In London women are three times more likely than men to take a child to school7 and 25%8 more likely to trip-chain; this figure rises to 39% if there is a child older than nine in the household. The disparity in male/female trip-chaining is found across Europe, where women in dual-worker families are twice as likely as men to pick up and drop off children at school during their commute. It is most pronounced in households with young children: a working woman with a child under the age of five will increase her trip-chaining by 54%; a working man in the same position will only increase his by 19%.9
What all these differences meant back in Karlskoga was that the apparently gender-neutral snow-clearing schedule was in fact not gender neutral at all, so the town councillors switched the order of snow-clearing to prioritise pedestrians and public-transport users. After all, they reasoned, it wouldn’t cost any more money, and driving a car through three inches of snow is easier than pushing a buggy (or a wheelchair, or a bike) through three inches of snow.
What they didn’t realise was that it would actually end up saving them money. Since 1985, northern Sweden has been collecting data on hospital admissions for injuries. Their databases are dominated by pedestrians, who are injured three times more often than motorists in slippery or icy conditions10 and account for half the hospital time of all traffic-related injuries.11 And the majority of these pedestrians are women. A study of pedestrian injuries in the Swedish city area of Umeå found that 79% occurred during the winter months, and that women made up 69% of those who had been injured in single-person incidents (that is, those which didn’t involve anyone else). Two-thirds of injured pedestrians had slipped and fallen on icy or snowy surfaces, and 48% had moderate to serious injuries, with fractures and dislocations being the most common. Women’s injuries also tended to be more severe.
A five-year study in Skåne County uncovered the same trends – and found that the injuries cost money in healthcare and lost productivity.12 The estimated cost of all these pedestrian falls during just a single winter season was 36 million Kronor (around £3.2 million). (This is likely to be a conservative estimate: many injured pedestrians will visit hospitals that are not contributing to the national traffic accident register; some will visit doctors; and some will simply stay at home. As a result, both the healthcare and productivity costs are likely to be higher.)
But even with this conservative estimate, the cost of pedestrian accidents in icy conditions was about twice the cost of winter road maintenance. In Solna, near Stockholm, it was three times the cost, and some studies reveal it’s even higher.13 Whatever the exact disparity, it is clear that preventing injuries by prioritising pedestrians in the snow-clearing schedule makes economic sense.
A brief snow-clearing coda comes from the alt-right blogosphere,14 which reacted with glee when Stockholm failed to execute a smooth transfer to gender-equal snow-clearing in 2016: an unusually high snowfall that year left roads and pavements covered in snow and commuters unable to get to work. But in their rush to celebrate the foundering of a feminist policy what these right-wing commentators failed to note was that this system had already been working successfully in Karlskoga for three years.
They also, in any case, reported the issue inaccurately. Heat St claimed15 that the policy was a failure in part because ‘injuries requiring a hospital visit reportedly spiked’ – neglecting to note that it was pedestrian injuries16 that had ‘spiked’, illustrating that the problem was not that pedestrians had been prioritised, but that snow-clearing as a whole had not been conducted effectively. Motorists may not have been travelling well, but neither was anyone else.
The following winter was much more successful: when I spoke to Daniel Helldén, a local councillor in Stockholm’s traffic department, he told me that on the 200 km of joint cycle and pedestrian lanes that are now being cleared with special machines (‘which make them as clean as in the summer’) accidents have gone down by half. ‘So it’s a really good effect.’
The original snow-clearing schedule in Karlskoga hadn’t been deliberately designed to benefit men at the expense of women. Like many of the examples in this book, it came about as a result of a gender data gap – in this instance, a gap in perspective. The men (and it would have been men) who originally devised the schedule knew how they travelled and they designed around their needs. They didn’t deliberately set out to exclude women. They just didn’t think about them. They didn’t think to consider if women’s needs might be different. And so this data gap was a result of not involving women in planning.
Inés Sánchez de Madariaga, an urban-planning professor at Madrid’s Technical University, tells me that this is a problem in transport planning more generally. Transport as a profession is ‘highly male-dominated’, she explains. In Spain, ‘the Ministry of Transportation has the fewest women of all the ministries both in political and technical positions. And so they have a bias from their personal experience.’
On the whole, engineers focus mostly on ‘mobility related to employment’. Fixed labour times create peak travel hours, and planners need to know the maximum capacity that infrastructure can support. ‘So there’s a technical reason for planning for peak hours,’ Sánchez de Madariaga acknowledges. But needing to plan for peak hours doesn’t explain why female travel (which doesn’t tend to fit into peak hours, and therefore ‘doesn’t affect the maximum capacity of systems’) gets ignored.
The available research makes bias towards typically male modes of travel clear. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Women found ‘a male bias’ in
