Lake County >> Lake County Transit Authority (LTA) is actively working towards establishing passenger conduct rules for their bus lines to help delineate what is and isn’t acceptable behavior. A major function of those rules is the ability of LTA staff members to issue citations to unruly passengers.
Under current policy, if a passenger is behaving in a way that the driver feels is threatening or potentially harmful to others, the driver issues a verbal warning to that passenger and contacts their supervisor for support. If the passenger doesn’t calm down, the supervisor will then meet the driver at the next convenient stop to remove that passenger from the bus. If things escalate out of the control of the driver, law enforcement is notified.
“Any time there’s a penal code or public utilities code section violation where we think there’s a situation […] we call law enforcement,” said LTA Transit Manger Mark Wall. “It may not be a priority to them and we may not see them; that’s one of the issues. We need to be able to deal with minor situations better. They will respond quickly if there’s an assault, but someone loud and unruly they may not be there quickly.”
According to Wall, such situations where staff feels compelled to contact law enforcement crop up at least once or twice a month.
“There are somewhere around 30,000 bus trips made each month,” he said. “Occasionally you’re going to have conflict.”
Under the proposed new rules, the supervisor would issue a citation to the offending passenger. These would have the effect of curtailing threatening behavior by accumulating into suspension from use of the bus service. LTA is also considering a plan including potential fines.
The second option has less support, especially from LTA leadership.
“We have two choices: administrative citations that don’t go to the court but do essentially put passengers on notice for a conduct issue; that they are subject to losing their privilege to ride the bus, so it kind of becomes a progressive discipline approach,” said Wall. “After the second citation, there would be short suspensions. The third citations gets as much as 30 days.
“The other option is that we could have an ordinance that would not only allow us to issue these citations with something like a notice or a warning but also attach a fine to it,” he continued. “People may or may not pay the fines, but there’s no benefit to the transit agencies; Maybe some to the county. We feel people are more worried about losing their bus privileges than they are about paying a fine.”
One of the first steps the LTA is taking is to establish a committee of similarly-sized and like-minded transit agencies statewide to form policies that dictate what training is required in order to issue the citations legally. According to Wall, the law that allows all this to happen was just passed last August, so there’s not much foundation in place for implementation, especially for smaller transit agencies like the LTA. He mentioned that, while larger entities such as BART have their own police force to handle problem cases, for places like Lake County that level of policing is out of place.
“The largest agencies we’re working with are Monterey and Contra Costa Counties. Both have rules in place but they don’t have the process developed to the point we’re talking about,” he said. “This is problem in all trans agencies where we sometimes have problems with passengers on the bus. We’re working on this policy with law enforcement. We’ve set up a peer network to establish what the training should be. Have yet to meet but will be meeting soon. We’re bringing in different people from different agencies around the state to work on a best practices training policy.”
The process for establishing these new rules is still early on in development, though Wall is hopeful that the policy implementation will be completed soon.
“We’re not sure exactly when this will happen,” he said. “Hopefully we will have it implemented sometime this summer.”
