(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 457: Want Riders? Run Frequent Service
This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by transit expert and former general manager for three transit systems Ron Kilcoyne. Ron joins us to talk about the importance of running frequent transit service in order to attract riders and how agencies in the Bay Area are underserving the population.
Find Ron’s Streetsblog SF piece here and the report he did for Seamless Bay Area. If you want to message Ron, you can do so at his email address [email protected].
To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:
Jeff Wood (1m 25s):
Well Ron Kilcoyne, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.
Ron Kilcoyne (1m 49s):
Thank you, I’m happy to be here.
Jeff Wood (1m 51s):
Yeah, thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Ron Kilcoyne (1m 55s):
Sure. Well, I have been a transit professional for about 43 years. I started my career as a planner at AC Transit in Oakland, California, was there 12 years. Then I moved around the country doing transit general manager gigs in Santa Clarita, California, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Eugene, Oregon. And after retiring from LTD in Eugene, Oregon, I became a full-time consultant. Currently I am senior manager with TMD, which stands for Transit Management Design and we are a service planning consultancy.
Jeff Wood (2m 27s):
So I’m curious about your time at some of the other agencies. you know, you’ve, you’ve been heads of agencies on both coasts and, you know, now you’re obviously consulting. But what, what’s something people might not know or understand about small to medium sized transit systems?
Ron Kilcoyne (2m 42s):
Well, first of all, I, I would say that three systems I managed were totally different from each other. Santa Clarita was an ex-urban. In fact, it was a new system. I was the first manager there by the time transit was established in Santa Clarita, which is a northern Los Angeles county. For people that don’t know where Santa Clarita is, it’s a long I five. As you leave the LA Basin, the population had already grown 150,000 without any transit service. Bridgeport was a classic, you know, sort of old industrial city. They’d seen better days. It was all located in Fairfield County, which is one of the most affluent counties in the country. But Bridgeport probably had more in common with Detroit than it did with the rest of Fairfield County in terms of, you know, it was the Arsenal democracy during World War ii.
Ron Kilcoyne (3m 29s):
And you know, most of those factories were abandoned. And LTD was a college town, you know, university of Oregon, LTD at the time I was there was 19th in terms of per capita ridership of all transit systems in the United States and also in the top 25 in terms of over all system productivity. So small town, smaller systems are unique to their particular areas that they serve, but I think some of the principles of transit, whether it’s in a small community or a large community, are still the same in terms of, you know, you need to provide frequency, you need to provide service span, you need to provide quality service.
Ron Kilcoyne (4m 9s):
Smaller systems tend not to have the resources that larger systems have or the staffing necessarily. The large systems have. Right now, as a consultant, I’m doing a transit development plan for Great Falls, Montana, and I was just there last week and you know, technologically they’re behind the times, but they’re sort of like a, a mom and pop transit operation, but they do a great job. You know, they, they are very customer friendly. They’ve regained mostly all of their pre pandemic ridership. The riders really love the service. you know, it’s, it’s a really good operation. They may not have all the bells and whistles, but they’re doing a good job, you know, serving the community. And they also do one thing that as a consultant, we always try to fix when we get into smaller systems, if you have giant one-way loops, that’s very unattractive to the customer because if it takes an hour to make a round trip when you could probably make it even on transit, a round trip in 20 minutes, you know, that’s obviously inconvenient.
Ron Kilcoyne (5m 8s):
But Great falls, they’ve got bidirectional Routes, which means making the round trip is double making a one way trip and not, you know, three times as much. But the lack of resources is probably the biggest challenge to smaller systems. They may not be able to justify running the same frequency that a big city has because they don’t have the density, but they do need to be providing bidirectional service at least every half hour. And many don’t have the resources to do that.
Jeff Wood (5m 33s):
Yeah. Well, we’ll talk about the principles later, which talks about those loops specifically, but I wanna go back in time a little bit and ask you, you know, what got you into transit? Like, what was the thing that got you interested in transportation and transit policy and those types of things?
Ron Kilcoyne (5m 47s):
I always say it’s prenatal because my mom said that when I was, she was pregnant with me, the only time I ever kicked was when she was riding the train to and from work. But in reality, I grew up in a household down the peninsula, it and Drive, we didn’t have a car, so it was dependent on public transportation. And I was actually riding the bus alone as young as six because my parents wanted me to go Catholic school and our parish didn’t have it. And so I meant I had to go from San Bruno to Burlingame on what was then the Greyhound buses. That was SamTrans. My dad was a mailman in San Francisco in sort of the outer mission, 29th, 30th street. So port or twice every summer, my mom would walk me to the bus stop and I’d ride up to San Francisco.
Ron Kilcoyne (6m 29s):
My dad would meet me and I’d walk the rest of his route. So I actually, I’m aware because a lot of people got in transit, you know, have this story about how it was accidental in my case. I actually loved, became fascinated with transportation, started collecting timetables when I was young, and always felt I could do a better job. Always kind of thought that, you know, the, the service is crappy and I could do a better job. I’m probably one of these few people that actually aspired to be a transit general manager as a kid, even though I didn’t know it was a career path. I mean, if everyone asked me what I wanted to do as a kid, I’d say there was a phase I wanted to be a priest. And then that stopped once I had puberty.
