The map shows how long it takes (in minutes) to travel by public transport and walking to the closest healthcare facility across the city of Rio de Janeiro. The analysis is disaggregated for facilities providing low-, medium- and high-complexity services.
The first thing to note here is that physical accessibility to public health is relatively high in Rio. Approximately 94% of Rio`s population could reach at least one facility providing low-complexity services under 30 minutes. Under the same time, medium- and high-complexity services could be reached by 81% and 72% of the population, respectively. This is explained to some extent by the spatial planning of healthcare in the region, which has been relatively successful in spreading low- and medium-complexity facilities across the city. The map also gives a good sense of how the distribution of healthcare facilities vis-à-vis the public transport network varies across space, and how access to public health tend to be much lower in the west and particularly in the urban fringes of the city.
ps. This is a map I created for my PhD research but I didn't include it in the thesis in the end . To create this map I used a 2015 dataset of healthcare facilities and the GTFS of Rio's public transport network from March 2017. The dataviz and data wrangling were done in R. In case you're interested in doing similar analyses, I've created a simple tutorial with reproducible example on how to use OpenTripPlanner (OTP) to estimate travel times.
[click on the image to enlarge it]
