SkyTrain safety is a real concern: Part 2!
Posted on August 13th, 2008 in society, transportation, vancouver |
This is the follow up to an earlier post detailing what made me change my mind about safety issues on SkyTrain.
As I said in the former post, I used to be anti-turnstiles and considered safety concerns at SkyTrain hyperbolic and mostly due to perception. Now that that has all changed, here’s a few ideas that I feel would make our transit system much safer.
Turnstiles with 1 attendant at each station
The real problem with safety *on* SkyTrain has to do with undesirables getting onto the system so easily. Turnstiles solves this problem because it creates a barrier (both figuratively and literally), encouraging only legitimate usage of the train.
Furthermore, turnstiles require at least one attendant to be there at all times in case there’s issues with the gates. This ensures that there is a staff presence at each station, and will make people feel safer because they know someone is always there (unlike the current roaming structure). If the attendants end up “adopting” one, or a few, stations as their regulars, it will also create a sense of community for users.
Flexibility with frequencies
What I encountered the other day with a completely empty train could be resolved by adjusting the train frequency. Now, I know, the great thing about SkyTrain is very consistent frequencies. For example, trains come at least every 4 minutes at late night! It’s odd though, considering how TransLink tends to play with frequencies much more on the buses to increase efficiency. That is to say, it’s not like they’ll run 1/3 full buses every 10 minutes over half an hour period - instead they’ll just run one full bus every 30 minutes.
So why not explore this option for times when safety is a real issue (usually late nights)? Why not reduce the SkyTrain service on Mondays to Thursday between 10 and 11 to every 10 minutes? Then between 11 and 1 to every 15 minutes?
On Fridays when things are busier, maybe increase the frequency a bit. Play with the frequencies to fit the actual demand - this ensures that there is sufficient ridership on the trains to reduce safety concerns.
This suggestion was made at one point during a 24/7 SkyTrain service discussion I was having. The point was made that having 24/7 service didn’t mean running trains every 6 minutes from 1am to 5am. It could be as simply as running one train every 30 minutes or hour! Besides, there wouldn’t even be enough demand to warrant such high frequencies that late at night.
Playing with frequencies would make more efficient usage of the trains, reduce maintenance costs, and improve safety on the system.
Stations as Community Hubs
Considering how much money we’ve paid for SkyTrain, it’s actually quite absurd that we haven’t utilized this expensive infrastructure to it’s full capacity. Transit oriented development around these parts is a relatively new thing unfortunately. Our SkyTrain stations should be the hubs of urban communities.
This model has never really been fully implemented yet, but half baked versions exist at Metrotown, Edmonds, Gateway, Brentwood, and Joyce. For example, at Joyce, what I refer to as the most successful attempt yet, they built an urban village in the south east corner of the station on former industrial land. This brought in a wealth of legitimate users to the station, as well as a handful of shops and community amenities like parks and recreational space. Joyce also has community gardens below the SkyTrain guideway, and a community policing station nearby.
Building urban communities around our SkyTrain stations makes much more efficient usage of the infrastructure, brings in more legitimate transit users (good for safety), and is a possible solution to the affordable housing problems. We need to be densifying around stations, and also locating community amenities like gardens, parks, sports fields, libraries, rec centres, pools, police stations, and more near or at the stations.
CPTED the system
CPTED stands for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. It’s a series of design protocols that enhance safety and deter crime. For example, different light intensities or light heights can have different effects on safety. The same can be said for bushes and trees.
The Expo Line stations were never built with CPTED. As we look at making substantial upgrades to the stations, CPTED should be implemented in every which way possible.
Furthermore, there’s a ton of minor improvements that could be made at the stations to incorporate some CPTED principals without requiring millions of dollars. For example, the metal grate walls could easily and relatively cheaply be replaced with glass. Thankfully the terrible lighting is current being upgrading to a CPTED standard. We should also be looking very carefully at the existing foliage at the stations, and perhaps replant most of these areas - improving safety and beautifying the stations at the same time.
A comprehensive media campaign
There are vast swaths of both transit riders and non-users that simply have no idea that SkyTrain has some great security features already (i.e. the yellow boxed secure zone, the silent alarm, the real time communiqué with SkyTrain control). TransLink has kind of been pushing this more recently, however handing out mini safety guides and whistles isn’t enough. The major media corps should be publishing guides for SkyTrain safety in their papers. Maybe TransLink should look at doing full paged ads in Metro and 24, highlighting a safety feature each week. Customers need to be better informed and this will help with the heightened perception of crime on the system.
Crime data online
Truthfully, I have absolutely no idea about the crime that goes on, either on SkyTrain, or around the stations. All I know is what the major media decides to report. So I might hear about a stabbing at Edmonds one day, but never about the cell phone or purse snatching rate. Making sure this information is consistently updated and readily available, in an easy-to-understand GUI, will also dramatically affect the perception of crime. The website could look like Google Analytics for example, showing the data in various forms such as graphs, percentages, pie charts, and even a map view. Crime stats should be taken from not just what happens on SkyTrain, but also mixed with the data from respective RCMP detachments and police departments of the municipalities, taking into account crime from 800m around the stations.
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5 Responses
Who’s to say undesirables can’t jump over the turnstiles? Or fit 2 people thru a single turn? And who knows some of them might even become legitimate non-fare-evading transit users meanwhile continuing their undesirableness on the skytrain. Unfortunately for handicapped people, cyclists and small children in strollers, they’ll have to wait for the attendant to put safety on the back burner and help them get passed the bloated security barriers.
Turnstiles are not the answer to the problems you discus.
Turnstiles do not require 1 attendant per turnstile. Many stations have multiple entrances that make this not feasible. The Toronto subway has many unattended turnstiles. Some are “hop-proof” and some are not.
It’s also fully possible to have an attendant in each station without installing turnstiles. If an attendant is the real problem solver, then we can go directly to that, no extra infrastructure required. I know there have been times when an info-person could have been helpful to me.
Less-frequent nighttime service (or fewer cars per train) and stations as community hubs are also excellent solutions.
one very simple way to deal with groups of teenagers that are causing trouble, which works, is to play Mozart over the PA system, I know this works as i’ve seen it in action. Chepstow bus station at 1am on a Sunday waiting for a express coach to the airport was not nice. 6 months later same bus station same time, no rowdy teens in sight but Mozart playing over the PA. Many other places are using this to good effect
Turnstiles won’t do anything to reduce crime or undesirables on SkyTrain. They’re just an expensive solution to pander to people’s fears.
I think it’s important that we start to define “legitimate” and “undesirable”. People who look a little rough around the edges are most often termed undesirable, but they have every right to public transit. At the same time, “legitimate” users can be every bit as threatening in the situations you’ve described as “undesirables.”
The crime rate in Canada is at an all time low, while the fear of crime has been increasing. What are the reasons for this? Just because CPTED says particular bushes could hide criminals, doesn’t mean they actually do. I think that while there are some good design principles behind CPTED, the idea of designing out “undesirable activity” simply perpetuates a fear of people who are different, who use public space in a different way, but most often are not causing trouble. Rowdy teens are rowdy because they’re teenagers. They require space to be teenagers in public, so let’s think of ways to design that might allow this.