¶ Introduction to Emily Yates and SEPTA Innovations
Should passengers on public transportation have to fold up their stroller? We'll ask Emily Yates today. Emily is the Chief Innovation Officer for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority or SEPTA, the public transit system in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the fifth largest transit system in America. I'm Paul Comfort and this is Transit Unplugged.
¶ Driving Innovation at SEPTA: A Deep Dive
Today we dive in with Emily in a description of all the interesting innovations she's bringing to the transit agency, her and her team. She leads the Office of Innovation, which focuses on driving innovative initiatives through internal and external partnerships and collaboration there at SEPTA.
In addition to growing a culture of innovation, the Office of Innovation works to incorporate sustainability principles and data driven decision making into all the aspects of SEPTA's efforts to become a lifestyle transit network. Prior to this role, she was the smart city director for the City of Philadelphia, and Emily has held a variety of positions in Europe and North America. including urban planning positions with the District of Columbia, the City of Cleveland.
She's worked in Germany, has a Bachelor of Science in Landscape and Architecture from Arizona State University. And today we dive into a number of specific innovations they're doing at SEPTA, which I think you'll be interested in, including the one I just mentioned, making some changes and even getting new buses that'll better fit strollers and shopping carts to allow passengers to ride.
She said that two thirds of their passengers are women, and they want to make sure they make changes to their policies to better allow them to go about their daily lives using public transportation. They're also adding up to 700 new e ink real time bus monitors at bus stops. We're going to dive into that and talk about the process of driving innovation at a large agency like that. The different steps they have to go through to push it through the system.
The approval process is up to the Board of Directors. We also talk about ways to increase safety for the passengers, as well as the operators, including deploying AI to make their stations safer, operator support for mental health and training, and, sustainability, micromobility, their sustainability playbook, and what they're doing about zero emission buses. Are they moving toward battery or hydrogen fuel cells? Or both.
We'll tell you if you stay to the end, you'll hear all about it on the ZEBs. That's on this episode of Transit Unplugged. Emily, great to have you with us today on Transit Unplugged.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk with you.
You're doing so many great things there at SEPTA that we want to talk about today. and I think I'd like to set it up first off to talk about, , your agency itself a little bit. Tell me about the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, SEPTA, in Philadelphia. Just some general numbers and statistics.
Sure. So we are the fifth largest transportation authority in the U. S. We cover seven modes of transportation, which is the most next to, MBTA out of Boston where they have ferries. and we service, the four surrounding counties, including the County of Philadelphia, the City of Philadelphia, as well as connecting to transit in New Jersey and Delaware. Southeastern Pennsylvania is the hub, the economic hub for the state. So what we do is really important. We have over 9, 000 employees.
here at SEPTA and provide, our latest is 700, 000, unlinked trips per day. So we are, back to 70 percent recovery, post COVID, which we're really excited about and just recently hit.
That's great. And your CEO, Leslie is, has been on our podcast before and on some of our big events. So, we really appreciate your connection to Transit Unplugged.
Absolutely.
Yeah. And as I mentioned off, off camera, we also recently had a focus on your SCOPE program, and I know we're going to talk a little about your role with that today as well. So, thanks for being with us today. Tell us about your role in the organization and where you sit in the organization.
Sure. So as chief innovation officer, I oversee the office of innovation, which I would say is probably not a typical office of innovation. We cover a lot of topics here. so in addition to having an innovation vertical where we really work to quickly pilot innovative technologies, and use of data. and then rapidly scale it up. We also look at data policy and analytics, and really focus on things like ridership numbers, and helping support making data informed decisions here at SEPTA.
And then I also oversee sustainability. where we're looking at things like, how can we increase our contribution for renewable energy to the grid, but also how can we become more sustainable as a transportation authority, both in the buildings that we build, in our depots, and also the vehicles that we put out into communities.
That's good. You know, I don't know if you know, but that's how, when I was CEO in Baltimore, that's how I set up our Chief Innovation Officer too. I put him over the Office of Performance Metrics. I put that person as the CIO. Because I think that our innovations need to be data driven. and they can't just be some great pie in the sky idea. And if somebody doesn't have other responsibilities under them, I think the data should always be driving our innovation.
I mean, do you, does that make sense to you?
