Theme Issue: Grounding legal geography

EPC: Politics and Space

2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–19
Breathing in and out: Domestic © The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/23996544221077810
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pollution in Bogota’s public
transportation system

Valentina Montoya-Robledo 
Law School, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia

Laura Iguavita
The World Bank, Bogota, Colombia

Segundo López
WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, Bogota, Colombia

Abstract
More than 150,000 low-income women perform domestic work in Bogotá, Colombia. They are captive
public transit commuters, traveling from low-income to high and middle-income residential sites for
work. However, the transport system between these neighborhoods suffers from missing links. Hence,
domestic workers spend more time commuting to work relative to any other urban worker in Bogotá.
Moreover, the system affects domestic workers’ overall health conditions, where they inhale high doses
of air contaminants. In the face of laws and policies in place perpetuating patriarchy, violence, and
segregation, these poor and often-racialized women face a conundrum: they must ensure their live-
lihood facing pervasive health hazards. This paper analyzes the lived realities of domestic workers in
terms of their commutes and the environmental hazards they face, depicting grounded legal geography.
Fundamentally, it examines how legally constituted housing markets and related transportation in-
frastructure contribute to highly gendered and class-based geographical divides, placing domestic
workers into the spatial and policy periphery and making their bodies disposable, but obliging them to
negotiate these divides using inadequate and death-delivering transportation infrastructure. Finally, it
reflects on the city’s planning methods that often ignore important gender, social, and economic
considerations. Based on a mixed-methods approach, the paper brings material that is not often placed
together, including a study of exposure to particulate matter, transportation, and legal analysis, de-
centering current ontologies by connecting law, environment, public health, gender, and class divides,
and grounding legal geography on the daily commuting experiences of domestic workers.

Keywords
domestic workers, public transportation system, air pollution, environmental justice, gender equality

Corresponding author:
Valentina Montoya-Robledo, Professor, Law School, Universidad de los Andes, Cra. 1 #18a-12, Bogota 11711, Colombia.
Email: v-montoy@uniandes.edu.co
2 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

Introduction
Constitutional, national, and local legal recognition of the rights to equality (Art. 13), freedom of
movement (Art. 24), health (Art. 49), a healthy environment (Art. 79), public transportation as a
public service (Art. 365 Constitution, Law 105/1993 and Law 310/1996), as well as the Colombian
State’s signature of treaties and international covenants to protect these rights, have done little to
protect the health of female paid domestic workers (hereafter domestic workers) who commute
every day for work.1 Law that constitutes housing markets and related infrastructure, such as
transportation systems, geographically divides the city according to gender and class, placing these
women at the margins. They spend the longest time commuting among all occupations studied in the
city (Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020). In their long trips (70 min on average per trip
based on data from Bogotá’s Mobility Survey- 2015), we show that on average, they inhale 179 µg
of particulate matter (PM) 2.5, which is 67% more than the average daily dose that men inhale
(107 µg) during their commutes. Repeated and extended exposure to toxic particles contributes to
cardiovascular morbidity and mortality (Brook et al., 2010) and increases acute myocardial in-
farction and cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses (Suárez et al., 2014). For example, perpetual
obstructive aspiratory sicknesses (COPDs) are among the leading causes of mortality (Kumar &
Mishra*, 2018). Furthermore, the International Research on Cancer of the World Health Orga-
nization (WHO) classified outdoor air pollution as a human carcinogen (Cohen et al., 2014).
There are more than 150,000 domestic workers in Bogotá. Unfortunately, their rights and their
needs often go unmet. By ignoring these workers’ health needs, which stem from their extended
exposure to air pollution due to inefficient transportation systems, planners and local government
officials reinforce geographic restrictions on low-income women that further marginalize them.
These experts plan through gendered and class lenses, without considering domestic workers’ time
and health needs, causing their segregation from many of the city’s opportunities and treating them
as “disposable” bodies (Wright, 2006). The law obliges domestic workers to negotiate class and
gender geographical divides using inadequate and death-delivering infrastructure: these women
have no choice other than to take public buses every day from the low-income areas where they
afford to live to the high and middle-income residential areas where they work, risking their health
in the process.
Domestic workers are the army of women who allow middle- and high-income families to work,
experience leisure, and devote the time they would use to clean their houses and other activities of
their choosing. The relationship between domestic workers and these families evidences a deep
interdependence (Jirón and Gómez, 2018). Yet, domestic workers face cycles of violence and
segregation, since the armed conflict forcibly displaced many of them (Esguerra et al., 2018). They
also often experience exploitative conditions in their jobs (Osorio Pérez, 2018). They further
experience health hazards, segregation, and violence in the cities. We explore how the laws play a
fundamental role in geographically structuring domestic workers’ harsh commutes and the sub-
sequent health effects in contrast to those of all other commuters.
We start by describing how we understand the law in this paper and its role in helping build a city.
Moreover, we examine the literature on gender and transport, domestic work, and urban informality.
Then we delve into data on exposure to contaminants while commuting and the resulting health
effects. From an interdisciplinary perspective combining legal scholarship with transportation and
environmental engineering, we describe the mixed-methods approach used to evidence domestic
workers’ excessive exposure to contaminants. Next, we reflect on the embodied experiences of this
vast group of women and the health harms they suffer in their daily trips that could become a State-
sanctioned death, grounding legal geography. Finally, we provide conclusions following part of the
environmental justice agenda.
Montoya-Robledo et al. 3

