Federal officials take aim at assaults on bus drivers

With transit driver assaults growing about 120% from 2013 to 2021, the Federal Transit Administration is taking steps to have transit agencies pay more attention to the incidents and learn from each other how to prevent them.

The agency issued a “general directive” to more than 700 transit agencies Wednesday that will require them to conduct a risk assessment for driver assaults and submit a mitigation plan within 90 days. In an online news conference, the agency said it has worked for weeks with transit agencies and unions that represent operators to develop this plan to try to reduce assaults.

Deputy Secretary Polly Trottenberg of the U.S. Department of Transportation said it is “unacceptable” that many transit drivers “have to fear for their lives just to go to work.” The agency will take “a data-driven approach” to study the assaults and give workers a big say in how their transit organization tries to reduce the number of incidents.

The order for a report in 90 days is the first time the FTA has ever issued a general directive, said Veronica Vanterpool, the agency’s deputy administrator. But the huge growth in driver assaults shows that workers are facing “unacceptable risks” that must be addressed, she said.

“We’re determined to protect these workers so they can provide needed service,” she said. “Everyone deserves to get home safely on public transit.”

Vanterpool said the directive is “an effort to understand how agencies are responding” to violence on their transit vehicles, especially when the victim often is a bus driver. The information will be used to identify best practices and encourage others to adopt those that work best.

In this area, Pittsburgh Regional Transit has annually averaged eight assaults on drivers over the past six years. There have been nine through August this year, but the agency said that could be misleadingly high because federal officials changed what type of behavior that should be considered an assault in 2023-24.

Ross Nicotero, president and business agent for Local 85 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said the local and PRT management meet once a month as a safety committee to discuss incidents such as assaults. He said there have been two particularly serious incidents in the past few years where drivers have been assaulted, and the only way to completely protect them would be to completely encase them so they have no direct contact with the public.

“[Driver safety] is one of the top priorities here,” he said. “People should be civil, but that’s been gone since COVID. If someone puts my driver in harm’s way, they need to be prosecuted.”

PRT spokesman Adam Brandolph said the agency takes driver safety seriously.

“PRT has been tracking operator assaults for many years and reviews and discusses them at our monthly safety committee meetings with ATU Local 85,” he said. “We have several measures in place in an attempt to mitigate and prevent operator assaults, including driver shields on all vehicles, operator de-escalation training, and multiple video surveillance cameras on every bus.”