Sponsors (5)
The bill aims to improve transit safety, access, and transparency through standardized reporting, multilingual outreach, and required response protocols, but it raises significant privacy and data-security risks, administrative costs for transit agencies, and the potential for stigmatizing or inaccurate attributions.
Urban public transit riders will see improved safety and faster agency responses because incidents must be documented and agencies must implement response protocols, enabling targeted safety improvements and greater passenger confidence.
Passengers with limited English proficiency (LEP) will have expanded outreach and reporting options in multiple languages, improving their ability to report harassment and access support.
Publishing de-identified incident data publicly will increase transparency and allow researchers, advocates, and policymakers to identify trends by location, time, and demographic groups to inform interventions.
Collecting sensitive demographic details and aggregating them into the National Transit Database increases privacy and data-security risks if de-identification fails or oversight is insufficient, potentially exposing vulnerable riders.
Transit agencies will incur administrative and compliance costs to build multilingual reporting systems, publish datasets, and run outreach, which could divert funds from operations, fares, or service improvements.
Requiring reporting of perceived perpetrator characteristics (motivation-based attributions) could produce contested or inaccurate information that stigmatizes named groups and fuels social tensions or bias in enforcement.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires large urban transit agencies receiving Section 5307 funds to collect, publish, and submit street‑harassment data and adopt response protocols.
Official title: To amend title 49, United States Code, to require certain recipients of Federal assistance for public transit systems to establish a program to collect data on passenger harassment on public transit systems, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 7, 2026 by Dave Min · Last progress May 7, 2026
Requires public transit agencies serving urbanized areas of 200,000+ that receive Section 5307 funds to create and run a street-harassment data program. Agencies must provide digital and in-person reporting, collect detailed incident and passenger demographic information (including protected characteristics), conduct multilingual outreach, publish de-identified data publicly, adopt response protocols, and submit collected data to the National Transit Database.