So welcome all. My name is Bonnie Woninger. I'm Executive Director of the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. We're one of the sponsors of tonight's roundtable. And we really appreciate you all coming tonight. I can't believe the turnout. I have to admit you surprised us a little bit. We were hoping with the first roundtable we might get 10, 15, then we hope for 20, and then we were wowed by 30 and into 40. So thank you very much. It's nice to see this many advocates out there doing work on the ground at home in your community, in other communities. The roundtable tonight is really focused on local actions for transportation transformation. And towards the end of the program, we'll talk about with you what you might like to see in the future for other topics for continuing roundtable discussions if you're interested in doing that. To talk a little bit about Central Vermont Regional Planning, I'll give you three statements or less, I guess is what I'll call it. We serve the 23 municipalities, 20 in Washington County, and then the towns of Orange, Williamstown, and Washington. And how I describe to people what we do is we leverage the power of people working together to help create shared visions and find solutions to problems. So what does that really mean? Anybody who wants to get together and do something in a community, we're willing to help you figure out how to do that and then to carry ideas into actions on the ground. And then our other two sponsors are going to introduce themselves later, but Ian and John are later in the program. We're each going to break ourselves out to do that. Do you want a group introduction? A quick who we are, but not much else about you, given the number in the room? Maybe name in town. Name in town. Sorry. I'm going to talk a little bit till it ends. Ready? Or we can start down there. Claire, would you like to start? Sure. I'm Claire Tubbs. I'm actually from Over the Mountain in Middlebury from the Askin County Walkway Council. I'm Alex Budd. I'm actually from Shelburne. That's what I'm actually doing. I'm Eric Brextner. I'm Kyle. I was with my wife. We're from Orange. I'm Naughty Kyle. I'm Phoenix Mitchell. I live in West Darin with the Hitching Host. Ann Donahue, I represent Northfield in Berlin. Here to learn, listen. Jane Hegel. Sarah Wolfe, Northfield Energy Committee. Virginia Scott, Barry City. Manna Carlson, Marshfield Energy Committee. E. Christian Stillerson. Kate Stevenson, Popular Energy Advisory Committee. Jessica Scrum, I don't know if I hear her. Honeysa Zirami, Montpainia. We are working for a sustainable Montpainia coalition. Elizabeth Hart, I'm Montpainia's sustainable Montpainer. C. Leacock, Warren Energy Commission. Diana Chase, Montpainia Energy Advisory Committee. Duncan McDougal, Waterbury Leighton, Local Energy Action Partnership. Erin McNeil, Callis, Energy Group, and Transportation Advisory Committee. Paul's Montpainer. Andrea Sander, Montpainia Reliance. Louie Hederland, U.S. Translating. Dave Roberts, South River Region, here representing Drag Electric, Vermont. Nancy Allen, Plainfield, Montpain, Marshfield. Emma Hinson, Baseton. Peter Kalman, Montpelier, Montpelier, Senior Energy Committee Center. Robert Dostas, Waterbury, and Green Mountain Power. John Gopin, South Mountain Power. Tim O'Dell, Corinth. Nate Cranmer, Phillip E. Gott, Montpelier. Ann Watson, I'm the Mayor, Montpelier. Paul's Forest Team. Mr. Pepper, Mill Sets, and Tasking on the Community Action. Ron American, Montpelier, Bight instead of Drive. Deb Sacks, representing Vermont. Sure, and I'm E. H. Gock from Vermont Natural Resources Council at Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network. Great, so John with the cap, oh, sorry. I have to tell you, I'm a Montpelier. Thank you. Anybody else who we didn't catch the first time through? All right, thank you very much. So our agenda tonight, quick and dirty, is to, sorry, for you all to share your work, but we're asking that each community provide one share. So if all the Northfield people, all the Montpelier people can just very quickly share highlights of what you're done, what you, sorry, one or more projects you've worked on over the last several months and some of the projects or other priorities for which you'd like assistance. So who could you be a resource for and what would you like assistance with in the future? Then we'll have our speakers talked about initiatives you can use and we will take those topics, walk-a-bike ability, rideshare transit and electrification and break out into small groups and have some discussions about how we can use what you heard and what you've already heard. So there'll be experts in your group, some of which are you, some of which are our speakers and there'll be new people who want to talk about what they can do in their community. And then after that, we'll come together real quick just for some quick summaries and we'll ask you to have a show of hands for topics in the future that might interest you. Please feel free throughout the night to go back and get more to eat or drink. Restrooms are in the bottom, where's my clothes? Restrooms right down this hall on the left. Same level on the hall to the left. You're welcome to step out at any time. Ian, John, anything else that was me? So let's start with you guys. Who would like to start their two minute town update? I'm looking for eyes that will meet mine. Thank you. All right. There's a lot of people here from Montpelier. I think I'm the one who's supposed to give the update and I have notes, so we're gonna go for it. So Montpelier, I wanna talk a little bit about a pilot project around microtransit that we've been working on. So Montpelier has a net zero goal for 2030 for all our municipal operations and then 2050 for our whole community. And a couple years ago, we had a sustainable design, a net zero design competition, which Deb was involved with putting together. Out of that came the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition. You heard there's a couple folks here from there. And one of the initiatives that the Sustainable Montpelier Coalition has been working hard on is the idea of microtransit. And so that turned into a working group meeting with V-Trans members of the Energy Advisory Committee, city council.  So right now, there is a plan for a pilot to go forward. V-Trans has agreed to that and it will be in partnership with Green Mountain Transit and VIA, which is a provider of this software service. It's gonna go in front of the legislature in the spring and we are hoping to have it up and running next summer. So summer 2020 for a pilot. And I think it's really exciting, alternative transportation idea that is starting to happen in a handful of places, but we'd really be one of the few places to offer this type of service, especially in a rural community. So that's kind of the hot news from Montpelier on transportation. Thank you so much, Kate, for doing such a great job of modeling what these Energy Committee updates will look like. I'm gonna interrupt the flow briefly just to introduce myself and my organization. My name's Ian Hitchcock and I'm from the Vermont Natural Resources Council and Vermont Energy and Climate Action Network. And we are made up of a network of 10 Energy Committees from all across Vermont. We're at well over 100 right now of local volunteers, many of those leaders in this room doing what they can, where they are, to move the needle on climate and energy issues in their communities. So I am thrilled to have you all here and to have Kate do such a great job of introducing the work that Energy Committees are working on. I also wanted to call people's attention to the resource table back in the back. Transportation is a very big topic and there's no way that we could cover everything that we wanna talk about with transportation in one event or one evening. So there's other materials back there that my hope can get you started. I just wanted to flag a couple of those. The first of which is this great website that a partner of ours, Vital Communities, put out just today where they put out online what they call a town transportation toolkit where they have guides on how to work for transportation, how to prioritize projects in your town and then case studies and success stories from communities that have done transportation work. So I'd encourage the folks in this room to take a look at that resource. At VNRC we also try to follow kind of the policy and legislative priorities that can help move things forward on the transportation front. One of the most important of those for folks to be aware of is the Transportation and Climate Initiative which is a regional effort to try to bring down greenhouse gas emissions from around the state. There's a handout back there which can talk far more about TCI as well. If you do get any great ideas tonight and you're thinking, you know, I would love to do a project like one that I heard about from other folks but I don't know where to start. I'm happy to say that Ross McDonald and the team at Govermont have generously provided up small $500 grants for town community transportation initiatives. You can find information about how to apply for those on that back table as well. So again, I'm thrilled to have all of you here. I thank you so much for coming and now I'd like to invite some more energy committees to talk about some of the great work they've been doing. If there's someone from Warren here who'd like to give a brief update of the committee's work. She'll have to see. I'm right here. Well, I don't really have anything to report. Sounds good. We're building back our committee. Right now, I'm the only member. Woo-hoo, small but strong. Dottie and Eric did years and years of great work so we're just building it back up. Fantastic, thank you guys. The representative from Marshfield's Energy Committee would like to give a brief update of their work. Yeah, so I'm from Marshfield. Actually, next week, if you guys have any families or friends that live in Marshfield, we're hosting a wood energy event with some folks talking about some incentives and just modern wood heating. Me, also, I'm talking, I'm the speaker. Woo-hoo, the speaker. Also, it's gonna be a button-up event through efficiency Vermont, so spread the word. Other news be applied for the electric vehicle charging station. Grant earlier this year didn't get it, but we have some interesting information about electric vehicle charging station and we hope to be applying for it again in the future. Thank you so much. Anybody here from Calis's Energy Committee?  Stand up. I think because this is being televised, it's as if we're managed to go to the microphone. I'm Karen McNeill. Our Energy Committee is unofficial. I'm obligated to state that every time, so we're not appointed. We're a very loose network and we've been inactive, but I do have good things to report about transportation in Calis, regardless. Because VTrans moved from national life to Barrie, now there's going to be a Route 14 bus going right past East Calis and South Woodbury. So a lot of work that our group has done over the years is coming to fruition because there will be now a bus as of October 7th. We had been looking for park and rides. Now the bus company, the same one that runs the St. Johnsbury bus, will be looking for those park and ride spots. So this is a big step forward for Calis people, especially low income people that don't have good transportation alternatives. We're very interested in microtransit. We tried to get carpooling going. We had a Facebook site that was used off and on, so that's definitely something we're interested in. And also safe biking along Route 14 and County Route. Do we have someone from Northfield who'd like to give a brief update? So the Northfield Energy Committee is very new as well. We've only been official since January of this year. We started to form in the fall of 17 when, if you remember when 350 Vermont was doing the tell meeting day resolutions. So we sort of came about as sort of an ill-fated attempt at that. And so basically we launched before even becoming official, we did a pretty extensive button-up last fall. And we're able to offer the free home energy visits through partnership with Efficiency of Vermont. So that was really great. And then earlier this year, and I'll talk a lot about transportation later, but we sort of got into saving our commuter bus line, the Northfield commuter. So that's taken up a lot of time but has really been a good thing and given us something to do and kind of branched us into other transportation options as well. We've also been focusing on making connections at Cabot Mills, the Darn Tough, Matt Jacobs over there, the Sustainability Director is doing some really good things with employees and trying to get van pulls going. We've also just done a lot of community outreach and making sure we're collaborating well with other local groups. Thank you so much, Jane. Would someone from Waterbury Leap like to give a brief update? Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm Duncan McDougal with Waterbury Leap. We, as you may know, are 501C3. So we're actually a non-profit. We took that step 14 years ago because we wanted to be able to raise some funds and undertake some projects that we might not be able to otherwise. So if any town energy committees are interested in taking that step, we'd be happy to tell you about that. We're all about education and motivation. So we hold a lot of public events around weatherization, solar, heat pumps, et cetera. We'll be doing a button up in a little over a month. We hold the largest energy fair in the state of Vermont, the Leap Energy Fair that takes place every April. This next one is coming up on Saturday, April 11th. We'd love to have you join us. Has anyone been to our energy fair before? We'd love to have you come. We're happy to tell any of the committees how we go about organizing it. And we've talked to a number of committees to give them tips on how to do it. We have about 80 exhibitors. We have 750 attendees. It's completely free. We have breakout sessions and lots of other activities. And the other thing I'll mention is regarding transportation. This summer, we had our second EV Fest, the Leap EV Fest. We had about 150 people come to that. We had, I think, 18 or 19 electric vehicles, some of which people could drive in and people could tour and worked out really, really well. And since then, I've heard from a number of people who've actually acquired electric vehicles, which is pretty exciting to hear. So any questions about any of those be more than happy to answer. Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Duncan. Is there any other energy committee in the room who would like to give an update who I've missed or who hasn't had a chance to get to speak? Excellent. I would just hope that folks are interested in continuing this conversation that folks in this room can put on their calendar. The December 7th annual weekend conference, this will be our 12th year of holding that event. We have an all day conference focused on a wide array of efforts and initiatives that folks can undertake to try to reduce climate impacts in their communities, switch to renewable energy and address issues like transportation, heating and just total energy use in their communities. It's a wonderful event. We have tons of exhibitors from local renewable energy businesses. We have Wellow, we're 300 energy committee members and energy interested Vermonters there. All day conference, great food, great company. I would love to see all of you there. Mark, your calendars for December 7th at the Lake Moyer Resort and Fairleigh. And with that, I'll turn it over to John. Thank you, Ian. So I'm John Copans. I work at the Vermont Council on Rural Development. I'm also a Montpelier resident and I've been working with Ian and Bonnie and trying to help coordinate this event. So I run a program at the Council on Rural Development called the Climate Economy Model Communities Program and we're actually working right now with Marshfield and Plainfield. And the idea behind the program is to sort of rally a community together around what we would say are opportunities in the climate economy. A lot of the way we talk about climate is with good sense from a sort of ecological threat standpoint. But we think it's also important to think about how there are actually sort of quality of life and economic opportunities in tackling climate change. And I actually think that applies really well to the conversation we're having tonight about transportation. I was in Marshfield two nights ago with the Transportation Task Force talking about this very thing and somebody around that table sort of reminded us like that this conversation about transportation is not about sort of maybe a question of guilt for driving your car, but instead thinking about all of the advantages and upsides to doing those other things. The social aspect of getting on the bus. The health aspect of riding your bike or walking. Like how do we emphasize the positive in those transitions as opposed to sort of focusing on the negative. So that's part of what we do at the Council on Rural Development with our climate economy work but it's part of also what I think we're all trying to do in our work, in our respective towns. There is a poster on the wall here that I just wanna acknowledge. It's up here, so it's a little hard to see, but Tara Robicek from the Vermont Energy Education program just put this poster out a couple of weeks ago and I just think it's so on point for what we're talking about here. It's the climate impact of getting to school and it's sort of the hierarchy where somebody walking to school has the lowest possible climate impact and of course somebody driving alone or riding alone in an SUV being at the other end of that spectrum. I would really, I think it's such a great tool for having this conversation both with schools but also as we all think about our transportation choices. And to me as we think about this work, like the way I've come to think about it is every trip makes a difference and every time you can move up that ladder, right? Every time, say you are driving your SUV, if you add another passenger to that SUV you've just cut your climate impact in half, right? If you've got a choice about how you're gonna get to school and you can figure out how you're gonna walk three days a week instead of driving your car. Every one of those trips, every one of those choices makes a difference and I think what we all are thinking about is how do we make our communities more sort of, how do we as communities facilitate those choices? Allow for people, make it more comfortable for people to walk and bike. Make those transit resources easier to access, available on demand. How do we build communities where people can not have that second car because by the way they're spending about $9,000 every year owning that second vehicle, right? So what is that menu? What does a community look like where we've got all of those things in place? And part of why I think it's great to be here is with this group is that's not just a town, you don't think about transportation within the borders of your own town, right? Inevitably our roads cross borders and we're crossing borders all the time and it's something where it makes more sense than almost anything else to work in a regional way. So I think that's part of what we hope comes out of this conversation tonight is some thinking about how we collaborate across our town boundaries to really make our whole region a place where all of these transportation choices rise on people's possibility list and sort of driving alone in your car sort of sinks to the bottom of people's options and opportunities. So I now have the pleasure of introducing our speakers tonight and really want to acknowledge our first one, Claire introduced herself as coming all the way over from Middlebury, huge appreciation that Claire Tebs has come to join us. And I first, I think I first, I don't know if I met Claire, but years ago they had the downtown conference in White River Junction and Claire presented about a specific project they did in Virginia that she actively supported to make that community a little more bikeable and walkable. But Claire is also actively, when she was at the Addison Regional Planning Commission, she really was part of the creation of the Walk Byte Council of Addison County and has been an awesome sort of supporter of that work. So I think Claire's gonna share that story with us. That's all you. So what is the Addison County Walk Byte Council? It's a citizen led, county wide advisory council. They don't call themselves an advocacy council and that was an important distinction that they had many conversations about. So it's an advisory council. It is supported by the Addison County Regional Planning Commission, but it is citizen led and it's supported in the way of having a staff on hand and at their meetings. And they also hold the council meetings at the Regional Planning Commission. Initial engagement strategy was led by a partnership between local motion and the Regional Planning Commission due to citizen led request that something be done about our streets to make them safer for walking and biking. And this came about in 2015 when you'll probably clearly remember there were four biking deaths in Addison County, Chittenden County and Rutland County all in like a three month span. So this was kind of a tipping point for our area for citizens to step up to the plate and say, come on, we can do better. So that was the initial conversation by citizens and they approached local motion and then approached the Regional Planning Commission and local motion and the Regional Planning Commission then partnered. There's currently 10 council members on the council and they're divided up into four working groups. And these working groups are really dependent on the interests of the people on those groups. And that's really why that's kind of their secret sauce to success is the people on those working groups are picked that working group and they are completely passionate about their topic. These are the working groups, citizen and school engagement, culture shift and marketing, municipal and agency outreach and infrastructure project review. It does have a website so you can check that out. And we are really lucky to have someone on the council that volunteers his time. He's also the co-chair Adam Franco and he's a website whiz and absolutely keeps us up to date which is an absolute miracle in my opinion. The council's up to some great things. It's really built capacity in the county and particularly for Vigens and Bristol. There was a lot of local champion initiatives happening in Middlebury and the council really plays a vital role in allowing cross-pollination of ideas and sharing resources and building capacity for those other towns that weren't sure where to start. This is a bike fair in Bristol. This is, it's a really cool collaborative picture here. We've got local motion, Ulta Consulting which specializes in walkable, bikeable communities and staff of Town of Middlebury and a walk bite council member. Looking at a specific intersection as part of a project to re-visualize intersections and crosswalks in Middlebury. And this is a demonstration project that the council was approached then by the town to say hey, would you guys like to be involved in this demonstration? That was something that the walk bite council was able to build capacity for and bring attention to the services that local motion had for municipalities. So as I mentioned before, how did we bring the council together? This really was a response to a citizen led inquiry. A lot of listening. We held two big public events at the Regional Planning Commission to bring everyone that we thought would be interested in being at the table to the table and then we opened it to the public as well. But we made sure that the local Vermont Health Department was there because we knew they had a dedicated coordinator for getting kinks out and being physical and walking and biking in there every day. We had parks and rec there. We did have a V-trans person from the state but we also had our local bus is called Actor. We had a representative from Actor. So we had the agencies, organizations and public who we thought would be interested in the conversation and then from there people signed up to see if they wanted to continue the conversation and we just kind of then had a small advisory group to initiate the engagement strategy for calling, putting out a public call to see who might want to be a council member. So then what was really, I think a successful element of bringing this council together was the Regional Planning being dedicated to putting a process together for getting a council that would be sustainable. And so like I said, Regional Planning Commission partnered with Local Motion to put an engagement process together. And so there was a dedicated staff from Regional Planning and there was a dedicated staff from Local Motion behind this effort. Once we did, we had, and we can get into this conversation at roundtables if people are interested but we were able to secure a 10 member council dedicated citizens and then Local Motion dedicated a year to putting that council to work. And Regional Planning matched that time so that we were able to put together a solid work plan with that group. And now there, I'm not at the Regional Planning Commission anymore but the Transportation Planner is the point person for that council still but the council is very much more on their own. So what's working well is absolutely building partnerships across municipal borders. We're building partnerships with the college. Middlebury obviously is a town-gown community and making that connection with students and community members can be an absolutely beautiful thing and that has happened. We had a senior seminar do a really thorough job of a county-wide walk bike survey last year and that funneled into a municipal planning grant application for a master plan for a dedicated bike group from Middlebury, Virginia and Bristol. So the council was essential as far as bringing the glue to those partnerships. We did bring the right people around the table so that resources could be shared across agencies. It is definitely building capacity. It creates a known starting point for walk bike conversations. If there is a walk bike conversation happening it's happening at this council table. Even though the council members wear a double hat of regional interest and then they go back to their individual municipalities with their municipal hat and going back between those two scales is really essential for spreading the word. It's attracting attention. Middlebury was then chosen to be the 2020 bike summit conference location and it just helped put the Addison County on the map as a walk bike enthusiast. Little press action. There's this awesome human paraphernalia that happens in Bristol and I think it would have happened with or without this walk bike council but together it's even better. This is the Triangle Bike Loop Master Plan that's happening through a missile planning grant funds and what was cool about this grant is that it's a consortium grant which means at least two towns have to apply for the grant together which is really rare to happen and it actually happened in the town of New Haven, Vermont which is a much smaller town in Addison County partnered with the city of Virginia to get this funding and they doubled the amount of funding that they were able to get more than doubled the amount of funding they were able to get to dedicate to this study. What needs work? Representation and recruitment? Obviously it is a volunteer-led council and the number one thing that I wish I had more time to do when I was staff on this council was help with the recruitment efforts of making sure that we had fresh recruitment from across the county and it's in this informal, formal discussion at the moment right now it's an ad hoc volunteer council it's held within the regional planning but it is not an official committee and it's not a non-profit so it can't get its own funding but that hasn't been a barrier as far as working on projects that are getting funding via the regional planning commission so that's kind of how they can get funding now but it is a little restrictive of looking at the big picture of funds out there. Staff time and priority shifts so you have to have a staff on site who absolutely loves this stuff to pour time into this effort and I would say I was that staff person and I'm crossing my fingers that that's still happening there but that is obviously something to be considered when you're where you're housing a regional council. That's probably my five minutes for sure and if you guys have questions later I'm happy to answer them. Thank you Claire and yes we're going to hold questions because we're going to do those in the breakout sessions right each of the presenters will go to the breakout sessions I want to just mention that somebody joined us since introductions it happens to be one of your state senators here in Washington County who's also a member of the senate transportation committee Andy Perchlich is here so it's great to see Andy so when you think about electric vehicles when you think about electric vehicles and state government what's interesting about them is they cross multiple agencies of course you've got the agency of transportation thinking about electric vehicles but you also have the public service department that regulates our utilities you have our electric utilities thinking about electric vehicles because of what it's going to do to the electric grid there's health benefits you think about electric vehicles don't have a tailpipe how much of the health impacts we see in terms of asthma come from our tailpipes and burning fossil fuels so one of the things that Vermont has done that is I think really smart is they convene this group called Drive Electric Vermont and it is the stakeholders who all have an active interest in electric vehicles state government puts in support the utilities put in support others put in support to convene that group another smart thing the state did is they actually hired Vermont Energy Investment Corp VEC to staff that Drive Electric stakeholders group and then VEC has done something really smart which has hired Dave Roberts who's now been leading that effort of Drive Electric Vermont for a bunch of years now and is really like the best resource in Vermont when it comes to EVs whether it's incentives whether it's charging infrastructure all of the complicated things that people are thinking about so Dave it's a great to have you here so thanks everybody it's great to be here and I am a little bit conflicted because I definitely appreciate all the work that I would sort of put in the transportation demand management category of reducing vehicle travel which is something we should all be doing and great to have other folks talking about that side of it here tonight because it's very important we don't just wanna get everybody driving EVs we wanna get people driving more efficiently of course but there's a lot of other options to consider so I don't have a presentation I'm just gonna give an update on some of the programs that are happening in the state and always happy I'll be here for the breakout but also always happy to follow up if your group has any specific questions about things that you might do in your community and you wanna bounce some ideas off of me so a few things kind of more recent developments the state of Vermont legislature so Senator Perchlich and others passed legislation earlier this year to start a state incentive program for plug-in electric vehicles it hasn't actually rolled out in terms of availability yet the agency of transportation is in charge of administering that they're currently going through the process of figuring out the best way to do it but the general parameters around that incentive program is it's probably gonna be about $2,500 for an electric car for households at or below 160% of the area median income which in Vermont is around $90,000 so the idea is you don't wanna just be providing incentives to people who should be able to afford buying a vehicle anyway it'll only be on new vehicles although there is another program that includes eligibility for used and also available for plug-in hybrids purchase and purchase or lease so it's exciting that the state is finally offering this because many other states have had incentives for a number of years but the good news is the electric utilities in the state have stepped up in the absence of the state program and pretty much all of them are offering incentive programs for electric vehicle purchases we've got information on the Drive Electric website and I have some resources here that provide information on that but generally speaking it's around $1,000 to $1,500 for an all electric vehicle and maybe a little bit less for plug-in hybrids and many of them are offering incentives for used EVs which is where things get a lot more affordable and when I talk about, do folks, how many, does anybody drive an EV? Yeah, so great, so preaching of the converted. Couple of things, couple of other things that I wanted to mention there is an electric bus pilot program which is funded by the Volkswagen diesel settlement VIC is also administering that but it's kind of a little bit separate from our Drive Electric work but it's gonna be providing funding for I think it's two school districts and one transit agency is the plan there's currently a process underway to select those communities and hopefully we'll have some good success stories to share and then future investments of Volkswagen diesel funding which is what's funding that program could go toward additional purchases of electric buses assuming that they're successful. Another aspect of that Volkswagen diesel settlement is funding that the state has put into charging infrastructure so the state has put in the maximum they can which is 15% of that settlement to charging and some folks imagine that they had applied I know several communities were successful in getting funding through that program the state had two rounds and has offered a million dollars in funding for charging across the state through that. The next step in that program is probably they're saying, it remains to be seen for sure but they're saying at this point that they're likely not go out to another broad sort of request for grant applications but instead we'll be focusing more on closing some of the gaps in DC fast charging which for folks who aren't aware there's three levels of charging there's level one which is plugging into a standard home outlet there's level two which is 240 volt which will give you about up to 20 miles of range per hour of charging so if you're gonna be stopped somewhere for a couple hours it can work for that and there's a lot of level two charging around the state and then there's DC fast charging which will give you an 80% charge in about 30 minutes to an hour and there's a lot less DC fast charging because it's very expensive to install and there are complications with it so the hope is that with roughly 1.5 million that's left in the state's pot for EV charging that they'll be focusing on getting more DC fast charging out there which should make it a little bit easier for