This article appears in the April 2024 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
“Leave this Black queen alone!”
Headed to UCLA on a February day, Karen Mack expected her usual uneventful ride on a Wilshire Boulevard bus in Los Angeles. Living in a transit-rich area in the center of the city, she gave up her car last year and knows neighborhood bus routes well.
In the middle of a cellphone conversation, Mack noticed that a man—“mentally challenged” is how she describes him—got on the bus. He had been talking to himself and began lashing out at riders as he walked down the aisle. He saw Mack talking on her phone. “You’ve got my phone,” he yelled and demanded that she hand it over.
“I’m not a shrinking violet,” says Mack, who is the founder of the arts and culture organization LA Commons and a member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission. She resisted and the two began arguing. That’s when a second man intervened and shouted at him to stop bothering her. “We almost were double-teaming him,” says Mack, “and then he just got off the bus.”
Street harassment is a common phenomenon that many public-transit riders, but especially women and girls, experience on buses and trains, in stations and at bus stops, as they travel between their homes, jobs, schools, events, and recreational activities.
Public-transit agencies often hear complaints from riders about harassment. But system officials don’t always know what to do about it, since public transportation is not immune from the wider social problems that communities face. That’s especially true for large urban systems like San Francisco’s BART, which have had a big chunk of riders drop out of transit altogether in the work-from-home transition.
What they do know is that no system can afford to lose more passengers due to heightened fears. That pressure has forced California systems to get serious about combating street harassment.
California has taken a two-step approach to harassment. A 2022 law directed the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University (MTI) to create a survey to help public-transportation systems collect data on riders’ safety concerns. A second law passed last year requires the state’s ten largest public-transit agencies to collect data from passengers about harassment, and make the findings public by the end of 2024.
Public transportation is not immune from the wider social problems that communities face.
Available in more than a dozen languages and free to any U.S. transit agency, the MTI survey will help systems figure out how best to handle the confrontations that riders face: if specific lines have more incidents than others, and if riders are being targeted because of their gender, race, language, or religion, or other personal characteristics. They will also help transit officials learn more about the perpetrators.
Street harassment is “transit’s dirty little secret,” says Alicia Trost, chief communications officer for San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the regional rail network. “It’s the biggest hurdle to even begin the conversation.”
“I’ve seen harassment based on race, gender, all kinds of situations,” says Eli Lipmen, executive director of Move LA, a community organization that works on public transportation, affordable housing, and other issues. Concerns about harassment can make it difficult to switch from driving to transit—or to keep riding. “If you have a very serious incident, you just don’t know if you can do that again, because it can be really traumatizing,” he says.
ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR ON TRANSIT CERTAINLY PREDATED COVID-19, but the early months of the pandemic saw an explosion of harassment in parks, stores, on streets, and on transit, with Asian Americans frequently targeted. From mid-March 2020 to December 2021, Stop AAPI Hate, a coalition fighting racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, logged about 11,000 attacks. Another two-year survey indicated that 40 percent of those attacks took place in public spaces and nearly 10 percent on transit. Those incidents persuaded the coalition that transit deserved a special focus.
“Ever since [COVID-19] became the ‘China virus,’ a lot of AAPIs really felt like they are not safe in public and nonpublic spaces,” says California state Sen. Dave Min (D-Irvine), who heard about incidents from family, neighbors, and other AAPI members. Min, who is seeking the congressional seat that Katie Porter relinquished when she ran for Senate, helped steer the two street harassment laws through the legislature.
Street harassment runs the gamut from threatening comments, racist gestures, catcalling, and swearing, to stalking and flashing body parts, and to physical violence like groping, muggings, and sexual assaults. The perpetrators act out against the people they target based on gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or disabilities.
In early 2020, MTI surveyed nearly 900 San Jose State University (SJSU) students and found that sexual harassment on transit is widespread. The downtown campus has regional rail and bus options and more than 60 percent of students use transit, especially buses. Women were overwhelmingly victims of harassment: 70 percent of women students reported verbal harassment compared to 36 percent of men. Nearly twice the number of women as men reported all sorts of harassment, which included indecent exposure, being shown pornographic images, and stalking and physical harassment, ranging from groping and other unwanted touching to rape and sexual assault.
Asha Weinstein Agrawal, MTI’s education director, also notes that most incidents go unreported and that contrary to what people assume, do not always happen at night. Some women respond by changing their routines, routes, and the time of day that they travel, if they can. Others give up on transit completely. Forty-five percent of women bus riders who took part in the SJSU survey reported that their fears about sexual harassment led them to cut back on bus trips; only 7 percent of men curtailed their use of transit.
