 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we're very glad that you found your way into this room in this cavern of the Capital Visitor Center. Anyway, we welcome you to this briefing this afternoon to talk about transit, a very, very important issue, certainly for EESI and I think for all of you. And of course, our topic today in terms of looking at public transportation, investments in public transportation, how it makes a difference in terms of local economies, and as we are looking at the great conversation all over Capitol Hill about the increase in gasoline prices and what that means for everyone's constituencies and what is the role of transit in terms of thinking about all of these topics in terms of investments, in terms of economic development, and indeed in terms of higher gasoline prices. And how does all that come together? And of course, I find it quite amazing that as we are gathered here right at this very moment, the transportation bill is on the Senate floor and there are amendments after amendments that are being offered this afternoon and as that bill then comes to closure, it will be taken up by the House in terms of maybe there will actually be a transportation bill. What a concept, right? Since we know that the Congress has struggled to come up with a transportation bill and that there have been numerous, numerous extensions in terms of this very, very important piece of legislation which governs so much of how we move things in this country. So we are delighted to have the panel of speakers that we have this afternoon. We think that they will bring all of us some very, very interesting examples and stories about the whole role of transit, what it really means, and the significance of it as again we look at this very, very important policy issues before the Congress with regard to the transportation bill. Our leadoff speaker this afternoon is Gary Thomas and he is the chair of APTA of the American Public Transportation Association and his day job however is as president and executive director of DART, the Dallas area rapid transit system. He has been president and executive director of DART since August 2001 after having joined the Dallas system in 1998. He brings a background in engineering and also in architecture and as the lead for DART he has been responsible for a 13 city transit system that covers a 700 square mile area with bus, light rail, commuter rail, paratransit and HOV high occupancy vehicle lane services. So he has overseen the expansion, the very rapid expansion of the light rail system in the Dallas area and that is now the largest in the country. Gary was elected chairman of APTA this past September after having served as vice chair and he has also over prior years served APTA in many different capacities. And so we are very, very glad to welcome Gary. Good afternoon. Carol, thank you so much to you and the environment energy study institute for allowing me to be here this afternoon and talk a little bit about what's going on in our industry certainly from American public transportation associations perspective as well as from Dallas area rapid transit perspective. You know, we just were kind of on the tail end of our legislative conference that we have every year and about four years ago I think it was we started talking about the next authorization. We didn't want to say reauthorization, it was the next authorization because we really saw that as a real shift in transit financing, transit funding, transit policies and so we started working on that process about two years before the bill ended. Bill ended in September 2009 right and we were ready. We're ready to go. We're ready for the new bill. We're ready for things to happen because people around the United States are looking for good choices, right? Because if you don't have a choice, I can guarantee you people won't get on the bus, on the train if it's not there. You got to have good choices. You got to give people good choices and that's what it's all about. So we started that process four years ago and lo and behold September 2009 came and it didn't happen and September 2010 came and we're not quite there yet. So here we are and the great news is the great news is everybody's talking about transportation so you go on the hill and it is absolutely true. Everybody is talking about transportation and that's the good news. We just need to make sure that we're talking about it in the right way because it's critical to people throughout and I'm not talking about agencies or businesses, I'm talking about people that ride the system every day. It's critical to them that we continue to stay focused on what we're doing, that we continue to provide good transportation choices to the people in the United States of America. So we, personally, I showed up last Wednesday to have the opportunity to talk to our members and our delegation within our service area, it's nine folks including our two senators and they're very, very supportive of DART, they're very supportive of what we do and if you're saying, you know, well, what are they, are they Republicans or Democrats? We have eight Republicans and one Democrat in our delegation and they're all supportive of what we're doing. Sometimes we just have to make sure, just like all of us do, we have to come up and we have to make sure they know what we're doing, the good things that are happening because they're busy. Everybody in and out, have you ever sat outside a congressman or woman's office and watched the amount of people? And some of y'all work for congressmen and women, I'm sure, so you know, but there's a lot of people in and out of their offices every day, so we have a responsibility, a responsibility to make sure they know what we're doing, they know what's happening in their district from our perspective and then they know the impact that we're having on their constituents and that's what they want to hear. They also want to hear how they can help us and that's, so that's our job to make sure that we convey that message now. As we had that conversation last week, it was pretty amazing because as we went into those offices, everybody knew, everybody knew where the transit community was. They knew that we wanted a long-term bill and they absolutely knew that we wanted the transit account left intact because you might remember at the beginning of February, there was a lot of conversation about maybe we didn't need the transit account being left intact and people throughout the country said, no, that's not a good idea. We don't buy into that. We strongly think that the transit account needs to remain part of the Highway Trust Fund that 2.86 cents needs to continue to go to transit and they heard us. They heard all of us. I mean, it was, again, it just wasn't us. The transit agencies are the business members. It was our stakeholders. It was the business community throughout the United States. It was our customers, the people that ride the system as I said earlier. So that's the good news. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody knows where we are. The Senate bill, I don't know if it's going to pass today or tomorrow, but I know as we talked to our senators, they said we feel fairly confident that it's going to pass this week. The Senate bill is going to do something this week and we're excited about. The House is on recess this week and I know when they come back next week, they're going to be very focused on transportation and doing something next week. And why is this important? I mean, I think we all know in this room why it's important, but just in case, it's because our economies, our economies in each one of our communities throughout the country is dependent on transportation, is dependent on good transportation. It's about getting people and goods and services to where they need to be, from where they are to where they need to be. So it's absolutely critical. So again, why does it matter from a transit and a transportation standpoint? You know, I have to tell you that, after just announced this week, that ridership is up throughout the United States. It's up 2.3 percent throughout the United States, 10.4 billion trips this past year on transit. And that's before gasoline prices were really starting to go up. That's the second highest it's been in the last 50 years. It's peaked in 2008, if you remember what was happening in 2008, gas prices or what? They were $4 a gallon. And then the economy hit us, and so it went down a little bit, but now it's back up. And it's the second highest it's been in the last 50 years. As a matter of fact, every weekday, just think about this. Every weekday, there are over 800,000 more boardings a day, every day, on public transportation than there was a year ago, 800,000 more boardings a day than the last year. That's pretty incredible. So there's a lot of people, 10.4 billion trips a year. There's a lot of people looking for transportation choices, a lot of people trying to figure out how to get out of their cars off the highways and do all the right things for all the right reasons. And we're talking about this this morning. A lot of people, when they think about public transportation, they think, well, it's about getting from point A to point B safely, efficiently and effectively, right? Well, it's also about congestion mitigation. If you're the one that's driving on that highway, well, all those other cars around you, you want those cars to go away. You wish all those other people would ride transit. And that's okay. Quite frankly, that's okay. What we have to do, though, remember is provide the choice. It's about air quality. It's about transit-oriented development. It's about those development opportunities around stations. But generally, if you talk to someone about why they ride transit, it's quicker, it's less expensive, it's easier, and it gives them that opportunity to check their emails to and from work, which is much, much safer if you do it on transit than if you're driving. Trust me, it really is. Or you can read a book, take a nap, whatever you do. But as our country continues to grow, we've got to provide those transportation choices throughout the country. You know, I was watching the news day in Sawyer's ABC News last night, and there was a teaser that came on, and it talked about high gas prices, and it talked about transit. And I said, oh, good. So I'm texting Michael Mulanife, the president of Apta, and I'm texting Michael. There's a story on ABC News, Diane Sawyer. They're going to talk about transit and high gas prices. And then they did the story, and they talked about high gas prices. And I said, wait a minute. I know I saw the teaser right. It talked about transit and high gas prices. But when they did the story, it was about high gas prices. We all know about gas prices. We all know where they are. I don't know where they are in DC. I know in Dallas, they're high. They're higher than we want them to be. And people are looking for what, a choice. Because now people are starting to have to decide, do I fill out my car? Do I pay the rent? Do I buy groceries? I have to start making that decision. Gasoline is that expensive? I have to start making that decision. I have to decide what I'm going to spend my money on. So as I watched the news last night, I thought, gosh, we're missing this whole concept. We've got a great solution, a great solution to high gas prices. And we kind of talk around the fringes of it. You know, we're close. We get the words out of our mouth. But we're not quite there. We haven't quite made that whole leap yet to get out of the car in Texas, get out of your truck, get on transit. That's what it's all about. That's what our job is. That's what we have to do as we continue to make this push throughout the country. So as we look at our long-term solutions, as we look at all the different opportunities, we have to look at transit as part of the solution. Of course, it's not the only tool in the toolbox. We all understand that. We have to look at more efficient cars. And quite frankly, we're less dependent on foreign oil today than we were than we used to be. And that's a good thing. And that's good news. But we're not there yet. And we know that every time someone blinks, somewhere in the world, gas prices can do crazy things. So as we continue to march forward, as we continue to do things, we have to create those choices. We have to have the balanced approach to giving people a choice on their transportation needs. You may say, Gary, what do you know about transportation from Dallas, Texas, for heaven's sakes? What are they doing in Dallas? Well, let me tell you just real quickly what's going on in Dallas, Texas, if you're not for me with it. Now, Michael Jones sitting up here, he knows. He's from Dart. He can tell you, if I don't answer your question, ask Michael. He can tell you all about it. We started in 1983. So we started a little bit late. Now, that's not to say we didn't have public transportation in Dallas prior to 1983. We all had public transportation throughout the country. Started in the late 1800s. And we had the streetcar system. We had the interurban system. As a matter of fact, in the 1940s, you could go all over North Texas on transit, right? Just like you could in many parts of the country. And then everything changed, and we know that. And so we kind of got back into the picture in 1983. And we have a 1% dedicated sales tax to help fund it. And right now, where we are in our system in North Texas, is we can't build the system fast enough. Now, what do we have? We have 72 miles of light rail. We actually have the longest light rail system in the country. Who would have thought, in North Texas, you'd have the longest light rail system in the country? We have 16, I mean, I'm sorry, 19 more miles under construction. 14 of that will open this year. We'll be at the airport in 2014. And I've got another three or four miles that people are saying, Gary, we know it's scheduled for 2019. But we want you to get it to us by 2015-16. You know, so, of course, that's in addition to, and we should never forget the fact that we've got a fleet of about 650 buses. We have HOV lanes. We have a commuter rail system that we jointly operate with the T in Fort Worth. We have the mobility management, on-call service, van pools, all the different things that so many of the systems around the country do. We offer all of those systems, all of those things. Again, it's about a toolbox of choices. It's about giving people a choice, right? It's not about saying you have to drive on the highway. You have to drive on the toll road. You have to do this. You have to do that. It's about giving people a choice so then they can make that choice. And for all the right reasons, and all the reasons that I said before, but our challenge, as I said, is we can't do it quick enough. Now, the next part of that challenge is we need funding to make that happen. Now, we have a dedicated 1% sales tax, and that's a good thing. And we overmatch our federal grants. And we've taken advantage of the new starch program. We've taken advantage of the RR program, and the Build America program, and the Tiger grants. And we're going to be doing a TIFI alone. And so we're taking advantage of every single