Why Transport Justice Could Redefine Rural Accessibility Planning in Germany

Accessibility has long been treated as a dry technical quantity in transport research: a number that tells planners how many jobs, schools, or doctors a person can reach within a given travel time. A new study by Florian Ahlmeyer and Sören Groth of the ILS Research Institute in Dortmund, published in the journal Geographica Helvetica, argues that this narrow view is precisely what keeps German transport planning from serving the people who need it most. The authors contend that accessibility should be understood through the lens of justice, drawing on internationally established concepts such as transport justice and mobility justice, and that doing so would fundamentally reshape how rural regions in Germany are planned and financed.

The theoretical roots of accessibility reach back to Walter Hansen’s 1959 article on how accessibility shapes land use, and the concept has since been refined by scholars across transport engineering, geography, planning, and the social sciences. Engineers tend to frame accessibility as the cost of using a transport system, geographers emphasize the friction of distance, and social scientists focus on the interplay between transport systems and social processes. A widely cited multidimensional definition by Geurs and van Wee identifies four components: land-use patterns, the transport system, temporal constraints, and individual attributes. What has often been lost in German-speaking research, the authors argue, is the normative question of whether the resulting patterns are fair.

Karel Martens, whose work on transport justice anchors much of the international debate, offers a decisive shift in perspective. Accessibility, he suggests, can be measured either from the standpoint of destinations, asking how many people a facility serves, or from the standpoint of people, asking which facilities an individual can actually reach. For justice-oriented planning, only the second view matters, because what counts is equitable participation in social life rather than the catchment potential of infrastructure. A person’s accessibility depends not only on transport networks and land use but also on income, gender, vehicle availability, place of residence, household composition, and physical ability. This definition stands in deliberate contrast to planning built around potential car mobility, which presumes a freedom of choice that many people simply do not have.

The study grounds this argument in the philosophical tradition of distributive justice. Drawing on John Rawls’s theory of justice, scholars such as Martens and Rafael Pereira have argued that inequalities in accessibility are only acceptable if they benefit the least advantaged members of society. Martens extends Michael Walzer’s idea of separate spheres of justice to the transport sector, proposing that access to mobility should be decoupled from purchasing power in the same way that education and health care are. He pairs Rawls’s maximin rule, which demands that the situation of the worst-off be maximally improved, with a maximax rule requiring that the gap between the best- and worst-served groups not become too wide. A transport system, in Martens’s formulation, is fair if and only if it provides a sufficient level of accessibility to all under most circumstances.

Empirical studies show what happens when these principles are ignored. Research on planning processes in Boston and Miami documented by Kate Lowe reveals how efficiency-driven investment deepens inequality: in Miami, objections from minority representatives that the disadvantaged north of the region needed rail connections were set aside because extending the existing airport link served more passengers at lower cost. Justice-oriented planning, by contrast, means treating all residents as fundamentally equal, analyzing accessibility in socially differentiated ways, attending to affordability, and involving civil society groups from marginalized communities. It also means establishing robust minimum standards so that already strong corridors are not endlessly upgraded while poorly served areas are bypassed.

The second theoretical pillar, mobility justice, shifts attention from the transport system itself to the social production of unequal movement. Building on the new mobilities paradigm associated with John Urry and Mimi Sheller, this perspective treats mobility as emerging from a tension between movement and stillness, in which queues, checkpoints, fare barriers, and access restrictions distribute the capacity to move unevenly across social groups. Sheller identifies several mechanisms that produce these uneven mobilities: infrastructures that grant privileged groups fast, comfortable, and safe travel while exposing marginalized groups to slow and risky forms; control regimes operating through policing and pricing; and large-scale mobility regimes that reproduce classed, racialized, gendered, and age-based exclusions. In rural Germany, the dominance of the private car functions as exactly such a regime, undermining the viability of public transport on which a substantial share of the population depends.

The authors connect these theories to the German planning principle of Daseinsvorsorge, or public services of general interest, which covers everything from water and energy supply to health, education, and mobility. Transport infrastructure occupies a special position because it enables access to all other services. Yet the study identifies a critical legal and organizational gap: public transport is a voluntary task for most German municipalities, so service quality tracks local budgets rather than any binding standard. There is no subjective right to public transport provision, and local transport plans are not legally enforceable. Rural regions with weak finances therefore enter a downward spiral in which declining services push residents toward car dependency, which in turn further erodes the case for transit investment. As one cited analysis puts it, rural areas are not inherently car-dependent; political frameworks make them so.

The scale of the problem is substantial. Depending on regional structure, between 10 and 20 percent of adults in rural Germany have no access to a car, with far higher shares among young people and the elderly, and roughly 7 percent of residents of sparsely populated areas own a car they cannot really afford, a phenomenon known as forced car ownership. Rising urban rents are simultaneously displacing low-income, transit-dependent households from well-connected cities to peripheral areas. The authors argue that justice-oriented planning should focus precisely on these groups, using fine-grained accessibility analyses on small grid cells to identify disadvantaged households that administrative-level statistics overlook, and combining quantitative modeling with qualitative methods that capture discrimination and perceived accessibility.

The study also applies its framework to contemporary planning ideals, most prominently the 15-minute city championed by Carlos Moreno and implemented in Paris. While the concept promises socially and ecologically sustainable proximity, the authors note that walkable access to daily needs is, in a country shaped by decades of suburbanization, a privilege of urban populations. They therefore endorse the complementary vision of a 30-minute region, developed by Stefan Siedentop and Christian Gerten, which extends the idea to rural areas through expanded public transport rather than private automobility. Transport justice supplies the argument for financing such a system collectively, potentially through a levy that replaces fare revenue, echoing the experience of Germany’s short-lived 9-euro ticket, while mobility justice demands that barriers, affordability, safety, and freedom from discrimination be addressed so that a dense network alone does not reproduce exclusion.

The conclusions point toward concrete reform. The principle of Daseinsvorsorge must be specified through legally binding minimum accessibility standards, as already practiced in Austria and Switzerland through transit quality classes, and public transport should be elevated to a mandatory municipal task with corresponding funding. The authors note that although public transport generates economic benefits exceeding its costs, improves social participation, and contributes to climate protection, public debate fixates on its subsidies while ignoring the costs of road infrastructure. Ultimately, they argue, accessibility should be planned around participation in social life rather than the economic viability of alternatives to the car, with resources deliberately redistributed toward groups with low network capital. Which measures follow, the researchers acknowledge, remains a decision for policymakers, but the theoretical foundation for judging whether a transport system is just is now firmly on the table.

Subject of Research: Transport and mobility justice as a theoretical foundation for accessibility analysis in rural Germany

Article Title: Verkehrs- und Mobilitätsgerechtigkeit als theoretisch-konzeptionelle Grundlage für die Analyse von Erreichbarkeiten

Article References: Ahlmeyer, F., & Groth, S. (2026). Verkehrs- und Mobilitätsgerechtigkeit als theoretisch-konzeptionelle Grundlage für die Analyse von Erreichbarkeiten. Geographica Helvetica, 81(4), 567-587. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-567-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-567-2026

Keywords: transport justice, mobility justice, accessibility, rural mobility, public transport, Daseinsvorsorge, spatial justice, transport poverty, 15-minute city, 30-minute region, transport planning, social exclusion