Regional Transit Partnership (2017-2025) Meeting   3/24/2022

I will read the notice of electronic meeting.

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 the 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 at the TJPDC offices to the media, website, posting, and 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 the TJPDC.org website within 10 days of the meeting.

And with that,

We need to call attendance for Lucinda so she can record everyone that is present.

Thank you.

Supervisor Lapisto-Kirtley from Albemarle County.

Here.

Director Morgan from Jaunt Rural.

Ms. White from UVA.

Hello, I'm here.

He's here.

He's here.

He's waiting.

Ms. White from Albemarle School System.

Present.

Ms. Pennington from Rideshare.

Present.

I'm here.

Right.

All right.

And our first agenda item is approval of the agenda.

So Lloyd is a has made the motion.

Is there a second?

Second.

I think that was Becca or Bea.

Bea.

One of the Beas and it was me.

Bea seconded.

So all those in favor please say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any abstentions?

So we have an agenda and the next item are the draft meeting minutes and these would be the minutes from our February 24th meeting.

And does anyone have any comments or edits or anything about the minutes?

If not, oh, go ahead, Loie.

Oh, you're right.

Second.

And then B is seconding again.

any nays and any abstentions.

All right, so we have our draft minutes now are formalized.

And Lucinda, you have on the next item is our holiday meeting schedule.

Yeah, so this is just as every year our holiday

Our meetings for Thanksgiving and Christmas are right next to the holidays.

So last year we, I'm just pulling up my calendar, we met the first or second week in December on a Thursday.

We sort of split the difference because obviously there's so much going on during the holidays that it's hard to get everybody together this late in the month.

Does that suit everybody?

I don't think we need to have a vote.

I just like consensus of a yes or no or is that okay?

Usually canceling one meeting is not a problem.

All right, Lucinda.

So I think we can make that an official change to our calendar.

That's great.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay.

All right.

We have next matters from the public.

Do we have any public that would like to speak for three minutes?

I don't have anybody who has signed up to speak.

I think they're all quiet right now.

I don't see anyone.

So with that, we'll go on to our exciting presentation that we have for today, Mobile App Trip Planning.

And we have the Chief Information Officer from Dallas Area Rapid Transit, Greg Ellsborg, which is really pretty exciting.

And I see Greg is on the screen.

Lucinda, did you want to do anything in the way of introductions for us?

You can turn it over to Greg.

Greg, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

It's absolutely my pleasure.

And I work for Dallas Area Rapid Transit, and you can tell I have a thick Texan drawl.

But I'm originally from England, but I've lived in the Dallas area for

10 years now.

And it's my pleasure to be here today.

So what I'm going to do is spend a little time talking through an exciting program that we've had at DART.

And when I joined, I actually was the Chief Innovation Officer at DART Air Rapid Transit.

And so when I joined DART in 2019, we set up the Office of Innovation.

And the few areas that I was really focused on, one was

to try and drive a culture of innovation across the agency and pull ideas from our employees and from communities around us.

And that's been an exciting activity set.

But another area has been the continued development and scalability of a mobile trip planning and management application that we have for our transit riders.

And so, DART has had an application for several years that we have managed for the riders of Dallas-Fort Worth.

And it's just a fantastic application.

So we've started bringing that to other agencies.

And I wanted to spend a lot of time talking through some of our learnings and some of the areas where we see particular value from having a mobility platform.

Uh, so I'll go ahead and show my screen and I can just, uh, it'll take me a minute cause I'm more used to teams, but, uh, give me a second.

Okay.

And at some point, maybe your presentation will have this.

We'd like to hear a little bit more about your transit system would be great.

Slide number one.

So can you see my screen properly?

Not yet.

Oh, I apologize.

Let me, as I said, I'm more used to Teams.

Oh, there we go.

I'm going to press the share button.

And you're still in your notes format.

There you go.

That's great.

Yep.

So as I mentioned, Greg Elsberg from DART, and you can see on the screen, these are a few of the different screens of the app.

We'll get into some of that shortly.

But a little bit of background about DART.

So Dallas Air Rapid Transit, we are a large transportation agency based in DFW.

So our primary service area is 700 square miles, covers Dallas and 12 other cities.

We're funded by a combination of federal funding, fair revenues,

and a one cent sales tax that's issued in the 13 cities that we operate throughout.

And our funding sources are about 50% from the sales tax and then 25% from fair revenues and from federal funding.

And so we have the longest light rail network in the country at 97 miles, I think now.

We also have commuter rail.

We have about 690 buses that run and

I can't remember how many trains, but there's quite a lot of them.

And generally, you know, COVID has impacted us every other transit agency, but we're seeing a nice bounce back now.

I think gas prices are, even though we're in Texas, we're still feeling gas prices.

So I think a few more people are coming to the rail network now because of that.

And one of the really interesting things about the DFW region is if you've ever visited,

It's not one urban center.

Like say you're in Chicago, the middle of the city is the big populated area.

There are pockets of urban areas all throughout DFW.

You have Fort Worth, you have Plano and Frisco, which have become really large cities in their own right in the northern area.

There's something like 50 different cities inside the DFW Metroplex.

It's a very large, diverse area.

and we have multiple transit agencies and different operations running within the area.

So back in 2013, we actually developed the industry's first, North America's first, multi-agency mobile platform.

And that was for ticketing and included DART, DART rapid transit,

We also had Trinity Metro which is Fort Worth's primary transit agency and Denton County Transportation Authority.

Now we are connected to those two agencies through rail network links and we have a regional fare policy that we've put in place with DCTN Trinity Metro.

So I can pay to travel across the entire region and pay a reduced fare to travel through the commuter rail links and then get from point to point in Fort Worth as well as in Denton County in the north as well as in the last 13 cities.

So the platform that we've had, we've continuously developed since 2013.

And 2013 is quite a long while ago in digital terms.

So we've built whole new versions over time.

We're on a third major iteration now, which we launched in 2019.

And we've added more capabilities through the time.

You can see that we've had various industry firsts during that time, including in 2018,

We put a cash to mobile option in so residents could go to area retailers like 7-Eleven and they could load cash to their mobile device from those retailers.

So if I'm an individual that doesn't have a debit card or a credit card, but I'd like to use the mobile app that I could go and

You know, I could use trip planning in the app and some of the other features, but to buy tickets, I could go and load cash.

As a retailer, they would scan a barcode on the app, and then this loads the funds into the app directly, so I could go and use that from a digital wallet to pay.

We also then added fare capping in the same year in 2018.

And so we have a day fair cap and a monthly fair cap.

What happens is your account in the mobile app, as you use tickets, we accrue how much you've spent.

And then when you hit a cap over the month, you're not charged for the remainder of the month.

We issue you a month pass for the remainder of the month automatically.

And there's a really nice tracker inside the app that shows you how much you've spent to get towards that fair cap total.

In 2019, we added

a really, really exciting feature that I'll talk through in more detail shortly, which is a mouthful, but it's multimodal microtransit.

And this means running on-demand services that then can be commingled with your fixed route services.

And I'll explain more about that in some detail shortly.

And in 2021, we added an integration with a company called Elurts.

They run a mobile app that we've had at Dart for a while,

and that mobile app is used for reporting incidents.

So DOT has our own police force.

We have about, I think it's 200-ish people between our officers, our fire enforcement staff that roam our network and help support safety.

And so any incident that gets recorded with that app would be directed to the police force.

We've integrated that app's capabilities into GoPro.

So now there's a single app where the riders can,

communicate any issues and handle all those pieces all from one place.

Then in 2022, we have some exciting things coming in.

One of those is another industry first, which will be the addition of guest ride booking with TNC partners.

And the TNC is a transportation network company that would be Uber or Lyft.

