A division of Metrolinx, GO Transit is the regional public transit service for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, serving 57 million passengers a year on routes extending to communities in an 11,000 square kilometre area across the Greater Golden Horseshoe including KitchenerWaterloo.
A division of Metrolinx, GO Transit is the regional public transit service for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area, serving 57 million passengers a year on routes extending to communities in an 11,000 square kilometre area across the Greater Golden Horseshoe including KitchenerWaterloo. GO Transit is one of the safest commuter systems in North America. The Safety & Security Division is responsible for a wide variety of security and safety programs which also necessitates the collection of offender information and incident occurrence reporting. D3, in partnership with FutureShield, provides the software solution for its Incident Reporting and Case Management implementation.
The challenge
Prior to implementing D3’s solution, GO Transit had 3 different homegrown solutions used for its incident tracking and dispatch, resulting in 3 disjointed databases capturing incident information spanning the gamut of criminal code, provincial statute and By-Law offenses. The older systems had limited reporting capabilities and were not compatible with each other.
Radios are essential for communicating with GO Transit Safety Officers and Customer Attendants, and their Dispatch is the key to monitoring and capturing all relevant communications and dispatching staff to incidents.
“We did it the old-fashioned way and realized that we needed to improve on our system using the latest technology,” said Steve Harvey, Transit Safety Manager for GO Transit.
“Disjointed systems produced mere snapshots in time of Threat & Risk Assessment (TRA), a good incident report on the daily state of affairs, and crime stats from CapIndex for a good historical indicator, but prediction was the key,” according to Harvey. GO Transit needed the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of their countermeasures. “Were they working? Were our incidents truly being reduced? Had we made the right decisions?”
Working on Futureshield’s initiatives, GO Transit decided it needed a cohesive and integrated solution that can share and analyze data among technologies, a risk assessment system, and crime forecasting data.
The D3 solution
D3 implemented a highly interoperable system with robust incident reporting capabilities. GO Transit also implemented D3 Dispatch System to automate dissemination of events to officers in the field. Security procedures are managed from D3’s Virtual Security Operations Center or vSOC – GO Transit’s all-in-one incident reporting, task tracking, and dispatch center.
Steve Harvey was impressed with the amount of time the D3 Business Analyst dedicated and spent on site in meetings with the security team to help them decide how the system would be configured. “By discussing the system configuration, it actually forced us to take a critical review of our own processes and come to some level of consensus among the management team. It brought us closer to a nice cohesive goal,” said Harvey.
D3 provided in person training, including access to D3 University where officers can train at their own pace using online tools. “It’s nice to have the ability for D3 to pop by in person – and they will! But it’s also nice to have the online tools,” Harvey added.
The results
Upon consolidating all of GO Transit’s incident and offender categories into a manageable list and proper training of officers in reporting incidents in the D3 system, Transit Safety can quickly measure staff performance, evaluate service delivery, and provide indicators of increased or decreased security related activity.
“We believe that we have chosen the best solution and are very happy with the direction that we have gone in. D3 has been very supportive of anything we need them to do – including even advancing the dispatch software at no additional charge to exactly meet our requirements,” Harvey remarked.
“I love the ability D3 provides me in assessing staff performance. Looking at the quality of Dispatch entries, the response times, and the content and quality of IRs written by staff is essential in determining if my supervisors and front-line officers are following our procedures and protocols,” said Harvey.
GO Transit is migrating into using the D3 system on mobile platforms such as in-vehicle laptop computers and other communication devices. GO Transit plans to accommodate further technological advancements by D3, including D3 Geospatial Incident Tracking System built within Google Earth.