Croatian Islands - insight into the traffic-geographical features of accessibility

Abstract

Traffic connectivity, and thus the accessibility of islands as specific spatial units surrounded on all sides by the sea, is an indispensable precondition to their physical and functional integration with the mainland. The paper presents the accessibility concept of the Croatian insular area and it also quantitatively and qualitatively analyses the main determinants: traffic connectivity, travel time, time dependent accessibility, type of traffic lines and the adaptation of sailing schedules to the islands population needs, for whose calculation the 2018 sailing schedule was used. The results show zonal distribution of the islands according to the time dependent accessibility, as well as more unfavorable quantitative and qualitative indicators for the islands with reduced area and population and which are more distant from the mainland.

Keywords

• accessibility
• Croatian islands
• insularity
• traffic connectivity
• distance