What Makes Transit ‘Family Friendly’?

by Jim Mathews / President & CEO

Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration published a Request for Information seeking public input on what it calls “Family Friendly Transit.” There’s a 60-day comment period and yes, we’re planning to offer our thoughts.

At first glance, the phrase may strike some readers as a political slogan. In today’s environment, many transportation discussions quickly become proxies for broader cultural and ideological debates. And I’m not naïve: this Administration has used that term to score culture-war points for a while now. It has become, weirdly, a loaded term. But after reading the notice, I think that there is, nonetheless, an opportunity here for a much more useful conversation.

I think the questions FTA is asking are really, at their core, still customer-service questions. Things like “Will I feel safe?” or “Will the station be clean?” or “Can I navigate the system with my children, luggage, stroller, or mobility device?” or “Will the train or bus arrive when it’s supposed to?” or “Will I know what’s happening if something goes wrong?”

For decades, transit agencies have measured success primarily through ridership, passenger miles, and similar operational metrics. While important, they don’t fully capture the experience of the people who actually use the system or, crucially, who maybe choose NOT to use the system even if it might be the better option.

In its request document, FTA explicitly recognizes the difference between actual safety and the perception of safety. A station may have relatively low crime rates and still feel uncomfortable or intimidating. Conversely, a station located in a challenging environment may feel welcoming and secure because it’s well-lit, easy to navigate, visibly staffed, and well-maintained.

For women traveling alone, teenage girls, older adults, families with children, and occasional riders unfamiliar with the system, those perceptions can be every bit as important as the underlying statistics. If people do not feel comfortable using public transportation, they often won’t use it.

This is an area where transportation researchers have been doing important work for years.

As one example, researchers at the Mineta Transportation Institute, working with transit agencies and policymakers, have examined how women and girls experience public transportation environments and how those experiences influence travel behavior. California recently required several transit agencies to begin using a standardized survey instrument developed through this work to better understand passenger harassment and safety concerns.

The lesson from this growing body of research is that safety isn’t just an enforcement issue, but a design issue. We’ve explored this at some length in the Railway Interiors events I’ve attended or co-chaired both in Europe and here in DC, with the award-winning U.K. design powerhouse PriestmanGoode really leading the way in this conversation. Whether in stations or onboard the transit vehicles themselves, designers need to think differently about lighting, visibility, sightlines, wayfinding, station maintenance, staff presence, the ability to obtain assistance quickly, and so many other similar ideas.

The best transit systems don’t simply react to problems after they occur. They’re designed and managed to reduce risks before problems emerge and to help passengers feel confident using the system. And that brings us to one of the most difficult questions facing transit agencies today.

Many transit facilities are grappling with the visible effects of homelessness, addiction, untreated mental illness, and other social challenges. Passengers experience these realities through blocked pathways, unsanitary conditions, intimidating behavior, harassment, or facilities that no longer seem dedicated to their intended transportation purpose.

Now, let’s be clear. Transit agencies aren’t housing authorities. Or hospitals. Or social-service providers. Their primary responsibility is to provide safe, reliable transportation. But at the same time, transit agencies, station owners and operators, and Amtrak really can’t be allowed to pretend they have no stake in these challenges.

As a firefighter/paramedic for many years, I saw these challenges up close. Based on that experience, I have to tell you that if the same individual has been removed from the same station fifty times, arranging removal for the fifty-first time might well be necessary in the moment, but it’s far from being an actual solution.

Nearly 80 percent of homeless people are "temporarily" homeless...a family breakup, a person getting kicked out of their home by an angry parent or similar, medical bankruptcy, and so forth. Roughly 22 percent of the homeless nationwide are what's called "chronic" homeless, and these are generally the ones who are the biggest problems at train stations and bus stations. For these people, mental illness, chronic physical ailments, malnutrition, and drug abuse and addiction (often from self-medicating for all of their other issues) are the big root-cause drivers, and those root causes are much, much harder to address. Rent stabilization, housing vouchers, and similar steps do nothing for people in this category.

And this is why it’s unreasonable and unfair to expect a transit or train station manager to “solve” a problem with so many interconnected dimensions. But it is equally unreasonable to think that simple enforcement alone, without addressing the underlying pathologies and poor support systems, will do anything other than temporarily move the problem along to some other doorway, hall, train platform, or station stop.

Passengers deserve stations that are clean, orderly, and welcoming. They should be able to use waiting rooms, platforms, and public facilities without harassment, intimidation, obstruction, or unsafe conditions. Maintaining that environment is an essential responsibility of every transit operator. Yet if the same underlying conditions continue to recreate the same problems, the broader system has failed.

Enforcement restores order…for a day. Lasting progress requires cooperation among transit agencies, local governments, public-health officials, housing providers, law-enforcement agencies, nonprofits, and community organizations. No single institution can solve these challenges alone. Neither can any institution honestly claim they are entirely someone else’s responsibility.

For that reason, I hope this FTA request doesn’t become a debate about politics, ideology, or competing slogans. Instead, it should focus on what passengers actually experience. Families often judge a transit environment through questions like:

• Is there somewhere to sit?
• Can I keep my children within sight?
• Is there good lighting?
• Can I find a restroom?
• Are there other people around with families?
• Can I recover from a mistake?
• If my train is late, am I stranded in an environment that feels hostile?

And that’s not just “families.” Passengers generally favor environments that appear maintained, supervised, predictable, understandable, and recoverable when things go wrong. Women traveling alone consistently report this in the literature. So do seniors, and occasional riders.

A transit agency can meaningfully influence whether a station is clean, visible, staffed, monitored, and orderly, providing safe and welcoming stations and facilities, accessible design, clear information and announcements, thoughtful wayfinding and pathways, and non-emotional, evidence-based, approaches to passenger safety. And all of this reinforces the idea that designing with the needs of certain populations in mind makes things better for everyone, and not just for those populations.

Perhaps without realizing it, FTA has opened the door to that conversation. Rail Passengers Association intends to participate, and we look forward to sharing more about our recommendations in the weeks ahead. We’re working on details, and I really hope you’ll share your thoughts on concrete recommendations after reading the FTA document, either here in our comments section or by email to us directly. But my going-in position is that passengers shouldn’t have to choose between compassion and competence. A good transportation system owes them both.