The MT Position

Posted by Christopher L. Rissetto, Marc A. Goldich and Michael C. Falk, Attorneys with Reed Smith, LLP, and Steven a. Diaz, Esquire.

The Indianapolis 500. The Kentucky Derby. The US Olympic Track & Field Trials. The Bucky Bus used for football Sunday’s in Madison, Wisconsin. State Fairs. These are just a few of the hundreds of events that have used public transit buses to ferry people to and from event sites. To comply with the Federal Transit Administration’s new Rule on Charter Service that went into effect April 30, these services must now be opened to private charter bus companies for competitive bidding.

The new FTA Charter Service Rule was created to protect private charter bus companies from competition with federally-subsidized public transit systems. And the competition is steep: Up to 80 percent of public transit agencies’ eligible program costs are subsidized by the federal government.

Below are some observations regarding the impact of the new Rule:

Public Service Providers Can Ask for Exceptions to the Rule: If you are a public operator, there are opportunities for you to continue providing buses to public events, but you must ask the FTA for an exception under the new rule. Many public operators are already seeking advisory opinions and petitions for exceptions. In fact, there were close to a dozen requests for advisory opinions before the rule even went into effect. To date, the FTA Chief Counsel has issued five advisory opinions and one supplemental advisory opinion. We anticipate a significant increase in this activity now that the rule has gone into effect.

Private Charter Registration Protections – Leveling the Playing Field: If you are a private charter operator, you must register with the FTA to be eligible to receive the many protections and benefits now afforded to you under the new rule. These protections and benefits include the right to seek FTA advisory opinions and request cease-and-desist orders. Also, once you register, you will receive notice of new opportunities from public operators seeking to provide the services in your area. However, be careful: if you post incomplete or inaccurate information during the registration process you can be excluded or removed from the Web site. Removal may last as long as three years, during which time you will not receive notice of opportunities disseminated by public operators.

New Matrix Provides Guidance on Level of Sanctions for Violations of the Rule: The FTA can penalize public operators for non-compliance in several ways, including suspension and termination of grant assistance. With the substantial level of federal grant support, there is good reason for public operators to follow the rules. Under the old rule, punishment for a violation was discretionary and funding was only withheld on an “all or nothing” basis. Now, the FTA’s view appears to be that federal financial assistance must be withheld if a pattern of violations is found. The FTA has developed a matrix of sanctions it may use to determine the amount of federal funds that can be withheld, based on the severity of the violation. The FTA has also hinted that a single violation might justify a penalty. No one knows how the new rule will be implemented or the extent to which penalties will be levied to enforce it. Given this risk of grant loss, many public operators are understandably on edge.

Labor Agreements Might Conflict With Implementation of the New Rule: Compliance with labor agreements may be impacted by the new rule. For instance, in a request for an advisory opinion by the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority (“KCATA”), a potential conflict with the labor protection provision of Section 13(c) of the Federal Transit Act was highlighted because services that had been previously provided under an existing labor agreement might now be barred under the new rule. The FTA’s advisory opinion responded that “KCATA cannot be forced to carry out contractual provisions that are not in accordance with the law.” Such conflicts will continue to arise and public operators must scrutinize all aspects of their operations to determine if compliance with the new rule will raise such an issue.

Public and private charter service operators must be aware of the many elements of the new rule, including a new and more formal complaint process. It is also important to realize that the anticipated reauthorization in 2010 of SAFETEA-LU (2005) could further impact charter service opportunities.

If you have questions or would like a copy of a bulletin on the FTA’s new Rule on Charter Service, please contact one of the authors: Christopher L. Rissetto, (crissetto@reedsmith.com) is a partner in the Reed Smith Washington, DC office, and heads the Firm’s Grants & Infrastructure practice. Marc A. Goldich (mgoldich@reedsmith.com) and Michael C. Falk (mfalk@reedsmith.com) are litigation attorneys in the Philadelphia office of Reed Smith, and are members of the Firm’s transit team. Steven A. Diaz (sdiaz@diazlaw.net) was formerly Chief Counsel for the FTA. Mr. Diaz has a law office in Washington, DC, and represents private and public transit operators.

