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A new evolution for transport-related social exclusion research?

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Abstract

This paper provides a brief overview of the transport-related social exclusion (TRSE) literatures and discusses the proliferation of this increasingly active research domain within transport geography over the last twenty years. It then focuses on a rapid evidence review of the implications for TRSE of major future innovations in the transport domain and the new mobility landscapes that will emerge from these technological, behavioural and policy changes. The key findings of the study were that more dedicated research is needed on the differential social and equity impacts of new mobility technologies and future policies to better understand the effects of these changes on already disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Transport geographers and sociologists have a particularly important role to play in the promulgation of these future research enquiries because in-depth socio-spatial research is needed to determine the people and places that will be mobility and accessibility included or excluded by these new innovations, and to help policymakers to determine how best to maximise their benefits and minimise their negative effects on future populations.
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Journal of Transport Geography
journal homepage: www.elsevier. co m/ lo ca te /j tr an ge o
A new evolution for transport-related social exclusion research?
Karen Lucas
Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
ARTICLE INFO
Keywords:
Transport
Social exclusion
Accessibility
Social equity
Future mobility
ABSTRACT
This paper provides a brief overview of the transport-related social exclusion (TRSE) literatures and discusses the
proliferation of this increasingly active research domain within transport geography over the last twenty years. It
then focuses on a rapid evidence review of the implications for TRSE of major future innovations in the transport
domain and the new mobility landscapes that will emerge from these technological, behavioural and policy
changes. The key ndings of the study were that more dedicated research is needed on the dierential social and
equity impacts of new mobility technologies and future policies to better understand the eects of these changes
on already disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Transport geographers and sociologists have a particularly
important role to play in the promulgation of these future research enquiries because in-depth socio-spatial
research is needed to determine the people and places that will be mobility and accessibility included or ex-
cluded by these new innovations, and to help policymakers to determine how best to maximise their benets and
minimise their negative eects on future populations.
1. Introduction
This paper provides a brief overview of the transport-related social
exclusion (TRSE) literatures and discusses the contribution of this
Journal to the proliferation of this increasingly active research domain
within transport geography over the last twenty years. It identies that
the Journal has encouraged new areas of research of TRSE to emerge
and provide a locus for the development of new methodological ap-
proaches to its investigation. The paper then reports on a rapid evi-
dence review of the implications for TRSE of major future innovations
in the transport domain and the new mobility landscapes that will
emerge from these technological, behavioural and policy changes. The
key ndings of the study were that more dedicated research is needed
on the dierential social and equity impacts of new mobility technol-
ogies and future policies to better understand the eects of these
changes on already disadvantaged and marginalised groups. Transport
geographers have a particularly important role to play in the pro-
mulgation of these future research enquiries because in-depth socio-
spatial research is needed to determine the people and places that will
be mobility and accessibility included or excluded by these new in-
novations, and to help policymakers to determine how best to maximise
their benets and minimise their negative eects on future populations.
Transport-related social exclusion (TRSE) has been a research topic
championed within by the Journal of Transport Geography (JTG) over
the fteen or more years, demonstrating growing pace, vigour and
enthusiasm from both its authors and readers over this period. The
origins of the TRSE research agenda can partly be dated back to the, by
now infamous, Making the Connections study (SEU, 2003), although
some academics were already publishing papers on this topic prior to
this (e.g. TRaC, 2000;Church et al., 2000;Kenyon, 2003). The SEU
study rmly established that if people do not have good levels of access
to jobs, goods, services and other essential activities, a lack of adequate
transport resources can contribute signicantly to social exclusion and
feelings of social isolation. The worst eects of road trac can also lead
to reduced quality of life due to high levels of exposure to pedestrian
casualties and fatalities, and trac-related air and noise pollution,
especially in dense urban areas. The study also found that these
transport inequalities are highly correlated with social disadvantage,
which means that some social groups are more at risk from TRSE, than
others, and are also more vulnerable to the health-related externalities
of transport systems.
2. Reviewing the past contributions of JTG to the TRSE research-
base
In a previous review of the TRSE literatures since 2003 Lucas (2012)
concluded that a social exclusion approach to the study of transport
inequality has both opened up new areas of research enquiry and
promoted the development and application of new methodologies. A
brief review of articles in JTG over the last twenty years serves to
identify that the Journal has been a major contributor to this increas-
ingly popular area of transport studies research.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2019.102529
Received 16 May 2019; Accepted 6 September 2019
E-mail address: k.lucas@leeds.ac.uk.
