Activity Highlights

Karel Martens gave a keynote lecture at the Platos Conference on Transport Modeling and Wellbeing, held on 29 March 2023 in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In his talk Transport Modeling for an Inclusive Society, Karel underscored that transport modeling is all but value-neutral and showed how transport modelers can use their existing tools to design and assess more inclusive transport systems.

Rasha Bowirrat, a Master’s student in the Fair Transport Lab, visited the Urban Tech Hub at Cornell Tech last November. Cornell Tech, a cooperation between Cornell University and the Technion located in New York City, brings together technology, urbanism and entrepreneurship. As part of the visit, Rasha presented her research on walking in cities to the Urban Tech hub members. Rasha’s visit was funded by the generous support of the Azrieli Fellows Program.

Wambui Kariuki and Yaara Tsairi, PhD candidates in the Fair Transport Lab, joined the prestigious Doctoral Training Network of EIT Urban Mobility. As part of the program, they participated in the 3rd Annual Forum in Barcelona, where they presented their research topics, and participated in Tomorrow.Mobility World congress.

On 21 April 2022, Karel Martens gave a Master Class on Transport Justice in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The event was organized by dr. Alphonse Nkurunziza from the Center of Excellence in Transport and Logistics at the University of Rwanda, as part of an ongoing partnership funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations. The Master Class was highly successful, attracting over thirty senior professionals, from central and local governments, NGOs, international development partners, and the private sector.

On 1 December 2021, Karel Martens gave the closing keynote lecture at the Annual Polis Conference, held in Gothenburg, Sweden. In his talk, he called on the audience to adopt a transport justice perspective on social inclusion.

On 13 October 2021, Karel Martens gave a lecture in the online Research to Practice Transit Symposium organized by the University of Florida Transportation Institute. In his presentation, Martens challenges the typical focus of equity analysis in the field of transport. Rather analyzing disparities between population groups, he argues that equity analyses should assess whether all people are served adequately by the existing transport system.

Matan Singer, Aly Kaufman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Fair Transport Lab, presented at the 2021 World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research. The project, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, analyzed why some public transport systems serve a region’s population better than others. Focusing on 49 regions in the USA, he found that land use features (density, land use mix) hardly improve transit accessibility beyond the local level, in contrast to what is assumed in much of the literature.

In his presentation held on 26.1.2021, Avi Parsha, an Urban and Regional Planning master student and a Lab member, discussed his findings regarding social identity effects on perception of cycling as a mode of transport among women from different income levels. Avi found that as cycling for transport is highly-associated with privileged social groups and not as a practice that ‘everybody does’, underprivileged social groups are less likely to take up cycling. These findings suggest that social identity may play a significant role in shaping cycling uptake among various social groups and that cycling promotion should go beyond cycling infrastructure and include strategies to normalize cycling as a ‘socially-neutral’ practice.

This paper discusses two variants of the accessibility paradigm for transport planning. The extensive paradigm aims to radically overhaul transport planning to incorporate issues of environmental quality, urban sprawl, safety and health. Its adoption is unlikely in the medium term and raises questions about the role of the transport planner. The limited paradigm calls for transport planning to adopt accessibility indicators in place of mobility indicators. However this will not meet the underlying goals of the accessibility critique. A change in the focus of transport planning is needed from the functioning of transport networks to the service that differently placed people receive from the transport system.