RIPTA’s New CEO Talks About Free Fares and Future Funding
January 30, 2025
Chris Durand, Rhode Island Public Transit Authority’s newly appointed CEO who helped the agency avoid service cuts during a driver shortage, answers questions about free transit and future funding sources for Rhode Island’s bus system and reveals his favorite bus line.
Subscribe and listen on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.
Please share any questions or ideas with podcast host and ecoRI News reporter Colleen Cronin by emailing her at [email protected].
This transcript was edited for clarity and length.
Colleen Cronin
Hey, Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
Chris Durand
Thanks for having me.
Colleen Cronin
So we’re really excited to have you on the show. I just was wondering if you could start off and maybe talk a little bit about yourself and how you got to RIPTA.
Chris Durand
Sure. I graduated from URI back in 2014, and later that summer, got a temp job at RIPTA, helping out with the budget and just kind of working in the finance office. And then later that fall, they hired me to be a budget analyst, and I’ve been there for the past 10 years.
Colleen Cronin
Oh, my goodness. So you’ve kind of risen through the ranks. Now you’re CEO of RIPTA. So tell us why you decided to throw your hat in the ring for that role. Initially you were interim, and now you are officially permanent CEO. What was the experience like and why did you decide to do that?
Chris Durand
Yeah, I think I was honestly a little shocked to be appointed interim, but I was in that role, and we started working on things, and I started to see what the job really entailed. And as we started digging in, I just got to a point where I really wanted to continue doing this. I wasn’t sure up front. I’ve got a family, I’ve got two small boys. Like, what’s that work-life balance? What’s the right thing here for everyone? But as I dug in, it just became something that I really enjoyed doing, and frankly, it’s just been a lot of fun. So I decided to put my name in.
Colleen Cronin
How do you think taking on the CEO role differs from your previous role? What’s been the most surprising thing about it?
Chris Durand
That’s a great question. I think I’m still transitioning away from the finance position and spreadsheets and all that. I think you got to have a feel for what’s going on. So it’s important to be out, go for a bus ride, and go to the garages. I think that’s been more challenging than you think, because you’re trying to, like, meet with teams, meet with staff, meet with different officials. So, you really gotta be deliberate about how you’re spending your time. The biggest thing I’ve learned is just time management and like, how do I make sure that I’m getting a chance to meet with different employees, getting a chance to talk to riders, getting a chance to talk to officials, trying to figure out where we can grow and do different things. And that’s just very different from sitting behind my desk all day and staring at spreadsheets, as much as I love that.
Colleen Cronin
So you just kind of hit on my next question, what does the CEO do?
Chris Durand
I try to be deliberate with how I spend my time. For example, Monday morning, we had an operations meeting that is really geared toward the lost service that we were experiencing. So it was the leaders from the fixed-route division, the paratransit division, scheduling, HR, maintenance and really trying to figure out what’s happening day to day. There’s a lot of reports that go out to a huge team within RIPTA, what’s happening for road calls or buses breaking down, what’s going on with accidents, incidents, but having everybody in the room gives us that chance to really make sure that there’s an understanding of what’s happening.
And it’s a big organization. It had a lot of moving parts. And so the operations meeting is just one example. But then I might have a one-on-one with one of the senior leaders, or I might hit up the Statehouse to meet with the governor’s office, or go to DOA. So a lot of meetings and making sure I’m setting a good direction for where we have to go, but also getting those chances to work with folks outside the agency, let them know what we’re doing and figure out what we can be doing differently.
Colleen Cronin
I want to ask you a little bit more in a couple of questions from now about how it is to work within the state framing of everything, but it’s Jan. 14 when we’re recording this. It’s almost Inauguration Day on the federal level, and we’re coming into a second Trump term. Transit hasn’t necessarily been on the chopping block like some other environmental initiatives have been for Trump, but climate change certainly isn’t something he seems to be prioritizing. How do you see the federal administration change impacting funding or any of the initiatives you have coming up this year?
Chris Durand
I think you’re right. We might not see so much electric-bus money, but we might get a chance to see more money for things like bus shelters and some of the more basic infrastructure things that we need to get working on. What’s important to note is, some of that R Line project was funded by Volkswagen settlement funds that we got under the Obama administration, right? So like the investments that the Biden administration has made as part of the bipartisan infrastructure act, we have hybrid money to buy hybrid vehicles. We’ve got electric bus money to deploy electric buses on Aquidneck Island. We are going to still be able to make a lot of progress ourselves in the next few years. So we’re going to have to find ways to kind of move on those initiatives ourselves, but also, I think a major part of climate change is mode shift, right? So we’ve got to get people to ride the bus more, and I think that’s something we could do today.
Colleen Cronin
So, I guess then that brings me back down to the state level. Going into 2025 the governor is asking departments and agencies to really tighten their belts. And I’m wondering how you think this could affect RIPTA and service?
Chris Durand
Yeah, I mean, the State of State is tonight, we’ll find out this week what the governor’s budget looks like. Though, in our conversations, I feel really good about where we’ve been able to make progress.
