MA Qiang, WANG Liangxu, GONG Xin, LI Ke
As the most typical public facility, public toilets reflect the civilized level and management service level of the city and are an important window for building a civilized image of the city. Current research focuses on the accessibility and coverage of public toilets, treats public toilets as spatial points without discrimination, and ignores the heterogeneity of public toilets in different urban functional areas. How to establish a comprehensive and accurate public toilet space evaluation system and analyze the comprehensive service capabilities of public toilets in different regions is obviously insufficient in the current research, which is not conducive to the deployment of public toilets and the advancement of the equalization of basic public services. The emergence of multi-source data provides a new perspective for the research of urban public facilities. Therefore, this paper proposes a rationality evaluation method of public toilet spatial layout based on POI big data from the perspective of urban functional area. We use Term Frequency-inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) information weighting technology combined with Point of Interest (POI) frequency density to identify urban functional areas, and integrate OpenStreetMap (OSM) road network density and WorldPop population data to construct a population travel vitality index and evaluate public toilet services in urban functional areas. Finally, the population and spatial coverage rate and the spatial imbalance index are calculated to determine the difference between streets and towns and the rationality of the layout of public toilets in streets and towns. Based on multi-source data, this method quantitatively analyzes the rationality of the allocation of public toilets in different functional areas and explores the differentiating factors of the space allocation of public toilets. This article takes Shanghai, one of the most urbanized cities in China, as an example for calculation. The study finds that: ① The number of toilets in different urban functional areas is different. The number of planned commercial service functional areas is the largest, but the public toilets in the commercial service functional area have the highest qualifications. "Industry-Commercial service" and "Green Space-Commercial service" and other commercial service-related joint functional areas are also at a high level of qualification. This is because a lot of commercial service organizations provide public toilet services to the outside, which has improved the service capacity of public toilets in the area; ② The public functional area has the lowest qualification rate, only 10.27%, which is related to the openness of this type of attached public toilet facilities; ③ The eligibility of public toilets in Shanghai’s streets and towns is generally reasonable, with an average space coverage rate of 67.31% and an average population coverage rate of 70.72%. The imbalance index between public toilet service and travel vitality distribution in streets and towns ranges significantly from 0 to 0.76, of which 147 have an imbalance index less than 0.4, accounting for 69.34%, indicating the comparison of the space allocation of public toilets between these streets and towns is reasonable. The rationality of the allocation of public toilets decreases significantly from the downtown area of Shanghai to the southwest, southeast, and Chongming Island, while there is no obvious attenuation to the northwest, showing a good contiguous service capacity. The results show that this method fully takes into account the issue of the heterogeneity of the functional areas of public toilets and the travel vitality of the population, and the spatial analysis is more accurate and has more practical value.