I thought it would have stopped by now. Someone would have come to their senses and realized it was a bad idea. It sends the wrong message, in the wrong place, and diverts attention from the reality. It doesn’t make any sense and besides it just sounds creepy. But still, every morning, as the bus full of sleepy students sipping their coffees and browsing their smartphones rolls towards Alma, a robotic voice orders me and the 50 other poor souls on the bus to “Call Safewalk to escort you to your destination.” No one else bats an eye anymore. Sadly, we’ve learned to tune it out.

Safewalk is a service run by UBC’s Alma Mater Society, and only operates at night, and only on campus. According to Matthew Duguay, AMS student services manager, the bus messaging was requested by UBC as part of coordinated efforts to respond to the series of sexual assaults on campus last year. TransLink’s message to “call Safewalk” supports UBC’s broader messaging, which continues to remind everyone on campus (although we women know they’re really just talking to us): “Stay safe. Don’t walk alone.” Although the recently released interim report from the Campus Safety Working Group mentions receiving feedback concerned with this messaging—its gendered implications and the way that it has instilled fear on campus—there is no mention in the report of any plans to change it.

The “Don’t walk alone” messaging from TransLink and UBC may be painting an incomplete picture of where we are really “safe”. While we’ve been reminded repeatedly about the six sexual assaults at UBC last year (and I don’t intend to minimize the seriousness of those incidents), according to a Globe and Mail article last month, there were 132 reported sexual offences on Metro Vancouver transit in 2013 (see Harassment on TransLink for several disturbing accounts). And yet, the message TransLink has decided to play four times every morning on my way to school is not “Don’t assault people on the bus” or “Keep your hands to yourself,” but “Call Safewalk to escort you to your destination.”

Duguay told me that they want TransLink to change the timing of the messaging—which plays all day though Safewalk doesn’t begin operations until 7 p.m.—but that it has had some success in increasing the number of people who call Safewalk to escort them from the bus loops, from one or two to between five and 10 per night.

I try to imagine what would happen if all 50 passengers who are on the bus with me, along with the hundreds of others arriving in the UBC bus loop at any given time obediently pulled out their phones as the bus passed Alma and called Safewalk to escort them to their destination. I imagine us forming a queue in the bus loop to wait for the two or three pairs of Safewalkers on duty to come and escort each one of us to our various classes and appointments. I imagine this causing quite the traffic jam in the bus loop, with some of us waiting several minutes, maybe even hours, for Safewalk to work through the high volume of calls from students who knew better than to walk alone.

But what would happen after the students reached their destinations? The “don’t walk alone at night” messaging ignores the much broader and more prevalent reality of sexual assault. While we are worried about a hooded, vaguely described figure lurking in the bushes at UBC, women are much more likely to be assaulted in their homes (80 percent of sexual assaults), and by someone they know (70 percent of rapes), according to the Rape Victims Support Network. According to the Globe article, we are also more likely to be assaulted on transit than at the university where we have the option to be escorted by Safewalk.

Unfortunately, it seems that the creepy robotic message that haunts me on the bus every morning is, at best, a way for TransLink to say, “See? We’re doing our part to stop women from being assaulted at UBC!” In my experience, it’s just one more reminder I face every day telling me I’m not safe on campus, I have no right to walk alone, and if I choose to ignore all the warnings, it’s my own fault.