In preparation for a recent meeting at Universidad de los Andes with the Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Vial - ANSV, I examined the report Siniestralidad vial de mujeres en Colombia. Un análisis con enfoque de género (ANSV, 2024), analyzing road traffic fatalities among women in Colombia. Although this topic isn’t at the core of my doctoral research, which focuses on gender, infrastructure, and care, the findings resonated deeply. They offered a timely reminder that road safety is not just a technical concern; it’s a matter of justice, care, and everyday survival for many, especially women caregivers.
Cover of the report Siniestralidad vial de mujeres en Colombia: Un análisis con enfoque de género (ANSV, 2024). Source: Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Vial – Observatorio Nacional de Seguridad Vial.
The report revealed a stark reality: between 2015 and 2022, road traffic incidents were the leading cause of violent death among women in Colombia, surpassing both homicides and suicides. Most of these women died not as drivers but as passengers or pedestrians, a pattern that reflects deeply entrenched gender roles and unequal access to safer, autonomous modes of mobility. And yet, this isn’t a conversation we’re having loudly enough. Why is the most common form of violent death among women still so invisible in public debate and policy?
However, this pattern is beginning to shift. A growing number of women are now riding motorcycles, both for work and for care-related travel. While this trend may signal increased autonomy and flexibility, it also reveals new layers of vulnerability. According to El País, a woman motorcyclist dies every 12 hours in Colombia. Between 2019 and 2023, female motorcycle deaths increased by 54%, outpacing the rise in male fatalities. Many of these women lacked proper training, licensing, or access to adequate safety gear. Others were drawn to motorcycles because of their affordability, efficiency, and even symbolic value, yet they ride in conditions of structural neglect. In the words of Ana María Puentes (El País, 2024), women are less skilled, but that they are riding the most dangerous vehicle in the country under the most precarious conditions.
What’s more, the 2024 Bogotá gender and mobility study, Caracterización de los patrones de movilidad en Bogotá con enfoque de género e interseccional (Sensata, 2024), revealed that many women perceive motorcycles not only as a practical option, but as a safer alternative to public transport. Women reported choosing motorcycles to reduce their exposure to sexual harassment, invasive stares, and physical proximity with aggressors, all common occurrences on buses, stations, and sidewalks. In this sense, the turn to motorcycles is not simply a matter of preference or independence. It is a strategy of risk management in a city where moving through public space means constantly weighing threats of gender-based violence.
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This growing trend underscores the urgent need to question not only who dies on the road, but under what conditions people move, and who gets the training, infrastructure, and protection needed to survive. It also reveals the paradox of mobility for women in patriarchal cities: the more control women gain over how they move, the more they are held responsible for managing their own safety, often with few real options.
Yet the ANSV’s report stops short of deeper interrogation. It remains mostly descriptive, without engaging with the structural roots of risk or proposing transformative interventions. What’s missing is a conceptual leap, an understanding that road safety is not gender-neutral, and that the design of mobility systems has historically centered on male, able-bodied, productive users. We need more than statistics. We need questions: Why are women disproportionately killed as passengers? Why is caregiving travel invisible in safety strategies? And why are risk and speed still valorized in masculine driving cultures?
To expand the conversation, I turned to two additional sources: a report from Spain’s national traffic agency and a regional study from the Ibero-American Road Safety Observatory. Both documents emphasize the need to move away from androcentric transport planning. They call for a shift in paradigm, from car-centered systems to people-centered mobility. They also suggest reimagining safety itself: not just as the absence of crashes, but as the presence of dignity, inclusion, and freedom from fear.
These perspectives remind us that masculinity, as currently constructed, is often tied to risk-taking, control, and a disregard for vulnerability, traits that are embedded in traffic behavior, vehicle design, and even policy language. Meanwhile, the voices of women and caregivers are still largely missing from planning tables, where crucial decisions about infrastructure, enforcement, and investment are made.
To deepen this analysis, I find it useful to draw on the concept of petro-masculinity, proposed by political theorist Cara Daggett. Petro-masculinity refers to the entanglement of fossil fuel systems with patriarchal and authoritarian structures, particularly in how fossil fuels support identities of dominance, control, and violence. Daggett argues that fossil fuels are not just energy sources, they are symbols and instruments of a gendered order that privileges toughness, rigidity, and explosive power, often associated with masculine identity.
When translated into the domain of mobility, this framework helps us understand why speed, individualism, and engine-powered vehicles (especially motorcycles and cars) have been historically coded as masculine, while walking, caregiving mobility, or public transport are feminized or devalued. The exaltation of risk and speed is not accidental; it’s part of a social imaginary where dominating the road becomes a way of reaffirming masculine power, even at the cost of one’s own safety, or the safety of others.
Seen from this angle, road violence becomes a gendered and systemic issue, not just a problem of individual behavior. The motorized dominance that defines most cities is, in many ways, a material expression of petro-masculinity, one that punishes slower, more collective, and relational forms of movement. It is no coincidence that in a country like Colombia, women’s efforts to reclaim autonomy through motorcycles occur in a context where infrastructure, licensing systems, and enforcement regimes still privilege the dominant, petro-masculine subject.
In short, the conversation around road safety must be reframed. It’s not just about better signals, stricter laws, or smarter cars. It’s about asking: Who moves? How? And with what dignity?
When we center care, equity, and intersectionality, we not only imagine safer mobility, we challenge the very structures that normalize risk, invisibilize caregiving, and replicate gendered injustice on our streets. Feminist approaches remind us that transforming infrastructure is not only about technical innovation, but about redistributing power, recognizing labor, and protecting life.
References
1. Agencia Nacional de Seguridad Vial. (2024). Siniestralidad vial en mujeres en Colombia. Un análisis con enfoque de género. ANSV.
2. Col·lectiu Punt 6 & OISEVI. (2023). La seguridad vial desde la perspectiva de género: análisis y recomendaciones para políticas públicas. Observatorio Iberoamericano de Seguridad Vial. https://www.oisevi.org/
3. Daggett, C. (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817
4. Dirección General de Tráfico. (2022). La seguridad vial con perspectiva de género. Gobierno de España. https://www.dgt.es/
5. El País. (2024, noviembre 4). Las mujeres que se suben a la moto en Colombia corren más peligro: una fallecida cada 12 horas. https://elpais.com/america-colombia/2024-11-04/las-mujeres-que-se-suben-a-la-moto-en-colombia-corren-mas-peligro-una-fallecida-cada-12-horas.html
6. Sensata & Secretaría Distrital de Movilidad. (2024). Caracterización de los patrones de movilidad en Bogotá con enfoque de género e interseccional. Bogotá.
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