Urban transport, environmental justice and human daily activity patterns

Emissions from road transport such as noise, particles and gasses have been associated with issues of environmental justice in urban areas. To date, the majority of analyses of this issue have used income, education, employment situation or ethnicity as parameters for distinguishing socio-economic groups, which might be unequally affected by such emissions in their home. However, in addition to people's residential locations, their daily patterns of time use in conjunction with traffic flows can also play a major role in determining their level of exposure to transport emissions. Through analysing time use surveys from Germany and the UK to establish human daily activity patterns in terms of time spent at home, this paper shows that the parameters age and gender are at least as important in identifying groups that might be disproportionately affected by road transport emissions in their homes in urban areas as are income, education and employment situation. The paper also sets the average time use patterns of different population groups in Germany against representative traffic flows on main roads in Hamburg, Germany, to investigate how differences in time use might relate to variations in traffic patterns. The paper focuses on the residential location as the most common unit of EJ investigations and also the place, where people spend most of their time.