For older women in two low-income neighborhoods in London and Manilla, care relations – caring for their own children, grandchildren, and neighborhood children – dictated their travel patterns, according to a new study from Oxford University and Vrije University in Brussels.
The complex care relations inside intergenerational households and extended families enabled members to seek higher-paying jobs or operate small businesses based in the home, while children benefited from the warmth of grandmaternal care, found researchers Anna Plyushteva and Tim Schwanen.
But one struggle uniting the women in these two distinct cities? Safely crossing busy streets to get children to school.
In both Newham, a borough of London, and Malate, a neighborhood in Manilla, study participants considered crossing the street so dangerous that children need to be accompanied by an adult. In Newham, parents often walked children to school, and grandmothers, who tended to not live in the same house as the parents, would pick them up. Meanwhile, because the households studied in Malate tended to be intergenerational, grandmothers assumed both drop-off and pick up duties.
“Before I used to take my children to school. Now I take my grandchildren,” one study participant in Malate said. “Because they might get into an accident crossing the street. Crossing the street on the way to school really is a problem. My grandchildren can be late because of waiting to cross the street.”
For women in Malate, being responsible for both drop-off and pick up dictated their daily patterns, reducing the time that could be spent on other activities.
In addition, participants in Malate felt unsafe crossing streets themselves. Rather than navigating traffic as pedestrians, they preferred to take modes like a pedicab or tricycle (a motorized rickshaw). However, the steep price made those trips a rare luxury.
What if crossing the street was safer? Perhaps older children would be able to walk to school themselves, saving grandmothers time and money. One participant in Malate told the researchers how because of different school start times, she walked two different sets of grandchildren to and from school. This dictated her daily schedule, requiring her to wake at 4:00 in the morning.
Traffic calming might not just help the grandmothers in this study: it would help all adult members of the household, as many (especially in Manilla) worked long shifts outside of the home due to horrendous traffic conditions.
Any improvement to transportation positively impacts people’s quality of life. But understanding people’s everyday travel patterns shows that sometimes, the biggest positive impact can be found not by building a new subway line, but by making it easier to cross the street.