 folks are still entering the meeting. So we're gonna give it just another minute or two. All right, it's a few minutes past six and it doesn't look like anybody else is waiting to get in. So we'll start the meeting. Well, thank you all very much for joining us tonight. We really do appreciate it. This is our sixth public meeting on the I-89-2050 study. And tonight, we're really gonna focus on the transportation climate actions and really for Chittin'a County, not just for this quarter. And I should start off by introducing myself. My name is Charlie Baker. I am the executive director of the Chittin'a County Regional Planning Commission and glad to be with you this evening. Here's our agenda tonight. Welcome. So thank you for joining us. I'm gonna kind of review a little bit of the project background just to update people on where we are during the course of the process of this study. Then we'll talk about the transportation demand management focus group, the telework evaluation. The fifth topic is how we use a strategic model to assess investments and policies to decrease vehicle miles traveled in greenhouse gases. We'll look at the strategic model evaluation and results and really probably at that point, we'll open it up for questions and discussions and then at the end, get into next steps. Okay, next slide. So project background. So this is a graphic of the scope of work for this project with seven tasks. And I know there's a lot of small print here that you probably can't read. So I'll just really just using this graphic to kind of summarize where we are in the process. The last time we had a public meeting last spring, we were nearing the end of task four. Thank you, Helene for putting the cursor on that task. And at that point in time, we were focused on the interchange evaluation and we had that public meeting. We got a lot of feedback about not addressing properly the climate emergency. And so now that we're in task five and starting to look at alternatives, and as we discussed some at the last public meeting, this meeting is really focused on the climate actions related to transportation that we evaluated. And of course you can see we have a couple more tasks after we've put together these alternatives, we evaluate them, look at an implementation plan and a final report, we are hoping to wrap this up this summer. Okay. And again, just to kind of go backwards, the last task we looked at interchanges, we started with like 10 interchanges, narrowed it down to three. And just to refresh your memory, we're looking at exit 12B, which is where 116 crosses I-89, exit 13 improvements and exit 14 improvements and some options at those locations. We're not going to spend any more time looking at those tonight. And then turning the page into alternatives, after the last public meeting, we met with the advisory committee and agreed that we will look at five different bundles, bundle one being a no-build, bundle two really being the subject of tonight's meeting, the all the kind of non-roadway investments. So investments in transit, biking, walking, transportation demand management, and we'll also talk about different policy choices. And then in the next phase, we'll evaluate, I'm sorry, Eleni, can you go back there? We'll evaluate those three interchanges with what we talked about tonight included. So we'll talk about bundle three includes bundle two, same for bundle four and bundle five. Okay, now we can go on. So we started with a transportation demand management focus group and I'm just going to kind of let you know that the organizations that participated in those meetings, we had representatives from the Transportation Equity Coalition, from VTrans, from the town of Williston, city of South Burlington, Green Mountain Transit, Burlington Electric, Katma, which is the Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association, Local Motion, Conservation Law Foundation, Sustainable Transportation Vermont, and from the staff at the Regional Planning Commission here and our consultant team. And the role of the focus group was to really help define what should go into bundle two and act as an advisory committee for the strategic model. And we'll talk a little bit more about what the strategic model means. There were three meetings to really inform and guide what policies and investments should be evaluated, where to apply those policies and what assumptions and values should be tested. They reviewed the results of the strategic model and then there was also a separate telework evaluation, just because the strategic model did not include a component to properly evaluate telework so we had to do that separately and they provided direction on policies and investments to advance. We'll talk more about that tonight. And at this point, I'm gonna turn it over to Eleni Churchill, who is our Transportation Program Manager to talk about the telework evaluation first. And then after her, Jason's Charest on our staff will get into the strategic model and then I'll come back on for kind of wrapping things up and opening it up for conversation. Go ahead, Eleni. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you. Let's see if I can do two things at the same time. There we go. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm just gonna, as Charlie said, I'm gonna provide you with a very brief update and just an overview of two major evaluations and efforts that we started back in the spring early summer. And we work on this with the I-D9 TDM focus group over the summer and early fall. So I'm gonna start first with the telework evaluation summary. As Charlie mentioned, the telework evaluation was not part of the strategic model, which we're gonna be looking at in a second. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the strategic model, why we decided to just use that and then Jason is gonna basically go over the results of that model. So for the telework though, we felt it was very important to actually just look at the pre-pandemic role during pandemic and maybe try to figure out what's gonna happen post-pandemic with telework, which can, it's one of the strategies that can really help us reduce vehicle miles travel, which is VMT reduction, as well as the greenhouse gas emissions. And that is gonna really help us not spend a lot of our transportation funding for big capital investments on our interstate or new interchanges. So, this is kind of a summary slide. So we started with the look, so this effort, for this effort, we hired RSG and we do have John Slason here from RSG so that can help explain very detail about these things when we go to the questions and discussions at the end. But basically, at the high level, we started with a look at the national data at the second year of the pandemic and then for three specific work categories, professional, mixed, and on-site. And I'll go through all this in a subsequent slide. And then we went from the national to the local, original look in the grade in Burlington area to see basically the percent within each category, the percent of employees that fall within each of those three categories that mentioned above. And then we looked at the commuter breakdown, how did the commuters travel before COVID and then we investigated two different future scenarios for teleworking. And then we selected the most probable one and we'll go over that in a second. So starting with the job category mix in our study area and our study area is the greater Burlington area. As you can see on the left, you can see a number of jobs that are included under those three categories. The professional, mixed and on the on-site. And that gives you an idea of what we mean by those categories. And then on the right here, you see a pie chart that shows, and this is pre-pandemic, show you that in our area, 47% of the employees work in jobs that they need to be on-site. So those employees cannot telework, they need to be present at their work site. So we have approximately 53% of employees that belong into the mix and their professional category that we can provide incentives for teleworking, make that easier for them to do that. And from the two categories, the professional category is the one that is a much more flexible to telework. Moving on in the community travel breakdown, that's pre-pandemic again. We can see that 74% of the commuters, basically commuter full-time, no telework, and 9% teleworked full-time. And there was a hybrid of 17% that they telework some days and they went to work other days. Again, this is pre-pandemic. And we looked at two different scenarios. The first scenario that we looked at was approximately 50% increase in telework participation in the categories. And that basically resulted in an 11% reduction in daily vehicle travel, miles travel for commuters. So that's just one subset of all the traffic that you see out there. The second scenario that we looked at but we did not chose to incorporate into the bundle too basically was based on data and results that we got at the very initial stages of the pandemic when we were all home, we had the state of emergency and a lot of people stayed home and they telework but other people stayed home because the businesses were closed. So we thought that that was an extreme scenario and we are not proposing to use that. We're proposing to incorporate scenario one into the bundle two for the I-D9 study. Moving on to the strategic model, that's again another effort that RSG assisted with. And we work with the TDM focus group. Again, they acted as advisory committee to this effort to help us develop the model and choose the strategies and the investments to evaluate. Some of you know that Chinatown County has a travel demand model. And so there is a question, why another model? And the answer is like a strategic model is the best tool to evaluate high level policies and investments to accomplish our goals. And our goal for bundle two for this study is to reduce vehicle miles travel, VMT in greenhouse gas emissions, GHG. It's a strategic model is an econometric model and I'm not gonna go into a deep what an econometric model is. John can explain all that, but it's just sufficient to say that this is really not a transportation model. So there is not a transportation network attached to this strategic model. These are just... So this model is like, you create the model or you choose and actually before I say that, I think I have a slide that shows this. So this is the very high level kind of like model process for the strategic model. So you start with whatever goals you have for our 89 bundle two, our goal is to reduce VMT and GHG. And then you basically you choose what we call key drivers of