Have you ever heard of transport poverty? Chances are, you haven’t. It’s been described as “a hidden crisis”, and it impacts millions of people around the world, in urban and rural communities alike.
An oft-quoted description of transport poverty is “an individual’s inability to fully participate in social life due to limited means of transport.” But those few words hide layers of complexity, as a 2016 paper – now seen as seminal – showed. The authors, led by Dr Karen Lucas at the University of Leeds*, set out all of the various factors that contribute to transport poverty. Their list was long, but it included things like affordability – that is, the inability of a person to meet the cost of transport in their own economy. This might be due to high public transport fares, or a result of ‘forced car ownership’, where low-income households have to spend a high share of their income on running a car, because public transport options are unsuitable or don’t exist. But money is not the only contributor. Accessibility is another factor – can individuals easily reach certain key activities (e.g. employment, education, healthcare services, shops, etc.) within a reasonable time-frame?
On their search for a universal definition, Lucas and her colleagues proposed the following (this is taken directly from their paper): An individual is transport poor if, in order to satisfy their daily basic activity needs, at least one of the following conditions apply.
- There is no transport option available that is suited to the individual’s physical condition and capabilities.
- The existing transport options do not reach destinations where the individual can fulfill his/her daily activity needs, in order to maintain a reasonable quality of life.
- The necessary weekly amount spent on transport leaves the household with a residual income below the official poverty line.
- The individual needs to spend an excessive amount of time travelling, leading to time poverty or social isolation.
- The prevailing travel conditions are dangerous, unsafe or unhealthy for the individual.
How do we measure it?
Even with this comprehensive definition in place, it’s difficult to quantify the scale of transport poverty globally. The small number of metrics that do exist (e.g. the poverty line) are often poorly defined. Proposed thresholds – e.g. the RAC Foundation’s suggestion that households spending over 10% of their income on transport should be considered ‘transport poor’ – may not be relevant in all situations, and they omit non-financial factors. In addition, data coverage is limited, with most of the published research on transport poverty research focusing on ‘developed’ countries, while leaving ‘developing’ countries understudied and under-served.
But there are some clues. For example, a UK-focused study published in November 2023 and focused solely on affordability estimates that 5 million individuals (or 8% of the population) experience transport poverty, with transport costs pushing them below the poverty line. The authors write, “A further 8 million are already in poverty before accounting for transport, and see their poverty exacerbated as a result. The costs, however, are not evenly distributed, and tend to fall disproportionately on the poorest households.” In Australia, somewhere between 8-12% of households are considered to be in transport poverty. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the proportion is 17% (just over 31 million households), making it “the developing region with the highest share of total household spending dedicated to transport”. Eastern Europe and Central Asia are in second place with 11%, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa (9%), and South Asia (5%). The numbers are staggering, and they show us that transport poverty is not a niche issue.
So, how can we begin to tackle it? As with all complex issues, there’s no simple, single solution. But researchers from Aotearoa New Zealand have found that making public transport cheaper can be one very effective option.
Half-price fares can help
Writing in the journal Transport Findings last week, their paper reports on a 2022 transport survey sent out to two urban communities – people living in social housing, and residents of a retirement village – in Ōtautahi Christchurch. This survey was one of three that were carried out in 2021, 2022, and 2023 as part of a larger, longitudinal project called ACTIVATION, which is investigating the impact of shared transport on peoples’ health and wellbeing.
Dr Angela Curl, a senior lecturer at the University of Otago's Department of Population Health, and lead author of the paper, describes it as “an opportunistic bit of work.” In 2022, halfway through the Otago study, the New Zealand government introduced a "transport temporary relief package….to support New Zealanders through the global energy crisis.” Between April 2022 to June 2023, fuel excise duty, road user charges, and public transport fares were all reduced. As a result, the cost of bus travel in Christchurch was halved, dropping an adult single fare to NZ$1.30 with a MetroCard, or NZ$2.10 cash.
“That gave us an opportunity to ask some questions about transport affordability,” said Curl. “And when we did a descriptive analysis of the survey responses, I was really surprised by the results. The differences between our two samples were so significant.”
They found that close to half (45%) of public housing residents said that half-price fares had allowed them to make a trip they would otherwise have been unable to take, compared to 16% of retirement home residents. When asked if the cheaper fares meant they were “able to spend more money on other things such as food”, more than a third (36%) of public housing respondents said yes, compared to just 8 % of the second group.
A quarter of public housing respondents said that they would not have taken their most recent trip if paying a full price fare (retirement residents = 8 %) and crucially, 15% of them said that if they hadn’t traveled by bus, they would have had to walk or cycle instead. “What this shows is that you've got people who are having to walk and cycle because it's all they can afford,” said Curl, speaking to me over Zoom. “In Christchurch, the MetroCard used to have a $10 minimum top-up. We've worked with people who couldn't afford to put $10 on their card in one go. They end up paying more expensive cash fares because they can't do that advance payment. Transport accessibility is a lot more complex than just ‘is there something close by?’”
Curl also emphasized the importance of thinking about transport poverty in the context of climate justice, saying, “We have to reduce car ownership and to become less reliant on cars from a climate perspective, absolutely. But the target of that effort shouldn't be people on low incomes, because we've created a situation [in New Zealand] that, because of the way we build cities, people need a car to get around. Not having one puts them at risk. We shouldn’t make people who've already suffered from our economic system be the ones that suffer because of climate action. We have to make sure climate action is just. And there are ways to achieve both. Things like reducing public transport fares!”
* Lucas is now a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester
