What Driving Distance Says About a Small Business's Access to Cash
The Bank of Canada measures small and medium-sized businesses' access to cash not by counting bank branches but by driving distance to the nearest financial-institution branch. The study works in two moves. First it measures the distance between each business and its closest branch. Then it uses a sample of 651 SMBs from the 2023 Merchant Acceptance Survey to examine the banking choices those businesses actually make. Proximity and behaviour are separate questions, and the design keeps them apart: one is a map of where branches are, the other is what firms do on that map.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Driving distance already smuggles in an assumption — that access runs through a car. Measure by transit or by whether a courier will collect, and you'd get a different map of which businesses are served.
Fair, but that's also why the second half matters. Distance tells you about the branch; the survey of 651 businesses tells you whether anyone uses it, and those can point in opposite directions.