Journal of Transport Geography 81 (2019) 102529
Available online 17 October 2019
0966-6923/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
The earliest signs of TRSE research in JTG can be traced back to a
1997 Special Issue on the topic of an integrated US and European re-
search agenda based around ve core themes for sustainable transport,
one of which is identied as social change (Leinbach and Smith, 1997).
An invited paper by Button and Nijkamp (1997) identies the main
driving forces for societal change, noting the continuing need to pro-
vide for geographical accessibility and social equity, which are the two key
underlying principles of the TRSE policy agenda. In particular, the
authors draw attention to the issue of mobility deprivationand high-
light the diculty of: a) providing public transport services in more
peripheral urban and rural areas, and; b) continued nancial support to
access transport for socially deprived populations within a deregulated
policy context. In a second paper in this same Issue, Giuliano and
Gillespie (1997) identify the common research themes which they re-
commend as relevant to to the topic of societal change and transport.
Amongst those trends that can be loosely associated with TRSE they
identify: i) increasing urbanisation and at the same time decentralisa-
tion of housing and other activities within cities; ii) the changing nature
of the workplace, both in terms of its exibility and skills-base; iii) the
increased prevalence of private car ownership within households; iv)
the growth in elderly populations; and v) the likely continued increase
in foreign migrants, who will be mostly residing within cities. However,
the potential for increased transport inequalities and resulting exclusion
from social participation under these changing conditions is not directly
mentioned by any of the authors at this point in time.
From this earliest identication of transport as a social equity issue,
JTG has progressed to publish a number of Special Issues and Editions
focusing on the travel needs and concerns mobility and accessibility
disadvantaged social groups. In one such edition, Schwanen and Paez
(2010) highlight the travel needs of older people and the implications
of this for the delivery of sustainability mobility in the context of na-
tions with structurally ageing populations. Their introductory article
identies that older people regularly do not leave the house on a given
day, make fewer trips on days when they do go out and travel over
shorter distances and make greater use of non-car transport than do
younger cohorts. This demonstration of immobility can in part be ex-
plained by a reduced need to travel in later life, but has also been
empirically proven to be an externally imposed driver of reduced social
participation, isolation and exclusion, which is often related to a lack of
adequate travel resources (the lack of a car, inaccessible public transit,
insucient paratransit services), and more personal factors within the
local travel environment, such as fear of crime or of falling. These
problems rmly established ageing as an important focus for TRSE re-
search.
From the opposite end of the age spectrum, Ron Buliung et al.
produced a 2012 edition of the Journal on child and youth mobility,
with a specic focus on their lived travel experiences and the produc-
tion of patterns of mobility that can be very dierent from that of adults
(2012). A contribution to the edition by Emond and Handy (2012) also
identies some important gender dierences in the travel of high-
school children in the US, noting that female students were much more
likely to have their travel freedoms curtailed by wary parents than their
male counterparts, with some serious consequences for their partici-
pation in out-of-school activities, and thus their social and skills de-
velopment. Macdonald's paper in the same edition (2012), and also
focusing on the US context, identies that, although boys are more
likely to cycle to school that girls, walking also diers depending on
geographical locations. This is trend is due to a decline in walking
overall, rather than an increase in female students who walk to school.
However, increasing car dependency inevitably means that children
living in households without cars are more likely to suer reduced
travel choices in all but the best served areas of public transit. As such,
children and young people as well as gender dierences also provide a
fruitful line of enquiry for studies relating to TRSE. The edition also
demonstrated an emerging interest in the adoption of more qualitative
methodological approaches to transport geography research that has
emerged more strongly within the literatures, which has certainly
helped in the identication of the process of TRSE over the last ten to
fteen years.
The Special Issue by Lucas and Jones (2012) sought to bring to the
fore ideas and discussions about TRSE from researchers working outside
the mainstream transport domain. A key aim of the issue was to present
their research on the social consequences of TRSE for other important
areas of activity participation, such as employment, education and skills
acquisition, healthcare and housing. In their introductory chapter, the
authors identify accessibility (used in its broadest sense to include af-
fordability, safety, security, etc. to reect people's ability to reach key
life-supporting activities). They identify three geographical scales of
accessibility that are important to consider in terms of the positionality
of TRSE research; micro-level pertaining to personal individual factors,
meso-level concerning factors relating to the neighbourhood or local
area and macro-level related to the strategic level or whole-systems.
They recommend that a disfunction at any one of these three scales can
lead to a complete break in accessibility, which if it persists over the
longer term will lead a process of social exclusion.
