 You want to be here in the back of the brothers. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. 11. I'm very excited to be here again and again. You're both in the series, it's just how good, we're good. How about you? This is dangerous. We'll stay at home. That's what I thought, too. That's what I thought, too. She's just coming to learn about it. She was here the last time, too. We're going to go to North Carolina in June, and then we're just going to do this thing here. Oh, man, you didn't call me. I was probably off anyway, so it doesn't matter. I'm going to go home as long as there's some meeting to go to. There's a lot of pressure. It's perfect, it's almost done. When you go in, you're supposed to act like you planned it that way. I know, we're still going to call Dorsal Park. Yeah. Let's get the show on the road here. Okay, let's get the meeting started, the July 17th meeting. And we'll start with changes to the agenda. Changes. Next item is, did I miss the consent agenda? No consent. No consent, okay. Next item is public comment period for items not on the agenda. Anyone from the public want to make any comments to the board? Don't see anything. So we'll move on. Approval of a minutes of June 19, 2019 annual meeting. Second. Motion from Jeff, second from Andy. Any discussion? If not all in favor please say aye. Opposed? All abstain. Abstain. Two is that John, Barbara and Don. Okay, next item. We have autonomous vehicles. Joe Cigali. Welcome, Joe. Thanks. Do I need to, Charlie? I definitely need it. You have to have this done automatically or we're just not going to like... I don't see what happens when humans get involved. It's coming up. It's coming up. Warm it up. Okay. All right. All right. Hello, everybody. I'm Joe Cigali. Joe, as we go through this, do you want questions as you go through or do you want to wait until the end? So you only have 20 minutes, right? Right. So let me get through it and then we'll have questions and discussion. Okay. Sounds good. So I'm Joe Cigali. I'm the director of policy planning and research at the Vermont Agency of Transportation. And I'm going to give you some background information on automated vehicles and talk about the law that got passed this year by the legislature to the self-automated vehicle driving app that allows for the testing of automated vehicles on public roads in Vermont. And I want to talk about the role of municipalities is in that process. But I think it's good for me to give you a little bit of background information first just so hopefully it'll make a little bit more sense. But I won't be going into tons and tons of detail about automated vehicles. So what this slide shows are some of the technology that's on automated vehicles. It includes LiDAR which basically sends out a point cloud and that can understand sort of three-dimensionally the objects that are in front of it. radar which allows measuring of distance. There's other cameras on board. There's obviously artificially intelligent software on board that's interpreting all that information. And all these things together are the automated driving system. And there are the convention right now is to talk about different levels of automation. And level zero is basically conventional car. The human is in complete control. Level one is driver assisted vehicles. And the example of that is cruise control or it's kind of staying in one direction. That's a very rudimentary type of automation. Partial automation, a little bit more options. The vehicle could actually not just go in one direction but might be able to move in different directions. Not just in one plane for example, self-parking cars. But in that case obviously the human clearly is still in control. And what the legislation addresses are levels three, four and five. So a level three vehicle automated driving system. The system itself has the ability to carry out the complete dynamic driving task as it's called. And that means it's the ability to interpret the environment around it. And make decisions about what to do and how to react to what's happening around it. Just like you can as a human. You see a pedestrian come out in the street, you know, you should slow down. You see other vehicles and you know how to interpret. And you are sort of going through the calculation of how fast is that vehicle going. Can I pull out ahead of that vehicle and so on. So it has the complete ability to make all of those decisions and actually control the vehicle. The key difference between a level three system and level four and five is that the human is always the fallback. So if the system fails in some way, it's the human that is responsible for putting the vehicle in what's called a minimal risk condition. That might mean they're taking over control of operating the vehicle or that they need to get it on the side of the road. A level four system has can completely drive the vehicle. The difference is that it's it's it happens within what's called an operational design domain. So for example, it might just be on the interstate or it might be only during daylight hours. So or it might only be in decent weather or date, yeah, daytime. So but while it's operating, the system itself has the ability to put the vehicle in a minimal risk condition. So the system has the fallback control in situations like that. The human may take over the vehicle at some point, but it's not required when the vehicle is operating where it's supposed to be operating. And so it can get into a minimal risk condition. And then level five is complete self driving vehicle, meaning the human never needs to control the vehicle. And humans are really only passengers and it may actually not just be humans. It may be commodities that are being moved by the by these vehicles. So the legislation that was passed again just to remind you has to do a level three, four, five and allowing the testing of those on on public roads in Vermont. And I will say, if you read the legislation, it's Act 60, this in its section 16 through 18, you won't see reference to level three, four and five. But you will see reference to the terms that I was using dynamic driving task, minimal risk condition and so on. Because these are, well, these are standard. These are recommended practice right now on the legislation really goes to the function. So these definitions kind of shift a little bit in the industry that it's still kind of it's resilient to those sorts of changes. So, you know, the common question is, well, how fast are these vehicles going to be on on the roadways? And this this was a forecast that was done by the National Governor Highway Safety Association. Looking at price points and, you know, the way technology has been adopted and and so on. And they're estimating, you know, in the 2020. So the next decade, you know, maybe one to two percent of the vehicles on the road will have some level of that of automated driving system three, four or five. And, you know, one to two percent doesn't sound very much, but when you think about electric vehicle penetration, right, it's really, really low. One to two percent in Vermont is is let's see we have six is like almost a million registered cars. I mean, you know, so you're there's a good chance you're going to see some of these cars out there next decade by out to the 2050s. It's maybe 40 to 60 percent of the fleet out there on the roads will have some level of driving automation. And one of the key takeaways here is, first of all, probably conventional vehicles are not going to completely go away, at least according to this forecast. And there's going to be a mix of these different levels of automation on the highway system. So something we really need to think about is in a lot of ways driving is going to becoming more complicated, not less complicated because there's just going to be all these different systems. Now, some might argue that this is a pretty conservative forecast. There is another forecast that I that I've talked about. I think it's called rethink X is the is the think tank that did it that they claim that they they projected that the smartphone growth and how fast that was going to happen. And their argument is that, you know, these if if self driving cars become shared vehicles, the cost is going to decrease significantly relative to, you know, the cost to own a vehicle, you know, anywhere between five thousand and ten thousand dollars per year per household. And if that really happens and the technology kind of kind of works the way some people hope it will, that that that the shift could be a lot faster. And but still there's there's going to be some mix of I think all these vehicles on the road for at least in our typical planning horizon, right, you know, five to twenty years. So, you know, in the transportation industry, the reason that most transportation people are really interested in this besides the fact that it's just coming at us. We're not really controlling it is that, you know, this is the number of fatalities on US highways in twenty seventeen and there's a lot more other serious injuries that happen as well. And ninety something percent of these are related to human error, right, our human behavior. So the thought is, well, if you can remove the human from the equation, hopefully we can start to make a dent in this because we've kind of leveled out in our ability, you know, with current technology and current drivers to reduce the number of crashes. And the number of crashes is now starting to go back up with vehicle miles of travel where it was it's been flat, you know, it's actually declining significantly over, you know, many decades. And now it's kind of like starting to go up again and talk generally about some of the impact. So there's kind of these two big scenarios. One is that everybody, every individual continues to own their own self-driving vehicle. You know, so each household has two of these and, you know, becomes easier to go places. So there's just going to be a lot more of these vehicles on the road. And this is obviously a pretty expensive model. The other scenario on the right and that is a self-driving shuttle is that we'll have some sort of shared system. If you think about Uber Lyft now, it's something similar to that and it's referred to as mobility as a service, except there won't be a human in the vehicle. You know, and Uber is now testing automated vehicles in Pittsburgh. You can get on board. You can actually try this out if you're in that city. And there's a bunch of cities that are testing these now. So if it's a shared model, the cost will go down. But, you know, especially in a rural area, will this work for us? I'm not really sure. You know, I think the opportunity is like it's expensive to provide rural transit, right? And a big part of the cost is the driver. And so, you know, you remove the driver from the equation and it starts to become much more affordable to expand transit everywhere and to make it much more flexible, right? So it's truly on-demand. I mean, the on-demand service we have now, it's not that bad, right? But you generally have to plan, you know, the special services transit. You have to plan ahead like a day, you know, or more. I mean, this still could be like very much on-demand. It might actually work in a rural area. So keep that in mind when we think about testing. So we did, we had a big stakeholder meeting in November of 2016 with the annual meeting of the Vermont Highway Safety Alliance. They had a lot of emergency responders and planners and academics and others there. And we were talking about this and, you know, the concerns are how do you, you know, grant it. A lot of people die on the highways in the U.S. But this is complicated technology. How do we sort of manage through the transition? Because it's complicated. Most agree that Vermont should require a permit for testing of automated vehicles on public roads. That seemed kind of obvious to me, maybe because I'm a bureaucrat, I don't know. But, you know, there are states that really just, that they don't require a permit. And they just let their existing laws stand and they're maybe not as concerned about what's happening out there with these. In the long term, automated vehicles are going to be important to Vermont's economy. And then we should start doing something actively to prepare. And so