Public Transport

A Depressing Truth: Women's and Girls Safety on Public Transport

We often talk about frequency, speed and reliability as the core parts of good public transport service. However, when you read the reports of girls' and women's experiences on public transport, it is clear we also need to include personal safety in that list. This report from Transport for London is grim reading.

Key Takeaways

• Of girls aged 13-16, 77 per cent who participated in the survey say they have experienced unwanted sexual behaviour on journeys involving public transport in the past 12 months.
• 13% of women surveyed feel unsafe most or all of the time.
• Young girls were significantly more likely to report feeling unsafe during the walk to or from public transport stops and stations from their home.
• Of women who were surveyed and travel after dark:
  • 62 per cent expressed feeling unsafe between 9pm and 4am,
  • 33 per cent also felt unsafe when travelling early in the morning (after 4am until 7am).
  • Comparatively, just six per cent of women who were surveyed felt unsafe when travelling in the daytime.
• Women and girls who participated in the survey also reported that buses are felt to be one of the least safe modes of public transport.
• Women and girls’ travel behaviour is greatly impacted and adapted in these moments of fear – or when feeling unsafe is anticipated.
• 40% of women have not made a journey using public transport due to feeling unsafe.
• 91% of girls had witnessed someone else experiencing unwanted sexual behaviour.
• Top priorities reported by women and girls:
  • Improved lighting and CCTV at bus shelters
  • Increased help points and passenger alarms
  • Trained customer-facing transport staff
  • Greater police presence at night
• Recommendations include:
  • Early intervention is needed
  • Include men in solutions
  • Embedding women’s safety into planning and public realm design
  • Partnership working is key
  • Integrated CCTV and new bus shelter design trials
  • Simplified safety and crime reporting triage
  • Clearer cross modal-crime reporting signage
  • Bespoke sexual harassment training for frontline staff

Comment

Last year, I was in Riyadh. Their new metro system has separate carriages for women. It would be easy to dismiss this from a western perspective as a cultural idiosnycracy of Saudi Arabia. However, part of the reason for the separate carriages appears to also apply to London.

I haven't looked at the evidence of what policies would improve the situation and the reports recommendations did not reference research. This may be because it has not been extensively studied.

The fact that women feel less safe on buses also reinforces my view that when making buses driverless, we are going to need very carefully about safety, something that drivers partly provide.

We also need to focus on the end to end journey. Neglecting the routes to reach bus stops and stations has long been a failing and is something that we need to focus on more.

We also have to accept that many of our transport agencies are very male dominated and there are reports of high levels of sexual harrassment of female staff that also need to be tackled.

What Next?

Do you know how women experience safety on your public transport system?

Travel demand

Why car travel is more price sensitive than it looks

What influence do factors such as prices and service quality have on travel demand? This paper from Todd Litman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute summarises the research.

Key Takeaways

• Various factors affect travel demand:

• Although some travel is very beneficial, the travel demand curve appears to have a long tail, meaning that if prices decline sufficiently people will tend to increase their travel, resulting in an increasing amount of marginal value travel that provides minimal user benefits.
• A considerable body of research has analyzed how transport price changes affect transport activity. Key patterns:
  • Transport pricing impacts can vary, including changes in trip generation, mode, destination, route, vehicle type and parking location. Pricing of one mode or service can affect demand of others.
  • Pricing impacts tend to increase over time, and are typically triple over the long-run.
  • Higher value travel, such as business and commute travel, tend to be less price sensitive than lower value travel.
  • Wealthy people tend to be less sensitive to pricing and more sensitive to service quality than lower-income people.
  • Travel tends to be more price sensitive if travelers have better travel options.
  • Motorists tend to be particularly sensitive to road tolls and parking fees.
  • How fees are promoted, structured and collected can affect their impacts.
  • Motorists are more likely to accept vehicle price increases if presented as part of an integrated program that is considered fair and provides dispersed benefits.
• Automobile use appears to be inelastic, meaning that price changes cause proportionately smaller changes in vehicle travel. However, this reflects how price impacts are normally evaluated. Short-run price effects are about a third of long-run effects, and most vehicle costs (depreciation, financing, insurance, registration fees and residential parking) are fixed. A -0.1 short-run elasticity of vehicle travel with respect to fuel price reflects a -0.3 long-run elasticity, which reflects a -1.2 elasticity of vehicle travel with respect to total vehicle costs, which implies that automobile travel is overall elastic.
• Countries that implement policies that favor automobile travel during the early stages of their development will tend to create automobile dependent transportation systems.
• Developing countries that implement more efficient prices that test consumers’ travel demands will have more efficient transport systems and fewer associated problems.
• Improved transportation demand models are an important tool to help policy makers and planners evaluate transport problems and potential solutions.

Comment

The main challenge with transport demand models isn't their accuracy. It is that their results are routinely ignored by decision makers.

The decision on whether to widen a road or build a high speed rail line is rarely made on the basis of a model's predictions.

What Next?

Do you have a comprehensive travel demand strategy?

Road Safety

Every 10cm taller, 11% deadlier: new proof on vehicle size and pedestrian risk

Do larger passenger vehicles really increase pedestrian fatalities? Most of the research has previously been from the United States. This research from Australia claims to have proved that they do. The authors have also written in The Conversation about their research.

Key Takeaways

• In Australia, since 2021, pedestrian fatality rates have been rising, while those for drivers and passengers have remained relatively stable, a reversal of the long term downward trend of pedestrian fatalities.
• The research linked 10,376 pedestrian crashes to the actual dimensions of the passenger vehicles involved.
• Every additional 100 kg of vehicle weight increased pedestrian fatality odds by 6%.
• Every additional 10 cm of vehicle height increased pedestrian fatality odds by 11%.
• Utes and US-style pick-up trucks were associated with around 60% higher pedestrian fatality risk than conventional passenger cars.
• The relationship was even stronger in lower-speed environments.
• Reducing size to typical passenger car was estimated to prevent ∼9% of fatalities.
• Equivalent percentage increases in vehicle height had a greater effect on fatality odds than weight increases. This is largely because taller vehicles are more likely to impact people’s upper body, chest or head.
• Between 2012 and 2024, the average weight of passenger vehicles involved in pedestrian crashes in Victoria rose from about 1,440 kilograms to 1,570 kg – an increase of around 130 kg (9%).
• Without policy change, this transition to larger vehicles is likely to continue with worsening outcomes for pedestrian fatalities.
• Possible policy options include:
  • Removing tax concessions that favour larger passenger vehicles.
  • Making vehicle purchase taxes or registration fees proportional to vehicle weight or size
  • Introducing additional licensing requirements for the largest passenger vehicles, including restrictions for probationary licence holders
  • Making parking charges or even road penalties proportional to vehicle size.

Comment

This trend to larger passenger vehicles is being seen around the world and the evidence of their road safety harm mounting.

However, to date, the response from policymakers has been muted, possibly because they fear a backlash given the large numbers of people now driving SUVs. The answer to that is to start making policy changes to only the largest vehicles (say the top 10%), so that those losing out are only a small part of the population.

What Next?

Have you got a policy for dealing with ever larger passenger vehicles?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​A Key Policy in a Climate Adaptation Plan: Why Should Cycling Be Included in London’s New Heat Strategy? - A blog on how cycling should be used in tackling heat.
• ​Let Them Linger? The Surprising Case for Robotaxis at the Curb - A blog interviewing some researchers on how to tackle the curb challenge for robotaxis (yes, they do recommend road pricing).
• ​Are Pedestrian Streets Actually Good for Business? - A YouTube video looking at pedestrianisation of high streets.