Week 4: New information communication technologies, new relationships in gender and transport.
This lecture explores the range of new information communication technologies which are or can be aligned with transport and explores their implications for traditional gender and transport relationships.
The key readings are:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/news/2001/oct/i01_1395_en.html
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/women-science/gen_mainstr_en.html
The first reading provides us with a condensed scenario of what new relationships between transport and gender might look like given the presence of new information communication technologies:
In the search for a solution to congestion, remember the transport discussion is a priority item for Government in the present both in Britain and globally, we need to be discussing ways in which we can reduce the total number of trips made. In-home information technologies give us a mechanism for reducing the number of trips made by bringing those activities to where we are - electronic banking, electronic benefit payments, electronic shopping , electronic work, electronic education, electronic reservation of tickets and hospital appointments and equally important electronic cancellations and in the future electronic diagnosis, can all make a contribution to trip reduction. Solving congestion will necessarily involve the development of tele-strategies and mass access to in-home communication technologies. Reducing the current barriers to low-income access to information technology is a transport priority if congestion is to be successfully tackled.
There have also been developments in the field of transport informatics (information technology applied to transport) which change the traditional system whereby a passenger moves towards a vehicle. It is now possible for public transport vehicles to be called through a smart-card system to where a passenger requires to be picked up. Intelligent systems can organise routings and bookings to provide efficient public transport which arrives where the passenger is. In the rural areas of Perugia, Italy, passengers place their key or smart cards into a receptor at a bus stop which then calls a bus for them. Clearly, in urban areas, where such facilities may be open to vandalism, in-home provision of smart calling facilities remove this particular problem. The development of in-home calling capabilities for public transport for special categories of passengers such as the disabled or low-income single mothers trying to meet employers reliability needs on New Deal programmes would be an ideal candidate for such provisions. In Angeloume, France, the passenger can determine when the bus will arrive at the closest stop to their home from, because of the French public in-home information technology provision, within the home itself (Lassave and Meyere, 1990). This has all sorts of personal security benefits for public transport passengers, most particularly women.
In discussing the need to assist the movement of single mothers from welfare to work, there has been almost no discussion of what are the mobility constraints on single mothers. In much of Britain, on low-income estates, transport provision is poor, public transport journeys are slow and the public transport system has low reliability. The lack of reliability in the public transport system has a clear consequences for the ability of single mothers to be reliable in the work place. In a context, where telephone access is not affordable and public transport is poorly organised and where the multiple roles of the working mother place heavy scheduling demands upon her, a sickness event with a child can be enough to jeopardise employment. A single mother with in-home access to information technology through the provision of a networked terminal could make arrangements for alternative child care to cater for a child's sickness; call responsive transport which enables both meeting the sickness needs of the chid and the employers need for reliability; send a message to the workplace that she would not be available on that day and book a replacement for her labour from a replacement worker service (something similar to bank nurses or relief teachers) and conduct a whole gamut of other activities through an internet service provided on a community basis. Buying time is already a market service available to middle class professional women. They can arrange for replacement labour to carry out a range of domestic tasks and other time services through their access to the internet (Guardian Newspaper, 1998). Surely, lone parents meeting the set of societally 'agreed' goals (as mother and worker) are more likely to need access to time services if both goals are to be satisfactorily met. We must, therefore, think about how we provide such time services for those most pressed at the lower end of the income scale. One example of this thinking is shown in the suggestion that the Government's new Education Action Zones would feature linking up homes and training establishments to overcome barriers to access for single mothers to increase their employability.
For example, community nets, already operational in Canada and the UK , we would argue, are the essential other side of the welfare to work equation. Simply requiring single mothers to intensify their task loads can not work as a long-term measure, not least because the unpredictability of child sickness events will have consequences for their reliability as labour. The child care arrangements which have been discussed to date all assume that child care will be required when the child is well; it is the failure to make provision for sickness events which will create problems. Buying time as a crisis facility needs to better organised within our society. Intermittent or occasional need to have the time services of another needs to be factored in. Networked terminals or community nets, enable women to work from the home. A key assumption of the New Deal schemes for single mothers, as they have been conceived, is that single mothers must leave the home for the workplace. The more natural logic given the character of recent technology developments, the transport crisis and the increasing number of women who operate businesses from home as a way of simultaneously meeting income earning and childcare responsibilities, is to think in terms of enabling single mothers to earn from their homes.
