(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 512: Bulk Transit Passes for All
December 11, 2024
This week we’re back at the Mpact conference in Philadelphia and joined by Ruth Miller of Jawnt. Ruth shares her superhero origin story and how employer transit pass programs like SEPTA’s Key Advantage Program work to support employees, agencies, and the region overall.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.
Below is a full unedited transcript of the episode:
[00:02:45] Jeff Wood: Ruth Miller welcome to the talking headways podcast [00:02:47] Ruth Miller: Thank you so much for having me [00:02:48] Jeff Wood: Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? [00:02:51] Ruth Miller: Absolutely. So my name is Ruth Miller. I am the director of product partnerships at Jaunt. I live in Boston and I’ve spent a really long time thinking about how to get people on the bus. [00:03:01] Jeff Wood: Okay. So before that, how did you get into thinking about people getting on the bus? What was the thing that brought you to transportation? Was it when you were a little kid or was it like when you were older or [00:03:10] Ruth Miller: my superhero origin story? Yeah, [00:03:12] Jeff Wood: exactly. [00:03:12] Ruth Miller: Yeah. I grew up in a really small town outside Atlanta in the late nineties, early two thousands. [00:03:18] And it was such a small town that my very first job was at a real estate office because they bought a computer and didn’t know how to put it together. And I had written a book report or something in second grade in DOS, somehow. I like submitted a floppy disk, so the second grade teacher’s husband I know what that is. [00:03:36] Yeah, the 90s. The second grade teacher’s husband worked at the real estate office and they were like, Who could put these computers together? Oh, there was that kid. What could she do? Let’s get her in here. And this was my freshman year of high school. And I realized that this was a job that was inside that didn’t work with the public and didn’t work with food. [00:03:53] And this was it. I was going to make this work. So I put their computers together and I convinced them to let me type up all their old contracts that had just been photocopied to death. And I spent all summer in the air conditioning inside. And then at the start of my sophomore year of high school, I was like, Hey, What if you pay me to type in the blanks and all these little contracts and then I had a job for the rest of high school just like a couple hours a week and I had this incredible access and opportunity to see what Sprawl looks like when it gets made. [00:04:21] So this is a real estate company. I started this in 2000, I want to say. And Newton County became the 11th fastest growing county in the country the next year. [00:04:30] Jeff Wood: That’s so interesting. It’s like the matrix, right? Like you see all the data going into the thing and it’s this is what sprawl looks like, but this is the back end of it. [00:04:38] Ruth Miller: Yeah. And it gave me a lot of respect and perspective. These were really nice people. They weren’t trying to exploit anyone. They weren’t trying to create any bad outcomes. They were folks who were dealing with mind boggling amounts of money. And we were taking multiple hundred acre parcels that had been trees or farm, a lot of homestead properties that we’re now going for several thousands of dollars an acre, just like life changing amounts of money. [00:05:03] And everyone was very excited, right? This is a big deal for this town. And in the three years basically that I was working there after school, we already started to see these two lane roads getting overwhelmed, the water and sewer, Georgia is experiencing a drought, but we had to go on restricted watering because the mains weren’t big enough to feed the outlying suburbs that were getting built. [00:05:24] And it was this genuine moment of what have we done? And how we didn’t have the questions, we didn’t have the tools, and this incredible nonprofit came together very organically, the Center for Community Preservation and Planning, that. Just started asking good questions, and I think they rented an old church and just had meals, like very Georgia, very grassroots, and they brought in folks from the University of Georgia, from Georgia Tech, and just started asking good questions. [00:05:50] And because I’d been working at this real estate office they literally needed someone to make maps. So people could point to a map and say, here’s where I live and here’s my story. Here’s what I’m seeing. And I was moonlighting for the county planning department because they were processing so many applications. [00:06:08] Your county planning budget is based on your current population, not the population that you’re trying to build and plan for. So they had a high school junior who taught herself ArcGIS one summer, again, another summer, not working with the public, not working outside not working with food. So I was. [00:06:24] Trusted a lot to work with these tools and had a lot of fun with them and made the first maps that went around that room. [00:06:30] Jeff Wood: How do you teach yourself arc? I did a lot of mapping and data and used ArcGIS and Arc3 and all that stuff. How do you teach yourself to do that? Because I took classes and it was like, here’s a shapefile here. [00:06:40] Ruth Miller: Yeah, that’s a great question. There were some things online. I remember someone offered one time if I wanted to go to the training, they would send me. And I knew enough to be like, I’m a 17 year old girl. I don’t think. This is going to be fun. I think I’m better off just like tooling around online. Also, this was, some good early internet era and we had cable internet probably going to downtown and I lived out in the, out of the sticks. [00:07:03] So we didn’t have great internet and I got caught downloading music. One time on the office computer. What was this? 2000, definitely Napster. Okay. Napster. A hundred percent Napster. [00:07:12] Jeff Wood: My whole phone is filled with Napster music. But [00:07:15] Ruth Miller: My boss was great. And he was just like, explain how this works. Like everything else that I had brought Oh, here’s ArcMap. [00:07:20] We need a plotter. Very thoughtful. Very curious. And then he had me burn CDs with his playlist for all of his friends. And that was part of the early networking. And then I started to see, oh, the same names are coming up over and over again. And some of them are attached to the streets and some are attached to the institutions. [00:07:36] And all these folks have the same questions. And then