Strategic Planning and Management in Transit Agencies (2005)

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4OVERVIEW The literature review revealed that strategic planning is a popular and widespread practice in both the private and pub- lic sectors. It is a leadership and management tool that has been successfully used for decades to help organizations bet- ter prepare for the future and improve long-term performance. There is increased recognition that strategic planning is not enough by itself and that too many good strategic plans have been left to gather dust. Effective leadership is required to both develop and implement strategic plans. This has led to the concept of “strategic management,” which includes the implementation and ongoing management of strategic plans, not just their development. Another trend has been to make the strategic planning process briefer and more flexible. Part of the problem in the past has been that formal and elaborate planning processes have often led to the development of comprehensive and thor- ough plans that are out of date by the time they are produced. Today’s more turbulent and uncertain times require that less emphasis be given to the form of the plan and more to the substance and timeliness of the results. Henry Mintzberg has suggested that strategic planning is quite different than “strategic thinking,” the creative synthe- sis of visionary new business strategies. He goes further by suggesting that strategic planning, essentially analytical in nature, may even be antithetical to strategic thinking. He believes that strategic planning is more appropriately thought of as “strategic programming.” As such, it may be quite suit- able for relatively stable public transportation systems. Although it began in the military, the early nonmilitary use of strategic planning was primarily in the private sector. How- ever, its use in the public and nonprofit sectors has increased substantially and there are now several good sources of infor- mation on performing strategic planning in these sectors. Sev- eral reports and articles that pertain specifically to public- sector transportation are also reviewed. Effective strategic planning and management requires not only deciding what an organization should do, but also its having the knowledge and skills required to do it. With this in mind, the tools of organization development are discussed as a factor that could increase an organization’s capability to develop and implement strategic plans. This includes devel- oping and retaining a workforce with the requisite knowledge and skills. Finally, a recent TCRP study about “emerging new para- digms” in transit has suggested that fundamental changes will be required if transit is to succeed in a world of increasing social, economic, political, and technological change. If so, it could well be that strategic planning and management will be a crucial tool toward this end. INTRODUCTION As would be expected, there is a significant amount of liter- ature on the subject of strategic planning in general, particu- larly in the private sector. There is also a fair amount written on strategic planning in the public and nonprofit sectors. How- ever, much less has been written specifically about strategic planning in public transportation. This literature review will be selective rather than exhaus- tive. It will cover strategic planning in the private sector; how- ever, it will primarily focus on strategic planning in the public sector and in public transportation. HISTORY Strategic planning has a long history in organizations. Its ori- gins are often thought to have been in the military, where there was a need to develop comprehensive, long-term strate- gies to win a war as opposed to the shorter-term, more limited tactical planning needed to win battles or skirmishes. An early form of strategic planning, the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), came out of the Har- vard Business School in the 1950s as part of their efforts in regard to business policy development and the analysis of business strategies in relation to an organization’s internal and external environments. The practice of strategic planning achieved considerable popularity in private-sector organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, it became more and more prevalent in the public and nonprofit sectors. Unlike other management fads that have quickly disappeared, strategic planning is a management technique or practice that has demonstrated staying power and broad usage across a variety of organiza- tions in both the private and public sectors. STRATEGIC PLANNING IN GENERAL Early on, strategic planning was a relatively formal, elabo- rate, and often lengthy process. In addition, because times CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

