How Bold Transit Agencies Redefine the Future

Stop Requested.

Welcome to Stop Requested, the podcast where we discuss everything transit. I’m your co-host, Levi McCollum, Product Manager at ETA Transit. And I’m your co -host, Christian Londono, Senior Customer Success Manager at ETA Transit.

Christian, you know, since we both work at ETA, we’re talking transit technology pretty much all day, every day. One thing that continues to come up, at least in my head, I’m not sure if you’ve experienced this, but I often think how the agency decides to be one of the innovators in transit technology.

How do you choose to take an approach that’s a little more forward thinking, that’s a little riskier versus, you know, some of the agencies that say, hey, I’m not a small guy, or even if you are a big guy, and you just kind of throw your hands in the air and say, I’ll let those other agencies sort it out.

I come back to that question a lot because I really want to figure out why those innovators are the innovators. Like, how did they get there? You know, how are those agencies so forward thinking and able to adopt technology so quickly and then others lag behind?

What do you think? Yeah, yeah, that’s an interesting topic of conversation. It’s not a simple one to answer because I believe there’s a lot of factors. You know, as you were mentioning that and talking about innovators and leaders in technology in the transit industry, a lot of big agencies names pop up in my mind.

And they, you know, they’re known nationally and, you know, at least for a lot of them statewide for trying technologies before. anybody else. And a lot of the times that open the road or clear the road or define a road for other agencies to start following and finding those efficiencies by implementing technologies.

But there’s sometimes some smaller agencies that are the leading ones in innovating. So it will be interesting to dive more into those factors and learn more, you know, what are those agencies and what are the reasons behind they try technology, they innovate with technology and they gain efficiency by implementing transit technology.

So where do you want to start with, Levi? I feel that this conversation Before we dive into those factors, it will be important to kind of define what transit technology is or modern transit technology.

So I know it’s kind of like difficult to just come up with a definition like that. But in your mind, I just want to just pick your brain. What do you think is transit technology? Just for our listeners, what do we define as transit technology?

Yeah, I think it’s any system that augments the transit agency’s abilities, right? It’s improving the way that they operate their service and providing them with a more efficient output, right? Your service that you’re delivering to your constituents, to the folks in your service area, they’re benefited by this system, whatever it is, right?

This technological system at the agency level. So I’m sure we could kind of break that down. It’s probably easier to break it down than it is to aggregate it up. But that’s what comes to my mind, right?

You can’t forget the output of what the technology is supposed to do. It can’t just stay at the agency level and not make its way to the individuals that are using the system. Right. And I think it’s all the pieces.

And to what you just said is driving efficiency, right? What do we gain or implement technology for anything that we do? It’s because it makes things easier because it comes with automation. And I think that one part is the efficiency of the processes in transit operations.

The other part, like you said, is also focusing on output, right? you know you know input in how much we can make that input a little bit more efficient but the output and the outcome. Safety, safety is huge in transit operations.

I think nobody would argue with me in the transit industry that safety is paramount is the number one thing that we have to ensure as we’re carrying lives in our systems around the country. So all the technology that is going to drive safety and you know reduce safety incidents is going to be very important and to your point customer experience because at the end of the day everything that we do in the transit industry and all the services that we work so hard to deliver are to help people get from one place to another.

So some of the systems that you know we know in today’s transit technology world that we know about you know you hear about intelligent transportation systems. ITS, being able to track vehicles, you know, CAD AVL systems, you know, computer aided dispatch, automated vehicle location.

So we, you know, technology today such can show us where vehicles are at. Automated freight collections or AFCs, being able to do contactless payment systems, being able to, you know, capture payment in a way that is more efficient and it reduces the time to load folks at stops, making the bus a travel time, you know, reducing that travel time.

So the passenger is going to get quicker to their destinations. There’s fleet management systems, too, you know, that help them send all these telematics on the vehicles, fuel efficiency, helps coordinate preventive maintenance to make sure that all those vehicles are going to that preventive maintenance cycle at the right time.

You know, we have that on -time performance on preventive maintenance, again, reducing risk of breakdowns, which who’s going to get impacted, Levi, the customer. They’re going to have to wait for the next bus.

They’re going to have a bad experience. So this is all technology, passenger information systems, surveillance systems. So there’s a lot of these data, I mean, technology systems out there that, you know, help with efficiency.

So I think that, you know, back to that definition and as you were saying the output, it’s how it’s going to impact the customer and how it’s going to improve their, you know, experience. So I think that that’s one way to start is defining our, you know, transit technology as a way to optimize or to increase the efficiency of the system that translate into a better passenger or rider’s experience.

Yeah. Absolutely. So continuing on that train of thought, what is the differentiator here? Why do some agencies decide to be the innovators? Why do some adopt early? Why do some come on to the scene late?

