Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning: Mike Pritchard, AICP

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[00:28] - Em Hall: Welcome to Critical Conversations Conversations in Transportation Planning, where we're bringing you a series of interviews with pioneers and industry leaders who are offering their insights into some of the most challenging issues facing our field. This podcast is produced by the American Planning Association's Transportation Planning Division. TPD connects planners working across all transportation modes to share innovation, foster collaboration, and advocate for sustainable mobility solutions.

[00:55} - Divya Gandhi: I'm Divya Gandhi, a Transportation Planner and a member of the Transportation Planning Division's Board of Directors.

[01:00] - Em Hall: And I'm Dr. Em. Hall, an urban planning consultant and member of the TPD Board of Directors. In this episode, we speak to Mike Prichard of the York County Planning Commission.

[01:09] - Divya Gandhi: We really enjoyed this conversation, so let's get right into it. Mike, do you want to get us started telling us about your role, all the projects you're involved with, the work that you do, and what brings you here today?

[01:23] - Mike Pritchard, AICP: Yeah. I am the Assistant Director at the York County Planning Commission. So we are a single county MPO, and We're also the County Planning Commission for York in Pennsylvania. We are north of Baltimore and west of Philadelphia. We have every landscape in our county. So we've got the city of York that's about 40,000 We've got 3,000 people. We've got suburban development surrounding that, and we still have a lot of great agricultural and rural areas throughout the county as well. My work has been in city planning for the city of York, and I've also served as a transportation planner since about 2011. My work for this conference that we're covering is about Community in Motion, which is our coordinated public transportation and human services plan.

[02:13] - Divya Gandhi: Excellent. So, Mike, you apply elements of design thinking and human-centered design in your approach to planning. Tell us what that means and why it's important for the work that you do.

[02:26] - Mike Pritchard, AICP: Yeah. Human-centered design is really about putting the people who are using a product or a service first, getting their input about whatever you're working on. So for us, working on public transportation and how seniors and people with disabilities get around, we started with about 20 interviews directly one on one with seniors and people with disabilities in our community. They didn't necessarily have to have a public transportation experience. We were interested in just learning how they get around county. So human center design more broadly is about involving the people who you're planning for directly in the process from your data gathering through your definition of different needs and objectives of a plan and even into creating the solutions or strategies or projects that might come out of the plan.

[03:22] - Em Hall: So that's not always the approach that's taken in gathering information for planning. And we chatted a little bit ahead to explore this topic with you. And a concept that you brought up is the notion of empathy interviews. And you're really focusing on people's experiences, their underlying motivations for the choices that they make. Can you tell us a little bit more about how this approach plays out in the work that you guys are doing in New York County?

[03:47] - Mike Pritchard, AICP: Yeah. So empathy interviews are really just about having human conversations with people. I gave that characterization at our presentation earlier. And I don't know why that's so hard for us as planners. I have some thoughts on why it is, but it really removes the jargon from the conversation. We ask questions the way that normal people talk, and it really allows us to dive in and understand people's motivations for why we see behavior in the transportation network, for instance. Why are people choosing to drive a car to get around, or why are they riding the bus, or however they choose to get around? Empathy interviews really allow us to to follow them down some rabbit holes that would otherwise not pop up in your typical data collection methodologies, like just a survey or even a focus group, because there's too many people in the room.

[04:43] - Em Hall: Yeah. How do you train Who's doing the interviews? Are these planners doing the interviews? And then how do you train folks in this method?

[04:51] - Mike Pritchard, AICP: Yeah. We had all internal staff doing that work. So we were a team of three planners that worked on this plan in particular. And I was lucky enough that I have a family member who is an expert in design thinking and teaches it to college students. Oh, wow. So she came in and gave us a boot camp, a one day briefing on design thinking overall and how to do empathy interviews. And then it's really just something that you have to get in and do it yourself, not unlike podcasting, where the more you do it, the more experience you get. And you learn what is worth diving into, how to ask questions that are open-ended, that you're not just getting yes and no responses to things, and how to pull up when you need to pull up and get back to whatever your outline of the topic is.

[05:45] - Em Hall: Right. Can you think of... I'm putting you on the spot a little bit here. Can you think of a specific example of the way, here's how we used to ask this question before, and here's how we have that conversation now?

[05:56] - Mike Pritchard, AICP: Well, I think we're really good as planners at collecting data from Census Bureau or even just Census, local Census. So we can observe phenomenon. We can understand what is happening in a community, but we don't understand why that's happening very often. We can ask people about what they think their needs are, but we don't get that additional layer of their motivations that might help us create a product or a project that people aren't going to think of themselves. So we got into a lot of conversations about behavior shift. How do we get more people thinking about their transportation future? If they are in a position where they can't drive anymore, what does that look like? How do you have that conversation in the community more broadly before people are facing that reality? The previous coordinated plans that we did were good. They were very based on maps, demographic data. We got a lot of good recommendations out of that about where the busses should go, what areas of the county to target. But this additional framework, again, really let us get into those motivations and think about communications and public outreach around transportation for seniors and people with disabilities that we would not have gotten otherwise.

[07:31] - Em Hall: Can you think of any... I've got one more follow-up question. This is interesting. Can you give us an example of one thing that changed as a result of your findings from the empathy interviews versus the quantitative data that you had before?

[07:45] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Yeah, we heard a lot about people feeling like they are a burden if they can't drive. Wow. Whether they're using the busses, the fixed route bus system or the paratransit system, or if they're just relying on friends and neighbors for trips. In both cases, we heard, I don't want to be a burden. The transportation network, the transit network, should be for people who need it. We heard that a lot. And we were talking to people who you would traditionally think of as someone who needs the transit service. That was not anything that we would have come up with had we not gone through this. So we're having conversations now with private philanthropic organizations in the county. Interesting. So the United Way has really zeroed in on transportation and housing as their two priorities for funding. And the United Way, our local community foundation, organizations like that, are helping us to explore other funding opportunities to have those more, I'll call them softer interventions or strategies so that we can boost those conversations in the community.

[00:09:04.920] - Em Hall

Yeah. So you're taking this information, sharing it back out, it sounds like. How do people feel being asked to share their stories or share their experiences?

[00:09:15.440] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

It varies. Some people were a little bit hesitant and not to share their stories, but to be tied to those quotes. Some people want to make sure that we're maintaining. And It was unanimity, obviously. I had other people in Empathy interviews that said, They were saying some negative things about our transit agency, and they said, You can tell them that I said that.

[00:09:39.760] - Em Hall

Yeah.

[00:09:40.600] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

So it varied. It was all over the place. I had some questions this morning. After our presentation, folks came up to me and asked, why did we develop personas, which are fictionalized synthesis of the input that we got. So we talked about the need maintain anonymity. That was important for us. It's not important for every project. But it also helped us just synthesize. We had 20 interviews and we went down to eight personas. Got it. Short of having 20 unique people in this plan that we were trying to plan for. It just helped us synthesize that.

[10:23] - Em Hall

That makes sense. Yeah.

[10:27] - Divya Gandhi

The qualitative, quantitative approach.

[10:29] - Em Hall

Yeah. We talked about that a little bit. So then are you... Yeah, I think we covered that. Okay. Yeah, I think we're good on that.

[10:37] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

I can talk just a little bit about putting this together.

[10:40] - Em Hall

There we go. That'd be great.

[10:42] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

So a common criticism, I think, is, oh, you only talk to 20 people. There's half a million people in York County. So what we did was we identified some of the demographics of the people we were speaking to, and we paired that with census data. So we can say the persona that we named Richard, who is a senior who is using fixed route on a regular basis, we can tie that to census data and other demographic information to say, Richard represents 2,000 people in our community, basically based on his experience. His experience. Yeah.

[11:18] - Divya Gandhi

Wow. Incredible.

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[11:49] - Divya Gandhi

Well, Mike, you also shared that your work spans urban centers, suburban areas, county seats, and some rural agricultural communities as well. So we were curious, what are some challenges and strategies that have emerged in ensuring that planning and transportation planning is truly inclusive across such different geographies.

[12:09] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Yeah. We are really lucky in Pennsylvania that shared ride paratransit is available to everybody, regardless of where you live and where you are going in the state. That's a program in Pennsylvania at the state level that is great. What we've done, though, is to try to think about what the different needs are for people in different landscapes. So at the urban level, you do have fixed route bus service, where maybe that's an option for you that with a 15-minute headway or 30-minute headway, you're going to get where you need to go on the fixed route bus. In more rural areas, though, we are probably never going to have fixed route service. The density just there for it. So we're exploring more informal ride sharing things among houses of worship or just local groups, like your rotaries, your elks, all of those kinds of social organizations. The United Way, in particular in York County, is looking at ways to incentivize that for churches, synagogues, et cetera, to really Try to get more people involved in that. Yeah.

[13:40] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah. Sure. Wow, thank you for focusing on and really talking about the context-sensitive approach to planning that you're taking. So one thing that we were wondering about, you mentioned about coordinated plans and funding. And considering all the work that goes into empathy interviews and the effort and the time that takes, we were wondering, federally mandated coordinated plans and efforts like this require strong relationships with probably fellow transit agencies and also funding sources to actually be able to do the work. So what has been the key to successfully securing that funding for studies like the one that you've done? And how have you navigated partnerships to really having them support human-centered planning?

[14:28] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Yeah, we have We have a long tradition of working with our public transit agency in York. So we've been working on coordinated plans with them for decades. And I think we're at this point where, or we were at this point, where The planning products were not getting the results or recommendations that anyone really wanted. We wanted more out of the planning process. So we were really lucky that our transit agency signed on, our MPO signed on to taking this approach to our coordinated plan update. We really emphasize that this was going to get stories directly from people who are going to use this service and humanize the work. I think that was important. Again, dive into those underlying motivations and those real needs that people have when it comes to transportation so we can start to address the behavioral changes and just the additional needs people have. I'll say our coordinated plan was funded totally through our existing UPWP funding for the MPO. This was not an additional grant that came in. We funded it through our usual federal dollars.

[15:50] - Em Hall

That's great. I want to go back to something you said earlier. You said people say you did only 20 interviews. I did semi-structured interviews for my dissertation, so I know that 20 interviews is like reams of data Or it can be, right? To me, that's a lot. I'm like, that's a lot. But I also get why people say, oh, you only talk to 20 people out of X, right? So how does this scale? How does it replicate? Not only for you, but if other... I mean, if Chicago was looking to do this, how many people do you have to interview? What does it look like? What would your advice, your insights be for both what this looks like next for you all and then how other municipalities might adapt this approach?

[16:28] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Yeah, I think It comes down to after you've done a couple of interviews, taking stock of where you are in your data collection efforts. And you do reach a point where you start to hear similar themes through every interview that you do. And you just intuitively get to a point where you're like, okay, this is diminishing returns, and we're not going to get a whole lot else out of talking to more people. Sure. But that's the really difficult part, I think, of the data collection for this, is that there is no formula, you can say, like a statistically significant population or sample size. You have to build that flexibility into your scope of work. We actually did not say how many people we were going to interview when we put the scope together. Okay, interesting. We just said, We know that we've got these groups of people that we want to speak to. We want seniors, people with disabilities, and we want people with varying levels of experience with the transit agency. Then a separate group was to speak to employees of human service agencies who are working directly with folks. So we put the call out to our partner organizations, and we said, We want to do these interviews.

[17:53] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Do you have folks who would want to talk to us about their transportation experiences? And again, in part, maybe because we did the entire thing in-house, we did not reach out to a consultant to help us out with it. For sure. We had that flexibility after we were about what ended up to be three quarters of the way through to say, Yeah, I think we're at a point now where we've collected enough interviews, we have enough data, and we can move that into the next phase of creating those personas and those needs and objectives. Great.

[18:27] - Em Hall

That's helpful.

[18:28] - Divya Gandhi

Yeah. Mike, You also mentioned about a lot of storytelling that had to go in to be able to really get this to fruition. So talk about storytelling in transportation planning, it seems like it's a very valuable skill. And as the division board, we do engage a lot with students and emerging planners and are constantly trying to put out content that can be very valuable for them as they step into the industry. So we were thinking, what are some ways to develop and refine those storytelling abilities and effectively communicate transportation concepts and projects that can sometimes be very engineering-heavy and jargony and get it across.

[19:08] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Sure. Yeah. Well, we are looking at ways to use the personas that we developed as public outreach, public communications materials. Great. So all of these personas are not real people, obviously, but they've got names. We use stock images for them. They've got a background that we created for them, essentially, based on the people that we talk to, obviously. But one of the planners on my team was really set on deciding that one of the personas was a former basketball coach. He was like, this person has a mean hookshot. I was like, okay. I don't know if it really matters in the grand scheme of things, but it humanizes and it personalizes. Right. So getting back to how we use those, I think we can talk about numbers all day. But when we start to say, does Richard, the one person in our persona group, does Richard's story sound like your story or the story of a family member, a friend, a loved one, et cetera. Here's then what we're saying we can do about Richard's needs in the community. If you've got other ideas, we'd love to hear them. Again, partnering with those other funding organizations, we can say, Okay, the MPO or the county isn't going to fund your project, but maybe we can go to the United Way, the Community Foundation, some of our other partners to fund whatever project or improvement that you have in mind because you've got a Richard or an Amelia or an Oscar, and you know their experience and you know what would help them out.

[20:57] - Em Hall

Yeah. I love the idea of like, this persona is not a right fit for you. Let's find where they do fit. That's awesome, though. I mean, this has been terrific. This is so interesting and different. And I'm curious, as we close out, what does success look like for you in five or 10 years? How do you know the personas worked or this approach moved things in the direction you wanted them to go?

[21:20] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

So I think if people start talking about the personas that we've developed in the way that people have started talking about the Alice population that the United Way has created, which is that happens to be an acronym for asset limited income constrained and employed. But they, again, created that ALICE name And people are, at least in our community, are speaking about the ALICE population. They know an Alice. And I think if people start to relate to the personas that we've developed in that way and say, Oscar is just like my neighbor. Oscar is somebody who's 35, who uses a wheelchair and is employed. And that sounds just like my neighbor, Josh. And here's what the Planning Commission, the MPO, and all of your partners are doing to help out Oscar and the Josh, who's a real person, and just being able to share that story in that way.

[022:26] - Em Hall

Wow. That's incredible.

[22:27] - Divya Gandhi

What a way to put out relatable content even for the community.

[22:31] - Em Hall

Are the personas online? Can folks explore them at all?

[22:35] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

They will be on ycpc.org, which is the county planning commission's website. We just adopted the plan, and we're waiting on Adams County to adopt the plan shortly. So once we go through that final approval process, it'll be on our website. People can check it out.

[22:54] - Em Hall

Cool. All that by the time this podcast comes out, we will be able to meet those personas. That's fantastic. Thanks, Mike, for your time. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you.

[23:02] - Mike Pritchard, AICP

Thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity.

[23:05] - Em Hall

Cool. That's a wrap. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Critical Conversations in Transportation Planning. To learn more, visit the APA's Transportation Planning Division website at transportation.planning.org.

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