If you get data, it should be data-driven. Otherwise, you’re just a person with an opinion. Stop Requested. This is Stop Requested. by ETA.
I’m Christian. And I’m Levi. These are real conversations with the innovators, operators, and advocates driving improvements in public transportation.
Today, we’re talking with Brian McCallum, a. transit management consultant whose career spans more than 50 years in planning, operations, performance management, and the National Transit Database.
Brian has worked inside transit agencies, at the Federal Transit Administration, and as a consultant evaluating how systems use their resources and measure performance. His perspective is straightforward: good planning starts with clear standards, good data, and an. understanding of the people and markets the service is actually trying to reach. We’ talk about what makes a good transit planner, how agencies can move beyond simply tracking metrics to understanding why performance is changing, and why NTD data remains one of the industry’s most valuable tools. Here’s our conversation with Brian McCallum.
Welcome back to Stop Requested. Uh, we’re back with another great episode and another great guest. Uh, and, uh, this guest is not related to, uh, my co-host,
Levi McCallum. Uh, his name is Brian McCallum. Uh, but he is just an expert in, uh, transportation planning, uh,
NTD, and, um, he also is a transit management consultant with, uh, McCallum, Management Consulting. Brian, how you doing today? I’m doing fine. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, of course. It’s, it’s an honor, uh, for us to have you. Um, for those that don’t know about you, they don’t know you, uh, could you introduce yourself a- and the work you do at McCallum Management
Consulting? Okay. I’ve, I’ve been in con- transit for a, I’d say a number of years, 50 years. A- and so that’s a long time, so I’ve done a number of things. I grew up in the Twin Cities in Minneapolis-St. Paul, and I started out as a civil engineer thinking I was gonna be a traffic engineer.
Hmm. Uh, but then I, after I got my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, I went to Northwestern University thinking I was gonna be a traffic engineer getting a master’s. However, there,
I fell in love with public transportation. And how’d I do that? I, my master’s thesis was operating a Saturday bus service in suburban Chicago with three other students. And so we drove the buses. We designed the routes. We did marketing. We did all those kind of things. And so I got really hands-on experience operating a bus route, also in convincing graduate students to drive for free because we made a deal with the bus company, you let us be the bus route planners, and we will drive for free. So that actually made them money.
Pretty good deal. It, it was a, it was a very good deal and a lot of fun. Not many people get a master’s thesis driving a bus. Right. Um, and so, but I, yeah, my, my degree, my master’s degree was in transportation planning.
And so then I went to interview, and I interviewed and actually got a job with a company called Simpson & Curtin, which is an all-line transit consulting firm that was purchased by Booz Allen
Hamilton. And I interviewed with Mr. Curtin thinking, because I didn’t know anything, uh, that I would try to impress him with my transportation planning, credentials.
Well, he let me ramble for about a minute, and then he said, “Brian, I gotta stop you. You know, please tell me your experience in doing, operating this Saturday bus route.”
He said, “When people try to get jobs with me, planners are a dime a dozen, but people who actually know how to operate a bus route and actually have driven a bus, those are the kind of people I’m interested in.” And so
I got hired, and I got hired by Simpson Curtin as a young engineer. I spent three or four years with them doing planning studies. And at that point, many tri- private bus companies were being purchased by public authorities, and so I actually did appraisals and kicked tires and things like that. One of the projects we did was looking at the six county Chicago area for its potential to become the RTA, the Regional Transportation
Authority. And so at one point, I knew where all the bus routes were. I was one of the few people in that time who could do that. And when I left Booz Allen, where’d I go? I went to the
RTA, and I was the manager with two other people of suburban bus service. Now, at that point, we had 29 bus companies and suburban operations. We more or less, more or less coordinated their services, and I got involved in delivering buses and doing coordination. And one of the things I set up was I had a checking force, a group of about six young people who went kind of incognito on bus routes to evaluate the bus drivers.
And we would write reports about the bus drivers and then send them to the bus companies. And what I found surprising was we’d also praise drivers if they did a good thing. They would post these in the driver’s room.
And just through peer pressure, no penalties, drivers who didn’t get a good score from us were given a real hard time by drivers. And so I learned a lot about drivers and checkers at that point. Hmm. After the RTA,
I went to the FTA, and I worked in Washington. So I left Chicago, and I went to Washington.
And I worked for initially the planning office, where I was involved in evaluating the transit planning program that FTA sponsors at the MPOs in the transit agencies.
And I got to know how the regional offices work and how the grant process worked. But the other thing I did, which I really enjoyed, was at that point, we had a good chunk of research money. And so I got involved over ten years in about fifty projects in all aspects of transit planning, and I, I called operations, planning, short-range planning, and transit management. So I did studies in costing, in forecasting, cost allocation, management, reviews. It was a great time. And I got to know a lot of people. From there, after ten years, I went back to consulting and worked with a man named Littleton
McDermott, who is a principal at Pete Marwick Mitchell. And he and I and a couple– and some teams of people, we did probably a hundred performance. management reviews where you go out, look at the performance of transit systems, and assess their performance, and hopefully come up with a way to improve their performance.
Uh, at– after with– being with Mac for about eight years, uh, he retired, and at that point, I became McCullough Management.
And so I’ve been doing McCullough Management for, mm, almost thirty years. And basically, I have continued to do these management reviews.
I’ve done work with the FTA, the FTA offices on policy. I became involved in the National Transit Database, so I got involved in training and in writing the reporting manual. And then kind of, uh, not the last minute, but, uh, maybe the last minute of my career, I involved for about ten, fifteen years with the World
Bank, going to different countries. So that’s a long kind of laundry list. Basically, kind of shows you I couldn’t hold a job. So Brian, you mentioned that you, you do teach courses, and
I, I, I’m a, a big fan of teachers. Some of the most influential people in my life have been teachers. I’m curious, what’s your approach when you get in the, the classroom? I’ve been part of one of, one or two or m-maybe a few more of, of your classes. But for those who haven’t, maybe they’re, they’re interested, maybe they’re in Florida, and they have the opportunity to, to take one of those classes, what, what is your approach?
Well, I guess, I guess because I, I do have an engineering and finance background, um, because I did get an MBA while I was with FTA.
I do have sort of a structured, uh, approach where people walk away with PowerPoint slides that basically, particularly like NTD reporting, kinda give them step-by-step approaches to filling out the forms. But in terms of being in the classroom, I get nervous if I talk more than five minutes without somebody in the audience talking or at, giving an opinion or answering a question.
And so I really like to get the class involved to the extent that, particularly in NTD reporting, it’s not the most exciting topic.
But if you can have a little bit of dialogue, ask them what their problems are, what, what they think should be done. If I do a planning course, uh, I think it goes a lot better, and people respond well. And, and Brian, whenever you’re, uh, teaching your operations planning courses, what core ideas are you trying to communicate to, um, uh, into those students?
Well, the, the thing is with, with, particularly with, with operations planning, we, we’re not a business.
We’re a business in a sense, so we should be structured, we should be organized, but we’re not making a profit. And so there are sort of building blocks that you kind of need to do good operations planning.
To start off with, I think you need policy standards. Okay? These are not ones that you’ve developed. These are the ones that maybe you developed, but you got approved by your policymakers, your board.
Because those standards, will help decide, first of all, what is a good performing bus route or a bus or a service, a transit service?
So they can identify good ones from bad ones and focus perhaps on the bad ones. Second is, in terms of that, is standards for, yes, we come up with a bus route. What’s the minimum bus route that is acceptable in our environment? And, and so is it service every sixty minutes, a sixty-minute headways every thirty minutes?
Uh, how long does it have to operate? Does it have to at least cover the rush hours? Those types of things we need so that we can be consistent in the way we plan across our area.
Second thing I sort of focus on is that we just don’t put out bus service for people in general.
Every bus route should have a market or maybe several markets. What are we trying to do with a bus route? You know, are we trying to get people primarily to work? Or in the case of, I told you earlier, my Saturday bus routes, what was the market focus there? It wasn’t getting people to work on Saturdays.
It was basically bringing people, uh, service workers to homes in North, northern suburbs of Chicago and taking people to shopping centers, all right? And so we knew when those people were on, but we had a sense of the market.
Okay? Third, third thing I’d probably say, and I know I’m, I guess I have four points here, is
That it, good planning. If you get data, it should be data-driven, otherwise you’re just a person with an opinion. But even if you do good planning, you do get good data, it just sharpens your judgment.
It doesn’t automatically… It’s not a computer system, it’s not AI who’s saying, “This is exactly what you should do.” It’s to help you make better decisions.
But you have to recognize as a planner, sometimes you’re not gonna make the right decision. And instead of fretting about it, it’s just best to move on and hopefully have a good batting average.
And then probably the last thing I’d say to operations planners, which I always say, is that you, your success in getting riders in large part is determined by your transportation setting. So the example I always use is you could have two jobs, one in Des Moines, Iowa, and the other in Manhattan.
Okay? You can be the smartest planner, uh, the skilled planner, in Des Moines, and maybe get a bus load of people, a couple bus loads of people, or maybe solid ridership throughout the day, okay? Because of the setting, there’s a limited market for people riding the bus. On the other hand, Manhattan, you could be a terrible planner and probably still fill the bus. So the setting is important, and it’s important for your mental health because if you get frustrated in Des Moines because you’re not getting ridership like New York, it’s probably not because of you, it’s because of the transportation setting.
