Connecting London: Philip Gerhardt Discusses TFL’s Transit Solutions

Hi, I'm Paul Comfort. I've been in the public transportation industry for more than 30 years and I know what it takes to run a transit system that attracts riders by creating a safe, efficient, reliable operation with world class customer service. And on today's podcast, we're going to challenge you to step up your game to meet today's most pressing issues, plus have a little fun along the way.

By hearing from an industry expert from what many consider to be the world's leading public transportation system, Transport for London. Welcome to Transit Unplugged.

My guest is Philip Gerhart, the head of bus performance at the Bus Operations Directorate. At Transport for London, or TFL, Philip, like a lot of us, fell into transit by accident and discovered there's not much better careers out there than helping to move people, creating mobility, allowing them to access all of life's opportunities.

Now, we've had several guests from TFL over the years, and most recently, the head of TFL, the Commissioner of Transport for London, Andy Lord, was on the show just a few months ago. TFL is one of the largest public transport networks in the world, with bus, light rail, commuters, subways, which they call the underground, ferries, and even a cable car. TFL is known for its iconic red double decker buses. Remember those? You've seen them everywhere.

They even have them on refrigerator magnets that you can buy in the tourist stores. And these buses cover more than 650 routes, with 19, 000 bus stops, and are operated by more than 25, 000 drivers.

For Wow, speaking of operators, when TFL talks about operators, they aren't normally talking about the drivers, they're talking about contractors who operate within the TFL bus system. These are private companies that have a set number of routes they cover, and they're responsible to TFL for keeping up performance standards. And one of those standards, obviously, is on time performance, right?

The reliability we were talking about in what I call the four cornerstones of operating a great transit system. Safety, efficiency, reliability, and world class customer service. And that's where Phillip comes in.

It's Phillip's job to make sure that all the routes are working as efficiently as possible, as seamlessly connecting to all the other transport modes within the system. Reliability. It doesn't help if you're taking an express bus to catch a train into the city, if the bus arrives at the station five minutes after the train left, right? Then you got to wait for another one. So Phillip's team analyzes all the routes across the entire system to see which ones are not performing well.

Then they work with the private operator of the route to find a solution. Sometimes it's as simple as tweaking a schedule, but other times it's as complex as letting express buses optimize their own routes on the fly to avoid traffic and make sure they all get to their stops on time. This is literally where the rubber hits the road. Let's listen and learn. Phil, great to have you with us on the show today. Thanks for reaching out.

we love digging into the depths of what it takes to run bus service and rail service better. you're the head of bus performance at Transport for London. Thanks for being with us today. Thank you so much. Real pleasure to be here.

One thing that's always impressed me about TFL when I ride it and when I visited there is how well integrated it is into the city and its populace. They think of public transport, as, as, an equal option, maybe even a better option than cars. that's not always the case here in the U. S. where we have, uh, You know, general ridership, under 5 percent of our population in America ride public transportation. People hate to hear that number, but unfortunately, it's true.

A lot of America, just doesn't ride, and a lot of people live in places where there's not good, solid, you know, regular public transportation. High Frequency Service. So, but there in London, man, it is. and you all have really integrated into that. So, talk about, your team and what you're working on now. firstly, in answer to the, you know, the nature of the network, yeah, it's amazing, isn't it?

We're all about multimodal and trying to encourage journeys across, across kind of mediums as well. So, it's great to have that on our doorstep and be part of it. It's amazing. But, yeah, in particular in what we do. So, we're, Bus journeys are key, to kind of setting up multimodal journeys in London. They're key to getting, getting, kind of the traveling public of London to where we need to go.

Some of the stuff we do with operators is all around improving the schedule offering, so to make sure that our schedules are best fit for the prevailing road conditions. And we've got some amazing stuff we do, both within the teams, within the operators, looking at schedules, seeing how we can optimize them, working with our colleagues in planning to see what we can do to make sure that the offering we provide, provides those journeys.

And you talked about the importance of a joined up network and encouraging people to use public transport. That's what we're all about. We're all about getting those people onto the buses, onto the trains, onto the tubes and, you know, anything under the roundel, you know, is great. It's all one operation that we can potentially deliver for our customers.

