Buses, Trains and the Media

Travel decisions - car, plane or motorcoach? - are getting more complex

I'll be attending the APTA Rail Conference this coming week and decided to drive up to San Francisco rather than fly. Normally, driving from Los Angeles to the Bay Area is a much cheaper option than going by air. But with the price of gasoline topping $4 a gallon, it's a pretty close call.

Figure that the round-trip will be about 800 miles on the ground and that my car gets 30 miles per gallon on the highway. That means that I'll burn approximately 26 gallons of gasoline. At $4.10 per gallon, that's about $107 in gasoline. Of course, you really should factor in some wear and tear on the car. This is probably conservative, but I'm going to add another $50 to the total, making it $157.

With two weeks' notice, I could have booked a $150 round-trip flight to and from San Francisco. That means that the car trip could actually be more expensive than a plane trip. Plus, you also lose time when you drive, several hours in each direction, even factoring in the wait at the airport, etc.

One option that I considered, briefly, was booking a trip on Megabus, which recently announced that it will be discontinuing its runs from L.A. to the Bay Area. With two weeks' notice, I could have booked a round-trip for as little as $56! It's not that simple, though, because I would still have to get to Union Station in downtown L.A., which adds some car mileage and, possibly, parking fees.

Also, if I flew or traveled by motorcoach, I would be without a car when I arrived in San Francisco. Which in some ways is good. Parking your car at a hotel can be expensive. In point of fact, I've fudged a little on this scenario because I'll be staying with my parents in San Jose and taking Caltrain into San Francisco. I admit that I'm being a bit lazy and simplifying things by using L.A. to S.F. instead of L.A. to San Jose, but I think you get the picture.

The point is that with fuel prices climbing into uncharted territory, the economies that we used to enjoy by driving instead of flying have gone away. It still makes sense to drive, however, when you have passengers, especially when it's a family of four, like mine. With four people, the costs are nearly the same for the car but are quadrupled for air travel.

Although I've never seriously considered traveling by motorcoach (vs. driving or flying), I'm going to start looking at that option more closely, especially if discount carriers like Megabus can build a strong following. The travel game is changing, and we need to be more flexible in our decision-making.

Until next time.

Steve

I work from home but don't telecommute

I've been "telecommuting" since Sept. 30, 2007, when I left my job as an editor at Bobit Business Media. That's not exactly accurate because I started my own business and work from a home office. Even if I wanted to -- and I don't -- I can't commute since I have nowhere to go.

With the price of gas eclipsing $4 a gallon here in Los Angeles, I'm surprised that interest in telecommuting hasn't cropped up again. Was it 10 years ago that telecommuting became fashionable? I seem to recall that people were renting workstations close to their homes so they could telecommute with all the niceties of an office -- computer, fax, phone, etc. Do they still do that?

I never gave a thought to telecommuting because I've always lived pretty close to my office. Well, almost always. For about eight years I had a 90-mile daily commute. It wasn't bad, though, because my start time was 6:30 a.m. and I left the building by 3 p.m. Had it been an 8:30 to 5 shift, I don't think I could have held out for very long.

These days, with all of the conveniences provided by the Internet (high-speed connections, e-mail, video conferencing, file sharing, web-based applications, etc.), it should be much more convenient to work from home. Employers, understandably, will always be leery of allowing their employees to work without face-to-face supervision, but the rising cost of commuting may soon override their reservations.

Speaking from experience, working from home isn't a perfect solution. Even if I could have telecommuted while I was still working at Bobit, I would have only done it two or three times a week, not because I feel a need to look over people's shoulders, but because it gets lonely. Work from home for a few months and you'll see what I mean.

Until next time.

Steve

Are you ready for the Baby Boom brain drain?

In the coming years, Baby Boomers are going to be retiring in massive numbers. The federal government is already feeling the effects and, surprisingly, is trying to do something about it.

According to this recent article in the Washington Post, a third of the federal government's current employees will be retiring in the next five years. And high-level executives are expected to make up a disproportionately large number of that fraction.

