A Reappraisal of Rural Public Service Location: the Case of Postal Facilities

農村地域의 郵政施設 立地問題

This study examines the spatial characteristics of postal office patronage in rural areas. in the light of future possible relocation and closures of the postal facilities. Most of private services have flown out small rural central places due to the decrease of supporting population, and there consequently remain only a few public services including government-run post offices at the Myon seats, the lowest level among rural central places in Korea. The small local population and its further decline undermine the rationale for maintaining such public services in depleted rural areas. For the worse of it, the government recently plans to transform the postal system to a quasi-private, corporational structure. One can fear that the profit-seeking nature of the new postal corporation will inevitably force to close many of such small rural facilities. The study first analysed nation-wide censuses of postal offices for the years of 1986 and 1992. The postal services examined are per capita number of postal stamps and revenue stamps sold, and letters, parcels, telegrams and monetary transactions handled at the post offices. It is found that, while the usage of postal services has increased substantially throughout the nation during the period of 1986-1992, the increment has largely been occurred by urban post offices rather than by those in Gun seats (i.e., rural counties); and that the gap of the service levels between urban and rural post offices is ever widening. The study further examined the service differentials among the post offices within rural counties to find that those post offices adjacent to the county (Gun) seats and larger urban centers rendered less amount of services than remote rural post offices, indicating that rural residents tend to partonize larger centers more and more than local Myon seats. At the second stage of the study, questionnaire surveys were conducted in Muju, Kimpo, and Hongsung-Gun's. These three counties are meant to represent respectively the remote, suburban, and intermediary counties in Korea. The analyses of survey data reveal that the postal hinterlands of the county seats extend to much of nearby Myons, the subdivisions of a Gun. It is also found that the extent of postal hinterlands of the three counties and the magnitude of patronage and quite different from each other depending upon the topography, population density, and the propinquity of the counties to metropolitan centers. The findings suggest to reappraise the current flat allocation scheme of public facilites to each of rural subdivisions throughout the nation. A detailed analysis on the travel behavior of the survey respondents yields that age is the most salient variable to distinguish activity spaces of rural residents. The activity spaces of older respondents tend to be more limited within their Myon, whereas those of younger respondents extend across the Myon boundary, toward the central towns and even distant larger cities. The very existence of several activity spaces in rural areas calls for an attention in the future locational decisions of public facilities. The locational criteria, employed by the Ministry of Communication of Korean government to establish a post office, are the size of hinterland population and the distance from adjacent postal facilities. The present study findings suggest two additional criteria: the order in rural central place hierarchy and the propinquity to the upper-level centers of the central hierarchy. These old and new criteria are complementary each other in that the former criteria are employed to determine new office locations, whereas the latter are appropriate to determine facility relocation and closures.

본 연구는 농촌 지역의 공공 서비스 입지에 관한 시사를 얻으려는 취지에서, 局勢錄을 활용하여 전국 군 우체국의 이용 수준(1986-1992년)을 살피고, 경기도 김포군, 충청남도 홍성군, 전라북도 무주군의 사례 연구를 통하여 주민들의 우체국 이용 행동의 특성을 밝히려 시도하였다. 그 결과 읍과 시에 가까운 면에서 상위 중심지로의 지향성이 강하여 공공 서비스의 면단위 관할구역이 큰 의미를 지니지 못하며, 젊은 연령층에서도 이러한 경향이 뚜렷하여 주민들의 활동공간에 世代差가 나는 것으로 밝혀졌다. 연구 결과는 중심지 체계로 본 위계와 상위 중심지 인접 여부를 현행 농촌지역의 우체국 설치 기준에 덧붙여 쓸수 있음을 시사하였다.