Neither recalls ever receiving this information. Two board members - Kemp and state appointee John Melendez - asked agency staff in June to aggregate and share driver assault data with the board on a monthly basis. Other changes promised in the wake of Dunn’s death have been slow to come. Meantime, officials put their focus on installing safety barriers, providing additional training to drivers, launching a “Ride with Respect" campaign and lobbying for new state legislation on operator assaults. The process has been slowed by an investigation into its chief executive officer that has stretched three months and by a legal challenge of the transportation sales tax that voters approved in 2018. Harris said the transit authority is working toward instituting an electronic system. “We should at least be scanning them in.” “If it’s on paper, it’s much harder to track and follow-up on and get results on,” Kemp said. Kemp, a board member, said she was shocked to learn this. And reviewing reports logged on the spreadsheet requires a trip to a satellite building where the mixed paper files are kept. But when the Times first requested the document, the staff told a reporter it did not exist. The spreadsheet lives on a shared drive available to employees in the safety, risk and operators departments. The battery category covers any physical acts such as spitting, punching or more violent confrontations. The assault category includes a belligerent passenger cursing at a driver and a rider pulling out a knife. Hillsborough’s safety and security team uses a spreadsheet to log and summarize driver-related incidents and puts them in two tabs. “We need to do a better job of defining and finding out what’s going on in that dataset down there.” if you don’t really get into the nuts and bolts of the root causes of these types of events, then you can end up missing something and someone can really get hurt,” said Ted Harris, chief customer experience officer for Hillsborough’s transit agency. “If you don’t look at their record in totality. Verbal threats and physical altercations are not tracked in the National Transit Database so record-keeping for each varies from agency to agency. The safety of transit operators is reviewed nationwide by the Federal Transit Administration, but only in cases of death or injury requiring immediate hospitalization. Executive director Brad Miller said they will also begin sharing the number of incidents, types and trends with the transit board. In response to inquiries from the Times, agency officials said they will start separating driver-related events for 2020, back to Jan. Still, she said, "My question is going to be what do we do with the information and how do we make things better.” Pinellas County commissioner and former board chair Janet Long said she is less concerned about knowing the number of attacks on drivers than she is about swift action to keep them safe.Īsked how the agency can choose a course of action without knowing what to address, Long paused and then replied, “That’s a good question.” If one type of incident is off the charts as far as frequency, we need to focus on that more.” “We want to make sure we’re taking the right action at the right level. “We need to have a clear picture of what’s happening out there so we know what issues to address,” Driscoll said. Petersburg City Council member and transit board member Gina Driscoll said she wants to see greater accuracy and efficiency in the agency’s data management.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |