Why I'm a Transit-Loving Feminist

This post is sampled from a speech I gave at the Women & Public Policy Program's Women's Leadership Board  at Harvard University on November 7th, 2013.


Early in the morning of May 14th, 1946, a woman named Nalini Nadkarni walked to Bandra train station. Hopping into the ladies' compartment of the suburban rail line before its open doors sped off to the next stop, she traveled to Victoria Terminus in South Bombay. Her final destination was Bombay's Municipal Corporation Building, where she had recently begun a job as a clerk---one of the few women in the whole, regal building.

Municipal Corporation Building, Bombay, India

Her husband wasn't very happy with her new occupation. Neither was his family---or hers for that matter. Her high school education had been terminated so that she could marry a good man and be a good wife: one that kept the house clean and prepared good meals for her hardworking husband. She willingly took care of these responsibilities quite well. 

But one thing she would not do, she insisted, was be financially dependent on anyone else---not her husband, not her uncles, nobody. She had relied on others for far too long growing up, and while she was grateful to those who helped her, she realized that this reliance often limited her own abilities---including the ability to continue her schooling. Nalini's skills were limited, but she was very opinionated, and very, very adamant. She would make the absolute best of whatever she had. And so, in spite of her family's protests, she boarded that train every day, held her head high as she facilitated the running of that Municipal office, and stood even more proudly as she came home with her own paycheck.

(All this may sound normal, even cliche today, but remember, this was India...in the 1940s!) 

Nalini and her baby daughter

A few years later, Nalini had a daughter. Nalini was insistent that her daughter's potential not be stifled by anything---not social norms, not sexism, not financial constraints, nothing. 

So by the time her daughter was in her teens, Nalini "Tiger Mom'd" her, signing her up for dance classes, advanced tutoring, internships at advertising firm, modeling jobs, even the navy cadets!---so she could earn confidence, discipline and strength, and start to be financially independent too. She shuttled her daughter between appointments by that same suburban rail line she took to get to work. 

(Again, remember that this kind of schedule was unheard of for any middle class youngster in 1960s India, let alone for a young woman, to say nothing of today's America). 

Nalini's Daughter in an ad for Afghan Cold Cream

Anything the family couldn't or wouldn't pay for, or for which scholarships were unavailable, Nalini would subsidize by putting in a few more hours at the office. 

"My daughter is one of the most talented people in the world," Nalini would later tell me. "I will not let her talents be hidden. She needs to fight. And she needs to succeed."

And Nalini's daughter did succeed, moving to New York City and setting professional and personal precedents that (I'd say) were unimaginable to most women of her background. When her husband first proposed to her in Bombay, you know what her response was? "No. My career as a copywriter in an ad agency comes first." When she moved to New York, she financially supported her whole extended family when her husband was still in medical school (the US didn't recognize his Indian credentials, so he had to redo all of his certifications). She was an exceptional mother that seamlessly blended the unrelenting love and engaged strictness of India with the enabling, empowering independence of American culture in how she raised her children. And all the while she excelled at a sometimes 6am-2am career as an advertising executive. All this was only after being forced to re-start her professional life when she arrived in New York with a job packing incense into boxes.

Nalini's granddaughter, in turn, was raised demanding nothing but the absolute best of herself, and for other women and people---and working to realize that. That granddaughter was a counselor at Sakhi, an anti-domestic violence organization that works with New York's South Asian community; one of Eve Ensler's key aides in bringing "The Vagina Monologues" to light and later to London and to V Day Celebrations in New York; and the author of the forthcoming, and I'll predict best-selling, novel "Where Earth Meets Water." (Go ahead and pre-order a copy). To say nothing of her successes as an athlete, advertising star and sister. 

If you haven't guessed, Nalini Nadkarni is my granny; I was lucky enough to be born her grandson. And thanks to her, these are some of the true stories and truer heroes that I grew up blessed to take for granted, and to learn from, subtly but profoundly; stories that demonstrated to me that, when enabled---and, very often, even when not enabled---women truly kick ass. 

