Telephone traffic dispersion and nodal regionalisation in the Australian states

Abstract

Telephone traffic is shown to be a reliable indicator of functional ties, with morning peak calls concentratedalong hierarchical pathways andevening peak calls more sensitive to population and distance. Traffic dispersion incident to each centre is systematically related to the size of the centre and to the size and spacing of interacting centres. Metropolitan orientation has a powerful effect on traffic dispersion in all situations and, in the more centralised states, negates the relationship between centre size and dispersion and converts the customary distance‐decay cones into an elevated surface of strong metropolitan orientation, broken by inverted cones around a few regional centres. Middle‐order nodal regions are delineated and intra‐regional flows analysed using primary linkage and standardised scores. Three distinctive systems of regional‐ordering are described, namely metropolitan‐dominated, provincial‐city dominated and multi‐ordered.

Urban Geography

“…Striking increases in unemployment rates in Australian cities produced patterns of variation that were eagerly analysed by geographers (Forster, 1983;Burnley, 1980) and others (Vipond, 1980;. Papers even appeared on aspects of urban hierarchies (Holmes, 1983;Forster and Brummeu, 1984), a topic which seemed rather strangely to have disappeared from the geographical agenda in the 1970s. At the same time a number of books were published which attempted for the first time to draw together some of the empirical work of the past decade.…”

Regionalization of Pre-Soviet Siberia by Postal Network

“…районов Австралии использовалась интенсивность междугородней телефонной связи [21], а во втором -рассматривались почтово-коммуникационные районы мира [20]. Анализ иных линейно-узловых структур, не связанных с информационно-коммуникационными сетями, позволил выявить еще два сетевых примера -библиотечное [17] и энергетическое [11] районирование.…”