A hundred percent. I couldn't agree with you more. I do think having data within the innovation department is critical. I also think it helps drive creative ways of using data, right? We have a ton of it. how can we create better, more informative data sets that really help us, be more responsible spenders of our taxpayer dollars, but also how can we start to think creatively, about how that data can form, the ways that we provide services to our riders. So, couldn't agree more
¶ Enhancing Rider Experience with Real-Time Data and Accessibility
. Well,
that's a great segue, I think, to the first topic I wanted to talk about, which is how you're using, providing better data to customers to give them a better experience on the vehicle. As we know, you know, I don't even want to say the word post, it starts with C O V, so I won't say it because we're trying to get away from that. But anyway, in this new era of transportation, there really is a renewed focus on the customer. There's new ridership patterns, and people have other options.
And so, making sure that riders have, the correct, accurate information about when the bus is going to come is key, right?
Absolutely. I don't like to use post COVID either, but I'm going to be risky and throw it out. Um, we actually launched our SEPTA forward strategic plan early on in COVID, which helped us pivot from a nine to five commuter service to really focusing on being the lifestyle transit network that we want to be, which means we want to be the mode of transportation.
For all of our riders, whether it's going to work or to doctor's appointments or the grocery store or whatever, and providing real time data and key information to them about detours, because there's always detours, right? There's always some kind of construction going on, especially here in Philadelphia. and.
It's just, it's critical in order to get our ridership back up, but it's also important, you know, we've done a lot of studies on things like perception of safety in our system, specifically with relation to gender, fair portion of our riders, in fact, two thirds of our riders are women who, ride our system and do multiple stops, oftentimes with children, and if we don't provide them with correct real time data, it can have a serious effect on their
feelings of safety and might make them choose another mode of transit, rather than riding public transit.
That's great. So tell us some of the specifics of what you're doing with your, you know, e ink schedules and adding, the ability to not fold up your stroller, et cetera, on the bus. Walk us through those. Those are really interesting innovations.
Sure. so our first one is, is I'm really excited. we just hired an innovation manager about six months ago and she got to work on issuing an RFP and a really quick amount of time for E Ink screens. And so as part of our bus revolution strategy, which is the first time in 60 years that we've evaluated all of our bus routes for efficiency and service compatibility. we are going to be deploying E Ink screens, which is basically like a Kindle. but their solar power is what we're hoping.
So we don't want to have to deal with, connecting to the power, in the ground. We want really quick deployment. And basically what it'll do is a screen that will update our riders with real time locational information. So if there are delays on our line, We can provide that to them, as well as detours and whatnot. So, just being able to provide real time data at bus stops, which are historically, you know, just a seat or even just a street pole that has, you know, this is where our bus stop is.
We'll be able to provide much better information to them, regardless of their ability to utilize technology. So, that's really exciting.
How many of those are you planning to deploy?
Initially in the pilot, we're looking to deploy a hundred. So we're looking to do some comparison because we've done kind of a landscape analysis and some people have had a great, experience with them. Some people haven't, and we want to understand how the solar aspect of it works, in our urban canyons here in Philly. so we'll deploy a hundred for a couple of months and, you know, make sure we're tracking metrics on that.
And then we are looking to scale it up to 700, within the next year or two. Okay, so it'll be a quick pilot. and then with regards to our micromobility strategy, which we launched last year, it's really looking at how we can connect folks better to our system. So we recognize that a lot of people are riding bikes, riding the e scooters that are darting down the street.
and we didn't really have clear guidance about how those, how Modes connect to our, transit and what's the best way to utilize them. we also, again, going back to the fact that women are a large portion of our ridership, recognize that historically we've asked people to close up their strollers, and take the children out of them and board our buses, as a means of safety.
We now know that's not necessarily critical, and so we've, made the recommendation that strollers do not have to be closed up if space allows. Right? That's the most important thing is we know that our buses are crowded and we want to maintain safety on them. And if it's super crowded, you do have to close your stroller, but that's at the discretion of our operators. but we've also, gone as far as to procure new buses, with space for strollers now.
So we're doing a seating reconfiguration that allows for, a stroller to be stored. open. And we hope that this really helps make it easier for our riders to ride our system and not have to, you know, lug a toddler, a baby, and a stroller onto a bus, which is, as a mother, I've experienced that and can be quite challenging.
Yeah, that's great. And shopping carts, anything with those?
