This is Transit Unplugged.

I'm Paul Comfort.

ridership is a big issue across America and the world when it

comes to public transportation.

What can we do to get ridership back up?

After the COVID pandemic, when ridership went down everyone was basically hoping we

could get back to what they were calling pre pandemic levels, although people

don't want to talk about that anymore, but a lot of transit agencies, according

to the American Public Transportation Association and other groups, are still

at around 70 to 80 percent of what was called the pre pandemic ridership levels,

and we're trying lots of different things.

I talked to Ron Kilcoyne, who's had 40 years of experience

in the transit industry.

He has served as general manager of three transit systems, and he did a

study and , published it and has been out talking about it and I invited him on the

podcast to talk about, we have more of a conversation today than an interview.

I wanted to have him and I both talk together as two long time transit

veterans about what seems to be working right now in the industry.

to increase ridership and so we go through some various tenets each of

us talking about what we've seen work and then at the end Ron gives you

the summary of his work so be sure to stay to the end and hear him there.

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Thanks so much.

Now let's join the conversation with Ron Kilcoyne

. Ron, thanks for being with us.

Thank you.

Great to be here, Paul.

So, you've had quite a bit of experience.

You were general manager of three transit systems, as we mentioned.

Santa Clarita Transit, Greater Bridgeport Transit, where I had some

experience as a contractor, and Lane Transit District in Eugene, Oregon.

Those were big jobs, man.

well, and I actually, before then, I, my first 12 years in the industry

was working in planning at AC Transit.

Wow.

And, I, worked hard as a planner, entry planner, worked my

way up to being the manager of, of research and planning at AC Transit.

and there actually initiated their first, restructuring.

And I think one of the things that got me frustrated is just doing the planning

was, the marketing people didn't know how to market it and the operations

people didn't want to change anything.

And, and so I thought, really what I want to do is, is be

able to run the whole show.

I wanted to share that background with our listeners

right up front to let them know that you're not just, a researcher.

You're not just, working on policy, seeing where transit service could be increased.

You, you do service plans for, uh, TMD, Transportation Management and Design..

You're not operating from an ivory tower.

You've actually implemented a lot of these changes in the past.

And so the things we're going to talk about today which are critical to our

industry at this moment, you've had, hands on experience, not just planning

them, but actually implementing them.

because, because It's one thing to sit in a room with a bunch of,

college graduates and say, Oh, wouldn't this new design be great?

But it's another thing to actually implement it.

And in your comments just a minute ago that you shared, you said, when you were

a service planner at one agency early on in your career, it frustrated you that,

let's say, marketing wouldn't do the work required to promote it, or operations

didn't want to make the changes.

And all three of those, Ron, are critical, to making these changes to

get our ridership back up, aren't they?

And I want you to talk about your three legged stool, because I think that's a

great way to kick off this conversation.

You say there's a three legged stool to grow transit ridership.

What are those three legs, Ron?

Let's talk about them.

Well, all right.

The first leg would be the design of the service.

In other words, the question here is why would somebody want to use transit?

Well, it's got to meet their mobility or their accessibility needs.

And I like to use accessibility more than mobility because it's really about access

to jobs, access to education, access to healthcare, access to retail, access to

social activities, access to opportunity.

Okay, so let's say you design a product that meets a person's needs.

Now you get to the second stool.

How do they know that this product meets their needs?

How can they be enticed to at least sample it?

And that's the marketing, the promotional thing.

So let's talk about that for just a minute.

Number two, sampling it.

I like that.

I was at, I heard a speaker just recently say that, which was

basically get them to try it one time.

you're not asking them to change their whole lifestyle and start

commuting if they're not a commuter.

Just say, Hey, for this week, we're going to do this promotion, right?

for, for try transit week, we're going to give it to you for free for that week.

Maybe not forever, but for that week to entice them on, and we're

going to give prizes and this, and if you run a good service.

And you can hook them, right?

That's correct.

Yeah.

And, and which of course gets you the, so the first two, the

first two legs of those stools get the people on, get, get people to try

transit, to get to people who use transit.

The third stool is what keeps them there.

And that's the operations part of it.

That's, and that's all, everything that comes to do with

operations, is the bus on time?

Is the driver friendly?

is the bus clean?

does the customer feel safe?

is the service reliable?

Is the bus isn't going to break down?

Is the air conditioning working or the heating, depending on the time of year?

That type of thing.

So, and that's the, basically, the operations aspect of it, and When I

was at Bridgeport, I want to change the title of the operations manager to

the Director of Customer Satisfaction.

I got a lot of pushback.

I got a real lot of pushback.

Because, it's not, it was a new term and, oh no, if I, if I go out and try

to get a job somewhere else, am I going to know what they know what it is?

