State Level Coordination, Taxi Study, Rural Meets Google

NCSL has released the latest in its series of state coordination profiles, this one from the great state of Texas. These profiles examine the statutory, regulatory or executive mandates for coordination, initiatives at the state level, funding and grant management, and the progress of coordination and mobility management. The Texas profile highlights statewide and regional efforts, a website clearinghouse, and funding.

NCSL also releases its first 2012 coordination newsletter. The new issue lists pending and recently-passed state legislation requiring coordination or making changes to human services or Medicaid transportation delivery.

Survey - Statewide Coordination

"NCSL is in the midst of a survey of all the states and territories on state coordination and other activities that facilitate access to transportation mobility for veterans. Planned for release in Aug. 2012, the report will feature a state-by-state comparison, three case studies and a synthesis of best practices from across the nation." Contact Jaime Rall at jaime.rall@ncsl.org to participate in the survey.

[Conductor and passenger during a station stop on Amtrak's Vermonter route.]

The Original Guaranteed Ride Home

By way of introduction to a very good study about taxi service, I cannot resist telling about a recent ride of my own. While making my way to a conference in Vermont, taking the Vermonter train to the Burlington area, I was reminded how a taxi driver can give a visit local flavor. My driver was a taxi advocate and local history buff. How many people do you know who can tell romantic and daring tales about the War of 1812? Probably not too many. Nicholas was so engaging that I contacted him for the ride back for my trek home. Stories of Champlain, for whom Lake Champlain is named, filled that trip. Champlain, according to Nicholas, was a visionary, though somewhat naive about tribal relationships. Nicholas left me with a reminder to read the book Taxi from Hell, written by an immigrant taxi driver with his own tales.

Local and State Partnerships with Taxicab Companies is a TCRP report that offers an in-depth analysis of many different types of taxicab/public partnerships, from subsidized services to a taxi-friendly regulatory environment. Covered are human services transportation programs, guaranteed rides home, accessible taxis and much more. Not only does the report cover a broad swath of programs, but it honestly examines the incentives and some disincentives for taxi owners and drivers to participate in publicly-run transportation programs.

If you want models of types of partnerships with taxi operators, how the public/private divide is handled, and incentives and arrangements that work, this is the study to read. This report will take time to sift through, but the time will be worthwhile. Examples from large cities and rural areas alike seemed amenable to adaptation in different types of places. Adequate compensation for participation is crucial for the taxi companies, with paperwork another concern; whereas the public agencies are concerned with protective practices, such as adequate insurance, drug and alcohol testing, and fraud prevention. The wonderful thing about the report are the examples of how these concerns have been negotiated and resolved.

The only fault I find with the report is the small number of respondents, particularly that only eight taxicab companies responded to the survey. Those respondents cited as obstacles to public/private taxi partnerships "insufficient financial incentives, low demand for service, and lack of government interest or participation." Despite the obstacles, which are examined in detail, there are case studies of partnerships that have discovered ways of navigating barriers and have figured out how to adequately compensate companies and drivers, while satisfying the need of public agencies to maintain records, ensure driver safety and guarantee sufficient insurance coverage.

Google Changes Transit Way Beyond the Big Cities

Evolution of Intelligent Transportation Systems for Mobility Management and Coordination Serving California’s Rural Frontier is an honest account of the barriers to coordination via technology for rural frontier communities. Google comes to the rescue in a sense with new possibilities, but systems designed for urban settings, with frequent service and many passengers, are not easily transferable to this very different setting.

Google Inc. added real- time updates through the same trip planning interface. Riders can see if their particular trip plan will be delayed by traffic, breakdowns or weather. In deploying a real-time interface, there are new standards that allow multiple agencies to communicate on behalf of the rider. Another recent feature offers all lodging options up to a span of time on transit, defined by the rider. These data integration features are the future of ITS projects. Riders will demand that innovative companies push technology solutions to meet their needs.

Yes, this report is about technology making mobility management be truly customer focused, but it is also about expectations, patience, and knowledgeable interaction with consultants on complex projects.

[Old railroad car at a Vermont Amtrak station.]

DOT Agencies Create Joint Webinars

Webinar - (SR500) FHWA FTA TPCB Transportation Planning Information Exchange - May 22, 2012. This webinar will be an introduction to the Transportation Planning Capacity Building Program, particularly its web-based resources, peer exchanges and events, manuals, training, and newsletters. The event kicks off a FHWA and FTA webinar series, the Transportation Planning Information Exchange (T-PIE). T-PIE is a web-based forum to connect the transportation planning community with information on training, technical assistance, and technical support for State, local, regional and Tribal governments, transit operators, and community leaders. The webinars will address issues like scenario planning, land-use modeling, livability, environmental quality, operations, and maintenance. The May 22 webinar airs at noon to 2 p.m. Eastern time.

