Welcome to the sixth anniversary show of the Transit Unplugged podcast. I'm your host and producer, Paul Comfort. Before we get to my interview with Randy Clarke, head of WMATA, I wanted to reflect on the past six years of doing this podcast. I began the program six years ago with an interview with Bill Carpenter, CEO of the Transit System in Rochester, New York. And while the program has been through several iterations since then, we've remained true to our promise to bring you in depth interviews with the world's leading public transportation executives and experts sharing their current projects, plans for the future, and the challenges they've faced along the way, plus a look into their personal lives and career. As we begin our seventh year, we're continuing our focus on bringing you the stories of public transit executives, but we're also going to delve into how they've tackled major decisions and projects, how they turned out, and what they might have done differently. And, if you're growing your career in public transportation, you'll hear real career stories, insight, and advice from people leading transit agencies to help you navigate your own transit career. Today's interview with Randy Clark, head of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority, or WMATA, is a great example of this unfiltered look behind the scenes at leading a major transit agency. Randy reflects upon his first year as CEO of the transit system in our nation's capital. And tells us frankly about the hurdles he's had to overcome, what he's accomplished, but also the looming challenges that lie ahead. don't forget to stay tuned after my interview with Randy for Mike Bismeyer and his Mike's Minute reflecting on the lessons learned from Randy's interview. Thanks for being with us over these past six years. Let's head boldly into the new year, bringing you great stories, inspirational insights into public transportation here in America and around the world. We are here in your great new platinum LEED certified building, man.

Yeah, Paul, good seeing you. Welcome to Metro HQ and happy to be with you today.

So, I remember I put up a picture on LinkedIn kind of prepping for this interview and it was the one we took at a conference we were at and you had just heard that you might be The CEO of this agency, so it was probably a year and a half ago, the last time we, I saw you in person, had a chance to talk to you. Congratulations on one full year in the job. Thanks, I made it. Things are going amazing.

Uh, made it a year, a little, uh, a little tireder, a little grayer, maybe I get, but a fantastic, uh, experience. I'm really proud of being part of the Metro team and really proud of what we've accomplished as an agency in the last year. Really, really delivered, so, um, you know, really honored to have the job and appreciate the opportunity the board has given me.

Yeah, when you got it, I was like, you're the perfect guy. You're the perfect guy for this job, you know, you, uh, and, you know, I worked here for five years helping run the paratransit system for MV a while ago, You bring the energy, the vision, and kind of the youthful vigor, which, uh, which I think was needed right now, so it's great, man. Tell me some about the first year. Give us a wrap up, you know?

Yeah, well, listen, everyone in the industry is going through challenges. Uh, we probably had... maybe the hardest headwinds of every organization in the country we've had like the same as everyone COVID recovery big staffing issues issues we've hired uh over 1200 people in the last year to get our kind of staffing numbers back uh you know everyone's dealing with Uh, ridership, uh, we're, everyone was dealing with some type of funding. We can probably get into that in more detail. Ours is catastrophic at a level that probably a lot of other agencies, almost, almost be happy that it's not that bad. Uh, we also had a vehicle fleet issue on our rail fleet, our 7ks, that, you know, we basically had half of the fleet grounded, that we had to get back into service. and safely, uh, uh, get a procedure done to get those back, uh, you know, we just avoid a federal government shutdown. Today's Monday. Right. So that's a unique thing that happens here, uh, you know, everything that kind of happens happens here. You've got to be spinning 15 plates, huh? It seems like, you know, we've had an enormous amount of public safety issues as a region this year, so around the country, but here, D. C., Area's pretty bad in the last year. And we had some, uh, some really close to home incidents that have hit us there. Um, so you know, a lot of things piled up. But I will tell you, if you told me where we would be as an agency a little over a year later, uh, I would've taken that deal 10 out of 10 every time. So we are, delivering the most rail ser service in the history of the agency right now. The most rail service? Yeah. Okay. The reliability's higher than it's been in years on, on rail bus and like elevator escalators. Crime has gone down the last four months, still higher than we want it, but it's going in the right direction finally. Ridership is basically almost doubled in a year, still down to where we want it to be, but it's coming back and it's coming back pretty strong. Last week was our highest ridership week since the pandemic, we can talk probably deeper than that if you want. Um, we got Silver Line open, opened Potomac Yard Station. Yeah, babe, that was nice. On a different line, um, and, uh, you know, and save money. Uh, saved about 100 million out of our budget. So, you put all that together. I had heard that one, the last one. Yeah, well, that's how we managed the place pretty well last year. That's good. Saved about 95 million. So, you put all that together. Yeah, I'd give that an A. That's a, I don't, I try not to get raving, but I do. Yeah, yeah. You know, I do, like, my big thing is I wake up and go to bed. You know, I kind of only live this thing, right? I'm all in on transit. My wife lets me be that way. Uh, but I just sit back and, you know, sometimes pinch myself and say, you know, this team is really, really gelled and delivered. Um, you know, and it shows. The customer satisfaction, we have the highest customer rail satisfaction since 2013, which ties the highest in the agent's history. So we'll still have some days here and there, you know. Still got lots of things to improve and work on, but I think it's undeniable where the agency is right now. It's in a pretty good shape and customers seem to be responding well to that. So, uh, you know, we got to keep the money alive to, uh, keep all this going, which is a whole different ballgame, but, uh, yeah, I feel pretty good after one year.

