Emerging Essential Structure of Spatial Mobility
Beyond Transport: Understanding the Role of Mobilities in Connecting Rural Elders in Civic Society
Parkhurst, G.*, Galvin, K., Musselwhite, C., Phillips, J., Shergold, I., Todres L.
Pre-publication text. Please reference as:
Parkhurst, G., Galvin, K., Musselwhite, C., Phillips, J., Shergold, I., Todres L. (2014). Beyond transport: understanding the role of mobilities in connecting rural elders in civic society. Chapter 5 in Hennesey, C., Means, R., Burholt, V., (Eds). Countryside Connections: Older people, Community and Place in Rural Britain. Policy Press, Bristol, 125-157.
*Corresponding author ().
Introduction
The present chapter argues for an understanding of connectivity through mobility by elders living in rural areas that goes beyond the traditional transport planning focus on the supply and demand of transport services. This involves consideration of not just physical movement but also all the other ways in which older people can be ‘mobile’ for connectivity and the wider benefits and meanings mobility brings, for example video-calling grandchildren using computer software, finding out about shopping delivery services for use in bad weather, or compiling a scrapbook about a past alpine holiday. Following a brief review of methods, a conceptual framework for mobility which can be applied across the lifecourse is presented. The following section applies this framework as context to understanding some of the key mobility policy and practice challenges for the promotion of connectivity of rural elders, which relate to the availability of mobility options - cars in particular - and the associated issues of accessibility and mobility-linked social exclusion. It is concluded that the more holistic appraisal of mobility for older citizens bring important conceptual benefits. A picture emerges of rural areas being ‘car intensive’, but less car dependent than identified in previous studies, with accessibility for connectivity also relatively unproblematic for the majority, although with minorities representing important exceptions. Practical relevance is drawn out for planning and urban design as well as for health and social care professionals.
Methodology
The analysis draws on the quantitative survey described in Chapter One and two qualitative data collection activities conducted specifically for the mobility and transport study that was part of the GaPL project: 45 semi-structured interviews, for which the participants were selected to represent a range of mobility lifestyles, and ten phenomenological interviews with participants selected according to varying health and mobility statuses.
The GaPL survey contained a series of mobility-related questions which addressed travel patterns and behaviours, mode choice (including over time), and whether mobility played a role in either exclusion from, or engagement with, the local community. Participants in the semi-structured interviews were mostly recruited from volunteers identified through the quantitative survey, but due to the low representation in the quantitative survey sample of a particular group of interest (people who had recently given up car driving) seven further participants were recruited from outside of the quantitative survey sample. Potential interviewees were initially contacted by letter or email, with arrangements for home-based interview made by phone. Interviews were typically undertaken on a one-to-one basis (but occasionally with couples) and were recorded digitally and transcribed. Age group (60-69, 70-79 and 80+) and gender were also approximately matched between the six locations.
The interviews focussed on mobility issues, both at a personal level and for the wider community of older people, and lasted on average around an hour. Some participants were active cyclists or mobility scooter users, others were ex-drivers, or were users/non-users of public transport, or were people who had re-located in order to achieve better access to services and facilities. Questions were arranged around five themes; exploring the meaning and importance of current mobility, the benefits and dis-benefits of the most commonly used mode(s) of travel, the impacts of losing access to a car (when relevant), personal mobility biographies, and a forward-looking theme covering which included sustainability issues related to travel. The data were analysed using a framework based on the research questions, assisted by the use of Nvivo software.
Participants for the phenomenological interviews were all recruited from volunteers identified during the quantitative survey. The interviews lasted between one and three hours and focused on what it was like to live in their locality of residence. The mobility aspects explored trips regarded as necessary (‘have to’, ‘must do’) and desired (‘want to’) by the participants, with the questioning intended to allow understanding of the meaning of transport in people’s lives and the meaning of mobility within the context of rural space to emerge. The analysis of this group of interviews was also phenomenological in orientation, following a sequential approach which began with holistic and background understanding, followed by the identification of discrete ‘meaning units’, and then finally these were transformed into more general expressions about the essence of that meaning. Todres and Galvin (2012) provide further detail of the phenomenological approach.
From transport to connectivity
As a particular focus of academic transport studies and practical transport policy, the mobility needs of older citizens in rural areas have traditionally been dominated by disciplinary perspectives which have emphasised economic efficiency principles which hold space and distance to be inefficient inconveniences to be overcome (for example Moseley, 1979; Nutley, 2003). Such accessibility planning approaches have their value, particularly for highly functional journeys such as journeys for medical treatment, or goods movements which are life-critical, such as the restocking of food stores. They also draw empirical support from studies which show travellers often do exhibit attitudes and behaviour which place importance on the money costs of travel, a disproportionate weight on time spent waiting for transport services and often preferences for faster journey times, particularly in the context of routine travel (for example TRL, 2004).
