Getting to work challenge: The first, last mile

When Brenden Pulte lived in Newport, he did not have a car. 

Getting to and from his restaurant job in Cincinnati’s Hyde Park neighborhood involved complex planning to ensure a connection to the right bus at the right time. 

This story is part of our latest super issue, which examines the future of work in Northern Kentucky. Click here to learn more.

To get to his job for the night shift, he would take a Transit Authority of Northern Kentucky bus that came right outside his door. But it only came once an hour. Then he’d be dropped in downtown Cincinnati for a layover before boarding the bus to Hyde Park.

“The bigger obstacle for me was getting home from work,” Pulte said. “At that point, I would have to take the 11 [Metro] bus back downtown and connect to one of the TANK buses going over to Newport. The problem is that those come once in an hour. The last [TANK] 16 bus, which I would take, ran out of downtown to Newport at 9:30 p.m. After that, I’d have to take the 25, which was going to be several blocks more of a walk once I got to Newport.”

Pulte is part of the 83% of Northern Kentucky’s workforce that still commutes to work every day, with 76% of workers commuting alone by car. While only about 1% of the population here uses public transportation for that commute, the jobs those people are getting to are essential to communities, said Gina Douthat, TANK’s general manager. 

“About 75% of those are people who are using the bus to either go to work or school,” Douthat said. “That is the primary function that our service provides.” 

TANK is carrying people to essential jobs like shipping and logistics, health care and child care and even front-line workers who do things like provide groceries or work in fast food restaurants, Douthat said. “These are people that all of us depend on every day to do the things that we need them to do,” she said.

How we get back and forth to and from work presents challenges across our region. Pulte, for one, thinks more coordination between Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky would go a long way. 

Anyone who travels along major transportation corridors knows the frustrations of rush hour congestion and delays. Local, state and regional officials and planning experts are working to address these problems, while they also look toward future growth, development and unknown technological changes. How will this change the way we get to work as a region? 

The first and last mile

The Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional Council of Governments, known as OKI, is the official body charged with planning and coordinating federal transportation funding in our region.

“We do more, however, than just plan,” said CEO Mark Policinski. “We get projects in the ground. We invest between $50 million and $80 million a year,… and we work very closely with all jurisdictions, state departments, transportation and transit agencies.” 

The agency handles critical improvements to roads and is part of the Brent Spence project, as a couple of examples. 

“We also invest a lot of money in transit,” Policinski said. “Just in the past decade or so, we’ve invested $116 million in transit agencies in the region.” 

OKI is working on a long-range plan out to the year 2050. The plan identifies $8.5 billion worth of projects, and $700 million of that would be directed to public transit, Policinski said.

“And when it comes to transit, the issue that has surrounded it since its existence has been the first and last mile,” Policinski said. “How do I get to the transit stop and then, when I’m dropped off, how do I get to work?”

Policinski pointed to a program at Cincinnati Metro that lets people book rides within specific zones that he said has gotten a lot of support. “So, instead of being public transit, where everybody goes to one place and gets on a bus, this is targeted toward the individual,” he said.

It’s something that has become possible only with technology that’s become available in the last five or six years, he said.

TANK started a similar pilot last year in Campbell County. Douthat said so far it’s had some success. It leads into a new planning effort by TANK called Reimagining Transit. The company recently launched a campaign to gather input from riders and communities.

“We need to make sure that the services that are being used are the ones that are available, and try some different things, try some new types of services that might meet our community’s needs,” she said. “That’s where things like this microtransit pilot come in … where you have more of an on-demand service. You have a vehicle that’s available in a designated geographic zone, and customers can either call or use an app very similar to a rideshare app.”

Microtransit will not replace buses, Douthat and Policinski said, but it is an option that could benefit commuters, especially those who live or work outside the urban core.

Ensuring access

The nonprofit Northern Kentucky Area Development District, referred to as NKADD, works closely with OKI, TANK and other planning and economic development bodies to coordinate and collaborate efforts.

“We’re actually written into state statute with the goal of supporting regional collaboration, convening and planning,” said Tara Johnson-Noem, NKADD’s executive director. “We also provide a number of direct service programs to clients, individuals, their families, employers, job seekers – lots of folks.” 

Three of the biggest barriers to finding employment are housing, child care and transportation, said Correy Eimer, associate director of workforce development at NKADD. He said employers have had to get creative to connect with employees who live outside the urban core, especially those living in the southern parts of the region.

NKADD also connects employers and their workers to programs designed to provide transportation solutions such as Enterprise Commute, a paid ride-share service provided through OKI. OKI provides a monthly subsidy toward rental of a seven- to 15-passenger van. Another program then coordinates ride-sharing logistics for commuters living and working along the same routes.

Ivy Stites is a community development planner for NKADD. She is working on the technology behind the Regional Mobility Coordinated Transit Plan designed to identify gaps, especially in public transit systems, and to help coordinate efforts to address those gaps.

NKADD Transportation Manager Jeff Thelen focuses on road travel for the five southern counties in Northern Kentucky. His counterparts in OKI focus on Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties. Both planning bodies are in the middle of the state SHIFT process – the Strategic Highway Investment Formula for Tomorrow. SHIFT is a prioritization process involving all the area development and metropolitan planning organizations, including OKI, across the state every two years.

The process involves identifying top projects in each county or region, an elaborate scoring process and further selection. A final list of selected projects heads to the state legislature for recommendations to the governor. If all goes well, they make it into the governor’s road plan.

Going autonomous

OKI’s Policinski said technological advances available today can change the commuting landscape if people are open to it.

“If you go out 10 or 15 or 20 years, if you’re really looking at what the landscape is going to be, you have to look at autonomous vehicles, driverless cars,” he said. “Autonomous vehicles are here. Waymo, Google’s driverless car service, has 30 million miles already on streets and roads. For years, driverless taxis have been operating in Las Vegas, and their use is spreading all over.”

The technology actually has been around for decades, he said, but recent advancements in other areas have made it a much safer and more practical choice.

Right now, public perception also poses barriers to overcome, Policinski said. After a handful of well-publicized accidents with driverless vehicles, the public is skittish. Yet, according to a recent study of Waymo published in Traffic Injury Prevention, safety data is promising. Comparing Waymo to human drivers, the driverless vehicles had 85% fewer crashes that could have resulted in serious injuries or worse. More research is needed, but it looks promising.

Not only do autonomous vehicles eliminate the most dangerous factor in driving – human error – they promise benefits in reducing pollution and easing congestion, but only if we approach the technology with these goals in mind. It’s a cultural shift, but it can happen, Policinski said.

“If everybody has an autonomous vehicle, you don’t get fewer vehicles on the road,” Policinski  said. “The only way this all works …is if people are willing to get in a driverless car and to share that ride.” 

Much of the technology already exists to figure out where people are, where they need to go and how to put all that together. People could be offered shared rides to work at reduced rates depending how many others are in the ride, he explained.

“This is a crazy word to use nowadays, but I would hope that people would be optimistic about what’s coming,” Policinski said. “How technology is actually going to work to make their lives better with easier access to work, as well as to their families. The technology is on the commuters’ side.”