For many of my marketing colleagues, this is the time they begin formulating their budget for the next fiscal year. And for as long as I can remember, it’s also the time when calls, letters and email begin to circulate, all asking the same question: “What is the right amount for a transit marketing budget?”

Often the response is simply to say, “The industry rule of thumb is that marketing should be in the range of one to three percent of operating expenses.” This is usually when I want to take out a hammer and pound on the thumb making the rule. Let me make it perfectly clear — this rule is bogus, it leads to bad budget policy and as long as it is applied, it will short change marketing efforts.

Why? Well, for starters, this perverse guidance goes back more than 20 years when transit marketing wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today. Those were also the days when marketing was undervalued and underfunded, and more often than not the first thing cut in hard budget times.

Today’s transit managers and their marketing staffs are much more market and customer driven. Their awareness of good marketing practices is better and their overall support of marketing as a key strategy to recruit and retain riders, as well as protect their revenue stream, is keener than ever.

Even so, this bogus rule of thumb is still around. But is there a better rule that can replace it and better reflect how transit marketing is done in today’s world?

The answer doesn’t lie in a rule. The answer lies using a process that takes into account the marketing functions and activities that an individual system engages in, then building a budget accordingly. Ask questions like how many materials does your agency still need to have in print? Are things like signage and on board information updated regularly? When it comes to major cost categories like Web sites, advertising, publications, etc., it may be especially helpful to compare what your peers are doing and spending. Exchanging this type of information can lead to a better budget perspective. Remember though, that size matters when it comes to costs, so make sure you use good comparisons.

Build on this idea by looking at areas where performance goals will help determine what the cost of achieving them will be. Take broadcast advertising for example. Reach to target markets and frequency of message are important in media planning, and gross rating points (GRP) are a good representation of measuring how much media you effectively need. So, if you need to achieve a certain reach and frequency level, you can estimate the average costs per GRP for your market and better budget in that area. Similarly, if you are in charge of a call center and need to achieve a certain level of calls being handled, then you’ll need to budget accordingly for staff and equipment.

Whatever method you use, bring the hammer down on a very bad and often unrealistic rule of thumb. It’ll feel so good!

Joe Caruso is Senior Consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting. He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has over 33 years of transit marketing experience. He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

By Dan Johnson-Weinberger

We transit advocates have a problem: bad language.

Listen to what we ask for:

* Operating assistance

* Formula funding

* Guaranteed appropriations

Boring!

Right now we seem like we’re still on the welfare train, asking for government handouts without any compelling, exciting opportunities for the nation to embrace.

If we want to inspire the imagination of our elected officials and taxpayers to create the modern transit network the nation deserves, we need language that similarly inspires.

And that means we’ll need a wholesale replacement of our current language that emerged from agencies and bureaucracies with language designed to resonate in the political world.

Thus, we should consider the names of the actual program simply a starting point for the language that we will choose to use in our communications with our riders, elected officials and the broader electorate as we look to build support for our political objectives.

Our challenge is capturing in two or three words what we want. We want a two- or three-word phrase that evokes all of the positive benefits that modern transit brings to the nation, and also subtly distinguishes our investment from rival investments (in particular, highway spending). This phrase will be the description of our policy agenda — our goal — that agencies and advocates can use as a replacement for our current language.

Some rules of thumb; ‘investment’ is a better word than either ‘funding’ or ‘program.’ ‘Assistance’ is a bad word. ‘Freedom’ is a good word.

Here are three guideposts to designing new language to describe transit and our policy agenda.

1. Appeal to non-riders (particularly drivers)

2. Convey the benefits of a transit investment

3. Avoid reinforcing the negative associations of taxes and government programs

My initial thoughts on each of these guideposts:

It’s important that we appeal directly to non-riders to build our base of support. Transit ridership, as a percentage of the electorate, is well below 10 percent (even in our largest metropolitan regions). Politics is a game of addition, and to add to our base, we need to target the people who benefit from transit ridership: drivers. Another important group of people that benefit from transit are property owners with higher values thanks to their access to the transit network (and the municipalities who tax the property owners to fund their local budgets).

