Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live stage performance here in Las Vegas for SAS Innovate 2024. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with my co-host and co-founder Dave Vellante, restructing the seeds of noise. We're back here with another SAS partner conversation, Gavin Day, EVP, executive president with SAS, and Tiffany Borghardt, CUBE alumni, vice president, general manager, fabric, strategic ISVs, Azure, Databricks, and AppDev, Microsoft. That's the longest idol I've ever heard. You got a lot going on. We do. And you have really interesting background from a startup that came into Azure. We're going to, that's really relevant. Gavin, great to see you again. As well, thank you. All right, so let's talk about the SAS, Microsoft relationship. Let's set the table. Give us a brief overview, and then we'll dig in. We'll dive in. Yes, so been strategic partners for four years. That was after kind of exhaustive research that we did with all of the cloud providers. And first decision was Azure is our strategic cloud provider. We run SAS internally on Azure. And second of all, we moved SAS cloud for our customers into Azure and then brought our products into the Azure marketplace. So really it's been a four-year partnership of build it and then go to market together. And one of the things we've said a lot about this partnership is that we're better together and we're meeting our customers where they are. It's been really, really exciting for us the last couple years. Dip, do you mention that they were a design partner? I'm not sure if that's public information or is that confidential? No, I guess it's out there now, but can you describe what that means and specifically why and when and the timing of the importance of that and what are you designing in? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first thing, thank you so much for running on Azure. We appreciate it. It's a very deep collaboration that we have. And as part of our Microsoft Fabric platform, which is a truly open platform, we have had SAS participate with us as a design partner from the early days. In fact, last year at Ignite, we introduced this and announced this and we'll be sharing more over the next several months. So explain Fabric a little bit more because you're unifying all your tools under a single environment. And I have some follow-up questions on how you're handling multiple models versus single models and what the future of apps looks like. Absolutely. So Fabric is an end-to-end unified analytics platform. It brings together the power of Power BI. Azure Data Factory, our Synapse Warehouse, Lake Houses, and so much more. Real-time analytics in a single unified platform where the foundation is One Lake. One Lake is what brings together the data and it's open formats. And so no longer do you have walled gardens of data, it truly is open. Your data could be in Azure, of course, but it might be in other clouds and it comes together in One Lake and all of these workloads run natively on top. So that's what Microsoft Fabric enables, a seamless software as a service experience for data analysts, data scientists, all the way to business users. So very wide range of personas, all being able to get a lot more with their data. And Fabric unifies the metadata models as well, correct? Metadata goes with the data. It's a big part of it, whether it is, you know, it's files in One Lake, whether they're tables, all of this is in, we use our Delta Parquet, Delta Lake format, which is completely open. And so you can run other workloads on top of One Lake as well. What's the strategy as, first of all, I love the open, want to get into that, dive into the lake if you will. Databricks last event they had really changed the game in our opinion. We've reported on that when they started to open up the formats. They're like, well, wait, we just want to move faster. We don't want all this thing. Snowflake made the market. But you have us now, NextGen, Data Lake, new way to get insights out of data. What's the differentiation for Microsoft? What's the core strategy? Should it be open to integrate in, seamless integration? What's the core differentiated that you guys are putting forward? Absolutely, right? Open is really important for us. And there's many forms of open, right? There's open formats, which is, we've started off with one, right? We'll do more in the future. There's open source projects we're already involved with, like X-Table. And then there's open APIs, T-SQL, KQL, all of these well-understood APIs that anyone can integrate into. And then the open platform. And that's where SAS comes in as a partner to really bring in a native experience along with our other Microsoft workloads. So we have Power BI and our warehouse and Lakehouse, and we'll have the SAS decision builder as a native experience, which we'll be talking about right now. So this is what I want to ask you about, because as an analyst, you try to squint through this stuff and say, okay, looks like Microsoft is going to one model, maybe two models, whether it's open AI or mistrial. And then you mentioned Databricks. They seem to be trying to build applications with multiple models. Now you got SAS decision builder, and this is multiple models now. And so I'm trying to connect the dots. What the future of applications look like, because I want to access multiple models. Maybe you could help us understand that. Yeah, for us, it's the freedom of choice for our customers, right? And we get to questions a lot about SAS and Microsoft and the other partners and competitive, like listen, we're all competitors and friends at the same time. Yeah, that's all cool. And for us, it's giving the optionality to our customers and bringing the power of SAS technology into Microsoft fabric. So our customers have the ability to choose and intelligent, you know, SAS decision builders built on top of SAS decisioning, which we're plowering, you know, banks around the world, where all of their credit lending decisions are going through intelligent decisioning. So for us, it brings together business users, application users and programmers to bring business rules and logic and AI models and deploying them into composite AI. So we're really excited about this. I mean, no one gets, no one wants to get locked in the optionality. Reminds me of the old interoperability days, Dave. Remember that back in the day? Oh, we got to be interoperable. Heterogeneous, it truly is that now because there's so much at stake. Absolutely. Okay, then you compete on the clouds. And for us, it's the optionality of customers using the technology that's fit for purpose for them. Sometimes it's standalone SAS. Sometimes it's SAS within Azure and we love that. All right, integration is a huge topic. You guys talk about a lot. I know in the cloud when you get the cloud, now you have cloud on premise and edge. It's cloud architecture, it's cloud operations. AI is going to certainly do a lot there. Again, we've talked about this a lot in the past theCUBE. Open data lakes, DevSecOps, it's all driven by data. If data doesn't have the SLA, it doesn't, it's not relevant. So you need access to all the data. So I like this idea of open lake because it facilitates the idea that let's not create a bottleneck or constraint on getting data to a place where you can architect it for the workload that you need. Okay, and then get all the right data and rethink that. So we think this flips the script. Gen AI flips the script on how you think about data architecture. Absolutely, like in this Gen AI era, you have to have open data, right? Because data becomes the foundation of these models. And once you have that open foundation, you can then run a variety of engines, models on top of it. It could be one of our Microsoft core workloads with Power BI or our lake houses or Spark or, and so on. It could be our partners who are bringing in to have build native experiences on a single platform so that our joint customers, our users can get more from their data in a very easy way. You don't need a PhD in this. You drag and drop. You use a native language to write SQL, build dashboards, make the best decisions from your data. Okay, so you're obviously open. You've got to have optionality for customers. As we said, Microsoft's ubiquitous. So you're a platform for everything. Okay, but things are changing so fast. This is why you have to be open. So two years ago, nobody was even, half the people didn't even know what iceberg was. Now all of a sudden that's the only thing that Snowflake and Databricks can agree on and it's forced them both to sort of change the strategies. So you kind of indicated, you talked about Delta.  Presume iceberg is part of that. So there'll be others in the future. So you've got to have this. Remember, Unix used to be open systems. The definition evolves. But now it's really, I think achieved what I think we have an understanding of what open is and that's around optionality. You guys agree with that scenario? I mean, absolutely. I think the way we think about it, we want it to be completely open from a format's perspective. Interop is what it is, right? X-Table is for interop. And then even for compute, there are different engines that may run different types of workloads on the same data, right? On the same data, you can have different insights, better insights that you can drive. And we pull in our partners and SAS being one of them because we want to have a very rich set of capabilities for our customers, right? We won't be able to build it all. And that's where we have to have this ISV ecosystem, wide ecosystem, where we can all innovate together for the better of our customers. And integration is key there. That brings integration. I won't even say challenges. It's really opportunities. As long as you put the resource in, the engineering resource, and it's not just a... Yeah, and we are. Collaborating together, very closely. The next, we have our Microsoft build coming up in a couple of months, and stay tuned. There's going to be, we might have some good things to show there. There's always a lot of announcements at Build and Ignite, and I mean, this is just viral. Is it better to attend the Build show or Ignite? It's hard to choose between two good shows. Builds, but it's kind of cloud developers. Yes, so Build is a developer conference, right? It's builders, right? And honestly, this is an era where developers are building the very new kind of applications. Increasingly, these applications are smart applications. Obviously, with GenAI plugged in, with more analytics that is plugged in, and we have all the platforms together with our partners to give them that foundation to innovate on top of. There's a lot of developer content at Ignite too. Absolutely. I mean, there is. Absolutely. There's a lot of new innovations coming and announcements. What I love about the cloud game right now with GenAI is very entrepreneurial, even in the big companies. And we've had a riff on theCUBE many times, certainly on theCUBE, I know we've debated it multiple times, Dave, about how this generation of entrepreneurship is changing because this is the first big wave of entrepreneurship, in my opinion. People could debate, go on Twitter, I'm happy to debate this, but I feel it's true. Where the cloud players are at full-scale capacity in terms of utility, not full-scale, and they can't do it anymore, right? They are a major presence in the factors of how startups will go now. Now, Amazon was there day one, just kind of by accident on purpose, because they had a big retail, and