High/Low Order Table
The High/Low Order table shows the balance, it is favourable to Low Order shops. Usually shopping centres where there are a load of people will show that they have great access and a great mix of High Order Shops. A shopping centre with a lot of people shows that there is going to be a great demand for access – Acocks Green has a lot of people visiting it everyday, there is going to be a need for access, which means that more access sums up to a greater Market Area.
Methodology
I have used a Questionnaire as one of my analysis methods on the Hypothesis: the bigger the shopping centre, the greater the Market Area. The Maps that I have used for Acocks Green, Fox Hollies and School Road have helped me when further going into calculating the Market Areas.
Travel Table 1 Travel Table 2
Travel Table 3
Market Area Table:
The further a person travels indicates that it takes them longer to get to a certain destination. The longer it takes to get to somewhere shows a bigger Market Area. Travel Table 1 shows us that the most people who visit Acocks green travel from the 0.5 – 0.9km range, and the least (none) are in the 4.5 – 4.9km range. Travel Table 2 shows us that the 0 – 1.5km range has the most amounts of people travelling from there to Fox Hollies. Again we see that the 4 – 5km range virtually doesn’t have anyone visiting Fox Hollies (or Acocks Green) from this Distance. School Road is the smallest shopping centre out of the three, so you would think of it as mainly for convenience – considering the number of shops that it has. This is exactly true as nearly all of the people that I found from the questionnaire came from the 0 – 0.4km range
The Market Area for Acocks Green was 23.75km2; most of the visitors came from up to the 3km2 ranges. Around 20km2 would be the area where lesser amounts of visitors would come from.
The Market Area for School Road was 1.75 km2, in total, and 0.4km2 was the range in which most visitors came from, so a little over 1km2 was the range where the smaller figures of visitors came from.
The Market Area for Fox Hollies was 9km2, the median amount for Total Market Area out of the 3 shopping centres; around 2km2 was the range in which most of the customers came from to shop at Fox Hollies.
Graph 1 Graph 2
Graph 3
Graphs 1, 2 and 3 show the Total and Majority Market Areas. Graph 1 shows the Market Area(s) for Fox Hollies, this graph correlates very well with the Fox Hollies MA Map as the map shows the area – in kilometres squared spread out over the region. The same goes for Acocks Green and Fox Hollies, the graphs and maps all show the same thing – the inner region of the map contains the majority MA; the graphs show the Majority MA at similar proportions when compared with the Total MA.
Transport Table
The Transport Table shows how visitors got to their chosen shopping centre, as you can see walking is the main option that people took up here. People who live the nearer distances would be the people on the questionnaire taken, who are part of this majority. The Majority MA has this effect on how people travel, from the maps and graphs there is the similarity of only a small proportion of people in a majority market area compared to the large scale of Total Market Area.
Buses and Cars are the main alternatives here, but are a rarity when it comes to transport to School Road, this is likely because School road doesn’t have as many parking spaces as Acocks Green and Fox Hollies, there isn’t a big supermarket e.g. Sainsbury’s – where people would park their cars if the centre lacks space. Also the School Road shopping centre is small, with a low amount of parking spaces – you wouldn’t expect the space for a bus lane – School Road is for convenience to those who live a short distance from it, and it lacks access.
Acocks Green and Fox Hollies visitors make the utilization of cars and buses, since walking to Acocks Green and Fox Hollies is the main option, use of the Car is at – 44 for Acocks Green, and 35 for Fox Hollies. Use of the bus is at 52 for Acocks Green, and 27 for Fox Hollies. Acocks green and Fox Hollies have greater access this is why so many use these options of travel. From Travel Tables: 1 and 2 you can see that when we get into the ranges of 3.5km+ that the number of visitors who travel from that particular area starts to decline. People who live in these ranges are the ones who are more likely to take the secondary option of using transport instead of walking because they likely have convenience and/or the distance is far for them.
Conclusion
The results of Hypothesis 3: The Bigger the Shopping Centre the Greater the Market Area tell us many intriguing but rather expected things from the hypothesis. The Market Area links to many things across the hypotheses that I have completed, order of shops; Access Levels; Transport etc. Hypothesis 3 uses these factors when testing on how good the Market Area is for a shopping Centre.
The results that I have gained from my main source of information: Questionnaire all correlate very well with my expectations of how Hypothesis 3 would have gone. The use of graphs, travel tables, MA, distances has all helped with the agreement of the hypothesis. The results have definitely told us that Acocks Green has the biggest MA (this was undoubtedly predictable), this was shown by the great levels of access (Hyp.2), mix of High/ Low Order Shops (Hyp.1) and the short – distance range which shows a high majority in MA (but this can be expanded to further ranges).
Fox Hollies and Acocks Green were the shopping centres here that this hypothesis was more targeted at; School Road doesn’t have the attraction of these two shopping centres so there wasn’t a load of information that could have been collected on the distance ranges – most of the information on School Road came from the other hypotheses. School Road is more of a shopping centre where you would shop for convenience goods/ everyday goods – this is why from Travel Table 3 we see that the majority MA came from 0 – 0.4km. Fox Hollies and Acocks Green are shopping centres which are very convenient for those who live nearer to them, but also if we extended the Questionnaire to further distances you would still see a small amount of people visiting Acocks Green (and possibly Fox Hollies). They have attraction; Acocks Green has the best access out of the 3 Shopping Centres: several bus stops, different routes, and a wide range of car parking. Stores such as Sainsbury’s, Argos and Boots give it that extra help to seek visitors from out of a majority Market Range. From Hypothesis 1 I found that there were over 130 shops in Acocks Green, more than half the amount for Fox Hollies – 34 shops, School Road only had 13 shops. A bigger total of shops will indicate that there are more reasons for a person to shop at a certain shopping centre.
Fox Hollies is also doing well – its Market Range has a very good majority. It also has a big supermarket in Lidl (which is beginning to expand) – which gives it attraction and better access through the extra car parking spaces. Fox Hollies has wider roads to help with the traffic, which from the Transport Table would help with the second choice transport of cars/ buses – which helps with bringing new customers into its expanding MA. Travel can affect the Market Area of a Shopping Centre very easily; pedestrian roads are very helpful to access when it comes to travelling from a short distance to a shopping centre, example – Majority of Market Area(s) is incredibly close to Acocks Green, Fox Hollies and School Road. Fox Hollies has faired well with its road crossings, the roads here are wider than on the other shopping centres – this will allow transport to get across more quickly. The downside to Fox Hollies is that there are several different routes leading into the centre – which can sometimes cause traffic congestion.
Acocks Green’s traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are helpful to visitors, but traffic mainly only occurs at the routes where people are exiting Acocks Green – over 700 cars come through Acocks Green on a weekday morning, and throughout the day a lot of them will leave. The cars that are leaving will have to face the traffic problems of cars entering Acocks Green; this shopping centre has narrow roads (unlike Fox Hollies) so more cars will have to wait their turn to exit/ enter Acocks Green because fewer cars will be able to pass through.
School Road has a couple of pedestrian crossings compared to the other shopping centres, but it is smaller.
School Road may have a small MA but a lot of cars pass through it on weekday afternoon (306). And it is noted to have had 75 pedestrians – around 50 more/less would have gone through School Road depending on what time the Questionnaire was taken. The roads here however are pretty narrow – but a lot of traffic may not be incurred because the routes to and from School Road are long – and some are Dual carriageways.
The Hypothesis in my view was very accurate as it didn’t just use elements of Hypothesis 3 which were conducted on a questionnaire but mixed these with elements of the other hypotheses’. Hypothesis 3 only tests for Market Area (but I have also linked it to the other Hypothesises) but if we tested the hypotheses’ together the outcome would give full circle detail on shopping centres. The accuracy would likely be very high and would show many results on how shopping centres differ.
Another way to test for accuracy would have been to have used another shopping centre, Touchwood in Solihull comes to mind as a bigger shopping centre with a large MA (but not as big as somewhere like the bullring). Touchwood has attraction and would bring in a better MA with people possibly visiting from 24km plus – Touchwood has attraction, great access and a wide variety of shops, this is why people visit it. Its Access levels, total number of shops all link to how big the MA is and would give us further evidence on it and what the positives and negatives of it are and some possible solutions to them.
Something that greatly affects this Hypothesis is the time of when the Questionnaire was taken, this is vital as the Questionnaire is the source of all data on Hypothesis 3. Accuracy can be defined on Hypothesis 3 as: at a different time the data is taken we will have a certain chance of seeing different results. The results that were gathered were found on a weekday, what if they were found on the weekend?
During the weekend shopping centres will see a lot of different people travelling from a lot of different places. Employment affects a big part of this – usually when people are working they don’t have the chance to travel 10 miles away to go to a shopping centre – at that point in time they will look forward to convenience.
Acocks Green is the most likely to have people from a 10km+ range travel to it on the weekend – why? There are more shops in Acocks Green than in the other two shopping centres, would it be very convenient for someone to travel 10km to find 3 shops, no. People will want to travel a certain amount to find a shopping centre which has a large amount of shops, has a mix of high and low order shops – and has big name stores e.g. Argos and Sainsbury’s. Acocks Green has all of these attributes, Fox Hollies and School Road would also be expected to have near as many as double the amount of customers that they have on a weekday.
The Market Area of any Shopping Centre will always have an adverse effect on a weekend – the usual outcome is more customers, more traffic. If this questionnaire had been taken on the weekend (and the distances had been extended) we would have seen the number of customers rising, and in the further ranges visitors still would have been coming in. The accuracy can be shown varying depending on what time information is taken, but a further range and a bigger majority Market Area could certainly be anticipated from weekend results.