springlike night i am shaven spencer director of public works and thank you for making it out tonight for a public forum bike share and scooter share so we are going to run a efficient meeting tonight and start with the presentation will have a q and a then we'll answer questions and mingle in the back there are some poster boards to engage with the bathrooms should people need those there are down stairs on the first floor and with no further adieu i'd like to invite mair more weinberger up to say a few words before we get started thank that i've been in this role we have seen these new technologies emerge that have already had a significant impact our transportation system thinking back to you know the high rates of the last seven years we didn't have a transit results with that with that effort we have seen i see any here we've seen car share really mature and expand in this community and and serve a key role in the community significantly to the transportation eco structure we have right sourcing now that we did not exist you know what was it three years ago five years ago and that has profoundly changed the way   dramatic expansion of electric bikes in especially electric scooters and in cities across america  we i think try to be mindful as a city that new technologies are not an unambiguous lee positive thing almost every there are always disruptive elements of new technologies and there not completely expert in this but we have been trying to pay attention and when i say i want to be clear i think i'm speaking have i'm speaking accurately for the mets my partners involved in the burlington bike share system both here has been helping lead that effort we are excited about having a bike share we are excited and hopeful about the idea of expanding it to include a bakes and he scooters in the upcoming season  at the same time we are aware that there has been a pretty dramatic difference of experiences in cities across the country depending on how this rollout is done in the way in which it is planned and communicated variety of issues the public was quite unhappy about while i wanted to the public were excited maybe fifty fifty in some cities is is sort of the public acceptance of these cities that we're more proactive  did better planning maybe have more room about where where these scrimmage could be stored the way in which they could be operated there is much greater public acceptance and excitement about these operations as hi ski scooters expanding our current bike share might look like to hear your concerns and hopefully excitement and enthusiasm for certain areas and it's you equip your feedback with all of our partners as you try to figure out where we go from here we are expecting to work again with the company gotcha that was the lead partner in this past season we have not signed a new agreement with them and that we i thought frankly i thought was critical that we had this meeting first before we kind of negotiate exactly what the upcoming season is going to look like and do we have a member a representative jock actually here so great really i know there are some of you here because you have concerns about this and real skepticism about whether this makes sense for burlington and and i do think we have some work to do before we fully commit to this i know there is emerging that's we are becoming an x expert in that and we need to grapple with that i think in general i'm of the mindset i think the partners are in the mindset that it is this is not this is an issue that we have to take grapple with and have to be open to innovation are making great progress in fact in some ways we have kind of achieved a milestone as a community and the way we light and power electricity doing so with one hundred percent renewable sheer in burlington the end it remains a challenge that no one really has the answer for today is in the transportation sector we know that missions even during a period of  possible pitfalls but at the same time we feel a responsibility to consider and explore innovations that have the potential to replace vehicle trips there is emerging data to speed over there so it's not a settled point but i think increasing the information coming out is that the scale you scooter and the bike trips can replace a significant amount of vehicle trips and when you do that not only do you make impact on on the missions you also make an impact on congestion and parking lot as well so there's a lot of potential upside we're looking for the conversation tonight and in the weeks to come to find a burlington way to get this innovation r technology the bikes need scooters does create an opportunity and a challenge for us to figure out the appropriate way to manage these uses and we have been working with the city attorney and looking at the general landscape our city ordinance does not have a lot of specificity when it comes to eat bikes in the scooters state statute does say that eba makes should not be ridden on the sidewalks  scooters are even less clarified in city ordinance and state statute in this is an area we want to hear from you and understand how best to manage it where we've seen  scooter programs in other parts of the country work well they are using by school facilities and communities with a robust network of of lanes of bike boulevards  provide safe corridors for folks to travel so we will be looking with the r p c the regional planning commission has a consultant on board to work with us on what city ordinance and what state statute may need to be adjusted to best to regulate this use so that it works for our communities send anything to add on the bike paths i know that's pretty much it so that's how a person that gets involved is that we obviously are not in the streets but we have our beautiful formal r p received several