J Magazine Winter 2019

how kids are so hooked on playing these computer games. I had my
entertainment every day and for an eight-hour period.
“And again, being single, I worked a great deal of overtime. So I
worked double shifts, and I worked at some of the busiest terminals in
the New York City transit system.
“It was a source of pride every day to move literally millions of people
passing through your hands, so to speak.
“From there, I was bitten by the bug. Every day you just strive to
do better than you did the last day, and you had to make split-second
decisions in terms of processing trains and passengers. And the next
day, that orchestra, that symphony, started all over again.”
Moving people’s lives
In 1992, Ford took his ambition on the road. He became an assistant
chief transportation officer for San Francisco Bay Area Rapid
Transit, responsible for the commuter rail between that city and Fremont.
The experience taught him not only another mode of transportation
but also how to work with local governments and elected
officials, as the route traversed multiple jurisdictions.
After five years, Ford came south to be senior vice president of
operations for the Metropolitan Atlanta Regional Transit Authority,
ninth largest in the country, where he expanded his band width to
multi-modal operations, with more than 680 buses serving 25 million
miles and a rail system with 38 stations connecting 48 miles of track.
He was named CEO in 2000, leading the rehabilitation of the system
When Nat Ford was hired as CEO of JTA in 2012, one of his first challenges was to fix a decades-old bus route system.
and implementing the first complete passenger-fare smart cards in
the country.
This experience was his second major inflection point, as Ford
began to learn that public transportation is more than modes, tracks,
bus stops and equipment.
He says he was profoundly influenced
by his board, which included Juanita Abernathy,
widow of civil-rights icon Ralph David
Abernathy; Joseph Lowery, another prominent
civil rights leader, and other community leaders.
“It’s shaped who I am today to a large degree in terms
of my leadership attitude,” Ford said. “Up until that time, my whole
focus was more performance-related terms of on-time performance,
vehicles, really statistically kind of just the day-to-day blocking and
tackling of making the trains run on time. They helped me truly understand
the importance of transportation to the community, from
an economic standpoint, from a health-care standpoint, from an equity
standpoint, in terms of accessibility, to hospitals, to jobs, to college
and educational opportunities.
“So that kind of spirit that I have now in what I do here at the JTA,
yeah, it’s buses. And yeah, it’s the Skyway and yeah, it’s road projects,
but at the end of the day, what I really preach to our staff is what does
it mean, in terms of somebody’s lifestyle and generational lifestyle,
and access to economic vitality and health care.”
Holism and technology
Ford returned to the West Coast for his third inflection point. In
2006, he became CEO of the San
Francisco Municipal Transportation
Agency and broadened his
experience by being responsible
for the city railway, parking and
taxis.
He led the integration of the
siloed system.
“The citizens actually chose to
do that, because they did not like
the disjointed decision-making
around transportation. Transit
was a No. 1 priority. But people
walk, they bike, they actually park
and they wanted a holistic strategy
for the governance and objective,
professional decision making
on the balance between those different
modes.”
Even more important, Ford
discovered that technology could
make complex systems function
faster, smoother and more efficiently.
The San Francisco agency
launched the nation’s first parking-management
system, an app
that provides real-time information
about parking availability.
“The idea was to cut down
congestion in 48 square miles,” he
said. “I have to get you in a parking spot as soon as possible. I don’t
need you circling around looking for a parking spot on the street
and quite often a lot of the municipal parking lots were empty. We
developed an app that actually got you right to a parking spot, and
if you chose, that app would also take you into a nearby municipal
garage where the rates were actually lower. So we got into congestion
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J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2019