Shopping carts are included. So, you know, if a person is coming on with their heavy shopping cart, they are not required to offload the groceries or whatever is in it and close it up. So really, again, just meeting people where they're at.
That's great. And you mentioned tying in microtransit and sustainability with the scooters and all that. what exactly are you doing there?
There's concerns around e vehicles on our system in terms of safety, the batteries are a huge component of concern, not necessarily the new batteries, but the ones that have been retrofitted or updated, Those tend to have a higher rate of fire. And as we know with lithium batteries, they can be hard to put out. So we just wanted to provide guidance around when we're allowing those on our system, how we're allowing them, and really just kind of be clearer with our guidance on
those.
¶ Navigating the Approval Process for New Initiatives
Let's talk a process question if we could, and that is, so your office will analyze, for instance, you analyze, let's use this one as an example, two thirds of our riders are women, we know that they sometimes have children with them, a lot of times have children with them, and we're going to make a recommendation that they not be required to fold up their stroller. Walk me through the process of how something like that gets approved. So you have a recommendation and then what happens?
so we submitted, we went to the board for, well, I would say, first of all, the important thing is to get the internal buy in. And so, Ann Tiska, my sustainability manager who ran the project, did a lot of internal meetings. We worked with our vehicle and engineering folks on, the bus layout. We worked with, our operators to make sure that they understood the new policy so that they weren't, issuing guidance in contrast to what the policy says. We updated all of our websites.
to reflect this new policy change and made sure that it was coordinated across all forms of communication. And we ultimately took it to our board and, presented it to them and got their support. But it was just a lot of internal buy in, and making sure that the communication was, organization wide in order for it to be fully implemented. And now we're working on procuring the buses with the spaces, making sure that the signage internally is very clear about these are spaces for strollers.
or carts, and, you know, working on announcements to let our riders know this update.
And would you be able to give us like a estimated timeline from the time you all thought of the idea through working it out, getting Leslie's approval, and then taking it to the board? How long does something like that take?
I would say it was about a year or so.
That's great. And I really appreciate you walking us through the steps because, you I don't want people to think that innovation is easy. Change is never easy. even something that makes sense to a lot of people, Oh yeah, you know, this makes sense. We want to serve, put our customers first. The process you go through involves a lot of stakeholders, doesn't it?
100%. And I think, you know, I always joke that you don't go into innovation to make friends, right? Because you're expecting change and people are going to be, annoyed with you because what, what's been happening has been working. and that's kind of a sentiment we have here at SEPTA.
Is, you know, what we had in place was working, from perception, but what we knew from looking at surveys and feedback, and recognizing that in this shift from commuters to lifestyle network, we really need to focus on those who were riding our system a lot, and this is just another way that we could, meet some of our critical riders, where they're at, and, you know, You know, it was a lot of culture change and getting kind of, okay, we've seen this happen elsewhere.
We're not, leading in this space, right? We're not the first to try this. So we know that it's safety, it complies with FTA, requirements and whatnot. It's just, we've got to change the way we think about who our riders are.
¶ Focusing on Operator Safety and Well-being
Now let's take a shift if we can from, one group of customers, which is your passengers, to another internal group of customers, which are your operators, your fixed route bus operators, your rail operators, your paratransit drivers, operator safety and well being, is critical. a lot of focus has been paid to, You know, mental health , but there's also the actual physical health of our operators, and you're taking action there. Tell us about that, Emily.
Yeah, the unfortunate part of this that drives a lot of this conversation around, say, our operators mental health is that they experience some traumatic events while they're providing services. Philly is no stranger, the city of Philadelphia is no stranger to violence on our streets, as any city really is, any large city, right?
and so, our drivers have experienced trauma and Innovation saw an opportunity, to step in and say, you know, is there an opportunity to address some of the concerns around our operators' mental health? We already have a, somewhat of a process in place, but as is pretty standard, I would say. It's not a standard operating procedure, right? We have support, but what is the actual process?
And so, Innovation wants to step in, and we've had a few handful of conversations around how can we use technology to help address this. Some of the issues are around things like, the belief that some operators feel that they don't need therapy, or they don't need to talk to somebody after experiencing a traumatic event. but then a few days later, they'll say, you know, I actually, I can't drive right now. I'm really upset from what I witnessed the other day.