These developments taken together show us a path through which the development of in-home communication technologies connected to the services of local public transport operators could help reduce the time poverty of low income women.
@ http://www.geocities.com/transport_research/spconf2.htm
The second reading alerts us to the growing recognition of the importance of attending to 'digital divide' issues amongst European policy makers:
The 'digital divide'
Information technologies and on-line services have a wide potential for breaking down traditional barriers which exclude the most disadvantaged in our society. New technologies can serve to distribute knowledge more creatively and more equally. They allow faster and easier access to public services. Digital literacy is a must for seizing the job opportunities of the knowledge society.
A recent report drawn up by the Commission's services together with a high-level working group highlights a broad range of best practices to tap these opportunities. But Eurobarometer data presented in this report also underline that huge gaps in ICT access and literacy persist, and that digital exclusion is more and more felt as a real barrier for people's lives.
Commissioner Diamantopoulou said : "Our challenge is twofold. We must fully exploit new technologies in order to fight and prevent social exclusion. And we must ensure that all Europeans can take full advantage of the economic and social benefits the knowledge society offers. This is why employment and social policies are central to the European Union's efforts to drive forward the knowledge-based economy. @ http://europa.eu.int/comm/employment_social/news/2001/oct/i01_1395_en.html
The third short reading indicates that within European policy 'gender' is being mainstreamed:
* research must address women's needs, as much as men's needs,
* research must be carried out to contribute to an enhanced understanding of gender issues.
@http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/science-society/women-science/gen_mainstr_en.html
The fourth reading provides us with a new policy scenario where developments in commercial logistics could be harnessed to provide new forms of transport organisation which better serve the needs of 'time poor' women reversing the adverse impacts of the contemporary centralisation of services on women's urban household schedules:
As neighbourhood based facilities gave way to centralised welfare and urban services, women were the urban losers. Their schedules became more complex and yet went largely unstudied, neglected and rarely regarded as a fit topic of interest for transport planners. This may seem a harsh argument but at present, new hospitals get built without any gender analysis of accessibilities. Yet it is women who are the major escorts of patients to hospitals. Indeed as a profession, transport planners have failed to produce systematic methodologies which incorporate gender analysis for the purpose of urban development and planning. At present it would be fair to argue that there are no systematic gender inclusion procedures for transport either in terms of the training of professionals, in terms of the participation of users or in terms of the design and planning of transport systems, transport services and transport equipment. Yet new informatic technologies are available which readily permit the capture and harnessing of gender data for transport and travel systems which better service women and most particularly low income women. Instead of standing and waiting with children at poorly serviced and poorly supervised unsafe busstops, low income women could through new technology call demand responsive services to get them to hospitals in time with efficiency benefits for the overall urban system. Only because we do not cost for womens wasted time travelling to overcentralised urban facilities or because we do not cost for the imposition of poor health on those who are discouraged by the epic quality of low income transport journeys do we arrive at costings which favour large hospitals on the periphery of urban space, hospitals which rarely have any customised transport to service routine low income needs.
Within the transport sector, there are new fleet management technologies which have been developed on the basis of state of the art information and communication technology which permit a greatly expanded flexibility in the routing and unit load size characteristics of commercial loads. Within the commercial sector, new technology has brought the instantaneous matching of customers with loads to transport and transport operators who can move those loads (within a system where goods are continuously tracked by tagging technologies): intelligent commercial delivery systems are now a common feature of reality.
The matching of public transport passengers and public transport vehicles could, if the policy vision were suitably applied, operate along similar intelligent principles matching passenger journey requirements with vehicle availabilities within the system. Historically, customers went to common collection points to join the motorised public transport system - an arrangement which emerged in a period when intelligent communications with their capability for making real time matches between customers and operators were not yet available. The advent of new intelligent technologies creates an opportunity for a differently designed system - or at least for the redesigning of a part of the public transport system so that it can better meet the needs of women with young children, older persons and the disabled. For these target groups, new intelligent technologies similar to those used for the transportation of commercial loads could be brought into use in the public transport system so as to provide the journey flexibility, including home pick ups, required by the least mobile categories of society.
