Karel Martens - Transport Justice: Designing fair transportation systems

Amidst a conservative political atmosphere across much of the developed world, justice is back on their agendas, at least those of civil society organizations and the general public. Social movements across the globe are involved in struggles against often brutal forms of social, environmental and spatial injustices, which often directly threaten persons lives or livelihoods.

Against this background, the injustices in the domain of transportation hardly ever attract attention. They are typically not a matter of life and death and, as a result, are seldom visible to the public eye. Yet the importance of transportation, and the possible impacts of a lack of transportation, can hardly be overestimated. Transportation is a fundamental requirement to participate in the labor market, obtain health care, enjoy education, or meet family and friends. It is a basic prerequisite for a life of meaning and value. Injustices in the domain of transportation should thus not be ignored, even if their impacts do not make it to newspaper headlines.

Moreover, transportation systems are to a large extent the outcome of intentional design. Governments at all levels, in developed and developing countries alike, have a leading role in the design of these systems. The design is typically guided by concerns over economic growth and economic efficiency. Yet, more than any other actor, governments as the representative of all persons in their jurisdictions have the moral obligation to act as guardians of the interests of all persons. Their actions should thus avoid pertinent injustices, while promoting justice where practically feasible. The design of transportation systems cannot be an exception to this rule. Governments fail and an injustice is done whenever the design of transportation systems ignores the plight of persons lacking adequate transport services.

This book presents an alternative approach to the design of transportation systems, an approach that takes principles of justice as its starting point. The resulting proposal may seem radical at first. But it should be recalled that when womens voting rights or basic education were proposed in the nineteenth century, their proponents were also depicted as radicals. Yet more than a century later it is hard to imagine that reasonable people ever opposed these ideas, let alone imagine a world without these basic rights. It has been my ambition with this book to strengthen and support the proponents who call for transportation justice, whether they are radical advocates, hard-working civil servants, visionary politicians, or others. It is my hope that, through their work, transportation justice will be seen as something obvious in the future, even though its shape may be fundamentally different from the one laid down in this book.