherlands (1970-present)

Accessibility through time: Building historical travel-time friction grids for the Netherlands (1970-present)

M-GEO
M-SE
ACQUAL
PLUS
STAMP
Potential supervisors
Serkan Girgin
Andy Nelson
M-SE Core knowledge areas
Spatial Information Science (SIS)
Spatial Planning for Governance (SPG)
Technical Engineering (TE)
Additional Remarks

This topic does not involve fieldwork.

The candidate should preferably have experience in data extraction and geospatial computing using Python.

Topic description

Grid-based travel friction grids represent travel cost for moving through each cell of a landscape, enabling flexible and spatially detailed travel-time calculations. They are especially useful for modeling accessibility in heterogeneous environments where roads, terrain, land cover, or barriers vary continuously rather than along fixed networks. Common use cases include estimating access to services, disaster response planning, ecological connectivity analysis, and infrastructure planning.

Although they are very useful to analyze spatio-temporal changes in accessibility, currently there is a gap in the availability of historical travel friction grids. This thesis aims to help bridge the gap by developing an open and reproducible workflow for historical travel friction grid construction, and demonstrate its applicability by creating a series of travel friction grids for the Netherlands from the 1970s to the present with 5-10 year intervals.

Note: Depending on your interest and data availability, it is possible to change the case study country.


 

Topic objectives and methodology

The objectives and overall methodology of the thesis work are as follows:

  1. Data assembly: collect and harmonize historical datasets for the transport infrastructure (e.g., roads, railways, inland waterways) and ancillary layers (e.g., settlements, land cover, elevation/slope) for Netherlands for multiple time slices from the 1970s onward (e.g., 1975, 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, 2025).
     
  2. Friction surface development: adapt and implement the Weiss et al. (2020) friction surface methodology to produce travel-time friction grids for each time slice.
     
  3. Validation: validate the generated grids by comparing with published global/regional friction or travel-time datasets, historical travel-time measurements where available, and sensitivity/uncertainty testing.
     
  4. Accessibility change analysis: quantify and map how accessibility changed across time slices, e.g. national and sub-national patterns, percent of population within 30/60/120 minutes of major urban centres.
     
  5. Methodological contribution: document adaptations needed to apply global friction-grid methods at national/historical scales, and produce an open workflow and reproducible code for historical friction-grid construction.


 

References for further reading