Why urban mobility policies should take women into account

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Why urban mobility policies should take women into account

On October 19, the platform for disseminating academic and scientific knowledge, The Conversation, published the article “Why urban mobility policies should take women into account.” This article, written by professors Lidia Montero and Jaume Barceló, experts in Smart Mobility, analyzed why gender plays a key role in mobility and the way we live in the city.

This study reflects on how the individual factors of each individual influence such as gender, age, family situation, ethnicity, physical abilities and the economic class in transport throughout our daily lives and as dependent on each person has a different impact, in terms of accessibility, in order to carry out compliance with daily obligations.

That is why the article aims to clarify that not only time and space condition mobility to access a service, but as users of the transport network, individual factors, as is the genre are as much or more important than the topology of the transport network offered by the city to movearound us.

The article tells us that after several studies by Eurostat and the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) on gender differences in mobility, it is clear that the travel patterns of men and women follow divergent paths. It is said that men on the one hand, tend to have longer travel distances and more direct travel patterns than women. While according to studies, women make many more trips that are related to participation in home and family care, such as leaving children in schools or nursery schools, shopping or what it might be like to accompany relatives to medical services. Both articles emphasize that these factors lead to a completely different urban mobility policy according to gender.

After the ravages left by covid-19, the article also wants to highlight how as a result of the pandemic, mobility patterns have been transformed and and how they have been modified according to the work and gender of each individual. The study carried out on the AMB concludes that gender truly plays a relevant role in mobility, and also states that after the disease, some population groups have been more likely to change mobility patterns.

The article tells us about differences in the socioeconomic field, and as throughout the pandemic, gender has played a crucial role in mobility and the number of trips made. As highlighted in the article, the highest income groups decreased their mobility compared to the lower income group. Lower-income workers were employed as frontline workers, such as healthcare activities and where basically, they were people who could not telework. In this sense, according to the statistics, women are more likely to be part of the collective.​

The study opens up a wide range of possibilities for more research in the field of mobility and gender, since being able to better interpret the billions of data currently collected could be an important advance in order to better relate the​ distributions of travel times and distances with information that includes the specific factors that affect gender.