After Dark: Encouraging Safe Transit for Women Travelling at Night

Abstraksi

Introduction The design of public transportation services are not always gender sensitive. The lack of a safe and inclusive public transportation system influences many decisions that women make, from where to go to work, choice of schools, to where to shop for basic household items. Despite these realities, there are many women who still have to travel in the evening to night hours to earn a living. Many of these women work in the service industry, for instance working as shopkeepers, restaurant servers, call centre operators and cleaning staff, and depend on affordable public transportation to get home at night. Research Objective Pulse Lab Jakarta has teamed up with UN Women to gather insights on women’s mobility and travel choices in urban areas in order to design practical interventions that can improve the safety of women and creating an inclusive working environment for them. To better understand about the individual experience of these women, we asked the questions of: ● How do women perceive safety when travelling with public transportation at night? ● What factors influence women’s perception of safety while travelling at night? ● What challenges do women encounter when travelling at night? How do these challenges impact women’s mobility and travel choices? ● How can transit systems be improved to engender a sense of safety for women travelling at night? Our Approach In this research, we apply human-centred design (HCD) method which relies on empathising with respondents to understand their behaviours and needs. Through this method, we tried to gain a deeper understanding about women’s individual experience rather than arriving at basic generalisations. And to help us achieve this outcome, our field researchers use diary studies, contextual interviews/shadowing, and in-depth interviews. HCD is an approach used to develop strategies to solve a particular problem that are responsive to the needs of users - for whom the solutions are intended. The approach is anchored in immersion and empathy to gain deep insights on users’ motivation, pain points, desires and latent needs. Insights from the research conducted then become the basis of ideas for solutions that are developed, tested, and iteratively refined together with the users. The Women We Met on the Field From the field work, we found that ‘women’ is not a uniform category. Although our respondents share similar demographic characteristics, their experiences travelling with public transportation at night are shaped by a set of distinct habits, needs, challenges and beliefs. Instead of describing the quantitative breakdown of our respondents’ characteristics, we identified four types of personas, or fictional archetypes based on the respondents that explain specific motivations, expectations and goals of women travelling at night. Each persona is a composite of quotes and stories from several respondents, and does not necessarily represent a particular category of women travelling at night. These personas reveal the different needs and underlying beliefs behind a woman’s choice of transport and travel pattern and provide useful descriptions that can help a range of stakeholders assess services that directly affect these women’s lives. Furthermore, these personas can serve as a design guide in creating interventions that can have meaningful and positive impact on women’s lives. The first persona is the woman who spends considerable amount of time coming up with defence strategies, The Overprepared Strategist. The second persona is the young woman who recently migrated to the city, The Anxious Newcomer. The third persona is the woman who juggles multiple jobs to stay afloat, The Moonlighter. The fourth persona is the woman who puts her work above her own safety, the Female Warrior. With these stories, we hope to give a glimpse of what it is like to walk in these women’s shoes. Key Insights The journeys reveal emotions and underlying beliefs that influence their travel decisions as they go from their place of work to home, as well as every stop in between. Despite the nuances in their stories, there’s one common thread - regardless of how unsafe these women perceived travelling at night to be, they all acknowledge it as part of what they have to deal with having to work night-shifts. For most of the respondents we met with, they believe job options are limited, and so it is better to earn a regular income working at night than earning nothing at all. In designing interventions or infrastructure that seeks to provide a safer environment and experience for women when travelling at night, it is important to consider the insights below that we gathered from the field. The first is being safe also demads a certain skill set, beyond intuition. Feeling safe, as these women have aptly described, is on a continuum -- it is not a dichotomy of safe and unsafe. The feeling of being safe also comes from a woman’s ability to shield and protect herself. Second, women’s safety parameter is adjusted based on their familiarity with an environment. Third, women’s perception of safety is more shaped by personal stories that the news. Fourth, angkot drivers are seen as both enabler and inhibitor of women’s safety. Fifth, bystanders somestimes want to help, but they are not sure if intervening is the best course of action. And lastly, waiting zones like an angkot stop are not just transportation points, they are “safety assessment” points. Conclusion The respondents’ perceptions of safety exist on a spectrum - it is not simply a dichotomy of being safe or unsafe. The overall nighttime travel experience is influenced by several factors, but the quality of infrastructure and public transportation services stand out. Notwithstanding, for these women, familiarity plays a key role in ensuring a safe journey. With time, they’ve developed their own shield and protection mechanism so that they don’t feel the need to always rely on others. All in all, these efforts are to ensure that they continue to work and travel safely at night. The main challenge is two fold: it is about how to reduce the burden that is placed on women to maintain their safety, and what steps can be taken to build safe and inclusive cities and inclusive working environment.