The benefits of transit include many of the following:

* Freedom from foreign oil

* Freedom from global warming

* Freedom from bad traffic and job-killing road congestion

* More prosperity

* Higher property values and property tax revenues

* Access to jobs and employees

We don’t understand yet which of these benefits are the most compelling to the greatest number of voters, and I suspect that some of these benefits will be more compelling to some groups of voters than others. While we should be prepared to emphasize certain benefits with certain constituencies, language for policy initiatives works best when it is repeated and echoed by the media as well as by the advocate. The new language is successful when it becomes universally accepted.

We don’t want to be associated with activities that elected officials shy away from: welfare, handouts or wasteful government spending.

We do want to be associated with the benefits that transit usage generates: freedom from foreign oil, freedom from global warming, freedom from bad traffic and more prosperity.

Finally, we do want to distinguish ourselves from our rivals for transportation funding: highways.

It isn’t easy to distill our advocacy language into tight, compelling, muscular words, but it’s a job we need to start.

Dan Johnson-Weinberger is the President and Founder of Permanent Campaigns Consulting, a Chicago-based communications firm specializing in partnering with transit agencies to grow ridership.

By Paul Meyer

With baseball season upon us, I can’t help but chuckle at how the bench players in baseball, full of energy and willingness to contribute, mirror private sector engineers and land surveyors who stand ready to step up and bring home Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Strategic Growth Plan, which puts $15 billion into transportation improvements.

So far, like the bench players in baseball whose value isn’t recognized until late in the season, the private sector is pitching in and working on projects, but is ready to do a whole lot more.

But can the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) deliver this monumental undertaking given the dire circumstances surrounding the state budget deficit, or is it time to call in further resources and reinforcements from the private sector?

For California, at least part of the answer can be found in the findings of a recent study called “A National Assessment of Transportation Strategies and Practices: Lessons for California.” The joint study, conducted by the California Taxpayers’ Association (Cal-Tax) and the Infrastructure Delivery Council (IDC), an affiliate of the Consulting Engineers and Land Surveyors of California (CELSOC), examined the best practices of the departments of transportation in 10 states with major transportation programs already underway including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, New York, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington, and California.

A pivotal fact revealed in the study was that California’s ability to successfully deliver these projects is currently hamstrung by the state’s fundamental underutilization of a cardinal element of modern infrastructure delivery methods – the public-private partnership (PPP) model.

California, unlike the other nine states surveyed, has failed to recognize that outsourcing engineering services on these projects actually leads to expedited delivery times in addition to saving taxpayer money.

The study found that Georgia, Missouri and Washington are outsourcing their engineering services on 50 percent of their projects. In Arizona, private sector experts are utilized at levels closer to 85 percent. California outsourced just 10 percent of its transportation projects,

Keeping in mind that time is money; these statistics underscore the importance of the private sector’s role in successfully delivering transportation programs faster, more efficiently, and most importantly cost effectively.

But the decision to outsource is not made solely on cost. One significant factor in deciding to outsource is driven by a targeted project delivery time. A recent look at Utah’s Mountain View Corridor project shows that due to inflation rates as high as 10 percent in recent years, delays are raising the cost of the $2 billion project by $200 million a year.

We agree with the state Department of Finance, which reports that California needs an estimated $500 billion just to bring current its aging infrastructure systems. And, using Utah’s Mountain View Corridor project as an example, we can reasonably deduce that every year our infrastructure projects remain on the shelf, the increased cost of those delays to California taxpayers will be hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

PPPs, as other states continue to demonstrate, are a cost-effective, efficient means of delivering infrastructure both quickly and professionally. During the 1930s-1950s visionary leadership was able to deliver a massive transportation program with limited inclusion of the private sector. But times have changed and departments of transportation (DOTs) across the country find it difficult the ability to hire, train and maintain large, fluctuating staffing levels needed to support these programs. In addition, DOTs often lack the specialty skills needed to engineer increasingly complex projects.