Some transit riders also may not understand that behaviors like catcalling or suggestive remarks or looks constitute harassment. Agrawal recognizes that if you ask people if they have been harassed, they may say no, but if they are asked about specific verbal, nonverbal, and physical behaviors, those same people will say yes. “There are some people who may not feel that they have been harassed but who do witness it,” she says. “But also, some people might not want to admit that some of these things had happened to them.”
The onset of the pandemic actually gave BART, California’s third-largest public-transit agency, an opening to focus on the issue. At the end of 2020, BART began collecting data about harassment incidents. The Alliance for Girls, a San Francisco youth advocacy group, had shared its own 2019 study about the indignities that women and girls suffered on buses and trains. Young people had concerns about gender and racial harassment taking place not just on the BART trains or on the region’s buses but also on the way to and from transit stations and bus stops. BART, the alliance, and community partners launched a street harassment public-information campaign.
“It’s a difficult topic to discuss because you’re worried you’re going to use the wrong language or you don’t know where to begin,” says Trost, “or you’re going to scare away potential riders or you’re going to victim-blame or shame instead of holding the aggressors accountable.”
What systems can do is update passenger codes of conduct with statements indicating zero tolerance for harassment.
Most transit agencies also do not have qualified people in-house to take on a full-fledged anti-harassment initiative. BART hired a cultural strategist to help them to do outreach to women, speakers of second languages, and other groups. They also worked with local community organizations to determine how best to approach passengers about harassment.
Recruiting residents and specialists helps boards of directors, some of whom never use public transportation, and agency officials to confront skeptical questions like “Why now?” “Shouldn’t we really be thinking about just safety holistically?” or “Why is this only about women and girls?”
Consultations with police forces are important, but since many harassment behaviors do not constitute criminal violations under local penal codes, there are limits to the actions that police can take. And young people, no matter what their background, tend to fear encounters with police. BART established teams of unarmed ambassadors, specially trained individuals selected from its own police department’s community service officers, to monitor rider behavior and offer assistance.
What systems can do, says Trost, is update passenger codes of conduct and websites with statements indicating zero tolerance for harassment. That shows how seriously a system is about addressing threatening behavior. “You need to actually say that it’s not welcomed and they will take action if someone else witnesses it,” she says. “Unless you’ve done that, anything you say falls empty.”
At roughly the same time as BART, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro) undertook a women’s travel patterns study. It reported that while most women feel safe riding buses and trains during the day, they were more apprehensive about using them at night and wanted to see better lighting and more police and security staff in the system. Women had been deserting the system since before the pandemic. LA Metro launched its own transit ambassador program modeled on the BART initiative in 2022.
For its part, BART started running shorter trains. Fewer cars with more people on each car helps people feel safer. After this change, the agency has had fewer incidents involving police. The system distributed “bystander intervention” cards. Proposed by youth design teams, the cards are available in stations and designed to inform riders about their options when they observe harassment or when someone is bothering them.
Many passengers suggested that BART install call buttons, not knowing that trains already had them, so the agency raised awareness about that fact in subsequent public-information campaigns. Artists have designed posters with examples of acceptable behavior and unwelcome acts. They were designed so riders, especially the elderly and disabled, would be able to see themselves and the problems they face in the art. “Trying to be funny or cheeky,” Trost says, “It’s not the vibes I’m going for.”
In response to the question “Have you experienced gender based sexual harassment in the last six months at BART?” for the period October to December 2023, 7 percent of BART riders answered yes to that question, a slight improvement over the same period in October–December 2022, when 9 percent did. Nevertheless, BART still suffers from anemic overall ridership at 42 percent of pre-COVID levels. Weekend ridership is considerably higher.
LA Metro saw its highest ridership increases last year after its high-profile moves to offer information services and deploy more security officers, transit ambassadors, crisis intervention specialists, and workers to handle people suffering from drug abuse and homelessness. The agency also made numerous facility safety improvements, adding new lighting, additional call boxes, station music, and modified entrances.
“The pandemic led to a general breakdown of social order, in a sense, and we’re having to kind of claw that back as people come back to work and are using the system,” says Lipmen of Move LA. Service that is frequent and reliable will keep riders and attract new ones. “The more we see people traveling together—families, students, seniors,” he says, will go a long way toward providing the atmosphere of safety that helps reverse negative perceptions.