Ron Kilcoyne (7m 11s):
But, or a lawyer fascinated with Perry Mason and that. And my mom said, well, you’re so into transportation, why didn’t you get into that? And I think, well, to me that was like a fun thing. you know, work is a job, but not that. But so yeah, I’ve always been interested in it and eventually managed to get a job. But what I was in college, I would take every opportunity to write a paper on transportation. Not necessarily transit, but transportation. And I also times when I didn’t have a paper to write, I would call up people at local transit systems and say, I was writing a paper just to get in and talk to them. And you know, at that time, this was the early seventies, you know, people were saying, wow, no, there’s no career, there’s no future for transit.
Ron Kilcoyne (7m 53s):
It’s gonna die and forget it. Think of something else to do or, and if you wanna get in transit, you gotta be a bus driver first. you know, that’s the only way to work up way up. So I got some discouraging words, but you know, I persevered and we’re here today still doing it.
Jeff Wood (8m 9s):
That’s awesome. Well, so I wanna ask a basic question first. I hope it’s basic anyways, but maybe it’s more complicated than we think. But I wanna know why transit service is important.
Ron Kilcoyne (8m 18s):
Well, transit can provide a lot of benefits to the community. For one thing, it provides access. And I, I like to use access instead of mobility because to me it’s really, it is about accessing opportunities, accessing employment, accessing healthcare, accessing education, accessing retail, accessing social opportunities. And number one, there are, are a number of people who don’t have a driver’s license, don’t have a car. But also we, because we have built communities where you have to get around with a car, that means that kind of limits the freedom, limits the accessibility for people that don’t have cars or driver’s license.
Ron Kilcoyne (8m 59s):
But more importantly, we just cannot sustain the high level of vehicle miles traveled that at auto centric communities provide. There’s a number of studies that have shown that simply electrifying all of our cars and trucks and buses is not enough to address climate change. You know, to deal with climate change, we have to reduce vehicle miles traveled. The fact is congestion is because we just, quite often it could be a sign of good economic vitality, but at the other hand, it, it’s a sign that there’s just too many cars out there. So for the sake of the environment, for the sake of the economy, for the sake of social cohesion, we need to give people choices.
Ron Kilcoyne (9m 44s):
And we need to give people alternatives so that they don’t have to own a car. Which, as I think some of your articles that I’ve seen in overhead wire and Streetsblog and what have you lately show that the price of a car is getting out of the hand, the price of housing’s getting outta hand. So people, you know, don’t have to be forced to have a car to get accessibility. But just the fact is that it is not sustainable to just keep building our way out of traffic. We need to give alternatives. And so to me, you know, transit is essential. And I still look at ridership as the North star because for transit to provide benefits to the community, the buses, the trains, the ferries have to be carrying people not be empty.
Jeff Wood (10m 28s):
Yeah, it’s interesting because we posted a number of articles last couple days, you know, one of ’em was with the University of Minnesota Transportation Center, the Accessibility Observatory on how during the pandemic, you know, traffic was so light that people had much greater access, even if they had a car, you know, Atlanta for example, people had access to 82% more jobs when the traffic was lighter because it wasn’t so backed up. And that you were able to get places in in faster times. And obviously we’ve heard about, you know, how cars are getting more expensive. And so if it costs so much to get into the system at all housing and transportation, then it’s cost prohibitive to actually, you know, operate in society, which is frustrating. But yeah. So another kind of metric question that I have for you though is, you know, I wanna talk about your report that you did for Seamless, Bay, Area, because I, I think it gets us a little bit deeper into the discussion this, this question I have, which is that per capita ridership is most connected to per capita service hours more than anything else.
Jeff Wood (11m 22s):
And I’m wondering, that seems like the big finding of what you’re talking about, or at least the big connecting point of what you’re talking about. I’m wondering what does it mean first and then why that is, and why does it mean what it means?
Ron Kilcoyne (11m 34s):
Well, there’s a couple ways of answering this question, but I think what it means is that that, you know, there’s been a lot of efforts, a lot of talk, a lot of debate lately. How do we get writers back onto transit, particularly since the pandemic really cut into transit ridership. And I started this work for Seamless before the pandemic and we said, well let’s finish it off. you know, there’s talk about free fares, there’s talk about security and they’re all important, particularly security. I don’t wanna make it sound like I’m diminishing that at importance. But to attract more customers to ride or to get more people to ride transit, I always say there’s like, there’s a three legged stool that the transit agency needs to focus on.
Ron Kilcoyne (12m 15s):
And if you take one leg off, the stool falls over. The first is designing the service, and that is how frequently it runs. The span of service, how early and late it runs and where it runs, and how quickly you can get from point A to point B that’s designing the product. That’s number one. But if you design a great product that everyone’s going to use or that’s gonna be useful to a large percentage of the population, they need to know about it. They need to be enticed to sample it. That’s the second leg. The marketing, the promotion, the public information piece of it. Now let’s say you succeeded in both those areas.
