Could the MTA Ever Make A Leap?

by Jeff Maki

This past March, Leap launched a new “lounge-like” bus service in San Francisco. The Verge found it reminiscent of the reception area for a large tech company. I was reminded of WeWork, in their own words:

At Control Group, we reinvent services– public and private– by building capacity within the organizations that deliver them; we connect our efforts to a business need or revenue stream to ensure the changes are sustainable. Part of this process involves putting aside the constraints of an existing organization– thinking big — and then (sometimes lightly) reapplying reality until things fit.

So a thought experiment: consider the New York MTA, which serves one of the densest cities in the United States, New York City. Could Leap become a model for MTA’s bus service, or is Leap forever destined to be a startup?

An overview of some key issues from our perspective:

Funding. Funding for “amenities” in the public sector is scarce. How can new revenues, e.g. from advertising, be earmarked towards funding amenities like Leap instead of being spent to maintain the status quo?

Mandate. A “customer-first” mandate needs to come from the top. Customer communications and marketing is an easy place to start; getting customer communications and operations together to affect service is a bigger challenge. Great things are happening atSound Transit, LA Metro and Motivate.

Title VI. Requires equal service be delivered under Federally-funded programs. Leap doesn’t serve everyone. It isn’t handicap accessible. It doesn’t stop in all areas of the city. Could MTA leverage technology to help?

Cultural Plurality. As Leap imagines bringing a “living room” to a formerly sterile public space, can we all agree what a living room should look like? Design-led research and community inclusion can help build consensus around shared values.

Partnership. One solution to some of these issues is partnership with the private- and third- sectors. Partnership can externalize risk, helping government “take a chance”. Finding the right areas and structure for collaboration and partnership is critical.

Technology. Technology is absolutely essential to making a model like Leap work on a larger scale– especially as it might expand the reach of such a system via dynamic routing, dispatch and pickup requests. Imagine a bus that works like Uber.

Density/Connections. Currently, Leap only travels between two neighborhoods in San Francisco, making only 3–4 stops to pick-up passengers, depending on time of day. Dense residential and commercial areas, bikeshare and other “last mile” mobility solutions make limited stop services like Leap work.

The biggest barrier for Leap as a model for public transit is that Leap solves a different problem. Public transit has to serve everyone, Leap serves a very select few. Finding the aspects that are transferrable and those that are not will be the task of government and startups that provide transportation services (like Leap, Bridj, Uber and others) in the coming years.

At Control Group, we are defining the “responsive city”– a place where connectivity, interactive digital touchpoints and sensors might make a city more efficient and responsive to citizen needs. Self-driving cars aside, these technologies stand to fundamentally change the economics and operational models for public transit.