Unleashing Fun: How Girls Celebrate with Style and Spirit!

Frequently in the discussions and publications concerning public transit, traditional working hours receive considerable attention. With a focus on working hours, journeys for salary labor, attending critical engagements like medical appointments, and commuting to educational institutions generally drive the usage of transit systems. This overlooks other factors influencing public transit use, such as recreational activities or non-standard working hours. To provide a more intricate understanding of mobility in urban settings, a collaborative study conducted by scholars at MIT and Morgan State University evaluates gender distinctions in nighttime transit travel for leisure pursuits within the Boston Metropolitan Area.

The research utilizes household travel survey data from Massachusetts collected during 2010-11 to explore variations in trip-taker demographics, their preferred modes of transportation, as well as the types of activities and their duration that motivated their choice to take a trip outside of conventional working hours. Their results reveal a dependence on single occupancy vehicles and a gender-based difference in typical leisure activities while indicating potential avenues for policies and transportation designs that could enhance equity, vibrancy, and economic outcomes through nighttime transit services.  

“With the rise of hybrid working arrangements, I anticipate witnessing an increase in travel trends centered on leisure and social gatherings. Besides the mobility for care-related trips, research on travel demand behavior and transit planning has seldom examined how individuals navigate cities for recreational purposes. These types of trips are essential yet insufficiently explored, and they contribute to productivity, creativity, and overall quality of life – indeed, I believe they are what make life worth living! I was motivated to investigate this subject through my own experiences and those of others utilizing public transit for leisure in various Southeast Asian cities, and I aimed to discover whether similar trends existed in a city like Boston, which is rich in transit options compared to other US urban centers. Simultaneously, there remains a significant amount of car ownership in the metropolitan area. If we genuinely aspire to encourage individuals to minimize dependency on private vehicles and transition to transit usage, we must contemplate how transit can facilitate a wide array of trips at any hour, not just work-related – such as visiting friends and family or arriving at and departing from restaurants, bars, or theaters in the evening, when safety becomes a more prominent concern,” states Bianchi Dy, co-leader of the research team. 

Dy is a Master’s student in City Planning at MIT, focusing on the integration and enhancement of urban planning and design standards through data and computational techniques. Gregory Newmark, another co-leader of the research team, is an Associate Professor at Morgan State University. His research emphasizes leveraging data to foster healthier, more equitable, and happier communities, particularly regarding mobility behavior, public transportation, sustainability, and urban science. 

A digital version of the team’s 2025 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting presentation poster, When Girls Just Want to Have Fun, How Do They Go?, can be accessed here.