 On behalf of the League of Women Voters, I want to welcome you all this evening for the Transportation Forum. I am Madhu Sridhar, the President of the League of Women Voters of San Antonio, and I'm delighted to see all of you tonight. First and foremost, I want to extend a very warm welcome to our new Mayor, Ron Nirenbe. I'm calling him new, although he has been in the office for now over 100 days. But for the League of Women Voters, who has been around for almost 100 years in San Antonio, you are still new. And I also want to thank the Mayor for graciously accepting our invitation, not only graciously, but promptly. And he was telling me on his way in that he is very fond of the League of Women Voters, and I'm sharing this with a great deal of pride. I also want to extend a warm welcome to our panelists and the moderator, Commissioner Wohl, Councilman, Councilwoman, I should say, Sandoval, Mr. Aund, Professor Baker, Barker, sorry, and our moderator, Francine Professor, Professor Francine Romero. So I'm delighted that we are all here. There is one person who is not here, and I will be amiss not mentioning her name, and that is the Mayor of Leon Valley, Chris Riley. She was very instrumental in helping us put together this program, and I'm very proud to say that she's a member of the League and very passionate about the transportation issue, and she has been exchanging messages with me from the Houston Airport, so her mode of transportation right now is airplane. The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization, and we do not support or oppose any political party or any candidate. So we are purely non-partisan organization. Our mission is to encourage, inform and active participation of citizens in their government, work to increase understanding of major public policy issues, and influence public policy through education and advocacy. At our annual meeting in May, there are three issues we have chosen to focus on for this biennium, and transportation is one of those three issues, and we are delighted that we have gathered a very good panel and of course the mayor who will be sharing their views and they're sharing their ideas, their visions, and how they're going to implement that vision with us tonight. I am not going to take up a lot of time introducing people and all that. I just want to say that have your questions ready. The mayor has graciously agreed to respond to questions from the audience. So what I would like you to do is after he has finished with his remarks, and if you have questions for him, to come to that microphone on my right, and form a line there, and my definition of a question is it has to be brief, it has to be concise, and it has to end with a question mark. And with that, it's my great honor to ask Mayor Ron Nirenberg to come and give his, you know. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. I have to confess to you all, I'm in a little bit of a state of mourning right now. I was just informed walking out the door that the Houston Astros eliminated the Boston Red Sox this afternoon. I know that's good news to some of you, but not in my family, so I apologize for that. But I do want to thank you all for having me tonight. I want to start by thanking Manu and the League of Women Voters for organizing tonight's transportation discussion. Transportation is indeed a complicated topic, and the way we address this issue will be crucial to San Antonio's future. I commend the League for its continuing efforts to educate the public and encourage more civic engagement in our community. And it is my pleasure to join you tonight. Here's the situation. About 150 cars are being added to area roads every day. We can all feel the growth as we drive through San Antonio's streets and roadways. By 2040, half a million vehicles will be on our roads additional to what we have today. When you drive on our major highways, even arterial roads from Vandera to Zarsa Morris Street, it is obvious that we can't absorb the coming growth without doing things differently. While there are significant investments on the way for new construction, such as those approved in the 2017 bond this past spring, that work will only begin to keep pace with our growth. If we build at the current pace by 2040, congestion at those major bottlenecks around town is expected to increase by 900%. And nearly every major corridor will be rated F, meaning they will be at the most significant levels of over capacity. The status quo quite simply is not a viable option. Traffic engineers are clear. Business as usual of just building more roads and highways means average commute times will rise by 75%. In San Antonio, we have a transportation system that has until very recently been stuck in neutral. We have an underfunded public transportation agency that doesn't stretch to the limits of our city, a single mode dominated system of traditional roadways that is increasingly over capacity, and a network of bike and pedestrian routes that landed us, our city, on the list of places where the streets are unacceptably dangerous. What's worse is that because of the lack of realistic alternative modes, as the recent gas panic showed, we have a transportation system that has a long way to go before it is resilient or it is sustainable. It's past time for us to do something about it. As Dan Rather said, Americans will put up with anything as long as it doesn't stop traffic. And if we don't do something to address our transportation needs, traffic will be stopped a lot more in the future. But first, there is some good news right here in San Antonio. The 2018 city budget takes some important steps forward. We increase spending for streets by 50%, bringing street maintenance to $99 million. And we added $5 million to supplement the $78 million in funding in the bond package for sidewalks, walking, after all, as a mode of transportation too. The budget also focused on improving our bus system and the quality of life for San Antonians who ride the bus out of necessity. We included $4.3 million for via to improve frequency on nine routes. Buses will come every 30 minutes on those routes and the funds will also add capacity to seven corridors. Two new Primo routes will be operated by January 2019. Via needs this help because it is hamstrung by the smallest sales tax allotment of any major transit system in the state. And the fact that it is one of the most efficiently run transit systems in the country is something that we should be proud of doing more with less. And significantly, also good news, over the last 15 years, city of San Antonio voters have chosen to tax themselves to build one of the largest linear creekway systems in the nation. With recent investments from the 2015 renewal, we are beginning to achieve the vision that Mayor Howard Peake had in connecting these trails as an actual mode of transportation to move around our city. Yes, these may be small steps when you look at our overall transportation needs and the size of the problem, but they are a necessary start as we launch the work for building the multimodal system envisioned in SA 2020 and in SA tomorrow. And we are laying the groundwork for the enormous task ahead. I created a new city council transportation committee that will review plans and projects designed to enhance connectivity and mobility of all kinds, including the airport and air service enhancements, congestion reduction projects, transit improvements, and of course, multimodal transportation options. I named Councilman Ray Saldana, who has shown strong leadership in pushing for the additional via funds from the city as chairman of that transportation committee. We also worked aggressively to put Councilman Saldana in an influential role as vice chairman of the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, and he is joined by several capable council members on the board, including our very own Councilman Anna Sandoval, who is here tonight. Of course, these steps are leading to the transportation issue that was a key part of my campaign platform, a modern multimodal transportation system which includes high capacity mass transit. Can you believe that? We had the gall to say that here in San Antonio. We can't wait another generation to start building a transportation system for the future. We might not blame ourselves if we failed, but our children certainly will, and they are in fact now watching us. We will advance the vision of an efficient connected network of traditional roads, greenway trails, bicycle lanes, and dedicated mass transit lines throughout the city, including improved bus service and high capacity options, even such as rail. I'm serious about it. I wanna get it done, and let's be clear, the cost of doing nothing far outweigh the cost of building for the future. Voters rejected a rail system by a wide margin of almost, by a wide margin almost 20 years ago, but our city has no doubt changed dramatically since then. Congestion has increased, and we know it will increase much more if we don't act. I believe San Antonio's attitudes about mass transit have changed too. The level of pain has grown. We will push forward on community input. Our plan will be citizen driven and wait, it will be voter approved. If we don't plan for transit now, we will cripple our economy and erode the quality of life that makes San Antonio so great. Next year we will celebrate our tricentennial, 300 years, happy birthday San Antonio. As we celebrate our city's heritage and progress, we will also be beginning a new era, our second 300 years. It is the right time to act on and build a modern transportation system here in San Antonio. It is true that San Antonio lags behind major cities across the nation developing mass transit system, but our situation does have some advantages. We can do it right the first time. If we plan properly and start building the system now, San Antonio's positioned to have the multimodal transportation network that works for a community that will grow to the size of the city of Chicago within the next three decades. And those are the demographic facts. Frankly, with so much growth ahead, we must build a system that works before gridlock puts us in a stranglehold. And remember, a multimodal system doesn't mean you can't drive your car anymore. In fact, it means that you will have a lot less traffic to contend with when you do. You'll begin hearing more about our community effort to draft a system for the future with a transportation summit being planned for early next year with Bear County. We will be offering details on that event very soon. Of course, our system for moving around the city is not the only looming transportation issue. Planning for the future of air transportation is also extremely critical. The lack of nonstop flights has been a criticism hurled at the San Antonio International Airport for decades, but neither the facility itself nor its location are the cause for the dearth of nonstop flights. Anyone who tells you differently is looking for convenient excuses. The reality is that airlines will go where the market is. Airlines are constantly reviewing the viability of current and prospective markets by identifying increased economic strength, new or growing industries. And San Antonio Airport officials are working with our business partners to remain up to date on markets identified by the business community needing new or additional air service. This effort is conducted through our air service strategic plan and is already bearing fruit. And I wanna thank our aviation director who's here in the audience, Russ Handy. Thank you, Russ. Since spring of 2016, the San Antonio International Airport has announced seven new markets from the city and 11 additional nonstops to existing markets. In addition to these new markets, the airport has welcomed new carriers on 11 existing markets, providing more options to the traveling public. This includes new American Airlines' dailies to Philadelphia announced just last week. When we refocus our efforts collectively on building an educated workforce, our economic development prospects grow. When we grow more businesses and industries through local efforts and expansion, we create the demand for more air travel. And in turn, the nonstops will come. The airport is not landlocked. Plenty of land for growth is available. And starting in January, a new airport system development committee will launch an in-depth study of our air service assets, including the runways at Port San Antonio, general aviation assets at Stinson, and the International Airport at SAT. They will answer the eternal question that we've all wanted answered for so long. What is the infrastructure of modern air service for San Antonio, and where should we be investing over the next several decades? Is the San Antonio International Airport the right place for making investments to properly position the city's air travel for the next 50 years? Or do we need to pursue another option? With data, not without it, we will focus on solutions and we will redouble our efforts for the next generation of air service in San Antonio. And with data, we will be all in. As I said at the outset, transportation is a complicated topic and how we address it will be crucial, if not vital for our future. I didn't even mention the efforts to utilize data and smart traffic systems along with smaller, more efficient, and more autonomous vehicles. The good news is we have many assets and we are well positioned to prepare for growth in a bright transportation future here in San Antonio. But make no mistake, it will require bold action. I intend to act boldly. I believe that is why I was elected. So why I ask all of you, will you join me? Let me ask that again. Yeah. Will you join me? Yes. Thank you for having me tonight and thanks to the League of Women Voters for the organization's persistent efforts to bring public policy discussions into the spotlight and nurture civic engagement. Nothing is more important for our democracy and I thank you all for being in attendance tonight as well. Thank you very much. Those who have questions for the mayor, please come to that microphone and you can ask your questions. Thank you. I'm so bored. That's awesome. So they go down fire. Thank you very much. It's okay to judge them. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Megan Nirenberg. My name is Lily Louder and I'm with the Alamo area Council of Governments. I'm thinking in terms of the future of transportation systems has to include considerations of alternative fuel and advanced technology vehicles. So I'm wondering what the city has planned for encouraging the adoption of EVs, particularly in terms of regional infrastructure along like the I-35 corridor. Thank you for that question. The SA Tomorrow plan as it was coming together on the, so there are three legs to the SA Tomorrow stool. One is the comprehensive plan, which deals with more land use planning. That's the one, if you're a neighborhood associations you've been very engaged with. There's also a sustainability plan, which is about a lot of our financial human and environmental natural resources capital that we have here. And then the third one is the comprehensive transportation plan. At the outset, we contemplated all these new technologies. Obviously some of them we don't, we can't conceive of yet, but we know that data and technology are already driving change. So we have our transportation planners, including our transportation capital improvements department, including Mike Frisbee have been monitoring these and also going to the conferences and making sure that we have the data to build the right system. From what I understand, and I don't have an exhaustive knowledge on all that's available, but so far the technology has been improving vehicles and not changing infrastructure. The cars and the vehicles are getting smarter. The infrastructure in other words is remaining dumb. So we just have to make sure that we have policies in place to deal with what's available now and also begin to use more sensors and other technology infrastructure that can be retrofitted to our existing streets and highways. Hello, Mr. Mayor. My name is Gene Mark. And I wanted to ask, what's the latest on getting a train between San Antonio and Austin? Well, this is one that I'll probably pass over to my colleague at the MPO, Chairman Wolf, talk a little bit about that, in summary, you'd heard about the Lone Star Rail District, which, and this is just my perspective, it was a 22 year effort that didn't provide an inch of rail between our cities in Austin and San Antonio. One of the significant reasons for that is that it lacked political efficacy because it was an appointed board without the elected officials really at the table. And the other reason was it had no funding support. It was all funded as pass-through from our MPOs. And I'll tip my hat to Chairman Wolf on this. A lot of work was done along with his predecessor, my former colleague, Chairman Ray Lopez, who's now at SAMCO, to really shake that up. And rather than have all the decision-making through a separate board, we bring the conversation into the MPOs, both at the capital area, as well as San Antonio, who can begin working in a more concerted way on the environmentals, as well as all of the alternative routes that would be available. The good news in my perspective, again, of having it done this way is that now we have the people who make the decisions at the table and who do the funding at the table who are doing the planning. And that is the elected officials around the tables at the MPO level. So it will happen. When is just a matter of getting through the environmental process and the planning process? Hi, good evening, Mayor. The one thing I didn't hear in your speech was about safety. That's, you know, you're to my heart, just coming into the meeting, there was like three accidents. One of the via buses, they had like a lawyer or a truck hit a car, really bad. So I was just wondering, have y'all done any research or based on any other cities on the safety issues? I mean, I think that would be a good push for mass transit if it show us as a city how safe it would be for us and our family. Yes, well, and safety, if it wasn't explicit in my opening remarks, is certainly one of the foundations on the modern, that we're building the modern transportation system on. I did allude to how San Antonio has been unfortunately recognized as one of the cities with the worst, not worst, but dangerous streets as it relates to vehicular and pedestrian traffic. That is the Vision Zero plan. We're working on building better infrastructure that is safer for automobiles and safer for pedestrians and bicyclists. So that is one fundamental value that's baked into our transportation planning now. With regard to other techniques, I know there's some conversations right now about at the MPO, which we will be hearing in the Transportation Committees as well, about how we can remove minor, minor, minor vehicle, fender benders and other accidents off the highway faster. We in fact baked in additional funding for our own transportation improvements in the city of San Antonio. Simple things like better striping of the streets, more consistent striping of the streets as an impact on safety. So we're very cognizant of that. But I would more so point to our Vision Zero initiatives, which is centered on the concept of safety for vehicles and pedestrians. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, my name's Allen Townsend. I am curious to know how ride sharing programs are being thought of in terms of the plan. And a little bit later in the future, self-driving cars probably with ride sharing programs. Yeah. Well, that's the Johnny cab from Total Recall. Can't wait for that to happen. So autonomous vehicles, as I mentioned, is baked into the SA Tomorrow Comprehensive Transportation Plan, but more specifically about peer-to-peer and ride sharing technologies. These have already changed the landscape of transportation in San Antonio. And it's also forcing innovation in traditional industries like the taxi cab industries right now. I think it has enormous potential, and we do have also transportation policy planners that are studying how it's changing our streets. But the big conversation about mass transit systems after you get to the point of actually building one is that last mile concept. This is something VIA has contemplated also with its placement of bus stops and parking rides. But we wanna make sure that there is a diverse transportation mix on the private sector side as well so that people have the option of using mass transit to get from point A to point B and then taking other modes of transportation if it's not a bicycle or walking. It's another option like a ride share from getting that last mile from the stop to your work or from the stop to the school or from stop to home. So it is very much part of the mix of transportation, and that's one of the reasons why I supported it from the very beginning. We need diverse, we need a multitude of diverse options for transportation, particularly in that last mile. Okay. How are we doing, Ron Mearnberg? Great, how are you? Well, thank you. So San Antonio is claiming to have 1.1 million new citizens over the next 20 years. I haven't voted for that. So what as a city are we doing to limit these 1.1 million new citizens? So it wasn't a ballot initiative, I can promise you that. And the 1.1 million over the next 20, 25 years and the next million and a half over the next 30 years, that's a demographic reality. It's coming from people having children. It's coming from people moving to San Antonio because they find it a great quality of life just like the reason why you stay in San Antonio. So it's not something we can fight. Many communities have tried and found themselves in worse shape because they've failed to invest in their own infrastructure and services. Outside of making San Antonio less livable, poorer quality of life, fewer jobs, which I don't think is a good alternative. There's not much we can do about growth. Okay, so what are we doing to limit the influx of citizens, if anything, at all? I mean, I think I just answered the question. It's not, you can't stop growth. What you can do is accommodate it, prepare for it and make sure that the quality of life once that growth occurs is as good or better than it is today. That's our approach. I think we can only take a couple of more questions. So let it be very brief if we want to accommodate all of them because we have a panel discussion that we call up. I'll try to be pretty quick. So hi, Mr. Mayor. My name's Drupal Seth, so I'm a local tech investor and I've lost transfer from Austin. I've put millions in this city, especially in the downtown tech ecosystem of my personal money and my company's money. The problem I'm having is, I see our, so we're trying to attract talent from Austin, from Austin, from Silicon Valley from these other areas. And the problems we're running into right now is that our public transportation is broken right now as far as I've seen, especially I think it's a city and the organizations that are running it, but we have to get from my house to downtown takes me almost two hours. What is the question? So what are we doing? What can we do in the short term to fix this? Because we're gonna track these talents. What are we doing? So it's not, okay, these are long-term tenure plans. What can we do to attract talent now that we can show them, or we can show them to the cities? Well, it's an all-of-the-above strategy. So what we have done, the city of San Antonio took it upon ourselves to make sure that we're improving public transportation in those places where they're not choice riders, they're need-to-drivers riders. So we made sure we were enhancing bus service. We're building out our bicycle master plan as fast and as safely as possible. And we're also enhancing pedestrian modes of transportation through our creekway system as well as sidewalk infrastructure. And we're adding capacity where it's reasonable to do on our traditional roadways. But it does not substitute planning as aggressively as we can in investing in a mass transit system for tomorrow as we're doing all those things. I think our solution for transportation today is to work diligently and to invest in all of the above options for the future. I mean, there's no time to waste. We do have alternative modes right now and we're continuing to invest in them in the meantime. So there is focus, there's focus for choice riders right now. There's strategies you're all focusing on or looking at for choice riders, not need-to-rivers. Oh yeah, well, and that's why you're seeing enhancements on those seven corridors as well as the new Primo routes. Via is becoming a more and more attractive alternative for use by professionals every single day. There's Wi-Fi on the buses, there's more handy mobile apps to get to the routes in as least complicated manner as possible. So yes, we're working on choice riders as well and we're working