I can think of a few examples, budget being one of them, right? Budget is pretty easy to… I think that everybody wants to be an innovator, right? Do you think so? I don’t know. I think that there are some agencies, and you know, not pointing any fingers, but I think some agencies are just fine with being middle of the pack, at least in terms of adoption.

Not necessarily that they don’t want to excel in the delivery of their service, but the risk is perhaps greater than the reward. Yes. Yes. No. And I think it’s just conceptually, right? Everyone would like to define themselves as an innovator or be at the cutting edge.

But, you know, like you said, there are factors. There are things that sometimes prevent you from being there. And like you said, with the risk aversion or at least to the risk balance, you know, you might have to find yourself in a different place, not necessarily being the innovator.

So, you know, what do you think are some of those factors that maybe would not put you on being the innovator, even though you might want to be? Yeah, the big one for me would be budget. Some agencies obviously have more money than others.

You know, that doesn’t necessarily correlate so well with size. I mean, we’re seeing a lot of agencies that are in that bigger range that are hitting the fiscal cliff, right? They don’t have enough money to be able to pay for the services that they currently offer.

You know, that so budget is is a big deal. And the bigger you are, it means you have to have more money to be able to implement this technology. So I think technology costs money. Technology costs money is going to cost a lot of money.

And it requires maintenance, right? You can install it once and just expect for it to work forever. That’s not how it works. And you know, I’d like to paint a very, very pretty picture of, you know, technology as being sort of the savior for the agency.

And, you know, you set it and forget it, but it doesn’t work like that. I mean, you know, that as being the former director of support services at Palm Tran, how many, you know, headaches does the technology end up causing along the way?

I mean, it’s not without its problems, but it can lead to some major efficiency gains. Yes. And that was going to be my counter argument to the budget portion. because yes you are constrained by the funds that you have and agencies within their budget they have different pockets of money for different things and certainly you have to have a pocket for fuel and you cannot say well you know this year we’re just gonna try to figure out how we spend less fuel and we’re gonna take some of this money and put it to buy the technology.

You cannot run out of fuel so there are some pockets of money that for the most part you cannot touch but at the same rate a lot of the times you know technology also saves money maybe not immediately but a little bit more in the long term so prioritizing a implementing technology and maybe not you know being the leading innovator but at least planning for you know technology advancement in your agency is gonna yield also savings and savings you know translating to opportunities to keep investing in more efficiencies.

So it’s complex because, like you said, it’s painful. It requires human resources. So who’s going to lead this project? Finally, who’s going to do it? And those folks that might be already busy working on another project, it could be a legacy project.

Some projects are multi -year projects. They cannot just drop everything and move into the next shiny thing. So that also talks to how you program your projects and those types of things. But certainly the budget is a big financial constraint, but it’s important to keep in mind the savings and somehow try to quantify those to help you make those decisions.

Yeah, that’s an excellent point. And you touched on a couple there that I’d really like to bring to the forefront. What I call the owner of the system, once the agency gets the technology, they onboard it, they’re trained, they feel like they have so much momentum and a new understanding of their system, there has to be someone that is the owner of that technology who lives inside the agency.

You can’t rely on the technological vendor to assist in every case. I mean, they’re there to support you, obviously, but they’re not going to be able to do the work. That’s not their responsibility. So I know, for example, of agencies that are really pumped up about getting this new technology and it kind of dies on the vine.

If no one is there to take care of it, to nurture. to make sure that it’s working, someone who’s got eyeballs on it, and looking at the data that’s coming from that system, it can, you know, it can end up degrading over time, and the quality of the data becomes useless, you know, you’re, you’re end up with a product that just doesn’t have a long shelf life.

You know, to your point, Levi, a lot of the money agencies receive are capital funds are for buying things. So you buy a system and you buy equipment. They’re not really operational. And sometimes with adopting technology, it requires what you just said, it requires a technology owner.

It requires, you know, folks that are going to be responsible for this that are going to learn the system that are going to learn how to use it. Because once the technology it’s implemented in the agency.

The agency has to take ownership. This is my system. I have to learn the ins and outs, and I have to make sure it’s running to its best performance. And working with the vendors, right? There’s a responsibility on the vendor to deliver what they promise, and the features that it’s supposed to have, and how it’s supposed to behave.

That is also a responsibility of the vendor, and the vendor has to ensure that it’s being delivered. But it is a partnership. You know, the agency needs that, you know, human capital. There has to be some investment on folks that are going to get trained on the tools, that are going to get trained in the technology, and become the expert, right?

And I’ve seen this in a lot of transit agencies in Pomp Train as well, where for different software solutions that we have, or different technologies that we had in place, there’s a point of person. And it lives within the department that that technology is intended to serve, right?