And so can we insert some sort of innovation, whether it's on call, therapy, is it, providing a special, room where there's privacy. you know, is it formalizing a standard, operating procedure around this? But, it's really important to us that our operators feel that they're supported in any and all aspects of their work. and this is just one that, you know, is really prevalent right now due to just what we're experiencing on the streets and around our services.
what about overall physical, safety? I mean, there's been a rash of. violence against drivers, or potential violence against operators in a lot of cities across the country. What are you doing at SEPTA to address that with cameras, AI, et cetera?
So we're deploying, some technology in our stations. I'm working closely with the police department. actually my team is working closely with the police department and SCOPE, which is our, the service we provide to individuals that experience homelessness or drug addiction, within our system. And we're deploying technology onto our cameras, which are one of our best assets. We have over 3, 000 cameras alone on our subway and elevated system.
So our, Broad Street line and our market Frankfurt line, we tested a pilot recently for about a year. It was looking at gunshot detection or weapons detection, rather, sorry, not gunshot detection. and we really, it was an R& D partnership because the company we were partnering with had never really deployed at a transportation. system. They had deployed in schools and been really successful. They were a local organization.
and so we tested it on our infrastructure, which consisted of analog and digital cameras, right? We have some legacy infrastructure that we're working with and trying to upgrade, but at the time we had about 50 50 in terms of cameras. we deployed it on 300 cameras in 10 stations. and. Just experience challenges both with the algorithm itself. and then also our situation. as you know, Paul, transportation stations below ground can often be a little bit dark.
it can be a little bit crowded and those make it really hard to do things like weapons detection. and so we. ended that pilot and determined that it wasn't in the best interest to scale it up further given some of the constraints that we had experienced, but we're still committed to identifying, a technology solution. So we're looking at other algorithms that can work given our, given what we learned from that pilot.
you know, maybe it's not weapons detection, but it's better tracking individuals through our system once an event has happened. So we know where somebody came in, where somebody left, and we can better support the City of Philadelphia Police in. capturing the individual who committed a crime on our system. so we're doing that. I think also is important, is we're partnering with New Flyer, our vehicles team.
I can't claim this as innovation, but I think it's important to share that we're looking at ballistics, for, you know, For protecting our drivers, you know, making sure that they're protected if some individual chooses to bring a weapon on our vehicles, and, you know, making sure that we're addressing their concerns. This is what they've asked us to look into. And so we're partnering with New Flyer to explore this because it's never been done before.
Wow, that's interesting.
¶ The Future of Transit: Zero Emission Buses and Workforce Development
And then finally, speaking about vehicles, let's move into zero emission buses. This is a hot topic this spring. It's probably the hottest topic of discussion among executives of transit agencies. What are you all doing there at SEPTA in Philadelphia?
Yeah, so we're in the exact same boat. you know, I think the rate of innovation that's happening, especially with this massive infusion of funds from the federal government is really going to change the landscape of zero emission buses. Everybody that I'm aware of has a mandate to transition their fleet. We're committed to transitioning to a fully zero emission fleet by 2040, which, you know, is 16 years away, but in transportation authority time, that's not too far.
No, because you have 12 years of a life cycle of a bus, which means you have to get started within a few years.
Exactly, and we were early adopters. We were really committed, you know, we didn't commit to CNG, that didn't make sense for us as a transportation authority, but we did purchase 25 battery electric vehicles in 2016, battery electric buses rather, and we were, you know, a little bit, bitten on that in terms of we had the buses operating for a short period of time before we had to remove them from service and haven't been able to bring them back into service.
and so now what we're looking at is, lessons learned from that. it hasn't completely removed us from the battery electric space, largely because there has been so much innovation, but it has made us look more deeply at what buses make the most sense for us. We're pretty confident that it will be a mixed fleet because of the variety of scales. Scale in terms of the routes we serve, right? We have very short routes here in the City of Philadelphia.
But then we also drive on the highway and connect to our suburbs. And so those are longer routes. And we, you know, we think that maybe our shorter routes will be better suited for battery electric, where we can do on route charging, and the longer routes might be more, better, for fuel cell buses, where we think that the long range will help us, right? But there's a lot of proving that we have to do. We don't know a lot of, we always say we don't know what we don't know.
the TVMs say that buses, hydrogen buses can get 300 miles per hour and that, you know, fueling is very similar to our diesel hybrid. but we don't know yet because we haven't tested out in our local context. We're going to be implementing a variety of pilots, which I'm really excited for. We've got, we have 10 fuel cell hydrogen buses coming to us, in early fall, late summer. We have a mobile fueling station. As well, and we're really excited to just see what that means.
we're going to do 10 battery electric buses as well, so we can do more of an apples to apples in terms of new vehicle comparison.
