News Clips 7-19-13

Today's Clips: MARTA Atlanta Beltline International/National Transit/Transportation News

MARTA MYFOXATLANTA 7-18-13 MARTA police job fair this Saturday

ATLANTA This Saturday MARTA will host a job fair to find team-oriented, customer-focused individuals to be one of the MARTA Police Departments finest. MARTA will offer on-site interviews for open police positions at the event being held from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. at the MARTA Headquarters, 2424 Piedmont Road N.E., Atlanta, GA 30324. The MARTA Headquarters is located across the street from the Lindbergh Center Station. Professional/business attire is required at the job fair. Applicants must be at least 21 years old and are required to pass all tests related to the position, including a background investigation to include criminal history records check, polygraph examination, and credit check. Applicants must also pass a physical examination, including drug/alcohol screening and psychological testing. Must possess a valid drivers' license. Pay starts at $17.12 -$19.25 an hour and MARTA offers excellent benefits and opportunities for advancement.

Atlanta Beltline Atlantamagazine.com 7-18-13 Modal Citizen: Jonathan Weidman, streetcar ambassador Chatting with a champion of transit, mobility, connectivity, and good urbanism The Atlanta Streetcar has always been a tough sell on papereven before construction challenges delayed its projected completion by a year, to spring 2014. Just 1.3 miles end to end, the route passes through blighted city blocks and is book-ended by the tourist hubs of Centennial Olympic Park and the King district, leading skeptics to wonder how ordinary Atlantans will benefit. But just as the Atlanta BeltLine uses bus tours to illustrate its complex vision, the city enlisted Jonathan Weidman, a contracted MARTA engineer by day, to lead monthly Saturday walking tours through what is, on street level, a vibrant and culture-rich urban core. The 2011 Georgia Tech grad and self-described transit nerd will soon depart for D.C. to work on that city's streetcar project. Walking the route with me on a muggy day last week, he reflected on his Atlanta experience. Who shows up for the tours? Its kind of a crazy mashup. I had one guy from Sandy Springs who told a WABE reporter [paraphrasing]: "I came on this tour not because I live in the neighborhood or particularly care about it, but what happens in Atlanta has a ripple effect on the entire region." I liked that. Another lady from Johns Creek was thinking about moving intown. Shes an empty nester; her daughters at Georgia State. Just a lot of curiosity, really. Whats great about the tour is nobody who hates the project is going to spend three hours on their Saturday morning listening to me talk, so I dont face a lot of haters. What are the big questions? Will this ever open? That's the biggest one. A lot of questions about gentrification, or if the city has plans for development, especially on the east loop. A lot of misconceptions about what a streetcar is and looks like.

The gentrification question seems particularly sensitive given that such an iconic black neighborhood is in the crosshairs. How do you answer it? That issue comes up with every transit project. Theres no good answer. To me its really about the speed of it. Are you kicking people out tomorrow, or is this a twenty- or thirty-year process of rejuvenation, and do the people who live here have the opportunities to capitalize on whats happening to the neighborhood? But when I take people to Auburn Avenue and they see how run-down it is, they kind of go, "Okay, this neighborhood really needs help." It's really interesting to walk people down Auburn. A lot of times you get these random history lessons, either from people on the tour, or one time, the pastor came out of Big Bethel and talked to us about the history of the church. (He gestures toward Dobbs Plaza.) This sculpture is called "Through His Eyes." John Wesley Dobbs was the unofficial mayor of Sweet Auburn and grandfather of Maynard Jackson, which I learned from some homeless guy. I mean, I verified it was true. What surprises people? I think the biggest thing, and the reason I love doing the tours, is that its 2.7 track milesa mile and a half end to endand there are a lot of challenges with it. And you read about it and youre like, You know what? I dont know if its worth what theyre spending. [Nearly $100 million.] But when you take people out there and they see how big it isit is just a mile and a half, but its such a critical mile and a half. And there are so many opportunities f or expansion. This is really just a starter line. And were doing a lot more than just the streetcar. Were putting in upgraded sidewalks, bike lanes on the east loop connecting Old Fourth Ward and Inman Park to Downtown. What do you say to people who think it's a tourist trolley? Downtown has a weak heartbeat right now, but its alive. People dont realize this about Georgia State, but it has 30,000 students. Its the second largest university in the state. There are tons of employment centers down here. That's another thing a lot of people don't get: Streetcars are catalysts. You have to have something there already that people want to latch onto, and we have that. You go down to Edgewood Avenueyou know what its like down there on

