Transport poverty and its adverse social consequences Karen Lucas PhD, MA (Res), BSc (Hons) Professor of Transport & Social Analysis, Institute for Transport Studies, Faculty of Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK (corresponding author: K.Lucas@leeds.ac.uk) Giulio Mattioli PhD, MSc (Hons), BSc (Hons) Research Fellow, Institute for Transport Studies, Faculty of Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Ersilia Verlinghieri MSc (Hons), BSc (Hons), BMus PhD candidate, Institute for Transport Studies, Faculty of Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Alvaro Guzman MSc, BSc PhD candidate, Institute for Transport Studies, Faculty of Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Transport poverty is an issue that has never fully captured the interests of the transport engineering profession in either the ‘global north’ or ‘global south’ and yet it is a problem that adversely affects the daily lives of millions of people across the globe. What precisely constitutes transport poverty is not adequately articulated within academic, policy or infrastructure design literature. This paper aims to demonstrate how the different ways that academic studies and policy programmes have defined and recorded the problem of transport poverty is directly related to the ways in which it has been subsequently addressed in practice. The overall impression is one of inadequacy, fragmentation, inconsistency and tokenistic treatment of an issue that potentially affects anywhere between 10 to 90% of all households, depending on which definition is used and which country is being considered. This suggests that it is a far greater problem than the transport profession has previously been prepared to recognise and one that requires its urgent attention given the continuing trends for mass migration, urbanisation and wealth concentration within and between the ‘global north’ and ‘global south’. 1. Introduction Various texts implicitly or explicitly refer to the problem of transport poverty, including those written by academics such as Lucas (2004; p. 291) and Litman (2015; p. 2), official pol- icymaking bodies such as the UK’ s Social Exclusion Unit (SEU, 2003) and UK Department for Transport (DfT, 2006) and lobby organisations such as the UK’ s Royal Automobile Club (RAC Foundation, 2012) and the Campaign for Better Transport (CBT, 2012). However, does it really exist as a stand-alone phenomenon; that is, is it something that is somehow fundamentally different to being simply poor per se? If it does exist, how easy is it to understand who might be affected and to convey its negative social consequences to pol- icymakers? Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, what should be done about it? For example, is transport poverty a real problem for individuals, or is it a systemic problem that needs to be addressed more stra- tegically at the community level, city-wide or across whole regions? Are different types of solutions needed, depending on who is affected and where they are physically located or will adjustment of some of the blanket policy measures that are cur- rently used within transport policy, such as concessionary fares, operating subsidies for socially necessary public transport ser- vices and supplementary community transport services work just as well to resolve the problem? Finally, is this ultimately even a transport delivery problem at all or one of urban and rural planning or for social welfare services to resolve? Although is not possible to address all of these issues within this paper, the authors attempt to provide an overview of the various ways in which transport poverty has been previously conceptual- ised within the available literature, as well as to offer for discus- sion some newly devised definitions. These different definitions are used to discuss how transport poverty might be measured, illustrating how different methodological approaches might be required, depending on the nature of the problem. A brief analy- sis is then presented of the publically available datasets that can be used to explore transport poverty and identify some important gaps in these datasets that need to be addressed in order to im- prove future analysis in this respect. Finally, a flavour is given of some of the policy approaches that have been brought into play to address different aspects of the problem of transport poverty. The paper is intended as a state-of-the-art review and think piece about how transport poverty has been conceptualised within the current literature, rather than an empirical study report. The primary focus is on the experience of countries of the ‘global north’ and in particular the UK, although examples are also taken from elsewhere. This evidence-base is used to consider the ways in which transport poverty might need to be explored differently within the ‘global south’ given the more extreme depth, breadth and intensity of the problem within the developing world. One of the most important issues that transport professionals need to understand and communicate better are the severe 353 Transport Volume 169 Issue TR6 Transport poverty and its adverse social consequences Lucas, Mattioli, Verlinghieri and Guzman Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers Transport 169 December 2016 Issue TR6 Pages 353–365 http://dx.doi.org/10.1680/jtran.15.00073 Paper 1500073 Received 24/09/2015 Accepted 05/01/2016 Published online 03/03/2016 Keywords: developing countries/social impact/transport planning Published with permission by the ICE under the CC-BY license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Downloaded by [ University of Leeds] on [14/08/17]. Published with permission by the ICE under the CC-BY license