Gendered Streets: Disaggregating gendered experiences of street travel

Keywords: gender, urban planning, active transportation, infrastructure
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 19

Abstract

Transportation planning often focuses on gender-neutral bodies, planning for universal physical accessibility and design standards. This paper focuses on understanding how gendered bodies experience streets, asking what makes streets gender-inclusive. Current research on daily travel through urban streetscapes focuses on physical accessibility, fear and safety concerns, and time constraints. While prior research has addressed gender and gendered travel experiences, it has focused on mobility gaps by gender role and gendered caretaking and travel behavior. However, little existing research focuses on the ways that specific street-level design and streetscape organization create spaces that are inclusive and traversable by people regardless of gender identity. This paper seeks to redefine inclusion through the experiences of people who actually use these spaces. We intentionally sought out different voices to generate a broader understanding of the relationship between infrastructure and gender inclusion, focusing on people who regularly travel on two major streets in Boston, Massachusetts. We used many approaches to hear about how gender impacted daily travel: on-the-street interviews, online participatory mapping, a long-format online survey, and interviews. Each method and medium brought different voices from diverse focal neighborhoods. By intentionally disaggregating values, wishes, and problems highlighted by different gender identities, we seek to understand what elements of street infrastructure are not gender-neutral. We provide highlights of the methods that enable us to actively include less-represented, gendered voices in creating this emerging transportation knowledge.