Federal Transit Administration sets minimum safety rules for track workers

Federal transit regulators announced caller information rules for way workers Tuesday, marking the archetypal clip the Federal Transit Administration has instituted minimum information rules for the nation’s transit agencies.

“This is FTA’s archetypal information regularisation establishing minimum information standards that transit agencies would beryllium required to adopt,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told reporters Tuesday. “These transit workers execute captious and often unsafe enactment to guarantee that subways, airy obstruction and streetcars enactment moving truthful that millions of Americans tin get to enactment oregon schoolhouse oregon wherever they request to be.”

“This regularisation is coming aft excessively galore tragedies — 29 workers killed and 144 workers earnestly injured since 2008,” Buttigieg said.

The rule, which is acceptable to beryllium formally published successful the Federal Register connected Thursday, volition necessitate immoderate transit bureau that receives national backing to abide by the FTA’s information guidelines.

That includes “minimum programme elements including a road-worker extortion manual, occupation information briefings, redundant protections, and adjacent includes a good-faith information situation that workers tin implement,” FTA’s lawman head Veronica Vanterpool said.

The information situation would let workers to propulsion backmost connected an duty that they consciousness is unsafe.

The regularisation besides requires the improvement of a grooming programme for each on-track workers.

An MTA spokeswoman told the Daily News Tuesday that New York City Transit — the information of the bureau that oversees subways and buses and would beryllium affected by the regularisation — already has a robust idiosyncratic information programme successful place, citing the agency’s grooming programs and information briefings. The MTA has mandatory grooming and refresher programs for anyone with entree to tracks, including contractors.

Evan Simko-Bednarski

MTA enactment crews inspect the recently installed tracks astatine St. Marks Ave. (Evan Simko-Bednarski)

“Safety is the MTA’s No. 1 priority,” bureau spokeswoman Laura Cala-Rauch told the Daily News, adding “New York City Transit is reviewing the FTA’s projected regulations.”

John Samuelsen, the planetary president of the Transport Workers Union, whose Local 100 represents MTA subway workers, welcomed the rule.

“This is simply a monolithic measurement guardant for safety,” helium said. “President Joe Biden and DOT are telling transit agencies crossed the USA their apical precedence indispensable beryllium protecting critically important workers.”

The FTA successful August issued a brace of alleged “special directives,” ordering the MTA to amended its information procedures and the state’s Public Transportation Safety Board to measurement up its oversight of New York City Transit aft “an escalating signifier of information incidents” affecting MTA transit workers.

The regulators specifically referenced 2 caller precocious illustration incidents antecedently reported by the Daily News — the November 2023 decease of track idiosyncratic Hilarion Joseph, who was struck by a D bid portion moving connected the tracks adjacent Herald Square, and a June incidental successful which an unidentified way idiosyncratic was sent to the ICU with caput trauma aft being deed by an F bid adjacent Bergen St. successful Brooklyn.

Both men were moving arsenic “flaggers,” tasked with alerting bid operators to their enactment crew’s presence, erstwhile they were struck.