A METGo! Driver Shares His Story

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Introduction

As part of our initiative to find new ways to capture and elevate mobility on-demand (MOD) drivers’ voices, we are pleased to share the perspective of Rufus “Shanghai” Nickles, a driver for Mountain Empire Older Citizens (MEOC)’s METGo!

Shanghai’s presentation was originally part of the January 2023 Mobility Innovation Collaborative Quarterly Meeting.

Shanghai’s Story

Transcript

Alvaro Villagran

Welcome everybody to our Mobility innovation collaborative all-grantee quarterly meeting for this quarter. My name is Alvaro Villagran. I am the Director of Federal Programs at the Shared-Use Mobility Center, and I will be moderating and emceeing today’s meeting. It is a pleasure to have you all here with us. So moving on into today’s meeting, here is the agenda. It is included in the calendar invite for those of you who cannot see the slides here. We’re going to start in a couple of minutes with our main session for today. It is “Insights on Mobility-on-Demand Services from a Driver’s Perspective.” This is a session that we tried to put together for the workshop we were planning last fall and we are very happy and excited that we are able to make it happen in a virtual setting today and very thankful for the participation of the three speakers that are going to be sharing their experience with us.

So as I’m going to be welcoming our three speakers for today, I want to make a very quick comment about the reason why we put together this session. As many of you know we usually talk about on-demand services and microtransit, we hear from vendors, we hear from planners, we hear from the agencies, we try to capture some of the riders’ feedback, we felt that the operator side of the story was missing here. So we made a deliberate effort to try to bring that voice in here from the everyday life of the people who are providing the service and driving and interacting with the passengers and on an in-person basis and dealing with the changes in technology and driving the vehicles. We think that this is going to be a very informative and productive conversation. So before moving forward I want to thank you once again Charlene, Shanghai, Shetera for making the time to join us today. We know that driver shortage is real, we know that your time is more valuable than ever, and having you making time to join us today for this conversation is definitely appreciated and valued so thank you very much. So, next today we have Shanghai Nickles, who is joining us from Mountain Empire Transit in Virginia.

“Shanghai” Nickles

Appreciate you folks taking time to see what we do in Southwest Virginia. We’re just a little bit different than most people because everybody knows everybody. And in the process of saying that, nobody knows anybody. If you need a ride, well that’s one thing, but if you’re asking your cousin to give you a ride, you’re probably not going to get it, you know what I mean? So we are METGo!, and I always say “well if you don’t know, just call METGo!, and we’ll be there to take you wherever you need to go.” But we appreciate the fact that this program was put in for our area just for the fact that we have so many people that don’t drive. And one of the reasons is age. One of the other reasons is we live between two federal prisons and one state prison, and we have a lot of people that, when they get out, if they’re going to be here, they have no driver’s license, and we are their source of them getting a job, getting a driver’s license, getting housing and all that type of stuff. And I always tell everybody, the client – I call them our clients – and our friends, they are the star of the program; we’re just a supporting cast, that’s all we are. And we try to make them feel like they’re a star. And thank goodness that we have people that we work with that’s in this METGo! division here at MEOC that feel the same way that I do. We have a great working knowledge of what the people need now and every day I think we improve on what what we do. And there’s every day something new, of course, but we have such a bunch of great people that have a heart for getting people from point A to point B. We’ve been able to put families together, we’ve been able to do things like putting food on some peoples’ tables.

I always like to tell the story that I met this little lady sitting outside of a homeless shelter, and started talking to her and I asked her, I said “well what’s your role? Where are you going to be in six months?” “I don’t know.” “Where are you going to go? Where are you going to stay?” “I don’t know” 

Well we got her in the homeless shelter, helped her get a job, and in the process of doing that, we brought two families together. And this lady came back to, I guess you say, pay It forward. When we needed stuff like hand towels that were sanitized during the Covid thing and all that, we ended up with twelve thousand spray things for our vans for other people. We also had a lot of other little things that she got for us. So we just made a kind of a circle out of that.