vendors that submitted proposals for the system and after much review and discussion we selected the gotcha group  current bike share system and now it was implemented and april two thousand and eighteen with one hundred and five bikes seventeen stations i think as the mayors that it's been great to have this foundation to learn from and build upon a little bit about count myself some of the i see some familiar faces we've been working with the institutions for over twenty five years and reducing single occupant vehicles on the hill and also increasing sustainable modes of travel for employees and students and we've been pretty successful in reducing single occupancy vehicles by twenty percent county which meant that we opened membership to businesses and developers and chetan and county and i say that because kamma is holding the contract with the bike share vendor right now it makes sense as a non profit regional agency to do so so that i cover everything i think i would look to bob to share some of the report and statistics from year one thank you intending county since april of two thousand and eighteen some of our statistics to date we have around five hundred eighty seven the number kind of goes up and down daily active members close to nine thousand trips  twenty one thousand total miles biked as sandy mentioned one hundred five bikes seven thousand hubs across three municipalities says across the south burlington and burlington our average trip distance was one point seven eight miles and our average trip duration was eighteen minutes we're hoping now that we're looking into the spring and expanding our different options both for mobility assets and different options and especially hub locations we are looking to sort of expand upon that and sort of boost some of those numbers so we're going to give you a quick little rundown on the proposition from the gotcha group looking ahead to the spring we're looking at possibly to roll out of these shared mobility options come around may of this spring so the gotcha group we're based on charleston south carolina we have around fifty plus mobility assets around the united states our big mission is to get people to lead happier more productive lives through transformative power sustainable and accessible transportation we always like to say when you ride gotcha you're right was some some  fierce micro transit advocates that are big mottos we believe mobility is freedom ominous photo here you can see a little bit of of our photo of our new assets our electric bike and the electric scooter which we're going to hear to talk about tonight i'm going get some public feedback on as we look ahead to towards the spring a little more information on gotch as we mentioned fifty plus mobility systems across the united states a lot of those are on university campus s and we have quite a few systems now partnering with municipalities and local partners in those municipalities around the country with with the new  transforming landscape of transfer transportation mobility options around the country a lot of bike share systems in both municipalities and university campuses are looking to go towards electri fleets it with god so we have now there are electric e books electric scooters and we also operate electric ride share vehicles throughout the country as well a little bit of an overview of our you bike it is one hundred percent this bike is a three hundred fifty watt motor carbon fiber drive g p s enabled smart lock automatic safety lights on both the front and the rear a basket or big thing this year we're implementing a cup holder in the basket has well the e books operate off of a swappable battery so the way these would work out in the field they would live out in our system area throughout the day and we would have a team of fleet mechanics that would go out both throughout the day and over night swapping out the batteries for our bikes on the proposition like the current green ice system is to have the bikes live outside three hundred sixty five days a year throughout the year we have a smart integrated lock cable lock that runs off of the front of the bike believe our next slide is a little bit more rundown on the bike specifics as well as we mention integrated alley de lay in the front of the basket we are now utilizing a cable lock which runs from the front of the bike underneath the basket which can be locked to both our gotcha proprietary racks and most township style racks that we have in the three municipalities at the moment a really nice little auto up seat handle which makes the seats very easily adjustable we have a steel auto release lock which locks the back wheel as well which allows for a little bit more flexibility that allows the bike to not necessarily have to be locked to something if we were looking to implement some of the sort of virtual hub areas we do encourage all of our assets throughout our systems to be locked to whether it is a gotcha hub or a city bike rack so that's another piece of the conversation that we're having with the municipalities with our partners on the ground is the utilize ation a both the cable lock and the lock to abilities for these bikes the big thing the big development which a lot of the new mobility options around the country are looking at now is of course the east scooter which i'm sure quite a few have some questions on which we will hopefully be able to cover most of tonight so this is the gotcha proprietary east scooter we developed this ourselves and it is our proprietary products so it is unlike any of the other scooters out there in the market has a three hundred fifty watt motor a fifteen mile per hour max speed and it gets up to eight hundred twenty miles per charge unlike the bikes our current scooter is a is not a swappable battery we are working