to build out every reasonable alternative mode that we have available. We have extended our time, there is good time for only two more very brief questions. I'm sorry, what you can do is save your questions for the panelists. You can always email me too. I can talk to you offline. I do have just one point. I do know that Austin is planning, let's wrap it transit down by 35. That's just something. The question I have is, is it possible to market livability as kind of a thing we could all get behind that we could describe what livability is? It's fewer cars, more people on rail and things like that. So we had a clear vision of the ability perhaps. Can we do that? Yeah. Well, so your version of livability is a little different than some other folks' version of livability, but we do have some agreement there. It's quality of life and all the things that describe it. I will say that there's a gentleman up front who wants to keep our livability a little bit more of a secret. So we'll do the best we can, but it's kind of all the above. Yeah, I miss me. Hello, Mayor. Thank you for this opportunity to ask you questions. I appreciate this very much. So what's the prioritization of complete streets? I know it's challenging in San Antonio, especially in the inner city, but I used to hear more about complete streets, but not so much lately. And that complete streets gets to safety, quality of life and a lot of issues. Yeah, so complete streets, and this is on us. I think as transportation planners and policy makers, we have to do a better job of defining what complete streets are. I think if you ask a member of the general public what a complete street is, it's one that's paved and it's got lanes on it. It's complete from construction standpoint. We have to define what that is. Complete street in my book is one that is future ready, is accommodating to all modes of transportation available at the service level and is safe. It's got new infrastructure, quality of infrastructure, and it's also got the amenities that make it a livable part of our infrastructure and more sustainable. So I think we just have to do a better job of defining what that is. In terms of the infrastructure investment though, you're seeing them throughout San Antonio. I had great pride in a complete street initiative that's in the medical center right now on the Floyd Curl area that's under construction. Broadway, as you know, is one of the prototypes for complete streets in San Antonio. That's underway. So you're gonna see those more and more, but we just have to do a better job of communicating it. Thank you all very much. I want to thank the mayor for sharing his bold vision with us. And as he said, vision is one thing and implementation is also equally important, if not more important. So we will be keeping track of all the challenges that we are facing and how we are addressing them. And we would love to have another session, another time with more time with the mayor so everyone can ask their questions. So thank you very much, mayor, for your time and for sharing the vision. I'm Evelyn Bonavida. I am on the board of the directors and also the program committee. I'm introducing Francine. Professor Francine Romero is the associate dean of the University of Texas at San Antonio College of Public Policy and associate professor of the Department of Public Administration. She's currently, excuse me, represents San Antonio City Council District Eight on the Zoning Commission and as chair of the City San Antonio Conservation Advisory Board. She's also on the board of the Hill Country Alliance and she told me to keep this short, so I've just done that. Thank you, everybody. I will, somewhere, somewhere, my name is here. They'll know. Good evening, everybody. It is a pleasure to be here. So I want to, again, just introduce our panelists. And I'm keeping this very short, so I'm sorry. I just wanted my title announced. That's all I'm gonna say for these people because their full biographies are very lengthy and they are in your programs, okay? So starting from the end, we have Kevin Wolf, who is Bear County Commissioner for Crescent Three. We have Jeff Arn, who is the president and CEO of VIA. We have Anna Sandoval, who is San Antonio Councilwoman for District Seven. And we have Professor Bill Barker, who is an adjunct professor at UTSA in urban and regional planning. So please welcome our panel again. I also wasn't near the microphone, thank you. We are going to start with an opening statement from each of our panelists and it is five minutes and the League of Women Voters will be timing you and they are serious about it. So they will be having signs for this. We're gonna go down the line starting with Bill and then I'm gonna have a particular question for each of the panelists and then we're gonna get to a lot of the questions that you have all submitted here tonight. So Bill, if you can start us off and somebody will be holding up signs for you. That's due to the timer, right? Thank you, Francine. Well, I've been asked to talk about sustainability as it relates to transportation tonight and the main message I wanna give you is that the amount of vehicular travel is the key measure when you're talking about sustainability and transportation. And we measure that in terms of vehicle miles of travel or VMT, one vehicle going one mile is one vehicle mile, of course. Now, the reason that we focus on vehicle miles of travel is it's related to everything else you're interested in. Obviously, it has to do with fuel consumption which means it has to do with pollution emissions. It has to do with accidents. It has to do with water quality. It has to do with obesity. It has to do with practically every other thing you can think of. And that's why, importantly, from a sustainability standpoint, we wanna focus on reducing the vehicle miles of travel. Less vehicle miles of travel, more sustainability. Now, it happens that our federal government has a policy of reducing vehicle miles of travel. And as the mayor mentioned, SA 2020 has a goal in reducing it, our new sustainability plan that was just adopted last year as a goal in reducing it. So how have we been doing? Well, over the last 20 years, our VMT per person has gone up. It's gone up to about 6.6% or about a mile and a half per day per person. Now, that costs about a half a billion dollars a year to travel that much more. So I looked around at other cities about the same size as San Antonio, and I found three that have reduced their vehicle miles of travel per person. Portland, Oregon, and Sacramento and San Jose in California. They're all about the same size as San Antonio, but they've managed to reduce their vehicle miles of travel by about five miles a day per person. That's huge. That's billions of dollars of travel savings. How'd they do it? They all built like rail systems. And they did that by having the funding to do it. I'm sure Jeff is gonna talk about that before we're all over with, but they fund mass transit four and five times the amount we do per person. They all, if you average those three cities in San Antonio together, the average commute time is 25 minutes plus or minus two minutes. So even though they're traveling a lot less and doing all the same things that everybody in San Antonio does every day, they're doing it at about the same commute time and they're doing it with five miles less per day, which adds up to $1.6 billion a year less in each of those cities by cutting that travel that much. Now, regarding climate change, I think we have a moral obligation to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And I think we also have a moral obligation to reduce the heat here in San Antonio. And reducing our vehicle miles of travel will do both. So to summarize and sort of present my recommendation, I think we need a 21st century approach to funding our public transit. I think we need to implement smart growth strategies and focus our growth in a very walkable and efficient way. We need to reduce the amount of impervious parking area that we have in San Antonio. And we need to develop the capacity among our local transportation planners to examine road projects to see that they're reducing our vehicle miles of travel and not increase. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Dr. Romero. And thank you, Madhu and Mayor Riley, when you watch this, for putting on this forum. So I think building a robust transportation system that works for every San Antonio is really what our charge is. And part of that will definitely be high capacity, mass transit. I think this is going to knit our city together and that we mean putting, connecting workplaces to neighborhoods. And that's not going to be just by mass transit. That's also going to be by carpools, by walking, by cycling. And the benefits, I could go on forever about why that's going to be great for us. But I will say that that is how we make our city, one of the ways we can make our city healthier, right? The air is going to be cleaner and people will be taking more steps. So if you're one of those people with your Fitbit, you would love living in a city with great mass transit because you're going to get those steps. You know, we're also the most economically segregated city in the United States. And this is one of the reasons why is because if you need to take the bus, you're not going to live in the far suburbs, are you? Because we don't have that kind of service there. So my first job out of school was working at Via, right before Jeff got there, a few years before. Because it was my first job out of school, it was a formative time for me. So even though I went to Via thinking, yes, mass transit is a solution to pollution, I came out thinking mass transit is a God-given right that everyone should have. Thank you. It's not just for people who can't afford to drive, people who are physically impaired, and people who have, let's say, aged out of the driving pool all need dignified ways of getting around and being independent. And we can't do this if driving cars is our only option. We need other options for that. So one of my first tasks at Via that my boss gave me was look up the economic impact of investing in public transit versus building roads and driving. And I don't remember now, but there were orders of, not maybe orders of magnitude, but factors of difference between investing in public transit. That's money that keeps giving back to your city, as opposed to buying oil for your vehicle, buying the car, which this was way before we had Toyota here in San Antonio. So there was that benefit. And then the next assignment he had me do was read this paper. And it talked about the barriers to transit. And I just want us to transit use. And I want us to be aware of these as we go forward and plan for this system that we absolutely need to have here in San Antonio. It's not going to work without eliminating some of these barriers to transit. I'm gonna pick three of them to highlight. And one of them, someone in the audience brought this up is safety. You have to feel safe walking to the corner. And not just say from crime, but say from vehicles hitting you or speeding past you. And you have to feel comfortable getting there. So when we build our streets, those complete streets, we have to be thinking about that as well. Number two, development needs to be welcoming of transit. That means when I build a new store, I am not gonna put two acres of parking before you can walk into my door, because if you're gonna take that bus, you're gonna have to carry, oh man, I've got one minute left. You're gonna have to carry all those bags out, right? And number three is transit needs to be competitive with vehicular use. And this does not just mean dedicated lanes, although that's gonna be one of my favorite things that we will do in the future, I hope. But it also means, how does our UDC, our Unified Development Code, incentivize vehicle use right now? A lot of us get free parking, and you all know there's no such thing as a free lunch, right? We're paying for that, some way. So looking forward to the questions that you have, and this is one of my favorite topics, so I have a lot more to say about this, so bring the questions, thanks. Thank you. Before my five minutes begins, I would like to point out that commissioner is the only non-former via. I'm not a former, Mr. Barker worked for via as well. And so I want to offer you an internship. Now can I start? Now I will start. So I would like to, first of all, show of hands, how many of you watch