Posted: July 8th, 2008 05:26 PM GMT-05:00
When I sat down and talked to Art Leahy, the Orange County Transportation Authority CEO, I realized he was just an average joe.
Now don’t take that as a slight. Art is the guy who buys you a drink after spending hours at a trade show, discusses problems facing the industry and shares stories about funny things he’s seen along the way. Like I said, he’s an average joe.
So when I went out to Orange, Calif., to interview Art about his life in transit, OCTA and the industry in general, it was less an interview and more of a chat between two transit guys.
Born To Ride
Art Leahy can honestly make the claim that he’s had a stake in the transit industry since before the day that he was born.
Leahy’s father, Arthur Leahy, was a rail operator for L.A. Railway before World War II. Then with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Arthur made the choice to serve his country and enlisted in the Navy.
Meanwhile, the future Mrs. Janie Leahy was living in Kentucky. As luck would have it, Janie moved to California to become a streetcar operator during the war.
After WWII ended, Arthur Leahy came home and resumed his career in transit. A short time later he met, courted and married Janie.
Arthur Leahy would eventually help usher in a new age of transit by training other rail operators on a new-fangled invention known as a bus.
The young Art Leahy learned the trade from his father, who not only was his mentor, but broke him into the business. “I hired on as a bus driver in 1971. My dad was an instructor when I broke in.
“He was my instructor. I was a lot more worried about him than I was the company. I didn’t want to get in trouble with him,” Leahy says.
The 22-year-old Leahy would spend the next three years as a bus driver for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority while he went to college at CalState.
Graduating from college in 1974, Leahy found that current circumstances presented him with a wealth of opportunities in transit.
“I finished college in March of 1974. So, transit was losing ridership from 1945 until the mid-1970s. It peaked in 1945 during the war. All of the sudden there is a fuel crisis and all of the sudden public investment comes into transit.
“I had been [driving a bus] for three years and I’ve got a brand new college degree, so I was faced with some great opportunities at the L.A. system for career advancement,” Leahy remembers.
Leahy would spend the rest of the 1970s in the marketing department and working with local government.
In 1981 he would get a break and become a superintendent in charge of six bus bases and more than 3,000 employees. After four years as a superintendent, Leahy would tackle the real beast of transit — scheduling. Becoming director of scheduling for L.A.’s MTA, making sure the buses ran on time was the least of his worries.
“As you probably know the scheduling system is a not well understood, but very important function of the transit system because in effect it controls shelf life, inventory, it drives all of the cost factors in it,” Leahy says.
“How many vehicles you need, how many drivers you need, all of that stuff is a function of how well the schedule works.
“That was a great assignment. I worked in that for about three years.”
From there, Leahy became assistant general manager for operations and ran the entire bus operations in L.A. before taking the job as general manager of Metro Transit in Minneapolis, Minn., in 1997.
Leahy would be with Metro Transit for four years until coming back to his home on the West Coast at OCTA in 2001. Since then Leahy has looked to improve the Orange County system and in 2005 was proud to have it named one of America’s No. 1 systems by APTA.
Mass Transit Milestones
Art Leahy has an interesting way of marking his years in the transit industry. He remembers the events that happened while he was at a particular agency and uses those as a touchstone to what he was doing at the time.
For example when he got into the industry full-time there was the fuel crisis in 1974-1976 and while he was a superintendent in L.A. in 1984 he had to run six bus bases with the Olympics going on in his backyard.
And then there are those events that you never forget, such as the devastating earthquake, which struck the West Coast in the late 1980s.
“Right after the earthquake I got into my car to go to work. It was a bad one. My chimney fell off the house,” says Leahy.
“I’m going into work and I’ve got a car with a radio. “This radio dispatcher says should we run the service? And I said yeah mobilize everything because we don’t know what happened. We just had a real bad earthquake, but we don’t know if hospitals have collapsed or if we have to do evacuations. We don’t know anything, so mobilize everything. Get the system going.”
Just then Leahy remembered something about the subway system.
“I know what’s under there — there are two kinds of gas under there. One of them [has] the rotten egg smell so you know it’s there, the other one is odorless, colorless and it will kill you.
“I call up and say no one goes into the tunnel without a gas mask and gas detection equipment until we get it checked.”
Leahy was also at MTA during a man-made disaster — the Rodney King riots. Despite all the damage done, Leahy says they had only seven employees injured during the riots. “We made more than a thousand trips [during the riots]. We transported prisoners, the Marine Corps, the U.S. Army and the National Guard,” says Leahy.
According to Leahy, route abandonment was only allowed if the operator reported gunfire or could see fire or arson. It was after ordering the operators to vacate some of their routes that Leahy realized he had heroes working for him.
“If the operator was heading west bound, he would turn around and go back because he would see people wanting to go east bound and he didn’t want to leave them there. “Here I am a transit guy. I am telling you to go do something and I am privately praying you don’t get hurt. It was a very tough experience,” admits Leahy.
Living in the O.C.
Thanks mainly to Fox, the “O.C.” has largely become a part of the modern vernacular. People think of Orange County and see blue-eyed, blonde-haired surfers with disposable incomes. While I am sure that is partly true, what I saw in Orange County were everyday people just going about their business trying to make a living for themselves and their families.
Orange County is about 800 square miles in size with about 505 actual square miles of incorporated land with the rest being taken up by a national park.
Now having a population of 3 million people, Orange County is a growing part of the California economy with more than a million jobs within its borders.
It also has a very diverse population with a large group of Vietnamese residents and a growing Hispanic population. Because of this dichotomy of image versus reality, the OCTA has an image problem as well. People look at it from the outside and think “transit agency” with all the usual connotations, but OCTA also runs the roads in the O.C., something most other transit agencies are not allowed to do or steer clear of.
Leahy says, “There are a few that have a broader sense of purpose, but like in San Diego they have a plane organization but does not operate the trains or buses we do. In Riverside they’re separate. In L.A. it’s unified except that there the MTA doesn’t take as aggressive a role in the highway system.”
One of OCTA’s main funding sources is a local half cent sales tax known as Measure M. Contrary to what you may think, Measure M has nothing to do with OCTA’s buses. It is used to pay for Metrolink, the OCTA commuter rail line, and the agency’s share on streets, roads and freeways. OCTA’s bus component is otherwise funded from the farebox, state gasoline tax and federal money.
Measure M also subsidizes elderly and handicap fares and the OCTA Access paratransit system.
As Leahy notes, while CalTrans is the state agency overseeing the roads, OCTA funds them for District 12 (the state district covering Orange County).
“Even though they are the state agency, we have the money,” says Leahy. “We invite them to board committee meetings and board meetings to report on construction status. If there is a problem they join us in front of the board and get to ‘share the love’ explaining why we’re delayed or whatever.
“We’re out to bid right now on about a $400 million project about 10 miles up. CalTrans will manage that project, we fund it. We’re managing this project. There’s a high degree of coordination between ourselves and CalTrans, so it’s pretty neat.
“We get to advocate for transit, but in the context of also advocating for roads and freeways,” says Leahy. Orange County has a predominantly conservative voter base with a very strong pro-roads attitude.
“The fact that we can do road projects gives us cover on the transit projects because we are doing both. We’re not trying to do transit at the expense of roads, which probably makes our job easier,” says Leahy.
Metrolink
Among many other projects, Measure M has helped expand OCTA’s commuter rail line, Metrolink, into a pseudo-light rail line with service from L.A. all the way down to Oceanside with Amtrak service on the same tracks.
With the Measure M money, OCTA purchased the LoSan Corridor, which Metrolink now runs, and the Pacific Electric Right-of-Way, which goes from Santa Ana to southeast L.A. County, for future development.
“There’s no doubt [the Pacific Electric Right-of-Way] will have value in the future. It will have to be elevated in my opinion because it goes off on a diagonal from Orange County to L.A. County and all of the streets are on a north/south, east/west grid,” Leahy notes.
Art Leahy admits that it is important for Measure M, which expires in 2011, to be liked by the voters since it pays for Metrolink.
And because of its link to the Metrolink service the white collar conservative votership of Orange County does indeed like Measure M — partly because of demographics. The average income of a Metrolink rider is around $75,000 a year, and as Leahy points out, having them like and use Metrolink has other benefits.
“The guys making $75,000 a year or higher have cars. When they take a Metrolink train into L.A., it’s a car off the freeway. And that’s increasingly so,” says Leahy.
Metrolink’s commuter ridership has become more bi-directional between Orange County and L.A. and Riverside counties and also from the north to south Orange County. What once was people riding the service from Orange County to jobs elsewhere now has an equal amount riding the service into Orange to work.
“Part of the reason for this is that two-thirds of the jobs and the population live within a four-mile radius of a Metrolink station,” Leahy says.
Taking the $300 million earmarked for its failed Centerline light rail project and reinvesting it into the Metrolink line, OCTA is planning on adding weekend service and expanding regular service to 18 hours.
