Insuring for accessibility Presented by Professor Karel Martens, Radboud University, Nijmegen

Insuring for accessibility
Presented by Professor Karel Martens, Radboud University, Nijmegen
Abstract

In Sovereign Virtue, Dworkin (2000) develops a theory of justice that puts competition over resources at its core. Dworkin proposes to use resources, rather than primary goods (Rawls 1971) or capabilities (Sen and Nussbaum), as the proper metric of fairness. He conceptualizes resources as the sum of material resources owned privately by individuals. A society is fair, according to Dworkin, if an equal amount of resources is devoted to each person’s life. In Dworkin’s approach, people insure themselves for bad luck. This includes disabilities, ill health, and lack of talents. Through insurance schemes, it is possible to determine whether people, if given equal resources, would be willing to set part of that resources aside to limit the bad luck which a person might encounter in life. This ‘willingness to insure’ is then seen as the indicator for the means that should be set aside in a real society through taxation, to assist people that befall this bad luck. In the paper, I will apply the Dworkian approach to the domain of transportation. I will do so through a set of abstract examples, in which people can insure themselves for lack of transportation opportunities that might befall them because of various situations. I will end with conclusions regarding fairness in the domain of transportation.

Speaker Biography

Karel Martens is Associate Professor at the Institute for Management Research of the Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He holds a bachelor and masters degree in Spatial Planning, and a PhD in Policy Sciences, all from the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. Martens has twenty years of international experience in research and practice, in both land use planning and transportation planning. He has carried out research and consultancy projects in the Netherlands, Israel, Belgium and the USA.

Karel is an expert in the fields of justice and mobility, transport and land use, and participatory decision-making. He has published extensively on the topic of fairness, justice and equity in the domain of transportation, amongst which in leading transportation journals such as Transportation, Transportation Research Part A and, Transportmetrica A. He has also given a number of invited lectures on transport and justice, at national and international conferences.

Karel has carried out a number of contract research projects relevant for the current project. For the Israeli Ministry of Transport, he has investigated ways to include equity concerns in the assessment of transportation investments (Martens, 2006). Based on this investigation, he has drafted, at the request of the Israeli ministry, detailed guidelines on equity assessment in the domain of transportation (Martens, 2007), which have been included in the official cost-benefit analysis guidelines of the Israeli Ministry of Transport in 2013. Karel has also conducted an equity assessment of the public transport network in the Utrecht region, the Netherlands, on behalf of BRU, the regional public transport authority, with a particular focus on groups in need of public transport, such as ethnic minorities, low income groups, and the elderly.

Together with a team of international colleagues, Karel has initiated a COST Action on Transport Equity Appraisal (TEA), which recently received funding from the European Union. A COST Action enables researchers and practitioners from EU and partner countries to bring together expertise from nationally-funded research at the European level. The ‘TEA’ COST-Action brings together European experts in the field of transport project appraisal, equity assessment, transportation economics, and travel behavior, in order to develop a novel approach to the integration of equity in the assessment of transport projects and programs.