Game of Thrones? All right, a fair number. So when I say to you, because this is my message tonight, winter is coming. I don't mean, you know, it's October and then December it comes. I mean the kind of winter the Game of Thrones is about. I think earlier we heard, you know, the number of people that are coming here because it's a wonderful place to be. I always tell people that by the year 2040, it would be as though the city of Austin moved to San Antonio and brought all their cars with them, but they didn't bring their lanes with them. They use our lanes. So you can imagine what kind of freeway congestion that provides. The second thing I would say is that by using the same technology and the same solutions that we have used all along and that not been effective, we can expect to have the same results. So I'll give you a perfect example of where winter has already arrived and that is Houston, Texas. Don't have to go too far from here. Where they spent 2.8 billion dollars to build the largest freeway in this galaxy. It is, it's the largest. And within three years, the travel time from Katie to downtown was longer than before they widened that freeway to 28 lanes. So 2.8 billion dollars later, what do they do next? We can't continue to do the same things and expect different results. So we're talking about transportation investment. Thank you. I got a hand. I'll take it when I see it. We're talking about transportation investment. I will compare this to when you invest in your own, you know, retirement or your pension plans, but you guys tell you, you should have a diversified portfolio, you know, don't put everything in large cap stocks. Well, what we've done locally is we have essentially built the non-diversified transportation portfolio. And we have built and spent a lot of money to move vehicles, to move cars, which is wonderful. But we, when we can't use the car, for example, gas lines for one day, my ridership went up 20% the next day. One day it goes up 20%. But here's the other fact, just because suddenly if it's of interest doesn't mean that the transit infrastructure is going to grow. If you haven't made the investment beforehand, then you have the infrastructure you have right now. Earlier the mayor referred to the fact that in 2040 most of our roadways are projected to be at level of service F. Level service is just like your report card. So you understand what F is. I will tell you that today most of the routes operate at level service D or F at the best of times because of the frequency. I'm thankful what the city is doing to help us increase that frequency. Hopefully I'll get to talk a bit more about that as we go along. And so what FIA has done is developed a 2040 plan. We did it hand in hand with the city's multimodal transportation plan, worked lockstep in that process. And we have a plan that says that we need three things to have a public transportation system that could be an attractive alternative to the community. The first is we have to have a better bus system. So I don't start with light rail. I start with better bus. Because better bus is the foundation of any system. If and when San Antonio has light rail, they'll have more buses than light rail vehicles by a long shot. Only a few cities that are reverse of that. So we have to have the kind of frequency in our bus system. We have to have some flexibility in the bus system. We have to build the park and ride type commuter services. And we have to build the lanes that will help us get those buses faster. But that is our foundation. The second is what we call rapid transit, which is anytime we operate a transit vehicle in its own right of way. So it's not stuck in the traffic. It just operates in its own right of way. That could be bus rapid transit, if you imagine a street with only buses running on it. Or it could be light rail transit, or it could be some technology that we haven't even really conceived of yet. But the advantage of that kind of operation is you get the speed, because that's the other challenge with transit is the speed. You get speed, you get frequency, you get reliability. And so that offers an opportunity of a different type. Plus, you start developing the city in a different way because you'll find that at those stations, the development will start congregating at those stations. And therefore, you're kind of building in ridership for your line. The last piece is what we call smart transit. So that goes to automated vehicles. In fact, a year from now, we expect to be operating non-automated, but automated vehicle is just like a Uber without a driver, right? So we'll be using Uber before it gets automated. In some of the suburban areas where it's very tough to bring the buses into, so we can get buses out and put that kind of system in and tie into transit ways so you can tie into the system. We know we have a long way to go. We know it'll take a lot of work and a lot of funding to get there, but we're excited. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Woods. Good stuff. I wanna start off first by thanking the mayor. He and I worked together to, I think, move the possibility of rail between Austin and San Antonio more in the last two years than it had been done in the 20 years previous to that. And with his help and others on the MPO, we now have it in the right place, right planning place in the right bodies to, if we can do it, it'll absolutely get done. So thank you for that. In regards to transportation, it is certainly one of the basic services that we all are interested in. And there are so many things that are affected by transportation. However, it's also not the sexiest thing to talk about. So I choose to operate on what I call the foundation model. And if you're gonna build a new house, you're thinking about how the walls and roof and how that's all gonna look. And you're excited about it, but you're not really excited about that concrete foundation that you're gonna build it on. However, if you don't build that concrete foundation correctly, then it really doesn't matter what you build on top of it because sooner or later it will fall down. When it comes to transportation, that's what we're dealing with. What we do today may not matter today, but it must matter tomorrow. So when these bodies, council, commissioners, court, MPO, when we're talking about transportation, we have to be thinking 30, 40, 50 years into the future. We have to be thinking about how can we put in infrastructure today that we'll be able to handle driverless car or driverless freight tomorrow? We have to think about those things. Otherwise, we will fail you and fail our children as we go forward. I wrote an article here, a op-ed article about the year or so ago called The Threshold of Pain. My wife and daughter and I moved to Manhattan. We moved into downtown Manhattan. And of course, being from Texas, I had to keep a car. So of course, I kept the four-wheel drive expedition. It turns out that the apartment we were in didn't have had a 30-person waiting list for parking. So the closest I could park it was four blocks away and it cost $750 a month. But I knew I would need that car. Because I had this site out on Long Island, only 30 miles away that I had to get to at some point. And so two months after living there, I finally had the opportunity to drive out to Long Island 30 miles away and it took me three and a half hours to drive one way. I reached my threshold of pain. I fell in love with mass transportation. I couldn't wait to take the six line in the morning and read my Wall Street Journal and drink my coffee. We are in that transition. We haven't made it all the way there yet, but we are reaching that threshold of pain and it makes it very, very important that we continue to look at that because we know we're gonna get there sooner or later. And mass transportation is absolutely one of the things that we have to look at. And quite frankly, we have not done a good job in the past of planning for today's future. We're suffering that because in the past we didn't think about tomorrow as closely as we should. That's why VIA is funded at half the rate the other major metropolitan areas are at. So it's important that we talk about those things. I also was really happy to hear the mayor talk about air transportation. For those of you that have been here and lived here, I can't tell you how many times I've complained about direct flights and how do we get more and what do we do? And I can tell you we've tried a number of different things. Usually the thing that sort of works and it sounds like it works, that's where we subsidize an airline for a period of time to do direct flights. But when that subsidy runs out, so does that direct flight. I've seen it happen over and over again. I remember being on council in 2005 and celebrating because we got a direct flight from Denver to San Antonio from Frontier Airlines. I remember a year and a half ago, I saw the same thing in the newspaper saying, hey, guess what? We got a new flight from Denver to San Antonio with Frontier Airlines. I'm like, okay, I know what's happening here. What did you say earlier, Jeff? The thing doing over and over again. Okay, you get the idea. So I was very happy to hear the mayor say that. I know for the last two years, two and a half years at the county we've been working trying to look at other alternatives in regards to air transportation. For the first time in two and a half years, I'm hearing one of our electives really point to it and say, you know what, staff, I need to hear from you as to what it is that we can do different. Because that hasn't happened at least in the last 30 years that we've talked about what we can do with air transportation. So again, mayor, thank you. Thank you for that leadership in that direction because there are a number of things in regards to air transportation that go beyond subsidizing current airlines. And then I'll wrap up, all of this is great to talk about and we wanna hear these things and the vision that the mayor has put out there I think is absolutely the right one. But at the end of the day, the hardest work is to figuring out how do you pay for it. So let me leave you with something to think about. The MPO and its 25 year plan has $17 billion worth of absolutely have to have projects. These aren't nice to have, these are have to have to handle that influx of new people in 20, 40, et cetera. However, based on revenue streams over that same period of time, we will only take in $7 billion. Don't take a math petition to figure out we're $10 billion short. We got a lot of work to do. Thank you. This is, commissioner is gonna stop you because I was gonna say, I'm gonna ask you that question in one second. I recognize everybody that's here tonight because I go to a lot of panel discussions and sometimes I'm up here and sometimes I'm out there and I just wanna make sure that we recognize the energy of all the citizens that are in this room. It's great that we have an expert panel here and I know you've all spent so much time even though you already could just talk about this stuff off the cuff. I know you do a lot of preparation for it. But I also know that when you come here to these meetings, it's not just to hear about what are these people going to do for us but to get a sense of what can you do. So I hope everybody that's here tonight is thinking about not just what can I do but what will I do when I walk out that door tonight or tomorrow morning. You don't have to do it tonight. But as the mayor mentioned that these are really difficult issues and without the entire community putting their energy into this it's going to be really hard to have it happen. And that's whether you agree or oppose some of the ideas that are out here tonight. So I have a few targeted questions. So I did want to start with Commissioner Wolff and I do want to try and get to some issues tonight that of specific ideas, you know moving beyond just talking about transportation but specific strategies that the public can really start to get behind. But I did want to talk to you about Transportation Policy Board. You were elected chair of the Transportation Policy Board at the Illinois Area Metropolitan Planning Organization this summer. And with that role in your position as County Commissioner you probably have the most expertise in the opportunities and challenges of the bigger picture of transportation in our region. And I'd like you to address what are the most important things that the MPO can be doing, will be doing and where do you