The Greater Richmond Transit Company’s new CEO answers 5 questions about her vision

Richmond has been logging a series of transit successes over the past year⁠—17% gains in ridership, a coming expansion down Route 1 into Chesterfield, and service extensions in Henrico. Richmond’s premier transit provider, the Greater Richmond Transit Company (GRTC), also has a new leader, its sixth (and first female) CEO, Julie Timm.

Timm is a Virginia Beach native who cut her teeth at Hampton Roads Transit and most recently as the Chief Development Officer for Nashville Metropolitan Transit Authority. She began work at the end of September. We sat down for an interview about her vision for transit in Greater Richmond.

1. GRTC ridership is trending upwards since the route redesign and launch of the Pulse; however, those numbers are still only half what ridership was in the 1990s. What do you see as the path to getting people back on the bus?

A lot of it is transforming people’s opinions about how they live. People are very enamored with the car. I love my Prius. I adore it. It’s my second one, but the way we have chosen to develop our communities and roads has made us very dependent upon the car. It’s going to be very hard to get people out of that and back into transit. As people are retiring, just joining the workforce, or just wanting an urban lifestyle, getting the information to them about how the transit system works, riding with them, and transforming our system so that it is reliable and frequent is very important.

When you have a system that is cut down to 60-minute frequency, when you have a system that doesn’t go to where people want, when it’s hard to use, those are things that degrade service. We can provide more frequent service. We can focus on better connectivity so people have more direct routes. We can start transforming the way people evaluate their mobility options.

Over and over you hear stories of people who say, “I didn’t realize how life could be so much better when I didn’t have to be tied to my car.” A lot of people can’t imagine life without a car and it’s about getting people to be able to imagine that life, embrace it, and see how liberating it really can be.

I’ve so enjoyed using transit whenever I can, and I look forward to the day when my son graduates high school and I’m able to move into the city myself and use transit more often. It’s a very different way of interacting with the community and interacting with the world. Not only do we need to have an effective, reliable transportation system, we also have to change the way people view how they live.

2. Making transit as convenient and seamless as possible improves the rider experience and leads to higher ridership. Other cities have introduced painted bus-only lanes, established reloadable transit cards or direct credit card payment, and expanded amenities such as seating, shelters, and real-time wait signs. What are your plans to make transit more competitive and comfortable in Richmond?

There are definite needs. When I rode the bus while I was interviewing there were a couple of places where I saw a lot of riders standing, and there was no shelter, no bench. It was obvious that this was a frequent occurrence. I talked to some of the folks at the stop, and that was one of my questions afterwards: why don’t we have a shelter or a bench here?

When you take that investment in a stop and multiply that times two- or three-thousand stops, it’s not quite as easy as just saying we’re going to put one bench or shelter in. It can be very expensive, so before I can commit to anything I have to look at what our funding sources and other priorities are.

3. Both Hampton Roads and Nashville have faced setbacks in their transit system development over the past few years. What lessons have you learned in your work with the light rail project in Hampton Roads and the ballot referendum effort in Nashville that will help guide your work in Richmond?

Getting to the public early with good information and really being very explicit in what transit can or can’t do is essential. There is so much misinformation that gets put out there that is very hard to counter. There are certainly some folks who feel very strongly that taxpayer money shouldn’t go into transit. There’s a lot of misinformation about transit, about what the priorities are, where the funding goes, what the impacts are, and it’s very important for people in transit to get out there and provide as much truth as they can about the issues so that people can truly make an informed decision.

A lot of the anti-transit information out there in Nashville was just flat-out wrong, and the pro-transit folks were also not providing good information. People felt like they could make a choice weighing bad information from both sides, and it made for really poor decisions from the public through no fault of their own.

One of the things that they did from the very beginning in the recent Phoenix light rail referendum was the transit agency very assertively countered misinformation. They were proactive in saying this is what the change will impact, what it won’t impact, and this is how much it would cost. They were aggressively transparent, and I think that is very important.

Too often people are afraid that if they put information out that people won’t understand it. It’s not too complex. It’s not too hard. It’s very simple. We just need to get the right information out and be very aggressive about getting it out. If we had done that better in Hampton Roads and in Nashville, the results may not have changed, but I would have felt better about them.

We have to show there is a regional vision for connectivity. Transit is one piece of a larger mobility puzzle, and when you dedicate resources to transit you’re dedicating it to better sidewalks, better bus infrastructure, and better connections for the paratransit community. It’s not necessarily about building out a transit system. It’s about building out a better mobility system for the entire community and balancing the needs of how people move around.

