PERMEABILITY OF CZECH-POLISH BORDER USING BY SELECTED CRITERIA

Czech-Polish border, 800 km long, includes the longest-lasting international borders in Europe in its western half. In the period of real socialism it represented a genuine development barriers and obstacles of cross-border cooperation. After both countries joined the EU (2004) and the Schengen area (2007), the importance of boundaries as barriers significantly weakened. The joint research team of Czech and Polish geographers evaluated the permeability of 100 km long sections of the border according to the criteria for which are publicly available data and GIS processing technology. Following criteria were used for the border permeability evaluation: the presence of orographic or hydrologic barriers in two levels of intensity, the number of road crossings, the number of other crossings, the availability of the inland roads, contrast of population density in the border micro-regions, the number of entrepreneurs from the neighboring country in the villages on the other side of the border, the number of solved micro-projects and the number of solved large projects. Numerical characteristics of criteria were transferred to score and the resulting values are divided into three levels of permeability, while using 1) the same weights of criteria and 2) the doubled weights of the key criteria. Cartographic presentation of the results then showed persistent difficulties with permeability especially in the central section of the Czech-Polish border.