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Maintaining the Status Quo is Always Okay (Except, Not Really)

Oct 18, 2016
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Transit Trends

Status quo. The way things are now. The current state of affairs. Normalcy. Does not like change.

Status quo – it’s a word that should be kept far, far away from transit.

As Henry Ford said, “If I would’ve asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That quote is one I’ve returned to over and over again when I’ve learned about how far we’ve come in the transit industry.

We don’t often take a minute, pause and think about what Henry Ford meant, and what that has to do with how we approach transit planning for the next decade and beyond.

If you take Henry Ford’s words at face value, they mean that our customers don’t always know what’s in their own best interest. Indeed, it’s a mantra that Steve Jobs adopted when he was developing products at Apple. “A lot of time, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” he said.

When it comes to transit, we like to think we know exactly what passengers want – faster service, more efficient scheduling, easier methods to pay for trips, maybe free WiFi on all buses and trains. Listening to those concerns is always important; but I believe that we have a bigger job to do: we have to not only give passengers what they want, but also transcend and provide them with innovation that they don’t even know to ask for yet.

 

Making Transit a Choice

Besides just giving passengers the features they want, it’s our job to go beyond that – and make transit their number one choice, when they need to go anywhere, at any time.

That requires thinking differently about how we approach transit – from who’s involved (such as public-private partnerships and working with city bureaucracies) to what priorities we need to achieve (short term – that might be dealing with FTA regulations like State of Good Repair; long term – that might be thinking about what will enable you to get to the transit agency you dream of becoming).

If there’s one goal that we all have – agencies, transportation software companies, and anyone who touches the transit space – it’s to make transit a choice for every citizen in every city. It’s not about increasing ridership this year, or decreasing costs of workforce management next quarter – it’s creating a transit system that is an integral part of all our lives.

Shifting our mindset isn’t easy. When it comes to change, we often fight it.

But why is resistance always our default response to change? Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the chair and director at the Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative, highlights some key reasons: “there’s a loss of control, excess uncertainty, and everything seems different.”

When it comes to our user conference, this truly hits home. As one of our past attendees said, the conference feels like a family – where we all work together to solve problems. We didn’t want to make any drastic changes to a conference that is so valuable to so many people.

And yet…

Yet, change is often necessary. Breaking the status quo is a must. And that’s why, over the past 24 years that we’ve hosted the conference, the focus of it has changed. What began originally as a way to provide technology training to our product users morphed into a conference that also focused on dealing with the most pressing issues facing the transit industry, learning from transit industry thought leaders, and of course, peers.

Year after year, the conference changed to the point that calling it a user conference simply didn’t work anymore.

I’m excited to announce that the user conference is now ThinkTransit: The Trapeze Technology Conference. Everything you know and love is not changing – the hands-on training will always be a core focus; but we’re adding more things we think you’ll love.

This change is exciting, scary, important – and we can’t wait for you to be along for the journey.

 

 

The Big Question: What Does This Mean for You?

To find out how this change affects you, check out the new ThinkTransit website here and read more about the evolution here. We’ll reveal more about this development over the next few months. Hope to see you in Chicago from April 9 – 12, 2017 at the first ThinkTransit: Trapeze Technology Conference!


 
Ashley Di Iorio is the Marketing Programs Specialist at Trapeze Group, focusing primarily on our critical events such as tradeshows, conferences, and ThinkTransit: The Trapeze Technology Conference. She previously worked as a Marketing Intern at Trapeze Group and is excited to be back full time. Her previous work experience includes customer-facing positions in Customer Order Management and Supply Chain, where she worked for both an oil and gas company as well as a consumer packaged goods company. From them, she learned that she loved solving business challenges, designing new processes, and being creative. She recently graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration from Wilfrid Laurier University.
 
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