people especially if you're thinking about an all electric vehicle. Couple of other things in terms of work that communities have engaged in look at my cheat sheet here so local motion has an electric bike loaner program so if you're not into cars they have a fleet of loaner electric bikes that they've worked with a number of energy committees to offer so people can try to figure out what might work for them including some of the electric cargo bikes which can replace a car for some folks especially if you're in a community that does have good walk bike infrastructure. A lot of events and outreach, a lot of the communities already here have already engaged in that work. Duncan mentioned the Waterbury Leap. We did one in Calis a couple of years ago there was one in Montpelier in the state house lawn just about a week and a half ago as part of Drive Electric Week so a lot of opportunities there for telling folks in the community about their options and fleets. So if your community has any fleet vehicles there may be options that there aren't many good options on the heavy duty truck sort of plow side of things at this point maybe sometime in the future but if they have any of the sort of smaller light duty vehicles we call them maybe think about going electric with those and in terms of some of the land use planning requirements land use is really important when you think about transportation and thinking about how do we get enough people in our communities to make them efficient to serve with public transportation or other options. So land use is really important for transportation broadly but then specifically on the electric vehicle side of things there are opportunities to make sure that EV charging is part of your zoning bylaws or development requirements so the state of Vermont does have some building energy code requirements for EV charging for larger developments but maybe we're thinking about in your community if there are sort of more I don't know stringence quite the right way but more powerful requirements to require new residences or workplaces to be at least ready for EV charging it's a lot easier and cost effective to do that as part of a larger project rather than trying to retrofit charging sometime in the future and just more broadly thinking about parking requirements I know my appeal here has had some controversy about parking and parking garages and that also is one of those levers that communities can pull in terms of reducing or affecting transportation demand so if you're I mean obviously some communities are thinking about doing away with parking requirements entirely which seems like a good idea to me in some respects but we could debate that but in any case at a minimum if you're providing EV charging that that should sort of count toward any parking requirements that the community has in place so you're not sort of penalizing property owner or host site for EV charging for making that investment and making it more available in the community so that a few others I forgot to mention some of the utility programs around electrification go beyond just EVs so they do offer incentives for electric bikes electric mowers now so if you have ideas for other sort of electrification things they may be interested to hear from you or support that work too so thanks My family just got a used EV in the spring and I can tell you we haven't looked back since it's been my wife and I fight over who gets to drive it every day if we have to drive so we already heard a little bit from Jane at the Northfield Energy Committee but what's what I think is so impressive is brand new energy committee that then creates something that's now actually a model for other folks around the state with their ride the bus campaign that they're gonna talk about so I wanna invite Jane up to share that story Thank you John So yeah in my mind the story of all this sort of begins actually when we were approached by a representative from all earth renewables about the potential for local passenger rail service cause the Montpelier to Roxbury stretch of track was seen as a potential for a train line for the blood cars and I remember Nick Sharer came to our meeting I remember assuring him that every year our town gets to vote on the monetary support for the GMT commuter line and that like this line item always receives like 67% support you know always passes so then you know the next week or so we learned that that that year the select board had actually decided not to include that particular ballot item on the ballot and apparently it was just precedent and wasn't actually a requirement to do so so they decided during their budget meetings that they would save $21,000 and not contribute to the bus line that year not put that on the ballot for folks and you know we looked at it as like okay that's like four to five homes property taxes that 21,000 and so then withholding the town's contribution could have caused the bus line to completely stop in in June of this past year of this year 2019 so we just really have completely pulled the rug out of from under people who depend on the bus line um so although we were originally thinking we were going to promote all earth rail we ended up you know responding to this kind of urgent calamity and realizing that we need needed to start by protecting the public transit infrastructure that was already in place so our committee members and others kind of started the community conversation on front porch forum and in the lead up to town meeting many individuals posted their support for the bus and their concern and frustration with you know not having that choice at town meeting day as usual we actually we found a bus champion in a local farmer charlie morse and charlie was willing to lead the charge at town meeting day by proposing that the ballot and be added to the floor vote uh... so there's a pretty lively discussion at town meeting and a lot of a lot of folks came out i think to town meeting just for that we heard people say stuff like you know i depend on the bus line were one car family and you know my husband my wife my wife takes the bus uh... sweet and folks said that you know they uh... like buying it influenced their decision to buy a house in northfield that there was this commuter bus line so there are a few residents who voice concern about low ridership and the actual cost per person per ride but overall supporters of the bus line far outnumber the naysayers and the resolution was added in the past so the uh... the energy committee knew that this was a critical moment to seize and there's there's community momentum around the issue so we wanted to harness that into productive conversation uh... and keep that keep it going so so we hosted a community conversation on april fourth at good measure brewing company which if you haven't been really good beer and it was facilitated by our own sarah wolf uh... we talked there about like barriers to ridership ways to increase ridership and we learned a lot i think you know some things that seemed seemed simple like having bus passes available for purchase at local institutions like the library or businesses uh... there were actually some difficulties around accomplishing this and one strategy that for uh... improving ridership that came out of this this community conversation was uh... to host a ride the bus to work week sort of in the same vein as like to work week uh... so we set a date for this week of events uh... for the week of may twentieth uh... we went around to local businesses and we asked for uh... donations of gift cards and uh... items that we could use for prizes to give out and all that week energy committee members took the bus at various times and talk to riders and folks fill out raffle tickets for prizes uh... we started the week out with uh... treats on the bus baked goods for the monday morning commuters uh... we had a mobile farmers market on the bus on tuesday uh... with uh... cast more selling produce and uh... and farmers market goodies on the bus doing a little cross promotion we did tabling that week uh... and you know really got the gmt bus schedules and information out to folks we took a lot of selfies and and uh... major got photos of happy bus riders posted a lot to social media uh... i think some deltas from for that week or at least one big delta would would be that we we chose a bad week in the grand scheme of things because norwich was no longer in seas in session the writers norwich ridership potential uh... that component was just completely not reach they just kind of had graduations so uh... we had times that week to to be right after bike to work week uh... so then looking forward so this this summer we did receive the five hundred dollar the trans grant uh... for uh... our proposal to them was you know promotion of the commuter bus line and other transportation options uh... we're currently planning our second sustainable transportation week uh... for a week that norwich is in session the week of november fourth and we're going to be seeking to collaborate with some of you particularly montpellier berlin and large employers like cabit norwich the state of vermont and national life uh... for the commuter aspect of that week we're also hoping to sort of branch beyond the bus line instead of doing a ride the bus week doing a sustainable trans transportation week uh... to talk about uh... the hitching post the govremont app biking electric bikes ebbs school bus ridership and walkability so we'll see how that goes so through the work we've done today we've also learned that the bus schedule is not super compatible with the schedules of large employers and so gmt had acknowledged that that hadn't really been evaluated in a while so that's something we're working on helping with and we're uh... starting to do some commuter surveys to find out where people go and how we can connect folks for uh... for carpooling so cabit and norwich have also expressed interest in incentivizing bus travel for students faculty and staff so we plan on following up with that and we just continue to update our select board and let them know that uh... transportation is a major piece of of energy committees work and that we have to ensure that there are more rather than fewer options for getting around so uh... with my work i get to spend time as i mentioned in in different vermont towns and often are among a group of people sort of confronting the conundrum of uh... well two conundrums one that i feel like jane just talked about which is we haven't exist we want better transit resources right we want better bus service we want more convenient bus service but we hear the valid response which is you've just got to increase ridership right you've got to get more people on those buses and then we can make a bigger investment uh... vermont actually invest more money in their public transit resources than any other state in the country in terms of how much discretionary dollars we put in and so like that that ride the bus week to me encapsulates that uh... that effort of how do we actually use this awesome resource that we have and then we can make it better we can make it more convenient and we can make it serve more folks the other thing i often hear in communities is we've got all these cars driving around with driver how do we match those cars passengers and uh... uh... phoenix uh... here who's our next speaker has i think done it like what i'd what i'm so impressed with is he just sees the moment and said you know what we're gonna create this thing that matches riders and drivers and and we're just gonna launch it and uh... it's been awesome to see the trajectory so uh... phoenix uh... you're alright everybody alright so uh... i'm phoenix uh... you're the first slide people know me as phoenix in montpellier my given names adam my mom still calls me