So we have a partnership that we're working on with Uber so that we can directly book Uber rides as an on-demand mode

through our app without having to have an Uber account or pay for your ticket through Uber you do it directly through our app and that will be an industry first when that comes out.

So you can see we've kept continuously developing this platform and you're really just looking at what our riders are asking for and what riders across the region have been asking for that's been our principal focus.

We started our expansion strategy in 2020 and actually Tulsa

and Ted Rieck's organization was the first agency that we bought on outside of the DFW region and we have eight agencies now of 50,000 cities represented and I'm actually taking another agency to our board next month and we're starting to ramp up the scalability side and our view is that the more agencies we bring on the stronger we can make the platform, it helps us to afford to keep

building new great features and to roll those features out to the other agencies using the platform.

So it's very much a collaborative funding model when it comes to agencies working together to keep building this thing and making it more and more successful.

This slide is an eye chart, there's a lot on it, but I'll quickly navigate just through without going too far into the details because I think we can stay at the higher level, right?

The first thing is the platform works across multiple agencies seamlessly.

The way that we do that is when somebody loads the app for the first time, we ask them which their preferred agency is from the list of the agencies we have loaded in the app.

They would pick their preferred agency and from that we would customize the content that you see inside the mobile app.

So you'll see that agency's tickets be prioritized in the ticket section.

Based on your location, you would see nearby stations and services to you.

The map section would load up with your local services.

Your service area map would load up those kinds of things.

and then local events and things like that would be prioritized based on the agency that you've selected as your preferred agency.

And so that naturally brings the app into being applicable for a region.

So Tulsa has the same mobile app that Dallas has, same mobile app that Lubbock in Texas has in other parts of Texas.

So what it means is that the content in the app can be tailored based on where the user is.

We've got, as I mentioned before, multimodal trip planning.

That's a really powerful part of the app.

So I can, just like Google, I can put in my origin destination and see all my transit options connecting from bus to rail to on-demand services, which is a unique feature that we have.

And I'll talk through more in a later slide.

We have digital payments, the cash to mobile feature, have Apple Pay, Google Pay, all the major credit cards, everything you'd expect to see, as well as a digital wallet to store funds and load funds and pay.

Additionally, we've also got the capability to issue event tickets for local events, which is something that we've done with things like the State Fair and NCAA events.

We see a big uptick in mobile app usage around the State Fair.

It's a big thing for us.

And the last thing I'd draw your attention to on this slide is the rankings.

We're very proud of the App Store rankings we have.

You can see 4.8 out of 5 with 35,000 reviews is a stellar App Store ranking.

And actually we launched a white label version of this app, which is the same code, but slightly different look and feel, different branding, different colors, which is something we can do.

It sits as a different app in the App Store.

We did that for Charlotte in North Carolina about a year ago, and they have the exact same ratings for their app.

So they have 4.8 on iOS and 4.7 on Android.

with probably about a thousand reviews on each at this point.

So I'm really pleased to see that, you know, that's continued as we bought out additional versions of the platform.

Greg, I didn't ask.

And did you just say Charlotte, North Carolina?

Yes, ma'am.

Yeah.

I don't mind.

Either way, I'd say both.

If you have questions, just feel free to call them out.

Yeah.

And I will say that I can't see everybody's picture.

So if you have a question, just jump in because I don't want to ignore you.

But anyway, all right.

Of course, thank you.

So right now, GO Pass is this like complete solution, really, where we have an all-in-one tool.

And that was always our vision is have a tool that pulls together trip planning and ticketing and events and security alert tools and rider alerts for issues that you may experience and all those different things into one platform.

Also,

You know, that combined with a whole host of third party integrations with vendors and then robust other tools like a back office for administration from agency employees, reporting tools to show ridership and ticket purchases and things of that nature.

And then we have an array of additional tools that we've built.

And I can show you one just at the end of the presentation.

You know, it's really a complete suite now.

And as I said, we continue to look and talk to our writers, and we've modified and enhanced the platform based on their feedback.

So things like making sure that the platform is colorblind sensitive, so that individuals that may be colorblind can see and use all the features, making sure it's compatible with text-to-voice systems for individuals with vision impairment.

Those kinds of things are the enhancements that we continue to make to the platform.

So the way it looks and feels, these are just screens from the App Store.

I didn't want to go into an actual demo today, but I would encourage you all to download the app.

We've had one and a half million downloads, but I'll definitely take more.

I'll put the links in the chat after the presentation.

So you can favorite your stations and stops.

And so that's a quick, easy way for someone to say, okay, I want to find out when the next train or bus is coming to the stop that I typically travel through too.

So they open the app and it will show the stop and then real time information about when the next vehicle is going to arrive.

And I have some enhancements planned for that area.

This year we're going to add favorite routes.

And the goal with that is to use real time information so that each day I can query a database and see, are there any impacts on the route?

Do we have a canceled run because the bus wasn't running?

or do we have some other problem that we need to communicate to the rider?

So I can tell people predictably through push messages before their ride starts, let's say 20 minutes before the ride starts, hey, there's an issue with your usual route, you should check the app so they can look at alternatives.

Because a lot of our riders, you know, a lot of people are in jobs where they

They can't be late.

They're written up if they're late.

If the bus doesn't arrive or the train breaks down, we need to tell them in advance of them arriving at the station or arriving at the bus stop.

That's our responsibility to tell them as soon as possible.

Adding that functionality is something I feel really passionately about and excited to add this year.

The next thing that I call out is we have this step by step multimodal travel directions.

And you can see on the screen, I've got a better view on the next slide, it links journeys.

So we might be rail to bus or bus to bus or bus rapid transit to on demand, all sorts of different options, but you'll see lots of options for each route when you plug in your travel plans.

The trip planner is powered through

I think it's Google Maps that we use, but effectively you can put in like home addresses and work.

You don't have to put in just stops and stations.

So just the way you'd use Google or Apple Maps or something like that.

We also have real-time information as well as interactive maps.

So you can click in on the map and see any of the stops, then look at the upcoming vehicles to that station.

That's the third screen is showing our Western station and the incoming trains.

And then we do have, as I mentioned, a lot of different payment methods available.

So,

One of the really cool things that we added, and we first added this in 2019, is this on-demand feature that we call GoLink.

And Dart recently expanded.

We now have the largest on-demand offering in North America.

And some of you may know this, but on-demand is when you run a vehicle that will be mapped in a zone and then someone can call it and it'll come to pick them up and take it to another destination inside that zone.

So the same way that Uber or Lyft would work, especially if you think about Uber Pool or Lyft Line, which are the pool services where they'll go and pick multiple people up on the route.

That's how our on-demand services work.

Dart was one of the pioneers in this back in 2019 when we first launched the service.

Right now we have over 30 unique zones covering 230 square miles.

That's the largest on-demand covering bus replacement service in North America.

It's a very large component of what we do now.

Just to recall, we have a 700 square mile service area, so about a third of our service area is covered by on-demand services.

And that is a combination of Dart vehicles, as well as taxicab providers, and we supplement in with Uber as well.

And the integration that we're building now will allow us to directly book Ubers from inside the Go-Pass app rather than sending the user out the app.

The beauty of that is my subsidy for a dedicated fleet ride right now is about $15 a rider.

My subsidy with Uber is $4.50.

So if I can change riders over to using Uber, I will save the agency a lot of money.

So that's the plan.

And everyone's on board and working through that now.

We plan to launch in Q2 that additional feature set.

So you can see in this instance, on the right hand side is easier to look at.

The rider has planned a trip from Rowlett High School, which is inside an on-demand zone, over to Akers Station, which is in downtown Dallas.

So you see the top service says GOLINK to rail.

So this is saying that you can book an on-demand trip and then transfer to the rail from there.

So we're dynamically surfacing the on-demand trips to riders through our tools.

The flow of that trip

in this instance would be the

You plan the journey and then you actually confirm the journey.

