Scott Stanford:

Hi everybody and welcome to The Infrastructors, the premier podcast for engaging conversations with influential thought leaders in AI, tech, government policy, and smart city innovation. Today's guest is the Chief Innovation Officer for SEPTA, Emily Yates.

Hi, Emily. Listen, thanks for stopping by today. You're currently the Chief Innovation Officer for the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, from here on in referred to as SEPTA. Now, before we get into more about what a chief innovation officer does for SEPTA, give us a little history, a professional journey of how you ended up in the city of brotherly love.

Emily Yates:

Well, Scott, how much time do we have to go through my journey?

Scott Stanford:

Start from childhood. Bring it up through high school.

Emily Yates:

Not a problem. No. I'll start with college. I think that's a good starting point for this. You don't want to hear about being raised in a family of six kids. So let's see, I went to school to be a civil engineer. I wanted to design golf courses. So really unique-

Scott Stanford:

Okay, so you know what, let me stop you right there. You go to school to be a civil engineer. What was it about that, that as a youngster made you want to go to school to design golf courses?

Emily Yates:

So, golf had really been a huge part of my life. My dad was a college golf coach, so we moved a lot. And then when his players started turning professional, my dad moved to the sports agent side of things. So, my mom would be home with us all day. And when my dad would come home from work, she'd be like, “Get the kids out of here. I really need some time away from them.” And as a mother, I now totally get it.

Scott Stanford:

You get it. Yeah, sure.

Emily Yates:

"Come on guys. We're going to the golf course." He'd throw the baby in the basket in the back and you would see the five Yates kids just running up the first fairway playing ready golf. And that would be how he'd tire us out before bed. It was a pretty key part of my life. I actually ended up getting a scholarship to play golf, and I just thought “What a great way to marry my passion of playing golf with a career.” You want to do something that you love, and I idolized my dad. Still do. I think he's one of the best men that I know. I was told to focus on geotechnical and hydrological engineering, and I’d be great for golf course design because if you have a course that doesn't drain, it's really not worth its weight in gold.

Scott Stanford:

You're in trouble. Yes.

Emily Yates:

Exactly. So I spent three years in civil engineering. Spent my summers up in Idaho, working on a construction crew, building a golf course. A Bobby Trent Jones Junior golf course. Came back another summer and helped the superintendent grow it in and get it ready for play. And I loved it and I thought it was great, but I didn't jive with civil engineering. So I ended up transitioning my end of my junior year, which my parents were really thrilled about to landscape architecture, which meant I had another four years in university.

And it turned out to be a really great change for me because I learned about cities in that time, because I had to take enough credits to get financial aid. And so I got into urban planning and I think I was a couple credits shy of getting an urban planning minor, but I had amazing professors at Arizona State who really taught me about the spaces between buildings and that's where my love of cities really started to be fostered. There's some pivotal points in my life that I can really point to and say that is where my life changed trajectories, and I think going into landscape architecture and having the professors I had at university teach me about urban design really was a pivotal point in my life and my career.

After that, I started in private development. I was living in Arizona around my family and I was like, "I need to get away from this little home squad of siblings." And that's why I moved to Richmond, Virginia and worked for a private development firm. I got bitten by the bug a lot of people are experiencing now where I wanted to have true impact. I didn't want to design five acre green field plots for housing developments. I really wanted to have an impact on the quality of life. So I went to work for the District of Columbia as a neighborhood planner. And I worked under Harriet Tregoning, and she was another person that's just monumental in my career in terms of how she looked at cities and really believed in the livable, walkable, workable city, and how we could make D.C. that way.

And I got assigned to a project in Anacostia. If anybody's familiar with D.C. and the communities east of the river, it's a largely African American community, historically disinvested, physically segregated from the city by the Anacostia River. And we were looking at this large-scale redevelopment site and doing an environmental impact statement because it was part of the federal lands being transferred to the city in lieu of taxes and all these things. And I just really couldn't find an adequate example of how to do climate change adaptation and mitigation with a community and really make it a place for the community and not a place that would change or gentrify the neighborhoods around it.

I ended up getting a fellowship to go to Germany and study for a year and a half in a waterfront development in Hamburg. Another pivotal moment in my life was spending a year and a half looking at a brand new waterfront development. I think it's around 40 acres if I remember correctly. And just the way that they leveraged the power of land ownership to achieve designs by private developers that met their needs. I got engaged while I was abroad and was convinced to move back to America, and we had a pit stop in Montreal that helped me readjust to life back in North America. I ultimately ended up in D.C. again, working for a transatlantic think tank called the German Marshall Fund.

