ThinkTransit brings together hundreds of transit industry experts across North America and provides agencies the opportunity to learn, connect, and discuss the future of transit. The massive wealth of knowledge at ThinkTransit creates an industry-wide ripple effect; What you learn at ThinkTransit can be taken back to your agency and applied to make real, impactful changes.

 

Blog and Podcast Manager, Tris Hussey, and Social Media Marketing Specialist, Randi Reshef, have teamed up to bring you a behind-the-scenes interview series, "Destination: ThinkTransit." "Destination: ThinkTransit" covers your need-to-know questions featuring ThinkTransit keynote speakers, Trapeze Group and Vontas employees, and key players that help bring the conference to life each year.

 

For our fourth interview, we caught up with Peter Aczel, General Manager at Vontas, and Teresa Domingo, General Manager at Trapeze Group, on the changes we have seen in public transit over the past year, what “The Ripple Effect” represents to communities who use transit, and their favorite memories from past ThinkTransit conferences. Let’s jump right in!

 

 

 

 

TD: Thank you so much for having us, Tris and Randi.

 

PA: My first day was on March 22 last year, so it’s almost to the day! A lot has happened, and it's been a great year. For Vontas as a new company, we had great success working with our customers, we managed to add over 70 people to our team, and grew our great organization across North America.

 

TD: It's been a wild ride. In terms of greatest achievement, I'd say I'm very proud of the team and what we've been able to accomplish with our Next Generation solution. Getting new product out has been a challenge, so getting that out and having customers start to touch and feel it, and eventually use it to support their live operations, is very exciting. Outside of that, we grew our team at Trapeze, and we stabilized post-split with Vontas, which is something I'm very proud of.

 

TD: What we've gone through over the last few years has shown me how critical and essential public transit is to people and to our everyday lives. I think we've broken the glass ceiling in terms of what can be achieved with public transit. When you think about equitable service and think of different ways to do things from a continuous improvement level, it helps move us forward and has opened our eyes to more opportunities. It’s showed us how we can do things even better than we do today, and how we can help agencies achieve their goals. “The sky is the limit” is truer now more than ever, which we’ve seen with what we've been able to accomplish over the last two years in reconfiguring solutions to support new needs and demands so that we can get service out for all.

 

PA: We have seen how essential transit is for us as a society, especially for the most vulnerable communities. We have seen how our lives and our cities have changed from concentrating mostly on transit downtown, to serving all areas with public transit; urban, suburban, and rural. I have seen what big role we can play with our solutions to enable transit agencies to offer these services, whether that’s on the scheduling side with Trapeze or with dispatch and planning with Vontas. We see how we can work on multimodal solutions and integrate technology to enable agencies to offer services that are getting more complex and more modular. We need more systems to talk to each other and we need to understand that we should not be working in silos. We must think about what matters, which is moving people and giving people the option to get where they need to go. In a post-pandemic world, the role that technology can play is tremendous.

 

TD: From the Trapeze perspective, our solutions are more focused on the back office; planning and scheduling, preparing for operations, asset management, and business analytics. Together Trapeze and Vontas fill the needs of an agency from beginning to end, and our solutions are integrated to do that, with Vontas being more of the front-end.

 

PA: That’s where Vontas picks up. We are half of the in-vehicle side, through vehicle tracking and dispatch, management of yards and garages, placement of vehicles, and payment solutions in stop stations and on trains and buses. We also have the hardware component that we're manufacturing and assembling. A lot of our joint customers will be attending ThinkTransit, and it’s typical for us to serve our customers together. Our teams are very close and work together on a daily basis. We're very much connected at the hip in our products and services.

 

PA: I left Texas about a year ago and moved to Iowa, so this is going to be my first time going back to the great state of Texas. I can get some What-A-Burger! Besides that, it's my first in-person ThinkTransit and it's a great opportunity to spend time with our customers and understand their views and needs for our products and services. Every time I speak to customers, I always stress that we're trying to innovate and develop products that impact their operations in a meaningful way. We’re not just doing science experiments in a lab where we think we're building good technology that doesn’t connect to their day to day. Getting dedicated time in and understanding how we can develop meaningful products is what I'm most looking forward to.

 

TD: Peter, I love what you said about not doing science experiments and instead, solving real-world problems. I am very much looking forward to ThinkTransit and to seeing our customers. In the last couple of years at Trapeze, we’ve been developing these new solutions to solve the problems of our customer base, so I’m excited to show everyone what we have in store and how we can help.

 

TD: When I started with Trapeze almost 16 years ago, I worked with a lot of our customers implementing our Workforce Management solution. It's the best feeling ever when you're walking in the halls at ThinkTransit and a customer pulls you aside and remembers the work you did with them, and thanks you because you've made their job easier, or the software helps them get things done more efficiently and effectively. You build a lot of deep relationships with the customers and it's just so nice to see them again.

 

PA: Last year at ThinkTransit I had been with the company for about a week and a half. For myself and for Vontas as its own company, we have established ourselves and have gotten the initial product and customer introductions out of the way, so now we can dive in even deeper. We've done a lot of work on new products and updates, so we are looking forward to talking about new features and functionalities of ITS, Yard Management, and Payment and Ticketing. It’s a very exciting roadmap in innovation that we can share, that wasn't yet in place last year when we met virtually.

 

TD: I feel personally and professionally that everything we do has an impact. Organizationally, as we're working better together across our various departments at Trapeze, we are understanding that everything we do has an impact. What you do is impacting someone else's job, and what they're doing is impacting someone else's day. It's amazing that the software that we build can have such an impact on not only the agency, but the people in the communities that we live in. It’s really part of why we all love what we do. We are ingraining that in our values because it's not only how we're going to help the greater community, but it's how we can all work better together to achieve ultimate success. We’re trying to bring that into work and everything we do.

 

PA: I always try to remind myself and our team of the tremendous importance access to transit has on communities. I always say that access to transit is access to opportunity, and how the opportunities and health of a community is directly impacted by access to transit. Communities from an accessibility and equality standpoint who have not historically had that access to transit have been at a great disadvantage. To me, there is a straight correlation between what we do and enabling this opportunity. This is how I view the ripple effect through the industry and our products. I'm excited that this is the topic that we’re discussing this year.

 

TD: I had the pleasure of meeting Terry at APTA Expo in November last year and I don't want to spoil anything, but even sitting with him for a few minutes and hearing some of the stories he shared was really moving. He's quite inspirational. I'm looking forward to listening to him because he's very engaging and I'm sure he's going to have a lot of thoughtful and inspiring messages to share.

 

PA: I had the opportunity in Orlando to chat with Terry briefly, and it was very interesting. Learning about his background and experience, how he worked and grew through his organization, grew in transit, and is one of the newer younger leaders of a major transit agency that’s trying to do a lot of things; It’s going to be very interesting to hear his perspective on the industry as a newer leader. It’s something I'm very excited about and looking forward to.

 

 

Randi Reshef, Social Media Marketing Specialist