How Palm Tran Drives Ridership Growth with Planning Director, Yash Nagal

January 27, 2025

In this special episode of Stop Requested, hosts Levi McCollum and Christian Londono welcome their first-ever guest, Yash Nagal, Director of Transit Planning at Palm Tran. Together, they dive into the nationwide surge in transit ridership, explore innovative strategies like Palm Tran’s Buslink program, and discuss how frequency and integration can transform public transportation. Yash shares key insights on tailoring services to community needs, the role of land use in transit success, and why storytelling is essential for the future of public transit. Tune in to hear expert advice, inspiring examples, and actionable takeaways for agencies everywhere.

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Episode Transcript

00:00 Stop Requested.

00:02 Levi McCollum: Welcome to Stop Requested, the podcast where we discuss everything transit. I’m your co host, Levi McCollum, product manager at ETA Transit.

00:11 Christian Londono: And I’m your co host, Christian Londono, Senior Customer Success Manager at ETA Transit. Hey, good afternoon, Levi. Welcome to our Stop Requested podcast. How you doing today?

00:25 Levi McCollum: Yeah, man, doing well. We’re really excited for this one.

00:30 Christian Londono: This is our, this is a very special episode because this is our first time that we add a guest to our podcast. So I’m very excited today to introduce to our listeners today’s guest, which is Mr. Yash Nagal from Palm Tran. So, Yash, how about you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in transit.

00:55 Yash Nagal: Hey, Christian. Levi. It’s fantastic to be here. This is a great way to, you know, end a great week talking about the thing I love and, you know, talking with people that I like a lot. So my name obviously is Yash Nagal. I’ve been in the US since 2016. Before that, I was born and brought up in India. That’s really where I got my first touch of transit. Obviously, trains that outside the US Is a lot more prominent based on, especially in India, the amount of density that you have. So a lot of people do have to have aggregated trips or trains that works really well. So I grew up doing all that. From there, I moved to the US 2016 and studied urban and regional planning. And then from that, I went to work at Orlando, at Lynx, where the first time in the U.S. you know, when I. When I really understood transit because I understood the people that were taking it, that’s kind of where I fell into. Fell into love with the idea of advancing transit. After about a year in Orlando, I moved to Palm Trend, where, you know, I got to work with some great people like Christian and Levi here. And I had several different roles. You know, planner, then manager of planner, and then now director of transit planning. So it’s been a. It’s been a really good time. I get to do what I really love and today, you know, also talk about it.

02:25 Christian Londono: Thank you, Yash. And so, Levi, you know, we’re. We’re very excited to have Yash here today. You know, could you tell us a little bit about today’s conversation? What are we going to surround our conversation about? And, you know, let’s take advantage of Yash and of course, try to hear from him his take on our topic for the day.

02:49 Levi McCollum: Absolutely, yeah. Today we’re going to be digging into the increase in ridership. Many folks that listen to this podcast probably are aware it’s going around the news. It’s on FTA’s site. APTA, of course, is sounding the bell on this one that ridership across the country is increasing. And we’re seeing that here locally at agencies such as Palm Tran, Broward County Transit, I believe Miami Dade as well. So today’s segment is really focused on ridership and what those current trends are, why we think that those current trends are in place and any challenges to it that might be presented by the increase in ridership. So I’m ready to dig into it.

03:38 Christian Londono: Yes, it’s definitely a very interesting topic. As we know, ridership is one of those, you know, very important numbers for any transit agency is, you know, how many people are using your service, that service consumption in terms of number of passengers. Of course there’s different order ratios and metrics that you associate with that that will tell you about efficiency. But just talk about ridership and gaining more people in our systems. You know, we see from APTA in some of their ridership updates they’ve shared, they Talk about In 2023, at the end of 2023, transit riders took 7.1 billion trips in public transit, which is an increase of 16% over 2022. And you know, we all remember about COVID and how that impacted ridership, but now it’s been a few years after that in some of the trends, as you know, the one that I just alluded to tell us that nationally a ridership is increasing back again. And you know, we wanted also hear from Yash here today and, and ask about specifically with Palm Trend and some of these agencies in South Florida. What’s he. What you heard about ridership? You know, if it’s also increasing for all the agencies and also what are some of the trends? What do you think are some of those trends that are influencing that ridership increase?