to develop a swappable battery for the scooter so that our fleet mechanics can go out in the field and swap out the batteries currently the system we're operating under is every night all of the scooters are brought in they are charged overnight and then our fleet team brings the scooters back out into the field in the morning the big differentiate differentiator between gotcha and a lot of the other operators out there which is one of the biggest concerns around scooters is the clutter scooters blocking pedestrian ways being just left out in the middle of the street being tossed up into trees you name it is that we encourage all of our scooters to be brought back to mobility hu similar to our current bike system we highly encourage that all scooters are brought back to designated areas and what we're really trying to work with the municipalities and all of our partners on the ground this year is what we want to do with a combination of physical hub systems and virtually geo fenced virtual hub areas where the bikes can be locked up and the scooters can be left out of the right of way out of the sidewalks so that they are not blocking any and the possessory in traffic or just causing general clutter it also helps our fleet team to be able to go out there out the day you know know where the scooters and the bikes are going to be at any given time so that we can make sure we're on top of doing all the battery swapping and charging and like we said that they're not blocking ways and that it's nice in a statically pleasing all the scooters are standing up they're not strewn all about and that our bikes are going back to our hub areas the great thing about  both these bikes and scooters is that they will all live through one app so we have developed our own gotcha app so you'll be able to see our system area find out where the bikes and where the scooters are all through our gotch app as you can see on that second little phone side there will give you a map of our area it'll show you where the scooters are where the bikes are and how many bikes and scooters are there it will also be able to tell you the electrical charge on those bikes and scooters so that you know exactly how far you can get on said bike or scooter that you choose to rent new users really easy quick sign up method just put in a credit card and you are ready to go  like we said you'll have the option of choosing either a bike or scooter it will show you where those are and little bit different from what our current bikes are that have the computers living in the back of a bike where you type in an account number and it gives you all your information right there really easy for the bikes and scooters all you need to do is with your smartphone or an r f id card for people who do not have smartphones you can either scan the q r code or tap in our if id card and then you're ready to go another thing we can do through our app is show people areas that we may designate as no park areas or areas that are restricted off limits for the bikes or the scooters we can go fence specific areas for both bikes and scooters if we do that we do not want to enable bikes or scooters in those areas it will give users a warning on their phone and it will also disengage the motors on both the bikes and the scooters and then encourage the riders to return to make sure that riders are first educated on the rules that's another great thing with our app as well as users are signing up and as they're going to rent one of these assets there'll be a lot of educational pieces that they can go through to see you know whether or not they're allowed to ride on the sidewalks and again one of the biggest things is where exactly we want to allow all of these assets at the end of the ride all you do is you lock up your bike leave your scooter in one of these hub virtual  areas and then you can give us a rating on how we did it will give you your statistics how far you went how much you were charged one of the big things that we are really looking to do with both the bikes and scooters this year a little bit of a change is in our pricing model we have one of the biggest concerns of any kind of bike share and especially the scooter share programs is impacts on local shop business we've had a few meetings with some of the local shops we're really looking to sort of continue these conversations especially as we continue our tool study with this change in county regional planning commission on some better ways to partner with the bike shops one of the big things that we're doing this year is changing our pricing model to a per mi fee for all of these assets which will really encourage riders to utilize this as sort of a short ride first and last mile transportation option as opposed to you know going out for you know a four five hour ride  out on the bike path so we're going to a permanent charge we're really trying to make this more of a transportation option first and last mile mile hour or less style rides a little bit more information about our hub system as some of you know on the left here we have seventeen hubs around the three municipalities bronx and south burlington and when you ski the proposition is to go to twenty five physical hubs utilizing our gotcha racks with the ability to geo fence some virtual areas just like on the right there these are great options if we wanted to you know geo fence that when you see circle for an event say we want to allow riders to ride to waking windows for the weekend we can the entire when you ski circle and they can lock up their bikes any existing racks and then bring scooters to a designated hub area with in that virtual within that virtual hub as well so we're really looking to sort of work with the on keeping this a really flexible system we're trying to figure out exactly