 All righty. Hello everyone. My name is Amy Garza and on behalf of the Future Forum, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Welcome to today's panel, Mopocalypse and Ubergeddon. How will Austin overcome its transportation challenges? We the Future Forum are a public policy discussion forum with many events much like this one ahead. So we hope that you will please check out our membership table to the left in order to get more information on membership as well as a calendar of upcoming events. We'd also like to note that our partners at the LBJ school are here as well to offer information about their academic programs so we're absolutely happy to have them as well. Also want to remind you that we have a reception immediately following today's panel. Beginning this week our newest sponsor Carbock Brewing Company will be available so we're happy to welcome them. Now we'd like to introduce Ben Ware. Ben covers transportation for the Austin American statesman. He's an awesome native and a UT graduate. Ben has worked for these statesmen since 1994 and has had the transportation beat since 2003. He also teaches journalism as an adjunct professor and in the fall he is a football official from everything to pop Warner to high school football games. He is a proud father of Molly, a sophomore at the University of Michigan. She's an aspiring actress and costume designer. Please join me in welcoming Ben Ware. I must have sent her an out-of-date bio of Molly as a senior so the statesman regrets there. Let me introduce the panel. Mayor Steve Adler to my left. Maryland native. A Princeton grad from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs then he got a law degree at UT. He had a long and distinguished career in the law specializing in imminent domain and also civil rights employment discrimination law and he served as El Paso state senator Elliott Shapley's chief of staff the whole time. Chief of staff for general counsel for eight years. He was elected Austin mayor in November 2014 and has served just under two years presiding over our revamped 10-1 counsel. He's been very active from the beginning on transportation issues including trying to broker a solution on the ride-hailing mess earlier this year and he and his staff were the primary architects of the $720 million transportation bond that we're going to talk about here in a minute. Joe Dess Hotel, not Dess, Dess Hotel he's a Beaumont native and he's the director of community engagement for Ride Austin that's the non-profit ride-hailing company that sprung up in the by Austin entrepreneurs were behind it in the aftermath of Uber and Lyft deciding to leave Austin. Before that he was communications director for the Travis County Democratic Party and at various times before that a congressional aid and a state legislative aid. Ben Holland is a consultant and the project manager for the Rocky Mountain Institute's Mobility Transportation Initiative here in Austin. It's a multi-year project and it was launched about a year ago to advance innovative solutions to Austin's transportation challenges. Among those initiatives and he can tell you more about those in a minute is one to improve walkability in Austin through better land use and development practices. So the title that the the forum came up with you know Mopocalypse and Ubergaden How Will Austin Overcome Its Transportation Challenges and I was caught by the word overcome as if we could just completely wash it all away maybe mitigate deal with keep from swallowing us whole. I don't know about you but every time I leave the house or the office or this place tonight if it's unless it's 10 o'clock at night I think can I get there in time how how will I go and and while you're in the middle of it I was I left at five and was wondering if I would get here in time. I think about the mayor going from event to event to event. I'm told that there used to be a helipad right up here in LBJ's day and you don't have a helicopter right now but you need one. So in attempt to deal with that we have the $720 million bond issue and early voting starts Monday and it's on the November 8th ballot. So if it's passed it would dwarf transportation bonds for the city of Austin that have been passed since in five elections between 1998 and 2012 the total I believe is just under 640 640 million so this one would be larger than all of that. So Mr. Mayor tell us what's what is in this you know and as briefly as you can and then how that would make a difference for the overwhelming majority of the people that have to deal with the things I was just talking about. Sure well I begin what Ben said about the the size of the bond is true but let me put that in context for you 183 project being built right now by RMA at Bluestine Boulevard out near the airport is by itself a $760 million project 183 to the north northwest by itself is a $650 million project every time we do a fly over lanes at an intersection of two highways that's 250 million dollars quarter of a billion dollars by itself the fact that this city over 20 years has cumulatively all together done 630 million dollars in bond elections is in part why we have the problem we have today because we've affirmatively chosen not to fix it by spending very little on the same day we go vote on our $720 million bond election the citizens of Seattle and that region about one and a half times the size of Travis County as a region will be going to their polls and voting on a $27 billion transportation bond election that's a city that's really serious about actually doing something about transportation long term this bond package has three components to it all of them are designed or the bulk of them designed to address congestion primarily automobile throughput delays at intersections but also at the same time because it's the same thing laying the groundwork for a transit system to be able to work in this city three buckets to the bond first bucket is just under 500 million dollars it's taking the the corridors that are our main congested roads in the city the state is working on Mopac and I-35 and 183 we we have to do the the other roads in our city Lamar Boulevard Burnett Road North and South Lamar Riverside Airport MLK William Cannon Slaughter Lane these are the roads that that two-thirds of us live within a mile and a half of these are our most congested roads other than the than the highways and it uses the existing right of way because it's incredibly expensive to start acquiring additional right of way and almost all the places it stays within the existing right of way and that's the goal and it uses the right of we have right away we have in a smarter way so when you talk to