TLPA to Launch Podcast

(ROCKVILLE, Md.)—The 100-year old Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association (TLPA) will launch its new podcast series this month, offering a new and exciting way for providers of local passenger transportation for-hire to stay ahead of transportation news.

Featuring interviews with transportation leaders and issue experts, the podcast, "TLPA Fleet Forward," will bring listeners information and insight on a range of topics, from current events in the industry to innovations shaping the future of for-hire fleets.

"This is just like having our own radio show and is part of our mission to always find new and engaging ways to keep our industry informed," said Mike Pinckard, president of the TLPA. "The great thing about a podcast is that you can listen to it on your own time: in the car, at home, sitting at your desk at work, or even while out for a walk. It's a great way to bring fresh content to life and can really help our industry learn about and meet the challenges of the future."

Podcasts have grown tremendously popular over the past decade, with more than a half a million podcasts on Apple Podcasts alone. Almost half of the US population has listened to a podcast, and some 80 percent of audiences listen to most or all of what they download.

The "TLPA Fleet Forward" podcast will be free to download, and anyone—members and nonmembers alike—will be able to access all of the episodes. Simply go to Apple Podcasts, iTunes or Google Play to download the podcast in just a few seconds to your phone, tablet or computer, and then listen whenever its convenient.

The first episode of "TLPA Fleet Forward" will be available at the end of March. It will feature interviews with TLPA President Mike Pinckard and Susan Shaheen of the University of California, Berkeley's Transportation Sustainability Research Center, as well as news about the industry and the association. New podcasts will be available every other month. In the inaugural episode, Pinckard discusses how his company has rebranded and changed its business model.

"We felt that it was imperative that we change our business model away from a traditional fixed fleet type of model, hard asset type of model, to more of what we considered a virtual or asset light model and put ourselves in a position to compete with the TNCs," he says.

"So, in 2015, right after the state of Arizona had really finalized its regulatory framework, we restructured the company. Total Transit was turned into a holding company, and we created two separate and distinct operating companies:

• One which is now called 'total ride,'
  
  
• the other which is called Veyo.
  

Veyo was effectively a TNC for the Medicaid brokerage space. We took our technology platform that we had developed internally and combined that with our previous transportation management book of business and we created the first TNC in the NEMT brokerage space.

Then we left our other legacy businesses in the other Total Transit Enterprises entity. The intent there was to transition our previous private transportation business, our cab business and our NEMT business, into a true TNC. As a result of that, we renamed Total Transit Enterprises totalride, and totalride operates on a backbone of a TNC platform."

In the same episode, transportation expert Susan Shaheen discusses the changes coming to the industry in the next 10 to 20 years.

"Transportation is going to change a lot, and we've already had some indications of that," Shaheen says. "A lot of that change has been foreshadowed by the smartphone, and since about 2010, in transportation.

What we've seen is a lot of innovation that has been driven by that connectivity and IT capability. That comes to us in form of apps like Uber or Lyft, for example, that a lot of people are familiar with. It also comes in the way of e-hail taxi apps.

"But, we also see them used for sensing and to collect data about people's travel patterns," she continues. "So it's not just a tool that we use to make it easier to get around. It's also a tool we can use to better understand how people move around and potentially how to ultimately affect that behavior and to better serve people.

That's just one element of this seismic shift. We also see a lot of technological development in the area of automation and artificial intelligence or machine learning."

Interested? Watch for and download the TLPA Fleet Forward podcast in the iTunes and Google Play libraries.

About TLPA:
Established in 1917, the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association (TLPA) is a non-profit trade association of and for the private passenger transportation industry. Its extensive membership spans the globe to include nearly 1,000 taxicab companies, executive sedan and limousine services, airport shuttle fleets, non-emergency medical transportation companies, paratransit services, and industry vendors. For more information, please visit www.tlpa.org