Mobility Committee Meeting Transcript – 4/6/2016 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 4/6/2016 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 4/6/2016 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [3:02:58 PM] >> Kitchen: Good afternoon. We are going to call to order the meeting of the mobility committee at 3:02. And we will begin with the approval of the minutes. So let's start with approval of the minutes for the March 2nd meeting. Do I have a motion to approve. Okay? A second? All those in favor? Okay. The minutes for the March 2nd meeting are approved. The minutes for the February 3rd -- I think we just had a correction. And that correction was just to say that the December minutes were approved on a 3- 0 vote with councilmember Zimmerman off the dais. So any objection to that correction? Okay. I don't know if we need to vote on it or not, but let's go ahead. All those in favor? All right. So -- >> Zimmerman: If you note on that, on the back of the minutes it shows me voting on the back of the minutes, if that's correct. >> Kitchen: We do not have any citizens signed up for citizens communication. Oh. Go right ahead. It's not showing on my system, but please go forward. I'll get to this in a second. I'm bill bunch with save our springs alliance. Our focus is water, but we figured out sometime ago that we've got to plan our water and transportation infrastructure together. And I'm concerned that we're not keeping that incredibly important point in mind. [3:04:58 PM] I really wanted to ask you to put on your agenda at a near term meeting some opportunity for us to make a more complete presentation to you and not just to us, but other community groups. I know you're overwhelmed with information coming at you. Most of that is coming at you from your staff, though, and I think that there's some groups, including us, who have some very important information to impart to you. What we've tried to look at is how our city decisions fit into the larger campo plan. And we haven't, I think, paid near enough attention to that. We're about to release a report from our expert, Owen Marshall, from smart mobility, who advice the envision central Texas process about 10 years ago, looking at the regional plan. And this study is looking at the campo 2040 plan and how it matches with our imagine Austin plan. And basically what it shows is it overwhelms and is in direct contrast and conflict with our imagine Austin plan. I don't see your transportation staff or your other staff talking about these issues. And figuring out how do we fix a regional plan that is just terribly broken? I think we can fix it, we can get buy-in from the surrounding counties if we have the right information and we put some good ideas on the table. The map here shows one example of this. This in blue shaded is the onion creek watershed. The red lines are the roads that they want to build in the first five years of the 2040 plan. $1.4 billion pavement, mostly toll roads in the Barton springs watershed. The bulk of that is in the southern part of the Barton [3:06:59 PM] springs watershed N the onion creek watershed. That translates directly to flooding in your district, councilmember kitchen, and in your district, councilmember Garza. From those -- that pavement itself directly and from the growth that is induced from that payment, our plans call for investing in east Austin. We want to see economic development east. And there's now a very valid proposal on the table to pay off the Toles on 130 -- tolls on 130 and make it free and make it the development corridor that we want it to be. And not just for our part of 130 but all the way down to I-10 so that we really have a growth corridor that makes sense for the whole region, that protects the Edward's aquifer and the whole region and that puts the money where we want our future to be and where we have land and space for it to be. So we would very much like some time on your next agenda, 15 minutes, something like that, to present the study that we're finishing up right now and to -- I can provide it to staff in advance so that they can provide some instantaneous feedback because we need that dialogue. There's a lot of stuff that we don't like about what your transportation staff is doing, but we need a healthy dialogue and it needs to be I think in this arena here. So thank you for your consideration. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Any questions? Okay. We'll talk more about that. Okay. Our next item to take up will be -- let's take up item number 5 first because I think we were -- does anybody know if Jim dale is going to be here? But he's not here yet, right? So we'll take up 5 first, [3:09:03 PM] item 5. We have one speaker on item 5, but we'll take the presentation first. Employ afternoon, I'm Eric Pollack, transportation engineer. Thank you for having us this afternoon. I want to go over our proposed mitigation ordinance that we're proposing, hopefully to the council may 5th, but I wanted to brief the mobility committee about some of the changes that are planned. So I'll kind of go over our current practices as it relates to development. Just kind of give an overview of rough proportionality and actually specific code amendments that we're proposing. And some possible future strategies that we've come up with. And as we all know, as we've heard, you know, the saying that property taxes aren't enough to keep up with growth. And so it really doesn't account for the infrastructure needs that the city, in particular Austin, needs with all our rapid development. And the thought that development should pay for itself. And typically what we look at is everything from right-of-way dedication, street construction, intersection improvements. And as -- it should be fair. And also as an