The reason why "transport poverty" is suddenly getting attention is ETS 2, which is expected to increase motor fuel prices a lot from 2027, and the associated "Social Climate Fund" which aims at supporting groups that are vulnerable to such price increases.
The Commission outlines a number of eligible measures which Member States can include in their SCF plans to tackle transport poverty
The Commission has also put forward a definition of transport poverty with 3/4 dimensions: Affordability, Availability, Accessibility and Adequacy.
(little self-congratulatory note here that these dimensions were inspired by a paper we wrote in 2016)
The Commission is recommending to Member States to introduce "social leasing schemes" to (as far as I understand) help lower-income households afford electric vehicles, following the example of France
At the same time the Commission recommends prioritizing more sustainable transport modes and reducing car dependency
The Comission emphasises the need for indicators to identify vulnerable groups, as the first step in a "strategic approach for combatting and preventing transport poverty"
The Annexes provide examples of indicators for the various dimensions of transport poverty, based on another recent report (linked below)
(second self-congratulatory note as some of these indicators are inspired by my publications)
But probably the most interesting thing is the "Transport Poverty Hub" - a data dashboard where indicators of accessibility and transport poverty can be visualised for the whole of the EU
(note that you need EU Login credentials to access the dashboard but don't let that discourage you - anyone can get access credentials you just need to register)
The Dashboard basically lets you map indicators of accessibility / travel time to different destinations (opportunities/people, primary schools, health care) by different transport modes (walking, cycling, public transport and driving) to identify where access is difficult
Note that there was no comparable EU-wide data basis on this to date - and in many countries not even national or regional statistics, so this is a huge step forward.
The indicators are estimated at a 1*1km grid resolution, so I can for example visualize accessibility to primary schools by public transport in and around Dortmund where I live...
...but they can also be aggregated at a higher level, so I can see for example how average accessibility to primary schools by public transport compares across municipalities in the region where I live...
...or across different European regions (at NUTS 3 / 2 / 1 level)
And for each indicator, several thresholds can be set , including an "accessibility poverty gap" that is meant to measure how bad the problem is overall
From what I hear this is a first version of the Dashboard and it will be improved with more data and possibly more indicators in the future. Overall great work congratulations!
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We first review existing cross-sectional evidence on the deteminants of air travel - summarised in this table (which the reviewers didn't like so didn't make it into the final paper :) )
Why it's interesting to use panel data?
1. How travel behaviour changes over the life course is interesting in and of itself
2. It provides better evidence of causality than cross-sectional data
3. Shows which groups & trends are driving rapid growth in air travel
Having grown up in Berlusconi's Italy, I can feel it in my bones that when they win the first time, it's tough, but when they win *again*, after all they've demonstrated, *that's* the really hard one to take
When it happens the first time, you can think "This is an aberration, this was a tantrum, people don't really stand behind this, this is not who we are". The second time around really brings home that yes, this is what many of "us" are & stand for.
But in a way, it cures you from populism. No there is no innocent, well-intentioned mass of people who have been misled. We live in liberal democracies with a lot of people who fundamentally reject key principles of liberal democracy.
[Little pedantic note before we start. For various good reasons the analysis in this paper refers to "fuel burnt", not CO2 emissions. But there is an almost perfect equivalence between the two so it doesn't matter in the end]
More than half of flights globally (54.5%) are over distances of less than 1,000km. The kind of flights you could imagined substituting with trains
The problem is that these flights account for *just 17.9% of fuel burnt*. Why? Because they're short
When my German-Italian son was born in the UK, with my family name despite us not being married, the German officials initially wanted to give us a passport with the mother's name, despite him having my name on both the UK birth certificate and the Italian passport 🤦♂️
There is something deeply amusing (and annoying ofc) in this "We refuse to acknowledge that foreign countries exist" when dealing with foreign countries that you sometimes encounter with Behörde.
OFC this attracted the usual responses along the lines of "How dare you question the holy rules"
Aviation emissions are booming. With climate targets looming, you would expect governments to act. And yet they don't - if anything they work to make sure that emissions increase even further. But why?
We tend to think of the aviation problem as one where we have this problematic sector, aviation, and then the State sitting outside of it. And we want the State to act as a REGULATOR so that emissions decrease.
What this study shows is that this is a very naive way of thinking.