Transform Scotland has today published its response to the Department for Transport’s inquiry into the safety of women and girls when making journeys, whether by public transport or by other means.
We welcome the inquiry and urge the Transport committee to consider women’s and girl’s safety as fundamental to the development of a sustainable transport system, rather than an issue that sits separately from questions of public transport provisions, service reliability, infrastructure and modal shift.
We wish to emphasise the relationship between service reliability and personal safety. Reliability is often treated as a matter of convince or operational performance, however for women travelling after dark it can also be a matter of personal safety. Maintaining frequent, reliable and predictable public transport services is in and of itself a preventative safety measure.
The evidence is clear that women and girls already change how they travel because they do not always feel safe on public transport. Girlguiding states that over half of women and girls aged 11-21 (56%) say they feel unsafe on public transport, an increase from 45% in 2022, and 31% of girls avoid public transport when travelling alone.
Previous work on this issue, prepared by Transform Scotland for the CPG, highlights that women and girls can find themselves changing carriages, getting off early, walking home rather than waiting at an isolated bus stop, or otherwise adapting their behaviour to manage perceived risk. These are not simply individual choices, but consequences of the way our transport system is designed and operated.
This means that safety cannot be considered solely in terms of what happens on a bus or train. We need a whole-journey approach: safe and accessible routes to stops, well-lit waiting environments, reliable and frequent services, visible staff, clear passenger information and effective ways to report incidents.
We cannot expect people to choose public transport, walking and cycling over private cars if those alternatives do not provide a reasonable expectation of safety. Making public transport safer is therefore essential to achieving modal shift and reducing car dependency.
Our recommendations to the committee are as follows:
1. Treat women’s safety as a core component of transport policy.
2. Establish consistent gender-disaggregated safety and travel data.
3. Adopt a whole-journey approach to safety.
4. Make reliability part of the safety agenda.
5. Invest in safe, attractive and accessible public transport environments.
6. Involve women and girls directly in transport planning.
7. Improve reporting and response mechanisms.
8. Strengthen staff training and visibility.
9. Ensure that technology complements rather than substitutes for transport provision.
10. Monitor the transport consequences of safety interventions.
Response author Katherine Scott said:
“The statistics are rightly startling and make it clear that safety is not a peripheral issue for transport policy. Women and girls are changing how, when and whether they travel because they do not always feel safe on public transport. If we are to achieve a shift away from car dependency towards more sustainable modes, safety considerations must be built into public transport from the outset.”
