(00:01):
Well I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet over someone, please save me trying to save the planet over someone. Please say me

(00:26):
Welcoming over my head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is Dr. Guilio Matteoli. Dr. Mattoli is a research fellow in the department of spatial planning at TU Dortmund. His research examines transportation systems and carbon emissions focusing on our car dependence with a particular interest in social inequality and transport disadvantage. He has published over 30 articles in peer reviewed academic journals since 2013 and was a contributing author to the I PCCs sixth assessment report on climate mitigation. Welcome to in over my head, Dr. Matt O

(00:58):
Thanks for having me.

(00:59):
So in talking about the just transition, I think it's important to cover transportation since this is such a large focus of many commitments to get to net zero, and I've heard it again and again, from previous guests that transportation North America revolves around the car, it's become such a part of our culture. And of course, this has been my experience living in Canada, European countries on the other hand are often championed for their excellent public transportation. Since you've researched transport poverty and car depends in Europe, I'm excited to get your perspective on all this. So to begin, I think let's dig into the data a bit. I know this will vary by country and region, but generally how dependent are Europeans on the car?

(01:35):
Yeah, well, yes, European countries are often portrayed as sort of sustainable transport paradise, but that's often a question of perspective. So if you look at it from North America, which is in many ways, extremely car-dependent, yes, Europeans use cars less, especially in large cities, they use public transport more and they walk and cycle more. But if you compare Europe with other world regions or with their own climate change targets, then suddenly it doesn't look so good. And Europe is actually pretty car-dependent in many ways. And that can be shown with many figures. For example, 82% of EU 28 residents had a driving license in 2014 and they were on average 1.4 cars per household and cars account for more than 80% of passenger-kilometres by motorized modes on land in 21 EU countries. And for more than 66% in all of them.

(02:31):
And in 16 member states of EU cars are the mode of transport used most often on a typical day, by at least 50% of the population in 2007 there was a survey EY that asked European citizens, whether they saw the car and other items as necessities that houses should not have to do without and in most countries more than 50% of the population agreed with that statement. And in the UK, they've asked this question for a long time since 1983, actually, which is interesting as we see car dependence increasing over time. So in 1983, just 22% saw the car as a necessity, but in 2012 it was 44%. So twice as much. And I wouldn't be surprised if you know, now, which is 10 years later, this figure was even higher. So definitely over the last few decades, this has got worse.

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And so why is this increase in car dependence happening in Europe?

(03:28):
Well, I think, I mean, levels of car ownership have increased along with growing incomes, but mostly we've. I think we've restructured our societies around the car, both in terms of areas that have been built. The 60 seventies, eighties are often, you know, very much built on the assumption, quite literally, that people will have a car and that they will need it to get around. So there's lots of car-dependent suburbs and per urban areas and things like that. And even things like social practices or even social norms have evolved around this. So certain leisure practices nowadays are made like car, whereas a couple of decades ago they weren't, or even things like the expectation that a parent with a, with a child needs to have a car ready to say, be able to rush to the hospital at a few moments. Notice, I don't think these expectations were there a couple of decades ago, at least not to that extent. So I think the more cars we've had, the more we've built our whole lives around them. And then it's a sort of thing that feeds itself in a way.

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And so how are, is our car dependence tied to our jobs?

(04:43):
Yeah, so there's quite a lot of research from North America showing that there's a very strong link between having a car and being able to get a job, being able to get out of welfare. So that's definitely a key factor in a person's employability. Europe is less codependent so that this topic has strong, less attention, but even there, there is evidence to suggest that cars outperform other modes in terms of access to employment opportunities, with negative effects on the employment, chances of persons without cars. And we see this even in places such as metropolitan regions in the Netherlands, which are renowned for the sustainable transport. I've seen figures that in England, 82% of the working-age population can't reach seven or more large employment centers by car within 45 minutes. But this is just 23% when you consider public transport. And that's basically just those living in the core of large metropolitan areas, such as London, Birmingham, and Manchester. So clearly if you don't live in one of those areas and you don't have a car, you are sort of at a disadvantage there when it comes to your choice of employment.