this kind of came out of, the legislature asked us two years ago to go out and talk to people and kind of see what they felt about this. So thinking about what the federal and state role is here, and municipal role to some extent, just as big picture is, this really is not going to change a lot. At the federal level, they're responsible for the equipment, the vehicles, the equipment and ensuring that they're safe. Generally educating the public about vehicles and issuing different guidance and so on. At the state role, we have a lot to do. We issue licenses for the operators. We do education and training, driver training. We register vehicles. We regulate motor vehicle insurance and liability. We do safety inspections. And at the state and local level, we establish and enforce traffic laws and we build and maintain the infrastructure. So these are all areas that are going to be touched by automation in some fashion. So over the last, I don't know, four or five years, there's really been a proliferation of legislation across the different states. You can see in 2016 that the gray is where there's not legislation or executive orders. And on the right, you can see it's kind of spreading throughout the nation. And this was in 2018, so this is still a little bit dated. We're shown as blue. Vermont shown as blue. And that's because there was some legislation in 2016 just telling us to go talk to people. So just take a little bit of gray and assault to this. But people are, you know, the states are thinking about this. At the federal level, there was legislation that made it out of the house in, I think, 2017, self-drive act, which is also a really long act on them for something. And it did make it through the Senate and, you know, now they kind of have to start over. But the tendency is to, you know, be technology neutral, make sure that you allow for innovation and don't be too prescriptive is kind of where they were coming from. But we still, you know, you go back and think about what the state and federal role is. The feds are really about the vehicle equipment and making it safe and we're about everything else. So it's, you know, even though there's concern about a patchwork, it's hard for there not to be a patchwork because we're all somewhat different. So S149, which it was part, this is the annual DMV miscellaneous bill. It had a bunch of other things in it. But sections 16 and 18 are called the Automated Vehicle Act. And so I think there's a good question about, you know, why would we want to allow testing on our roads to start with? And, you know, it's first of all to facilitate the deployment in Vermont. We really want to encourage testers to come here and run these vehicles in our environment just because our context is different than other places. I mean, you know, yeah, we're similar to New Hampshire, we're similar to upstate New York and they have some of the same challenges in Maine and so on. But, you know, it's sort of like we don't want to fall behind this technology. We also want Vermonters to have some experience and start to build some confidence with it to be able to touch the technology and think about it. We want to provide a clear process for testers and we want a publicly transparent process on the testing. In Arizona, they allowed testing and there wasn't really an open process. And, you know, some of their residents are throwing things at these vehicles, you know, rocks and things like that. Because they might move a little different and they're just frustrated with them. So, you know, and we have a long tradition of public input in Vermont, so we're trying to respect that. So, okay, there's a lot here. So the board that will approve the testing permits is the Traffic Committee. And that includes the Secretary of Transportation, the Commissioner of DMV, and the Commissioner of Public Safety. So that's a standing, you know, committee that, you know, you might be most familiar with them on setting speed limits, right, when you want to change the speed limit in your town on the State Highway. They do some other things as well. So, the Traffic Committee can issue a permit without any sort of municipal input for testing of automated vehicles on the State Highway system, which includes interstate, you know, U.S. and Vermont numbered routes, and also class one town highways. So that's the continuation of a, you know, U.S. or Vermont numbered route through a town that's still under, it's under municipal jurisdiction, but the thought was we wanted to make sure there was some continuity. So, if the testing is, if a tester wants to be on a municipal road, a class two, three or four municipal or town highway, then it does require pre-approval by the municipality. So, and this was, we, there was a lot of back and forth on this one with the legislature, but, you know, basically the way it's supposed to work is I need to start to recruit municipalities that are willing to be automated vehicle testing municipalities and try to do that ahead of time. And so, we'll have a bank of municipalities that say, these are places that, you know, are welcoming you, welcoming you, and you can come and test your vehicles there as long as you get a permit from the Traffic Committee. There will be, you know, a public process while the Traffic Committee is reviewing and issuing those permits. Municipalities can pull out whenever they want, which is, that's a little bit dicey, right? I mean, because a tester makes a lot of investments in coming here and a municipality decides at the last minute to pull out. They actually can still do that, but the legislature just felt really, you know, strongly that, you know, it's about local control. Municipalities can't approve a testing, testing on their own, right? So a municipality can certainly seek out testers and decide they want to be a testing community, but still the Traffic Committee needs to approve the permit. So we're charged, the agency of transportation is charged with developing a testing guidance, and I'll talk about that in a minute, and the actual application process that we have, we have till January 2021 to do that. So it's still a little ways out, but I wanted