Thank you for inviting me. I'm joining from Treaty No. 4.
I'm going to make four points.
First, transportation is critical infrastructure, and this is true for rural and remote communities as much as it is for urban ones.
Second, the right to stay in rural places and the ability to live a good life are increasingly contingent on the right to move—that is, on mobility and the ability to get around as one needs and wants.
Third, mobility is more and more an intersection of inequality, particularly for already disadvantaged rural and remote people.
Fourth, the market cannot be expected to solve this problem. Innovative, integrated, system-wide public and co-operative models are needed to realize the full potential and benefits of public transportation.
I will take these in turn.
Transportation is critical development overhead capital. It is critical infrastructure for rural places. Its absence results in disadvantages and vulnerability for rural communities and the people who live there. Transportation substantially influences how and where social and economic activities take place, and the development path of rural communities. It plays a crucial role in shaping the relationship between places and the flows of people, goods and services.
However, it is easy to overlook the network and systems that constitute critical infrastructure, because the roles they play in enabling activities and providing public and private goods and services are often invisible. Transport policy is economic policy, rural development policy, agricultural policy, health policy, environmental policy, cultural policy and mental health and antiloneliness policy. It is also reconciliation policy.
The right to stay in rural places and our right to vibrant, sustainable rural places are increasingly dependent on mobility, or what people sometimes call accessing the rights to the city in and from rural places. Rural restructuring in Canada has meant more inequality in rural places, more poverty and food insecurity, more low-wage and temporary workers and more immigrants, while services, both public and private, are leaving rural places and centralizing in larger towns and cities. People are increasingly living their lives across regions, with jobs, education, family, health care, social services, shopping and leisure activities spread across distances. As the private sector and governments improve their bottom lines for consolidations and service reductions, these costs are transferred onto rural users, who must pay more and travel farther or else forgo services.
These same people are less likely to have access to communications technologies to compensate for the loss of transportation and access to services, such as the ability to find medical advice online or shop online. For people to live and thrive in rural places, they need transportation.
Places play a role in perpetuating poverty, as does the uneven development between places. Constraints on transport-based accessibility “tend to deepen these socio-spatial inequalities leading to multidimensional deprivations and, eventually, poverty traps”. They also intensify and worsen the experience of disability and make it harder to leave situations of domestic violence and abuse.
In contrast, transportation accessibility and mobility in poor regions can improve access to higher-quality public goods and social services for disadvantaged people living in those areas, and promote poverty alleviation and a better quality of life for both individuals and communities.
However, we should not expect the market to solve this problem. As opposed to democracy, in which it is “one person, one vote”, markets respond to money, and more money equals more votes. Markets respond to the possibilities of private profitability. Depending on markets to decide whether or how transportation operates is unlikely to yield solutions to the problems I have outlined here.
Besides, society has created an uneven playing field between public transportation and private automobiles. The entire system is shaped by automobility—the default assumption of widespread access to and dependence on the car—and pervasive but mostly invisible subsidies to automobiles and trucks in the form of public dollars going to the construction and maintenance of physical infrastructure and to dealing with the effects of accidents, pollution and lost opportunities.
Governments can and do intervene in transportation networks to shape systems that better reflect public policy objectives, such as facilitating access to health care, education and work.
It is true that improving transportation can be a double-edged sword for rural regions. The wrong investments can advantage richer regions at the expense of poorer areas. However, with proper consultation and recognition of local needs, the effects of public transportation investments are likely to be equality-enhancing and poverty-alleviating, benefiting both populations and regions.
Thank you.