Grid-based assessment of road network accessibility and connectivity in Kolhapur District, India

Accessibility to road infrastructure is a fundamental prerequisite for regional development, social inclusion and transport safety, yet secondary cities in India are rarely analysed at a fine spatial resolution. This paper develops a grid-based framework to evaluate road network accessibility and connectivity in Kolhapur District, Maharashtra, using a 5 × 5 km lattice of 85 cells covering 14 municipal councils overlaid on an OpenStreetMap-derived network comprising 17,087 arcs and 10,548 nodes. Accessibility is operationalised as arc density per grid, connectivity as the β index, and spatial inequality in the distribution of road infrastructure as the Gini coefficient and Theil T index. Results reveal a highly polarised pattern: only 3 grids (3.5%) lack mapped roads, but 25 grids (29.4%) fall in the very high accessibility class while 30 grids (35.3%) fall in the combined low and very low classes, yielding a Gini coefficient of 0.622 and Theil index of 0.642. The global mean β index is 1.63, with high β values clustering in the urban cores of Kolhapur and Ichalkaranji and low β values in peripheral councils such as Panhala and Malkapur, indicating potential single-link failure locations. These findings demonstrate a pronounced core–periphery structure with significant implications for transport equity, safety and regional planning, and support targeted last-mile connectivity investments in low-access grids and safety-focused interventions in dense urban cores.