enough time to kind of put it together and to recruit municipalities. So any state or local law enforcement officer may stop a specific AV test vehicle when it's out on the road, but the Traffic Committee is the only one that has the authority to actually make the entire permit void. I think those are the main highlights. And then some other things about the testing entity itself. So the human operator has to be in the vehicle at all time and be able to take over control. So that's regardless if it's a level of three, four and five. And this again, there was some back and forth on this one. I kind of was hoping that we would allow the vehicle to be, you know, possibly you could take it over remotely, but some of the legislators just weren't comfortable with that. They said, let's give this some time and see how it works. You have to have, so the operator must be at least 21 years old. The operator must pass a background check and they can't have a blood alcohol contact more than .02, which I think that's the level for school bus and commercial vehicles. There's $5 million of liability insurance. You know, there's different, I guess, ways you can provide that letter or credit or whatever, but $5 million of insurance is required. The vehicle has to be able to comply with all state and local laws. And then the testing vehicle must be clearly identifiable. Would you think that would be a logical thing? But the industry is not that excited about that. They would prefer that drivers don't know that's a self-driving vehicle. So when they're in the traffic stream, you're not acting differently. But again, for now, you know, I think it kind of makes sense. That's actually a, I think it's in Michigan, a pizza hut is testing out self-driving vehicles to deliver their pizzas. So this is just a quick overview of the guidance that we're putting together. I won't go through all of these, but lots of, well, not lots, but several other states have similar guidance, so we'll be drawing from that. And this is really the specifics of the information that has to be provided for the permit, so that when the traffic committee is reviewing it based on staff review, that they feel confident that they can allow these vehicles on the highways. And just looking down the road a little bit in terms of, you know, a year or two, a lot of, many states are actually not just allowing testing, but they're developing legislation that allows for the use of these vehicles once they're on the market. So we just, you know, in some ways this was a learning year. We wanted the legislature to understand kind of what the complexities are here. But I think it's not unreasonable to think in a couple of years we will start, we will have some legislation that allows the use of these vehicles. It's called deployment by the general public. And, you know, we have to think about who the operator is, especially when this, when it's shifting from a human to the system, you know, lots of other things there. But, you know, there's like, there's a law in the books right now that you can't have basically an idling car, right? Well, these vehicles, if they could drive themselves, they won't have an operator in them. And, you know, the way the legislation is written now or statutes are written now, that's not allowed. So there's some specifics like that we have to deal with. But really it's like who, and also who's liable. That's also a big question. When the operator is switching from the human to the system, you know, and if it's the system that's operating the vehicle, is it the manufacturer of that system that's liable if there's a collision? And so there's some models out there, but that's going to just take a lot more time to kind of figure it out. And we're working with our neighborhood states to really think about, you know, where should we be consistent across some of these things as well. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, we may want to, you know, I got a couple calls from testers. One was from someone that wants to do a commercial vehicle test, a truck test. And they're working out in California now, and they're thinking about the Eastern Seaboard. Another one was from a company that's working in Boston, and they're running a test right now. And the guy, you know, he has a connection to Vermont, right? Just that's kind of like the Vermont story. So he's like, well, you know, this would be great to test these vehicles in Vermont. So I think there might be some interest, but I think we'll have to sort of take the initiative and maybe, like Rhode Island DOT is running a shuttle in Providence right now. Maybe we want to do something similar like that and take the initiative ourselves. So that's it. I mean, I could use some help with thinking about how I reach out to municipalities, recruit some municipalities, and I mean, I know there's going to be some skepticism, but it'd be great to hear your thoughts on that. I just have a question. Is all the technology now being designed to be on board, or is the infrastructure also going to have to be upgraded with some kind of embedded technology improvements to handle these things? There might be a... infrastructure side of things. I mean, our response to that is you cannot depend on our infrastructure. You can't, you know, these vehicles are not going to work. I mean, think about gravel roads, 8,000 miles of gravel roads in Vermont. And if they're going to be ubiquitous, they've got to be able to handle those kinds of conditions. So just like you as a human can interpret, I'm on a gravel road and I can kind of see the ditches and it's got to be able to do that. And that's a big issue around the country, like California up there, the width of their edge lines, white edge lines from like 4 inches to 6 inches. Well, that's a huge amount of money, right? And maybe some of that needs to be done initially to help with the transition, but in the long run, they have to just be able to interpret and work on the roads that are out there. It's the same with navigation. I mean, GPS cuts out a lot in mountainous terrain and stuff. Right. Well, you know, and the human ends up getting lost. But the vehicle itself