change, which is the categories that you think that they're gonna have an effect in actually accomplishing your goals. And then for us for this study, we use land use, bike and pet share, transit improvements, electrification of the fleet for the greenhouse gas emissions. We also use fuel pricing and Jason is gonna go through that in detail and some other categories, climate change included. And then within those key drivers of change or like we develop, we included a number of policies and strategies and levels within those policies and strategies within those options, the investment options or packages. And of course we run the model and then we got the outcomes and the metrics. One last thing that I wanna just touch upon before I just turn it over to Jason is that the strategic model area that we developed this model for includes Chinatown County and the five surrounding counties. And that was very important for us because a lot of the travel is happening from outside into Chinatown County. A lot of people commute to come to work here in Chinatown County. And there are some of us that go to other counties to work. So we felt it was very important to include the whole kind of Northwest and Central Vermont in this model. Having said that though, we had a lot more detailed data for Chinatown County and there was a lot more granularity in Chinatown County in this model. So with that, I will just pass it along to Jason to talk about the evaluation of the different strategy options, investment and policy options and the results. Jason. Great. Thanks, Eleni. So as Eleni said, I'm just gonna go through what we evaluated and then touch upon the results that came out the outputs. And just to orient you here, this is we're gonna go through probably eight or so slides that are gonna look very similar, have this kind of structured sort of design to it. And on the left, we have levels one through four. And then across the top, we have either a policy or investment option. And so each of those either policy or investment option has different levels to which they could have been evaluated. And once we decided on all of those, the strategic model itself runs all the various different combinations within those six options and the four levels yielding somewhere north of 400 different scenarios. Starting with level one, this is our base and it is the CCRPCs, what's included in the CCRPCs Metropolitan Transportation Plan, otherwise known as our MTP. It's also known as a long range transportation plan, looks out at least 25 years, 20 years, excuse me. And within that, we've called for a goal of 90% of household growth in the existing developed areas, significant expansions to walking and biking and adding transit routes and increasing frequencies, continued or expanded investments to transportation demand management. And that's either at the personal level or at the employer level through programs that Katma offers, they mentioned earlier, Katma being the Chittin area transportation demand or transportation management association, excuse me. And then lastly, but certainly not least in terms of its effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions is that we're calling for 90% of personal vehicles, including light trucks, will be electrified and this is looking out at the future year of 2050, okay? So moving into the land use and community design option, we only have one additional level aside from the base under this option. And I'm just noticing that there's a little bit of a tech snafu on the base. I think I mentioned it earlier, the CCRPC's long range transportation plan is also called our metropolitan transportation plan. So just to hopefully clarify any sort of confusion. But the two levels or excuse me, the level that we looked at under the land use and community design option contained two parts. One was an increased land use or a 10% increase in the population and housing in Chittin County. So seeing what sort of effect that would have on travel throughout the county. And then the other element to level two was community design. And that was a 50% increase in mixed use neighborhoods that would promote sort of a walkable, bikeable environment. The next option was bike and transit. And there were two levels under that option in addition to the base. And the first component of level two was to double the trips made by bicycle throughout the region. And the second piece of that was a 50% increase in transit frequency and miles of service. And what we mean by that or another way to think about that is an increase in frequency is a decrease in headway. So if a bus comes every 20 minutes now, it could come every 15 or 10 minutes in the future depending on that decrease in headway or increase in frequency. And then for level three, we are continuing with doubling the bike trips. So there's no change to that component of the level. But for the transit, we're kicking things up a notch and looking at 100% increase in frequency and a 200% increase in the miles of service. And that's all throughout the model area which as Eleni discussed is Chittenden County and the five surrounding counties. So under the demand management option, we again have two different levels that we looked at, levels two and three, in addition to the base. And first component of level two was to double our TDM transportation demand