Good evening, everybody. Start of our transportation advisory board, May 2023, 6 p.m. Call of order. Taylor Wicklund. Here. David McInerney. Through approving the minutes of the preceding meeting of April 10, do any board members have any comments or corrections to that? Second to the last paragraph should read in part. Age six, or six. We were talking about reviewing the bylaws. And I just mentioned that they were reviewed last April. And that I suggest that we should review them again. But I actually think we're good. We just need to all have the newest documents. So I don't know that I said that exactly. I think those are the changes to the minutes from the April 10 meeting. We can move on to communications from staff. May I interrupt, please? I need a motion to approve the minutes. And I say, been amended. All those in favor, say aye. Now we'll move on to communications from staff. Thank you, Stacey. Appreciate it. If I would be in all transportation planning manager with the city. I want to introduce Jim Anand instead to talk a little bit about the Vision Zero update that we presented to City Council on April 25. So I'll turn it over to Jim for that report. Good evening. Board members, Chairman. Just want to give you an update on where we're at with Vision Zero, as you're aware that on April 25, 2023, Council adopted Vision Zero via resolution. So we are moving forward. The next step is the formation of a task force. It's currently underway. We're currently identifying stakeholders and preparing for an advertisement to hiding some of the residents' task force. Anticipating maybe seeing 20 to 30 members on that whole task force of our stakeholders as well as some of the residents. What we would also throw out at today's meeting is how does the advisory board want to be represented? I mean, members have indicated an interest in being on the board on this task force. We would anticipate that you would have a strong force in that. So I'm not sure if you want to decide tonight or put our staffing needs for Vision Zero. We're taking an evaluation of our existing staffing or existing FTEs that are currently in the Public Works Department. We have currently an unfilmed position that we're no longer, we did a reorg a few months ago, we're no longer in that position. So we are looking to shift that over to manager or coordinator to start taking, we're currently working with human resources to determine the details of that position. What is a job description? We'll process what is called an ad change form to change that position over. It is funded through other funds, the water and sewer fund. It would have to be all shifted over to the street fund. That is underway now. We're also evaluating the staffing needs citywide for implementation of Vision Zero as part of the 2024 budgeting process. So that will be an ongoing endeavor. And then we're also starting an RFP request for proposals for consulting services to assist with recommendation and basically crafting of the action plan. We're also evaluating budget needs for Vision Zero for not only this year, where are we going to initiate some dollars or find some dollars to fund the beginning of the action plan, as well as budgeting for 2024. So what we'd be looking for is we've already proposed several hundred dollars, about 400,000 in next year's CIP to initiate Vision Zero for some projects. We'll also be putting money into our operating budget, which is where we fund a lot of our signal improvements, some of the small scale signing and striping. So those items will be ongoing or budgeted as part of one of the items, the council meeting. We will be applying for safe streets and roads for all grants to assist us with funding the action plan. So I'll throw out, do you want to make a decision about who wants to be in the task force or do you want to think about it and wait for another month? Open up for comments. Maybe wait for other members to actually get a, maybe a more diverse, also expanded outlook. How many task forces do you think you'll have? Like one for each ward or are you thinking one for each neighborhood? I'm thinking one for the whole city. This is the task force for creating the action plan. Action plan will detail how we kind of take on Vision Zero. There may be future task forces for individual areas of the city. That could be part of the action plan. You just have to see how we decide to craft it. So you're thinking 20 participants in one big group? Is that what you're? I'm visualizing a task force very similar to the recent climate emergency task force, which I think 20 to 30 members. I don't want to limit it. I don't want to say, you know, someone offers up to be engaged with some of this. I don't want to say no. We just have to see what maybe put out an advertisement for volunteers, what comes out of it. I agree with board member Wicklund that maybe we should get through the interviews and have a few more board members appointed and see who has time and interest. Would we use our chance to put someone on the task force? Absolutely not. Okay, then I agree that there is a wisdom in waiting at least a month. Yeah, I would echo that. I would thank for the representation for our board. We probably don't want more than anything to possibly max three. I wouldn't want to take away seats from other stakeholders where we're already involved in it, obviously, tangently from sitting on the board itself. So that's just my thoughts on that. The task force meetings anticipate this to be a public forum kind of thing for public to sit in the lesson. And that is, do you have a source of information you could provide to Tab that explains in greater detail the elements of vision zero and what the task force would be expected to accomplish? Yeah, certainly we can put something together from previous presentations and we're kind of paraplemetry school traffic update that was requested the last meeting. So again, I'll turn it over to Jim Anstette for more information on that. Thank you, Phil. So central elementary is the city of West Main Street. It is surrounded by four streets, fourth avenue, fifth avenue. I know how to talk about the area I've heard from a number of the neighbors saying that the signing staff's done a number of reviews of the area and I just want to let Tab know that the signing and striping area is in accordance with our standards for the city. We met with the residents in August before the last school year. And we talked about some adjustments to some of the striping, some of the signing area.  We also restriped the block crossing. It was on the 400 block of Gay Street. We added crosswalk signing in the fourth and boss to accentuate that crosswalk. We also identified in our field meeting a number of the stop signs that all of these intersections were placed beyond the crosswalks so that someone, a vehicle stopping would be stopping right in the middle of the front end of the crosswalk blocking pedestrian. So we have operations team shift all of those stop signs to be basically in front of the crosswalk so that a vehicle will stop before the crosswalk. We then also, we talked about adjusting some of the school zone signing where the flashers are when we did adjust one of those and extend one of those school zone areas. We also did propose the extension of the school zone on fifth. That has not yet been accomplished yet. That requires shifting of one of the flashers and the signal team has been working towards that but it still has not been accomplished. We'll hope to have it done before the start of the next school year. In addition to that, we've also been collecting pedestrian data and speed data that we did initially a fourth and boss for four-way stops at that intersection. So we analyzed, we've got data analyze that intersection for the establishment of a four-way crossing stop signage. That was done in September of 2022. It did not meet the criteria, of course, in the NETCD manual uniform traffic control devices. So that intersection remains as is. We also evaluated the accident history at those intersections. We've heard that there's a significant number of accidents there. So we went back about five years and looked and at all four of those intersections, there was a total of five accidents over a five-year span. It's interesting to note that those five crashes, four of them involve people disregarding stop signs. We also evaluated, there's a lot of pedestrians, because it is a school. So they're an influx of school, of kids twice a day of arriving and departing. We looked at the pedestrian and bike accident history at those four intersections and we went back 20 years. And then fourth and boss was the only intersection that had a pedestrian-related crash of all those four intersections in 20 years. So part of the challenge with looking at this area is what, when we hear about residents about accidents, we hear about them about safety, we're trying to figure out what problem we're trying to solve. So we are currently collecting data again in this area. We will be on all four of the roadways. We will be evaluating all four of the intersections to see if it warrants stop signs. We anticipate that work to be done within the next two weeks. We committed to that to the city manager, so we will be providing that. We'll also be working with the school district, we're gonna be scheduling a meeting with them to look over the summer to see what are the issues that they are seeing and then addressing them prior to the start of school. And then over the summer, our operations staff will be re-striping all of those crosswalks and suspending for school to start and make sure that they are highly visible. We're also looking at an additional school zone on Bross to see if that warrants to be established and that may address some of the residents' concerns. The speeds on 4th, 5th and Bross are 25 miles per hour now. The speed school zone will go over to 20 in accordance with state statutes. The A Street is posted and is 30 miles per hour. And that was the update I have for the comments from the board on the central elementary school discussion. In the next couple weeks, the school gets out soon because I went there for at least five minutes because they're really out of school. So I'm just curious if the study will include also maybe during the, you know, maybe it's a flashing light saying $20 an hour. Also realize there's 100 kids trying to get home. So I'm just trying to figure out how we do the study and at what time of day. So when we look at the accounts, we do them basically like we do them over three days. So we look at the data over those, all three of those days for 24 hours for each day. So we count the data, we're pulling all that data and then look at the warrants that is necessary for the warrants and the traffic eyesight. The defer to Kyle is exactly what those warrants are. I know one is depending on the amount of vehicles per day. One is regarding pedestrians. I'm not sure what the other ones might be. Yeah, so we're currently collecting data right now. We're almost complete with that and school does end in three weeks. But most of the changes we want to make during any part of the school is during the summer. Usually when you make changes throughout the school year, people are very used to the routines. So it's very hard to get them to notice the changes. So middle school year's not a very good time, especially it comes to kind of safety in general. So I think those improvements then, but the data we're collecting is kind of a multi approach where we have the traditional railway tubes that you see on the roads. We've also invested in a couple of radar units. So they're off the road, you do not see them in the road at all and they collect speed data. And then we also had a video collection of the intersections to see for pedestrian counts, bicycle counts and also incident