Podcast: Exploring the potential of Mobility as a Service to transform your commute

(Transcript below)

HOST: Mobility as a Service or MaaS is one of the hottest topics in public transportation. While the subject may be new for some, there's little question it impacts you every time you get on a BART train and its reach has potential to go even beyond that. Welcome to “Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART.”

I'm Chris Filippi, your host for this episode and I'm joined by BART's Director of Technology, Angie West, and Tim Moore, our Manager of Web Services. Both are here to talk about MaaS and its far-reaching impacts. Thank you both for joining us.

WEST AND MOORE: Thanks for having us.

HOST: This podcast has the opportunity right off the top to settle an important argument. Is it “mass” or “moss” because it's capital M, lowercase a, lowercase a, capital S?

WEST:  You know, I say mass and it's just the way I like to pronounce it.

MOORE: Yeah, that's me, too. Me, too. But it's I hear I hear it all across the board. I mean, I think there's a personal preference there, but we like mass.

WEST: Right. And I love that as an ice breaker, moss or mass. And we always settle on mass.

HOST:  Let's go with that. And if everybody asks, they can come back to this podcast and the debate's been settled. We've already accomplished something.

MOORE: At least between us.

HOST: Exactly. You know, I think when many people hear about Mobility as a Service, the first thing that's likely come to mind, especially for BART, is the Trip Planner and we’ll talk more about the Trip Planner as we go on. But let's start with how would you define Mobility as a Service?

WEST: “What I'd like to do is, Mobility as a Service to me is like is it an app? Is it a platform? But when I look at Mobility as a Service, it's really about improving the customer experience and how they would like to journey on transit, right? And it's not just about BART, but from the time they leave their home, all until they get to their end destination how do we improve their customer experience? So that's our main goal is have a frictionless or a very good personal journey for the customer. The other thing is, is that mass also includes modernized business practices. And what I mean by that is you have the old parking stalls, now we're moving into better ways to pay for parking. And also just seamless. We use the term seamless. Tim knows I like to use the term more frictionless because I believe seamless means is just going to be perfect from end to end but frictionless means we try to get as just as smooth as possible for the customer's journey. So, that's really kind of what I look at as the definition that we use here at BART.

(BART Director of Technology Angie West)

HOST: That is a really powerful vision, and it touches on so many aspects of a person's trip. And that really is empowering when you think about it because if you can make something simple like paying for parking at BART, that really improves someone's commute, doesn't it?

MOORE: For sure. For sure. I mean, I think for me, MaaS has like three elements to it. First, it's like a comprehensive view for customers of all of their transit options. Bus BART is in there, bike, rideshare, scooters. All of these related services also including parking, as you mentioned bike lockers, maybe WiFi service on BART at some point in the future. All of this is wrapped up in our in our case, at least, as a mobile app. It's kind of like your personal concierge service for transit. The second element, I think, for MaaS for me is the platform gives a more convenient way to pay to customers. So, it's not like you're paying for every leg of the trip, all the way down the line in multiple transactions. What we're trying to do is wrap up all of those transactions into one single transaction for ease for the customer. And third, and this is really kind of where Angie touched on and things get interesting is MaaS platforms help us create more value for customers, for the community and also for the business. Like, for example, BART can use mass platforms to give customers rewards and incentives, perhaps as a way to move folks out of the private car, reduce congestion, mitigate transit constraints that are just structurally there like for us, first and last mile, getting to BART, getting from BART to your final destination. Those are some of the constraints that we feel like mass can can help us with. And we also think it's a critical part of our post-COVID recovery.

HOST: Yeah, talk about that because it would seem like a lot of these services are even more important now as riders are starting to come back to BART. But we're really doing our best to regain their trust, to regain their ridership. It seems like MaaS has a huge role in that.

