Environmental justice is an increasingly important element of policymaking in transportation and is fundamentally about fairness toward the disadvantaged, often addressing the exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from decisionmaking. This handbook is intended to help those who are new to transportation decision processes influence how environmental justice is incorporated into decisions about transportation policy and projects. Various approaches to environmental justice are discussed, along with steps in the planning process when citizen involvement is particularly effective, suggestions for how environmental justice can be included in a project, and legal requirements for environmental justice implementation.

Lack of access to transportation among low-income groups is increasingly being recognised as a barrier to social inclusion. However, 'transport poverty', and its links with wider welfare objectives, is poorly understood. This book looks at the delivery of transport from a social policy perspective to assist in a better understanding of this issue.

Publisher Description

Transport Justice develops a new paradigm for transportation planning based on principles of justice. Author Karel Martens starts from the observation that for the last fifty years the focus of transportation planning and policy has been on the performance of the transport system and ways to improve it, without much attention being paid to the persons actually using – or failing to use – that transport system. There are far-reaching consequences of this approach, with some enjoying the fruits of the improvements in the transport system, while others have experienced a substantial deterioration in their situation. The growing body of academic evidence on the resulting disparities in mobility and accessibility, have been paralleled by increasingly vocal calls for policy changes to address the inequities that have developed over time. Drawing on philosophies of social justice, Transport Justice argues that governments have the fundamental duty of providing virtually every person with adequate transportation and thus of mitigating the social disparities that have been created over the past decades. Critical reading for transport planners and students of transportation planning, this book develops a new approach to transportation planning that takes people as its starting point, and justice as its end.