Content uploaded by Karel Martens
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Karel Martens on Jul 18, 2016
Content may be subject to copyright.
Transport
Justice
Designing Fair Transportation Systems
Karel Martens
Transport Justice Karel Martens
“In Transport Justice Martens considers many dimensions of fairness in society’s provision of
physical accessibility, demonstrating clearly how concepts of justice developed by renowned
thinkers like Rawls and Dworkin can be extended to, and quantified in, the assessment of urban
transport systems to improve the process or regional transport planning.” – Martin Wachs,
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
“Transport Justice is an exceptionally important and original addition to urban studies
literature. Combining theoretical and practical insights, it shows the way in which transportation
policy, usually a technical domain focused on efficiency, can be a significant contributor to
equity and sets up principles for evaluating transportation systems in terms of the distribution
of benefits.” – Susan S. Fainstein, Author, The Just City
“Karel Martens has written an insightful, thoughtful book that will transform the field of equity
analysis of transportation systems. By focusing on accessibility and establishing new thresholds
for analysis, he presents a new analytical framework that focuses on justice.” – Deb Niemeier,
Ph.D., P.E., Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of
California, Los Angeles, USA
Transport Justice develops a new paradigm for transportation planning based on principles of
justice. Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of
transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and
ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing
to use – that transport system.
There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of
the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial
deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting
disparities in mobility and accessibility, have been paralleled by increasingly vocal calls
for policy changes to address the inequities that have developed over time. Drawing on
philosophies of social justice, Transport Justice argues that governments have the fundamental
duty of providing virtually every person with adequate transportation and thus of mitigating the
social disparities that have been created over the past decades.
Critical reading for transport planners and students of transportation planning, this book
develops a new approach to transportation planning that takes people as its starting point,
and justice as its end.
Karel Martens is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning,
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel) and at the Institute for Management
Research, Radboud University (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). He also holds the Leona Chanin
Career Development Chair at the Technion.
TRANSPORTATION
Cover image: © Shutterstock
www.routledge.com
Routledge titles are available as eBook editions in a range of digital formats
9780415 638326
ISBN 978-0-415-63832-6
