Transport accessibility is a prerequisite for a well-functioning cultural ecosystem in the city, especially that spatial exclusion is often associated with other factors, such as poorer access to education. If residents are unable to quickly and safely access the city centre, where most services are located, they will rarely go to the cinema, dance workshops or English classes, even if they are free of charge.

This is why we decided to review the transport accessibility of selected cultural institutions in Katowice. The full results of our experiment will be discussed at the exhibition summing our project, while here we present a prototype analysis for the Silesian Innovation Centre, Katowice’s new investment project to be built in the former Park Hall in Kosciuszko Street (formerly occupied by Alma delicatessens).

The Centre’s educational programme will be designed for children and young people, who will usually visit the facility in organised groups, so we have checked travel times to the Centre from all schools and educational facilities in the city by car and public transport. We used the Google Maps navigation tool to check the actual transit time between these locations.

• Location: 19.011335370960,50.246267806709, Tadeusza Kościuszki 90
• Arrival time: Tuesday 11.00
• Transportation mode: transit and driving

We sourced a list of 656 facilities including profiles and addresses from the Educational Information System (data prior to the education system reform), then, using the Google Distance Matrix API, we automatically measured the arrival times from these locations. The results were visualised on maps and subjected to statistical analysis.

When looking at the maps showing travel times using public transportation and driving times, one needs to remember that the values corresponding to the colours are not proportionally scaled and therefore not easily comparable in both maps. This means that though the travel time to the centre from the point marked red in the public transport map may be an hour, the driving map may use the same colour for a journey that is even twice shorter.

Even though we might know the specific travel times from schools and educational facilities to the Park Hall in Kosciuszko Street, we cannot be sure what this means to the potential event participant. For a New Yorker, a half-hour subway ride from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan may seem nothing out of the ordinary, but for a small town dweller accustomed to small distances, it may well be a major cross-city expedition.

Our studies show that the average travel time to reach a specific location is approximately 28 minutes by public transport and 12 minutes driving (we assumed that the driver would use another 3 minutes to find a parking space). Interestingly, we found out the exactly the same times were normally needed to reach the cultural event venues we examined and decided that 30 and 15 minutes, respectively, were convenient journey times.

Our attention was drawn to those institutions from which the travel times to the surveyed location would be as long as 45 to 55 minutes (over 1.5 hours both ways), as this could be a real disincentive to travel to the centre.

Interestingly, these facilities are not necessarily the farthest from the city centre, as shown in the following table, which shows the institutions with the greatest disparities in travel times by various means of transport.

Seeking to attract people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods, many institutions run special educational programmes to offer them not only free admission, but also free public transportation to the event venues. With the above data, it is easy to point out the locations with difficult access to the event venue and, consequently, offer some beneficial solutions, such as field activities or, if driving times are acceptable, hire a coach that will transfer people to the venue.

A popular proposition in the discussion on Katowice’s culture has been the imperative to decentralise the cultural institutions and events, which, in practice, means their transfer to the outer districts and making them more easily accessible to the residents. While contemplating such decisions, however, it should be ensured that such actions are not, in fact, counterproductive in hindering access to selected events to residents from other districts, who find it easier to get to the city centre. Alternatively, some critical districts that are really cut off from the centre should be identified and addressed first. We will prepare a study report containing a summary of the transport accessibility of the cultural institutions located in different parts of the city centre.