Ron Kilcoyne (12m 55s):
Everyone knows about it. Then the third leg is the ongoing operations. Is the bus on time or the trainer very on time? Is it clean? Do the people feel safe? Are the operators friendly and courteous? Is it reliable? Is it not gonna just not be on time? You don’t have to worry about it breaking down while you’re riding it. Those are the kind of the operational things that’s not gonna bring people to transit, but that’s gonna, once they’ve sampled it, that’s gonna keep ’em coming back. If you fail on that area, people are gonna stop using it. So you need to have all of those three elements together to maximize ridership. But the one piece of glue that you absolutely need gets back to that first leg.
Ron Kilcoyne (13m 38s):
The service levels, if the service is well marketed, it’s clean, shiny, what have you, the fair’s free or the fear’s low or whatever the fair is, the bus is running once an hour, or if it’s a one-way loop, or if it’s just only runs from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM it means that people aren’t going to use it because it’s just too inconvenient to use. And I think that’s why the relationship of per capita service hours per capita ridership is the strongest correlation. I first came across this idea in my first general manager’s job where I wanted to do PI 10 peer agencies and look at all of the particular measures that they had to compare how we were doing, but also to see where the strength was.
Ron Kilcoyne (14m 30s):
And believe it or not, the only one I could find a correlation to was per capita ridership to per capita service hours. I could find a system that was crappy on-time performance, was still doing good with ridership or vice versa. Now I’m not advocating all these other things. I mean, they say you wanna have all those three legs working together well, but the one piece of glue, and I like to say, well it’s like flour for a cake, even though there’s flowerless cakes is that service level because everything else supports it. But it all falls apart if you don’t have a high level of service that’s convenient for people to use to meet their accessibility needs.
Jeff Wood (15m 10s):
It’s interesting ’cause you know, a lot of people talk about density, a lot of folks talk about other metrics you mentioned there’s access, there’s, there’s other things that we can talk about, safety, et cetera. But the kind of, the loss of focus on, on ridership itself seems, you know, counterintuitive to providing service as well. I mean, like thinking about how we can, you know, bring back transit systems but not thinking about ridership. It seems off to me, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Ron Kilcoyne (15m 34s):
I would agree with that. I mean, I think that when I see we need to come up with other measures, I think that’s kind of missing the point. I mean, accessibility is an, is an important message. And I, I made reference to an article that David Zipper wrote a few years ago about accessibility. And while I agree with everything he said, but what is accessibility? How do you define accessibility? Well, it really gets back to, again, service levels also, if you’re providing good accessibility, does that really matter if you’re not caring people? So that’s where I still think that ridership is the north star. I have often made this comment, I mean I used to always tell my staff that transit dependency is not in our vocabulary.
Ron Kilcoyne (16m 19s):
And this was probably something that I used to advocate. It was very much misunderstood because when I talked about we need to focus on choice riders, people kept thinking, well that meant you’re gonna focus on high quality commuter express services and ignore people in the inner city. No, that’s not thinking about that at all. It’s nothing to do with that aspect. What I mean by this is that I’d see people say big comments like, well affluent people, time is more important to them. So you mean timing isn’t important to people that are not affluent? I mean, to me that’s very condescending. I guess. I guess what I’m getting at is that I felt a transit, when you talk about transit dependence in that sense, it subconsciously becomes condescending that they’ll take whatever crap we give them.
Ron Kilcoyne (17m 7s):
And that’s the point I’m trying to get to that we can’t look at it that way. We gotta look at that. Everybody has a choice and everybody does have a choice. They may not be good choices, they may be limited choices, but if we can’t give high quality service to everyone regardless where you are on the economic stratus or what have you, then you know, we’re not doing a good job. We have to be earning the choice of riders. Now you mentioned density. Yeah, density’s important. I mean, you know, you’re not gonna be running service every 15 minutes if you have really, really low density. you know, that’s kind of a fourth element. And I didn’t put that on my three legged stool because I was looking at what the transit transit agency needs to do.
Ron Kilcoyne (17m 51s):
The fourth element is the transit agency should be an advocate for transit supportive development. But as I found in Santa Clarita, which was built around the car by focusing, we were still able to generate a good deal of transit ridership by providing a high quality service. So you’re not gonna get the same levels of service in Santa Clarita as you’re gonna get in San Francisco ’cause they’re two completely different cities. But still focusing on ridership, providing as high a level of service as the density can support is still a basic principle that that applies to big or small systems.
Jeff Wood (18m 34s):
I also wanna know where the per capita is coming from. So per capita basically means per person, right? So a population, but it’s spread out through a certain geography. And so when we talk about per capita, what are the geographies that we’re talking about when we’re comparing these systems to each other?
Ron Kilcoyne (18m 48s):
Well, you know, one of the things is you try to look at the service area, and I, when I say service area MTD, the National Transit database, you have to report your service area population, your service area, square footage or square miles. And the way they say that is, if you have fixed route service, anything that’s within a threequarter mile of a fixed route, if you have a station, train station, anything within a threequarter mile circle of that route. And if you have dial aide, wherever you’re providing dial aide service too, that’s kind of the NTD, the National Transit Database definition of service area. For my analysis, I was basically using that for the United States, for Canada, just use whatever qda came up with.
Ron Kilcoyne (19m 33s):
But it’s in theory the population or the employment within that has access to transit. I have found that there is some places that are probably bit more generous in how they define their population. But you know, you just kind of have to work with that. But that’s, that’s where the per capita comes from. It’s basically the population that does have access to transit service.
Jeff Wood (19m 60s):
It’s interesting ’cause I go back to, you know, my work at Reconnecting America and the Center for TOD and thinking about transit ridership and what drives it, right? A lot of the work that I did specifically was looking at densities and, and how they were connected. And a lot of the literature pointed to employment density being the big draw because a lot of transit trips were work trips, which is, we’ll talk about that in a second compared to like what the pandemic means for that. But you know, you look at back at push grab and Zan and their work in, in the seventies thinking about, you know, what makes for a good, you know, transit service and those types of things. I was always interested in kind of those connections. And then, you know, when I started blogging in the early two thousands, thinking about, you know, these weighted densities, trying to figure out where the density actually was and and the perceived density, right?
Jeff Wood (20m 42s):
Like what the density felt like versus what the actual density is like. ’cause you know, there’ll, there’ll be people out there that say Los Angeles is denser than New York City or New York as a whole, which is true technically, but at the same time there is, you know, the density feels different because of the hyper density of Manhattan and the, and the lower density of some of the suburbs. So it’s just an interesting discussion that continues to this day. But it makes me think of that when I think of like per capita density or per capita ridership or tho any, anything along those lines.
Ron Kilcoyne (21m 11s):
Well, one of the things I try to do in the report, if you notice, like when I was comparing Toronto to the Bay area, I compared Toronto, the city to San Francisco, the city, and then I compare the region, which of course, you know, involves a lot of lower density areas to the Bay area, which is a region. And you know, I think you could probably get into much deeper, deeper details as far as different densities than what I did. But at the same time, I think that at the level I did it at, it still makes sense because, you know, one of the things that I found out that totally surprised me when I was looking at the Bay area systems is I, I did a subset of the 27 Bay area systems, the 20 systems that have bus service, this would exclude and Caltrain and and Ace and that.
Ron Kilcoyne (22m 6s):
So what really surprised me was if you look at the top five systems for per capita ridership, they are the top five systems for per capita service. They provide, number one being Muni. you know, if you know anything about transit, you could pick Munis number one. Number two was AC transit and they’re number two both in those things. But number three in per capita service totally shocked me and you are the report. So you know the answer to this, it was a West catt. Now, I would never have picked West Katt as being number three in terms of per capita service, but they were also number four in per capita ridership. So it’s like the correlation was there, I mean for many of your people listening to this don’t know what West Katt represents.
Ron Kilcoyne (22m 53s):
It represents communities of Pinola and Hercules and Crockett, which is Western Contra Costa County. It’s a suburban area, it’s a hilly suburban area. If you look at the geography there as well as the density, all those factors, you know, you would never peg that to be high. Now how do they come out? Well, part of it is because they were providing a very high level of service connecting that area with a BART station. They also had some direct service into San Francisco, but they also provide I think a very high level of service, relatively speaking for the environment they operated in.
Ron Kilcoyne (23m 33s):
So there’s nothing about the West Katt service area that says transit friendly or transit supportive. But somehow, you know, they managed to do that. And I’d like to think that I’ve succeeded in Santa Clarita when I was there. I mean by the time I left we were doing 3 million rides a year. you know, this is a exurban area that was built around the car because there was no transit service until, you know, it hit a population 150,000. Well, you know, there was an article today in the transit news about Birmingham, Alabama, and they mentioned, oh, we’re doing 2 million a year. you know, well Birmingham, Alabama should be doing. Of course the whole article is about how they really need more service in Birmingham.
Ron Kilcoyne (24m 16s):
you know, that was the point of the article. But you have the suburban community, suburban LA community, which doesn’t have the density or even the demographics that are supportive of transit that Birmingham has, and you’re able to carry more people. So, you know, I think that goes back to this thing that you give ’em great service, people will ride transit even if it’s in an environment that’s not necessarily, that’s supportive. Now I’m not arguing for Autocentric development of, I’d love to see less auto centered development. I, I think the solution to when, when you hear about the Doom loops, this is a little off the topic, but when you’re about the vacant office space in San Francisco or any other big city, I think why can’t we somehow move those auto centric office spaces in the suburbs that split around and move those jobs into the center cities where you have the transit infrastructure and and the density.
