Safer Cities: Her Way

Safer Cities: Her Way is a collaborative partnership program between Transport for NSW and a number of pilot councils across NSW.
The program will deliver demonstration projects aimed at improving the perception and feeling of safety for women, girls and gender diverse people when walking or moving to, through and within public spaces and transport hubs.

The demonstration projects are a way to test how to make public spaces feel safer. Each project will be developed through co-design workshops with local communities and designed to reflect local place identity and character. The projects will be evaluated for their effectiveness and insights will be used to build the case for longer-term change. Once complete, each project will develop a detailed case study that will be shared in the Great Public Spaces Toolkit.

Transport for NSW conducted a survey seeking community input to better understand the concerns and experiences that affect the community's sense of safety in and around public spaces across NSW. The survey closed on Wednesday 8 February 2023 and contributions to this consultation are under evaluation and review, with a detailed report to be published in the coming months.

Some initial findings from the state-wide survey are:

• 59 percent of women do not feel safe after dark in public spaces.
• 9 in 10 women agreed that safety influences how they move around.
• The top five things that help make a public space feel safer for women are: good lighting, presence of people, time of day, easy to navigate and if it looks cared for.
• When moving through and within public spaces, women prioritise safety over convenience.
• Three in four women would walk more if they felt safer in public spaces. Women feel safest in activated public spaces where there are people around no matter what time of day it is.

Her Way focuses on collaborating with councils and state agencies on public space demonstration projects. These projects aim to engage the community and create safer public spaces in and around public transport hubs across NSW. Her Way projects are small in scale, but with big impact. 

Her Way is one part of the Safer Cities program which is investing $30 million over two years to improve safety in our cities and towns, particularly for women, girls and gender diverse people.

The aims for the Safer Cities program, based on the United Nations Safer Cities for Girls program are: 

• Increase women, girls’ and gender diverse people’s safety and access to public spaces 
• Enable women, girls and gender diverse people to move freely and alone in their community 
• Increase women, girls’ and gender diverse people’s engagement with how the spaces around them are designed and managed

Transport for NSW and councils will make lessons from the Her Way projects publicly available as case studies on the public Great Public Spaces Toolkit webpage. We will promote the case studies to councils, government agencies and industry to support public space improvement projects across NSW. 

Her Way also uses the Evaluation Tool for Public Space and Public Life before, during and after the demonstration projects. Transport for NSW has developed this free tool to help evaluate what is working well and what could be improved in any given public space.

Councils were selected based on criteria focussed on improving the perceptions of safety of women, girls, and gender diverse people in public spaces, and centred around the following themes:

• Planning and Economy
• Safety 
• Active Transport   
• Culturally and Linguistically Diverse communities
• Environment

Selected councils were also assessed to ensure strategic alignment with the Safer Cities program. Review was undertaken to confirm councils’ strategic priorities aligned to the program’s outcomes and themes of safety, walkability, and access to public space. 

As a result, the selected councils span across the six cities and regional areas of NSW each with differing demographics and sociocultural environments, and therefore, provide unique opportunities to improve mobility and access for women, girls, and gender diverse people.

Transport for NSW are working closely with partner councils across Sydney and regional NSW on Her Way demonstration project partnerships. The partner councils include:

• Blacktown City Council 
• Bayside Council 
• Central Coast Council
• City of Canterbury Bankstown
• City of Sydney
• Cumberland City Council
• Fairfield City Council
• Griffith City Council
• Lismore City Council 
• Wollongong City Council 

As a part of the project site selection process, councils will conduct engagement such as co-design workshops with local women, girls and gender diverse people to define where the projects will be located and what interventions will be trialled. 

Gosford has been chosen as the initial location for the Central Coast Safer Cities Her Way project.

Gosford is considered by the Central Coast Community as a city that has not advanced and can be perceived as unsafe.

We want the revitalisation of Gosford to include safer connections and places for people who live, work and play in the area.

Whilst the pilot is occurring in Gosford, the learnings from the Safer Cities: Her Way program will be used to inform planning and decision-making for the entire Central Coast region. 

Transport for NSW is contributing up to $1 million to each of the listed participating councils, with project deliverables defined in the funding deeds for each council. 

Project milestones are unique to each of the projects and the unique place-based approach for each council. In general, project planning for round one projects began in November 2022, with projects to be completed by mid-2024. 

This includes planning, design, construction, installation, engagement and co-design activities, activation/programming and case study development. 

Each council follows its internal procedures to consult the community and stakeholders so that residents, businesses and other stakeholders are informed of the project planning, launch, activation and completion.
 

Phase 1: Discover & Define March – June 2023 (4 months)

The initial phase focuses on consulting and co-designing with the community and key stakeholders to better understand the right problems to solve. 

We are currently asking women, girls and gender diverse people to get involved in the following ways:

• Read the project information and FAQs on this page
• Share your experience in our community survey
• Show us the places where you feel safe or not safe and tell us why, on our interactive map

In this phase, we are also hosting community co-design walking workshops and establishing key stakeholder and community focus groups. If you are interested in participating in these, please contact us or complete our community survey

Phase 2: Design & Deliver July 2023 – February 2024 (8 months) we are here now
The second phase we will begin to co-design and implement solutions through key stakeholder and council staff working groups.

A community focus group will work alongside these groups to evaluate effectiveness of the pilot interventions.

Delivery of interventions will begin by November 2023.

Phase 3: Deliver & Evaluate March 2024 – June 2024 (4 months)
In this phase will finalise delivery while collating information to compile a case study and best practice framework to implement across the entire Local Government Area and share with other Councils.

We started in the discover and define phase to establish what needs to happen to make Gosford safer.

We started the conversation with women, girls and gender diverse people because a safer area for them will result in a safer place for everyone. 

Everyone could get involved in the start of building a safer Gosford up until 30 June by:

• Reading the project information and FAQs on this page
• Sharing experiences in our community survey (now closed)
• Showing us the places where you have felt safe or not safe and why, on our interactive map (now closed for input but you can still view what others have said)

We used the learnings from the survey and interactive map to inform walking workshops and focus groups. 

We are committed to creating safe and vibrant communities.

If you or someone you know is experiencing violence or abuse, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or contact the Domestic Violence hotline on 1800 656 463.

In the case of an EMERGENCY or a crime in progress, call Triple Zero 000

To report information about a crime that has been committed, call Crime Stoppers 1800 333 000 

For confidential crisis support, call Lifeline 131 114

For further information about community health and safety visit https://www.centralcoast.nsw.gov.au/residents/support-programs/community-health-and-safety