Strategies for Improving Safety at Toll Collection Facilities

OVERARCHING SAFETY STRATEGIES

This section presents findings according to two major types of strategies that could be viewed as over-arching: training, and an overall culture of safety. This section provides examples of ways in which training and a strong safety culture have helped agencies improve safety at their facilities.

TRAINING

The use of training as a safety mitigation strategy varied widely from agency to agency. At one end of the scale were those agencies that offered short, on-the-job safety sessions taught as part of a general course focused primarily on revenue collection, with minimal to no re-training. At the other end of the scale were agencies that offered intensive safety training sessions upon hiring, used professional trainers and props such as safety videos, and undertook periodic refresher courses and annual "safety" or "toll training" days. One agency had undertaken a unique approach by offering Web-based training that workers could access from break rooms. Another agency required all maintenance staff to go through work zone safety classes and flagging classes. Yet another agency requires crossing training for all workers (even vendors who put out ads at plazas).

In terms of safety training topics, most covered safety procedures at toll plazas including lane crossing, lane closing, hazardous materials, emergency situations, and robbery. Some agencies determine their safety training topics based on injury statistics from the previous year.

SAFETY CULTURE

The final set of mitigation strategies refer to something that was ever-present during the various site visits, but almost intangible to quantify: a culture of safety. Establishing a safety culture involves both setting an overall tone of safety (e.g., by featuring safety as the first topic in annual reports), and undertaking a series of small, often changing actions (e.g., posting rotating safety reminders in break rooms, displaying safety reminders around the workplace such as the floor mat shown in Figure 34).

Figure 34. Floor Mat in Plaza Building Reminds Employees to "Think Safety"

Focus on Safety for Maintenance Staff

One way that many agencies ensure that safety is a priority is that they place a higher priority on safety-related maintenance items than on other requests. For example, one agency records such safety-related requests on red paper versus the regular white paper used for other requests.

Safety Committees

Most agencies that the team visited have some type of safety committee in place. Those that placed the greatest emphasis on these committees ensured representation from all spectrums of the workforce – from collectors to senior managers - and often established subcommittees at each plaza or for a small group of plazas.

Safety Audits

Two agencies that the team visited made use of random safety audits, with one using internal staff to conduct the audits and one using an outside firm (since plaza personnel were able to identify the internal auditors). Both of these agencies also supplemented the formal audits with more frequent "self-inspections" by plaza managers and supervisors.

Employee Safety Meetings

Several agencies have regular employee safety meetings, typically held on a monthly or quarterly basis. Topics of safety meetings include reminders about safety procedures for lane crossing and lane closing; procedures for handling robberies; procedures for emergency situations; information on preventing slips, trips, and falls; and information on stretches to prevent repetitive stress injuries. Several agencies take the opportunity at scheduled meetings to review a recent incident and to review the proper steps employees should take to prevent a similar incident from occurring again.

Safety Award Programs

Many toll agencies use award programs as part of their overall strategy to reduce worker injuries at toll plazas. Most awards are presented annually. One agency presents an annual "Plaza Award" to any plaza where no one has been injured over the past year and an annual "Turnpike Award" to any turnpike that have had no employee injuries.

Figure 35. Tracking Employee Performance Publicly can Be an Incentive for Employees to Follow Safety Procedures

Another agency gives employees awards for preventing possible injuries. This same agency will also reprimand employees for not calling out safety concerns. For example, if one employee sees another employee crossing a lane without a vest and does not try to correct it, not only does the employee not wearing the vest receive a reprimand, but so does the employee that witnessed the violation and did nothing to correct it.

Safety Incentive Programs

Safety incentive programs are also a fairly common technique for promoting a culture of safety. These types of programs reward employees for passing safety audits and maximizing days without injury either with cash bonuses or with points that employees can use to purchase items out of catalogs (an example is shown in Figure 36). In some cases, the program works such that an entire plaza is rewarded as a group, thus introducing the factor of peer pressure to maintain good safety records. While successful, these programs are not without controversy. One concern is that they must be constantly re-invented to remain fresh and capture the imagination and interest of the staff. Another concern is that they may actually lead to under-reporting or treatment of legitimate injuries and/or safety violations and can present challenges to management-worker relations.¹⁸

Figure 36. Sign in Plaza Office Reminds Employees about Safety Record

Safety Awareness Programs

One agency has a Toll Plaza Safety Awareness Program. This is a month-long program run twice a year by the agency together with its dedicated police force and the State Police. Police perform various operations at the toll plaza, including seatbelt checks and ETC speed enforcement. Additional signs, such as portable changeable message signs, are used as needed. The agency reported that toll operations are not negatively impacted and that the program seems to reduce unsafe driving behaviors in the vicinity of plazas, but that the benefit is only short-term.

