Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   8/27/2020

Diana McKeel, Lucas Ames, Bea Lepigstow-Kurtley, Nikiah Walker, and Becca White.

So that gives us, and Neil Sherman.

So that gives us our quorum for voting members.

I will be, today we have elections, so I will just

Chair the meeting until we get through the election of officers and then I will let it be a hot potato.

We have the choice of the current chair can finish the meeting now or the new chair can finish the meeting now.

And we can move forward from there and I'll be glad to help walk us through that if needed.

But with that, we would like to open up the matters from the public.

If anyone would like to speak on any topic related to regional transit, you would have three minutes per person.

You may be able to either raise your hand electronically on this Zoom format.

If you're on the telephone, you can hit star 9, and that will raise your hand.

And either Sarah or I will be able to call on you

to speak.

But prior to that, if I could, I do, as you all know, I have to read a notice of electronic meeting that due to the COVID-19 state of emergency, this meeting of the Regional Transit Partnership is being held pursuant to item 4.0-01,

of the approved state budget, which was House Bill 29, and this does allow public bodies to hold electronic meetings in the current COVID-19 emergency and that it is impractical or unsafe to assemble in a single location.

and that the purpose of the meeting is to discuss or transact business statutorily required or necessary to continue operations of this public body.

This meeting is being held via electronic video and audio through Zoom online meetings and will be accessible to the public with closed captioning and there will be an opportunity for public comment during

That particular portion on the agenda.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice at our offices to the media, website posting, and the agenda.

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of this emergency, that the meeting was held electronically, and the type of electronic communications that it was held.

A recording of the meeting will be posted on our website at www.tjpdc.org within 10 days of this meeting.

And that is it for the formalities.

Okay.

I won't be with no speakers.

We will move along then for the minutes from the June 25th, 2020 meeting.

They were in your packets.

So this Becca I have two things on the maybe Garland already caught this but there's a typo on Garland's name on page three you just search for Mr. W-I-L-L and then I think it there's a typo so just to fix that but on page four there's an update about

UTS, and the paragraph starts, there is only one route, or something like that.

And I'd like the opening phrase to say, if you guys don't mind, I'd like it to say, as of summer 2020, Ms. White said there's only one route running.

And I can put this in the check so that I can grab it for the midst.

But two years from now, when somebody's reading it,

I need to be clear that it was a summer of 2020 thing that we had to do.

I would submit that as a potential correction to this.

Okay, thank you.

With those corrections, any other?

If not, if we could get a motion to approve these minutes.

So moved.

Miss.

Second.

And was that B with the second?

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

We've got a motion and a second.

Any other further discussion?

Yay.

Any opposed?

I hear nobody opposed.

It does pass.

Now we have our election of officers.

Just as a reminder to everyone in our bylaws, we hold an election on the very first meeting after July 1st.

We did not meet in July, so this will be our very first meeting.

We had a nominating committee that volunteered at the June meeting of Mr. Snook and Ms. Kirtley.

And we will be asking for their recommendations for the chair and vice chair positions.

Those are the only two positions that we have with the partnership.

Okay, thank you very much Mr. Boyles.

I will take that as your formal recommendation.

Just for everyone, according to our bylaws, the chair and vice chair position can be reappointed.

So there's no limitations on that.

Okay, I think that was Randy Parker with a motion to close nominations.

Was there a second?

And who was that?

I'm sorry.

And Becca White seconded.

We will take a vote on closing the nominations.

All in favor, please say aye all at once.

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

Hearing no opposition, it passes unanimously.

That brings us then to the voting.

And I believe we can take both positions at once.

And the motion is Miss Diana McKeel to continue as chair and Lucas Haynes to continue as vice chair for fiscal year 21.

Aye.

Aye.

Anyone opposed?

Aye.

And no opposition.

So congratulations, both Diana and Lucas.

We're glad to have you back.

Thank you very much.

Lucas, I look forward to working with you again this coming year.

And thanks, everybody.

This is really, we appreciate it.

And thank you very much.

So let me just see, the first item on our agenda now is the John On Demand Services and Jody Saunders from John is going to be giving us that presentation, I thought.

Yeah, no, she's getting pretty good at

Remembering a lot of the stuff I have been saying about the topic.

So one day she'll probably take it away from me and make her own presentation on it.

So we wanted to provide the RTP with an update on one of the more larger initiatives that we're working on at Jaunt.

And it's starting to gain traction.

So it's worth now bringing it to the attention of a various number of groups to just let them know

What we're working on and how we're working on it so that we can get feedback and continue to refine as we reach more of the implementation.