(05:56):
Yeah. And obviously we're talking about transportation poverty. So how does the car tie into transport poverty?

(06:04):
Well, transport poverty is a funny concept cuz it's used in the literature as a sort of broad umbrella to refer to all sorts of inequalities related to transport. And what I've done in my work is try to link this a little bit with the concept of car dependence, but in a paper that we published a few years ago with car Lucas and others, we suggested that it would be useful to break transport poverty down into four dimensions. And first of which is what we call mobility poverty, which refers to a lack of tangible transport resources. For example, if you don't have access to a car or if you don't have access to diesel in public transport. So that would be mobility poverty, but there's a second dimension, which we call transport affordability, which is more focused on the inability to meet the cost of transport.

(06:52):
So you might have that transport resource available in a way, but you might not be able to afford it. And then there's a third dimension that, which we call accessibility, poverty, which we sort of used to highlight that there are various other factors besides the lack of resources that can result in reduce accessibility. So there might be for example, mobility restrictions due to aging, due to disability due to safety concerns due to lack of certain skills or lack of time. So you might be able to afford using public transport nearby, but if you're too old or if you're a woman who's concerned about her safety, you might still, you know, not be able to use that opportunity. And these first three dimensions refer to inequalities in the distributions of the benefits of transport. So basically access to services and opportunities, but transport also creates a lot of burdens in terms of externalities, such as pollution, noise and so on, which have negative effects on health. And there are strong inequalities there as well in terms of population exposure to these a environmental and health issues. So we thought it would be helpful to have this as a fourth dimension of transport poverty, which we call exposure to transport externalities.

(08:10):
Yeah, it's really interesting. I think we can kind of touch on the, the first read and then we can touch on the fourth one. How many people are in that situation? It's not that they just can't afford the public transportation, but they fall into those other categories as well.

(08:23):
Yeah. It's a bit hard to quantify. Cause at these categories are more analytical, but they tend to overlap to some extent as well. What I've done in my work is try to quantify who are those people who own cars in Houston, but they struggle to afford the costs of cars. The kind of people that we hear about a lot when the fuel prices increase, you know, a lot of people are reliant on their cars, but really, really do struggle with increased fuel prices. And I've tried to quantify how many of them there are in countries like the UK and Germany and France to some extent. And I use different methods and I always sort of come to the same ballpark, which is between five and 10%. It's quite a few, but it's not as massive as it's open implied in the public discussions. But I suspect in a north American country, it could be more than that in European countries. If you look at people who are technically poor, typically you find that half of them don't have a car at all. And the other half they do have one, but they struggle to afford the running costs. Whereas I think in the us, or in Canada, you probably have more people who are technically poor, but do drive just because there are so few people without cars. So it might be a higher percentage in, in those countries.

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And so do you, I dunno if you have numbers on it, but do you have an idea of how many people are affected by transport poverty who don't fall into that category of they, they can't afford a car. So maybe it's the people who don't have access to the public transportation or, or other factors.

(09:54):
Yeah, we, I mean, in countries like Germany or the UK, you have roughly 20% of the population of households without cars and not all of them can't afford them. It's much less than that. Like something like 10% who say they can't afford them. And it's mostly people living in cities because people who can't afford them, but live in dependen area. Then at the end of the day, they get one anyway. Whereas, you know, if you're poor in an urban environment, you, you can't do without it, you will have a certain disadvantage from it. But yeah, we, we had a, a piece of research where we tried to estimate how many people were affected by one of, of, or the other of these many dimensions. And we came up with a pretty high figure, which I can't remember, but it was pretty high cause this, the people affected by, by one of these dimensions tend to be, those are not affected by the other. So say people with long, very long commutes with problems of time poverty typically not those who struggle to afford the costs of transport. So if you add them all up, you end up with a, with a pretty high figure.

(11:00):
Yeah. And I think this is interesting, cuz it doesn't just affect people who can't afford a car. It affects so many other people. And you talked a bit about time poverty. How does that play into transport poverty?