WEST: Yeah, it does, and I just want to touch on the second point that Tim said is just a convenient way for them to pay. We're also looking at a better way to offer discounts and incentives. So, think about when you leave your home, the first thing you want to do is plan your journey and then that planning, that journey, you don't want to have to pay for your rideshare or your car share or your TNC and then go and pay for BART and then go on and pay for your scooter. We're trying to wrap all of that travel in together from end-to-end and that is what our roadmap is. And not only just for those that are on BART, but if you want to plan a journey and it has the best way is not on BART our mass platform will also provide that type of itinerary or first mile and last mile journey. We're not looking at our primary focus is BART but the way we've wrapped MaaS around it is if it does not include a BART like that's okay but if it does BART will be part of that itinerary. So, we're what we want to do, what's best for the customer.

HOST: You both mentioned incentives. Let's talk a little bit about that, what that might look like. Obviously, in September, we celebrated our 50 years of service by giving 50% off and that was available for anyone who was using a Clipper card. Would it look something like that or what kind of ideas could be on the table?

WEST: I'll let you take that.

MOORE: Sure. I think one of the greatest things about having a MaaS platform is being able to see what customer choices are occurring out there and mapping those into some of the constraints, again, that that we're trying to deal with, like peak ridership, for example, or bringing people to special events. And so, if we know that a customer is taking a particular journey and that time period is perhaps oversubscribed, there's too many people during that period we can incentivize them and this is a project that we did a few years ago, incentivize them to just make a little adjustment in their trip, either earlier or later, so that we can get more people onto the train during those peak times. Also, these types of rewards to kind of upsell and you see this in like the Starbucks context or some of these other rewards programs to just incentivize you to take that one more trip a week. We're doing our best to lure customers onto the service in any way that we can, because it's more competitive than ever now, particularly as the number of trips that people are taking are not as much as they were before COVID.

(BART Manager of Web Services Tim Moore)

HOST:  It sounds like there are a lot of possibilities for that and the technology is making it possible. And I would think that would even go in the area of maybe partnerships like with local businesses to create incentive programs. Is that a possibility at some point?

WEST: You know, we're still looking into that, and we'll be working with planning and development and also marketing on where we really go with the incentives component. So that's what we call is on our roadmap ad that just means it's something that we have we know we need to do and it it's in our vision to integrate incentives. With that said, for the MaaS program, we will have incentives. We're partnering with CCTA (Contra Costa Transportation Authority) on a mobility on demand project where BART MaaS platform is being used, and that offering will have incentives and they're using how many miles you travel. So based on those miles, you gain points, and those points are more back towards another CCTA trip or with another, what we call micromobility partner, like Hopper, Lime, Bird, the scooters, the bikes.

So right now, I know with our previous perks program, we did partner and gave gift cards out. But we still have to look at what's the best way to move that forward.

HOST: I'm struck by how important data is in all of this. And it to me, it seems like a two-way street. Like it's critical that we give riders updated information, real time departures, Trip Planner has all the latest on how to get to and fro. So that's part of it but it's also you, I would think, have more access to data than you ever have in terms of what our riders are doing. And doesn't that tell you what the riders want because you can see what their trips are like?

WEST: Yes, definitely. One of the things that we're looking at in our next area is to really look at the analytics and we have I don't know, Tim, you know more the numbers, just millions of records of the travel patterns, what station they entered/exit, the times of days and we really want to begin to look at that and we're actually looking at some tools. But yeah, we have so much data, but let me let you get the details.

MOORE: Yeah, we have a lot of data, and we don't really have a lot of data that's matching specific individuals to trips. We have aggregated data that tells us in general how people are traveling and boarding and arriving at specific stations and that sort of thing. And then the other thing is we have the intention of what customers are doing, their trip plans. And again, we can't really lock this into any individual, but we can see the Trip Planner is giving us that intelligence of where people are going to go on specific days in the future and what we really want to do is track that into our service planning team so that they can make more informed decisions about the type of services we put out in the field.

WEST: Right, and we actually put a lot of effort into ensuring that we were not able to identify a specific customer and their travel patterns. But what we see is travel patterns. So again, it’s very aggregated on there and we have a very good policy that oversights us to not do location-based services, etc. I mean, they can turn it on in their app, but we will not be able to pinpoint that. So that's just something I want to bring out. The data is rich, but we will never be able to say Tim Moore here's what you do. Right? Exactly. But yeah, we're really so excited to begin to dig into the analytics behind what we've curated over the last four years.

