Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   4/28/2022

Good afternoon.

Welcome to the Regional Transit Partnership meeting for Thursday, April the 28th.

It's a lovely day outside and I wish we were all out under a tree.

But anyway, we're not.

Welcome, welcome.

First order of business.

is for me to read the notice of electronic meeting, which I'll do right now.

This meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings when the locality in which it is located has declared a local state of emergency and a catastrophic nature of the emergency

makes it impractical or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location.

And the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the discharge of its lawful purposes, duties, and responsibilities.

This meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public with closed captioning.

And there will be an opportunity for public comment during that portion of the agenda.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice of the TJPDC offices to the media website posting an agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency.

The meeting was held by electronic communications means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

A recording of the meeting will be posted at tjpdc.org within 10 days.

And with that, Lucinda, would you call our roll for attendance?

Supervisor McKeel from Albemarle County.

Present.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley from Albemarle County.

Present.

Director Morgan from John representing the Rural

I see Brian.

Let me just double check.

Brian, can you say something so we can hear you?

Not sure.

Well, I see him on the screen.

Mr. Rieck from Jaunt, we have Karen Davis in place, Mr. Rieck.

Ms. Charmaine White from Albemarle School System.

Sara Pennington from RideShare, she's not available today.

Sandy Shackelford from the MPO.

I'm here.

Present.

And maybe a couple of the others will join us shortly.

We'll see if we can catch them as they come in.

All right.

The first item on our agenda is approval of the agenda.

Thanks, Lloyd.

So we have a motion.

OK, Hal, thank you for the second.

Any opposed?

Any abstention?

All right.

Next item is the approval of our draft meeting minutes.

which were attached to your packet.

And I just wanted to make a note that we did catch a couple of typos.

It looks like under approval of the minutes from the last meeting, Lloyd both made the motion and seconded it, which I don't think was accurate.

So does anybody remember, I thought Bea you were seconding the motions last time, but

Well, if Lloyd made the motion, I probably seconded it because I hold him in such high esteem.

There you go.

Okay, it's all good.

We'll double check.

So we need to check on that page.

Yes, exactly.

And I noticed on, or someone noticed on page three, I think it was Karen, that Jen DeBruell's name is misspelled under the DRPT report.

So we'll make those corrections.

Oh good, thank you.

Yeah, you're right.

There we go.

Thank you, Lloyd.

I appreciate all the help here.

All right, so.

You killed my heart.

We have a motion and a second.

Any abstentions?

And any no's?

All right.

I think we have the minutes approved.

That's great.

Next, let me just say, oh, the meeting in person

I can talk about this.

Christine or Lucinda?

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about this.

The TJPDC staff is coming back in person full-time beginning May 1st with the option for telework days, of course.

But then we're going to be bringing all of our public bodies back beginning June 1st.

And so that would mean the June meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership will be in person.

You guys already previously adopted an electronic participation policy for when you're eligible to participate electronically under those specific circumstances.

Well, it'll be nice to see each other in person.

I did.

Thanks for the update.

Excellent.

Yes, the hybrid will be available for the public.

It'll be for any guest speakers or staff that are not primarily responsible for the meeting.

All right.

And just for everybody's refreshing our memories, is there a way Lucinda that you can send out the policy or the rules about attending so that if folks are out of town, I know, you know, sometimes with summer coming, people may be nice to just for us to be able to read them and see what the criteria is and what we have to do, if you don't mind.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So that'd be great.

And I do see we have folks popping up.

So, oh, Brian, you noticed, Lucinda, that Brian's here now.

You caught him.

Yes.

All right.

Great.

So it'll be fun to see everybody back in person in June.

Be a great start.

The first or the next item on our agenda matters from the public.

Now's the time.

All right.

See, I don't think we have any takers.

All right, so that real meat of our agenda this afternoon is pretty exciting.

We're gonna be hearing from one of our peer cities, and it's about combining student and public transit, and the folks are from Burlington, Vermont.

Welcome, welcome.

And Peggy, why don't you all introduce yourselves?

And your team, you'll do a much better job than I.

And then just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Thanks, this is exciting.

So my name is Peggy O'Neill-Vivanko.

I am the Vermont Clean Cities Coordinator, which is, we're nationwide, a Department of Energy funded.

I'm housed at the University of Vermont.

And I am working with a great team, some of whom are on here, Mike Ritter from Tri-Valley Transit,

Jennifer Wallace Broder from the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, and Jamie Smith from Green Mountain Transit.

And so Jen and I, with a group of others, pitched this idea of combining transit and school routes, some of which we already do in parts of Vermont.

for transportation efficiencies, saving school districts money, and eventually moving towards bus electrification.

So that's like our concept, but we do have some of these systems already in place.

So I will tag to Jen and then she can tag to either Mike or Jamie.

Hi everyone.

I can give you a little bit more description of our vision for this project.

And I'll be really interested to hear if you hear similar comments in Virginia as we get in Vermont, which is why do we have two public transit systems?

One for students, one for the public, that's really inefficient.

Wouldn't it be great if we could get the public on school buses?

So because school buses go everywhere and they reach places that are hard to reach by transit and

These two systems are inefficient.

Sometimes that comes up in the context of climate conversations, energy use conversations, sort of transportation options and access questions.

So this has been a perennial question in our state for years.

It's been studied at different times and it's almost got to the point where it's like,

Can we go at this again?

Like, can we really go at this question again?

Because it's a very challenging thing to think about.

Is there an opportunity to provide transportation for the public on a school bus or transportation for students on a public transit bus?

and somehow eliminate routes and save money and greenhouse gases, et cetera for everyone.

So we have a really intrepid group of people who have been very dedicated to looking at this issue over the last couple of years.

We have funding from the Vermont Agency of Transportation as a group to pursue this work

as well as from a local membership alliance called the Energy Action Network in Vermont which was really the forum for which this idea sort of sprung and they sort of sponsored this idea and then we were able to get additional funding from the Agency of Transportation.

But we started out by looking at where the

Our public transit system is currently providing services that students can access.

And so there's a couple of examples that we can share with you in Vermont.

There have been some research done for one of our regional planning commissions on the topic where they really dug into some of the legal issues, some of the other challenges that could come with this.

And then we did a lot of stakeholder outreach, just talking to school districts and transit agencies in the state, really trying to figure out what the opportunities of this concept are.

And we came to the conclusion that our best path forward was to really look at how our public transit system could provide potentially more services for student transportation.

and we did that for a couple of reasons rather than trying to get the general public on a school bus.

We did that for a couple of reasons.

One, we have a fairly robust rural public transit system in the state of Vermont and anybody can ride the bus.

There's really no barrier to that.

Anyone can ride the bus.

including little kids, older adults, anybody, the general public can get on the bus.

It's not so for school buses.

And we had a lot of questions about whether the general public would be interested in getting on a school bus.

And so we thought the other fundamental issues like

We want our public transit system to thrive and increasing ridership is a really important aspect of that.

And obviously young people are part of the general public and if we can make more connections that are relevant for them to ride the bus, that's great.

So we made a strategic decision to really focus on that aspect of it, which helped us a lot actually just to solidify what we're trying to do.

And then we actually sought out a couple of school districts to work with so that we could really dive into what the barriers, challenges, benefits could be with this concept.

And we've been working in a couple of regions since then, one in what I would call the suburbs or exurbs of Burlington, which is our largest city.

So it's more of a suburban, I would say school district bordering on rural.

And then one on the Eastern side of the state that is much more rural.

And we identified opportunities where public transit could serve some school transportation needs or gaps.

And we've been since then trying to figure out like how to meet those needs.

It's a super exciting and interesting project, but very challenging.

And we are now focused on looking at opportunities in the suburban sort of Burlington area.

Green Mountain Transit is looking at potentially expanding service in that region.

And we're now thinking about how can we connect the school community to that effort and look at providing input into that route

or those routes and how they could potentially sort of serve both the general public and the student travelers.

And we've also been looking at the Eastern Vermont area, looking to expand public transit routes to basically deviate for short distances to serve a couple of high schools.

We got quite far along on that and Mike can tell you a little bit more about that.

But the school district, I think, ran into some challenges with that.

But all to say, I think there's a lot of opportunity to build and strengthen our public transit system by making stronger connections to school transportation.

to young people who are riding the bus, building lifelong transit users and potentially filling gaps that school transportation can't fill.

One of the things we hear a lot about is that students can't access some afterschool activities if there isn't a late bus or something that can get kids home after extracurriculars.

So students don't have personal transportation, they miss out

on really important opportunities, which then becomes an equity issue.

And we also have students that are traveling because there isn't a home school in their district or in their town and lack of transportation sometimes limits their choices.

So there are definitely gaps in our school transportation system that transit could potentially help address as well.

I'll stop talking.

There's a lot of layers to this.

I'm sure I forgot things, but I'm happy to sort of turn things over to, maybe we could turn it over to Jamie who works with Green Mountain Transit, which serves the Burlington region and other surrounding areas in Vermont.

So let me just pause a minute, Jennifer.

Thank you very much.

Let's just see if there are any questions that folks have that came up while you were chatting just to make sure if that works.

Yes, absolutely.

Garland?

Thank you, Diantha.

So my only question at this point is the age group, are you going K or you're just, you're doing middle schoolers or high schoolers, getting them on and using the

Sure.

Nice to meet you.

You have a great job.

So I think for our project, we've really been focusing on middle and high school opportunities, although

In the, you'll hear from the other, from Jamie in particular, there's younger kids that ride the public transit bus to school.

But we felt like there's just a lot of barriers with talking about younger kids getting on public transit buses and sort of cultural barriers, issues with safety.

And so we made a decision to focus on high school and middle school age kids.

I'm mayor of Charlottesville and also I guess I'm technically vice chair of this august body.

That three bucks gets me a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

My question for any different way of organizing a transit system is

How do you decide, I guess, what sort of metrics do you use?

What sort of decision points do you have to say this is working versus I'm not sure this is working.

Because obviously nobody should be sitting there saying we want a transit system to pay for itself where the amount of money coming in in fares equals the cost of the operation

That's sort of the traditional way that people have of thinking about it.

Amy and Mike can handle that.

Hi, all.

My name's Jamie.

I'm the director of planning and marketing for Green Mountain Transit in Burlington.

And so, you know, we receive funding in a lot of different ways.

So there's FTA standards, right?

We receive state funding and the Department Agency of Transportation in Vermont has basically a reporting

Annual report that they look at every single transit route in the state, and they look at average cost per passenger, average cost per revenue mile, ridership, and they create an acceptable, a successful, and like a chart.

They chart every single route.

And so

It's pretty standard.

I would say Garland, probably you look at these same types of metrics in your system.

And that's how we look at all of our public transit routes to determine are they successful.

The state of Vermont currently through the entire pandemic has been fare free across the whole state.

We're still fare free in all of our transit properties.

And so, you know, when you factor in things like loss of fare revenue,

revenue.

It takes our average cost per passenger and kind of pushes that up.

And so the last couple of years have not been really a great indicator of the efficiency of public transportation.

Our ridership overall across the state is down.

Just a quick question.

