¶ Introduction from Tris Hussey, Editor Transit Unplugged
. Tris Hussey: This is Transit Unplugged. I'm Tris, Hussey, editor of Transit Unplugged. And welcome to our transit leaders round table recorded live at TripSpark Ignite in Nashville, Tennessee. Joining Paul on stage for this transit leaders round table are Pam Shepherd, Executive Director, Federated Transportation Services of the Bluegrass in Lexington, Kentucky. Ryan Landers General Manager. Lawton Area Transit in Lawton, Oklahoma.
Randy Anderson Operations IT Systems Administrator at City Bus, Greater Lafayette Public Transit in Lafayette, Indiana. And Matt Maier Director of Operations at LakeTran Lake County, Ohio. In this dynamic conversation. Paul and these leaders talk about the major challenges facing public transit in North America and around the world. Getting enough people. Cyber attacks, getting enough buses and funding.
And in this conversation, these leaders share what they've been doing to overcome these challenges and keep their operations running better than ever. Hope you enjoy this episode and stay tuned to the end for what's coming up next week on Transit Unplugged.
¶ Transit Leader Roundtable at TripSpark Ignite
Today we're going to do a Transit Unplugged CEO Roundtable. I'm excited to bring you basically some insights from transit leaders that work with TripSpark, this is going to be a fun, a fun event, I think. Why don't we invite our four panelists up? And, why don't you all give them a round of applause as they come up? Basically what we do is this is a conversation with four leaders. And it's an opportunity for us to share about, not just the trends.
But how they are specifically affecting transit agencies, it's not the trends, it's the trends down to specific agencies. So I love this conversation we do here. and I'm just going to.
¶ Introducing the Panelists: Leaders in Transit
Introduce them in the order that, I, I wrote them down. They're not sitting in the, in this order. But Matt Meier from Lake Tran Cleveland, Director of Operations. Give him a wave. Randy Anderson from Citibus, Greater Lafayette, Ops and IT Administrator. My friend, Pam Shepherd, who's Executive Director of, I love this name, Federated Transportation Services of the Bluegrass in Lexington, Kentucky. And, Ryan Landers, who's general manager of, Lake Tran Area Transit in Lawton, Oklahoma.
All right, you ready for this? It's gonna be fun. Let's dive in right away.
¶ Tackling Transit Challenges: From Driver Shortages to Public Amenities
Let's just go into what are your challenges. Tell us about, you know, your one or two biggest challenges in your transit agency. We'll start with you, Pam. We're going to move down this way, and then we'll come back to you. what's your one or two biggest challenges, and what are you doing about them? What can we learn from? What's your tried, maybe that didn't work, tried that did work?
Well, I mean, I think everyone We never dealt with the deal of trying to get vehicles. We dealt with not having chips. We didn't have seats. Every time that you go out for, to get a bus, there'd be something else going on. And so it seems like, that that's looking a little bit better. I mean, we just, our state just went out for a new bid and it's, it's out there and people are being able to order off of it. I actually was able to order some buses and I got some in.
so it, that part of it's looking a little better, but the thing about it is we are always going to be behind because we've been behind for years and so you're trying to catch up. Since COVID, you know, everything went off for production and then Ford Motor Company made a change in what they were doing and so they were down that year, so it just. Over and over and over. So, and then of course the other issue is driver shortages. And this was something we talked about when we first got together.
It was really, really strange because I spent Thousands and thousands and tens and thousands of dollars on advertising. Every type of advertising I could think about, you know, spend all the money with Indeed and everything else. Anytime anyone would tell me something, I would go out and try to figure out how to do that. Well, it's kind of funny is that probably in the last three months I've gotten more applications with actually no advertising except on the back of the bus. I have.
These, you know, just I had them made up at a printer and I've just had them put on their vinyl onto the back of the bus and when my price went, you know, when I increased the My employment on my pay, I put an X through it and put another one showing that we were increasing price, that we're going to pay our employees, and that actually in a few, I also got yard signs, and I had them now, you can't put yard signs everywhere that you want to, like election signs, so I put them
in front of my building, and I gave them to some of my drivers, and they actually put them in their yards in their own homes, so that kind of took them around town and different places we were, so actually, I've gotten more, people applying just off of the simple stuff. So, I mean, you know, I listen to everybody and I just try to do anything. So that's just kind of what came out.
I love that. Don't y'all love that? Alright, Matt, go ahead, buddy.
