Operationalizing an indicator of sufficient accessibility – a case study for the city of Rotterdam

Abstract

Equity considerations in transportation planning literature have received increasingly more attention in the previous decades. While there have been theoretical suggestions to base transportation planning methods on the philosophical principle of “sufficientarianism” (whereby everyone is entitled to a minimum level of a good or service), the proposed approaches have not yet been developed enough to be usable for policy decision-making. In this paper we aim to bridge this gap by operationalizing in a case study an indicator of equity based on the theoretical work of Martens (2017) which argues for sufficientarianism. The presented formalised methodology can identify and quantify equity issues in transportation, is flexible to different contexts, and is a transparent way to assess equity in transportation. The case study shows that data availability is an important constraint and that careful attention must be paid to various assumptions and choices made.