With the vital role that public transit systems play in connecting communities, ensuring the safety of passengers and the protection of assets has always been paramount. US transit agencies and railroads have been addressing the increasingly robust safety requirements through the recent FRA System Safety Program Plan and the FTA Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan. Canadian rail saw Transport Canada augment to their Safety Management System requirements in 2015. While in different jurisdictions, what these programs have in common is the need to not only record safety incidents and apply mitigations but also to be able to measure and demonstrate the efficacy of those mitigations. It follows then regulators and the public are asking the same question: Are your safety measures really working?
Recently updated safety regulations aside, there is a heightened focus on transit safety, with serious incidents making front page news. The causes of these issues are complicated and run from homelessness and mental health support to larger socioeconomic issues, but the fact is transit agencies were not built to handle these broad societal problems that have been dropped on their doorstep.
Returning to pre-pandemic ridership levels has been slowed, especially among women, by the fear of becoming a victim of crime. Transit employee recruitment and retention is also being significantly impacted as front-line employees feel less and less safe doing their jobs. Declining ridership and staffing-related service cuts can contribute to service and funding shortfalls, and ultimately to what has been dubbed the “Transit System Death Spiral;” a self-reinforcing pattern of reductions to funding and service until the system collapses. Those who understand transit to be the lifeblood of a city and both literal and figurative vehicles of equality know that we cannot let this happen.
The solutions may be complex, to say the least, and require buy in and support from many sources like social services, law enforcement, and funding from all levels of government, but the common thread that fuels cooperation, collaboration and support from these different stakeholders will always be the data from which the funding requests and the mitigation strategies spring.
I’m reminded of going to a recent public transportation conference. In every session I attended, from safety to equity to recruitment, the insights and recommendations were entirely data-driven, and the lamentations were almost always about the gaps in knowledge from missing data or data silos. The methods of incident reporting, tracking, and analysis can vary widely when the data sources may include several unconnected software systems, and even paper logbooks and spreadsheets.
Using a single source of truth to consolidate the data across a transit agency, and even facilitate the potential for faster, standardized data sharing across agencies and beyond, must become a central part of any transit safety strategy. To satisfy this industry-wide need, Trapeze has engaged with transit agencies across North America with an Agile-based development focus that began with the problem being defined by customers. Thanks to that process we created RISC (Risk, Incident, and Safety Compliance), to go well beyond the needs of the Safety System Program Plan (SSPP) and Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan (PTASP) to break down data silos and provide a true agency-wide safety management program.
RISC provides:
RISC plays a powerful role in addressing safety and making public transit safer for everyone—passengers and employees alike—by providing:
RISC helps agencies plan, understand, and make data-driven decisions about their safety programs.
Learn more in our upcoming webinar on June 14th: How to Build a Solid Safety Assurance Plan
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