Alright, so we also have challenges hiring as well. Mostly drivers and mechanics. Mechanics has really been the, huge problem for us. for drivers, we actually went to a hiring event type of situation where anybody who showed up to the hiring event, they got a interview, no matter what. that actually helped quite a bit. You know, we had, obviously, we weren't scheduling interviews for people who weren't showing up. I'm sure that that's happened to quite a few people here.
but we also, with our mechanics, we partnered with a technical facility very close to us and now we are, we are starting a program where the people that are at the technical facility can actually come to Lake Tran, start working on vehicles and, So, we're going to be putting that into place probably next year. So we're really hoping that that's going to really boost our mechanics.
Pam, I'm gonna use your example as I start, you know, I talk every week around the world, different places. That's a great, I never thought about yard signs. An actual campaign, you know, like you're, that's a great idea. And have your drivers put them in the yard, that's awesome. All right, thanks. Go ahead, you have one more?
I do have one more, actually.
¶ Innovative Solutions and Success Stories in Transit
We are also starting a thing called FlexDriver. So, a lot of people these days, they kind of want gig work, right? So, what we're doing is we're putting together a program where, you know, a person can choose the day that they want to work. They have to work a four hour shift. And, you know, we train them up, we get them ready to go, and then it allows them flexibility in their schedule. That's the biggest thing for us. And I think that's really going to help.
I love that. I mean, that's what, that's the theory behind Uber, you know, Userve, all these companies.
they get Aunt Susan, who has three hours, when her, you know, when her kid is in daycare, where she can go out and drive, and it's a whole different type of driver than somebody who wants to get in uniform, come in, check in in the morning, you know, are you rested, alert, ready to work, and get their shift work, and go out and drive for eight hours with somebody, you know, watching over their shoulder. It's very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. We had a conversation last night over dinner.
A bunch of us were out and we're like, Where's all, where is everybody? Where's everybody making the money? Where, how come they're not working? So, that's good. I think Suzanne was asking me those questions. Yeah, go ahead, buddy.
Alright, I could probably bore y'all with all the rest of the, I guess problems that we actually have, but one particular area that we had an issue, and it's been probably about eight years going, is public amenities. we do not have an actual transfer center building, and for about eight years now we've been trying to get one. And we've, you know, gone the political route, we've gone the, You know, other agencies, everything. And so, over the past year, we needed to really step up our focus.
And so, we started, among another things, huge marketing campaign. And we started to reach out to, our clients. Our public schools to try to get the youth involved in our, in transit a little bit more. and we started a, ambassadors program. And so we go out and we teach kids, you know, how to ride the bus, get on. And it led to among other things, our very own mascot. We have an actual tire as our mascot and we did buy a mascot costume. Funny enough. I'll show you pictures later.
and that has generated. We need enough support that I guess recently, in the past week, we were finally approved by our city council to go after up to 25 million dollars in a grant application for new building, not just a transfer center, new administration, new maintenance facility, as well as hybrid electric buses. So, we finally, Have, I guess gotten over that mark, and got that public support that we've kind of had.
And you credit your mascot for that? Absolutely. Bouncy? Really? Oh yeah, Bouncy. That's the name of the mouse. Does it look like the Michelin Man or what's it look like? Oh yeah, no, I'll show you pictures, yeah. Alright. Wow, that's amazing, man. That's a great story.
Alright, so kind of three main challenges, as we've heard here on, I mentioned previously, is operator shortage, has, you know, been a challenge for us. We've been able to recruit and have good, you know, new hire classes, but just the attrition rate, of those classes just hasn't, kept up with, what we, what our needs are.
one thing that, our, we have a new CEO, he just came on board about a year and a half ago, but he came from, Ohio was one of the places that he was at, and Ohio, they actually have a lower age of, drivers that they allow, and being that we have Purdue University, and we get a peak when, the university's in session, we, it would be nice to be able to have, kind of, like, surge type drivers, if you will, in the program, so.
But with the state and the MDOT DMV, they limit our age for the bus operators to 21, whereas in Ohio, I believe it's 19, could be 18, I'm not for sure, but anyway, but they would have student drivers would come in to augment the staffing for the operators, so he's starting to work with some of the state entities to figure out how we can potentially drive the age down for the, requirements for the drivers to try to get in that population pool.
And that also helped not having to hire those full time and or part time operators or just be natural through the students. Funding is also an issue. We have not received, I think it's been 10 years since we've had any type of increase from the state. for the state, state level funding.
so we're looking at other revenue streams, advertising, historically we had also included the fares for the students, in our regular fixed city routes and we're entertaining and looking at do we start having passes actually required for the, students for our, our non, campus routes. You and then we are also, we're putting in, we've got an issue with our communication systems. It's, due to height limitations because of our airport. we do not have coverage in our fringe areas.
now we've expanded some of our routes a little bit. We don't have the radio coverage there, so we're looking at a cellular based, radio system. and one reason for that is that we are also mates of a COA as well as a facility relocation We don't know where we're going to end up.