Bus services go over the boundary as well, so into, into, into other local authorities outside our, our kind of jurisdiction, but we work with those, those, borough, sorry, those, counties very, very closely. because they're, they're big commuter towns and, and conurbations that are really, you know, have a, have a, which don't necessarily have a rail link, but need to have a key, kind of key connection within, within, sorry, into London.

Yeah. yeah, there's some, some great examples there in terms of, areas like, like, Red Hill, and we've got, places like Dartford, which is just on the, on the edge of London. But if we support journeys into London and we have some really, kind of. Important feeder routes is what we, what we, what we term to link people up to either heavy rail stations or, or Elizabeth Line, you know, or an London Underground station.

And, and our view is for every journey that people take on the bus is potentially another customer using an passenger using, another one of our services. So the bus is so key to linking up those bigger, those bigger kind of, bigger pieces.

And, and ultimately, you know, we have an extensive night bus network as well. which is there to, to serve the community in London and workers in London, you know, who don't necessarily, you know, you don't necessarily see during the day, but are doing really important roles like, you know, like, for example, cleaners and, and, you know, other night workers, really, really important for us. The Night Bus network could, in that sense is so key to what we do.

So is a big piece as well, which I'm more than happy to talk about around how, the importance around the reliability of our Night Bus network, and also how we want to improve it around some of our other real key objectives around women's safety as well. So there's loads of stuff we're doing on reliability as well about improving that, on the night night bus network in particular.

One of the things I really love, Phil, about the bus network in London is just the fact that the iconic double decker red buses, you have them all painted red, bright red, is a symbol of the city. You know, it's not just an also ran. I mean, when you see, like, you go to a gift shop, any gift shop and you pick up like symbols of London, the red bus, your bus is always in those tableaus, you know, whether it's a key chain it just has been It just represents the city, which is phenomenal, man.

Yeah, do you know what? I get so much pride from it. I really do. It's one of the things that's really attracted me to what I do. You're right. You go into any toy shop, you see it, you know, and I quite often sit there and go, I'm fact checking. Ooh, well, you know, the Route 29 doesn't go there, but no, no, it's not about that. It's about That's right. It's a bit of a bigger, you know, take a step back. It's a bigger what the bus stands for.

And, you know, I've got plenty of buses in my office at home and I've got, I've got some kind of heritage bus blinds on my wall and I think I'm, I think I'm, I'm immersed into it in many ways to the amusement of my family. But I think it becomes a bit more, it's not just, it's not just the red bus, it's what's underneath that. It's what it signifies.

it's the history behind it is a pedigree of what we deliver, uh, and more and probably most importantly, it's the passion of people, not just within TFL, but within the people, within our operator partners who deliver us day in, day out, 364 days a year. we only stop very, very shortly. Kind of overnight over the Christmas period, So, you know, it's, it's massive and, it's just everything about it. And you see it everywhere, don't you?

I mean, I mean, you're, you're saying this as an American, it's great. It's absolutely great to hear. And, yeah, I love it. I really, really do. That's amazing, Phil. And, I know you have so many, things, projects and efforts that you're undertaking right now in the bus performance office to improve the network because, as they say, if you build it, they will come.

And so, the, the, the message is, right, adapting to what the passengers want today. Tell us about what you're doing there. the changes in flows and passengers in London, it is, you know, it's a bit of a moving feast. just for context a minute, I mean, myself and my team are looking at approximately 150 to 180 routes, of the 650, not because there's necessarily problems with them or challenges on it, but about how we can improve them. And, We're constantly working with the data.

We've got some great systems, and using that and the loadings data and, you know, some of the data we have from our traffic signals to help inform what we do with our schedules. and some of these, some of these, all kinds of options open to us. You know, it could be a case of we have to put in short term mitigation. So what we.

Colloquially we'll call here in London widening the schedule, so adding time in, so it's, it's protected, protects those journeys, whether we add additional resource into a route, again, to protect it, or whether we do something a bit more, I don't know, exciting or jazzy with it, you know, do we do, do we do something a bit more, In terms of changing the frequencies on it, do we, do we, um, do we change it and so is a peak at a certain time?

