The Phase II of the Florida Transit research that was aimed at investigating the need to track external driving hours by transit operators. The same methodology used for Phase I was used with additional analysis on external driving hours. It is interesting to note that the findings of Phase II were in agreement with the results obtained in the first phase. About 15% of surveyed operators claimed to have a secondary driving job outside the transit agency. Only 17% of the operators with a secondary driving job indicated that they were part-time workers, suggesting that the majority of drivers who have external driving hours were full-time transit operators. This suggests a need to take measures to track external driving hours as the combined internal and external hours may be in violation of Rule 14-90. The study recommends implementation of an outside driving employment request form for operators to report any driving hours outside the transit agency. Consistent with Phase I of this research, it was found that operators with fewer split hours have a lower risk of being involved in preventable collisions compared to those who have longer splits between driving duties. It was observed that the collision risk doubled for each additional split hour and spiked significantly for splits of four hours or more. The study recommends that transit agencies should try to minimize the splits in order to reduce the extended long hours for transit operators. Interestingly, the study also found that fewer than 20% of operators involved in preventable collisions had fairly consistent shifts over the week leading up to the collision occurrence. Reducing the daily shift variability may enhance existing safety measures and reduce overall crash occurrences. View Final Report.
FTSON
Florida Transit Safety and Operations Network
