The Right to Mobility: Social Justice in Urban Transport

The right to mobility is the guarantee that every person can reach the places they need, work, school, hospital, family, at a cost in time and money that does not exclude them from the life of the city. It is not the right to move for its own sake but the right to access, which is why it is measured in reachable opportunities rather than kilometres of road. Two authors have shaped that idea: David Harvey, who in Social Justice and the City (1973) showed that location and transport silently redistribute real income, and Susan Handy, an engineer at the University of California, Davis, who made accessibility the central measure of transport planning.

David Harvey: transport redistributes real income

Harvey started from a simple observation: a household's real income depends not only on its wages but on where it lives and how much it costs to reach what it needs. A motorway connecting affluent suburbs to the centre transfers value to its users and takes it from those who live beside it, breathe its fumes and never use it. A poor public transport system in low-income peripheries forces residents to pay in hours of travel what others pay in money. Harvey concluded that transport decisions are decisions about who wins and who loses, and that presenting them as technical hides that redistribution.

Susan Handy: accessibility versus mobility

Handy gave that critique a tool. In her work since the 1990s she distinguishes mobility, the ability to move fast and far, from accessibility, the ease of reaching valued destinations. A city can have high mobility and low accessibility if things are far apart and reachable only by car, or low mobility and high accessibility if school, shops and work are ten minutes away on foot. Handy proposes measuring transport by how many jobs, services and people each resident can reach in a given time, and shows that this measure favours density, mixed uses and public transport over motorways.

Transport poverty and justice: the Bus Riders Union

Transport poverty is the concrete face of the problem. It affects those without a car in a city built for it, those who spend more than is reasonable on travel, those who turn down a job because they cannot get there and those who do not go out for fear or because of physical barriers. The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union showed in 1996 that it was possible to sue a system that invested in suburban rail for the middle classes while cramming poor workers onto buses, and won more buses and lower fares through the courts. Karel Martens has since proposed a theory of transport justice that sets a guaranteed minimum of accessibility for everyone.

Policies to guarantee the right to mobility

The policies that make the right to mobility effective are well known. Frequent, affordable public transport that reaches the peripheries, with social fares and, where tried, free travel, as in Tallinn since 2013 or Luxembourg since 2020. Cycle networks and pavements that make moving without an engine safe. Universal accessibility in vehicles and stations for people with disabilities, older people and families with pushchairs. Planning that brings services closer to housing, in the spirit of the fifteen-minute city. And evaluation of every investment by the accessibility it creates for those with least, not by the minutes it saves those who drive.

The right to mobility connects with the right to the city: without being able to get there, no participation in urban life is possible. Harvey and Handy, from critical theory and from engineering, agree that transport is a social justice policy before it is a matter of flows, and that the right question about any project is not how much traffic it moves but whom it brings closer and whom it leaves behind.