Ron Kilcoyne (25m 11s):
You know, that it’d be nice if we could kind of use that as a way to get less auto development and then we can redevelop those suburban areas into mixed use housing projects. But anyway,
Jeff Wood (25m 23s):
Well that’s a whole other discussion I think about people’s love of short commutes and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. Well, so you found this about West Katt, you found this about the Bay area agencies or so many of them, but then you also compared it to other agencies around Canada and the United States as well. Which of the agencies was most interesting to you?
Ron Kilcoyne (25m 43s):
Well, first of all, I’ve found that, you know, when you looked at the six largest Canadian metropolitan areas, you think about Edmonton or Calgary are very sprawling metropolitan areas. you know, I think Canadian cities tend to have stronger downtowns than we have in the United States because they didn’t do as much freeway building. But still Edmonton and Calgary, you know, the prairie, it’s flat, they have plenty of land, so they’re able to sprawl and while they don’t have the same level of transit ridership that you find in Vancouver or Toronto or Montreal, they still exceed what you find here in the Bay area or the North America in terms of per capita service and per capita ridership.
Ron Kilcoyne (26m 25s):
So even with that less transit supportive development, they’re still, you know, able to succeed very well. I also found that, you know, I remember back in sometime in the eighties, Toronto was bragging that they had the highest fair in North America. Now, bear in mind, trying to compare Canadian and United States fares might be a little tricky, but I think they were right. I think that even if you did the, the conversion, it’d still be the, they had the highest fair in North America, but they also had the highest per capita ridership in North America. And the point was, is that fares really isn’t driving in its probably service levels.
Ron Kilcoyne (27m 6s):
So I was expecting Toronto to be the top dog in Canada, but it was actually, Montreal actually has much higher per capita ridership and per capita service than Toronto does. Both TTC as well as the, the metropolitan area. So that was kind of another surprising finding. And you know, I think as you see from the report, if the Bay area is trying to match Montreal, we would need like something like to increase our service by 73% to match it. And the thing is is in Montreal they’re still expanding service, they’re still adding service, you know?
Jeff Wood (27m 38s):
Yeah. They just opened that regional rail
Ron Kilcoyne (27m 39s):
Line, right? So, you know, Vancouver, I made a reference in the blog from February, but I just saw something this week that in British Columbia they said that they’re, they’re back at a hundred percent pre pandemic ridership.
Jeff Wood (27m 53s):
So what that tells us is that basically they have really high service levels, they have really high per capita ridership. So the Bay area is underserving, the population is kind of the idea that comes out of this.
Ron Kilcoyne (28m 4s):
That’s correct. And the fact is, is that the Bay area is probably comparatively speaking throughout the United States, it does have much higher levels of service and higher levels of ridership, but it is still being underserved.
Jeff Wood (28m 16s):
So what does that mean in terms of like if you wanted to make the Bay area more like Montreal, what would it take to do something like that?
Ron Kilcoyne (28m 24s):
Well, I think this is, might be a little bit off the question, but you know, one of the things that I see people that tend to be critical of transit saying, well we need to right size our service levels. And usually they mean as well cut service and they’re referring, then they point to the fact, well we don’t have as many commuters commuting in, so we need to write fewer peak hours trips. So that’s fine. you know, that’s okay. The thing is what we need to have, what, what Montreal or oh any of these Canadian cities have is basically a high level of service all day long, seven days a week that’s accommodating all trip purposes.
Ron Kilcoyne (29m 6s):
I think one thing during the pandemic, you heard people talk about, well we need to focus more on essential workers who weren’t working nine to five and what have you. Which was all true. But I recall, I mean probably one of the things that influenced me in my career was before I even started working at AC Transit, I lived in San Francisco, muni was going through their first total restructuring of service and you know, as a transit geek, I made sure I went to every meeting and started talking with the planners. Things that stood out to me was a slide that said 70% of the trips in San Francisco are not to downtown. And 77% of the trips in San Francisco are not work trips.
Ron Kilcoyne (29m 50s):
And this was back in the late seventies. And that’s always sort of stuck with me thinking that, you know, we need to focus not just on work trips to downtowns, but we need to focus on all trips in the region. We need to have build multi destinational networks that provide service all the time. Now, bear in mind I don’t want this to be taken as a critique of the transit systems that exist in the Bay area because from that standpoint, as far as the amount of service that transit agencies are provided is based on the resources they have. So I wanna make it clear that this is, I don’t want people come away thinking that I’m being critical saying that the Bay area systems are doing a crappy job because they don’t provide the same level of service as Toronto or that they don’t have the resources to do it.
Ron Kilcoyne (30m 42s):
They can’t, if I were managing any one of these systems, I might have figured out some things or another, but without additional dollars, I would probably not be able to put any more service on the road than what they are. So this is not intended to be a critique of the transit agencies that they’re somehow hoarding resources and not putting it out in service. you know, they’re putting out what they can put out.
