 right next to it. Yeah, thank you. And we'll see. Jimmy's going to come in here. Great. Very good. All right. Good morning. Are we recording? No. All right. Very good. Well, I'm going to call today's meeting to order. This is so exciting. Donna, are we ready? I'm sorry. Yes, I'd love to make a couple of announcements first. I'd ask everybody to silence their cell phones. And also just to remind you that the restrooms are right outside the door to your right and right again. So please make use of those as you wish. We have a lot of material to go through today. Michael and I will try to keep everyone on track. So a lot of terrific information we're going to be sharing. So we have called to order. I'm going to call Donna. All right. Director Brown. President. Director Dowling. President. Director Dutra. Director Cullin-Terry Johnson. President. Director Conan. Director Payton. Here. Director Parker is absent today. Director Rockett. Here. Ex officio director Henderson is absent today. Ex officio director North. I do have quons. Okay. Thank you very much. For announcements, I want to note that today's meeting is being recorded by community television of Santa Cruz County. I believe they will be able to re-broadcast this. Ended out the breaks and so forth. So that will be available. Thank you for your work on that today. Will this be our website? Good question. Here will be a link. Thank you Michael. Any communications from the board? On items that are not on the agenda? Looking around. This is exciting seeing people in person. How about? I'm just a thank you to Metro for their work with Scottish Fire and the training and all of that. It sounds like it really went well. I appreciate that. Very good. Thank you. Any members of the public have anything to add today? Looking to labor as well? Labor? Not seen yet. And I don't believe we have any additional documentation. Other than what was placed at each of the seats? Yes. And it's available to the public as well. Very good. Thank you. With that, we're going to turn it over to our CEO Michael Tree. And take the show on the road please. That sounds great. And we don't have a mic right? It's just that... Do I need to use accents when we're recording? That would help carry you. I'll just take a couple of seconds if you want. I'll use a mic just in case it needs to be picked up. Would you say it was kind of? It's right there. Or you could use the podium mic. I'll just kind of tuck myself. See that one there? Yeah. Everybody alright if I'm just kind of like close to this? Sure. I literally only have two slides because my job is to kind of like get out of the way and let the experts come and chat this morning. But I did want to welcome everyone this morning. I'm pretty excited for the future. I've been here six months. And it's like really exciting to see everybody around the table in person. There's just a different atmosphere when everybody's kind of looking at each other and reading each other as we have discussions. So I'm nervous and I always tell myself when I'm nervous, it just means it's really important. And when I nick myself when I'm shaving, I know it's damn important. I nick myself this morning a little bit. Listen, I wanted to first just tell you over the last six months it's been really great to work with the board. And community leaders, I think I pressed in here from RTC, who's going to play a part in a project we're working on that we'll talk about. We've broken the workshop into three sessions because there's really three things that I have seen are really important to Santa Cruz County and to the board. The first session is on ridership. We want to talk about where we want to go with ridership, but there's some really key fundamentals to ridership that are planning fundamentals. So we brought the best planner in the nation to talk with you this morning about not so much about our goal for ridership, but about planning principles that support that goal because there's trade-offs. And as you know, you're driving Metro as board members and those trade-offs will be really important as we move forward. And then we wanted to talk about the environment. You know, riding the bus, you have a big impact on the environment as a rider. But you're also seen as a technology leader in the county and so we want to talk to you about zero-emission buses. Buses, you've had a lot of discussion over the years with your master plan for the zero-emission bus technologies and you also have a implementation plan. Money has been the key to getting into zero-emission buses and we have worked really hard over the last six months to analyze several different scenarios. We've got a recommendation for you this morning that we just want to get your input on and then we'll bring it back later for some action at your near future board meeting. So, you know, when I came on board, my direction to staff was I prefer to never buy another damn tailpipe again when it comes to buses and that has been a huge Herculean challenge for your finance staff but we've got some planning done and wanted to show up today. And then the last is housing. Everywhere I go, man, that is a big topic of discussion. The Mercury News came out with an article probably about a month, maybe a month and a half ago that other than San Francisco, you had the highest rents here in Santa Cruz County and any other place in the nation. And that's a big deal, right? It's a big deal for our workforce. We've got the best operators that I've ever been a part, you know, of being in an organization, a transit agency and great mechanics. You have great staff all the way around at Metro. I mean, I'm just really excited to work with the staff we have but now I tell you, some of these folks do an hour and a half of need into work. They have a split shift for you that encompasses up to 12 hours and then they turn around and do an hour and a half to you. So huge sacrifices being made to put those service on the road. So we want to talk about housing because there's some opportunities that you're currently a part of and there's some opportunities that we envision moving forward that we want to ditch out with you about. So there's three sessions. We're pretty excited. I will conclude my results as we embark on session one with three goals that I just want you to think about today especially in session one as you're hearing about trade-offs and some opportunity that our consultant brings within Jarrett Walker. So here's the goals. Your executive staff has talked and we have come up with different ideas and scenarios on how to get there but we want to increase your ridership a hundred percent in the next five years from a baseline of fiscal year, this current fiscal year. So we think you're going to be at 3.5 million rides by the end of the year. We want to get it to seven within five years. We want to purchase only zero emission buses moving forward and convert your entire fleet by 2037. This is like a massive leadership role not only in Santa Cruz County but in the nation. You're going to have a lot of eyes watching what you're doing. There are some rare exceptions that we probably will talk to you about on an ongoing basis like there are huge articulated buses. We're not quite a hundred percent sure that technology is ready for battered electric bus or hydrogen on the specific routes where we need to run them but we haven't ruled it out yet but I think the big picture is we don't want to buy tailpipe anymore when we go and make a bus purchase and that's the goal. And then the second is you've already got 94 housing units under development there with the Metro Center down count. We view that you can get up to 175 units total including at 94 when you consider two other locations where Metro has facilities and so we want to talk to you about that. So those are the three goals. What does a hundred percent ridership look like in the last five years in the context of Metro's ridership history? That's what it looks like, that dotted line and so you can see there's a whole lot of ambition packaged in the dotted lines moving forward to get you to 7 million within the next five years. I mean key to that is trade off and the board and the willingness to talk to the public. We really want to introduce 15-minute rapid service. We've got some corridors that are key. You've got a lot of Rena numbers where you're talking about where you want to put your housing. We want you to put it right there on those 15-minute corridors. There's an advantage to everyone when we're working together on a 15-minute rapid corridor. You've also got your UC Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College. If you go out at certain times of the day you'll see that we're leaving up to 20 people behind at bus stops. That is a cringe factor for your executive staff and for everybody at Santa Cruz Metro but you have a huge opportunity there in regard to moving the ridership and then last but not least, Watsonville. Watsonville has a ton of opportunity to increase productivity. So with that said I'm going to get out of the way and introduce Jarrett Walker. I know we've got his genre go there. There we go. We introduce Jarrett Walker. Good morning, everyone. John Ergo, Planning and Development Director. So I'm going to introduce the next two speakers. For a bit of context over the next one to two years we're going to be embarking on a network reimagining plan for all of our fixed street service here in Santa Cruz Metro. And in advance of that we have done some holding to try to get some community feedback before we embark on this plan. So I'm going to invite Adam and Sonneinstein up to share the results of a community survey that was conducted over the last two weeks that starts asking the community about these types of trade-offs. So we have a limited budget, fixed resources any type of service change entails trade-offs and so Adam. Thank you everyone. I'm Adam Sonneinstein with FM3 Research. We're a public opinion polling and research company based in California. I'm out of LA. We have offices in Oakland and we have done quite a few projects in the Santa Cruz area including for the county including for RTC and others and for a number of transportation agencies around the state. So what we wanted to do here and what we were asked to do is get a little bit of a sense of how people are thinking about Metro the services that you're offering where their priorities are and maybe what some of the improvements are that they would like to see. So we did a survey in just finished last week really so it was last week September into the first week of October the population of people we studied was any adult resident in the county so anyone over the age of 18 we had over a thousand survey interviews which I know in the context of the whole county may seem small but in the context of a survey of the county it's actually quite big most of the time when we do surveys of the county would be 600 people we do surveys of the state it's usually 800 to a thousand people and tend to be highly accurate so a survey sample of over a thousand people is really nice here we have a margin of error plus or minus 4% that's for questions that are asked of everybody if we look at any subgroup analysis those margins of error are going to be larger as we're talking about a smaller group of people so we reached people in a couple of different ways first there were telephone calls which were done with a live telephone interviewer we also sent out emails and text messages which led to an online survey people could do one or the other they couldn't do both and the online survey was not one of the ones where it's just open to whoever gets it and they can post it to Facebook and have all their friends take it it's a controlled random sample so you have to have we looked at the county overall, the demographics where people live took a random sample of adults contacted them and worked that list until we had a group that represents the county in a number of different factors including age and ethnicity the city they live in the survey was available in English and Spanish but it doesn't quite add up to 100% of the number that you're expecting because we rounded up so just starting with general community attitudes and basic awareness we ask people and you can see the text I know it's probably small if you're on that side of the room but at the top in italics you have to know the name of the local agency that runs the bus system in your area over 6 in 10 we're able to say metro in some variety that Santa Cruz metro SCT, Santa Cruz metro transit from just people who said metro 1% said the county or RTC 2% gave some other answer Caltrans or something like that 5% just said yes but didn't give an answer and then about 30% said no they don't know they don't know the agency that runs the buses or they said something like oh we don't have buses in our area so you know this is sort of a glass half empty half full kind of response given the percentage of people who take your system regularly many more people than that know the agency but there's also 3 in 10 who don't know the agency at all and aren't able to name it so this is something that just in a sort of future looking perspective we want to think about how we have more people know who's in charge here we also wanted to see what kind of opinion they have of metro as an agency so this isn't necessarily a rating of the service although I'm guessing most people are basing their rating based on the service 52% had a favorable impression of metro 14% had an unfavorable impression and over a third had no opinion you'll also notice that the strong opinions here very favorable very unfavorable are pretty low it's about 15% very favorable 13% very unfavorable but the bulk of that favorability is a somewhat favorable so in the context of this survey we don't have the ability to probe and find out why they think this and what does somewhat favorable mean compared to something else we just have the first point which is finding out the statistics here but it says there's a favorable view of the agency but it's soft right and there's a lot of people that don't know now one thing that's really helpful I think is that we look at people who ride compared to those who don't those who ride have a very favorable opinion of the agency so on the left hand side you're looking at the respondents who said they ride metro once a month or more to preview a future slide that's 14% of the respondents 81% of them had a favorable opinion of metro only 16% have an unfavorable opinion so of your customer base the folks who are using the system they're very happy with the agency those who ride just a few times a year which in this survey is about 17% who said that was the case for them also very favorable 76% those who don't ride at all which is almost 70% are more mixed 39% favorable 14% unfavorable and 47% who don't know so that side on the right here is again 7 in 10 of all respondents and they're in this squishy don't know more favorable than unfavorable they don't have a bad impression of metro but many of them just have no impression at all now looking at some questions around current prior and potential ridership we ask people these days how often do you ride on local Santa Cruz metro buses and I'm sorry for the questions in the bottom and I'm sure you probably can't see that but when you get the copy you'll be able to read it when we broke it out we asked them is it once a week or more a couple times per month about once a month just a few times a year or never 8% said they ride once per week or more 14% say once a month or more in total now we always have to reflect on the fact that these are self reported numbers and there might be some folks who are feeling like oh yeah they should say they ride the bus a little inflated when we ask people how often they ride but we're at 14% once a month or more 17% just a few times per year and then that almost 70% would just say they don't ride at all now we wanted to get some sense of comparison to prior data or prior time so we asked them thinking back to 2019 the year before the pandemic the COVID pandemic began how often were you using those buses at that time similar percentage but we're looking at a little bit of a different number here because we've got folks who didn't live in the area at that time so you can see the 9% who didn't live in the area the net of this is that we had about 9% who told us they were riding more frequently before the pandemic than they are now we followed that up those people you can see it's 94 out of the 1054 respondents with some reasons why other people are riding less often how much do these apply to you for these major reasons or minor reasons for you to be riding less often there's kind of two things near the top one it takes too long to get where I need to go on the bus and then if you skip one and look at the bus it does not come often enough we kind of saw both of those as a little bit of convenience kind of related to the bus and bus service and then the second item which has the largest major reason which is just my transportation needs have changed that could be I got a car I work from home I stopped working my job changed to a different place my girlfriend moved whatever it is I don't need the same service that I had before and that's the reason that I'm riding less at this point only about 50% of people say with 25% saying that's a major reason for them and then in your case which is different than some other transit agencies it's a relatively small number who would just say they don't feel safe on the bus for reasons other than COVID you only have 15% who would say that's a major reason for them in some other communities where we've asked similar kinds of questions that's a much higher number we wanted to get a sense of the potential for people who are not riding to become riders and one of the ways we wanted to look at that was by asking them about a hypothetical scenario in which there's a convenient bus stop, a bus that goes by every 15 minutes and could put you within a block of two or where you need to go so in other words you kind of take the convenience factors off the table for them then how likely are they to use the service once a month or more and we only ask this of people who are not using service once a month or more now which you recall is a healthy percentage of people so of these people again who are not riding now 19% say they would be very likely to ride in the future under these conditions another 30% say they're somewhat likely that's 49% although if I'm looking at this I'm kind of going to focus more on the 19 those people who they're not just saying yeah I think about it but they're actually saying I'm very likely and that's a pretty significant bump in terms of your ridership right if you had 19% of the almost 90% of people that don't ride once a month actually riding once a month that would you know I can't do that math in my head but it's a lot of people and for the convenience you've got about half of people who are saying that's basically not the factor for them there's something else that's preventing them from riding the next section deals with some of the priorities for your services this slide has got the same question on a couple of slides here we told them as they might know Metro which runs the bus service in your area's public agency whether or not you use the bus or not how important are these various services that Metro provides now or could provide and they're rated on a scale extremely important which is the dark blue very important which is the the next blue somewhat important which is kind of the turquoise we gave them both not very and not important at all options which we grouped together in orange and then don't know which is the very small sliver and gray a few things before we get into the specific items just looking at the totals here there are a number of things that large percentages of people are saying would be extremely or very important to them particularly remembering how few people are using your services now so in the survey we've got several items in the 80s for extremely or very important with another 8 to 13% who would say they're at least somewhat important and very small percentages who would say they're not important to them at all or that they don't know so that says to us you have things in your purview that people in the community actually care about whether they're using the service or not at this time top of the list in terms of importance there's a couple of items the first two items are statistically the same that's providing routes that make it possible for workers to get to where most jobs are and providing affordable transportation in places where many or most residents may not have personal transportation so those are two items that were a little bit higher than everything else you see the extremely important at 87 or 56% combined with extremely or very important 87, 85% similar numbers just a very, very small tick below and really statistically not very much difference if we look at the overall providing services that are tailored to the needs of the elderly and persons with disabilities providing transportation to the areas community colleges and universities and then one more helping reduce the growth of traffic congestion now some of these speak a little bit about an individual who's responding to the survey might actually engage with the system and some are more the benefits that they may gain from the system being improved and expanded even if they don't ride so something like reducing the growth of traffic congestion may have nothing to do with them personally using your buses but if other people use them then they'll be less traffic and they'd be happy about that a little bit lower if we look at extremely important but still quite high on the last one providing routes that make it possible for people to get to stores and appointments you can see compared to the first item right that in terms of prioritization getting people to jobs is really kind of the number one here next but on the same question other items that were maybe the next tier down right if we're thinking about kind of where the priorities lie connecting to other public transit systems transportation systems that allow for travel throughout the region that's almost 80% helping reduce or limit increases in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions 77% another one that's not specific to them using the system at all right other people use it if other people aren't driving we're gonna we're gonna have cleaner air providing transportation in the areas high school 74 that was a little lower than the colleges and universities just generally speaking increasing the overall amount of public transportation service in Santa Cruz County good it's 71% 41% extremely important but remember what we saw earlier about that emphasis on getting people to jobs and how important that was specifically compared to just generally speaking increasing supporting housing and commercial development in the urban areas that is denser and more walkable got about two-thirds so still a priority but lower than some of the others we start to drift down here particularly at the prioritization level if we're looking at the dark blue extremely important when we talk about services for tourists to reduce traffic congestion and then making some bus service available to every community in the county even if most people in some communities will not use it that's actually under 50% in terms of extremely or very important and you can see that the higher reading here in terms of somewhat important or not very important at all now the next section we have four different tradeoff questions that we ask people because all those on the last two slides they could have said every single thing that we asked them was extremely important they don't have to make tradeoffs you as a board you have to make tradeoffs right you don't have an infinite amount of money there aren't an infinite amount of options so you have to you have to decide here so you can see the text that we told them we wanted to give them a little bit of background in context right metros of public agency spending tax dollars as a limited number of buses and money to operate them they have to make hard choices with that in mind which of the following options would you prefer so a lot of these choices that we're going to offer them are basically between kind of fast and frequent service compared to a distributed service that has a feeling of fairness because every community that has some amount of bus service in their area you can see there's a really strong preference here for frequent service over just broad availability in the dark blue we've got provide fast and frequent service that comes every 15 minutes and takes the most direct routes even if that means transits only available in the areas where the most people live and work or provide service to as many places as possible even if that means the bus only comes every hour or two and most trips take a long time almost 70% want that fast and frequent service where it's going to be used the most about 26% say we need to make sure it's broad and everybody has an opportunity and then beneath that we looked at the different attitudes such as they are among people who ride metro so you've got the folks who ride once a month the folks who ride a few times a year the folks who never ride and again they never ride as a larger group than the others and you can see while there's some variation it's pretty consistent it's well over 60% up to 70% who are on the side of that fast and frequent service we also wanted to give them a little more information so the first is sort of a base think of that as a baseline then we give them a little bit of additional information to see how that changes their opinion and that's here's another way to think about this when you rely on a bus it doesn't come very often it's hard to be on time you might get there early in wait or risk being late now what do you think and with that additional context the percentage you would say they would want fast and frequent service goes up now we've got 74% compared to 22% and again it's pretty consistent with the non-riders being even more enthusiastic about the idea of that every 15 minute service thinking about the way that the service impacts the broader community we asked focus more on supporting the local economy by providing fast and frequent service in the areas where many people could use it to get to work, school, shopping, other everyday needs or the benefits of fairness to all making sure there's at least a little service to everyone in all communities even if it's slow it doesn't come very often we have 71 to 25 again on the support the economy perspective here even stronger among the non-riders 74% and actually a little more divided although still on the fast and frequent or supporting the economy side among the people who ride most often those who would say they ride once a month or more are more like 60-40 whereas the non-riders are even more enthusiastic of 74 to 21 and then lastly a different set of options for them to consider focus on the needs of communities where many people have low incomes or don't have reliable access to a personal vehicle compared to provide service equally to all communities regardless of need income or access 72% would say focus on the low income communities where people don't have their own transportation 25% equally to all in a similar pattern here where the frequent riders are still on that left hand side the blue side 60-40 but not as much as the people who ride less frequently or don't ride at all who are at about 73-74% saying focus on the needs of low income communities and places where people don't have their own personal vehicle so that's the end of this slide, Michael, do you want to save survey questions for later or if you want to do survey questions now? So I'm Mike Rocking, one of the board members before the I'm not sure how much earlier than the pandemic we had about 6 million riders as compared to what we have now when we made difficult decisions about budget cuts we decided rather than cutting needs of time we cut a few weeks out but primarily what we do is reduce frequency on a lot of riders this is not about 15 minutes this is anything like an hour service bus and making it 2 a half an hour to an hour and so forth I'm looking at the numbers that you've given us trying to get a sense of if we were even to restore the frequency that we had before we made those difficult cuts with that likely bring back when you look at the issue I used to write it before but now I don't because the data you may have to support the idea that we lost those riders because we cut the frequency is there some is that a reasonable conclusion? So it's hard for me to go from here to as far as you need to go but I'll give you a little bit of context for the people who said they're riding less frequently now than they were before and that could include they were riding and now they're not riding at all or they were going every day and now they're only going a couple times a month when we asked them why these were some of the answers they gave so it takes too long to get where I need to go on the bus was the number one if you look at both major reason and minor reason and then the bus did not come off enough that's a head raise issue as opposed to how often the bus comes it could be but it could also tell that it could be they're thinking about the whole trip also right so it's hard to get to that level of granularity but I would say certainly time is a factor and then in terms of restoration one of the things I would be worried about is if people didn't have a car because they were taking the bus then they got a car and now you're putting their bus group back and are those same people going to get back on the bus or is it going to be new people coming in I don't know the question I'm worried about being safe from COVID how does this figure comparable to other transit agencies? are either similar or higher for other bay area? I've seen higher also but this is such a time sensitive question I'm looking at myself and everyone else here with one exception who's not wearing a mask right so three months ago, four months ago my guess is that would have been higher on the same side around I do not feel as safe on local buses for reasons other than COVID do we know what some of those reasons are do we go into depth at all? we don't we just offer them that answer so that's one of the limits of this kind of survey is we can't do back and forth dialogue and open-ended responses that you need more about a focus group scenario to get to but you were saying that was lower than other areas? it is and I'm thinking of denser urban area so if we're talking about a bigger area like an LA or San Francisco bay area larger those tend to be higher and oftentimes that's related to folks experiencing mental health crisis or folks experiencing homelessness on buses and that's where that driver is so in this case that is lower than what I've seen in some other areas and one other question we're seeing now I'm sure everyone is with the change in the school hours that everyone is having to arrive at 8.30 instead of the day it's had a tremendous impact in our city and to where there's safety concerns for the kids and everything so I'm wondering if that might be something that we'll be looking at planning to see if we can not only match or look at the high school riders but even maybe the middle school riders to see if we can't address some of those traffic concerns and parents who are seeing very congested lines might welcome an option and we tested the idea the prioritization of providing transportation to areas high schools I wouldn't say it was a top priority but it's sort of in the middle I think also as the school year progresses and more people are experiencing the situation you're talking about that might see that go up it might also be more localized to people who have high school students or live near a high school who would really see oh yeah this is impacting this change in hours is really impacting things thank you um nearly 70 percent don't ride metro is that high in general for a community of our size and we have a broad spectrum of demographics as well but also in the in Saturn's parlor ballad it's just a different terrain too and then it was 47 percent the second question was don't ride metro is unfavorable today what puts that in your mind the question so the 47 percent is don't have an opinion the people who don't ride metro and then 47 percent of them don't have an opinion it's 14 percent who have an unfavorable opinion which is pretty consistent with the folks who do ride I think you've got a group of people who just really aren't clued in enough to know one way or another in terms of the ridership I would say it's a little high in terms of the non riders although it's changing so much in different communities these days you also have a little bit of variation within your county where ridership is higher in at least in the survey in the city of Santa Cruz and somewhat in Watsonville than it is in other parts of the county and so the numbers aren't equally distributed where if you were to go to every neighborhood you would find the same percentages of people who ride the bus and who don't ride I would just add from the unfavorable at least in terms of what people call and ride and get on the public meeting to speak about the idea that we ride empty buses your service is not I can't use it it doesn't run around whatever that's probably how do 14 percent think it's a bad system because they think that the UCSD buses come down at the empty in the morning we ride empty buses and you're about that a lot yeah and that may be and again it's one of the things we didn't have the space to probe much further I'd also say you're never going to have a public agency that has zero unfavorability right if you're not going to happen so 14 percent is pretty good so we set aside 30 minutes after Jared's presentation if we can hold the rest of the conversations really thanks I don't know so we were hoping that we'd set the state in a smart discussion and provide valuable valuable information for the next speaker and the broader service planning effort that we have to follow so I'm going to introduce Jared Walker he's an international consultant in public transit network design and policy based in Portland, Oregon he's been a full-time consultant since 1991 and has led numerous major planning projects in cities and towns of all sizes across North America and Australia and New Zealand he's the author of Human Transit how clear we're thinking about public transit can enrich our communities and our lives so he literally wrote the book on this topic he is president of Jared Walker & Associates a consultant firm that provides advice and planning services in North America he has a VA from Pomona College as do I and a PhD in theater arts and humanities at Stanford University I do not have that I'm passionately interested in a practical number of fields he is probably the only person who here reviewed publications in both the Journal of Transport Geography and Shakespeare Quarterly please welcome Jared Walker thank you very much Matt, thank you Adam that was really helpful in setting up some things for us to talk about here so I've been asked to do a quick survey of sort of some basic principles of transit planning that are going to give you a sense of decisions you should expect to have to make and consequences of those decisions I always want to start with a couple of quick things about life fix transit and life buses just because you all need to be able to have these conversations with your constituents and respond to some of the comments we hear about that so the case for public transit the one that is always going to be there that is irreducible is that it's about the efficient use of space and which is why cities that have less space per person, denser cities need transit more and that's pretty much an iron law this is 100 people and how much space they take if they're in a bus how much space they take on bicycles and how much space they take if they're in cars congestion is what happens when we travel by a space in efficient mode and therefore get in each other's way one way to think of congestion is that when we use space inefficiently we end up waiting in line to use it because we need more than there is and so if we think of congestion as essentially waiting in line because you're waiting for something scarce that's often a useful way to think about it technology never changes geometry we are enormous amounts of intracapital or being spent making us believe that various kinds of technology are going to make transit obsolete or make it completely different or whatever here's how much space 60 people take if they're on a bus there we go there's how much space they take if they're in private cars here's how much space they take if they're in a taxi or a Uber or a Lyft here's how much space they take if they're in driverless cars and so the point being none of those things are really touching the geometric fact we're talking about if we ever had a driverless bus that would be different but that's some way off so the thing to remember is that in dense cities and cities wanting to be dense for cities that are going to be dense maybe to some extent whether they entirely want to or not transit is existential so be careful whenever anyone tells you that new ideas and technologies are disrupting fixed-rap transit the case for fixed-rap transit is geometric and technology never changes geometry now what's a bus people have all sorts of attitudes about buses people often want to start the conversation about buses but a demographic conversation who uses the bus from the standpoint of an elected official it sometimes feels natural to organize your thinking in terms of groups of constituents and to imagine that there is a group of constituents who are bus people and who are those people that they like it's important if you're going to see the full potential of buses to not think that way or at least to not think entirely that way and to work with a very capacious large definition of what everything a bus can be your buses are all kinds of things in particular the definition of a bus is very there's enormous room in it for you to do lots of different things and for buses to be different things a bus is public transit capable of high ridership in other words not a car using routes rather than rents and that's all it is and buses around the world are very diverse there are incredibly miserable bus systems there are magnificent and luxurious buses I won't say luxurious in the sense of exclusive but very very nice bus services that lots of people use I was just writing them in Seattle the other day you can do all kinds of things for that but it is important to not get trapped in a demographic of buses that says because this is who uses buses that is who is going to use buses and that's always the danger when you start with the notion that these people are bus people and some elected officials start so I want to encourage you not to start having a little difficulty with this clicker there we go bus service is a climate solution because it's the fastest and most effective way to make transit useful to more people in more situations through its low capital cost and fast implementation I'm not expressing a view about the train project I'm just saying that buses are really efficient way to move rapidly on this they're also an equity solution because they can scale affordably to cover most of the city's people and destinations if that's what you want to do one of the challenges you will have if you move forward with rail project and I'm not telling you you should or shouldn't is that a single expensive piece of infrastructure doesn't go to everywhere in the county it will be in this neighborhood and not in that neighborhood and you will have to have a story about how everyone benefits from it and that's why I've been through a lot of funding battles and ballot measures about transit funding and the ones that have succeeded have been the ones that had a story about here's this cool piece of infrastructure we're building but here is the total network that explains how everybody has access to that infrastructure and benefits from it even if they're not next to a station so I want to talk now about how we measure success because there is a there are lots of different ways to measure success out there, lots of different ways people talk about success in public transit and I want to introduce a particular way of talking about it that we have found very powerful and that we've particularly been using in all of our studies for the last five years or so and when you think about how you want to go about expanding the range there is a theory that says this is essentially a marketing problem and so we need to go and find out who our potential market is, find out learn about the people who could potentially shift to be writers learn more about their needs and preferences and design around that that's not wrong but it's very complicated and it draws us into a lot of uncertainties it puts us in the position of claiming to know perhaps more than we really know about how individuals are actually going to respond to their options the other way to do it is that rather than trying to predict what people are going to do there's another way we can do it which is