see the challenges coming in especially in terms of I think the urban I'd like to say urban and rural there's not a lot of rural left so urban and not so urban. And I would also like you to take this opportunity to clarify your position on light rail because I know that you have talked about not being at the pain threshold yet but you have also talked about specific projects that you would support. And I don't know, are we timing these? Okay, we're timing these two. I'll be as fast as I can. It's a long question. Okay, so MPOs by their very nature are supposed to be thinking about things regionally. Most folks don't know this but in the last four years we have expanded our MPO to include Komal, Guadalupe and part of Kendall County. One of the major reasons we did that is we had always been the third largest MPO in the state which meant we were third in line for money from the state. However, Austin expanded their MPO and moved into third place and it was costing us $75 million a year in transportation dollars. So we expanded, which was a good thing to do. However, that also makes you have to think about the difference between urban and rural because we do have some rural areas in Komal, Guadalupe and Kendall, especially Guadalupe and so their needs and wants are different which means we have a body of 21 individuals that has to decide what's the best thing to do for all of us. Now, expand that to another level. We have a plan in place in our MPO in regards to expanding 35. It's already in there. We already know how we're gonna pay for it. Well, guess what? Campo, Austin's MPO also has a plan on 35 and it looks very much like our plan. So one of the things we started to do is work much more closely with Campo or Austin's MPO and we are even going so far as to figure out how we can put some of our plans together to really think regionally. And you heard me earlier talk about rail between 35 and Austin. Again, it's those two bodies that are working together and quite frankly, if it wasn't for the rail issue, if it wasn't for us stopping Lone Star Rail and taking it over, our two MPOs probably never would have thought to talk to each other and work together, not only on rail but on future projects as well. So rail is in my wheelhouse. I like it. I will tell you there are many different types of rail. There's rail reuse, which I could support almost immediately. We have a line that is close to being available for that. Rail between Austin and San Antonio I'd rather concentrate on rather than light rail within just San Antonio. But the last thing I'll leave you, and that's the last thing I left under my opening remarks, is you gotta figure out a way to pay for it. And the only way to do that today based on existing revenue streams is to pass a referendum in San Antonio and in Bear County that says I am willing to pay for any sort of infrastructure over and above what we already pay. Okay, thank you. We have a lot of questions about rail so we're gonna come back to that for all of you if you wanna talk about that. But for Jeff, we have a lot of questions on this. I kinda compiled them all here. Can you give us, and there's a couple parts to this question, but first of all, can you give us a brief via funding 101 by explaining the sales tax structure that funds via, including the new allocation that city council just approved in the new budget. And if you wanna talk about federal and state funds and why that all still leaves you in a challenging position. And the second part of the question, I think you have gone out there with your message a lot. I remember we did a transportation forum, well, maybe two years ago, and I asked what you were prepared to do to get more money from city council, and you said beg. So I don't know if you had to do that, but you have a lot of good, you have your peanut butter sandwich metaphor, and lots of different things you say to the public. But I'd like you to be frank with us about whether you think that message you're sending out to the public is really resonating with citizens and elected officials that via simply does not have enough funding. But starting with the funding 101, explain what your sources of funds are. Okay, so everyone have their handkerchiefs handy? It's a sad story. So the MTAs in the state of Texas primarily funded by a sales tax that was authorized by the state legislature. MTAs could pass up to a one cent sales tax to fund transit. Austin, Dallas, and Houston all in fact did that. San Antonio decided to go for half a cent, which meant that there was another half cent remaining. You don't give up the authority, ultimately go to the full cent. Sales tax comprises 75% of our revenue. So big piece of our revenue, pretty much true of the other MTAs in the state as well. The remainder of our revenue comes from three sources now. The second source is the federal government has formula funds that comprise about 12% of our revenue. So we are not heavily dependent on the federal government that way. The city with a $10 million plan by the end of next year will be almost equal then to fair revenues. So we get about 12 million in fair revenues, 10 million from the city, about 30 million from the feds, and all the rest is sales tax, sales tax alone. And just to put frame that up, so two stories. One, Dallas at their full penny brings in almost six times dollars per square mile that we do six times. The second piece is Houston, when I worked in Houston for 25 years, built their first light rail line out of their savings account. They didn't need a penny from anybody else, they just saved up money. I promise you that we are not able to save up money with our half-send and provide the kind of service we need to the community. You can go over a little bit because it was a long question. I had a two for a question. So I mentioned earlier that we do get federal funding primarily through the formula funds and it comprises about 12 and a half percent. State funding, we get no state funding. The state in allowing cities to create MTAs essentially backed away from funding transit in the larger cities in the state of Texas. And so since I've been here, we've received a total of $32 million from Textot so that we could build sidewalk improvements in the northeast side of town, not for transit, direct transit improvements. Clearly we need sidewalks, I'm not minimizing that. So we get no funding from the state and in fact the two elections on Prop 1 and Prop 7 specifically said this money must be used on highways and bridges and it cannot be used on toll roads or public transportation and the $12 vehicle registration fee that was enacted about two years ago. Similarly as restricted to streets and bridges not public transportation. So the opportunities that we've had for more funding are not that great. The other thing I'd say is I believe that the elected officials fully understand our funding scenario. I truly believe that when city council, when we would talk to them about the $10 million plan, if there was any resistance at the time, it was the city didn't know what was gonna happen in the legislature so there was some uncertainty but I don't think there was anybody on council that said no via you don't need any more money. You're already providing plenty of service to the community. Whether that's getting out to the general public, I'm not as confident just based upon conversations and focus groups we've had. Okay, thank you. Okay, Councilman Sandoval, following up on this. Some of you know me, I am very supportive of the Edwards Aquifer Protection Program and I'm not in any way trying to question this but the Express News did open this discussion several weeks ago that we do have two sales tax funded programs in San Antonio pre-K for SA and the Edwards Aquifer Protection Program and the Creekways Program which both each have an eighth of a cent sales tax and they are both run out when you get to a certain amount of funding and that amount will come up probably in about 2020. Councilman Sandoval, have you thought about your position yet on whether you would support not renewing either of those programs in order to focus the sales tax on transportation and also as part of that, because you've spoken about this a lot, when you have to make the argument to the public about spending money on transportation what do you think is the best basis for that argument? Is it public health? Is it the cost of not doing anything? Is it quality of life? Some mixture of all of those things because you have brought a really refreshing viewpoint into making, getting people to think about things in a different way. So the specific one on the sales tax and the more general one about how you get people to think about it. Thank you for that compliment, Dr. Herrera. So I have not thought this out fully. I will say I obviously need a lot more information about that but I do feel that investment in preschool or early education is one of the best things we can do to invest in the health of our economy locally and in the health of our population, lifelong health of our population. So I would be reticent to revisit the pre-K4SA. I do think it's important for our city to be on par with some of the other major metropolitan areas in Texas in terms of being at the one cent sales tax. But I don't think that might be sufficient. I mean, we're very far behind right now and I think we will need to explore other avenues even if it's temporary. Some of that may have to be user fees. I don't necessarily mean toll roads but other things that we do right now that induce driving and I can go into a longer discussion but I see I only have one minute left on that. Okay, all right, thank you. And Bill, I had noted your piece in the REVAR report and you talked about our miles travel per person actually going up. So can you circle back to that a little bit in terms of specific planning strategies because people always talk about how we can plan better for transit oriented development. And I just feel like everybody needs to go to zoning commission. I know there's a couple of zoning commissioners here tonight, Grace Rose Gonzalez and Sibonette Diaz Sanchez and it's different when you're sitting there at zoning commissioner. I know when council is dealing with zoning issues it's very hard to shape development when developers don't want it to go in a particular direction. So can you talk about some of the most important strategies you think the city might adopt whether incentive based or regulatory based that would get at the transportation issue from the land use direction. So how can we use land use to really make transportation? Get at some of our transportation issues. And I wanted to, well, I'll save this question. I'll just save it for, keep it at that right now. There. Well, commissioner Wolf talked about the foundation and if you think about it really transportation system does form the foundation it shapes the development. I think the key for transit oriented development is really getting back to rail transit. Investors are not going to invest in a building next to a bus stop because the bus stop can change tomorrow. They will invest next to a light rail station because that's gonna be there for a long time. And so that's an important difference between bus transit and rail transit is that it has a much more impactful effect on land development patterns. In fact, there's a, what they call a land use multiplier for rail transit. If you look at the ridership that shows up on rail transit and you say, okay, everybody came out of a car. So that's, if there's one mile a rider that means there's one less vehicle mile roughly. Well, with rail transit, it's three miles. It's three vehicle miles are reduced that you can't account for it just from the ridership. The rail transit has an impact on land development that in essence is multiplied by three in terms of the vehicle miles that are affected. Once you have an investor interested in a rail transit station, then I think that development proposals are much different because they realize they need pedestrian access to that rail station and will design accordingly. If they're just designing in normal bus service that's not the biggest priority they have although they didn't consider it obviously. I've seen multiple cases of that. They think about that. But the rail transit station is really makes a big difference. Okay, all right, thank you. We are gonna be getting to questions on rail but I did want to take a second to ask if any of you wanted to comment on the other answers right