Editorial - Household transport costs, economic stress and energy vulnerability

Since the early 2000s issues of transport poverty and social exclusion have received increasing attention in transport studies (Dodson et al., 2004; Hine and Mitchell, 2001; Lucas et al., 2001). Although much of this research has focused on low-mobility and/or carless individuals, there has been growing awareness that the costs of daily mobility can have important economic stress impacts. In developed countries with high levels of car dependence, the costs of motoring can be burdensome, raising questions of affordability for households with limited economic resources. A number of developments in the first two decades of this century have contributed to raise the profile of household transport costs as a research topic and a policy concern. First, and more obviously, increasing and increasingly volatile global oil prices have raised concerns for the vulnerability of households to fuel price increases (Dodson and Sipe, 2007). Second, the rise of the climate change agenda has led to consider pricing measures as a key component of sustainable transport policy. Implementation of such measures however, has often been hampered by concerns for the distributional impacts of increasing transport costs faced by households. Third, the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its aftermath have highlighted broader issues of living standards, economic stress and affordability, which go beyond the specific case of transport. In this context, a further reason to investigate household transport costs has to do with other competing pressures on household budgets.