Future Mobility project aims for a new transportation approach for women and caregivers

The project, called “A Design Framework for Women-Centered Mobility Hubs” wants to rethink how mobility hubs are designed. It’s a collaborative effort between Living Cities and Communities (LCC) in Sweden and the Shared Use Mobility Center (SUMC) in the United States. 

A mobility hub is a place where various modes of transportation converge, allowing for seamless transitions between different types of travel. Examples include bus and train stations integrated with bike-sharing programs, car rentals, and pedestrian pathways, all designed to provide a cohesive and convenient travel experience. 

But while they are designed to facilitate connections between different modes of transportation, they “often fail to serve women and caregivers' travel patterns and infrastructural needs," explains Henrik Nolmark, Senior Advisor at Living Cities and Communities, who is leading the project. Traditional designs typically focus on the classical home-to-work commuting model, which does not reflect the more complex travel patterns of women and caregivers.  

A recent study by Amy Z. Fong and F. Atiyya Shaw further highlights these disparities. The research indicates that women are more likely to engage in trip chaining, where multiple short trips are linked together, often involving caregiving responsibilities. This contrasts with the more linear commuting patterns typically observed for men. The study concludes that women may disproportionately benefit from transportation services and improvements that enable their care recipients to travel independently more often. 

Hannah Wilson, Senior Director at Shared-Use Mobility Center, explains that “additionally, women and caregivers face heightened safety and security challenges in travel environments, both physical and social, which are often not sufficiently addressed in the design of existing hubs.” 

Rethinking Mobility Hubs 

The project seeks to address these gaps by centering its design considerations around the needs of women and caregivers. It involves a comprehensive review of international literature and on-site dialogues with representatives of women and caregivers in Chicago and Los Angeles, in the U.S., and Gothenburg, Sweden. This combination of knowledge harvested from science-based literature and direct conversations with users of public transportation provides a triangulated overview of challenges, opportunities, and suggested improvements. 

To ensure inclusiveness, the team developed an overview of personas to better cater to the most vulnerable groups from an intersectional perspective. This includes paid and unpaid caregivers, women with reduced mobility and disabilities, older women, women who travel by night, women of color, members of the LGBTQ community, and young girls. 

Future Impact 

Being part of Future Mobility has provided a valuable platform for the project. "The program presented a great opportunity to test the project idea and the grant gave us a financial framework for collaboration," says Nolmark. Despite some limitations in the funding rules, a constructive dialogue with Vinnova allowed the project to proceed as planned. 

This bilateral partnership leverages the unique expertise of both organizations. "SUMC has both deep and broad knowledge in innovations in mobility, inclusive transportation, and urban development, while LCC contributes with co-learning and co-design skills, as well as expertise on inclusion, gender, and equity in urban systems," explains Nolmark. 

Looking ahead, the project aims to disseminate its findings through a comprehensive communication and outreach plan. The goal is to create a design framework that can serve as a knowledge infrastructure for communities in the global north, ensuring ease of understanding, use, and applicability as part of their transportation initiatives. "Our proposed Design Framework could become a trigger for discussions and potentially even a guide for planning, designing, and building the infrastructure and services that can address gender-based equity issues in urban mobility," Wilson envisions. 

The Design Framework for Women-Centered Mobility Hubs project is not just about improving transportation systems; it's about creating a more inclusive and equitable urban environment. As Wilson aptly puts it, "this initiative has the potential to reshape our understanding of mobility, making it more accessible and safer for everyone, especially the most vulnerable users."