In this episode, Shireen Ali-Khan and Jo Field discuss the pressing issue of women's safety within the transport sector.
Featuring guests Jade Neville and Susan Leadbetter, the conversation explores the problems of normalisation of safety concerns and underreporting, with personal experiences.
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Listen to a clip
Susan Leadbetter on “the persistent normalisation of discomfort, discomfort and fear”
Jade Neville on becoming an active bystander using the Distract, Delegate, Report approach
About our guests
Jade Neville is the Chair of our Women’s Safety Steering Group and Sales Operations and Marketing Manager at Trellint
Susan Leadbetter is Vice Chair of our Women’s Safety Steering Group and an Associate at WSP
The episode highlights practical measures and policies that can enhance safety, including improved reporting systems and targeted design changes.
The discussion also emphasises the importance of intersectionality and empathy in transport planning, calling for a collective effort to create safer, more inclusive transport systems.
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Sonya Byers: Hello, I’m Sonya Byers, Chief Executive of Women in Transport. Welcome to Season 3 of the Women in Transport Podcast, where we’re sharing the voices and stories of women from across the transport sector.
Each episode, we explore the experiences, challenges, and triumphs of those shaping the industry, spotlighting the power of representation, allyship and leadership at every level.
Thanks for tuning in. Let’s dive into today’s conversation.
Shireen Ali-Khan: Welcome to this episode of the Women in Transport Podcast. Today’s episode focuses on one of the most urgent issues in transport: women’s safety.
Every woman travelling, working, or leading in this sector deserves to feel safe, yet too many still face harassment, fear, and barriers to speaking up. Safety isn’t just personal; it’s cultural and systematic. Tackling it demands action at every level.
Today’s guests are delivering incredible work with Women in Transport and are really driving change within this area. Together we’ll explore what’s working, where the gaps remain, and how to build a transport system that’s truly safe and inclusive for all.
Whether you’re a passenger, a practitioner, a policymaker, this episode invites you to listen, learn, and be part of the solution.
Jo and myself are really excited for this conversation. Joe, I’ll come to you first to say hello to our listeners and then we’ll introduce our wonderful guests.
Jo Field: Hi everyone. I’m Jo Field. I’m the Chair of Women in Transport, and women’s safety is one of my top priorities that we’ve been focusing on since I became Chair.
Shireen: Wonderful. Excellent. Good nod to the safety work as well. Very good. And welcome to our guests, Jade and Susan. Please introduce yourselves.
Jade Neville: Hi, I’m Jade Neville. I’m the Chair of the Women’s Safety Group for Women in Transport. And a past president of the British Parking Association. So I’m a parking professional at heart, but with transportation in mind.
Susan Leadbetter: My name’s Susan Leadbetter. I’m an Associate at WSP. I am the Vice Chair of the Women’s Safety Group, but I also lead our gender-inclusive design team at WSP, making sure that our systems are representative in design.
Shireen: Wonderful. Thank you. You seem like you’re doing really interesting work in your day jobs, but also in this kind of extracurricular safety realm, which we’re really excited to have this conversation, but understanding what a huge area of work.
This is something that we’ve been trying to lead in for a long time, I think, trying to make change. So for our listeners, when you think about the current landscape, what is that single issue around safety and the challenges that are facing women today?
Jade: Under-reporting is a massive issue for us. It’s hard for us to be able to fix something if we don’t know the full scale of the problem. And it’s something that we’ve always battled against in terms of the quality of the data that we are getting back from reports. And there’s a mixture of reasons why that’s happening, which I’m sure we’ll touch on throughout this conversation. But that’s probably one of the biggest challenges that we face today, and we have done for some time now.
Shireen: Really interesting. Thank you. And Susan, would you agree with that?
Susan: Yeah, definitely. And just to add to that, I’d probably just say one of the biggest challenges is around the persistent normalisation of discomfort, discomfort and fear. Too often as women, we’re adapting our behaviors, we’re changing routes, we’re avoiding looking in certain directions or pretending to be on the phone, having your keys out. And these are just really accepted as the norm. And there’s just so many different elements of this that make it so hard to tackle. Incidents are looked at as isolated rather than looking at the whole environment, whether it’s culture and the physical design environment as well. So we also need to make sure that we’re looking at those underlying behaviors and attitudes as well as those design decisions and look at everything together rather than isolated.
