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The evaluation of the effectiveness of emergency shelters is a key task to improve disaster response capacity and reduce loss of life and property. Most previous studies, however, neglect the heterogeneity of evacuation capacity across age groups. The objective of this study is to develop an age-integrated method for evaluating the effectiveness of emergency shelters. The age-integrated method considers travel time decay effects, competition effects among emergency shelters, and heterogeneity in evacuation capacity of different age groups. Based on the real road network, we apply the proposed method to evaluate the effectiveness of emergency shelters from the perspective of accessibility and potential crowdedness under 20, 40, and 60-min scenarios in the main urban area of Lanzhou, which has a high proportion of vulnerable populations. The results indicate that (1) accessibility is poor in densely populated areas, whereas sparsely populated suburbs have relatively high accessibility, where large shelters are more easily found; (2) accessibility from the central regions to the suburbs gradually increases, with this difference becoming significant in the 60-min scenario; (3) the Gini coefficient of accessibility for the three scenarios is above 0.6; (4) differences in accessibility and potential crowdedness (a strong negative correlation between them) should be considered to achieve an effective layout of emergency shelters. The findings of this study provide new insights into studying the effectiveness of emergency shelters considering different groups in the context of the severe aging phenomenon, as well as a scientific basis a scientific basis for future shelter development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a public service facility that provides relief, resettlement, and evacuation services to disaster-affected people, emergency shelters play a vital role in helping people cope with disaster events. The measurement of spatial accessibility of existing emergency shelters is a key task in improving emergency shelter services and minimizing property losses and deaths. In this study, considering the differences in emergency shelters' service capacities and population distribution, we developed a two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method with a variable service radius and evacuation radius to describe emergency shelter accessibility in Lanzhou's core area and compared with the traditional 2SFCA method. Furthermore, we used bivariate local Moran's I to identify the spatial relationships between emergency shelter accessibility and population density. The results show that the traditional 2SFCA method underestimates accessibility in densely populated areas with dispersed emergency shelters. Shelter accessibility in Lanzhou's core area is unevenly distributed, with the lowest levels of accessibility in densely populated areas. There is an obvious spatial mismatch between the accessibility of emergency shelters and the population density, and the central and western part of Chengguan has a serious shortage of emergency shelters. This study provides important information for the planning and construction of emergency shelters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]