Wired, Transportation | 1-21-2020 Public transportation is sexist. This may be unintentional or implicit, but it’s also easy to see. Women around the world do more care and domestic work than men, and their resulting mobility habits are hobbled by most transport systems. The demands of running errands and caring for children and other family members mean repeatedly getting on and off the bus, meaning paying more fares. Strollers and shopping bags make travel cumbersome. A 2018 study of New Yorkers found women were harassed on the subway far more frequently than men were, and as a result paid more money to avoid transit in favor of taxis and ride-hail.

The details vary by region, but the trends follow similar patterns across continents and cities. Researchers have spent decades studying the mobility habits of women and frequently find that transport systems are ill-suited to their needs.

“Most transport systems were explicitly designed for the solo male commuter,” says Jemilah Magnusson, a spokesperson for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, a nonprofit that works with cities to promote sustainable transport solutions. Transit schedules are mostly designed to accommodate 9-to-5 workers, resulting in longer wait times for anyone travelling outside peak hours. Many subway stations lack elevators to carry strollers from curb to platform. In cities that don’t have integrated transit services—for instance, where the subway is run by one company and the bus by another—people who “trip-chain” must pay a fare for each leg of the trip, inflating their transport costs.

Many transit agencies have been trying for years to make their services better suited for women (as well as for people with limited mobility). New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority is spending part of its $5.2 billion Capital Program for 2020-2024 on accessibility projects. Women’s safety concerns have spurred interventions including women-only subway cars and buses, enhanced complaint filing processes, and security cameras.

Yet it’s hard to know how different tactics address different problems, because few governments and transit agencies take gender into account when collecting ridership data. (Same goes for categories like income and ethnicity.) Moreover, that data collection often fails to consider the traveling experience of women. A recent investigation by The Globe and Mail showed that most Canadian transit agencies do not record incidents of sexual violence that happen at bus stops or shelters, because they consider those to fall under the municipality’s responsibility. Without a clear picture of the problem, transit agencies can’t design an appropriate response.

Transport for London is perhaps the most forward-thinking agency in this space. It has been studying the travel patterns of women and other groups of riders for years and annually releases a summary of its data. It has also adopted a policy on equality and inclusion that includes clear, measurable goals on improving opportunities for staff and transit users.

While London is an exception, other cities are moving to follow in its tracks. Before 2019, Los Angeles Metro had never collected and analyzed gender-disaggregated data. When it undertook that work, it found no other North American city whose example it could follow. So it came up with its own research plan, mixing data from older customer surveys with new questionnaires, focus groups, and workshops. The resulting report, released in September, contains 168 pages of illuminating data on how women use public transit in LA. It showed that women are more likely than men to travel in the middle of the day, when transit typically slows down. And that female transit riders are also more likely to be low-income. The 20-page section on safety includes sobering statistics, like that 14 rapes were reported on transit lines between October 2017 and September 2018.