Is it something we can do with the actual contract itself when it's up for renewal, to better reflect the communities we serve? And so we're constantly looking at the data and how we can use data better to inform what we do. and I've got some really great examples where we've looked at that. We're trying to improve the performance of our new outer London bus network for Superloop, which, listeners may have heard about, but I'd highly recommend checking that out.

Have a, have a quick Google of it. and, I'll be, been in since, June last year, June, 2023, some great, great stuff going on, which I'm, I'd love to come and talk on about shortly. Yeah, Andy Lord mentioned that. He was very excited about the Superloop program. So, your office there, the Office of Bus Performance, you take the data, you analyze it, and then what? You make recommendations to operations about changes? How does the process work?

To actually go from the plan and the idea to actually implementation. Yeah, so the whole process is very collaborative with our bus operators, so we'll have a list of routes that we have a focus on as Transport for London. The operators will have a list of routes they want to focus on. They overlap completely.

so whether it's ones you've got a reliability, ones you want to grow patronage on, or it could be some of something else where they're, they're struggling, in terms of, of covering route for one reason or another, we'll work really close to them and we'll agree a kind of a shared list of routes for each of the eight operators, which we're going to target. and of course that, that list is, is, is never ending. It always changes. One drops off and everyone comes in. So it's like a live, live list.

and we'll work closely with operators about what we can do. What is it? I talked earlier about the options open to us. What is it we need to do? and what I love about my job is sometimes I'm right down in the weeds, as we would say here. I'm right, I'm looking at departures from a second, bus stop. I'm checking the service control. I'm working with my team to see what we can do. You know, is there something operators missed? Is there something we can support them on?

and I'll be dealing with operators day in, day out. And the next minute I'm at a strategic level in the meeting, you know, talking about a future trajectory of where we do, what we do with certain bus routes. And I love that. I love the different, different lenses. At one minute, I'm talking, you know, I'm looking right down. and sometimes I have to pull me out of that because it's important that, you know, that I have a team to do that. But I suppose that's my enthusiasm for what I do.

and anyway, the process then is we'll come to an agreement and, as, as a transport authority, we will, we will, we will make that, that decision on what we do formal for our governance, and then we'll implement it to, to the, to the schedule and that will feed through, in, into, into our schedule systems and out into, into through the API and through to, to apps such as our OTFL Go app.

That's great. Well, tell us a little about your background, Phil. I accidentally fell into buses, if I'm honest. I always planned to get into rail, and now I can't get out of it. You know, I love it. so I left university, did a geography degree, loved it, obviously. Didn't want to go home, just wanted to get out in the world and just get going. And, and I, I applied for various graduate schemes with various big transport operators, and actually got offered a, a job with a London bus operator.

It I worked with Stagecoach for, I think, eight years in total with a, a brief period in, in the Seasunder Bus Group. Some of my formative years. I mean, I had a great time. I did everything. I'm so glad I did. I, I highly recommend graduate programs. but I've always said the best teams are blended teams. There's only one way to climb a mountain. I worked with some amazing people who worked their way up from bus drivers.

In fact, in fact, my, my mentor at the time, a guy called Bill Daly, I'm going to give him a shout out as well. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for him.

wasn't for him, and he supported me with some of the trickiest times, but I worked my way up various, working on the operator side relationship in London, did, various garage manager or depot managers, roles across London, working for Stagecoach, and then I got a, madly, I kind of lost Lost love for transport for a bit and I actually went and worked at telecoms for, with with British Telecom actually, with their infrastructure deliveries arm called OpenReach, delivering big

fibre circuits for big merchant banks across London and with huge service level agreements and absolutely amazing . I had a great time, But I miss transport, and, I actually got approached by You should get it in your blood, right? Yeah, I know! That's why people never leave. It's a job for six months and you, you never leave. But, I, I got approached by Reeve London, who, at that time, who were, again, another bus operate in London, one of the eight, and actually in, in performance.

so I'd never really had experience in performance and I, I kind of had to retrain a little bit. I mean, I knew, I knew of the basics of it from my time as being in operations, but the performance here, because it's quality incentive contracts. so if the operators get, can achieve a, a, a bonus, for every increment they do better than a minimum performance standard for reliability. And, the same way they can achieve a, a deduction for, for, for worse than the standard.

and my whole role there was to get the Arriva London estate. I started as a head of, head of route performance there to, to deliver and, Arriva London South at the time, which was the South operation of Arriva London. We were consistently top in the, in the league tables for excess wait time. I think for, for, of the two and a half, three years, I think I was there.

