At the Monday, November 26, 2018 Board of Trustees meeting, Laketran was recognized by Ohio Transit Risk Pool as the 2018 recipient of organization’s Safe Operators Award Recognition (SOAR) award.

Ohio Transit Risk Pool is a not-for-profit public transit risk pool serving ten regional transit authorities across the State of Ohio providing stable property and casualty coverage and risk management education. Laketran joined the risk pool in 1996 to alleviate the insurance costs transit systems are exposed to in the regular commercial insurance market.

“OTRP would like to congratulate Laketran for their excellence in safety and this important achievement,” presented Barbara Rhodes, CEO of OTRP during the award presentation to the Laketran Board of Trustees. “In the 13-year history of the award, Laketran has won the SOAR award an impressive five times.”

“I am very proud of the professionalism of our drivers in achieving this award, but also our maintenance, road supervisors and training teams,” commented Ben Capelle, CEO of Laketran. “It may sound cliché to say that safety is everyone’s responsibility, but at Laketran everyone plays a role from maintaining the fleet, to supervising and training our drivers to prepare them to put the safest service on the road.”

The SOAR award was established in 2005 and is presented annually to the transit system that operated at a lowest cost per transit mile in the prior year. In 2017, Laketran operated 3,789,236 miles throughout Lake County.

“We are honored to receive the SOAR award this year. This award is a reflection of our driver’s commitment to safety on the roads in Lake County,” shared Brian Falkowski, Laketran board president, “When you operate over 120 buses that travel almost 4 million miles in a year accidents are bound to happen, but this honor illustrates our commitment to safe driving to keep our community safe as well as our costs down.”