05:09 Yash Nagal: Yeah, so, you know, I think even, even, even before that, we, when we think about just public transportation or transit as a, as a, you know, field of work or, you know, an industry, it kind of, you kind of have to think in terms of like, well, what. What is it? And to me, it’s always been this push and pull of. It’s a mix of public service, but it’s also a business. It has all these departments that are, you know, operational and accounting and all those departments that you would have in a business. But it also has a very political side of, you know, how you represent the people, the people that you carry. So there’s a lot of Equity involved in it. And I think over, at least in recent times, there’s been a couple things that have happened throughout the US Transit technologies have come a long way. So creating equities in transit or creating more equitable transit systems has become a little easier. And that has also given agencies certain tools that we can dive into and talk about which have helped basically right. Size the system. And I think if you all want, I can give examples of how Palm Trend has been able to do that a little bit too. And then, you know, we’ve also seen the shift of just commuters that went away with COVID them coming back now so many years after Covid and you know, people trying to get back into their jobs. So just the general travel demand has also gone up. Palm Beach County this year experienced a 6% increase in just traffic and usually was experiencing around you know, 2 or 3%. So it’s just population growth, especially in our area, has gone up. Transit technologies have advanced a lot more. So there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of tools that are involved now that previously really weren’t available. And I’m happy to jump into these ideas more if you guys want.

07:10 Christian Londono: Yeah, no, thank you for sharing the very interesting points and some of the things that you said are factors. The other thing that comes to my mind that I was thinking about is, know, vehicle ownership is also expensive. You know, insurance in a big percentage of transit riders are young people under age of 25. And you know, I’m imagining that a lot of them are also transitioning into public transit. You know, I’m also thinking that investment in public transit, investment, infrastructure or services are a critical factor. A lot of these agencies that are reporting ridership increases, they haven’t stated stagnant or just a, you know, business as usual, service as usual, but they have gotten a little creative and you know, it started shifting the way they use their resources to maximize that return. Right. Like to be able to, to have a service that is also very equitable, you know, very important but also very user friendly and useful for a lot of the people in their, in their community. So more people are, you know, interested in taking it. So, Levi, I don’t know if you want to add anything else to the conversation, but I was thinking we can start discussing a, you know, some of those strategies and maybe some of the things Yash have seen firsthand that have resulted into increasing ridership.

08:44 Levi McCollum: Yeah, let’s hear what Yash has to say. I think Palm beach county is a good example and I know you have Several new services. Yash. So maybe you can explain some of those for us.