I left for college and I was going to go study computer science. I went to MIT. And turns out I hated computer science. I, I kept asking questions like why are we designing it this way? Why, who said this is how it’s supposed to work? And then turned into Oh who was able to go to the meet? [00:07:54] Where, what, when was the meeting? Was it transit accessible? Like, how are they going to get there? And then they were Oh You’re lost. You’re not supposed to be in computer science. You’re supposed to be in political science or urban planning. And I continued to work with this group back home. [00:08:06] And I, it took me a couple years. I don’t think I declared it until I was a junior to realize that this was even something you could study. That there was a right way to do it. Because I was just, I had organically came up with all these people who just had really good questions and good intent and had made very rational decisions with the information that they had. [00:08:24] So I’ve always had a lot of empathy for, I love developers. They’re rational. They work with numbers. You just change the rule and then they will work with the rule. There’s a spreadsheet that has to work. I think they, they don’t always get a fair shake in some of the online Twitter spaces. But yeah, so I, I had a great time learning all these things and realizing that this was a space where There was good need and good conversation that I could lend some expertise to. [00:08:47] And then, yeah, then there was no going back. Once you’ve become like urban planning pills, there’s no other way to look at the world. You get sucked in. [00:08:53] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And that’s great. It’s interesting. Cause I have actually, even a couple of weeks ago, I had somebody that’s younger emailing in and cause he asked the question, like, how did your origin stories and a lot of people don’t come at it, always wanted to be an urban planner and they’re like, it’s a circuitous route. [00:09:05] And like me, I just fell into it to a certain extent. And so people will email and be like, I appreciate that because then it means that I can do it right. Cause I’m interested in this stuff and I can actually come at whatever angle I came from. And I think that’s really important because, we don’t learn about urban planning in high school or anything like that. [00:09:22] I took a class at the university of Texas called the modern American city with professor Davies, professor Shane Davies was one of my favorite professors. And it was like slides and we were showing this stuff and we talk about the death of distance and whatever else. And then. The person sitting next to me, my friend, Mark was like, Hey, this is a whole, like you can do this, right? [00:09:38] And I was like, really, there’s a school over there in the architecture department that’s called urban planning. You can do this. I was like, Oh my gosh, this is awesome. Cause I was like, I ran track and cross country and I was like, Oh, maybe I’ll be a kinesiology major, or I’ll be a coach or something like that. [00:09:51] But then I was like geography and planning and that’s how I got in. So I just, I appreciate your story. [00:09:56] Ruth Miller: Yeah. Thank you. Geography is a great gateway drug too. Yeah. It’s a field where we need more people to be passionate and engaged, and the more channels like this, that people who didn’t just figure it out before they happened to graduate from college, can learn how to move the needle, and it has to be a big time, and I definitely felt a little, I think arrogance is fair right out of college Oh, I have this degree. [00:10:16] Why am I not? Why is every door not open to me immediately? And and who are these people that are younger than me that are so much more smart and capable and passionate and all these things. And I realized fairly quickly, like we need them. I’ve been a big fan of every nonprofit board I’ve ever been on of instituting term limits. [00:10:33] Because I want to come in and be excited about something. And then I want to always have an eye to whoever’s going to come next and make sure that I can grow out and they can grow in. And we just need to get as many people talking about transit and making cities better to undo all of the stuff that [00:10:46] Jeff Wood: we have to undo. [00:10:47] That’s so interesting. I was talking with somebody about a major national organization that I won’t name, but like just thinking about how some of the cult personality takes over and it exists forever. And then who’s next, who takes over for that? Cause cult of personality isn’t easily transferable. [00:11:01] But you have to have people that are in it for a different reason for it to be longterm. And so I appreciate that thinking because it is true. Like a lot of the nonprofits and stuff that are in our space, there’s somebody at the top, maybe that does like a really amazing work and they’re great, but at some point they retire. [00:11:16] And so who’s the next person. And so the people that. I feel do the best or the people that like we talk about sports coaching trees, right? Like you have the coach at the top and they have coaches under them. And then those coaches go on to do big things and they teach people below them. [00:11:27] And so you have this kind of trickle effect of people throughout. And I feel like it’s the same thing. There’s like certain leaders who have basically been mentors to so many people, and they are the ones that are the most successful because they get their ideas infiltrated versus the ones that continue to just be like, it’s all about me. [00:11:42] Ruth Miller: That’s interesting. I like the visual that you just gestured of a sort of a tree falling or just more of a pyramid. But I’ve used the language a lot around an ecosystem in the nonprofit advocacy world. We have a finite number of volunteer hours of dollars of. Attention of other O columns. There are only minutes. [00:12:01] There are only so many things you can do. And when I decided to leave my first real job and be an advocate for a couple years I was a consultant. I was writing reports that were sitting on shelves and had a bunch of feelings and worked for a small nonprofit in Oakland that really was having its moment because there was a seniority transition at the big, more dominant organization. [00:12:21] And I think it’s fair to say they were struggling to figure out what they were gonna do without this. Person and he went on to do amazing things and the people that came up did amazing things and people that stayed through or So many of my good friends, but there was a falter and I was asking people. [00:12:35] Hey, what should I do? I have time I want to go somewhere and this other new organization that I worked for was a walk oakland bike oakland was able to Yeah, wobo. Shout out Was able to emerge because there was a vacuum And everyone’s constantly evolving, and I think it’s important to realize that nothing is permanent. [00:12:52] This one person who’s able to work for free for a long time is eventually going to go away. They want to make money at some point. Or they’re going to retire, or they’re going to something’s going to happen. I’ve also seen a trend with a lot of smaller boards where you have a bunch of folks in, I’m going to say your late 20s, early 30s, who are really passionate, who are all friends, who are all so smart, who are so well connected. [00:13:11] And then within a couple years, Kids, jobs, moves, things happen. And if you don’t have that transition plan, it’s frustrating for everyone. But I think especially for the younger volunteers that want to come up and do things and to have the ground shifting beneath you is tough. So I appreciate how many people have, and we named a few earlier before we started officially recording, but how many people have. [00:13:33] Helped me take a step back and focus on the bigger picture. And it’s not about this organization and the drama and the day to day. And Lord knows I tweeted plenty. I did my fair share of it, but I appreciate that if you can give yourself the space to come back and realize that. More people are going to be graduating from school. [00:13:50] More people are going to be discovering this content organically, and we need to maintain on ramps for them to feel encouraged and to want to continue being passionate about this [00:13:59] Jeff Wood: and get involved. Yeah. Moving on to like more professional, like the, not that I was pretty non professional, but like your professional career, like you’ve been at Lyft, Apple maps, MBTA, Cal ITP. [00:14:10] I’m wondering like what kind of, some of the lessons are that you’ve learned from like All of those stops along the way. [00:14:15] Ruth Miller: That’s such a great question. So adding to that list of big names that I’m very proud of, I’m currently at an amazing company I’m very proud of that we haven’t heard of as much. It’s certainly no Apple working on it, right? [00:14:28] But Jaunt, J A W N T is here in Philly. I now, because I’m there, I have the comparison that I’m making and those other companies, they’re household names. Brands. Cal ITP should be, it’s getting there, but I was attracted to them all because they were big, high profile projects. There’s nothing more fun than going to a party, telling people you work at Apple and they’re like, Oh, I use your product all the time. [00:14:51] Or they ask a question and you’re like, Oh I can’t really tell. That feels good in a very vain way. I [00:14:55] Jeff Wood: had a roommate who was working on the iPhone three, maybe, or something like that, it was like one of the ones that got stolen off of a bench or something like that. And he would come home and I don’t care about that stuff. [00:15:05] I don’t care about like the next iteration or whatever. There’s a lot of his websites, all that. Oh, people [00:15:08] Ruth Miller: do. Yeah. People do. I don’t, but they terrorize us with that. [00:15:13] Jeff Wood: And he was like, okay this is no disrespect to you, Jeff, but I have to go in my room and close my door so I can do work. [00:15:18] And I was like, Okay, I don’t care, but sure, I understand. I’m surprised [00:15:22] Ruth Miller: they let him work from home, [00:15:23] Jeff Wood: frankly. Wow. But this is a long time ago. [00:15:27] Ruth Miller: Yeah. No, that’s fun. So that set of amazing teams doing incredible work were personally unified for me in terms of, I want to go do big things that are fun to talk about. [00:15:37] And I, I had some cool nonprofit projects. Also, I went to Guyana and was working with indigenous people to do very remote offline mapping. Another great story at parties. And they were also tracking this through line of GTFS data, of trip data, and Apple was started by, people who wanted to reach parity or provide a complete trip planning experience. [00:15:59] And the legend, who knows how true this is, but the legend I heard was someone said, you go take three weeks and go get all the transit data. In the world, and then two years later, they hired me to continue solving that, and they’re still working on it, and it’s [00:16:11] Jeff Wood: never ending. [00:16:12] Ruth Miller: It’s never ending because they didn’t have any reason to understand the scope of the problem. [00:16:17] So while I was there, I was able to be part of some conversations, and those conversations continue to lift. And then the industry was organizing effectively and created. I was a small part in the process that created mobility data. An incredible nonprofit based out of Montreal, the standard keeper for GTFS data. [00:16:35] I was fortunate to be able to go to CalITP where they played more of a regulatory role and we’re building tools to support smaller transit agencies, the ones with the greatest need and understand why it was so hard to get this trip data. Jillian was just on here a couple of weeks ago talking about there are hundreds of transit agencies in California and many of them, the general manager drives the bus. [00:16:56] So if we say. Hi, I’m from Apple. Could you send us your trip data? I was not a California agency, but an agency in a different state hung up on me because they thought I was a prank caller because they were very small. And I said, I really need your trip data. And we sent it to Google, but that’s not public. [00:17:13] So I was fortunate to be able to continue chasing this problem through the regulatory side and then had a blast at the MBTA. On the data creation side and came to really understand just chasing upstream the bookend of passenger information and the issues with GTFS, the amazing people working to resolve those issues, why they’re so hard to solve and left the T and was just that was fun, but is this really a space where I need to be? [00:17:40] It seems like it’s working itself to resolution talking about being fun at parties. The fact that GTFS data is now required by the NTD. There are a handful of people that get really excited about that and no one else, it makes no sense to anyone else. So [00:17:53] Jeff Wood: I appreciate it. I [00:17:55] Ruth Miller: get it. This feels like a good audience for that. [00:17:58] Jeff Wood: I’m sure the listeners get it too. [00:17:59] Ruth Miller: Yeah. But that’s incredible. So if I have all this experience and I’m clearly obsessed with getting people on the bus and making it easier to understand how to navigate transit and all these things about there’s trip awareness, which is different than trip planning, which is different than trip execution. [00:18:15] What else is there to solve? And the payment side really came on my radar first at Cal ATP. I was working on the GTFS vertical, but there were also people working on eligibility verification. If you’ve already, the state knows how old you are. The state knows if you’re eligible for a veteran’s discount. [00:18:33] So rather than requiring people to submit a slice of a dead tree to go live in a filing cabinet somewhere, what if we just made the computers talk to each other? So there are amazing people working on that. And I became aware of payments and contactless as a topic and was really fortunate to land in. [00:18:51] The company I’m working on now, which is much more focused on how to get people to pay for it. And I can’t cite this, but I’ve heard that in Boston, more than 50%, I want to say Seattle, more than 60%, but the majority of trips that people take on transit are paid for by someone else. So my company, Jaunt, is working to make it easier to pay for transit on behalf of someone else. [00:19:11] And there are lots of fun little nooks and crannies, so I will be busy for a while. Yeah. I’m excited to get to continue solving fun tech problems in transit. [00:19:18] Jeff Wood: I do want to ask you, like from when you started to now the GTFS issue, like what’s been the biggest change? What’s been the biggest thing that you’ve seen change? [00:19:27] Is it adoption? Is it just more people know what you’re talking about? Is it something that nobody would think about? [00:19:33] Ruth Miller: That’s a great question. I think the expectation changed. I think it’s no longer acceptable to say we have a schedule, so that’s fine because enough people, so many people are, You know, those are building transportation for people that aren’t themselves. [00:19:48] They’re not consumers of the product. And that’s very frustrating when you’re trying to advocate for those consumers because the people that have all the control don’t seem to always have empathy, and that is unfortunate. So I think it’s more universally understood that, yes, I expect to look at my phone or to go to the stop and see some indication of when the bus is coming or when the train’s coming. [00:20:09] I’m grateful for that. [00:20:10] Jeff Wood: There’s like expectation of a real time information instead of just the schedule. It’s like it’s supposed to be here, but it’s not. No one believes in schedules. Yeah. [00:20:18] Ruth Miller: It’s more universally expected that a bus rider will be able to know. First off, that the bus is running at all, when it’s going to arrive. [00:20:29] I ended up walking here from where I’m staying in Philly because I saw the bus go by as soon as I walked outside. I made no effort to actually look at when it was going to arrive. I just, it was close enough I felt like walking. And then as I was walking, I was like, oh, I could catch the bus if it’s going to pass me. [00:20:45] Let me look into that. And Transit App had the real time location, which let me know that it was on detour, so I had no chance of getting it along its original route. And we’re still, detours are now the cutting edge. The T’s doing some really great stuff in Boston, and that’s going to be a great thing to solve. [00:21:01] And I appreciate that in not that long, we’ve moved from, hey, it’d be nice to know when the bus is supposed to go, it’d be nice to know that on my phone, to here’s the real, here’s actually what this. The bus that you want to get on is going to do right now, and that’s great. And it’s just, it’s customer expectation and the fact that we also expect it to be available in a more open format. [00:21:22] GTFS is great. I tell people all the time, if you’re trying to teach yourself Python or get into mapping, what’s more fun than downloading? Some GTFS data, because it’s organized. Half of data science is cleaning up your data. So here’s a nice format that’s local to you. You can tell a nice story, have some empathy. [00:21:38] And when I was at Apple and Cal ITP, we had a lot of people tell us we already send it to Google, so we’re publishing it. [00:21:44] Jeff Wood: It originally was called the Google Transit Speed Specification, right? It was. And it changed into general. [00:21:49] Ruth Miller: And I appreciate them for being willing to hand over those reins. [00:21:51] And that made it a lot easier to be able to set the expectation that, Just sending it to this one person isn’t the same as putting it out there. And I want every student who’s getting excited about this or every person who’s teaching themselves about this field to have access to as much information as they want. [00:22:07] Jeff Wood: It’s helpful. When I started doing GIS in the two thousands the data was sparse of census data, right? Which was really cutting edge at the time. And then you get to where you get the LHD data and I was downloading parcels off of disks. And then eventually, now you have all this real time data that you’re just like the, anybody can. [00:22:23] Digest and metabolize. Ooh, I like that. Yeah. Michael Batty actually was the one that shared that with me a couple of months ago, or maybe it was like a year ago. I can’t remember, but time, exactly. But just like the data is so interesting now because, we used to have this 10 year census and this 10 year data set, but now it’s like instantaneous, right? [00:22:40] Like we’re metabolizing all this data. And from all different like angles to, you have all these Waymo vehicles driving around getting LIDAR data about the streets every single second. And so if you can metabolize that what would that tell you about what’s going on in the city? [00:22:54] So we’re gone from this small amount of data collection. And we can, we have, it’s almost episodic versus binging television. So like where the episodic, you have a week in between each episode to stand at the water cooler and talk about it, but then if it’s like a binge, like everybody’s okay, I’m in it. [00:23:08] And I’m out. And then. There’s not as much discussion, but it’s happening and it’s crazy. [00:23:12] Ruth Miller: I like that. I also, I want to walk back a little bit. I said people who are teaching themselves should have as much data as they want. There’s such thing as too much data. And but I think it is important to have data out there for people to understand