How Women Travel

Nadine Lee: Imagine you're a single mom standing at a dark bus stop. It is seven at night, and you've got two young children, a stroller and a bag of groceries.

You're tired, the bus is late and there's nowhere to sit. Now ask yourself, was this system ever really designed for you?

Today on mobility in motion, we're asking what transit would look like if we designed it for the way women live.

I'm your host, Nadine Lee, CEO of Dart, and this is Mobility in Motion.

There has been a lot of research and thinking around this issue in the past few years. Most recently, the Shared Use Mobility Center, a public interest organization that advocates for Transit, studied women's transit habits and put together a new design framework for mobility hubs centered around women and caregivers.

They asked a question we don't always ask, what do women need from public transportation? Two of the researchers on that project are here with me today.

Hannah Wilson: It's really great to meet you and thank you so much for the invitation to chat with you. My name is Hannah. I am the senior Director of Partnerships and Engagement at the Shared Use Mobility Center.

Natalia Perez Bobadilla: And I'm Natalia Perez Bobadilla. I am a research communication specialist, and I was very happy to join The Mobility Hubs for Women and Caregivers project because it’s a topic that I'm very passionate about.

Nadine Lee: Well welcome to our program and we're so delighted to have both of you. I want to just start a little bit talking about the study that you all did. Can you tell us how this project came to be? What, what sort of triggered your interest in research in this work?

Hannah Wilson: In our research we couldn't find any papers or guides that look at how mobility hubs could work better for women and caregivers specifically.

We know that women and caregivers travel differently, typically shorter, more frequent trips, not always during peak travel hours. They're often looking for more safe spaces and typically spend more of their time and money to meet their everyday travel needs.

Natalia Perez Bobadilla: And so we thought of the most vulnerable women and caregivers we could think of and then developed a series of personas. Let's say an archetype of women from different ages, sexual orientations, ethnicities, and so on. And then from that, then we developed a series of dialogues with women who were similar to these characteristics.

 And then that really fed into the research, which together with a literature review and reviewing case studies and best practices, came to the design principles. And so I think that's a lot of the value of this project, which is based on a dialogue with real women who have real issues.

Nadine Lee: So let's talk a little bit about safety, because safety concerns are major barriers for women using public transportation. And I wanted to know what are some of the real-world design solutions that can make transit hubs safer and more welcoming for women?

Natalia Perez Bobadilla: That's a very important discussion to have in terms of safety, because I think that the first reaction also in the dialogues is like, “just have more police or have more policing.” It's not always welcoming for everyone. Maybe it can be just welcoming for a few.

Hannah Wilson: One of the things that my brain goes to is the soft infrastructure that we can create in a space to help people feel safer. Staffing your spaces with real people who appear ready to help and support. And that's something that we should be looking for  when we're hiring for folks that are in those hubs. That should be part of what they're excited about and what they're really good at.

So having those familiar faces that people can count on. There is this sense of belonging that can translate I think to how safe and comfortable you feel in a space.

Nadine Lee: Having humans stationed in different locations, I think does really instill that trust and confidence in the service and also in just the general space that you have. And we talk a lot about instilling confidence in our riders. And I think a lot of times we've talked about confidence in the context that the operation is gonna be reliable, right? That the services are gonna be there for them when they need them.

But we also have to talk about the confidence of the customer, that they feel confident enough to be in the space. And that is where I think the human element can be so compelling as a strategy to improve our services and our systems for people.

Along those lines we have found through our Clean Teams initiative exactly what you said, which is that armed law enforcement presence doesn't make everybody feel safe.

And so it's been really interesting to us as we've initiated our clean teams on our system cleaning up in real time, what we found was just having a uniformed presence, unarmed, not even Law enforcement, actually instilled a level of confidence in our customers and made them feel more safe just because there was a human, a face of DART, in a uniform, there. Even if they weren't even engaging the customers, they just saw them and I think they felt a lot better.

We got a lot of comments, a lot of really good positive comments from our customers, just from having the clean teams there.

Like this from Phyllis Silver, one of our regular riders in North Dallas, and a member of DART’s Citizens Advisory Committee.

Phyllis Silver: My starting point is always the Addison Transit Center.

Seven days a week, we have The Clean Team. They come on board the buses as they come in. And because Addison is a terminus point. They get on there with their brooms and they clean. The bus operator is usually off the bus during this time. It's a break time for them. If the clean team comes on, it gives you more of a feeling of safety somebody else is watching. And I thought that was an interesting twist on it because I think of the cleaning people just as cleaning up the trash.

It's beyond that.

Nadine Lee: So, uniform presence doesn't have to be armed law enforcement, which is one of those things that you learn as you do. And so I appreciate hearing that.

I wonder if any of the findings that you received from the study surprised you? Was there anything that you didn't expect?

Hannah Wilson: We had several focus groups and one of them was with a group of people that had a variety of physical disabilities, and I think it was just a really illuminating conversation for me to hear about, just the everyday struggle of how they get around.

