 Good morning everyone, I'd like to call the August 24, 2018 Board Meeting of Santa Cruz Metro to order. Please, first of all, before we call the roll, I'd like to swear in our new ex-official board member, Zach McDaniel. It's great to have you here, and would you carry out that situation? Who would be swearing him in exactly? The council? Yeah, we don't have a judge. Here comes a judge, kind of. So, Zach, if you'd stand up and be sworn in as an ex-official member? I think where we can just see with the camera. Okay. Yeah, right where he is. Perfect. Okay, Zach, by the time we're done, you're going to be using a firearm, so bear with me. Okay. Okay, I, Zach McDaniel. I, Zach McDaniel. Do solemnly swear or affirm. That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. And the Constitution of the State of California. Against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance. To the Constitution of the United States. And the Constitution of the State of California. And the Constitution of the State of California. That I take this obligation freely. Without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. And that I will well and faithfully discharge. The duties upon which I'm about to enter. Thank you. It's great to have you here and being part of our board as an ex-official member. I think I'll skip now to number four of the roll call before we get into the first item of business. Call the police. Call the roll. Director Baltimore? Here. Director Chase? Here. Director Copeland Gomez? Director Dutra? Director Hayden? Here. Director Leopold? Here. Director Lin? Director Matthews? Here. Director Ex-official Director McDaniel? Here. Director McPherson? Here. Director Rothwell? Here. Ex-official Director Thomas? Present. We have more? Thank you. I'm also here. I'm Mr. Atkin. Oh, I'm so sorry. Director Atkin? Here. Okay, we do have a packed agenda and we're going to try to get through it. I think I'll make the announcement too that Spanish language interpretation is available on oral communication during oral communications and for any other agenda item for which these services are needed. And today's meeting is being broadcast by Community Television of Santa Cruz County. And now that we have sworn in Zach, we'd like to introduce his big boss, the President and Superintendent of Cabrillo College. Is he here yet? He comes in. Absolutely. Okay. As soon as he gets here? You might have an interpreter that seemed to ask what you made in Spanish. Oh, excuse me, with the interpreter, please make the announcement in Spanish about oral communications. Pleasure. Un placer. Directors. Buenos días. Carlos Santa Verde. Para las personas que prefieren español, voy a estar en la parte delas. Gracias. Okay, we're going to item number six, Board of Directors' comments. Comments by the board. Can I just make one more announcement? Yes. So anybody coming up to the podium, you might have to push the red button on the mic. And all of the directors, these are our new speakers, so hopefully we'll be good to go. Okay, thank you. One, two. Yeah, gotcha. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we're all written communications to the board of directors. Okay, there's a public comment. Any items that members of the public would like to address us on that are not on the agenda. That are not on the agenda. What's the comment on the consent agenda? Let us know. Okay. Okay, we will. We have written communications from MAC, item number eight. We have one on your agenda. And the other labor organization communications. Any communications from labor? Okay. Additional documentation. We do have something, I think, is that correct? Yes, Mr. Chair, we have item 12-11-2, a minor adjustment to one of our board reports on the consent calendar. And just to tag on to what Nina was talking about earlier, we're testing new microphones. We're hoping we finally found one that works right. We did point out that when you go to turn it on, there might be a couple of seconds of lapse or delay before it starts. So you might put it on a little bit earlier than you want to speak. And when you turn it on, the red light will come on so the Chair knows that you want to speak. And let's see. Is there anything else you want me to add on the new microphones? Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, before, on item number 11, that's going to be a lengthy presentation. So I'd like to delay that to see if the President of Carrillo comes here first. And I think you'd like to make some brief comments and then we'll go from there. So I think to make this work right and not break it up, we'll try to just move on with the agenda. We have several items on the consent agenda. Is there anyone that would like to comment or pull an item on the board on the consent agenda? Anyone from the public that would like to comment or form an item from the consent agenda? And we would like to comment on the cancellation of the Route 34. That's coming up later. Okay. Yes. I will share. Board members, Mr. Clifford. My name is Norm Reynolds. I'm a regional sales manager for Gillick. I need to be presumptuous, but should you approve the purchase of the Gillick buses? I just want to say on behalf of the 900 employees of Gillick, thank you for supporting American jobs. Thank you for supporting California jobs. And thank you for supporting local jobs. We look forward to building some great buses for Metro and beginning a long term partnership. So again, thank you very much for your business and thank you for your time. Thank you. We appreciate the quality. Thank you very much. Okay. Then we'll be bringing back to the board for approval of the consent agenda. Second. Second. All those in favor of approving the consent agenda. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Group unanimously. We go to item number 13, the presentation of employee longevity awards. I think, I think one person's here at least. Ernest Brown. Ernest Brown is not here. Okay. Let me. The only person who's constantly here. There's a. That's here. That's for real. Okay. Oh. Let me see if. You will tarot Garcia. Dan Stevenson. Okay. We will make sure that they're presented. We thank them for their years of service. And I think we'll. Yes. Sorry. I just want to point out that what I understand is Dan would really like to be here. And because of his scheduling, couldn't use. I think we're going to try to reschedule this next month. Great. I'd like to see him here. Okay. There's no action really needed. The. The board. How about the. We have a couple of retirements. I think I'd like to just to get to those quickly. Presentation of a. Employee retirement resolution for Patty. David. Dotsky. David Dotsky. Luis Keller. Christopher Lanigan. Just calling the street. Juca. Juca. Yeah. Just Juca. Nobody here. Well, we thank them for their services as well. Now we will. April. April. Oh, excuse me. April or not. Is. April. Is not here either. No. April is here. In spirit. She's here. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. In spirit. I opposed. So ordered unanimously. Okay, now we will go to the presentation by the president of the如果你 o college, Matthew啊, West, Stein. Great to have you. Sir here and Welcome to Metro I thank you for career in the past and present for Offended services that we do provide for so many students. There it's very much needed here for Metro. here for Metro and I think it's a great service for the students. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Chair. Thank you to members of the board as well for allowing me to be here just briefly to introduce myself. I've been making the rounds to a lot of different community meetings and my apologies for being so late in getting around to this one. I'm really grateful for the opportunity for Zach to serve as an ex-officio member and very appreciative of that. The real students have been wonderful in supporting Santa Cruz Metro and we're proud of the fact that they voted to offer transportation fees to help support operations of this organization and we are very grateful for the service that you've been providing to our students. If there's anything that I can do to help Santa Cruz Metro in any way through Zach, through myself, please don't hesitate to call the college and let us know. I've had great meetings with staff and very appreciative of the welcome that I've gotten around town. I see familiar phases around the table and around the room as well. So thank you so much for the work that you do and again anything that I can do to help you, please let me know. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you for making the effort to be here. You're welcome. Now we will go back to item number 11. Your presentation, Mr. Beryl Emerson will introduce Jarrett Walker. Good morning, Chair, Board of Members, Staff and the Public Beryl Emerson Planning Director. It's my pleasure to introduce Jarrett Walker, an international consultant in public transit network design and policy with 25 years of experience planning public transit in North America, Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand. This firm, Jarrett Walker and Associations based in Portland, Oregon, provides transit planning and executive advice to clients worldwide. Jarrett is also the author of Human Transit, how a clearer thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives. At the invitation of Director Leopold, and by the way, happy birthday yesterday, Jarrett has reviewed the current metro bus service and remember this is following two years on from our horrible service reduction. And he will give a short presentation on how to organize our thoughts about our various goals we have for public transit and how to ensure that our policies reflect those goals. Jarrett first became familiar with Santa Cruz County through his presentation earlier this year as part of the RGC speaker series. Metro staff is particularly looking forward to his thought-provoking discussion, and we see this presentation as timely for two particular reasons. Number one, the upcoming board strategic business plan retreat later this fall, and number two, the looming November Proposition 6 ballot measure, which could have a major impact on metro services in the future. Also, I would ask that after today's presentation, the board members read again Consent Item 12-10, the Planning Department's annual status report on the state of service planning at Metro and the activities the department plans on taking on in the next couple of years. So without any further rambling on my part, please welcome Jarrett Walker. Thank you very much. Thanks very much, Barrow. Thanks everyone for your time this morning. I appreciate the chance to chat with you a little bit this morning about some of the big picture issues that you're going to face in any kind of transit planning and any kind of transit policy major. And encourage you to maybe give you some new frames of reference for many of the decisions that are going to come up for you and many of the debates that you're already having. I want to start with the question of what fixed transit is. You're by and large a fixed route transit agency. And I want to make sure you understand why that's a good thing because there are lots of people out there, particularly from the other side of the hill, who are running around saying that because fixed routes are fixed, they're somehow rigid and that rigid routes are the product of rigid mines and that there's something new and exciting coming about that will sweep all these dinosaurs away. And that's nonsense and I want to make sure we all agree. As a city grows denser, the overwhelming problem of the city is the problem of sharing spaces. The shortage of space per person is what a city is. A city is lots of people in very little space which means a city has a place without much space per person which means that life in a city is about sharing space. Now you have your own decisions to make in these communities about how urban you want to be. Obviously there's a great deal of growth pressure. Obviously there are opportunities for you to grow an answer where you like and as you grow an answer if you choose to do so, you're also going to become more city-like and the fundamental geometry that plays out here is going to become more and more unavoidable for you. So this which in my mind is the single most important image that I could show anyone about urban transportation is showing how much space a hundred people take if they are all on a bus, all on bicycles, or all in cars. And everything you need to know about the essential role of public transit in densifying cities is in this area. It's fundamentally about the ability to use space efficiently so that more people fit in the city. It's important to understand right away that I'm talking here about a geometric fact. And because we're talking about a geometric fact about big things not fitting in containers that are smaller than themselves. So this is a fact that's not going to change in response to anyone's culture or anyone's values or anyone's ideology. This is just one of those basic substrate facts about the universe. And as a result it's also not going to be changed by technology. So we know how much space a hundred people take if they're on a bus. We know how much space they take if they're in cars. Here's how much space they take if they're using taxis or Uber or Lyft. Here's how much space they take if they're in driverless cars. And someday perhaps we may have a driverless bus which will bring us back to that situation. The ratio of people to vehicles to vehicle occupancy is the thing that determines the efficient use of space that technology has nothing to do with. Now driverless car people will say oh wait a minute wait a minute but when we have driverless cars they'll run a little closer together and that way they'll save a little more space. Yes they might of course that only happens at 100% uptake of driverless cars and it only happens at the end of a very long period of transition. But what's more driverless cars are going to trigger a horrific outcome called induced demand. Induced demand is a biological fact. It's also something you can take to the bank because it's a pretty substrate fact about all life which is that if something is easy an organism is more likely to do it. And so when if driving suddenly becomes massively easier because we remove the hassle of driving so that you can relax with your laptop and drink a martini on your way to wherever you're going we're going to go to more places and cars we're going to drive more and that's going to completely reverse any little bit of spatial savings you might have from cars running closer together even if that turned out to be five. So one of the things that driverless cars mean is a real crisis around pricing and around the need to put pricing systems in place to discourage everyone from taking their driverless cars everywhere they want as much as they would like to because the congestion impacts of that are just horrific. So fixed transit is existential for cities. The city is impossible without it if you want to get above a certain density. I would argue that the UC campus is already there. Much of Central Santa Cruz is very close to there and of course a lot depends now on the development decisions you want to make if you want the city to go and answer it. You're going to raise this issue more and more. So be careful when anyone tells you that new ideas and technologies are disrupting fixed route transit. They may have some relevance around the edges in really low density, low demand areas that will come back to that even that is more challenging than it sounds. So what are we trying to do with transit? And what are we doing when we're doing transportation planning? A lot of you are used to sitting through processes that are fundamentally about the prediction of outcomes. What will this do for the economy? What will this do for the environment? What will this do for traffic? Much of it boiling down to what will ridership mean? And I want to suggest that there's another frame that we can use that's equally compelling to talk about and that's able to excite people just as much but that doesn't actually require that we... but that doesn't require that we make such difficult predictions. And that's the basic idea of freedom. It turns out that the way to expand ridership is to expand freedom. And by freedom I mean where you can get to in a given amount of time. So we're working right now on a redesign of the bus network in Dublin, Ireland and one of the basic tools we're using is a tool where you can plunk down your point or anywhere you want. This woman is hypothetically at the university and she's asking, where can I go in 45 minutes? And the answer to that question, that isn't even a question about transportation. That's a question about freedom. That's a question about what jobs could she hold? Where could she go to study? If she works at the university, where could she live? But also where could you shop? Who are you going to? Who do you have the potential to meet in daily life? All of those things that require that you be able to get there. We can answer that question because there's an existing network and there's an answer to that question in the existing network. There's an answer to that question in a proposed network and there's a difference. And so we're saying under our proposed redesign she can get to 43% more jobs, 68% more residents can get to there. And that is a quantifiable increase in freedom. More people able to go to more places so that they can do more things so that they have more opportunities in their lives. And the presence of meaningful opportunities and choices before us in life is freedom. Freedom is the sense that you have lots of things you can choose about. It means, for example, that you can probably choose between two grocery stores instead of being stuck going to the only one you can get to. That