The evolving impact of continental accessibility on local employment growth

The time taken to access the railway, and the time taken at the other end to reach the final destination, is added to the rail time: furthermore, this access time is raised to the power 1.25 in order to take into account the fact that the choice to use a railroad will be more likely the closer one is located to it. [...] On the other hand, the variables already contained in the CPS model are fairly successful in predicting the location of primary employment, with a total r2 of 60.0, of which only 0.3% is due to the four modal mixes. [...] Thus, taking total employment growth for 1991-2001, the full model explains 44.3% of the variance in local employment growth of which 6.5 percentage points are uniquely attributable to the four accessibility variables – four modal mixes – which thus account for 14.7% of the explanatory power of the model. [...] In each of the three cases, the inclusion of the variables contained in the base CPS model significantly alters the relationship between the accessibility variables and local employment growth. [...] The fact that the relative weight of the incremental impact has declined somewhat over the last period (1991-2001), while the total explanatory power of the model has grown, means that other variables – for example the centre-periphery split between places close to and far from big cities – have grown in importance as determinants of local employment growth.