However, this approach encourages a simplistic classification of trips drawing on a limited range of factors (see Figure 5.1). Daily or routine journeys, such as to work or to shops, are seen as having no direct value in themselves, regarded as a ‘waste of time’, to be minimised through travel-time reductions or delivery services. Even the space between the formal activities can be seen as a devalued obstacle (Cresswell, 2010). Consideration of journeys for tourism perhaps illustrates the shortcomings most starkly: in these cases the journey may literally be seen as richer, more satisfying and desirable than the destination activity. As tourist travel does not fit with the efficiency-maximising paradigm it has traditionally been on the margins of transport planning. Locations in which it is significant are viewed as anomalous, and tourists themselves as dislocated from their routines. Implicit in this perspective is that novelty enriches travel, while repetition, familiarity and the mundane are undesirable. It also ignores the opportunity routine travel offers for time safeguarded from social and familial obligations (Jain and Lyons, 2008) and, as will be argued later, the importance of engagement with the familiar locale.
Figure 5.1: Implications of the narrow economic-efficiency approach to trip characterisation
In a further extension of the economic logic employed by some transport planners, those routine trips which are identified as creating net benefits within the formal economy are referred to as utility travel - implying that other types of trips are lacking in value – whereas routine trips seen as less urgent and lower priority – such as a walk in the countryside, or to ‘windowshop’, and for social purposes - are termed discretionary. ‘Discretion’ implies choice and voluntariness, and that such trips can be foregone without essential needs being unfulfilled. People making such trips may also be assumed to seek to minimise the time costs of travel, but at the same time the consequences of long journey times or unexpected delay are seen as less important than they are for high-utility heavy goods vehicle deliveries, business-to-business meetings, or the peak-hour commute.
Further, the utility/discretionary/tourist characterisation of trips also relies on a distinction which also often breaks down in practice: in the GaPL study justifications made by the older respondents blurred between ‘subsistence shopping’ and social connectivity:
‘I could shop online, give up using the greengrocers... But you make friends... if you don’t go in the shops as a regular customer you would miss that.’ (Female 60s)
Another of the participants in the GaPL research identified how a hybrid trip, almost without an explicit purpose, could even be identified as a social norm:
‘Nowadays it’s part of life to go and wander around the supermarket and have a cup of coffee and a cake… when you have got time to do it, it’s the sort of thing you do.’ (Male 60s).
Implications for older citizens
The categorisation of trips has practical as well as academic importance: the triad is particularly disadvantageous for considerations of the transport and mobility needs of older people and younger people, due to their lower involvement in high-profile, ‘high utility’ economic production, notably paid work. The definition of ‘utility’ has an implicit meaning of ‘essential’, which risks marginalising the travel aspirations and needs of older people through categorising them as discretionary - and therefore low priority for transport policy - leaving trips to access the short-run basics of life – groceries and health care – as the main priorities (Figure 5.2).
And as the majority of formal economic activity, and the traffic congestion transport planning tends to focus upon, occur in urban areas, this approach is also not well oriented towards understanding the transport problems of rural areas. Hence, older citizens living in rural areas may be doubly marginalised by professional practice, whilst experiencing fewer mobility opportunities. Urban-dwellers are more likely to have independent access to service centres offering a range of essential and discretionary services, so a visit by bus primarily to a food store might be combined with a visit to a social club or perhaps a cinema. However, a rural dweller is more likely to need to rely on a lift in someone else’s car, in which case the activities may be rationalised to minimise the impact on the lift-giver’s schedule, with the ‘discretionary’ trips which enhance the quality of life or have special significance, such as reunions and funerals, being those most likely to be forgone (Davey, 2007).
The focus on the formal wage economy also marginalises the important unpaid work contributed by older citizens. People in the UK aged 65-74 are those most likely to be involved in voluntary activities (Department of Communities and Local Government, 2010), a mobilisation essential to the present emphasis of numerous governments upon civic engagement as a way of meeting needs at a time of austerity budgets for the public sector (see Chapter One). Equating paid employment with high-priority, productive economic activity is one process which systematically disenfranchises volunteering and familial social care. Another is that they rarely appear as a trip purpose category in transport planning surveys, models, or analyses, despite the importance of these to welfare (the broader economic notion of utility) and even to the wider issues such as climate change and the sustainability of much modern social services provision (Evans et al, 2012).
Figure 5.2: Indicative comparative trip profile classification by stage in lifecourse
Even from the perspective of economics, the definition of utility employed in some transport analyses has also been excessively short-run, focussing on the immediate production and welfare consequences of journey characteristics. Health economics is becoming increasingly aware that the utility benefits of enabling leisure walking include long-run welfare benefits both for the individual walker and in reduced cost to health services through avoided poor health (Cavill et al, 2008) and this awareness is becoming increasingly influential on transport economics, with the benefits of promoting physical fitness now included within official UK government transport project appraisal procedures (DfT, 2013).