[00:03:52] Jade Neville: I couldn’t agree more. The normalisation of it was something that I was a bit naive to at the beginning of this, and I think that’s probably one of the main reasons why I wanted to take on this project so much was that I was doing all of those things that Susan just mentioned, and I never thought twice about it. It was just such a normal thing to do. And because we don’t speak about it and verbalize it enough in an open forum, I think there’s half the population here, which probably don’t even realise in most cases that that’s what happens on a daily basis for us. And we do it without thinking.
And that’s, yeah, it was an eye-opening conversation in the early stages of this project that we were having in open forums.
Shireen: Yeah, really interesting point around that normalization, because the more we talk, the more we realise, oh, that’s not normal to feel this unsafe. And it’s not normal, but I feel that in the way it manifests really similar behaviors in in women or vulnerable groups.
Susan: I was just going to add to that as well. What’s really interesting from my perspective is that, as a transport planner for 10 years, it was only the last four or five years I actually considered my own experiences and my own gender within our day-to-day work, and that did stem from Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard, and then opening that wider, broader conversation and talking to my male colleagues, for example.
And then they would go home and talk to their wives and their daughters and they were like, oh, this does happen. And we’ve just never considered it before.
Shireen: Yeah, absolutely.
Jo: That’s great, Susan. Thanks. So it’s, I think what you’re saying is the sort of experience of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa, that was a bit of a wake-up call for you to bring in your own lived experience. So would you say that that was the moment that made women's safety feel more urgent or personal to you? Or was there something else?
Susan: From my perspective? Absolutely. So for context, I was at university at the time, in my final year doing my dissertation, and I was actually looking at gendered barriers to cycling. So I still had the gendered lens.
And then it was in March that year that the Sarah Everard tragedy happened, and there was just such an output of my friends and family and people on social media just talking to their own personal experiences, and there was just that sense of anger and frustration, and living in London and being in London and being in Clapham all the time. It just felt really personal because I’d walked that route so many times. She’d done all the things that she was meant to have done as a woman, where she was wearing bright clothing. She took the most well-lit route. And it just still wasn’t enough. So I did a total change of my dissertation with five weeks to go, which was an absolute nightmare. But we got there in the end and we heard from over 600 women across the UK talking about their experiences, which I never asked anyone to go into detail too. But I had one open question at the end of my survey along with some more in-depth interviews, but just the amount of experiences, really traumatic experiences that were being shared. It’s just stuck with me ever since, and I’ve just had to keep going with it.
Jo: What was the standout finding then from your dissertation? From the people that responded?
Susan: I think the thing that stood out the most was just how common these experiences were, but no one seemed to care or be listening or doing much about it.
I remember one of the quotes that I got in the survey was that if this was happening to men, something would’ve changed a long time ago.
Something else that was really standout was just how personal and nuanced these experiences were. So, for example, some women were saying they felt much safer on the bus because there was a driver, or it stopped closer to their house, or some people said that they preferred the Tube because they had a shorter walking distance.
So that in itself makes this issue very challenging and complex because it is so nuanced and personal. But I think as well, something that stood out was around the reporting and handling of incidents. For example, of all the women that said they’d reported an incident, 19% of them said that they would never go through the trauma of reporting again because of how challenging it was and how poorly it was handled. And in some instances nothing happened. Or in some instances, they were constantly being passed around to other people, and it was just really traumatic for them. And that’s a huge number.
Shireen: Where was that reporting? Is that reporting to the police or to transport police or to the transport operators? Where did that reporting take place?
Susan: I don’t have the specifics on that. It was just a generic question about reporting, but I suspect there’s probably a mixture. But across transport police and the police, for example.
Shireen: Yeah, and I raised that because of where we are currently in 2025, there’ve been lots of reviews and reports around authorities and how they handle reporting specifically, and how victims are supported, particularly around safety and women’s safety. And there’s been recommendation upon recommendation about how that could be, should be handled.