It sometimes is software for maintenance. And of course, you know, one of the, you know, leaders or technology owners, as you call them, are within that section, you know, in maintenance. Same thing, if it’s a tool that is for planning, and is mostly used for planners, then the experts within that department.

But to your point, the agency has to ensure that a lot of other times you’re acquiring this technology, you’re not depending on one person, try not to depend on one person leave. What happens when one person leaves in the agency?

And that’s the only person that knew how to do things. And, you know, I’ve experienced that for some customers where they only had one person that knew how to use, you know, the tool in and out, and now they have to make changes.

And they don’t know how to do it. So now they have, they need a new person to go through the battery training and learning curve. Right. Yeah. I mean, you have to have a backup person. There should be an owner, but there probably needs to be a backup.

as well just for redundancy. You know, redundancy does not hurt, especially when there’s turnover at an agency. You know, people retire, people move to a different agency, people change lines of work.

You know, another thing that comes up though for me when I think about the the the inability to adopt a new technology is how it integrates with your existing systems, right? You have to have a very thorough understanding of what your current technological setup is to be able to onboard a new technology.

And then how are those technologies communicating with one another, right? Is it via API? Is it, you know, is it downloading a CSV file from one and importing that CSV file into another? You know, does it need to be in a certain format for those to be able to talk to one another?

It gets complex pretty fast, and before you know it, you can end up with more manual work just to make these systems congruent with one another. Have you experienced that before, where you’ve adopted a new technology and just didn’t know how it fit together with your existing puzzle pieces?

Yes, and not only just that, it’s been taking years in the transit industry for different technologies to be adopted. And as technologies have been adopted, it has been piecemeal. Agencies went after the most important, or the latest and greatest, or the fad of the moment.

What’s the technology everybody’s going after that is transformative? I need to have it. So the problem is that before all transit technology, and you actually go back in time when everything was manual, for fair collection, they would just drop the coins and the bills, and that’s it.

It’s just a place where all coins and bills are collected, and it’s paper tickets, and there’s no passenger counters, there’s no cameras, there’s no technology at all, there’s not even vehicle locations.

Maybe back then, the only thing available was radio. I don’t even know exactly how that world was back then before the technology. But as technology emerged was being piecemeal. So it’s been taking years till now, and back to the question you asked me, the moment that I came in, there were some aspects of technology implemented in the agency I was working for, and I work on bringing new ones.

But then the problem is what you said, the integration. So, because everything… The other thing is being piecemeal, and yes, it’s yield efficiencies, but the interoperability in how well they’re connected, if they’re APIs or not, or if they’re, you know, a lot of the times, to your point, there’s a manual process to kind of make the information from one system goes to the other one.

So even though I would argue that those solutions did yield efficiencies, and that is why we brought them into these agencies, they’re not connected because from the beginning they were not intended to be connected.

They were just, you know, I’m getting just this solution at least, so I can, this piece of the process, I can make it more efficient. And the other piece is they’re still manual today, and we might grab a solution in the future, but everybody’s been doing the technology just for the moment.

It doesn’t seem that agencies really had a big roadmap, thinking that in the future all these solutions were going to exist, and there could be a way to make them all integrated. And I say that because what I see in transit in a lot of agencies is that they have all these different technologies, and they have all the different solutions, and a lot of times not integrated.

And from cutting edge or leading innovators in the industry, I’ve seen RFPs to integrate them. You know, we’re talking about agencies now with five apps, Levi, three, four, five apps for the customers.

So like, okay, my customer, if you want fair payment, download this app. But if you want to know where the boss is at, download this app. Or how about this for trip planning? But wait, you want microtransit?

Download this other app. So what are we doing? And what are we having all these different apps? You know, isn’t it that a reflection of lack of interoperability and connectivity? And then what they’re doing now, those RFPs, they’re looking for a solution to integrate.

And that’s the, you know, key word is that integrated transit solutions, being able to put all those things together. So yes, I experienced that. And I think that that’s common across the transit industry, where people have a bunch of solutions, some integrated, and some that are not.

Some that are just acting, you know, outside of the whole ecosystem. Yeah, five apps is ridiculous. And I know those examples traveled to those cities where there are those examples. It’s not a good customer experience, right?

You shouldn’t have to download five apps to be able to use that service. And it makes it more difficult to use. It makes the transit adoption lower, in my opinion. If people have these burdens, there’s a barrier to entry before they can even use the service that to understand that you’ve got to download five apps, it’s just overwhelming, I think, to the majority of people who are not in the industry.

If you or I were to go to one of those agencies, we’re probably frustrated, but we can figure it out. All right, Christian, well, this has been a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope our listeners have been able to follow along with the conversation, and feel free to give us any feedback.

Did we get anything right? Did we get some things wrong? Please let us know, and we’ll be back next week with another episode of Stop Requested. Bye -bye. Thank you.