opportunity that's been presented to us. And we can't get it done quick enough. But let me tell you what, if we don't have a transportation bill, if we don't have a well-funded, long-term transportation bill, I can't plan those next projects. I can't get those next set of projects done. I can't continue to provide the transportation choices for the people in our area. And that's the challenge. That's why we're here. That's what we're talking about. And the good news is everybody's talking about it. We have to have a long-term, multimodal, well-funded bill with a transit account intact so we can continue to plan, so we can continue to provide those choices. Because again, if you don't have a choice, I guarantee you, you won't get out of your car. It's as simple as that. Thank you very much for the time this afternoon. I look forward to answering any questions later. Great. Thanks very much, Gary. And I must say, it's really interesting hearing the story about Dallas and in terms of the huge growing demand that you are seeing there. And I think that it points up also sort of an interesting juxtaposition in terms of thinking a little bit about what our next speaker is going to talk about. Because while we're seeing growing demand in places like Dallas, we also see the value that that brings to so many of the neighborhoods in terms of local economic development and what that really means. And so now we will hear from Nat Bodyheimer. Did I get that right? OK, I am so impressed. I got that right. Who is the Assistant General Manager for Planning and Joint Development with Wilmata with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority? And Nat is a transportation planner who specializes in the coordination of transportation service and infrastructure planning with local economic and real estate development. And we clearly see all of that here in the Washington area for all of us who faithfully ride Metro every day. And at Metro, Nat oversees the agency's long-range planning, real estate, and parking functions. And prior to joining Metro, Nat worked for the Maryland Department of Transportation, where he was part of a group that oversaw the looking at land use coordination as a way to really improve transportation around this state. Yeah. Thank you very much, Carl. Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this forum. Some very exciting work. We're very interested in sharing it far and wide. So I hope you find it as interesting as we do. So the story on this begins about five years ago. When we did some long-range forecasting of demand in the region and concluded that in the year 2030 plus or minus, we would no longer have the capacity to be able to move people to and through the core of our system. And so that begs the question, well, what are we going to do in 2030 plus or minus? We need to put together a regional transit system plan and start evaluating different alternatives for how we're going to be prepared for that time. 20 years is not at all too long to be thinking about that kind of challenge. And the recognition at that time was really anything that we talk about is going to have a big price tag associated with it. And what we didn't want to happen was to have just a huge number of land in a region that is already thinking about the critical state of good repair needs that are already a real challenge for us to meet. Because the first reaction is going to be there's no way we can afford it rather than the alternative reaction we'd like people to have, which is that we can't afford not to. So the question was really, how do we get to that place? And so we wanted to step back and start thinking, what if funders care about? Why do they make the investment in transportation? As transit agency managers and operators, we're disciplined on a daily basis to really think about engineering and operations. We want to do the same thing tomorrow that we did today, matching operators to equipment that works. And even though we may have a really good idea of what's in our strategic interest, it's not necessarily the top thing on our to-do list each day. So it takes a lot of effort to kind of carve out some space where you can actually look at it the way funders look at it and think about the things that it does for a community in terms of affordable housing, in terms of improving the fiscal performance of a local government, in terms of creating a positive business environment. So, yeah, well, I'm a long introduction and then quick race through slides and show things. And we wanted it to be as compelling as possible and we didn't think that we could really make the case by linking those economic benefits to a sort of notional expansion plan. So we really wanted to refer back to the experience because at this point it's a large mature system. We have 86 stations, 103 miles of track. We have 1,400 buses and 1.2 million riders a day. There's something we can say about the impact and so we wanted to look back and measure what our impact in the region had been. Carol referred to some of the effects we've had in the region. Oops, sorry. I talked about that. There we go. So this is Boston in 1980. First, a quick question. How many people actually are here from the DC region? Just so I can, okay, so when I say Boston, people know pretty much, I hope. I'm gonna make that assumption. So this is Boston in 1980. This is Boston today, actually a decade ago. It still looks more like this, but more. So the question is really, well, what is this delivering? And the next question really for us was so having gotten some training as an economist, that I know enough about doing a pure analysis to know that it's not easily communicated. So we wanted to break this down into things that people really cared about and things that people could understand. We also wanted things that were easily measurable because we didn't have time for a PhD thesis and we knew we were gonna have to do things like measure counterfactuals because we just knew that we were gonna have to test, we could measure what's there, but we also had to do some kind of a job of estimating what would happen if it weren't there. The way we did this work is we wanted it to be replicable around the country, but we wanted it to be specific to the DC region. So we worked together with AE-COM to do sort of the technical heavy lift and have the technical expertise to do this work, but we also wanted to pair with Smart Growth America, which is an advocacy organization, partly because we wanted to make sure we had the end user perspective that are closer to the ground in terms of what people want out of transit. And we also wanted that communicability. We wanted them to be able to sort of advertise around the country and shop something around the country. I also just wanna say just a few words about limitations. This is, we didn't wanna get an exact number. We wanted to get order of magnitude numbers. We know that the annual capital expenditures for the system are about a billion a year that the operating expenses are about 1.6 billion a year. We wanted to see what the benefits were from a capital point of view to sort of look at the comparability of total impacts now versus system construction costs. And we also wanted to see what kinds of recurring benefits there were and kind of compare them to our order of magnitude of operating costs. We really wanted just to sort of say, is it bigger than a bread box for us? Is it bigger than the bread box for the benefits? And we were hoping that the results would be robust enough that someone would say, okay, these are motivating. We can take a sharpen the pencil for them, but