 I'm on. Are we good? We're going to go ahead and get the meeting started. Commissioner Rotkin. Commissioner Chase. Commissioner Bator. Commissioner McPherson. Commissioner Leopold. Commissioner Alternate Moharn. Commissioner Coonerty. Commissioner Caput. Commissioner Kaufman-Gomez. Commissioner Johnson. Commissioner Brown. Commissioner Bertrand. Here. And Commissioner Low. Thank you and for the record this is the Santa Cruz Regional Transportation Commission our transportation policy workshop for Thursday August 16th and today we're going to start off with oral communications and we've got a presentation today so we're just going to limit the presentation to two minutes so you can line up and come and talk about things that are not on our agenda and it's okay to line up and save a little time. Thank you. Go ahead. Good morning commissioners and members of the public. My name is Jack Nelson and I attended your transportation policy workshop I believe it was in June this year and spoke about something that I'd like to elaborate on because I was referring to the April issue of Scientific American Magazine in which a plain English summary of recent studies on the Arctic was published and as I was holding up this this magazine Commissioner Rotkin was kindly was gesticulating at me and he was trying to signal me that I was holding the magazine upside down but I wasn't. The headline story here is Arctic meltdown and the publishers chose to put that upside down because of it's kind of a way of communicating this can turn our world upside down. The headline inside along with a picture of melting ice reads the Arctic climate is shattering record after record altering weather worldwide. Well that's because what happens in the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic and climate scientists are examining how a warming Arctic reduces the constraints on the polar jet stream and the jet stream in turn misbehaves and we get things like the ridiculously resilient ridge that gives California a drought and drought plus heat makes hot drought makes uncontrollable wildfires. So that's a really simple line of connection that you know for me it doesn't make me depressed it just makes me grieve that we as humans haven't acted sooner on this question and we do have a shared responsibility and as I'm here to point out again I believe your Commission has special responsibilities because you are the designers of or at least the approvers of what we do with transportation and I have to shut up. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Nelson. Good morning commissioners Gail McNulty Santa Cruz County Greenway. I just would like to take this opportunity to first of all reiterate and maybe update all of you on Greenway's current priorities and then speak a little bit to the wonderful series that we have going on here. So Greenway supports continuing freight rail service in Watsonville we want to be clear on that however we do not want commuting options along the corridor to be lost as a result. We want to preserve future transit options along the corridor while exploring how current transit innovations like the small electric minibuses currently being tested around the Bay Area might coexist with bicycles and e-bikes on the corridor. Bike commuters, children, tourists all need this safe new route and we should be exploring how to make it as effective as possible for as many people as possible. The popularity of the new jump bikes and Santa Cruz offer some idea of just how popular this new safe route will be. It's very nice that we are back here in Watsonville for the third RTC meeting in a row and it's again wonderful to see the speaker series continuing. I have a few takeaways that we have found from the speakers so far. For instance, Jared Walker of course talked about transportation options how they equal freedom and opportunity. Farhad Mansaran pointed out that smart is comfortable however it does not seem to be a very equitable solution since it's a small small part of their population that's benefiting from it and it has not helped at all with Highway 1 gridlock. Kirk Triplett in the short time he was allotted at the last meeting pointed out that if we remove the rails north of Watsonville as Kirkland did our community could benefit from a trail while our transit conversation continues. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good morning commissioners and I'm looking for my time limit is it? Okay and thank you for those who are here from Caltrans. My comments are directed both to Caltrans and to local officials. I follow personal rapid transit very closely and in particular suspended PRT where you would have podcars suspended from a monorail guideway. You may think this technology is pie in the sky but it's getting a little more real with each passing month. There's at least five companies working on different versions of suspended monorail PRT. One is Skytran based in Mountain View and also in Israel. They're designing a maglev system that could go up to 200 miles an hour. This means it could replace California high-speed rail providing better service to more locations at a small fraction of the cost of high-speed rail. Another is Fu-tran, F-u-t-r-a-n. Our own local Ron Swenson is deeply involved traveling back and forth to South Africa building their prototype system. They expect to have a prototype that people can actually ride within a year from today and they expect to provide actual passenger service by 2020. If you know the local Swenson family they're very successful at building things. It's a very well-designed system and I expect they will be successful. Ron Swenson is an excellent speaker I think for the innovators and transportation series should be considered. So why do I support the personal rapid transit technology? It comes down to four C's and an S. Carbon-free, capacity, convenience, cost and safety. Carbon-free because the system can include solar panels to power itself, capacity, maybe not passengers per vehicle but a lot more passengers per hour than a train track or a bus lane, convenience instead of people waiting for the bus, we would have the pod cars waiting for the people, cost cheaper to build than high-speed rail and operating costs much cheaper than any conventional bus or train and safety. These systems are safe and cannot interact with people on the ground. So I'm out of time. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Good morning commissioners. Michael St. Campaign for Sustainable Transportation. I'd like to go back to August 2nd RTC meeting where we had Agenda Item 18 which was entitled California Hits its Climate Goal Early but its largest source of pollution keeps rising and if we all don't know what that is, that's transportation. Basically the reason we hit our goal was electricity's generation has plummeted due to Monterey big community power, renewables, less coal, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is transportation pollution is rising from 2013 to 2016. Car and truck pollution has risen 8 million tons. The reason for this, which some of this is pretty surprising, low gas prices. I'm thinking we as a society have grown accustomed to $4 a gallon gas, growing an economy, which is a good thing. Consumers preference for roomier, less efficient vehicles. That is a change in people's thoughts about transportation, which is hard to change. Also slower adoption of EVs. These factors are wiping out gains from state's emission cutting regulations. Transportation pollution is nearly double the next highest polluter, which is industry. In summary, to reach our 2030 emission goals, we have to double greenhouse gas reductions. The recommendations are cleaner electrical grid, which I mentioned earlier. Monterey big community power has done this for us. A rapid shift to zero emission vehicles powered by that grid. And I'd like to add one of my own personal ones. No projects that give single occupancy vehicles more incentive to be used as the primary source of trips. EVs will not solve the congestion problem we have on highway one. I believe this RTC has the responsibility to get people out of their cars and to meet California's greenhouse gas emission standards, helping to cut transportation emissions and vehicle miles travel. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. St. Good morning, commissioners. I'm David Leiby. I live in Santa Cruz near Depot Park, where we have rail traffic all the time from Roaring Camp. We went to, my wife and I went to the presentation that was given at the Simpkins Center by the smart people. And we decided to go up and ride it, which we did this last weekend. And it was really a wonderful experience. And I seem to have got a different view of what it was going to be like than a previous speaker about the amount of people that get taken off of the transportation corridor by a rail. It doesn't seem like a lot, but if you took maybe five or 600 cars off of that, off of highway one and put people on a rail, you would have a lot less congestion of people even just trying to get on highway one, which is any other solution that's pro has been presented in some of the meetings I've been to is like put more transportation on that quarter. You just more and more people trying to get into that narrow, narrow slot is never going to be a good solution as far as far as I can see. And I really support the idea of keeping the rail and making it viable for people to actually use to get somewhere. Thank you. Good morning, commissioners. My name is Nick Balych. I'm a Watsonville resident. I'm going to talk about the little initiative that could. So there's a children's story about a little train that could where the little train has to haul up a big hill and it says, I think I can, I think I can. This Greenway corridor initiative that's over there in Capitola, which looks like RTC is getting into is the little initiative that could in my mind, what it could do is expose a lot of rot, which is unfortunate. Citizen initiatives most of the time, government bodies and elected officials hate citizen initiatives. They do a lot of tricks against them. Not always. Sometimes they'll do it where they'll order a study City of Capitola did. They use funny wordy on a ballot question which goes before the voters. City of Capitola did. They file a lawsuit. City of Capitola did. Only one left really is the big one is to use taxpayer dollars for informational purposes to try to sway the voters. I certainly hope Capitola doesn't. And I certainly hope RTC doesn't do it. Now we have a burning question here about a letter that I'm not sure really was turned in or not, but from your executive director, George Dondaro to City of Capitola, saying you should counsel your counsel should refuse to place it on the ballot. And that it is the initiative. City Council has no legal right to refuse to place it on the ballot. None. Zero. Their city attorney told them that they either place it on the ballot or adapt it adopted as is, they can go file a lawsuit. And it's the courts to decide whether or not it goes on the ballot. So if such a letter was really sent with such language, giving legal advice, and not only that, but bad legal advice, there really should be an apology to the RTC members to the city of Capitola and to the members of the public. Hopefully we're not having taxpayer dollars used on this issue. Thank you for your comments. Good morning, Commissioner Steve Trujillo, candidate for City Council, Watsonville 7th District. When I'm in my rounds of the district talking to voters at their door, I need to let you know there is no enthusiasm for expanding Highway One, none, zero zip. Nobody wants any more lanes on Highway One. There is enthusiasm for rail and trail. A great deal of enthusiasm, including people who are even older than I am and I'm older than the dirt under this building 65. They would like to try a transit public transit in maybe the smart car or maybe one of the other systems that the other gentlemen just mentioned with great enthusiasm. And again, it does come down to the fact that yeah, I'm convinced we're producing 8 million more tons of crap into the air than we were three years ago. And it is because we're driving bigger cars. I know I drive a little car, a cute little Honda Fit, which preludes still pollutes, but very little. And it would be nice also to have incentives for people to buy those types of cars rather than those great big fat huge Ford SUVs. But that's just a personal prejudice. In any event, I wanted to report to you what the people with the actual people out there living in East Watsonville are saying thank you. Thank you. Good morning, Barry Scott. I live in Aptos. I wanted to share a celebration that last Thursday, there is a groundbreaking in Salinas for the Salinas to Gilroy extension. Fabulous project. It's going to have a station in Pajaro where our our rail line ends. And that may be operational we hope in 2022. Imagine that a rail line that we own, that's actually active and recognized by the federal government, the state government that could run passenger cars before too long and connected Pajaro to jobs up and down the state. While I was there, I spoke to someone I'm sorry, I left his card at home, Chad, something I think from the California State Transportation Agency. And we're chatting about train technologies and and and it came up what what kind of train might Santa Cruz have. And when you do the enough research, you find that the likelihood this has been said over and over again is the likelihood that is that they will be battery electric, multiple units. That was the term he used BEM use. And you know, for the presentation that we had that we enjoyed last week about the smart train, I want everyone to understand that the smart train is a huge vehicle. It's a different train than was looked at in our in our study. Our 2015 study identified a light diesel multiple unit that had much lower floors, much smaller physically car, the cars, the rail vehicles, and was a lighter vehicle. By the time we actually deploy anything, the chances are that it'll be like a Tesla, a very light electric battery electric powered by Monterey Bay Community power renewable energy. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Peter Stanger. I just cycled in here. I want to congratulate everybody else on the commission here. Everybody else that's in the audience that cycled or took mass transit, the metro to get here, you're part of the solution, not part of the problem. For the rest of you. Well, I guess that puts you on the other side. I wanted to thank you for the speaker series. Again, I thought it was really illuminating. It helped me define what I feel is necessary for Santa Cruz County and for South County residents. As a long time 45 year South County resident. I know that I need transit as well as a bicycle route that's safe for everyone to use. And I would like to encourage you to stand behind those two principles, transit and also transportation on for safe bicycles and not endorse any one means like a train or anything else at this moment and keep your minds open, please. Also, I'm a little bit concerned about how much of the funding goes to or not to infrastructure, especially here in South County. While North County is working on segment seven, while North County is devising the bridge over the San Lorenzo River, while North County got the Yacht Harbor and Twin Lakes improvements here in South County. I still have to pedal along Beach Street at 40 miles an hour traffic with no bike lane and I just don't see the wisdom in that. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Good morning, commissioners. Lowell Hearst. Thank you. That's that's a reaction I get going door to door sometimes too. We knew you'd like that. Thank you. As the as the alternate, I'm required to think in alternate terms sometimes. And nobody brought up the traffic report yet. So let's get the traffic report out it's bad. It's bad going north. It's bad coming south. It's bad from Moss Landing and Monterey. Yesterday I was at the airport on Silver Cloud in Monterey. And coming back from that, I'm looking at the air being from the airport and I see this big cloud of dust. And sure enough, somebody's doing an alternative mood mode, an alternative mood move on the road. That section of road between Salinas Road and Moss Landing is a there's a little wider shoulder. So there's a produce truck and a whole string of cars and somebody moves over into the shoulder and passes the line of cars and produce truck. Great big cloud of dust. Well, monkey see monkey do. Somebody else pulls out there and this guy's got a big four wheel drive and it's bouncing up and down and stuff starting to fly out of his bed and the dust cloud is getting bigger and bigger. But the truck driver he gave him gave him a little bit of room and so he moved over there too. And so that gave me the conclusion that four wheel drive on the shoulder is probably the new modus operandi at least in North Monterey County. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Hurst. Okay, we're going to go ahead and close the public comment period before I move on any commissioner comments at this time. Commissioner Bertrand. Yeah, thanks to George and their RTC staff for putting this speaker series on certainly helps us expand our vision of possible solutions. Thank you. So with the put off of our postponement of the investment study, I'm a little concerned about a couple of things and that is our available time to completely digest this report. It's going to be a complicated report that's going to influence this area, Santa Cruz County and beyond for many years to come. I'd like to propose that on the next agenda item for the RTC that we consider a side commission of members on this commission here to do a deep dive into that study and report back to the commission itself. Obviously, this wouldn't be a recommendation, but it would be commissioners here who would take the time out of their normal schedule and really dig deep into that report, try to understand all the details. And I know some of us have that time. And so those are the people that be on that commission. They would cell phone to her so that we get an idea from commissioners beforehand, some of the aspects that may not be visible in the executive report. Thanks. Thank you for that. Mr. Chair, let me just say that I've talked with Mr. Dondaro. We will have an item on the September 6 agenda that talks about what our timeline is that we can all see what's going on. The idea is to get this report out and give people time to take a look at it. And we're going to we should all do a deep dive. This is an important document for for the commission and the choices that's going to make at the end of it. Thank you for that. Okay, I don't really want to discuss at this point, but we will have that item on the agenda in September and we can get further into that discussion at that point. And all commissioners come prepared to weigh weigh in on that at that point. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any additions or deletions to the agenda today? No. Okay, thank you. So that takes us on to the regular agenda. And today we continue our transportation series. So Mr. Dondaro, I'll let you take over and introduce the first speaker. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. So it's a great pleasure to continue our series. We've been getting lots of positive feedback, both from commissioners and from the public on this series. And today we're very pleased to have Kyle Grattinger, who's the division chief of Caltrans division of rail and mass transit to sort of follow up on a presentation that he gave to you last fall on the state rail plan. Kyle did a great job of covering the state rail plan when he was here, I think it was October last year. But a lot of questions came out of that and I've had some conversations with him. And I said, you know, it would be great if we could pull out some of the details of what the state rail plan means for the state of California and how that connects or could connect or affect your future decisions on this commission. And so he said, yeah, that would be a good thing to do. And there were some other things that sort of tied into to the overall perspective of the rail plan. There's been a lot of questions about involving technology in the rail industry, which there seems to be a very little knowledge about that. And particularly about the funding that's available now for rail plan rail programs in the state. So I did speak with Kyle yesterday and he does walk his talk. He was riding the Capital Corridor train from Sacramento to get here and then he rode the bus, the 17 Express to Santa Cruz and then another bus here to Watsonville. So he's he's also an avid cyclist, but he is a great believer in better public transportation for everybody. And I think he comes with some some great experience and ideas to share. So Kyle, the floor is yours. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you, George. Thank you, commissioners. Thank you very much for the opportunity to return and speak again. I suddenly I'll get the memo and I'll dress down for Santa Cruz. It's very nice here. Well, I would thank you for the direction George. I would mention that there was actually a fourth mode I took yesterday began my trip. I left my house on my bike with my wife and two young kids and they decided since dad was going out town for a few days, they would hop on the bike with mom and we would go tour the the mural arts program that's going on in Sacramento take a look at a few murals and then I would head to the train station. So bike to the train, train to San Jose, and then fantastic service on Santa Cruz Metro, the route 17 and then the 69 W last night and then a nice walk down down main street here in Watsonville and here I am. It works. It's it's it doesn't it's not as fast as a car at two in the morning, but it certainly beat dealing with traffic on a Thursday afternoon or Wednesday afternoon. And so we think there's an awful lot of opportunity in California to improve the situation on public transportation. It can get you where you want to go, but we think it can become the mode of choice. But that is going to come with a partnership with other modes as well, transit rail, biking, walking and other first and last mile solutions. So I'm going to try to keep it. Well, I'm never good at keeping it brief. I'm going to give a quick recap of the state rail plan and try to dive into some of the issues that George mentioned and hopefully you will have some questions. I know I will not touch on everything even though I will talk a lot. So a quick overview of the state rail plan and first of all, I should clarify, I am the assistant division chief for rail and mass transportation. We have now a permanent division chief and that is Dara Wheeler. She was the chief of staff to Caltrans director Malcolm Docherty and I think that is a fantastic symbol of the importance that Caltrans is giving to rail and mass transportation now that they have given us one of the best and brightest and someone who is very critical in helping Malcolm Docherty do his job over the last several years at Caltrans and I really enjoy working with her and she shares in the vision that we have and the deputy secretary, Chad Edison at California State Transportation Agency has. So a quick overview of the rail plan. We are still in the draft. The final version I presented last November on the draft which had just come out. The final version is really waiting ready to go. We are just getting final talking points together. So I am very hopeful that we will have it out imminently. Not a whole lot has changed since then. Some of the details, the high speed rail business plan came out early June. So we wanted to make sure that we were lining up nicely with what high speed rail authority is working on as well and then some specifics about projects that have been evolving since the draft was released in June, November of last year. So what we are looking at is a 20 year vision or 22 year vision for rail in the state of California. We are going in a different direction than traditional state rail plans had gone in the past. They were very much an inventory of what rail lines are out there and maybe one or two projects. California under the leadership of the state transportation agency has taken a whole new approach and really grabbed the bull by the horns and said rail can solve a lot of the problems that we have in the state and we want to really support it. So we are taking a vision now that looks at an integrated statewide network of passenger rail, intercity and commuter, high speed rail, integrated express buses to the regions of the state where rail does not make sense. And as I mentioned, the other contributing first and last mile modes, walking, biking, jump bikes, lift, Uber, all the solutions. We want to have them all work together more closely. On the rail side and with the integrated express bus, what we're looking at is coordinated schedules. The idea of a regular pulsed service, repeating timetables every hour or every 30 minutes or more in major metropolitan areas, you will have a train running on a line. If you live in an Aptos or if you live in Fresno, you know that if you show up at your local station at that time, 33 minutes past the hour or three minutes past the hour, there will be a train in the direction you'd like to go. And then down the road, that train meets with other services to connect it to the rest of the state at pulse hubs where the trains come into the station around the same point in time, transfers are quick and you move on. And additionally, we really want to apply a customer focus to the vision in the state rail plan. This isn't about building projects, this is about providing a service that we want people to use. So we're really focusing on seamless first and last mile access. We're looking at integrated ticketing. The idea that yesterday I had to use three apps for information and ticket purchasing and then still cash fares to get on the bus. Is there an easier way to do this? Is there a one stop shop like Uber provides now for their cars and their bikes, jump bike? Can we do this statewide? And so we talk about some strategies to do that as well. And the state rail plan creates a vision that is both auto and air competitive, that it can provide trips that are a potential replacement for long distance statewide trips as well as local trips that would be driven every day. When we looked at the rail plan at the ridership model and where we were headed in 2013 when the rail plan process began, what you see in this graphic on the right is the counties of California lined up roughly from north to south. You see the Bay Area, San Francisco and the Caltrain corridor there in the middle and then Metro link and Los Angeles services in the south. What we saw was a vision of just sort of incremental growth and the link between Northern California and Southern California by the 2013 state and by 2040 and on a business as usual scenario. We finally got 500 passengers a day, which is enough people to show a line on the map connecting the two San Francisco and Los Angeles regions. There is continued growth on the rail side, but we realized that there is a market potential for networked services and we've been planning things corridor by corridor, not thinking about the entire system. And when we put it together and put together a network where we have those time schedules and the services that are able to take you from A to B and then from B onto C, D and E and provide real options and real connections that that network can create far greater growth and this is what the ridership looks like under the network vision that we modeled during the rail plan process. We go from about 120,000 trips a day on commuter and inner city rail so that's San Joaquin's capital corridors, Caltrain, it doesn't include Metro link, BART or light rail systems, but if you look at just commuter and inner city rail that ridership grows from about 120,000 trips per day to 1.3 million trips per day. We are also looking at opportunities to drive down the cost for rail. If you look at rail around the world the U.S. is traditionally a very high-priced market, high-cost market, especially on the passenger rail side. The freight's do a fantastic job moving goods, moving a ton of freight, but on the passenger side we've been faced with very high operating costs and we think that with changing federal rules and with opportunities to look at other approaches to delivering service and maintenance and things like that and by just operating a more efficient timetable and network we can drive down the costs to operate rail significantly. The cost per train mile we think we can, what it costs to carry one train, one mile, cruise, fuel equipment, we think we can reduce down to by about 45 percent. Global international standards are around $20 per train mile, we think we can get it down from our 65 to the high 30s, and the cost per seat mile we can drive down even farther. As the system grows, as the trains become more full, the cost of adding additional rider is minimal. We have empty seats on trains or we can add a coach to a train for a very low cost so the marginal cost of adding riders to a train is incredibly low so the cost per seat mile drops down even more and becomes a much more efficient service. So this is the jumping to the actual vision to the maps. I'm sorry the colors aren't showing up incredibly well on the screen here, I hope they're better on your computer monitors, but what we're looking at is three time frames. 2022 is the immediate time frame, 2027, the 10-year vision, and then 2040, the long-term vision in the rail plan, and we have drawn the maps, the colors indicate unfortunately I apologize to those in the room, the colors indicate the frequency of train service and how many times per hour service may operate and speed, a combination of the two, I'm sorry I'm having a hard time describing that, looking at this image, but basically what we're looking at is services such as the Caltrain service on the San Francisco Peninsula operating at 15 minutes or better frequency throughout the day, and then other services such as the capital corridor out to Sacramento and Auburn up to one train per hour, San Joaquin as well, and you see that in the expansions of service you can see the Salinas extension which was mentioned by a previous speaker and and the smart train corridor extending up to Windsor and down to Larkspur Ferry, which is a project I'll talk about in a moment. By 2027 we begin to see a bigger increase in the frequency of service making it a much more available, making rail much more viable and available option to passengers throughout the Northern California area, and some service restructuring, and then by 2040 you begin to see that high-speed rail has connected Gilroy to Madeira through Pacheco, and that we now have a full Bay Area to Los Angeles high-speed rail system with a hub at Gilroy where a Monterey Bay rail network can plug in and provide access across the state so that the Santa Cruz branch line would not just be a branch line for Santa Cruz County, but that it plugs into the statewide system and gives you a 35-40-minute ride from Gilroy into Fourth and King in San Francisco, or a two-hour ride to Los Angeles with a cross-platform transfer in Gilroy. So that's a very quick synopsis of the vision. This is how, I believe I shared this last time I was here, but this is an example of how these pulse hub stations work. This is Switzerland is a country which has perfected this every day in a country of seven million people. There are trains and buses throughout the country that run on a 30-minute headway, 30-minute interval, and the way that they do this is they design their infrastructure and their timetables so that trains and buses meet at the top and the bottom of the hour and bring people into the system and send them back out, like gears in a machine. And this is a town called Vetsicon. It's about 45 minutes southeast of Zurich. It's in the metropolitan area. These are Espan regional commuter trains. Three or four lines converge in the small town of about 10,000 people. There's another dozen or so bus lines which then fan out to small villages of 100 to 1,000 people or so. And every day, every half hour, Monday through Sunday, this cycle repeats itself. They introduced this system in 2001 across the entire nation. And this is a story where they wanted to build a high-speed rail line between Zurich and Geneva. Went to the voters with it in 1987 and the voters said it's a country with a lot of rural residents. It's a federal system. They said it benefits the bankers in Zurich and the UN workers in Geneva. What does it do for the other five million people in Switzerland? We want service too. They went back to the drawing board and they came up with this system that creates services that are reliable and dependable for every resident in the country providing this network where you can tie in whether you're in a village of 10 in the Alps or whether you're in a metro area of a million. And that's what we're going to hopefully recreate in the state of California with these systems that tie in together and provide benefits across the state. So some of the outcomes that we're looking at with the 2040 vision in the state rail plan is we're looking at the opportunity to significantly reduce the CO2 emissions per passenger mile and by significantly, I mean the graphic in the lower left, you see that we're cutting it by, I believe it's, I forgot the math, 100-fold or so from around 175 grams per mile traveled down to around 5 or 10. We're looking heavily at opportunities to electrify or to use hybrid train technologies and looking at battery electric as well. And we also assume that cars will come cleaner over time. So we're giving credit on the highway side as well. We do hope that the current trend reverses. As I mentioned, current ridership on inner city and commuter rail goes from about 100,000 trips per day to 1.3 million. And really importantly, in the lower right, you see the mode share. Today, commuter inner city rail cover about a third of a percent of all the passenger miles traveled in the state of California. That's not much in the big universe of things. It does mean that a third of a percent of the miles traveled are people who are enjoying the ride, getting to check the newspaper and do things and be productive on the way and not dealing with traffic congestion. But we think we can grow that to almost 7 percent statewide of all passenger miles traveled on the rail mode. In metropolitan areas where congestion is heavy, we think that this rail network, which is going to combine long distance inner city services as well as improved commuter and regional services, that share on rail can go far more perhaps in the 15 or 20 percent of all passenger miles traveled range. And that's where we really get this dent in greenhouse gas emissions. So I mentioned the three time frames and these are just a couple of Northern California highlights of what we're looking at in 2022 and I'll talk about 27 and 2040 in a moment. But by 2022 these are funded and committed improvements that are also now enhanced by funding provided through Senate Bill 1. So one is caltering electrification. That project is on track for 2022 operation. These are projects that will happen by or before 2022. We'll be expanding service on the smart line in Sonoma Marin County to Larkspur Ferry and we'll be expanding the service now down to Tamsi to Salinas with two trains a day with Tamsi. We're increasing service in the Sacramento to Stockton Corridor and the ACE rail commuter service will be extending from Stockton down to Ceres and Merced and we're looking at those early efforts to think about integrated, ticketing integrated travel planning system to make it easier for the user and also to reduce the costs that transit agencies and rail operators have to actually collect revenue and provide a ticket to passengers. By the 2027 timeframe what we're looking at is high-speed rail having its two initial segments open, the Central Valley segment and the San Francisco to Gilroy segment. We continue at that point in time we'll be working to integrate regional and intercity rail with high-speed rail so that we can extend the work that's being done in the Central Valley from Merced or Modesto. We'll have improved service from there up to Sacramento. We'll also look at opportunities for this region to tie in to high-speed rail at Gilroy. And by that point in time we hope to have full implementation of a statewide integrated ticketing effort that the high-speed rail operator can come in and use. By 2040 we'll have, again by 2040, we'll have high-speed rail operating from San Francisco all the way to Anaheim. We'll have connections up to Sacramento and phase two connections to the Inland Empire and down to San Diego. We're also looking at the opportunity for a new trans-bay crossing, whether that is a BART only tube or whether it is a BART and conventional rail tube. That could provide opportunities for one-seat rides between Sacramento, downtown San Francisco, and San Jose, and really become an artery in Northern California. And we're looking at new regional networks feeding into the system. So a completed Monterey Bay regional rail network in the Central Valley. We're looking at connections across the Valley. LaMoure, Hanford, tying into high-speed rail and North Bay smart tying into the capital corridor at Sassoon City. So I want to try to get into a few more of the details that we didn't have in November. So when we look at rail funding in the state, we have three primary sources. We have the California Climate Investments, which is the cap and trade or the GGRF funds. Those funds have steadyed. I arrived in California about a year and a half ago and at that time we were getting some poor auction results. But immediately after I arrived, the legislature approved the new 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions. And that has affected the market and cap and trade auctions have been very successful since that point in time. So we provided certainty into the market and we're getting a lot of money back out of those auctions now. The public transportation accounts tied to the Transportation Development Act of early 1970s. That is traditionally the bread and butter for our rail operating and capital dollars in the state. We have about $130 million a year that we provide to Amtrak services and additional PTA money is used to fund minor capital improvements on that rail system. Whatever we don't use goes back into the stip and then we try to identify rail and transit projects out of that shared pool with highway. And then since last year we now have SB1 revenues. The SB1 revenues that are funding rail and transit to the tune of about $750 million per year in California are primarily the diesel excise tax and the vehicle license fee. So those dollars are coming primarily from trucking companies and from this vehicle license fee where if you have a 20 year old cheap automobile you're not paying a very much larger increase in your vehicle license fee but if you are just buying an $80,000 Mercedes your vehicle license fee is more than my $20,000 Subaru. And so that's we feel a very fair licensing approach and that's where a lot of the money for rail and transit improvements is coming from. So as I mentioned that totals up to about $750 million a year for rail and transit capital and operating support in California which is a significant funding source and I came from the federal railroad administration where we had spent $11 or $12 billion in federal stimulus funds after 2009 and the amount of money and the self-help that California is giving itself now is greater than the federal government gave in the last decade or so and so it's really a pleasure to be working here and have the opportunity and the support of legislature to spend the money in the areas where I believe the money needs to be spent. So with those funding sources we have a number of capital programs that are funded the largest of which is the transit and intercity rail capital program I'll go into that in a little more detail in a moment state rail assistance is a small additional operating fund for the intercity operators as well as the commuter rail operators in the state we also have the STIP where we continue to look for capital improvement projects the PTA I'm sorry that's not that's a source not a program and then under SB1 there's three new programs that were created for which rail and transit are competitive the solutions for congested corridor program looks to identify opportunities for multimodal investments in corridors the trade corridor enhancement program can apply to to rail especially in areas with where freight improvements could also benefit passenger rail and sustainable communities planning grants but the transit intercity rail capital program I think of this as sort of the stimulus for rail in California it is a program that was created to provide competitive grants for transformative capital investments that will improve the statewide network of rail and transit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions its primary goals are to as I mentioned reduce those greenhouse gas emissions and increase transit and rail ridership we also want to improve network integration create that statewide cohesive network and improve transit safety we also have secondary objectives to provide benefits to DACs to disadvantaged communities and provide geographic equity in the program and we also want to provide benefits to freight movement so we've had three three funding rounds of TIRCP the first two were funded solely with cap and trade revenues from those those sort of unstable early auctions and the third round was funded by the more stable cap and trade auctions and the new SB1 revenues so in the first two years we gave out about $600 million for projects and in April of this year we announced awards for over $4 billion worth of transit intercity rail capital program projects $2.7 billion is for projects in the first years one through five of the program we also have the ability to write a letter of no prejudice and fund longer term projects in the six to ten year time frame the way the federal government does with their their full funding grant agreements and so that that way we were able to forecast revenues from greenhouse gas and SB1 and provide awards for over $4 billion worth of projects this is an exciting program this is the down payment this isn't the down payment this is a significant trunk moving toward the state rail plan vision and actually beginning implementation in northern we chose around 30 projects statewide and in northern california this is just a sampling of the projects that we selected for TIRCP awards in northern california funding the bart extension to san jose trans bay corridor core capacity so that the bart can run more trains through the tube we funded additional EMUs which are the new electric double decker trains the caltrain will be operating 101 express bus pilot with sam trans electric buses every single agency that came in for buses we worked with the resources board and we said congratulations you won an award but your diesel bus will now be an electric bus so we we're working with them now to roll out infrastructure deployment on the electric side and that's going to be a big thing to tackle but we're all going to be better for it if we figure this out and roll it out we bought more light rail vehicles for san francisco muni we funded the smart extensions to larks per ferry and Windsor we've also funded additional research into an east west branch line which i'll talk about in a moment in the San Joaquin joint powers authority we funded their valley rail program to the tune of about 500 million dollars to improve services between the central valley communities stockton medestimer said Fresno up to sacramento which we believe is not only a growing market but a very strong market statewide Solano transportation authority integrated zev electric express buses in that corridor where we'll be shifting the capital corridor onto a slightly different alignment to the bay area which will shave about 10 minutes off the travel time between oakland and san jose and then many of these awards included what we call a network integration component it's a little bit of extra money that we've provided to make sure that the investments we're making are tying into the broader network so that could be things like this integrated ticketing study that we're working on it can be ensuring that where bart and cal train meet that we have a cross platform transfer and that the opportunity to transfer is seamless for the user so i'm going to dive into three of the projects that i think are very relevant in northern california the first is is smart they have not had a normal day of operation i know that i don't want to take any words out of the mouth of far high montserrion but they began i believe three or four weeks before the tragic fires last year in san jose and who knows if their ridership model will ever have a real actual day to be tested upon because they went straight into emergency operations and providing hospital evacuations and then residents were displaced and moved north in the county and now they have a tremendous park and ride demand at the north end that they never foresaw but they've been resilient and they provided a very important alternative to travel in the in the snowman ring 101 corridor since they started and and so we are continuing to help them expand that service down again again to the larkspurry ferry and up to winzer and importantly we we really think that there's an opportunity there to connect that north south spine with an east west what they call umbilical cord to the rest of the world to tie them into the network so that it's no longer something you have to drive up to marine county to get to but that a traveler from novato who needs to go to Sacramento to to do something at the capital has an option to avoid traffic in the the 37 corridor the congested corridor on the north side of simpablo bay we think that there's an opportunity there to connect along an old rail line it won't be a high speed rail line by any means but it provides a a valid reliable transportation option to get from Marin and Sonoma counties to Solano and onto Sacramento without having to be stuck in that chronic congestion that corridor in an area where adding a lane is going to be next to impossible so that's something we're very excited about supporting as well the Salinas rail extension was mentioned we had the ground breaking last week so that that is an opportunity to tie Montere county into the statewide system eventually into high speed rail initially what we're looking at is funding two round trips per day growing to six on the existing Union Pacific corridor we're working with them now to hammer out how that's going to work and then by the time that the first high speed rail segment between Gilroy and San Francisco opens what we're going to be looking at is a cross-platform seamless transfer at Gilroy where rather than being a train running from a single train running from Salinas into San Francisco the opportunity then may be a shuttle train to Salinas excuse me Gilroy cross-platform transfer and then a much shorter high-speed rail or electrified cal train trip up the rest of the corridor but that plugs Salinas and Monterey county and also Santa Cruz county into that statewide rail network that's the first the first time we really plug into that world-class high-speed transportation system and then the future Monterey Bay network once high-speed rail goes through the Pataco Pass and down to LA will be connected to the to the rest of the state through that connection to Gilroy all of a sudden trips over the hill and into the valley will shrink by half or more and then a third project this is actually Southern California but I think it's very relevant to what we're talking about here in Santa Cruz is a project we're funding with San Bernardino CTA they're doing the Redlands Rail project also known as Arrow to extend from I believe it's San Bernardino station to Redlands it's a short 10 mile or so extension with a few stations and they tie into the metro and commuter rail system at San Bernardino where you can then head west into Los Angeles Union Station and they're expanding it to a couple of great old walkable communities in the Redlands area they purchased three of these vehicles this is a Stodler it's a Swiss manufacturer that's been incredibly successful in the last 15 years is constructing a new plant in Salt Lake City Utah and they have a concept for a diesel multiple unit that's been used around the world where they have a power pack in the middle of a two car train set the power pack is modular and convertible what you see in the the upper left is is how if you wanted to have a very strong you know beefy you know Camaro version of the train you could have four essentially bus engines put into each of the four bays in that power pack providing good acceleration and high maintained top speed that's the model they've been looking at around the world but they have been working with clients in in the Netherlands Switzerland and other countries where they're looking at opportunities to take that power pack and turn into something much more efficient and so we funded San Bernardino CTA to buy one more of these train sets and to do R&D and use it as a test base for new technology at the zero emission multiple unit or the battery electric multiple unit we're looking at battery electric we're looking at hydrogen and all of these things are products that Stadler is working with somewhere else in the world with other clients the Maria Tellerban in Austria just contracted with them to do a hydrogen train they're working with Arriva a private rail operator in the Netherlands to use a this concept on a train that has an overhead wire pantograph to run on electrified lines and when it gets to the end of the lines and heads off into the the Netherlands of the Netherlands then it can run on a diesel line with stored battery electric power these things are are either in operation or will be in operation the next three to five years and we're bringing out here to California with San Bernardino and so as as one of the speakers mentioned by the time we have rail rail services operating in Santa Cruz County this will be state of the art and operating technology whisper quiet zero emission hydrogen battery electric not your typical large lumbering diesel locomotive that will not be the future for short branch lines like Santa Cruz and in order to allow that to happen traditionally in the U.S. we've been been knocked for our approach to rail vehicle safety it is a very it's not that it's not a safe way we've been approaching it but traditionally we've been saying the idea is to be able to win the match when there's a crash and basically have the largest safest heaviest vehicle possible and that drives down the performance on the operating economic side it drives down the performance on the environmental efficiency side when you have large pieces of steel moving around just trying to to protect themselves during an event the rest of the world has been switching toward a crash avoidance approach where they use signal systems and technology to avoid crashes and then mitigate when a crash does happen I'm not going to say if when it does happen they use crash energy management other approaches to minimize and mitigate the impact of that crash and enhance safety so the industry has been working for about a decade now on what they're calling alternative compliance crash energy management crumple zones new technologies to ensure the safety of the driver and passengers in a crash in the less likely event that they occur in this crash avoidance world the FRA has worked with industry with manufacturers railroad operators since like I said around 2008 or so with the federal advisory commission and they developed standards that they agreed to in 2011 for crash energy management about a week before the last presidential election a notice that proposed rulemaking was published by the FRA which we basically create a final rule then the president came in and said we're going to slash two regulations for everyone that we create I'm not sure how the math works on slashing quantities of regulations and they've been sitting there trying to noodle on that for a while but I spoke on the FRA in the last month or so and and what they've mentioned is that they are going to promise an alternative compliance waiver to any agency that wants to follow those standards and they do hope that NPRM can turn to an actual rule in this calendar year so the path is cleared for this new approach to lighter weight better performing rail vehicles in the country those vehicles will be smaller lighter and quieter and just what manufacturers are doing today is providing a much more comfortable experience with spacious interiors and large windows we have eight or nine foot tall picture windows on these toddler vehicles it's it's quite an experience to ride in them the E-BART extension if you want to go ride a stow their vehicle is is running in the E-BART and we're going to be looking at opportunities to provide passenger amenities that make your time more enjoyable on the train it's already quite enjoyable but including cafes bike storage and providing enhanced ADA accessibility not sure if smart mentioned this but I thought this was fantastic on their commuter line the vendor that they went with to provide the the coffee and pastries on their train is a local services group that provides jobs for for handicapped individuals and and I think it's it's a non-profit and I think it's just a wonderful model to they built the train built the cafe into it saw the vendor out later and decided we've got a great approach to do this we don't have to go to Aramark or a large corporation we're going to keep it local and we're going to give jobs to people who need them so I just wanted to mention that was a great idea in my opinion and then rideaways what we're looking at in the country and I'm getting into the sort of bikes and trains nexus here with these smaller vehicles what you see on the left is a photograph of Austin downtown Austin, Texas where they've been operating a Stoddler vehicle for about seven or eight years now and this is this is one of the first ones in the country and on the lower left you see a two-way protected bicycle path and then the rail right-of-way and in a city arterial street just on the other side of those yellow flex posts this is nothing new we've been we've been operating in constrained corridors with with rail bike and cars and spots throughout the country for a very long time and so I think that this is something that is a provable case and then you look at smart and if you talk to their planner up there Joanne Parker she'll tell you she's not building a rail line she's building a rail and trail that's their that is their mission and their their core goal and they are doing that and again a very small constrained right-of-way and creating a system that provides options for all users if you need to get from Heelsburg to Larkspur you're going to take the train but if you need to get from Sonoma North the or Santa Rosa North to Santa Rosa South and you'd rather just ride your bike you've got both options now and so I think that you have a lot of opportunities to bundle the corridors and provide all the trip options for those who want to take public transit or those who feel like taking a bike ride that day I think there's certainly ample cases where that happens and then the lower right as a photograph in the Netherlands where what they're doing now is they're creating snail feeds route it's their term for a bicycle expressway essentially they're finding linear corridors between villages 10 20 miles apart and creating basically routes where cyclists do not have to yield to crossing traffic turning the stop signs etc and building high quality infrastructure from town to town right along the rail line where you have 125 mile an hour electric trains operating next to bicycles and you can choose which way you want to get around that day so forgive me for the humor and digressing here this is a presentation I gave to the California Bicycle Summit last year and just wanted to kind of joke around about it bikes and trains they go great together but bikes what are they good for well they're great for commuting or exploring or recreating or saving the planet or riding to the capital corridor to come to Watsonville and trains well what are they good for commuting exploring bringing us to recreation and saving the planet you know little things like that as well so they have a lot in common and but what do we need to improve how they come together and I think there's a couple of things I apologize the animations a few a few things this is not an exhaustive list by any means and these are my my boys get on the capital corridor train in the upper right we need a secure and sheltered place to store our bikes we need to think about and not just a road bike not just a 15 pound carbon fiber road bike but that 60 pound Dutch family bike with two seats on it that's a little bit taller than the handlebars on a road bike we need a place to put those bikes either onboard the train or at the station and be sure that when we come back it's going to be there we need improved first and last mile access we need safe and welcoming infrastructure eight to 80 infrastructure I mean I say two to 90 infrastructure my boys were on bikes at six months and and and it's possible but only when we have that safe infrastructure that makes a parent feel like this is a place where I can ride with my child bike showing that is something that is growing enormously Santa I was shocked to see the jump bikes from Santa Cruz they rolled out in Sacramento in April or May and and every one of my offices I have a co-worker who walks in on heels and says I just rode to my mom's house for lunch this thing is amazing I never would have seen her on a bike in in a hundred years and and she's been riding it weekly to go visit her mother at lunchtime and I think that that's just going to open the world to to people using bikes e-bikes bikes that you can get with a click of a cell phone are really going to transform the way we get around and then finally rails with trails this is not an either or opposition it is not a train or a bike it can be a train and a bike it can be a train next to a bike path it can be a bike on a train that comes together in a million ways these are all possible so where can we look for inspiration again the Netherlands is the obvious choice they have 1.2 million rail trips per day we're talking about that in 2040 in California with with 40 million residents they do with 20 million residents today 40 percent of the passengers in the Netherlands reach their station by bike every day another 15 percent reach their final destination by bike either they're storing their own second bike at the station at the other end or maybe they're using the railroad owned bike share system but but they're using an awful lot of bikes the state rail infrastructure provider manages today 520,000 bike parking spaces and they're growing that to 600,000 by 2030 these are fantastic facilities a small town with a thousand covered bike parking spaces or you've got a Rotterdam station with a three level subterranean ride in ride out bike parking facilities so that you can ride your bike park get walk up the steps to the train platform and as I mentioned they have this nationwide bike sharing system if we applied those rates of bicycle use bike to train use to California with our 2040 rail ridership goal we'd have over 715,000 new bike trips to and from rail per day in 2040 and just think what that does to greenhouse gas emissions and we also have better weather than the Netherlands so but you know it's not just the Netherlands we are doing great things here in California cal trains explosive growth has been fueled by bike access they have serious bike problems on board that they are writing special plans just just to address those the capital corridor has been pulling out all the stops to make sure that biking to the train is an easy decision they now carry about 11 to 12 percent of their passengers arriving and departing by bike that's that's getting to Dutch standards in a way smarts rail and trail concept I think is a model for other rail systems in California and nationwide SB one is also going to infuse a hundred million dollars into active into the active transportation program across the state every year those are opportunities I think we should begin at rail stations at the synergy of rail and bike bike link lockers and secure biking parking facilities are rolling out across northern California and bikes your systems are expanding literally weekly every new city I go to you're going to see those those red bikes this was smarts very first week of operations and they were carrying on some some days over 200 bikes and this was the week when when before they had a normal day and so moving forward looking at Caltrans we have a strategic management plan has a very ambitious goal it's it's a it's a reach goal stretch goal triple double double it's the idea of tripling transit and rail ridership I'm sorry tripling biking doubling transit and rail and doubling walking trips in the state of California a reach goal what they don't have in there is the rail trips themselves and we're looking at an 11-fold increase according to Google the word for 11-fold is non-decoupal so I call it the triple double double non-decoupal if we grow 11-fold on the rail side that's how we're going to help get transit walking and biking to their triple double double goals I think that's something we can latch on to so just food for thought we're doing a lot of great we need to be doing more first mile last mile planning for bike pet access to rail and transit systems support opportunities to share the linear right of way that railroads provide for and share that with bike and pedestrian paths support bike parking need that stations and define appropriate bicycle accommodation policies it's not just a couple of you racks outside the station anymore it needs to be something that makes people really comfortable leaving their bike at the station supporting seamless integration of bike share and public transit fair systems on a regional and even statewide scale so that my today Uber I can choose do I want an Uber car or do I want a bike share hopefully in the future we'll have an app that says and tie that tie that BART trip in there as well or the Santa Cruz metro trip as well and at CalTrans we can provide technical assistance and grants for station area plans and creating 8 to 80 networks throughout the state a few more examples of these fantastic bike parking garages in