Upcoming Events

National Transit Institute has courses coming up around the country in mobility management, public involvement in transportation planning, environmental reviews, state and metropolitan land use, bus rapid transit, procurement and asset management, and many aspects of technology.

Easter Seals Project ACTIONhas a webinar on May 16, 2012. Best Practices in Premium Paratransit Service will cover ACCESS Transportation Systems in Pittsburgh, Pa., and its successful premium paratransit services.

DOT Requesting Collegiate Assistance

This is a call to action. The Department of Transportation (DOT) is engaging in a dialogue with the public and requesting assistance. Following the recent announcement of its SaferBus app, DOT is asking the nation's students to submit improved apps that give consumers easily accessible, comprehensible, and navigable safety information about intercity bus services. The Secretary himself made the request in a Fastlane blog post. Submissions are due by August 30, 2012.

Public Participation - Legal Requirement, Resources, TA Providers

What do you as technical assistance providers say when you are asked for advice about public participation aspects of planning, transit development and creating transportation services? What are resources that are written for laypeople? What staff from within our network can assist you and your constituency? This blog post describes some common issues to keep in mind, legal requirements, just a few recommended resources and a list of staff within the TA Provider Network who can help when public participation issues arise.

Legal Requirement

Public involvement is a legal requirement of SAFETEA-LU and is increasingly used at all levels of government to inform official decisions and projects. A successful public consultation process is proactive and provides complete information, timely public notices in relevant media, and opportunities for early and continuous participation. Early issue identification and cooperative solution-building can reduce the potential for conflict later in the process.

Planning for public participation should account for costs, reasonable timelines, and serious consideration of community voices. To stay in communication with community members, organizations and leaders throughout a planning or other process, establish and maintain a list of all parties interested in transportation in the region or in the particular project at issue.

[Mural near Amtrak station in Galesburg, Ill.]

Outreach

The digital divide looms large for community outreach because methods of outreach, particularly use of social media, email and the Internet, will depend on the lifestyles of the community at large and populations within the community. To rely only on social media and the Internet, however, is to ignore rural populations in areas without good Internet access and people who do not use the Internet and social media.

Effective Participation

Guidance for effective participation applies both to those seeking public input and people who wish to contribute their input. It takes a champion, a committed individual, to identify the players and organize and facilitate meetings in a way that others can see the merit of participation.

Community members should coordinate with other individuals, groups and local and regional political leaders. If possible, it is best to reach a unified position because it is more likely result in success than a lone voice. Newspaper editorials and letters, blogs and comments, Facebook, Twitter, and email campaigns can be useful for publicizing a position and gathering support.

Local political representation should be included from the start so that politicians may take ownership (credit) of the idea and guide it to success. It is best to keep politicians informed all the way through the process, as they can be instrumental in moving the projects along.

[Bus serving what will be Denver's renovated Union Station transit hub; right now the bus appears in the middle of the construction site of the station area.]

Channel Your Inner Boy Scout: Be Prepared

Community members should prepare for a public workshop by obtaining the necessary materials and studying each suggested alternative for any given project. As much factual information as possible should be employed to support a position on a project. Data will be more persuasive and credible than an unsupported opinion. Similarly, enumerating specific concerns and providing explicit suggestions for improving a project are likely to be better received than a general statement of opposition.

Effective participation requires knowledge of the planning process and methods of participating that are proven. Community members may attend the meetings of the MPO or other regional body, its board of directors, technical advisory committee (professional staff from the county and larger municipalities), and its citizen advisory council, all of which are open to the public.

Stakeholder Committees: Convening a stakeholder committee is a strategy that is widely used for supplying transit agencies and governmental entities with feedback about proposed projects and changes to service. Some are used from the planning through the implementation stages of specific projects; some are permanent fixtures.

Resources

Coordination: It’s the Law - explains SAFETEA-LU’s public participation legal requirements.

Public Involvement in Transportation Decisionmaking - a course offered by the National Transit Institute (NTI) that discusses public participation and federal requirements.

How to Engage Low-Literacy and Limited-English-Proficiency Populations - excellent resource for including people who either are unable to read well or are not fluent English speakers. Low literacy is generally a marker for low income populations. The report offers a multitude of methods for reaching people who do not read well, including places to go, people to use, and ways to conduct a meeting.

The Do's and Don'ts of Working with Local Communities: Tips for Successful Community-Based Public Meetings - provides a checklist for effectively leading a public meeting.

