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In Nigeria, family is most important. It is usually made up of people who are related by blood, marriage, or adoption. Family plays a major role in influencing the use of psychoactive substances by adolescents and can help protect the adolescents or the reverse. Family differs in so many ways, for example, in the extent of support for education, children’s upbringing, monitoring peer activities among others. There are certain family situations where values are not being instilled, parental and social guides are not in place to ensure that children are well brought up. High levels of economic hardship (such as unemployment), family conflict, poor communication skills, domestic violence, parental divorce or single parenting, death, parental criminal activity among others disrupt parenting which reduces adolescents’ emotional security and reinforce the use of aggression and interpersonal hostility which in turn expose them to certain risks of psychoactive substance use. It is in this context that this chapter examines how family factors affect the use of psychoactive substances among adolescents in Nigeria. Empirical investigations were carried out through a review of literature search. The findings show family factors having a significant influence on the use of psychoactive substances among adolescents in Nigeria. In addition, proper parental relationship through training of moral values, teachings of the immense danger attributed to the use of psychoactive substances through counseling and communication skills could serve as a control measure that will discourage the future use and thus improve the health, safety and the general well-being of the adolescents.

Male identity and motor-mobility are deeply intertwined across much of the globe but nowhere is this relationship more strongly in evidence than in Africa. On the African continent, road transport work has always appeared, in essence, to be a masculinist domain: it is almost always men who are seen driving commercial vehicles, regulating loading activities in the lorry and bus parks (and now the motorcycle stages), undertaking roadside repairs, vulcanising tyres, and even serving fuel. This does not mean that women are entirely absent from the sector, but their place is commonly peripheral – constrained at least in part by hegemonic norms of femininity that shape women’s self-understandings. They typically supply cooked food, alcohol and sex to male road workers, or take on back-breaking work in the lowliest – and lowest paid – of porterage roles, head-loading goods along the road, carrying materials when assisting men making and mending roads, or loading vehicles. From time to time, women have aspired to infiltrate more lucrative areas of the sector, especially through ownership of commercial vehicles, but their closer engagement with the oily nuts and bolts of the road business remains rare.

This chapter draws on a wide range of published and grey literature and some personal ethnographic research from a diversity of African countries and contexts to examine women’s efforts at engagement in the sector. The discussion spans women’s employment in road transport services (porterage, ticket-selling, taxis, buses, Bus Rapid Transit [BRT] and commercial trucks) and the road construction that supports transport service operations (engineering, planning, contracting, and labouring). The authors pay particular attention to the factors that so often continue to impede women’s progress in these arenas. The concluding section first references COVID-19 and its detrimental impacts on women transport workers’ jobs, then considers the potential for overcoming current barriers and promoting a more central space for women in transport operations, a development that could provide significant benefits across the sector.

Freight and logistics are central to everyday life. These sectors depend on a variety of workers, and the types of work have changed rapidly with shifts towards e-commerce and changes to urban logistics. Yet a particular form of masculinity dominates imaginaries of the sector, especially freight transport. Such imaginaries rest on ideas of freight drivers requiring (physical) strength, toughness, flexibility, mobility and driving competencies, as well as being unencumbered by caring responsibilities. In the UK, and elsewhere, the freight sector, and particularly driving-related freight jobs, are heavily reliant on male workers. The freight driver shortage crisis in the UK has been referred to as a ‘ticking timebomb’, emerging from a reliance on white male workers, the majority of whom are over the age of 50. A ‘diversifying’ agenda has been the primary response to this crisis, which has largely focussed on increasing the number of female drivers. At the same time, however, little has been done to address issues associated with pay and conditions for freight workers. In this chapter, the authors examine gendered freight work across three themes: changing mobilities of work, ‘flexibilisation’ of freight working practice and automation of freight vehicles.

This chapter focusses on the use of immobility policies and practices in the Asia-Pacific nations of East and South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand to respond to COVID-19 across 2020–2021. Concepts from the field of mobilities studies are adopted for analysis. Transport system managers in the region have increasingly played roles either limiting movement, adjusting transport supply, creating proscribed ‘mobilities passageways’ for travellers that present COVID-risk, and encouraging or mandating passenger compliance with other pandemic measures. The series of immobility policies and practices used at the international, intra-national and local scales are analysed. Transport agency responses differed greatly including whether to retain levels of public transport supply or reduce them in line with falling patronage. A summary of known travel behaviour impacts is then discussed, using available data from government travel portals, and, for Shanghai, Brisbane and Hong Kong, a range of road volumes, public transport boardings, micro-mobility, bicycle and pedestrian counts. There are indications that a series of socio-technical transitions have occurred, such as increased work-from-home, new social practices around walking, increased demands for roads to provide place functions (as opposed to movement functions) and the role of cycling and micro-mobility as liberating technologies in a world of increased control and fear of contagion. Transport agencies have harnessed some of these changes in attitudes and societal needs, using radical institutional responses such as pop-up bike lane trials and other ‘tactical urbanism’ approaches, to adapt their cities to life during and after the pandemic.

COVID-19 has changed the landscape within which we travel. Working from Home (WFH) in many countries has increased significantly, and while it was often forced on a society it has delivered some unintended positive consequences associated in particular with the levels of congestion on the roads and crowding on public transport. With a likelihood of some amount of WFH continuing as we move out of the active COVID-19 period, the question being asked is whether the post-COVID-19 period will return the pre-COVID-19 levels of traffic congestion and crowding. In many jurisdictions, there is a desire to avoid this circumstance and to use WFH as a policy lever that has appeal to employees, employers and government planning agencies in order to find ways of better managing future levels of congestion and crowding. This chapter uses the ongoing research and surveys we have been undertaking in Australia since March 2020 to track behavioural responses that impact on commuting and non-commuting travel, and to examine what the evidence tells us about opportunities into the future in many geographical settings to better manage congestion and crowding. This is linked to a desire by employers to maintain WFH where it makes sense as a way of not only supporting sustainability charters but also the growing interest in a commitment to a broader social licence. We discuss ways in which WFH can contribute to flattening peaks in travel; but also the plans that some public transport authorities are putting in place to ensure that crowding on public transport is mitigated as people increasingly return to using public transport. Whereas we might have thought that we now have plenty of public transport capacity, this may not be the case if we want to control crowding, and more capacity may be needed which could be a challenge for trains more than buses given track capacity limits. We conclude the chapter by summarising some of the positive benefits associated with WFH, and the implications not just for transport but for society more widely.

This chapter introduces the scope and contents of Women, Work and Transport. The situation concerning the extent of women’s participation in the transport workforce worldwide is detailed and the challenges facing women transport workers in different world regions and transport modes is highlighted. The chapter describes the structure, contents and key contributions of each of the 21 chapters that are presented in this volume and signposts readers to key material. Although the chapter necessarily highlights some of the many challenges women face when working in highly masculine cultures, this wide-ranging international collection of evidence of the experiences of women transport professionals in both the Global North and Global South also provides numerous suggestions for how employers, governments and trade unions can address, and ultimately overcome, gender segregation in transport. The chapters acknowledge the dramatic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the transport sector, while also pointing to some of the opportunities provided by new greener forms of transport and automation, as well as noting the risks for women workers.