But really, to me, that's what the Director of Operations is, is the

Director of Customer Satisfaction.

So, you've got basically the three legs.

And, and I think that the first two legs have to do with getting people there, so

I like to have an individual, I think that an organization should have a director

of planning and marketing, and I would call that maybe the director of customer

customer engagement, customer, customer attraction, something to that effect.

I like to use the customers and titles because that's really what it's all about.

It's about the customer.

And then the operations would be the director of, customer satisfaction

because that's what that, the operations person's really all about is making

sure the customer is satisfied.

So they keep coming back.

Their expectations are being met.

Wow, Ron, that's really a bold change.

Operations doesn't always see themselves as focused on the end customer.

They see themselves focused on the nuts and bolts.

Yeah, correct.

And that's, and, but really it is, why are we working on the nuts and bolts, I mean,

to serve the customer, begin with the end in mind, right?

Yeah.

Like the seven habits of highly effective people.

That's good, Ron.

I love that.

when I was in Baltimore, similarly, we had had, Like most transit agencies

did back in, 16, in that timeframe.

There was a general decline in ridership as TNCs came into cities and took away a

lot of what they call the choice riders.

and a lot of CEOs were very concerned about it.

I've told this story before.

We were all in Florida at a CEO summit that APTA put on and everyone's

hair was on fire, metaphorically speaking, about what are we going

to do about this, And the same thing has happened post COVID, right?

Now the ridership generally has been down 20 to 30 percent.

Some agencies are, and we'll talk about how they're doing in a minute,

you did some research recently that I'll have you share, but what I found

there, and it ties back into your point that we can't really control who

comes on, but we can build access, is I saw what I call our North Star, and

I had four North Stars there, and that was safety, efficiency, reliability,

and world class customer service.

And everything we did Focused around that.

Do you agree with those, that those are four key elements?

Absolutely.

And, those are four key elements.

And, one of the issues that we deal with a lot in our work is the

fact that is, is running times.

We're going to be starting a project, for a client, next month, and one of the

things in, in the RFP, they said, how are we going to deal with the fact that

we have to lengthen our headways from 15 minutes to 20 minutes because of traffic

? And, that, third cornerstone you mentioned about bus, bus lanes and

stuff like that is really critical.

It's like.

And, you know, our response was, one of the things we want to take

a look at is what can we do to give priorities to the buses?

I mean, it's, sometimes doing lanes isn't always the, it's a hard knock.

There's still things like, queue jumpers, and, and signal priority, and where you

locate bus stops, and, yeah, there's just a number of little things you can do, and,

and that, and I think the key thing to do that, I know that when I was in Eugene

with it, with MX, we were able to, with the BRT, we were able to speed it up, And

the good news was that the perception was greater than the, actual, but that's fine.

Perception is reality.

But we also found that in some cases, trying to take a look

at what really sped things up.

In some cases, it was just the fact of off door boarding.

the fact that you had level boarding and you paid your airs off board,

you could enter through any doors.

that's one thing that could really.

speed it up.

So, so I think it's important to kind of look, look outside the box

of how you would, lay out to see how can you can make the service faster

and a bus stop location, which is a project I'm working on for another

client right now is a big thing because trying to get that sweet spot between.

good pedestrian access to the stop versus making sure the buses can run, aren't

bogged down by making just too many stops.

That's right.

Most of the folks, who did a Houston style reboot of their transit system after 2017,

a big part of it was going through your system and straightening out the routes.

Adding high frequency routes, that pulse on a regular time frame so you don't

need a schedule, you just know the bus is going to be there every 10 to 15 minutes,

and reducing the number of bus stops.

But also.

Ron, would you also agree that we need to make wayfinding and signage very easy for

people who haven't used transit before?

I mean, those are key, aren't they?

Especially to try to attract new people.

Oh, absolutely.

And, an example that I can give is, is I live in the Bay

Area, San Francisco Bay Area.

The firm I work with TMD is only physical offices and is in Carlsbad.

So, I work remotely, but, but when I do go down there to the office, now I can

get there on transit from the airport . as long as, the flight times are right.

But that involves taking a shuttle from the airport to the Old Town train station

where we catch a poster and then catch, NCTD's Breeze to get to the office.

But the key thing here is when you get to San Diego Airport, now I knew

that there was a free shuttle between San Diego Airport and the Old Town

Transit Center, just to get to Carlsbad.

Okay?

And so, I knew there was this free shuttle, but first of all, I went

on the MTS website, nothing about there, they tell me I have to go

to downtown San Diego on their bus.

So I finally go, I finally found the information on the

shuttle on the San Diego airport.

Okay, so I know this.

Now I get to the airport.

Where do I catch it?

There is absolutely no signage in the airport.

I'd ask somebody, where do I go catch the shuttle?

