Women’s empowerment is a powerful engine for personal and societal economic development and well-being. Nevertheless, gender biases in physical infrastructure investments lead to negative consequences for women and children that reduce their empowerment and limit their economic benefits. Public fixed-route buses, such as those in Washington, DC, illustrate how physical transportation infrastructure has innate gender biases. These young residents likely depend on strollers to travel longer than a few blocks. The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) runs the public transportation system in Washington, DC. In 2021, 7% of DC’s 720,000 residents were under five. WMATA maintains a fleet of approximately 1595 buses, 95% of which banned the onboarding of open strollers until recently. This ban directly limited the use of Metro buses for the caregivers of young children, primarily women. It also reduced the opportunities for these caregivers to participate in DC’s economic life. In neighborhoods dependent on buses for essential mobility, the stroller ban reduces employment, healthcare, social service, educational, and recreational offerings beyond walkable distances. This paper examines the publicly available discussions and actions that led to the updated stroller policy and offers opportunities for improving caregiver transit access in Washington, DC, and, by extension, other cities worldwide.

Introduction: Infrastructure regularly supports male pursuits more than women’s. Recent transportation scholarship focuses on this inequity by quantifying the daily travel of women and men for everyday care provision, often termed “the mobility of care.” Care trips include dropping off and picking up family members, accompanying young children and old adults to medical appointments, and acquiring household goods. This study analyzes gendered travel behavior in the National Capital Region of the United States, including Washington, D.C.Methods: The basis of this study’s analysis is data from the 2017/2018 Regional Travel Survey conducted by the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board. The survey included records from approximately 16,000 households, 2,000 in Washington, D.C. Our study sample contained 19,274 unique people who made 49,215 trips. Many of these trips were made using the local bus and subway systems. Following an established methodology, the researchers recoded trip purpose data into five broad categories: care, work, shopping, leisure, school, and all other purposes. We then ran descriptive and statistical analyses of travelers aged 18 through 65 to measure the frequencies of household demographic characteristics and person-level trips for all purposes made by five travel modes: walk, bike, car, bus, and subway.Results: Based on our analysis, trips for work represent the majority of trips (34.7%), followed by shopping (28.2%), care (22.3%), leisure (8.5%), other (4.1%), and school trips (2.3%). Our findings indicate that women make more care-related trips during the day than men (25.1% vs. 18.8%). They also make fewer work-related trips than men (30.3% vs. 40.2%). Regression analyses revealed correlations between care-related travel by all modes and public transportation by age, race, location of residence, and income.Discussion: The mobility of care, done mostly by women, is one of the primary reasons that people travel in and around Washington, D.C., and its suburbs. However, D.C.’s bus and subway systems are primarily designed to support the mobility of work done mostly by men. As a result, our study identifies the need for improvements in gender-responsive infrastructure, including public transportation policies and programs that explicitly address the mobility of care, improve access to care, and reduce the environmental impact of cars.