Title

A methodology for the incorporation of social inclusion into transport policy

Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2004

Subject Area

Social Issues - Social exclusion, Social Issues - social inclusion, Transport planning - Accessibility planning

Abstract

Social exclusion is an area of increasing concern. The UK Government requires local authorities to take it into account when formulating and implementing transport policies. However, there is no well-defined methodology to enable them to do so. This paper is concerned with the development of a tool to assist in this process. This research is part of a larger research programme entitled ‘Accessibility and User Needs in Transport in Sustainable Urban Environments (AUNT-SUE)’ in which benchmarks to help define social exclusion will be defined, and transport designs and operations to help reduce social exclusion will be developed. These will feed into the design of the tool. The tool will consist of an accessibility model overlain by GIS to facilitate effective input and output. Its development will be carried out with the active cooperation of a local authority. When the tool has been developed it will be used to address a variety of policy issues and to examine the impacts of various possible transport designs and operations on social exclusion, by examining the changes in the number of people above the benchmark. There are a number of interesting research questions which are discussed in the paper