Meet a Planner: Max Henkle of Pierce Transit (Pierce County, Washington)
Max Henkle (above, left) came to transportation after stints in the oil and gas industry (which he didn’t like) and as a pedicab driver (which he did). He now works for the Pierce County Public Transportation Benefit Area Corporation, better known as Pierce Transit, which serves the region just south of Seattle and works closely with nearby Sound Transit.
As a planner analyst, Max “runs in the background,” as he tells us — which means furthering Pierce Transit’s forward-thinking usage of data and technology. We talked to Max about the operational and economic benefits of understanding rider habits and what it’s like to plan for a region that’s capturing the runoff of Seattle’s explosive growth.
Can you talk about what you work on, and some of the things that you really enjoy?
We have a lot of data coming in that’s telling us how our system is performing. We have an AVL system that beams out the location of our buses every minute, and from that we get really rich data on average speed and schedule adherence. That information is fed to third-party data providers or order to provide real-time stop arrival estimates. We have automatic passenger counters so we have a very good idea of what a typical load is on a given bus route at any given time. It’s nice being able to take all that information in and get a picture of what the system looks like, and try to use that data to make decisions on how to optimize our system — for example, I can see the bus is really crowded between point X and Y at this time. So that makes a case for adding a trip.
Of course one of the ways we try to optimize routes is by looking at potentially other new markets that might be nearby that we’re not serving yet, because they haven’t been around very long or we haven’t had the resources to try to consider them. We’re just barely starting to climb out of recession-era steep cuts. We had to cut something like 40 percent of our service hours during the depths of it, so we’re slowly climbing out of that hole and looking back at where we cut to see where we can restore service or if there’s something that we want to try that we haven’t tried yet. That’s really where Remix comes in handy: being able to build a bunch of alternative scenarios really quickly, and getting a rough idea of what those tweaks are going to cost you.
It seems like Pierce is doing really innovative work with data and transit planning.
We were one of the early adopters of an AVL system that allowed us to push our data up to the web via OneBusAway, a real-time arrival application developed by the University of Washington and now supported by Sound Transit. OneBusAway is functionally similar to the NextBus service seen in other regions but is a non-profit rather than for-profit entity. Most agencies in the Puget Sound region now share their real-time AVL data for free since it enhances the transit rider experience. We’re doing pretty well in that sense.
The 150-odd Pierce Transit buses as well as most of the roughly 120 Sound Transit buses operated by PT have automatic passenger counters. Having nearly 100% APC coverage can save you a lot of time in collecting data and analyzing trends and really drilling down into the minutiae of what happens on a particular day. If you only had APCs on a small subset of your fleet, you would have to resort to other data analysis methods or not be able to answer certain questions at all.
What kinds of interesting trends have you noticed in your riders?
“We had a situation where we had these 13 30-foot buses that were sitting unused in reserve. These were purchased during the good times mainly to improve the optics of the transit agency, but because they are lower-capacity than a 40-foot bus they make runcutting more difficult since you wouldn’t want to put them on anything but low-ridership trips. Most of the public doesn’t realize that the operating cost savings of a 30-foot bus vs a 40-foot bus are negligible. It’d been years since we routinely used them in regular service.
One of the first projects I had when I got here was to take a really thorough look at the historic loads and determine which blocks could support 30-footers without cause undue discomfort for passengers. A block is the piece of work a bus does in a given day and it often includes serving trips on different routes. Looking at the 95 percentile loads of those blocks, we could predict with reasonable accuracy when you’d have a standing load. We were able to find a substantial number of blocks that could reasonably accommodate a 30-footer. This was around the time we were ordering new buses, so we were able to save some money on buses and add service. Not that you’d always want to mix capital and operating budgets, but it in this case it was a win-win and serves as a good example of being able to do something useful with all that data.
What do you think the future looks like for Pierce Transit? For the greater Seattle region? For transportation?
I am optimistic about our service area down here. I think it’s going to experience a lot of growth in the next couple decades as Seattle becomes saturated. A lot of the things that make Seattle neighborhoods great, those urban design elements, also make Tacoma great. It’s already experiencing some of that boil-over and I think it will continue to do so. The zoning’s already pretty permissive for enhancing density, but it just needs private capital to build it up. If the current generations continue to drive less and not own two cars per household, it looks promising that we can improve our service even more and help build an interesting, dense, and vibrant community. Transit supports that.
In doing long range planning, you never know about what random outliers might arise. Relatively few people saw the Internet coming and even fewer could envision how that would impact our society. So who knows what other technological innovation is going to come along and revolutionize transit? When you think about all the work that automakers are doing with self-driving cars, if that ever got into transit that could totally change the way we operate and do business. When you consider the fact that currently 85 percent of operating costs are tied to the human behind the wheel, the amount of service that you could put out on the street would be a lot different. Do you even need a fixed route? Could you apply Uber’s pool model to transit? That’s something to think about and try to plan for if you can. There are so many things that haven’t been figured out. People are willing to share an elevator with a total stranger and that doesn’t even have windows. Would people be willing to trade the security reassurance of having a driver for a huge increase in service?
Remix is interviewing planners about their innovative work in public transit. This is one conversation in a series.