is, you know, able to look, you know, in the environment around it and, you know, it's like, well, I'm lost. I don't know where to go next. And it's going to stop and, you know... Detour? Yeah. Try going through the detour up in Montreal. Up in Montreal with an AI. Can you even tell you where you are in the GPS? And, you know, there's... I didn't talk about the whole other connected vehicle side of it, which is, you know, so the vehicles being connected to traffic signals. So it slows down. So it hits it when it's green instead of red, but also connected to work zones. That might be technology we would want to get out there as soon as possible. And that might be some of the early technology. Even if it's not a self-driving car, connected technology is going to be available on other vehicles. Other vehicles sooner than the full automation. So, I mean, I think there's value in us making investments that improve safety in certain places like that. But overall, they kind of have to take what we have available and work with it. Yeah. Joe, what do you see is a couple of the benefits of being an early adapter as a municipality versus what you feel might be the downsides if you were a municipality looking at this? That's a really great question. Yeah. I mean, you know what? I haven't tried to push this too much. I mean, my only thing I can say is that you get to be on the cutting edge of this technology and to be a leading community in it. I think, you know, the risk might be if a crash happens in your community and it is related to these vehicles. That's going to be a tough thing, right? Because the Select Border City Council or whatever is, you know, going to have said, yeah, we're okay with this. And, you know, so, yeah, I think that's probably the main downside if something bad happens, you're kind of on the hook for that. Other questions? Yes. Chris. In municipalities, it would seem that, you know, Burlington, South Burlington have probably the opportunity for people who are coming in as tourists, the number of hotels in South Burlington and certainly the growing number of hotels in downtown Burlington would be the two communities to start with as far as talking to their DPWs and asking them, what do you see for traffic, you know, getting down and dirty with larger cities in the state to figure out what they see? And then, yes, there are smaller communities that have the same thing if you go to Northfield and you ask them, you know, what happens? Who gets stuck? Where do they get stuck on the mud roads in March and April? You know, talking to the DPW forum and folks of that sort, I think, would give you some decent feedback as a sampling of the other more rural towns and certainly the smaller sized towns as well. And, yeah, I don't know how to kick it to select boards or councils, you know, because they'll not necessarily give you the short answers or... I need to think about my response to your question, I think. You know, I sort of had this thought that one of our, you know, there's, like I said, shuttles being run in Providence, Rhode Island and other places and I think in Vermont, maybe we should be thinking about a shuttle that runs from Huntington to Burlington, you know, or Huntington to the parking lot, you know, and how can that work in a rural area and I think that's something we can learn from in that and then, you know, slowly ramp that up, you know, in bad weather, you know, and that sort of stuff. Because I think there's huge opportunities for us in a rural state, you know, ultimately in the long run. And then some of the questions I had, they had the category and you probably can tell me quickly for the emergency vehicle first responders interactions, you know, I said that police officers can pull over a vehicle. If it's the vehicle's fully automated and there's no way for the human to control it, how does the vehicle know that versus pulling over to allow emergency vehicle to go by? Officer gets out, the vehicle takes off. Well, you know, there was an incident where there was some level of self-driving vehicle on the road and I think the driver had fallen asleep or something and the police were trying to pull it over and they just pulled out in front of it until they stopped. So that's like a simple way to do it, but in the long term, you know, this is the connected vehicle technology again. I think the vehicle has to be stockable by law enforcement, which means some sort of connectivity and control. And then similarly, when you talk about level 3, 4, and 5 for the legislature, it sounds like we require in our legislature that it have a human operator in control. Yes. We are going to have level 5 vehicles in this state according to that. Well, that's for testing purposes. So in the automobile, the American automobile alliance kind of made that argument. They said, you know, basically by always requiring a human in the vehicle you're never really going to see a testing of a fully self-driving vehicle. I guess I see it as let's get the ball rolling and we can, you know, we can change that legislation after there's, after we show some confidence, right? You know, they didn't like it the other way, which is like just trust us, let us give us that flexibility first and then you can change it later. Now let the machines take over. Yeah. So you kind of made some reference to a public relations standpoint, but is there liability protection in here? Like financially, is there a financial risk to a municipality that says it? I don't, you know, my take on it and I'm sure someone, you know, that is not the law of an idea is that that's what the liability insurance is for. I mean, no more, it shouldn't be any more liable than you are now. Right? I mean, if you were to, if a municipality was to, you know, dig a hole to replace a culvert and they let that hole wide open some night, you know, that's, they might be liable in that particular case. Yeah, I'm not talking about other actions, but just allowing AV testing in your town and AV operator does something bad. The answer, Charlie, is the lawyer will sue the town to the judge to dismiss whether or not the town is actually liable because the lawyer will come