A seminar led by Christo Venter on the findings of the new working paper “Equitable Access to Opportunities: Widening Mobility Choices for the Under-Served”. This working paper is part of the World Resources Report (WRR), Towards a More Equal City. It highlights the constrained transportation choices for the under-served and the resulting inequities in access to opportunities in rapidly growing cities of the global South. The paper allows first for a more nuanced description of the urban underserved, by differentiating between the “motorizing under-served” and the “immobile underserved”. Second, the accessibility approach allows us to make the much-needed explicit connection to land use solutions which are addressed in other WRR papers. The paper highlights appropriately nuanced solutions for more equitable access to opportunities, as identified through evidence, the literature, and over a decade of the Ross Center’s work in transportation practice and policy guidance across geographic regions. The findings of the paper are expected to be useful for public, private, and civil society actors, the development and research community, and other urban change agents working towards more sustainable cities.

Speaker: Christo Venter

Christo Venter is a civil engineer with 20 years’ experience in transportation planning, transport modelling and public transport operations. He is a registered professional engineer, Member of the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) and serves on various local and international editorial panels and research fora. He is currently employed by the University of Pretoria as an Associate Professor: Transportation Engineering, where he teaches courses in the areas of transport planning and engineering.

Christo completed a PhD in Transportation Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1998, focusing on travel behavior research and activity-based modelling. In 1999 he joined the CSIR in Pretoria, working on a range of local and international projects including Travel Demand Management, bus and minibus-taxi planning, and stated preference studies.

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