Reimagining access for
marginalized people
We need to reclaim power over buses, trains, and sidewalks to create communities that genuinely serve everyone, not just young, able-bodied cis men.
In the urbanist discourse of walkability and transit-oriented development, the reality is often neglected that many resi dents experience transportation in profoundly different ways than anticipated by city planners and politicians. That’s especially the case for people with disabilities—which include physical (or ambulatory), visual, hearing, and intellectual disabilities—seniors, and people who are subjected to increased surveillance and harassment in public spaces due to gender and sexual identity.
These identities of age, disability, and gender and sexual identity frequently intersect. About 10.5 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 have a disability of some kind, as do more than 35 percent of people age 65 and older.1 Black, Native American, and Hispanic people are considerably more likely than white people to have a disability.2 People with disabilities are far more likely to be unemployed, earn lower wages, and live in poverty than those without a disability. They are also far more likely to be assaulted.3
As well, almost half of trans people have reported being verbally harassed in the previous year because of their gender identity; another 9 percent have been physically assaulted.4 Almost two-thirds of trans and non-binary people who have disabilities have been sexually assaulted in their lifetime.5 Traumas and oppressions can take on less visible forms as well, such as being misgendered and denied access to washroom facilities based on perceived gender presentation.
Everyone desires transportation that guarantees safety and comfort, especially if they have previously survived traumatic attacks or situations. That includes basic and predictable levels of dignity and respect expressed by transportation workers and fellow riders to people of all ages, abilities, and gender and sexual identities. Next-generation automobility claims to meet these needs.
Uber’s website boasts that the company has “transformed mobility for many people with disabilities, and [is] committed to continuing to develop solutions that support everyone’s ability to easily move around their communities.” Such solutions include the ability to request a ride using a smartphone’s accessibility features, a contractual obligation to allow service dogs on rides, and the ability to request accessible UberWAV service in several cities.6
In 2016, Uber launched Uber Central, a means for businesses and non-profits to book and pay for rides on behalf of clients. It marketed the service as a means for seniors without a smartphone to use Uber to get to medical appointments and grocery trips.7 Uber Health, introduced in early 2018, followed a similar model; it allows healthcare providers to order rides for patients who have limited access to transportation.8
At the end of that year, Uber launched a partnership with MV Transportation, which specializes in transportation for seniors and people with disabilities. At the time, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote: “Thanks to our work with MV Transportation and other providers, Uber riders in wheelchairs can now get picked up by a WAV in 15 minutes or less on average for trips in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago, and Toronto.”9
A 2018 research collaboration between Lyft and the University of Southern California Center for Body Computing awarded free Lyft rides to 150 people in the greater Los Angeles area who were over the age of sixty and living with chronic conditions.10 It found, over the course of three months, that the amount of activity the seniors participated in increased by 35 percent, with a 74 percent increase in social visits and a 68 percent increase in ease of access to medical appointments.
A specialized ride-hailing app, GoGoGrandparent, has emerged to cater to seniors who don’t own smartphones by offering a hotline to call to book an Uber ride.11 Other apps specifically for female drivers and riders have launched across North America, attempts to increase the sense of safety that people feel when relying on strangers for transportation.12 Meanwhile, major ride-hailing companies have taken steps to provide information to reduce the risk of danger. Uber, for example, advises riders to sit in the back seat of the vehicle, which “gives you and your driver some personal space,” and to share your trip details such as driver’s name and licence plate with loved ones via the app’s “share trip status” option.13
Autonomous vehicles are heralded as improving accessibility still more. In 2016, Steve Mahan, a legally blind man, rode around Austin in an autonomous Waymo vehicle. He told the Washington Post: “This is a hope of independence. These cars will change the life prospects of people such as myself. I want very much to become a member of the driving public again.”14
The head of the American Network of Community Options and Resources (ANCOR), which represents more than 1,600 private service providers to people with disabilities, penned a 2018 op-ed explaining the organization’s committed support to the AV START Act—the federal legislation that would regulate autonomous vehicles. That support was explicitly based on the potential the technology has to improve access for people with disabilities, including those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to employment opportunities.15
Such technologies could allow people with disabilities to set their own schedules without having to rely on other people. Waymo is reportedly working on a technology that would emit an audible signal when it arrives for a pickup if the rider is blind, while hearing-impaired riders will be able to see the route on a computer screen.16 Seniors who can no longer drive, or prefer not to, will be able to determine where and when they travel unaccompanied.
