 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this afternoon's briefing. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director for the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we are delighted to welcome you to this afternoon's briefing, which is co-sponsored with the American Public Transportation Association and the National Association of Realtors. So so many times we hear what's really important in terms of thinking about where our homes are or what really matters when we think about trying to sell a home. And so often we hear it's location, it's location, it's location, right? Well, today we are very very pleased to be hosting this briefing where we're going to take a look at a report, a new report, that was commissioned by the American Public Transportation Association, that is being released today, and this report is titled, the report is titled the New Real Estate Mantra, Location Near Public Transportation. Hopefully all of you got a copy of it outside the outside the room. And we are going to hear today firsthand in terms of what we have learned as a result of this new study on the New Real Estate Mantra, and we are going to hear about it from perspectives from people who are engaged in public transportation as well as the real estate industry. To look at these very very important issues that really affect where we live, how we live, and what are the consequences in terms of thinking about property values and the issues that really matter in terms of thinking about how decisions are made with regard to where transit is, and also what that means with regard to locations where people choose to to live and services be provided. So to start us off today, I would like to introduce the president and CEO of APTA, the American Public Transportation Association, Michael Melanife, and Michael's career has been spent in public transportation with more than 26 years of experience in both the public and private sector leadership with regard to this. He has been involved on executive committees with regard to the Transportation Research Board, TRB, which as you probably know holds major major conferences with thousands of people here in Washington every year looking at every aspect of transportation. He's been involved in a number of other energy efficiency commissions with the Alliance to Save Energy, for example, and serving on various other boards. And I think another thing that is very important about Michael's experience is that he brings also business experience from a bus manufacturing perspective. He's worked in both Canada as well as the United States, and he has also led public sector transit agencies, including being the general manager of Charlotte Transit. So I think in terms of the leadership he provides at the national level now, heading up APTA, he brings a very rich experience coming from both the private sector as well as being on the ground in terms of leading transit agencies right where we all live. Michael? Thank you, Carol. I appreciate that. Good afternoon, everyone. How we doing? Excellent. Well, thank you all for being here. We appreciate it. This is exciting. This is an exciting new report. There's really good information here. High frequency public transportation communities are better, are working better and consumers are responding to them by moving to these cities and finding that the values of them are certainly much more strong and robust. They're better because public transit makes the mobility options more functional. There's fewer cars on the road. There are more walkable neighborhoods and the environment is more accessible to cyclists. We are using our scarce resources much more efficiently in these communities. Before I get started, I want to certainly thank, as we talk about this exciting new report, the new real estate mantra, location of public transportation. I want to thank our friends, the National Association of Realtors. We'll be hearing from shortly. They played a key role in this report, as well as Carol and the Enviable and Energy Study Institute, and our friends from Reconnecting America for being here as well. And they'll also be sharing some thoughts and perspectives on this exciting report. First, I'm going to provide a general overview. And then, as I reveal the top findings from each of the cities that we looked at, we'll delve deeper into two cities, in particular, Phoenix and Boston. This will provide a sense of the high frequency impact that public transportation has on home values, has on access to jobs, and on transportation costs in these areas. First, there have been a number of studies that have shown that properties close to public transit have had higher values. This study adds to that data by noting that during the recession, home values outperformed other properties in the region if they were located near high frequency public transportation. I don't know if you can put that slide up there. We looked at data from five, a five reason representative sample of the U.S. It's showed that average sales prices with residences in close proximity to high frequency public transit were more stable during the recession. Supporting the assertion that public transit access helped mitigate the effects of the recession on property values. We're seeing there the five cities, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Paul to Twin Cities, Phoenix, and San Francisco. We're looking at there is the zero baseline is looking at the aggregate of the region, the performance of homes in the region. The blue line is the performance of those homes, the home values that are along the transit corridors that they responded much more positively to the impacts of the recession. And the magenta line below are those homes that were in the region that were not along the transit accessible corridors. And the fact on average that home values performed 42% better on average in this study when located near high frequency public transportation. And what do I mean by high frequency public transportation? That includes heavy rail, commonly known as subways, and for you in DC, the Metro. There's light rail, commuter rail, and bus rapid transit. Let's explore why home values performed better when they were located within a half mile of these high frequency transit corridors. First, consumers are choosing neighborhoods with high frequency public transit because they provide more mobility options. People like having the the opportunity to have different options for different trips. It's so important that we not be focused on one mode that we take the most efficient and effective mode for each individual trip. And giving people options gives them freedom, mobility, and a way to move about their communities more cost effectively. Second, these areas have superior access to jobs, to nearby areas without similar public transportation options. And as we'll discuss later, public transit areas provide access for up to three times more jobs. And third, other attractive amenities in the neighborhoods include lower transportation costs and walkable areas. And when I say lower transportation costs, that means lower transportation costs for everyone that lives in that area. Lower cost, even for those who do not use public transportation in the areas, because they've got shorter car trips, the amenities are close by, and they can have shorter drives, or they're able to walk to those or ride bicycles to those areas, not have to drive as much because we have more density in those cores. These findings show that communities benefit when they respond to market demand, and clearly consumers are voting with their feet, showing that they want communities with more choices. In this study, we chose five regions which were representative samples of the types of high frequency public transit systems throughout the U.S. And here's the five cities. There are Minneapolis, St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, and Boston. We picked them to be representative of different types of cities around the country. Some are newer cities, and some are more legacy cities when it comes to the transportation infrastructure, and it's worthy to look at the juxtaposition of those different types of cities in transportation infrastructure. And while home values declined substantially between 2006 and 2011 across the nation, residential properties in public transit areas of these cities showed significantly stronger resiliency. Let's take a look first at the Minneapolis, St. Paul area. In that area, residential property values in the public transit area outperformed other properties by 48%. Minneapolis is a newer system with two types of fixed guideway service. They have the Hiawatha light rail line, which was open in 2004, and more recently in 2009, they opened the North Star Commuter rail line. Let's move west to San Francisco. There are the property values in the public transit area outperformed other properties in the region by 37%. As we all know, San Francisco is a mature city that has a number of public transit options. They include rail, commuter rail, heavy rail, light rail, cable cars, and street car lines. There's a wide variety of options in this mature city. Moving back to the Midwest to Chicago, in the residential area, the public transit area outperformed the general region by 30%. Chicago is a mature system with three public transit agencies that serve the citizens of that area. Chicago has heavy rail, commuter rail, and bus. Commuter rail has an average weekday ridership of over 300,000 people. Subway ridership is over 700,000 a day. And when you add bus and rail together, there's an average of 1.7 million trips on public transit every day in the greater Chicago region. I'll take a deeper look into two of the cities that we want to look at a little deeper because they give views on two ends of the spectrum in the study. We'll talk about two important factors here. Access to jobs and transportation costs for residents living near fixed guideway public transportation. Let's look at Phoenix. I was just there a few weeks ago looking at this line. It's incredible, the development that's going on along this transit corridor. It's a fairly new light rail system. It opened in 2008. As we think about these numbers, think about the fact that 2008 is when the economy started to take the crash that brought us into the recession and understand the dynamics here. It's really an incredible story. Residential property values in the public transit area outperformed other properties in the area by 37%. When we look at access to jobs, Phoenix public transit areas provide 88,000 jobs per square mile versus 32,000 jobs per square mile in the greater region. That equates to more than twice as many jobs per square mile along the high frequency transit corridor. And those who live near high frequency public transit in Phoenix save an average of $175 a month in their transportation costs. Remember again that those savings apply to people whether they take transit or not because they're living in a community that functions much more efficiently. Let's go to the northeast to Boston, which is obviously a very mature system, one of the oldest transit systems in the country. They have heavy rail and one of the very first bus rapid transit systems in the nation. Home values in Boston's public transit area outperformed other properties in the region by an incredible 129%. The Boston public transit area provides access to almost three times as many jobs per square mile. These are amazing statistics. There are 170,000 jobs in the Boston transit area versus 57,000 in the region on a per square mile basis. In the Boston public transit area residents save $351 in transportation costs per month when they live near fixed guideway transit. Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, they're mature systems that are dominated by heavy and commuter rail. Now finally, these findings show that communities benefit when they respond to market demand. Clearly consumers are voting with their feet and they're showing they want communities with more choices. The presence of high frequency transit not only benefits individual property owners, it also supports a more resilient tax base for the cities and counties that they reside in. In fact, stable property values in areas of public transit access have a number of policy implications. As we look at Congress, state and local governments for ways to accelerate growth and promote long-term economic health, this data shows that investing in public transportation is a boon to revitalizing our economies and making our cities and our country more globally competitive. Secondly, public transportation infrastructure can support other community goals such as public safety, access to education, healthier and more vibrant communities. The corridors utilize scarce resources more efficiently and allow us to be more energy efficient as we run our cities. And finally, public transportation is better than ever. That's why Americans continue to flock to transit. In 2012, we recorded the second highest ridership in public transit since 1957, since the year the Interstate Highway System was started. We had 10.5 billion trips on public transit last year. And that's in spite of the fact that we had Hurricane Sandy shut down transit systems from Washington DC to Boston. 30% of all transit was shut down for that storm and yet we still had the second highest ridership since 1957 in a very tough economic time. It's extraordinary what's going on in transit. And the other really important metric there is that there were 62 local transit tax initiatives across this nation last year. In a time when we hear so often that people won't raise taxes to support infrastructure investment, in 49 of those 62 elections, the taxes passed, the initiatives passed. An 80% passage rate last year, one of the toughest economic times of our generation, people trust their transit systems. They understand the importance of investing in good public transportation because it allows not only good movement for people who ride transit, but good movement for everyone who uses that city. If you have fewer cars on the road, it's easier to move goods and services and commerce throughout your city because there's less congestion on the roadways. Your city runs more efficiently and more effectively. We need higher levels of long term investment and we thank you for taking the time to look at this study. With that, Carol, I'll turn it back over to you. Thank you very much for the opportunity to talk to you today. Lots of good information there and during our time of Q&A for discussion, hopefully we can delve into some of the details even more. And at this time, I would like to introduce Jed Smith, who is a senior economist with the National Association of Realtors. And of course, the National Association of Realtors was partnered with APTA in terms of the commissioning of this important report. Dr. Smith is the managing director for quantitative research with the National Association of Realtors. He's been involved working on real estate issues for a couple decades looking at housing, commercial real estate, tax and planning issues. Before that, he brings again a rich business experience having also worked for Washington Gas and with General Electric's power business. And he has also been an adjunct professor. So he brings together a lot in terms of his work in looking at the economics behind real estate and transit. Thank you. Good afternoon. It's nice to be here today and there's good news. The housing market continues to recover and that's great news. And of course, a significant degree in many parts of the country that recovery is supported by or done in conjunction with transit. So that's very good news. In terms of housing, sales are up, prices are up. And the American homeowner has gained about $1.4 trillion of additional net worth in the last year. So that's good. However, that's not the real reason you buy a house. You buy a house for lifestyle purposes. It's the type of place you want to raise a family possibly it may you want to live in a neighborhood that's walkable. And with a lot of amenities, you may want a place that you can get to a job easily and so forth. So there are real financial benefits to buying a house. But also there is a lifestyle decision involved there. And high frequency public transportation helps to promote communities, home ownership and a general quality of life. In other words, among the things we can reduce congestion and those of you who live in the Washington area commute to the Washington area or have seen the Washington area and that's all of us know just how congested this area can be. So anything to get rid of some of that congestion is great. Rapid transit can foster economic development and go a long way towards mitigating air pollution. You know, we all breathe air. And it's kind of nice to breathe clean air. And that's something that this can certainly promote. Now, as far as home ownership goes, home ownership provides a lot of value to families. Obviously, there's the economic value and that gets in the paper a whole lot. But there's also a lot related to the quality of life. Families that live in houses and neighborhoods, walkable neighborhoods, whatever, tend to have a higher quality of life as measured in a variety of ways. Educational achievement, the people stay in school longer, they have better test scores, whatever. Civic participation, have a community, not a place where just people come and sleep, but rather a place where people interact, get to know each other, fosters a higher quality of life. There are health benefits to home ownership. Homeowners tend to be healthier, happier, whatever, less crime, better maintained properties, and decreased design demands for public assistance. Now, how do we know this? Well, economists have done a variety of econometric and statistical studies that measure all these variables, and then allow for all sorts of different impacts and so forth, and come up with peer reviewed literature that shows this type of thing to be true. So in short, home ownership provides vibrant community communities, a nurturing family environment, increased civic pride, and to the degree that rapid transit can have an impact, and it clearly can in many environments, that's good, providing a variety of options, transportation options, and so forth. So looking for a second at the advantages of high transportation, high frequency transportation, you get a lot more accessibility to jobs and amenities. You know, it's kind of nice to be able to walk down the street to a restaurant rather than pile in the car and take a 20 minute ride. You get walkable communities. Walkable communities are nice places to live. You get a mix of uses, a mix of people, a mix of backgrounds. We've already heard that transit is job friendly. And that's kind of a key issue these days. Jobs are still in short supply. I know unemployment's going down. We'd like to see it go down further. Because unemployment present fosters a lot of happiness among those who get a job. And of course, they're then in a position to buy a house or raise their family in a better environment. And transportation can provide a variety of housing options. We've got a new generation coming up, one the old generation. And their tastes are a little different from what we had maybe 50 years ago, where the typical person wanted four bedrooms, a third half an acre, 30 miles, 20 miles from the city so they can commute an hour by car. Millennials are looking for walkable communities, places where you know your neighbors and so forth. And this can very definitely be promoted by high frequency