For the past three years, the six international transit study missions fielded under the Transit Cooperative Research Program have given U.S. managers the opportunity to develop professionally and to broaden their outlook by studying exemplary transit systems outside the U.S., meeting with colleagues and bringing back good ideas. Operated by the Eno Foundation under contract to the Transportation Research Board, the study missions have yielded a wide range of contacts, initiatives, and innovation transfers, from low-floor technology to moving block systems to clever marketing ideas, bus stop signage, security measures, and passenger information techniques.
Federal Transit Administrator Gordon Linton joined the teams at several locations and came away with policy notions of his own sparked by discussions and site visits overseas. In his view, the overriding lesson held by successful transit systems is their holistic approach to transit planning, but Linton also has incorporated effective technology and joint development ideas at work abroad into, FTA policy thinking. Here are extracts of an interview conducted by George Wynne, APTA consultant for international affairs, upon Linton's return from Curitiba, Brazil. Curitiba has created a high capacity urban bus system with the passenger capacity of a metrorail system at a fraction of the cost.
Wynne: You have been a proponent of the International Transit Study Program, which allows up-and-coming managers selected by their peers to meet professional colleagues. They look at innovative systems overseas to take back good ideas for possible application in the States. There have been six such study missions to date and you have joined some of them. In your view, what can we learn from abroad?
Linton: First of all, when we get a chance to allow some of our up-and-coming managers and transit people abroad, they get a chance to open their eyes to new possibilities. Very often here in the States, we are so used to doing what we see our neighbors doing in other transit systems around the country that we don't get a chance to see applications of new technologies. Nor do we get a chance to see environments where all of the elements are put in place to make world-class transit possible. This is a much different approach than here in the States. I think exposing middle managers, those looking for long-term careers in the transit industry at that level, is productive for them individually, but it is also productive for the country. We give them a chance to grow and bring back new technologies and applications. What they have seen they can apply to their own properties, but they also begin to exchange ideas and cross-fertilize with other members of the transit industry in this country.
Wynne: Can you share with Passenger Transport's readers what practices or solutions have impressed you the most personally on your visits to foreign transit systems?
Linton: We tend to discuss what needs to happen to make transit work in this country, and sometimes we get so caught up in bureaucratic regulations and rules that we don't see the real merits of something as it is applied. I was always taken aback by the fact that, in this country, we invest in light rail systems and yet have difficulties in getting traffic engineers and others to allow us to take advantage of what the systems offer in opportunities for pre-emptive signaling so that the service reliability and the time efficiencies that we can derive from these systems is fully realized.
I was in Germany and I had a discussion with one of the officials about the many tramway systems that were getting priority in mixed traffic, and I asked him: Did you have any difficulty with traffic engineers or others in achieving this pre-emptive signaling system? He said no, of course not, we would never invest in a fixed guideway system in mixed traffic without giving it the pre-emptive signal capability-how in the world can you get full efficiency otherwise? It was so obvious to him, and to us it's been a source of continuing struggle. So when I came back I met with my staff and immediately began to use our ability to bring about pre-emptive signaling when we sign negotiated agreements to invest in fixed guideways.
We now have as a policy in this country, we will not put federal funds into a fixed guideway system if it doesn't have pre-emptive signaling. So we're doing it. That was a very simple solution, something they took for granted-we saw it as a major challenge and I just couldn't figure out how to get a handle on it. I came back from that with some major ideas.
When I was in Asia, I became so impressed with public-private cooperative agreements, what they call the third sector, and also the major joint development projects they were doing that when I came back we began to revise our joint development policies and regulations. Now we're spending a lot more time with transit systems getting them to explore our joint development options with the private sector. That was a direct result of my trip to Asia.
Wynne: Can you point to some specific happenings in this area?
Linton: Absolutely. We are doing joint development conferences around the country. We did one about a year ago with WMATA. They've had a tremendous response from that. In fact, I just heard that they've put up 30 of their sites for joint development opportunities. I think they have a number of significant applications, and it looks like they have closed deals on 24 of them, so that is pretty phenomenal.
We're also going around the country and holding joint development workshops at transit systems. We did one in St. Louis and one in Atlanta; I just met with people from Sacramento-we had one there in September. Seattle recently passed a referendum providing $3 billion for infrastructure investment. They want us to do one there where they will bring in people like Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, and Microsoft and others from the corporate sector who want to work with them on doing some joint development activities as well. So once again this has provided an impetus for us to re-look at what we're doing in joint development to see if we can do more.
Wynne: Would you say that some of the institutional barriers to joint development that exist in this country are in the process of being dismantled?
Linton: I think we still need some additional work in this area. We have begun to look at some of the institutional barriers that we have created through regulations or procedures and that we can, in fact, control. There are some other things we may not be able to control that require some statutory changes or acts of Congress. If we can demonstrate to the Congress that this makes good sense and is good for the country, and Congress agrees and changes some statutes, we could even do more. So we're using this as an opportunity to build on successes, give us an opportunity to get a platform to go to Congress and ask for more. We think we're on to the right way to do that.
