ACCESS
Mobility Justice
ASK DIFFERENT QUESTIONS
What does it take to create fair and inclusive transport systems? Are we measuring the right thing or are we completely off track? Francesco Ripa sat down with Karel Martens, the author of Transport Justice: Designing Fair Transportation Systems and a professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology to discuss his work, in view of his role at the POLIS Annual Conference 2021 as a keynote speaker
© Lucas Quintana, Unsplash
1. We are very happy to have you as a keynote speaker in the closing plenary of our conference. Can you share a preview of what you will be talking about?
Karel Martens (KM): My message is very simple: a transport system should serve everyone. This is a very obvious statement, I think, but that is not how people tend to think about transport. It implies a radical shift in our perspective.
Karel Martens is Professor in Transport Planning and Head of the Fair Transport Lab at Technion – Israel institute of Technology
2. Equality, equity, justice, fairness – sometimes we tend to use these terms interchangeably. Do you have any advice on how we should better frame this topic?
KM: For me, equity, justice and fairness have an identical meaning. The difference lies primarily in how they are perceived. The term “justice” is very confrontational for many people, because it is the mirror of “injustice”, a word that triggers strong emotions. So many people prefer the gentler term of “fairness” instead. Equity, in turn, sounds much more technical than either justice or fairness and so is often perceived as a more neutral term – and so is very popular among transport researchers. Equality means something very different than these three terms. Equality means everybody gets the same. Sometimes, justice demands equality, but in other cases it is only fair that some receive more than others. Still, equality has a strong intuitive appeal and large deviations from equality often trigger a public outcry, such as seen around the extreme wealth of the “one percent”.
3. Do you think welfare states should include transport services in the set of services that they provide for, just like healthcare or education?
KM: The right to housing and the right to basic education are well-established across Europe. But a right doesn't fall from the sky. It reflects a strong intuition we all have, an intuition that is often backed by systematic philosophical argument. When intuitions and arguments point in the same direction, a social right can emerge. What I tried to do in my book, Transport Justice, is build an argument about what “justice” means in transport. My argument resulted in a very simple and straightforward conclusion – that a just transport system provides everybody with sufficient accessibility. You could say that this is a definition of transport justice from an engineering perspective, as it focuses on the transport system. The conclusion of the argument can also be formulated from the perspective of a person. In that case, the conclusion is that every person is entitled to a sufficient level of accessibility. This is a new basic right. Perhaps surprisingly, this right is already implicitly part of some formulations of the right to housing. More than hundred countries have enshrined the right to housing in their constitution. In some of them, this right to housing is defined much more elaborately than merely as “a roof above your head”. These constitutions speak about a right to “adequate” housing, with “adequate” not only referring to house itself, but also to the access it provides to services and employment. The right to sufficient accessibility as I formulate it is thus merely a more precise version of a right that is already there, at least in some constitutions. So yes – I think transport should be part of the welfare state. It is actually very surprising that governments continuously use public money and public lands to improve the transport situation of the best-off, whereas they often spend very little to improve the situation of people who are now poorly served. Some governments even radiate that people should be grateful that they receive some subsidized public transport at all. This is completely against the logic of the welfare state, which underpins domains like education and health care. Like these domains, I argue that the provision of transport infrastructures and services should be based on principles of justice. It is simply the essence of a democratic state – that all policies should treat all citizens fairly and are thus based on principles of justice.
4. How can we make this topic politically urgent?
KM: The single most important step is really to start measuring the right thing. Start measuring whether transport systems really serve everyone. One way to do that is by measuring accessibility, by showing how many places people can reach within a reasonable time and to compare the situation of people with a car to that of people without a car. You will see the enormous disparities. Unless you are able to show the vast injustices embedded in current transport systems, you won't create a sense of urgency. Another way to show these injustices is by asking people about their travel problems. By simply asking the question: “How easy is it for you to get to places, or how difficult?” For 70 years, transport studies have mapped travel behaviour. So, we know where people are going and how they get there. But we never ask: Was it easy for you to get there? Did you have difficulties? Was it expensive? Did it take too much effort? Were you dependent on other people to get there? Travel problems tell us much more about our transport systems than our travel behaviours.