adam but uh... i'm uh... what sustainable montpellier might call car liberated uh... and uh... i don't own a car uh... even though i live eight miles north of here in Worcester uh... so my maybe what v trans might call me as i'm in need of mobility solutions uh... especially in the winter uh... that's my bike that i took around europe uh... for a whole year in which i still ride in south side right now uh... it's gonna get me home tonight hopefully so yeah i i kind of exist in this interstitial space where it's there's no bus to Worcester have money to buy an e v uh... and but there's a bunch of cars going in between Worcester and montpellier every day so i was committed to trying a uh... winter commuting with my bike uh... this winter and i did it and it was a proof of concept it's possible uh... but it wasn't very fun it was kind of cold and uh... so i i quickly realized there's got to be a better way to do this with all these cars driving past me how can i how can we uh... take advantage of this resource that is just like it's like the problem is the solution so you can go to the next side so this winter i decided to try uh... hitching from my road so i'd actually just stick my thumb out in the first car that passed me every time for like a month straight would always pick me up and so and they're always going to montpellier so um... you know how many cars uh... from surrounding towns are constantly commuting to montpellier uh... so i through that uh... those acts of generosity and my amazement of how easy and simple and how i was connecting with my community meeting people i wouldn't have met i met everybody on my road uh... i know all my neighbors now how awesome that was and that generosity was born the hitching post so the problem is the solution we have all these single occupied vehicles like to call so v's and how can we uh... actually make that a way that we can actually have a transportation service uh... so utilizing that resource so the hitching post actually is a literally a wooden post it's a cedar four by four local cedar and it's uh... put in the ground or attached to something and um... it has a simple flag on the front this this post there's two posts right now in the first trial run that started in july this post is at birch grove baking in the other ones at the post office cafe in wister i'll explain how it works but you put up the flag in the direction you want to go it signals to drivers that you're looking for a ride drivers pull up and you get in the car with them and on your way so uh... it's uh... flexible and efficient you don't have to run on a fixed bus schedule you don't have to think i'm going to miss my bus did i miss my bus is there a bus running today cars are always running so especially during commuting hours there's constantly traffic uh... so if you're a cyclist like me it's like that's not great but when i want to ride it's actually really great so uh... it's community building like i said i got to meet all these different people i'm constantly meeting new people uh... it's it's really awesome it's like uh... it's just uh... it's a great way uh... to share a short ride with someone eight-minute ride and uh... and so i get to know just a little snapshot of who these people are uh... before we get to our place and then we're on our way uh... and it's also empowering uh... participants who take part in this because this is something people can do right now there's no there's no buy-in while there is it's a dollar i'll explain that uh... but uh... there's no buy-in you don't have to do anything you just you just have to like just uh... step up and just say you know what i'm not going to drive today or you know what i'm gonna pick someone up today because i really feel like that's the right thing to do i want you to riding around when we're thinking about this hierarchy of carbon emissions it's true yes you can half your carbon footprint when you uh... share the ride with someone but you can also what i heard recently in a presentation this room not long ago was about the multiplier fact which i think is really cool i mean how much is it that we actually multiply when we come together uh... we have all these communities we have all these people we have things happening and when we come together those things are multiplied quite a bit so i think that it's not just about emissions it is but it's also about bringing communities together bringing people together the how do we get more hitching posts so that's me hitching post material around on my bike that's pretty fun those pieces are actually brought my friend uh... goes to the generator space which is a maker space in burlington and uh... laser etches the etching post into the beautiful cedar so it turns out really nice and uh... my partner works at timber homes and she actually helps me fabricate them and get them operational so we go to the next slide so i thought of this thing called coffee pooling what are natural meeting places where people are uh... talking there they're slowing down there just hanging out sometimes uh... and not their cafes typically and in a lot of these little towns that we have that don't have fixed bus services uh... they have little cafes so uh... i thought this thing called coffee pooling and how it works is you go into the cafe you give the cafe a dollar and they give you a coffee corn which is a a laser etched little piece of wood and you go out to the etching post which is outside the cafe put up the flag and when you get a ride you give it to the driver it's just an active of uh... saying thank you for picking me up and then that little coin the driver can actually go to any of the participating cafes or stores as a spreads and it's a one-dollar certificate so if they pick someone up once a day five days a week they've got five bucks on the weekend spent no smart phone or app required yet we live in vermont so most of us don't get cell service where we live so that was a requirement maybe in the future that we'll see so um... use of it's been sporadic but very positive fern um... lives in Worcester she was having car issues she wrote it for about two weeks getting rides back and forth Montpelier uh... now she's hitching actually sticking her thumb out to get to other towns that don't have hitching posts that maybe will have hitching posts soon Rick lives in Worcester he uh... had to get to Montpelier to go to an automotive appointment he dropped off his car and then went back to the hitching post back to Worcester where he was and then later in the day took the hitching post back into Montpelier to get his car Liz lives in Elmar that's my mom I have to have to say she rides it every weekend to go to the farmers market she parks in Worcester and uh... coffee pools into Montpelier to go to the farmers market back so what about funding how do we make this happen um... what's great about it is it's really lightweight it's really simple it's a post okay next slide um... so from the state we talked about the five hundred dollar grant that's um... that is uh... two-thirds of the cost of making this thing it's about seven hundred fifty bucks including time and labor the other portion of it has been covered by uh... municipalities so uh... Worcester got the five hundred dollar grant in Montpelier and uh... emtick is covering a large portion of the other hitching posts that may be coming uh... private donations to i have a GoFundMe page it's all just kind of been like grass roots so we just want to I just want to see this spread and I want to see less cars on the road and I want to see more people coming together uh... finding so far yeah I said it's kind of sporadic use but definitely people in riding it proof of concept it works it's way faster than waiting for a bus and you don't like is that there's no schedule so last night I waited about thirty seconds before I got picked up like I said there's one at the post office cafe one at birch Grove baking in the morning from post office cafe people are waiting less than five minutes on average it's key also the commuting hours are the the great time to do it on the weekends are also good times um... enthusiasm to expand so northfield we're talking with northfield about getting one set up uh... getting carrier roasting into it red hen baking is in middle sex is on board they're gonna have one frenzy coffee and hardwick i'm in talks with a hunger mount co-op about getting one there uh... and also uh... yeah i think there's another one where it talks with uh... maple corner as well so uh... it's spreading and we're hoping to have more post set up soon that's just something that i wrote i think it's nice yeah we can do better we can you know four out of five cars if something like that or single occupied vehicles let's be let's let's do something different about that okay so be a pioneer not an s o v you can you can pioneer this you can help get it set up in your town you can be a writer you can be a driver spread the word i just build a hitching post the hitching post dot org website it's pretty awesome check it out get involved we're on face book i hope to be not on face book but that's where we are right now thank you very much that's it things we talk about how nobody can get to the park and ride unless you drive because it's two miles on route two and you take your life into your hands but there's traffic backed up the stoplight every morning how many people could go to the park and park jump in the car to carpool to the car which is a little strange it could work somewhere along the way and so we've heard a lot about ideas now let's talk about action so what we're gonna do is we're gonna move into workgroups and we've got throughout workgroups discussion groups action groups you name it you would like it to be we're gonna talk about three topics walk and bike ability ride share in transit and electrification so as i was starting off by saying you know for for twenty five years for as long as i've thirty years lives i've lived in northfield anyway every time i pass a hitchhike my reaction is anger that's anger because what i'm saying in my head is i'm mad at you because you're making me feel guilty because i want to pick you up i want to pick you up and i can't because it's not safe for me to do it so therefore i'm mad at you because you provoked but that's you know uh... i wouldn't have them you know i wouldn't have any trouble all getting right into popular anytime i want to take my thumb out on main street and i can't do that either because it wouldn't be safe so what's the response for me is either driver or a passenger i don't have an answer i max i can only speak for my experience uh... you see you appear very different than me as a person sure i mean i didn't mean that negatively yeah no that's a great question your young guy i'm an older woman i think there's a certain uh... i'm speaking from my own place but uh... yeah there's a certain understanding or like stigma i think around hitchhiking where it is perceived as potentially dangerous and uh... that's okay i think that's okay i think you know if one in ten cars you know were to stop and because they felt comfortable then that would be huge success uh... so most people if they're scared to pick someone up they don't have to there's probably other people that will and and yeah and just my experience is that uh... you know we're we're doing this like as like little communities like we're not like new york city where we're small little world communities and the people that have picked me up most of the time in people i already know so it's a small tight-knit group of people uh... and and so you know what i've heard some mother is actually saying that all of my children read this what i'm gonna say is uh... when they get to the big arts teaching post and someone pulls over your ride and they don't know that person is