This focus on accessibility to activities over mobility of itself is
major dimensions of the Journal's contribution to innovative metho-
dological departures in subsequent years. In fact, from about 2006
onward, it is possible to identify a growing number of nationally-fo-
cussed case studies using accessibility models to identify dierences in
the spatial availability of transport services to identify under-served
places and populations groups. It is not possible to oer a compre-
hensive review of all of these literatures within the connes of this
article, so only a few notable developments are included.
In one early paper building on the notion of accessibility planning
as recommended by the SEU study and later adopted by the UK
Department for Transport (2006),Preston and Rajé (2007), developed a
useful Schema to identify whether mobility or accessibility is the main
problem experienced by socially disadvantaged groups. They identify
that, within the UK context at least, this very much dependent on the
geographical locations in which people live, their socio-economic
characteristics and activity needs. So that, older people living in a small
market town might not experience TRSE, whereas young people living
in the urban periphery might be highly excluded from jobs, training and
social activities if they do not have access to their own private vehicles.
Their identication of this extreme variance within the TRSE phe-
nomenon is an important contribution to the eld, as subsequent re-
search increasingly attempts to add multiple layers of complexities to
its analyses, with mixed results and conclusions.
For example, as part of a major Australian study to look at the re-
lationship between transport disadvantage, social exclusion and well-
being, Delbosc and Currie (2011) found only a small relationship be-
tween transport disadvantage and social exclusion, but that transport
disadvantage had a particularly negative aect on wellbeing in the
regional outskirts of the Metropolitan City Region. This was largely
because most poorer people tended to live in close proximity to both
public transport and their daily activities, whereas their more auent
counterparts had moved to the car-dependent suburbs and needed to
drive long distances at high costs to access employment in the city.
More recently in the Canadian context, Deboosere and El-Geneidy
(2018) developed a ne-grained, GIS-based spatial model of in-
dividuals' accessibility to low-income jobs by public transport, speci-
cally taking account of the realised travel times of low-income in-
dividuals. This study illustrates general trend by academics towards the
development and application of increasingly complex and sophisticated
spatial modelling techniques in light of considerable advances in both
micro-scale datasets and geographical software programmes. These
incremental studies are to be welcomed within the academic space, as
they us to better understand TRSE over time, space and individual life
courses. Unfortunately, such analyses are all still too rarely adopted by
policymakers and integrated into mainstream transport decision-
making.
K. Lucas Journal of Transport Geography 81 (2019) 102529
2
Quantitative models to measure TRSE also need to be com-
plemented with qualitative methodologies to understand how people
experience and overcome it from the grassroots perspectives of those
that are aected, if we are ever to develop more appropriate solutions
to the problem. For example, Oviedo Hernandes and Titheridge (2016)
use qualitative interviews with the residents of informal peripheral
communities on the outskirts of the Colombian capital city of Bogota to
consider the issue of TRSE based on their lived experiences. They
identify how people can generate their own coping strategies and so-
lutions to their overcome the peripherality of their residential location
in order to provide informal paratransit and vehicle sharing options to
access the city, and thus avoids social exclusion. Their study also notes
another important departure in the TRSE literature, which is the in-
creasing contribution of studies from Latin America, Africa and Asia.
These have partly been encapsulated within invited guest editorials for
Special Sections, such as Mobilities and livelihoods in urban development
contexts (Lucas and Porter, 2016) and Contested Mobilities in Latin
American Cities (Blanco et al., 2018), but also increasingly appear in the
mainstream content of the Journal.
3. Updates on TRSE in the present UK context
In the UK at least, many of the issues and concerns regarding the
TRSE of individuals and communities that have been raised in past
studies remain pertinent to the present day. Jobseekers are still ex-
periencing problems with public transport supply, aordability and
reliability. Young people say they often need to use cars to access higher
education opportunities, which are located in less accessible locations
(Kenyon, 2011;Bourn, 2013). Public transport dependence is also
problematic when escorting children to a nursery or to school, and lone
parents can have particular problems in this respect due to their sole
responsibility for these escorting trips (Kenyon, 2011). Our recent re-
search also suggests that in many instances, the problems of TRSE have,
in fact, worsened over time.
For example, our recent analysis of the latest Department for
Transport Accessibility Statistics for the Government Oce for Science
Foresight on Future Mobility project (Lucas et al., 2018) identied that
over half of the current UK working age population (57%) live in areas
with low public transport accessibility to jobs, of which a quarter are
concentrated in areas of high deprivation (compared with 18% living in
areas with high job access and low deprivation). Although most sec-
ondary school children can reach at least one school within a 30-minute
bus ride, 15% are only able to access one school in this time, which
suggests severe constraints on the policy of parental choice. Alarmingly,
our analysis also identied that 66% of people over the age of 65 years
are unable to access a hospital within 30 min by public transport. The
relationship holds for other social groups who are public transport
dependent but is perhaps more of a concern for older people, who de-
spite the increase numbers driving into older age, still rely rather
heavily on public transport for accessing services that are key to their
health and wellbeing. Unsurprisingly, accessibility levels have de-
creased the most where there have been the most signicant cuts in bus
services due to local austerity measures. These have been more pre-
valent in rural areas and small towns, but have also occurred in the
urban periphery, and especially aect o-peak early morning, evening
and weekend services.
Analysis of the UK National Travel Survey for the same study (Lucas
et al., 2018) (and also the research of others, internationally) has de-
monstrated that, persistently over time, car owners and main drivers in
households will be the least mobility constrained across all social
groups and most geographical contexts (except in highly-congested and
car-restricted urban centres). They make more trips over longer dis-
tance for all journey purposes, theoretically giving them higher levels of
access to activity opportunities. However, there are now increasing
concerns about time poverty and reduced social participation amongst
individuals who regularly spend excessive amounts of time travelling to
their everyday activities (Mattioli et al., 2018).
Car access is still relatively low in the lowest income households,
since 40% of households in the lowest income quintile still have no car
access in the UK. Female heads of households, children, young and
older people, black and minority ethnic households and disabled people
are overwhelmingly concentrated in this quintile. Gender dierences in
car use are declining, but women are still less likely to be the main
driver in households, whilst people with mobility diculties remain at
roughly 38% car ownership and travel much less than the average
population.
However, our research has also demonstrated considerable non-af-
fordability and debt issues with car ownership for many lowincome
households. Currently, 9% of all UK households experience car-related
economic stress annually, due to the excessive weekly cost of running a
car, which can aect as many as 67% of car-owning households in the
lowest income quintile (Mattioli et al., 2018). The analysis is based on
an index of household weekly expenditures on motoring relative to
incomes, based on the UK Living Costs and Food Survey, whereby high-
cost is dened as twice the median cost share of running a motor ve-
hicle.
In terms of exposures to transport-related risks, which is also an
important dimension in a holistic approach to the analysis of TRSE,
research has identied that people from deprived neighbourhoods are
more likely to be injured or killed as road users (Ward et al., 2007). This
is highly correlated with the more hazardous and exposed environ-
ments that are associated with deprived neighbourhoods in the UK,
which tend to have greater proximity to busy roads and, thus, high
volumes of fast-moving trac. As such, the residents of these locations
have higher levels of exposure to road trac risk, such as road ca-
sualties and deaths and trac-related pollutants, which is exacerbated
by their over-reliance on walking, and the lack of safe spaces for chil-
dren and young people.
And so, the very people who have the least access to cars and the
greatest reliance on non-motorised modes, are the same ones who are
disproportionally negatively aected by the motorised vehicles to
which, in the main, they are denied access. A new problem that has also
emerged since the SEU report, is the issue of obesogenic lifestyles and
the physical environments and activity trends that contribute to this. In
England gures show an increase in levels of obesity over the period
1993 to 2013 from 13.2% to 26.0% for men and 16.4% to 23.8% for
women. The gures also show a rise in levels of child obesity (HSCIC,
2015).
4. Looking to the future of TRSE research: new directions
One major question that remains largely unaddressed within the
realm of TRSE research, but one which is highly pertinent to this dis-
course, is the question of how transport innovations will aect the fu-
ture equity of mobility and accessibility in the transformed urban
morphologies that will inevitably ensue from their introduction and
uptake. An overview of the sparse literatures on this topic identies
almost equally split opinion camps. On the one side are the optimists,
who believe that the new landscape of autonomous vehicles, robotic
deliveries, shared mobility and mobility as a service (MaaS) will allow
people who are currently not able to own or drive their own vehicles to
have new access to the benets they derive. On the other side are the
pessimists, who predict an increased concentration of transport wealth
amongst the already privileged and partial or a total lock-out of the
people and places who cannot access these services for reasons of their
unaordability or non-operability within certain spatial contexts, e.g.
sparsely populated and remote areas. Whichever scenario will be ma-
terialised, and it usually ends up being a blend of the two sides, it is
clear that transport geography research has a huge role in the analysis
of these issues, and in at least one important aspect, how they will aect
TRSE for future generations. There is also no reason why we should
wait to undertake this mammoth research challenge.
K. Lucas Journal of Transport Geography 81 (2019) 102529
3
For example, in the UK we already have a fairly good understanding
what the future transport system will look like by 2040. It will have a
few more strategic highways, rail lines and slightly expanded airports,
but it will basically link the people with the same places using much the
same modes as at present. However, the UK population is projected to
look quite dierent by 2040: it will be signicantly bigger (rising from
66 million to 73 million by 2041) and most of those people will live in
the major English cities, with more modest growth in the rest of the UK.
International migration will account for 77% of this growth, meaning
that there will be more ethnic diversity in the population, and more
women of childbearing age. Nevertheless, we also know from the bal-
ance of births and deaths, that overall it will be a structurally older
population; the proportion of people over 85 years is projected to
double by 2041 to 3.2 million. Based on current housing development
permissions and land use supply, we can also predict that poverty is
suburbanising, in other words poorer people are moving out of the ci-
ties and into the urban periphery and beyond. Income poverty and
polarity is predicted to increase, so there will be more poor people and
their income disparities will be harder to overcome (Oce for National
Statistics, 2014a,b,2016,2017).
Even based on this cursory overview of the future UK population
prole, it is easy to see that it has signicant implications for future
transport systems as they are currently planned, unless current travel
activity patterns change dramatically. It seems obvious that if there are
more people, then there is likely to be more demand for travel overall,
even if individual demands decrease. Some people will need to travel
more for work, but many more people will economically inactive (ei-
ther for reasons of their age or because of increasing automation and
the changing skills nature of work itself), which places greater emphasis
on non-work and o-peak transport services. If more people are located
in suburban areas, the demand for travel will be more dispersed and
less easy to cater for through mass transit solutions, suggesting that
transport services will be more fragmented/exible. Many households
will still not be able to aord cars and so, automated and electric ve-
hicle options will likely remain outside of their ownership. Shared
mobility might be an option for some but, as is the case already, there
will be greater risks associated with shared ownership in some locations
and for some social groups, for example, many companies will not
currently rent cars to people living in social housing, or to young people
with limited driving experience. Also, some social groups are more
reluctant to share their travel spaces with others, for example older
people and women. Young men are most often seen as the greatest risk,
and so they might also become locked-outof these services.
These inequalities in access to the new transport systems, resources
and accessibility opportunities and benets they can bring are, of
course, not inevitable. It is possible that through careful planning and
policy regulation and intervention national governments and city
planners can intervene to extend their availability to make them as
socially inclusive as possible. But it would be a grave mistake if pol-
icymakers now failed to recognise the potentially severe TRSE issues
that accompany the introduction of these innovations within the future
mobility landscape. Here is where transport geography research can be
of enormous help. Not only can transport geographers help determine
the optimal socio-spatial spaces and conditions in which these new
innovations can operate to allow for maximum inclusivity; they can also
to provide the experiential knowledge required to understand how
dierent populations might interact with those innovations in dierent
social, culture geographical contexts, and to the inclusion or exclusion
of others around them. It is also important that we undertake such
analyses not only in the cities of the Global North, in which they will
operate under already mature legal and operational regulatory frame-
works, but also in the less mature transport systems of Global South
cities where there may be less capacity to halt or slow the speed of their
introduction so as to ensure they best serve economic, social and en-
vironmental goals.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge and thank Jeroen Bastiaanssen, Gordon
Stokes and Giulio Mattioli for their analytical contributions to this ar-
ticle and the Government Oce of Science for funding our recent evi-
dence review of future inequalities in mobility and accessibility in the
UK. I would also like to thank all of my co-authors and many con-
tributors to various publications on the topic of TRSE during my time as
co-editor of JTG and beyond. I am sorry I was unable to cite you all in
this short article, but all of your contributions to the eld are most
appreciated. Keep up the good work, we still have a long way to go.
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... These challenges relate to environmental, social, and economic sustainability (Steg 2003) and all result in distributional impacts (Jones and Lucas 2012). In view of these complex and diverse challenges, the ability of technological innovations alone to achieve environmental and social sustainability is called into question (Ferreira, Bertolini, and Naess 2017;Lucas 2019;Nikolaeva et al. 2019;Ziegler 2017). At the same time, the interest of governments has increasingly been drawn to the potential of SI for sustainable development, with transport being highlighted as a promising area of potential (BEPA 2010;2014;European Commission 2012. ...
