Last month, Cubic Transportation Systems named Collins vice president and general manager of its transportation consultancy service, Urban Insights. Cubic is a large corporation, but Cubic Transportation Systems specializes in revenue collection management systems — like Chicago’s new Ventra system — for transit agencies and authorities.

Urban Insights was created to provide transportation consulting services and technology, that according to its website, “merge its parent company’s domain expertise and technology heritage to empower transportation organizations to gather data, comprehend insights and act on them.” It strategically injects data analysis into cities one transportation system at a time to help increase cost-efficiency and user-friendliness.

“What Urban Insights is interested in doing,” says Collins, “is making operational decisions. The interesting insights come from ways data is manipulated and applied that you didn’t think to ask.” He gives this hypothetical: A transit authority asks why red buses are often late and blue buses on time. “You already know a lot about schedules and the buses,” he explains. “You’re asking me to go find something in the data that you already reasonably suspect is there. But maybe the red buses are more expensive to keep clean than the blue buses, and you didn’t ask me about that, but that’s an important operational decision.”