New Port Authority CEO wants guidance from riders
Katharine Eagan Kelleman wants riders to expect one thing from the Port Authority: Excellence.
But that will require the new Port Authority CEO to first learn what “excellence” means to the 200,000 daily riders who use the agency’s buses, light-rail vehicles, inclines and paratransit system. So this summer the agency likely will hire a firm to conduct twice-a-year surveys to ask riders what they think of the service.
“We are going to be excellent,” Ms. Kelleman said Thursday in her first extensive interview since arriving in Pittsburgh the first week of January. “You should have a great customer experience when you ride our system. But if we tell you we want you to have an excellent experience, we have to find out what you think that is.”
The surveys will be a key part of a three-year strategic plan Ms. Kelleman said she expects to present to the authority board in July. That approach, which comes from Ms. Kelleman’s background as a transit planner, will set goals and
identify steps the agency will take to meet them.
That will be followed by a plan to determine what the agency should strive for over the next 25 or 30 years. The surveys, which also will ask whether riders would recommend the service to others, will be a key part of that approach.
“We want to hear about the nuts and bolts that people use every day and what they think of them,” she said. “If they tell us the trash cans at the stations are too dirty, we’ll figure out a way to clean them more often. We have to try to give them what they want.”
Ms. Kelleman, 44, came to Port Authority with a $230,000 contract after about five years as head of the Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority in Tampa, Fla., and previous transit experience in Baltimore, Dallas and San Angelo, Texas.
In her third-floor office at the authority’s Downtown Pittsburgh headquarters, where she has installed a wall-size map of the transit system that’s still not quite straight, she said her previous stops taught her the importance of listening to and engaging riders and staff.
For example, during her first days in Dallas, she was assigned to hand out transit schedules and was surprised that many people just walked past her. She learned many of them spoke only Spanish, so she brushed up on it. In Tampa, Spanishspeaking workers were impressed when she went out of her way to speak to them in their language.
In Pittsburgh, Ms. Kelleman has been visiting the agency’s garages, maintenance facilities and inclines to get a better understanding of the system and to meet the employees. She said she’s been impressed.
“People don’t stay 25-30 years at a job if they don’t care about what they do,” she said. “It’s been nice to go out and let them show off what they do.”
Ms. Kelleman took over an agency with ongoing projects that have to be addressed and she’s approaching them using that same combination of planning and engagement.
Riders in the Monongahela Valley say their neighborhood service and direct access to Downtown Pittsburgh will suffer from the proposed Bus Rapid Transit system linking Oakland and Downtown. Ms. Kelleman will hold a second round of neighborhood meetings this month to see if a workable solution can be found.
On the light-rail system, a coalition of community groups have expressed concern about a proposal to use armed police officers to make sure customers pay their fare after the system goes cashless later this year. Her first assignment to staff was to research whether the rail system has a serious problem with fare evasion — early signs are it doesn’t — as she reviews whether there is a more effective way to ensure payment.
Other goals include more internal and external communications — expect to see one of the agency’s green buses in the St. Patrick’s Day parade; more employee engagement “to make sure we have all the tools they need”; and attention to areas where the agency lags behind peers such as cost per passenger, passengers per service hour and time spent carrying passengers.
On a personal level, Ms. Kelleman has settled in at her Upper St. Clair home with her husband, Chris, an astronomer who is a stay-athome dad for now to their sons Finton, 5, and Sebastian “Bash,” 4. They moved in on a snowy day and, since snow was a new experience, Bash yelled, “I’m burning, I’m burning” after he put snow on his tummy.
She is happy to be closer to her in-laws in Hummelstown, near Harrisburg, and learning the tricks of the neighborhood, like how she can get extra cheesy bread from the owner of her favorite pizza shop if she speaks to him in Russian. She scored points with her Polish-Czech father-in-law when she brought him a cup from the Strip District engraved with “dziadzio” (grandpa).
Although her contract is for five years, Ms. Kelleman said she expects to stay in the Pittsburgh area until the boys graduate high school.
She rides the T to work from South Hills Village, not concerned that she might be recognized. “If we’re doing job the right way, they won’t be mad at me,” she said.