Transit Ambassadors

Transit Safety Ambassadors are unarmed, uniformed professionals deployed throughout public transportation systems — on trains, buses, light rail lines, and at stations — to provide immediate response to safety concerns, medical emergencies, and quality-of-life situations that do not require law enforcement. They are not security guards, not transit police, and not social workers in the conventional sense.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board described the scope this way: “the vast majority of safety concerns cited by riders are about comfort and cleanliness,” specifically “homeless people sleeping on the trains and buses” and “people experiencing mental health crises.” [1]

Los Angeles Metro described what it was building in these terms: a system where ambassadors “act as the front line, managing the lion’s share of incidents in transit” and “reserve law enforcement and armed responses to those incidents that truly warrant it.” [2] Angela Averiett, who served as Bay Area Rapid Transit’s (BART) Deputy Chief overseeing the public transportation ambassador program before becoming Police Chief of San Leandro, stated: “Just them being in a train may stop someone from smoking crack or from defecating in a train car. I think it really makes people kind of think twice before they do something that’s illegal or harmful to themselves or others.” [5]

The Los Angeles Times editorial board stated: “Riders deserve safer bus and rail service. And Metro is doomed without it.” [6]

Three pressures converged to produce transit safety ambassador programs: a ridership safety spiral documented in rider surveys, a structural mismatch between the problems transit systems were accumulating and the tools available to address them, and a medical emergency gap created by opioid overdoses occurring in enclosed transit environments where response times matter clinically.

Five alternatives have served as the default transit safety tools: sworn law enforcement, fare enforcement officers, private security contractors, social workers and outreach teams, and surveillance cameras. Each differs from transit safety ambassadors in documented ways.

The Los Angeles Times editorial board documented the scope: “the vast majority of safety concerns cited by riders are about comfort and cleanliness,” specifically “homeless people sleeping on the trains and buses” and “people experiencing mental health crises.” [1] LA Metro’s mission defines the program’s scope: ambassadors handle “the lion’s share of incidents in transit” while reserving “law enforcement and armed responses to those incidents that truly warrant it.” [10]

The evidence base for transit safety ambassadors is uneven. Some outcomes — lives saved through naloxone administration and CPR — are directly countable. Others — crimes deterred through visible presence, escalations prevented through de-escalation — are harder to measure. Most documented data is program-reported rather than independently evaluated. And the evidence comes almost entirely from large urban transit systems in cities with established transit infrastructure.

The life-saving outcomes are directly documented and specific. The crime reduction and ridership recovery outcomes are promising but based on limited, self-reported data from programs operating in specific contexts.

Transit safety ambassador programs are operating in transit systems across the United States. In 2025, Illinois passed state legislation creating ambassador programs for the Chicago metropolitan region under a new transit authority — the first time this program model has been written into state law.

A Safer Cities national poll found 75% of voters support “the creation of an unarmed transit security ambassador unit where they live.” That number holds above 70% across party affiliation, race, gender, age, and educational attainment. [1]

This is a public opinion finding and should not be treated as evidence that programs work. What it establishes is that, as a policy proposition, transit safety ambassadors command majority support before most voters have had any experience with an actual program.

The function-specific findings, by net importance (percentage rating “important” or “very important” minus percentage rating “not important”):

Responding to medical emergencies: +74 net (59% called it “very important”)
Helping people experiencing mental health crises: +70 net (53% “very important”)
Preventing drug use on transit: +69 net (53% “very important”)
Deterring harassment: +67 net (50% “very important”)
Assisting elderly and disabled riders: +63 net (48% “very important”)
Walking people to their cars: +62 net (45% “very important”)
Helping with directions: +51 net (37% “very important”)

[1]

Medical emergency response ranked highest, with 59% of voters calling it “very important” — not just “important.” [1] The full importance breakout for each function, per the Safer Cities / Data For Progress poll:

Medical emergency response: 87% important vs. 13% not important
Helping people experiencing mental health crises: 85% vs. 15%
Preventing drug use on transit: 84% vs. 15%
Deterring harassment: 83% vs. 16%
Assisting elderly and disabled riders: 81% vs. 18%
Walking people to their cars: 81% vs. 19%
Helping with directions: 75% vs. 24%

[1] The 334 lives saved by LA Metro ambassadors as of July 2025, per Metro’s official board records, represents the documented outcome that corresponds to this top-ranked function. [LA Metro board press release, July 2025]

A separate finding: 77% of voters agreed that “trained safety ambassadors consistently and competently perform the same role for less cost which allows the city to have more safety ambassadors, and therefore more eyes on the street, for the same budget.” [1]

LA Metro’s board voted to make the ambassador program permanent after finding that ambassadors had “improved public safety and helped increase ridership on its transit system.” [3] D.C. Metro General Manager Randy Clarke described ambassadors as “another additive layer to make sure we have more visibility for safety, security and more thinking about the customer in everything we do.” [6]

Sacramento Regional Transit’s board voted unanimously to expand its ambassador program with a $1 million budget increase. Board member Roger Dickinson (who subsequently won election to the Sacramento City Council in November 2024) described the expansion as “calibrated to have the right level of response for the particular incident.” [4]

Illinois lawmakers passed the Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act in December 2025, mandating transit ambassador programs for the Chicago metropolitan region with implementation targeted for 2027. [Illinois Governor’s Office, December 16, 2025]

Three documented incidents and several structural patterns define the known risk profile for transit safety ambassador programs.

Every transit agency that has launched a safety ambassador program made the same set of design choices, and made them differently. How ambassadors are activated, who is on the team, where the program lives institutionally, what situations it handles, what it does on scene, and how it relates to law enforcement are not standardized. They vary by agency size, ridership profile, political context, available workforce, and the specific problems the agency was trying to solve when the program launched. This card walks through each major design decision in sequence, with documented examples of what cities chose and, where available, what happened as a result.

Los Angeles Metro, Washington D.C. Metro, and Sacramento Regional Transit fund ambassadors through transit agency operational budgets. [1, 3, 4]

LA Metro’s board voted to make the ambassador program permanent in 2023, finding that ambassadors had “improved public safety and helped increase ridership on its transit system.” [1] The July 2025 in-house Teamsters transition set the authorized workforce at 439 positions with a daily deployment target of 322 ambassadors, adding $11.8 million to the FY2026 budget. [1]

Ambassador programs funded through operating budget line items face annual competition with other transit priorities where they lack the institutional protection that comes with a legal mandate or dedicated funding stream. [10]

LA Metro ambassadors are funded for active deployment. The organizational capacity required to maintain more than 400 trained, equipped, supervised workers — training infrastructure, program leadership, workforce development, ongoing quality assurance — competes with the salary line item for budget priority. [10, UCLA ITS December 2025]

Transit safety ambassador programs have responded to thousands of situations across American cities, medical emergencies resolved in minutes, conflicts de-escalated without arrests, vulnerable riders connected to services, and 334 lives saved in Los Angeles as of July 2025 through Narcan and CPR. The leaders who have launched and expanded these programs communicate the rationale in a consistent pattern: transit systems have a problem that police weren’t built to solve, and ambassadors are the right tool for the job.

The political coalition supporting transit safety ambassadors spans transit agency executives, law enforcement leaders who championed the programs, elected officials from both parties, and rider advocates calling for more coverage. BART’s Deputy Chief of Police Ja’Son Scott championed the program while also serving as a law enforcement executive. [3]