extension of being fair, also legal. I'll get into rough proportionality a little bit later. Some of the things, mechanisms that we typically use in bonds, debts, transportation user fee, the tuf that we have and some are tax increment financing and some of the others listed there. And one that's possible for the city of Austin looking in the future is impact fees. So I'll go over that a little bit. So traffic impact analysis, I'll refer to it as a tia. Under current code a development must be projected to generate at [3:11:03 PM] least 2,000 trips per day. And that's been our standard for probably a couple of decades. So what we're finding is we get a lot of developments that fall right under that 2000 and all of a sudden that cumulative impact of the developments isn't really recognized. The city doesn't have a mechanism to collect money for improvements or actually require improvements to be made. Typically we look at a pro rata share and that's meaning say if an intersection has 10,000 cars go through it a day, a particular development will add a thousand. So say that intersection needs to be signalized. They'll only be expected to pay a 10th of that, about a thousand dollars. Historically what we've gotten is we might get a lot of mitigation for improvements, but we've never been able to put them all together and get a real improvement into the system so in addition to ti a as and traffic analysis and those are generally smaller in scale. It's more 300 trips, and those really focus on residential and what we call collector streets. We can't ask for the same type of mitigation, but typically the impact is going to be much less than what a tia would require. We also have the border street policy and this is really limited to streets that are adjacent to the site. We require right-of-way and what we really look to is atp, the Austin metropolitan area transportation plan and that's kind of our governing plan at the moment. It was last updated several years ago, but in that plan it really calls for long-term vision for the [3:13:10 PM] city's street system basically how much right-of-way is needed. And that's our primary goal that we have right now outside of an tia. That's something adopted by council and what we can refer to. >> Kitchen: Let me ask you one quick question. The tia, I understand what triggers that, the 2000 trips. What triggers an nta or border street policy. >> The nta have to have 300 trips in addition to what's existing right now. So it's really much smaller scale. Actually staff actually conducts those. So it's something that staff can conduct. So it's more 300. >> Kitchen: Is it automatically conducted on any property that meets that requirement? >> We take a look at it. We have determinations, development services department looks at it and kind of part of the review process, they check off, does it trigger tia, does it require an nta. That's part of the rose. >> Kitchen: And the transportation department does the nta if it requires one. >> Typically development services will do the nta, not the transportation department. >> Kitchen: And what about the border street? Who does that? >> It's a partner with add and atd. Typically they'll ask for the right-of-way for the map. They're getting our staff involved just to kind of sign off on what exactly is required. Because sometimes some atp calls for 200 feet of right-of-way. Something very large when it might have been envisioned as a more of a regional -- more major network connector. In that time we've realized that sometimes it's just not realistic. So sometimes we do go down on the amount of right-of-way requested, but we do try to get as much as we can. [3:15:11 PM] So just to brief you on rough proportionality, there are two major cases that really established all this, Nolan and Dolan as they're commonly known. Nolan really talking about the central nexus. So whatever improvements that we as a city ask for, any sort of mitigation, dedication, it has to have some nexus to the type of project being proposed. And then the second one, Dolan, which followed about seven years later, it added roughly proportional. So basically anything we ask can't be so far off, exactly what the impact would be. And so this actually-- the state of Texas as of 2005 also adopted it, and it covers dedication fees, construction costs and Blake the quote down there, may not exceed the amount required for infrastructure improvements that aren't roughly proportional. So what applies? They're really not design standards. Some of the things we require, say like street furniture, benches, trash cans, that's more of a design. What we're really looking at in rough proportionality is improvements, specifically increases to capacity or helping the overall network. So I was determined -- the language wasn't very specific about how municipalities were to determine what's roughly proportionate. So a few years ago the city and county, with the help of a consultant, came up with the process and then the consultant was very familiar with best practices in the state. So we have an active spreadsheet that's on our development services website. Anybody can kind of look at -- you just get an idea of what their roughly proportionate impact would be. And as it says there it's similar to about 30 other cities in Texas. Really what we're looking at is legal principle. [3:17:14 PM] It's a fairness check. But it's not a serious city policy or rule, so that's part of what this mitigation ordinance will aim to do. So how is it determined? Well, transportation demand, there's sort of an industry standard. Each land use given the type of use and the intensity, their estimates, about how many trips it would generate per day. So that really works the demand side. And that demand, the number of trips are converted