all of the traffic engineers they tell you that if you want to improve congestion and throughput you have to use your right of way in the smart ways you possibly can and primarily that involves getting rid of the conflicts in traffic that exist so that cars move more quickly and then doing the technology associated with the traffic lights and synchronization which means moving cars more quickly you put in right and left turn lanes at all the intersections you you put in bus pullouts so cars aren't stuck behind buses you get the bicycles off the road so that you're not stuck behind bicycles it means you take out the suicide lanes the chicken lanes in the middle of streets big cities don't do chicken lanes which is why you don't see that that kind of mode being constructed nowadays in in big cities because of the conflicts in the turning movements you take out the chicken lanes you put in mediums you put in left series of left turn lanes so as to steer traffic it also by the way is is is 60 to 70 safer than a than a suicide in a chicken lane which also helps with congestion but that's that bucket it's it's taking those those corridors that have been studied intensely by this community over the last six to eight years millions of dollars hundreds of people thousands of hours these are the most vetted projects that that we have in our in our city it has us actually moving to execute those austin does a great job in in designing things and planning things not as good a job in actually executing things over time so what have is execute those and then it sets up the next series for planning ronberg lane pleasant valley road colony park manchuk so it sets up that next series but that's that work the next bucket a little over about 130 a little over 130 million dollars is for other transportation elements primarily sidewalks it's safe passage for kids to school kids are now walking in the street and airport boulevard to get to to school safe passage away to school safe passageway to to transit stations that's what the bulk of that money is but it also has some money for the bicycle master plan the urban trail master plan about 20 million dollars each for those and then focusing on some of the most dangerous intersections in our city that's the 130 million dollar component and then the last component is pain points primarily in west austin the folks that do not live proximate to the corridors we talked about second ago so some work on i on loop 360 anderson mill palmer lane 620 and 22 22 but again it is work that is designed primarily to address congestion in the city and then secondarily well not secondary to two priorities congestion and enabling in the future the ability for us to actually have mode shifts to to to transit and those priorities are set by a contract with voters that the council passed which is the very first time our council has ever done anything like that so is to ensure that the next council or the council after that can't walk in and say hey let's spend this money differently on different priorities so not to be the skunk at the party but i have to ask you about some of the criticisms that have been out there please the city staff has estimated that to build seven of the nine quarters that are potentially or that are mentioned actually in the ballot language to build seven of the nine would be 1.5 billion or more there's 482 million in this bond so voters will go to the ballot and they won't know if this particular one or this particular one or how much of this one will be done so how do you answer that that criticism well i begin with by saying that we have nine and a half billion dollars and i met transportation needs in the city part of the reason we're in the place that we're in nine and a half billion dollars and i would say that that we shouldn't not spend money because we don't have enough money to spend to do everything we have a certain amount of money we can't we have so the council went to the staff and we said there's a billion and a half on these corridors how much money would we have to raise in order to actually have a material and substantial impact on congestion and they came back and gave us this number and that's the number we used about a little over four four hundred and fifty million dollars and then we set up a process that would be very public so the public community could see we're asking staff to go away take a look at how they can leverage that money both at the state level and the federal level all we have to do is watch what Hayes County did and Williamson County did in terms of their bond money in order being able to to leverage it and bring home more money because you don't get money at the federal level at the state level unless you come to the table with money and with projects and you can't really know exactly where it is that they're going to want that work done or how that work gets done so we've laid out the priorities we want to deal with congestion in this city and we have the money that's adopted for that staff has to go away come back and make a recommendation to us as a community on these corridors where we can spend that money to have the greatest material impact uh and it'll be very public the whole community can see it it's set by those priorities and that's where we'll spend it and part of it we can't know the answer to part of it may depend on who's developing property and who's willing to to to help fund in order to make their projects work part of the program or offset some of the costs associated with that well the only thing we do know is that staff can't go away by themselves and start spending the money somewhere and we all look up and say where did that money go it's something that is done by a contract with the voters where the city is unable legally to spend that money unless it hits those priorities and unless it comes back to the council in a very public way to order uh can we talk about lost lanes and you've already talked about the chicken lane question uh the east riverside plan contemplates uh having bus only lanes and taking a six lane road and and making it four lanes for the for the remaining cars uh also i've reported that one of the plans says that uh on south limar that during rush hour a lane would would be associated with uh would be allocated only for buses the mayor just a few minutes ago tells me that i've got that wrong that i need to look at the study again so go ahead well you know i think the question that a lot of people ask is this corridor work dependent or built around removing through lanes for traffic in order to uh create uh dedicated lanes for buses or for bicycles that may or may not be a good policy to do that but this