HOST: It really seems like for MaaS to be its most effective, it has to be implemented on a regional level, especially when it comes to our Trip Planner. It's multimodal and can even offer trip options, as you mentioned, that don't even involve BART.

WEST: Right, right, and the one thing I'd like to bring out is we are probably the only right now trip planner that is true and I'll let Tim get into the details like what you said is true multimodal. A lot of times we get asked the question, well, isn't Google multimodal though they're unimodal they'll give you bike, whatever. But we actually give a true multimodal trip plan and I think that is one of the differentiators in what we do. But not only do we do the true multimodal trip plan, but we also give the fares for all of the modes, and you see the end cost of that journey. Our next step is you can see it on your itinerary. Now, our next step is to do a unified payment, so the customer is only paying one time and able to take the rideshare, get on BART, and then do the scooter. And they don't have to do three payments, but just one.

MOORE: Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think our Trip Planner is pretty unique in the market for a few reasons. I mean, when you look at a trip planner like Google, for example they do include different modes, but the difference is that they could do a better job providing the truly multimodal trip. Like when you approach these trip planners, you have to pick a single mode upfront like I'm going to drive, I want to take transit, I'm going to take my bike, and then you plan that trip. You're pretty much locked into this single mode unless you go back and start over again. It's terrible for transportation, transport, like discovery, right? Like what are my options? Because you have to go in and do individual trips and it's the same with other players like Apple Maps, for example. Like if you have a bike and you want to compare transbay trips on bus and BART and ferry, you've got to go in there and do multiple trip plans. But with the BART Trip Planner, you see everything door-to-door and then you get your best options. Walk and transit, bike and transit, transit and transit, scooters and transit. You see all the combinations across all those different, all the infrastructure that's available and we don't make you pick a mode upfront and lock in into that.

WEST: Yeah, and then what you can do though is you can choose your favorite modes, right? And then that's what it's going to serve up if you don't want a scooter and you only want bus and BART, you can actually choose those favorites and that's what it'll serve up to. So, it just goes back to us not forcing, but the customer choosing right? But if they want all modes, it'll show them all. That's really what we're trying to make that change. It's not about us forcing, but the customer being able to choose. But yet we're doing and covering the transit as a regional offering for the Trip Planner.

HOST: And that's what makes it a powerful tool, is you're giving the customers, you're giving the riders choice, and you're being very transparent about that, too, which gives you credibility and I would think would draw people to the Trip Planner even if they're not necessarily planning on taking BART. It becomes a destination. It becomes a tool that's useful for them. And again, with the transparency, one of the changes I've been impressed with is when we do major track shutdowns, it includes that bus bridge now and you can see it. So, talk about transparency now you know for sure there's no question, if you're going to ride in a certain area where a track project is happening, you have to offer to train and get on a bus.

MOORE: It's true. Yeah, I have to give my hat tip to our operations planning team for putting that together. They're the ones who are really scheduling out the time transfers and all of the schedules that get customers to where they are, and these bus bridges and they describe them to us and give us those data so that we can represent them properly in the in the Trip Planner. So, it's really a team effort for sure.

WEST: Yeah, definitely. They are just so awesome, and I think it's the Trip Planner, but we have a back, engine that allows you to do forward planning for shutdowns and bus bridges, but also it allows you to do there planning, right? So, if a station gets shut down, we have the capability to show in our Trip Planner that that station is shut down. So, I love the forward planning and the real time availability of being able to show that a station is shutdown. I think that's just powerful.

MOORE: Definitely. I mean see, we got excited, right? I mean, it's one of the one of the worst-case scenarios to ever see on a BART service advisory is seek alternate means of transportation, right.

HOST: Nobody wants it.

MOORE: Nobody wants to see that at all. But what we want to try to do in those cases is provide customers what those alternate modes are, and BART Trip Planner does that.

HOST: How long has BART been pursuing Mobility as a Service?

