Ron Kilcoyne on the Three Essentials for Growing Transit Ridership

Paul Comfort: 00:00:05

This is Transit Unplugged.

Paul Comfort: 00:00:06

I'm Paul Comfort.

Paul Comfort: 00:00:07

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:11

comes to public transportation.

Paul Comfort: 00:00:12

What can we do to get ridership back up?

Paul Comfort: 00:00:15

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:20

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:23

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:27

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:31

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:35

and we're trying lots of different things.

Paul Comfort: 00:00:38

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

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in the transit industry.

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:45

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

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

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

Paul Comfort: 00:00:57

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

Paul Comfort: 00:01:01

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

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

Paul Comfort: 00:01:08

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

Paul Comfort: 00:01:12

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Paul Comfort: 00:01:38

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Paul Comfort: 00:01:40

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Paul Comfort: 00:01:46

Thanks so much.

Paul Comfort: 00:01:47

Now let's join the conversation with Ron Kilcoyne

Paul Comfort: 00:01:54

. Ron, thanks for being with us.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:01:56

Thank you.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:01:56

Great to be here, Paul.

Paul Comfort: 00:01:57

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

Paul Comfort: 00:02:00

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

Paul Comfort: 00:02:03

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

Paul Comfort: 00:02:07

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

Paul Comfort: 00:02:12

Those were big jobs, man.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:13

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:17

was working in planning at AC Transit.

Paul Comfort: 00:02:20

Wow.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:20

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:29

and there actually initiated their first, restructuring.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:33

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:39

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:42

people didn't want to change anything.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:44

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:02:48

able to run the whole show.

Paul Comfort: 00:02:49

I wanted to share that background with our listeners

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

Paul Comfort: 00:02:56

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:02

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:07

You're not operating from an ivory tower.

Paul Comfort: 00:03:09

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:12

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:15

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:20

them, but actually implementing them.

Paul Comfort: 00:03:22

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:25

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:29

But it's another thing to actually implement it.

Paul Comfort: 00:03:32

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:35

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:39

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:44

didn't want to make the changes.

Paul Comfort: 00:03:45

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:51

get our ridership back up, aren't they?

Paul Comfort: 00:03:53

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

Paul Comfort: 00:03:56

great way to kick off this conversation.

Paul Comfort: 00:03:58

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

Paul Comfort: 00:04:02

What are those three legs, Ron?

Paul Comfort: 00:04:03

Let's talk about them.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:05

Well, all right.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:05

The first leg would be the design of the service.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:08

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:12

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:16

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:21

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:26

social activities, access to opportunity.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:29

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:33

Now you get to the second stool.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:34

How do they know that this product meets their needs?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:38

How can they be enticed to at least sample it?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:04:41

And that's the marketing, the promotional thing.

Paul Comfort: 00:04:44

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

Paul Comfort: 00:04:45

Number two, sampling it.

Paul Comfort: 00:04:46

I like that.

Paul Comfort: 00:04:47

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

Paul Comfort: 00:04:50

basically get them to try it one time.

Paul Comfort: 00:04:52

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

Paul Comfort: 00:04:55

commuting if they're not a commuter.

Paul Comfort: 00:04:56

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

Paul Comfort: 00:05:00

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

Paul Comfort: 00:05:03

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

Paul Comfort: 00:05:06

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

Paul Comfort: 00:05:09

And you can hook them, right?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:11

That's correct.

Paul Comfort: 00:05:12

Yeah.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:12

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:15

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:20

transit, to get to people who use transit.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:23

The third stool is what keeps them there.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:25

And that's the operations part of it.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:27

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:30

operations, is the bus on time?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:32

Is the driver friendly?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:34

is the bus clean?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:35

does the customer feel safe?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:37

is the service reliable?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:38

Is the bus isn't going to break down?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:40

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:44

That type of thing.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:44

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:49

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:54

the Director of Customer Satisfaction.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:57

I got a lot of pushback.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:05:58

I got a real lot of pushback.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:00

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:05

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:08

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:11

Director of Customer Satisfaction.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:13

So, you've got basically the three legs.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:16

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:19

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:33

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:37

It's about the customer.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:38

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:43

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:46

sure the customer is satisfied.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:48

So they keep coming back.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:06:49

Their expectations are being met.