management. So doubling the participation in those programs such as guaranteed ride home, carpooling or vanpooling and then the parking component to this was a reduction, a 50% reduction in the residential parking spaces available to homeowners throughout the county and an expansion of paid parking areas in downtowns. And for level three, there was no change to the TDM piece of it, but there was a change to the parking and that was a 50% reduction again in residential parking spaces. But this time for paid parking, it was expanding it to villages and an actual increase in the pricing of paid parking. Under the pricing option, we looked at three additional levels. The first one being a carbon tax of $50 per ton. A CO2 equivalent. Level three being doubling of the cost of fuel. This would include gasoline, diesel and electricity for electric vehicles. Cause if you remember, part of the base is 90% electrification of the fleet for households, household vehicles and light duty trucks. And for level four, we're looking at a mileage-based fee of five cents per mile. Next up, we have income. We had a couple of different options that thought were just worth exploring here. What would happen if the middle class shrunk? So there was more people at the lower end of the income spectrum and higher end. And the thought behind this is what would happen if the middle class had less of a travel budget? Would that push people towards less expensive modes? And then the opposite being the case for level three, if the middle class was expanded, would that increase their travel budget enough that there would be much, much more travel? So because it would decrease the cost of travel by car. Last option was about commercial vehicles. And this was a decrease in the cost of ride-hailing if you're not familiar with that terminology, something like taxis, Uber or Lyft services, and an expansion of electric vehicles to include all commercial vehicles, not just household and light trucks, but all your delivery trucks and whatnot. And when you put it all together, these are all the options in the various levels beneath them. Here's a look at what the actual output looks like from the tool across the top. You have all the options that we just went through. So land use and community design at the top left all the way over to vehicles on the right. And below that, you have the outputs of the different metrics that we took a look at. So you have transit trips, walk trips, bike trips, DVMT is daily vehicle miles traveled. You'll see that listed in a couple of different spots. It was looked at a few different ways. And then we also have emissions and fuel use to get at that greenhouse gas component that we were concerned about looking at. This is just a little insight to how we use the tool. It's kind of a couple of different ways you can select options at the top or you can go down to the bottom. And it has a slider sort of bar feature. So here we've highlighted, we really wanted to focus on, as mentioned earlier, how could we, what scenarios are most likely to help us decrease the amount of vehicle miles traveled per household. So in this screenshot that you're seeing right here, we've highlighted the ones or the blue bars that are highlighted there within that pink box are the scenarios that had the lowest daily vehicle miles traveled per household. And you can see there's 35 scenarios. Thanks, Lenny, that are selected as part of this subset. And yeah, thanks. This is one of the scenarios or the scenario that we landed on and is the low vehicle miles traveled or BMT scenario, that's what we're calling it. And this is, you can see the blue bars is how it's stacked up. You can see the blue bar under the DVMT per household graph or chart is pretty much all the way to the left. And we don't have a picture of it, but we also looked at a greenhouse gas emission scenario. And that was just a little bit lower than what we're showing here. And on the, let's see the next slide, this is kind of graphically where we're landing in our preferred scenario. And I mentioned that we also looked at a greenhouse gas scenario. And that's why we're including just a component of that level, level two was to increase the electrification of commercial vehicles. But we're not including the decreased cost of ride hailing component. And for income, we are leaving that at the base because it didn't have that much of an impact overall in terms of people's daily vehicle miles traveled for greenhouse gas emissions. So we're just leaving that at the base level. And the only other thing I wanna make mention of on this slide is under the land use and community design, we are looking to go towards the community design element of that level, but not the land use piece of that level. And the community design piece of that was to, I think it was a 50% increase in walking and increase in mixed use development, dense mixed use development that would promote that sort of behavior. Pop in and pick it up from here. There have been a couple of questions in the chat that I'm gonna hold on that for a moment just to summarize the conclusion and recommendations of this analysis that we've been doing over the last few months. And I really should start off by really thanking the consultant team, particularly at RSG and John Slason and his teammates for all this work. And