going to say you know i actually i'm going to wait for someone that i do know to get a ride with and uh... but the chances of them not knowing this person probably so uh... that's that's not actually addressing your question of like saying like what about i mean things something could happen sure but you know something can happen when you're driving alone to work too you could crash your bike when you're biking you hit by a car or whatever you know there's a lot of different things that can happen so it's not it's not perfect it's just a it's one way that we can start thinking about how we get around how we move our body around the state i'm sorry for injecting maybe inappropriate humor but i can't help it because it's so uh... it's just something i saw a week or so ago totally unrelated to this and that's two people in a car and the one guy saying well i was going to you to pick me up i mean you took a gamble how light how what's the odds that i might be a mass murderer and the other guy says i figured they couldn't be two of us in one place how would some of the rest of you addressed that concern if you started a hitching post in your community i think the formality of the jacobos kind of alleviates some of the safety concerns like your community members know what it is and it kind of takes away that safety concern most right away oh i know that person's looking for rides won't be there i'm going to walk you there just want to spin around clockwise counterclockwise there is there any inexpensive electronic modalities like a camera take a small photo of the person so that they know exactly is pitching i don't want to so fear here is a great idea uh... but uh... small thing that will take a small snapshot of the camera of the car driver's license for drivers and the person general sense of that that they see who's doing it and that help is there a cheap way to do that probably not but uh... it's not that it's out of the question but uh... actually like what's your name amanda i really like which sentiment is that actually that has come up for two or the hitching posts as they are now for coffee pooling are public gathering spaces not like down some weird road was just you and the other person is like your you know the camera could be everybody else in the community whose was around you know it's a very visible your held in the container of your community and i think that is going to be our best uh... way to like create safety i would say you also have control for those of you who have this you can that's right snap a photo of a license plate send it to your partner that's a good idea it doesn't address the there's still a fear factor right i was going to say the fear factor i think part of it is looking at this as a community the things that happen we've kind of built up in the country we've built up a somewhat defensive approach to our strangers i think it's really healthy to look at that i remember feeling really offended the first time i walked into up to the high school one of my sons was still a student and all of it i didn't even know they were going to have cameras and like you now have to bring yourself into the building and feeling really alienated by that which is crazy because we know pretty much every single teacher and every single person in the building but it's hard it's just hard to reconcile these things together so i wanted to say with other forms of transit i really like the word that i hear more and more of shared transit rather than mass transit because mass transit sounds like mass killer's mass you just hear it and shared transit sounds more like a phoenix it's ingeniously come up with i've noticed i use uber two and a half of my kids live in boston now and the other one is in burlington part time is moving to boston and so when i go down there it's a lot easier to get around town by using uber and lift and it's really sad that peter kelman left but he's working on options for seniors in the area he works with the senior and that's a very vulnerable population i have to say it's fascinating to me that a private organization like uber and lift can feel very safe and it really does in these big cities which have problems and the way it works is every time you use it you rate the driver and they compete because they get calls more often the higher they're rated and they bend over backwards to be friendly to keep their cars clean as you kind of hook up you see the license plate on the car, the make of the car the person you're guessing you could share that if you wanted to and it's all trackable so it feels very very safe there's no money that changes hands in your account, your credit card account so it's taking out a lot of the fear and i've used it in cities where i don't know anybody and i feel very safe so i think there are actually a couple of uber drivers in Montpelier who it's just really hard to get them when they're working to get a ride but i think that that has a lot of potential as well i wanted to bring up the example i have a lot of friends in Worcester and some of them are getting older and they can't drive into Montpelier and they are truly homebound in the winter they're afraid of driving on icy dirt roads and we've got to come up with a way for them to stay at home that is the most efficient use of resources and there's got to be a way to do this because short of my driving out and they need to go to the store they've got to be able to call anything if there's a microtransit in Montpelier that i know Elizabeth is working on or Lyft or someone can get into the hitching post it just would really improve the quality of life for a lot of people if they didn't need a car and then i'm going to say one more thing and then i'm going to be quiet for the rest of the time i had a really good opportunity to live in Germany 30 years ago that's a really long time ago 30 years ago and i worked in a big city, Stuttgart and i lived in a tiny village that was no larger than Worcester called Erdmannhausen it was about an hour away by public commute Erdmannhausen was mostly older people some younger families and almost no one had a car 30 years ago the only reason why people had cars was to go to their version of Costco to get a lot of groceries at one time but i could walk less than 300 feet and get on a bus the bus took me to the Marbach which is the next village so it was like from Worcester to Montpelier Marbach is the size of Montpelier i got on the commuter train there to go to Stuttgart and then i took the street car inside Stuttgart to get to my office the whole thing took less than 60 minutes in good weather i could ride my bike to the Marbach station and i would cut my commute by 15 minutes everybody could do that everybody could get anywhere actually in the world because using public transportation let's call it shared transportation people literally didn't need a car and they also didn't need to move into large cities i feel like that's the future for Vermont and i really hope everyone's heads together we can figure out a way to keep our network of small villages, viable villages and not be trying to like change our way which is a very sustainable way of living except for the single car drivers it's pretty sustainable how we live on the earth here and i'd like to figure out how we can do that in the future thank you for letting me tell us that anyone else is going to say that we're sharing something else maybe a sign near the hitching post that says this is our safe travel spot or something like that because i think that it's like seeing signs in my neighborhood somebody put up slow down it's our neighborhood and it's actually made an effect on that intersection of people slowing down so it's our community our safe travel spot there is a sign on one of the cut-through roads in Richmond it says drive as if your child lived here mine does and it slowed me down in an instant just like that and it does every time it became personal go ahead alright thank you i'll get about three or four things to say i'll try to be as quick as i can first of all, regarding the perception that hitchhiking is dangerous or it might be disreputable or anything like that there was a time when it wasn't really that so much and i think we all should understand that probably you know everybody over the age of 50 in this room has been gamed in one way or another during the 1960s because a lot of young people were using hitchhiking and forgetting around pretty long distances the FBI actually had a national campaign to smear hitchhiking as a practice i mean it's been done we've been gamed that way as somebody who has done a lot of hitchhiking in the past and in fact i just hitchhiked about a week and a half ago when i needed to get to a garage to pick up my car that was being inspected the i'm here to say yeah let's do it the Uber has already been mentioned here as a service that documents a transaction of this sort which provides a great measure of security and Nick you said yourself or you pointed out that Airbnb does the same thing before you can use that service you have to provide a profile for yourself and the providers of the lodgings have to provide a profile and be extensively vetted by Airbnb to be providers within that system i know there's overheads involved with this but once you're documented in the system if you have any evil intentions perhaps carrying them out um i'm really interested in the fact that you've created these coffee tokens as a sort of a complimentary currency i think that's really cool have you, and no pun intended but have you figured out how many of those you have to make for a particular microtransit district to have sufficient liquidity hahahaha i'm just interested how many of these things have to be circulated yeah so with the first launch between Worcester and Montpellier is 300 tokens about a third of those have been circulated now so they've been moved around so they do get shifted around to different cafes as these spread there's more people joining they're gonna end up at certain cafes and they're gonna have to be back to other cafes and so there is going to be a fixed amount of coffee coins in existence no inflation right and it's just a simple accounting ledger where you're just saying there's more people getting redeemed here and more people getting bought here well then i will buy the ones off the one that are the cafe that's getting them mostly redeemed and sell them to the one that's selling more so if they get low they have to buy they have to get more they have to get some from the other cafes so it equals it out because the cafes that are redeeming them are actually they're like giving back 1 dollar gift certificates so to equal the playing field that's how they thank you and as one last thing i'd like to share with you a way of getting a ride that has invariably worked for me it's extremely effective but before i share this with you you all must promise me that you will never use this unless you're really desperate you must not use this you make a sign and the sign says Jesus would stop you wouldn't believe that hopefully we won't need that but i hope not yeah well i'd like to go back to the process and as wonderful as the work that you're doing i thought what's happening in northfield is amazing and that i think that we still need buses and that we need somehow to get that ridership that you know up in Montpelier i walk every morning and i see this one bus and i'm not sure i think it's from way out it's the red bus so there's this one guy there's only one guy that gets off this bus and with his bikes and then he rides down the hill down to Montpelier and i thought this is nuts you know there's gotta be and it's marketing basically and i'd love to hear what people think about how we get more marketing and not necessarily hiring a marketing person which is expensive but how do you get