5were more stable, a strategic plan was intended to last for several years. More recently, largely in response to these more rapidly changing and turbulent times, there has been a clear trend in the private sector to • Shorten the strategic planning cycle so that the plan is not out of date by the time it is finished. (However, it should also be noted that there has been a countervail- ing trend to open up the process and involve as many participants as feasible, rather than having it be a “top- down” plan developed largely by top management and imposed on the organization. The effect of this has been to lengthen the process.) • Make the planning process less formal and more flexible. • Make the process relatively continuous rather than some- thing undertaken only every 2 to 5 years. • Link it to other important business processes such as budgeting and performance measurement. An example of this is found in Strategic Readiness: The Making of the Learning Organization (1) in which the authors suggest a shift from strategic planning to strategic learning through a regular process of • Continuous planning—wherein the organization focuses on questioning and quickly adjusting existing plans; • Improvised implementation—that is, both experimental and evolving, and that provides good information for learning; and • Deep reflection about original assumptions—what has changed and what has been learned. The authors maintain that “most organizational change results not from formal plans and fixed programs for change but from a process of learning—and not just from the learning of indi- viduals but, more importantly, from the collective learning of entire organizations” (1, p. xi). The 1994 publication of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning by Mintzberg (2) presented a very comprehensive, complex, and contrarian view of the practice of strategic plan- ning. His central argument is that strategic planning by its very nature is the antithesis of “strategic thinking.” He views strategic thinking as a creative act of synthesis, and strategic planning as a process that is essentially one of analysis. (An analogy might be right brain versus left brain thinking, in which the right brain is considered to be more creative and holistic and the left brain is considered to be more linear and logical.) Mintzberg believes that “strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers” (3, p. 107). Mintzberg goes on to argue that “Strategic planning, as it has been practiced, has really been strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist” (3, p. 107). He asserts that strategic planning does not fail because of such commonly mentioned pitfalls as a lack of commitment from top management or resistance to change, but instead because of its fundamental nature of being too analytical, too formalized, and too detached from the functions and interests of the business’s line managers. In spite of his belief that strategic planning is not effective at creating business strategies (strategic thinking), he believes that it can play important roles including: • Strategic planning as strategic programming—Instead of trying to use strategic planning to generate strategies or visions, use it to program them. This can be done through a process of “codification” (expressing the strate- gies in ways that are clear and operational), by “elab- oration” (breaking strategies down into substrategies and action plans), and “conversion” (identifying the impacts of the strategies on operations; e.g., on budgets and performance controls). • Strategic plans as tools to communicate and control— Plans can be an important way of communicating the organization’s intentions both internally (helping to ensure that everyone in the organization is pulling in the same direction) and externally. • Strategic planners as analysts—Planners can use their analytical skills and orientation by performing special studies and by offering new perspectives. • Strategic planners as catalysts—In this role, planners do not try to enter the “black box” of strategy making, but instead encourage and assist line managers to think in creative ways about the future (3, pp. 112–114). In Mintzberg’s words, “Planners shouldn’t create strategies, but they can supply data, help managers think strategically, and program the vision” (3, p. 107). Although insightful, Mintzberg’s distinction between strategic thinking and strategic planning may be more rele- vant to the private sector, where the environment tends to be more volatile and where businesses must constantly be on the lookout for new business strategies and opportunities. Gen- erally, in the public sector, and in public transportation more specifically, the situation is usually more constrained. For example, the purpose and geographic jurisdiction of public transportation agencies is usually prescribed by state legisla- tion. For the most part, public transportation agencies are not going to be pursuing business opportunities outside of the area of public transportation. In addition, their financial struc- ture is often defined or controlled in large part by their enabling legislation or funding bodies. It might therefore be argued that strategic planning, when thought of as strategic programming as described by Mintzberg, may be the primary role it should play in public transportation. Mintzberg implies this when he states that “Only when an organization is sure of the relative stability of

