Jeff Hamm
Executive Director/CEO
Clark County Public Transportation Benefit Area Authority (C-TRAN)
Vancouver, WA


How many people do you employ? 390.

How long have you worked in the industry? 21 years.

How long have you been an APTA member? 13 years.

I’ve been the CEO since 2007. Before that I was the general manager at Salem-Keizer Transit for 9 years, and before that I was the GM at Jefferson Transit, a small rural system on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State.

What drew you to a career in public transportation?
Like so many things in life, serendipity plays a large role. There were probably two pivotal points, one being when I was in graduate school. I had a research assistantship in the civil engineering department at the University of Washington, studying transportation systems management. That led to opportunities in ridesharing and vanpool development. When that program was absorbed into the public transit system in Seattle in 1984, I found myself surrounded by people talking about schedule adherence and breakdowns—and it kind of went from there. I went with the flow—it swept me up—into the public transportation field.

I have embraced it since that early initiation. As my family will tell you—we travel quite a bit, and I always come back from those trips with more photos of the transit systems than anything else!

What have you found to be the most valuable APTA benefit or resource—that helps you do your job?
The opportunity to rub shoulders and talk face-to-face with the best and the brightest in the public transportation industry.

Please explain why or how this has helped.
When I come back from every APTA conference, I write a report for my board and staff summarizing the most important points that I have learned—epiphanies I have grasped from being there. One example was implementing a safety initiative in my organization because I was moved by how Toronto addressed its safety issues several years ago.

APTA also provides education for me and other board members surrounding national issues as well as legislative advocacy. Those are just really important benefits of APTA that could not be gotten any other way.

What do you like most about your job?
It is constantly changing—it requires a complete palette of professional and technical skills every day. From labor to politics to data analysis to personnel problems to customer complaints/sensitivity, it’s always different every day. It’s not just the variety, either. It’s the challenge that comes with the component parts of that variety. That there are few easy answers—I find that exciting.

To me, what’s important in leading this organization is being able to relate to every employee, and that starts with learning every employee’s name. I think that pays off. It helps humanize me and helps humanize them in my eyes.

I ride the system a lot, so I see them in their daily work environment and the things they have to contend with daily. And I’m able to convey that to the board and the non-transit users.

Every Wednesday I travel on my most heavily traveled route—and it’s a slice of life like you wouldn’t believe, like the time a woman got on the bus carrying a screen door—with her 4-year-old daughter in tow. Another time, there was a bike on the front bike rack. A man got on the bus and said: “Whose bike is that? It looks just like mine, which was stolen yesterday!” Another man initially said it was his, but after a heated argument, rapidly left the bus at the next stop, so the first man got his bike back!

What is unique about your agency/business?
We’re not in Canada—we’re in the United States. It’s Vancouver, Washington.

Make sure you see Jeff Hamm's video, now that you've read this!