Identification and Typology of the Mobility Highly Vulnerable Households Using Vulmob, a New Composite Indicator

Mobility enables us to find jobs, go to school or meet people. However, long distances, high costs, car dependency and poor accessibility are sources of mobility vulnerabilities. The current rise in fuel prices may have a strong impact on mobility, especially for households that rely heavily on their cars. Moreover, the need to reduce air pollution requires the implementation of ambitious environmental policies. It is therefore necessary to identify transport-poor households, affected by financial issues, as well as vulnerable households whose mobility would be strongly impacted by changes in individual mobility conditions and would have difficulties to adapt to this situation. To this end, we construct VulMob, a composite indicator made up of 13 individual factors organized in four dimensions: financial resources, work constraints, heavy car use and structural constraints, such as accessibility or household structure. We apply this indicator to the Grenoble area, in France. Our results show that 9.6% are highly vulnerable, meaning that they face at least six vulnerability issues and 5.5% of the households are transport-poor. A typology of five profiles of highly vulnerable households shows that some are financially constrained; others are heavy car users, work at night or face territorial accessibility problems