(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 473: Public Sentiment and Public Transit

This week we’re featuring a 1 to 1 conversation between Adelee Le Grand of Intellectual Concepts and Scott Wilkinson of AlphaVu. They chat about how transit agencies can get a better handle on how riders and non-riders alike feel about their service.

This episode was produced in partnership with Mpact. Find out more at http://mpactmobility.org

Listen in first at Streetsblog USA or find the audio in our archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:

Adelee Le Grand (2m 34s):
Good morning, Scott. I hope you’re doing well today. Looking forward to our conversation about this interesting space that we have been occupying, which is public transportation or public mobility. Welcome to the podcast series where we’re talking about issues that impact communities. And before we jump into it, I thought it’d be great for me to introduce myself to those who may be listening and then give you the opportunity to do the same Scott. So my name is Adelee LaGrand and I work for a firm called Intellectual Concepts, where I serve as the strategic advisor. Been in the mobility space for three decades and I’m fortunate to sit on the impact board of directors and serve on the executive committee as the secretary.

Adelee Le Grand (3m 22s):
And for the last, I would say decade plus, my involvement with impact has really been about how we better, I would say, connect to the community and the work that we do as a planner. I have spent most of my career doing planning studies and I’ve always wondered if the plans and the studies that were developed 20 years before or 10 years before actually reflect the desires, the needs, the wants of the communities that we are being actually paid to serve. So today I am so super excited to lead and participate in this conversation with Scott because I’ve met him during this journey of mind and Scott, you do such great work.

Adelee Le Grand (4m 4s):
So I thought, well, when this opportunity presented itself, it would be awesome to hear from you and have you share some of what your observations have been, both on a political side as well as in this work of public mobility. So with that Scott, I’m gonna turn it over to you to just share a bit about yourself, what you have been doing, how you landed here in this transit space, and then we’ll jump into the interview.

Scott Wilkinson (4m 28s):
Hey, good morning, Adly. I appreciate you having me on. It’s always great to be able to spend time with you and to pick your brain. I’m, I’m always appreciative of your, your perspectives and you’re one of my team’s favorite people in the industry, so it’s, it’s always fun to get to spend, spend some more time with you. Gosh. Well, I am the CEO and founder of AlphaVu. We are a public opinion analytics firm. I started the company actually 15 years ago this month. So we have been at it for, for a while. And I, I guess my journey to this space is kind of a winding one, but when I was thinking about our conversation this morning, I, I was thinking about on some of my earlier jobs and I was having a thought that I don’t think it fully really occurred me to me before, but my very first job out of college was when I really, I just hated it.

Scott Wilkinson (5m 19s):
I, I couldn’t stand it, but I had gotten a job for the newly elected governor of Virginia where I grew up and my job was opening the mail. I was in the mail room and I, my job was to open between five and 600 letters every day and to read them. And I had to sort them into ones that had to go to different offices to res receive responses and then pick out the ones that would be answered by the governor’s office. And every day I had to write down, keep a list of what topics people wrote about and whether they agreed or disagreed with the governor’s position. And I got really good insight into how people communicate with their elected officials, their community leaders, and with how those community leaders understand and process that information.

Scott Wilkinson (6m 10s):
Back in those days, people wrote about not just things they were the angriest about or most opposed to, they’re root about the topics they cared about the most. And so that means you got both sides back then you had the luxury of sitting down , the governor would take a stack of mail and sit down and read through it at his leisure and get a good sense of what the people thought. And a lot has changed since those days. But I’d say that was really kind of my, my grounding and understanding this communication with the public and, and how people communicate and, and how we understand those communications.

Adelee Le Grand (6m 46s):
So that is really interesting Scott and it’s in , you can know someone in the industry from I would say afar or even working with them on projects. But not until you sit down and have this kind of conversation. Do you learn that they started off opening mail in the mail room? I just, I can think of all the things I could have made little funny comments about during the years if I had known that. Right. But now I do Scott, so just be prepared. After going through that experience and working in the governor’s office and understanding that there is community engagement, what motivated you to move from this political space into the public transit space as it relates to just, did you even see yourself in this space

Scott Wilkinson (7m 29s):
? Honestly, I did not a number of years after I had had that experience working for elected officials, I was running a technology business that was doing survey research, it was doing polling and I had been to graduate school by that time and I found out in graduate school I really liked statistics. That was just something I had a natural affinity for. And so I, as part of this work in doing survey research, I was building targeting models and targeting in marketing and communications is something everybody does. If, if it’s political, if you’re a consumer product that’s all about just understanding how to spend your money most effectively, who should you be talking to and what message is gonna be most interesting to them?

Scott Wilkinson (8m 12s):
And there’s all math behind that. I got really frustrated in that experience because targeting models like that are usually built on polling, on telephone polls. And even 15 years ago there were problems with telephone polls. , we think about the problems we see today. I mean they were there 15 years ago. The biggest problem is you run an organization 365 days a year. If you’re polling at all, you’re maybe in the field with a poll three or five days a year. Well what do you do in the other 360 days? And with the speed of information and the amount of information, my basic premise was we just need to have more intelligence on what the public is saying and thinking every day of the year.

Scott Wilkinson (8m 55s):
And that’s what I started the business to do. It was really only about five years into having the company that we started to work in transit. And honestly it was just happenstance. I, I knew some people who said, Hey, you need to come to these folk, talk to these folks. I think they would find this interesting. And one of the first people who I talked to was Gary Thomas, who was general manager of Dart in Dallas. And he really sort of picked up on what we were working on and he said, something I’ve never forgotten, forgotten. He’s like, transit has a really unique problem. We have to have the support of people who don’t use our product. Right. And that it, it’s, it’s unique and it’s an interesting problem.

Scott Wilkinson (9m 37s):
If you’re Coca-Cola, you don’t spend time or money advertising to hardcore Pepsi drinkers. Right? Right. It it’s just not gonna happen. But if you’re a transit agency, you need to have public awareness of and support of people who will not get out from behind the, the wheel of their cars. Right. And so that’s what we really started doing initially in, in in Transit is helping transit agencies understand community beyond their own riders and help them burnish their brands outside of the people who were on the service every day.

Adelee Le Grand (10m 7s):
Right. And , and it’s interesting you shared that It wasn’t, I would say your north star to get into the transit space and figure out what the community is actually saying. It just , you talk to someone who said, yeah, this may be a good space for you to at least test the waters. Right. And , that’s not unique for me as well. , I went to grad school for transportation and I started off in logistics and then there was a conversation, , why don’t you come and work in the public mobility space? It’s moving things, it’s just moving people instead of goods. So , sometimes the journey takes you to a place where you didn’t even think about, but then when you get there you’re like, wow, this is pretty cool.

Adelee Le Grand (10m 52s):
And I’m happy to be here. On that note though, and and I agree with you a hundred percent right in the transit space, you do have to spend a lot of time convincing people who don’t use your product and people who probably will never use your product to support it and fund it. With that being said, we also realize that every trip is not taken by the same mode. So before we jump into the core of our discussion, I am curious, what is your favorite non-car mode and where do you take it?

Scott Wilkinson (11m 23s):
Oh, there’s no doubt. I live in Baltimore. Our, our headquarters is in Washington DC and so I take the mark train to commuter rail to DC and back to Baltimore at least three days a week. And I gotta tell you, it’s it, it is so much fun. You get to know people there. About a week ago, or maybe it was just before the holidays, I was on the train on my ride home and there were a group of friends on the train who have ridden together for decades. And one of them was on his last trip ’cause he was retiring and they broke out bottles of liquor and food and had a big old party. Everybody on that car was having a good old time.

Scott Wilkinson (12m 5s):
It was just something you don’t get in your car and it was a lot of fun. That’s, that’s my favorite mode. No doubt.

Adelee Le Grand (12m 11s):
That definitely sounds like fun. I don’t know how the mark folks would feel about that. I’m sure they’re breaking all sorts of rules, but it was a fun time. So that is great. Thanks for sharing that. So let’s get into the core of our conversation and really talking about data analytics and the work that you do. And I think it’s so timely ’cause we just kicked off our 2024 election cycle and here we are right back in the throes of polling. Everybody’s familiar with hearing that word, polling what the polls say and understanding the data. So I’d like to hear from you, Scott, from a perspective of transit, understanding the data, how does elections or how do elections impact the Transit space and how do you utilize the data that comes from all the data sources?