now, come on, come on. Real quickly, I'll answer from my perspective to the question you asked Anna. I absolutely agree with her that pre-K education is vital. I also agree that protection of our aquifer is vital. What I might not agree on is who should be primarily responsible for that. On the education piece I would tell you that it's our horribly broken education system that when cities jump into the job of educating our youngsters you're essentially enabling our state to not do their job. So I have a problem with that. So I would move that money to mass transportation which the city is supposed to do. I can make the same argument for aquifer protection. However, we have done some great things with that aquifer protection. I see Anna leaves a piece out there. I know she's worked her tail off on that for years and years. And so, but are we to the point now where, okay, we've got that in place. We've spent as much as we can and protected as much as we can in Bear County and other places. Do we need to consider moving that to mass transportation as well? I certainly think it's worth looking at. And I'm quite sure that this council will be looking at that. And I know exactly what Anna Lisa is gonna be for. So, thank you. Okay, thank you. Sure. I think that's why I suggested we need a 21st century approach to mass transit funding. These other programs are very valuable and you make a good argument and maybe somebody else ought to pay for them but that somebody else hasn't stepped forward yet to do it. Actually, VIA was the first transit authority in Texas and showed a lot of innovation back in the day and Houston and eventually Austin and others caught on and informed transit authorities. We have Mayor Henry Cisneros to think for that. We need to. Remember the buckets. We need to get our innovation hat back on and think about a new way that perhaps to fund mass transit because these other cities that I mentioned earlier that are getting it done, they're funding transit at four and five times the rate that's being funded in San Antonio. So another quarter cent here or half cent there isn't gonna do it. Okay, well that will lead us into our next question. I'm gonna read, these are gonna be questions for everybody so we'll just open enough to whoever wants to answer. I'll start with this one, which is how did Denver, Colorado get billions of dollars to build probably hundreds of miles of light rail and San Antonio finds it difficult to get a few miles of light rail built and we're gonna have another question about rail between cities but just in terms of light rail right now, this is the biggest question we heard coming into this forum. What's gonna happen? How can we get it? What are your thoughts on light rail? What are the chances of it in the near future? Where would it be? Best ideas you can all throw out here on this. So, you know, you heard me earlier in talking about different types of rail. Let's talk about light rail here locally. Why is Denver in a different place than we are? Why is Dallas in a different place than we are? Dallas actually went with the referendum the same time we did back in 2000, 2001. They passed theirs and we did not pass ours. At that time in our history, the federal government also had much more rail potential dollars available. Whereas today, if you can get rail dollars out of the federal government to go anywhere but the East Coast, you're creating miracles. So, you know, in my office, we have a saying, start with the ideal and work back to the real. I would tell you the ideal is that we would have a funding source available to do light rail. If you asked me where I'd probably do it first, I'd probably do it from the airport to downtown. But I can tell you that that project right there by itself is almost a billion dollar project. And today we don't have any revenue stream that can afford to do that. That's why I said it would take a local referendum of you folks saying, yeah, I wanna charge myself more in order to have that. So while I'm certainly, I don't believe myself to be against light rail, I'm happy to discuss it. I'm happy to put it in our plans, but at the end of the day, we still have to figure out how to pay for it. And that's where it begins to get difficult. That's something most people don't know about the MPO. Before we can put it in our plan, we must have it financially constrained. What that means is you're gonna put in a plan for rail, a road, whatever, you have to have a funding source that's real. And today there is no real funding source for just about any type of rail. There's one small category at the state level for rail. You can get steady dollars out of it, but it's about $2 million for the entire state. So it's not real. That's the only dedicated revenue source that I know of for rail. Councilwoman Sandoval. Hi. I guess I'm gonna challenge the commissioner just a little bit, because I know he likes a good fight. So this area, not just the MPO, spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year on implementally beneficial transportation projects. That means your commute from point A to point B, maybe you shaved off two minutes. And the commute from point C to point D, maybe you shaved off another three minutes there. And I know that all of these projects are important and may seem vital to each of those areas, but if we keep spending all of our dollars on incremental improvements, we never get a chance to make a transformational improvement. So I think we may wanna ask ourselves that, maybe not in the next five years, but at some point in the future, hopefully when I'm still on the MPO, I think it's time for us to be bold reasonably and ask ourselves those questions. Are we willing to forego some of these incremental improvements to begin to transform our community and make that big investment in rail? So let me go back to Denver before you start arguing with each other. So if you look at some of these other systems, like Denver had the largest single capital grant from the federal government for a rail system of any city in America. Where they got the local dollars, I don't know, but I'll just tell you that you don't get a grant from federal government unless you have the local dollars. And you have to be, so the same way you can't put in the plan, unless you have finance, federal government are going to say today to you, we'll give you at most 50%. When I started 37 years ago, it was 80%. So you can see a federal support has really dropped on the first hand. That's the first part. Dallas has the largest light rail system in the United States. They built the first leg out of their savings account and then they went to the voters having put in light rail, which is the history, of course, is when you get the first line in and people have an understanding and see how it works, then it's kind of, I want it next, I want it next. Same thing happened in Houston, as I said, Houston built out of their savings account, had a referendum actually a few months before the line opened and passed the plan that they have largely built today. So, our dilemma is being able to leverage those federal dollars requires that we find a way to fund the local share. And I want to say something to the councilwoman about incremental improvements because there are 100% with you. When I moved here, the interchange at 1604 and 281 was under construction. And I needed, I would one day avail myself, but in the meantime, I got off on the front of drill, went through a couple of signals and got on the freeway. They built the overpass and I went up and over and didn't have to go through the intersections. But when I landed on the freeway, the freeway had backed up because people were landing there. So ultimately, I didn't save a minute for that investment. And so, I agree totally with you that you have to start looking at some of those things and saying, saving three, five minutes versus a transformational improvement, which is what the city has done in their assistance with the funding of VIA. The things that we're doing, moving from a 60 minute frequency to a 30 minute frequency, you can see that substantial. Even though 30 minutes is still D, it's not F, right? And it's moving in the right direction. Okay, and Bill, because a lot of your land use plans depend upon a light rail system. Your thoughts on the most feasible funding source for this. Because you can't be a planner and you're saying we should have it. I'm gonna talk about the tax increase. And I was here, in fact, I was the planning director at VIA when we had the 2000 referendum on light rail here, which we lost. But we learned a lot, as you do, when you try something new. One of the things we learned is I think we need a citizens academy, not unlike what's going on here tonight where people come together and they can start to understand what the issues are and what the facts are and so on. Because what happens is in these situations and happened in 2000, it happened in the streetcar situation more recently is there are outside interests, various national organizations that have as their mission to defeat such referendum. And they come out and they confuse everybody with misstatements, with confusing information and so on. And if you're talking about a tax increase, the best way to shoot it down is just confuse everybody because nobody wants to vote for a taxman. They're confused, right? I see a lot of nodding heads. So I get back to the idea. We, yes, we need another way to fund transit, but we also need a way to increase the capacity of our San Antonio voters to where that when they go to vote for whatever it is they're gonna vote for and to get a tax increase of something, you're gonna have to have a vote that they know what they're voting for. Okay, all right, good. And then real quickly, if you could each address, because we have some questions about the San Antonio to Austin rail line, a San Antonio to Monterey, Mexico rail line. Where are we on that? Because people have a lot of questions. Is it ever going to happen? Is that have a better chance than light rail within the city? Commissioner, you wanna talk about that one? Sure, I'll start. I don't know that I could say it has a better chance than light rail within the city, because within the city that's a decision that we can make at the local level, whereas that's not a decision we can make at the local level in regards to rail between Austin and San Antonio. I agree with Councilwoman in regards to how we should be looking at things. The problem is back to the real. There are 10 different categories of funding within text.alone. Each one of those categories of funding has specific rules about what you can and can't spend it on. And so when you heard me talk about that one category of funding in regards to rail, that's the only real thing out there. So it removes the power of even our local MPO that's spending billions of dollars from being able to say definitively, I want this type of transportation, I wanna focus on this type of transportation, et cetera, because we are forced into utilizing what the state legislature and what the federal legislature does in regards to the monies that they send back to us and what the rules are around that. So while I agree with the philosophy, the reality is is we don't have the ability to make that decision at the local level. So we need to be lobbying at the state and federal level that says, hey, give us more autonomy in regards to how we spend our own dollars. And that's a never-ending argument across a whole bunch of different areas. Like I said, Francine, we are much closer in the last two years doing rail between Austin and San Antonio than we've ever been. Myself and the chair from Campo went to Dallas and visited with their executive director of the largest MPO in the States, bigger than Harris County. And we were specifically talking about high-speed rail. And one of the things we looked at, we were talking about, hey, high-speed rail from Monterey to San Antonio is probably the easiest section that you could do. And then we kind of went a little further and we said, you know, it doesn't have to be high-speed rail all the way. It could be high-speed rail from Monterey to San Antonio. It could be normal passenger rail from San Antonio to Austin, pick up high-speed rail again. You get the idea. There's a number of different potential plans out there. The good part about it is that, remember how I talked about us and Austin MPO working together on projects? Well, now we're looking at us, Austin and DFW MPO and how to