plan does not do that this plan does not take away through lanes for either trains or buses and and you may catch a commercial that started airing today from the kind of the the do nothing voices in austin suggesting uh otherwise as if we're doing that wholesale it's not true the only places in these plans where that is contemplated or discussed at all not on riverside not on airport not on north limar not on bernard road on on on none of those projects on riverside drive it adds some some parking lanes as a part of the the urban rail design that was happening on that road but as the council discussed it the council said whether or not you keep in parking uh and and or or maximize the number of lanes the question for the only question their only criteria on that question parking versus through lanes is going to be how does that impact congestion and that's the only place other than the drag on guadalupe in that area which quite frankly is probably already a dedicated bus lane when you try to travel that area no one's quite figured out exactly how to do that yet and we need to figure out how to do that on south limar south limar report specifically says that there is insufficient right of way to be able to do a dedicated bus lane there is an unfairness to you there is a chart that's contained within that report if you go all the way down to the bottom of the chart there's language that says that in the future in the event that bus ridership should warrant it you could have a a a bus lane well i mean that's a truism for me if you if you have suddenly buses that are all full and and and and and and and somehow or another we have that conversion in time and and ridership warns it because everybody's riding a bus well then probably you do go that direction but that's not what's contemplated in the uh in in the plans as as evidence i think by what the the text of what the report says i'll go ahead go ahead and i would urge people to push back hearing this because in austin confronted with two options of things to do option a and option b and i've been here for almost 40 years the very first thing we'll do in this community is we'll look at those two options and we will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither option a nor option b are perfect of course no options ever are but having conclusively proven that neither a nor b are perfect this community will choose to do c nothing and it would have been better for us to have either chosen a or b i think in most cases so i would urge people to push back against the message that we are taking away through travel lanes in order to make bus lanes what they're talking about if anything our chicken lanes in the middle of the street those are not through lanes for traffic and there's so much more we could do on that but i want to make sure i get to both of them joe works for ride austin as i said and uh in the wake of uber and lyth leaving on the monday after the election may night uh it wasn't long before the one remaining uh ride hailing company we had get me was joined by fair and fasten and then by june from scratch ride austin was formed and so now there are multiple options and they are going through fingerprinting i just want you to give us a sense of what's what the landscape is now for for ride hailing in austin five months later right well the bottom line is people can get a ride when they want one and we're doing tons of advertising at the airport so when you come down those escalators as long as you're not actually looking at your uber app wondering why it's not working you'll see all of our signs and uh you actually you know at the information booth we have advertising pretty much everywhere it's possible to get advertising in the airport and then we work with organizers of events when they're coming into austin so on their itineraries when they're telling folks hey when you fly in make sure you download the app and then we're doing things of course like we had the big partnership with honda for acl which was really great for us help raise the profile level of us also uh acl was letting the travelers know that hey uh you know these other services aren't in town but ride austin is and you should download right austin and so uh between us and the other companies we were able people were able to get rides i sat down there um almost every single day of acl where we had a dedicated pickup and drop-off location at uh south lamar and riverside and people were able to get rides and i we didn't have any crashes that never crash uh we can always use more drivers of course and we're constantly are advertising that and um drivers have more options than they've ever had of companies to drive for now i know fair and fast and don't share their numbers with you necessarily but maybe you can help us how many people have been fingerprinted how many drivers have been fingerprinted and approved through that process if you have any idea well the city did set up these benchmarks and currently the benchmark right now is 50 of driver hours must be completed by fingerprinted drivers we're well over that i think in our our last report we are at something like 89 percent or something uh i'm sure that number has come down as we've expanded but we are well over the uh with the the current benchmark is and we'll continue to be well over whatever the benchmark is at any given time i will tell you after the first ut game i did get a few emails from people saying well i had to wait an hour or and i finally gave up and walked or you know got a cab or tried to get a cab have there been some problems some implementation problems for people uh trying to get a ride through right ailing i think it's a lot of it is a scale issue and it's kind of what the mayor was saying like whatever happens there's going to be time that these companies are going to need to scale up and so what the fingerprinting thing did in the very beginning was slow that time down from the very beginning we had to get to sort of amass the number of drivers who had gone through that process and then if you look at those charts that you're talking about which we post on our facebook weekly our volume ride volume charts you'll see how it's going up just like that and so it took us 31 days to give our first 10,000 rides uh and this day seven like it's uh day 120 we've we've given about 300,000 rides so the curve of the number of rides we've given is exponential and it continues to grow uh the mayor participated in a panel at the trivfest where there were uh three other i think legislators there and at least two of them were very determined to pass a statewide bill and and backed by uber and lyft that would set statewide