and a good morning the meeting of the house and human services transportation committee when i come to order it's about nine or nine a m on tuesday december eighth twenty fifteen before we begin may i please request we all turn off or silence our cell phones or other noisemaking devices at this time i'd like to introduce our committee members and we are at a very di to introduce our administration representatives from the director of transportation joanne johnson weiner thank you for being here like to add that she's going to transport  western consulting services and also in the gallery is in the five star he also from westland consulting services thank you for being here and also from the department of transportation we have today so we're going to get started with public testimony we will start with our agenda item i'd like to our agenda item is h h t she won her and five department of transportation's short range transit plan pursuant to of the rules of the council the committee intends to receive a presentation on the up the to the department of transportation's short range transit plan including recommendations for the maui bus fix route commuter and para transit service the committee may receive a presentation from the county department transportation and s s f international in on the short range transit plan update and discuss relate matters members only legislative action will be taken at this time i like to have the representatives present us with their presentation was actually completed back in two thousand and five when the department was just kind of getting started and so that original shereen transit plan in two thousand and five was looking forward five years so  started thank you thank you marc good morning chair committee chair members of the committee it is the light working on this project because quite frankly you have so much to be proud of in your last month we had community meetings on this plan but to see people standing in lines and to start to say we have the opportunity to make some recommendations this was a contract my we contract five six one eighty percent of the funds from the contract came from the federal transit administration from our fifty three zero five planning grant and twenty percent county match it was eighteen months and duration started june two thousand and fourteen in this is we're coming to the closure of the contract period these study objectives were to describe the existing system to see what was going on and then to develop a service plan for the years two thousand and fifteen to two thousand and twenty including what should be the geographic coverage what is the potential for ridership through extensions what might be the routes and frequency of service what kind of vehicles would be required to provide that service and what might the schedules be from that we would develop a capital program for the purchase of vehicles and we placement vehicles and other passenger amenities such as your beautiful  stop locations and then to develop a financial plan including issues of fares revenue and sources of funding so you'll find in just a minute that that basically reflects the outline of our presentation today but i want to start with six important findings takeaways if you will from our work number one maoi bus is important to your economy it connects workers to their jobs over seventy five percent of the riders are using the bus to get to work either a full time job or a part time job the maoi bus provides options to low income residents in order to get to work and they were point mintz the maui bus connects important population centers attractions and business centers it's also seen as an amenity to your visitors about eight percent of the  riders are visitors molly bass now only ten years old which in cross united states would make it a very young system has been a phenomenal success the ridership currently exceeds over two and a half million riders per year and many times we see standing lines waiting for the bus to to board the bus the maui county council should be extremely proud of the world you have played in this with your leadership in advanced mint the county has been able to leverage just over thirty nine million in federal funds in the past six years alone in order to make this possible and  extensions of the principles of transit in the transportation system and it's now on the president's desk and we are all eagerly awaiting his signature which we believe will be forthcoming so in today's presentation we'll talk about your system history your current services the writer feedback and community input we got from a on board survey from talking to the drivers and from the community meetings and then we will focus in on our specific recommendations in these at this time of the consultant recommendations for service adjustments for capital investments and for a financial plan so at this point i will turn it over to west legislation it is kind of curious you're in perfect harmony with the federal legislation because the last time they passed a long term funding authorization was ten years ago and they just passed the next one five years later than they should have and that's a five year plan so one of the good things about this project in this plan is that in the past you rely heavily upon federal funding and that federal funding will be there in the future the last plan put an emphasis on how to get started the administrative make up of the organization that exists today and it did outline the services in some initial capital improvements in looking at the current plan we are taking those services and making some significant improvements to them but the other aspect that is a bit different than the original plan is we have a particular emphasis on capital investments cheryl mentioned the six success of your or your system in attracting writer ship i think it's important to kind of put that two and a half million figure in context if you go back ten years ago there was only one hundred to two hundred thousand people using the system so that growth has been in fact phenomenal also corresponding with that growth has been your investment in the system so if you look at the third column there the operating budget of the system you can also see how that has increased over the past ten years to about ten million dollars today the capital investment has actually been much greater this is your money that you put in it's not including the federal money there's been a significant amount of federal money put into the fleet acquisitions in particular  just a word about the federal programs they are complicated and they're more complicated because you've become an urban area so the staff has had to work very effectively in terms of grants been ship try and take maximum advantage of all these different programs and they have been very successful in doing that the only thing i'll say we can come back to some of these charts is that yes these programs are all going to continue but they're going to be a little bit different in the future and we're still kind of sorting through what this new federal legislation is going to be offering us the current system has seventeen routes into four different categories there are four central routes to loop routes to go in either direction there are six island or routes which really connect up different parts of the island three villager routes and four commuter outs those commuter outs of existed for a longer time in just ten years and they're predominantly oriented to peak period peak direction home to work type trips we looked at a lot of information and i'm only going to share with you a little bit of this for example we looked at population density and we were kind of surprised when we looked at the population density in terms of dots a of times you have colored zones and it kind of disguises the real nature of the population density but if you look at a country for