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Introduction and Background
Hazard and Security Planning: "One size does not fit all!"
Rural, small urban, and community-based public transportation agencies face many of the same
security concerns as other service-sector enterprises. Transit employees may experience workplace
violence or spillovers of domestic violence, and there is a risk of domestic or international terrorism.
Beyond the immediate trauma, intentional harm to an employee, a destroyed vehicle, or a vandalized
facility can be disruptive to operations and emotionally disturbing to employees and riders. Consequently,
transit systems must have a plan to identify and to eliminate the risk of these events or mitigate the loss.
Rural, small urban, and community-based public transportation systems do not generally have
sufficient staffing and funding resources to develop and apply the type of system security plans that
may be generated and used in larger urban areas.
Yet, as security planning becomes a requisite element of transit management across the United States,
researchers are discovering that one size does not fit all. In some respects, security and hazard planning
can vary more between Bonifay, Florida, and Boonville, Missouri, than between New York and Los
Angeles. What researchers have found is that in rural areas there are wide varieties of hazards and
security threats ranging from nuclear bomb disposal in rural Texas to large earthen dams in Pennsylvania
to tsunamis in Hawaii. It can be said that urban security needs are more similar and more predictable
than those in the rural portions of our country, where safety and security threats, ranging from modest
to extreme, may develop from circumstances unknown in urban areas. Consequently, security planning
for rural areas does not fit neatly into prevention and response patterns established in urban areas.
To help overcome this variability in security and hazard planning for rural, small urban, and
community-based transportation, the malleable "hazard and security plan" (HSP) template was
developed under Project J-10D, "Security Planning Tools for Rural, Small Urban, and Community-
Based Public Transportation Operations," for the Transit Cooperative Research Program. The HSP
template should help rural, small urban, and community-based transit managers select policies and
procedures that fit the individual needs of each service area. The template is introduced in an 8-hour
workshop. During the workshop, participants are guided through the template in an interactive process
to help participants establish the foundation of the plan so they can return to their home office to
complete and refine the document for use. Recognizing that rural, small urban, and community-based
transit managers "wear many hats" in their organizations, the template is designed to be comprehensive
and thorough, yet also adaptable and not burdensome. A CD-ROM containing the plan template and
sample policies is given to each participant with the workshop materials.
An important feature of the workshop, designed to help participants understand the nature of their
hazard and security threats, is the preparation of an area base map, similar to the map shown on Slide
68. Workshop participants are first asked to identify all the hazards on the sample map. Then they are
directed to draw a map of their home operating territory. In preliminary workshops, the map exercise
has been greeted enthusiastically, with comments such as "I had no idea how many threats and hazards
there were in my home area!"
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