Sufficient mobility and access within limits: Research agenda for bringing together corridor frameworks and transportation research

Recently developed frameworks that explicitly define boundaries of sustainability, such as “a safe and just space” or “consumption corridors,” are key for achieving good lives for all within ecological limits and have been explored in multiple influential studies. However, these “corridor frameworks” have rarely been explicitly applied to mobility and transport, and there is a need for more work in this direction. In this article, we provide an overview of the corridor frameworks and their links to four main strains of mobility and transport literature: sustainable transport, transport poverty, accessibility, and tourism and long-distance travel. The literature traditions have meaningful links to the corridor frameworks, but their approaches to social and ecological justice are largely disparate and disconnected. Existing studies rarely consider explicit ecological ceilings, and when ecological impacts are considered, the focus is usually on efficiency or relative improvements. Transport poverty and accessibility literature provide a meaningful contribution to defining social floors, but they largely neglect ecological ceilings and consumption maxima. Considerations of floors and ceilings are rarely explicit or are based on unquestioned assumptions of necessity and excess. Explicit ecological ceilings and social floors in mobility have been defined at national or global scales, but there is a need for more work on locally-specific thresholds that are distributively and procedurally just. We highlight the need to more comprehensively apply the corridor framework to transportation research and suggest a research agenda with seven main directions.