Some of the biggest challenges in Rail and Transit were on full display during this year’s annual American Public Transportation Association Rail conference (APTA 2025) in San Francisco.
The most common themes centered around infrastructure maintenance and upgrades issues with both aging rail infrastructure requirements and the need for substantial investment for maintenance and upgrades. Circling around the need for essential repairs is what Deb Wathen, President of the Wathen Group, calls the “issues that lead to serious safety concerns.”
The Wathen Group provides a range of services in transportation, public transit, rail industries and offers decades of experience mitigating safety-related challenges as part of their mission to help clients in this space with strategic issues management, strategic planning, cultural change, customer service initiatives, improvements, and operations reviews.
Wathen sees change management as an effective component to a multi-tiered strategy toward improving safety in the transit and transportation industry – and a critical component to a larger and more holistic asset and resource management strategy that includes technology integration and embracing innovation through more effective partnerships. The innovation integration at APTA is an undercurrent to the theme of infrastructure maintenance and upgrades specifically as it relates to achieving asset management excellence with more robust, digital integration.
One glaring observation at the event was how the push for more effective asset management – with a focus on digital integration – is leaving some transit and transportation leaders searching for the best approach and practices for effectively embarking on “innovation journeys,” leading to the following questions heard at the event:
- What can I achieve with digitally integrated asset management practices?
- What solutions make up a modern and robust asset management practice?
- Where do I start on this journey and what are the main challenges?
What can I achieve with digitally integrated asset management practices?
“Digital integration to asset management enables collaboration to happen,” remarked Arup Digital Delivery Leader, Jon Berkoe, P.E. on a panel to a full room on the final day of APTA 2025. Berkoe’s sentiments echoed the previous speaker and Director, Americas Transportation Industry Lead at Bentley Systems Asset Performance Services, Greg Hoile. Bentley Systems help infrastructure managers design, build, and operate better and more resilient infrastructure capabilities for transportation, water and energy companies.
Both speakers centered their discussion on the digital integration ability to:
- Drive predictive maintenance, AI-driven analytics, and real-time passenger information systems.
- Empower transportation leaders with the ability to not only improve operational efficiency but also enhance safety and passenger experience.
“The question is are you going to use the data or waste the data?” mentioned Berkoe to a silent crowd during his presentation. Berkoe continued to illustrate how using the data effectively not only led to collaboration, but more importantly better decision-making capabilities.
The Role of Digital Twin and AI in Transit and Transportation
Before Berkoe took the stage, Hoile discussed how the role of digital twins is to create “repository of intended vs real services in a visualized form to create a view of what transportation and transit leaders are trying to achieve.”
Leveraging an airport case study, Hoile illustrated how a digital twin with AI integration helps companies in the asset industry:
- Integrate advanced capabilities like real-time tracking, automated systems, and predictive operations, people flow and maintenance.
- Address capacity and congestion which for airports which are seeing a growing demand for services reduces capacity constraints by simulating the operational nuances that add delays, reduce services, and increase operational costs.
The speakers also addressed how digital twins scale new features and innovations more effectively in any asset-intensive environment.
Where do I start on this journey and what are the main challenges?
All panelists, and several attendees asking questions, addressed the toughest challenge – data. Getting the data, addressing the silos, moving the data, driving the context to turn the data into useful insights; all of these are some of the key issues discussed during the event.
“An effective data strategy is important,” remarked Hoile, “but sometimes before someone creates a database, the important thing is the ask ‘why?’ without answering this question you may be on a path to lose time and money.”
The data challenges underpin the importance that effective collaboration and partnership plays in helping public agencies, private companies, and community organizations navigate pitfalls on the path to performance.
“You have to work with the right people to advance rail and transit projects and address common challenges,” address Wathen. This approach is the best most effective step an agency can often take in determining the best path forward. And partnerships help highlight real-world examples where effective innovation projects improved service delivery.
