Inclusify – Barcelona

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT FOR INCLUSIVE MOBILITY

Place: Barcelona, Spain
Timespan: January 2022 – Ongoing
People reached: up to 800.000 women
Topics: citizen engagement, inclusive mobility, female empowerment, co-create urban spaces, urban public mobility systems, gender inclusion

In cooperation with the city of Barcelona, its metropolitan area and EIT Urban Mobility partners (Institut d’Estudis Regionals i Metropolitans de Barcelona, Amb Informació I Serveis, Walk21), WeSolve developed, tested and implemented an innovative new methodology to empower women to report challenges that they encounter in their use of public transport.

The name of the project is Inclusify and it aims at creating a safer, more inclusive, and more equitable urban mobility system in the metropolitan city of Barcelona. We are very happy to be part of this project and to create an impact in making women feel safer and more protected when using the public transport.

The problem

In many EU cities, pickpockets, harassments, nighttime safety, and infrastructure breakdowns, etc. are prominent issues that threaten people from moving around and accessing public transportations. Women walk, cycle and use public transport more often than men in most cities, and yet they are rarely invited to share their experiences or targeted to ensure existing services meet their needs. In Barcelona particularly, women take 80% of their journeys by public transport, which is 11% more than men and hence makes public-transport more relevant for this specific social group. In a survey in 2016, 26% women experienced crimes and street harassment and these situations prevented them to furthermore using public transportation. Women in Barcelona took 5.7 million daily trips in total (50.8% walking-only and 27.4% using public transportation). Unfortunately, authorities do not always have the tools to integrate women’s perspectives effectively. 
Solution

Inclusify is a citizen engagement project that proactively engages women to share their challenges and concerns with the transport system to create better future policies in regards of women experiences. An innovative tool allows to collect issues and feedback that can be mapped and analysed. This will challenge relevant authorities policy development to ensure their services are equitable and inclusive for women to create a safe and sustainable future urban mobility system.
Overall, the project aims to make trips safer and easier for women moving within the Barcelona metropolitan area. Inclusify reinforces existing transport policy commitments with a gender perspective. Moreover, it creates an efficient digital solution that proactively engages and embeds women in the sustainable future of metropolitan mobility. Hence, the goal is to achieve a more equitable and accessible mobility system, an increase in active and public transport use, a reduction in crime and road traffic casualties and lastly, greater sense of belonging.

The project is built on 3 core pillars that are introduced below

Approach

The project is based on the AMB travel app, which is already used by more than 200k active users. This allows us to reach and engage women quickly and efficiently to help co-create a community for empowering them through the usage of the new module. Integrating this dimension into the formal digital channels, users can help in the process of implementing more effective policies on the improvement of enhancing women´s travel safety and experience. It is built simple, tested and made perfectly scalable to other cities or metropolitan areas in a short period of time.

WeSolve’s interface is used to collect reports of incidents from women commuters to pinpoint the public areas that are more prone to urban mobility-related incidents. This functionality is integrated into the existing urban mobility app AMB Mobilitat in Barcelona which currently displays public transport itineraries, lines map, and time schedule.

The specific possibilities that WeSolve offers,  helps the authorities to better understand women’s concerns, including the possibility to:

Collect issues and organize them in categories (gather information on issues and keep user updated about their status)

Create surveys and polls (collect opinions from the women, visualize and analyze aggregated data).

Create challenges (explain the content 
and goal of challenges, set deadlines, manage status and view the ideas proposed by women).

Thanks to an user-friendly web interface, the stakeholders are able to benefit from the whole potential of the solution.

What then?

With the knowledge and expertise of our project in Barcelona, we are confident to help other cities across Europe to integrate this solution into their existing tools.

The methodology and the tool proposed are scalable and replicable across Europe, as well as internationally.  Wherever women are using the public transportation system, WeSolve helps to improve safety, equity and sustainability.

Do you want to learn more about other use cases?

Find them here.