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March 8, 2023

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 Hello. And again for the sake of anybody who doesn't know, I'm Kristin Joiner and I'm here with my friend Ron Brooks. He's a colleague and a very good friend that I've known for over 12 years and over the years we've. Work together. We have had a lot of conversations about accessibility and customer service, and so I've invited Ron here to talk about that. But first Ron, why don't you give us an introduction? Good morning, Kristin. Thank you for having me as part of this conversation. So I am Ron Brooks. I live in Phoenix, Arizona. I have been in the transit industry for about 30 years, and I'll share more of how I got there in just a minute. My current role in the industry, I have two. I work with a company called ERV that does paratransit on demand. And in my role there, I do stakeholder engagement and work around policy. So my entire responsibility there is how do we as a company. Talk to customers. How do we make sure that we are hearing what our customers are telling us so that as we design the services that we provide, we're hearing the customer's voice in our ear and incorporating that into how we build our product, how we do our marketing, and how we deliver service on the street. So the other role that I have is. As the founder of a company called Accessible Avenue. And Accessible Avenue is a company that provides advice, training, and consulting to transit agencies and other transportation industry providers, technology providers, and other players. And our focus is accessibility for people with disabilities. Prior to my time with these two organizations, I've spent a lot of time, about 27 years just working in the industry for public agencies and also for private providers. And during that entire time, my work has been focused around accessibility for people with disabilities, and I've done that both in terms of fixed route transit, accessibility, and also paratransit. So I said that my entry into the industry is really part of how I got to where I am today. And I wanted to share just a little bit about that. I am a person who began life in a small Midwestern city. And I was a kid who was born with a visual impairment. So I could see a little not great, but enough that I could get around and. Ride my bike and play basketball and do all the things that kids do in small cities in the Midwest. And when I was in my teens, about 14 actually, I had an injury and lost my residual eyesight. So from my freshman year of high school on, I was a person with no eyesight. I'm totally blind to this day and I'm in my mid fifties now. And as a person who never had the opportunity to drive. Public transportation was always a service that I needed to use. And I'm old enough that I was at a time when there was no Uber and Lyft taxis existed, but they weren't in the town where I lived, at least not in great numbers, and we didn't have a lot of money anyway. So for me, the bus was how I got around. I went to college, graduated from Indiana University, went out to graduate school in San Francisco, and during all that time I was a pedestrian and I was a person who traveled on public transit. So as a customer of public transit, I found the service to be liberating because without it, I could not have gone anywhere. And yet there were times when it frustrated me either because. The typical service challenges that everybody experiences from time to time. Buses that run late, maybe a bus that breaks down, maybe a train that's a little dirty, an operator that's maybe not as courteous as they should be, or just other passengers and all the challenges that come up on any transit system. And then there were all the accessibility challenges, just using the service as a person who's blind dealing with things like. How do I find the bus stop? Or how do I find the correct train platform to board? How do I know when I'm at my correct stop? How do I get assistance when I get lost? All the things that are challenges specifically because I have a disability. And then of course, later, paratransit became an option, which is really good because some trips were really difficult on public transit and I would either have to get help or. Hire somebody or find some other way. So when Paratransit came along, I started to use that and that created a whole new sense of liberation and a whole new set of frustrations. So it was really these feelings this love of what transit could be and how it could work, coupled with the experiences that I had of where it didn't always work the way I wanted it to. That really. Motivated me when I had the opportunity to get into the industry to do and throughout, really throughout my entire career. That's been the thing that has motivated me. It's been this idea that I can use my experience as a customer the experience of my friends many of whom have disabilities. My family. I'm married to a woman who is also blind. So we have a lot of shared experiences. And being parents of trying to use these services and it's hard, and being in the industry where I can have an impact on those things has been very motivating to me. So that's really how I got here. All right. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I do wanna point out to people who are listening to this, viewing this, the concept of lived experience having people around you, working with you, writing the service providing input. Ron and I have talked a lot about the concept of lived experience and. Transit. Ron, I wanna give you an opportunity to just explain what does that term mean, lived experience. Example and I love stories. So one of the things that I, as a person who uses both public transit, you know the traditional kinds, bus, light rail train, and also paratransit. My lived experience is quite broad relative to most people who are in transit, and particularly people who are in management roles in transit. There are very few transit managers directors, CEOs, and board members who have disabilities. We don't have statistics in the industry, but it's a small handful. What I've often found is that I, because I have this lived experience, I'm able to, for example, I can go use a paratransit system as a customer, where a non-disabled manager, director, or anybody would find that extremely difficult. If for no other reason, then they have to become eligible for service and if they don't have a disability, at least in theory, they're not eligible. And they would stick out like a sore thumb. I can go get on a pair of transit vehicle anywhere in the country, and unless the person actually knows me, I'm just another customer. So I can literally be the undercover boss. And that has given me the opportunity to make decisions as a manager of paratransit. And I was a manager of a paratransit system for six years in Phoenix. Back in the mid 2010s, I had the opportunity to make decisions that were easy for me to make based on the fact that I experienced the service directly as a customer. And I knew lots and lots of people, as close friends and associates, who also did, and that is experience that it's very difficult for a typical transit. Manager, director, CEO, to obtain simply because they don't have a disability and they probably don't have as many people in their immediate circle of family and friends who have disabilities. Very good. And I love that idea of Undercover Boss. I think we're gonna explore that more in the future. Part of why I wanna have this conversation is the concept of a gap marketing. Model that is out there where in general business, it's trying to figure out the gap between what a customer actually thinks, feels, experiences about a product or service and what the company actually thinks about that service, what they're providing or the goods, whatever. But in transit. We don't typically look at the gaps and so that's one thing I really wanna focus on today is the gaps between what the customer wants and needs and what they should be experiencing. Juxtaposed with what? A CEO, a transit manager, an operations manager, a supervisor, even a bus driver might think about what they're actually providing through policy. There's gaps in in policy. There's gaps in communication. There's gaps. Just service delivery. I think you have two or three examples that you could share with us that would be helpful in exploring this concept of the gaps that are there in providing good quality customer service. Why don't you give us the first example. Yeah, that's a great. Great question, and it's really a fun way to think about it. So I'm gonna give you one that's a policy one and then I'm gonna give you one that's a real kind of on the streets service delivery one. So one of the things I wanna start with on time performance, I'm gonna give you. And these are paratransit or, but they could also be demand response examples, these first two. And then we'll look for some fixed route ones as we talk. But let me just start with these. So one of the things that we talk about a lot in our industry is on time performance. We talk about the fact that. In most systems, our goal, particularly for paratransit, and I think this is probably true for demand response also we tend to think of 90% as a magic number. If we're on time, more than 90% of the time, we're pretty good and we probably, we may still work on that, but it's not a concern if we're below 90%. Usually then it's okay, we probably need to look at this, but 90% is that magic number and we feel pretty good about it. So that, that's the management's perspective. So here's the customer's perspective. If you do the math on 90% on time performance, what that means is that you will be late for one trip. Per week, assuming that you're taking the five day a week round trip, and actually this applies to fixed route. Although fixed route usually is well above 90% but if you think about the idea of being late to work one day a week, or if you think about being late to pick up your kids at daycare one day a week, or if you think about just having a really. Late trip that's stress inducing one day a week. That's not so great. So on the one hand you have management celebrating success at 90% on time performance, and you have a customer going one day a week, I'm gonna have a bad trip. I would say that's a pretty good example of where policy is up here and customer expectations are down here. Give you a more kind of operational example. One of the things that we teach drivers in paratransit is how to provide assistance to customers. And we teach drivers how to, as, how to guide people maybe who are, who have a visual impairment or we teach them to. How to help a person who's in a mobility device load that device onto a paratransit vehicle, whether it's with a lift or with a ramp, or we tell drivers how to help passengers secure a seatbelt and a driver who is really courteous. Helpful and they try really hard to provide assistance that they've been trained to provide. Occasionally you'll have conflicts between drivers who are very helpful and they believe that they are doing the best job they can to assist passengers. And then you'll have the occasional passenger who is really resistant to that type of assistance. They don't like it when the driver takes them by the arm. Or when the driver is trying to help them more than they feel that they need, and it creates conflicts and it creates complaints. And so this is not a right or a wrong, but it's a difference in perception. You have a person who is a driver who is just doing the best job they know how to do based on the training they've been given. And you have a customer who is frustrated because, and it could be for a lot of reasons. It could be because they don't think they need the help, or it could just simply be because they've had a really bad day and they just wanna be left alone. And the last thing they want is some driver up in their personal space trying to give 'em help that they don't really feel like they want at this point. And it's all perceptual, but it's real. It's absolutely real. The driver's, right? But so is the customer because they're living in their own skin. And by the way, this is the kind of conversation, unfortunately, that doesn't often happen as we work with drivers in training. We usually focus on technique and procedure and policy, but we don't really spend as much time as we might, helping drivers understand how customers perceive that help. Because a lot of times there's nothing personal, but it feels personal on both sides. So let me pause right there for a second and ask you, are there questions that a driver could actually ask or something that drivers and even dispatchers could be trained on to ask that would be helpful in this situation? Yeah, the dispatcher one feels a little bit more removed because, I think dispatchers should get the same training that drivers get because they often provide guidance to drivers when drivers aren't sure what to do. But this is really, to me, this is a person to person kind of issue. This is the driver upon meeting the passenger. And by the way, this also, this part applies both to fixed route. And demand response and para trans, this is any situation where you have an employee who is interacting face-to-face with a customer who has disabilities and who may need assistance. And I think there's two questions that the driver should ask. The first question is, first off, always introduce yourself so that the customer knows that you are in fact a representative of the agency or the provider, and that you're there to help. Introducing yourself. Hi, my name is Ron. I'm your driver today. The first question is do you need assistance? And then I think the second question is, if the customer says yes is how can I assist you? Because the customer knows more than your procedure can tell you. What your procedure does is it gives you tips and tricks on how to assist. A customer who has expressed a need for assistance, but the fact is the customer may have tweaks on that assistance. And here's a really good simple example. We teach drivers how to provide what we refer to as human guide assistance to, for passengers who are blind. So if you're a demand response or a paratransit driver, we teach you that a customer can take your arm and you can guide them to the vehicle. Some customers don't need that assistance either because they have a little bit of usable vision or because they prefer to simply follow the driver. So as insisting that person take your arm or you take their arm, could be viewed as offensive when in fact that person actually do need assistance, but the assistance they need is simply to follow. And so this is a case where we wanna help drivers understand. That we have some techniques for them to use, but those techniques are dependent on what the customer actually needs. And there are times when the customer needs more than the customer thinks they need. Their customers are, people too. And sometimes they overestimate their own ability. But in those situations, I think that's when it's time to maybe get a little help from a dispatcher. Or to simply say to the customer, Hey I'm happy to, if you wanna follow me, but then if they're not following, say, Hey, this is a really tricky route that we're running to the vehicle. If you don't mind, I'd be happy to help you. And at the end of the day, as long as the customer's not being totally unsafe, it's probably okay If it's a little bit awkward, you can deal with it later. Very good. I love those two questions and I wrote them down first of, and I just wanna to repeat one more time what you said, and it was always introduce yourself. And then the first question is, do you need assistance? And the second question is, how can I assist you? Just making that one change. Does personalize the service instead of standardizing everything for everybody, that there's only one way to do things. So it does give a more personal feel and anyone, no matter what service they're providing, paratransit on demand service fixed route any kind of service. An even more personal experience that you've had that I'd love for you to share, if you don't mind. And it was when your children were young and you just needed to get from point A to point B. Would you share that story with us please? So the story that I wanna share is I referenced earlier that there are times when a public transit bus, light rail. Fixed rate service is difficult or was difficult and not a great option. And one of those times was when my family and I first moved to Phoenix. My wife and I, and again, my wife is also blind. We had three small children, ages five, four, and two. So they were a little bit small to take on a bus or a light rail for example if it was just me just trying to keep track of three kids, I could keep track of them, but I couldn't always keep track of the other people. And the interactions that were taking place on crowded buses and it didn't feel entirely safe, the walking distances were a little bit long, especially for my younger ones. So then you think, okay, how about paratransit? The challenge with paratransit was policy base. The agency had a standard, a DA paratransit policy that basically said you can bring personal care attendant who is somebody who assists you with your disability. So that would not be a five-year-old four-year-old or a 2-year-old. You could also bring a companion, and that could be anybody that you wanted to bring. So that could be a five-year-old, a four yearold, or a 2-year-old. The problem is I had all three of those. There were many times when I needed to travel with all three of my kids at the same time. So put yourself in my place. It's 2007. It's Phoenix. It's hot, and I've gotta take these kids somewhere. Maybe it's to the store. 