So we're working on a on-demand approach to providing transit services.

And on the next slide, we're going to be talking with whatever groups that we feel like have an interest in hearing about this.

We've spoken to the Board of Supervisors

presented to the city council now to the RTP.

We're going to be speaking with each of the planning commissions and really speaking at that point about how this concept can make its way into some of the comp plan documents and just what starts to shape around it from a planning standpoint.

CAR has a luncheon coming up next month that we'll be bringing up the topic at that point, talking about some transit trends.

And so we're trying to get to any group that has an interest in transit.

and really start hashing through the concept so that we have a pretty decent product when we're hitting the ground running.

On the next slide, we cover two main areas of this project.

And one is, it's pretty much an evolution of what Jaunt already provides.

And in the natural way, we've always focused on our customers.

And so continuing to focus on the customers, but providing that enhanced ability to serve them is what On Demand provides.

And what I mean by that is we've always been able to provide those connections for people, but we can do it more around when and where they need it and not just where we think or where we plan to do it.

So we can be more responsive to those things.

We can also structure this fair approach so that we're meeting the needs of the customers, but also meeting the needs through different partnerships.

And so the cost to the actual user,

versus the cost overall, we can help mitigate that so that we can, again, help match where people need to come from and where they need to go.

And one of the other aspects is that immediate availability.

As the name kind of entails, on demand means being responsive to that immediate demand, that request that's made.

And of course, all of this is based on a technology platform, a user app

kind of phone approach as well as just a web-based approach.

And because we're kind of moving in this new direction of how we provide services, we wanted to make sure that we built it around some principles or guideposts so that we don't lose track of what we're trying to do and who we're trying to serve.

And there's five main areas that we've come up with.

One is to be responsive.

We want to make sure that it's not just responsive in the sense of you made a request and we're responding, but being responsive to the emerging needs throughout the community.

A good indication or representation of that is the food security, not just with what we see happening with places like loaves and fishes, but just in general, we see a spike in need for people to access food resources.

And of course, one of the missing links is transportation, getting people to those food resources.

And so being able to provide an approach that helps us respond quickly to making those connections that people don't have.

As always at the core of Jaunt, being inclusive, making sure whatever we're putting out there is able to be accessed and used by a range of residents, whether it's a disability, English as a secondary language, whatever it might be.

We want to make sure that the system is dynamic enough that we can create different partnerships.

And so the partnerships will help be key and help creating some zones or layering of opportunities for users to access different services.

So whether we work with human service agencies or different businesses or other groups, I think we'll be able to achieve more by start building those kind of dynamic relationships.

One of my more favorite guiding principles is empowering.

We want to empower the users more than we even empower them now.

One of the downsides of transit is that people tend to be slaves to the schedules that are published or offered.

We want to turn that around and start to put that in the hands of those users so that they're dictating more of what's needed and not just building their day around what's been put on the road.

And then finally, this is where transit I think separates from any

other type of service that's more on the private side and that is safety.

We operate under a pretty heavy blanket of safety and we will continue to offer that through this on-demand approach.

So with all that said, there's an interesting opportunity and approach to this that I think most transit systems haven't really kind of taken.

And on the next slide,

helps in a way kind of represent what we call this convergence of opportunities.

So most transit systems related to on-demand tend to find, have a need or a gap somehow in some sort of service, whether it's get college students late at late night to back home safely or provide weekend trips for seniors or whatever it might be.

And so then they'll go out and try to find a platform or an approach that meets that specific type of service need.

When we at John started looking into on-demand more and more, what we realized is it actually opens up a wide range of possible opportunities and that we shouldn't limit ourselves to just one or two or three types of services that can meet, that we really should try to engage the public and find where there's this convergence of these different opportunities to maximize the vehicles and resources that are out there.

And these are a handful of them that we've come up with already through various different types of conversations.

But quite frankly, as we stir up the conversation more and more, there's going to be more.

There's going to be other opportunities that crop up.

And I think that's what we want to see.

We want to see how we can maximize the platform and the service.

And of course, looking through these, things like connecting people to jobs, the whole housing to employment connection is always a big

issue.

And I'll do a shout out to the city, especially the economic workforce development office with Holly.

She applied for what's called a TANF grant and they won.

So that's a prime example of where we're able to work with using this type of platform to kind of help make those kind of connections.

And it's not just John making the connection, but it could be where John makes a connection to a transit hub and then that person's making that last part of the trip on CAT to employment or such.