transportation. So what are the key benefits? Well, first of all, that's 42% housing value advantage. In other words, there's a lot of money on the table and high frequency public transportation, among other things can help from a financial point of view. But there are many benefits to the communities which go beyond the financial and I've just discussed them. And right now, consumers to a significant degree are choosing neighborhoods where you've got increased mobility, got more access to jobs, walkability, as we say, and they're voting with their feet. So this is good news. The good news today is that the housing markets are headed up. And the other good news here is you see the advantages of rapid public transportation. They've been documented. And hopefully as we go down the road, we'll continue to continue to see advances in this area. And promoting not just economic value, but also social value for the country, as we get to walkable communities and so forth. So thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Smith. We'll now turn to Sarah Klein, who is the Policy Director for Reconnecting America. And Sarah is responsible for reconnecting America's work with policymakers in an effort to help foster healthy and prosperous communities that serve people of all incomes, and of all kinds of backgrounds to make communities truly, truly work. She, too, brings a very important, rich policy background in that Sarah had worked previously as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. And that is the committee that has jurisdiction over transit, over public transportation policy here in the United States Senate. And before joining Reconnecting America, Sarah was also Director of Policy and Government Relations for Ramada at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. Great. Thank you very much, Carol. And I want to thank APTA and EESI for inviting me to join the panel today. I am really excited about this report. And I'll tell you why. For those of us who have worked in this field for a while, the resiliency value of transit in helping communities remain strong has been something we've long suspected. There has been evidence that has pointed to that being the case. But until today, there has not yet been a report directly on this point, at least that I'm aware of. This is a really important contribution that this report is making to the field and to our understanding of the value that public transportation has. So I really appreciate being part of the panel. I'm going to provide a little bit of the context about what we already have known about public transit and its effect and its benefits for communities. Reconnecting America is a national non-profit organization and we work with our partners, two of whom are listed up there on the slide, Center for Transit Oriented Development and Transportation for America, on helping places become complete communities. What do we mean by a complete community? A complete community is a place that provides everything a person or a family needs to thrive. And I don't have to pay Kaiser Permanente when I use that word I've checked. So it provides access to jobs, affordable housing, quality education, the health care and healthy foods and the parks and recreational facilities that people need. And in our mind, in our research, what we found is that the linchpin that ties a complete community together is a high frequency public transportation service. It provides people with the transportation choices that they need. So there are many benefits of complete communities with transportation choices and today I'm only going to focus on two. The first one that ties in with the theme of today's briefing is economic development and competitiveness benefits. There are many examples around the country of the economic development benefits that transit can provide. I've listed only a couple of them here. If you can't read it they do have hard copies. So I don't know if the folks in the back can see the numbers. But the basic point of this slide and these are just a few of the many examples that I could have pulled from around the country is that the economic development benefits of transit are not limited to a single region of the country or to a single type of transit. These are three different cities, Portland, Oregon, Cleveland and Meridian, Mississippi in three very different regions of the country with three different types of transportation services. And yet all of them have seen an interest by the private sector to come and to invest around their transportation system. Businesses as well have really started to highlight the importance of a high frequency transit system in their day to day business decisions. There are high-profile companies like Blockbuster that have actually said we chose our location because it was near transit. There are businesses that have experienced greater passenger traffic, greater sales because of their location near transit. Now, Jed alluded to the generational shift and one of the things that we spent a lot of time at Reconnecting America looking at is what are we what are we going to see in the coming decades? Are we really seeing a generational shift in terms of the desires of people in where and how they want to live and move around their communities? And we think the answer is yes. They're the desires of what's been called the creative class. This is a term that was coined about 10 years ago by Richard Florida to refer to those individuals in the economy who are the innovators, who are the problem solvers and who really contribute to economic growth and competitiveness for communities. Many of these folks are the younger generation, the millennials that we're just talked about, kids born between I love saying kids. Kids born between around 1980 and 1995 who are really in many ways innovators and the future innovators in our economy. Cities are responding by trying to attract this generation of people to come and work in their in their community because they see that this is the future of their economic strength. What do cities need to do to bring this millennial generation and the creative class in to work in their communities? A couple of the trends have been talked about. Millennials want to drive less. They are actually showing the trend of driving less than their previous generations have done. They are waiting longer to get their driver's licenses. They are affirmatively looking to live in the types of communities that were just described with affordable homes near high frequency transit service with other amenities that make the give you the ability to walk to access all of your daily needs. The chart that you may or may not be able to read from the back. It shows a couple of different pieces of research that I've kind of put together just because I think they illustrate this trend. The left hand column of the chart shows the cities in the United States that have the highest percentage of college educated 18 to 34 year olds. This is a proxy because it's the data set that we had available a proxy for sort of the millennials in the creative class. Many of them were covered in the report. We have Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis, St. Paul. They have a high percentage of these innovators in the new economy. The next two columns in the chart illustrate that these cities are all in the top 10 nationally when it comes to public transit usage. So the middle column is the percent of jobs that are accessible by means of transit in those cities. And the right hand column is the percent of commuters who take transit. So these cities that have this high concentration of the millennial generation, these younger folks also have among the highest transportation use in this country. And I think that this is indicative of a trend of what we're going to see more of in the future. And I think instructive for cities that are looking to bring more of these younger people in, they're going to need to think about how to get some numbers like this. They're going to have to think about how to invest in a high frequency public transportation system. Just briefly, I'm going to spend some time on one of the other benefits of public transit, which is the benefit for households in terms of the savings that they receive when they live in a transit-rich environment. So the pie chart all the way on the right, that red piece or kind of orangy red piece that you see shows the percentage of a family's budget that they have to spend on transportation when they live in a neighborhood that is very auto dependent when you basically have to get in your car to get to anywhere. They spend about, you know, on average about 25% of their family budget on just transportation, zooming over all the way to the left and looking at the little orange, orange is red slice in that pie. That's the percentage of a family's budget that they spend on transportation when they live in a transit-rich neighborhood where there are transportation options and they don't have to get in the car for every time they need to go anywhere. Now this is important for families, obviously, if they get to save some money on transportation, they can go and do other things with it. But why is it important for cities? It's important for cities because the people who have additional disposable income, they can use that and spend it in the local economy. And it continues the cycle of giving back to the local and regional economy and helping to keep that robust. So I'll run just quickly through this. Not surprisingly, because of all these great benefits, I've talked about demand for housing near transit is growing. In fact, research by Arthur Nelson at the University of Utah says that if we were really going to meet the demand for housing near transit, every single new residential unit that we build between now and 2050 would have to be near transit. It's a tall order. Demand for transit is also growing. Cities are recognizing the benefits that transit provides. And we have done a survey of projects all across the country and identified over 700 projects that are being planned, designed and built in regions around the country. This is not just a few regions. This is everywhere. Of the 700 projects that we've identified, about 500 of them have cost estimates. They're far enough along the process that they have a rough idea of how much they'll cost. So for those 500 projects, their total cost is about $250 billion. Now, I've got a slide up here that shows how much money was dedicated in the recently passed federal transportation bill, map 21, specifically for the purpose of new transit. It's a little bit short of the need. In fact, if we continue investing in new transit at this rate, it's going to take nearly 80 years to build all of the projects that you saw on the previous slide. And these communities should not have to wait that long. So the conclusion of this is that while states and localities are doing, as Michael Malanofi said, they are passing sales taxes. They're putting up a lot of their own dollars to build these projects. Federal government needs to help too. It's not easy. I've been in the seats that some of you are in now and it's really, it's tough, but it needs to be done. Thank you very much. Lots of food for thought there in terms of thinking about what does this mean? What are the policy needs coming out of this that we recognize? Thinking about all of the benefits, all of these trends that we are seeing really important to have all of this information pulled together. So now is your chance to ask questions, offer comments with regard to this brand new report. And you should feel very, very fortunate that you got to be here for the release of this really important new information. Any questions or comments? And if you would just identify yourself, please when you ask your question. Okay, we'll start here and then we'll go to the back. I'm excuse me. I'm Chris Yoder. I'm transportation chair for the Maryland chapter of the Sierra Club. And my question, I'm thinking of Jed Smith with the realtors, but anybody could chime in. And that's I see a huge disconnect from what is projected here demand for housing in transit rich areas, with the actual decisions that are made on the ground in land use planning in the jurisdictions of Maryland, particularly the suburban ones. I what I see are local planning and zoning boards and county councils, approving what I disparage is sprawl development, but and development, residential housing development that's makes transit very difficult to justify economically because the people are so dispersed. And I wonder if somebody could comment on what I perceive as as the disconnect between what was said here and what I see on the ground. Probably everyone will want to take a stab. But did you want to start yet? Sure. Well, all real estate is local, so it'll vary from region to region. But and specifically, I think you're going to see increasing demand for central city or urban environment types of properties. And so I think it's not so much an issue of what various boards are doing, but what the consumers are doing by voting with their feet and with their demands. And so I think that's the real place that the important vote is cast when somebody puts money down for a for a for a house. And I think you're seeing an increasing interest in in places near transportation. So regardless of what people are doing, I think you're going to see people voting for what they want. And and in many cases, that'll be transportation rich environments. If I could jump in here, I think one of the things we're seeing now is that communities are understanding that public transportation is about so much more than just providing a seat, a ride from point A to point B. It's it's part of land use. It's part of a transportation system. It's part of the economic viability of a region. When you think about how all of us move about our communities, we're not constrained by geopolitical lines. You don't stop at a city border or county line when you go to the store or school or Medicare, medical care. You move about your cities much more freely and openly and public transportation is doing that much more. And we're seeing that cities have looked at what's made them competitive as we've come through these economic challenges. And those cities that had good, rich public transportation options were more resilient, they responded, rebounded more quickly. They got people back to jobs more quickly because you can't get people back to work if you can't get them to work. And by having good public transportation, people have found that this is a key component of making their cities more competitive, not just locally, but when they compete with other cities, other states or across the across the world as we think about the international influx of new businesses coming into this country. One of the key things that people ask for when they're bringing their businesses to cities is, do you have access to good public transportation? Because they want to be able to attract good employees to work in their environment. So it is a land development. It is a policy piece. It's much more than just about transit. Transit isn't just the thing. The thing is all the movement and the use of the system to make their city work more effectively. And one last piece before I toss it over to Sarah, who I know is going to give us insightful thoughts, the US Census projecting that by 2050, we'll have 100 million more people in this country. We have to find more efficient and effective ways to utilize our existing infrastructure so we can move these people about not have our cities choked by congestion. And putting good public transportation options in those cities is going to make a big difference in how we make our cities more efficient and effective going forward. Sarah. Yeah, is this on? No. It just stays red, not green. Is it on? Yeah. OK, good. OK. So just, yeah, just a couple of brief points and I agree with everything that's been said. I will say that it took us a long time to get to the land use that we have today. I mean, the patterns that we see of development which are in many places very car based and based around roadways and suburban neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs, that didn't happen overnight. It happened over many decades and it's going to take us some time to move towards the newer, I think, the more desired model that we've been talking about. So I do think we've seen in a lot of places that there are forward-thinking folks who are trying to respond to the demographic trends that we're seeing, but it takes people a long time to get into the sort of mindset of doing something different. It's not easy to do change. You have to do it incrementally in many places. You know, one zoning decision at a time. So I do think that there is, you know, perhaps there are individual decisions that are not necessarily those that we'd prefer to see, but there are trends nationally and in the communities that we're working in towards people thinking ahead and trying to get the mindset towards building the communities near transit that we want to see. Okay. To the far back first, and then we'll... My name is Tamika Monterville. I'm with the Transportation Planning Office or the Program Office of the Federal Transit Administration. Hi, Sarah. I've worked in the industry for a long time and I think it's wonderful that the real estate market is really acknowledging and addressing the importance of public transit. One of the challenges with expanding public transit is the need and the capacity of our existing cities for facilities for all this great public transit. And I think that's going to become one of the hugest obstacles that we're facing, especially in cities, metropolitan areas like this. So is there something, when someone says you want to locate near public transit, most people aren't looking at a bus facility? Is there something that the real estate market is doing or the community is doing to address the demand for large parcels of land for street cars, buses, some type of partnership that maybe some city has done a creative thing and did a multi-use facility for parking all these great buses and trains? I'm not particularly aware of any master plan, so to speak. As I say, all real estate is local and I think that's being handled in a variety of ways. Obviously some people, you know, you always hear there's not in my backyard, but if not in that backyard then in which backyard? So I think that's an increasing challenge. I think it's one though that'll have to be worked out at the local level. To me, I think you hit on a really important point and that is, there's no one entity that makes our cities work more efficiently and effectively. It's a system. You have to work together. It takes a federal investment, it takes state investment, it takes local policies and local investment. It's in the public sector and the private sector working together. To make all these things work officially and effectively, you have to have that partnership and so you hit on a really good point. We have to have policies and funding at a federal level that support the capital side and infrastructure. We have to have policies on a local level in land use and cooperation and MOUs so that we can cover systems of movement across various geopolitical lines. It takes a collaboration. We have to have the private sector involvement as they look for ways to partner with us and to make our cities better because they understand that the city is better, it's better for them and that creates a better tax base for the community. So it takes all these pieces working together and it's so