Transportation planning ignores care work travel patterns

Transportation planners design cities for a commuter who doesn’t exist. They optimize for the mythical worker who travels from Point A to Point B twice daily, following predictable patterns that align with traditional employment schedules.

This fictional character bears no resemblance to the people who actually keep society functioning.

The invisible mobility of care

Care work operates on radically different spatial and temporal logic than traditional employment. A parent dropping children at school, picking up groceries, visiting an elderly relative, and collecting kids from after-school activities doesn’t follow neat origin-destination pairs.

These trips are:

Multi-destination and non-linear
Time-sensitive with narrow windows
Burden-carrying intensive
Responsive to unpredictable needs

Yet transportation systems are designed as if these patterns don’t exist. Bus routes run downtown during rush hour. Subway systems radiate from business districts. Parking is optimized for 8-hour workday patterns.

The result is systematic exclusion disguised as neutral planning.

The commuter fallacy

The standard transportation model assumes:

Single-purpose trips
Predictable timing
Individual travelers
Downtown-focused movement
Car ownership as default

This model reflects the mobility patterns of a specific demographic: office workers with traditional schedules, disposable income, and minimal care responsibilities.

Everyone else becomes an afterthought, accommodated through “special services” rather than integrated design.

Quantifying the mismatch

Women make 25% more trips than men but use cars 15% less often. They’re more likely to:

Chain multiple errands together
Travel with children or dependents
Carry heavy items (groceries, medical equipment, childcare supplies)
Need door-to-door connectivity
Travel during off-peak hours

Despite generating more total mobility demand, their patterns are systematically underserved by public transportation designed around male commuting patterns.

Economic invisibility creates spatial invisibility

Care work remains largely uncompensated and economically invisible. This economic devaluation translates directly into spatial exclusion.

When transportation planners calculate “economic impact” of route decisions, they measure:

Business district connectivity
Commercial trip generation
Employment center access
Freight movement efficiency

They don’t measure:

Childcare accessibility
Healthcare appointment connectivity
Elder care mobility
Household maintenance trip efficiency

The economic invisibility of care work becomes literal invisibility in transportation planning.

The suburban trap

Car-dependent suburban design doesn’t solve this problem—it exacerbates it. Suburban sprawl forces care workers into expensive private vehicle dependency while offering no alternatives.

A parent in suburbia might drive:

12 miles to drop kids at school
8 miles to grocery store
15 miles to elderly parent’s house
12 miles back to school pickup
6 miles to pediatrician
Various distances for errands

This creates a spatial tax on care work, paid primarily by women, that can exceed $10,000 annually in vehicle costs, fuel, and time.

Technology reproduces bias

Ride-sharing and mobility-as-a-service platforms haven’t solved this bias—they’ve digitized it. These systems optimize for:

Single-passenger trips
Point-to-point efficiency
Peak demand profitability
Urban density zones

Multi-stop trips with car seats, medical equipment, or elderly passengers become “edge cases” that algorithms struggle to handle efficiently.

The technology reproduces the same male-commuter assumptions embedded in traditional transit planning.

Planning for actual humans

Designing transportation around care work patterns would mean:

Multi-destination routing that optimizes trip chains, not single journeys
Flexible scheduling that accommodates unpredictable care needs
Burden accommodation with space for strollers, wheelchairs, groceries
Distributed destinations serving residential areas, not just downtown cores
Cross-suburban connectivity linking neighborhoods directly

This isn’t about adding special services for women. It’s about designing systems around how humans actually move through cities.

The efficiency paradox

Planners claim current systems maximize efficiency. But efficiency for whom?

A transit system that efficiently moves office workers downtown twice daily while forcing care workers into expensive, time-consuming multi-transfer journeys isn’t efficient—it’s discriminatory.

True efficiency would minimize total social cost, including the hidden costs imposed on unpaid care workers.

Political economy of mobility

Transportation planning reflects political priorities. Current systems prioritize:

Economic productivity (as narrowly defined)
Business district vitality
Property value enhancement
Male-dominated employment patterns

Care work gets relegated to the private sphere, literally and figuratively pushed off public transportation networks.

This isn’t accidental. It’s the spatial manifestation of economic systems that rely on unpaid care work while refusing to support it.

Beyond accommodation

The solution isn’t to accommodate care work within existing transportation frameworks. It’s to recognize that care work represents the majority of human mobility needs and design systems accordingly.

This would mean starting with questions like:

How do people actually move through their daily lives?
What trips are essential for social reproduction?
How can we minimize the burden of necessary travel?
What mobility patterns sustain communities?

Instead of: How can we move the maximum number of commuters downtown as quickly as possible?

The care-centered city

Transportation systems designed around care work would look fundamentally different. They would be:

Distributed rather than centralized
Flexible rather than rigid
Burden-accommodating rather than passenger-only
Community-connecting rather than downtown-focused
Time-responsive rather than schedule-dependent

Such systems would better serve everyone, not just care workers. Students, elderly people, disabled individuals, and even traditional commuters would benefit from more flexible, accommodating transportation networks.

Value alignment

Current transportation planning embeds specific values:

Economic productivity over social reproduction
Individual efficiency over community connection
Speed over accessibility
Private ownership over public provision

These values aren’t neutral. They’re political choices that systematically disadvantage care workers while privileging a narrow class of traditional commuters.

Recognizing transportation planning as value-laden is the first step toward creating systems that serve actual human needs rather than abstract economic models.

The question isn’t whether transportation should accommodate care work. The question is why we continue designing cities as if care work doesn’t exist.

This analysis examines systemic bias in urban planning, not individual transportation choices. Personal mobility decisions occur within systems that constrain available options.