The rider, who shared her experience to warn others, described being trailed through the train by a man. When she trusted her gut and approached a fellow passenger for help, the stranger — a man who pretended to know her — stepped up and helped her exit safely. A genuinely good person doing what decent people do.

But here's where it gets infuriating: when they approached a Caltrain employee about the situation, the response was essentially a shrug. No urgency. No concern. No action.

This is the fundamental problem with Bay Area public transit, and it's not about track gauges or electrification timelines or fare structures. It's about whether riders can expect a basic level of safety — and whether the people paid to maintain that safety actually care.

We pour billions into transit infrastructure across the Bay Area. Caltrain's electrification project alone cost north of $2.4 billion. And yet a woman being stalked on a train in broad daylight can't get a transit employee to take it seriously. The priorities are, to put it mildly, misaligned.

The broader conversation in the Bay Area transit community reflects a grim resignation. Riders routinely advise each other to budget for Uber rather than rely on public transit during off-peak hours. As one Bay Area commuter put it plainly: "the cost in time is not worth it" — referring not just to schedule inconvenience but to the safety calculus riders are forced to make every single trip.

When your ridership strategy depends on passengers self-organizing safety networks with strangers because your own staff won't engage, you don't have a transit system. You have publicly funded infrastructure with a staffing problem and an accountability vacuum.

The rider plans to file a report with transit police. We hope they take it more seriously than the on-board employee did. But hope isn't a safety plan — and riders deserve more than hope.

Stay vigilant out there. Trust your instincts. And if someone near you looks uncomfortable, be that stranger who steps up. Apparently, you can't count on the people getting paid to do it.