... As one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, primarily from road transport and cars, the sector is a major contributor to climate change (EEA 2022a(EEA , 2022b. Additional challenges include noise, air pollution, accidents, and congestion (Lucas 2019;Steg 2003). These impacts can relate to multiple dimensions of sustainability. ...
... Thus, transport equity addresses the distribution of transport's burdens and benefits across society, including disadvantaged groups (Karner et al. 2020;Verlinghieri and Schwanen 2020). For instance, access to transport options like public transport or shared mobility is often limited for lower-income citizens and those outside urban areas (Button and Nijkamp 1997;Lucas 2019). Besides accessibility, equitable transport also requires considering individual capabilities (Martens 2017;Pereira, Schwanen, and Banister 2017;Verlinghieri and Schwanen 2020). ...
... Inequalities derived from uneven distribution of expertise and use of smart-mobility technologies (see Durand et al., 2023) can reinforce pre-existing structural inequalities that, to some extent, are the primary cause of the uneven mobility conditions (Church et al., 2000). Lucas (2019) argues that new mobility technologies will affect transport-related social exclusion for vulnerable populations and calls for more dedicated research in this field to inform future policy-making and urban planning. ...
... Notwithstanding some results counter to expectations due to the use of different dependent variables and even slightly different universes (public transport patrons versus internet users) and time periods, we reach some robust conclusions. One conclusion is consistent with the proposition posed by Lucas (2019) and Groth (2019): smart mobility can constitute a source of inequality and may combine or interact with other urban and transport disparities. The findings are also consistent with more general concepts regarding the organization of cities such as splintering urbanism and platform urbanism (Graham and Marvin, 2001;Graham, 2020;Bauriedl and Strüver, 2020;Stehlin and Payne, 2022;Groth et al., 2023). ...
Article
All over the world, cities are becoming “smarter.” The improved use of data generated by the transport system (e.g. smart cards data), combined with GPS trackers and citizens’ mobile data enabled the development of a new generation of smarter mobile apps (e.g., Waze) and several local real-time public transport services and trip planners. These technologies have the potential to reduce transport inequalities via two mechanisms. First, governments can develop more efficient and evidence-based public transport plans. Second, citizens have access to better, real-time information about public transport for trip planning and, thus, can make better—i.e., more efficient or cheaper—decisions regarding their everyday mobility. To assess whether citizens’ appropriation of smart mobility—as with their appropriation of any other digital service—depends strongly on having a certain set of socioeconomic and digital attributes, we analyzed both a mobility survey and a digital inequalities survey based on representative samples of adult Uruguayans living in the capital Montevideo. We find that while the use of mobility apps increased in the second half of the 2010s, the adoption of these tools was stratified by traditional digital inequalities, such as type of internet access and digital literacy, and by variables that predict inequalities in both digital and transport fields, such as age, gender and education. As a result, mobility continues to be stratified in favor of those who are more knowledgeable (i.e., tech-savvy) and have greater access to digital technology. Thus, “smart mobility” has failed to ameliorate—and may even exacerbate—transport inequality. Policy implications of these findings are discussed.
... The spatial equity of accessibility is the provision of consistent access throughout a geographic space. Since Wachs and Kumagai [6], up to the present day, the equity of accessibility has been a subject of research interest [7][8][9][10] and, more recently, public policies [11]. ...
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The significant climate change the planet has faced in recent decades has prompted global leaders, policymakers, business leaders, environmentalists, academics, and scientists from around the world to unite their efforts since 1987 around sustainable development. This development not only promotes economic sustainability but also environmental, social, and corporate sustainability, where clean production, responsible consumption, and sustainable infrastructures prevail. In this context, the present article aims to propose a development framework for sustainability in food sector SMEs, which includes Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) strategies as key elements to reduce CO2 emissions and improve operational efficiency. The methodology includes a comparative analysis of strategies implemented between 2019 and 2023, supported by quantitative data showing a 20% reduction in operating costs, a 10% increase in market share, and a 25% increase in productivity for companies that adopted clean technologies. This study offers a significant contribution to the field of corporate sustainability, providing a model that is adaptable and applicable across different regions, enhancing innovation and business resilience in a global context that requires collective efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals.