Private engineering firms and engineers can be used to fill the current and future gaps in staffing levels and specialty skills our state needs to succeed. But today in California, the lack of an adequate statutory framework for authorizing PPPs is “blocking the road.” Without new legislation, wide-scale authorization and implementation of PPPs in California is simply not going to happen.

Take the Golden Gate Bridge project for example. This highly successful project was structured as a PPP long before the term became popular. But the statute that authorized that landmark PPP project only authorized that one project. Our hope is that current efforts by Gov. Schwarzenegger and a new generation of visionary leaders across the state will succeed in their quest to enable California to finally bring its systems and processes in-line with twenty-first century practices.

The taxpayers who will eventually foot the bill for California’s underinvestment deserve nothing less than to have the best players from both the public and private sectors working together to rebuild our state.

It’s time for the public sector in California to call the private sector off the bench and into the game. We need to put our best team on the field and allow them to get to work rebuilding California’s infrastructure and economy.

For a copy of the full study, visit www.caltax.org.

For more information on PPPs visit www.celsoc.org

Paul Meyer is the executive director of CELSOC, which is a 52-year old, statewide association representing 1,200 private consulting engineering and land surveying firms that average 20 employees each. CELSOC is dedicated to enhancing the consulting engineering and land surveying professions, protecting the general public and promoting the use of the private sector in the growth and development of our state. CELSOC’s members provide services for all phases of planning, designing and constructing projects. For more information, visit www.celsoc.org.

Ask the locals in London for the nearest subway and you’ll be pointed somewhere you didn’t want to go: to a pedestrian underpass, forbidding and barren, a walk through which is likely to stir one, irrepressible thought: that someone very bad is waiting for you at the other end.

What you really want, of course, is London’s tube or underground, a considerably better-attended venue that delivers the transport you thought you were asking for. Native New Yorkers like me will naturally liken the tube to their home town’s storied system, and, in some respects, the latter indeed tops the former.

The London tube falls about 5 hours a day short of New York’s 24/7 ubiquity, calling it a night at about 12 am, and its cars are in fact decidedly scruffier than the Apple’s, all but recast into a lending library for that day’s free Metro newspaper discards. Air-conditioning is a non-starter on the tube, and while the London system website (tfl.gov.uk) sports a cool Mapquest-like tube destination finder, its directions often ask me to start my journey from places I’ve never heard of. But the tube owns one mighty advantage the New York system can’t touch: if your train ride takes 15 minutes longer than it’s supposed to, you get your money back.

That incredible factoid is, well, credible. Supply the authorities with some identifying information and a passably accurate recollection about the place and time of the delay, and a reimbursement voucher heads your way in a week or two. I have been compensated twice so far for tube trips gone wrong, and when my stepdaughter was made to take to the buses after her line underwent serious problems a few years ago, she, and lots of other Londoners, were paid back for every day of their above-ground detours.

And the voucher is accompanied by a mea culpa that, for New Yorkers, seems unimaginably contrite:

Once one overcomes the disbelief that attends such official acts of kindness, the obvious question begins to loom: could the selfsame fare pay-back system be brought to New York’s subways, or any other American transit system, for that matter? I emailed that very surmise to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, a response from which bobbed up in my inbox the next day. A representative explained:

Of course my correspondent has a point. What, after all, prevents scam-minded Londoners from imagining a delay, or more plausibly, alerting themselves to the news of an actual tie-up and insisting that, they too were on the 10:46 out of Tooting Bec (they really have station names like that), the one that languished beneath the Thames for an hour?

