MTA Wins 2016 APTA Bus Safety & Security Gold Excellence Award

The Maryland Department of Transportation’s Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) recently received several top national honors for safety, security and customer service at the 2016 American Public Transportation Association’s (APTA) Bus Safety & Security Excellence Awards ceremony.

The MTA captured both the prestigious Gold Award for Safety and the Gold Award for Security, which were given to agencies with the best overall bus safety or bus security programs, selected by an independent panel of judges at APTA’s Bus & Paratransit Conference in Charlotte, N.C., May 15-18.

The MTA won in the highly-competitive large transit system category for systems with 20 million or more bus passenger trips annually.

APTA also crowned MTA Bus Operator Bennie Williams the first-place winner of the Customer Service Challenge Award. This competition was extremely competitive and featured operators in the large transit systems category. The contest judged professionalism, customer service skills and problem-solving creativity.

“It is extremely gratifying for the MTA to be recognized as an industry leader in several key performance areas,” said MTA Administrator and CEO Paul Comfort. “The changes we have implemented are clearly delivering results. The MTA has dramatically improved our performance in providing safe, efficient and reliable transit with world-class customer service. And clearly, our peers are recognizing it.”

The APTA Bus Safety & Security Excellence Awards recognize public transportation organizations for innovative and proactive programs dedicated to improving safety and security for their employees, passengers and the public.

MTA Bus Operator Williams, who received the first-place Customer Service Challenge Award, began working for the MTA in 2000 as a part-time bus operator and now works as a full-time operator out of the Bush Division. Williams has won the MTA’s Bus Rodeo competition for drivers three times.

“Mr. Williams is a terrific example of the MTA’s commitment to deliver the highest levels of customer service,” Comfort said. “He exemplifies the professionalism and dependability that all of our operators are committed to achieving and truly serves as a model for other operators to demonstrate what excellent customer service looks like in action.”

The Customer Service Challenge Award competition tests the customer service skills of bus operators as they face real-life scenarios. Contestants are judged on their ability to resolve each scenario. The contestants’ customer service skills are judged by an esteemed panel of transit professionals.