We’re All in this Together

Anyone with a child under the age of 13 is now humming the song of the above title from High School Musical.  I know I am.  Sorry about that.

I recently attended an APTA meeting on state transportation partnerships, and was struck by the collaborative nature of everyone at the meeting.  No, there was not a group hug at the end between the highway, rail and bus folks but if I had known them all better I might have started one.

They all point out that with reauthorization (again? are there any acronyms left?) a mere 18 months away, this is the time to be forging our partnerships and not fighting each other for the scraps on the table.  The transportation system is critical to our economic, social and political growth.  It is at the heart of our success as a nation (well, that and that document called the Constitution).  The panelists all pointed toward a transportation system that covered everything from airports to vanpools, with everything (including highway and bridges) in between. 

One particularly interesting session for me was the one on Mobility Management.  As a Transportation Demand Management professional for most of my career, we had always used that term to describe what we do for commuters and able-bodied individuals.  Guess what.  The rest of the transportation industry uses that term for what we would consider paratransit.

But a colleague of mine from Connecticut DOT pointed out that mobility management is actually mobility solutions management.  That’s the core of what we do.  We provide transportation solutions for people who need to travel from point A to point B.  It doesn’t matter whether they do it via rail, bus, carpool, paratransit, bicycle, or eliminate the trip altogether via teleworking.  We provide solutions.  The buses need good roads to travel on.  The highway system is critical to move goods and people, particularly in areas not currently served by transit.  But providing solutions without regard to mode or territory is the best we can do for the people who rely on us to get to work, school, medical appointments, and maybe, when they’re done with all of that, to go out and have a little fun.

Have we missed the bus?

As I pulled into the normally mobbed Costco gasoline station the other day, I stared with horror at the price sign–$3.99  (and 99/100 of a cent) per gallon for regular.

I know, for most that would be a welcome sign.  Finally, gasoline below $4 a gallon.  But as an industry that has been searching for way to get people into bus, train, subway, carpools, vanpools, telework, bicycling and walking*, is our great opportunity just about ready to pass us by?  Have the people who have tried MARTA in Atlanta enjoyed it so much that they are going to continue (and did they get a parking space at the station I hope?).  Did all those people who tried the bus for the first time get a seat, a comfortable ride and arrive at their destination on time?  Are newly formed carpoolers bonding for life or secretly resenting that they have to share the ride?

I worry about this.  The increases in ridership didn’t have too much to do with the efforts of highly professional, skilled TDM professionals or brilliant advertising campaigns (but if only I’d had one out on the street at the right time…..).  It was $4 gas.  What this experience has shown me is that there is a huge discretionary market for alternative transportation–higher than I think anyone in their wildest dreams ever expected.  We interact with the captive market and the super long commutes and the people who are fed up with traffic and maybe want to save a little.  There’s a little bit of “last resort” in all of that.  But with $4 gas, these new riders suddenly saw our alternatives as a viable and maybe even attractive option.  Did we do enough to make their experience enjoyable? Of course we want every rider, transit dependent or discretionary rider, to have the same excellent experience when they use BTSCVTW (call me lazy–my son and three friends are out back on the trampoline and probably are in need of some adult supervision because its all fun and games until someone pokes an eye out; my mom used to say that all the time). 

I know that transit operators, TMAs and others work very hard to make the travelers’ experience as easy as possible.  We should keep that as a top priority and maybe concentrate on incentives to maintain some of these new riders for a while rather than spend marketing dollars on attracting new ones.  We will never, ever attract as many as $4 gas did.  Let’s hold on to a few of them.

I don’t want people to have to pay $4 a gallon for gasoline.  That’s not my point.  I know it hurts people.  Heck, it hurts me since I made a knee jerk boneheaded decision to buy a Mercury Mariner SUV last year–I’m a single mom with one son, sure he’s got sports stuff but that’s what trunks are for. 20 miles per gallon. And I have to put a flag decal on the back so I can distinguish it from all the other silver SUVs in the Target parking lot. Seriously.

But when the price of gas goes down, as it most likely will, I want to be sure we keep those new riders.  It’ll cost a lot more to get a new rider to keep one–if I didn’t hear cries of pain coming from backyard I would do a search and look up that number, but I know it exists.  That’s a real big shift in how we think about marketing.  Retention has always been mentioned but never really taken seriously.  Now’s the time to pay attention to all of our BTSCVTW’s.

*I propose an industry standard acronym for that since I’m tired of writing it out.  So here goes: BTSCVTW.  Not perfect.  Any transit modes that start with vowels?

Slooooooow Start!

Not quite sure what I thought this was going to be like.  I knew I wouldn’t be flooded with teaming opportunities within the first month and need to hire an aswering service to take in the calls from local operators who were dying for me to impart my marketing wisdom on their systems.

Not exactly the way its working out, nor is it the way I should have expected it to work out.  This is a sloooooow building business.  Even my extremely conservative dad thought it would be a year before I started seeing some money (and with out his encouragement I would have given up, defeated!).  There are two levels: forging, re-establishing or maintaining relationships with exisiting consulting firms who are always looking to put teams together.  That’s the long term stuff–from RFP issue to actual invoiced and paid work could be well more than 6 months at light speed.

During August, I will be meeting as many transit operators and smaller agencies as I can who might have projects that don’t need to be bid, but can be done quickly with a single consultant–writing, marketing plans, training, strategic plans, newsletters–I rock at stuff like that, and enjoy it too (see my web site list of capabilities for my menu of services, maybe one fits a need, or triggers an idea?)

After investing about 2/3 of my life savings into this and working with some great designers to hopefully give off a professional image–when I’m not tripping myself up with misspelled URLs and typos on business cards–I am finally in building and sales mode.  What I enjoy most about all of this work is that it is truly based on relationships–with clients, with team members, with consulting firms, transportation organizations.  What I have learned, a bit the hard way, though, are the two tenets of consulting: assume nothing and trust no one.  But if I can build a career and still get stabbed in the back for lack of trust in my partners, I’d rather be in that space.  The assume nothing stands–you barely ever know why you don’t win a contract, even if you get a debrief, so you do your best work in the proposal and keep your fingers crossed, pray, meditate, or whatever floats your boat.

I know this isn’t exactly on the top of your blog list, but I would be most grateful for other independent consultants to share any advice, horror stories and, even better, happy endings here on the blog.  Perhaps many would benefit from your experience.  Once I get some of my own, I’ll be happy to share that, too!

Anyone going to the APTA transit coordination meeting in Providence August 4-6? I would like to meet the two or three people who are reading my blog.  I’ll even buy you a beer.

Tale of Two Floridas

As a part-time resident of Florida, I keep up on the transportation issues that are on the verge of choking the growth out of this once-booming area. 

When my family began coming down here in 1988, it was to Jupiter, then a reasonably sleepy town with few stores along Route 1 and barely any multilivel construction along the beach.  Now, Jupiter is overbuilt and if there is a chain restaurant that is not there, it is in the planning stages somewhere.

About a decade later, my dad’s wish for a boat and a yard to putz around in brought us up to Martin County, to Hobe Sound.  Again, when we started to come here 8 years ago it was a sleepy little town.  Now the town just to the north, Port St. Lucie, is one of the largest growing towns in the country.

I like this part of Florida.  The house is in a neighborhood with working families, in a nice area about a mile from the beach with a dock out back and the Intracoastal waterway a few doors down.  I try to ride my bike to Jupiter Island every day, the bastion of the “quiet” rich who completely abandon their homes in the winter to go who knows where (and where Tiger Woods brought three properties–spanning from the ocean to the waterway, and he’ll build his home in the center for privacy.  Cool when you look at some of the ridiculous excess of the area.

