| Introduction One of the truly
amazing stories of this otherwise low key Presidential election
season has been the discovery and exploitation of a
"new" demographic group -- the so-called
"soccer mom." Pollsters, spinsters, pundits and
columnists have all rushed to chronicle the existence of
these middle to upper income women, who spend their
suburban days and suburban nights shuttling in their
Volvos or minivans between school, shopping trip and
soccer game, often with a job sandwiched in between. The
selection of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman
as the keynote speaker at the Republican Convention was
widely seen as candidate Bob Dole's attempt to reach out
to this new target group, in a clear vindication of the
findings of the first conference on Women's Travel Issues
nearly twenty years ago.
Of course the rush to reach out to the "soccer
moms" by candidates of both political parties has
not included serious discussion of the transportation and
land use trends that have created their daily plight, or
of the strategies available to government to deal with
their problems. Instead the candidates focus on issues
like education, abortion and values, and spin their
messages to appeal to the supposed bent of this group. At
the same time other political issues which could have
significant impacts on women's travel and quality life
are discussed without reference to their implications for
women, including welfare reform, school choice and
affirmative action. The one legislative initiative which
has provided real tools to respond to women's travel
needs -- the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act,
up for reauthorization next year -- is seen as a
construction bill or jobs bill.
What are recent key legislative initiatives and how
have they affected women's travel? What legislative
issues are on the horizon and how will they be reflected
in the demand for travel and in the satisfaction of that demand?
And, finally, how can research and policy analysis help
to better define these issues so that legislation and
spending can be targeted to dealing with the real
problems of the so-called "soccer moms" and
"welfare mothers", along with everybody for
whom a category has not yet been invented?
Current Legislative Context for Women's Travel
Arguably, women's travel patterns have been partly
shaped by past transportation and land use policy, with
the construction of the Interstate highways, beltways and
bypasses contributing to the suburbanization of jobs and
housing as women have entered the work force while
continuing to perform child care and household manager
roles. The resulting travel patterns have been well
documented throughout this conference. With the completion
of the overwhelming majority of the Interstate highway
system in the late eighties, federal attention shifted to
system management and dealing with problems like suburban
congestion. The transportation legislation passed in
1991, called the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency
Act or ISTEA, refocused attention and funding to
metropolitan areas, revitalized the consideration of
social, economic and environmental considerations through
a planning and programming process, expanded the eligible
uses of federal transportation funding and called for
increased public and local government involvement.
ISTEA has been hailed as a much needed sea change and
decried as the most anti-highway highway bill ever. ISTEA
clearly provided many opportunities for improved
consideration of women's travel issues in the transportation
planning process, as well as for the development of innovative
projects to eliminate barriers to transit use or
ridesharing. In addition, the bill created something of a
boom in transportation planning and research, by doubling
planning funding and by creating a variety of new funding
programs for transportation and travel behavior research.
While the ISTEA bill is clearly the major piece of
legislation affecting women's travel in the past five or
six years, other legislation can have impacts as well.
The 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act, for example, more
closely linked transportation spending and air quality
attainment. In so doing the Amendments focused attention
and research on travel demand modeling. Indeed, the
transportation air quality conformity process has forced
many metropolitan areas to undertake travel surveys and
update and improve their models for the first time since
the sixties. In addition, the Clean Air Act initially
mandated the development of Employee Commute Option
programs, intended to reduce single occupant driving to
work. These employer oriented rideshare programs prompted
research that identified child care responsibilities and
the prospect of family emergencies during the work day as
being significant barriers to ridesharing by women. In
some companies, the result has been the institution of
guaranteed ride home programs and child care facilities
in the work place. While the air quality benefits of
these programs has been hotly debated, the quality of
life improvement for women who participate has been
undeniable.
President Clinton's issuance of the Executive Order on
Environmental Justice, coupled with heightened
enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, has
raised awareness of the differential impacts of
transportation decisions on communities of color. Some
environmental justice advocates have begun to identify
the need for involvement in planning by women of color,
perhaps the single most underrepresented group in
transportation decision making.
ISTEA's Impact on Women's Travel
The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act
promised change in the transportation arena in a number
of areas. Two that bear attention are the impact of more
flexible funding on women's travel choices and the impact
of ISTEA's changes in the planning process. With respect
to flexibility and expanded eligibility, ISTEA allowed
almost 50% of former highway only funds to be used for a
wide variety of purposes at state and local discretion.