sort of basic freedom that a customer presents. So this is pretty important. And it takes us out of transportation. It takes us out of the geekery of transportation and talking about fundamentally how do we give people better lives with public transport so that it makes sense for them to use public transport. Transportation is physical freedom. So in my view, what we call transportation planning should be called freedom planning. It would be much clearer to everyone about what is at stake if we understood that when we make decisions about transportation, we're talking fundamentally about how free people should be. Where should they be able to go? Which is to say, what should they be able to do? Which is to say, how free are they? Now, in this culture, many people associate freedom with a vehicle and so we hear the notion of do cars offer freedom? Well, it depends on where you are. There are places where it does. In a rural environment, cars are of course the tool of freedom. In an urban environment, they tend to create their own kind of terrain. The tyranny of traffic congestion, the unreliability, all of those other impacts. And one of the key things to remember is that a meaningful concept of freedom, a concept of freedom that is consistent with civilization, requires that we be able to be free without getting in the way of other people's freedom. And traffic congestion is the failure of that principle. Traffic congestion is when we can only do what we want to do by getting in other people's way. That's the core idea of what traffic congestion is. It's us getting in each other's way, obstructing each other's freedom in the pursuit of our freedom. And being trapped in an infrastructure that essentially forces us to do that through the inadequacy of other alternatives. Now here's the cool thing. Freedom doesn't require a complicated model to predict because freedom is a geometric fact about a network and the land use pattern that serves. So from a network and from the design of a network and knowledge about the demographics and land use behind it, I can calculate access. How many places, how many jobs somebody can get to in a given amount of time. That's a purely mathematical calculation. There's no prediction of human behavior there. And then next step in a ridership model is to apply a whole bunch of social science variables to get to a ridership prediction. Now we're way more sure, with all respect to social scientists in the room, we're way more sure about geometry than we are about social science. It's a vastly higher level of certainty. One of the basic challenges about predictions of human behavior, especially as you go out very far, is that we have to predict future people's behavior based on how people behave now. So if you make a 20-year prediction, for example, as is often required for big quarter studies, you know how are people going to behave in 20 years? The only basis we have for predicting that is how people behave now. So when you think 20 years out, more or less a generation. What we're basically saying to make that prediction, we're telling young people that when you're the same age that your parents are now, you'll behave exactly the way they do. That's what we have to assume. We are assuming that we know your future behavior based on how your parents behave now. That may or may not be a good assumption. We won't really know until we get there. But it's not the sort of assumption. But when you think about it that way, it's maybe not the sort of assumption that we want to treat as the absolute bedrock of certainty. When we can talk about freedom instead. So just to point out, when we talk about prediction, we're not talking about freedom. So think about that when you see predictions, predictions about markets, predictions about human behavior, predictions about what customers will do being presented to you as though they were rock solid facts. Because although people do their best to make the best predictions, they can. I feel much more confident in predicting the permanence of geometric facts. I'm quite sure of what that large objects don't fit in small ones. I'm quite sure that will still be true in 2100. I'm quite sure that that's true on Mars. We can be very sure about that. And so be aware of the kind of certainty we're talking about. You know, the principle of induced demand, just a basic fact of biology and organism will tend to do something that's easier and will tend to do it more if it's easier. Again, it's true in 2100 and if there's life on Mars, it's true in that too. So if you have to predict, predict the permanence of math, physics and basic biology, and be suspicious it may be necessary to at least bring some caution when you see predictions of human behavior beyond the most universal biological motivations. So, when we're trying to maximize freedom with public transit, what are we doing? What we're doing, if I want to maximize freedom for the most people, is to lay out high-frequency lines forming a connected network that's reasonably fast and reliable and that's focused on transit-friendly places and that will turn out to be politically the hardest part of this. Let me just step through that quickly. Frequency, long ago I coined the term frequency is freedom, really frequency is part of freedom but it's a necessary condition. Frequency, how often the bus comes is a cubed value. It's powerful because it does three independent things and because those things are independent we tend to get a nonlinear payoff from it. Frequency is reduced waiting. Frequency is also easier connections. You get off one bus, the next bus is coming soon, it's easy to make a connection and it's the connections that allow people to move out across the network to wherever they're going instead of just being able to go downtown. And finally, reduce the impact of disruptions. Bus breaks out and another will be along soon. That's why lines with higher frequency tend to not just have higher ridership but higher ridership over cost, very striking. Every time my firm does a transit plan for some agency, we take all of their level and dump it into a database and just keep growing it. This is higher frequency to the left on the x-axis, higher productivity on the y and you see that higher frequency gives us higher productivity and that you see a bit of an upward curve to that. That's striking because frequency actually pulls the productivity ratio down. In the bottom of the productivity ratio is quantity of service and if you increase that you initially pull productivity down and yet the overall relationship of higher frequency tends to be to higher productivity. Now part of that is we tend to deploy higher frequency in the places where the land use pattern and everything else is favorable but still that relationship is so strong and it's so counterintuitive that it's worth pausing over. Concentrating service on fewer streets so that you can run more frequent service really is the key to success in ridership terms and that's extremely counterintuitive. Also I'll mention very few people will come before you and ask you to do that. Many more people will come before you and ask you to keep a particular bus route or to add a bus route up into a particular place. Very few people will come to you and talk about frequency and yet it actually is foundational to our success. Because frequency tends to be invisible because we can't draw a picture of it a lot of policy work now is the frequent network brands. Vancouver in Canada one of the leaders on this 10 years ago they adopted a policy that said that over half of all population and jobs will be on the frequent network. Frequent network to them means all the services that run every 15 minutes are better all day and they actually achieved that goal within a few years not by the way just by expanding the frequent network by development occurring along the frequent network as it only was so that a greater share of the population ended up living on the network that was already there. Those are always the two steps. A long term frequent network vision can help you organize land use thinking can help you for example build apartments with less parking in certain places whereas a matter of policy we know transit will be good because people in those apartments can be expected to use transit more. Parking means more affordable apartments and that's a key step on affordability so that's the key thing here frequency is tied very much to concerns about affordability because especially frequent bus service is useful enough to be liberating unlike rail service though it's abundant enough in going up places that it can't possibly drive up housing crisis everywhere the way a rail station often does and the key thing is it helps you build apartments with less parking which is a key to affordability particularly at the density of some of your cities you need to be talking about that particularly given the affordability concerns here. Here's where you are with frequency during the school year you've got roughly 15 minute frequency that's the red line between downtown Santa Cruz and the University other than that you are primarily a network of 30 minute long distance lines and hourly short distance lines so you see for example here's your kind of a pointer here you can see the 30 minute lines going north to San Lorenzo Valley the complex braid of 30 minute lines between Santa Cruz and Watsonville by the way there are actually 4 buses an hour there it's just the 4 buses slightly different thing along the way it could add up to a total 50 minute headway point to point if you wanted it to but you can also see a lot of areas with 60 minute headways that's the intentionally you can see no it doesn't work oh I'm sorry you can see that you just can't see my pointer so interesting areas inside the Capitola Live Oak a lot of the eastern part of Santa Cruz south of Soquel Avenue actually has 60 minute service those pale blue lines that you can barely see over such short distances over such short distances as you're serving there that service orders on useless because when we're going of very short distance when you're going of very short distance you need a higher frequency because we experience our wait time as a percentage of the total travel time right that's why you'll wait an hour for a flight to LA but you'll wait a day for a flight to London we experience that the waiting time relative to the size of the total trip eastern Santa Cruz Capitola the trip distances are so short no one with any options is going to wait an hour to go such a short distance whereas it's not unreasonable to ask people to wait half an hour to go to the settlements of LA or potentially go to Watson those distances are long enough but that can make sense so let's talk about the harder part which is where does high ridership go because when I talk about freedom we want to say freedom for everyone but the irony the cruel fact for elected officials here is that the way we get freedom to the most people is not to try to use transit to get freedom to everyone because some people that in places were getting good service to them is just fantastically expensive so density we hear a lot about density and it's because again I want you to notice I'm describing geometry here in this series of explanations I'm not going to talk anything about human behavior I'm going to talk about the geometric relationship between land use patterns and bus routes so density those two bus routes have the same cost to operate they each have two buses on them the one in the top image has twice as many people around every stop so of course twice as many people twice the size of the market of course you have higher ridership to put it more geometrically we are delivering freedom to twice as many people by running down the street in the first neighborhood so low density is a negative for ridership more importantly it means that we are providing freedom to far fewer people by focusing our resources there walkability on a fixed route you have to walk out to the stop that is the source of the incredible productivity of fixed routes relative to anything you can do running around with little vehicles going to people's stores so it matters whether you can walk out to the stop and so in more historic street grids where it is easy to walk out to the stop because you have a connected local street network you are going to get freedom to more people on bus hire ridership so these two images on the left that is a bus stop in the center and the circle is a quarter mile radius which is often something we draw on a high level of abstraction what really matters is the street network in that area whether you can actually walk to the bus stop in a quarter mile one of these we have shaded in black the part of the street network where people that are actually a quarter mile walk from the bus stop what you will see of course is that if you have an old street grid like you have in Central Santa Cruz it is easy for most of the area in the circle to actually walk to the stop in that distance if you have a shredded, disconnected street grid it becomes very hard and you end up the bus stop is literally just serving fewer people because of the barriers presented by the street network like freeways and rail lines and so on but in any case so that lower street network is a negative in terms of the basic question of how much freedom are we providing to how many people that are running good service in this place the other issue of course is that it makes no sense to stop anywhere on a street or it is not safe to cross the street because transit will always take you from this side of the street and return you to that side of the street if you can't cross the street you have one way service we have not really provided useful freedom now my architect and urban design friends all know about density and walkability but linearity is a problem that is peculiar to transit and that is that what we need to deal with a fixed route is straight together, is serve a bunch of places such that a single line is useful for going to many different places all over the line for connecting many different places the one on the top the places are all in a straight line the one on the bottom the places are all back from a straight line so that in each case you have to deviate up into them to get to them so you know, the university on the hill top the employment center and the business park by the freeway the large residential cul-de-sac that you have to drive into and get back out of in the same way something like the MR for example or of course the Walmart behind the quarter mile parking each of these gives us a worse outcome in terms of our ability to provide freedom efficiently because we have to deviate to them and that makes the line less straight and that makes the line less useful for providing the freedom so I thought I would show you an incredible local example it's actually the bus route that comes up here once an hour look at this even once you've spent some time figuring out what this bus actually does basically all this and figure that out this line is basically nothing but deviations it is wandering around exclusively focused on getting to places that are non-linear, they are hard to get to you have the county facilities up in the northeast which include some critical social service facilities which should never be placed in cul-de-sacs like that up on Emily Avenue you have the Harvey West the industrial area over to our west you have this location here at Vernon street each of these requires going there turning around and coming back while other people ride through this is pretty much the definition of a route that nobody with any choices would ever use and so you have to have incredibly low expectations for if you have to understand also you must understand pretty clearly it's not Santa Cruz Metro's fault that the community got built this way such as to create this terrible situation for fixed-rack transit these are just not places that you're going to be able to go with any and actually provide useful service that would be liberating to everyone because the geology is just completely hostile to what you're doing so you have to make decisions about these places okay is this the best we can do should we have some sort of little land thing going on well we'll talk about that those are much less productive than they appear or should we just say ride your bike to these places or maybe there's a senior disabled kind of service but we expect most other people will find other means because transit just can't do so little when you have this kind of extremely nonlinear development pattern where you have to drive into cul-de-sacs over and over again notice the way this also messes up your ability to actually provide a clean two-way service in a place where it might be useful like going up and down River Street or going up and down Ocean Street it's a permanently good two-way kind of street that would support frequent transit service but because you're doing all these loops you can't really deliver that simple thing that people can actually find useful before this proximity obviously it costs more to go longer distances than shorter ones if hypothetically Davenport could be moved to a little bit east of Wilder Ranch it would support more transit service but because it is far away it supports less transit service because it costs more to get to brutally obvious point but when you hear, particularly as we start talking about rural services, if you hear well those people have it, why don't we the answer is often you are just very far away and that makes it really more expensive to serve so those kinds of freedom maximizing choices that you would make involve the painful decision that transit is not the best way to provide freedom to a lot of places transit is the way transit maximizes freedom overall is to focus on the places where the geography is favorable and I