Nalini is certainly a very, very special person; a driven woman with a serious, rough exterior whose love for her family, concern for their welfare, and resulting motivation and efficiency for getting things done are literally unparalleled in my experience. A woman who, even today, gets more done from the confines of her little apartment in Bandra East with just her land line telephone, a pad and pen, and her audacity than most people can even think about. (Seriously, put this woman in charge of healthcare in the United States, and we will surpass the Swedes within days).

And yet this is a woman whom society---even her own family---tried (and, by some measure, sadly succeeded) to hold back. Imagine---imagine!---what women, and people of all hues, classes, and backgrounds can do when fully enabled. As Hillary Clinton famously put it, "every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given potential."

* * *

Very often that chance, that access to opportunity is enabled by something that has been at the heart of my WAPPP-funded research this summer: mass transit.

Churchgate Station, Bombay, India

What if Nalini had needed a car---which she and her family couldn't afford---to get to her office? Well, she probably wouldn't have been able to get to that municipal building in the first place to develop the financial independence that lay underneath all of her other successes. (To say nothing of the emotional toll that the stress of driving takes on working commuters; stress that the authors of "Poor Economics" argue indirectly restricts economic mobility).

Similarly, when moving to New York City, my mother would have had a much, much more difficult time traveling between her home and family, and upwardly mobile job opportunities without the subway and bus systems of NYC. The same goes for my sister, and most others who succeed in urban economies. 

Union Square Station, Manhattan, New York

Transit is infrastructure that is so fundamental to the effective running of life, that connects so many people with the places they need to go---but that most of its users don't even think about. And ideally, people shouldn't have to think about it: transit should be of such good value that it doesn't make a noticeable dent in riders' wallets; transit should simply and efficiently connect different places where different people need to be; and transit should be comfortable enough that people can travel without worrying about their physical, emotional or sexual safety.

Of course, these are still 'shoulds' in too many cases. All too often, transport is prohibitively expensive; all too often, it doesn't efficiently connect those who need it most with the places they need to go, with ease (think of those who need to drive a car to a bus to a train to another train, all the while lugging a bag or stroller); and all too often, it's not physically safe, particularly for women, as we recently saw in the New Delhi gang rape case.

And it's women that account for a greater share of transit trips than men, with three women taking transit to work for every two men---women who take transit because it's the only financially viable option when they're getting paid less for what's usually more work. 

In fact, transportation has had a historical role in both giving and restricting access and opportunity, from Rosa Parks' bus, to the literal "other side of the tracks", to highways constructed through poor neighborhoods, and White Flight that was enabled by interstate highways. 

Making access the norm will be one of the great challenges for the world as its people converge into cities, from India to China and even the United States. The only way we'll be able to do that effectively is if we study, learn, and adopt lessons from what happens to different people in different places.

US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx recently wrote that, "sometimes the way we build bridges is by actually building bridges...and roads and transit."

So this is where those bridges connect: we enable awesome people to do the awesome things they're capable of, by physically connecting them to the places they need to be to do them. Anything less, which both the left and right would agree with, is both unjust and inefficient.

I've learned so much from my time in China, lessons that I have taken throughout my work and life---and will continue to. And I really cannot thank Harvard's Woman and Public Policy Program enough, for this opportunity to bring together what I do---study and make urban policy---with who I am: a very proud feminist; certainly someone who believes with all my heart in equality of opportunity.

And if you ever meet this feisty little lady who is, in many ways the reason my family and I are the way we are---certainly many of the good things---you will see that she has more chutzpah in her little finger than most people have in their entire bodies; you will see that there is literally nobody else like her on the face of this earth.

Nalini Nadkarni with her Grandchildren

So here's to making sure that the Nalini Nadkarnis of China, India, America, and the rest of the world get---safely and efficiently---to where they need to go; to where they can realize their God-given potential.