and get excited about. [00:23:26] I want to brag for a moment about the transit matters team lab team out of Boston. So for those that aren’t fortunate enough to get to ride the red line, sometimes Boston’s been going through it. And has been doing a lot of slow zones, they call them, where they need to maintain the tracks, they need to do some sort of work, and they just slow the trains down, and it’s been brutal. [00:23:46] And a tough sell when you’re trying to get people excited about the train, and they’re like, yeah, but it takes twice as long as it used to. The T, I think it was one of the last agencies to publish real time information. Understandably, you don’t want to, making it easier for people to hold you accountable, perhaps, sometimes. [00:24:01] But now they’re doing much better. They’ve had some great leadership changes, but they still weren’t publishing a ton of information about the slow zones. So a bunch of volunteers got together and said this is all public data, so we’re going to do it. So they made the transit data dashboard, it’s on version four, and just very great metrics that a bunch of volunteers put together, and it’s laid out very clearly, and it shows here’s the progress. [00:24:22] And the concept of a slow zone. probably exists somewhere else, but it’s not as familiar a visualization, so they invented a lot of their own representations and coded it all themselves, and they’ve gotten great coverage in the globe and have been able to fill an informational gap for a good year or so. [00:24:39] They were able to take public data and an advocacy Mindset and turn into real narrative shift. And now most of the slow sounds, I think, are probably gone. They’re working on the last few and not because of this public accountability, but it certainly helped. And certainly has helped the team regain its credibility now that the public watchdogs are saying, no, they are, they’re doing a good job. [00:25:00] And that’s where we want to be. No one wants to. Spend all this time building these tools to be negative. Like we want to see these systems get better. I live in this city. I need it to work. And that’s great. And that wouldn’t be possible without the wide availability of GTFS data. [00:25:11] Jeff Wood: Yeah. And shout out to transit matters. [00:25:13] We had Jarrett Johnson on I think it was two years ago. He was at impact and we interviewed him here at the conference school. They do great work and the folks there do really amazing things. Jaunt has Philly roots. The name, what’s the local vernacular for her? What is, what’s the word I’m looking for? [00:25:28] I knew you [00:25:28] Ruth Miller: were going to ask me this. Yeah. So a Jaunt, I don’t live in Philly. I love coming to Philly to eat. Is it like [00:25:33] Jeff Wood: yinz? Is it like, yeah, okay. Yeah, [00:25:35] Ruth Miller: but it’s not just people. It can be any noun, any person, place or thing. I actually took a photo on the walk here. There was a, Like one of those outdoor advertising sort of placeholder boards said, this could be your John. [00:25:47] So it’s J A W N. [00:25:49] Jeff Wood: I sit on your water bottle. J A W N, not J O H N, because that could get weird real quick. I have [00:25:54] Ruth Miller: literally said at work, of all the ways we could advertise, A radio format would be one of the most difficult, because we’d have to say jaunt, J A W N T, and there were some really silly ones on KQED in San Francisco, I remember, where they’d have to spell their name every time, and I was like, I don’t wanna be one of those guys. [00:26:09] But now we’re one of those guys. Yeah, now [00:26:11] Jeff Wood: we’re I wanted to have you here. Cause I was really interested in the key advantage program and I’d seen all the positive press about it. And I wanted to learn more about like how it came about, why it matters to the transit agency. So can you give me like an idea of the program and what it is? [00:26:27] Ruth Miller: Absolutely. So again, I don’t live in Philly, but I, what I’ve heard is that, a lot of agencies really used the pandemic as a moment to make good changes that were otherwise going to be very slow or hard. And Philly did a great job capitalizing on that. So the story of SEPTA Key Advantage really starts with the city passing a commuter benefits ordinance in December 2022. [00:26:48] So any employer within the city of Philadelphia that has 50 or more employees is required to offer commuter benefits. And then SEPTA was right there ready to go and make it a lot easier for employers to participate. So the cost of a monthly unlimited trail pass is over 200 and SEPTA Key Advantage is an institutional pass program. [00:27:10] A lot of cities have. Versions like this and septas is unlimited ridership on regional rail on bus on trolley on trains for about 90 percent of the cost of the regular retail price and in addition to creating a cheaper option and then requiring it, they also. saw the services of my company John to help implement it. [00:27:32] So would we hear from a lot of the employers that we support with commuter benefits is the administration time and passes in particular can be tricky if you’re. Registering for a SEPTA Key Advantage Pass, you need a physical key card, and there’s a number on the card that you need to register with so the value can go onto the card, but the number on the card is not the one that we need to know. [00:27:57] It’s the one that you need to use to create an account online, and then get a different code, and that’s what has to be submitted to your employer or your benefits provider to receive the benefit. SEPTA new. Up ahead, this was going to be a big challenge, and they didn’t want to put that administrative burden on the employers. [00:28:15] They wanted to do as much as they could to make the program. Feel good for everyone involved. It’s supposed to be about increasing access and reducing frustration and helping people love their city. So they worked with John, a third party benefits provider, and we were able to just make that a little bit of an easier process to have some infield validation, customer support, all that great stuff. [00:28:35] Jeff Wood: So it’s an employee benefit program, but basically the employees pay the transit agency a certain amount of money per employee, or how does that work specifically? [00:28:44] Ruth Miller: This one, so every city’s institutional pass program is a little bit different. And SEPTA’s is Part of the new cutting edge, I would say, of usage based pricing. [00:28:53] So I want to say LA, Portland, Denver, Philly are the usage based ones that I’m aware of, which makes