sorry, I'm gonna pause for a second. I think we may be switching interpreters here. Okay. So this slide is the recommended policies investments to be included in that bundle too that I talked about in the beginning. And I'm really repeating some of what Eleni and Jason mentioned earlier. But the first one is increasing teleworking by 50%. The second one is to go with a densification policy of 90% of new housing units being built in areas where we already have existing services to support them just for some context. During a faster development error in our region like in the 80s and 90s, we were at a level of only about 65% of new housing units being in those areas. So this is definitely a more compact settlement pattern that we had maybe historically in the boom years of the 70s, 80s, 90s. The third strategy is doubling trips by bicycle. The fourth is tripling transit services and improving frequencies. The fifth one here is doubling participation in transportation demand management programs. Those are really carpooling programs and things like that along with increasing costs for parking. And then the last one is a mileage-based fee of five cents a mile. So I need to make, and if all these things, all these policy investments and decisions were made, we could achieve a reduction in vehicle miles of travel between 10 and 20% from the future. That is a big reduction in driving, which also should point out to everyone that this is a big challenge. This is not by any stretch something that can just happen. If we put more buses on the road or tell people to telework, it doesn't, our society doesn't work like that. We're talking about behavior change for all of us. And this is in my, the way I've been thinking about this is kind of a challenge to our community. Number one, do the policy makers, whether the local, regional, state policy makers, can we get to these kinds of changes? Are they willing to do that? Do we as a community and a state, I don't know when we may get to a mileage-based fee, for instance, that's a drastic change from how we pay for transportation usage now, which is paid for in the gas tax. So anyway, there's, I think just a lot of questions that still need to be worked on here. And this is truly the challenge, but it does have a significant benefit in terms of miles of travel, if all these policy changes were to be made. And so this is, I think maybe I'll pause here and really kind of open it up for questions and conversation from those of you that are in attendance here. I'm gonna pick up one or two questions from the chat. The first question we got was, was this meant the 90% of households? Was that meant to say that we were trying to increase households by 90%? The answer to that is no. The forecast, the estimate for future growth in housing units is about 20%. What we're really saying is, we wanna achieve a future where 90% of those new housing units are located in areas that are already existing and developed. The second question we got was about the less expensive ride hailing program. I answered this one in the chat also. And Nick Anderson asked, wouldn't that compete with public transit and make public transit less competitive? And the answer to that is yes, it would. That's why that particular strategy is not recommended here. That did not have good outcomes from a climate or a vehicle miles of travel standpoint. And then I think there's a new question here about what does the pricing refer to? And there were two aspects of pricing that were analyzed in this. One was increasing the cost of parking in downtowns and villages. So that is an idea strategy here that would have a positive impact on vehicle miles travel. That's in the second to last bullet here. And the second is, and I see the question in the chat asking about a fee on what? And so this mileage based fee is essentially an idea that would replace your gas tax. Particularly important if we've converted to electric vehicles the way we've talked about where 90% of cars at least are electric vehicles, you're not paying gas tax. And so the thought is there'd be some sort of depending you pay five cents per mile. So a little bit of an analogy to what is now your gas tax, right? Obviously the more you drive, the more gas to actually pay. That is the mileage based fee. And so I'm looking at the chat. There's a question about demographics calling for more worker retirements. Is this taken into account? The more worker retirements, I don't know that we're calling for that. Our forecasts and right now, we are certainly maybe somewhat as a result of the pandemic and the age of baby boomers, we are seeing a decrease in our labor force. That is not the future that we are forecasting though, that yes, we are in a dip now, but that should grow over time. So there is an increase in workers. There's a question about whose miles, how are those miles reckoned? I think that's a reference to this mileage based fee. That's the miles that we all drive in our personal vehicles. There's a comment about, think you've underestimated the increase in teleworking. Teleworking, we're hoping I guess in this, recommending a strategy of trying to increase teleworking by 50%, that is pretty significant. And it's probably, we'll see how that evolves. It's unclear yet. And I should mention also, all these things, us putting these things on