Community Transportation

Intensives

Delivering Essential Information

Based on your recommendations, we’ve developed a menu of intensive training sessions on the industry’s most pivotal topics. These sessions do not come with the standard EXPO 26 registration. Add one (or more!) to your EXPO registration to take full advantage of EXPO 26’s training opportunities.

Intensive pricing is as follows:

$650 for two day (ex: PASS and CCTS)
$450 for one day
$250 for half day

Note: You must have purchased an intensive to attend an intensive. Proof of purchase is required for attendance.

One-Day Classes, Monday, May 11

CTAA's Tribal Transit Deep Dive

Time: 10:15 a.m. - 4:45 p.m.
Instructor: Kelly Shawn
Cost: $0
Room: 211
Join tribal transit leaders and advocates from across the country for a deep dive into the trends and issues impacting public transportation in Indian Country. This deep dive will cover such issues as sovereignty, technology deployment, policy development and funding. If you're engaged in moving tribal members, you won't want to miss CTAA's dedicated day to tribal transit. This one-day meeting will provide insight into tribal transit challenges, resources and best practices and would benefit tribal transportation managers and planners, state DOT’s, tribal transit advocates, tribal agencies and transit managers near tribal communities.

Survive & Thrive

Time: 10:15 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Instructor: Chris Zeilinger
Room: 208
Among the many critical tasks they face, successful transit organizations must be focused on how to ensure their financing – especially the “local match” for government grants – is secure. They also need to be strategic, and not scattershot, about their pursuit of new projects or new funding. Designed for senior- or upper-level managers in rural transit and smaller urban public transit systems, this course explains a 13-step approach to transit business planning that helps you ensure your transit system is fiscally sustainable and strategic, both now and in your organization’s future.

Succession Planning: Preparing for Future Success

Time: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Instructor: Caryn Souza
Room: 212
Your agency’s success depends on its ability to identify, retain and prepare future leaders. Preparations must go beyond simply staffing positions that become vacant. Effective succession planning is a process of identifying, assessing, developing talent and knowledge transfer that ensure continuity throughout your agency at both the senior leadership level and throughout your agency. This interactive session will have you come away with the assessment tools, templates and an action plan needed to strengthen and support the overall capacity of your organization. This course is geared to senior leaders and human resource directors.

One-Day Class, Tuesday, May 12

You Get What You Measure: A Systems-Based Approach to Community Impact

Time: 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Instructor: Coordinating Council on Access and Mobility Technical Assistance Center (CCAM TAC)
Room: 212
Learn how to clearly demonstrate your community impact through You Get What You Measure, an interactive, systems-based strategic planning and measurement process. This intensive, hands-on workshop will guide participants in identifying shared goals and meaningful indicators of progress across complex systems. In this highly participatory workshop, you will experience a powerful approach that integrates evaluation and outcome-focused thinking into project design from the very beginning. You Get What You Measure will help you create measures that matter, allowing you to focus your efforts on the most impactful changes that will move your entire system toward your goal of improving local and regional transportation systems serving people with disabilities, older adults, individuals with low incomes, and their partners. Program includes a working lunch.

Transit Marketing Tools for this Brave New World

Time: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Instructor: Selena Barlow
Room: 208
A transit agency’s communications with customers increasingly occur online. This intensive will address the key ways in which transit systems can market their services digitally – with customer focused websites, mobile information apps, effective use of social media and digital advertising and virtual outreach. A transit agency’s website is often the potential customer’s first interaction with the system. It needs to clearly and quickly answer the many questions that a first-time rider has, while also meeting the information needs of long-time users. During these times of rapidly changing services, it needs to be a source for up to the minute information. Mobile Apps such as Google Maps, Transit and Moovit make using transit as easy as driving and allow potential users to decide when transit is the optimal travel mode. They are the first step in moving towards MaaS (Mobility as a Service). Social media is a tool that allows transit agencies to engage directly with existing riders, letting them know what to expect from day to day, while digital and social media advertising can be used to reach new audiences. Also, video meetings and events have become a way to maintain relationships with important stakeholders or rider groups. The intensive will address how each of these tools can be used to maintain and build transit ridership, what they can and can’t do, and how they fit into the overall transit marketing toolkit.