to simply explain what people could do and that's called freedom analysis or access analysis and that's what I want to talk about now freedom is a big, grand, fancy word it's a street name actor and that's but I'm going to talk about freedom as something where it's quantifiable, something that we can actually measure the other word for it is access or accessibility you'll hear me using both words the idea is the image of a wall around your life this thing is failing so I'm going to have to stand over here I think can people hear me if I stand here this thing is not working here so the basic idea is this here's the person she's in a city that's full of possible destinations places she could shop, places she could work places she could worship places she could have a social life and so on, places she could study given the network as it is in 45 minutes say there's an area she could get to this is what I mean by the wall around her life we only have a certain amount of time and if we can't make those trips in that amount of time places beyond that wall are simply not available so her access to opportunity is simply the number of destinations of useful destinations that are in that area we can measure that we can measure it getting bigger or smaller here's an example from our network redesign project in Dublin, Ireland which we finished a few years ago and is being implemented now so you imagine a person in a hypothetical location she's asking where could I be in 45 minutes which is really the equivalent of asking where could I work, where could I study where could I do all kinds of things that involve a trip of about that length where that travel time is reasonable and so there's an area that she can reach now there's an area that she could reach under the proposed network and I can calculate the difference I can calculate exactly how many more jobs she could get to or if she's actually a destination I could calculate how many more people could get to her so we presented her the business for example or an employer it's helpful to think about it that way also so I'm in the position now to say Jane at this location is 43% free if by freedom we need the presence of meaningful options in our lives if we mean the availability of options the ability to choose to do one thing or another that's really what I'm talking about now the interesting thing about this calculation in the survey that you just discussed and in a lot of the conversations you'll have you'll hear about opinions about each of the three parts of the transit trip and you'll hear about them separately so the walk that's a conversation about walking distance and walking infrastructure the weight which is a conversation about frequency and the ride which is a conversation about speed and liability and also about reactiveness and a couple other things it's normal for people especially people who are more experienced transit riders who know something about transit to express individual opinions about each of these things but freedom analysis is just interested in some of those three things and we know as transit planners frequently trade off one of these for another for example, people walk further to a more frequent service not for a psychological reason but simply because they're optimizing their total travel time and the optimal total travel time often arises from walking further to weight less so that's why freedom analysis invites us to focus more on the total and less on forming opinions about each of the parts now there will be people who are not with us on this there will be older people people with disabilities who have a different experience of the walk than the rest of the students so I don't want to say that this is the answer for everyone but this kind of analysis does tend to capture pretty well what the overwhelming majority of people tend to optimize which is not each part of the trip separately but the sum of it now here's the cool thing when I'm talking about freedom or access another word for this is useful so if you imagine somebody looking up somebody has a trip they want to make and they're curious whether they can make it on transit and they look it up on your trip planer what are the odds that the trip planer is going to tell them that the travel time on transit is reasonable that is also what we imagine when we measure access because by expanding the number of destinations that are within a reasonable travel time that's the same thing as saying by increasing the odds that when a person looks up a particular trip they will find a reasonable travel time and that is the foundation of ridership there are all sorts of other things that are important to ridership but if you don't have this you're not going to be considering it now the other thing about cool thing about talking about access is that at the same time that it has this fundamental role in ridership it's also doing all sorts of other things that are important to people the first page of the survey that Adam showed talking about all the different kinds of benefits of transit to the community more than 50% telling you that almost all of those things were highly important to that that's a very good sign if you're ever going to the voters by the way well we can actually measure benefits for some of those things access to economic opportunity and actually the functionality of the city an economist would tell you that a city is that the whole purpose of a city is for people to have access to things the reason people live in cities instead of rural areas is so that many things are available in a short travel time and for that reason travel time is often described by an economist as one of the most fundamental measures of the viability of the city economic functionality of the city but we're also talking for example about the value of investments that are made in a walkable community when people choose to locate where we make it possible for people to locate in places where lots of things are nearby and finally of course it's simply personal freedom which in addition to all the other things we get out of it from a policy standpoint is also something that needs no justification it's something everybody wants and everybody values now the relationship between access and ridership here's the thing that has a finding that the travel time is reasonable when they look at the trip that's something that's going to endure ridership is fallible it's going to keep going up and down for some other reasons obviously we all saw in March 2020 when ridership fell 80% or whatever it did mean that transit was suddenly 80% less important or 80% less relevant or the transit agencies were 80% less commenting all of which are reasons to be careful about letting your ridership be read as the only measure of your value for your success ridership is valid it's very much affected by the cost and attractiveness of people's alternatives so in the late teens as we all knew they tended to be somewhat downward trajectory of ridership even before we got to COVID there were reasons for that having to do with what was happening with the economics of riding having to do with what was happening with Uber and Lyft which were essentially venture capital subsidized competitors operating below their actual cost so as to give the illusion of being more viable than they actually are that's mostly the Uber and Lyft fairs are back up closer than what they will need to be to be profitable and as a result Uber and Lyft are not as effectively competing with transit as they used to be that kind of stuff is going to keep happening economic context is going to keep changing but the thing about access is that it's an enduring thing it's the thing that stays constant and that is kind of the foundation of what you're doing even as the consequences of ridership inevitably go up and down with internal factors so when we talk about access I'm essentially isolating the impact of the network design from a lot of other factors of all sorts access as I mentioned is a geometric fact I really like to stress this because when you understand that you're looking at a geometric fact it helps you sort out what is actually a valid argument about social science is wonderful but it doesn't touch geometry so the calculation from a network to the access outcome is a purely mathematical calculation because it's about what's possible it's not about who people are it's about what they could do the journey from access to a ridership prediction is social science it's a whole lot more today and there's a whole lot of challenge around the whole idea of prediction now I'm a bit of a radical in our profession most of my colleagues and competitors are much more eager to make predictions than I am and to say hey we have a great computer algorithm there that will tell you what your ridership will be I believe very strongly that we invent predictions pretty much impossible that the assumption behind those predictive models is that the future is a road in the central valley and the road is nice and straight and we can see a way out of ourselves and maybe one thing will change but we can have this background assumption that almost everything else is going to stay the same so that we can look at this one thing we're studying I think the future is more like Highway 9 I think the future is a squiggly road in the forest and that's what we've been experiencing lately surprises and you can't see around curves nobody's predictive model can see around curves and that's made me and again I'm a bit of a radical in my profession that's made me really interested in how to think about how to talk about the value of what we do without prediction because I don't really believe anybody's predictions and I don't particularly want people to believe in that and so that's one of the other cool things about stopping with access and talking about access to the value rather than what conventional transportation planning does which is to calculate access inside the black box but then immediately to rush ahead to a prediction assuming that's what people want so how do we maximize access when we design a network that expands people's access or freedom which is also by the way how we design a network to maximize ridership what exactly are we doing what's the recipe the recipe is high frequency lines forming a connected network reasonably fast and reliable and focused on transit friendly places when we talk about those a little bit fortunately I've already heard a lot of conversation about frequency today sounds like the concept of frequency is fairly well understood so I won't spend too much time on it notice frequency is a huge value which is to say it does three logically independent group things it's reduced weighted it's also easier connections when two lines cross on the map my frequency lines means you can actually get off with one bus and onto the other which means that you can this route is useful for going to all of those places that's not true about frequency and finally reduced impact of disruptions thus breaks down that's why lines with higher frequency tend not to just have higher ridership but higher ridership per unit of service now I have to show you a chart but this is really interesting and it's worth taking a moment so every time my firm does a study of some transit network somewhere we take the route by route data from this network and keep dumping it into this database and growing this database so each of these is a route in some American city and higher frequency is to the left so 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes they're 10 minutes on the y-axis is productivity passenger boarding is divided by quantity of service now as we go to the left quantity of service is going up higher frequency is we're running more and more service that ought to be pulling the ratio back shouldn't it but it's not in fact the ratio goes to the relationship goes the other way you may even detect a slight upward curvature relationship in other words there's a highly exponential payoff frequency that actually compensates for the fact that frequency is more expensive and it particularly starts happening in this range of better than 30 and especially down to 15 minute frequencies now let me be careful I am not making this claim as a time sequence claim I'm not saying that if you double the frequency you will immediately get more than double the ridership what's going on here is land use higher frequency routes tend to be in places where there's more stuff around the line but I am saying that if you develop those things together if you were developing frequency at the same time if you were developing your form around the frequency then you can inspect these kinds of factors so this is very surprising and powerful now this is why there is so much frequent network oriented land use plan this is something that's really changed over the last couple of decades 20 years ago around the turn of the century most architects and developers would have told you that if you want transit that generates and supports any kind of density you just have to be ready what matters is that we are next to a train station and now I think it's much more understood that if you want to support high density you need to be in a high freedom location and frequency is one of the most visible parts of that now remember it has three parts one of them is just the weight but it's still an overwhelming one the weight also needs to be talked about a little more than the walk in the ride because it's harder to explain to people who are themselves and motorists or I might add cyclists people who use a personal vehicle that is ready to go whenever they are will often undervalue frequency and not really be aware of how frequency the weight makes transit so fundamentally different from personal vehicle options like your car or your bicycle sometimes I will use the sometimes when I know I'm talking to a largely suburban constituency who mostly lives in nice homes behind the gates I'll say imagine having a gate at the end of your driveway that only opens once and out and you can only get your car out once and out that's what the transit experience is like that's what frequency is so Metro Vancouver obviously a fantastically dense place but has been working for 20 years on a goal of the form half the population which also beyond the frequent network this is a goal they adopted in 2007 and I think they actually achieved it within a few years and are now continuing to develop beyond that I can talk about my hometown Portland, Oregon where the Frequent Service Network which has been defined for about 20 years and Frequent Service by the way the idea here is not just the U.S. service every 15 minutes but there's a brand association you're making that really visible and you designate something as frequent service when you're pretty sure it's always going to be there you want people to feel a sense of permanence about it in a way that people have a sense of permanence about rail one of the cool things and by the way as you'll notice in the background there we in Portland are generally starting line and frequent service routes with three or four story buildings pretty much continues now so we have a market for that but there's a relationship very importantly to affordability so one of the cool things about building high density next to Frequent Network next to the Frequent Network is that you're encouraging people to sort themselves out with their own location choice based on whether transit is something that they value and what you want to make sure of is that everybody who would like to leave a transit on either lifestyle can afford to live in a place like that that people are not living in a hard to reach cul-de-sac out on the edge of Watsonville where we can't get frequent transit to a very effective way but they're not living out there because it's the only place they can afford to live there needs to be a place they can afford to live that involves choosing transit if they want to choose them remember their freedom is still fundamentally new we're talking about low and community so one of the cool things about the Frequent Network is that it's useful enough to be really liberating as we've measured with access analysis but we can also make it abundant enough that it can't possibly drive up housing prices everywhere the way a rail has sometimes tended to do rail investments have sometimes produced really really disproportionate spikes in real estate value around the station again, I'm not expressing a view about a rail project here but a reason to continue to care about the bus network the other thing of course is that it makes it even easier to build apartments with less parking which is absolutely foundational mandatory parking and of course we know what's happening with state line use law here in general in the state you're already being pushed in this direction but building apartments with less parking makes the apartments more affordable and also tends to mean that they can generate higher density without generating the kinds of traffic impacts that make people react that way to dance to each other I should add that I'm making an assumption here I imagine there are different opinions in the room about exactly how dance community should become but I am assuming that since I don't see any spare horizontal buildable land in this county I see built-up land and then I see some mountains I am figuring that any particular growth here is pretty much an absolute performance benefit and obviously I'm assuming that given the affordability crisis that has already been cited once here there's going to have to be some supply-side solutions to that so those are the only assumptions I'm making I don't want to wait any further into local debates you may be having so let's look at where you are with frequency now this is where you were before the pandemic every map that my firm draws will draw frequency with colors with the red line meaning 15-minute service the dark blue line meaning 30 the pale blue line meaning 60 and pale gold lines meaning worse than 60 so at the moment of course you're not running that red line up to the university you're also running essentially a 30-minute service up there that has to do with driver availability but this was the standard form of the network before the pandemic your staffing problems disappear tomorrow my assumption is you'd snap back to this for me 30-minute services Soquel Boulevard local two paths into Watsonville San Lorenzo Valley but notice most of these side Santa Cruz in Capitola local routes every hour much of west side Santa Cruz local routes every hour Watsonville several local routes every hour or less now this is important because we're talking about relatively short we're talking about just back and forth inside of Santa Cruz just back and forth inside of Watsonville now the sensitivity to frequency is particularly high if you're making a relatively short trip it doesn't make sense to wait very long to go not very far right that's why you'll wait two hours for a flight to LA which will wear a waiting date for a flight to London same principle right you won't wait as long for a small trip that's not a psychological insight that's actually just an access calculation it doesn't contribute very much access to use an infrequent service for a short trip because the waiting time is most of the ground time and at some point it becomes faster just to walk you can if you think about if you've just missed an hourly bus in Watsonville to go two miles most of you can walk those two miles in an hour so it's interesting when I look especially both at parts of Watsonville and at the parts of Santa Cruz in Capitola that you see marked with the pale blue lines here there's some generally dense areas there that's not just you know low density sprawl a lot of that historic fabric with some significant you know a decent density to it that you're just not there for so that's interesting so now the other part of this is where does high ridership trains so because frequency is expensive we're going to if you choose with a network design to put frequency in a certain place such that you generate really high access to certain places the overall benefit of that depends on there being lots of people at those places or going to those places now I showed you the diagrams from Dublin about that particular place where Jane got 43% more freedom as a result of our plan we also had a city-wide sound bike that was the average doubler averaged across the entire population not just Jane can get to 16% more jobs and educational opportunities in 45 minutes that was our headline sound bike so average doubler is I would say 16% free but the average of course is maximized by there being lots of people in the places where the access