TEA | Transport and Equity Analysis

Understanding the equity implications of transport policies and investments is becoming increasingly important, as underscored by social movements around the world. This poses a major challenge in the assessment and appraisal of transport projects and policies, in which equity issues are currently hardly addressed. In fact, current evaluation methods in transport do not account for equity issues, and this topic is not dealt with in EU guidebooks for project evaluation. Only Germany, as an exception, considers equity between regions (Läender), but not in terms of accessibility to key life activities within an urban region. The TEA COST Action will contribute to the body of research by bringing together new approaches to incorporate equity consideration in transport project evaluation and decision making. The approaches consist of the measurement of accessibility with the literature on social justice, travel behavior models and socio-economic impacts analysis in line with mainstream welfare economics.

Floridea Di Ciommo, current co-director of cambiaMO, has been the chair of the program financed with European funds, bringing together more than 40 academic institutions and 100 researchers from Europe, the United States and the Middle East. The main results of ΤΕΑ have been (1) the establishment of a methodology to explore the links between transport accessibility and distribution factors; (2) the development of new transport assessment criteria that take into account accessibility in the social welfare function; (3) the generation of a guide to integrate the evaluation of equity in future transport policies and investments.