干旱区生态环境知识资源中心

Accessibility to healthy and nutritious foods is a crucial factor for public health outcome. This paper proposed a store square footage-to-population ratio as indicator of spatial accessibility to food stores. An enhanced floating catchment area method is used to compute the store footage-to-population ratio. The method adopts the Huff Model to model the people's selection on food stores and consider the impacts of both travel cost and store capacity for accessibility analysis. Furthermore, the relationships between spatial accessibility to food stores and income are explored by a grouping analysis. A case study of Springfield, MO at the census block group level showed that the method well revealed the spatial variations of spatial food accessibility, and results from grouping analysis uncovered the spatial patterns of spatial accessibility to food stores and income in the case study area.