You buy your passes and you'll match the driver.

You take the entire journey inside the app.

So it's almost exactly the same as if you've ever taken an Uber or a Lyft ride.

It's that, but in a transit context.

And it's the same ticketing as our fixed route services that we use for on-demand services.

You can charge a premium or have a separate ticket.

That's something we do, but DART doesn't do that.

We have a time-based fare policy and we just say, nope, you can travel on demand if

if you book it inside that window.

So that's the structure of On Demand.

It's a really powerful feature set and it's something that more and more agencies and groups of agencies are starting to explore because if you have bus routes that are running two or three people an hour, it's not efficient.

And the ability to say, take this pocket and then transfer that to other service types is a very powerful addition.

And we were lucky in a sense that

When COVID first started to impact, we were in the midst of a service redesign study with Jared Walker Associates.

And so we just pivoted them and said, right, look at what we do with COVID now, because it was new.

And we already have this great on demand service.

And that became effectively part of the recommendation was, okay, let's look, do we want to do high frequency?

or do you want to do high coverage on the service route?

We move towards high frequency, but filling the gaps with on-demand services.

And because the tools are able to support those services, it's been really successful for us.

You know, our average trip, you can see you can rate the driver at the end of the trip, which is really good as well if you're looking to curate the drivers that you have and monitor them to see, do we need to weed anyone out that's not performing the way we want?

Our average rating is something like a 4.9 or 4.7.

It's very high.

on the drivers.

This is Garland Williams, Director of CAT.

Yes, we did.

We never formally suspended fares at DART.

What we did is

We just didn't enforce really for a period.

So we're back to full fare enforcement now, but we held back at fare enforcement officers and said, okay, we're not going to get close, check people's passes.

It moved almost to an honor system for a period.

We also were not, we were asking bus operators not to engage a rider, walk past them and then pay for a period until we had plexiglass screens installed to protect the bus operator.

Early in COVID, but we never actually suspended fair collection.

If we had, we still could have run all the same tools and we actually

ran a free fare program for two weeks with the service redesign we put in place in January just to soften and ease that change.

I will say that when we did that, we did have some pushback from the operators because there's nothing to kind of gate the service on bus at that point.

So you would have people riding the service all day to stay warm and things like that, which I understand.

But, you know, naturally, it's just a natural piece that having a fair policy kind of limits that because people will not tend to just wander onto the bus.

They'll be paying to get up.

But no, we didn't cancel the fares.

So, Grant, we have a question in the chat from Becca White, who is the director of UTS, University Tranded Service here.

Thank you.

And yeah, I was just wondering about the configuration effort required by each agency for those multi provider trips.

And we can, these are just really just ask the questions as placeholders.

No, it's a good question.

And I'll just address it.

So there's multiple levels, right?

The base of being in the platform that we have,

We load in the GTFS feed, right, which every agency really tends to have.

And we'll load in the GTFS feeds of the agencies.

And that's really it.

I mean, once we have the GTFS feed in, the platform does the rest of the work in terms of configuring so that, you know, the rider can get from point to point effectively and cross the different agencies.

We will, you know, one thing that has a little bit of complexity is if there's a regional fair policy is knowing the parameters and the rules around that.

So we have a regional fair policy, as I mentioned.

So knowing, okay, well, if someone is only traveling within this agency services, then this fair applies.

If they're traveling across services, then apply the regional fair.

Nothing really on the agency side.

It's just something we have to manage on the platform side.

That gets a little bit more complex when you add in on-demand services, because we do have multiple agencies that we support with on-demand services in the Metroplex.

Um, so,

We have an agency Star Transit, which is a more rural agency in the southeast of Dallas, and they have a different fare structure for their on-demand services.

But the way we have the platform configured, it's intelligent enough to know

When there's an on-demand service, is it part of the current fare structure and the fare policy, or is it a separate additional fare based on the setup of the rules?

So that's partly done by the app's own engine, and it's partly done by the on-demand provider who codes in some of those fare policy pieces in the back office.

But the demands on agencies that we bring on board are really low.

It's pretty easy to bring an agency on.

It's like a

probably a month turnaround if you become a tenant on the go pass app to get everything set up.

And if it's a white label app, I think we turned around in six to seven weeks last time around.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

So the general pricing model, and this is really similar across any

So mobile texting type platform is we have a monthly fee, well there's actually a little set up fee first, then there's a monthly fee and then it tends to be a revenue share component as well.

So there'll be a percent based revenue share and then a monthly sort of licensing hosting fee.

And that's the sort of base structure for licensing.

That's what we've used with other agencies.

And the nice thing about that is that it scales as agencies get bigger because that percent share obviously gets bigger with the

You know, a large agency like DAR pre-COVID had 70, $80 million in fair revenue a year.

So 2% of that, 3% of that is a bigger number than if an agency has two or $3 million in fair revenue a year.

Yep.

Thank you.

And that's the, that's the benefit.

This is Nick Steglitz, senior manager.

of Innovation Partnerships.

I just was hired.

I came from Chicago Transit Authority.

I was there for six, seven years.

That's the benefit of working with an agency, right?

So you have an agency partnership.

You know, and I understand sitting in your seat.

I sat in the seat at Bus Maintenance and Operations at CTA, and I get it.

I get it, right?

You're dealing with vendors, and you're dealing with a lot of vendors.

You deal with our department, right?

You're dealing with an agency, a fellow agency.

We're going to have your best interests at heart.

We're going to have, you know, I think comprehensive updates to this.

I mean, this is the way of the future is mobility as a service, right?

So a lot of folks asking about it.

I think the benefit, again, going with an agency is you're not having to worry about, oh, this software company is going to get bought up and they're going to be bought by somebody else and now I have to deal with somebody else, right?

because that happens with buses and trains all the time and support with service and warranty and all that.

We don't like headaches in transit.

I get that.

I get that.

We don't want headaches, right?

So the beautiful thing about this is it's continually been improved ever since it came out.

And that's the beauty of having it here at DART.

So we've been able to be the test guinea pig, if you will, to see and refine and bring better enhancements.

If I may, one of the things that I really like, and I'll move to this slide, and this is towards the end of the presentation, is DOT, you know, is a reasonably large agency.

DOT has the, you know, we've worked with partners like Uber since 2015.

We first had an Uber tour up in some capacity in 2015.

And so I'm working with those partners to say, okay, these are things we'd like to do.

And we have the size then to kind of bring them to the table and to drive what we think is next and help push the industry forward.

So from there, that then has a really nice kind of roll on effect for other agencies using the platform that they can go, okay, great, now we can leverage the same thing, where maybe they might not have

The internal capacity to go drive something directly, they can leverage those benefits as we're bringing them on online.

You know, the service redesign we did in January, if we didn't have the ability to surface our on-demand trips in the way that we do through the trip planner that I just shared, we wouldn't be able to do it.

There's no way we would have been able to change over 120 square miles additional of on-demand services overnight without showing that to our riders in advance and saying, this is what's coming.

And this is how you're going to engage through those tools dynamically.

So it's been very powerful.

And I've seen, I've seen where other agencies have had challenges with those kinds of changes and a lot of agencies now looking to like, okay, what do we do to right size and right shape our service model?

I'm really proud of the tools we have and the capacity they've had to

to really drive success for our riders.

We did a survey and 90% of our riders said the website or the app were where they found out about the service change, where they learned about the changes happening.

And we put tools on the websites as well as the app that are really the core of what we're now looking and sharing with others.

But we did win the Aptra Innovation Award from the American Public Transit Association in 2019.

which was a great honor.

And then we've also, you know, we've been engaging in competitively bid contracts and we're winning those, which is good.

And so, you know, the more agencies we have, the more platform feature capabilities we can have, which is really, you know, where my thrust continues to be in terms of where we look to go to the platform.

This is the mobile app component.

You know, it's not directly.