what balance we want to strike between physical and virtual hubs which is sort of something that's kind of a rarity in the  share world out there right now is gotchas we are really dedicated on working with municipalities and cities after they've had their conversations to really try and cater all of our systems specifically to to what areas we are and as you can see that photo on the bottom right there that is what we are currently using down in fort lauderdale florida unlike some of the other scooter share operators that are out there that just allow you to leave the scooters wherever you please you could park it in the middle of the middle of the sidewalk you can park it in the middle of the street if you really please we really encourage all riders to bring a back of the scooters and the bikes back to our hubs and again when you are penalize if you do not bring scooters or do not bring the bikes back to either a virtually geo fenced or a physical hub area and like we said it's kind of an ongoing conversation with the municipalities on what we want to find for a balance of physical and and virtual hubs so thank you and i think we're going to hand it back to j p thanks bob it's brian davis here i don't think so brian couldn't make it  elaine churchill is here from the regional planning commission and thanks to their support they've helped us fund a study to look at suggestions on stations and also looking at the regulatory environment that we discussed earlier there will be an opportunity there's option back in the room to put your green dot where you would like to see but there's also going to be a wiki map online soon and then suggestions here about how to regulate and educate will be brought forward and thanks to the r p c for having that consultant help out so we're here in terms of what's next you can see right up here we're going to continue  negotiating with gotcha see if we can come to an acceptable agreement for both parties mend ordinances as needed and the goal would be to get up and running by summer so with that we want to hear your thoughts we do have c c t v here tonight so if you could speak up with your question i'll probably repeat it for the listening audience and let's we also have facebook live is that correct  so anybody can add a question via facebook live and we will get to those questions later on as well that folks could not make it in the snow so questions all right let's go with rick first and then  yes one of the one of the be concerns obviously with the local shop businesses in town is how much this is going to cannibalize some of the longer distance trips one of the things we really are looking to do with this tools design study would be put on by the c c r p c is figuring out how we want to especially position hubs more into residential areas keeping hubs away from just these tourist market waterfront areas so that we can truly and transform this more into a transportation option and not take over take over some of the local shop businesses another point just to touch on really quick which we didn't really get to earlier with  especially the scooter piece a really big piece that we probably should bring up today gotcha proposes for as long as we have scooters on the ground in burlington for both bikes and scooters there will be no more  financial contributions that we will require from any of the municipalities first of all that we are actually looking to then cunt contribute a dollar persecutor per day so with the proposition of adding close to two hundred scooters if we have those scooters on the ground between april and say through to the end of september we're looking at close to thirty thousand dollars that gotch as looking to invest into a local micro transportation sustainable transportation fund which we want to have catman oversea to beauty i'm on the electric commission and i support electric vehicles and i support maybe how lector scooters but when i'm just a guy on the street on my bike i have a little different view about electric vehicles and i want to point out and i think i heard you say this change when we basically have no policy about where these things can go and cannot go when we replace a car with an electric car we save a lot of carbon and the car  same space with the car did before when we replace a car with an electric bike we only hit about one eighth this hard in terms of carbon and furthermore we now open for less it previously were close to motors to motors a prime example my mind is a greenway so when i'm hearing that we're going to go full out on these things by memorial day and ironically it means that you won't be able to ride a bike that is motorized and we still don't have any idea about where they should go legally i think the whole thing is turned upside down we're rushing and we're not actually confronting the issue of what are the downsides of some of these things and specifically i'm concerned about motors going where they didn't used to go thank you bob all right sir yes folks home and if any of you did not catch the mayor's facebook little visit to their new space highly recommend checking it out there moving into a beautiful new space but going back to the our if i do yes so for unbanked users and people without smartphones they the ability to go visit old spokesman also looking to sort of broaden throughout multiple other partners in the local area so that users can prepay for it in a specific amount of time or a monthly yearly membership for the bike share and then will be issued an r f id card which they can then use on the bikes and scooters to unlock the bikes and scooters will then track their usage through the bike in school and computer g p s and they can then see either online if they were to you know utilize a computer or to go into old folks home and see how much