A GIS Analysis on Service Oriented Accessibility and Road Development Potentials of Northern Sri Lanka

Since the urban-rural linkages mainly depend on the availability of the transportation facilities, any project on infrastructure development should concern the level of accessibility through the existing roads which should be developed. Most of the regional development programmes in post conflict Sri Lanka, particularly in the Northern Province have not reached the expected deliverables due to several reasons. No any particular system has been used yet to prioritize the regions with less access to the services because of insufficient road networks. Even after a decade of war ended, most of the roads in rural areas in the Jaffna District are still in sad condition. Therefore, this paper has aimed to formulae a systematic approach based on the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to identify the level of development of sub regions and to classify the regions based on level of accessibility and finally to prioritize the road networks which should be developed by any road development project. In order to achieve these aims, the present research selected the Jaffna District using the judgment sampling method for data collection. Most of the data were from secondary sources such as government bodies and open sources and four methods of spatial analysis; distance, density, reclass and weighted overlay were used in data analysis. One of the findings of this paper is the possibility of divide the region into five key development clusters based on the accessibility to 15 services. It was revealed that, the development level of each divisional secretariat division (DSD) of Jaffna District totally depends on the quality of road network and the accessibility to the services. Out of five development based regions in Jaffna District, there are two marginal divisions; Delft and Vadamarchi East which consist less than 30% of accessibility and no any A or B class roads connected to the urban centres. Furthermore, lack of connectivity to the main roads and poor condition of rural roads have adversely affected to the regional development of Jaffna District. It is recommended that the method introduced by this paper can be applied to the regional physical planning