The Social Indicators of Walkability

As transportation planners, physical barriers to walkability are at the core of our work—influencing infrastructure, transit, and the built environment to support pedestrians. But what about a perfectly built public realm where certain users still don’t feel safe?

What is our role as planners in addressing these social issues while working on and with the public realm? While physical barriers to walkability and public realm use are widely discussed and planned for, social indicators of walkability, such as the rates of street harassment, are less often included in our planning work but deserve just as much attention and thought.

‍What is street harassment?

The concept of street harassment—also sometimes known as “catcalling”—has several slightly different definitions, but a commonly accepted version includes “unwanted comments, gestures, and actions forced on a stranger in a public place without their consent… directed at them because of their actual or perceived sex, gender, gender expression, or sexual orientation.” According to a 2014 report by the nonprofit organization Stop Street Harassment, 65% of women have experienced street harassment, 86% of them more than once, with 68% of women saying they’ve worried verbal harassment would escalate into something worse. 70% of these harassers are males acting alone.

This harassment is largely directed towards transit users, pedestrians, women, minorities, and other underrepresented and vulnerable populations—and when these citizens are made to feel unsafe in urban spaces, they’re less inclined to engage with the public realm, more likely to prefer the privacy of a car over public transportation, and even sometimes reluctant to travel down certain streets. Women frequently wrestle with the decision to walk a less crowded street to reduce harassment, with the trade-off of a quiet street leaving one more vulnerable to worse, a physical attack. Transit is broadly accepted as not being safe in the evening for a woman traveling alone, encouraging rideshare and auto use instead.

Social indicators of walkability have wide-reaching equity impacts as well, impacting the BIPOC community at much higher rates. Per one of the most comprehensive harassment surveys available, 48% of black respondents and 45% of Hispanic respondents have experienced verbal harassment, compared to 36% of white respondents. 57% of LGBTQ respondents have experienced verbal harassment, compared to 37% of heterosexual respondents. 

Street harassment happens multiple times to most people, with 86% of harassed women reporting multiple incidents. Many women would guess their lifetime incident count is in the hundreds. Studies have found that harassment or the fear of harassment can influence victims to change their clothing, transportation choices, or even their jobs—and to lose trust in their communities, leading to social isolation and poor mental health outcomes. Women everywhere have “man outfits” they use to cover up in public places, think twice about what to wear on their commute, and even change their hairstyles to reduce harassment and risk in the public realm.

The most common change to behavior reported by harassed people is a constant assessment of their surroundings. Women report that harassment ruins their ability to relax in the public realm, such as while exercising or taking a lunch break. People’s ability to move about the city freely and utilize urban areas is a huge goal for many of the communities we work in, and we spend millions of dollars designing quality public spaces and functioning transit systems. It’s clear that large portions of our population are uncomfortable using them.

Street harassment has become such an issue that the United Nations is increasingly bringing the topic into discussions of women’s health. U.S. cities barely crack the top 16 worst cities for female transit riders.

What can planners do?

It’s easy to dismiss such a prevalent issue as unsolvable, but what’s unique about confronting harassment is that it doesn’t take big changes to have a major effect locally. It’s a problem that (hopefully) most of us can agree should be addressed in some way, and it doesn’t require updating the land development code or convincing the state legislature to give us a break. Compared to more divisive conversations about our country’s many urban challenges, stopping harassment is politically popular and potentially something almost everyone could get behind, with the municipalities themselves positioned to start the conversation if its leaders choose to do so.

There area wide variety of international precedents available for municipal leaders to review while crafting potential local policy on this issue. A low-cost, tactical approach from Mexico City in 2016 provided subway-riding women with whistles to embarrass harassers—though this approach is not without its critics. Last year, Washington D.C. passed an unprecedented anti-harassment law, which created an advisory committee that would define the issue by surveying citizens to understand harassment’s local breadth. Transit agencies have also begun to work on the issue, getting involved through messaging and driver training.

In addition to hands-on, in-the-moment solutions, a number of cities and agencies have completed studies to understand how various people experience the public realm. In response to the Understanding How Women Travel report, LA Metro created the Gender Action Plan to address gender gaps in their policies, programs, projects, and services. The report includes an action plan to address safety, cleanliness, stations design, and more.

While even the best physically designed spaces are more dangerous for women than for men, certain urban design choices—such as lighting, visibility, seating, and activity—can support women’s perception and reality of safety. Highlighting these urban design choices, such as multi-generational spaces, shared streets, and lighting is key to engaging women safely in the public realm.

I often get questions from men about what they can do if they witness harassment, and I always tell them they should speak up if they can! Tell the harasser their behavior is not okay and ask the harassed if they are okay. You’ll find some other specific recommendations on how to speak up to better support one another as we work on making our streets and transit systems safer for everyone.