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Two Fully-funded PhD positions in Fair Transport Lab!

The Fair Transport Lab has 2 fully-funded PhD positions:

One position is for a project that seeks to bridge the gap between big data and transport justice. More details about the position can be found here (in English) and here (in Hebrew).

The second position is for a project that aims to obtain reliable estimates of the incidence and severity of mobility problems across a population. More details about the position can be found here (in English) and here (in Hebrew).

Research Assistant Position in the Fair Transport Lab

We are looking for a passionate and detail-oriented Research Assistant (part-time) to join the Lab! The selected candidate will be in charge of updating the Fair Transport Lab website, assist with ongoing research projects (including collecting data, analyzing and summarizing results, etc.), translate research materials from English to Hebrew and vice versa, and any additional work related to Professor Martens’ and Lab members’ research.

More details about the position can be found here.

New grant from the Israel Ministry of Science & Technology!

The Fair Transport Lab has received a grant from the Israel Ministry of Science & Technology to explore whether big data on people’s mobility can be used to identify people and population segments at risk of mobility problems. Karel Martens will be leading this project, jointly with co-investigator prof. Avigdor Gal from the Technion’s Faculty of Data and Decision Science.

New grant from the Israel Ministry of Science & Technology!

The Fair Transport Lab has received a grant from the Israel Ministry of Science & Technology to explore whether big data on people’s mobility can be used to identify people and population segments at risk of mobility problems. Karel Martens will be leading this project, jointly with co-investigator prof. Avigdor Gal from the Technion’s Faculty of Data and Decision Science.

Karel Martens at the Israel Association of Municipal Engineers

On 27 February 2023, Karel Martens gave a keynote at the Winter Conference of the Israel Association of Municipal Engineers in Modi’in, Israel. During his talk Can we accelerate housing production and achieve transport justice? Karel showed the audience how redesigning traffic space can generate multiple opportunities for new housing projects, while also improving quality of life.

Jonathan Levine visits the Fair Transport Lab

Last May, the Fair Transport Lab was honored by a visit from Prof. Jonathan Levine. Prof. Levine, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, who joined the distinguished ranks of The Israel Pollak Distinguished Lecture Series. During his visit, Prof. Levine delivered inspiring lectures on the gradual but revolutionary shift from accessibility to mobility in transport planning.

Keynote on Integrated Public Transport in City Regions in Estonia

On 27 April 2023 Karel Martens gave a keynote lecture at a CARIN-PT event in Tallin, Estonia. CARIN-PT, an EU Horizon 2020 research project, aims to explore the relations between social inequalities and public transport. In his lecture,  A Transport Justice Perspective on Fare-Free Public Transport, Karel explored the (lack of) justifications for fare-free public transport.

Diana Saadi at AESOP Congress in Poland

Lab member Diana Saadi presented her research at the AESOP 2023 Annual Congress in Lodz, Poland, which took place on 11-15 July. Her study explored the differences in daily travel behavior between Arab and Jewish population in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. She found that Arabs who moved to Jewish towns and cities show similar travel patterns to their Jewish neighbors, while being distinctly different from their Arab counterparts who live in Arab towns. Amongst others, results showed that Jews and Arabs living in Jewish towns have lower total daily travel distance, shorter home-to-work trips, yet more chauffeuring trips than Arabs living in Arab towns.

Karel Martens invited to give yearly PBL Academielezing

Recognizing that justice is becoming increasingly important in designing spatial and environmental policies, the Netherland Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) invited Karel Martens as the speaker for its yearly ‘Academielezing’. For a large audience of national, regional and local decision-makers, Karel presented his perspective on Fairness in Policies for Cities and Regions: Mobility and Housing on 25 May 2023 in The Hague, the Netherlands.

New Article on Systematic Measurement of Travel Problems

In this paper, John Pritchard and Karel Martens move beyond the measurement of people’s travel behavior towards the direct measurement of the travel problems people may experience. Their approach enables the identification of both the successes and the failures of government’s investments in transport infrastructures and services.

Karel Martens Staring at the Annual Conference of Landscape Architects

Last December, Karel Martens gave a keynote address at the 19^th Annual Conference of the Israeli Association of Landscape Architects, held in Tel Aviv. Karel called on landscape architects to use their expertise to (re)design urban streetscapes in a way that not only makes them greener, but also more inclusive.

Ya’ara Tsairi and Diana Saadi at the Israeli Transport Conference

Lab members Ya’ara Tsairi and Diana Saadi presented their research at the 3^rd Annual and Students Conference of the Israel Smart Transportation Research Center. Ya’ara’s presentation explored to what extent social responsibility frameworks require companies to report on employee mobility. Diana presented her analysis of the differences in travel behavior between three distinct groups in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area: Arabs living in Arab towns, Arabs living in Jewish towns, and Jews living in Jewish towns.

Karel Martens at 2022 Conference on Advancing Public Transport in Israel

On 20 October 2022 Karel Martens joined ministers, governmental officials and academy experts to discuss the future of public transportation in Israel at this yearly event organized by Transport Today & Tomorrow. In his talk, Karel showed how urban and intercity junctions can be turned into efficient and comfortable transfer nodes for public transport users.

Avital Arbel at the Rural Geographies in Transition Conference

Avital Arbel, a PhD researcher in the Fair Transport Lab, presented her work on youth mobility in rural areas at the 3rd European Rural Geographies Conference, held on 26-29 June 2023, in Groningen, the Netherlands. Avital is analyzing rural youth’s mobility needs, their strategies for coping with mobility challenges, as well as their attitudes towards (lack of) fairness in transport planning. Her initial findings show that rural youth relies much more on cars than urban youth, while they use non-motorized modes at half or less the rate of urban youth. The findings also show that rural youth have to travel over substantially larger distances to access work and other opportunities.

Karel Martens at the Urban@It Seminar in Italy

On 27 January 2023 Karel Martens gave a keynote lecture titled Leveraging transport justice to build a new transport future at the Urban@it seminar on Mobility and the City: Towards the Post-car City, held in Bologna, Italy. In this talk, he criticized how proponents of car-free cities tend to focus their efforts on select early adopters of car-free lifestyles. Instead, Karel proposed to promote car-free cities by adopting a transport justice approach, in which most investments in public transport, cycling and walking flow to the large, often low-income, urban populations who are already living a car-free or car-light lifestyle.

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.

Karel Martens at the University of Westminster

On 27 May 2022 Karel Martens remotely joined the research-to-practice-seminar Transport Justice – Putting Principles into Practice organized by the University of Westminster. Karel shared how the functioning of transport systems can be assessed from the perspective of justice, thereby shedding an entirely different light on what is and what is not a transport problem.