Jeff Wood (31m 4s):
Yeah, I was gonna say, I mean it’s a critique, but it’s a critique of politics, I think. And yeah, what people understand. I mean, there was just a mercury news piece about a survey that was done on, you know, people’s feelings about a new ballot measure in the Bay area. And you know, people were still very supportive, but it wasn’t as high as it was before because of California is so strange in the way that we do votes for transportation. We have to have two thirds votes for things. So if you’re not getting 66 to 70% of the vote, then it’s really hard to pass stuff. They might change that in legislature or whatever. Yeah. But basically there was a lot of people saying like, oh we’re, they have enough money or you know, the agencies, like you said, need to be right sized and, and I think that’s a misunderstanding of how we get back to the core of, of providing people service that gets higher ridership.
Jeff Wood (31m 47s):
Right. Cutting service has never led to higher ridership. Yeah. And so, you know, we need that resource and that that is a political critique and I think it’s an accurate political critique because we can always pour more resources into transportation transit because the road system has tons of resources that they pour into that system continuously. And nobody’s ever saying you need to rightsize the road system. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s funny that we have this kind of bifurcated discussion about transportation when it’s all a network, right? It’s all connected.
Ron Kilcoyne (32m 17s):
And I think that’s a key thing. It’s a network. And I, that’s probably the other piece where maybe we could do it, we can do a better job is working seamlessly as a network. you know, I, I do see some things that, you know, I find troubling occasionally as far as, you know, trying to better coordinate service. I, I do think there’s some better integration. It’s hard work. It really is hard work. And there is some probably work on fares, you know, where and MTC ISS doing this, MTCs trying to come up with, you know, the metropolitan PO Transportation commission here in the Bay area is trying to come up with an integrated fair structure, integrated way finding as well as to come up with a way to better integrate services.
Ron Kilcoyne (32m 57s):
But they’re also, when you look at the regional map, there are some gaps and, but again, that gets back to the politics because before you create any fill, any gap, you need the resources to provide that service.
Jeff Wood (33m 10s):
Yeah. I also find, you know, your discussion about San Francisco really interesting and going back to the seventies because right now there are so many Routes that are actually, you know, around a hundred percent of their ridership or even higher in the case of Van Ness where they have the new bus rapid transit line. And so that’s interesting too, is all of these Routes that I see that are crowded when I get on the 24, the 22, the j places like that, you know, they’re not going to downtown. The j does, I, I guess it goes into the subway, but the 22 and the and the 24 don’t, but they’re always packed ’cause people are going to destinations along the route. Right. And I think that that’s, that’s a really important kind of point to make is that if you create a, a system that will get you to all the destinations, then you can provide that service and get that ridership pretty high actually.
Jeff Wood (33m 52s):
And it’s not downtown centric.
Ron Kilcoyne (33m 54s):
Yeah. Well and the other thing is like for example, AC Transits one T, I mean it doesn’t go from downtown to Oakland, but basically it’s carrying people along the International Boulevard corridor between San Leandro, downtown Oakland. Again, that is carrying more people than pre pandemic. Yeah,
Jeff Wood (34m 12s):
Exactly. So then politically, I mean, what do we need to do to increase service levels? Like if we wanted to increase service level to a level of Montreal or if we wanted to do it to Toronto or other places that have these high per capita ridership, high per capita service levels and we wanted to say increase, you know, 35% or something like that. If we average all those things like you did in the report, what does it take, I mean, what’s the value that we need to pull out of the air in order to make it happen?
Ron Kilcoyne (34m 38s):
Well, I mean obviously it takes dollars and I mean you, first of all, you have operating dollars to sustain it and capital dollars because you’re gonna need more vehicles and probably more maintenance. And I can’t give you a dollar figure, but it’s, it’s gonna take the funding. But then how do you get the funding? How do you deal with the politics whether you’re going to the voters or going to the legislature or both? How do you get there? you know, unfortunately there’s been a lot of bad press about transit in terms of safety and I don’t wanna downplay it ’cause incidents happen, but then there’s plenty of times that things don’t happen and agencies probably, you know, I think the perception of transit that it’s unsafe needs to be addressed.
Ron Kilcoyne (35m 19s):
Let me put it that way, that you need to address that. That wasn’t necessarily an issue pre pandemic, but that has become an issue right now. I think that to the extent that agencies can adapt their schedules and service to the new reality based on the resources they have, I mean, Bart just redid their schedule. Caltrans actually running more off peak service. I’m kind of disappointed. Caltrain ridership hasn’t rebounded, given the fact I think they’re doing the right thing schedule-wise, we’ll see how Bart’s modifications work. But I think again, they’re doing the right thing. AC Transit is doing a realigned project, which I’m working on actually, which hopefully, we’ll we’re able to find some creative ways to provide more service with existing resources in the AC transit service area that I think, you know, projects like that.
