Episode 541: Via CEO Daniel Ramot on Reimagining Public Transit Beyond Fixed Routes

**SPEAKER_2** (0:12)
Welcome into another episode of the Inside the ICE House podcast. Today's guest is Daniel Ramot. He is the co-founder and CEO of VIA. Daniel, thanks so much for joining us inside the ICE House. Happy to have you here.

**Daniel Ramot** (0:24)
Thanks. Real pleasure to be here.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:26)
So take us back to the very beginning before VIA existed. What did you see in transportation systems that felt, I guess, fundamentally broken or inefficient? And what were the sort of key gaps in the market that you wanted to address with your team and create this company?

**Daniel Ramot** (0:42)
Yeah, I think the key thing that we saw, my co-founder, Orin, Orin Chaval and I, when we started VIA, was a gap in the fundamental concept of how public transit works. So if you think about public transit, historically, transit, it really depends on buses and trains. These are large vehicles that run on fixed routes. In the case of rail, you have to even build it out.
And they really depend, for their success, they really depend on very large numbers of users, all traveling in the same direction, basically at the same time. That works great, you know, we're here in New York City.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:11)
I take NJ Transit every single day.

**Daniel Ramot** (1:13)
I take the subway pretty much everywhere I go. You know, the subway is amazing. Some of the buses in Manhattan, other places in New York are amazing, very busy.
If you're going down Fifth Avenue, this is a great solution.
Most parts of the United States in particular, and other parts of the world, look very different from a major city. There's not as much density. We've chosen to build in a very spread out way. So if you try to run a bus through those neighborhoods, you end up with what we have in a lot of parts of the United States today, which are very inefficient buses. Nobody's writing them. And then as a result, you can't afford to write them very frequently. So you run them even less frequently, once an hour perhaps, and then even fewer people want to run them. So we had this thought that, well, could we use smaller vehicles, shuttles, think of them vans, minivans, and run them in a way that their routes are constantly changing. So totally dynamic routes, have people summon them on their phones. And in that sense, be able to create a transit system that's much more dynamic, data-driven, technology-enabled, and add to the bus and the train systems that were there. The question was, well, could you really make that work as a mass transit system? Or would it look like a cab? And after we did a lot of work, we came to the conclusion it could really work as a mass transit system.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:20)
Yeah, and clearly has, I mean, it has had great success, obviously, enough to join the ranks not long ago of our great listed companies here at the New York Stock Exchange. And when you dug deeper into those challenges and those gaps in the marketplace that you were trying to solve, whether it was the fixed routes or underutilized capacity or lack of flexibility, right? How did you begin to conceptualize a model that could better match supply and demand in real time?

**Daniel Ramot** (2:44)
So the first thing we needed was data. And there wasn't a lot of data out there in the beginning to say, OK, how do we design these algorithms? How do we make decisions when someone opens up their app and says, I want to go from here to there? How do we figure out which vehicle to match them with, which route that vehicle should follow and so forth? And so we realized that a few years before we started, New York City had installed these credit card readers in taxi cabs, in yellow cabs. In order to make sure that people weren't cheating on the fare, they tracked the GPS location, that the fare was done right, so if they pick up in the drop-off, so that they can compare to the fare. And so they collected, in the time, there were about half a million yellow taxi trips in New York every day.
So over years, they collected many, many millions of, tens of millions of trips where they had the data of the pick up and the drop-off. And so we submitted a Freedom of Information Act to the city and asked for that data.
And, you know, I believe that 30 days to respond to our request. And on day 30, we got a bunch of DVDs.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:37)
They waited all the way up to the wire.