What surprised you the most coming from CapMetro where you were CEO down in Austin?

I guess if there's a biggest surprise for me, I knew we were in the fishbowl here, but to the extent of that, might have been even more than I realized. So like, something that happens here is, is amplified or magnified at a level that would not be the same as if it happened somewhere else. Right. And that could be Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago. You're in the nation's capital. Yeah, and FTA and FRA ride our system, NTSB's on our system. Members of Congress on our system. I get random text messages sometimes from little, little things from very high ranking people, but to me, that's, so that, that, that most people look at that as the challenge or negative. I look at it as kind of a positive because, um, you know, it, it makes us perform at a higher level and I do believe that we, we run the best system in the country. You know, I know some, some listeners will be woo, and I don't mean that in a cocky way. I, I just, the system itself, The whole thing itself was designed to be at a high, high level. if you can't do the bread and butter well then nothing really matters at the end of the day. And so the customer experience is bread and butter. They, they love the futuristic stuff or even the advanced and stuff, but they want the stuff to just, that they exist today to work well. And that's where the team is probably the most laser focused. That's good. How does the stuff we have work really well for them every day?

Let's talk about that dig in a little bit. You're adding, you've added a lot more frequency. Uh, to your system. Talk about how you're improving kind of the blocking and tackling, so to speak, since we're in football season. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When you put it all together, frequency is ultimately what matters in transit, right? I mean, we can, around the business, we do a lot of this stuff where we got beautiful colors on buses and trains and other... At the end of the day, people want service. That's what everyone wants. And the more frequency you have, the more people are induced to use it, and the ultimate better, uh, you know, connected community you're going to have. So, we, we are running a lot of frequency. Like I said, the most trains in the history of the organization. Um, let me talk about bus in a second because we're doing a network redesign. But on the rail side, we, we've really created an all day, all day of week frequency network. So Metro historically, and I lived here once before, Metro was very, very rush hour centric. And, I mean, great, just incredible. At one point, redline was like three minute frequency. Maybe even got that at two and a half at one point, uh, but very, very rush hour frequency and then all right during other periods of the day and I would say weekends not as good. Those would be the words I would use, you know, like weekend frequency of maybe like 15 minutes on a lot of lines, um, maybe 12 on some. Now we're into pretty good rush hour frequency, not as high on certain segments as we used to be, but midday, evenings, and weekends are all much better. So, ridership is actually not monolithic, as we all know, and I actually, you know, I've said this kind of publicly, and then some people shake their head. I think we're gonna look back and say COVID was actually good for the transit industry long term. So, I know people are like, what is wrong with the peak of the peak. Well, and it changed us from being a monolithic, utility driven on rush hour, and acting like a commuter. had to look like me with a, with a tie on that went to an office. Right. Everyone that goes to the, deals with the economy is a commuter. So if you go and you work at CBS and you get off at 9 p. m. at night, you are commuting. If you work at a museum in DC on Sunday, you are commuting. Right? And everyone therefore is equal. So we, I think there's too much so selling transit historically on congestion mitigation versus the larger historic, his holistic impact to society. So if you look at our ridership, bus, we are above pre pandemic on weekend. We are now equal to just above on weekend on rail during the week, bus is about 90 percent recovered, uh, where we are right now. And quite frankly, if we had a little bit more service, we'd probably be pretty close to a hundred percent. Cause we're leaving people on the curb at certain, especially PM rush. We are, we do not have enough bus on our biggest corridors to carry them all right now. and then on the rail side, we are definitely not where we want to be yet on weekday, but it's coming back. So last week, the week before we've had our highest 8am and 5pm, you know, one hour rushes. So, uh, directionally we're going right. We're going in the right way. Um, you know, we just got to keep delivering because you got that reliability built in. So, you know, the challenge we're going to have is this fiscal thing coming up here. Yeah, let's talk about that. What's going on there? Yeah, so we projected a 750 million dollar deficit. So that, just so everyone gets that, right? A one year deficit? One year, 750 million dollars. What's your total budget? So operation is $2.5 billion, capital's 2. 5 billion, so we're 5 billion total. Okay. Right? We have a 750 million operating deficit. That's, that's bigger than outside of like, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 agencies in the country. Right. That's the entire budget. Yeah. That's just our operating deficit, right?

