Stop AAPI Hate and The Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) hosted an online discussion panel on Tuesday morning titled “Putting the Brakes on Rider Harassment: Research Tools, Community Partnerships and Data-Driven Solutions.”
The Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) is a research and training organization that is partnered with Lucas College and the Graduate School of Business at San José State University which seeks to improve transportation through research, education and workforce development, according to the MTI website.
The discussion was prompted by issues public transportation agencies have addressed about harassment that public transport riders experience.
Laws recently passed in California forced these agencies to recognize these issues as a serious matter.
Orange County Senator Dave Min signed two transit safety laws in 2022 SB 1611 and 2023 SB 434. Both laws enact an approach that engages riders to fill out a survey regarding harassment and makes public transit agencies participate in public outreach and data-based solutions, according to Legiscan.com.
The survey implemented is the Transit Street Harassment survey, developed by the Director of MTI’s National Transportation Center at San José State University and MTI’s Survey Presenter, Asha Weinstein Agrawal.
Agrawal said that she and her team created the survey by pilot-testing 329 riders on both AC Transit and BART to reach a wide range of people.
She said wanted to document the different kinds of harassment; which are verbal, non-verbal and physical harassment.
The survey is meant to be handed out to passengers while they are riding the public transit or in a scannable QR code, Agrawal said.
“We learned that if you simply ask people, ‘Have you been harassed?’ the great majority will say ‘no,’ ” Agrawal said.
She said that when listed behaviors to the same group 30% to 40% of the respondents will say they experienced one or more of the harassment behaviors.
Alicia Trost, chief communication officer for BART, said she wanted to address the issue of sexual harassment for years but has been unsuccessful since creating a less-than-well-received social media post.
The social media post sought to address sexual harassment in public transport, using a graphic that read “How to Avoid Creeps 101” according to to The East Bay Times.
“What made this effort different is that we brought on cultural strategists and community partners like the Alliance for Girls, Betti Ono and Unity Council,” she said.
Chantal Hildebrand, executive director for Alliance for Girls said her organization helped provide research for the transit safety laws that showed that of the 63 girls and gender-expansive youth respondents, 100% of them experienced sexual harassment, according to Hildebrand.
Alliance for Girls is an organization with over 120 girls and gender-expansive youth-serving organizations across the San Francisco Bay Area and LA County, according to Hildebrand. The organization works towards creating a society that has experience and knowledge of girls and gender-expansive youth of color.
“We do this work by building interconnected and generative spaces where girls and gender-expansive youth of color and their champions and institutes that serve them, share knowledge, power and accountability,” she said.
She said the research done by the organization resulted in the establishment of the Not One More Girl initiative.
The Not One More Girl initiative is helping to reimagine safety for BART riders through the lens of girls and gender-expansive youth, according to Hildebrand.
The initiative has implemented awareness campaigns designed by local artists on public transport, created tools to report harassment and has helped its unarmed transit ambassadors, according to the Not One More Girl Initiative webpage.
Unarmed transit ambassadors will be on public transit to ensure rider safety along with helping passengers with other needs. These ambassadors are equipped with NARCAN to respond to overdoses as well as radios to report any safety concerns, according to the BART website.
Naloxone (known by the brand name NARCAN) is a life-saving medication that can reverse an overdose from opioids when given in time, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
According to BART, this is a part of their progressive policing action, acknowledging that armed policing can only lead to riders feeling unsafe.
Progressive policing action aims to create equitable policing and a welcoming environment for passengers, according to the same BART website.
“Ask young people how girls and gender expansive (people) themselves define safety,” Hildebrand said. “What does it mean for them because it is different than how we think about safety as adults.”
She said that it’s important that transit agencies assess and connect with their community to see if these initiatives would work for them.
Currently, Trost wants to start handing out New Bystander Intervention Safety Cards for BART.
New Bystander Intervention Safety Cards were developed by the Not One More Girl youth design team, to give options to those looking for help or approaching a harassing situation, according to a BART website.
Created by the youth design team, these cards are meant to be a subtle way for bystanders to check in on fellow passengers who they think are being harassed. These cards are also created for passengers who are being harassed to be able to reach out for help.
New Bystander Intervention Safety Cards are available at BART’s Station Agent Booth along with the onboard unarmed safety ambassadors and crisis intervention specialists, according to the same BART website.
Meghna Khanna, deputy executive officer of mobility corridors, countywide planning and development at Los Angeles Metro (LA Metro) said in 2017, LA Metro established the Women and Girls Governing Council, a group of union and non-union metro employees that applies gender perspective to policy programs.
She said there were efforts to make public transit both reliable and safe for female passengers, however, Khannah realized there wasn’t enough data collection according to a 2019 study titled “Understanding How Women Travel” that was conducted later to help establish a Gender Action Plan in 2022.
The Gender Action Plan of 2022 is designed to amplify the concerns of women riding public transit, according to LA Metro.
After 2,000 hours of observational data, LA Metro was able to create a gender analysis tool that is used to collect gender-disaggregated data and the transit ambassador program, according to Khannah.
Similar to the unarmed safety ambassadors, LA Metro’s transit ambassador program is meant to increase the feeling of rider safety and any issues that occur on public transportation, according to a Long Beach Post article.
Orange County Senator Dave Min said, “I think on public transit, we have a right to feel safe and secure in our bodies no matter who we are (or) what we look like.”
