CONSIDERING WOMEN TRIPS IN TRANSPORT PLANNING
Women, inherently make many activities at home and some of them also have activities at job places. This is caused by double role of women in career and household. In developed countries, women position may be better, because men can share work at home. Different with those in developed countries, many women in developing countries have to deal with both jobs and houseworks, while husbands concentrate on their jobs only. Consequently, more trips are made by women within a day.
Let us see what have been written by some researches regarding trips made by women in developing countries. There are similarities in trip characteristics in developing countries, that the priority of using cars are dominated by males as husbands or head of households, particularly for households having one car. Tricia L. Brennan, in the second National Proceeding regarding woman trip issues, stated that:
If women made trip in Puebla, they made more trips with many reasons, and they depended mostly on public transport. Whereas, Angela Astrop, Crowthorne University, United Kingdom in her research regarding women trip behaviour stated that in Pune, India, society with low income relayed on cheap public transport and walking. Bicycle would become essential transport means for individual, but women generally could not get the access for bicycle in a household because of the culture.
As the case study in Puebla Mexico, analysis of women behaviour in Palembang, Indonesia, one of developing countries showed that car ownership of the samples were 57,10% non car owner and 42,90% car owner. It meant 57,10% were “captive passanger” for public transport either for male and female. While, for priority of women using cars were 37,19%. As the case in Puebla,Mexico, women in Palembang, Indonesia also depend mostly on public transport (88.7%).
From this reality, problem of women trips in developing countries can be formulated as the following:
- How to capture the women trip characteristics either as car users or as public transport users.
- How is the women behaviour in utilizing public transport?
- How women behaviour in making trips can be considered in transport planning?
Many travel diary survey formats have been developed by researchers. All we need to do is to develop analysis toward women trips characteristics. After that, some improvements on designed format can be developed, in order to capture the the purpose of women’s activity. In capturing the women behaviour in utilizing public transport, survey results in Palembang study showed that women tend to choose door to door service that can reduce walk trip, such as using becak (tricycle) and Ojek (taxi-motorcycle).
Now, after all data from women trip characteristics are obtained, government may not neglect this in planning implementation. Government might think, after all this years, there is no exception about women and we have “no problem” about that, why should we pay special attention for women trips? But, this opinion is not true. Let us see, portraits of some cities, where some becak (tricycles) or Ojek (public transport-motorcycles) or minibus (oplet, mikrolet) wait for their customers. Most of their customers are women who do not want to walk far. So, these public transports can far from the market or intersections. How can we make regulations, if we never consider these demands?
Transfer points which consider and facilitate those connecting modes (becak, ojek and oplet, and parking cars) are important to remove the congestion from the market (on street and off street).
Posted: August 20th, 2008 under Public Transport.