The Ethics of Care of Community Transport

Keywords: care, transport, older adults, informality, automobility, neoliberalism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Across the United Kingdom (UK), a vast network of community transport organizations provide informal, low cost, and accessible mobility to thousands of people, most of which are older and/or have a disability. Community transport provides a wide range of schemes (e.g., volunteer car schemes, community buses), all of which have the common aim to meet local transport needs that are not met by ‘conventional’ transport. Unlike typical commercial or public sector transport services, community transport follows a non-for profit and community-based model, and in most cases in volunteer-run and managed. In 2020-2021, Community Transport delivered over 70,000 passenger trips in the UK, and yet this form of transport has received little attention to date in both academia and practice.
Relying on qualitative fieldwork of community transport schemes in Oxfordshire, this paper positions community transport within the landscapes of care literature. The service community transport provides is first conceptualized as care: as a practice that responds to needs, requires emotional, physical, and logistical labour, and raises questions of reciprocity. Then, the ways in which this care is shaped by the social, economic, and political context of the UK is explored. Specifically, community transport has emerged through members of diverse communities taking it upon themselves to provide transport for those who fell through the cracks of increasingly neoliberal and automobile-centric contexts. By positioning community transport as care, this paper highlights how this mobility is embedded in societal power relations and illustrates how a more just distribution of transportation resources can be achieved.