Inferring mobility of care travel behavior from transit smart fare card data

Existing research underscores substantial gender-based variations in travel behavior on public transit. Studies have concluded that these differences are largely attributable to household responsibilities typically falling disproportionately on women, leading to women being more likely to utilize transit for purposes referred to by the umbrella concept of “Mobility of Care”. In contrast to past studies that have quantified the impact of gender using survey and qualitative data, we examine a novel data-driven workflow utilizing a combination of previously developed origin, destination, and transfer inference (ODX) based on individual transit fare card transactions, name-based gender inference, and geospatial analysis as a framework to identify mobility of care trip making. We apply this framework to data from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). Analyzing data from millions of journeys conducted in the first quarter of 2019, the results of this study show that our proposed workflow can identify mobility of care travel behavior, both in terms of (1) detecting times and places of interest where the share of women travelers in an equally-sampled subset (on basis of inferred gender) of transit users is 10 %–15 % higher than that of men, and (2) finding women significantly more likely to exhibit a consistent accompaniment patterns with riders who are children, elderly, or people with disabilities. The workflow presented in this study provides a blueprint for combining transit origin-destination data, inferred customer demographics, and geospatial analyses enabling public transit agencies to assess, at the fare card level, the gendered impacts of different policy and operational decisions.