its environment and is in need of the tight coordination of a myriad of intricate operations (as is typically the case of air- lines with their needs for complicated scheduling), does such strategic programming make sense” (3, p. 112). The more creative strategic thinking described by Mintzberg might be used only infrequently, when there is a need for more trans- formative organizational or institutional change. Another valuable perspective on strategic planning, that appeared in the mid-1990s, was the concept of the “balanced scorecard,” as developed by Kaplan and Norton in response to their belief that strategic planning and management as practiced in the private sector gave too much weight to financial matters (4). To remedy this, they developed the balanced scorecard idea, an approach that provides a frame- work for helping an organization achieve its long-term strate- gic goals by viewing the organization from four key per- spectives: (1) the customer, (2) internal business processes, (3) learning and growth, and (4) financial performance. The balanced scorecard system involves the development, utilization, and analysis of performance metrics that are devel- oped for each of these perspectives. STRATEGIC PLANNING IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR One of the “bibles” of strategic planning in the public (and nonprofit) sector has been John Bryson’s Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide to Strength- ening and Sustaining Organizational Achievement (5). This book was first published in 1988, and then substantially revised in 1995. Bryson defines strategic planning as “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it” (5, pp. 4–5). He offers a generic strategic planning model that has been successfully used by many public and nonprofit agencies. This model consists of 10 steps that he refers to as the Strategy Change Cycle (5, p. 23): 1. Initiate and agree on a strategic planning process (including who should be involved, and their roles and responsibilities). 2. Identify organizational mandates (e.g., enabling legislation). 3. Clarify organizational mission and values (this step should include an analysis of key “stakeholders”). 4. Assess the organization’s external and internal envi- ronments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportu- nities, and threats (SWOT analysis). 5. Identify the strategic issues facing the organization. 6. Formulate strategies to manage these issues. 7. Review and adopt the strategic plan or plans. 8. Establish an effective organizational vision. 9. Develop an effective implementation process. 10. Reassess strategies and the strategic planning process. 6 Note that Steps 1–8 focus primarily on the planning process, whereas Steps 9 and 10 shift the emphasis from strategic planning to strategic management. There are some lessons to be learned in the revisions the author made to the book in 1995. For example, Steps 7, 9, and 10 were added, reflecting the need to not just produce a plan but to effectively implement it, and also to reassess the planning process as a prelude to another round of planning. The emphasis is on strategic management, not just strategic planning. In addition, the author places more emphasis on the recognition that strategic planning is different than strategic thought and action (a point strongly made by Mintzberg and noted previously). In summary, the 1995 edition makes a more explicit linkage between leadership, strategic planning, and management. Bryson is clearly a strong believer in the benefits of strate- gic planning, including the promotion of strategic thought and action, improved decision making, and enhanced orga- nizational responsiveness and performance (5, p. 7). However, he also recognizes that strategic planning has limitations and should not be considered a panacea for all organizational problems or situations. For example, strategic planning is most likely not an appropriate response to extreme adverse circumstances; if the organization does not have the necessary people, skills, or management commitment to pro- duce a good plan; or if the likelihood of plan implementation is low. Bryson believes that strategic planning is here to stay because it effectively deals with substantive issues and con- cerns as well as the reality of political decision making. In 1993, the U.S. Congress passed the Government Per- formance and Results Act (GPRA). This act requires that federal agencies take a number of steps to operate in a more businesslike manner and that they become more accountable to taxpayers. These steps require agencies to • Define their missions and desired outcomes, use strate- gic planning, involve their stakeholders, assess their environments, and align their activities, core processes, and resources in support of mission-related outcomes; • Measure their performance to ensure that goals are being met; and • Use the performance data to improve organizational processes, identify performance gaps, and set improve- ment goals. Under the GPRA, agencies were instructed to develop mul- tiyear strategic plans, annual performance plans, and annual performance reports. As a result, in 1996, the FTA published its first strategic plan, covering the period from 1997 to 2001. An executive guide for implementing the GPRA, pub- lished by the Government Accounting Office, pointed out that

