Thunder Bay transit union president calls for more safety measures for buses, transit stops
CBC
The president of the union representing the city's transit employees hopes a new report will lead to increased safety measures on city buses and at transit stops.
Fred Caputo, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 966, said transit operators in Thunder Bay regularly face aggressive behaviour while on the job.
"They're seeing everything," he said at the City Hall terminal on Tuesday. "They're being assaulted. They're being spit at, sworn at."
"Passengers are taking out their frustrations on the operators," Caputo said, explaining that a shortage of drivers can lead to changes to route schedules. "Especially now with the buses being pulled, we're noticing an influx in operators getting verbally assaulted due to people having to get to work and being late."
One incident that occurred in July saw a transit operator shoved and spit on; Caputo said that operator is still off the job.
"There are a lot of low level incidents that happen, but this builds up on the operators," he said. "They shouldn't be coming to work and being sworn at."
And while the incidents do occur across the city, he said most happen at the City Hall terminal.
The issue prompted the union to make a deputation to city council in April. At the time, council passed a resolution referring the matter to administration, and the city's Employee Safety Task Force.
A report is due back to council in October, but an interim update in the form of a memo was presented to councillors on Monday.
In the memo, the city's transit department said it's already implemented several transit safety measures:
The memo also states more measures are in the process of being implemented, including replacing the temporary barriers with permanent ones, providing de-escalation training for all transit employees, and digitizing transit's incident reporting process to allow for better data collection and tracking.
Caputo said, however, the memo was disappointing, as "it's just going over the issues that we've been talking about for the past year and a half, two years."
"There's no real timeline on when anything's going to get done. So it just seems like it's just going around in a circle."
Caputo said the security the memo mentions isn't specific to transit. Rather, its referring to the security guards that are posted inside City Hall.