I don't want anyone to think that these are exact numbers. And also because we're gonna be looking at a couple of different scenarios, I don't want anyone to think that they can all be added together because they can't. And one other caveat I guess I'll make is that this is a rail oriented or rail emphasizing presentation. More work needs to be done on the business case for the benefit of buses in regions, the benefits of power transit. We've been focused in the DC region on real estate impacts because that's something that's really noticeable here. But there's a business case for power transit just as there is for any other kind of transit. You just have to identify who it is who is benefiting from the service. And so you may think that 30 or $35 per trip is expensive, but somebody does not have to provide life, the whole life support for somebody who now has a job. And so somebody is not incurring expense to support the life and lifestyle of a mobility challenge individual. And that might be that a small number compared to the, or that might be a large benefit compared to the transportation cost. So there are, I just wanna emphasize the business case is something that can translate to all forms of transit, not just heavy rail or transit oriented development. So here's some of the initial findings. A couple of years ago, people were asking us, well, what do you think the real estate impact is of your system's development? And at the time, we said maybe $25 billion. And they said, well, how do you know that? And we said, somebody said it last year. And so it was, that wasn't really enough definition. So we've assembled a database of all properties assessors information around the region. The answer is it's $235 billion worth of real estate value within a half mile of our stations. 112 billion within a quarter mile. Of the value that is, was measured, we thought about 10% of that, seven to nine percent depending on the location was directly related to transit. That's 28% of the region's real estate value on 4% of its land. And it generates $3 billion a year in property taxes and there's a whole other suite of taxes as well that go to different levels of government. As far as moving the regional economy, we did another test where we turned off transit in the regional travel demand model because we wanted to see what happens when it's gone. And without transit, peak travel times in the region increased by 25% for the total region which imposes a total of about $1.5 billion in additional costs on the regional on an annual basis. Again, this is a model result, not natural result but it gives you an idea. And that's one of those things where I was talking about comparability. Our annual budget is $1.6 billion. We're seeing a kind of a comparable level of benefit in the region on a recurring basis. Another thing we see is that people stopped traversing the region. They stayed in their own part of the region. And so you see the region's economy fracturing which is a weakness for the competitiveness of the regional economy. If you add back road infrastructure in order to replicate the levels of service that you see on the system today, what you see is you get another thousand, you need another thousand lane miles of radial and circumferential roads. The result of that is another million automobile trips per day, eight million vehicle miles traveled per day. It's the equivalent of two new capital beltways, four to six new lanes crossing the Potomac, just the construction costs are $6.7 billion of that. And that's an average construction cost for an average facility. It doesn't recognize any of the extraordinary construction costs of building in such a tight urban environment or the cost of acquiring land. The other thing that occurs is that you need 200,000 new parking spaces in the core of the city, which is 166 square blocks of five-story parking garages, which is what this image shows. And that's basically from the mall up to north of Dupont Circle. So that's one of those counterfactuals that can't really exist because no one would come downtown for the 200,000 parking spaces, even though you could be sure you could get a parking space. And so then of course, the sort of that question, well, is this so far fetched and are we making something up that's really just sort of a boogeyman. And this is Minneapolis St. Paul. And just to show you that a downtown can be covered in parking, that's an example. One of the issues associated with that really as well is not only is there the capital costs of paying for all of that transportation and parking infrastructure, but there's also the opportunity cost of all of that economically productive land that has to be taken away in order to create space for that. Again, there's also issues of livability. This is a graphic demonstrating, portraying a couple of what are now very vibrant downtown neighborhoods. An original transportation plan from the 1970s shows a freeway and an interchange going right through the heart of the city along K Street. This area here in Mount Vernon Square has the City Vista development and that would be unrecognizable today. The activity just simply wouldn't exist. Two more slides. This is a graphic that just represents from the DC region, the association of transit use in a census block group or a census geography with the total housing and transportation expenditures. And what it basically shows as the transit mode share increases in an area, the total housing and transportation cost for a household goes down. That equates to more household spending power and a greater strength for the jurisdiction in which that household lives. More spending power that a household has. I think just the more robust that jurisdiction is gonna be. So the last is wrapping up slide is really just to make a couple of points that mobility metrics, which are the kinds of things that as operators and engineers we tend to emphasize don't tell the whole story. Transit investment adds value that goes way beyond those individual, those metrics that we do rely on to describe the quality of our service. And that we think that adding this kind of analysis to the way we talk about what we do really strengthens the case for transit, makes the business case for transit. And using that vocabulary of business case, I think is just, even if people don't hear those numbers, talking the language of the people who fund us is helpful in making them feel that we understand what it is that they need to do. And that I think makes them more receptive to the case we have to make. Thanks very much. Thank you, Nat. We wanted to look at a variety of situations with regard to transit, because every part of the country is different. And we have lots of different kinds of communities that have different kinds of needs. We've had people now from two really large metropolitan areas. But we now are going to turn to Tony Thomas, who is the chairman of the city council of Savannah, Georgia. And which is another wonderful and very historically important city. And I think that Tony brings another whole perspective that's very important in terms of sort of looking at, not only from Savannah's point of view, but also from the leadership that he provides through the National League of Cities. Tony was elected to the Savannah city council in 1999, and he was elected chairman of the council in 2005. And he has served on numerous boards in the city of Savannah, including United Way, the YMCA board, and I think also very importantly is the council's liaison for Savannah's development and renewal authority. But in conjunction with the leadership that he provides to the National League of Cities, he is vice chair of their leadership training institute, and has been on the Community and Economic Development Steering Committee for the National League of Cities, another whole very important group of cities that oftentimes I think are overlooked because we so often are focused on the really, really large cities. Tony? Thank you. First of all, I just wanna say that love listening to you guys and as to Nate with the Metro, look at it like a theme park being able to come up here and ride that Metro. That's a real fun experience for a guy. You know, you gotta realize just a couple of hundred years ago it took us 12 days to get to you and we had to do business up here so y'all could make a lot of decisions before all of that. My thoughts today that I wanted to share with you or I don't want them to upset anyone but I'm bringing you a different perspective of transit. We, being small cities, don't have, many of our cities don't have light rail other than Atlanta and Georgia. There's no system that's outside of buses, paratransits and for Savannah we offer water taxis but I did wanna just bring and share a few things with you. It is my pleasure to be here and have this opportunity to talk with you today. I wanted to talk a little bit about the link of public transit to economic development and the things that we've been working on down south. For me, public transit's near and dear to me. First of all, I have, you know, first of all I'm the chairman of the city council in Savannah as an elected official for 13 years. It's been something that's always been on my plate. You know, we've had our demands although the county and the cities are structured differently in Savannah, in Georgia. The responsibility lies with the county but the city does participate in the funding and the responsibility of it. A second reason is, I own a company called Renaissance Marketing and we are engaged with transit authorities across Georgia with the largest transit advertising firm in the state of Georgia. So I have an opportunity to work with many of the leaders in the transit industry throughout our state and it's really open my eyes to the different levels of challenges and opportunities that we face. In my opinion, the greatest challenge that public transit faces today in Georgia and across America is the image of public transit. Citizens need an understanding and appreciation of what mass public transit is, what the possibilities are and what it could become. Then I believe once you get that message across you can get a buy-in and create the real argument and fight for the real funding to create this change that we all want. I come from a railroad family, 325 years. My family has worked with the railroad and watched it change. We forged the west. That's the original public transit right there is when you're connecting the east to the west and somehow somewhere that was a glory age of connecting all of it and somewhere it got lost. I don't know. You know, I looked back on historical accounts in the year 1900. There were articles written by a visiting New York editor who said that the city of Savannah had a rail system that was equal to that of New York City. But somewhere in the 1950s, Detroit came along, offered all kinds of discounts to go to buses and the rails got covered up, taken down and we became a bus system at that point. Now say all of this to you because one of the greatest possibilities for public transit is its connection to local economic development. In Savannah, we have Chatham area transit which operates a bus system and a water taxi operation. For those of you who don't know, Savannah is one of the largest ports in the United States. So we have a river. Part of our city is divided by that river. So we have to cross that river. So we have ship, we have captains at taxi folks across the river to our trade center which is on the opposite side of where our core of our city is. So that's where the water taxis come in. Our system, like some of the others, have seen a 22% increase in ridership this year alone. Much of that attributed to gas prices, but also we have our executive director, Dr. Chad Reese, sees the connection between economic development and the need for public transit. Our system's county wide but it is forced to engage in negotiations with eight different municipalities. Now I want you to think about that for a moment. That's eight different mayors and eight different city councils that have to be pleased in order to bring public transit into their municipalities. Not an easy task for anyone to do. For a variety of reasons, some of these municipalities have chosen not to have public transit. In doing so, they hinder economic development in their communities and put a strain on local employers and industries that are looking for a reliable workforce. Recently, just a couple of weeks ago, JCB, an international heavy equipment firm in Savannah cited that 25% of their employee turnover was due directly to transportation issues related to getting workers to the site. That's 25% that's costing this company millions to get a qualified workforce to them because of the lack of public transit. And it's significant because companies that are looking at locating to our industrial mega site, we have a thousand acre industrial mega site at the intersection of I-16 and I-95 have no public transit in place to provide for manpower issues that has a direct correlation to the possible development. In some cases, the slow development of this prime site, possibly one of the most prime in the South and the state of Georgia with its proximity to the port of Savannah, the fastest growing container port on the East Coast of the United States. Another example I want to cite is Gulfstream Aerospace, makers of the fastest business jet in the world. They are based in Savannah. While Gulfstream is located on the verge of our city limits, it's in an area that has no public transit service. Dr. Reese has reached out to Gulfstream to begin talks on how to provide services to Gulfstream. They have indicated to us that they have 8,000 employees and vendors who work between their campus facilities daily. So the challenge is bringing the system in and making it work when municipalities won't vote for the taxing districts that's needed. So this is one where you have to think creatively and reach out and do things that you typically aren't under the control of the government itself. Additionally, in the city of Savannah, we have just engaged and finished a two year feasibility study of a viable cruise ship home port. That study has suggested we could yield 1,000 new jobs averaging $30,000 a year and more than $90 million a year in economic impact to our community. A major component of that possibility is directly reliant to public transit and how we move people around in and out of the community and to the ships without public transit. These type of opportunities would not exist. So again, these are a few examples. I have some others from some of the markets from some of the markets that I work with. I got held up the three minute sign. So I'm not gonna, I'm gonna give my time to my next speaker here, but I do appreciate being here with you today. Great. Thanks, Tony. What a powerful story in terms of looking at the enormous potential that is there that weaves together all of those needs and the enormous economic development potential. Our last speaker before we open it up for Q and A is Scott Volgren, who is a communications director for the Community Transportation Association of America. And he is also the editor of Community Transportation Magazine and