“There simply has to be a conversation with the public about what the goals are, and what the definition of success is,” said Jarrett Walker, principal and founder of Jarrett Walker and Associates, a transit planning consultant firm, and author of the book Human Transit.
Jarrett spoke Wednesday during a panel discussion looking at the future of transit and how to plan for 2025. The event was organized and hosted by Optibus, a transportation technology company.
U.S. transit systems are still largely operating on COVID-19 relief funds, which are set to run out in the next year or two. This, Walker said, will put a number of agencies at the edge of a “fiscal cliff,” requiring them to “go back to their voters and seek more funding.”
“This is happening in the context, of course, of a huge shift toward working from home among more affluent information workers, which has dramatically reduced the traditional rush hour into downtowns,” he said. “That’s the story everywhere.”
Transit ridership in the U.S. is at about 78 percent of pre-COVID-19 levels, according to the ridership dashboard maintained by the American Public Transportation Association. Transit ridership on systems serving regions of 500,000 residents or fewer is at 92 percent of 2019 levels, signaling a near return to normalcy after four years of turbulence; however, big city systems continue to lag pre-COVID-19 ridership.
As cities are forced to rethink the level of transit service they can offer on existing funding, or turn to voters for new funding, they will need data to have these conversations, Walker said, adding that it often needs to be the kind of granular, location-based data with information related to demographics, travel destinations and other details that cities do not always have.
Leon Daniels, president of Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport in the United Kingdom, a membership organization for transportation professionals, said such data needs to examine the kinds of journeys being taken, by whom, and the nuances between transit capacity and demand.
“Many organizations could say they have plenty of data, but no information,” Daniels quipped during the panel. Too often, he added, the data used by public transit is too disjointed and not related to each other, “which is wholly useless, and frankly, time-consuming.”
Preparing for re-imagined public transit will require a willingness to more fully explore technology like artificial intelligence, said Eva Kreienkamp, CEO for EK Consulting and the former CEO of Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, a German transit company.
“Invest in IT and AI much more than you might have done up to now, because no matter what, funding is scarce, and optimization is needed and that’s one of the ways to get there,” she said during the panel.
Similarly, Daniels advised agencies to pay less attention to baubles like new buses or trains, but instead look at what new transportation innovations may be evolving. He used Uber as the classic example of a tech-supported transportation disrupter.
“The challenges to our industry are coming from elsewhere. They’re coming from other forms of transport technology,” Daniels said. “Look out into the bigger, wider world, and see what the next game-changer might be. And be prepared for that.”