Domestic workers are a massive group of commuters, particularly in the Global South. In Latin
America (LA), one in every five female wage workers is a domestic worker (International Labor
Office, 2021). Often, and tied to the invisibility of paid and unpaid care work (Arango and Molinier,
2011; León, 2013; Pineda Duque, 2010; Pineda, 2006), their commutes are exceptionally long
because transportation planners make choices disregarding their needs by leaving good public
transit out of the high and middle-income residential areas where they work (Montoya-Robledo,
n.d.; Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020). The paper adds to the contemporary literature
on domestic workers’ commutes in the Global South (Buchely and Castro, 2016; Fleischer and
Marin, 2019; Montoya Robledo, 2019; Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020). Likewise, it
engages in the literature on disposable and marginalized bodies through State action—or omission.
It contributes to the existing literature by combining topics and methodologies that are usually kept
apart. By grounding legal geography, it provides a novel analysis of the impact of air pollution on
this population’s health. It further shows how the law helps constitute domestic workers’ reality
based on gendered and classed divides and how it treats their bodies as “disposable” through death-
delivering infrastructure and sexist planning logic.

The legal approach

This paper understands that the law is one of the constitutive forces of human relations with a
significant impact on the real-life of urban dwellers. By law, we mean what is written in the codes
and the way government exercises its power by choosing when, where, and how to implement it -or
not- and how it affects flesh-and-blood people. This understanding of the law draws, first, from the
Legal Realist tradition. Second, we consider that the law necessarily makes decisions connected to
the society it governs (Aber, 2020). Following critical legal scholar Duncan Kennedy and realist
Robert Hale, the law constitutes social power by establishing ground rules for almost every type of
social dispute and behavioral decision (Kennedy, 1991). Furthermore, borrowing elements from
Law and Political Economy, we consider law’s constitutive role in power distribution and its
interrelation with political concerns (Aber, 2020).
In LA, we follow sociolegal scholars Rodrı́guez and Garcı́a-Villegas’ description of Institutional
legal pluralism. It understands that various legal regimes can coexist under the same jurisdiction
because of the State’s selective application of the law. In practice, the same legal norm is applied
differently to diverse groups and persons (Garcı́a-Villegas and Rodrı́guez, 2003: 47). Whether the
State intervenes or not, the reason is not always legal. It neither follows the general interest and the
individual freedoms. It builds on technical, contextual, and political considerations, and yet re-
gardless of these factors, the final decision is a legal one (Garcı́a-Villegas and Rodrı́guez, 2003). In
LA’s urban spaces, the decision to apply the law selectively produces harshly divided spaces of
protection and abandonment, yielding the most unequal region worldwide (Caldeira, 2000). Law is
present by State omission, and the abandoned site or group still responds to the legal regime.
Considering this broad definition of the law connected to the social group it affects, we believe
that the law constitutes cities’ planning and operation. It is not the only force at play but a crucial
one. Our position draws from Gerald Frug’s legal scholarship, emphasizing that the urban fabric
does not result from individual choices alone but from multiple governmental policies that translate
into legal norms (Frug, 1999). Legal rules’ structure markets for cities, including housing markets.
They also create boundaries among cities, markets, the government, unions, and corporations
(Schragger, 2016). Human judgment on where to establish these boundaries precedes this law
(Schragger, 2016). Likewise, city authorities deploy their power both through formal authority and
actual capacity to govern (Schragger, 2016). For this paper, we understand the law encompassing
the choices and the power of authorities, the written law, and the legal effects (by action or omission)
on urban dwellers, as we ground legal geography.
4 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

The literature review

Gender and transport
Studies building on the sexual division of space critique capture the differences between men and
women who commute in the urban space worldwide. Although men often travel in a pendulum
motion, from their homes to their jobs and back; women frequently travel with dependents and
engage in trip chaining—they make more trips tied to their familial responsibilities due to their
gender roles as primary caregivers (Hasson and Polevoy, 2011; Jeff & McElroy, n.d.; Pickup, 1984;
Queirós, Margarida, Marques da Costa, 2012; Sánchez De Madariaga, 2013). These patterns in-
crease their commuting expenses and the number of trips they execute (Lecompte and Bocarejo,
2017). Moreover, the law linked to transportation planning operates in a gendered and classed
fashion that causes inefficient and expensive commutes for women.
From a gender perspective, mobility is both a social practice and social relation; thus, mobility
and social structures are mutually constituted (Jirón and Singh, 2017). Since women are a diverse
group of commuters, factors such as their income, residence and job location, bodies, role as
caregivers, occupation, educational level, and interdependent decisions to travel based on multiple
individual and contextual circumstances must be analyzed when planning transportation (Chant,
2013; Jirón and Cortés, 2011; Law, 1999; Mejia-Dorantes, 2017; Montoya Robledo, 2019; Rivera,
2010; Sang et al., 2011).
Studies have been conducted on the mobility experiences of women in LA. For example, Soto
has written on how women in Mexico City experience gender-based violence, in addition to
detailing their strategies regarding space usage and the familial responsibilities they perform while
commuting (Soto Villagrán, 2013, 2019). Buchely and Castro have also researched informal transit
in Cali, Colombia, describing urban spaces as social constructions where gender power dynamics
operate and impact the geographic experience in a differentiated manner (Buchely and Castro,
2016).
In Bogotá, transport scholars show that women travel less frequently and for shorter distances
than men, but their trips take more time (Lecompte and Bocarejo, 2017). Similar to international
literature findings, women’s commuting characteristics directly relate to the gender roles that make
them the primary caregivers inside their household (Lecompte and Bocarejo, 2017: 4248). The
travel patterns also reflect women’s socio-spatial status. Although higher-income women often live
closer to the Central Business Districts (CBD) and thus have higher chances of getting the job they
want, lower-income women tend to reside further away from desired opportunities1 (Lecompte and
Bocarejo, 2017: 4250).