We actually have and own the tower on our building so to kind of help future proof things, so no matter where we end up from a location perspective we will have radio coverage wherever we're at with cellular based because we're you know, you can, as I've told the operations manager, if you wanted to you could dispatch from your cruise ship when you're out in the ocean when you get go cellular base, so
That's interesting, you should check out those Orion dudes, that's what they dO, yeah.
¶ A Day in the Life of Transit Leaders
Let's go back into an interesting question, I always like this one. I mentioned yesterday, I've done, you know, small, medium, and large systems, been in management. And I want to know from you, what is your day like? What's a day like? You know, I know that no day is the same. But give us an approximation. Just a one minute summary of what is a day or a week like in your life. Let's start with you. With me? Alright, why not? Yeah.
So I'm, I'm very project based. A lot of my job is just making sure that all of these projects are moving along. So, my, I'm always buried in spreadsheets, you know, making sure that the timeline is meeting what our expectation is, things like that. You're the director of operations. I should have said that ahead of time, what your title is.
Yes. And, you know, a lot of, you know, overseeing the actual operations as well, you know, I don't, I would say that no day is the same, you know, just like you said. And, you know, most of the time it's following up on projects, you know, following up with people, you know, all that.
Let me ask you, so who do you report to? I, I report to the CEO. And how often do you interact with the CEO on a, you know, on a, not a casual basis, but, you know, a meeting or whatever?
Probably once or twice a day, if not more.
Okay, if you have regular interactions, the CEO wants to know what's happening, you're reporting. Are you giving your CEO written reports, or is it normally verbal?
Just verbal.
Okay, that's interesting. Always interesting to see all the different dynamics, how things work. alright. Let's go with you. Tell me about your life.
well, first thing in the morning, I look at my morning report from my dispatcher telling me who called out that morning, or whatever. So, that's always a lovely email that you get first thing. I would say the first thing I kind of do is, meet with operations, my operations director first, kind of get a, kind of layout. You're general manager, I should have said. I am the general manager, yes, yeah.
and then after that, I'll go in, to maintenance, kind of get a, you know, FYI, here's what's going on. And then, kind of meet with staff. here's what we're doing, and then give them multiple projects to do, so they're loving the fact that I'm not there this week or whatever, so they can just do what they want. they're not, though, so but yeah, it's just not every day is, is the same.
you know, we try to do different things, just to kind of keep moving, but, you know, it's, it's kinda So, it sounds like to me you don't manage from behind your laptop, right? You're getting out walking. As soon as you get there, you're going out in the garage, meeting with everybody? Yep. No, I want to put a face to, to everything. You know, my doors, I hate the cliche, the door's always open, but, it's true. Anyone can come and talk to me. I want to talk to them.
and it's not about transit all the time. I want to talk, you know, did you watch the game last night? no, because I had to get up early. So, yeah, I'm just a personal guy. I don't, you know, I don't like to talk about business all the time. It's fun to talk about business, but people have other lives outside of it.
How many folks do you have That aren't out on the road in your, in your staff, would you say, that you're interacting with when you're there?
Well, we're, we're limited on space right now, hence why we have to get a new operations facility. but, so I actually had moved my HR person into my office, and so I actually have like a colleague there now. so, I would say we probably have about 10, 15 people. That's great. Excellent, thank you. Randy, what's your life like?
So, I'm IT manager and reporting to the CEO, so I start off my day by going into operations and dispatch and confirming that all the technology is working correctly, we don't have any issues with any of the buses. Then I start looking at some of our, more of the IT metrics, let the operations manager and the others deal with their own metrics, but, uh. Take a look at the security analysis. Do we have any threats that have hit us overnight? Is that common? The cyber security thing?
Yeah, I try to do it every day. I mean, are you getting attacked? We see about three to four attacks a week coming in. Nothing serious, but at least they're trying to infiltrate our system. We see more on, we don't host our website. But we see more, things going on with our, our, actually our corporate website, our company website than we do our internal. but we do see, you know, attempts being made. most of them are international.
We've had a couple, that have actually, you know, surface from various states within the U. S. I don't know if it's college students, or what, trying to infiltrate it, but, then look at the antivirus, and make sure we don't see any threats there.
