Environment Audit CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by Dr Karel Martens

Executive Summary

1. The UK approach to accessibility planning is path-breaking in an international context, but will fail to deliver as long as its goal—the provision of accessibility to key services for all citizens—is not reflected in national transportation policies and investments priorities. The goal of accessibility planning can only be achieved if a distributive approach is adopted in the transport domain, in analogy of the well-developed approaches in the domains of housing and education. A distributive approach implies the explicit definition of fairness in the distribution of accessibility, again in analogy to the well-developed principles of fairness that guide the provision of health care services and education. The resulting criteria should subsequently guide national level investment priorities so that they support local level initiatives to cater for unmet mobility needs within the context of accessibility planning.

A Brief Introduction to the Submitter

2. Currently, I am an associate professor at the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I have over twenty years of experience as a researcher and practitioner in the fields of transportation and urban planning, in the Netherlands, Israel, Belgium and, recently, the USA. I have worked for universities in the Netherlands and Israel, for two international consultancy companies, as a director of a non-governmental organization, and as a private consultant. My main research interests include transport and justice, the land use–transport interrelationship, parking, and multi-modal transportation. I have published a large number of papers on transport and justice, among others in Transportation (2011, 2012), Transportmetrica (2011, with coauthor), The Annals of Regional Science (2010, with co-authors), Transportation Research Records (2010, with co-authors), and the Berkeley Planning Journal (2006). I have also presented my work at a substantial number of international conferences and seminars, most notably at the Annual Conferences of the Transportation Research Board (2007, 2009, 2011), and at the 5th State of Environmental Justice in America Conference (2011). I am a member of the Environmental Justice Committee of the Transportation Research Board and of the organizing committee of the 5th International Conference on Women’s Issues in Transportation that will take place in Paris in 2012.

Factual information

3. It is beyond doubt that citizens in modern societies heavily depend on some form of motorized transportation—whether private or public in nature—in order to fully participate in those societies.

4. The large body of academic literature on transport-related social exclusion, transport and gender, as well as spatial mismatch, provides conclusive evidence that current transportation policies, in the UK and elsewhere, have been unable to provide a system of motorized transportation that ensures access to key services and destinations for all citizens.

5. This failure can in large part be attributed to the fact that providing accessibility for all citizens has never been a key goal guiding transportation policy, nor an explicit condition shaping the spatial organization of public services. Here, too, the UK is no different from virtually all other countries.

6. The UK approach to accessibility is path-breaking in nature, as it explicitly requires local authorities to assess accessibility to key destinations in their locality and to propose and implement measures to improve accessibility in case of unmet mobility needs. The only country with a comparable emphasis on providing accessibility for all citizens is Flanders, which has enshrined this goal in its mobility law and translated it into a far-reaching public transport investment program.

7. However, by entrusting local authorities with accessibility planning, the UK approach has failed to acknowledge that accessibility levels are first and foremost determined by transportation investment programs at the national level. Over the past decades, accessibility levels of households and neighbourhoods alike have changed drastically due to large-scale investments in transportation infrastructures, most notably the road network. Service delivery policies have subsequently taken advantage of improved accessibility for the majority of the (car-owning) population, often through a process of concentration to benefit from economies of scale and scope, while largely ignoring the accessibility consequences for a small but significant part of the population unable to make use of the improved (road) transport infrastructures because of physical (travel impairment), legal (no driving license) or financial (low income) reasons.

8. Because accessibility levels of households continue to be shaped by national transport investment priorities, local accessibility planning is unlikely to achieve its goal of providing adequate accessibility levels for all. Local accessibility policies will hardly be able to compensate for the uneven accessibility landscape that has resulted from, and is still being reshaped by, large-scale national investments in transport infrastructure.

9. Accessibility planning at the local level thus needs to be complemented by, or embedded within, accessibility planning at the national level.

