Gender Equality in urban transport provision: a chance to build back equal
Photo: KL Sentral (before the pandemic) The recently concluded ESCAP Regional Meeting for Asia and the Pacific “City and Transport: Safety, efficiency and sustainability” had a session on Gender Responsive Urban Transport Policies. I was invited to participate in that session. I had five minutes for my intervention and this is what I said. I wanted to make a case for approaching transport provision from a rights perspective, and from the perspective of a state’s obligations towards the protection and fulfilment rights of all its citizens. Cities and economies are not just spaces and processes that exist independently of the people that inhabit them and make them work, and it was encouraging to see that several speakers at the UNESCAP meeting had begun to put people at the centre of their thinking. The importance of centring people was reinforced by the COVID19 pandemic experience. We saw that it was people who helped us get t