“It's such a big ask for a volunteer”: Community transport as a sticking plaster solution to rural transport poverty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Compared to urban settings, rural areas are characterised by high rates of car ownership and few alternative transport options. This can lead to transport poverty, especially among older adults without car access. Community transport, not-for-profit and primarily volunteer-run local transport schemes, helps to address this rural transport poverty in the UK. This paper focuses on the emergence and evolution of these schemes, presenting a critical analysis that traces the researchers’ discomfort that arose during a study on community transport in Oxfordshire. Unpacking this discomfort draws attention to two societal processes that have shaped the emergence and evolution of community transport: neoliberalism and automobility. Results indicate how community transport can be rolled out in response to the neoliberal roll-back of the state, in this case cuts to bus subsidies and the National Health Service (NHS). However, community transport is often itself rolled-back by the state as part of further rounds of financial cuts, prompting providers to improvise ways to continue what they understand to be an essential service. Further, community transport emerges as a car-based solution in increasingly car-dependent contexts and, as such, re-enforces and further normalizes automobility. Although community transport schemes address rural transport poverty, they do not at present tackle the source of this challenge: the interconnected processes of neoliberalism and automobility. The paper concludes with a discussion of the current role of the community sector as a sticking plaster solution to rural transport poverty, as well as its potential role in contributing to the dismantling of neoliberalism and automobility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".