exciting to see this enlightenment where everyone's understanding these pieces come together and they interplay with each other. I think it's a really good point that you raised. Sarah, you should add to this. Sure. I'll just add one example that I came across recently of a public private partnership like Michael was just referring to in Miami. Anyone here from Florida? Miami area? No, good. I could say whatever I want. Miami-Dade Transit, which is a division of the Miami-Dade County government, is actually partnering with a private developer to build a joint facility. It's not actually a bus garage, but it's a bus transfer facility. So lots of buses coming in every day, lots of people getting on and off and transferring. And so they are working with the developer on the same site to have both the bus transfer facility for passengers and also some retail and a theater and some residential units. So there are innovative projects like this where they're trying to work with transit and address the transit needs to make sure the buses can go in and out but also give people what they want, which is to be able to work and shop and live near that high-frequency transit service. They also just opened an exciting new terminal at the airport where the train comes into the airport. Bus services there, interconnectivity across different modes. It's an exciting opportunity right there in Miami as well. Exactly. That's a really, really interesting example, Mike. Thanks. Okay, we had a couple of hands in here. Okay, here first and then we'll go to Darren after that. Thanks. My name is Michael Kiefer. I'm a recent transportation engineering graduate from Purdue University and I will be the first to admit I'm pretty young and green in all this, but I do fit the stereotype. I mean, I myself would like to live next to a transit-oriented development. However, the cost of constructing one of these stations or just the infrastructure in general is one thing, but from my understanding, now correct me if I'm wrong, but the cost of actually upkeeping and maintaining these systems is quite considerable and there are relatively few systems in this country that are actually profitable. So how do you, I mean, foresee, I guess, the future of maintaining or just from the financial perspective, these numerous systems and the 700 projects that or 500 or whatever you said that are identified throughout the country. Lots to say about that. Mike, you should start. Well, I think you have to look at the financial picture as the total package. The development that's gone along these corridors is extraordinary. Let's talk about Phoenix. Phoenix put in a $1.7 billion for the late rail line and that opened in 08. So it opened when the economy was hitting as it was diving to the bottom. Since that time, they've had over $7 billion of economic investment along that corridor. Universities, businesses, homes moving along that corridor. So let's say I have to look at the economic piece. You don't look at each individual piece. It's the total economic impact on that city. How strong is that message? It may say Arizona where Mayor Scott Smith, very conservative Republican Vice-Chair of the Conference of Mayors, he flexed his highway money to build an extension to the rail line in the city of Mesa. Four universities have moved along that corridor and moving there right now while they're building the rail line. That's how you measure the economic impact. It's about what it does to the entire city. Yes, it's important that we make sure that we invest and state a good repair for our systems, that we don't just put the capital and structure in place and then walk away and say, oh, it's all done. It'll last forever. It's important that we continue to look at that. We make that investment. Just like when you all buy a house or you buy a car, you have to put maintenance into it and plan for that and budget for it. We have to do that as well in our public transportation systems. And that's part of that partnership. Each of us has a role, whether it's federal, state, local, they all have a role in that, but it's the economics so we have to look at it on a bigger picture, what it's doing for the economies of those cities. I might just also mention that the maintenance alone with regard to thinking about our huge highway and road structure is also incredible and that many times we forget to take that into account as we also think about transit systems. So we have to look at that whole picture to really get any sense of their context. Anybody else? I'd like to say something. We put an awful lot of money in this country into roads. An awful lot of money into automobiles. And no wonder many of the transit systems operate at a loss because we're not putting the equal amounts of money into them that we're giving to the other areas. So it all depends on how you allocate the costs and which cost you're talking about. And we studied all of that when I was at Purdue. I'm also Purdue graduate and it's great to see you. I'm a Hoosier. Well, that's good too. Oh my goodness. I can't stand it. I always feel we've got Indiana really in here. But anyway, proper costing and an allocation of the numbers is I think real important and we don't have that now. And that's a major contributor to what we see on the books. The books are really just not accurate. And just think of all those negative externalities we're getting. All that smog and pollution that we get to breathe every day, which we wouldn't have as much of if we use public transportation. So, and I think such an important piece of that is that all of those things, both in terms of thinking about the values but the economics behind each of those co-benefits that once again, it becomes actually really fascinating and fun to start to parse out looking at all of these different kinds of costs and how it really affects the economics of a very big picture. Darin, you got a question? Okay. Could you? So I'm Darin Lovas with the Natural Resources Defense Council. And as Sarah said, this is a great addition to the literature. So kudos to those who did the work and thanks for getting it out there. So publicly. Is this kind of analysis and analysis that could be done pursuant to this that's similar? Is it going to help transit agencies to develop public-private partnership proposals to capture this value, to help finance expansions and even more specifically and pointedly, will it help agencies to submit proposals for TIFIA funding since the 29 projects that have been proposed currently for TIFIA, the vast majority of them are toll roads. And I think the intention when Congress expanded this program eightfold was that you'd get a little more innovation than comes with a toll road. So anyway. Mike? Well, I think one of the things that's reviewed in the evaluation of the submissions and we certainly appreciate everybody making their submissions for TIFIA loans is that looking at those other where you can show more partnerships, more of a shed of benefits, others that participate in that, having this new very current body of work that looks at things in its current economic time is an important tool. And part of the key here is to raise the collective awareness of these impacts and nothing helps that more than having data. And as you can help build that collective database, as you can build new partnerships, help people to have the awareness and have the understanding with the data behind them that these are good things to do. It builds that partnership and I think it's gonna forward and advance the cause even further. I could offer something. Go ahead, Jed. There are two things that are gonna capture people's minds, dollars and cents and quality of life. And I think this report makes a good start towards showing people some of the benefits from rapid transit as related to both of those. So I think it's a good step in the right direction. Okay. Well, go here first and then back here. Hi, I'm Eric Wolfe. I'm just a member of the public who won. Interesting public. That's okay. Right. But I am interested. I'm looking through the study and I noticed that all of the areas that have the biggest housing drops are outlying areas, which is exactly what you'd expect irregardless of transit. That's where the X-Serves were. It's where the building was. It's where the housing crash was. The housing crash I never heard an economist say is because of public transit or lack of transit because of horrendous loans. When you were looking at 2006 to 2011, methodologically, how did you separate the housing crash and the fact that values in far-flung areas fell much faster than in inner-city areas? How did you separate the transit causes from just what was happening in the economy? Well, people had home loans in the cities, too. I mean, they weren't just in the suburbs. The entire California outside of Phoenix, outside of Boston, that's where the really bad ones were. Let's bring up one of the researchers. Let's have Darnell talk about that a little bit who is very familiar in terms of the innards with regard to. Donald Grisby with the American Public Transportation Association. Hello, everyone. Just wanted to thank all of our partners, including CNT, Center for Neighborhood Technology, who did a lot of the work behind the study. To your question, I think economic demand is a large part of it, correct? So perhaps there's a drop in demand in some areas in increasing other areas, right? And we've shown that there is a change in preferences underway. You have a generation Y and millennials who want to have a certain way they want to live. You see empty nesters also making a shift. And a lot of times these things might happen at the same time as some other external factor. So you bring up a good point that perhaps it could be these other external factors, but there's so much noise out there pushing towards a change in preferences that could be the driver behind these differences. Thank you, Turner. Great. Okay. Okay, another question back here. Thanks. Dan Emmerine from the District of Columbia Office of Planning. Another couple of really nitpicky questions just to help better understand what the research is telling us. I've heard, I think all of the presenters sort of jump back and forth between talking about fixed guyway transit and high frequency transit. And those are two different things. So I'm just wondering if you can shed a little more light on what the research is telling us about the value of running on a fixed guideway versus the frequency of the service. And I'm also curious what you can tell us about the value of connectivity of service. Because I think intuitively we all know that a transit system that helps you connect point A to point B doesn't provide as much value as one that helps you connect to point C and D and E and so on. And the other question that I have is just wanna be very clear about what the report is looking at because it does look like you've been trying to look at the value of homes within a certain radius of fixed guideway transit stations. And you're calling that transit sheds and everything else is not in a transit shed. But that means that we're excluding anything that gets bus service. And you could be living on a corridor that gets headways of five to 10 minutes. But if it's a bus, you're not counting that in your report if I'm understanding correctly. So there are two main drivers behind variations report. One would be what is the transit connectivity index. And you'll see this in the report. And what is a transit connectivity index? It's the measure of transit access that's actually around a station. So within a half mile radius of a station, how many connections can you make within a 30 minute connection? So essentially what was done there's a buffer around the station of a approximately half mile that was done five additional times and each additional point was measured of what kind of access you have from the station and that was weighted appropriately. And what you find in the study is there's some direct relationship between the connection between transit connectivity index as well as the transit access shed. So the transit access shed is 30 minutes by public transportation scaled by the frequency of service. And we've done this by using what is known as general transit feed specification is the way that most transit agencies actually communicate their schedule systems. So the researchers were able to actually compile all this information. And when you combine the transit access shed and the transit connectivity index, you get a general sort of feel about how much general service there is available to a given user. And the connection between those two gives you the difference in performance. So that explains why there's a difference between cities. And you can expand that extrapolate that out to explain the variations amongst a variety of different situations. So the answer is, if you wanna have higher home values, at least as they're connected to transit, you wanna have more service. So adding more service is the key driver, not the fixed guideway system necessarily to answer your question directly. Well, doesn't that correlate to Boston having a very mature system with lots of connectivity? You saw a higher resiliency number there because you can get more and more places because there are so many more options with high frequency transportation, public transportation as opposed to some of the newer cities where there are more linear passes, they're beginning to maturity curve with their system. And so that's why you see some of that variance. And as we look at BRT, it's also about the infrastructure you put in place with it. The more you have real tangible assets where you've got stations that reflect their community that are unique, you've got pavers and landscaping and things like that that tie in a fixed corridor, you see a higher yield toward that being a high frequency corridor like you see on the health line in Cleveland or out in the system out in Eugene, Oregon. So it's looking at systems that emulate that type of fixed alignment where people feel a concentration of transit's gonna stay there as a permanency to it. So you can get that type of outcome from things beyond a fixed guideway system. So buses could also accomplish that if they have the right kind of frequency, but traditionally you'll see that through a fixed guideway system which could include the BRT system as which was discussed. So a fixed guideway usually has BRT and light rail, streetcar, heavy rail. Bus rapid transit, right? Okay, great, thank you very much. Over here first. Hi, good afternoon, Anna Ricklin at the American Planning Association. And I'm really happy to hear people talking about quality of life as including health explicitly. There was a recent study published in the American Journal of Public Health that showed that folks who access public transportation by walking and use public transportation regularly got a lot more physical activity in their day than people who didn't. And of course it was more beneficial for people who accessed train lines because they saw that there was more regular access to train lines than to other forms of transportation. But my question is how is public transit and what is your perspective on what we need to do to improve public transit in our suburban cities and our suburban areas and how we can have land use and developers come together on that more? Do you want to start first, sir? Sure, that's a great question. And I'm glad to hear you echoing the importance of public health, because that's something that really I think is often missed in this conversation. But with regard to suburbs, a lot of suburbs, particularly those that are what's called the first ring, the first set of suburbs around the city actually have a land use pattern that could lend themselves to a kind of transit orientation. There's often an older downtown-ish area that can be the focal point for creating a walkable neighborhood. And so these are places for communities to start when a region is looking at trying to create more opportunities for people to live in walkable neighborhoods near transit. They should not only look at the center city, there are other places in these regions that can support transit service and can be a focal point for that development. So I do think that looking at the suburbs is very important. And many places around the country are doing that. We have some research on our website as well that looks at some of the suburban areas that places are looking at and strategies for providing transit service in those places. So it's a very promising place to look. I think if you look at this from a real estate point of view, the data show, and this is quite consistent with other data that I've seen, that where you have transit, prices tend to be higher, tend to do better than where you don't. So people are voting with their feet. And I'll just give you one simple example here in the Washington area. Arlington County is very transit-friendly in the sense that you can either walk to something or find some transit to a significant degree. And yet some of the other counties are much less transit-friendly in the sense that they've got bigger lots, more spread out, whatever. And by golly, if you look at the prices for Arlington County housing versus prices elsewhere, they're mirroring the fact that in one case you can get somewhere quickly in a walkable neighborhood and in another case, it's back into the car and not so fast. So I think that the market's showing that. And over time, and we're talking about many, many years, this will all work its way out as the market adapts. But it'll be a long time. Mike? You touched on two really important parts there. And first, the public health. We had the privilege of participating in a six-hour White House roundtable put on by the Surgeon General a few weeks ago talking about healthy cities and the role that public transportation plays in that. And it's such a critical piece that we have healthier cities. They had some great statistics on only 0.2% of your life has been actually with a healthcare provider and 30% has to do with genealogy. But the rest of it's about your environment. And by providing better environments, we can really impact healthcare and healthcare costs in its nation by having healthier cities. So a really, really important point you touched on there. The other thing to think about now was the evolution of technology, how it's changing, how we use our transit systems. So often, all of us are apprehensive to use a system that we don't know. That we don't know when the bus is coming. We don't know when the train is coming. We don't know if we can transfer. We don't know what the fares are. And technology is changing that. Now all of us, many of us in this room, have transit apps. We know when the next metro train is coming. I've got all the different stops I take or quick clicks on my phone. And we've got those systems around the country and we're seeing that impact in the way people are using the systems. Because when you take the apprehension away, when you demystify the transit experience, especially for riders in areas that aren't used to typically riding it, when they have that information right there on their phone, no more app to use it. And we're seeing those type of ridership pattern changes. So it's about the infrastructure. It's about the land use. And it's also about the technology to enabling a capacity to use the system more easily. So great question, thank you. Okay, back here. Hi, I'm Megan McCanna with Congressman Tom Petri. And we are working on a value capture bill to open RIF and Tiffia loans to business developments around