So we've opted to stay with, well actually, what I want to say is the real-time trip data will be generated from the CAD-AVL system, right?

And that gets presented out and then we'll consume that in the GTFS real-time format.

So we will consume that data in, but there's not a direct integration with the CAD-AVL system.

So you're pushing your information into a database and then it comes from there into your mobile app.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the core of it would be on the trip plan side, agencies will generate their GTFS schedule files.

Let's say this is where my services will run.

Then in addition, the CAD AVL system will be pinging saying, my bus is here, my bus is here.

That then gets generated by whomever your vendor is most likely into a GTFS real-time file format or into an API.

If we get provided with that API, we would have that overlay in the app to present real-time data on top of the schedules.

And then that data is what's consumed in the trip planner to then pull out multimodal results and say, here's your options.

The additional bit that we've done on top is this mapping of the on-demand zones so that when we've got these additional on-demand zones, they're not going to be in your CAD-AVL systems.

That's a whole separate world.

But we've done vendor integration.

We actually have two vendors now.

One's called Spare Labs, and that's the company that Dart uses.

There's another company, Veer, that you may have heard of.

And we're in the final stages of integrating them in the same way.

So we'll have multiple vendors.

And another piece I didn't mention, that's another piece of the model is our goal is to bring in lots of partners so that we give choice for Dart and for their agencies.

So if you find like, hey, this vendor works for us, we need turnkey.

We might want to go with Veer because they run their own vehicles often, you know, the whole model.

then if VIA's in there, great, it's a good option.

So the intent is to kind of bring on more vendors and make the platform flexible and an aggregation platform for mobility as a service.

And we actually found, so just on this, I've covered most of this, but the key number on this slide for me is 70% of our on-demand bookings come from our mobile app.

And I think part of that is because it's really similar to Lyft and Uber.

So people use now,

to using Lyft and Uber every once in a while, so without being the same, it's beneficial.

I'd already mentioned, but just for visibility, this is kind of a general view of the DFW area.

We have DCTA, Trinity Metro, and DOT, where we all have a regional fair policy.

But then in the broader North Texas context, we have additional agencies that also operate that we don't have a regional fare policy with, but you can still travel between those agencies and DART using the cooperative trip planning features.

So we can get you from here to here to here.

These are the combination of tickets you need to buy from these different agencies.

And then in the back end, the reporting, we have all that mapped out so we know

who bought what where, that's the only gotcha I'd say with a regional fair policy because with regional fair policy you have to figure out okay how do we attribute which tickets were purchased and used where and we have tended to do that on looking at our ridership volumes and then just aggregating it between the agencies and say okay if you guys got 10% of the ridership volume we got 30%

you know, we would just, and then they got 60% would put that and then split out the fair revenues in that manner.

I think that's pretty much how we do it at DART.

If you guys want, I'm happy to find out more details on exactly how we do it, but I'll leave that to smarter people than me in the finance side, but we have all the data to do that.

So I think, you know, the risk of being redundant, and this is the last slide, you know, the,

The key things that we've looked for with a unified platform for mobility is first thing is trying to create one solution that meets riders at that point of need, right?

That is all the different features, the rider alerts, payments, trip planning.

We actually have scooters and on-demand services present in the app as well.

So you kind of see bird scooters in the app as well as bike share with B-cycle too, and electric bike share with B-cycle.

So we have all those things as well.

So all those different services all mapped to one place.

That's more powerful.

It allows us to launch new services, to pilot new things.

And as I shared with our service chains, that giant change that we did, I just, I think it was monumental.

We changed every single bus route number.

We reduced our stops from 10,000 to 7,000.

230 square miles of on-demand.

It was just a tectonic shift.

and the ability to have a platform where we could communicate the changes to riders ahead of time so they knew.

We even did things like we mapped where people had purchased tickets inside the app, we took that rider set and we sent them specific messaging from the app

telling them that they were going to be in an on-demand zone now.

If before they were in a fixed route bus coverage area, we're swapping to on-demand, we segment to that audience and send them messaging specifically through the app saying, hey, your motor service is about to change.

So they're aware specifically of that.

So all of that only comes because you have one central platform that you're driving the engagement through.

So, you know, for us, I think the fifth point, if you're operating fare-free right now, is not applicable, that it lowers the cost to recover revenue.

But generally, we found it to be a really successful platform for us, and we wouldn't be looking at how we can share this with others if it wasn't something we believe strongly with and see a lot of value.

So with that, that was my presentation.

Thank you very much.

I know folks are going to have some questions.

I was just going to say, I know people have questions.

And I want to take a minute because I was really remiss.

Ted is the person that we can thank for this great presentation.

And Ted, did you want to say anything?

We'll catch him in a few minutes.

Yeah, I just want to thank Greg for doing this.

As he mentioned, we adopted this in Tulsa.

Greg speaks more eloquently than I can.

I kind of call this the Swiss army knife for mobile apps.

And I think as we look for ways to bring our region together on transit,

A mobile app like this could be a starting point.

We all have different systems and we can kind of tie everything together with GO-PASS or some other platform.

Hopefully it's GO-PASS.

When we acquired GO-PASS, we did a formal solicitation and we had the big firms like Genfair and Masabi and those and I think

The Go-Pass was a great product and I think it's a way the industry should go instead of everybody kind of creating their own app.

Nice to have a standardized app that you can just use and whether you're in Washington DC or in Dallas it's the same thing.

I'm sure Greg wouldn't mind that but I think from a user point of view it's a great way to go.

So I think

Well, we really appreciate you hooking us up and I'm going to open this up to questions.

Garland, did you have a question?

You're fine.

My question is more on the kind of the technical side.

So kind of in my former job, I was the director of planning and scheduling.

So I'm really interested in the nuts and bolts of how the

back office works.

So when you're putting in the GTS pass fee and it's going to this data warehouse, no matter what you got, you got clever devices or any other, it's not really, it's just pushing that in.

And the data warehouse is spitting everything out, right.

To make, so that Rebecca's information or Ted's information is in a central location to allow you to pull it.

Yeah, yeah.

Let me, let me show my screen.

I can show you, um, the, one second.

I'll show you, this is, this is actually DART's live web trip, web trip planner on, um, on our website.

So this is a trip, um, right here.

I'm sorry, bouncing around.

This trip is complex, three hours.

It's going from Fort Worth, from a bus to another bus, to our TRE, which is our commuter rail, over to DART, to our DART light rail,

and then an on-demand trip at the end.

There's a very complex trip.

That'll be a rare trip that someone would take, but you can see that's bringing someone all across from Fort Worth from, this is Trinity Metro there on the left, over into Darts and then up.

If I were to go from, so Lewisville area, this, sorry, that's not a good area.

We go from, I always struggle with DCT and knowing their exact area.

So this is an example.

I'll come back into Darts service there.

So the way that this works is we have loaded in the GTFS feed, which is your bus schedule feed from different agencies.

So we've got DARS GTFS feed, and that includes the stops component, includes the routes,

includes all those pieces.

So if I were to click on a route, I can see this is my route with all the stops along it, all those pieces.

And I can see the vehicles in real time on that route.

That's the 227 here, here, here.

These are all my vehicles that are running on that route.

So that's

That's taking the blue line here is my schedule data that's updated periodically by the agency.

And then the real-time data is that vehicle overlaid from the GCS real-time feed.

And that will come in our case that comes from trapeze.

We have trapeze transit master as our sort of planning and scheduling platform.

That outputs GTFS real-time data we then consume and display in the app.

We give an API key over to the vendor that the apps run through and then they will just query that feed every five seconds based on the trip that's being requested and that's what we'll prompt up.

So if I were to put in a stop, I'll just pick one here.

Let's go to this one.

So I can see that I have, you know,

scheduled, on time, canceled, and all these future ones are further away, so they're still scheduled.