Adelee Le Grand (13m 1s):
And if you could spend a little bit, a little bit of time sharing what those data sources are, how do you use that data to really start to leverage what the folks in the, I would say, political space, use the data to help candidates or parties understand where they’re moving forward. How do you use that same type of data to help transit agencies?

Scott Wilkinson (13m 22s):
The communications landscape has just changed so dramatically from those days when I was opening the mail , like I said, back then you could read through a stack of mail and get a good sense of what people think. But the fact of the matter is today, if you scroll through your Facebook feed, you get a sense of only what a small selection of people who are curated for you by an algorithm think, right? And the fact of the matter is pretty much every source of information you look at is the same thing. It’s curated for you in some way. And that creates all kinds of strange incentives and it’s really hard when that’s all you see.

Scott Wilkinson (14m 4s):
That’s all any of us see every day to remember that what you’re seeing is not necessarily representative of what the community thinks. And I think it’s a really important thing both for Transit agencies to understand and the elected officials who govern them. You really have to do extra work to be able to understand what the community thinks and why it’s just not going to be, it’s not gonna come to you in the mail and it’s not gonna come to you on your phone. People have the luxury of being able to communicate in so many different ways now by email, by social media, they can call a transit agency’s call center, they can post something on social without it being on the transit agency’s page.

Scott Wilkinson (14m 48s):
It could be on the mayor’s page or or the member of Congress’s page or on their own page. They could be sending emails, they could be attending community me community meetings. And it’s really important for transit agencies to understand. They have to collect across all of those possible channels and put all of those representations of people’s opinions together in one place to really start to be able to get a good sense of what the community thinks. elected officials, , they have their own incentives. They want to get, presumably have a policy agenda and they wanna get reelected, right? And so I think it’s for the transit agencies, , they have a responsibility to always remember that the elected officials have their own incentives and it’s incumbent on us to make sure we align to the best we can with their incentives.

Scott Wilkinson (15m 42s):
Because at the end of the day, they’re ones who can elected to make, to make decisions and hopefully that’s not gonna change.

Adelee Le Grand (15m 48s):
So , you, you mentioned a good point, right? So there’s so much information being thrown at us all the time and I believe that it’s like over 2000 advertisements every single day, individuals are exposed to and even if you just open your phone, right? I’m not a big social media person at all, but , if I just open my phone to look at my emails or text someone, the next thing you see is like some ad that popped up, right? Or you reading an article, even if you subscribe to like the New York Times or your local paper, like some ads are gonna pop up and how do you navigate, right? And how do you, as an agency, let’s say, how do you take the fact that people are so exposed to so much advertisement to maneuver through that to get your message to really resonate with people who are living their lives, right?

Adelee Le Grand (16m 44s):
Like understanding more about transit is probably not on the top of anybody’s list, even the person who is writing it every day, right? So how do you, how do you navigate that and what are the tools that agencies and I would say practitioners should be aware of that they can utilize to help get through all of that noise, if you will, through the advertisements that everyone is seeing

Scott Wilkinson (17m 5s):
It. It’s a great point . And that that 2000 advertisements, I mean just think about that for a second. From the time you wake up to the time you go to bed, 2000 ads, how many of those do you remember? Close to zero, right? Exactly. Exactly. And those, and those ads are being put out there by huge, a lot of them by huge consumer product companies that have really big budgets. Again, if you’re Nike or you’re Coca-Cola, if you want to affect, create, affect public opinion, you go and spend a ton of money to do that. Transit agencies do not and will not have that luxury. I’m not saying advertising doesn’t have a role, but I think we need a little humility to understand that a Transit agency is never going to compete in, in advertising on the level that most of the companies out there and who are advertising.