a Friday night. You kind of have that spark already. And then you have Auburn Avenue with so much history and rich culture. Will people be willing to wait fifteen minutes between trains? Thats a tough question. We have four vehicles, and the fifteen-minute headway comes from operating two of them. So we have that potential for better headways in the future, and thats the real hurdle, having the vehicles. How did you become interested in transit? I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Vermont, but my grandparents lived in New York City, and I thought all cities were like New York. They have subways and sidewalks and skyscrapers and you don't have to have a car. By my second or third year [at Georgia Tech] I'd been riding MARTA a lot and just realized how bad it was and decided to get involved. I joined Citizens for Progressive Transit and a couple other sustainability groups at Tech and became a big transit nerd. Atlantas a weird, weird town in terms of transit. I went out to Utah for a conference, and Utah is probably the most conservative state in the universe. But I sat in this conference with the Chamber of Commerce, their board chair, all very conservative people, and they all stand up there and talk about the value of transit in their community. Georgias completely different. Its more Tea Party, hate the government, hate taxes, hate people telling me how I should get places. And you have a rural legislature that beats down on the city. The T-SPLOST that whole thing just decimated me. Its one of the reasons I stayed here after school. I campaigned really hard for it, put in hundreds of hours volunteering. To have it fail was just, ughhh. Heartbreaking. Changing gears. Whats your favorite spot along the route to grab a bite to eat? A tossup between the Sweet Auburn Bread Company and a Venezuelan place called Arepa Mia. And Noni's. Favorite shady spot to sit? Woodruff Park. Its getting wireless. Favorite pocket of unrealized potential? The Odd Fellows Building for sure. Its an amazing building with so much history. And it has a rooftop venue space. The next streetcar walking tour will take place on July 27. Visit the Facebook page for more information

International/National Transit/Transportation News Theatlanticcities.com 7-18-13 How to Fund Transit Without Raising Fares or Cutting Service When Mark Aesch became head of the Rochester-Genesee Regional Transportation Authority, back in 2004, the metro area's bus system was in terrible shape. The agency carried a $4.5 million deficit and on-time performance was stuck at 76 percent. Officials wanted to approach the problem the way so many other city agencies were handling similar situations at the time: with a fare hike. Aesch said no. "There was no way in my judgment we could ask the customer to pay more for an underperforming experience," he recalls. Not only did Aesch keep his pledge not to raise fares, but in 2008 he actually lowered them. By the time he left the position, at the end of 2011, Aesch and his creative approach had transformed Rochester's bus system into a total winner. Buses drove fewer miles, carried more passengers, and boasted a 91 percent on-time record. The agency accumulated a $35.5 million surplus while decreasing its reliance on taxpayer funding by more than a third. The best way to raise both ridership and revenue is by improving the transit experience. Aesch has since started a consulting firm called TransPro and written a book called Driving Excellence. His mission with both is to encourage transit officials to bring a "private-sector mindset" to public transportation. So far it's working. Last year, Aesch even stabilized the bus system in Detroit, of all places. If his methods can succeed there, they should do well in any number of struggling systems across the country. "I think the model works in almost any location," says Aesch. "Improving the quality of the customer experience, creating that atmosphere where the individual employee is rewarded for organizational success that's critical. You can do that anywhere." These days the public expects transit agencies to cut service or hike fares when funding runs low. But Aesch's entire philosophy is based on the belief that the best way to raise both ridership and revenue is by improving the transit experience. In Rochester, Aesch and colleagues took aim at the poor on-time performance of city buses. Using data to evaluate system routes, they realized that much of the

problem came from buses that were early, not late. Soon they identified the culprit: because routes had down time built in at the end, drivers were rushing to finish up and take a longer break. As the system began to improve, Aesch created incentives to keep things moving in the right direction. He concocted a so-called "stock price" for the system and tied it administrator compensation. When performance improved, so did pay. Eventually enough drivers realized the advantages of merit-based compensation that the union voted to tie their paycheck to performance, too something Aesch says would have been "unimaginable" when he first arrived. "You've got to go identify new business partners to fund public transportation with non-taxpayer dollars." His biggest achievement came through securing partnerships with the community. Once bus service improved, Aesch sent out a sales force to college campuses, shopping centers, apartment complexes, and the like, and asked them to pay for the better service that now carried so many students and customers and residents through their corridors. Sometimes he drew a comparison to a utility: just as a housing development might pay the water bill for tenants, so too should it pitch in for transit. "If the model of public transportation is simply to ask the taxpayer for more money or the customer for more money, it's a short path to reducing service and reducing quality," says Aesch. "You've got to go identify new business partners to fund public transportation with non-taxpayer dollars." A big fear that many people have about a private-sector approach to public transit is that rewards efficiency at the expense of providing a social service. If a particular route isn't capturing much fare revenue, for instance, then businessminded officials might be more apt to cut it. That approach could end up stranding riders particularly those in low-income corridors. Aesch says he's responded to this concern by creating a service metric that gives equal weight to ridership and fare recovery. So if a certain route does well at the farebox, it's a keeper, and if another route has a lot of riders, it's a keeper, too. What won't score well on this metric, he says, are those routes that neither make money nor seem to play a vital role in the community. These are the ones that efficient systems should be aiming to cut. "You ask yourself the fundamental question: is public transportation responsible for providing service to the community, or providing return to the taxpayer?" he says. "The answer to that question, we concluded, is yes. So what we built was a performance-measurement system which takes both of those competing metrics and combines them into one score."

Last year Aesch's system passed what some might call the ultimate test. In the wake a series of embarrassing bus crises in late 2011, Detroit brought in Aesch to overhaul service. Despite being given only a year to produce results, Aesch improved on-time performance, kept ridership stable, avoided a fare hike, saved the agency roughly $39 million, and even improved customer satisfaction by 40 percent. While he says the future of Detroit's public services is up to the emergency manager, he does think his year there proved that his methods can apply to transit agencies big and small. "It's one thing to transform a transit agency Rochester, New York," he says. "It's another thing to reduce cost and improve customer satisfaction in the city of Detroit, where very few things succeed."