spring late light evening yeah gorgeous day in santa barbara shall we shall we begin things committee member blackerby here bradley two thousand and eight professor john parker came here from rutgers university to a chair the walk white forum which the bicycle coalition put on i have been in touch with him since and he just came out with a new public new paper published by the transportation research board and the subject is essentially the question is is there a bicycling renaissance in north america and i'd like to just read the conclusion to his paper there which the short answer to the query post at the title of this article is yes a bicycling renaissance is indeed has indeed been underway for the past two decades with growing cycling levels and widespread interest in cycling in both the usa and canada there was much definitive answer to the question the boom in cycling however has been limited to a few dozen cities which have implemented a wide range of programs to aggressively promote cycling such as the nine case study cities portrayed in this article those city cycling growth has been highly concentrated in the central cities and especially in gentrifying neighborhoods near the central business district and university districts while cycling remains a very low levels at most suburbs moreover cycling is is messy cycling levels vary greatly by region the western us states and provinces in canada have by far the highest cycling rates while most states in the american south from texas all the way to north carolina have extremely low levels of cycling over the past decade there has been large increase in funding for cycling and in the range of magnitude of pro bike policies to promote cycling that suggests that cycling is less of a fringe mode than it was considered even a decade ago indeed cycling is becoming a mainstream mode in a few cities portland's two thousand and eight survey found that eighteen percent of us residents used bikes as their primary or secondary mode to work  trip that is comparable to cycling mode shares in northern european cities the success of portland is important because it shows that even cars dependent american cities can greatly increase cycling by implementing the right package of infrastructure programs and policies the cycling renaissance is indeed underway in many cities in north america but there are islands in a sea they are islands in a sea of car dominance over the nineteen year period from  for the nine case study cities true dramatic progress has been achieved and the offer of superb examples that other cities can follow portland in particular is a model of what is necessary to dramatically increase cycling in north america  americans and canadians need not cook so way to europe four models of successful cycling practices the nine cities by the way are chicago minneapolis montreal new york portland san francisco toronto vancouver  washington so i think the key is the package of infrastructure programs and policies that will make a difference here and elsewhere thank you well thank you so much i have a question for the speaker mister chair  ph you mentioned a list of cities where bicycle use has been increasing right yes now is that only big cities and and with with santa barbara not be in that data set do you think i don't know why they were chosen but they are all big cities you're right so they may have excluded small ones like boulder where the university is tightly knit with the community and and speaking of data could you very quickly remind us what what are the data collection sets or protocols or i think the bicycle coalition actually collects field data of bike use and other transportation modes and very quickly could you just sort of remind the public when when and where that's done there are different things the one that the bicycle caution has worked partnered with the city since  seven on is a bicyclist count and it's taken place it used to be every year but there was much not much change from year to another so it's been every other year the last one was done in two thousand and nine and there will be another one next month and it's like two hour counts four to six p m it mid week tuesday wednesday thursday counts of twenty five intersections within the city so we'll find out at the end of next month just whether how much things may have changed from two thousand  nine i think they've gone up but that's that's my guess also there is a us census information right yeah and it is a reported website somewhere for our data it'll probably be on the bicycle gray well just for the public because they don't see these reports i think they we should notice it in february march due to weather constraints has shown that the downtown waterfront did go down but i thought was interesting is the cross town shuttle in both months did go up in ridership which to me looks like a very good trend i mean considering that is also an open type bus situation but that shows that people are riding the bus more and i have a feeling probably the next month will probably show even more considering what the price of gas is doing right now there was a wonderful segue and developed the content i was going to make if you all didn't indulge me just today i was looking at the data for april we had just closed the month and as i'm the downtown waterfront shuttle there was a pretty substantial increase over previous april about two thousand two hundred additional riders so that was  good news we were glad to see that and the crosstown can continued its its growth as well it's there was an increase of actually twenty two percent of riders on the crosstown over the previous month and that was with one mister mas got glad to have you up here i'd like to make a comment as well unless there other comments on the report yeah well i'll sneak my comment and before you david it it is interesting with the  i'm sorry with greyhound moving from where it's close to the mtd down to the the train station on lower state well how that might play into changes for use of the of the downtown express or i'm sorry t straight sheet shuttle and then also had a separate comment on a more to kind of disappointing note it seemed really frustrating the you know massive over the last year in six months reduction in use in the creo commuter lot probably both the reduction and use of the lot and reduction and used obviously of that that shuttle is there any kind of better explanation of what's going on there it mentioned in the report that there's low it's not at full occupancy has there been any insight into that i don't have really any more information at this time we do need to look into that some more i don't know if the i just went it on the same point since i also worked downtown i think i'd like to see the city do a little more outreach because i'm there has been a lot of hiring going on downtown and i have a feeling the new employees are not aware of the commuter lot you know where i work and make a point to make sure they know it but there's a lot of small little businesses that might not know that that is available to them and because i have a lot of associates like we're very surprised that the city does have this for a nice rate versus the private lots so if there's any way the city can step up the for all the new hires because the economy is starting to improve there's going to be some new businesses opening up i mean we're funds ennoble that will be a new business shortly there's a lot of new little boutiques that have opened up on state street and these are all workers that can't afford the you know eighty five ninety five dollars but they could probably afford the forty dollars for the commuter line which would help also help reduce traffic downtown and the shuttle of the ninety minute shuttle and also just trying to find street parking timur i was just gonna note i didn't remember the source of the news i saw today that one of the indicators we have been using for the ups and downs in the shuttle ridership was a occupancy in hotels and we had to increase in occupancy tax revenue recent months month or months so that was good news for all um for anyone from mtd in early two thousand and eight was a rapid escalation of fuel consumer fuel prices and now it's in the last few months that's happened what's your sense from your data about how is bus ridership you know for any lion or system wide tract with the price of fuel going up in two thousand and eight then dropping down and now going up again  around downtown santa barbara about why people drive or write a bus well we do see a correlation when the price of gas is up our ridership tends to be up and in fact system wide in april not only the downtown shuttle and the crosstown but system wide we saw a pretty large increase in ridership over the the previous april even as i said with one last weekday most of our routes you have more riders on a weekday obviously even on a on a weekend the one route that we've looked at in great detail in that a couple years ago was our valley express period commuter service from from santa ynez valley and that one it was the the correlation between the price of gas and the  ridership was as close a correlation as i've ever seen in that type of analysis and of course that that market is even more affected by the price of gas but even and our local service here we definitely see a correlation shuttle or the the crosstown express and then also comparing that to long longer distance so the express bus is obviously going to have very different ridership than the the local kind of service buses but it would be helpful especially cases like that the creo lot shuttle to kind of compare what other cities maintain for for that type of service so thank you so much committee and so we just gave you some good news there's some ridership increasing but we also need to talk about some difficult times with the budget constraints that we're facing i probably don't need to tell you a long story about how we got into a budget situation but suffice it to say that as with all other agencies lately it has a lot to do with sales tax revenue has a lot to do in our case with the price of fuel although we do have a contract with a fuel provider that will be valid until the middle of two thousand and twelve which has been helpful to us nevertheless we're facing in this coming fiscal year almost a four hundred thousand dollars need to dig into our reserves if we don't make a reduction in our service we've looked for all the revenue choices we can find short of another fare increase and as you probably remember we just increased fares back in two thousand and nine so we think it's not an appropriate time to be discussing that again so we're talking about some reduction of service in fy two thousand and twelve thirteen you see on the screen that we if we don't do anything now we will be facing a one two million dollar reserve issue and when you talk about reserves with a small agency like us there's not a lot of reserves you can dig into without really depleting the entire system and that story doesn't tell the whole story because that diesel fuel contract will end in the middle of two thousand and twelve we're of course looking to in to expand that but we don't have control over that entirely we also have a collective bargaining agreement with the vast majority of our employees close to two hundred of them that expires in the middle of two thousand and twelve you probably remember from the news that we were close to a strike on that issue recently we're happy to say that at this point were settled with both our supervisors and our maintenance and drivers but that's the story that leads into why we want to talk to you and to our community about what we feel that we need to do so starting first with a line one and two and then i'm going to say right off the bat that the one and two not only is to within the confines of the city of santa barbara but of course is a concern to you when it comes to parking downtown circulation etc we recently in two thousand and seven were able to decrease the headways when say decrease it sounds like it's something bad but we made it faster to catch a bus you could catch a bus in the morning and p m peak every ten minutes that's true as of today we're proposing for the a m peak on the line one and two which is the west side  side service to change that to fifteen minute headways we know by the numbers that we have of riders during that time period that that will mean everybody will be able to get on the bus with the small possibility of needing to provide some boosters in that peak hour and we'll watch that and provide boosters as needed we continue to keep the ten minute service in the to five thirty timeframe although that's changing it's currently three to suggesting two thirty to five thirty as you can guess there's a load of passengers straight after the schools get out of service or get out for the day this is a concern to you i know and we wanted to talk to you about the mitigation you have this service and we're talking a little bit about the crosstown as part of what mitigates the concerns for the granada garage we believe based on doing a study of this that this might result in sixty less passengers per weekday not a huge number but we recognize that anybody who has to jump back in their car is a concern to all of us as we go through this you'll see that these changes result in the ability for us to avoid that four hundred thousand dollars concern or budget constraint so i go on from there and let you ask any questions at any point feel free to jump in at any point and ask questions the line twenty two is a wonderful piece of service that goes from downtown santa barbara garden street to the old mission and the natural history museum and on saturday and sunday only by request of a person on the bus or a person calling from botanic garden it will go up to the botanic garden it's an amazing piece of service that's been out there for about forty years unfortunately the ridership is low the ridership on this service is about looking at the wrong spot here i think it's about fourteen passengers per hour and our system ridership is about thirty eight passengers per hour someone looked at what could we do to reduce our costs our expenses this is one piece of service that we talked about reducing or taking away entirely we did hold what we call transit talk back in the tail end of april we had a number of people visiting us including deborah schwartz and they're members of the community we did hear from quite a number of people that the twenty two was a concern for them that it was in fact their only service to and from and that they would be stuck without it so our new proposal to our board tuesday will be a either to eliminate the whole route or be to reduce from the nine trips that we currently provide per day to seven trips per day  thereby saving the majority of the twenty two oh and that's why that's what i was looking for okay thirty eight passengers per hour and most of our system some of our system has eighty or ninety passengers per hour you've seen some of those packed buses on the other hand this one had an average of fourteen passengers per hour on a flip to the line nine kind of quickly it's not within your vicinity but of course if you're traveling to goleta at all the nine is how you get over the fairview bridge yet again it's a service that doesn't have enough riders on a per hour basis so we we were promoting it first to take away the line nine and to extend another route over that bridge periodically again we've listened to the community and what we're proposing now is to reduce to peak hour and with some limited midday service we have in our hands to pass out to you some schedules for the twenty two and the nine if you'd like to see those at any point here so we'll be proposing tuesday not to drop the line nine but to reduce the number of trips to those trips that are most needed line three cottage hospital again entirely within the confines of the city of santa barbara this service goes from our downtown transit center to cottage and then you can see further on the map there up to the samarkand area out to la cumbre plaza train around and coming back in to the cottage area we find as you would expect that the vast majority of riders on this line are going as far as the cottage and in same thing coming back in nevertheless an important piece of service which we were able back in no seven with the help of the city of santa barbara and i should have said that on the one and two also we were able to reduce this from thirty minutes every day excuse me every part of the day thirty minute had ways down to twenty minute headways and that was very successful unfortunately we need to reduce some service and this particular route can handle the thirty minute head w at least based on today's ridership there will be enough space as long as we again consider whether or not we need to boost and i should qualify for a moment i know when i say boost some people think we mean schools we're not we're just talking about an extra bus when there's not enough service out there and when we need to have additional seats or space we also are considering dropping off the last two trips per day which is a seven hundred and thirty trip out of a transit center in a nine o'clock p m trip then nine p m trip w specifically put in there to assist people who go to the evening classes at shot center unfortunately the ridership is as low as zero or one on that inbound trip as i say these things i want to remind you all and the public listening that we're still in the mode of listening so although this is what i believe today we're going to be recommending to our board tuesday there's still time to get information in to us and city of carp which is to not go as far as ashton sandy land which is down to the beach but to turn around at the train station and that will make a shorter round trip therefore we'll be able to run the bus every twenty minutes that will be helpful to the community so there's an average of twenty one passengers per hour on that and we will actually be able to reduce our costs a little bit while running the bus every twenty minutes because we aren't going quite as far and thirty one which you know as and i know as in my head as the downtown waterfront shuttle which runs during the summer every ten minutes currently on summer evenings we run we run late service on friday and saturday nights until ten zero p m and what we're recommending that we would do is stop that service at p m our ridership is about five passengers per trip during that span between nine zero and ten zero p m so although it's tempting because certainly nice to have  service as late as we can we're recommending the reduction that it's not a huge reduction but every little bit helps is the theme of the some of these changes the line thirty seven but better known as the crosstown shuttle it's kind of a fun story we we bought those vehicles now we've had an opportunity and those same vehicles to switch out to i'm going to say this slowly so i get it right lithium ion iron phosphate batteries those and i'm going to test you on that those batteries have given us an opportunity to run a bus that used to have to be charged at least everyday of course and let acid or nicad we can run the bus for about eight hours and then charge overnight for about eight hours the allow the bus to go two days without a charge if we care to it wasn't the purpose the purpose of doing it was to get batteries that would last a lot longer and in in span and their lifetime span not so much  but also to have more power if you've ever been behind us on the mitchell train a bridge you might not have been happy okay you i have been haven't you slow we're going over that bridge these batteries are less expensive in the first place will give us more power the ability to travel a little faster in some of those areas i'm not suggesting we're going to be speeding but we're going to be going along with traffic rather than holding up traffic and trying to be those traffic calming measures that we don't really mean to be so we're going to be able to save a little money by reducing the number of trips that the vehicle is taking while we're actually going a little faster we expect instead of fifteen minutes during peak and twenty minutes during non peak we expect to be able to travel approximately twenty three minutes all day long and nevertheless save some vehicles and sufficiently save some driver time so then we come to that question again so what happens if we reduce the number of trips on this crosstown shuttle because again it's a mitigation for the garage and our study shows that we might lose as many as fifteen passengers per weekday we're hoping of course that in all those cases those passengers that we lose on those trips will in fact  go to another time of day to ride the bus or a slightly different ten minute before ten minute after trip other changes and these are sort of the faster version the  which you know is as one of our mesa services we will reduce the number of evening trips from the current five to four and that is because we know that where while we were ending at a royal borough beach we had people who needed to go not only just a hillside house but into that oh i've got drawn a blank on the neighbor on the name of that neighborhood thank you yes into the neighborhood and so in order to go into that neighborhood and back it would take us a little bit more time so instead of five trips it'll be four but they'll be the same span of time the line six and eleven on the weekends we need to adjust our schedule because we're not able to keep the time points at this point in time so there's a nice little probably end up with a reduction of one trip or torres and that service will just be adjusted because city college is adjusting their class time so we'll adjust that last evening trip twenty four we have one trip coming in in the morning that had less than five passengers on it so we're going to do away with that trip coming in from the far end not changing anything on the trips going out that out that direction to ucsb and this is largely ucsb students riding to school boosters now this time it does say boosters and that does mean boosters for particularly for students and i'm going to stop them in and tell you we're not a school bus system we're public transit but of course we have many students riding with us and glad to have them we're showing you we call it twenty three ten and twenty three twenty that run between the and the west side were eliminating them because of very low ridership again five to seven students writing it those students will have other opportunities to ride our regular system our line fives and fours and so on they might have to take two buses that it's a really low ridership and then the next one shows you at a trip from goleta valley there will be two bus trips that are combined into one so that'll still serve the students they'll just be on one bus together and the valley express think we started to talk about a little while ago is ending on august the th sp cag through santa maria transit or smat will be putting into place some different service to provide for solving in buellton one of those trips will be a trip that comes from santa maria stopping off at buellton to pick up passengers one of those will be a trip coming through solving with a but yet to be or a being purchased bus  