Mobility Innovators

Nadine Lee ([00:00:00]):

Since I’ve been here, we’ve really dramatically improved the quality of our services. And we’ve been really trying to focus on security, cleanliness, and reliability because those are the three core things that are important to people in order for them to even consider writing dart. And also, are we going where people want to go? What I always say to people, you’ve probably heard me say this before, but what I always say to people is that we are in a long-term relationship with our customers. We want to court them, we want them to love us, and at the end of the day, we want them to be with us for life and so we need to figure out how we do that. In the United States, when you have a light rail line, you have these massive surface parking lots that become a huge barrier between the surrounding neighborhood and our platform. And what we want to do is start to blend that space so that we can bring people closer to our platform and they can see that DART is part of the fabric of the community in terms of the built environment. So we are working really hard to figure out how we leverage our land assets to do more for our communities. Welcome to the Mobility Innovators Podcast.

Jaspal Singh ([00:01:13]):

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 logistics sector to share their experience and future forecasts. In this episode, we’ll be discussing the urban mobility landscape in Dallas, a city in Texas.

Today guest is responsible for running transit system in Dallas. She’s a president and CEO of Dallas Area Rapid Transit. She aims to improve the rider experience, enhance service reliability, and increase ridership in the car-centric Dallas region. With nearly 30 years of experience in transit agency, she bring a wealth of experience in public transportation management and infrastructure project. Prior to Jan Dart, she held a key leadership position at Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Metro, where she worked as a chief of staff and Deputy chief Innovation Officer.

One of our notable achievements, LA Metro was leading the development of Vision 2028, a strategic plan, aim at improving mobility for Los Angeles County Desert. Before her time at Element Metro, she played a crucial role at Denver Regional Transportation District where she managed a project like Flatiron Flyer Bus Rapid Transit, which significantly boosted transition. I’m so happy to welcome Nadine Lee, president and CEO of Dallas area Rapid Transit. It’s now time to listen.

 

Jaspal Singh ([00:02:34]):

Hello, Nadine. I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. Thank you for taking time out from your busy. I know it’s a lot going on in Dallas, so thanks for taking time out on Thursday evening.

Nadine Lee ([00:02:44]):

Of course, Jaspal, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

Jaspal Singh ([00:02:48]):

Great. So why don’t we kickstart something with your personal journey. You’ve had such an amazing journey in public transportation sector, work on many key projects in Denver, Los Angeles, and now in Dallas. It’ll be very interesting to know what are some of the key milestone in your career so far and any interesting fact about your career, which is not on LinkedIn or not many people aware about it.

Nadine Lee ([00:03:11]):

Well, I have to remember what I actually have on LinkedIn. That’s the first thing. But in terms of major milestones in my career, as I think about the things that really were turning points for me, I think I have to start out by reminding everybody that the original job that I had in my career, the first job I had in my career was actually as a highway design engineer where I worked for a consulting company in Kansas City, designing highways, designing roadways, and doing something that I was not really that excited about. I was kind of embarrassed to tell people what I was doing for a living. And about six years into that, I had this opportunity to move, moved to Denver and work in transit still in consulting, so on the private side, but to work in transit. And that specific project was now the Southeast light rail line in Denver, and I was working on it when it was still called T-Rex Transportation expansion.

Nadine Lee ([00:04:13]):

But that was a really important point in my career where I made this decision to go work in transit and I really haven’t turned back since. So I did that for a few years starting in 1998. And then in 2006, the Fast Tracks initiative passed. It was a ballot initiative that was designed to fund the transportation, the light rail expansion and transit expansion in the Denver metropolitan region. And so at that point I thought, wow, if I could get a job in the public sector, that would be amazing. And so at the time, RTD, the Regional Transportation District in Denver, because they had this huge program, they had to hire project managers, and as you probably know, government doesn’t pay as well as the private sector.

Nadine Lee ([00:04:58]):

And so a young upstart like me, I was willing to work for next to nothing. And so I applied for a job, they made me an offer. And it was really exciting because, and back in that day I didn’t realize that in the private sector I was not likely to be able to lead a big light rail project the way I would’ve wanted to. But going into the public sector, I was able to do that. There were so many people 10 years older than me at that time who were running these big projects and they weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t about to retire or anything. So it was really important for me to move into the public sector so that I could actually manage projects and be that decision maker on these transit projects. So what happened then was I ended up getting assigned to a bus rapid transit project. So a lot of people when they think about big transportation or transit expansion programs, they’re thinking a build out of light rail or commuter rail. And I had the one bus project and all of fast tracks, which the bus had no tracks. So it was always sort of the redhead stepchild of the fast tracks program. But what I used to say was it is the biggest major corridor investment in fast tracks that is not rail.

Nadine Lee ([00:06:21]):

So it was like my selling point. So it was kind of like this mission for me to sell the BRT project when everybody was focused on rail. So it became this really interesting way to craft storytelling. So that made a big difference for me in my career. And then just as my BRT project was opening, the BRT project is now known as the Flatiron Flyer, and it is a really successful BRT project in the Denver metro area. It serves Denver to boulder that route. But as soon as we opened that, I had this opportunity to go work at LA Metro in the Office of Extraordinary Innovation. And I’ll tell you that the reason that wasn’t a significant milestone is because it was a big departure from the traditional engineering and career path. And

Nadine Lee ([00:07:10]):

I was really, in my mind, I was risking all of my education and the career that I had built as an engineer and doing construction and things like that and saying, you know what? I’m just going to throw that away and go work in innovation, which was already something that was very, everybody was talking about innovation, but nobody really knew how to do it. And so Phil Washington, who was my boss back in Denver, he ultimately became the CEO at LA Metro and he started this office of Extraordinary Innovation and we created this department that had not existed in any transit agency before, at least not in the United States.

Nadine Lee ([00:07:52]):

And it was kind of a joke like we always said, because everyone said, what isn’t ordinary innovation good enough? You have to be extraordinary. And the joke was, well, if you don’t know why it’s extraordinary innovation, then you’re missing the point. Because we wanted to be the best. We wanted to be much more progressive and out of the box thinking than anyone else. We wanted to be really at the bleeding edge of the industry. So we had a startup department, did a lot of really interesting things. And ultimately I think that set me on a path to become the chief of staff at LA Metro, which then of course when Phil Washington decided to leave Metro, I was positioned to apply for the job as CEO of DART. And fortunately, the progression of all the things, the cumulative effect of all the things that I learned at those major milestones in my career, I think added up to becoming the CEO of DART.

Jaspal Singh ([00:08:51]):

That’s amazing. And I would say extraordinary journey starting from a highway engineer to a CEO of a public transit company. And it’s good you move from highway to public transit because we are friends, otherwise we would have been fighting with each other. But it’s good now we are friends.

Nadine Lee ([00:09:06]):

Well, and now I’m not embarrassed to tell people what I do for a living

Jaspal Singh ([00:09:10]):

And now you feel proud, but at the same time I feel highway is also important because buses use those roads and everybody is important. We tell people we need everybody, but the share of public transport should be more and travel. But what a journey. Thank you so much for sharing. And I think a couple of important point, which you mentioned is taking risk in life. Sometime we need to jump in for unknowns, leaving your engineer career and thinking about let’s go for innovation, which is more management side, but it all pays off. And I always feel that it’s always important to have a role of a mentor. So finding a right mentor in your life play a very big role in your career. So great to see. And I’m pretty sure you’ll be mentoring a lot of other young talent and carry forward that light.

Jaspal Singh ([00:09:53]):

So thanks. Thanks Nadine for sharing this course. Now about your current role. You mentioned about you moved from LA to Dallas in 2021 and la a city of angel or I would say a city of a good public transit network because they have light rail, they have system, metro buses and all. And you move to a city Dallas, which I will not say it’s not a good city, it’s a nice city, but they don’t have a many public transit network and it’s not a city which is known for public transit. And top of that, you move during the pandemic time, which is not the right move where people were just holding on what they have. Again, you took a risk unknown jump. So I’m curious to know why that move and how you feel that DART has evolved in last four years from 2021 to 2024 now. And if you can share a little bit about the DART mandate, what DART do, and because this podcast is international, so a lot of people, if they’re not aware about Dallas and where Dallas is and how big is DART, so it’ll be good for them.

