Amalgamated Transit Union - Local 587 - Seattle, WA

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ATU Local 587
2815 Second Avenue
Suite 230
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 448-8588

Urban Transit Drivers face an unusually harsh job environment with physical and mental impacts far beyond what one would imagine. Disability is the most common end of transit careers across the United States and Europe. Your Union is highly involved in the fight to protect both our members who have been injured and need treatment and those who are currently healthy but being unnecessarily put at risk by injurious equipment and working conditions.

Your editor will continue adding resources to this site to assist broader understanding and better medical care.

WHOLE BODY VIBRATION MEASUREMENTS IN KING COUNTY BUS DRIVERS

James D. Ploger, Rick Neitzel and Peter W. Johnson

University of Washington Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences

(Editor's note: This research summary is tough reading due to the amount of technical detail but it is excellent work showing the amount of shock energy absorbed by our bodies. Individual impulses can be over twice your body weight and in some circumstances; the air-ride seats deliver more vibration energy than sitting on the floor! This affects the entire body. For instance, vibration causes muscles to contract, leading to elevated blood pressure, and back fatigue which then makes us vulnerable to back injury. A continuation of this study will be posted as soon as I get it. Risk Management and Metro Safety should be thanked for their support in examining this issue which is directly tied to occupational injuries and our extremely high rate of disability.)

Health Impact Urban Mass Trans Wk-NYC

USSC Seat Pan Problems

Red Light Camera Information Page (SPD)

Note: Below is an informational article to help better understand Personal Electronic Device use and driving. This is in no way a recommendation of doing so.

Think You’re Good at Driving While on Your

Cell phone? You May Be Right

By Bruce Bower, Science News
April 1, 2010 |
1:31 pm |
Categories: Brains and Behavior

cell_car

Cellphone users frequently drive themselves to distraction while operating cars, and all too often end up in traffic accidents. But a select few multitask behind the wheel with extraordinary skill, a new study finds.

About one in 40 drivers qualifies as a “supertasker,” able to combine driving and cell phone use without impairing performance of either activity, say psychologists Jason Watson and David Strayer, both of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. These unusual exceptions to the general rule that performance declines when a person does two things at once (SN: 3/13/10, p. 16) may offer insights into the workings of attention and mental control, Watson and Strayer propose in an upcoming Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Laboratory tests of 200 volunteers operating a driving simulator identified five extraordinary individuals. These people were good drivers: They hit the brakes quickly in response to cars that slowed in front of them and maintained a safe distance from other cars. They also excelled at solving simple math problems and remembering words heard over a hands-free cellphone when not driving. Critically, their performance on these tasks stayed just as high while driving and using cellphones at the same time.“Supertaskers did a phenomenal job of performing several different tasks at once,” Watson says. “We’d all like to think we could do the same, but the odds are overwhelmingly against it.”

Watson and Strayer studied college students, ages 18 to 43. After learning to operate a driving simulator on a virtual highway, participants followed an intermittently braking pace car driving in the right-hand lane. For each volunteer, the researchers measured time needed to depress the brakes when the pace car slowed and distance from the pace car throughout the trip. In a separate trial, participants listened through hands-free cellphones as an experimenter read two to five words interspersed with simple math problems that had to be immediately labeled as true or false. Volunteers then tried to recall words in the order that they were presented. As expected, overall group performance declined markedly when driving and the cellphone task were performed at the same time. Volunteers took an average of 20 percent longer to hit the brakes when needed, and increasingly fell behind the pace car. Word recall fell by 11 percent and math accuracy declined 3 percent. But the handful of supertaskers maintained their braking times, following distances and math accuracy while multitasking. Their word recall rose 3 percent.

Stanford University sociologist Clifford Nass wonders whether supertaskers in the new study prefer doing many things at once in their daily lives. He and his colleagues have found that young adults who often multitask — say by regularly sending text messages while navigating websites and watching television — perform worse when switching back and forth between two mental tasks than peers who rarely multitask. Frequent multitaskers have difficulty ignoring information irrelevant to a task at hand, Nass argues. That leads Nass to the somewhat surprising conclusion that supertaskers tend not to juggle multiple duties and don’t need to practice multitasking to be good at it.

Researchers need to explore whether supertaskers jointly simply perform well-learned abilities the same way everyone else does but with far more efficiency, or instead deploy mental resources in distinctive ways, says psychologist Randall Engle of Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Watson and Strayer plan to do that by comparing various measures of brain activity for people who do and don’t rank as supertaskers.

Image: CraigOppy/flickr

drivers raise safety concerns

Nearly three dozen new King County Metro Transit vans bought last year for $7 million have been pulled off the streets after drivers worried they might hit someone because of poor sightlines from the driver's seat.

By Mike Lindblom

Seattle Times transportation reporter

PREV of NEXT

ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

King County Metro Transit has sidelined 35 new vans after drivers complained of poor sightlines because of pillars at the sides of the windshields and boxy hoods.

Most local transit buses and vans have either a flat front or a small hood, so operators can sit close to the front windshield to look nearly straight down. But the front of the 35 new vans looks more like the nose of a Boston terrier — the drivers sit farther back behind the boxy front hood.

Drivers also had trouble seeing around the vertical pillars at the two front corners, which widen at the bottom, said Paul Bachtel, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 587.

"You could lose somebody in a blind spot very easily," he said.

It's a sensitive issue for the union, he said, because transit vehicles in the past have hit pedestrians who were obscured by windshield pillars. On the other hand, the new vans are meant for low-population areas with few pedestrians.

Another problem with the pillars is that they continually interrupt the field of vision for split seconds, causing a strobelike effect that disrupts the brain's ability to perceive objects, Bachtel said. Shorter drivers had trouble looking over the dashboard, and windshield wipers missed water droplets in a critical sight path, he said.

