Abstract
Quantitative measures of transport disadvantage are reviewed in this paper from the perspective of their effectiveness to investigate social exclusion. The effectiveness is assessed using criteria derived through a review of the concepts of transport disadvantage and social exclusion and their operationalisation. The specified criteria are related to issues of spatial (e.g., urban accessibility, and public transport accessibility), temporal (e.g., public transport availability, and facility opening hours), and social attributes of travel and activity participation (e.g., personal mobility, and disability). Four groups of transport disadvantage measures are identified and evaluated. These include deprivation-based measures, mobility-based measures, accessibility-based measures, and activity-based measures. The review suggests that although the first three categories of measures have traditionally been used to identify transport disadvantage, they do not satisfy issues surrounding activity participation—the key outcome of social exclusion. The activity space concept is a way in which these issues can be incorporated, as it is a measure of the outcomes of activity participation and their associated travel to that activity. Participation in an activity means that an individual has overcome the spatial, temporal and social barriers of travel for that activity. The research using the activity space concept has, however, inadequately identified individual travel and activity participation. This has been due to a separate application of a range of different indicators to assess activity space size. These indicators are by their nature multidimensional—e.g., area visited, distance travelled, and number of activity sites visited. Although each indicator represents a specific qualitative/quantitative aspect of travel and activity participation, researchers have treated these indicators in an isolated manner to identify transport disadvantage and consequently transport-related social exclusion. This paper identifies the weaknesses and strengths associated with these measures; and methods are directed to overcome the limitations.
Highlights
The reduction of social exclusion has been a focus of policy agenda for some time
The attributes are used as the review criteria, which are related to the ability of the measures to incorporate spatial, temporal, and social barriers of travel and activity participation (Section 4)
Disaggregation is required to take into account the relativity of the measures [21,51]. This relativity means that the levels of accessibility and mobility of others living in the same area need to be considered to identify transport disadvantage, when the analysis is concerned with the differential levels of area accessibility and area mobility
Summary
The reduction of social exclusion has been a focus of policy agenda for some time. This paper examines issues surrounding the transport dimension of social exclusion. The UK Department for Transport [19] has reviewed different modelling techniques (e.g., 4-stage model) used in transport research to develop accessibility measure tool to identify transport disadvantage This is inadequate because the lack of accessibility is just one aspect of transport-related causes of social exclusion. This paper presents a review of transport disadvantage measures and operationalised examples in order to assess social exclusion. The limitations of such measures in identifying transport disadvantage are discussed and methods are directed to overcome these limitations. The attributes are used as the review criteria, which are related to the ability of the measures to incorporate spatial (e.g., urban accessibility, and public transport accessibility), temporal (e.g., public transport availability, facility opening hours, and dynamics), and social (e.g., personal mobility, and disability) barriers of travel and activity participation (Section 4).
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