Nadine Lee ([00:10:51]):

Well thank you for that question. Let me start with a little bit about Dart itself. So DART is we are the public transit authority in a 700 square mile service area. We cover 13 cities in the north Texas, what we call metroplex, which is all of the cities within the metroplex and we directly operate the bus and the light rail system. We also run a micro transit system, which is contracted service. We run a commuter rail system in partnership with Trinity Metro from Fort Worth, which is also a contracted service. And then we also run Paratransit, which is contracted. So we run the full spectrum of transit modes here. And I think in the past we’ve dabbled a little bit in things like bike share and scooters and things like that, but that’s all coming back now. And mostly in the hands of the cities that we serve.

Nadine Lee ([00:11:46]):

Our area is about two and a half million, maybe 2.7 million people. And the broader metroplex is getting close to 8 million people. And so we only serve a fraction of our metroplex. So our mandate really is trying to provide additional mobility services for the people in our service area because we know, as everyone knows in the world, we know that we can’t build ourselves out of this problem that we have with trying to transport people from point A to point B. And so we are doing everything we can to improve the services for our customers because we know that transit is the best way to move people.

Nadine Lee ([00:12:31]):

When I came here, I think you asked me a little bit about what drew me to DART in the first place. And I’ll tell you that the board, the board of directors, when they were recruiting for a new CEO, they were very thoughtful about what they wanted to accomplish with their new CEO. And so even their job description was very clear about wanting to improve writer experiences. So I mean, as the story goes, when the recruiter first called me, there were a couple of jobs that he was recruiting for and he told me about each one of them and I was like, I’m not interested in moving to Dallas, so don’t, don’t bother telling me about that job. And because he is a good recruiter, he said, well, let me just tell you because I think you might be interested in this. And so he started talking about how this board was very interested in improving writer experiences and they’re very interested in leveraging transit and all these things.

Nadine Lee ([00:13:24]):

And there were enough things that were in alignment with what my philosophy was for transit that I was like, alright, send me the job description, I’ll read it, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be applying for that job. And so of course as the story goes, I mean at every step of the way, I kept being very skeptical that this is something I would really do because I didn’t want to move to Texas, didn’t want to move to Dallas. But in the end I went through four interviews and at every turn they kept surprising me by saying all the things that were very, very much in alignment with all the things that I’ve always wanted to do. And I remember telling my colleague at LA Metro who I had worked with in the office of Extraordinary Innovation, I said, everything we always talked about doing at LA Metro can be done at dart.

Nadine Lee ([00:14:17]):

It’s possible at dart because the potential is there, there’s alignment, the planets have aligned. So they offered me the job, I took the job obviously. So moved here. And what I came into was an organization that of course during the pandemic had to decide how it was going to be functioning and with the uncertainty related to revenues and things like that. DART had offered a voluntary retirement incentive program. And the result of that was that over 350 people took that incentive program. And so we were down about 500 staff when I first came, and that’s 500 out of, at that time, 3,700 people. So quite a few people, about 15% of the population of employees. And with that retirement program, we’d lost a ton of institutional knowledge. And so I had to rebuild I to rebuild the staffing, but in order to rebuild the staffing, I had to lift a hiring freeze that had been put in place because we were uncertain about our revenues. I had to hire an entirely new, almost entirely new leadership team. I restructured the leadership of the organization, made it flatter.

Nadine Lee ([00:15:33]):

So I have a lot more people on what we call our leadership round table, which is the executive team. There’s about 12 of us instead of four. So the decision making is much more inclusive than it used to be. I hired people of all walks of life with all different perspectives on how to do our business and really I think we’ve rebuilt the organization and we’ve stripped away as many unnecessary obstacles as we could. We’ve tried to empower our staff, we’ve asked them to rise to the occasion to contribute their ideas. So our organization is very different than it was when I inherited it. I think people are much more excited and empowered to do their best work. And I’m proud of that because it’s not just me, it’s the people who I’ve hired on the Leadership Roundtable who also share the same philosophies on empowering staff. And so it’s really something that we’re quite proud of right now. And so we’re just getting started. And so I feel like we’ve gotten ourselves to the point where I think we’re running a pretty well oiled machine at this point. And so I don’t think anything can really stop us at this point.

Jaspal Singh ([00:16:45]):

That’s amazing. I would say the best night for the CEO or a leader when you feel your team is very empowered and they have a common vision and then they’re working to achieve something greater, I think the best, that’s a best place for the CEO. You said a very strong line in the beginning, which I loved and I should use many places like Transit is the best way to move people. There is no other way to move people. So that’s transit, but it’s really great and I feel it’s a destiny which take you there. Like you said, you never want to come to Texas, you were saying, no, no, no, no, no, I don’t want to interview. But then hey, hey, you are. And not only you join, but this year is also special for you because you are reappointed as a CEO and president of dart. So congratulations first for that. So it means

Nadine Lee ([00:17:33]):

Yes, thank

Jaspal Singh ([00:17:34]):

You. You love the place so you’re not leaving soon, which is again interesting. And what you mentioned is it’s very important to think about the future and long-term plan and in recently that has really the 10 year strategic plan. And I really love the line. I watched the video and read the report. It’s very interesting and the point you mentioned about where that go, economic opportunities happen. So it’s not purely about moving people, but also creating life, creating wealth for people, creating job opportunity for people. So can you share a little more about the strategic plan and why it is important for DART now to have that strategic plan and what you want to achieve?

 

Nadine Lee ([00:18:13]):

Yeah, thank you. So the strategic plan, we call it point B because we’re trying to get people to point B. And so our strategic plan is centered around the concept of leveraging DART as a strategic economic and regional asset.

Nadine Lee ([00:18:30]):

Because we are a mobility asset for people, our region is about to welcome 4 million more people. So that’s 50% more people in the next 20 years. And so if you do the math on that, it’s about 200,000 more people a year. So we don’t know where they’re going to go right now according to the model, they’re projected to go to areas that are not served by transit. But as we’ve been tracking the influx of individuals to our area, they are actually starting to reside in the areas that are served by transit. So that’s actually very positive. But what that means is we need to provide more and better services for the population because right now we have what I would call a very low ridership. Given the number of people who are in our service area, I would love to see our ridership in the 500 thousands a day or close to a million a day.

Nadine Lee ([00:19:26]):

That’s something that we’ll have to build up to, but right now we’re carrying I think less than 200,000 a day. So we have a long way to go to attract people, but it’s not because we don’t run a good service. Since I’ve been here, we’ve really dramatically improved the quality of our services and we’ve been really trying to focus on security, cleanliness and reliability because those are the three core things that are important to people in order for them to even consider writing dart. And also, are we going where people want to go? When I first got here back in, actually it was about two years ago, we restructured our bus network. The bus network had not been looked at in 40 years. And so we’d been tweaking it all along, but we never did a wholesale restructure of the routes. And we’ve never really been as thoughtful until 2022. We’ve never been as thoughtful about where are the current travel patterns happening, where is the current travel demand and how can we restructure the bus network to capitalize on the areas where we can capture the best ridership, but also provide that coverage service that everyone needs so that people have access. And so that was a big thing that we did just right after I started working here. But building off of that, we know that we can leverage bus system.

Nadine Lee ([00:20:48]):

We know that we can provide much better services to everyone. And so our strategic plan, we rewrote the vision of the organization, we wrote the mission of the organization, and then we also set six new strategic goals that are organized in three kind of audiences. The first audience is our workforce. We want to empower our employees to do their best work and we want them, like I said earlier, we want them to rise to the occasion and

Nadine Lee ([00:21:13]):

Want to contribute to the outcomes we’re trying to achieve. So we want them to bring their creativity and their energy and their passion to make everything that we do better for our customers. And then the second bucket is about the quality and connectivity of our services for the customers. So we know that we can provide a better service and we know we can do it efficiently, but not everything we do has to make our lives better. We should really think about how we make the customer’s life better. And what I always say to people, you’ve probably heard me say this before, but what I always say to people is that we are in a long-term relationship with our customers. We want to court them, we want them to love us, and at the end of the day, we want them to be with us for life.

Nadine `Lee ([00:21:56]):

And so we need to figure out how we do that. And so that’s what the kind of second or the third and fourth goals of our strategic plan are about. The fifth and sixth goals are about community building and relationship building. The first part is fantastic spaces. It’s leveraging all of our land assets to try to do more for our communities to activate the space, to make them economically productive for our cities and for the communities that they’re in. Because a lot of times, and this is probably not as true in Europe or Asia, but in the United States, when you have a light rail line, you have these massive surface parking lots that become a huge barrier between the surrounding neighborhood and our platform. And what we want to do is start to blend that space so that we can bring people closer to our platform and they can see that DART is part of the fabric of the community in terms of the built environment. So we are working really hard to figure out how we leverage our land assets to do more for our communities. And along with that is just the recognition through our strategic relationships goal, the recognition that we don’t do things alone. We rely on working with our stakeholders, with our communities, with the residents nearby to integrate transit into the fabric of their life.