so you'll turn it around, build a data center or go to this cloud with some console. Now it's actually a major part of the startup ecosystem. So low-code, no-code, workbench, data, workflows, and now the intellectual property, that's clearly coming out of this CUBE event here, and others, that the workflow and the data is the IP, and the scale is going to be a resource. So how do you guys see this creating value on behalf of the customers? Because at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are, they see opportunity, you've been a co-founder of companies, and so when you see opportunity recognition, you can seize it faster. And that's the end game, that's what we're talking about here. It's keeping up with the pace of change, right? And it's cliche, but the time to value is shrinking daily for our customers. And one of the things you heard this week that's so important to us is you mentioned open, right? There was, for a long time, there was a perception of SaaS being a very closed language. And what you continue to hear this week is us embracing and using SaaS. We believe it's very powerful, the language, but R and Python, bringing the optionality to our customers so they can get time to value faster based on the languages or the tools that they're used to using. And this partnership is one example of that. And Dipty, you've been an entrepreneur, you've seen it. So you can see opportunities, not just out on the streets and the wild as a startup entrepreneur, but inside a big company. You could make, you could fix one feature of an app and change the nature of that app, whether it's lowering costs or even driving, or both. And you don't need to be like a coder. So opportunity capture, what's your vision on how you see this? I mean, the game has changed, right? And you could say that three more times. The number of capabilities you can build today in days, not years, in days with Gen AI and with the tools we have today is just phenomenal. And so, on the one hand, you would think it's harder to build and grow, but on the other hand, there's a lot to innovate on. The good news is with partnerships like this, we're making it super easy for customers, for startups all the way to large enterprises, to build new experiences for their customers and do it much more smoothly, less effort, hopefully lower costs and with less resources, right? So productivity is a big part of it. Huge productivity gains, you can innovate faster and the scale of it, right? You can, with cloud scale, you can start off small, but you have the ability to grow as large as you would and be ambitious to be. Easy to experiment. I'm glad you brought a low code and then something that you talk about all the time, boring but important, governance. So you got the power platform, right? So you're knocking down the low code story. And then, governance, is it purview that you guys have that's your governance capability? How does that fit into all this? Yeah, so purview and governance is a big part of data, right? So Microsoft Fabric has built in governance, but we integrate very deeply with Microsoft Purview as well to give customers that entire platform, right? A complete unified platform with advanced capabilities. So whether it's metadata or all the way to lineage, advanced lineage across all these workloads that we're talking about, any change to your data can be tracked. And that's really important, especially, from a security cyber perspective, the world is changing on that front too and providing a nice secure governance tier on top of Fabric so that even as partners come in into that ecosystem and operate, we are actually creating a much more secure and governed platform for everyone. So it becomes really important. Fabric has what we call one security which applies across the platform and it will apply to our partners. So as the SaaS experiences come in, they will use and leverage the one security that we have built in. And so this is what really truly makes it an end-to-end unified platform where you have GenAI built in, you have semantic models, you have pipelines, right? You have real-time analytics and we have the power of our ecosystem coming in. We're opening up this platform through SDKs and that's where you can envision a single experience for our partners and us together. And just fast-forwarding maybe, maybe it's a couple of years transactions as well. I think for now, let's leave it as unified analytics platform. I don't want to get into any trouble here. You know. Dave's spoken the bear, come on. But I mean, you can envision people, places and things and new systems coming together. I mean, we saw a lot of things. We saw on Twitter a lot of controversy of people saying the modern data stack is dead. I mean, okay, it was not modern yet. It was modern for two seconds and it became dead. Long live the modern data stack. But people talk a lot about digital twins. You hear that term now much more than you used to or digital representation of your business, different data types, different data formats. SaaS obviously plays a part of that. There's the analytic systems of record and someday transactions are going to be there. Again, this is a big debate area. Again, you will get Joe, you work at Microsoft. Stick to your messaging, but it's okay to riffle a bit. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this because what's coming out of the market that we're seeing is that, and I said this a while ago, Dave, that no one can construct, it's hard to own the data player as a vendor or a supplier if you own other things. Or a new player might emerge and own that data layer or control plane and the semantic layer or no one owns it. Okay, and so what's happening is that data is only as good as the person valuing it. Beauty's in the eye, the behold of the workload. So we're seeing this layer that has to be kind of open that supports the open. So what do you guys see that? It has to be intelligent. How does this roll forward? What are the prerequisites for a CISO, a CIO, an app developer, the people that are really going to have to get in and relook at these things, these workloads to make it so that it's highly available. It hits latency SLAs, and it's the right data. Formatic, Gnostic, and multiple query types. I mean, you guys to take care of all that with technologists. They're exactly, give it, aren't we? And we touched on interoperability and that's the most important part. There was so much vendor lock in with databases and appliances and all of those things that we saw. So interoperability is key. For us, we have to consume and be able to store data where our customers want, right? We're not dictating that. But for me at a higher level, I'm glad we're talking about data again because it became unfashionable for a number of years and there was a whole bunch of bad practices around data. Not talking about necessarily security and things like that, but data quality, data integration, data governance, a little bit of what you mentioned. I mean, go ahead and go train your general AI models on bad data and let's see the results, right? So I'm glad that we're back to having this conversation again because it's a critical point for enterprises. Yeah, and you guys pointed out last year just to give you guys props on this kudos because Brian said you guys, your top four verticals are pretty much regulated industries pretty much and they have to have data quality and data hygiene. And so people who have done the work are actually in pole position with the Gen AI wave, they have this short-term lead out of the gate. Do you guys agree with that? Yeah, I mean, look, the foundation of it is this desegregation that's happened, right? Of storage and compute, with this, with the storage tier, your data can sit anywhere with one lake. We hope your data's on Azure, but we know that you probably might have some on S3 and you might have some on GCS. Well, guess what, you could shortcut this data into one lake, let it sit where it is and just link it into one lake and have a unified platform, right? Now you got me started. Because you're right, the modern data stack has separated compute from storage but now we're basically separating data from compute where any compute can go to the data. And that's a big win for customers. Because today I can only operate on the compute of whether it's an AWS or a Menager and in the future, with things like Iceberg, I'm going to be able to bring any compute to any data and that's what the customers want. Yeah, on one lake, you could run multiple different engines. You could bring in your own libraries, right? You could bring in your own code. We're welcoming all our partners into fabric so that their workloads can run on one lake. You can interrupt with one lake, even just links using these shortcuts without using fabric, right? The data is where it starts. You can build on that, pick the right engine. We have our native workloads and we hope to have hundreds more on top of fabric natively. I know, you got me going. No, no, she's got to get on SuperCloud 7, and I want to reach her. But a unified metadata model and a semantic layer that makes all these different data types coherent and that enables co-pilots to take action, transactions. And become agents. We're not talking about any specific roadmap or anything, just envisioning the future. Yes, absolutely. We're not under NDA, so we can speculate all we want. The good news is the future is bright. The best is yet to come. And moving quickly towards us. That's right. Have we had more time? I get a couple more questions in, but last question to end the segment. Gavin and Dipty, what's next in the partnership? You kind of hinted to lighting something up with these guys at SAS, relative to being a design partner. Gavin, we heard builders around the corner. I also see you guys had a multi-year relationship. Sure that's going to go forward. What's next in the partnership? Give us, tease us with a little bit of specifics. Yeah, I mean, we're going to show some pretty cool demos tomorrow on stage of, you know, decision builder. And then, as we said, there's a number of events coming where, I think Dipty said it right, stay tuned. But yeah, there is, this is the first of many from a co-engineering perspective that we have across all the different aspects of the Microsoft ecosystem and with us at SAS. So as Dipty said, the future is bright. We have a co-engineering that meets and works together daily on this partnership, side by side. We're sticking with our cues here, right, Gavin? But actually, we're really excited about getting this into the hands of our joint customers. Because at the end of the day, we want to make sure that these experiences really benefit from a time perspective that it takes them minutes, if it stays, if it's hours, if it's weeks, and really get feedback and iterate on it, right? We see this as the beginning. It's just the beginning. There is so much more that we can build on top. I mean, just like we've talked about with co-pilots and all of these other things, very exciting times. And yeah, looking forward to build and stay tuned. Great to see you, Dipty, and I want to say congratulations on your exit of your startup to Microsoft. They got a big win, congratulations. And Gavin, that's always great to have you on, to love the operational focus of data and the roadmap you guys have and the partnership.  Congratulations. Thank you guys again for being here, great. Okay, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, watching theCUBE. We're going to be right back with more after this short break.


