PSTA Pinpoints Bus Safety, Planning Solution

It’s not that the safety team at Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority enjoys it when one of their buses is swatted by low-hanging tree branches. But, for the last six months, a new technological capability for tracking those and other types of bus incidents has brought along an exciting potential for refined planning, increased safety and a tool to share with other transit agencies.

Built in less than two months and with a team of one, Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority (PSTA) constructed its first digital database for collisions and other incidents that occur with its 207-bus fleet. Along with early insight on tight roadways and problem residential trees — in the form of “pins” determined by longitude and latitude — the Accident Incident Management System (AIMS) has already taken home an award.

“It’s our job to find cost-effective solutions that can fix the safety concerns in our community,” said Jacob Labutka, PSTA transit planner. “Not just when it comes to transit, but also vehicles, pedestrians, multi-modal development … (AIMS) is one piece that can help us accomplish that.”

Pedro Galvez, PSTA software engineer, had built other databases for the transit authority’s operator training and certification in prior years. As the four-person safety and planning team sought a solution to the floor-to-ceiling cabinets of historical transit collision and incident paperwork, they reached out to Galvez. At the cost of “my salary” and no new software or hardware, Galvez built, tested and tweaked AIMS in two months during the summer of 2016. In short, AIMS involves a database management backdrop of Microsoft Access and a simple, familiar interface for incident entry and search.

“It was a matter of digitizing their data … turning those forms and fields into tools they could work with,” Galvez said of his communication with PSTA safety officials to construct AIMS.

Rather than sift through disconnected incident paperwork or rely on anecdotal evidence, PSTA has been able to quickly identify data connected to route trends for its more than 40,000 daily trips. In total, they’ve recognized 239 “pins” — any incident with a bus collision, such as sideswiping cars to obtrusive tree branches — since August 2016. From there, the PSTA safety team can pull specific reports on this gathered information based on GIS data or various fields, like types of incidents. Entry is much faster than the previous paper trail, with the possibility of adding fields, types of reports or some historical incident information down the road.

Lisa Bacot is executive director of the Florida Public Transportation Association, which chose PSTA for its top award among the states larger transit systems. Even at this early stage of implementation, PSTA’s database carries a strong “potential for mitigating existing and potential hazards, and ultimately the reduction of transit incidents and risk,” Bacot said.

While the county is in the patent process with the database, the initial plans would be to share, not sell, the technology with other transit agencies. Early AIMS results have already been shared by PSTA with its fellow members in the American Bus Benchmarking Group. As Labutka has been able to map and visualize more data in the first few weeks of 2017, he said he feels the compiled information from the forthcoming year could better arm PSTA in its discussions on routes, fleet, strategy and partnerships.

“Other trends are going to arise that enable us to find solutions [and] reach out to partners with some of the problems that keep popping up,” Labutka said, later adding, “This package that we have here, as it continues to grow, we’re more than willing to share.”