BART works with Alliance for Girls on building better safety and security initiatives
The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has teamed up with Alliance for Girls to enhance safety, increase ridership and prevent and address sexual harassment and gender-based violence. Alliance for Girls has helped BART to put out a report, “Youth-Informed Radical Vision of Safety Evaluation Framework”, which focuses on the ideas of local girls and gender-expansive youth through an outline of steps BART can take to advance gender equity, create a welcoming environment and measure the effectiveness of strategies.
This report works to document research and outreach conducted for BART in early 2024 with 100 participants, primarily girls and gender-expansive youth who identify as people of color. Ideas listed in this report suggest preventative and interventional safety measures that can be taken by BART, focusing on themes of physical and environmental safety, emotional and mental safety and the safety of others.
The report, along with new data about harassment, was presented to the BART Board of Directors at its Dec. 5, board meeting with community members voicing their support of the recommendations laid out in the report, notes BART.
“Safety, as defined by girls and gender-expansive youth of color, goes beyond the absence of violence," said Chantal Hildebrand, co-executive director, Alliance for Girls. "It encompasses a sense of belonging, respect, representation and sovereignty. To create truly safe public transit, these values must guide the conversation. We are excited to collaborate with BART to amplify and center their voices as we reimagine public transportation.”
BART partnered with Alliance for Girls on this research and outreach process to develop a pathway to root the groundbreaking work of the Not One More Girl initiative to uplift the voices and needs of girls and gender-expansive youth of color and find non-policing solutions to prevent and address sexual harassment and gender-based violence on BART. The agency aims to create a culture of care among BART riders and teach safe bystander intervention tips. The effort has previously led to BART policy changes and system changes based on the feedback from girls and gender-expansive youth.
The Youth-Informed Radical Vision of Safety Evaluation Framework report outlines a recommended approach for BART to continually evaluate if this work is enhancing safety, deepening community engagement and increasing ridership. The process calls for leveraging data from the recently conducted Mineta Transportation Institute’s Street Harassment on Transit survey; creating instrumentation tools; partnering with community-based organizations to gather further insights from girls and gender-expansive youth; and collaborating on findings to inform a continuous improvement cycle.
Read the full report on BART’s website. The street harassment survey and the publishing of the report meet the requirements of SB 434, signed into law in 2023, requiring the state’s ten largest transit agencies, including BART, to collect comprehensive survey data identifying the leading causes of street harassment on transit and to conduct outreach and gather qualitative data with those who are underrepresented in surveys.