after everybody. It's just the way it works. But there wasn't anything that's physically in the bill that held them harmless. Yeah, that gives protection to towns who do that. It would seem to me, I mean, you know, we have all had situations with bad accidents in our towns and, you know, typically they don't get sued. I mean, like you said, I mean, they'll grab whoever they can. So I would imagine it would fall under similar guidelines. Anybody interested? Anybody really? Are there any select board city council members on that? How about Vermont League of Cities and Towns? Do you talk with them? Well, they were definitely involved with that, making sure the municipalities were going to have a say during the while the legislation was being developed. Any other questions? I think, Joe, generally, you know, like, you know, as you start to, you know, work on the story here and, you know, happy to take it around the towns or do whatever. I will say that, you know, particularly at the House Transportation Committee was really insistent that the regional planning commissions be involved in helping us sort of pull this together and find municipalities that are willing to, you know, participate. And so I think that's where I really should be working with you guys at probably the staff level and see how we can craft a message. I'll go around to the boards in the fall. So there's, I mean, I can at least plant a seed. It doesn't sound like we're going to be probably over the course of the next 18 months, really, working on who's ready, right? Right. Okay. Certainly there's a time window that's, I don't know if it's here, but, you know, the AI is progressing in kind of a very quick pace. Yeah, okay. Had the legislative committees or is your shop kind of looked at this and determined that there's a minimum technology threshold to incur, you know, and what's the timing of the testing? Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it 18 months? Is it 24 months? I mean, you're going to do your book by January 2021. Does that coincide with when there's going to be an effort to at least establish a timeline for when we'd allow this testing? You mean how long the testing would be on the road? Well, no, I'm talking about when does the AI involved in this meet the minimum threshold that would allow for safe testing? And has somebody made that determination? Well, it's happening, or the testing is happening around the country now. I know, but in different limited environments. I mean, if you're doing it in Boston and in Pittsburgh, you're doing it in an urban environment. Yeah. And I'm just wondering, has anybody here decided that, well, before we allow it to happen outside of Burlington or South Burlington, you know, is there some minimum level of technology that needs to be achieved? Is there anybody capable of looking at that? I mean, here's where I'm coming from. In my community, we don't have bus service for school kids. They all walk to school in the village. If we've got autonomous vehicles running around and there's little pint-sized kids walking across streets, even with crossing guards, that's a cause for concern. Yeah. You know, this might be an oversimplification, but what I saw as a requirement and the other testing guidance around the country is that the tester will have to demonstrate that they have run these vehicles in similar environments. So that might mean, like, if we want vehicles run on gravel roads, well, maybe they did a test up at the firing range. I don't know. They have to show that they tested it in very similar environments. So that's the only answer I can give you. I can't really say what level of AI is required. It's more like how do they actually operate and can they operate in the conditions that you're going to be testing them on the road. Well, it almost seems to me that we need to have some comfort that the AI is going to work. Right. OK. Yes. And, you know, it can be a fresh start. We haven't, you know, yeah. And there's a risk to be in the first combined kind of semi-urban, semi-rural place and it hasn't been tested there. And who wants to go first? Who wants to be the first one to allow them to run around their streets where nowadays people are walking like this with their heads buried in their phone, not paying attention, thinking the cars are going to stop for them when they step off the curb. Absolutely. I think if you look at it in a different direction, too, one of the values we may have in the unique environments that I'm thinking mud, I mean, it can, are there areas that a company would be wanting to try where, like, my Honda can't go. You know, if you've got a four-wheel drive truck, you know, with certain roads, you can't go on. How does the autonomous vehicle understand when it hits that road that, you know, mud is basically solid. So how does this LiDAR work to tell it that it can't go over that road? And we can, so that doesn't mean they have to be running around everywhere, that there may be three roads in a neighborhood that are a perfect test ground for that kind of thing during a certain time of the year. And you can actually market that to them. There may be some economic opportunity here as well. It will learn, I mean, so the first automated vehicle that gets stuck in the mud is going to share that experience with every other automated vehicle. Whereas each human, they get stuck, each human that gets stuck in the mud has to pass it down generation by generation. We're in a valve. And in providing an environment where that might be able to happen to be tested, that's not, quote, running around. They're doing a test in a certain neighborhood. It could be valuable. But, initially, it's not operator-less, correct? So, I mean, there is somebody who is controlling. Except for if the operator is playing mad and there's something like that. Well, yeah, but that's no different than regular drivers who are doing things they shouldn't be doing. I think we're kind of... No, no, I understand. I understand. I understand that. I understand that. But we're kind of getting off on tangents here about what couldn't happen. And I think, going back to what Barbara was saying, the testing phase