Hong Kong's MTR: Some Caveats

In the comments section of my recent article in The Atlantic, a Hong Konger had some personal gripes about the MTR, and wound up making some interesting points in the process. I responded to her there, but I figure I'd share my response here too. In this response I discuss some of the caveats of the Hong Kong transit system that I couldn't explore in that piece

 
Hi Lina,

Thanks so much for these excellent comments! I wrote this upon returning from a research trip to China and Hong Kong and heard a lot of stories like yours first-hand as well. I absolutely agree that there have been many caveats to MTR's approach, which I unfortunately wasn't able to detail in this piece. So thank you for raising some of them here!

One of those is unquestionably the affect of Value Capture on real estate prices. Though I couldn't go into specifics, I wrote that "value charges are often displaced onto consumers, causing real estate prices to go up a little faster than they otherwise might." This is one of the effects you're seeing and rightly decrying in your neighborhood. That said, MTR has been practicing VC since its inception in 1979, but this real estate hyperinflation in Hong Kong has been more recent. So it's not owed exclusively to transit value capture, but to the huge influx of Chinese money into the Hong Kong economy, particularly the real estate sector, since the 1997 handover. You can probably tell us more about the broader inflationary effects of that, Lina, and I think the colorlessness of retail (especially in the malls) you mention is correlated with that bigger economic change rather than the MTR's specific malfeasance. I'm not sure which neighborhood you're referring to regarding new stations that are "not necessary", but given the time for construction, those kinds of capital investments are usually made in anticipation of future demand, not what's needed today. When the station is completed, people probably will be using it, maybe even inducing more demand. And with VC, those beneficiaries will be paying for those assets; riders won't. (Of course, it would be ridiculous for me to deny that decisions for transit planning are influenced by politics and power! Just look at this great Atlantic piece: http://bit.ly/18PPEoQ)

Second, you rightly flag the linkages between MTR and the government. An important detail I wasn't able to mention here, particularly to contrast private property-loving America, is that the government is the sole proprietor of land in Hong Kong and only leases it (and air rights) for extended periods. But more often than just giving land to MTR, it SELLS /leases that land and air rights to the MTR at "pre-rail" prices (say $1 billion). The MTR then "sub-leases" that property to other developers or renters at "post-rail" prices (the value of the land plus the monetary contribution of new transit that makes that land accessible, say $1.8 billion total), and then gets to keep the difference ($800m), which it invests in actually building the new transit infrastructure.

Despite this "market" orientation of the MTR, you're right about government involvement---before 2000, MTR was a public company; since then, the Government's been a 74% shareholder of the MTR Corporation. I'm admittedly not as personally familiar with Abraham Razack. But his presence on the Hong Kong Legislative Council, and as non-executive director of MTRC, is explicitly to represent real estate interests. But the composition of the LC as a democratic-corporatist hybrid representing different interest groups is a broader issue related to Hong Kong's model of democratic governance---not to the MTR and transit management specifically. (See this great FP piece by Adam Rose on how that democracy is managed and its relationship with Beijing, post-handover: http://atfp.co/18c6GRV).

And frankly, because mass transit is a PUBLIC good, I think that, though one can take issue with the make-up of any government, public sector influence in transport is vital; it not only helps steer economic development in ways that the market might neglect (such as the Fare Adjustment Mechanism), but ensures that its contributions remain fundamentally public and integrate land-use planning with access, even if its management is profit-driven. The fact that PUBLIC transit provides a tangible benefit to private interests---which should thus re-invest in the public good---lies at the heart of this model.

I wrote this primarily for those unfamiliar with Hong Kong, and specifically those interested in new models of transit financing. And on that measure, despite the challenges you highlight (and again, thank you for doing so!), the MTR deserves acknowledgement for those innovations.

Best,

Neil

Funding Mass Transit - The Case of Hong Kong

I wrote in my last post that "running good transit systems...comes with large financial costs," and promised to have a forthcoming explanation of how Hong Kong, one of the best run transit systems in the world, keeps fares cheap and quality high, while still turning a huge profit.


