Civil and Municipal - Mar 2023

64 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 4, ISSUE 3 and show up for work, according to Distler. “If you can do all three of those things, you will be very successful here,” she says. Since assuming the role of CEO, Distler and her management team have been a part of several changes designed to further emphasize the importance of safety at METRO. One such change was to expand the role of the METRO Police Department, which previously included just one officer, in both numbers and responsibilities. METRO contracts much of its law enforcement needs to the Akron Police Department. However safety is not just about preventing accidents, Distler says It also refers to the ability to provide an essential service for residents while keeping both passengers and employees healthy, something that METRO was able to do successfully during the COVID pandemic. Around the same time, METRO cut its number of accidents in half over just five years and was declared the Gold Winner in both Bus Safety Excellence and Bus Security Excellence by APTA in 2021. One of the reasons METRO achieved this was by developing and executing an updated safety plan. According to Distler, “we’ve made some positive changes that allowed us to get where we needed to go.” That is important because one of METRO’s missions is to enhance the quality of life for the Akron community by providing innovative transportation that is safe, dependable, cost-effective, and customer-focused. There is little question that COVID had an adverse impact on METRO ridership, and that remains at levels that are 65 percent of where they were in 2019, with nearly 4 million estimated (3.4 million through November 2022) riders in 2022. That number was more than 5 million in 2019 but just 2.7 million in 2021, so Distler is encouraged by the upward trend. She is also excited about the building of a new