Scott Wilkinson (17m 56s):
So that means we have to be smarter, we have to be smarter and more targeted and to make those dollars go go farther. That’s where my team and our business, we do a lot of measurement around public Sentiment. So when people are talking about transit across all of those channels, we mentioned is it positive, is it negative? Which way is it trending? And importantly, what’s causing it to change is what, what’s causing public Sentiment to become more positive or more negative? Because we can identify the causal factors that gives us something very targeted. We can go after, sometimes we see a drop in public Sentiment and it’ll be tied to an operational issue.

Scott Wilkinson (18m 36s):
, a bus is broken down or there’s a delay or something. And, and, and that’s, that’s totally expected, right? People, we don’t expect people to be happy about operational issues. But sometimes we’ll see a drop in Sentiment that has got nothing to do with an operational issue. It could be just some misinformation that’s out there. And that is a real opportunity where a transit agency can go in, they can put some content out, they can advertise, they can make a statement and they can have a real significant impact for really a very small or reasonable investment. And it’s that kind of precision that’s really necessary in in the modern communications environment.

Adelee Le Grand (19m 16s):
I like what you said there as far as really understanding the Sentiment. So when there are these negative perceptions that are out there and sometimes there’s another outfit that is putting the negative messaging out into the community, how do we counter the anti or anti-trans messaging that the community is hearing in a way that makes sense, right? It’s not a waste of money, like you said , you can’t over advertise. But how do you, how do we instead of you, how do we as practitioners and those who work in this space and even those who may be the head of community organizations that understand that there is value to supporting public transit, how do we work in your space, I would say to really counter the anti-trans messaging in a way that doesn’t break the budget and make sense and they’ll give you results.

Scott Wilkinson (20m 13s):
Yeah. Well as public agencies we’re burdened with having to tell the truth. I’ll start with that . There are organizations out there that are in campaign mode that frankly can say whatever they wanna say, whether it’s true or not. If you are a public agency and you are communicating with the public about services and capital projects or whatever the case may be, you have an legal and moral obligation to only speak facts to tell the truth. That can be a challenge. But I think one of the things is understanding that there are some people who you’re not going to persuade and that’s okay. There are people who have made up their minds, they’re not interested in what you have to say.

Scott Wilkinson (20m 54s):
Being able to know who they are so that you don’t waste your time and your money trying to communicate with them, that in itself is a win. You’re not wasting resources on, on something where, in an area where you’re not gonna have any effect. But what we can do is we can understand the populations that are genuinely interested in information about the service. We can understand populations that may be vulnerable to misinformation and make sure that we get the facts in their hands so that have, they have access to the facts. I think that’s a really important function of communications in public agencies. But to do all that, we have to know where the community is, who they are and how to reach them. And that is just, that’s a massive project.

Scott Wilkinson (21m 36s):
It’s a massive data, massive data project in this day and age. But it can be done. But I just think we have to remember that we’re working in the context of we have to tell the truth and we have and understand that there’s some people who are just aren’t interested in it.

Adelee Le Grand (21m 50s):
So , let’s talk about telling the truth, right? So earlier we talked about the fact that in this public mobility space, a lot of the support that you need are from people who are not customers who may never become customers and you need their support because they’ll come out and vote or whatever the litany of reasons are. So if you go back to getting out there and getting the message and telling the truth, do we spend the time focusing and communicating with the customers or should the time be spent focusing on those folks that you need their support to keep the lights on and and how do you balance that?

Scott Wilkinson (22m 32s):
Yeah, that’s, there’s a lot to unpack there. That’s, yeah, that’s the big question. And , I have some, a few thoughts and there’s people who certainly disagree with me on this, but I think first of all we have to acknowledge the fact that, and I’m speaking in broad terms here. There’s certain exceptions to what I’m gonna say. Of course I’m just speaking in, in broad strokes by and large public transit ridership is largely impacted by macroeconomic factors. So gas prices, unemployment, public health situations, things like that. And paid advertising has only a marginal impact, right?

Scott Wilkinson (23m 14s):
And I know we may talk about AI a little later, but some of the work my company’s doing in ai, we’ve gotten to the point now where we can actually forecast, okay, gas prices drop a dollar a gallon, you’re going to lose certain number of riders. This is how many riders we think you can get back by increasing your advertising budget. That’s great ’cause it lets you calculate a a cost per new rider unless you be really efficient. But what those models also say is that there’s really no amount of advertising that you can spend that’s gonna get the riders back. You lost from that big of a drop in gas prices. I think that’s really important to know. It helps elected officials, it helps board members understand that what is within and that what is not within the power of the transit agency, right?

Scott Wilkinson (23m 59s):
There are things that are just out of our control. What does that mean for our communications and branding? Paid advertising has a role certainly, but I think what leads us to have to recognize is that the primary focus of our communications, of our branding has to be at helping the community understand the community at large, understand the value of public transit. We have of course have to be communicating with our riders, make sure they have the information they need to be able to use the system. But by and large, a big focus of our communication needs to be reminding, advancing the brand and reminding the community the value, the overall value, whether you’re a writer or not.

Adelee Le Grand (24m 44s):
No, I I, I totally get that. And , we have this philosophy if, if I may, that we like to say that the work we do in the public mobility space, in the planning space is really toward creating and supporting more sustainable and just communities. But what are the people actually saying and, and I’m, I’m asking you this question not rhetorically but from the sentiments and all the data that you and your team has gone through all over the country, , what are people saying around public mobility? Do they see it as a great commute option for the 21st century or are they looking for other types of services from the bus to the train to, I don’t know, an electric scooter to an autonomous, I don’t know, unicycle?

Adelee Le Grand (25m 36s):
There are all sorts of things that are out in the space right now. So I’m just curious like what, what are people actually saying those who are using the system, what is it that they want and are we giving them what they’re looking for?

Scott Wilkinson (25m 48s):
It’s a great question. a lot of people in the industry, we sort of, it goes back to getting caught in sort of the circle of certain communities and who you’re listening to and hearing from. It’s really easy if you work in a transit agency to sort of get in the middle of an urbanist group of people who like love transit and care about these urban issues. And that’s great. It’s a really important community. They’re incredibly supportive of transit. But it is so important even in , the densest, most urban cities in this country to realize that that urbanist community is often not representative of the larger community and how they think of what they think about.

Scott Wilkinson (26m 30s):
If I had to make some broad brush stokes here, the thing I would say is that people are busy with their own lives. They’re going to work, they’re taking their kids to school, they’re going to the grocery store, they’re getting an older parent to healthcare. They don’t care about anything relative to transit then if it’s easy for them to do what they need to do, right? And if it really is easy cost effective, they’ll use it. But if they think it’s not easy enough, they won’t. And and so that and a lot of people , we’ve done a lot of research over the country and , we’ve asked people, do you use transit? And if they say no, we say okay, why not? And they say, well I don’t live close enough to a bus stop and we will be able to know that they live within like five blocks of a bus stop for example, right?

Scott Wilkinson (27m 17s):
Right. And it is just a cold hard truth that a lot of people will not walk five blocks to a bus stop. And then of course there’s the issue of how many, how long would it take them to do that and get there versus getting in their car. And those conversations can be hard to hear, but they are far more common than not. And we just have to understand that’s how people think and that needs us to work backwards and think, okay, is there something we should do about that in terms of so service or redesigning the system or are we just going to be willing to live with that and understand that, that we have the ridership that we have given what we can do with with our capital costs and our service as it is

Adelee Le Grand (27m 56s):
. That’s a good point too. Scott as far as , understanding what the customer’s expectations are as well as those who are not customers, why they are saying it’s difficult, especially if you’re using the system and , it’s easy to navigate but it’s because , it’s easy to navigate. You’ve done it how we reach people who may feel like, hey, this is too difficult, I’m just gonna stick with what I know. And I think that’s human nature, right? People are comfortable doing what they’ve always done. as we start thinking about the different modes or the new innovations in the space of public mobility, , I did mention autonomous vehicles.

Adelee Le Grand (28m 36s):
I did have an opportunity, I was fortunate, I was in Phoenix, so shout out to Phoenix, Arizona and they had Waymo out there as an autonomous option that you could do like a Uber or Lyft. And that was pretty interesting. getting a vehicle with no driver at all. And it’s just like a monitor that’s welcoming you to get on board. And I know there’s lots of other companies that are deploying this technology in different cities across the country. And , this is all technology too, right? So I’m just curious, like with AI and all of what’s out there right now just for the normal consumer, can you share a bit about the role of AI in the work that you do and how Transit agencies should be thinking about utilizing ai?