Below is the unedited version of a piece on the subject that I wrote in The Atlantic. 
There are some details (like government involvement, land grants, and real estate pricing) that are important caveats to this model's adoption elsewhere, but I unfortunately wasn't able to discuss them in depth in this piece. I did, however, make a presentation at the NYS Metropolitan Transportation Authority on this subject, which included lessons as well as cautions from Hong Kong and China. Please get in touch if you'd like to see that presentation live!
 

The Unique Genius of Hong Kong's Public Transportation System

Most subway systems around the world struggle to operate their services. In NYC, riders complain about the unreliable, squalid service they get for ever-increasing fares. And yet, the New York City system has one of the most subsidized systems, relying on supplementary taxes and state government subsidies just to keep trains running. Money collected from fares only covers about 41% of the day-to-day operating costs of the system. Capital costs (system expansions, upgrades, and repairs) are an entirely different question, and require more state and federal grants and borrowing (bonds) from capital markets. This is the situation most subway systems around the world deal with: struggling to pay for what they already operate and, if needed, going into lots of debt to pay for upgrades and expansions. 

Hong Kong seems to have figured out a pretty winning formula. Their Mass Transit Railway (MTR) Corporation is considered the gold standard of transit management throughout the world. Within Hong Kong, the MTRC manages the subway and bus systems on Hong Kong Island and, since 2006, the northern sections of Kowloon Bay, as well as Harbor Ferries and bus systems throughout the city. In 2012, they produced a revenue of 36 billion Hong Kong Dollars (HK$), which is about 5 billion USD. After considering expenditures, they still brought in a total profit of HK$ 10 billion---about 2 billion USD. And most impressively, their farebox recovery ratio (the percentage of operational costs that are covered by just the fares people pay) for Hong Kong was 180%, the world's highest---compare that with NY's 41%---which means they made a 80% surplus just from operating their trains! If you're unfamiliar with most transit budgets, suffice it to say these numbers are unheard of anywhere. (The next highest FBR, Singapore is about 120%).

In addition to Hong Kong, the MTR Corporation runs individual subway lines in Beijing, Huangzhou, and Shenzhen in China, two lines in the London Underground, and the entire Melbourne, Australia, and Stockholm, Sweden, systems. In Hong Kong, they've got a pretty gleaming system that operates impeccably and has a number of different amenities that sweeten service: from public computers in stations, to wheelchair and stroller accessibility to the platform and spaces within the train to store them, to impeccably communicated signs for spatial orientation when you're in and when you exit the system (including "numbered exits" with landmarks), and even (on longer-distance subways) first-class cars so people can stretch out if they want to pay a little more.

 

So how do they pay for all this fancy stuff? Through a nifty concept called "Value Capture."

The MTR understands the monetary value of urban density---what economists call "agglomeration." When people live close to one another, it's easier and cheaper for them to trade, communicate, and share ideas to innovate. ("Transaction costs" are lowered). Plus, when located around a lot of people, one small business has a much larger potential market and clientele---a store would do much better if it opened on a busy street than in the middle of a barren field. ("Returns to scale increase," and dense cities produce "economies of scale".)

Of course, mass transit enables this kind of density and agglomeration. Lots of people can travel together in a relatively small box (subway car) that travels underground. But if each of those people had cars, they'd need space for ALL of those 15 foot by 8 foot boxes (cars), space to drive them on (roads), and space to store those cars when they're not using them (parking lots, garages). All of this car infrastructure takes up land and space, decreasing density and increasing sprawl. Mass transit, on the other hand, uses economies of scale (lots of people benefit from a little change) to take up less space and increase density. Take a look at this visual of how much space the same number of people take up if they use different modes of transport:

So, we know that density increases economic growth and opportunity, and that mass transit enables that density. The MTR, then, understands that transit access actually has a calculable monetary value---that access, and proximity to transit, increases property values. If the only way to get to a mall is by a train, then that mall would have no customers and make absolutely no revenue or profits if it weren't for that train. The MTR reminds the mall owners this and asks for a cut of the mall's profits. Sometimes the MTR corporation actually owns the mall so it can take that cut itself!