Another is like aiding in transit growth.

Sometimes you've got to do a little bit of a gateway approach to building up an interest in ridership.

If you look at the corridor of Avon Street extended or in that area towards Mill Creek that you don't know what the ridership might be like, but there's always this desire to plan for routes to go out that way.

But something like On Demand could help tease out where those interests are and where the people are interested in going and start building more of a fixed service around that.

And of course, broadening our agency partnerships, our human service agencies and others, trying to help them

meet some of the needs that we haven't traditionally been able to meet, making connections to transit and other modes, working with employers.

And as I said, there's probably a host of other opportunities that we haven't even come across yet.

But as I make these presentations more and more, we are getting that feedback from people about, hey, could this approach help with this transportation need?

And

That's our main goal is to just get this information out there and get people's gears turning and hopefully shape a service that best serves the community.

And with that, I'll just end with taking any questions or any comments from anybody about the concept.

Thank you, Brad.

That was great.

Questions, folks?

Thank you.

I was really interested because I went on your on the job website today just looking and you have five or six on demand response service areas listed already.

That's in addition to your connection, your connects that you're doing for us in Albemarle County.

Really, you all are.

Thank you.

And this type of approach actually helps simplify a lot of that so that someone doesn't have to do a lot of research to figure out what might be available to them.

We're hoping this type of platform will help simplify that.

And not just again for Jaunt, I think it's any mobility option that's out there.

You know, I think it's important as we're emerging, heading hopefully towards emerging from COVID that we're making sure people who are

Yeah, I didn't, you know, you have one listed for Keswick and Crozet in addition to Earliesville.

I mean, just really pretty impressive for the Albemarle community, which is so big and spread out.

Any comments or questions from anybody?

No?

Okay, I guess that's, thank you very much.

I look forward to seeing you at my Citizens Advisory Committee meeting, presenting.

And the next agenda item is Cat, John, UTS, and our COVID-19 updates.

And I guess we start with the video that we're hearing about some.

So who's taking this one on?

Just a reminder, we sent out a note earlier, we were hoping to working with Kat, John, UTS, and some of you have even I think had a brief draft viewing of the video that they have

But it's not ready to go out for public yet, so we may have to bring that back to you in the future and you'll likely be seeing it hit the airwaves before then.

But I do know that some of you have had a chance to already brief it and see what a really great partnership that's turning out to be.

So I think we have to take that one off, but the other was just to get an update on where some of the CARES Act.

I know the local governments have received a second phase of funding and don't know how that might be relating to transit.

Garland, you want to start?

We can't hear you.

Neil, you're on.

Just to give you an update, I guess on COVID.

A lot of the systems across the state are obviously providing service, but it is in many areas still being restricted for ridership numbers, how many people in the vehicle.

And I think across the board, people are doing things differently.

There have been a few that have returned to doing fares, but there are a lot of still not doing fares.

I think the big part is obviously those such as Charlottesville and Blacksburg and JMU with universities coming back are certainly seeing a different process that they're looking at and how they're gonna, even though right now the schools aren't, people aren't there, but just assuming that they will be back at some point, how that will, you know, how they'll maintain service and things like that.

So as far as, you know, again,

Everybody is trying to maintain services.

Becca, are you on?

Can you give us an update for UTS?

Thank you for your patience.

I've been in and out a little bit as the meeting has unfolded.

But University Transit continues to provide service.

We did expand beyond our service to employee parking lot shuttles.

That's what we've been running for most of the last five months.

But as of Monday, we restarted our redesigned route package in anticipation of residential students returning.

So we put our routes out on the road on Monday.

Everybody's welcome to go look at what's new in transit on our website.

We did redesign the routes, but if you look at the map, our coverage is about the same.

What we did was transit had to be pulled off from McCormick Road, and thank you to

Kat for joining us on creating a transit hub just one block off of Whitehead Road.

But we're already seeing more passengers riding this week than pretty much we had all summer on any route besides our employee routes.

But we are still limiting to 20 passenger boarding.

We're still using all the same precautions, rear door boarding, a barrier in the aisle so that passengers can't get within six feet of the drivers.

cleaning protocols, et cetera.

So the big anticipation, as we said before the meeting started when we were chatting, is the decision that UVA will make tomorrow public, or we'll all find out at the same time whether residential students will be returning to UVA housing and whether any in-person instruction will be taking place at all.

It really, we will continue to run the routes that we just put out on the road on Monday.

It's just a matter of how many buses we put on them.