is going to be a driver there. And they're going to be, if I heard you right, Joe, those people are going to have to pass some kind of a test or certification that they're going to be in charge of the vehicle if it gets off the road. And I would suggest... You might be able to find operators, you know, relatively available to be there and to have it in a very contested environment without having it off track and otherwise going places wouldn't necessarily want it to go. I probably missed this, but what was the timeframe that you would be looking for municipalities to be signing up? Well, so the law basically says, when I publish the guidance... So it's 20 by 2021. I think the towns that have decided to, you know, participate. I mean, if no towns decide to participate, I mean, you still have the option of doing it on the state routes. How do you decide whether you want to participate with the guidelines without the guidance? Well, I mean, I can describe what the, you know, the enough details. I'm working on that now. I mean, we'll have that as a draft, but... I would also want to add addressing your concerns, Jeff, is a lot of these... A lot of, you know, some of the technology even now, a lot of these cars are full of warning lights and, like, you need to have both hands on the wheel if you don't. It shoots off the lights. That's often an alarm. Perhaps that would alleviate some of these safety concerns if there's enough feedback within the car, where if the driver does decide, oh, they're going to play John Madden football, the car will scream at it. You know, there's definitely the technology exists for that to happen now in the Tesla's and things like that. And maybe some additional legislation there where we would tell them that there needs to be some sort of system there to keep the driver paying attention. And that Pennsylvania has that and their guidance. They have some specifics about what's required to be able to make sure the driver is, you know, notified to be able to take over control. Okay. So, stay tuned. Thanks, Joe. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'll see you in Essex, man. Next item is the 2023 Transportation Improvement Program. Christine, that's you, I guess. I'll just make some calls while I'm here. All right. Transportation Improvement Program for 2020 to 2023. I handed out copies of the TIP document. If anybody didn't get one, then I have more. Just so this, most of you have seen this presentation before, so I'm just going to go through pretty quickly and if there are questions, feel free to stop me. But just I always like to show this slide, which gives kind of an overview of the transportation planning process that we carry out here, beginning with a broad vision, goals for the county, and through the Metropolitan Transportation Plan and the ECOS plan. And from there, we start looking at location-specific issues with planning studies, corridor studies, and the scoping studies then get more specifically looking at improvements in specific locations and alternatives. And once we develop those projects, we look to get funding for the projects and have them move forward in the TIP, which is where we are right now and hopefully moving into right-of-way design and construction following that point. So what is the TIP? It's a document that we're required to prepare. All MPOs across the country are required to make TIPs, Transportation Improvement Programs, and there are specific federal regulations that say how we need to do it and what needs to be in it. Just so I think most of you are aware that there is also a State Transportation Improvement Program, the STIP, and that covers the rest of the state outside of Chittin County, and the TIP is incorporated into the STIP. So the TIP becomes part of the STIP for Chittin County. So a few important points regarding this document. So the TIP is multimodal. It includes all federally funded transportation projects. It must be fiscally constrained, and that means that there's a dollar limit that can't be exceeded for the TIP. So where does the constraint come from? Well, it comes really in a consultative process with VTrans when we're developing this document, and it's based largely on project schedules and their readiness to move forward. And once the TIP is adopted, the limit is set, and we can't go above that amount for any of the years in the TIP. The TIP covers four years. It must be updated at least every four years. Whoops, what did I just do? I'm sorry. It must be updated at least every four years. We follow the schedule that VTrans does for the STIP, so we do it every year. And the TIP authorizes the obligation of federal funds. It's a little bit of your language that we use, but basically all that really means is that the obligation is a formal process by FHWA to set aside money for a specific project. So it doesn't mean that the money is spent, but they just say, Champlain Parkway, here's 10 million, it belongs to you, and then they can spend down on that money. So that's what it is. So how do projects get on the TIP? So it's the intent of the federal government that we all work together, right? It's supposed to be a continuing, comprehensive transportation planning process. And I think the point of this is so that the federal funds that come to the state, the county, everyone is spent according to a plan, a planning process. So we work with VTrans, we work with GMT, we work with the airport, although I will say the airport projects are listed in the TIP for information, and we don't have authority over those funds. And another important point is that projects in the TIP have to be ready to spend the money. So this is funds that come from Federal Highway Administration. They have to be obligated before the end of the federal fiscal year. If they're not, then they can go away, and Federal Highway won't obligate the funds unless the projects are ready to go. So we want to make sure the projects are ready to go in order to have them in the TIP, and then the last piece is that the projects also have to be listed in the Transportation Capital Program, which is what authorizes VTrans to work on projects. So Chittin County, it