can't emphasize too strongly people will take this personally they'll say you don't like them they'll say you're discriminating against them no, your transit service is not who you are but it is not where you are and it can't help there being about where you are because the geography determines what's going to be viable if freedom and ridership are the norm so it obviously raises the question is ridership even what you want and this brings us to the issue of the ridership coverage straight up and this is another issue that's a bit like plumbing you're used to thinking about your own ways of lots of different frames people want to bring to talking about public transit lots of different ways they want to talk about it but then there's a way that the technician who is responsible for making it happen will insist that you talk about it and this is that sort of conversation so I want you to imagine that situation where you're remodeling a part of your house and you've got a plumber there and the plumber is looking under your sink and he says look I could just wrap this up with a duct tape and we could do it like this and it cost a couple hundred dollars in the last few years or I could put in a whole new assembly just like new with probe and everything and it would last for decades and that would cost a lot more and so he's asking you to choose between two of your goals cheek or girl do you want a cheek, do you want a girl and the thing to notice about that story is that you have to answer the question the way that the technician framed it he's there to implement your values but to do that he gets to ask you questions about your values and you have to answer the question that he asked and you can imagine other ways of dealing with this the plumber asks you this question you don't want to think about it so you pick up a magazine and start talking about the look and feel you want of the place if you start talking about that and the plumber just stands there with his wrench and waits until you answer his question because that's all he can do until you answer his question he can't implement your values so this is that sort of situation it's what I call a plumber's question so here's a fictional urban area the dots represent residence and jobs so dots close together represent density we have 18 buses to serve this hypothetical if the goal were right we would do this if the goal were ridership which also means maximum freedom for the most people we would do this we would put all our service on just the two biggest streets we would serve about 70% of the population by doing that and for that 70% of the population we'd maximize where they could get to and that would be the best possible outcome on average for the city overall would be to provide excellent service to that 70% and that would be the highest ridership way to deploy this service however mrs. jones lives in the southeast corner of the city and she doesn't like this all time okay I actually had this experience many times the first 10 years of my career was designing transit systems of about your size and smaller all over california and I would come in at the beginning of the project and say what's your goal for this project so I would design them this and they would say what about mrs. jones and I would say you told me you wanted ridership you didn't tell me about mrs. jones so now if you have a goal that's about everybody having a little bit of service that's something else that's this so another way that I could spend so I could spend 18 buses this way and have the maximum ridership system or I could spend them this way and now I have 10 routes instead of 2 because whereas here the buses come every 10 minutes here they come every hour because I've spread them over so many routes because the buses come every hour most people don't find them very useful and as a result most people don't ride them and as a result ridership is really low but we covered mrs. jones wherever she is we provided a little bit of service everywhere so I want you to notice the ways in which the expectation of coverage which tends to show up at you at this podium as people saying access to where's our bus causes you to spread resources out to the point that service is pretty useful to most people although it is still much appreciated by this moment for people who use it and that's pretty much the normal feature of coverage service coverage service shows up at the bottom of your productivity rankings because it's not really trying to be a ridership service but when you try to cut it people come out of the venue and so you have to make that decision so what I tend to do is say let's acknowledge that you have a non-ridership goal that's different from your ridership goal but it's in conflict with it so the question to ask is how do you want to balance these goals it's not that one of these goals is writer one it's just that mathematically they are opposite in the way that the plumber knows that the goal of cheapness and the goal of durability are opposite and you're going to have to choose between them in giving him direction about what to do now these goals line up with a bunch of other things that people want out of transit and a bunch of other things that people can say going into the transit conversation think like a business what a business does is maximize the number of customers it can serve focus where ridership potential is highest the ridership goal gives us the sort of maximum revenue goal which appeals to a certain kind of think like a business perspective it's also the goal that supports dance and walkable development because that's what it focuses on that's the high ridership solution but it's also the goal that gives you all of the environmental benefits of transit transit's benefit for the environment arises from transit being ridden not just from transit existing transit has to be ridden for it to have any big benefits and so the competition with cars the VMT reduction, the emission benefits all the things that come out of that require ridership on the opposite side of the goal though there are excellent reasons to run a coverage goal like a public service there it often arises from a goal like access for all when a transit agency says access for all now Caltrans for example would never say that its mission is access for all its mission is to create a backbone highway network but it's not going to run a state highway to everyone's front door but access for all in transit has come to be understood as there needs to be a transit line for everyone and that of course gives you a coverage down it causes you to spread service out to the point that that you end up you end up with very infrequent service the coverage goal of course tends to be preferred by people who represent lower density areas it has two other really really strong reasons though one it's very much bound up in the idea of lifeline access for everyone somebody comes up to you and says I don't know what I will do without this bus because it is my lifeline but some of those people are right and the question becomes ok that may be a reason for you to run coverage service just know that coverage service is what you're doing and finally political geography service to every member city or service to every electoral district you obviously have that kind of dynamic here tends to lead you to a coverage goal to the trust you just spread service have it's going down the spectrum it helps to know where you are and know what you're doing right now your system is about 60% ridership, 40% coverage what I mean by that is about 60% of your service is where it would be if the goal of your network were right about 40% is not and so seeing it that way there's now a knob on your dashboard that knob say we want more ridership less coverage or we want more coverage less ridership and you could then expect and understand why you'll get certain outcomes as a result you should expect that if you turn the knob toward coverage by for example saying yes to people to want you to run a bus out into a new rural area you should expect ridership overall ridership and productivity put down if you turn the knob the other way maybe some services out there eliminating some low ridership services dealing with people being angry about that and going back doing that you should expect but the point is the knob is on your dashboard and you can turn that possible and that will have those impacts and it's going to be difficult either way but it is something that's within your power to give just to give you a sense of what I mean ridership services right now 60% of your service that's high ridership it's interesting what they are the UCSC services but they're also the long hauls Santa Cruz to Watsonville, Santa Cruz to San Lorenzo Valley San Lorenzo Valley by the way does a stunning way well for a rural service and is and it really goes to the intensity of need up there but also the minimal number of alternatives up there for getting excited for coverage services the other 40% the Watsonville locals the most other rural service where you're not going to a big place like Watsonville or Felton and most of the circuitous short standard food services like that crazy route for the register it's interesting to notice though almost all of your coverage service has an equity dimension when you're running low ridership coverage service you're generally going to hard to reach disadvantaged areas areas of some economic disadvantage so that's a dimension to what you'll be dealing with and by the way when I talk about equity it's mostly equity in terms of income usually not in terms of rates by and large I think you rarely find who had disparate impact in civil rights terms if you shifted say resources for ridership to coverage within Watsonville for example or vice versa but there is through a lot of the coverage services you're running are reaching relatively low income people who are inexpensive to certain places for reasons of the geography let me run you through the quickest case study of just how we use this tool it's on a geography you probably know just over the hill I'm just going to talk to you very fast and I'll be back we did a network redesign project for VGA a few years ago still waiting to be implemented as soon as the party stands you know and we showed them their current all day frequency the same colors you saw in your map red equals high frequency 15 minutes or better blue equals 30 green which you can hardly see and we showed them some alternatives we said okay here's where you are you had about 70% ridership do you want to look at 80 or 90 because they were very concerned about moving toward ridership they didn't want to talk about moving toward coverage so we introduced these maps and we said okay there's your current frequency and here's what it would do if we would look like it we would have kept it at 70% ridership 30% coverage here's what it would look like if we went to 80% and here's what it would look like if we went to 90% and what you'll see is two things as I go through these you'll see more red lines appearing high frequency lines where there's high density and you'll see blue and green lines disappearing coverage disappearing in order to put more resources in those high ridership areas 70, 80, 90 by the time we get to 90 there are large light areas on this map and you can imagine the people in those areas who will freak out and will be angry at you and that's an intrinsic part of this process for agencies who want to think this way as BTH shows to do now the interesting thing is that why on earth would anyone do this the elected officials response is oh my god there's a bus route disappearing from my city my constituency, my electoral district absolutely not well actually down to the Almond and Valley in the south we had a San Jose city councilor who said yes please cut my bus service it's a lousy investment for the county as a whole we'd rather have a little more light rail frequency and we'll drive down to it and we'll drive to it or take, lift to it or whatever because we understand we have lousy density up here this isn't the place we're going to fix my answer so it will surprise you sometimes what position people will take if every elected official gets to figure this out for their own money but just wanted to quickly show you the freedom how it comes we were able to describe because on the surface going from this to that is so painful and I don't want to minimize how painful it is the public hearings will be horrible if you propose to do something like this which is why I'm not telling you to do it I'm going to have to be very clear I'm not advising you to do this I was very clear to the BTA board I was never going to tell them what they should do I was never going to make a recommendation about this anyone in the plumber is going to tell you whether it should be cheap or durable that's my answer but we were able to show that this kind of outcome so for any hypothetical person location in the city this happens to be Mission College you imagine a person located there this woman is named Jane she's a kind of every person and there's where she can get to in each amount of time 15 is light 30 is dark blue 45 is light blue and pink is 60 that's where she can get to in those amounts of time in concept 7 as we move toward concept 90 and we have all those painful impacts here's how that changes 80, 90 so if you're on that high frequency network and the majority of the population is about 230 is the population is the usefulness of the transit network gets better and better for you as resources are shifted into these higher ridership higher freedom solutions we can show exactly what that means you know the journey from the existing system to the proposed system like at the bottom by the time you get to network 90 she can get to twice as many jobs 100% more jobs than 30 that's also a proxy for shopping, social, all kinds of other things we can essentially double the level of freedom that she has in her life by virtue of having gone from 90 to do that the board by the way went through this whole conversation and came down at the same time and that's what we ended up preparing as the final plan and again that plan we're doing when part of it so this is an example of that thought process leading to a kind of clear decision and the important thing is the board understands the consequences of the decision that's why we took this process so that they would not be surprised then they would know what the coverage rounds are they would expect low performance from them they know what the ridership rounds are I want to raise one other issue that's very interesting which is the surprisingly good performance of your wall all services to Felton, San Lorenzo Valley and also Santa Cruz once a bill and also to UCSC Santa Cruz Metro's most successful services focus on trips that aren't conducive to walking in a cycle this is a pretty good community for walking in cycling compared to a lot of places in California so you tend to be succeeding but there's a big barrier to walking in a cycle either the hill going up to UCSC or just the very long distances to once a bill or to Felton and the hill in Felton's case as well so the other thing to remember is that very short trips need outrageously high frequency if you're actually going to be this is what's wrong even with most downtown shuttle services that you see in a lot of places if you're actually going to compete for a trip that's 1 or 2 miles long you have to be incredibly frequent when you're starting to walk or even starting to roll in a wheelchair in many cases because a long wait for a short trip is something very few people will do it doesn't make sense to you so as a result, shorter distance services in a city in a region of your skin will usually be coverage services and this is very interesting because it's a new way of thinking about the balance between long distance and short distance the value of your long distance services is that they connect pedestrians to a short distance that's too far to walk and that may be an interesting way of thinking about your work in the future so to sum up, if you wanted higher ridership, we know what you would do if you're running coverage services that's fine as long as you don't expect ridership things to consider adopt a policy about where you want to be on the ridership coverage right now it's about 64 and it's helpful also to have some priorities for coverage service right now the priority seems to be on coverage services where there's a strong where you have a significant low income population the value of having a policy is that you turn the dial consciously instead of turning it accidentally turning it out accidentally is what happens when someone comes and asks you to add a low ridership coverage route and you do and then you're surprised because average ridership went down well no you shouldn't be surprised when you do that that's actually completely predictable so again do whatever you want as long as you understand what the outcomes will be so thanks very much happy to take your questions thank you for that thank you for that presentation I'd like to get some comments from the board before we go out to the general public John thank you I wonder if you could put that map of Santa Cruz up with the routes it was an early slide yeah it was an early slide I'll take a while to get back to it but they don't have the right control to do it yeah well this is where it was colored right it is yeah and so I think to me this is a very telling map because in part this doesn't line up with the I will just point out the county's voters development strategy or the county board of supervisors development strategy because the voters set an urban services line back in 1978 and said we're going to concentrate development in the urban services line if you look at this map the areas where we say we're going to concentrate development are in light