Our manuscript on evacuation travel planning versus everyday travel

A new manuscript:

Liu, S., Murray-Tuite, P. & Schweitzer, L., 2012, Analysis of child pick-up during daily routines and for daytime no-notice evacuations, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 46(1), pp. 48-67.

From the abstract:
In a no-notice disaster (e.g., nuclear explosion, terrorist attack, or hazardous materials release), an evacuation may start immediately after the disaster strikes. When a no-notice evacuation occurs during the daytime, household members are scattered throughout the regional network, and some family members (e.g., children) may need to be picked up. This household pick-up and gathering behavior was seldom investigated in previous work due to insufficient data; this gap in our understanding about who within families handles child-gathering is addressed here. Three hundred fifteen interviews were conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area to ascertain how respondents planned their response to hypothetical no-notice emergency evacuation orders. This paper presents the influencing factors that affect household pick-up and gathering behavior/expectations and the logistic regression models developed to predict the probability that parents pick up a child in three situations: a normal weekday and two hypothetical emergency scenarios. The results showed that both mothers and fathers were more likely to plant to pick up a child under emergency conditions than they were on a normal weekday. For a normal weekday, increasing the distance between parents and children decreased the probability of parents picking up children; in other words, the farther parents are from their children, the less likely they will pick them up. In an emergency, effects of distance on pick-up behavior were significant for women, but not significant for men; that is, increasing the distance between parents and children decreased the probability that mothers pick up a child, but had a less significant effect on the fathers’ probability. Another significant factor affecting child pick-up behavior/expectations was household income when controlling for distance. The results of this study confirm that parents expect to gather children under emergency conditions, which needs to be accounted for in evacuation planning; failure to do so could cause difficulties in executing the pick-ups, lead to considerable queuing and rerouting, and extend the time citizens are exposed to high levels of risk.

Giuliano and Schweitzer in the National Academies of Science Proceedings on Women in Transportation

In October 2009 the Transportation Research Board (TRB) sponsored the 4th International Conference on Women’s Issues in Transportation.

The two volume set of the Proceedings of this Conference (all of whose papers were peer-reviewed in accord with National Academy of Sciences standards) is now available in PDF for free on the TRB website.

Many of the papers cover important transportation, land use, community design, and planning issues from the perspective of women and their children and their aging parents. A special feature of the 4th Conference was a focus on international research, and comparative travel patterns, particularly in the developing world.

Among the papers in the two volumes are six papers commissioned specifically for the Conference:

● Marty Wachs, “Women’s Travel Issues: Creating Knowledge, Improving Policy, and Making Change”

● Ananya Roy, “Gender, Poverty, and Transportation in the Developing World”

● Sandi Rosenbloom and Maryvonne Plessis-Fraisard, “Women’s Travel in Developed and Developing Countries: Two Versions of the Same Story?”

● Gen Giuliano and Lisa Schweitzer, “Her Money or Her Time; A Gendered View of Contemporary Transportation Policy”

● Lidia Kostyniuk, “Road User Safety: Women’s Issues”

● Anastasia Loukaitou-Siders, “What is Blocking her Path? Women, Mobility, and Security”

In addition there were a variety of papers on women’s traffic safety, women’s personal security concerns, children’s travel, extreme events and disaster preparedness, and household travel patterns in the US and a number of individual countries.

You may find these papers to be useful in a variety of planning courses as well as your own research.

The website addresses are

● Women’s Issues in Transportation; Summary of the 4th International Conference, Conference Proceedings 46

Vol. 1: Conference Overview and Plenary [pdf] Papers

Vol. 2: Technical Papers [pdf]

The Conference was funded by the UK, Swedish, and US governments, the University of California Transportation Center, UC Davis, METRANS (USC and Cal State Long Beach), and the New Mexico DOT.

Why do marketers hate real women and men so much?

The WVU and Villanova men’s basketball game this morning was fantastic, and as usual, I got my fill of commercials. It never ceases to amaze me how many advertisers think that men are the only audience for sports, and how little respect they show for either men or women.

One commercial, which I am not going to link to because I’m not helping them market, begins with the announcement that a man has allowed his girlfriend “to remove his spine, so he will, therefore, not be able to watch the game.” The next shot is of him carrying her packages around; she whines at him to “come on.” The product is for a pocket television. I can think of a million ideas for marketing that product without diminishing people like that.

Every time I see a commercial like that, I think of the dozens of wonderful men I know who watch sports on tv (my colleagues, David Suarez, Richard Green, David Sloane, Gary Painter, Chris Redfearn, Tridib Banerjee…my former advisor Brian Taylor, my good friend Martin Wachs…my former colleague Asghar Bhatti) and who ALSO genuinely respect and support the women they’ve committed to and who gladly carry packages or give up something they want for something their spouses want because they are grownups–not man-children who sulk and suffer through their interactions with women so that they can get some later.

Contrast this with the enormously cute Bud Light commercial:


One of my favorite science bloggers wrote about this commercial:

Astronomy & Bud Light

He’s right: fire extinguishers are great fun.