So we are stabilizing into a service package that we hope will hold, no matter what the go, no go decision is, it'll just be a matter of how many buses we put on those routes.

And again, you know, John and Kat both have been

Great partners during this evaluation of how can we keep the drivers safe in terms of route design.

And so, you know, John was already on Whitehead Road now, Cat's on Whitehead Road and

UTS is on Whitehead Road as well.

Big hub right there, shifting to Whitehead Road.

So I really don't have anything else to add.

We're hoping that we can just settle into some kind of normalcy.

But if anybody had any questions for me, UVA is not declaring that employees need to return to work.

at any certain date.

It's all about conducting the business of the university, working from home if you're able, and working on site if you're able.

So we're just now starting to get an idea of how many people really are working on grounds, as opposed to telecommuting, and what that does to the parking demand, what it does to the transit demand, and all that sort of stuff.

So it's right on the eve of yet another roller, top of the hill of another roller coaster ride.

So thank you.

Are there any questions for Becca?

Anybody have any questions about the university?

Becca, do you all know how many employees, do you have a percentage of how many employees at this point are coming back physically rather than or maybe the reverse?

Well of course the hospital is its own thing and we have actually returned fully to every single boarding on our employee shuttles that we had pre-COVID have rematerialized on our employee

Parking lot shawls.

We're almost all the way up to 100% is what it was pre-COVID.

So let's just say the hospital's back.

On the academic side, there's quite a wide range.

So a lot of the trades are back.

So facilities management, dining, some of the services.

If you can gauge it by parking demand, our parking demand is probably down 70%.

And it's kind of dynamic, so I think the go, no go will change that.

We'll bump it a little bit, but for the most part, our trades and services are already back and that probably represents

3,000 people, 3,000 employees out of 10,000.

And then we'll see what this no-go thing or go thing does to that.

But so many of our administrators like foundation employees, HR, IT, even the library, HR, you know, many, many entities, communications, advancement, and all that stuff are being productive from home.

Any other questions for Becca?

I will say, you know, UVA did, we have this COVID app that, health check app, and I have been in touch with the big data people.

Of course, it's all aggregated and anonymous data, but yet I have been in touch to help build a demand model and a, not exactly a travel model, of course, you know, VDOT's probably

Hair is curling over saying a travel model, but at least maybe build some sort of demand model based on how many people are using the app every day to say, yes, I'm going to be working my office on grounds.

because you have to do that to work on ground.

So we're zeroing in on it.

UVA just implemented that I think around August the 10th.

So it's still normalizing, if you will, but we're hoping to get at least a few hints at how many people really will be not just on ground, but on the roads and on transit and impacting the community in that way.

Okay, so we're still running our lifeline service.

We're preparing to, we hired a consultant back

The actual first day they were on site was July 20th.

They started putting on six of our vehicles temporary APCs.

That's been giving us some really good information on our running times, on time performance, whether we're running early or late.

It's giving us all kinds of information that we haven't been able to see before.

it's also giving us much more detailed information about ridership actual ons and offs at specific locations so that's the temporary model that we talked about that's going well we're going to use that information to cut off so we can start our planning part of the process which is going to take approximately like 45 to 50 days with the second part of the consultant team Kinetics Transportation Group

They're actually starting to look at all of our existing routes, our COVID existing service, and then our pre-COVID existing service, and they're going to be making modifications to all of those runtimes so we can get the system working well.

So that is going well.

So we didn't have any money before July 1.

July 1 comes.

We're flush with cash.

Thank you very much to the state and to the feds.

So we're able to get to work.

So the planning process is starting to happen in earnest.

We'll be working through that and hopefully have something tangible with some suggestions that we've talked with Rebecca about.

We've actually, the housing community is asking for some additional services.

We're trying to potentially plan for some of that, some augmenting that service also.

So I think those are

Those items are going well.

COVID money is supplementing our services right now.

It's been a very big help.

I would dare say if we didn't have the COVID money, we probably would run a negative balance by the end of the year.

But that is not the case.

So it's been very helpful in kind of plugging that hole because our service levels continue to adjust up and down.

And we're running fare free right now, so we're not collecting anything.

which is that's keeping our drivers safe because rear loading prevents that interaction that close, less than six feet of distance when they have to get on and interact with the fare box puts our drivers at risk.

Something that we wanna make sure that we are very mindful of and try to limit that as much as we possibly can.

So we're hoping that transit will get another round of COVID

CARES Act funding.

There has been some discussions that I'm aware of that don't know how robust those discussions have been thus far, but I am aware that they have been happening and they continue to be kind of pushed through the pipeline.