public transportation to hopefully provide a suitable, dedicated funding source to pay back these loans. And I'm hoping you can just maybe elaborate on the business benefits and how you think this study translates to the development of businesses around public transportation. Okay, great, Mike, do you want to go first? Sure, I think it's a wonderful thing to be looking at this for so many years. We've made these investments in public transportation and others have yielded the benefits around those developments. And to look at what's that really worth? What's the value of that? We're seeing city after city now really doing the studies and capturing that value and telling that story and the more they tell that story, the more it builds the case for more companies to relocate along those corridors because they see if others are doing it and they're reaping economic benefit from it that it's really helping to build the case and make those cities stronger, more resilient. And so I think you're gonna see more and more of that discussion and we certainly appreciate the work of the congressman on this effort. Sarah, do you want to add her, Jed? Yeah, I'll talk to you for a second about Metro right here in Washington. If you went down to Clarendon in the 1980s, there wasn't a whole lot going on there to draw you there. It really was not that charming a place. It was, there wasn't much to buy or do or anything else. Now if you go to Clarendon, it's a happening place. So what's the difference? Metro, they came and by golly, you've got all these vibrant businesses in a vibrant neighborhood instead of parking lots. That's a great example. Let me give you one other example. Savannah, Georgia, there is a streetcar that runs through the historic downtown. And do you know who pays for the operations of that streetcar? It's a partnership between the city and the business community. Those businesses see a benefit from the tourists who are able to get around the old cobblestone streets on the streetcar rather than having to carry all their shopping bags by hand and walk. So that's a very direct example. Those, they're not voting with their feet. Those businesses are voting with their wallets or their dollars, they see a benefit. And I think the congressman's bill is actually a really exciting opportunity. I think a lot of people often think that this issue is very local, the benefits to business and how it gets returned to the transit. But I do think there's a role for the federal government here to encourage and support this kind of activity. So I think it's a really exciting bill that you're working on. Great, and I must say at other times when we have looked at transportation, we've had folks from Philadelphia in terms of thinking about the septic system, Chicago, and also Cleveland. And we've had business people in terms of local economic development officials as well as chamber of commerce officials who have been all about business and why they needed transit because it was absolutely a key to local economic development. And it was a very, very serious business opportunity. And they felt it was a huge requirement for successful economic development activity. There were a couple other questions. Okay, here, on the other side there. My name's Jeff Butheth on the night, but I also chair the new start working group in the community street car coalition. I'm also a board member reconnecting American and a board member of American public transportation. I want to, to your bill, the issue is, and to your comment, we've been giving value away as transit. We have been generating value in project quarters and we have not captured it. And unless the transit agency owned the property, there's no way for them to capture the value and get that return on investment for what they create in a community. And so I think one of the challenges is cities are building transit systems to begin to look at differently about their system to begin to explicitly capture that value and have a conversation with the local government as they're developing the project and doing economic development land use in the quarter. So how can we more explicitly capture value of the project? Now that's also a conversation with the local government because typically land is owned by, the local government decides land use and working with the private developer in terms of economic development to be able to have a more explicit value capture mechanism. And the real challenge is there has been some value captured down at Union Station in Denver. The Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, we worked on that loan under TIFIA for the Transbay Terminal where there's gotta be value and you have to create a TIF district or some way to repay the loan over a 30 year period. But I'd encourage you to also look at cities or look at streetcars because in that case cities have the ability to influence land use development decisions and therefore can more effectively engage in dedicated funding source to repay a TIFIA loan. So I'd love to talk about that because I think what's happening in the industry is we are having a new conversation in the industry about value created by transit and this report illustrates that. I think transit agencies are more explicitly looking at that as the development of their new system. So I'd love to talk to you about that but I think we are seeing a change happen in terms of transit agencies' communications with their local government to get more value to the system. Great, thanks Jeff. And obviously it's really critical. I was also really struck in terms of the conversation to how it's so important in terms of different elements within communities really coming together so that they hear about these experiences and think about what are the different components and the rationales that all need to be brought together because each piece in a community and so many of the benefits or co-benefits so many times various individuals may not be aware of the whole and so it makes it really important to make sure that people from different components within a community are all brought together with this kind of information. It's the only way we can do ourselves an important favor here. There was a question, okay back here and then over here. I'm Sharon Pugh from the Federal Transit Administration. I want to follow up on Jeff's point and we'll be very specific about it. There is capturing the value that's provided by transit however it is not going back into transit and that is what we need to get local communities to understand that their transit systems are creating their economic engines for the development, the growth of their local and regional communities but as we saw on Sarah's chart we have no money going into the investment of transit and that's where that return needs to come back. There are taxes that are imposed in some communities but they're on everybody and we see that with the household residential but it's the business communities that are not paying their fair share. They're the ones who are reaping the real benefits from those transit systems and we have very few instances outside of street cars and circulators where they are willing to pay for the investment in that system. As Jeff mentioned we have Transbay in San Francisco, we have Denver Union Station, here we have the dollars corridor. Outside of that the only real investments we have value capture investments in transit are street cars and circulators. We do joint development but that's limited because that is the property owned by the transit agency but beyond that, where we're talking about TODs that's where we need to get the focus. That system has to be sustained in order to maintain that growth of driver. Thank you, really, really important points. Okay, there we, uh-huh. Thank you. This is a mecha monomer, infrastructure and transportation consultant. Sarah, it's good to see you. I think this conversation is very interesting and as we're talking about the different ways that begin capturing that value, one of the questions is there's obviously a focus on the DC, excuse me, not DC, but the US market. And looking at, I mean should we be talking about a different model for transit properties to be able to properly capture that value? Are there other ways to be doing it and looking at it, international models? I mean I know of Singapore is obviously a very well run way to do transit development and there's other models in Spain that didn't work out as well but just maybe kind of taking a conversation beyond what was on paper. Any thoughts maybe, Michael, about other models out there for the transit industry to look at? Well, certainly we work with our international partners around the world and we talk with them, we visit with them, we go out and see their systems and ride their systems and you've got the extremes of the model that we have our model here and you look at in Japan, Shinkansen, the high speed train, the bullet trains, they own the real estate along the corridor, they actually own the Marriott hotels and the restaurants and the housing and it's the revenue from that that really subsidizes the transit operation and so you've got kind of two extremes of the system and actually in the management structure someone will work on the transit line for a while then they'll go work in the hospitality industry and then they'll come back into the rail system to get, understand the full capture, they understand that full dynamic of how that works together but those are different policies that allow that to occur in the first place but it's interesting that you bring it up and I think it's worthy of as we look at the bigger dialogue and talking big picture in the long term to share these stories and learn from others and there are things we can learn from those as we move forward into building a new