Jaspal Singh ([00:23:12]):

I mean, amazing, you remember all six of them by heart.

Nadine Lee ([00:23:16]):

I’ve been talking about it a lot.

Jaspal Singh ([00:23:18]):

So that show you are so committed and all of those points are really important. What you mentioned about the first is always employ because like we say, happy wife, happy life, it’s like happy employee, happy customer. So that’s very important. And taking customer’s points, having empathy for your customer is very important because sometimes we say, Hey, we are running the service, they’re not coming, but it’s not the service need to serve them. In fact, we had some European friend last week in US and they were shocked to see the parking lot near the station and they were like, how can you have such a big parking lot? You guys are living in luxury? I’m like, yeah, that’s a reality. And like you rightly said, it’s actually a barrier between a community and the transit. So how can you bring them closer? That’s very important and that play a huge role.

Jaspal Singh ([00:24:08]):

So thanks for sharing. And one important point you mentioned about the population of Dallas is growing and it’s really growing fast. I know many people in my network who moved to Dallas and they love the city, they didn’t love the transit yet, but I am pushing them to use more. So hopefully we will increase the ridership. But can you share some update about the dark major rail project? I know you love BRT more, but rail is also equally important part. I mean, you’re building two lines, silver line and the D2 subway. So can you share a little more about those real line and what are the biggest hurdle you are facing in terms of timeline and budget and how you’re addressing them? Because in today’s world, any infrastructure project leads a lot of efforts.

 

Nadine Lee ([00:24:52]):

Yeah, infrastructure projects, particularly in the US, I think are very challenging. And we have lots of financial constraints. So let me talk about D two first because D two is a project that for those people who are unfamiliar with D two, it’s the proposal to have a second light rail line through the downtown central business district in Dallas to provide an outlet or a relief valve for some of the pressure that we’re experiencing on Pacific Avenue where we run the light rail line through downtown. So it was about a four mile project proposed to be Subway, and of course there was a lot of excitement around the idea of having a metro and everybody likes grade separation or grade separated rail lines because it’s much more efficient to run. So we ran into a number of challenges. When I first got to DART back in 2021, we had taken about a year long pause to have a second look at the east end of the alignment and to determine what the appropriate alignment should be through that eastern section.

Nadine Lee ([00:26:06]):

And there were some questions about how a subway day lighting, a subway in our deep Ellum neighborhood might affect the, I don’t know, the values of the deep Ellum neighborhood and all the things they were trying to do to connect deep EL to downtown. So right now, deep Ellum is to the east of I 45. It’s kind where us 75 and I 45 converge and I think they call it three forty five too, but it was a big challenge. And so the city council in Dallas had asked us to take a pause that they’d spent an extra year exploring alternative alignments. And then at the end of that, it was just really unclear if there was really any big champion for the project. And for me, I know you mentioned how much I like BRT and buses more than I like rail, and there is a little bit of truth to that without getting into a big argument about which is better.

Nadine Lee ([00:27:06]):

I think everything has its place and everything has its utility. But I think from my perspective, I asked the question, are there improvements that we could be making to our existing light rail line through downtown Dallas that if we did those things right, could we increase the capacity of that part of our line? Because of course, that’s the bottleneck of the whole system because every line runs through there. And the answer was, yeah, there are a lot of things that we could do to improve the capacity of our current light rail. So in my mind it was, well, we have a whole lot of things we need to do to get our system to a state of good repair because it’s getting to be 30 years old. And so while we make those investments, should we not invest a little bit more and modernize our system and increase the capacity or the throughput through the downtown area?

Nadine Lee ([00:28:02]):

And ultimately maybe we could delay the need for a D two because even though it will cost more in the future, we didn’t really know when we would need it. And so what I didn’t want to do is sink a couple of billion in capital dollars into a project that doesn’t really give us the relief that we need when we could spend 2 billion or a billion dollars improving the state of affairs along the entire system. So we had a lot of conversations about that with the city of Dallas, with our board members, and ultimately we decided to push D two beyond the 20 year financial plan so that we could take some more time to figure out how we could invest in the system in a meaningful way that would still increase capacity without spending 2 billion there. And so D two is currently not in our financial plan.

 

Nadine Lee ([00:28:54]):

And again, we have a 20 year financial plan. Now on the flip side, the silver line is a significant 2 billion investment that connects from east to west our northern suburbs, so Plano, Richardson, Addison, farmers Branch, sorry, Carrollton, Carrollton. And so we’re connecting those cities up in the north from Shiloh Road and Plano all the way 26 miles over to the DFW airport. And that’s a significant connection point for our system. We have a lot of north-south travel on our system, but that’s because back in the day it was a hub and spoke system where everything was traveling through downtown Dallas, but now we’re going in just a year or so, we’re going to be opening the silver line. We’ve advanced the construction. When I first came on construction was sort of stalled. We were still trying to buy right of way for the project. And so in the last three years, we actually have dramatically advanced and progressed the project.

Nadine Lee ([00:30:00]):

And so we’re projecting in a revenue service date of end of 2025 or early 2026, and I’m hoping we can even beat that. But I think for that particular project, it is an important investment. We may not run a ton of service right away on it, but I think we’re projecting half hourly service most of the day. And so as the population grows and starts to use transit more, I think, and as congestion continues to plague us with all the people coming here, I think what will happen is people will more often start to ride the silver line and really use it to its maximum potential. So we’re really excited about the Silver Line project coming online in a little over a year. And in terms of the hurdles, there’s always something, right? There’s always something we didn’t discover. It’s the unforeseen things that we don’t plan well for or can’t plan well for.

Nadine Lee ([00:31:00]):

It’s nobody’s fault, but it’s always our problem. And so I think what we want to do is just keep our eye on the prize, which is getting to that revenue service state. And I think we’ve done a good job of working with our contractors and all the different people who are participating on the project. We’ve gotten them to understand the mission. Let’s figure out how to get to the end, get to the outcome we’re trying to achieve. And I will say, this isn’t just on the silver line, but you had asked me a little bit earlier about the strategic plan and we have spent a lot of time with our entire staff socializing what we’re trying to accomplish with our strategic plan. So everything that we do at DART right now is about giving people a good understanding of the vision we’re trying to achieve so that they understand and see themselves in that vision and understand what their role is in making that happen. And so we’re getting people to rally around the important things because from day to day you have your ups and downs, but if from day one to day 365 you’ve made progress, that’s what we want to do.

Jaspal Singh ([00:32:09]):

Yeah, that’s most important is where you are achieving what’s your destination and how you’re achieving that. And I agree, not all the day can be seen. Some days you have up, some day you have down, the important thing is just keep moving and delivering. And like you mentioned when you came in, the project was tall, but you move forward and now within three year, wow, now we are looking how to launch the project. So it’s great. And I think as a leader it’s also important to say no. So you saw that project is not bringing return, it’s not really benefit the people at large, so why not use that money for doing something else? But not saying like, no, no, no, we plan it and we need to spend and we need to do this. It’s as a leader, it’s very important to make those choices. And sometime you need to say no to things if you really want to roll out to grow. So thank you for sharing. I think probably you can teach other leader how to kickstart the style project and take them to the finish line, which is very interesting.

Nadine Lee ([00:33:11]):

Yeah, well, it is kind of interesting because just this morning we had a groundbreaking for our equipment maintenance facility for the Silver line, and Dee reminded me that we had actually previously had two other locations proposed for this facility, and it’s now in Plano at the end of line. And so it’s just a reminder that we, from day to day, sometimes we don’t realize that we’re progressing, right? Because it’s like,

Nadine Lee ([00:33:36]):

No, we’re going to have it here. No wait, we’re going to have it here instead. Oh wait, let’s try this other place. So I think we have to often, I think everyone in the industry should often look back at the things we have accomplished because we don’t give ourselves that grace and Don, we are not kind enough to ourselves because public transportation is hard. It is probably one of the hardest industries to work in because everybody has an opinion about how we do our jobs and nobody’s ever happy and we never have enough money. And so we have to kind of celebrate our successes whenever we can.

Jaspal Singh ([00:34:10]):

I always say the toughest job I have seen is the CEO of a public transit company. You need to cry alone because you are facing challenges from outside. At the same time, you need to keep the moral high and move forward. So thanks Nadine, for your service and doing this. And now I know you also love to write, you wrote a very good article in Passenger Transport in 2021, and I know you really feel excited about it because you sent it to people and say, Hey, this is what I believe how transit should work. And there was some three key point which I actually picked from your article. One is that you mentioned about, and you rightly said, all mode has its importance. So all the regional transportation partner need to work together to the best and the highest use, and we need to adjust that transit frequency to meet the demand.

Jaspal Singh ([00:35:01]):

So it’s not necessary to say that frequency need to be very high, but depending on the demand, you need to adjust and you indeed provide service. And I think the third point, which is in your strategic plan is to put a laser focus on existing customer retention. I mean, it’s good to look for new customer, but if your bucket is leaking, whatever water you’re putting in end of the day, the bucket will be empty. So it’s very important to retain those customer and they should become your lifelong. So like you mentioned in your strategic plan, so can you share a little more about why did you wrote that article and what exactly comes to your mind? And then how can transit agencies evolve themselves to retain and attack new riders? Because as a growth, like you mentioning now you’re investing in capital projects, so you want to attract new riders and all. So how the transit agencies can evolve themselves to stay relevant in this changing world?

Nadine Lee ([00:35:56]):

Yeah, that’s a great question. So a couple of things. First, when we talk about leveraging all modes to their highest and best use, not everybody rides transit, right? And transit doesn’t work for everybody, and that’s okay. But what I want the industry to get away from is this idea that we have to have modal competition. We see it at all levels, right? There’s the car versus transit, there’s bus versus rail, there’s all kinds of competition that really are not answering the right question because every mode has utility for a particular type of trip. And so the question then becomes, what is the appropriate mode for whatever trip you’re trying to take.

Nadine Lee ([00:36:42]):

How have we really improved that mode so that it’s possible for you to take it by that mode? We’ve made it super easy in the United States specifically, we’ve made it super easy for people to drive cars

Nadine Lee ([00:36:55]):

And to drive them fast and to park them wherever they want. And Dallas is probably one of the biggest offenders. If you were to come to downtown Dallas and stand on any street corner, you could probably see at least two or three, nine or 10 level parking garages in downtown Dallas. And downtown Dallas is not that big. We’re severely over parked. And what that means is that there’s a ton of land being used to park cars, to store cars. And that also means that people are driving from long distances to get to downtown. And of course, post pandemic, the fact that there aren’t that many people coming downtown on a regular basis says something. So how do we want to use our land and how do we want to leverage the various modes in order to provide the best mobility and the most efficient mobility without hurting our economic productivity? For example,

Nadine Lee ([00:37:53]):

Actually, I always cite Hong Kong because Hong Kong, I was there in 2009 on a trip visiting with Hong Kong Transport. And their philosophy at that time was, look, I mean, we don’t have space to build out any more lanes of roadway. So what we want to do is we want to move people, as many people as we can, move by transit because that’s the most efficient way to move people and free up all of our roadway capacity to move goods, to move deliveries, move not cars, but trucks and things like that. And that made a lot of sense to me even back then. And so when I think about the growth that’s happening in our region, and I always say this, but with 4 million people also comes of course the jobs and the cars, but all these 4 million people, do you think they’re not ordering from Amazon or from Uber Eats or all the different home delivery services that will clog up all of our curb space, all of our local street space?

Nadine Lee ([00:38:58]):

And if we think that that’s a future that we want without any sort of mitigation possible, then I think we have something else coming to us. Because I mean, I have said, I think maybe in that article that you were referencing, I may have said that there are a lot of similarities between Dallas and Los Angeles where I used to live. We have a highly decentralized landscape as far as businesses and activity centers go. And unlike Los Angeles, we are very sparsely populated, not very dense for our built environment, which makes it that much harder to provide transit for people. So we have to really kind of rethink what we’re going to be doing in the future in order to make our transportation system work as best it can because again, it’s about economic productivity. How are we going to remain an economic powerhouse in the future when four more million people are here now?

Nadine Lee ([00:39:58]):

So that’s about how we talk about leveraging each mode for their highest and best use as far as frequencies and schedules and routes. Specific to the bus system for Dallas, for our DART area, we could be providing a ton more bus service and make it much more useful to the people who are riding it. I don’t particularly think that an hourly bus service is useful to anybody. I don’t even think a half hour lead bus service is useful to people. And so when I think about the convenience of the automobile, you don’t have to wait half an hour to get in your automobile and drive somewhere, and it might take you half an hour more because of the congestion, but the truth is that nobody has to wait to get in that vehicle. So why do we make people wait as long as we do? And especially in a place like Texas where it’s super hot in the summertime and it can be super cold and icy in the wintertime

Nadine Lee ([00:40:56]):

And nobody should have to wait half an hour. That is part of the beauty of having Microt transit because that’s more demand responsive. But to me, there’s an opportunity here to leverage our bus system so that it actually produces a lot more potential for people to ride. It’s much more available for people to ride, and it doesn’t have to be a high capacity rail line. This goes back to highest and best use. A bus has much more flexibility in terms of the places that it serves. It’s smaller capacity, so you don’t have to worry about it always being empty. And if we do our job, we can capture a lot more people. The bus, which, because I mean the truth is that the ridership on bus and rail is almost equal here, and in most places it’s like three quarters bus and one quarter rail.

Nadine Lee ([00:41:44]):

So we could do so much more on the bus side. And then on the customer side of things, I am a big believer in treating our existing customers with the most dignity and respect that they deserve. I think there’s a lot of rhetoric out there that I think unintentionally suggests that the riders that we have today are not important to us and that we only care about people who don’t ride. And to me, why would you ever do that? We have to produce a product that people are willing to buy. And the way to do that is to think about our existing customers first, and customer retention is a much, much more cost effective strategy than new customer acquisition. And if we do our job, people will come because it’s such a great service, but we have to start with treating today’s customers as well as we can.

Jaspal Singh ([00:42:37]):

Yeah, that’s very true. And what you mentioned about customer acquisition costs versus retention costs, I mean, it’s very difficult to acquire a new customer. In fact, most of the automobile company, they show ads just to retain their existing buyer not to attract new. So a lot of people think that oh, BMW and Audi and all showing these ads to attract new customer, no, no, no, they just want to retain what they have and they just want to play with that brand value. So I think it’s very important to do that. And in fact, something you mentioned very important, which is we need to use different mode for their highest use. And actually I would say that is doing that. I mean, when the ridership went down during pandemic and you quickly pivot and you understood, okay, we need to change the frequency. We need to under change the service and we need to serve what customers are looking.

Jaspal Singh ([00:43:27]):

And that launched this micro transit service called GoLink in partnership with Uber and Spare, which is very interesting. And in fact, I want you to share a little more about that partnership and why you think it’s important for transit agencies. So think about these micro transits services along with the fixed route loan because like you said, the biggest point for automobile is I don’t need to wait. I just go down, switch my car and go, but in bus you need to wait sometime for half an hour, and that’s kind of a pain. So how you can reduce that pain for the customer. For micro transits, it’s so happy to hear more about what Dallas has achieved and how other agencies can learn from Dallas.

Nadine Lee ([00:44:08]):

Yeah, so GoLink is one of the largest Micro transit services in the world as far as I know in the world.