So when I was about 12 years old, my mother said, you know, she's, I called, people say, what's wrong with your mom? I just called a walking DSM because I don't know, I couldn't narrow it down.   So by the time I was 12, I knew that she had lost control over me completely by the time I was 12.  But maybe my sister did, started having sex at a young age. So what I learned from her was there's two types of women. There's a warm, wet hole. That's all you are, right? If the only thing you have to offer a man is sex, that's what you are. And guess what? Guess who else has a warm, wet hole? The other woman out there, right?   You get a good, strong, healthy woman, you can catapult a man, I can do so much. We are very, we're powerful beings as women. We are. If we use it in the right way, in the right direction. Some of the most successful men have admitted, but for my wife, I never would be where I am. You have very successful men who have children who turn out to be amazing and they say, but for my wife, my wife enabled all of this, right?  That's horrible. You say warm, wet hole. I'm like, well, I mean, if you have one and it's not warm and wet, you might want to seek some sort of gynecological, I don't know, intervention. But let's be honest. Let's start talking real talk.   All right, so then, right, we have a guy, we have a man who ignores all these huge red flags waving, right? Ignores them. We justify them. And then they get married. But all too often, the red flags start to wave after the marriage, right? You know, there's more men who are victims of domestic violence than women. That's what the latest statistics show. So women believe that they're victims of domestic violence if they're told, perhaps. You know, I don't like the way that you did this. You doing it this way, it really, it makes it difficult for our family. What, you don't try to control me. That's abusive and controlling. You don't tell me what to do, okay, then this power struggle ensues, right? Or she might come back, I had one recording, a man brought in, and this was her evidence that she was being abused. As he said, look, you're on social media, you're flirting with all these guys. Here it is, we're married, we have four kids, and you're flirting with these guys. And she's like, oh, really? She goes, you're trying to control me now? She goes, this is exactly why I want out of this abusive situation. Never mind. She got caught in a fair. Apparently the military gets upset when you try to bring drugs on post, right? She got caught with that too. But somehow and all that, she's the victim. She's a victim, right?   She degrades him, he's a very highly decorated soldier. Who's abused there? I'm like, I'm so glad, I'm so glad you have this, right? Because who's being abused? But men don't take it that way, men grossly under report. But yeah, the latest stats are that there is more men abused by women. So I'm going to talk briefly on the divorce, 79% to 85%, depending on what stats women initiate family court actions. They're the ones who are the plaintiffs. They're filing to end the marriage. Women are awarded custody about 80% of the time. Don't tell me that 80% of the time women are better parents, I won't believe you. I think we've seen what single moms have done to society, right? Somebody asked me, well, name one thing that single moms are good at. I'm like,


Welcome to digital asset news to get top stories in cryptocurrency and digital assets and break them out of bite-sized pieces Let me tell you what's going on in the market in 30 seconds or less First up Bitcoin is tumbled from a high of 62,000 all the way on to 56,000 in less than 24 hours. What happened? Well, there's some conflicting reports But it looks like the RBI or the Reserve Bank of India is talking about banning cryptocurrency and digital assets The good news that the RBI does not set law and actually the finance minister of India has already covered out and said This will not happen and they will meet them at the table on top of that We're gonna take a look at non-fungible tokens and the channel actually minted an NFT and it's a complete garbage But people are still bidding on it. So is it a bubble? Yes, it is if you want to see this complete video Just click the link below


The troops of sector 1 operation Hadinkai have rescued 17 civilians from being kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists along Maiduguri Damaturu Road in Borno Street. The director of army public relations Brigadier General Oyema Oachiko said on Tuesday in a bocha that the terrorists had attempted to infiltrate Aono village through the rail line adjacent to the community but were quickly intercepted by troops in a fierce gun duel. Brigadier General Oyema Oachiko said the rescued civilians have been documented and handed over to officials of rapid response squad for further action. The chief of army staff, Lieutenant General Farouk Yahaya, commend the troops for their commitment and decisive operations against terrorists.


James Cook University has a special focus on the tropics, we're situated in the tropics and we have a large range of data collections associated with the tropics of high value. Some of those include VecNet which is a malaria based data set, Mangrove Watch which is a series of images around the coastlines of tropical Australia and in fact South East Asia and also state of the tropics. We're bringing together a lot of statistical data to understand the status of the tropical world. VecNet is a consortium of institutions all around the world that was formed in 2011 to come together in solving part of the problem of malaria eradication and one of the outcomes of that was a recommendation that there needed to be some tools that allowed all sorts of different users in different parts of malaria, the malaria community, to access data and some modeling tools to use in decision making. One of the major tool sets that VecNet provides to users online all around the world is a digital library and a data warehouse. So this brings together lots of different data sources in an easily accessible and freely available online resource. So people working in countries that have malaria problems are asking questions like what can I do, what are the range of interventions that are available to me, which of those should I be using to get the best outcome? So for example they could use the modeling tools to ask a question like if I get people sleeping under bed nets what effect will that have on reducing malaria? In contrast if I did some spraying inside houses of insecticide onto the walls so that there was a long-term effect what effect would that have in comparison to getting them to sleep under bed nets because each of these have different costs or another question might be well what if I did both? Is that going to double the impact and really speed up effectiveness? So the modeling tools that are accessible on the VecNet interface allow people to ask those kinds of questions and make better decisions, better informed decisions on what to do with their resources. For example we could have a situation where a researcher was sitting here in Cairns trying to understand how to assist in eradicating malaria in one of our Indian neighbours such as Papua New Guinea and they may have access to some modeling frameworks and know that there's a range of data that they need to be able to utilize that. So to start off with they might need some data on weather, climate, demographics etc. And someone who's working in the field may not know how to access that data very easily even if it is openly available it's not their skill set to know how to go and get it quickly. So using our system they can get that data, it defaults to that data in the system so they don't have to go out and find it, it reduces that step for them. James Cook University through our Tropical Data Hub project what we're trying to do is expose of many high value tropical data sets as we can. We know the tropical world is very interconnected so what happens in a coastal environment may actually be the result of something that's happened further in land, what happens in a reef may result from something that's happening on a coastline. So it's very important that we get open access to these data sets and can look across them for correlations and interactions between environments. No environment actually exists independent of any other environment everything's interconnected. So interconnected data sets are a critical component of understanding what's happening. Mangrove Watch is an unusual project it involves not just data collection from professional researchers and scientists but it's also a citizen science project where people from the community can take their own video data, contribute that to the repository and build up this understanding over time of coastal changes. So in Mangrove Watch video cameras are used to record the coastline both from boats and from helicopters. The data from those image files are extracted and they're categorized, the GPS locations are taken and so people can go back and understand that coastline at that point in time. Over time you build up a picture or a status of the change in coastline over the time whether that's human influences or environmental influences. If mangroves disappear so do those fish species and so do those economies subsequently collapse. So it's very important that we understand the influences of mangrove health and what we can do to improve that health and what we have to not do to prevent the mangroves decline. So the Mangrove Watch is going to be available free and open for planners, for developers, governments, industry to actually look at and understand the impacts of their developments not just in the short term but the medium and long term as well. Open access to data is absolutely critical. There's no point in one research program gathering lots of high value data and not being able to share it with the next person. Over time in the environment we're looking at changes in the environment so to do that we need to understand what our baselines are. It is very important in a mangrove and coastal environment where weather events and human development really lead to quite rapid changes to the environment. Open data is a solution to that problem.


My name is Jennifer Hamelman and I'm an Adventure Cycling Association and I've got two co-panelists today who will be working with me to present long distance bicycle routes. And kind of our theme is from the national to the state and from currently available to the future and building of new trails. So I will go ahead and get started. I'm just going to tell you right up front, I'm a little bit out of practice. I haven't stood in front of a room for, you can expect, at least a year and a half. So bear with me if I stumble a little bit. I'm going to just put that out there. So first of all, who is Adventure Cycling? We are a national nonprofit dedicated to bicycle travel. Do I happen to have any members in the room? Excellent. Yay.  Excellent. Well, thank you all for your support because we are a membership-based organization. We have about 55,000 members around the world. Our mission is to inspire, empower, and connect people to travel by bicycle. We have several tools that we use to do that, one of which is a 50,000-plus-mile bicycle route network that crosses the country. We produce an award-winning magazine, nine issues every year filled with inspiration and how-tos. We offer over 100 organized tours, everything from a small group, self-supported, to a larger group, fully-supported event. We also have an advocacy department, which is where the US Bicycle Route System, the program I'm going to talk about in a little bit, is housed within, as well as our safety program, where we are working to improve conditions for cyclists. And our website is filled with lots and lots of layers of resources, from stories to how-tos to videos to a blog. I get lost there sometimes. There's a lot of information. So that adventure cycling route network that I was just speaking about is this. Let's see. I think I actually have a pointer here. I do. So this entire network is about 50,000 miles. And our flagship route is the Trans-America Trail, which starts in Yorktown, Virginia, crosses along here up the Rockies, and ends in Astoria, Oregon. And that was our very first route. Our organization, I think I might have neglected to mention, has been around since. It was originated in 1973. We ran our first event in 1976. We also have routes that go up and down the West Coast, the Atlantic Coast. Am I getting two lines? Yeah. If you think I need it. OK, let's do it. So then there's also a northern tier route and the southern tier route. And then we have the Great Divide Mountain bike route, which is over half unpaved roads. And in that same family is our Idaho Springs loop, which is a lot of off-pavement. And our latest off-pavement is the Arkansas High Country, which has been really popular. In fact, I think as soon as the maps came out, there was already a race established on it. So it's pretty popular, that off-road stuff. And then we also have some smaller things like the Texas Hill Country Loop and some other loops up here in the New England states. So it's a pretty extensive network. Let's hope I don't do that again. All right, so you're wondering maybe what are the California routes. A little bit differently. I had some different things showing up on that slide. So in California is our Western Express route. It starts in San Francisco and connects to the Trans Am route in Pueblo, Colorado. Then there is the Sierra Cascades route. And it actually starts all the way up at the border of Canada and ends down here at the border of Mexico. And it roughly parallels the Pacific Ocean. It will vary from that trail in a lot of instances. But that was the basic idea was to run it in the mountains. Yes, no, no. And actually I forgot to say what I was gonna try and hold questions until the end, I'm sorry. But those quick yes, no ones I can probably address. This one here is the Route 66. So it actually starts here or ends here in Santa Monica and begins all the way over in Chicago. And it follows roughly the same path as the original Route 66. There are some places where modifications were made for safety reasons because Route 66 has become an interesting in a lot of places. And then there's our Southern Tier route, which is our shortest route across country from San Diego to St. Augustine, Florida just because shortest doesn't mean easiest just so you know. In fact, the hardest day probably on that entire trip if you're going west to east is the very first couple of days because you've got mountains right out the starting gate. And then there is the creme de la creme of routes which is our Pacific Coast route. It also has a border to border route and interestingly enough, people from come from all over the world to ride this route, it is very iconic. And it is the one route in our entire route network where I can confidently say which direction a cyclist should ride it. As far as I'm concerned, they should always be ridden southbound because the winds especially in the summertime which is a popular time to ride it are consistently out of the south and they will give you a lovely tailwind. Otherwise, unless maybe you like fighting headwinds, I don't know. But the other benefit is if you're riding at southbound you've got the ocean right on your side and you don't have to look over traffic or try to cross traffic to get to that scenic viewpoint or take a rest. Okay, so now what is this US Bicycle Route System? It is a national bicycle route network and it passes through rural, urban and suburban communities on existing facilities that are deemed appropriate for cycling. It began in the early 80s, kind of went fallow for a very long period and came back and was reinvigorated in 2005. This was an AASHTO project actually. I think I've heard lots of folks use that acronym around here so I'm gonna assume most of the room is familiar with the American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials. And so the routes are selected by state DOTs and agreed upon by local jurisdictions who actually own the pavement. It doesn't have to be on a state roadway or a state right of way. But the DOT does have to be the one to submit an application to AASHTO. So that is what makes the US Bicycle Route System significantly different from the Adventure Cycling Route Network because this allows for a level of public input that the Adventure Cycling Routes do not. DOTs have an opportunity twice a year to submit applications. So what does it look like? It looks something like this. This is the National Corridor Plan and you'll see a couple of different line styles. Some of it might be hard to see. The lighting in here is a little hard to see the distinction, but there are these more solid lines are routes that are designated. There's nearly 18,000 miles at this point that have been designated in 31 states plus Washington, DC. And all of these dotted lines are what we call corridors. So they are where a US BRS route could occur. Back when they, in the early 2000s when Ashito reinvigorated this program, Adventure Cycling, East Coast Greenway, Mississippi River Trails, some other organizations all got together and threw a bunch of routes on a map. It looked like spaghetti. There were a lot of lines. And then it was distilled down to what seemed to be the most appropriate sort of corridors that would be of the greatest interest to the cycling community for long distance bicycle travel. So does California have any US BRS routes? We can sort of see them there, but I will take you to the low up here. So now what you're probably noticing is, wait, didn't we already see this slide? That's because it looks an awful lot like the Adventure Cycling route network. And many US BRS routes begin as you adventure cycling routes. So a DOT, once they've decided to engage in the US BRS program, will oftentimes start with an adventure cycling route, use that route to take to the jurisdictions and say, we'd like to designate this as a US BRS route. How do you feel about this roadway being used in that way in your jurisdiction? The jurisdiction then has the ability to come back and say, yeah, sure, that sounds good. Here's the letter. Or to come back and say, no, actually we've improved our facilities and this is the ideal. We've improved our facilities and we'd rather you use them instead. And so then that's where the route would occur. In rare circumstances, we actually do have jurisdictions who come back and say, no, we don't want this at all. Which is kind of mind blowing to us because there are so many benefits to having a cyclist in your community. But that be that as it may. So the routes that you have here in California include that US BR 50, which is based on the Western Express route, route 66, which is based on route 66. And then US BR 95, which is the northern half of that Pacific coast route. And we are like two or three jurisdictions away from getting this southern part ready for Caltrans to be able to submit for application. We've got our fingers crossed that that will happen. Oh, I hate to jinx myself, but it would be wonderful. It would happen in the fall application cycle. So do I have anyone from Caltrans in the room? Probably should have checked that out first. No, it's all good. It's all good. We've, yeah. So we'll just leave it there. And then the other route that's, well, let's do these two first. 