ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an ex post evaluation of changes in the road potential accessibility of Polish municipalities as a method for evaluating Cohesion Policy. It provides an overview of the potential accessibility indicator methodology, with particular emphasis on two dimensions of accessibility: the spatial scale and the variation of the distance decay function. The impact of EU investment on territorial cohesion is measured using the Potential Accessibility Dispersion (PAD) index, which takes into account the standard deviation of the potential accessibility values across municipalities, using the population as the weighting variable. This chapter shows how Cohesion Policy resources spent on road development can be used most effectively and efficiently in Poland in the next programming period, 2014-2020. Road traffic is particularly concentrated in areas of high population density: the Upper Silesia region, and the Poznan and Warsaw conurbations.
