We explore how perceived access to destinations supports broader human capabilities such as play, health, joy, and wonder. Drawing on Nussbaum’s (2011) framework, we surveyed over 1,400 residents of Melbourne, Australia, asking whether their neighbourhoods support their capabilities “to do or be” in 26 aspects of life. We then applied a structural equation model to examine the interrelationships between demographics, perceived access, observed access (walkability and transit), activity participation, and life satisfaction. The models show that being male, owning a vehicle, and having more friends nearby are associated with higher perceived access, while financial difficulties and disability predict lower perceived access. Although walkability and transit access have a small negative direct association with life satisfaction, they exert positive indirect and total effects through increased perceived access and activity participation. These results underscore that accessibility—particularly as it is perceived—plays a meaningful role in individual well-being.

The concept ‘mobility of care’ captures all the daily travel necessary for the upkeep of a household, including trips to grocery stores, health-related appointments, errands, and caring activities for dependents. Since it was originally coined in 2009, a handful of studies have shown how poorly mobility of care trips are captured in transportation surveys. These preliminary analyses also find that care trips comprise a substantial proportion of daily mobility. As women disproportionately engage in ‘mobility of care’ travel, the under-consideration of care trips is argued to result in a gender bias in transport planning. Despite this, transport policy related to mobility of care has received less attention. Given that transport policy shapes how transport systems operate, this paper explores the extent to which recent transport policies consider mobility of care. A critical policy review framework is used to systematically examine seven policy documents (435 pages) from the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the largest transit agency in Canada. Results indicate that mobility of care is rarely directly considered or significantly discussed. Instead, transport policy often uses the commute to work as the default trip. Mentions of care destinations and trip characteristics associated with mobility of care are more common in recent years and most frequently discussed in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic or specialized services for seniors and people with disabilities. Policies that likely facilitate mobility of care indirectly are also identified, including fare discounts, transfer windows, and accessibility policies. The review concludes with preliminary recommendations on how transit agencies can more directly plan for mobility of care.

Compared to urban settings, rural areas are characterised by high rates of car ownership and few alternative transport options. This can lead to transport poverty, especially among older adults without car access. Community transport, not-for-profit and primarily volunteer-run local transport schemes, helps to address this rural transport poverty in the UK. This paper focuses on the emergence and evolution of these schemes, presenting a critical analysis that traces the researchers’ discomfort that arose during a study on community transport in Oxfordshire. Unpacking this discomfort draws attention to two societal processes that have shaped the emergence and evolution of community transport: neoliberalism and automobility. Results indicate how community transport can be rolled out in response to the neoliberal roll-back of the state, in this case cuts to bus subsidies and the National Health Service (NHS). However, community transport is often itself rolled-back by the state as part of further rounds of financial cuts, prompting providers to improvise ways to continue what they understand to be an essential service. Further, community transport emerges as a car-based solution in increasingly car-dependent contexts and, as such, re-enforces and further normalizes automobility. Although community transport schemes address rural transport poverty, they do not at present tackle the source of this challenge: the interconnected processes of neoliberalism and automobility. The paper concludes with a discussion of the current role of the community sector as a sticking plaster solution to rural transport poverty, as well as its potential role in contributing to the dismantling of neoliberalism and automobility.

The 15-minute city (FMC) has recently emerged as a popular planning paradigm. While the concept builds upon well-stablished urban planning principles, such as density, mixed use, and proximity, its operationalisation in research and practice faces methodological and contextual challenges. This study conducts a systematic review of FMC performance metrics, analysing thirty-nine peer-reviewed articles analysing how assessment metrics have been defined and used to evaluate the alignment of a region with FMC principles across different geographical contexts. We categorise performance metrics into six broad groups: amenity-based, population-based, distance-based, gravity-based, behaviour-based, and weighted scores. The findings reveal significant methodological diversity, particularly in time thresholds, transport mode choices, and the selection of amenities. European and Asian studies tend to focus on the spatial distribution of amenities, while North American research emphasises behavioural analysis, highlighting the challenges posed by car dependency and urban sprawl. This review identifies key research gaps, including the limited attention given to digitalisation and equity concerns. Additionally, we highlight the need for standardised performance metrics to allow for comparability across studies. Given regional variations in urban form and behaviour, we argue that FMC policies should not adopt a one-size-fits-all approach but rather be tailored to local contexts. The findings from this research can be of interest to policymakers interested in understanding the regional challenges and methodological variations of FMC performance metrics.

On October 3rd, 2024, three stations along the east end of Montreal’s blue metro line were closed, resulting in a seven-day service disruption. While previous studies have examined the operational impacts of such disruptions, their effects on user experiences remain underexplored. To address this gap, we measure the impacts of the closure on user satisfaction and their willingness to recommend transit services. Using data from a bilingual online survey launched the day after the disruption began, we analyzed responses from blue line users (N = 655) by employing ordered probit models. The survey included a treatment group of riders directly impacted by the closure (N = 361) and a control group of those unaffected (N = 294). Additionally, we incorporate data from a secondary survey conducted one year prior to the closure, which included riders living close to blue line stations (N = 161), as a secondary control. Our findings reveal a significant decrease in both user satisfaction and willingness to recommend transit services among those impacted by the metro closure. However, these negative impacts can be mitigated when users perceive the availability of reliable and suitable transit alternatives. The findings from this research can be of interest to practitioners and policymakers as they highlight the broader implications of metro disruptions.