this piece of paper, doesn't make them happen. So there's a lot of policy work to be done and also to monitor, are these things actually happening? How do we track this? Are we seeing these impacts on travel? The question about the probability of hitting this 10 to 20% VMT reduction. And John Burton asked that. John, I think the answer to that is, it really depends on how effectively as a community, as a state, we are at achieving these strategies. And that's the million dollar question. That is, do we do all of these things or not? This is, a lot of this is pretty consistent with what came out of the climate action plan. So I do think there is going to be momentum into these directions. So I would express some hope, but I have no way to give you any guarantees about the absolute probability or certainty of achieving that level reduction. Megan Emory asks, if the mileage-based fee would be income sensitive? I think that's a very reasonable policy consideration. Obviously this would have to happen either in Congress or our own state legislature. I wouldn't be surprised if that was factored in. I do not believe, and maybe I'll ask John Slason to pop into the chat, I do not believe that there was an income sensitivity analyzed as part of this modeling. That's correct Charlie, that's right. At this point, it's a global application. Yeah, thank you John for popping in there. Sorry, another question about how the numbers of miles would be calculated or reported. I don't honestly know exactly how that might be done. I think there's been some conversations about whether it happens annually at an inspection or registration timeframe and your odometer gets checked and you pay at that time or over a period of months or if there's some other technology involved to monitor that, I don't know exactly how that might work. We clearly do not have the technology at this point nor has that been a policy decision that's made yet. So, and I'm not saying it definitely will be either but if we want to achieve these VMT reductions something like that probably needs to happen. John Burton is recommending that we talk to the department of labor about their workforce projections as they are changing. Thank you John, we'll do that. Melanie asks to which policies are the results most sensitive? I'll ask Jonathan Slason to pop in again if he could. Yeah, sure, Charlie. I think pricing definitely had the biggest impact. However, it is accumulation of all of these factors. We realized that the land use itself didn't quite have the magnitude that we needed to achieve some of our goals. The tool that Jason showed which had those kind of sliders and those blue bars that allowed us to test a variety of those policies. And I don't know if we want to show that slide again Jason or you can pop in there but it is the effect of all of these different things coming together. So if you just want to go forward one slide you can see that, or there you go. You can see in this case the lowest VMT strategy we're taking aspects of the various packages that we described which includes some pricing. So the VMT strategy, we discussed income effects on the middle class. We talked about changes in the ride-hailing vehicles. We talked about demand management and the bikes and transit pieces. And so all of those policies come together to give us the biggest DVMT, the daily vehicle miles travel reduction to the VMT fee and the gas fees are probably the most significant drivers to affect change. We realized that our land use strategy just simply isn't dense enough to really maximize the benefit of our transit investments if we were to triple the amount of revenue miles or the frequency of our double our frequency. But we did see a big shift in bike travel. And so by extending our bicycle network and improving those we do offer people a better opportunity to bike more often. Now that would be combined with a physical investment, of course, as well. But in terms of the policies themselves, pricing probably was the most significant. Thanks, Jonathan. And Jonathan, you better hang on here. John Burton asked a question again about the probability of the model results. Is there anything that comes out of the model that gives you an idea of the probability of getting to these kinds of results? The probability, as you said, Charlie, comes down to political conversation. I think we realized that from a land use and planning point of view, there's limitations to what we can do. That's the bicycle networks, even the transit networks takes investment from all of us, number of communities that invest in this. The demand management side, it does work, but it doesn't achieve the total reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or vehicle models traveled that we're hoping to achieve. And those are more in our control and from a regional, from an MPO perspective. The idea is that pricing, particularly fuel pricing, taxes, as well as a shift from a fuel tax to become maybe more of a miles traveled tax, that's something that exceeds our political ability. So I can't put a probability on it, of course, but what we're saying is that these things are essential in order for us to achieve these types of reductions. Thanks, John. Eleni, could you back up to the job category mix? Sam Anderson has a question about the job category mix. And Sam, I don't