Transit California interviewed Stephanie Wiggins, CEO of Los Angeles County Metropolian Transportation Authority (LA Metro) in Los Angeles, the first woman and first Black woman to serve in this role. Previously, Wiggins served as CEO of the Metrolink regional passenger rail network, as Deputy CEO of LA Metro, and as Regional Programs Director for the Riverside County Transportation Commission.
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Transit California: Since 2021 you’ve served as the CEO of LA Metro, leading a 30 year old agency with 11,000 employees, a budget of $9 billion, and more than 880,000 weekday passenger boardings. You also previously served as Deputy CEO of LA Metro. What are you most proud of in your time at LA Metro, and what are some emerging priorities for you?
In fact, I just celebrated my 2-year anniversary as CEO of LA Metro on June 1! I think I’m most proud of the fact that we have steadily made our system better, friendlier, and expanded access to more people over the past two years – and as a result, we are earning new riders. Our ridership today (as of May 2023) is almost 40% higher than it was two years ago (in May 2021) – and that’s because we’ve expanded our service and put a big emphasis on the customer experience. Just in the past year, we opened the K Line and the Regional Connector, and returned our bus service to its pre-pandemic level. We’ve rolled out a new comprehensive, multi-layered approach to public safety, including a pilot Transit Ambassador program. We launched our pilot GoPass fareless system initiative for K-12 and Community College students; more than 20.5 million rides have been taken with GoPass since the program started in the Fall of 2021. We’ve hired more than a thousand new bus operators and made our service more frequent and reliable through our NextGen program. And we’ve continued to make good progress on our capital program, which is the nation’s largest. It’s been a time of immense change at Metro, and I can’t thank the 11,000 members of the Metro family enough for all their work on behalf of the people of LA County.
Transit California: LA Metro is responsible for up to $25 billion in capital projects. What projects are you most enthusiastic about making a reality, and what challenges for these projects do you foresee in the coming years?
This month, we’re excited to open the Regional Connector Light Rail project, which we call the “missing link” in our light rail network. The Regional Connector ties three of our existing light rail lines together underground in downtown LA and provides one-seat trips from East LA to Santa Monica and from the San Gabriel Valley to Long Beach. For many of our riders, it eliminates a time-consuming transfer at our busiest rail station, 7th Street Metro Center, and saves them 10-20 minutes off their commute. It's truly a gamechanger for our customers, and it really redefines what you can do in LA using Metro.
Aside from the Regional Connector, we’ve got more than two dozen other capital projects that will be completed before the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028. Next year, the Airport Metro Connector will open on the K Line, finally giving us a rail connection to LAX – another game changer. The Westside Purple Line Subway Extensions will also open, which, when all three are complete, will enable you to travel from downtown LA to UCLA in just 30 minutes. A lot of the projects that people have been dreaming about for a long time are finally coming to fruition, and they will fundamentally alter the transportation landscape in LA County.
Transit California: LA Metro has identified a $400 million deficit in 2024-25 and a $600 million deficit in 2025-26 if the Legislature and the Administration do not provide additional public transit funding in the state budget. At the same time, the California Transit Association and other stakeholders, including LA Metro, are advocating an accountability framework for providing transparency about the additional funds to transit agencies. What are LA Metro’s most urgent needs for these funds?
First off – we are encouraged by the recent budget deal that would restore funding to TIRCP and provide additional resources to transit agencies. Metro wants to send a big ‘thank you’ to the leaders in Sacramento who worked tirelessly in the interests of the millions of Californians who take public transit.
We aren’t completely out of the woods yet: this is only one piece of the funding that was included in last year’s TIRCP commitment. The balance of the funding will need to be appropriated to next year’s budget. That said, the restoration of this year’s piece of the TIRCP commitment is good news for transit agencies across the state.
Coming out of the pandemic, we’ve needed to do a lot more on the operations and customer experience side to bring back ridership and deliver the type of fast, frequent, reliable, clean, and safe service that people expect. The reason we have been able to grow our ridership by 40% over two years is because we’ve invested more than $1 billion in things like more frequent cleaning, more frequent bus service in the off-peak hours, social service teams supporting homeless, drug use and mental health crisis outreach, Ambassadors, and a stepped-up transit security presence. We’ve also expanded new programs that attract more riders to transit, like the GoPass Pilot Fareless Program for K-12 and community college students. All those programs are paid for out of our transit operations budget.
