Mobility for All

A journey to work can depend on several other journeys: accompanying someone, obtaining supplies, and reaching services before the working day begins. Mobility for all, an English-language animation published by TU Wien TV, makes these connections part of transport planning. Produced within the GEECCO project and based on a literature review by Tobias Lehmann, it asks whose daily life a transport system makes possible. Moving people quickly between two points is only one part of the answer.

The journey that a commuting model misses

The animation contrasts a relatively linear home–work route with chains of shorter trips serving different purposes. Its diagrams make a usually invisible relationship legible: the journey of the person who is accompanied belongs to the carer’s working day too. A route that is efficient for one uninterrupted commute may be inconvenient for someone who needs several stops. Travel demand is therefore shaped by the distribution of responsibilities, not simply by individual tastes in vehicles.

The narration explicitly rejects a biological explanation and warns that women and men are not homogeneous groups. This qualification changes how to read the opening comparison. It is a pattern to investigate through routines and unequal access, rather than a claim that all women travel one way and all men another. The video also acknowledges that the research it summarizes has not studied other genders. Its later use of varied gender symbols does not fill that evidentiary gap.

The question of class sharpens the account. People able to buy domestic and care services may transfer some journeys and time constraints to someone else, including migrant care workers. Those tasks have not disappeared from the transport system. Counting only an employer’s improved freedom can hide the worker’s own journeys and responsibilities. Gender-sensitive planning needs to ask who can delegate, who receives the work, and whose schedule remains absent from the model.

Making access easier without fixing roles in place

The discussion expands from gender averages to disability, age and exclusion from social and economic resources. An inaccessible environment or fear of violence can narrow the activities someone can undertake. Mobility consequently concerns the ability to reach work, housing, education, shopping and recreation, including across urban and rural settings. A formally available service does not automatically make those destinations equally reachable.

The video’s most productive dilemma is temporal: can planning improve carers’ conditions now while helping change the division of care over time? Refusing practical improvements until roles change would leave present constraints intact. Designing every improvement around the assumption that women will always provide care would preserve another constraint. The problem calls for both immediate access and scrutiny of who continues to carry the responsibility.

The animation is a conceptual introduction, not a new survey or an evaluation proving which intervention works. Its compressed diagrams invite questions that local evidence must answer: which trips are linked, who cannot make them, and how services intersect with work and care arrangements. Better mobility cannot by itself redistribute domestic labor, but a system built around one supposedly standard commuter can make that redistribution harder.

Hirata and Kergoat’s analysis of the sexual division of labor provides a useful companion. Their account of delegated care explains why one woman’s reduced burden may become another woman’s work. The video extends that question into routes and destinations: whose newly available time depends on whose continued movement?