sense. You want to make it feel fair. If your office is out in the suburbs and you don’t think a lot of people are going to take transit, you don’t want to pay what feels like an unfair amount to participate, especially because it’s a requirement. [00:29:11] So SEPTA came up with a system where For the first six months that you participate in the program, there’s a fixed price. I don’t want to say what it is, but it’s about 90 percent of the retail. And sometimes the employers choose to subsidize the pass entirely for their employees, which obviously we prefer. [00:29:29] And that just lets them have unlimited access to explore their city. Sometimes they do pass on some of that cost. And then there’s a question of integrating with payroll, and it’s not insurmountable, but it is a little more friction. And then the employee gets It’s deeply subsidized by both SEPTA and sometimes their employer, Transit Access. [00:29:49] The employer is putting some skin in the game, is participating, and SEPTA gets more ridership. [00:29:55] Jeff Wood: How’s this different than a commuter check, right? Where like in the Bay area, when I was working in Oakland, basically we’d get like 120 commuter check every month. And then we’d go and take it and get a muni pass or a BART card or whatever it was, we could put it all on one thing. [00:30:08] How is that different from that? [00:30:10] Ruth Miller: It fits into that universe with it. So that 120. Amount you cited now is 3. 15 a month, that’s set by the federal government. It’s 3. 15 a month in 2024, we don’t know what it’ll be in 2025, but presumably I dated myself then. We’ve all been working for a little while. [00:30:25] Thankfully it goes up a little bit every year, but that is the amount that you are allowed to divert from your paycheck pre tax towards the cost of transit and vanpool. Transit and vanpool share a 3. 15 a month. The thinking there being that vanpool is the rural equivalent. To transit, so if there’s something. [00:30:43] For that part of the world to benefit from as well, you can also legally take 3. 50 a month or that same amount for parking. Not bikes currently, but that should come back at the end of 2025. We’re very excited about that. That is a cash value amount. You could spend that on your Sub to Key Advantage. Pass, whatever the value is that you’re paying comes out of that 315, but let’s say you’re a Patco, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak and SEPTA rider, then if your employer chooses to allow it, you could also put money into a travel wallet, or you could just buy a pass. [00:31:19] With either a cash value, if it’s a wallet situation, or another monthly pass to be able to use those services as well, because a lot of people use more than one system. [00:31:27] Jeff Wood: Yeah, because I noticed that on SEPTA now you can use, I can just use my credit card right in the contact list, which is pretty cool. Yes, you [00:31:33] Ruth Miller: can use your contact list bank card. [00:31:35] My team at John also produces a visa backed debit card. So let’s say your employer says, You have the option of Septic Key Advantage, you have the option of a PATCO New Jersey Transit Pass, or you can just put cash value on this, what’s effectively a flexible spending account card, and so when I took SEPTA yesterday, I tapped my jaunt pass on the bus to be able to ride, so I didn’t pay the full value of that because it had been paid for with pre tax funds, so I got effectively a 30 percent discount. [00:32:03] And contactless is going to be really fun for those cards and passes, because I just described all the difficulty with getting the right card reference ID on the card and no shade to that vendor, but come on guys. And Chicago, New York, Omni, Boston Now, just being able to tap something and use it and have the employee or the rider be able to choose how they want to spend that. [00:32:25] It’s edging much closer to universal mobility passes, which is in the direction of universal basic income, which is very exciting. There’s so many obstacles to riding transit already. Just don’t make it harder than it needs to be for people to pay for it. Just let people, I want to get people on the bus and reducing those obstacles. [00:32:43] So if someone wants to. Use Amtrak and Patco and New Jersey Transit and SEPTA, just put money on a card, put whatever restrictions you need to make sure it follows the law, of course, but then just let them make the choice for their trip that makes sense in the moment. [00:32:58] Jeff Wood: I talked to Scott Bernstein a long time ago on the Monday show, but I just talked about something in the newsletter the other day, which is like this idea of poverty reduction, right? [00:33:05] And thinking about What this universal basic income or universal basic mobility might be mean for people. And the idea that, if you can reduce people’s like the amount they pay for goods and services, like transit or housing or whatever, if you give them money to do this, or if you give them services, you actually are making it easier for them to save money because. [00:33:24] If you make money, you make 1, 000, or you give them 1, 000, they have to pay taxes on that. But if you give them a service that’s worth 1, 000, you don’t, they don’t have to pay taxes on that. So they get to keep that 1, 000 that they might have spent on something otherwise. And so you’re increasing people’s income in that way. [00:33:38] And so I think that’s a really interesting way of thinking about how these passes can impact people and can help people get through the strains of life and things like that. And so it’s not just a pass program. It’s something bigger than that. And it’s buildings worth something bigger, which I think is interesting. [00:33:51] Ruth Miller: Yes, and also. It is so hard to ride transit in some parts. I was describing earlier how I missed my bus and there was a detour and I walked and it was fine. And it’s so easy to get in a car in this country. And the more obstacles we can remove it’s yes to, it’s giving people. The financial means to ride transit or just softening that requirement, but reducing the mental load of having to juggle passes. [00:34:18] And we’re all transit nerds here. We all have our collection of smart cards from different cities and they all have, and they all have so many New Zealand dollars because what am I going to go back and use this? But it had a little Kiwi on it. So it’s a souvenir now. That’s a bizarre system. [00:34:32] And just when I worked at Lyft, we talked a lot about. You’re leaving money on the table, [00:34:37] Jeff Wood: right, in all