Revisiting sufficientarianism in accessibility research: a review of accessibility poverty

Sufficientarianism, a principle of distributive justice concerned with ensuring everyone has “enough”, has gained increasing attention in transportation studies through the concept of accessibility poverty, the condition in which individuals or groups lack sufficient access to essential destinations. Despite this growing interest, recent debates on sufficientarianism in philosophy highlight the need to review how these ideas have been applied in accessibility research. This article revisits the integration of sufficientarianism within the accessibility literature and presents a scoping review of empirical studies that have adopted sufficientarian ideas to map existing contributions and provide a foundation for future research. Based on existing theoretical contributions, we first develop a theoretical framework outlining several key considerations for incorporating sufficientarianism in accessibility, including (1) the definition of accessibility; (2) the importance of setting accessibility poverty thresholds through democratic exercises informed by empirical evidence; and (3) quantifying the extent and severity of accessibility poverty and arguing that once sufficiency has been achieved, there are still moral reasons, under other principles of justice, to continue improving accessibility for individuals. Based on this theoretical framework, we conducted searches in three academic databases for articles and references in these articles, ultimately including twenty-two empirical studies. We found that most studies define accessibility thresholds arbitrarily, often without empirical evidence on how accessibility affects people's lives, with few exceptions that focus on the impacts of accessibility on activity participation or transit mode share, but with limitations. Notably, we found a lack of studies incorporating democratic exercises to define accessibility thresholds or identify people’s accessibility needs. Similarly, roughly half of the studies relied on simple descriptive approaches to capture the extent of accessibility poverty, while a comparable number also examined its severity. We therefore propose five directions emphasising the definition and measurement of accessibility, empirical grounding, participatory processes, and measurement of poverty.

Mots clés

• Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
• Disability Rights and Representation
• Down syndrome and intellectual disability research
• Human Factors and Ergonomics
• Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
• Safety Research