To prepare for this onslaught of job vacancies, the feds are attempting to remove some of the bureaucracy from the hiring process. They're also allowing their agencies to offer student loan reimbursements to top candidates and more leeway in using bonuses to recruit and retain employees.

Non-federal employers in public transportation need to be prepared to up the ante, too. Transit systems are going to have to sharpen their claws as they scrap with other public agencies and private companies for promising young people, and experienced transit veterans, to fill the many openings that are sure to be coming.

I've read about bonuses being offered for hard-to-fill positions like bus operators. I think that strategy is going to have to be expanded across the board. Referral bonuses, as well, should be a serious consideration. One company that I worked for offered as much as $750 for a successful referral. That's a pretty good chunk of money and certainly helped to fill many of the company's vacancies.

Anything that can be done to reduce the paperwork will help too. I can recall several instances in which candidates accepted other jobs while our company was mired in a weeks-long effort to complete background and reference checks. Those are important steps that must be taken, especially in safety-sensitive positions, but we would have been better served by making the job offer contingent upon the candidate passing the necessary background checks.

Job seekers who have been through the wringer as a potential employer holds off on a firm job offer know that it's not worth the wait. Companies that don't treat job candidates properly typically don't treat their employees well either. But, as an employer, you hate to lose people before they're even in the door.

Until next time.

Steve

Transit job titles are anybody's guess

So I'm trying to crunch the data that I collected in a recent salary survey of the transit industry. I've got about 1,150 responses from a diverse group of people. Collectively, they work in two dozen different departments, from accounting to human resources to planning to training and development. Problem is, nearly everyone has a different title!

For example, I've copied and pasted a sample of titles of respondents who work in planning:

• Senior Transportation Planner      
• Special Assistant to the Director      
• Manager of Planning & Scheduling      
• Service Planning Manager      
• Project Manager      
• Planner II      
• Development Services Associate      
• Planning Technician      
• Transportation Planning Manager V      
• Manager of Commuter Bus Service      
• Director of Planning      
• Vice President for Service Development and Strategic Planning      
• Transportation Planning Manager      
• Transportation Policy Analyst      
• Deputy Chief of Planning and Technology      
• Business Data Analyst      
• Deputy Transportation Director      
• Transit Planner II      
• Transportation Planner      
• Senior Transportation Planner      
• Planning Manager    

Now I've got to combine these positions into a small set of generic titles. Can I group the Business Data Analyst with the Planning Technician? How about the Transportation Planning Manager with the Service Planning Manager? It would be so much easier if the transit industry adopted a standard set of titles. But that's not going to happen, nor should it.

Every transit system has its own peculiarities with regard to its workforce. Each needs to have the latitude to create job titles that custom-fit the position. But it does make it hard for those of us trying to create apples-to-apples comparisons with regard to salary. In any case, salaries attached to specific job titles vary so widely that the inexactness of the categorization process is probably not as critical as it seems.

Salary surveys always attract a lot of interest, but need to be kept in perspective.

Until next time.

Steve

Let's throw 'under the bus' under the SUV

When I was the editor of Metro Magazine, a trade publication about bus and passenger rail transportation, I was occasionally "thrown under the bus" by some of my colleagues in other departments. Oddly, I didn't really mind this treatment because it was often deserved. As a meeter of deadlines, I was, how shall we put this, not good, which often led to my under the bus-ness. The part that bothered me was the fact that I would be "thrown under the bus" without a trace of irony.

"Dude, she threw you under the bus," someone would say, never acknowledging the fact that I was the editor of a magazine about buses. Maybe it was too obvious. Maybe the irony was there and I somehow missed it like I missed the deadlines. Anyway, I digress. . .

What I wanted to do was provide you with a link to an opinion piece in the Washington Post about the overuse of "under the bus." It's true, you hear it everywhere. In covering the presidential campaign, political pundits toss the phrase around like confetti. And we're all getting tired of it, especially those of us in bus-related industries. Why couldn't the phrase be, "under the semi"? Or "under the steamroller"? Or, even better, "under the SUV"? Why do buses have to be the instrument of death?

If you can avoid it, don't use the phrase. It's only perpetuating a negative stereotype. For this small favor, the bus industry thanks you.

Until next time.

Steve