GRTC boss John Lewis has big plans for transit system

VIDEO: Reporter drives GRTC bus

The offer to John M. Lewis Jr. to become the GRTC's boss could hardly have come at a more painful time for the reserved Baltimore native.

His then-3½-year-old daughter, Kasey, had just undergone surgery for a rare form of childhood cancer.

"I got the phone call when I was in hospital" with her. "I can't really describe it," Lewis recalled of that moment in 2005.

"It was very emotional," he said. "Your little one is going through the fight of her life. There's nothing you can do about it but be there, hold her hand and hope the doctors know what they're doing."

They did. Kasey has been cancer-free since.

At the time, though, she still had to go through months of radiation and chemotherapy. Lewis considered turning down the job running the GRTC Transit System to be with his family in Baltimore, where he was the Maryland Transit Administration's director of metro rail operations.

"My wife was incredibly supportive," Lewis said. "She said, 'No, go do it.'"

While he and his wife, Maggi, were talking over the decision in Kasey's hospital room - and thinking she was asleep - his daughter popped up and said, "Cool. Sounds like an adventure to me."

Lewis took the job.

"Sometimes when it gets a little tough here, I think maybe we were destined to be here," he said. "There was a reason."

. . .

Lewis, 42, cut his transportation teeth at the Maryland Transit Administration, one of the nation's 20 largest public transit systems. The multimodal operation serves metropolitan Baltimore. He began his career in the system as a legislative liaison for the state transportation department, which runs the MTA.

"I liken it to juggling chainsaws," said Maryland Secretary of Transportation John D. Porcari, his former boss and mentor. "But John was very good at it."

But Lewis was impatient with the pace of the change he could help effect through the political process.

"I got an itch for operations," he said. "They don't move very quickly in policy."

He talked his way into the MTA.

Careful what you wish for.

In 2002, he had just become deputy director of bus operations when wheels - 25 of them - literally started coming off MTA buses. "Everybody above me got let go."

Lewis was catapulted into the big time. He had no magic wand, he said. What he did have was good luck.

Through a chance social conversation, Lewis learned that the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland might be able to figure out why the dual wheels - weighing a ton - were falling off MTA buses.

"I was fortunate," Lewis said. "They enabled us to find the solution."

In 2003, he moved up to director of the MTA's bus operations.

"In a year, I went from training to director of operations," Lewis said. "I fell in love with it."

Better yet, Porcari said, "John did a remarkable job of turning the operation around in a very short time."

. . .

When a corporate headhunter asked Lewis in January 2005 about running the GRTC bus system, the first thing Lewis did was come to Richmond - and ride the bus.

"I came down and spent a weekend here," he recalled. "I took several buses - just got a ticket and rode."

And, he chuckled, "got lost."

Seeing GRTC from a passenger's point of view is one of Lewis' strengths.

"John has the great gift of empathy . . . of being able to put himself in other people's shoes," Porcari said.

"What sealed it for me," Lewis said, "was that the vehicles were clean, well-maintained, and the operators were very friendly."

Lewis aims to keep them that way - and then some. So far, so good.

"You just see results daily on the street," said Jack Berry, president and CEO of the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau, which has a stake in the quality of the region's public transportation. "There's always something going on with GRTC."

Every weekday, 43,000 people depend on the system's buses to get to work, go to school, visit the doctor or shop at a store.

As roads become more congested, as the area's population ages, as highway funds dry up and gas prices go up, more central Virginians have joined GRTC's passenger load - about 10.3 million annually - to ride the bus.

"Transit is not the answer, but it certainly is one of the tools in the toolbox," said Lewis, who runs marathons for fun.

For its effectiveness, GRTC won the American Public Transportation Association's Outstanding Public Transportation System Achievement Award as the best transit agency of its size in North America in 2008.

Nominated by its employees, GRTC also was named one of the nation's 10 great transit systems to work for by Metro Magazine, a bus and rail industry publication.

"That speaks volumes about the quality person he is," Berry said of Lewis' leadership.

. . .

When he took the CEO job, Lewis found GRTC Transit System a well-managed small city bus operation, serving Richmond, Henrico County and a bit of Chesterfield County.

The agency, with a $46 million annual budget, also runs express buses to Petersburg and Fredericksburg.

Merrill "Buddy" Scherer, GRTC's special-projects manager, takes the long view of the company, which traces its roots to 1888. Scherer has worked for GRTC for nearly 35 years, and he is the third generation of his family with the Richmond bus company.

"John is the kind of person who says, 'It works, but it could be better,'" Scherer said.

In fact, Lewis found critical issues confronting the company:

• Riders frequently have to wait a long time for the next bus, except in peak times.

• Customers have to transfer on the street, resulting in crowds of people standing around downtown stops in all weather, blocking sidewalks and businesses.

"On-street transfer is inefficient, ineffective and our customers hate it," Lewis said. "We take up entirely too much real estate in the downtown area."

• GRTC needs to expand so that it goes where riders want to.

"Our most successful model is the commuter express," Lewis said. "We're going after the briefcase mob" in the suburbs.

At the same time, he said, "we can't forget about people who not only are your loyal customers but who have no other choice" for getting around.

. . .

An out-of-the-bus thinker, Lewis has a new vision for the metro Richmond transit operations, said Charles M. "Chip" Badger, director of the state's Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

"He wants to do a lot more than what GRTC is doing today," said Badger, whose agency is one of GRTC's major partners.

Lewis said his charge from the GRTC board "was to take and turn this into a regional transit system," reshaping it into a truly regional, state-of-the-art, multimodal system.

Lewis has set in motion a group of initiatives to achieve that goal:

• Hiring a consultant to analyze GRTC's operations, which became the basis for the agency's Mission 2015 plan.

• Building a $36 million environmentally friendly headquarters in South Richmond to move GRTC's workers and buses out of their century-old trolley barns near the Fan District by this fall.

• Planning for construction of a $70 million multimodal transit center at Main Street Station downtown. Lewis hopes to have the center built and running in three years.

• Establishing a bus rapid transit line from Rocketts Landing to Willow Lawn, using that as a precursor system to a light rail - streetcar - system along the area's main population axis.

Then there's the matter of finding enough money every year to operate and make these kinds of capital investments.

Though owned by Richmond and Chesterfield, GRTC has no dedicated funding source. The agency depends on passenger fares as well as local, state and federal grants.

As a result, "I spend a lot of time chasing money," said Lewis, a former college football player.

That has made him an advocate for a central Virginia transportation district to support public transit and other transportation projects in the region.

"He's such a cool combination of a strategic thinker as well as a person who seems to have a grasp of the details, too," said Karen Cortland, president of the Children's Museum of Richmond, on whose board Lewis sits.

"When he speaks," she said, "everybody . . . listens."

Contact Peter Bacqué at (804) 649-6813 or .