reporting to see if there's any closed calls and like that. So our engineering tech's going through that data right now to get into a presentable format. And just a broad question, the NETCD, like I was, when I talked to engineers, they always refer to that document. And I read the NACTO more so and they kind of butt heads a little bit. So I'm just wondering how many guidelines do we need to follow versus maybe what's just the right thing to do. So our current standards is to use NETCD. It's kind of a federally accepted standard for traffic engineering for signage striping. When you do deviate from that code, it does incur more risk to the city of using non-standard approaches. So even some NACTO stuff follows NETCD, doesn't necessarily go with it. So it events something about something that may or may not help or may cause an issue. The city takes more risk on that part versus being able to defer to MCD and then show that that's a standard practice in the engineering field. So it's more of a legal, yes. Yeah, as far as that, there's options but as far as the same standards in the city code is we use the NETCD in Colorado. So I'll just add to that. I think one of the opportunities of Vision Zero would be to take a look at some of those standards that have been utilized in the past and then maybe opportunities to adopt others. As Colin indicated, it's embedded in our code through an adoption of the model traffic code, state statute. So that's what we follow. So we'd have to, there are ways around that with basically we've adopted parts of the model traffic code. So part of I think Vision Zero in the action plan would be to take a look at that and then maybe requiring some code revisions. I think the opportunities that will be there. This was asking, NACTO is National Association of City Traffic Officials or City Transportation Officials. Thank you, Jim. So I want to ask items from staff if there are no more questions. We just have the Board Recruitment Process Update. You'll see four members up there. There's more active members and we'd like to get back up to seven eventually. Two of you have volunteered. Thank you very much. Board Member Chris and Board Member Layner for, Stacey has put together some number of times for us to choose from. We have four people that applied to the Transportation Advisory Board for the next group of folks. They're 18 years old, so not eligible. So we have three members that are really eligible members. It's great to see the excitement of a younger person who wants to get involved in transportation. So I wish we had different rules, but we don't. So we'll put this together later in May. So appreciate your time on that. If you have any questions, let me know. But we're just to give everybody some information. We're on our way to doing those interviews then we'll get them to Council in June and then Council will be able to check our recommendations. We can make recommendations or we don't. We can choose. So there's a lot of flexibility I think on our part as far as what we provide to Council, but we should try to make a recommendation if we can and make sure we feel good about the folks that we're sending out. So just wanna let you know what we were in the process. So if there are any questions, I'm happy to answer. Is it possible to leave application process open to where we might have five applicants? Unfortunately, the application process is pretty strict as far as the time, the deadline. So we passed our deadline. That opens it up then to this next step in the process. I wish we could do that as well, but we'll have to see how many people we get on board and see if we need to do it this again at the end of the year. Hopefully we do not, because we really are a mid-year board and all of our things are run to June 30th. All of our terms run to June 30th of the year. So we have two regular member terms ending June 30th, 2026. So we'll have to pick two of the three for that. And there's one unexpired regular member term ending June 30th, 2025, just based on how we had resignations over the past and who we left when. So that's what we'll have to do is figure out probably the recommendation to city council is who should get the longer terms and who should get the shorter term, or we don't have to fill all those spaces either. So, or we don't have to recommend if all the spaces be filled. Did I understand you to say that at the end of the year we could have another open application for mid-year? I'm taking into that because we're doing that on the airport advisory board, which I also am part of. So we are doing that. We're doing it your replacements on that board because we've had a number of resignations too and people moving away. So I don't see the difference in my mind. So if we don't have a full board, let's see if that's possible. Okay, thanks. In our previous meeting, Garrison from Sunrise Drive spoke during the public invited to be heard expressed an interest in becoming a CAD member. Is he one of the three candidates? I can't say, but if you can't say, I guess my question is if he's not, would it be appropriate to reach out to him and remind him that if he was not one of our candidates, we could not reach out to him. Thank you, Phil. That's it from staff. Thank you very much. Okay, now we will do comments from our public input and it looks like we have Don and Ruth Clay's here to speak. With you tonight, my name is Ruth Clay's. My husband and I are residents of Firestone, Colorado. However, we come in to Longmont every single day. The reason I'm here tonight is to question you about the feasibility of having, extending a bike path along Colorado 19 up to your avid bikers. And we would just be, it would be so nice if I could actually bike in to work in the morning or to my doctor and then back home and feel safe. 119 is just so horrendous, especially in the morning. If you've ever traveled on that in the same way at night. And I don't know what the feasibility is of connecting those two areas would be. And perhaps I need to talk to Frederick Firestone as well and figure out what their plan is if it is part of the plan. So that's what I'm bringing to you tonight and I'm hoping that you may consider that for in the future. Questions for me? No, thank you. Thank you for the comments. If you have anything else you can add that we can definitely look into that or ask. And you're probably right. It would involve probably a multi-jurisdictional kind of conversation. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Go ahead, Phil. I don't know if you want to save it to the end. We've got quite a bit from RTD. So I'm just wondering, I can really quickly address that or I could talk to her. We are working with Firestone, Need, in the 12th County, try to extend a path that goes from Union Reservoir, which will be a connection to Sandstone Ranch very soon. We're working on that connection to go east over to the same frame state park. And connect with those trail systems. So we're all working with the folks. We have some transportation improvement planning dollars or program dollars, tip dollars from the region, then the Regional Council of Governments to start designing and we've got some construction dollars too to get at least one phase going. Yeah, thank you. Okay, we can move on to the RTD presentation because I know that's probably the bulk of our time tonight. Just a real quick introduction. So we work with these folks very closely. These are the staff members from the Regional Transportation District. They're not elected members. We did invite the elected board members to this meeting a little bit later in the process and I would have liked, so I apologize for that. One person was in Spain, so we do have one of our board members in Spain. So she did not want to partake even virtually on this one. But I did not hear back from the other board member, but I apologize for not letting him know sooner. But I just did want to make it very clear that this is not, these are not policy folks. These are staff members just like us. So just appreciate your, we told them how kind and gentle you guys are as far as a board and so we just wanted to pass that along. Thank you very much. And here's not many humblest to kind of kick things off from the RTD side. Thank you. Good evening, TAB members and councilwoman. My name's Nathalie Huntels. I'm a senior service planner scheduler for RTD service development division. I'm here to give an update with several of my colleagues on the local regional service, special services and long range planning projects that we have ongoing right now. We introduce the team real quick. Go through here. We have Brett Quilken who's our service planner schedule one. We have Chris Quinn who's our planning project manager. We have Aliya Mansi-Kain who's a project manager for engineering. And we have Patrick Stanley who's our manager for engineering programs. So we're gonna tag team it and to keep it moving. Just real quick, we have the overview. We have quite a few topics to cover per request. We are going to give you an update on the fixed route services. Quick update on our special services. Our project, our manager of special services unfortunately could not be here tonight. So if there are any follow up questions, we'll be happy to take those questions back and get you the answers and information that you might need. We're also going to go quickly over the future plan services as well as give you an update on Northwest Rail and the Longman station. And then to close it off, I'm gonna give you a quick update on SEAL 119 BRT. I think everybody is familiar with the project as well. Okay, great. Off we go. No, where it gets to go. Good evening. It's an RTD and it's a pleasure to meet with all of you. And I'm gonna go over our basic fixed route service for Longmont. And so what we're doing is we're comparing last year's August Run Board to pre-pandemic Run Board. And basically what our costs, this is what our costs were here versus August 19th. And you can tell on August 19th, we spent $2,915,200 this last year. It was $1,815,687,000 was our total cost here in Longmont for the local services. And this breaks down each of the local routes, the bolt, as you can see, like the J has been suspended. We are, and you can also compare our service hours, frequency that we're running. Any questions as I'm going through on these, if you see anything that stands out, please feel free to. And this is our statistics going daily boarding to average daily boardings going back to 2016. And you can see that it really takes a hit when that pandemic in 2020. And we are not back years ago. And this is our numbers here. I know that it's almost, you know, not even, it's a little more than half of what we were running on our daily boardings. The locals are seemed to be coming back a little better, but still half of what we were boarding pre-pandemic. And this is our local boardings, just in total for the area up here, year by year. And this is just the local, what we call the 300 routes, 323, 324, 326, and 327. And you can see there where we're not back to where, again, the regional boardings 2016 to 2022. And you can see as we're going, you know, we're doing okay, we're holding pretty steady. And then we had 81% drop in 2020, understandable.  