Structural unemployment, poor educational achievement, ill-health, high crime rates and poor social integration remain a major focus of the social welfare agenda in most advanced industrial societies. Transport is increasingly being recognised as having a significant role to play in both the creation and alleviation of such problems. Although mass car ownership has brought huge benefits to the majority of people, a significant minority of the population still do not own or are unable to drive cars. In both the US and UK, non-car ownership is overwhelmingly concentrated among low income and other disadvantaged sectors of the population. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that these people are finding it increasingly difficult to carry out the basic daily activities that the rest of the population take for granted. Furthermore, car drivers from the lowest income quintile are spending a large proportion of their income on travel-related costs and may be making considerable financial sacrifices in order to purchase and operate their vehicles.

Poor people are also predominantly concentrated in neighbourhoods that are disproportionately affected by the negative impacts of road traffic, such as pedestrian accidents, noise and air pollution and severance. They travel less often and over shorter distances than the average population, but the social and economic consequences of this behaviour, such as reduced work and educational opportunities and poor access to healthcare and other essential services, all too often have been overlooked. In part, this is because the policy professionals have poorly understood ‘transport poverty’ and its impact on social welfare. Traditionally, transport has not appeared as a topic of analysis in the social sciences; equally its social effects have tended to be overlooked by the transport disciplines. A key aim of this book, therefore, is to begin to encourage greater cross-fertilisation between these two disciplines. Although the main focus of the text is policy and practice in England and the US, much of its content and analysis will also be applicable to the rest of Europe and most other advanced industrial nations.

The term ‘social exclusion’ has gained common parlance in UK policy from the late 1990s, being widely adopted by the New Labour government to describe the linked economic, social and environmental problems experienced by people living on low incomes in some of England’s ‘worst estates’.