into a construction cost because -- so there's basically a unit cost for every lane mile. So the supply side, it's all based on the length of the trip, the type of street, the cross- section, the right-of-way. Those are all things that we can ask for. So basically we have to make sure that the demand and supply are within reasonable Numbers compared to each other. So here's an example where we have an intersection 38th and Lamar. You may be familiar with it. Here's an example where it's a busy one. So the standard practice at tia, say the sites, somebody is redeveloping there, we may take a look at these intersections. They're rather major. A lot of it is up to staff judgment. Obviously the farther you go out the less impact you could really tie to a specific development because trips will start to distribute and disperse. And so our model looks at a one and a half mile trip length, and the same standards that we look to for trip generation, it also speaks to how long an average trip is. In most types of land use really are more than a mile and a half. This is really conservative estimate, but we are consistent. It doesn't really matter the type of land use. We just kind of set a mile and a half as an example. And so actually we're only [3:19:15 PM] looking at half because half the trip going somewhere can then be attributed to where the destination is, so we cut that in half. It's a mile and a half. So this kind of -- it's a good illustration of now if we take a look at a mile and a half we can capture a lot more and be consistent. And it's good for the developers to know what they could be possibly looking at in terms of impacts and study. So like I said, the mile and a half is what we used. The current state has the pro rata share, but our approach is consistent with other cities and it's also on the website. And so in terms of specific code amendments, so land development code, chapter 25-6, is the transportation portion of this. >> Kitchen: We have a question. >> Gallo: Before you move off of the distance, because that seems to be a lot of conversation that surrounds zoning cases and tias. So the department determined that a fixed trip length of 1.5 miles was the appropriate number. >> Right. >> Gallo: And I think I heard you say it seems like there's 30 other Texas cities that are using the rough proportionality now. So of those 30 other cities do the majority of them use the 1.5? I'm just trying to understand how we came up with -- how your department came up with 1.5. >> Most of them follow -- I think San Antonio, for awhile they were using different trip length based on certain land uses. I think the community got a little confused and it was harder to justify. Well, why did they get half a mile? Why did some people get five miles? I think a mile and a half was the consensus. All the cities we looked at seemed the most reasonable and fair because if we would go to five or six miles, I mean, I think we would have that authority, but to justify some of the rough proportionality they could be -- a development could be on the hook for quite a bit [3:21:17 PM] of money. So I think we have that ability, but based on our analysis, a mile and a half seemed fair. >> Gallo: So of peer cities approximately the same size as Austin, would you say the 1.58 is consistent with those cities? >> Yes. >> Gallo: Thank you. >> Kitchen: Before going on to the code amendments, could you speak to how what we're talking about today relates to the transportation impact fee? My understanding is -- I want to make sure I've got this understanding right. That the rough proportionality is what we're doing right now. So what we're looking to do or what you guys are recommending is that rough proportionality is sort of the practice, but it's not in policy, so we need to put it in policy. >> Correct. >> Kitchen: But if I'm understanding correctly, that would stay in place until such time as the city adopted a transportation impact fee. >> Right. >> Kitchen: And my understanding from -- we've had a presentation from you guys from the staff on transportation impact fee and my understanding of that timeline is that there will be a consultant selected to do that analysis and it will be at least another year, maybe longer, before recommendations of how we put in place and transportation impact fee comes in place for us is that right? >> That's right. We're currently trying to get somebody on board to take a look at the impact fee. I believe it's about 18 months is the timeline. Roughly. >> I did want to clarify. So rough proportionality will not go away. It is the cap. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> That's the maximum amount we can ask for. The impact fee is how do we get up to that cap. What portion of that cap do we ask for for a particular [3:23:19 PM] project. But rough proportionality is the law and that's what we want to get close to, but not over. >> Kitchen: So the code amendment that relates to rough proportionality that -- the proposed code amendment that will be brought back to us, that code amendment, what happens to that code amendment when and if we adopt a transportation impact fee? Does that code amendment go away or do they work together in some way. >> I'm sure they will work together. That's part of the longer term analysis. So what we're looking at here is kind of an interim. We don't want -- we think this could be expanding or clarifying a lot of what's in code and what we haven't used over the years. So this is a good way to put it in code, get the expectations out there. Everybody knows it, particularly a development community and everybody else until such time that the impact fees are looked at or even taking a stronger look at even our tia requirements, kind of following national best practice and getting somebody on