4. Currently fare enforcement on the Pulse does not follow industry best practices. In Cleveland, after the introduction of similarly heavy-handed enforcement, ridership dropped by 18% on their BRT system. How big of a problem is fare evasion and do you plan on sticking with the current enforcement system?

I was on the Pulse when a fare enforcement agent came on and watched that person look at every single person’s pass, including my own, and only one person was very respectfully escorted off where she was then allowed to pay to get back on. I find that that method was very effective. Everyone else on that bus had paid, and when I have ridden I’ve seen a lot of people pay for it. In my personal experience I haven’t seen fare evasion as an issue. I understand other people have a different experience, and I know the agency’s already been looking into it.

The question I have is whether or not rampant fare evasion is a reality or perception. That’s the first question. Regardless, we’ll address it because it is something that is very concerning to some of our key stakeholders. There’s a lot of different ways to address it. We can increase enforcement, but there’s a balance there of how much you pay to have fare enforcement officers. Checking every pass versus the timing and the efficiency of the route itself needs to be considered.

I hate to say this, but there’s always going to be people who try to cheat the system. Whether it’s paying tolls, paying for parking, or paying for transit, you’re always going to have people who try to get away with cheating. The question is how prevalent the problem is and how much money do you put into trying to solve it? At what point are those costs outweighing your gains? There are models ranging from people giving more police powers to enforcement officers to write tickets, fines or engage to the other side of people making the entire system free. Then you don’t have to worry about enforcement at all. There are solutions in between, and which way this region decides to go needs to look at the pros and cons of of all of those.

I don’t like the more draconian approaches. Any time you put a negative spin on using transit, you’re more likely to have people move away from it and go back to their other options. My background is in biology, and science says people have a tendency to encode and to better remember their bad experiences. We make the negative experiences larger in our mind because you have to remember those bad things to survive. So when riders post a bad experience with enforcement officers holding up their bus online and it gets amplified, that negative perception of an instant becomes the reality of the entire system when the truth is that enforcement is a very minor component of the entire system.

How do we balance that with people’s positive experiences to be able to say to folks we understand that yes, those concerns are real. Yes, we need to address negative experiences, but they truly are minor. I’ll be looking into all that, and hopefully we’ll have some answers very soon as to what direction we want to go with enforcement.

5. Richmond, Henrico, and Chesterfield have shown promising interest in transit lately and increased their funding for GRTC accordingly. What do you see as GRTC’s role in regional conversations and negotiations on transit? How do you plan to consolidate these gains and help expand service across the region?

GRTC is the Greater Richmond Transit Company. We are the regional transit provider. I know that there is a desire from some communities to expand, but where that goes, when it goes, and how it goes, and the funding for it will be pivotal to these conversations and how we implement. We can’t expand regional transit until we have a firm, fixed source of funding to be able to support those operations. We also need to have a more established recruitment and retainage for our drivers. Until we have those two issues firmly in hand, we can’t expand too much further. Having those conversations with our partners about how we fund, how we use those funds, and how we grow is going to be the foundation to where we expand regionally.

Ultimately, GRTC needs to be in a position where we look at a continuous and uniform system and present information about a regional plan for mobility that each of the municipalities in the system supports. As we present our operational budget to them each year we’re not presenting it in isolation but rather we’re giving them a multi-year plan so they know where we’re going. GRTC needs to take a very clear role in establishing and maintaining those routes and how they are maintained in the face of unknown funding from year-over-year. Those decisions have to be made by the agency in very clear coordination and very clear transparency with the people funding it and the communities they serve.

The best way to manage this would be for our region to advance towards dedicated funding so localities don’t have to make very hard decisions on the funding they provide. When transit becomes a competing interest against teachers, police officers, and fire fighters, it makes it very hard for localities to then become a sustaining, reliable source of funding for the agency and for the routes.

We need a system in which GRTC can talk with the three localities about our service and plans for where our region is growing with transit. Then we can ask them if they can support this year, next year, and so on. I believe in very collaborative and transparent coordination with our partners. I wouldn’t want to come across at any point in time as saying GRTC is the primary decision maker in this process. We can’t alienate the very people that we serve. I need the localities to have a very clear voice in the process. I need them to be supporters of it. I believe that the community needs to come together. We need to have clear champions in each of the localities and GRTC needs to be a leader in bringing people together.