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Ask many a driver why she doesn't take public transit, and a good number will cite safety reasons. While I think this safety issue's often overblown by the Prius-driving neighbors in my Santa Monica neighborhood who drive around midday with the excuse that bus stops can be dangerous in the middle of the night, both real and perceived dangers can certainly keep people -- especially women -- from taking to our public transit systems.
After all, what woman would feel safe waiting at a bus stop like the one pictured above? Could bus stops that feel safer get more women taking public transit?
That's what one professor at the University of California, Los Angeles is looking at. Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, a professor of urban planning, recently authored How to Ease Women's Fear of Transportation Environments: Case Studies and Best Practices (PDF, 96 pages), which points out "a mismatch between the expressed needs of women passengers and the types and locations of common safety/security strategies adopted by transit agencies."
In an interview with Grist, Anastasia explains what some of these disconnects are:
Women are much more scared waiting at the bus stop or transit station than within the enclosed space of the transit vehicle. Yet most transportation safety resources are concentrated on the vehicle. Women were also not comforted knowing that there was a camera or CCT technology. They were not against it, but they felt that if anything happened to them the camera would only help after the event, not during. So they were much more in favor of more policing, human solutions rather than technological solutions. Yet the trend is towards more technology, not less. We found a lot of these sorts of mismatches between policy and what women want.
As Anastasia's study points out, the wait time at transit stop's what really scary for many women, according to Browne Molyneux, an L.A. blogger and avid transit taker who writes The Bus Bench:
Many people feel that the issue with women and public transit is the obvious sexual harassment ... but in my opinion walking to and waiting at bus stops (and sometimes rail stations) puts you at a greater risk. Most of the time on the rail in LA you aren't the only person, but at bus stops in LA you're often the only person. And the wait is the horrible part.
Waiting in an isolated spot for 30 minutes or an hour is not just something people should have to do. For many women this is deal breaker in regards to public transit or it should be, but many of the women who ride public transit don't have a choice. This isn't a deal breaker because of inconvenience it's a deal breaker because it's very unnerving to wait in the dark for a bus that may or may not come.
Browne isn't waiting for transit agencies to deal with the issue; she's started her own collaborative public campaign of sorts. Browne launched The Bus Bench Google Map Project -- with the goal of "critiquing every corner with a bus stop or rail in the LA area by August 30, 2010."
Anyone can collaborate on this mapping project by reviewing a public transit stop and labeling it with special symbols, if need be. A red triangle with an exclamation point, for example, scarlet-symbols a stop as "Not woman friendly," while a yellow sun shines upon livable streets that are kid safe and pedestrian friendly.
That project's limited to the L.A.-area -- at least for now -- but other women bloggers too are speaking up about transit agency decisions that don't seem to take safety concerns seriously. In a Seattle blog called Publicola, Erica C. Barnett writes about how a well-lit stop with a traffic light and several nearby businesses was shut down "as part of the process of consolidating stops on my route to improve reliability" -- making her closest bus stop "an unlit intersection, in front of a vacant parking lot, with no businesses around, no traffic light, and a bus stop across the street where people frequently congregate to buy and sell drugs." Writes Barnett:
Besides being a pedestrian-safety nightmare (cars whiz by at speeds upward of 50 mph because of the huge distances between lights on the main drag of my neighborhood), the intersection feels unsafe to me. Will it keep me from taking the bus? No. But would it deter someone who isn't reliant on