We've become a lot more diligent, in looking at doing our, penetration testing, both external and internal, we've shored things up, I know when we first ran the test, it was surprising, this was a couple years ago, but if you have not done this at your agency, I would strongly encourage you to look at all of your, you know, servers, your workstations, your applications, both internal and external, and make sure that they're, you know, locked down as much as they can be, to
reduce your exposure to, you know, others. Obviously, the risk from, internal operators is just, you know, as high as external threats, but, you know, don't, don't take that lightheartedly. I know that, you know, there's a company in town, just a month or so ago, got hit by a, security threat. So yeah, and then, you know, the rest of the day is just, working with the staff, try to evaluate, go out and look at what tools we use in Microsoft 365. for our office suite.
So, I'm constantly looking at what, what tools are available both for Microsoft 365 and other, companies that can help us, with our daily needs. Be it doing surveys, just day to day tasks that the finance may be doing, so. Yeah. That's interesting.
You know, we, we, Because we are connected, you know, Trapeze, Modaxo, TripSpark, because we're connected to so many agencies across the country, we get notice of when a transit agency is attacked, cyber attack. And Simon, wouldn't you say it's about every week? About every week, somebody, we're getting an email, I can say this one because it was public, Kansas City, my, my buddy there, you know, and all the guys there, they've got a, you know, a hardened system, but ransomware, shutdown.
You know, we're shutting you down unless you pay a ransom, and they didn't pay it, but it was a major deal, I was actually doing a presentation with him, with Frank White, the CEO, at SWATA, the Southwest Transit Association Conference, a month or so ago, and he didn't have his presentation, because his laptop and all his, everything got shut down, you know, and he was like, I have to redo it, so it's a serious threat, I'm serious, like every week, a transit agency gets attacked
in some way, in the country, and there's probably more, like you said, I know that our, Our, our internal infrastructure, the guys that are in charge of IT at our big corporate overlords, not the right word, but you know what I mean, the guys that run all the IT stuff over us, in the, in the cloud, they're saying we're getting, I mean, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pokes from people overseas on our system, I mean, it's a serious deal now, cybersecurity is like,
top of mind for everybody, how many of you saw the AT& T thing, you know, last week, some of the biggest, most secure companies are coming out saying, oops, Sorry, your information got hacked. And we're like, wait a minute, you're a credit reporting agency. You're supposed to be the most You get the drift. So, you gotta make sure that you are, like you said. and any resources that you're aware of that anybody could, could find more information about that at?
I know that, we have, cybersecurity insurance, like, probably most of you may or may not have, but, I know through our cybersecurity, agency that they actually offer, pen testing at no charge, at least, Once a year, it's not the remediation, but at least the pen testing. So, I, you know, encourage you to start with your cybersecurity insurance company, because they obviously want to help you, because they don't want the exposure for you getting hacked and having to pay out, so.
They have a lot of resources available to them, and then, I just, I've got a couple of resources, locally, some, security companies that I, IT security companies that I, you know, reach out to and get some ideas on some things to do, and just a little plug to TripSpark, you heard me, hey, I didn't go into the servers and check things, I can tell you that I've been, I've been at CityBus for seven years, and, and it's been very, Reassuring, the stability that I've seen
in both the hardware and software of West Street, I just, for the most part, I don't have to worry about it, which is a good thing, so I can be confident when I'm coming in at the start of the day, that, you know, 99 times out of 100, I'm not going to be dealing with, a system issue, for operations, so.
Awesome. Thank you. That was a great, great comments. Pam, what do you got? What's a day in your life like? I know you've got stuff all over.
Well, okay. So, I'm the executive director. I report to a board. I'm also the president of the Kentucky Public Transit Association, so I kind of wear some different hats. But one thing is, I tried to make sure that we worked in a building before that was on one floor, and they can attest to this out there, is that if I scream, they all knew it. They could hear me in the building. So when we moved to the new building, I'm upstairs, and so anybody would ever, like, oh gosh, he'd report upstairs.
And so people would freak out, because any time you have to go up the steps to go see Pam, it could be danger city. But anyway. But, so I wanted to make sure that when we move to the larger building that unless I'm under a terrible deadline and I've got something that's really, really due, that I will come down those steps every morning. So when, even at my house in the morning when I get up the first thing I call dispatch.
You know, I just want to know what's going on, if everything, nothing's broke down, you know, everybody's there. And, so, I'm trying not to be micromanager, but I also work for people that you never saw, that you never, but I wanted everybody to see me. I want to be able to interact even when the drivers are coming and going, but.
I get to the office and I work my way down the steps and I go around and I go to different offices and the administrative part, the call center, and I there, I work my way over to dispatch and I go back to the garage and then I've gotten everything and handed it out and gone back upstairs.
