For 23 years, public transit for the City of Mobile, Alabama ran on autopilot. A pass-through contract kept the day-to-day operations at arm's length, and over time the underlying problems quietly compounded: aging technology, rising and uncontrolled annual operating costs, double-digit gaps in on-time performance, and ridership decline during and after COVID, alongside a strained relationship between the management company and the union.
Mobile decided it was time to take the system back. Jacob Laurence, a 20-year city employee and a team across City Hall teamed up to help bring newly elected Mayor Spiro Cheriogotis’ vision to life. Here’s what they did.
What made the situation in Mobile, AL so challenging - and how did you reign it in?
For more than 20 years, we'd had a series of transit management companies sitting in the middle between the city and the local operating entity. While outdated, it’s not uncommon for cities to still have “pass-through” style agreements like ours was – costs flow up to the city, the city pays the management contractor, the contractor handles the day-to-day transit operations without a great deal of city oversight.
The problem is that nobody in that middle layer had an incentive to consistently improve the services or bring costs down. So the underlying problems don’t get solved - costs grow, year over year, until they are impossible to ignore.
You're new to transit, but you have a finance eye and a clear sense of your responsibility to taxpayers. You saw the problem - What happened next?
After a few contract extensions to keep operations going, I was tasked with coordinating the new RFP process. The only responsible option was to re-conceive how transit operated. Specifically, the city team focused on finding a partner who was extremely data-driven and outcomes oriented.
I wanted to be able to stand in front of the City Council, Mayor Cheriogotis, or the local media and explain what's happening with our transit system in plain terms. For years it had been one opaque line item in the budget, and nobody should have to dig through a mountain of invoices and supporting documentation to understand where that amount of money and effort was going.
Our focus was on accountability. Transit is a service, so we wanted a provider responsible for the actual work and motivated to achieve better outcomes: local hiring, managing the union relationship, maintaining the city-owned buses, improving network infrastructure, technology, and delivering a better type of partnership with the riders and with the city. Not a billing layer that passes every cost back to us.
"We took a broken system and gave it the attention that was sorely overdue, so it could get back to working the way it should."
We're still the FTA recipient, but now we contract for Purchased Transportation with Via for turnkey “Transportation-as-a-Service” for operating of the system. That was the first time our RFP had ever said "turnkey.” From there it was the usual nuts and bolts of a solicitation: we issued the RFP, waited six weeks, ran submittals through our selection committee, and Via earned very high marks across the board. The committee's reaction was basically, "Of course, this is the obvious answer based on the criteria we set."
It also gave Via room to do what it does best, which is data-driven transit. We lean heavily on their tech platform and their experts from around the country. On any given day we can pull in exactly the person needed and ask, "we need this, we need that," and someone always comes back with the answer. Those types of experts don’t always live and work in our communities, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t have access to them.
Nine months in, what are you most proud of?
First, we can now go to the mayor, the City Council, the media, or a conversation like this and speak to the details of our system. No one has to constantly ask the contractor, wait a week, ask again, and again — it’s all right there in the Via system every day.
Beyond that, it's about the numbers. Over the last nine months we've seen double-digit increases in on-time performance, consistently 95% to 98% month to month. This is incredible if you consider where we came from.
Ridership is climbing, and we can track it on a daily basis. Everything runs through Via's platform, the VOC, and that insight is what defines every decision we make. When something's working, the choice is easy. When there's a problem, we go back to the same numbers and micro-adjust toward the goal.
And the quietest signal might be the loudest one. What used to be daily complaints is now maybe one a month. To me, that's the quintessential sign we're doing this right — this is a system for the public.
"On-time performance is consistently 95% to 98%. What used to be one or two complaints a day is now maybe one a month."
There's a big announcement coming in September. Tell us about it.
The announcement is that Mobile is launching a new brand for our transit system, or what we're calling Second Line Transit. The name carries a double meaning. For transit folks, "second line" signals multimodal options, and now we're a multimodal system. For anyone who knows Mobile culture, a second-line parade is part of our Mardi Gras tradition. It's a tip of the hat to both - local culture and transit - blended into one. Every bus gets stripped down and re-wrapped. Everything will feel different, but very much the same, only improved in all the best ways. Mayor Cheriogotis was instrumental in overseeing these changes. In addition to our normal fixed-route buses and the expansion of microtransit in the area, Second Line Transit will also introduce trolleys into the mix in the future. Building on the mayor’s vision from when he first took office, we truly believe Second Line Transit will be a system that works for all Mobilians and we couldn’t be more excited to see it launch soon!
“We want a generational system — something that lasts twenty years.”
If you were standing in front of a room of your peers, what would you tell them?
Every community is different and has different needs, priorities, and desired outcomes.
My advice would be to grab a few of your best team members, take stock of your transit services, and ask yourself if your operation is efficient, responsive to riders' needs. Blend the vision or desired outcome into the decision-making process as early as possible in order to identify a capable and dynamic partner who also understands what you are attempting to achieve.
Second Line Transit launches in Mobile in September 2026. Inside City Hall continues with more conversations featuring the leaders behind high-performing public transit.
