School location planning in Trinidad, West Indies
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Date
1987
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Abstract
This study evaluates the spatial efficiency of secondary schools in Trinidad, and makes recommendations for the location and order in which eight proposed schools might be built. Spatial efficiency is construed in terms of minimizing distance travelled by students to get to school, and is evaluated against an ideal system of school locations. Road distance between primary and secondary school is used to measure distance travelled to get to school. The main instrument used is a location-allocation algorithm, which minimizes distance between primary school (origin) and secondary school (destination). The local road network is abstracted as a system of shortest path "links;" the school locations are abstracted as origin and destination "nodes" respectively. The findings revealed that, in the existing system of secondary schools, the maximum distance travelled by students was 19.364 miles, compared with a distance of 17.387 miles, if the schools were ideally located. In the existing system, the total distance travelled was 476,817.6 miles, in contrast to a mean mileage of 2.408, and a total mileage of 343, 854.2 miles, given an ideal location for each secondary school. The findings also stipulate the order in which the eight proposed schools, whose locations were already determined, should be built if spatial efficiency in the existing system was to progressively improve, with the incremental addition of each school. Ideal locations for the eight schools, and the priority order in which they should be built to render the system even more efficient, are also stipulated. It is concluded that formal and technical planning procedures would increase the spatial efficiency of the secondary school system in Trinidad, and that future geographic expansion of the system would be more efficiently planned and executed, if policy makers are presented with data derived from techniques like location-allocation modelling