blue and now the county just finished a sustainable Santa Cruz County plan which doubles down on that strategy which is that we're going to become more dense along those transit corridors that are light blue and then we're going to just up the ante a little bit more of them we're going to say density bonuses anywhere but because of the the voter approved urban services line it's going to be right in those areas where it's light blue so this is a I represent a big area here that's in light blue so I'm very sensitive to that yeah listen this is many years this isn't like this board of supervisors is the only one but this is what we've been doing for years this board not many of these members but this board when we looked at the short term transit plan I think that's what we call it short term I don't remember short range transit plan didn't even consider anything outside the city of Watsonville and the city of Santa Cruz which blew my mind I argued against and I think this shows the failings of that of doing that because you only have these routes where you don't have it where the people are so I think that we have to sync up what our development strategies are with our transit strategies to be more effective at meeting the transportation needs because our goal along whether the city's transit corridors plan or the county's Santa Cruz plan is that we're going to look at modest increases in densities along transit the idea is that people would actually be able to take a bus instead of everybody having cars but when you look at that light blue section it's pretty easy to see I mean I would be fascinating to look at Jane on Capitola Road and see where she can get to in terms of jobs if we could increase the service there so I think this is our board has to think about this because as I say we have to link up our transit strategy with our development strategy right now to me they seem very disconnected the other thing that I will just say about this and this is not a knock on the San Lorenzo Valley I think you made a point that the San Lorenzo Valley those routes get used but as someone who represents the summit area the Soquel Hills the Soquel Valley they're not even light blue they're white so those people don't even get so when we talk about a coverage system where we're trying to reach people I have a there's a large number of Santa Cruz County residents who don't even get infrequent service and if you think about where people are getting housing now affordable housing they're going further out we're going to have a strategy where we build more dense affordable rental units in the urban areas and we better put transit service there or we should if we're going to be caring about coverage let's talk about the thousands of people who aren't getting coverage at all right now these are I think big decisions for us to make as an agency but you can see where a lot of people are being left off so I appreciate the frame to be able to think about it I've seen your presentation now a couple of times because you've been a regular visitor here to Santa Cruz but it helps me think about the kind of choices that we need to make here in Santa Cruz so thank you Director Botford I just want to click on top of that point you can leave this what scares me on this is you made the point about coverage and I'm just imagining this with the 70, 80, 90 implemented into this which I know you haven't done yet but if we were to look at this going through the 70, 80, 90 ship probably all the blue lines in your area would disappear it would be like here I would argue that if you went up to higher ridership those would become darker because that's where the people are I'll let the speaker if you did just speculate because I know you haven't done it formally but if there was a 70, 80, 90 chart what would this map look like what would the network look like at 90 I think we would look at LIBO and some of those other areas and we would say density coming in there but on the other hand short trip distances such that we have to be in there with high frequency to be useful at all and if for example a cycle way were being developed for that same quarter and we were expecting a higher and higher cycling mode share that gives me a smaller and smaller transit market so we'd have to have long conversations about that because maybe it would depend on the long-term level of reliance on transit that is planned for those neighborhoods but I could see if I were working from the existing ridership with the existing patterns that a 90% alternative might very well just be in service on South Elkhorn from Santa Cruz to Watsonville and you know maybe and probably you could get some kind of maybe you could probably get a second 50 if you took out everything else you'd be taking out the three and the four and then the Watsonville local network I think although the Watsonville local network really needs a look you should probably take a closer look at that network generally it's got a lot of one-way loops in it it's got a lot of stuff that's that looks like it could be improved on and there's probably you know there's probably so I wouldn't speculate on what a Watsonville local network would look like but my guess is that you know there would certainly still be one Thank you Thank you Mr. Reagan I I'm thinking a couple three routes that when you get consistently three or four passengers a day morning and night those things are detrimental we cut out the 77 because that's what happened I'm also thinking you know there are areas we go to on 79 clear on Lakeview and you're going to have to deal with do we go coverage or consistency or ridership and I've got proof as well of spots how to deal with surface let me just say this about Watsonville I'm sorry I should have had a photograph an image of it here Watsonville has a route that looks just like this it's the 79 you can ride 20 minutes in circles 30 minutes to get where you're going because you're going to have so many other places along the way so again you have to be really you have to have really no options at all to use something like that it's important to remember even when you're talking about very low income people there are very few of them who truly have no options at all if nothing else they won't walk or ride an old bicycle or do something and so that's just not a service that's of much use and when I look at a city of the density of Watsonville and with the kind of level of social needs of the system of Watsonville and look at it as a place where really we should be helping low income people own fewer cars because that makes them wealthier if they don't have to spend that much money on cars think about the below income family who's kid is turning 16 and they have to decide whether to buy a car or say it's going to go to college those are the kinds of choices that families make and you know bus driving around in circles there's not going to help them there's not going to help them decide to be as a new car so those are some of the things that I think arise and I think that Watsonville particularly I mean Santa Cruz you just have to decide whether to go into those cul-de-sides or not also though you've got I think more of an opportunity to build you've got a more connected street system you've got more different ways the local network would work and I would encourage you to take a closer look Director Ruckin would you know I've probably been around long enough to remember when we made the decision to have what we roughly call urban roots and rural roots and different ridership expectations and that was sort of our way to have a sophistication of the way you presented this but I see the pants came to this idea that we should you know have a certain amount of our service dedicated to identity, more frequent, etc and a certain amount of the would be in rural areas and that's the kind of tool we've used I think up until pretty recently to make decisions about whether we should cut or can we kind of have to do a budget cut, which route should go and so you know the rural routes are meeting their minimal expectations in the get cut and the urban ones that can be theirs as well and I'm just sort of wondering what I think the board probably I can't speak to the board my guess is that people grasp your point and have the idea that we should probably be increasing our ridership to some extent, not how much is the issue but I guess the question is what kind of a tool is useful for figuring out if you're going to dedicate a certain let's say this side we're going to instead of 40 we're going to have 25% of our service be let's not call it rural now but coverage or something what kind of a tool do you use since ridership is not the you know rather than sort of a political slugfest where everybody fights for their local constituents which we've been thankfully not it's been a good board about trying to think about the whole system generally what kind of tool allows you to make that kind of decision about where coverage goes if it's not just who has the most political right and can line up the most allies so we asked a couple questions about coverage first of all are we talking about significant populations of people who are really severely disadvantaged by not having the service and there you're usually looking at income you may to some extent be looking at distribution of senior populations if you have a concentration of senior populations then then you look at and then you also look at sort of how much duplication does this service require how useful is this really so I'm going to make an example of there's a very awkward route you have at last college you walk up and trace it for you route 3 comes out of downtown when it physically can the location of this whole deviation down to the boardwalk area back comes around here on top of another route and then it serves that little piece of mission that nobody else is serving which happens to be a commercial strategy then it comes over here and wanders through this and ends up in Metro Bridges so every little look and cranny that that route is hitting where it is unique it is the only coverage but it's a ridiculously circuitous thing that it has to do to hit those little pieces that is probably a route that would drop off very quickly every one of the first routes that would disappear if you turned the dial to the right it's not just that and it's not just a judgment about how important that or unimportant that coverage is it's also just the fact that the linearity is so poor the overlap of other services you have to do is so great that you're getting very little coverage in a very high cost and that's a very poor performer and you know I could point to the 79 in Watsonville which has a similar kind of geography so things like that would drop away and everything you see in LIGO everything you see south of Zocale Drive and east of downtown would probably collapse back to the one route you'd figure out whatever the one route is that seems to have the best stuff on it and make one route there as frequent days you could and the rural services would go away again I encourage you not to have a category of rural services because many people think of Felton San Lorenzo as a rural market but it's actually a very strong interurban market Felton and San Lorenzo are sufficiently high-generators especially since the threat also goes to Stuska's Valley that you have you've hooked up quite a strong set of generators there in that route to us very well so that's why the urban rural is not so useful in terms of ownership coverage because it helps everyone come back to the fact that we're just talking about density but yeah rural by definition is low density it's a sparsely market but linking significant communities across gaps especially gaps that are too far to walk or cycle or that are uphill or whatever that's a powerful market because you're a city that's largely your region's largely otherwise pretty friendly in walking and cycling there's a lot of policies that you want a lot more people to be doing particularly in the flatter areas and open distances if I could add we used to have four number of trees we had the ABC and D and we got in one of those bunch of years whatever it happened we got rid of all of them and we redesigned it because it had to cover what all four of them or tried to cover as much of what all four of them used to do and so I guess that again the question there is is it simply a technical issue of how you best design a route so it doesn't have the duplication problems of the others to this if you want to provide some service to this again on the basis of coverage to the west side of Santa Cruz which is where three is about and I'm just trying to sort of grasp what has we done wrong or you know it's led to three of what we could do differently if we did want to have coverage some coverage same thing's happened up in Felton we used to have two or three other routes in various budget cuts they were left with a one this there now the routes were considered later looking at what we should do with it and that's exactly a process we've been involved in so the concept in general we sort of been following the logic of what you laid out but how you technically they actually end up with a route that's rational and not the number four is it purely a technical issue well four is a great example you know if you do if you've decided to go into every one of those cul-de-sides then you're going to have about the books all the things and there isn't a technical way that I can fix the problem presented by your land use see and it's really the same way with number three you know are you going down into that boardwalk if you are you're going in going back out and that's going to be a deterrent to anyone else trying to ride through and that's going to be an indicator of the coverage service the point is it's even inefficient as a coverage service it's even inefficient at providing coverage not to mention being hopeless at providing ridership so I don't want to make it appear that there are I mean yes there's a certain amount of technique to this especially where we're dealing with a landscape where the street network is connected enough and we have some options I think it's very flexible I don't count the total what do you got this you either drive into these cul-de-sides or you don't and that's a very binary choice right and if you turn that's why I would say if you turn the dial toward ridership it does not disappear very quickly and so what happens instead what happens instead is that access to those social service offices that have been put in that unfortunate place becomes an issue more people start riding their bikes up there maybe maybe human services organizations for lack of a better, well first of all come to you and try to save their services but if you make that decision there's a whole infrastructure of human services transport that might be brought into some of those places you might have an increase in paratransit demand although that's differently less than we expect because paratransit is so limited and then finally you probably get a little bit more Uber and Lyft ridership one of the things that some transit agencies have explored is using, is funding a little bit of a discount for Uber to use Uber and Lyft into places they don't run but honestly that's been done only in affluent areas it doesn't work very well for low income areas because it's very expensive Uber and Lyft are very inefficient and it's very expensive to get those prices down just something that would be more affordable to a low income person so these become very painful binary choices you know what I mean low income people work in industrial towns way down on RV West you don't really have an alternative for them if you're not going to do this so final question last time we made our cuts not that long ago we decided one of the ways to look at coverage was to make sure that people could get to particular institutions we wanted to make sure that our buses may be a factor a result of saying we want to make sure our buses go to the hospital let the buses go to the big school I don't remember the other particular places but as we said like the government center that those are places people need to get to particularly low income people may need to get to those places and so that was the principle in which we designed some of our what we understood to be pure coverage factors you can't cut this because if you can't get to the hospital somehow there's a problem so is that a not wise way to sort of think about distributing the coverage as long as it might be the coverage goal yeah, you have to look at there are going to be places of severe need that are going to be impossible to reach with higher education and I don't know maybe you would come back with a coverage network and say well, we're still going to go up to social services offices across the freeway but we're going to go there once an hour and that would take half a bus and the buses go to something else you would start to do that but you wouldn't turn the novel not very far toward ridership before that separate just to some extent and if we're going to have a big hospital that's something else the hospital is generally actually a ridership generator if it's of any magnitude but unfortunately so many times people are telling you about the isolated office that has a social service but it's been placed where the land was cheap because the access is poor and they've essentially transferred an expense on thank you director Higgin I'm thinking again of 72 and 79 we agreed and designed to extend to various points could we take those outlining points and make them say three times a day morning middle of the night with that the rest of the time of that route that's definitely the sort of trainoff you're looking at is that reasonable it is the sort of thing you would look at in the context of a redesign if you were looking here's a typical example you'll have a rural area or an outlining area Watsonville has this bridge Green Valley places like that that are just kind of rural but they're just enough people out there for it to be an issue and often what you'll find is that the only ridership is happening in school times or that the only ridership is happening on a couple of trips and you can often decide based on that look we can't do that those of you who were around in the early 90s will remember the time that school budget cuts demolished over California suddenly this became a transit agency without any more resources to pay for it and we can that's the sort of thing you would look at and again, if you were turning the knob some of that stuff would just fear but if you were just trying but certainly if you were just trying to make a network more efficient within some of the different bounds you would look at things like that often we look at a low ridership route and we find that all of its ridership is on two or three trips and you know, there's an opportunity this is from the board any public comments? Thank you for your excellent presentation being a Scotsman and having loved the film Braveheart, I just want to yell Henry Wall's freedom Yes, Director Leopold I'm wondering in preparation for our business retreat in October are we going to are we thinking about trying to look at some of these issues or have you already done some of this work with Mr. Walker to help inform our decision or our conversation the first observation is where we're at when we're talking about a strategic plan we would like to incorporate this kind of philosophy into the discussion that occurs at that workshop we haven't done any work with Mr. Walker on this yet we would have to do a contract and something like that might come out of the strategic retreat if that's the direction the board wants to go is to analyze the system I will tell you you often hear speakers come up to your mic talking about frequency the need for more frequency in certain areas from a staff perspective we love frequency we'd like to do more frequency but the challenge is this usually the speaker is assuming that somehow you have additional money so you'll keep everything geographically in place with the frequency whereas from a staff perspective we know the financial constraints and absent new money falling from the sky we have a limited resources that then require us to do things like what Mr. Walker is talking about reallocating those resources within the model that we have so that's the challenge but yes, long answer to a good question we will incorporate this discussion into the strategic workshop we've always been through a number of cuts here this is what we do we take the shrinking pool of resources and we try to make some choice and whether it's conscious or not about ridership or coverage we've done that a number of times it would just be helpful using this frame to have us think long term of where we want to be Director Chasley I just want to echo that I was in the operational analysis committee and we talked a lot about this and I was thinking about the language that we use to bear a lettuce through that and we kind of we use this kind of loosely as a concept but I think we really do as a board need to go straight into that and really set some either percentage standards around what we're looking for either percentage in the coverage or the frequency or looking at well I think that we need some metrics on that to make a good thing for us to do strategically and very explicitly because that should set sort of the standard as the board moves forward I just wanted to point out to our general manager that that money can not just fall from the sky it can come from the decent federal government that the leading public doesn't have to I stand it right I stand it right I'm the board I'm the board from the government one of the things which is ridership but I'm coming from a point of view I am the ridership and I understand much of what he was talking about 79, 72 we've made choices various ones important choices and it's going to defeat ridership and we've done that with 79 twice now and there's ways that we could alter 79, 72 75 all three of them in south county and I would think improve our ridership and maintain coverage to a certain degree that would be the point of discussion I'm sure okay I think is there any other board member that would move on to item number 15 the oral reports by our CEO thank you Mr. Chair, directors civil items I'll cover with you as usual each month now I can talk about tell you about new hires and promotions we have some new hires this month Marcos Hernandez, a pair of transit operator Andrew Crote-Bull, a pair of transit operator Jesse Mendoza-Garcia, a pair of transit operator Sarah Crane Edmund Specialist Cristobal Gravera Solis-Macon's One Worker Ezekiel Rodriguez Solis-Macon's One Worker Edward Diaz Mechanic One and Cesar Alvarez-Castillo Mechanic One those are all new hires this month or in the last two months actually because we're calling it dark in July and then promotions we have José Carranco he is promoted from pair of transit operator to pair of transit dispatch scheduler and Holly Alcorn promoted from senior accounting technician to accounting specialist so a lot has happened in the last 60 days a couple of the things on my agenda to talk to you about you've probably followed some of the discussions going on in Washington DC about the Senate version of the transportation, housing, urban development what they sometimes refer to as the FUD and the house version of that Senate version proposed to plus up that is add more money to the bus and bus facilities program by 400 million the house version by 550 million that all would be fantastic if it happens but word on the street is we'll see that there was also an article this last couple of weeks about both the house and the senate looking at the possible preclusion of buying Chinese product with federally funded money and where that would manifest itself is in BYD even the BYD for example has a plant they built in Antelope Valley down south to build a very high US content bus the potential legislation if it were to go through is less about build American about what the ownership is and the ownership is in the Chinese in China and so that looking at different iterations one iteration of courses to preclude that from happening for one year and then if it happens that they don't allow you to spend federal money on it for one year there's always the possibility that that could be renewed so who knows where that will go that might have impacted us because we were originally looking at buying some BYD buses with federal money for our public road coaches I will hold it on that right now because we're going to talk about that in a later item and then lastly you have before you a letter of response to a letter that we received from Felipe De Leon the vice chair of the commission on disabilities in June you received that that was a complaint about one or two individuals having gone to the Watsonville Transit Center customer service booth and found it to be closed we researched that extensively we cannot figure out what this complaint might have been what state's names anybody to talk to to investigate this further we did as much investigation as we could and we're sending them back a letter just saying if you provide us more information maybe we could research a little bit more we are making clear that at Watsonville Transit Center when we have a legal duty to give our employees their two fifteen minute breaks during the day and their lunch breaks when we have one person staffing that booth we put sort of a clock the traditional clock on the window says back in fifteen minutes or back in an hour so the customers know that's the case but we do have a duty to get those folks their breaks that concludes my presentation I'll be happy to answer any questions any questions okay we'll move on to item number sixteen public hearing there's a route 33 and 34 due to ridership followed by potential board action regarding elimination of those two routes Mr. Emerson good morning again hopefully when we're open the public hearing at ten thirty five thank you again board chair and members this item as was just said is the public hearing on the proposed elimination the routes 33 and 34 due to low ridership in Fairbox and low Fairbox recovery as a reminder the board opened a public comment period at its June 22nd meeting and since then we have received comments from seven people in one organization the Long Pico Community Center as background this is really important in 2015 Metro identified an impending $6.3 million dollar structural deficit for a single year of FY16 among the many tools and solutions to address that deficit was the major service reduction we did in September of 2016 where we eliminated almost 20% of the trips in the system but we now have a balanced budget and we still exist that's I can't emphasize how important it is that we're still here during the comprehensive operational analysis or the COA as we all came to call it during that time the service analysis within that reduction plan these two routes were the two least cost-effective routes in our entire system but it was decided to retain them in hopes that the ridership could increase Metro worked closely with Director McPherson and the San Orlando Valley School District to try to develop stronger ridership for these two routes which the reality of us there's one trip of each in the morning and there's one trip each in the afternoon designed and scheduled to serve the SLV schools however we we kept the services however over the last two school years the ridership has remained extremely low and in the case of Route 33 it's actually dropped even further from two years ago on average boardings per trip as you note in our quarterly ridership reports to the board we give you every quarter including the item on today's consent calendar 12-06 attachment B1 during the last two school years these routes have continued to have the lowest per trip ridership in our entire system this is almost shocking the cost of providing these services is approximately $80 per trip that's 10 times the system average Metro would propose to continue operating these routes until the end of the fall semester at Christmas time giving plenty of time for the school district and the local community to develop more appropriate transportation solutions to address this small scale need fixed route full size buses are not the solution for all types of mobility needs staff recommends that the resources used for these services be reallocated to other services in the county which are in need of additional frequency and or span of service to meet demand and just a quick sidebar since our annual report was on the consent calendar date our system is such that we probably in many cases don't have a minimal span of service that covers a 10-12 hour period that allows people to get to jobs and places so although we absolutely need frequency some of our system needs to bump up in span of service the last bus being at 5.30 or 4.30 on a Saturday afternoon the live vote that's not a transportation alternative so as noted in the annual planning department status report consent out in 12-10 pending the outcome of Proposition 6 in November the intent would be to reallocate these resources in expansion of the Route 35 and 35A in the San Lorenzo Scotts Valley area and just to remind ourselves per board direction we have 160 some bus operators and your commitment in the budget for last year let's add one more this year and one more next year that's 116 so that speaks to Alex's context on how much capacity we have to fix our system as we all know we put that new position on hold till we see what happens with Prop 6 so that's kind of the box we're in moving on per Title 6 this proposed service elimination does not have a disparate impact on minority populations of para crews there are three patrons who access para crews for whom the service could be eliminated however staff believes this could be mitigated in some cases because the Route 35 is operating in the vicinity and it may be possible for some individuals to arrange a point of origin or drop off within three quarters of a mile of Route 35 and this has done quite a lot in the para crew system so the sort of destination is slightly outside you get to a point within three quarters and we pick them up and deliver so that's the end of my introduction of this item and I'll wait next steps this is a difficult situation for me in particular but are there any comments by the board before we open up to the public? a couple questions for me can you mention the $80 per trip how does that relate to another route is that per person or how does it work? first of all our average cost per trip in the system is $8 a passenger along with their $2 fare that gets it to the cost of $10 to operate a trip but the $2 fare gets a date so we took the number of hours operated on these two services during a year multiplied them by the $200 that it cost to run a bus for an hour and divided by the number of boardings per year which is about $23 or $2400 comes out to $80 per person and the other thing is is there a cost associated with the route 33 and 34 general cost to run those routes? $200,000 in a year yes thank you any other questions from the board? anyone from the public who would like to address us on this yes sir? my name is William Shakespeare I'm a local resident for the next 35 years and I found out about the 33 and 34 might be discontinued from a bus driver if it's possible I might have seen the notice at the Scott Valley Transit Center but how I found out about it was from a bus driver who I had conversations with I think it would have been better to open the public comment period by starting it when the bus was running maybe just putting a piece of paper on a lit piece of paper in there so the people who write it would know this was happening and so I informed all my friends people in the community that this was happening public comment letters so anyway that's just how I found out about it I do want to say that I really liked the metro I enjoy riding the bus my means of transportation I wrote a letter telling my personal situation how I use it but I do and you have that in your file so we'll talk about that I think we should look at it this way we have one bus drives to Felton does the 33 route comes back does the 34 route and then drives back to Santa Cruz the 33 bus is used a lot I've ridden it for a couple of years ago just like the gentleman in the city I'd get on that bus sometimes and it'd be full of kids just absolutely kids standing last couple of years it's dropped off a little bit this year I wrote it on Monday when it started there were seven people on the bus that was the first day of school, seven people and I think that is a fair number for what we're looking at here because the bus goes up Cuell Hollow which neighborhoods there goes into Long Pico comes back out and goes to Zyanna then goes down West Zyanna that bus serves if you need a piece of you need to get somewhere on a bus that's the only one that gets us there and so it's important to get everything to the east of Highway 9 and if we could take Long Pico and Zyanna and move it over next to Highway 9 we wouldn't have a problem but we ought to save the bus so that's the way it is and it's really important to the people who do need that bus that we have even though it's a very limited service that if I got to go somewhere like San Jose or something like that I'd get up early, walk down on almost dark in the morning get on the 7 o'clock bus and then my day gets started anyway it's important to us and your decision is going to affect me for a long time and all the kids who write it everybody who will ever use that bus if it's not there we don't have a bus I could afford to go buy a car I didn't want a driver I said I'm tired of driving I drove for a living I said I'm going to take the bus and I am so glad I did my life is so less stressful so anyway that's why I take the bus so I broke the numbers down this gentleman gave some figures I heard one time from a bus driver that it was $100 per hour so that was the number I used and I calculated out the time at $100 an hour divided by 60 that's $1.67 times the number of minutes per ride comes out for bus but to run the bus the 33 bus it's going to run the bus anyway I figured out that using a 23% fare box recovery rate would be 7 people on the bus that's exactly what it was on the bus the 34 I've never ridden it I never go to that part of town I can't speak to it all I know is it costs you money if you break it down the cost is the entire thing going from the 33, 34 back to Santa Cruz the 33 is 39% of it the 34 is 30% of it and the cost to get that bus to go from here to Safeway and then come back that's another 30% the 30% of the cost is just giving the bus to that starting so if you break it down like I said I'm running about the 34 the people who ride it how many people if you're going to eliminate something I'd say eliminate 34 from a business standpoint they say there's two people who ride it in one nobody in the afternoon no sense in sending a bus somewhere thank you sir any other comments from the public thank you my name is Gail Jones and I'm the president of the Long Beach Community Center and there's a letter in the packet that the Board of Directors wrote on behalf of our membership so I won't go over that I did take some notes while I was listening to the gentleman's presentation and I the biggest point I got out of this presentation and what's happening with the bus to that right now is it doesn't sound like to me that you have decided if you're going to go ridership versus coverage so I think maybe you should think about what your goal is going to be before you start cutting services the