Dealing with graffiti on public transport
The Public transport graffiti: Understanding and prevention research project undertaken by Swinburne University of Technology for Transport New South Wales has been completed, with an executive summary available for download below.
Graffiti in Australia and across the world is an expensive, multi-faceted problem that involves more than management and maintenance strategies. The full cost of graffiti vandalism includes not only prevention strategies and physical removal but results in service disruption costs and property damage. Graffiti can also impact public transport patronage, with graffiti recognised as one root cause in an increased perception of risk and/or danger for users.
The goal of this work was to explore the current state of graffiti and graffiti prevention in Australia and overseas, with a particular focus on public transport. The aim is to understand how graffiti perpetrators operate, including their motivations and methods, and to identify the range of interventions that work and the contexts that they work in. The researchers dive deeply into how graffiti has evolved over time and present both context and best practice management strategies for implementation using the methods including:
- Literature review including the history of graffiti and motivations of writers; how graffiti is policed, reported and removed and legislation and graffiti policies and practices.
- Survey of public transport (PT) users on their use of PT and how graffiti impacts this.
- Interviews with industry experts on modes of reporting, methods prevention, data collection and sharing, and
- Facilitated participatory workshops in three capital cities on reporting and best practice prevention and removal.
Background
Graffiti has deep rooted social, cultural and artistic dimensions, and has its roots in the late 1960s and early 70s in New York City with artists initially writing or ‘tagging’ their name in a public space in an effort to garner notoriety. Given the relatively simple way graffiti offered a path to this kind of street respect, thousands of young people began ‘tagging’ walls, bridges and other static locations alone and/or as part of a crew. It wasn’t long before the graffiti subculture started eyeing public transport as another way to be seen; the allure of a moving canvas providing a method to ‘reach’ many more people than simply writing on stationary infrastructure.
Public transport graffiti began on buses due to the relative ease with which this could be done; however, it wasn’t long before graffiti vandals moved onto trains as their preferred primary targets. To be successful, graffiti writers have to ‘get up’ and be visible to other writers and being visible on or from the train carries the most subcultural capital and as graffiti-ing trains is riskier and harder to execute on, the practice is seen to carry more cache.
Where graffiti is located depends on a variety of factors, researchers posit that the existence of a graffiti subculture locally is one of the biggest drivers of graffiti. Other factors include evaluating whether the graffiti will be quickly removed or ‘enjoy’ longevity, the particular style of graffiti, ’tagging’ name vs more complex designs, visibility of graffiti and how easy it is for vandals to physically enter and exit spaces.
Trains still retain the highest value amongst graffiti vandals, and researchers note that when trains are not stabled, even for a short amount of time, they’re likely to be targeted.
A best practice
Graffiti vandalism remains a common and costly issue for urban planners, traffic authorities, property owners, the ‘public purse’ and private businesses alike. Research suggests the most effective way to reduce graffiti is immediate removal, which frequently requires cohesion and cooperation from different parties with resources like cameras and personnel employed to help prevent and limit graffiti practices.
Amongst recommendations, the researchers posit the development of a common Statement of Practice as a valuable way of understanding roles and responsibilities across each greater city or state. The Statement of Practice would require all signatories agreeing to remove graffiti within a set period of time and the establishment of a common approach for removing graffiti on private property.
In addition, they suggest:
- Having dedicated transport police working in the same space as transport security staff
- Having special prosecutors for graffiti vandalism offences
- Consider launching civil suits against serious repeat perpetrators
Potential further work
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Recommendations for further work
Amongst recommendations for future work the researcher’s cite:
- Embracing technology as an aid for example: CCTV with Artificial intelligence capabilities to help with monitoring, detection and predictive policing of key sites, tethered drones for removal and surveillance.
- Developing a data dictionary as a way to report and share accurate data. This would include establishing the most useful forms of data, identifying key blockages, restrictions, and enablers ultimately providing a pathway forward for national data sharing.
- Developing educational material for the broader sector (magistrates, prosecutors and police) to outline the real costs of graffiti using explicit figures to illustrate graffiti budgets and on costs.
- Developing material that defines best practices across a range of regularly used graffiti interventions.
Download reports
Two reports from the project have been made avaiable. Click on the lonks below to download.
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