At a meeting I recently attended on transport spending, a couple of the women in the audience objected to the promotion of public transit on safety grounds. How can we ask women to use the bus, they demanded, when it is unsafe? I have a few problems with their argument. One, concerns about safety are often based more on perception than reality. That is, public transit is often far safer than we perceive. Two, public transit becomes safer when more people use it, and safer for women when more women use it. If women who can afford to abandon it choose other methods, then only those who have no choice will continue to travel by rail and bus. Those powerless women are unlikely to be able to campaign for better conditions; those who could campaign for improvements are no longer interested when they no longer use those modes of transport. That means abandoning the poor to whatever miserable state public transit is allowed to descend to, which is hardly an equitable outcome. And given how vastly more space efficient public transit is than private, it also means worsened traffic congestion. Of course the car is more convenient and comfortable than public transit; that is why we require disincentives to use cars, as well as incentives to use public transit (by making it a pleasant mode). Similarly for walking and cycling: we need to entice people to use those means while discouraging them from driving. Rather than allow our fear of strangers to cause us to withdraw from the public realm, we need to reclaim public transit and public spaces with vigour and pride.