Adelee Le Grand (29m 24s):
And also I’d like to hear , ’cause there’s folks who are gonna be listening in and some people are very concerned about AI and what does that mean? And as it continues to develop , how much of our, I would say privacy are we really giving up, right? And and how much control are we giving up? So if you can really talk about AI and go as in depth as you feel necessary, but to really help people, one, understand what AI is in our space of public mobility. And then two , what the positives are and what the potential, I would say drawbacks of AI could be in in public mobility.

Scott Wilkinson (30m 4s):
It, it is such an exciting area. There’s so much going on. I think it’s really important that leaders in the transit industry do two things at the same time. They start to get involved in AI ’cause it’s coming. So they might as well start to to dive in now. But they also need to think methodically about it. Just like you suggested understand its role, its pros, its potential drawbacks. And really start to, to build some policies out around all those things. We’ve done a lot of research, I’ll, I’ll start like out on the, like the autonomous vehicle side. We’ve done research in multiple markets and the, what’s interesting is that the two greatest concerns among the public are one, safety and two, the impact on employment.

Scott Wilkinson (30m 51s):
I don’t think that surprises anybody . And for the autonomous vehicle perspective, I think the industry understands that this has to be incredibly safe. There’s gotta be record a a, a demonstrable record of that. It really goes for those of who us who work on the data side. With ai, it’s really the same thing. Safety. We have to be absolutely first and foremost concerned about data privacy and data security. And then we have to help really understand how this is likely to, to impact people’s jobs. on the data privacy and security side, there are, I would say generally in the data world, there are three areas of data that are considered really sensitive. Anything regarding health, anything regarded regarding like finance, credit card numbers, that sort of thing.

Scott Wilkinson (31m 37s):
And then personally identify identifiable information or PII that’s like your name, your address, your phone number. My company, we, we, we don’t deal with credit card numbers, we don’t deal with health data. So it’s just that that PII, the standards that we have established are, we never transmit PII through an AI model. Okay? So any, any AI processing that gets done with that data happens on our own servers. It doesn’t go to Microsoft, it doesn’t go to a open ai, it doesn’t go to Google, it doesn’t go anywhere else. And so that helps our customers maintain complete control and ownership of

Adelee Le Grand (32m 15s):
It. So. So as a transit agency or one of your clients, is that something that should be written into the procurement document so that whoever they choose, they know that they’re protecting their community by putting this in the procurement documents?

Scott Wilkinson (32m 32s):
Absolutely and I will say we have just started in the last few months to see some really strong language in, in contracts in, in that regard. And anyone who is not doing that absolutely should be. Ultimately the transit agency is the ones who will get blamed whether it’s not their fault or not. So they need to be sure they have the safeguards in place. , we take the use in management and control of PII very seriously and our policies policy is to be extra safe and simply not send it anywhere else. , there are AI tools where you can send that kind of data and and do certain things with it. Our judgment at this point is none of those things are important enough to risk sending the PII out so we don’t do it.

Adelee Le Grand (33m 16s):
Well that’s good to know. And then hopefully , those who are listening who are in the space of procurement, they understand and they can get more information on how to put that language in contracts to ensure that they’re protecting the community. So let’s talk a bit about the benefits, right, of utilizing AI and I guess it’s not whether transit agencies will use ai. ’cause like you said, it’s embedded in some of what we’re doing right now for daily engagements. But who will benefit from really being deliberate in how you deploy ai?

Scott Wilkinson (33m 54s):
I think a main benefit is . We are a wash and a sea of data. Everybody has access to so many dashboards, so much data. I think we’ve gotten to the point where we’re not taking advantage of it like we could. Nobody has the time to spend every day looking at like complex dashboards day in and day out and trying to, to figure out what to do with it all. One of the main benefits of AI is it really in a, an intuitive and quick way is going to go through huge amounts of data for us and give us the lessons we need quickly. An example is something that we’re working on right now where a general manager will be able to say to her phone, I’m gonna go speak to this neighborhood this evening at the Kiwanis Club, given what that communicate, what that community has been saying about transit and our recent on time performance.

