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 transport planning and a failure to address gender ‘in system configuration’.17 A 2014 EU report on Europeans’ satisfaction with urban transport describes male travel patterns as ‘standard’ even as it decries the failure of European public transport systems to adequately serve women.18 More galling are common planning terms such as ‘compulsory mobility’, which Sánchez de Madariaga explains is a commonly used umbrella concept for ‘all trips made for employment and educational purposes’.19 As if care trips are not compulsory, but merely expendable ‘me time’ for dilettantes.
The bias is also clear in government spending priorities. Stephen Bush, the New Statesman’s political correspondent, pointed out in a July 2017 article that although the Conservative government has consistently spouted austerity rhetoric, the last two Tory chancellors have made an exception for road-building, on which both have spent lavishly.20 With living standards falling and Britain already having a fairly serviceable road infrastructure there is a whole host of areas that seem a potentially wiser investment, but somehow, both times, for both men, roads have seemed the obvious choice. Meanwhile, by 2014, 70% of councils had cut bus funding (the most feminised form of transport), with a ￡19 million cut in 2013 alone, and bus prices had been rising every year.21
British politicians are not alone here. A 2007 World Bank report revealed that 73% of World Bank transport funding is for roads and highways, most of them rural or linking up cities.22 Even where roads are the right investment choice, where the proposed road leads is not a gender-neutral decision. In an illustration of how important it is that development projects are based on sex-disaggregated data, another World Bank report recounted the disagreement over a proposed road in one village in Lesotho. Women wanted the road to be constructed in one direction to ‘facilitate their access to the nearest village with basic services’; men wanted it built in the opposite direction ‘to enable them to reach the larger town and market more easily on horseback’.23
The gender gap in travel data continues with the intentional omission in many transport surveys of shorter pedestrian and other ‘non-motorised’ trips.24 These trips, says Sánchez de Madariaga, are ‘not considered to be relevant for infrastructure policymaking’. Given women generally walk further and for longer than men (in part because of their care-giving responsibilities; in part because women tend to be poorer), this marginalisation of non-motorised travel inevitably affects them more. Ignoring shorter walking trips also adds to the gap in trip-chaining data, as this kind of travel usually involves at least one journey on foot. In short, the assumption that shorter walking trips are irrelevant to infrastructure policy is little short of an assumption that women are irrelevant to infrastructure policy.
But they aren’t. Men tend to travel on their own, but women travel encumbered – by shopping, by buggies, by children or elderly relatives they are caring for.25 A 2015 survey on travel in London found that women are ‘significantly less likely than men to be satisfied with the streets and pavements after their last journey by foot’, perhaps reflecting the reality that not only are women more likely to walk than men but also that women are more likely to be pushing prams and therefore be more affected by inadequate walkways.26 Rough, narrow and cracked pavements littered with ill-placed street furniture combine with narrow and steep steps at numerous transit locations to make travelling around a city with a buggy ‘extremely difficult’, says Sánchez de Madariaga, who estimates that it can take up to four times as long. ‘So what do young women with small kids do?’