So those are the kinds of things we kind of emphasize in the planning course. Right. And, you know, the, the economic situation certainly plays a part in that, that ridership piece.
Uh, if folks are, you know, unable to purchase cars or perhaps the… You know, they can, and they, they choose not to, like a, a setting in, uh, where it’s very dense. Uh, all of that kinda plays into what your, um, w- what your outcome is for how well the, the transit service is received. I-
I’m curious, Brian, when you think about a, a good transit service planning, what are, uh, what is required from the planner beyond just, you know, going on Remix or in a GIS and, and drawing routes and setting schedules?
Are, are there some, uh, you know… Do you have a perspective there about what a, a good transit planner should, should bring to the table other than just, you know, those technical skills?
Um, yeah, I do. I think that being a planner is almost like being… You need a variety of skills. You, you tend, when you ask the question, to talk about drawing routes, uh, setting schedules, things like that. Almost sounds like engineering, and that’s important. It’s important to do those efficiently.
But there’s another side of it, which is that you’re a marketing person, a true marketing person trying to figure out what do people want, how will people respond, right?
You’re forecasting, you’re estimating demand, right? That it’s not like these big, elaborate long-range models. It’s having a sense of, for this particular area, what, where do people wanna travel, and what time of day do they wanna go? That type of thing.
As a result, a good planner doesn’t just plan from his office. A good planner gets out in the field, rides the bus routes, talks to people, okay? And you say, “Okay, let’s talk to the riders.” That’s important, but it’s also important to talk to the drivers.
Who talks to riders every day? Drivers. And I would say that often they’re kind of ignored in planning.
And in places where I think they do an effective job, they try’ to get drivers’ input, okay?
Now, not just suggestion boxes, but actually talking to drivers in a particular area, saying what they think is important, right? So I think that’s true. And then finally, my… I kind of say you need to think of yourself as a resource manager, as a planner.
You only have a certain number of annual hours and miles of service that you can operate from your budget, right? But, but you always probably have more needs than you have budget. You need to think carefully about where are we perhaps misplacing or not placing the resources effectively, and perhaps moving those resources to areas that, that perhaps need more service.
So you need to kind of monitor what’s going on throughout the system and try to place the resources the best place you can, and that’s not an easy job. So, um, that’s the kinda thing I think is important.
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See it at etatransit.com. Yeah. I- in other words, don’t just try to plan behind the computer screen
You know, g-get out in the field. And, and, uh, you know, we had recently, uh, um, an honor guest, uh, James Drake, uh, he said, “Good planning starts with observation.” And, and I couldn’t agree more. Uh, when you talk about, uh, performance improvement philosophies and like, you know, Kaizen and, and all these things, it, it, it, it talks about going to the source and observe and ask why. And, you know, riding the buses, riding the, the, you know, the service, talking to the riders and talking to the drivers, like you said. Uh, you know, public transportation happens in a very ever-changing, dynamic environment. A- and a lot of the factors that affect, uh, how people use the service, the ridership, uh, the useful- the usefulness, the directness of the service are outside of your control. And i- if you’re not connected to those things, it’s just gonna be very hard, uh, to make effective decisions.
Um, but I, you know, it’s also challenging, uh, and like you mentioned, with limited resources. As transportation planners, we would want to increase the modes of service and, and put more service to go to more places. Uh, but then again, resources, like you mentioned, they’re limited, and you have to have that awareness in, in how you make decisions. Uh, but, you know, uh, looking from the performance, uh, lens, right? Like, we’re trying to look at the organization.
Transit planners, we’re looking at the performance and analyzing, like you said, where- what’s working well and then where, what is not working that well, where there’s opportunities.
Uh, so my question is, you know, when you’re reviewing any transit system, what do you look at first, uh, to understand if it’s operating well? Uh, well, um, I, I guess I could answer that question in two ways. All right?
One is just to pro- uh, just to, uh, play back on what you just mentioned that I guess Mr. Drake said, I, I have to 100% agree about observation being important.
Okay? I would also kind of say in response to that, w- there has been in the last 10, 15 years a some-somewhat of a movement, not a great movement, a little bit of movement, what they call transit redesign, right? Where instead of providing complete coverage for the service area, tends to focus, refocus resources on the core arterials, uh, with, with the hope that people can get to those core arterials and that excellent high-frequency service and arterials will serve people better than spreading the resources uniformly across the area.