Transit Safety: Leadership, Culture, and Everyday Risk

Time: 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Instructor: Tom Eser
Room: 211
This one-day workshop is planned to provide small urban and large rural transit professionals with real-world tools to improve safety performance, increase leadership effectiveness, and cultivate a culture that supports safe, reliable operations. The session is structured to meet the realities of agencies with limited resources, wide service areas, and evolving staff roles. Participants will engage in a high-energy, scenario-based experience designed to support both learning and reflection. Each segment is grounded in real operational challenges and focused on producing solutions that can be applied immediately at the agency level. The workshop will feature scenario-based learning, a method I use passionately to foster real-world understanding and strong participant engagement.

Two-Day Class, May 11-12

Passenger Assistance, Safety and Sensitivity (PASS)

Time: 10:15 a.m. - 5 p.m. on May 11 and 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. on May 12
Instructor: Joe Seitz and Mike Watts
Room: 206
The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) presents The Passenger Assistance Safety and Sensitivity (PASS) Trainer Certification Program. The program ensures that community transportation trainers have current expertise in passenger assistance, techniques, sensitivity skills, hands-on wheelchair securement and lift operations, bus evacuation knowledge and skills in order to train drivers to serve persons with disability. PASS Trainer certification is valid for three years.

Certified Community Transit Supervisor (CCTS)

Time: 10:15 a.m. - 5 p.m. on May 11 and 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. on May 12
Instructor: Dan Mulraney
Room: 207
The front-line supervisor has a pivotal role in every transit organization! He or she is accountable for most of the day-to-day success of its operations. Many supervisors are promoted from within the ranks of the operating staff, while others come from a variety of backgrounds, and must then learn how to effectively supervise. In their supervisory capacity, these individuals must understand the overall mission of the transit organization, and in turn be able to convey its practices, principles, and priorities to the operating staff.

Financial Management for Transit Agencies

Time: 10:15 a.m. - 5 p.m. on May 11 and 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. on May 12
Instructor: A.T. Stoddard
Room: 210
In today’s financial management you cannot afford to be without top-notch financial management skills. You must know your true costs of providing service and be able to track those costs and manage your cash flow. Learn how to use financial information, operations data, and proven financial strategies to plan, develop, and implement your transit system objectives. Learn what data to collect and monitor to ensure success and to evaluate potential changes in service – whether it is new service, service enhancements, or reductions in service. This session will provide tools that any transit manager or supervisor can use with existing data and financial reports.

Half-Day Courses, May 11 or 12

Customer Driven Service and De-Escalating Stressful Situations With Passengers

Time: 2 p.m. - 5 p.m., May 11
Instructor: Michael Noel
Room: 209
Bus Operators, Dispatchers, front-line supervisors and customer service personnel have little control over the mood of people who contact your organization or riders when they use your agency’s transit services. They do however have control over their own reactions. When used skillfully, how you react can demonstrate good customer service and keep situations from escalating into full blown incidents or possibly violent situations. This half-day workshop will help you understand how to provide good customer service and explore skills you may use to de-escalate stressful situations with passengers. The workshop will show how good customer service skills make life better for both the customer and the Bus Operator, understanding the triggers that create potential conflict, controlling your own emotions, and understanding your own stress. The workshop will include lecture, power point, videos, and interactive exercises that will engage the audience.

Fatigue Awareness for Front Line Transit Employees

Time: 2 p.m. - 5 p.m., May 12
Instructor: Michael Noel
Room: 209
Transit services should be first and foremost safe. Fatigue is a significant root cause of vehicle accidents, near misses, customer complaints about rudeness, and can be a contributor to onboard assaults when a person is in a state of acute or chronic fatigue. Fitness for Duty should drive all legal, policy and daily operating decisions by the agency and fatigue critically affects an employee’s ability to perceive and react quickly and appropriately. Agencies must have in place appropriate policies and procedures for identifying and preventing issues related to fatigue. Transit agencies must determine that frontline employees (bus and van operators, mechanics, dispatchers) are fit for duty, physically, emotionally, and mentally for their difficult and potentially dangerous jobs.

The Community Transportation Association of America (CTAA) and its members believe that mobility is a basic human right. From work and education to life-sustaining health care and human services programs to shopping and visiting with family and friends, mobility directly impacts quality of life.