How Our Transport System is Biased Against Women

Photo: TransitCenter

In her book , published earlier this year, Caroline Craido Perez uncovers the way designing essentially everything with the default user being an averaged size man puts women at risk.

StreetsBlogUSA - continues

 

Do you actually believe the article you posted? I could go through and deconstruct everything in it that seems ridiculous or twisted way out of proprortion, but it would take me an hour or more. I don't want to spend that much time on it if you're just posting the link because the headline sounded interesting.

 

i remember a short period of time when nobody cried about being "different". i dont get these times we are in now where everyone is nit picking stuff and needing a shoulder to cry on. wah. this is a car site...i come here to escape all the crybaby "rights" stuff. i wanna see "man stuff" (yea i said it), even in the "off topic" section.
jeeeez.

 

Hello hasdrubal,

To answer your question; yes, yes I do! Quite strongly as a matter of fact. You are more than welcome to dispute any and all points made. My bet is that it will fall on weak grounds.

Here's something I just saw on the nightly news two nights ago. Tried to find a solo video of just this point, but couldn't really track down anything quickly. You can go to the video below and see how many kids have a close call or get hit. This starts at 12:00.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news...st-68034629768

 

Cars are inherently political.

Your post and your desire to avoid politics you don't like are inherently political.

You don't want to see politics that you don't agree with, you'd be fine with something that doesn't make you question your own views being posted.

The article posted is a bit hyperbolic on a few points but that is heavily outweighed by the real & valid concerns it touches upon.

 

mike410b- everything can be made political. That doesn't mean it always should be. If someone just wants to drive their car to work, there's no reason they should have to actively think about voting for or against a tax increase for road construction. They can, sure, but they don't have to actively take part if they don't want to. A few years ago most football fans just wanted to turn on the TV and watch football games. They didn't want to think about politics, just have a good time watching people paid large amounts of money to produce entertainment. It was made political anyway. I could take my kids to the park and have someone say that's political because inner city people have less access to parks than richer people living in suburbs- perhaps a real and valid concern, but not something I need to think about every time the weather is nice.

User1- I'll give this a shot, I don't expect to change your mind any more than I expect you to change mine, but I feel that open and reasoned debate can make people understand their own arguments better and figure out if they're valid or not. Sometimes it just comes down to personal opinion, which we're both free to have. This might have to be in sections though, and please understand that I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to address the points of the link you posted.

 

No they aren't.

They are made political by those that believe them to be a major offending cause of AGW. The contribution of cars to overall CO2 emissions is in the single digit percentages. Manufacturing, heating, and electricity production make up the lion's share. Cars are just an easy, visible target for those that want something to demonize.

Those are the same people who see plastic straws as evil even though they contribute a nearly statistically-insignificant pittance towards plastic pollution.

As hasdrubal said, everything can be made political. Usually by those who lack much capacity for objective thought.

 

The article seems to view everything as being sexist and against women. It's even in the title, so no surprise.

To the extent there are different fatality rates in car crashes, how much of the difference is because of poorly fitted seatbelts or other safety equipment, and how much is simply because women are on average shorter and lighter? I'm not going to buy and read a book for this, so I don't know if the author conducted or commissioned crash tests to show a different physical mechanism for the impact of seatbelts on different sized bodies, but the g forces on any body ought to be the same for a given rate of deceleration in a crash. The seatbelts are meant to spread the force across the body while preventing the user from being ejected.

I don't go to a lot of fatality crashes, but I've never seen a crash seatbelt, airbag, or seat be a cause of injury- like the seatbelt was fitted wrong and put force where it shouldn't go. It always appears like it's just the acceleration imparted by the impact. Bigger, stronger people seem to handle physical trauma better than smaller, weaker people. We could mandate reduced g forces to the dummy in crash testing at a given speed (resulting in improved crumple zones and such), but that would benefit men as well, so unless you reduce the number of fatalities to near zero, the disparity should remain in the statistics. If my assumptions here are right, there is no inherent sexism among car engineers not caring if women get killed using their product.

If my assumptions here are wrong, and it's based on the size/shape of safety equipment in the car, then men's and women's bodies need different equipment for equal protection. Should auto makers be required to size seats for average women? Or produce different models of the same car, so some are intended for male occupants and some are intended for female occupants? That sounds ridiculous, and aside from men not wanting to buy a car that feels uncomfortably cramped (I rode in an S2000 once when I was younger and thinner, and the seat back was almost painfully narrow for my shoulders), when I go anywhere with the family, my wife refuses to drive. Having a car with equipment sized for her wouldn't work too well, and many families can't afford a his car and a hers car depending on who wants to go for groceries.

