Daisy Chapman-Chamberlain works for Transport for the North and is the self-described ‘Queen of the Railways’. She writes a regular guest blog for Routes into Rail about the interesting and innovative projects happening in rail. Improving gender accessibility is a key area of my current work and a national priority in rail. When we think about accessibility, we tend to immediately think in terms of disability and reduced mobility. This is certainly a hugely important area of work. However, we must also focus on accessibility in terms of gender. We know from the British Transport Police that gender-based crimes and incidents on the railway have increased by 50% between 2021 and 2023 (some of this is due to improved reporting processes). This represents a huge gap in what we need to do to make sure everyone feels safe and is safe using public transport. There is a lot of work focused on this at a national level, with a need for regional and local customisation. For example, staff presence is important – ensuring you have staff in stations and on trains. CCTV is another factor, and vital to the reporting system. There are many other considerations, like lighting and train design. A great example is Merseyrail’s new 777 fleet that gives a complete view through the entire train, with no doors in the way. No one is going to be in a situation where they are in a carriage by themselves, or with one other person. It is easy to understand how that reduces crime. The cultural aspect is also important – making sure people understand what a criminal act is and how to report it. Railway stations are not an island – nobody leaves a station and immediately steps through their front door. There is always a walk, a drive, a bus journey, biking. It is important to ensure passengers can continue their journey safely, with good lighting and signposting. There are also exciting new technologies that are contributing to increasing gender accessibility and safety for everyone on the railways. Train operator applications and booking apps can be used to get feedback from passengers. At the end of a journey, we can use a pop-up that asks ‘How safe did you feel on your journey today?’, for example. We could use this information to build a heat map of where people feel the least safe and take action to improve those areas. Another new technology is the use of AI to detect changes in sound. The pitch of people’s voices changes when they are stressed or fighting, and those changes can be detected by AI. That information can be used to alert staff or the British Transport Police that there may be an incident happening, and staff or police can log into the CCTV to check. It is impossible to have someone watching the CCTV for every single station – but we can have smart systems that feed into the CCTV and alert process. Lived experience is an integral part of our work on gender accessibility. We undertake consultation, of course, but we also need women coming into the rail industry to inform how we develop this work into the future. Building a diverse rail workforce is vital to delivering services that meet the needs of everyone in the community.