know. Charlie, it was one of your first slides. Yep. Eleni's getting back there. Sorry. That's all right, there you are. Here we go. As I look at these with the onsite, even if Titton County is home to about 40% of our value added manufacturers, which require onsite attendance, I do not see manufacturing, distribution, printing, any of those categories in the onsite categories. And to be quite candid, it will impact your pie chart to the right if you include them. I could rattle off companies, but we could start with global foundries, and there are large, well, large for Vermont, manufacturers in almost every location. Yeah. Sam, I think, and Jonathan can either confirm or adjust my answer, but I think maybe those are captured and they are meant to be in the onsite portion of the pie, but they're kind of lumped under the production line near the bottom or right at the very bottom, but Jonathan, is that a fair response? I think you're right. I looked at the source, it's the BLS description of the job occupations. And so there is not a manufacturing category in the BLS description for the Burlington, South Burlington area. So it's grouped into these other categories. Then I would say that is a shortcoming of the model because we have so much manufacturing in Chittenden County in every, almost every municipality. Sam, do you think it's more than 47% of our workforce? Well, Sam, how about this? We'll review the numbers with you after the meeting. We're just gonna do a double check on this. Yeah, just double check. And the other thing was going through all those pricing and income. It was surrogate the ability to the modeling that could look at the possibility of pricing and income affecting people as far as moving outside of Chittenden County or Vermont. Do you know what I'm asking? Can we price people out of living here? Jason, in what he was presenting, yeah, basically given that we're in a workforce crisis and for the rest of the participants, please don't misunderstand, I'm all for everything we can possibly do to address these issues in a proactive way. I truly am, but I'm just asking questions. Yep, Elena, you can move on to the next slide, I think, or the next couple of slides where we have the summary at the end there. And I think, Sam, I mean, obviously that is the public policy question. Nobody wants to price people out of living here. And so, and we put these things, we did an analysis, but I don't want anybody to think that we're taking some of these recommendations lightly. They all have impacts, and certainly the two at the bottom in terms of pricing are, they're gonna be the subject of a lot of debate before anything like that happens. And I think it's five cents a mile, how does that compare to the gas taxes we pay now? It seems like a lot, I'm not quite sure the answer to that. It may be significant, it may not, I don't know. I haven't done that math. So anyway, I think that is a future question for sure, but thank you. Thanks. And John Burton is asking about, oh, sorry, the lady, we still have a few more questions. If nothing's done, how much would increased congestion impact all this? Would more decide to change behavior if they experienced gridlock? I do think this is based on my experience working in more urban places, that does have an impact, certainly, in places with a lot of congestion, certainly if transit, particularly rail transit is an option, but I don't have a good answer from this analysis. Jonathan, do you have any sense of a response to that? I don't, Charlie, sorry. John, I think I'm not sure that congestion would help change behavior as much as we need to in terms of if we're trying to get to these kinds of VMT reductions. The reality is that the congestion that we face is not at a level that is starting to affect real travel choices. That's, that could be an opinion, but I think that's basically spelled out because the level of congestion just doesn't register from comparisons to other urban areas. We're not sitting in traffic multiple hours a day. Yeah, that's a fair point. Pat Bradley asks, would the mileage fee be applicable only to Vermont or Chinden County residents? If not, how would you apply it to out-of-state commuters to our short-term travelers, et cetera? Yeah, thanks, Pat. And the mileage fee is definitely a very, very tough policy choice. And that's why I kind of made the reference to not, that clearly isn't happening by action of our board. It's not happening by action of any municipality. Could the state legislature do something like that? Maybe, but I will say your point is right on that most of the conversation I've heard about that idea brings it back to DC and that this would have to be a federal policy change. And frankly, this has been a topic, a conversation in DC, particularly with the US DOT about how to fund the transportation infrastructure of the country, which is now predominantly funded by the gas tax. And if we are successfully converting over to electric vehicles, that revenue is gonna go down. What is it going to be replaced with? It is very much a national question. So that is a good point. Phil made a comment. And I think mostly that we are addressing some climate changes. So thank you, Phil. I know you had to run. And John, again, there is no mathematical probability. And John Burton is asking about what the modeling tool that