1. Leveraging Data to Support Sustainability
Thanks for having me, brief intro to who I am, etc.
I am here to talk about how the SFMTA leverages data to support our sustainability efforts. The agency has a sustainability team that has recently been fully staff with three members. We focus on mitigation and resilience, facilities, and fleets/fuels. We use data across all areas. And the confluence of this is the recently re-launched EMS tool. And I want to walk thru what the EMS tool is, how it was developed, how we maintain it, what some successes are, and then end with previewing a few dashboards that we find especially useful.
Stephan Schmidt
Sustainability Planner – SFMTA
San Francisco, California

2. EMS at a Glance Re-launched in 2015 by SFMTA Sustainability staff
Monthly data on resource consumption, waste and GHGs
Excel framework, visualized in Tableau
So just a quick overview of EMS…

3. EMS Development
In the early days of EMS before I joined the team, and before we began using tableau, this was an entirely excel-based tool. I just wanted to provide a few images of what this used to look like. Keep these in mind when I pull up tableau later and you’ll really see what a big change we’ve made.
We formerly has tabs for each facility, and we also were missing a lot of data…we had a rough skeletal structure, but were missing lots of pieces.

4. EMS Development
And this is an example of our waste “dashboard” from before the re-launch. It did the trick, and provided the info we needed, but was not as user friendly as one would like. And the process to add more data was tedious.

5. Gather raw data
Re-shape into Excel master spreadsheet
Connect to Tableau server
Create Tableau dashboards
Publish internally and externally

6. Successful Uses Grant applications
APTA Sustainability Commitment application
Strategic Plan and other required reporting
Progress towards goals and targets
Flagging issues early
Correcting erroneous accounts and bills

7. Dashboard Previews
Transtat
Facility overview

8. Next Steps Continue to automate re-shape process
Shorten delays in data collection
Expand internal relationships to improve access to data
Expand external, public-facing data reporting