Three constructive people of different generations
David Brown
At the Institution of Transportation Engineers (ITE ANZ) breakfast meeting in Melbourne at the end of February, I chatted with three women who have had and will have a great role to play for different reasons.
Beverley McCombs
Peter McCombs, who had been awarded Honorary Membership of ITE. This is the highest recognition of notable and outstanding professional achievement ITE presents to an individual. Since 1933 when the first Honorary Member was selected, only 84 individuals have been honoured this way.
Beverley has been his marriage and business partner for some 56 years.
It would be easy to just play pleasantries and call her “and partner”. But she has played an integral part in hers and Peter’s businesses and she had a very clear perspective on working in our industry. The business, formally TDG but now owned by Stantec, was a transportation planning and traffic engineering consultancy. When they set up the company, Beverley was one of two shareholders and a Director on the board – uncommon for women to own an engineering company or be on a Board of Directors at the time. It was heartening to hear Beverley speak about the critical role of helping staff achieve their best. We often laud those who have the title of head of an organisation but fail to grasp the depth of understanding that people have throughout a business and a profession.
Beverley has a long history of advocating for women engineers and has been involved in programs encouraging girls to take STEM subjects at school. She believes that talent is the thing to look for and, of course, many women have that in spades.
I noticed that Beverly astutely judged those who didn’t feel the need to stop and have a meaningful conversation. She was not negative but I sensed there was a long history of people who only wanted to talk to the man of the business.
Beverley is the published author of “The Ascott Martyrs”.
Alice Woodruff
Alice received the Sustainable Transport award at the ITE breakfast for her work on the Change to Walking project. She is the Director of Active City and she is:
A transport planning specialist who works with communities to change their travel behaviour for healthier, happier, low-carbon communities.
Influencing people’s travel behaviour is complex. To design and implement successful interventions and policies requires integrating and translating across disciplines, as well co-designing solutions with communities and stakeholders.
Change to Walking tested the effectiveness of specific ‘nudges’ to encourage walking for short trips to train stations and primary schools, over a six-week period between between early May and late June 2018. The program was a pilot behaviour change initiative funded by VicHealth and delivered through Victoria Walks in five locations across Melbourne and regional Victoria.
A ‘nudge’ is a small change that can be made in a setting that influences people’s behaviour. It applies insights from behavioural psychology and behavioural economics to encourage voluntary changes in people’s choices or actions.
In her acceptance speech Alice said in part:
We know that good infrastructure and urban design is critical to support more efficient and sustainable travel options for our growing cities and regions. But what is often downplayed is the complexity of people’s travel choices. They are guided by personal motivations and beliefs, as well as people’s local physical and social context. That local context might be a school, a workplace, a whole precinct or the larger city or town.
Where we live strongly influences our travel choices but so too do the travel choices of our friends, colleagues and families. Nudging changes in travel choices requires us to work within these local contexts and respond to the behavioural influences on our travel.
We need truly integrated responses that combine infrastructure enablers, alongside behaviour change interventions to tackle our complex transport challenges, which include a 50% reduction in emissions.
Further links
- Change to Walking report - Link
- Alice and I have a common colleague, Liz Ampt, who is an international expert in transport survey design and has moved into behaviour change. We interviewed Liz some time ago about some practical examples she had experienced in her work. Link
- Liz Ampt and I prepared a paper for the 2018 AITPM National Conference: “Road safety and the science of behaviour change – If the answer is obvious why are we failing?” Link
- I took this concept to NZ and the Engineering New Zealand Transport Group conference in 2018. Link to abstract, paper and presentation.
Laura Aston
We have met Laura, a PhD candidate (Sustainable and Effective Public Transport ) at Monash University through a variety of other activities. She was awarded a World Wide Learning Opportunity (Sponsored by Austraffic) to travel to the US to visit the head office of ITE and to attend their international conference. She travelled to the US again in January to participate in the ITE Strategic Planning Meetings
She recently had an opinion piece posted on the ITE Transport Professionals web site. In part it said:
One of 2019's most popular books addresses gender bias in planning and decision-making. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez, exposes a simple truth about bias in our societal structures. She delivers many examples to illustrate that a simple under-representation of women in decision making and research, translates to the design of systems that do not meet their particular needs. Engineers make decisions every day based on data. Is our data delivering the full picture?
A colleague of mine and fellow transportation researcher recently delivered a speech at TedX Amsterdam about gendered transportation systems. Women's daily mobility patterns have traditionally differed from men’s (1). While this is changing, there are still important differences. More complex trip chains and less regular commuting patterns, are not adequately catered for in the planning of our transportation networks. Caroline Perez of Invisible Women provides a fantastic example of this point. A city in Sweden changed its snow ploughing priorities in favour of minor roads instead of major roads. The minor roads were used more frequently by women to carry out daily errands. The effect was a significant reduction in accidents and healthcare costs associated with women’s harm from unsafe sidewalk access (2).
This is not just a matter that concerns women. At a conference I recently attended, Transforming Transportation, a question was raised about the fairness of designing 'walkable' streets that did not consider different abilities. In response, Maria Vassilakou, former Deputy Mayor of Vienna, answered “Walkability presupposes that you have an optimal division between public transport and public space. A city that does not provide links for different access needs is not walkable enough”. Is your city truly walkable?
Further Links
- Laura’s Opinion Piece: National Engineers Week 2020: Inclusive Cities are Built by Diverse Teams
- Link: Interview with Laura about her WWLO trip and her career so far.