Mobility Innovators

Richard Davey ([00:00]):

I’ve been in this business 20 years and mean distance between failure and on time performance and customer journey time. And you go down the list of all the things that we measure in this business are all important, but to me the absolute number one and most important is customer satisfaction. Someone made the joke to me once that if you’re running a 100 percent on time but you’re punching every customer in the face, they’re probably not going to be satisfied. And that’s not going to show up in your on time performance data, right? I mean, but it will show up in your customer satisfaction.

MIL ([00:38]):

Welcome to the Mobility Innovators Podcast.

Jaspal Singh ([00:45]):

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Mobility Innovator Podcast.

I’m your host, Jaspal Singh.

Mobility Innovator Podcast invites key innovators in the transportation and logistic sector to share their experience and future forecasts. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the role of transit in mega City.

Our today guest is responsible for managing the largest transit agency in North America. If you’re still guessing, it is New York City Transit, the agency responsible for subway, network and buses in the New York City. He joined as a president of New York City Transit in May 2022. Previously, he served as a director and partner at the Boston Consulting Group in their public sector and industrial good practice area. He also served as the CEO of Boston 2024, the organization that sought to bring the 2024 Summer Olympic and para Olympic games to Boston. He’s a transit enthusiast and was the Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation from September 2011 to October 2014. And previously the General Manager of MBTA.

I’m so happy to welcome Richard Davy, President of New York City Transit. Now it’s time to listen.

Hello Richard. I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. I’m really excited because given your long journey in the transportation and consulting space, I’m really excited to learn from your experience.

Richard Davey ([02:06]):

Well, thank you for having me. I look forward to sharing some thoughts and your questions, looking forward to the conversation.

Jaspal Singh ([02:13]):

Great. So I want to kickstart our discussion with your personal journey because I already shared in my intro with audience that you had worked with MBTA, Boston 2024 and Boston Consulting Group. You had such a long and interesting career. I’m curious to know some other interesting fact about your career and some highlight of your professional journey and anything you haven’t posted on LinkedIn.

Richard Davey ([02:39]):

Yeah, sure. So I’m an attorney by trade actually, and I didn’t take transportation courses or classes in college or high school for that matter. I think I came to this in part, I took public transportation to high school. I took the MBTA high school. I went to school just outside of Boston. I lived outside of Boston, but went to school in Boston. So I guess I’ve always had public transportation in my blood. But my first job out of law school, I actually worked at the INS, the Immigration and Naturalization service, which no longer exists. It was folded into the Department of Homeland Security after 9- 11. And I worked here in New York. So this is my second stint in New York City. I was a young lawyer here for three years and a resident of Manhattan during 9-11 actually. But I think in that year time I worked for the justice department for the government, learned a lot about people’s stories about why they wanted to immigrate to the United States.

Richard Davey ([03:44]):

Many folks were seeking asylum from countries that were pressing them based on their race or their gender or their political affiliation. And so I heard a lot of not always truthful stories, but many were and many were compelling. And so I think in that regard, I probably have still to this day as I look out my window by the way, and look over at Ellis Island here in New York, I still have an appreciation for the place where I work and live and that the United States with all of our imperfections and flaws is still a country that folks feel like they can come and bring their families and thrive. And I think that’s part of what we do in New York and in New York City Transit. We’re part of that ecosystem which allows folks, regardless of their income or their race or where they come from, to be able to get around our city and to contribute to the lives of their family or to contribute to our society.

Jaspal Singh ([04:51]):

Amazing. I didn’t know a lot of these facts and it’s very interesting the way you described and I feel the job is a perfect place to learn. You don’t learn in college. You really want to learn, go into the job and learn. And like you, I never studied transportation and here I am, I’m working in the sector. So great to see and thanks for sharing that.