Colleen
It seems to me, although the state in general might be in a more precarious financial situation, it feels like the feeling around RIPTA financing is a lot more positive than a year ago.
Chris Durand
So we’ve spent a lot of time, I think, listening. We’ve listened to the governor. We listened to everyone. We meet with all the General Assembly members to get a feel for where we are. What are we missing? And making sure that they know what we’re working on. And I think in a lot of cases, they’ve been impressed with what we’re working on, and we’ve learned some of their priorities, and, frankly, how easy it might be for us to solve or play a role in some of those priorities is just having that open mind and really trying to work on communication and getting that information out there. And I think us getting through the driver shortage, getting to a place where we can make service improvements, that’s a totally different conversation than where we’ve been. And we did it without a new funding source. We were able to just, on our own, lean into the resources. We had to figure out a way forward. And it’s been successful. We’ve got new service launching. We have plans to grow.
Colleen Cronin
Do you have any concern about how potential budget issues could affect the Transit Master Plan implementation? And do you feel like there might be some less expensive items on that wish list, basically, that could get done without maybe the huge influx of money.
Chris Durand
We’re out of the crisis mode, but we are still meeting regularly and having a lot of deep conversations about what should driver training look like? How many training sessions should we have? What programs should we be doing? How can we leverage other resources to really build these things out to get to a place where we know with a high degree of certainty each month we’re going to get so many drivers into a seat, or could put them into a seat, and then with the Master Plan, that’s telling us where we would deploy them. And so we’ve got a lot of that framework, but we still have a lot of work to do, right? We’re still looking at putting back service we cut two years ago because we didn’t have drivers, but we’re on our way.
Colleen Cronin
I’m wondering, switching gears a little bit, what you can tell us about the new bus hub, and when we might get an announcement on a location?
Chris Durand
My hope is really soon, because we’ve embarked on a process that really helped us get the right team, instead of us coming up with the project and saying, “We want to go do this.” And then there’s always pitfalls to whatever we came up with, and then it falls apart. It’s, I think it’s such a complicated thing to do that the way it’s been gone about just, just didn’t work, right? But the way we went about it as this Progressive P3 approach we got the right team.
Colleen Cronin
Progressive P3. Can you explain that a little bit?
Chris Durand
Sure. So, basically, the way I explain it is that we figured out as we go. So instead of us having a really, like prescribed approach to the project.
It allows us to have the right engineers and developers and construction folks who can be in the room with us, with stakeholders, and say, OK, where could this thing go and what are the downfalls? What are the pros? What are the cons, and what’s the buildability? What are the cost factors along the way? So, that allowed us to look at multiple sites all at once. And honestly, the public, we’ve heard loud and clear that the train station site is very intriguing to everyone. It’s intriguing to us. We’re looking at the development that happens up and down Massachusetts along the commuter rail lines … there’s some really exciting stuff that’s happening there. And I think if we want to be connecting people to jobs and educational opportunities, that connection makes a lot of sense.
So, the reason it’s taken so long is that as we’ve been exploring that, and we’re actually working with Amtrak figuring out how to make some connections there that would help our buses move through the area. And so we’re doing due diligence, looking at the engineering drawings that were done in the past, and refreshing things where we need to. But my hope is that shortly, we’ll have something that we could share with the public.
Colleen Cronin
We’re moving into a new legislative session, and there’s always some talk every year about free transit. And then some legislation sometimes follows with that. The R Line free pilot was a really big success, so it certainly seems like there’s an appetite for more free transit out there, which makes a lot of sense. But what do you think about it? How feasible is something like that?
Chris Durand
We haven’t fully figured out how to pay for more service and address budget shortfalls. We’ve got things we’re considering … these things we’re looking at and just how we can deploy services to generate more revenues. So that would be the concern I would have; you wouldn’t want to see free fares be at the expense of the service improvements, but in an all-things-equal world, there shouldn’t be any barriers, and fares are a barrier. And I think what we’re seeing is, certainly, we have free-fare programs now for targeted populations. It’s clear that people fall through the cracks, and we need to start talking about that.
So we’ve been doing different pilots for a few years now to understand this. And we’re finally getting to a place where we might even have recommendations of changes to law that would expand that program. But in a perfect world, we want people to ride, and I think that’s going back to the climate change and the need for mode shift, getting more people on the bus is the goal, right? And fares, fare technology, it’s come a long way, but it’s still complicated. Integrating with organizations is still complicated. And at the end of the day we really just want people on the bus. Ridership is the number one factor for success here, and so I think that there’s changes coming. I don’t know what they look like just yet, but I think certainly it’s something that shouldn’t be ignored.
Colleen Cronin
In some ways, maybe this goes a little hand in hand with it. I always think about when I went to Brown and there was a U-PASS program, and so RIPTA was free for me with Brown footing the bill, which was wonderful.
Chris Durand
Exactly.
Colleen Cronin
What kind of programs like that might be on the horizon?
Chris Durand
So we have all the private colleges in the state that are on that same program that you got to use. Rhode Island College is there. We’ll be talking with every state school to see how we can partner everyone’s transportation needs a little bit differently.