'cause you're always going to the store when you have kids. So I couldn't use the bus. I couldn't use paratransit and using a taxi was pretty much out of the question with three car seats to be carried. This is really a little bit before rideshare services like Uber and Lyft were in the market, and they would've had the same challenges as far as car seats. So I bought a red wagon, imagine a red wagon from when you were a kid. The one that I bought had two seats and two little seat belts, so my strategy was to put the two older kids in this wagon and seat belt them in. I bought a camping backpack designed to carry babies up to a certain weight up to about 40 pounds. And my 2-year-old was barely inside of that size. And that's how I transported my kids. So I would put my daughter, my youngest, in a backpack on my back. I would put the two older in the wagon. I would then harness my guide dog 'cause I use a guide dog. I would pull the wagon in one hand. I would have the backpack on my back with my daughter who weighed almost 40 pounds, plus the weight of the backpack and whatever supplies I could fit in it. I would work a guide dog with one hand and I'd have one hand free to open and close doors and carry groceries. And my distance would be one mile. I could manage that level of effort for one mile. Anything further than one mile was really beyond my physical ability and on the ability just in the heat of Phoenix and living where we lived to manage. And so because of the policies of transit and the realities of transit that was it. I did not ever leave my neighborhood with my kids unless we had people at our house who could take us all usually in two different cars. And that almost never happened. We did not travel as a family for five years or pretty close to it. We really couldn't do it until our kids were all old enough to take transit, by walking. Or until services like Rideshare that had larger vehicles hit the market. And that was a really tough time and that is a reality that many people with disabilities have to manage. And my situation was good. At least I had my own physical health. I could walk and I could pull a wagon and carry a kid and work a dog and have a hand left over to hold whatever I could hold. A lot of people don't have that much physical strength or endurance, and they're not crazy enough to actually do it, and they're just trapped. And that reality has affected how I view everything in transit how I view our mission, how I view what paratransit should look like and how I view what we should be doing as an industry to make our services work better. And that's how lived experience affects me as a manager in this industry. Wow. Just painting that picture of all three kids, a wagon, a guide dog, and Phoenix. Heat is a little overwhelming, but does drive home the point that that one size can't fit all with transit. I just keep hearing that over and over again. Now, if you had, 1, 2, 3. You know how it can be one, it could be five, whatever it is, tips that you would give a transit manager, a transit, board member on just what are a few things that transit could do better right out of the chute. So I'm going to avoid the temptation to talk about policy changes right now. Because I think I wanna make this actionable today. And policy changes are, I think there are policy things we should be looking at as an industry that are longer term, but I wanna give you actionable things that you can do right now. So every agency should have a good, strong process for engaging with your local. Disability community. If you don't have an advisory group that's giving you regular feedback, then start one. And there are lots of approaches for how to do that. The value of that feedback is priceless in terms of developing empathy with your staff and the people who deliver service. And it's really helpful for understanding. How policies, procedures, changes, are gonna be perceived within your community. So I would start there because that's probably the easiest thing you can do if you have an advisory group already. Think about how effective it is. Is it giving you the kind of feedback you want? Are you getting. Value from what that group is doing? Or is it just a box that gets checked? If it's the latter, get a facilitator, get somebody in there, sit down and try to figure out how to get more out of that relationship. And it could be as simple as let's do a survey to find out how the community feels about the engagement they have with the agency. And if it's not where it should be, why is that? And then you can start to work on those issues. I think that those are easy things you can do. Another easy thing to do is to really look for opportunities to employ people with disabilities on your staff and ideally at as many levels of staff as you possibly can. There is value in having people with disabilities in frontline customer facing roles, but there's also untapped value at having people with disabilities in senior leadership roles, because these are people who can bring lived experience into the decision making that you do as an agency into the planning that you do, into the policy work that you do into the community outreach that you do. Those are very valuable steps that you can take immediately. I would start to think about how can we assess our policies as an agency, not so much in light of just what the law specifically requires, but to what extent do they meet the needs of our local disability community that. Conversation only works if it's really honest. In terms of being able and willing to hear what the community really thinks of your service, what do they think of the rules that you have, and being willing to suspend judgment long enough to get that feedback. Because once you have it, you can decide, okay, we can't change this. It's too hard right now. This is something we could do, even if the law doesn't require it, because maybe it doesn't cost a lot of money and it's something that might help some folks. And I'll give you a good example. This policy of only traveling with one personal care attendant and one companion. In most systems there are ways to solve so that if folks have children, they can actually travel with their kids. Up to what a vehicle holds, obviously. Another one is looking at stops along the way on paratransit. If customers need to make a stop at a daycare even the ft A is now saying that's something that they believe is appropriate. Looking at these kinds of policies, not in light of minimum legal standard, but in light of what makes sense for your community based on your community's input. I think those are places that I would start. Wow. The conversation here is about marketing, customer service, minding the gaps between what a customer needs and perceives and what services actually