Wynne: You have a great personal interest in livable cities, and recent FTA initiatives have promoted the livable cities concept. Have your overseas experiences added to that?
Linton: When I first came to this agency, we began to focus on transit as being more than just isolated movements of people. It is connected to the livability of cities, and we have tried to magnify and develop its role in this respect.
The most shining examples of livability that I have seen have been in my trips to Europe and other places. I have seen the care and attention that goes into designing and putting together the local transit systems to make sure that they are fully integrated into the daily lives of the people they serve. And all of this is not high-tech, nor is it always very expensive. A lot of it is just creative thinking and application and keeping your customer at the forefront of what you do. And we've tried to do that both by our own policies here at FFA and also as we work and communicate to the rest of the transit industry, in terms of the things that they can do themselves to make their projects much more livable. We think that's been one of our biggest successes.
There have been a number of articles in major publications written about our efforts in that regard. Earlier this year, in fact, I co-hosted a conference on smart growth and livable communities with Gov. Glendening of Maryland. We thought we might get 300-400 people at a one-day conference of this magnitude. But there were a thousand people that came-many from Maryland, but also from around the country-talking about transit, land use planning, growth management. There is a phenomenal interest sweeping across this country right now, and we think the trips to Europe have been a real opportunity to showcase what other countries have done and how we can do that as well.
Wynne: You mention it doesn't all have to be high-tech. I understand you recently returned from Curitiba, and there they certainly have some low-tech solutions. Do you think some of these have something to tell the U.S.?
Linton: George, you know, I've been saying for the longest time that the problem that we've had in transportation and transit specifically has been lack of planning, lack of land use planning, lack of integration, that policies outside of transit affect the effectiveness of transit. And that we always tend to look for high-tech, very costly solutions, when very often the solution is just going back to the table and approaching transportation in a holistic sense. And what I really found that I was most impressed with in Curitiba-it was almost like I'd died and gone to transportation heaven-there they didn't talk about transportation as something isolated, it was integrated with everything they did and talked about: they talked about housing, they talked about child care, about moving their country forward in terms of quality of life, transit being an integral part of everything.
And I think when we talked to them they made it very clear that if you just come away and you look at our bus boarding tubes and see our people streaming into the system and how we've been able to reduce boarding times-if you only look at the physical things, you lose a lot, because you don't understand the thinking that goes into putting this entire system together.
Wynne: It's all coordinated.
Linton: That's right. If you lose the thinking, you will never be able to get the finished product. And so often I think we tend to look for something that's isolated, that we can accept simply without absorbing the whole picture. And I think that what they're saying is that when you continue to do that, you're going to continue to fail. It's only when you're successful in looking at it holistically and begin to integrate it that you'll find your system less expensive but also more effective. And I think, if nothing else, the trip to Curitiba really drove that home for me.
As I've been talking more and more to people about Curitiba, I think we clearly understand we're moving in the right direction in our thinking. But now we have to go to our other partners-folks in housing, in the retail sector, in metropolitan planning organizations-if we're really going to be successful building livable communities. It has to be all these people, those forces that have to be brought to bear on the livability problem, and that's the direction that we're going to have to go next.
Wynne: Mr. Administrator, given the benefits of cross-fertilization, the track record of innovation transfer and of career development inherent in the Transit Cooperative Research Program, its supporters hope that it will be continued and possibly expanded when the current ISTEA legislation is re-authorized. How does FTA feel about the program and do you expect it to continue?
Linton: I think the program very much should be continued. I think it's very important that it does not lose its mission. Very often, when you get a successful program, people tend to try to change it and make all kinds of additions and bring people in, and you lose the real strength of the program itself. This program was designed for middle managers' career development, giving people exposure to what's going on in other parts of the world, allowing us to cross-fertilize. If we maintain that as a premise for the program, I think it will continue to be successful.
I do think, however, that there should be an opportunity to spin off from that, some related type of initiatives. For instance, I mentioned that if we're going to really get livable communities, we have to bring to bear some of these issues with some of the other partners-housing, commerce, MPOS, elected officials. I think it may be important for us to do some additional trips where the mission would be to look at integrated and comprehensive planning and development from the perspectives of several different eyes.
For instance, if I were to do another trip to Curitiba, I would want to bring somebody from a metropolitan planning organization, someone from the elected officials to understand the mayor's role in this, someone from the traffic engineers, from the transit systems themselves, from the housing department, from the education department, and other people who we don't normally get into our core group of transit system managers.
Wynne: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us and for helping to make these learning opportunities possible.
Return To International Focus
Some of these pages may include links to documents in the Adobe PDF format. Please download the Adobe PDF reader if you have not already done so.