time or dollar amounts they view lies if they're doing the paper go and with both of our monthly and annual memberships you are a lot of a certain amount of free time writing per day right thank you very much and for you to the next question is just to remind folks that the only way to come and we do have this e mail address p w planning that is up and running the public should feel welcome to submit comments and up soon will be a wiki map to contribute ideas for locations of hubs yes topography around here we do see this really revolutionising the barriers for income for you know for the biking but again with the bikes being a pedal power you know putting a have the ability to geo fence areas in which we can control the speeds of both scooters and the bikes and g and not just geophones but put govern the speeds at whatever we decide any kind of maximum speeds for the bikes i years we decide on with the partners diverse set of pedal powered battery powered mobility devices the city has been expanding its infrastructure both on wrote it off road this year we have bike lane expansions planned for lower pine street for flint avenue in a number of other communities neighborhoods in the city so we will be continuing the network these technology these are intended to be used on road and we want to develop a system where the users of the bike share and scooter share system are writing safely and appropriately on our travel ways as you may have even been on the commission at the time of the public works commission we've lowered the speed limit to twenty five miles an hour except on a handful streets we're continuing to build up the neighborhood greenways we have a couple new neighborhood greenways coming online this year so it is a progress but you know it is a opportunity for us to have new users and advocate for infrastructure that the city is interested in  system we really see that sort of revolutionizing usage especially in this area with the topography one of the current downsides of you know having a bike share system in a very hilly area is a lot of people tend to take the bikes from the top of the hill right downtown turn around look back uphill and say oh you know what i'll walk all i'll take the bus or all of you know just leave the bike here so what we really see especially from an operational side the sort of revolutionizing out a system that can really self balance itself so that people can ride back up the hill get back out to where they are wherever they are trying to go we're really looking to utilize some planning with the chicken county regional planning commission and this tool study to really focus in on redistributing and adding some more hubs to make this a transportation option as opposed to something that people are just going to be taking cruising in on their bikes down the bike but that's really not our goal with this system so again nothing that we're talking about here is a done deal no pens have been put to paper we are really looking to go through all of the planning conversations with the city being there at the table with them and as these conversations go on i'm sure chipping in kind of touch a little bit more on the next steps but we are gotcha are really really focused on working with the city before implementing any of these assets and making sure that we have you know are of well and thought out system before we put anything on the ground great thank you i will just say bird scooters wanted to come here last fall and launch no cost the city we said no we need to wait we need to go through a process it was the mayor who said to us we want to do a public forum and engage the public before we sign a contract so that we can understand how to move forward it was the city of burlington who asked the r p c for the money to do a study with a tool designed group so that we could figure out how best to regulate this program i don't  disagree that there are risks there are challenges and we are learning last year's program was a limited launch this year's program is going to be more challenging and for that we have asked for these additional resources and we have also gone to gotch and said i got you was interested in signing a multi year contract we said we want to do a one year with options to continue we need time to evaluate this merging approach and so that are those are some of the steps we've taken to take a measurement approach yes so said i just wanted to take the opportunity to react to your reminding us about the speed limit in the city as you know it's one of my prime joyous unrealised and so i look to the possibility of electric whatever joining the roads mostly to help auto drivers realize that they're not the only ones that can enjoy the infrastructure so my my point is that i'd like us to think about what it's going to take for people to actually  limit i've come to the conclusion that people won't do it voluntarily and i think if we can go home here and really limited a population that probably not worth two or three people would say yeah i conscientiously do not more people on the road i think it's going to be strategic to somehow deal with all the cars whether it's d p w or the police or the school buses whoever's driving all of us really failed from what plan that was adopted two years ago was a vision zero platform which is zero fatalities and zero serious injuries on the roadways a serious city is taking a very close look about whether we are resourced and ready to launch such a campaign if we do we are going to be aggressively moving to engineer our roads even more than we are now to i get people to abide by the policy limits that we have set yes and we want to hear more more input on that one of the nice things is because of the technology should we choose to regulate it on the bike that we are able to