There’s a possibility of greater safety for passengers, as well. Some have speculated that autonomous vehicles could include “safe exit strategies” in the case of an uncomfortable or dangerous situation with other riders, such as being dropped off near one’s destination instead of in front of one’s home or using a safe word that would reroute the vehicle to the nearest police station.17 Other suggestions include being able to route a trip through a populated area at night, and to stop for longer while a person with restricted mobility is exiting the vehicle to notify a contact at the destination for assistance.
All of this sounds utopian compared to the heavy restrictions that people with marginalized access to transportation have to deal with today. But a long string of situations with Uber and Lyft, along with the whole history of private automobility, suggest that it’s unlikely things will pan out in this way.
One indicator of this trend is the committed struggle by Uber and Lyft to continue to be legally categorized as technology companies that match drivers to riders, rather than as transportation companies. As a result of this categorization—which is why Uber is legally called Uber Technologies Inc.—the companies argue that they aren’t subject to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, transportation, and federal agencies. In 2015, Uber faced ADA-related lawsuits in California, Texas, and Arizona alleging discrimination against wheelchair users and blind riders. The company’s response appealed to its inability to control what its independent contractors do.18
Lawsuits have been filed against Uber and Lyft in New York and California for failing to provide enough wheelchair- accessible vehicles.19 A report by the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest found that Uber and Lyft consistently located non-accessible vehicles on request but met requests for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle only 30 percent of the time.20 Wait times were also greatly different: four minutes for a non-accessible vehicle compared to seventeen minutes for a wheelchair-accessible vehicle.
In 2018, Uber, Lyft, and Via collectively sued New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission over its new rule that by 2023 every company has to dispatch 25 percent of trips in wheelchair- accessible vehicles.21 The companies claimed that the percentage was arbitrary and that it could cost around one billion dollars to comply.22 In a statement, Dustin Jones of United for Equal Access New York said: “This lawsuit proves once and for all that Uber, Lyft and other ridesharing companies just don’t give a damn about providing equal access to New York’s wheelchair users.”23
Shortly before Lyft’s initial public offering, the Disability Rights Advocates filed a lawsuit against the company in a California court, arguing that “Lyft’s practice of excluding persons with mobility disabilities who need WAVs violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.”24 As a result of these consecutive incidents, Uber’s partnership in late 2018 with MV Transportation was regarded with serious skepticism. Joseph Rappaport of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled said: “They’ve lobbied against proposals, they’ve sued, and they’ve spent millions of dollars to prevent a requirement that they provide accessible service…. The only reason that they’re even doing this is because they face legal action.”25
Ahmed El-Geneidy, professor of urban planning at McGill University, told me that many ride-hailing drivers aren’t properly trained to deal with people with disabilities in a safe and respectful way, including safety precautions and etiquette.26 Meanwhile, the seniors-focused app GoGoGrandparent has faced criticism over lack of additional compensation for drivers, lack of liability coverage, and expensive rates. One Uber driver suggested: “The whole thing screams of scam. On top of everything else, they seem to be targeting the people who are most vulnerable.”27
There’s also no guarantee that helpful private services will last. In December 2019, Ford announced it was ending GoRide Health, its non-emergency medical transportation service providing on-demand wheelchair service—leaving people dependent on such a service without an alternative.28 This news came less than a year after Ford shut down its “microtransit” service, Chariot.29
This precedent renders dubious the prospect of autonomous vehicles radically improving the mobility of people with disabilities. As Alex Birnel of MOVE Texas told me: “I just don’t see a disproportionately poor demographic like the disabled, who are the number one in need of options, being the first to benefit from any new innovation.” Alexander Stimpson, a senior researcher at Duke University, said that autonomous vehicle companies are aware that people with disabilities are a market, but it’s not their priority: “The focus is how can we get these driving on the roads.”30 Similarly, University of Alberta design anthropologist Megan Strickfaden concluded that “the cars are being designed for drivers with normal competency levels, rather than a passenger perspective. The population they should be designing for is excluded.”31
Further complications include the uncertainty whether a quadriplegic rider could enter and exit an autonomous vehicle without assistance, or that the vehicle wouldn’t drop a wheelchair user off in front of a pile of snow in the winter.32 Hana Creger of the Greenlining Institute told me: “Based on what we know about the lack of access that these shared mobility companies have for folks with limited mobility, that’s a strong indication of how autonomous vehicle technology will roll out as well, especially if it’s left to its own devices in the private sector.”
