« Previous | Contents | Next »
Listen
CITY REGION BOUNDARIES STUDY
CHAPTER FIVE TRAVEL TO WORK AREAS
5.1 Travel to work is perhaps the single most important cross boundary characteristic of the City Regions. The vitality of the cities depends on the availability of a workforce, and the choice of where people live depends on being able to access work more than for any other trip purpose.
5.2 Economic success of a city region depends on many complex economic linkages. There are many employment centres within and outwith the boundaries of the City Council areas that contribute to the success of a City region. To recognise the polycentric nature of the city regions would require a more detailed analysis than is possible within this project. The aim of this work is simply to look at the sphere of influence of the City Council areas as specified by the current administrative boundaries.
5.3 Travel to work patterns have therefore been plotted by postcode sector as described in Appendix C. The maps show the percentage of residents by their postcode who work at a location with the boundary of the city Council area. The most comprehensive data is available from the 1991 census but this is now fairly old. Data has therefore been obtained from the Scottish Household Survey (SHS) to examine from a much smaller data set what changes have taken place since 1991.
CENSUS ANALYSIS
5.4 The approximate boundaries of the areas within which more than 5% and 10% of travel to work trips are to the city are plotted for Aberdeen in Figure 3 and Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee in Figure 4. Council boundaries are also shown. The choice of the 5% and 10% thresholds is not intended to indicate any absolute measure of importance for travel to work purposes. They do, however, represent areas where a significant number of people work in the city and which therefore merit consideration in strategic planning.
5.5 It is interesting that even at the 5% level there was no overlap between the Glasgow and Edinburgh TTWAs in 1991. Fife and Falkirk are the only two Councils to be affected by more than one City at the 5% level and only Fife was affected by more than one City at the 10% level.
Figure 3 - Aberdeen TTWA at 5% and 10% level
Figure 4 - Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dundee TTWAs at 5% and 10% level
5.6 If the 5% level is adopted then the TTWAs for the Cities would include:
- Glasgow - City of Glasgow, East Dunbartonshire, West Dunbartonshire, Renfrewshire, East Renfrewshire, and parts of North Lanarkshire, South Lanarkshire, East Ayrshire, North Ayrshire, Inverclyde, Falkirk and Stirling.
- Edinburgh - City of Edinburgh, West Lothian, Midlothian, East Lothian, and parts of Fife and Scottish Borders.
- Dundee - City of Dundee, and parts of Angus, Perth and Kinross and Fife.
- Aberdeen - City of Aberdeen, most of Aberdeenshire and a small part of Moray.
HOUSEHOLD SURVEY ANALYSIS
5.7 Although the sample sizes were much smaller from the SHS, a similar analysis was possible to that undertaken for the census data. As can be seen from Appendix C there have been some very substantial changes in TTWAs since 1991. Figures 5 to 8 show the changes for each of the cities. The approximate SHS TTWA boundaries are shown using dotted lines for comparison with the solid lines showing the 1991 boundaries.
Figure 5 - Change in 5% and 10% TTWA boundaries for Glasgow between 1991 Census and 1999-2001 SHS.
« Previous | Contents | Next »