Women's Mobility and Urban Transport: The Mobility of Care

Women's mobility in cities differs from men's in distance, mode, timing and purpose, and urban transport has been planned for a century as if that difference did not exist. Women make more short, chained trips, more on foot and by bus, more outside peak hours and more accompanied by children, older relatives or shopping; men make more long, direct trips between home and work, more by car. Two researchers have turned that difference into an object of planning: the American geographer Susan Hanson, who documented it from the 1980s, and the Spanish planner Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, who named it with the concept of the mobility of care.

Susan Hanson: the geography of gender, work and constraint

Hanson showed with surveys in Worcester, Massachusetts, and later in many cities, that women work closer to home and accept worse jobs in exchange for proximity because they need to be available for care. In Gender, Work, and Space (1995), with Geraldine Pratt, she explained that this geography is not a preference but a constraint: the unequal division of domestic tasks ties women to a short radius, and transport designed for the long commute serves them badly. Her conclusion is that mobility is a matter of gender before it is one of engineering.

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga and the mobility of care

Sánchez de Madariaga took the statistical step. Mobility surveys classified trips by purpose, work, study, shopping, leisure, other, and in that other the trips to take children to school, accompany an older person to the doctor, do the daily shopping or handle household errands disappeared. By grouping them under a single category, the mobility of care, she showed that they account for around a third of trips in a city such as Madrid, as many as work trips, and that they are made mostly by women. What is not counted is not planned, and for decades transport was sized for half the trips.

Frequencies, fares, accessibility and harassment: where transport fails

The consequences are concrete. Frequencies drop mid-morning and early afternoon, when care trips are made. Per-trip fares penalise chained journeys with intermediate stops. Buses and stations without level access make it hard to board with a pushchair or an older person. And safety conditions every decision: most women in Latin American and European cities report having suffered harassment on transport, and many avoid times, lines and stops, which reduces their access to jobs and to the city. Insecurity is, in Hanson's terms, one more constraint on the radius.

Vienna, Montreal, Bogotá: gender-sensitive responses

Responses have multiplied. Vienna redesigned stops and frequencies after measuring care trips. Montreal lets passengers get off the bus between stops at night on request. Mexico City and Bogotá combine reserved carriages, app-based reporting and anti-harassment campaigns, amid debate over whether segregation protects or normalises. Barcelona and Madrid have built the mobility of care into their surveys and plans, and several cities have moved to time-based fares that allow transfers and stops without paying again. Sánchez de Madariaga has taken the concept to the agendas of UN-Habitat and the European Union.

The lesson of Hanson and Sánchez de Madariaga is that planning transport with a gender perspective is not adding a carriage but changing what is measured and for whom the system is designed. A network that serves short, chained, off-peak trips, accessible with a pushchair and safe at night, serves women better and also older people, children, people with disabilities and anyone who one day cares for someone. The mobility of care, once counted, turns out to be the mobility of almost everyone.