And so we’ll talk about practicalities in a moment, but I just wonder actually how many people are being affected still, even though there are processes in place. And we know there’s been a documentary on just last week around how the Metropolitan Police are handling certain things around that avenue without going into the details of the kind of atrocities there. But those that are meant to look after us are not doing the basic stuff right around reporting and capturing information. And so as you’ve just said, it was quite stark that people said, I would not go and report again. Like that’s the blocker for me. It’s the reporting, not the incident that took place.
Susan: What really came out of that research was that women actually didn’t realise what was happening to them was something that could be reported. So sometimes they were realising years later if it happened to them really young, for example, or sometimes they didn’t realise until they went home and they spoke to a friend and they’d processed it and they were like, actually, no, you should have reported that. And by then they think, oh, it’s too late now, so I won’t bother. And it’s that normalization again that comes into play.
Jo: I guess I’m interested to hear from you, Jade. Was there a factor? Was there something that made you think, okay, women’s safety, that’s what I really need to focus on?
Jade: Similar to Susan. I’d been working in this group and actually thinking about this as a project before I’d even considered how I consider my own personal safety. And then the more I’ve actually done this and worked in this group, and the more I learn, the more I consider my own personal safety.
I had an experience only recently where I travel internationally quite a lot for work. And I’d normally be alone. So I’m travelling alone across to the States, normally night flights, connecting flights in between. And I had an incident on an aircraft actually, where I was receiving some unwanted physical attention from a male, and on this flight in particular we were experiencing heavy turbulence.
And these are the nuanced situations where there isn’t a guidebook, there isn’t a poster or anything to tell you what to do in these situations, but we were all strapped in, even the flight attendants. We couldn’t get up to press the call help button. I couldn’t move seats, I couldn’t do anything, and I felt trapped.
I felt like I couldn’t respond to the situation how I would naturally do it. And it was very uncomfortable. That made me think to myself even more, you know, what are we doing to support and to help women in these situations? Because we do have flights, the night flights, where these situations do happen. You’re within feet of a stranger, and if you are strapped in for your safety because you’re experiencing turbulence, there’s no discreet way other than making quite a large scene to get out of that situation. It felt trapping. And it kind of crystallised in my mind that even though we’re doing a lot of great work at the moment, there’s so much more to be done, that needs to happen.
And, you know, that’s going to have a knock-on effect for people taking roles as well. Women in senior leadership roles where there is going to be a certain element where there will be travel involved. You know, they will think twice about it because they’re going to consider their own safety. And it has even made me nervous thinking about travelling alone now in these kinds of circumstances.
And it shouldn’t be the case, you know? I’m sure that that’s going to have an impact on the roles that women continue to take on in terms of senior leadership roles. Why should they have to risk it to get there safe? You know, it shouldn’t be, it shouldn’t be an issue, it shouldn’t be a thing. So yeah, that kind of solidified it more in my mind. It made it very personal to me having actually experienced it after I started working in this environment.
Jo: Sure. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, it sounds awful, Jade. And was there any guidance or, in your experience, do employers put forward any guidance on travelling alone when working? Travelling by yourself, what should you do? I’m just interested to see what support there is from employers.
Jade: Yeah, there isn’t a consistent approach, I’ve noticed. And it’s something that we’ve been having conversations with, especially from a parking perspective, where we are looking at women in parking as a group, for example.
We had a whole seminar based on a whole panel discussion based on safety policies and what we have in line for that. And you think about things. Simple things like travel policies, for example, where you’re looking at hotels in proximity to the venue that you’re going to stay close to. A lot of the travel policies have elements in place where you have to consider cost, right?
When you’re going to a city, you’re considering costs and there’s caps on how much you could spend or going to a particular venue or a hotel. And that might mean that you are stuck going to a hotel that’s quite far away from the venue, and you have to get another mode of transport to get from A to B, and you could be finishing that event late at night. And there isn’t a consideration there to look at the individual if they, you know, if that’s a safe thing to do. Is there a cap on getting a taxi? Sometimes that could be a case as well. So you have to rely on getting a bus or getting a Tube. All of those elements and stripping it back down to look at that on a gender level: is this the right thing to do by the safety of your employee?
And to consider changing those simple things like transport policies, just having a look and go, okay, is that worth the safety of your employee to restrict those transport modes and methods? So those kinds of conversations are happening and are happening more, and we’re starting to see more changes in that respect.
