Design This Day | Episode 4

Could Amtrak become the next AirBnB?

Anthony Paul joins Teague Futurist Devin Liddell to talk about America's rail network, the tension between a company's mission and its business model, what a train conductor of the future looks like and why you might start hearing about party trains in the coming years. Anthony Paul, director of Strategic Foresight at Amtrak, and has deep expertise in mobility and logistics, and throughout his career he has explored the intersection of humans, AI, and industrial automation. 

Scene: You reach into your backpack, searching for something to eat, hoping you remember to pack a snack for the trip. You've just settled into your room on the train. You are 10 minutes into your first big solo adventure across the country and you're already hungry. No luck. Your phone reminds you, the restaurant in the car next door is serving seared salmon this afternoon. That sounds good. You add a ginger ale to your order and hit submit. You make your way to the dining car. You sit at a table next to the expansive windows that sweep up and over the roof of the train. Red and orange foliage dominate the landscape rushing by. The leaves are so beautiful this time of year. You look up through the roof and notice drones flying away from the train, carrying parcels with them. The train is a moving launch vehicle for a courier service.

Just then, someone taps you on the shoulder, the passenger across the aisle asks if you could watch their laptop while they grab something from their room. Of course, you say. You will be neighbors on this train for the next three days after all. This is the future of rail. Welcome to Design This Day, a podcast about the future, the futures we want and the people working right now to make those futures real. This is the future of rail. 

Devin Liddell: Before we jump into our conversation, let's hear what Anthony finds so special about rail travel today.

Anthony Paul: US rail is intrinsically tied to sort of the formation story of what we call the United States of America. It was western expansion across our continent. It allowed us to move things and people and connect in ways that horses and carriages, they weren't really great at doing. And so it's tied to human connectedness, it's a social space and just the stories, like looking out the windows and having conversations with people and seeing the world around you together. And so, when I was first introduced to rail as a segment it was just something that I immediately onto, it was sort of the magical combination of all of the things that I did throughout my career path. In addition to being in a segment that I'm just emotionally connected to and invested in.

Devin Liddell: I've worked in rail quite a bit as well. But what is it about rail that garners that term magical.

Anthony Paul: I have thought about this a lot and what I came to understand is if you take all these different modes of transportation, so cars, there was a promise of individualism and speed and everything else, but it's not a social space. You're in a car with people you know, unless you're talking about an Uber driver. It's a couple of people. You're confined to your seat. Other than the vehicle itself moving, there's no mobility inside of the car.

Airplanes, you've got this large vehicle that is not unlike the form factor of a train. But aside from getting up to use the restroom, you're still not encouraged to move about the cabin. Aside from the rare instances where you see a mountain peak or a farm or if you're really lucky, the Northern Lights, the airplane doesn't really have that much to look out outside of the window. And generally you're not encouraged to bother the person next to you. Sometimes you get a nice little serendipitous conversation, but there's not really too much conversation that goes on.

A social ecosystem really requires a third place where people you don't know come together, they exchange ideas, they talk about the current state of the world and how the world could be better...

Rail takes the best of both of those and puts them together. So I have a physical space that is large. It's a melting pot of people. I can see somebody reading a book and it's not off-putting to say, oh, I just purchased that book. I just started. What do you think about it? And to have a conversation about that. You go to the dining car, you run into people. Some of the booths actually face each other, and so you're also connecting out of the window in the way a car would, but an airplane can't. So if you ride a popular corridor like between D.C. and New York, you might look out at the skyline and say, oh, my great uncle helped build that building over there. Or, I wonder what that amphitheater is over there and I've always wanted to go there. Oh, I've been there and I recommend this or I recommend that.

I've been on train rides where the conductor goes above and beyond and is actually telling Civil War history along the way and pointing out battlefields and historic buildings. That's not in their role description at all. And I would like to get to a point where we take advantage more of those types of things. I see rail as one of the last third places.

Devin Liddell: Third places is a term coined by American sociologist Ray Oldenburg. He came up with this framework in the 1980s. Home is your first place, work is your second place, but third places can be numerous. Third places are informal gathering spaces that foster community and connection, like parks, bookstores, and coffee shops. But third places deteriorated during the COVID-19 pandemic as remote work became more common and social distancing measures discouraged people from gathering. Anthony believes that trains could refill that gap.

Anthony Paul: A social ecosystem really requires a third place where people you don't know come together, they exchange ideas, they talk about the current state of the world and how the world could be better or how it could improve and just share and find commonality among people that you would otherwise walk by on the sidewalk and never exchange more than a head nod.

Devin Liddell: That was really interesting. You said it very well. It's actually one of the things, I mean, I'm a big fan, to be very clear of and of commercial aviation, of course, one of the tragedies of commercial aviation in my opinion is that there is no community on board an aircraft.

This is an exciting time for passenger rail travel in the US. In 2022, the American government announced $368 million in grants to improve rail infrastructure. Pair this with growing interest in sustainable modes of transportation, along with a surge in domestic travel and the push to innovate becomes clear.

So I'm curious on a couple of things. Where do you think conductors of the future will come from? And I know this from rail work we've done as well at Teague, that the conductor can play a rather outsized role in terms of the guest experience. And then I've also just to kind of push on it and at the risk of being maybe overly provocative, I'm curious if you think there's ever a future for an AI conductor.

Anthony Paul: I don't know that we ever would, and I wouldn't recommend us replacing the human crew. And this goes back to a number of studies even outside of our segment. Like city buses, the technology is there for them to be driverless. People didn't feel comfortable without the driver, and it's not because they're worried about the bus crashing. Having a driver and having somebody who looks in the mirror and tells somebody to sit down and stop bothering people, it creates a social environment. It's kind of like when you have a house party and you decide explicitly, I'm going to give people glass bottles and I'm not giving them red solo cups because I don't want stuff spilled all over my house. When you have a glass bottle in your hand, you have to have a certain amount of environmental awareness and it creates this sort of subliminal social construct for that environment.

Drivers and engineers and people who are on the train do the same thing. It creates somebody that I feel safe, I feel consoled by having this person. And it's not only about the transaction of I have somebody who I need something done and they can do it for me. So to the beginning of your question, we have been talking about this concept of a digital concierge. I think we'll increasingly see the training and that role shift more into hospitality. Like today when I go on a website for travel or really anything, there's a front loading of many issues that could be resolved by a chatbot. There are some things that are self-served. I just need to be able to be pointed in the right direction. And so this digital concierge will allow sort of a blurring of the lines between the roles and tasks that are accomplished by the crew and by the passengers and guests themselves.

The whole idea of that digital concierge is you come up to me in a station and you start to explain what issue you're having. Could I scan your ticket or the equivalent of that and immediately know, okay, this person, they have accessibility needs or this is their history of travel and I see your travel has been disrupted and that there are options available to me to give you the quality of experience you're looking for and it's much faster than me hearing your story and you being frustrated that I'm another person that you have to dictate the same thing too.

This existential tension between a company's core mission versus its business model is one many leadership teams grapple with. It is at the heart of every decision about innovation.

Devin Liddell: Interesting. I have a sense often that, and this happens particularly I think in mobility, that companies sometimes confuse their mission with their business. They think their mission is to operate aircraft or to operate autonomous vehicles or to operate buses or to operate shared scooters. When really their mission is to connect people to the people and places and things that matter most to them. Do you envision that Amtrak decades from now will look quite differently and, yes, operate trains, but operate other things as well?

Anthony Paul: So the funny part about that is another one of these sort of religious dichotomy is that is a war internally always, which I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. It's sort of a healthy tension. Train operations is not even one of the two ends of the spectrum. So one is, are we a construction company because we build and manufacture stations and tracks and we just happen to run trains over it, but really most of our capital spend is in building and maintaining stuff, including maintaining the assets themselves? Or are we hospitality and travel company?

And the pendulum can swing in either direction. We could over-invest in hospitality and travel, and we could become this amazing brand that is thought of as cutting edge. But then we could be shying away from looking at optimization opportunities and things that create a viable business. Or we could over invest in us being a construction company and then as a result, we never sort of get into the opportunities for new products and services that would allow us to continue to be viable and everything else.

Devin Liddell: This existential tension between a company's core mission versus its business model is one many leadership teams grapple with. It is at the heart of every decision about innovation. And Anthony's assertion that he doesn't even consider train operations as one of Amtrak's two identities reveals something important about the future of rail. Amtrak is not limiting itself, not even to the mode of transport most people associate it with.

Anthony Paul: I could see us naturally diversifying more as a broker of travel and trains being one of the assets that we have high level of control over. But it could be that I use my trains to launch little drones that drop burritos in people's yards. It could be that I have express parcel delivery that I'm using our passenger network within. And then as I said, Amtrak becoming a better partner to integrate with other carriers. In that way, you become more like Amazon's two-sided business model. Where, do I become a broker for other people to sell stuff through my booking platform? I become like Expedia, including having my own operations that I sell things through.

Devin Liddell: Historically, most people board a train for transportation purposes. Maybe it's part of your daily commute or you prefer to take the train for short haul business trips to avoid the traffic. But more and more people are starting to consider train travel as a source of leisure itself. Anthony says, future rail travel will find ways to serve both markets better.

Anthony Paul:
We have many different types of travelers, but to oversimplify it, we have a traveler who is trying to go from one place to another because they're doing it for commuting purposes, they're coming home from college, they're doing whatever. My personal dream is just to walk into a station, tell somebody where I want to go, and it all gets planned out and comes out of my Bitcoin or whatever. I don't even have to wonder if it's the best time to buy or the worst time to buy. No matter what I don't feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick. So that is one ecosystem.

The other ecosystem is this travel and it's authentic experiences, the annual family vacation traveler. Having more of it be treated as pop-up experiences where it's fleeting, it's 
limited time thing, it's a special event and us to be able to fulfill that just in a way that just blows people away. So not only do we have this long train that's planned in the way we have today, but could I have the equivalent of a party bus that is something on the tracks that is an express. Somebody's paid a premium, they and a group of people are going on a private tour around the country, or maybe I have an express that I want to run between cities and it has events and Mariah Carey is performing. The world is your oyster in terms of identifying what you would use different vehicle types for.

Devin Liddell: Is there a route, I have to ask, that is a natural forbearer to the party train of the next 10 years?

Anthony Paul: That is a good question. Let's see. Maybe New Orleans to Miami you could put together.

Devin Liddell: I think that sounds like it fits the bill.

Anthony Paul: I think you could do this, but I mean even our northern scenic routes, I wouldn't necessarily come up with a party train first. But could you have an old Western themed train where people are in costumes and they talk in funny accents and it has historical sightseeing and a murder mystery, and there's certainly ample opportunity to meet the many diverse desires of our population.

My personal dream is just to walk into a station, tell somebody where I want to go, and it all gets planned out...

Devin Liddell: That's fantastic. I love it. So those are the first two types of travelers. One, the commuter. Two, the person who travels for leisure. But Anthony says he sees the possibility for a third type of traveler, one who wants to travel for leisure and for work at the same time.

Anthony Paul: I've been at companies where I've worked in a WeWork space before where you have sort of a membership that gives you your office accolades, you have printer and coffee and things that you need. And then when I travel to other cities, I'm able to easily book a conference room and use it for my work and I'm working on the go. Well, even though all these people work from home, we started seeing a rise in, I've got cabin fever and people want to get out of the house. My employer has now said that I can work from home, but even though I don't want to go into the office, I don't want to be home all the time either.

So is there an opportunity for something like a WeWork model or a membership model where I pay a monthly fee, however we were to put it together, but I have unlimited travel, I work on the go and I'm able to use these capital assets that we have in all of our stations where we have empty office spaces? Could I set up the equivalent of an Amtrak WeWork where a business traveler or anybody is able to book a room, have a place to work, but I'm spending my day traveling and looking out the window and doing things while I'm working, that sort of scratches that business and leisure itch? It's a new addressable market that we haven't really thought through.

Devin Liddell: So a digital nomad, if you will.

Anthony Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Devin Liddell: There is a lot of potential for trains to do more than simply take people and goods from point A to point B in the future. And emerging technologies could play a big role in maintaining the railroad tracks that those trains travel on as well. There are 140,000 miles of railroad track in the US. Amtrak owns about 623 miles of that track, and those routes require regular upkeep. For this maintenance, Anthony's team came up with an unexpected solution.

There is a lot of potential for trains to do more than simply take people and goods from point A to point B in the future. And emerging technologies could play a big role in maintaining the railroad tracks that those trains travel on as well.

Anthony Paul: One of the problems that we have out in the deserts in particular is we get sand drifts over the tracks. And one of the solutions that they came up with that we've started employing is we have to plant grasses that are on the sides of the tracks. It doesn't always have to be a robot with a plow that comes through to take care of it. You can think about what is the actual cause of the problem and is there something that is addressable in a more sustainable way?

Devin Liddell: I love Anthony's statement here. Good design is not about throwing the latest technology at every pain point that comes across your desk. At the same time, AI and industrial automation will likely change many aspects of trains that we take for granted. I asked Anthony what train operation might look like 30 years from now in 2055.

Anthony Paul: I think there will be new ways that we think about what a train is. Instead of having it go to a rail yard to be un-built and rebuilt again, is it doing it dynamically while it's moving down the track? Things are coming together and coming apart and going in different directions and you sit in different cars based on where you want to go. Do we have things that fly off, not in a disaster way, but fly off to do a purpose? Do we have mechanical cockroaches that repair things while the train is moving? Just like R2-D2. I have a detected issue somewhere and rather than scheduling a stop for that train, I have a little drone that delivers a replacement part and I have a robotic cockroach that runs around on the outside of the train and swaps it out, and it's all taken care of.

Devin Liddell: I have to say I was not braced to hear the phrase robotic cockroach yet. I love it. All right. So a speed round: What's your take on the most over-hyped and under-hyped technologies?

Anthony Paul: So in the space that we operate within, I think GPS is over-hyped. And then under-hyped is this idea of quantum positioning and that is an object knowing where it is in something without reliance on any external network or external device. Essentially our sensors are becoming strong enough and sensitive enough that I can detect the magnetic pull of the earth and the direction it's pulling from. And that creates a unique signature where an electronic could know exactly where it is on the globe all on its own based on the magnetic pull of the planet.

And the reason I call those two out is because everyone wants to talk about autonomous robots and autonomous this and that. And I've gone to robotics trade shows and conferences where they've got all these robots running around the room. However, when you look at those spaces, it's like the leg of every shelf has a QR code on it. They've LiDAR mapped the whole space. It has a communication infrastructure. It has overly redundant sensors and things that have been created in this safe padded ball, bubble boy type of environment that this robot operates within.

But if you take that robot and put it in the woods in Wisconsin, it will do nothing. It is not autonomous. In fact, I don't even think it would try and spin its wheels. But I have not seen any robot aside from maybe Mars Rovers or some of these really edge cases that are actually autonomous. And so for me, it's whenever we propose GPS is the solution and it requires a satellite and it requires an internet connection, now those are still useful sources of information, but I definitely think this communication infrastructure for control and then also calling something autonomous, it just doesn't go together.

I think there will be new ways that we think about what a train is. Instead of having it go to a rail yard to be un-built and rebuilt again, is it doing it dynamically while it's moving down the track?

Devin Liddell: Got it. Yeah, I mean it gets into our potential over-reliance on GPS in the face of things like the Kessler syndrome where we actually might start having a lot of problems keeping satellites up in orbit because of the increasing amount of space debris knocking things down. What book or show, could be a TV show, could be a movie, has influenced how you think about your role as an innovator or as a futurist?

Anthony Paul: Oh gosh, too many. I was really moved by the series, The Expanse on Amazon Prime. And what I liked about that sci-fi series is it really shows this human nature of people organize into groups where they're against each other and then they use each other's weaknesses against one another. It's like self-serving communities. And that's a lot of the work that a foresight person has to do is identify with anything that we introduce who's helped and who is harmed, and how do I come up with a plan where I can get them to both see the better path forward, but then also work together and accomplish it.

Devin Liddell: It's probably impossible for two futurists to talk and for science fiction not to come up.

Anthony Paul: To be transparent, when I saw the question to begin with, none of that was actually the answer that I put down.

Devin Liddell: Good. Yeah. Exactly. What's an innovation in another industry that has inspired you to think differently about your work?

Anthony Paul: Really what Airbnb has been doing, especially recently. Where they've been putting together these sort of extravagant pop-up experiences that are just very tailored toward... it's like extreme personalization and it's tapping into, again, connecting us and bringing people together. Barbie was a great example of a film that really tapped into an important part of our culture, and so it was just an immediate attraction to be pulled into that world and into that universe in this sort of temporary way. And then for Airbnb to cleverly pull that into a physical environment with pop-ups and create this sort of really, again, authentic tangible experience where people touch things and they talk to one another and they relive experiences and they share stories. Like I saw the Polly Pocket one and people who have turned their houses into old-timey Blockbuster rental stores with a theater in it and you rent the house and you watch movies on VHS.

There's a lot to learn there, I think, because Amtrak and just public transit in general has become very vanilla. Apologies if you're like a really big vanilla fan. And maybe consistency is part of the draw, but on top of consistency it's also I want to build memories. And you build memories by having these unique things that you then later on share stories with people and your friends and you say, do you remember that time that we took that trip and this bizarre thing happened?

Devin Liddell: Well, it's a really, really interesting point. When you talk to families about their favorite memories, a lot of them are actually born of really imperfect moments, but it becomes this sort of family mythology. And so to your point about consistency, it's missing that texture that comes with imperfection.
All right, this has been really, really fascinating.

Anthony Paul: It was a pleasure.

Devin Liddell: That's it for today. Thank you for listening to Design This Day, a podcast by Teague. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss the next episode. We have some really exciting guests coming up. I can't wait to share more with you next time. And if you have a complex problem that needs solving, we'd love to hear from you. Visit us at teague.com or send us an email at hello@teague.com.