The improvement in a regions’ accessibility that accounts for various means of inter-regional transport and inter-regional communication is one of the main determinants of sustainable regional development. This study focuses on road accessibility in rural areas where an insufficient number and scope of international and domestic investments can lead to an imbalance in the transport infrastructure. Therefore, the aim of this study was to evaluate road accessibility at the level of the NUTS4 units in view of their sustainable development and their divergence from rural units that are less distant from the main transport routes. The studied area—a province—is situated in the northeast of Poland. Data concerning the travel time, condition, and density of the road network were analysed to develop and compare the measures of road accessibility in individual units and to perform an overall assessment of the NUTS4 units. Partial indices were calculated with the support of the QGIS and ArcGIS software. Peripheral regions in post-socialist countries appear to be particularly underinvested in terms of the transport, including at the local and regional level. The applied methodology supported the presentation of problem peripheral areas that are underinvested and threatened with exclusion.

In central and eastern European countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 and 2007, there are strong connections between transport development and sustainable regional development. The needs for transport development in post-socialist countries are so high that it is difficult to finance them, and most governments have to choose between immediate and less urgent needs. The aim of this study was to determine the role played by sustainable transport growth in the improvement of regional cohesion and sustainable regional development with a use of geographical information systems’ capabilities. The specific goals of the study were to: (i) determine the impact of EU subsidies on the regional transport development; (ii) identify threats to regional cohesion resulting from under-capitalised regions, (iii) examine geographical information systems’ capabilities in periodical regional transport development monitoring. The analyses include evaluation of the regions’ involvement in sustainable transport development as well as the presentation of direct and indirect results, such as road system improvement, with the use of GIS capabilities. It is particularly important to develop a system for monitoring the level of EU fund allocation with the use of GIS tools and the capabilities of geographic information systems. Such in-depth analysis would be useful for regional governments and decision-makers in creating and updating long term transport policies as well as monitoring long term regional development strategies. Both sustainable transport development and EU fund allocation can be monitored within the use of GIS tools, and such analyses should supplement the INSPIRE Geoportal scope.

The process of identifying urban areas in OECD countries uses population density to identify urban cores, and travel-to-work flows to identify the hinterlands as the “worker catchment area” of the urban labour market, outside the densely inhabited core. As the travel-to-work analysis seems to be an important issue for creating coherent functional urban areas, the main determinants of daily commuting in a subregional scale should be investigated. There is a common opinion, that residents of the suburbs are bound to use individual forms of transportation, and public transport does not meet their needs. That is why the aim of this research is to identify the main challenges, opportunities and barriers to sustainable transport development in functional urban areas, in order to avoid the adverse effects of urbanisation. For the purpose of the article, a comparative analysis for selected Polish functional urban areas was conducted, and both short term and long-term prospects of transport development are depicted. The article includes statistical, spatial and descriptive analyses based on Central Statistical Office data, Regional Operational Programmes for 2014–2020, made for the Polish provinces, as well as selected development strategies, due to intermunicipal cooperation within delimited functional urban areas. As a result, on the basis of the compared and transformed information, the sustainable development scenarios for a selected functional urban area are built.

Urbanization is one of the processes that determine the development of a country or a region, but it has both advantages and side effects. Some of its aspects may lead to unsustainable growth and dispersion of built–up area. The main causes of this process are increases in costs of transportation, infrastructure and nature conservation. There is a threat of uncontrolled spread of development as a result of urbanization processes, particularly in suburban municipalities. It has been requested by many researches that authorities put more interest in avoiding dispersed suburbanization, but they still are looking for better solutions, tools and procedures to solve this problem. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the important role of spatial information from land information systems in identifying and predicting the causes of the development of dispersed built–up areas. Thanks to GIS instruments local authorities are more likely to preserve spatial order and avoid the side effects of “sprawling”.