Ron Kilcoyne (36m 13s):
But I, we need more money, but to get more money, we need, people need to feel that transit is doing a good job and any things we can do to enhance services to make it more attractive with the resources we have. SamTrans just did a realignment, I understand they, they’re having some success ridership wise as well. WIDA is having some success with the things they’re doing, you know, we’ll still have to see what happens with bart. And then as I say, we have AC transit next year we’ll be doing a realignment that hopefully we can show the same kind of results of saying, Hey, you know, hey, we’re doing a lot better. We’ve got limited resources and we gotta get the driver shortage dealt with. I mean, that’s the other big problem is that, you know, many agencies including AC Transit could be providing more service with the dollars they have, but not, they don’t have enough employees to, to do that.
Ron Kilcoyne (37m 5s):
So we gotta get that fixed. And then, you know, it’s not only needs to more long-term sustained funding to get that higher level, we also have a short-term physical cliff that has to be addressed. Worst thing to do is you cut a whole bunch of service just before you go to the voters and say, well, we just cut all this service, but we need more money. you know, it’s complicated. It’s not, it’s not a silver bullet. Funding is the key thing, but there’s a lot of working pieces that have to be put into place in order to get the funding.
Jeff Wood (37m 34s):
Yeah. In addition, I mean I, I like this idea of increasing service hours and I, I hope the discussion continues because I think it’s really important and I think that we do need more service. It’s a really annoying when you have to wait 15 minutes for AJ versus 10 minutes for AJ or five minutes for AJ, right? Like there’s a a time period that you’re waiting that makes you feel like you might not wanna come back the next time, but if it’s short enough you, you feel like, you know, you can hop on at any time. So the service levels really do matter in pulling in people. But I’m also wondering if there’s like some sort of a rethink we need to do on like capital investments, right? So let’s consider like the van, SBRT, like that’s actually changed travel times dramatically. It’s increased ridership. We probably should have more discussions about making some of these, you know, pinpoint specific changes to certain intersections or things like that.
Jeff Wood (38m 21s):
The, the kind of stuff that like the swiftly adv advocates for anyways, I think those things are really important too. So you know, the discussion of service hours, but also maybe talking about, you know, what is the thing that’s gonna make the service more valuable over the longer term.
Ron Kilcoyne (38m 34s):
Well I would would agree with that. And that’s another way of getting more service hours, particularly on, you know, high density Routes. Whereas if you can speed up the service then you, you know, a bus can make more trips, you can provide more trips with the same number of dollars. It also makes the service more attractive. And this is where, you know, sometimes even this is where perception actually works in your favor because you know, as up in Eugene and we put in the, the BRT, the MX BRT, the perceived time savings was greater than the actual time savings. So there it was good thing that people perceived to do better worked in our favor. But you know, the thing is what we have to try to avoid is making it a 10 year project.
Ron Kilcoyne (39m 17s):
And it doesn’t have to be, you know, I think there’s a lot of little things that, you know, we have the technology for signal priority and signal preemption and that is much better. Simple things is on LO bus stop locations. Some of the work we TMD did down in LA, they had, for example, they did the rapid Routes, which made, you know, limited stops and then they had a lo overlaid on a local route. you know, what we recommended down there was reduce the number of stops on the local route, but still have more stops than you had on the rapid and just combine the service together. So you were able to provide a much higher frequency consistently along that corridor that was also consistently, maybe not as fast as the rapid, but much faster than local.
Ron Kilcoyne (40m 4s):
And you know, that concept, you know, allowed you to provide more service with existing. So there are a number of imaginative things you can do to speed up service and if you speed up service, you can provide more service. So you’re doing, it’s a double whammy because the faster service makes it attractive just in itself. I can get, you know, like a van SI can get from here to there much quicker, but then you also providing the more frequency. So it is a double pleasure and I think we need to find ways we can do it economically. I mean that’s a whole nother topic and I don’t have the answers to how we can build more stuff cheaper and faster in this country, but we need to, we need to figure out a way.
Ron Kilcoyne (40m 47s):
I mean there’s been a lot of work done, you know, and N NYU’s done stuff showed, showed the way, but that needs to get done. But in the meantime, I think we also need to look at sort of more, not as flashy, but still ways that we can speed up service and if we speed up service, we can provide more service with existing resources.
Jeff Wood (41m 5s):
Why do you think we haven’t made ridership a national goal?
Ron Kilcoyne (41m 9s):
I don’t know. I mean, earlier in my career, maybe 20, 30 years ago, I was trying to get apt to the American Public Transit Association to make this a major focus. And I am, I’m kind of at a loss at how, you know, how come we haven’t, I don’t know. I really dunno. I mean this might be, this might be not answering your question directly, but one of the things that comes with funding is that it’s easier to get capital funds than it is to get operating funds, capital funds. You can get, they’re one-time things. There’s always a ribbon cutting or a groundbreaking or stuff like that to go with it. you know, operating funds, you know, is like there’s this, oh, it’s just gonna go in a black hole or it’s just gonna, oh, the unions are gonna just get more money.