board to kind of give an independent review of its best thing we need to do as a city. >> Kitchen: If I'm remembering correctly, the transportation impact fee, one of the things that that could do for us is it allows a six mile radius -- the dollars that you collect can be used for improvements within a six-mile radius and we don't have that authority right now. >> Right. So the way the law reads it's a six mile area. It's a diameter -- it kind of depends. We have the ability to define that. But as govern was saying, so rough proportionality is the coop. So right now all we really ask for in rough proportionality is kind of based on the tia when in reality we could -- there is kind of a gap. So in the particular case per the impact fee you might be able to ask for this must. Our standard process is somewhere in between. That kind of remainder of money you can use within this six mile area. [3:25:23 PM] You have to refer to a plan that's adopted and other criteria, but it's a good way to make the most out of our hitgation and collection. >> Kitchen: Okay. I wanted to make sure I understood the relationship between the two concepts and what we were doing now would not be negated by what we do in 18 months. >> Even impact fees are subject to rough proportionality. So this is the concept that this all follows. >> Kitchen: Okay. Wait, we have another question. >> Gallo: I'm sorry, I kind of had a second half to the question about the distance. So you mentioned that most other cities the same size use that 1.5-mile distance. But do other cities also have a -- the same distance for different reviews or do you see other cities coming up with different distances for certain uses? >> I think we have seen for different uses. I think it gets a little bit -- it harder to be consistent. And if we have a distance that's pretty reasonable and which captures most land uses, I think in our eyes that's fair. Like I mentioned, the city, I think it was San Antonio, that was using half a mile. I think it -- over time when we consulted with that city they said yeah, these are the concerns. These are some of the problems that are coming up that frankly we wish we would have done one consistent trip length for all use and move on from there and let everybody treated equally. >> Gallo: So have you had -- so there are some other cities that have different distances for different uses and San Antonio is one of those. >> I'd have to check on that. >> Gallo: And have stakeholders been involved in the discussion at this point or will they be involved in the -- I'm thinking of the development community because I'm just curious of the different uses. Is there really a different traffic impact [3:27:23 PM] depending on the uses because when you look at the tias there is a different analysis based on the usage. We're talking about a pretty substantial way in evaluating and I want to make sure that you have stakeholder participation in this process as we talk about changing. >> We have. I was trying to remember the timeline, but we did have open houses with the development community. Basically we presented the rough proportionality concept. We fielded questions. I think that the trip length was understood by most in terms of being fair and understanding why we chose that consistent one lane. >> Gallo: Was there any concern addressed from moving from a system that has a different traffic impact calculation for uses to one that doesn't? >> In terms from our existing kind of pro rata model or in terms of rough proportionatety -- >> Gallo: It's my understanding that when the tias are done that there's a different trip generation that's dependent on use so there are some uses that have a more intense trip generation. So we're going from a system that calculates it based on use to it sounds like a system that they would -- all the uses to be treated the same. I'm just wanting to make sure there weren't any concerns expressed by the development community about making such a substantial change. >> Not to my knowledge. I can follow up. But every use is still looked at separately in terms of expected trip generation. So they're all subject to calculating the total number of trips, and that total number of trips is then multiplied by the average trip length. So if you need a little bit more feedback from the community in terms of how they reacted to that, I can follow up [3:29:23 PM] falled so I think what -- >> Gallo: So I think what I'm hearing is in relation to the total fees that were due, there is a calculation that takes into effect under rough proportionality the different use case and the trips that are generated. >> Yes. So that part doesn't change. It's kind of consistent with our tia. They'll say so many square feet of this. That's still all in our calculation. >> Gallo: Okay. Thank you. That's helpful. >> Kitchen: And I think you probably have a next steps tend, but it will be helpful to understand when there will be a draft ordinance to look at. Because I know the stakeholders will want to weigh in on the language of the ordinance. Okay. Keep going. Go ahead. >> Garza: Can you explain the relationship. So the one and a half trip miles and the six miles? >> So the six mile, that's actually specific maximum area that's defined in the state law in terms of impact fees. It says you can define an area up to six miles. They can be last. Typically they might be different sizes downtown as opposed to kind of more outside part of the city, maybe the suburban area. Mile and a half, that's based on -- so we have data that says, say, a single unit house, the average trip length is X. A convenience store is another distance. So that's kind of looking at the average length of those types of uses. Some fall under mile and a half. A lot of them fall -- actually are above a mile and