Activity Highlights

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.

I propose that if we are serious about promoting transport justice, we should start measuring the prevalence and severity of transport problems directly. We should develop new surveys that seek to systematically identify difficulties in travelling and barriers to travel, rather than registering actual trip-making. We should also explore how big data can be used to identify the most severe transport problem people may experience: the transport problems that prevent people from actually making a trip. Only if we start directly measuring real transport problems, will we start addressing them and move the transport system forward to a state of justice.

Keynote lecture at the Symposium on Socioeconomic Impacts of Automated and Connected Vehicles , held 26–27 June 2018 in Brussels, Belgium. Hosted by the European Commission and the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the Academies), it was the sixth annual symposium sponsored by the European Commission and the United States. In his lecture, Karel Martens discussed the challenges of developing fair transportation systems in the era of automated and connected transport.