also at its Rail Magazine. So Scott has been with Community Transportation Association since 1988 and has served in a variety of capacities there and the magazine has grown a lot under his tutorship and making it one of the leading transit publications in the country. So Scott brings another very useful and interesting perspective to our session this afternoon. Welcome, Scott. Thanks, Carolyn. Thanks, John Michael for the invitation today to speak. Before I start, I wanted to also, less than two weeks ago, our board of directors met in Savannah, Georgia of all places. And as a welcome, they sent down somebody from City Hall down down to us at River Street and I met this gentleman. And so he welcomed us to Savannah. So I'd like to welcome you to Washington. Thank you, I appreciate it. Yeah, I doubt you'll have as much fun here as I had in Savannah. That's another story. I don't know. Yes, it is, we'll get to that later. I'm here to talk a little bit about how transit and economic development overlap for smaller communities and in rural parts of the country. The association that I work for, we have about 4,000 members around the country. We deal largely with those types of issues. And though they're very similar to what you've heard, they're kind of more scalable and a little bit different types of impact. And I think the impacts in a lot of those communities when it comes to passengers and the outcomes from trips are just as important economic development wise as is bricks and mortar. And I'll talk a little bit about that, give you some strategies that we see happening in rural and small urban communities. And then I'll talk about some of the work that our members are doing. I'll try to do that as quickly as possible. In rural communities, you will find buildings, you'll find brick and mortar, you'll find transit oriented development. It's maybe not the same as you're gonna see here in Boston, but it has an impact nonetheless. And when it comes to passengers, we find that a lot of the economic development is livability, it's aging in place, it's access to healthcare, it's access to jobs, and it's regional approaches that are sticking and making an impact in smaller cities and in rural communities. And I have a couple of maps that I wanted to show you here. And I also wanted to act like I was a weatherman. I've always wanted to do that. This one here, we were talking about gasoline prices. The orange and yellow colors indicate where folks spend the highest percentage of their income on gas. And you can see where folks are spending 16% and higher is in rural communities. Not surprising if you really think about it. They've got longer distances to travel. They have oftentimes less fuel efficient vehicles, older vehicles. So as gas prices rise, the impact for folks living in those parts of the country is significant. Like in other parts of the country, rural communities have seen unemployment rise dramatically, not unlike what we're seeing in urban communities. And lastly, the population shift is really an important aspect of what we've seen. And the impact of that is kind of, I like Nat's term, counterfactual. You might think that when a area loses population the transportation need goes down. But actually what we find in a lot of these rural communities is when the population decreases the mobile folks in the community are leaving and leaving behind the less mobile aspects of the community, seniors, people with disabilities. And so all of a sudden the need actually increases. So that's one thing we definitely see. And you can see this is why regional approaches to transportation are so important because towns that used to have a hospital, now there's a regional hospital that may be 40 miles down the road. And I've done work in places like South Dakota where a dialysis trip one way is an hour and a half, two hours one way to get to the closest dialysis clinic. These are significant economic development in that those folks can live and remain in their homes. I thought Gary also touched on some of that when folks don't have to leave work to take somebody three times a week to dialysis but the transportation is there to do that. There's an economic multiplier on a lot of that. Go back to the front here so you don't have to look at these maps. So what are the strategies? For us it's connectivity, first and foremost. And that's really the history of this country when you talk about transportation where rivers and paths and then roads and rails and ports, where you have those intersections, that's where economic development happens, that's where we think that the future lies for public transportation. If you look at it in some ways from a transportation history, we've just finished the Eisenhower Highway development program. We've built in the last 40 years a lot of excellent transportation systems, transit systems. Now we need to connect those all together in seamless ways, in common sense ways and in ways that attract both business and passengers and when all those things happen, absolutely economic development will happen. In rural communities we're very concerned about connectivity because we're losing a lot of it. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics had a 2011 study that showed that 8.9 million rural residents now lack any access to intercity transportation. It's 11% of the rural population. Between 2005 and 2010 in that five year span 3.5 million rural residents lost access to a form of intercity transportation, rail, bus, those types of things. So as we start to think about connecting these things back together, we need to not forget the folks that are living in these smaller towns and in rural America where airports are often not so handy and where bus, rail and transit all kind of intersect. Another strategy that we've been focusing on is livability and for us in many rural communities that means preserving Main Street and maybe working on that train or bus station that may have sat fallow in the community for years and bringing that back to life and then bringing these intercity services and these regional services through those and frankly connecting those services into places like Dart and Dallas and I'm sure Gary could speak very eloquently of how some of the outlying communities and rural communities link in because Dallas is a job center, Dallas is a healthcare center, this all works. Aging in place for seniors, that's critical and everybody here, we are all gonna say, I don't wanna be, no one wants to be prematurely institutionalized, yet it's a lack of transportation more than anything else that leads precisely to premature institutionalization. So outcomes, we're talking about healthier communities, we're talking about economic development, we're talking about issues that can lead to communities growing and transit being an active part of that. I'll give you some of the examples and I have many, but I'll be quick with these. In Spearfish, South Dakota recently built a brand new transit facility, an intermodal transit facility. Spearfish is about 40, 50 miles up the road from Rapid City, which is in Spearfish, Rapid City is the big city. It's a great facility, they've got joint maintenance so a lot of the other municipal maintenance is all done there. You've got the inner city bus carrier right along I-90, pulls right into the station so you've got a connection to the outside world for Spearfish, you got a lot of non-emergency medical transportation, dialysis trips, all organized and run out of this facility and I think kind of neat, they've also got a daycare center there so folks that are moving in and out, these are the kinds of ideas that are happening in a place like Spearfish. In the Menominee Tribal Reservation in Menominee, Wisconsin, which is a little bit northwest of Green Bay, the Menominee Tribe actually encompasses the entirety of Menominee County. 