Matters of care in transportation: Addressing disabling environments in the movement for care-full transitions

Urban scholars are increasingly calling for greater attention to care, as both a practice and ethic, in response to socio-environmental issues. In the urban transportation literature, care has helped to underscore uneven mobility patterns and the need for inclusive planning frameworks. Likewise, urban political ecology perspectives have foregrounded care by examining the everyday practices, ethical relations and uneven labour through which urban environments are sustained, contested or made livable. While discussions on gender and care inequities are gaining prominence in these fields, this literature has tended to neglect people with disabilities and the role of their leadership and care relations in the movement for sustainable urban transitions. This provocation paper brings the literature on care-full transitions into conversation with critical disability theory and activism. We do so through a specific focus on two large-scale transformations reshaping public transportation in the United States: the retrofitting of legacy subway systems and the roll-out of micro-transit services. In light of ongoing issues of universal inaccessibility and disability exclusion, we underscore the importance of working to address disabling environments and adopting an ethic of care that honours the leadership of disability communities in the transition to sustainable urban ecologies.