Is this endeavor statewide?

The Future of Rural Transit project right now is focused on two school district communities that Jennifer mentioned.

Our plan is to, you know, potentially take this statewide, depending on kind of efficiencies and metrics and, you know, getting kids where they need to get and big people where they need to get and work with V-Trans, our state DOT and the transit agencies

Can you give us an idea?

It might be interesting for folks to know what those two divisions look like.

That's a really good question.

I mean, just ballpark.

Yeah, MMU is called Mount Mansfield Union Unified School District.

As I mentioned, it serves one, two, three, four, five, six, I think it's six communities.

It's a regional high school.

It is on the outer ring of Chittenden County, which is our largest county.

And Burlington is the hub of Chittenden County in terms of population.

It's, so they're, you know, sort of as I was saying, the exurbs.

Fairly decent size, I think population wise.

And then the other school district is on the Connecticut River on the New Hampshire border.

It's called Orange East Supervisory Union.

That is serving a lot more rural,

areas of the state, smaller communities.

But again, it's a union school district, so serving multiple communities.

I don't think there's any from New Hampshire.

We do have a few cross-border school districts, but I don't think that is one of them.

But I would say that Mount Mansfield

So Mount Mansfield, I just looked it up, they have about 2,600 students, but that's K through 12, six communities sending in.

And that's even, I think, smaller than Burlington.

That helps a little bit.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Any other questions from folks?

We are small.

Yeah.

I imagine you guys are probably like, what?

Bea has a question.

Yes.

So to make sure I understand, you use school and public transportation for everybody

For Burlington,

For Burlington, the school district has a couple of school buses, a handful of school buses for special needs kids.

Most of the schools in Burlington are walkable.

Interesting.

Yeah, it wasn't really a merger.

The Burlington School District, you know, just hasn't been able to form a transportation and they don't need to.

There's robust public transportation that serves all of the schools in the Burlington area.

Jamie, you just sparked something.

So, Burlington, so they have a,

Urban fixed route system, or are they still kind of under the rural model?

Or are you running like a deviated fixed route service?

Green Mountain Transit actually serves the whole sort of northwest part of the state of Vermont.

So we have three main areas.

We have in the upper corner of the state, we operate a rural deviated fixed route service.

In the central Vermont area, Washington County, like Montpelier State Capital area, we operate a deviated fixed route service.

And then in Burlington and Chittenden County, that large county, we operate an urban fixed route transit.

So we don't deviate on that system.

Okay.

Any other questions?

Jamie, I thought you had some topic you were going to talk to us about before we started asking questions.

Sure.

I don't really have a presentation.

I was just going to talk a little bit about the way that we serve students in our school, you know, the school district in Burlington.

We operate during the school year, 10 additional routes.

So, you know, the FTA doesn't really allow

traditional school transportation to be operated by a public transit agency, but they do allow for us to increase our capacity during the academic school year.

So we have 10 routes that operate in and around Burlington that sort of help meet those capacity needs of our fixed route system.

We do have a handful of just really popular areas where there are lots of students

And instead of operating a dedicated route out there, we just increase the frequency on our fixed routes line.

So if it's going out into what we call the new north end of Burlington, where there are lots of students, where the high school was located until very recently,

We just add supplemental trips to that service.

They don't deviate.

They don't really do anything special off of the fixed route line, but it's really a capacity building system at that point.

Then in some of our more rural locations where we do have

In Montpelier is a really interesting example.

We have deviated fixed route service, but we also just launched the first, the state's first micro transit service.

So our first on demand bus system, we're in the middle of a two year pilot.

And so the school district

There were a lot of challenges before we had that on-demand system being able to meet the needs of the schools in Montpelier.

There isn't a dedicated busing system in the in the Capital Region.

And our start and end times of our service didn't necessarily align well with the school start and end times.

And so with the new microtransit service, it's sort of a, you know, a curb to curb system.

where all of the schools in Montpelier, downtown Montpelier are in that bubble that we serve.

It's a 12 and a half mile square radius.

And so students, I just pulled numbers the other day and 8% of our ridership on that service serves the school.

It's interesting Jamie because we're going to be starting a micro transit pilot very soon for this this area so that's fascinating to hear.

Other questions?

That's sort of my life, but I'm happy to turn it over to Mike.

Yeah, we provide, sorry, Mike Reeder from Tri-Valley Transit and the community relations manager for our orange Northern Windsor County regions.

Tri-Valley Transit actually spans a belt right across central Vermont, Addison County, Middlebury area, right across the couple of mountain ranges to the Connecticut River Valley.

And specifically where we've been working with future rural transportation is in that

RNG East Supervisory Union that Peggy had mentioned.

And we really operate alongside of any school bus systems.

We operate commuter routes along two interstate lines, Interstate 89 and 91, that brings commuters into centralized location in

where we identify as the upper valley of Connecticut River Valley there.

So students are really incorporated into our established bus routes.

I think Jennifer mentioned a partnership that we were working on with one of the local high schools.

We were looking at an addition to one of these routes that

that would be able to transfer students basically from one high school to another to take more advantage of those afterschool opportunities.

Worked great, great partnership, really great information shared and culminating in our ability to provide that service.

I think it was one of those instances where COVID came to bite us once again.

The real need wasn't really there at the time,

There weren't the afterschool programs in place for students to take advantage of, so we kind of tucked that in our back pocket and hopefully by next school year that partnership can actually work hand in hand.

Not only that there's a program here that transportation can be provided, but maybe the school district can look at that and say, hey, transportation's available, let's see what we can create to be more efficient, create one program in one school instead of having to replicate it throughout the district.