It was, I think we were top of the table for every period bar one, which I will, I'll never live down, but, and a great, I got such, you know, delivering, we had, we had some of, we had an amazing control team, I had all the control centers under me, I, I worked with a really experienced, team. manager there as well shortly before his retirement. And we delivered some amazing things.

We worked with the data, in ways that, I could only dream of, back to my whole, kind of, my whole passion to working with data to improve the offering for public. And we did some really cool stuff and I had so much fun, And then the opportunity came up here in Transport for London.

I was in a bit of a mad situation for about three months where I was answering to somebody, well reporting somebody at TfL who would be working for me, which was a bit weird but also a bit fun and we laugh about it now.

Yeah. And that was really good and it, you know, It was really nice, coming here was a bit like coming to family, because I knew most people up here, I'd worked with them, okay, through a different lens, from a private sector, but I knew my, I knew, I knew my predecessor in this role, and, you know, and I knew quite a lot of the challenges, but also I feel when I'm sitting and dealing with operators every day, I feel I've got a bit of me sitting in their seat, I mean,

I'm sure some of them would disagree, but, I, I'd really try and put my, my My feet in both camps, you know, and I think that's the key of, of the relationship. And I think it goes really nicely back to what I talked about at the start. It's all about partnership. Yes, there'll be times when we disagree. Yes, there'll be times when things don't go right, but we always seem to resolve it.

And we always do, because we're all out there to do the right thing for whoever we've, not only whoever for London. And I think that, that's something that is, is, comes right back to. doing the right thing under round, doing the right thing for our, for our customers. And it, it, it's really the essence of TFL and anybody works with or for it. I love your enthusiasm, Phil, for improving service operations.

So many times we get caught up in the bigger pictures of, you know, funding and, you know, policy when it comes to decarbonization, etc. But at the core of it, it's our customer, which is what I always try to keep in mind. I had a similar role to you in Washington, D. C. when I worked for an operator, a contractor, running their paratransit service.

For people with disabilities, and my focus was on getting, hitting that 92 percent on time performance, hitting, you know, hitting the, lowering the numbers of preventable accidents per 100, 000 miles, and, learning the levers to push forward. to make that happen. It's really not always science. Some of it is art, learning and pulling it all together and realizing that if we provide, improved the, if these statistics go up, they're not just numbers, man.

They're improvement in people's daily life. If, if a passenger doesn't have to wait an extra six minutes out in the heat at a bus stop or in the rain because I Phil Gerhardt have been able to adjust some things in the schedule to make it more reliable for them. That's where it's at, isn't it? Yeah. And this is exactly it. These are, these are real life dec real life decisions read to, you know, real life outcomes. You're right.

And there's so much can be done around customer information, and it's not just a schedule. It's about how we, how we improve, telling, telling customers when things go wrong and, and so we can plan their journeys. And, and you're right, it's not just the, it's not just what the data's showing. It's not, it, it, it's that.

It's that understanding of a real life experience and, I always use the example of, of Mrs. Miggins wanting to go and get her shopping, you know, she, she, she waits for the same bus every day, and it doesn't turn up one day and she does, she can't get her shopping. she, you know, and she, she's, she, it's changed her whole life upside down. It's her, it's her, it's her weekly trip. She, she, it's the same driver.

We have routes out on the outskirts of London where, you know, it's usually the same driver regularly and, and it becomes a bigger piece. It becomes those drivers also. They know the people. They go, oh, we've had it before where drivers have have noticed that somebody hasn't been at a bus stop and they, they check in, check in to check out the bus again. And that's what it's about. It's about the bigger, the bigger kind of existential what we're here to do to support.