The new StarTrans vans, built in Indiana and worth about $200,000 each, went into service in November on outlying routes in the southern and eastern parts of the county.

After hearing operator complaints, a safety committee of union members and managers discussed and test-drove the vans Jan. 19.

Metro pulled them the next day. They remain parked in the yard. Many sat in neat rows last week at East Base in Bellevue. They are 26-foot StarTrans "President LF" models customized to Metro specs with low-floor entrances. They can seat about 20 people.

Jim Jacobson, deputy general manager of Metro, said Tuesday the agency will be installing different windshield wipers, changing the wiring of interior lights to reduce glare, adding mirrors, lowering a dashboard instrument or making other minor modifications. Costs aren't known.

The van tweaks aren't a big deal, he said.

"We've had issues like this with almost every fleet we've ever purchased. This isn't Toyota here," he said, referring to that company's massive recall.

But Local 587 Chairman Neal Safrin wrote in the union's newsletter: "While I am not optimistic that such poor vehicle design can be made safe for passenger service, it will be attempted."

Union President Bachtel praised Kevin Desmond, Metro general manager, for taking swift action.

Because this was a small order, Metro pulled the whole group of new vans at once, and restored older vans to the rural routes. In the past with larger bus orders, Metro would retrofit a few at a time, gradually rotating them in and out of service, Jacobson said.

Sam Craig, vice president of StarTrans bus sales in Goshen, Ind., said Tuesday he hadn't heard of Metro's dilemma, and the company hasn't had sightline complaints from other U.S. clients.

"I had King County inspectors from the time I started, from the time I finished all 35 units," he said. Metro requested several minor changes during manufacturing, but not for sightlines, Craig said. "It surprises me they would be taking them off the road."

Metro's strategy for ordering vans will get a closer look, but not until after this group is re-equipped to go back on the road, Jacobson said. "We've had a pretty successful record, buying buses that hold up pretty well," he said.

Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com

Metro Safety / Security Data from 9/09 News Review

TCRP Report 125 Guidebook for Mitigating Fixed-Route Bus-and-Pedestrian Collisions

Below is a small sample of files and photos exploring visibility issues.

Gillig Phantom Blind Spot Files:

Video taken from the driver's seat in a Gillig Phantom showing hidden pedestrians - some were taken using a telephoto lens setting to increase resolution of the area around the pillar. All were taken from a normal seated position.

Madison and Alaskan Way - five adults and three Children hidden while they cross the street next to the bus
MVI_1572.AVI This includes leaning forward which only moves the blind spot and does not overcome it. Please note that the pillar blocks the operator's view of the path followed by the pillar itself, including most of the lane ahead at roughly 3/4 of the way around the turn.
MVI_1584.AVI One pedestrian is hidden for the first 9 seconds of the video and this includes the critical crossing of the lanes the coach will turn to. Another takes six seconds to walk across the blind spot. Please note that for the latter, the time required was greatly shortened by the coach moving in the opposite direction. This also demonstrates leaning out the window which helps to the left and blinds the operator to the right. Leaning out the window was pivotal in a pedestrian accident at 50th and University Way, where not moving in the seat would have prevented the accident.
MVI_1589.AVI This shows how the path ahead, including the entire lane to be traveled, can be hidden for hazardous lengths of time.
MVI_1590.AVIA pedestrian is hidden for 15 seconds. When pedestrian accidents are examined, investigators usually can not understand how someone could remain hidden as they approach the intersection and as the coach moves down the lane prior to someone being struck. The blind spot gets wider with distance from the coach and the motions can synchronize. Here, the pedestrian walks from the viewer's left to right approaching the intersection. An operator could do as they are instructed and preview the area, see all the crosswalk and sidewalk area and not see even a large group of pedestrians. The coach moves roughly 60 feet in this clip and still the pedestrian is not visible. Please note the small scale of the pedestrian once they finally emerge from behind the large pillar. Also, leaning forward prior to the pedestrian exiting the blind area could cause the obstructed angle to track the pedestrian's motion, increasing the time they are not visible.
MVI_1604.AVI A pedestrian is hidden for 13 seconds despite the operator doing the "bob-and-weave". The operator is supposed to be checking mirrors and scanning the entire area at all times. If the operator was looking right as a pedestrian, like the one seen here for the first second approaching from the left, comes from behind a building; the pedestrian would not be visible despite the operator moving as far as possible in the seat. I was using the forward and lowered seat position common to operators having these accidents and leaned as far as possible, due to the large steering wheel contacting my chest. Please note that I am over six feet tall and can lean fairly far by comparison to the shorter operators most at risk for pedestrian accidents. Also, please note that one Dozen pedestrians fit behind the pillar while both they and the bus are in the middle of the street.

The Farebox Visual Obstruction

Improved Gillig Driver's-Side Mirror

Polar Maps of Blind areas in Metro Coaches (includes some no longer in the fleet for reference)

Gillig Phantom
M.A.N. "Americana"
New Flyer Articulated
Breda
Ford Taurus (an average car for comparison)

Next are agency photos from a fatal accident investigation. A series were taken along the path followed by the coach. The intersection is of two four lane streets with turn pockets. The coach approached the intersection and made a left turn.

Window Reflections are solved in well designed vehicles by using curved glass. Many transit coaches are built as cheaply as possible and trade safety for the lower price of flat glass. Window tinting makes this worse by decreasing transmitted light (what you need to see) and not decreasing reflected light.

Safety
Committee Members

Neal Safrin, Chair

Note: Below is an informational article to help better understand Personal Electronic Device use and driving. This is in no way a recommendation of doing so.

Think You’re Good at Driving While on Your

Cell phone? You May Be Right

Metro sidelines new vans after

drivers raise safety concerns