And I led the programming and their public policy arm that focused on sustainable and livable cities. So again, taking my passions about improve the quality of life for its residents and starting to dive into, that was right around when smart cities became a big topic in the U.S. and the federal government started through their programming. I worked a lot with legacy cities in the U.S. So the Pittsburghs, the Detroits, the Clevelands, and really taking lessons from Europe and applying them to their local contacts in the U.S.

Working with my peers in cities and seeing workforce development that works really well in Germany and Finland and the Netherlands, and the components of those policies that could be translated to our context in Cleveland, for example. There are so many people doing amazing work in these cities, especially in Detroit. This was right around when they declared bankruptcy. I got bitten by the bug to get down to the local level and have impact again and lead some of this work, and move to Charlotte, North Carolina, where I worked for a local NGO that was focused on smart cities. Supported the city of Charlotte in developing energy climate action plans and led the development of the first circular economy strategy in the United States. Finally, I started missing my parents.

Scott Stanford:

It's about time. It took you long enough.

Emily Yates:

That's not a fair statement. I missed them a ton, but some things happened in my life that made me realize that time with my family is limited. And I had two young children that I wanted to make sure had a relationship with my parents and they were living in Wilmington, Delaware. They still are. And the opportunity with the city of Philadelphia to be the smart cities director came up. So, I threw my hat in the ring and was selected to lead the city's efforts and was there for two and a half years before I started here at SEPTA as the chief innovation officer three months ago. So that's my long and winded story.

Scott Stanford:

And listen, unfortunately we're out of time, but it was great talking to you and... No, I'm kidding. Emily, listen, so you just started when, back in June, May? When did you start?

Emily Yates:

April. End of April I started.

Scott Stanford:

Give us a little overview of what so far, the overall mission and goal for SEPTA's innovation department is as you see it right now.

Emily Yates:

Happy to do that, but I think a better way to ground the work that I'm hoping we do in innovation is to talk more broadly about SEPTA's mission. I think COVID and what we've experienced over the last three years has really changed how SEPTA's thinking about the services we provide. What we saw throughout the pandemic is that SEPTA and really all transit agencies were an essential service. Without SEPTA, people weren't going to get to the grocery stores and stock those shelves. The hospitals weren't getting cleaned. The sick weren't getting cared for. And I think the important thing to note is who our riders were during that time. They weren't the population that has choices and flexibility of how they live and how they work. It was really the moderate and low income individuals, the disabled individuals, the older demographic that were riding our services. And it really showed us how critical it was. Was it Rahm Emanuel that said, "Don't let a good crisis go to waste," or something along those lines?

Scott Stanford:

Yes. Yes.

Emily Yates:

Wise words. And I think in SEPTA, we really wanted to learn how these lessons could create a 21st century transit service that met the needs of a people today. And so we are no longer operating the same basic principles that we were designed around decades ago. Really it was an opportunity to change our model and the vision of the future of ridership. And so we launched a SEPTA forward strategic plan and we're working to become a lifestyle transit network. We are not all about just the nine to five commutes, which we were prior, but really it's about serving all types of trips. An integrated, seamless, and frequent transit network that allows people to move about and have freedom to participate in all aspects of life. We want to be the first choice for people to get around the city, not the last.

Transit is at the core of a resilient, prosperous, and equitable community for everyone. That's one of the reasons why I took the opportunity to take this job. I feel very strongly that transportation is the backbone of a city's resiliency. Environmental, social, and economic resiliency. If you can't get people to where they need to be, you're really going to struggle as a city. When I came on board to lead the innovation team, I'm leading not only the sustainability program, but the data policy and analytics. And then there's the third vertical that I'm working on, developing around highlighting innovative tech and data, and really helping leverage the innovative application of that tech and data to support the development of a lifestyle transit system.

Scott Stanford:

So when you talk about tech and data, how does the department evaluate new technology? Is there an approach that says, yes, there's potential here or is it really viewing technology as tools and trying to bring that up organically as an opportunity is identified along the way?

Emily Yates:

The lessons learned in the city of Philadelphia I'll be applying and working with my team. I think there's two ways of doing it. For example, right now safety is one of the challenges around increasing our ridership. If our riders don't feel safe, they're not going to ride any mode of transit.

But there's a plethora of solutions out there that could really be helpful and I keep that in the back of my mind. And as I'm approached by vendors or I'm on webinars and hearing different technologies, I do organic evaluation. It checks a lot of the boxes. Let me dive a little bit deeper. Let me pull in some of the subject matter experts for my team and see if this is something that we think would be valuable to SEPTA. And then we look for ways to move forward to pilot it and test it out. We want to de-risk it as much as possible. So we're not looking to invest $5 million immediately, but if we can do a pilot for $50,000, that's great.

