Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus piloted two units in 2019 . The system now runs on 36 buses and is headed for half the fleet.
The standard maintenance inspection on a Q’STRAINT QUANTUM takes two or three minutes. A technician presses the button, lets the system run a full cycle, watches it finish, and decides whether the bus goes into service.
For Jesus Ocampo, the is also the part other agencies have the hardest time believing until they see it in person. Ocampo is Transit Vehicle Maintenance Superintendent at Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica, which put two QUANTUM units into a pilot in 2019 and now runs the system on 36 buses, with more arriving on new orders.
Set that against the same check on the previous Q’POD station: “It’s a lot simpler than previous securement systems,” Ocampo says. “Simply because we press a button, we let it go through a cycle. Once it goes through its full cycle, we then determine if it’s okay to continue in operation or not.” Providing maintenance inspections for all the equipment on a bus can be time-consuming, and older securement systems were no exception. They demand attention to keep them in good working condition, since regular contact with the floor and other vehicle components leave them prone to general wear.
Big Blue Bus did not arrive there by chasing maintenance efficiency, though. It started with a question about riders.
Why the pilot happened
“Our main goal was to provide greater independence for our wheelchair passengers,” says Eric O’Connor, the agency’s Assistant Director. “Of course there are other added benefits, but really, that’s why we started the pilot in 2019.”
Two buses were equipped with the Quantum for a six-to-nine-month trial. The agency brought in Santa Monica’s Disabilities Commission along with other city commissions, and surveyed riders on the buses while the trial ran. The feedback came back positive, and Big Blue Bus committed.
Getting those first two buses ready took some improvisation. QUANTUM needs a thin seat behind the securement area, and at the time nobody was building one for transit. Don Eaton, the Q’STRAINT representative on the account, went at it from the supplier side and got American Seating to donate a set. Q’STRAINT provided the two units, came out and helped install them, then trained the maintenance department and training departments and let the agency run.
“It’s nice to work with an agency that is willing to work with you,” Eaton says. “Everybody worked together, and it was smooth and pretty seamless.”
What the installation actually involved
For maintenance , the work was familiar and as easy as it goes for a retrofit application. Crews drilled the floor, ran electrical, and configured settings at the operator’s console. “A simple installation. Nothing super critical,” Ocampo says. “A lot of basic electrical steps that we had to go through, but not something that was too difficult for our workforce.”
Where the skepticism was
Enthusiasm for new technology is easy at the director level. The maintenance department is naturally more skeptical of radical changes. . “Our technicians were doubtful that a largely automated system would last as long as it has,” Ocampo says.
Eight years on, the durability question has answered itself. Danny Jaramillo, Transit Training Supervisor, came up through maintenance before moving into training and still talks regularly with the shop. “You just never hear any failure points on it,” he says. “You can always rely on it to perform.”
Day to day
Ocampo describes QUANTUM as close to a standalone system. It runs its own cycle, needs little routine attention, and generates few service items. Most of the calls his department has placed to Q’STRAINT have been for software and version updates rather than failures.
Support has mattered as much as the hardware. “Either a sales rep or engineering is on the phone within an hour or two,” Ocampo says. “They’re there to help us troubleshoot.” That level of service has held beyond QUANTUM; Q’Straint has worked the same way on the agency’s other securement equipment.
There is also an emissions benefit that maintenance teams tend to spot before anyone else does. Two of the pilot buses were CNG. Because QUANTUM lets a passenger secure independently with very little to no operator involvement, the bus spends less time at the stop, and a bus that is not sitting at the curb is not idling at the curb. “If you get the passenger on the bus, secured and ready to go as fast and safely as possible,” Ocampo says, “environmentally, overall, it’s done a pretty good thing!”