is best and that happens by thinking about transit together with land use and even more importantly thinking about land use together with transit so there are four key features of a land use pattern and again I'm giving you these simple geometry diagrams because I want you to be aware that I'm talking about geometry I'm not talking about social science this is important because I'm now about to say that one neighborhood is better than another neighborhood at supporting transit and it's very important when we all say this that we not sound like we're saying that this neighborhood is just better than that neighborhood or these people are better than those people which is how some people won't tend to take it so we have to be very clear that we're not talking about who you are we're just talking about where you are and the pattern of development that you live in the pattern of the streets that you live in and the way that governs what's possible density is the easiest these two bus routes have the same cost to operate they both have two buses on them but one of them has twice as many people around every stop so of course twice as many people around every stop means that even if everybody uses transit at the same rate that's twice as much right but what's more it's a little more nonlinear than that because when people live at high density they start to have other reasons to not use cars as much parking is more of a hassle that's why the relationship between density and transit ridership tends to be a little nonlinear but at the very least it's linear because there are simply more people walkability can the people around the stop actually get to the stop now this is too different in these two diagrams here the center is a transit stop and the circle is a quarter mile radius out of that transit stop and the black lines are places in that circle where you could actually walk to the stop in a quarter mile given the street name so in a good well connected grid about two thirds of the area can get to the stop in that amount of time if you have a fragmented cul-de-sac oriented neighborhood with lots of obstacles you can easily get that down to less than a third so if I'm thinking in access maximizing terms and I'm looking at that lower development pattern there might as well just be fewer people there there may be people in the quarter mile radius but if they can't actually get to the stop given barriers they might as well not be there the other very important thing is that it must be possible to cross the street at every stop this is a very important conversation between the outranges and between you and your public works departments because if you put stops on opposite sides of the street where it is not safe to cross you have provided one way service because the transit is always going to take you from this side of the street and bring you back to that side of the street so that's another critical thing that we're looking at and so again as a transit planner if I'm sitting down working on a project where nobody wants my opinion about the land use but I'm expecting to design a high ridership transit system to it and I'm going to react negatively to that lower to that lower development pattern I'm going to react negatively to a big fast street without crosswalks at every quarter mile or so those are going to tell me lower ridership potential overall now linearity density and walkability are things that architects and developers and most city planners understand linearity is a uniquely is uniquely transit's problem and as a result a lot of people don't understand it and don't consider it here are two different ways that a community might be configured a community of the same forward land use patterns so if they're all in a straight line and I've got a reasonable path reasonably straight path connecting then that's an optimal situation in terms of ridership because it's an optimal situation in terms of access because transit drives the shortest possible distance to connect them all and transit drives a straight path that is perceived as a reasonably direct path between any two points this is why so Calamity is a good transport is that there's lots of stuff and something that people experience is more or less a straight one this is why a hospital on a hilltop is a really bad transit problem a giant university on hilltop is arguably a bad transit problem although some universities would probably go ahead and deal with that but you're very but you are, I cannot tell you how fortunate you are to have Cabrillo College where it is instead of say where Cal State Hayward is which is up on a hilltop at the end of a long route where you have to drive up there and turn around from there you can't go anywhere else via that destination because of where it is so discouraging future institutional development in Colisex is a really important thing because they create enormous problems for transit once they get done by and large you're pretty fortunate in this regard but the other similar examples the Walmart behind the quarter mile of parking a lot of other things that we see a lot of if you go over the hills here you're mostly pretty fortunate in that regard but I'm sure you can think of examples basically that lower way of organizing the same four land uses means the bus drives further to follow a more circuitous path which therefore slows down the fix of people on property on the bus it's a lose lose all the way across it's a lose for the passengers and it's a lose for the transit so this is one of those things where ultimately we need to be educating people about the consequences of their location I'm having a great, I'm having this conversation in Portland right now small exclusive liberal arts colleges one of them is on the frequent network on the way to other places the other one is in a cul-de-sac and they're asking me why does that other college our arrival across town that we compare ourselves to all the times why are they getting frequent network and service and I'm having to explain it has nothing to do with who you are it has nothing to do with anything about you except just where you are they're not they're on the way to things therefore you have to support all your bus service all by yourself whereas their market for bus service is created not just by them but by lots of other people going the same direction which is why they get more and more bad linearity some of you may have traumatic memories of this route this is the sort of thing my understanding is you're not running this particular pattern anymore but this is the sort of thing that happens when you have an extremely nonlinearist community and you have an expectation of covering every part of that community we'll come back to coverage in a moment there's different things going on there but as we know as we get into the hills we start to get lots of cul-de-sac neighborhood patterns here where there is one road into them and all you can do is drive into them and then go around and then come back to the high ridership transit so this is the sort of line that you look at and you look at what's on it and you would say this is not a high ridership line it is geometrically impossible for this to be a high ridership line don't run this line if your goal is ridership but as we'll talk about there may be other reasons to run it finally just proximity all of the things being equal it costs more to go a long distance this is why there's more service from Salinas to Monterey and do space between Salinas and Watsonville with not much there and as a result it cannot be as much of a priority by the way we just did the network we designed for MST so moderate county expression I'm happy to talk about those examples so now the important question is if you're trying to optimize access overall which is how you optimize ridership overall or what do you actually do well is ridership actually what you want it's easy to say yes of course ridership is what we want until you look at the actual trade-offs involved and then it turns out to be a somewhat harder decision so this is a little like plumbing if you hire a plumber and he goes to work under your sink and he comes back and he's holding his ranch and he says look I could glue this all together like this and it would last another year or so or I could rip out the whole assembly and replace it and then it costs $500 so he's given you a choice between cheap and durable and here's the thing you have to answer his question exactly the way he phrased you cannot say pick up a magazine and start talking in general about what you feel you'd like to have in your kitchen he's going to stand there with his range of weight he asked it cheap and durable and it's your choice that's really important because your transit planner your staff, John here they're like the plumber they're going to present you with choices and they're choices about your values but you have to answer those questions in the form that they ask because until you answer the plumber's question in the form that he asked him to be able to do to take your ideas so that's the one okay so here's a simple fictional town that dots are people or jobs so in this particular fictional town most of the people and jobs and destinations are along two straight streets and everyone else is scattered and let's say I have 18 buses to design a network for this town so my first question is what's your goal? if you want ridership I'll do this I'll take all 18 buses and I'll put them on the two main streets and as a result I will provide excellent access for about 70% of the population and zero access to the rest of the population but that will give us the highest average access across the city which is the basis for having the highest ridership this is how we optimized by averaging it across the city Mrs. Jones in the southeast corner of the city is not like the city and that's because she feels entitled to a certain map service or she needs a certain map service even though she lives in a low density maybe unlawful place and so rather than saying that there's something wrong with Mrs. Jones whether Mrs. Jones's needs aren't important or that or something like that I have found it more powerful and more accurate just to say that there's an opposite goal that is what Mrs. Jones and many other people are advocating the idea of the coverage goal is that the top priority is to get a little bit of service to everyone think how easy it is to adopt a statement like access for all or leave no one behind it just rolls off our tongues it's very easy to say but this is what you're saying you're saying spend enough on going everywhere that you get to everyone but to do this I take my 18 buses now I have 10 routes instead of 2 so I've spread those buses across all those routes and now these buses only come once an hour whereas the other buses give every 10 minutes because these buses only come once an hour they're probably not coming when you leave them therefore not very many people use them therefore the riders should use them I can also describe this in access terms the average access across the city is now more uniform geographically but it is also much lower for everyone access as well across the city so here's the thing both of these goals have a lot of people behind them and are tied to a lot of important public policy outcomes that people care about ridership goal we're thinking like a business we're supporting dense and walkable development because high ridership service will go there and we'll focus there anyway by virtue of maximizing ridership or maximizing competition with cars or maximizing the MT reduction somebody who's thinking financially might also want to say that we're maximizing fare rate that's also true if you're targeting fare rate the coverage goal is thinking like a public service access for all support for low density development lifeline access for everyone leaving a one behind now what I want to be clear here is that when you are doing a service change proposal and every time somebody comes before you and says I need the bus here my life will not be possible without this bus you're in the presence of someone legitimately proposing coverage based plan don't think of that as just being selfish they're just proposing this other perfectly valid goal for public transit which is covered so it helps to choose a point on the spectrum and this is the question that's eventually going to come back around to you so right now you're about 64 which is to say and I'm sorry this is actually an analysis of your pre-covid network because I'm going to assume that that is for now by default what we would snap back to if you had it correct about 60% of your service is where it would be if the goal were covered and about 40% is not sorry it's about 60% about where it would be if the goal were ridershift and about 40% is not so that gives you a sense of a starting point think about there now being a dial on your dashboard that you could turn left or right so for example services that are clearly ridership services in your network are clearly anything going to the university but also the Santa Cruz Watsonville Corridor and in particular the Soquel Corridor that involves the Rio College not just the Express Corridor and San Lorenzo Valley which when I first started studying this network I was surprised at how well San Lorenzo Valley does but it's denser than it looks and it actually does very well coverage services basically all the time that you are driving around once an hour because hourly service has the unique ability to get terrible ridershift out of absolutely any land you're standing and most rural services so I'm just going to quickly take you through a case study and then I'm going to start we did this whole exercise at BTA across the hills here and I'm going to look like because it's something you may want to consider doing yourself as part of the study that's coming up so they had a pre-existing all day frequency again red means the high frequency network but you can also see the whole extent of the network they asked for three concepts 70% 80% and 90% ridership the coverage is 100 minus that is how much gets spent on coverage again those colors so there was the existing frequency concepts 70 see the red lines but also see all the coverage of the network 80 90 by the time you get to 90 it's almost all red lines and a lot of the coverage has disappeared I'll show you those again for you in this network 70 80 90 now you see why we have to use those colors because otherwise it would just look like we were cutting service actually no reallocating service and the colors are the payoff the high frequency network so now here's the thing I don't need to explain lots of people are never going to quite understand frequency but I can explain this in terms of access so from the standpoint of somebody a particular intersection in northern Santa Clara these access diagrams show you in concentric blobs where you can go in 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes those are the colors the pink is 60 minutes there's the existing network concept 70 29% more jobs reachable in 30 minutes concept 80 concept 90 by the time you get to concept 90 the blob has expanded enormously and we've doubled the number of jobs reachable in 30 minutes one interesting thing to notice by the way going on right here is that this east-west corridor has appeared as being reachable now that in a high frequency grid she doesn't have a direct route to those places what she has is a frequent to frequent connection because in concept 90 that north-south route is very frequent and the east-west route is very frequent as a result it's fast to connect as a result those areas start appearing inside of the wall around her life so this is a number that takes very little effort to explain it to most people including to most policy makers because when I phrase it in those terms expanding the number of jobs reachable in a fixed amount of time I don't have to explain frequency I'm just talking about the some effect of walking, waiting and writing of what transit is achieved first of all you do not have very much transit so if in this forthcoming study you decide to go forward with an exercise about how to reapportion resources within the existing fixed budget you're going to find that to be a very challenging conversation because there aren't a lot of resources and it will be and we had this experience in BTA many people in the BTA community are still mad at me or trying to blame me or framing me as some sort of neoliberal austerity advocate like I just come out of my kids or something and so that's one of the occupational hazards of my job but you're going to get a certain amount of this as you go into that process as you start talking about moving things around and potentially if you remove some people's service what you can afford right now is a network of mostly 30 to 60 minute rounds and to either grow frequency without coverage or grow coverage without having frequency you'd need more resources and that's going to be another part of your conversation but again so there's this question about what you do with the current fixed budget and then there's also the question about whether this budget is adequate one of these new things about this process is that trying to think about how to properly allocate services within a fixed budget will often help more people come to the conclusion that the budget system isn't adequate because it will help more people see that you are in fact up to the limits of what you can do you can do more of this, you can do more of that everyone wants more of it but by referring back to a couple of things in Adam's presentation he's already given you a first blush at a public response to this he queried the ridership coverage tradeoff essentially almost in those words and what he got back was basically 70% support for greater focus on ridership and the rest from coverage so already you could say you have 70% support for some resources from coverage to ridership and enduring the complaints of the people who are affected by that that isn't necessarily what you should do but it is one point of reference in figuring that out the other thing I want to call out from what he just presented is that when he went through the most common things that people value out of public transit things that are valuable to the entire community you've got a long list of things that more than 50% more than 50% said that they strongly value and that's a very positive signal yet at some point you decide to look for more money so thanks very much and let's have comments and questions in the discussion thanks for the presentation Jared so I'm a county supervisor in the live oak and live oak so-cal area so I've got the horse so-cal drive going right through, great service and good frequency today we've got some of those lighter blue lines going through how would you redesign service in that area with the focus on ridership would you have like a circulator through the area to get people between so-cal drive and the coast or would you just have two linear lines or would you just no actually we're a little further to the left the out there where the land comes a little further out further west so getting co-capital 60 minute frequency once in here okay well that's very hard and we'd have to have it would be an interesting conversation and I'm not going to give you a network design without having studied a lot more data but one extreme solution would be you'd figure out how to have just one east-west route here south of so-cal drive and you'd have the argument about where it should be so you could get that route after a higher frequency and people walk further to better service but I'll tell you this area is really hard because there's quite a bit of density there it's mostly small on single family as I remember it's not big mansions there's a fair amount of difficulty in the street network there's a lot of discontinuity in the street network there's a series of reasonably useful east-west streams and it's awfully hard to choose among and so I don't know what you'll do because then the other question will be to what extent is the high ridership solution for the whole network just to put more frequency on so-cal drive and not even try to be covering some of these areas those will be the kinds of questions that will come up so your balance of ridership and coverage what is your experience where someone chooses more coverage but that actually improves ridership because more people that are covering start to if they can get to those main areas just do you see any improvements at all or is it just well even if we don't I worked in lots of systems where the existing network was really inefficient and had lots of problems that we could fix without