the Netherlands this is a beautiful bridge that they created across a canal in the Netherlands with 125 mile an hour trains with a cantilevered bike path off the edge of this steel structure you see it in the lower left Stockholm, Sweden in the upper left again a four track busy mainline with a bike pedestrian path next to it and in the lower right we see the steel bridge in Portland, Oregon a double deck lift bridge owned by the Union Pacific Railroad carries Trimet light rail vehicles and city traffic on the upper level carries Amtrak and Union Pacific freight on the lower level and Trimet said can we tack on a bike and pedestrian path to you don't ask things like that of Union Pacific Railroad lightly again this is a this is a lift bridge balance is incredibly important especially when you're trying to match up miter joints on train tracks miter joints on light rail tracks catenary systems for light rail and ensure that cars aren't having to bump you right over the top so any any rock or pebble you add that creates an imbalance is going to make that bridge fail Union Pacific and this and Trimet got together and made it work that they added on an aluminum bike and pedestrian path on the side rebalance the bridge worked on the safety concerns and made it happen so just more proof that that bikes and trains really do go together and if you're willing to make it work there's there's always a way and then I'll just conclude with the idea of state-wide integrated mobility this goes back to the the ticketing thing that I was talking about the secreting and seamless user experience today our intercity rail services pay around 20% to Amtrak to support ticketing and reservations 20 cents of every dollar they earn goes back to selling the next ticket globally there are European railways are paying 10 to 15% a decade ago or more we've spoken with Deutsche Bahn the German company which is the early train operator for high speed rail they say through technology and other enhancements and and and sharing their platform with other mobility providers and in Germany they have that down to about 4% now the Swedes had had started a similar process about 20 years ago to unify public transit operators the private rail operators and others into a nationwide system it's about 100 companies today that that are part of a nonprofit agency that shares the statewide travel planning and ticketing and they they are about to drop the cost of their share of revenue collection down to 1% that is not only going to significantly improve the bottom line for transit operators but it's also going to what they're doing is they're creating a platform that makes it easier for riders to choose to take transit when they can go into an app and say I want to go from Reading to to Watsonville and figure that out without having to go to six web pages and fuddle around for quarters and cash and so the state rail plan and the statewide transit strategic plan another document that we're working on sort of a policy strategy document are going to emphasize the coordination of rail and transit services to create a fast, frequent and reliable mobility network across California and we're all going to be more successful I believe if we can all sell tickets to places beyond where our transit agencies go alone we're going to provide comprehensive dynamic travel planning information coordinated fairs these are not going to be easy things and a single payment mechanism across all rail and transit services in California this is our goal the state it may be the state leading it it may be private sector leading it it may be a few transit agencies leading it but we think this is where we need to go in order to draw more riders into our system we're going to bring in TNCs UberLift and others and try to create a platform that all can share from and we think we can do all of this and save money in the process so we the state we have put together a group a program a project called the integrated travel project we hosted an event in Davis in early May where we brought in guest speakers from around the world from the Netherlands the UK Norway Switzerland and Sweden and and Hong Kong and said how are you doing this is this something we should pursue we had speakers from BART LA Metro San Joaquin RTD across the state and and the consensus was yes we should be doing something we don't know what it is we're not trying to be prescriptive but what we've done is we have used the TIRCP program to fund an effort to dig deeper into this to get really into the nuts and bolts of of that governance and and hopefully in a few years we'll have a pilot project and in seven or eight years we'll have something functioning statewide that every Californian has as the first app in their phone or or or the first website they have on their their browser tab so I believe I've taken enough of your time and I will and I'm sure there's questions so I will leave it there thank you very much for your time and attention Kyle thank you for that very thorough presentation let me see if there's any questions commissioners Commissioner Rocking Of course there are unknowns in terms of whether we'll be in a recession and how deep it will be and whether SB1 will be repealed hopefully not but even with those unknowns is there can you give us some order of magnitude idea of what additional funds would be necessary to meet this plan's goals by 2040 are we going to need an additional revenue source like another SB1 or gas tax increases or something else or is this fundable with the current if we don't have a deep recession and SB1 doesn't get repealed is this plan funded I haven't done the math on whether we have enough but but SB1 and greenhouse gas cap and trade is certainly a helpful and significant contribution to what we're trying to get to here high speed rail itself has its own needs and targets for funding they have if you hear Brian Kelly speak I believe he says that they have I will not quote him but a certain amount a quarter or a third of the money that they need to build they actually do have commitments and agreements too it's getting to that remainder that's going to be tricky for them and on the high speed rail side we're looking at an operation that should be profitable and so the question has always been about private sector participation I really do believe that once we have that system that once the public has has built the system that operators will be able to create revenue and profit and return and so I think the private investment will come in at the end on the high speed rail side the rest of the network I think that we'll be able to drive down costs and on the operating side significantly the capital will be a major investment but I think we'll be able to drive down operating costs and therefore be able to cover maintenance and operations and a lot of the pieces of this future network that said capital is a big thing a big part of the problem SB1 and greenhouse gas cap and trade are going to get us a lot of the way there if they remain steady if SB1 stays that will be incredibly helpful there are also initiatives such as South Hop counties can do an awful lot measure what's the measure in Los Angeles you know $120 billion or so is a fantastic leveraging point TIRCP gave Metrolink over $800 million to build a regional rail network leveraging that off of a lot of the self-help money from LA county and so I think there will be opportunities there the federal government I'm not going to say that there's ever a trend in the federal government but this year a lot of the federal rail money has been shaken loose they're in a third round of capital funding right now but that's $300 million the entire country and we have through SB1 $750 million for California alone but that'll be helpful and what we've done is we've created through our own state funding the opportunity to go in and leverage those federal dollars the feds like to say we want to see you leverage our money well it's kind of like California saying thanks feds we're going to leverage our money with you now so you know the calculation of what's needed what's that difference that's out there I don't have that number for you but I think we're really moving well in a way to start getting these initial investments to building this network just to follow up it wouldn't be an argument against it that it's not fully funded at the current moment that's not my point but trying to get some sense of the order of magnitude again on the either the operating or the capital or in fact on both sides trying to get a least order of magnitude sense of whether for example I mean if people took the money they're spending on their private cars now and that we spend on parking in streets and things in terms of public money you could operate a lot of public systems for a lot less money if you actually began to make that shift and people were willing to go there but I'm just trying to get some sense of whether this is only to sort of start up money to make this happen that's available and we're really going to have to go back and make a major shift in funding sources or whether the current funding is halfway there or something again when I say order of magnitude your answer didn't give me a really good sense of that yet and so maybe you could tell me a little more about what your sense of you know realistically whether we're going to need additional funding sources from the federal government or from California and somewhere to make this the 2040 plan actually come become real yeah I don't want to speak about my pay grade here but one way to think about it is that if you look at the investment plan in the state rail plan and I don't have the number off the top of my head it's over a hundred billion dollars for the system but if you look at that investment by 2040 that total on the rail and transit side is about three percent of total transportation spending that will take place in California by 2040 as an old member yeah local statewide and private investment in the system and if you think about it that way that we can get all this and we can get a go from a third of a percent of passenger miles traveled to seven percent for three percent of the total transportation spending over the next 22 years to me that sounds like a pretty darn good proposition and so I'm hoping that I think we need to be strong out of the gate we need to deliver on these early projects we need to start making improvements so that people begin to see the value of the projects and this seamless integration so that we are bringing people on to the rail system if it's not working if we get out five 10 years down the road and it's not getting the predicted ridership and revenue and mode shift that we're looking at it's going to be a very hard sell to get that you know the remaining 70 percent of it built so I like that number the three percent of total transportation spending is a pretty good number for those benefits in my opinion thank you Mr. Cappard thank you yeah thanks for thank you for your presentation and one concern I have is in general is CO2 emissions and how it puts stress on all of our ecosystem and everything and on us and how do they measure tons I probably could look that up but anyway you're here so maybe you have the answer somebody has the answer it says so many tons of CO2 emissions is that the actual particles that they're able to somehow calculate that you know maybe through a filter and then how much if they put it all together back together I'm here so I'll pass the buck now right that is certainly a question for the Air Resources Board we work with them when we evaluate the TIRCP applications you know we it's a tailpipe emission calculation so I'm not sure if that's what's coming out of the tailpipe or how it then interacts with other gases in the atmosphere I did very poorly in physical sciences but ARB has the calculations for that and like the big redwoods they're probably well they are the biggest filters of CO2 in the world actually I don't know Jack Nelson maybe do you have the answer I mean I'll say that the gas itself has the gas itself has a weight and so that's what they're measuring is how much the gas itself actually weighs even though you know to your eye or something you don't think you know what's coming out of the tailpipe is anything that you could weigh or measure that's exactly what's being measured is how much does that gas actually let's try not to go out to the audience for questions we'll allow this one right here but let's try to get Commissioner questions go ahead Mr. Nelson so Commissioner Caput and just very briefly there are carbon dioxide molecules zipping around in a gaseous state in this room right now we're all breathing them in and out and so those are atoms and molecules that actually have mass so a volume of gas has a weight to it so that's that's the weight we're talking about so for instance if you get in a average emissions car in the United States right now you drive one mile you've emitted one pound of carbon dioxide you know another way to think of it that like the concerns me it's like rolling down your window every mile and throwing out a bag of garbage except for this stays in the atmosphere and drives global warming thank you thank you for that short consensus thank you very much so knowing that now the calculations for for TIRCP we do what we do have many factors but we we we calculate the emissions reduction per dollar spent and that's how we then evaluate the the water production Mr. Leopold thank you Chair thank you Mr. Gradenger for your presentation it is you packed a lot in in a short period of time and I appreciate your personal commitment as well it's it's it's good to serve as a role model on the and I know I've taken that the bus to the train and and the train up to Sacramento quite a bit I've never come all the way down here to Watsonville but I'm gonna maybe I'll have to add that onto my extra credit trip so that you there were a lot of good information that you shared with us and I won't get to all of it because I'm sure we could spend all day talking about it you talked about the future of reducing cost per mile and the trends with that beyond just more people using it is there any other thing that you think is is is driving that there's a number of factors top of my head is just these more efficient rail vehicles the the the gold standard being you know perhaps a battery electric ZEMU but we're we're making progress now with the new charger locomotives which are we're putting into service across the state with CM Joaquin's Capital Corridor and and next week in LA those are tier four diesel locomotives with with a lower fuel burn we're working with Capital Corridors working on a renewable diesel program and so they're able to hedge fuel costs and so there's some there's reduced fuel consumption savings there life cycle costs for maintenance of these new vehicles designed and engineered you know with with quality we're hoping we can reduce the life cycle maintenance costs significantly on these new locomotives on the operating side there are a number of things that we can be doing to reduce costs traditionally in the United States the the contractor is Amtrak Amtrak is a great partner we are also looking at opportunities to to find other operators there are many out there who who would like to run these services that happens a lot on the on the commuter rail side Couchain has a very successful has been reducing costs and providing great service significantly with private contractor Altamont commuter express has been doing that as well so there's opportunities to look at who your contractor is and what your costs to provide that service is we're also in a situation nationwide with Amtrak where today again our intercity operations are provided by Amtrak since 2008 the passenger rail investment and improvement act took place that changed the relationship between states and Amtrak so states where corridors that are less than 750 miles are operated they took on the cost responsibility for providing those services starting in and I think the act was 2008 and that happened around 2012 or 2013, 14 we now have line item costs in our contract from Amtrak for everything on the train onboard Wi-Fi coffee service conductors per car things like that we know a lot more about where the costs are coming from and so the the JPAs and those who are directly operating the service can work with the state to identify opportunities to reduce those costs so there's onboard there's operational costs there are equipment costs and then as we get to this sort of future state where we're just operating more efficiently where we don't have trains running from one and the line to the other and laying over for eight hours if we press it back into service we're getting more dollars out of that capital more revenue so just smarter operations as well so the future does not look like my grandfather's railroad it's a it's a it's a very different unless your grandfather's railroad is in pennsylvania yeah as a matter of fact my grandfather is in pennsylvania but we ran them very well in the 30s and 40s and it's been rough since then you mentioned that the state is spending about three percent of its transportation funding for for rail and although that sounds like a small number you've pointed out that it's hundreds of millions of dollars in these rail funding programs that you talked about are there going to be planning funds the capital funds funding for the the nice swedish I think it was swedish not switzerland swedish I was getting confused when the bus trains work together I mean that seems to be critical but will the will the state funding programs help support those kind of activities yes first of all on the three percent number that that is the projected capital cost for delivering this this rail vision we think the the that cost is about three percent of all the capital dollars that we spent till 2040 I don't know the number of what percent of the state transportation budget today is going into rail I don't know if that's less or more than three percent I just want to clarify that there will be planning opportunities there are in the in the TIRCP awards as I mentioned we gave the network integration dollars to some of the agencies TAMC received a little bit of network integration money and so we can look at things like cross-platform transfers coordination at PAHRO with the with the Santa Cruz branch line things like that there are other you know I believe Santa Clara has has a a self-help source as well that we can leverage that certainly on planning funding there are sustainable communities planning grants there are all the traditional planning sources we want to we want to help our partners bring those into the rail side into the rail planning side and we are working at the state to partner what we did we've created a Northern California mega regional rail working group which is the rail operators smart capital corridor a San Joaquin CalTrain and now TAMC where we're getting together and CalTrain or CalTrans is using some of its internal planning dollars with our partners now and we're investing in new tools to help us do this planning and so we want to try to do a lot of that in-house rather than going out to consultants as much as we can but as the money is identified we want to expand that work and create the foundation create the principles for planning the principles for timetabling scheduling and then begin to to do the further planning that gets into implementation No, I appreciate the statewide plan and I'm just thinking about our the local needs because I think it serves as a if we chose that route we'd want to use the sort of best practices in order to increase participation and ridership That's a great question I don't know the exact sources like I have a list of my top of my head but I will bring that question back and I'd be glad to if you want to reach out to me I'll try to get sources for planning dollars Yeah, I mean you can get it back to Mr. Dondaro that would be fantastic you talked about the congested corridors funding stream as well for multimodal you know one of the things that we're contemplating here is looking at both our rail and our trail so that that combination does that make us more competitive or if we only chose one mode would it make us less competitive? I don't want to speak to what is competitive and what isn't but I think I think it's certainly the kind of thing that that program is the legislation would probably say this is the kind of corridor we should be investing in you know it the idea very roughly speaking was was how do we add capacity in a corridor without adding single-ocument vehicle lanes you know it was looking at express lanes hot lanes rail transit how that program has been defined in the first round you know is probably going to be looked at again so I think providing feedback on future guidelines for the congested corridors program is an opportunity to make sure that project like years are considered great you mentioned something you showed some