In fact, that's the secret behind MTR's success: a RAIL + PROPERTY (R+P) Model in which it is the developer and manager of transit as well as of properties that lie adjacent to that transit. Two of the tallest skyscrapers in Hong Kong are MTR properties, as are many of the offices, malls, and residences adjacent to every transit station (some of which have direct underground connections to the train), and all of the retail within subway stations (which are essentially large shopping complexes) is leased from MTR. 

The View from the MTR office of 2-International Financial Center , HK's largest tower and one of the MTR's properties

The proceeds from these real estate ventures go into the MTR's revenues and cross-subsidize transit development: most transit capital expansion and upgrade projects are paid for by these real estate profits, as well as that 80% operating surplus I spoke of earlier. So because the MTR is never struggling to pay for important capital upgrades, the Hong Kong system itself requires less stop-gap maintenance---and service interruptions---than other transit systems might. This reliable technology and service lowers operating costs, streamlines capital investments, and encourages more and more people to rely on transit to get around. With all these customers using this excellent service, there's more total revenue from fare payment---even though fares aren't that expensive.

Of prices, the longest distance subway, i.e. from the city of Shenzhen in China to downtown, was about HK$ 50-60, about $8-10, while a special train to the airport is about 25 USD. More normal commutes, though, are between HK$4 and HK$20, about $0.50 to $3, depending on the distance traveled. (Compare that to London, where a fare can get as high as $18). Any fare increases in Hong Kong are limited by regulations linking fares to inflation and profits. Still, the HK government  recently started giving a HK$600-per-month travel stipend to low-income households, i.e. those that earn less than HK$10,000 a month.

This R+P model of Value Capture and transit management works partly because Hong Kong is a closed island: there are no suburbs from which people can commute by car, so everyone is essentially forced to use transit if they want to be in the city. Plus, given that it's a public yet independent corporation (and not an agency, ministry, or authority), it has the freedom to develop real estate, to hire and fire who it will, and to take business-minded decisions---whereas many other transit systems are hemmed by union contracts and legal regulations.

Still, the idea of value capture is a very powerful one for transit management. Understanding---and quantifying and even just communicating---the important contribution that mass transit makes is the first step to making it a well-funded priority.

"Crying in a BMW" - The Ridiculous Social Stigma of Mass Transit

We know about the gender imbalance in much of Chinese society, in large part as a result of the One Child policy. Here's a silly and ironic story about the effects of this, plus urbanization, plus the rise of the market economy in those cities.

Douglas Raymond is a former Google executive who was trying to start his own company in China. When trying to hire employees, he realized that most Chinese engineers are usually only children who must be at the very top of their game in order to reap the most return on what's been a huge investment from (usually) his family to put him through a good school. This makes young Chinese engineers very risk averse when it comes to employment; so they're less likely to work with an untested start-up.

But to add to this risk aversion is the increasing expectation that, in order to sufficiently impress a woman that will marry him, a young man must already own, at the least, his own apartment. This is not easy in a place where many Shanghai and Beijing apartments often cost 27 times the average white collar worker's annual salary. Still, this expectation can exist because of the gender ratio: for every 119 men, there are only 100 women in Chinese cities, which allows women to have their pick of male partners. So with the increasing allure of material goods and capitalist comfort, home ownership is the mere cost of entry.

To illustrate this, Raymond recalled a popular television show called Fei Cheng Wu Rao ("If You are the One"), in which contestants make their pitches to eligible girls, who decide whether to choose or reject them. One male contestant tried to woo the girls by regaling them with promises to take his beloved around Beijing on the back of his bicycle, to show her the sites and experience love in his hometown. In her rejection, 20-year-old female contestant Ma Nuo replied, "I would rather be crying in a BMW than laughing on the back of a bicycle."

Soon after the airing of the comment, the Chinese government forced the creators to change the format of the show to discourage the kind of superficial and materialistic morals this comment, and the show, ostensibly promoted. Nonetheless, the clip and quote went viral, and spoke not only to changing urban Chinese values, but also to important symbols, namely that Beijing's nouveau riche are ditching their bicycles, buses, and trains in favor of (fancy) cars as modes of transportation. It evokes Margaret Thatcher's extremely dangerous quip that, "if a man finds himself riding a public bus at the age of 28, he can consider himself a failure."