that we don't own and those will be done through santa maria transit and one of the trips will be eliminated unfortunately for all of us it was right in the time period when gas start going back up that this decision was made because at the time our ridership had gone down with gas going back up ridership is going back up between us and sp keg we're getting this information out to the community of riders so that they'll know what their choices are and what have i missed here anything and thank you i have a lot of information to back up all of this and certainly be glad to show any of that but most of all i'd like to listen to what you have to say which is the purpose of being here tonight sure you're for sure obviously the budget shortfall is challenging but let's start off a round of conversation do you want to start from line to line well i'm still kind of absorbing the the last item there the the valley service i don't not quite sure i understood that the the service that you you're providing or cooperating with  is being terminated then it's some of it's being replaced through sb cag was what what proportion do you are you estimating that might be we lose one hundred percent of the seats or we currently run three trips and they're planning to run two trips one of those as far as seats will be combined with a service day of coming from santa maria's so there's not a whole lot of seats left over available on that bus i want to say i think there's ten seats or so but i  may be just going off the top of my head there the other trip that's will be continued they believe they will have a i believe that they'll have a passenger that's forty see a bus that has forty passenger seats where we had more like fifty passenger seats but they weren't all used so there is one trip that's going to be entirely discontinued okay and yes that was an issue you might remember that originally we had a grant for three years and that was how we provided the service it's always a bit of a balancing act for us because the money that we receive in revenues is really meant for this community that we serve from the winchester canyon to ventura county line yet we'd like to be as helpful as we can so we always didn't want to have to take away anything in the south in order that following up on some of the other discussion on the lines i think question i had was i how's the booster service work is it when a driver leaves five people on the bench the driver will call the dispatcher and say i left five riders on the bench and they'll send somebody right out to pick them up or wow how does  a great question sometimes that's exactly how it works we don't know that we don't know that you're bringing twenty five friends to go to where to the beach or whatever and then if you you know you told us ahead of time that would be helpful but that's not what public transit is generally speaking people just come to catch the bus so sometimes it's exactly what you said there are in fact a great number of people on the i'm talking on the radio i can't pick them up and we look to see what driver is going out of service what we can do to get a bus over there on the other hand that's an expensive way to provide service where they didn't plan that it's probably overtime so most of the time we hope to learn through the process of our  ridership numbers that in fact every day there's twenty five too many people here or and i don't want to say that like that's a bad thing there's twenty five extra people then we will just plan and prep and you might not see it in our book because the book might say there's a seven hundred and thirty trip you wouldn't notice that actually there's two seven hundred and thirty trips we would know it but you as a passenger wouldn't have to worry about it it's what happens a lot on the fifteen again that service coming in from isla vista to city college especially at the beginning of the school year the students ride a lot and we're delighted we find that as the year the yeah school as the semester goes on either people are carpooling or sometimes they're leaving the class and the ridership goes down so we tend to start maybe even with three trips at seven thirty and then we watch that and we know that it's going to go down to two to one but then again it might go back up so it that's sort of an imperfect science that has a lot to do with music yes i'm living on a  i noticed the numbers it stops there i've gone down considerably since the beginning of the year but final they're coming up i'm sure everyone will jump back on as soon as that soon as that comes around you had mentioned shift on line two one and two shifting them the morning headway from back from ten minutes to fifteen minutes but not changing the p m headway is that because the morning is more of a concentrated rush and pm is more spread out yeah it's because we we know that in the p m we're getting you're a me again you're correct the morning is tends to be everybody tries to get into school and work somewhere in the same timeframe but in the afternoon they're leaving school they're leaving various jobs it's it's more spread out but also that in the morning we don't have quite as many people coming in as we do going home in afternoon how did they get there they got there in the middle of the day then so there's kind of streaming in during the day and then coming up in afternoon okay well i guess philosophically it's difficult decisions have to be made and you hate to hear  we're losing riders i think struggle so hard to attain additional ridership and then but we try to serve the most amount of people with resources we have i understand that and i think a priority to me in this equation is servicing those folks who are getting to and from work so i think music we know which lines those are and i think if there is a  way to focus energy at those lines that will be my priority cherie thanks for coming here's a i have a few different points here's a their engineering nerd question um so for the electric shuttle buses you're putting in these they just call them lithium batteries that's they fit in the same place in the vehicle you just sort of getting newer battery technology that works better and it's probably even cheaper you are nerds and you can just order them to fit they didn't quite fit right we had to change the trays the battery trays that hold them in the aluminum foil shim or something mm hmm okay yeah you're right it's slightly different i couldn't give you the exact measurements but yes they we actually are able to get more power into the trays that we had but we didn't have to create new trays and in the old batteries it came to a stop on top of mitchell torana street the driver had to wait and then he the hall he and me  prayed to the deity of our choice because it was all a downhill cruise and apparently that worked that didn't take much of a slope but are you with this new battery availability are you all right because i heard a few years ago the life of these vehicles the bus individual bus electric bus vehicles were thought to like be reaching its limit and i've heard the ball bearings grind a few times sorry now reconfiguring your planning with the new batteries that these individual buses can last longer already have a anyone have a prediction now the fleet so to speak will last ten years instead of three that kind of thing they definitely will last ten years and they have we have buses that have first vehicle with some lithium lithium batteries already in it coming to us that way and we will be putting it into service once received for about six months while we evaluate it and that it's our intent and we have already a really old grant in fact to further those buses and to be able to set aside some of those buses that you were just talking about that have expand expanded past their life yes we're hoping that that means the the buses that we gain and this process will their batteries will be last longer the buses themselves have lasted a lot longer than any of their sets of blood asses or my cats we replaced batteries several times on some of those vehicles okay you you  congratulate you on the transit talk public outreach meeting i heard from some participants and there were i know there was a lot of advocates for line twenty two the one that goes up towards mission canyon so you just said the original proposal was to cut it out two zero trips and now the proposal is to reduce it from nine to seven trips so does the rest of the proposal for service reductions sort of make up that line twenty two won't be cut as much as originally estimated no when we first said drop the line twenty two entirely and we're still offering our board that as an option so it's still a good time to tell us if that's not a good thing we would have been reducing our entire revenue hours by about five percent without the twenty two it's going to be four point two percent and that's not an exact number because we also just changed the nine a little bit but four point two percent four point two percent will be enough to solve that four hundred zero or almost forty thousand dollars shortfall but it doesn't go of course as far toward solving the next year's shortfall we can all hope that things will continue to turn around between now and then i'm not sure how much of a pollyanna i should be certainly believe in that speaking of shortfalls the i remember in your in the budget discussions from two maybe three years ago when fare increases happened  the lot of the story was that the typical funds that came from the state government for shrinking and shrinking and shrinking are those now just all gone and it's a much bigger share of your total revenues from local sales tax or you know is this the state budget it's hopeless on many levels but one could argue so is that not even a big share of your budget anymore it's still the biggest share of our budget there certainly have been some changes that have made it difficult for us on the other hand some of the state budget resolved in favor of transit there's also the minor miracle of measure a in ione two thousand and eight we all many many people voted yes on it and measure a is is certainly helpful to mtd in spite of the fact that for all of us it's not as much revenue as we anticipate it would be when we vote a guess on it and that's just a matter of sales tax which will was time turnaround how fast and how much is a good question the other thing wasn't gonna say i'm sorry i was thinking about what you asked and i know that you got to my points and my last question is on some of these city of santa barbara related lines you presented i presume a calculation from a model that if the headway goes from ten minutes to fifteen minutes or whatever the figure was that would put so many that would result in so many fewer bus riders presumably to go to another mode so is this a standard bus ridership choice  is that like new nation standard yes and of and to answer that even more fully i'm going to turn to steve but yes that was what he does i want to get to the point of like does this model differ depending on where that bus line is going so you can predict like people going people going downtown maybe let more willing to wait a little bit longer instead of drive versus someone going uptown or nolita or whoever will just say heck i'm driving because parking is plentiful and nolita or people on a line three where there's service three blocks away with a six and eleven may be more likely to still go to the  sort of think about the mood of the writer and where they're going and that kind of thing or is it just bodies on the bus versus time to wait how does that work i would say the the modeler thinks about those things yeah  exchange in headway or in travel time