Which brings me to my title.  Property tax reform has resulted in budget cuts in transit throughout the state just at the time when people are starting to get interested.  It will take billions to build out the wish list of the South Florida Regional Transit Authority–expansion of Tri-Rail further north to serve suburban outposts like Jupiter, and extensions to serve the VA center.  Buses from the west to serve West Palm Beach, the primary employment centers in the area.

But the real question is–what about all these stores and fast food restaurants that have popped up from Jupiter through Hobe Sound up through Stuart in just the past decade?  What choices are these people making to put gas in the tank to get to work? What are they going without?  Florida also ranks among the lowest in terms of education.  Without good schools and a good transportation system, how will the state bring new businesses to the area and keep it thriving?  In many cases its the elderly vs. the younger families, In think–the elderly educated their children at good schools up north, and have no interest in paying more out of their limited income for education.  And with older drivers welcome on the roads, they see no need for transit.

Seems to me that Floridians need to put up or shut up.  They complain incessantly about traffic congestion.  But they won’t sacrifice their hard earned money today to make improvements that will keep the state vital tomorrow.  Rich against poor? Elderly against young? I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the country where the differences are so marked.  All have good points.  What they lack is a vision for Florida.  There are ballot initiatives being planned to help move the issue forward, but it will take a lot of convincing.  These are not groups that are used to agreement.

Obsessive Brand Disorder?

I recently completed a very interesting book by Lucas Conley entitled “Obsessive Brand Disorder.” (available through Amazon.com and through www.publicaffairsbooks.com).  Throughout the book, Conley slowly (but effectively) builds a case of whether we have come to a point where everything, everyone, every place, every aspect of our lives needs to be branded in some way.  Think about it–cities?  Can a city of millions of residents be distilled to the one element that will resonate with potential visitors, but not leave some lasting impact on its residents and spirit?  Even people are branded.  Millions have been made by gurus who promise to identify your true essence so you can market your brand to potential clients, employers–and even online dates.  It may not be how you think of yourself or even what you do or enjoy best, but if it hits the needs of the market, that’s the brand they’ll steel you toward.  Kind of minimizes us to one-dimensional beings, don’t ya think?

I worked on a project a couple years back that sought to brand a major transit system.  We finally decided that rather than brand the system–which in a city of such diversity meant different things to different people–but to brand the ACT of using the system.  Sure seemed like a good idea at the time.  I’m cool with branding an action–you can always bring your own interests and personality to how you use it, but use it just the same.

Conley also talked about the extensive market research that went into identifying just the right brand for a product, service, city, you name it.  As a veteran of dozens of multi-state, qualitative and quantitative research projects to find brand triggers, I was amazed at the multitude of alternative means that he mentioned that got even deeper into our emotions.  Facial recognition–both “hidden” as part of focus groups and deliberate in specific studies, can identify the slightest movement that could indicate displeasure or acceptance of an image, concept, or celebrity.  Brain scans are also used to see which concepts “light up” certain areas of the brain and indicate a positive reception.

I have two thoughts on branding (that I can think of at this time): 1. They are very useful in streamlining outreach campaigns and bringing disparate elements of a program (different transit operators, for example) under a seamless brand.  and 2. Despite extensive evidence from the most popularly branded products in history, the transportation industry insists on rebranding its systems every time it embarks on a new marketing campaign.  Spruce it up–sure! But change the look, feel and attitude of your system because your new ad agency might have a better idea?  The greatest thing lacking in transportation marketing today is, I think, brand equity.  Multi billion dollar companies price their equity separately at a value of millions and millions of dollars.  But often, transportation systems toss out their brand as if it is campaign related and not the core of its identity.

Vacation?

I’ve been at this for four months, and while I haven’t set the world on fire yet I have received a great deal of encouragement from all of the professional colleagues who I have had the privilege of working with over the past years.  Its an interesting business, probably not terribly not unlike other consulting businesses–you have the big projects, where a single consultant is part of a larger project team primed by one of the big firms, then you have the smaller projects that keep the cash coming in at a reasonable pace.  In the meantime, I am contacting everyone who I have ever met over the past 20 years in the business to let them know I am available and eager to work with them.  So far, so good.  But no work yet.  Thank God for supportive parents (not in the financial sense, thanfully, or I would have bailed out for their sake).