So. Maybe explain why that is that you don't have a dedicated funding source. No, no. It's pretty weird. It. I know you can't say it, but I can say it.

I can say it, it's weird. Yeah. Now people will say, There's dedication to some of the funding streams, and they are correct. So some, depending on the jurisdiction, there is legal kind of framework about those sources go to, go to fund transit, but they don't go to Metro. They go to someone, and that person then gives it to Metro, and, and so we have a lot of layers here. It's like lasagna, right? Virginia has a... Lasagna funding package. Yeah, and governance, and how it's all worked. Yeah. So there's a lot of, um... Appointments to the board, uh, from a funding jurisdiction versus a board, uh, the board is fantastic by the way, it couldn't, and one of our board, actually our board chair is getting APTA board member of the year, Paul Smedberg. So we have a great board, uh, but it is politically very challenging and it's been kind of set up this way since 1967, and everyone kind of knows it's a challenge because Metro really has none of its own funding, and therefore doesn't have really good, like, we don't have our own operating reserve. Doesn't make sense. Right. Right? I'd like to get into multi year budgeting. We can't do that. Everything we do is have to go to a jurisdiction every year and say, here's what we'd like to do.

Yeah, hat in hand. Unlike Texas, where there's a dedicated tax. that you can kind of count on every year.

For sure, LA or Atlanta. So if you went down to Atlanta right now, they don't have the same crisis that we have because they can have more predictability and then manage workforce development, manage capital, manage operating based on that. So to me, I, it's not so much we need our own money, mind you, I Logically, I do think there is a lot of value in that, um, but I think it's the predictability part. That's the word that matters most and right now we don't have good predictability line of sight on what the funding is. So then you get to a deficit by three sources for us. One, we gave a jurisdictional credit, so we actually gave money back to the jurisdictions in the first year of the COVID crisis, um, because we had some federal money and they didn't before they got their money and then that wasn't kind of refunded, so that caused a little bit of a you know, problem. Two, we ran out of a massive amount, you know, we were, us, BART, New York, were such fare recovery based systems. Yeah, big. So we lost all of that for multiple years straight. Okay. And it is, as it's coming back, we have one employer in this region, our largest employer is the federal government, and we have a lot of people that don't seem to want to return to an office environment. Oh, yeah, right. Despite some pushes from the most powerful person in the world. So those trips, Used to be funded by smart trips of federal benefit and therefore that made up a lot of revenue for us as well and then obviously inflation just crushed us especially our Collective bargaining agreement is it had cost of living adjustments So the last couple years a lot of our frontline staff specifically got really significant increases and that by the way good for them that that's what the contract was but you put those three things together enormous pressure

So, your, uh, your other three areas of funding, you, you, you went through all of them. So, where are you at now? Let's project, okay, we're in September of, uh, actually we're in October, sorry. We're in October of 2023. What's going to happen next for your budget and all that?

