Data-Smart City Pod

Trains and the Future of Transit

Episode Summary

Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews William J. Flynn, the CEO of Amtrak, about navigating COVID-19, building back better infrastructure, and the future of rail travel in America.

Episode Notes

In this episode Professor Steve Goldsmith interviews William J. Flynn, the CEO of Amtrak, about navigating COVID-19, the intersection of trains and climate change, and the future of rail travel. As the CEO of a government-owned corporation and a major infrastructure system, Flynn discusses how Amtrak plans to build back better by engaging a new workforce, increasing digital infrastructure, and improving on "green" travel.  

Tune in to learn about the future of train transit in America, and what cities Flynn wants to connect next.

Music credit: Summer-Man by Ketsa

About Data-Smart City Solutions

Data-Smart City Solutions, housed at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School, is working to catalyze the adoption of data projects on the local government level by serving as a central resource for cities interested in this emerging field. We highlight best practices, top innovators, and promising case studies while also connecting leading industry, academic, and government officials. Our research focus is the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology. We seek to promote the combination of integrated, cross-agency data with community data to better discover and preemptively address civic problems. To learn more visit us online and follow us on Twitter

Episode Transcription

Betsy Gardner:

Hi, this is Betsy Gardner, Senior Editor at the Harvard Kennedy School and producer of the Data-Smart City Pod. Since we started this podcast, we've had great support from our listeners, and to make sure that you don't miss an episode, please find us under the new Data-Smart City Pod channel, wherever you listen. Make sure to subscribe, so you get each episode and thanks for listening.

Stephen Goldsmith:

This is Professor Steve Goldsmith of Harvard Kennedy School talking again to one of our country's leaders on management operations and the use of data. We're with Bill Flynn, the CEO of Amtrak, a remarkable individual doing a remarkable job. Welcome Bill.

Bill Flynn:

Thank you, Steve. Great to be with you.

Stephen Goldsmith:

Thank you. You and actually your predecessors represent an interesting approach to government operations management leadership, which is you all were private sector CEOs with distinguished records. You come into an organization that's a quasi-government organization that has a little bit more feel of a government organization than a totally private one. So talk just a little bit about why the Amtrak board has chosen private sector leaders for public sector jobs, or quasi-public sector jobs. And then let's talk a little bit about what you brought over from your CEO days before, and how that might be applicable.

Bill Flynn:

Well, I think in terms of succession in governance, the board of directors of Amtrak did want to bring some outside perspective in to look at this tremendous franchise that Amtrak represents for our country, a national inner city passenger rail system operating in 46 states. And as you look at the several CEOs who were here at Amtrak before me, first starting with Wick Moorman, who was the CEO and chairman of Norfolk Southern, he brought in a real tremendous focus and discipline around the operations of our company, and how to drive on time performance and just better product outcomes for our customers. And of course, when we operate better, when any transportation system is operating at high levels of reliability, by definition, it's driving increases in productivity, increases in effective capacity, and lowering cost. Wick was followed by Richard Anderson, who had been in his career certainly chairman, CEO of Delta Air Lines, had been at Northwest Airlines, and also so in the healthcare industry.

And I think Richard brought, again, a different focus, a focus on the market, on the customers, on driving marketing to a higher level within the company, focusing on everything from product through price, to revenue management and capacity, and also a focus on the use of data to drive key decisions in the company. I came in, in early 2020, looking to build on that, to bring my own perspective. I've had a long career in transportation, in network operations, and was really excited to have the opportunity to join Amtrak for a number of reasons. But at the time I joined was almost the same day that COVID hit here in the United States. I was announced in the role on March 2nd, intending to start on April 15th, 2020, but effectively started that next day as COVID was coursing through the country, the impact on Amtrak was immediate.

Our bookings dropped 40 percent that week. And then by the end of March, of 2020, we were down to 3 percent of normal ridership as COVID just swept through the country. And so what we knew was key for us, are our services essential? Normal ridership would be 90,000-100,000 riders a day. We were at 3000, 3200 riders a day. I, we were all convinced that the 3,200 people riding Amtrak really needed to use our services. They needed to get somewhere. We for sure were taking people up from the Washington, D.C. area of Virginia to New York City. As the pandemic was really quite dramatic and quite intense in March, April, May of 2020, we recovered to about a 25 percent level of ridership by July, of 2020. And then that number stayed there really until April, May of this year 2021, as vaccines began to roll out and people, for a number of reasons, began to feel more comfortable traveling again and were up to about a 65 percent level of ridership.