work on some of these really large, futuristic types of projects, whether it's, you know, writing in the, you know, pneumatic tube like a bank or, yes. That's not me. I'm here. Or high-speed rail alternatives. And one of the things that we talked about doing is putting out an RFI to the private sector that says, hey, the only way to fund it today, high-speed rail is private sector. You're not gonna find federal, state, local dollars for that, not in the real world, okay? So private sector, what could you do? You come up with some ideas of how you would do it and we'll get them. There's a number of private sector entities out there that are interested in doing this. So we've talked about the possibility of putting out an RFI for some sort of all-encompassing rail system between Monterey and Dallas. And I see two people from the Express News here tonight and they're gonna ask me a whole bunch of questions about that and I wasn't supposed to talk about this yet. So, at any rate, the point being is that we are very focused on rail options between our major metropolitan areas because when you get down to it, the corridor between Austin and San Antonio is the fastest growing corridor in the entire United States. We are the DFW of tomorrow. What you see happening between Dallas and Fort Worth? Pretty soon. Yep, no, I'm done. Okay. Let me respond to him for just a second. Which is to say that I'll get you off the hook. So everything about that high-speed rail project is on TechStats website because they have done EIS and they've submitted a federal government. So there's nothing top secret about that so you haven't let out any secrets. The other thing is that that whole plan says that it would be built in a public-private partnership. The challenge that having just the private sector finance and it's the problem that the Dallas-Houston high-speed rail line is facing is that the private sector doesn't have the ability to exercise eminent domain so all you have to do is have one property owners as I'm not gonna sell and it's not like you can jump over that tract of land or relocate your rail. And so that's where I think the partnership is probably one of the biggest hurdles is getting past that eminent domain. So that's the opportunity there. The public side could be in assembling right of way and the private side could be in the development. Okay, thank you. Did anybody else wanna weigh in on that quickly? Okay, I'm trying to combine a few questions here and I did wanna get to the equity issue and start with the councilwoman on this. We have a number of questions here from different directions about how transportation options in particular may be failing our most vulnerable communities. I think one of the best metaphors for this, for the invisibility is councilman Saldana when he was riding the bus. He probably still does ride the bus. And he said that people would always say to him, well, I don't think people really ride the bus to go to work because when I go to work at seven o'clock in the morning, I never see anybody on the bus. And he said, well, that's because people ride the bus at four and five to get to work, not at seven. And that just really struck me about how there's so much people really don't realize about the lack of transportation options and how that impacts people in San Antonio. And we have a number of questions at the same time. I'm not really sure they're from this direction, but when we think about low income communities, we tend to think of them more in the downtown of San Antonio. But there's also a lot of those in the unincorporated areas of the counties who also don't have transportation options. So it's a big question. I'd like to start with a councilwoman on this one and have everybody weigh in on it. Sure, yeah, it is a big question. So transportation isn't just one part of our life. I think it connects everything in our lives, right? How you move, how you go to school, how you go to work, how you go to entertainment, how you connect with your family. I do think that our public transportation system is failing our most, it's failing all. And this is no reflection on you, Jeff. And in some ways it's failing all of us, right? Because it's not an option that some of us have to use for most of our, for some of our trips. But let me tell you how I think it's failing the most vulnerable, because it keeps them from being competitively in the workforce the same way people with a vehicle can be competitively in the workforce. How many job applications, job descriptions have you seen that says requires reliable transportation or requires having your own vehicle? You may not even need it for your job, but it's required and you're not going to apply if you don't have it. That's one way. Another way is that sometimes we force, based on our development here, we force the cost of vehicle ownership or vehicle transportation on our most vulnerable in some ways. So take for instance an apartment complex where you live that was constructed with parking for everyone. Say you don't have a car, you're not getting a special deal on that apartment because you don't have a car. You're paying for that, it's inherent. Say you walk to the HEB, that parking's not free. HEB's paying a property tax on it, they're maintaining the asphalt. But that cost, small as it may be, is integrated into the cost of the groceries that you have. I see someone who works at City Hall here. Oh, you don't get free parking, sorry. Let's say another place that gives free parking. Free parking to all its employees, whether you take the bus at 4 a.m. or you drive in. That company's still spending that money on parking and they're not doing a parking cash out for people that aren't driving or can't drive. So those are just two of the ways. And not to mention access to health care, to preventative health care. When you don't have a vehicle, how much harder is it to leave your work or when you don't have an easy way of getting around, such as mass transit or a vehicle, how much harder is it to leave your day-to-day job and go get preventative health for you and for your family? So those are some of the ways that come to mind. Thank you. All right, others? Yeah, I would like to talk about a story I heard from a young man came up to me when the second BBC Tech opened after the ceremony he came up and said, I want to thank you for Via, which I thought was pretty cool since I'm just one person. And then he said, because I was raised by a single mother and I rode the bus since the moment I can remember, she would take me on the bus to daycare and then she'd go on to work and then later take me to the bus to school and then later I was able to get myself to school. But my mother always drove the bus, took the bus to work. And then once I was more independent, she decided to go back and get more education. So she got a bachelor's degree and she was excited. So she got a master's degree and then she must have been real excited and she got a doctorate. And you can imagine what happened to her career as she went along doing that. He had told me he just got his bachelor's and he was going for his master's. And now he said, I want you to know my mom bought a car. And I said, don't worry, it happens to the best of us. So, but that's what, you know, that is what fires up me and I think the people at Via is we know that in the areas where it really works, it does allow people to have empowered lives and transform lives. I just want that to be broader. That's the better bus system. Okay, Bill. Yeah, let me jump in at 15, 20 years ago, there was an article in the express news about a fella who slept at the post office because he worked there late at night, he took the bus. But then the buses stopped running at certain hour at night and he couldn't get home. So he had to sleep at the post office and catch the first bus that came to the post office. He could take home. I spent many years doing surveys at transit systems around the United States. And one of the interesting things I learned was that people who work at jobs that are on a bus route may actually get paid less than people, than they would if they could go to jobs away from the bus route. It was about 50 cents an hour less if because the bus was there and the employer is the one that gets the benefit of being on the bus route. And of course, the same sort of dynamic occurs with apartments. If you lived on a bus route, you paid higher rent than if you didn't. And again, the apartment owner is the one that gets the benefit of the bus route. I just wanted to throw in that also when I was with video, we used to get calls all the time from the restaurants out on 1604. They wanted more bus service because they relied on the help in the kitchen and so on to conduct their business and they couldn't get along without bus service. So you think about 1604 not needing bus service well, yeah, they do, the business is out there needed. Okay, and Jeff, we did have a number of questions about that and you've said yourself that Via doesn't do a good enough job of moving people in from suburbia into the center city or I think the opposite direction as well. So can you address that? Cause we did have a couple of questions about that. Do this. First of all, we do have a number of parking rides, parking rides plan and the first will open in January at Stone Oak and 281. And so the system is starting to be designed to look toward that kind of commute. The second thing is out of that parking ride we'll have a crosstown that will originate there and take you to the medical center. It's a crosstown, so it's not going to be expressed but that's the other challenge in a transit system that's especially a transit system that was established and hasn't grown significantly. Most of you know that we're kind of a hub and spoke and you probably heard the stories about I have to go all the way into downtown transfer to come out to the neighborhood next to me, right? And so one of our best routes is the looper route which kind of goes around almost like how 410 goes around and connects you. So as we're designing a system we're trying to build more of that in again with our resources. The reason we run these hours, you know somebody says well why do you even bother running our service? And the reason is because there are jobs out there that people are trying to get to and it's tough but if they didn't have that service they wouldn't have that access at all. So the parking rides also the Stone Oak parking ride will be on the first HOV in Bear County which will start at the county line and go down to 1604. I ran the HOV system in Houston 100 miles of it. You know we're gonna have a few miles and I sure wish it would go further in and hopefully we'll find a way to bring it further in because that's the way you really make the service attractive to the people of Stone Oak for example is they get an HOV lane that takes them right by all the traffic on 281. I will sort of add to that because you also asked me about rail between Austin and San Antonio. I'll tell you the backup plan is true BRT between Austin and San Antonio. So if rail doesn't look like it's gonna be a reality we might be able to achieve almost the same thing by taking some of what we already planned to build and dedicating a lane or so to true bus rapid transit. So at any rate I wanted to add that. I did want to talk just a little bit about I keep hearing this term equity lens. The Ian and the city is gonna be mad at me for this. I'm not sure we've defined that appropriately or completely. So when you hear about equity lens you hear that we for the first time are spending dollars where they're where they're needed more. And so whether it's district five or district six or two or one or whatever instead of just splitting it up 10 ways which is the way it has been. What is it? Something or other. I can't remember what term they use for that either. The one thing I didn't hear is that if let's say for instance you are a citizen in district nine when I was on council a district nine citizens paid 21% of all the property tax for the entire city of San Antonio whereas district five paid 2.7%. However, district nine got 10% of the services and district five got 10% of the services. So I think it's a little disingenuous to say that for the first time ever we're looking at things with whatever an equity lens is. I think we've done that in the past. And nobody bothered to say to those folks in district nine remember that 10% you used to get even though you paid 20% is now gonna be 5%. So