Transit California sat down with Dr. Kari Edison Watkins, Co-Director of the Transit Research Center at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies.
Transit California: You work at the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS-Davis), which is one of four affiliated institutes in the UC system. The Davis center is a worldwide leader in sustainable transportation. From your perspective, what are California transit policymakers getting right with sustainable transportation, and what are the next steps for the future?
I think California has the right attitude when it comes to sustainable transportation, but our execution is lacking. I think most residents believe that we need to be more sustainable in our choices, but we don’t always have the policy in place to develop a system that prioritizes more sustainable modes like transit and biking. We have made great strides with adoption of EVs and other alternative fuels, but car-based transportation, especially single-occupant, is always going to have other problems that EVs won’t fix. We need to make it easier to give transit vehicles priority, build bike infrastructure within 3 miles of rapid transit stations, and discourage automobile use through pricing the trip in line with the impacts.
Transit California: Within ITS, you serve as Co-Director of the Transit Research Center (TRC), which supports research about reasons for the declining use of public transit and ways to increase use. What are some of TRC’s current research projects, and how do you prioritize researching possible decline factors and possible solutions?
We have a project working with Capitol Corridor on new markets for regional rail services in light of the change in work patterns many formerly commuter-based transit agencies are seeing. We have a project looking at microtransit services across many regions in the state (and even one outside California) to understand the benefits these on-demand services bring and how to bring costs down to make them sustainable. We are working in partnership with Unitrans to develop a living-learning sustainable transportation lab in Davis, a component of which is using data to improve transit services. We are evaluating ridership among teens stemming from free ride programs in places such as Santa Cruz. We are looking at the effects of streamlining the CEQA process for TOD projects. These are just a few! Our focus has very much been on understanding and increasing ridership in many contexts, even before I arrived at UC Davis and have been able to support previous efforts the TRC was already undertaking in this area.
Transit California: How does TRC ensure that its researchers’ findings can help inform transit operators and public policymakers? How can operators and policymakers best keep up with and help inform TRC’s research?
We have a website that we do our best to keep updated. They’ll find a button on the “Contact Us” page with “Join Our Mailing List Here!” We only use that mailing list for big events we have with the Transit Research Center, so it won’t be a lot of spam. One such big event that they can watch for is our yearly Transit Research Symposium held every spring with a morning dedicated to practice-applicable results from our research and an afternoon brainstorming around topics relevant to the industry. We have many students involved showing off their research via posters as well, so it’s a great chance to meet them for people looking for future talent. They can find presentation slides from previous years on our website.
Transit California: In December 2023, California State Transportation Agency Secretary Toks Omishakin appointed you to serve on the Transit Transformation Task Force on which you occupy one of two seats reserved for representatives from academic institutions. Why is the voice of academia critical as California contemplates the future of public transit in our state? What do you hope to accomplish on the Task Force?
Academics have a good view of practice across the industry. We know what the trends are and keep an eye on agencies to know best practices and strategies. We also study these trends and practices to explain them and have a good understanding of not just our own research but research others are doing. That is what Juan Matute and I bring to the table at the TTTF meetings. I also teach transit planning and operations at UC Davis, so I can help bring us back to the basics in terms of fundamentals of what makes transit work well and motivates people to ride.
I truly believe in the mission of the TTTF to quadruple transit ridership statewide by 2045. The early examples given of places like Vancouver and Winnipeg are not all that different from the Bay Area and Fresno. But they have integrated transit networks, very frequent service, and vastly different development patterns that emphasize transit access. Through the task force, I hope to stress that all transportation and related agencies in the state (Caltrans, Housing, even Health and Human Services, every region, every city) need to be focused on how they improve priority for and access to transit. When they think transportation, priority for and access to transit has to be priority number one.
Transit California: You serve as an Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Davis, where you serve as an advisore in the multidisciplinary Transportation Technology and Policy (TTP) Graduate Group. How does the TTP approach help alumni of the MS and PhD programs become decision-makers in government, the transit industry, and academia?
First and foremost, TTP is an interdisciplinary program, which is both unusual and highly necessary in our industry. Much of the program has engineering at its core, but with a focus on policy, planning, environmental science, economics, and more. We want students to have the skills necessary to be leaders in the field of sustainable transportation, including understanding of technology, policy and data science. We combine that with advisors who are actively conducting research in many areas within transportation, but almost all focused on sustainable transportation. We start with Mobility Quest during orientation to get students out and about seeing sustainable transportation at work in our area and we have weekly seminars on Fridays to invite speakers from across the industry to engage students with the latest and greatest in transportation research and practice. This fall, we are starting a mentorship series as well, to do cross-group mentoring of students in policy-outreach, job search skills, publishing, and more.
Transit California: You developed the award-winning OneBusAway program for transit agencies, which is a suite of open-source transit information tools including real-time vehicle locations, alerts, and arrival information. Transit agencies can access these tools for free or in concert with a OneBusAway hosting vendor. Can you talk about your inspiration and process for developing this program, and describe a few of the program’s successes?
We started OneBusAway in Seattle in 2008 just as smartphones were really starting to take hold and people wanted information about things like bus and train arrivals in the palm of their hand. It started when I was trying to take buses with my two small children as a grad student new to Seattle and I needed better rider information. I took my knowledge of and contacts in the transit industry and partnered with people in computer science who could help code apps and backend servers as well as understand human-computer interaction. We did some of the first research studies on how having access to real-time information encourages people to ride transit more, makes people wait less time, makes people more satisfied with their trips, and helps them feel safer. By the time we graduated, we had 40,000 unique weekly users of our apps and website and motivation to keep the program going beyond just our dissertation projects. Since then, we created a non-profit, the Open Transit Software Foundation, to oversee OneBusAway and like-minded open-source coded transit software. We have expanded to many cities across the world, including within California, such as a longstanding instance in San Diego, a new instance in Davis, and hopefully soon one in Redding. Any agency with a GTFS-RT feed looking for better rider information can use the software for a small donation to the non-profit if they do the hosting themselves and we are starting to offer hosting as a service for a minimal monthly fee.
Transit California: A part of your recent research focuses on bicycle use and cyclist infrastructure preferences. What do you want transit agency professionals and Association membership to know about best practices in public transit to meet cyclists’ needs and encourage transit use amongst cyclists?
Transit and cycling can work hand-and-hand to bring a greater reach from high-capacity frequent transit services. The problem is that we have built infrastructure that prioritizes neither mode, thus leaving transit vehicles stuck in traffic and cyclists fearing for their lives. Station area design is critical so that cyclists traveling up to 3 miles or more from a station can safely and easily access it in all directions, securely park their bikes, or easily bring them on board if capacity allows it. I take students to the Netherlands each summer on study abroad and the Dutch have fantastic examples of how infrastructure can be used to encourage the bike-to-transit connection. We are also exploring new pilot programs with agencies like Capitol Corridor to subsidize bikeshare trips and make the payments for connections between services seamless.