A Guide to Transportation Planning for Citizens - explains in simple language the planning processes contemplated in federal mandates and how to become involved.

TCRP SYNTHESIS 85: Effective Use of Citizen Advisory Committees for Transit Planning and Operations - a must-read about public involvement via stakeholder committees. Provides a veritable cookbook for residents, political leaders, government personnel, and non-profit staff of all stripes. Descriptions of a range of purposes for the committees, procedures, membership, sizes, and types of projects and project phases for which the committees were utilized.

Including People with Disabilities In Coordinated Transportation Plans - gives a simple explanation of coordinated planning, benefits of coordination, and improving coordinated planning through the involvement of people with disabilities. This Easter Seals Project ACTION brief includes resources for facilitating the process of coordination.

Contacts

For information about reaching people in rural areas or places where many people are not connected to the Internet, contact Kelly Shawn (shawn@ctaa.org, 202-299-6596).

Remember that including people with disabilities means outreach that is accessible to those populations. Contact Ken Thompson (kthompson@easterseals.com, 800-659-6428) for more information about including people with disabilities.

Convening public meetings and stakeholder groups to discuss issues that will require supporting technology has been a key component of the Mobility Services for All Americans (MSAA) project. For more information, contact Yehuda Gross (yehuda.gross@dot.gov, 202-366-1988).

Contact Sheryl Gross-Glaser (grossglaser@ctaa.org, 202-386-1669) at the National Resource Center for Human Service Transportation Coordination for more information.

Performance Measures

What do we measure and why?

What are our goals and are we meeting them? Are we trying to provide access to jobs or encouraging healthy lifestyles or reducing congestion or reducing carbon emissions - or all or some of the above? Are we interested in transit efficiency and measuring costs compared with revenue? Are we assessing safety of workers and riders?

Measuring Transportation Investments: The Road to Results examines whether states are measuring performance and what they are measuring. The report from the Pew Center on the States and the Rockefeller Foundation does not analyze the performance metrics, but describes what metrics are being utilized across different modes, primarily looking at auto-centric travel.

An interesting section discusses the Transportation Investment Generating
Economic Recovery program, or TIGER grants.

One typical TIGER grant awarded $22 million toward a new station in downtown Normal, Illinois, a city along the Chicago-St. Louis Amtrak Line, which will serve Amtrak, city and long-distance buses and taxis. State officials say the
project shows a potent multiplier effect in terms of economic development.
“Since that project was announced, up to $200 million has been invested in the downtown area by businesses coming into town,” says Joe Shacter, director of public and intermodal transportation at the Illinois Department of Transportation. “This included new hotels constructed right next to the intermodal facility.”

Standardized Performance Measures

If success can be replicated, if success can even be determined, then we have to compare apples with apples and and better yet, one type of Macintosh with another type. TCRP Report 141, A Methodology for Performance Measurement and Peer Comparison in the Public Transportation Industry complements "TCRP Report 88: A Guidebook for Developing a Transit Performance-Measurement System, which describes how to implement and use performance measurement on an ongoing basis at a transit agency."

TCRP Report 141 talks about "selecting performance measures appropriate to a particular performance question but [the report] does not prescribe a particular set of measures. This approach requires some thoughtfulness on the part of transit agencies in selecting measures, but also provides much-needed flexibility that allows the methodology to be applied to a wide variety of transit modes, transit agency sizes, and performance questions." The report discusses benchmarking, which is a comparison of peers, in this case transit agencies that are similar. "Participants agree upon common measures and data definitions—this provides standardization, focuses data collection on areas of interest to the group, and gives participants more confidence in the quality of the data and the results."

The report supplied six case studies of peer benchmarking for different types and sizes of public transit. Two of the case studies were (1) costs and revenue comparisons performed for Pennsylvania systems; and (2) funding source ramifications for Knoxville, Tenn.

Performance Measurement in Action

CalTrans, the California Department of Transportation, posts its performance indicators and measurements. Performance Measures For The Quarter Ending March 31, 2011 shows CalTrans' goals and realities. The document reports numbers for safety, rail ridership, single occupancy vehicle commuter trips, and much more. The frank statement of goals that arrows on charts provide when compared with the direction of actual results is illuminating and valuable data for transit agencies as well as taxpayers, voters, politicians and those who report to them.

TCRP Report 88, published in 2003, is a must read. There is a veritable department store of performance categories and measures as well as case studies.

There is tons more to read about performance measures. I am left with these thoughts: Choose how you define success, examine how success was reached in similar contexts and adapt lessons learned in keeping with the local culture and resources. And, of course, measure those results - because what gets measured is what gets resources and attention.

