What is it and why are we doing it?
The Canadian Accessibility and Remoteness Index (CARI+) is used to describe how easy or difficult it is for people to reach services and population centres across Canada. In research and policy, communities are often broadly classified as urban or rural; in contrast, CARI+ treats accessibility as a range. CARI+ scores range from 0 to 18, with lower scores indicating easier access to services and higher scores indicating more remote areas. These scores are often scaled from 0 to 1 for mapping and comparison, where 0 represents the most accessible areas and 1 represents the most remote.
CARI+ is calculated using real road travel time and distance at a very local scale called the dissemination area. This allows the index to show differences within regions, not only broad differences between cities and rural areas. This is important because communities that are often grouped together as rural can experience very different levels of access, with some being considerably more isolated than others.
The general CARI is used to help us better understand how location affects access to services across Canada. CARI+ helps show how access changes across space, especially in small towns, northern regions, and areas at the edges of cities.
What can we use this for?
- Mapping where access to services is more or less available
- Identifying communities that may not be well served
- Planning and funding policy/decisions
- Applying the same approach to specific services like health care, schools, or pharmacies
- Combine services to create a combined measure of accessibility
For more information on this, please visit:
- Insert link to CARI+ publication.