regulations for ride hailing and probably based at least on what the form they've said and what i've been hearing from legislators if it passes and i think it might the requirement for for fingerprinting would go away so would would would write austin still require fingerprinting if it wasn't the law well first of all i'd say that their time will probably be better since trying to actually solve her transportation problems and when you look at us having a 720 uh million dollar bond here in austin we could use a lot more help from the state um and so i would say that's probably a better use of their time um but yeah i think that uh the voters here spoke the city council who was voted in by the voters they spoke and uh it turns out that it's really not that big of a deal you know the they they go in they get their fingerprints and we pay for it uh after you know 20 trips with ride austin they show that hey we're in it with you and we'll reimburse them for that for that cost of 40 dollars and a lot of the drivers like it honestly they feel like it helps build that trust between themself and the customer and at the end of the day what it would provide if that did happen is a real choice right and so like you mentioned before uh if it was if it was a preference for riders that they wanted to go with a company that goes the extra mile because we also do in-person interviews and car inspections of every driver in every car and so i think that's really important to people when they know that well i know you're not the boss but i'm sure this has been discussed again would would you keep finger printing or is that an undetermined thing well i'd say it's probably we probably would i don't say why we wouldn't yeah right um will the city lobbying team fight that such a bill you know i'm sure it would uh you know at this point we believe in local control we see it is a liberty issue uh we think that uh cities ought to be able to people ought to be able to have their elected officials uh adopt laws that that they want and it's the local officials that are accountable to the local people uh there are a lot of people in the state legislature that that the people in austin didn't get a chance to to elect there's no way for this community to hold a lot of them accountable uh but you know we'll be defending that we'll be defending the fair chance hiring uh legislation or ordinance that we passed uh the the i would imagine that that you know we'll be defending the decisions that we make locally uh can you tell people about thumbs up and what's the status of thumbs up thumbs up was uh one of this one of the ideas that i tried to bring out last uh december and january maybe as a way of avoiding the the election and avoiding uber and lyft having to leave and that was to have real choice in the community uh so thumbs up was the the concept of not having the apps uber and lyft do anything but uh to incentivize uh drivers to go get fingerprinted outside of that system what we created was the first third party independent cross-platform uh validator batch they don't exist in the in the world right now but you all know ebay you go on ebay and you find a vendor who has the the the power seller badge and you know they do a certain amount of volume they've been around for a certain period of time wouldn't it be nice if you went to any of those vendor sites and it was always the same badge and you knew what it you knew what it meant um you know on on on air bnb you can rent somebody's uh house you can rent a room in their house or you can rent their sofa uh in their living room wouldn't it be nice if if you could know something about the person who was renting your sofa or if you were renting a sofa know something about who it is that might be lurking around the sofa all night that you're sleeping there wouldn't it be nice to know that they that they don't have a criminal background they're not an axe murderer uh and and to be able to have a badge like that that would just attest to the fact that this person got a fingerprint it could be passengers uh on tncs and the status uh it's uh there's a startup in austin that's putting that together they've gotten about a three million dollar grant from the federal government uh and i think they'll start moving forward with it with a perhaps a whole uh menu of a third party independent validator badges that in a sharing economy when we're interacting more and more with people we don't know will help us get uh information yeah i'd just like to make a comment on that too uh because one thing that i think the legislature is missing in this picture because i was in that panel i was sitting uh sitting there listening to that and i had raised my hand because i wanted to raise i wanted to ask a question uh because there's so much talk about innovation and competition and what these local rules are doing to herd innovation competition but uh the reality is when you look at the picture here we have more companies doing this uh than any other city we have the most competitive market in any other city and we even have new ancillary startups that are coming up because of this issue and so really to me is what you what you see the legislature might end up doing is actually stifling innovation and competition because in every other market there's only one or two companies and even in this market you're seeing companies with features that aren't utilized by those other two companies that people are starting to see and uh we're looking at and we're incorporating uh the best of what we see in the marketplace and i think that in the long run it's going to benefit everybody in fact i've often said that i think that austin texas innovative capital of the country was innovating uh a little too quickly for uber and lyft uh a little too disruptive but they're big companies now and that happens when you come a good company get a little slow uh and and i think that's the work we were doing yeah and ben let me uh let me ask you about rocky mountains activities you've been here a few months so so tell us what the institute has been doing and what actually initiatives might be either on the ground or about to be on the ground sure yeah so i'll just give a little background on the organization because uh you know we've been here for a year now and um i know there are plenty of people in this room and in austin are wondering why there's an organization called rocky mountain institute setting up shop here basically but uh we're environmental energy focused organization based out of uh boulder colorado and traditionally we've worked in buildings transportation industrial processes and electricity basically to understand what the opportunities