would lead to a why percent change in ridership and it's up to me and you know looking at the particular route and the conditions to see what what would that elasticity likely be in this case based on the range of what is is available through national research that's been done and in this case is as general manager fisher mentioned earlier it looks like on the one and two we might see somewhere in the range of a loss of fifty riders per weekday due to that change in the a m peak and on the line three maybe fifteen riders a day  i'm the i'm sorry on the across town rather which is also part of the mitigation maybe fifteen riders per day which is well not you know not to belittle anyone's need for transit but at least it's not a significant enough number to negatively affect the when the headways got quicker i'm gonna always mix up if that's increase to decrease when it when the bus line one for instance went from fifteen minutes to ten minute headways the crosstown shuttle sort of became flat or decreased ridership that was a theory going around so are you all expecting with the headways to be spaced farther apart on the east west lines one and two well then riders go to the crosstown bus but your proposal is to make the crosstown bus run less frequently as well so how how does that multivariate fit into your model or is the crosstown shuttle already with enough capacity you think is that well the person does have the capacity but that but that very reason is why i'm not assuming that the riders that might not ride the one two will shift to the crosstown or vice versa from the crosstown to the one two since we are doing some some small decreases on both r and the numbers i quoted earlier i'm assuming that's actually a loss in ridership that's not to say that some of them won't all right you know still ride on this is actually a conservative estimate to because i was basing this on  current year ridership which is down from previous years due to the economy and the and the lower price of gas until recent times and so it's quite likely that our actual our based ridership with no changes  would be considerably higher in the future and you know so it might not even be this this small loss that i had estimated that this model or your own experience if if you're showing that the headways are getting longer between buses fewer riders are going to wait for the bus does do have any way to account for how those riders are getting around instead are they going to then choose drive an individual car that you know they're from they're gonna walk carpool bike or drive in that order i'm sure and skateboard okay thanks but what to add a little bit to that is that on the milpas side of town or the east side there are a lot of choices of what you can ride into the transit center depending upon where you are there's the fourteen coming in from montecito there's the twenty coming in from carpinteria and of course we just talked about the cross town and the line too on the west side of town not so much there's the line one and this the crosstown but people in milpas side i just like to encourage people not to give up on us and the skateboard is great but you don't have to get in your car because there is still a lot of service over there and tell us if there's not enough miss blackerby okay i have lots of comments and questions so bear with me um so in the first slide you mentioned you know projective don't have any strings tied to them would be the kind of reserves that we're talking about now so we you can look at our our cash report and find seven million dollars sitting there which i know when i talk with a union they always think that sounds like a lot of money maybe we should go ahead and use that but in our case the vast majority of what we have set aside already has some strings are tied to it and really we don't even have enough reserves right now to cover the long term cost of our employees who have already retired so that would be millions of dollars that the don't exist for so really although i may say the word reserves it's not really reserves that are available for something nobody but you   on strings attached reserves are i you know i i hesitate to say that it's really anything because we also have this on liability with the return mean every level of government  so exactly so i i wouldn't even want to be i'd have to think real hard about that answer okay um the other catch is kind of a general comment and maybe there's no answer to this as we're looking to all these different things  all these different proposals it it kind of i guess it's it's hard to kind of get a handle on what saves how much right and so i don't know if you have those those specifics but that's kind of like when i'm you know i don't want any of these things to happen but when i'm kind of prioritizing what i think like what's the least bad thing or you're only saving that much by cutting that it's not worth it to lose  ridership that's kind of what i'm wondering but you have to answer that right away we do have it of course i didn't bring it with us and prepare one of us didn't but we could eat that email that to you that'd be great instantly as you can see yeah some of its pretty small if you're talking about one small part of a trip and some of its significant like the three and so so i'm really glad to see that the that one of your proposals is to keep the line twenty two because that i mean it is lifeline service and even though it's averaging fourteen people per hour most likely darn near every one of those fourteen people that's how they get to where they're going and there's not really going to be many other ways um can i interject there that because we heard that and because we were uncertain about exactly what everybody needed we've gone out to every single trip of every passenger riding and talked to them so that's you're here what it is that they absolutely ne schedule and if there's one trip in the middle of the day off the top of my head i'm sorry to say that i need to study but i can do that we just i just got this recommendation fully  by the planning department this afternoon is they just finished so it's okay you still won for me is this the current or the proposed you're passing out  alright so i guess we don't know what middle middle yeah i can tell you currently there's a six thirty five a m trip that's being proposed for deletion then the seven hundred and fifty eight hundred and twenty five those remain the same and currently there is a inbound trip at five thirty or five fifty that's and at eight forty five that are both being proposed for deletion okay so yeah i would definitely what you're saying tell us if you think that's a bad idea to eliminate the line and this is me telling you that would be bad yeah and i think it really is a great line of what you were saying of like kind of the especially the the weekends have to get to the botanic garden that's um that's really helpful i think um right yeah and i mean just kind of in general you know over the past couple of years even though the economy has been you know in the tank it's you guys come to a cent i go okay what are the service change is gonna be in the past couple times that's been like oh okay not so bad right and part of that being we had that fixed fuel cost and also that economy's bad people take the bus and so when i saw at the transit center the other day the you know list of hi dropped to see all the different lines that are affected and maybe it's you know a long time coming we've delayed the pain as long which a lot of governments obviously are dealing with line three close to my heart the yeah i i mean i is upset when it it was when it went to twenty minutes just am and pm but it's still i people are still getting getting to and from work which is ultimately the the most important thing  i can tell you that if real life situation if it was thirty minutes because sometimes it's true i'm not perfect i will miss the bus and i'm willing to wait in the morning when i'm getting to work you know you cut it close i'm willing to wait for that nine hundred and three bus and be ten minutes late to work don't tell anyone but am i gonna wait thirty minutes or am i gonna go home and get my car and drive and i will go home and get my car and drive most likely  and and and i live close enough that technically it's it's a schlep but i could walk if i needed to but for folks who are up further on the line that's not an  option also the reducing the weekday span of service eliminating the seven thirty and nine zero p m i think is a really bad idea i know i take it but i i know that that other folks do that sometimes that's the last last chance to get where they're going some of us could take the and eleven zero but for people farther away it's it's a little more of a trap so do i hear that as a recommendation yes everything i'm  it i think it's funny that the seaside shuttle is getting farther away from the sea and yes so hopefully you don't have to change the name of the the downtown waterfront shuttle the the idea what was it originally did i see any original proposals that it was that was going to change that was going to be more or was that just the crosstown that i saw i think just the crowd okay i don't remember anything else you know with the transient occupancy tax bouncing back the way it is i think and what's your definition of summer service like what's the summer starting with memorial day weekend through labor day weekend okay um i mean i think it's it's really helpful i think it's great that it goes till ten zero and i think ridership is going to increase on that not just because of the economy but because our tourism is bouncing back and people love that thing and hop on it all the time the other the other thing that was interesting we're talking about the cross town and the the downtown shuttles how many people just want a seat twenty seven okay because i know it's like it it's not kind of not the same thing as like the the three or the eleven right it's it's still pretty pretty well although of course when we say per hour there we're not assuming that there's twenty one people sitting on the bus for a whole hour they're on and off  another thing i'm kind of wondering and maybe we can save this to the end the total revenue hours that are you're proposing to eliminate are four percent of our almost two hundred thousand so it's about eight thousand hours so and i know you have brand new collective bargaining agreement in place but is that going to eliminate or are people gonna get thank you for asking them no we're being very careful at the moment we part of our collective bargaining agreement offered changed our age to retire but offered people an opportunity to make their mind up by the end of this year so there are some people who are we'll have my hair decided to leave sooner rather than later so we're just being careful not to hire at the moment there won't be any layoffs necessary mm hmm and i and i'm grateful to be able to say that okay  and then the the line five reducing evening trips from five to four i'm assuming the smartest way would be eliminate one of those middle trip happening right great um oh and  some frequency but so the first the other first trip coming in from ucsb i'm sorry is i'm at the wrong place i'm a saturday  is the one we talked about six forty okay yeah i mean my concern about that and just to to keep in mind that the x isn't just students and a lot of families who work downtown or further on who are taking it to the transit center and then have one to two more buses to hit before they get to work yeah that one is on is down to something like one passenger per trip sometimes none sometimes two okay yeah i'm just just just to keep in mind