And hopefully we'll get another tranche of money six, eight months from now.

But

That's great.

Are there any questions for Garland?

I have one.

I noticed in the minutes, it refreshed my memory that you were talking about Garland, there were some challenges.

around some riders wearing masks.

Those, we have to work through them.

So I would say that there still is a small minority group who doesn't want to wear the mask.

We are not,

There's no ability for us to enforce it using the police.

And we're trying not to do that.

The majority of our individuals who are using the mask, who don't want to use the mask are riding short distances.

So we're just making sure everybody who wants a mask has a mask.

We provide a disposable mask to all of our drivers to hand out.

So it is readily available to anybody who wants to use it, but there's a group who just will not use it no matter what we do.

We're trying to keep our drivers safe because there have been incidents, one in New York City, one in Philadelphia, where drivers have been attacked for asking individuals to put on a mask.

Fred, just to quickly ask you, is John having good experience with people wearing their masks?

No, not for the, there's no real challenges.

I think, talk to the drivers.

I'd be with three of them a week over lunch at a distance to chat about how things are going and I ask about those things in

We don't seem to have any compliance issues there.

It's just people lack of remembering that they needed to bring their mask from home or something.

Yes, thank you.

I was just going to put it in the chat, but We so far up until Monday, you know, we were only moving employees around and For the most part and employees are subject to UVA space covering policy and social distancing policy physical distancing policy that was passed

And so of course we, and like everyone, we had a supply of paper masks.

However, we have had zero compliance issues.

Now, starting Monday, we're now running on 14th Street, JPA, et cetera.

And we'll see once the students are fully back.

But at this point,

You know, this policy, this face covering policy applies to the students no matter where they are in Charlottesville, Albemarle.

So I don't know if you guys have seen this policy, but you know, and the students have put together this social norming campaign and UVA's communication campaign.

You're starting to see our buses rolling down the road with giant, you know, we used to have those beautiful photographs of sunsets and the rotunda, but now it's all now wearing masks.

The artwork was being,

applied to the buses this week.

So we're really trying to set a standard that you wear a mask and you wear it correctly.

And we're not like Garland having to serve such a broader population than what we serve.

Almost everybody that boards our buses are subject to UVA's policy.

So like Garland, we've been transporting students mostly to VIA.

And some of those students, they can't wear masks.

It's just impossible.

So our assistants wear a mask and a shield, face shield, and hand protection and gloves.

And our driver just wears gloves and a mask.

Right, the Virginia Institute of Autism, so, and Garland transports there as well, so.

Yes.

And, but we don't start school till the eighth, so we're requiring all students to wear masks.

So that would be interesting at the bus stop the first day.

We're gonna supply masks to students that don't have them, but if there's a student there and there's no parent present and they won't wear a mask, we're gonna try to isolate them on the bus.

I mean, we're down to 10 students max on a bus.

And then when we pull into the school, talk to the administrator immediately because we can't do that again with that particular student.

Okay.

So Charlottesville Public Schools, similar.

Just actually had an earlier call at three o'clock that talk about some of the issues.

They're going virtual for the first nine weeks.

There's going to still be, we're still transporting some individuals out of town to specialty schools.

So that's still going on right now.

Our folks are being given gloves, hand sanitizer, wipes to wipe down their areas.

Face shields are on the way.

They've got KNY95 masks.

So we're getting all the protective PPE that we possibly can.

We're also, I think, city schools is actually

looking at a way of trying to put out a policy to the parents to kind of enforce the use of face masks.

So I believe they're moving forward with that effort in the next couple of weeks or so.

But the goal is to try to minimize the exposure.

There will be kind of a seating chart so individuals will know in order that they get on the bus so they don't have to pass each other.

that really is the first kid on will be the last kid off.

And then when we unload, so the last one on will be the first one off.

And as we exit, it'll be the same thing on the return trip.

So that first kid that gets all the way in the back will be the last kid off.

VIA did have a positive case with one of their staff members, and I thought they did a good job of communicating with us.

Right.

Becca, just in case anybody hasn't seen, UVA did launch a COVID gas board earlier this week.

for positive COVID cases and then different aspects of it.

It'll be tweaked as interesting data becomes available and questions come up, but it did launch this week.

I guess the only thing, the last thing I would say, Diana, is on the COVID positive cases, I don't know if everybody is aware that CAT did have one

a positive case.

That individual has gotten overthink, really fortunate it wasn't a bad case.

So they've returned back to work.

We have a testing program that is in place that happens every other week, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.