Transport Accessibility and Equity of Health Services and Facilities

Dear Colleagues,

Adequate and equitable accessibility is of increasing importance to researchers, urban planners, and practitioners. Ample evidence has shown that spatial restraints between service providers and consumers significantly reduce the level of public services usage, which further lead to poorer health consequences. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), health equity refers to “the distribution of health resources between different population groups, arising from the social conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age.” It also reveals the processes concerning the ability of individuals and groups of people to access the health service delivery system. Health equity is closely related to five key dimensions of health access, including acceptability, spatial accessibility, affordability, availability, and accommodation. Among them, it is particularly spatial accessibility or simply accessibility that has gained much attention over the past decades. Spatial accessibility indicates the travel impedance between patients and providers.

In the literature, transport accessibility is a commonly used instrument to measure the ease of reaching (and interacting with) the destinations or activities distributed in cities. Good transport accessibility allows residents to efficiently access public health facilities such as hospitals and clinics, while poor accessibility can lead to, or exacerbate, inadequate healthcare services. Thus, sufficient accessibility to health facilities, as argued by many authors (such as Bocarejo S and Oviedo, 2012; Hamal et al., 2018; Rachele et al., 2017), should be ensured in different regions and for different groups of people, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, in order to achieve the goal of health equity and improve the well-being of residents.

To encourage this type of study, we welcome contributions employing interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks. From this perspective, contributions may refer to multiple fields of urban studies, such as city and regional planning, transportation research, economic geography, public policies, and administration. The Special Issue will facilitate meaningful discussion of many fields of urban policy, including transportation planning, neighborhood development, mobility, public health services, built environment, quality architecture and urban design, and social justice. Potential contributions can be theoretical, methodological, or empirical. Particular attention could be paid to efforts that investigate the mechanisms by which transport accessibility to health facilities of different regions and groups of people improves or aggravates health equity.

Specifically, the themes of this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following concepts: 

• Methodologies and theoretical reflections on transport accessibility and health equity
• Inequity of health services or facilities across regions, including intra-city spaces, urban-rural areas, metropolitan areas, and regional spaces at provincial and national levels
• Resilience of public transport/private transport to access public healthcare services during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Land use, mode choice (i.e., private car, public transport, micro-mobility, shared vehicles), and the accessibility of health facilities
• Methodologies of equitable allocation of health and transport facilities
• Transportation policies and urban planning interventions and implications on transport accessibility to health facilities

Dr. Yuanyuan Guo
Prof. Dr. Peng Zeng
Dr. Huaxiong Jiang
Dr. Jixiang Liu
Dr. Zhenzhen Wang
Prof. Dr. Linchuan Yang
Guest Editors

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• transport accessibility
• health facility and service
• equity
• mobility
• COVID-19 pandemic
• transport resilience
• transport planning
• urban-rural disparity