WEST: We started in 2017, and I just like to give you the backdrop of how we got there. We were actually looking to revamp the website and the quick planner at that time, and I think I was just coming into BART. When we started looking at revamping the website and quick planner, we start looking at what was going on in the industry and this term Mobility as a Service has been around, MaaS has been around for a while, but people were really starting to take hold of it. Instead of just doing a website and quick planner update, our first one was to upgrade our Trip Planner. We went from quick planner to Trip Planner, but then we said we have more opportunity to, as Tim says, to put out a customer concierge type solution that expanded to an app, to our website to Trip Planner and then we went into payment. So, it started as trying to do an upgrade to our website but because we have, I think innovators and really had innovators on our team and we actually worked very closely with Alicia Trost, what are some of the pain points that you're seeing? And that's how our MaaS came into existence.

HOST: Are other transportation agencies reaching out to BART to find out what we're up to and ask questions?

WEST: Yes, we get a lot of agencies reaching out to us, asking us where we are. And we actually just did the MaaS Summit, what was that mid-February, and I and I've heard this often is, if you were to say who's the most innovative in this space and a lot of times they say, BART. Once they understand what we really have behind the hood, it's not just about the Trip Planner. They see that we have parking payments. They see we have done a contactless payment for paratransit. Maybe most people don't even know that, but we actually have now reached out into our paratransit space. We support now the employee and the airport discount programs. They reach out to us Chris, and I'm going to kind of make a turn here because a lot of people think MaaS as an app and to me, the phone and the app are not MaaS, right? MaaS is really a back engine or platform that runs many services. So, it runs a payments service, it runs our customer feedback component, it runs our parking, now our paratransit app. Tim I'm probably leaving a lot of them out, but we also have our cybersecurity elements around it. MaaS is not just about the app and that's why people reach back out to BART because we have this holistic roadmap that we're looking to move forward. The reason I like to say it's not about the app, it's about an ecosystem or a platform because if apps begin to die and there is another what we call channel or a way that you interface and want to schedule your journey because some people don't like an app, they want the website. We can use any channel based on the way we've built our MaaS platform. We can serve it up via app, we can serve it up via website. We're even looking at can you put the Trip Planner and journeys on a kiosk. That's why people are really reaching out to us and even to the point their stories for SFMTA (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Aency), I think their trip planner went down and they pointed people to BART's Trip Planner, and we work with them and SamTrans and others, we've talked to them about our platform.

MOORE: Yeah. It's encouraging, too, because we do see some of the other like there's some other big ad agencies in the Bay Area pursuing the same trip planner that we use. It's a product from a company called Hacon. They’re a subsidiary of Siemens. It's a German company. They do a lot of work in Europe and really have the trip planning thing down. The other thing is we are partnering really closely with MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission) on things like payment for Clipper 2.0 and some of these kind of related services like parking, like bike lockers and those sorts of things. So, these partners are all really critical for us and the fact that they want to work with us and be part of the platform is really exciting for me.

WEST: And the major one is CCTA. I mean, they reached out to us to be part of their grant and help them build their app so they could take advantage of a lot of what BART's platform already does.

HOST: That's got to be a huge gain for BART as well as these other agencies come along with their MaaS plans. It's a lot easier, I would think, to integrate.

MOORE: For sure and I guess the other kind of interesting element about MaaS is there is a perception or a kind of a I guess two schools of thought one might say. There's the kind of one app to rule them all sort of like the Lord of the Rings, sort of singular app. And some markets are pursuing that. But then there's also another mode where individuals, individual agencies or individual groups are providing even private companies or providing MaaS platforms in their vision. And it gives the customer the choice to select whatever one works best for them. We think we know our customers and we're making informed decisions about our MaaS platform based on that customer intelligence. But as SFMTA may have a different view and they may have different needs and use cases for their customers, and they should be able to serve them appropriately. So, it's exciting to see this ecosystem start to develop and the and the cross collaboration occurs.

HOST: And nobody can be sure kind of what direction we're going to be going in in a few years. So that really gets to the point that it can't be channel specific.

MOORE: For sure. We're talking about Alexa, Apple watches, kiosks. We don't know where these things are going to go, and the platform has us in a position to serve wherever we go

HOST: What are next steps for BART when it comes to MaaS? What could our riders look forward to say in the next year or two?

