Transport Poverty in Chinese Cities: A Systematic Literature Review

The widening income gap in post-reform China has given rise to social inequality. Among those, transport poverty and inequality have significantly affected the daily life of low-income groups. While important, this is an under-researched topic in China. This gap in the academic literature is glaring given the country’s urbanization rates, sprawling cities and income differentials. Most previous studies have only focused on two aspects of transport poverty—job-housing imbalance and accessibility. A comprehensive understanding of the causes and impacts of transport inequality is currently lacking. Therefore, a systematic review of academic literature based on keywords relevant to transport poverty in China was conducted to provide a more complete assessment of the situation in Chinese cities. In total, 62 relevant studies were identified after close examination of the articles (including titles, abstracts, and full-texts). This set of articles allowed a number of general patterns to be identified. It was found that the most common causes of transport poverty include: a lack of access to private vehicles; uneven access to alternative transport options; inadequate public transport provision; jobs-housing imbalance; and the hukou system (a system of household registration which aims to regulate population distribution and rural-to-urban migration). The main impacts of transport poverty include: curtailed mobility and longer travel times; higher household expenditures on travel; reduced access to jobs and essential services; higher household expenditures on travel; and health and environmental issues.

A novel metric for responding to transport inequality

Analysis of English data on personal travel provides new insights into the distributional implications of personal travel: not only do poorer people pay more in relative terms per unit distance for their travel; they also travel substantially more slowly than wealthier travellers. This implies that, in order to be useful to policy makers concerned about transport inequality, any measure of the costs borne by individuals when they travel must, as a minimum, include both time and relative financial impact. A tendency to omit financial impact is identified as one of several problems with the use of accessibility measures in this context, another being the general absence of individuals’ journey aspirations.In light of the above, an “index of personal travel impact” is defined, based on the journeys people would like to make rather than either their actual travel or centrally-made assumptions concerning “important” destinations. The index is calculated using income-adjusted financial impact and door-to-door journey time. It is made comparable across individuals by using crow-flies distance as the denominator. The formulation of the index is debated and steps toward its implementation discussed. Its potential usefulness in policy making is also briefly explored.