Advancing women’s active travel safety through technological interventions

Abstract

The idea of feeling safe while travelling by foot or bike is inherently influenced by gender, and throughout history, women have adopted safety measures as a way to protect themselves. These practices are primarily undertaken in response to fear-based concerns for one’s personal safety and are especially important for active travel (travel made under one’s own steam such as walking, cycling and scooting) due to the need to enter public space. To address the need for safety work and to combat crime, a swathe of technological solutions has recently been advanced to make individuals ’safer’, but do they in fact support women’s safety?

The goal of this thesis is to investigate if technological progress can offer lasting protection for women by conducting a comprehensive study of the capabilities of technology in assisting them, while also identifying future potential areas for development and research.

This thesis examines the role of technology in supporting women’s safety through the activities and social practices that women engage in while active travelling. The methodology is founded on a practice-oriented perspective. The reason for using a practice perspective is to include material or infrastructural (contextual) objects that are part of the practice of ’doing’, and are frequently unaddressed by social-psychological approaches. It focuses on two distinct domains of ’practice’ where technology is employed. The first, in the ’doing’ of active travel and the second, in the reporting and campaigning undertaken via social media and the collective intelligence that this provides.

The findings show that the interplay between trust plays a key role in the adoption of safety technology. Technology is also unable to alter existing active travel safety strategies but does support their undertaking. It challenges rather than discredits the optimistic stance that technology can solve the issue of personal safety, requesting that development should centre on the availability of information rather than being used as a deterrent or weapon. This is of significance to developers, users, social science researchers, policymakers, urban planners and transport companies that constitute part of multi-modal active travel trips such as public transport and mobility as a service (MaaS) providers.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Rachel Hayward: orcid.org/0000-0003-2357-8932

ORCID for Dame Wendy Hall: orcid.org/0000-0003-4327-7811

ORCID for Pauline Leonard: orcid.org/0000-0002-8112-0631

Catalogue record

Export record