Some of the programs with a particular interest to researchers
interested in women's travel issues are projects to
provide day care at transit station in Cleveland,
Southern California and the San Francisco Bay Area,
programs to provide a guaranteed ride home being offered
by transit agencies including the Virginia Railway
Express, and a wide variety of ride sharing and commute
option programs. In addition, programs to make transit
more reliable and to provide traveler information have
been promoted through Intelligent Transportation Systems
funding. These and other innovative uses of
transportation funding, including transit oriented
development efforts nationwide and traffic calming
projects intended to reduce the need for travel, need to
be studied with respect to their impact on women's travel
choices.
The changes to ISTEA's planning process have the
potential of promoting greater understanding of the
issue. Greater public involvement, improved models and
expanded consideration of social issues all promise to
break down the one-size-fits-all approach to
transportation planning in favor of planning which
acknowledges the diverse needs of different parts of the population,
including women. Some five years after ISTEA's passage,
all fifty states now have some form of long range plan
completed with some level of public involvement and
hundreds of metropolitan areas have completed
transportation plans. By and large, these plans, though
greatly improved, still do not adequately address the
transportation needs of women for four reasons.
Capital Project Emphasis. First, transportation
plans and models are still focused upon projecting the
need and identifying the funding for new capital
facilities, such as highways and transit lines. The
planning process has not yet adapted to managing the
transportation system to promote accessibility for
different population groups. For example, programs to locate
and quickly and safely remove stranded vehicles from the
side of freeways can have a big impact on congestion and
on women's fear of traveling, yet these kind of programs
are not well analyzed by existing transportation models.
Overemphasis on Rush Hour Work Trips. Secondly,
most transportation planning and modeling is based upon
assessing the capacity of the system to handle rush hour
loads and home-based-work trips, not off-peak, non
home-based trips. This single-minded attention overemphasizes
capacity considerations on major facilities and de-emphasizes
the difficulties faced by women forced to trip chain,
make suburb to suburb or inner city to suburb trips and
generally lavishes funding and attention on the part of
the travel market dominated by men. New research in
activity patterns, non-work travel, barriers to transit
use by women and off-peak suburban congestion promises to
shed light on these problems, but most of this work is
going on outside the context of the metropolitan planning
process.
Public Input. Third, despite tremendous
increases in public involvement programs in the
preparation of metropolitan plans, involvement by women in
the planning process still appears to be low.
Transportation planners are still predominantly male and
attendees at public involvement sessions appears to be
predominantly male as well. One of the most ambitious and successful
public involvement programs in the country was undertaken
in Albany, New York as part of its "New
Visions" effort. As part of an extensive
documentation of their effort, the Albany planners logged respondents
at each session. Only about thirty of 160 participants
were female. Few public sessions feature child care, and
fewer still offer transportation to and from the
sessions. Most meetings are held during business hours in
downtown locations, although this appears to be changing.
More and more planners are learning to hold gatherings in
the community in conjunction with existing neighborhood
groups.
Lip Service to Social Issues. Finally, despite
ISTEA provisions calling for consideration of social
impacts, STPP's scan of metropolitan plans indicates that
many consider social issues through a
"check-off" process, where issues mandated by
ISTEA are listed in a matrix in an appendix to the plan
and a check mark indicates that the issues were
considered.
ISTEA was indeed a major change for planners all over
the country and the foregoing discussion is not meant to
imply that it has not sparked an improvement in
transportation planning. Women's issues in transportation are,
however, not adequately being considered in
transportation plans. Perhaps the most encouraging long
term trend is the great interest in transportation and
livable communities, with projects aimed at transit and pedestrian
oriented mixed use development and traffic calming
underway all over the country.
ISTEA's reauthorization debate is already underway,
with the bill scheduled to expire on September 30, 1997.
Various proposals have been advanced by different
interest groups, ranging from the "HIghway Only Transportation
Efficiency Act" (HOT-TEA) proposed by the highway lobby
to the various proposals for state level block grants
being advance by state agencies. Local government,
transit and environmental groups appear to be coalescing
around incremental improvement of ISTEA.
A Preview of Coming Attractions -- Legislative
Issues Which May Affect Women's Travel Patterns
As important as it is, Federal transportation policy
and investment is only one source of change in the way
Americans will travel in coming years. Travel by women is
no exception to this rule. This election and the 105th Congress
will consider a number of issues which may have
substantial impact on travel by women and families over
the next few years. Each of these areas requires research
and analysis; this listing is meant only to identify
possible areas for further study.