a half. Again, going back to best practice and what other cities are using. I think a lot of cities determine that if they're going to five or six miles, then the amount that we could ask for, probably just not really feasible in terms of could be tens of millions of dollars where they might just be doing an apartment complex, for example. [3:31:29 PM] >> Garza: Councilmember kitchen asked a question about the six miles and what I thought it meant was we can base rough proportionatety on the 1.5, but that money can go up to six miles, is that right? >> Kitchen: I thought the six miles was where you could spend the money, not the formula for how much money you ask for. >> Zimmerman: That's what I heard too. >> Councilmember, Andy liensize. We've been working on this for quite awhile. I want to back up a second and go back to these slides where we created this hypothetical project. Said okay there's a project at 38th and Lamar. Very heavily traveled intersection. I don't care what they build there. Their percentage of trips in that intersection won't be that great. So okay. So under the practice of tia, which you're all speaking to, we would make it move -- we would pick a series of intersections based on a tia scoping process. Like in this example I said we pick these six intersections. We would ask the consultant to do a tia based on their land use, trip counts. They would look at each of the intersections and propose improvements based on a recommendation of staff that these are the ones we want you to look at. That defines our scope of what we're looking at for mitigation. So for this hypothetical project they're only looking at six intersections. That doesn't capture what else is going on. In this case it could be further out. We've had some projects, further out. Some of the intersections we've looked at were pretty far away. They're usually not six miles, but they can be further away. In this hypothetical example we have these six intersections, they propose mitigation to staff. We have turn lane, improve the signal. We'll do whatever on a pro rata base and say my percentage of the trips is 10 percent. That's a-million-dollar improvement. Here's $100,000. That's today's world. All that is still subject to our rough proportionality calculation. But when you're looking [3:33:29 PM] at mitigation we collect today under tia nta, it's in this methodology where we pick specific intersections, we ask them to mitigate those intersections. In the next slide where we're doing roughly proportional, we pick the mile and a half. Most of the trip length, some are nine, some are 13. In the ita table, if you look at the spreadsheets there's a breakdown by how long the trips are. We said half. Half goes to the destination, half goes to where you came from. So we put it in half. If you look I would say about 80, 90 percent of the trip length in our table based on tia are less than three miles when you cut it in half. Are more than three miles and they would be more than a mile and a half. So we look back and forth. One of the reasons we fixed on a fixed link fixed use. Every project we bring forward now seems to be a mixed use. How do you evaluate that if you don't have a fixed length. That was part of our discussion. We said let's be conservative. We're not going to say our trip length is five miles. That's the Austin way. So we settled on this mile and a half based on what Eric said standard practice of other cities. To avoid having other project have a discussion, I had more apartment and less of this and arguing with them about the proportional share because it is not a mathematical exactitude. That's what the law says. It's roughly proportional. It is roughly. When we're looking at the rp, when you look on that map, I've got them overlaid. Today's world where we have our six intersections we're only collecting mitigation and analysis at those six months points. When lure techniquing at the project there are impacts to other areas. They may not be measurable. It might be one, two, three, four cars. It could be better pedestrians or whatever on the other streets [3:35:30 PM] that we didn't analyze. That's the change. So the proportional model is saying there are impacts to the network inside that yellow bubble, and that's the cap. So we've come up with a model working with our consultant that said the cap we can request on the estimated impacts inside that bubble. A mile and a half, a formula that does the vehicle miles traveled, costs based on actual construction costs from public works and that's our estimate of that's the max we can ask. That's the cap. >> Kitchen: That's instead of just the six points. >> Yes. What we're looking at when we talk about the cap of improvements, the max we can ask for is based on the mile and a half. That's it. The total impact to system or network is based on the mile and a half. In our current practice today we're only capturing mitigation on only the six points or however many it happens to be. Some projects have a ton. The grove has a bunch of points, so does Austin oaks. It depends on the scale. So I don't know if that helps. When you're looking at the roughly proportional share it's the max we can ask for. We're a layered approach so we have a border street. We get some boundary, dedicate right-of-way. Maybe they fix an intersection, something else. Those add up. So you have a small component. But that's all we can get under code. Even under our code change. But then impact fees goes what code won't let us collect that's not roughly proportional and that's a council decision on how much they want to catch when you get to that point. >> Kitchen: Did you have -- >> Zimmerman: Yeah, maybe seems to belabor the point. The point is you're expanding the radius or the area that you're considering in analysis. At