Stephen Goldsmith:

That's a pretty remarkable path. Your timing doesn't strike me as particularly good, starting your job, the onset of COVID. But you know, I was a mayor and a deputy mayor, and one in New York. And I had a few dozen city counselors who we found to be interesting folks to both learn from and to manage the relationship. None of that compares to hundreds of members of Congress. So, how do you think about management and operations, and congressional/stakeholder relationships? Right? I mean, all of us, and you're. In a particularly difficult environment, all of us manage, but you have different interests, right? Doesn't mean in one setting that interest is right and the other's wrong. You have passenger interest, you have congressional interest, you have employee interest. So how do you think about management reform in such a messy environment? Not only messy, bad, I just mean messy.

Bill Flynn:

Well, certainly managing our relationships with the FRA and Congress and the several committees of jurisdiction is very much important for Amtrak. We are a government-owned corporation. We're actually a D.C. corporation. All of our shares are held by the Secretary of Transportation. It's interesting, the sentiment around about Amtrak really runs the gamut we have bicameral, bipartisan support, very strong bicameral, bipartisan support for Amtrak for different reasons, for the different services we offer. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I think we have some skepticism about Amtrak, and its role, and the role that it plays in our nation's overall mobility. So our challenge, really our obligation, is to be able to communicate the value that we create today, what that value is for different sectors of our economy and of our society, and what continuing and continued investment in Amtrak can produce. And we believe our service is essential. We believe it absolutely does create value. We've got to be able to articulate that, and demonstrate that to the whole spectrum of stakeholders that we have.

Stephen Goldsmith:

I do think that we talk a lot about creating a narrative and public value, and that's essentially what you pointed to right, is the importance of the value, great. Let me shift gears a little bit. You are involved in what surely is the largest infrastructure investment in Amtrak's history. It feels like to me, 12 billion and some dollars, and that's a little bit unique to Amtrak, but I want to connect that investment to your investment in people. So talk to us a little bit about how the modernization of the equipment, use of internet, of things, digital infrastructure, how does that make Amtrak more productive, more customer-centric, and how does that affect the employees?

Bill Flynn:

You know, it's very interesting. You think about the Amtrak employees. We have about 20,000 employees, Steve. And then if you look at the tenure of our employees, we have many long-tenured employees. And recently we did an employee survey, right? And the question that got, I think the highest positive response was a question that when something along the lines, the work that I do at Amtrak is important, and that it's effectively, and I can see a line of sight between what I do and the output of the company. And of that 20,000 employees, about 2,700 are our management, and the majority of our employees are union members. We have 17 different unions here at Amtrak, but that very strong 80 percent - 85 percent “yes, I know what I do is important” was the same in both work groups. So as a leadership team at Amtrak, we are fortunate, but we have an engaged workforce.

People who care about what they do and know what they do makes a difference. So, as we invest in the company, as we bring on new train sets, for example, or a new locomotive, or particularly IT. Invest in the digital experience, invest in the experience, be able to provide feedback to our frontline employees about that customer experience. We're building on a virtuous cycle that exists already. And so the investment in the employees, whether it's employee training, we run trains and we run them in stations. So as we rebuild and invest in stations like we've done with Moynihan and New York, we've just announced a multi-year initiative for 30th Street station in Philadelphia. We have groundbreaking on union station in Baltimore, we'll have a lot to do with Washington union station. Our employees absolutely are excited because they see it as job creating, and future-confirming.

And this is the levels of investment that we have now. And the infrastructure built. We will have investment that's 20 to 30 percent greater than has been invested in the company for the first 50 years of our existence. So it is really transformational. So we have to invest employees, we'll have a large hiring, I would say challenge and opportunity because we will need clearly skills, particularly as we think about train sets and engineering and onboard staff, and we'll need to hire younger employees. So we have to, again, with a large group of employees that are 20 to 30 year employees in a somewhat stable base, we've now got to bring in, and attract and retain, younger people and provide a value proposition to them as to why, why should I join Amtrak? What's this company about? And what does it offer me? So we have to think of that across all levels.