other thing I want to say is it is not feasible for anyone in Long Beach to get three quarters of a mile to the near to Felton without walking on the side of the road with no sidewalk it's very dangerous I can't see any of our kids senior citizens walking down the side of the road to get within three quarters of a mile of Felton and you talked about choices but long people really have no other choice Uber and Lyft tend to not want to come out there and the people that are riding the bus can't afford Uber and Lyft and or they're too young so I don't know I just don't see any alternative for the people in Long Beach Thank you Any other comments from the public Good morning I'm cutting meal 33 to 34 is a bad idea I think that saying that it's not disadvantaged community is incorrect anywhere out of Syracuse County is a disadvantaged community because I live here I pick up all the students and it's probably important after noon when they don't want to get home so take that into consideration you're taking the opportunity for kids to go to school so I'm going to have the fair sometimes just a rural area you can walk because it's taking an hour from one of the participating Lyfts and I can go out there just take that into consideration before you guys make any cuts Thank you Anyone else from the public this issue bring it back to the board I want to thank that people took the time to come down share their concerns about this issue when we made our cuts last time at that time this was a recognized these two routes were recognized to be the least productive in the system and made a hard choice the board voted to see if we couldn't find a way to build the service and maybe we could save them if enough people got on the routes to make them productive enough to support but that really hasn't happened with all due respect to the people that spoke it's not an easy decision I take quite seriously their concerns to be told that $80 a rider suggests and I only say this not as a serious suggestion but to point out the absurdity of the choice of being offered buying it a car or to like pay them for Uber service or something else because $80 arrived I mean it's a level that's just way beyond our ability to maintain a service I have to say I don't do this easily I'm not excited to do it you never want to cut service to anybody but I will make a motion that we accept the recommendation that we cut these routes because they're just so unproductive that we really cannot continue to end up supporting them it does have a negative impact on people I think we recognize that but again it was a larger group when we did it but what we made the cuts before we had at that point scores if not hundreds of people who were being similarly disadvantaged and we still made the hard decisions to cut those in order to maintain the routes that actually will provide a lot more service for more people and that's a hard choice but that's my motion that we accept this report second second motion I brought into I know Mr. Bonthrup do you have a comment? I just had a question I'm trying to go back in my mind when we were talking about the bus routes I was looking through the appropriate entities oh I'm sorry some law, some guideline about us in conflict with school districts not being able to provide a route provides school service can you just refresh my memory on that? there is a federal regulation that we can't compete with bus services, contracted bus services that provides school service this is not a direct conflict because there's a fixed route that is an open door the reality is the riders tend to be some students probably pointed out in this two years that have passed we've met with the folks at the school district try to see if they would do something like what we do with UCSC and Cabrillo which just subsidized us to keep it running and they said well, no, why would we do that your cost is way higher than it would cost us to contract for yellow bus service and so we got our answer there and that ultimately led to this discussion today but the short answer to yours is no there is no direct we've investigated it since I think I've made that comment a couple of years about four, a couple of months ago but there's no direct violation we think of the federal law thank you I just wanted to comment on the board, I know I really worked hard almost two years ago to keep this service and been trying to see what we can do to keep it or have it become more productive which has not happened although we're focusing on an isolated instance here of two routes in our consolidation reduction effort we reduced 20% I think of the structure that we had and we kept this whole so I'm appreciative of the board going along with that to see how we can make this work better it's not approved to any degree and reluctantly I think each of us is going to I'm going to vote to support the motion under the circumstances and I think this will be part of a further discussion when we have our retreat in October I know that as well so if there's not any more comments from the board I'm going to vote Mr. Chair just for the record do you have in your packet in the attachments letters that we want to make sure are included in the record from customers and others and then we've also dropped under desk today some lay the rivals that we're including in the record Mr. Director Leopold I just had a question about that because a gentleman came up and said but we can't tell any names of anybody who wrote I understand not including addresses and everything but not including names just seems I can include the names they're entering something into the public record I haven't seen the practice actually on any of it but I understand if we don't want people's address but knowing who the writers are it does make a difference so I'll correct the online version well I just think in the future it would be helpful not to have that xed out or blocked out I think it's helpful for me to know who it is or by seeking constituents to know oh Will said something you know wrote something that's I know I got his letter good for the point but we will delete the email address on the one that we got today but I do want to emphasize your own I do want to emphasize that and that we did get those letters and they're heart-rending and it's like you understand that people are not making this up that there's a negative impact and we shouldn't fool ourselves that somehow this is going to go down easily or doesn't negatively impact people it does and that's one of the hard things of being in a seat okay we have a motion on the floor second all those in favor so public hearing is closed the public hearing is closed and we will move on to item number 17 which is the next public hearing award of contract for the mental facilities lighting retrofit project chair and this one is open yet is the public hearing is open yet is that staff report they approach this chair and director of staff and the name is Eddie Benson and the name is manager of the metro our recommended action is that the following the public hearing on the energy service contract for energy efficiency lighting the manager is seeking to retrofit all the lighting for the metro facilities and doing so the summary is that the central metro transit metro has a need to replace all the lighting features with the emergency efficient lighting LEDs at all of its facilities as part of its area wide efficient effort to have a more sustainable and eco-friendly business at our June 2nd meeting the board of directors authorized the CEO to execute a PG&E loan application with a total value of $129,100 the loan is to be paid monthly and being paid off approximately three and a half years with zero percent interest after conducting public hearing and making recommendations for funding the central metro is to to enter into an emergency service contract with governments with our contract per government with section 42,17.10 they want to speak to that last mic lost your voice yes just quickly under metro here we go under metro's naming legislation for public works contracts you're required to let according to the little bit process but the legislature has made an exception for energy savings contracts so part of that exception is we have to have a public hearing and the board has to make specific findings so that's exactly what this does and when you make your motion those findings are part of that and it's just really a formality and otherwise it's in front of you in the report but that's why we're doing the hearing comments, this is directly available given the experience of the county I would be prepared we may get some complaints about the brightness of the lights and that you should be prepared to put some shields on it this is happening in some street lights in the county I don't know whether it will happen here given the locations but our experience is that sometimes people complain about the change in the lighting so just be prepared any other comments from the board okay we'll open the public hearing is there any public who would like to comment on this item okay we'll close the public hearing and bring it back to the board, Director Rockin it's kind of hard to imagine the argument against this it's an environmental sound that saves us money and gets paid off in three years so I will move to read about the recommendation including the findings second moved and seconded and we accept the recommendation, all those in favor are opposed so item number 18 to act on the selection of replacement for the senate group metro board vice chair, I'm very sorry but understanding that our vice chair, Cynthia Chase will not be a member of the city council so she will be not be a member of the metro board in the near future and we'd like to have some comments from Director Chase I am still surveying all the rest of my term but I did want to allow a new vice chair to have the opportunity to prepare, hopefully, for being chair the following year and it just seemed right to step down and to allow that person to have an opportunity to do that so I am hoping you'll accept my resignation as vice chair no absolutely chair through the end of my term and I might show up in the public there's actually a high chance that I will but I would actually also like today the board to consider my nomination as the vice chair to replace me so I'd like to make a motion that you, the board accept my resignation as vice chair and accept the nomination to replace me seconded Director Leopold Thank you chair Thank you Director Chase for being thoughtful in terms of trying to find this and Mr. Bhattop is an excellent choice and I strongly support it I had a question though for our council about Director Chase she is a representative of the city of Santa Cruz so she is appointed by the city of Santa Cruz and she is appointed until they appoint someone else so even if her term ends she is still a city representative or appointed by the city this has come up in the past when you have an outgoing council member and you don't have the new one appointed yet you actually do not benefit from their membership on this board because you have a funky provision in your enabling legislation that says their service on this board ends when their service on their appointing body ends it's one of the things we're talking about getting a legislative fix for other transit districts don't have that it says their service continues until the new member is seated so we want to fix that but right now we'll have a whole so even if the city took action there's no way to do that so if the city takes action they don't tell January that's director Matthews so that requires a legislative fix and not an internal fix? correct because it's in your state legislation in your enabling legislation I do remember when this happened it happens every year we'll fix it I mean it's on our agenda hopefully to find a sponsor and get that corrected what do we anticipate the timeline is for that? next year unfortunately the post-chase era as opposed to post-chase that will name the legislation okay any other comments from the board having not accepted vice chair of the state have you recommended the vice chair of the metro and transit district all those in favor all opposed thank you excuse me is there any member of the public that wanted to speak in 2019 who approved consideration of authorizing the CEO to execute a second contract amendment with CPS for HR consulting to increase the contract totaled by $60,688 for an SEIU classification and compensation study Angela Aiken our human sources director CFO yeah so back in 2016 November 2016 we went out to the public with an RIP to get a class in comp for management as well as SEIU and then in May of 2017 that was March of 2017 we came back and CPS as our contractor so then in May of 2017 we had a side grant together with SEIU where they agreed to have this class in comp done by December 2018 December 30th 2018 today we're asking that you do the amendment to the CPS contract we are almost done with the management I am trying really hard to get it to you by September October would be the latest but September is what we're going for and in the meantime we're also going to be starting SEIU next week if this is approved today to start that process with them next week so we have some timelines that we're putting together, some goggles and right now I'm looking at about 80 class positions that we need to review with SEIU there's other ways that we can Mike went on, oh there you go different ways we can approach those positions and so I've had some initial talks with SEIU but we're going to be starting an artificial review of the positions and going down to class in comp with them next Thursday I had been in contact with Jennifer some of you may remember Jennifer when we first started the management comp plan her and I are going to meet the team leads on each side to make sure that this goes as smoothly as possible and that everything is taken into consideration so today I'm asking for the board to approve the second amendment to the contract for the first CPS so that we can move forward with SEIU okay, thank you any comments from the board? Director, I think we originally thought that the management study would be done a lot quicker than it was and we had others losing the HR director so I make sense to advance this now so we can actually meet our SEIU and try to get this thing done in a timely fashion so I'm going to wait for public comments but I support doing this thank you any other comments? Director Matthews here you wanted a comment? No okay you're okay I'll open it to the public on item number 19 bringing the issue back to the board approval of the recommendation second moved by Rockman, second by Matthews that we approve the contract all those in favor? Aye opposed, so ordered now we have consideration of a resolution of Proposition 6 which would repeal Senate Bill 1 which is filed to the operations of Metro as any transit district or anybody who drives a car or a vehicle or drives a bike or a business anyone in existence so our CEO and Alec Clifford will comment on that? Sure I think this is your one get out of jail free card to pass a resolution in opposition to Proposition 6 as you know we from here on in will need to be very mindful of talking in terms of educating the voters about what will happen in the event that Prop 6 passes that you're allowed to actually do a resolution at this point as are many other transit properties and other legislative bodies across the state I will tell you that we will participate and are participating in a countywide series of meetings to develop our strategy countywide public works directors CAO city managers on how we will sort of pool our resources to educate the public between now and November about what the consequences are of Proposition 6 passing and as you already know we celebrated the arrival of new equipment that was jointly funded by Proposition by SB1 and also Measure D and then that led to our last headways having a cover page and article inside about how important SB1 and Measure D are to funding equipment that we desperately need to replace and then you have at your desk the next version that will hit any day now as we get closer to the next fall service change in which we talk again about the consequences of Proposition 6 passing and what that will mean to us and on the inside of the cover will be a story about that so that's only the beginning we'll keep ramping it up and again obviously participating in the countywide effort to educate but this is your opportunity now to speak to the folks that are in the audience speak to the folks that are watching on TV hopefully many are and tell them what you think about it and how important this is thank you I'm sorry to prepare you for this question but can you give us an order of magnitude statement about what happened to our budget if Prop 6 were to pass? Yes that's in the report it's 2.4 million dollars 2.4 million dollar impact and if out of a total budget of 50 million dollars and so Measure D and SB 1 have allowed you now for the first time in a very long time to not only stabilize services but to dedicate nearly 3 million dollars to capital which we're using to leverage against state and federal money in order to try to begin the process of chipping away at the big old iceberg of 62 buses that need to be replaced if this passes we'll have to come back to your short order and you'll have some tough decisions to make because it's probably not as easy as just saying well we just won't buy buses I think it's not that easy and so this will be a very difficult series of discussions for you to have to figure out how to rebalance our budget in the event that the voters approve Prop 6 I think it's in general too one of your bullet points is that it's projected to drive approximately 20 million dollars in its public transit priority visual transportation projects in Santa Cruz County