Despite the importance of elected officials in shaping transportation policies, there has been little direct research on their values and experiences. Understanding the values of elected officials is particularly important in the context of transportation equity, which is fundamentally concerned with the distribution of benefits across communities and geographies. This research draws on a survey and in-depth interviews with local elected officials in Canada to understand their experiences and how they view transportation equity issues. We find that elected officials have little direct experience with transportation barriers, with few experiencing issues such as unaffordability, disability, or harassment, and evidence that this influences their values related to equity. While there was widespread agreement with values such as procedural equity, there was limited support for prioritizing marginalized communities in transportation investments, and this support varied by experience and identities. These findings point to a significant disconnect between academic/professional discourses on transportation equity and the values of elected officials. This underscores the need for addressing political contexts in understanding transportation decision-making and offering deeper understandings of the motivations and values of elected officials.

The “15-Minute City” concept has been embraced by global leaders to promote human-scale neighbourhoods with transport and land-use designs that support short trips to daily necessities. This paper bridges the 15-Minute City to “Mobility of Care”, a framework that foregrounds travel to care destinations, travel done predominately by women. This focus contrasts the more commonly studied travel to employment and leisure destinations. While the 15-Minute City concept is flexible enough to consider all destination types, gendered examinations are relatively lacking in the literature, and little research to date has focused explicitly on care destinations. This gap is addressed in this paper by identifying which areas in the city of Hamilton, Canada are ‘caring 15-minute neighbourhoods’. To do so, a database of care destinations was compiled to estimate the number (using the cumulative opportunity accessibility measure) and diversity of mix (using an entropy measure) of care destinations within a 15-minute walk from residential parcels. Using data-driven machine learning techniques (Self-Organizing Maps and Decision Trees), neighbourhoods were classified into ‘caring 15-minute neighbourhood’ typologies that are examined across residential socio-economic profiles. Our results suggest that the majority of caring 15-minute neighbourhoods are in the urban core, where more lower-income households currently reside. In contrast, areas that lack caring 15-minute neighbourhoods are in higher-income peripheral areas. Areas that make good candidates for urban policy intervention are identified and the implications of enhancing 15-minute walkable caring access are discussed in relation to equtiy and gender mainstreaming in transportation planning and limitations of this work.

Older adults’ living environments are instrumental in making walking part of their daily lives, as we strive to promote healthy aging. Objective measures, such as WalkScore®, and subjective measures of walkability provide means to grasp the factors that enable or hinder frequent and enjoyable walking. However, there is limited consensus on what factors contribute to mismatch between perceptions of walkability and objective built environment measures, particularly among older adults. We interviewed fifty-eight older adults (65 +) from six Canadian cities to uncover the relationship between their perceived neighbourhood walkability and objective built environment measures. We segmented our interviewee sample into four categories based on their residential WalkScore® and perceptions of neighbourhood walkability. Our thematic analysis provides insight into strategies older adults use to respond to barriers to walking in their environment and walking facilitators they experience in their neighbourhoods. The findings can be of interest to practitioners and decision-makers as they seek to improve walking environments for aging populations, ultimately contributing to older adults’ long-term health and well-being.

Transportation researchers have long used social-psychological theories to understand the impacts of travel attitudes on travel behaviour, especially in relation to the built environment and residential location choice. However, there has been limited research on whether social and transportation inequities impact the formation and change of travel attitudes and behaviour. In this paper, we used qualitative research to explore whether people’s experiences of transport poverty, defined as the combined effect of social and transportation disadvantages, contributes to the formation and change of their travel attitudes and behaviour. If transport poverty influences travel attitudes, then, according to the social-psychological theories, inequities impact travel behaviour not only through material deprivation but also by influencing travel attitudes. To examine such a relationship, we propose a framework integrating transport poverty, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (TCD) and Habit Theory (HT). We also empirically test our framework using retrospective and qualitative data collected in the Rexdale neighbourhood in Toronto. We found that consistent with our hypothesis, experiences of transport poverty influence people’s travel attitudes via perceived behavioural control and past travel behaviour, which is also influenced by transport poverty. Furthermore, transport poverty impacts the relationship between travel intention and behaviour. Moreover, daily travel behaviours of individuals living in marginalized conditions are often ad-hoc and dynamically adapted. We also explain travel behaviour adaptations in the context of transport poverty by integrating a framework for intention with social-psychological theories. Finally, we suggest research and policy implications of our framework based on our findings.

Clustering activity patterns and identifying homogeneous travel behaviour through trip chain sequences offer valuable insight for transportation planners and policymakers in addressing transport equity problems and travel demand management. This study explores how income and car-ownership levels determine mobility patterns and travellers' decisions. Unlike previous studies that investigated the travel mode and destinations separately, we designed a novel, aggregated form considering the trip purpose and associated transport mode use as a unit of our analysis. To mitigate the subjectivity of rule-based approaches for trip chain analysis, we employ a novel sequence clustering framework to extract homogeneous clusters of activity patterns. Our results reveal that income and car-ownership levels influence travellers' travel decisions and mobility patterns. Among low-income carless households, 37% of their daily trips include care activities where women more frequently than men play this traditional role in a household by either public transit or a car as a passenger. In the low-income car-owner subsample, females still use public transit for their work trips, whereas males more often use the available car to commute to work. Males of wealthy carless households integrate public transit and active transportation for their daily trips when they live in high-density and more accessible neighbourhoods. While our findings demonstrate the impact of car ownership, income, and built environment on trip-chaining behaviour, we recognise that achieving transport equity will require tailored transportation and land use policies and investments that address the specific needs and barriers faced by different household types, particularly the most vulnerable ones in terms of sociodemographic characteristics, accessibility levels, and affordability issues. Hence, we recommend that policymakers and planners take a more holistic approach to transportation planning that considers the interplay of these factors to ensure that transportation systems and services are accessible, affordable, and equitable for all.