example these kinds of graphics really reveal that there are a lot of people in different remote a reas of the island and this is from the census which is once every ten years there are other sources of information out being conducted uniformally throughout the united states where there's an ongoing community survey  done almost every year and this gives us some unique information that's more current and more specific to transit with that we didn't have before so for example this particular graphic shows us where people are located that are employed that use the bus to work and again you can see one of the zones in the up country kind of popping up here as well as other areas that you might expect would be identified in a graphic like this so cheryl mentioned that we did do a writers survey this is one of the more important aspects of trying to really get a feeling for who's writing the system and why and what they think about the system so we did this about a year ago and we got over a thousand  usable forms back which on a system the size is really quite a good participation rate so that represents about forty percent of all the surveys that we distributed about twenty percent of the daily writer's ship this is the form and we actually have copies of the form with this if you want to take a look at it and there are other questions that we asked that we're not showing you so if you have any questions about this survey we might have the information with us to dig into that but let me just sort of summarize what we found in terms of the nature of the writers a lot of them forty five percent have been writing the system for three years or more so that's important that's a ongoing level of support for the system but the next bullet is also kind of intriguing because ten percent of the people that we surveyed are first time writers and by the way we did this over a three or four day period and only one of those days was a cruise ship days so we did kind of get a good mix of representation of who's running the system on different days so consistently we found that a number quite a large percentage of the writers on the system every day are people who are new to the system ninety two percent this is sort of the flipside of how many people our visitors are tourists ninety two percent are residents one percent are disabled five percent are students k through twelve students and seventy five percent are employed and i want to put an emphasis on this because sometimes people look at transit is something that's for tourists or for people who are employed or for people that are disabled but really the most important aspect of your current system is it's moving a lot of people from home to work and so you can see on this chart  the employed full time fifty five percent employed part time one thousand point eight percent looking for work nine percent those that are not employed are typically students so that accounts for that group and then some are retired so you have a very good mix of  ridership on the system as you might expect when those people are writing this system they kind of reflect the the trip type so this is not just the commuter routes this is all the routes fifty three point seven percent of all the trips on the system are people who are going from home to work and the other big categories fourteen percent that are on social trips and sometimes these are also workers making multiple trips on the bus fare payment so we took all the information about how a person paid for their fare and broke it down into five different categories as you can see on the right side of this graphic and for those categories are different kinds of passes the one category is the cash fare so you can see that about twenty percent of all the people writing this system on the days we surveyed are paying a cash fare and about twenty seven percent are using the daily pass and come back to some of this information because some for recommendations deal with  fares that you should be offering in the future one of the important things we ask is how people felt about the system overall and in specific categories and i think that thirty four percent saying that they thought the system was excellent although some had areas where they want to see improvement is a really good rate another fifty percent saying it's good and only twelve percent say it's it's fair so we felt that this is a pretty good response and something that we should continue to monitor over time and see how the system might improve in the future as we implement some of our recommendations this then takes the individual questions that we asked on the form about their satisfaction with different categories and rank orders them in terms of what was a few to be most favorable and least favorable and you can see that safety and driver courtesy kind of popped out as being the best things and as you go down the list you can see that the last four for example areas serve service frequency evening service on time performance these are all things that people felt well you could do better and that's what the plan really addresses and you're going to see some of that over and over again as i go through the presentation so what we did is we took a lot of this information out to four different community means and the emphasis in those particular presentations was the service recommendations for those particular individual areas we typically had like ten to twelve unique slides for each of those areas that we didn't show in the other areas that really got into the specifics of the service recommendations so i'm going to show you more of an example and key hey as to what those slides look like but then give you just sort of a quick overview of the other three there were some major themes that we got out of the public me not the writers survey or some of the other things that we did but from the testimony that we received during those four particular puppet means and these are things that we heard more than just once so more frequent service expand service to new areas later evening service at bus stops again somewhat consistent from what we heard on the writers survey i think we're also going to skip down to the last bullet some of these are kind of detailed and if you want to have a question anyone we can go back to it but i think the people that came out and testify had a very high appreciation for the bus they may have had specific recommendations about a particular bus stop or one that doesn't exist or how they would like to have a route extended or  trip but they were very happy with what they had to use and they were using the system route ten is the islander this serves key hay and so for each route and each area people would on the writers survey put down particular comments and we paid a lot of attention to those because when somebody takes the extra time to hand write a particular note about what they feel really should be something we are paying particular attention to we also want to make sure that we do that and so for the route ten not the other routes just the route ten these are the major comments we're getting extend night service for workers we had to fourteen people say something like that and they might give a particular time a particular location where they want to be picked up or destination but that again was a common theme from those handwritten commas more frequent buses larger buses and clean the seats and i'm sure with exactly  i didn't see any dirty seats when i wrote the buses but some people think that they could do a better job at doing it clean the seat so we also use other information so what i've discussed so far as the writer survey the public testimony  data but then the other things we want to know what everybody who's using the bus does now so this information shows for just the route ten and he hey those people by the size of the dot that are getting on and off the bus and then  splits the size of that circle the size of the circles reflective of the volume of activity at that particular bus stop location and then the green portion or those people at that stops are getting on and then the blue portion or those people are getting off with these kinds of graphic show is that for example with this key hey islander would think the key hey coastal area even though the route may be coming towards the end of its trip people are still getting on and making short trips within the community so that's something that maybe those people didn't support to speak in the testimony at the meetings or to fill out a ridership survey but we can technically find out that she people are making short trips on these routes and perhaps they would do that even more so if we provided them with more service this is the northbound direction same kind of information people are getting on at the very beginning of the route and then getting off just like five six seven stops later so a lot of shorter trips intern aber hood kind of activity one of the things that we do is we take all that census information i showed you earlier and come up with something called a transit support areas sort of a national standard that says if you have this amount of population density and or this amount of employment density and you add those factors together this area probably has enough characteristics to be warranted is being served by transit and then we color coded those areas as to whether they're served now with green in that those people are close to a curb bus stop or pink where they're not close to occur bus stop another tool we use to  design the recommendations that we have for you and this map basically shows those recommendations only just give you the highlights if i started getting into the details would be here for a long time but the highlights are that if you look at the bus stop locations you'll see that the hollow circles are new bus stops the solid circles are existing bus stops so if you look malka of the coastline you'll see a lot of new bus stop locations and if you look at the routes we're taking the existing villager and splitting the two routes and providing more malcolm a service the next two slide show this little bit more dramatically and with the skip this one for a second to show these two slides because i really like these two slides and i go back and forth if you look at the screen and i go back and forth between these two slides and with this shows you this slide here shows you the current stop locations and a quarter of a mile around each stop location indicating what homes and what transit destinations like shopping centers and different kinds of hospitals and schools are served now so if you go backwards to this slide this shows you what stops would exist with the plan in place and basically what we're doing is we're increasing the overall population being served in the destinations that are available to them this is sort of a highlight of their recommendations for key hay as i said for the other three areas i'm going to have more of a  downscale presentation just give you the highlights but we have two new routes we have routes that are going to be connecting again we're trying to take all these individual routes and make them into more of a system so we're going to provide places where at the pilani shopping center the routes can connect later evening service three additional trips in the peak period and we're adding bus stops so that's a summary of key hey going to skip through these slides again and i show you this lie was sort of summarizes all four geographic areas so there's four different areas of focus we had in terms of sets of recommendations there along the top of the slide there to expand the service hours to add specific trips in response to what people were asking for to add bus stops again in specific response to what people are asking for and to add new routes a lot of that was based upon our technical analysis of where there are areas that are not being served that are consistent with where you are providing a service now to expand service so you can see for example that last column percent increase in serp operation again using geographic information system technology you can do this kind of stuff it's just really wonderful you quickly calculate with those circles how many people are going to be served compared today so it's one hundred forty five percent increase in the population serving he let me go through a latina when we looked at routes twenty twenty three twenty five twenty thirty these are all areas that serve the l hina area and these are the commas are written on the forms of what people specifically wanted to get and provide later evening service offer more frequent service have more stops be on time and provide more of those wonderful shelters and i should mention that this survey was conducted a year ago and since then some of those shelters have actually been put into place this is a map we say of my laser pointer working but i understand doesn't work on the t so the route structure is being kept somewhat the same but if we're pulling pieces apart so that people can get from one area to another so if you look at  want to board a long road and go to the wharf cinema center today they have to go all the way out a direction to the line a civic center and back so what the new routes would do is provide a direct connection to war center  and the same thing with line a civic center there be direct connections to that particular hub and the one thing that i might mention advance of some of these slides that you'll see at the end is that when we start to concentrate even more service and buses at the current centers we have a capacity problem at those locations so this is a summary of the service improvements for line a we are taking the line of villagers i mention is split into two routes we're starting earlier we're starting we're extending service later into the evening on the island or out or interlining are connecting some of the routes so that people have to get off the bus in the back on and we're adding bus stops for easier access to the service now jump into the central area this is the map for the central area and the one thing i want to mention that you might be able to see if you look at this map is right now we have loops and that's great for internal service and a lot of people love those routes but we also saw both technically and from people's comments that they wanted to make more direct connections like this building from the louis or from the airport so we have put together in addition to the current routes additional routes to provide like a trunk service or a spine that goes along the east west corner from the airport to the government center where we're located right now so this will provide  strong central core for the entire system in summary we have those as a package of five new routes we're going to thirty minutes service on those routes and we're adding bus stops so if i go to the kinds of buffer diagrams i showed you before this is the coverage that it will as it will look like if we institute all the recommendations in the plan and this is what it looks like today so you can see if i go back and forth again how we're filling in some of the holes how we're extending this area to provide more service coverage to more people upcountry this is a series of four maps the first one in the upper left hand corner is just an insert map if you drop down you can see another map that shows you some new connections so from why well why oh why how to there's a new route that doesn't exist now the current cooler route is going to be extended there's also if you at that that's more dramatically shown in the lower right hand corner where you can see we're going down to the hospital and to the high and homelands area and then also in the  current route goes in a counter clockwise direction and we're going