Conversations on Equity and Inclusion in Public Transportation (eBook)

Chapter 1

Alex Z. Wiggins
Chief Executive Officer
Regional Transit Authority of New Orleans

Let’s hear from Alex…

Paul Comfort: I’m with Alex Wiggins CEO of the Regional Transit Authority of New Orleans

Alex, tell me some about the recent background on New Orleans and where the city’s at right now.

Alex Z. Wiggins: New Orleans is one of the most resilient cities I’ve ever lived in. You know I’m born and raised here. I moved away in the eighties out to the west coast.

New Orleans actually deals with a lot of extreme weather adversity on a regular basis and now Covid. It is a consistent theme, no matter what is thrown at the city, whether it be Katrina or whether it be Covid, the city always marches forward and the perspective of the residents here is really always to do the very, very best you can in any on any given day and any different situation.

And so New Orleans is like all cities across the country right now recovering from the impact of Covid.

We are working on restoring business, obviously, in our case, restoring transit service, and then the city is beginning to generate the kind of revenue that it does, in order to survive. I think what makes New Orleans unique is a highly resilient a tough workforce, a very well committed workforce that’s always focused on bettering the city.

Paul Comfort: Tell me about your personal history and how you got into transit, and what motivates you right now.

Alex Z. Wiggins: You know I got into transit professionally by accident.

My first job in transportation was when I was in high school and I got a summer job with Oceanside Unified school district washing and waxing school buses by hand. This was in the early 80s and to be truthful Paul, I fell in love with buses.

There’s just something about the responsibility of maintaining them and what they represent that has always resonated with me. To this very day when I see a nice clean shiny bus, I have a very, very positive feeling.

So that’s really where I got my start. I really fell in love with transit after college. I served in the military and after my military service, I took two exams. One was to be a bus driver outside of Fort Lewis, Washington, where I was. The other was the Seattle police department test. Well, the police department called first and so I ended up working in law enforcement. For the first 12 years of my career, but my off-duty job was for King County Metro.

And so, transportation, has always been at the core of what I’ve been interested in.

Then I decided to change careers after 9/11. There was a very unique opportunity at Sound Transit. They were building a light rail line from the airport to downtown. And they were looking for someone to lead the Community outreach for construction mitigation. And so I jumped at that because I knew everyone in the neighborhood, every one of the business owners and most of the community leaders. It was just a natural fit and so I was hired at Sound Transit initially.

I helped them manage community outreach and then because of my law enforcement background ended up helping to design their law enforcement training program. Then my career in transportation really just opened up.

I ended up working at the Seattle Department of Transportation as the city of Seattle light rail liaison, and so we essentially had a regulatory oversight function of all construction related transportation in city. The mayor hired me to be his light rail liaison and my job there was to mitigate all of those Community impacts associated with building a large capital project.

My job was getting out ahead of challenges relative to access for businesses and residents who may have had issues with construction and resolving them.

I then became the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation and since then I’ve had a chance to work with some great people.

I was a chief administrative officer at North County transit district in San Diego county and I learned about the bottom line and transit. I believe transit is a service, but we still have a bottom line, and we have to be mindful of our decisions and how they impact our budget.

Then I worked for Grace Crunican as her Chief of Staff. She was recently inducted into the APTA Hall of Fame and she’s probably the most demanding and tough boss I’ve ever had. She actually made me a better professional and without her influence I wouldn’t be sitting here today, I can say that with 100% certainty.

Then I went to work at Metro in Chicago and you know wasn’t politically suited for Chicago.

Then I was lucky enough to work on the private sector side for a while, on the Denver Eagle P3 project, where we are responsible for building commuter rail lines three different lines and then renovating Union Station in downtown Denver, building a new station at the airport, and of course the commuter rail lines. Then I had a chance to work for Phil Washington at LA Metro, where I headed up our law enforcement emergency management division.

Then this opportunity opened in New Orleans. And, given that I grew up here, I felt that I had a shot at the job and decided to go for it and it’s been over two years now. There’s nothing more pleasing than providing transit in the community where you grew up so, I’m very happy.

Paul Comfort: What an amazing career story. Did you go to LA when Phil went from Denver or shortly after?

Alex Z. Wiggins: Shortly thereafter. I was part of the first management team that he built after he took over, so I joined him a couple of months after.

Paul Comfort: In the last year or two you’ve really been talking about looking at everything for a transit agency through the lens of equity and inclusion. So could you tell me what that means to you and define that?

Alex Z. Wiggins: Yeah, absolutely. So with regard to equity we’re really looking at removing any barrier to mobility or access to employment, etc, access to education.

Any barrier that’s tied to any demographic data, you know your ethnicity, your income, where you grew up etc, and having transit being very purposeful about bridging that gap.

I’ll give you an example:

We have communities that are essentially transit deserts and then we have other communities where we have transit service every six minutes.

So as a transit agency it’s equally important to us to make sure that that young person, that professional, that single parent, that person going out to their first job has the same access to mobility and same level of mobility as someone who may live in a higher income community that is rich with transit resources. So, we’re very intentional about removing those barriers that have had adverse impacts on someone’s ability, just to get to work or just to get to school or just get to the grocery store.

And Covid really hammered that lesson home for us because, like a lot of agencies, we saw a drastic reduction ridership and drastic reduction in revenue. But we had a population that still had to get to work, and so we had to be mindful about - Okay, yes, we have to reduce service, but when and where do we reduce service? And how do we ensure that we don’t harm folks unnecessarily? It really focused our thinking on how we’re going to provide equity with regards to transportation mobility.

Paul Comfort: And what does inclusion mean for you?

Alex Z. Wiggins: Inclusion, you know, making sure that again, everyone has a chance to be at the table, and we are hearing all voices. You know in transit, we love to hear from our fans we love, from those advocacy groups that think we’re doing everything correctly.

But it’s more important, to hear from voices who don’t ordinarily attend Community meetings that don’t go online to attend our virtual board meetings and to make sure we go out to them and we hear critical feedback.

Or we hear information that we may have overlooked about how to better serve our Community. So we want to be very intentional about having all of those voices at the table and helping us truly plan and then deliver transit service that meets the community’s needs.

Paul Comfort: Can you share some examples of what specifically you are doing to produce more equity and inclusion?

Alex Z. Wiggins: Yeah, one of the things that we started was we actually put together racial and social justice toolkit.

Then we look at every major decision, and this goes well beyond a Title 6 review. But every major decision that affects transit service we looked at the actual neighborhood, looked at demographics, we look at all of those factors that may influence our decision.

And we are intentional about not having an adverse outcome, and so, if we identify a Community that’s low income that has low frequency with regard to transit, we’re going to make a decision that improves that condition in every case. And to the converse, where we have imbalance, we’ll address that too. I’ll give you a perfect example - our St. Charles street car essentially travels through the most affluent neighborhood in New Orleans, the Garden District Uptown and travels at a frequency of six minute headways.

Our lowest income community in New Orleans East at one time had headways of an hour. One hour transit service for the lowest income neighborhoods and the highest...