Regional Accessibility in Europe: changes in road infrastructure 1955-2012

This paper discusses the road accessibility for European cities and regions over the period 1955-2012. For this period a historical database of European roads networks has been constructed covering all EU27 countries. This database enables to evaluate to what extent EU infrastructure policy has led to an improvement of the accessibility of peripheral regions relative to the core regions. The results show that peripheral regions have lost accessibility relative to the centre during the first periods but have been catching up after 1990