Chris Durand
I think anywhere we can get someone to buy fare products for somebody, that’s a huge opportunity for us. So if it’s an employer buying passes so their employees can get to work, schools buying passes so the students can get to school … that’s where we really want to lean into this year.
Colleen Cronin
And speaking of those partnerships or working with private industries, you guys just added service around the Amazon facility in Johnston. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails, and are there other businesses or industries you’re looking to target for other initiatives like that?
Chris Durand
So Amazon as part of their economic package to come and build a facility in Rhode Island had committed to buying $90,000 of fare product a year for quite a few years … we basically we were in a position to say, “Well, let’s just start service next week, directly from Kennedy Plaza to the facility. Let’s just go. Let’s just do it. And if we get one person the first day, we’ll call that success.”
And we had exactly one, but now we’re up to about 30 a day going each way, and they’re still early in their hiring process. So taking what we’ve learned there and looking at elsewhere we’re going to go, we’re already speaking with Electric Boats and the Quonset Development Corporation about how we can start to solve the problem in Quonset. There’s a lot of congestion. There’s a lack of parking to begin with. These people are getting shuttled around a little bit. Our bus service stops off on Route 1, so then you have to walk from there, which is what people do, but it’s not great, especially in the cold weather like right now. So if we can start to create more direct service from Kennedy Plaza directly to there, to the park, and then maybe we have some other like Park-and-Ride opportunities as well to kind of help out. I think we could get a lot of ridership, and that’s something we have to really focus on. I’m hoping to get something going as soon as I can this year where, again, we’re talking with them. We’re just going to get some shift times and figure out where we are, but it’s something we should be able to deploy, and I think that’s a critical piece.
Colleen Cronin
So, as we’re kind of winding down this conversation, what are the challenges for RIPTA in the next year?
Chris Durand
The biggest challenges are going to be building ridership. It’s an opportunity, too. You know, Amazon’s working really well … finding ways to create that really efficient service to get people to work is a challenge. If it was easy to be solved, they would have been solved a long time ago. And then the other challenge is, turning the corner on the workforce development program and getting it out of crisis mode, and building it out so that it’s more robust and it’s more reliable, and the infrastructure is there, not just to onboard a driver, but any employee.
Colleen Cronin
Yeah, it’s funny that you say this about workforce development, because I would assume, and I want to ask you about RIPTA biggest wins, it feels like those programs that you guys have established within the last year have been hugely successful. I’ve, I mean, written about how it’s been able to change how many people you guys are onboarding.
Chris Durand
I would say that’s the biggest success. And I think it’s not even just the number of people onboarding. I think it was merely the process of internally of getting everybody in a room and saying, “Well, what’s going to happen? Did you get here? And we need to get this many drivers. Otherwise, everything’s going to fall apart on us. And what is that going to take for training? What’s that going to take for buses? What’s that going to take for HR and interviews and seeing the job fairs, where we had people from marketing, customer service, like everybody was helping and involved.” It was just an incredible experience. And I think it was really good for the agency to get around a goal to work together.
Colleen Cronin
I had these two questions written down as bonus questions, if we had time. And I think we have a little bit of time, hopefully. Favorite bus line?
Chris Durand
The 20. It’s our front door.
Colleen Cronin
That’s fair.
Colleen Cronin
And favorite bus story?
Chris Durand
I had a meeting at City Hall, and I was taking the bus back to our headquarters, waiting for the 20. There were a ton of people. There were kids, there were families, and there was a young family, and they had two kids with them, and they had a stroller. They were just waiting for the bus, but they were really just together, and they were playing, and they were playing with the kids, and the kids were real little, and they got on the bus. It’s still one of my favorite memories.
But you just see how people use RIPTA, and what it means, right? And I cannot encourage people enough to just ride just if you want to know what we’re about, get on a bus. See who’s using it. See what they’re doing. You’re gonna walk away as a believer, I hope.
Colleen Cronin
Thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate it.
Chris Durand
Thanks for having me. Colleen.
Categories
Join the Discussion
View CommentsRecent Comments
Leave a Reply
Your support keeps our reporters on the environmental beat.
Reader support is at the core of our nonprofit news model. Together, we can keep the environment in the headlines.
I find it encouraging that Mr. Durand uses the bus. Early on in the pandemic and the shuffle-shuffle of planning for a new bus hub, I was on a call about the issue. It turned out that none of the people on the committee making the decision had ever ridden a RIPTA bus.
“And I cannot encourage people enough to just ride just if you want to know what we’re about, get on a bus. See who’s using it. See what they’re doing.” I’ve found in visiting new places that riding the bus is one good way of seeing who lives here, how do they act on the bus, how do the drivers interact with the passengers, what’s the general feeling of this place? This is also true when I ride the bus regularly in my hometown. I find out all kinds of things, good and bad, about the people–the young man on the R bus, going north on Broad St., who got up to adjust the seat for the wheel-chair user waiting for the bus to stop, and, in another town, another time, a rock coming through the window where the lone Black rider was on the bus going into the all-white town.
Ride the bus.