“The trains today are full during the rush hour. Therefore more frequent service is good,” Leahy states. “As you know if you don’t have late night trains and you don’t have insurance trips behind whatever the guys’ normal departure is people are hesitant to take it because they don’t want to get stuck somewhere.
“If we run until midnight, we’re confident we’re going to get people who are going to have business dinners in L.A. and want to come home,” Leahy says.
Ridership on Metrolink is up about 10 percent since it started. Stationlink ridership is up about 7 percent in the last year. With increase in ridership always comes the need to increase service.
Leahy says that OCTA is already planning to expand the Metrolink to have triple track all the way from its Fullerton station up to L.A.
OCTA will also be looking into whether it needs to buy rolling stock, parking structures and stations to handle the increased Metrolink ridership.
And it’s not just OCTA that is planning on building near the Metrolink tracks. With Orange County seeing a continuing densification, residential development is increasingly being planned around Metrolink.
Right now residential buildings are going up around the Fullerton train station, in the Great Park project in Irvine and in the area of Anaheim known as the Platinum Triangle, a series of 20-story skyscapers have been contracted out.
“We’re going to the board [and] one of the recommendations from the staff is to allocate $30 million to cities who will make projects, which will be competitively evaluated and the moneys for them is to make transit plans and [transit oriented development] around their Metrolink stations,” Leahy says.
“People here can imagine taking a Metrolink train. Can imagine living in Irvine and going to Fullerton to have lunch. They can imagine going to L.A. or Disneyland.
“With all of this densification and development occurring around stations all over O.C., we’ve begun to imagine transit service including commuter rail in a way that wasn’t conceivable in the recent past,” says Leahy.
As Leahy notes, residents of Orange County are recognizing that the freeways are becoming increasingly choked as their trip frequency and length increases, so desire to live near a train station is becoming a prevalent issue for them.
Orange County now has 10 Metrolink stations with an eleventh under construction. Leahy says that OCTA has actually begun a rail network, which is amazing considering none of it existed in 1990.
One of OCTA’s biggest plans are intermodal stations, one of which is the ARTIC or Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center, which is planned to be built across the street from Arrowhead Pond.
ARTIC would act as a station for OCTA buses, Metrolink, Amtrak and a possible high-speed rail line to north Orange County, Riverside County and beyond up to possibly Las Vegas. But as Leahy explains, that’s not its coolest feature.
“The idea is that the ARTIC would serve as a remote terminal for the airport.
“You go to the ARTIC, check your baggage in, get on the train, and when you get to the airport, you get off and get on your plane and your luggage meets you there,” says Leahy.
But he is also the first to admit ARTIC is far from reality at this point.
“We’re dreaming great dreams right now. There is some big money being talked about, big ideas, which is really good, there is nothing wrong with that.”
Orange County Lifeline
As Art Leahy told me, the OCTA bus system carries around 220,000 people a day with the bulk of those trips between work and home with home and school being the next largest category. As he explains it, it’s a lifeline system.
Despite being in a wealthy county with a robust economy, the average per capita income of an OCTA bus rider is around $17,000 a year, which sets up a paradox.
“We’re fortunate because the board of directors supports the bus system very strongly and it’s growing — we’re going to be growing it by 3 to 5 percent a year — for the foreseeable future. It’s not controversial, but again it isn’t funded by Measure M,” says Leahy.
OCTA’s CEO explains that their bus system has had solid ridership growth in recent years, but last year it flattened out due to a fair increase.
“We hadn’t done that for like 10 years. That’s really a luxury isn’t it,” chuckles Leahy.
“And so we wanted to see what would happen to ridership. It dipped a bit. We exceeded our revenue projections, ridership dipped a bit the first half of the calendar year. By the fourth quarter it had recovered and began to exceed what it had the previous [year.]
“That’s another indication we are becoming a mature transit system — it’s not so much of a shock to the system.”
Leahy breaks down the bus system into two or three major themes. His first action as the new OCTA CEO was to gather his management staff together and tell them that he wanted OCTA to be the best transportation organization in the state and that started with them.
“The words were not random, they were not window dressing, they were not nice sentiment words. I meant them,” he says. “People out here pay a lot of money, taxes, to us. Our bus drivers make more money than our passengers do. We owe it to them to break a sweat to earn their trust and confidence and for them to believe and know that we’re spending their money wisely.
“As part of that exercise about being outstanding and being the best we began to look at how we manage the bus company. Frankly, I was not happy.”
