Uncovering how transport access reduces deprivation: When colocation misleads

Abstract

Since transport access determines who can reach jobs, education, healthcare, and community life, governments increasingly use accessibility improvements to reduce deprivation and tackle social exclusion. Yet whether better access causally reduces disadvantage remains uncertain because observational analyses struggle to separate cause from context, and because accessibility itself can be measured in many, nonequivalent ways. Two challenges follow: i) widely used measures of accessibility, cumulative-opportunity, gravity, and random-utility may yield conflicting maps of accessibility and; ii) estimates from observational data are vulnerable to confounding. This paper conducts a London-wide assessment that a) compares widely used accessibility measures, and b) applies instrumental-variables (IV) estimation with road-safety-based instruments to address confounding and identify the causal effect of accessibility on deprivation. Using neighborhood-scale accessibility and the 2019 Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD, proxies deprivation, and more broadly, social exclusion), we report two main findings. First, although accessibility rankings are broadly consistent across measures, gravity and cumulative opportunity measures display similar linear behavior, in contrast to the strong nonlinearity of the random-utility measure. The choice of measure affects not only how accessibility is represented, but also the variation retained for empirical analysis. Second, simple correlations suggest that accessibility and deprivation colocate, whereas causal estimates indicate a consistent, beneficial effect: Improvement in accessibility leads to lower deprivation, with magnitudes differing across IMD domains. From a policy perspective, this highlights the importance of grounding transport investment decisions in causal evidence and considering a range of measures to understand how accessibility improvements may help reduce disadvantage.