Urban transportation is more than roads and bridges. It’s a powerful social force that shapes our lives and influences our opportunities, well-being, and even power dynamics. Consider the everyday experience of commuting to work—the route you take, the cost of the ride, and the people you encounter are all shaped by social forces.
By looking at transportation through this social lens, researchers at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs are moving beyond physical infrastructure to understand its deeper impact on society.
“Urban transport is deeply intertwined with our social lives, culture, and power structures,” says Yingling Fan, associate dean and urban and regional planning professor at the Humphrey School.
Through her research, Fan has developed a new framework, which was the subject of a recent open-access article in the journal Urban Studies. “[Transportation] has a profound role in shaping urban life, social interactions, and the lived experiences of diverse populations.”
To build this framework, Fan and her co-authors—Astrid Wood, senior lecturer at Newcastle University, and Evelyn Blumenberg, professor at the University of California Los Angeles—closely examined the vast and growing body of urban transportation research to identify three key strands.
Three strands of research
The first strand is the individual level, which examines how transport directly affects people’s lives—for example, how a lack of reliable public transportation might limit job opportunities for certain groups, or how a long, stressful commute impacts mental well-being.
The second strand expands transportation’s scope to the community level, showing how it creates social meaning, sparks debate, and shapes mobility. A packed subway car, for example, is not just a mode of travel but a shared social space. An argument around bike lanes is not just about concrete and asphalt, but about who has the right to use the street.
The third, and broadest, strand encompasses transportation’s systemwide level. This perspective shows how transportation systems are deeply embedded within societal structures of social hierarchies, economic arrangements, political institutions, and power relations.
“This view emphasizes the totality of ways that transport infrastructure and policies both reflect and reproduce existing social structures, reinforcing patterns of privilege and disadvantage,” Fan said.
Future research topics
According to Fan, enduring and emerging transportation trends make this sociological approach necessary and urgent. These trends include persistent patterns of disenfranchisement and exclusion, such as the enduring legacies of transportation injustice and racism, economic inequality, homelessness, and violence in spaces of public mobility.
Newer trends include post-COVID transformations (such as the increase of remote work), ride-sharing technologies, environmental challenges, and the use of digital technologies such as sensors, big data, and smart devices within cities.
By framing urban transportation as a social construct, Fan and her co-authors call for a shift toward understanding transportation as a sociopolitical force that structures inequalities, reinforces or challenges power, and shapes urban life.
Their theory of “urban transport as a social construct” highlights four directions for future scholarship:
- Social construction of transportation systems: Examining how biases, power structures, public involvement, and systemic inequalities shape the design and operation of transportation systems, including the roles of colonialism, racism, and knowledge production.
- Social benefits and burdens of transportation: Investigating how transport costs, environmental impacts, and disparities disproportionately affect marginalized communities, while also assessing transport’s links to employment, health, education, and quality of life.
- Social interaction and cultural production in transportation spaces: Exploring transportation spaces as arenas of social interaction, segregation, and cultural expression where everyday norms and creative practices unfold.
- Social and cultural determinants and experiences of travel: Understanding how cultural values, social roles, and symbolic meanings shape travel behavior, preferences, and policies across diverse groups and contexts.
Together, these research directions move beyond seeing transportation as mere infrastructure or mobility, instead positioning it as a central arena where power, culture, and everyday life converge—ultimately shaping who benefits, who is burdened, and how better urban futures can be realized.
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A version of this story was originally published by the Center for Transportation Studies
