Accessibility is as important for location decision-making and regional development as it is for the individual life situation of the population. Accessibility determines the regional quality and provision of infrastructure. Against the background of the normative political goal of providing comparable living conditions in all regions of Germany, current empirically sound information about the accessibility of SGI is important to form an objective and realistic impression of the current situation. This information can then function as input for future policy actions and interventions. We analysed the accessibility of street petrol stations as one core service of general interest important for the overall individual mobility of the population, especially in rural areas, based on an exemplary raster-based GIS accessibility analysis building upon an open source approach using PostgreSQL/PostGIS as well as the Perl-module „Graph-0.94“. Besides acquiring objective data on street petrol station accessibility for policy advice we were also interested in reviewing the usability of OpenStreetMap data compared to commercial routing networks, as well as the usability of open source GIS solutions within rural studies in departmental research. The article summarizes the findings.