PUBLIC TRANSPORT ACCESSIBILITY AND SOCIAL EXCLUSION: MAKING THE CONNECTIONS

Social exclusion is a condition affected by different factors: quality of life, low income, inadequate housing conditions, high crime rates, elderly age and ethnic/cultural minority are all crucial aspects that must be considered. The possibility to have a good access, in a spatial sense of the term, to work places, education and healthcare services is a key factor to achieve that the whole population could take part to the society. In many South Italy cities, access to opportunities is mainly guaranteed by private transport, since public transport supply and services are low quality. Public transport should have the main role to overcome the mobility difficulties faced by disadvantaged groups. Accessibility to destinations by public transport can be considered a proper indicator and a simple measure to assess the impact of changes in the transport system on potential users and to evaluate solutions to remove spatial barriers. Accessibility indicators can aid decision makers in the determination of those population categories that are socially excluded and they can also be used to improve transport urban service supply. In this paper transit accessibility measures are evaluated for an urban area using a GIS approach, taking into consideration socio economic factors from CENSUS data. Moreover, Lorenz curve is used to measure how accessibility by public transport is redistributed among different categories as a result of different alternative transport projects; through the use of this methodology, the Gini coefficients provide a single measure of overall accessibility equity. Methodology is tested in a case study related to the city of Catania.