Featured Graphic. Spatial Inequality and Workplace Accessibility: The Case of a Major Hospital in Göteborg, Sweden

This map visualizes the interrelation between car/public transport workplace accessibility differences and place of residence. (1) The case is based on a hospital with 4500 employees and is the city’s single largest workplace with a majority of female workers. The analysis shows that 53% of the low-income female workers at the hospital can save between 30 and 60 minutes daily if they commute by car instead of public transport, compared with 46% of the high-income men. In addition, only 33% of the low-income women can save up to 30 minutes per day by using car instead of public transport, compared with 42% of the high-income men. The pattern of accessibility difference in the map indicates that low-income groups in general may be overrepresented in the semiperiphery of the city, refl ecting a gentrifi cation process of the inner-city areas, which often mismatches with the location of low-incomedominated workplaces. Thus, affordability of housing seems to be an important determinant for the place of residence choice, since most areas with the least difference between car and public transport accessibility are located in the city centre where property prices are high. Furthermore, the map shows a concentration of low-income female employees close to the hospital, with the number of commuters reduced drastically with increasing distance. This indicates that proximity to work is still an important determinant for the place of residence choice. Overall, there is a relatively small area in which employees at the hospital may live without having to spend signifi cantly longer time commuting by public transport compared with car. For groups with limited mobility resources (ie, without a car), this creates time– spatial restrictions on the home–workplace accessibility dynamics. One conclusion is that planners and policy makers need to be aware of the relative importance of public transport for different groups depending on factors such as gender, income, and place of work. The analysis illustrates how accessibility and travel opportunities are unevenly distributed among different groups in society, as well as across space. The map exemplifi es how infrastructure, gender, and income are important factors to explain this pattern (Church et al, 2000). Looking at spatial commuting patterns, the gendered labour-market structure provides an important component of analysis. The geography of workplaces is often spatially uneven, with central areas of the city dominated by women’s places of work and industrial and peripheral areas of the region dominated by male workplaces (Gil Solá, 2009). Mapping and analysis use register data from Statistics Sweden with a 100 meter geographical resolution, in this case aggregated to 500 meter cells. Accessibility calculations are based on the Swedish National Road Database and public transportation travel time data. For further description of the methodology see Elldér and Larsson (2011). The case was selected to represent a typically female-dominated workplace. One further limitation is made through the selection of a low-income group containing women with a yearly income below the national average for women (203 900 SEK /year). On the basis of these criteria we consider the selected group to be less likely to afford a car and hence more dependent on public transport or walking/bicycling for their daily trip to work.