Although knowledge of women’s travel behaviours is essential to guarantee equality in transport, there is still a lack of awareness of gender-differentiated behaviour and gender issues are not often incorporated into urban policy. The aim of the article is to present a first attempt at a wider-scale diagnosis of women’s travel behaviours and needs as well as existing barriers to transportation access for woman in Poland, with respect to current findings. Documents on history, culture, social factors and labour market data were reviewed to indicate factors that may explain travel behaviours. The data of the Travel Studies for seven Polish cities were analysed to diagnose gender differences in travel. Public policies and initiatives were analysed to examine the level of awareness of women’s needs and the adaptation of transport to these needs. The results proved that the greatest differences in the trip purpose was observed for age group 25–49, in which women make more trips for errands, and men for work. Women travel more, which is observed among 25–59-year-olds, if the main occupation is considered. Women travel more on foot and by public transport, while men by private car and the results indicate that it is mostly visible for people aged 25–59. The age groups 39–49 for women and 30–49 for men are the most dependent on the car. The differences may be explained by historical, cultural and social factors, and these factors can be also seen as barriers to achieving equal access to transport. A low level of awareness of women’s mobility needs is one of the reasons that Polish transport systems are not fully adapted to their needs.

Transport available to people with reduced mobility assures their full involvement in social and economic life. A fundamental way of improving the travelling conditions for people with reduced mobility is to adapt elements of the transportation system, including interchanges, to their needs. This article covers the niche subject of adapting interchanges to the needs of people with reduced mobility. It contains the results of research assessing selected interchanges in Kraków (Poland) for the needs of that user group. The four variants of interchanges were assessed with one of the Multiple Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) methods – the Compensation-Conjunctive method, which allowed to obtain the final rankings of the interchanges. The adaptation of the Assessment Method of Public Transport Interchanges (AMPTI), expanded with aspects resulting from a review of literature and the authors’ experience ensured a broad range of assessment criteria that comprehensively refer to the interchange planning. The unique nature of the research is the fact that opinions of people with reduced mobility were taken into account and the results proved that the most important aspects of interchanges are spatial compactness and solutions dedicated strictly for persons with reduced mobility. The other major aspects are quality of stop infrastructure and information.

The sustainable development of transport is fostered by innovations. To implement innovations, the European Commission issues different regulations, programs and initiatives and the European Transport Policy has a significant impact on transport policy in the member states. At the same time, transport policy is dynamic and requires new solutions that will allow the planned goals to be achieved. In this context, it is important to analyze the effectiveness of the current innovation policies, and to create recommendations for future actions that bring innovations to the market. This article concerns the subject of innovation policy in the transport sector. It illustrates the possibility of applying one of the methods of the multiple criteria decision aid, i.e., the simple additive weighting (SAW) method to assess the European Union (EU) and national policy measures in surface transport in terms of their influence on the market take-up of innovations. The use of this method allows for the analyzed policy measures to be contemplated in terms of various criteria and to identify those that best meet the adopted criteria, and thus those that could contribute the most to the stimulation of innovation. The article focuses on the method itself, indicating its flexibility and ease of use, while the analyzed collection of policy measures constitutes only the background of the deliberations.

The predictors of urban trip mode choice and one of its important components, public transit ridership, have still not been thoroughly investigated using case studies in Central Europe. Therefore, this study attempts to clarify the correlates of mode choices for commute travel and shopping, and entertainment travel to distant places, as well as the frequencies of public transit use of university students, using a wide range of explanatory variables covering individual, household, and socio-economic attributes as well as their perceptions, mobility, and the nearby built environment. The correlation hypothesis of these factors, especially the role of the street network, was tested by collecting the data from 1288 university students in Krakow and developing Binary Logistic and Ordinal Probit models. The results show that gender, age, car ownership, main daily activity, possession of a driving license, gross monthly income, duration of living in the current home, daily shopping area, sense of belonging to the neighborhood, quality of social/recreational facilities of the neighborhood, and commuting distance can predict commute and non-commute mode choices, while gender, daily activity, financial dependence from the family, entertainment place, quality of social/recreational facilities, residential self-selection, number of commute trips, time living in the current home, and street connectivity around home are significantly correlated with public transit use. Some of these findings are somewhat different from those regarding university students in Western Europe or other high-income countries. These results can be used for policy making to reduce students’ personal and household car use and increase sustainable modal share in Poland and similar neighboring countries.

Improvement of efficiency of processes of mining product processing at ­transport hubs