Seminar Series1: Gender, transport and information communication in the developed world.

Week2: Gender, transport and stranded mobility: a traditional set of relationships

This seminar will provide an introduction to the concept of stranded mobility. The seminar will explore the interactions between household organisation, the transport system and the mobility constraints experienced by women.

The key readings for this seminar are:

http://www.surf.salford.ac.uk/documents/UrbanVulnerability/Grieco.pdf

http://www.n4a.org/datoolkit/Health_Disparities.pdf

For the first reading, the term stranded mobility is defined as:

the inability to access key services locally or to access mobility to key services located elsewhere

The argument provided in this reading is that poor public transport services to low income areas, coupled with women's household tasks and low income circumstances, can generate situations of stranded mobility within modern societies where other groups experience high quality mobility facilities.

Poor mobility circumstances often occur in locations where there is also a poor accessibility of local services. The combined difficulties of poor mobility with low levels of accessibility of services and the co-ordinatory load of combining child care responsibilities, the greater share of the burden of household tasks and very often the most vulnerable sources of employment (local, part time, low wage) all serve to intensify the stranded mobility experienced by women as compared to men.

In these circumstances it is argued in the on line reading that information communication technology can make a difference. In transport terms, ICT can be used to bring demand responsive vehicles to points of use; it can be used to enable the electronic performance of a service that would otherwise have to be performed in another locality which requires either a trip by the citizen or a trip by an employee of the service provider; it can be used to bring a service into a locality, for example the doorstep delivery of needed medications; it can be used to reschedule trips which require appointments; it can be used to organise escorts for journeys; or used to communicate with the household and reorganise household schedules and tasks when journey plans run into difficulties (such as late trains or bus failures).

The reading picks out a number of scenarios which can be used as demonstration of the capabilities of the new information communication technologies aligned with new forms of transport provision in reducing and removing situations of stranded mobility in contemporary urban society.

"Within the transport sector, new information communication technologies could be used to summon reserve vehicles where existing transport arrangements have failed (Grieco, 1995; Raje et al. 2003): a mother waiting at a bus stop with a sick child on her way to a doctor's surgery could on a Wap phone check the divergence of her waiting time from that scheduled in the system and call for a replacement vehicle.

Her call would not only bring a replacement vehicle to her and her sick child but would record and register inside the operators' system the 'drift' of vehicles away from their scheduled times.

This mother would now be part of an 'open management' system. The distributed feedback capabilities of the client base would become a tool which assisted in the better organisation of service delivery: a recorded account of system performance is being developed at low transaction costs to the client.

User or community monitoring can be developed as part of public service management: the quality of interactive participation can now be harnessed not only in the more lagged participation of overhauling failing public service but also in the fine tuning of operations.

To move beyond the demand responsive transport example, in health organisation patients can through interactive appointments systems play an active hand in rescheduling of their own appointments with substantial benefit to health systems which have experienced the high costs of missed appointments.

The new interface possibilities between client and service in the public service arena are likely to require a rethink of our urban management systems."

In the second reading, we see the interaction between gender, ethnicity and stranded mobility constraints.

Arizona Border Health HIV/AIDS Care Project,Tucson, AZ:
The influx of illegal drugs and impoverished migrants has significantly increased the presence of HIV risk factors in the Arizona-Mexico border region. Residents of the region face many barriers to care, ranging from lack of insurance to transportation difficulties to problems with maintaining confidentiality. Few physicians are both knowledgeable about HIV care and adept at working with the many cultural and linguistic differences in the region's population.@ http://www.n4a.org/datoolkit/Health_Disparities.pdf

This reading suggests that patterns of broken appointments at health points should be more systematically investigated to reveal the barriers experienced by different groups to effective health services. Transportation difficulties and their interaction with other social factors can be documented in this way.

The reading also provides graphic descriptions of the difficulties experienced by migrant women in their journeys in search of health care.

�Rosa,� who recently came to New York from Puerto Rico, goes to her local clinic and is relieved to find that the clinic provides an interpreter,because her English is poor. She explains to the doctor that she has fatiga, but she is perplexed when she is counseled to �get a little more sleep� to deal with her illness. Fortunately, she persists in describing her ailment, and discovers that the interpreter, who is from Spain, has been translating fatiga as �tired��in Puerto Rico, however, the word fatiga is used to describe wheezing from asthma. @ http://www.n4a.org/datoolkit/Health_Disparities.pdf

This vignette of Rosa's problems serves to make the point that immigrant women in low income neighbourhoods have their experience of stranded mobility compounded by linguistic factors. This situation of compound disadvantage could be remedied by the use of new information communication technologies which enabled access to translator of same regional background or transport organisation which enabled the client to be escorted by a social contact who had the same linguistic background but with higher levels of english competency.

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