This would be your flex ride. And it spoke down is how many in-service hours we have for the flex ride. And so as you can see here, we're running again, post-pandemic, we haven't recovered the number of service hours that we were running pre-pandemic, and we're running about for 2022, about 4,400. And so there again, it's just- Have any data or have you done any studies as to why you haven't returned to full ridership after COVID? You know, and I'm really, you know, at everything as a whole, a lot of our commuter traffic is not. So people that are commuting from Longmont to Denver that would have rode the LX or would have rode the LD are not commuting to Denver. Things changed, you know, people learned how to maybe not go to the store as much, maybe they're ordering, you know, I mean, there's a lot of different reasons why it hasn't come back. It's the million dollar question is what it is. Does it correlate with remote worker data from- I'm not sure because, you know, that's out of my expertise comparing those two numbers. But I can tell you like, oh, see, here's the expert on this. I'm gonna let the more experienced team member here take over. Here's your clicker. So it actually, it's a national trend that we're watching and it's not even an international trend that anywhere for transit ridership has not come back to a point that it was before COVID. We're seeing ridership at about 75% return from pre-COVID, which is actually pretty good. There are a lot of areas that are only seeing 50% at the most. There are some areas where ridership has come back more than that, but there are far and few in between. And that is mainly because travel patterns and demand has changed. That's due to the policies for very many places that for instance downtown Denver has maybe two at most three days per week people coming into office and then they don't necessarily go into office full day. They have shift work. They're also because of the way routes are currently operating because we have to suspend certain routes. People are not riding as much because the services are not available. So it's a little bit of a chicken and an egg thing, right? Yet there are only so many resources that we have to point out that we do have a driver shortage or a people power problem challenge. I don't like to say problem. It's an opportunity, but very short operators and that makes it very hard for us to bring back all of the services that we would like to bring back. Yet we also have to be very conscious of taxpayers money. So we cannot just put all services back and hope that ridership comes back. We have to look and see where ridership is, where the demand is and make the adjustments based on that. We have certain areas within the Denver Metro area where ridership has come back quite well. For us one of those areas where we actually have routes where we need to add service. We have standing routes and we have pass ups at certain times today. We have other routes that are very busy with the service level that we're providing. Yet the challenge is we cannot increase those service levels because we don't have the operators to do so. For Longmont, it's been pretty steady. We're actually happy to see the numbers that we have, especially for the local routes. The boats, that's a challenge because it is mainly a commuter route. There are some students, students are back in class and you can see that uptick occurring for the boats when students start to come back to see you. That is that additional ridership mainly. For the flex rides, people, yes, travel patterns also have changed. Like Greg said, there are people now, they figured out you can order certain things online. You don't have to make all those trips. They're coordinating better in regard to medical appointments and so forth. Where, with Freelight Longmont, that was back in 2015? 14, not 10, it's 10 plus seven. We did see an immense uptick in ridership when that program came into place. And people decided to take the bus more often. It wasn't that necessarily more people were riding, but those who were riding were using the service more often, which is great. That's what it's there for. However, with a pandemic and now coming out of pandemic, again, the need has changed and so we have not seen that uptick yet. Also in regard to schools, we have not quite seen the demand from the schools back that we used to have. For before we were struggling to meet that demand, we don't necessarily have that stroke, which is a good thing on one hand because we don't have to turn too many passengers down. At the same time, it means, yes, the ridership is lower. Did that answer your question? Yes, thank you. And I think Greg, that pretty much finished it for special services and I'm up next anyway. One more question. Yeah, just one question related to COVID. These now we're trying to figure things out after. And then obviously we're learning people's patterns are changing, but then could you say anything of what RTD has learned as well of how either, how do we increase that ridership to provide service to, especially the people who really, really need the service? It appears that we are providing the service that is needed, especially when it comes to the local routes. Those were the routes that pre COVID were the ones that had ridership that was transit dependent. I'm not necessarily like to use that term either, but that's a standard industry term that the majority of people who were using local service were transit dependent, they had no other choice and that's what they were using. And that has been the same for decades. I've been the senior service planner for the Morse team for this time flies. And I've been in the area for over 20, I've been doing this for over 20 years, close to 25 years now. So looking at that, the trends haven't changed. Based on who rides what, you have those who ride the regional service and you have those who ride the local service. And there's hardly any overlap that people actually transfer from regional to local and local to regional. It's actually the parking rides, you get on the regional bus to get to Boulder or to Denver or you use the local service to get around, you use the flex ride to get around. I guess what I'm kind of alluding to is, one good example here in Longmont is we do have local buses, but like this board, if we wanted to take a bus home, the last one is at eight when we leave. So thinking of the service industry workers that are getting off at 11, 12. So like that type of thinking of, what are we learning from COVID and maybe the people who really need transit? So demand-wise, it's actually, we extended the service, we used to only run until at five or six o'clock and we were able to extend it a couple years ago until seven plus because there was some demand, we did hear that. Yet, when you look at who's riding, how many people are riding on average on those trips, it's in single digits. And so for us to extend that service any later would not be using taxpayers' money very well. So we're aware of that, what might make sense instead of fixed route is to look at the flex ride and see is that a service that we would want to extend the service hours of because that would actually allow you for more flexibility to get anywhere within Longmont, right? Just versus having to be on a fixed route that then you can only get to specific places, specific times. We've had conversations back in 2012. I think we took several of the school trip routes and merged them into, took those in service hours and merged them into the flex ride in order to provide more service on flex ride because that is where the demand is within Longmont. When you look at a map that shows two from origin destination trips within Longmont, it's everywhere. People try to go from everywhere to everywhere all day long. And so fixed route can only do so much and there is a demand for fixed route yet there is a greater demand for flex ride. Even though ridership isn't back, I think some of that has to do with the restrictions in the vehicles that are currently out there. The service that we can provide with the resources that we have. We'd be look at potentially some of the other routes, some of the way to increase service hours for flex rides. Figure out where can those resources come from in order to address that and allow for more flexibility. That's definitely something that we've talked about multiple times. It's definitely something that's always up on the table as an option. It's one thing to put the lines on the map and say you have fixed route service, right? This is where your tax payer's dollars go. But when they can't really provide the service that your community needs, then we should take a look at that and see what can we do to make it better. Moving on to the next topic. So future plan service adjustments. There, this is specific to Colorado 119 BRT. There also is, and you might have heard about the re-imagine RTD, the system optimization plan that was approved by the RTD board last July, July 2022. With the two pieces to it, I've only included the 119 part, but I can definitely give some information related to the system optimization plan as well. So for the 119 BRT, we worked with staff and with a consultant very closely to make sure that this local transfer to network feeder plan for Longmont was incorporated as part of the Highway 119 project. So that when the 119 BRT project comes online and currently we're looking at 2026, that we could then have the opportunity to restructure the local network based on connections, improving connections to the 119 BRT, which currently the bolt and the J suspended, but the bolt operates, yet there are gonna be some changes. There are going to be some major locations that are stations versus just stops. And so the network plan was created to allow for those better overall network connections. Not sure how well you can see this on the map. You have the current network on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side is that local proposed feeder network. You can see the underlying gray lines where current services versus the colored lines to where the proposed new routings are. Again, those routings were based on heavy input from city staff based on where at that time in 2018, 2019, there were centers, destination centers, origin destination centers, as well as these proposed future stations for the 119 BRT. And these are, these are lines on the map. The plan is attached to the 119 BRT. If this doesn't make sense when the BRT comes online, we will have a conversation, say what is it that is going to make sense? Because it makes no, again, if I put lines on the map and it doesn't serve the community, then I'm not doing my job. However, on this map, the one thing that I do like and we were able to push this through was the 328, which would go over to Walmart and the hospital, which we know there is demand there of an hospital now, that's right. Yet it hasn't been enough for us to establish that fixed route. The demand is in low, single, single digits, one, two, ever so often, people asking, even the flex rights, one or two people ever so often, it's not that high demand. However, in the future, never say never, that's why the line is there and that's why we want to make sure that we can have that opportunity should it allow for itself that we can make it happen. Also just real quick, so you get an idea what that, it would be a service increase to have that new network. And these are the numbers, it's a table. You can look at it, I'm not gonna go over every single number, but just know that it would be an increase in service to move this forward. Now, when 119 comes online, again, we will take a look and say, what's gonna make sense, what's warranted, we do have server standards that we have to follow so we can't just really, really put out service just because it's in a plant somewhere. You have to see what the resources are that we have at hand. And again, over the next couple years, we're gonna be closely watching what the travel patterns are, where do the man's are, and then through our regular service changes, which we do three times a year, January, May, and August or September usually, we'll address that and put the service into place that's going to make sense. And there's a question about this map. Hey, I'm glad you just had a conversation with Phil about iron horse departments aren't serviced. And I have some friends over there that can't get into town. And then also there's a hospital over there. I think getting the details is kind of pulling us right now, but I'm curious if we could learn how this process goes about, how long this process takes. So like you say, once the BRT goes online, there might be adjustments, how long does it take to adjust? Because time is of an essence if you want people to use the bus. Great question. Usually if we're working on regular service changes from one service changes to the other, we're working six plus months ahead. That's just regular service changes. But we're working on something that is a big project. We're already having these conversations. This is already on our radar that we need to make sure as we progress with 119, and we're looking to potentially make some adjustments even to the BRT patterns because of travel pattern changes that we keep a very close eye on what the travel patterns and the needs are within the community. So implementation wise, it would happen with the service change that implements the BRT, the 119 BRT in 26. Over the planning process is already ongoing. We're already meeting with stakeholders with eight local agencies. We've had some public meetings as we move forward and get into 2024, later 2024 and into 2025. That's what we're really gonna do some specific outreach in the quarter and long, long and bolder with the public specific to get that information. We've already done several surveys. We're gonna continue to do some more surveys to get that information. And we will then look to put that plan together. My team has to have it done six to nine months ahead of when the implementation happened. So we're say 2026, middle 2025, fall 2025. I have to have something that said this is what we're gonna look to go with because we have to know what our resources are, et cetera. As well as publicize it. Does that answer your question? Yeah, mainly. It is very complicated for a regular service change. We have a spreadsheet that is an 11 by 17 size eight font for each service change. It is seven to eight pages long. But those are all the details that we have to follow each service change. So that was the big picture. 30,000. Okay. I notice on the new plan that we go back to reducing service on the northeast side. But when I look at, I'm talking about the 323, which is the green line on the left map. We have a lot of, if you look at the very top hook there, the 323 ends at Santa Fe. Whereas if it went to the end of that block all the way to Alpine, it would actually intersect with all the high density housing and senior housing that we have there. It's a little far for them to get to that 323. And I notice on the change in service that you've only lost about 200 riders. But on the 324 you've lost about 400 riders since COVID. So I'm concerned about centralizing service more when there's a lot of activity and a lot of building on the east side. And honestly up in that area, the poverty levels at 48% and persons of color are over 50% in that neighborhood. So I would think it's an underserved area and should get more bus service. So as I mentioned, as we're going forward, these are just lines on the map. We have to have a plan to attach to the 119 BRT plan so that as we're moving forward, we could have the ability to make these changes to make this network adjustment. So how long are we gonna be without service on the northeast side? But at this point, the ridership and the man and we can have that conversation, right? This is where I rely on city staff to tell me they would know much better than I would as to what exactly is going on. We keep an eye on what the development is and so forth before an era like that. We should have that conversation and we should look to see if we can make that change earlier than waiting to implement the plan. It's definitely something that could be done. I guess to be more specific, I think if you made the change to go all the way down, all the way west on Olympia and turning around on Alpine, you'd get a lot more ridership there because you would intersect a lot of housing. You know, for me, I live up in that neighborhood that takes me a mile to ride my bike to catch that, but that's my favorite route to catch.  And then there's all the regular apartment complexes there, too, and I just think it would be easier if it came down all the way Olympia and turned around on Alpine. It just makes more sense to me. Yeah, as city staff, we can certainly look at that and take those into consideration when we're talking about the actual details. We'll make them out with the actual route changes, which, again, Natalie said, probably won't be exactly what you see on this map. A lot of things have changed land use-wise since we looked on this two years ago, two years ago. More than that, it was 2018. Oh, gosh, okay. Yeah, we rebuilt from our buildings since then, okay? Yeah, we were originally pushing just for the, you know, for some of the things that we saw out there in 2018. So we knew the things that we were gonna change. We just wanted to kind of get the idea that there'd be more service. So I would look at the service numbers, more than I'd look at the actual lines on the map and just understand that we're gonna get more hours of service and more of a variety of bus than we have today. And so those are the things we can play with, with the nuances, the details. We'll make sure those are right. There may not be overlap on some of these things where we see overlap on these maps, who knows. But the details will be worked out as we get closer to the idea of implementation. And then they go through a whole public process where they come back out to the cities that are affected by the route changes, or the new service, and work with actual community to figure out what kind of comments, if somebody says, hey, this might never serve this location if you were just to move the bus, a block this way or a block that way, then they do listen to that and they take it into consideration. We also have to go through Title VI, our civil rights group evaluates every service change that we do. So as we move forward, any of these changes, they would look at that, and that's one of those things that they probably will point out to us and say, hey, you have an area over here, you need to address this. And then I have one other quick question, and that is, it's new for Longmont, but do you factor vision zero into your formula? Yes, we will have to, because it will slow down the buses. It makes a big difference. You might think a minute here or there doesn't, but it adds up quite a bit. I was actually thinking during the staff presentation, I was kind of talking to them and said, so, where are you applying this? And then we also have to keep an eye out, depending on what the mitigation is for the speeds. If there are speed narrowing of the roads, it affects operations. We might not be able to get a bus down the street all of a sudden, has happened before. So just a thought might make more sense to have a wider pattern, in other words, to go around the areas rather than to be more centralized, because of vision zero. But, you know, just cogitate on that, it's just an input. Yeah, but at this point, we have Ethan Kaufman as our main hub. We are going to have Longmont Station soon, also as a main hub. We're going to be looking at Main Street as a spine, so to say, as we're looking to also have another parking right on the north end of Highway 66 and 287. So looking at these different locations to spread out that service and not necessarily have everything and all three hubs for sure. But Longmont Station in the plans is the hub to allow for local and regional transfers and to allow for that future rail connection so that we have it all in place. But as it comes to the other locations, we're going to be looking at spreading it out a bit more to allow for that wider net. Okay, thank you. For this one, I just wanted to point out real quick that we did include the frequencies of the service, which it wasn't in the other two slides. I just wanted to make sure that you had that so you can see when it was 30 minutes versus 60 minutes, it's not necessarily the same frequency all day. And then we say 3060, then 30 is in the AM and PM and 60 is midday. If you want more details on that, I can happily provide that at this point. Just the basic facts. Chris Quinn, and I am one of the project managers on the FAIR study that RTD has been conducting. Got a lot of slides, I'll try to go just in the manner of the interest of time, I'll try to go through them fairly quickly. So please, if there is additional information on any one of these slides that you want me to focus on, happy to do that, but I'll try to buzz through them quickly so not to get too into the details. Going into the study, we get three goals, overarching goal is equity, make sure especially, and I know Natalie just mentioned, the fact that especially since the pandemic, one of the big ridership changes we've seen is a lot more of our riders are people, who are transit dependent but people who have no other choice but to ride. So we wanted to make sure that now that that's really become a big chunk of our core ridership group that we made sure that anything that we come up with is also over time we've heard and I'm sure you guys have probably heard when you're out in public, our TD fairs are too expensive and that they are complicated. So our goals, equity, simplicity, affordability. Real quick here, we started the public outreach portion of the study back in roughly April of last year. Had three major, what we were calling engagement milestones, we went out to the public first in April with kind of, okay, what do you think of the current system even though we sort of knew the answer? People hate it and too expensive and confusing but that's exactly what we heard. In the summer we came out with some real high level concepts of okay, what of these concepts, what would you like to see? Then in the fall, we came up with two alternatives which we have since merged into one alternative based on public feedback and I will jump right into what that is now. Currently, our fairs, you see in the red box on the left side of the slide and then the proposed fairs are on the right side in blue. Couple of big things to take note of, one is that the regional fair has been eliminated. So with the exception, we still have an airport fair but for all other fairs, whether you're hopping on the L bus going to Denver or you're heading somewhere around town, cost is the same and it would be lower than the current local fair which is $3.00. So that the standard, what we're now calling the standard fair that would go down to $2.75. The other big thing to take note of is currently the monthly pass for a local is $114 a month. If you get one for the regional again, so for the L services or the airport and those two are combined, it's $200 that would be reduced to $88. So pretty significant savings on the monthly pass with the intent of trying to reward our frequent fliers so to speak. And then for the adult discount fairs then the discount fairs are applied to anybody who's 65 over or somebody with disabilities. The fairs, in general they're half but just a couple of things here to note. For the monthly we went way down. So monthly pass $27.00 and for the discounted fairs one other big thing. No local regional or airport. So if you're subject to a discount fair, you can travel anywhere in the district with a three hour pass for $1.35. They pass $2.70 and again the monthly pass $27 for the month. I don't know if any of you are familiar with what we're calling, we call our live program. That's the, or it's a program for people low income. It's a specific pass for them that they can apply for it through the Colorado Peak system. That's the state's benefit system. One of the things, when we were out in the public especially as we were talking to nonprofits and to social service agencies, one of the things we found is, well it's a great discount. There's still a lot of people in need that don't, just don't quite qualify for it but are still in need. So we'd like to, right now, a couple of things. The discount that a live customer gets is 40%. We want to increase that to 50% so it lines up with all of our other discount fairs. And also, right now, to qualify, you have to be at 185% or lower of the federal poverty level in terms of your earnings. We want to increase that to 250% of the federal poverty level. The way we got to that number, it sounds nice but also, we looked at what the minimum wage is and then applied it on a household basis so that somebody making the minimum wage would qualify for this where in the past they would not. Something else that we've heard as we were doing our outreach is that there's just a lot of low income people that are not even aware that the program exists. So we also want to try to reach out more to nonprofits, social service agencies to get the word out there that this does exist. And then lastly, we also heard a lot of complaints that it is kind of an arduous application process. So we want to see if here again, we can start forming partnerships with social service agencies and others to help with the application process. Currently, we do contract with the city and county Denver, their social services and it's not just limited to people who are Denver residents but see if we can do more of that. Again, just to kind of help move the process along and make things simpler. Youth fairs, this is another big one. We are proposing for this next year a pilot program where we would have zero fair for youth. So anywhere you're going, 19 and under would ride for free on the system. The reason we're calling it a pilot is it's fairly expensive. We expect it to be approximately $5 million a year hit on the amount of revenue we would get from the fare box. So what we'd like to do is establish this, see how much data we can get and then look to outside partners for funding whether that's the state, local government, school districts, just we'll have our hand out. But point being, our general manager in particular was very interested in this. The intent being, you know, there are a lot of kids that just aren't able to access either the schools they want to attend, employment opportunities and we figure this would be a really good equalizer for helping out with that. For student fairs, and by students now we mean college students, right now we do have the semester pass that something that CU takes, participates in, the area campus, BU works great for them because they have more traditional students. All of their campuses are well served by transit. But when we're reaching out to community colleges where we've had no participation, one of the things we've heard is, yeah, the semester pass is great, but we have a lot of students that are only taking one or two classes at a time, they may be coming right from work. So the idea that the college pass is predicated on which is that everyone participates in it so it's almost like an insurance model just does not work for a community college or a technical school. So what we've proposed instead is to create a semester pass for those schools and they would be a student who is interested in that could just buy a semester pass and then the semester pass would be $88. And the billing purpose of showing that table is just to see what the savings would be over say buying a monthly pass instead. And then with our accessorized system, currently we do not have a live discount. So a couple of things going on here, one is that we are proposing that the fairs in general would be reduced for accessorized, but also that we would introduce the live discount to accessorized customers as well. So there'd be some pretty substantial savings for our low income customers that do rely on that service. So without walking through all of the pieces here, I think really the big thing to focus on is kind of the first bullet there. One would re-emphasize, so adults that are using the discount fairs can travel to any destination within the district, including the airport for a discount price. And the monthly pass, as I said, would be, I forgot the number already, to roughly $23.  And then just jumping to the interest of time here again, the EcoPath, or I'm sorry, one of the other things that we heard, and we used to have a system that was sort of similar to this, where we did provide assistance to nonprofits to help them for passage for their client populations. What we're proposing as part of this program is that we would create an assistance program. We would start it out at a million dollars. For those social service agencies that, now while we have the live program, the process, as I said, you do have to apply through the state's benefit system, can take three weeks plus in order for the processing before you actually get your pass, recognizing that there are agencies that serve people with immediate needs, whether it's a homeless population or say victims of domestic violence that need passes right away. We'd like to create a program where those services could apply for a transit assistance grant where we would be able to provide them with passes. Additionally, we also want to propose, recognizing also that there are certain businesses that may or not want to take advantage of the EcoPaths because of whatever constraints or limitations they have, that we'd be able to sell to them, apply to them for a bulk discount of 10% for a minimum of $1,500. And then also related to the EcoPaths, in addition to simplifying the pricing, we'd also have a two-year contract price because we've heard from a lot of businesses that given the fluctuation in prices, it's really hard for them to do budgeting on a year-to-year basis, trying to figure out what it's going to cost the next year. So we figured we'd be going on a two-year period that would help stabilize their prices and give them a little bit more predictability. We've already had two virtual meetings on this, and I took out the slide that had all the events we're going to be at because it was the closest event that coming up, I think on Wednesday, September, Wednesday, May 4th, we will be at the pop-up at the Boulder Farmers Market. In addition, we do have a couple of more public meetings coming up one later this week. That one will be live, another one next week, and then one more virtual. Those are all on our website. And in addition, on our website, I want to emphasize this, we do have a comment in a survey form where you can put in comments, support it, you like it, you don't like it, there are things you like, there are specific things you don't like. So we'll be here, any feedback that you have, of course, tonight as well, but encourage you yet to get on our website on that. And the address is up there. If for some reason you don't have the presentation in front of you, just Google RTD fair study. It's the first thing that pops up and it'll take you right to probably where you need to go. And I think, I'll put this out, but yes. This slide does show meetings that we do have one next week. The two live ones coming up are in Denver, but we do have two more online meetings, one in English and one in Spanish. And for all of our meetings, we've made sure that we've had one in English and one exclusively in Spanish. So, happy to answer any questions now or hand off to Patrick on the northwest. You said May 4th, I'm assuming you met for May 11th and the 17th for events? Yes, okay, sorry. No, I just, I'm still in April somewhere. And then just because I read a CP article last week about the RTD boards voting this week, I believe, on a three-spare for July and August. Yeah, so two things going on there. Yes, so the RTD board will be doing that. And then in addition to that, I can't remember whether this was noted in the article or not. Tomorrow night, we will also be going to the Board Finance and Planning Committee to just let them know that as far as, so our schedule has, our assumption is that we'd be going to the Board of Directors with the full package of the fair recommendations in July.  Then the intent would be that the fairs would go into effect. There's a lot of work that has to go on behind the scenes. The fairs would go into effect beginning our first quarter of next year, preferably January. But what we've heard from the School of Districts is, well, if you're gonna do a pilot free fair for youth, it would work a lot better for us if you could establish that with the academic school year, which would be obviously August, September. So we're going to the Board tomorrow night to just tell, just kind of let them know, not necessarily even ask permission, but say we're not considering this a done deal yet, because we know you haven't acted on it, but we wanna start talking and working with our partners at the School of Districts and all there is to see exactly how this would work. And so we are going to start working on this now. So our hope, of course, is that the Board does approve all this in July. And so if it does, then we'll be ready for the zero fair for youth pilot to pick up right after the zero fair for better air, which would be July, August. So then beginning September, we would start the free fair for youth pilot so that it coincides with the school year. All right, and then another thing about fairs is you're mentioning partners of school districts and then some buses even here in town service some schools, does the district put some money for into those routes or how's that cooperation? But then also just a general question about fairs because our RTD is partly tax payer funded organization, but then what part of the budget do the fairs go or is it just all in a lump sum? Yeah, where does ridership money go? So right now, pre-pandemic point of the pandemic, the point of the pandemic, everything comes down to it, but pre-pandemic, we, approximately 20 plus, a little bit higher than that percent of our operating costs were covered by what we call the fair box recovery ratio. So your fairs paid about 20% federal grants and the RTD sales tax covered the remainder of that. Since the pandemic, that number has plummeted and we're down to somewhere in the low teens, let's say 10, 13%, something like that. So our fairs are already covering a smaller percentage of our operating costs and that's kind of one of the reasons where general manager's been a little bit more liberal with the, in the past when we've started fair studies we've always had specific revenue targets and this time we were a little bit looser with that, with the recognition that the fair is already covering a lower percentage of costs, so why not just lower that and see if we can backfill that with other funds? And you had another, I'm sorry, you had another question on there as well and I don't know, I forgot what that was already. Oh, yeah, so one of the things we'd like to do and we don't even have a good sense of what this would be yet, you know, have our hand out to either a school districts, the state, anyone. As far as the zero fair for youth, a few other states have done this. Washington State's a real good example where they have set up a grant for local transit agencies to apply for, to cover, to actually cover the cost of implementing that. We're really just starting our lobbying efforts on that, so I can't give you any good information yet on who you really think would cover that chunk of change, but we're hoping, I guess there's a good way to put it, we're hoping it's popular enough that somebody might be willing to help us. The school districts see the value of public transit to then also be of value to the young children to gain independence. Yeah, you know, I think one of the challenges we may have in this is me speaking personally, yeah, we have pretty good school ridership in Boulder County, Denver, some of the suburban districts, it's a lot less so, so, you know, I'm thinking it may be more difficult if we won't be approaching and making this up, say, Arapahoe County to say, well, you know, are you gonna be willing to put in and, well, none of our kids use it, but it's certainly something, you know, we're gonna start the discussion on. I think it's an interesting idea because, you know, I studied in a country that had no school buses and they just had public transit and they put down a school sign that says, all right, this bus is now a school bus, but it's a great way to get people into transit as well for the next generation, so. Yeah, and following up on that, and that's, I think, one of the reasons that is for our general manager in particular, this has been a really important issue. She believes strongly that by introducing transit to kids, you know, that's the way of marketing it out, you know, to transit riders. Hearing how small a percentage of RTD's total revenue is provided by fares, I'm wondering whether you've studied doing away with fares altogether. Yeah, the challenge, going into the study like as I said in the past, we've typically had specific fair revenue targets. This time in our discussions with our finance department, we figured if we came, if we had a reduction that was somewhere in the range of around 20%, then we could probably still get away with not having to do any service cuts. Anything lower than that, then it would start to impact the amount of service hours that we could provide. So, we did a lot of back and forth on this, but you know, running the financial model, going, you know, there's always the push pull, but by lowering, eliminating the regional fare, and then even lowering all the fares, we pretty much hit rock bottom to get, we're at the 20% now, so anything lower than that, then we would likely see service cuts, which 5% cut in service for service planners is usually pretty painful, yeah. Would still provide 20%? No, we're probably hovering around 10 now. 10 now? 10%-ish, yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, with the cut. We've reduced the fares. So, with the financial model is showing, kind of pulling this out of my head now, so I hope I have this accurate in my mental picture. We will see, we expect to see an uptick in ridership because of the lower fares, but not enough to offset the loss in revenue from the lower fares. So, if my memory is correct, we'd still be hovering somewhere around 10%, but I don't remember the exact number. Okay, so you're saying that the increase in ridership would roughly offset the... Not quite, no. So, we'd still anticipate a loss of revenue, but that, yes, would be offset with higher ridership, but at least that's what the model is showing. So, I see, thank you, yeah. Mr. Quinn, Longmont's had pre-fairs for quite some time, and I think the city subsidizes the fare, is that correct? So, is this a change to the subsidy that the city will be paying, or am I understanding that come January will the individuals will be paying the fare? I can probably answer that a little better. Yeah, thank you. Sorry, the thank you, I don't know the answer. You need to take a... We're gonna have to take a real close look at this because this is gonna have a game changer as far as the whole reason why we bought up fares in the first place, the fare box. We bought up all the money that was going into the fare box. We said we will pay for that if we can get free fares for everyone, no matter what, no cards, nothing. And so, with this new model, we're gonna have to really talk about that at these different policy levels to see if we wanna continue that or not because it's a great benefit for folks in the city, but if this new fare structure is what we think it is, and it's offsetting a lot of the reasons why we didn't have ridership before, because our argument at the time was the fares that RTD is charging for us in Longmont are the same as in Denver, same as in Littleton, same as in Boulder, same as in Golden. We're not getting the same bang for our box, so we would like to buy those up and prove that we have people who will ride the bus, and certainly we had some pretty good growth in our small bus system of four routes. So we'll need to take another look at that. I don't need to come to this group and to city council and really have those discussions about how we wanna approach this in the next eight months before this, or five, it's less than that now, seven months before the new fares take place, because it's a huge factor, where are we going in the future? Well, as a follow-up question, I wonder if you have data of how many persons under age 19 have been riding the buses. I know, I said I ride the 323, and I do see teenagers, because that goes by the high school, ride that bus. I would say a C4 or five every time I'm on that round. So I wonder if you see, what do you see in terms of ridership in that age group? Yeah, one of the challenges we have is we're not allowed, we do an onboard survey every couple of years where we actually have people that come on, a survey agency that comes on board and surveys our riders. We are not allowed to survey under 18, so our data is... Yeah, we don't have solid data on that. So good numbers, one of the things that, and I'm not only probably be able to speak to this a little bit better, we do have a sense of at least as you mentioned, by the schools, we definitely see higher ridership. So I think our service planners have been able to kind of extrapolate from some of the data we have, based on what the ups and downs are between the beginning and the ending of school year, and then assume that certain percentage of that may be related to students that are riding to the schools. Just real quick, I just want to do a time check with you, we're at almost 7.30, so we've got about 20 more minutes for RTD, so I just wanted to give everybody a heads up that we're trying to get in, so you can have your comments at the end as well. Over to Patrick Stanley, who will provide you with an update. Your reference just feels set, why don't we hold our questions to the very end. Thank you, good evening. Patrick Stanley, Manager of Engineering Programs at RTD, and thank you for having us here tonight to give you an update. So look what I'm just gonna start with a basic kind of overview of the Northwest Rail for everybody that might need a refresher course, but Northwest Rail was part of the 2004 Fast Tracks Boat. It is a 42 mile segment that goes from Denver Union Station to Longmont. The first six miles of that was built as part of the B line opened in 2016. That's an overhead electrified segment of rail that operates an RTD dedicated and controlled track. In 2010, we did the environmental evaluation, which looked at 55 round trips per day, 11 stations and a full double tracking for the entire corridor. At that time, we didn't have a dedicated funding source that weren't able to build it at that time, so kind of continue to study it. In 2013, we did the Northwest Area Mobility Study, the NAMS project, which looked at really implementing the Northwest Rail in physical segments, so Denver to Westminster, et cetera, and kind of in chunks. At that particular time, it was identified that the Northwest Rail would be a longer term project, and that was identified between the stakeholders and RTD at that time. 2016 mentioned the B line did open, and now here in 2017, the concept for the peak service came up really from our stakeholders to RTD to look at a peak service operation. So the first question is what is peak service? So the peak service proposing that we're studying right now is three weekday morning trips from Longmont to Denver, and three weekday evening trips back from Denver to Longmont. We're partnering with local jurisdictions to plan six new stations along the corridor. We're also looking at feasible potential maintenance facility locations here in Longmont, just mostly because we're gonna be running a different technology for the train. We won't be looking at an overhead powered train for this 35 mile segment that were for the extension. We're gonna, of course, we're gonna be operating on the, and let me back up a little bit. I should have said this in the first slide, but the 35 mile extension from the existing B line will operate on the existing BNSF ray tracks. So obviously, that means we gotta talk to the BNSF.  We're also evaluating potential train types. It's not our goal to select a specific vehicle as part of the study, but we do wanna make sure that the type of vehicles that we need to operate are available. And then of course, there's a lot of partnership opportunities out there, one in particular that we're a little bit excited about to explore is the Front Range passenger rail. So as I mentioned, six new stations, working from the south up, downtown Westminster, Brunfield 116th, Flatiron Station, downtown Louisville, Boulder Junction at Depot Square, and then here in downtown Longmont, which is located near the first and main project. So RTD is leading the project, but we're obviously not doing it alone. So we have a study advisory team, which is made up of our representatives from the local stakeholders, and as well as transportation partners in the area. People you see here on the screen here make up our SAT, provide us guidance and input throughout the process. Got the note filled pretty well, and it's part of that team. So why is Peak Service something that might be worth looking at right now? So given the fact that we have limited resources, it would provide a potential for us to maybe bring a Northwest Rail solution to the Northwest area sooner rather than later, to cost effective approach to get some service started while we continue to pursue funding for a full day operation. Accomplish this in the initial track safety and track upgrades, positive train control, which I'm sure many people have probably heard about, would be required if we ran community rail service on the freight rail, that getting that safety system implemented early on allows us to build upon that. We're not the first, we wouldn't be the first ones to do this. There are other locations that have looked at a Peak Service and they've been able to build upon that as the ridership grows. And then it allows us to address some of the ridership concerns today while we plan for the future. So we don't have a set start date for the service. This is a study at this point. We're trying to evaluate what we call the common set of facts. We're looking at what is the infrastructure needed to build this and then how much is that gonna cost? How much does it cost to build? How much does it cost to operate? What type of agreements do we have to have in place? What is the ridership benefits, impacts, et cetera. Which will be called a common set of facts that we'll have at the end of the study in order to make some decisions and move forward in a direction on the Northwest Rail as well as looking at potential funding sources throughout. So a little bit on the study schedule and I apologize, I'm rushing a little bit through here to get through everything here. But the study schedule, it's a five milestone process that we're working through right now. We are at the tail end of milestone three right now which is really defining the initial base footprint for what it would actually take to do the six new stations, the passing sightings for the BNSF, you know, in the three round trips per day. Milestones one and two are really fact finding processes. We're really looking at what is peak service? What has changed since we did the EE? Obviously that was 2010, so the number of things have changed since that particular time. We needed to find out what, you know, what are the conditions look like today. Then moving forward in the milestones four and five, it's where we wanna look at some potential partnerships and opportunities that might be out there and look at what are the strategies and next steps to move forward. And in total at the end, this should wrap up towards the end of this year. So real quick, I wanted to touch on, we did have our first touch point community involvement. This was, we had two open houses. One was January 31st and Boulder. And then we had our second one was in Westminster on February 2nd. It was an in-house meeting. We had about a total of 195 total visitors to both of those open houses. At the event itself, we got about 29 total comment cards, but we did give out, we had an online meeting that was running at the same time which had the exact same content which allow people to view the content at their schedule. And on that particular online meeting, we got about 3,300 total views of the presentation and included about 170 or so completed surveys and then on the RTD webpage itself, we got about 350 comments and sign-ups for emails. So real quick, right after the open houses, we sat down with the SAT, we kind of went through, okay, what do we think we heard at these meetings? And in general, what we heard was there's either a neutral or a positive attitude towards the Northwest Rail and there were some, I think, let's say reserve excitement, perhaps, that RTD was still looking at this, trying to find a solution to the Northwest Rail solution. There were quite a few concerns with, reverse commute, since it only goes one way in the morning. There's not really an opportunity for somebody from Denver to come back the other direction. There were some concerns about additional stations potentially at Gumball or Nilewatt in particular. A lot of people had questions about what is the BNSF or front-range passenger rail partnership and what does that look like? A lot of questions about what's the difference between this concept and the full service concept, particularly in regards to ridership and cost. And then we had a number of comments from people that didn't have non-traditional commutes, maybe somebody in the service industry or hospitality that doesn't really commute at a regular time. And growth around the stations, what does the nature of the stations look like? What does that development look like? Is it private, public? What are the impacts on the existing infrastructure at the station locations? And then finally, the big question that we all know is one that we have to address is what would happen if peak service turns out to be maybe an infeasible option at this, and what would we do in that scenario? So then we had a chance to actually look at the comments themselves and just kinda get checked, make sure that we were hearing what people were saying for the most part. There were a lot of parallels here. Generally, some, I think, excitement that we were still looking at the Northwest Rail in general. Same comments we had about the stations and the locations. A lot of people were still mostly gun rail and Iowa in particular. Had a number of comments about the integrated service with RTD, how would this integrate in with other services that were providing in the areas, what would there be any reductions to any other services potentially as a result of the Northwest Rail possibly coming in? Questions about the land use? This particular one, people had concerns about maybe being pushed out of the station areas. Existing residents. And of course, construction, which is a little ways off, but if we do move this into a future phase, that's something obviously we'd have to take into, excuse me, taking into consideration. So one of the questions we asked was, please select the reasons why the service may not work for you, peak service. And most of these, the bigger numbers are really related more towards the actual nature of the service itself, not providing weekend service as an example is the first one, midday service, evening service, and direction of service. Those are kind of the primary pieces, which is, I think to be expected a little bit with such a limited peak service type option. Really towards the end, it was really more the station's not necessarily being in a location that was convenient to use the service. So next we asked about kind of the benefits, what are the benefits that people might see with the Northwest Rail? And it was a little bit encouraging to see that a lot of these numbers were all fairly high. So to me, that indicates that there's a lot of different reasons why people could potentially use the Northwest Rail or would use the Northwest Rail. But you can see at the beginning, being stuck in traffic, which probably doesn't surprise anybody, getting out of the traffic jams, reduced vehicle admissions, opportunity to use, read, work, rest, and then new transportation opportunities kind of the first top four. And really down towards the end was the reduced transportation cost. And that's really the cost personally that you would have for your gas parking downtown maintenance of your vehicles, that sort of thing. Now finally, Hanlaumont, actually we asked the question so what are the most important factors to consider for a maintenance facility, citing? I should note that most of the people that answered this actually don't live around the locations of the maintenance facility that we're proposing, but these are what you would expect in a study like this, noise impacts, air quality, traffic disruptions, really more towards the end, or your private property impacts and visual impacts. Where do we go from here? So we're gonna continue to define the initial footprint. We wanna use the public input that we got and see what that notifies us, what that tells us, and how that informs the study and make adjustments as necessary based on those comments. We're gonna continue to compile the comments that are facts that's gonna be something that happens throughout the entire process really all the way up to the end. And then we're looking at some, the next round of open houses, we say late spring, early summer, but I think we've had some recent conversations with our SCT that we're probably looking more summer to late summer, probably for those open houses, but that's kind of predetermined yet. We need to have, I think, some pretty serious conversations over there so to be on the best timing for that. So concludes the most well presentation. I apologize, had to rush through it a little bit there, but I'll check the Chris real quick and he's gonna give a quick update on the Longmont station. This is sort of related to the Northwest Rail. Just a little bit of history, back when the contract bids came in for the A line and the G line as part of the Fast Tracks plan, there was some extra money left over and so the RTB board, it was approximately $17 million allocated that for the first and main station of the downtown Longmont station. So with the intent of that being, knowing that we couldn't necessarily do the rail right away, we could at least establish it as a transit hub and that could work as a transit hub for the 119 BRT and also for the rail when it is established. So, and I haven't been working on this so Phil, you can correct me on, the planner who has been working on this couldn't be here tonight so I hope I get all of this right so it will correct me if I don't. We have been working very closely with the city on a, what is known as an IMP or an infrastructure master plan that has been completed and now we have signed an intergovernmental agreement with the city so that the intent being that the money that RTB would have used to develop the station, we will be providing to the city so the city will take care of the construction and of the facility which we'll include and you see up there that approximately 10 bus gates, the city also will be in charge of land acquisition and then we RTB will provide the funds kind of as a lump sum to the city with the expected project completion somewhere around the 2025 timeframe. If I can answer any questions you might have on that hold on. Ali Mansapani with RTB, project manager for Colorado 119 BRT. From 2017 to 2019, RTB engaged in the planning and environmental linkages study was the aftermath of NAMS, the Northwest Area Mobility Study which identified future BRT corridors in the Northwest region. After that happened the number one corridor identified as part of that NAMS study was the Colorado 119. The L happened and here we are with some money through with CDOT and others to make it a reality. The goals are outlined here as you see demand is a huge issue, first and last mile connectivity, optimizing the transit services between Boulder and Longmont and reduction of transit travel times. Are definitely the huge goals for this project. It's a truly multi-modal project. It's gonna have a bikeway right in the center of the diagonal. This project is gonna be and how it's gonna become a model for future BRT corridors. Not only in this region but really elsewhere in RTB's district. Map on the right is a little bit hard to see but probably you could see better on your screens. The one thing to understand about what is Colorado 119 BRT project is it's really two projects within the scope if you saw the southern limit with Hills Parkway to the northern limit has safety and mobility project that we are partnering with CDOT and Boulder County to the rest of it but you see the extension to the south and the extension to the north. Other BRT improvements including a brand new parking ride in North Longmont and the improvements on CU campus on the south side are what RTB is doing on its own. So that's not the CDOT. It's gonna be completely done by RTB and its partners. Again, what you see here, we already talked about the PEL and the vision but PEL had managed lanes as part of their preferred alternative. We did a thorough traffic study as part of the safety and mobility project that we're working with CDOT and others and decided that the best bank for our buck is what is called the Q bypass lanes. So these are these bypass lanes that get implemented, get built to bypass the queue as it sort of implies in its name. So the bus could get to the intersection way ahead of the, you know not getting stuck in the back of the queue and then get its own signal across the intersection, do its aligning and boarding and then getting back into the general purpose lane and proceeding. Again, bikeway is a key piece of this multimodal effort. There are other projects that feed into the big BRT project. One key one is the Kafton Street busway which we've been working with Phil and his staff to make sure that it's done correctly and can just a multimodal corridor. CDOT's call on the 119 sitting we talked about the safety and mobility project and managed lanes were infeasible and we went with the Q bypass lanes. So that's where we're going forward with. See the key improvements identified if you pay attention to the legend identified where the bikeway underpasses are, the queue bypass lanes, the locations of the parking rides and where the stations and platforms are going to be in the diagonal piece. Other roadway improvements, adaptive signal system that CDOT Region 4 has already implemented. It's going to make traffic signals work far better in the diagonal piece of the project. The cycle lanes adjust during the day. It senses a real time traffic and adjusts accordingly instead of the traditional, having AMPM and off peak plan. So it changes all the time. A lot of signing, striping, lighting at parking rides and at the platforms and a whole complete reconstruction of the intersection of Colorado 52 which is also IBM Drive to the West. Graphic to the right, you'll see what the Q bypass lane, a good