For example, our particular business, we got training on lone worker travel as well, and particularly travelling at night, and processes in place to try and buddy up where you can, try to avoid night fights, those kinds of things. They’re not always avoidable. You can’t always get around those things, but it’s a good start.
Jo: Good. Glad to hear. And yeah, the point about hotels, that’s quite pertinent for me at the moment because it’s conference season and me and colleagues from the industry and associates, we’ve all been talking about the various different travel policies that our employers have. And exactly right, that issue you raised, Jade, about budget hotels so far away from the conference venue, about late-night working. And then particularly people who work for public sector and charities, the sort of thinking that you can’t get a taxi. So I think you’re absolutely right. More needs to be done to prioritise employees’ safety over cost.
Shireen: Yeah, I never really thought about the policy around costs. Yeah, I’ve had experiences where colleagues have booked me the cheapest hotel. I remember going in: there was no lock on the door, so I had to ask. We moved, I think I got moved three times before there was kind of a thing. So now I take a doorstop with me just to shove it underneath. And you think all these kinds of hints and tips and tricks, actually, should they be on us to do it?
I remember going away with work and in the middle of the night somebody else came into the room because the keycard obviously worked and it was a drunk person. I was just a bit like, oh, half asleep. Not expecting another visitor to be there. And you just think, oh, that’s a bit funny. But actually when you wake up in the day, you realise actually what could have happened and what might, yeah… But it’s the after-thought of it, so I never actually... It sounds really silly to say it, but I never thought about just a real practical thing about changing the policy, taking the cap away, not making it the most cheapest hotel, and just thinking about what’s that member of staff that’s going and actually making it personal, but also not making it a thing that you have to then say, do you mind if I stay near to the venue police? Then it becomes something that you then have to instigate.
But actually, if we just had a policy that was safe for everyone, then actually you are taking the kind of request away from it and that you’re not making it into a thing. You’re making it safety first. What a really practical way to emphasise that everyone can be treated fairly there.
Thank you for that. I would like to ask a question. We touched a little bit around the normalisation, so I want to speak a little bit about culture. And we spoke about people not wanting to report and actually that being a thing, again, for me, that speaks around culture. What can transport operators, authorities do to build that culture where people feel it’s okay to report? Naturally we’d like those incidents not to take place, but if something did happen, then how do we encourage that reporting?
Susan: I think something that I would say here is around awareness raising. I think for some people this is still quite a daunting topic. It’s a complex one at that as well, both from a sort of individual perspective, whether you’ve experienced something, for example, and knowing what happened to you was reportable.
So TfL have a really good campaign, for example, around different types of behaviours. It was about what’s appropriate and what can be reported. I think our industry is very male-dominated, and sometimes because it’s not their lived experience, and it’s not criticism per se, but because it’s not their lived experience, they’re not necessarily thinking about it.
So it's raising awareness that these things do happen. We’re here and we’re listening and we want to support you and help you, I think is really key. And also showing people where to report. So, for example, when we’ve worked on projects for combined authorities, we’re looking at, let’s say, 16 or 17 different bus operators within one region. And they all have different ways of reporting on, and some don’t even have any ways to report on their website, so people don’t know where to go. Because the British Transport Police don’t operate on buses. So there is a big gap there as well, I think.
Jade: We need to make reporting as easy as possible and discreet in some cases, in most cases as well. I mean, every frontline role should be trained to respond consistently and empathetically. And also we need to close the loop as well as it’s something that we don’t do enough of. So publish what’s changed because of those people who have reported, so confidence will rise in women when they start to see reports that they make lead to patrols or design fixes or arrests. I think we don’t close that loop enough to actually show the impact that reporting has. And I think that would help quite a lot as well.
Susan: As someone who is chronically online on TikTok, I always see young women sharing their experiences and just sharing, airing their frustrations around how nothing’s happening. No one’s listening. And sometimes I comment because there’s actually so much happening. We’re doing a lot of work in the sector, but it’s not shouted about. And I think, Jade, that goes to your point around, you know, we need to shout about what we’re doing because it’s not easy and we’re not going to change it overnight. But there’s so much really good work, great work actually, happening that no one’s talking about.