The other way that I'm teeing up for innovation and technology to be explored here at SEPTA is really leveraging the pitch and pilot method that we set up at the city. We identify a challenge. We issue a call for solutions or an RFP, leverage the mechanisms of SEPTA and we source solutions. And then we evaluate all of those and determine which one works best. It's a team evaluation. So again, pulling in the subject matter experts to assess. And then we manage the pilot and have those relevant departments partner with us to ensure success. But again, de-risking the effort because we're not applying it to the full system. It's not a full rollout, but really just seeing if this is a square peg in a round hole or is it something that's going to fit into the broader system? And that's kind of the way that I've evaluated technology and successfully done that. And I plan to do that here at SEPTA as well.

Scott Stanford:

You touched on it earlier, before you came to SEPTA, you were the Philadelphia smart city director. Some of our audience might not know what “smart city” means. What constitutes a smart city?

Emily Yates:

Man, I thought I was almost out of this space of defining smart cities every time I talk. No, I always laugh that you have to do that. But to your point, there are so many definitions around what a smart city really is, that I think to level set. This is the perspective I'm approaching stuff from. And so when I was working for the city, the way I defined smart cities is very simply the innovative application of tech and data to improve efficiency and effectiveness of government services to ensure that there's an equitable impact on the quality of life for all our residents. It's not about the tech and data, but it's really for me about the application and ensuring that it addresses things like equity, efficiency, and effectiveness. And to me, those are the three important Es in order to be successful. If they don't touch on that, they're not really helping address the challenges that a city faces.

Scott Stanford:

And before, again, while you were there as the smart city director, you started something really cool called the Smart City Phil Program. Tell us a little bit about that as well.

Emily Yates:

I started in October of 2019 with the city of Philadelphia, they had launched the Smart City PHL roadmap in February of 2019 with an executive order from the mayor, which was great. It really gave it some traction to start. And basically, it was a clean slate. We have this roadmap, we need to figure out how to implement it. We'll support you. If you fail, that's okay, we're giving you that opportunity. Just make sure you learn from it. And so, we were small but mighty. It was only two of us working to deploy the pitch and pilot method, which became the basic way for us to engage with the vendor space.

A big challenge that the city had encountered is that there were shadow IT departments outside of OIT, the office of innovation and technology, which is where Smart City PHL sat. And so a lot of times vendors would just engage with multiple IT departments. So, the streets department has their own IT, the health department has their own IT. And there's not this coherent way of leveraging tech and data in the city to be effective. It was ineffective, quite the opposite of what you want.

And so, we created the pitch and pilot as a mechanism for being consistently transparent about how as a city, we want to engage with vendors and the process that you must go through to do that. And so internally we had to create relationships with all the relevant departments that operated in the public space and bring them on board to help partner with us, to deploy these pilots, measure them, and determine if they were successful or not before working to scale them up. And so, I think over the two and a half years that I was there, we launched 14 different pilots. We had over a million dollars invested in the efforts from outside parties. And we leveraged a budget of under $250,000 for that time, I want to say.

Scott Stanford:

Wow, I've been hearing a lot about these smart light poles.

Emily Yates:

Oh, yes.

Scott Stanford:

... that you had at Smart City PHL, but I don't mean the light just turns on when it goes dark. What made those light poles different than all the city light poles we've seen on the streets since the early days? What does a smart light pole do?

Emily Yates:

Well, it gives you a lot of gray hairs. You can't really tell right now, but I think my gray hair count went up drastically over the course of executing on that pilot. Not because of the partnership. That was amazing. We partnered with Comcast and US Ignite. It was just all the minutia and the details. And you think you kind of got to where you wanted to be and then low and behold, there's another kind of roadblock. A smart streetlight is simply a streetlight that has technology in it to manage the energy put out, so you can adjust the strength of the light. But it also has sensors in it that provide climate and environmental data. It can have noise sensors. Ours had optical sensors and environmental sensors in it. But it just has technology in it beyond the typical streetlight.

This was an interesting pilot because it evolved over time. We originally entered a partnership with US Ignite, who is also in a partnership with Comcast to do a smart cities pilot. I think we met in February 2020, and said, "Yes, let's work on something." And then a month later, everything stops and shuts down. And the city kind quickly pivots to be working from home and managing and sustaining services. It was a little bit chaotic, and we were really appreciative of the patience that Comcast and US Ignite showed us. We wanted to deploy some smart streetlights that can analyze if people are maintaining safe distances from each other.

