TCRP Reports

Women have traditionally been underrepresented within the transit workforce. However, the percentage of women within transit agencies appears to be increasing, and many transit agencies report that the percentage of women advancing into management and leadership positions has also been increasing over the past 5 years.

The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program’s TCRP Synthesis 147: Attracting, Retaining, and Advancing Women in Transit explores the strategies that have been deployed in transit and other related industries in order to attract, retain, and advance women in a variety of roles.

A critical first step to ensure success in these areas is to remove barriers to entry and address challenges women face once employed.

Around the United States and Canada, both transit agencies and the unions representing operators have recognized the serious impact of limited restroom access and begun to negotiate ways to address this problem.

The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program’s TCRP Research Report 216 presents a catalog of good practices, tools, and resources that provide a foundation for implementable strategies to improve restroom access, primarily for transit vehicle operators.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Synthesis 143: Managing the Transit Scheduling Workforce examines how transit agencies are recruiting, training, developing, and retaining schedulers. In the case where transit agencies use third parties to create schedules, the report also shows how transit systems manage those third parties.

Transit workers experience more health and safety problems than the general workforce, primarily as a result of a combination of physical demands, environmental factors, and stresses related to their jobs.

The TRB Transit Cooperative Research Program’s TCRP Research Report 217: Improving the Health and Safety of Transit Workers with Corresponding Impacts on the Bottom Line focuses on the prevalence of these conditions, costs associated with these conditions, and statistical analysis of data on participation in and the results of health and wellness promotion programs.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Report 194: Knowledge Management Resource to Support Strategic Workforce Development for Transit Agencies explores the importance of knowledge management (KM), which is an organization’s process for collecting, storing, and sharing organizational information and knowledge, and provides guidance on implementing KM strategies in transit agencies. In addition, the guidance includes action plans for developing particular aspects of KM, analysis of KM strategies at several transit agencies, and a catalog of KM technology tools and resources.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 185: Bus Operator Workstation Design for Improving Occupational Health and Safety provides guidance to transit agencies and bus manufacturers as they integrate emerging technologies into current procurement practices and improve bus operator workstation design across the transit industry.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 181: Labor–Management Partnerships for Public Transportation, Volume 2: Final Report, documents the materials used to develop Volume 1: Toolkit. Volume 1 provides resources for public transportation management and labor union leaders to establish, manage, and improve labor–management partnerships.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Report 162: Building a Sustainable Workforce in the Public Transportation Industry—A Systems Approach provides a guidebook that addresses contemporary issues in workforce development, retention, and attraction, and public transportation image management.

The guidebook provides practical tools to transit agencies on a variety of workforce issues including workforce strategies that enhance organizational processes, performance metrics to evaluate the impact of workforce strategies, image management techniques that improve perceptions of the public transportation industry, and benchmarking processes that allow for continuous organizational improvement.

The guidebook is separated into modules that may be used independently or together in the form of the fully integrated guidebook.

TRB’s Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Research Results Digest 100: Professional Certification and Credentialing Program for the Transit Industry explores the findings of a literature review and a gap analysis of the efficacy of four transit-specific professional development programs. The report also examines potential strategies that might be used to deploy and maintain a transit industry certification and credentialing program.