Report: Incidents against public transit workers increasingly violent

Public transport employees are faced with incidents that are becoming more violent. Though the actual number of incidents did not really increase over the past years, according to professor Ronald van Steden of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Telegraaf reports. The professor studied new figures from public transport companies at the request of the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament. The aim of the study was to map how often train conductors, tram drivers, bus drivers and other public transit workers face aggression in their duties. According to Van Steden, there were nearly 10 thousand incidents in Dutch public transport last year. Many hundreds of those incidents involved serious crime, like robbery, armed robbery and assault. Violence against train workers was a recurring theme in news headlines last year. This year armed robberies on buses seem to be the crime of choice. Numerous measures were implemented to reduce violence against public transit workers, including more cameras at stations, extra police deployment and double conductors on night trains. Bus services in, among others, Amsterdam, Tilburg and Breda plan to go cashless to reduce robberies as soon as possible.