Today,  I attended a Rose Cafe talk in which the topic discussed was how gender effects transportation habits. This is something I have never thought about before, as I always thought people are so different that personal preference would not be as easily modeled as it is in reality. The main focus of the talk pertained to the problems women in the developing world face with respect to transportation. In the industrialized world, many families have two cars or easy access to public transportation, so the issues are not as great. However, in the developing world, most families have one car if they have one at all. Due to this fact, the public transportation system is over crowded and inefficient. The crowded nature of public transportation make it a breeding ground for harassment for women especially. Therefore, the biggest problem is twofold: making transportation more accessible, whether it be public or private, and helping women feel more safe on public transportation.

There is not a one-size-fits-all solution to these big problems. The first step in my estimation is to lower the barrier of entry for privatized transportation. Recently, the Indian government banned a form of taxi service common in the village area. This has caused even more people to flood public transportation and exacerbated the preexisting problems. If there are more private options, not only will less people rely on public transportation fixing the crowding problem, but the cost of private transportation will drop based on economic theory. This is what we are seeing in the industrialized world with Uber and Lift coming into prominence. While this would help with accessibility, it does not guarantee the improvement of women’s safety. Some ideas to combat that are harsher penalties on assault or more serious harassment or simply educating the public on acceptable behavior. This problem has much more gray area in both the definition and potential solutions, but it can be muted with some basic measures.