So I think that’s important. I just wanted to add that. Um, but in direct to your question, if I’m looking at transit system, and I’m going beyond service, and I’m doing one of these trans- transportation reviews, management reviews, or management audits, whatever you wanna call them, initially, from my, from my computer screen, I will look at numbers, and I’ll request numbers.
And so typically what I’ll do is I’ll look at numbers like the NTD to look at trends and performance over, say, the last five, six years. I’ll put together a peer group, meaning s- transit system that, systems that look similar or have similar characteristics. Maybe the densities are the same, the population is the same, uh, buses are the same, things of that nature.
I look at that, and then I request additional data. And the ability for an agency to provide the data is a metric in itself. The other thing I do is I don’t totally rely on, I don’t read my numbers, but I like to enhance it. Typically, I’ll do, have interviews or an interview, like a, a survey, where I ask a bunch of people questions in their different functions.
All right? So if we’re looking at drivers, all right, you know, and you have the manager of operations,
I’ll ask them for their policies and procedures for hiring drivers, training drivers, monitoring drivers, that type of thing, and get them to fill out interviews like that. Uh, same with maintenance. I’ve asked questions about their protocols, how they track, uh, different performance. For example, if they’re doing, uh, inspections, uh, do they track how closely they fo- m-meet their inspection intervals? ‘Cause nobody hits it exactly on the mile, but they may. How far do they depart from it? Things of that nature, uh, before I go out and talk to people.
So you, you’re mentioning a lot of things that are not necessarily the performance metrics, uh, from operations like, you know, on time performance or ridership. You, you’re looking at other, you know, policies and procedures of how the, uh, agency’s operating and through the in- interviews, unearthing several things, uh, from the employees themselves. And it, it’s very interesting because when you talk to the employees and you have those, uh, open conversations, you start unearthing a lot of things. Like, there’s a lot of knowledge that is kinda, like, buried in the agency, and different people have different things. And once you start having those conversations, pre- pretty much you start, you know, hearing the patterns, right? Interviewing different folks from different areas of the organization, and then, you know, they end up mentioning different things that correlate and, and make sense to you. Um-
Absolutely … you know, so w-when, when it, it comes to, like, well, and, and that’s how you, uh, conduct your assessment of an agency.
Uh, but, you know, uh, how, how should agencies also decide which perf, uh, performance metrics, um, they should focus on and, and help them make better decisions? Well, um, they, they need to define
Uh, first of all, I wanna make a comment by what you just said because I happen to totally agree, and I think you did a nice job of summarizing my answer. Um, but what you often find, find with both drivers and just general agency people is they do have good ideas, but they don’t feel their ideas are respected.
Mm. So if I make them my ideas, I’m the outside expert, and outside expert’s usually somebody who lives 100 miles away from the agency. They’re not a local person. That same idea all of a sudden has credibility.
So I’ve made somewhat of a career of stealing local ideas, making them my own. I, I acknowledge I got them from them, but then, um, you know, a good idea is a good idea.
So I, I think that’s important. But getting to your s-setting of the metrics, okay, what is important, and you, you… from two points of view, for the rider a-and for the agency using their resources efficiently. You know, for the rider, some of the stuff, you know, operating trips as scheduled, okay, is important. We have a contract with operators, with, with our riders, okay?
So we say we’re gonna operate every 30 minutes or every 15 minutes. Do we do that? Do we track that? How many missed trips do we have?
Okay? Of the trips we make, how many are on time? Okay?
And how many agencies track that? That’s not an NTD metric, but it’s certainly a measure of quality because people don’t, particularly if you’re going to work, it’s very difficult if you’re always late. It’s hard to keep your job. And then finally, if you define the bus does come or the transit system service comes, does it break down?
And, and so kind of identifying what are we trying to do is important by the different functions that are operated in transit. And the key ones are operations, running the service as scheduled, okay?
And maintenance, making sure our vehicles don’t break down and basically perform e-economically.
And so if you sort of focus on that, the, the industry does have, you know, acknowledged metrics to do that. It’s a matter of just applying those and following those, reviewing those monthly, quarterly, but on some, uh, periodic basis.
Yeah. A-and, and those are very important, and it seems sometimes that agencies, um, you know, are measuring, like, the same performance measures. And, and for the most part, sometimes maybe they got them to stabilize or their, you know, ridership is, is not that great, but it is what it is, and, and they just accept it. You know, when, when it comes to, um, the performance audits, uh, what are performance audits useful for an agency instead of just looking at the metrics or, like, running an audit report? Like, what, what’s kinda like the difference and the importance of having, you know, an external person coming in and, and doing that performance audit? Okay. So yeah, i-if you sort of go through maybe the, you know, s-typical steps in a performance audit, okay, you can look at the numbers, right? We’d come up with a peer group, and we’d say, “Oh, you perform better than the average in this peer group,” all right, on this particular metric.