Now, other question I have is now you control, and everybody agreed that life of a transit, CEO, especially North America, is not easy. It’s really tough job, very hard job, and you really need to get your hand dirty. And on the other hand, the life of a consultant is a bit easier, not too much, but bit easier. What inspire you to take this role of president of New York City Transit and what vision you have for the future of public transportation in New York City, like you mentioned, it’s your second stint.

Richard Davey ([05:46]):

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I had some government experience in Massachusetts and worked for a great governor, Deval Patrick when I was there and decided I wanted to try back to the private sector. So working for BCG, which is one of the largest consulting firms in the world, was there for about five years and had a chance to consult with and provide advice to a whole host of clients including transit systems, both here in the US and abroad actually. And I would say this about consulting, you get a broad perspective on what other systems are doing. I would just say that interestingly enough for, and I won’t name them, but some of your listeners who work at some of the best transit systems in the world, we hold up in the United States as the examples we wanted to embody. They themselves admitted they weren’t perfect and sought our help, which was interesting.

Richard Davey ([06:56]):

But I will say this, I think the frustrating part of being a consultant is you’re giving advice. You’re not an implementer necessarily. And so probably about 30% of the time what we suggested was actually implemented and the other 70% for whatever reason or reasons wasn’t, and I missed the ability to implement and to be part of a team that takes that advice, if you will, and make a system or a city better. New York, John Lieber, who’s my boss, reached out and he’s got a great reputation. I like John. I wouldn’t work for just anybody and I was happy to come work for him. But to have the opportunity to come and work and live in New York, I mean it’s just an opportunity for someone like you and I who were in transportation. It was just too good to pass up. And so it’s not something that I necessarily aspired to or had on my list of things I wanted to do before I retired. But when the opportunity came about, hard to say no. I would argue the pinnacle of public transportation in North America.

Jaspal Singh ([08:26]):

Oh yeah, it’s a largest agency. And also in fact, I started my career in consulting and the biggest thing I feel bore in consulting is not ability to implement and you just give advice, create report, but you don’t see implement. And when you work in transit, you see people and I see a lot of your video, you actually go on a ground and you want to see and mingle with people and see how it is impacting their life. And you feel some satisfaction. I tell people public transit is the most social and noble work one can do because you are helping people to reach to the destination and do that.

Richard Davey ([09:02]):

And the other thing I was say, the other thing I’ll build upon that if you don’t mind, is what I love about public transportation is that you can be forward thinking. You talked about the future of transportation and you can think about 10- 15- 20 year segments, but I also have a rush hour to deliver today. When I became General Manager of the MBTA, now 14 years ago or so, my mom, my mother gave me a clock with a quote on it that said, you’re only as good as your last rush hour. So that’s like my mother judging me twice a day.

But as a transit, CEO, regardless of where you are in the world, right, you’ve got that cadence call rush hours, but that cadence to deliver on a daily basis. But then you’re thinking about new signal systems, CBTC, which I know we’re going to talk about over the next 10 years or here in New York, we’re on the verge of implementing congestion pricing, which has been talked about for 15 years if not longer, in New York City. And we’re about to put out a capital plan in the fall draft capital plan that looks at what our needs are five years and beyond. So that’s what I love about this job and being in public transit is there’s the here and now delivering right now we’re in the middle of a Friday afternoon rush hour here in New York, but we also need to chart a course for the next decade or beyond.

Jaspal Singh ([10:28]):

That’s a beautiful quote. You are as good as the last rush hour. So life is not easy and I feel you are also lucky in a sense. A lot of people don’t know that you work on two of the oldest system in the world, the Boston, which was started in 1897 and New York, which started in 1904. So there are very few CEO who get that opportunity to work on these old system. And I’m curious, what are the lessons you learned working in these legacy system? It’s old. It has a heritage value, it change. And I know you are focus on innovation and technology and you want to bring these innovations, these actions, but issue is the change management. So I would love to know some initiative you’re doing at New York. I know you’re doing a lot of things, but something you want to share.

