J Magazine Winter 2019

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“I came from New York where I’m managing
a train coming every 30 seconds to Jacksonville
with a bus every 75 minutes. So it was like almost
going to the moon in a lot of ways.”
– NAT FORD –
found that 258 JTA bus drivers had 1,276 criminal and
driving violations since the 1970s, leading to the departure
of CEO Michael Blaylock.
Ford’s name surfaced as a rising star in the world of
public transportation, and he came to interview.
“During the interview process,” he remembers, “I was taking
lunch or something, and I just observed this elderly lady sitting
on an overturned shopping cart at a bus stop that really was just a
pole in the ground, a kind of worn-down, goat-path-looking area.
And I just thought that this was the place I wanted to come. This
Powered by cheaper, cleaner compressed natural gas, a JTA First Coast Flyer stops at a North Jefferson Street bus stop.
The Flyer was launched as a premium rapid-transit service connecting Downtown to outlying neighborhoods.
was the place to be able to improve on her experience with all the
30-plus years of experience working around the country. When I
left that lunch and came back the other way, I actually saw her still
sitting there almost an hour later.”
He was hired in 2012, and one of the first challenges he had to
take on was a decades-old bus route structure that presumably
caused that woman’s long vigil on the grocery cart.
“The philosophy at that time was, we just we put the least
amount that we need to put out there, in terms of service,” Ford
said. “I came from New York where I’m managing a train coming
every 30 seconds to Jacksonville with a bus every 75 minutes. So it
was like almost going to the moon in a lot of ways.”
With the attitude he developed in Atlanta about the impact of
public transit on people’s lives, Ford led JTA into a massive restructuring
of the bus system. He told the T-U editorial board in 2013: “We
want a faster system, one that’s more understandable and more direct.”
After public outreach that included 14 public meetings, 19 community
advisory groups, 95 community events and scores of meetings
with business and civic groups, JTA launched its overhaul in
2014 — redesigning all bus routes
to provide more buses more often,
increasing on-time reliability,
increasing service late at night
and weekends, spacing bus stops
more efficiently, simplifying busroute
numbering and providing
riders online, real-time information
on bus arrivals and departures.
Improvements included
almost six miles of new sidewalks
and 62 new curb cuts.
“It’s definitely bold,” Ford said
on a return visit to the editorial
board just before the launch.
“(We) couldn’t take a delicate approach
to this.”
The impact was immediate,
with dramatic service improvements
and ridership increases by
6 percent overall and as much as
18 percent on weekends.
Looking back, Ford said, “No
one across the country had ever
done anything like that. Maybe
with 30-plus years of experience
and a little bit of New York cockiness
in my mind, it was like, we’re
going to do this, we’re going to
be the first to do it. We’re going
to take that bold risk and that bold challenge. And we did it. It has
been replicated by cities all around the country now as the way
for transit systems to be viable, to not ignore, but find a way to
deal with the political issues around something like that. For
the JTA, I think that’s what set us on the course to where we
are today.”
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J MAGAZINE | WINTER 2019