Distributive justice and equity in transportation

ABSTRACT

Over the past decades, transport researchers and policy-makers have devoted increasing attention to questions about justice and equity. Nonetheless, there is still little engagement with theories in political philosophy to frame what justice means in the context of transport policies. This paper reviews key theories of justice (utilitarianism, libertarianism, intuitionism, Rawls’ egalitarianism, and Capability Approaches (CAs)) and critically evaluates the insights they generate when applied to transport. Based on a combination of Rawlsian and CAs, we propose that distributive justice concerns over transport disadvantage and social exclusion should focus primarily on accessibility as a human capability. This means that, in policy evaluation, a detailed analysis of the distributional effects of transport policies should take account of the setting of minimum standards of accessibility to key destinations and the extent to which these policies respect individuals’ rights and prioritise disadvantaged groups, reduce inequalities of opportunities, and mitigate transport externalities. A full account of justice in transportation requires a more complete understanding of accessibility than traditional approaches have been able to deliver to date.

KEYWORDS:

• Accessibility
• Equity
• Justice
• Distributive Justice
• Social exclusion
• Transport Poverty
• Ethics
• Capability Approaches
• Rawls

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rafael H. M. Pereira http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2125-7465

Notes

1. Questions of how distributive policy is decided and by whom have attracted much less attention in the political philosophy literature (Young, 1990). Similarly, this paper does not cover the concept “right to the city” (Fincher & Iveson, 2012), nor feminist theories of justice because they go beyond the scope of distributive justice.

2. These include freedom of thought and of association, political liberties, the rights and liberties covered by the rule of law, and the physical and psychological liberty and integrity of the person (Rawls, 2001).

3. This integral notion of accessibility is encompassed and further developed by the concept of motility (Flamm & Kaufmann, 2006; Kaufmann, Bergman, & Joye, 2004). Motility incorporates how personal, social, and environmental factors interact to form the processes that shape the relation between an individual’s spatial and social mobility. The complex relation between the concepts of motility, accessibility, and capability deserves more attention in future research on equity in transportation. We should note, though, that these concepts generally overlook issues of externality from a societal perspective.

4. For a discussion on the integration of Rawls’ theory and the CA applied to planning theory more broadly, see Fainstein (2010) and Basta (2015).

5. According to both Rawls’ theory and the CA, people’s health/physical integrity should be protected inasmuch as it is understood either as an individual basic right or as a basic capability.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Capes Foundation, Ministry of Education, Brazil [Grant Number BEX 1397/13-3]; Ipea – Institute for Applied Economic Research.