Accessibility, mobility and transport-related social exclusion

This paper briefly reviews the inexorable rise of the social exclusion policy paradigm and uses an adaptation of Amartya Sen’s theory of entitlement to determine appropriate policy responses. In particular, the promotion by the UK Department for Transport of accessibility planning is examined. Although this initiative is not totally without merit, the resulting analysis may be too aggregate, both spatially and socially. The weakness of such an approach is that transport-related social exclusion is not always a socially and spatially concentrated process. Instead we suggest a matrix of area accessibility, area mobility and individual mobility as a possible schema for identifying concentrated and scattered manifestations of social exclusion and inclusion and for suggesting appropriate policy responses. This schema helps produce a more spatially and socially differentiated conceptualisation of social exclusion, helps identify policy responses and most critically highlights that the problems of the socially excluded immobile should not be analysed in isolation from the socially included mobile.