Nadine Lee ([00:44:15]):

Yeah. We have 30 zones where we operate Micro Transit and the partnership with Spare and Uber is, and we also have a contractor now Transdev, who’s running our micro transit as well as our paratransit service. So this partnership that we have between Transdev Spare and Uber is that Transdev kind of operates the regular micro transit service, and then Uber serves as a backstop for when we don’t have enough drivers and vehicles to respond within our 15 minute response time. So if we can’t hit that target, then Uber is called to backfill that particular trip, which actually helps us keep our response times low

Nadine Lee ([00:45:00]):

And Spare provides the platform for us to do this through Go Pass and also through our call center. So it’s a great partnership because with a lot of other things, everyone understands the outcome we’re trying to achieve. We have a performance-based contract with Transdev, so they understand again the outcome we’re trying to achieve, and then they, through their expertise, help us figure out how to deliver on the promise of micro transit. Now, one of the things that I think is interesting about Micro Transit is that before micro Transit happened, of course we had things like Call Ride and these sort of less route specific services, which probably didn’t work quite as well as they could have, but again, the technology wasn’t there at the time. Now we have technology where you can actually just call at a moment’s notice. You don’t have to schedule your service 24 or 72 hours in advance, which is much, much nicer for the customer. And what I think is interesting about the advent of micro transit is that we’ve now created, or we’ve now discovered a type of service that could fill in the gap between cycling and walking and

Nadine Lee ([00:46:14]):

A bus because there’s a big gap there. And so what we’re trying to figure out right now at Dart is what’s the trigger level on Micro transit that causes us to think, okay, now’s the time to reinstitute a fixed route bus service. So trying to look at the data and the demand for trips and things like that to figure out where that tipping point is, it’s probably not a trigger, it’s a tipping point. So we’re looking at the data to figure that out. I think that Micro Transit, it has its place in our service offerings. It is an expensive service to run, but as a function of our entire budget, it’s a small fraction of the entire budget. So it has its place in our portfolio of services. What we’re trying to figure out now is how do we leverage demand responsive service where it makes the most sense, and how do we convert things to bus where it makes the most sense.

Nadine Lee ([00:47:15]):

Is that the right mix of service offerings that we have in our family of services? So there’s still a lot to learn about it, and I think it’s going to get better. We are just trying to figure out how can we continue evolve the Micro transit service because there are some questions about what’s the average length of a trip on Micro transit, which is more designed for short trips, partially because we limit them to certain zones and zonal boundaries. But if there’s a threshold at which you see a lot less trips happening, maybe there’s an opportunity to do something more like a distance-based fare and remove zonal boundaries. So there’s some things that we can iterate and explore and pilot to see if we can continue to make Micro transit even better than it is right now.

Jaspal Singh ([00:48:06]):

I think that’s very important to continue to learn. It’s not about just launch a service and I believe it’ll work, but idea is to learn from the data. And that’s what some of the cities are doing. They launch micro transit service and they see a lot of passenger are using particular route. They launch the fixed line service particular to that zone or area because you have a demand. So it’s actually a data collection process and then use that data collection to launch a service. No, that’s really amazing. And I really like your point about learning and experiencing staff, and also you’re the chairperson of UITP North America division. And because of that, you get an opportunity to visit different city in the world, and you see how public transit play an important role. You use example of Hong Kong. I mean, you cannot live in Hong Kong without public transit.

Jaspal Singh ([00:48:57]):

They have no space for road, and the transit has 88% model share. So it’s play a big role. And I don’t compare. Every city should be like Hong Kong, but at the same time, every city need to evolve their own way. The challenge in North America is like you mentioned, our cities are designed for car. You have nine and 10 story building for car parking in Dallas, downtown, and at the same time we are talking about lack of housing and housing affordability. So we really need to make a choice. What are the biggest challenge you think for us to shift the public perception of transit in such an environment where it’s so easy to use CAR and what strategy you are trying In Dallas, and I’m pretty sure you must be trying every day, some new idea to bring passenger and shift ridership is what strategy you feel effective in encouraging ridership. I love your point, what you said in the beginning, cleanliness, security, cleanliness and reliability. You just do three things and do, but what are the other strategy you’re implementing to bring the ridership and encouraging people to use public transit?

Nadine Lee ([00:50:03]):

Yeah, there’s a lot of levels to that. So I think, let me start by talking about the concept that there’s a panacea for solving the ridership issues in the US. There’s not a panacea. There are lots and lots of reasons why people don’t ride. And some of the most basic ones are, does transit actually go where they want to go? And does it go there and quickly? So I think one of the reasons we don’t capture more trips on transit is because we’re not very efficient, and I don’t mean we don’t operate efficiently. We are not efficient for the customer. And so we just had a statistic come out with our customer satisfaction survey for 2024 that talked about the high percentage of people who ride DART today who have to take a three seat ride, not even a two seat ride, but a three seat ride.

Nadine Lee ([00:50:55]):

And I can’t remember if it was somewhere between 30 and 40%, but it’s a high percentage, which tells me that we don’t provide that connectivity that people are looking for. And so if you imagine with every change of mode or every change of bus or whatever, you lose a certain amount of riders. So if we could fix some of those things, and it is hard to do in a decentralized environment, but if we could fix some of those things, I think we would really start to see some changes in the number of riders. But going back to security, cleanliness and reliability, I think every transit agency in this country should start by saying, have we provided the most basic things that somebody needs in order to think about riding? Have we provided that security, cleanliness and reliability? Have we provided speed? Have we provided the connectivity? And let’s think about from the perspective of the customer what they need to be attracted to use the bus. Now, on the bus side, I will say that it is extraordinarily hard to communicate how best and how easy it could be to ride the bus.

Nadine Lee ([00:52:08]):

A rail line is easy, right? You have fixed stations along a fixed route from point A to point B, you don’t have that many stops. And people know, right? People know how to read the map because the genius who created the dot line map, I think was from London underground. And I think that map has endured the test of time, but bus routes we have stops every two blocks sometimes. Sometimes they’re every four blocks, and we don’t even show them on a map because they’re far too close together. So it’s a really difficult hurdle for us to figure out how to communicate to people how to ride a bus to get to their destination. Now, it’s gotten easier with technology because we have trip planning and you can just put in your destination and they can tell you which buses to get and at what time.

Nadine Lee ([00:52:51]):

And then we also have real time information so we can tell people when the bus is going to be coming. So that all helps. And so we just have to continue to push to try to make things easier for our riders to understand how to ride. So I think that’s something that we really need to be thinking about. And I think trying to ensure that we don’t always prioritize cars. I mean, I think that particularly in this country, and I said this actually just last week when I was on a panel, somehow in of our built environment, particularly here in the north Texas metroplex, we’ve sort of forgotten that people live here, right? We’ve forgotten about the humans that are actually the ones using the systems and shopping and spending money and dining and interacting, having social interactions and conducting economic transactions at all of our different locations. And because we’ve forgotten about people, we’ve designed everything for the car

Nadine Lee ([00:53:52]):

Not just the car, but the single occupant vehicle. So I think if we are starting to refocus our attention on human beings and what it means to have a good quality of life, we might want to think differently about how we build and produce new neighborhoods and new homes and things like that for the human beings who live here. I know a ton of people who they live here, but they’ve traveled to Europe and Asia and they always talk about how great transit works there. And I’m like, yeah, you have to be willing to live in a much more dense environment among people.

Nadine Lee ([00:54:33]):

There are reasons why there are great plazas in Europe, great places of gathering for human beings that have no cars in them. It is because they put an emphasis on people being around people. And so I think if we start to talk about how to impact and improve ridership, we have to think about people first.

Jaspal Singh ([00:54:56]):

Yeah, the human-centric approach, I would say is how think about around human, not around vehicle, not around road, and all is how people can interact with each other. In fact, one of the speaker, I think it’s Jared Walker who said this quote, and I really love it, he said, transit need density and density need transit. So it’s both way. So it’s not one way street, it’s both way. And I think what Dallas is doing, you initially mentioned that example, now you’re taking away that parking lot and converting into some kind of a development and reducing those barrier. In fact, I read the study done by University of North Texas, which share the economic impact near Dallas flight rail station between 2019 and 2021. It was very interesting because it say the transit oriented development in Dallas service area generated more than 1 billion in direct spending.

Jaspal Singh ([00:55:49]):

And that’s what people forget. If you live near to the transit and you have access to everything, it actually lead to more spending because you’re saving money from that transport expenditure and putting somewhere else, and it create money, it create new job. So I just want to understand what you mentioned about the transit oriented development initiative taken by Dart and any lessons you want to share with other agencies, which are looking, because I know San Francisco is looking to do that. New Jersey is now looking to do that. They’re taking away some of those parking lot because that’s a good land value and converting those parking lot into a community or housing or affordable housing. In fact, Paris is doing Hong Kong is doing for a long time. So there are a lot of good example, but I want to understand how Dallas is doing and what are the lessons you want to share with others?

Nadine Lee ([00:56:38]):

Yeah, we at Dart, we’re really starting to think about how to leverage our land assets. And part of it is because a lot of our cities in our service area are running out of space and so they want to continue to grow. And in some cases densify, not everyone wants to densify, but what I consistently see in our cities here in our service area are that they actually do want to activate space.