Richard Davey ([11:17]):

Yeah, the interesting thing about working in two systems that are over 120 years olds mean, so the history and the DNA of a city in some instances, maybe places like Atlanta for example, or even as Phoenix continues to build out its system, it’s not quite part of the social fabric or the civic fabric, although I think it’s building in that direction. But here everyone has a New York subway story and in Boston it’s pretty similar where everyone sort of has a T-story, whether they were growing up in the city or taking commuter rail back into the city. So there’s a DNA, there’s a commonality, there’s a bonding. And here New York in particular, regardless of your income level or who you are, where you come from. There was a story a couple days ago that Billy Joel took his a train into his last concert or one of his last concerts at Madison Square Garden.

Richard Davey ([12:17]):

You see New Yorkers of all sort of stripes, if you will, using the system. So everyone sort of has a story. And I think capturing that sort of magic as you tell a story about why public transportation’s important, I think that can resonate in cities like New York and Boston. Now the obvious flip side is everything’s really old and people, elected officials, citizens, business people get excited usually about new things. Extensions, the green line extension to Somerville for example in Boston or our most recent extension like the seven line to Hudson Yards, which has created this whole new neighborhood in the sort of Midtown west on Manhattan. But we have signal systems that were installed here in the 1950s or rail that was installed a hundred years ago. And that infrastructure that might not be glamorous or sexy needs to have a constituency as well. And I have found that old systems have a hard time building a constituency and building a group of individuals who understand that the investment required can’t see it, but needs to be consistent in order for that reliability to occur. And I think that’s a challenge is building and even with the FTA and the USDOT, some of their funding programs in the past have been very focused on new starts, new programs, but I think as of in the last few years, they’ve really focused around state of good repair, which is great. But I think those are some of the challenges for older systems is getting citizens, writers, elected officials to understand that there’s a lot of investment that it has to occur in order to keep that infrastructure reliable.

Jaspal Singh ([14:16]):

In fact, I read one of the project you’re doing is, which nobody thought about, is changing the lighting system in the station and it was fluorescent light and the world has moved LED long back, but it doesn’t look glamorous. Nobody care about it, but it has big impact on the safety security.

Richard Davey ([14:36]):

We’re changing 150,000 light bulbs across the system, but the stations will be brighter, they’ll look cleaner and they’ll be safer actually. And they’ll also save us money. On the change management question you asked about. Quickly, I would say that the good news is we have a lot of folks here who have significant tenure in some instances their families have worked here. So there’s great history and knowledge. But I would say generally speaking, and this isn’t just in government organizations, I’ve also seen it a large private sector organizations is there is a reluctance, there’s a risk aversion, there’s typically an aversion to take a risk. And that’s because in some instances, risks aren’t rewarded or if taking a risk, not a risk that has a safety attached to it, for example. But if you take a risk and start a new app or a new program or something and it fails, particularly in the public sector, there’s a lot of media who want to be critical or criticized as opposed to praise. They took a risk, it didn’t work, and let’s try something new. I think that’s the biggest challenge in an organization like this, which is the risk aversion and creating an environment where it’s okay to fail, it’s okay, and you just pick yourself up and move on. I know that sounds easy and as I said, it’s just not government. It’s larger organizations in the private sector too. But creating that culture is hard. It’s very hard.

Jaspal Singh ([16:06]):

Credit goes to you because I see that culture is now being implemented in New York City.

Richard Davey ([16:13]):

We have work to do

Jaspal Singh ([16:15]):

I know, I know. But at least at the leadership level, when you say the tolerance of failure and giving freedom to people, it’s amazing thing. And I know one of the recent project, which you also got award from UITP is about this predictive maintenance. And you expanded that project, would love to know a little more about, because New York has large fleet of buses and you implemented this predictive maintenance project and how you’re achieving cost saving with that project.

