Urban transport, pedestrian mobility and social justice: a GIS analysis of the case of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area

Urban transport projects redistribute accessibility and environmental quality across the city, potentially creating disadvantages for some social groups. This thesis investigates whether these effects are cumulative or compensatory in the case of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, analysing inequalities in the light of competing principles of social justice. The novelty of this research lies in the interpretation of local environmental effects as factors restraining the mobility of pedestrians. We propose a series of GIS-based indicators, including community severance and noise exposure of pedestrians on the way to work and walking around their neighbourhoods. We found that projects giving priority to private transport have a disproportionate effect on the pedestrian environment of the elderly and low-qualified populations. The analysis addresses two of the most pressing issues in transport equity analysis. The first is the spatial heterogeneity in patterns of inequality. We estimate relationships between socio-economic variables and indicators of the local effects of transport using alternative comparison areas, defined in terms of centrality and commuting destinations. We found that the social distribution of those effects is sensitive to location and spatial scale. The second issue is the nature of the processes leading to inequalities. We show that accessibility and pedestrian mobility have an influence on neighbourhood socio-economic recomposition and on patterns of settlement in newly developed areas. We also analyse the implications of integrating distributive concerns in transport planning. In the design of the optimal route alignment for a new road, these concerns may increase aggregate community severance costs. In the application of traffic restriction policies, there are trade-offs between the welfare of different groups of concern in terms of time to work and pedestrian exposure to noise. In both cases, the achievement of equity may not be compatible with the party-political interests of the policy-maker

Does road accessibility to cities support rural population growth? Evidence for Portugal for the 1991-2011 period

Transport investment is frequently advocated as having the double virtue of achieving both economic growth and territorial cohesion. The idea is that improving the accessibility of lagging regions to cities, increases the attractiveness of those regions for people and businesses. However, transport is only one of the factors affecting local development and there is no consensus on its net effect on population growth. The large scale of public funding allocated to motorway investment since the country joined the European Union in 1986 makes Portugal an ideal case study to examine the potential effect of improved road accessibility on the development of lagging rural areas. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between rural population change and road accessibility to the urban hierarchy (i.e. cities of different sizes) between 1991 and 2011. Regression analyses show that rural population growth is negatively associated with road distance and road travel time to the urban hierarchy, notably to medium-sized cities (i.e. 20,000-99,999 inhabitants). This suggests that medium-size cities play an important role in supporting population growth in their rural hinterlands. Robustness tests confirmed the validity of these findings. There is no evidence of nonlinearities in the magnitude of the effect between accessible and remote rural areas, which may be partially related to the relatively small size of the country.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio