Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan (PTASP)
What is the PTASP?
The Public Transportation Agency Safety Plan (PTASP) Rule was published in 2018 by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), requiring public transportation providers to develop a new safety plan. The PTASP establishes a Safety Management System (SMS), which is comprised of data driven processes to proactively manage risks of our transportation system. The PTASP and SMS intend to change the Agency’s safety culture and reduce safety events by making safety everyone’s responsibility, empowering employees to play a role in safety, and encouraging employees and contractors to report safety concerns to senior management.
The FTA requires transit agencies to have an agency safety committee comprised of equal parts of labor and management to approve a transit agency’s safety plan. For the SFMTA, that committee is the Joint Labor Management Safety (JLMS) Committee. The JLMS has other duties in addition to the safety plan development, including:
- The review of identified and recommended risk-based mitigations or strategies necessary to reduce the likelihood and severity of consequences identified through the agency’s safety risk assessment.
- The review of mitigations or strategies that may be ineffective, inappropriate, or were not implemented as intended.
- The review of identified safety deficiencies for purposes of continuous improvement.
Having an updated PTASP is a requirement to receive federal funding. The SFMTA PTASP is updated by the JLMS and approved by the SFMTA Board of Directors annually or on an as-needed-basis.
Why is the PTASP Important?
Safety is everyone’s responsibility. The PTASP seeks to create a positive safety culture within all levels of the workforce and reinforce that everyone has a role in promoting safety. The PTASP will help ensure that safety issues are proactively identified and mitigated, not only reactively addressed, and that safety information is communicated throughout the agency.
For more information from the FTA: https://www.transit.dot.gov/PTASP-FAQs#General-PTASP-FAQs
