How Men and Women Use Cities and Services

This is probably a click-bait article, but I still found it fascinating - an examination of how men and women use cities, as well as some of the things cities around the world have done based on those results:

In 1999, officials in Vienna handed out a questionnaire about how people in the city used transportation. The men filled it out in five minutes: go to work in the morning, come home at night. The women couldn't stop writing.

The things they wrote were about dropping the kids off at school on the way to work, or taking them to the doctor some mornings, or helping their own aging parents buy groceries, or picking the kids up from activities.

It was an extremely more varied pattern of use—with far more walking and public transport—and one that resulted in several changes to the city's infrastructure: easier access to public transport, wider pavements, ramps for pushchairs and buggies. This thinking is part of a movement called gender mainstreaming—assessing how planning and policy decisions will specifically affect both women and men.

Some of the changes cities have made include a stop request system, that allows bus passengers to be dropped off closer to their homes, grouping public services frequently used by women together, and redesigning neighborhoods and apartment complexes.