The MT Position

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit

This week’s news was dominated by the looming doom of the economic crisis the United States finds itself in — as well it should. With corporate giants falling like dominoes on Wall Street, it’s no wonder the recent Metrolink crash fell off the public consciousness. Of course, this begs the question, what will the media hounds chase next week as we spiral towards the presidential election?

If you listen to the doomsayers on the cable news networks, you’d be better off taking out your 401K and start stuffing it into your mattress — of course they could be wrong. That’s the problem with what I’ve been seeing this whole election cycle, it’s one crisis after another. There always seems to be something to point fingers at and tell people to worry about.

It could be argued that in essence is the root of politics in general — finding something people are scared of and assuring them you are the person who will save them from it. Taxes, “evil” foreign nations, high gas prices or an economic collapse all fit into this bill.

And despite what most politicians may believe, and what sometimes we as a society validate, people aren’t stupid. They can smell politics, but sometimes that smell is so permeable that valid statements get mixed up in it. Take transit for example.

The transit industry could scream from the mountaintops all the perils of congestion — and to a large part the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission did this with their findings — and people would say it’s just those crazy transit people trying to get more money for Amtrak.

That sound you hear is the collective sigh from the transit industry as they look at their findings and throw their hands up in the air. Transit, despite its tremendous increase in popularity, needs to keep hitting home all of its findings. Congestion isn’t a crisis. It’s a cancer that is eating away at our cities. We need to keep pushing for a cure, not a quick fix miracle infusion of money while attention has spun toward transit.

How many crises have you seen in your lifetime? How many have there been in the history of this country? And we’re still here. We’re still standing. Football games will be played on Sunday and the buses and trains will run on Monday. The problem with surviving crises is that we eventually start looking at anyone pointing out one as Chicken Little. We need to make sure people don’t see congestion as a crisis needing a solution, but the evolution of transit in our nation.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

It’s a great time for public transportation.  Almost daily a system is reporting increased ridership in great part to $4.00 a gallon gasoline.  The ramp up of ridership has paralleled the increase in gas prices for a couple of years now, but the most recent high prices have been the point where transit is seeing the most converts come over from driving their cars.

So can we safely say that our newest customers are flocking to buses and trains to save money? Sure we can, but the real question to be answered is why are they staying?

Let’s go back to times of more stable gas prices.  Why did people use transit then?  An easy answer is that they had no other choice.  They were captives.   A few others may have chosen transit for a variety of reasons, and we considered those choice riders icing on the cake.

I’ve never liked that breakdown.  It’s too simplistic.  It is true that some portion of riders have no choice nearly one hundred percent of the time.  But what about a person who carpools three days a week and uses transit the other two days?  To what degree is that person a captive or choice rider?  Or how about a person of means who doesn’t have a way to get around other than transit because they have chosen that way?  Is that person now a captive now because of their choice?  Seems to me in both instances, those individuals are a lot of both.

What about the “green” person who is passionate about the environmental benefits that transit provides?  That’s what motivates them.

And there are those commuters who really dislike driving.  They get on board because it helps them avoid the hassles of traffic and parking, as well as the road rage.

All of these are good, valid reasons for people to begin riding, but then and now, why do they stay?

They stay for two basic reasons that are co-equal in importance: Convenience and Reliability.

Transit customers define convenience like this:  Transit is close to where I start my trip, close to where I end my trip and it runs when I need to travel.  Reliability is defined pretty much as:  I can count on transit to run the way it is supposed to run.

Realizing that those are the basic and underlying reasons why a customer uses transit is also the first step toward building a customer driven service organization.  You can’t build a first class service organization around the concept of captive riders.  You have to build it around service concepts that are blind to the degree of captive or choice.   It’s OK to let people think they are saving money or the environment, or avoiding the negative aspects of driving.  If that’s why they think they ride, then it is very likely that the transit organization is satisfying their more basic requirements of convenient and reliable service.
And that is why those customers are staying.

Joe Caruso is Senior Consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting.  He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has over 33 years of transit marketing experience.  He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine

Time is interesting. Many people spend each day watching the clock tick off the minutes as they wish they were anywhere but at their job. But as slowly as the work week crawls, the weekends seem way too short. Of course, anyone who is preparing for the upcoming Expo can tell you, time is definitely flying by.

If you’re even remotely interested in public transit, you heard about the Metrolink accident this week. In fact, it’s taken most of the week for the news about it to die down. The newswire on Monday was inundated by stories about the tragedy from any number of angles.

Time for the people in California must have crawled this week as the entire nation shifted its focus in their direction for a few days. And well they should. This tragedy was preventable on a number of levels and though it may well be forgotten about under the “human error” classification in the future, the transit industry should asterisk that note and make sure we let it be known this did not need to happen.