these places. [00:34:38] Ruth Miller: We talked a lot about the case of people flying into a new city and needing to understand how to use transit immediately. And yeah, but like most people don’t have that problem. They just want to get where they need to go and not have to juggle things. [00:34:49] And I think Philly has a great example. Boston, a lot of places share this where there’s a set of railroad tracks that are shared by Amtrak and the regional agency. And a person gets to the platform. And if they only have a SEPTA pass, that’s great, they get to ride SEPTA for free, but it’s an hour long headway, and it’s staggered, so if they are able to just buy an Amtrak pass, they wait 30 fewer minutes, and don’t have to figure out what the app is, and that’s, it’s more than giving people money, it’s giving people time, and it’s just reducing that friction to, again help people want to explore transit, or feel more comfortable and more confident with it. [00:35:27] Jeff Wood: It also is beneficial to agencies, it feels and that, that was one of the big things that I took away from some of the articles that were written is that, when you have these past programs, you’re getting more people on transit. And during the pandemic, obviously we had a ridership drop. [00:35:38] Obviously a lot of center cities are having problems with office space and things like that. Philadelphia is, public sector workers have to come back to the office. Now I heard a lot of complaints about that recently in the last couple of days, but it also feels like it’s a way for. These large companies to support the system that nourishes the region. [00:35:57] Ruth Miller: This was the thing I was most excited about when I started thinking about commuter benefits and I was applying for this job is what a great way for the private sector to share a little more of the responsibility for the upkeep of something from which they benefit so greatly. And yes, we all pay taxes and we can argue about if they should be higher or lower, but if you’re in a city center, people come to your office as guests as Employees, just why not make it a beautiful place to be? [00:36:25] Why not help people appreciate their surroundings? And yeah, it’s not isn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet, but it’s just like you’re a member of this community and you benefit from this community. And why wouldn’t you want to do this? This very manageable thing, especially if you’re going to do return to office to support your property value and your investment. [00:36:43] This serves. The company at a very top level, the least you can do is pay for people’s commute to come to that office, to support this higher corporate purpose. [00:36:52] Jeff Wood: And the companies that got, got on first, the anchor institutions, the big companies that are like, Hey, we’re doing this. [00:36:58] We’re supporting our region too. There’s a, there’s like a, there’s like an advertising benefit almost to it as well. [00:37:02] Ruth Miller: Absolutely. And those are, I think you’re referring to university of Penn and Philly and the other universities and the hospitals. And they feel. Accurately that they are leaders in their community and I appreciate them taking on that role. [00:37:15] Jeff Wood: What about smaller companies? Because I think that’s another kind of important, you have the large ones that can afford this, but what about like smaller companies with small amounts of employees and maybe not as much purchasing power or not, maybe not as much ability to jump into a huge commitment like this? [00:37:29] Ruth Miller: Absolutely. It is an administrative effort to be able to offer an additional benefit. And certainly a smaller business is going to have less capacity. And probably less advanced systems, we work with a lot of smaller employers that have a CSV that they upload sporadically and yeah, if you have 50 employees, if you have 10 employees, like you’re not going to sign up for a big HR system and you shouldn’t have to and I give a lot of credit to SEPTA for designing the SEPTA Key Advantage program to make it as easy as possible for those companies. [00:38:01] Since they’ve been open to smaller businesses, if you want to participate in SEPTA Key Advantage, you get our services as a third party benefits provider for free, funded by SEPTA, because they want to be able to direct participation and they want to be able to make sure that everyone in the community gets to participate. [00:38:17] Jeff Wood: What did you learn from this process? [00:38:19] Ruth Miller: Everything about commuter benefits. I came in with very little knowledge about this. I had a bunch of money on my Clipper card when I left the Bay Area and will not have to Pay for Clipper for a while and didn’t understand anything about it. It was just, I get to ride Bart and it’s fine. [00:38:35] And I appreciate the creativity in finding these seemingly narrow opportunities to drive ridership. I wouldn’t have thought three years ago I would be recording a podcast talking about commuter benefits, but like it is all hands on deck with transit ridership in. Urban areas and what a great place to revisit and to try to modernize and pay more attention to. [00:38:58] These have been around for decades. You mentioned transit check earlier. This has been an option for a long time, and it’s great that cities are taking a closer look at it. [00:39:07] Jeff Wood: I’m interested also in what cities should know if they want to get themselves into this, if they want to learn how to do it. [00:39:12] What are some of the things that they should know and how to jump in feet first? [00:39:16] Ruth Miller: Great question. They should be prepared to handle. The past orders is one that I think has surprised a few or been unexpected. There are levels of requirement of full on commuter benefits law, like the Bay Area or Seattle or Chicago. [00:39:32] Or Philly or the entire state of New Jersey, Commonwealth of New Jersey are great, but there are subtler ways to do it. I lived in Oakland for a long time and I know they have offered the option to distribute transit passes in lieu for building parking for downtown offices, which is great. You shouldn’t be building. [00:39:48] I went to a lot of public meetings to say, please don’t build more parking in my neighborhood. Cause I, I’m three blocks from a barge station. And then. Just making sure you have the capacity that collaboration, this is something Philly did very well, the city can pass the rule, but the transit agency has to be on board and prepared and ready to run with actually implementing it, and that coordination