Mobility, Poverty, and Gender: Travel ‘Choices’ of Slum Residents in Nairobi, Kenya

By D. Salon, Sumila Gulyani. 2010

222 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract A survey of 4375 slum residents in Nairobi, Kenya, reveals that the majority cannot afford any of the motorized transport options in the city. They cope by limiting their travel outside their settlement and, if they do travel, by often ‘choosing’ to walk. As compared to the non‐poor, poor households are systematically worse off. But the burden of reduced mobility is borne disproportionately by women and children. Using joint‐choice modelling to empirically explore the travel ‘choices’ of Nairobi’s slum residents, we show that women, men, and children in this population face distinct barriers to access. We conclude that policy aiming to improve mobility and transport access for the poor needs to grapple not only with the crucial issue of affordability but also with specific constraints faced by women and children.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Transportation, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/801b99ce09151125e0f1ff124ea91eb85703cdf2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Georgina M. Mace
2. Slava Jankin
3. P. Drummond
4. T. Litman
5. K. Lucas
6. Paul Ekins
7. M. Maslin
8. Karyn Morrissey

In Transportation

1. T. Litman
2. H. Frumkin
3. K. Lucas
4. R. H. M. Pereira
5. M. Carmona
6. Karel Martens

In Urban Studies

1. T. Litman
2. K. Lucas
3. M. Boykoff

Citations in the corpus

• Slum Real Estate: The Low-Quality High-Price Puzzle in Nairobi’s Slum Rental Market and its Implications for Theory and Practice (2008, unknown): “Kenya (2007), Southall (2005), and Klopp (2000).”
• Understanding Transport Demands and Elasticities: How Prices and Other Factors Affect Travel Behavior (2012, methodology): “Although easy to use, this method is only accurate for relatively small price changes.”
• Making the connections between transport disadvantage and the social exclusion of low income populations in the Tshwane Region of South Africa (2011, background): “In common with the Salon and Gulyani (2010) Nairobi study, we found that although our participants made a lot of trips on foot, motorised travel was identified as a basic need by most participants.”
• The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: from 25 years of inaction to a global transformation for public health. (2017, background): “Although many cities have begun collecting this information in the past decade, there is a paucity of data on trends from before 2000, with particularly wide gaps in data availability from cities in Asia, Africa, and South America.138 In Berlin, London, and Tokyo, the proportion of trips by privatis”