(11:12):
Yeah. This is something that we sort of call transport related time poverty. And there's not that much research about it, but it's basically when individuals need to spend such a long time traveling that it leads them to miss out on other important activities or it leads to social isolation. So there's quite a bit of research on this in the global south where there's lots of people who have no other choice, but to really walk very long distances and maybe to get to work. And they end up really spending a whole lot of time on it. But in places like Europe or north America, this problem is more often related to long commute with motor rights modes, either by car or by public transport. So for example, what I think we see in large cities in Europe, it's that you've got a pretty high share of the population without cars who travel to work by public transport.

(12:05):
But for some of them they do end up spending a whole lot of time commuting, you know, maybe more than one hour each way, which can lead them to travel less for other reasons. But then you, you also have people on the fringes of urban areas or outside of urban areas who spend a whole lot, lot of time commuting by car, which can have the same implications in terms of time poverty. So this problem is interesting in that's something that sort of crosscut that we can find both in co-dependent and less co-dependent areas, although for different reasons.

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And with that, you mentioned a bit of like missing out on social engagements. Were there any other adverse effects of long commutes?

(12:43):
Yeah, there's something this is something where there's been quite a few studies and they have shown associations between long commute and, and a range of adverse effects, including less time spent on activities, such as visiting others, exercise, volunteering, and other kinds of trouble, less emotional and moral support from relatives and friends and difficulties balancing commuting with family demands, which can lead to higher separation rates and lower fertility and generally worse health and quality of life increased stress and particularly for parents. So there's a whole range of negative effect from it that we don't get to talk about as much.

(13:27):
Does that lead to people maybe moving to different areas or do they just put up with the commute?

(13:33):
Yeah, I suppose like families are often in a difficult balancing situation, you know, where they commuting time is just one among many considerations and a house decides to live in a certain place because it allows both parents to commute to where they, maybe they work in different cities, you know, and that's like the midpoint or maybe they have family that lives there and they want to be near too. Or maybe they're looking for cheap housing. So a lot of these choices actually, when you dig into it and you interview those family, a lot of those choices are pretty rational in a way though, not entirely, but those are just such a complex set of factors that families need to consider, which that you, you can't understand why they might end up in such situations that are less than idea in some respect.

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How is housing affordability related to transport poverty?

(14:29):
Yeah, there is a very strong link between the two. So for example, when, when fuel prices spike, as it's been the case recently, there is a recurring argument that some low-income people live far away from cities, far away from everything. And they need to drive long distances to do pretty much anything. But if we look at the reasons why they ended up there, we often find that it's because they couldn't afford homeownership somewhere else. And so they decided to, as I believe you say, north America to drive onto you qualify for a mortgage, but we have that phenomenon in Europe as well. So in doing that, they sort of trade-off lower housing costs with higher transport costs and also make themselves vulnerable to fuel price increases because maybe they move to that area in times of low fuel prices. But then they are caught by surprise by a fuel price spike a couple of years later.

(15:21):
And there is evidence to suggest that, you know, I've just said that people are pretty rational, but they, can't also pretty irrational in that they have little, often little awareness of transport costs. So maybe housing costs are their primary consideration and transport costs for, for many reasons, they are difficult to grasp, you know, because you refuel every week and there are, you know, there are fixed costs and running costs every week. And so there are, they're a bit more difficult to grasp. Research has shown is that many houses tend to overlook the transport costs when they move to those car-dependent locations. So it can happen that people who move to those affordable places in terms of housing actually end up being a worse situation financially at the end of the day because of transport costs that they've not considered. So in practice, yeah. Transport affordability and housing affordability are very much Ang.

(16:16):
I think I'd like to touch on the transport externalities now. So let's talk a bit about that.

(16:22):
Yeah. So there's a lot of negative environmental impacts from transport ranging from not just climate change, but also things like road safety, exposure to local air pollution and noise pollution. And for all these problems, what we find is often a pattern of injustice whereby those who use cars less and therefore contribute the least to those problems are also those who tend to be the most exposed and the most vulnerable to them. So for example, people on low incomes who are more likely to live without cars are also more likely to live in proximity to heavily traffic roads often because housing is more affordable there or because that's where you find rented accommodation as opposed to homeownership. And that's the case in the city where I lived, for example, which is Dormont in Germany, where you have the Northern part of the city, which is significantly poor.

