Toward spatial justice: The spatial equity effects of a toll road in Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract

Abstract:The present study sets out to provide an ex ante insight into the equity effects of a toll charge on the traffic diversions and geographical accessibility of work locations in the Cape Town metropolitan region, South Africa. Based on a static traffic assignment model and aggregate accessibility measures, computed in a GIS environment, the effects of a toll were estimated for different income categories for both a reference scenario and two toll scenarios. The findings indicate that particularly low-income commuters will divert to alternative routes. However, the results also indicate that the introduction of a toll will only have a limited impact on geographical accessibility. Nevertheless, because particularly low-income commuters are likely to divert to alternative routes, a toll should maybe not be levied on the road toward spatial justice without revenue redistribution or additional investment in the public transport system.

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

“…Geurs and van Wee (2004) highlight a number of accessibility measures in their review, amongst which two of the most commonly used measures are gravity-based measures and threshold type measures. Both of these measures have been applied extensively in transport literature across the developed and developing world, the latter including South Africa in studies by Venter and Mohammed (2013) to explore a possible relationship between transport energy consumption and accessibility in the Nelson Mandela Bay (gravity-based measure) and van Dijk et al (2015) to explore the effects of tolls on the public transport and private vehicle accessibility across various income groups in the Cape Town metropolitan region (threshold type measure).…”

“…In the South African accessibility literature, there is use of traditional accessibility metrics (Venter & Mohammed, 2013;Dijk, Krygsman et al, 2015) and even the application of newly developed accessibility measures such as the access envelope technique developed by Venter and Cross (2014). This new measure was a step towards explicitly incorporating travel cost into an accessibility measure while combatting some of the shortcomings of the more commonly used traditional accessibility measures.…”

Toll Roads in Indonesia: Transport System, Accessibility, Spatial and Equity Impacts

“…This part presents an ex-post evaluation of the impact of a toll road on job accessibility and spatial equity in a developing country context, which to my knowledge has not been done before. So far, the few studies of the impacts of toll roads described in the literature have been ex-ante studies, such as by van Dijk et al (2015), who conducted a GIS-based evaluation of traffic and job accessibility impacts of planned toll roads in Cape Town, South Africa.…”

“…Hence, several researchers also developed a traffic model to evaluate road infrastructure investment (e.g. van Dijk et al, 2015;Xiong et al, 2015).…”

“…According to Chi (2012), the impact of a new highway differs across rural, suburban and urban areas. The implementation of a new toll affects different income population segments differently (Di Ciommo & Lucas, 2014;van Dijk et al, 2015). Therefore, in the cluster analysis, we considered variables of residential land use growth and income per capita to classify the districts.…”