Based on a chapter in the recently published 3rd edition of Health of the Move, this article summarizes past and current knowledge regarding how gender, health and transport (GHT) interact, and implications for policy and practice in both transport and health spheres.
The chapter, ‘Gender, transport and health: Emerging trends and gaps in global research’, comprises an extensive review of research on these topics and their intersections in recent decades. It summarizes key concepts from the earliest publications regarding GHT issues and provides insights from 155 scientific articles published between 2000 and 2023.
“Gender”, a socially constructed concept reflecting culture-specific perspectives on the roles of men and women, is often used generically to reflect “sex”, that is solely the biological differences. Similarly, the assumption that transport is “gender neutral” remains a powerful arbiter, particularly within engineering and policy. Key findings are: 1) women's mobilities are significantly affected by violence. There is a need to address its association with hegemonic masculinity through sustained focus on the harmful attitudes and behaviours of this gender identity. 2) Women walk more and cycle less than men with positive and negative impacts to health depending on context. Transport infrastructure safety and accessibility must be improved to ensure women's health is equitably associated with travelling actively. 3) Women are more involved in caring for others than men. A gender-sensitive approach to mobilities must consider care-giving needs throughout the lifecycle.
Gender differences in travel are substantial and highly relevant to health equity. Gender-sensitive planning requires fuller integration of walking, cycling and intermodal solutions into regular transport planning, and requires strong policies to make all transport-related spaces accesible. Major gaps appear in research, particularly how hegemonic masculinity is related to road, gender and criminal violence that clearly limits the mobility of specific groups by gender.
Sexual violence and harassment occur in different settings, including public transport, and cause significant harm to victim-survivors' mental and physical health. While sexual violence and harassment on public transport is a documented problem, the public transport sector uptake has been slow and the true prevalence of sexual violence and harassment on public transport is yet to be determined. We aimed to investigate existing public transport and key stakeholder data systems, and explore the views of service providers, to ultimately improve sexual violence and harassment incident reporting and data monitoring.
Using a mixed methods design, researchers worked with public transport providers and other interested stakeholders in one Australian state. Twelve organizations were involved in the project and six provided current data on public transport safety for analysis. An audit of public transport and stakeholder websites was also undertaken to assess sexual violence and harassment incident reporting pathways. In addition, seven managers from five public transport organizations were interviewed to capture views on gender sensitive data collection and monitoring, and the challenges and enabling factors facing the sector.
The results uncovered varied sexual violence and harassment reporting formats and subsequent limited reporting of sexual violence and harassment incidents on public transport. In addition, poor-quality data sets lacked gender sensitivity, comprehensiveness, comparability, reliability and accessibility. Three key themes from public transport providers, on sexual violence and harassment data collection included increasing incident reporting, barriers and enablers of collecting and analysing quality data and governance frameworks. A minimum data set collection tool has been developed and could be tested in future.
To improve women's safety on public transport, enhanced gender-sensitive data collection and monitoring is required. Long term government investment in sexual violence and harassment primary prevention strategies on public transport are urgently needed.
Adolescents' and Parents' perceptions of active commuting to school ACS have been studied mainly separately. This study aims to: (1) examine and compare the benefits and barriers of walking to school perceived by adolescents and their parents within the whole sample, (2) and based on adolescents' modes of commuting to school (walking and using motorized transport).
Third grade adolescents at secondary education from 4 Spanish cities and their parents participated in the PACOyPACA cross-sectional study. All completed a benefits and barriers questionnaires regarding to adolescents walking to school. Descriptive statistics, paired samples t-test and Wilcoxon test were used to identify differences between adolescents' and their parents' perceived benefits and barriers.
466 adolescents (age: 14.86 ± 0.51 years old) and 499 parents (age: 48.00 ± 5.42 years old) entered the study. Results showed that 209 (44.8%) adolescents walked to school, and girls did it significantly less (p < 0.01). Benefits were perceived as significantly more important for parents than for adolescents (p < 0.001) in all cases and regardless of the modes of commuting. As for barriers, adolescents cared significantly more about saving time (p < 0.001), and parents significantly gave more importance to traffic danger and additional planning to walk to school (p < 0.001). When adolescents walked to school, they were significantly more concerned than parents about saving time (p < 0.01), weather and walking being a hassle (p < 0.05), and parents reported traffic as a significantly higher concern than adolescents (p < 0.05). When adolescents commuted to school by motorized transport, they significantly gave more importance than parents to saving time (p = 0.001), and parents reported significantly higher values for additional planning to walk to school (p < 0.001), lack of continuous paths (p < 0.01), distance, weather, and traffic (p < 0.05) than adolescents.
Perceived benefits were important for adolescents and parents, regardless of the modes of commuting to school. Adolescents and their parents presented higher concerns when adolescents commuted to school by motorized transport.
Active travel is an accessible form of physical activity, associated with physical and mental health benefits, particularly for older adults. This study aimed to identify the behavioural determinants that significantly impact older adults’ engagement in active travel as well as how and why these behavioural determinants occur.