Shireen: Couldn’t agree more on what you just said. I know that through Women in Transport, the safety workstream is doing lots of new work, so I don’t want to introduce that for you. So Susan and Jade, tell us what does that involve? How can people get involved? What would the output look like?
Jade: Yeah, so at the moment we’re very much in a research phase. We understand that there’s lots of gaps there. So we are trying to pull in as many resources as we can.
We are working on survey that would be published quite widely actually across parking and transportation later on this year, which will help us form part of that research project.
And alongside that, we’ll be hosting workshops as well to talk to transport leaders and leaders across the parking industry as well. What programs are out there at the moment in terms of focusing on women’s safety? What’s working well? What can we learn from which will help us then form our research into a whitepaper, which will happen early next year.
Susan: One of the key purposes of this research is to really understand what’s happening at present and set that baseline so we’ve got a trajectory to work towards. So we are not just asking what’s happening, but what’s missing. What do people need and want within the industry to really drive that change forward?
Jade: And we definitely see this, that the Women's Safety Group, and Women in Transport, are leading those conversations and being the home for everyone to come together to be able to have that collective voice to push this agenda forward. We’ve been talking about it for a long time, and we’re really keen to push action now.
Shireen: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like with Women in Transport, we’re very much in that ‘so what?’ space, which is we’ve got a lot of data. Yes, data’s always really helpful and underpins things, but actually what are we doing collectively to further the agenda? And so this sounds like a really invaluable way for people to be involved.
So I think we’ll probably look out for communications with regards to the survey. But certainly if you’re a transport operator and you want to be part of this, reach out to Women in Transport and I'm sure Jade and Susan will want you to be part of this.
With that, Jade, you alluded to some of the nuance there. I just wanted to ask the question around intersectionality, being that this is all part of the Intersectionality workstream, really understanding that we’re not just a lump of gender in the sector. There is all of that nuance, and I feel like I say the word nuance at least a hundred times a day. Actually, when we talk about intersectionality, we know that safety isn’t experienced equally. How do factors such as race, disability, age, and everything else, how do those things intersect with gender and transport?
Jade: Safety risks stack. Disabled women often feel less able to escape or report. Women of colour face racist or sexist harassment combined together. Young women are targeted more frequently, so accessible reporting, diverse staff, trauma-informed responses, and multilingual comms really matter, and that’s something that we need to work harder on. If we design for the most marginalised people, then we will help everybody. You know, we need to make sure that we are including those voices into that conversation.
Susan: And just an example of that: we’ve been working on the Earl’s Court Master Plan project. And the architect, they’ve set up a group called the PRI, which is a public realm inclusivity panel. And it’s brilliant. It’s essentially a diverse group of people brought together from the local area to really sort of co-design everything, not just within the master plan, but extending beyond that red-line boundary. So how you actually access the master plan, whether it’s walking, wheeling, or cycling. And we did some site audits with that group and we went out with three of the members, one of which has COPD, which is a chest breathing issue, and she also had mobility aids. And then Lizzie is a wheelchair user, and Natasha, who is neurodiverse. So it was a really broad range of experiences and Lizzie’s really struck me. So she’s a wheelchair user, and she was saying that she actually feels safer at night when there’s less people around because during the day it’s so busy. She’s focusing on not bumping into things and obstacles. And it was just a perspective that I had never considered because, generally speaking, when you speak to most women, they say they feel least safe at night. And that conversation was really eye-opening for me and emphasizes that it really is making sure we get the simple things right, like removing street clutter and obstacles. It’s very basic and wayfinding as well, and just having clear signage. The lady who has neurodiversity, she was talking about how it’s very stressful and she doesn’t know where she’s going, and really simple things like that can really help improve her experience.
Shireen: And how important is it to have these conversations with real people with real experiences to then make changes?
Susan: So, so, so important, because safety is so context-specific and subjective. For example, as a consultant, we work all over the UK and I live in London. So if I’m going to, let’s say Birmingham, if I go and do an audit of a space, my experience is probably going to be very different to someone who actually lives there and uses that area day in and day out. So it’s really important that you are capturing those local voices. Really, really important, and also paying people for their time to contribute as well.