We're going to get, 5 fuel cell and 5, battery electric articulated buses or 60 footers as well to just really understand what, the spatial demands of what those are, operationally, if they work as promised, as marketed, and the project I'm really excited for, because I think it's a great tool to have in our zero emission transition toolkit, is a pilot we're doing to transition 12 of our, diesel hybrid buses from 2018, into battery electric.
So we're partnering with the company to, develop battery electric kits and then have our mechanics install those kits. And hopefully in time for the World Cup in 2026, it's coming to Philadelphia, But this is a lower cost way of transitioning fleets.
And I, you know, we don't know yet again, what we don't know, but, looking at the bus market in terms of supply chain challenges, TVMs that are available or, you know, are able to accept federal dollars and provide us with battery electric or fuel cell buses is a smaller group now.
So we just anticipate that there's going to be a little bit of delay as the demand increases for these vehicles and being able to transition some of our vehicles at the vehicle overhaul point, is really exciting for us to test out. And so we're, we've committed to doing 12 vehicles. to see if this is something that works for us. The great thing too is that once we develop the battery electric kit, it's really easy to develop a fuel cell kit, right?
Because it's just adding the propulsion component onto the battery electric. should it be successful, look at how we can do, fuel cell as well. The other exciting thing, you can tell I'm excited because I just can't stop talking about it, is that there's an economic development component to it, right? The company is looking to locate their headquarters here in Philadelphia.
We'd love to become a hub for this kind of, work where, you know, MTA and WMATA bring their buses up here and we can help them transition. But there's also a workforce development component. And that's something that we're looking at in the ZEB space as well as how do we train our mechanics, who are amazing. I, like, one of my favorite things is to go out to our facility in Barrage and just see all that we can do with our buses. You know, you talked about a 12 year lifespan.
We actually are able to keep our buses operating for 15 years, because of the great work that our mechanics do here. and this, you know, having them install the battery electric kit will train them on how to maintain and better understand how a battery electric bus works. So there's lots of benefits, to that pilot as well. And, you know, we're looking to have, to make data informed decisions about what the mix of our fleet is.
in 2026, hopefully, so we can start to procure, vehicles and kind of queue those up to, to support the transition.
And about how many buses, SEPTA operates?
We do, we operate over 1, 300.
Okay, yeah, big fleet, very big. Big,
Very big fleet. Buses are our biggest, you know, are 50 percent of our rides on a given
weekday. Well, Emily, this is fascinating to see all the things you're working on there. You've got a full plate. How many staff do you have to help you with this?
I have nine. Well, actually, my team just grew because we added traffic checkers to the data program. So, 12 on my team. Very good. They're all very passionate and good collaborators because this requires more than my team. I think that's the exciting part is innovation is collaboration and couldn't do this without our colleagues across the organization.
That's great. Any final closing thoughts you want to share about innovation in general or where you think the industry is going?
I just think that there's. You know, with the zero emission buses and vehicles coming out, with AI and chat GPT and the language learning models, there's so much opportunity to, address a lot of the challenges that we're seeing coming down the pipeline in terms of workforce challenges. In terms of how do we create more efficiencies with limited budgets and maybe not the ridership that we want, that is just a really exciting space to be in.
you know, innovation is something that's critical to every transportation authority in my mind. and I'm excited to stay in contact with you, but also to see what my peers are doing and that can benefit SEPTA as well.
Very good. We wish you all the best as you continue to innovate in one of the nation's largest transit systems.
Thank you so much.
¶ Coming up next week on Transit Unplugged
This is Tris Hussey editor of the transit unplugged podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode with our special guest. Emily Yates. Now coming up next week on the show, we're celebrating the release of Paul's latest book. The new future of public transportation. We have interviews with two of the contributors from the book Dr. Karen Philbrick Executive Director of the Mineta Transportation Institute.
And Paige Malott who is a researcher on high-speed rail for the international union of railways. And if you have a question for Paul about public transportation, you can email him at Paul Comfort at transit unplugged.com and ask him. He'll read it and he may even read and answer your question on this podcast in the future. 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.