are from a business standpoint to transition away from a carbon intensive energy system that's you know based on fossil fuels on transportation that's meant like working on has meant for the most part working on electric vehicles and looking at the design of vehicles themselves we took a step back about two years ago a year and a half ago and said you know we really need to be looking at this from a the whole mobility system and and shifting away from and this is really our theory of a change is shifting away from a personally owned vehicle paradigm to one that is just just in time so currently we have a just in case paradigm where our vehicles are basically sit idle 95 percent of the time um there's a great deal of opportunity to shift away from that we're seeing a number of reasons to be optimistic for doing that and we spoke about innovation here in austin that was a big part of the reason why we came down here was just this uh kind of vibrant community very entrepreneurial community we looked at a number of different cities around the country with the goal of finding one that we could take everything that we've learned through our research and start implementing some things and help facilitating um and helping the private sector bring mobility solutions greater options that are more efficient and sustainable um so we chose austin i think we announced it in november um and and we've been really excited to be here ever since and so what we've been doing really is um concentrating first and foremost on commuting in austin this great deal of opportunity we see it's kind of a low hanging fruit to bring in new options for commuting it's about 40 percent of all vehicle miles traveled in austin it's just commuting so you can tackle the origin destination piece of that um then you can get a you can get um a long ways away toward solving some of the issues um public transit still plays a very key role in that so we have designed this program that's really tackling the first and last mile issue with public transportation very simply put you know many people don't take public transportation because the nearest stop is a mile or more from their their destination um there there's problems getting to their final destination and it's been a kind of a subject in transportation for quite some time how do you do that so we helped bring chariot to town this they just launched last week and very simply what they'll be doing is connecting um it uh employees of currently we have two main employer partners uh gs dnm and whole foods will be connecting employees of those companies to their offices from the metro rail stop and the metro rapid stop so um so only on the back end not only on the back end for now um so yeah there obviously there's some things that we need to work out on the front end but we saw this as flow hanging fruit we also recognize there's a great deal of need for more services more frequency out on the east side and other parts of austin but we just wanted to try to get a quick win um up on the wall and in more given the fact that we're a non-profit um i think we're in a position to to take what we learn from that program and share it with the rest of the country in the world and that's kind of in essence what we're doing we call um austin our lead implementation city and so in the next couple years we want to start spreading what we learn out to other cities i think the hard part for the most of us that aren't in your world they're inside your walls or inside boulder this can a metro area like austin which is large and spread out and and nowhere near as dense as places like new york and chicago and boston can can replace with our set of meaningfully transition to anything other than single or double occupant vehicles so some of my work is focused on land use as well so i give that a lot of thought the uh certainly there are some areas i think austin can improve on density and that's certainly the part of the the uh conversation with code next and it's why code next and future land use plans for austin are so integral and so interrelated with transportation and that there's there's tremendous amount of talented people on staff working through that right now i would i would definitely stress that code next is one of the most critical important things in the future of austin from our standpoint but um you know i think given the design of the city it has kind of helped proliferate some of these private services as well um i think it's part of a reason why ride sharing in austin it's one of the fastest growing um cities in in the country for ride sharing and you know there there may be some density issues in parts of the city but um it has in a way enabled the private sector to come in and and fill in the gaps and to all three of y'all just throw the rail question out there we've had three rail elections in austin and uh it was defeated in 2000 and and then there was a smaller version that is now on the ground a single commuter line that passed in 2004 and then austin said no again in 2014 i i just wonder what your thoughts are about the seeming resistance to rail here when it's in other texas cities and other places and uh have we missed the boat because of the changing situation with federal funding that they don't support as much of it now so my sense of that is that we have two million people in the msa today metropolitan area where the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country have been for the last five years each year we just got the census numbers and the projections that came out earlier this week and they project that austin metropolitan area will go over four million people by 2040 and that we will be the fastest growing metropolitan area in that period of time as well it's hard for me imagine how you move that many people around without some kind of mass transportation system uh and and as you look around the world at ones that worked the ones that worked best our our rail uh so i think you have to be planning not just for who we are today but but who we will ultimately be the question that you raise in terms of funding is is obviously the the big issue which is one of the reasons why i am not promoting rail now and did not push to make it part of the the the vote to make it part of the the bond election that we have coming up when you look at other cities how they have been able to transition into or tasked for their communities a rail option some of them started with smaller projects than the one that we were looking at before that were keyed to the most traffic areas that they had and they were small enough projects that the financial lift was not as great and then it lets the community