Measuring unemployment by location and transport: StepSA's access envelope technologies

Increasing emphasis is coming onto spatial planning as government in South Africa moves to address the massive challenge of unemployment. Attention has been turning toward the critical intersection between spatial location, for poverty-level human settlements, and available transport.

To deal with the interaction of unemployment and transport access as they impact poor settlements, new, fully metricated technologies are needed to enable spatial planning to assess what a given location will mean for access to work for the population intended to settle there.

Under StepSA, Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) commissioned its research partners at the Centre for Transport Development at University of Pretoria to develop the transport access envelope technology and the transport access stress tests, as a new social technology aimed at metricating the question of poor settlements’ transport access to the developed economy through access to the urban labour market.

Abstract based directly on source.