So, if I didn't know this existed in the first place, I would have

probably just said, okay, I guess I got to go to downtown San Diego,

or get an Uber, or what have you.

that's really, really key to that, but the wayfinding is getting to the Bay

Area example, and MTC is doing this.

MTC, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which is the MPO and regional

planning agency for the Bay Area, is spearheading this effort, but is to

have some kind of a pilot project.

universal wayfinding, transit information, so regardless how many, whichever transit

systems you're, you're using, you can figure out how to get around, because

let's face it, individual person trips are not confined to the boundaries of one

transit agency, and, and actually this gets into probably this whole integration

issue, which is something that I've been passionate about my whole career is

that, people, when you drive anywhere, every city, every county, every state.

is responsible for planning, building, and maintaining the street system.

But when you drive anywhere, how many different agencies are

responsible for the streets?

You never give it a thought.

transit needs to have the same, work in the same way.

That's right, and you, you helped author a study recently, for the

Bay Area, which shows how restoring and increasing transit service levels can

play a critical role in bringing back ridership now that the pandemic is gone.

And I know that we've been talking about some of your findings, but why don't

you dig into that a little bit more.

Tell us about it for a few minutes and your, your ultimate findings.

Okay.

Well, I, one of the things when I got my first GM job, down in

Santa Clarita was I wanted to figure out how to build ridership.

So I found 10 peers.

Similar suburban systems like that, and I asked them, for, a whole bunch of

metrics, and, I went through the whole things, like, all of the things we talked

about earlier, like, on time performance, and cleanliness, and so on, and I wanted

to relate this to their ridership, and, one of the things that came out of this

was that the, The only correlation I could find was the correlation between

per capita service hours, the amount of service you provide per capita, for your

service area, and per capita ridership, which was the amount of ridership.

I mean, I could find that, I couldn't find a correlation between on, I mean, not to,

not to disagree with what we said earlier, because on time performance is important,

but the correlation wasn't as strong there as it was between per capita ridership.

And I did the same thing when I went to Bridgeport, when I went to Eugene.

I did found peers because each of those three systems were

very different from each other.

So I found different peers.

I still find that correlation.

So when the question came to me here in the Bay Area from an organization called

Seamless Bay Area was, we want to know how much service we should be providing

in the Bay Area because we, want to promote a ballot measure to do that.

And so how do we want to do that?

And I said, well, I don't know that there's any real way.

I did some research on measures to figure, and I said there really

isn't a way to kind of determine some sort of this optimum thing

other than to sort of see where is the relationship between per capita

ridership and per capita, service hours.

And now the Bay Area is in many ways transit rich in terms of overall,

probably we're number two to the New York area in terms of per capita.

service and per capita ridership, but the feeling was, is that despite that

fact, there's just a lot of unmet transit needs still, within that, and that

there would be needing for more funding.

I looked at the Bay Area systems, 27 Bay Area systems.

And found that, when I took the 20, of the 27 systems, 20 systems that

provide bus service, just focus on their bus service, ignoring the, any rail,

ignoring BART and BAT for the time being, again, I found that same correlation,

but I found a really interesting thing that really, I would, having, started

my career in the Bay Area, being a native of the Bay Area, back in the

Bay Area, I would have never guessed.

And that is the top three, top five transit systems.

Muni's number one in per capita ridership and per capita service, no surprise.

AC Transit's number two, no surprise.

Number three totally threw me off.

Because number three in per capita service and number four in per

capita ridership, so again the correlations there, was WestCat.

WestCat serves Western Contra Costa County, it's sort of Pinole, Hercules.

It is about as transit unfriendly environment as you'll find anywhere.

It's really low density suburban things, and it's like, well, why?

They provided a very high level of service to BART.

they provided some service in San Francisco, but it also, I think, really

illustrates, that, in any type of environment, there's still, you can still

draw a correlation between the amount of service you provide And the amount

of ridership you're going to generate.

So, what would you, based on that, and based on what we've talked

about today, give us your overall recommendations for transit agencies and

the staff that are listening today that are still stuck around 70 80 percent

of a word we don't want to keep saying, which is post pandemic ridership, or pre

pandemic ridership, but it is what it is.

People want to get that ridership back up.

What is your recommendation to them right now?

Well, number one is, well, of course, the probably the

biggest challenge is when it comes to operations is you need dollars.

And if you don't have the dollars, you're going to have to, you may not be able

to provide the level of service that, that, that you, your community deserves.

I, I think there's a couple things.

One is that on the dollar side things is that you probably should maybe do

a, do a similar type of effort like this, just simply to sort of lay how

much service we should be providing.

And the one thing I did not do in this research, but maybe I would say just

transit systems do is it not just saying how much service we identify how much

service we should provide, but then provide, what is the ROI for that?