see and the community can then touch it and feel it and taste it and my guess would be that if we go that direction that it would probably be following that kind of uh that that that kind of a model now houston was maybe seven miles this one was nine or ten miles but i don't know about dallas it's back in the eighties i'm not sure whether they went half of the red line right away or the blue line um i meant to ask you a while ago on bond elections obviously there's a tax impact so i wanted to give you a chance to talk about the what the tax impact is going to be if the bond passes and there is in this the uh the tax impact is uh less than five dollars a month to the to the median home home value to 200 to tax value of 250 thousand dollars uh so it's a it's a it's a relatively small amount that less than five dollars for for what it is that we get uh that still preserves by the way uh about 250 million dollars in bonding that we can do as a community without raising tax rates uh from where they are and we formed a citizens bond commission seeded it with that 250 million dollars so they can start looking at other things uh affordable housing open space parks libraries uh that kind of thing but would rail i mean absent you know something from the legislature how do you ever get to one billion two billion three billion whatever it takes to build even a starter system because the one that we turned down was 1.4 billion it was and and i'm not sure that that was the route that was best in terms of the the transportation need and and i'm not sure that it needed to be quite that long and i don't know that it needed to cross the river uh so if you're trying to get something that costs less in order to prove a concept i'm not sure that that was the right project to choose but you're absolutely right i mean and if you look at what's happening to legislature right now it's the high speed rail that is on the tip of lots of people's tongues at the legislature right now that would join dallas to houston almost by way of a college station on a high speed rail is entirely privately financed and they're not seeking any public funding for that in the camp over the other day we are beginning to initiate a study that would have us looking at the corridor between san Antonio and austin from 281 out the sh 130 to take a look at feasibility in those questions and we've asked amtrak right now to take a look at what they could do because amtrak has the ability to to to to use the union pacific line even in situations where union pacific doesn't want their lines to be used that way so i the answer to your question is i don't know yeah but uh it's certainly with us looking at and studying and seeing seeing what we can what we can learn can we talk about expectations you know austin you have a lot of people around here who were here when it was 500 000 people and or less and spaces before you got to flugerville or before you got to buta and kyle is it a realistic expectation for people that they that they shouldn't have to deal with what we're having to deal with or is that just the the price of being attractive and and and having two million people and up uh is is there a question of managing expectations uh yes and no uh i mean the the traffic problem that we have is not going to go away in the short term the solutions that we're putting on the table right now would be real effective from preventing us from going where we might go the the corridor studies for example say if we don't do this work congestion goes up by sometimes 200 percent on some of these corridors which is unimaginable i think if you're actually riding those roads during peak times that's an expectation you can't manage if you if you actually do this work the the studies show that in dozens of intersections the delay times actually get improved from anywhere from 15 to 40 percent so it's a pretty wide swing but the real changes i think in terms of an expectation will happen when things happen considerably differently automated vehicles when when that first concept first came i was talking to university experts in the field that said it was going to be 20 years before we saw that on the road that it was an interesting technology uh an Atlantic magazine uh ran a piece uh april i think of last year could have been the april before uh that said uh automated buses uh no time soon was the cover story on the Atlantic and in september the Atlantic came out and they had a picture of the automated bus on the road in china announcing that which gives new meaning to the phrase no time soon it's about six months i think uh so so the the technology solutions that are coming to this city chariot is one bridge is is another that's operating right now in kansas city where it's like uber kind of concept for buses where you walk outside and you say where you are and where you want to go and a bus bigger than a van smaller than a than a bus comes and picks you up not on a fixed route but it picks you up and it starts heading to where you want to go and along the way it's picking up more people that are going and dropping people off and the route of that bus is being changed by the computers as people are getting on and off that bus it's another first and last mile potential solution so i think uh a lot of the new technologies uh may very well open up doors that that are not real apparent to us now i want to open it up to you you guys if anybody has a question well apparently go ahead and she has a mic unless you have a loud voice i guess everybody can hear me so i am i guess disappointed that the one option that i have most of my dancing crowd has not been brought up yet even though i think the city has set aside some money to study it which is the most often and that was proposed don't laugh no that was proposed at the tech conference here in 2011 it was done by broad design downtown it makes an enormous amount of sense compared to fixed rail track it solves a huge number of problems and other cities have done it and i figured i got here about six miles per hour and it would go at 12 so there you go let's any reaction to the ctrma ctrma i just recently agreed to do a feasibility study on it which i think is the most important first step so they're going to be looking at it with the viability is in the city of austin so it was it i know there are a lot of people in this community that are interested in that option and they're excited about that being elevated with ctrma elevated yeah no pun intended i'd like us to be looking at lots of different kinds of ideas and i'm happy that that's being looked at as well i'll get to you next go ahead thank you for taking my my question my name is michael