was used. Jonathan, I don't know if you want to spend maybe another minute kind of describing the modeling tool you were using. Yeah, happy to. And we can send a link out to the website. It's a tool called vision eval, regional strategic planning model. And it was first developed in Oregon back in 2012 and it's been continually supported by FHWA and several DOTs. And it continues to have pooled funds, they call it. There's about seven DOTs around the country that are supporting the evolution of the tool. It's an open source tool. So anybody can dive into to understand the nuts and bolts of it, the equations that underpin it. And as Charlie said, it's an econometric model which uses a regression-based approach that's calibrated on national household travel survey and then calibrated to local conditions from census data. And what we consider are the income of households, the how many workers work in the household and where those households reside in the county. And so all of those conditions help us estimate how much travel is in demand by that household and then that travel is changed by changing various factors such as those that we have explored in this study. Thanks, Jonathan. And then John Burton is also asking, did you model how increased growth of surrounding towns would impact these patterns? And you're kind of, I get a, well, I guess I'll answer that question by saying we did not look at that particular issue in this modeling and analysis exercise. We have looked at that the last time we updated our long range plan. And that's where this 90% of households being in our existing developed areas idea came from in that we had better transportation, energy, climate, health outcomes if we had a denser development pattern. And that also allowed people to use other modes. So it was better in terms of congestion also on our roadways. Hopefully that answers. And there's someone, Beverly, thank you, giving massive props to the interpreters with all of this dense talk. So thank you. John Burton is asking what census data was used? John, there was a, I don't know if, or John, if you wanna answer that question quickly. I don't believe there was census data used per se in this modeling exercise. We do use census data as a basis for them looking at our forecasts where I mentioned earlier, like 20% household growth is pretty consistent with the census numbers that just came out recently. So John, can anything else I add about census data? The model was informed by John Sounds pretty involved in this data. So I'm gonna use the data, the pumps, the micro use, the micro use sample. I might get that acronym wrong, but it's the American community census data. So both the American community census and the pumps data, which is a subset of that goes into the model. And that helps us understand the characteristics of the households that are within the zones that we're modeling. And there's more information available and also happy to connect after this call if there's other further questions. Any more questions, comments? You can either put something in the chat or unmute yourself if you'd like to ask something or make a comment. I just wanna thank you, Charlie, and the team at the RPC for the work you all have done on this. We are putting your tax dollars to work, so thank you. If you do have any further comments, please feel free. Actually, we have our contact information at the end. Let's go down next steps and I'll give you just a few minutes here on what happens next. So we're trying to take these strategic model outputs and that telework analysis and combine it up with our travel demand model. And John, this may go, John Burton, this may go to some of the questions you were asking to get a better sense of how would some of these policy changes and impacts on VMT affect the future travel network or the future road network and volumes and congestion on the road network? That is the work that's in front of us in the next couple of months. We will then look at the various bundles with this travel demand information. We'll look at exit 14, exit 14 and 13, exit 14 and 12B. And then also what happens on the I-89 mainline and I think some of the questions, do we need those capacity investments or not? We're gonna be trying to answer some of those questions. Hopefully by the next time we all meet in a few months, which is the last bullet. We were hoping to have a next public meeting in probably about three months, late April or early May. And thank you for all your input and questions tonight. We'll bring some sort of summary to the advisory committee, which is meeting on February 8th. And I think I'll conclude with the next slide. Eleni has some contact information. There's our project website is there on the left. All of this information, the presentation is up on the website. There's an ability to contact the project team there or feel free to email me or Eleni with any comments or questions that you have, even if you didn't get them out on the table tonight, happy to take them. And any last questions, I'm seeing a couple of thank yous. So let's thank you all very much for your attention tonight and appreciate your engagement in our community. So at that, I will wish you all a good night. I thought we were gonna go a lot longer. You guys took it easy on us. Thank you very much and have a good night everyone.