In our other region around Middlebury and Addison County, we do have more of that deviated fixed route kind of schedule that helps serve the area schools.

Students anywhere from kindergarten through 12th grade can access those buses and use that to participate in community events, after school programs, occasionally going home as well for students that live close enough that the school bus service isn't being made available, but far enough that they'd rather get on the bus and walk in the snow.

We do look at this service as being very important.

We think of it as when we're serving a child, a student, we're also serving that family that allows a parent to work that maybe otherwise would have to be home taking care of or transporting their student to these other programs.

And also just really the reality of the fact that young people

Pre-drivers license age are transit dependent.

That's something that we're able to help out with, reaching a population that otherwise would be underserved.

As Jamie mentioned, and Garland was alluding to, certainly some, we're very careful about not stepping on the toes of bus services in these areas where we're not trying to replace those services.

In a lot of ways, we do provide something very different

I get it, Mike.

I see what you guys are doing.

You're making sure you're staying within the letter of the law.

You're doing these little deviated things.

Actually, just one little, not seasonal.

We provide these services year round when the schools are a stop on our routes.

Our services are seasonal, the 10 additional routes.

So how long have you been working at this project?

What are kind of the results?

Are you seeing a need for less operators, more operators?

In the urban system, for sure, we had more than 10 of the routes that operated during the academic school year.

The city of Burlington, we have member communities.

communities that pay into our system that have a seat on our board.

And the city of Burlington is by far the largest contributor to the system, just given where all of our start and ends are in Burlington.

And so it was a cost savings to be able to pull some of those dedicated services off the road and put

kids directly onto fixed route services.

And I'm going to ask a really stupid question because I'm not a

No, it's okay.

So all transit providers are required to offer paratransit service for folks.

And so a deviated fixed route basically incorporates their paratransit system into a fixed route system.

Got you.

We're familiar with the, okay, I've got it now.

That makes sense.

Just a new term I hadn't heard before.

or at least if I hadn't picked it up before.

Yeah.

All right.

Do I gather that then they deviate only when there's a specific call for them to deviate?

In other words, it's not a standard stop for them.

Well, correct.

Somebody says, hey, you got to go down to 4th Street and get Mrs. Jones.

Correct.

Yep.

Makes sense.

All right.

Other questions, folks?

What size buses do you all have?

Just curious.

There are different sizes depending on- Everywhere.

Yeah, so we operate 30 to 40 foot vehicles, mostly Gilligs.

We have two Proterra electric buses in our fleet.

And then in our rural properties, we offer, they're just 28 passenger smaller cutaway vehicles.

Yeah, the 28 passenger cutaway is our largest vehicle in our fleet.

We go down to 14 passenger buses on some of our real local circulator services.

And we're typically running

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We want to be, we want to be at the right size.

Right.

They're actually working great.

We've had a number of small issues with them, but it's not issues related to them being electric.

It's just, you know, we're introducing a new bus into our fleet and there's mechanical, you know, things that we haven't had to encounter with our Gill Lake buses, but overall, they're amazing to be on.

They're so, so quiet.

We run them on our local routes, but with our next driver bid that starts in June, we're going to start putting them out on the regional commuters.

So how far will they go?

And what are they?

Yeah, the range is probably about 115 miles before we have to recharge.

And that's based on the topography of Vermont, which is not flat.

So we have to account for, yeah, those hilly sections.

And it's obviously in the wintertime, we have a lot of cold weather as well.

Yeah.

Charlottesville and Albemarle is not flat either.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But having said that, we're a lot flatter than where some places where some of us are from, like I'm from Stanton, and we're a lot flatter here than we are in Stanton.

So it's all relative, right?

So you're fare-free now.

What happens when you go back to collecting fares?

Sure.

For the foreseeable future, all of the rural system will be fare-free, and the urban system is sort of in the process right now of working with our local legislature for some funding that would allow us to remain fare-free, at least for our fiscal year.

But when we are charging a fare on routes, the school district actually pays the Ford on fare for students.

So there's a threshold at which a student has to live away from a school to be eligible for that service to be paid for.

And we

As a part of that rural system, we are looking at the foreseeable future being fare-free.

We have worked with some of the schools on our commuter routes in particular in a sponsorship agreement.

So the schools would provide

On those routes, our commuter routes, it was

$3 or $3.50 per trip, depending on the route.

For a one-way trip, right?

For a one-way trip.

Oh yeah.

Great.

That's good.

So, and I'm sorry to keep asking questions.

You guys put your hands up or just start talking if you want to ask questions too.

I'm trying to figure out about your drivers.

Do your drivers have the same pay, hourly pay?

Do they have the same benefits?

How do you work all of that?

Everybody's trying to struggle.

Yeah, we have multiple systems.

So we have three CBAs, collective bargaining agreements, one with our urban drivers, one with our rural drivers, and then one with our mechanics and maintenance staff.

And at the moment, all three contracts, at least the two driver contracts, align on salary.

So it doesn't matter where you are in our system, the salary is the same.

So I guess, tell me how you ended up getting everybody on the same salary.

Is that because of the collective bargaining?

Is that, I mean, I'm just kind of naive here because we haven't had collective bargaining in this area.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

That makes sense.

Yeah, probably is, but that's a novelty for us.

Anything else you all would like to share with us?

I mean, this sounds fascinating.

Oh, I know one thing I wanted to ask you.

Sure.

We have a similar agreement with the universities in Burlington.

So there's a transportation demand management company, CATMA, that manages transportation for the local universities and colleges around Burlington.

And we have an agreement with them, an unlimited access agreement, where students are able to use their IDs to ride for free in our system.

and the school, the universities pay a discount rate, but they do pay for those student fares when we are charging.