But I can look and see, okay, this is, this is the run.

This is when the bus is expected to control these places.

I can start digging in and seeing that detail.

So, so that's really the combination is we take the GTFS schedule files from, from agencies, which pretty much every agency will have available.

Then we overlay in,

The real time day trip that's available from agency.

If it's not, we don't have to present stuff in real time.

There's no drilling into a bus or a rail car, you know, clever devices.

is hardwired into the vehicle or any sort of tracking device is hardwired into that.

We just merely have the, because we use clever devices at Chicago.

Now that's fairly labor intensive, right?

There's a lot of things that go, and then of course it goes out of date, right?

It's not even current if you did it 15 years ago.

That being said, this is a lot more on the software side and the API side.

Yeah, I was just trying to figure out how are you getting the real time in because it's really not, because it's not pinging, you're using the GTFS feed.

So I was trying to figure out how you were in it.

The vendor stores and stores locally the copies of the GTFS schedule feed, but then GTFS real time will ping that every few seconds.

And part of the reason is because, um, like if you were to look on the map view, you'll see in the app, you'll see like the buses traveling around.

And that's the piece that everybody gets concerned about.

You see the bus and then it's gone.

So if you're going to help you make sure that the real time is there, get it.

And something that you guys can think about from a much more bigger level, Ted's on the call, clearly there's a lot of decision makers on the call, is if you were to use a white label application, you would be able to design your own Charlottesville

application.

You could name it, you could color it, you could do all sorts of things with the white label.

The difference though is it's a little bit more.

So it'll just cost more because it's more customizable.

But that being said, if Ted's vision and you guys are in an agreement that maybe some going down the line, you want a vision for this and you want it to be named something, absolutely it's fine.

Because Charlotte wanted to do their thing.

Charlotte, North Carolina, they want to do their thing.

It's understandable because they have a brand and they have a message they're trying to send to their customers.

Of course, that's a big city though, too.

Is that John Lewis?

I think so.

I'm trying to think who.

So I work mostly with our planning team and our IT team.

But one of the things I will say is on the go-past side, something we shared with Tulsa,

is we built a lot of assets and we can always like provide those in a suitable format as well.

If you want to, you know, debrand stuff or put a new brand on, that's fine.

But we have a lot of really nice assets that are transit specific, like bus wrap assets and things like that, that, uh, that we can provide as well, specifically go past in terms of promotion.

Cause you know, our goal, you know, we have about, like I said, 40% of our riders use the platform in some capacity.

It's very, very well adopted now about ridership.

We've had it for nine years.

So it's like,

Well, that's great.

For the Charlotte team, I know them very well.

I mean, that's what I was asking.

John Lewis,

So I wanted to see if anybody else has any questions.

I have a quick question.

Yeah, Lucas.

Greg, this is a tremendous app and innovation.

I think it's really an exemplar for regions, for governments around the country to do this type of work.

I think you're doing things that are

really important to us here in terms of you've unified a region around transit.

You've lowered the barrier to entry to potential riders and introduced to new riders with all the integrations.

It just seems tremendous.

I'm curious particularly about, you know, you're collecting a lot of data and you guys clearly have a robust API with all the integrations that you have.

And I'm interested to know if any municipalities or planners have taken the data

kind of that has come through the app and come up with any innovative changes or planning things that they maybe wouldn't have had before the app?

Thanks.

Thanks for the question.

I appreciate the compliments as well.

I mean, we're really, really pleased to go past and how it's used.

You know, it's always a little difficult because

The app will trend a little bit towards our more affluent riders, right?

I mean, at the end of the day, having a smartphone and a device that needs connectivity, that's something that will tend to trend towards our more affluent riders.

We can and we have used data based on when you activate tickets and when you purchase tickets to then look and see, okay, where are trends with, you know, where people are tending to use the app, where they're tending to

trending towards in terms of utilization.

So we've used that data to kind of look at patterns and timings of activity as well.

I would say one of the things that I'm planning to do, I have a capital project request in this year for, so we'll see if we get it, but I'd like to add beacons to our bus stops.

And the reason is because I like when someone comes up with the app to be able to see when someone's at the bus stop for a few reasons.

One is I'd like to send that to the MDT on board,

The other thing is I can see how long the app pings to say someone's at a bus stop for, to know how frequently people are really waiting at bus stops.

So I think that

Combination of the pure play digital and then some more physical environmental locational data would be really valuable.

I've resisted from adding in like constant locational and background locational information queries for two reasons.

One, it drains battery.

Two, it can harm you.

You can use lots of data.

I have to be conscious.

A lot of our rides are data sensitive.

You know that there may be on fixed data rate contracts and things like that.

So

I'm cautious to introduce anything that looks at background locational data.

I'd much rather use something that's actively pinging and beacons would allow me to do that with low energy usage through Bluetooth.

Great, any other questions?

I must admit some of this is above my pay grade, but.

But I'm fascinated and I know that the providers here really get it and that's all good.

I will admit.

Any other questions?

Sounds like a really exciting program.

Yes, Kendall.

All right.

Any plans to kind of connect with parking management software like park mobile, pay by phone, et cetera?

So that's something we've looked at and we do have an integration that we built for Trinity Metro with Jennifer.

because their parking systems are run by Jennifer.

And so you can, um, you can actually use the Trinity Metro.

So our tickets generally a visual validation, right?

So what that means is the ticket shows and it's got, um, colors and graphics and video.

So it's like hard to replicate.

So you couldn't just like to take a screenshot and say, Hey, here's my ticket.

And you can tap the text.

It changes color.

It's got a timer on and all sorts of stuff to do for prevention.

That's the flexibility, but, um, Trinity Metro,

We have created integration with Jennifer, who's the validation provider.

So we've put their barcode and tickets on the app for Trinity.

When someone buys Trinity Metro, it puts the barcode on, calls Jennifer and gets the new ticket ID.

Trinity use the same technology for their parking systems.

So you can buy a ticket for the transit system and open up parking barriers.

And you can use that same QR code to open up the parking gates.

So that is something we've done.

It's obviously case by case with regards to vendors, who's got what built, but it isn't insurmountable to add that kind of integration.

We also have, if you have any information flying through in your GTFS feed on parking capacity and fill rate, Dart has that.

So we know how many people have passed into our parking rides.

Someone just popped in and said, no, they need to leave.

Great meeting.

People are really liking this meeting.

Any other questions for Greg or Nick?

This was really wonderful.

And I assume everybody knows how to get in touch with each other.

Yeah, and it sounds like it's a beginning of a wonderful relationship, which of course Greg has with Ted, but I think what's good for me and for all of us is whoever's collating the emails and contact information so that you, that way if you want to reach out to us, you can, right?

So

I would love to have your information.

I'd be happy to provide ours, no problem.

If that's through Greg and Ted, that's fine, but we'd love to know who you are, what your title is, so that when we talk again, because clearly you have Kendall from UVA.

You have some players on this call, which you can create whatever you want to create.

It probably costs you a little bit more money.

You want to create something very unique, but you really can.

I mean, you're Charlottesville.

And there's a lot of things you could offer here.

So a lot of things to think about, I'm sure.

Well, I'll make sure Lucinda has contact details.

That's wonderful.

Great.

And we really appreciate you joining us today.

Thank you for the time.

And Ted, thank you for the connection.

It's all good.

That's great.

Well, I'm completely replaced by the player known as Kendall Howe.

That was making me smile.

Now I'd like to

introduce a few people.

We have our general manager is on this call, Allison Day.

I'm not sure everybody knows her, but she's she expressed an interest in listening in on on these discussions and she's our

basically are equivalent of our general manager.

And then Kendall Howell is our assistant director for transportation services and his colleague, Patrick Clark, whom some of you have met through his excellent work in alternative transportation and regional transportation.

I'm actually just going to hand the floor over to them.

We had a suggestion that we take just about 10 minutes and talk about our recently implemented

combination of fixed route and on demand.

So prior to now, and Kendall and Patrick will take this away and they can introduce themselves further as they see fit.

But prior to now, it was sort of like we either ran fixed route or we ran on demand.

And what we have tended toward now

is a combination of those two.

We're about four months into it, three months into it, and they'll bring you up to speed.

I do have to leave this meeting.

I have a very hard stop at 5 15, so Kendall will then take over the transit provider update for me at that at the appropriate time as well.

But many thanks to Kendall and Patrick for putting together about a 10 minute

It will very interestingly partner with the presentation that we just heard.

So with that, I'll just hand it over to Kendall.

Great.

Kendall, it's your turn.

All right, guys.

It's really great to see everyone and thanks so much for the opportunity.

If you'll reach into your take home packets, you should find a cigar.

Go ahead and light that up.

That's a celebration cigar because we've given birth

to a bouncing baby multimodal transit and transportation system.

That was a bit cornball, and I apologize, but blending on-demand transportation with fixed route transit.

So this is something that Allison, our GM, myself, Patrick, our micromobility program coordinator, and

Mobility Manager and Alternative Transportation Manager, Becca, our Director, and Andy Mansfield, our Associate Director.

We kind of went into the BEAT Laboratory when we were facing some challenges and emerged with what we are calling the UTS Night Pilot and UTS On Demand.

I will kick it over to Patrick and here we go.

Can everyone see this blue and orange slide?

Yeah, thanks, Kendall.

And I will say before getting started, I think it's a little unfair to make us follow Greg, because I feel like the presentation is already out of date.

But we'll go through it anyways.

So to give a little background or set the foundation, we thought we would review what our Safe Ride program is.

So this is our late night transportation option.

It is a point to point transportation service within a geo-fenced area.

It is a van service that operates when UTS bus service is not on the road.

So that was a varied, but traditionally it runs from 12 AM to 730 AM.

And then this is staffed by RMC Events.

They're a local staffing company.

You've probably seen them.

They wear the yellow ambassador shirts at the football and basketball games.

So we use them as our drivers.

and this is the kind of, if the students missed the bus service and it's now gone, they can use these vans to basically get them home in the evenings or if they're night owls to travel about.

And the way they request a ride is through the Transloc app.

This is our real-time app that we use for our bus service as well.

You can see where all of our routes are at different times.

So, you know, along with everyone, we had some challenges and faced some problems during the pandemic.

And, you know, there were some consequences.

We were in a CDL driver shortage like we all were throughout the pandemic.

We had to reallocate our drivers to our highest density timeframes.

so that we could meet the biggest demand, which was really when the students were in class and then when our hospital staff were in their commute to and from their rush hour style commute to and from work.

Because of that shift in our staff to really focus on the day and that commuting piece, it resulted in decreased service levels for us at night.

Specifically, Thursday through Saturday service was ending at 12 a.m. instead of what we would like to go until 2 a.m.

To ensure that there was no gap in service, we had to shift the safe ride start time to compensate.

However, RMC events was also facing staffing shortages, but it was a little bit easier to hide.

And as our associate director would call it, we would play the shell game because it wasn't as outwardly visible if we would take a van off the road.

It would be pretty invisible to the user, other than maybe some longer wait times and stuff.

That being said, the demand for transportation in our safe ride model, which was point to point, curb to curb, led to some critical failures, as the aforementioned long wait times.

And then because of those wait times, kind of a poor trip completion rate.

So that was, you know, through this pandemic, you know, coming into the fall 2021, things really weren't looking up in terms of being able to, you know, get the requisite number of staffing, train new CDL holders for our bus routes, that's, you know, our commercial drivers licensed bus drivers.

And so coming into the fall, we needed to do a hard look at our operations because if the trend continued, then come spring, we would not be able to meet our responsibilities.

And so we had two big takeaways from the fall semester.

Regarding the UTS bus service, those last two hours of service, we would only carry roughly 10 passengers per bus per hour.

For those in the transit world, I don't know of any agencies really that that kind of meets their standard to require a transit trip.

UTS, our goal specifically is to have 30 passengers per hour.

That's the number we're looking for to require transit.

And so 10 is pretty abysmal.

and then staffing.

So that was, we would have three routes, two buses each with an on-call driver to cover.

And so we were using seven CDL drivers to move those.

And when you add it all up, 120 or so people in those last two hours.

So not a good allocation of resources.

And then looking at safe ride, that switch over to 12 a.m., once the buses go off the road,

And the point to point service came in, it would be slammed with people wanting to use the service.

It was not uncommon for there to be 25 rides requested in the first 10 minutes.

And really, no matter how many vans we had on the road, we'd never be able to meet that level of demand.

So we would have routinely 30 to 60 trips per hour requested.

We'd only complete about 69% on average.

And then the low of like 40% on the weekends wasn't uncommon.

And then a wait time.

So the time you would submit the request to when the van would arrive to pick you up 13 minutes with 18 minutes on the weekend.

And then for staffing this operation, we required five non-CDL drivers, so one dispatcher and four drivers.

And just so everyone can visualize it, this is a screenshot from our app.

Like I said, we use the Trans-Lo-GAP.

This Millennium Falcon shaped light gray area is the safe ride service area.

The different points are pre-programmed points that you can select from, but any address that falls within that shape can be used as a pickup or drop-off.

So I said our two big takeaways, we had too much fixed route and it was not agile enough to meet the demand that's visible from people

people not using the bus service, but they wanted to use the safe ride service to go places that the buses weren't going or it wasn't going fast enough.

So we were wasting resources there.

And then conversely, safe ride was too convenient in that it essentially, instead of being a quote unquote safe ride, it essentially became a taxi service, an Uber or Lyft that people got to use for free.

And because of that, it overwhelmed the service and we weren't really able to meet our safety standards with the long wait times

and then which would snowball into, like Kendall said, the no calls, assuming the no shows and the cancellations.

So with those observations, we also reviewed the data.

And so we took a look at our APC data, that's our automated passenger count collected from our bus routes.

And it showed that 70% of our bus trips were between central grounds and close-in housing areas.

So those familiar with grounds, this is your McCormick Road, Dorns, Alderman Road, Hereford, and then along JPA.

So 70% of those trips were within that tight little area.

You can see it from the heat map on the right, that bottom left, really red area.

And then SafeRides saw a similar trip pattern for the 12 a.m. to 2 a.m. hours.

So we took this information and we

As Kendall said, gave birth to the idea of a multimodal system that we wanted to pilot for the spring semester.

So since it was a pilot, we'll just call it the night pilot for our fixed route service and then the on-demand for the other part.

And so what it broke down to was for the 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. hours, we removed the three fixed routes, six buses total, and replaced it with the night pilot route, which is the black route you'll see overlaid the heat map.

So that's one bus to service 70 percent of our trips.

And then for the remaining 30% and all the other heat areas around the not the don't overlap with the route would be served with on demand and on demand is essentially a rebranding of safe ride, but to imply now more what it is, you know, these aren't safe ride.

had gotten away from the safety component.

You know, there's still a safety element, but this is more a transportation trip.

You want to go to point A to point B, whether it's for safety reasons or not, you just want to use the service.

And so we want to use on demand to cover the remaining 30%.

The one big change

was unlike Safe Ride, we stopped using the curb-to-curb model and moved to a hub-to-hub, which is hub is essentially a stop.

We just wanted to rebrand it differently from bus stop.

But you can think about it from taking an on-demand trip from bus stop to bus stop, hub-to-hub.

And so with that, we created our first multimodal system, night pilot and on-demand, used together to cover what our fixed route and safe ride would cover.

And then you'll see we have one central hub located at the AL, that's our Alderman Library.

