Armed-conflict accessibility and equity in Kharkiv's public transport system

Protracted armed conflict in Ukraine has disrupted urban mobility, yet reconstruction agendas still privilege strategic corridors and macroeconomic recovery over minimum everyday access. This paper develops a conflict-sensitive framework to evaluate how public transport accessibility and equity evolve under wartime degradation, and the extent to which a minimum public transport function is preserved under progressive conflict and energy-system stress. We model Kharkiv's multimodal transit system at the Traffic Analysis Zone (TAZ) level across three empirically grounded scenarios: a pre-invasion baseline, a post-invasion configuration with partial operation under available power, and a severe blackout stress scenario in which electricity-dependent passenger services are assumed unavailable. Accessibility is measured through stop coverage, stop density and number of modes per TAZ, while equity is assessed through damaged versus non-damaged zones, inhabited transit deserts and vertical-equity indicators based on transit travel times to the city centre, interpreted as time-loss penalties caused by disruption. Results show a staged transition from a dense multimodal network to a bus-only lifeline. Aggregate coverage declines moderately, but TAZs without any service and inhabited transit deserts increase sharply, while multimodal redundancy collapses. Damaged zones start from systematically longer trips and experience larger increases in travel times, zero-access status and time-loss penalties, with the damaged/non-damaged travel-time ratio rising from 1.31 to 1.56 between baseline and blackout conditions. The study reframes critical transport infrastructure as a multiscalar system and proposes securing at least one operational and reasonably timed public transport connection for every inhabited, non-destroyed TAZ as a core criterion for conflict-sensitive reconstruction and resilience planning.