Equitable Everyday Journeys

This book examines urban mobility across rapidly growing South Asian cities by drawing upon critical analyses of user experiences, popular media representations, and transport policies. While transport infrastructures are expanding, many residents - particularly those from lower-income households, older adults, women, and people with disabilities—lack access to affordable and accessible transport options. This limits their opportunities for decent employment, healthcare, and social participation, making inclusive mobility not a privilege but a fundamental right.Through interdisciplinary analysis, the contributors generate evidence-based insights essential for developing inclusive transport policies. Moving beyond traditional engineering approaches, they adopt a user-centred perspective that highlights how multiple forms of discrimination - classism, sexism, ageism, and ableism - intersect to produce urban mobility inequalities. The chapters uniquely position transport as a crucial link to health services, education, and employment, serving as both a call to action and a roadmap for building inclusive transport infrastructures in unequal societies.This book will be of use to researchers of transport geography, urban studies and development studies besides sociology, economics, management, geography, urban planning, urban sociology, policy studies, gender studies and development studies. It will be an important resource for transport and urban policymakers.

Ajay Bailey is Professor of Geographies of Health, Inclusion, and Development at the International Development Studies group at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University. He works at the interface of anthropology, geography, demography, and public health.Sobin George is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Social Change and Development, Institute for Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru, India. His research and teaching focus on social gradients in health, work and health, marginality and development, informality and labour rights and mobility and welfare outcomes. He has authored Medical Innovation and Disease Burden (2021), The Caste Embeddedness of Rural Public Health Services (2018) and Work and Health in Informal Economy (2016). He has edited volumes including Change and Mobility in Contemporary Indian Society (2019), Redefined Labour Spaces (2017) and Health System Strengthening (2016) and has published widely in peer-reviewed journals.Prajwal Nagesh is Assistant Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He earned his PhD from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. His research focuses on urban inequalities, the political economy of urbanisation, urban transport, and caste studies, using qualitative research methods.