Nadine Lee ([00:57:10]):

And so when they are redeveloping, they’re thinking about how to create an environment where people want to go and congregate and spend money. And I think it’s an interesting phenomenon to know that longstanding suburban type cities are really wanting to be more urban. Not everybody, but a lot of them do. And so for me, I would love to see Dart become an economic development partner with our cities. And I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but to me, if we have a land asset, I would love for us to leverage that land asset to contribute to the realization of a city’s vision for certain areas around our stations. I’ll take the city line development in Richardson for example, right up at our city line station. Richardson has built a ton of new rental apartments. I don’t think any of them are for sale. They might be, I’m not sure, but they have a lot of housing units and they have street level retail and restaurants and things like that. And even today when we were coming back from our groundbreaking, we drove through that area and there were tons of people walking around. Some people had just gone to the grocery store. So some people are probably working from home and the space is active and alive.

Nadine Lee ([00:58:35]):

And to me, if we can make our spaces alive, I think it’ll make our cities much more interesting to be in and much more attractive for new residents. Because I think today, not everybody wants the suburban home that’s like five bedrooms and three car garage and things like that. Not everybody wants that, right? A lot of young professionals want spaces where they can walk everywhere they want to go because not everybody wants to drive. And so trying to, when I think about the 4 million people who are coming to or coming to our metroplex, I think, okay, let’s leverage DART as an asset. Let’s find ways to make Dart the reason people come to the service area. I want people to think of having DART as this huge benefit to them, even if they don’t take it, they want to have DART as the opportunity to take DART wherever they need to go. And because we do such a good job in the future that we have attracted as many of those 4 million people to our service area and we’ve been able to grow and densify and become the best place to live in north Texas, I think it’d be great if 4 million people came to just our service area.

 

 

Jaspal Singh ([00:59:55]):

Yeah, it’s already made ridership. It’s already made ridership. And it’s like your point about how to capture how to attract those people. Well that’s great to know that you’re working on those component. And in fact, if we look at the international example, like JRE in Japan, I think if I’m correct, 33% of their revenue come from the rental and other commercial activities. So sometime they call themselves as a real estate company, not as a transit company because they have invested in these infrastructure. And like you mentioned, if you can use those asset, you can actually provide cheaper transit to people and sustainable. You can have higher frequency, you can provide better connectivity, but some way you need to really think out of the box. You can’t just think about running a service which is one hour wait time. Nobody’s going to use it.

Nadine Lee ([01:00:50]):

Yeah, I mean that’s definitely something we want to look into is what would it take for DART to be a real estate company? Because I think that that is part of the equation because we don’t have to stand idly by and watch somebody else do it. We can be an active partner in that and we should be because it’s our land.

Jaspal Singh ([01:01:11]):

And TFL is doing it same transferred for London, they actually created a new commercial entity

Nadine Lee ([01:01:18]):

To look Yeah, places for London, I think.

Jaspal Singh ([01:01:19]):

Yeah, places for London. So they’re looking actively how they can use their spaces to leverage. So I think it’s a new trend and we need to, you mentioned in the beginning the transit need to evolve, the transit agencies need to evolve and think about it. Now, one point I want to discuss with you is, which you highlighted again and again the security, and I think safety and security is emerging as a very key factor which influence the modal choice. If people don’t feel safe, nobody’s going to use transit. And we all know it’s becoming a more increasingly biggest issue in North America, both in US and Canada. We see people don’t feel comfortable in transit and a lot of cities have their own transit police, they’re working with police. In fact, LA Metro is now launching or reintroducing the transit police and it’ll cost them like $200 million or something. It’s a big money, but it’s very needed. I mean, I don’t say it’s not required, it’s needed, but how do you think Transit can tackle these issue? Because I can understand that must be facing the same issue. So how you are addressing that safety issue?

Nadine Lee ([01:02:20]):

Yeah, that’s a great question and I think there are a lot of new ways to tackle the issues. And again, with customer experience ridership, I think there’s not only one way to solve this problem. I think historically, I think because we always react to situations that happen on our systems, one particular bad incident causes everyone to say, okay, we need more police on the system. Well, the truth is is that not everyone feels more secure when there’s armed law enforcement presence on our system. So at dart we actually have a new security strategy that starts to look at other ways that we can create a safe and secure system for people. And part of it was when we created the security strategy, we wanted to start with what’s the outcome we’re trying to achieve? What’s the problem we’re trying to solve here? And really for us, it’s not just having visible presence on the system. For us it was we want people to feel confident and secure so that when they’re on the system, they have an enjoyable experience.

Nadine Lee ([01:03:27]):

And so there’s a lot that goes into that. So we have found that part of security is how clean our system is, and we have clean teams that ride our light rail system every day and they pick up trash while we’re in service and things like that. And they do have uniforms. And what we found was that people, they felt more secure just seeing somebody in a dart uniform. So it didn’t have to be law enforcement specifically, it could just be somebody who was wearing the DART logo somehow. And so that was a great find for us because what we learned was, okay, so visible presence doesn’t have to be police, it can be so many other things, so many other people. So you could have ambassadors, you could have cleaning people, you could have whatever. But part of that too was when we pick up the trash on the system while we’re operating, people see that and they’re like, dart cares. DART cares about us as customers. And so we found that we got a lot of compliments, people thanking us for cleaning up because we’re not just leaving things. Because sometimes if you don’t fix whatever your broken window, then people feel like you don’t care about the neighborhood.

Nadine Lee ([01:04:45]):

So that’s one thing we’re trying to do as part of our security system, our security strategy. The other thing that we’re trying to do is to look at some really different perspectives on what it means to be secure. I always think about some examples from South America where I think there’s just this culture in the writing public, this culture that wants to take care of each other. And so this isn’t an elegant term, but it’s kind of referred to as a culture of self-management on the system where the writers want to hold each other accountable. The writers, they think so much of the investment that they’ve made in their infrastructure and their services that they don’t want anybody messing it up. So in South America, you could have a five-year-old riding the system on his or her own and the community watches out for him or her.

Nadine Lee ([01:05:37]):

And so to me, what would it take for us to create that sense of obligation, social network and commitment? How do you create that social network? And it’s a weird concept for people in the United States. This is not the way Americans work, but it doesn’t mean it’s not possible. So to me, we should really be working on that. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we should work on that. And the ways we can do it are how do we communicate with people who are riding the system? And if you look at any one of our trains or buses, there’s a million messages posted everywhere about all the horrible things that are going to happen to you if you do something wrong. But if we take a page from Steve Martin’s book, you remember him, he was actually in Stockholm and he works for Columbia University and he does a lot of stuff in behavioral science.

Nadine Lee ([01:06:31]):

And what he says is you have 90% or 99%, however many percent of people who pay their fair, but all of your messaging is directed to the five or 10% of people who don’t pay their fair. Why not just thank people for being honest and for paying their finger? And so to me it’s like, okay, let’s figure out how we can message things in a different way so that people don’t feel so on edge all the time. And maybe if we make them more comfortable on our system, they won’t feel so agitated and worried and on the defensive. And so even little things like that could make a big difference. What about human-centered design of all of our stops and stations and trains and buses? If we create an environment where people feel good, feel enlightened and feel proud of the infrastructure and the services that we provided for them, maybe they’ll be more inclined to take care of it. So we don’t really know if that’ll all work, but to me that’s a better strategy than just doing the traditional status quo thing, which is just flooding your system with security like armed law enforcement. So we’re just trying to start some different initiatives that we hope will result in a different outcome.

Jaspal Singh ([01:07:50]):

I love your point because what you mentioned is it is like a glass half full and half empty where you want to focus your energy, you want to look at the half full or you want to look at the half empty. So it’s like it’s not even half empty because there are 5% people who create trouble, but where you want to focus your energy, that 5% who create trouble or 95% who are good and working and by cleaning, I think what you right mentioned actually human presence which make you comfortable. When you see the DOT logo, you feel like, okay, somebody’s there. If something goes wrong, he will be there. And at the same time they’re making the system clean. So you are solving two issue with the same answers and same method, which is really great. And I just shared one example from MTA New York. So New York City Transit, they are investing money now to change the fluorescent bulb with the LED because the stations are dark. Even if you put 10 police sky, the stations are dark. So now they said, okay, let’s change all these pulp and put LED light, which brightened up the station and it create the lighting, create the sense of security and people see somebody is watching us. So I love your approach. It’s like where you want to put your energy and do

Nadine Lee ([01:09:00]):

It. Yeah, it’s so true too because I think forever everyone has said what’s the minimum standard and let’s do the minimum what we can afford. And when you start to think about what works for your customers so that they feel secure, you think a little bit differently about how you might spend the money.