7the success of the GPRA “depends on strong leadership prac- tices that devolve decision-making authority with account- ability, create incentives, build expertise, and integrate man- agement reforms” (6). STRATEGIC PLANNING IN PUBLIC-SECTOR TRANSPORTATION In the mid-1980s, the University Research and Training Program of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration (UMTA) (currently the FTA) funded a project that examined strategic planning in small- and medium-size transit agen- cies (7). The study report included a discussion of strategic planning and its benefits, a survey of 104 transit agencies, and a case study of a small transit system in Missouri (South- east Missouri Transportation Services, Inc.). The author observed that the crux of strategic planning is to create a process that answers three basic questions (7, p. 5): 1. Where are we? 2. Where do we want to go? 3. How can we get there? In the survey of transit properties, the following percent- ages of respondents answered that they conduct a formal strategic planning process: • Small systems (fewer than 50 vehicles) 42% • Medium systems (50–99 vehicles) 68% • Big systems (100–500 vehicles) 62% • Large systems (more than 500 vehicles) 93% The average for the four sizes was 59%. However, when responses were analyzed more closely, it was noted that more than half (57%) were actually referring to long-range service and capital plans as required by the fed- eral UMTA, short-range service plans, or to the annual bud- geting process. In short, there appeared to be a great deal of confusion as to what actually constitutes strategic planning. The study identified the following managerial tools used by transit agencies that might become part of a strategic plan- ning process: • Strategic-type special studies (e.g., performance audits), • Performance indicators, • Management by objectives, and • Strategy retreats. It found that there were a number of obstacles to con- ducting strategic planning in agencies, and that these obsta- cles differed according to the size of the agency. For exam- ple, inadequate staff resources was regarded as a significant obstacle by small agencies, but much less so by large ones. Conversely, a lack of good information was regarded as a serious problem by large agencies, but not so serious by small agencies. Large agencies cited the “fish-bowl” envi- ronment of public agencies as a problem and also changing state policies. Other obstacles cited by respondents included: • Operating pressures, • A short-term orientation inside and outside the agency (“fire-fighting”), • The annual budget process, and • An inability to enter new markets or alter the agency’s external environment. The study also found that small agencies in particular have difficulty in regard to strategic planning. In general, these dif- ficulties had to do with inadequate resources, including staff, expertise, data, and the money needed to hire outside exper- tise. Three key conclusions emerged from the study: 1. The need to reinterpret the concept of strategic planning. 2. The importance of organizational readiness. 3. The need to mold strategic planning to the specific context of the organization. In regard to the need to reinterpret the concept of strate- gic planning, the study noted that conducting a comprehen- sive and formal strategic planning process (the “classical” strategic planning model) may be beyond the capability of most transit agencies. Moreover, it may be more than is nec- essary. Five strategies are suggested in regard to this issue: 1. The formality of the process needs to be de-emphasized. 2. The level of data and analysis should be kept in rea- sonable relationship to the capabilities of the agency. 3. The cost of the process should be kept in some reason- able relationship with the likely benefits. 4. There needs to be a better understanding that long- range planning is not the same as strategic planning. Long-range planning may be necessary and useful; how- ever, it does not fulfill the same purposes. 5. Strategic planning might best be performed by seg- menting it. Rather than implementing a single, rigid process, it might be more effective if it is kept more flex- ible and if it uses various tools for specific purposes (e.g., special strategic studies). The second conclusion was the importance of organiza- tional readiness; some organizations may just not be ready to undertake strategic planning. Key factors in whether an orga- nization is ready include organizational sophistication and stamina, the flexibility and commitment of management, and the skills and expertise of the participants. Finally, in regard to adapting strategic planning to the orga- nizational context, management is encouraged to be realistic about the capabilities of the agency, set priorities and clearly define objectives for the process, design a process that reflects

these considerations, and build on what already exists in the agency. In 1985, an article was published about a case study of the development of a strategic management process in the Penn- sylvania Department of Transportation (8). This study made clear the importance of not just developing a strategic plan but of also creating a management process to implement and man- age the plan. There were several factors that distinguished this effort from typical strategic planning processes at the time. For example, several key structural changes were made. A strategic management committee made up of the agency’s six top managers was formed to direct and manage the change process. Seven substantive subcommittees were also formed to help manage the effort. Organization-wide planning was centralized and program and project planning were decentral- ized. A concept of “business groups” was used to create a new way of thinking about the primary products and services pro- vided by the agency (as opposed to the more traditional way of thinking about the functions performed). Four-year plans were developed for each of the agency’s operating districts. Finally, the strategic planning process was tightly linked to the budget process to ensure that the agency’s resources were being aligned with the plans. All of these actions served to institutionalize the strategic planning process throughout the agency. In 