statistics about bike use and the smart train we had the the general manager and the head of the transportation agency here just two weeks ago gave a great presentation and we didn't really get into this very deeply but it was my understanding and you could correct me if I'm wrong is that they built a lot of bike lockers but they found that people weren't using them as many bike lockers as they wanted space on the train so they could do their first and last mile on both ends has that something that you see in other places or is that even correct yeah yeah that is and and it's we need an all the above strategy we need bike lockers we need the capacity on trains we need bike share systems if you look at the Netherlands they don't allow bikes on trains on a lot of their peak hour trains and so they and yet that's the main way people get around once they're not on a train and so that second bike or that bike sharing system is playing a very important role along with the nice place to park that second bike capital corridor struggles with this they've been struggling with it for many years now they have as I said around 11 or 12 percent bike access they have we cannot build enough bike racks in their trains for some of their peak hour trains we have we have the capacity for I think 17 bikes in the cab car and three more and every other train and they are oversubscribed so you know more than 30 people on most segments of their peak hour trains so capital corridors looking at rolling out the bike link lockers the bike share systems I think are going to be really helpful that giving people the opportunity to just leave their bike at home and hop on a bike share bike and leave at the station and forget about it it's going to be very helpful the other thing is there's just regional peculiarities in play I think in in Sonoma, Marin you've got a lot of those road bikers who maybe want to get out to the countryside on the train and they want to bring their you know carbon fiber racing bike with them they're not going to leave that right something at the end so everything is going to be a unique experience and that's why it needs to be in all the above solution but bike parking is a fairly easy thing to do the biggest hurdles are local permitting and finding the space sure yeah the the last question I'll ask I'll say there's lots of lots of talk about but you talked about what future train engines look like if you were you showed us the San Bernardino what they're using which is a primarily electric vehicle it seems like it looks like it could be battery electric or hydrogen worse looks yeah yeah and they're quieter and looking at that picture was hard to tell whether they were gonna it was low enough to require stations or whether they were gonna be able to just have people walk on do you have it some sense about that that that particular vehicle has about a 20 inch floor height and and so we could do low level platforms essentially entrance into it and and we're talk we're having a discussion all the time about whether we can standardize around a high level and a low level railcar boarding height in the state it's an issue that just needs to get we need to kind of wrap it up but I think that that globally if you look at at where these vehicles are are being designed originally as in Europe where they have a far worse situation in terms of a unifying standard for boarding heights they have really elected to go toward lower boarding heights but they still have 15 inch 18 inch 22 inch that they're dealing with but I think that in general the vehicles could for lines like the regional networks we're talking about in the Monterey Bay area I think that a low floor boarding level boarding to a poured concrete you know 18 or 20 inch platform is probably a very feasible solution it's not doesn't have to be a 48 inch high fair like smart house right well as a speaking as a transit board member I know that staff our staff is working on giving you an option to pay for your 69 W trip or your highway 17 trip on an app it's not immediate but we're but the but the staff is working on it we recognize that that's how people want to pay for their transit travel so maybe sometime soon you'll be able to come down here and just use your phone thank you and the wi-fi on the 17x bus worked really well excellent good to hear thank you safe store stay data I'll start at the far end on your work with commissioner Johnson oh thank you chair welcome thank you you strike me as kind of the half glass half full kind of guy it sang me in positive and actually I think the population of California is is that way I'm proud of the fact that people regularly will tax themselves and I think the high speed rail tax some 15 years ago was a good evidence of that um people who were confident that something like that would really pan out but I'm looking at just I think yesterday's orange county register saying it's time to pull the plug on high speed rail because of all the problems that you're having starting with 30 billion dollar promise and now projected possibly to go to 100 billion dollars so on the one hand I'm you know nobody wants to throw cold water on plans like these but the taxpayers pay attention and I think we're finding that they're losing a little bit of patience with things like high speed rail and you keep referencing that high speed rail is part of these plans that we see up here that things are going to work out but at the same time we've seen massive delays huge cost overruns and the cost overruns aren't just particular for high speed rail you find that most rail projects double in terms of the costs that are originally projected you talk about you know rail offers reliability and convenience but that's not quite true in some ways okay you got here and I again I'm not bringing it up but you did say that you got here via rail bus and whatever to get here in a car probably would have taken you two and a half hours how long did it take for you to get here using all those modes was it five or six that's five yeah yeah okay so even though in this room right here people talk about all the benefits of how great it is to bike how great it is to take trains and buses and so forth people vote with their feet and with their cars and with their transportation modality and most people say it isn't convenient enough for me to change my method of transportation so I just want to on the one hand I think places like Bart Caltrans I forget the name of the train that goes from say the San Diego corridor which is filled and does a terrific job there are plenty of plenty of places where transportation with rail works beautifully and investment to those populated corridors should be really really expanded but I notice most of your examples use places like Switzerland you know that has 15,000 square miles not 165,000 like we thousand like we have in California with the population density that is four or five six times more than we have in California so on the one hand your presentation impressive I like it but on the other hand you know the taxpayers have a way of evaluating and being critical and I would caution you just not to throw out things that eventually will find the face of what the taxpayers expectations are and what the deliverables are I mean that was your word the deliverables unless we quote deliver then we're going to lose credibility and high speed rail the bullet train has lost a lot of credibility but some people are just hanging on tenaciously and I'm not going to put words in your mouth but you sound like one of them that we're going to hold on to this high speed rail thing when editorial boards taxpayers I think even Lieutenant Governor Newsom has kind of backed off saying I don't know if I support this much like he didn't support the Trans-Base Center that got built so again I don't want to throw cold water on but I think I think the taxpayers have to be represented and I'm just throwing that out there thank you no I appreciate all that and you're right like I said we do need to we need to show the benefits of what we're doing and we need to show that we're changing the dynamic of how we deliver the rail system and what service we deliver and we have to do that quickly or we will run out of political capital to do that and I think one of the things that's interesting is we talk about private investment well I think we're getting to the point now in California where we are having network rail from England SBB the Swiss Rail Operator Deutsche Bahn's Consulting Group they are they are growing their presence in California because I think that they see the opportunity to do what they've done here and they know that there's a role for them to play so I think that even if it hasn't happened yet laying out the vision saying that this is where we want to go is attracting the intention of those who have done it and I think that by combining their expertise and experience with our willingness is our best chance to get it done it may not happen it very certainly could not happen but the alternative is something that congested roadways that cannot be expanded will only get worse and so I think the rail plan really focuses on high-speed rail is the spine that will tie together a lot of the benefits but the region the state rail plan really looks at these regional networks that are going to help people every day and I think that that is something that we have to invest in or we will hit a wall when we hit the wall in congestion but I agree it's not a guarantee we've got to do it differently than we've done in the past if we want to be successful thank you Mr. Chair yeah I just want thank you for your presentation it was great when you were here last time I think your enthusiasm is really real and important and necessary because this is exciting what we're talking about I think one of the things that's sort of related to the points that Commissioner Johnson made is are being constrained around the development of technology because while there's really great things on the horizon for instance those of us who are on the metro board we are waiting excruciatingly long for what we're very excited about which are electric buses but we can only go as fast as the buses are being developed and the development of that changes all the time I personally am leasing an electric vehicle because I know that the batteries in electric vehicles are changing as we speak and in a couple years when that leases up I'll get a different electric vehicle that's even better and goes farther and more energy efficient so I think that that has to be really talked about too because that is one of the challenges to the exciting parts of the multimodal system you just outlined is the costs and benefits of a very rapidly changing technology which also changes the cost of that and then also the infrastructure and so I'm not sure that everybody fully appreciates the complexity of that when we're talking about such combining all these different modes and making them work and making them work within existing infrastructure that doesn't really support that so there's my comments thank you yeah and we're working with PG&E and some of the utilities are now coming to us and saying we have we want to spend money we have to spend money settlement money but we want to help be a part of this and and we know with our toe in the water it's not going to be easy but we certainly and ARB is saying all electric by 2030 and I know CTA is is doing a great job working for you all to say let's figure out how to make it happen and we'll work with you morning thank you and welcome and thank you for an excellent presentation some of the questions have already been asked that were on my mind but I I wanted to just mix and match the numbers and there were a lot of them and understandably so but I did you say to that today that in the integrated system there's 120,000 trips in California now and the target is to get to 1.3 and does that equal the getting to 7% is that or is that correct yes that's correct and and and I I'll have to get back to you on on the 7% where we're finalizing the numbers whether that is trips or passenger miles traveled but I believe that number was trips one point yeah I just to 1.3 we have a nightmare here on highway one and I just wonder what percentage of of those single passenger vehicles if they were if there were two people in what 10 or 20% of them that's probably not for you to answer but would that alleviate our problem if we can get people to ride share and all that you know I just I don't know I'd be interested in those kind of figures from our own but do you for when you have a nightmare like this and I guess it depends on how many lanes of travel there are two or four or six or whatever but when is there any criteria to says if we can reduce that single car single driver to two or three people in a car this will alleviate the situation is there any kind of a data that has that kind of a well result I guess it's certainly a part of the solution that they can't hurt to try to do that but I would look to the hot lane experiences that are you know and I'm Sam Mateo is working on it the Northern Virginia area has been doing hot lanes and trying to drive up the the number of passengers per vehicle through pricing but but it's certainly an approach that I mean more people per car is going to help and in the last the last mile the assumption is always that people would walk or ride a bike to for that last mile not because you'd have a if you were going to use the integrated system and they would drive the car to the station that that creates some real planning concerns does that how does that mix with what you're presenting to I think we're heading into a really good future there because yes we want to get as many of those trips on on feet and bikes as possible but that's not reality it's it's a very small portion but people will you know automobile will be the dominant access mode in most places for a very long time but with TNCs with lift and uber the thing that that does is you got to deal with the congestion still they're they're gonna they're gonna create local traffic congestion but that drives down the demand for very expensive and difficult to build parking and I think that's the the silver lining with with the fact that even if 85 percent of people still come in a motor vehicle it that motor vehicle is gonna get out of there and go pick up someone else a big chunk of those trips I think are gonna become lift and uber and we're we don't see the TNCs as competition to the rail mode we see them as complimentary and figuring out what the role of rail is and what the role of those first-class mile providers are what will balance out our time but but I think that there's the big benefit is if if uber and lift are used for the short trips there's access trips and rail is used for those line-haul long-distance trips at least economic the economic mind in me is saying that's the ideal and I think that's where the market may go and it reduces reduces the need for expensive parking great thank you for your enthusiasm Commissioner Bertrand thank you so I want to talk a little bit about bike storage either end and a little bit about technology a lot of people talk about technology but I have a different direction so I commuted on the SB from San Francisco Socom Valley for multiple years and it took me about a year to get a bike storage thing so I took my car to the station Forth and Townsend and then I had a walk many of my passengers would actually talk about joining together to get a junky car in Sunnyvale and then that's how they got to work so we've gone a long ways and SB couldn't allow me or wouldn't allow me rather to bring my bike on board which would have been great can you comment on the effect of bicycle riders or commuters by the placement of more bike storage units at a station I don't have numbers for general use but from my own personal experience I think that what the like you said you would sign up for a bike parking locker took forever yeah some people never get off the list this this current technology the bike link lockers unfortunately my wallet is so thick with these cards I'm going to have a spinal condition soon but the bike link locker allows public access you know you wait three days in the mail for this to come through and then I can use any available open locker I don't have to sign up for a three-year list for that one spot that then only one person ever gets to use it's kind of parking sharing and I think that that is making bike parking more efficient and more equitable right now and so that's going to be a big part of it cities are also looking at bike garages you know sort of we call them special parking areas bike spas in Sacramento and you know a maybe even a valet or a staffed nice facility there's again like I mentioned with with peculiarities between systems there are a lot of solutions to bike storage and bike accessibility on and off trains and I think every market's got to look at what's best for them but I think technology like this bike link card is is letting us really expand the accessibility of using your bike using your own bike thank you it's a station I think another thing is safety there's a lot of theft bikes here in Santa Cruz for instance and you mentioned carbon fire that could be a $3,000 bike I don't know that I'd bring my bike into a storage area that costs that much but I think addressing safety and pilferage and damage to bikes that are stored is important my second question is around technology you talked a little bit about experimenting with different power sources and things like that very exciting you also talked about trying to integrate different systems which is also very exciting to reduce costs so are you in the bird seat in a sense when you're talking about trying to come up with common standards so that technology isn't all sorts of things all over the area you know in terms of what's being developed but trying to reduce costs by coming up with some common standards so that in terms of maintenance in terms of interconnectivity in terms of a whole variety of things that could be solved by common technology is being addressed at this early stage thanks I wouldn't say I'm in the bird seat but we are able to fund R&D and I think that some things are becoming clear that these are actual potential technologies and these may not be and so if we can zero in over the next three to four years on this is going to work and this isn't then we can begin to start thinking about standards when it comes to propulsion yeah because as an individual vendor is trying to decide which direction to go that could help tremendously because development costs are extremely expensive and that's something they have to carry until they could sell their product so you could help out a lot that's why I asked about the bird seat thing yeah and we're working with a lot of the rail vendors today we're not in a procurement right now so we're able to have conversations with them and there's really only five or six major rail manufacturers in the world Amtrak is going through procurement we're helping them we're listening in on those briefings but we're going out and saying you know we don't just want to train we want to train that's more efficient and that has a low platform or whatever it may be and California it's an odd place to be but when California speaks the vendors listen and it's cyclical in this country every 50 years a big order comes in a few companies compete and then they go out of business for 30 years now we're opening up where the market is so small with those major vendors that they're going off around the world doing great R&D selling great products and then they come back here and they have something to offer us because our standards are adapting to theirs global standards but with the dollar amounts and the growth that we could be seeing we actually have the ability to help kind of shape the market and tell the builders standardize around this and really be a powerful buyer thank you Commissioner Kauffman Gomez yes thank you what I what I haven't heard really in your conversation because I know this is primarily about passengers is the F word which is the freight freight's going to be using these lines as well and I would imagine that we should see some funding as a result of freight in trying to bump those up do you have any figures of the changes that could happen with freight as a result of developing this rail system and as a whole I don't have those numbers on hand they we do discuss freight significantly the whole chapter of it in the rail plan and what we do want to do is we want to look to any opportunity to shift goods movement onto rail but at the same time we're also trying to use more of that rail capacity for passenger we have very good relationships with the BNSF and the Unipacific Railroad and we're talking about new approaches to using that capacity so that they can continue to grow while we also grow we're also talking about where are the no-go lines for passenger trains and if we you know if