louis and this is for you mayor good to see you again uber and lyft when they came here it was definitely innovators and i wanted people who's been here since 1988 and i did an internship in 84 and getting around was really really nice then based on what you know now about uber and lyft do you think they will ever come back to austin if even if they decide to do fingerprinting and and was fingerprinting the the major issue well you know i think that that we ended up in that election because uber and lyft didn't want to be in a community that had choice we were trying to set up initially a structure where they wouldn't have to change their app but we could have choice that was something that they didn't want to be part of you know i i think it would be great if uber and lyft came back there's nothing in our ordinances now that stopped them from coming back uber and lyft are spending a lot of money on new technologies on automated cars on carpooling on other things that our companies that are starting might not have the bandwidth at this point to be able to invest in so we'll have to see how that goes but there are a lot of reasons why they would want to be here there's a lot of reasons why we would want them to have them here but i will say also that i'm real excited that we are the only open tnc market in a major city in the world and what we're finding you have when that happens is you would expect there to be competition and innovation when that happens in the marketplace and that's what we're that's what we're we're seeing so it's a different city than it was when they left and certainly they're they're they're they're more than welcome and invited to come back thank you so the uh you know as ben has written you know my first focus because i was also on the roads i was looking at mopak and 183 and and high 35 those are pretty heavy lifts those are real expensive projects to be done and what's happening right now is the state and the region are stepping forward with respect to those so the 183 project that bluestine is funded and under construction 183 in the north and north west is funded and under construction mopak north i think it's just funded just funded mopak on the north i understand that there's a light at the end of the tunnel and it's not a train in fact ben was was the first person to ride first paying civilian i have to first paying civilian to to ride in the managed lane on the section that has just opened and i think that we're all hoping that that technology actually helps with with congestion but that funding is there the funding has been set up for mopak south obviously it's involved in some legal issues at this point and i-35 in projects that are being quite frankly led by senator watson is looking like it may very well bring about four billion dollars to be spent on i-35 between sh45 to the north and sh45 to the to the south so so those projects are happening outside of us that's why our bond focuses on the other streets and is aimed at trying to to leverage and draw down as much of that additional state and regional money federal monies we can and the rest of the north mopak project they don't want to make any predictions anymore but sometimes under their breath they're saying late spring we'll see they've missed some before other questions go ahead is there any chance of getting uber back because i would take uber because i hope it's through the airport or sometimes if a friend came into town and they weren't staying with me we'd get these uber and go to the u2 club and want you to do a quick rally or something well actually they're they're right over there several uh if the statewide law passes and makes regulations the same here i think almost certainly they'd come back if it doesn't pass i don't know i want to jump in my hope is still so you know again because i think there are advantages of having the companies here but we're in a different city than we were before uh there are certainly uh uh tncs that are operating right now i mean there was a fear when we did acl that the city would would would fall apart and that uh we would all be seeing lots of things on social media about the breakdown at acl there's a large number of people to come in and and that hasn't happened that way uh the ridership is growing on the tnc so you you got used to using uber and unless and until uber comes back there are you know five or six others that you should you should try they they work very similarly um to to use but i think you know it's it's there are a lot of things that are that are in motion right now and will be over the next year noted yes sir ask you if you could give us a little bit of insight into the negotiations that went along within city council between you and uber and lyft i know that you had a lot of back backdoor meetings and i wanted to get some insight into that because one of the major criticisms that i've heard from people is that you were applying old economy rules to a gig economy and that there was a lack of understanding in city council of what uber and lyft actually were in those negotiations was there a sense of a give and take that maybe uber and lyft would be able to move on this item but not on this and you would be able to move on that one item or another and what were those where is there room for compromise i suppose the question well i think i think that that that everybody now is in a different place than we were a year ago and in a lot of respects there are different people that are involved now than a year ago but where that debate happened a year ago was we had a increased number of sexual assaults that were happening among people that were riding in tnc's we also had sexual assaults of people that were riding in taxi cabs but we had were 20 25 year old women incapacitated they had drunk too much and their friends were pouring them into the back of cars and either on the way home or when they got home they were being assaulted the lesson to be learned from that by the way i think is that if you're wanting to help a friend who it doesn't lacks capacity don't put them in the back of any car take them home and then come back to where it was that you you were before but we had our public safety people were telling the council that it's better to have a fingerprint than not a fingerprint if for no other reason it helps with post incident investigation and prosecution so we started looking at that question uber and lyft came in and said it doesn't fit with our business model and we began to have a standoff between some members on the council that wanted to have a mandatory system based on what we were hearing from our public safety people and and people that were liking