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On November 26, Mauro Salazar will host professor Karel Martens.

Title: Transport justice versus modeling, optimization and AI: two worlds apart?

Abstract:

The development of mathematical foundations for justice in transportation systems requires a careful definition of what is meant by 鈥榡ustice鈥� before turning to the mathematical foundations. In my presentation, I aim to contribute in three ways to the discussion. 

First, I will provide a broad overview of how justice could be understood in transport. In the philosophical literature, justice is often defined as the 鈥渕orally proper distribution of benefits and burdens over members of society鈥�. This definition suggests that justice in transport can focus on various benefits and burdens 鈥� like mobility, accessibility, health impacts and pollution 鈥� and can use a range of moral principles to assess patterns of distribution 鈥� like equality, proportionality, sufficiency, and equalization. Yet, this distributive perspective is to open ended to truly promote transport justice. The proper question to ask is what we owe to each other in the field of transport. Different answers can be given to this question, with the recently emerging relational approach to justice suggesting that transport should contribute to 鈥渁 world of equals鈥�. 

Second, I will briefly present the outline of philosophical argument developed in my book Transport Justice. Drawing on Michael Walzer, I argue in the book that the equity of transport systems should be assessed based on the accessibility it confers to people. Subsequently, I draw on the philosophical works of John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin to develop an argument in favor of an intuitively appealing principle of justice: each person is entitled to a sufficient level of accessibility (under virtual all circumstances). 

Third, I will apply this sufficiency principle to the assessment of the transport systems in 49 large US metropolitan areas. For this purpose, the sufficiency principle is formalized in a mathematical equation drawn from poverty studies. It enables the systematic comparison of the fairness of transport systems between metropolitan areas, as well as an identification of patterns of insufficient accessibility within these areas. The analyses show the vast transport injustices in current US regions. I end the presentation with a pathway for enhancing justice and a call for the development of analytical and mathematical tools to identify transport network improvements that can bring as many people as possible above the sufficiency threshold within a given budget.

Bio:

Karel Martens holds a master鈥檚 degree in Spatial Planning (1991) and a PhD in Policy Sciences (2000), both from Radboud University, the Netherlands. He is a Full Professor of Transport Planning and holds the David J. Azrieli Chair in Architecture and Town Planning at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, where he also heads the Fair Transport Lab. 

Martens is an international expert on transport and justice. He has authored numerous publications on the topic, culminating in his book Transport Justice: Designing Fair Transportation Systems, which has been described by colleagues as 鈥済round-breaking鈥�, a 鈥渓andmark鈥�, and a 鈥渞evolution鈥�. He was one of the initiators of the EU COST Action on Transport Equity Appraisal (TEA), which brought together European experts to develop novel approaches to the integration of equity in the assessment of transport projects. 

In 2014, Martens was elected Transport Professional of the Year in the Netherlands, in part because of his inspiring work on transport and justice.