WEST: What we want to look forward in the next year or two is we're going to continue to improve our parking offerings with ALPR and payments to be more seamless on parking. In addition, we will continue to improve our offerings in the paratransit arena and do what we're calling the book and pay. What that means is that for the micromobility, carshare, rideshare, we're trying to ensure that you can book and pay through our app, right? So that's what we're looking at in the next year.

MOORE: The other thing from the Trip Planner perspective is we're looking at some kind of new data sets that will allow us to help the customer navigate better through the station, specifically from the fare gates to the escalator to the elevator, to internal parking validation machines, that sort of thing, so that the customer has a better, more thorough trip plan to look at and we can increase that comfort as they're walking through our services and our stations.

HOST: One thing that's really heartening in our conversation that keeps coming up is paratransit. I've heard that several times, and we also hear a lot at BART about access and for us that means making it as easy as possible for people to use BART and when you're talking about the paratransit community, that can be a real challenge, but it seems like MaaS has tremendous potential to be helpful there.

WEST: We've actually rolled out a paratransit app, so but again, we used our platform in order to serve up an app for paratransit where they're able to book their trip and pay for it. And we did the testing around ADA compliance, and we worked with East Bay Paratransit, BART and AC Transit to get that deployed. It's going very well right now. It's newly deployed since July, but it's going very well and we're getting a lot of good feedback. But also, we're learning to improve on some of the ADA stuff.

MOORE: Oh, yeah, for sure. I think one of the other key elements there is that it really removes the need for the customer and the paratransit driver to exchange anything. It's all contactless. This was really important for us, particularly as we were developing this thing during the lockdowns. It was really important to bring that service out to these customers of ours.

HOST: Tim, I'm going to steer this one directly to you.  MaaS has only been around, you mentioned BART's been going at it for about five years, thereabouts, but you've been at BART since 2005. I know one of your first efforts I saw you write about this was to provide real-time arrival information and service advisories to our riders. I mean, that sounds so basic, but that was not the case back then, was it?

MOORE: No, that's funny. It's funny that you're bringing that out. Yeah, I mean, there was a time when we did not inform customers about delays, and we did not provide real-time information about when trains were going to arrive. And it seems like second nature now, but at the time, even just talking about this really got a lot of folks excited here. There were there were some folks on one side who thought, oh, well maybe having real-time arrival information out there might set up expectations that we're not going to be able to meet or customers are going to judge us more on our on-time performance, things like that. On the delay advisory side, there were some who said, do we really need to talk about how we're failing? But yes, we do. We need to talk to customers about where things are changing, and their expectations are not going to be met. We had we had a lot of internal discussion on this and a lot of folks who felt very passionately about it on each side. But at the end of the day, everybody decided to work together and get this thing to happen. And it really cut across a number of different groups in our in our company, our computers, systems, engineering team, transportation, our folks down in OCC (Operations Control Center), media, and public relations. I mean, it was a was a huge effort and I think everybody was really excited when we first got that going.

HOST: Yeah, and data has kind of won the day, hasn't it? That discussion is entirely different now.

MOORE: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I mean you talk to folks internally now and it's we have to get that information out and we've been improving it incrementally adding things like canceled trips, for example, which you can see on BART.gov and you can see it within the BART Trip Planner. Not so many of the third-party apps are carrying this for some reason, but we think it's really important to get that information out to customers. That’s what we're trying to do is make the service more transparent and make the service more available to folks so that they can make better and more informed decisions.

HOST: Angie, you've been a part for about eight years. In that time, what do you feel has been the most significant gain in the area of Mobility as a Service?

WEST: I just think getting it to a platform state. Making the mind shift from an application to really getting the support to build a platform. The executives here at BART have been behind supporting us. I think that was the major shift because most people thought of Mobility as a Service, as Trip Planner and app. And so, like Tim said, some people in the industry still think that way. We want to be the innovators to say it's more than about Trip Planner and an app. It's about a continuity of services and improvements. So, I think that's been the biggest shift and putting the customer first and not the technology.

HOST: I want you both to answer this one. What's your favorite part of your job here at BART?

