Developing a country-wide index for measuring transport poverty

Transport poverty (an inability to access opportunities due to different social, economic, or personal reasons) causes Transport Related Social Exclusion (TRSE), an inability to participate in social or economic life due to transport scarcity. This work proposes a methodology to calculate a country-wide index to measure transport poverty and the risk of TRSE using Canada as the case study, with the aim of creating an easily interpretable tool to help guide transportrelated decisions. This task is challenging due to the need for quality data available for the whole country, and due to the diversity of territories within it. The index is generated for all of Canada at the smallest geographic level with available population data and combines a social disadvantage component with a transport disadvantage component using nationally available data. Results show how social and transport disadvantages shape transport poverty, as well as the need to have different scales to interpret the index depending on the levels of compactness/dispersion of urban fabrics and the urbanity/rurality of the territories being assessed. These distinct scales of interpretation are relevant because they allow for uncovering land use and transport characteristics leading to the variation of index scores. Future research should further refine the index, develop a prioritization framework for transport investment decisions based on the index, go deeper into the relation between transport poverty and TRSE, and longitudinally analyze the impact of major transport investments, among other potential investigations.