87 and 85 are a couple of different routes, through the Central Valley and through the mountainous areas. Parts of them could potentially use the Sierra Cascades route. And I'm gonna leave the rest of the discussion to one of my co-presenters because he has started working on some developing some routes here. So we'll leave that for later. The last one that I will mention here is this USBR 90 that would mimic the Southern Tier route. That route has actually been put on hold for a little while because the connection into Arizona is a little tenuous right now. And that's another important piece to remember about the USBRS is that a state can't just designate a route, any route that they want. The goal is, is that it will connect to another state to a, or to another country like in Canada. It could end in Canada. But that means then that every state needs to get concurrence or agreement from the adjacent state. That, so in this case, Caltrans needs to go to AZOT and get agreement that that is a good place for USBR 90 to join. Right now there are some concerns about this piece of USBR 90, so it's not a given that that is going to change. And in fact, AZOT will probably have to consider changing their route in order for California to be able to designate their route. It's a little bit complicated and it's on hold for the time being. And the other important thing to know is California has just over 1,000 miles of USBRS routes and that puts them seventh in the 31 states, which is pretty great, I'm impressed. Especially since they have only just started designating routes in the last couple of years. So it's pretty exciting to see the growth happening here. So why would somebody want the USBRS, right? So it's a great national recognition for local and regional routes. It's just another sort of lever there. Cycling has a lot of positive health impacts for communities. It improves the cycling conditions in the local communities, because it sometimes can inspire jurisdictions to want to spruce things up a little bit because they suddenly realize that there are people other than their constituents perhaps that are using these facilities. It increases the visibility of cycling. The more cyclists you can get on a route, the more motorists start paying more attention to the fact that there are cyclists on that route. And the economic development opportunities via bicycle tourism, especially when they pass through rural areas. These small, and I'm sure through the pandemic, it's become even more apparent to them how much these small like little markets and the mom and pop hotels really have come to rely on that group of cyclists that passes through their community every summer. So that's an important piece of the puzzle. So I just want to throw this national corridor plan back up here is some inspiration and take a second to offer some thanks to our partners of Caltrans and all of the local jurisdictions, as well as the pool of volunteers that we have that have done a lot of work going to these jurisdictions and presenting the case for why they should agree to have a US BRS in their communities. Without that, that's not, I couldn't do all of the work that it takes for this by myself. There are small meetings that happen all across the country all year long that myself and Carrie Irons and others in the audience who have really helped to move that project forward. So at this point, I will just quickly flash my contact information and some website at the bottom there and pass this on to Michael. Thanks, Jennifer. So this is gonna be a little bit different in terms of what I'm gonna talk about here is a thing called the Great Central Valley Bicycle Route. It isn't by organization or anything else, it's something I created. But I created it with the help of many, many people, sorry, with the help of many, many people. It began just with me wanting to actually ride the Central Valley of California. And along the way, it required a great deal of input from many, many people, a lot of volunteers along the way. I'd like to just put in a plug again for adventure cycling. I've been a member since 1993 and in 1994 I rode across the country on the Northern Tier Route that Jennifer mentioned. And I've ridden several of the other routes down the East Coast, parts of the West Coast, all around on that road system, on the adventure cycling route system. And so it's a great organization and if you aren't all members, you should all join. It's really, it's been my touchstone for really my bicycle riding career. So just a little bit about who I am. I've been a lifelong cycling tourist. I took my first tour when I was 14 years old, self-supported with a buddy. Why, we went 500 miles over the mountains, different cities and how in the world our parents let us do that, I have no idea, at that age. But that's when I started and since that time, as I mentioned, I've been riding continuously when I could for the last, oh gosh, 50 years. I also have had a quite satisfying career as an urban designer and city planner, private consultant. And I've done many, many of these plans, the things you're seeing about in some of the other sessions and so on.  Every time we did an urban plan, there was always a transportation component in our thing. We were always interested in it. I was particularly interested because I was a bicycle rider is making streets complete and building a good bicycle network into these new urban areas, some new and some. So, on the basis of that, you put those two together and I think that's what led me to want to create the Great Central Valley Bicycle Route. I was living in Nevada City. How many people know where that is? Up in the Sierra Foothills at the time. This was, my wife and I moved up there and we're there about 10 years. And while I was there, I used to ride the valley all the time and I rode the Northern Valley. And at that time, I started saying, you know, I wanna see the whole valley because I don't know it. By the way, how many people here are someone affiliated to live in the Central Valley? So, in any case, I decided I wanted to do this. What is the Great Central Valley Bicycle Route? It is a, first of all, let me start by saying it's not a future plan. This is a plan you can ride today. That was the whole goal because I wanted to ride it myself. So, it isn't something that's gonna cost $300 million and we're gonna see it in 20 years. And of course, that presents many challenges and I'll talk to you a little bit about that. It extends from Lake Shasta to Bakersfield. So, it's in the valley. It's not a foothills route. It's not intended to be a foothills route. It's intended to be a valley route. And it's about 800 and about 850 miles total. It has a main line and then it has several spurs that will take you into cities and towns for services if it skirts a city. But because I'm an urban designer, I like cities and towns. So, I wanted to go through towns whenever possible and then I also was interested in the natural landscape. One of the things that I pointed out there is the third from the bottom says it avoids state highways. That's on purpose. One of the things that's unfortunate still is that state highways, they will get you through a state or through California in many ways. But it's, A, it doesn't feel safe. It's very uncomfortable. In many cases, there's no bike lanes on state highways in California. Now, Caltrans is making a lot of progress now in improvements. But there's many, many miles that I personally did want to ride on and if others were going to ride this, I couldn't imagine recommending others ride on these routes. So, there's something in the order of 12 miles out of the total that are on state highways. So, why, I need to get to a place where I can see this, I'll just get in there. Why ride the Central Valley? We hear about the coast. As Jennifer mentioned, the coast route is an iconic route. People want to ride down through the Rocky Mountains over the Sierra, which I did too. Why ride the Valley? But the Valley, I think the bottom line is one of the key things that I enjoy is that the Valley history is California's history. The Valley really supported the Gold Rush. And in fact, there's more money ever been made in the Central Valley just in agriculture than the Gold Rush ever yielded. So, it's a tremendous amount of history there. But the other thing that I think is interesting is the fourth item up from the bottom is the accessibility of the terrain. I have come to believe that it's probably the best bicycling in the state. And part of that is the fact is essentially flat. And many, many different people can ride. You don't have to be an elite rider to ride it. And it's also got quite a large population. So, connecting it in some way, not just for people like me who want to tour through and learn about the place and enjoy it, but also as a way that people locally, they can become the basis for something that people locally can do. Because it's an ideal place to ride. And we can start to stimulate the idea of street improvements and so on. When I started the project, the first thing I did is I went to adventure cycling because you saw that route map of the USB-R system and it shows a line on the map called route 87. It goes down the central valley. And I thought, oh yeah, I got to get my publication. I saw it there. I said, well, maybe something's been done on that. I can get the map and I can ride it. Well, no, that's future. It's just a magic parker line on the map. But if you put something together, we'd love to talk about it because maybe that could be the basis of USB-R 87. Well, so I started. And I used the planning tools that I have learned over the years, starting with assembling all the bicycle plans for all the cities and all the counties in the valley and starting to link this thing together. And the first thing that I needed to do is I said, well, where do we want to go? What are the iconic places that we want to connect together? Identify those dots on the map and then how do we connect them and how do we connect them in a way that a bicyclist would want to do it? So here you see some of the things that are really the icons of really the central volumes. It's just a small touch of everything there is to see and do an experience of it. The second of the four planning criteria that I established was to identify who's the target rider. Now, I am what you might call with modesty an elite rider, I've been doing it all my life. I know how to manage traffic, but I also don't like scary places. I'm a little nervous about traffic and so on. I want to be in good conditions. And I started thinking also that if this is going to be something that others might want to ride, who is the target rider? It's people like me who are touring riders who are not centurions out trying to do mileage who are stopping is just as important as going. Seeing is as important as just putting on the miles and keeping my wattage up. So the trip is really what it's all about. It's the trip, not the destination. The other thing is that for those of you that are familiar with the ranking system that's been developed about the four classes of rider, I was seeking to target the interested but concerned group. And this is something in the order of over 50% of the population. We include all the elite riders plus down to this group of interested plus concerned. Now that's a lot of different kinds of people and with varying different skills and so on, but this needed to be a ride, a route that wasn't just for people like me or just for elite riders. And that does mean however that there has to be some experience in one way to in riding and traffic. And now I restart riding when I was 14, but I concluded that the target rider should probably be 16 and have a driver's license. Because at least then you're fairly certain that they have familiarity with traffic blocks and so on. The third criteria was safety. And here, if you're familiar with the LTS, the level of traffic stress standards, the four level, four being the worst I'll call it and one being basically a class one facility. I was gonna see if I could target LTS two. And that would be something that the interested but concerned crowd could actually feel comfortable on. So I'll tell you that you can see the type of facilities that are mentioned here on the kinds of roadways and facilities that were the target for this route. And you can see some of the photographs. Generally that was the target. I'll tell you that it doesn't achieve LTS two over the entire 800 miles. But I would say it's close to 95%, which is pretty extraordinary. And that's why it took four years to put this together. So it does achieve that. And the places where it doesn't achieve LTS two where it gets into a three, four category tends to be at intersections where you've got a difficult crossing. But the goal was always to seek a place where you had a push button opportunity or some way to get across without having to actually engage in traffic in very dicey situations. The other thing was ride quality because this gets at this question about state highways is that in many cases, state highways will have good wide shoulders but the traffic's going 70 miles an hour. It's noisy and it's uncomfortable even though the facility might be basically safe. So the ride quality became very important as well. And finally, access to services. This was the other thing is that for long distance riding you need to be able to get certain things, particularly if you're on a route that's extending for maybe 30 miles and there isn't a lot available. You need to make sure that that route touches certain things. And one of the ones that was most important to me is that large photograph in the upper right, which is the lower, which is the bottom one here, access to transportation. In particularly, it's Amtrak stations and the San Joaquin Valley from Sacramento down to Bakersfield has a San Joaquin's train stops up and down, many cities up and down. So you can do a day ride between cities or you can ride the whole thing in a week and you can always get to that train and take the train back and they accommodate bicycles very comfortable. It's not as good going north but there is an Amtrak bus and then there is a once a day coast starlight that runs up. Unfortunately, it gets redding at three in the morning so it's a little bit of a challenge getting there on the train or getting back. But still, it became very important to have access to these kinds of services that this kind of mileage spacing and that was one of the reasons the Spurs were created in addition to the main line. So sometimes you'd have a safe way so that we aren't down on the road then we don't know how to get to town on a safe road. And we end up out by the Walmart shopping center. So the Spurs get you safely in and out and I use the word safe as we need to be careful how we say safe but to get you in and out of town in a bicycle friendly way. As I worked on this, and I was dealing with bicycle advocacy organizations up and down the valley. I was working with local agency planners and so on. It was amazing. It was just extraordinary. The kind of enthusiasm I saw for this route as it was being developed. And so I decided that towards the end, when it was finally coming together, I said, you know, I need to create a way that this can become public and essentially donate it to the public. So that's what I've done. I worked with the folks that ride with GPS and they have an ambassador route program. How many of you are familiar with ride with GPS and how they know about the ambassador route program? Well, that's a special program. If you have a project that is, they deem worthwhile, they will host what they call ambassador routes as a separate page on their platform. Because I didn't want to create my own website and have to manage all that. So they were, and they've done this pro bono to assist me. I assembled it and so on with the ride with GPS with the ambassador route program. So here you see, I'm gonna show you a few shots out of this website. It's got overall mapping of the whole alignment. This is sort of a typical ride with GPS page. And you can zoom in on that route. That's the main line. Then there's another page that shows the main line and all the spurs. And so here you're seeing two spurs. The red is the main line. This is near Oroville between Chico and Yuba City. Oroville is in the middle on the right there. And then you see an alternative route that I also created called the river route. And that's the orange line that runs to the left. That's this line here. So that's an alternative route. And then there's a spur into Yuba City because if we're coming down around the Sutter Buttes, which are right here, then if we need to get into Yuba City for services, for hotels, motels and that sort of thing, there's a spur that'll take you in there. Part of it on class one. So that the spurs are shown on a collections page that you can access. Here you see the spur around Fresno. The main line is the green around the top and to the right. But you can also go right into the heart of Fresno if you wanna see a professional baseball game. It takes you right by the ballpark. That's the red line that comes down, runs vertically and then horizontally going back out if you're southbound. And finally, if you can click on that route and this'll take you and show the alignment right on the surface streets, right through Fresno. So there's 850 miles of this kind of availability of information that's downloadable to your device so you can use it, whatever you use, your garment or whatever you use, or I use it on my phone. So future opportunities. I would like to see in conversation with some of the folks in the valley, I think it would be great if there was an organization like the Great Allegheny Passage. If you're familiar with that in East Coast, Pennsylvania, or the Oregon Timber Trail up in Oregon, there's an organization that supports it. I'm not in a position to do that myself, but in conversations we're having now there's a possibility this is gonna happen. We've developed website and programs. There's also some beginning efforts to get some local agency approvals on segments of it. Different cities and counties were adopting it into their local bike plans. And of course that's for the goal of getting the route improvements to improve it and begin to get some implementation of certain areas where we could make it even better. Finally, through all this, I sort of developed a vision myself is that it seemed to me that because the riding is so good in the Central Valley, I mean it's accessible to so many people that really there ought to be a Great Central Valley bicycle route network. And that might be that there would be a west side, the route tends to run down the east, that might be that there's a west side route, which is the black line you see running down the west side of the valley there. And then a series of crossroads, like you see in a lot of valleys that might link across. It could become even more extensive than that. But this could be the basis for a network that would connect the valley and it would link all the various communities and various attractions and so on throughout the valley and it would serve the benefit of both through touring bicycles and locals. I'd like to just, I don't know what's happened there. We've lost half of it. Anyway, this whole slide is full of names. There's been about 70 people who have helped and provided input throughout this and I'm really indebted to them for the input they provided and lots of Zoom meetings and coffee and so on. Sometimes I'd meet with them as I went on recon missions and that sort of thing. So it's been a really collaborative process and I don't know, but if you would like to access the website, you can do it with this QR code. I don't know if it'll work in this room with the lighting the way it is. And I'd just like to give a special thanks to Alex Gay and Chad Sputh, give them a shout out because Ride the GPS has really been a great support of this project and this is where it stands now. So it's available to anybody who wants to ride it. It's out there now in the public domain. And then one last thing that we are doing is that we have had some conversations with Adventure Cycling about this possibly becoming a piece of USB R87. So with that, thanks very much and I'll pass it on to Neil. I haven't said anything yet, but thanks. So yeah, so Michael was talking about a route through the central valley and Jennifer was talking about the route that exists along the coast. I'm gonna talk about the concept and what's already existing with the Great Redwood Trail that goes between those