Smart Mobility: Co-Creation and Participatory Research

The Challenge

Mobility patterns are gendered. Typically, one can still observe gender norms, gender-specific divisions of labor in households, and gender disparities in resources. Gendered household labor is particularly important on the demand side, since trips related to caring—running the household, errands or caring for others—are different from commuting to work. Another set of issues has to do with safety. On the supply side, urban transportation is increasingly offering smart mobility options underpinned by information and communications technology (ICT) platforms designed to ease access to transportation services and to personalize modern transportation. These developments, however, have largely ignored gender (Nobis & Lenz, 2009; Nobis & Lenz, 2019; Lenz, 2020).

To close the gap between gender-specific needs and new smart mobility services, we need to: 1) understand gender-specific needs across populations of different genders, ages, religions, socioeconomic status, etc.; 2) develop and apply gender-sensitive methodologies to assess those needs and to co-create services that enhance mobility options.

Gendered Innovation 1: The Mobility of Care

Effective transportation systems rely on Big Data. Transportation planners collect data to understand how people use different modes of transport—cars, bikes, trains, subways and buses. The gendered innovation is to reconceptualize how data are collected and analyzed.

Researchers examining public transport often categorize trips by purpose to better understand existing transportation patterns and to plan infrastructure changes. Traditional categories used in transportation surveys collect information about trips for employment, education, shopping, leisure and the like (see graph below—left side). Categories used by the U.S. National Household Travel Survey (NHTS, 2017), for example, include work, school/day-care/religious activity, medical/dental services, shopping/errands, social/recreational, transport someone, meals out-of-home, home, something else. These roughly correspond to those used by most European National Travel Surveys.

The innovative concept “mobility of care” reveals significant travel patterns otherwise concealed in data collection variables (Sánchez de Madariaga, 2009, 2013). The charts below represent public transportation trips made in Madrid, Spain, in 2014. The first chart (left) graphs transportation data as traditionally collected and reported. It privileges paid employment by presenting it as a single large category. Caring work (shown in red) is divided into numerous small categories and hidden under other headings, such as escorting, shopping and leisure.

The second chart (right) reconceptualizes public transportation trips by collecting care trips into one category. Visualizing care trips in one dedicated category recognizes the importance of caring work and allows transportation engineers to design systems that work well for broader segments of the population (Sánchez de Madariaga & Zucchini, 2019).

Method: Reconceptualizing Data Collection

 

Reconceptualizing data collection is important because women perform a relatively large share of accompanying trips. They make more short trips and more chained trips than men (Allen and Alam, 2019). Women also tend to prefer shorter distances between home and the workplace. These observations are true in particular for households with two or more adults between the ages of 30 and 50. These differences do not apply to younger or single-person households (Nobis & Lenz, 2005).

Gendered Innovation 2: Enhancing Public Transportation

To introduce dynamic ICT-based public transport services, a “LivingLab” was set up in Schorndorf, a city in the South of Germany, to experiment with gender-sensitive methodologies (LivingLab “Reallabor Schorndorf,” 2018; Gebhardt et al., 2019). The objective was to make public transport more user-friendly and efficient. To this end, conventional public transport was transformed into an on-demand bus service at times when demand tended to be low and variable, such as evenings and weekends. The service used a digital platform with access via a smartphone app, the internet or a telephone. The LivingLab introduced smaller buses with flexible routes and a dense pattern of flexible stops that allowed people to get on or off the bus close to the start or end of their journey. Users did not have to walk to traditional designated bus stops.

This gender-sensitive on-demand service addressed the specific needs of women and contributed to the comfort of all users in need of safe and efficient off-peak services:

• Users, especially young women and girls, found the on-demand bus provided a safe way home. Longer walks from the flexible bus stop to home, sometimes leading through pedestrian subways, could be eliminated. At the same time, waiting times for the bus were considerably reduced.

• Smaller on-demand buses provided an improved feeling of safety for people travelling in the evening or at night, as all seats were close to the driver. (The need for the presence of a driver to ensure safety was a reason women argued against autonomous vehicles.) Providing mobility services that are perceived as safe enhances options for out-of-home activities, especially for elderly people who often restrict those activities to daylight hours (Giesel & Rahn, 2015).

The LivingLab included participatory research, where users contributed to concepts and evaluated designs (see below). Users emphasized a need for multi-functional spaces in the on-demand vehicle that could accommodate strollers, shopping trolleys or walking aids, required by elderly passengers in particular. A curb-to-bus ramp allowed barrier-free access to the vehicle for passengers and their equipment.

While designed with women in mind, this project has the potential to improve safety for all users—men, gender-diverse people and people from diverse socioeconomic and regional backgrounds.