Okay? But on this particular metric, cost, let’s say cost per hour, everything being equal, factoring out wage rates and so forth, your cost per hour is higher, okay?
First of all, it’s important that you recognize that it does because not every agency does a peer group. That’s what external people kind of force you to do. Let’s compare ourselves to like agencies. But the second thing is to understand why.
Why is cost per hour, as an example, too high, okay? Is it because we pay our drivers a higher than average rate?
Okay? That’s something you have to collect new data from the other peer agencies because NTD doesn’t do that. Is it because our extra board is too high?
Okay? Okay? One could look at that. Okay? So you could look at the required number of drivers, and do you have 20% more people on the extra board? A possibility. I’m not saying it’s, uh, but it’s a possibility, okay? Or do we have, don’t you have enough drivers? Because you can run up overtime costs. So d- starting at this indicator that says, oh, we’re higher than, uh, cost per hour than perhaps our peer, diving into it and finding out why is that, okay?
And some of it may be your transportation setting, but it also may be that you’re not monitoring certain things. Okay?
So I found in one agency they had a tremendous breakdown rate. Okay? So miles between road call was, like, half what the, their peer averages were. So peer average might be 9,000 miles between a breakdown. They were doing
4,000. Actually, it was down to 2,000. It was really bad. I didn’t stop there. I didn’t say, “You’re terrible maintenance.” We went into why. Why is it so poor?
And so we looked at the types of breakdowns, okay? And what we find in that particular case, it was a hot place, and their air conditioners were the main problem for the breakdowns, okay? And what did we find when we investigated further? That they didn’t have a good third shift of maintenance people who knew how to fix air conditioning equipment.
They were not skilled. So we started off with, you know, miles between road call. We ended up with zeroing in, we need to train people better in air conditioning maintenance, then we can improve our performance. So I, I kinda like those kinda deductive steps, um, because at the end of the performance au- I would hope it’s not just saying, “Oh, you’re top,” or, “You’re in the middle,” or, “You’re below,” but some kind of actions where we could take or we could improve our performance because most agencies have some area that they can improve.
We all can improve, right? Right. And it sounds like you have a, a, you know, a, a very specific root cause analysis type approach to solving, uh, you know, these, these challenges that the agencies are facing.
Um, w- where did you come up with that? Was that, uh, just your, your engineering background or the experience over time? Like, how, how did you, uh, develop that sort of method, uh, to be able to solve the problems? Well, I, I, I don’t think…
I did not, uh, you know, come with, up, up with this on my own. Mm. Um, it came about through experience because when I was a young engineer with Simpson Haugh or Booz Allen, uh, they just didn’t turn me loose. I was with transit veterans who c- who had retired from transit agencies and became consultants.
Okay? So they weren’t good at doing the numbers part. But once I said, “This, this doesn’t look right,” they would suggest to me, “Let’s, let’s think about what it could be,” and they’d send me off to do the investigations.
So part of it was these senior people that a young guy who was 24 years old worked with, okay? They taught me transit, not the numbers, but the actual operations part of it. Okay? Second part was that particularly in the state of Wisconsin, and the state of Wisconsin did performance audits, and this is going back 30-some years. Yes, we’d look at the numbers, but implicit in find- in th- in this, uh, every audit for a system was finding areas that needed improvement. And the state of Wisconsin, at that point in time, would say, “Okay, we found a problem.” Just, I’ll just throw out a name, Beloit, Wisconsin. The state would put in technical money to help Beloit solve whatever problem came out of the audit.
Okay? And, and so that sort of pushed us. Okay, it’s not just sufficient to say Beloit isn’t good in this particular area. Let’s find out what could be done, even if it’s a study, if, uh, we don’t have the answer, but a study to look at this, and the state of Wisconsin would provide some money to look at solving that problem.
A- and, and, y- you know, I, I know that you have worked at a variety of transit agencies in the US and abroad, and y- you brought up money there. I, I know that, that money is always a challenge, but it seems especially, uh, you know, important these days with a l- a lot of transit agencies facing this financial cliff.
Um, y- what, what’s your perspective on, uh, on fare free transit to be able to sort of drive ridership? We, we had a conversation recently, it’s yet to be released, with, uh, Frank White III, who’s the former CEO of KCATA, and, you know, he was giving us some of the background as to how that came about, uh, their fare free service. I, I’m curious, you know, what you, what you think of it and, uh, how that potentially impacts the service delivery.
Well, um, I, I have to admit that I have, uh, a little bit of mixed feelings, okay?
My, my strongest feelings are that I am not supportive of free fare, okay? A- as an overall policy for the whole, for the whole service.