changing the ridership coverage split and so sometimes you'll see redesigns we've done where we didn't change the ridership coverage but ridership got better overall that's just because we found lots of design problems in the network that we could fix where there was just waste I don't think there's much of that in your network I think your network strikes pretty tight so now again I haven't done a detailed analysis you'll get that in the study that you're about to do and you'll have a chance to put deeper into that but my first reaction is that I don't see a lot of waste so what that means is that coverage service is going to be but because by definition coverage service is a little resource spread over a big area it's not going to be very frequently and that's always when it's useful so I would encourage you to think of by definition we're talking about low ridership service there's a different thing you do with much higher frequency it's the connectivity I'm thinking of because I have a neighborhood in my area that lost their service they want it back and a lot of people that I've so we have but there's other parts of the area that has either infrequent or no service but people want to be able to get to so tell drive where that is so when you add coverage that's maybe infrequent which is what I have now in my neighborhood can you craft it so that it gets to these frequent areas within maybe not the 45 minutes but do you see ridership you're still it really is also question is you're still talking about a low frequency service into an area where density handle walkability not really on our side and as a result you're just not going to be able to be useful to very many people so the way the ridership coverage question plays out there is if you turn the dial toward coverage you get that feedback but you also the so called driver out stays every 30 minutes would you rather have a so called driver out every 15 minutes and be something that it's worthwhile for people to walk to it you know some people in Apto sort of like way down the hill from it and but that's what the ridership coverage trade up is so that's if you don't have any money you've done a good job I think of teeing out a difficult discussion about coverage versus frequency I'm someone who sort of schooled in the notion of giving two choices looking to the third and my question would be and it's not one that you can answer about our staff I think the possibility of combining this difficult decision that we're going to have to make it's easier for me I'm appointed by the board of supervisors to be a citizen represented for the whole system and I don't have a narrow constituency that everybody else does to some extent geographically speaking what I thought is what about the possibility of combining a campaign to raise new funds for transit a transit tax in effect with this plan in such a way that for example you could at least not reduce the coverage and then put the vast majority of the new money into the frequency issue you've basically been arguing in favor of in your presentation to what extent might that avory the other one, the kind of that it's likely to happen about somebody who's thinking my constituency's about coverage but not on some fill out in my experience it's important in studies like the one you're about to begin to have the conversation about in the austerity context as well because if you want people to vote for more money they need to see how far the current money goes and they need to understand that the reason you're not serving them better is not that you don't like them the reason you're not serving them better is that you're also doing these other things and here's what you would have to cut in in order to serve them better and so in my experience when people have that kind of experience of having to see what the real choices are it makes them understand and make a more informed decision that they want to pay more to have more service in some form because otherwise a large part of the population will easily and you mentioned this earlier that running these empty buses around obviously it's not important an important turning point about that by the way your staff is being very smart to run big empty buses around because operating cost is mostly late and explain to your constituents we talked to you about empty buses that the marginal cost of that empty seat is very, you know, zero it would be much, much more expensive to run smaller buses so as to carry out fewer empty seats but also occasionally have overloads and fences so it is absolutely important everyone be able to explain this because that's a really common illusion that oh, we see those empty buses they must be wasted and actually I don't I could be correct but I don't think our problem is that the action to run a bunch of empty buses tends to be insulated to service in one direction like to the University campus where buses are staying in the moment and pass by in one direction but coming back in the morning people are not all going home there will always be places where people see buses empty we just always have to go and respond to that we've been along this for a long time one of my recollections is we've been sort of coverage oriented in order to assure that we had the paratransit coverage for a large area so I love the map with the lines but I almost imagine the gray area that illustrates the paratransit coverage by maintaining those outlying routes that may only come once an hour so does that fit in reality what is proceeding the previous conversation was about more focus on ridership the denser areas that get the bigger bang for your buck that's what I heard about five years ago or whatever was concentrate on that and get better ridership before you start expanding out I represent the Santa Rosa Valley which only got good frequency out there but I just one question I had aside from that is the new term now equity does that come into play a lot or probably a lot more today than it would have five or ten years ago well y'all gonna have to tell me what equity means it's not got a it's not got an agreed definition but one of the things that equity means is that we care about the needs of disadvantaged and sometimes also historically excluded or marginalized populations okay well in the context of the geometry it still matters where those people are it always matters where they are and so let me tell you what we're doing in a project I'm doing right now for trying to be important for you we've put out a draft plan based on having heard from the public that we have two pillars which are ridership and equity those are the only two justifications of service that we're supposed to be working with so what is that? that means that I'm going to we're going to design a network with lots of frequent service which is a high ridership network which by the way also serves lots and lots of disadvantaged people who are fortunate to live on it then we look at our coverage and we say which of this coverage is serving significantly disadvantaged populations and we keep that coverage but coverage of say a largely affluent hard to serve, balling up into the mountains with big nice houses now that probably goes away because there isn't if it has neither ridership justification nor an equity justification obviously people are screaming all over the place that's part of the process and I don't know where that's going to end up but that's the draft plan that we put out that based on what we were being told about what the goal should be so you have one of the ways you can manifest equity and you heard that in Adam's survey did you hear that? when he asked specifically about focus is it appropriate to be focusing on going on people you've got like over 70% over 70% yes now in practice what that means I don't need that justification to justify a good service on so called draft that's justified by ridership I do need that justification to decide to run a particular circulator in Watsonville where the geography is not suited to high ridership but where I know I have particularly intensity that becomes equity justified I think that I answered your question I think that's more episodic there's a couple of small cases where we kept the line because there seem to be quite a few disabled folks that already access to parent transit I don't think that's been much more like people are dabbing for some service we can't leave them with nothing since something goes hand to tie or whatever that argument is actually remains in less times around bells and things but I also think that it's very hard not to make things more complex but it's always hard to have this discussion without a planning discussion about where people can low income people and disabled people can afford to live I don't think it's unreasonable to say this is where we have high frequency service if you expect that kind of service public service from us subsidized by taxpayers dollars this is the place where you need to live live up in Manila and nowhere in the mountains and expect that we're going to run either parent transit or anything else up to you we had somebody like that it was an evil rock or something it was like an hour ride to get to their house or something to pick them up at some point we said no it was difficult we can't provide service to you it's just not reasonable but I do think that this is a different question we really do need to think about this is an issue in my city of Santa Cruz you know we had a quarter plan trying to build a lot more affordable housing on Central Avenue which got turned down by the city council I don't think that's the current council's view but that decision was made that makes it it would be a much easier argument that people should be living on the bus route if they want to have affordable housing or accessible to disabled folks housing don't expect us to come serve you out for a minute and no way you need to find a house where you're on the train absolutely it's great that we have elected officials here on the board who are a part of both of those conversations because ultimately that has to be one conversation well and in Scottside we have one of the issues we have is we have transit center right there and we built housing dense housing with limited parking saying you know well they can walk to the bus however then of course and they had it in their CCNRs that there would just be two parking spaces per home of course it wasn't long that they were calling us they wanted 54 spots in the metro parking lot for their vehicles and how dare us approve a project without more parking and I said you guys all knew and they said yeah but our kids grew up and this happened and you know so the idea I've gotten to the point of going I can't rely on the fact that they could walk because they're not and then they're filling other areas with parking and we're really struggling to manage that so it sounded logical put dense housing near a metro and they can take the bus but they're not so I'm not sure will I see your recommendation to do this I'm going to it sounds good on paper but it doesn't seem to be working in line I think that the thing that needs pushback in that conversation is as you said and I understand that it was not pleasant or to push back still not as you said they knew what they were buying and I mean look we know where state law is going on and one of the reasons the state is getting actively involved in this is precisely because it is so horrible for you as a city official to deal with this by yourself and now you can blame the state and that's great you know that's part of the larger process of getting a kind of transition that we need both for affordability and for climate and yeah it's very very hard just one thing I don't know where it's coming up but when you're mentioning the bicycles and stuff we have also a group of employee group that has been calling Metro courageous up at UCS he's admin and enterprise going that want bikes you know and we and they're not enough bikes racks on the buses and so that's another challenge that I'm not sure how to solve bike racks on buses are one of those wonderful ideas that only work as long as they're not very fine but they don't scale they don't scale what scales is bike, a secure bike carton and you know I think you know that but yeah that's a challenge I just wanted to build off of something that bike is bringing up as far as where we provide service we actually have an urban and rural services lines in the county to find today so you live outside those lines you're probably not going to get water service you're definitely not going to get sewer service I would argue why should you get transit service you know I recently was training for the Sunrise Rotary I got the chance to get out on a lot more of our county's rural roads there's been places that I was shocked to find a bus stop I mean like some of the furthest wheelock road in Green Valley road I had never been on a wheelock road in my life and so I'm for dialing up the dial to 90 you know I think that we can do a lot more and I'm also interested in opportunities for funding that are related to land use too I mean how can we get in order to get the housing we need we're going to have to dial back parking requirements I think that the geometry might just not be there in Scotts Valley yet I would venture to say that's why we've seen that with your project but I think we've got to, it's going to take some time but I think we need to keep pushing the geometry in the right direction I just have to step out for like 20 minutes I want to encourage other guests if you have questions Thank you so much Mr. Walker I really admire your work and appreciate you bringing your expertise here so thank you so much I have a few thoughts that came to mind one is you're thinking about equity I would say it's not just caring about inclusive living others from other communities but actually actually bringing in representatives that speak on behalf of the needs of those communities within our community Couple thoughts about moving forward in terms of we know that e-cars are not a viable move for the future because we don't even have the natural resources to fund or to provide all those cars that we need so we have to somehow move towards public transit and that's moving forward but I'm trying to think of in terms of the turnaround ability of buses for example and you spoke lightly about rail I loved your comment about liberating service where it will liberate the most people where the most people will go I feel that of course rail is a wonderful addition as a backbone to our community because it hits through the heart of so many of our towns and cities and I absolutely agree that our bus needs to be wrapped up demonstratively for our community but I'm curious as to the longevity of a particular bus over time in comparison to maybe a car or a rail that sort of thing and then I apologize just one more thought about ground up level of community involvement so for example I think Boulder, Colorado increased their ridership something like 200% at the same time that our ridership decreased somewhere around 25% just your thoughts on that ground up level inclusivity that can affect the system and thank you again so much the second question first it was great that Boulder had a community driven process important things that community driven process led to Boulder spending lots of money on transit I mean what they did effectively and Boulder sits inside a larger transit agency so it would be as if Palo Alto would say sits inside of BTA had decided to massively fund the system far above the beyond what the regional transit agency that's what Boulder did I think and totally agreeing with you about the role of community representation certainly in these kinds of studies it's very common to spend a third of the budget at least on public average sometimes even half the budget on public average because it's a lot of work to find the people who can speak especially from marginalized communities one of the things I encourage you to be aware of when you get into public meetings and this is just this is not to invalidate everybody's input but you will tend to hear from people who have to you will tend to hear from people who have time to engage with them and so if you want a transit network that's useful to people being on a parade you have to price in the fact that you're not going to hear from them as much because they are too busy to engage even separate of barriers of education and language and things like that which you can work with that good communications and Spanish and so on you just keep have to visualize keep visualizing that single mother who has two jobs and then goes to get the kid from child care and has no tool so you won't hear from them and so you have to be aware of her because she won't be here talking thank you so much for the presentation really insightful and I'm excited to help get your book and read it in your work have you engaged or have communities engaged with bus drivers and gotten their input and feedback in terms of how their scope and their work has impacted in where that balance lands well when we talk about the ridership I'm pretty clear that that needs to be a conversation with the customers of the agency by which I mean everybody who's writing new checks which is the entire population and it's the role of staff to implement that direction and I would include bus drivers as part of that larger staff where because it's a value judgment about what the priorities are for public funding I think it's an every one question when I'm doing projects like this I'm talking to bus drivers because I need their knowledge and I need to understand their experience and I need to understand you know if they're having to go pee on a tree because their route is ending in a place where they don't have any facilities I need to know if they are if they have enough time I need to know all those kinds of aspects of their experience and so there's all kinds of great information that comes from there that's an important part of that process and it's not like we don't value their opinions it's just that like anyone else on staff they're ultimately here to deliver what the public wants to pay for according to the values that are motivating that investment I want to one more question to break with regards to what Manu said about the urban service line I was going to bring that up because you can't really develop these large scale housing developments without having that line and I know you don't have that on your map but some of us have it in our heads but the affordability comment that you made earlier about our county is because we're so affordable a lot of people just literally carve out a place to live where they can and it's not necessarily within that urban service line they're literally renting a lean to up in the mountains and they're riding on all those little roads just to get to where the road road is it's just something I think we need to consider when we're figuring out what that equation is no, the suburbanization and ruralization poverty to some extent driven by problems of affordability we heard from the beginning about staff here driving in from Salinas or Hollister or whatever it is I'll service them on you alright thank you very much let's take a break until about 10 past 11 get everybody a chance to get up get a snack you are right we talked about upcoming planning efforts at the agency I just want to give you the timeline in December actually in November you'll have the recommendation on the preferred proposal to do your short planning and so we're hoping that in December you actually kick off those efforts so for sure the first half of calendar year 23 you'll be having great discussions with your consulting team and with your staff and with more importantly the entire community about how you're building a better metro going into the future so we'll leave that topic and now so the second session is all about technology but before we have that discussion we invite Steve Claremont up and I think Wanda Mu is going to introduce Steve I certainly want to bring Danielle up and she's been working on a project the last six months it's pretty amazing and not only will I drive a bit of ridership on the system but your good will throughout the system and your leadership with the environment will come out in a big way through this project and I'm not sure she has it in her slides but before she comes up I just want to give you a list of people who are financially interested in this project just to keep in mind while she's talking you've got RGC Guy Preston and his staff who have the assets to help on this project and Danielle will talk about you've got clever devices one of the other consulting team putting in your APC