The accessibility of European regions and airport network

The objective of this work is to evaluate the accessibility of European municipalities by ground and air transportation. We compute the quickest paths between any origin municipality and any destination municipality separated by more than 500 km. The total travel time includes three components: i) travel by car to reach the origin airport; ii) travel by air from the origin airport to the destination airport, including waiting times when no direct flight is available; and iii) travel by car from the destination airport to the municipality of destination. For each city, we calculate the average travel time to reach any other city in Europe, weighted by the populations of the destination cities. This statistic identifies which European regions are “remote” due to difficulties accessing the nearest airport and/or a limited offer of flights. Finally, based on the proportion of travel time spent reaching the origin airport and the extra ground travel time in routes that do not leave from the closest airport, we propose a general framework to evaluate policy options for improving the accessibility of remote regions.