I mean, if you have a couple routes, particularly in a large city, their downtown area that are free, that’s one thing. It’s another thing when all the system is free.
Okay? And I, I think, and this is perhaps where this, this is a very, in my opinion, it’s, it’s not like some of my other things where I can say with numbers it’s pro- provable.
Transit riders aren’t looking for fare. The first thing they’re looking for is not free transit. They’re looking for good service, all right? And if the service is there, they’re willing to pay a portion of the cost for that. They’re not gonna pay 100%, but they don’t expect it to be free because they are getting a benefit. And if you talk to my many riders, they have pride.
All right? They don’t want something for nothing. All right? And so I think from their standpoint, give me better service, I’m willing to pay at least a portion of that cost. Okay?
Second is ser- uh, public transit, for the most part, is publicly subsidized. Okay?
And to make a good case to say we deserve this money, shouldn’t the riders pay a portion of the benefit that they’re receiving? Right? They don’t have to pay the whole cost. But when you go to the legislature, you go to a city council, to be able to say the riders are paying their fair share,
I think that’s a much more convincing argument than saying, “No, we’re gonna give them a free ride.” I think that, that, that’s tends to be my perspective.
So I think that a minimum farebox recovery, whatever the agency feels it should be, whether it’s 10%, 20%, 40%, is a policy Just to have that balance of benefits and the cost and cost sharing between the rider and just the general public. Uh, have you, uh, in, you know, all of the transit systems that you’ve observed, uh, seen some common mistakes that the agency has made in trying to figure out the, um, you know, the costing for services? Let’s say they’re, you know, adding, uh, you know, a new bus route, or maybe they’re adding frequency on a route. Are there some, you know, common pitfalls that you could share with our audience? Uh, you know, maybe it’s a, a, a bit of a, a reminder for some and a, a teaching for others who are new to the industry.
Yeah. Well, I, I would say a couple of things. Okay? One is that I, I, you know, present, particularly present to the public versus as a board in general.
You know, it will, it will be said in the newspaper, it costs tran- you know, our transit system $90 an hour to operate service. It implies that every hour of service we add or subtract during the day is cost
$90. Okay? That’s not true, right? That is not true, and why is that? Because most services are operated w- with union contracts, and particularly peak hour service, service where we bring in a boat, you know, a busload of people downtown to go to work. Yes, that bus load will be full, but the cost will not be just an hourly cost to the driver, you know, to one hour, let’s say it takes. But they’re guaranteed eight hours of pay during the day. If they only work four hours, two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, in effect, the cost is double, right?
Because for every hour they work, they’re essentially getting paid two hours. So sort of the fallacy of every hour of the service is during the day, um, I think is an issue. The other issue is that when you either add or subtract service, that it, that we’re gonna save
$90 an hour, to only use my example. It’s gonna cost us $90 an hour more to operate an additional hour, or we’re gonna save $90. That’s not true. Why is that?
Because we have fixed cost. We still have to pay the management. We still have to pay a variety of people. So if we add service, it may not cost 90 extra dollars. It might cost you 60 or 70, but it’s not 90. On the other hand, if we cut service, we still have some fixed cost, maintain the garage, maintain terminals, things like that. We’re not gonna save
90. Okay? Now, we’ll save, we’ll save money, no doubt about it, but, you know, having a, a good planner, person who can say or a scheduler say, “This is more likely what the costs are,”
I, I think is, is something that would be helpful to people, and I think a lot of agencies have that. Yeah. It, it’s understanding, um, you know, how, how their cost is structured, right, to, to your point. And, and that is why, you know, when we talk to, about fixed route, a lot of it is also fixed cost, right? Like we, we’re predicting how much it’s gonna cost, and if you get, get more people on board, then, you know, your cost per passenger is, is less versus, you know, if you just operate the same service and, and you don’t have as much ridership.
Um, you know, I, I wanna move our conversation to speak a little bit more about the NTD, and, and I wanna dig i- into, you know, some of your perspectives, uh, when it comes to reporting to National Transit Database.
Um, I wanna start by saying that the US has one of the most impressive databases, uh, you know, working with the transit agencies to build it and to contribute to this data. There’s a lot of countries ar- around the world that has no information, uh, such this, and are not able to do the peer comparisons that you were discussing earlier, where you can put different agencies with similar, uh, characteristic- characteristics together and, and compare across different metrics.
Um, but why, why, you know, in your perspective, reporting to a na- national transit database i- is important? And why does it matter beyond, you know, funding formula and like, you know, co- you know, doing the, the, fulfilling the federal requirement? Like why, why is this important?