provided. Transit does a really good job of providing the service that they can. But I think that we really need to have more innovation kinds of talks and innovation comes from finding out what people truly need. And the fact that you are challenging folks to have an advisory group. If you already have one really consider is this just a box to check or are you utilizing your advisory group and also your public engagement in a way that it's not, again, just checking a box, but it's actually listening to what people have to say. I know that you have people who complain. I know that you have people who you just can't seem to satisfy those are really, they're the loudest voices it seems, but they're the minority. The majority of the people that you are serving need the service. They want the service, and they want to be a partner in the service. Wouldn't you say, Ron, that a partnership may be a better way to look at this as opposed to something else? I think we often think of. The advocacy groups, and this is true not just for folks with disabilities, but it could also be other advocacy groups that come to our board meetings and that come to our city councils and, all the different places that we have to answer as an industry and complain. We think of them as adversarial relationships very often. And what I would like us to consider is that they're not. These are not adversarial relationships. It's more like everybody is pursuing self-interest. They are pursuing the things that matter to them. It's not about transit, it's about what they need. And if we can take the judgment out and not view them as adversaries, but just view them as self-interested, which we're self-interested too. I don't know about all of y'all, but my interest is. My family and me and the things that are important to me and, I will defend those interests and I will pursue those interests. And I think most of us are the same way. So I think if we can recognize that this isn't personal that once we do that, then we can, it's easier to be tactical and it's easier to not get emotional about when people. Say the things they say and do, the things they do that formerly felt personal and like they were attacking us. The thing that I would say is once we understand that, what I'd like to see us then do is really understand what a group's priorities are from their perspective. What are your needs as a group? We may not be able to solve them, but let's at least understand them and let's get 'em all laid out. And I think what we will find is a lot of these folks are natural allies of transit. As long as we are able to meet at least some of their needs or at least try and I will tell you, I have had very good luck or success with the disability community, partly because I have lived experience. And maybe it's also because I have lived experience, I can be pretty honest with them. There have been times when I've had to tell the community no, because they needed something or wanted something that our agency that I was working for couldn't do. Sometimes I didn't agree with my agency. You get into these decisions that are priority decisions and sometimes I didn't like the priorities, I could be honest and say, we can't do this and here are the reasons why. And of course, we had to get those reasons all vetted and we had to say it the right way because we're speaking on behalf of an agency. But being truthful made it a lot easier because people at least knew that if I said yes, then it was yes. If I said no. There was usually a reason and I would give them the reason and I wouldn't pretend and try to hold back, and then those people would support us when it was time that we needed support. So I think that can be very, that's a powerful way, to ally with communities that we serve. And I just wanna leave you maybe with one other set of questions to think about when people ask for things. Our first reaction, if it's not what we already do is to go, no, we can't do that. And what I would like to leave you with is to say, maybe change that question to first off, is that something that would be good if we could do it? So would this be a good thing if we could actually do it? And then the second question is, how could we do it? We may go into the how and decide, okay, that's not feasible, but at least let's know how we could do it, because maybe it is feasible or maybe it's something that's not feasible now, but maybe there's a way that we can think about making it feasible. Maybe we apply for a grant that we're not currently getting, or maybe we find a partnership that we don't currently have. But if we always start from the position of we can't do that. We never ask those follow up questions of how could we do it? Or is this something we might like to try? And I think when we open it up, that's where we can start to find innovation is in the how could we do it. I love that, how we're ending this conversation. It's the yes. And so it's not on the No and really good marketing, good customer service. Truly begins with closing that communication gap because you can't have all of the other issues of policy, service, delivery customer expectation. You can't fulfill any of those until you first have a conversation. Ron, thank you for joining me in this conversation. If somebody wanted to get in touch with you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Couple of ways. I think that the easiest way would be to, you can find me on LinkedIn Ron Brooks accessible avenue. You can check out Accessible Avenue's website@accessibleavenue.net, and accessible avenue is all one word. So those are probably the easiest ways and. I'd love to interact with anybody who would like to, oh, and I guess you could also send an email. There are still people that do that. If you wanna try an email, you can go connect@accessibleavenue.net. Very good. All right, Ron. Thanks so much and everybody, thanks for listening. I hope that this has gotten you started thinking about how can you close the gap so that we are providing the best transit service that we can in every community for every person. Thank you very much.
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