Once they have accepted that they have a problem, step two for transport planners is to design evidence-based solutions. Of the 131 transit agencies (more than half of all the large and medium-sized transit operators in the US) that responded to Loukaitou-Sideris’s survey, ‘only one-third felt that transit agencies should really do something about it’, and only three agencies had actually done anything about it. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the chronic lack of data and research on women’s safety in transport settings, Loukaitou-Sideris also found ‘a significant mismatch between the safety and security needs and desires of female passengers and the types and locations of strategies that transit agencies use’.
Most of the agencies she surveyed had security strategies on their buses: 80% had CCTV; 76% had panic alarms; and 73% had public address systems. But the vast majority neither had, nor intended to install, security measures at bus stops. This is in diametric opposition to what women actually want: they are far more likely to feel scared waiting in the dark at a bus stop than they are to feel scared on the bus itself. And in fact, they are right to feel this way: one study found that people were over three times more likely to be a victim of crime at or near a transit stop than on the vehicle itself.71
The type of security transport agencies install also matters – and there is also a mismatch here. Transit agencies, possibly for cost reasons, vastly prefer technological solutions to hiring security officers. There is little available data on what impact CCTV has on harassment, but certainly repeated studies have found that women are deeply sceptical of its use, vastly preferring the presence of a conductor or security guard (that is, a preventative solution) as opposed to a blinking light in the corner which may or may not be monitored miles away.72 Interestingly, men prefer technological solutions to the presence of guards – perhaps because the types of crime they are more likely to experience are less personally violating.73
But if paying for a full-time guard is expensive (although arguably worth it if it increases women’s use of public transport), there are plenty of cheaper solutions available.74 Loukaitou-Sideris tells me that ‘the city of Portland has a digital timetable in the bus stop so you know when the next bus is going to come’, meaning women don’t have to wait for ages in the dark, simply because they don’t know the next bus is half an hour away. I admit, when I heard this presented as a radical solution I was shocked – in London it’s far more unusual to come across a bus stop without a digital timetable.
Other evidence-based75 solutions include transparent bus shelters for better visibility and increased lighting – not just at bus stops and metro stations themselves, but on the route to them.76 The location of the bus stop is also important: ‘sometimes even moving the bus stops a few feet up or down the block if it is in front of a well-used establishment’ can make all the difference, says Loukaitou-Sideris. My personal favourite approach is the introduction of request stops in between official stops for women travelling on night buses: although women make up the majority of bus users overall, they are in the minority when it comes to night buses, and while we don’t have data on why exactly this disparity exists, given the data we do have it seems reasonable to conclude that feeling unsafe might have something to do with it.77
The good news for transport planners is that, other than increased security guard presence and lighting, none of these measures is particularly costly. And research conducted by Loukaitou-Sideris in Los Angeles found that there were specific bus stops that were hotspots for gender-based crime, suggesting that costs could be kept further in check by focusing on problem areas.78 All each transport authority would need is its own data – and the will to collect it. But that will is lacking. In the US, Loukaitou-Sideris tells me, ‘there is no federal incentive’ for transit authorities to collect data. ‘They aren’t legally obligated to collect it and so they don’t.’ She doesn’t buy what she calls their ‘excuse’ that they don’t have the money.
In India (Delhi was ranked the fourth most dangerous public transport system in the world for women in 2014) following what came to be known as the ‘Delhi gang rape’, women are taking data collection into their own hands.79 This assault, which hit headlines around the world, began just after 9 p.m. on 16 December 2012 in south Delhi. Twenty-three-year-old physiotherapy student Jyoti Singh and her friend Avanindra Pandey had just finished watching Life of Pi at the cinema when they decided to board one of Delhi’s many private buses.80 Their plan was to go home – but they never got there. The two friends were first severely beaten with a rusty iron rod – and then the gang of six men stared to gang rape Singh. The attack (which included shoving the metal rod inside her) lasted nearly an hour, and was so brutal it perforated her colon.81 Eventually, having exhausted themselves, the six rapists dumped the semi-conscious friends on the roadside, five miles from where they had boarded the bus.82 Thirteen days later, Singh died from her injuries. The following year, three women set up a crowd-mapping platform called Safecity.83 Women can report the location, date and time they were harassed, as well as what happened, ‘so that others can view “hot spots” of such incidents on a map’. The data collected so far is revealing: groping is the most common type of harassment – ahead even of catcalls – and it is most likely to happen on public buses (likely because of overcrowding).
Innovative solutions like this are to be welcomed, but they are not a sufficient substitute for data collected and analysed by professional researchers. And this kind of data is severely lacking in all areas of urban planning, not just transport. A 2016 article in the Guardian asking why we aren’t designing cities ‘that work for women, not just men’ cautions that the limited number of urban datasets ‘that track and trend data on gender make it hard to develop infrastructure programmes that factor in women’s needs’.84 Even when we do start collecting data, there is no guarantee we will continue to do so indefinitely: in 2008 a UK-based database of research on gender and architecture was set up; by 2012 ‘Gendersite’ had closed for lack of funds.85 And when we don’t collect and, crucially, use sex-disaggregated data in urban design, we find unintended male bias cropping up in the most surprising of places.
Most women who use a gym will have experienced that moment of psyching herself up to walk into the free weights area, knowing that many of the men who dominate the space will regard her on a range from nuisance to freak. And yes, you can technically just walk in, but there’s that extra mental hurdle to clear that most men simply don’t face, and it takes a particular kind of self-confidence not to be bothered by it at all. Some days, you just won’t feel like it. It’s the same story in the outdoor gym in my local park; if it’s full of men, I often give it a miss, not relishing the inevitable stares and all too clear sense that I don’t belong.
The inevitable reaction from some quarters to such complaints is to tell women to stop being delicate flowers – or for feminists to stop painting women as delicate flowers. And of course some women aren’t bothered by the leering and macho posturing. But women who do avoid these spaces are not being irrational, because there are plenty of accounts of hostility from men when women venture into supposedly gender-neutral shared exercise spaces.86 Like transit environments, then, gyms are often a classic example of a male-biased public space masquerading as equal access.