Description

The concerns of transportation equity have grown to play an increasingly larger role in the conversation of urban social and spatial justice (Karner et al 2020; Sheller 2018). The crises associated with the Covid-19 pandemic, global economic recession, and racial injustice of this past year have only made more urgent the need to consider transportation as a key input in building an actionable “right to the city” for all (Attoh; 2019). Our contemporary moment -- where those with the ability to work from home or easily access a private automobile can reduce their risk exposure, while low income and front line workers must still commute in public facing environments -- displays prominently what has long been known; that transportation is key mechanism upon which the inequities of class, race, and gender are defined and acted out daily (Blumenberg and Pierce 2017; Blumenberg 2008).

Previous research has developed both a robust vocabulary through which to discuss transportation in light of diverse theories of justice (Pereira et al. 2017), and a range of quantitative (Martens 2016) and qualitative (Lowe and Mosby 2016) metrics by which to evaluate transportation equity initiatives. Still further research has engaged the problem of how to communicate such equity or justice-oriented propositions to practitioners in the transportation engineering and planning fields (Golub et al. 2013). The foundations set by this body of research and the pressing examples of urgent need in the contemporary transportation environment together ask for new, creative, and rigorous engagements with the questions of what transportation equity and justice means today and how we can achieve a more just distribution of transportation resources.

This session will bring together empirical work that addresses issues of transportation justice and equity. We welcome a range of topics from within transportation planning and geography, as well as other subdisciplines interested in transportation questions. We are particularly interested in transportation equity/justice analysis that utilizes spatial methods and/or GIS.
Topics may include:
• transportation-related gentrification/neighborhood change
• Modal shifts of workers in response to Covid-19 exposure concerns
• localized air quality impacts of highway infrastructure
• the geographies of predatory/subprime auto loans
• the uneven geographies of people living in their cars in response to unaffordable housing costs
• racialized\income-based violence stemming from minor traffic infringements
• the geographies of urban protest related to traffic stops

Citations
Attoh, Kafui Ablode. 2019. Rights in Transit: Public Transportation and the Right to the City in California’s East Bay. Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.
Blumenberg, Evelyn and Gregory Pierce (2017). “Car Access and Long-Term Poverty Exposure: Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) Experiment,” Journal of Transport Geography, 65: 92-100.
Blumenberg, Evelyn (2008). “Immigrants and Transport Barriers to Employment: The Case of Southeast Asian Welfare Recipients in California,” Transport Policy, 15: 33-42.
Golub, Aaron, Glenn Robinson, and Brendan Nee. 2013. “Making Accessibility Analyses Accessible: A Tool to Facilitate the Public Review of the Effects of Regional Transportation Plans on Accessibility.” Journal of Transport and Land Use 6 (3): 17. https://doi.org/10.5198/jtlu.v6i3.352.
Karner, Alex, Jonathan London, Dana Rowangould, and Kevin Manaugh. 2020. “From Transportation Equity to Transportation Justice: Within, Through, and Beyond the State.” Journal of Planning Literature, May, 088541222092769. https://doi.org/10.1177/0885412220927691.
Lowe, Kate, and Kim Mosby. 2016. “The Conceptual Mismatch: A Qualitative Analysis of Transportation Costs and Stressors for Low-Income Adults.” Transport Policy 49 (July): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tranpol.2016.03.009.
Martens, Karel. 2016. Transport Justice: Designing Fair Transportation Systems. New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Pereira, Rafael H. M., Tim Schwanen, and David Banister. 2017. “Distributive Justice and Equity in Transportation.” Transport Reviews 37 (2): 170–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2016.1257660.
Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in the Age of Extremes. London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso.