Intersections of Gender Discrimination, COVID-19 and Micromobility
By Alyssa Pichardo and Jose Pillich, PhD
The choice by cities and micromobility operators to locate micromobility services in the most profitable areas, wealthy neighborhoods and downtown central business districts, have led to a dearth of affordable car-free travel for essential workers throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Bikeshare systems are failing to serve essential workers - who are predominantly women - highlighting ongoing sexism in how urbanists design transportation systems.
New York’s Citi Bike is one of the few bikeshare systems to provide open data on bikeshare trips and subscribers’ self-identified gender, defined solely as male or female.* Bikeshare trips by men outnumber trips by women nearly 3 to 1 on the Citi Bike system before the COVID-19 crisis. That trend may be changing. From April to May 2020, free bikeshare memberships were provided to essential workers in NYC through Motivate/Lyft’s Critical Worker program but the system infrastructure itself limits access for these workers. Only 18% of NYC’s health care and social services workforce live within a short half-block walk to a bikeshare station, less than 500 feet. And this workforce is overwhelmingly female in NYC, 76% of the city’s health and social services workforce are women.
Why this matters: Gender discrimination in the design of transportation systems is ongoing, limiting women’s access to safer travel and economic opportunity. Gender disaggregation of travel data highlights unequal access and differences in where, how and when transportation systems function for women. During COVID-19, women have been negatively impacted by this crisis due to economic discrimination, even in countries with more benefits for working moms. Conversely, free and widespread access to micromobility services like bikeshare may help protect health workers - who are predominately women - by giving them travel choices beyond expensive car-ownership or the safety risks public transit and ridesharing services might bring.
While few bikeshare stations achieve a true gender balance in their use, there is a slight shift towards a more gender-balanced system since COVID-19. Particularly, for trips ending within a thousand feet of healthcare or hospital facilities in NYC. For these trips, 25% of riders were women, in the 10 days before and after the statewide stay-at-home orders on March 19, 2020. By May 2020, trips by women subscribers increased by 6%, compared to a year earlier when 25% of rides were by women in the vicinity of healthcare facilities.
Where women are picking up Citi Bikes before they ride to healthcare facilities.
More striking is the differences in where women are picking up bikeshare before heading toward healthcare facilities. Of these trips, bikeshare stations that have at least 50% of trips by female subscribers picking up, overwhelmingly lie on the periphery of Citi Bike’s service area. Two key changes also happened during this time. Firstly, free membership was provided to over 20,000 critical workers in April and May, many of whom are likely to be women. Secondly, bikeshare expansion into the Bronx in May 2020 shows how those sites are serving more women than men. These trends highlight how free and expanded bikeshare access could change travel choices for women and essential workers.
Yet there remains a vast imbalance in bikeshare access for women and that lies at the heart of urban planning decisions made to prioritize locations in New York City’s Downtown and Midtown neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are wealthier and whiter than the boroughs, leading to a “flexible” micromobility system that is still largely serving 9-5 office workday trips for men or tourists. Many of whom now work from the comfort of their homes or aren’t traveling around NYC. The women working in essential sectors of our economy are left out of Citi Bike’s service area. For an industry that has 3 women for every man, an increase of 6% in women’s ridership during a time when bikeshare membership is free just isn’t enough. Redistributing and rebalancing the Citi Bike system for women and essential workers in NYC has to prioritize station expansion into areas seen as “unprofitable” for micromobility operators - specifically all of the Bronx, Queens and South Brooklyn.
* Casual users do not identify their gender when using hourly or day passes on Citi Bike’s system, but they make up less than 13% of the trips analyzed. The analysis above focuses on the gender disparity between males and females as defined within the existing data source, Citi Bike’s ridership data. Unfortunately, this binary distinction does not allow for a more nuanced analysis of genderqueer, transgendered or nongendered populations and the disparities in transportation access they may face.
Additional notes about the data:
Given the resolution and attributes of the open data provided by Citi Bike, it is not possible to state a trip purpose for any given bikeshare trip. However, there are three factors that suggest many of the trips analyzed by IQSpatial are done by healthcare and essential service workers:
The timing of the data queried, March 1 to May 30, 2020 both shortly before and during the statewide stay-at-home orders.
The use of spatial restrictions on where trips ended and their adjacency to hospital and healthcare facilities in NYC, specifically bikeshare stations within 1000 feet of these facilities.
The provision of 20,000 free Citi Bike membership subscriptions to “Critical Workers” from April 1 to May 30,2020.
All data has been sourced from NYCDOT, CitiBike & the US Census Bureau and analyzed by IQSpatial, LLC.