If China's burgeoning upper-middle class all wants to drive cars, and that desire turns into pressure to build infrastructure to accommodate cars, we'd see a whole mess of problems: more pollution (on the scale that leads to health problems); congestion (on the scale that leads to not just frustration but also inefficiencies...that can compromise life quality); spatial design that separates people, things, and places (and makes the economy less efficient); to say nothing of the environmental and monetary costs associated with constructing and maintaining that car infrastructure. Mass transit presents an alternative that addresses all of these problems through economies of scale.

But the social association between type of mobility and socio-economic status is one of the biggest hurdles in making those necessary investments in a responsible manner. Ma Nuo derided bicycles in favor of a gleaming car (even if it cost her happiness). And in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, the mass transit rail has long been associated with the poor and downtrodden: its MARTA system is derided with the acronym, "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta," referring to the poor Black Americans who are the system's captive users (they don't have the choice of driving). This association makes it less likely that affluent (White) Atlantans would use the system willingly. Similarly, when the recently installed Pope rode the subway in Buenos Aires, the media took this as evidence that he is "pro poor".

The solution to this problem is, of course, to make mass transit so efficient, effective, (fun), safe, and comfortable that people don't use it simply because it is cheaper, but because it is better than driving a car. The way to do that---in Latin America, the United States, China, and elsewhere---is to give it the resources it requires to keep it in top shape. This is largely a challenge for politics, to ensure that priority and resources are given to transit. But it's also one for economics: running good transit systems, despite their economic benefits, comes with large financial costs, including necessary subsidies for riders, and expenses for operations, management, maintenance, and capital expansion. (I'll have a post forthcoming on how Hong Kong, one of the best run transit systems in the world, pulls this off).

Still, as China---and even the US---go forward, we ought to try and remember what Gustavo Petro, the Mayor of Bogota (which developed the world-renowned Bus Rapid Transit System, TransMilenio), said: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."

Groped on the Subway - When Eyes on the Platform Aren't Enough

A couple of months ago, the New York Times posted this piece by a woman who was groped on a crowded subway in New York City. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/i-was-groped-on-the-subway/

In a nutshell, she discusses her experience on her daily commute on a crowded subway, where, one day a lecherous and disgusting man gropes her. Though dozens if not hundreds of other passengers are mere inches away, they don't say a thing or intervene. And despite the numbers, she doesn't feel comfortable yelling or asking for help, and feels completely vulnerable and alone throughout the ordeal. When she gets off the train, a plainclothes police officer, having witnessed the crime, calls her over and asks her to identify the perpetrator, whom the officer has detained. The lady does so only reluctantly, fearing some sort of retaliation. The whole experience gives her a number of insecurities about interacting with the world, making her especially afraid of riding the train at rush hour.

You should definitely read the piece in full---I would never be able to capture or relay a harrowing episode like this with the same sense of pain, violation, shame, fear, and loneliness. I hope that her story did eventually end in some kind of more solid triumph. But sexual harassment is an all-too frequent occurrence on mass transit, certainly in places like NYC. Probably every woman in transit-oriented cities have their own story about this, and it adds to the reasons that people abandon public transportation. The piece raised a few important points with regard to what I've been thinking and writing about here. Despite everything the piece made me feel on a visceral level, I'll keep this discussion to one that's policy and planning oriented.

First, I wrote a few weeks ago about the "eyes on the street" concept of, for lack of a better word, community policing. Again, this is the notion that if you design a space so that there are people present at all times, passively keeping a watch over it, criminals are less likely to perpetrate crimes. This remains true; imagine what might happen without those eyes. But what about those other times, where dozens or even hundreds are watching, but that's still not enough to deter crimes, especially of a sexual harassment nature? 