08:55 Yash Nagal: Yeah, absolutely. And another thing I forgot to kind of mention, there was land use too. You know, the land use in most parts of the US where you see the suburban sprawl type of land use, you know, outside the urbanized areas, that’s kind of also played a really big role in how transitive services have, have been built over time. So the idea of, you know, Jared Walker’s idea of coverage versus ridership, a lot of agencies are just figuring out how to get out of the coverage model, which means try to spread your resources as thin as possible. Doesn’t matter if they’re frequent or not, they’re coming out of that and they’re finally jumping into, you know, people do things that are more convenient and convenience means that I’m not going to wait around for 60 minutes. So people are investing now in more frequent transit system. And that’s kind of what we’ve done at Palm Trend too. And you know, previously I talked about trains and technologies that have come a long way. Really what I meant by that was if you look at the size of Palm beach county, you realize really fast that one, it’s a really, really big county and two, not all parts of the county are the same. There are areas that are super dense and then there are areas that are very rural. There’s areas where the income levels are really high. There’s areas where income levels are really low. So previously we only had one, basically one toolkit which was, you know, have our fixed route services, the 40, 40 to 60ft bus that we have, that we’re traversing all these areas. So if we really wanted to increase, you know, any sort of frequency or do any, anything like that, that was a really massive investment because we couldn’t just, we couldn’t just stop serving an area. You never want to just take access away from an area. If you’re going to take some sort of access away, you have to make sure that they have some other alternative to be able to do that and do that well. So over the last five, six years, transportation networking companies like Uber, Lyft, taxi services, these have come a long way into the market of on demand transit. And what we found was these work really well in areas where you not necessarily have high density, so you have low density and you have, the geometry of your landscape is basically you don’t really have state straight roads, you have a lot of curves. So bigger bus has a lot of issues traversing these areas. Mass transit obviously Works very well when you run it as frequent as possible and you run it in the straight line. But if you see in our county, once you go past or once you go west of military, you sort of lose that grid aspect and you turn into a lot of gated communities where, where it becomes really hard for a person to go from their house all the way to the gate. And then it’s. That in itself might be a quarter mile or half a mile walk. So at that point transit isn’t really that convenient. So what we’ve done over the last year is we’ve started a program called BusLink, which I want to, I want to make sure that I give credit to Christian here because he came up with that. And you know, the idea here being that you have Uber and taxi services to be able to serve your first and last mile needs. And what we want to do is also make sure that there’s a high frequency fixed route there in case you wanted to go outside of a, of a zone and you wanted to continue your journey. So you take, you take the Uber for the first and last mile of your journey. But if you want to do a longer journey, you connect to a frequent route that takes you, that takes you for the most of your journey. Being the idea that the shorter trips are now being covered, now you have an open access towards. You know, previously if you had to walk to a bus stop or if you had to bike to a bus stop for individuals that weren’t able to do that, or the individuals that thought it was a lot, a lot more inconvenient to do that, now they have some sort of system to be able to enter into the world of palm trends and connect to routes like that. So that’s been a really successful program for us. Another big reason why it’s been successful has been that we were able to reallocate a lot of the resources that we were spending in low density communities and take those resources and reinvest into our routes that really needed frequency. We had routes that the transit development plan, which every agency has to do, had identified that it had frequency needs. But over the years due to funding constraints, we weren’t able to do that. So now because we have different toolkits, we have different tools in our toolkit, basically we’re able to offer different type of service delivery models based on really the need in the community. So we’re building our high frequency where we know there’s a lot of density and the roads are very straight. We’re doing that high frequency stuff. Over there. And then for the areas that don’t necessarily have a grid and straight, straight roads, we have this first and last mile on demand type of model to be able to serve that area. So that’s kind of how we’ve been, you know, bringing our ridership up. We have routes that have experienced ridership, you know, all the way from 5% going all the way to pretty much. I think our highest route is over 30 or 33% or something like that. So it’s, it’s a really, it’s a really big increase that you don’t see every day. Even system wide, our ridership has gone up 13, 14%. So I think we’re finally getting to a point where we feel equipped to be able to serve different people’s needs with different types of services. So that’s been really good for us.

14:36 Christian Londono: Yeah, thank you for sharing that, Yash. And it’s very interesting, right, because sometimes with transit or the way that we operate transit in our communities is one site fits all. So we have one model and then one type of vehicle, and then we have the service area and we put that service out there. Pretty much the same service for that service area. But then alluding to Palm beach county, how is made up from urban and suburban and then more kind of like rural areas. The way, you know, like you, you said gated communities, less density, and then you go more kind of like east of Military Trail. And then now you start getting a little bit of density and walkability and all these different factors for, you know, good fixed route service. And then now you look at these different pockets in different areas in the community where you have those gated communities, where it’s not as walkable, where is not as dense, and then you’re for a type of service that better serve those communities to get them to have access to the entire system. So pretty much you just expanded the, the kind of like all the options for mobility in the different regions or communities within your service area. So I think that’s very interesting and really tailoring the service in a way that it works, right. That it makes sense for those in that community that have to take it. Right. If you live in a gated community and you have to walk 30 minutes to get to the bus stop, that’s in itself by design, you know, a roadblock to actually access transit.