we do not go there with passenger trains do you have another opportunity for us for passenger elsewhere we're having those discussions we're also working closely with a lot of the short line railroads some of the there's large holding companies which operate many short lines in california and we've been having a lot of discussions with with two of them in particular in the last year looking at opportunities to to whether it's going out and finding a single shipper on a line or finding a market along a line that may produce many shippers we're working with them they also own a lot of these branch lines and so if we build a relationship with them it's going to help us expand the passenger service onto those branch lines as well and and and we can invest together but we're certainly supporting not just moving people but moving more freight by rail and and in southern california with the ports of long beach and we are working very closely with up and b and s f and well i'm hoping as a result of that we also see some funding that comes from that angle because obviously if they're going to benefit from this they should also financially contribute and also I know that we we have has there been any development in the areas that have to do with a collaboration between the rail and housing component because i know that there's a lot of interest in developing housing along the pockets of the corridors and the reason why I bring this up is there's a divide here of either your housing and this is the housing bond this is transportation this is a transportation bond but if there's a collaborative effort have you seen any of those kind of models work anywhere in california that says let's let's see what we can do to to say okay if we can do an incentive here that helps the housing demand in these pockets that will also contribute to the transportation component have you had anything like that in conversation throughout or anywhere yeah i'm still learning the alphabet soup of agencies in sacramento but there are a couple that i know are working very closely on this strategic growth council department of housing and development are working with ARB uh office of research and planning they're all they're all they all realize I would say at the leadership level that we have to think about the connection between transportation and land use and housing and so there are programs for planning and technical assistance that are out there you know the senator from san francisco had the the housing bill last year which which didn't get through a committee but there are thoughts about legislation but there is a lot of activity going on among the agencies that touch on housing and transportation and there's collaboration and funding opportunities for planning and I think that at least they're in a very good place they recognize it the need for it and I only hope that coordination continues we'll we'll we'll continue to do our part yeah because the thing is if you it's a blend I mean our our measure D here was a blend we all pitched in on what our compromise was in order for us to get that two-thirds vote and and being able to put that together and it this may be an opportunity in terms of getting that kind of blend that people know that we need this and others that we know that we need that but how can we work collaboratively to make that happen and it might be something as one of the models used elsewhere too it like the the bucket list of where the local money came from and how creative local jurisdictions have been maybe a list of like some ideas to give to the RTC is this is how it worked in Marin this is how it worked in San Diego the LA whatever the sources because I'll tell you that we're tapped out on the dollar in terms of the tax that we're charging our consumers in this in this county or in our area here so going back to them saying you know we're going to come after you for another tax we want to know on a community basis here or county basis how do we get creative of where this money is going to come from that needs to be extra on top of what we've already gone out to the taxpayers for we're going to have to figure that out and I know that there's some answers that are out there would be helpful for us to see some of that that's happened elsewhere for them to come up with that last last matching amount of money that's that's needed for these projects we we we talk about the efficiencies on the rail system in my division but but I think that there's office if we can tie it together with housing if we think about transportation planning and land use planning together then that's also a huge opportunity to deliver more with those tax dollars that you're getting already thank you well thank you Mr. Granger for that thorough presentation especially the detailed answers to all our questions I'm going to have you do a step aside now and open up to the public see if they have any questions so if there's any questions from the public when you come up now go ahead and have two minutes for for questions you might want to point out that we're not necessarily going to answer those questions right now we're going to take the same format and if you construct staff we'll take the questions and if we can just post these on our website like we did the last presentation so sure go ahead Mr. Nelson Jack Nelson and this is just a very brief comment one aspect of transportation that didn't get mentioned yet in this discussion is induced travel so you build a freeway lane it's it's it attracts more traffic it fills up and so when it once it's filled up your solution your next solution in that strategy is you have to build another lane because cars have the demand for space and you can't fix that with the train the train car fills up you know you roll out train service there's the demand is there the train car fills up at that point you don't have to build another rail line you just add a train car thanks thank you hello Peter Stanger what I got out of it was different from maybe what others did when the speakers said about the width of the trail and the train rails I don't know that he recognized that in many places here in Santa Cruz County it gets too narrow he couldn't take a bus out to La Selva Beach because we have no bus service to La Selva Beach but he would have walked out on the bluffs and he would have seen that it gets too narrow for both a bicycle lane and a train track he could have looked up to the La Selva trestle and he would have seen that the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation had built a new bridge but they didn't provide any room for the trail as well as far as the they deviated on segment you all deviated with segment 17 of the rail trail and now when I came in on Beach Street I could look across with all the tanker cars parked there with liquid propane gas which evidently is off limits also for the trail to be built and then when you think about the Capitola trestle your idea has well the original proposal was to just dump everybody off the train track trail and have them go through Capitola Village so I really have to wonder about what where we're going with the Regional Transportation Commission also what you could do is the bullet train comes down from CalTrain and it comes to the station and dirt in at one o'clock 105 but the Cal but the Highway 17 bus leaves at one o'clock so it gives us a 45 minute wait thank you morning Chair Batroff and fellow commissioners my name is Mark Maceti Miller I'm a professional engineer I'm also Chair of the Friends of the Rail and Trail I know I've been here many times before I wanted to add my thanks to Mr. Gadinger for an excellent presentation thank you very much for coming down and sharing your your thoughts about the state rail plan with us I had a couple of questions one was that looked to me like Santa Cruz County was an integral part of the state rail plan but that timeframe was 2040 and I'm wondering how do we get Santa Cruz County to be part of that state rail plan by 2030 what do we have to do to accelerate our participation in this statewide integrated rail system I like the idea of being able to get to LA in two hours that's like 45 minutes of San Francisco so how do we accelerate second I was pleased to see that there's money available for planning it seems to me like that would be money well spent would be to start planning how we're going to integrate our local branch line into the state rail network and sooner would be better so since that money's available for those purposes we ought to get after it second or third Ms. Kauffman Gomez brought up the idea of creative financing and I think that's in the forefront of everyone's mind housing is a clear need in our community transit is a clear need in our community and maybe this is an opportunity for us to bind those together in a way that benefits all of us so some creative thinking around that maybe there's some planning money that can be spent there and I'm glad Mr. Sanger brought up the the Selva-Tressel bridge because I was wanted to remind you that that might be a possibility to cantilever a rail trail off of that bridge like we're doing in Santa Cruz right now or like you're doing in Santa Cruz right now at substantial cost savings thank you thank you Michael Sain again campaign for sustainable transportation to answer help answer your question Mr. McPherson it looked up a few of these rideshare things as one U.S. study indicates the global car fleet could be reduced by a third if sharing schemes were widely adopted and to give you some specific numbers it says car sharing schemes whether point to point or free-floating also lead to reduce car ownership with studies indicating five to 15 cars are replaced for each shared car added to a shared car fleet so if you go between five and 15 10 cars could be replaced just with one car share so those are the basics I wanted to ask one question this gentleman excellent presentation what year specifically I know you showed up here but I I missed it would we be able to go to Pajaro station and points east or up to the Bay Area on Caltrain or any type of train thank you thank you Hi, Brett Garrett I just want to ask if Caltrans is considering elevated transit as a form of rail I strongly encourage doing so in particular looking at the SkyTrend system that expects to attain 200 miles an hour I mean there's a lot of doubts about the high-speed rail and whether the budget will accommodate that and it just seems like the SkyTrend system could achieve the goals at a much lower cost and it would be worth taking a tiny sliver of the high-speed rail budget and putting it into building a prototype and seeing if it works I'm really impressed with the talk about having coordinated schedules so that you can you know just go across the station and get to the other transit but I just want to point out that that would be so much simpler with the pod car system where there's no schedule that they're just on whatever schedule the person is on it just seems to me it would make those goals so much simpler to attain so thank you very much thank you good morning Yannicka's Joss with Bike Santa Cruz County connecting to the state rail system and the state in general via transit it would be a transformative opportunity for our community both in sustainability our economy and accessibility we currently you know to go down south you need to take the greyhound and that is you know not convenient or accessible for people the jump bike success in Santa Cruz right now shows how successful a first last mile or that there is a first last mile solution right here in our community already I really appreciate Mr. Gradinger's spending time today on the cohesion of bikes and trains the average trip distance for a cyclist is three miles to live a car free or car light life we need to have a long distance option he said if you're willing to make it work there's always a way we need to lean into the future and catch up with the world's transportation innovation and continue to explore passenger rail in Santa Cruz County thank you thank you hello I very much again like the spirit of this speaker series I like the idea that we're exploring options I like the idea that we're bringing here to try to help us find the best solution for our county I wish that Mr. Triplett when he was here would have been allotted equal time to Mr. Montserran if I'm saying his name correctly it just would have been more fair and equitable um I wish there were more diversity in this series and that it better reflected the full range of things that we are currently looking at in the UCIS and also the full range of options that the state of California is looking at as solutions for our whole state many of many areas of which are facing similar grid like problems to us what if we were to fully explore these options Mr. Gradenger mentioned today it wasn't the focus of his talk but he did mention the congested corridors program which is funding HOT and other highway solutions which are not included in our UCIS and which are not currently being looked at here but which might actually be the most equitable climate friendly solutions for our county I hope we have the courage to fully explore all options Mr. Johnson mentioned yesterday an orange county op-ed there was also one in our own Sentinel yesterday looking at problems with the DMV and a second time calling for an end to the bullet train what if we not only wait for our own unified corridor study results we try to make sure we're not tied into a freight rail plan that closes off our options and we maybe even wait for the November election to see who our new governor is and what he's going to do about the state rail plan because we as a county surely don't want to tie ourselves to something that dies with a new governor so thank you thank you I sure thank Kyle for the presentation and it's very exciting to me and I think hopefully all of you all have had the pleasure of being in Europe and other places where rail is a is a staple as I observe the different camps you know everybody has a preferred mode PRT and Greenway and wait wait wait we we hear the same thing over and over again wait till this study is done do another study if I don't get my way we better do another study wait till there's a different president and I mean when I stood here in June of 2015 I think it was when the when the feasibility study came back and it said this is a good idea this could work unfortunately they they scored the highest two two scenarios that didn't go all the way to to Watsonville and I thought well then go to Watsonville for gonna say I feel like we've been waiting a long time and we've been doing a lot of studies and here we stand today the difference between three years ago and today is Pajaro station is a part of a plan that's funded and being built by Monterey there's a state rail plan there's 136.8 billion in that plan our population weighted share of that fund if it stays intact is $950 million now I know that's that's not money that's there yet but if it if it came out that's enough for three systems four five maybe this is you know I'm waiting for the unified corridors investment study to come back I'm confident that it's gonna score passenger rail service well and I sure hope I live to see the point where we can as a community and I know it has to be a community decision can commit to moving forward with with passenger rail and a trail thank you you okay we're going to go ahead and close this presentation again Mr. Grander thank you very much for coming we're going to get the questions that we've assembled here to you and you can get them back to our office and we'll post them on our website so with that we'll move on to the next presentation which is a highway one bus on shoulder feasibility study this will be Sarah Christensen from our office welcome Sarah thank you so today we're going to receive a presentation from the consultant about the Monterey Bay Area feasibility study for bus operations on the shoulder of highway one we're also going to receive an update on the highway one 41st Soquel auxiliary lanes project and how the potential bus on shoulder improvements may be able to be integrated into that project and then lastly we'll be asking for authorization to enter in in negotiations for a co-op with Metro to fund this initial effort and so with that I'm just going to hand it right over to Bill Bill Hurl he is with CDM Smith and he was in charge of this feasibility study and I'm going to hand it over to Bill thank you Sarah welcome thank you good morning so this was a very interesting and exciting project and I'm happy to be able to brief you on it this morning first start out with a little bit of the the history of the well what we're going to talk about we're going to talk about the history the findings of the feasibility study itself and then what some of the next steps will be some of you may be aware but in 2013 AB 946 was passed and that allows both Monterey and Santa Cruz counties to implement bus on shoulder operations as a pilot project subject to approval by Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol and pursuant to that Monterey Salinas Transit actually obtained funding from Ambag and also from Tamsi and Metro to conduct this particular study and the study covers both counties Monterey and Santa Cruz though today of course I'm going to focus on what's happening here in Santa Cruz County in Monterey County it also covers the use of the Monterey branch rail corridor very germane to the earlier topic this morning in terms of the project itself we started in December 2016 and we most of the data that we collected is from 2016 and then we had many meetings with stakeholders RTC staff and Metro or key participants here in Santa Cruz County and then we issued our feasibility study just about a little over six weeks ago so bus on shoulder I think when people hear the idea of bus on shoulder they envision a freeway sort of like Highway 1 was this morning going northbound where traffic is just at a crawl and that buses are zooming by on the shoulder at let's say 55 60 miles an hour well that's not what bus on shoulder is bus on shoulder is a very controlled operating scenario where buses only use the shoulder when traffic speeds are below 35 miles per hour and then the bus operators are specially trained in how to use the shoulder and one of the key things is that they never are allowed to go more than 15 miles an hour faster than the traffic so there is essentially a way of bypassing congested traffic on the shoulder but operating in a very safe format in order for bus on shoulder to work there's certain things that have to exist and one of them is the shoulder has to be wide enough and strong enough to support the buses at least 10 feet wide is the standard that sort of evolved on a national basis 12 feet would be better if you could have it and also we have to make sure the shoulder area is clear for the buses there aren't signs that overhang it or other obstacles that would impede or interfere with the buses and by the way there's over 500 miles of bus on shoulder operations throughout the United States so it's not a it's not a new idea it's been inexistent since the late since the 1990s our study area here in Santa Cruz focuses primarily on the area between Morrissey Boulevard and Freedom Boulevard and Highway One is your well aware one of the key things that's going to be happening on Highway One is the development of the auxiliary lanes and there are in the map shows but there are some auxiliary lanes sections in place now but by the year 2025 we expect that there'll be auxiliary lanes all the way from Morrissey Boulevard to State Park Drive and then beyond that to the south further in the future but that's you'll see that's an important aspect of what we looked at with this particular study so one of the things that you have to have for bus on shoulder work is congestion because that's the whole idea you bypass congestion so I think you have that I don't think that's an issue what we did here is we we use cellular data actually from a company called INREX and for an entire year this is for the year of 2016 and the dark shaded area or the red area shows where speeds drop below 35 miles an hour which as I mentioned before is sort of the threshold for bus on shoulder and down the left hand column that's time of day and across the top our locations it's a little hard to read but basically what it tells us is that from between those areas I talked about freedom boulevard to Morrissey throughout in this case three o'clock in the afternoon till seven o'clock at night there is congestion on a typical this is for what's called 50 percentile or the typical average day so congestion definitely exists and this same pattern exists in both the this is a southbound but exists northbound in the morning southbound in the afternoon very directional so to address the situation we developed a number of alternatives and the first one is the idea of what I would call classic bus on shoulder the goal was just see what we can do with the