By Corrine Vibert, Director of Communications at EASST and Member of the Technical Secretariat of the Global Alliance for Feminist Transport
This year's International Women's Day theme - Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls[1] - is a call to dismantle the structural barriers that limit women's lives: discriminatory laws, weak legal protections, and the social norms that erode their rights. Road safety rarely features in that conversation, but it should. The streets women move through every day, and the transport systems they depend on, are shaped by structural choices, about whose needs are centred in design, whose safety is prioritised, and whose experience is treated as the default.
When gender is raised in the context of road safety, the conversation tends to follow a familiar pattern. The statistics on male risk dominate - globally, around 73% of all road fatalities are young males, a figure cited so often it has become the default frame for the issue. The implicit conclusion is that road safety is, at its core, a problem affecting men.
But this framing conceals as much as it reveals. On a per-crash basis, women are significantly more likely than men to be killed or seriously injured.[2] They are more likely to be killed as pedestrians or car passengers than as drivers.[3] They disproportionately rely on public transport - yet many women do not feel safe using it. When given the choice, evidence suggests women would consistently prefer to travel by private car, citing safety concerns and convenience as the primary reasons.[4] The result is more cars on the road, emptier buses, and a transport system that is failing both its users and its sustainability goals.
The transport sector also remains heavily male-dominated, and this matters. Road infrastructure, street design, and public transport networks have largely been designed by men, for assumptions about travel that reflect male patterns of movement. Women are more likely than men to travel with children or other vulnerable road users. They are more likely to chain their journeys, combining a commute with a school run, a visit to the doctor, a stop at a market, rather than making single-destination trips.[5] A transport system built around the needs of women would look quite different from what most of our cities currently offer. It would almost certainly be safer for everyone.
This is not simply an argument about equity, though equity matters. It is an argument about effectiveness. If roads and public spaces were designed to meet the needs of those currently least well served - women, people with disabilities, older people, young children - the evidence strongly suggests they would be safer and more functional for all users.
The principle is perhaps most clearly articulated in relation to accessibility as presented by the Design for All Foundation: infrastructure that is essential for 10–15% of the population turns out to be necessary for around 40% and beneficial for 100%.[6] Dropped kerbs are indispensable for wheelchair users, but they also help parents with pushchairs, delivery workers, cyclists, and tourists with luggage. Well-lit, wide, unobstructed pavements serve people with visual impairments - and also women travelling alone at night. At-grade pedestrian crossings are accessible to people who cannot manage stairs - and also to everyone who would otherwise dash across a busy road rather than climb a bridge that adds distance and difficulty to their journey.
We have seen this clearly in Tbilisi, where city authorities replaced around 40 pedestrian bridges with at-grade crossings. The bridges had been so inconvenient that many people chose to run across live traffic instead, with fatal consequences in at least one recorded case. The new crossings stop traffic and allow people to cross safely and with dignity. The results have been immediate and measurable.
Pedestrian bridges and subways are a striking example precisely because they are so often proposed as road safety solutions. In practice, they frequently function as the opposite, shifting risk onto those least able to manage it, while giving drivers an unobstructed road that encourages higher speeds. Dark subways are avoided, particularly by women, for reasons of personal safety. Steps and ramps exclude people with disabilities, older people, and anyone carrying something bulky or heavy. And the perceived safety of separating pedestrians from traffic is often undermined when people choose the shorter and faster route across the road.
The connection between these issues - gender, disability, and road safety - is not incidental. They share a common root: infrastructure and systems designed without adequate consideration of who will use them, and how.
The starting point is better data. Without gender-disaggregated, locally relevant road safety data, it is impossible to understand the scale of the problem or to make the case for change. Globally, the evidence base is improving, but significant gaps remain, including in the Eastern Partnership region. Collecting this data is not a technical exercise; it is a prerequisite for effective advocacy.
Beyond data, meaningful progress requires genuine collaboration between civil society organisations working across different sectors (see our Editorial on the role of CSOs in road safety), between planners and the communities they serve, and between decision-makers and the people most affected by their decisions. Women, people with disabilities, young people, and other marginalised road users must have a real seat at the table in transport planning processes, not as a consultation exercise but as a substantive part of how decisions are made.
And finally, the physical design of streets and transport networks needs to reflect the full range of people who use them. Infrastructure that links up meaningfully, that is consistent and reliable across a network, that prioritises the pedestrian experience, and that is planned around observed travel patterns rather than assumed ones is what makes a transport system work for everyone. A cycle lane that cannot be safely reached, a bus stop placed away from where people actually need to go, a pavement that disappears at a junction: these are not minor inconveniences. They are the everyday barriers that determine whether a city is liveable for all its residents or only for some of them.
On International Women's Day, it is worth stating clearly that gender equity and road safety are not separate agendas. Dismantling structural barriers means examining every system that shapes women's lives, including the streets they walk, the transport they rely on, and the infrastructure that too often fails them. Safer streets are a public health goal, a sustainability goal, and a gender equity goal. Progress on one depends on progress on all three.
