What Women Want:

Transportation Research Expands in Scope and Relevance by Pursuing Questions Related to the "Other" Sex

Back in 1978, when the first conference on women's transportation issues was being planned, the male-dominated transportation research community greeted it with skepticism. What could be so different about women's travel behavior? they asked. And if there were significant differences, why should we care anyway?

Indeed, the working model for most transportation planning gave hardly any weight to women at all—wrongly, it was soon shown. The standard scenario had a male breadwinner traveling from home to work in the family car (or, in a few places, by transit) and returning in the evening. Those were the trips that clogged highways, train stations, and bus lines in rush hour and thus were what interested transportation network builders and designers, whose main concern was capacity, and, primarily, highway capacity, as car use in the U.S. increased.

This year, the third women's transportation conference, held under the auspices of the National Academies of Science's Transportation Research Board, is winding up publication of its findings and reports. (See "Research on Women's Issues in Transportation: A Report of a Conference." 6.3 MB PDF.) And there is still resistance to the notion that women's issues merit special attention, concedes Elizabeth Deakin, Director of the University of California Transportation Center (UCTC), and professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, who has supported many researchers in the field of women's transportation. But, it is slowly melting away.

"There are more women in the field, and they are saying, 'Wait a minute, what about us?,' and more and more men, by the way, are saying, 'Yes, that's right. We need to look at this more creatively.'"

In fact, the first conference marked a significant shift, just by showing, once the data were examined more closely, women traveled, too. The family car often stayed home if there were children in the house. And, the more egalitarian the household was—that is—the less disparity there was between the woman's and the man's working hours and earnings, the more egalitarian was the access to the family car.

Some of the most compelling research questions in travel and travel behavior today have their lineage in women's transportation issues, among them:

• walking and the role that transportation can play in public health, especially in light of the current concern over rising childhood obesity;

• trip chaining or trip linking and other complex dynamics of household and individual travel patterns, especially shopping trips, as they connect with other travel decisions;

• the transportation impact of "tele-travel" such as shopping over the Internet and by phone, or telecommuting; and

• factors that influence mode choice.

New Ways to Ask New Questions

The impact has not just been in stimulating new fields of inquiry, but has also led to new ways of studying transportation itself, and, by necessity, new ways of collecting data and new questions to ask to elicit the new data needed to pursue these questions.

The impact of the first conference was to open up the transportation discussion to literature outside of the standard transportation-engineering approach, Deakin explained.

"I really mark the time when we started to ask these exciting questions to when we started to look at women's travel," Deakin said.

For example, it included the work of sociologists, who were studying the way individuals used their time. One finding was that women spent large amounts of their time taking care of the household—shopping, ferrying children, and the like—and that they spent much more time on these activities than the men they shared their homes with. Deakin recalled that when many male colleagues first heard those findings, they assumed the disparity was due to the fact that women did not have jobs or worked part-time. However, several studies showed that even when work hours were controlled for, and (largely) when income was controlled for, women were assuming a vastly disproportionate share of household maintenance tasks.

Secondly, women's travel patterns, it turned out, were much more complex than most theories had suggested. Shopping behavior, for example, is not as simple as leaving the house, heading for the store, making purchases, and heading home, especially when ferrying children and meeting other household obligations on the way. And shopping trips differ depending on what the individual is shopping for.

Why Shopping Matters

Why should we care about shopping trips? They are by far the most common type of trip made, Deakin explained, responsible for a huge share of all vehicle-miles traveled and associated emissions, congestion and wear and tear on the transportation system.

Part of the complexity in their trips derived from women's practice, born of necessity, of knitting together disparate destinations. Trip-chaining and trip-linking, as the activity is known, assumed much more significance as a result, with important implications for policy and planning.

It helped explain why programs to get people out of their cars and onto transit or into carpools were not as successful as had been predicted. Women who would otherwise seem likely candidates—those with steady work hours and characteristic incomes—weren't interested. "We looked to see why, and it was because they were running a dozen errands on the way home from work," Deakin recalled.

