Towards addressing transportation planning’s contradictions: The unified theory for transportation planning based on the capabilities approach
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes a unified theory for transportation planning based on the capabilities approach which helps reconcile three key contradictions with which transportation planning has not sufficiently grappled. Those contradictions include the following. First, should transportation planners focus on opportunities or outcomes? Second, is travel good or bad? Third, how can transportation deliver value in a polyrational world which faces challenges in balancing universalist principles (meaning that they apply everywhere) and local context? To address these contradictions, the proposed unified theory firstly includes nine core principles, builds on the work of Vecchio and Martens, and centers locally produced understandings of accessibility (here refined to the construct of freedom of access ) as one of many capabilities necessary to live a life of dignity. Transportation planners’ key roles are to locally co-produce understandings of freedom of access as a capability—thereby bridging universalist ethical frameworks (ones which apply everywhere) into local circumstances through discourse ethics. Secondly, the proposed approach embraces the necessary linkages between freedom of access and transportation system use. Therefore, while travel is not of central interest, it is necessary to realize other capabilities. Third, the constructs of fertile functioning , corrosive disadvantage , and tragic dilemma enable transportation planners to uniquely co-produce (with residents and institutions) interpretations linking freedom of access-as-a-capability with transportation system use-as-a-functioning. Finally, the proposed unified approach reframes public involvement from project-specific initiatives toward a community-centered and domain-specific spatial ethics of transportation planning which revisits the changing meaning of freedom of access over time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".