Karel Martens

Karel Martens (born 1967) is a Dutch urban and transport planner who is a professor of transport planning and is currently the dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. He holds the David J. Azrieli Chair in Architecture and Town Planning and directs the Fair Transport Lab.

Biography and career

Education and professional career Martens studied at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in spatial planning, cum laude, in 1986, and completed his master’s degree in urban and regional planning with distinction, and a Ph.D. in policy sciences in 2000. He was a Lady Davis Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion. Martens worked and was then head of Transport Today & Tomorrow, based in Israel.

Academic career Since 2000, Martens has been based at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology as a faculty member in the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning.From 2002 to 2006 Martens was a research fellow in the Environmental Simulation Laboratory in Tel Aviv University. From 2015 to 2021 he was associate professor in the Technion. In 2022 he was made a full professor in the Technion. Since 2022 he holds the David J. Azrieli Chair in Architecture and Town Planning and directs the Fair Transport Lab. The Lab undertakes both philosophical inquiries into mobility rights and empirical analyses of public transit equity, seeking to translate justice-based frameworks into actionable planning tools. It collaborates with policymakers and practitioners worldwide to address issues such as fare policy, access to employment, and the measurement of mobility risk.

Transport Justice A major work of Martens’s scholarship is his monograph, Transport Justice: Designing fair transportation systems published by Routledge, in 2016, which critiques performance-oriented planning metrics and proposes a justice-based approach grounded in the sufficiency principle guaranteeing a minimum level of accessibility for all. Martens based his theories on earlier works from Rawls, Dworkin, and Walzer. Martens articulates distributive, procedural, and relational dimensions of transport justice, challenging planners to embed equity at every stage of policy and project appraisal.

Martens argues in his book that people who already enjoy sufficient accessibility should themselves pay for the costs of further improvements in their accessibility. A road widening based on road tax and fuel excise duty paid by all motorists is not fair from that perspective. Those who still want to tackle traffic jams could do so by introducing "high occupancy toll lanes" that are fully financed by the users themselves (including construction, maintenance and management). Such "high occupancy toll lanes" consist of lanes where the toll amount depends on the traffic density at the time, so that those who are prepared to pay (considerably) more can move faster and thus 'enjoy' a higher level of accessibility.

Martens is the most cited scholar in the field of transport justice. Even more importantly from Martens' perspective, electric cars do not contribute in any way to improving the accessibility of people who do not have access to a car. The self-driving car does have the potential to improve road safety, but makes little contribution to solving the other issues.

Lucas, K. & Martens, K., Measuring Transport Equity. Elsevier, 2019.

Martens, K., "Justice in transport as justice in access: applying Walzer’s ‘Spheres of justice’ to the transport sector", Transportation, 39(6): 1035–1053, 2012.

Martens, K., "The role of the bicycle in limiting transport poverty in the Netherlands", Transportation Research Record, 2387(1): 20–25, 2013.

Martens, K. & Di Ciommo, F., "Travel time savings, accessibility gains and equity effects in cost–benefit analysis", Transport Reviews, 37(2): 152–169, 2017.

Honors and awards

Transport Professional of the Year (Netherlands, 2014)

Leona Chanin Career Development Chair (Technion, 2015)