The answer to that near-rhetorical question is sealed in a chip implanted in the system’s Oyster card, a protean stub of plastic that, in addition to affording entrée into the tubes, collects a history of the bus and tube journeys amassed by its owner. Graze the Oyster against a tube stop scanner and a diary of the rider’s trips unfurls onscreen, with all the wheres and whens duly remembered. It’s rather eerie, and perhaps born of deeper security concerns, but these mini-archives enable system watchdogs to cross-check their reports of delays against actual passenger whereabouts. And by simply requiring claimants to post their Oyster card number on refund applications - submitted easily online - the system stops a good many of the fraudsters in their tracks, as it were. (And consider the new Oyster incentive - top up, or refill, your card on the Transit for London website and you get to download 5 free iTunes selections. I’m making my list even as we speak.)

Is there, then, any good reason why the London precedent couldn’t be transposed to American transit systems? The technology is there, and the example has been set. New York’s Mayor Bloomberg has already folded London’s auto congestion charge idea into his budget strategy; why couldn’t he, and mayors of other cities, imitate London’s fare-back beneficence as well? Mass transit, is, after all, nothing if not a time-sensitive enterprise - and if London is prepared to take the hit for its tardy trains, why should American systems recuse themselves from reprisal?

Abbot Katz is a New Yorker currently living in London.

Marketers need to be agents of change, and effective change agents must be risk takers too. How about you? What risks did you take last year? What risks are you planning to take this year? How will the risks you take advance the reputation and ridership success of your transit organization?

About ten years ago, the transit system I worked for needed to build ridership and one of the key components of the plan was a television campaign built around a commercial called “My Name Is Eric”. The commercial showed a man sitting down with a group of people in a church basement. His opening line was, “Hello. My name is Eric…and I drive a car”. While the rest of the spot extolled the benefits of riding the bus versus driving, the support group portrayal was seen as too realistic by recovering alcoholics, especially one who happened to be a prominent local congressman. After three weeks of complaints, we pulled the spot. Ironically, a few weeks after it was pulled, it won an award from Advertising Age Magazine.

My boss at the time was quite understanding. In fact, he had challenged me and our ad agency to be edgy. But sometime risks aren’t as much about being edgy as they are about pursuing a big bold idea. And more often than not, big bold ideas are found at the intersection of risk and innovation.

A few years ago, after realizing that my organization had the ability and opportunity to identify a large portion of our riders, we started planning for a relationship or loyalty marketing program. The development costs were not insignificant, but we figured the program, once up and running could be sustained for much less than what a typical mass media campaign would cost. Within three years we had signed up over 20,000 participants as well as a number of promotional partners who created added value offers for our riders.

In this case, the effort didn’t result in any awards, but it did reward us with an effective ongoing way to stay close to our customer base at a time of service cuts, fare increases and budget reductions. It was an important priority to retain as many riders as possible under the circumstances, and our loyalty program gave us a highly personalized way to do so.

It was a risk born from a bold idea. You might say it was the right risk at the right time. And speaking of the right time, isn’t NOW a good time to go forward with that bold but risky idea that makes sense for your organization?

Keep the thread going by sharing a story that relates to your experience with taking marketing related risks. Let me hear from you!

Joe Caruso is Senior Consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting. He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has over 32 years of transit marketing experience. He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

Posted by Debbie Dauenhauer
Executive Director, SNTC

The Southern Nevada Transit Coalition (SNTC) is a 501C3 organization established in 2002, that provides public, senior, paratransit and medical transportation to residents and visitors in 10 rural southern Nevada communities. The SNTC operates under the brand name “Silver Rider.” System wide, the SNTC provides more than 550,000 rides each year, making the SNTC the largest provider of rural transit in the state of Nevada.

Have you met Ed and Ned? They ride your system. In fact they ride every transit system in the world. Sounds like these two guys are the ultimate transit junkies, doesn’t it?

Who are they? Ed is the representation of your everyday rider. Ned is the representation of your not everyday rider. And together they make up your total customer base.

Ed rides everyday or nearly every day as a commuter, student, a committed rider or a true transit dependent. Ned on the other hand rides much less often to go shopping once a week, or goes only to ball games or festivals. Perhaps Ned’s car is being repaired or the car pool is talking the day off.

Actually, there are lots of Ed’s and Ned’s and knowing something about each is helpful. By the way, it is very likely that the Ned’s outnumber the Ed’s. How else would you explain the fact that despite Ned’s riding less frequently, your ridership is about the same each weekday?