existing shoulders and where can we actually find enough width and the right operating conditions to have bus on shoulder we call the interim because the idea was it might happen before the auxiliary lanes were put in place because as you can imagine once the auxiliary lanes are under construction that's going to change everything in terms of the shoulders and so forth what we found was that there's some ability to do bus on shoulder in the southbound direction almost no ability in the northbound direction this is on the right hand shoulder by the way we also looked at the left hand shoulder but that is even worse there's really no opportunity to do it on the left hand shoulder just because the shoulders are not wide enough this is a very old highway it hasn't changed much over the years it's the shoulders are not up to current standards either in terms of their width or their strength so in order to do any extensive bus on shoulder it involves quite an investment but there are some sections we identified where you could possibly do it those are the red sections on the yes yes yes sorry I should have pointed that out and then there are two different options that we looked at which sort of piggyback on the auxiliary lane project they could not occur before the auxiliary lanes they could occur at the same time or after the auxiliary lanes are put in place and the first one we call the hybrid because the way it would operate is if you understand auxiliary lanes they're basically a connection between the on ramp and the off ramp so it's a lane in between the two but it does not extend through the interchanges so between the interchanges where the auxiliary lanes exist the buses would be in the auxiliary lane along with the other traffic auxiliary lanes tend to operate faster than the general freeway lanes so the buses would get some time advantage from that and then as the auxiliary lane ends and goes into the off ramp the bus would just continue straight on ahead and go into the shoulder through the interchange area part of the auxiliary lane project is make sure those shoulders meet the current state standard so they would be upgraded to the 10 foot minimum and so we're essentially taking advantage of that investment that you're planning to make with this particular option the second option is pure bus on shoulder so it takes advantage of the fact that with the auxiliary lanes the shoulders will be improved also all the way but in this case the bus stays on it gets on the shoulder and essentially stays there it does pose an operating challenge in that as you approach the you're in the shoulder and then as you approach where there's an off ramp the bus has to merge back out because the shoulder there's a shoulder then there's the auxiliary lane so you have to get into the auxiliary lane and then onto the shoulders in order for it to continue so there's a jogging movement there but even so the bus's this concept has worked elsewhere and it is workable but it does have that one operating issue so the option A is definitely much more operationally feasible than option B although they're both quite feasible from a bus on shoulder operations standpoint and then the third alternative was to look at the project that's already been studied previously and as part of the regional transportation plan in terms of the long range and that's HOV lanes so one difference with what we looked at is that the Santa Cruz metro asks us what's sort of the best segment for HOV lanes where you get the most benefit so we looked at all the traffic information and we looked at the engineering information regarding costs so the best segment would be from Soquel Avenue all the way to State Park you get the most bang for the buck with that particular one so this would be typical you know be adding a lane in each direction in the median buses could use the lane but also car pools and other exempt like clean air vehicles and so forth could use the lane that's kind of the just typical HOV lane investment and you can imagine this is a much bigger investment than the other options that we're talking about fact this table kind of summarizes that for each of the alternatives so what we found starting with the interim bus on shoulder is that quite a bit of money would need to be spent about 14 million dollars to upgrade the current shoulders in the south bound direction for certain segments to make this particular option were and there was a there's a small gain in transit ridership from that because it's only it's only a certain portion of the freeway so the cost benefit ratio was very low was only 0.2 and we're we're looking for our cost benefit ratio benefit should be bigger than cost so it should be higher than one now the two options using the auxiliary lanes both did quite well their cost is relatively low in the range of 8 million dollars ridership benefits are pretty strong and the cost benefit ratio for both of them are strong we I think because of the operational issue that I talked about the first option tends to in our minds to be more practical and more feasible than the second but again as I said they're both quite feasible the third option the HOV lane project and we only looked at benefits to transit riders for this project so the cost benefits very low because of the high cost 364 million is what we estimated so it's quite high so our key findings here first no surprise to anybody there's very severe congestion secondly metro and we I didn't talk about this but they experience a lot of issues when they do operate on highway one and and frankly they've somewhat avoided any major service on highway one because it is so congested and unreliable and then the current shoulders just really aren't suitable for any practical bus on shoulder operation although there could be something done in the southbound direction but it probably doesn't make a lot of sense given that the auxiliary lane projects are are coming relatively soon the option so if you did want to do bus on shoulder by the way the best segment is actually south of the railroad bridges there's the shoulders as you go further south the shoulders get better and wider of course the problem there is that the congestion is not as severe in that area so so the primary of congestion is kind of been bypassed when you get to that point so the best opportunity is either option 2a and 2b but option 2a which is the hybrid solution using auxiliary lanes with the bus on shoulder through the interchanges definitely is operationally superior to option 2b and this is again looking at that particular option it's relatively straightforward really all it needs to be done for the most part is signing and striping and there are a few areas where more detail engineering may identify some small obstacles and things that need to be removed but nothing nothing significant that we know of far as next steps of course today today we're talking with you there are presentations coming up I guess a week from Friday Santa Cruz Metro and then next Wednesday at TAM seat for this and in both counties there's interest in further evaluating the bus on shoulder here with the auxiliary lanes in Monterey they have the same problem with their shoulders not being adequate but there's is still interest in it but there's also strong interest in use of the rail right of way for buses there in Monterey County so so with that I guess I'll turn it back Sarah basically the goal at this point is to see if we can expedite the bus on shoulder elements has to go through the Caltrans process of a project initiation it has to have a project approval and environmental document and the intent is to expedite this process with the goal of catching up the bus on shoulder elements prior to the auxiliary lanes project going to construction in 2020 ideally we would like to construct as one package to limit construction impacts to the general public we see a lot of benefit and efficiencies with that so Metro we've been working closely with them and we've basically the next step is to develop an operating concept for the facility and Metro has pending their board approval have agreed to invest $50,000 for this effort to develop this concept this is going to be an iterative process with Caltrans Metro the RTC also CHP to develop what's called a concept of operations we're looking at a few streamlined project delivery approaches for the bus on shoulder elements to get them caught up and hopefully if we can achieve that we can get it into one construction package so an update on the Highway 1 41st Soquel auxiliary lanes project back in May you authorized us to negotiate a cooperative agreement with Caltrans for the PS&E phase which we've been doing we've been going back and forth and we're very close to having a cooperative agreement hopefully in September I'll be back to ask for your approval for that we've also been very busy with procuring a professional engineering consultant to prepare the construction documents for the auxiliary lanes for the PS&E phase what we did with the procurement was as the feasibility study was finishing up we decided to add this evaluation of the operating concept to the scope of work for the engineering consultant so this kind of allows us to really get going quickly if we all agree that that's what we want to do so hopefully we'll have a consultant on board in September as well and so today we're here to ask authorization for the executive director to enter into negotiations for a cooperative agreement with Metro to fund the preparation of the operating concept for the bus on shoulder and the reason we need that is because it will be the RTC's consultant who's doing the PS&E for the highway project who will be doing the bus on shoulder development of the concept and Metro has contributed $50,000 to that effort so with that I'm sure there's questions so we're here to help answer okay thank you for that presentation so what we'll do is we'll have a commissioner questions then we'll open up to the public and then we'll bring it back for a recommendation and consideration so we'll start down this end Mr. Mohr any questions Mr. Rodkin first of all let me express my huge excitement about this if you think about buses even if they only go 20% faster which is something in the range we're talking about here people drive stuck in this traffic look and watch a bus and it's not going by them at 60 is the presenter made clear but going by faster and the auxiliary lanes already definitely move faster from before so Cal if you're going south but so I'm very excited about this possibility the Metro also would save money because it takes us we waste money and time with the buses stuck in traffic so the extent to which it's faster would free money for additional buses to actually be on this system and so the over impacted buses like this route 71 and 69's could benefit from this as well so I think this is huge my first question is there are some costs that weren't mentioned but I assume would be part of the the cost of this and maybe this is too detailed too early but my quick for example when you go under the when it goes let's take plan A where it goes the where it goes under the bridge at Soquel Avenue you have cars coming there's a traffic signal system and the cars enter the highway going south after the bridge but the buses are going to be coming underneath there you're going to have to have some traffic signal cost I assume to have the bus know that it's okay and it's not enough very much merge room there at Soquel Avenue and some of the other bridges so I'm sort of assuming that you have to have a traffic signal coordination system that's like a hundred thousand dollars or something another cost would be the fact that on some of these bridges you have a slope coming down from the side that you might have to cut back on and build a retaining wall so that you actually have the 10 to 12 feet that you need to make this thing work I think so when you talk about the 14 I've got the price right here the 14 million dollars for this with the auxiliary lanes addition to the auxiliary lane costs does that include things like the signal prioritization thing or the any kind of construction under the bridge to make a there's enough room and I assume you've studied that the buses all can go under the bridges that far over on the right side right you know where it would be on the shoulder at this point there's a lot of questions wrapped together so let me start at the beginning well the first thing is that the cost that we estimate was around eight million dollars nine dollars and so it it includes whatever physical things we saw needed to be changed but it's important to keep in mind the auxiliary lane projects do address some of these deficiencies of the shoulders through the interchanges so that like the retaining wall situation that you talked about if that if the shoulder isn't wide enough now then that type of thing would be done it wouldn't be where the auxiliary lane is though because it's be under the bridge the auxiliary lane is going to go turn off the exit at Soquel and you're going to be going on shoulder where there's currently no improvement there's there's some space that I looked at it today as I drove down yeah no but it it it is actually part of it and then the where in general when the when you're on the shoulder and you approach an on ramp the operator again they're especially trained so they in a situation like you're describing they would they would decide either on decide just to get probably just get out of the shoulder and go into the into the regular lane at that location when there's cars entering yeah wherever there's an issue so that's the whole concept to bus on shoulder is is make use of the flexibility of the operation and don't spend a lot of money on capital improvements that's what makes it so effective and then the the traffic signaling thing that's something that will be looked at as part of this next phase that Sarah was talking about that there's spent some discussion with Caltrans about it one thing we want to be more of a signaling type thing than rather than what's called a ramp metering approach understand so but the bus driver would know when the cars are coming in when they have a green light versus when they don't or something that seems like just well there would be a transmitter on the bus and there'd be a detector at the traffic signal so as the bus approached the traffic signal would detect that and it could preempt the signal and then stop the stop the traffic on the ramp great that those costs are not included in the eight million dollars so we that's that would be separate so and then my second and last question is the if when after the auxiliary lanes are constructed in both directions which is the plan would there then be the ability to have this bus on shoulder going north or not it wouldn't work without the auxiliary lanes but when the the 2a project with the auxiliary lanes that goes in both directions it's in both directions right wasn't sure i understood that yeah i'm sorry i didn't make that clear it wouldn't it wouldn't work just with bus on shoulder currently without the auxiliary lanes because there's not room on the shoulder you're telling us but with the auxiliary lanes it would be working both directions morning and evening that's right yes i have to say i'm more than prepared to make this motion to get into this but i'll wait till the time comes right thank you that sorry just to clarify the auxiliary lanes project widening is just between the on ramp and the next off ramp so where we're talking about putting the buses on shoulder at the interchanges that pavement widening it's not very much but that pavement widening would be part of the bus on shoulder improvement so it would have to have its own project approval environmental document we haven't costed everything out because we haven't you don't have really a concept yet but later this year we should have a cost and so we're anticipating because it's only at the interchanges the um the capital cost is really going to be not very much and so we're looking at potentially having a streamlined project delivery approach because of that and then also at interchanges that it's already disturbed and so it's most likely not going to require extensive you know biological or any kind of studies like that because it's already it's already disturbed area so we're hoping to to move it forward quickly thank you i'm going to go out of order for a minute i've got a commissioner that has to leave in five minutes commissioner chase yeah I want to thank you for the presentation chair and I had an opportunity to receive a presentation in the metro capital committee meeting I guess that was that this week or last week this week it all gets combined and so we were supportive of the presentation and recommendation to move it forward to the metro transit district to discuss so I just I have to excuse myself so I just wanted to say thank you for the presentation it's exciting we did get to hear this earlier this weekend and appreciate that this is coming forward because it's really exciting and I think a game changer thanks commissioner commission did you want to connect leave about noon myself but I as chair of metro I think this is very exciting first of all it addresses two issues that we're on in measure D to address improvements on highway one auxiliary lanes and to see how we can improve the services of metro this is a two for and I think it's a tremendous project and I'm as enthusiastic about it as Mr. Rutkin I think commissioner Johnson thank you chair I will echo my colleagues on this I think it's you know this is a ribbon of transportation corridor that is meant to do exactly what you're describing move people and I think being as aggressive as possible in terms of facilitating and expediting and even if it costs an extra you know million dollars here or five million dollars there to provide metro service so they don't have to take the side streets of Soquel Avenue and you know pollute those ribbons of stoplights and so forth and actually do something on the on the freeway is very important and I would also you know I was just talking to my colleague here she she was nice enough to tamp down some of my expectations but you know it seems that towards the center of the freeway where you know you have the middle is it possible to maybe extend the ribbon of Asphalt by two or three feet and then maybe move the highway closer to the center of the of the corridor and then just you know cobble out small amounts of of operating room that allows you to kind of have more operating room where these bus rapid transit possibilities exist again I don't know if that's something that we should explore during the EIR process but people are shaking their heads already and so but do you see what I'm saying in other words you expand it towards the middle makes more room on the right hand side and my second question this is for Metro are there specialized buses that would lend themselves to a more efficient way of moving kind of maybe more narrow and longer that allows bus drivers kind of navigate this bus rapid transit scenario that's my question your first question about shifting the traveled lanes to the inside so that is possible if we could get design exceptions from Caltrans I would not advise us going that route though because design exceptions basically Caltrans has a highway design manual and the standard shoulder width is 10 feet on the inside so that is possible if we could get design feet on the inside as well as the outside and just from my experience of getting design exceptions it's not easy to get design exceptions and especially if you have enough right of way which we do even though it's not paved currently we do have some right of way to do a little bit of widening so I would not that's why we are not pursuing that at this time and then the other question off hand I don't know of any any buses any that are purposely narrower buses but I should say the width of the bus isn't really a big issue it's if we can get 10 feet that's more than adequate the typical bus is roughly about 10 and a half feet from outside mirror to outside mirror but as you might imagine when they're in the shoulder lane there's room for them to extend out on either side they don't it's not really a problem they and I and I should say this has been as I mentioned before has been occurring all over the country it did occur in San Diego as a demonstration project and was quite successful and actually they used the same format we're talking about they had auxiliary lanes coupled with going on the shoulder and that worked quite well and they're actually so they actually ended up making improvements that section of freeway to add an HOV lane later so they stopped that project but they're now getting ready to implement another bus on shoulder project in San Diego and there's one understudy now for highway 680 in Contra Costa County Marin County is looking at bus on shoulder Santa Clara County is looking at bus on shoulder so it's an idea