Mobility, Social Capital and Sense of Community: What Value?

Recent research by the authors has shown that increasing trip making and improving a person’s social capital and sense of community is likely to reduce risks of social exclusion. That research has enabled values to be assigned to additional trip making, in the context of reducing risk of social exclusion. This paper extends that analysis to impute values to increasing a person’s sense of community and social capital. The social capital extension requires strong assumptions for the derivation of values, given the available data, but the valuation of sense of community is likely to be an important new support for policy measures intended to achieve this purpose. 1