But I just want to make sure that my employees and that we're all one big family that they know that I'm there and they can come to me and they know that anything that they need I don't want to ever be off limits just because I'm upstairs. And so that's why I try to make sure everyday that I do that, so they hear me coming, but now they don't hear me as much as when I'm upstairs and I scream. So, but that's kind of not that I wouldn't do that.
But anyway, but I just I think that that's one thing that as an executive when you're over a group of people, and you've got to let Your team and everybody that's in charge, be in charge of their own little nick, but you've got to make sure that everybody has access to you and that you're not untouchable.
To summarize, I think, you know, what we can glean from this is, all of you seem to be very hands on managers. Manage it by walking around, you know, we have time, we have to be in our office, but since we're leading people. And we're managing things in these roles.
¶ Navigating Post-COVID Challenges and Opportunities
You need to make sure that you don't over emphasize just the managing things, but you also have the leading people. I think especially, to be honest with you, in this post COVID world, there needs to be a lot more interpersonal connection, there was a lot of that that was missing from our lives during the pandemic and so maybe even going overboard on connecting with people like you were saying about, you know, how are you doing? What's going on? You know, did you see the game last night?
Whatever, some interpersonal connection, right? With your team so it feels like a family more. yeah. That's good. That's good stuff, man. Okay, so let's go to the next question then. I want to ask you all to give a little bit of a tidbit. I know we're trying to not say post COVID anymore, but we're trying to get past that and get to the new reality.
¶ Ridership and Revenue Trends: A Closer Look
But what's your ridership and revenue trends like? That's, you know, everybody's talking about the fiscal cliff and ridership not back up to where it was, and we're trying to figure out what the new norm is. Just give us real quickly where you're at in all that. Start with you, Randy.
All right, so we're probably about 70, 80 percent back to normal. I, I would say our biggest rise, um, so we have an interlocal agreement with our public schools. So they, they pay us a one time fee each year and every, Lawton public school kid can ride free of charge, as well as the staff and everything like that. And that probably encompasses, I would say about 30 percent of our ridership. And that's probably been our biggest rise.
They pay you?
They pay us, yes.
Based on what? Based on a total flat fee or?
It's just a flat fee. Yeah, okay. Yeah, but that the revenue that we've actually generated for the last, I don't know, four or five years that we've had that service, that's actually helped us with our local match with our vehicles and everything else. that's been a huge, huge help. And so because we were able to save money over the last three years, because we had COVID money and everything, that's why we've been able to apply for the grants.
But yeah, ridership is, is one of those, you know, interesting things. We're about to change our routes, hopefully in the fall. we're actually reducing our routes, but we're making it more efficient, but we're gonna be adding some microtransit.
A lot of people are doing that, by the way. It used to be that bus routes, you know, were the same forever and a day, but people are much more responsive to what's happening now with ridership. They're establishing, okay, if we don't get an average of 10 passengers per hour on this route, I'm not going to run a 30 or 40 foot bus down here on 30 minute headways all day long. So we're going to take it away and through hearings and then. Drop in microtransit as a way to cover it.
And sometimes they're not even providing the microtransit directly, they're contracting out the taxi cabs, or Userv, whatever. You got anything like that happening?
¶ Innovative Solutions for Transit Systems
No, we have TripSpark ah, yay. No, no. so, no, actually we would not be able to do half of the services without Trip Spark, mainly good rides on demand. that was a big selling point. you know, one of the new services that we're wanting to start up is a service onto Fort Sill, where they reached out to us to kind of help out soldier wellness. they were having a lot of DUIs, a lot of wrecks.
a lot of soldiers do not have access to vehicles, and we do not have a. really dynamic Uber Lyft or taxi service So when they reached out, the mayor, command sergeant major had reached out to us. Hey, can you do this? Yes, we can do this. Ironically enough, it was like a week after we signed the contract with TripSpark. you know, we reached out to our account, person, Melody, and, she said, Hey, we have this product, Rides On Demand.
Very next day, I got a demo of, of that product and, you know, I think a week later, did a presentation in front of council. They loved it. Our night owl service. we recently run into a couple of issues, mainly because of vehicles. You know, trying to get the funding for that. But, that's my main project that I have, starting next week, actually.