Richard Davey ([16:42]):

So we’ve done a lot and I appreciated the recognition for the team that has been pushing this, right? So I think this is a place where our industry generally hasn’t done a very good job of considering how predictive maintenance and predictive technology can help us improve reliability. So as you said on buses, what we did is took a technology and overlaid it on our bus telematics and with some success we were able to predict for a particular component of the bus, a failure before it failed. And so we were able to get the bus out of service before or not send it even on out in the road before we had customers on it. And then what was also beginning to develop too is then the telematics became so smart that rather than the mechanics we had or have having to diagnose the problem, in fact it would not only predict a failure but then say to the mechanic, change these two parts.

Richard Davey ([17:39]):

So it would provide a repair plan as well. So we got rid of the diagnostic and went right to the repair plan. So that saved us time and it saved us on parts. We were specifically changing the right part. So we’re out now to bid to see if there are other folks out there who can provide this scale.

And then we started to do a little bit of this on our infrastructure side as well. I’m very interested in understanding how we can use predictive maintenance for track, circuit, signal, switches. Again, predicting failure before it fails out in our system. And we’ve started a little bit that. And then finally car equipment too, to the extent that any of your listeners work for major rolling stock companies. Here’s a hint, if you’re pitching us for rolling stock, this is something I am very interested in. So the cutting edge companies to the extent they have, and I think that would bode well for all systems across the world, not just in New York, but I think predictive maintenance is the wave of the future for transit and will help reliability wherever it’s rolled out.

Jaspal Singh ([18:48]):

Yeah, in fact in Europe now they’re going next step of predictive, they’re saying more prescriptive maintenance. So they’re saying, why do I do predictive? I just know that five year this is going to happen and how I can maintain my fLeet health. So I’m happy to share more detail on that.

Richard Davey ([19:03]):

But your point, using data, right? That’s all about data. So in that instance, rather than saying what the OEM says or what a regulation might say, and we did this a little bit too, looking at our overhauls of our rolling stock here on the subway side, we were doing a six year overhaul maintenance overhaul, and we did a whole big data analysis and saw that in fact, six and a half years was the right time to do this major overall. So we’ve switched with, again, improved costs but no impacts to reliability.

Jaspal Singh ([19:37]):

That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing that and talking about infrastructure as well. One thing, I was checking your LinkedIn profile and really loved your headline. When you say customer satisfaction is a north star, because not many people talk about North Star, especially in transit world, we always talk about the vehicle and the maintenance and the staff, but you talk about customer satisfaction and I saw you visit on the ground and I saw one of your video, you were talking to people who parked in the bus lane and telling them not to park in the bus lane. It’s a bus lane while you’re park your vehicle. So just want to understand how you are looking at increasing the customer satisfaction by using technology to improve the efficiency, safety and overall experience.

Richard Davey ([20:23]):

So I’ve been in this business 20 years and mean distance between failure and on time performance and customer journey time. And you go down the list of all the things that we measure in this business are all important. But to me the absolute number one and most important is customer satisfaction. Someone made the joke to me once that if running a hundred percent on time, but you’re punching every customer in the face, they’re probably not going to be satisfied. And that’s not going to show up in your on time performance data, but it will show up in your customer satisfaction. Obviously that is an exaggeration. But so what we’re doing here in New York City Transit, when I started as president two years ago, we started at what we’d call a pulse survey. So on a monthly basis we’re getting about a few thousand customers on bus, subway and paratransit, which are the three modes I’m responsible for to see what the customer’s mood is and getting details on safety and performance and cleanliness.

Richard Davey ([21:23]):

And then every six months, Jaspal, what we’re doing is doing a deep dive. We’re getting over a hundred thousand customers to respond and that we get by bus route and station and we can really then dig deep into what our customer sentiments are and then as a result, move resources to more cleaning staff here or you talked about the LED program we have, we’re starting that in stations where we have lower customer satisfaction scores so that we’ve really reoriented New York City Transit. And I’m proud of this. And whenever I leave someday, I think this is the thing I’ll probably leave behind, is that folks will be reoriented to customer satisfaction as the north star, as the number one metric, the bus lane. I always think that subways in every city I’ve consulted and I worked in typically wins the day. People love trains. Sometimes the customers are more unified and are louder, but our bus customers tend to be less organized, usually from poor communities or minority communities that aren’t as organized.

