Understanding How Women Travel

LOS ANGELES METRO

Executive Summary

Why study women’s travel?

Mobility – or one’s ability to get around – shapes the opportunities we can reach, and the way we interact in and with our communities. Although women comprise over half of all transit ridership in Los Angeles County, their mobility needs, concerns, and preferences have not been critically accounted for in the way our transportation systems are planned. As a result, women tend to bear outsized burdens and risks in the course of their daily travel.

Despite these conditions, women continue to make their way through a mobility environment that has not been designed with them in mind, navigating the transportation networks to get to school, to work, to run errands for and with their families. Many studies have shown that, in addition to the persistent gender wage gap, women pay more for goods and services than men. Transportation is no different. The “pink tax” does not only apply to the added cost of finding safe means of travel at night: it includes all the ways that women put in extra time and effort to make transportation work for them.

In seeking to understand how women travel, Metro is taking an important first step towards easing the disproportionate efforts women put in to making the transportation system work for them.

What is this study?

Understanding How Women Travel is an effort to understand the unique and diverse mobility needs of women in LA County. For the first time in Metro’s history, this study explored the experiences of women traveling by Metro through an analysis of existing data sources, such as on-board surveys, and innovative new data sources, such as ethnography in buses and trains. Initiated by Metro’s Women and Girls Governing Council and endorsed by Metro CEO Phil Washington, Understanding How Women Travel will form the foundation on which Metro can develop a Gender Action Plan for the future.

Study Background

In an initiative led by Metro’s Women and Girls Governing Council, CEO Phil Washington adopted several gender-specific equity initiatives in 2018 to improve women and girls’ experiences on Metro.

Metro collects and analyzes many different datasets to inform a variety of planning and operations decisions. Some data, such as the On-Board Survey, includes gender information. Other Metro data, such as ridership counts, do not. Even in cases where gender information is collected, the agency has never disaggregated its data analysis by gender to understand the unique travel patterns and preferences of women. Despite the known gender disparities in travel behaviors, the data and analysis that inform the most important transportation planning decisions at Metro remain gender neutral. The Women and Girls Governing Council identified this gap in Metro’s work and recommended the development of this study.

This groundbreaking study is a broad, intersectional effort to identify mobility barriers and challenges that women face. This study analyzes existing data sets and activates five primary data collection methodologies to fill gaps in the existing quantitative data sets and to connect with core transit rider groups that may be difficult to reach through conventional methods. Understanding How Women Travel provides a foundation of knowledge upon which Metro can actively work toward enhancing the quality of the travel experience for women in LA County.

This study builds on several recent and ongoing efforts both to expand and improve Metro services and help ensure equitable outcomes for LA County residents. These efforts include the massive infrastructure expansions planned with Measure M (and Measure R) funds and participation with County transit operators in the Ridership Growth Action Plan that will feed into the NextGen Bus Restructuring study currently underway. At the same time, Metro has taken strides to be a better neighbor for the County’s most vulnerable populations, including: partnering with Peace Over Violence in the “It’s Off Limits” and “Speak Up” campaigns to address sexual harassment on Metro services, providing outreach and services to Metro’s homeless customers, actively promoting the human trafficking hotline, providing transit passes to foster youth through Youth on the Move, and making low-income fares easier to access through the Low-Income Fare is Easy program.

Metro’s goal for this initiative of gathering and analyzing gender-disaggregated data is to have access to Metro/Los Angeles County-specific research and data that really reflects how women travel to make informed decisions and ensure that applicable departments at Metro are utilizing gender specific data to implement service changes and improvements. Metro has limited information on how women travel, which limits the consideration of women’s unique needs during planning, design, and operation of our system. Further research is needed to ensure that women’s issues are at the forefront of policy making. This will result in better information for the NextGen Study and Long-Range Transportation Plan and will lead to better, more effective and more integrated solutions to address the mobility needs of current and potential female riders.

Why should LA Metro study women’s travel?

For a long time, women’s needs have been lost because they haven’t been measured. The core finding of all existing evidence is that women are responsible for a disproportionate share of the household’s transport burden while at the same time having more limited access to available means of transport. Women use the Metro system more. Women are a larger portion of the population. Women have different travel patterns than men and have different commute demands. While these findings are universal based on our literature review, this study references LA County-specific data to justify the business need for service improvements. The minimal attention paid to gender differences is in part due to the lack of statistics that show the differences in how women and men travel. For this reason, it is hard to understand gender differences in making trips, trip frequency, distance traveled, and mobility related challenges in accessing services and employment.

Without further research into gender specific concerns, we will only continue to receive glimpses of the overall issues women face. Furthermore, while some agencies like Transport for London have conducted a needs assessment of women’s travel patterns, the majority (unfortunately) still remain reactive. We have limited information on how women travel, which limits the consideration of women’s unique needs during planning, design, and operation of our system. Today, fear and safety concerns stifle and constrict access to destinations for many female Angelenos. The “pink tax” increases women’s travel costs because systems and services do not meet their safety needs, and women substitute with more expensive options to fill the gaps. Womens’ stories of harassment and assault have upended the way that we think about public space, including the space that we share on trains, buses, and sidewalks. In holding ourselves responsible for those transportation spaces, we redefine what an inclusive mobility network could look like in the future.

In order to reach the goal of having world-class transportation systems that meet the needs of all Angelenos, we first need to understand the ways in which women travel, how those patterns differ, and what types of solutions might have the biggest effect in reducing the travel burdens faced by women. This study is the first major undertaking by a US transportation agency to research, analyze, and publish the findings from such an effort.

Download full version (PDF): Understanding How Women Travel

About Los Angeles Metro
www.metro.net
“Metro is unique among the nation’s transportation agencies. We serve as transportation planner and coordinator, designer, builder and operator for one of the country’s largest, most populous counties. More than 9.6 million people – nearly one-third of California’s residents – live, work and play within our 1,433-square-mile service area.”

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