Access for All A New Paradigm for Transportation Planning Based on Principles of Social Justice

Access for All aims to develop a new paradigm for transportation planning, based on principles of justice. The book starts from the observation that the principles underlying transportation planning have hardly changed over the past fifty years - in practice, as well as in theory, the focus has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve this performance. The goal has been to avoid congestion on the main road system and to achieve free flowing travel as much as possible, given budget restrictions. On the fringes of mainstream practice and literature, some scholars and advocates have critically addressed the implicit distributive consequences of this approach and have shown who benefits from improvements in the transport system and who loses. This has resulted in calls for policy changes, to redress at least some of the inequities that have developed over time. Access for All aims to develop a new approach to transportation planning that takes distributional effects as its starting point. Access for All builds on the extensive literature on disparities in mobility and accessibility, including the bodies of research on: spatial mismatch women and transport urban service delivery and the more recent body of literature on transport and social exclusion. This book argues that a distributive approach to transport (or accessibility) is necessary to systematically address the social disparities found in these bodies of literature. In absence of an explicit distributive approach transport-related social exclusion is inevitable, as it is actually generated by current transportation planning practices.