Former RTC leader has eyes trained on different track in transportation

By Ric Anderson

Sunday, Dec. 15, 2019 | 2 a.m.

During Tina Quigley’s 14 years with the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, she saw her field undergo revolutionary changes.

Autonomous vehicles went from drawing boards to test tracks to public roadways. Technology allowing vehicles to interface with traffic signals, roadside cameras and other infrastructure came into being. Refinements in safety equipment and design offered an increasing level of protection for the occupants of vehicles, yet the proliferation of smart phones and in-vehicle displays presented new safety challenges.

Quigley and her team stayed up to date on those changes, pushing Las Vegas to the forefront in testing new technology.

“We weren’t afraid to partner with the private sector on initiatives that either improved efficiency or improved safety and increased capacity,” she said. “I’m really proud that we became a leader in advanced mobility technologies.”

This year, though, it was time for Quigley to make a change of her own. After nearly three decades working in the public sector — she spent 15 years as a manager at McCarran International Airport before joining the RTC in 2005 and becoming its top executive in 2012 — Quigley left the RTC for an executive position at Virgin Trains to work on the company’s proposed high-speed rail link between Las Vegas and Southern California.

“I had enough years in the retirement system that I was certainly eligible to retire, but for a long time I just couldn’t do it, because I love the job,” she said. “I love the team, I love the mission of the RTC, I love the role and its responsibilities to the community, I loved that I had a board that pushed us and wanted us to keep growing and trying new things.

“But at the same time, once you get to a certain point in the retirement system, staying is not necessarily the best financial decision. And then I’m not getting any younger — I’m 52 years old, with 30 years in government. If I ever wanted a second career, if I ever wanted to try being in the private sector, it was going to be time to do it.”

So she did, leaving the RTC in November and becoming the senior vice president of business strategy for Virgin Trains this month. The 170-mile Virgin Trains project is off to a promising start, with the state of California having approved a $3.25 billion bond request, and the Clark County Commission having voted to endorse a request for $950 million in total private activity bonds.

Recently, Quigley visited the Sun to discuss the Virgin Train project and her time with the RTC. Excerpts of the conversation follow.

What was it about this new opportunity that attracted you to it?

It was exciting to me because it was in my wheelhouse. It’s transportation, and it was the closest thing to a public-sector project being done in the private sector.

This will be the nation’s first true high-speed rail project. The definition of high-speed rail by European standards is 160 mph, and this will be able to get up to 180 mph.

There’s something very Vegas about that — to be the first to have this type of technology.

The Virgin brand is very aligned with the image of Las Vegas — edgy and exciting and innovative and aggressive.

So it felt very right. I mean, how many years have we been hearing a train is coming?

When I first moved here 30 years ago, I remember in the downtown area there were these columns of concrete being built by the developers of the HSST — the High Speed Super Train.

So as far back as I can remember, and I’ve been here a long time, there have been “the train is coming” iterations every five, six, seven years, and those projects have all come and gone.

But this owner, this operator, this company, this isn’t new to them. They’ve actually built a train in Miami.

So the reason I have confidence is, one, they’ve done it before. This is a company that has built and now operates a rail transportation system.

In Miami, I toured the station, and it’s amazing. It’s not what you’d consider a train station to be. It’s a lot more like a mall blended with a high-end hotel with guest hospitality as its main focus.

Then the company has bought the land around it and is building things like condos and class A office space, so it’s really taking the terminus of this transit system and turning it into a destination.

What will be your role?

One, it’s to help (Virgin) understand and navigate through Southern Nevada and explain who we are, and help communicate to our public about the project. And then also, one of the challenges of the project is how do you get to these stations, ideally without adding congestion to the roads?

So with my background being in mobility and public transportation, my job will be to figure out how we’re going to move people from our stations to their final destinations.

Here in Las Vegas, it’s a little bit easier because we’re just about a mile away. (The station is across Las Vegas Boulevard from the Las Vegas Premium Outlets south mall.) So we’ll be able to fairly easily provide some high-capacity transit shuttles between that terminal and destinations — resorts, Green Valley, Henderson, Summerlin, wherever it is. Using advanced mobility and data and phones and stuff, we’ll probably be able to shuttle people with on-demand type transportation and shuttles.

