Chief Technology and Sustainability Officer
North County Transit District
Oceanside, CA
Chair, APTA Information Technology Committee

The transit industry is really opening up from a technology perspective—to work with crowd sourcing of applications. We’re making our data available and we’re finding that people are doing these wondrous things with us as a result—in ways that don’t cost us a lot of money and provide a lot of value to the community.

For example, putting our schedule up resulted in people showing up with great applications to help our customers. And now that we’re starting to make feeds available in real time, it makes the data all that more valuable. That’s such a different dynamic from how we used to operate.

Add into that all the social media contact, and suddenly younger people are starting to feel part of the transit system—they are invested in it. Social media is tremendously exciting for the industry, but at the same time it’s also challenging: Is it secure? Can we guarantee its reliability?

None of these products were things we thought were achievable just five years ago.

The speed of change of these mobility technologies is, in turn, changing everything. So now, how fast can you get information to customers and how self-sufficient can they be?

When you think about a vehicle, everything from the way in which people on the vehicle communicate back to the operations center to how we track where the vehicles are is dependent on technology now. Cameras for the security, counters for how many people ride, where they get on, where they get off, emergency communications—these are all dependent in a way that was not there 10-15 years ago.