There is ample evidence, both historical and contemporary, that people with disabilities and mobility restrictions simply aren’t a priority for profit-hungry companies that routinely dodge regulatory requirements. Even if these companies came into compliance with existing accessibility laws, it remains unclear how the disproportionately poor demographic of people with disabilities would be able to regularly afford such services.
Plenty of lobbying and advocacy work is being done by disability organizations to change this reality. But it’s an uphill battle. Outside of occasional PR-oriented pilot projects, ride-hailing companies don’t seem willing to concede ground. Providing service to people with disabilities and seniors, who may require more driver training and time spent in pickup and drop-off, will likely continue to be low on these companies’ to-do lists.
Ride-hailing options also don’t offer inherently safer rides for women (cis and trans), trans (of all genders), and gender non-conforming people (including non-binary, genderqueer, and Two-Spirit people). In early 2018, it was reported that at least 103 Uber drivers and another 18 Lyft drivers in the U.S. had been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing their passengers in the previous four years; at least 31 of the Uber drivers were convicted for crimes including forcible touching, false imprisonment, and rape.33 At the end of 2019, Uber announced that it had received more than 3,000 reports of sexual assault in the U.S. the year prior.34 Several states, including California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Texas, have launched investigations into the ride-hailing services about alleged failure to properly screen drivers.35 Two women who were assaulted by Uber drivers filed a class-action lawsuit in late 2017 that claimed “thousands of female passengers have endured unlawful conduct by their Uber drivers including rape, sexual assault, physical violence and gender-motivated harassment.”36 A 2019 lawsuit was filed by fourteen survivors of assault, including one blind woman, against Lyft for mishandling its “sexual predator crisis.”37
In 2018, Uber was accused of attempting to force sexual assault survivors to settle cases through arbitration with confidentiality agreements, which would avoid a public trial.38 Uber later announced that it was withdrawing the requirements of mandatory arbitration and confidentiality, and was installing a panic button in the app for riders to notify 911.39 Yet a 2019 investigation by the Washington Post reported that Uber’s so-called Special Investigations Unit, tasked with dealing with serious incidents, exists to protect the company from legal liability; investigators in the unit aren’t allowed to direct complaints to the police or advise the customer to seek legal counsel.40
“We know that people are being assaulted and sexually harassed in those [ride-hailing] spaces as well,” says Nicole Kalms, the director of the XYX Lab at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “I don’t think they’re necessarily safer. They don’t have the same publicness and capacity to hold the ideology of right to public transport space and access in the same way.”
An online survey conducted on behalf of the U.S. National Council for Home Safety and Security found that 23 percent of female respondents had reported an uncomfortable encounter to Uber; 8 percent stated they had involved the police over a driver’s behaviour.41 Women, trans, and gender non- conforming riders have developed techniques to avoid assault or harassment while using ride-hailing services. For example, they will share the GPS location of their phone with a few friends, and make sure that the driver matches the licence plate number and model of the vehicle listed in the app.42
A viral Twitter thread by writer Jill Gutowitz explained the constant need to lie about where exactly she’s going in a ride-hailing vehicle when asked, protecting herself by telling drivers that she’s going to a fictitious boyfriend’s house. “Any time I Uber/Lyft home at night and it’s a male driver, I risk being assaulted, or worse,” she wrote. “Don’t ever forget that women, especially WOC [women of colour] and queer women, have targets on our backs.”43
Amelia Tait wrote in the New Statesman about being driven in an Uber all over London, completely off the predetermined route that Uber had instructed. In addition to costing her four times as much as it should have, the trip caused her to fear that she was going to be assaulted. “This wasn’t the first time that it struck me how strange it is that Uber users entrust untrained strangers to drive us around simply because they operate via a sleek, shiny app,” she reported.44
Writer and designer Robyn Kanner, a trans woman, wrote for Mic about the anxieties from being frequently misgendered by Uber drivers: “Here’s what’s going through my head: Are they stronger than me? If I call them out on gendering me properly, will they hurt me?”45
It’s far too early to tell what safety technologies will be integrated into autonomous vehicles. Very little information has been made public about how safety would be guaranteed for riders. But the potential for women, trans, and gender non-conforming riders to be assaulted or harassed with no ability to easily escape on a trip seems of profound concern. That’s especially the case for people with disabilities and seniors, who may be less able to respond to immediate threats in confined spaces.
