Planning transport for social inclusion: An accessibility-activity participation approach

Abstract

Social equity is increasingly becoming an important objective in transport planning and project evaluation. This paper provides a framework and an empirical investigation in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) examining the links between public transit accessibility and the risks of social exclusion, simply understood as the suppressed ability to conduct daily activities at normal levels. Specifically, we use a large-sample travel survey to present a new transport-geography concept termed participation deserts, neighbourhood-level clusters of lower than expected activity participation. We then use multivariate models to estimate where, and for whom, improvements in transit accessibility will effectively increase activity participation and reduce risks of transport-related social exclusion. Our results show that neighbourhoods with high concentrations of low-income and zero-car households located outside of major transit corridors are the most sensitive to having improvements in accessibility increase daily activity participation rates. We contend that transit investments providing better connections to these neighbourhoods would have the greatest benefit in terms of alleviating existing inequalities and reducing the risks of social exclusion. The ability for transport investments to liberate suppressed activity participation is not currently being predicted or valued in existing transport evaluation methodologies, but there is great potential in doing so in order to capture the social equity benefits associated with increasing transit accessibility.

Suburbanization of transport poverty

“…This shows that the fewer resources people have, transport and socio-economic, the less likely they are able to travel to and participate in daily activities. This corroborates previous theoretical and cross-sectional findings on how social and transport disadvantage limit the ability to travel and participate in daily activities, a key indicator of transport poverty (Roorda et al, 2010;Lucas, 2012;Lucas et al, 2018;Allen & Farber, 2020b). The findings in Table 5 show that these trends are also true when examining changes in transport and social disadvantage over time, and lend a somewhat more causal explanation to the observed changes.…”

“…This aligns with both theory on transport poverty (e.g. Lucas, 2012), as well as empirical research (Roorda et al, 2010;Allen & Farber, 2020b), that low activity participation rates are related both to transport disadvantage and SES.…”

“…Overall, though, previous research has highlighted how low levels of activity participation predominantly indicates that residents are experiencing barriers to daily travel, and furthermore, has been used as evidence of increased risks of transport-related social exclusion (Martens, 2016;Lucas et al, 2018). For instance, mapping neighbourhood-level "participation deserts" have been used as a transport planning tool to assess which neighbourhoods within are region are suffering the most from transport disadvantage (Allen & Farber, 2020b).…”

“…contexts (Blumenberg, Brown, & Schouten, 2018;Allen & Farber, 2020b), and in the long-term, it is negatively associated with social outcomes such as income and employment (Blumenberg & Pierce, 2014;Smart & Klein, 2020).…”

“…( 3)Several research projects have empirically analyzed how transport disadvantage can negatively impact activity participation for more at-risk groups like low-income households (e.g. Farber & Páez, 2009;Roorda et al, 2010;Lucas et al, 2016;Allen & Farber, 2020b). Auto-oriented environments can also dissuade active transportation like walking or cycling, for example, due to limited or unsafe pedestrian and cycling infrastructure or simply because destinations are too far away (Cervero & Kockelman, 1997;Ewing & Cervero, 2010).…”