Editorial for special issue of European transport research review: transport poverty and inequalities

It is my pleasure to introduce this small collection of four papers that emerged from sessions on Cultural and Social Issues in Transport at the 2016 World Conference on Transport Research in Shanghai, China. I first became interested with this important topic of transport poverty and inequalities as an early career researcher in 1999 during my time working on the Jubilee Line Extension Impact Study for London Transport. The client kept asking ‘What are the social benefits of the new metro line?’ and I kept replying, ‘Benefits for who?’ At that time nobody seemed to understand what I was talking about. Unlike many other areas of public policy with which I was more familiar at that time, such as housing, education and, healthcare, transport policymakers did not appear to concern themselves with the social distribution of the benefits derived from their delivery sector, nor the inequalities therein. Neither did they seem willing to consider that there might be an unfair distribution of ‘negative impacts’ from the transport system, which should be mitigate to protect vulnerable populations and communities. More than 20 years later, I am glad to say that the situation has improved to some extent. There is certainly greatly increased recognition of transport poverty in its many forms and manifestations. The academic literatures seem to be ever expanding and deepening in their theoretical understanding of transport poverty and inequalities and the technical dexterity of their methodologies to measure and evaluate this. Transport poverty can be broadly defined as follows: An individual is transport poor if, in order to satisfy their daily basic activity needs, at least one of the following conditions apply.