that not everyone coming from there is just a student hanging out downtown absolutely and then yeah i mean the larger question of measure a right and and that kind of having been moved around and my and my understanding to to benefit mtd more than measured you did and and my major concerns about the lines the the mitigation measures and the you know the lines that the city is you know closely involved with that you know we're you know are we getting less for our money now it kind of feels like it's a big concern and i'm wondering about the the mitigation of saying like well if it's fifteen minutes it's still ultimately decides if it's mitigated enough ultimately the passenger decides whether they'll write it and mitigate and the numbers that we provide to you will you know you rent you have a planning commission requirement to mitigate up to see nine hundred and eighty five daily trips two hundred and twenty nine p m peak hour trips we provide information to you all the time on that and and  met but yes it's a concern and and your question about measure a is is valid certainly in measure d did not have any direct money coming in to mtd but by the graces of the city of santa barbara and as it turns out also the and eventually the county and city carpinteria and ucsb to a smaller extent we reached out in two thousand and six and by two thousand and seven we were getting assistance from these agencies to help provide more service unfortunately of course after that the economy tanked so things change but but back to that that storyline that assistance that we got is in fact how measure a then got translated into a certain dollar value or a certain percent of everybody's assistance to mtd and so i know that if i say to you sitting in this city that we want to reduce some service that is related to your city it must feel like oh we took the money and ran but we need to look at the entire agency and obviously we're not just talking about the city santa barbara we're also talking carpinteria colita but we need to reduce our costs because even though it's a i like to call it a minor miracle that it was voted in and that it went so well nevertheless the amount of money that any of the agencies have right now isn't as much as it was we would hope to be able to turn this around over time and i can't promise that and and i feel like we have a responsibility to look at the entire district not just specifically what happens within one agency although i don't want to be offensive saying that no i i agree and i care about their lines you did did you have some mitigation requirement if we don't we have the report to planning staff and eventually the planning commission and then we have to see what we can do to get back to meeting that mitigation requirement whether it's mtd figure out a way to get more trips off the road or come up with other measures but we're okay right now but we're gonna have to pay closer attention to the mitigation requirement in the sea make sure it doesn't fall below what we're currently meeting but i agree with you i am it unfortunately it's a responsibility that's not just our responsibility but certainly we'd like to be the solution right um yeah and also the what you mentioned about the boosters that boosters not the school ones but them you know if if there's five people left on the bench people are gonna know the schedule people will look at the schedule and if there's not a bus coming if there's been a you know  that's i think that's devastating i mean if that is if that is truly if that turns out to be and yeah people may be able to move their schedules around but let's be honest people majority people taking the bus don't have flexible work lives or home lives and they're you know slammed running from one thing to another and that's either going to be a car trip that's going to be more you know it's not mtv's problem and i know you care about it but it's not your problem about  downtown barking it's not your problem about what our congestion is but you do more than anyone else to relieve congestion right downtown but um it's just something we're gonna have to deal with i guess but but  yeah i just hope that when when you bring the suggestions to the board that you do you know pass on obviously everything that the public has has brought you and i do appreciate the public outrage that that really means a lot and i  appreciate you coming to us as well but you know lots of agencies are digging deep and taking a hit and making cuts i know that unfortunately the type of cuts you have to make really really affect people in it and it really trickles down so hopefully you'll you know take some of the things we say into account and if if we can really you know especially at the time when everyone's starting to take the bus again you know you just hate to if someone's first foray into bus riding they find out like look at the schedule and go oh well this doesn't really work for me they're probably not gonna be back um maybe until the next time gas skyrockets so anyway i know i've talked for a long time but it's really important to me so thank you for listening absolutely and and if i could also let you know that one of our when we talk about boosters even though as i say we're not a school bus company but one of the things that happens a lot for us is overloads that are related in fact to ucsb and city college students and we're delighted that both campuses are so green and there's so many riders it has created a situation for us where we have had to put more resources into serving those populations and i will be going we will be going to those campuses to ask for more assistance because we agree with your comment that what we're concerned about providing here then the community is not only the students but of course those people who are trying to get to work and to doctor appointments and so on so we it's hard sometimes to balance those people that might be seen at the bus stop at the moment with those people that would might be encouraged if they could see there was a time to get there we will be going to both campuses to seek more assistance and i already know that they both will say that that's up to the students we'll be working with it do they have to like a lock in it what do you know what it currently is for you csp in city college steve doing off the top it's one of them is twelve dollars and one of them is right because once a semester once a i went to quarter i don't know he's whole dollars thirty quarters in significant amount raised in it of course is one of the many things you know nine times and you've paid for it all yeah i not that public school you know people in public higher education need like more things to pay for but that one you actually get what you pay for good gray uh yeah hi sherry i have a few questions here one i know you answer but i just didn't hear it on the downtown shuttle you mentioned the passenger count from nine to ten pm currently  yeah both directions yes i mean i'm sorry is that average or just the actual it's it's no it's yeah it's average i'm sorry sometimes it's five and that most it was was ten but it's more like five fifteen and then we reduced it to ten there was a past time period when it was thirty minutes and then down to twenty minutes and then down to fifteen but we're talking over the last ten years or so so in o seven it was fifteen minutes between buses and then we reduced it to ten and then with the mitigation we've brought it down to ten for the anp right yeah i'm not sure that that decision was made based on just mitigation or insisting transit well what we did when we made the chain first thing we did is when working with and what we did prior to finalizing the agreement with entity to provide measure d funding and downtown parking funding for that we went to rob dayton and i went to the planning commission to have the mitigation requirement changed from the my right bus pass to the the people sitting are okay and right now it's averaging twenty one passengers purchase instead the city average is thirty eight but that's because you're looking at large buses and right brows right right passengers per hour we're talking a yes our system wide including the lowest and the highest is yeah they were looking at it the lowest and highest is thirty eight we certainly have some chips that are eighty passengers per hour but on the crosstown people aren't really on it for an hour that would be an entire round trip right okay so it's twenty one okay and yet the twenty one you're talking about when was this because as we know ridership all of a sudden is peaking a lot   last month because of gas so was this done in december was this done november when when october october tends to be a month where we don't have holidays and weather is generally speaking okay where we do of course look at the entire last year but october is the base okay t do you do that because it's before the rainy season to doesn't before the holidays and when schools and service and some pretty much has all the things we need okay  zero and eleven zero i didn't hear anything so i assume that's gonna stay the same it's the six in eleven we're changing the schedule on weekends we didn't bring you that yet but it's going to result probably in one less trip on the sixth one less trip on the eleven because we're not able to keep the schedule right now we're not able to travel as fast as we need to keep up with that schedule okay but it would no change on weekdays okay well my concern is and i think i agree with what mister taber said is you know getting people to and from work i think is very important and the lines that really affect that i think we should really try to keep service as much as possible i hate to pull one from  another i mean i do agree though line twenty two i don't think that should be eliminated i think there is that need you know so i grieve with line twenty two keeping that service but i think in general we need to emphasize to getting to work going to work and especially look at communities on just areas where we know the income is a lot lower and we have you know you look at the mesa area are nothing mesa you look at the eastside area and of course the westside area incomes are a lot lower so they use the bus a lot more as a way to get to and from work so i'm real concerned about this reduction of service in the morning and that's my concern generally i understand the constraints and we do have everyone has to make cuts but if there's any way to save that you know that a m period did back to keep it ten minutes because i'm sure when we get the news from say the end of this month that you're gonna see ridership is probably even going to be higher because the price of gas and i just really hate to see this happening on these two lines downtown shuttle i think you know that's a whole different ballgame i know we're going t about that and another agenda item so i don't want to go into that too deep but you know that's designed as a tourist way to get them up and back and forth without driving their cars and i think that is a very important thing in the summertime too but you know we get to one and two i really hate to see as tweaking from this is a great success that we've had and getting people to ride the bus more and we start cutting back on that area it's just going to be a hardship for a lot of people so those are my comments one two million could be much worse it could be better we could get a fuel contract that's better when i smile hoping praying that that'll happen but i'm it's doubtful so yes it could be worse and if we don't take fiscal year is that that's the prediction there's a there's a possibility that we're gonna be able to extend our fuel contract not for the same price