That makes your Ned’s pretty important riders. Take a minute and ponder the possibilities. If a Ned rides once a month, then a Ned riding two or three times more is a significant increase in ridership. The point is that you already have a relationship with Ned. You know Ned. Ned knows you. Think of it this way: Your best customer prospects are ones already using your service.

Get to know these riders through surveys and observation. Ask your riders about their riding frequency, the length of time they have been using your system, how they pay their fare, and the reasons they ride (work, shopping, school, etc.). Pretty soon, you’ll have a feel for the proportion of Ned’s to Ed’s.

Let’s say you have 10,000 riders (not trips) each weekday, and your surveys show that 60 percent ride every day. On average the other 40 percent ride 1.25 times a week. Knowing this you can make an educated guess that the ratio of Ned’s to Ed’s is 4 to 1. That would mean that there are 6000 Ed’s and as many as 24,000 Ned’s. Instead of 10,000 generic customers, your base may be as high as 30,000 customers.

Turning a Ned into an Ed takes some effort, but the payoff is huge. Identifying Ned’s and courting them with incentives like university and employer pass programs, service frequency and route improvements, relationship marketing programs and improved customer services are all ways to migrate Ned’s into a higher level of use.

That doesn’t mean that you forget the Ed’s riding your buses, ferries and trains. But doing more to make Ned’s into Ed’s will pay off by making the Ed’s more loyal and committed customers.

Like I said earlier; think of the possibilities.

Keep the thread going by adding or modifying the above principles, or by sharing a story that relates to your experience with Ed’s and Ned’s. Let me hear from you!

Joe Caruso is Senior Consultant for Brecon Hill Consulting. He’s the former marketing director for the Milwaukee County Transit System (WI) and has over 32 years of transit marketing experience. He welcomes your comments at jcaruso@breconhill.com.

Posted by William R. Coulson
Member, RTA Board of Directors

Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) was established by state law to provide financial and planning oversight to the operations of the ‘service boards” — the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) (light rail and city bus), METRA (commuter rail) and PACE (suburban and paratransit bus), who actually provide the transit.

The RTA and the service boards have been warning Illinois political leaders for years that the system was seriously underfunded and heading for a serious breakdown. Last year an independent agency, the Illinois Auditor General, confirmed this financial crisis in a lengthy report. Simultaneously, the RTA and the service boards painstakingly formulated a “Moving Beyond Congestion” plan outlining their vision for strengthening and expanding the six-county region’s long-term transit, assuming new funds were available. Virtually every mayor and every county board in the six-county RTA region endorsed this plan.

Thus, there is no dispute that the financial crisis is real and that there is a long-term plan to significantly improve the system. Enter Illinois’ unique brand of politics.

The RTA is financed largely through fares, a sales tax imposed in the six counties and a state match of 25 percent of the sales taxes raised. So optimistic was the RTA board in December of 2006 that the 2007 budgets included as projected revenue more than $200 million in what was called “New Transit Funding.”

A bill was introduced in the Legislature to raise modestly the sales tax rate to generate this new revenue for the foreseeable future. The bill also proposed to significantly increase the RTA’s oversight authority of the service boards. The CTA and its unions even negotiated pension and benefits concessions, contingent on the bill’s being enacted. The Chicago media has consistently characterized this proposed dedicated funding of critical infrastructure as a “transit bailout.”

The governor, however, announced that he would veto the bill because it raised a “tax on people.” The state capitol, Springfield, became a welter of intrigue and distrust among the leaders, over a wide variety of issues — the most “poisonous” atmosphere statehouse veterans have ever witnessed. Legislators and the governor could not even pass a state budget until after months of overtime sessions. The governor called 17 different special sessions of the Legislature; the legislators finally just ignored these calls and did not even show up.

