SEPTA is launching its first buses with armored compartments for operators

SEPTA plans this spring to begin road testing safety compartments with bullet-resistant glass for bus operators — protection demanded for several years by members of Transport Workers Union Local 234 amid a surge in assaults on drivers.

A police SWAT Team is scheduled to fire on a prototype Tuesday afternoon at a law-enforcement training ground in Upper Bucks County during a demonstration by the manufacturer building the enclosures, Custom Glass Solutions.

Transport Workers Union of America asked for the display to boost its push for the same level of protection on other transit systems. Bus operators and union officials from Houston, New York and other cities are attending the demonstration.

“We’re going to pursue it in every city we have,” said TWU International President John Samuelsen, originally a track worker for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York.

“This would not be tolerated for other professions,” Samuelsen said. “If teachers were assaulted at the level of 10 a week in New York City … the National Guard would camp out in schools. God forbid elected officials were getting assaulted like this, it would be a national crisis. But transit workers, the powers-that-be have just accepted it as the cost of doing business.”

» READ MORE: SEPTA drivers are increasingly victim to abuse and assaults. Some say the agency isn’t doing enough to protect them.

SEPTA would be the first public transportation agency in the U.S. to run transit buses with cockpits for operators that include armored glass, according to agency and union officials and Custom Glass Solutions.

For SEPTA and its frontline workers, the search for greater safety gained urgency in late October 2023 when bus operator Bernard N. Gribbin was shot to death while driving his morning route in Philadelphia’s Germantown section.

TWU Local 234 won the agency’s pledge to install bullet-resistant barriers in buses during negotiations over their latest labor agreement, reached last November. SEPTA engineers had worked on barrier designs in the past but could not find a solution that was light enough and fit in the tight space at the front of a bus.

Initially, SEPTA will run eight buses with the Custom Glass Solutions cockpits on a cross-section of routes, spokesperson Andrew Busch said.

“We want to see if the operators are good with them, and we’ll be doing stress-testing to see how the axles and other [bus] systems handle the extra weight,” he said.

The manufacturer, SEPTA engineers and Local 238 representatives worked together to design the prototypes, starting with a meeting the day after Gribbin’s death, said Tony Ricci, business-development manager for Custom Glass solutions.

The initial models are being made at the company’s factory in Trumbauersville, Upper Bucks County, and will undergo adjustments as they are fitted at a SEPTA facility. It costs $15,000 to $18,000 to outfit a bus with one of the protective cabins, Ricci said.

Custom Glass has installed bullet-resistant glass in 4,000 law-enforcement vehicles across the country and the glass for bus-operator compartments evolved from that, he said. The company also makes bullet-resistant glass for U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense.

It also has supplied regular glass for SEPTA vehicles.

Custom Glass has subjected its bus prototypes to live-fire exercises, and SEPTA Transit Police conducted its own last year.

“It performs really well,” Busch said.