Transport poverty research has a blind spot. For decades, the conversation has focused almost entirely on people can they reach hospitals, schools, jobs? These are valid and important questions. But freight is invisible in this literature, and that invisibility has real consequences. When a neighbourhood has poor road quality, unreliable logistics infrastructure, or no last-mile connectivity, it is not just residents who suffer. Local businesses face higher costs, longer lead times, and reduced competitiveness. Small manufacturers cannot scale. Markets fragment. Economic isolation deepens quietly, without anyone naming it as a transport problem. My research tries to name it. The Freight Accessibility Index is an attempt to measure what has been systematically ignored: the degree to which a location is connected to freight networks, and what it costs when that connection breaks down. Warsaw is my case study. Not because it is broken it is not but because even in a well-functioning city, the spatial variation in freight accessibility is striking once you start measuring it. Some corridors perform well. Others carry hidden penalties that compound over time. The goal is not just academic. If we can measure freight accessibility the way we measure public transport accessibility, we can start designing policy around it. We can justify infrastructure investment in the right places, for the right reasons. That is the work. It is slow, sometimes frustrating, and occasionally feels absurdly niche. But someone has to count the invisible things.

Infrastructure rarely fails in a visible or dramatic way. It does not collapse, nor does it cease to function. It continues to carry traffic and connect locations. However, over time, it begins to introduce small but persistent inefficiencies. Travel times become slightly longer. Surface conditions deteriorate. Minor delays emerge at points where none should exist. Individually, these effects appear negligible. Collectively, they alter the performance of the system. For freight movement, such changes are particularly significant. Increased costs, reduced reliability, and declining route viability emerge not from disconnection, but from inefficiency within existing networks. This form of failure is difficult to detect. It is not reflected in conventional representations of infrastructure, such as maps or network diagrams, and it rarely prompts immediate intervention. Instead, it accumulates gradually. Over time, it produces disparities between locations that appear equivalent in terms of connectivity. Understanding this requires moving beyond the question of whether infrastructure exists. It requires examining how infrastructure performs under real conditions. In transport systems, performance is not defined solely by connectivity, but by the quality, reliability, and efficiency of movement that such connectivity enables.

Most discussions about transport poverty focus on people: whether they can reach work, schools, hospitals, or public services. That matters. But there is another side of transport poverty that is often ignored. Freight. Cities and regions do not only depend on people moving. They also depend on goods moving: food, medicine, construction materials, business supplies, spare parts, and the everyday logistics that keep the economy alive. When freight access is weak, the impact is not always visible immediately. Roads may still exist. Deliveries may still happen. But costs rise, delays increase, reliability drops, and some areas become less attractive for business. This is where my research begins. I am interested in understanding how infrastructure quality, accessibility, and logistics performance shape economic connectivity. In simple terms: which places are well connected to freight systems, which places are disadvantaged, and how that disadvantage can be measured in a clear engineering way. Freight transport poverty is not only about distance. It is also about road quality, travel time, reliability, service availability, and the hidden penalties that businesses face when infrastructure does not perform well. My PhD work focuses on developing ways to identify and measure these problems, with Warsaw’s metropolitan freight network as one of the main case studies. The goal is not only to describe the problem, but to create tools that can help planners, engineers, and decision-makers make better infrastructure choices. Because sometimes the most important transport problems are not the ones people notice first. They are the ones quietly increasing the cost of everything around them.

A map can show that two places are connected. It can show a road, a route, a junction, or a corridor. But it cannot always show how well that connection actually works. This is one of the main reasons why freight accessibility is more complex than it first appears. For freight movement, the question is not only whether a route exists. The real question is whether that route performs well enough to support reliable and efficient logistics. A road may connect an industrial area to an expressway, but if the surface condition is poor, the geometry is weak, travel times are unstable, or access is constrained, then the connection becomes less valuable in practice. This kind of problem is often hidden. The infrastructure is there, so on paper the area looks connected. But in reality, businesses may face higher delivery costs, longer travel times, lower reliability, and reduced competitiveness. That is why freight accessibility needs to be measured through performance, not only distance. In my research, I am interested in these hidden penalties. The small inefficiencies that do not always appear dramatic, but gradually affect how freight systems function. Transport systems do not only fail when something collapses. Sometimes they fail quietly. They continue to operate, but with friction. And for freight, that friction has a cost.