I have worked independently (but for companies) for probably the last ten years, and there was always a line between work time and vacation/holiday time.  And even weekends.  Since I travel with a wireless laptop and carry a blackberry, I am essentially 100% available and working, all of the time (except that wonderful period when the flight attendent forces us to turn off all electronic devices–I find that to be quite freeing).

So now I’m in Florida.  Am I working? Am I on vacation? My son is certainly on vacation.  Guess I’m doing a little of both.  But since work is fun and still exciting, I guess its okay to slip a glance at the blackberry once in awhile.  Since noone appears to be reading my blog anyway, maybe I’ll ease up and write a bit more about the vacation than the work.  Though I did bring 6 business books so I can start recommending reading resources.  Like you all have time to read.

So happy Independence Day (I told my son that the name of the holiday was really Independence Day; he insisted that was the movie with Will Smith and the name of the holiday was the 4th of July; try to win an argument with a 9 year old, its pointless).

Product Placements for Good?

Much has been said lately about advertisers’ practice of blending their branded products into the storylines of television programs—Staples for “The Office”, for example (actually a pretty good idea).  They figure that with everyone DVR-ing through their commercials, they need to get the word out somehow.

Its one thing to have a blatant Coca-Cola sponsorship of American Idol (full disclosure: my sister works for Coca-Cola, but it doesn’t mean I get a discount on my Diet Coke).  Even those Ford commercials, though extraordinarily annoying, are at least not fooling anyone but the most sheltered viewer.

I know I was as excited as anyone when “Carpoolers” came on the scene last season.  Anyone know what happened to that show?  Okay, so it didn’t exactly show a realistic view of carpooling, and in some ways brought the image down a peg or two, but it did get the word into the public lexicon and gave us something to talk about for a few months.  Maybe “Vanpoolers” would have given them more story lines—conflict between characters, clandestine romances, medical issues.  Heck, I think its an hour long drama, myself.  Maybe I’ll write it someday.

In the meantime, though, can’t we get some Desperate Housewives onto the LA Metro for a shopping trip? Does Ugly Betty have a good experience on the subway? Can the cast of The Office decide that they can’t take the rising gas prices and take advantage of a company-sponsored vanpool?  Or even Chloe and Courtney fighting for a bus stop in front of their clothing stores on Keeping Up With the Kardashians?   That pretty much exhausts my knowledge of prime time TV (and I happened to catch the Kardashians on The View last week; my son and I normally stick to Deadliest Catch and the Food Channel, although right now he’s watching Wipeout, which is just downright hopeless).

I was on a project team recently where a part of the marketing plan was to have buses roll by with the project logo on them.  I think we can be more creative than that.  Just as driving the latest Escalade helps to define a character so, too, would their use of transit, carpooling or vanpooling.  Watch for “The Real Working Housewives of Westchester County” coming to a network to you soon.  Just kidding.

Who’da thought?

I saw a piece on Fox News Channel this morning that talked about a serious problem being faced by thousands of commuters trying to escape rising gasoline prices–the lack of parking at transit stations.  The report, which did not mention a specific region but identified it as a countrywide program, reassured the audience that the states and municipalities are now looking to expand this parking.

Anyone who works with transit knows what an incredibly oversimplified statement this is.  Are there many plans on the books right now to expand parking significantly in major transit areas?  I know that Connecticut has done its best but is at the mercy of the municipalities who don’t want traffic from out-of-towners clogging their streets.  Many other areas simply have run out of space–and noone wants to build a big nasty garage in a suburban area (although they are coming through on occasion).

And once the parking is in place, can the transit services accommodate the additional passengers?  I know, that certainly depends on the system.  But the irony of cutting transit budgets in states like Florida when riders are flocking to do what millions of dollars have been spent to get them into transit is almost too much to process.  So we are left with carpooling and vanpooling as the only sure-fire methods of helping individuals stop spending their food money on gasoline.  It seems like a missed opportunity to pass this new interest in transit by.  Are states reviewing their transportation budgets to pay more attention to transit and parking? Are we as an industry good enough at marketing vanpooling and carpooling to really have any impact? 