Of course, the media is all over the story. Tragedy will do that. Unfortunately, the national media seems hyper-focused on positive train control (PTC) as the one and only way of solving this problem. I’ve seen more CGI renditions of PTC in the last week than I’ve ever seen before.

But, much like many other stories that catch the national media’s attention, this story will pass by quickly as the new “hot” story is looked for.

Remember the “big” story this time last year? It was another tragedy, the I35 bridge collapse. Coming out of that story the national media was up in arms about infrastructure and the poor state of our highways and bridges.

The I35 bridge reopened this week to little fanfare nationally. It reopened under budget and three months earlier than expected. This tremendous accomplishment has been pushed to the side while “bigger” stories are discussed.

For transit, though, this should be a continuation of the biggest story facing the industry — infrastructure. Simply, we need a massive investment in it. We can rebuild a major highway structure in less than a year, yet, it takes decades to make bus or rail improvements?

We need to make infrastructure improvements to make sure we can prevent tragedies like I35 and the Metrolink crash from happening again. Time is not on our side here. It needs to be done now, so a decade from now we’re not still looking around asking when things will be done.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine

Remember the good ole days? You know the ones where ridership was low, funding was manageable if not what was really needed and transit was an afterthought for most of the public? Of course, those were the days before gas prices increased exponentially, driving people from their cars and onto public transit systems, which also had to shoulder the increased gas costs. But unlike drivers who could turn to transit, transit it seems really has no one to turn to.

What? You don’t remember those good ole days? The ones where the largest concerns were admonitions of “transporting air” in vehicles? Now air is probably the least populace item on vehicles packed to the gills with riders. Next would probably be seats (especially since some agencies are considering taking them out to shove more people on each vehicle).

And what do agencies do? Do they increase services? Really, for all the buses and trains that evidently were only designed to transport air previously, they must have a whole yard full of extra vehicles to throw into service. What?! Agencies are cutting service? Having vehicles sit rather than relieving the strain on over-packed transit cattle cars? Yep.

What most of the public just doesn’t understand is that transit agencies get about a third of their revenue from fares. The bulk of an agency’s funding comes from other sources. And unfortunately, those sources are wildly unpredictable. Sure, a local sales tax seems predictable, but the hike in gas prices has shown that even that is subject to the whims of the economy. As people tighten their belts, so to do transit agencies have to tighten theirs.

Locally the Milwaukee agency is sitting on $91.5 million in funds to expand its system and the officials holding the keys to that account can’t agree on how to spend it. They fight like two boys in a school yard over who gets to impress the girl by proving their idea was the best one. And so the city, transit agency and riders (both current and potential) sit and wait.

We need to end the waiting. It’s amazing that transit is bursting at the seams with riders and no one — not the President, not Congress, not either of our two President-elects — has made a call for a dedicated nationwide investment in transit. It’s always wrapped up in funding for highways and other infrastructure projects.

All of these projects are needed, but when people sit in gridlock on a highway, money appears to alleviate the problem. When people are too stuffed on a bus to sit down, the agency is told, sorry, you are going to have to figure that one out yourself.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com

Posted by Fred Jandt
Editor, Mass Transit magazine

There are times when the federal government makes me sit here and scratch my head. This week the President put forth the proposal of $1 billion in aid (humanitarian and economic) to Georgia to recover from what is being called a “short and disastrous war” with Russia last month.

According to the President, $30 million in aid had already been sent to Georgia, which is great. We need to help out people where we can. But here is where I scratch my head. Why aren’t we spending this money here in the United States?

There was a report that came out this week that the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority (RIPTA) is facing a $12 million deficit and is looking at shutting down a fifth of its service and shutting down lines to four cities entirely to cut costs. This from an agency struggling with the overburdening ridership increases in recent years.

Before anyone goes off on me comparing humanitarian aid to transit funding, consider that last year the United States provided Georgia with more than $20 million to train its military and police forces. Now we are considering giving them a lot more money.

What makes me scratch my head is that while we’re arguing over drilling for more oil locally to reduce gas prices, we’re ignoring the fact that transit agencies are quietly starving to death while being trampled with drivers getting out of their cars.

How about this; let’s stop propping up countries around the world and start spending some of that money on ourselves for a change. And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and drill for more oil locally, but instead of using it to drop gasoline prices, let’s leave them alone and instead spend the extra money on infrastructure improvements and repairs.

It’s all about spending your money wisely. It’s a fact. Our infrastructure isn’t just crumbling, it’s a shambles. People are making the case for public transportation with their feet. And yet we continue to spend money on other countries because of the outdated philosophy of the enemy of my enemy being my friend.

Thanks for reading the MT Position updated every Friday,

Fred
fred.jandt@cygnusb2b.com