The proposal of dropping a rider at a location near, but not at, someone’s house appears rather short-sighted; a predatory rider could feasibly also get out of the vehicle and follow them. Unlike the relative anonymity that riding a bus or train can bring, a small pooled vehicle may make one’s personal travel pattern overly visible to other riders.46 Similarly, the idea of being able to redirect the vehicle to the nearest police station may be severely limited by the fact that it could take a long time to arrive, and that many people may have serious concerns about interacting with the police in any capacity. An ability to share one’s location and vehicle information could potentially help respond to crises—but it’s dubious that it would be particularly effective on a high-speed highway or deep in suburban sprawl.
Such concerns may motivate those who can afford it to buy their own autonomous vehicles or book the entire vehicle for themselves, which would undermine the anticipated environmental and congestion benefits of shared rides. Kalms told me that she fundamentally disagrees with the solution of female-only ride-hailing services or transit, like segregated train carriages in Japan and India, “pink taxis” in Mexico, or women-only ride-hailing services DriveHer and She Rides. Such options make women, trans, and gender non- conforming riders assume responsibility for their own safety, she says, and exclude many non-binary and trans people who don’t want to declare a gender identity in public or may not pass as a cis woman.
People with marginalized access to transportation—whether due to disability, age, gender and sexual identity, or some combination of these factors—have the right to navigate a city in a safe and comfortable manner. While ride-hailing services and autonomous vehicles promise to revolutionize mobility for such riders, years of disturbing precedents from companies like Uber and Lyft along with the lack of priority by autonomous vehicle companies in challenging them indicate that the automobility of the future will simply be more of the same. People with disabilities will be largely ignored, seniors stranded or heavily reliant on others, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming riders subject to constant anxiety over harassment and assault.
Banking on autonomous vehicles as the solution to accessibility will leave many people waiting for years or decades more before they can use transportation in a safe and dependable way. That is extremely callous and unjust—especially since we have the opportunity to greatly improve systems of public transportation, fighting to guarantee access for all.
It’s partly because of the profound lack of transportation service for marginalized people that Uber and Lyft—and the prospect of autonomous vehicles—have acquired such momentum. Many communities have been routinely ignored, underserved, and insulted by transit agencies. Regardless of how improved safety and comfort really are, the idea remains that catching a private taxi with an app is less threatening than navigating a ride on a bus or train, for those who can afford it. In many instances, these criticisms aren’t wrong.
Many transit stops are literally off the map for people with disabilities.47 Of the 15 million people in the U.S. who have difficulty attaining transportation services, 40 percent have disabilities. Barriers include broken lifts and ramps, failing to stop for a rider with a disability, not providing adequate space, and lacking accessible alternatives to board if level-entry boarding isn’t available. The top four barriers to transit listed in a survey of over 4,000 people with disabilities were inadequate transit service, drivers not calling out stops, inappropriate driver attitude, and lack of an accessible route to the stop or station.48
Here’s how a 2019 report by Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council put it: “In many cases, bus stops and train stations can be impossible to reach, due to the lack of sidewalks and elevators. Paratransit options are limited and fractured with a multitude of funding sources, disconnected political jurisdictions, and providers with competing priorities.”49
In New York City, only 92 of the subway system’s 425 stations are accessible, and an average of 25 elevators a day are not working.50 There’s little information for riders when shutdowns happen, with no intercom announcements or reliable website updates.51 The New York Times has described subway elevators as “often tiny, foul-smelling and hard to find, positioned at the far ends of stations, forcing long wheelchair rides along narrow platforms.”52
Accessibility differs greatly by transit agency. All subway stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, are wheelchair accessible, but only 68 percent of stations in Philadelphia and 67 percent of stations in Chicago.53 In Toronto, 43 of 75 stations have elevators.54 Steven Laperrière, vice-president of the Montreal-based disability rights group RAPLIQ (Regroupement des activistes pour l’inclusion au Québec), told me about the local situation: “One time out of two, if you want to take the regular street bus, well, you won’t be able to. When it’s summertime it’s one thing. But when it’s cold outside, or when you’re expected at a medical appointment or job interview or just for your job, it’s impossible to count on your being 100 percent sure that you’ll be on time.”
