Transportation barriers and access to destinations

Transportation will be critical to helping Syrian refugees access services and successfully integrate into Canadian society. New arrivals are often reliant on others, including their sponsors, for assistance with transportation for both their social and practical needs. Without access to their own automobile immigrants are often more reliant on public transportation, but the cost and time required to travel by transit can be prohibitive. For refugees settled in suburban and rural areas where public transportation is limited, their potential isolation and disadvantage is heightened, and we hypothesize that the lack of access to transportation results in decreased participation in settlement services, language training, and employment opportunities, all of which enable the transition to Canada.  

The goal of this research project is to understand the effect of inaccessibility and transportation barriers on recent refugees’ participation and social integration in Canadian society, with particular objectives being to identify whether refugees suffer from transportation inaccessibility; to discover whether inaccessibility acts as a barrier to participation in settlement activities; and to understand how recent refugees experience and interact with the transportation system in determining their daily activities. 

We will achieve these objectives by combining quantitative travel behaviour research with qualitative focus groups and interviews of recent refugees. Though refugees are settling across Canada in a wide array of urban and rural contexts, Durham provides a useful case as a largely suburban and rural region with transportation issues that will have similarities to many other settlement regions across Canada. Additionally, this project will allow for the establishment of a new research relationship with settlement agencies in Durham Region who have identified transportation issues as a priority area for successful settlement of refugees. The project will allow us to gauge the necessity for improved policies regarding the urban and suburban contexts of refugee settlement, transportation-related barriers to participation, and assistance programs aimed at increasing the independent travel capabilities of refugees during the settlement process.