A famous story that comes to mind is one in which a woman named Kitty Genovese was violently assaulted and screamed for help, with a handful if not dozens of neighbors hearing what happened but not even moving a muscle to help her or call the police. The episode was later reported to have been exaggerated. Still, the scenario was tested under controlled circumstances: grey smoke was billowing out of a room and when there was a sole witness, ze called the fire department immediately. But when dozens of people walked by and all saw the same smoke, and watched other people seeing the same smoke, nobody was compelled to act. "If they're not concerned or doing anything about it, it's probably not a big deal. Why should I intervene either?"

There might be a similar dynamic at play in crowded subways: if other people see it, and are okay with this groping, it's probably not that big a deal, so why should I do anything? It's a strange sort of social paralysis brought on by embarrassment...of disturbing the stability of the status quo. (Or maybe people are just too crowded and wrapped up in their own minds to realize or care about what's happening to others around them?)

The first priority, of course, ought to be to teach men not to be lecherous or worse. More on that in a moment. Second, in addition to creating a space where women feel safe, we ought to create a space where witnesses feel safe and responsible to intervene in things they realize are wrong. Public policy can help shape that: signs and announcements in the NY subway have recently begun to exhort victims and witnesses to intervene, call police, and speak out when sexual harassment takes place; and remind riders that sexual harassment is indeed a crime that must be stopped. It'd be interesting to find stats on what kind of a dent that's made in interventions or reporting.

Then there are always the more subtle ways of intervening in a burgeoning problem without even making a big deal of it; this guy intervened in a fight just by casually walking in the middle while still eating his snack:

And this intervention is related to my second big takeaway from this Times piece: how pleasantly surprised I was to read that a police officer not only recognized that this happened, but also intervened and attempted to bring the criminal to some kind of justice. This does not happen enough: victims are blamed, or often not even recognized as victims and dismissed. In an ideal world, the official police would not have to have a role in enforcing gender violence norms, as the problem would be effectively dealt with by society. But in the world in which we live, law enforcement plays an extremely important function.

And getting law enforcement to care comes back to that "first priority" identified above: to teach men not to be lecherous or worse---and to teach people to intervene when they bear witness to a crime. Awareness really is the beginning of that, and sharing information a big component therein. In Egypt over the last few months, reports have shown that over 99.3% of women have been sexually harassed in their daily lives (with some particularly gruesome cases of gang rape and molestation), yet in less than 14% of those cases did someone try to help. Much as Chinese women have been able to take to Weibo to share information about this while saving face, the creators of HarassMap are trying to leverage technology to get Egyptians to share information about incidents and map them for better societal awareness. Actually seeing and hearing about incidents really brings it home to people in ways that matter; it's less of an abstract idea that happens to "someone else." Once that societal awareness and concern is strong, it would more easily filter up into police training, if it's still needed at that point.

Of course, coming back to the notion of culture and sexual aggression we'd discussed before, that awareness goes much deeper. Chris Kilmartin, author of "The Masculine Self," says that the source of sexual violence is a "cult of hyper-masculinity, which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable...'we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.'" Try to tackle that, and we'll be riding on a much safer train.

But the first step to ending a huge problem is to recognize when it recurs right in front of all of our eyes.

Gender in Beijing Transit - a conversation with the Lincoln Institute's Zhang Chun

I recently had a great conversation about transit development in China with my PKU colleague, Zhang Chun. She’s written a lot about the subject, including for a recent World Bank project on transit accessibility of the urban poor. In addition to transit, Zhang Chun and I spoke about broader gender issues in Beijing’s development.

So's to start: the first two lines of the Beijing Metro---Lines 1 (an east-west line) and 2 (a circular line that goes around the Forbidden City---were originally developed, starting in in 1969, for the exclusive use of the People’s Liberation Army. They were only made public in 1980 and expanded in 2004. The development of roads was under the central Ministry of Roads, while subways was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rail, which no longer exists. (It's been broken into Ministry of Transport, which covers safety and regulation; the State Railways Administration, which does inspection; and China Railway Corporation, which oversees construction and management. As for funding, municipalities must fully fund and manage subway systems by themselves. (The case of Beijing is a little different, as it's also the national capital, giving it access to a few more resources and priorities than other cities might get).