I don’t know the answer, but this is the time our industry has been waiting for, forever.  Not to benefit from the misery of all the families who have no choice but to pay the gasoline for lack of options and inability to accommodate any form of ridesharing–there will always be an ambient level of people who can (or will) not do anything but drive alone to work.  But this is our time, folks.  When gasoline is back down at $3 a gallon and the panic is over, we’ll be kicking ourselves in the butt for letting this opportunity pass us by.  I hope to hear from some readers who can prove me wrong.

Why, Mom?

As I was watching the five minutes of news I get on Saturday mornings at the top of the hour while watching cartoons with my son (I admit I enjoy them, too) a story came up on drilling for oil and he asked “Mom, can I ask you a question?” That ususally means it is something he is really thinking about.  He asked “Why do we care about the environment now, when its going to a long time before the world is gone?” 

I had two responses for him (both of which could probably have been better, but I do the best I can): first, the world is not going to go away because lots of people are working really hard to do things in a different way so we can save the planet and second, we have to care about it now because it takes a long time to do these things, and we want to be sure the earth is healthy for him when he grows up and his kids and his grandchildren. 

Then my five minutes was up, and it was back to The Best of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles–yes, they’re back for a new generation.

They always say that kids should not deal with adult issues.  I worry about the message that we send our children in talking about the impacts of our current behavior on the future.  Often, when we are planning a marketing effort, we say we should work with school kids so they will bring the message home to their parents and become engaged in the issue themselves.  While this is an issue they will be aware of (it is inescapable these days) I believe I will think twice before I suggest a school based program that talks about the doom and gloom that they may face if adults don’t do something now to secure their futures.  Maybe we can frame it as healthy earth habits–something positive that they’ll feel good about rather than be afraid of.

Its bad enough that they have lock down drills in the schools.  I hope we don’t grow up resigned to life on a violent, dying planet.  Sure its a serious issue, but we can frame it in a positive way that is based on hope rather than fear.

Who is leading this charge?

As I’ve mentioned in my earlier posts (which have been read by no one because technically my blog is not operable yet, but I do enjoy reading my own writing and my mom says she likes it but she’s my mom) this is a spectacular point in time where transportation demand management has merged with environmental and energy issues to be top of mind with most of America. 

Who is our spokesperson?

I personally believe Al Gore blew it when (a) he released “An Inconvenient Truth” commercially rather than recruit thousands of people to give free DVDs out in the downtown areas of every city in the country—the people who had to be persuaded.  All the move did in theaters was preach to the converted. And (b) he rejected me (and my friend Jeff) as spokespeople to deliver his speech to other groups, even though  between the two of us we could have brought most of the transportation, municipal, marketing and business leaders in the tri-state area to the table.  He did, however, pick Cameron Diaz.  Okay, she is better looking than me (and much better looking than Jeff).  But is she going to get up in front of 200 Chamber of Commerce suits at a luncheon in White Plains and do the show?  I think not.

We need a powerful, non-partisan champion who is respected and well spoken and can leap a small Rush Limbaugh barb in a single bound.  Not a Hollywood type (though I respect Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio for their efforts, plus that guy from HBO’s Entourage).  Not a politician.  An enlightened business person?  A former president?  A dynamic university president?  And its not a matter of whether you believe the planet is going to be a puddle by the time our kids graduate high school.  Its about how our world works—how things are made, how people get around, how we power our homes, how we feed our people.  Please send suggestions to me via this blog, and I’ll follow them up. And don’t nominate me, I’m way too busy writing my blog, raising my kid, building my consulting practice, that kind of stuff.  Plus (and this I know will get some responses) I think it needs to be a man.  Gotta be practical if we’re keeping our eye on the prize.