so we can see that there have been a lot of projects recently that have been up and running so to speak and without this it's not going to happen or it's going to take a long longer time to get accomplished Thank you chair yeah I'm glad you point out that this is a SB 1 has been a huge lifeline to the metro to the county road system which would look about an 8 million dollar loss so if you care about transportation in Santa Cruz County it's critical that the legislature raise the gas tax for the first time since 1993 it's a sound way of getting the people who use the road to pay for the roads and pay for the services that are on the road and it's a cynical attempt by congressional Republicans to increase turnout to try to save congressional Republican seats in Southern California it's a terrible way to make policy it's a stupid way to work against funding what's a critical piece of infrastructure in Santa Cruz County and in California and when you can get local government and the Chamber of Commerce to all agree on the same thing you should listen to them but they're all against Proposition 6 so I'm glad that we'll be joining them Alex, you had spoken on a group of people that would try to pull resources together and see how you can educate the public who exactly are in that your potential group that you spoke of yes so we had our first meeting this week as you may recall I initially said we had a meeting together we can now transfer that response over to the RTC which makes better sense plus they have a communication person and we don't so that really helps so that group has been pulled together it's again the CAO city managers, public works directors and of course we're at the table to strategize on how we will jointly invest our resources in the coming months to educate the voters about the consequences of Proposition 6 and is there any UCSC representation there? There are 17,000 students in the city so we are a bit below right now we can add that Varro would you mind communicating that to the RTC I think that's a great suggestion Larry's right there I always advocate for Larry to be involved in these conversations I'm surely certain that students will be in favor of working with all of this so I would definitely advise for including UCSAN crews in these discussions I could really no doubt Good suggestion Director Matthews My questions were along those same lines so the RTC is taking the lead it would be great if you could get us the actual contact person and if they have a website or a link on their website specific to this issue and I understand the difference between education and advocacy and I think it's on the charge of all of us and everyone we can think of to pull them onto the advocacy side of this I presented last night to one group and it's on our council agenda and so I think everyone here I think they're probably doing that making sure that a similar action is taken to their group like I think in SUA and Cabrillo for example certainly in terms of the advocacy part of this the Measure D campaign was a model and do you know to what extent someone's picking up the ball on a coordinated advocacy effort I will say I got some really good material from the League of California Cities on the impact to Santa Cruz County specifically what's at risk and I think that kind of speaks to making a pitch to whoever the group is and I'm thinking I'm hoping all the unions are putting this on their agenda all the writer groups we can think of et cetera et cetera and again I understand the difference between education and advocacy but it's an all out press and we sit at four points so I just you know we're a little county but we can deliver some votes I think there's one thing that we clarified too the state in the past has had a habit of taking transportation funds and putting it into different agencies there was a measure on the June ballot that would give it that specifically so that revenue funds meant for transportation stay in transportation and I think it's an important issue part of this discussion if you happen to because some people might have heard of this in the pocket before that's not allowed so I think it's still a lot of people that are confused about that well I think that's a point that used to be made because that's been a big criticism in the past excuse your microphone not to be picked up on TV it's been a problem I think in the past that people have objected to these kinds of funding mechanisms because the money was not actually going for what they were going for and now we have with that passage of that proposition that is no longer the issue but I'm not sure that everybody has gotten that message I think that's why it's important to make it part of your educational discussion did we have a motion or was there a public comment on this any comments from the public hi Joan Jeffery I just wanted to say that the unions were part of the measure D effort and we certainly also want to be a part of this effort too to say no to Prop 6 we've chapter leaders reached out to our CEO we want to coordinate efforts and get out there and help spread the word about this and help try and convince voters so that's great Director Matthews and just again thank you for that and to your point when you look at the I think it's six pages of groups that are already signed on in opposition to Prop 6 there are the statewide organizations but then there's all the little local chapters and so that's part of just reaching the numbers is even if your state organization has signed on having a local chapter educate and take actions right Director Hagen Yes, John mentioned how the money that's gone into the structure rebuilding roads we need to maintain from my point of view sidewalks, asphalt walkways you have no idea how many times I have to go down back up two or three blocks and get out of the bike lane where I was that infrastructure for us in the wheelchair group is critical I can't tell you how many times I do just want to add to this as I go here comfortably in my own car I saw you in your wheelchair from I don't know where you originated but I thought boy that is the germination yeah but I appreciate you go ahead all right so Director Rotten move approval of the resolution of this board in opposition to Proposition 6 on the November ballot moved by Rotten, seconded by Leopold to oppose Proposition 6 on the November ballot all those in favor opposed so we're unanimously I'm numbered I think if you could this goes on distribute to board members and other interested parties whatever informational pieces you get because we don't need much money and that will just help us keep current I certainly will do that and the beauty of what we discussed this week in the RTC forum is that FAQs and other kinds of pieces of information useful to all of us in the various ones including part of the plan would be for some of us to identify key people whether it's us or elected officials or otherwise to go on radio talk shows and all kinds of other opportunities where we can get the word out you know our county voters can help compensate for other counties in which the swing might be the other way so we really need our folks to vote for this and go for 100% again if you could give us the contact person we have questions it doesn't have to be circuitous we'll move on to item number 21 to discuss the 2016 low or non-emission grant preservation request approval of a letter to the federal transit administration region number 9 Mr. Clifford so this is related to our 2016 low no grant that we received $3.8 million combined with local match over $4 million a small sum of money and you recall in 2016 we received one of the highest awards in the nation we got a higher award than Chicago Illinois got so that's pretty substantial they can't do that they won't be back good joke good joke so it's a big thing for us and in writing that grant we partnered with BYD and at that time BYD had not produced a zero emissions over the road coach but they said we have one coming it's timely for this grant and we talked about our needs which were horsepower and capacity and they said hey we can do that and we want this thing to be able to do a certain number of trips over the hill and back before it has to be recharged because we were worried about that and what the hill might get out of the mountain I guess I should say might do to the draw of the power of the bus so then fast forward it wasn't until late 2017 they finally produced the prototype the prototype bus was brought here and it wasn't measured although it did seem to meet our needs for recharging that is it would make two round trips over the hill before needing to recharge even that is a little bit suspect because that's today that's not life of battery life of battery needs what is it capable of doing 12 years from now because batteries degrade over time so that still had to be taken into consideration but the biggest failure was that it couldn't meet our power requirements it could not keep up with traffic it could barely do a little bit better than our compressed natural gas buses and so we try to go back to BYD and say hey what are you going to do about this what's your plan what are our options and they really just sort of told Aaron gee we don't have anything really to offer you right now but in a couple of years we might and that really was not worth it wasn't written on to us so at that point we decided it was time to reach out to the federal government and let them know there's a potential problem here and it began our effort to do everything possible to ensure that we keep that money that doesn't leave this region as a result of our partnership with BYD so we met with the local regional office in San Francisco with the acting administrator talked through some strategies we then rolled that a couple weeks later into our board visit so our board visit Mr. Dutcher was there also we in April we went to Washington DC to do our annual event of working our way through the halls to talk about things that are important to transit but we went to the FTA to talk to them about this specifically well in addition to the fact that favorably upon us for future funding we have a lot of buses to replace and we've made two proposals well we made at that time you might recall we had a previous discussion about maybe buying low emission diesel buses for highway 17 and so we presented them a proposal low emission diesel these new low emission diesel buses qualified into the low and no program so we presented that to the FTA and kind of looked down the table not very enthusiastic about that proposal but we talked to them about well what about another proposal in which we take this money and move it over to zero emission bus fixed route and they seemed a little bit more enthusiastic about that they said go back to make a proposal we went back we took zero emission I'm sorry low emission diesel off the table came up with that proposal as our primary with a fallback proposal the state committed to over the road coaches but we can't buy them until another manufacturer enters the market so we got a primary and a fallback in the revised approach went back to San Francisco as a team Ciro, Bero, Aaron and I went pitched that hard to the acting administrator and his team and he said gee we don't like your primary proposal but we like your secondary proposal and he pointed out that one of the reasons why you not only won this grant but one of the reasons why you won such a significant amount of money is because of the inner city approach you were taking connecting Santa Cruz County to Santa Clara County and because it was on a commuter line and it was over the road coach so those all factored in and so if they allowed us to move the money over to fixed route they felt that they would have sort of a cardinal change in the program and the original award and that could make the whole thing suspect so they said we like your second plan and so what we'll do is we'll cap your money not that you spend any more of it we'll hold it there for you, we won't let you spend it other than you're allowed to continue to build the electrical recharging infrastructure that you need to build over at the yard so they'll let us over the next two years continue to draw down on that grant to build the electrical infrastructure for the buses because that's the lead time that's the long pole in the tent you got to get your electrical infrastructure in place before your buses arrive and they take longer it takes longer to build that infrastructure than to build the buses so they'll let us do that and then over the course of the next year or two we'll be watchful of other vendors entering the market now MCI has already said they are developing a bus as a matter of fact we sent a team up north to meet with them this week to bring back on what that bus needs to include in order to serve our work purposes so the nice thing about MCI is they're reaching out before they put everything on paper and say this is what we're going to build they're reaching out to us and saying what do we need to build for you and they talked about the range and they talked about the horsepower so that bus could potentially be here in another year or so with a prototype so once a prototype is developed and maybe Van Hool and some of the others will have one at that time the prototypes will be as cautious as we were with BYD and once that bus gets here we'll test it, if it's right then we'll put out a competitive procurement so the FDA is allowing us to abandon the commitment of the partnership with BYD and go with a competitive procurement and then make that award and keep our money the reason why you might say well that sounds like a no brainer why is this here before us the reason why it's here is I needed to make sure there's a firm caveat in this and that is that the FDA said if we approve it now I have to send this letter to them they still have to approve it but if we approve it and later on in a year or two years it costs more money to buy three over the road coaches you Metro have to commit to coming up with the difference in order to still buy three over the road coaches so if it costs 100,000 more 200,000 more for more money I'm here to tell you I think that's a good gamble to risk an incrementally more expensive bus two years from now than to give up $3.8 million so that's the recommendation I ask that you approve that and allow me to transmit it thank you for simplifying a complicated situation or has been made so but I think this is worth the gamble and I don't think it's a gamble at all it's a great opportunity are there any questions about whether the electrical infrastructure will be appropriate and work with whatever is designed a year from now we certainly do have those concerns so I think to the point of building the infrastructure to get the electricity from say the pole or the property line out all of that should be pretty good we need that to have room sufficient capacity to charge 10 buses so I think we're going to be okay there in the way that we're working that out it really I think I'm going to let you jump up if I get any of this wrong but I think the problem really is on the other side of the transformer where we distribute that to the charger itself and so we don't know what that looks like and we don't know if NCI will build an inductive charger it's important to us because the way we envision operating this is say you do two round trips over the hill and then you lay over at Pacific Station for say 10 to 15 minutes and start boosting up the power and then probably every run there after the rest of the day the layover time becomes recharging time and that allows the bus to make it through the rest of the day we don't know if they're going to build a inductive charger so there's still some things that work out Director Mathews I think it was the same question I feel like it's technologically stupid but I think the question is is it a universal flow connection every single electric manufacturer at this point has some different there is not and that is part of the problem the industry is talking about is standardization of exactly that and then there's the chargers which the larger the capacity of the charger the quicker it will charge the bus and so we kind of want to stay on top of that and get the most current thing a couple of years from now because maybe today's charger takes 4 hours throughout the night to charge but maybe tomorrow's will take 2 that's important to us because as we start incrementally growing our transition into electric buses and head towards 100 electric buses which once the car regulation comes into place we will have to do remember after 2029 we'll have to buy everything we buy as electric buses when that regulation passes so we just need to make sure that when you start thinking through gee your last buses come back to the yard let's call it say 10 o'clock at night your first month's roll out at 4 in the morning you've only got so many hours to charge those buses and you can't charge them all at one time so you have to roll through the fleet and be able to charge them so the quicker they charge the better chances we'll have that we can get through 100 buses but this is just a hundred bus imagine when you're talking a place like Los Angeles where you have two three times as many buses as we have in a yard to charge this is a big problem that has to be solved I don't want to get into the weeds too much but I know we've been looking at this and you just mentioned MCI is our only viable builder right now Procura is not in the game anymore and BYD is falling off beforehand, my question since we've got a guest in the room from Livermore is there any potential for Gillie to look into electrical buses or is that not on their radar? So just one clarification Pratera has given some indication that they're looking at over-the-road coaches and I don't mean to overly focus on MCI because remember