No European municipality has yet investigated the possibility of creating such a demand responsive public transport provision on any scale to service the needs of these least mobile sectors of the community. There have been however three developments which demonstrate that there is potential for such an approach in the European domain. Firstly, in the rural areas of Perugia public transport customers can summon a bus to collect them by placing their smart card in the unit provided on bus stops; secondly, in Angouleme in France, public transport passengers can tell the exact time at which a bus will next arrive at the bus stop nearest to their residence through the information screen on the technology within their home; thirdly, a new residential area is about to be built on the Greenwich millenium site in Britain which will have networked terminals in each home, terminals which connect with local transport providers real time information services.
These three developments taken together show us a path through which the development of in-home communication technologies connected to the services of local public transport operators could help reduce the time poverty of low income women. In-home networked terminals have very low communications costs; they would permit women to make reservations, on both routine and crisis services, giving exact details of the journeys which they need to make to meet their survival needs. Within an intelligent system, these requirements can be rapidly aggregated and integrated with similar journeys to be made by others: there is no need for efficiency to be lost, indeed efficiency may be gained. For example, the availability of in-home scheduling or communication technologies for low income mothers would permit the better integration of hospital appointments, the access transport necessary to reach those appointments and the reservation of the child care provision necessary to meet those appointments.
At present in-home networked terminals are viewed as a feature to be developed in higher income homes so as to enable the remote control of the domestic environment by professionals who enjoy frequent, long distance travel. However, the exact same technologies could very well service the needs of those who are on low income with restricted mobility. We commenced this section with drawing attention to the way in which urban development had dispersed vital local functions over the greater urban space as a consequence of centralisation; we noted that women were losers in this arrangement and that those with the greatest need to be in the greatest number of locations and to access and perform their business in these locations quickly were the very group which were confined to the slow modes. Intelligent communications via the in-home domestic scheduling technology mode give us a new solution to this problem: the tele-strategy solution. Tele-strategies are fast solutions to womens time problems: womens local constraints can be greatly ameliorated by access to the information highway. Functions which could only previously be performed by being physically present in dispersed urban locations can now be accomplished by communicating through information technology: reserving medical appointments and cancelling them with the immediate print out of the information in hand; electronic banking and money transfers; electronic shopping and delivery of goods; tele-working; virtual conferencing with school authorities; electronic voting; electronic distance education for sick or disabled children. At present, there has been no major policy agency involved in investigating how the various functions performable through new technology can be integrated into a format that better serves the time poor woman; but clearly the potential is there. @http://www.geocities.com/margaret_grieco/womenont/time.html
The bulk of our attention so far has lain with indicating the changes that are occurring within the public domain of transport and technology in respect of gender, however, there are in-vehicle changes which are taking place in respect of gender, transport and technology. The 'connected car' is now a feature of modern day living and connected cars are likely to be increasingly utilised by women in their management of their contemporary task loads. The availability of information communication technology within the private car enables the ready rescheduling and reorganisation of spatially dispersed household tasks. For information on the 'connected car' go to http://www.embedded.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=162101607
New information communication technologies, most particularly the internet, enable new targeted product marketing strategies and issues of gender begin to feature explicitly in this domain. New marketing strategies and changes in design culture to better accommodate gender issues interact: for further information go to http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3896/is_200201/ai_n9066215
New information communication technologies enable the business of the household to be more mobile: as youngsters acquire mobile phones, they can keep in contact with the senior members of the households through the mobile phone. The youth market for mobile phones is pronounced yet its impact on gender travel patterns has yet to be thoroughly researched - go to http://www.telenor.no/fou/program/nomadiske/articles/11.pdf for research into the relationship between gender and the youth mobile phone market in Norway.
Click here http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~nalinik/mobile.html for an extensive bibliography on social science research around the mobile phone.
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