WEST: Being able to be innovative on the MaaS platform, the team that I work with, and then also our business partners. Specifically, I want to call out customer access because Val Menotti’s group and Bob Franklin's group have allowed us to work with them in their customer facing areas to help build this platform. And they're also key in the way we think through it from a customer perspective and then us implementing the technology. So, I think that's my favorite part, being innovative and then my team and the customer and the business partners that we work with.

MOORE:  I think for me it's the immediacy of solving problems. And I didn't get a chance to do this as much anymore. When I was managing the website on my own it was kind of a different thing because I always was doing that. But, recently going through customer comments and we all go through customer comments because they're really, they're the thing that helps us get better and they're the thing that gets us to the next level. Going through some customer comments the other day, I was looking at some feedback on the website, real-time information and the way that it was presented, and we made some quick tweaks on that, got it into one of our development sprints and it got out in a couple of weeks and to see feedback unsolicited about that change that people appreciated it. It was just very a very basic UI change. I love that. I love that feeling of immediacy when you when you do some sort of improvement, and you get that feedback back and that validation. I love that.

HOST: I would think that has to be tremendously rewarding and gratifying for your work because the stuff that you're doing is very much behind the scenes. But do you take that pause and it sounds like you do to think about how many riders are truly impacted by the innovations that you're coming up with?

WEST: Yes, we do. We look at how many, how much feedback we're getting and we actually whether the customers know it or not, when we get feedback, we really look at it to see how we can improve because we want to hear the customer's voice. The other thing is, is that we look at our app ratings.

I know I said it's not about the channel, but we look at the feedback that comes back on the iOS and the Android apps to see where we can improve. So, it really means a lot to us when we hear the customer voice, when we're out at webinars or a seminar and we hear this is making a difference and we do see what you're doing.

MOORE: Yeah, on the on the traffic side we get about 48,000 users a day on the website and on the app and it's about 20,000 users a day. To put that in context our digital properties are serving about 41% of our daily ridership on a daily basis. These are numbers that we like to track because, you know, customers have options. They can go to Google, they can go to Apple, they can go to any number of places to get information about BART. We take that competition very seriously.

HOST: Give us some perspective on that. Is that considered a high number in transit to have that big of a percentage come to our app?

MOORE: I cannot tell you that. This is one of those things that it's really hard to get out of other agencies. I'd love to set a baseline, for example, a metric like the one that I just told you about to pass that out to a lot of different agencies and see where we are. It's hard for me to say I wish I knew.

WEST: Right, and the other thing is I like when we go on to some of the websites are the news and we find out we're rated one of the top ten apps in the Bay Area and we had no idea that was coming. So even to see some of that but to know whether we're that was a good number or not, that's something as we dig into our data and reach out to agencies that we hope to find. And one of the things I'd like to add is that data is very key to MaaS, right? We're talking about the tools and the technology, but you'll see that BART has really focused on gathering data so that we can make more key and informed decisions. And it's not just, oh, here's what we need to think and it's not just about the rider data, but it's about the customer feedback. That's data, too and information we need to look at. So, we just don't know about the number yet, but it's something that we hope to get to.

One of the things that we haven't done, we actually have a systems integration partner, so I'd just like to give a shout out to them. They helped us form our current MaaS platform and they have been really key to getting us where we are now. So, I just want to do a shout out to TransSight and Satinder Bhalla and his group.

HOST: Talk about that. Talk about how they come into play and why they're important.

MOORE: We work on a pretty thin crew here. I've got two people in my group running the website and running our web services. We do a lot of contracting work. In my group, we also run our Salesforce org and that's where we're getting a lot of great business intelligence, particularly around the customer feedback. But we have to rely on partners like TransSight to help us deliver these services because we're just not staffed up to deliver all of the elements of it. TransSight is a big part of, I think, our innovation process. They're bringing ideas as well but at the same time, they also provide the boots on the ground for us to get this work done. And it's a critical element in what we're doing.

HOST: BART's Director of Technology, Angie West, and Tim Moore, our Manager of Web Services. Thank you both for joining us.

MOORE: Thanks for having us, Chris.

WEST:  Thank you for having us.

HOST: And thank you for listening to Hidden Tracks stories from BART. You can listen to our podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and of course at our website BART.gov/podcasts.