Domestic work and urban informality

Domestic workers lie at the intersection of labor and urban informality. Their limited earnings for
the highly informal jobs they perform compounds the difficulties they face in accessing housing as
very low-income urban dwellers. The International Labor Office suggests that while domestic
workers represent 0.8% of the total employment in developed countries, the number goes up to 7.6%
in LA (International Labor Office, 2013). Furthermore, 95% of people who perform domestic work
are women, making it a highly feminized occupation. For example, in Colombia, there are more than
700,000 domestic workers (DANE, 2018). Ethnographic studies on domestic workers’ labor rights
in LA revolve mainly around the complex, emotional, and hierarchical relationships between
employers and domestic workers (Brites, 2000, 2013; Gorban, 2012; Gorbán and Tizziani, 2018;
Osorio Pérez, 2018; Tizziani, 2011); care chains and migration to the Global North (Ehrenreich and
Hochschild, 2002; Killias, 2018; Montoya-Robledo, 2011); and collective action and unionization
Montoya-Robledo et al. 5

to ensure these rights (Acciari, 2016; León, 2013; Maich, 2014; Montoya, 2019; Osorio Pérez,
2018; Tizziani, 2011).
As Melissa Wright described in “Disposable Women,” female factory workers in Mexico and
China remain disposable to maintain the productivity and competitiveness of the industry (Wright,
2006). Although American men make-up the head and the eyes, Mexican women make-up the arms
and the hands, reinstating the gendered and racialized subjects essential for the idea of “progress” to
occur (Wright, 2006). Wright also refers explicitly to how managers of these companies described
working women as “brainless bodies” (Wright, 2001). She further connected these production
bodies to the hundreds of murdered and discarded female bodies in northern Mexico to show them
as a waste from the corporate complex (Wright, 2006). She brings in the myth of “disposability,”
how it materializes in death and torture, and how it hides value production within capitalism
(Wright, 2001, 2006). Wright demonstrates how these low-income Mexican women become
nobody’s concern in the public sphere, in addition to being considered incomplete humans, resulting
in the State and society ignoring the violence inflicted upon them. Domestic workers in Bogotá are
similarly dehumanized both at work and in the city.
With recent decades’ rapid urbanization process in LA, most domestic workers shifted from
living inside their employers’ households to living in their own homes with their families (Brites,
2013; Huyette, 1994). This shift combines with large LA cities’ urban segregation where, first, high
and middle-income and low-income residential neighborhoods are often geographically segregated,
and domestic workers are bound to live in the city’s outskirts. By incentivizing urban developers to
buy cheaper terrains for lower-income housing in the city’s extreme periphery and then inefficiently
planning bus routes and proper streets in these areas, the law constitutes these segregated housing
markets and the deficient public transportation that connects them to the city. As in the United
States, cities often “… make decisions that benefit the interests of landowners and developers
because cities depend on them to stimulate the local economy. […] [T]hese decisions not only
impose substantial costs, such as displacement, on others in the population but are hard for those
adversely affected to overturn” (Frug, 1999: 148). Additionally, high and middle-income residential
sites lack proper public transportation (Montoya-Robledo, 2020). Despite inadequate pedestrian
infrastructure, domestic workers must walk long distances in these residential sites. These factors
account for domestic workers’ excessively long commutes.
Low-income women are the primary users of Bogotá’s public transportation (Moscoso et al.,
2020). Insufficiently integrated fares within an integrated transportation system like Bogotá’s
impacts domestic workers because most travel daily to different neighborhoods for work (Oviedo
and Titheridge, 2016: 159). Ethnographic accounts of domestic workers commuting in Bogotá have
reflected on their subjective experiences (Fleischer and Marin, 2019). A mixed-methods study
described domestic workers’ expensive trips in Bogotá (Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez,
2020).