those people to ride and i think one thing that i and maybe other people know this especially the regional planning commission is there any what are the surveys within communities or within a region of how of getting a feel of how people are willing to at least try to travel from the hitching post to a bus to on demand transit to satellite parking and coming into town do we have a sense of what people will actually do many of them express that it comes down to what you're doing you're used to doing you got your routine down you get the kids out the door you got them on the bus and like anything else from weight loss to not smoking to whatever you're doing when you've got a routine it's breaking that routine the other piece i think but is this a survey? this is not an official survey by us but whenever you ask i will say i used to work up in limoio county and we did do that survey and people basically said i'm not going to use it because what i have now works so as long as what i have now works i think people are comfortable going what does change for them is when there's a personal ask from a person they know versus someone they don't know one of next roles for us in the upcoming year is green mountain transit has a program called bus buddies so you as a bus rider offer to be a buddy to someone who wants to try out transit and it's just a little yeah i don't really know what do i do with my money how do i get on, where do i stop help me plan my route so he's recruiting both potential riders and bus buddies and what happened in chitlin county is they got a whole lot of bus buddies and not a lot of people to ride but it's making that personal connection that's when they get potential riders is there a ridership going up? it is but you can't just attribute it to that where ridership has gone up the midday route in northfield went up is that your campaign? i hope so but it went up and there are other places it went up and there are other places it goes down the number one thing we know is when gas prices go up transit ridership goes up when gas prices go down transit ridership goes down that talks to choice our kid activists have to get on their parents backs i don't know if that was helpful no no very our kid activists also have to get on the bus yes i work in k-12 education around the state and one of the things we talk a lot about is transportation there's i think a lot of the roots of how we get around start when we're in school and less and less kids do actually choose to get on the bus and i think that as we're talking about those campaigns around busing and public busing for adults we need to be thinking about youth it's also an interesting conversation with the hitching post because i heard you say that you know people who would feel comfortable with their kids doing it but i think a lot of parents wouldn't feel comfortable with their kids doing something like that i think the photograph thing actually could boost that a little bit but we need to be thinking not just about how we as adults get around but also how the youth get around and the seniors get around it so there are a few less options i heard an interesting proposal at an energy meeting that like making school buses multi-use for like senior citizens and i know that brings up a lot of safety concerns of like random citizens getting on the bus with school bus full of children but these big diesel buses in our rural communities with like five kids on them and then what i'm sorry let alone did it for seven years many large cities yeah makes sense yeah exactly and they're like traveling every road they're like these far out back roads yeah i mean it's a it's a classic you know wasting asset that just sits there idle for probably 99% of the service life for a dwindling population of school students did it work out Deb might have more information than i did i just learned from Deb that it went down well out of business it was constrained to float on its own bottom financially yeah the town funded the whole thing oh so the town subsidized it and they decided the subsidy wasn't worth it in that general regard let me note that all three of the major subway lines in New York City started out as private for profit corporations and it it didn't last long in that mode transit is public good and it has to be subsidized I have a couple of points I love your idea the problem is I come from I'm sorry Philadelphia that's that's Philadelphia and I love it here I think everyone has been so kind and wonderful to me but there's one concern that I have the buses don't run too late they don't run late enough now the needs of businesses are extremely stringent anywhere you go in America and I understand it I get it but the issue is the buses stop at one point if the boss needs you to work a little later it's a barrier to work it's a win-win situation the bus drivers will make more money because they'll work later hours they'll hire more bus drivers in my opinion I hope it helps students if there's more bus lines to say Goddard and the other colleges students who wish to work late on their papers in the library removes barriers to work the disabled people there are many disabled people in elderly people they want to feel safe so the bus is a great way to get on and feel safe everyone wants to feel safe the way we can pay for it I mean it's actually pretty easy if we only maybe pay 50 cents extra if you can afford it and have say a program where you show your disabled card and get that 50 cents taken down back to $1 so it adds up can I address that point just by reporting how this very problem has been approached in the upper valley on both sides of the river and the people who fund it are the major employers like hypertherm and Dartmouth hospital and Dartmouth College you know trip timers of the economy there they offer something called the guaranteed ride home when the local free transit system which they also pay for when that stops running in the evening if somebody has to work late picks up a phone and somebody comes and takes them home that exists here too it applies to coffee pool according to Ross but it's kind of an emergency well yes it is but it's good to have they know actuarial math they have a pretty good idea but it's going to cost them your national life up here they know how to do that so the last thing I want to bring up briefly is that some people are not very social they they keep themselves it doesn't make them bad people they're very good people they just might be a little shy and they might not want to hitchhike in the winter months as you said it's pretty difficult to get around and I'm glad you brought that up the buses I think a later bus service would solve that issue magnificently I mean these things are awesome you know so yeah thank you so I just wanted to ask how many of you filled out the recent v-trans survey online that went into the economics the time that jessie good, 1, 2, 3 pretty good school, of course you did pretty good show of hands thank you I think it's so important that we are advocates for when we're talking about bus lines for public transportation I'm part of an advocacy group that's in washington that's always going after public transportation dollars and I think that it hoops all of us amongst our many other things every once in a while they'll have a big campaign where something's in congress and you have to call or write but most of the time you don't do anything and I think to get hooked up to those types of groups are tremendously important it's been a dream of mine that we would have a bus of group 14 ever since I came back in 2000 when did I come back 2007 or 8 or something like that anyway I'm so grateful that that's getting started up and I really hope that we can be responsive and really I happen to know someone who's at darn tough in her cabin and they want to hire 20 to 30 employees but the timing of the bus routes just don't coincide somehow we can get everybody on the same page and really work with the business and the schedules it'd be great to see a whole bunch of people riding the bus from my feeling to work down in Northfield and that discussion is happening right now do you see one of the questions I'm going to ask you guys is do you see ways that we can work collectively to increase transit or build some of these other options that are out there region wide as well as locally you do work in your communities what do you think the idea of sharing and brainstorming is phenomenal as soon as you started mentioning pictures it's like well Northfield the common is on camera just put smile on camera and have your hitching pose right there and you're covered I think a lot of it is how we define the word bus I think of like a passenger van that can be made so people get in and out really efficiently I remember traveling in Asia when I was early 20s and they had something called a bemo which was about the size of a minivan but it had a door in the back and a door in the front and it had two long benches along the side of the vehicle so it was made to get in and out and people would travel with like roosters and cages and sacks of beans and I mean like it was ridiculous what would get stuck to people but it was a free flow in and out and these were privately owned and they would go it was funny because when you were further up the path there would be a fork in the road to go in one city or another when one was coming up you would actually do this to the driver to let him know which city or village you were going to so it was like self-regulating it cost people like five cents and it seems to me if what I understand Elizabeth is working on could be that that network between communities seems like we need something that goes late hours that goes long distances it's not just staying inside one municipal boundary those things are really key and I don't know how maybe there is a different vehicle circulating all around all the time that one is dedicated to going out to the Worcester one's dedicated to going Northfield they all come into Montpelier so maybe if you're going from Northfield to Worcester you change in Montpelier that's the part that but it seems to me it's a small and nimble vehicle was your question though how we continue to work together do you see it in the conversation of were we transit and ride share are there opportunities to work together to kind of increase our impact or does it need to be local I think she made a really good point as to why it needs to be connected because it's all about connection access back and forth between communities but I was going to respond directly one of the issues that ties into safety and all of those ties into Germany and what they do is we have to acknowledge and own the fact that we are an incredibly liability conscious litiginous society and even something like the trading post can get sued and we can't produce vehicles like you're describing because they wouldn't be allowed on the roads trains cost double to produce in the United States because of our weight of trains because of our safety requirements so that's another piece of the mix that we have to recognize we're fighting against part of our own problem I just thought of Laura Byron and I made this little thing I put up over here that is just the beginning because we don't have a coffee pooling on it and various other things but here maybe I'll just hold it up but it's the idea that when you are kind of liberated you have choices and so we were talking about local choices in green here which are electric bike, on demand microtransit and then you move into commuter bus, commuter rail carshare being a little bit of both inter going in between cities and also inter regional and then inter regional potentials and so I think the more we look at options and there are so many that are becoming spontaneous like what you're doing and I just