The training transition
Agencies implementing new technologies of all kinds usually brace for a retraining lift. This is an even greater concern when the new technology has such important safety implications, but Big Blue Bus found the transition seamless. “The transition from what we had with the Q-POD to the QUANTUM, the training strategy didn’t really change much,” Jaramillo says. Same modules, same classroom sequence, same annual verification of transit training refresher. Operators still spend a full day on wheelchair securement covering every system on the property, and the hands-on portion still uses the agency’s own manual chairs plus a three-wheeled mobility device.
What changed was the difficulty. “There are less moving parts and there’s less componentry involved in training for the QUANTUM,” Jaramillo says. “Not as steep of a learning curve as perhaps you would have on some of the other systems.”
The agency embeds Q’STRAINT’s training courses into its own modules, which Jaramillo counts as an advantage. Material from the manufacturer gives an instructor something to fall back on when a question lands outside their own experience.
Keith Battles, who trains operators at Big Blue Bus, covers the full range: which mobility devices fit inside the unit, how to secure properly, how to run the system manually if the bus loses power, and where the interior safety button is if a passenger needs to stop the cycle. He also teaches operators how to explain the rear-facing position, because riders do ask. A big part of his pitch is the backrest. In a hard stop, it’s there to catch a rearward-facing passenger, absorbing that momentum before it turns into a jolt. That support matters more than it might seem, since many riders decline the occupant securements the system also offers.
Keith’s read on the equipment is short. “As a former operator and a trainer here, QUANTUM makes it a whole lot easier.” He still tells operators to walk back, confirm the rider is comfortable, and greet them. The automation does not remove that part of the job, and the training does not pretend it does, but it drastically reduces the time needed for securement, especially for those consistent routes for familiar riders.
Jaramillo’s summary of operator feedback is something a training supervisor rarely gets to say out loud. “We literally don’t have any negative feedback.” His department asks directly, every operator, whether anything needs more coverage. “There’s never a laundry list. I don’t have anything really to say, which I think is a good thing!”
What operators and the risk column see
Enrique, a Motor Coach Operator at the agency, puts the change in the simplest terms available to him. “It’s safer and easier because often I don’t have to get out of the seat,” he says. “I don’t have to invade people’s personal space [during securement], even if they ask for assistance with the occupant securement.” He frames it as a timing thing too, which is how it reaches the operations side. You do not want customers waiting, whether they are passengers using wheelchairs or other customers
O’Connor sees the same shift from the risk side. He oversees the agency’s workers compensation administration and is careful to call his observations anecdotal, but it is consistent. “When you see claims relative to injuries regarding wheelchair securement, you see them almost all the time with other equipment,” he says. “You never see them with the QUANTUM system, because the operator typically doesn’t have to do much to secure the passenger.” And the simpler something is to use, the less potential there is for error.
Not everything landed cleanly at first. The Disability Commission and some riders pushed back early on about the rear-facing position, saying it made them feel like they stood out. “After some time, they assimilated to using the QUANTUM system,” O’Connor says. “In fact, we hear the change often after they use it.”
The rider side of it
David Radcliff, an Emmy-nominated television writer and co-chair of the WGA’s Disabled Writers Committee, boarded a Big Blue Bus and used QUANTUM for the first time this year. He has spent a lifetime learning that technically accessible and actually accessible are different things, which is what makes his reaction useful to an agency weighing the decision. “There was no one that had to actually hook me to anything. I could just push a button and watch the arms clamp into place.” His standard is blunt: anything that requires someone else’s assistance is not truly accessible. By that measure, he said, QUANTUM clears the bar.
Where Big Blue Bus stands
The agency’s fleet consists of 195 buses, 36 of which are equipped with the QUANTUM system. One sixth of the fleet is zero emission, and those buses carry QUANTUM as well. By the 2028 Olympics, the agency expects half the fleet to be on the system.
“If you’re looking to put the QUANTUM on the fleet, as an agency we would highly recommend it,” O’Connor says.
Ocampo fields the calls from neighboring agencies, some of them considerably larger, and his answer has not changed since the pilot. “Come on over! We want to show it off to you.”
A contributed field test by Q’STRAINT and Big Blue Bus, Santa Monica, CA.