So UVM, the University of Vermont does UVM.

We have six, no, I'm sorry, nine compressed natural gas shuttle buses that run the inner loop of campus.

And then there are some smaller transit vans that will do some pickups outside of the main campus because we do have horse farms and maple farms.

I'm sure you do too.

So we have these satellites and the medical college as well.

So those smaller shuttle buses deal with that.

And that's really for on campus.

And then Champlain College, which is also in Burlington, they have

Jamie, do they just have one bus?

I think they have one bus that's maybe two that is a private contractor.

This is one of my frustrations because I was like, oh my god, there's so many buses here.

And that does kind of really car park runs.

So there's satellite parking as well as student housing that's off their core of campus.

So, and it's down a hill.

You can walk up the hill, but whatever, they have the bus.

And anyone can jump on that bus.

You don't need to be a student.

It isn't really advertised, but they'll take anyone because they just want to fill the bus.

Yeah, we have quite a few Middlebury College students that use our

Shuttle System, also we have some commuter routes that run from Middlebury up to Burlington that a lot of the students will use to get to the airport for leaving and arriving from campus and we've got Amtrak coming in the next couple of months so we'll be looking at a whole new

New type of service or new demands that will be out there for accessing the trains as well, we're sure.

And yes, I think similar kind of arrangement.

We work with Middlebury College on sponsorship agreements to provide basically free transportation back when it did cost something to those students.

No, I don't believe that they have much of a transportation system of their own.

So that's where they're really, really relying on us.

Nothing, nothing consistent in town like UVM would for a, you know, it's a much smaller, smaller scale campus and you know, more contained.

I don't know, Peggy, do they?

No, no, we don't.

I think they are all CDL.

Most universities are transitioning away from using student drivers because you're trying to establish a professional system.

And when students have, you know, they have their studies

And when they need to study, they do so and they don't come to work.

So that means buses sometimes don't run.

Yeah, they're all starting to do the same thing, getting away from that student model.

Other questions?

We would love to hire hundreds of them if they wanted to work.

That's kind of been our problem.

We've gotten away from it, not by choice, but by necessity.

You don't need the money.

They all drive their Mercedes and their BMWs.

Talk about UVA college students.

Okay.

Interesting.

Any other questions?

Nobody?

Oh, Garland has his hand up.

Yeah.

I just had one question.

I'm sorry.

So you said the university, you, you offer a discount to the university for affairs.

We, we, what we do is we offer them a 28% discount off of our cash fare.

And it's a purse swipe.

So they use their ID in our fare box system.

I assume you have federally funded your vehicles and your operation is federally funded also.

So how are you getting around the, so the feds are

I don't, I don't know the answer to that.

But I think like, you know, what Jamie was saying is we do work with transportation demand management organization that they work with.

It's called the Hill Institutions.

They worked with like the medical center, Champlain College and the University of Vermont to reduce the number of single occupancy vehicles that were coming into this area like at the same time and leaving at the same time.

So sort of that's a little bit of that kind of historic relationship with CAPMA, that Transportation Demand Management, and the institutions and transit.

And we don't just receive federal funding in that system.

We also receive state funding.

And so I don't know if that's maybe what sort of gets us around that part.

Let me just ask one more question.

Do you all have anything that you could, after this meeting, you know, over the next few days, that you could send us about your programs or your offerings that would be helpful for us?

Just electronically, you know?

Maybe send them to Lucinda and she can share them out, if that would work.

I personally am especially interested in the high school and the middle school.

transportation piece.

I think that we've been talking a little bit about that around the edges as well, you know, trying to figure out how that might, because we have, we have two city in a county and right now in the urban rain there, and even in the city, they're crossing each other.

Seems kind of trying to figure out what to do about that.

I just have one question because I know your folks are really smart and they're not going to get you guys in trouble.

So I'm assuming that

It's actually, yeah, it's not spelled out in our discount policy.

No, you don't need to, I'm just saying that's probably how your,

We don't have an official tariff, but we're developing one, which would definitely include that.

The reason I'm asking is because I guess if you have a student policy that says the students only pay, let's say 75 cents,

And you have the age range to be like 19 or 20.

And that kind of fits the student model at the university.

Right.

We do have that in place for our local students.

Okay.

That's probably how you do it.

And how well received for the kindergarten through high school?

Yeah, we have a lot of students using it.

I do think it's well-received.

I guess one thing that we sort of talked about before this meeting that didn't come up today is all those routes are open to the general public, whether or not the general commuting public wants to ride with elementary school students is a different question.

So they're pretty well-received by parents.

In some of the more rural areas that we serve, Vermont actually is, you know, throughout the state having concerns with some of the smaller schools and smaller communities closing down, which on one hand is wonderful that, you know,

Parents living in that town, families living in that town are able to choose where their kids attend school, but transportation becomes a much larger concern.

And, you know, where the benefit side of a family gets to choose where they send their kids, but

If both parents are working in a northerly direction, well, maybe the best goal for the child is to the south, but they have no way to access that school.

So, you know, for some of the transportation that we've provided to some of the

the high schools in the area.

If I could just add maybe a word more about the Burlington piece is that there aren't

It's not like you can choose, oh, do I get a school bus or do I get a transit bus, if you want to go to school.

You walk, you bike, or you take the bus.

And for, again, because there are a lot of neighborhood schools, there's six elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school.

A lot of these schools are neighborhood schools, so there really isn't a need.

It's really more for the middle school and high school where kids really develop a lot more independence.