10. The introduction of accessibility planning at the national level, in turn, requires fundamental changes in the transport policy domain, in line with the principles prevalent in domains like health care and education. These latter fields of government intervention are strongly shaped by the goal to provide fair service to all citizens. To this purpose, these domains have adopted a distributive approach, implying that policy interventions are shaped by the explicit goal to guarantee a fair distribution of resulting benefits (and burdens) over all citizens. While the distribution of benefits (and burdens) is sometimes addressed in the transportation domain, it is at best perceived as an impact to be mitigated, rather than as a condition guiding policy interventions and priority setting. It is precisely the absence of an explicit distributive approach to accessibility that has enabled the emergence of the uneven accessibility landscape currently experienced at the regional and local scales and widely reported on in the academic literature on transport-related social exclusion, transport and gender, and spatial mismatch.

11. The UK approach to accessibility planning—while path-breaking from an international perspective—falls short in establishing such a distributive approach, as the decision regarding major investments in accessibility improvements (new roads, railway lines, light rail connections), at the national and local levels, are being made outside the scope of accessibility planning.

12. The proposed distributive approach will bring into one comprehensive framework the bottom-up measures developed within the context of local accessibility planning and the top-down infrastructure investments resulting from mainstream transportation planning at the local and national scales.

13. The core of the proposed distributive approach is the explicit formulation of a set of distributive criteria (eg, “minimum accessibility thresholds” or a “maximum accessibility range”) that guide government action within the context of accessibility planning and mainstream transportation planning at the national and local level, as well as within the context of various domains of service delivery.

14. At the local level, these distributive criteria should be used as the yardstick for the appraisal of all transportation policies and infrastructure investments, as well as spatial strategies in service delivery.

15. At the national level, the distributive approach requires an explicit distinction between government investments in transport for purposes of economic growth and for ensuring accessibility to services. The vast majority of government transportation budgets at all spatial scales should be reserved for guaranteeing access for all citizens (as in line with the domain of education). Investments to promote economic growth should be self-financing where possible, through contribution by the sectors that benefit from them, while limiting government investment from regular funding sources.

Recommendations for Action

16. The approach outlined above suggest the following for the UK government policy regarding accessibility planning and mainstream transportation planning, and has the following implications for the work of the UK Environmental Audit Committee Inquiry into Transport and Accessibility to Services:

(a)Accessibility planning needs to be supplemented by an explicit national approach to providing accessibility for all. This implies that the inquiry should go beyond accessibility planning at the local level to assess especially national transportation planning and transportation policies and the underlying distributive principles which create the (uneven) accessibility landscape experienced at local and regional scales.

(b)The government should move beyond the definition of a set of accessibility indicators, and engage in an open discussion on fairness in accessibility. This open dialogue with stakeholders should ultimately result in a set of distributive criteria or thresholds regarding accessibility levels, with the possibility of regional and local differences depending on context. This implies that the inquiry should explore whether explicit distributive criteria for accessibility have been defined in practice and/or whether the literature provides directions for defining such criteria, in analogy to well-developed fairness principles in the fields of education and health care.

(c)The government should reconsider its current approach to priority setting regarding transport investments and explicitly base investment priorities on a well-developed approach to fairness in accessibility as a necessary complement for local-level accessibility planning. This implies that the inquiry should explicitly explore how local level assessment of accessibility levels could be used to set national level priorities regarding investments in transport infrastructures.

Supplementary Materials

17. The following supplementary materials belong to this memorandum:

18. Martens, K (2012). “Justice in transport as justice in access: applying Walzer’s ‘Spheres of Justice’ to the transport sector” Transportation (Online 21 February 2012).

19. Martens, K, A Golub, et al (2012). “A justice-theoretic approach to the distribution of transportation benefits: implications for transportation planning practice in the United States.” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice 46(4): 684–695.

20. Benenson, I, K Martens, et al (2011). “Public transport versus private car: GIS-based estimation of accessibility applied to the Tel Aviv metropolitan area.” The Annals of Regional Science 47(3): 499–515.

6 September 2012