Okay. Uh, I, I think it’s important primarily as, as you just pointed out, from the database and the use of the data for making comparisons and looking at trends in performance, either at a local transit agency or just nationwide when you’re providing information to funding agencies or funding groups like state legislatures,
Congress, whatever. Uh, I, I’m glad you pointed out the thing about our database being, I think, world-class, or at least maybe it’s not the best it could ever be, but it’s only better than most countries. Because in my World Bank work,
I… Once people found out that I was involved in a national transit database and was like the database nerd, they had a lot of questions. So in China, they had me sit down for a day and talk about how do we make this database work. Wow. How do we get people to pro- report reasonable numbers, things of that nature.
And what kind of technical support do we give to people who have to report? Because nobody likes to report the numbers, uh, but we want the numbers to be reasonable. You know, how do you maintain that kind of balance?
So when- So I think the, the- You, you said you, you were in China, like, uh- Yeah … as far as your work in, and then in China there’s nothing like the NTD. Is, or is there- Yeah … something or did they start up building something after you had that conversation?
Could you elaborate a little bit more on that? That sounds very interesting. Okay. So in, in China, in China they report a couple of basic numbers. But the fundamental problem we had in China, which we don’t have here, is that we have auditors. Okay? We have auditors.
Okay? And the auditors presumably say, “Here’s what these, the transit agency reported, and here’s when we did our normal audit at the end of the year, our annual audit of the sy- system books, the numbers match.”
Okay? Problem in China was, which is, I guess, continue, I’m not an expert on China, but they laughed. They said, “How do you, how do you get people to report the right numbers?” I, I said, “We have auditors.” And they laughed at me and they said, “That’s not exactly how it works here’ in
China.” He says, “We…” This, this is a while back, like 10 years ago. This- Mm-hmm … we set program goals. We’re gonna get 10 million of this.
All right? If we only hit eight million, we report that we got 10. All right? There’s no auditing feature there. There’s nothing like that to check on it. We just accept the numbers and publish them. So the auditing function in that case w- was, was very important.
Okay? Whereas ours, our history isn’t that FTA set up the reporting system. Okay?
The history of, of NTD is that a predecessor of APTA, the American Transit Association, ATA, got a special research grant from FTA back in the ’70s to put together a system of financial, uh, accounts so they’d be consistent. So if people reported numbers, we’d have the same definitions because ATAs, or I’ll just call them APTA, APTA’s role back then was they collected financial information from their members, plus operational data, and made it available to their members so their members could see how they’re doing compared to somebody else. Okay?
When FTA in 1975 was required by Congress to set up a reporting system, they didn’t develop it on their own.
They took what A- APTA developed a couple years earlier and said, “This is what we’re going to do.” So the NTD was designed not by government bureaucrats, but by transit professionals, people who were working at transit agencies who said, “This is the kind of data we need to look at our performance and to help us improve.” And so I think that’s a big use. And
I would argue that if you look at data, you say, “Well, that’s the FTA’s data.” I think more local agencies on their own, or funding agencies, use NTD data than does the federal government. If you look at FTA, yes, they use it, but they have 600 people in the agency. I, I, I would doubt that, I don’t really know, but not all of them use that data, probably at most 50 use it. So I think it’s the industry uses this data. Yeah. And it really is a, a wealth of information.
I h- have spent many nights and weekends, you know, pouring over some of the spreadsheets just because that’s the type of person I am. Uh, and I think Christian, and probably you are as well, Brian, uh, that you, you just wanna understand something and y- you know, you have it at your fingertips. It, it really is, uh, world-class. So we are approaching the end of our podcast here, Brian, and just wanna say, uh, first, you know, thank you for your time, and i- it’s been a really enlightening conversation. Uh, but before we head out, we’ve got a rapid fire section that we, we have as a recurring segment, and I’m gonna ask you a few short questions, and just give us the first thing that comes to your mind.
You ready? Uh, I’ll try. I hope I have an answer. Okay. I hope so. Okay. All right. That’s fair enough.
Bus or rail? Uh, bus. Okay. All right. You want an explanation quick? But because- Sure … I think bus is under, undervalued, and I think the public overrates rail, and they can do a better job if they did more bus way projects than rail. Okay. All right. I love the explanation.
Uh, favorite transit system? Could be worldwide. I don’t have a f- Okay. I, I, I don’t have a favorite transit system, but I’ll tell you three that I follow. Okay. I follow Metro Transit, which is in Minneapolis.
I follow that because I grew up there, and I know all the people there. I, I follow CTA because that’s, I spent a lot of time in Chicago, uh, and, and I follow them. Are they the best? Not necessarily, but in certain aspects, they’re pretty good.
Mm-hmm. What is an underrated transit planning skill that comes to your mind?
Okay. Well, if the transit planner does what I want them to do, it’s communication and pulling in- pulling ideas from other people in the agency and riders.
