Recently HART recieved a very prestigious award from the Transportation Security Administration highlighting HARTs dedication to safety and security system wide. From a personal perspective I think this award was well deserved, even though there is one piece of security that I think HART is lacking. That one piece is a Transit security team.
While HART is staffed with a knowledgable and capable supervisor staff and we are assisted by local law enforcement entities we still need a security detail that is stationed at a minimum at every Transfer location. I would like to see security personel stationed on every in service bus to assist the operators with enforcing rules and laws as well as fare enforcement. I know that this kind of operation is costly and the budget is tight right now, but making a move like this would greatly improve the image of safety at HART. There are several times a day where operators encounter beligerent, potentionaly violent individuals and we are ill-equiped to handle these individuals by ourselves. Currently our SOP (standard operating procedure) is to contact dispatch in emergencies, that by itself can take time to get a response. When we finally recieve a response from a dispatcher it then takes even more time to dispatch the authorities. By the time this is all done, the problem individual is in the wind and we only can hope they are caught. If there were a law enforcemnt officer at the transit centers at least the response times could be drasticaly cut.
This would be a far better use of transit dollars than funding a study that will most likely prove to be fruitless.
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YO Bus Driver! 