Air quality and public transportation

The increasing urbanization of cities poses a challenge to transport systems, as they try to keep up
with the growing demand for services (Boisjoly et al., 2020). Cities often rely on aging, fossil fuel-
based vehicles that contribute to air pollution to meet this demand (Johanssona et al., 2017), as the
high cost and inaccessibility of vehicles that run on renewable energy are prohibitive (Li and Loo,
2014). A standard indicator of air pollution is PM, a mixture of solid and liquid organic or inorganic
particles suspended in the air (World Health Organization, 2018). Given its physical and chemical
characteristics, exposure to PM represents a risk to human health, especially particles with an
aerodynamic diameter of 10 micros (PM10) or less (PM2.5 or ultrafine particles). PM2.5 is
breathable and can reach the lungs’ alveolar region (Thabethe et al., 2014).
6 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

PM concentration correlates with adverse health effects on humans at concentrations found on

traffic corridors (Kumar and Mishra*, 2018). Chronic exposure to high PM levels closely links to an
increase in respiratory problems, hospital admissions, and mortality; and short-time exposure to
peak concentrations can also relate to adverse health impacts (Odekanle et al., 2016), including
cardiovascular and respiratory effects (Environmental Protection Agency, 2017).
Emission inventories in urban areas suggest that motor vehicles are the primary PM source at an
ambient level. In Bogotá, the Decennial Plan for Air Decontamination established that mobile
sources are responsible for 1400 +- 400 tons/year of PM compared to 1100 +- 120 tons/year that
result from stationary sources. In the case of transport, public buses account for the most significant
share of PM emissions (39%), followed by freight vehicles (33%) and motorcycles (21%)
(Secretarı́a Distrital De Ambiente, 2010). Traditional public transportation and freight vehicles
operating with diesel engines produce the most substantial emissions of PM2.5.
Although most adverse health effects are associated with ambient air pollution, it is worth
studying the effects of pollutants in microenvironments as people spend significant time in confined
spaces, at work, at home, or in transit. Travelers inside different vehicles experience high exposure
to pollutants due to air intakes’ proximity to exhaust emissions, which may contribute to a sub-
stantial fraction of the total daily exposure (Johanssona et al., 2017; Odekanle et al., 2016).2 Studies
comparing the exposure level on different transportation modes have concluded that motorists and
public transit commuters have higher exposure levels than cyclists and pedestrians (Cepeda et al.,
2017; Morales et al., 2017).

Methodology
Data comes from three primary sources. First, we use Bogotá’s Mobility Survey (2015), with a
confidence level of 95% and confidence intervals of 0.73% for the whole area studied and up to 6%
for each study domain. It includes data on 28,213 households and more than 147,000 trips (District
Mobility Secretariat of Bogotá, 2015). We calculated the average daily individual travel times per
transportation mode per gender and per occupation. Our analysis only included weekday trips made
with an origin or destination in Bogotá. We estimated a statistical test for identifying significant
differences in travel times, as the sample varies for each mode and person’s occupation. To have
statistically significant differences in travel times and, thus, in exposure times, we estimated
differences in inhaled dose for female domestic workers versus women vs. and men, by calculating
the time spent on different transportation modes and the mass concentration of PM2.5 found on
different transportation modes. We also estimated the number of trips by each mode to analyze PM
exposure by population studied, in addition to the individual analysis.
Second, we took the PM2.5 concentration for each transportation mode from a previous study
conducted in Bogotá by Morales et al. (2017), measuring the PM2.5 exposure concentration in
arterial corridors for the leading transportation modes.
The inhalation rate indicates the air volume that a person breathes in during a unit of time (l/min)
in comparison to the amount of PM2.5 inhaled by a person. The potential inhaled dose of a
commuter i during a trip on a transport mode j, Dij (µg) is measured with the exposure concentration
Cji (µg/m3), the inhalation rate that corresponds to the most common activity for each transport
mode IRj (m3/min) and the exposure time of the commuter on a specific transportation mode Δtij (h).
The inhalation rate associated with each activity level was selected from the EPA’s Exposure Factor
Handbook - Table 6.17 (U.S. EPA, 2011), while the exposure time is equal to the travel time
calculated on Bogotá’s Mobility Survey (2015). (See equation (1))

Dij ¼ Cji IRj Δtij (1)

Montoya-Robledo et al. 7

The total dose DTot

ij (µg) is associated with the average ambient air pollution concentration of
PM2.5, Caip (µg/m3) monitored in Bogotá in 2015. The background inhalation rate, IRbg (m3/min),
is assumed to be a passive level of physical activity during the day for all commuters and tmax (h)
corresponds to the remaining time of the day not spent commuting

DTot


ij ¼ Dij þ Caip IRbg tmax Δtij (2)

Third, we conducted more than 20 semi-structured interviews and participant observation with
domestic workers and 60 semi-structured interviews with experts and public officials. Fieldwork
took place between December 2017 and July 2018 in Bogotá, Chı́a, Cajicá, and Soacha. Participant
observation with a domestic worker entailed spending a night at her house and commuting with her
to her job and back home while recording our observations. We coded qualitative data using Atlas.ti
software.
We followed a snowball method to contact interviewees. We selected domestic workers based on
whether or not they had to commute from their homes to their employers’ houses several days per
week. We picked experts and public officials based on their knowledge of urban reality, mobility,
and domestic work. We finalized the interviews after collecting experiences from enough domestic
workers who lived and worked in different areas in the city and concluded that their stories revealed
patterns, some of which will be described below.
As for experts and public officials, we finished our fieldwork when we reached data saturation,
and we had a clear understanding of the explored phenomena. When we conducted fieldwork, we
did not inquire into health issues linked to commuting, so we primarily analyzed quantitative data on
this subject.3
The mixed-methods approach shows both the large numbers and patterns and qualitative in-
formation added by individual stories. It follows New Legal Realism which considers that “research
methods should be chosen to match the kinds of questions being asked […] this methodological
eclecticism inevitably embraces qualitative as well as quantitative work” (Suchman and Mertz,
2010: 562). We changed domestic workers’ names to protect their privacy.