to add a reverse loop in that area so we're providing a lot more connections in the country area that's sort of summarize again on this particular chart not only making more connections but having all those different routes interconnect with one another so it's providing a system a network that people can use in understanding clothing for example in that second bullet a transfer point to connect to the haiku islander with new route so that's one of the things that in that particular public meeting we had an excellent interaction with the community and we've already put  in some recommendations that responded that it hasn't filtered into our cost estimates so some of the numbers you see in the subsequent slides in the service cost will be increasing slightly if the staff agrees with some of our recommendations this again is the area that are lit up now and some other stop locations that provide more service and exist today now i'm going to get into slides that we didn't show the public that are really for you because this is getting into ok this is all but how much is it going to cost and we did calculate all of the service improvements and we can come back to this the point of this table is not to go through each cell but to let you know that we did go through year by year improvement by improvement we went through an analysis of when it would be best to implement that particular service in the future keeping keeping in mind they had to have the the buses you have to have the bus stop locations they had to have the staff that can develop the details of the schedules so there's work that needs to be done before these things can be implemented and there's a certain sequencing that's logical in terms of adding service to the existing system but over the six year period from tw first column twenty sixteen is what your budget is now so if you go all the way down to the bottom of that column you'll see it's about ten million dollars so if you go across you can see how we've added different routes and for the six year period that total amount of operating cost including your current services is seventy eight point seven million the next like kind of breaks us down into major categories so these are costs for the entire six year period the total in the bottom is the same as on the prior sheet and includes all those details but this kind of puts them in the category so the current routes would be fifty one point six million if you did nothing and that you'd have to include the fourth and fifth bullet so  thirteen point three million for paratransit will be expanded slightly to correspond with the increases in the fix route operations and administrative marking one point seven million so if you look at additions to routes over that six year period that's about three point four million and the new routes is about eight point seven million so that's the total amount over a multi year period that we're talking about just in terms of the service now to support those services as i mention we're running out of at the transit centers so we need to kind of continue with the current bus stop program that has been really well received by the public and frankly when i have done this kind of work for hundreds of systems for all throughout the united states these shelters are the best we've ever seen they're really well designed they're attractive they're well maintained the public loves them and basically the public says we want this program to continue the difficulty is you've done a lot of the easy locations now it's getting more difficult because of having to make sure you comply with eighty a avoiding traffic conflicts so placing these shelters in key locations is becoming more challenging as we go along the other thing  that now that you have a lot of new vehicles and the federal government has an investment of those vehicles they would like to see your assets and their investments in your assets protected to the maximum degree possible and properly maintained in the top of the line you sorry ok if you look at the picture on the right in the middle of the right that's a aerial for photographs of a new maintenance facility at another location actually this is a yes this is much better so i want to just sort of point out what is involved in developing a system like this because this is a major or investment we're looking at a twenty five million dollars investment here so this is about a ten acre parcel this is the entire facility the buses as they come from service would go into this facility which would be where the fare boxes dropped off this is the refueling tank  this is where there's a vacuum operation and then the bus either goes into this maintenance facility which is where all these kinds of heavy maintenance occurs or they park so these the larger buses these are the paratransit vehicles these are vans commuter vans this is the administrative facility and this is a visitor parking this is a sunday the system doesn't have sunday services that's why you see all the vehicles there it's kind of a convenient picture but i just wanted to get give you a feeling for when you include all the interior mechanical devices and everything you're talking about a significant investment in the facility of this nature located their well located but right now they're all at capacity or over capacity whether we're talking about the buses trying to use them or we're talking about the people waiting for those buses so you're at the stage now where if we're going to increase services and we're going to make the trip on transit more pleasant for everybody we're going to start looking at investment in transit centers and really all the locations where these activities occur now so we've included in the budget this cost which is also fairly substantial well this is identified again in the plan by year by particular element in a form that with then be given to you every year in terms of the c i p we can come back to this and talk about any particular element the total cost over the six year period six nine point three million i've put into groups of major capital investments on this particular chart again  adds up the same number sixty nine point three million for the six year period for transit facilities including that maintenance facility i just talked about it would be about forty million dollars passenger systems includes things like electronic information s and fare boxes and all the back room types of support that is necessary for those kinds of systems as about five million and then fleet replacements i think you're very familiar with the need to keep the fleet replaced as it a ages so that includes fleet replacement of fifteen million or so so we looked at how this could be paid for and of course you want to have a certain return on the investment you're making for writers who use the system so one of the ways of achieving that is through fares so we could raise the cash fare or raise the cost of the passes or do both among them talk about that a moment advertising revenue can generate some but not a significant amount of money and part of that goes back into what i just talked about in terms of the electronic information systems as a way of having advertising tied into that so it's almost a cost neutral type of investment and of course there's county funds or i'll get to this in my last couple of slides the general excise tax increase so when it comes to fares there's a couple of things that we used to guide our recommendations one is to be consistent with industry practices so we went through what all the systems in united states are doing in terms of their basic cash fare all the different kinds of passes the different kinds of ways in which the those fare structures are presented to the public and we have certain recommendations   line with what the national practices are also what we like to do is make sure when you have a care ash fair that when you do passes there's