needs to be set up or it’s going to be frustrating for employers. [00:40:12] Jeff Wood: So what else is interesting to you right now? [00:40:14] Ruth Miller: What else is interesting to me right now? Small vehicles. I am obsessed with the Japanese K trucks. Okay, yeah. And That’s like [00:40:22] Jeff Wood: a big discussion in like the Northeast, I feel it is. Was it Maine or somebody that just said maybe it’s Massachusetts, they just finally fixed the K trucks. [00:40:28] People were getting harassed about it. And then they finally fixed it and it’s said, no, your grandfather didn’t officially, or moving forward or something like that. [00:40:36] Ruth Miller: These are a great question. According to streets blog, a very credible news source that I follow. Yeah. They were banned for a little while in Massachusetts and they’re back. [00:40:45] They’re smaller than the enormous trucks that are more common. [00:40:47] Jeff Wood: the same size. The beds are the same [00:40:49] Ruth Miller: size. Oh my God. And they’re so cute. And what a system we have where. You aren’t allowed to do the smaller, safer thing because so many other people are allowed to do the bigger, scarier thing. That’s just a bizarre way to do it. [00:41:01] So yay, Massachusetts for fixing that. Cargo bikes. I live in Somerville next to Boston and there’s a great dog park near my house and Getting to watch the dogs play during the school rush hour commute. It’s just cargo bikes and I heard a long time ago that women were an indicator species for bikes. [00:41:18] If you see more women biking, it means that they feel safer and kids are even better. And just the incredible, legit looking contraptions with the rain shields and the vests. And it’s just, there’s a street in Somerville that has more people traveling by bike during rush hour than cars. And Somerville and Cambridge are just, are great for it. [00:41:36] I lived there 15 years ago and just moved back. And apparently the best way to improve bikes is to leave and let people stay behind and do all the really hard work and then just go enjoy California and then come back. And it’s Oh, this is really nice now. And e bikes exist, e bikes also, but just, I realized I live in a bubble in Somerville, but how much more normalized it is to have these vehicles that are such smaller, such lower impact and so much cheaper. [00:42:00] And I. I’m excited for cargo e bike delivery to get more normalized. I know the battery situation’s tough, but yeah, there’s so few things that I need a car for. And it’s getting so much easier to not have to use an enormous vehicle to move around. Yeah. [00:42:14] Jeff Wood: I don’t know if it’s because I have a two and a half year old or if it’s, I think it is because more people are doing it, but I do notice like more parents and kids and more women riding those huge cargo bikes with the rain shields and all that stuff in the buckets and all the kids are just sitting there like enjoying their day or they’re like, They’re just looking around and the wind’s hitting the face. [00:42:33] It’s just normal. It looks fun, right? Yeah. It looks like just enjoyable way to get to school and for parents to drop off. So it just looks awesome. [00:42:40] Ruth Miller: And to have your parent pick you up and be in such a better mood. I went to schools that my parents both taught at, so I didn’t have to go through the school drop off. [00:42:47] My mom ran the school drop off and I had to hang out in the cafeteria and it was a military level of precision for this small elementary school with a couple hundred students in the middle of nowhere to deal with just what must have been a half mile of parents and their cars [00:43:00] Jeff Wood: alone. [00:43:01] It’s so crazy, right? Like the whole, there’s been a bunch of articles about it. Henry Gabor wrote a piece on this and somebody in the Atlantic wrote a piece on this. The number of kids that aren’t walking as much to school. And we were talking about mapping in GIS earlier. [00:43:12] I’ve heard this statistic as well, which is kids that ride around in the back of their parents cars just don’t have as much mapping capability in their brains as much as they might have if they have to navigate the streets. The streets with their parents like by walking or biking or whatever. [00:43:25] I totally [00:43:26] Ruth Miller: believe that. Yeah. I noticed the difference in myself when I’m at a new place and I’m navigating off my phone the whole time. You don’t have the opportunity to stitch it together, but you’re on foot and now you’re figuring it out and it’s fun and you can’t love a thing you don’t see. [00:43:38] Jeff Wood: So where can folks find out more about the Key Advantage program and the work that you’re doing at Jaunt? [00:43:42] Ruth Miller: Absolutely. SEPTA is the owner and visionary and absolute authority on all of this, and they have some great information on their website, and my team at Jaunt can be found at j a w n t P A S dot com, jauntpass dot com, and we’re also presenting a paper at TRB this year about just a landscape analysis of how, I mentioned usage based pricing is one option, but there are several others. [00:44:07] Reach out to me, happy to share a copy if I’m able. And it’s just a really exciting moment for trans agencies to have a little more freedom to get creative, because they have to, and we’re far enough into it that there are some really good examples that have. established traction and are great references. [00:44:25] Jeff Wood: And where can folks find you if you wish to be found? [00:44:27] Ruth Miller: I can be found. Yeah. I, oh God, Twitter. I think LinkedIn, I’m sorry to say it’s LinkedIn. [00:44:33] Jeff Wood: It’s okay. [00:44:34] Ruth Miller: MC Planner. [00:44:35] Jeff Wood: It’s Twitter is a dying forum with still a fair amount of People, they’re doing good work, but it’s definitely people are disappearing. [00:44:43] It [00:44:43] Ruth Miller: makes me so sad. It does make me sad. It was such [00:44:45] Jeff Wood: a great thing, but maybe it’s okay. Maybe all of those institutions that we talked about earlier, needing to evolve and move along, maybe we need to, [00:44:53] Ruth Miller: yeah. And offline, yeah, I just moved to Boston a couple of years ago. You can find me in the garden on the greenway at the pottery studio. [00:44:59] I’m trying to. Trying to make my friends and blend art and transportation. [00:45:03] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Awesome. Ruth, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate your time. [00:45:06] Ruth Miller: Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.