Yeah, it's a rough challenge. So, I'm going to do... Uh, the general manager's proposed budget to the board, public, and the public in December. Okay. Uh, we do have some savings from last year. That'll take it down a little bit. Uh, we have a cost efficiency task force that I think we could save another 50 million a year. Uh, annual, uh, you know, reoccurring. So that's good. Okay. We are, we think the inflation numbers are coming down a bit. That matters a lot. For our cost escalation on labour, so we might have a little savings there, uh, we're probably gonna, you know, I don't want to get in front of, there's no decision made, but I'm pretty sure we're going to use a higher level of FTA preventive maintenance funding and use operations on some of that, uh, that could be worth better part of 300 plus million for our agency size. But even if we do all of these things, I, you know, might get the deficit down to 300. We're going to play around with a little bit on fares, we're going to come up with that later this month, and some service efficiencies. I'm going to do everything I humanly can to protect service, period, and especially frequency. The second you start cutting into frequency, it starts, and it's pretty hard to get it back. That death spiral. Yeah, and even people go, wow, it's not a death spiral, it's just one ring. Well, then that ring might take six years to get to that service level back. And again, if everyone's using the system differently now, what ring am I supposed to cut? Yeah. now, we think we have a couple small efficiencies that, you know, like, uh, like, let's not run eight car trainsets, run some sixes over here and do... But those are, you know, 5, 10, 15 kind of million dollar things. Around the edge. But, yeah, so we're going to have two budgets proposed, uh, we need a legislative cap in Maryland and Virginia, so further complication, Virginia and Maryland have a law that says our funding, their funding to us can't grow by more than 3 percent base a year. Really? Yup. So now they have to legally change those laws in both states to give us the money. Their legislative... cycle start in January, so the earliest we'd even know if that's done would probably be the end of March into April. Yep. I'm already told publicly that we'll probably have to do a hiring freeze starting in January and potential layoff notices in January. So all the good work that we've kind of pulled off in the last year, we could, uh, You know, get into a pretty bad divot, uh, on that and then start degrading service next. Just as spring is our busiest time here, we expect back up to at least 500, 000 on rail. So just as we're really starting to kick again, you know, we might have to start cutting trips and laying people off. So yeah, we got a big challenge in front of us. Uh, and then the capital program, if we use that operating kind of preventive maintenance money, it kind of, uh, impacts the capital program and drags that in earlier. So we're looking at the capital program only having two or three we have years left to do, you know, a lot of our big additional projects, so this will impact our new trains, zero emission program, some other things like that. So yeah, like, I mean, at the end of the day, uh, you know, we're gonna keep delivering, we gotta keep working on efficiencies. Every single piece that we can modernize here, that's my biggest effort, I'm into modernization. Right. Yeah. And modernization is not just IT stuff, although there's a big part of that. It's modernizing the organization to be, uh, as cost efficient as possible. I want to get to driverless trains that's not, that's not anti-union. I'm, I'm, I have a great relationship with the union. Um, but listen, this has been done all over the world. We're late to the game Yeah. In America. And we're the system that's perfectly set up to do it.

So and you had farebox evasion right oh you have a lot of fare evasion like 40 million or something

yeah I estimated if I go 40 million so fare evasion I won't lie to you, last summer I was like, what is going on here? Like, this used to be a pretty rules based place, and it just kind of, COVID got out of control for all over America, and listen, let's just be frank, there's a group of people in society that just turned into jerks. Um, COVID just ripped the band aid off of civility, and hopefully we can get that band aid back on. Um, and fare evasion, so like, and I want to separate a policy discussion about fares, versus enforcement. Yes. So, if you have a policy discussion, And, uh, an agency or region, jurisdictions, whatever, make a decision that, hey, we want to go fare free or some other form. Great. That's a mature policy discussion. And then you then set up your system for that. That's different than we have rules and no one wants to follow them. Right. So until someone comes up with a policy framework that is different. My job is to enforce the rules we have. So what we did, and I'm proud of this, we set up a low income fare program, first in the agency's history, a regional program. So if you're on SNAP, you immediately get 50 percent discount on fares. We've already signed up, I think, better part of 5, 000 people in the area. And the goal here is if you really need assistance, we're here to help you. Everyone else, pay your fare. And so we're going to enforce that. So, uh, citations up 500 percent so far this year, um, you know, that, um, we also have reinforced all of our gates with this new kind of material. Now it looks clear, so people think it's, like, kind of easy to get through, you can't get through it. It's really significant. You're not going to be able to jump the term style, huh? That's right. So we've, we've now done 10 stations, um, you know, and We'll have them all done by next summer, but the first 10, including places where there's a ton of fare evasion and places where there wasn't much because we wanted to test them different ways, every station we're down between 70 and 90 percent reduction in fare evasion with the new gates. Really? Yep. That's great. It worked. Police have been empowered to do their job. Gates have been put in to stop people. We're never going to be at zero, right? Right. And I'm not going to chase to zero. That's the one thing to chase. But, uh, we, I, we, we got it under pretty good condition at this point.