In addition, any time we grow our service – as we have done with the expansion of our rail network with the K Line and the Regional Connector – our operations costs go up. With a deficit as large as the ones we’ll be facing in a few years, there’s little we can do but look at program cuts, service cuts, or delay projects that are important to our communities. As an example – we have committed to the total electrification of our bus fleet. We’ve got 2,200 buses. Replacing them, and installing the necessary charging infrastructure, will cost us hundreds of millions each year. What’s more, the costs of construction materials and labor continue to rise. Absent action by the Legislature and the Governor, we could quickly find ourselves in a situation where we need to make a choice between cutting transit service, cutting the programming that makes the transit experience better for our riders, or delaying projects like fleet electrification – so we’re watching the action in Sacramento closely.
Transit California: Prior to your work at Metro, you served as CEO of Metrolink, the regional passenger rail network that serves Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura, where you emphasized customer experience. How did your time there inform your current work?
The customer experience was a major focus of our work at Metrolink, and our customer-first approach led us to realize Metrolink’s highest ever ridership in 2019. Then, the pandemic hit, and ridership evaporated overnight. Metrolink is particularly vulnerable from a fiscal perspective to reductions in ridership as fares are a big proportion of their overall budget – so the first year of the pandemic was particularly difficult for us. It took a lot of effort, but we were able to leverage that customer-first approach to begin to drive ridership back to Metrolink in 2020 and 2021, communicating to customers and customer groups about our robust cleaning, security, and safety protocols.
We’ve brought that same customer-first vision to Metro over the last few years. Shortly before I became CEO, Metro’s Board passed its first ever Customer Experience improvement plan, which gave us a great framework – but it didn’t have any funding attached to it. We set to work on implementing that plan and getting funding behind its programs. I hired the first ever Chief Customer Experience officer at Metro in 2022, and we started building out the key programs: Ambassadors, enhanced cleaning, enhanced security, station improvements, enhanced customer-facing communications, and new discount programs for key ridership groups. We’ve still got a long way to go to get the customer experience on Metro where we want it, but we’ve made incredible progress over the past two years, and we’re getting better every day.
Transit California: You’re in a number of Board positions at a variety of regional institutions, including the UCLA Lewis Center on Regional Policy Studies, the Greater LA Chamber of Commerce, Whittier College, as well as the local chapters of Friends of the Children and the American Heart Association. How does your experience with these organizations inform your priorities at LA Metro?
I value my participation on these non-profit Boards. To me, they serve as an external check on whether we’re aligning our investments to the needs of the community. Additionally, it’s always helpful to understand the needs of our workforce, both current and future. Overall, participating on nonprofit Boards helps me understand the community better, so I can do my part at Metro to help achieve healthier communities, a thriving economy, and a sustainable environment.
Transit California: At LA Metro and throughout your career, you have centered diversity and access as an important part of transit policy. What are some of your current and past accomplishments in this area that you are proud of? What improvements would you like to see?
I’m proud to be leading an agency that really walks the walk when it comes to these issues. We live in an incredibly diverse global city that has long been at the leading edge of social thought and policy. We also have a difficult and complex history of racial injustice and inequity in Southern California. I’m conscious that I lead an agency with many tools at its disposal to help people who have been marginalized in our community, and I think we’ve tried to expand on those in the past few years. From our ambitious goals on hiring diversity and small business contracting for our capital projects, to standing up the Women and Girls Governing Council and our efforts to build the next generation of the transportation workforce through the SEED School and other programs, Metro is a true leader in the transportation industry on diversity and access. I’ve been proud to be a part of that progress over the years.
Going forward, I think we will need to continue to work to ensure the benefits of the programs we’re creating reach the people that need them the most. For example, we’re rolling out our Fare Capping policy this summer. With fare capping, no one will pay more than $5 a day to ride Metro – but it only works if you have a TAP Card. About 40% of our bus riders still pay in cash, and what’s more, about half of those people live in a totally cash-based world. Many of them are not banked, and a lot of them see the need to keep their cash, rather than load it onto a TAP Card. That’s why we’re expanding our outreach and communication in the communities where we have the highest incidence of cash fares and adding new partners to the TAP vendor network. It’s a big challenge, but it’s important as we continue to seek to drive equity in our programs and services.
Transit California: You grew up in a military family, with your father having served in the Air Force. How did this experience impact your career in transit?
Growing up in a military family gave me an upfront view of the benefits of diversity and inclusion. Having to move every few years exposed me to different cultures, different languages, different people, and different ways of doing things. I think some of our riders at Metro might have a similar experience: coming to a new city, learning how to get around and the way we do things here in LA. For me, it was helpful when people took the time to put themselves in my shoes and try to understand things from my perspective.
I think these experiences have helped shape how I lead – particularly when it comes to community engagement. In a place as complex and diverse as LA County, not everyone comes to the table with a similar lived experience. That’s why I strive to listen and understand how our customers, staff, and stakeholders see and experience the world so we can deliver service and infrastructure improvements that make sense for them and their experience. This type of engagement can sometimes be tough, but I think it’s helped us become more successful over the years.