and putting in your CAD-ABL that we'll talk about a little bit later on to the tune of giving you $100,000 discount on an upcoming contract just so they could participate in this project and then we've got Clean Energy who provides your natural gas we've got Mark Thomas your engineering firm you've got Allied, your security and then you've got Hanson and Bridget all interested in being a partner on this project so we'll go with Danielle on her project then I wanted to introduce Steve Claremont and then Chuck's going to come up and put some spreadsheets on the screen to show you how we're going to get to where we want to take it on that goal so Danielle all yours thank you so I am Danielle Cagola the marketing communications and customer service director of Metro as Michael mentioned we have an exciting project that I'm going to introduce to you today it's in our conceptual phase as you may know Metro has a long standing commitment to our community of clearing the air so when we start to think about Metro's mission statement of protecting the environment I thought to myself personally what do I appreciate about this county what makes us different from surrounding areas and for me that's seeing the dolphins at Manawisa Beach and the whales from the harbor or even just walking on our local coastline being a public transit allows us the ability to shape our local environment by reducing emissions but to really make the lasting impact we have to get the entire community involved we want to remind people by trading just one personal vehicle use for a public transit ride one ride at a time makes a difference and that's why we're working on the one ride at a time program with Metro the campaign is aimed towards encouraging current Metro riders and potential riders to use public transit more often not only will the rider reduce emissions by using public transit they will now have the option to donate directly to our local non-profit partner the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and on this slide you have some of what the Monterey Bay Sanctuary does and then I also have a little video for you here at the bottom here you want to go ahead for 30 years our local community has overwhelmingly supported the protection of Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary with 276 miles of spectacular coastline from Marin County to Cambria and over 6,000 square miles of ocean this sanctuary is the largest in the continental United States the sanctuary's Monterey Canyon at more than two miles deep is a seascape like no other called the Serengeti of the Sea the sanctuary is home to countless marine mammals shorebirds and fish like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park it's a national treasure the sanctuary is home to world-renowned science and research and it's provided a clean and safe habitat for the marine animals that rely on our coastal waters to thrive and raise their young the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation's Monterey Bay Chapter helps fund the ocean heroes who find and free entangled whales trapped in nets and debris saving the lives of these majestic giants and working in partnership with fishers and the community we are supporting the design and testing of fishing here to prevent these entanglements from happening for the millions of people who live near or visit the central coast the sanctuary offers wildlife water-fueling, ocean recreation stress reduction and inspiration that can only be gained by escaping the pressures of daily life and experiencing the beauty of the natural world bay net and team ocean docents connect visitors both ashore and on the water to sanctuary wildlife allowing people to safely explore and discover the wonders of the sanctuary the community's involvement with the sanctuary is at the heart of its success Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary just like oceans around the world today are being threatened by climate change, by human destruction by political threats that's why we need your support more than ever so please go to MontereyBayFoundation.org and help us to protect this legacy for our children our planet needs your help do it now after 50 rides the riders will have the opportunity to participate in donations in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and then just as one more part of this campaign in order to really highlight the importance of what we're trying to do here for our local community we would like to go ahead and wrap 25 to 30 of our buses with the one-time, one-right and a time messaging and this would include imagery directly from the Monterey Bay thanks to photographers photographers like Jody Freeman and National Geographic photographer Fran Slanting so I have a couple examples for you it's really just to drive the point home that we're trying to stay in our local environment reduce emissions and everything that comes from that and really just riding one or two trips of public transportation a week or even a month actually really makes a difference and so we will be coming to you guys in the next 60 to 90 days with a more planned and announcing more program partners but as Michael mentioned we already have a lot of agencies and individuals involved so we're hoping this is a very successful project I would like to produce Steve Grimont our senior consultant from CTE Center for Transportation and Environment Steve has more than 25 years of experience in sustainability development and alternative transportation technology Steve holds Masters of Business Administration degree and Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Management from Georgia Tech CTE has been working with almost more than 100 agencies nationwide in terms of transition to zero emission CTE and Metro has been working on zero emission technology over the last five years CTE has put us to apply for grants for FTA grant in FY 16 for the highway highway zero emission buses Steve will give us some presentation on zero emission bus technologies and thank you thank you on the moon do I need to switch anything over here click it alright very good thank you very much for having me here today my name is Steve Grimont really quick introduction about CTE Center for Transportation and Environment we are a non-profit planning and engineering firm which is kind of an odd combination when you think about it we are engineers first and our entire mission is to help move zero emission transportation and the adoption of zero emission transportation technologies into the market we do that through research, development demonstration programs and deployment programs and typically in combination with federal government or state government funding fleets like yourselves and technology providers I'm going to skip over some of these slides here just real quick as one of you mentioned we've had a lot of success over the last 15 years or so working with transit agencies on zero emission technologies one thing about transit is because they have access to federal funding it's an easy place to get the technology into the market professional operators, professional maintenance allows us to fix routes allows us to collect data and analyze the performance of this new technology and then that technology starts getting out into the general market we're seeing that today with battery electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles starting out in transit and getting into the broader sector of commercial trucking we've been working with Metro for quite some time now started in about 2016 with a grant application that we helped work with Metro to write and was awarded for battery electric buses shortly after the war I made a trip out here drove over about 17 where the buses were supposed to be deployed and I thought, oh my god what can we just commit ourselves to and we're going to talk a little bit about why that's such a challenge first of all the CARB's ICT regulation the innovative clean transit regulation which you are subject to just to understand what that regulation is all about first of all we've heard about the 2040 goal to be 100% zero vision that's a goal that's not the regulation regulation is a purchasing requirement so for small fleets like yourselves by 2026 all new buses that you order start to procure in that year I'm sorry 25% of those buses need to be zero emission does it mean your entire fleet is zero emission so if you would buy 20 buses in this year a quarter of those or 5 of those buses would have to be zero emission that's what that means so that number percentage of new bus procurements for zero emission up to 2029 going forward all new buses that you purchase have to be zero emission so that gets you to zero emission by 2040 assuming that you hold your buses for 12 years so that's the FDA standard that you have to hold your buses for a minimum of 12 years so if you hold them for only 12 years by 2040 you'll be at 100% but most agencies like yourself hold onto your buses a little bit longer than that but assuming that it's a 12 year program that's what you get to so let's talk a little bit about the technology itself and what is a zero emission bus I think we all know why zero emission is important and what the advantages of zero emission are so we'll get right into the technology itself essentially a hydrogen fuel cell bus and a battery electric bus are very much the same they both have an electric drive system it's basically a propellant vehicle for they both have batteries just the battery electric bus has a lot more batteries what's the batteries that supply power to the electric drive batteries supply power to the electric drive that moves the bus down the big difference is with a battery electric vehicle much like a Tesla there's an external charger that will charge that battery and you go out and run the vehicle and take energy from the battery the fuel cell bus you have hydrogen tanks on there so the fuel and hydrogen the hydrogen moves through the fuel cell supplies electricity and the battery drives the electric drive so again virtually the same type of technology but think about this as having an onboard charger and this as an off-board charger some of the key things to understand though about how one of these technologies is there no free heat so on a sea energy bus or a diesel bus those systems like a diesel bus only about 25% of the fuel you burn and diesel bus actually is used to move that bus down the road the rest of it is all used to generate heat alright so the primary purpose of an engine is to generate heat and the byproduct is really to move the vehicle down the street since you don't have an engine any longer you no longer have that free heat so that has to come with an external heating system so now there will be a radiant heating system that gets added to this or an HVAC system so if you want to use heat the only source of power for that heat is coming from the same batteries that are moving you down the road so you can either decide to move the bus down the road or heat the bus but if you're heating the bus you're not getting the range so there is an impact in the range of heat the other big differences between these is the time to refuel these vehicles so a battery electric bus can take 3 to 4 hours to recharge alright it's a fairly slow process a fuel cell bus is about the same time as a CNG bus or a diesel bus so operationally a fuel cell bus matches kind of what you're doing today think about the kind of processes you go through when a bus goes back in the yard goes through and gets cleaned gets fueled and is parked and you take it off the next day battery electric bus is a slightly different process that's to get cleaned if it goes parked and it's charged if it's charged by the time you want to leave it efficiency comparison this is also very important so a CNG bus is probably the least efficient of all the fuel types that are out there on average about 3 to 4 miles per diesel gallon equivalent a diesel bus gets about 4 miles per gallon hybrids are a slight improvement over that light duty hybrids are a lot more efficient than heavy duty hybrids so it's a marginal improvement with a bus fuel cell as you can see is significantly better battery electric is far better than any other type of technology one thing to point out though is this range or differences between the efficiency so whereas all these other type of technology the efficiency range can be within fairly small range with a battery electric bus some days you're going to get over 20 diesel mile gallon equivalents some days you're only going to get around 12 which is a little bit more difficult requires a little bit more planning you don't know which day you're going to get which there's a lot of factors involved with that another thing to compare technologies on your standard diesel bus you have about 100 gallons of fuel on it that 100 gallons of fuel gets you about 400 miles that's about 400 miles per gallon with a battery electric bus with carries 450 kilowatt hours of battery that battery has about 12 diesel gallon equivalents alright so you would never leave the yard with only 12 gallons of diesel fuel on it you always want to fill it up and then go out on the road however because of the efficiency of a vehicle of battery electrics it's about four times as efficient as a vehicle remember I said before the diesel engine is only about 25% efficient 25% of the fuel you burn actually goes to moving that bus down the road so the electric motor is about four times as efficient so that 12 diesel gallons whoops acts allows you to get about 200 miles acts about about like a 50 diesel gallon equivalent and gets you about 200 miles of range as a result still it's not at the 400 mile range so what are the factors that affect range and as I go through this think about this in context of the operation here for metro speeds stop grades so highway speeds require more energy so if you have stop and go traffic braking you're actually more efficient than you are when you're driving in the highway ridership so it's all about moving weight so the heavier buses more passengers there are the heavier the bus becomes and you lose efficiency as a result climate eating and cooling I already talked about that the battery you have to use the battery to heat the bus you have to use the battery to cool the bus so that reduces your range so for degradation we're all familiar with your cell phone is cost when you first get it in the last few days and it seems like after about a year maybe you get a day or less out of it and then after that it's useless same thing with battery-elected buses they suffer degradation and at a certain point in time they have to be replaced and refurbished you lose range and then finally the operator themselves you can't operate one of these vehicles the same way you operate a diesel bus slamming on all accelerator or all brake it leads to great inefficiency the operator can make about a 30% difference in efficiency so training on operation on these buses is very important so we have a methodology trying to understand all these factors and how it impacts your service how these vehicles can be used in your service and ultimately how the impact is on capital and operating expenses we took metro through this process recently so let's talk about some of the results of that process so first we go through vehicle modeling so we collected data on a bunch of your routes we have a software system that was developed by ARCA on national labs where you can simulate the operation of the battery-elected bus on your routes based on the data we collected so right now when we talk about feasibility when you're sending a bus out on your route in your blocks can we meet the same performance criteria as your current buses and right now maybe with current technology about 40% of your blocks can be feasibly operated with a battery-elected bus an overnight charge battery-elected bus now we do expect technology to improve over time and actually technology has improved since we did that it's been probably two years since we've done that but with improvement in technology either energy density in batteries or more efficiency in components we do expect that you'll be by 2040 that you'll be up around 85% or so for feasibility block feasibility but that's not 100% that's not 100% so what do we do to improve your the ability to reach that 100% so we look at a couple different scenarios again the scenario we just looked at depot charge overnight charge battery-elected buses and as a result we see that we can only replace about 62% of the fleet by 2040 if we limit ourselves to that technology so we have to look at alternatives to improve that feasibility so on-route charging that's an option you guys seen some of that before where excuse me, operate and then say at a transit center receive additional charge and then continue to operate throughout the day so that's that is a an option for you there are some challenges with that operational challenges essentially once you get behind schedule you can't make it out because you always have to charge and you'll be behind schedule for the rest of the day so you have to account for the time at the depot we can also use a mixed fleet a battery-elected pan-hydrogen fuel cell so where battery-elected buses are kind of designated to the easier, shorter blocks less strenuous blocks hydrogen fuel cell put on the longer blocks or more strenuous blocks or finally if you decide well if I'm going to mix my fleet why don't I just stick it with one technology so of course so 100% is achievable but just not with that single technology infrastructure so in addition to buses you need to consider a whole new set of fueling infrastructure and this is a conceptual slide to think about here on the relative cost of infrastructure for battery-elected versus hydrogen so it also leads to understand why you don't see too many hydrogen buses out there in the market right now everything is all about battery-elected because with battery-elected right now you can go out and buy a single battery-elected bus and a charger fairly cheaply and get that charger installed and be off and running so the cost of entry at a very small fleet size or for very few buses is pretty low a hydrogen fueling station at a minimum is going to be $5 million right and to spend that much money just a few buses on a pilot project you're not going to do that very few agencies do that so that's why the cost per bus for a small fleet size is very high but over time on the fuel cell side you'll be able to leverage that cost over more buses so the cost per bus becomes much lower whereas a battery-elected bus is not just about a single charger per bus then you have to start adding more transformers and more infrastructure to support all those additional chargers and the costs actually start escalating over time looking at infrastructure if you were to go battery-electric at your facility we'd be looking at some sort of overhead structure in order to have some kind of infrastructure in addition to the challenges the route challenges that you have with the high speeds and the hills you're also very space-constraining with your facility so you're going to have to build up and that adds costs to do some sort of overhead infrastructure for your equipment if you were to go down that path this would be kind of a conceptual view of how that might look but all that equipment takes up space that you don't have currently so if you were to go down this path I think you can park seven or ten fewer buses in your yard if you were to go down this way on the hydrogen side again this is kind of a conceptual view of some of the equipment that you might need if you're placing it on your property where you're envisioning that back corner it would be the place that you would put that because you can't get rid of your C and G fuel if you put it in the equipment you need to keep that as long as you have C and G around that's kind of a picture of a real life system about the size that you would require so as we think about your transition and your plan one of the things that we need to consider as I mentioned you still need to maintain all your fuel and equipment throughout the transition period so prior to the next 20 years that equipment needs to be maintained we talked about JKS and it's a so I showed you the constraints the parking constraints have added if you're trying to do both fuels at the same facility that makes both problems even worse we talked about refueling time already transition risk so some other things to consider as you're going through your planning or implementation so supply chain issues we've all heard the phrase and probably have experienced that but right now most battery electric projects are looking at 2 to 3 years from inception so not only is it