Byline: Edmond. Fernandes, Abhay. Nirgude, Poonam. Naik, Neevan. Dsouza, Soumya. Shetty

BACKGROUND: Transport and commuting need to be viewed from a more inclusive nature because it adds a very strong gender component. Invariably, gender perspective is never included during road transport authority meetings and naturally gets excluded in the entire transport planning discourse. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study was carried out to assess commuter problem and study the opinion of commuters with regard to public transport and road safety by involving 139 commuters by purposive sampling who travel daily in the coastal city of Mangalore in Southern India using public transport. RESULTS: Among the study participants, 66 (47.5%) were males and 73 (52.5%) were females. The mean age of the respondents was 28.5 [+ or -] 7.9 years. One hundred and sixteen (83.5%) feel the roads in the city are unsafe and 69 (49.6%) felt stressed due to travel and 71 (51.1%) felt the public transport are rarely safe for women to travel at night. CONCLUSION: The issue of women and child safety during travel by public transport, the behavior of auto drivers, the need to increase road patrolling during day and night will require sincere investment from policy makers and stakeholders. Perhaps, the time to create a gender sensitive commuter-centric road safety policy requires to be developed.

Introduction

Enrique Penalosa, the then mayor of Bogota in Columbia once said, “A developed country is not where the poor use cars, but where the rich use public transport.” Countries like India are dependent on roads as an arterial line for the country. Poor road quality, inadequate patrolling, shortage of traffic police, poor lighting remains a bottleneck and aggravates commuter problems particularly affecting women and children the most. The number of vehicles is also increasing at over 10%/annum.[sup][1] Going by various estimates, the total stock of vehicles will reach up to 2 billion by 2050 and maybe even more, depending on how the ownership trends shape up in countries like India and the People's Republic of China (IEA 2009).[sup][2] New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru have 5% of India's population but 14% of its registered vehicles.[sup][3]

Transport and commuting needs to be viewed from a more inclusive nature since it adds a very strong gender component. Invariably, gender perspective is never included during road transport authority meetings and naturally gets excluded in the entire transport planning discourse.

Bus services are overcrowded, uneasy, chaotic, and often dangerous, mainly because of the population dynamics in India. Public ownership and operation of most transport services are greatly decreased.[sup][4]

Smeed in October 1967 at the University College London said that “The feeling that something should be done to mitigate the harmful effects of motor vehicles is almost universal, but the opinions on what should be done are wildly conflicting.”[sup][5]

The needs of women and their interests have largely been under-represented, what some scholars call having a gender-blind approach in India's urban development planning and the benefits of development reaches more to men than women, whereas on the...