Transit advocacy, safety, feelings, and increasing ridership
How does transit in your community feel?
Yesterday I showed a team of consultants around Oakland’s eight BART train stations and their surrounding neighborhoods as part of a larger project they are doing around safety, policing, and BART. They were delightful folks visiting Oakland from elsewhere in California and the country– and some of them are readers of this Substack– (hi folks! I forgot to mention it, but if you’re still in town tomorrow, poke your head into the Museum of Art & Digital Entertainment which is a unique Oakland spot near where you’re staying).
While frequent, reliable service is core to improving rider experience and ridership, there are a lot of other factors affecting rider experience too. Safety, policing and BART is a huge topic to tackle regarding rider experience. But it’s also a topic that’s a bit muddled and its framing might bias people toward certain tools, so I unpacked the topic so we could then simplify & expand it.
Unpacking “safety.” Safety is mainly:
Level of risk exposure. What are the actual risks to you at that moment? How risky are your alternatives like driving, biking, busing, or skipping the trip all together? Heart disease, cancer, COVID and “accidents” are the top causes of death in America. The place you are most likely to be a victim of violent crime is your home and the person most likely to do it is a friend, loved one, or someone you know— not a stranger. So, when it comes to risk exposure on transit– the main risks are COVID exposure, accidents, and exposure to pollutants that can lead to disease. Depending on what your route and options are– transit could be a less or more risky choice.
The understanding and feelings around that risk exposure. Safe is in large part a feeling. It’s a feeling akin to relaxed, welcomed, comfortable, and empowered. Feeling in danger is the opposite end of that spectrum. Stressed, not wanted, uncomfortable. How welcomed or confident you feel in a space can shape your perception of safety.
You can feel safe while in danger (hello from earthquake country!) and you can also feel at risk while you’re actually safe (anxiety). And In terms of transit & cities, this often boils down to the truth that the vast majority of strangers do not want to intentionally hurt you and (except when they’re driving or have COVID) they will not hurt you unintentionally. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop someone from being afraid of strangers so it’s helpful to keep this in mind when talking about getting more people onto transit. The perception of safety on transit is almost entirely divorced from the reality of safety on transit because we are talking about strangers.
Risk to reward. People choose to do things that are dangerous and/or that feel dangerous all the time. Partially because the perceived reward is better than the understood risk and partially because some types of risks are fun because they are risks! People have loads of options on HOW to get travel to try and meet their needs and also IF they need travel at all. Transit agencies across the country can increase ridership if they increase the benefits or joy of transit regardless of what’s going on with “safety.”
Unpacking policing is a bit simpler. Policing is a specific set of tools that, in theory, address a certain type of problem. Ideally the problem policing addresses is “threats to public safety” but in practice that set of tools is expensive, ineffective, capricious, re-active (e.g. not preventative), and has a long history of being counterproductive (to put it mildly).
So across visiting the Oakland BART stations, we analyzed and explored the deeper question of “how does it feel on BART and how could it feel better in order to attract more riders?” Taking that approach opened up a universe of different problems and (often low cost) tools to solve them. Some were straightforward– like how platform barriers would reduce the actual and perceived risks of falling into the tracks. Some were more complicated– like how BART reinforces a culture of suspicion & fear of strangers, but it could shift to supporting a culture where strangers are viewed as positives of the experience or at least as benign irrelevances. Additionally, BART– like most transit agencies– has a lot of opportunities to strengthen how it communicates about the rewards & joys of transit.
All in all, it was a great experience and way to look at the Bay Area’s leading transit agency. I encourage you to take yourself on a similar tour of your transit agency and potentially bring along allies, community leaders and decision makers in order to help bolster support for transit and explore better solutions to make transit more inviting for everyone.
Want help imagining, planning and winning better transit and or safer streets? I’m here to help! Whether you want a 1-on-1 training session, a group workshop, or something else let’s talk. Email me at Carter@carterlavin.com to set something up. Here’s a bit about what training sessions are like.
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Thanks for the post, Carter. You mentioned that BART does not play up feelings of safety, actually the reverse. It might be informative for you to do a post comparing the two approaches with representative signage leaning in the two directions. Perhaps this could help people in other cities figure out how to lean away from feelings of lack of safety (or stranger danger) and policing as a response.