three - The global context: how is Britain different from other places?

Summary

Urban travel outside the UK

The significance of everyday travel for individuals, families, economies and societies is clear, but good comparative data on everyday mobility is surprisingly scarce. Moreover, the ability to travel freely, easily and cheaply in order to fulfil essential everyday tasks is rarely taken into account when measures of quality of life or development are constructed. For instance, the United Nations Human Development Reports construct a series of indices, including the Human Development Index (HDI), on which the UK ranked twenty-eighth out of 187 countries in 2011, but in which access to transport and mobility exclusion is not included in any form. The only data on human movement relate to residential migration and then almost exclusively to international migration flows (United Nations, Human Development Reports website). This is, perhaps, surprising as it can be argued that restrictions on everyday mobility because of, for example, poverty, incapacity, lack of transport, fear of violence or political constraints are among the most fundamental of human rights concerns. For instance the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 13) states explicitly that ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state’, while the ability to move freely is an implicit requirement of the ability to carry out many of the other rights stated in the document (United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights website). Where freedom of everyday movement is restricted it is almost always the case that many other human rights are also violated.

The lack of good global comparative data on everyday mobility can be attributed to a number of causes. Because everyday travel is so mundane it is rarely recorded in official documents – indeed attempts to record movement could themselves be construed as restrictions and a breach of human rights – and thus much everyday mobility remains invisible. While many countries, especially in the richer parts of the world, do undertake travel surveys of various sorts, these are rarely constructed in the same way and thus data are not directly comparable (Kunert et al, 2002). In most cases the only data available relate to those aspects of mobility over which (in most cases) governments have some control, such as the provision of infrastructure and the registration of motor vehicles.