... Moreover, augmented accessibility measures may be a tool shedding light on how individuals interplay digital opportunities with opportunities available in a built environment, modifying the agenda of daily activities to be completed (Lila and Anjaneyulu, 2016). Moreover, using space-time thresholds as part of performance indexes would allow practitioners to identify new dimensions of vulnerability emerging within localities and new population groups potentially vulnerable to experiencing accessibility-related disadvantages (Lucas, 2019;Weiss et al., 2018). ...
... To designate these groups, the term "disadvantaged groups" is used, referring to people who are more likely to encounter difficulties travelling and accessing necessary destinations [6,7]. Such difficulties can increase their vulnerability to some form of exclusion besides the use of the service, such as social exclusion [8]. ...
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Mobility hubs facilitate multimodal transport and have the potential to improve the accessibility and usability of new mobility services. However, in the context of increasing digitalisation, using mobility hubs requires digital literacy or even owning a smartphone. This constraint may result in the exclusion of current and potential users. Digital kiosks might prove to be a solution, as they can facilitate the use of the services found at mobility hubs. Nevertheless, knowledge of how digital kiosks may improve the experience of disadvantaged groups remains limited in the literature. As part of the SmartHubs project, a field test with a digital kiosk was conducted with 105 participants in Brussels (Belgium) and Rotterdam (The Netherlands) to investigate the intention to use it and its usability in the context of mobility hubs. This study adopted a mixed methods approach, combining participant observation and questionnaire surveys. Firstly, participants were asked to accomplish seven tasks with the digital kiosk while being observed by the researchers. Finally, assisted questionnaire surveys were conducted with the same participants, including close-ended, open-ended and socio-demographic questions. The results offer insights into the experience of the users of a digital kiosk in a mobility hub and the differences across specific social groups. These findings may be relevant for decision-makers and practitioners working in urban mobility on subjects such as mobility hubs and shared mobility, and for user interface developers concerned with the inclusivity of digital kiosks.
Article
The link between transport disadvantage and social exclusion is now firmly-established. Smartphones emerge as an integral part of daily life with a strong potential to influence this link by improving people’s capacity to access transport information and availability, and enabling direct connections with others in society. However, the role of smartphone use for transport purposes in influencing people’s daily mobility and quality of life remains under-studied, in part impeding a more concrete discourse on how it can be better evaluated and considered in policymaking. This study seeks to shed light on the above issue through probing into the interrelationships among smartphone use, transport disadvantage and social inclusion, and their relation to subjective wellbeing. Using Beijing as a case study, we tested a series of hypotheses through structural equation models (SEM). Our findings highlighted potentially bidirectional interactions between smartphone use and transport disadvantage. By and large, smartphone use for both normal purposes and new modes can help mitigate transport disadvantage, and this may further stimulate more smartphone use as a proactive solution. Furthermore, the link between smartphone use for new modes and transport cost, and their consequent effect on social inclusion and subjective wellbeing were found to vary between low- and high-income groups. Findings suggest that smartphones and smart apps should be carefully integrated in policymaking to reduce the risk for people of being socially excluded due to a lack of transport options and improve subjective wellbeing.
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Accessibility, or the ease of reaching destinations, is increasingly being used and examined in both literature and practice. The most common accessibility metric, the cumulative opportunity measure, is often computed as the number of jobs that can be reached within a certain time frame. Aggregating all jobs, however, often inflates the opportunities that can be reached by socially vulnerable residents, which could feed into and/or generate inadequate policy decisions. This study therefore develops the measure of accessibility to low-income jobs for vulnerable residents by public transport, specifically taking into account realized travel times by these vulnerable individuals. This fine-grained measure, computed across 11 major Canadian cities, is a modified place-based accessibility metric that incorporates facets of person-based metrics, allowing planners and policy makers to propose more targeted interventions to improve the quality of life of their cities' most vulnerable populations. The study further allows for direct comparisons between the impacts of variation in accessibility levels between different regions to help create best practices in land use and transport planning.
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This special issue brings together contributions from the three diverse perspectives of its co-editors – urban geography, planning and transport studies. Its primary aim is to think through the relevance and utility of contested mobilities as a framing concept, and Latin America as a paradigmatic case. In particular, we ask the question: what can scholars learn from thinking about mobility and contestation together, both theoretically and empirically? And, in particular, we think about this in the context of Latin America, which has been as a focus for numerous mass social protests in the transport arena in recent years.
