Utilising case studies in Greater Manchester, UK and Vancouver, Canada, this study identifies a gap in public policy and transportation studies literature, with both heavily focused on theory or technical details. This is a gap that public policy academics should endeavour to close, enabling the production of theory into real-world examples and the application of public policy approaches to identify and manage technical detail, alongside applying theoretical concepts and feeding back issues from those who operate the transportation network. In addition to the gap identified the study further explores a trend in literature, namely that, in both academia and industry, economic language, rhetoric and frameworks are overwhelmingly dominant. This is observed to have led, through the historical and modern context provided by the case studies, to entrenched structural injustice; this study proposes that, as shown in Vancouver and Greater Manchester respectively, long-term, stable transit governance, together with principles of accessibility and justice enable a public transportation system to overcome this trend. Overall, this study identifies a gap in public policy literature that should be closed, along with an economic trend that has led to ingrained structural injustice within transit provision. The study concludes with a recommendation for a qualitative approach that centres the experiences of those who face inequality, to compliment Martens (2016) quantitative approach.
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