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A Focus on Mobility of Care

January 14, 2025

by Aman Chandi

Two years after getting my N license, I finally bought a used electric car, which, unbeknownst to me, has opened up a new dimension to my role in an intergenerational Punjabi home. Suddenly, I am tasked with driving elderly family members to appointments, picking up medicines, grocery shopping, and shuttling people around. 

This new responsibility, I learned, is also called "mobility of care”. Mobility is care is a concept coined by Inés Sánchez de Madariaga and refers to all travel required to perform non-paid caregiving tasks–essentially, the stuff that sustains our everyday lives. 

Of course, mobility of care is not just exclusive to those with cars; people dependent on public transit or for whom driving is not an option also provide this form of care/mobility. The fact that owning a car has assigned me this role speaks volumes about the inadequacies of our transit system in Surrey, the municipality in which I live. Alarmingly, 13 of the region’s top 20 overcrowded bus routes are in Surrey! The lack of reliable transportation options in Surrey was also a recurring theme during REACH-Cities team’s engagement on the 15-minute neighbourhood concept with residents. Given the limited transportation options and the sprawl-oriented design of Surrey, those who can afford a car often find it becomes the default mode for mobility of care trips, perpetuating the cycle of car dependency.

Photo from an engagement activity with single mothers in Surrey, where they ranked their preferred amenities within their ideal 15-minute neighbourhood.

Many of us are receivers and/or providers of this form of care, yet mobility of care is undervalued and rendered invisible because of gender bias. Mobility of care is more common among women than men, especially in low-income households. Traditional transportation planning, policies, and research have disproportionately prioritized the 'typical' journey to work, reflecting historical patterns of men’s commuting habits. Ultimately, creating a current transportation system that is not designed with caregiving in mind. 

Leslie Kern, author of Feminist Cities, notes that we have decades of research on women’s mobility which shows that women’s journeys throughout the day are much less linear than men’s. Women tend to travel shorter distances, take more frequent trips, and more often use public transport and taxi services. Due to their higher frequency of trips, women are also more inclined to engage in trip chaining, where multiple short trips are linked together to optimize travel efficiency and minimize costs.

Example of trip chaining. According to Dr. Léa Ravensbergen, ..“people often trip chain to incorporate a care task into their commute to work (e.g., grocery shopping on the way home from work).

REACH-Cities lead Dr. Meghan Winters was recently featured in a video by Shifter, where she spoke about how shaping our active transportation networks around mobility of care is an important step toward making cities work better caregivers. She emphasized the importance of ensuring that high-quality, safe infrastructure connects directly to destinations such as community centers, libraries, stores, and services. Such an approach is a shift from historical patterns that primarily direct people to the central business district. This produces more of a ‘radial network… than a classic ‘hub and spoke’ – that Lam recommends in their article “Towards an intersectional perspective in cycling.” 

We all know care trips happen. But is care showing up in transportation policy?   

In her honors project, Hitika Gosal, a SFU Bachelor of Health Sciences student with REACH-Cities, explored if – and how – care is considered in transportation planning in Canadian cities. She examined transportation plans and policies from four cities: Vancouver, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Halifax. None of the plans she reviewed explicitly mentioned care or mobility of care. However, many of the policies and actions within the policies could indirectly facilitate mobility of care. She introduced a framework (illustrated in the graphic below) that grouped these into three possible supportive pathways: actions could reduce the need for care trips (eliminating trips in the first place); they could make care trips more efficient (thereby making trips faster); or they could make care trips more comfortable (thereby making trips easier).    

There is then a more fundamental issue: these care trips aren’t explicitly captured in transportation data, and thus they are invisible. Dr. Léa Ravensbergen and colleagues, in their exploratory analysis of mobility of care in Montréal, discovered that current transportation data collection methods frequently misclassify care trips as leisure, shopping, etc. This misclassification undermines the importance of caregiving activities and neglects the needs of both caregivers and those they care for. In fact, the research team in Montréal found that while currently invisible in data, care trips may comprise over a quarter of all travel.

Capturing mobility of care explicitly in transportation data is a crucial step toward creating more caring and equitable cities. Our transportation policies should be shaped through a caring lens that promotes well-being, comfort, ease, and independence for both caregivers and care recipients. I envision a future where my grandmother confidently takes a short walk to her doctor's appointments, feeling safe and supported by her urban environment. In this future, I can live car-free, knowing that public transportation is reliable, accessible, and accommodating. I trust that there will always be space on the bus for me and that it will arrive on time, making care-related travel and daily commutes stress-free and easy.