Assessment of Gender Impacts of ITS

Abstract

The World Bank and China has over 30 years of partnership and this partnership has evolved over time. In the early years, the World Bank shared its global knowledge with China on infrastructure development and institutional capacity building, which contributed to shaping China’s modernization and development. Today, many Chinese cities are making significant investment in Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) and the scale is among the largest in all countries. The World Bank is supporting over 20 urban transport projects in China. This study uses Wuhan and Urumqi as two case studies to evaluate the gender impacts of their existing urban transport ITS, by adopting methods of survey and focus group discussion. Under the support of the World Bank, Urumqi and Wuhan have completed its first Bank-financed ITS construction in 2007 and 2010 respectively. They are now proposing to expand or upgrade ITS in their new Bank-financed projects. The findings suggest that men and women have unique travel patterns and transport demands, which result in special requirements of ITS; the findings also suggest that ITS can play a significant role in filling the gender gap in urban transport. In addition to improving infrastructure and intelligent transport facilities, the pressing issue is to build gender awareness for policy makers and practitioners and mainstream gender in transport and ITS. The study aims at strengthening capacity for gender-informed operations and policy making in East Asia and Pacific (EAP) countries. Besides this report, the team has also developed a technical guideline to better incorporate gender considerations in ITS planning, design, implementation and operation.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://hdl.handle.net/10986/25207 under the license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo/