Abstract
Mobility systems raise multiple questions of justice. Work on mobility justice and policy often treats different elements of the debate separately, for example focussing on environmental justice or accessibility. This is problematic as it can privilege policy solutions without a full view of the winners and losers and the values implicit in that. Using analysis of current policy, we investigate how mobility justice can reconcile its different components, and find two major consequences. First, is doubt about the justice of the existing policy approach which tries to tackle transport pollution primarily through a shift to low emission vehicles. This approach privileges those with access to private vehicles and further privileges certain sets of activities. Second is a need to reassess which basic normative ideas should be applied in mobility justice. Work on mobility justice has tended to appeal to conceptions of justice concerned with access to resources including resources enabling mobility. These conceptions say little about how resources should be used. We show that avoiding stark inequalities means collectively thinking about how resources are used, about how we value activities involving mobility, and about what sorts of goods and services we create.
Highlights
Whether or not they are explicitly recognised as such, normative ideas are embodied in policies, policy tools and actions influencing transport
With some reason given their complexity, work has focused on one or other of these aspects. We argue that this tendency to focus separately on different aspects of justice has limitations which can be far greater than a matter of scope, and that addressing this has two major implications for mobility justice
It is in examining the potential of these approaches for settling tensions in mobility justice, that we engage with choice based theories of justice, and examine the case for collective thinking about values and what sorts of activities should be accommodated, enabled and curtailed
Summary
Whether or not they are explicitly recognised as such, normative ideas are embodied in policies, policy tools and actions influencing transport. In the face of this, we begin to explore how different approaches to reducing pollution, involving mobility systems less reliant on private powered vehicles may be more promising at reconciling different aspects of mobility justice (cf [46]) It is in examining the potential of these approaches for settling tensions in mobility justice, that we engage with choice based theories of justice, and examine the case for collective thinking about values and what sorts of activities should be accommodated, enabled and curtailed. As our argument develops we show that for mobility and Transport, the liberal ‘choice based’ theories face particular problems, and this makes a case for adopting an approach closer to the virtue ethics and communitarian approach Both of these branches of political philosophy will have concern that people have material and other conditions needed to live well.
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