The travel behaviours of women in Ireland are a lesson for all of us! This article refers to the report from TII (Transport Infrastructure Ireland) called "Travelling in a Woman's Shoes" published in July 2020 by Rachel Cahill, Kelly Saunders & Lean Doody which can be found here
This extensive report ("Travelling in a Woman's Shoes") is an excellent piece of work addressing the needs and travel behaviours of women in Ireland. I shared the results with my wife and my daughter and was impressed to see they felt the same needs, wishes and worries, particularly in regards to the safety aspects. Although these stories are at a local tiny level, the message given by these Irish women is universal and speaks to all of us.
For those who (like me!) are enthusiastic about new mobility concepts (carsharing, multimodal transportation, connected cars, EV, AD, micro-mobility, “15 minutes city”…), we always face the risk to build castles in the air.
I recommend that you go beyond the summary/key findings to read the life situations of these women and you will touch ground for sure: how can we promote cycling as an alternative without taking into account the need to care a baby, grand-parents, disabled family members?
How can we encourage ride hailing and public transports without considering the risk of sexual harassment? How can we consider multimodal mobility solutions without thinking about daily stressful situations (fear to be late to an appointment, need to rescue a family member in emergency…)? How can we talk about “last mile” journey home without any regard for the scariness of our infrastructure for pedestrians (obscure tunnels, poor street lighting, unfriendly places…)?
My takeaway from this research is that we will be successful in this mobility revolution if women take the lead and develop solutions to tackle the issues raised by these Irish women. Their engagement will enable us to implement appropriate alternative mobility solutions for women, which will stimulate as a second step the rest of the population to embrace this transformation.
Another takeaway is that the implementation of these mobility solutions needs full integration of new technologies, infrastructure and behaviours; therefore it will require a strong cooperation between OEMs, new tech companies, software developers, transportation/energy private actors, infrastructure designers, policy makers and public authorities.
If we all decide to “wear woman’s shoes” to embark in this fascinating journey, can you imagine how far we could go in the Mobility Revolution?I don’t know if it is ironic or poetic, but we used to call these micro plastics “mermaid tears”. Benjamin Von Wong, Canadian artist, has been inspired by their tears: he has taken a series of photos of mermaids in an ocean of plastic bottles for an art installation called “Mermaids hate plastic”.
You can see more on his blog with photos, videos and comments about this production. Less romantic is the name of Garbage patches which are forming across the globe: the most famous is the Great Pacific one with 8 trillion of bits of plastic moving around in an area bigger than Texas State.
It’s estimated that there are 4 or 5 other patches in other oceans still to be recognized. If you want to know more about this desperate situation of the oceans, you can find detailed examples and data from the following links: World in data, UNEP and Coastal Care. This situation is disgusting and shocking for all of us and not only for the young generation. Enough should be enough, right?!
So what are the Mobility actors doing to contribute to solving this big problem?
The automotive industry has taken a few actions mainly on the downstream side to recycle mainly plastic material & bottles and, for a few cases, ocean waste. This is a nice effort because recycling plastic used to be more expensive than buying new plastic.
The most impressive case is the Luca Electric Vehicle concept car which was developed by students at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands with almost the entire car being built with ocean waste material!
But, this is not enough, and the actors engaged in the future of mobility should take actions on the upstream side to prevent waste in the oceans. Companies have implemented internal policies to reduce one-time plastic usage by their employees. But what else?
Here, I could not find examples of upstream initiatives from Automakers or other actors in new Mobility, likely because taking a proactive approach to prevent waste is more complicated and not immediately visible for the customers.
Our attitude is often driven by emotional reactions (for instance, our outrage to see a photo of a turtle with a plastic straw in the nose) and we are looking for immediate countermeasures. I wish I was wrong, but I believe that customers might have a better opinion of a brand communicating on its downstream activities rather than a brand that talks about its proactive actions to put a stop to pollution and waste.
As I am not limited by these constraints, I would like to suggest below a few upstream ideas which could be initiated in some of the “Future of Mobility” domains. With all of their Hackathons innovative projects, I trust that the young generation will take and implement the right decisions to save the marine life.
Then, I dream that Benjamin Von Wong could celebrate this victory with another series of photos of happy mermaids in clean waters and colourful coral… I would be delighted to publish them on a future article!
As a final comment, I would like to express my recognition to Mathias Echenay from La Volte editions who allowed me to use Philippe Curval’s drawing from his most recent novel, a science-fiction story taking place on a gigantic plastic garbage continent. I have a special fondness towards Philippe Curval who is one of my favorite French writers, whose books enlightened my readings as a teenager.
To this day, Philippe Curval continues to write and draw masterpieces at 91 years old… truly admirable of him, and I encourage you to discover his work!
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