Skip to content 
How people move through their cities, or are prevented from freely moving, may seem like a commonplace infrastructural issue but at the core of the issue lies fairness, power and opportunity. Transportation systems reflect decades of decisions informed by political parties and movements, patterns of exclusion and reinforcement of power structures. Mobility justice asserts that transportation systems are deeply political, and attention should be paid to the disparities embedded in how we fund, design, regulate and encourage movement in urban spaces.
What is mobility justice?
Mobility justice’s primary goal is to examine the systemic barriers keeping specific transport users from safe, affordable and dignified movement. Multiracial collective The Untokening, that “centres the lived experiences of marginalized communities to address mobility justice and equity,” described mobility justice as an umbrella term “to address how street safety goes beyond car-based violence.” They go further to explain,
“Mobility Justice demands that “safety” and equitable mobility address not only the construction of our streets but the socioeconomic, cultural, and discriminatory barriers to access and comfort different communities’ experiences within public spaces. We must shift focus from the modes of transit people use to the bodies and identities of the people using those modes by centering the experiences of marginalized individuals and the vulnerable communities. It acknowledges that safety is different for different people and should be defined by those most economically and legally vulnerable.”
The term gained further popularity with the publication of Mobility justice: the politics of movement in an age of extremes by Dean of The Global School at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and founding Director of the New Mobilities Research and Policy Center at Drexel University, Mimi Sheller.
Sheller asserts that the focus of her book is to show how mobility is “channeled, tracked, controlled, governed, under surveillance and always unequal — striated by gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste, color nationality, age, sexuality, disability, etc.” Thus, to look at patterns of mobility is to see the historical and current injustices that take place in our cities and beyond.
How inequity shows up in transport systems
As mobility justice connects individual experiences, like feeling unsafe on public transport or not being able to participate in active mobility due to low air quality, to broader systems of inequality ties to race, ethnicity, gender, disability status, income, immigration status, language and more; transport inequity does not affect everyone in the same way.
For example, in many European cities the poorest residents are often concentrated in areas with poor transport links, making commutes longer and less reliable while exposing residents to higher levels of air pollution and road danger. Similarly, in the United States, this segregation can be found across racial and ethnic lines, a legacy of formalised segregation policies borne from slavery and the Jim Crow era that live on, deepening inequality for generations.
Across the world, women and LGBTQ+ individuals frequently experience harassment and violence while in transit or in public spaces. London TravelWatch’s 2023 survey found that 21% of LGBTQ+ respondents had experienced a hate crime on public transport in the past year, and 67% said they “always feel there is a possible threat of violence or harassment” when using it—limiting their freedom of movement in ways often overlooked by data-driven planning. Disabled people routinely face barriers, from inaccessible platforms to poorly maintained sidewalks, that can turn a simple trip into an insurmountable challenge. For individuals who are blind or partially sighted, the lack of accessible wayfinding tools in public spaces and transport systems contributes to significant exclusion. As a result, the unemployment rate among blind and partially sighted people of working age in Europe exceeds 75%.
These injustices are not isolated but are symptoms of transport systems built without equity at their core. After World War II, urban planning has prioritised private vehicles and infrastructure that serves wealthier, more mobile populations, while leaving others behind. In New York City, highways have cut through communities of colour, in Rome historic preservation has outweighed the mobility needs of working-class neighborhoods, and in Paris’ banlieues immigrants and low income families live at a significant distance from the city centre with long commutes to economic opportunities.
The sustainability transition and justice’s role
Incorporating mobility justice into transport policy and planning has the capacity for transformative benefits. For example, by improving connectivity in previously underserved areas, air pollution can be reduced, and active mobility can increase – positively impacting public health with real financial benefits. This experiment has been quantified through the Healthy Cities Generator’s financial impact module. It showed that redesigning central Bradford, United Kingdom, an area facing deep socio-economic and health inequalities, through interventions like urban greening and pedestrianisation could generate €700 in annual health savings per person, with the investment paying for itself within two years.
Mobility is central to daily life and closely tied to access to work, education, healthcare and community. When people can’t move freely and safely, their ability to participate fully in society is diminished. Mobility justice highlights this connection and insists that transportation must be understood not only as a technical system, but as a human rights issue. In Sheller’s words, “these are problems not just of accessibility of existing infrastructure, but of the ways in which easier access for some makes life harder for others when the built environment is designed to exclude some people and create hierarchies of benefits and unequal distribution of harms.”
Mobility justice also goes hand in hand with climate justice, as the same communities that suffer from poor transport access are also disproportionately exposed to noise, air pollution and the effects of climate change. Thus, the transition to sustainable urban mobility is a prime opportunity to right some of the historic wrongs that have taken place throughout our cities. However, special attention must be paid to including the communities, through citizen engagement activities, that planners aim to serve from the beginning of projects and development.
As cities strive to become more resilient to the impacts of climate change and more equitable for all residents and users, mobility justice offers a powerful framework for transformation. Only by placing justice and equity at the centre of planning can we move towards a decarbonised future that is truly socially and environmentally sustainable. In the words of Sheller herself, “A full transition away from the currently dominant automobility system will only take place when we simultaneously address the issues of social inequality that underpin the un-sustainability of the current system, and begin to promote mobility justice as integral to sustainability.”