whatever we do there's always the give and take and I don't think it's fair when we talk about only those things that we want to hear we fall into the trap of it sounds good so it must be good but then we fail to look as deeply as we should especially in regards to unintended consequences. I'm quite sure nobody intended for district nine or anybody else to get less. And it's obvious that other areas of the city absolutely need more. And I think it's a good way this council has gone about and doing that but I think it's more fair to make sure we're really clear about what that means. And that we haven't always been the bad people who didn't give more in other areas than we should. We have been that's why we created single member districts back in the 70s. Councilwoman. I actually just wanted to go back to what Jeff was saying about providing service and I apologize if I sound like I'm knocking VIA I'm not I love that place new, you know I do. But so our whole transportation system is failing some of our citizens in some ways. However, our transit dollars provide more per dollar than any other entity in the state because VIA has had to run extremely lean so they know how to get how to maximize the benefit for every dollar. And there is some excellent service in many places in the city. But many of us may not know which are those routes where do you need to live to take advantage of that? Like you said, your ridership went up 20%. What about all those people who didn't know how to use the bus yet? Had they known, you know, how much would it have gone up? So recently councilman Sardana and I worked on a policy proposal council consideration request to help people learn about those routes. And for those commuters that the bus may not work for them there is something in between and it's called carpooling, right? So if you live in a certain neighborhood and you go to work at the same exact time every day and you don't need to move your car at all during the day and you leave at the same exact time every day and there are plenty of people like this, right? We know that there are people like this, right? Who have a very predictable schedule. Those are your optimal people to try to get on the bus. So that's what we're working on and we think it's a perfect compliment to spending more money on VIA. And now we wanna make sure that those riders are there too and avail themselves of that. Thank you. Okay, thank you. And I wanna do two sort of last rapid fire questions to end this. So for the first one, we have a good question here. What is your vision for how people in San Antonio will access transportation differently than today in the future? So if y'all can just be futurist here for a minute. And I think thanks to Nowcast SA if somebody is watching this event 30 years from now that we wouldn't want them to say, wow, they were really asking the wrong questions. They weren't aware of how quickly everything was about to change. So if you had to think about 30 years in the future, are there things that we really, just to sort of get out of what we've been talking about, should we be talking about things completely differently? Should we just have been talking about driverless cars or the underground, who was talking about that? Elon Musk or somebody, the underground road system. So just real rapidly, what would you think, say people 30 years from now might say about our discussion tonight? Is it off base? Are we in the right direction? And we have to go through these quick because then we have another quick question to finish. So let me just first of all say Hyperloop, which is the pneumatic tube, right, is not designed for inside its intercity. So I'll take that to the side. So no, I think that it all builds. So from my, I think 30 or 40 years from now, you'll have autonomous vehicles. I think that they'll take people to locations where they'll get on some kind of high speed, mass transit, if you will, that can take them into activity centers. And so it's not so different than what we're looking at today. I think I can see how a BRT line could become a connected vehicle line where folks would very close spacing between vehicles all get in there and become almost an automated vehicle train of its own type as well. But I do think that a lot of the things that we do with buses and the suburbs will probably go away and be replaced by some of that. Okay, all right, Bill? Well, since I teach planning, which is all about the future, I think a lot about how to relate to the future and the reality is we have a very poor track record in predicting the future. Nobody knows what it's gonna be. It's a story that we can tell each other right now because we don't really know what it'll be. In fact, I was heard the story about the president of Intel when somebody was describing a phone that you could carry with you and as you're riding on the train, you could talk to anybody in the world and it would show you a map of where you're going once you got to your final destination and everything. And he just poo-pooed that as just utter nonsense that we'd have a phone like that. And of course, today we do. I do think that the most important thing to focus on is having options for people for transportation and for housing so that they can adjust to whatever's gonna happen because we can't predict exactly what's gonna happen. Whatever's gonna happen, if all those people from Austin come down here and they bring their cars, as long as people have transportation options and housing options, they can adjust and adapt. And that's how these other cities are accomplishing their transportation needs is by flexible transportation options and in housing. There was a national survey done, two thirds of Americans. And I need you to finish up fairly quickly. Yeah, one sentence, two thirds of Americans don't think they have enough transportation options. Councilwoman? Like Bill, I'm reticent to predict the future but I can tell you what I hope it looks like here in San Antonio and that's a city where we bring everyone forward with us and they all have those transportation options and maybe we're not gonna have a bus route stretch to every single neighborhood in San Antonio and we'll determine what those corridors are going to be and people can choose to live around them but that they have those options available to them just like Bill said and that every stretch of San Antonio has no matter who you are and how much you earn has an opportunity to live a fulfilling and rewarding life here in this community. Okay, thank you commissioner. Yes, no, I'm kidding. I will try to predict it. I think the future really holds for almost completely what I'll call driverless transportation. I mean, if you think about subways or trains or those types of things, that's sort of a version of driverless transportation so are buses, all right? And I think we'll continue to move down that route to where you see freight that is driverless, you see cars that are driverless and if you've ever seen Minority Report, you get what I'm thinking in my head. That's what I think the future will be and so I think it's very important for us that if we think that or something like that is going to happen that we make sure today we put in the foundation infrastructure necessary to handle that type of change because if we don't, we're gonna spend a lot of money. And then look back and say, oh damn, we really did have a phone like that. So if we can plan far out and as much as we think the future is going to change and still be able to answer our questions today and in the short run, then that's absolutely what we should be doing. Okay, and then the last question I wanna throw at you for everybody who's in the audience and there's a lot of young people here tonight which is great. So if people are leaving here tonight saying, I don't wanna just go to panels. I wanna do something. I live here, I wanna be part of this movement and there's been so many ideas here tonight. I'd like you to each maybe make a suggestion to people about how they might grab onto one idea, how they might play a role in advocating for something in particular. What would be the best way for people to do that? Whether it's, I mean, I know it might involve going to meetings but what can people do? So they can try and move progress in the right direction. Aside from please go vote, it's probably the number one thing you can do, right? I was talking to a group of Cub Scouts today about civic responsibility and all of them left there today knowing that in 10 years they will be voting and so that's important but I will tell you if you really wanna get involved now and you don't have a lot of time to go to meetings and those types of things, there is a wealth of information online by group. So if you wanna know what the MPO is doing, all of that stuff's online. If you wanna know what Vee is doing, all of that stuff is online and take the time, especially if you're suffering from insomnia or something, take the time to go through those webpages and look and find the things that are interesting to you and when you find something that's interesting to you that you wanna spend some time on, then approach that organization and say, how can I do that? And I promise you they'll give you something to do because we're always looking for help and direction and ideas on how we can do what we're doing better. So take your time to do that, find something you like and then go tell somebody I wanna do this. We'll just go down the line on this one. We have like a minute. Okay, so I can't beat vote. I can't. There's nothing more important, right? And the second thing I think is staying educated, which goes a great deal to what the commissioner was speaking about. And then the other thing is you'll have an opportunity to engage in the dialogue because as we've all said here, both the plan, the public transportation plan and the funding are probably going to become very public and require public votes. And the more educated you are and the more you share with people and can debunk stories that are out there and the greater value you are from my perspective. So that would be my advice. Okay, councilor. I totally agree with voting, but then also holding your elected officials accountable and reaching out to them. And well, you know where I stand after tonight as far as public transportation, but you have many more elected officials that could benefit from hearing from you. On top of it, including the Texas Transportation Commission. Now they're not elected, they're appointed, but they do make a lot of decisions as far as dollars in Texas. Right. But I'd also say if you don't already try riding the bus once a month or once a week or try carpooling. And when this stuff affects you personally, you will become a lot more passionate and hopefully effective about it. Thank you. Bill? Vote. Learn who your elected officials are, not only locally, but at the state level and the federal level and let them know what you think. And you can do that these days with an email, but write, go see them and tell them what you think and educate yourself. And I like the act part two. Try some different forms of transportation, not just riding the bus, but maybe try the bike share system, try signing up for a new ride that ACOG runs these days where you can be matched with people and get credit for that. There's lots of different options. Try Uber or Lyft or whatever or the taxi company or try the different options that are available to you. Find out where the buses are near you. I tell my students to live someplace where they have transportation options and then they don't have to worry about transportation because they have options. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Bill. Well, it's been a pleasure to be here tonight and as Madhu comes up to close out the session, I think she wanted to say a few words, please give our panel a hand. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining us. I certainly hope you got answers to your questions and learn something about transportation. We'll have to follow the subject and I want to thank the panelists for joining us and shedding light on this very important public policy issue and also want to thank our moderator, Professor Francine Romero, for doing such an excellent job. This program has been livestreamed by Nowcast and you will be able to watch it. If you want to watch it later, you can go on the League website and there is a link and the League website is lwbsa.org. Thank you all and good night. Thank you.