two routes. My name's Neil Davis. I'm the former director of Walk and Bike Mendicino and now I'm with the city of Ukiah as the director of community services. And I'm gonna be talking to you about this as a project that I started working on probably 10 years ago trying to get some rail with trail kinds of projects through Ukiah. And in the last few years, we've started developing it into a little bit of more than that. They look the same, mission control. Well, while they're working on that, well, that's an example of my credible Photoshop skills right there. There, that one works. The map doesn't work, but the map that you would see if you could see it up there right down at the bottom shows the San Francisco Bay and up at the top it shows Humboldt Bay with a line that goes between the two of them. And that's the main thing. The vision is a 320 mile route that's going along what was the North Coast Railroad Authority's rail line. And it'll be separated bike path. It maintains that public right of way. We're working on rail banking the whole thing. So theoretically, if at some point in the future rail could come back to the area, you could bring the train back. There's a whole discussion, that's a whole nother topic we won't get into. But it's really along the whole corridor we're gonna see what is currently really a blight be turned into real public benefit. This is an example of the kind of blight that you see. This is just south of Ukiah. This was an application for some funding that we asked for. The Urban Greening Grant has funded this section of trail in Ukiah. We have two miles of trail right now. This will add another two miles. And so we'll see a big transformation there. And then this is a section of the right of way as well, just north of Willets. This is where the path transitions from the Russian River watershed that heads to San Francisco Bay to the Eel River watershed that heads to the Humboldt Bay. This water right here is headed to Humboldt Bay probably 100, 150 miles away through the Wild and Scenic Eel River Valley. So with this trail, what you'd be seeing is you'd start in Marin and Sonoma going through the rolling hills that we all know and Marin and Sonoma, how beautiful that is up through the wine country along the Wild and Scenic Eel River through the redwoods that are up there and then around the Humboldt Bay. We've already, so that's kind of the vision, but what I wanna really talk about is that we've begun this and that this is a realizable vision. We've, Senator McGuire has gotten a couple of bills together. I don't have time to go into all of that stuff either, but the point is it started. That's the grand opening if I think it was phase three of the Great Redwood Trail in the city of Ucaia and we already have over 24 miles in Marin and Sonoma. We have two miles in Ucaia Valley right now. In this time next year, we'll have four miles. Humboldt has over 11 miles. At that point, we're already 10% complete and we have plans that put us at about 20% complete. So just yesterday, the California Coastal Commission approved another step that's getting this project around Humboldt Bay another step towards completion. And I kind of just put some of these photos in just to prove that, no, this really is happening. Some of this trail has already been built and a lot of it's planned and or funded already. In Marin County, again, over 24 miles that's already been done. Another 14 and a half miles are funded for construction. 13 miles in the design and engineering phase. Again, and you'll hear different people have different opinions on how well those gaps are connected. Some people will tell you, oh, it's a terrible connection. Some people will tell you, well, it's not so bad. Kind of depending on how comfortable you are with various writing situations. So here's the big thing.  And I'm seeing his eyebrows going up. And yeah, that's real money. $3.1 million per mile is the estimate. This was an Alta Planning Feasibility Study or an assessment of the project that was done two years ago. We're guesstimating it's a billion dollars in 2030 dollars. And there's probably unseen so far environmental remediation costs that we just haven't predicted. So I mean, if you've done any project, you know it costs more than you thought it was gonna cost. So that's real money. But the question that for all of us advocates we always move towards is like, well, what's it worth? This is a section of trail just north of Redwood Valley, 10 miles, Ukiah, I've mentioned Ukiah a couple of times. That's two hours north of here, right up the 101 corridor. This is just north, this is about 10 miles north of Ukiah. And this is how much of the route looks. You're gonna see section and after section of this that this is kind of what you're looking at.  So moving further into what's it worth, Alta Planning did a cost benefit or did some benefit analyses of what this project would benefit. And I asked them, could you break this down just for the Ukiah Valley? Ukiah, 10 miles south of us is Hopland. 10 miles north of us is Redwood Valley. What if we had just like a couple miles on each side about 25 miles of that section here? These are the numbers that they came up with. Close to $16 million in health and recreation benefits per year and direct economic benefits of close to $5 million per year. So this is also real money. Now here's the deal. Right now, steel is worth a lot. And there are companies that will pay to salvage these lines. I talked to one particular company they're out in New York and they said, we're paying $75,000 a mile for the rights to come pick up the ties and the rails. We'll take them away and when we're done, you're essentially gonna have a rough road. You can negotiate a deal with us. Do you want it to be really rough or less rough?  It kind of up to you.  In our neck of the woods, I think our ties probably aren't very good and probably aren't salvageable. We probably wouldn't get $75,000 a mile for it. But we don't really need $75,000 a mile. That $100 billion, or excuse me, $1 billion. There's a lot of zeros in either way, but we'll stick with $1 billion. That $1 billion price tag is really a price tag for building it out class one, fully realized ADA, full shebang. What if we don't do it full shebang? For me, I'm happy to get on my mountain bike and ride on this trail and do it a dirt ride. If I can have that in the next five years in dirt, I'm like, let's go with that. As a quick little side note, I would just tell, say, I talked to some of our local engineers and they pulled out their napkin and their crayons and they started saying, well, if we had just a rough already compressed railroad bed, how much would it cost to just put down some pavement? Not $3.1 million a mile. They were talking more like $3 or $4 million for the 10 mile from Yuccaia to Hopland. So, you know, we can look, we're a little bit of hillbilly up in Yuccaia. We don't do it quite as many as we may do down in the Bay Area, but we can get that thing open, I think. This is a picture you can't see it too well. That's my friend, Sean. We rode the path from Yuccaia down to Hopland. Right to the left there that you can't see is the Russian River. We're just far enough away from Highway 101 where you can't really see it or hear it. As you walk along here, you're seeing vineyards for a while, then you're into a riparian corridor, then you're into kind of more of a woodland kind of area. Absolutely amazing. Again, my fantastic photoshop to kind of get, for those of you who don't have the imagination, you know, what it might look like with the path. This is the text of an existing trail in Yuccaia. The native paths that we put in there have sort of grown up already. You can see it's really on the trail, but it's there. And as the pattern we can see, in the photo lecture, this is on the right end of the screen, right at the end of the screen. And what we see, and probably most of you build it, people get on it fast. But actually, what we've seen is people get on it before you finished it. And then this is a little bit of a trail up around the Humboldt Bay. So there's a lot of talent to it. No doubt about it. Cost is a huge challenge. We need to get the whole corridor rail bank. There's environmental remediation. I wouldn't be the argument that political will and belief that we can actually make it happen is the biggest challenge that you have to overcome. Calcans, you know, this number, I put this up here, I think $7.3 billion a year is the CalTrans budget. Dave Snyder did a presentation this morning, and I think his numbers are probably better than mine. It's actually more like $23.4 billion per year. 1% of CalTrans's budget to work on this. We build this trail in a few years. Money's there. We'll never pay for that. And it's already happening. Getting those next sections, it's gonna be built out, beginning right at the most, at the urban population centers. But if you don't think of it in terms of it being completely built, perfect, but how do we get it open? Then all of a sudden, it's much more doable. It's not a billion dollars a day, a billion dollars a year. When you get into the Eel River Canyon, we may see portions of it that are single track trail. Oh, that would be just the worst thing in the world, wouldn't it? Let's take that and let's make this thing happen. Please tell it, when you hear people say, talk about this, what you can do to help this happen is just say, no, it doesn't happen. And it doesn't have to be our grandchildren's grandchildren's. We can make this happen soon. And with that, that's all I got. I think you probably have questions for anybody. Hello, that one, there we go. So thank you very much. I applaud all your efforts in all this great work. And especially like the idea that we don't need to go super fancy on the class ones. Let's just get it done, appreciate that. On the asphalt, is there any chance that we can get some colored asphalt, such as Arizona's doing, so it's not all black asphalt? Anybody can work on that? So that was kind of my hope. I'm really tired of the dark black asphalt for multiple reasons, but that would be nice if at all possible. But thank you so much for doing all the work you're doing. I got nothing on the colored asphalt thing. Test, test. So thanks for the wonderful presentation. I, by the way, worked on US Bike Route 66, I told you earlier. And so there's lots of stories to tell there. I actually have two questions. The first question is for Neil. And the second question is for you and Michael. But I'm gonna do it in reverse order, so I'll start with my question for you two. I have looked very carefully at what Amtrak does in California in terms of what we can do for a trip that goes, say, starts in Sacramento, and ends in Mount Shasta, and then we take the train home. Okay, in Southern California where I live, it's really pretty great service with one exception.  