It was only from 2003 that the Beijing authorities thought to develop subway transit with greater seriousness. They did this largely because they realized the folly of what they had been doing: Beijing's local automotive industry had long put a choke hold on the city's planning, so roads were prioritized over mass transit (and rail) lines, leading to massive traffic congestion and air pollution. What really spurred the authorities on to change things, of course, was the public relations surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Here's a great gif showing the evolution of Beijing's subway system:

So owing to these weird administrative snafus, and also the relative recentness of the subway's development, Beijing’s bus system is actually more extensive, more prolific, cheaper, and more used for mass transit. Both the bus and subway systems are heavily subsidized in Beijing. The Beijing subway system costs only two yuan to get anywhere within it, whereas other cities have fare systems that are priced according to how far and which districts you travel. (Guangzhou can go as high as 10 or 15 yuan for a ride).

The buses are managed in a very interesting way: there’s usually a male driver and a female conductor who collects tickets and keeps folks in the bus in line. In fact, it is the conductor’s responsibility to find a seat for pregnant women, old people, or the infirm (subways also put 'people with children' in this category)---and if these people are unable to find a seat and something happens to them, the conductor is liable. In the subway, on the other hand, there are signs that tell people to vacate certain seats for “those in need,” including the old, pregnant, with children, or infirm, but in practice that is not enforced and depends on how generous straphangers are feeling. This lack of certain provision makes it a little difficult for “those in need.”

This provision is among the biggest issues for women’s access, as discussed in my earlier post on transit access. Women with children usually have to carry their carriages down stairs, because only the newest stations and transit hubs (those that connect a few lines) will have elevators. Because of this, many women simply hold their children in their arms instead of bringing a whole carriage. (Plus carrying a carriage or bassinet in a crowded Beijing subway can be pretty unwieldy and tough. Not to mention, prams or strollers are actually a pretty recent arrival in China; parents have long preferred to hold their children in their arms).

Shanghai and Hong Kong have better transfer systems within subways (i.e. between different lines at transit hubs), which makes it easier to bring a bassinet or child across a system. Beijing, however, has been less good at this, making the subways in Beijing less accessible to the non-young. It’s been built into the urban planning building code, which is fairly strict in Beijing, that a subway station entrance cannot be kept close to any building, which makes it that much more difficult to access transit. This was owed to the earlier development of underground utilities such as pipes and electric wiring.

On the related note of women's travel patterns, China has mandated maternity leave of four months. And yet, there is no daycare provision until a child is 2.5 years old. Hence, between four months and 2.5 years, the child has minimal institutional support and the mother has to figure out how to take care of hir while the mother is working. Double income families were often the norm among Chinese couples, particularly before 2000, when the one-child policy was relaxed in urban areas. But the income of one person was insufficient to pay for a nanny while the mother worked (a nanny cost almost the mother’s salary). So instead, many women have simply been staying home as housewives instead of returning to their jobs after giving birth, while others keep young children with grandparents as babysitters. This lifestyle change altered transit patterns, to say nothing of economic and physical mobility.

In the 1990s, the worker welfare system was ‘reformed’ and essentially stopped nationally, with worker-provided public housing being terminated. (Prior to that they were heavily subsidized, with public housing residents paying as little as 21 yuan per month). But less than 1% of government employees have public housing, and more recently, a few companies have been providing their workers with 13,000 yuan to simply purchase their own houses. As the housing market has been privatized, many are forced to live farther and farther away from their places of work, given that central business district and central city housing prices have gotten so high.

This has been maybe the greatest folly of Beijing's urbanization, even with its emphasis on mass transit development: markets are increasing space and distance between buildings and neighborhoods, and even between uses (e.g. home and work). So even though density remains pretty high (compared with the US, for example), sprawl is still going pretty wild. And because, as the capital, Beijing serves as a model for the rest of the country, the tenets of its growth are affecting planning patterns elsewhere in the country. Without some fresher thinking, China's urbanizing billion---including its 500 million women---will have a number of difficulties adjusting to city life.