Tokyo
I always go for primary source data.
A discussion emerged in earlier blogs about the reason that Japanese commute trains now have a women-only car; it is the last car, with a pink sign for women commute riders only between 7:26 and 9:24 am.
To count 33 trains with roughly 36,000 passengers (19 cars were women-only with over 2,500 women riders), I stood on the platform at Yoyogi-Uehara station between the Okakyu line (that had the pink cars) and the Chiyoda subway line.
I was in harms way five times, when the women-only car arrived with passengers transferring across the platform to the subway. Everyone runs, even in high heels. Being in the middle of this rush was like standing in the middle of a womens' roller derby track. An adrenalin high.
The data will not readily support anyone's
theory about pink cars. The pink car is the 10th
car on the train. The composition of the other nine cars grew, in a
straight line, from 5% women at 7:38 to 45% at 8:58. The train cars
were always full. A train car holds 60 people seated, 120 people
crowded and 140 people when railway personnel are available to push
people on. Only one train had 140 people per car, only two pink cars
had 140 women. On the whole, the pink cars have 10% fewer riders than
the remaining 9 cars.
I got to observe an interesting but not defining experiment. In five cases the train with the pink car waited for the subway (plenty of space in each car by then) and I counted the women going from the subway cars 8 and 9 to the waiting car 10, the pink car, on the other track. Roughly 500 women made this transition. Of these, 200 went from car 10 on the subway straight to car 10, women-only on the commute-line. Of the remainder, 100 went from subway cars 8 and 9 to the women-only car and the remaining 200 went to other cars. This is not a defining experiment. The remaining ride on the pink car is less than 10 minutes and most Japanese seek the train car closest to their final exit.
Misc: One out of three women were wearing skirts, local trains had more than 50% women (maybe they live closer to their jobs) and one out of twenty women were wearing designer dresses.
I sacrificed for my readers. What do you make of the data?