We did do a focus group for the high school students on their perceptions and

Some had never ridden a yellow school bus except for sports and their comments were that they feel bad for the kids who have to ride yellow school buses because they found the school bus drivers not as friendly only because they had their kind of regular, usually guy, their regular bus guy who drove the GMT bus.

and these kids do multiple sports so they could you know my kid went on the bus with her skis and she's like gosh how do people get on and off a school bus with their their skis so so I think it's because I know because this is what their reality

It doesn't seem odd to ride the transit bus and that's why I think you know even Mike's comments in a rural area where their schools are closing because of consolidation and then this is the transportation option it just becomes this is it.

Well, the great thing about getting young people onto a bus is that they learn to be comfortable with transit and they will use transit as adults.

That's great.

Any other questions from the group on the screen?

Anybody else have any follow up questions?

You're good?

Well, this was really fascinating.

Thank you ladies and Mike.

Thank you very much for joining us.

This was very interesting.

And if you do have anything you think would be helpful for us, if you can just send it electronically to Lucinda, we can share it out.

Maybe use it at some point to refer back for something.

But thank you.

And- Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much.

This is great.

Thank you.

And if you want to stay, you're more than welcome to stay for the rest of our meeting.

Thanks again.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you all.

Bye-bye.

All right, folks, fascinating.

I really am appreciative of Lucinda and staff working on getting some of these folks in to talk to us about what transit looks like in different communities.

It's pretty interesting, yeah.

Yeah, so I'm just going to give a brief update on the Regional Transit Vision Plan project.

In May, we're going to have the consultants here to provide a more in-depth update on the project and the next steps.

So in your packet for this meeting, we wanted to get you a draft of the vision memo and the public engagement report

ahead of time because they're pretty in-depth and long and we wanted to make sure that you had enough time to read them before the May meeting.

Yeah.

So yeah, I'm just going to give a project overview, summarize the work to date and preview upcoming activities.

So the project started, I know most of you know this, in the fall of 2021 and the team developed a land use assessment and a transit propensity assessment.

They identified community goals and solicited community input from the vision for the future of transit in the region.

And now they're drafting a networking corridor improvements.

And in June, the team will gather public input on the proposed improvements and then make adjustments and the project should finish in August.

I'll put a link to the project website in the chat after this and you can see all of those documents that have been prepared.

So in May, the consultants will come and present another project overview and then present the draft vision framework for your comments.

Then the project will engage the community and gather feedback on the draft vision framework, including sharing with the board of supervisors in June for all of the jurisdictions will be going to all of their meetings and sharing the vision, kind of the draft vision with them.

So you'll go to city council as well, right?

And then the plan should be completed in August and the study team will again present the final plan to the Regional Transit Partnerships and the stakeholders and the public.

So we have a month to read all those pages.

And so that we have good questions at the next meeting.

Okay.

Any other questions right now though?

Any comments or questions?

Looks like everybody's quiet.

Yes.

I'm missing somebody who's.

Oh, Brian, is that you?

Yeah, can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you.

Try again.

Brian, we're having trouble hearing you and now it looks like you're muted.

Are you asking about the difference between the Regional Transit Vision Plan and the Albemarle County Vision Plan?

Maybe not.

That's a great idea.

Brian, put it into chat.

I don't know why I didn't think about that.

Lucinda, that was brilliant.

There it goes.

I'm not sure what the study that we're doing right now is.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So we haven't started the study for the governance study yet.

The funding was put in the budget, but it has not been approved.

Yeah.

The difference between the two are that the vision

is going to kind of be a framework for what the community wants and kind of a list of projects and services that the community wants kind of on a grander scale.

And then the governance study is more on how we're going to pay for the vision and the projects.

And so it would be a framework

Talk about, it would kind of study how we could collect more revenue as a rural region and as a region and then dole it out and distribute it.

Does that help Brian?

Hopefully he heard the answer.

There we go.

So they're complementary efforts.

Yes, they are.

Exactly.

Great question.

All right.

Any other questions from anybody?

Then with that, we will move to the transit providers update.

And Jaunt's first on the list.

So Karen, we have a couple of people from Jaunt.

So Karen, you want to start?

Sure.

Thank you.

I have to be here today.

I will say my understanding was Ted couldn't be here today.

So we were that's correct.

Happy to have

He sent me his comments, so I'll share those with you.

He wanted you to know that we're in the process of setting up a meeting with the other providers, UTS, CAT, ACPS, as a follow-up to their initial meeting back in February to discuss the driver shortage issue and to work together on that.

John has identified some potential overlap of CAT routes with ACPS routes which weren't discussion so that was one comment.

He also wanted you to know that we are looking at a new transit software that could potentially handle both microtransit and our

Demand Response Services, which would be terrific.

And we also include a smartphone-based app similar to GoPass, which I think he's already discussed with you.

As our plans develop at Jaunt, we will coordinate with the other providers as well.

And the last update is that Jaunt was approached by Charlottesville, I'm assuming that's Charlottesville City, to assist in finding an improved transit solution to serving Crescent Hall.

Garland, you look like you're puzzled, but I think you know what I'm saying, right?

Any questions for Karen from happening to John?

I haven't seen Charmaine on the screen.

She could not attend today.

Yeah, there's something going around the community.

I've heard that from a couple of people lately, so no right.

Well, we'll have to catch her up because she would have probably been really interested in the presentation we had.

We'll have to get her a copy of it.

I think Kendall was, and he put something in the chat.

I wasn't sure if there was someone else.

I think he's...

gone.

So we're good on that one.

So CAT just completed our required triennial review.

As a part of that review, there was a section of it that we got assistance from because Jaunt provides our ADA service that Jaunt sat in on a couple of, was it one day or was it two days?

I don't know.

