Does public transport accessibility enhance subjective well-being? A study of the City of Johannesburg

Abstract

Within the corpus of accessibility measures is the Net Wage After Commute, which describes the potential wage earnable less the transport costs incurred to commute to work from a particular location. This paper explores the time-series development of accessibility, using this poverty-relevant metric, in low-income residential areas of the City of Johannesburg, biennially from 2009 to 2013 when accessibility patterns were altered as a result of major investment in the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system. The results suggest that significant changes in accessibility are driven by improved affordability rather than spatial coverage enhancements, which were very marginal in the case of Johannesburg. A difference-indifferences approach is adopted to explore the effects of access to the BRT on the subjective well-being of lower-income households. The model fails to find evidence that the additional accessibility provided by the BRT improves the general sense of well-being in the communities it serves. We hypothesise that the incremental accessibility improvement is so small as to be overwhelmed by other social drivers of well-being. We do find evidence however of well-being improvements among the narrower cohort of actual users of BRT, especially in terms of their satisfaction with the amount of free time they have. This suggests that the BRT in Johannesburg is beneficial as a transport project, but not yet as a general urban intervention able to leverage wider improvements in life satisfaction within served communities.

The impact of transit monetary costs on transport inequality

“…Most of these look at how such costs should be considered when https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692322000321 assessing accessibility and inequalities levels (Bittencourt and Giannotti, 2021;Bocarejo et al, 2014;Bocarejo S. and Oviedo H., 2012;El-Geneidy et al, 2016;Guzman et al, 2017;Guzman and Oviedo, 2018;Liu and Kwan, 2020;Ma et al, 2017;Oviedo et al, 2019;Rodriguez et al, 2017;Van Dijk et al, 2015;Venter, 2016). Others analyze the interaction between accessibility and subjective well-being (Lionjanga and Venter, 2018) and propose a transit path finding method that accounts for monetary constraints (Conway and Stewart, 2019). Most of these studies focus on cities of the Global South, especially in South America and South Africa, perhaps because transport affordability is a more salient issue in the transport equity debate in these contexts than in the Global North.…”

1 Introduction

“…Bajada (2017) summarises the common bus service quality characteristics explored in research, amongst which accessibility, information, time, customer experience, comfort, security, fare structure and environmental impact (Andreassen, 1995, Balcombe et al, 2004, Paulley et al, 2006, and Joewono & Kubota, 2007. More recent research has focused on accessibility (Lionjanga and Venter 2018), customer experience (Currie and Fournier 2020), and satisfaction (Mokonyama and Venter 2018).…”

The impact of transit monetary costs on transport inequality

“…Most of these look at how such costs should be considered when assessing accessibility and inequalities levels (Bittencourt and Giannotti, 2021;Bocarejo et al, 2014;Bocarejo S. and Oviedo H., 2012;El-Geneidy et al, 2016;Guzman et al, 2017;Guzman and Oviedo, 2018;Liu and Kwan, 2020;Ma et al, 2017;Oviedo et al, 2019;Rodriguez et al, 2017;Van Dijk et al, 2015;Venter, 2016). Others analyse the interaction between accessibility and subjective well-being (Lionjanga and Venter, 2018) and propose a transit path finding method that accounts for monetary constraints (Conway and Stewart, 2019). Most of these studies focus on cities of the Global South, especially in South America and South Africa, perhaps because transport affordability is a more salient issue in the transport equity debate in these contexts than in the Global North.…”