that's really catching on and the beauty of it is that it doesn't require a lot of special things that keeps the cost low and it makes it easy to implement so thank you Commissioner Bertrand I have a feeling there was a lot of staff work to make this work all the agencies mentioned difficult to maneuver and bring such a report to us so thank you very much I was mentioned that there's going to be the need for special training and I was wondering if that could be common on and also it seems to me that regular commuters are going to have to get used to this new vehicle passageway on the right side so if you could comment on that too and what we could do as an agency to make sure the public is well aware of this something that's coming well as I've been saying there's a lot of good experience in history to build upon with this so Minnesota has been the leader and bus on shoulder and they were the first ones to develop the training programs for operators you want the operator to know how how to handle every situation that would come up on the shoulder you know what to do if they spot you know a vehicle stopped on the shoulder what if the CHP is using the shoulder what if there's a major accident occurring where emergency vehicles need to use the shoulder to get to the accident site all those things need to be taken under consideration so the operators receive training they also receive training how to maneuver through the on ramps and off ramps which are the most critical areas and typically they're given the option of using the shoulder or not so they if the operator feels it's not not safe on a given day they can opt out of doing using the shoulder they don't have to use it although in San Diego when the operators didn't use the shoulder the riders would start yelling saying get on the shoulder so it's very popular so that's so that relates to the training aspect of it and I forgot what was the second half your question my other concern was the public in general oh yeah this is going to be a new development yeah so there is again and there'll be a need for public education with this but there also is there's also a lot of experience with the types of signs to be used and so forth to make sure that this the people when they're on the freeway that their that buses can operate on the shoulder in fact it'll be more specific than that it will say it'll say that it's only two buses that are essentially proved to use the shoulder so it's not just any bus can use the shoulder that's that's an important important thing so I don't know what other questions so this is not really oh sorry just really quick I was the project manager of the San Diego project all good questions all dealt with training signage no incidents in five years give that one other question just occurred to me so how about the public if they decide they're going to do just like with the mayor of Watsonville relayed earlier so is that fraction or is that permissible well it's a it is a concern I've heard but again the actual experience has been that that's not a problem I mean it is quite clear I mean people in California and it's actually better here than in most states they're they're train that the shoulder is not a place that you operate your vehicle and but but all across the country again there has not been any big issue with people using the shoulder you know inappropriately because of this happening there is an issue as I mentioned if there's a major incident or something then then suddenly the shoulder becomes you know it may be you actually use the CHP may actually direct people onto the shoulder but typically no it's not a problem so Commissioner Kaufman-Gelmez thank you I'm not sure if you would be the specific person to answer the question it might be a bit more of the metro we're looking at peak time in terms of the bus usage for this the shoulder and how would we be looking at maybe the buses diverting to be able to use as an opportunity and coming off of like for example Soquel where they're picking up passengers so what kind of volume and frequency will we we actually be looking at for these shoulders obviously since this is so far in the future I don't haven't laid out service plans but we start with the service we have and currently we don't operate a lot of services that work in the neighborhoods be it Soquel or or whatever and then jump back on the freeway we essentially operate and express between Watsonville and Santa Cruz on there that would be the initial service and we would obviously include increase the frequency at that time we'd consider whether there are more opportunities but like I said in our system now we don't do a lot of on and off mixing the freeway with central Santa Cruz functions so currently are we a bus every half hour for the four hour window of time that this is looking at happening I mean is four hours the window I don't know well given the fact that you can get on it or off of it our express services do run all day they do run about half hour in the peak and if they're if the general traffic lanes are going fast enough you stay in them if not you move over would we increase frequency I don't think we'd go to all the work to build this project and that not bump the frequency during the peak periods but that becomes a matter of operating dollars and when we get there okay and my other question has to do with the EIR um our current EIR from start to still working on to get to our highway one projects now let everybody know what the duration of time is because I don't know when it started and I know we're not quite there yet and then we're talking about another EIR for this one so what can we expect in terms of having the results of an EIR and or can we put this as a chapter in the current one so that we might be able to push us along a little bit more quickly so we're so close to having it done that we don't want to add more we want to keep we want to keep the two projects clearly separate the the you're referring to the tier one tier two combined environmental document we're expecting to have it approved at the end of the year and we went through an extensive you know public outreach and circulation and all of that the bus on shoulder project is considered a tier two project under the overall program it has to go through its own environmental studies and project approval process now you mentioned an EIR it most likely will not be anything close to an EIR because of the small amount of pavement needed and signs striping this sort of thing it's really most likely going to be exempt under CQA so assuming that this really you know that's why we're looking at an expedited approach if it required an EIR we would not be considering an expedited approach so just to clarify that did that answer your question I believe so yes thank you thank you well as a metro representative I'm excited but I share that my other colleagues this is a great project I just have one question what's the funding source for this project the eight million dollars so you're talking about the capital cost of the construction correct so we don't have a funding plan yet and we don't know exactly how much it's going to cost really the eight million is an estimate at this point for planning purposes so once we develop the operating concept we'll have more real numbers and then we can develop a plan but there's a lot of sources of funds out there for this you know the first little bit of doing the operating concept is going to be funded by metro which is great so hopefully we can keep that going for the support costs and then for construction you know we'll be looking for funding just like for the auxiliary lanes we'll be looking for SB1 money hopefully or other competitive grants okay great all right at this point we're going to go ahead and have you step aside open up for the public anybody from the public like to comment on the bus on shoulder yes thank you my brother lives in Minneapolis that's where I grew up and he is a bus on shoulder rider so he lives in south Minneapolis works downtown I-35W south is perhaps calling at 10 miles an hour and he's on a bus on shoulder bus that's whizzing by at 25 miles per hour that's 150 percent faster for getting home and so if you're in a car and you look at that say hey I I'm going to get one of those so this has been in place in in the Twin Cities since the 1990s it's it's a solution that's been hiding in plain sight it belonged in the RTC's EIR study as an alternative there have been no alternatives in the study other than widening lanes adding lanes for cars so maybe that EIR still needs an actual alternative like this studied in there and in the presentation I didn't see mention the cost of those ox lanes and the cost of HOV lanes HOV lanes upside of 600 million so what if you took some of that kind of car-oriented money and put it directly into a Primo bus on shoulder system and had money left over to send some operational cost and so forth over to the Metro more buses and you've you've really started to do something right for commuters and right for the environment that that would be super duper and you know also looking ahead to the future if I may add one more point right now we have climate denialism in in effect in Washington D.C. but we're going to change Congress now has a congressional climate solutions caucus that's growing it's bipartisan and when we're ready we're going to pass carbon fee and dividend legislation that puts gradually increasing price on carbon and that's going to drive people out of their cars and towards climate for a friendlier solutions like the bus thank you thank you michael saint to campaign for sustainable transportation tried reading this last night it was incredibly long but I didn't get I just tried to get to certain aspects of it I'm not an expert on it by any means so what I'm trying to understand here is we're going to say that we're going to get oxwains two and three constructed by 20 25 or 26 so basically seven more years of traffic congestion plus construction and any litigation that may come up may extend this to a longer period and we still going to have the aptots what they're calling the strangler slowing things down in only four miles done and 100 million dollars gone why not just a suggestion after being kind of brain dead last night why not widen shoulders to 10 feet without the ox lanes in other words leave the present infrastructure do the 10 feet for the bus on shoulder to state park that was kind of the plan for the ox lanes anyway and do an alternative one at that point it's 0.8 miles from state park to real del mar boulevard bring the bus back on it goes the eight tenths of the mile you're at real del mar and this gentleman the head said pretty good shoulders after you get up to that area so then you can go back on to the bus on shoulder for now maybe we could study that cost also inclusive with the rest of it and then you're getting close to getting the whole 7.5 miles done with the exception of the difficult area of the two trestles which is said in the study 124 million to do that aspect use the 100 million from ox lean project to get the majority of the funding and I think if you approach the state as well as federal as this as a mass transit project you'll get more support for your funding and some matching funds for that to maybe complete the rest of the 7.5 miles had other comments but time's up thank you hi I'm Brett Garrett it'd be great if this table could come back on the screen it was up there a few minutes ago so that's 1.2 and my comments will mention that anyway I just want to say I like the concept of bus on shoulder I think we're missing some important data which is the unified corridor study is going to also be studying bus rapid transit on the corridor on the train corridor and on Soquel it's not obvious to me if bus on freeway shoulder will be faster than those options that will be studied in the UCS maybe they are maybe they aren't I just don't know I did find the feasibility study to be somewhat confusing and maybe some misleading information in this table that I just mentioned on the environmental issues it it shows that bus on shoulder the interim plan has eight environmental impacts compared to none for the bus on the with the on shoulder with the auxiliary lanes somehow the environmental impact of the ox lanes is swept under the rug there I don't think they're a done deal yet because they still have to go through an EIR process that isn't isn't finished and I don't believe they attain their goals of reducing congestion or safety so I don't I don't really yeah so and also this number in the lower left of that table it basically says that the no build project will save 8.4 minutes compared to the no build project that doesn't make sense to me it it's comparing it with itself and saying there's an 8.4 minute difference I do think the no build is a misnomer because it's assuming the ox lanes are already built and I'm going to run out of time so I'll just stop thank you thank you hi um okay go ahead so I echo some other people's sentiments and that I like that this seems to be a low low cost option I like that it sounds as though it can be implemented in a relatively short time frame and that it might offer some relief and that it might begin to encourage increased transit use these are all things that I like about this idea um I hope and I'm not a transportation planner I I hope that the bus on shoulder study option doesn't preclude other options for the highway as um Brett just pointed out things that are currently being studied in the UCIS the HOV option and also things that aren't in the UCIS like actual bus or a transit on the highway or a transit lane dedicated on the highway things that might be cost comparable to a train on the rail corridor but actually might prove to be a more effective and equitable option for those dollars and as we learn from Mr. Grudinger and the congestion relief funding that's out there if our county wanted it I think we could get the funding for it so a lot of this conversation is clearly being steered by what our county wants and I am worried about the unified corridor study that we're still waiting for results on one of the things that worries me most is Chairman Leopold's quote in the Good Times from June 19th where he talks about the study and it says you know there are going to be record you know the study is going to use data and make some points and there are going to be recommendations from staff but people will find the part of the report that most validates their point of view the UCIS is not going to be a magical document that gives all kinds of answers it's going to be open to interpretation that's pretty normal it may be normal but it's almost a million dollars that we're spending on that study and I certainly hope it will have some effective actionable achievable outcomes thank you thank you Hi Mark, I'm Steve Miller again I just had a couple of comments what a great idea this is like eight million dollars to get some kind of improvement to our public transportation system inspire people to get out of their cars reduce greenhouse gases I think given that we're spending about a hundred million dollars on our auxiliary lanes project this is a great investment and is a terrific pilot project we can really see how much of a difference this will make so I would encourage you to go with your staff recommendation and approve make the approval necessary as far as comments though I want to mention two things that the presenter mentioned one is that traffic seems to be very directional I'm finding that there's traffic in both directions almost any time I mean it almost doesn't seem to matter anymore although there is a tendency maybe in the morning one way tenants in the afternoon but gosh I've been there at noon and had traffic in both directions stopped and then which kind of goes to the merge idea of having the bus on shoulder in the ox lanes my experience with the ox lanes is they back up just about as bad as the regular travel lanes so there might it might be worth when I realize this is early but you know keeping our focus on shoulders rather than auxiliary lanes thank you thank you okay we'll go ahead and we'll wrap up the public comment and bring it back I believe there's a motion ready to be made a quick comment first if that's successful of the chair it was interesting the comments from the public some people want us to spend the HOV laying money like as if we had it the problem is we never could get it and we're not going to we're talking you know 600 million dollars and that's why we went to measure D because we tried an HOV laying and went down in flames on it so that's not an option and we don't have money there we can transfer to something else it's money we don't have and that's part of the issue I think I'm sure that director Leopold commission member Leopold was not suggesting that the study is worthless that we're spending it's just that he's I can guarantee he's right that when it's all done there'll be disagreements about what it means that's a very different thing than saying the study is not that there's no information there that a rational person could make use of to try and come up with a really good response I will make the motion that we authorize the executive director to enter into negotiations for a cooperative agreement with the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District Metro to find the preparation of an operating concept for a bus on shoulder facility on highway one between Soquel Drive and 41st Avenue interchanges that's the first step of this process I was second for a motion by Rodkins second by Leopold any other comments just a brief comment go ahead you know we are spending a lot of time thinking about what the future of transportation will be let's not pick the fights that we've already had have already been settled by the voters and move on to the things that have been discussed with the voters and which they have funded and which we're trying to do this is an innovative way to use our existing infrastructure in a way that we can actually afford to those as my colleague pointed out to those who want to keep on pushing an HOV lane as soon as you can find that money tree with the 364 million dollars or the 500 million or to do the whole thing maybe three quarters of a billion dollars that's not something you can raise with individuals and it's not going to come other ways so we need to start thinking about other ways of moving people around on reliable schedules so we can keep people moving here in Santa Cruz County this is one way I support it comment Ms. Coffin Gomez yes I think also with what Watsonville has made that the sacrifice on is putting the money towards this type of a project and I know that I'm in support of it as well because we see that kind of impact in the frustration to move around we know that we have a bottleneck this won't be a perfect solution for that and we're just hoping that there's alternatives that we can offer the taxpayers and being able to resourcefully use their money and also it's like it's about time we're hearing some frustration of let's get something started instead of studying it to death so I'm really looking forward to getting things moved and seeing some pavement improvements other comments I agree to get something going I agree with you comments I share the same enthusiasm I think about two years ago we did a little project at the Fish Hook less than two million dollars we got substantial relief from that so this is one of those projects with a little investment we could get some great results so for that I'll go ahead and call for a vote all in favor aye opposed motion carries unanimously thank you that concludes our regular agenda can we get a review of items discussed in closed session yes Mr. Chair we do have a closed session scheduled for you today it's a conference for lever net negotiators pursuant to government code 54957.6 with your negotiator Lozano-Smith and Yesenia Potter on the bargaining units or ROTC Association the middle managers and the community of ROTC employees excuse me how many do we need for a closed session Luis we need a well you need a quorum of seven to Randy you can be able to stay for closed session oh I just saw you got up I didn't know if you were leaving okay excuse me I just mean to interrupt you Mr. Mender so you're completed with that I'm done with that yes okay and do we expect to report anything out we do not expect to report out no and I think we're going to hold the closed session in this room not not not not going to have it right here okay so we're going to have to ask everybody to clear the room we're going to hold closed sessions here I'm going to go ahead and make an announcement that our next meeting will be Thursday September 6th of the Regional Transportation Commission at the Board of Supervisors in Santa Cruz and our next TPW meeting will be September 20th at 9 a.m. at the Santa Cruz City Council Chambers thank you and we appreciate if you could expedite clearing the room thank you and turning off the mics