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Wambũi Kariũki and Karel Martens at ATR Conference 2024

Karel Martens and PhD candidate Wambũi Kariũki participated in the first-ever African Transport Research Conference, which took place 4-7 March 2024 in Cape Town, South Africa. Wambũi attracted much attention from the audience with her work on the nexus of dignity and paratransit. Karel presented two studies led by PhD candidate Chebe Polycap Chesifu on walking in Sub-Saharan Africa, both reporting on the impacts of different road designs on the prevalence and experience of walking among low-income residents, as well as their impacts on accessibility and livelihoods.

Wambui Kariuki and Ya’ara Tsairi win prestigious grant! 

PhD candidates Wambui Kariuki and Yaara Tsairi has been awarded a prestigious grant by the Israeli Smart Transport Research Center for excellency in research for the year 2024. Wambui research deals with investigating transport financing models and pricing effects on divers socio-economic backgrounds. Yaara research focuses on the topic of “workplace responsibility towards employee mobility.”

New Article: Workplace responsibility for employee mobility?

Corporations and other employers are increasingly expected to contribute to societal goals, going beyond merely profit-making. In this paper, Yaara Tsairi and Karel Martens review whether sustainability reporting frameworks also expect employers to address the social and environmental impacts of employee mobility. Their findings show a strong focus in reporting frameworks on greenhouse gas emissions, while largely ignoring other forms of environmental pollution and social inclusion issues. They advocate for expanded reporting requirements, so that employers are encouraged to address the far-reaching negative impacts related to employee mobility.

Omer Dilian wins prestigious grant!

PhD candidate Omer Dilian has been awarded the prestigious Pine excellency scholarship for early-stage PhD students. Omer’s research deals with older adults’ mobility and health decline and its relations with transport modes, with an emphasis on cessation processes – when, how and why do older adults cease using certain modes of transport, and what are the implications of this on their health and wellbeing.

Presentation by Ya’ara Tsairi, Omer Dilian and Ian Trivers at TRB

Lab members, Yaara Tsairi, Omer Dilian and Ian Trivers, presented their research in the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting 103, held in Washington DC, one of the most important conferences in the field. Their research deals with promoting bus stops, elderlies in public transportation and promoting sustainable employee transportation.

Karel Martens speaks at IPAM workshop at UCLA

Karel Martens gave an invited talk at a workshop on the Mathematical Foundations for Equity in Transportation Systems. The five-day workshop, co-organized and hosted by the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, was held at UCLA from 22-26 January 2024. The workshop brought together mathematicians, engineers, economists, and social scientists to connect mathematical models and algorithms with the burgeoning research on equity and justice. In his talk, Martens stressed the importance of starting from a clear and well-founded conceptualization of equity before moving to mathematical formulations. A recording of the lecture can be viewed here. 

Presentation by Karel Martens in a webinar in the Philippines 

On 11 October 2023, Karel Martens gave a keynote at a webinar on transport equity in the Philippines. In the seminar, the philosophical foundation of transport planning, rooted in principles of justice, was explored. Additionally, various pathways were discussed regarding its application and integration into transport planning education, training, and practice across Asia, with a specific emphasis on the Philippines.

New paper: implementing a sufficient level of accessibility 

In this paper, Karel Martens and Jean Ryan explore what is preventing transport authorities from adopting standards for basic accessibility in their strategic and operational plans. Drawing on interviews with professionals from Sweden, Belgium and UK, they identify both technical and political barriers. They conclude that standards for minimum accessibility could gain political support if their reach is clearly circumscribed.

Second grant from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology

The Fair Transport Lab has received a second grant from the Israel Ministry of Science and Technology ! The project, in cooperation with dr. Yodan Rofe of Ben Gurion University of Negev and Nachman Shelef of Transportation Insights, seeks to develop a new housing and transportation cost index that will explicitly ccount for transport justice, drawing on the Transit Score developed by Shelef.

Ebtihal Ragheb joins the lab! 

Ebtihal Ragheb is an M.Arch. student at the Faculty of Architecture and Town planning at Technion. She recently joined the Fair Transport Lab as a new research assistant. In her role, she will oversee the maintenance of  the lab’s website and communicate the team’s research results to the Israeli audience through writing short articles in both Hebrew and Arabic.

New article: Measuring travel problems: Testing a novel survey tool in a natural experiment 

In this paper, former lab member Matan Singer and Karel Martens introduce and validate a survey tool to assess people’s travel problems. Leveraging the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, they show that the survey provides robust insights into the extent to which people experience difficulties to reach destinations. The conclusion outlines a research agenda for developing versatile measurement tool.

The dashboard tracks the state of Transport Justice in 49 large metropolitan areas. Employing an explicit sufficiency standard for accessibility, it identifies where transit does and where it does not provide sufficient access to key destinations. The dashboard also provides detailed maps of accessibility insufficiency hotspots and an equity ranking of the analyzed cities.