Maintenance Technician Staffing Levels for Modern Public Transit Fleets (2016)

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29 Maintenance Staffing Calculator and User Guide A simple calculator (the Maintenance Staffing Calcula- tor) was developed for agencies to input basic information on current fleet and staff and receive a comparison of their various staffing ratios to a peer group of agencies. The Main- tenance Staffing Calculator was offered for validation to the participants in the initial and revised questionnaires. Through analysis and detailed discussions with agencies and the TCRP Project E-10 panel on how to make the Main- tenance Staffing Calculator useful to all types of agencies, desired elements of the Maintenance Staffing Calculator were identified. These elements included the following: • A breakdown of staff by location and/or sub-fleet • Adjustment of current staff to FTEs and available produc- tive hours using information on current technician staff- ing; other employees contributing to maintenance; and breaks, vacations, and shifts • Calculations of preventive maintenance, core maintenance, and unscheduled maintenance task hours required by sub-fleet • Calculations of heavy maintenance and repair hours required • The ability to model changes to fleet composition or usage • The ability to model changes to maintenance times or intervals • A way to account for required overtime • A dashboard to compare current staff, calculate required staff, and revise staff based on changes modeled • A comparison of results to a group of peer agencies The resulting Maintenance Staffing Calculator and User Guide include all of these elements. The Maintenance Staff- ing Calculator is very flexible and can be used by all types of agencies for very detailed analyses or quick snapshots. The Maintenance Staffing Calculator and User Guide are available on the TRB website by searching on TCRP Report 184. The benchmarks for each peer group of agencies included in the Maintenance Staffing Calculator are based on all 68 survey participants from both rounds of data collection. As additional data were gathered, the reliability of the data increased and the range of vehicles for each peer group was tightened. The peer group benchmarks used for the Maintenance Staffing Calculator are shown in Table 8. C H A P T E R 4

Number of Vehicles Maintained >1000 (n = 6) 500–999 (n = 7) 250–499 (n = 12) 100–249 (n = 17) 50–99 (n = 17) <50 (n = 9) Avg Std Dev Avg Std Dev Avg Std Dev Avg Std Dev Avg Std Dev Avg Std Dev Vehicles maintained per technician 3.5 1.3 4.4 2.0 4.9 3.0 5.7 1.9 7.3 2.7 8.1 4.4 Vehicle miles per technician 102,227 24,682 182,505 107,668 176,163 54,629 177,628 55,506 213,378 79,957 278,509 89,792 Vehicle hours per technician 10,301 1,441 10,842 4,159 12,264 3,947 13,187 2,914 14,732 5,223 16,975 5,540 FTE technicians per vehicle 0.31 0.09 0.27 0.11 0.25 0.09 0.20 0.08 0.16 0.06 0.15 0.1 FTE technicians per 10,000 vehicle miles 0.10 0.02 0.07 0.03 0.06 0.02 0.06 0.02 0.05 0.02 0.04 0.0 FTE technicians per 1,000 vehicle hours 0.10 0.01 0.10 0.03 0.09 0.03 0.08 0.02 0.08 0.04 0.06 0.0 Annual total maintenance hours per vehicle 484.0 136.5 459.5 169.4 410.1 147.0 337.2 117.9 247.0 116.7 237.1 102.3 Annual total maintenance hours per 10,000 vehicle miles 158.8 43.8 114.3 54.6 97.6 28.8 108.3 33.7 84.5 39.2 62.9 29.1 Annual total maintenance hours per 1,000 vehicle hours 150.1 21.4 166.3 59.8 142.3 43.8 142.7 38.5 127.3 77.6 102.3 41.0 Annual miles per vehicle 30,847 6,819 40,736 9,545 45,121 8,679 33,462 9,639 29,362 6,770 36,056 10,100 Annual hours per vehicle 3,151.9 324.4 2,404.4 614.4 2,976.0 574.4 2,271.7 731.3 2,003.4 405.4 2,379.1 820.2 Average miles per hour in operaon 10.2 2.4 17.9 5.7 14.6 3.5 14.6 2.9 14.0 2.8 15.8 3.5 Fleet average age 8.4 0.7 9.1 3.2 7.0 1.8 8.7 2.3 7.6 2.6 8.3 1.0 Table 8. Peer group benchmarks used for the Maintenance Staffing Calculator.