Moving with Care: Rethinking Urban Transportation
By Holly Milburn-Smith
What would transportation look like if it were designed around the trips that keep everyday life going?
Every day, people move through cities not just to get to work, but to care for one another. They take children to school, accompany family members to appointments, pick up household necessities, and fit these journeys around paid work and other responsibilities. Yet transportation systems have traditionally been planned around a much simpler model: the commute between home and work. As a result, the more complex travel associated with care is often overlooked in decisions about how transportation systems are planned and funded.
Because women perform most unpaid care work globally, they disproportionately absorb the consequences. Transport systems that fail to account for care can add time, cost, and stress to already demanding days—deepening women’s time poverty and limiting their opportunities to work, learn, rest, and participate in public life.
Towards a Care-Centered Approach to Urban Transportation asks cities, transport agencies, funders, and planners to see transportation not only as a way to move people, but as part of the infrastructure that makes care possible.
What does care-centered transportation look like?
A care-centered approach asks transportation planners to broaden what counts as a successful transport system. Alongside traditional measures such as ridership, commute times, and economic development, it considers whether people can reach the services and support they depend on, how much time and money those journeys require, and whether transportation is reducing—or adding to—the burden of care.
The report uses the 3Rs of care—Recognize, Reduce, and Redistribute—to translate that idea into practice:
- Recognize the journeys people make to provide and receive care.
- Reduce the time, cost, complexity, and stress those journeys require.
- Redistribute care by making services, jobs, and support networks easier to reach, so families—and especially women—are not left to absorb the burden alone.
The guidance applies these principles across the entire transport investment cycle—from planning and project appraisal to design, operations, and evaluation.
The bigger idea: transportation can give caregivers time back
A care-centered approach does not require cities to create an entirely new category of transportation projects. It asks them to reconsider the decisions they are already making—and to recognize reductions in the time, cost, and stress of caregiving as meaningful public benefits.
That can mean changing routes, fares, schedules, or infrastructure. But it can also mean questioning whether a trip should be necessary in the first place. Bringing childcare, healthcare, schools, and other essential services closer to where people live can reduce the amount of time caregivers spend simply getting from one responsibility to the next.
The goal is simple: transportation systems should reduce the time and effort required to care for one another, not add to it.
Drawing on research, the experience of cities including Bogotá and Nairobi, and insights from transport, care, and urban practitioners, the report offers a practical starting point for anyone shaping how people move through cities.
Care-centered transportation in practice
Barcelona’s Superblocks show how street design can support care by making walking, accompanying others, and spending time in public space safer and easier. By reclaiming space from cars for pedestrians, seating, greenery, and community life, they can reduce the time and stress involved in everyday care journeys while strengthening neighborhood connections.
Tokyo Metro’s concept of “One-route” is especially relevant because care-centered mobility requires thinking about the entire journey, not just individual pieces of infrastructure. Rather than counting an elevator somewhere in the station and calling it accessible, One-route represents a station which assures one or more route connecting the “Ground to Gate to Platform” using an elevator, slope, stairlift, or a wheelchair-accessible escalator.
LA Metro’s Gender Action Plan shows that care-centered transportation can begin with better information, not just new infrastructure. By combining gender-disaggregated data with surveys, focus groups, and measures of both implementation and outcomes, Metro has developed a fuller picture of how different people experience the system. It is a useful example of a basic principle of care-centered mobility: transportation agencies cannot respond to journeys and barriers their data do not reveal.
Singapore’s Green Man+ system shows how small changes to existing infrastructure can make everyday mobility more inclusive. At participating pedestrian crossings, older adults and people with disabilities can tap an eligible card to receive additional time to cross the street. Rather than assuming everyone moves at the same pace, the system adapts to people who may need more time—supporting greater independence while also making journeys easier for those accompanying or caring for others.
Care-centered transportation is also about the people who operate the system. Bogotá’s public bus operator La Rolita was created in part to expand service in underserved areas while opening a traditionally male-dominated profession to women. Women received driver training and licensing support, alongside working conditions designed to better accommodate workers’ wellbeing and care needs. It demonstrates that a transportation system can support care not only through the journeys it enables, but through the conditions it creates for its own workforce.
Research in Nairobi using the “mobility of care” framework found that women’s journeys on the city’s matatu network are often trip-chained rather than simple home-to-work commutes. As Nairobi expands its transport infrastructure, including a planned BRT corridor connecting hospitals, a rail station, and major market areas, these insights offer an opportunity to treat caregivers as priority transport users from the outset—using their actual travel patterns to shape how new systems are planned.
This guidance was developed by CHANGE with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).
Cities: Barcelona, Bogotá, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Nairobi
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