You mentioned earlier that you're going to a bus route re optimization plan? Yeah. Can you talk to that for a minute?

Yeah, better bus, uh, so... You know, you went through one, uh, Link up in Baltimore, that's kind of the model a lot of people have used, uh, I, I did one in kind of CapMetro with Dottie and the team, turned out fantastic down there, ridership increased and we got better cost efficiency per, per mile per trip, uh, we need to do that desperately here, Routes haven't really changed in like 40 years, and uh, it's been kind of kicked around a lot. The team has done a fantastic job in the last, we took like a three year project, and I basically told the team we got about a year, and we got all the maps done, we did a lot of community engagement. Our challenge now is, how do you implement something when... We want to implement for next July 1st, but July 1st next year is our new budget year, and we have no idea how we're... So how do you implement a new bus network at the same time you might lay people off, right?

Yeah, it's gonna be like Denver was, where they couldn't do their new thing because they didn't have... So

we don't know, so we don't know what to kind of do there, um, so we are probably gonna be not being able to implement, um, on that, but we're not quite sure yet. We'd love to, because it actually increases efficiency of the network. Yeah, yeah. And it actually drives more ridership. I can't do that while I'm also potentially laying people off. So, uh, you know, there's a, this, we're into a really challenging year here at MAPTA for sure. There's so many initiatives happening at once, and they all have to kind of work together. So tomorrow, uh, I'm going out to Dulles and we're going to celebrate our millionth customer at Dulles. So since November, we've had a million people use Dulles Airport. Dulles Airport is the fastest growing airport in the country for international flights. And the number one reason the airlines and the airport saying is because we have the new silver line to the airport. Really? Yeah. So, awesome. So that's why I, I, you know, I'm relatively optimistic about the funding stuff. All rational thoughts should be not, but maybe it's my, I don't know what you call it, young, young energy or whatever. The vigor. The vigor, or it's my naivete. Um, but I don't believe we're going to have... A rail line that took 40 years to get to Dulles Airport and then we're gonna not run trains to it. Yeah, yeah. Or we're not gonna run trains to the Pentagon, or we're not gonna run trains to DCA, or on and on. So I think we're gonna get there, but um, yeah, so that's how all this fleet is coming together and lots of good stuff.

All right, now let's talk about a tough issue for a couple minutes and that's crime. Crime has really been hitting, you see it in the papers in New York and LA a lot, in Chicago, but here too?