a certain relationship with the passes so they provide some benefit but they're not so much of a bargain that it's an unreasonable practice also fares are to set to reflect the quality of service so a lot of systems when you have a longer distance prima type operation like the commuter routes those are sometimes charge different fare structure or higher fares structure farebox recovery ratio is basically what percent of the operating cost is paid for by the passengers that are using the service and then also any time you talk about a fare change it should coincide with something that people are getting back in return so we tried to look at scheduling fare increases when there's also service improvements or major capital investments in the system so we have two slides on fares this is for the fix route system and we didn't pick the particular year although we did some things we came up with our cash flow analysis for your financial plan but basically the current cash fare is two dollars and is yuko across you can see that that would stay at two dollars but if you go down you can see that that would be with the introduction of a senior disabled medicare fair and a daily pass that we go up to five dollars we think that your daily passes  underpriced significantly underpriced when compared to other systems throughout the united states and we can we can come back and talk about that and then for the mid term and longer term we see the cash for going to three dollars so when you elect to do those things it's not even really identified in the plan that's more of a policy decision that's at your discretion but we wanted to make sure that we had some assumptions built into our financial analysis so we did that same kind of set of fair recommendations for the commuter bus operation and also for the paratransit for operation the right highlight sort of indicates you that when you when you put together this whole fare structure and you go through the mathematics it gives you about three to four million dollars per year during this period of time and increasing every year accordingly especially when you increase the fare but keep in mind when you increase the fare you often sometimes lose some ridership too and we've built that into the financial plan calculations and that's really what's represented on this particular page this is the cash flow the expenses for both capital in operations and shows where the revenues coming in and the farebox recovery ratio and again sort of point to this so this is the farebox recovery ratio twenty twenty twenty seven twenty nine twenty nine thirty two this is when the fair might go up to a dollar two dollars three dollars actually i think in this time period three dollars so we're expecting more return on the fare structure but that's also when a lot of service improvements are scheduled to go in so hopefully that's something that would lose too much ridership because of those service improvements and then the last set of rows going across are the capital funding federal grants by formulas that are grants discretionary we may be changing this as we see after the president i'm assuming the president will sign the long term  w federal program package i believe that the federal grants discretionary will have more money in it just to let you know the last long term federal program actually eliminated the discretionary pot of money this program put that back in so we were clear as to whether or not that program would be there the way it has been in the past and it certainly looks like it will now and you probably will be able to get more out of that federal program that we've estimated here but in any event we want to be conservative with their estimates and let you know what the county share of the cost might be so this is sort of a summary of the financial plan the bottom numbers one hundred forty eight million so if you take all the cost identified for you for the service improvements including the existing system all capital investments all the fixed facilities the fleet that all adds up over a six year period to one hundred forty million and then this breaks out where the money might come from twenty three million from operating revenue that's the fair's county general fund fifty five million federal grants twenty eight million and the c h p forty one million same county general fun is different the federal funds are about the same or they are the same the county c a p is different and the reason being is the last line we went through an analysis of what could be possible under i think it's act two forty that was passed to extend the excise tax and as you may know that is primarily for a wahoo to complete the rail investment there making the first time that excise tax was  and acted there was an opportunity a window of opportunity that closed whereby the other island counties could in fact also enact that excise tax not for rail but for whatever per chance for taishan purposes they want to kno county did that that same opportunity is available to you again but it ends july first and if you back up over time you'll find that really need to make a decision pretty soon as to maximum amount possible and it would have seventy four million being used for transfer purposes but after we did all the math we found out that we really didn't need the full amount that the excise tax would generate at that level that six year period would be one hundred fifty seven million total so the plan as it sets now the maximum we could use if you implemented everything that's been recommended and you implemented when we scheduled to be implemented you got the tax as soon as you could get it which wouldn't be until december or january of twenty seven thousand or so the amount the balance left over for other purposes would either be eighty two million or you could decide to have the rate be lower so that's basically the end of my presentation in the will just make one minor addition and that is that t that's how it can roll into the combined cap on operating financial plan that we have recommended for the boss and that completes our presentation to thank you the department do you have any county in our state for we still com was initiative on map twenty one and the long term commitment for for funding for improvements not only in the transit system but also in other areas you know infrastructure is also be key to that and that three hundred five billion dollars sounds like a lot but when you're a trillion dollars short it's still a drop in a bucket but it's an improvement over five years i molly has still been a little reluctant to put that forward but we'll leave that as another subject matter my question to you is with all of these improvements and additional routes you know  it was when i did the financial analysis i had to do it if we can get that precise number for you i really do but i believe it was getting close to doubling the current amount of ridership and you'll notice on that gram that  the writer she was flattened off a little bit actually dropped a little bit but when it peaked and came down it was also when you were just at the fairs and that's actually it came down less than a person like myself would have forecast so you have a very solid dedicated writer ship base now that really except at the last fair adjustment so i believe with service improvements you would see a substantial increase just one dimension to that based on the comments we were getting we we know that for the early morning trip and the late trip they all have to have backup plans somebody has to be prepared to come get them  roadways in some of the changing corridors would not then would prohibit larger punches but i was curious what do you think drove that aspect because they were that was the one area that said that no he said because they're not getting on the buses because the buses are full but they feel that the larger buses will be necessitated or is it