3,200 people live in the county. The tribal system has a very effective transit system. For a population of 3,200, they estimate that they serve 90% of those residents, they provide 80,000 trips a year to 3,200 people. They've just built a brand new transit center that houses a lot of the Indian Health Services, which draw a lot of people in it, also houses retail and an important thing for the tribe and when I've talked to some of the tribal elders is it actually also serves outside of the reservation in that way whether you're going to specialize healthcare, employment opportunities, folks can live on the reservation, live with their families, go access that, come back, bring those paychecks and keep living the way they want to. Normal Illinois is a town that has two universities, large corporate headquarters, state farm insurance, Mitsubishi's only North American plant is in normal and has the second busiest rail station in Illinois. Does 180,000 rides a year at a normal and they are building a new intermodal transit center that's gonna be even bigger and part of what they're building onto that in a place like it is a hotel and a conference center that are just, they look really like they're gonna be a top notch. Central Massachusetts, Fitchburg and Greenfield. Fitchburg just built a rail station that's connected to Boston's commuter line and what that allows is my folks all live in Boston and they refer to Fitchburg and Greenfield as those towns out west kind of like Denver or Salt Lake City that's kind of their mentality in the Boston area but regardless people can live in Fitchburg now and an hour and a half later access the job rich Boston and Boston suburbs areas works very well. They're expecting four to 600 passengers a day and the local ski slope Mount Wachuzitz. I was worried I wasn't gonna be able to pronounce that one. Actually set up a shuttle to run and pick up economic development wise, move skiers right from the train up to the slopes and that's happening right now. Greenfield is a little bit further west of Fitchburg so it would be way out west of my parents and Greenfield is also this month gonna be cutting the ribbon on a brand new bus facility in downtown Greenfield and as I was just looking at newspaper stories this morning I couldn't help but notice a headline that said transit a catalyst for revitalization of Greenfield and I thought well I should carry that headline along today and lastly yesterday at one of the APTA sessions I was talking to a friend of mine who runs the transit system in Monterey Salinas and smaller community Monterey's about 30,000 population certainly near larger urban areas but you wouldn't expect that Monterey has that transit system has absolutely the most astounding military commuter program in the country. They started this program for active duty military personnel in the Santa Clara County and in Monterey they had 7,000 riders when they started the program in 2009. As of last week Carl let me know that they now do 46,000 rides a month so Carl's here in town because he is very interested in the commuter tax benefit being continued it's a very important part but what does that do in the community that reduces vehicle miles traveled by 2.5 million miles on these 16 bus routes that they're running moving up military personnel. So there's a lot of really good work and these are just some of the examples in smaller cities that is scalable it's not it doesn't rival the big numbers that we saw with Nat's presentation but to those folks living in those communities it's just as meaningful and I'm looking forward to answering any questions you might have. Thanks. Thanks very much Scott. I wanna thank all of you for very very thoughtful presentations in terms of really looking at how important transportation and the whole role of transit is to Americans across the country no matter where we live and in terms of what that means for all of us economically as well for our communities and for us as individuals. Let's open it up for any questions or comments and if you could just identify yourself please we'll start in the back. It's a real position on closed legislation instead of relying on the right of civil proposal but the increase in gas prices. The president and the secretary and almost all of the Congress is opposed to raising gas costs. I think everybody accepts that gas prices are going to go higher, where is it going? Is it profit for the oil companies and how can we capture the profit for the oil companies? Let's probably the question for the day, right? To see who wants to, anybody wanna talk and just turn on your mic. I agree with you and it's a shame I know that in the Senate we've had a couple of brief interludes of some senators offering up at least the idea of indexing the gas tax but that amendment never actually gets put into the hopper. It's pulled back pretty quickly but it's nice to see that discussion going on because I would agree with you and the message that I know we have carried for years is the gas tax allows us to invest in ourselves, invest in our own transportation future and the members that I talk to are very fearful of higher gas prices because they know what it means. It means more riders, it means increased demand at a time when they're very concerned whether or not they'll be able to meet that demand and they're also very concerned that you get a lot of first-time transit riders whose impression isn't gonna be as good as they'd like it to be because the equipment is old. A lot of the issues that I'm sure you're very familiar with so I appreciate the question. If I had a vote, I could tell you how I'd vote. I mean, as far as the appropriate funding mechanisms, that's not really what I wanted to speak to. I guess I just wanted to expand on the point that the map, the graphic that Scott was showing before about the share of income that goes to gas taxes and actually just to repeat a fact that I heard from folks from the UITP, the International Transit Union on a trip to Belgium in December which was basically they keep a database. My point is, I think the important perspective is how to build regional transportation systems that protect people from big variations in the price of gasoline and one of the things that they have in their database is a comparison of the total expenditure on transportation in different metro regions around the world ranging from places like Houston where it's 12% of the GDP to places like Tokyo or Hong Kong where it's 6%. And in economic terms, the difference is about $2,500 per person per year. And so when that gets to the point of are we, are some regions over providing transportation or are they making it too costly for households to compare to an alternative regional transportation system that maybe requires less expenditure of household income in aggregate to meet daily transport needs. And I think you can argue that some of these places that are spending less per capita on total transportation to meet their daily needs, you know, they're places that have higher gasoline taxes but they're much, much more protected against the price of gasoline going up or down. And again, I wouldn't necessarily offer an opinion on how they ought to, while I have one, certainly, I wouldn't necessarily get into how they ought to do that. We can talk about that all afternoon and folks have talked about that all afternoon for months now and