Oh, no question. Uh, DC, um, I think is at the highest murder rate this year. It's been since maybe 2013 ish. Okay. Something like that. It's, it's been a really bad time in the region. And it's not just in DC. It's all like the suburbs. Part of this too, if you look around the country, places that kind of came out of COVID had a year, year and a half, a lot of violence. We came out of COVID probably last of every city in the country. You know, we're right. It was much more cautious here. NIH is here. Lots of reasons for that. That's, I'm not judging good or bad. It just, just factually. Um, so, you know, there's been this big spike of violence, lots of, uh, really sad, a lot of young people, guns everywhere, a lot of teenagers killing each other. It's been real sad. Just this last week we had another big batch of shootings. So, I will tell you, on the transit system, we have had a challenging year. Crime is going down now the last four months. We have a really good Chief, we put all of our officers, we've hired. Uh, 100 armed security guards in the system every day as well, plus we have MOUs with five other police departments to do patrols in our system with our officers. I mean, we have police everywhere. I brought, just like I did in Austin, crisis intervention specialists, and we have like social worker style individuals out dealing with, you know, people that might have some issues out on the system, and they've done some really good stuff to, uh, Help people, you know, whether people were thinking of suicide or other things, that has been good. We got a, we have over 30, 000 video assets at the agency and we're doing some interesting stuff. Doing AI, analyzing. Yeah, and some other stuff we're working on there. That's good. Uh, but crime has been bad. Um, you know, we've had, we had probably hands down the most tragic day I've had in my, in my entire career. We had one of our electricians at a station, uh, we had, there was a guy with a gun, he was shooting multiple people. We had an electrician, grabbed him, tried to subdue him, unfortunately, uh, that, our, our employee got shot and killed, um, in front of his partner and other people, uh, so heroic act by our employee, um, so that was incredibly sad and horrible situation. I will say, I've never seen a region rally around a transit authority more like that. Um, people really came out to support the family and support the organization. Uh, and our team, we were worried, a good example, we were worried the next day that people might not come into work. We never had any, like, no one didn't show up. It was, you know, so people rallied as an organization. That's wonderful. But there's been, but, um, I think we've had five murders on the system since I've had the job. Mm. Um, but, you know, luckily, we think we're going in the right direction now. That's good. That the spike is... seemingly to die off, but as a region, as a country, you know, a lot of us as CEOs, we get together or other, these are topics that are not transit topics, right? I mean, what am I or whoever runs a system supposed to do? We have a, we have a national gun crisis. In the national, lack of civility crisis, and we are just, we're just the blood that runs through, um, you know, the arteries that run through a good community, good transit. So we are not immune for that kind of getting on to us from time to time. So we're doing everything we possibly can. but at a certain point, you know, this is a much larger conversation that, and it's, it does hurt ridership. There's no getting around it. It hurts, it hurts morale, and it hurts, um, you know, the employees that work at these agencies. I, I, I had a, one of my station managers the other day was dealing with someone with a mental... Kind of break down, you know, having a really tough time and she's crying, comes over and gives me a hug and I hug her like, like, you know, my frontline staff, just like around the industry, we got incredible people working in this industry and a lot of people that have certain jobs and offices around the country don't realize that we are first responders every day and deal with a lot of, a lot of stuff that they don't see. So, uh, just a really proud of, of the, of the people that work here and around the industry Going through a lot of difficult times.

Thanks, sounds like you're on the right path. All right. Yeah. One more question. Sure. That's from Brett Spellbring, good friend of mine who used to run the radio shop in Baltimore at the MTA. I hired him there, yeah. Now he's down in Texas working for a camera company. He says, what do you enjoy most in your day to day life in transit?

Yeah, hey, that's a, so, well, like, I'm on the system every day. I've had, I don't know, 600 plus trips. Yeah, you ride to work, right? Every day, and on the weekends, my wife and I take the bus. Like, that's just what we do, right? So, I, I guess, I'll give the thematic and then, like... Okay, for lack of better. So thematically, it's I really like when good policy is like making a place better. And so what I mean by that is like, when transit works well, no one should be talking about it. It's just this quiet thing in the background, right? Like, so like, we make tons of noise here at Metro. And like I told people, my job was to make Metro boring. And people like, Oh, that's funny. And I'm like, I'm serious, right? Because if it's well functioning, people are not, they're just, and that's the way it should be. People should be able to count on us and go about their life, and that means good policy. Because then, when it's working well, that leads to better housing policy, education policy, it leads to wellness, it leads to a bunch of other things, right? So, I just, like, What we do as an industry is as meaningful as almost anything there is in the public space, right? It's also why, you know, I know you've got a lot of listeners, I would say a transit CEO, a police chief, and a school superintendent, arguably the three hardest public sector jobs in America because they are so meaningful. Uh, those, those kind of three places. So that's on the thematic. On a personal, I just love getting stuff done. Like I, that's, that's who I am. It's how I'm cut. My parents grew up as entrepreneurs, run a construction company. People in Austin that work with me, people in Boston, people in the industry, they, uh, people here. I come in. You know, some people joke like high energy, tornadic, that's who I am every single day. And so therefore to me, that's not tornadic, right? Tornadic is come and go. I've been doing this this way for like a long, long time. And I'm always hopefully going to be this way, which is I live on a sense of urgency every day. Now, urgency doesn't mean easily distracted away from prioritization and being strategic. Urgency means what we do really matters and we got to be good at it. And we got to continue to move that needle. So I love getting things done. And the best pride I have is seeing other people that I work with really proud of them getting, getting stuff done. Because when, because to me, our leaders, management is like us getting in the room and laying things out. Leadership is about getting a group of people that can work together to get more done than they believe they could get done. And when that happens, you move the needle, or you move the threshold, A little bit more and a little bit more, right? Because most people you ask, they're going to say, can you do X? They're going to say, I can do Y. And then once they prove they can do X, then they can do this and this and this and this. Momentum is, is really infectious when people are proud of what they do and work well together. So, probably the best thing I feel about the last year is we have a team. We've done surveys that internally prove it. The pride of the organization has come back pretty significantly. And where people feel good about coming to work and, but what they do. They're willing to work hard and they're, we're willing to work collaboratively and really get stuff done. You know, a good friend, uh, you know, Ray Malady? Oh yeah. Right. So he's a friend of mine just like yours. Uh, he and I use this term all the time and you know, I'll be the PG version of this, but Okay. Like I always say, what I like to be surrounded with, p people are people that have gas. Give a And if you come in every day and do that, and if you make a mistake, that's okay. Because if you're making zero mistakes, you're not trying. Right? So, we need some risk tolerance in our industry. I think we've been too risk intolerant as an industry for a long time. So I really want to empower, I think my job is just that, to empower people to work together. Try hard, and uh, if you make a mistake, we got your back, and we'll just grow and learn from it, instead of worrying about never making a mistake, so. Sorry, I don't know if that's the way you want to end that, but, uh, to me, I just, we're, we're a great industry with great people, and we gotta get people fired up about what we're doing.

