Case Studies, General News, Mapping Software > How increasing fuel prices affect rural life…
December 19, 2011
Part One: Driving to local towns
We started the BD blog to allow us to be geeky and topical and so we decided to make good on that promise and look at one of the most debated topics around: fuel prices.
In order to make this relevant and allow us to show off a bit of nifty geography we decided to map average drive times to major towns / cities for less affluent people living in the country to assess how increasing fuel prices would affect rural life…
We decided to look at ‘harder pastures’, that is, one of the branches of our people classification that live in the country. This branch makes up 1.68% of the UK population and comprises mainly married couples who are at least middle-aged or past retirement age with grown up children. Some of the younger couples within this category still have children living at home. The main occupation is farming, with many having skilled jobs although some who are younger than middle age have routine occupations. They have a high level of car ownership.
While this branch is not the poorest in our classification, it includes the least wealthy that live in the countryside. Any increase in the price of petrol and diesel affects them greatly. In future posts we will examine their situation in more detail but here we have chosen five locations where many of this branch live and used our drive-time tool to estimate how long it takes them to drive to local towns.
Below is a map of part of Yorkshire showing places where this branch resides. The towns identified are: Hull, York, Scarborough, Malton, Bridlington and Doncaster. All these locations have reasonable shopping facilities and major hospitals.
It is interesting to see that the drive times to our chosen urban centres range from under 15 minutes to over 40 minutes calculated on average road speeds for cars. In adverse conditions the drive times can be worse, making some of this branch more vulnerable than average to emergency situations and increases to the cost of motoring…
In our next post in this series, we will explore the costs of travel for this branch.
Posted by Geoff Beacon, Chairman at Beacon Dodsworth.
