- One word to describe yourself: Transformational
- Alma Mater: Virginia Tech
- Favorite book: "The Carrot Principle" by Chester Elton and Adrian Gostick
- Favorite TV show: "Modern Family"
- Favorite movie: "Crash"
- Favorite hobby(ies): Anything to do with being on the water and inspiring minds and creating healthy lifestyles through teaching Boot Camp
- Fun fact about yourself: He is a dog walker volunteer at the Oregon Humane Society.
- What is your favorite transit system (outside of the one you work for or have worked for!) and why?: Chicago Transit Authority. The L Train is a unique 24/7 elevated rail system that quickly and conveniently transports passengers through Chicago’s dense city core.
TriMet in Portland, Oregon, contracts with First Transit to operate its LIFT Central Dispatch Call Center, as well as transportation for their paratransit customers. Throughout a given day, LIFT Central Dispatch Call Center employees manage operator schedules, provide support, answer questions, ensure that passengers are safety transported to school, work and leisure activities, and at times, attend to medical emergencies and unforeseen incidents. LIFT Central Dispatch maneuvers the buses through unpredictable traffic and potential inclement weather to deliver customers to their destinations safely. Managing a transit operation is a complex job and prior experience within the industry is highly recommended. When the Portland, Oregon, TriMet LIFT central dispatch general manager left the company in August 2016, Ricardo Boulware, a 27-year-old operations manager in Washington, D.C., had no idea what he was getting himself into when he accepted the promotion to relocate.
Boulware, who dedicated his professional career to public transit management 9 years ago when he started out as a bus operator in college at Virginia Tech, had a full agenda ahead. Not only did he have to fill several vacant managerial positions, he had to manage the restructuring and transition of the call center operation from First Transit’s western region, into the central region. That required educating the new management about the new central region, and yet still somehow find time to run the operation from top to bottom.
Today Boulware is the general manager of TriMet LIFT’s Central Dispatch Center in Portland, Oregon — making him personally responsible for the provision of more than 4,000 ADA passenger trips per year in a 24/7 operation that keeps people moving. He works closely with his colleagues in bus operations and with TriMet to ensure that the LIFT Central Dispatch Call Center provides the best possible service to TriMet passengers. Boulware began his career in the transit industry in 2008 as a bus operator for Blacksburg Transit. His excellence earned him supervisory roles very quickly and he was eventually responsible for 130 employees and a 60 vehicle fleet.
Boulware is a turnaround specialist. He is a real person who is committed to the future of the organization. He took on a role that expanded his knowledge and skill set that ultimately lead him to be successful in retaining First Transit’s partnership with TriMet. Outside of his full time job as general manager for First Transit, Boulware is an active member of the American Public Transportation Association. He is an APTA Foundation Scholar and Renewal Award winner. He was a guest speaker for the APTA Youth Summit in 2015, delivering a presentation on Future Careers in Public Transportation. It was a timely conference, because Ricardo was a part of writing curriculum for the innovative APTA Early Career Program. Ricardo also served on the steering committee for the 2016 APTA Public Transportation and Universities Conference in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
"I started driving buses when I was a student in college at Virginia Tech. Blacksburg Transit was locally owned by the town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech was their largest shareholder and just out of the blue I saw an advertisement for student operators and I applied for the position. I actually applied before I was eligible for the job, but then everything was made official on my 19th birthday, because that was the minimum age at the time to drive. That just opened so many doors and gave me a different career path opportunity then I had initially went to school for — I had gone to become a high school Spanish teacher. Once I got involved in driving buses, I was also a business major and human resources and I learned that HR was a function of transit operations throughout anywhere from the training process, to developing employees, to offering advancement opportunities and so that is where my passion really relied in transit."
"I quickly realized that transit is not just operators and mechanics. We've got finance, legal, commercial real estate folks, operations and maintenance. It's this big industry that is really tight-knit and a lot of people know each other. I also like the fact that there is a lot of collaboration, best practices and making sure that we have learning opportunities as we go in the communities that we live in and build transportation options. So its that we ultimately want everyone to succeed and making sure we save those best practices."
"When we receive a customer complaint, obviously we want to make sure that we are doing everything possible to get the customer picked up on time and delivered on time ... Ultimately customers are utilizing our service because they depend on us and we have the obligation to deliver on our service. So if for some reason we are sub-par to that, I want to make sure that we are doing everything to continuously improve so that the next experience for the next customer is better then the one that we did not preform."
