Today, FTA published the first major update to the Public Transportation Agency Safety Plans (PTASP) regulation concurrently with updates to FTA’s National Public Transportation Safety Plan. View the PTASP and National Safety Plan documents.

These updates are a part of a continuing effort to improve transit safety performance on federally supported transit systems, and PTASP is the first rule finalized by FTA under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law requirements to make transit safer for both transit workers and passengers. It will also allow transit workers more of a voice in improving their safety on the job.

New PTASP requirements call for transit agencies to set safety performance targets in their safety plans based on safety performance measures for fatalities, injuries, safety events and system reliability, which are established in FTA’s National Safety Plan.

The update also clarifies the roles, responsibilities and requirements around the joint labor-management Safety Committees required by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. These committees will be required to identify risks and mitigations surrounding transit worker assaults, as well as collisions between pedestrians and transit vehicles. Agencies must enact mitigations identified and added to an agency’s safety plan. The update also clarifies tiebreaking procedures surrounding the evenly divided committees, particularly noting that the transit agency’s Accountable Executive cannot be the tiebreaker.

The updates also incorporate Bipartisan Infrastructure Law requirements and:

• advance Safety Management System (SMS) processes,
• increase frontline transit worker involvement,
• expand de-escalation training, and
• address safety risk, including assaults on transit workers, transit vehicle-pedestrian collisions and infectious disease exposure.

Through the updates, FTA is advancing SMS by focusing on data-informed risk identification. This includes the Safety Risk Reduction Program, which requires agencies serving large urbanized areas to set safety performance targets based on safety data they report to the National Transit Database. The safety risk reduction program aims to improve safety performance by reducing the number and rates of vehicle and pedestrian accidents involving buses, as well as the number and rates of assaults on transit workers.

FTA will host a webinar in the coming weeks highlighting these important safety updates. FTA also plans to provide additional technical assistance designed to support agencies as they adopt these new requirements.