Domestic workers’ commutes

Domestic workers’ commutes are the longest and mostly in public transit
Bogotá’s public transit mainly operates under two systems. The traditional buses that are in-
creasingly disappearing (Garcı́a, 2017; Hidalgo, 2018), and the Transmilenio System (SITP), a mass
transport system composed of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), integrated buses, and one aerial cable. The
city’s goal is for the SITP system to operate Bogotá’s public transit entirely. Initially inaugurated in
2000, politicians and experts portrayed Transmilenio as a miracle mobility solution for the city’s
massive number of commuters. It was said to democratize the system by bringing small bus
companies into business, tackling the penny war,4 moving many passengers, and diminishing the
commuting times at a much lower price than a subway system (Archila, 2017; Sandoval, 2018).
Transmilenio was a global success (Ardila, 2003): “… before Transmilenio there were ten BRT in
the world, and after it, there were 150 BRTs” (Archila, 2017).
Nevertheless, the SITP has only partially benefited domestic workers and other commuters.
Map 1 below shows how BRT trunklines and socioeconomic levels are distributed geo-
graphically. The lowest socioeconomic levels’ sites, located in the South, have inferior access to
BRT trunklines. Due to the geographical location of lower-income areas, people inhabiting these
sites have trips covering the most extended distances and taking the most time. Although in these
areas, integrated buses help them connect to the trunkline. This situation worsens if their
8 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

Map 1. Socioeconomic level and BRT trunkline in Bogotá. Source: Bogotá’s Mobility Secretariat and Planning
Secretariat.

destination is a middle- and high-income area, particularly the highest-income sites in north-
eastern Bogotá, where mass transit access is also poor. Integrated buses are very scarce in these
areas. Therefore, the BRT mainly connects low-income areas with the CBD, based on the
estimated BRT ridership.
Montoya-Robledo et al. 9

Domestic workers spend the most extended time commuting among all occupational categories
in Bogotá (Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020).5 Many of these women are captive
commuters of the two public transportation systems described. Domestic workers’ long commutes
result from the fact that they can only afford to live in very peripheral areas and that the middle- and
high-income residential areas where they work are mainly built for private vehicles and have
inadequate public transit (Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020).
Transportation planners choose not to provide good transit in middle- and high-income residential
neighborhoods. These are job sites for massive groups of low-income workers accessing them daily. It
is a choice that fits into the broad definition of the law proposed by the paper. So, why do we claim this
is a choice? In informal conversations with mobility experts, they explained that they concentrated
most integrated buses that connect to the BRT in low-income areas and less so in middle- and high-
income residential neighborhoods due to limited financial resources. Many also agreed that residents
of high-income neighborhoods would never allow buses to traverse these sites based on classist logic.
This mirrors the situation in cities like Medellı́n and Buenos Aires (“Nordelta: Las Empleadas
Domésticas Denuncian Que No Las Dejan Tomar Combis Con Propietarios,” 2018; Restrepo, 2018;
Román et al., 2018). These decisions are part of the broad understanding of the law described above.
Another piece of evidence revealing that planners and local law-makers choose not to respond to
domestic workers’ urban needs is the most recent project for Bogotá’s Territorial Ordering Plan
(POT)—presented to the city council in September 2021—; the most critical legal planning in-
strument for the city’s future development. One of its main goals is building a city for care work.
Nevertheless, its more than 400 pages explicitly refer to unpaid care work, leaving aside paid care
work, which domestic workers perform (Montoya-Robledo, 2021). It proposes aerial cables close to
areas where domestic workers find their jobs, such as La Calera in northeastern Bogotá. This aerial
cable focuses on tourism and recreation, leaving out the employment purpose, which is fundamental
for domestic workers. It excludes paid domestic work from any commercial, services or residential
classification, ignoring that these women render paid care work in residential sites.
Low-income women’s access to private vehicles—that is, motorcycles and bicycles, which could
significantly improve travel times is minimal (Moscoso et al., 2020). Domestic workers often lack
financial resources to buy a car –which is unlikely the case for low-income populations in the Global
North. When transportation planners decide not to respond to domestic workers’ access needs in their
definition of public transit routes, they deny the right to free locomotion and public transportation
service to hundreds of thousands of low-income women in Bogotá. This omission violates Article 13
of the Constitution, not only for the unequal treatment based on income but because, as a profoundly
disempowered social group, the Colombian Constitutional Court has recognized domestic workers as
subject to superior constitutional protection (Decision T-185, 2016). Also, the law segregates do-
mestic workers by transportation design by not recognizing the difference in access needs—for
instance, from low-income neighborhoods to high-income areas (Montoya-Robledo, n.d.).
It is worth highlighting that although low-income families are segregated as a whole, within these
families, domestic workers are in a particularly burdensome situation. First, adult male family
members have more access to private vehicles such as motorcycles and bicycles than domestic
workers, which improves their commuting times and allows them to take routes where they could
face less PM exposure. Due to their occupations, they could also be commuting to the CBD (better
connected to public transit than residential sites). Second, children often find schools closer to home,
so they do not face the commuting hazards that domestic workers experience.
Moreover, when transportation planners build public transportation systems between low-
income residential neighborhoods in the periphery to the CBD, where most men work, they do
not recognize the gendered character of the work that domestic workers perform, that they are
primarily women and that the sites where they work are commonly located beyond the CBD
boundaries. Thus, they are treating these low-income women more unfairly than they are low-income
10 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

men, following sexist logic of planning. Both accounts of inequality represent how the law that
grounds on choices and constitutes transportation planning instruments operates under gendered and
classed logics, thus socio-spatially segregating domestic workers from the rights and services that
urban areas offer, evidencing how law situates certain people at the margins.
Beyond these broader expressions of gendered inequality, our analysis allows for a more detailed
assessment of gendered transport use, particularly for female domestic workers. As shown in
Figure 5 below, the average time spent daily per transportation mode differs mainly in public transit
trips (BRT and bus in the graph), where domestic workers spend, on average, 30% more time in the
BRT than workers in other occupations. According to domestic worker Chava, who lives in Garcés
Navas in western Bogotá, “I wake up between 3:30 and 4 in the morning. Then, I cook lunch for my
son and myself, and I clean the house. Then, I take a shower and leave home at 6 in the morning […]
I arrive 2 hours later in my employer’s home that is close to the Virrey Park.” She adds, “In the nights
I leave at 6 p.m. and I am usually home by 8:30 or 9 p.m.” (Chava*, 2018). Chela, who lived in
Soacha, on the southern border of Bogotá, spent 3 hours getting home (Chela**, 2018).
Figure 5, showing the average daily time spent on transit in Bogotá, shows that women on
bicycles tend to have shorter trips than men and domestic workers. Domestic workers often do not
cycle (Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020). It could be because they tend to live in
peripheral areas with poor transit accessibility (Guzman et al., 2018) and face higher average travel
times (Moscoso et al., 2020). Also, they often have to travel between steep, high-income, and low-
income residential sites that are not easily accessible by bicycle, as in Medellı́n (Montoya Robledo,
2019). Out of the domestic workers interviewed, only Sally cycled to work because she lived in a
closer, low-income neighborhood in the locality of Suba. She used to leave her house at 6 a.m. and
would arrive at work at 6:50 a.m. She was young and fit, and she considered the bicycle the most
comfortable and fastest mode. Sally explains: “I started cycling to work because once there was a
bus strike and cycling was my only option to get to my job” (Sally*, 2018).
As mentioned, another issue significantly impacting domestic workers’ travel times is that their
destination tends to be a high or middle-income household with poor transit accessibility (Montoya-
Robledo, n.d.; Montoya Robledo and Escovar Alvarez, 2020). For example, Argelia, who works in
the exclusive Santa Ana neighborhood in northeastern Bogotá, explains: “When I get to the seventh
avenue with 109 street, I walk for 15 more minutes to get to my employers’ house” (Argelia**, 2018).
She has to walk because there are no bus routes in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, Mary works in
Chapinero in northeastern Bogotá. In her words: “I get down in the 63 station [of the Transmilenio
system] in the Caracas [avenue] and walk uphill for 20 minutes until I reach my employer’s home”
(Mary**, 2018). Compared to men, domestic workers make almost twice the number of trips by feeder
buses to access BRT stations (District Mobility Secretariat of Bogotá, 2015).
Figure 2 shows the share of trips on a typical day that women, domestic workers, and men
execute. In general, women use more transit than men, but this difference is only significant for trips
made by regular buses (not BRT). Domestic workers’ trips by BRT represent twice the share of
women and men and almost twice by bus. Similarly, women make fewer trips than men in individual
modes; this difference is higher for domestic workers as they only make 2% of their trips on those
modes. Between 2011 and 2015, accessibility decreased for bus users as integrated buses started
operating—the bus system is connected to the BRT, buses are bigger, and their frequency is lower
than traditional buses. As a result, it increased travel times (Guzman et al., 2018), disproportionally
impacting women, and especially domestic workers.
Several domestic workers referred to this change with sorrow. Miriam remembers with nostalgia
taking a traditional bus from the north where she worked, spending around an hour to get back
home, compared to the more than 2 hours she takes now (Miriam*, 2018). For Jimena, the mass
transit system has worsened in the last ten years: “The SITP [integrated buses] are more stressful
than traditional buses. [Traditional] buses came more frequently and would stop everywhere,
Montoya-Robledo et al. 11

Figure 2. Average daily time spent per mode, gender, and occupation analyzed on a typical day. Source: Our
analysis, drawing from Bogotá’s Mobility Survey (2015).

Figure 3. Modal distribution of urban trips on a typical day by gender and occupation analyzed. Source: Own
elaboration based on Bogotá’s Mobility Survey (2015).

[unlike integrated buses with designated stops]. That helped” (Jimena*, 2018). For Sally, trans-
portation has worsened because they have taken away the traditional buses to bring in integrated
buses, which do not cover the entire city. She believes that the system could improve if they brought
in more traditional buses (Sally**, 2018).