CAT, was it one or

One day with the auditors.

We got a preliminary report.

We're working through that and hopefully the final report from them to be in about a couple of weeks or so.

These are things that we, they're good things and bad things, and not to horrendous us as far as bad things that we need to improve upon.

There's some just procedural things that we need to kind of brush up on, but it's our normal,

Trying to review every three years.

We're working through that.

So it looks like we actually did a, we did a fairly good job.

I want to say that the team has done a wonderful job to make sure we provide everything to the, the audit team.

So I think it went as well as it possibly could have went.

We are working through a couple of things here on operationally to, as the budget was adopted, there are some timing of when we can potentially add new services.

So we're working on, I'm working with

Sam to make that part of it happen to the extent service and that's part of the thing we are we're extremely limited on our driver numbers we're actually really short so we've got to figure out how to get more drivers in the hopper to do the level of service that the community wants so that's got to be addressed here at some point in time only other thing is we are

We're applying for some additional grant funding to do some capital projects.

Looks like we may get thumbs up from the state to look at doing some additional projects here to add on to our building facility build out.

So that's gonna be, if approved, will be a great thing because operationally wise, we do need to make some changes in preparation for

adding alternative fuel vehicles to our facility.

So that's gotta happen at some point in time.

On the school bus side, we are meeting with a meeting with the school system, I can't remember this next week or the week after, looking at where we are, looking at the summer programming and then talk about

So that whole effort is starting.

I don't know if you guys have seen, we actually launched a television commercial for hiring new drivers for a school bus, I guess about a week ago or this week, Monday.

It'll be running for about a month.

And then the next effort will be some print ads.

And then we're still, we have some radio ads that are actually out there already.

Then the next tranche is actually a push for transit drivers.

So that'll be the next effort to start getting that done also.

Okay.

Any questions for Garland?

Pardon me.

Yes.

What about, we talked last time about going to the IRS because we're getting some of the people

We're leaving no stone unturned.

We're going to be everywhere.

We are at a point right now.

We've got to, we've got to get our numbers up.

I'm right now on transit side.

I'm about from where we were.

I've lost seven, eight, seven, eight drivers.

And we were already basically about 12 short.

So we're almost 20 drivers down.

Before we can really start, we need to get that put in place for, you know, just to make the numbers work better.

Because what we've been talking about is as we work through this model,

It's not just getting the numbers to make the model work.

It's also having a reserve in case somebody ever wants to take off or someone gets sick.

So you can't just say you need 60 drivers because that's what you needed.

It's now 25%, 30% more just to ensure that we're going to be able to run the existing service because somebody needs to take a day off.

That's clearly, regardless of whether it's CAT or Jaunt,

or UTS, the model is still the same.

You need more than your driver share to run your model.

We've had a little bit of a shortage problem, but the pandemic has really caused a real issue

and it's nationwide, it's not just this region, it's across the country.

CDL drivers are worth their weight in gold right now, they can command basically what they want and we have seen at CAT, we've seen three of our drivers left and go, they're running box trucks and they're making a ton of money, not just going back for, I shouldn't have said that out loud.

I don't think so.

If it is, it needs to come back.

The moral of this story is that we all need to get our CDL so that we can make some money.

All right.

Oh, the only thing I actually had is I know Peter sent me an email and I responded back to him.

He was concerned about when we're going to be able to get service to the center.

And I explained to him as a part of the email that it's not that we don't want to go to the center.

That is not the problem.

The problem is

When I look at the route, which was Route 11, and try to extend that to the center, if I extend it to the center, I really throw off the timing and the connections for other people.

So I can't do it in isolation.

If I move that route to do the deviation, they say, well, it's not that far.

It actually, it's a couple of minutes up.

You've got to load people a couple of minutes back.

That's at least a five minute deviation.

That five minutes could mean people missed their connection hub to the other buses.

which means we're running a small, I mean, our frequencies are down right now, which means they potentially are missing, have to wait an additional half an hour or hour.

That is totally unacceptable because what we have done is made one group happen and the whole rest of the system not work efficiently.

So we're working through that.

As soon as I can get more drivers, we can look at, and we're working through that with our consultant to make the model work better.

Some of them, the routes that we're running right now,

are not gonna be able to have the service that we're used to, because we just don't have the drivers, so we're gonna make the adjustments on that, and we'll just have to do what we can.

We will incorporate, and I've told him repeatedly, and I wanna make sure everybody else is aware, we are going to incorporate the center.

So Garland, let me ask you a question and maybe for Peter as well, although I think he's still here and he was talking about having to leave early.

So the center, I believe, is in your microtransit area.

Yeah, that's what I'm questioning.

So that would be from the county side, right?

Going to the center.

That helps.

It helps immensely.

But if I'm coming from the city wants to go into the county, the only option there is still the bus.

And because of the location, I can only technically go in one direction, but come in the back direction.

Cause I can't get, so I can come in when I'm coming from Fashion Square Mall to go to, but it's getting across those six, eight lanes of traffic with a 35 foot bus.

That is the problem, which means that we can't do that because that's a,

That's not the problem.

It's not the buses.

Yeah, okay, so that's good.

And one quick thing, if you can just give us an update, because, and this is more for Albemarle County, but certainly you and I have been working with VDOT and Trevor knows about this, trying to figure out how to get benches, shelters, right of way for you to put shelters on Albemarle County roads, right?

I had a little bit of a snag on my end because I lost Steve McNally.

He is no longer working with CAT.

So that has pushed back yet.

Steve left us Friday.

It was, you know, it was just a personal issue and family thing.

He had to take care of it.

I totally understand.