Scott Wilkinson (34m 52s):
And keeping in mind that the city council person from that district will be in the room, give me a five minute speech and send it to my phone. And the AI is gonna do that in a few seconds. And it’s going to include, the talking points are going to accommodate the realities of the on-time performance in that neighborhood. And it, it will help you to understand what that community has been thinking before you go in the room so you’re not caught off guard. And it will also understand that there are people in the room who are elected officials who have certain positions who will take certain votes and be able to draft a statement that you may need to go back and edit, but it’ll be 90% of the way there and you could do it in the, you do it on the bus when you’re going to the meeting.

Adelee Le Grand (35m 36s):
Wow. So pretty much it’ll help you get a lay of the land before you walk into the room and then be prepared to address the the folks. I guess it’s addressing the audience, right? Knowing who the audience is and not in a general term but specifically and then being able to address their specific needs. Can you also use AI to predict, and I think earlier you talked about predicting ridership, like you had models that could do that based on the price of gasoline or , the change in unemployment. But can you also use AI to predict how many writers you’ll get , let’s say after Covid or after a major event that may impact ridership?

Adelee Le Grand (36m 20s):
Can it be used as a tool to do that as well?

Scott Wilkinson (36m 22s):
Yeah, I’ll say we’re working on it. Okay. , we’re really working on understanding transit agencies are pretty good at understanding and predicting ridership given service availability given the season , whether, whether schools are in or not, those sorts of things. But being able to predict near term ridership based on like a change in unemployment based on what’s happening in the news . So maybe there was an an operational issue, but how does the news reporting about that operational issue impact your ridership over the next few days? Okay. Those are the type things that are, are coming in the next few months and it’s, it’s gonna be these, these models are gonna be much, much better predicting what happens when very unexpected things occur and helping you adjust and recover from them much more quickly than you may have been able to do in the past.

Adelee Le Grand (37m 15s):
Well I like that. I mean being able to be more responsive is always a good thing, especially if you have reliable data. So throughout our conversation this morning or today if you will, Scott, you’ve mentioned a couple of things, several times, audience segmenting and set and Sentiment, right? So can you spend a little time just explaining what the difference is between audience segmenting and audience Sentiment? Sure.

Scott Wilkinson (37m 44s):
So Sentiment just really means favorability or support or opposition. And so when we collect public opinion data from all across the channels a public transit agency may have, whether it’s the call center or their social media or wherever the case, we basically have a huge body of text of things that people said. And we do a few things with that text. We pull out what topics people are talking about. So they’re talking about their bus route, for example, right? And then we are able to measure using AI algorithms was what they said, positive or negative. Generally people don’t say a lot of positive things about their bus route. If things are going well, occasionally, occasionally that happens.

Scott Wilkinson (38m 26s):
It’s nice to see. What we usually see is negative Sentiment about a bus route when there’s a problem. So if the bus is late, something like that. And so we have basically a big body of data of people talking about trans related issues and we know how positively or negatively they are speaking about each topic over time. What we do is we break that population out into different segments. People who care about buses, people who care about rail, people who care about pass costs, people who care about access for people with different, different abilities and segmentation is really about being able to break the population into groups so that , you’re talking to them about things they care about.

Scott Wilkinson (39m 15s):
And maybe it’s a segment of people who have been hearing a lot of negativity about transit, but who you think would be receptive to some more positive factual information that’s really important from a brand perspective. So there are lots of ways to sort of segment the population and and a segment by the way can be a segment of the population who’s never talked, spoken about you, right? Right. And that can be a really important segment in who you decide to communicate with. So it’s really about understanding the entire population, both your ridership and your not a ridership, and then breaking that population down into these various segments so that given the budget, given the time, given the resources you’re talking to, the segments of the population that are most critical to helping you achieve your goals, that can change pretty quickly.

Scott Wilkinson (40m 3s):
You may need to talk to these segments today and different segments tomorrow. And being able to have that agility and flexibility is really critical to success.