Richard Davey ([22:33]):

And as a result, bus becomes a second class. We have put bus front and center here. We’re doing a bunch of things, but one thing that as you saw on my LinkedIn I’m a little obsessed with is cars parked or using bus lanes and I have a ticket book over to my left. I can actually write tickets. I took a course, an hour course, which is not that efficient nor effective, but in May we will be sending out on our buses, our buses will become cameras on wheels. And so we can now ticket cars that are parked in bus lanes, but starting in May in New York, we’ll not only be able to do that, but we be able to ticket cars that are parked in bus stops, which is also a pet peeve of mine. It’s also a civil rights issue too. Our customers who are disabled in wheelchairs, sometimes we have to put them out in traffic because that’s crazy.

Richard Davey ([23:34]):

And then cars that are double parked along our roads that get in the way of buses. So we are obsessed with our number one issue for our bus customers in New York City is wait times and speed. So the more we can speed up, the happier they’ll be, the quicker they’ll get from where they’re picked up to their destination. So we’ve made a huge effort to get the word out. And by the way, from the data we’ve seen behavior changes. Like once a New Yorker gets a ticket from a bus, 80% of those folks never get another ticket. Their behavior changes immediately. So I think this works, and I would love to see this in other cities. I have no doubt it will work in other cities as well.

Jaspal Singh ([24:16]):

That’s amazing. And in fact, I don’t know if a lot of people know that you don’t own a car.

Richard Davey ([24:22]):

I don’t. true,

Richard Davey ([24:23]):

That’s true. I have not owned a car since 2010, I think. And it’s a funny story. I’ll tell you a quick story. So this goes to show you, so one Christmas, one of my gifts from my wife Jane, was a membership to Zipcar, so it’s the car sharing program. And I said, honey, this is really great, but we own a car. She said, no, I donated it two weeks ago. So the car had been gone for two weeks and I didn’t notice it. I didn’t notice it. So it goes to show you how often I use the car. It could have been stolen, but she just donated it without telling me and I didn’t know. But no, we rely heavily on public transit, Zipcar, as I mentioned as well, and we’re able to get around.

Jaspal Singh ([25:09]):

That’s amazing. Thanks for sharing that story. And I remember when you’re a user of yourself, so you see a lot of thing in the system, and that’s what I’m seeing more and more North America, most of the CEOs are now user of transit, so they firsthand experience and change. Now, one of the key challenge for the legacy system, like you mentioned, is asset renewal. And it’s also rolling stocks, signaling system like you mentioned. And one of the sad thing in us right now is that we don’t have any city with a complete CBTC communication based on Train control in the US.

Richard Davey ([25:45]):

Correct.

Jaspal Singh ([25:46]):

In Canada, we are lucky, we have two cities, Vancouver and Montreal now, but in US, we don’t have even any city which what’s a New York City plan in that area. And why do you think US city should adopt the system quickly?

Richard Davey ([25:59]):

Yeah, so I mean our plan is to do it across the system, but it’s going to take time. It’s incredibly expensive. We don’t shut down. We’re a 24 hour operation seven day a week. And so the CBTC that we are building out, we’re building out a few lines now we’re doing it around service that we’re running. But on the flip side, CBTC, so our L line and our 7th line both have full CBTC. The L line, a little older technology, but it is still CBTC. The seven lines are very new, reasonably new and not surprising. Those are our best performing lines with the highest customer satisfaction.

