By Jade Neville
There are moments in your career when something quietly shifts. When your conversations stop sounding like “issues” and start sounding like reality — a reality shaped by women who move through our transport systems every day, often adjusting their behavior long before anything becomes a statistic.
That shift came for me well ahead of when I chaired the Women’s Safety Group within Women in Transport, the U.K. nonprofit organization that empowers women in the transportation sector. It came from listening. To colleagues, frontline teams, customers, friends — all describing small, instinctive changes they make to feel safe. Not dramatic. Not reportable. Just routine.
In mobility and parking, we talk confidently about design, capacity, flow, and operations. But we talk far less about how women experience these environments — parking facilities, interchanges, platforms, walkways, mobility hubs, and the in-between spaces that shape the emotional reality of travel.
That truth is what drives the work we’re doing in the U.K. through the Women’s Safety Group, a collaboration that brings together operators, planners, local authorities, researchers, technologists, policy teams, and safety specialists to create a more complete picture of where the sector stands.
A sector willing to do better
During the past year, we’ve seen a remarkable shift. Transport leaders are acknowledging openly that women’s safety isn’t a side issue or a niche concern; it’s a fundamental measure of how well a system works. Parking is part of that system and plays a bigger role than it’s often given credit for.
A single operator cannot solve this. A single agency cannot solve this. But when the sector works together, acknowledging gaps honestly, momentum becomes real.
A survey focused on sector action, not lived experience
One of our first major steps has been launching a baseline survey nationwide in the U.K. But rather than asking women to relive unsafe moments, we’re asking the sector itself what it is doing.
The survey examines:
• What programs, pilots, or safety initiatives currently exist across parking, transport, and mobility
• How organizations are measuring safety — what data they use and what’s missing
• Where strategies are aligned across the journey, and where they break down
• What training operators provide to frontline teams, enforcement officers, parking staff, or customer-facing personnel
• How safety is being communicated to users — clearly, inconsistently, or not at all
• What good practice looks like, and whether it’s being shared across the industry
• How organizations evaluate impact, rather than simply activity
• Where the sector feels confident, and where it feels unsure or under-resourced
This focus is deliberate. We already know women adapt their behavior. We already know perception often differs from measured risk.
What the sector doesn’t yet understand well enough is:
• which interventions work and which don’t
• where programs exist but lack evaluation
• where teams feel unsupported
• where data fails to capture the reality of safety
• where parking is unintentionally overlooked in wider safety planning
This is the gap we are working to close.
The survey builds upon the 2021 recommendations from the U.K.’s Transport Champions for Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls, helping us understand whether progress has been meaningful or superficial. It gives us a baseline, not of emotion, but of action.
Turning findings into collective understanding
Data alone isn’t enough, so we’re bringing professionals together across multiple workshops and sector roundtables, including those from parking, mobility, enforcement, planning, technology, and public realm design.
These conversations surface questions the survey can’t answer alone:
• Where does policy misalign with operational reality?
• Where is safety mentioned in strategy but invisible in daily practice?
• How does design unintentionally send the wrong cues?
• Where is staff presence critical and where is it lacking?
• How does the industry learn from what works, instead of reinventing it?
• What makes parking a confidence booster in some cities and a barrier in others?
The willingness to engage has been extraordinary. People want clarity. They want direction. And they want to do better by the women and girls using their services.
A roadmap for practical change
All of this — the survey, the workshops, the sector conversations — will feed into a white paper designed to offer something the industry has lacked: A clear, practical, evaluated roadmap for improving women’s safety across transport, including parking.
The white paper will look at:
• design principles
• staffing and presence
• customer experience
• lighting and visibility
• communications and wayfinding
• behavioral insights
• data challenges
• cross-sector alignment
This isn’t about blame. It’s about clarity. And it’s about creating spaces where women don’t have to adapt to feel safe because the environment already supports them.
A united voice across transport, including parking
Parking is the first and last touchpoint of many journeys. It shapes confidence long before a bus or
train arrives.
If we get parking wrong, we set the wrong tone for everything that follows. If we get it right, the entire journey feels different.
The work ahead is challenging, emotional, and deeply necessary. But with every conversation, every operator willing to reflect honestly, and every organization ready to align with others, I feel hopeful.
Progress begins the moment we stop asking women to carry the burden of staying safe and start asking the sector to do better.
And that is a future worth building — together.
JADE NEVILLE is a director for the Alliance for Parking Data Standards (APDS), technology representative on the Council of Representatives at the British Parking Association, and the sales operations and marketing manager for Trellint.