but we're watching market price now we have an agreement with our supplier that if we lock into and seventy so as a possibility it'll be better than our worst hope but not certainly better than today the union you know and i want i want to say this with all sincerity to thank our employees for their hard work on an everyday basis television but i also know it's hard for everybody so you know i can't really know what that's gonna be yes it could be much worse and then what do we do so i mean i guess i'm just predicting cuz i guess was it six months ago  shaved off you know i don't know if it was one percent or two percent with some changes in scheduling we call them sort of surgical cuts at that point yeah and i know that when i say something is a small change it really affects somebody or some twenty people or some sixty people very much yeah and then and then obviously the worry is we're making more substantial cuts now i don't no matter what some matter of severity and then the concern so yeah it's it's hard because obviously we're we're sitting here looking at service that we want to see maintained and there's just this economic trade off that's happening  as a general comment was it maybe one quick specific comment i guess the line one in two is of the most concern to me for the mitigation and for the the projected loss and is to just to clarify is that sixty or what was the number again per passenger passengers per day make sure i'm getting this correct report did she report that you get that includes the lines one and two is the quarterly mitigation report and that is an average daily number that you see in there well this is average daily number okay i need to be being more shrewd and reading those reports okay thank you that that makes me less worried about that i have to say it sounds really trite but for things like the line twenty two and i did live in mission canyon for a little while it's kind of a you know just to echo what you're saying it's it's a user to lose it you know these these low ridership routes present major challenge y the the one thing i want to kind of put out there to to not just it to the mtv but certainly to to our staff terms of thinking creatively especially knowing that we may have further challenges coming up in the future  how can we improve ridership and also improve access outside of the bus within local urban core transportation and how can we improve transportation to the bus we're talking about reduction routes basically shifting some ridership to nearby routes that are just a few blocks away how can we facilitate that because if that's going to be a reality we need to start answering that question and some of those might not even be you know as majorly financial as political decisions so we're looking at access challenges to access for our residents and we need to be proactive about how to address that and if if service is going to fall back to some more core routes then we need to be honest about that look at that happen and plan for that you know plan for that contingency because we need to maintain access for our residents so sorry to nearby there right there's challenges like that you know that the bike theft at the transit center you know when the issues like that are gonna ultimately come to a head i think if we're facilitating people coming to those core  routes i'm sorry i cannot give any better solutions but i do hope that whatever happens facilitates the least pain especially into the coming year in financial year two thousand and twelve and i haven't really s to you or to the audience listening but obviously that's our hope we don't make these decisions over these recommendations lightly this is what we do we'd like to provide more and more service but unfortunately we have a budget to consider and and that doesn't you know it's not just a word that's a reality for the following years where we might have to cut much more deeply we'd like to say that the city of santa barbara and the other agencies do work closely with us when there's any kind of a housing project or a  building going on they work closely with us to not only give access to the stops but to provide shelters if necessary which unfortunately could be helpful if you're having to wait five more minutes in the rain or whatever that's giving us a lot more street furniture so to speak and presence and and you know we're certainly open to other ideas we will also need to be thinking about whether or not we need to increase fares that is not today's discussion this year's discussion but certainly that's something that ucsb i don't know is that feasible they have mitigation a better fund the x and other routes used by students not a not a student lock in either but you know just something that the university would have to to pay for mitigation to expand the planning commission is coming think we we're working closely of course with ucsb on their lr dp and we have i want to use the word insisted but we've worked with them to develop a plan that says that if indeed the ridership becomes such that they that we need more service because of the provision of more housing and more students on campus then they would find a way to help us with that with those resources that are necessary that's a loosey goosey way of saying it but at least we're all looking at that same question how do we make it more possible to solve the problem for the students while that also then makes it possible to save resources for the rest of the  community when that's coming ahead i you know every rider is different in their behavior just to kind of throw out anecdotally one thing that's hard for me is and i know this is just the challenge that we have but when service schedules change i don't keep up on it i try oh yeah i remember from two years ago it picks up you know on the hour and and and that yeah is tricky also yeah as everybody know i hope that now on your on your smartphone you can you can check the bus schedule right and if you find yourself downtown and you can connect by bus you can just check you don't have to find a paper schedule you can just find online just in the exact way that you find driving directions i hope people know that and you and through google transit if you're not really sure what that you don't know that you live on the line three you can input it just like you would with a  be can be supported is by more ridership and at the fare box so you know we have assisted bus service but we also have to pay for it and use it and that's how it we can see increases opposed to cuts and a little further add if i can this year at the transit center we are what going to be able to provide some new fare options which basically will be machines that will sell tickets and tokens with credit cards so we know that we know that's the world we live in we we don't have credit card access on buses but we'll be making it more and more possible for you is really remarkable there are many other cities that do not kind of conduct it in this way there may be a single public hearing but then that information and i've had this direct experience myself in northern california is really not incorporated into the board decision so first you know mike mike who does go out to you for that on the one hand we have cost reduction and cost avoidance but i think there are opportunities and so i would like to ask you to talk to us a bit about ridership stimulation and what type of perhaps joint marketing efforts you might be discussing whether that's with the the lodging industry so when visitors come to town in addition to our residents how can they learn more about  availability of our great transit system and perhaps there are disc combo discount packages that could be offered sort of a transportation and entertainment you know cultural activities and transportation i mean i'm not certainly reinventing the wheel here other cities do that but i didn't know to what extent we've really reached out and partnered with some of these other sectors to to make that happen there there's a couple things that are already in place but we're always open to hearing more we work closely with  bd and certainly with car free santa barbara and for those who aren't familiar with that you know even online car for santa barbara will help you get deals when you come into santa barbara that include lesser cost of your hotels and your lodging and so on so we work closely with them in fact we have one of the sad things was we've already done a lot of that with the line twenty two and yet it still hasn't grown to the level we would like it to but there there's that aspect certainly we work with amtrak if you ride the bus up here excuse me that would be a train ride the train up you can ask the conductor for a transfer to mtd and then get a free ride with mtt and in fact caltrans after that it's a program with them we have some of those creative things in place probably not as many as we could and you know we certainly look to more and more of those opportunities when we talked about increasing ridership on the twenty two would certainly take an awful lot of riders on a twenty two to close that four hundred thousand dollars gap however the twenty two would not be the i suppose target if you see it that way of our seeking to reduce cost if it wasn't for the fact that the ridership was so low there and if it was a opportunity for the community not only of riders on the twenty two but those community of people who come into santa barbara and want to see one of the things we have to be careful of though is not inappropriately competing with the private  as you all know there's a trolley that actually gives a nice tour in and talks about what you're looking at where our driver would probably be happy to tell you what you're looking at that doesn't really help us feel prepared so i'm certainly open to other suggestions though and and not just sitting here today but please get those in from you know the suggestions coming in and thanks for the compliment on our open house so to speak and we also went out to goleta and and this is another opportunity we think to hear from the public so we do want to hear and we did make changes based on that  i was not updating my facebook page with the photo i was just checking the smartphone friendliness of the mtd website and it's okay but could be better so if you have some spare brain power on your staff and you have the brain power it may not be spare think about an mtd app for android and maybe even iphone if people still use those but an android app for but the google transit is great because it's right there on the left side of the screen and it shows up right away building upon what mister france was saying what's the latest on bike rack capacity  savvy with a lot of things especially the need for bike racks i'm sure and the mtt board of right you're meeting tuesday to go over the proposed service course do you still have schedule a for the board schedule adjustment opportunities before you really got to lock in the budget mid june or so you know it could happen i guess you're correct when you say mid june or even the very end of provide the information and have it ready by august yeah but there's a little room for conversation still but really that we you heard some input from our committee and we have got a good pulse on santa barbara city but like when the fair fair discussion happened a few years ago it's it's always a public policy tension between what does the transit district and government oh the public to make writing on a bus an option no matter how few writers it may be and you know there's some there's a very there's a few but just a few totally dependent writers on line twenty two and they came to transit talk but the same side bus