Richard Davey ([26:45]):

So I mean, that is the reason, right? You can run obviously as folks know rather than a block technology, you can run trains safely that run closer together. So you have shorter headways on the seven line that runs from Hudson Yards. By the way, my home station, so I’m in the seven line every day to Queens out to just east of where the New York Mets play baseball. We run service every two-three minutes during rush hour. And those trains are reasonably full. And by the way, when there are Mets games, of which there are 81 year at least, those trains are very busy. Or when the US open comes the tennis tournament in late August, early September. I mean those trains are packed. It’s the best way to get out. Or if you want to go to LaGuardia Airport for that matter. So we have, but CBTC coming back to New York, it just greatly improves your reliability, your throughput, and at the end of the day, customer satisfaction. So some of that is wrapped up in our congestion pricing. And so once we get congestion pricing, those dollars are dedicated to our capital program, but we’re going to continue to push for CBTC across the system for sure.

Jaspal Singh ([27:59]):

Oh, that’s amazing. I agree with you that it improved the reliability and with the reliability, customer satisfaction will increase with the CBTC. One of the other challenges coming is you’ve seen this autonomous mobility and now Waymo is expanding. They are in San Francisco, they are in LA and expanding, and I feel in next five years we will see much more Robo taxis around different cities and around the globe. What impact do you see for transit player in coming year and any plan that New York City want to implement some autonomous technology for buses or some other vehicles?

Richard Davey ([28:35]):

Yeah, so it’s interesting. I remember when I was transportation secretary of Massachusetts 10 years ago, and we were predicting 10 years from now, the technology would be ubiquitous. And I was vacationing in Phoenix and Scottsdale a few weeks ago, and I saw the very first Waymo autonomous vehicle one. So we’ll see about the scale, but it’s clearly coming. And I would say a few things. Autonomy probably helps, for example, individuals who are unable to drive, customers who are disabled, for example. And paratransit is maybe a place where we might see, although if the customer needs assistance getting in and out of vehicle, that’s something different. But that might be something where we see that as sooner. In terms of adoption, I think here in New York, we’re probably a long way off. Obviously there are union considerations. Our jobs for our bus operators are very good middle class jobs in a city where middle class jobs are harder and harder to find, particularly for those who maybe didn’t go to college.

Richard Davey ([29:46]):

But the streets here are incredibly complex and with dining structures these days and something like we are doing a pilot right now with a company to improve our real-time bus information to our customers, and they did a study and said something like 20% of our bus routes on a daily basis are on some kind of a detour, just give you a sense for the construction and protests. And New York is a very dynamic place. So I think for the road, I’m not sure, maybe we’ll see it in other cities. As I said, maybe in a Phoenix or a Fort Lauderdale where you have wider streets, more investment has been made in streets, for example, and the street grid is a little more predictable, but it will have an impact. That said, then you’ve got to think about single occupancy vehicles. Again, probably less so here because we’ll have congestion pricing.

Richard Davey ([30:55]):

So we’re going to try to incentivize folks to utilize public transit. But what we’ve also seen in this city is with cars in the road and congestion, safety issues increase. So pedestrian and bicycle accidents, emergency vehicles have a harder time getting around the road. And then the other question is electrification. That’s something else everyone’s looking at. But again, we’re probably 10-20 years away from material electrification of vehicles. Obviously we have a plan to electrify or to go to zero emissions for all of our buses, but that’s still 16 years away to get to a 100 percent. So autonomy, zero emission vehicles, they’re coming not as soon as probably we expected. But over the next, I would say 20 years is probably the timeframe where changes occur, but certainly not in the next five.

Jaspal Singh ([31:55]):

Amazing. So this is my last question. One thing I want to check is there is a lot of discussion about this artificial intelligence and Generative AI. What do you see the potential use case in mobility space for Gen AI?

