Safe Transit for All Act of 2026
HB8699, the Safe Transit for All Act of 2026, would amend federal transit safety law to require certain large urban transit agencies that receive Section 5307 federal transit assistance to create a program for collecting data on passenger harassment on public transit. Covered agencies would need to provide accessible digital and in-person reporting options for riders who experience or witness incidents, and the data collected would include the type, location, time, and frequency of incidents, as well as whether the conduct involved verbal harassment, physical assault, or sexual assault.
The bill also requires agencies to collect demographic information about affected passengers, identify actual or perceived characteristics that may have motivated the incident, and assess the impact on transit use. Agencies would have to conduct outreach in multiple languages for riders with limited English proficiency, publish non-identifying data on a public website, and establish protocols for responding to reports. The bill defines “street harassment” broadly as intimidating or threatening words, gestures, or actions directed at a person because of actual or perceived protected characteristics, including characteristics covered by civil rights and age discrimination laws.
In addition to the safety-plan requirements, the bill would amend the National Transit Database to include any street-harassment data collected under the new program. As a result, the measure would expand federal reporting obligations for transit agencies serving urbanized areas of 200,000 or more people and would create a new federal data category on harassment-related incidents in public transit systems.
Because the bill was only introduced and referred to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, there is no recorded vote or committee transcript showing formal debate. Based on the text, the bill appears aimed at improving transit safety and documenting harassment patterns, with an emphasis on civil rights, accessibility, and multilingual outreach. Potential points of contention likely include the administrative burden on transit agencies, privacy concerns around collecting demographic and incident data, and the breadth of the harassment definition and reporting requirements.
The bill would amend title 49 of the U.S. Code, specifically the public transportation safety plan provisions in section 5329 and the National Transit Database provisions in section 5335. It would impose new federal program and reporting requirements on certain recipients of federal transit assistance serving large urbanized areas, requiring them to collect, publish, and report harassment data and to establish response protocols. Transit agencies, riders, and federal transit administrators would be directly affected, while the bill would also expand the scope of federally tracked transit safety information.
There is no recorded committee discussion or vote history in the provided materials, so formal sentiment cannot be measured from legislative action. The bill’s framing suggests a generally supportive intent focused on rider safety, anti-harassment protections, and better data collection, but the absence of debate means there is no documented consensus or opposition in the record provided.
No specific objections are documented in the available transcripts or votes. Likely areas of contention, based on the bill text, include whether transit agencies can absorb the cost and staffing demands of new reporting systems, whether collecting demographic and incident details could raise privacy or misuse concerns, and whether the definition of “street harassment” is broad enough to create ambiguity in implementation. Stakeholders most likely to raise concerns would be transit agencies and administrators, while advocates for riders, civil rights, and transit safety would likely support the measure.