Using structural equation modeling for secondary medical areas throughout Japan in 2015Takuya KUSUNOKI, Tohru YOSHIKAWA, and Ryo SANUKI This research aims to clarify the related structure of the distribution of general, chronic phase, and psychiatric sickbeds and capacity of long-term care insurance facilities in secondary medical areas, The results are as follows:1. urbanity and depopulation, which are latent factors of regional characteristics, influence the latent factors of sickbed distribution, such as acute care abundance, chronic care abundance, clinic care abundance, and observed variable of long-term care insurance facilities and home care support facilities, through the concentration of elderly.2. the number of universities with medical schools is positively affected by urbanity and positively affects acute care abundance.

No abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the effect of units for population aggregation on calculation precision of the road distances from the residents to the nearest regional facilities. To this end, the distances from the central point of municipality subdivision areas were compared with the average distances from the central points of basic unit blocks in Japanese Census weighted by population in Kanagawa Prefecture. The results show that the error increases in the western part where the road network is sparse and that the relative error is high if the distance is less than one kilometer.

This article aims to study the reorganization of transportation network systems responding to the expansion of small cities by analyzing the change in accessibility caused by the change in shape and the system of the transportation means. This study assumes the following three cases: 1) to introduce key route buses; 2) to introduce LRTs or railways; 3) to introduce LRTs or railways and to reorganize the bus systems. The accessibility is measured by the minimum total expected value of required time from the residence to the downtown. The results show that the service frequency is a more important factor of the accessibility rather than the service speed, and that the case-3 is more effective for improving the accessibility.

No abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyze the effect of establishing places of refuge in commercial facilities in addition to public facilities. To this end, the differences in accessibility of the places of refuge were analyzed across the Kii Peninsula and Matsuzaka City among various cases of facilities providing food. The analysis of the Kii Peninsula shows that supermarkets would be most useful. The analysis in Matsuzaka City shows that the facilities providing food would be useful to increase robustness and decrease the distance to refuges but less effective than refuge buildings on the coast in case of tsunami.

This paper aims to formulate a quantitative method of evaluating accessibility to the various food facilities, which share the same purpose as meal suppliers but different characteristics, by a common index, for analysis of population distribution. In this study, food facilities are classified into Facility Group I where food facilities cook meals and provide customers with a space to eat meals and Facility Group II where food facilities cook meals but provide no space for eating.By comparing the transportation and initial loads, this approach models the zone where residents find that one facility is more advantageous to the others. This article also compares the loads of facilities between the case where a user makes a round trip to a facility and the case where the user stops by a facility on the way from/to his/her home. The proposed model theoretically explains the zones obtained in the preceding empirical analysis. Analysis on the locations of facilities and the population distribution around a station shows that the facilities of low initial load were located near the station to promote users to stop by, and that areas with small loads tend to have a large share of single-person households.

No abstract