its core it seems like it's something that could be explained in 30 seconds and yet the longer you talked, the more confusing it got. [Laughter] >> Kitchen: Thank you for trying. I think we got it now. >> Garza: I'm still trying to understand the [3:37:33 PM] six miles. >> That's impact fees and actually a second set -- it's a second set of slides after the improvements in the ordinance. And yes, we were required by the courts and state law to come up with a way to make sure that our asks are roughly proportional. It's been very confusing because we have this new thing where we're doing roughly proportional and then we have mitigation we're collecting. There's a lot of confusion with the development community. I think with council and even with the commissions. >> Zimmerman: One more point. There's really probably a non-proportion or a non-linear effect. Ed idea here is as you get further away from the point that you're affecting, the probability goes down that something is going to be affected. So it is non-linear, right? If you're thinking about what's happening in locale, the closer you get to locale the more activity you're affecting. As you get further away from it the statistics drop that you will have any impact at all. So it's, not pro corporation national, it's disproportion national. It affects the locale where the development is the most and as you go out from there the probability decreases, you will have any effect at all. You will have no effect from San Antonio for what happens at 38th street. >> Kitchen: I think proportional probably relates to the impact of the other development that's already there. Yeah. Okay. So let me just recap to make sure I've got it. So basically what we do now is looking at the different points. That's your six points example. The mile and a half, as you put it, councilmember Zimmerman, that's actually kind of expands the scope of where we might look at the impact. But both of those have to do with how you measure the impact or the geography of where you measure the impact, right? >> Yes, ma'am, that's correct. >> Kitchen: The six miles then, that's theoretical at this point because we won't be addressing that until you come back to us and until and unless we [3:39:34 PM] adopt a transportation impact fee because the six miles is a state law requirement for transportation impact fees that allows you -- this is the point I want to make sure I've got right. That allows you to spend the dollars that you collect for mitigation, assuming you're collecting dollars, within a six-mile area. Right? >> Yes, ma'am. It's is service area and it can be up to six miles. >> Kitchen: It's like apples and Oranges. It's not measuring the area where you measure the impact. It has to do with how you can spend the dollars. >> Absolutely. There's a lot -- we can quickly walk through -- >> Kitchen: It's more complicated. >> We could quickly walk through this and go back to the code changes. >> Zimmerman: Let me talk quickly about motivation and why there is that limit. It would stop the politics of taking impact fees from here and putting it 15 miles away in a different part of the city. >> Kitchen: And on the other end it also allows -- one of the problems we talked about before was in some circumstances having collected dollars, but not being able to spend them because we were constrained about where we could spend them. So the money is not being used. Let's just keep going in order and then we'll -- okay. So you can go back to your code amendments. >> I'll let Eric recouple now. Resume now. >> So in terms of what we're proposing to change in the code, broadly defined transportation plan right now it's just called transportation plan, but we want to make sure that we're capturing not just the map that was referenced earlier, but other multimodal plans, other plans that might be adopted in the system. The system being kind of a way to deliver people and services and goods. So say like the roadway is a a system, the trails might be another system. They're all part of a larger network. Really what we're talking about, before it codifies the requirement for proportionality [3:41:36 PM] determination since we're using it, but we really want to put in the code, looking off site right away are transportation improvements. Being in compliance with the government code in terms of each determination as to be an independent determination, certified by an engineer. So we're just bringing the city into compliance with those requirements. And it claves roadway dedication. Clarifies roadway dedication. A lot of times looking at right-of-way was in the reservation section where we're dedicating more than reserving it. It really just authorizes as a condition of development approval which is one thing we look at a lot when looking at collections, support all modes of travel and proposed determination is required for off site right-of-way. And also authorized the staff to require construction and also fee-in-lieu, fee-in-lieu can be an option for developments. A lot of times we do want the improvements just to be constructed, but we do allow for fee-in-lieu when approved. And it just opens up for future code for off site mitigation. And so right now in our code, if you read it, it kind of does say the director does have the ability to require improvements to mitigate. Now, in practice the city hasn't done that outside of tia or nta. In the spirit of this ordinance before it's looked at in greater depth and more changes are made, staff has come up with a series of improvements we feel we could require that would not necessarily require tia or nta. So going back to the 2000 trip per day limit, we might be getting a number of these developments that we're just not collecting anything for. [3:43:39 PM] So within a quarter mile -- if