Leahy grew up in an era of the transit industry where it was paid for 99 percent out of the farebox, which meant you had to watch the bottom line.
“The system I grew up with taught you a lot about minding pennies and being careful on how you allocate service and so forth. Here I didn’t see that,” says Leahy.
“We began to talk about things like a minute of bus service costs a dollar and a half.
“If your average hourly cost is $90, that’s a dollar and a half a minute. If you have 800 buses and waste one minute a day, that’s 800 minutes. Times a buck and a half. Times 360 days a year.”
Which, doing the math, comes out to $432,000 a year. That’s not a small sum of money for any transit system by any means, and that’s only if you are just losing one minute a day per bus, which most transit officials would admit is pretty darn good on a good day.
“The point being you could hemorrhage a lot of money painlessly because no one’s going to feel it,” says Leahy.
“We began to focus on better management and better planning so we can track where the high risk accident locations are.
“I’m pleased that after the five years I’ve been here those kind of performance reports, those analytical reports have begun to become part of the culture of the OCTA. That’s been a learning process.”
Part of the changes Leahy instituted since arriving in Orange County got its genesis one night when he stepped out his front door.
Late at night he’d see men riding by on bicycles. At first he thought maybe it was recreational riding, but then he realized these guys were going to and from work.
So Leahy instituted night owl service on four of OCTA’s bus lines and the ridership was good, but then he noticed something wrong with the service.
“As I drove around and looked I’d see these bus stops that were remote from intersections and remote from where a restaurant might be or whatever.
“And they were dark. And I’d see women out there at 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock at night. Some dark place, right. Now that’s not good. And furthermore it’s hard for the bus driver to see them,” says Leahy.
Leahy went about installing new solar-powered lights on the stops to not only help the riders, but also the drivers.
“The lights we’re buying have two features. One is the light for the pedestrian, for the passenger, but the other is like a strobe that flashes so that the operator knows someone is there.
“They are expensive, but I think it’s a reasonable adjustment with the fact that we are running nighttime service.
“And there are parts of O.C., which are dark at night. It’s a safe system. Crime is at a very low level. “We hardly ever have anything happen that’s serious. But still we should make our passengers feel as safe as we can. So it’s a good expenditure.”
Transit = Roads?
Every transit agency has its own flavor if you will. What adds the spice to OCTA is that not only is it a traditional transit agency, but it also handles the freeways in Orange County.
Where the 404 and 5 freeways come together in Orange County is known as the “Y” and is one of the widest freeway interchanges in the world at 26 lanes currently. OCTA paid for that as part of its Measure M. This is all part of a process to deal with the changing demographics in Orange County.
More people live in L.A. County and Orange County than the opposite.
Orange County is no longer a suburb of L.A., but an urbanized area in its own right. With this increasing urbanization comes an increase in density and a larger number of high-rise buildings being built.
This has caused ridership to pick up as people make their way into Orange County. In fact, Leahy says that the commuting in the area is now bidirectional.
“It’s like 6 to 5. This is economically very robust, so there are a lot of jobs here,” says Leahy.
So what did OCTA do to take control of this growing problem with the roads? They bought one.
“We bought the toll lanes of the 91 freeway about three years ago,” says Leahy.
“The importance of that — this is Riverside County, there is a lot of land out there — lots of lower-cost housing out there, lots of jobs here.
“So this freeway is very jammed. We bought the 91 tollways three years ago and we established a demand management toll system. The board approved it. Every three months we can adjust the tolls without going back to the board, which I’ve never heard of in a transit system, so it’s really cool,” admits Leahy with a smile.
Toll increases are triggered by traffic volume. Cars are counted in hour increments. At about 3,200 cars per hour per lane coupled with high speeds the roads become unstable. At that point the toll is raised.
OCTA raises the tolls by hour and by day of week, not across the board. Travelers heading on the toll road during rush hour will pay more than they would driving on it at any other time.
“The neat thing since we took over is that last year we had the highest traffic volumes in the 10-year history of the road and the highest revenue,” says Leahy.
He also is quick to point out that average occupancy in cars in the toll lanes has increased as well due to the spiking of tolls during peak hours. All part of the OCTA plan.
“Because we are interested in transit, we allow car pools to go free almost all week and half price late in the week during the PM outbound.
“We’ve induced more carpooling on the toll lanes. It’s really a neat thing. The toll lanes make money,” says Leahy.
OCTA’s toll road franchise runs through 2030 and it is using the money from this profitable venture and putting it back into making improvements on the free lanes.