Support London and, and, and more broadly the UK and I guess, I guess the world as well, but it's, and that for me is what, if I'm honest, in the past what got me up was to deliver great performance and reliability. What gets me up now is not, is to do that, but also to serve customers, to get, to get these real life experiences heard and, yeah, we get stuff wrong, of course we do, like any organisation, but, so we listen. And we actually learn from them.

I was always taught the devils in detail and I will, my, the best thing I was ever taught was Areva. And again, by my manager at the time, a gentleman called Peter Batty. He always said to me, and I didn't need to be told this, you can't run a transport company from behind the desk. I think, I think any of, any of your listeners will know that.

And I, I think getting out and speaking to drivers and I, you know, I try and do it and I don't do as much as I should do now because I'm very office based, but I try and get out. I try and work at a control center. I'll phone up one of the operators and say, can I just come and spend some time in your control ? Because for me, it's getting back to my roots.

Tell me about the super loop. and, and what that is, that circles the city, right? It's suburb to suburb transportation? Yeah, so it's, it's, it's a, it's a kind of circular outer, outer London circle of bus, express bus routes. With, with, with a, with a few express routes that intersect it. so kind of, and go straight into centre. So they're part of the Superlute family. but if, but, Obviously you're not specifically as part of the loop.

So it's the concept that if you're in the outskirts of the city and you want to go to another part of the outskirts of the city, you don't have to necessarily go downtown, switch buses, and come back out. You can just circle the city, right? Yeah, so that's one element of it. and the other, the other thing around Superloop, the kind of biggest thing for us is it links up some really key nodes, particularly around the Elizabeth Line, around National Rail Stations. So it gets people.

Okay, it's feeder service. Yeah, so they're not only a feeder services, but they're also express services going between key, key conurbations within London as well. So they serve dual purposes, and also to support what we want, bigger bus patronage, bigger public transport patronage across London, and to support those as alternatives to car.

because per unit area, buses carry far more passengers and cars and we want to make, make using bus and using public transport in London attractive, attractive option to everybody. particularly, you know, with those who, who, who may not want to drive and may not be able to drive in London or for whatever reason So we've had express bus routes in, in London before. but as of June, 2023, we rolled out, what a what?

We called the Superloop, which is a collection of, orbital bus routes that all join up. Express bus routes, some parallel existing routes, some are new routes, and also we've also got a few which intersect that which, I think route SL8, BSL6, and soon to be the SL4 as soon as the Seal of the Town tunnel opens. We'll be running buses, 32 buses an hour, through the Silvertown Tunnel with the SL4 and 129. so those intersect the kind of loop.

I'd encourage listeners to have a Google of it and you'll see this lovely schematic diagram of how it all works. And they're, kind of in a state of, of, express bus services. So, The key thing about ExpressBus bus services are they need to be express. Yeah, tell me what that means. Yeah, exactly. And so that is giving them the gold standard treatment. So we try and give all routes that, but we need to give them enhanced bus priority measures.

The schedules need a huge, a huge kind of focus to make sure they're set up to deliver. Constant review. The drivers need to be aware in terms of what's expected of them, you know, into a, into a kind of degree of detail. And the other thing we do as well, which is really interesting, if it's express bus route, and it's limited stop as well, Well, do they have to follow a set route every time? Can we not have a selection of routes they can follow as long as they don't miss out bus stops?

So, they go down one road and it's, and it's, and it's, there's a lot of traffic and the bus gets stuck. Well, why did they have to follow that route? Is there another route they could have done? and how we map that with our customer information. So, we've been doing loads of work on that. How often do express buses run? What's the headways in between them? Why are they called express? So, it really depends on the routes themselves.

So, we've got, they're all, they're all high frequency, some of them are approximately 15 minutes, some are less, but they're usually on headways of approximately 10 to 12 minutes. We do have a low frequency one, which is the SL6, which actually is done on a clock face, but that's 10 trips, each direction, peak, AM, peak, and BMP, just to get commuters in. It goes fast from a place, called West Norwood, and it gets, gets them straight into, into the heart of London.