Victorville’s going to be a little harder.

But here’s something I’d like to start emphasizing to Southern Nevada: It’s not so much about ending or beginning in Victorville.

The company recognizes that we have the opportunity to start your Vegas experience in Victorville as opposed to having to drive 170 miles and start it here.

So what are the benefits for Las Vegas?

If you drive on Interstate 15 (between Southern California and Las Vegas) during peak hours, you know it’s an absolute mess. Usually, we’re going counter to the traffic, so we see these huge lines backed up. I start to think, why would these people come back?

There’s some concerning statistics about that. One is that we’ve plateaued. We’re never going to be able to build any more asphalt between here and there, and even if we could, it’s not going be enough to relieve that peak-hour traffic.

This ridership study we just finished indicates that 25% of the traffic between Southern California and Las Vegas occurs during those peak hours.

And the concerning thing is that the numbers are starting to plateau and even drop off. That could be an indicator that people are deciding not to travel. That should get our eyes open.

So having an alternative mode to me is very exciting, because it adds capacity without having to lay additional asphalt.

How much capacity?

The plan is to operate between 6 a.m. and midnight, every 45 minutes. And each train has a capacity of about 500 people. And the reduction in greenhouse gas is significant.

Brightline (the Miami operation) has drawn significant concerns about safety (the Associated Press reported that more than 40 people have been killed along the train’s route since January 2018). What’s being done to ensure this train is safe?

The team in Florida has been aggressive about rail safety including testing new technologies that could change the industry. Suicide by train — which is the majority of what we have seen in Florida — is an industrywide problem. The major difference with our project is that track alignment is within the I-15 right-of-way and does not intersect with roadways.

We’ve looked forward, so now let’s take a look back. At the RTC, what were the most satisfying accomplishments you took away?

This sounds cliché, but the team that I leave behind I’m really super proud of. The chemistry of the team, the respect for the team members. We had really great ideological debates — we could fight stuff out like crazy, but there was this underlying respect. And when you have a team like that, anything is possible, right?

I think they worked so hard and did so much that they built a lot of credibility with the community. And the more we did to take care of the community, the more the community believed in us to execute.

And we did. We passed a fuel tax, which is hard to do, but working with this community and messaging and explaining the case and getting out there is what helped get that passed.

I’m also really proud that we became a leader in advanced mobility technologies. In fact, even though I’m retired, I’m still getting invitations from the federal government to come and explain what we did.

What are some examples of that?

One of my go-tos is that we were the first city to partner with Audi with countdown-to-green technology. So if you have a newer-model Audi and you subscribe to the service, then it will tell you how many more seconds until the light’s going to change.

So we have some very long cycles of lights here, and it’s very tempting to text or eat your sandwich or talk to your passengers and you get distracted. With this audible alert, though, it tells the driver they have to go. How many times are you behind a car where there’s this huge gap? That gap is more than just inconvenient, it’s lost capacity.

The more drivers who are smart and aware and knowledgeable, the more capacity we get out of that intersection without needing to add any additional lanes or technology.

Another example is the technology that gives us the ability to predict where the next accident or incident is going to occur.

Working with NHP to station patrol cars at those hot spots, we’ve reduced the number of accidents by 17% — and that’s a saving to taxpayers, because we’re no longer needing an emergency response. And when a response is needed, we’re able to get there about 12 minutes faster.

So we’re clearing the accidents too, which means you’re getting your capacity back faster.

We also partnered with the city of Las Vegas to become the first city to operate an autonomous shuttle in a real-world environment.

The federal government really appreciated how we all partnered with the private sector in doing that, and helped kind of get other cities to experiment and test this technology. Really, the only way technology is going to advance in public transit is to do these small pilot programs.

Why can’t anybody do a moonshot?

If it’s public, you have to have people’s trust in it. One of my favorite analogies is the elevator industry.

Elevators were invented in the late 1800s, and at the time you had to have an elevator operator who helped bring the car even with the floor.

Then in the early 1900s, Otis electrified elevators (and automated them) but people wouldn’t get in them. People were afraid of them — what it if goes through the roof, or drops straight down?

So we still had elevator operators on board. It wasn’t until the 1940s when elevator operators went on strike that Otis and store owners sat down to figure out how to get people to use elevators. So they did three things: They put an emergency stop button in the cars, they put in phones, and they put in that soothing human voice.

That voice gives us the perception and belief that somebody is in control.

The same thing has happened in autonomous vehicles as well. Lyft is in partnership with a company called Aptiv, and they’re doing autonomous rides. When they started up they gave us rides, and I actually really liked that voice. It would say, “Preparing to stop,” or “Preparing to change lanes.” That made you feel like, this car knows what it’s doing. It’s so interesting how the brain works and what we find soothing.

So you say why not shoot for the moon? Because humans are going to need these iterations of progress before they’re really going to trust it.

The polls now show 60-70% of people say they’ll never get in an autonomous vehicle, so the industry has a long way to go to earn that human trust. Frankly, the infrastructure has a long way to go too.

When you left the RTC, what hadn’t you checked off of your to-do list?

I would have loved to build light rail along Maryland Parkway. I felt like that was a very appropriate corridor that would have created a sense of destination. We could have done with the stations something similar to what Virgin Trains does with their stations — creating a sense of place by partnering with developers and doing transportation-oriented development.

But I really respect our board’s decision. It was a tough one. But the facts are the facts, and that is that the costs were starting to come in over $1 billion and that was a big nut. Our original cost estimates were around $750 million, but when we started getting updated cost estimates based on what rail was costing in LA, the estimate went up.

The other issue is the federal government was very candid. This is not an administration that’s super supportive of the feds funding rail, and they made it clear to us that you might get 33%, whereas with other rail projects in the past, at one point you’d get 80%. Most of the newer systems in the U.S. were built with 80% federal money.

If we were getting 80% from the feds, I think we could have done it.

Is there anything that could have been done differently to get light rail green-lighted?

I don’t think so. I think in the end, the costs were really tough and the ability to overcome those costs in communicating what the vision was were really tough.

Do you think it would it have been a good investment anyway?

I do, because of the development that comes in association with rail. That was the right corridor for that type of investment.

Historically, you can’t deny that when there’s steel in the ground, developers have confidence in investing in that corridor. And you see organically things start to happen.

Now, what the RTC board has decided to do is invest in something similar to rail, which is bus rapid transit. If you see the cross-section of Maryland Parkway, it’s going to be fun to watch because you’ve got bike lanes that are elevated — not actually part of the road, so there’s some protection for bikes and clearly delineated for bikes. You’ve got pedestrian walkways, you’ve got landscaping, you have the dedicated bus lane and then you have lanes for vehicles as well. So I look forward to seeing that develop.

I have no doubt it will also attract developers, and I think our riders will appreciate having a very reliable, very frequent transportation service along that corridor.

What would be your advice to people in the community who still want a light rail system?

I’d say take a look at what happens with this bus rapid transit installation. I think if ridership increases and there’s continued interest with developers, you could easily see it transform into a light rail installation.

That’s the flexibility of bus rapid transit.

Do you think we’ll ever have light-rail on the Strip?

I really don’t know. Even though the Strip is a public right of way, really it’s those companies that have addresses along the Strip (that) really want to define it and help protect it. So whatever happens will have to be very inclusive of all of those who have addresses along that corridor.

What about other options? In Jacksonville, Fla., for instance, there’s a project to use autonomous vehicles as sort of a light rail system.

They’re recycling their old monorail track. They had a monorail installation built in the early 1980s, and it never really took off in terms of ridership. So they hate to lose this infrastructure they’ve got, but they know it can have more use if it’s connected to at-grade transportation as well. So their project is to use autonomous vehicles along that elevated track, but then also have ramps up and down that can allow at-grade transportation.

And just so you know, they received a federal grant for that project, and at the same time we received a federal grant for a project called our Go Med project. It’s in the medical district downtown. We’ll have four autonomous shuttles operating in the downtown area to connect people from our medical district — we’ve got four hospitals in that area — and our monorail transit center.

You’ve said a number of times that, essentially, we can’t build enough roads to get us out of our transportation situation.

In North America, we’re caught in this congestion death spiral, because we have this pervasive belief that building just one more lane of traffic is going to solve all of our problems.

And the real solution is ... ?

You need higher capacity. You need to be moving more people within the infrastructure you have already built.