In order to raise awareness on particularly gender disparities during their exercise of the right to be mobile and participate in the city, this work aims to examine the associations between the frequency of the usage of on-demand transport services and particular factors related to gender-based inequalities such as sexual harassment, gender-based violence and fear, crime rates, social class and individual practices to contribute with broader debates on gendered social exclusion and inaccessibility. While intersecting concepts underpinning transport-related social exclusion (TRSE) and access to the city, this study uses official quantitative data, including attitudinal preferences, from the cities of Bogota and Mexico City provided by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as part of their broader research on ride-hailing and Social Exclusion.

Ride-hailing services have grown ingrained in the urban mobility landscapes of cities all over the world. Uber alone has completed over 10 billion rides across 10,000 cities in a decade (Uber, 2018; Uber, 2020). During this time, ride-hailing players have revolutionized the transport sector by disrupting the taxi industry, public transport systems and labour protection laws. Despite its growing popularity in cities, many unknowns about ride-hailing’s impact make it difficult to regulate. The case of Uber, which faced regulatory hurdles and briefly ceased operations in Colombia in January 2020 (Feiner, 2020), a first for any LAC nation, exemplifies this. In the context of concerns about urban sustainability and social equity, Oviedo et al (2020) emphasize that as this new mode becomes more popular in LAC, assessing its impact becomes all the more crucial for local authorities and transport planning organizations. Scholars argue that research on this topic has been limited due to under-conceptualisation (Gomez‐Morantes et al, 2021), knowledge gaps regarding emerging markets (Granada et al, 2018) and a lack of focus on distributional perspectives and social disparities (Oviedo et al, 2021). Moreover, disagreements about the effects of ride-hailing and the resulting regulatory inconsistencies stem mainly from a lack of adequate data. Due to the novelty of the service and the unwillingness of its companies to disclose information due to privacy concerns, it has been difficult to measure the impact of ride-hailing. As a result, most of what is known comes from small survey samples, such as Henao's (2018). To overcome these limitations, this dissertation leverages one of the largest ride-hailing focused datasets made available by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) which captures responses from over 4000 LAC respondents. By placing ride-hailing within the well-established transport related social exclusion literature, this timely research adds much-needed information to the field of transport, specifically to the sub-discipline of shared mobility. The dissertation recognizes the complexity of framing the various dimensions of Transport Related Social Exclusion and analyzing all these effects in one study. However, at the core, under this theoretical framework, the research objective is to examine the potentially restrictive nature of ride-hailing for residents in LI neighbourhoods in Bogotá, Colombia. Ride-Hailing, Transport Equity, Transport Related Social Exclusion, Urban Mobility, Latin America