It can be argued that the environments of transit systems are unique in comparison to other settings. They generate areas of social convergence that have long been associated with crime susceptibility and are frequently perceived as unsafe (Ceccato, 2013). However, the risk of victimization is not uniform across the transportation system. Passengers’ perceptions of risk in urban environments are also place and time dependent, which in turn affects mobility patterns and travel choices. Therefore, creating secure and safe transport environments should be viewed with the same level of importance as ensuring a person has low levels of risk of victimization and high levels of perceived safety outside of the transit system. To achieve this goal requires an integrated and cross-disciplinary set of theories and methods that are capable of analysing and making sense of increasing quantities of data and information, and examining information from a range of perspectives, akin to the new frontier of research and planning practice. Safety and security in transit environments are not issues that can be dealt with within the boundaries of a single science or discipline; rather, they require the knowledge and contributions of criminologists, urban planners, engineers, geographers, architects and psychologists, to name but a few.

The aim of this book is to illustrate safety and security conditions in transit environments from an interdisciplinary perspective, through the use of both theoretical and empirical approaches. It presents a collection of high-quality studies which cross traditional boundaries between different disciplines, yet share a number of important commonalities. These shared ideas are used to organize the material presented in this book and discussed in this chapter. This edited volume examines both the security and the safety conditions of transit environments, through a place-based approach to understanding crime and security within the different components of the transport journey, and also considers safety and security from the perspective of the transport user.

Firstly, the book reports on both safety and security conditions in transit environments, and in this volume these are associated with criminogenic conditions of crime and perceived safety, respectively. The criminogenic conditions of crime determine the statistical risk (actual probability) of an individual’s becoming a victim of crime. According to Hale (1996), fear of crime can be defined as ‘the fear of being a victim of crime and may include a variety of emotional states, attitudes, or perceptions’ (Warr, 2000, p. 453). Passengers may feel safe in crowded, high-crime stations and fearful in empty, low-crime stations (Ceccato, 2013). Secondly, the book adopts an approach that puts the transit environment and the journey at the centre of the discussion on safety and security. This is very different from the more traditional approaches, which focus on criminals, criminality and why people commit crime. The book has therefore a place-centred focus on the context of crime, which provides a promising alternative to traditional offender-centred crime approaches (Weisburd et al., 2012). Most places have no crime, and most crime is highly concentrated in and around a relatively small number of places (Eck and Guerette, 2007). Some places are so crime prone that they are labelled hot spots of crime (Sherman et al., 1989). Research shows that crime follows patterns of activities and land uses that are rhythmic in space and time. If crime is concentrated at a certain time and a particular place, then there is no doubt that there is something about that place that results in a crime happening there and not somewhere else. Moreover, if these rhythmic patterns are identified, the argument holds that crime can better be prevented. Thirdly, the book attempts to open up the issue of safety and security in transit environments to a wider audience by illustrating the case of those who are in transit, and may sometimes become a victim of crime: the users. In doing so, the book takes the needs of different users into account, specifically young people, females, the elderly and disabled individuals. These groups are often highly reliant on public transport, may be at a high level of risk of victimization, and, moreover, may have elevated perceptions and fears of crime on transit systems.

In this volume it is argued that safety and security in transit environments is dependent on multiscale conditions that act at various geographical scales in the urban environment. These conditions are determined by the micro-environmental attributes of a node (a bus stop or a station); the characteristics of the immediate environment (short walk distance from the node); the type of neighbourhood in which the node, is located; and the relative position of both the station and the neighbourhood in the city, which constitutes the node’s meso and macro transit settings. Safety and security should be examined in the content of the whole trip approach, the movement from ‘door-to-door’ incorporating all aspects of the passenger’s public transport journey.

The book is perhaps the first volume devoted entirely to crime and perceived safety in transit environments from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. As the majority of the current literature in this topic to date is dominated by North American and British case studies, this book aims also to open this field of research up to other contexts. The book includes examples from transportation systems in Japan, Scandinavia, and Italy, and also draws from the Global South, including a case study examining public transit from a South African context.

Transit systems are multifaceted and challenging to study due to issues such as the complexity and rapidly changing dynamics of transit environments; the potential vulnerability of public transit users; the difficulty of transforming an actual reduction in crime levels into reduced fear and perception of risk on the part of people; and the unique difficulties associated with analysing safety and security concerns related to transit settings and identifying an evidence base of what works for prevention. These challenges call for an interdisciplinary approach towards safety and security in transit environments. The road to achieving this goal is misty and tortuous, full of uncertainties and challenges, many of which will become evident in the following chapters of this book. However, there are also a number of promising developments in this area which this book seeks to highlight.

Part II focuses on crime and perceived fear at the micro-level landscape (for example, bus stops, and platforms at a subway station). These transit nodes effectively mark the exit and entry points of transit systems, and are often a place where people converge. This has important implications for safety. The environmental features of these nodes and their relationship with safety are analysed across four case studies: Boston (Chapter 3), Stockholm (Chapter 4 and 5) and London (Chapter 6).

The whole journey approach to secure and safe transit environments is examined in the third part of this book (Chapters 7 to 9). Hypothetically, even if transportation nodes could be made entirely safe, there is also a consensus that it would not be easy to guarantee a completely safe journey from door to door. One hindrance to an individual’s movement is the fear of being exposed to an uncontrolled or unexpected danger, such as being a crime victim. This part of the book considers the moving journey and examines safety from both the offender’s and the potential victim’s perspective. This part also deals with the space-time dynamics of crime and safety, and details some of the challenges in making this dynamic system safe. Two examples from the United States (Chapter 7 and 8) and one from the United Kingdom (Chapter 9) are presented in Part III.

The complexity of transportation systems in relation to the neighbourhood and the city is the focus of Part IV. Safety and security at transportation environments are not independent; they are fundamentally embedded to their surrounding local environmental conditions, land use, demographic and socio-economic contexts. The chapters in this part of the book are devoted to the ecology of crime and perceived safety across the wider transportation environment and urban context. Articles here illustrate this perspective from both North American cities (Chapters 10 to 13) and urban areas from the Global South (Chapter 14).

Part V moves the users’ perception of safety in transit environments to the forefront of the discussion. As stated earlier, access to car ownership and...