Today, as part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to protecting America’s frontline transit workers from assault, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Transit Administration (FTA) announced General Directive 24-1: Required Actions Regarding Assaults on Transit Workers.  This General Directive, the first one to be issued by FTA, will require more than 700 transit agencies nationwide to take action to protect frontline transit workers from the risk of assaults.

General Directive 24-1 requires every transit agency subject to FTA’s Public Transportation Agency Safety Plans (PTASP) regulation to do the following:

• Conduct a risk assessment of assaults on the agency’s transit workers, specifically on transit vehicles and facilities, using the Safety Management System processes outlined in its Agency Safety Plan.
• If a transit agency has determined it has an unacceptable level of risk of assaults on transit workers, it must identify strategies to mitigate that risk and improve transit worker safety.
• Every transit agency serving a large, urbanized area (with a population of more than 200,000 people) must comply with PTASP requirements to involve the joint labor-management Safety Committee when identifying safety risk mitigations and strategies.
• Finally, each transit agency must provide information to FTA within 90 days on the risk level identified in its system, how it is mitigating those risks, and how it is monitoring the safety risk associated with assaults on transit workers.

The General Directive is necessary because from 2013 to 2021, the National Transit Database (NTD) documented a 120 percent increase in the number of assaults against transit workers.

-via Press Release