If they're out in public right away, we want to make sure that they're following protocol and recommendations from the department of public health. And if not, can that trigger a response where we don't have to send an individual out to say, “hey, people are a little too close here? You're violating our recommendations.” But instead, trigger a text message to the manager of the restaurant that says, “hey, you've got some people that are not sitting six feet apart” or something along those lines. Really looking at ways to create efficiencies and not have to send an individual out.

As we progressed on that the recommendations shifted, and we did not really face as much concern over the six-foot distance. And so, we pivoted to eventually deciding that we manually send people out to do pedestrian and traffic counts. Can we use these smart streetlights to get real time data around traffic counts and pedestrian counts and see if that improves our ability to make decisions and also opens up capacity for some of those individuals who don't now have to count cars or pedestrians? So, our project was looking at counting pedestrians and counting vehicles and types of vehicles. Is it a large fleet vehicle? Is it a car? Is it a bike? And getting us that data and providing some environmental data around humidity, temperature. The goal was to look at how the city can more broadly collect data in the public space and still respect the privacy of our citizens and residents.

Scott Stanford:

Right. Yeah. That's always the case. And it's funny, getting new technology launched in a city kind of sounds like a no-brainer to a novice like myself, but isn't innovation inherently opposite to what a city or state procurement process is? I mean, the technology moves-

Emily Yates:

Oh, 100%.

Scott Stanford:

... much faster than the pace of the procurement. How do you address that issue to get things done a little quicker than normal?

Emily Yates:

I wish I had the answer. I mean this is a challenge that cities around the U.S. are grappling with and have not really created a solution. There are a lot of band aids out there. Risk and innovation are the opposite of what cities are supposed to do. Our mandate as a city is to provide stability around services that our residents need. We need to make sure that the water's always running, that the streets work, they're meeting whatever needs that we are supposed to provide as a public government. And innovation happens so quickly that there is a lot of risk that comes with it. So, it's this constant tension that you're dealing with as a smart cities director, anybody working in this innovation space.

I think we were able to navigate it because we recognized that a low level procurement, so procuring under $100,000 in the city of Philadelphia allowed us to use the small order purchase or the SOP as we called it, which meant that we had a standardized set of terms and conditions and indemnification that allowed us to procure at a quicker rate than if we had to go to a full RFP, which has adjustable terms and conditions and indemnifications. So by keeping it small, we were able to use the standardized version of it and procure in a month or two, what would normally take three to six months or longer for a larger project.

I think also being given the expectation of we will fail at some point, empowered me in a way that I wasn't going to push forward a project that I didn't feel great about. But if I had a little bit of concern, I knew that, okay, if we fail, which we did one time, our second pitch and pilot was around access to tap water. It didn't click 100% for me, but I was like, "No, no, we should push it forward. There's support for it." And then it ended up that we didn't get any solutions pitched to us that we felt were worthy of an investment of taxpayer dollars. And so, we just didn't move forward with that. And we learned our lessons. We kind of looked back and did the iterative process of, okay, what did we do wrong and how can we take that learning into our next pitch and pilot process?

But yeah, it's a constant challenge. It's a legal issue, it's a procurement issue. But it also gives me a lot of hope for the future of cities. Because I think when we start to see these big infusions of IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) funds coming into cities, and the rate of innovation is going to just happen so quickly that cities will have to adapt to that because there will be no other option. And that they'll start to see and achieve some of these goals that just seem so far off. And I think that will just motivate people more. That's my hope. My silver lining.

Scott Stanford:

You talk about these pilot projects, the industrial development corporation, that vehicle recognition pilot at the Philly Navy Yard. For our audience, the Navy Yard in Philly is no longer just a place where ships are built and renovated. I mean it's rapidly transforming into Philadelphia's second downtown. How's that Navy Yard pilot going? Is that working out well?

Emily Yates:

It's awesome. I have caught up with my colleagues at PIDC and they have nothing but positive things to say about the work that's being done around that pilot. It's been a responsive partnership between PIDC and Rekor, and really responding to changes in needs, but also the quality of data that they're able to pull off. I think the one that I keep hearing about is that similar to the city, so the city's ears perked up when they heard this, you have accidents where people will hit street poles and knock them over. I think there's some statistic I found out when we were doing the smart block PHL that there's something like seven or eight street poles that get knocked over daily in the city of Philadelphia.

Scott Stanford:

Every day.

Emily Yates:

... Every day. Speaks a lot about how we drive in Philly. But I think it's largely trucks that are turning around on the street or backing up. We had a couple of our streetlights knocked down in the pilot. But anyway, back to the Navy Yard, the quality of the images and the data is so good that they can use that to track down somebody who hit a streetlight pole and make them pay for it. Whereas PIDC would've had to pay for it. So there's definitely an ROI for that. And I know that by working with the city that they're very keen on learning more about it and the technology. At SEPTA, we're very interested in the AI capacity that Rekor showed.

Scott Stanford:

The vehicle information, I mean, can stuff like that be pressed up against different databases, like vehicle emissions and provide a real-time look at things like smog and greenhouse gas emissions? Can you use vehicle data for that as well?

Emily Yates:

If Rekor could do those calculations for their client, then yes. I don't know if the city's quite at the level of doing those calculations. But I think absolutely, granularity is something that cities struggle, and being able to zoom in and out on data that is so valuable.

Scott Stanford:

Yeah. And just thinking about things like electric vehicles, I mean, they could be a priority just knowing where vehicles are driving. That could help a city determine where you might want to have the cluster of chargers where people can just plug in and be where those electric vehicles are most.

Emily Yates:

Any data that the government or a government organization can have about how people are moving about their city is valuable. We have seen the impact of investments based purely on demand and not on foresight. This is a conversation that I'm having a lot around EVs, because again, with the IIJA funding there's a huge push towards electrification. I'm trying to have the conversations where it's not just SEPTA having the conversation about where infrastructure goes, but really understanding how the city's going to be deploying infrastructure, how the school district is going to be deploying infrastructure. What our local energy company is thinking, because we need to be efficient about how we're doing that and we need to share the infrastructure.

We need to make sure we're providing EV charging for where people will have EV cars. Where are people going to have EV cars in 10 years? Probably in a lot of areas where they don't have them now, because we're looking at the car market. We saw five years ago that European car makers like BMW, Porsche, Volkswagen, Audi were all saying that they will no longer have internal combustion engine cars by 2030. Volvo joined. Now we're seeing U.S. car makers say the same thing. We need to be thinking about the communities that don't have it now but will have it in the future so that there's not that discrepancy in investment again.

I mean, we saw that play out early on with Black Lives Matter uprisings in cities, wherethe historic disinvestment throughout cities came to light. And it's really something that's changed the way the city of Philadelphia is exploring how they're investing their funds. They're trying to do it with much more of a lens towards equity. And I think we have to prevent making that mistake moving forward. So, I think the data around where the cars are now is very important, but we also need to start looking at where we need to deploy them for the future.

Scott Stanford:

And Emily, before you go, I just want to ask you about cities in our country, they've always been pitted against each other when it comes to that competition for federal funding. In the past, when cities looked for grants and funding from the government, individual cities have really tried to emphasize what makes their locality unique and different. But wouldn't something that works in Philly also work in Chicago or Denver or any other city? I mean, wouldn't the other cities just want to work off the information that you guys have in Philly that's working really well?

Emily Yates:

Oh, absolutely. I always joke that we are solving the same problems that other cities are trying to solve. And this takes me back to my days at GMF, where I was talking about applying for the local context. My favorite saying is that we shouldn't reinvent the wheel. That there's probably a solution out there already that just needs to be adapted to our unique Philadelphia. A great way to create efficiencies is, “why do we need to recreate it?” It's out there somewhere. I often spend a lot of my day talking to colleagues in other cities and having coordination calls about what's being done in New Jersey, talk to the MTA a lot about what they're doing. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, but I think there's also value in being the first city to deploy something.

That was how I got a lot of work done in the smart city space, to be honest. Because a lot of early-stage companies came to me and said, "We want to work with the city." They want to get an example of their work deployed in the city. And so, creating those R&D relationships were great. And then I could talk to other cities and say, this is how it worked for us. So, I think it's great to learn from other cities, but there's also value if you're trying to do things on a certain budget to offer up that R&D partnership.

Scott Stanford:

This is the real last question. Is there any innovation that you could possibly think of that would get the Phillies to the world series this year or no?

Emily Yates:

Ouch.

Scott Stanford:

You don't need to-

Emily Yates:

My dad would kill me, because-

Scott Stanford:

... You don't need to answer that one.

Emily Yates:

I don't watch baseball enough to answer properly... I'm embarrassed.

Scott Stanford:

Emily Yates, Chief Innovation Officer for SEPTA. Emily, listen, congratulations on the new gig and good luck with it and I hope you're there for a very long time. Everything you've done up till now has come out of developing that one golf course, right?

Emily Yates:

Exactly.

Scott Stanford:

Emily, enjoy the rest of your summer. Thank you so much.

Emily Yates:

Yes. Yes.

Scott Stanford:

That's all the time we have today on the Infrastructors. Join us next time for our conversation with the president and CEO of ITS America, Laura Chace.