Very cool. Shout out to Melody. Hey. Alright, tell us about what your revenue and
So, the ridership, as I mentioned before, we're basically at, pre COVID numbers. we had, so month of March, this year we had 435, 000 rides. month of March 2019, we had 465, 000. and you know, right now we are running three blocks short on a daily basis. So, we're about 8 percent down on, the blockage. And then.
we've got, five percent, we're down about five percent on ridership, so we believe that if we actually had the operators and the actual three extra buses en route on a daily basis, We'd be exceeding our 2019 numbers. you know, one thing to talk about the operators, just kind of sidebarring a little bit, but one of our sister agencies down in Bloomington, what they've done is they've taken some of their local funds, for their late night work and sent that over to Uber and Lyft to fund them.
Cut back on the late night service. I think they cut back after 10 p. m. now, where most of the routes are now, augmented with Uber and Lyft type service.
They, they haven't implemented microtransit or rides on demand, but they've decided to go with Uber and Lyft, and they've found, economies of scale on doing that, where it's actually costing less, even though, so they're still charging, the regular fare for the passengers and then they will supplement the extra, through the local funds to Uber and Lyft.
But they're finding the cost to do that is actually less than having that 35, foot bus out on, or 40 foot bus out on the street and paying the operator. So, but, yeah, right now, we're, you know, from a ridership perspective, we're in good shape. How about money? Revenues?
So, revenues, we are, As I mentioned before, state wise, we're looking to get increased at funding, we're flat on revenue right now, and with the cost of, you know, green energy, we're, we've got some hydrogen fuel cell buses coming in, the cost of those vehicles plus the operational fueling cost, we have to find additional streams, so we're looking at, you know, advertising and other methods to help, you know, I'm also trying to figure out, do we look at
an additional, you know, increasing the tax, the local tax rate that we get, you know, is, potentially another stream, but yeah, the revenue is definitely, uh, tight and, we are looking at some shortcomings about two years out, some of the projections right now, so, we've been working to deal with that. All right, Pam, I know you're in a different world because you're Medicaid some, but tell us where you're at.
We're probably back around 85 percent pre COVID. the thing is, I think it's been really difficult is trying to get the amount of money that's being paid to us as brokers and then back to the providers. Because, since COVID, it's been kind of up and down and trying to get a standard. So if you go up here, you go down here, and it's been kind of that way since COVID. So I'm hoping that we can get a more of a flat line on to be able.
So the brokers and the providers and everyone's going to be doing okay. I just think it's been very, very difficult because you get it at one part, And then now your utilization is going up. So when the utilization goes up, then you're needing more money. So then it's like, okay, so we're looking at that.
So I think until we, everyone gets back to 100 percent of where we were before, to be able to totally gauge the amount of money that's going to be put into that, it's going to be a little bit difficult. I think that things will even back out because, you know, overall, I'm okay. It's just from year to year, it's not, it's kind of up and down.
I think that people were, they had money that they were given from grants to purchase vehicles, but then you couldn't buy vehicles, so a lot of people have got some dollars that they still have that they're being able to actually use for capital equipment now. So, hopefully that people will be able to get their fleets back up, over the, deal of longevity and, useful life.
I know that, If anyone, this might be a little sidebar, but, if, used to be that you'd look at, you know, 100, 000 miles in five years and, you know, on, on cutaways and things like that that was past its useful life. But I found out because of having my own garage that, hey, I can change an engine, I can change a transmission, I can make that bus go further. And being able to have great mechanics to do that. And when people thought, oh.
This vehicle isn't even good anymore and then they would try to sell it, but having the ability to get that vehicle back out on the road and up and going and just doing a few things to it. And so, you know, it's nothing for me to have a cutaway. I have several now that has 500, 000 miles on them. So, you know, and they're running 500. And I mean, I would have never said that before COVID. But, you know, when you couldn't get something, you had to do the best you could.
And if you had a wrecked vehicle out in the parking lot, it's like, Oh, well we just put that engine in there, and he'd go, Okay, we're gonna get that engine, we're gonna put it back in here. And I'm, it was the things that you never thought of. And I mean, they had to be very, very creative also during that time period.
As you know, with parts you couldn't get a part and you, you know, it's like, and my mechanic, he, Jimmy would always say, no, no, we're not getting rid of that because they'd be out there getting screws and bolts and everything in the world off of it just to make sure that it could run. So I mean, that was the, the way of the world.
I mean, we look at things so much differently, not only from being isolated and everything else and like wiping your milk off to actually having to be creative to keep, because we had a job that never stopped. You know, other people could go home and work from the house. That bus didn't run from the house. So, you had to learn a lot of new creativity.
That's great, Pam. Matt?
so we actually increased our services at the pandemic because we wanted to make it easier for people to get around during that time. So, with that, we didn't have nearly as much of a ridership drop just because, you know, it was easier to get around, more buses on the road, so you felt more comfortable getting on the bus. we're, we're currently 16 percent up from where we were, and that's huge for us.
