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Make Intelligence Transport System More Women-friendly

Yang Yi, Transport Analyst at the World Bank

Transport infrastructure planning and design take into consideration men and women’s differences in travel needs, patterns, and behaviors to promote gender equality. But do these differences also affect how they use intelligent transport systems (ITS)?

When I searched online for “IC card” (integrated circuit card used to pay transit fares), I found the pictures below. They illustrate one of the differences between men and women: men tend to travel carrying very little while women tend to carry one or several bags. When women get on a bus, they need to locate the card in their bag which may take some time and hold up the queue behind them. To save time, a simple modification to the IC card reader could facilitate the process by not requiring them to take it out of their purse for swiping.

IC cards are just one of the many ITS applications available in the market. What more can be done to improve gender equality through these newly emerging applications?

Among the over 20 urban transport projects that World Bank supported or is supporting in China, most have ITS components. Wuhan and Urumqi are among the first few Chinese cities where we have projects for urban transport development. Both cities completed the initial construction of ITS, such as public transport information services, IC card, monitoring cameras at bus stops and in vehicles, traffic signals, e-police, and parking guidance, and recently started to implement a new Bank project to integrate and upgrade their existing ITS subsystems.

Using Wuhan and Urumqi as case studies and funded by the Umbrella Facility for Gender Equality, our team designed a survey and set up focus group discussions to explore how to maximize the benefits of ITS through incorporating gender-specific needs throughout the planning, design, implementation and operation stages.