just an icon for more visitors i don't be because i was curious why that particular comment came up in that  twenty and if you've ever ridden on some of those routes sometimes you have to stand and that's a long term to stand on and if you have to do that day in and day out it becomes a bit annoying  and the thing is when we talk about larger buses and the people are asking for larger buses they're they're looking for those larger buses on those types of routes not the villager routes but i want to be islander routes the commuter routes on the commuter outs for example sometimes there's a full load waiting plus a few people right and so sometimes people as charles indicating get frustrated because they can't get on the bus they really want to get on they have to find an alternative ride and once that happens they sort of get discouraged from using the system again so they're getting back to your first question about future ridership if we fix all these problems there's already people prepared to ride the bus more the tried it out and it didn't quite the question that i've been asked from constituency is really i mean is recent as yesterday is that essentially we're doing an eighty percent currently i'm eighty percent subsidy to get people on a bus in the more people that come on the bus the more it's going to cost us so and your suggestion is to raise the excise tax at least point two five percent and put the onus on everybody else so i do have a concern with that and and how it works in your other hundreds of other places because if that's expensive i mean it's basically an extra hundred million dollars in six years over six years that's one heck of a lot of money that could be going to other infrastructure issues that we we have in the county so i need to know how to answer those folks who say well wait a minute we need other things so how is it handled elsewhere well  council member i want to break that two parts ones just the concept of supporting public transportation overall and the other one would be the nature of the excise tax as we indicated the fare structure  recommendations and also the supporting data for that your system is getting a lot of people to work and the employers recognize that so as we identify for example the fare collection system improvements we're looking for more participation from the employers to support their employees getting to work through different kinds of programs so it's not just the public at large and it's not just the writers that are supporting the system it's also those people who are benefiting the employers from getting people to work that's really a lifeblood of the community so other areas throughout the united states and throughout the world really justify it because there's very few systems that make any money they're all subsidized to one degree or another really supportive because of that nature of public transportation it really gets people to work and if you start relying upon the people having a car then you have the traffic problem that also has sort of an inherent public subsidy to it so you know you you had to support that part one way or another in this matter of what's equitable in terms of the degree of support and i might mention that through ordinances and i believe you have one  has won some states have laws that say that a certain amount of the support for this system operation needs to come from the farebox and there's different percentages and that's a good policy determination and so that's purely your discretion but it's a good tool for everybody to have to know ok what is the fair share for people using the service to pay for and and the other aspect of your question deals with the excise tax and so one of the reasons that i was who put so much emphasis on that as a funding source is because a lot of research was done as to how that excise tax is being generated i believe wahoo be somewhat similar to maui in about a third of that is being generated from visitors and so it was felt to be a harper burden on the visitors because if you look at you in the first part you're getting people to jobs a lot of those jobs are in the tourism visitor industry it all sort of makes some sense that the visitors through that excise tax should be paying the for a disproportionate amount of the subsidy so that's why the excise tax in particular in the wahoo at least has been viewed as a good funding source for this purpose to to quit the notions to what west has said of that one hundred million increase twenty five million of it is for the maintenance facility and it's my personal view based on experience that with the discretionary grants coming back in that that's the most likely way for you to fund that which is going to be closer to an eighty twenty type of net situation again that requires the application process and but with you having an m p o now one of the messages that came from the federal officials when they were visiting on the m p o issue was that they wanted that they put a lot of thought into what they call system preservation asset protection and they they class and that's one of their top priorities for expenditures and they classify a mainten facility as asset protection so i think you'd stand a good chance of being successful in a discretionary grant the second thing is that in the financial plan that we have proposed we're fashion so say we do all this and we raise all that money in new so you really like our shelters they have three seats for increasing passengers is there a better way to i mean they look great as you say but they have three seats some some double to six and if we're trying to put a bunch of people on these buses you can already see certainly in this on south key here road there adding benches you know like we used to have where it was nothing but these homemade benches now they're adding on the back again so yeah they look good but is there a better more efficient way to do the shelters that's a  a shelter at literally it's provided shelter from the wind in the rain and and they have opportunity for lighting and when your early morning waiting and late night that that's a particular important features so whether you get a seat waiting or whether you have the amenity at the lighting in some way to take trout in and to with each other while you're waiting they are a benefit from that perspective not just the sea well but do you have a better design so that it's not happens in a walk through is oftentimes you'll see two or three shoulders at a high volume location and also when you have a number of people waiting and i believe your shoulders may have this in it already but a lot of systems are going  to lean rails so you're not just standing on your feet but you have another option available to you that's easier to maintain and so there's different ways of the comedy comfort for people that are waiting and i think that your design fiar make leadership as to what we are expecting from our national level and regarding to i guess a three hundred five billion dollars we got back that thirty percent we lost in the math twenty one the highway surface transportation act madam chairman the house and senate move quickly there was one of course a major issue the export import component of the transportation bill which the president has some issues with and our understanding is the white house is going to support the passage of our transportation act for the next five years so we have a good sense of where we are going to be for how far east counties regarding to try and get some resolution on the aviation component based far as for this madam chairman yes they'll be the federal funding my concern and what we need to communicate is what is going to be potentially our responsibility and for me there is something we need to be clear because i see this as one of the tools of our legislative branch to use to manage and direct our growth i would not jeopardize our position