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The notion of ‘fuel poverty’, referring to affordable warmth, underpins established research and policy agendas in the UK and has been extremely influential worldwide. In this context, British researchers, official policymaking bodies and NGOs have put forward the notion of ‘transport poverty’, building on an implicit analogy between (recognised) fuel poverty and (neglected) transport affordability issues. However, the conceptual similarities and differences between 'fuel' and 'transport' poverty remain largely unaddressed in the UK. This paper systematically compares and contrasts the two concepts, examining critically the assumption of a simple equivalence between them. We illustrate similarities and differences under four headings: (i) negative consequences of lack of warmth and lack of access; (ii) drivers of fuel and transport poverty; (iii) definition and measurement; (iv) policy interventions. Our review suggests that there are important conceptual and practical differences between transport and domestic energy consumption, with crucial consequences for how affordability problems amongst households are to be conceptualised and addressed. In a context where transport and energy exhibit two parallel policy worlds, the analysis in the paper and these conclusions reinforce how and why these differences matter. As we embark on an ever closer union between our domestic energy and transport energy systems the importance of these contradictions will become increasingly evident and problematic. This work contributes to the long-term debate about how best to manage these issues in a radical energy transition that properly pays attention to issues of equity and affordability.
Article
The relationship between transport, poverty and social exclusion has increasingly held an important place in both research and policy agendas, particularly in industrialised countries. While this has helped consolidate an emerging body of theory concerned with the social consequences of mobility, our understanding of these dynamics in the context of high vulnerability and poverty in the Global South is still relatively undeveloped. Through the case of Soacha, a municipality adjacent to Colombia's capital, Bogotá, this paper explores travel strategies in a context of scarce provision of transport which, when combined with acute conditions of low-income and segregation, limit vulnerable populations' access to the city. The travel practices, perceptions and priorities of low-income populations in deprived areas of the Global South are analysed, using a framework of transport-related social exclusion, to critically examine the elements that play a role in gaining access to the city. The emergence of adaptable methods, relations and transactions between demand and supply that allows deprived populations to reduce their risk of becoming socially excluded show potential for conceptual and practical development in addressing and analysing transport-related social exclusion.
Article
There are important social changes that are influencing the way transport is now viewed. In particular, there are concerns that current trends in transport are not sustainable over the long term. This paper describes some of the main forces for social change and the way that they interact with transportation. It highlights a number of key areas were conceptual research work could prove advantageous and considers institutional mechanisms that would foster, in particular, transatlantic initiatives in these fields.
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This paper explores the spatial differences in measures of transport disadvantage, social exclusion and well-being in a survey of inner metropolitan, outer suburban, urban fringe and regional areas of Victoria, Australia. Its aim is to understand how geographic context may influence transport disadvantage which may in turn influence social exclusion and well-being. There were very clear differences in mobility and car reliance between geographic locations. Car reliance peaked in fringe Melbourne with regional areas showing slightly less car reliance. Mobility and kilometres travelled also increased with distance from central Melbourne, which in turn resulted in greater sensitivity to fuel price increases. Again these factors were greatest in fringe Melbourne. Links between transport disadvantage and social exclusion were small and inconsistent in this paper although they have been demonstrated in other research. Links between transport disadvantage and well-being were strongest in the regional sample. The implications of these findings and their connection to the transport literature are discussed.
Article
Rates of walking and bicycling to school in the US have been declining for decades, with implications for public health and the environment. Planners and policy makers are looking for ways to reverse the trend through such programs as Safe Routes to School. However, the research on school travel mirrors the policies in leaving important gaps: most studies focus on elementary students rather than high school students, and many focus on walking rather than bicycling. This study addresses both of these gaps. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of what encourages or discourages bicycling among high school students using data from a 2009 survey of students at Davis High School in Davis, CA. The analysis points to individual, social-environment, and physical-environment factors as important in explaining bicycling to school for high school students. Parental encouragement and the student’s comfort with bicycling are key factors, and perceived distance is more strongly associated with bicycling than actual distance. These results suggest the need for multi-pronged efforts to increase bicycling among high school students.
Article
This paper examines the student experience of transport, within the context of two hitherto distinct discourses. Firstly, the transport and social exclusion discourse, which highlights the role that low mobility plays in the experience of exclusion. Secondly, the widening participation discourse, which emphasises inequitable access to and achievement in higher education (HE) by non-traditional students as a component of social exclusion. The paper reports the results of a series of focus groups, undertaken with current HE students from a diverse range of backgrounds, many of whom may be considered to be non-traditional students. Results suggest that inadequate access to transport is a substantial barrier to access and achievement in HE, for these students. This highlights the influence of transport upon the successful implementation of social policy. Without consideration of transport and the physical accessibility of HE, the aim of increasing and widening participation in HE is unlikely to be realised.