has to be in the TIP and in the Capital Program. So just a quick overview of what it is, and you have the document in front of you to follow on if you like. So there is an introduction that just says what it is. There's a brief discussion about transportation performance measures in this section. There's an adoption resolution, there's a glossary, there's a map, and then there's the section two is the Projects by Municipality. The section three are some tables and figures that give you the overall totals and show the information in different ways. Just very briefly, so this is page one of the TIP. Projects are organized by community. We have the project name. There's a project number that we assign to the project. There's also a VTrans number. What we're probably most interested in are the dollar amounts in the next four columns. These are the federal funds in each of the four years of the TIP and there's also the phases, project phases, preliminary engineering, right-of-white and construction in that section. There's a comment. This is the most common comment right underneath. Those numbers, funds to be obligated in FY19. That's another weird use of language, but what that means is that the project is under construction or we expect it to be constructed this year or shortly into the next year. There's also a comment. New projects are identified. Also in this location, all CIRC alternative projects are identified. So these two columns, we have this column that says federal funds obligated through FY18 and FY19 federal funds. Basically you add those two columns together and you'll have how much has been spent on the project through September 30th of this year. So right before the beginning of this TIP. Total project costs, this is in total funds, not federal funds. We have project use categories. There's 10 categories that we use just so that we can summarize the project, the information in different ways. Federal funding source, percent, federal state, local. And then there's a comment section that's just any other information that we might want to include. This comment that's highlighted that you may not be able to see, just lists all the grant funds that were awarded to this project. And last thing, the Trans Project Manager. So the overview of what is in this TIP, these are the dollar amounts per year, 26 in 2020, 62 in 2021, 61 in 2022, and 48 in 2023 for a total of 246 million. So what does that really mean? So this table shows the amount over about the past 10 years of the TIPs and what you should notice. First thing you might notice is that part of it is green and part of it is blue. The green projects are airport projects. I put them in a different color just because that's FAA money. It's not something that we can control. We can't direct it in any other place than where they want it. And then the blue columns is everything else. And really what you... The one thing that I want you to notice in this table is how much it changes from year to year. And basically the TIP is based on projects. There's a long process of developing projects we all know and it takes a long time. And so there's a lot of jaggedness there because of the schedules to build projects. We have more projects. They go higher. Projects get snagged in right-of-way. They need supermits. They get delayed. The number gets lower. So just... So this... There's a table at your place that lists all these projects. I'm not going to talk about all the projects, but if you have any questions about specific projects, please ask them. Aviation, that's 14.2% of the total. These are just... A lot of these are grant funded projects that the airport submits to FAA for funding. We do have money in there for noise mitigation. I know there's ongoing work on that. So I expect it's not defined what exactly that's going to be spent on. Sidewalk and path projects, new sidewalk and path projects. So these are just new facilities. They're bike-ped... Excuse me, bike-ped program and transportation alternative program grants, sidewalk grants, and there's one circle alternative project here. Bridge preservation. These are a combination of interstate bridges, state highway bridges, and one town highway bridge, 8% of the total, like 19.6 million. Excuse me. In our modal, we have one project, the Williston Park and Ride. That is set for construction in 2020 right now. 0.9% of the total. New facility, major roadway upgrade. This is a little bit of a fuzzy, defined category, but just things that we consider to be major projects. So four projects in this category. Champlain Parkway, exit 17. Exit 17 is requiring reconstruction of the U.S. two bridges over I-89. So that's going to be quite a significant project. Crescent connector and S6 junction, and then S6... Exit 12 improvements in Williston. And the first three will be constructed over the three years, four years of this tip, or that's the plan right now. Paving. We have interstate, state highway, and class one town highway paving. Seven projects, 10% of the total cost. Roadway corridor improvements, another kind of a fuzzy definition. Just looking at, I think we put exit 16 in this category because while it does add capacity, it's not substantially increasing the footprint of the road. So we're calling it a corridor improvement rather than a new facility major roadway upgrade. It could go in either category, but this is where we've placed it. 3.4% of the total. And then this long list is the safety traffic operations in ITS, 15 projects on this list. And these are a combination of signal upgrades, intersection improvements, and rail grade crossing improvements. So 14.4% of the total. Transit. Most of this is FTA funds or CMAC funds. There's FTA grants and then elderly and disabled programs. 21.4% of the total. Last column is stormwater environmental. These are the municipal highway and stormwater mitigation program grants and also transportation alternative grants. And 3 million, 1.2% of the total. So how does this all stack up? Well, the largest category in this year's tip is the new facility major roadway upgrade category, followed by transit. ITS, you can see the rest of them come down. I would point out...