Richard Davey ([32:07]):

Yeah, I mean I think there’s a few things. Security for example, is a bit of a focus of ours right now. And so can AI be overlaid on our camera system, for example, and see if folks have, for example, a weapon on them trying to come into their subway system. I mean obviously there are privacy concerns as it relates to using facial recognition and what not. I think that’s a question that we as a society will need to grapple with. But I think AI for purposes of weapons detection is something that may be nascent but might be interesting for us to take a look at in the future. I think AI as well can help us with that predictive maintenance question I raised earlier, right? So taking these incredible amounts of data that we have and we have a lot of data, but really using AI to generate some high performing analytics to help us improve our service, for example, I think that’s another important and practical use of AI. But I also think too, as I mentioned, there are privacy concerns that need to be considered in the public space.

Jaspal Singh ([33:18]):

Yeah, thank you so much, Richard. I mean, thank you for sharing your knowledge. Generally, I end this podcast with a rapid fire question round. Great. Generally to no personal side of your, and if you’re ready, I’ll start with my rapid fire.

Richard Davey ([33:31]):

Go for it.

Jaspal Singh ([33:32]):

Okay. So my first question will be if you are not in transit or consulting space, what other profession you would’ve selected?

Richard Davey ([33:39]):

Maybe a game show host.

Jaspal Singh ([33:43]):

Any particular reason for that? Or just

Richard Davey ([33:46]):

As a kid? I remember watching the prices, right? And my mother would tell me that when she had friends over for lunch, I was three years old. I’d be always giving out a new refrigerator, a new car to one of her friends. I don’t know why, but because I like to make people happy. I don’t know. But

Jaspal Singh ([34:04]):

That’s a reason you like to make people happy. I love that line. Now you travel across the world and seen different cities, and I know you will be wise, but which is your favorite city in the world and why?

Richard Davey ([34:15]):

Oh, Paris. I love Paris. I mean, the city is beautiful. The people are lovely. I was able, when I worked for the commuter rail, which was the majority shoulder was Veolia. I now Transdev. I would a couple times a year spend time in Paris for business and absolutely loved Paris. So if there’s any place, Tokyo is a close second I would say, but Paris, Paris is my favorite.

Jaspal Singh ([34:44]):

Amazing. It’s a favorite for many people. And you have an Olympics this year, so more reason for you to go there.

Richard Davey ([34:50]):

It’s very true.

Jaspal Singh ([34:51]):

Which is your favorite book?

Richard Davey ([34:54]):

Remembering America by a guy named Dick Goodwin. So Doris Kerns Goodwin was a famous historian in the United States. Her husband wrote a book and it’s about basically his time as a speech writer for President Kennedy and then ultimately President Johnson. So it’s an amazing book about the history of the US in the 1960s, so the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and all the tumult that was occurring, and it’s a great storyteller.

Jaspal Singh ([35:26]):

Amazing. I’ll read that. I’ll go back and this is my last question now, and is if you can change one thing in life, what would it be?

Richard Davey ([35:35]):

In my life or in life generally?

Jaspal Singh ([35:37]):

Anything.

Richard Davey ([35:38]):

Anything. Well, I would probably give a Metro card or an Omni card to every New Yorker since they try to use our system Bus or Subway at least once a day.

Jaspal Singh ([35:54]):

Amazing. I wish everybody wants to have that card. Probably when I come next time, I’ll claim from you to get it.

Richard Davey ([36:01]):

Well, I should say you don’t need either. You can just tap and go if you’ve got a de credit card. So we have an open system. How’s that?

Jaspal Singh ([36:07]):

That’s amazing. No, thank you so much, Richard. I know you have such a busy schedule, so thank you for taking time out from,

Richard Davey ([36:15]):

I very much enjoyed the conversation and thank you and UITP for all you do to help our industry continue to improve. So thank you.

Jaspal Singh ([36:22]):

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I’m looking forward to see you. Take care.

Richard Davey ([36:25]):

Yes, take care.

Jaspal Singh ([36:26]):

Bye-Bye bye. Thank you for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode, please don’t forget to give us a five star rating as it’ll help us to spread our message. If you have any feedback or suggestion for this podcast, please feel free to reach out to us at info at the rate mobility innovators.com. I look forward to see you next time. Thank you.