impacted but the utilities are severely impacted as well so I was with the client a couple of weeks ago and the utility was saying it was 18 months before transfer so now it's the utility that's driving some of the timeline to get some of these things implemented of course with battery electric you're subject to the grid and of course when you have rolling blackouts you have your state government suggesting that you shouldn't charge your battery electric vehicles for a period of time because of the constraints on the grid this is a challenge for you so when this means you need to invest in other technology and more equipment to mitigate the risk of blackouts on the hydrogen side again there's a desire for green hydrogen hydrogen made from biogas sources which is great it's a little bit more expensive but you won't be the only ones that want this fuel right now the production capacity of green hydrogen is very low it is increasing because everybody else wants it as well so while there's a desire to get a much lower cost of hydrogen and I really didn't mention cost of hydrogen meaning it's extraordinarily high right now for non-green hydrogen sources it's about eight dollars per kilogram it really needs to be less than five in order to be more compatible with diesel or cng I don't see that price getting any lower that might get more expensive as the demand for hydrogen increases technology maturity there are more battery electric vehicles in service out there hard as because the ease of implementation there are a lot more options available for all sorts of size vehicles as well as manufacturers fuel cell vehicles fuel cell buses there's only 40 footers and 60 footers made it's going to take a while before other options are available there's only two main packages out there right now so that's a challenge you need to consider as well operational constraints we talked about range of fuel cell it's not the answer to everything right now we're seeing some performance issues on high speed routes and hilly routes and you have a few of those around here so that's something we need to consider now that problem will be solved with time and technology improvement but based on the current technology out there we need to consider the limitations to where we recommend using a fuel cell vehicle finally emergency response incident I mean we're so focused on the zero emission side and moving that down the equation don't forget to consider incident response with a battery electric bus if there's a thermal event in the unlikely event of a thermal event we're not going to put that by side but you're going to let it burn to the ground essentially what happens now fortunately there's plenty of safety systems on these buses so that if it's in operation and there are passengers on it there's going to be bells and warnings on any impending thermal event so that it doesn't just go up instantly so there's plenty of time to get passengers off and call for emergency service so that's not a safety issue the issue that we see is the buses parked in your yard and you notice, you know, go back think about the picture of that all the buses parked in your yard the buses in the middle there's a thermal event the buses turned off there's no sensors that are running on that bus so no one's going to know that there's an impending thermal event on that bus your first indicator of it will be the smoke coming out of the top of it so again this is what's going to be done this is a really serious issue because this happened recently and so it's top of mind for a lot of folks in the industry right now is how do we address that and there are basically the only way you address that is pour tons and tons and tons of water on it and we keep pouring it until the thing smolders to the ground a fuel cell bus also has batteries on it not as many so that helps it does have hydrogen but it's not a hindenburg event that hydrogen escapes and evaporates and goes into the air very quickly so the hindenburg if it wasn't hydrogen that was burning in the hindenburg it was the cell so that's just something to think about but again some serious considerations here to build into your designs so with thinking about operations thinking about range constraints thinking about yard constraints thinking about your topography and your climate working with the metro team came up with a recommendation so number one zero emission bus is the priority we consider a mixed fleet scenario but the focus should be on hydrogen buses we think that that's going to be a better solution for you in the long run the near term pay it purchasing goal again a preference for zebs but anytime you go out to purchase or each year you're going to purchase we suggest doing some modeling and analysis to make sure that what you want to purchase is feasible with first a hydrogen bus it's not feasible with a hydrogen bus it's feasible for a battery electric and unlike the event it's not feasible with either of those technologies still allow for a renewable natural gas bus in the near term because it's more incumbent that you provide service ensure that you can provide service versus just focusing entirely on zero emission long term purchasing goal obviously it's following the ICT procurement schedule again I don't anticipate that you would have an issue with that again the next thing is is really doing a a theory is having jurisdiction it's really a permitting study so you're in some sensitive areas right now with putting that equipment just want to make sure you wouldn't have any permitting hurdles with coastal commission or the fire department or the city putting hydrogen stations in the location that we have recommended alright any questions I think what we might do is go into Chuck's piece and then group them all together because this is a perfect intro to Chuck's spreadsheets no I love spreadsheets sorry it's not that bad it's Chuck's just so you can see I'm just going to let you know I'm not going to talk specifically in detail about numbers I promise I won't get you guys all squirreled up in numbers in details but I want to talk about this because it is pretty important so I'm going to talk quickly about zero mission bus plan um so so in the bus plan that I'm going to talk about basically we've gone through a three phase approach so just kind of get a little bit clear we've been doing this for six months six months we've been talking about this target how do we transition from diesel and cng to zero emission buses I know we have to get there but how do we do it and as part of that process Michael everyone has been part of this process and as part of it one of the things is phase one we deploy these bags down in the Watsonville Circular so of course these are the ones that are going down there and it's just a sum so you know check off on that the second is how do we convert the fleet in Watsonville to a hundred percent um you know zero emissions and that's one and currently right now is you know it's the basically the battery electric buses and then we talked about hydrogen which Steve alluded to earlier this is what Michael talked about at the beginning is the fact fully transition for full agency that means no more cng no more diesel powered buses on our lot we're now primarily either fuel cell or battery electric buses here and our goal is 2037 so right now as we kind of went through this process months you know we want to say how do we get to zero emission buses and we went through basically three scenarios one let's just stuff ourselves with a whole bunch of cng buses right now wait till the the three years where we talked about well 25% of our buses have to be zero emissions the rest of them are they could be either diesel or cng and just kind of wait and let the regulations take over or do we gradually from now start to lead into buying buses that are zero emissions and then of course once we get mandated in 2029 from there on out it's all or do we just say the heck with this let's just go that you know why do we need to buy any more cng buses or any diesel powered buses and how does that work and then as a result and I will give you this this is a different conversation that we had four or five months ago than we are having today and I'll tell you why in a minute but right now going through all the financials to replace all 96 buses we have 93 plus three we lease right now so 96 we're going to spend between 130 to 140 million dollars to replace all these buses now the biggest thing about it is a lot of this stuff comes from rebates and grants and so forth to that major external to the money that we receive we put aside three million dollars every year for our bus replacement fund that's really our money the rest of it is all coming from external sources whether it's state local or the feds and as part of it it's actually $1.9 million cheaper for us to actually go ZET now than it is to buy a whole bunch of CNG buses and then wait for the mandates to kick in and I'll walk you kind of through our process so let's just focus right here on the top the cost of a 40 foot electric bus is approximately 1.2 million a hydrogen bus is $1.35 million a CNG bus this is why I said four months ago we could have had another conversation it was less than $700,000 it's now $800,000 as that supply chain everything is going to be more expensive but here's the kicker in the electric and hydrogen we get certain I'll say grants and rebates that come back that's only specific to electric and hydrogen and by taking in this money we've now reduced the money to be 830 for CNG 833,000 for a hydrogen and about 900,000 for electric see now we're talking apples to apples because now we have buses that are basically on the same farm cost and as part of it even with the Arctic buses down here $1.6 million for a hydrogen bus versus a million dollars for a CNG when you start layering in the federal rebate, the state rebates and so forth that will get only with hydrogen and electric we're talking about it's pretty much a million versus a million seventy versus a million one so when you start talking about that then all of a sudden it kind of like said levels of playing field this is something we want to look at now we kind of have this conversation four months ago I couldn't have it because CNG up here was a million dollars and then we started creating it down but that gap is not closed so based off of that we looked at the alternative going zero base budget zero zero emissions buses going forward and as part of that process we've kind of laid out a two piece approach to replacing our buses so one is we have historically bought buses either in lump sum or in the years of buying buses and doing it again as part of it as you can see buses start coming in here where we're talking about beyond useful life that just means beyond 14 years doesn't mean that we can't do some refurbishing to keep them running but what it means is we have these peaks that are going to come in and then we want a bunch of years no buses and that's basically what happens we should be buying six to seven buses every year assuming the service stays the same 96 buses which that's another conversation about increasing service and increasing buses but if we keep the six to seven buses our bus replacement plan where we're putting outside three million dollars a year that covers half of our buses and if we get a grant we could afford six or seven buses every single year as we go forward and as part of it we're talking about hydrogen up here we have five electric in the works we're talking about five artifacts that we need to get up here as soon as possible and that's really a conversation around we're probably going to go to CNG but we're looking heavily at whether it's going to be electric or hydrogen and whether they can really fulfill the needs that we have up here at UC Santa Cruz one is around and two whether it has the ability to service it but we know we are in need of those buses so that may be something we go with CNG but that would be it outside of that it's all fully 100% zero zero emission vehicles and as you can see at the bottom we have 24 once you kind of do this replacement in and out we actually get by 2032 actually I'll tell you that 21 we've killed out all our backlog of old buses and we've replaced all those old buses with basically zero base or zero emission buses and then lastly, this is the eye check I don't want to go into detail so it's not about the dollars it's about that we've solved the dollars up through 2036 actually this goes beyond here but effectively if you look down in the corner that's the 96 buses to replace in here here's basically all the this represents all the different sources of funds that we can use between now and going forward to pay for all these buses and these are already agreed to here this is for the five electric buses the CNG Arctic right now it's only available for the 5339A and the 5307 and then from here on out it's hydrogen or hydrogen or electric you know it just depends on how the technology so this will be evolving over time but ultimately this is our money right here so 31 million out of that 140 is our money and this is all coming from our bus replacement fund that $3 million we're setting aside so everything else states rebates 5339 MBAR STIP, HVIP all this stuff these are all rebates so we have a pathway and this is what we've been working on and we feel like this is the pathway we need to start down and like I said we have contingency campaigns where we can separate move off the highway and go around the accident if need be and as Steve alluded to when the funds in here of getting stuff ends up being three or four years we can revert back and take another path that we need to in order to get it because I know we need buses and buses for ridership but at least we have a path and now we have a direction going forward and I think this is critical now and we have a financial way of getting there without touching our operating panel so do you or a consultant give us an idea of what percentage of our routes given current technology can't be run with a hydrogen bus because of the hills and whatever that is ballpark yeah we haven't studied that but my guess would probably be around 20% that can't be done with a hydrogen again we need to spend a little bit more time to really understand if you're going to have those challenges here but these are the challenges that we've seen elsewhere another question I should notice in terms of battery electric charging are we currently charging our Watsonville circulators in Watsonville or are they being charged in our main garden and driven to Watsonville what's the thought in terms of the question of where the charging stations would be for our system given the constraints on our yard currently they're being charged at JKS so your card yard the thought is that if you were to build a facility in Watsonville and put electric charging down there that feasibility would increase because a lot of the easier routes are down in that area and the big challenges you're just deadheading from here to there and that's what's requiring a lot of energy and pushing you over that feasibility threshold so that is something that we did contemplate we think we can increase feasibility if we did an all electric facility in that location so if you were to do a mixed fleet I would still recommend that one location would be hydrogen the other location would be electric so where's the infrastructure in the real estate money coming from this is all just for vehicles yes this is just vehicles so I can't talk to you about a south county because that's still kind of in the words whether we do it or not but as for the infrastructure regardless of what scenario we've got to put in infrastructure which includes chargers whether it's overhead or under and then as well as a hydrogen fueling station and then there's some stuff we have to do with our maintenance facility and train so as part of that our goal is to go with the new LONO grant to go out and pay for that infrastructure piece which is not on here because this is just focused on the bus part on Michaels on Michaels did you consider Highway 17 as that part of the 2020 percent? yes because I thought there was a challenge for Highway 17 there's a challenge of battery electric on Highway I mean battery electric bus can do it it was demonstrated the challenge there was can it do it as long as can it run an entire day that's really the challenge there you would have to have multiple buses to battery electric buses now whether or not a fuel cell bus probably haven't done the modeling but I suspect there will be a challenge because you have highway speeds and so the current fuel cell technology out there may not be able to keep up with it again it could run it may not be able to maintain the highway speeds it would be able to run it I do anticipate that that is a technical challenge that will be resolved before or before 2014 I want to emphasize this you know we're talking about technology today with the delivery schedule over the next 14 years so technology here is going to be completely much better, much stronger than it is here so a lot of the stuff as we start to deliver this could be around the easy route Watsonville here, Santa Cruz and as technology starts to expand and as we start swapping out our CNG buses that's where I think highway 17 and those kind of more steeper routes hopefully then we'll be addressed and fixed at that point and is one better anticipated whether hydrogen or electric would be or battery would be more effective on highway 17 as far as the hills and the weight and all those things yeah I mean assuming they get over past the propulsion challenges certainly the hydrogen bus carries more energy on it so it would allow you to run the entire day whereas you know we've seen very electric bus adequately demonstrated on that route it just doesn't have enough energy to run the entire day and so it would need a recharge and a second bus to go out when that bus runs out of energy thank you as we rapidly move towards electric and or hydrogen fuel sorry energy do we have a plan to oversee that we're using renewable resources for that energy so for example with hydrogen you can have pink, gray, green, yellow alluvial sources only sustainably sourced form of hydrogen one of the things you said actually I'm sorry the other gentleman who spoke first said which is really thoughtful could we then create our own green hydrogen that it becomes an income source for our not just bus metro but greater uses within our community for transit so I think right now you're purchasing renewable natural gas to run your cng buses on so certainly in the future with hydrogen you can source renewable hydrogen from your suppliers you'll just pay more for it than fossil fuel based hydrogen your second question comes down to you know self-generation of that type of fuel and we often get in these conversations talking about battery electric and producing your own electricity or hydrogen and producing your own hydrogen but I think in the long run economically you're going to be better off buying it from an industrial supplier of that fuel I mean today you're not out there fracking natural gas or drilling for oil to produce your own diesel or natural gas to run your vehicle and the reason is it's more economical to buy it from a supplier industrial scale supplier the only reason why some agencies are considering producing it their own is that the supply of that energy hydrogen is not widely available or on the electricity side the reliability is of question or concern so that's why agencies are considering producing it themselves but in the long run I don't believe that's going to be the right equation I think you could be better off doing with an external third party supply for that so a statement and a question I have been interested in hydrogen for some time because of its resiliency we where we are are dependent on PG&E for our power grid and I believe the metro JKS was impacted by some of the public safety power shutdowns so that is a difficult way to run a transit system especially if you have occasion to say use transit to move people away from a fire site or an area that's being evacuated that was the statement the second the question is is the scale of hydrogen fueling such that metro might have a station that is shared with other jurisdictions or agencies the city of Santa Cruz has a yard just down the street are there other ways that there are partnerships with other jurisdictions is that a model yeah absolutely it really depends on your funding source so if FTA is contributing to that then you're limited to who can use it unfortunately so if you're using non federal sources then you do have that opportunity to share so for example City Transit has been