MAINTAINING SAFETY WHILE USING OPEN ROAD TOLLING

By a strict definition, ORT refers to fully-automated electronic tolling in an "open road" environment, allowing vehicles to travel at highway speeds when passing through toll collection points. Under this definition, customers must either possess an electronic transponder, or be assessed toll charges via license plate recognition technology. By this strict definition, safety is improved as there is inherently lower exposure: there are fewer worker-vehicle interactions since there is no plaza, and fewer vehicle-vehicle conflicts since less traffic is traveling through a plaza. Also, noise and emissions are lessened due to the reduction in vehicles starting and stopping.

Figure 37. Open-Road Tolling in Illinois

Beyond this strict definition of ORT, a number of agencies have implemented what might best be termed hybrid ORT operations: that is, they include a combination of mainline, full-speed electronic toll collection along with fully separated cash lanes. Typically, cash-paying customers must exit the roadway or shift to a separated toll plaza in order to make cash payment at a traditional, staffed plaza. An example of this is shown in Figure 37 above. This type of arrangement can also present some new challenges that are worthy of discussion.

One potential safety-related drawback to ORT (both fully "open road" and hybrid-ORT) is equipment maintenance since, in most cases, repairs that take place over the roadway would require that all lanes be closed. However, the Florida Turnpike has addressed this concern with a unique overhead gantry design that allows maintenance workers access to equipment without closing lanes or disturbing traffic (Figure 38). The gantry provides an area large enough for maintenance employees to work above the roadway, and all ETC equipment is positioned on a lever that allows workers to pull the equipment up into the work area. Additionally, there is a screen shielding workers from passing motorists to avoid distraction, and there is a fine mesh material at the base of the gantry below the work area to prevent the danger of debris dropping onto the traffic below during maintenance activities.

Figure 38. Florida Turnpike's Overhead Gantry for ORT Allows for Maintenance Activities without Road Closure

Another new safety challenge that hybrid-ORT has introduced is the issue of managing queue spillback onto the mainline from the cash payment plaza. Preventing this involves both design and operational solutions. For the Illinois Tollway, which recently converted all of their mainline plazas to hybrid-ORT facilities (a cash payment plaza separated from the mainline traffic by physical barriers), this has been a challenge that it has had to actively monitor and manage. At the planning stage, the agency modeled each of its plazas to estimate queue lengths at various times of the day and designed longer deceleration lanes at plazas where they expected longer queues. As an ongoing effort, it has been monitoring the number of cash transactions occurring at each plaza and performing targeted marketing to residents in areas near plazas with a high percent of cash transactions in an effort to increase adoption of ETC, thereby reducing queues. The issue of queue spillback is expected to be less of a concern over time as more and more customers switch to electronic payment, but is likely to be an initial challenge for any agency switching to ORT.

Another drawback noted by the Illinois Tollway is that the switch to hybrid-ORT has resulted in cash lanes having a higher percentage of inexperienced users. The agency feels that this may have increased the amount of erratic driving behavior at some of its plazas as the motorists who are less familiar with the facility can no longer "follow" the experienced motorists through the plaza.

A final challenge associated with hybrid-ORT is that vehicles that are not ETC-equipped may stop in travel lanes due to confusion over how to make payment. One agency that faced this challenge was the PANY/NJ, which recently changed the lower deck of the George Washington Bridge over to ETC-only during nighttime hours (the plaza is unstaffed at night and equipped with an automated enforcement system that charges customers by mail), and the agency initially encountered a wide range of unsafe maneuvers (e.g., vehicles turning around, backing up, cutting across the plaza). To address these issues, PANY/NJ added signs at each booth that say "YOU WILL BE BILLED" and added an intercom system to provide customers access to supervisory staff on the staffed upper deck toll plaza. PANY/NJ also changed its signs to direct non-ETC customers to the right side of the plaza where they will pose less of a danger to other motorists in the event that they do come to a stop or attempt other erratic behavior. The sign that the agency has evolved to at the right side of the plaza is "ALL OTHERS."

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¹⁸ Teamsters Safety & Health Facts: The Hazards of Behavior-Based Safety. http://www.teamster.org/resouces/sh/factsheets/hazardsofbehavior-basedsafety.pdf

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