That finding also suggested that new strategies were needed to meet the transportation requirements of women who were trying to find work as part of the welfare-to-work transition. Women on welfare tend to have small children and so are unwilling to travel long distances to jobs if it means being a significant distance from their children, or, if taking transit tacks on too many hours to their work day—time they could spend with their kids. This suggested the need for alternatives to traditional transit such as paratransit and experimental programs that gave women access to private vehicles. Deakin cited work by Evelyn Blumenberg, of ITS Los Angeles, who has received support from UCTC to pursue some of these lines of thought.

Karen Chapple, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley who also earned her Ph.D. in the city and regional planning there, interviewed women in the Bayview-Hunter's Point neighborhood of San Francisco to learn what had contributed to their success in getting off welfare and finding jobs. The notion that the urban poor need to be matched to jobs on the suburban fringe was not the case for these women. They thought of trip lengths in terms of number of bus transfers, and one change of buses was about the limit they were comfortable with. "The idea that they were going to go all the way out to Pleasanton [a suburb 40 miles east of San Francisco] is like asking them to look for a job on the moon," Deakin said.

Walking is another area where women provide a stark contrast to the general population. As a group, Deakin noted, they walk a lot. "They walk with children. They walk by themselves." That led researchers to ask questions about children's travel, especially in light of changes in childhood obesity rates and children's access to regular exercise.

ITS Berkeley Ph.D. recipient Noreen McDonald, now on the faculty at the University of Virginia, wrote her dissertation on children's travel. That is directly connected to women's travel behavior, Deakin noted, because if women view transit and even walking as an untrustworthy way for their children to get around, children will be walking and riding transit less.

Additionally, women's travel patterns are changing dramatically. In the years since that first conference, women's earning capacity has risen dramatically as more women have gone to work and have entered higher paying jobs. One result has been a drop in their transit use and a rise in car ownership, trends that have been studied by ITS Los Angeles' Randall Crane, Paul Ong, Evelyn Blumenberg and Brian Taylor (Director of ITS Los Angeles).

In terms of transit, Deakin cited her own work and that of Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris on the barriers that might be keeping women from using transit more. It can be something as simple as the built environment around a bus stop. In a study Deakin carried out in the Bay Area, she found that park-and-ride users were often dropped off at a location to wait for a bus or had walked there, and that the majority of these carless park-and-ride users  were women. That had significant implications for how the lots are designed. "These places had no lighting, no security, hardly any policing, no sidewalks. Women were walking down the road to get to them and then standing in the rain waiting for a bus to show up."  (See "Fear Factor".)

As new questions are being asked, researchers are finding that new ways of collecting data and new ways of studying the problems are needed to capture the complete picture.

For example, Deakin said, the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission attempted to get information about tele-shopping. But the questions were asked in such a way that shopping over the phone via services like the Home Shopping Network was lumped into the same category as shopping over the Internet, despite the fact that they have very different implications. This problem came to light when recent Berkeley Ph.D. Christopher Ferrell sought to learn more about tele-shopping's relation to trip generation.

Standard data sets were not adequate for McDonald when she sought to test why children accompanied their parents, usually their mothers, on a shopping trip. Was the mother taking the child to buy something for the child? Or was she taking the child along essentially in lieu of having an adult at home to take care of the child? Knowing the answer could guide policies. The shortfall also showed the importance of family dynamics in the number of trips a household generated.

Even the type of data that is collected needs to be changed. Census data about travel, for instance, only reports on work trips and only asks about how an individual usually gets to work. That approach automatically excludes a lot of potentially useful answers, especially when women's travel is concerned.

"One of the things we know about women versus men is that women are a lot less consistent than men in how they travel. And that type of data will not capture that," Deakin said.

Finally, the experiences and insights gained by pursuing this line of research have led to the development of a new style of study, Deakin noted. "We often have to do exploratory research before we're ready to do hard theory. And exploratory research often involves open-ended interviews, field work, observation and looking at raw data before it has been cleaned up with a theoretical model.

"Because of the work on women's transportation issues," Deakin said, "we have learned a lot more about what we need to know."