A candidate for the British Parliament is calling for evening subway trains on the London Tube to be limited to women passengers only to cut back on sexual harassment complaints.
The candidate, Labour Party member Jeremy Corbyn, said he is proposing the idea of operating gender-specific trains because “it is unacceptable that many women and girls adapt their daily lives in order to avoid being harassed on the street, public transport, and in other public places from the park to the supermarket.
{mosads}”Some women have raised with me that a solution to the rise in assault and harassment on public transport could be to introduce women only carriages,” he said in a post on his campaign website.
“My intention would be to make public transport safer for everyone from the train platform, to the bus stop to on the mode of transport itself,” Corbyn’s campaign post continued. “However, I would consult with women and open it up to hear their views on whether women-only carriages would be welcome — and also if piloting this at times and modes of transport where harassment is reported most frequently would be of interest.”
The London Tube is the 11th busiest subway system in the world, with 1.265 billion passengers annually, according to the website Metrobits.org‘s World Metro Database.
By comparison, the Washington, D.C., Metrorail system carries approximately 209 million passengers per year.