Can you guys see my mouse cursor as it's moving all around?

Yeah, okay.

So these red areas here,

our dorms.

And what we're looking at in this heat map is the destination of these trips during that timeframe, not the pickup location.

What we found is the pickup location more often than not was the, believe it or not, it was the library.

So that's why we plopped that main hub down at the library.

Yeah, no worries.

I think we're in for the next slide.

So we, so through the fall and over winter break, we formulated these plans and kicked it off for the spring semester.

So through our, the results through our first eight weeks of operation, mostly positives.

So our average nightly ridership right now is 92 and that's increasing week over week.

And our fall average was 113.

We feel like we'll at least get up to that number.

We're delivering the same level of service to the people that were using it.

but the service has improved from the on-demand component our trip completion rate when compared to safe ride at the later hours improved by 13 percent our wait times were decreased by six minutes or essentially were cut in half and you know this is one by design because the night pilot relieves a lot of that burden but also the hubs are much more effective

and in multiple ways, one, getting away from that taxi model.

And so people that only want to use it for that have to basically, you know, find another service, whether they want to use Uber or Lyft to make up for that trip.

So we've kind of naturally, like a natural selection of who our like true ridership is that needs the service versus those it's just really convenient for them.

And then, so then if we look on the right, I have the Millennium Falcon screenshot again, someone noted for safe ride, but then in the blue, we have our, now our on-demand.

So you'll know there's no geofence light gray area, but there's just the 50 or so stops people can choose from to go as their point A to point B.

And then of course, so we're able to deliver just about the same level of service, but where there is considerable staff savings.

So where before we required 12 total staff, the seven CDL and five non we now only require seven staff to get through the entire service for the night.

And two of those being CDL.

So those 10 hours of CDL driving, we were able to reallocate during the day.

We haven't been without our pain points and unfortunately Greg hopped off the call but when he was demonstrating what their app can do I was salivating because currently we lack the ability to do the trip planning portion so this is a multi-modal journey that a lot of people need to take but they need to be educated enough on the service to formulate that trip for themselves

The on demand portion is in one part of the app, and then they have to navigate to another portion to see the night pilot, it doesn't do it for them.

So just educating our ridership on how the service out of two systems operate together.

has been a challenge for us.

And then right now, again, due to the staffing shortages, the bus runs on a 20 minute frequency.

So it does make it difficult for those that are waiting at the stop, you know, they could wait 20 minutes after getting off the on-demand for the night pilot to come around.

So hopefully we'll have these things smoothed out through the summer and we'll be good to go for the fall semester.

The other pain point is still those that hop on at 12 a.m. to use Safe Ride.

Currently the on demand system is only available to UVA affiliates.

We currently require a valid UVA ID and those credentials in order to interact with the Translocap in that way.

Right.

Right.

All right.

This looks like this is your last slide.

So, and then we'll have questions.

Okay.

Yep.

Continue.

Actually, if I could just interrupt real quick.

That's specifically the on-demand requires a UVA ID.

The night pilot as well as all the other UTS bus routes are open to the general public.

Okay, good clarification.

Yeah, that's great.

So next steps, we did a little deep digging through the first couple of, well, maybe six weeks of the spring semester.

And we updated the route a little bit beginning a couple of weeks ago.

Now we go past the corner, but we don't make a stop there.

We make a stop a little bit beyond the corner.

So we have, in order to hit that 70-30 balance,

We've tried to collect some of those rides that originated from the corner by making a stop at Madison Hall.

We've also extended the hours of the package from midnight to 2am, so now it's on the road from 10pm to 2am.

And we're going to keep things as they are for the rest of the semester.

And then we're going to take a long loving look over the summer, hoping to kind of have a better service ready to go in the fall.

All right, I'm going to open it up for questions.

And maybe we can take down the presentation.

Bea, you have a question.

Yes, thank you very much.

Great presentation.

I enjoyed that.

Do you have the same CDL as a commercial driver's license?

Great question.

And this is really, you know, the honeypot of this whole thing is we do not.

The van drivers don't need that same CDL.

Okay.

We have a combination of our own in-house training and then the training that RMC provides.

They've been the safe ride provider for a while, five plus years.

And so they've developed their own training program for their hires, their new drivers.

Go ahead, Patrick.

Absolutely.

Like we said, you know, we're I mean, you know, believe it or not, we're still in a pandemic.

Other things are looking much better.

But yeah, we've suffered with the staffing issues throughout.

So this is open to anyone.

Would you give me a number?

And the reason why I just heard it from a constituent today

that she's working with some Afghan families and they are here.

They speak English.

The guy just got his driver's license.

Who should I send the presentation to?

I'm sorry, what?

And that'll have a phone number where they can call?

Yes ma'am.

Thank you.

That's great.

A little networking going on here.

A little networking going on.

Or a U.S. driver.

Garland excited.

There you go.

Okay.

A little bit of competition going here.

Any other questions, though, for the UVA folks?

That was really great.

Very interesting.

Okay.

All right.

And trying to keep us on time, guys.

We have our transit provider updates, which I know everybody likes to hear.

So, Ted, John is the first one on our agenda.

Yeah, just real quick.

We launched

A transit development planning process last week.

We're going to look at our system both in the near term and maybe a little bit of long term.

So we're excited about that.

We also spent some time in Greene County.

The staff wanted to cut our budget request by 44%.

So we appealed to the Board of Supervisors and they seemed more sympathetic with our request.

The cut is only half a percent of the county budget.

So I'm not sure what's driving the staff issue, but we're hopeful we can get our full request, but we'll know more about that in April and May.

All right.

Any questions for Ted?

All right.

Yes, hello everybody.

We are certainly still in the trenches of our recruitment.

We just had a job fair and we have about three more lined up.

So this boots on the grounds trying to find drivers working on

Short range goals to deal with some of the double back issues that we have.

We have to go get one load and come back and get another.

So that certainly is not the ideal plan for our children to get them to school late.

So we're working on that.

And then of course our long range goal is to recruit drivers and it's not going to be

Just a one-time solution, one approach.

There are going to be multiple things that I'm working on to address this issue.

So more in the works, more to do.

So that's what we're doing in Albemarle.

All right, UTS, Becca White.

And Becca, I think, had to leave early.

Yeah, we're going to three prong fork it between myself, Patrick, and Allison.

But long and short of it, we're trucking along.

Our semester ends at the end of April, the very beginning of May.

That doesn't mean that we downshift our service level or anything like that.

It's just, it's one of those markers where, you know, maybe our ridership decreases a bit through the summer.

And like we mentioned there in the presentation, we have some route exploration and enhancement to go through over the course of the summer.

Just trying to get to a better place, you know, post pandemic this fall.

Y'all good?

They look like they're good.

Okay, great.

So Cat, I think I informed everybody the last time that we installed our APCs.

We granted authorization from

NTD to go back and adjust our ridership using AAPC data that's already bearing fruit.

We're at 760,000 riders, which is, you know, about half of what we've done before, but this time last year with just manual counting, we were roughly around, total, the whole year was only 617,000 riders.

So that's telling you how bad COVID affected our ridership.

We're already seeing 163,000 up comparatively over the whole year.

Hoping to be able to get back to pre-pandemic levels of about 1.3 and then build off from there, because that's where we were prior to.

Before we are making the route adjustments, we're trying to get those done as we're coming up on the next fiscal year.

Additionally, we're going to be starting our feasibility study for looking at alternative vehicles.

City council granted us the ability to put the additional money that we got from the state.

We got some additional operating funds.

Thank you, Neil.

That was $980,000 for a CAT.

We're earmarking $300,000 of that to do our alternative fuel study.

and then what we're calling an integration study to look at the recommendations that come out of that.

So that hopefully kicks off next week.

We're targeting probably Friday of next week to make it all happen.

So keep our fingers crossed.

