Council must get on board with transit safety

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/11/2018 (2142 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Tuesday evening, Mayor Brian Bowman and city councillors were sworn in for their term on Winnipeg city council. While the swearing-in was a celebratory affair, Winnipeg Transit operators will be watching to see what action this council takes to protect civic workers and passengers on city buses.

As a Free Press investigation revealed this week, assaults on Winnipeg Transit buses are a frequent hazard for operators and riders, occurring on an almost weekly basis. Can you imagine a situation where you go to work and fear for your safety? This is an almost daily reality for our members.

While the slaying of Winnipeg Transit operator Irvine Jubal Fraser last year raised the profile of safety on Transit buses, this has been an issue for years. Unfortunately, Winnipeg Transit has been slow to act to fix the problem. For example, Transit has only now finished a trial of shields after installing them in six buses out of a fleet of 623. While a photo op was arranged last February to show them off, the trial has now ended and city council and Transit have failed to take definitive action, leaving the outcome of the issue unclear.

City council needs to look no further than the Edmonton, where, unfortunately, a driver was recently stabbed. Edmonton’s city council acted decisively, implementing a $20-million plan to add 24-hour security and protective shields for operators, as well as adding additional peace officers to patrol the buses.

In Winnipeg, the difficult task of addressing operator and passenger safety was punted to a new creation of council, the transit advisory committee. After city council saw fit to approve only $590,000 to address security concerns, the committee voted against an Amalgamated Transit Union recommendation and chose instead to hire five additional transit supervisors. While supervisors play valuable roles, they are not trained to address security or safety concerns and are not granted peace-officer status that would allow them to detain potential assailants on buses.

The inadequacy of this patchwork solution has been made clear on several occasions. In August, a transit supervisor was assaulted on the job. Our union’s concerns about the hiring of additional transit supervisors, rather than security, police or peace officers, is that it will shift some of the assaults from our operators to supervisors. We feel this is unfair to supervisors, who are being pushed into the line of duty without the proper tools or training to address these difficult situations.

From our perspective, Winnipeg Transit is more concerned about its image than properly addressing the issues faced by our members on a daily basis. Transit did not notify the union about an assault that occurred on a bus last week, as it did not directly affect the driver. The notion that an operator who was not directly assaulted would not be affected by an incident of this nature is ludicrous. By chance, a member of our executive was on the bus when the incident took place; had he not been there, we would likely not have found out about the event.

This brings us back to the newly sworn-in city council. Certainly, we will be pushing all councillors and the mayor to take the issue of transit safety seriously, and we encourage the public to join us in calling for greater security for passengers and operators alike. However, council needs to take decisive action on this important issue.

We are calling on the mayor and council to meet with our members, the public and corresponding public agencies to begin to address this issue. There is no reason to again punt this issue to an advisory committee. The time for studies and consultation is over, and our members need the mayor and council to show leadership.

For Bowman, this is an issue that is more urgent than potholes, road repair or the fate of an intersection. Winnipeg is a growing and prosperous city, but this progress will mean nothing if we cannot ensure a safe environment for our workers and our citizens.

Aleem Chaudhary is president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1505.