These improvements actually extend past the borders of Orange County into neighboring Riverside County. The reason for this is because while the toll road may be in Orange, one end lies at the county line. Either you get on the freeway in Riverside before getting on the toll road, or you get on the toll road and get off in Riverside.
For Riverside County residents this was a plan by Orange County to get money from its residents. To say the least, the relationship between the two neighboring counties was contentious.
Riverside residents were beside themselves. A private company held the franchise for the toll road and Riverside was suing it and the state, both of which were countersuing.
“We had a logjam both legally and also in terms of traffic. The reason for this was because the franchise included a non-compete clause. That meant that basically there could be no improvements in the freeway until 2030,” says Leahy.
“We’re looking at rapid jobs growth here, rapid population growth there. Anyway we buy the road, we get rid of the non-compete and the Riverside guys hated us.
“The meetings with them were as antagonistic as I’d ever seen.
“Once we bought the roads we created a joint policy committee between the electeds in Orange and Riverside and they now meet together to jointly manage the toll lanes.
“What was once contentious has become a highly cooperative relationship.
“We just completed in December a major investment study on what to do with transit and the roads between the two counties — jointly funded. That’s really a bright spot.”
Customer Service
As Leahy admits, when he came to OCTA the agency wasn’t committed to giving proper attention on its customers. It wasn’t trying to find out what they wanted.
Rather than hold a series of public meetings or solicit responses from the public as a whole, Leahy found an interesting way to address the situation. He found his most outspoken critic and he hired her.
“About four years ago we hired an outside citizen who was a complainer. A critic. I met her several times, her name was Jane. And when I met her I thought she was pretty good,” says Leahy.
“Her complaints were thoughtful. She had researched them. She knew what she was talking about. And I found her ultimately to be a reliable observer about things that were going good or not going good. In fact, she was more reliable than reports up the chain of command.”
So Leahy hired her. He gave her a small contract and guaranteed her two things.
“I guaranteed her that nobody in management would seek to squelch her — that order was given — and secondly that at the end of her review — which was not specified, not limited — she could report to the board of directors,” says Leahy.
OCTA brought in its biggest critic to view the system from the inside out and create a list of recommendations for the board of directors. Jane produced a list of 100 recommendations. Of those, Leahy says 70 to 75 of them were things easily handled.
One of the easier ones was putting the Metrolink schedules in OCTA’s bus schedule book. According to Jane if OCTA was paying for both systems, why not put both schedules in the same book.
“Well, our guys didn’t want to do that because — believe it or not — the management staff said the bus book is too thick already. If we have to put more pages in it, it will cost more money,” says Leahy.
“Well somebody made a narrow calculation about the cost of an additional page which didn’t factor into consideration the needs of a passenger who’s taking a bus and a train. It reflected a lack of focus.”
Of the 100 items created by the outside analyst, only 15 of them are currently “pending.” The remainder are either completed or part of an ongoing process. Of those, Leahy explains it came down to funding.
“Twenty-five of [the recommendations] were expensive. Run all your lines all night, which we don’t have the money to do. A bunch of stuff like that, which we couldn’t afford. Those all become — we’ll work on those over time as we improve the system. They’re all good ideas, we just can’t do them all overnight,” says Leahy.
Assessing the system from an outside perspective wasn’t easy. It’s always hard to take criticism, especially from someone outside your company, and Leahy found that out firsthand.
“One day our then marketing manager came through the door, came in here with a big head of steam up and told me that he wanted me to know that he was personally offended at what Jane said about the bus line. He was personally insulted by what she said.
“I said was it true? And he said, well yeah.
“So I said you should be offended. And you should fix it. Well, within a week he quit.
“Now I didn’t expect him to quit. I didn’t ask him to quit. But I tell the story just to say bringing in outside perspectives and empowering them to tell us what they think created anxiety, created unhappiness. But I think it’s all still to the good,” says Leahy.
Leahy admits that they are still working on efficiency and improving customer service, but that large improvements have been made.
But if you ask him was it all worth it, he’ll say definitely.
With his more than 30 years in the transit industry you’d think he’d be tired of all the stress and problems that come with the job. Nah. Just let him smile and tell you about it.
Printable version may be for personal use only. Content may not be duplicated, re-used or otherwise replicated without expressed, written consent from MassTransitMag and/or the original author/source.
Provided by MassTransitMag - A Cygnus Business Media site
Visit MassTransitMag daily for the latest industry news, commentary, features and more.