“I think systems have to start to reimagine the service with their imagination and not necessarily with their memories, because things have changed and I don’t see them going back to the way where they were,” said Jameson Auten, general manager and CEO of the Lane Transit District (LTD) in Eugene, Ore.
Auten was speaking on a June 21 panel about transit and technology. The discussion was arranged by transit technology company Optibus.
Reimagining transit means having a new understanding around when residents need to travel and where they’re traveling to. In Eugene, ridership is growing — up 15 percent from last year — primarily due to weekend trips. Lane Transit is in the process of conducting an operational analysis to better understand these trends.
“I think it’s important for us to get the lay of the land, and to design services that meet the needs of our communities that way,” he said. “And I highly suspect that we’ll have fixed-route service, of course. But we’ll also have a larger mix of other services like on-demand and more biking.”
As new service is designed, technology can aid the customer side of the business by seeking to address nagging questions all riders seem to have. They are often reliability related like, “Is my vehicle coming? Is it coming on time? How’s the crowding on the vehicle?" Auten offered.
And then on the operations side of the organization, technology can help in areas like using artificial intelligence to better manage predictive maintenance.
“I think there’s value in how technology can help make decisions,” said Auten. “But at the end of the day, it is humanistic. It boils down to, what’s the utility of the product or service that I’m using? And then how does technology help to make that return much bigger?”
Technology in the form of universal trip-planning tools like the Transit App can help to reduce barriers to using public transit.
“Understanding the network is probably key. And that’s where technology can really help people,” said Lorna Murphy, operations and HR director for Abellio London, an operator of large bus and rail transit, during the panel. “Especially if you’re not really using the network regularly, or you’re going somewhere you haven’t been before, that’s where technology can play a real part in helping people onto the network.”
It wasn’t that long ago when every transit agency boasted and bragged about the new app it had launched: capable of trip-planning, e-ticketing and communicating with riders via push alerts. Today, those apps — each unique and requiring downloads and updates — are seen as somewhat passé. The mood and focus, instead, has shifted to a world where there’s one universal app that accomplishes all of these tasks, regardless or where someone is riding.
“The push for each agency to have its own app — I’m guilty. We did it in Kansas City, [Mo.] and we’re doing it at LTD [Lane Transit District] right now,” said Auten. “But you know, there’s an app out there that you can use everywhere, and I think that’s probably the approach that we need to have.”
These are the kinds of technology developments that reduce the barrier to use transit, so that it can become as ubiquitous as Uber or a personal car.
If technology is largely viewed as a means to an end, and not the end itself, transit leaders say that tech should serve outcomes; and those outcomes are also not what they have always been. Counting ridership is important, and is a metric agencies will surely continue to deploy, but there are other outcomes as well, Auten mused.
How many jobs does transit access? Does it serve health-care needs? Can it help to address the housing crisis in the form of transit-oriented development? These are all the kinds of lens transit agencies will be viewing technology through, he said.
