The realities Transit Operators face can change daily: new construction, new routes, new rules, and even new vehicles (like ZEBs) introduced to the fleet. In those situations, training modules clearly need to be updated to stay relevant. But even if nothing changed out on the road, everything has a shelf life, and stale training modules are as unappealing as stale crackers.

William Cameron has decades of experience in Transit Operator training, including a 25-year career with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), where he served as the Division Chief of Training. He’s designed countless curricula and training modules for Transit Operators. In that time, he found that regularly refreshing the curriculum to make the most of new teaching technologies helped ensure that his agency’s training remained as engaging and relevant as possible.

Refreshing Curriculum to Reinvigorate the Classroom

People get used to the same old training approach. Periodically updating the curriculum to address learning styles in new ways almost invariably boosts engagement.

Refreshing curriculum doesn’t have to be complex or entail a major investment. As Cameron explains:

“Back in 2010, I was still an instructor [with MBTA], and we were doing a recertification program. I was one of the first guys in the department to know how to use PowerPoint, and I knew how to embed video in it. We had a whole library of videos of accidents and incidents. At a large legacy transit agency like the MBTA, it’s not uncommon to have six to seven accidents in a day. So it just made 100% sense for me to connect the two: for each module, I went through the library, found a couple of different incidents that pertained to the lesson, and embedded the video in the PowerPoint. And I’ll be honest, when we first started this program, I could not believe the response we got from the drivers. They were blown away. Instead of getting sent to this training to sit in a lecture and stare at a chalkboard, they came to this class, and they saw videos of actual incidents in their city, on their routes.”

Cameron saw the largest increase in engagement when the MBTA invested in a transit training simulator. “When we first introduced simulators, we got a tremendous response on just the advancement of the technology. That in turn became an advancement of the class.” Cameron especially saw improvements in how engaged Operators were during the class and how quickly they progressed.

Making the Most of Learning Opportunities

Even if the roads don’t change and the laws don’t change, people—and their foibles—do. For example, over the last decade, deadly crashes attributable to road rage have at least tripled, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Reports and videos covering accidents and incidents that happen along your routes aren’t just a record of what went wrong one day; they’re a roadmap for preventing similar incidents in the future.

Just as he’d embedded videos of accidents and incidents in his training PowerPoints in 2010, Cameron also created training scenarios for their simulators modeled after actual on-the-road incidents on MBTA routes.

“This is really valuable,” Cameron notes. “Today, with simulation technology, we aren’t limited to just showing the trainee what happened. After going through the module and watching videos, you can have them get into the simulator and experience that exact situation on their own.”

Not every transit driver training simulation provider makes this easy. FAAC was the first company to develop interactive, customizable transit simulators that combined high realism with the ability to easily create custom driving scenarios. This earned FAAC’s bus driving simulators recognition from the American Public Transportation Association, which listed them among the top 100 safety improvements of the last 150 years.

With FAAC’s latest generation of transit simulators, instructors can create new custom route-specific training scenarios right from the Instructor Operator Station. Each simulator includes all the tools instructors need to quickly update and customize their simulation training curriculum.

Have questions? Want to talk about how to freshen up your Operator training programs? Feel free to contact us. Our team of experts looks forward to speaking with you.