Cities across the US, including Miami, have been redesigning their bus networks to better serve today’s riders. Many decades-old networks have simply not kept pace with changing residential and employment patterns. Az Chougle is the Executive Director of Transit Alliance Miami, a non-profit organization that advocates for walkable streets, bikeable neighborhoods, and better public transit. In 2019, Transit Alliance Miami became the first advocacy group in the country to lead its city’s bus network redesign process. In this episode, Az details the group’s innovative community engagement efforts, and discusses how Transit Alliance worked to ensure the redesign benefitted Miami residents who rely on transit the most. He also outlines the benefits and drawbacks of advocacy groups taking on this work.
Cities across the US, including Miami, have been redesigning their bus networks to better serve today’s riders. Many decades-old networks have simply not kept pace with changing residential and employment patterns.
Az Chougle is the Executive Director of Transit Alliance Miami, a non-profit organization that advocates for walkable streets, bikeable neighborhoods, and better public transit. In 2019, Transit Alliance Miami became the first advocacy group in the country to lead its city’s bus network redesign process. In this episode, Az details the group’s innovative community engagement efforts, and discusses how Transit Alliance worked to ensure the redesign benefitted Miami residents who rely on transit the most. He also outlines the benefits and drawbacks of advocacy groups taking on this work.
“I think it's very important for agencies around the country to recognize that distinction between who you actually are trying to serve. Are you trying to get someone out of an Audi, or are you trying to prevent someone in poverty from having to take out a car payment because your service is not frequent, reliable, dependable enough?"
For more on Transit Alliance Miami, click here.
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Disclaimer: Political views raised by guests on the podcast do not reflect the views of TransitCenter.
Disclosure: TransitCenter is a funder of Transit Alliance Miami, and has provided support for the Better Bus Project.
Hosted by Kapish Singla
Edited by Ali Lemer and Kapish Singla
Produced by TransitCenter
Music: “Comma” - Blue Dot Sessions
Please note that transcripts are generated using a combination of automated speech recognition software and human transcribers. There may be errors in the text.
Kapish [00:00:02] From TransitCenter, I'm Kapish Singla. This is High Frequency. In season two of High Frequency, we're having conversations on how cities and transportation agencies are learning from past mistakes and remedying inequities in transit.
[00:00:20] Cities across the US are redesigning their bus networks. It's common for agencies to make minor changes in any given year, but agencies can make a much bigger difference by overhauling the entire network. In recent years, cities like Houston and Columbus have successfully implemented new bus networks that better serve the travel patterns of today's riders. Every city has its own approach to rethinking bus service, but a common strategy is to simplify the network and make it more like a grid. With simpler routes, it's easier for agencies to run service frequently all day, every day, and that helps people reach more places in the less time.
[00:01:07] For several years, Miami's bus ridership has been declining, dropping twenty-five percent from 2013 to 2018. In that time, Miami-Dade County has had several false starts to redesigning their bus network. That is, until April 2019 when the advocacy group Transit Alliance Miami was entrusted to lead a Better Bus Project. Taking over the reins, Transit Alliance Miami began a community driven process to rethink the network. The advocacy group brought equity lens to the project, ensuring that households with no cars would see improved access and frequency in the new network. Guided by data and community engagement, the group submitted their final proposed map to the county last fall, with implementation expected at the end of 2021.
To learn more about the logistics of running a redesign, I spoke with Az Chougle, the Executive Director of Transit Alliance Miami. Az joined Transit Alliance Miami in 2017. The network redesign is the product of years of effective advocacy under his leadership. Since our conversation in February 2021, Az has announced that he'll be moving on from Transit Alliance this spring,.
Kapish [00:02:31] Az, will you get us started off by talking about what Transit Alliance Miami does.
Az [00:02:36] We are a nonprofit organization in Miami-Dade County, Florida, advocating for better public transit, walkable streets, bikeable neighborhoods, all of the things that Miami really should have, but doesn't really. We've been around for a few years now, starting with reversing transit cuts in our first year. Since then, leading a lot of large projects, culminating in a redesign of the county network that we as a nonprofit were the first advocacy nonprofit to lead.
Kapish [00:03:03] What is a network redesign?
Az [00:03:06] A bus network redesign within our current modern context aims to fix the very nonsensical network planning that has plagued a lot of American cities for the past few decades. When I say nonsensical, just network planning that in our case in Miami has been driven primarily by politics rather than any sort of data and equity driven exercise in network planning. But in other cities, it might be things like redundancies or just a network that has accumulated a lot of dust bunnies over time, whereby just ceases to be as useful as potentially possible to all residents of the city.
Kapish [00:03:46] Why is the current network no longer serving the needs of Miami riders today?
Az [00:03:51] In Miami, our bus network, as it stands right now, can probably be traced to around 30 years ago. And since then, there are a lot of new urban centers and job centers that simply didn't exist back then. But our bus network sort of hasn't kept up with that in a few ways: 1) in just the basic alignments of who would connect to what and how, but 2) in terms of delivering frequent service to across the county, all of these different nodes that really need it. For example, educational institutions or centers of job activities, it just hasn't progressively kept up with how the city is currently formed.
Kapish [00:04:30] And so Transit Alliance Miami is one of the first advocacy groups to be tasked with a redesign, how did that role come about?
Az [00:04:39] It's important to know that the county has tried to do this many times in the past 30 years, but failed. And it's not a position that we took on with great glee. It is a position we took upon ourselves out of pure necessity. There's obviously systemic failures there that are preventing the county from being able to do this. And I think that what Transit Alliance was able to do is take what is usually a very broken, contentious process within government to take it outside government for a second and bring advocacy as a lens that really makes people understand why this is so necessary. And this is not some random, silly thing that the department wants to do.
Kapish [00:05:20] And a large part of a network redesign is talking to riders. How did Transit Alliance Miami approach community engagement?
Az [00:05:29] Very luckily, we had extreme leeway in how we wanted to engage riders. So, for example, one of the first things we did is we put a sign on every bus saying, "Your bus route may change, please text this number." And over the course of the redesign, we had 1700 text message conversations with riders about the redesign, which was awesome and super informative and so direct. Then we approached workshops very, very differently from most government agencies. I, as an advocate, even hate attending government workshops. So we took all of the things that we hate about government workshops and decided to do everything the opposite. With the government workshops, you have to show up at 6:00 and then you have to sit through a presentation. And you need to wait and then everyone gets to talk a little by little and then you have to end up leaving at 8. Our workshops - we call them express workshops where people could stop in for 15 minutes, get an explanation, fill in a survey, have ways to contact us and leave.
Kapish [00:06:25] And to return to the text line, let's say I'm sitting on a bus and I texted you what would have happened next.
Az [00:06:33] What would have happened next is that you'd have first gotten an autoresponse saying, "hi, you've reached the better bus line." And the first thing it would do is send people to the website and send people to the concepts and give a brief explanation, "Hey, this is what's going on. Check out this link. And in the meantime, tell us what route you're riding." So people generally go to link and then they would respond: "I'm riding this route." OK, fine you're riding Route 35. We would just send the explanation or for route 35, and then a bit of an explanation on the overall network. And we would encourage people to take the survey. And I would say most conversations sort of went like that. Someone tried to play "words with friends" with us over a text message. That that was OK, wasn't as informative as you can tell for the project. But most of the conversations were actually very productive because, you know, the wonderful thing about text message engagement, it's a level of engagement people are much more comfortable with. The signs were also in English and Spanish and Creole, and you could text in those languages.
Kapish [00:07:23] How does Transit Alliance Miami define equity and how does that definition shape the goals of the redesign?
Az [00:07:30] We define equity on two levels. The first is the distribution of service and access to services. And the redesign is probably the best example of how inequitable, essentially our current system is. When you start to look at a lot of areas in our community that are either majority Black or have high levels of poverty, they're not getting a single frequent bus line through their communities. Even though they have the density, it just hasn't been planned that way.
[00:07:56] And so there are deep inequities within the bus network that the Better Bus Project fixes. Beyond that, I think there's one level above that that we struggle with in Miami in terms of delivering equitable service, which is how transit riders as a group overall are treated within general governmental policymaking. Transit riders in Miami, 85% of transit riders are either Hispanic or Black, and the majority of transit riders have a household income of below twenty-two thousand dollars. So it's a segment of the population that has a really high demonstrable need for public services. And transit is simply sometimes overlooked or not given as much weight or attention within policymaking. But also by consequence, households that don't have access to a vehicle are also generally overlooked within policymaking. And when you have a government that is car-oriented in its nature, in its policy making, you constantly have an entire group of people who happen to have, again, an underlying demographic and socioeconomic need who are just constantly being left behind by government policy-making.
Kapish [00:09:11] Transit Alliance has put forth its final proposed map, who wins with the new network and why is it a more equitable map?
