We sat down with Derek Winning, the Executive Director of the Tulare County Regional Transit Agency (TCRTA), to talk about consolidating regional transit, nearly doubling ridership in less than a year, and why he believes the public transit industry is ripe for technology and disruption.
TCRTA is a relatively new agency. It’s a project in our region to consolidate the transit agencies, and we're really proud of that. The real idea was to make transit more efficient. Before this, we couldn't even agree on basic things—everything from our pass structure to what officially constitutes someone who is elderly. So we’ve been moving toward fixing that.
The other thing is that Tulare County is agricultural-based with a suburban city setting, and that isn't necessarily conducive to traditional fixed-route transit. That’s why when microtransit came around, we had a lot of support for the concept, both politically and at the staff level. We want to bring in more transit riders—non-traditional transit riders—and we feel microtransit is the way to do that because it takes you exactly where you want to go and picks you up on demand.
Our ridership has grown significantly over the last few months. I would say over the last eight to nine months, we’ve almost doubled our ridership. The service is becoming very popular, and it really helps get people where they want to go.
But the real idea is to find a synergy between the fixed-route system and microtransit to sort of match the proper service to the demand out there. Quite frankly, we’ve had a problem with the traditional operator not really understanding the value of microtransit or the flexibility associated with being able to change zone geographies and schedules. We really wanted to make microtransit a success here, and we didn't feel our operator was being a good partner in reaching that goal. That was a big part of bringing Via on as an operator; we want to work together as partners to figure out how to right-size transit in our region.
We were able very early on to co-mingle the microtransit service with our paratransit service, and we feel that’s been very successful. You gain efficiencies by having the availability of vans out there to pick people up in between paratransit appointments based on on-demand need.
As we work forward together, we want to ensure that people have a myriad of options to get where they need to go—whether that’s a hybrid trip using microtransit for a first-and-last-mile connection to a fixed route, or just door-to-door microtransit. We really want to have a customer-service-oriented design where the riders have options.
A big part of why we brought on Via is that we're moving toward contactless payment, mobile payment options, and a uniform fare and pass structure in the region. We want to have ease of transfer between systems and services.
Quite frankly, it's shocking that you can still go to big metro areas and not have tap-to-pay to get on their transit services, but you can go to Lowe's and buy Girl Scout cookies from a 12-year-old girl with Venmo or Cash App.
So we really agree with the mission to disrupt transit, to modernize it, to make it more efficient, and to solve the questions—especially in our suburban and rural environment—of why transit is so expensive and why don't enough people ride it. Ultimately, it’s our job to provide a good service for folks, meet their needs, and make it efficient enough that they can get where they need to go. With the cost of car ownership and the price of fuel being real drivers right now, more people will need to utilize transit, and we need to be there for them.
Because it's an app-based solution, you get a ton of data, and Via has a great dashboard. As a director, I'm able to see information in real time—how many riders per hour, which of our zones are functioning well and which aren't, and where the demand is during the day so we can try to get the schedule to match that demand. It’s very impressive.
It’s way different than traditional fixed-route transit, where you might not really analyze data until the end of the fiscal year when you do your NTD reporting. This is something you can look at every day. We’ve also embarked on a short-range transit plan where, probably for the first time ever in our region, we’re using big data and modeling tools like Remix to understand travel patterns and help us design the system from the ground up. If you don't have high-quality, real-time information, it's very difficult to make informed decisions.
I told my board straight up the other day, "Are we taking a risk bringing Via on, a tech company? Maybe so, but I don't really think so. Am I willing to risk it? Yes. Hell yes, I am." Because we want to do better, we want a better system, and we want to bring our transit service into the 21st century.
A lot of this comes down to budget. You have to look at it this way: we’re going to spend X amount of dollars on transit this year, and it’s going to be a similar budget next year. How do we maximize ridership with that budget? How do we design a system that provides the most access and mobility for our riders and gets the most bang for the buck? That’s how you have to sell it. You can’t be married to a non-performing fixed route. You pay for new tech by cutting the dead weight on non-performing routes. Microtransit can be a solution there because it provides coverage across a large geographic area, and if you've got relatively low demand, you can use those cost savings to implement better technology.
I’ve seen places bring on microtransit, but they look at it like a red-headed stepchild—like it’s a standalone service unto itself. They don't fully integrate it, they don't redesign their system, and they just let it stand alone. Then they look at the metrics and say, "Well, we can't afford this," because they just added it on top of their current repertoire of services that they're providing.
That is not the right approach. The right approach is to treat it as a complementary service to what you currently provide. You need to analyze and redesign your system to maximize both your hard infrastructure fixed-route systems and your paratransit and microtransit. You have to find the right fit for all of those services.
Disruption is really a story of tech and the promise of the future. It's the promise of making workflows more efficient so that for the same use of resources, we get a better outcome, a better output, and a higher standard of living. That’s why we want disruption, why we want tech, and why we want better information to make better decisions. We want to be more nimble to be able to course-correct and not be married to something that isn't working. Frankly, there are a lot of monopolistic companies within the transit space that haven’t innovated in a really, really long time.
I have a background in finance and planning, and I wasn't raised in a transit environment for my career, which enables me to look at these challenges from a different angle.
I was shocked when I came on board to find that they were billing our hours based on handwritten driver logs. We would get one set of data for our invoicing and then another set of data for NTD, and they didn’t match. It’s not even the left hand and the right hand—it's like two right hands doing completely different things.
This industry is just ripe for improvement, and ultimately, disruption means a better experience for our riders.