it hadn't gone anywhere. I think from my perspective though, what I think we really need to do is offer public transportation as a solution in part to the higher gas prices. I think there, as I said earlier, there was a great story on ABC yesterday that almost got us there. And we just need to make that push, you know, every day there's 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline saved annually, the equivalent of 900,000 automobile fill ups on a daily basis from people riding public transit. So I think that's one of the real opportunities is as gas prices go up, whoever's profiting from them and why they're doing that, and we can all speculate. But I think the real, from my perspective, the real message is to get people out of their cars and on the public transit. Thank you. Any other questions, comments? Okay, here, and then back there. It has been this dinosaur mindset for the first row. And we've just got banged for up to our state spending $4 billion on what one expected to be. And then there's no money for anything else. And then there's a paradigm throughout this region that's been a paradigm for a long time that somehow transit must be self-supporting but not rowed. So you have this unlevel playing field. I'm curious as to the jurisdictions that won't put in transit, are they putting in rows? Or what is the reluctance to spend the money? Or should the federal government, because of all the ultimate benefits, should some leadership as the top and top mayors in the 1980s oppose some of our foreign policy priorities and try and shift the money and the priorities of the Mexican community? There's no leadership doing that today. I don't know about Maryland and Washington. It's such a long question, I can't repeat it. But I don't know about Maryland or Washington, I think in the metro areas it's a much different animal. But I know that in the markets that I'm involved in, there is a lack of understanding of what transit serves. And I believe that there are some racial prejudices that govern how transit is looked at in those markets. And it hurts, it hurts the community, it hurts economic development. And that's in my remarks, that's what I was referring to as image. I think that the image of transit is not being substandard, but really a viable way of moving and getting people connected around. And we've got to stop thinking of just cities. Regions have become the new cities now. And if folks are still on a thought plane that it's my city, they're gonna lose in the end because regions have to connect to be competitive in this new world global economy that we're dealing with. And I just, I think a lot of it has to do with the overall image and perception of folks who don't understand what transit is. Which is also very different from what we've been experiencing when you're talking about transit is the way people want to go and demand. Yeah, no, I just essentially wanted to agree with that statement. People have very reflexive responses to what they should invest in. And as long as the prevailing idea is that an automobile is freedom and the automobile is, I can move whenever I want to, wherever I want to, that's gonna drive people's reflexive impulses. But there's a whole generational difference and there's a lot of people who think, I wanna move to a city and walking is what I can do. That's the ultimate freedom. We're just grabbing a bike and going someplace is the freedom and that'll get me closer to where I wanna go. And it's very difficult to figure out from a policy perspective how to create a reflexive reaction on people's mindset. But I mean, that's what we have advertising firms for and marketing budgets and... There you go. So you just need to do more with that whole aspect of your job, right? Yeah, I'm doing my job. Oh. Did you want to add anything? You know, and you stated it, that he understands that roads are not self-sufficient, but I'm not sure everybody does all the time. I think there's some folks throughout the country that still think roads are self-sufficient and that transit isn't and we ought to be more like the highway system. And that's one of our challenges is this communication and education. Roads are not self-sufficient and we all know that and it's not free to build roads. And as a matter of fact, in Texas, one of the, while we used to have a great highway system, the problem we have now is we can't maintain what we have with the gas tax that we have and the state is starting to realize that. And again, just realizing what our mindset has been for so long, people in our state are starting to realize that we can't build our way out of this fusing roads and continue to compete and continue to compete with other cities around the country and around the world. Okay, back here. Because I think that's one of the items that we're trying to get across from all the transportation. But you mentioned to do the work that would be replicatable at other places around the country, around the world that got the same techniques. You know, is there any chance those could be implemented in a certain way? So we just finished this up in October and there's Montgomery County as a suburban jurisdiction here in the Washington DC region. They're thinking about doing a 150 mile rapid bus network and one of the first things that they actually realized as this task force was deliberating how to build the case for it was that they need to make an economic case for it. And it was just good luck that we had the scope of work available for that. I shared it with the folks in the task force and they basically said, you know, we want to use this exactly as is and they've moved forward on that. I was very heartened by that. There was that sort of immediate appeal. And then in this region in December, there was a bit of a media squall about how much money we spent on this study. But some folks picked up to our defense at the Atlantic Cities and at tbd.com, which are blogs in the area. And I was also heartened that the Boston Globe picked up on it. They were tracking that debate and they're having, they have a real budget issue there. They have raised fares. I think it's 40%, 6% was one of the proposals there. And the Globe editorialized on the basis of this study and they said, look, the MBTA should do the same kind of analysis because all this shouldn't be burdened on the backs of the strap hangers. In fact, that was the title of the editorial was not for strap hangers only. So what I'm seeing is that this kind of approach is really appealing. And I think that over the apt legislative conference of the last couple of days have been people who've expressed interest in looking at that scope of work and talking about how to replicate it in other cities as well. So I think there's an appetite for it. Any other last comments or questions? Any closing remarks from anybody? Any other points that any of you wanted to get out? Go ahead, Matt. I just want to let people know we have about 25 brochures here that detail the findings and covers some of the ground that I didn't have time for in the presentation. So if anyone is looking for that, we'll have them up here. Great, terrific. Okay, and the presentations will be on EESI's website. And so I want to thank our speakers very, very much for such thoughtful presentations. And hopefully this will be very, very useful to everyone in terms of moving forward your particular work with regard to thinking about how transit fits into how we need to think about overall transportation and economic development and simply better livability and better competition across the country. Thank you very, very much. Thank you.