- One word to describe yourself: Dedicated
- Alma Mater: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical Engineering (equivalent to M.Sc. in Engineering)
- Favorite book: “Homo Faber” by Max Frisch
- Favorite TV show: “The Office”
- Favorite movie: “Forrest Gump”
- Favorite hobby(ies): Traveling, hiking and exploring the outdoors
- Fun fact about yourself: He was born in the same city as Albert Einstein, Ulm, Germany
- What is your favorite transit system (outside of the one you work for or have worked for!) and why?: The Seoul Metro System. They have Wi-fi service on their complete fleet and the best thing: heated seats.
Thomas Schaich’s first job working in public transportation was manufacturing buses, but while finishing his Master’s program in electrical engineering in Karlsruhe, Germany, where INIT is headquartered, he had the opportunity for an internship there. Upon graduation he was hired as a systems engineer and quickly demonstrated high aptitude for working with people as well as providing strong engineering and increasingly gained greater responsibilities.
He had the opportunity to work for INIT in the United States and was initially working in the automatic passenger counting department and was deploying several projects all over the U.S. He was then the project engineer for a couple of CAD/AVL projects, a traditional area for INIT in the United States and then the project lead for its first fare collection project in the U.S. It was a small transfer printer project in Portland, Oregon.
Currently Schaich is the project engineer for the company’s highest priority project in the United States, TriMet’s Hop Fastpass on TriMet, C-TRAN and Portland Streetcar. With a lot of core development on INIT’s part for the project, Schaich oversaw that and served as the interface between the customer, customer needs and the development group. The soft launch was in March and it was rolled out system-wide July 17 of this year.
A smooth, on-time Hop Fastpass launch is one of his proudest accomplishments, as there was so much new technology on their side. While a technology project, it has an impact on each and every department within an agency and involving the various departments, including IT, maintenance, finance, accounting, HR and marketing, and fulfilling all the needs of the various departments took was critical to the success.
In addition to this project, Schaich directs work in the Sacramento, California Connect Card project, and provides technical guidance to staff supporting other projects around the country.
“I will never forget the first time I traveled to Singapore and I took the train from Munich and was there in front of that ticket vending machine with roughly 900 buttons and 200 zones. I was using public transit everyday but I could not figure out how to buy something simple, which is a ticket to the airport. And it turns out I still didn’t buy the right thing. Then in Singapore, all I had to do was buy a card, load 10 bucks to it and tap on whenever I wanted to board the train and then tap off whenever I left the train. It just showed me how easy it can be. There is something that allows people to not worry if they paid the right fare and everyone can use public transit. It fascinated me how you could use technology to make it easy for everyone to use the system.”
“When it comes to the agencies and getting RFPs out there, think of the future. I see so many projects where you have all components interacting with proprietary interfaces and that makes it so hard to follow trends, to stay state-of-the-art, because you just can’t replace specific system elements. With new approaches like open architecture and open APIs, it enables agencies to replace whatever they need … without replacing the whole core components. Create an open system instead of something where you are stuck to one vendor and you’re not flexible.”