regarding the transit accommodation tax or the t t c that is our own money state needs to come to terms that we generated and that is should be money everyplace else is the local government's money on how it chooses to make it's the and i don't agree with that so for excise tax it doesn't gave me the flexibility i need for my general fund use because we have to prepare for the bigger perspective he cites transit i've made everyone well aware of the sewer requirements coming up soon referred water department regarding their projects we still got to keep up with police and fire protection and always the need for more parks man i'm sure so i kept for improvement i get is over a billion dollars a very this is one component of that and he will be funded to what we believe is this fair amount and i think we should be discussing what is fair subsidy the level of subsidy and who is going to pay it a subsidy let's not forget who at the end of the day pays the  bill ridership it has it's a you know appropriate place but if you don't ask me to subsidize something you better make sure you have a damn good argument because i will not go over a certain amount of any subsidy because i don't think it's fair evacuation what is this purpose going to be the transit system and what its role will be for evacuation where the before hurricane was when i was able to see the aftermath of  program should there be one so our bill is a lot bigger than the estimates i see i'm sure because again fairness to the county not just for the central area  if we don't have it would see work with the department to get additional breakdown was in how we can get the information because i'd like to know regarding the use of the system is it part of their length of residency where they came from that was part of their normal pattern of work in relaxation recreation choices or eighty they were used to to a transit system that was available to them whether was portland or wherever they may have chose to reside that was the common way of transportation i don't know is it more young people are more open in willing to take advantage of us as our older people i don't know as i make a difference if their own or rented property i d did it make a difference whether it was one mile or ten miles i don't know i think we need to have as best information possible to make the best financial decisions and this gives us a starting point and i thank you thank you i will as staff to follow up in regards to your questions as far as i guess demographics as far as we can get that kind of more detailed information from the department or the consultant on anything to do with evacuations so we recently maybe a few weeks ago just had a meeting with and her team along with i believe there are parks and housing human concerns represent to start looking at updating our current plan so that's one of the areas i guess that you're wondering about regards to transportation provided  we do work very well with them you know and so if we do have any requests that come in from those islands we do sit down with a meal and see what we can offer to those residents the vehicles it's very limited to who is currently on the island i'm unless you unless you have the company you contracted out to to bring in rent the facility and bring in  i guess a laborer or find labor there so i know that i was one of the issues we've had even i know that even emil has issues sometimes when their vehicles go down if they can't get support  on those islands they have to fly out a mechanics from here as well as i know that on e we've had communications with i guess  since company i guess at one point they were looking at finding out what it would take to start up their own public transit system so i'm not quite sure where we are with with we haven't had any recent talks with them but i know one of the questions came in was what it would be what it would take to have a transit system there so i know that their company itself was thinking of some  do come to molly often and still utilize our services so i think that's part of the reason why we are all going to suggestions from so so actually proposed service improvements is really at this time with this study is just from ireland and yes yes it is thank you so so this is why i guess i recommendations is to look at how seniors are defined throughout the country and there was only almost one hundred fifty systems that we looked at there was only one other system that  prices that's a good question that we really use that robert's contract amounts which i believe roberts is there a variable for fuel in their country you know so department how will you be prioritizing the recommending service improvements if if you will be taking this study into for implementation and how would they be  you thank you in regards to the implementation of any of the route expansions i do know that the ones that would probably be moving forward quicker are ones where it's basically route modifications that don't cost any more money or if it does cost any more money it would be very little cost so it would be maybe changing a search in or out that still does that same route but maybe you split it in half and it does certain route from maybe homes to destinations such as the mall and then he calls back out to a different area of homes so those modifications if we can do it without spending any more money those are the ones that are probably going to move forward faster than the ones where we will have to request funding to then be able to start any new additional route thank you mem any kind of study or can you give us figures as to what kind of a cost benefit is to this us it's going to cost us i mean a million dollars more a year if we go through this plan but what is the benefit and i know you say you take some cars off the road can you get numbers as to how many and that kind of thing is that ever been done or will that be done madam chair i can answer that part of the formation within the metropolitan planning organization would be to engage in studies additional information that right now this particular study we only had a certain amount of funding that we had to deal with so it had to be constrained so i think we would be able to commission that kind of information from future studies the other thing too that i wanted to point out is you know we range between twenty five and twenty seven percent farebox return for which is better than the industry average which usually goes between fifteen and twenty percent but one of the things that you know just observing some of the questions with regard to the neighbor islands and the scope of the study one of the difficulties that we always have is gathering information the human services it while it's referenced within the framework of the now we you know short range transfer plan update it was very difficult for us to gather a lot of information you also have no fa structure so some of the questions that we challenge to s s f them with answering that they would not be able to really address because that system is wholly funded by the county of maui that is what serves honna that's what serves the outlying areas that operate outside of our current transit areas not so in a future update what my suggestion would be and mark and i have spoken about this when additional funding becomes available and this was largely focused on the programs that are have you do with the public transit system as opposed to you know the human services transportation program that i think would be we would be able to do some of that with the implementation of the software that m e o is now in the process of installing in their busses i think that while it may still be difficult to gather that information on molokai and lanai i think that they will be able to get a better handle on that so that we can track ridership we can track the different demographic groups we can see what ways we may be able to