Adelee Le Grand (40m 12s):
So you should, and I’m, I’m just trying to make sure I understand this clearly. You understand your segments and the Sentiment that’s associated with that, and then you utilize the data to help inform how you communicate with those groups. Is that a good way to,

Scott Wilkinson (40m 31s):
The goal is, I would say the goal is something we, we, we said back at the very beginning, the goal is to get an honest understanding of what the community really thinks. That’s the first thing for transit leaders to really have an honest, unbiased understanding of what the population really and truly thinks no good communication can happen. Until that happens, , once transit leaders really understand what the community thinks, what they’re saying, what they care about, that’s when good communication plans and and outreach strategies can be built.

Adelee Le Grand (41m 4s):
Okay. Well Scott, you have left us with a lot to think about Before we close, there are a couple of questions I just wanna make sure that we walk through so that we don’t leave anything hanging. I would say again, back to the fact that we have just kicked off our 2024 political season and there’s gonna be a lot of information that’s thrown out there, a lot of misinformation, as you clearly stated, , not all of us are governed by being truthful. So we do have to navigate. And I would expect that , if Transit gets brought up into the conversation that Transit agencies need to be vigilant in making sure that they get the message out to their key segments, if you will.

Adelee Le Grand (41m 48s):
And making sure that people understand what the agencies are doing. I would say what are some key things to keep in mind when you think about bringing projects forward or investments forward, especially during this period of time, right? If we say the next nine months or so, , what are, what are some of the key things that decision makers need to keep in mind as they are navigating and moving their projects forward in this environment that’s happening in the real world, in real time?

Scott Wilkinson (42m 17s):
Yeah, it’s a real challenge, particularly in this election year. Transit leaders have to operate in a very unpredictable environment. I’d think any of us knows what’s gonna happen in November. And so we have to implement a strategy that is going to more than likely leave us in the best place no matter what happens. I think that means being really brand vigilant. Certainly that means taking care of your customers, but we have to be really aggressive in communicating the value of our service, of our capital projects, of any potential changes we have for funding and how that will value the community.

Scott Wilkinson (43m 0s):
And those values have to be communicated in the terms that each community cares about most. That could be employment and jobs, it could be technical advancement, it, it could be the environment, it could use standards of living, lots of different things that are gonna be different from community to community. But it’s important that , we really protect ourselves and have to advance the mission by being brand vi vigilant. And that requires not using standard talking points that I think it circulated in the industry a lot, but by really listening to what your community thinks, understanding how they talk, how they communicate, and using that to build your brand strategy and your brand message to communicate with your constituents over these next few months.

Scott Wilkinson (43m 47s):
It’s gonna be a really, really critical time to do that and do it well.

Adelee Le Grand (43m 50s):
Well is there anything that we did not discuss Scott, that you are itching to talk about as we have a couple of minutes before we close?

Scott Wilkinson (43m 59s):
Gosh, no. We talked about a lot, but I just wanna thank you for, for your leadership in this industry and everything you do. We, we appreciate you and like I said, it’s always, it’s fun to get to talk to you and I hope we’ll get to do it some more soon.

Adelee Le Grand (44m 12s):
Well, Scott, the feeling is mutual. I really do enjoy talking with you and talking to people who are thinking in a way that will help us move forward in a sustainable manner and really help the community. ’cause at the end of the day we’re doing this to make sure that people can have a better quality of life. Life and it takes big thought and action to do that. How can we reach you? I’m sure after listening to all that we talked about in this short period of time, folks are gonna have lots of questions. So how can you be reached?

Scott Wilkinson (44m 45s):
Sure. Our website is AlphaVu AlphaVu dot com. It’s A-L-P-A-V u.com and my email is Scott, SCO TT at AlphaVu dot com and we’re, we’re responsive. We listen to our customers, so we’re pretty easy to reach.

Adelee Le Grand (45m 1s):
Right. You have the algorithm . That’s right. So thank you so much Scott for spending time with us. Today, we on behalf of Impact, we’re happy to add you to our list of podcasts and hope you have a great day and good luck. This I would say 2024 election cycle. So good luck to you.

Scott Wilkinson (45m 21s):
Thank you, Adelee.