The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has released a video from FTA Administrator Nuria Fernandez regarding the impact of assaults on transit workers and the importance of FTA’s proposed general directive requiring larger transit agencies to assess and address risks to transit workers. The FTA published the proposed general directive to gather feedback as part of an effort to address the significant and continuing national safety risk related to assaults on transit workers. The general directive would require each transit agency subject to FTA’s Public Transportation Agency Safety Plans (PTASP) regulation to conduct a safety risk assessment, identify safety risk mitigations or strategies and provide information to FTA on how it is assessing, mitigating and monitoring the safety risk associated with assaults on transit workers.
Since 2021, FTA has taken multiple actions to respond to and mitigate transit worker assaults. In addition to those efforts, FTA notes it is continuing to advance changes in the PTASP regulations and authoring important, statutorily required worker safety rulemakings.
In her video message, Fernandez stressed how seriously FTA regards assaults on the nation’s transit workforce and asks transit agencies, community leaders, transit riders and anyone interested in transit to submit comments on the proposed directive.
The comment period for the proposed General Directive will close on Feb. 20, 2024. The video can be found here.