16:27 Yash Nagal: Right. And I mean, that’s, that’s really where land use comes into, into the, into effect. And you know, I try to implore everybody I talk to, to look into the land users Just because of a lot of the times, at least in my experience, talking to other transit agencies, too, I don’t know if enough people realize that when they look at their own land use that they’ve been set up not to increase ridership. They don’t know. There’s a lot of wondering of, like, why, why ridership not going up. And that’s really not up to the transit agency at all. They’re following what they were given and they’re trying to best fit it. But if you don’t look at the source, if you don’t, if you don’t see how you were set up, it’s really hard to be able to, you know, implement these things or implement programs that actually give you high ridership and ridership, as you all said, you know, that’s. That’s the number one metric that’s around there. And, you know, if you truly want to, if you truly want your initiatives to be able to get you more ridership, you have to, like, go all the way back and look at the source. And at the end of the day, you know, like, like other agencies, the name of the game for us is access. You want to. We want to give people as much access as possible. And that’s another thing the bus link programs have done is it’s, it’s sort of now giving all these people access that previously didn’t have access because they didn’t live on the bus route. So previously, you basically had to live on the bus route to have access. I mean, if you can walk a quarter mile, you sort of, you have a little bit of flexibility there, but, you know, not everybody lives within quarter mile of a bus stop. So now this program is just increasing the access to the city system, and.

18:06 Levi McCollum: We could debate about whether the unlinked passenger trip metric is the right one to use if a system is successful or not. I think we’ll push that aside to, you know, perhaps a different episode, because I think there are other ways to measure success rather than just the pure ridership number. But in the end, it’s the most important metric. I, I want to follow up on something, though. Yash, you said about BusLink, and I’m, I’m curious, are you able to see the demographics around who’s using the BusLink service? Are you able to drill into that at all? And if you are, could you provide us with some insight there?

18:46 Yash Nagal: We have not been able to drill into demographics yet, but we did do a customer satisfaction survey recently. So we did look at factors like, you know, one of the big things that came out of when we were shifting sort of our program from, you know, you have a fixed route that you use today to you’re going to essentially be using Uber because we’re going to give you a voucher or a taxi service. So you’re jumping from this world of public into private. One of the biggest things that was a concern that was brought to us was safety. So we did cater our survey around how few people, how safety people feel on a bus link ride. And we got responses where it was upwards of 80, 85% where people felt really safe, people felt that the driver was really, really courteous, people gave the busing program, I think it’s our average is about 4.1 right now out of five stars. So that’s, that’s really been doing well. We don’t have a lot of demographic information because we just haven’t collected that kind of information yet. But that would be one of the ideas in the future as the program goes on. Of course, it’s a pilot program, so we’re still in the first year of it, right?

20:04 Christian Londono: Yeah.

20:05 Levi McCollum: I’d be interested to learn if that’s more millennials or perhaps Gen Z that’s using it, or what the age is there, what their background is, financials, of course, like if they, you know, maybe they’re more well to do or are they, you know, perhaps a little less well off, you know, what’s pushing them to use that service and why. But yeah, it sounds like it’s still pretty early days, you know. Glad to hear that it’s, it’s successful though, in terms of the ridership and just a follow up on that. And, and I guess more generally, are you seeing this increase in ridership across your system, you know, 13, 14%. Do you feel like that’s coming from the increased access that’s a result of having this bus link program? Maybe you’re just pulling more people into the fixed route network. Or is it the increased frequency? So being able to reallocate those funds from maybe the poorer performing routes to the more frequent routes and just amping up that frequency to drive people to public transit, what are you seeing?

21:19 Yash Nagal: It’s 100% from frequency. Frequency is freedom. Right. What people do, what’s more convenient. There’s a lot of backstory to this too. Since 2018, there have been several frequency improvements throughout the system, majorly on corridors that we know carry the most amount of jobs in populations. So there have been several routes that we’ve improved to 30 minutes to 20 minutes. And these are big routes, like routes that are going 40 miles north and south. So most of the frequency increases have actually come from the improvement of frequency and then just building that faith with people that there’s service when you need it.