Stephen Goldsmith:

Let me just take a couple more questions – you’ve got to get back to making sure the trains are on time.

Bill Flynn:

Sure.

Stephen Goldsmith:

In our work at Harvard, we spend a fair amount of time on how conversion to digital systems actually help systems work better. Your trains, I'm sure, are the ones you're about to and have purchased, or much more modern, their use of, we really talk a lot about digital infrastructure. Just a sentence or two, if you would, about how the modernization of not just the rolling stock itself, but the digital infrastructure of that, helps you operate more productively or more efficiently.

Bill Flynn:

Well, they're just mutually dependent, right? There is the physical infrastructure that exists. The digitization of the operations across that infrastructure and on that physical infrastructure improve product, on time reliability and service for our customer, improve operations based on the insight that it gives us about the trains, and the cars, and the signaling system, and the track infrastructure, and the ability to invest in that, gain velocity, overarching all of that, improve safety. That is our number one job, improve safety and reliability. And then of course, we leverage that information for our maintenance and our repair, and ensuring we have the highest on time, not only reliability, but uptime availability of rolling stock.

And then that just translates into our marketing and our product design, pricing strategies, and ultimately customer satisfaction. So it's an integrated hole. It is actually very easy to see when you conceptualize what we do. We're almost a 200 year old industry, in 2028 the Baltimore and Ohio railroad would celebrate its 200th anniversary. It's all part of CSX now. And perhaps we're sometimes thought of as that prior century industry, but we're anything but, right? The opportunities here are tremendous, and the role will play in our nation's mobility, whether it's from an environmental perspective, whether it's moving people, growth corridors, and parts of the country where we really don't have operations today, it's an exciting future for Amtrak.

Stephen Goldsmith:

Well, Bill, I think you almost gave the closing talk. I was going to ask one last question, but I'll ask...so if Congress, the President and Bill Flynn succeed in their investments in leadership, what do you see 15 years from now? That will be the result of all of this coming together and operate as you envision.

Bill Flynn:

So we announced a strategy earlier this year named Amtrak Connects Us. And it focuses on growth outside of the Northeast corridor. The Northeast corridor is kind of separate and apart, we own that track infrastructure. But when we were founded 50 years ago, the population of the country was about 208 million or 338 million, 330 something million. And the vast majority of that growth in the south and the west is where Amtrak has little to no service today. And so there are some 50+ corridors of about 450 miles, 500 miles in length, major city pairs anchoring those corridors with key cities in between. And I would say, if we're successful in that strategy, we handled 32 million riders in 2019. 15 years from now, we should be handling 20 million riders more a year. We should be 52, 60 million riders a year.

The vast majority of that growth is going to come on those corridors, traditional corridors. Cleveland to Cincinnati, Columbus state and in between, Las Vegas New York, Nashville Chattanooga, Atlanta. No passenger rail service, one could continue to make in Savannah. Denver to Boulder. Those are the corridors where people live, where they have moved to in many cases, where there's virtually no inner city passenger rail today. We consider the cost, the efficiency of that, advances we're making. We are environmentally the least environmentally impactful on a passenger seat mile basis. But the technology that we're investing in now takes us further. We're not resting on what we have. I really didn't talk about that as much in this podcast here, but the investments, the train sets we're talking about, the locomotives that I discussed earlier, are quantum leaps in their environmental impact. We're minimizing their environmental impact over the position we have today, but we're not resting there.

Stephen Goldsmith:

This is Steve Goldsmith from Harvard's Kennedy School talking to Bill Flynn, the CEO of Amtrak, about his vision for the present and the future. Sustainability, customer focus, but involving a fair number of data changes and employee training and product activity. Bill Flynn, thank you very much for your time today.

Bill Flynn:

Thank you, Steve. Great to be with you.

Betsy Gardner:

If you like this podcast, please visit us at datasmartcities.org, or follow us at Data Smart Cities on Twitter. And remember to subscribe at the new Data Smart City podcast channel on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. This podcast was produced by me, Betsy Gardner, and hosted by Professor Steve Goldsmith. We're proud to be the central resource for cities interested in the intersection of government, data, and innovation. Thanks for listening.