Project Summary
A project to map the rail journeys women and girls avoid due to safety concerns. Using creative, story-based workshops and a lightweight digital tool, we will build an open, geo-tagged dataset capturing where, when and why fear shapes travel choices. This hidden data will help policymakers and rail providers design safer, more inclusive transport systems.
Project Achievements
Journeys Unspoken successfully demonstrated a new methodology for capturing “unspoken journeys” – rail trips that women choose not to take due to safety concerns. These journeys are largely invisible in existing transport datasets, which tend to measure reported incidents rather than behaviour change. Through three facilitated storytelling workshops with women across East Anglia, the project generated the first structured dataset of rail journey avoidance decision points. Participant narratives were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis and coded into geotagged locations, times of day, and causal factors such as darkness, unstaffed stations, disruption, and information gaps. The project also developed a prototype digital platform to visualise these patterns interactively for policymakers and operators. The findings demonstrate that journey abandonment is not random but concentrated at specific spatial and temporal nodes within the network. The project therefore provides both a methodology and an evidence base for identifying where targeted safety interventions could unlock suppressed demand and improve women’s confidence in rail travel.
Conclusions
The research confirms that women’s safety-related journey avoidance is a real and measurable phenomenon with implications for transport equity, ridership, and decarbonisation. Participants described making frequent adjustments to travel plans, delaying journeys, changing routes, or avoiding rail entirely when environmental cues suggested elevated risk. Importantly, these decisions were rarely triggered by single incidents. Instead, participants described cumulative risk, where multiple environmental conditions combine to influence behaviour. Darkness, poor information during disruption, unstaffed stations, and uncertainty about onward travel were particularly influential decision points. Despite these concerns, participants consistently described rail as safer than available alternatives such as taxis, buses, or walking alone. This suggests constrained choice rather than lack of confidence in rail itself. Capturing journey avoidance behaviour therefore provides a new form of preventative safety intelligence. By identifying the locations and conditions where suppressed demand occurs, operators and policymakers can prioritise interventions that address safety perception before journeys are lost.
Next Steps
The immediate next step is expanding the Journeys Unspoken methodology to generate a larger and more geographically diverse dataset. The current workshops demonstrate the approach’s validity but broader participation will enable stronger spatial analysis at station and route level. Development of the prototype platform will also continue, particularly the citizen science contribution mode, allowing women to submit journey avoidance experiences directly. This would support ongoing data collection and create a longitudinal evidence base of suppressed demand across the network. Engagement with transport stakeholders is also underway to explore operational applications. Initial discussions have taken place with regional transport bodies, and conversations are planned with Transport for London regarding the potential application of the methodology within the London Underground context. Longer term, the project aims to establish journey avoidance as a measurable policy outcome alongside passenger satisfaction and punctuality, supporting evidence-based investment in safety improvements that enable more women to travel confidently by rail.