Here too, however, movement is identified as providing a measureable functional output with a specific derived objective: staying healthy and avoiding imposing costs to the healthcare system. In contrast, Musselwhite and Haddad (2010) have provided a hierarchical conceptualisation of a much broader and in respects less tangible range of benefits from mobility including satisfying affective needs by establishing personal agency, status and role and aesthetic needs derived from travel, for example, from experiencing nature.
As in the case of transport studies, gerontology has been identified as focusing excessively on mobility as ‘actual realised movement’ (Ziegler and Schwanen, 2011, p 760) or physical functioning, for example, someone’s ability to shop or use public transport. Nevertheless the gerontological literature has been more aware of the wider benefits of travel, including the importance of maintaining independence and wellbeing (Gabriel and Bowling, 2005; Sugiyama and Ward Thompson, 2007), maintaining social inclusion (Scharf and Bartlam, 2006) and avoiding isolation (Victor et al, 2005). Mobility constraints are seen as not just creating additional constraints in accessing the destinations of goods and services, but also as potentially limiting different life spaces and hence they are implicated as a contributory factor in the incidence of physical disability and loss of independence (Hirvensalo et al, 2000). Gerontology has begun to recognise the multidimensionality of mobility (Ziegler and Schwanen, 2011) with authors such as Mollenkopf et al (2011) exploring the subjective meaning of mobility over time. In the next section, past approaches are synthesised and developed, considering how a wide range of modes of connectivity can be variously important for wellbeing over time, according to personal needs, aspirations, and capacities.
A continuum of mobilities for connectivity
Urry (2007) emphasises how social connectivity arises from relationships maintained across distance with varying extents of face-to-face meeting or ‘co-presence’. Social groups have particular expectations and rules about how distance is managed which influence how the social life of that community is established. While this has always been the case, new technologies have influenced the nature of how these mobility relationships are negotiated, and have also brought new mobility options. Urry identifies five forms of mobility, which can be summarised as:
- ‘corporeal mobility or the physical movement of the body through space,
- the movement of objects such as goods,
- ‘imaginative travel’ by which the mobility experience is solely within the mind, typically triggered through audiovisual media, but with no connectivity with the actual environment across space,
- ‘virtual travel’, facilitated by information-communication technologies, whereby the quality of the experience substitutes corporeal mobility,
- ‘communicative travel’, whereby information is passed through high and low-technology media including letters, text messages and telephones.
The five forms of mobility are not always straightforward to independently establish – a letter involves both the movement of an object but also communicates from sender to recipient. Virtual travel and communicative travel in practice seem to differ by the quality of the experience, whereby taking part in a videoconference achieved through high-quality facilities may be (nearly) equivalent to being co-present whereas a poor-quality videophone call may amount to communication rather than co-presence. Hence, the term ‘virtual mobility’ rather than ‘virtual travel’ is used here to address both these forms.
Older age cohorts in industrialised states are developing diverse corporeal mobility narratives. Overall they arguably have a wider availability of transport resources than any previous cohort of older people, with rates of driving licence holding and car access continuing to rise, the introduction of new forms of mobility using flexible bus services and single-person electric micro-vehicles. In some locations public transport supply is at an all-time high and, in the UK, older people can travel free on most public bus services, while discounts are provided in many other states.
Parkhurst and colleagues (2013) presented a continuum of modes of connectivity which links corporeal mobility with three other mobilities: virtual, potential and imaginative (Figure 5.3).
Figure 5.3: A continuum of modes for connectivity
Virtual mobility comprises the real-time aspect of Urry’s ‘virtual travel’, where there is the experience of visiting a location without corporeal movement, such as through internet-connected cameras; his ‘communicative travel’, namely the exchange of person-to-person information through ICTs; and traditional media such as paper, and the procurement of goods and services without corporeal travel by the consumer. Virtual mobility is rising among older citizens as well as the wider population, and is expected to continue to rise as older cohorts in the future are increasingly technologically-enabled and engaged.
‘Yes I use the internet. Buying things and especially emails. Oh gosh…it’s a godsend. I’ve got lots of friends all over the place so it’s a wonderful way of keeping in touch with them. I look at it every day and use it quite often.’ (Female 80s)
The GaPL research found that, already, 60% of older households were internet enabled (Figure 5.4).
However, ICTs are also subject to capability constraints, due to limited dexterity or visual acuity or cognitive ability. While these constraints are by no means exclusive to older people, they experience them more frequently than younger people. Therefore the extent of universality of use will depend in part on the extent to which future technological development is inclusive. In the GaPL study, resistance to the proliferation of higher virtual mobility technology was also identified:
‘Two of my eldest daughters have said, why don’t you get a computer daddy, a laptop… but you know I've already had a computer and I gave it away because I did not see the sense in having it. I said what is wrong with picking up the phone and phoning me, or me phoning you, which we do.’ (Male 70s)