Editor’s Observe: This text was written for Mosaic, an impartial journalism coaching program for highschool college students who report and {photograph} tales beneath the steerage {of professional} journalists.
Day by day, lots of of VTA buses whoosh alongside the streets of Santa Clara County, carrying nearly 90,000 individuals a day.
Cia Castro Carbajal is well-accustomed to driving the bus — paying the fare, discovering a quiet spot within the again and ignoring disruptions and loud conversations. She commutes nearly an hour to San Jose State College, the place she’s a pupil, from her house in Santa Clara.
Cia Castro Carbajal of Santa Clara stated she was harassed whereas driving a bus. “I just had to cry at that moment,” she stated.
(Padma Balaji/Mosaic)
Carbajal was driving the bus house from faculty one afternoon when a person slapped her and swore at her. One other younger girl, seeing Carbajal being harassed, sat subsequent to her, blocking her from the view of her attacker. “She was so comforting, and I just had to cry at that moment,” Carbajal stated.
For a lot of transit customers, harassment is an anticipated a part of utilizing public transit. In a 2024 survey carried out by the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, greater than two-thirds of riders stated they’ve skilled or witnessed at the very least one occasion of harassment. Ladies and folks of coloration reported increased charges of experiencing harassment and had been extra prone to really feel unsafe on transit than their white, male counterparts.
Nevertheless, harassment isn’t reported — in the identical survey, the VTA stated that solely 1 / 4 of riders who expertise or witness harassment report it.
Even simply the concern of harassment could be damaging.
“The idea that something could happen, even if it doesn’t happen, that fear does have an impact,” Haleema Bharoocha, a transit security advocate, stated. “Folks are kind of walking around with this psychological lack of safety, even if it hasn’t happened to them personally.”
Carbajal is aware of that solely too nicely.
“For a while I was afraid of taking the bus, but I still had to take it, so I just had to swallow my fear and just get on the bus anyway,” she stated.
Bharoocha, who served because the senior advocacy supervisor of the Oakland nonprofit Alliance for Ladies, printed a report in 2019 about women’ expertise with harassment. It discovered that 100% of 60 women who participated in focus classes had skilled harassment whereas taking public transit every day.
The next yr, the Alliance for Ladies and BART partnered to launch a marketing campaign in opposition to sexual harassment known as Not One Extra Lady.
“We knew right away that the starting place to do this initiative would be to speak with young women of color and to have them serve as spokespeople for this initiative,” stated Alicia Trost, chief communications officer for BART and a marketing campaign chief.
Greater than 500 women labored on the marketing campaign, sharing their experiences and main social media technique and design.
Trost stated BART was the primary transit company within the Bay Space to steer a marketing campaign that targeted on neighborhood voices.
“I had seen other transit agencies launch harassment campaigns, and a lot of times they either used the wrong language or put all of the onus on the victim to stay away from the bad guys, and there was backlash against the campaign,” Trost stated.
As a substitute, BART applied suggestions from the neighborhood. Listening to that youth usually felt unsafe in empty vehicles and located security in numbers, BART shortened the size of their trains. In addition they displayed QR codes to Spotify playlists curated by youth, as a result of younger individuals who had been a part of the main target teams stated understanding BART cared sufficient to construct a playlist for them made them really feel safer.
After the marketing campaign led to 2023, a survey discovered that 65% of individuals felt extra conscious of the difficulty. By the top of the marketing campaign, information from a quarterly survey confirmed harassment reducing, from 12% of people that responded in 2020 to 10% of people that responded in 2023.
To this point, BART is the one Bay Space transit company to implement a sexual harassment marketing campaign pushed solely by the voices of younger ladies of coloration.
As ridership lags throughout all public transit, there’s renewed curiosity in specializing in security and addressing harassment points.
“It’s really important for the future of our success and to maintain our level of ridership and to gain new riders that we tackle this,” Trost stated. BART’s ridership ranges have solely returned to 55% of pre-pandemic ranges. “We know that people who experience harassment may avoid BART afterward. They’re not going to go and tell their friends to ride BART, so it’s a reputational risk for us. It’s a safety risk for us. It’s a financial risk for us.”
Padma Balaji is a member of the category of 2026 at Mission San Jose Excessive Faculty in Fremont.