routes skewed to be really useful and friendly to people going to work rather than you know going clubbing you know that that's another major policy emphasis and then you could roll it in the other variable that if they go to work they help generate economic stimulus that makes sales tax that helps mtd in the total budget so maybe you all for your own board could sort of remind them of this ridership based only way to decide on bus service versus the broader policy goal that we need a network to get out there in the whole south coast with less of an emphasis on ridership and that's totally political judgment of course so that's where i see it is and we've reminded the public you have a major discussion next week at the board tuesday morning and then  some really the decisions really have to be made mid june or so so that there we go and and when when things slow down you'll get that android app with mtd getting going we have a young lady tester for that all right all right i do look up schedules on my phone and it is not easy to you're like scrolling in like three different things at once anyway luxury problem i suppose if if these reductions are  made or some form of reduction is made to the one and two in the crosstown shuttle since in general it's getting you to and from the same place as different you know different schedules obviously what i'm wondering is if there's a way to and i think you'd probably have to ship shift the shuttle around more since it runs less frequently but to make so that if you miss that if you missed that line you know going to the east line going to the east side but hey the crosstown shuttle leaves not twenty three minutes from now but five or ten you know kind of being able to so they're not going at the same time and maybe that's how it is already but since they're coming every ten minutes it's kind of harder to see but if those get farther apart it would be i think really excellent if you'd be able to work it out so that it's not you're not waiting that long to get to the next your next way to get across town so you can balance by going from one to the other right that choice yeah definitely increase your options and it's part of what happens of course is it's always a judgement call when you're actually trying to get the passengers in from from the other side who are coming over this side so it's always a balance with the schedule we know that sometimes you'll see i'm meltus you might see a line twenty and fourteen almost right beside each other and wonder why it's mdd doing that level because the measure a money is lower than originally projected when we did the investment plan in two thousand and eight yeah so i've told mtd last year i'm telling them again this year if you have to cut back on service to stay within the amount of money is being provided and that's we're gonna have to do and that's one of the things that we're looking at when they're looking at the late evening service it's can't afford to do it the other thing that i want to talk to the committee about is the fair currently is twenty five cents per rider you know the uncertainty what's gonna happen with the redevelopment agency we know it's going to expire in two thousand and fifteen if it expires earlier three hundred thousand dollars of rda money it's going to support feet a lot slash downtown waterfront shut that goes away then i have a three hundred thousand dollar hole in the budget so we need to bridge and one of the things we looked at it well maybe we need to look at raising the fare from twenty five cents to fifty cents it's a hundred percent increase and and fair but it's only a twenty five cent you know still cheaper than the regular service in mcs putting on the on the street and this remind everybody that the reason it's twenty five cents is the city is providing a million dollars a measure a money  parking money and rda money and we're buying the fare down the regular fur for the michelle it's a buck seventy five but the city is buying the fare down to a quarter to make it really affordable and attractive to everybody and it was free when the city and mtd first started it but we had some people riding in all day long yes so the city bat fathers back then decided hey we needed charts a nominal amount of money to discourage people for getting on it and just staying on that all day long just to get out of the weather or find a place to sleep or whatever was they were doing that's before my time with the city you know i had a downtown parking committee meeting this morning and we're talking about this service as well and one of the things they asked about is there some creative things that we can do and in terms of downtown parking and people parking and right in the shuttle one of the reasons we have a downtown settle is the fact i was looking at the  shuttle yeah and the whole idea of park it wants concept where you park your car in one of our downtown parking lots and go ahead and pay some parking and then take the shuttle up and down state street and instead of having a search for parking and putting more cars in the road especially during the summer months where we have a lot of people who are driving up and down state street makes a little difficult driving up a down state street and another thing i have asked  sharing it to do is this this summer and maybe during the fall let's do it we can do a ridership survey or serving at the ridership as well as how do you feel about paying fifty cents versus twenty five cents yeah i've heard a lot of people saying well the whole reason we have the shuttle is for the tourists i'm not convinced that's the whole reason if everybody that's riding the shuttle is tours i know looking at new you all know looking at the reports that steve prepares for us is during the months of july and august in particular we see a twenty five to thirty thousand rider increase and that's the tourists coming in but during the rest of the year it stays constant in the thirty to forty thousand you know monthly writers you know some of them are tourists but i think some of them might peak our peak seasons you know i use it from time to time you know come in with my family we park in lot six we come down you know down to this area down here and then we maybe will walk one direction and take the show back up and i think a lot of our locals are doing that as well so i'm kind of curious to see what that is to see what that ratio is the amount of money that we give mtd is covering approximately ninety percent of the cost and they're still covering another ten percent that was something that we negotiated bill was that five six years ago you know so i just wanted to bring this before the committee kind of get your input on and your feeling about should we be do something with the the rates of the parking or the race of the shuttle or some type of system almost like almost thinking that we need to get a subcommittee of the of this committee to sit down with probably the finance committee of the downtown parking committee to start talking about some options that we have to really encourage people just to park once and use a shuttle to get up and down state street and not go from lot ten and ago you know parking lot to because they want to go to nordstrom's instead of  it's probably but then you know i think the couple of times i used it with with the lester but then five minutes of getting to the shell stop though it came to pick us up it's really convenient you know you know one of the other things is you know continue to market it you know  should we start does everybody have a comment you undo a line maybe start with mister coughlin gray i guess the one comment is how much does the twenty five cent bring in every year right now we have estimated right around one hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year mike we're not sure if we do another twenty five cents we'll see another hundred twenty you know steve has to do could tell you what we've done so far on that and yes i know you're gonna ask me about the elasticity of this but using the standard elasticity it would say that we'd lose about twenty five percent of the riders and then there's the modelers ideas when when he's looking at that insane if it's a quarter more that's a hundred percent more yeah you should lose a lot of riders but it's only another quarter so the assumption that steve made based on that information put together is with it we would probably make at least sixty thousand dollars more that's a lot of quarters i like that does the survey you're already gonna plan to do is that what i understand so that's not a you know discussion we you're gonna do this survey well i always thought that it  was especially with how long it's been a quarter i'd be willing to wait and look at the survey and see what the results are but you know i'm willing to definitely consider that you know that small increase isn't a whole lot so those are my i'm i'm never for fare increases but i fifty senses i still i think fairly reasonable and and for the large amount of tourists that do write it they're not gonna be like i was here three years ago and it was a quarter now it's fifty cents and i'm not gonna get on the shuttle i'm guessing i'm just guessing we'll find out but but yeah i think in the future after we see a survey that's something worth looking at but um it's yeah i mean it's such a gem and i think too it's good to point out that we do buy down the fare that it's not it's not like oh this is just really cheap to operate so i think it's good for the public to hear like  also what you're saying about getting together with the downtown parking committee to maybe put something together of some kind of incentive if you park you can ride for you know cheaper it'd be interesting to see if other cities have done something like that i'm sure someone has somewhere i don't know if you if you know of any but um see what kind of models there been which would be good to know before we just you know looks like a good idea to us but i don't know if you've heard of anything like that haven't heard anything that something would have to research in terms of like our parking program it's unique from other cities primarily because it's so cheap and with the city five minute free period and i'm not aware of any other city that has the electric shuttle bus like we have running up and down state street back down were what other cities that look at interns if they want to do some type of shuttle service for usually elected bus rather than us looking other agencies yeah i guess i the fare but once they follow the process we can implement it sometime later dens of their normal times so the contract is not locking the fair the it has a provisions to change the the fare up to fifty since if that's something we want to do sometime during the next fiscal year how what's the expected duration of the contract isn't one year agreement is it always been a one year contract since we did the been renewing on an annual basis when i came to the city ten years ago it was a five year agreement with but we had to send notices every ninety days prior each year right and we just been doing one year agreements it's right now with the economy and the al have any issues with mtd now proposing to cut back that service a little bit no like as i mentioned earlier we told them to do the amount of money we have is what we had last school year in the previous year and when i come conversation with jury last year if you have to come back and your service then do it and so what the agreement that we have had two years ago and i think was fifteen thousand and eighty eight hours and the languages between gonna tell me how to do my job i trust them in terms of that type of a separation