So what we are working through right now is that's come back on me and we're going to try to work through that, but I'm going to hire some project management.

staff to help us work through that.

And I think that's probably the easiest way because the projects that we're working through, not just the amenities component of it, but the larger project that we're trying to get done are going to need some specific project management experience on the FTA side.

And we can pay for that service.

Yeah, we're close with VDOT.

I mean, I would say that before Steve left, he did get the last request that they asked into the office.

Okay, all right, because I think Albemarle County has money in our budget, at least for some shelters, because we were prepared for that.

Okay, sounds good.

Then with that, if nobody else has any more questions, I will, oh, we don't have, Neil's not here from today from DRPT.

And Chuck Proctor's not with us today.

Must have been a good day.

Everybody's playing hooky.

All right, staff updates then.

Sure.

Yeah.

I just have a few updates for you.

The most significant one is probably that we have the final budget allocations finally from both the FHWA and the FTA for MPO budget for FY 23.

So it looks like, you know, we were expecting the budget to go down a little bit because the PL funding that came through the Federal Highway Administration side was a little bit reduced from previous years, but the FTA portion of the funding actually increased.

So

It pretty much evened us out.

What's really significant going into this next fiscal year is that we have a fairly significant rollover that is being applied from unspent funds from this year just due to some staff transitions and things like that.

So we're looking forward to being able to move that funding into next year.

As we start our long range transportation plan update and being able to take advantage of those additional resources to make sure that we do a really good job of integrating a lot of the initiatives that are occurring with the transit visioning study and making sure that we have the technical support that we need to

More comprehensively include transit considerations, as well as developing really methodical processes that will set us up to be successful in the future.

So if we were going to have additional funding, this is a good year to be able to program them into.

We have reviewed the work program, the Unified Planning Work Program with the MPO.

We've reviewed the initial draft, and so that will be on the MPO's agenda to approve hopefully at their policy board meeting in May.

As Lucinda mentioned, the draft six-year improvement program is out from both DRPT and VDOT.

I'll drop some links in the chat here in a second.

And that does include the transit governance studies, so we are moving forward with programming a match from the

MPO to be included as part of that work program, which is part of what the rollover will go towards.

It is funding the match.

So just so you all know, they did already have the public hearing on the Six Year Improvement Program in our construction district, but they will be accepting comments through May 23rd.

So I'm just sending a chat that has the link to the secure improvement program.

It has a link to if you want to make comments, there's a form you can go to that has all that information on it.

And that should be approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board at their meeting in June.

A couple of other just really brief items.

Ryan Mickles started on January 24th and the very first thing he did when he got here was come to a meeting about smart scale projects with me and so he successfully submitted

Was it eight, Brian?

Eight pre-applications for SmartScale projects.

So we got all of those submitted and we're going to be working to finesse a couple of those a little bit more before the final applications.

But those were all submitted in our process.

We have the four that were identified by the MPO.

And then the PDC also is submitting four projects that

We're requested by Albemarle County, so we're letting them take our additional slots that we were not going to use and nobody else had need of them.

And we thank you very much.

Happy to do it.

And then the last thing I'll mention as far as the MPO work program is just that we are working on finalizing the scope for the long range transportation program, including a preliminary sort of expectation for what we're going to be using consultant services for.

Just so you all know, you're probably not going to see me for a couple of months after this.

I'll be taking some short-term leave.

I'll be going on maternity leave, probably somewhere in the middle to end of next month.

Not exactly sure when, but- Congratulations, sweetheart.

Thank you.

Well, it's been kind of fun.

It's kind of like a little secret to sort of break the news to everybody.

But yeah, I'm working with Lucinda and Christine and Ryan to make sure that, you know, there's a transition plan and coverage and that you all, you know, have everything that you need to move forward and are getting the information that you need.

I can do that.

Yeah, that's good.

Good afternoon, Supervisor McKeel.

The bicycle and pedestrian committee continues to meet once a month.

In the past three, the past three meetings, the committee has looked at smart scale.

As Sandy mentioned, there were eight project applications and

All of them, well, each of them has a bicycle and pedestrian element with the exception of one, maybe two.

The committee has also been looking at or receiving updates from both the county and the city on the Greenways projects.

Ms. Jessica Hersh-Ballering gave an update on the RAISE grant at the last meeting.

And Mr. Christopher Ginzig with the city gave an update on a few

projects that he's been working on and shepherding through the bid process.

And then lastly, slated more for FY 23, there's been some interest with a few folks on the committee to reignite the efforts with One Map.

All right, any questions for Ryan?

Yeah, Sara is out of the office this week, so I'm filling in for her.

Yeah, so I put in the chat, May is theme commute month.

We're really excited.

We're going to do a promotion.

We're working with UTS, Jaunt, and CAT.

everybody's been really helpful and we've been working together kind of as a team we'll have a poster and there's a website I put a link in the chat and we're going to ask people to share pictures of themselves on social media clean commuting which can be really creative and it can also be going to school if not work and

People can share their pictures on social media using the hashtag Clean Commute Seville.

And each week we'll have a drawing of prizes.

We've got some bike shops and Stonefield Market has donated some gift certificates for the event.

I hope to see everybody's pictures.

All right.

Any questions for Lucinda about RideShare activities?

We're all good?

All right.

We're getting close here.

I'll open it up for other business.

If anybody has anything they want to discuss or put on the table.

People are shaking their heads.

I don't see anything.

All right.

I know you all, as I say this every time, I know you all are going to be disappointed because we're getting out a little early here today.

I would suggest it is five o'clock somewhere and it's a gorgeous day out there.

So with that, I will adjourn us until our next meeting, which is May 26th and have a great month.