Welfare Reform. The other image of women that
has been exploited by politicians, their handlers and the
media is the image of the "welfare mother", and
indeed most welfare recipients are female. The impact of
the welfare reform bill passed by the Congress and signed
by the President this summer is just beginning to be
felt. Surprisingly, many newspaper accounts are focusing
on the spatial mismatch between the location of job
seekers in center cities and rural areas and the location
of jobs in the suburbs and the exurbs. The Washington
Post reported last week that state welfare agencies are
advising rural job seekers to move to cities to find
jobs. Inner city residents are finding that transit
connections to suburban jobs are unreliable and that
employers are reluctant to hire transit dependent person. Clearly
welfare to work programs will have a disproportionate
impact on women, especially women with children.. Issues
of job creation in cities and transit connections to
existing jobs are likely both to heat up in the next session
of Congress and to have a real impact on women's need for transportation
services.
School Choice and Charter Schools. The state
and local trend toward programs which allow parents to
choose which public school their children will attend as
well as the trend toward charter schools and school
voucher systems is likely to have some impact as children
are enrolled in schools increasingly dispersed across the
metropolitan area. Couple this trend with the collapse of
pupil transportation programs around the country and the trip
to school begins to become a major component in family
travel, with the major responsibility still being placed
on women.
The ongoing efforts to eliminate affirmative action
programs may affecton women's opportunities for
employment, particularly with respect to women of color.
Also of potential imortance are efforts at control of
legal immigration.
Informing Future Legislation -- Suggestions for
Research
It often seems as though the political process is
little influenced by research and analysis, but examples
abound where relevant research and analysis has informed
and advanced a political debate. Future research on
women's travel can serve such a function, if the research
agenda is developed in a way that recognizes the
legislative context. ISTEA's reauthorization offers the
opportunity for research to impact legislation, and it
offers the opportunity to develop a research agenda that
can help to eliminate some of the barriers to resolving
women's transportation problems. The following is a list
of research topics which could serve to aid in the
legislative arena as well as in transportation planning
and investment.
Impacts of Demand Management on Women. Most
analyses of demand management strategies such as
ridesharing, guaranteed ride home, and day care at
transit has focused on the trip reduction and air quality impact
of these programs. A compelling case can be made that the
real impact of these programs is a quality of life impact
for working women. Have women found these programs
useful, do they provide a lifeline option, and what
impact do they have on the employability of women with children?
Activity Oriented Travel Research. Continued
study of the reasons people travel -- for work, shopping,
education, recreation -- and the factors that influence
their choices can help to develop new methods of analyzing
the adequacy of the transportation system in satisfying
women's travel needs.
Understanding Suburban Travel. Off-peak
suburban congestion is becoming a perceived problem,
especially by women. How real is this problem and how
amenable is it to traffic management, neighborhood land use
strategies and traffic calming programs? Most evaluations
of these strategies deal with rush hour work trips, not
with off peak travel.
Travel Needs in the Transition from Welfare to
Work. The spatial mismatch between those who need
jobs and job locations has been well documented. Not so
well documented are the travel patterns of welfare recipients,
particularly female heads of household, and the way their household's
travel needs affect their ability to seek and get to
work. These issues may mitigate against reverse commute
programs and toward place based strategies. Transit's
adequacy in serving this market also needs to be assessed
in more than an anecdotal way.
Travel Needs of Female Immigrants. In some
metropolitan areas, legal immigration constitutes a major
shift in the population, and, potentially, a major change
in travel patterns. What are the travel needs of recent
female immigrants and immigrant households? How do they
change over time. Researchers speculate on their early
transit dependence and transitions to automobility. Is
this true?
Trends in Pupil Transportation. Women continue
to be predominantly responsible for getting kids to
school. What is the extent of the pull out in school bus
service, and how has the loss of the neighborhood school impacted
mode choice and travel patterns for the family. Do cities
with school choice or voucher programs exhibit difference
from cities which do not have such programs?
Improving Public Involvement by Women in
Transportation Planning.What are current levels of
involvement by women in ISTEA planning processes? Can
involvement be improved by holding evening meetings,
providing child care, or providing shuttle service? Would increased
involvement result in the raising of different issues?
Conclusion
It took almost twenty years for women's travel issues
to move from a national conference to the notice of the
political soothsayers and media mavens. Hopefully, the
lag time between lip service and serious consideration of
the policy issues in a legislative context will be much shorter.
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STPP