So you're at 116 percent of 2019 ridership.
Yeah.
That's amazing.
And we, we put a lot of, you know, we put, you know, 40 minute headways where it used to be, hour headways. You know, we were adding routes during the pandemic. You know, we increased our hours. We did all sorts of things to help with that for the community. Yeah. You know, we also, you know, during that time, we're, you know, delivering food to people's homes, you know, during, stuff like that.
as far as revenue goes, like, we're, we're sales tax, so, we've seen, actually a pretty big increase in the amount of stuff that people have been buying. So, it's, it's actually going pretty well.
Does your state, does your sales tax apply to Amazon sales? That's why you're making more money, right? Yeah, that's good. Good stuff, man. Thank you. What do you all think of that? Good ideas, interesting ideas, new revenue sources, contracts with new agencies or new services, you know. It's, you have an asset, as creative as you can be, to have people utilize that asset, I think is, is, a question coming out here. Can we be more creative in how we're utilizing our services?
Or, is there a way that we can, add more service? To provide, to get more riders, right? If you build it, they will come. All right.
¶ Embracing Technology for Future Growth
Let's talk technology for a few minutes. let's project ahead. I mean, Simon talks some about the new technologies that are impacting the world. We have so much new AI machine learning, but even, you know, in autonomous vehicles and all the other things, but as you look ahead, just one to two years, tell me one or two technologies you think that will most impact your service. We'll start with you, Randy.
We're looking to see if we can leverage AI, you know, it's a buzzword right now, but, especially on the kind of reporting side of things is, can we actually have our ops manager or finance, go into a reporting engine and say, hey, give me the ridership, compared for this year over last year of those. We're looking at some more trends. So, Oh, I see that. That's not my go to.
I think, um, um, we're also, The other piece is just with the on board technology and leveraging that and getting the information out to the riders. We've come a long way with the MyRide app and getting information out there. But just looking at new ways to keep the riders informed about what's going on within the agency.
That's powerful. Pam?
I guess we're going to start completely over. I mean it's When you've had one software for 20 years and then you're going to start with something new. And, I think the problem was with me is there was a lot of things out there that I wanted to do. I, I didn't have an app, I didn't have it out there for, the passengers or facilities to actually go onto an app and be able to, you know, book trips and anything like that. So, I think that that's going to go away.
Get us into more technology and getting people more involved.
it's just, and then also with, in my Medicaid brokerage making it more, to all my subcontractors and being able to get the data and everything back to me and, you know, Quick and timely fashion where now we're actually waiting on the subcontractor to fill out the manual data, put it back into the system and give it back to us, then where we would actually have the ability for them to do it automated just like we do on our own vehicles and that everything be, I'm
looking more in a timely fashion and, and like, doing a lot of things that we're, we were having to do manually because of, you know, the, the, the Not having the capabilities and actually having a better interaction with the customer.
Great, good thank you.
Actually, in the same boat. We are running pass and going to be switching to Nowvis as well as we are purchasing rides on demand. I think for us one of the big things with especially Nowvis is just the ease of use. Novus, you just kind of sit down and you, you use it. you know, we're looking to really, accelerate our, efficiencies with that, as well as, you know, with rides on demand, we're going to be adding same day service. So that's going to be a huge, huge thing for our community. So, yeah.
That's great. That's exciting. All right.
well, I mean, we're in the process of, implementation of Novus and Streets at the moment, and then soon Rides On Demand, but, I, I, I think the technology, I mean, it, it's ironic that, you know, Zoom and, Teams ended up being, you know, such a integral part, during COVID and everything, and we had that technology 10, 15 years before, no one used it. and so, You know, I think that's the interesting thing is that we, you know, there is technology that we just haven't really used as much anymore.
But I mean, that I would, that's probably the biggest thing since COVID that's it saved me time. I don't have to travel to Oklahoma City all the time for, you know, a 30 minute meeting. so time has probably been the biggest thing with, with that simple technology.
That's good. just a quick question for you. Do Do you all have everybody coming back into the office? Everybody, everybody's coming, all your staff, everybody, yeah, yeah. Pretty much everybody's done that now. Took a while, but for operations, that's good. Alright, so, we got 15 minutes left. We'll probably finish a few minutes early.
¶ Personal Insights and Agency Success Stories
But I wanted, I have one more question for you all, which is going to be tell me about, one great thing happening in your agency. So I think one thing that's been going well in our agency for the past year or two is we've become really more involved with our area planning commission, as well as the area development. Previously, bus pull offs, you know, right of ways and things like that. That weren't even thought of, and there's been a number of new developments in the area.