1988, the same year that Bryson published his book on strategic planning in the public sector, the UMTA published A Guide to Strategic Planning for Transit Properties (9). Considered by some in the transit industry to be a classic text, this report provided an early guide or framework for strate- gic planning in transit. The authors define strategic planning as “the analysis of environmental change, the formulation of organizational objectives, and the establishment of priorities for resource allocation” (9, p. 1). The report goes on to describe why it is important to do strategic planning, and presents several case studies as examples of how to do it effectively. (The case studies were Alameda–Contra Costa Transit, NJ Transit, Port Authority of Allegheny County Transit, Seattle Metro, and the Utah Transit Authority.) In addition, the report discusses the following key differences between planning in the public and private sectors (9, pp. 3–4): • The private sector is primarily driven by the financial bottom line, whereas public agencies generally have multiple and often ambiguous goals and a variety of key stakeholders. • Public agencies are more often subject to public scrutiny and political pressures. • Mandates in the public sector are often legislated and are not up to management prerogative. Key conclusions of the study were: 8 • Upper management must be seriously committed to and participate in the strategic planning process. • The development of a mission, goals, and objectives should be based on a careful analysis of the environ- ment (both internal and external) and should emphasize a marketing perspective. Objectives should be stated in ways that are measurable. • There should be linkages between strategic planning, program planning, and budgeting, and between achieve- ment of strategic planning objectives and personnel appraisals and compensation. • Indicators should be developed that measure the effi- ciency and effectiveness of transit services. • Good communication is a crucial ingredient of an effec- tive strategic planning and implementation process. • “Strategy champions” with appropriate responsibilities and incentives are needed for successful implementation. • Environmental change should be regularly monitored. • The process should be flexible, iterative, and continuous. • Based on the case studies, there are clearly different ways that strategic planning can be conducted in terms of levels of detail and formality, how the process is organized, who participates, and the degree of analysis and documentation. The report ends with a recommended strategic planning framework that includes the following seven steps: 1. Organize management team and planning staff. 2. Undertake an environmental or situation audit. 3. Establish mission, goals, and objectives. 4. Develop broad strategies. 5. Establish programs and budgets. 6. Monitor program results—measure. 7. Monitor the environment. In 1990, the NCHRP published Strategic Planning and Management Guidelines for Transportation Agencies (10). This study looked at the current environment for strategic planning and management in a variety of publicly funded transportation agencies, provided a definition of strategic man- agement and its components, and recommended guidelines for successfully institutionalizing strategic management. The report distinguished strategic management from other traditional management practices by noting that the tradi- tional practices ask “How do we keep doing what we are doing, only do it better?’ Strategic management focuses instead on an overall vision of where the organization should be heading, i.e., what it plans to accomplish and how it can get it accomplished. It provides for the involvement of the entire organization in managing its people, processes, and products toward successful accomplishment of its goals and objec- tives” (10, p. 1). The report went on to delineate the following minimum components of a strategic management process (10, p. 2):

9• Mission statement (including goals and objectives), • Environmental scan, • Strategy development, • Action plan development, • Resource allocation, and • Performance measurement. An environmental scan generally involves an analysis or assessment of both the external and internal issues that are likely to affect an organization. It is sometimes referred to as a “situation audit.” It concluded that in the various transportation agencies stud- ied, a “strategic management process and its benefits are pres- ent and understood in less than a dozen state departments of transportation” and that “many of the remainder—plus many transit, airport, port authorities, and other publicly funded transportation agencies—seem to have insufficient interest in, or understanding of, strategic management” (10, p. 1). The report included a set of guidelines for instituting strate- gic management comprised of four primary stages: Stage I. Identifying the Need for Strategic Management • Determine the current status of strategic management in the agency. Stage II. Establishment or Enhancement of Key Strategic Management Elements • Define the agency’s business. • Develop plans for implementing strategic management initiatives. Stage III. Integration of the Key Elements into a Functioning System • Ensure that the agency mission statement and goal structure are in place. • Obtain chief administrative officer and senior management commitment to the strategic management process. • Establish a clearly understood division of responsibility for strategic management implementation, including the selec- tion of implementation managers or facilitators. • Develop an accurate information base and maintain its timeliness. Stage IV. Ongoing Use and Refinement of the Strategic Management System • Monitor the strategic management system. • Develop a reward and recognition program. In a 2003 article, “How to Develop a Strategic Plan That Won’t Gather Dust” (11), Richard Simonetta (CEO of Val- ley Metro Rail, Inc., in Phoenix, Arizona) recognized that there is often a significant gap or breakdown between com- pleting a strategic plan and implementing its recommenda- tions. Too often the focus is on the production of a plan doc- ument and not enough emphasis is placed on its execution. He outlined several principles to ensure that the strategic planning effort is successful (11, p. 80): • The process needs to be ongoing, with broad input for development and specific responsibility for effective implementation. • The plan needs to have milestones and performance metrics to measure progress and celebrate achievements. • The plan needs to involve stakeholders in the develop- ment, deployment, and refinement stages. • Finally, a strategic plan must be a living document that evolves over time as the public transit system becomes more successful at achieving its short- and long-range goals. A similar case, that is, that strategic plans often fail to achieve full-scale implementation and significant service improvements, is made in “Segmented Strategic Planning: An Incremental Approach to Transit Planning and Implemen- tation” (12). The authors propose a segmented approach— rather than attempting a comprehensive organization-wide strategic planning effort, they recommend a “series of orches- trated, low-level strategic plans” (12, p. 1). The report describes such an approach in Knoxville, Tennessee, where only the downtown and university campus trolley service was the focus of a recent strategic planning effort. This segmentation made it much more manageable and helped to avoid many of the obstacles that often arise from a larger-scale planning effort. In December 2001, recognizing the potential of strategic planning to improve the effectiveness of transit systems, APTA produced a Strategic Planning Resource Kit (avail- able on CD) (13). Basically, the kit contains copies of the strategic plans of 28 transit systems. STRATEGIC PLANNING AND PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT Almost all of the literature on strategic planning and man- agement emphasizes the need for linking the process to per- formance measurement. This is necessary to be able to mon- itor whether plans are being achieved and whether corrective action needs to be taken. There is a great deal of literature on the general subject of performance measurement. An excellent and very compre- hensive study of the issue that pertains directly to transit is the 2003 TCRP Report 88: A Guidebook for Developing a Transit Performance-Measurement System (14). This report provides detailed guidance for developing a system using tra- ditional and nontraditional measures that address both cus- tomer and community issues.

STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT One of the strengths of strategic management is that it recog- nizes that strategic planning by itself often does little to change an organization’s direction, because it does not deal with the significant structural, political, and behavioral forces that tend to resist change. This point is made in two articles that argue for the blending or “marriage” of strategic planning and management and “Organization Development” (15, 16). Organization development (OD) seeks to develop and implement planned change strategies aimed at improving an organization’s effectiveness. It uses many tools or techniques to ensure that an organization has the internal capability to effectively achieve its goals and objectives. These include such activities as goal setting, leadership development, team building, employee feedback surveys, education and train- ing, organizational design, process consultation, coaching and counseling, and development of appropriate reward and recog- nition programs. In “For Successful Strategic Change: Blend OD Practices with Strategic Management” (15, p. 43), Buller suggests that OD tools can be helpful in the following phases of a typical strategic planning process: • Assessing and developing the organization’s readiness for change, • Facilitating the strategic planning process, • Helping with strategy implementation, and • Developing leadership skills. A similar point is made by Eadie and Steinbacher in “Strategic Agenda Management: A Marriage of Organiza- tional Development and Strategic Planning”; that is, that tra- ditional strategic planning too often results in “unimple- mentable strategies” (16, p. 424). In this article, the authors describe a case study of a large and complex public-sector organization in Ohio. They argue that strategic management can be one of the tools in the larger strategy of OD. More specifically they describe a concept of “strategic agenda management.” Strategic agenda management basically involves the “col- lective management of a strategic agenda, which changes as an organization’s problems and opportunities change.” The authors state that “effective strategic agenda management requires intensive, continuous, and collective involvement of senior management,” and that a strategic agenda must be highly selective if it is not to overtax the organization’s abil- ity to manage strategic issues (16, p. 425). The important point is that strategic planning and man- agement must pay close attention to not only the development of strategic initiatives but also to the organization’s capabil- ity to implement the initiatives. OD tools can be an important resource for developing or enhancing this capability. 