we're going to do a competitive process but it could be Pratera then who'll MCI that are all in the game at that time so we have a nice competition and it's going to be a beautiful thing Normie, you can speak for yourself I know I've talked to Joe about it I thought that over-the-road coaches weren't on your radar screen in the short-term is that true? That is correct You're absolutely right Gillie has just recently entered into an agreement with Cummins it's an exclusive three-year deal where they're going to be providing electric drives four auto electric vehicles 40, 35 and later on 30-foot vehicles only 45-foot over-the-road coach is something that's not on our radar but yes we will be building electric buses and prototypes will be going online later this year we've ordered our first generation of electric buses for CCCPA up in Concord but since we signed the agreement with Cummins we will have to cease and desist making that type of vehicle and work with Cummins exclusively and I think it's going to be a great deal because they will be providing tri-motors, electric management systems, and the battery packs themselves we will be having those buses going online later this year and we encourage you please if you have a chance to come see us and take a look at our electric vehicles for 45-footers not over-the-road I just want to really give a kudos to Gillie as we've gone through this proposed regulation and remember how it started out and it's sort of migrating to become a little bit more palatable Patera and BYD got out there from day one and even as recently as today really advocating for the regulation and not so much for the changes that as a transit industry we were asking for they just got out there so let's get this done tomorrow we can sell lots of electric buses and that's a great thing Gillie could have done that Gillie didn't do that Gillie sat at the table with us at CTA and advocated for the things that were important to us let's not rush into this let's be careful, let's be mindful of the fact that the product today even the product that they would build which uses the same battery technology can only go about 150 miles and everybody acknowledges we need buses to go 300 miles end of life after battery degradation for many years from now Gillie has been the champion of that and they've been on our side and I just want to say thank you well thank you I'll just say that Gillie's been in business for 127 years and some of the reasons that we've been so successful for so long is being a little bit conservative is when it comes to jumping into new technologies and totally agree that the battery technology really needs to be yet as it's being mandated and pushed forward we have no choice but to go ahead and bring our product to the market thank you but Mike, you know Rick Rothwell you're none I just see the red light sorry okay so just the inaction so I can transmit the letter I think the motion of the recommended action to write the letter and all the other associated pieces move by Lee Polk, second by Rotkin and all those in favor excuse me, I didn't go to the public besides from Mr. Gillie he's representative was there any public comment on that I'm sorry okay it's passed unanimously now number 20 item number 22 approved state right one bus on shoulders feasibility study I've heard this presentation a couple times very exciting I think it's a tremendous option that might be available to us Mr. Emerson thank you for chair this item is about the recently completed state route one bus on shoulders feasibility study back in 2016 and bag and can see the transportation agency of Monterey county they awarded to Monterey Salinas transit and Metro together a grant to study the feasibility of bus on shoulder operations in both counties I'll speak only to the Santa Cruz county portion today it's interesting in Monterey county they not only have the highway with its shoulders but they also have a rail reserve that's relatively adjacent so they're having a very interesting conversation down there this completed study analyzed various approaches to implementing bus on shoulder and I will say that the full study the Metro planning webpage so if you're interested in the 120 pages it's there under planning projects bus on shoulders is a relatively low cost solution for transit in highway environments when there is not a formal high occupancy vehicle lane or an HOV lane in many bus on shoulder projects around the country including the most well known in Minneapolis bus on shoulder operations is on the right shoulder of the highway an important concept very often when you see full HOV lanes or carpool lanes they're in the center on the left shoulder another example of a right hand shoulder bus on shoulders project is in San Diego interstate 805 stage off 52 which I was actually involved with it for a few years initially in Santa Cruz we are hoping to achieve a left side inside shoulder operation because it was envisioned the primary use for us was for our services that traveled to express from Santa Cruz to Watsonville we didn't have a great need in our road network to get on and off in the center of the county unfortunately the reality is the engineers looked at it and there were too many structures where we couldn't even move the freeway around and now you're moving into the hundreds of millions of dollars if you think about taking down interchanges think about a 50 million in a shot that starts to sneak up on your old 800 million dollar HOV option but that is all costed in this study in the background of fact using the right shoulder and having buses travel in the auxiliary lanes between the interchanges and having them operate on the shoulders at the interchanges is the proposal on the table at the moment as the preferred one this particular cost effective strategy of operating is possible only because of the program of auxiliary lanes that RGC is planning to implement through the county we all know what auxiliary lanes are they run from on-ramps and we have a couple but they're hit and miss and I'll speak more to that in a second rather than operating on the shoulder between interchanges which would require much further environmental analysis and financial investments we want to be able to be in the auxiliary lanes because auxiliary lanes move faster than the adjacent general purpose lanes and one of the reminders in the bus on shoulders world 65 miles 8 inches from parked cars all the regulations around the country limit you to going up to the most 15 miles an hour faster than the adjacent traffic but that's really important because it needs to reliability and if there's anything more important in transit and speed it's reliability of every trip taking the same amount of time so that people can make transfers and come on the service so the request today going forward is we're extending up to $50,000 of our current budget in the planning department this year in professional technical fields to have RTC's auxiliary lane design consultant develop an operating concept for Caltrans's review which would hopefully lead to a substitute project approval and environmental clearance moving to that process if we get to there could be another $250,000 to $500,000 if we're fortunate not to get to that point we're making some tough choices here but we gotta get in the queue there the strategy goal is for the concept to be deemed a categorical example environmentally and have its design be incorporated into the Oxlane final design project and be constructed as part of the multi-phased auxiliary lane project so we can start using more and more as it comes online this completes my presentation however I'd like to acknowledge that RTC's auxiliary lane project manager Sarah Christensen is in attendance and could help address any questions about the bus on shoulders or Oxlane projects thank you thank you very much any comments from the board comments from the public there's a request to approve up to $50,000 for a study on this from the Metro Director Rockwell I've had a bunch of questions that I gotta answer in RTC to actually work I have to say from my own experience there's no question that the auxiliary lane that goes from Santa Cruz to Soquel Avenue is fast keeping the lanes lots of people are sort of in that and waiting to unfortunately the very last minute to switch back into the general lane but for people to grasp this when you get to that bridge where all the traffic goes off to the right this is just one example at Soquel Avenue the bus would then go under the bridge there's no preemption because there's people coming off of the entering the freeway going south from Soquel for example there it is on that side of the road where they get on the road and so they obviously don't want to have a conflict there's a long enough entryway at that intersection so it probably wouldn't be a big conflict but some of the other bridges have a shorter loading lane so they don't have to have some way of dealing with that there's a bunch of other issues which I won't go into here again this is incredibly exciting because it's not that it's going to get to Watsonville twice as fast or something but if people sitting in the traffic on Highway 1 see a bus going by them and even, you know, saving 20 minutes or 10 minutes to ride to Watsonville you can't buy advertising they would get people out of their cars the way this would make that happen people would just go why am I sitting in my car when I could be taking the bus and all the other advantages of doing that are the overall cost of car operation but I'll definitely move this recommendation it's well worth $50,000 to get further into the study of how this would work and because this is not taking additional space except under a bridge you're going to have to build a retaining wall some of those little sloping things that come down under the bridge probably get in the way of the bus there might be some cost involved in the actual development of how you get under the bridge of the bus but what they study is that you can do that under every bridge of the state, State Park Drive so this is really exciting with our buses it would save us money and time because instead of having every bus taking it takes about four buses or something to get there at a certain time now we might be able to reduce that to three buses in the same frequency of service so this is exciting I need approval of the recommendation moved by Rodton, seconded by Rothwell Director Buffer I just have one comment this presentation was made at the RTC here, kind of a technical question but I did get a little confused because it started out this is called a bus on shoulder program and what I was envisioning is what I will just simplify is a bus on auxiliary lane program with the concept being the same is that whether the bus was on the shoulder or the auxiliary lane it would potentially use the auxiliary lane in some kind of cut through under the bridges to proceed so my question is what we're proceeding here because it's going to take more to be able to either develop a shoulder or widen the shoulder when those costs are built into this and my question is could this stand alone and just be a bus on auxiliary lane program which would prevent the bus drivers having to merge from the shoulder to the auxiliary lane they would just stay on the auxiliary lane the whole time not using the shoulder and is that more cost effective or is that even something we're considering sorry to make that question confusing let me make let me make a bus operations clarification then Sarah can talk about the project the concept of you're in the auxiliary lane you're going along the auxiliary lane gets off with that interchange the fact that we can then continue under the bridge in what is today's shoulder straight on through and we rejoin the auxiliary lane 35 yards later was that the question? that's exactly so it would never really when I'm talking shoulder I'm thinking something to the right of the auxiliary lane and when you're talking shoulder you're only talking about capturing that space connecting the two auxiliary lanes but then we're on the same page we are on the same page so just to clarify the option that we're looking at which is the most cost effective option and it is the most preferred for general freeway operations I would say is called the hybrid bus on shoulder and the hybrid being the buses travel in the auxiliary lanes and the only bus on shoulder is at the interchanges between the off-ramp and the on-ramp so there's some technical challenges with that obviously as we mentioned the conflict points with the on-ramp we can work through that but mainly the challenge is procedural at this point because we are looking to expedite the segment between SoCal and 41st of the bus on shoulder in order to catch up and only go to construction one time for that segment there's a lot of challenges with that which we're working through with Caltrans because we are talking about streamlined project delivery approach with Caltrans so that in itself is going to be a tough sell but we are working very hard on doing that and it makes a lot of sense we think so we're pushing for that Thanks for the clarification I appreciate it Director Leopold The only other thing I would add from the RTC meeting is that in the cost of something like $8 million there seem to be broad support from the RTC to spend the money they consider that a wise investment actually a low investment is efficiency in the system so that's good for Metro Absolutely Anyone else who wants to speak on this? Just a clarification so the the expediting of the project is just for that first segment that's going under construction in 2020 the future bus on shoulder facility south of that we may consider combining it with the auxiliary lane project from the beginning so we don't have to play catch up Sounds great Any comments from the public? Just one addition just from a future marketing perspective I could see us building a whole program around this being our first BRT bus rapid transit potentially having nice stops related to this in Santa Cruz and and another attempt to market and gain more ridership I would move the recommended actions by Leopold seconded by Botford All those in favor? Opposed? So ordered Next item number 23 Approved consideration of authorizing Metro to continue the UCSE articulated bus pilot project for the CEO to execute agreement amendments with the shuttle bus to proceed for the buses and with UCSE to fund all related costs of the operations Mr. Emerson Still morning and we're on the last item That's right, Leopold is going to be online Right, so key point there are three actions authorized continuation of the pilot of the articulated buses number two to allow the CEO to execute the agreement with the leasing company and to execute the agreement with UCSE being UCSE paying all the costs of this project As Metro is not in a position to provide additional trips to and from the campus today with our either vehicle or operator resources in August last year you approved the pilot project which ran for two quarters last year winter and spring quarter these operated on the five UCSE routes effectively addressing bus overcrowding in the past five students waiting at stop that alone made it golden for both the university and Metro UCSE desires to continue the operations of three buses for the entire three quarter school year this time Metro staff recommends continuation through the entirety of the school year to more thoroughly analyze the potential impacts and or benefits over a more substantial amount of time in the five months that we did last year that completes my presentation and again I'd like to acknowledge that Larry Teigler from UCSE is here in the tenancy to help with any questions if you desire Any questions about this for the board? Yes Mr. Thompson Please approve it That was a lot more to say to be honest with you My first year to my second year there was a good start contrast and use of transportation just so phenomenal there's not really much to say against it there hasn't been any complaints on campus from the different student groups I was really happy with the outcome of the articulated buses I'm really happy and I have little slugs on them so there isn't really any other option but to pass this like Burrell said UCSE is taking up all the costs anyways so it's been a really helpful program for a lot of students I've been more inclined to take transportation fast up, you know, it's either that or wait 30 minutes for another bus or call it Uber in 5 minutes I don't have to do that because these buses are a lot longer to take more students so it's overall been a really awesome program on our campus and I'm glad that it will continue on for the next three quarters I really thank Larry for his awesomeness and helpful in keeping this program going so I do a picture that we appreciate as the 17,000 students on our campus Thank you Yes I haven't had breakfast my adjectives don't come out so fast We have any comments from the public? Mr. Montecino One of the Montecino representatives the bus operators we initially had concerns because again the lack of communication and transparency but I think we've gone through a few letters back and forth and I think we're in a better space now Thank you Any other comments from the public? I just want to again thank as it's been done too thank UCSME It's in the conversation a lot with its growth and enrollment discussions it has come to the plate to help Metro time it again and this is another example of that and very appreciative of them funding this it's very much welcomed by Metro We have Motion to approve the recommendation Second Moved by Roth Second by Matthews All those in favor? Aye Okay we have come to the end I don't know if there's anything else but the announcement of the next meeting will be Friday September 28 at the Santa Cruz City Council Chamber This meeting is adjourned