Excellent. What is one common NTD reporting mistake that you come across, especially when you’re teaching your courses? W- what do you hear or see? I think,
I, uh, I think the, the common reporting mistake is, is, is… I’m gonna give you a short an- or a long answer, and I’m very sorry, but I think it’s important.
No, it’s okay. Sure. Um, it’s not comparing your data with what you reported last year or the year before. And often in
NTD, people only are, they’ll fill out the reports for two or three years, they get promoted, they’re no longer in NTD. No one looks at are the numbers consistent with last year. And they get irritated with NTD or the NTD analyst people who review the reports because they keep asking them these questions.
Nobody has asked them that question locally, and so they get annoyed And so not looking at your data and then searching for explanations. Why did your cost go up five times the rate of inflation?
Is it a reporting error? Is it some crazy union settlement? Whatever. That’s, that’s the re- mistake I would say they make. Uh, I would agree with that. You know, as a former reporter and, you know, learning the practice from others and then just getting handed the book and say, “Here you go,” uh, y- you, you don’t really know what came before you, and sometimes you’re, you know, when you’re new, you’re just thinking, “I’m, I’m just supposed to submit the report.”
Uh, but, uh, those analysts are very good at catching the anomalies, and now I’m sure they have software to be able to help them with that, and they, uh, make you explain it. What is the best piece of advice, uh, that you have for someone coming into the transit industry? It could be a planner or maybe a scheduler, someone in operations.
Y- you pick. Okay. Uh, well, the advice I would give them i- is, is first to be curious. Okay? Because even though y- people say transit doesn’t change much from year to year, things do change, and so you need to be curious. I think the second thing is to make friends.
All right? A- and, you know, I think there’s a tendency in agencies to have, you know, people call it silos, but, you know, you end up sitting in your department. You don’t know what the other folks are doing, and you probably have some relationship, should have some relationship with them. So to make friends within your agency I think is really important. And much more so, particularly if you’re brand new, if you go to training courses or any opportunity to make friends at different transit agencies, I think that’s important, because, you know, there’s always new things coming about. How do you know if they work? You know, you don’t wanna talk to the person who’s selling it. You wanna know with somebody’s experience and see how it worked. You wanna be the second or third guy who tried it, not the first guy.
Well, the only way you know that is if you have a friend. And so I think making friends, that’s helped me a lot, you know, knowing a bunch of people so I could bounce ideas off of and get their ideas or, or views of how new things work. Absolutely. I completely concur. A- and that’s a good segue to another recurring segment that we have on the podcast, Brian, which is our, our takeaways, and I wrote down a few while you were speaking. Uh- Okay … several gems here.
Uh, but I, I would like that you start with your policies and standards. What is the agency trying to accomplish? Is it codified somewhere? W- what are you measuring against? You know, what do you define as, as success?
And, and that should be written down. Uh, there is a market focus for a bus route. What are you trying to achieve for that, that bus route? What’s the objective? You also mentioned, Brian, that there’s a, a lack of attention that’s given to operators and maintenance, some of the front line staff at times, but they also have good ideas, and it’s important to get their input whenever you’re developing your service or, you know, that could be m- modifying it by adding routes or, you know, removing trips and so on. And then lastly, I think you summed it up very well there, be curious and develop a good professional network. It’s going to come in handy later on. Is there anything that I misstated there or you would state differently? Uh, no. I, I, I appreciate you writing those down and, uh, if you’d have done that in the beginning, we could have done this in five minutes. So there you go. Well, then we wouldn’t have a very long episode.
Okay. All right. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.
And, uh, you know, the, the reason why I wanted to bring you on is because you have all this experience. Uh, have taken those NTD courses with, uh, with
Cutter, and have, have seen the a- amount of knowledge that you’ve shared with the, the classes that I participated in. So I, I thought it’d be a good idea to get you in front of, uh, other people who are listening to the podcast, so that way they’re familiar with you and your work. And if people want to learn more about you or maybe even contact you for consulting work, how can they do so? Well, I, I do have a website, which is, um, McCollum,
McCollum, you have to spell it right, not like you spell it, but McCollum, M-C-capital C-O-L-L-O-M, consulting, runittogether.com. Um, you c- you could reach me at my office at 301-258-0810, or you can email me at brian@mccollumconsulting.com.
Uh, if you don’t write any of that down, just call somebody at NTD and they know how to get ahold of me. They know you well. They’ve got you on speed dial, I guess, right?
Uh, something like that. Um, okay. All right. Well, thank you again, Brian, for your time today. Really appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure. And thank you to our audience for tuning in to another episode of Stop Requested. We’ll be back next week.