I attended this café at least in part just because I wanted to know what a talk about “Gender and Transportation” could possibly be about.  What could that possibly even mean?  Gender and what kind of car you drive?  It turns out that it was about something rather more interesting than that – transportation availability and movement patterns of people in a city.  This is related to gender because patterns and availability are very different between men and women, especially places like India where traditional gender roles are stricter.

The pattern differences are definitely something that I can recognize in how the families I interacted with as child worked.  My dad always drove straight out to Denver to work in the morning, and then straight back at the end of the day.  Linear patterns associated with work.  My mom worked as well, but she also drove me to school and music lessons, bought food, went to the bank, came home to let the dog out, etc.  Much more complex patterns of travel due to being responsible for the children, pets, and household matters.  Some of my earliest memories are of driving around town with my mom, but it wasn’t until this talk that I thought to look for patterns in how she moved.

Both of my parents, however, had cars.  This is often not the case in the developing world, which leads to inequality in who had gets to use the car – generally the man of the household.  Women in places like India instead must often build a daily transportation system that involves buses, trains, walking, etc.  A car, for them, would represent ultimate freedom of movement.  This was an eye-opening realization for me, because I personally tend to view a car as a restriction.  It’s a responsibility.  It’s a cost.  You have to buy it, buy gas, pay to park it everywhere, pay for upkeep and repairs, and then also spend time on all of those things.  For me, true independence would be freedom of movement without having to lug around a very expensive 2-ton hunk of metal every time I want to go to buy groceries.  One of my life goals is to eventually live somewhere where I don’t need a car – somewhere where I can get around using a sensible and reliable system of subways and trains and the occasional Uber.  I want to do away with my car because I know I can live in a place that has a reliable and safe system of public transport, but in a place that doesn’t have such a system a car is infinitely desirable over public methods.

Overall the most significant thing that I got out of this café was a shift in how I think about cities.  I’ve spent my entire life interacting with my city’s parks, roads, buses, rec-centers, etc.  Yet somehow, I’ve always thought of a city as a place one lives, and it has never before occurred to me to think of a city as something that one “uses”.  A city is not just a “where” it’s also a “what”.  A city is not just organically grown, but also in many ways deliberately designed and carefully constructed.  It’s fascinating to imagine a city not just as a place with a lot of buildings, but as a set of tools that people use and the pathways through which people flow to reach them.

In addition, I’ve never really conceptualized transportation as a major responsibility of government before.  I suspect this is at least in part due to the fact that unlike in the developing world, everyone I know always had a private car.  Still though, I took the public bus to school every single day for four years and somehow it never really sank in that “public” meant “local-government run”.  This might not change how I interact with TCAT too much, but it does change my perspective on local government as compared to the state and federal government.

In politically fraught times like 2017, something I hear over and over again is that if you want to be politically active you have to start with participating in and interacting with your local government.  Yet, I’ve never really seen the point in doing so because what does a city government even do, especially in a small city like my hometown?  Plant trees in parks?  Fill pot-holes?  Things that must be done, sure, but how could those be in any way relevant to the divisive national issues that I actually care about?  This café has caused me think harder about what important functions city government has that I might not really have properly connected to it before.  Local government has responsibilities with regard to transportation and housing availability, environmental issues in transportation and regulation of public spaces, public education, water and power access, and regulating local presences of behemoth firms like telecoms.  I really ought to start paying attention to my county election ballots.