10 NEW PARADIGMS IN PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION In the late 1990s, a group of transit industry leaders gathered under the aegis of the TCRP. The reason for this gathering was a shared concern that unless fundamental changes were made, the future of the transit industry was in jeopardy, owing to the significant changes taking place in the world and the inability of the transit industry to adapt to them (e.g., fundamental social and economic changes in this country, an emerging global economy, and the increasing significance of rapid advances in information technology). In 1997, a “future search conference” was organized by TCRP and the Eno Foundation to explore this issue. The con- ference included approximately 80 individuals representing transit managers, riders, drivers, labor leaders, political lead- ers, community residents and other important public trans- portation stakeholders. The effort led to a TCRP project that in 2003 culminated in a report that described emerging “new paradigms” that might affect the industry and that outlined a number of suggested responses (17). Many of the responses are such that strategic planning and management would be a key tool for developing and implementing them. The report points out that the transit industry has not changed its basic business model for more than 40 years. It also notes that although in recent years transit ridership has reached post-World War II highs, its market share of trips remains quite small. Moreover, increasing levels of automo- bile traffic are far outpacing the capacity of the street and highway system, thus leading to severe congestion and grid- lock in many areas. The project studied transportation in three key arenas else- where in transportation industries in search of lessons, or new models, for transit. 1. The “logistics revolution” in intermodal freight. 2. The rise of airline “alliances.” 3. New models for organizing and managing transit in Europe. In the freight arena, companies are finding ways to inte- grate their operations to better serve the door-to-door needs of their customers, encourage customer loyalty, and increase efficiency. This involves use of a logistics manager, who coordinates the movement of items from start to finish, and the use of powerful information technologies that allow uni- fied dispatching and tracking. Airlines have followed a very similar strategy, forming alliances with other carriers so that passengers can book trips through a single airline and so that the quality of service can be better tracked. Information tech- nology again plays a key role. Much the same is occurring in European transit. For exam- ple, even though there are a variety of operators that provide service in metropolitan London, London Transport has been empowered to set broad policy on fares, service coverage, and

11 service quality. It tracks efficiency and quality from the cus- tomer’s viewpoint. More recently, organizational changes are being made that give multimodal responsibility (buses, taxis, rail systems, ferries, and traffic control) to a new agency— Transport for London. The report goes on to identify four key elements of “the emerging paradigm”: 1. Emphasis on monitoring service quality and customer satisfaction across the entire network is replacing the previous emphasis on the operation of a particular agency’s vehicles and facilities. 2. New collaborative relationships or alliances are replac- ing independent agency operations and head-to-head competition. 3. Traditional assets such as vehicles, passenger terminals, and maintenance facilities are being jointly managed. 4. State-of-the-art information technology is being used to better manage operations, evaluate service quality, and provide customer information. A key theme of the emerging paradigm is that of “mobil- ity management,” the function of meeting the door-to-door travel needs of the customer no matter whose transportation assets are being used. This concept should be a central focus of the strategic planning efforts of transportation agencies. One of the new paradigm project reports includes as an appendix a guide that organizations can use for managing the change process (18). This includes strategies for • Recognizing the need for change, • Leading and planning change, • Making change happen, and • Institutionalizing new approaches. Most of the strategies described would be excellent com- ponents of an effective strategic planning and management process. The final report points out that transit agencies cannot do this alone, and that public policy decisions and public invest- ment must be coordinated in other key areas such as land use strategies, other public infrastructure investments (water, sew- ers, parking facilities, etc.), environmental measures (clean air and energy conservation), and other public policies such as tax incentives and economic development strategies. Because transit agencies have little or no control over these areas, they must work indirectly to encourage such coordination.