(17:13):
And it's also the part of the city with the wars air quality, because many drivers from other part of the city and probably from more affluent part of the city drive through that area, sort of imposing their pollution on the local resident. So that's pretty problematic. What we try to argue is that transport poverty is a complex thing with many dimensions. So when we're talking about transport policy or climate policy, we should really consider the impacts of such policies on all of these dimensions at the same time, not just to one of them. So for example, when we're talking about policies such as CO2 taxes or congestion charges or urban vehicle access regulations, which are thing in Europe, whereby you just say certain cars that are particularly polluting cannot enter a certain area, or if they do, they have to pay a charge. So when talking about this measure is often pointed out that they would disproportionately affect some low-income households who live in car-dependent areas as they would struggle to afford these additional expenses.

(18:14):
And that's true, to some extent there is a group of low-income people for whom that is true. And we've talked about that, but that's not the only inequality. I mean, there are at least in Europe, many low-income people who live without cars and who are particularly exposed to air pollution. So introducing measures that reduce car use would help mitigate that sort of inequality. So the, the effect of these measures of inequality is complex and contradictory in that it could make a certain kind of inequality worse, but it could make another kind of inequality better. And it's often the case that the public debate focuses on only one set of those inequalities, notably those related to affordability, perhaps because they're easier to grasp in terms of inequality. But if we ignore the others, we're probably going to come up with policies that are pretty unfair at the end of the day.

(19:02):
This show is about empowering citizens to take action when it comes to the climate crisis. So based on what we've been talking about today, what can people do to address transport poverty?

(19:13):
This is probably where I'm going to disappoint you in your listeners. Cuz my inclinations I'm, I'm much better at identifying describing problems. They're not coming up with solutions. So that's my sort of niche. This is why I like to, you know, exchange and work with people who are more solution-focused so that we can be more balanced as a team, as a general message. I think it's very important to recognize that card dependence as a problem that underlies many, if not all of the dimensions of transport poverty. So if, if we're in a situation where people are forced to rely on expensive and fossil fuel-based vehicles for satisfying their basic needs, this tends to cause a lot of inequalities and a lot of injustice and it makes solving all sort of UN environmental problems more difficult. So our first thing that people can do is to acknowledge perhaps that this is a problem that we should think about how to reduce car dependence and that this is not going to be easy, right?

(20:10):
Cause it is very much entrenched in many ways. I think the second thing that people can do is perhaps a change of mindset in how these inequalities are discussed. And this is an argument I am borrowing from Karen Martins. Who's a leading scholar in transport justice. What he says is that a common fallacy in transport debates is discussed in terms of winners and losers, right? So we have a particular policy and we say, who wins from this and who loses from this? But what he says is that that tends to assume that the state of score was fair in the first place, right? Which it isn't the case. If we look at transport and transport poverty, we have to recognize that the current situation is pretty unfair already. All those people, for example, living close to air pollution and living, you know, shorter lives as a result.

(20:57):
That's not very fair. When we think about measures that try to change, we should think about how does it change the state to score? Does it bring it nearer to a fairer situation or not? And in doing that, there might be some losers, but maybe they, you know, maybe they were privileged already. Maybe they ought to lose a little bit so that the winner is a losers frame is very widespread and it's pretty counterproductive. So I think if we can try and think in terms of is the current situation fair and if not, how can we make it a little bit fairer? That's already a first step towards grappling with these difficult questions.

(21:34):
Well, Dr. Mattioli, thanks so much for being on the show. This has been very educational.

(21:38):
Thank you. It was great to be on your show.

(21:42):
Well, that was my talk with Dr. Mattioli. My biggest takeaway was how complex transport poverty is. It's not just about people who can't afford a car. It's so much more complex than that. So I really appreciate how we broke down some of those different elements of transport poverty and explained it. So that was really good. If you're getting something from this show, I encourage you to tell a friend about it because the more people that we have addressing the climate crisis, the better off will be. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Bartz. Here's the feeling a little less in over our head when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see again, soon. In, over my head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

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I'm trying to save the planet or who will someone please save me.