Location Evaluation of Childcare Facilities Focusing on Transportation in Japanese Urban Areas

In recent Japan, as there has been an increase of dual-income households and the demand for childcare facilities has especially increased especially in urban areas, childcare facilities and workers are lacking and it leads to the serious issue of children on waiting lists. Though subsidy is granted for the construction of childcare facilities, childcare facilities cannot be greatly increased as there is a limit to the amount of subsidy. Therefore, when constructing new childcare facilities, it is essential to place priority on districts lacking such facilities. In order to do so, it is necessary to evaluate current locations to extract districts lacking facilities. And for childcare facilities, the distribution of facilities should not be concentrated in specific districts but rather arranged in locations where all who need to use them can fairly do so.

Based on the background mentioned above, using statistical method, geographical information system (GIS) and public open data, scenario analysis to select transportation, the present study aimed to propose a method to quantitatively evaluate the current location of childcare facilities in Japanese urban areas. And the model of the p-median problem used to obtain the optimal location of facilities was modified, and a method to evaluate the current situation concerning the shortage or overage of childcare facilities by district was proposed.

As evaluations were conducted using quantitative data such as the specialization coefficient of person trip for transportation and the distance between childcare facilities and districts, the evaluation results were also quantitative, making it an effective indicator for evaluating the locations of childcare facilities. Additionally, the specialization coefficient of person trip for transportation and the distance between childcare facilities and districts were calculated based on public open data. Therefore, the evaluation method in the present study has a high temporal reproducibility as well as spatial reproducibility.

For future research subjects, the improvement of the evaluation method for cases where there are multiple facilities within a certain range as well as the application of the evaluation method of the present study in the evaluation of other facility locations and other areas can be considered.

Article by Keisho Satoh, et al, from University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan.

Full access: http://mrw.so/529Aqc