the service and saying it doesn't fit with the technologies and the onboarding processes there were several of us myself included that stepped into the the middle of that said you know there's probably a way we can work both these if we can get the number of fingerprinted drivers up sufficiently high so that anybody who wants goes out and calls for a car has just as good chance of getting someone who's fingerprinted and as is not and they have a meaningful choice so we went to uber and lyft and we said let us drive the participation in the community let us take the percentage up so it would be sufficiently high to be able to to to do that and we'll run incentives that are outside of the app and outside of the onboarding process quite frankly we had some opposition from some of the members of our council that said nope it's got to be mandatory and uber and lyft were not ready to be in a community that had that kind of choice that was presented i think in part because they weren't sure how that would be communicated around the world because they're not just in austin they're around the world and it confused the the messaging and the branding and and what happened was is while we were in those conversations we we it stopped and we went to an election had we had more time had we not stopped progress and had conversations if we had had another month or two back in january and february my belief is we may have been able to work out something but as soon as the election was set at that point the discussion's over the the voters are presented with a binary binary choice maybe one more ben has to be out of here in about three or four minutes yes i've really i've really enjoyed this panel sorry if the sound and i certainly support uh the bond initiative in a general sense but i wonder about this whole thought of having a collaborative community and are we expending our political capital on this initiative we can never spend enough money and may or you brought out some great points about the underspending and underfunding that the city has done relative to the state and the regional side so i'm i'm wondering if the public really is fully aware of the mobility bond the components of that you've explained it fairly well tonight but i'm not sure when you package that much in a bond program whether the community fully understands it hopefully maybe it does pass but i'm i'm thinking that with the rocky mountain institute of how you're looking at kind of the nexus of things the the demand and the supply we can never build enough capacity with right-of-way issues and funding issues so i'm wondering about you know really providing for the future and maybe engaging the creative economy that we have here certainly a lot has been done but maybe initiatives that engage the college the universities maybe even high schools that create kind of a think tank that bring all these organizations together that supports a political process and maybe some technological creativity that supports things whether it's could be the ride sharing the gig sharing activities it could be uh van pools and things i grew up in california there's van pooling and corporations don't seem to be really engaged in these things but when they come here they want to know that there's transportation provided or some a lot in there any reaction well yeah i mean i would say that's precisely what we wanted to do in coming down here is to help kind of foster that collaborative community and we've been really impressed with just work with everybody we've worked with from also transportation department to downtown austin alliance and mobility austin university of texas just this you know broad array of um of stakeholders in the city and you know we have a lot of engineers on staff but we also we're not in our role we're not really playing traffic engineers um we're not we're not playing that role in our work we really are trying to kind of play this convening role we're trying to get more options to the city of austin and just try things out um i think the mayor has said many times we're not a city that's afraid to fail and try new things that's kind of where the role we want to play you know so if it's a commuting service or it's an electric taxi fleet or something like that we'd like to try that out and um be completely transparent with the results we're doing we're doing all the things that you asked about all those things are happening in this city right now on a hundred different places in a hundred different ways one one quick one and this isn't a question so much as a reminder that the november 8th ballot is a very long ballot and this issue is just a warning that if you choose to vote a straight ticket you have to look and review your ballot at the end and see if you voted for or didn't vote for be sure you go back and vote for those other down ballots that are not politically partisan the city council members the aisv trustees the acc board members and the bodies very true thank you very much well okay so when i was born in austin there was about three or eight five thousand people here it's like just cringe when you say 24 you're gonna ask me also by that time the five dollars a month out of the pay uh you know more than twelve hundred dollars increased taxes from this bond and when i'm at that moment i want to go back to tonight ask why didn't we build rail or sometimes why didn't we invest on that trend but even in an iterative way starting way back in way back at this moment it's like you can talk about we're going to meet that why not start focusing on that now why why didn't we pass up on the opportunity to try and create and build iteratively on rail and on investment we should have i got here in 1978 we didn't have 385,000 people at that point and it's good to see a unicorn in the crowd i think because the the do nothing voices in this city have always been very very strong and and at each point in the process that we've had that nothing anybody's proposed has been perfect i think we just have a community that culturally resists change we have a community that culturally wants a solution to be perfect we just have a a city that culturally is is reticent to to try things like this and to move forward and to make commitments and i think that's part of what this bond is we're fighting the same people who are the do nothing voices in this bond election are the same people who are the do nothing voices and and and repeated things not just transportation but but it's the same people it's the same kind of ad campaigns it's the same kind of signs it's the same kind of messaging and as a community i think we we have to we have to move to a new place thank you thank you