example of it is at 63rd where you see the parking ride in the middle of the highway, what is the middle E grassy area right now. There is an animated version of this graphic so where you click on it, you'll see the bus coming into the maroon on the left side of the intersection if you will. Proceeds to the parking ride, does it's aligning and boarding. Proceeds to the traffic signal and then that little horizontal bar turns green ahead of the general purpose traffic. The bus travels through the intersection and then back to the general purpose traffic on the right side of the intersection. That's how it's gonna work. That's what the Q bypass lane is about and the parking rides facility we talked about the brand new one at Park Ridge which we are partnering pretty heavily with the city to acquire that right away needed for that parking ride facility from the developer to the city and then to us. So we can be able to have the basic layout already worked out at that location and then a whole bunch of stops as mentioned in the first graphic, the cities of Longmont and Boulder. There are gonna be BRT grade stops not all of them are gonna have shelters and that is because of the lack of public right away. So if we have the room, we will install them. If not, it's gonna be just a bench and a flag. We have done that, the cities of Longmont and Boulder staff two rounds of meetings each to make sure we will do the best we can with those BRT stops. We should have started with this slide but yeah, BRT is a reliable, convenient, faster and more frequent service than the traditional bus service and there are gonna be two variations of it for the Colorado 119 BRT, the orange route and the blue route serving different parts of Longmont and Boulder. Very similar to Flatiron Flyer. Just talking about the blue pattern and you'll see the headways, the frequency rather the weekdays and holidays as well as the orange route serving different parts of both cities. The RT grade stops we were looking at, again, identifying them in Boulder and Longmont. Orange basically, the orange route basically replaces the J route from University of Colorado. Just wanna say how much we appreciate RTD and their staff coming here. We get them once a year at least and so we really appreciate their time and efforts and you can see how busy they are and especially how much they touch Longmont with what they're doing, so thanks. Any questions from the board? I would love to go another hour. PR, that has to come to a vote, I believe, from our citizens, so I'm just curious, you know, because 2004, to make a joke about my age, I was 14 when Fast Tracks was passed and Longmont is very anxious about getting a rail and now it seems like RTD is kinda siding with FRPR, but then that ultimately has to be passed by voters, so I'm just curious how they're gonna campaign for the public that. Good question, so first thing I guess I would like to say, the peak service study that we're doing right now is really to look at what it would take for RTD to run peak service. We do obviously wanna keep an eye on what a potential partnership would be with Front Range Passing Rail. I think there's a real opportunity there that might open some doors that are maybe close to us right now, maybe in particular probably regarding funding. I think we're keeping our eye really close to what's happening with the Front Range Passing Rail. They're also doing a study right now. We don't know if they're gonna be, I can't, I don't wanna speak for them too much, but I think there's still a question about 2004 versus 2000, I'm sorry, 2024 versus 2026 vote. But Andy Karzin at Front Range Passing Rail would be the best one to answer that question as far as timing, but so I think our first goal that we're trying to do is find out what are the facts for peak service and what picture does that paint? And where does that put us and what possibility do we have to move forward? Regardless maybe of Front Range Passing Rail being there as well. So hopefully that answers your question, but I think if it does end up being a partnership obviously that's something that we'll have to address together with Front Range Passing Rail how that would work. Well I'm still excited of this getting done. And then another question about the LOMA station, RTD board committed to construct the station in 2011. It'll be done hopefully 2025. Can someone just explain that process, why it takes 14, 15 years? I'm trying the perfect one. I can help answer all of it was RTD did not have the money at the time that they made, they were just getting into that agreement with EGO P3. EGO P3 was the name of the project. It really did the whole A line and the West line and those different things. And it was part of that that we started to, it was because of the way the contract was structured that we were able to get the cost savings. And of course we raised our hand first thing and said hey we'd like to realize that cost savings up here because we don't think we'll see anything soon. So that started the process in 2011 and then we've been going through the process. RTD was pretty sincere about the idea that we needed to do an infrastructure master plan to make sure that everything was in place for the station to be at that location. And then yeah, it's just, you're on this fast. WAN use and I hope RTDs, I'm sure you guys RV is, the governor was trying to also tackle WAN use that has unfortunately failed because it's really, you need both to have a good transit system, a good plan. But really, I would just like to end because I think overall we're always dealing with the what came first, the chicken or the egg. And I look at examples, so like Houston granted bigger city but they redesigned their entire network essentially doubled in an increased ridership. So I think thinking outside the box and not waiting for riders but maybe building and they will come. So that's my final comments. Mr. Stanley, initiate a new conversations with the NSF? Yes, we have. So in fact, it took us a little bit longer than we were hoping to take but we do actually have a contract with them right now. We just, I think it was actually last week we issued them a notice to proceed to provide 30% basic engineering plans. They will give us a price estimate, a cost estimate for what it's gonna take for us to operate on their particular line. So we know for a fact that there's gonna be several sightings that will have to be part of the project and those would, the way those would work is the NSF would actually pull around those sightings during a certain time period, certain chunk of time. So say the peak morning service, they would pull over and then we would have operational priority on the tracks during that time. But right now it's all a single track. So that's one of the pieces that we need to get from them is a better understanding of where those sightings need to be, how many there needs to be, how long do they need to be, as well as what type of track improvements would need to happen potentially to run a passenger service on their freight rails. So we have talked to them, they've been at the table, we've been talking with them for a little bit. So hopefully we'll start getting a little bit quicker movement on that here just shortly. Not a full go, but I'll come to the table and negotiate. We wanna understand what the cost is and we wanna understand what their requirements are gonna be for us to operate on their line. In order to do that, that's what we wanna engage with them. We've got a contract to do some work with them so that we can fully understand what those are. So at the end of the day, we'll have a cost estimate from them on what it would take for us to do as well as what infrastructures needed to do it. Okay, so it's a contract to make an assessment and then is there any other method under consideration of the size underpasses for the bike route on the BRT? And the reason why I ask that is, I think you know what the county commissioners, there was quite a lot of concern about safety and underpass involvement with the bike route. And I just wondered if there was anything else that could happen. There was a lot of conversation about NiWat where NiWat Road comes into about it being unsafe and this was just listening to other comments. So yeah, I just wanted to get your input on if anything else is being considered. I can definitely have the person who understands a bit of the project. Sometimes you're for the bikeway, I get back with you on that. But yes, there were definitely other options were considered overpass, I hope for one, which subject to litter of course and then also the legal was more expensive to build. It is there hurting for money, they only secured enough funds for underpasses, not all of them. So the series of the tip grant, they conveyed that. Well, I know one of the concerns is that it narrows down to 12 feet through the underpass and it's a mixed use with pedestrians and thank you, Chair Lainer, for sending out that article, intermixing with bicycles and pedestrians. So I just wondered if there was a solution to that or a way to address those concerns. At the touch points, I believe there are 16 feet but then it takers back to 12 feet. I think it's 16 feet, obviously it would be a better option, but it's gotta be. Just a concern about the speed of bicyclists combined with pedestrians. Do you have an excellent point? Yeah, the e-bikes one, now I believe all classes of e-bikes are gonna be allowed on it. So classes one, two, and three, that means up to 28 miles per hour. Yeah, it becomes, the presenters, you've given us a lot to think about. You answered a question that I have. So one more brief question. Could one of you explain to me what runboard means? I've been trying to figure it out from context on your figures and I stumped. A excellent question, thank you. We say a runboard, it is the time period of when a service change goes into effect until it ends. We have three runboards a year. We make a service change in January, it ends in May, and we have a runboard that starts the next day, ends in August or early September, and then another one that then continues again until January. So it's a period of when a service change is in effect. Yeah, and I just want to reiterate, council member, or board member, McInerney, and thank you for giving us all this information. A lot of stuff to look over, thank you. Phil, do you have anything you have or can we wrap up? Excuse me, do we want to wrap up or is there anything else you need to add? Nothing more about RTD, but I did just want to let you know that this is Stacey's last meeting with us. So our last TAB meeting with us. So I appreciate all her work and help over the years she's been with us. So thank you, Stacey, and I miss you. And council member Yarbrough, do you have any comments you'd like to make? I guess we can wrap this up. Can I, excuse me, get a motion to end the meeting? Okay, we'll do comments from the board. RTD is still there. I'll say thank you. You can email from me, taxes we contribute, and what the outcome is. So, yeah. I would just suggest if you could send that through Stacey or me, and we can send it to them and get the answers and send them all back to, all the two directors to the right person. We'll just make sure everybody gets the information. Yeah, so that'll be good. Well, likewise, thank you RTD, and thanks for your patience in answering all the questions that we had, and to all the other board members for their excellent questions as well. And once again, Chair Lainer, thank you for that article you sent out in between meetings. And Stacey, thank you for your excellent help all the time. Very thank you, so I'm good. Any motion to end the meeting? Chair, do you want to find out if your council member has any comments? Oh, she said, all those in favor, say aye, meeting adjourned.