model. Sarah? Well, I'll just add to that just a couple of quick points that's a really important difference between the international model and what we have here in the US and the kind of corresponding element of that is that the entity that's currently capturing the value from transit in addition to the businesses is the local governments that are getting the bigger sales taxes, property taxes, et cetera. They have many competing priorities in terms of what they do with their funding. They've got to hire police and fund schools and all those sorts of things and I think in many cases the local governments are, because they are different from the transit provider which is often a regional agency or a separate department or division, there's education that's needed about the benefits of transit. I mean, we are sort of at the beginning of this conversation about value capture and there are a lot of people in the local communities who don't get it yet. In fact, there was a very important piece that was just done by Womata. I'll throw them back at you guys. That actually was a nice report that attempted to quantify all of the benefits that Womata provides to this region. So not just the property values but all the saved infrastructure costs from not having to put parking lots all over the National Mall. So there are so many benefits of transit and yet we're just at the beginning of the conversation and that's why this report is so important to keep that conversation moving forward. Jet, did you wanna add? Well, I think Sarah has put it very clearly if you don't pay for additional benefits after you've gotten some benefits, you don't get more benefits. And therefore, you know, the local governments and everything's different from government to government but if the local government's benefit then they may wish to consider putting some money in to benefit further. Any other questions or comments? Okay, go ahead, okay. Again, I'm Chris Yoder with Maryland Sierra Club. I wanna, the question that I'm gonna ask is this discussion, I believe, has almost entirely focused on what I would call urban, even larger urban areas. And so the question will be does transit have value outside of urban areas? Then I will put that in context. First, the slide about the MAP-21 money available for transit against the $250 billion identified need and the observation that one of the reasons for that is that rural legislators don't believe that their constituents see any value in transit and in fact, indulging in a stereotype, I think that many legislators representing rural or even suburban areas think that their constituents think of the cities as that other that is probably the enemy or at least in the best case can be just ignored. And so my question then becomes is transit only urban? And if it is not, and I don't believe it is, how can transit advocates best ensure that constituents understand the value of transit when those constituents live in non-urban areas? Mike? Well, Chris, you hit on a number of points and I'll run through them fairly quickly. First, with respect to this report, this report was focused on high frequency, quarter-based transit and its impact on real estate. So in that regard, there's less emphasis on rural but the question you asked was is there value in rural communities for transit? Absolutely. Some of the highest ridership numbers we saw across this nation, we talked about very high record ridership numbers in fact across the nation. 16 cities had record ridership numbers last year. Many of those high numbers were in rural areas. People need that connectivity. And we talk about how does this message work for all different constituency groups? Let's not forget in addition to providing critical access to healthcare jobs and social activities, good transportation in rural areas can provide that connectivity to good healthcare in a centralized CBD area instead of putting healthcare facilities in lots of little rural areas if you have good transportation to there, it's a more cost-effective way to provide access to those needs. Let's also remember that when the federal government invested in public transportation, fully 76% of the dollars flow right through to the private sector because we have to build the capital, we have to build the buses and rail cars and infrastructure. And recall that those construction projects, they don't happen, the assets are built, not in your central business district, you don't have a bus plant in the middle of Washington, D.C. You have it in rural areas, you have it in Aniston, Alabama and Pemona, North Dakota and you've got a big rail car facility in the middle of Nebraska and rural Illinois. These jobs are created that build these things in every district around this country. Those are jobs that flow through, those are not only big companies, but the supply base to build the wiring harnesses and the windshields and the seats and the fabric. Those are often small family businesses. It makes a big difference that investment in public transportation flows through. We have to be able to tell that story as well. Anybody else want to comment? Okay. We have time for one last question if anyone has one. Okay, well, I would like to ask a question in terms of, so there was, this is like a new area, taking a look at this particular topic. We are seeing all sorts of challenges with regard to the transportation bill with regard to overall funding. And as we look at kind of a very disproportionate amount that goes for roads in this country, as opposed to the amount that 20% roughly that goes for transit at the federal level. And at the same time, we all have been hearing about record numbers with regard to transit. There is this huge demand in terms of business and consumer desirability for access. So what do you see being sort of the next steps in terms of taking this particular study, other kinds of analysis connected to this so that we can make better policy decisions? How do we reach policymakers in a better way? How is the real estate industry going to take this kind of information, get it around the country to help in terms of decisions, et cetera? What comes next? Our membership are individual small businesses and they are there to help the consumer find what they want. And obviously they'd like to see a transaction occur so they can get paid and the consumer can get the house. And one of the things that I think our people are gonna find is that calling transit options to people's attention, the desirability of certain areas over others, it's gonna be real interesting to people. And so from a marketing point of view, because our people, among other things, are salespeople helping the consumer get what they want. This is a marketing tool to tell them these are your options and maybe you ought to consider this. I think in the discussion and the dialogue, it's not about transit versus roads. Right. I'm the transit guy. It's okay to take a car for some trips. Okay, I own a car. But you have to do a combination. It's what's the most efficient, most effective trip for the needs, for the trip you're taking. And if you can take transit for many of those trips and your usual work trips fully 60% or almost 60% of all trips on transit are for work, you can take those on transit and then use your automobile for trips that don't operate along that transit corridor. That's okay. And it's finding that right mix, that right balance. And I think when you have give people options, they'll choose the one that's best for them and it makes our cities work more effectively. So I think as we heighten that awareness, we've got more parties that understand it. We look at bigger policy pieces that fit together and realize that it's not just transit and land use and health, it's all these different parts that fit together. And I think as we raise that, we make our communities better. Great, Sarah. Yeah, you know, I think one of the great things about transit in terms of thinking about next steps, you know, 15 years ago, the conversation was about the new economy, there were budget surpluses in Washington, everything was booming forward, you know, tech stocks were through the roof, et cetera. We didn't know then that we were gonna face what we faced in 2008 and the recession and all the associated impacts of that. The concerns that were in people's mind in the past decades are not there now. They're different. The environment that policymakers are working in now, it's about how do we restore economic growth? It's about how do we meet the demands of our new, really new economy. It's now, it's an old word to say new economy, but the new new economy that we have now where so much business can be done virtually and from wherever and people all over the place through technology, transit can respond to that. This report shows that transit can meet the needs of the country where we are today. And I think that's a really important point to carry forward to policymakers to think about that many of the policies that are in place today were developed in a very different time and we need to be thinking about where we want this country to be and where we think we're going to be in 20, 30, 40 years. And that's what I think this report says to me, transit meets the needs that we have today. Thanks, because it's not easy for policymakers to be able to put together all of these competing areas and issues and demands. And so the more that we can help provide really, really solid information so that we can think about things in as holistic a way as possible, I think it helps all of us. So I want to thank our presenters very much today. The report is a very, very interesting one that I hope everyone will take a long read and also pass around and forward to your friends and colleagues. And I want to thank also all of you for being here and for your thoughtful questions. Thank you.