Shireen: Yeah, I love that. Not just tell us what you think, but actually providing incentives and compensation. Absolutely. Jade, your perspectives on that?
Jade: Yeah, I think it’s something that we don’t talk about enough at all. There’s a real gap between how we approach intersectional safety and recognizing that, like Susan just said, safety looks different depending on who you are and when you travel. And whether that be women of colour, trans women, people in low income, young girls. They’re all, they all face distinct risks. And the opportunity now is to bring those lived experiences directly into co-design, audit, data collection and training, so our solutions truly fit the people that are actually using them. So that does sum it up for me, and I think Susan did a great job in putting detail on that.
Jo: And something I always say, when I’m talking about how much of a priority women’s safety is to us at at Women in Transport, I always say that we are quite unique because we are bringing our expertise as transport professionals, but we’re also bringing our lived experience. So we can come with solutions; we’ve got that expertise.
So, of all the initiatives that you’ve been involved in, which has had the most tangible impact on women’s safety? And I’ll go to Jade first and then to Susan.
Jade: The ones I’ve been directly involved with from a parking perspective, which is slightly nuanced, but I think it’s a gray area. I don’t think we consider that in the grand scheme of the transport ecosystem. And a lot of the journeys end and start with a car and then probably move on to another mode of transport. So it does have quite a knock-on effect.
So, last year, from a parking perspective, we adapted the Ask for Angela campaign and WAVE training, which is welfare and vulnerability engagement training. And we worked with the Safer Business Network and Thames Valley Police to adapt the training and make it bespoke for frontline teams. So generally both of these campaigns, for us in particular, were focused on licensed premises, nightclubs, pubs, those kinds of things. Where if someone felt unsafe, they could say a codeword, i.e. ask for Angela at the bar, and they can discreetly get assistance without causing too much alarm or distress or making the scene, and they can be helped to safety.
So we trained our civil enforcement officers both in the Reading and Oxfordshire areas, in WAVE and Ask for Angela training, and then publicised that as wide as we possibly could. So the civil enforcement officers that are often patrolling the streets in an evening around the nighttime economy, for example, or even in the quiet areas that you wouldn’t normally get to see somebody patrolling around. They’re walking ambassadors for the Ask for Angela campaign and the welfare and vulnerability engagement. So they can look out for signs of people that might be under distress. Whether they feel like they’re being followed, they can flag them down if they feel like they’ve been spiked or not feeling well, or if something’s not quite going how it should be, they can get assistance directly through these officers who have access to mobile phones, radios, backup, everything like that. That, for me, was a great way of being able to use resources that were already out in areas where you wouldn’t necessarily have that. Just to help. They’re there to act as an active bystander. They’re being trained in that, to give them the confidence to be able to deal with those situations, comfortably and safely. And they’re there to help the public as much as they can.
Jo: Brilliant. Thank you, Jade. And do you have any feedback or stats on how successful that initiative has been?
Jade: Yeah. The feedback from the public has been quite good to hear. And I say that because parking’s not generally something that people look at with the most loving lens. So you know, generally when you see a civil enforcement officer, you’re worried that you’re going to get a parking ticket. But in this case, they’re looking at them as somebody who can actually offer them support. And I think that was so well received. And it’s done a great thing for public trust in terms of the services they provide. And also to feel more comfortable in areas where if they saw a civil enforcement officer walking down their street at night, they didn’t just look at them as somebody who was a punitive force or somebody who could offer directions. You know, there was somebody there that can help them feel safe, overnight as well. So it was a great way of being able to build that trust between public and public service.
Jo: Thank you, Jade. And Susan, of the initiatives that you’ve worked on, which would you say has had the biggest tangible impact on women’s safety?
Susan: I think it’s a tough question because we’re in the design space and as you know, it takes a very long time for these schemes to be constructed. So in terms of measuring the impact of those design changes that we’re making at the moment, I don’t necessarily have an answer per se, because monitoring and evaluation does take a very long time.
However, what I would say is something that our team will always continue to do, and what is really, really important is that upskilling and awareness raising. So we’ve developed various materials, some for clients bespoke, some more high-level and generic, but we’ve probably delivered over 150 presentations and webinars on the issue of not just women’s safety, but just gender differences in travelling.
