A quasi-experimental study showed that the program is widely valued by users as a measure to travel safely on public transport, as it has been an effective measure to reduce the incidence of sexual violence against women on public transport, even though it has had unintended effects on other indicators, including non-sexual physical violence, which increased while the program was in operation.
However, with respect to sexual violence in particular, this study shows that when control variables are added, the effect estimate indicates a decrease of more than 11 percentage points in the probability of a woman suffering sexual violence. Given the average incidence of sexual violence, this suggests that when there is separation between cars, sexual violence virtually disappears.
The study was conducted using a quasi-experiment with a fuzzy randomized regression discontinuity design (RDD). A satisfaction survey was conducted among female and male users of public transport. The possibility of identifying a causal effect comes from the variation in the timetable of application of the rule. As the exclusive carriages are only valid during hours of high demand for public transport (until 10 am or after 2 pm), the authors conduct satisfaction surveys to collect the responses of users who boarded the train a little before (or a little after) the time when the program is suspended or started [1].