Ron Kilcoyne (41m 57s):
Or you know, the federal, this is a state, the state says local, I mean it’s just operating funds isn’t sexy, it isn’t thing, and it’s really hard to get operating funds and to provide more service requires more operating funds. Now bear in mind I make my living helping transit agencies do more with less or do more with the resources they have. And I think we as a firm have done, have been very successful at doing that and is very rewarding reward when you, you know, you can come up with a good idea. You can streamline service, you can improve service and you’re doing it with the resources they have.
Ron Kilcoyne (42m 38s):
But even after that’s all said and done, that’s a, like your first phase, you still don’t have as much service out there as you should. And that gets back to operating funds and that basically, that’s just hard to get that level of funding at any level of government. I would say that maybe people know that for ridership to grow you need more service and you need more funds. And it gets back to that. I, I don’t really have a good answer as to why ridership is not a national goal, but I wish it were, I do wish it were, and I still, when I look at any project, I say again, what can we do with the resources we have to get more ridership and we’ve had success.
Ron Kilcoyne (43m 23s):
We can point to a lot of successes, but success even with our successes, there’s always more that you could do if you had more resources.
Jeff Wood (43m 31s):
Yeah, I think that’s, we should be able to do more with more, right. Instead of more with less. Yeah.
Ron Kilcoyne (43m 37s):
And and the thing is, I could agree is I’m not one that says you just wanna throw money at it. Yeah, right. ’cause you know, you don’t wanna just throw money at it and to be wasted. I mean, that’s the worst thing to do. And I think there’s a fear of that also, that if we put more money into it, it’s gonna be wasted. Which means that there, there need to be, you know, I’ve always been an advocate of tying funding to metrics and that’s gets a little, you know, I think there’s come discomfort there as well. What if we don’t meet the metrics? But, you know, I do think that that is a concern that, you know, if you throw more money at it, it’s gonna be wasted. You don’t wanna do that because at the end of the day, you wanna make sure that money is being used, there’s a definite return on investment as it were.
Ron Kilcoyne (44m 20s):
And what is that return on investment really gets back to ridership because you know, again, when you talk about equity, you talk about access, they’re important metrics. But if people aren’t taking advantage of your service, what good is the access you’re providing? What good is the equity you’re providing? Those metrics are important to show that you’re providing a valuable service. But at the end of the day, the results gotta be people using the system’s gotta be the ridership that results from an equitable system and an accessible system.
Jeff Wood (44m 51s):
So what should we take away from the paper that you, you worked on with Seamless and like what are the next steps in trying to figure out, you know, how to get this larger amount of service maybe politically or is there a, something we can sign to ask for it? Is there a, a petition? What’s the next steps? Well,
Ron Kilcoyne (45m 8s):
I don’t know if there’s a petition or thing like that, but, and I’ll let Seamless answer that question, but I would say that the takeaway is that, you know, we need to be providing more service. We need to be thinking about how we can get strategically, how we can get the resources to provide that more service. The strategic thinking. There’s not a silver bullet has a lot of moving parts. I think, you know, the transit agencies need to be showing that they’re doing a good job and not saying that they aren’t, but if the polling shows that people are kind of lukewarm that says that more needs to be done. you know, I think we need to be showing, I mean MTC has been pushing, you know, integrated fares and integrated way finding is looking at possibly network manager type of thing.
Ron Kilcoyne (45m 58s):
I think that those things need to need to progress because, and I think the public will see, you know, that there is some progress on that. I think that, you know, for any kind of funding, it needs to be clear as what that funding buys and there’s gotta be some kind of follow through to make sure that if the funding comes through that the end of the day we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna see. It’s like, well where, where’s that service we promised? I mean, there’s gotta be some kind of mechanisms in there to make sure that the funding is being used for what it was promised to be used. That it’s not just because, as I say, if you just, they give us funding and trust us, people aren’t gonna say no, you know, they gotta see what they’re buying and they gotta see some sort of guarantee that they’re gonna get that at the end of the day.
Ron Kilcoyne (46m 51s):
And I think that the work that we’re doing for AC Transit, we’re not only doing a constrained plan to be implemented in the fall of 2024, but we’re also showing what the service should be if we had the resources that are available. MTC, I think through its transit 2050 plan investing more at a regional level. So we need the funding, but we need to make sure that we look at all the steps that are needed to build a support for that funding.
Jeff Wood (47m 21s):
Awesome. I’ll link the report in the show notes. Where can folks find you if, if you wish to be found?
Ron Kilcoyne (47m 26s):
Well, I’ll give you my, my email address, I guess it’s ril coin, R-K-I-L-C-O-I-N [email protected]. But yeah, you can reach me through there and I’ll be happy to reach out to anyone. As I say, I make my living trying to help transit systems do more with less or with what they have and feel that we as a firm have been very successful in that endeavor. But at the same time, the other side of me is a transit evangelist that says we need to grow transit beyond that, we need more resources. But we also understand that we gotta make sure that those resources are spent properly and we gotta earn the support of the public and the legislators to do that.
Jeff Wood (48m 7s):
Yeah. Well, Ron, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.
Ron Kilcoyne (48m 11s):
Well thank you. I appreciate the invitation
