Mining female commuter typology, commute cost and labor supply in Riyadh: a space-time investigation based on e-hail taxi data

Before 2018, Saudi Arabia was the only country that enshrined a legal prohibition on women driving. However, little has been done to empirically investigate the associations between female commute cost and labor supply before the driving ban was lifted. This is largely due to the data scarcity on disaggregated-level female mobility patterns and travel behaviors. To fill the gap, this study deployed a space-time framework to identify suspicious female roundtrip commuters whose majority of taxi trips were between home and workplaces based on about one million e-hailing O-D data from female passengers in Riyadh. Her commute costs (i.e., distance, time, out-of-pocket cost, commute burden) and labor supply information (i.e., work hours, skill-job mismatch) were then inferred by supplementing neighborhood-level Census data and open data on major female employers. Overall, female riders had significantly longer travel distance/time and higher out-of-pocket costs than male passengers. Though no causal statements were made, higher commute burden was related to lower Saudi female employment rate and longer working hours, while lower burden was associated with higher skill-job mismatch in terms of over-education, confirming our hypotheses that well-educated Saudi females might 1) choose not to work, 2) extend hours of work to offset travel costs, or 3) switch to nearby jobs with lower wage and skill-job match. Therefore, females’ restricted mobility became a non-negligible job market friction. Meanwhile, females worked in the manufacturing sector could pay more than 75% of her wages on e-taxis, implying a sector-specific spatial mismatch issue. Our findings provide a useful baseline on the female travel cost and labor supply situations before the lifting of driving ban. It enables comparative studies to understand the impacts of ongoing women empowerment for mobility and employment autonomy. The space-time framework also provides useful references for future research when gender-specific travel behavior surveys are not feasible.