Domestic workers’ exposure to particulate matter while commuting

Domestic workers are highly exposed to air contaminants in their time-consuming commutes.
Despite the constitutional, legal, and local regulations on air quality, domestic workers remain at the
margins. Our gender-based comparison between commuters on BRT shows no significant difference
in the inhaled dose in transport microenvironments (excluding ambient air pollution) between men
and women. Both genders inhale between 223 and 225 µg of PM2.5 per day (see Figure 3). Thus,
when comparing domestic workers’ exposure, they can be exposed to up to nearly 300 µg/day.
According to WHO guidelines, this amount is 1.5 times the safe dose (25 µg/m3 of PM2.5) a person
can inhale over 24 h (World Health Organization, 2018)6.
Exposure varies by transportation mode. For example, workers who commute on BRT can take up
five times the amount of PM2.5 of those that walk (56 µg) and 15 times more than those who commute
by car (18 µg). Overall, domestic workers inhale the highest average total daily dose of PM2.5.7
As shown above, domestic workers are regular commuters of mass transportation systems, which
have the highest value of PM2.5 inhalation. When comparing the different total dosages inhaled by
male, female and domestic workers in various transportation modes, public transport presents the
highest value for the latter group of commuters with 411 µg on BRT and 301 µg on the bus (see
12 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

Figure 4. Average daily PM2.5 inhaled dose in multiple transport microenvironments on a typical day in
Bogotá.

Figure 4). This trend is also visible for women’s general population, who are more frequent BRT and
bus riders than men.
There is more air pollution on buses. Since women use public transportation more frequently than
men, and domestic workers more than the general female population, both domestic workers and
women are generally exposed to more air pollution than men. This exposure shows the gender and class
divide in how the law structures the city. When analyzing the specific modal distribution for domestic
workers, not only do they experience the highest PM2.5 inhalation dose on public transport, but three-
quarters of their daily trips are on the BRT or public buses. Therefore, they face more PM2.5 exposure
individually—because of travel times and as a group—because they use more buses than men.
Generally, when commuting by bicycle, men are less exposed to PM2.5, followed by women,
and domestic workers having the highest intake. Trip’s duration can explain this result. Moreover,
Bogotá’s best transportation alternatives are private cars and walking, despite the latter having a
moderate inhalation rate.8
In Figure 4, we compared the proportion between the ambient and in-vehicle inhaled dose based
on the total dose analysis. This comparison explains how the selected transportation mode impacts
the total amount of PM2.5 a person can inhale. For example, domestic workers inhale 70% of their
daily PM2.5 dose while commuting on the BRT system.
The data in Figure 3 and Figure 2 reveal domestic workers inhale, on average, 67% more PM2.5
than men (107 µg), and 57% more than other women (114 µg) due to their higher distribution of trips
by modes with a higher PM concentration. Similarly, women are 7% more exposed on average than
men due to their higher usage of conventional buses. Although the law protects the right to health
and a safe environment and regulates the system to maintain air quality, in practice, domestic
workers are continually breathing in and out high PM2.5 quantities, facing higher chances of
respiratory and cardiovascular diseases in the long term. Moreover, as captive commuters of public
transportation systems, they are tied to buses that operate under a system planned through sexist
logic. Thus, the State violates both their constitutional right to a safe environment and health. The
law embedded in planning instruments and decisions segregates domestic workers.

Figure 5. Estimated total daily PM2.5 inhaled dose per transportation mode used, gender, and occupation on
a typical day in Bogotá.
Montoya-Robledo et al. 13

Domestic workers as “disposable women” through environmental

violence
The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States has coined the slogan “I can’t breathe” to
refer to the police brutality against African-American citizens. It expresses the direct State-
sanctioned death inflicted upon the black body, similar to the study conducted by Pulido and
De Lara (2018) when analyzing environmental justice from a racial perspective in the United States
and the slow violence and death sentences imposed on the racialized bodies (Pulido and De Lara,
2018). However, the marginalization of non-white bodies occurs beyond the American borders. The
“I can’t breathe” slogan also applies to impoverished and often-racialized women who, like the
domestic workers in Bogotá, always have to inhale high PM concentrations in their daily commutes.
Their inescapable need to breathe places domestic workers at a heightened risk of premature death
(Dedoussi et al., 2020; Steingraber, 2010). Violence is obscured in the shape of a State that chooses
to overlook their health needs making their bodies “disposable” (Wright, 2006).
Domestic workers face very high PM2.5 exposure while commuting every day to work. They
have no choice but to travel in public transportation. As a result, they have no choice but to breathe
in air contaminants that are hazardous to their health. Their situation is similar to that described by
Débora Swistun, who explores the question of “the social effects of carrying a pollution landscape in
the body” (Swistun, 2018: 100). She argues how environmental inequality is embodied after her
ethnographic work with low-income residents of villa Inflamable and barrio Porst in Buenos Aires,
who live close to oil plants and suffer from constant health problems (Swistun, 2018). It also fits into
a recent publication on how environmental harms accentuate inequality in Bogotá (Daza et al.,
2021). In connection to the description of Wright above, it is not only through police brutality, the
death penalty, or life imprisonment that a State takes life away from citizens but also through
dehumanization, violence, and constant health hazards caused by precarious environmental con-
ditions that the State has not addressed, thus deciding to overlook the lives of some gendered and
racialized citizens.
Very few domestic workers have access to proper health care, although the Labour Code states
their right to Social Security. The Ministry of Health data revealed that only around 20% had access
to Social Security (Ministerio De Salud, 2017). Therefore, when they suffer different types of
sicknesses due to their daily commutes, they have a limited quality health network to tackle these
contaminants’ negative impacts on their health.
Considering freedom of locomotion is a constitutional right, and transportation is an essential
public service, everyone should have equal access to it. This public transportation should have the
quality to protect commuters’ health and safeguard proper environmental conditions. The primary
purpose of public transportation systems should be connecting people to opportunities and urban
services. Public transportation is essential for domestic workers to access their jobs. Legal ge-
ography is grounded for domestic workers commuting in Bogotá, as we show how the law
constituting public transportation systems is embedded in cultural and social patterns of gender and
class segregation, affecting flesh-and-blood domestic workers and making their bodies “dispos-
able.” Instead of safeguarding domestic workers’ health, transportation systems limit their right to
health because of the contaminants it exposes commuters to.

