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ABSTRACT It is argued in this paper that the orthodox sustainable transport vision leads to the further empowerment of technocratic and elitist groups in society while simultaneously contributing to the further disempowerment of those marginalized social groups who were already bearing the burden of the environmental problems resulting from a troubled transport ystem. Scalar redefinitions of the transport problem play a prominent role in the twin processes of empowerment and disempowerment. Furthermore, the contributions of spatial planning and neo-classical transport economics to the sustainable transport discourses will be critically investigated. The issues of transport inequality and transport inequality and transport poverty should be re-inserted into the dominant transport polity. debates and practices.
1. Introduction
Although initially planned in the 1970s, the Flemish government decided in October 1997 not to construct a highway section between two small towns (Ipres and Fumes, located near the French border). The road would have provided these towns with direct highway access to the Channel Tunnel and all major north-west European cities, and it would have solved the problem of through traffic that several smaller municipalities between Ipres and Fumes are currently facing. The decision generated peculiar coalitions of local interest groups which were either in favour of or against the highway development. Some local politicians considered it would have been an indispensable economic booster, and they had been dreaming of new industrial estates, opened up by a brand new highway to the rest of north-west Europe. People living in village centres torn apart by heavy lorry traffic believed that the highway was the only practical solution to influence unbearable levels of unsafety, pollution, and noise that now make their neighbourhoods difficult to live in. Farmers and their unions, however, were not willing to give away fertile land to yet another highway in a country that already has the most dense highway network in the world. Environmentalists, finally, saw valuable areas of open space being lost if the highway were to be built, and welcomed the decision as a proof that government was not just paying lip-service to its official environmental commitment. Shortly after the decision was taken, both opponents and supporters of the highway section held peaceful demonstrations, the former to confirm that environmental justice was done, and the...