Jaspal Singh ([01:09:20]):

And I would say if the system is dirty, even if you put 10 policemen there, you will still feel bad. And if this one is clean and you have just one guy standing there, you will have a sense of security. I love this approach. I think that’s very much required. Now, I mentioned in the beginning the life of the transit CEO. It’s very hard. And sometime I say it’s the most difficult job. Now you are a leader for last three years and many more year in coming. So as a leader, you need to keep everyone motivated at the same time, battling alone. Many times you don’t have many shoulder to cry and you need to find your own thing. So I’m really interesting to learn some of the leadership lessons you have learned from your experience from your mentor. And what are the thing you look while hiring senior executive, because you mentioned you are lucky to have that senior executive team with you and they are taking, but I’m pretty sure you must have some key checkpoint, like when you hire these people, what do you look in the people?

Nadine Lee ([01:10:23]):

Yeah, those are all great questions. Let’s start with the leadership lessons. And I’ve made plenty of mistakes just so you know.

Jaspal Singh ([01:10:34]):

So you’re more experienced.

Nadine Lee ([01:10:35]):

I’m more experienced, don’t make the same mistakes. But I’ve been very fortunate to have some wonderful, wonderful sponsors and mentors. Phil Washington who was the CEO at LA Metro and is now the CEO at Denver International Airport. He’s been such a great, great person to test things with. And when I have a bad day, he reminds me that we need to live to see another day. So we need to survive that day. So not to feel so beholden to just the five or 10 year timeframe, but there are times when you just have to get to the next day. And so it’s a good reminder. And so other leadership lessons are just, I think really learning how to listen to people and what they’re saying because you can never expect people to necessarily articulate exactly what they’re thinking, but it’s okay to ask questions and be curious and try to unpack what it is they’re trying to get at because I think that that is a special skill to be able to listen well and to understand and repeat back to people what they’re saying.

Nadine Lee ([01:11:53]):

The other thing is I think it’s really important to trust your staff. Hire good people, let them do their best work and do your best not to micromanage them, which is hard to do as somebody who used to be really micromanage. But I also understand that I’ve come from a background of really being a perfectionist and I’ve learned to adapt and not expect perfection, but are things perfect enough? If we’ve missed the brief altogether, that’s a different story. But when that happens, I have to look at what I’ve communicated to people and make sure that I’ve actually appropriately communicated my expectations. And really I think one of the biggest things that I’ve learned as a leader is to be okay with being the dumbest person in the room.

Nadine Lee ([01:12:49]):

And I say that very lightly because I kind of joke to people about I want to be the dumbest person in the room even as a CEO, because if I’ve hired people who are better than me, that’s a great thing. I’m not afraid of that. I am not afraid of my staff being smarter than me because they’re the ones who can help us achieve this mission. And so speaking to the leadership roundtable and what we look for when we hire executives, first of all, I say we because it’s not just me who’s hiring them. We actually, when we hire an executive into our team, they go through a very rigorous process. There’s at least five people on the panel when we interview them. We take them through at least two interviews, if not three or four. And what we test for, what we look for when we interview them is leadership skills.

Nadine Lee ([01:13:45]):

We’re not asking them about technical skills or technical knowledge because we expect that they know enough. Really when you’re at the executive level, it’s not really about subject matter expertise, but really being able to understand quickly the situation at hand and figure out how to tackle it. So we have hired a lot of people, and this came from Phil, a lot of people with the same instincts but different skill sets because the diversity of thought around the table is incredibly important. And then the other thing that we do is we really look to see just how passionate they are about what they do. Why do they want to work at Dart Dart’s? Not an easy place to work, actually. No transit agency is super easy to work, but if you don’t come in with any passion, then you’re probably not going to last because it’s really, really hard from day to day to do this job and be subject to the scrutiny and the criticism.

Nadine Lee ([01:14:45]):

It’s hard to do that if you don’t care about what you’re doing. And so we look for that and we look for people who can easily adapt, people who can get along with others. I will tell you that we certainly have strong personalities on our leadership roundtable, but everyone understands the goals we’re trying to achieve and everyone is willing to set aside their own egos in order to achieve that goal. We’ve cultivated that, right? We’ve actually done a lot of work to test how our executive team responds when we’re in conflict. We’ve taken ourselves through conflict and we’ve really tried to create a cohesive team that is willing to call each other out when we aren’t behaving well and when we’re not listening and when we need to be better. And thankfully, we’ve cultivated a really great team that I always tell people the window of opportunity for us to work together is quite short, so we must value the time that we have together and try to accomplish everything that we can because when the time comes that one of us leaves for whatever reason, it’ll be a good reason. I hope some of them will probably get promoted to being CEO when that time comes. It’ll be a sad day for us, but a great moment for them.

Nadine Lee ([01:15:59]):

But we need to enjoy this while we can and try to accomplish as much as we can.

Jaspal Singh ([01:16:04]):

That’s amazing. I’ve been so many lessons and I can correlate and I love the first line which Phil Washington told you live for another day and you need to survive if you kill yourself and don’t get a time to see the better time. So that’s the most stupid thing. So you need to survive. And there always, I always tell people one, the pressure is a privilege. If you are not pressured at your job, you’re doing not anything interesting. If you are pressure under pressure, you are privileged because not everybody get that privilege. And secondly, you need to be always surround yourself with the smart people and challenge each other not to satisfy your ego, but to get the best outcome from each other. So when sometime you challenge other person, it’s like I tell my team sometimes I’m challenging you not to say that I’m smart, but I don’t know what you’re doing.

Jaspal Singh ([01:16:59]):

So can you explain me? Can you tell me what is the outcome you want to achieve? And I think the point you mentioned earlier, what do you want to achieve with the security? What do you to achieve with the pull is you want to make people feel safe. What are the other way you can make them feel safe? Is it the only option or there are other option? If there are other option, what are those options? And can we do it implement easily or not? So I think that problem framing and is very important. So thanks for sharing. I will put this quote in front of me live to see another day. Otherwise,

Nadine Lee ([01:17:33]):

Well hopefully you don’t have to use that as your thing every day because hopefully there are more days, more days that you can say, I’m so excited about the 10 year timeframe. But in the darkest moments, you’re going to be like, okay, I have to live another day.

Jaspal Singh ([01:17:47]):

It’s important to remember those code. No, at the darkest moment, then you look around yourself for help. So then you can see.

Jaspal Singh ([01:17:54]):

So now this is my last question. And you mentioned you were the Dipti Chief Innovation Officer at Metro. You were involved in this extraordinary innovation center, and I’m pretty sure you are excited with innovation and new stuff and all. So now looking 10 year ahead, now, you’re a future forecaster or what is your vision for the future of public transportation in the US and how do you see some of these emerging technology like autonomous vehicle? We saw Alarm Musk launching taxi, which is $30,000. If it happened, it’ll be reshaped the whole transit. But how do you see autonomous vehicle and how you see AI shaping transit systems? So how you feel excited about next coming 10 years?

Nadine Lee ([01:18:38]):

Yeah, I think AI specifically has lots and lots of potential. Of course, it also has a lot of potential pitfalls, but let’s focus on the positive. So AI, I think can help us comb through data so much better and so much faster and help us figure out perhaps how to do modeling better.

Nadine Lee ([01:19:01]):

And I think that AI in conjunction with things like autonomous vehicle technology can help us really vastly improve safety in the operation. I think that’s a great opportunity there. I know that there’s a lot of focus on autonomous vehicles for circulators and things like that. Certainly that’s an opportunity, but I think we need to work with all of our cities to figure out how do you want to use the space that you have? Do you want a zero occupant vehicle running around when you don’t even have space for single occupant vehicles? And I think UITP always says an electric vehicle traffic jam is still a traffic jam, an autonomous vehicle traffic jam is still a traffic jam. Now, can we fit more? Can we get more capacity with autonomous? Probably. I remember experiments back in the nineties in the southern California area where they were looking at queuing vehicles up and platooning vehicles down the HOV lanes.

