A novel metric for responding to transport inequality

Analysis of English data on personal travel provides new insights into the distributional implications of personal travel: not only do poorer people pay more in relative terms per unit distance for their travel; they also travel substantially more slowly than wealthier travellers. This implies that, in order to be useful to policy makers concerned about transport inequality, any measure of the costs borne by individuals when they travel must, as a minimum, include both time and relative financial impact. A tendency to omit financial impact is identified as one of several problems with the use of accessibility measures in this context, another being the general absence of individuals’ journey aspirations. In light of the above, an “index of personal travel impact” is defined, based on the journeys people would like to make rather than either their actual travel or centrally-made assumptions concerning “important” destinations. The index is calculated using income-adjusted financial impact and door-to-door journey time. It is made comparable across individuals by using crow-flies distance as the denominator. The formulation of the index is debated and steps toward its implementation discussed. Its potential usefulness in policy making is also briefly explored.