The Spokane Transit Authority is in the process of searching for a new Chief Executive, but in the meantime, two of its top officers are stepping in as its interim leaders: Brandon Rapez-Betty and Karl Otterstrom.
Otterstrom sat down with SPR's Owen Henderson for a conversation about the agency’s future and the priorities laid out in its recently released 10-year plan.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

OWEN HENDERSON: Joining me now is Karl Otterstrom, the Chief Planning and Development Officer at Spokane Transit and one of STA's two interim CEOs. Thanks for being here.
KARL OTTERSTROM: Thanks for having me.
OH: You and Brandon Rapez-Betty are serving as co-CEOs. How has that been working so far? What are each of you bringing to the table in this partnership?
KO: So Brandon and I know each other. We've worked together at STA for over 10 years and we've known each other for over 15 years.
Brandon is our Chief Operations Officer and he continues that role on top of the interim co-CEO. And so he brings a lot of the background and knowledge of the operations divisions and how to bring all those things to bear. The daily service that we deliver, transit is really as good as every single day they get out there and provide that service.
I have a lot of the background with the planning and development. I also am overseeing our financials division through our interim CFO as well as our Chief Information Officer which deals obviously with IT and the security of our records and systems.
OH: What inspired you to want to work for a transit authority agency in the first place? What brought you into this space?
So for me, transit has been really a lifelong interest. When I was eight years old, our family went to Vancouver, British Columbia to see the World's Fair. And that was the same year that Vancouver, BC launched the SkyTrain which is their driverless train that's elevated and running throughout the city. It was very fascinating and it made me interested in transit.
It also drew me into cities, the benefit of cities, the walkability of cities. And so that was an interest going into my studies at Eastern Washington University. And in those years of growing up, I desired to work at STA someday, and I followed the news of STA.
I remember the morning in July of 1995 when the STA Plaza opened up and rerouted service through downtown. I actually interned with STA in 2002 just as I was finishing up my EW degree in urban and regional planning.
OH: STA recently released its 10-year plan. Some of the priorities I saw listed were elevating customer experience, working with community partners to enhance the quality of life for the region and strengthening the capacity to anticipate and respond to the demands of the region. Why don't we break those down a little bit? What does that mean in practice?
KO: Sure, so customer experience, ultimately the customers want mobility. They want to get from point A to point B. And how we do that is not just having a bus there, but it's having good information [on] how to ride the bus. It's having frequent service. It's having sheltered stops. It's having real-time information. It's having mobile apps and ways to pay your fare more easily.
So all those things are the customer experience and that begins as you're contemplating riding the bus till the time you get off the bus and get to your destination. So things like getting better data into the mobile apps, putting out more shelters — those things all tie to the customer experience.
And ultimately our biggest project in that is Division Street BRT. The partnerships — it is recognizing every rider, every organization, every business we work with, or they have customers, they have clients who ride the bus, they are all our partners, as well as the jurisdictions we work with, the nonprofits, et cetera.
And so strengthening partnerships is recognizing that everyone has a voice and some input in this and helping everyone recognize that they need to be vested into transit success because our success ultimately is tied to the success of downtown.
It's tied to the success of the region. So this includes things like partnering on transit-oriented development. It also means how do we engage our riders in getting more information more responsively on their experiences so we have that feedback and we can address it more quickly.
And how do we track our engagement with nonprofits, with government leaders, and businesses so we have a really comprehensive picture of their interest, their input, and how we move forward. The last one, capacity, is really looking at our facilities and our employees. And transit does not exist without a dedicated workforce who really know their stuff.
And we're so proud of our workforce here at STA. And how do we develop them further to have them every day provide that reliable, consistent service in a way that draws people into the experience. It's so exciting to see riders give us feedback about their direct experience with our employees that brightens their day and makes them want to be a better person.
It also means providing the capacity in our facilities, both to operate and maintain buses, but also to look to the future of transit, whether that's zero emission vehicles, whether that's other types of modalities into the future. All of those play a part in us connecting our current system to the future in our investments that we plan from here on out.
OH: So you brought up BRT. Why don't you explain to our listeners what that stands for and what STA is hoping to do in the future?
KO: Division Street's Bus Rapid Transit would be our second Bus Rapid Transit line, or BRT, extending from downtown Spokane up to the meat area on North Division Street. Many may be familiar with the City Line, which is an east-west line running from Browne’s Edition out to Spokane Community College through downtown, the University District, and Gonzaga. That is also a Bus Rapid Transit line.
What's distinct on Division Street — City Line was interesting because we amalgamated different routes together to make a new, coherent service with very frequent service. Division is an existing route, Route 25. It's one of our busiest routes in the system. Nearly a million rides a year are provided on that route.
This is upgrading that route to provide [a] platform for more frequent service, more reliable service, and faster. How do we make it faster in a corridor like that? It is providing something called business access and transit lanes.
So as the North Spokane Corridor is completed and the connection is made to I-90, there will be a shift of traffic, especially long distance or through traffic on that corridor. That shift provides some capacity, especially outside of peak, even peak period, to dedicate the lanes on the outside for business access so everyone can still get into driveways, they can get to side streets, but the through-access on those outside lanes are for transit only.
And so what that means, if you're at Division and Wellesley and in the right-hand lane, you are only there because you're turning right or because you're in a bus. And that reduces the conflicts the bus has with other motorists and other vehicles in terms of the traffic congestion.
It also actually reduces the friction in the road because fewer people are trying to swing back and forth, getting around cars that are turning right in and out of businesses and can help the overall traffic flow. That investment overall is oriented toward improving the customer experience and that customer experience is about reducing how much time people have to take to use transit and how safe it is, making it safer to get on and off transit.
It also means we're investing in a way that establishes a commitment to the land use changes, supporting more housing along that corridor as well.
Division Street BRT is part of our vision of what we call high-performance transit. And high-performance transit is a network of corridors with frequent, easy-to-use service that is elevated above our regular routes simply by the fact that it's an important part of the system.
And we've been investing in this over a decade and making corridors work together to provide that frequent service. I'm excited that Division will be part of that network. We'll also invest in Wellesley High-Performance Transit connecting east-west to North Spokane. And we continue to have other investments as part of finishing up our current plans along the I-90 corridor.
We're also bringing double-decker buses next September to Cheney and the West Plains. So all of those things work together, are very exciting. I'm also excited about our zero-emission electric transition moving vehicles towards electric and other zero-emission technology in a way that's sustainable, both financially and practical for the operation of the system.
We have one of the largest fleets of zero-emission buses in the state at this point and are regarded as a leader among our peers and have a lot of positive experience, a lot of learning experiences with those vehicles as well.
But overall, looking to the future to improve our overall footprint and help attract more people to the system.
OH: Karl Otterstrom is the Chief Planning and Development Officer at Spokane Transit as well as one of its interim CEOs. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with me.
KO: It's been a pleasure, thank you.