speed govern the bikes and scooters to a point where either they would be very slow or they thing and that's why we're here this is the possible question the good news is we can make the decision and i think i understand your thoughts about how we set up the financial pricing to disincentive eyes procurement process but there is a negotiation underway for the twenty nineteen proposals it does not mean that this community can't decide that we want to regulate this in a way where we want multiple vendors in our community that is a choice we can make there are pros and cons with multiple vendors you get choices at the same time you get additional companies with varying price points with different management strategies and it may be more difficult for our community to get the type of program we want those are choices yes right here you good question i'm not sure but bob you're welcome to come up and give a short answer if you'd like and then we're going to move to wrapping up so that we can have folks provide input in the back the conversion we use at b d is that one electric car replaces one electric car a regular car that's ten thousand miles i'm doing on a per car basis one bike replaces one eight of a car because it's only use easily doesn't answer your question  our right to decide we want to go with bikes we want to go scooters we want to go with both the city can regulate and allow operators to have hubs within our right of way under our or so as to the others i'll give to bob yes so to touch on the operational side of things the way we first see if we decide to go with both the bikes and the scooters we would continue our relationship with old folks home who does all of our reb cing and battery swapping on our current bike system to continue as our partners for our bike maintenance as well as our bike battery swapping in the field and then we would be hiring on a local team to help manage the scooter side of things so what we use in other systems is at eleven pm our fleet mechanics go out they collect all of the scooters out of the field they are stored in a facility charged overnight and brought back out and redistributed out there are hubs systems at seven o'clock in the morning we then have teams that are staffed throughout the day whose sole jobs are to go out and collect any scooters that may have been left outside of hubs or in the public right away to help make sure that we are mostly what we saw was when we saw the diagrams was seventy five sixty percent of all the trips were taken from church street or the waterfront and that to me isn't like a i thought this is supposed to be someone who is in off the bus getting town and they're going to bypass like do we they're going to go there regardless if we need to get electric bikes on there or electric scooters and stuff like that so like but we were down because if you look on church old north and the new north and get the people to actually right into these areas to do it and that was kind of my big concern how many trips did you get out of this hub in the whole north and near share scooter share is changing dramatically last year the city of burlington did contribute forty thousand dollars to the to last year's pilot this year the model has changed so quickly among the whole industry that we've gone to a place where  bob pointed out they're looking for no municipal contribution and actually proposing to share some of the revenue with the municipalities on building out the bike and pestering infrastructure i share some of your concerns j p and sandy and others  rick who have talked about the locations from this last year i think we learned with a small fleet and few hubs there was a great opportunity for a ride from hub to hub that met people's needs and that too many of the trips from my standpoint were out and back trips from a particular hub this venture for me is about mobility and that is why we're proposing a larger fleet why we're proposing many more hubs and i am very open to hearing the public's interest about where they do want ups and where they don't want ups and that is very much an open conversation which is why you're why we're here essentially empty and it's not really a problem to ride her bike on the side and you know should i think we should just apply the saying your fire district  prior and that and i'm excited that in the past year we've doubled the number of share the ability options and we're actually going to triple it and i think that making those options available to huge you know part of the is just part of the contract and so this is why we're here and it sounds like from what i'm hearing from you and others that it should be public so as whether or not the data on ridership  asked to be part of the organizing committee between u t m and champlain and cab and the three municipalities so that we can be an active player but in any partnership it's going to be a team decision exactly  i would just add to when we initially signed our agreement with gotcha it was a three phased project so we had agreed to launch with one hundred five bikes with the intention right from the beginning to expand into phase two and phase three based on the experience and the data that we acquired so i would just mention that and also echoing  great so please send us comments via email the goal here for us is to be getting a vendor under contract the hope is within the coming months so that we have time to shift in get something up and running for this summer so please give us your comments in the next couple weeks we really appreciate you being here tonight thank you for your leadership mayor on all sorts of transportation options look forward to the ongoing conversation make sure you've signed in if you want to stay in touch with us as this project moves forward thanks for coming in