This thesis aims to provide knowledge that can be useful when designing or executing transport policy, specifically in relation to the concepts of fairness and distribution. What is considered fair varies among, and within individuals, even within the relatively narrow scope of the transport sector. Because what people perceive as fair varies with the item of distribution as well as among whom the distribution occurs, the distributional principles vary in different parts of the transport sector. While the transport sector does not exist in isolation from the rest of society, it does have three specific features which make it an important area of research. The Hrst feature is that the transport system is used to access amenities and opportunities in other sectors. The distribution in the transport system thus influences distributions in other sectors. The second feature is that the costs and benefits of the transport system are inherently unevenly distributed in space. This second feature does, to a certain extent, induce the uneven distributions of the amenities and opportunities. The third feature is that it is a sector that receives significant public investments and subsidies. The two papers in this thesis relate to these features and distribution in different ways.

While both papers are inherently affected by the third feature, they study different phenomenon. Paper I sets out to improve the understanding of how individuals with low income use the transport system compared to those with higher income; specifically, whether they choose to purchase more expensive public transport tickets than their more affluent peers. Paper II aims to improve the understanding of how the transport sector (potentially) influences outcomes in other sectors by studying how accessibility explains food prices.

The overall aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of goal conflicts between various policies in the transport sector and their distributional impacts. This aim is broken down into two research themes:

1. What are the distributional outcomes of the transport system?
2. How do different actors incorporate distributional considerations into the allocation of infrastructure investments?

This thesis comprises of four papers. Papers I and II relate to the first theme and Papers III and IV to the second.

In Paper I we study whether income explains why some choose to travel with public transport using single tickets when their cheapest ticket is a monthly travel card. We investigate this using the Swedish national travel survey and find a positive relationship between travel card possession and income among those for whom the monthly card is the cheapest ticket.

In Paper II I study the effect of accessibility on other markets, in this case the market for food. Specifically, I study how accessibility explains variations in the price of food in supermarkets. I find a U-shaped relationship with higher prices in low and high accessibility locations and lower prices in medium accessibility locations. 

In Paper III we investigate how the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) compiled the draft 2018-2029 plan. We do this by studying which qualities of individual investments that explain inclusion probability, complemented by interviews with planners.

In Paper IV we conduct a choice experiment to solicit the public’s preferences for aggregate benefits and distributional outcomes in the context of infrastructure investments. The distributional dimensions included are geography, gender, and income. We also conduct latent class analysis to capture heterogeneity.