Handbook of Sustainable Travel by Tommy Gärling Dick Ettema & Margareta Friman

Author:Tommy Gärling, Dick Ettema & Margareta Friman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht

Introduction

Since the landmark Brundlandt Commission Report (1987), “triple bottom line” approaches to high level goal setting for transport systems have been common. Economic and some environmental drivers have long currency in terms of influencing transportation initiatives, with the economic dimension receiving an important stimulus in recent years from work on agglomeration economies and climate change becoming more important in relation to environmental goals. The social policy or welfare dimension is the least developed. This applies both with respect to impact assessment (ex ante and ex post) of specific transport policies, programmes or projects (Geurs, Boon, & Van Wee, 2009), and also in terms of the generation of such policies, programmes or projects to specifically target social policy goal achievement. Where they are considered, social policy drivers of transportaton initiatives tend to cluster around a few particular issues – public transport fare concessions to assist those on a low income, physical access to public transport for those with a disability, and recently, transport measures to assist access for those people at risk of social exclusion.

The above topics are certainly worthy issues to pursue but are only a small part of the story to fully understand the place of transportation in achieving broad social policy goals. After all, in most situations, transportation of itself is rarely an end point goal, but a means of obtaining an economic or social outcome. The authors argue that the transportation field is yet to fully understand and define the full set of social policy goals where transport plays a role. Instead, interest in social policy goals has concentrated on some parts of the picture without a clear understanding of how these parts might make up the whole, as well as leaving important gaps. By way of example, social inclusion work was largely pioneered in the UK by the, then, Social Exclusion Unit (SEU). In the report on transport (Social Exclusion Unit [SEU], 2003) five groups of transport-related barriers to social inclusion were identified: (1) The availability and physical accessibility of transportation; (2) The cost of transportation; (3) Services located in inaccessible places; (4) Safety and security – fear of crime; (5) Travel horizons – people on low incomes were found to be less willing to travel to access work than those on higher incomes. These identified topics are important issues of themselves but do not represent a cohesive structure or framework leading to an improvement in wellbeing, nor indeed, social inclusion. Currently, the Norwegian National Transport Plan 2010–19 states that it is about (inter alia) “making society more inclusive and universally accessible” (Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communications, 2009, p. 3). The goals to realise social inclusion are not spelt out, except perhaps improved infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists and universal design features. Similar goals which reflect part of the story and which provide tenuous connections between actions and goals, are reflected in many transport plans at a national level or at subsidiary levels (e.g. provinces/States or local authorities), depending on where jurisdictional transportation responsibilities lie.

This

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