So, that's on low frequency, but the rest of them are purely managed on headway, and the off, the, the operators themselves who run them, again, have had that, that, that kind of key focus around the super loop have to be expressed. So we don't want behaviors of what we call locally in, in London, I'm not sure what it's called termed elsewhere in the world, but we call it, they call it scratching, which is, I'm not sure, which is bad.

is buses regulating at stops for periods of time which to even out the slack in in the schedule we don't want that because it's a it's not very express and b you know it doesn't help journey times and we're all about improving journey times for people in london getting bus speeds to where we need to be and getting people to where they need to go so we we We work the operators.

I've talked earlier about how we work with them, work with them on specific routes, but these routes have got a constant review. I'm doing work on one at the minute, particularly about how we can redistribute time on the schedule. it's been, been in about, I think it's one that's been about three to six months now. So I really want to get underneath that. And of course we, you know, we report publicly on our performances of those routes.

So for more, from a personal perspective and from pride, I've got to have these, got to have these routes delivering what they need to deliver.

Give us one or two more, successful stories of changes that you have implemented in the bus service to improve performance. So I've got a great one. It is a super loop one, but it is a really great, great case study, so I'm gonna use it. that's great if you allow me, but Yeah, go ahead. Let's do it. But yeah, so, so, the SL seven, which is goes, it goes from CRO to, to, Heathrow Airport. It's, it's one of our, it's one of our. Our busiest, busiest, kind of superlute routes.

we've recently increased the frequency on that. but one of the things which was happening with the SL7 was it was actually being monitored low frequency, because whilst it's 15 minutes, it technically counts as a low frequency service. But of course, because it's an express bus route, There's limited bus stops on the route, which means that the timing points, which is where we take the, the reliability measures, that they're few and far between.

So it's quite a big gap between the, the, the penultimate one and Heathrow Airport. So if you get in your plane and you're flying to, see Paul Comfort in Maryland, then the last thing you want to do is, Be late for your plane because your bus is being held at a stop to make sure it's on time before it departs. So what we looked at was how we monitor that route and we decided we'd do a trial of the operator, can we monitor that high frequency?

we had to do it, there's some real challenges around that because if you move it from a clock face timetable and put it on a headway, the certainty of when buses are going to arrive obviously disappears. And of course, where does that say in the evening, particularly around people, 15 minutes is a long time to wait at a bus stop, particularly when I've been talking about women's safety and other items. So, so, from a monitoring perspective, we thought, let's try that. We spoke to the operator.

They were really keen to do this. you know, explore that. and we, and we, we've done it. It's worked really well.

Reliability's improved, speeds have improved, we haven't had, we haven't had scratching or regulating at the last stop, and we've still advertised on timetables, a lot of deliberation on how we put the timetable out, because we wanted to make sure that there was still certainty for those early and late journeys, particularly there's obviously a lot of workers who want to get to Heathrow, in addition to people flying, so, and for me, that's one of,

one of, A, timely, and B, given it's an express loop, one of my, it wasn't me, it was a team effort, but one of our big successes, because we can see, it's on paper, the reliability improvements, and we're getting the patches increased as we want to, so it's how can we do, what I term here, the super loop treatment, to other routes in London, how we can learn, and I think that's probably Even bigger achievement for me, always learning. We always like to learn. There's loads to get at.

Well, Phil, that's a, that's a great, example, specific example of what we're doing to improve performance.

I know we could talk for another hour, but thank you for taking the time today to share with us, the role of, the Bus Performance Improvement Office, the bus performance team there at TFL. Thanks, Thanks again. Real pleasure to come on and, yeah, all the best. I'm sure we'll speak soon.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Transit Unplugged. Hi, I'm Tris Hussey editor of the podcast, and I'd like to thank our guests, Phil Gerhardt for being on the show. Coming up next week on the show, we have a special episode we've done in conjunction with Uber Transit.

Paul will be talking with Bonnie Epstein of PSTA, Carlos Cruz Casas of Miami Dade County, and Robert Betts of Marin County, talking about how TNCs like Uber have helped them expand their service offerings with micro transit that help shift workers. The disabled and the elderly. Transit Unplugged is brought to you by Modaxo. At Modaxo we're passionate about moving the world's people and at Transit Unplugged, we're passionate about telling those stories.

So until next week, ride safe and ride happy.