22:08 Christian Londono: Yeah, I think that that’s 101, one of the best strategies. If you’re looking at ridership and you alluded to Jared Walker in the contrast between ridership and coverage, and how do you, you know, manage those two? You know, coverage is very important as well. And, you know, almost any transit system is looking at coverage right. Like that is why we have early trips and late trips. Typically those early trips and late trips, they’re not high in ridership, but there’s people that are trying to get to that job, and having that early trip allows them to. So it’s more that coverage and access. Same thing with the lake trip and some of the service, but then ridership. And when a lot of the agencies are being evaluated based on ridership, is is people interested in your service, is people wanting to use your service, and then if so, then we’ll support you and keep growing and expanding. But if not, if that ridership number looks like less people are using it or don’t find you useful, then we want to fund and support less of transit. So it’s very important to, you know, maximize your ridership as possible. And what you were alluding to, when you have some routes that have that mixed use and they just have all the right combination for transit, being able to invest frequency is a great formula for yielding ridership increases and also, of course, increasing the trust and the perception of reliability for the public. Because when you get to that frequency level where people don’t really have to look at schedules, they just know that this bus takes you to that destination, is literally just going to the stop and just waiting, and, you know, in a few minutes you’re ready on your way. So, you know, looking forward to, to hear more about that and how that’s going to potentially allow, you know, Palm Trend and you to start exploring order service opportunities and, you know, new projects in the community.

24:13 Yash Nagal: Yeah, and I want to give us an example too. I think, and this is, this is an example that’s really. That kind of drives. That message is, in 2021, we did, we made a rap 43 that runs from Wellington Mall into downtown West Palm Beach, Straight Road 7, Benoist Farms, Belvedere, Okeechobee. It used to run every 30 minutes, and in 2021, we made it every 20 minutes. And if you compare the 2021 ridership to now, it’s. It’s upwards of an increase of 100%, 115%, something super, super high. Now there’s Covid plays a little bit of a factor in that too, because we’ve gotten post Covid ridership coming back. But the improvement of the frequency really shows you how. It’s basically the concept of induced demand, but not in terms of traffic when it interrupts the transit. So when you increase the frequency, people understand that they can take the service a lot more. They rely on the service a lot more. They start taking the service a lot more. Demand builds up because you just get higher usability. In this coming year, our plan actually is to convert our Route 43 on Okeechobee into a 15 minute service. That’s our next step. And 15 minutes is really where you start seeing the benefits of ridership, even peaking a lot more. So that’s sort of our plan. Okeechobee obviously is a major east west corridor in the county. So that’s sort of our plan on increasing ridership, but also, you know, addressing a big problem, traffic congestion that everybody’s dealing with.

25:56 Levi McCollum: Yeah, those are really great points, Yash. And you know, I know that you mentioned the frequency is freedom Line from Jarrett Walker earlier. I think that certainly rings true, especially in the examples that you gave. But do you find that it’s just a build it and they will come type mentality here? If you’re increasing your frequency, people just find out about it. Or are there some public campaign initiatives that Palm Trend is doing to be able to get the word out? How are your customers finding out?

