Above photo: Getty Images/Unsplash+.
Here’s How To Change That.
Researchers have crafted a new framework for making mobility hubs safer and more comfortable for everyone.
A new report takes mobility hubs (traditionally, transit stations) and asks: How can planners design these spaces around the needs of women and caregivers?
Imagine a centralized place in your neighborhood where you can chat with your friends over coffee, buy a few carrots for dinner, fill a prescription or watch your kids play on a playground – all while accessing the train, bus, bikeshare or rideshare.
“Part of the feedback that we’ve gotten from practitioners is that it seems a bit utopian,” says Natalia Perez-Bobadilla, Research Communications Specialist at the Shared-Use Mobility Center (SUMC) and one of the authors. But the researchers believe it can inspire better questions and design choices.
A collaboration between SUMC and Living Cities and Communities, the design framework offers a roadmap for transforming transit stations into places where women feel safe and comfortable — where they can even make connections and build community.
Here are three takeaways for planners.
Make women the protagonists of their transportation journeys
For the report, researchers spoke to 60 women in Sweden and the U.S. from 11 to 95 years old. From focus groups and interviews, researchers created seven personas based on women at different stages of life and with different mobility needs.
Mobility hubs connect users to different modes of transportation, but are often designed around the prototypical commuter: male, working a 9-to-5 job and taking a fixed route to and from work.
This transitory model for mobility hubs fits “a worker who is already fed, who doesn’t need to do grocery shopping and who is carrying very [few] items,’ says Perez-Bobadilla.
It doesn’t work for caregivers who often engage in “trip chaining” or linking a number of trips with different goals. Far from being merely transitory spaces, participants in the study viewed mobility hubs as places to linger, socialize or grab a (cheap) bite to eat.
By talking to women about their vision for mobility hubs, researchers were able to envision fresh ideas for making the transportation experience better. Some of these ideas became illustrations included in an open-source slide deck.
What do women want? Bright lighting, benches, clear wayfinding and crosswalks, among other things.
Focus on bathrooms, functioning elevators and seating
Mobility hub planners should focus on infrastructure, says Perez-Bobadilla, especially bathrooms, functioning elevators and seating. These might seem like basic requirements, but they came up repeatedly in conversations with women about their transportation experiences.
“Centering these groups, even in just minor design considerations, can improve accessibility, not only for women, but also for other more vulnerable users of transportation systems,” adds Perez-Bobadilla.
Providing for basic human needs is a matter of transportation equity. Functioning elevators are necessary for people who use wheelchairs and also women pushing strollers or carrying shopping bags. Even if a country like Sweden is more likely to have public restrooms at transit stations than the U.S., these are not always clean and accessible to everyone.
Lack of a bathroom or working elevator can prevent women from making certain trips, like to run errands, do chores or see friends, radically affecting their quality of life. Researchers were shocked to learn that when taking public transportation became unworkable, some women stopped making those trips altogether.
“Older women mentioned a lot how, for example, they used to use public transportation and then they stopped using it because they need to use the toilet a lot,” says Perez-Bobadilla.
To build safety, build community
One of the primary questions the researchers have received is how to balance the needs of different groups in public space: providing safe and accessible spaces for women without excluding other vulnerable groups like unhoused people.
There are alternatives to criminalization and hostile design. For example, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority employs Metro Ambassadors to help riders navigate the system and provide “eyes on the street.”
There are no easy solutions, but the report suggests that mobility hubs can be more than just a place to catch the train or rent a shared e-scooter. They can also be places for building community.
“Having shops or pharmacies or spaces to sit down, spaces for children to spend time while the train comes — then it might be harder for them to become a no man’s land and foster asocial behavior,” says Perez-Bobadilla.
Could mobility hubs become another type of third place? Younger women in particular said they wanted cheap food options so they could hang out with their friends and then take public transit home.
“They wanted to spend time [at] the transit stations just having a coffee,” Perez-Bobadilla says. “They said they would like to have eyes on the street — but also they themselves could be eyes on the street because they needed spaces to hang out.”
This story was produced through our Equitable Cities Fellowship for Social Impact Design, which is made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.