you want to use the term like a walk shed, a lot of people are comfortable walking a quarter mile and so that really speaks to the types of developments that would not generate 2,000 trips. But we also go up to three-fourths of a mile. We're looking at we still want the nexus to be there. We still want it to be roughly proportionate, so we will still run those two determinations. A lot of times our code might require a sidewalk in front of a development, but then again it could be 100 feet we're missing to just get to a bus stop or give enthe type it might be residential development that's on a major street then we've given them no safe way to cross the street. And so those are types of things that outside of a tia -- so tias are usually more in-depth, run a lot of Numbers, analyze a lot of things and say you need a signal based on more robust analysis. Now, we believe these are ways that staff can -- it's the nexus is pretty much understood. We can run the rough proportionality. It's something we can ask for. And all of these things we've listed here would typically fall under -- be roughly proportionate even in developments that generate less than 2,000 trips. We get a lot of the 1999 examples. A lot of the curb ramps, markings we put up every everyday. We go from the less expensive to the more expensive. Traffic calming devices we know that certain neighborhoods sometimes request these when a development might be coming in a neighborhood. Upgrades to bike lanes, kind of going to rectangular rapid flashing beacons, pedestrian islands, hybrid beacons. So the last bullet, other measures define -- so Austin transportation [3:45:39 PM] department, we're constantly getting requests for, say, new traffic signals or pedestrian hybrid pee cons. So we're pretty transparent. We have a website where they rang. As staff we've kind of come up with a preliminary score of -- based on the need of where -- if we had the funding kind of the order we would fund them. So if we're not getting a tia, but something coincides with something we've already identified as staff saying we've identified the need, we just didn't have -- that's a good way to say, yes, it makes sense. We can ask this development to pay for this improvement. >> Kitchen: Let me make sure I'm understanding. These changes to the code are necessary to make it clear that you can ask for those kind of changes, even in the absence of a tia. >> The code does say that we can ask for it, but we didn't want such a great change at this point that we could do away with tias. We still see benefit with having the tias and somebody having the impacts, but these are improvements that we could see and ask for under our current code and changes to the ordinance that under our authority that we could ask for and start getting some mitigation from some of these smaller developments outside of a tia. >> Kitchen: Do these code changes give us greater authority or do they clarify the authority we've already been exercising? >> I would say it clarifies a lot of what we're doing. This is a little bit more specific so people know what -- so we can't be accused of, where was the nexus here? You're just asking for something. Well, no, we kind of have in mind what we would want, particularly if we've already identified it previously before the certain development ever come our way. It's something that we can point to and say it was already identified and we see the need for the system and the network. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Garza: The priority list you mentioned, is that strictly based off [3:47:40 PM] of feedback from the community? >> Not necessarily. As staff we recognize some locations that might be needed, but we do receive a lot of feedback and input from the public. You know, currently we probably have between 80 and 100 requested locations for hybrid beacons and the same for signals. So we've come up with our -- kind of our own analysis in terms of surrounding network, say for like a hybrid beacon, the amount of pedestrian activity we see, even sort of latent demand where we know there might be a mile between traffic signals and we can clearly see maybe it's a bus stop and people are crossing. So we can use those tools to kind of help score preliminarily the ones that we would like to study further and given the budget or the funding we could -- we can install once we have the money for them. >> Garza: But how is the score from the community feedback you've gotten? >> In terms of if it's the ranking criteria? I think we broadly say -- >> Garza: I think a vocal community has an advantage over a less vocal community. >> As far as the ranking goes, the community -- I mean, basically once we receive a request is when we evaluate it. Whether five people request it, whether one person requests it, it does in fact go to the actual scoring. >> Garza: So a project you've gotten 30 emails won't higher because of that? It just brings it to your attention when you do an analysis? >> Correct. >> Garza: Okay. >> Kitchen: Go ahead. >> Zimmerman: So I think the point of this from my viewpoint, from a technical viewpoint, is a lot of these requests, they need to be based on technical [3:49:42 PM] merit, not on political demand because, you know, we have certain people in neighborhoods who say well, I was just going to demand a bunch of new signaling and demand this and demand that and arbitrarily bile pile that on because I have political power and force the developer to pay for that. Maybe they just won't do it or pass the cost on to whoever buys or rents the property. So that's why I would favor making this based on technical analysis, not based on political pressure. >> Kitchen: Thanks. >> To talk more about political impact fees, it does talk about a number types of utility, impact fees in