running hydrogen buses for over a dozen years now what 15 years so their particular station they have a fence dividing it on one side of the fence it's all transit agency the transit they're fueling the transit buses on the other side of the fence they actually have a public hydrogen fueling station open to the public so certainly there's a much greater opportunity for you to get into that sharing opportunity for hydrogen than there is for battery electric I would say battery electric chargers you never want to share those if you need to, because you're going to spend three or four hours at that charger you don't want somebody else sitting there you want somebody's Tesla taking up your time spending some of that charger sorry what about Ambeg with San Benito and Monterey County and us could it be something to consider for hydrogen production I don't know what their transit systems are going to be moving toward we've talked about it we've talked about San Luis Obispo Monterey County even us like what if we put one in the central valley or something like that that produces stuff like this we just haven't progressed far enough to have those conversations but it would be good if we can get the valley along with maybe even pulling in part of BTA because BTA is going to have to get to that we could all kind of leverage I just think we're already in that organization so it's not making sense to start there and you may have noticed or not but M-Bard the Air District was one of the fund sources on Chuck's name I think in the interest of food we might just any last statements and we can keep talking during that I just want to say Bruce we need two to one to two hundred thousand per bus which is not reflected here and it would actually be even more cheaper so from a staff perspective I think the takeaways are that the climate's changing to where from just a pure bus perspective and buying a bus it's just as economical if not more economical to go the Zebra route, the zero emission bus route than a traditional diesel or a CNG bus so that has piqued the interest of staff to make sure when we go buy a bus that it doesn't have a tailpipe on it unless the route unless the technical specs on the bus don't meet what we need on the route and I just think when you're looking at that spreadsheet 3C Energy is the bottom their staff is in fluid conversation with us and Chuck mentioned 200,000 and Bruce their staff is looking at $200,000 contributions to Metro towards future ZEP purchases so you can see how even further that will create a ZEP price that is to our advantage so I guess the bottom line takeaway at least from my perspective is it's just the technology now it's not the cost as much on the bus and the technology is there that the majority of your routes could be served by a hydrogen bus which offers you a lot more operational flexibility fuel time, the range of the bus resiliency and so your implementation plan that you've already approved said you wanted the majority of your fleet to be hydrogen for that flexibility but recognize that a mixed fleet so we're kind of going down that path and so I think the key takeaway is when we come to you with future bus purchases we've got a different mindset than what we had even six months or eight months ago just because of the changing landscape so I'm pretty excited I think the future is really trending now towards zero emission the tailpipe on those buses whether it's natural gas or not it has a real impact locally where we live because it's an emission coming out of that tailpipe even if it's a renewable natural gas so I just think the leadership of the agency and the region there's a lot of good reasons to continue to tell staff bring to us ZEP purchases unless you absolutely just can't make it work it'd be nice for board members not to try to explain to the public two steps forward, one step back you could spend a lot of time and then you still don't get it why would we do that why wouldn't you buy more fossil fuel buses you know we had a rationale on cost very good thank you Chuck, thank you Steve this is great stuff so this is the bus time application from clever devices that will be rolling out to the public and this will be rolled out in February of next year oh cool and we hope to actually beat that so where's my bus you have real time bus track and you can give your routing information your stock okay cool but what I really want to know is when will my bus get here we'll have real time predictions there'll be some customizations that the user can order a writer can drop for bus stop favorites etc and we can also subscribe to prediction alerts so in addition to that we will have the ability to push out information to our writers as to disruption let's say you have detours you'll see so back to where's my bus or when will my bus get here let's say it's running five minutes late or whatever it's going to happen here right you'll have information related to that so people will have more insight into what's happening out there and why their bus is a little behind the time you would grab a cup of coffee etc so really make it much more useful for our writers so in addition to the AVL aspect you see the APC component or automated passenger counter on the agenda we as of now do not have a contract for this aspect of the system we will be bringing in the board for consideration we expect to do so this month and with that aside from utilization data and very valuable tools for planning and Jonathan makes us to get this going we will be able to provide our writers with crowded level information and this would have been really valuable for pandemic times or peak pandemic times because he did set private thresholds on a bus so that's just a brief overview I really wanted to roll through this quickly so that we give you guys the opportunity to ask the questions any questions it looks great February so yeah it's getting earlier February is our target it's going to happen do you have an idea of how an individual usually has a smart phone connecting this what's it going to take on their end so this is going to be published through the tap store so it will be both iOS and Android available through that but in addition to this there will be a data back end so GTFS RT which stands for general transit feedback you will be able to use other applications such as transit app there will be a GMAP layer so you don't necessarily have to use this application to get that information any other questions sounds good Isaac thank you very much so as we transition into the affordable housing portion of this discussion which we've heard a lot about this morning Jared mentioned a few times in his presentation the importance of linking housing, affordable housing transportation particularly focused on certain corridors and we even saw evidence of support for that idea through the survey I wanted to introduce Bonnie the Economic Development Director from the City of Santa Cruz to give an update on the Metro Center Pacific Station project which has been a really important partnership between Metro and the City of Santa Cruz for the redevelopment of not just our transit facility and downtown but also the NB4 unit completely affordable housing thanks John and it's a pleasure to be before you today, thank you for inviting me to give an update on where we are with Pacific Station before I start on that I do have some handouts I don't have slides although I realize it would be much better if I had slides but I do want to leave you with something and I'll hand this one out afterwards we have so much housing going on it sounds like part of the theme for some of the topic today has been talking about the great need for housing and also that nexus between housing and transit so one of the things we've really been focused on it's been such a challenge in our community with such a housing crisis is really focusing on denser developments near transit so to that end we have three projects right now in the downtown core we have two affordable housing projects PAC Station is which really started with a collaboration with the Metro going all the way back to 2001 has morphed into two projects PAC Station south and PAC Station north and I'll talk about those in just a second but overall and with some of our partners we have over 400 units of 100% affordable housing in the downtown alone we have close to 1400 units in the pipeline some already in construction the project right next to Laurel Street 205 market rate units actually that project dedicated some land to the city which is now part of our PAC Station project so we're able to leverage that into more affordable units in our downtown core so I will pass this out because there's actually about city wide over 2,000 units in the development pipeline in the city and this will go a long way in our next regional housing needs allocation cycle that's coming up in 2023 to us hopefully meeting or at least on the track to meet some of our goals because I'm sure many of you are tracking on it's pretty daunting what we have to achieve as far as affordable housing through the state we want to do it we're in this housing crisis we're all in this together but it's going to be hard to secure those projects so going back to Metro and Pacific Station the projects in our collaboration together are just vital I think it's vital to show public-public and public-public private partnerships can work I think it's vital to show that projects in proximity to transit are really where projects and where we should be focusing a lot of our energy so to that and I'm going to hand out just just a few slides that show where we are with the project and I'll say one of the benefits of doing projects on publicly owned land is that our focus and goal is to build this project together so a little different than many market rate projects is that we can help really support the project by providing that land and that is definitely the case with Pack Station South and Pack Station North okay it looks like you all have them so I'm going to jump right in we do have some incredible developers working with us in the downtown on these projects with really depth of experience in doing mixed use projects transit and affordable housing specifically for Pack Station we have two projects and you can see on the bottom slide on that first page the one on the top is Pack Station North the one on the bottom is Pack Station South Pack Station South is actually under construction right now it's 70 units 100% affordable we are targeting it's a combination of studios of the three bedroom all of our units are between 30 and 60% of area median income and so as a public entity we can really come in and using some of leveraging some of our affordable housing trust fund ensure that those units at the deepest level of affordability get built they're more expensive to build they often need more subsidy but we've been able to leverage our funding and secure some public funds through the state and through the local housing trust program to match our city affordable housing trust fund for this project for Pack Station North we've been able to secure with Metro and with our development partner over 51 million in state grants we have an infrastructure grant for 20 million for the project for a lot of the public enhancements improvements a lot of that funding will go directly to part of the Metro facility itself from the tarmac to some of the solar elements that we're doing in the project and then we also have an ASIC funding award of 30 million and that one has specifically 20 million that's going directly to housing and 10 million that's also going to public infrastructure so between these two we're doing really well when we haven't even submitted our application or our building permit so we're feeling pretty good you can see roughly the area in downtown Pacific it's right where the current Metro is and what we're doing is we're exchanging from your curious about the partnership that we have with Metro is exchanging some of the land that we own south of Metro to get that frontage right on Pacific Avenue so that we can focus a new office for Metro with housing on top of it and then the new transit facility for Metro behind that with a new tarmac and better flow and orienting towards front street we are making some changes to front street including a new on the intersection a new lighted intersection widening it a little bit there to accommodate the bus turn radius that we are making some improvements there we're taking a little bit of corner of a property we own on the parking lot across the street on the front street side to accommodate that turning radius and the turn lanes that Metro needs for the buses that's the plan and you can see some of the layouts here also show one of the things we're really excited about is also our partnership with Santa Cruz Community Health Center and DENTIS so in Pack Station South we're including low cost medical and dental care as part of that project and so there'll be an office space for the two of them and medical offices on Pack Station South just south of Pack Station North where we are right now is we're planning plans in December so we're working towards that we feel like we're in a good place one thing we did change that we did do is that we originally were planning on doing an office on the second floor Pack Station North we're now going to be adding some more affordable units in there it helps us be even more competitive for our next funding round so while we were originally targeting 94 units you'll see we're actually up to probably probably going to be around 130 units in Pack Station North so we're getting even more units in the project so February March is the next tax credit round application we are looking to make that round and so where that puts us is completely on schedule for hopefully a decision and a funding award in May and June and potentially construction start next year November December weather permitting 23 time frame with that at the back of this packet just because I get so many questions about it and it might be a slightly controversial project there's some information about the downtown library affordable housing project if you just are curious about what that project is that's at the back as well I'm happy to answer any questions that you have and after I finish I'll also hand out these other packet of information on just sort of the other housing projects that we have thank you Pauline thank you for having me any questions let's move on to John are we back where are we going next John Soquel Park and Ryan Brian Brian Hi Brian Specter Specter Corvid Architects I've been in the community since 1985 we've helped the metro with various projects over the decades including your Watsonville Transit Center in 1994 we were the architects on that project we've helped you with your admin offices and a number of your other facilities so in specific we're assisting you with the Paul Sweet Road Park and Ride site looking to land the Paracruz and mobility center there with about a 5,000 square foot building 32 shuttle bands 25 driver parking spaces 10 staff parking spaces and some visitor parking spaces so that's going to be pretty much a horizontal program on that site which leaves room to go up so we put together an initial study for that site we met with the director for the community development and infrastructure department with the county and one of their principal planners to vet that information so with the sustainability updates that are happening with the county's planning ordinances as a base level that property could have 41 residential units if we went 100% affordable with that it would be subject to the state density bonus state density bonus units would get you an additional 33 units so that site could actually hold 74 residential units so this is the property here Dominican is up in this area here's the Soquel Avenue bridge so it's this park and ride your property lines are actually a little bit tighter here and come back to this spot and the state owns that parcel so GIS needs to be updated a little bit but it's a three six acre site so you could potentially get 74 units there so we're looking obviously the primary directive is to support the metro's operations with parent crews and the mobility center on the site but we have a lot of room to go up and get additional units on that property so we're currently doing some initial analysis for you on that aside from that your other facility is any questions on the pulse week road site and then the other site where you have a lot of opportunity is the which is now dated Watsonville transit center so when we helped you with this project back in 94 this was a conversion of an existing bank building into a bus terminal and then obviously the bus circulation and multimodal transportation hub I think the metro's been having some preliminary conversations with the city of Watsonville about some of the opportunities on that site so similarly there's room to go up and get a substantial number of units on that property and that site's just under an acre so depending on where the city ordinances are and some initial studies it would probably be something similar to density that would see at your pulse week road that's it in a nutshell that's great thank you I just want to say it feels so good to be part of an agency that actually doing something about the housing transit connection that people talk about but there's some real numbers here and real affordability in the units that's really great any other questions for our guests before but Lonnie you have a question it's kind of a perspective so I think it's amazing this opportunity we have to build densely around transit that's critical if we're going to move in the direction for we to move both with our county and national and beyond some things to think about when we look at these buildings and these communities that we're going to build is to include a ground up perspective from the community because I think that that helps bring in the vibrancy and the perspective of what keeps things alive in the communities I have concerns when we talk about fully segregating and I know there's issues in terms of how funding is given to us for that, segregating low income versus market rate because you end up potentially like with the projects having failures when you don't have integration of socioeconomic cultural and other aspects of our community and you segregate them out so if there was a way to be more inclusive and integrative I really would urge us to look at that also street level vibrancy there's some great books and literature and research on how to create happy cities part of that is that ground up level communication with the community inclusiveness but also ensuring that we include this ground level life that is interactive between the street life and the people that live in those housing developments so again there's a lot of research around it I urge you to look at some of that that's out there because it can make a great future of the vibrancy of our community as we grow it so graphics let us not be so haste that we forget this important integration of vibrancy in our communities and how it can include people in that and it's important to create walkable cities as well so we have this great opportunity to do that so one thing I think about is in every remarkable community there should be a market that you can go get chicken and eggs and small things that don't have to necessarily worry about getting one to transit so if you can create a block of housing why not create a market as a part of that as well and other services that are easy to access and I appreciate your time presenting this it's a great opportunity thank you any comments, questions from the rest of the board I appreciate our staff on the day it's been quite a loss Shepra thank you this has been a really enlightening and great, great workshop just to pick up that thread around housing there is a real opportunity with the city and the county revising their housing element and potentially looking at zoning ordinances so I'm looking forward to the metro district really being engaged and as that effort goes on the way starting January around the table I think everyone appreciates great job by the staff all the consultants no wasted time at all just good content just a wide variety really really exciting to thank all of you it's nice to get good news things are moving looks good any closing comments you know what your executive staff and all of your staff they're top notch so I'd say hold on tight because coming up you got a lot of action on it you already see what October and November all right and to that end our next board meeting this is October 28th at 9am we'll be doing that via zoom once again and with that I adjourn