Conclusion
We grounded legal geography by reflecting on how the law constitutes the highly gendered and
classed commuting experiences of domestic workers in the transportation system of a megacity in
the Global South. Although public transit’s main objective is to enhance users’ opportunities and
access to city services, we showed how sexist and classist logic underlying planning excludes
14 EPC: Politics and Space 0(0)

domestic workers from these services and opportunities and further harms their health. We
demonstrated how domestic workers’ rights to access public transportation on equal terms with
other citizens, equality, health, and a safe environment are continually threatened. Their time-
consuming commutes tie to the disconnection between low and middle- and high-income residential
sites that the law constructs by regulating the housing market and the transportation infrastructure
that connects housing to the rest of the urban fabric. As captive commuters of public transportation,
their commuting times expand because of the segregation between housing sites. The very long
commutes they experience force them to breathe excessive PM2.5 quantities compared to any other
commuter on public transportation or any other transportation mode. Chronic PM2.5 exposure likely
produces health complications. As a highly vulnerable social group, domestic workers often lack proper
healthcare, and thus daily inhaling high doses of PM in public transportation compounds their harms.
Bogotá’s government has recently implemented some electric transport, improving domestic
workers and other commuters’ health conditions. Nevertheless, even if buses produced less PM,
domestic workers’ commutes would continue being extremely long. The difficult conditions re-
garding time and health for domestic workers who commute daily symbolize segregation and
violence that further compound additional vulnerability sources they face and that the Constitutional
Court has recognized. Domestic workers are interdependent with families they work for as they
perform invisible care work, and yet they are “disposable.” Although there are constitutional rights,
national laws, and local regulations in charge of maintaining air quality standards that should protect
them, grounded legal geography shows how this large group of low-income women does not access
these rights.
Segregation and State-sanctioned death are not always direct or evident. Accordingly, domestic
workers live in a city where they have to use public transportation to move if they want to survive,
but this transportation paradoxically creates excessive time and health burdens. Hence, Bogotá
becomes a place where breathing in and out, which is fundamental to life itself, ironically places
them at risk of death. As indigenous activist Kyle Powys Whyte says, environmental and climate
justice must address the present struggles of those affected directly by environmental and climate
disruptions (Whyte, 2018). Domestic workers commuting in LA cities are one of those groups.

Acknowledgments
We want to thank Claudia Adriazola, Natalie Elwell and Ayushi Trivedi from WRI for their contributions,
comments and edits.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Valentina Montoya-Robledo  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8772-4671

Notes
1. Low-income women in LA cities can often afford housing only in the urban periphery. It contrasts with the
postwar pattern for Global North’s cities, where poor people tended to live close to the city centers while
middle- and higher-class residents lived in suburbia.
Montoya-Robledo et al. 15

2. Commuters on private cars experience less exposure to pollutants as they are more isolated from exhaust
emissions than those traveling on BRT or bus.
3. The fieldwork was initially conducted for the dissertation: “Invisible: A Local Government Law Study on
Domestic Workers Commuting in Public Transportation Systems in Bogotá and Medellı́n” (2020) Harvard
Law School.
4. When bus drivers drive recklessly to collect as many passengers as they can in order to earn more money.
5. Besides domestic workers, other women also move to perform paid care (Ex: nurses and doctors who work
in hospitals; or school teachers). Formal care workers can be middle- and upper-class women with greater
access to transportation modes besides public transit. Likewise, the location of their jobs might not be in
residential areas inadequately connected to public transit. In as much as they have a higher income than
domestic workers, these care workers could also choose to live closer to their jobs, diminishing their
commuting times.
6. Assuming the subject has a passive level of physical activity (5.11 l/min) during a 24-h exposure time.
7. We calculated the total dose inhaled per day from the micro-environment and ambient air pollution, as
shown in equation (2). We calculated The PM2.5 ambient concentration for 2015 from Bogotá’s air
quality monitoring system. To calculate the background inhalation dose, we assumed that men, women,
and domestic workers tend to remain on a passive level of physical activity for the remaining time of the
day. We acknowledge that domestic work involves physical activity, but this analysis goes beyond this
paper’s scope. A study on the level of physical activity for domestic workers could compound this paper’s
results.
8. There is an unequal PM2.5 exposure while commuting on different transport modes. Some studies have
shown that the concentration levels of PM2.5 in the bus rapid transit cabin can remain in 500 µg/m3 over
5 min. However, air pollutants’ concentration does not sufficiently describe the personal consequences of
exposing a human body to this contamination level.

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