Accounting as an Element of Coordination

Sharing the Costs of Human Services Transportation, a TCRP toolkit and report, goes into the nitty-gritty details of accounting for transportation costs with the simple theme that assessing cost is an important step toward talking concretely about partnerships, coordination, price of service, and making decisions about transportation.

Among the topics covered in the toolkit are:
* Performance measurement options and reasons to measure performance.
* Types of transportation and costs associated with them. For example, administration of eligibility is part of the cost of paratransit service.
* Coordination of accounting practices among programs and services to determine cost of transportation and facilitate coordination of service.
* Price versus cost.
* Employing cost information to make decisions about transportation providers, price of service and assessing benefits of coordination.

The report, Volume II, discusses the history, and whys and wherefores of unaligned accounting for transportation across different types of programs.

Another major problem is that human service programs that treat transportation as a supportive rather than a primary service often combine transportation costs with the accounts of other services, precluding transportation costs from being reported as a discrete cost category within the agency. Such approaches make it impossible for any organization to directly identify total transportation costs. Any potential solution must recognize transportation as a discrete program or functional activity.

The report not only recommends simple accounting practices, but specifically discusses the tools to make them possible, even supplying a:

simple spreadsheet software provided as a companion to this report in CRP-CD-86, “Cost Sharing Model for TCRP Report 144,” can convert the results of the reporting methodology into contract rates (prices) that can be used by both transportation providers and purchasers to have confidence in the fairness of transportation charges.

The software is available at http://144.171.11.107/Publications/Blurbs/Sharing_the_Costs_of_Human_Services_Transportation_165015.aspx.

State Coordination Page

Check out the Massachusetts Human Service Transportation Coordination webpage. It includes resources from the National Resource Center (NRC) as well as information about various state models that exist.

ADA Paratransit: Driver Satisfaction

A quality workforce in almost any field requires experience and incorporation of employee opinions about how to do the job well. TCRP Report 142: Vehicle Operator Recruitment, Retention, and Performance in ADA Complementary Paratransit Operations lists pay, workable schedules, the support of dispatchers and management, and installed GPS systems as high on the list of what paratransit drivers are looking for.

In many ways, the report simply lays out common sense management practices that keep keep employees happy, with specific examples and suggestions for the particular field of paratransit services.

A common theme in systems that were identified to have stable workforces was that there was a good overall work environment. Vehicle operators from these systems reported that the organization was like a “family” and that they enjoyed the people they worked with. They indicated that the organization had a real interest in its employees and looked out for their interest.

Happy Birthday

Such recognition as celebrating employee birthdays, having comfortable and attractive facilities for drivers, and bonuses for good performance were cited as important to drivers. However, the low pay was recognized as a key factor in high turnover, which "for private paratransit contractors average 30% per year and range as high as 80% per year."

The report notes that low wages can result in higher costs due to the reduced productivity that results from high turnover. The report has a good discussion of the benefits of better driver pay. A detailed study appears about halfway through the report that measures the productivity benefits of driver experience in two systems.

The report also discusses the gap between pay for fixed-route drivers and their paratransit counterparts. "Wages for ADA paratransit vehicle operators were found to be lower than for fixed-route operators. Fringe benefits for ADA paratransit operators were also found to be minimal, especially for services operated by private contractors."

Flexible Transit Service

TCRP Report 140: A Guide for Planning and Operating Flexible Public Transportation Services, a product of the Transit Cooperative Research Program, gets into the weeds on what constitutes a non-fixed route, flexible transit service, why communities and regions choose them, the relative costs and how they operate either on their own or as supplements to traditional fixed route and ADA paratransit service.

Warning: The report I am recommending is dull, sometimes painfully so. However, the case studies are informative and cover a wide variety of types of communities.

The authors noted their surprise that so many communities have flexible fixed-route service, ranging from service very similar to a traditional route to service almost indistinguishable from demand-response ADA paratransit. When reading the case studies, many of which featured flexible service in places that have chosen not to have conventional transit service and mandatory complementary ADA paratransit service, I started to wonder about the future of conventional transit in rural and cash-strapped communities.

Those interviewed for the report were frank that flexible service is for transportation-challenged people and that those served better not be too concerned about timing and being prompt. Explicitly stated were cautionary notes that this type of service is not ideal for commuters and students, who need to be somewhere on time pretty much each day.

What I found intriguing were the case studies, the tales of places trying to provide transportation that is very different from quality transit-rich urban rapid transit. Getting people out of cars was clearly not the goal. There are some tales of lack of community resources and others of filling in gaps in regions that have traditional transit, but also include far flung communities or where there are transportation needs at hours of low demand.

The report, though dull, paints a picture worth looking at.