Paul Comfort: 00:06:51

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

Paul Comfort: 00:06:53

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

Paul Comfort: 00:06:58

They see themselves focused on the nuts and bolts.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:07:01

Yeah, correct.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:07:02

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:07

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:10

Yeah.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:10

Like the seven habits of highly effective people.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:12

That's good, Ron.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:13

I love that.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:14

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:17

did back in, 16, in that timeframe.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:22

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:26

lot of what they call the choice riders.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:28

and a lot of CEOs were very concerned about it.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:30

I've told this story before.

Paul Comfort: 00:07:32

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:35

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:38

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:41

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:44

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:48

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:51

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

Paul Comfort: 00:07:55

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

Paul Comfort: 00:08:01

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

Paul Comfort: 00:08:05

and world class customer service.

Paul Comfort: 00:08:07

And everything we did Focused around that.

Paul Comfort: 00:08:09

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:12

Absolutely.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:12

And, those are four key elements.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:15

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:18

fact that is, is running times.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:20

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:25

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:33

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:38

stuff like that is really critical.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:41

It's like.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:41

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:44

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:48

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:54

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:08:59

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:03

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:08

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:13

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:18

Perception is reality.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:20

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:23

at what really sped things up.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:25

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:31

you could enter through any doors.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:33

that's one thing that could really.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:35

speed it up.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:35

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:39

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:43

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:51

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:09:57

bogged down by making just too many stops.

Paul Comfort: 00:09:59

That's right.

Paul Comfort: 00:10:00

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:06

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:11

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:15

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:19

and reducing the number of bus stops.

Paul Comfort: 00:10:21

But also.

Paul Comfort: 00:10:22

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:27

people who haven't used transit before?

Paul Comfort: 00:10:29

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

Paul Comfort: 00:10:31

Especially to try to attract new people.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:32

Oh, absolutely.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:34

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:37

Area, San Francisco Bay Area.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:40

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:44

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:50

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:54

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:10:58

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:03

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:07

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:11

Transit Center, just to get to Carlsbad.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:14

Okay?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:15

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:19

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:22

to downtown San Diego on their bus.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:26

shuttle on the San Diego airport.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:28

Okay, so I know this.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:30

Now I get to the airport.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:31

Where do I catch it?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:32

There is absolutely no signage in the airport.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:34

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:37

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:41

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:45

or get an Uber, or what have you.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:53

Area example, and MTC is doing this.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:11:55

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:00

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:04

have some kind of a pilot project.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:06

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:12

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:17

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:22

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:27

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:31

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:36

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:40

But when you drive anywhere, how many different agencies are

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:43

responsible for the streets?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:44

You never give it a thought.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:12:45

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

Paul Comfort: 00:12:48

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

Paul Comfort: 00:12:51

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

Paul Comfort: 00:12:56

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

Paul Comfort: 00:13:00

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

Paul Comfort: 00:13:03

you dig into that a little bit more.

Paul Comfort: 00:13:04

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:08

Okay.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:09

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:12

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:17

So I found 10 peers.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:19

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:33

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:37

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:42

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:52

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:13:56

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:01

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:06

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:10

I did found peers because each of those three systems were

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:13

very different from each other.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:14

So I found different peers.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:16

I still find that correlation.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:17

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:23

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:27

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:31

And so how do we want to do that?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:34

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:38

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:41

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:45

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:50

ridership and per capita, service hours.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:53

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:14:59

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:03

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:08

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:12

there would be needing for more funding.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:15

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:19

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:31

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:36

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:38

Bay Area, I would have never guessed.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:40

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:44

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:48

AC Transit's number two, no surprise.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:51

Number three totally threw me off.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:53

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:15:56

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:01

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:06

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:11

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:16

They provided a very high level of service to BART.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:20

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:24

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:32

of ridership you're going to generate.