That obviously has direct impacts on the ability of people with disabilities to access employment, education, recreational opportunities, and engagement in public life. People with disabilities in Montreal have access to under half the jobs that non-disabled people have, due to inaccessible transit.55 Accessibility is also impeded by factors including inadequate snow clearing, inaccessible public washrooms (if they exist at all), and lack of power wheelchair charging stations.56
New dockless electric scooters, rented by companies like Lime and Bird, aren’t required to be returned to specific places. Many are left strewn on sidewalks, which makes it very challenging for people with physical disabilities to navigate safely. In early 2019, a lawsuit was filed against several scooter companies operating in San Diego; the complaint read: “People with disabilities who wish to travel in the City using the City’s walkways are being forced to either put their physical safety at risk or just stay home. This is not a choice that they should have to make.”57
Most transit stations and buses don’t include both visual and audible communication of schedule changes and stops, making it challenging for people with visual or hearing issues to use transit without a companion.58
Paratransit, which specifically services people with disabilities as a substitute for inadequate transit service, tends to be unreliable and restrictive.59 Toronto’s Wheel-Trans service has failed to strap riders in properly and frequently leaves riders waiting for up to an hour.60 Polling of 1,500 paratransit users in the U.S. found that over half experienced scheduling problems and long wait times; one-third identified inefficient rides, inadequate service times, and inappropriate driver attitudes as additional problems.61 El-Geneidy told me that an overreliance by a city on paratransit can have the added impact of segregating people with disabilities from the broader community.
“[With paratransit,] you’re isolating the person with the disability. You’re telling them ‘you’re on your own’ and ‘you’re not part of the community.’ Psychologically, it’s not the best. The best and the cheapest is to use the good transit service that everybody else is using. It’s the responsibility of the society to give them the freedom of transit.”
—Ahmed El-Geneidy, McGill University
Seniors, too, tend to have a tougher time accessing transit. Many bus stops fail to provide benches, let alone shelter, making transit difficult and potentially dangerous for seniors to depend on. Marta Viciedo of Miami’s Urban Impact Lab told me: “We’re a very rainy place, particularly in the summer. It’s very hot. So it’s bizarre not to have any kind of protection, especially when most of our bus routes run at maybe thirty- to forty-five-minute intervals. You can conceivably be sitting in the sun for twenty or thirty minutes.” The lack of easily accessible public washrooms can also limit seniors’ ability to take trips.62 And when older people can’t walk to transit stops due to sprawl, parking, and other impediments, it can lead to debilitating isolation and depression.63 Such issues aren’t going away: most countries worldwide are experiencing an aging population.
Many women, trans, and gender non-conforming people also experience public transportation in significantly limited ways. Hollaback Vancouver, a local iteration of the global movement to challenge harassment in public spaces, reports that 58 percent of women surveyed said they don’t feel comfortable on transit.64 Kalms told me that recent mapping of safe and unsafe spaces in cities by young women, trans, and non-binary participants in Australia, Uganda, Peru, Spain, and India indicates that around 10 percent of all sexual harassment and assault occurs in public transportation spaces. She says that many women will have a traumatic experience in such a space and never return or use the system again.65
Kalms adds that transit agencies tend to implement measures that require women, trans, and gender non-conforming people to monitor their behaviour at all times, including not travelling alone and having to stand in certain well-lit areas in view of CCTV cameras and ride in certain train cars.
Such situations can become even more likely in congested transit or at stations with poor lighting, making it very difficult to get away if being harassed. “On the other end of it, it’s very easy for perpetrators to be very anonymous on public transport spaces because they are so busy and very transitory,” Kalms says.