So in October last year, our team went to York to go see Active Travel England and spent the day with them and did a whole session on this is how gender relates to transport planning and design. These are the different experiences that we have from an intersectional perspective. And then they actually went out and did a site visit together and took what they learned in that session and used that practically and they, we also did a gap analysis of their existing tools and put forward recommendations around how they can actually enhance them. Are you looking at your schemes in daytime and darkness? Are you actually making sure you’re going out on site? Because sometimes as designers, site visits don’t always happen. But to really understand how that space looks and feels, you really, really should be going out on site where you can. Does the lighting work? Is the lighting placed in the most appropriate location, for example?
And I guess the second element that we’ve been working on is our design tool, the Safety Inclusion Assessment. So one of the gaps that we noticed when we did our own research back in 2023, talking to designers to understand their issues and what they’re doing to consider women’s safety. It was just… there’s a lack of general awareness, but also design guidance and tools. So we actually just developed our own, where we took everything that women and girls told us, and we have built that into a tool which has a set of different criteria that can be applied to various different schemes. We’ve applied it to over 35 different schemes, whether it’s parks and gardens, high streets, active travel schemes, for example.
And alongside that audit, we’ll make sure that wherever possible where budget and program allows, we’re bringing in that lived experience. So sometimes we’ll do focus groups, for example, and we’ll pay people for their time. So we typically offer a £50 gift voucher, and to come attend a focus group, we did a drop-in session in a hospital to capture views from shift pattern workers as well.
So yeah, just making sure that it’s well rounded and bringing in that local voice, and hopefully we’ll get to a point where we can do the post-implementation assessment and everyone says it was really good.
Jo: Brilliant. Thanks Susan. So, yeah, and thank you for everything that you’ve put together, all these resources. It sounds like you know the work you’re doing is about creating guidance, creating toolkits and frameworks and things for people to follow so that in future we will have truly safe and inclusive transport systems.
So I guess my question now is about future vision, and what does a truly safe and inclusive transport system look like to you?
Susan: I think for me it would be ensuring that women’s safety is not an afterthought and it’s embedded in your scheme or policy from the get-go. We see a lot of projects where we are bought in. It’s not criticism that things happen where we’re bought in too far down the line and we can’t actually have much of an impact. Or we can, but it’s going to cost you a lot more money because it was so far down the design. So bringing this in right at the start, talking about it early, would be really key for that to be mandated.
Jo: Okay, thanks Susan. So, yeah, having that women’s safety at the forefront of the planning process.
Okay. And Jade, if you could change one policy or practice tomorrow, what would it be?
Jade: I would make it mandatory for every UK transport operator to have a sexual harassment prevention plan and standardised training. Make sure reporting’s easy. Data sharing between agencies. And regular public performance on public safety perception.
I think safety perception is not measured enough. The perception of safety should almost be our success measure. How well is this being designed? How well are our policies hitting should be measured on. What the perception of safety is for women. If they don’t feel safe, they normally avoid that mode of transport anyway. And then we’ve already kind of lost that battle before it’s even happened.
And, you know, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that mode of transport isn’t a safe… the safest route to take, either. So the perception of safety is something we need to start measuring on and using that as success points and tie it into funding so it happens everywhere. And it’s not just the proactive regions that are doing it. We need a level of consistency. So if I had a magic wand, that’s what I would do.
Shireen: Thank you. Really practical ways that you are supporting and people can support. As we bring our conversation to a close, what is one thing that the listeners can do, whether they’re passengers or colleagues? What is your call to action for people to be allies in improving the safety for women?
Jade: For me, one of the most effective frameworks for a passenger is the Distract, Delegate and Report approach. It’s the framework of being an active bystander. So what that means is there is a method, a simple method, that we can take as passengers when we see a situation that might be occurring to one of our fellow passengers. We can either distract, which means just break the moment up by asking an innocent question. We could be asking for directions. We could drop something and say, oh, I’m sorry, just to break up that situation that’s happening. And generally that kind of stops the momentum and it can help the situation. Or if you feel comfortable enough, I would even have sparked up a conversation with the person who’s being aimed at in terms of the victim in that scenario as well, just to show some kind of allyship and that they’re not alone and you are there to be able to support them if they need it.