Paul Comfort: 00:16:34

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

Paul Comfort: 00:16:37

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

Paul Comfort: 00:16:42

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

Paul Comfort: 00:16:47

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

Paul Comfort: 00:16:50

pandemic ridership, but it is what it is.

Paul Comfort: 00:16:53

People want to get that ridership back up.

Paul Comfort: 00:16:55

What is your recommendation to them right now?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:16:57

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:01

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:05

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:10

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:15

I, I think there's a couple things.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:16

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:20

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:25

much service we should be providing.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:27

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:31

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:36

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:39

What is the, what is the return on investment?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:42

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:47

because a politician may say, well, fine.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:50

I don't know.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:51

What, what does it matter?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:52

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:55

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:17:58

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:01

markets can you best serve?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:03

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:05

equity priority communities.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:07

Where are the communities that need the service the most?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:10

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:16

looking at, at, where you want to focus.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:18

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:21

AC Transit, I lived in San Francisco.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:23

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:27

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:32

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:34

I was a transit nerd.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:35

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:40

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:45

And 70 percent of the trips are not work trips.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:52

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:18:58

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:01

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:06

We need to, we need to focus beyond that.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:08

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:12

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:17

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:21

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:24

than the fare you charge.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:26

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:30

service to get more people riding.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:31

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:35

free doesn't matter.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:36

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:39

Or we had a budget deficit.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:41

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:45

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:19:50

not going to have something to ride.

Paul Comfort: 00:19:52

Those are good.

Paul Comfort: 00:19:52

Those are good recommendations, Ron.

Paul Comfort: 00:19:53

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

Paul Comfort: 00:19:59

so that you can apply for more money.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:01

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:03

the end of the COVID funds.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:04

And then, providing that higher level of service.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:07

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:11

So we've got a hybrid work schedules.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:13

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:17

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:21

used to have at your peak periods.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:23

You may need to expand service.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:24

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:28

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:31

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:35

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:38

primarily a commuter service.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:40

We're now considering ourselves a lifestyle mobility service.

Paul Comfort: 00:20:44

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:48

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:51

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

Paul Comfort: 00:20:56

That seems to be the overall arching recommendations.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:20:59

You get pretty good travel data.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:03

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:06

all modes by time of day, by trip purpose.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:10

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:15

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:19

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:24

can, where can transit work the best?

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:26

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:28

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:31

preconceived notions aren't existing.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:33

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:35

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:39

m.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:39

and 9 p.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:40

m.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:40

than between 7 a.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:41

m.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:41

and 9 a.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:42

m.

Paul Comfort: 00:21:42

Wow.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:43

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:47

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:51

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:54

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:21:59

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:22:02

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

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:22:06

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

Paul Comfort: 00:22:08

Well, thanks Ron.

Paul Comfort: 00:22:08

Great conversation today, sharing some of your, experiences.

Paul Comfort: 00:22:12

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

Paul Comfort: 00:22:16

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

Paul Comfort: 00:22:21

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

Paul Comfort: 00:22:23

Thanks for being with us today, Ron.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:22:24

Well, thank you, Paul.

Ron Kilcoyne: 00:22:25

great to be here.

Tris Hussey: 00:22:31

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

Tris Hussey: 00:22:34

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

Tris Hussey: 00:22:39

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

Tris Hussey: 00:22:45

really improve ridership at our agencies.

Tris Hussey: 00:22:48

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

Tris Hussey: 00:22:53

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

Tris Hussey: 00:22:56

The agency that serves Detroit in Southeastern Michigan.

Tris Hussey: 00:22:59

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

Tris Hussey: 00:23:03

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

Tris Hussey: 00:23:09

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

Tris Hussey: 00:23:14

to keep up with today's transit riders.

Tris Hussey: 00:23:17

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Tris Hussey: 00:23:20

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Tris Hussey: 00:23:23

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Check the links in the show notes and sign up.

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Tris Hussey: 00:23:31

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Tris Hussey: 00:23:35

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Tris Hussey: 00:23:39

So until next week ride safe and ride happy.