26:30 Yash Nagal: It’s definitely a mix of both. I mean, we do heavy public outreach from, from social media to on ground ads that we can go through radio, television, the news ads. We do all of those things. We do a lot of stakeholder meetings where we’ll go to municipalities and our local MPO and tell them about the service that’s happening at the inception of the service. And then we try to periodically bring that up too. But also, I think one of the bigger factors is as, as people start taking the service, they, they start experiencing, you know, that this bus is really available. It’s really, if you look at, in terms of like, you look at, at. In terms of. At a scale. So you, you go from. I know this bus comes once an hour. Oh, it comes, you know, twice an hour now. Oh, it comes four times an hour now. I really don’t need to drive. It comes four times an hour, I can rely on it. Once you get to four times an hour, that’s every 15 minutes. It’s really having to build up that trust in your system where you can actually get somebody to rely on it. And then once, you know, once people rely on it, that becomes a habit for them and they know they can trust the system. And that’s really where you start seeing those trips. Because now you went from, and this is just an example, so you went from it being, maybe I’ll take the bus every now and then to, oh, I can take the bus every day if I need to. So you’re, you’re, you’re building into their primary mode of transportation. That’s the point that I think we have to get to. That’s how, you know, that’s how we think about frequency. And most of the places, you know, in some cases where we know the corridor is really set up for success, when we know it’s really straight and the land use around it’s really good and it’s dense and people can easily walk to the bus stop. And obviously there’s other factors, like you have to, you have to see if the stop is ADA accessible or not. Does the person have an adequate place to wait? What type of street furniture do you have? Do you have sidewalks? So there’s a lot of mix of those things. And then usually if the formula is right, if the place is right, the build it and they’ll come philosophy works. Unfortunately, there are some cases where we know that even if we build it, the surrounding infrastructure might not necessarily be there, and not just the infrastructure, but the demand might not be there. So in some of those cases, it doesn’t really build the same way, but definitely it’s a mix of both outreach and the person also building the faith in the system.

29:15 Levi McCollum: If you just had one piece of advice to give to some of your fellow transit employees around the country, what would you say is that piece of advice to be able to increase ridership on their system?

29:30 Yash Nagal: I mean, you know, I 100% say the future of transportation or the future of transit is it’s not mod, it’s not tnc, it’s not fixed, it’s integrated. You just, just think of, in terms of integrated, it’s a combination of all of those things. And for some people, maybe based on, you know, if you live in a really dense area, maybe you don’t need the other choices. You know, obviously if you live on the island of Manhattan, you don’t really need the TNC part to support you, you’re set up to be able to do all those things. Your grid is set up, your system is set up, your pedestrian infrastructure is set up. So you don’t necessarily need that. But for the vast majority of the people that are looking towards challenges and in terms of ridership and trying to really grow transit in their neighborhoods, I would say 100% think of the system as an integrated system. Don’t try to think on one mode, because whatever mode you have today, it’s probably not going to work tomorrow. Populations are going to change, your landscape is going to change, jobs are going to change, people’s behaviors are going to change. Be adaptable, have as many tools as possible in your toolkit and just know that you’re going to need all of them and you don’t know which one you’re going to need when.

30:44 Levi McCollum: I love that. That’s really great advice. And listeners out there, you heard it from the expert. Think about how it’s all integrated together. That really is key. So with that, I want to close this episode of Stop Requested. Yash, I want to thank you so much for joining us today. This is really a pleasure. We’ll have to have you on in the future to talk about all the other initiatives that Palm Trend has going on, but until then, absolutely.

31:10 Yash Nagal: And before, before, before I leave too, there is one thing that I have to say. You know, I think one of the, one of the big reasons that public transportation hasn’t been maybe as successful, at least this is, this is my opinion. Public transportation hasn’t been as successful as it can has has been that the stories haven’t gotten out. We haven’t really done a really good job telling our stories. And I think, you know, both of you know to, you know this too. And you know, this is straight from the Academy of Clinton B. Forbes, that if you don’t tell your story, someone else is going to tell it for you. And that’s what’s been happening for a long time. So I really appreciate you both doing this, you know, getting people on, sharing the stories of transit because, like, that’s how we get ahead. That’s how the mission of public transportation gets ahead. That’s how really you build an equitable future. So kudos to both of you.

32:02 Christian Londono: Appreciate that. Thank you, Yash.

32:05 Yash Nagal: Absolutely.

32:07 Levi McCollum: All right, well, see you all next time. Thank you for tuning in. And Yash, again, thank you so much for spending your afternoon with us. Appreciate it.

32:15 Christian Londono: Thank you.

32:16 Yash Nagal: Thank you. Take care, guys.

32:17 Levi McCollum: Bye.

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