## 3 Analysis and Results  
### Monterery Metropolitan Area  
Figure 5 shows the average distance from every AGEB to the closest public schools using bicycles as the transport mode. It can be observed that most of the AGEBs have a public school in a range of less than 1000 m. This is due to the high density of schools (especially primary and secondary) that most areas of the MMZ have. Building schools has been one of the priorities of the authorities, as there is a high demand for them given that Mexican demographics maintain a pyramid structure. This means that there is a considerable amount of people younger than 30 y, as observed in Figure 3a,b, which shows the age distribution of the population of the MMZ and Monterrey, respectively, according to the INEGI 2020 census. Interestingly, many suburban areas that are not even physically integrated into the city have high accessibility levels (e.g., some northern and southwest regions). This phenomenon reduces the travel dependence from suburban areas to central areas to access education. The south and southeast of the city have the lowest access levels, which relates to the fact that both are high-income areas where residents tend to prefer private schools and that some of these areas were designed and built as gated communities with only residential land use. Figure 4: Marginalisation levels in Distrito Tec. Figure 6 compares the performance of the transport modes (bike and walking) in accessing the closest public school at the metropolitan level. The first important thing to highlight is that despite the transport mode used, 75% of the AGEBs can access a school in less than 10 min. This is related to the high density of schools at the metropolitan level, as observed in Figure 5. By comparing the transport modes, it becomes evident that cycling achieves considerably higher levels of accessibility: while it takes 9.7 min for 75% of the AGEBs to reach the closest school by walking, for the same percentage, it only takes 3.5 min by cycling. It is important to mention that Figure 5 is just a preliminary approach to understand accessibility to schools; this variable will be disaggregated in the following section, to analyse how access varies depending on each school's education level. Figure 7 presents the average travel time by AGEB to the closest public hospital by foot. The map shows a considerable divergence of accessibility between AGEBs, with many going beyond the 30 min travel time, mainly due to the low density or nonexistence of hospitals, predominantly in suburban areas. Central areas show high access to hospitals. This can be attributed to the historical conformation of the city, which started at the centre and gradually sprawled. Therefore, central areas have existed for longer periods, allowing the authorities to implement through time the necessary health infrastructures in these areas. In contrast, many suburban areas are relatively new, and some have lacked formal planning procedures (people built homes without having any official permit from the government or public administration), while others have been designed following urban paradigms that purposely create isolated and monofunctional areas, such as gated communities. The southeast of the map represents an excellent example of how planned urban communities can lack access criteria in their planning procedures and how these problems are not exclusive to lower-income areas or highly marginalised ones that have been built without any formal planning. In this sense, what some people think could be a solution (urban planning) can trigger a problem. Figure 5: Average distance to the closest public school travelling by bicycle. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how important it is to have a robust and accessible healthcare system [22]. Therefore, poor access to health services should be unacceptable, as observed in many AGEBs of the MMZ. The MMZ needs to urgently tackle this problem by developing new public health centres in any area of the city that does not meet the desirable access parameters.