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Faring Badly By Teena Gill Source: http://www.oneworld.org/panos/news/35nov99.htm BANGKOK (PANOS) - Every evening as housemaid Jue Petchwong gets off the bus that drops her home from work she thanks her lucky stars - for surviving the trip. While the Thai capital, notorious for its nerve-wracking traffic jams, is not exactly kind to any of the city’s millions of commuters it is particularly harsh on low-income women, who make up the bulk of the city’s teeming migrant workforce. Among daily hazards Jue has to brave are an inefficient and crowded public transport service, expensive and often unsafe private transport and physical insecurity while travelling both during the day and at night. "I have little choice," says Jue - she cannot afford taxis, and cheap transport other than buses, such as ferries and motorcycle-taxis are too unsafe and, in any case, do not cover the areas where she works. Transportation is a major issue: over 70 percent of the labour force in factories around Bangkok is made up of women, who also account for a large portion of the city’s over-one-million workforce in the informal sector. "The main problems with Bangkok’s public transport system are inadequate services and relatively high tariffs for quality services," says Dr Nimitchai Snitbhan, who works on transport issues at the Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), a Bangkok-based policy think-tank. This is not a problem unique to Bangkok or developing countries. "Women are much less likely to have access to private vehicles than men," argues a research paper, titled Women and Transport: Bus Deregulation in West Yorkshire. Researchers Kerry Hamilton, Linda Jenkins and Abigail Gregory of the University of East London say less than a quarter of women in Britain had a car available all the time in 1980, thus making them heavily dependent on public transport, especially buses. At the same time, Prof. Hamilton says in a separate article in Environment & Health magazine, "women’s travel needs are as significant as those of men, though often radically different": in addition to the transport needs implicit in the fact that globally women comprise half of all employees, their ‘invisible’ role in unpaid domestic labour as carers of children, sick or elderly adults is unrecognised. All of this is ignored by policymakers. Poor transport has all kinds of effects on women, including isolation, physical wear and tear and stress. The researchers found that where bus frequencies were reduced it also reduced elderly women’s ability to reach basic services or to visit family and friends. "Women in Bangkok have to rely a lot on public transport but the government has no policy on women," says Siriporn Skrobanek, based in Bangkok with the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women. She suggests that the government and employers should jointly contribute to providing safe transport to women who have to travel late at night from their place of work. Researchers say women constitute nearly 40 percent of government employees, over 40 percent of private employees and 30 percent of the self-employed workforce in Bangkok - all heavy users of public transport. One section of women that is in dire need of such services are those employed by Thailand’s export processing industries, which are located in and around Bangkok. Although women constitute 70-90 percent of the workforce, their only means of transport usually are public buses - rarely available at night - or private commuter trucks. For them the choices are bleak. While buses run by the Bangkok Mass Transit Authority are too few to meet demand, ‘seats guaranteed’ bus services run by private firms are unaffordable for most. This has seen a mushrooming of cheaper but crowded and often unsafe private pick-up trucks and public vans. "I usually take a public bus or ferry when I need to travel," says Mathana Chetamee, who works at the Foundation for Women in Bangkok, "but I have faced sexual harassment on buses and so have many other women. There is certainly a need for a security system on buses, so that if a passenger asks for help the bus driver and conductor should check to see who is causing the problem." A few months ago a group of rowdy male polytechnic students forced a young schoolgirl at knife point to get off a bus in Bangkok and then raped her. The incident happened at daytime and no one on the bus tried to help her. Other affordable options are crowded ferries which operate mostly during the daytime across the busy Chao Phraya river running through Bangkok and canals criss-crossing the city. It is estimated that over 400,000 commuters travel daily by ferry, but numerous accidents over the years, often leading to drowning, have made this an unattractive, last-choice option for most. Many experts are concerned that rather than addressing the needs of women commuters, the focus of Bangkok’s transport authorities is on expensive projects aimed at increasing road space and car use - hardly the solution, Prof. Hamilton says. "If you reshape your city or town to accommodate car drivers by building more roads, this can act as a barrier to movement and can lead to community severance and remove the possibility of play by children in the streets, while increasing noise levels and adding to pollution." In Bangkok, one in seven residents suffers from respiratory ailments, she points out. Nov. 30, 1999 895 words |
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