Amy Lubitow, co-author of the 2016 journal article “Transmobilities,” which featured interviews with twenty-five trans and gender non-conforming people, told me that interview subjects reported a sense of constant vigilance in public transit spaces, with a feeling that they couldn’t easily get out of an uncomfortable situation.66 She says that gender non- conforming riders she spoke with often restricted their movements to certain parts of the city and wouldn’t take some trips during the evening.
These factors undermine the ability for a vast percentage of a city’s population to get around efficiently and safely. But contrary to the messaging of ride-hailing and autonomous vehicle companies, the answer shouldn’t be to further privatize transportation by getting everyone into ostensibly safer cars—that will only exacerbate environmental impacts, economic and racial inequality, and congestion. Rather, we should fight to pressure transit agencies to improve their service to people with disabilities, seniors, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming people, ensuring that everyone can be guaranteed public transportation where riders feel respected and included. As Angela Marie MacDougall, executive director of Vancouver’s Battered Women’s Support Services, put it:
We don’t believe that harassment is an unavoidable part of a woman’s daily commute. We believe that women must be able to move about and occupy the public space without being placed in danger or threatened. It’s a fundamental freedom. Safe public transit for women and girls is about recognizing our experiences and needs. We all have the right to feel safe in our cities. Let’s make this a priority.67
Silicon Valley’s investors would prefer us to throw our hands up at the dismal state of public transportation and opt instead for their ritzy but ultimately no better, unaccountable products. We need to reclaim power over buses, trains, and sidewalks to create communities that genuinely serve everyone, not just young, able-bodied cis men.
There are plenty of examples of this power being exercised. The legendary disability organization ADAPT, now known as American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today, formed in the late 1970s amid a fierce struggle to ensure that wheelchair lifts were added to buses in Denver. The group used a range of direct-action techniques to see their demands were met, including the famous “Gang of 19” rolling into traffic to block a bus and the destruction of sidewalks with sledgehammers to protest the government’s failure to ensure accessibility.68 ADAPT has repeatedly intervened with militant protests in the years since. Its members have been arrested countless times while calling for defence of Medicaid and the Disability Integration Act.69
Lawsuits are another tool to force transit agencies to pay sizable fines and improve accessibility. Boston only has fifty-three subway stations, but it is more than 90 percent wheelchair accessible due to a group of wheelchair users suing the transit authority in 2002 and gaining guarantees for the construction, maintenance, and monitoring of elevators.70 Seattle is in the process of installing 22,500 curb ramps over the next eighteen years at an estimated total cost of $300 million in response to a class-action lawsuit filed by three people with disabilities.71 A series of lawsuits have been filed against New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority for allegedly ignoring the ADA, including failure to install an elevator during renovations of a Bronx subway station.72 Similar class-action lawsuits were filed in Montreal and San Francisco in 2017.73
In April 2018, a ritzy public discussion with the chairperson of the MTA held at the Museum of the City of New York was protested over lack of public transit accessibility, which led to the event being cancelled. An activist with The People’s MTA, the group that shut down the event, explained that “the everyday frustrations experienced by riders, which are so much worse for people who use wheelchairs, exploded … because people didn’t want to allow the MTA to pull off a public relations stunt.”74 Advocacy by the Canadian Federation for the Blind in 2014 led BC Transit to implement an automated system to announce bus stops and require drivers to call them out if that technology isn’t available.75
Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council identified thirty- two recommendations to improve transit accessibility, including the integration of real-time accessibility information into trip planning tools, increasing audible cues at busy intersections, and building shelters with seating and restrooms.76
Struggles for accessibility are neither easy nor guaranteed to succeed. They are often multi-year fights, against obstinate bureaucrats and city councillors more concerned with keeping property taxes down than ensuring that residents with disabilities can genuinely access transportation. But these struggles can be won. Public agencies are often far more susceptible to legal and public pressure than venture-capital-backed private corporations are.
A 2019 paper presented at the national Transportation Research Board Meeting reported that women used Los Angeles’s new Expo light rail line about half as much as men; 20 percent of women surveyed avoided it for fear of harassment.77 Interviewees had suggestions to improve conditions: more lighting at stations, staff available to respond to situations, locating stops in busy areas where other people might be. These are not unreasonable or costly requests. They only require that a transit agency take them seriously—and they reinforce the importance of improving transit service to reduce overcrowding and lengthy waits. Importantly, they must also be implemented in a way that recognizes that feeling uncomfortable does not necessarily mean being unsafe; unconscious racist biases often contribute to discriminatory policing of Black and Indigenous people.
