Bus Operators are regularly exposed to workplace violence. According to ATU (North America’s largest labor union representing transit workers), in the last ten years, the rate of assaults on Transit Operators increased by 232%. The Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University has found that, among developed countries, the United States leads the world in attacks in transit settings.

This is no blip. As you can see below, during the last decade, this trend toward violence has been steady, even as ridership cratered during COVID shutdowns and has yet to return to the pre-pandemic baseline. (“UPT” on the chart stands for “unlinked passenger trips” and counts the number of people who have boarded a transit vehicle.)

This graph is drawn from a comprehensive new guide that seeks to help transit agencies looking to address and reduce assaults on transit workers and passengers: Mitigation Strategies for Deterring Transit Assaults, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

 

What the Guide Says

There’s an undeniable upward trend in transit assaults, even as ridership has yet to fully recover. Mitigation Strategies for Deterring Transit Assaults identifies trends in transit violence, highlights causes and consequences, and details strategies agencies are using to successfully reduce violence on public transit.

According to the guide, there are distinct patterns in who is victimized: On rail systems, it is riders who are most frequently assaulted. On the bus, the victim is most often the Transit Operator. Riders accounted for victims of assault roughly 75% of the time on rail systems, whereas bus assaults were almost evenly split between riders and Operators.

There are also clear trends in mitigation. The guide notes that the two most widely implemented mitigation strategies by transit agencies are de-escalation training and the use of video/audio surveillance technology. This technology isn’t limited to traditional cameras. It also includes innovative approaches, such as smartphone apps that allow riders to quickly and discreetly report concerns, and AI-powered surveillance technology that harnesses existing camera networks to proactively detect threats, including visible firearms.

These technologies are important additions to the transit safety toolkit. But do they boost Operator confidence? Advanced reporting and video image-processing technology make it easier to prosecute incidents after the fact, but do little to prevent them. Even with early warning technologies like AI-powered surveillance, knowing about a threat is of limited use if you don’t have strategies to prevent it from escalating into a life-or-death situation.

This is why the guide emphasizes the important role of employee training in mitigating transit violence. As the guide explains, proper training “can equip employees with tools to assess and handle tense situations and reduce the risk of injury and harm. Passengers will feel safer when staff can assess and de-escalate conflicts effectively.”

 

Simulation Training to Prepare Operators

Mitigation Strategies for Deterring Transit Assaults specifically highlights two types of training that are essential for transit workers:

1. Situational Assessment Training: teaching Operators to assess threats, use observational skills, and make risk-based decisions
2. De-escalation Training: giving Operators the skills to defuse volatile situations

A simulation platform like FAAC’s Transit Response is the ideal environment to safely and effectively develop these skills. Transit Response is a real-time immersive interaction simulator integrated into an existing full-cab bus simulator (like the MB-2000). During a scenario, the Operator must monitor and manage the potentially violent situation from the driver’s seat, just as they’d have to do in real life. Scenarios are specifically engineered to challenge trainees to apply agency-approved tactics and procedures that align with specific policies for de-escalation, conflict resolution, emergency response, customer communication, and so on. Instructors can tweak scenarios as they run, escalating or deescalating the situation further based on the Operator’s decisions.

 

 

The latest version of Transit Response prepares transit Operators to handle customer service issues, maintain situational awareness, address potential danger or victimization, and de-escalate tense moments. The current 40-scenario library covers all of these and also includes three scenarios specific to paratransit. FAAC’s in-house scenario-creation team can also work with transit agencies to develop and film new custom scenarios on the customer’s property.

Transit Response includes integrated tools to plan lessons, apply realistic situations, and objectively evaluate trainees’ performance—everything trainers need to engage trainees and meet agency objectives. For agencies whose funding sources mandate de-escalation training (such as those relying on FTA funds subject to PTASP), Transit Response is designed to help them meet both funding requirements and their own training needs.

Consistent immersive response training has been shown to help ensure that policies are consistently communicated and applied across agencies, creating the best possible conditions for well-written policy to become good daily practice. FAAC’s unique simulators combine driving skills, situational awareness, and passenger interaction in a single training session that consistently offers the Operator the most realistic and comprehensive training experience.

Want to talk about what your training program needs? Feel free to contact us. FAAC’s team of experts looks forward to speaking with you.