of agencies is always good um well i i think this is great i i've been saying for years that the transportation committee in the downtown car parking committee could need to coordinate a whole lot more i've had vast ambitious proposals on how to do that in prior careers so i think it's a great proposal to think about a lot of options we've got a little time with this flexible contract renewal and if a system could be set up to how people park their car once downtown and then have some way to get on the the state street shuttle for free or a discount how you verify they put their car downtown i don't quite know yet although some of the lots because the lots consume the ticket when you leave you can have a live ticket in your hand and otherwise you don't keep them when you already paid for them so maybe you know i'm sure they've probably even talked about this yeah you know my i i ride the state street shuttle to go to the train station sometimes i'll write line one for the transit center and then find it on state street i think there's a variable about headways for the streets state street shuttle could be better it's often jammed or people won't stand there and they'll just keep walking down and then when they get to the next one two blocks later look again is it coming to things so slow and conspicuous but my sense is bumping the fare to fifty cent's would be with a ridership response in that you know you're gonna ride the thing anyway i think it could be even a dollar and hardly see a drop in writers and and you got to figure out if you need then a machine to take the money that could consume bills instead of right now i think they're only four coins there's another variable when things are lively people get on and they don't drop a quarter they just get on and the right that driver is just trying to get into traffic city money but i would encourage this contract renewal not to just say up to fifty cents put it up put up to seventy five and it's not going up at all until this study and survey is done but leave  open the flexibility and i i think once this gets out there in public discourse i think a lot of people would say that's such a great convenient service when i have visitors and we're all partying and unable to drive and we're paying a lot for hospitality downtown anyway another buck in that bus isn't going to matter to people so i i think that that's an option and another option could be have the state street shuttle in a more of a writer commuter mode have it accept transfers doesn't do that right now so so sort of a way to tweak the market for sort of the  the novelty writers will pay a dollar or a quarter or whatever the transfer doesn't matter for people use it in part of their commuting network a transfer would help and then the great analyst at mtd can figure out how will that affect the income level you know if people are now using transfers so so anyway as long as the contract has the flexibility it's good and yeah pick tab two or three committee members from each group and hammer this through yeah i started to touch on some big policy points when you start talking about this whole parking thing downtown and i like i really like the idea of sitting down and hashing some of those ideas out further of the idea of parking once when you come downtown makes sense especially if it's coupled with pay a shuttle fee once and you can kind of ride the shuttle all day long for for a dollar a day so some of the ideas i think start adding up there and making some sense if they're thought of collectively so i think sitting down and chatting those out should be our next step following the survey and i think the idea of serving the tourists versus serving locals i think we're serving ourselves by serving the tourists i think we get that look at that time of year where it's not so many the number of people the number of people downtown in july slowing everyone all the locals down downtown by trying to find where the parking is and looking here and looking there it's how many times you have to circle a block to do that and if they're getting in their cars every every time they come back with a bag to do that and do that all the way up the street that compounds itself to compounds the problem so park once ride once for right how many ever times you want and combining those fees i think has some ideas too if you pay for the pay for the shuttle when you pay for your parking has some legs so let's move on to the next step ideas i love hearing the concept because especially in terms of funding that were really already bundled between this shuttle and downtown parking as well talking about communal odds i mean all this opinion you know a dollar a dollar is in a sense kind of a base price that people pay for things you can't pay for you know a little candy machine with twenty five cents anymore you know and especially if we consider somebody coming out of like the one of the commuter lots i'm gonna use the state street shuttle if they're commuter lot thing that they pay for monthly or however is their free entrance then i'm a lot more amenable to something more than fifty cents and a dollar and if i'm a tourist in another town i don't mind paying a dollar and yes it's a way shorter route then you know typical bus and i think all these ideas of transfers bundled with you know parking maybe you pay you know maybe people do pay for the four seventy five minutes but they get an all day pass on the shuttle so i definitely think we yeah we're not doing anything now because this is not even kind of really and you know the subcommittee with the downtown parking comedian be and we'll probably be doing it over the summer and even the fall which we get the second serving that'd be great you know in terms of you know my other hat managing the downtown parking program were you know we get the same twenty five minute free period you know and then people are trying to get out within the same five minute so they don't have to pay a buck fifty so yeah i'm looking on the other side where people don't want to pay a buck a buck and a half and they're trying to get out and not pay for parking so it's a balancing act that we have to look at my house is fun it's worth next time like dab down santa barbara's fun and then you have the experience running the shuttle so there's a balancing act that we have to look at so that's why working with the downt parking committee who has that in mind and how we can you know look at the using the park once and using the shuttle and and how we can work that out be be great if we could both committees together and doing some good really good brainstorming i  look forward to something like that anything be enjoyable working with both committees together want something like that okay are we looking at any future joint committee meetings we can do that i think probably what we can do is have the two subcommittees work and get some preliminary ideas and maybe do a joint workshop where we have some ideas on the table see how everybody feels and we'll probably have to go back and refine that but we definitely do the one or two joint meetings as we go through this process but you know get a lot of heavy lifting at the at the subcommittee level yeah obviously a joint committee is a big table too i think we talked about this maybe even starting a year ago and i'm sure conversation  long ongoing but have we ever just appointed a liaison kind of like deb swartz as our liaison from the planning commission hey what what prevents us from aside from the fact that downtown parking meets at seven thirty in the morning what prevents us from appointing an liaison and just starting to get on the same page obviously with the end of the rta and this kind of funding we do need to be on the same page being here at seven thirty in the morning the only things that prevents  we have projects going through another process but i but it's equally important with the downtown parking committee and having that relationship with them and hearing what they're talking about and how that might impact could be and would that be something we would need to select who that person was as a committee to go to these different things or is it just like whoever the sucker that gets up at seven thirty or whenever the hlc which i'm sure is like and after that say the fair has changed could things like reinstating from nine zero to ten zero on the shuttle be back on the table or are you already have contract with the drivers so you could not do that after june there is of course a time point at which we're done with the drivers bid for the year and that's really is kind of a june timeframe would be the latest if we changed our mind later than that so we sort let me start again and say this summer we're gonna still have that late service because it's our changes don't start to august th so we could still extend it you know for this summer through september without that being a big issue but normally we do things in august but august september it's not a huge issue so we're really talking about a year from august when we would be or a year from summer i'm sorry used for me would be putting that into effect so that gives us a lot of time still to talk about it the one other thing that's on my mind about timing is we would we do put out a new bus book that would be effective for august nd and normally that bus book says what the price of the shuttle is so it'd be nice if we could hustle this all up and get this done but i don't think that that's going to be able to happen before that bus book so if we can think creatively about what we might say in that book there's a discussion going on you check with us later or we just gonna say just  changed the race in the downtown parking lots we spent a year over a year studying it with the public outreach and all that and so when we started it was for the next fiscal year you know and and did we want it to lane that by six months and had to go into effect on january st so realistically if we're talking august you know we're doing the summer doing another survey in the fall and then that's to make two committees to get together and other strategies we might be looking at by the time we get through the process and all that it could very well be for the next fiscal year beginning in i have kind of a before we close a request enough maybe i'm just addicted to email i don't know if any you all might might have the same sentiment but i think it would be more helpful to me personally to receive agendas or reports by email than even by mail no no even my snail mail and you know it is you know whenever a buck forty you know when a packet comes through the mail but even if if it's both email and and and paper i think especially in this case with i'm sure there's a lot of changes you know happening with these service modifications that would have allowed maybe a report  coming in a little bit later than ideal at least something coming in i don't know when when the service change report came in is that something that was like a process point we could change it's really the person the preference of each individual committee member is a member of the  suggest that you think about it if you don't know now and just email camel what your preference is if you want to email as well as a paper one we can do that if you want email only we can do that if you want paper only we can do that it's really up to your own personal preference yeah i was just thinking of them and i was talking to misplace my downtown parking committee agenda and the reason i had this note look is this heart harder for me to misplace my notebook and kim usually gives it to me the morning of the meeting well i don't misplace it it's also invaluable the ability to search your email