A city report updating a transit frontline safety plan quickly turned to concerns from riders at city hall Tuesday.
“Bus Riders of Saskatoon want to live in a country where public transit is easy. Today, we want to emphasize that public transit should also be safe,” Peter Gallen, a member of advocacy group Bus Riders of Saskatoon, said to the city’s transportation committee.
“Unfortunately, that is not always the case.”
Last June, the city initiated a frontline safety plan aimed at reducing rising concerns from transit employees about escalating violence and safety issues.
The plan was centred around nine initiatives, including enhancing security, improving internal processes, employee training, augmenting mental health support for employees following an incident and strengthening coordination with emergency services.
The following month, the city created Fire Community Support teams alongside the Saskatoon Fire Department. These six firefighters are deployed at terminals and on bus routes with higher rates of incidents and are meant to respond to concerns of safety on buses.
But Gallen wondered how roughly nine months later, there has been no update or indication if the program has been successful or not.
“There should already be sufficient statistics available from data collected by bus operators on a daily basis for transit to have an indication almost nine months in whether current efforts have had a truly positive impact on safety in our busses,” Gallen said.
Ward 5 Councillor Randy Donauer wondered what Saskatoon Transit is doing about a rising number of bear spray incidents on buses over the last few months.
Mike Moellenbeck, director of Saskatoon Transit, says nearly every reported incident of bear spray on a Saskatoon bus has resulted in an arrest.
“There has been success on that front,” he said.
City Solicitor Derek Kowalski told the committee Saskatoon police will present a report in June with a request to the city to further investigate and curb bear spray use. He didn’t indicate if that would include creating a bylaw or not.
“I’m thinking it would probably be a bit more prescriptive than that. I think the report is going to be addressing what we would like to see,” he said.
As concerns from the public grow louder to ban troublesome users or implement transit police, Donauer asked administration when to deviate from the frontline safety plan if it is no longer effective.
“We’ve got a plan, and I want to work the plan,” Donauer said. “But at some point, if it’s not working, we’re going to have to up it and I think there’s more rattle going on in the community about that.”
Moellenbeck said there will be an update on the effectiveness of the fire support teams later this summer.
Saskatoon Transit surveyed riders about safety on transit with push notifications through the Transit app’s “Rate my ride” feature.
Approximately 1,600 people responded to the survey each week, with respondents inputting a perception of very safe, fine, not so safe. Results for “not so safe” ranged from three per cent to five per cent.
Ward 3 Coun. Robert Pearce questioned the phrasing and the results after he reached out to rider groups on social media with a similar question.
“And I got news for you. Roughly 80 per cent say it’s not so safe. So that’s a big discrepancy between three per cent,” Pearce said. “Clearly I have been questioning these responses that we seem to be hanging on to in our reporting.”
Pearce didn’t clarify how many responses he received to his informal poll.
Moellenbeck also said transit has implemented a process to ban riders, which gives drivers the ability to call police or inform a supervisor. Still, Moellenbeck said drivers are instructed to pick them up as if they are any other rider.
“Enforcing a ban would be an escalating situation,” he said. “They pick up the individual, they continue on, and police would respond.”