What is the, what is the return on investment?

what, what are the benefits, the social, economic, and environmental benefits,

because a politician may say, well, fine.

I don't know.

What, what does it matter?

You carry more people, why, why does that matter?

What do you do, what do you do with the funding you have?

I think the key thing here is, again, you got to look at what

markets can you best serve?

one of the things we spend a lot of time looking at what we call

equity priority communities.

Where are the communities that need the service the most?

and making sure that you, provide that service, looking at the off peak periods,

looking at, at, where you want to focus.

I mean, Actually, if I want to go back a little bit, before I started

AC Transit, I lived in San Francisco.

I was working in retail, but I was interested in transit, so when Muni

was doing their first restructuring, and this was in the late 70s, I went

to all the meetings because I wanted to find out all about this stuff.

I was a transit nerd.

I, I, and one of the things I learned at that meeting was they pointed out that,

our system's focused on downtown, yet 70 percent of the trips don't go downtown.

And 70 percent of the trips are not work trips.

And this was this something back in the seventies that sort of really, when I was

at AC Transit, when we tried to do the restructuring, uh, that was our focus.

And so one of the things the pandemic did was sort of highlight this fact

that really it isn't people just getting people nine to five people downtown.

We need to, we need to focus beyond that.

And I think that that mindset is really, really, really critical.

But, every agency's got to take a look at their own type of situation.

I think you just, you just got to kind of get back to the basics.

but, The amount of service you provide is probably more important

than the fare you charge.

and, I know a lot of places feel that, well, we just offer free

service to get more people riding.

But the service doesn't go where you want to go, when you want to go.

free doesn't matter.

I can think back of times when we've had to raise fares.

Or we had a budget deficit.

And the question is, well, do you cut service or do you raise fares?

And chances are people are going to say, well, we don't really want

to pay more, but raise the fares, because if you cut the service, I'm

not going to have something to ride.

Those are good.

Those are good recommendations, Ron.

I think analyzing your situation, making a good case, using KPIs for your service,

so that you can apply for more money.

A lot of people are facing what they call the fiscal cliff with

the end of the COVID funds.

And then, providing that higher level of service.

Taking people where they want to go today, which is different, right?

So we've got a hybrid work schedules.

Now people are doing the three day city where they're home on Mondays and Fridays.

You may not need the level of service some days, or it's sometimes that you

used to have at your peak periods.

You may need to expand service.

Like a lot of commuter rails are doing now, expand, Higher frequency

service to nights and weekends based on what you're trying to do.

I was talking with the chief innovation officer of a major transit agency

just this week who told me we now are no longer considering ourselves

primarily a commuter service.

We're now considering ourselves a lifestyle mobility service.

And so we're focused on, female riders, making sure we have room for strollers.

They don't have to fold their strollers up anymore or shopping carts.

And so just kind of changing the focus of the agency to where people are now.

That seems to be the overall arching recommendations.

You get pretty good travel data.

And we find that, you know, we can determine where people are traveling via

all modes by time of day, by trip purpose.

between, zip codes or, census tracts or, TAZs and stuff like that.

And that really tells you what are people doing and that helps, I think

that can help you sort of say, are of these major traffic flows, where

can, where can transit work the best?

And, and I think that's the key thing.

And the other thing we find is that quite often, we find that,

preconceived notions aren't existing.

One of the things we found is that, for example, work we did

in Los Angeles is that more people are traveling between 7 p.

m.

and 9 p.

m.

than between 7 a.

m.

and 9 a.

m.

Wow.

And so, you displace conventional wisdom, but we've found

that to be very, very helpful because again, if you have limited resources,

and even if you don't have limited resources, You always wanna make sure

you, you focus your resources in the right place, right , that's good.

And, and that's, I think that being able to look at the overall

travel pattern and there are tools that can enable you to do that.

That's I think very, very important to do.

Well, thanks Ron.

Great conversation today, sharing some of your, experiences.

As a general manager and also the findings from the study you did,

in the post COVID era about how folks can increase their, ridership.

And we'll put a link to that study on our website.

Thanks for being with us today, Ron.

Well, thank you, Paul.

great to be here.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Transit Unplugged.

Hi, I'm Tris Hussey, editor of Transit Unplugged and thanks to this week's guest,

Ron Kilcoyne for a really insightful interview on what leavers we can pull to

really improve ridership at our agencies.

Now coming up next week, we have another really great episode.

And it's with Dwight Ferrell, GM of smart.

The agency that serves Detroit in Southeastern Michigan.

Now Dwight not only talks about his advice for people coming up in the

transit industry based on his 30 years as a transit leader, but also some

of the things we need to improve, especially in technology, if we want

to keep up with today's transit riders.

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