By Ryan Harshbarger
As retirements and turnover accelerate, agencies are increasingly measuring workforce health by a single number: how long it takes a new hire to reach full productivity.
Transit agencies across the country are watching an unusually large share of their operator workforce approach retirement while turnover among newer hires remains high. Recruiting is often the easier problem: agencies can typically keep the hiring pipeline filled. The harder problem is what happens after that. How many of those new hires stick around? How quickly will the ones who stay reach full productivity behind the wheel? APTA has named workforce shortages among the industry’s leading priorities. For operations leaders, the practical question is readiness: once someone is hired, how much time and support does it take before they can safely and confidently run a full day of revenue service.
From system training to mission training
Historically, becoming a confident operator was achieved through a combination of classroom and on the road training over one to three months. Public transportation by design is operating during rush hours and in some of the highest pedestrian areas of your community, so learning how to safely handle a transit bus in this environment is priority one. The Avail operator experience is designed to keep focus on the road and on your passengers by handling all the technology on the bus from a single platform, leveraging our Single Sign On MDT.
myAvail’s operator console consolidates all of the bus technology for the operator: one login carries an operator through the mobile data terminal (MDT), farebox, headsign, ADA announcements and radio tools they need over a shift, rather than separate credentials and processes for each. For a new hire, that removes a real barrier to entry: training time goes toward service, safety, and customer interaction instead of relearning how to access information the operator already needs. The payoff is lowering how much an operator must hold in their head before they’re comfortable, which shortens the distance between hire date and full productivity.
Navigation brings confidence to new operators
Once an operator is confident controlling the transit bus, they turn their attention to route familiarization. This has traditionally depended on paper guides, ride-alongs, and repeated practice runs, methods that remain useful but scale slowly against a hiring pipeline agencies need to fill quickly. Real-time route and detour guidance, delivered directly on the operator’s screen, gives new hires a resource that doesn’t depend on memory built up over months on the same assignment.
Avail’s Route and Detour Adherence tools work this way. The route trace, the vehicle’s live position, and turn-by-turn guidance appear on the operator’s MDT and are audibly announced, so an operator’s first day on a route can look closer to their hundredth. When dispatch builds a detour, the system confirms the path is passable for the vehicle, then pushes the detour automatically, with turn prompts, to every affected route before the operator reaches it. For a new hire in particular, that’s a meaningful difference: the operator has guidance in front of them the first time they encounter a detour, not the fifth. The same tool helps experienced operators as well: when a shortage means someone needs to cover a route outside their normal assignment, turn-by-turn guidance lets them run it with the same confidence as a route they know well.
One system for the whole operation
Operators are the most visible part of getting a new hire to full productivity, but the rest of the operation runs on the same underlying system. myAvail ETMS brings operations, maintenance, finance, and administration together in one platform, so dispatch and maintenance teams are working from the same live data as the operator on the road. When there is a service disruption the platform is designed to share that information with your team and your customers. If a bus breaks down along the route, a dispatcher alert your customer service team and riders using public messages, initiate a work order for the maintenance team and log the missed miles and hours for the compliance department, all from a single point in myAvail.
When an agency needs something beyond that core, Avail 360, Avail’s API integration layer, connects it in, so the platform can be built out to match how that agency actually runs.
Where this points
In a labor market where the hiring pipeline is often the easier problem to solve, the most useful measure of a platform is how quickly it gets a new operator to full productivity and confidence. Training an operator inside the same system the rest of the operation runs on gets them there faster than treating the console as its own island, and Avail’s team will be demonstrating the latest MDT and route adherence interface at APTA Expo in Chicago this October, Booth 643.
Ryan Harshbarger serves as VP of Product for Avail Technologies. Visit
www.availtec.com for more information/