Well, we can't wait to see what you're gonna do next.

Hey, I just want, hey. It's what time is it? Yeah, I got a PM rush hour in a few hours.

Yeah, you're only as good as your latest rush hour.

Gotta keep our eye on that prize,

too. Yeah, Randy Clarke, CEO and general manager of Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority. Thank you so much for being our guest today.

Yeah, thanks, Paul. Good seeing you again.

Hi, this is Mike Bismeyer and this is Mike's Minute, where we talk about leadership, mentorship and kindness with the hopes that will inspire you to pay it forward. First and foremost, congratulations to Paul and the entire Transit Unplugged team on your 6 year anniversary. Truly fantastic, and I'm truly humbled to have been a regular contributor myself for the past 3 and a half years. And what a way to celebrate with one of our industry leaders and always great guests, Randy Clarke. When we talk leadership in transit, Randy quickly comes to mind. it has been great over the years to watch him at different agencies and through many panel discussions. Conference sharing, sharing his insights and his visions, his day to day habits, and most of all, the valuable lessons he's learned. You don't have to listen long to understand the many hats that our great leaders and mentors wear, and try to juggle for that matter. As Randy rattled off many of the day to day challenges he faces, many are consistent at agencies across North America. Albeit just at different scales. Staffing, ridership, public and operator safety, funding, and service reliability. They all sound familiar, right? Of course, they do. But what is also familiar is the passion and vigor in which our leaders pursue these issues at every agency and apply the lessons learned, build dynamic teams. And get the vision complete. I like Randy's comment on surrounding yourself with people that get stuff done. In my 15 plus years in transit, I've been privileged to be both surrounded by and have learned from many of the doers and folks getting stuff done. There are challenges every day, but peer to peer sharing, communication and belief in your team. Allow us daily successes to help keep our teams motivated and again driving the point home that leadership is both mentorship and kindness and action. Actions that propel the betterment of our industry for sure. I look forward to seeing everyone at CUTA in early November, where I will have the honour of participating on a leadership panel with Paul discussing more industry leadership and kindness traits in our industry. Thanks for listening. Kindness is cool. Have a great day.

Hi, this is Tris Hussey, editor of Transit Unplugged. Thank you for listening to this kickoff to season seven, with our guest, Randy Clarke really hope you enjoyed this special interview. Now coming up next week on the show, we have part two of our live CEO round table recorded at APTA last month. In part two of the round table, you'll hear from each CEO about what projects they have going on at their agencies. And some of the things they're most proud of right now. While you listening to the podcast, could you do us a favor? Take a moment and rate and review Transit Unplugged wherever you listen to podcasts. Reading and reviewing the show helps other people find Transit Unplugged and become part of our transit enthusiast community. If you have a question comment or would like to be a guest on the show. Feel free to email us anytime@infoattransitunplugged.com. 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.