And it had a couple of different levels. Just from an affordability perspective, like their cost for transportation was massive. And it wasn't for a lack of trying to take public transit and reduce those costs. This was a group of folks that lived in Chicago. So we have transit.

They talked about checking the elevator maintenance regularly. And despite checking it regularly, they would still arrive at their station and the elevator would be down. And when it was down, that kind of felt like a dead end for them.

They expressed that there were certain routes that they felt comfortable taking public transit on and if that route wasn't an option, they felt that they didn't really have other options.

I think to your point, Nadine, about providing more options, there were a lot of scenarios that they discussed that they had their one option and when that didn't work, they were—they felt—stuck.

Natalia Perez Bobadilla: I think for everyone that was the most shocking. Maybe not surprising, but it was the most heart wrenching because women living with disabilities experience was they would say that they would end up not going to their destination sometimes and they had to just turn around and get back home because an elevator wasn't working, which is crazy to hear.

Nadine Lee: One of the most frustrating things that I find as a CEO is that in some cases we built our infrastructure, like on our light rail lines, without redundancy built in. So for elevators, maybe we only have one elevator, or maybe we might have two elevators if we're lucky, but we don't have a backup plan.

And so to me, I think about somebody who's in a wheelchair arriving and finding that the elevator doesn't work, and then we have this sign that says, oh yeah, go use this other station three miles away, which is super inconvenient for somebody.

And there's so many different aspects to what we need to do to improve the customer experience and the customer journey overall. And again, if we think about it in the context of women and people who are disabled, we probably would do a much better job of accommodating everyone.

There's been a lot of research and thinking around the issue of how women travel in the past few years.

In 2019, LA Metro published a study on women's travel behaviors. It was the first major effort to highlight the unique needs of women when it comes to public transport.

Madeline Brozen, the deputy director of the Lewis Center at UCLA, assisted with The Understanding How Women Travel study and found that even something as basic as the regular bus schedule was not designed with women in mind.

Madeline Brozen: So we know that women have these distinct safety needs. They face harassment concerns more than men, but also they have different travel needs, Because women, you know still to this day and have for a long time, have more household-serving duties, have more responsibilities for child-related travel or elder-related travel.

So how much service is put out during midday or during the weekends, right? Because having a system, having service, that’s really oriented towards seven o'clock to nine o'clock in the morning and then four to six in the evening and that's just not supporting household-serving travel.

It's not supporting school travel very much, right? So those were some of the big findings relating to how people get around?

But there were things like financial access. How do you think about your fares? So for example, every person that rides transit at LA Metro has to have their own TAP card. But if you're a mom with two kids, you're expected to carry three tap cards, which is like our transit fare card.

Your six-year-old carries a card, right? And so, like, thinking about ways that transit fare products could better support families was another thing.

And then there's reliability. If you think about, for example, child-care-serving trips, there's a really big-time penalty to being late. An actual monetary penalty to picking up your kid late for childcare. And if you're on transit that doesn't give a consistently reliable transit time, like that's just putting a lot of stress and anxiety and financial pressure on you.

Nadine Lee: Women often travel with children with bags, and frankly, with a lot of responsibilities and transit systems aren't designed with that in mind. These studies made one thing clear: Women's transit needs aren't edge cases

There are everyday realities that have been overlooked for far too long. But identifying the problem is just the beginning.

The real work starts with changing how we design our systems from the physical aspects like safety and comfort to fares and schedules. And here's the surprising part, when we build with women in mind, we don't just fix transit for women, we make it better for everyone. It's called “the curb cut effect,” and it's one of the most powerful ideas in inclusive design.

Nadine Lee: I call it a philosophy of designing for the most vulnerable people in your population. Because when you do that, you design for everyone. And the reason it's called “the curb cut effect” is because when they started to create curb cuts at corners where the sidewalks had to go down the curb, they originally did it to accommodate folks who had mobility issues.

What they found was that it was actually beneficial for people who were pushing strollers. People who maybe weren't in wheelchairs but had like a cane and couldn't quite navigate a curb.

I think it really helps articulate in a more simple way why we need to design for the most vulnerable populations, in this case, women. Who doesn't want shelter seating and lighting at bus stops, right? Who doesn't want to have a place to put their belongings on the bus?

Who doesn't want to have more affordable transportation in case you have two kids and two seniors with you? Everybody. Everybody benefits from that. So how do we make those things happen?

Here at DART, we're making those changes real. Our new bus shelters include seating and lighting for increased comfort and security. We're designing the interior layout of our new buses and trains to provide more space for strollers and bags and also provide better sight lines for increased safety.

On top of that before production, we'll invite our writers to test things out and let us know if we're hitting the mark.

Mobility in Motion is a podcast from DART. Special thanks to the Shared Use Mobility Center, Madeline Brozen and Phyllis Silver.

I'm Nadine Lee. Thanks for listening.

This episode was produced by The Glue and Neille Ilel, edited by Michael May, with music by BC Campbell.

We'd love to hear from you, especially your burning transit questions. If you have ideas for future episodes or anything else you'd like to ask us about DART or Transit. Please email us at [email protected] and we might answer in a future episode.

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