And as best I know, there's no baggage service on the three stations north of Sacramento. So that'd be Chico, Dunn's, Muir, and Reading. That's, to me, a real limitation in for something like the Great Central Bike Route, because it would mean I'd have to figure out how to not only get from my home to the start of it, but then to get from the end of it back to my, so it's a logistical mess. So my question, and that same issue also applies to the train routes going from LA out over the desert. Because that means U.S. Bike Route 66 coming this way, just that California segment, is not doable either for that same reason. So what does the Adventure Cycling Association and the Great Central Valley Bike Route have in mind for addressing that set of issues? I mean, it's obviously advocacy, but what can we do? So the Amtrak issue is really a multi-layered issue. It has to do with their equipment and what the stations all look like. And I am not the expert on Amtrak, so I'm just giving you the top level that I can put together on that question. But my understanding is that equipment that can carry bicycles and allow for roll-on, roll-off, that kind of service really varies from station to station. And so that is a really expensive proposition and takes a lot of lobbying with Amtrak. That said, we do have the Amtrak task force where we do try to surface those issues and have conversations with them about the benefits of making those kinds of changes. And it's probably a long haul to get something to happen because it's a pretty big investment. As far as connecting more directly to US BRS routes, is that kind of the other part of your question? Yeah, yeah. And undo stress, sure, sure. Yeah, and that's really the benefit of being able to start like, say, in an urban center. But it's a logistical problem on a lot of routes all across the country and I don't have an easy answer for you. For Amtrak, yes. So if you would like to email me or we can sort of talk offline a little bit about this, I can hook you up. We'll have that conversation. So the question is how much of it is writable right now? It would be 24 plus 11 is 35, 37 miles. 47 miles. No, no. There's, you can make it, like I said, Sean and I rode that section. It was a very rough ride. He was on a full suspension bike. I was on a hardtail and I would not recommend it on a hardtail bike. There's a lot of those sections where you go along the side and there's room to go. So we would have sections where we could just ride for a while. But the main reason I emphasize no is because it's private property and it's not really legal. Sean and I had a letter from the authority saying we could. So I think that is one of the things that the new North Coast, excuse me, the Great Redwood Trail Agency could work on is getting it so that it was legal for at least people to walk on because you could walk it relatively. If you don't mind 10 mile sections of hike, you could walk it now. A little bit of feedback on the Amtrak thing that's interesting is the Amtrak throughway buses that connect to the San Joaquin system and the Capital Corridor system carry bicycles very nicely. And they go a lot of places that the trains don't. And so for example, there's a bus that connects to the San Joaquin and connects to the Capital Corridor that goes up to Redding. And you can just slide a bicycle into the luggage compartment underneath it. That's how I came here a couple of days ago. And I've done that and I've done a tour where I took the San Joaquin to Bakersfield and so it is possible to do it. One of the missing pieces, which is incredibly easy to fix if they weren't so dumb about it, is that at this point, they only allow you to use those buses if you're connecting to a train. That used to be legally required. It is no longer legally required. All that it takes is for the Joint Powers Authority that runs the San Joaquin train to make up their mind to allow you to use the buses without connecting to a train and you could do it. There's no obstacle to doing that. It's just that local Joint Powers Authority needs to be persuaded to change their minds about it. Does it work? Does it work? First, I had no idea I'd see a trail going through my college, Davis. And I had no idea it'd see a trail going through my town, Santa Rosa. Very excited to see this. I've heard about the project a lot of times before. I have friends from my school years that moved north to the city of Willets and they're all incredibly optimistic and positive this is gonna happen. When I see this proposal, I immediately think giant fire hazard. Maybe it isn't a fire hazard and I'm just dumb, but is it as popular as my image of it is or is there actually opposition or there's probably concern about the money, but just kind of what is the reaction? Okay, the fire. When I do trail work and I talk about, because I do a group called Yucaya Valley Trail Group, whenever we talk about new trails and new things, people always say, well, what about fire? And the same thing with homeless. Well, there's fire risk whether we have trails and there's fire risk if we don't have trails. The things that cause fire are high wire lines, they're gas combustion engines. They're generally not really caused by people riding bikes or hiking. So will people complain about that? Will people use that as no, you shouldn't do it because of fire? Yes, absolutely. I would dismiss that for myself just categorically, no, fire is not an issue. Other terms of other people, there's a lot of private property owners, ranchers, for example, who aren't crazy about having people have access to their property all of a sudden. And there's at least some reasonableness to that concern. If you haven't had anybody going on to your property, that is a concern and there have been cases where people have had vandalism and that kind of thing. So the main opposition would really be from private property owners who don't wanna see access to their property again. And then, but up and down the corridor, yeah, there's a lot of excitement about it. A lot of people are really excited about the vision and this is really where, do you believe it can happen? If you believe it can happen, people get really excited about it. Hello, so I'm wondering, and of course this question is for Jennifer and anyone else who can answer it, is in trying to route a US bicycle route through particular communities, different jurisdictions, county jurisdictions, if you face opposition from them, how do you get around that or how would you contend with that? Because liability is usually one of the biggest that these jurisdictions will fight. Yes, liability is definitely something that jurisdictions try to cite and generally speaking, cyclists, if it's a road or a path that a cyclist has allowed it to be on, there really is no greater liability to call something a bicycle, US bicycle route. That has been, we've got documentation, it's been through, I think it's the Michigan Attorney General tried that, they tried that argument there and they struck it down and said no, there is no greater liability. However, if a jurisdiction does decide they really don't wanna participate, then our only option is to reroute outside of that area. There's no other, there's no, because the DOT, I guess there's an outside chance if it's a state-owned road, a DOT, if it's their road, they can overrule the jurisdiction, but most DOTs in our experience don't wanna do that. There's too many, there's relationships there and that makes a lot of sense. We wanna help them preserve those relationships. We would never push a DOT to make that choice. So it would just simply become a rerounding issue. Is this working, yes. I'd like to add one other thing that really doesn't come out the problem the question in the same way is that I have not been involved, as Jennifer has in the planning of the US bicycle route system per se, but in planning the Great Central Valley Bicycle Route, I didn't mention it specifically, but another sort of sub-criteria is that I wanted to work with existing local bicycle plans and programs as much as possible. Partly that was a tool to help me in an area I didn't know. Well, where's the class two bike lanes? Well, look at the bike plan for the local county or the local city and you can learn where in the existing conditions map it tells you where the class two, the class one and so on. So that became a tool to plan the route. Subsequently, I started discovering that it's much easier to get a jurisdiction to approve it if it's already on their plan. And so a great deal when we think about, for those of you that are route planners, think about what you've already got. Work with your existing plans. Start there, don't just invent something new because there's a lot of good work with people that come before us. And when you do that, then when it comes time to see if we can get it approved in part of a larger system, 75% of your routes already approved. It's already on local plans. And so you don't face that problem with the local jurisdiction. I think, I think. Thank you for coming.