 

I'll give the article credit for the assumption mothers care more about child seats and child safety in general than fathers. I can't agree that it's sexist against women for cars to not have integrated car seats- although it's not a bad idea. The article suggests that "Cars should come equipped with seats that can accommodate children of all ages," although that's a quote from someone they interviewed. The article seems to accept his assertion, but there's the potential for legal problems. Even if you exclude infants who need rear facing seats, because I don't think anyone would seriously advocate for rotating chairs instead of traditional rear seats in a modern car.

An integrated car seat that meets federal standards in 2019 might not meet federal standards in 2020. Or in 2025, etc. Would a parent be liable for traffic citations if they use the integrated seat a few years after they bought the car? Would the car company be required to issue a recall for new seats that conform with updated federal standards? This sounds ridiculous too, and an easy answer would be to relax some of the increasingly strict local laws about child seat usage, and also to treat integrated seats like building code, where you don't have to rip the wiring out of your walls every time they change a standard about the insulation.

This is interesting for me, though, because a few days ago I found a ten year old video on the effectiveness of child seats talking about statistics, which claims that they don't actually make any difference in saving lives after the age of two. My wife is angry at me for even watching it, because she doesn't care about data when emotion is involved, but you might find it interesting.

I don't know if the guy in the video is right or wrong, but it's worth a watch.

 

I've got to take the kids somewhere right now (hope that doesn't get political), so I'll try to make some commentary about the rest later.

 

That's often why things become political. (That is not meant as negative towards your wife, just to be clear!)

Integrated child seats make little sense. Aside from the regulatory requirements constantly changing for anything child-related, the cost to integrate them into every vehicle would be wasteful.

Without knowing actual stats, (since this is obviously conjecture), I have to assume that a large percentage of those integrated child seats would get no use at all. Those that did get used, would likely only get used a small percentage of the occupied time of the total lifespan of that seat.

It would make more sense for a car manufacturer to simply offer a free separate child seat, upon the purchase of a vehicle, whenever a buyer asked for one. That would be much more cost efficient and solve the regulatory issues. I could actually get behind that.

 

Not to go too far off on a tangent from what is being discussed already, hospitals will provide (for free!) an infant car seat for the parent/s to take the baby home.

 

all i know is i am 5'6'', hispanic male and my seats in my ge8 are uncomfortable as $h*t. clearly they were not made with MY comfort in mind. there is no way these things can be safe. im pretty sure there is some sort of conspiracy going on. im also pretty sure honda hates short hispanic people. i dont get why they didnt offer a ge8 with a 2 foot shorter roof for me. i believe the only answer is for me to write a book to wake the rest of the world up. and organize a parade. and get political. and sue someone. maybe chipotle because i know the founder is not hispanic and they are here in new mexico. wtf are they doing here! who let them in! oh wait i eat there sometimes. i cosign that red salsa but damn it gives me the bubble guts sometimes. its not because its too hot, lord knows i can eat chili like a man.... i mean a human. maybe its e coli again. did anyone go dumpster diving like a bum....uh i mean a racoon...for those free burrito coupons after that a few years ago? i know i did. that was the shiznit.

 

That would have been nice when we had our daughter. They did give us a cardboard box (that can be used as a temporary crib) and a starter kit of baby necessities. They didn't offer a car seat!

 

i dont know if thats funny or sad

 

Lol. The cardboard box? Apparently that started in Scandinavian countries. I'm sure it would actually work fine for a short while. It's not like they move much when they're brand new. And bassinets are expensive.

I joked with my wife that we'd just use a Tupperware bin as a bassinet until it was time to put the kid in a crib. She was not amused.

 

Back to the computer, some good stuff posted above.

The main problem I have with the article is how it assumes any problem the author can identify is obviously and exclusively because people are anti-woman. Companies are out to maximize profits. If Uber and Lyft want to get a larger share of the market, and they can do so by telling their drivers to install child seats, then they can do it. If individual drivers want to maximize profits, they can do it. If installing a child seat takes a space away from a paying adult customer, it could hurt profits. This could actually be an issue, I've got two kid seats in my Fit and it's a major pain to take them out for cleaning, the way they get latched in for a modern car.