There was no budgeted “New Transit Funding.” The service boards’ 2007 budgets had to be amended accordingly to cut services dramatically, layoff employees, postpone maintenance and raise fares. The cuts hit the CTA and Pace first. These agencies announced that these cuts would become effective on Sunday, September 16, 2007. Springfield remained locked in gridlock. Then, four days before this “doomsday” deadline the governor announced that to forestall the cuts he would authorize the immediate advance to the RTA of the $37 million budgeted for the first six months of 2008 to paratransit service and senior citizen discounts. The governor wrote that a long-term resolution of state mass transit funding “is not far off.”

Once again the service boards amended their 2007 budgets to include this advance, and it fell to the RTA board to determine if it could approve these new budgets as “reasonable and prudent” under the RTA statute. Nine votes were required. In a contentious 10-2 vote, the RTA board approved this advance of next year’s moneys. I was one of the two “no” votes. To me, this was like a bad “pay-day loan,” except that even a pay-day loan has a reliable, dedicated source for repayment! One of the board members who did support the measure literally held his nose as he voted “yes.” So six months of next years’ paratransit and senior discount money is now gone — spent this year! Without new monies, next year’s cuts would have to be even deeper. But doomsday was averted for a few weeks.

More gridlock in Springfield. The bill to raise the RTA sales tax and to establish more RTA oversight got a majority vote in the Illinois House (61-48), but the sponsor withdrew it because it needed a super-majority (71 votes) to take effect immediately and to survive the promised veto by the governor. The CTA and Pace had no choice but to again plan for “doomsday” cuts, this time effective November 4, 2007. Again, layoff notices and route elimination notices went out. Community groups and the unions protested. This time, two days before “doomsday,” the governor announced that he had found $27 million in a state infrastructure bond fund that he would transfer to the RTA to stave off the cuts. Again, the governor wrote that a permanent “fix” “can be completed in the near future.” The Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate wrote that they “understood fully” the “urgent need” for a “major increase in stable, long term funding,” and pledged to work to that end “over the next seven to ten days.” This advance of capital funds had to be approved by the Federal government (late on a Friday afternoon in Washington!). Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and the Republican Bush administration agreed to the last-minute proposal, thus accomplishing in an hour the kind of statesmanlike bi-partisanship that has so far eluded Illinois leaders. Doomsday was again averted — for now. The “doomsday” cuts, now more severe then ever, were reset to commence now on January 20^th, 2008.

Yesterday, November 28th, the governor called his 18^th special legislative session, this time to consider only the mass transit crisis, saying, “we cannot afford more delays.” A new funding proposal had been touted by several legislative leaders — the dedicated transfer of regional sales tax revenues from gasoline sales to transit. This would provide a more modest sum to transit than would the increased general sales tax proposal, and it would leave a gaping fiscal hole in the general state budget (where the revenues would otherwise go). Many legislators, including those from downstate Illinois, insisted as a pre-condition the passage of a capital funding bill for highways and schools which would be funded by new casinos in Illinois. The gas sales tax bill failed by a vote of 57 -53 (60 votes are required). “Doomsday” faces us again on January 20.

What to make of it all? I have tremendous respect for the elected public officials who face the daunting task of balancing the state budget in the face of competing demands from constituents. They will have to decide ultimately how important mass transit is to the well-being and economic vitality of Illinois. And the people — who elect them — will have the final word on all this.

As an appointed board member of the RTA, I share the responsibility to provide the best transit to the people of the six-county region that the allotted financial resources will responsibly permit. If our elected leaders want a second-rate system, that is what they will get.

William R. Coulson is a Chicago attorney and former federal prosecutor, who was appointed to the RTA Board on April 1, 2007, by the Cook County Board of Commissioners.

By Leah Harnack
Mass Transit Associate Editor

It’s not often you go to a conference and the welcoming reception is at a night club with lights flashing, music pounding and there is what looks like a woman, but what is indeed a man, belting out songs on the stage.

It was a fun, energizing way to meet up with familiar faces, get acquainted with new ones and to kick off Rail-Volution 2007: Building Livable Communities with Transit.

The conference was three days in Miami Beach, with more than 50 workshops and 17 mobile workshops that provided hands-on learning and a trade show featuring 24 exhibiting companies.

