Providing safe transport systems can be key in promoting women’s mobility and their access to services, education, and employment opportunities. Transport safety, however, remains an important concern for women across income levels, communities, and countries (Ng and Acker 2018). Alam et al.(2020), for instance, found that security and safety concerns are common for women across high-, middle-and low-income countries. In several countries, such as the Philippines, safety is ranked as the most important factor affecting individuals’ choice of mode in cities, regardless of age, gender, income and intent of travel (Mayo and Taboada 2020).

Travel safety has two core elements: safety from accidents and safety from violence (Joewono and Kuboto 2006). Vehicle safety systems, usually designed and evaluated for men, need to be sensitive to considerations about women’s biology and the biomechanical effects that forces have on the motion of their bodies (Bose et al. 2011). For instance, in private transport such as cars, the odds of female drivers who are wearing a seatbelt sustaining injuries is 73 percent higher than for men in a comparable car crash (Forman et al. 2019; UVA 2019), primarily because women’s physiological differences are not incorporated when testing vehicles’ safety (Nelson 2020).