We've just announced there's going to be a new 4 billion semiconductor plant coming into town, with 800 employees just for the plant alone. so we're seeing extreme growth, in our city. So having that, getting that relationship built with our APCs and the development and being able to, you know, Get more transit friendly, you know, roads, shelters and that get in place. I think it's going to set us up well for the future and continuing to see our growth in the ridership. Thank you. Pam?
This is a little bit kind of off, but I guess the biggest thing is that I lost my operations manager. So I decided that I would go through and look at all the job duties that she was doing. And so I kind of went around my office and I said, what do you like about your job the best? What do you like least? And I started taking those jobs and I started kind of moving around.
And then I had to get a buy in from everybody and getting like my call center manager to agree to let me have a couple people to do a couple of things that she lost. But I'll give her a new call. So then I was having to get the drivers to do a buy in where there were some things that the previous person was doing that wasn't automated and I got that done. So it just, I feel really good because I got a buy in from all my staff to do this and it made things easier.
I feel like it works so much smoother.
So what is it that you did? I'm not quite sure I get it.
Okay, so it was, it was silly stuff. Like, and I guess I didn't even realize that it wasn't happening. I guess because that was a part that I'd missed. It's, my drivers were still doing pre maintenance check sheets on a piece of paper and handing them in. And I mean, I have Fleet Maintenance Pro. But I'm thinking, well, why in the world is this not automated? Yeah, on a tablet. I put the app onto the tablet, now the drivers hit the buttons, okay.
And then, the other thing was, there was an app I put onto the tablets, was from our payroll company, ADP. And so, she was going in every day and putting in their breaks manually. I'm like, why don't they do it themselves? You know, they clock in and out. Oh, so there was a lot of stuff your ops manager was doing that was manual, and as you analyzed her job responsibilities, you realized you could automate a lot of that.
Right, so I automated that, and then like I moved some duties around, And I feel like things are smoother.
And so now you don't need an ops manager?
I'm not hiring one right now.
Wow, that's interesting. Very interesting, thank you. Alright, Matt?
I think the biggest thing for us is just the growth and innovation. you know, we've really been trying to push the bar and see what we can do that is different just to, you know, Make things work better for our community.
One specific, come on, give me something.
that same day, service. That's a, that's a pretty big, big one. Going same day is big, man. Yes. That's going to, it's going to revolutionize what you do there. Yeah. I think there's going to be actually a shift from, you know, our traditional people, you know, our traditional dialeride over to that same day service where we might even start kind of lowering our, you know, dial a ride and increasing our same day. Just because of how people live their lives these days. Thanks, brother.
All right, Ryan, bring us home.
I would say, the people. I've, I've recently hired some new, you know, new HR person, new staff. we hired a mo a mobility manager recently. And, just the recent hires. I'm running out of space. I don't have enough space because I'm hiring too many people, but, but I think it's the overall excitement.
We have so many projects going on, obviously we're, as I mentioned, we're switching over, you know, with Novus, Streets, the on demand, but the, you know, the new facility that we're actually doing, we've actually, re energized, the city. Politicians are getting more involved in transit, You know, they're calling me up all the time, which is great. It's kind of annoying at times, but, you know, it is what it is. but yeah, I'd say the people, honestly.
I love that. That's a great way to end it. What did you all think? Was that good? Why don't we give our panelists a round of applause. Matt Meier, Randy Anderson, Pam Shepherd, Ryan Landers, thank you for sharing with us some of your experience. We're happy to be partners with you in helping you take your transit systems to the next level.
¶ Coming up next week on Transit Unplugged
This is Tris Hussey, editor of Transit Unplugged. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the show with our guests. Pam Shepherd, Ryan Landers, Randy Anderson and Matt Maier coming up next week, we have a rather unusual show. We have Faye Di Massimo joining us from beautiful Savannah, Georgia. When Paul recorded his original interview with Faye she was leading the Chatham Area Transit agency.
But since then she's gotten a new job working with the City of Savannah, overseeing all things that connect. And move people around the county. This is really fascinating. Look at how people advance through transit in their careers. You like listening to Transit Unplugged, right? We're pretty sure you do. So why don't you share it with a friend?
Bring your friend into our transit enthusiast network so they can stay in the loop with everything that's going on with transit around the world And advice on how to make the most of their careers. Transit Unplugged is brought to you by Modaxo. At Modaxo, we're passionate about moving the world's people. And that Transit Unplugged we're passionate about telling those stories. So until next week. ride safe and ride happy.