When talking to friends about the conference I was going to be attending, the name was a bit misleading as they thought it was simply a conference about trains and passenger rail. Rail-Volution covers much more, looking at how all modes of public transportation can shape a community.

Workshops illustrated some of the latest creative solutions to common challenges and reiterated the importance of cooperative relationships between everyone when it comes to successful transit.

I don’t know if it was from the hot sun, the exhilarating nightlife or the restful beach, but the conference had a relaxed ambience with quite a bit of humor on the part of the presenters.

But more importantly, it provided examples of what can be accomplished and what has already been accomplished. Many of the common challenges were addressed, including parking, partnerships, gentrification, climate change and of course, funding.

In the workshop TODs and Responsible Development in Lower Income Communities, James Hencki, senior urban designer with PB PlaceMaking, talked about planning with the community of West Baltimore.

At the end of a weeklong charrette at the beginning of the process, a small group of vocal dissenters presented unforeseen negative attitudes due to their anger, fear, anxiety and frustration.

Hencki stressed to us the importance of responsible development: everyone has a safe, decent place to live, to succeed you need a place to call home, hard-working people should be able to afford a home and necessities to live there and children deserve an opportunity to succeed.

He concluded his presentation sharing that the second community workshop was very well attended after they had learned a few things that made all the difference in collaborating with the community.

It’s better at their speed, not the planner’s speed. Reach out to the community early and thoroughly. Identify and support community leaders. Focus on the community’s issues, not planner issues. Gender and ethnicity do matter. And, to build a place, you have to build trust.

At the Implementing TOD at the Regional Level workshop, Tom Boone, TOD project manager with the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) in Denver, Colo., had his own list of information to share — his Top Ten Ways to Fail at Collaboration:

10. Make speed your priority

9. Speak negatively about stakeholders in their absence.

8. Hold unfocused meetings.

7. Send irate emails when someone does something you don’t like.

6. Use jargon when you don’t want people to understand.

5. Be exclusive.

4. Don’t concern yourself with how you will resolve conflict.

3. Want more for yourself, your cause or your organization.

2. Don’t take the painful steps to agree on the problem you are trying to solve.

1. Push for your favorite solution and hope others will acquiesce.

The question and answer part of the discussion maintained some humor, despite the tough topics being addressed.

Boone talked about DRCOG’s breakthroughs in behavior in the community through marketing and was asked how he felt DRCOG did at communicating with the community prior to the campaign. He responded, “I think we sucked at it.”

It was good to have a session such as this, where attendees could hear the steps involved that improved the communication and the effect that has had in the community.

When asked about the three biggest challenges in the Bay Area, Steve Heminger, executive director of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in Oakland, Calif., answered, “Parking, parking and parking.” He then added, “If you build it; they will come. Especially if it’s free.”

Some thoughts on solutions revolved around what people should be charged for parking and to build parking in a way to make it easier to turn into development as an area changes. A parking lot is easier to turn into a multi-use development next to a transit station, as opposed to a multi-story parking garage.

Understanding and Using Federal Legislation and Regulations provided a lot of useful information, especially for those not familiar with the FTA’s funding process.

Mariia Zimmerman, vice president for policy with Reconnecting America in Washington, D.C., discussed what is going on now on the Hill and the impact that is having, or could have, on transportation dollars.

SAFETEA-LU is important, but we should be showing equal enthusiasm in the energy bill she pointed out. Climate change and transportation are key issues for energy and transit has not been in the climate change discussion as much as it should be.

Another big concern is that when SAFETEA-LU is up in FY09, the highway trust fund is projected to be down to $0 and they could look to transit dollars for money.

To win support in communities for public transportation, Zimmerman says, “Make public transportation personal.” Transportation is the second biggest expenditure for the average person but often people don’t realize it.

Rail-Volution provided many examples of specific strategies that illustrated how public transportation creates sustainable and livable communities. Hopefully next year we will see you in San Francisco next year as more industry leaders share success stories and lessons learned.