We'll be doing, if you like, we will come back to this group.

And I know we hadn't planned on doing that as a part of our initial, but I think it might be helpful to this group get that in

Garland would liken up, I think that'd be great for this group.

Absolutely.

So switching gears to Pupil.

We are, like Charmaine, actively recruiting.

We're going to start our robust hiring advertisement program in about two weeks.

We're lining up all of the local, whether it's we're looking at radio, we're potentially looking at TV ads,

We've got to do something here to add more drivers.

UTS and John didn't make it easy, has not made it easy on us when they raised the rate for their drivers.

I think both of them are around $19 now for coming in the house.

So we are looking at making some potential adjustments ourselves, but we'll let everybody know when that happens.

Okay.

Okay, and I guess just to give you an update for DRBT, which we've had some major news here, but Jennifer Mitchell, who was their agency director for eight years, has left the agency to take a position with the

Federal Railroad Administration, and we were excited for her.

And she was certainly a wonderful leader for our agency over this time.

And Jen DeBruy has been appointed to be acting director of the agency.

And that started on Monday.

And replacing her as acting chief of public transportation will be Grant Sparks, who

It's also our director of planning.

So we do have some changes that are going on.

And as far as this year's program projects and applications, everything we're working on it in a draft will be publicized in the middle of April.

I know there's a public hearing somewhere between the end of April and middle of May and Culpeper Road will be there.

Great, Neil.

Thank you.

And Chuck Proctor is on.

Chuck is great to join us every month from VDOT.

Not really.

It's a lot of good information and the presentations were great for both UTS and for the DART that go past looked amazing.

So a lot of good information.

I'm glad to be a part of it and listen to what you guys are investigating and hopefully including in some of your future endeavors.

So that's pretty much all I've got to say.

Head deep in smart scale and pipeline right now.

So that pretty much covers me for everything I got to do.

Right.

We have two more updates and then we have a question in the chat that we'll get to in a few minutes.

Yes, I will be real quick.

First update I want to give is on the Afton Express.

We have officially hit our six month of operations, which is very exciting.

And in those six months, we've seen over 3,100 trips taken and that's through mid-March.

That is four morning runs and four evening runs Monday through Friday.

In the month of February, there was an average of 30 passenger trips per day.

And that so far has been the highest performing month that they have seen.

And most days there are still averaging around 30 trips, but we did have one day where there were 47 trips.

for the whole thing.

So ridership is continuing to climb, which is exactly what we want to see, but we still have plenty of room on those buses and we'll be continuing to do outreach.

Patrick Clark and I did an outreach event the beginning of this month of March where we set up outside one of the Afton Express stops there near the health services centers.

to continue to raise awareness.

And there are still folks who don't know that it exists and we still have a lot of work to do to increase that ridership, but there's still lots of opportunity.

Really quickly with Rideshare, we are still working on promoting all of our programs.

We have now been given the official okay to go back to promoting park pooling and van pooling.

So we have now rounded out and all of our services are back so we can promote all forms of alternative transportation.

So look for some more exciting, you know, media and ads regarding ride share, particularly on our rewards and app program, in addition to guarantee ride home.

Great.

Well, maybe we'll see you on TV along with Charmaine.

Yes, ma'am.

First of all, I would just like to thank several folks here who just sat through a two-hour policy board meeting right before this that we had to reschedule.

So thank you to those of you who had back-to-back meetings and for being troopers to stick through everything.

We appreciate your flexibility to accommodate some of those schedule changes.

The most exciting thing that probably occurred previously is that we picked an alignment for the Ravenna River bike bridge that we've been talking about.

So the policy board voted to move forward with applying for a bridge at the East Market Street location, which would connect the State Farm property area to the wool factory development.

So we'll be moving forward on finalizing that application as a smart scale project.

One thing that came up kind of last minute that we had to talk through is that there were some complications with VDOT's ability to maintain a cable stayed bridge, which was the kind of the one that had the triangular looking cables that came from the arch.

So the policy board determined that they were comfortable supporting more of an arched

style trust bridge at that location.

So that's what we will be developing as the application.

Otherwise, to echo Chuck, we are just working really hard to support a lot of smart scale applications.

We just got approval from the policy board to approve some rollover funding from FY22's work program, which we work

not going to be able to spin down due to some of our staffing challenges that we experienced in FY22.

So they did just approve rolling over some of those funds into FY23.

So we're working on developing the work program for the MPO in FY23, which does include supporting, assuming we're successful, DRPT technical assistance grant to complete a governance study.

Nope.

Well, I must admit, I appreciate that because I wondered what VDOT's pushback was on the access down at the, on the, for the Rivanna.

And it sounds like to you, me, it was the Brit, the arch and the, and it's all been, it's been taken care of now.

So that makes sense.

Okay.

Any other questions from anybody?

Or anybody?

No?

All right.

I will say other business updates and reminders.

I just wanted to ask this question to someone put it in the chat.

Can we get an update on CATS route changes?

Team is meeting Monday to figure out how to make, we are short on drivers.

We're short on it.

We're short on vehicles.

We're having some serious issues with getting parts.

So to put the enhancements in, we got to get the parts, we got to get the vehicles up and running.

That's the holdup.

Okay.

No, it's open until I think we're looking at probably another month or so before we're going to cut it off.

But, you know, it's out there that please, you know, we're trying to get as much feedback as we possibly can.

And then we'll move to the next step and then hopefully get to a final design that is incorporate some of the changes that the public has brought to us and then hopefully move forward with the design and fabrication and pick a site for

I know we're excited about this.

Sounding good.

Any other updates from anyone?

Questions?

Yes.

Garland, could you please send us that survey or link or the information regarding the types of bus stops, because I'm going to be meeting with some of my CACs and I'd love to run it by them.

Yes.

With CACs, they should be giving their input and sharing it with their other people.

And also, Garland, I'm wondering if any of your buses, the parts that you need, I mean, could you not take them from the UTA buses?

Would you, maybe what we can do is get Lucinda to send us the link for the CAC's information to all of us.

That would be great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it says, there's a note here from somebody, I'm not sure who, it says, Kat will be sharing the bus shelter designs with the RTP in May.

So we'll see those in May.

That's great.

But do we want input prior to that?

Oh yeah, absolutely.

But we're going to actually be seeing them ourselves, which will be nice.

Yes, thank you, Supervisor Miguel.

I just wanted to take a really quick minute since we haven't yet done it with the Regional Transit Partnership.

And many of you already know her, but I want to make sure to introduce Ruth Emmerich.

She has come on board here at the PDC as our Chief Operating Officer and Director of Programs.

And so I just want to make sure everybody's seeing her.

I know you know her through other connections, but she's going to be helping a lot with the administrative functions of our agency and operationalizing some of the new things we want to do, but also supporting individual programs that we have to include transportation and transit.

Great.

That's great.

Well, welcome, Ruth.

We're happy to have you aboard.

Matt Lawless from the town of Scottsville has a question.

Matt, if you want to, I don't, I didn't see it in the chat, Matt.

Okay, sounds great.

I was wondering, I thought maybe had a question.

So this is really was a great meeting.

Um, I want to remind everyone that our guest speaker in April will be someone from our peer from a peer city, which is Burlington, Vermont, which will be interesting.

We're looking forward to that.

And I do want to take time to thank Lucinda and Christine and

All the folks at TJPDC who are working really hard to contact folks from outside our area and bringing them in for this presentation.

I know the coordination is not easy.

It's time consuming.

But we really appreciate the effort and it's reaping rewards because we're learning all kinds of good stuff.

So thank thank all of you.

And unless anyone has any objections, you Oh, there's something else in the chat.

Am I supposed to do something else?

Oh, thank you to Lucinda.

Yes.

This group usually doesn't mind if I dismiss us early, for lack of a better word.

Thank you.

Bye bye.

Take care.