Az [00:09:20] I think the biggest gains, households with no car, for example, that have access to frequent transit within a five minute walk: it goes from the high 20s to the high 40s. So it's more than a doubling. For people of color, it goes from around nine percent to, I believe, twenty-three percent. Seniors go up to twenty four percent. So I think for the people who really need the sort of access that the transit system is not providing right now, it really does work very well. The transit service has lost so much ridership over the past few years. There's been this false narrative, which I think you've seen nationwide on why transit has been losing ridership. And so the transit department's response has generally been along the lines of we need to get more people out of their cars and onto transit rather than provide the most effective service possible to the people who need it the most, who many times are struggling with car ownership. So I think it's very important for our agency and agencies around the country to recognize that sort of a distinction between who you actually try to serve here. Are you trying to get someone out of an Audi or are you trying to prevent someone in poverty from having to take out a car payment because your service is not frequent, reliable, dependable enough, and designed in a way to connect people to those opportunities?
Kapish [00:10:40] What are your thoughts on whether or not an advocacy group such as yours should be leading a redesign process?
Az [00:10:48] It's an interesting question because I've had other advocacy groups asked me that question and I've given them a very honest answer. I think the main difficulty for a nonprofit in running this is that usually advocacy organizations are used to fighting for what everyone wants. As advocacy, your role ordinarily is solely to amplify the common demands and build momentum around that, redesigns aren't necessarily that in a redesign as a nonprofit were put in the position to say, actually, some of these hard decisions make a lot of sense. And while in another alternate reality, the advocacy organization is the one fighting with the writers for very specific changes to the redesign. In our case, because we're running the process. We are often having to tell people: "No, I'm sorry, most of the community engagement actually is leading us down this course, not the one that you personally want." And it's a very weird position to be in and as an advocacy organization to do that. As advocates, you always want to be on the side of the riders and fighting for every possible thing that they want. That makes sense and that is reasonable. But within this process, your role is different. And in effect, your role as sort of a bit more important in the way is that you are trying to broker the most common sense out of everyone to achieve the best outcome possible, which is a heavy responsibility and really difficult.
Kapish [00:12:14] And what were the advantages and the disadvantages to being an advocacy group that was leading this process?
Az [00:12:23] The major advantages is that you won't find anyone else who fights as hard as us within the ecosystem, you can have, for example, a department or an agency going through redesign that they don't necessarily believe in or want to do or feel invested in or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But with Transit Alliance, since we had so much ownership of it, we were bent on this thing working and seeing it through and fighting every obstacle. And I don't think that there is any comparable comparable way where you can put essentially the passions of advocacy and also the power of advocacy to convene and mobilize and build power. And, in this case, build consensus in an outside world as opposed to having it to be us versus the government. I think the greatest disadvantage is that during the course of time when you are doing the redesign, it is such an intense project, it is such an intense process and it involves so many stakeholders.
Az [00:13:25] And you have to be so conscious of every step that you can't be working on multiple things at the same time. And during the course of the redesign, we hardly worked on a lot of things that weren't related to the redesign. And I think something that if any organization would you ever consider doing this... It's a very, very difficult thing to do and it takes a huge personal toll. It is very difficult to often be the villain in terms of making hard decisions. It is very difficult to show up to a meeting where people aren't necessarily looking forward to hearing from you. Now again, something transit agencies deal with every day. But it's something advocacy organizations don't. And I think it's actually a very humbling experience in that way because we often try to put ourselves in the department's shoes. But once you are in the department's shoes and you're actually trying to do something they haven't been able to do, you realize how hard it is.
Kapish [00:14:20] And Az how would you say that you've been humbled in this process?
Az [00:14:24] Oh, you know, probably the most humbling thing about this entire thing is really gaining a really deep understanding of the system, its challenges. And I think as advocacy organizations. Yes, you kind of get that through the course of your advocacy. But without a bus network redesign, you don't really get that at scale with that level of responsibility and with that level of direct implication for how it might change someone's life. And I think that that's an incredibly humbling process and in all honesty, probably be like my life's greatest honor to have been a part of this project and to lead some portion of it, because I really think that it's just so it's so special and unique and all logic would point to it not happening and not working. But the fact that it has so far is something I'm incredibly proud of.
Kapish [00:15:22] That's all for today's episode. I'm your host, Kapish Singla. This episode was edited by Ali Lemer and Kapish Singla. High Frequency is a TransitCenter production. For more information, please visit us at TransitCenter.Org