sustain that because when you look at the growing elderly population whether it's molokai han areas our population is growing in general therefore over time the fact that the county funds human services transportation very generously which is really helping our overall service capacity to serve all of our individuals you know that live throughout the county i really think that that has to find a way to also become more sustainable because it's very difficult to look at the money is generated in many of our writers who use both systems saying well how come i have to pay and that way buzz and i don't pay anything and the whole you know transportation human services transportation and with elderly populations growing the need for more exclusive or more individualized services is throughout the entire island is going to grow because with aging comes the need for the  requirements for the needs that need that actually are perhaps not being met in the various communities to get them to tell you i will assess that's another whole subject that we are struggling with in transportation department but those items because of the fiscal constraints that we had within the actual amount of money we could secure we had to kind of pull back on some of those components and also because the data gathering capability was limited due to the technology that emea does or does not have which you do you thankfully have helped us to enable them to address i think with those missing elements it was difficult for us to do all of the entire you know island chain and look at it but it's not that we don't that those areas are important because we struggle every day trying to provide services and especially i think even though number carol is in here harness really proven challenging at times  with getting you know people in and out of there and they have had requests for increase and services so you know our department i think that i'm leaving it in good hands because with mark and diane has been doing the financial portion of it so we're looking at creative ways that we can help to fund the system but we're still and we did get a response and i know a consummate pro who comma you were also looking at advertising revenues that's another way that we may be able to offset some of these costs and so i know corp cultural did give us a response so that will be coming down to an event after the first of the year with regard to the metropolitan planning organization formation and monies that will become available throughout that process i am more than happy as a private citizen to discomfit and i hope you know in whatever capacity i can to either gather information or provide information that you will need in order to make the decisions on to where our money should be expended but i think in general we're moving in the right direction being very cost effective in how we manage that department and i think that there are some things that we can do in house to try to improve our i guess our data gathering capability through national transportation nothing is free this misconception of the county provides free service or free that that is not true somebody is paying the bill we know that and i think we need to be more upfront with our community and tother we can do pretty much anything provided you willing to pay for it it's simple if you hire me to pay we can provide the problem is there's a lot of asking to provide very little to pay so i think we need to be real real very real with the community regarding services quality level frequency we can provide as a county i don't have to but doubt in my mind but who do people expect to pay is another thing that is of concern to me because twenty percent is not good enough for me we still got a thirty million dollars subsidy for agriculture we've got to work on hardest subsidies that we need to make the people aware and find ways to reduce this subsidy so we can put it where we need to to improve our communities of the infrastructure in reinvestment that we desperately know we're going to have to do and so for me this is part of the long range this i think we should i don't have a problem i am willing to consider giving the department to find the need to do those additional studies to get those answers we want before i'm willing to commit major capital improvement monies because i want to know is this the only option for us and if it is then let's make a call by somebody tells me why didn't you think about this and we were never taught about it then very upset  us more money and loss of time to things i'm short up in my time of life so i would see if i can assist us with some numbers that the feel is reasonable for to get those studies done quicker than later take provides us some more certainty and answer for those coming off into the ferry system or the airline system to be able to use those transportation hubs to grip on the ground and get within this community off this island that i think is still critical an you know and so cost to move our people around it's much more than any of the other counties and we spent a lot more money just in that respect moving our people from place to place so i like the plan i grimaced of cama were coming up and facing some tremendous issues in the not too distant future when it comes to not only shore water the infrastructures in that area but crew need for housing matter and even though it's not part of the subject matter today it is part of what we're talking about because if we are to build all of this housing especially in censuring country i would think that would central and i have spent i don't know if you've heard this but i spent time donica i sit there with people with the drivers just to find out what's going on because when you find out when you see it with the people people yes who are running the boss and the dave told me all these same scenarios they'd like to see expansion does this doesn't it but they also realize it costs more so i've told them in many in all cases i've said this we can give you what you want are you willing to pay more to get it because we cannot subsidize for ever so all of these factors come into the manager i want to thank you for bringing this forward i think it's great for our county and our people to see what's going on and what our future plans are whether we can achieve them or not i'd like to thank the consultants for their efforts and you know i think that's frabjous but most importantly i'd like to courage people to continue their ridership two point five million people are writing a system where we have one hundred fifty six thousand plus residents is astonishing you compare that to other municipalities we exceed all kinds of well numbers that you can come up with and finally up close with this we have opportunities in the not too distant future to decide whether we want to go g t and and maybe help our bus system will continue on doing the way we have been but i want to leave t t off the table because that will always have to be a big part of it i know this may not be directly connected to this project matter but indirectly it has a big part in what what we're discussing today but madam chair thank you very much i think for myself i feel very comfortable yes decisions have to be made yes we have to look for the opportunities and if it is and state have monies whole the whole thing the complete operation maintenance a p to a third party vendor and the county just provides the grant for a site on employees whereby we you know we're just a funnel or call funder of the whole operation program but it's a completely third party contract or grant and that we have we enforce and provide members there are no further comments or further discussion i want to thank the department for this presentation with westland good information lots of information for us to swallow we appreciate it adjourned unity media you're watching channel fifty three green government and public