think that it's important for us to realize and get out and I think that this is actually going to be used in an article soon in The Bridge to get that idea out there that we have choices that we are in a multimodal situation and the more options we have what Sandy's trying to talk about is the more options that we have whether with volunteer drivers or new things like on demand microtransit that will start to be able to it takes all of those things in order for someone to feel like they can give up their personal vehicle. They have to be able to travel within their town, in between towns and in between regions so we just wanted to start to get people thinking about that and how we can work together creatively within our region to get in between towns is what you're asking of us, Bonnie. How do we do that? How can we meaning John Ian and I in our organizations help facilitate your work to do that but also have those conversations? I'm glad you asked. I love the idea, I think you might have mentioned it, repurposing buses I think that would be wonderful. Also, there's a saying I really don't want to bring this Buddhism into it. But I'm gonna anyway, sorry anyway, you take a candle, right? You pass it on it's like a flame. Okay, then you got all these candles, all these flames if we can talk to the other legislatures and lawmakers and other towns somehow I don't know how we're gonna do it we can create transfer systems and it's almost like a relay and more of these repurposed buses, the later hours the more workers we get even some volunteers here and there it could work it could genuinely work and it would cut down and on emissions it would convince people, yeah they can trust this system and once they can trust that system they can get where they're going and everyone might give up their cars. I'm wondering if there's an opportunity with the opening of the new transit center in Montpelier to make a bus about buses just as a timely piece yeah, I agree I think that what Phoenix is doing is absolutely amazing it's so exciting that it's already kind of spreading out it seems to me that's an immediate thing that needs to be encouraged and then I wanted to also mention that when I lived in Germany I got everybody had one pass and I think it was something like $70 a month that one pass covered everything and that made a big difference to have all those choices available with one pass and then the way it works in Boston with my kids is it's just online apps so they just with each of the apps they use they just have their credit cards so when they're trying to make a given transportation decision they just look to see what the, and there's actually I think apps that they look at all three different ride companies and give you a choice but there is even one in Boston for private car rentals like you can hook up with let's say John in Somerville go over to John's house and get his car and drive up to Vermont and so they've covered all of the reasons why someone might ever purchase a car it's already covered so whether it's in the private market or one pass it seems like for instance, if there was a group that had some car like ten cars and you could sign up with your pass to use the bus and just pay, I don't know they go on a five rides and then have a car for a day so if someone wanted to go to Costco or go to Dartmouth for a medical appointment they didn't have to put a lot of effort into arranging it I do want to speak to just really quickly not the seamlessness piece of that but there are a couple existing really good resources for transit planning like there is an app called Transit which is a worldwide app which I've tested a little bit here and seems to work pretty well and go over one actually has some links to some really good mostly bus planning but both local routes from Montpelier to Boston what's the quickest way to do that and those are available on the resources table I'm trying to remember who's spoken how so in terms of how CVRPC can help, I think that we're covering a lot of topics here and so that doesn't really create action and creates ideas so we have some really practical things happening right now the hitching posts so maybe we could get a few of our communities together at this kind of little round table and say okay how can we work together how can we get more hitching posts and how can we network and kind of market together that's one thing Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission and then the other one is the Route 14 bus and the Transit Center make a fuss about buses that's good tag Commissionality so right there is impressive currently the opening date got moved to about November 4th which is now the new start date for the Morrisville to Barrie commuter as well that start date gosh it wasn't being highlighted in the opening ceremonies it's about housing because it's such a great housing project as well and city efforts so if anyone wanted to get transit boosted in that it seems like we could have a little separate round table just on marketing transit around that same time Central Vermont transit in general which connects to that hub and then my other question is I'm really interested in the on-demand sharing and I would be interested in a separate group just to talk about that what's happening now what are the possibilities how my community can be involved and I suspect that would love to talk about that and there's also a working group starting with capstone and CVRPC focusing on some of those transportation needs and I will say starting with us but it's a larger group of how do we meet those rural transportation needs that transit isn't going to serve it's a trunk line it's not a two-year front door I have a question for Phoenix yeah I'm done oh okay I'm done okay my question is does hitching posts have any way of measuring ridership between any particular set of points and my point in asking this is that if I were say a jitney scale transit operator and I realized that hitching posts was moving say 200 people a day in your dreams from Worcester down to down to Montpelier and back I think about putting a jitney on that line with a jitney? a little bus like a 20 passenger a 20 passenger bus and I you know and I see this potentially if it demonstrated the demand as being a bridge between on-demand rideshare and a more formalized transit sort of thing that would be a really cool place for you to be in the ecosystem yeah your rides are your tokens actually we can monitor that through the rideshare app and go a lot with people we could put the hitching posts within the go a lot app it's already on the map right now but yeah they're talk to your developers and they're like okay next spring okay I'm just saying that maybe sooner so I have a form right now that the cafes report this Google form put a chip in the coin and track where they go but that would be a great study in itself a role of the RPC could be to put the hitching posts on a map if they're not already there all the hitching posts and then a conversation dialogue around this could be to look at where potential hitching posts could be like at the transit center on November 4th we could try hitching posts that would be a great PR opportunity hitching posts should be at every node could I we're stacked a little bit I think you had your hand up I know Jane had hers I just had something quick on working together I thought if we could do a sustainable transit week that was central Vermont wide big and supported we found in Northfield the bus signs, the stops are very small the yard signs we could all put up all the same this is a bus stop public transit is free for that week so people who that was a barrier for might be likely to hop on we could do like transit fare or something central Vermont wide at the transit center I just wanted to follow up on Jane's and Sarah are doing a survey and that survey could actually serve as a template if it were expanded to the other town yeah so yeah we can share with anyone maybe share with you the draft that we have right now and then I could be sharing around do you have a comment? I just, you know I'm so thrilled to hear all of this effort and all of this energy and all of these absolutely fabulous ideas my concern or my worry is that sort of what Northfield experienced and we're experiencing more clear is the lack of government backing for these things and including the state legislature and I think without the political will of really forcing our representatives both on the town and state level it's going to be really hard to pull things off to working out a policy level in addition to the and also a political strategy that says this is what we have to do sitting down with you know even within our town sitting down with our representatives and saying look you guys you got to be on board with this this is what's happening this is why we need support either through the town or through the state we need those resources to be funneling into you know whether it's buses or on demand transit or whatever it is they've got to be on board but we can't you invited it and when you have that conversation with some of them and all of them in case you didn't realize it thank them for doubling transit funding in the past 10 years because they did do that and that's why we have such a robust investment in Vermont and we all want more yes it is true Vermont actually does spend more of transit than other rural states pretty much anywhere in the country so we have that problem as well but a question about hitching posts what happens when we have a lot of them so it's being in Montpelier so if we use the transit center as a hitching post how would we know how would we go Northfield Middlesex Worcester yes I thought about this and that's why I approached Tonga Mountain Co-op because I thought they were actually a natural neighborhood gathering place there's lots of them around town but you could have one hitching post with multiple flags that were different colors or like a little placard that you could just flip down saying oh I'm going to Worcester then people can just see the flag or see the little name tag that's one way to do it it's your version of doing it yes are you a little one doing it it's your signal Middlesex so I just wanted to say when we are looking at the multimodal diagram that we just did together we have workers with poor people who are working on the idea of creating a transportation club which to our knowledge has never happened in the entire country and so we have been in touch with people who are who give assistance to food co-ops and we have there's a wonderful manual that we're using and we're doing just a market analysis right now for that idea of my pillar and so I just wanted to put that on your radar that we're at least doing that research because that idea of one-stop shopping you know the kind of Walmart of transportation I'm sorry either way you can go and you can pay a fee and it allows you to get cars here or it allows you to do one in a microtransit or it allows you to take GMT or it allows you to take the all-earth rail supplied blood cars on the yet to be determined operator of the railroad and so you know that kind of thing where Justin's a nice group of people and if anybody's interested in learning more definitely if you can as the regional planning commission work on trying to help this consolidation effort it would make it different for instance if there was a zip car as part of this mix and it used more units to get a zip car so be it but if for instance an employer could actually provide their employees with passes so it felt free to people it would be amazing it's really uncomfortable but we need to raise our gas prices at the tank and what other countries do is they take a tax on gasoline and pay for public transportation


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