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Study of commuter problems and opinions in a fast developing coastal city of Mangalore in India: A gender perspective analysis

BACKGROUND: Transport and commuting need to be viewed from a more inclusive nature because it adds a very strong gender component. Invariably, gender perspective is never included during road transport authority meetings and naturally gets excluded in the entire transport planning discourse. METHODOLOGY: A cross-sectional study was carried out to assess commuter problem and study the opinion of commuters with regard to public transport and road safety by involving 139 commuters by purposive sampling who travel daily in the coastal city of Mangalore in Southern India using public transport. RESULTS: Among the study participants, 66 (47.5%) were males and 73 (52.5%) were females. The mean age of the respondents was 28.5 ± 7.9 years. One hundred and sixteen (83.5%) feel the roads in the city are unsafe and 69 (49.6%) felt stressed due to travel and 71 (51.1%) felt the public transport are rarely safe for women to travel at night. CONCLUSION: The issue of women and child safety during travel by public transport, the behavior of auto drivers, the need to increase road patrolling during day and night will require sincere investment from policy makers and stakeholders. Perhaps, the time to create a gender sensitive commuter-centric road safety policy requires to be developed.