This study employed an explanatory sequential mixed methods design informed by the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). The study focused on older adults in Scarborough, Canada. In the quantitative phase, a TDF-informed survey was distributed among Scarborough older adults and analyzed using descriptive statistics, Chi-squared tests, and generalized linear models. TDF determinants that significantly impacted older adult participants in active travel were identified. The qualitative phase followed up with select survey participants about their experiences with these TDF determinants. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and data was analyzed using thematic codebook analysis. To integrate the quantitative and quantitative results, data were interpreted and integrated using a joint display matrix.
The survey results suggest that the TDF domains of motivation (i.e., feeling inspired to active travel) and skill (i.e., having the aptitude to active travel) were highly predictive of active travel behaviour among older adults in Scarborough, Canada. Beyond the TDF, the likelihood of active travel increased if participants reported being encouraged and satisfied with their health, fitness, exercise, and well-being in general. The interview results suggest that fostering motivation and skill require a network of interventions that address multiple TDF domains such as promoting action planning, creating commitment, building social connectedness, increasing awareness of active travel options, and building emotional and physical safety. By integrating the quantitative and qualitative results, three overarching themes were presented about older adults’ needs to engage in active travel: building reassurance (i.e., putting safety first); building meaningfulness (i.e., creating joy, fulfillment, and purpose); and building relatedness (i.e., creating awareness and connection).
This study suggests several important implications for future research and policy. The results of this study provide evidence to support investment in both built environment improvements (e.g., safer intersections, bike lanes, lower vehicle speed limits, public transit subsidies) as well as tailored activities to promote active travel (e.g., public awareness campaigns, skill development activities, organized walks). The mixed methods study design employed in this study in conjunction with a novel application of the TDF allowed for a more thorough understanding of behavioural determinants of active travel among older adults.
Ebiking offers positive physical and mental health benefits for riders. However, inequitable access to bike share schemes and purchase cost barriers limit ebike availability and uptake in lower-income communities. Furthermore, as bike culture differs from place to place, incentive schemes responsive to the local culture are needed to improve access to ebikes as a healthy mobility choice.
Three trials of ebike access were co-designed sequentially between 2021 and 2023. Give-it-a go, Ebikes in daily life, Pathway to Permanence were all designed by a community bike organisation working in tandem with a research team. Trial delivery was community-led. Trial participants’ experiences of ebike use were gathered through group and individual interviews, and the research also included a brief before and after survey of trip destination and mode use.
Trial participants valued their ebiking experience, including the skills training and group rides, new knowledge of safe routes, health benefits of exercise, and fuel savings. During the trial, a third of weekly trips were made by ebike, while trips made by motor vehicle reduced by 25%. Cost emerged as a substantial barrier to ebike ownership.
Effective models to support ebike uptake in lower-income communities will be characterised by: adequate funding of community organisations to grow local bike culture; safe and secure bike infrastructure; community ownership of an ebike fleet to support skill acquisition and social connection; and a pathway to low-cost ebike access.
The proliferation of travel-based multitasking activities has been attracting more and more attention since it is assumed to have the potential to alter people's in-vehicle behavioural patterns, and their perception of travel elements, such as travel time/cost/seat availability. Despite the pioneering efforts in establishing the theoretical supports for people's in-vehicle activity, a systematic assessment leveraging on psychological factors, namely travel-based multitasking habit and travel-based smart device addiction, are lagging behind.
To fill in this gap, we designed a stated choice (SC) experiment, and collected responses from 886 travellers in Singapore. Self-reported travel-based multitasking habit and travel-based smart devices are considered as latent constructs in the integrated choice model.
We found that multitasking habit helps to mitigate negativity from increased travel time and need for having a seat, while smart device addiction is found to be amplifying such negative impacts on travel utility. Furthermore we found that younger travellers are more likely to develop such habit while being an older people (60 or more) is negatively related to multitasking habit formation. Males are also less likely to develop multitasking habit while travelling, however they are more likely to form device addiction.
The results highlight the impacts of smart device usage on individuals. It is worth pointing out the adverse effects on the individuals as induced from excessive use of smart devices addiction even in travelling scenario, which has been long ignored.
This study examined interactive effects of the built environment, perceived safety, age and gender on active travel and public transport use among adolescents for school journeys.
This study used cross-sectional data from 440 adolescents (mean age 15.4 ± 1.5 years, 58% girls) in Melbourne, Australia. Adolescents self-reported their school travel modes, perceptions of traffic and personal safety. Exclusive active travel and public transport use to/from school were determined. Objective built environment features around home and school (1 km buffer) were generated. Multilevel logistic regression was used to estimate main and interactive associations.
Overall, 18% travelled exclusively by active travel and 32% by public transport. Distance to school was negatively associated with exclusive active school travel (OR = 0.44, 95%CI: 0.34, 0.56). Distance to school moderated the association between some built environment attributes (land use mix, residential density around home, distance to public transport stops) and odds of active school travel. There was a positive association between residential density around school and active school travel among those who perceived their traffic environment to be safer. Boys were more likely than girls to use public transport if they lived further from school. A negative association between distance to a public transport stop from home and the odds of public transport use was observed among those who perceived their environment to be less safe.
The findings highlight the complexity of influences on mode choice for the school journey. Distance to school remains one of the most important predictors of active travel/public transport use. Supportive built environment attributes, such as a diverse mix of land use around home had facilitating effects on active travel among adolescents who lived closer to school. Multilevel interventions that target both the environment and perceived safety are needed to promote active travel and public transport use among adolescents.