What Women Want (Part 2)

Second Volume from the 2004 TRB Research Conference Is Published

In the fall of 2004, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) convened a conference on  women’s issues in transportation. It was the third in TRB’s history.

Roughly 120 transportation leaders, policy makers and researchers participated, and some 22 papers and nine abstracts on the subject were published in TRB’s “Research on Women's Issues in Transportation, Volume 2.” The Winter 2005 issue of the ITS Review Online contained an article on the conference and a link to Volume 2. Now TRB has published Volume 1.

In her keynote address, Ann Frye of the Department of Transport in the U.K. explains the purpose of the conference and resulting publication.

"Transport is a world designed, built, and operated predominantly by men and used predominantly by women. As a result we have transport systems and pedestrian areas that women are frightened to use; vehicles designed with seats and seat belts that are not appropriate for a woman’s body mass; transport planning decisions that do not reflect the different work-life balance that many women have…; (and) fare structures and job requirements that work against those who need to work flexibly or on a part-time basis.”

The publication contains overview material of the conference and papers by four researchers, including ITS Davis associate professor Susan Handy.

Handy, an organizer of the event, addressed the subject of community design and travel behavior in her paper—and how they pertain to women. She suggests that researchers in this area must move “beyond quantitative studies” to explore the “travel needs, constraints, attitudes and preferences that shape behavior and can produce new insights into the role of community design as facilitator, constraint, or both.”

Quantitative data cannot adequately provide a clear picture of how women and men make travel decisions.

In another paper contained in Volume 1, “Understanding Women’s and Men’s Travel Patterns,” Sandra Rosenblum, of the University of Arizona, suggests that as women have entered the workplace some of their needs are converging with those of men, but are “likely to continue to diverge substantially from men’s in a variety of areas.”

She, too, suggests that quantitative data cannot adequately provide a clear picture of how women and men make travel decisions.

“Because many travel behavior researchers do not respect more qualitative or less statistically-based research, they do not read it and fail to profit from the insights offered by that literature. Thus they do not recognize or challenge the questionable assumptions in their models and methods.” As a result, she writes, many travel behavior researchers have developed models that do not reflect reality.