Nadine Lee ([01:20:04]):

And that was back in the nineties and it never went anywhere. But that technology has been there. And so how do we want to leverage that? And I think technology could really help us figure out how to charge for our services, how to price services. So there’s a lot, I mean, AI is something that I think people are using to look at behavior on the system. It’s a little bit minority report, which is not good. So we don’t want to get to the point where we’re predicting that somebody’s going to commit a crime. But I think if we’re looking at the various attributes of, I mean in Texas because we have open carry laws and things like that, detecting weapons I think could be an interesting, I got to be careful what I say probably, but I mean it’s like how do we use AI in the way it should be used? And to me, combing through data, understanding travel behaviors, travel demand and things like that I think are really great opportunities. And so we don’t even know what’s coming around the corner because I mean, how long has the iPhone been around? I don’t remember, but not that long in the whole state. 2008.

Jaspal Singh ([01:21:20]):

So it’s 12, 16 years, so it’s not

Nadine Lee ([01:21:22]):

Long enough. Yeah, exactly. And that keeps evolving even, right? So I know payment technology has evolved. I know that there has been technology around in fair collection for a long time where you could just get on a train and it automatically charges. There are a lot of things that we got to figure out, at least in the US application. I think Europe is way ahead of us on that, but that could be another way to do fair collection without dealing with the hundreds of millions of dollars of investment that we’ve all spent to install our fair collection equipment and things like that. So who knows what the future holds? What I would really like to see in terms of innovation is how do we deal with cash paying customers? Because not so much in Europe and Asia, but in the US and here at Dart, 40% of our bus riders are still paying with cash. So to me, how do I make it really affordable? How do I get them to access discounts when they’re still paying for one ride at a time and probably paying full price and having no mechanism for getting a discount? That’s something I want to figure out. And I don’t know if technology can figure that out, maybe they can’t.

Jaspal Singh ([01:22:34]):

I think it’s both technology and policy issue. But I agree with you. There are a lot of, we will see a lot of changes. We saw in last 14 year, a lot of changes and we’ll see more. And I think I tell people, autonomous vehicle, we already have autonomous technology, which is rail, and it’s working very well. In fact, today East announced they are launching Shinon, which is their high speed rail driverless. So there’ll be no driver in those train, which are running like 300 and 400 kilometer per hour. So imagine the technology has advanced and we don’t need to just depend on the single vehicle and do well. Thank you so much, Nadina. I think it was a great conversation. Really enjoyed. Thanks for sharing all your knowledge and lessons. So generally, at the end of the episode, we have this RapidFire question round, and generally now we know your professional side. Now we want to know your personal side. So if you’re ready, we will start with this rapid fire.

Nadine Lee ([01:23:30]):

Okay, sounds good.

Jaspal Singh ([01:23:31]):

Okay. So my first question is, if you are not in transit space or now I would say highway space, what other profession you would’ve selected?

Nadine Lee ([01:23:40]):

That’s an interesting question for me. I actually think I would do something in healthcare. I always thought it would be fantastic to get into physical therapy and help people be healthy.

Jaspal Singh ([01:23:50]):

Oh, you are already making people healthy. So by using transit. That’s right. The outcome is not changed, but the way is different. But thanks for joining Transit and helping transit now, which is your favorite city in the world and why?

Nadine Lee ([01:24:05]):

Oh, that’s a hard one. I think my most favorite city in the world is Paris, but London is a close second, and I think it’s Paris because it’s just such a be beautifully built place. Actually a lot of cities in Europe are, but Paris has that particular attraction because it’s such a center for fashion and beautiful things and wonderful people, wonderful food and wonderful wine. And I think what strikes me about when I go to Paris is how much Paris as a city, as a region has created spaces for people. And you see families out and about all the time. You see a lot of integration of a mix of people, like many, many, many interracial couples and integrated families. And it just seems like a very inclusive place. And of course, I’m an outsider, so I have no idea, but it is always a beautiful place and I love visiting, and in fact, I’m going to be heading there in a few weeks.

Jaspal Singh ([01:25:11]):

Oh, amazing. In fact, I was thinking you will say Tokyo, because many time you mentioned Tokyo as a favor, but I didn’t know Paris is your number one now.

Nadine Lee ([01:25:20]):

Well, I’ll say that one of the reasons why, because I do love Tokyo, but Tokyo is probably a little too orderly for me.

Jaspal Singh ([01:25:28]):

That’s true. It’s too orderly. You need a little bit of chaos. I tell people I need a little bit of chaos in life, otherwise it look artificial. I know. Same here. It need to be a little bit chaotic. Now, my third question is, which is your favorite book?

Nadine Lee ([01:25:42]):

Okay. This is always a hard question for me, but I have to say there’s two books that are my favorite books and for different reasons. So the first book that I love reading is The Great Gatsby. And even though I don’t love the story, I find the writing so beautiful and elegant and lovely and so easy to read. You just get swept away with the language that F Scott Fitzgerald used. And so I love reading it because it’s just beautifully written. The second book that I really love and I read over and over again is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. And it sounds weird to be like, oh, I love this Victorian kept woman sort of book. But the reason I love it is because it is a story about a woman who has her own mind and doesn’t want to be relegated to a status quo expectation of women in that period of history.

Nadine Lee ([01:26:42]):

And so she’s funny and she is demanding, and she’s just insistent that she’s not going to just get married to kind of secure her place in society. And in fact, she shuns this man who she thinks is completely pompous, and as it turns out, she kind of accuses him of being a proud person, but she’s the one who’s the proud one. And so I love it. I also love it because she has this great relationship with her father, and I had a great relationship with my dad when he was around, and we had very similar senses of humor as Lizzie Bennett does with her father. So it is something that I just really relate to.

Jaspal Singh ([01:27:22]):

So you feel the part of the story I feel.

Nadine Lee ([01:27:24]):

Yeah, absolutely.

Jaspal Singh ([01:27:25]):

Way you love it.

Nadine Lee ([01:27:27]):

Not that I married the richest man in society, but I mean, because she did.

Jaspal Singh ([01:27:33]):

No, but you need to marry with the person who love you the most rather than Oh, yes. And I know your husband. He’s very nice guy. Yeah. Now, my next question is what is the one thing do you wish you should have learned early in life?

Nadine Lee ([01:27:51]):

That one’s a good one too. This is something that’s impossible to learn early in life in some ways, I think. But I think I wish I would’ve learned not to be afraid not to feel like I was going to fail. And only now in my career can I look back and say I actually didn’t have the propensity to fail. There were plenty of things that I did wrong, but I didn’t quite fail, and I wish I would’ve known at that time what I could have accomplished if I had not been afraid. But I’m okay.

Jaspal Singh ([01:28:26]):

No, it’s okay. It’s part of learning. But yeah, sometimes you feel something and it’s kind of a lesson for others. So it’s not only for you, but for others. Also is don’t be afraid. You will never fail, even if you’re in a difficult situation. I mean, they may not get the outcome, but you will not fail kail, it will not be a disaster. Okay, so this is my last question, and it’s more philosophical, and I always ask the people discussion is if you can change one thing in life, what would it be?

Nadine Lee ([01:28:56]):

So I actually get asked this question pretty often, and I firmly believe that there’s not one thing that I would change in life because if I had changed any one thing in my past, I wouldn’t be exactly where I am right now. When I think of all the things that had to happen for me to be where I am, it’s not possible to have changed anything. And so I tell young women, especially, I tell young people all the time, I’m like, I wish I could give you my brain and my experience so that you would know that when you get to be my age, you’ll be fine. Because so many, I mean, it goes back to that thing we just talked about related to not being afraid. Because early in your career, you worry so much that you’re making the wrong decision. And now looking back on my career, I can say it’s not that I ever made a bad decision. I was fortunate that I didn’t fail in anything. But I feel like if I had known then what I know now, would I have still done the same things? I mean, maybe I would’ve been even more aggressive with what I did, but I didn’t know then. But I can say that every single thing that I did, whether it was a good decision or a bad decision, every decision I made led me exactly to where I am today. And I love where I am today. And so I can’t say that I want to change anything.

Jaspal Singh ([01:30:30]):

That’s amazing. And in fact, I tell people and recently read an article about deciding versus choice. So decide and versus choice. So you don’t decide you make choice, and that choice will take you to some level, and there is nothing good or bad choice. It’s just a choice. You need to fail your gut feeling and go forward and do it. No, thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed and thank for sharing all your insight and love your conversation. Yeah, likewise. Wish you good luck with all your key initiative and the next year launch with the Silver Line and a lot of fun, exciting thing coming in Dallas, huh?

Nadine Lee ([01:31:10]):

Yeah. Thank you so much. It was really fun to be on your show.

Jaspal Singh ([01:31:13]):

Thank you. Thank you. 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 red mobility innovative.com. I look forward to see you next time. Thank you.