Show travel injustices by asking people about their travel problems © Ketut Subiyanto, Pexels
But simply showing the results of such analyses might not be enough. A respectable Dutch organisation once showed that 90% of all trips made in the Netherlands would take at least twice as long by public transport as by car. The response in the media: absolute silence. Compare how the public would respond to a study showing that one group of people would have to wait twice as long for a doctor’s appointment as another. There would be an enormous public outcry! Transport disparities are apparently more difficult to grasp than injustices in domains like health care or education. Showing the huge gaps in accessibility or in travel problems may not be enough. What might help is linking these insights to actual project investments. For each proposed project we should systematically ask: Who is benefitting from this investment? Does the project improve the situation of people with few travel problems and a high level of accessibility? If yes, why are they receiving the benefits? Why choose for a project that widens the gaps, where research shows that some people are really struggling to get to employment, to the doctor, and even to their family and friends?
5. What key tools do cities have in order to tackle transport poverty?
KM: I would suggest that we don’t use the phrase “transport poverty”. It turns the question of transport justice into a small niche issue, seemingly affecting only a small share of the population. I would frame the challenge as that of achieving an inclusive and fair transport system, a transport system that provides everyone with a real freedom of movement. The most important tool cities have to move towards such a system is by adopting an inclusive transport system as the core goal of their transport policies. Some cities have already included such a goal, but then fail to systematically assess whether their policies move the city towards that goal. So, the second key tool is to change what is being measured. Cities should move beyond counting traffic or analysing people’s travel behaviour. Instead, they should start measuring whether everybody is served well. They should measure accessibility or travel problems, or gaps in travel times between different modes, or better, between different user groups. They should think how they can use big data to identify population groups that are poorly served, instead of using these data merely to better manage traffic.
We already know how to make our cities better – giving priority to public transport and more space to pedestrians, and building bicycle lanes, for example. © Mutlu Burak Paksoy, Pexels
From the moment you make a different analysis, you will identify different problems, you will start changing priorities, and will start directing known and less-known solutions to addressing those problems. And you will also see that congestion disappears as a problem; it just disappears, as often people in traffic jams are among the best served in a city – strange as it may sound. All the tools for intervention are already there. We know how to make our cities better – transport justice simply provides a powerful argument for such changes. We know that we should give priority to public transport. We know we have to give more space to pedestrians. We know that everywhere there should be bicycle lanes so young people can get easily by bike to most of their destinations. All of these interventions will move cities towards an inclusive transport system. And these interventions have long-term impacts too. If you create a safe walking, cycling and public transport network that can be used by kids of eight or ten years old, they can start navigating the city on their own already at a very young age. They will become completely different people; they will become citizens of the city rather than just its residents. They really become part of the city and they will start shaping the city. These tools are all known, and many cities are doing the right thing, but they are still afraid of measuring the right thing. They keep collecting data about the same issues, which circle them back to the same problems, pointing at the same solutions, which are then assessed with the same evaluation tools, which turn out the same results justifying the same kind of investments. If transport should serve everyone – and I think it is hard to suggest anything else – then let's measure if everybody is indeed being served well. Once we start doing that, we can create a ranking of who's being served well and who is poorly served; of who is at the top and who is at the bottom. Once cities start doing this, they will know exactly where to start and how to spend their often-enormous transport budgets. It is really that simple.
Karel Martens is Professor in Transport Planning and Head of the Fair Transport Lab at Technion – Israel institute of Technology
Francesco Ripa is Communications Manager of POLIS Network
You can contact them respectively at: kmartens@technion.ac.il and fripa@polisnetwork.eu