Similarly, Jana Korn identified three related solutions in a 2018 article for Next City: “investing in transport infrastructure, easing the process of filing a complaint, and raising public awareness.” With more predictable and efficient transit, riders have less chance of being the victim of a crime, she wrote, while simpler reporting processes for survivors and witnesses, such as an anonymous texting or app service, can facilitate faster responses and prevention mechanisms. Hollaback Ottawa successfully pressured the city’s transit agency into launching an anonymous online reporting system.78 Kalms notes that there’s a “huge case for not having such congested public transport in general because it has huge safety issues.” That means allocating the funding to run more buses and trains.
Marketing campaigns proclaiming zero tolerance for harassment and assault can help, as can posters and commercials that encourage bystander intervention. Korn reports that an awareness campaign by Washington, DC’s transit agency—fought for and won by Collective Action for Safe Spaces—doubled rates of reporting by people who had been harassed. Battered Women’s Support Services in Vancouver created a brochure that lists ways that bystanders can intervene if someone is being harassed on transit, ranging from asking if the person is being bothered to offering to get off at the next stop with them, telling a transit worker, or dropping your bags to create a commotion.79
Lubitow and her “Transmobilities” co-authors recommended gender-sensitivity training for all transit employees, informing them of the threats of harassment and assault that trans and gender non-conforming people face. Interviewees in their study suggested installing signage to inform riders that everyone should be able to ride free of harassment regardless of gender presentation, and including gender identity as a protected class of riders. Lubitow told me that changes as simple as transit drivers not gendering people when they get on the bus by saying “sir” or “madam” can make a huge difference. Better lighting at stations and stops can also improve the sense of safety. However, the interviewees often specified that increasing police or security presence wouldn’t help them feel safer, given the long history of police violence and incarceration of gender non-conforming people. One participant said: “My worst experiences … have been TriMet police. I do not feel safe with any police officers, ever. I don’t trust the police, just based on my personal history with them, but also being Black and trans and queer and disabled.”
Governments also need to recognize the overwhelmingly gendered unpaid labour of childcare, grocery shopping, and running kids to and from school. Many women “trip-chain,” making multiple and sometimes lengthy stops that can become very expensive if fares only allow for one-way travel.80 A shift toward time-based transfers—or free fares—reduces the financial burden placed on riders in those situations. As urban planning professor Anna Kramer has argued, “good public transit is a feminist issue.” In Toronto, 58 percent of transit riders are women, especially women of colour and recent immigrants.81 Kramer wrote:
What transit improvements would benefit women? Better service across the network: reliability, capacity, frequency, speed, coverage. Lower and more integrated fares. Safety and wayfinding. Better accessibility for those with strollers and large packages. Unsurprisingly, and happily, the same kinds of improvements that would benefit all kinds of riders, not just women, and help shift mode.82
There’s a vast overrepresentation of able-bodied men in the transportation workforce; women make up only 15 percent of the industry in the U.S.83 In Vancouver, 20 percent of TransLink’s staff are women, while in Toronto a mere 15 percent of transit employees are women.84 Transit boards are also disproportionately male.85 But that can change under democratic and accountable processes that a publicly owned agency will respond to. Seniors, people with disabilities, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming people should be at the forefront of decision-making to improve transit service.
Transit agencies are underfunded and constantly subject to further austerity, making them less inclined to take on “extra” projects that don’t produce immediate returns in the form of increases to ridership or funding. Private companies, though, are beholden only to their owners and shareholders and insist on downloading access issues onto their independent contractors. For public transit agencies and the communities they serve, we have the ability to force change. Decades of successful, though difficult, struggle have proven that such victories can improve conditions for people with disabilities, seniors, and women, trans, and gender non-conforming people. Faced with the prospect of a ride-hailing and autonomous vehicle sector that wishes to destroy what remains of public transit and further undermine access and safety, we must commit our collective power to making the drastic improvements to transit that are so desperately required.