The other option is to delegate, which means getting some help, which means we can flag down a member of staff that’s on that transport network or even report it to the British Transport Police. Say, for example, if you’re on a train, we can use a text number to do the See It Say It Sorted approach and get some help from somebody else.
And the last thing to do is to report it even if something’s happened and we haven’t necessarily felt comfortable enough to distract or interact or even had the opportunity to delegate. At least it’s been reported; it has been captured. That necessarily doesn’t always have to be down to the victim that’s there.
We could do it as bystanders as well. And I think the more that we encourage that data gathering and that communication between the two, it’s going to really help us build that picture of what’s happening and where. And I always, always say, don’t be a hero. Just be human. The small acts of speaking up or checking in on someone can completely change how safe someone feels. So it’s the small cultural shifts like that applied across multiple networks that will start to transform our travel experience for women.
Shireen: Oh, I love that. Really helpful, just be human and just do something. And I love how you’ve described ways of doing something. And none of those are confrontational. None of those mean escalation. All of those are around distracting, delegating, reporting. I wonder how many people know that they should do that.
I think TfL is really good, kind of a London bias here. And also having worked there before, I know TfL are really good. I do see it on the transport network, ways of, firstly ways of helping, but also what behaviour is not acceptable. And so I love that the culture is shifting around things. Certainly when I was younger, those things were very acceptable. So to see them now not being acceptable was a real kind of culture shift.
But what about other transport networks and operators? Just making it really clear to other passengers how they can be allies.
What more can they do in order to support exactly what you just described, Jade?
Jade: I think communication’s the key. I think the transport police for the See It Say It Sorted campaign is great, but I think at first people assumed it was for terrorism because of the, you know, the time it came out, the way it was being promoted… that it’s actually for everything.
And we need to make sure that those schemes that are there, there’s quite a few of them. You know, there is a lot happening. They just need to be communicated clearer. And I think that the See it Say It Sorted campaign is a great way of being able to use that as a test, as like the utopia of how that should be communicated is repeated all the time. It’s there all the time. And having that kind of knowledge that someone’s a text away is a huge empowerment piece, I think. And we need to communicate that more across other transport modes as well, including buses, even planes. You know, being on a plane like I was, there was nothing, I didn’t feel like there was anything there to be able to support. So we need to be able to be better at communicating these things.
Shireen: A real collaborative approach as to what’s acceptable on transport and what isn’t, but exactly as you just described there, that awareness and that communication.
And Susan, from your experiences and your perspective, what do you want our listeners to take away?
Susan: I think just around practice and empathy. Think about other lived experiences outside of your own challenge, the way that you’re doing things, and think about other people. I think women’s safety as a topic, particularly when it comes to design as it’s very complex, can be very daunting and seem something that’s really hard to change because you don’t have a set design document that you can follow that says do this, this and this, because it is so context-specific.
But what we’re finding is design changes don’t actually have to be big. They can be quite simple tweaks. Like on a scheme we worked on: we just looked at where they put their cycle parking and we’ve redirected it from down an alleyway at the back of a building to the front of the building. So in the grand scheme of things, a very small tweak, but it’s now somewhere that’s in a visible location and well lit.
And I think lastly, just think about the impact of your decisions and who’s going to be impacted the most. We’re seeing a lot of local authorities turning off street lighting to save money, for example. Are you thinking about the users and the impact on them and the bigger sort of transport system, not just that individual change?
Shireen: I love that. Thank you Susan. Just be more empathetic, really understand the impact of those decisions. They might make sense today and on a spreadsheet, but actually what are those long-term impacts and who are you impacting?
Thank you so much. Really, really great conversation. And for our listeners, definitely join in the conversation, let us know what you’re thinking. We’ll keep everyone abreast on socials with regards to surveys and whitepapers and things that are coming out of the safety workstream for Women in Transport.
Thank you for joining us. Thank you, my guests. Thank you to Jo, and I look forward to joining everybody on the next episode.
Sonya: Thank you for listening to the Women in Transport Podcast. Together we’re championing inclusion and celebrating the women driving change across the transport sector. To join the conversation, connect with us and explore more stories, head to the episode show-notes.