Safe mobility for women: assessing travel challenges and constraints

Abstract

With the development of technology and the revolution in society, female travelers have increased significantly than previous eras. This tends them to use more transportation modes, mostly public transport. However, women encounter significant challenges in transport systems related to accessibility, safety, and security. Later women tend to use particular transport modes, other than using public transportation because most of the time the harassments have been occurred and reported there. The objective of this research was to investigate the mobility issues of females while travelling and possible measures to reduce them. By distributing a questionnaire among the female travelers in Northern Province in Sri Lanka, data were collected. To analyze the data, SPSS software was used. In the analysis, mobility issues were used as the dependent variable and associated factors for them as independent variables. By applying the binary logistic regression method, the analysis was conducted. The study found that twenty-two percent of female travelers in the age group of 21 -30 years face sexual harassment more than others during travelling, and one-third of sexual related issues happened in the trains than other public transport modes. As Sri Lanka is considering as a safe country to travel for women, this percentage is a considerably high value. So, to control this situation, it is necessary to revise and remake travel policies and laws of public transport by the government in Sri Lanka.