METGo! is one of these situations here in Southwest Virginia – we don’t have the biggest area to cover. We have four vans that do 14 miles to cover. And I’ve lived in Los Angeles, and I’ve lived here. It’s tougher to drive here than it is Los Angeles, it really is, because in this area, we fight coal trucks, log trucks, all kinds of tractors and trailers, and there’s a few people that don’t have driver’s licenses, so that’s one of the things that we have been able to bridge a lot of people in the right direction with what we do. We’re we’re very much “it’s all about the client” and “it’s all about the service” and, really, it’s all about everybody. I have lawyers that ride with me, I have some people that are homeless, that ride with me, I have some people that we hope that this time next year they’re still living on the face of the Earth, but you never know. But METGo! has gone out of our way to get them assistance in housing. METGo! has gone out of their way to get them medical care, and it makes you feel pretty darn good when you know that you’ve done something, at the end of the day, that’s making a difference in somebody’s life.

We were able, with METGo! to deliver 50 Thanksgiving dinners which had never happened before. We had people who said, when they got out of jail, we didn’t know what we was going to Do. We thought we’d have to steal a car, and we’ve kept people from going back, I guess you could say.

You know, when we talk about how we have interacted in the county, well it is a county, but we just do 14 miles. I just wonder what would happen if we did the entire county. I think that we don’t have to compete with Uber, we do have other companies that work in this area but they don’t have what we have. We have a heart and a love and desire to make these people feel special each and every day. We have a great support group with our transit people that work in dispatch. They help us out tremendously. We’re all kind of on the same page there. We have the MEOC bus line, which is a part of what we do. It’s a different division, but all those folks there are saying “we see what METGo! does.” 

Now why did I get picked for this job? I have no idea but they said they thought that I’d be pretty good at it, and I’ve really enjoyed it, I really have. We have a lot of fun. I asked a woman to marry me, that was 81 years old, in front of Walmart and she said “yes,” if she could talk her son into. But I am happily married, though. But since that day, every time I see her, she’s showing me her little pinky ring that she wears. I would have given her a ring, but I ran out of quarters in front of that claw machine, so that makes it pretty tough on a person.

We’re not in in a city, but we are in a county, but Wise Virginia and Norton Virginia are back to back, but they are as different as daylight and dark. Why? I don’t know. All the other three drivers that I drive with – Judy, Carlton, and CeCe – we’ve all discussed that, and we’ve had to massage these people because for years these these two communities was at each other’s throats, and they started with sports and politics. But now METGo! has become the soft spot. They get on our bus and they can talk about sports and politics if they want to and there’s no problem. We don’t talk about religion, but I think we’ve been a bridge between two communities. You’re talking the haves and the have-nots, but both of these towns have that, but we have been able to take the haves and have-nots, put them on one bus, and they’ve become one family. And I really think in the process of making them one family, it’s made us better also. It gives us a chance to see the problem of the person getting on the bus. 

One of the things that’s pretty tough is that if we go to pick up somebody, if it takes us more than two to three minutes to get somebody on the bus, or three or four people, then we lose time; it makes us late for the next stop. So we don’t do too many pickups of anybody in wheelchairs or anything like that. We’re capable of doing that, but we don’t do a whole lot of that. That’s left up to MEOC. We do tell people if they want to go grocery shopping, it’s what you can carry back out and sit in your lap. We do that. We help them get on the bus, although we aren’t supposed to, but we do that because some people can’t take that one step up into a bus or a van, and so we do that. I think we’re we’re we’re pretty helpful in what we do.

They they asked me the question “was it hard to learn how to to do the app?” Well this is the experience that we had. Judy had no experience of doing the app. Carlton had no experience, and Cece had no experience, and all I had was experience doing computers for radio stations. Was there a learning curve? There absolutely was. We made mistakes. Did we laugh about them? No, we took it serious. And at the end of the day, when we get off at five o’clock, we would sit down and talk about it for a half hour in our time, I guess you could say, so we could get better. And now we try to say we don’t leave anybody. We stop at seven o’clock, but if somebody comes out of Walmart and we know that they’re at point A and they need to be at point B, there’s nobody they can call – most of them have very few friends. We make sure they get home. We had one guy that went home and he got worried, but the woman at the local Food City grocery store left his house went all the way back to the grocery store an hour after he went home and there stood the lady. She didn’t know how to use the phone. She was 76, 77 years old. That’s what we do. We are so much into making sure people get to the doctor, making sure that people get to the dentist, making sure that the kids that are taking classes, that they get a chance to be at college on time. We’re right in the setting of a college, the University of Virginia’s College at Wise and it’s imperative that we pick them up on time, get them into their class on time. 

Are we always on time? Absolutely not. Are we there because we care? Yes we are. ‘ve always said “if you did this job for money, you’re in the wrong job.” Because, at the end of the day, I know I help somebody. I know if it wasn’t me, it was one of my fellow drivers that helped somebody. And you can’t help but fall in love with some of these people. They have no family, some of the elderly people, and you become a part of their family. And that’s the reason. When you become a part of somebody’s family – what’s that I was saying? You can pick your neighbors, but you can’t pick your kin. And you become their kin folk and they tell you whether they’ve got a bad knee, or had a baby or whatever, you become a part of their family. So I figure, when I drive down the road and they see me in a METGo! van, they say “there goes Shanghai and he’s driving one of OUR vans!” And that has happened many times.

And of course, we go a little bit further than that. I dressed up as Santa Claus and drove a couple of days, which was a lot of fun. And also Halloween. I will tell you this – at no time was my vision impaired, [laughs] I want that to go on record, although my boss Mitch might say otherwise.

But I see how Charlene – you talking and showing your slides and stuff. I’m not saying I wish I lived in that kind of area. We have beautiful areas, but we don’t have the cleanliness that you have, because we have coal trucks, we have logging trucks, and you can clean your vehicle, but you know at nine o’clock which is two hours later, your vehicle is going to be a little bit muddy inside and out. But I really appreciate the fact that this has came to our region, because we had a lot of people – 1100 about 1100 people a week – it’s what we do with four vans. So there’s a big need where I live, and always we put the client first. And then they know our safety rules, they know what they can do and can’t do on the bus or the van. They know where they got to stand, they know that we don’t go looking for them.

I had a lady that got on the van one day and she said “I couldn’t hardly walk out here.” And I said “well what’s the matter?” She says “I’m about two weeks from having a baby.” and I thought “well here we go, I’m going to be a METGo! guy and I’m going to deliver a baby.” But you talk about getting her to the hospital – I didn’t break the law but I did break the speed limit a little bit, you know what I mean. I stayed on my side of the road. 

But we have so many success stories that it is hard for people to understand until you ride with us. We have a lot of success stories. Anybody have any questions for me?

Alvaro Villagran

Thanks Shanghai. We’re gonna hold a little bit on questions until the end. Thank you for that very lively firsthand experience. This is great to hear how it works for you on every day life. I want to thank everybody again for staying with us and hopefully this is very helpful for you all. stay safe, everybody and have a good rest of the day.

Conclusion

Bringing MOD drivers’ experiences to the forefront of MOD conversations adds a valuable perspective that can make for better systems for passengers, operations staff, planners, dispatchers, and drivers alike. Thank you to Rufus “Shanghai” Nickles and MEOC for helping share this story.

Our effort to capture drivers’ stories is ongoing, and could use your help! If you are a transit agency or operator of mobility on demand services and would like to participate in this project, contact us at mic@sharedusemobilitycenter.org for instructions and interview questions.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us at mic@sharedusemobilitycenter.org.