If I'm an Uber driver, though, how do I get it right? I could take my rear seat and install one infant seat, or one infant seat and one booster seat, or one convertible seat facing rearwards and one facing forwards, or two of whichever in case a customer has two kids about the same size, the combinations could go on for a while. If I don't get the right mix of seats for however many kids the customer is bringing on a particular day, does that mean I hate women?

How is a federal or local law supposed to fix this? That seems to be where the article is heading, but the issue is the same for a private company. Do we require all taxis to carry an assortment of child seats in the trunk just in case? How is a taxi thusly equipped supposed to take two adults with luggage from the airport to a hotel?

 

The bus issue seems like something that could be fixed, though. I'm trying to figure out what the problem is with letting people bring an opened stroller, and all I can come up with is the risk of the stroller flying around in a collision, or lack of space on a crowded bus.

Could be as easy as a bus policy saying kids in strollers should be strapped into the stroller, and that the stroller should be connected to a seat with some kind of quick detach strap- since it's common for a bus to have a space set aside for a passenger in a wheelchair, it should be possible to use a similar space for a stroller. If there's not enough space, then the bus service needs to look at rider numbers and scheduling, and just have more buses running the route.

I blame bureaucratic resistance to change for that, in general. Not sexism.

The article seems to think there should be proactive measures aimed at stopping sexual harassment on the bus. I don't even know how to address that- the cost of putting a transit cop on every bus, during the entire day, could easily double or triple the police budget for whatever area you're talking about. My agency has nine people on for the entire city during the day, and the population is somewhere just north of 90k. There's probably more than nine buses running around at any given time, and we already take up more than half of the city budget... and then you'd have people complaining racism because some of the criminals who avoided taking the bus were minorities.

It's possible the article meant something else, but they don't really give any hints. An ad campaign? Mandatory sexual assault prevention training for male riders before you can get a bus pass? The first one isn't proactive, and the second is completely impractical. Open to non sarcastic thoughts on what they might be talking about, because I'm out of ideas.

 

The part complaining about lifted trucks is not likely to prompt a good rational debate. And I don't even like lifted trucks, for styling and performance reasons. Most of the people I meet who drive them seem like narcissistic jerks, and I think they wasted their money on the modifications.

That said, I don't want to see more government regulation of people having fun the wrong way. This is supposed to be a free country, and life isn't supposed to be 100% safe. I'm not saying we should go back to the society we had to inspire Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle,' but if we accept the purpose of the government is to limit freedom as much as necessary to preserve life, how far are we going to go?

Should we mandate cell phones only be capable of calling 911 when moving faster than a walking pace? Should we mandate all cars with outdated safety equipment be impounded if driven on public roads? Should we require swimming pools in private homes to have certified lifeguards on duty when people are swimming? How about federal regulations preventing people from eating fried foods, or steak cooked medium rare? That's not sarcasm, locally they're already trying to tax soda, and nationwide the taxes on tobacco have been about deterrence instead of revenue for a long time.

 

I'm going to skip over the bicycle part because I'm too biased against bicycles on the roadway to give a reasonable opinion.

The part about road planning is interesting. I haven't had reason to think about it before, but I'm definitely in favor of biasing road planning towards commuting. Why? Because everything that happens in society has to be paid for by someone, and things like roads are paid for by the taxes of the people who work. Really, everything public is paid for by the taxes of people who work, either through their income taxes, or sales taxes, or gasoline taxes, property taxes, or through taxes on the businesses they work for, and everything that makes it harder for people to get to work reduces productivity, which seems very much like it would reduce tax revenue and lower the average standard of living.

To quote President Coolidge, “the chief business of the American people is business.”

If you believe in manmade global warming, millions of cars idling on the freeway can't be a good thing either. I don't really believe in it to the extent the media claims I should, but I don't like wasting time in traffic and I don't like wasting the gas I paid for. To the extent stress is bad for health, reducing commute times might even have a positive effect on the cost of health care and on life expectancy... but if it's mostly men commuting, the author of the article might think that's biased against women too.

Edit- the part about Sweden rescheduling snowplows sounds good, but couldn't you reach the same result by studying injury rates instead of basing it on gender bias? Who cares if it's men or women being injured, shouldn't they be trying to reduce injury rates across the board?