Public transportation has a key role to play in sustainable transitions to limit the worst case scenarios of climate change. But sustainability doesn’t just mean climate-friendly: it also means accessible, affordable and feasible. Two recent national reports have uncovered that public transportation is not getting people to Dutch hospitals fast enough. Could car sharing help overcome this issue?
In September, the PBL (Environmental Assessment Agency; Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving) concluded that people who depend on public transport face longer travel times to work, school and hospitals than they were a decade ago, according to reporting by Dutch national broadcaster NOS.
Life or death issue
Taking longer to get to school or work is inconvenient and an important factor in quality of life, but lack of timely access to medical facilities can be a life or death issue.
“People who don’t drive often end up taking a longer time to get to the hospital or outpatient clinics”, NOS writes of the report’s conclusions. “Analyses showed that 30 percent of elderly people can’t reach medical facilities within half an hour, and 12 percent of them have to travel more than 45 minutes [by public transport]. That is true both in urban and rural areas.”
The Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) sees three concrete measures to improve accessibility, PBL researcher Jeroen Bastiaanssen told NOS: “Public transport must become more accessible by bicycle. We need to carefully consider where we put facilities such as hospitals and schools, and, when building new homes, we need to anticipate whether they are easily accessible by public transport.”
Accessibility, walkability and signage
From the side of hospitals, more could be done to improve access as well. Rover, an organization for travel in the Netherlands, identified 24 hospitals with public transport connections, and analysed them based on accessibility, walking routes and signage to lead from the bus stop to the hospital.
Two northern Dutch hospitals were included – Scherperziekenhuis in Emmen and Treant locatie Bethesda in Hoogeveen, both in Drenthe – but insights are lacking from the provinces of Groningen and Friesland, which is noteworthy because they are two of the most rural provinces in the country.
Rover found that while bus routes may offer fairly regular service, getting to the bus stop in the first place is part of the problem: walking distances to parking places is often shorter than to a bus stop.
Car sharing
The reports focused on travel times for car owners and public transport users. But insights from SMiLES (Shared connectivity in Mobility and Logistics Enable Sustainability) – a five-year project studying sustainability, transport and logistics in the northern Netherlands – suggest that car sharing and other demand-based forms of transportation may help bridge the gap.
Michelle Lohmeyer, a PhD candidate studying different perceived barriers and motivators to support the process of car-sharing, can imagine that limited access to public transport could inhibit people from giving up their own cars.
“People are afraid that when the shared car is not available they have no alternative if no easy, accessible, and fast public transport is available, so they would rather stick to their private car”, Lohmeyer says.
Demand-based public transport
Taede Tillema, professor by special appointment at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences and a researcher with SMiLES since 2019, points out that fewer and less frequent busses in rural areas decreases accessibility, especially for people without a car.
Tillema also points out that the PBL report only looked at public transport with a regular timetable, and does not take into account demand-based transit systems.
“We are seeing an increase in demand-based public transport, such as the Hubtaxi in Groningen and Drenthe”, he says. “The question is whether these demand-responsive options offer the same quality as the often more expensive timetable-based buses. By excluding these demand responsive systems in their report, the situation PBL describes can be seen as a sort of ‘worst case scenario’ of actual accessibility in practice.”
Read more about the research insights coming out of the SMiLES project in our in-depth blog post!
