This store aired in the July 28, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
Click the button above to listen.
According to a survey conducted by BART and the VTA last winter, the majority of transit riders, whether on the train, the bus, or the light-rail, have experienced or witnessed some kind of harassment. Women, especially young women, are disproportionately impacted, which can leave lasting trauma.
STORY TRANSCRIPT:
REPORTER: Around 150,000 people ride BART every day. Another 90,000 ride VTA buses and lightrail daily.
CIA CARBAJAL: I mean, usually a bus ride is fine. But I don’t know. Like, sometimes you get on the bus and there’s certain things that happen that make you wonder like, man, do I really want to take the bus?
REPORTER: Cia Castro Carbajal is one of those people. She takes the bus every day from her home in Santa Clara to San Jose State, where she goes to school.
"My brother doesn't have to think about that kind of thing. I know he just steps outside and he's like, 'Oh, it's another day.'" -Cia Castro Carbajal
CARBAJAL: My brother doesn't have to think about that kind of thing. I know he just steps outside and he's like, oh, it's another day.
REPORTER: For a lot of young women, feeling unsafe on transit is normal. One survey from the VTA found that almost 70% of people have witnessed or experienced at least one safety issue.Cia told me about a time when she was harassed while taking the bus home from school.
CARBAJAL: I'm not entirely sure why they hit me, but they hit me… But they kept swearing at me, the whole bus. Ride home and calling me very disgusting things. And I was really afraid. But then I moved and somebody came and sat next to me 'cause they saw like how like shooken I was.
REPORTER: Tirada Phomin is another college student who I met when I was on the BART. She lives in San Francisco and commutes almost three hours to UC Santa Cruz.
TIRADA PHOMIN: I don't have a license. I can't really drive, so I was always very experienced in commuting.
REPORTER: One day, as Tirada was coming home from school on the BART, a man on the train kept staring at her and following her, even when she moved cars.
PHOMIN: And then it gets to the point where I felt like I started having like a panic attack. And so luckily this guy who saw what's happening, he was able to help me and he asked me if he could sit next to me. And so that was when, um, I felt a lot more safe.
REPORTER: Haleema Bharoocha is no stranger to harassment on transit either. She’s a transit safety advocate and began researching this issue in 2019 when she served as the Senior Advocacy Manager of the Oakland-based nonprofit Alliance for Girls. There, she launched a campaign against sexual harassment called “Not One More Girl.”
HALEEMA BHAROOCHA: Access to transportation is crucial. Uh, it is a lifeline for many people, especially if they don't have an alternative option like a car. Um, especially when we think about low income communities in particular and also just young people who may not be driving at the time.
REPORTER: She led the campaign in partnership with BART. It was driven by feedback from young women of color, whose stories inspired a poster campaign. Each poster was designed by local artists and encouraged people to use the BART Watch app if they witnessed or experienced harassment.
Alicia Trost is the Chief Communications Officer at BART, and worked on that campaign, too.
ALICIA TROST: People told us they now know what to do if they witnessed harassment, they know how to report it, and then they know how to make sure that the victim feels that they're in a safe environment because of the community of care that we are trying to create in our transit system.
REPORTER: Initially, she was hesitant to do a campaign around harassment because she wasn’t sure that BART could do it right. She worried that if they used the wrong language, it could put the blame on the victim.
However, when she was approached by a group of community organizations to create a campaign that centered around youth voices, she knew this was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
TROST: Well, data showed that if you are, female or gender expansive, and if you are a person of color, you're more likely to experience harassment. And so we just knew right away that. A starting place to do this initiative would be to speak with them and to feature them in our materials and to have them almost serve as spokespeople for this initiative. It created trust with the community. It gave us credibility and accountability. It invited the public to have real conversations with us,
REPORTER: The campaign ran in two phases across three years. After it ended in 2023, a survey found that 65% of people felt more aware of the issue, and 36% felt safer riding BART after seeing the posters. The initiative also required BART to start collecting data on sexual harassment. By the end of the campaign, the data actually showed harassment decreasing.
For Trost, it was incredibly impactful to hear direct feedback from youth and to be able to center their experiences and ideas for solutions.
TROST: I think a lot of transit agencies don't realize that there's small things you can do to enhance safety that don't involve policing (((and obvious things like better lighting and having a cop everywhere.))) Some youth do not want that, and it's really important that we listen to those youth and give them alternatives.
REPORTER: The campaign ultimately created a space for youth to have conversations about harassment and share their own experience. Especially for young women, harassment was often seen as an expected part of using public transit. This campaign reversed that status quo, telling young women that harassment was not a reality they had to silently accept.
CARBAJAL: But I mean like, is it fair? That's what I ask myself. Like is that fair for me to like sit on the bus and not feel safe? No
REPORTER: Since the campaign ended, sexual harassment on BART has continued to go down from 10% in 2023 to 7% in 2025. BART is currently working on a third phase for the campaign, which they hope to start in 2026.