Texas. So it has to be capacity related costs in terms of when we're talking about roadways, no public art streetscape elements. It's a way of recovering these costs and again it's subject to rough proportionality. And here's a quote that kind of sums it up. Basically what we've been talking about, chargers, assessment imposed, has to be basically roughly proportionate, attributed to the next development that establishes the nexus there. And then when you look at it, you look at a 10 year growth horizon that we would be required to look at it every five years to check up and see how we're going, but there are things subject to rough proportionality. We look at growth projections in terms of where the city would be heading in terms of population and development and it really has to point to adopted plans so that kind of speaks to that area where that gives us the ability to say within the six miles we've collected this money. Okay. It can be given towards this particular project because it's understood that it's been adopted and part of the street network plan or bicycle plan, for instance. [3:51:42 PM] What I alluded to before, it's checks and balances to have somebody look at it from an engineering standpoint, to look at the capital improvement plan and having somebody else take a look at it. It requires a public hearing so everybody knows because it does have a big impact of how we would start assessing and collecting for improvements. And it does require a committee. And these are all part of the state laws in terms of impact fees. So we're -- Ms. Kitchen, you asked about the timeline a little bit. So just last week we talked to the planning commission and zoning and platting, they had a joint meeting. So we'd like to bring it to codes and ordinances and also the planning commission just to kind of get their feedback, but before council would see it we're looking for may 5th for the public hearing. >> Kitchen: When you say it you're talking about the proposed ordinance that puts this in place, right? >> Correct, the language, yes. And in terms of the impact fees, yeah, just several weeks ago the rfq for the impact fees went out. So we're in that process. And hopefully this summer we're looking at selecting a consultant. >> Kitchen: So the June 23rd there is the request for city council action on the consultant, is that right? >> Correct. >> Kitchen: And that's the consultant for both the strategic mobility plan and the street --, the impact fees? >> Monique Boday. Definitely for the impact fees we're trying to figure out the procurement method. We're targeted for June 23rd for the strategic mobility plan, but depending on the route we choose we may go with a rotation list [3:53:44 PM] potentially and we're trying to figure out the quickest, most efficient way to get the quality that we want with the plan. So definitely street impact fee, potentially as and P. And we'll update you all on the method at the time if you're not going to see the strategic mobility plan on the 23rd of June. >> Kitchen: Is this the kind of thing that the expertise is different, that y'all's expectation, you have different consultants for these two? >> Definitely. Definitely the scope is very different on both of those, yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. And the code amendment is the may fifth target. Go ahead. >> So I'm looking at the -- >> Gallo: So I'm looking at the code amendment schedule and it looks like on the 19th it goes before the planning department code and ordinances. I think you asked when the draft version of it would be available. Did you ask and I didn't hear it? I'm sorry. >> I don't think I have a date at this time, but we did want to kind of get this message out to those commissions. But I can get back to you in terms of exactly when the council would expect to see the language. >> Gallo: It's council and stakeholders too. I think a lot of times we put something out on Friday for a meeting the next week and that really isn't I don't think adequate time for all the stakeholders to take a look at it and mobilize and talk and kind of find out where they are on it and meet with us if they need to. I would just say I would prefer a process that gives enough time to the stakeholders to be able to look at the draft ordinance before it begins the process forward. >> Understood. >> Kitchen: Wouldn't you have to have the code before -- before April 19th? I mean, the ordinance, the proposed ordinance? >> Right. We do have a draft in hand in terms of I think we just recently completed the draft in terms of what we're [3:55:45 PM] proposing for the mitigation ordinance. >> Kitchen: So there is a draft now. >> Yes. >> Kitchen: That's something that this committee would like to see if there's actually a draft. And in fact, my understanding was that we were getting a briefing today, but we didn't have a craft to look at -- draft to look at. I apologize to my fellow councilmembers. I didn't know we had a draft to look at because I would expect us to have it for us to see. Okay. So for future reference, if there's a draft and you're presenting to the mobility committee we would expect to see the draft. >> Zimmerman: Yeah. I would echo that. I thought there was no draft and that's why we didn't have it. >> So our code amendment process, code and ordinances initiated and we were following that process of posting the draft with code and ordinances, getting the feedback from the code and ordinance committee, then the planning commission with a recommendation to you. We certainly can provide you the draft. We were planning to do that after we get the feedback from the commission. We're on a very of course expedited time frame because we're trying to get this to you, but we can certainly provide the draft. We can post it for the public as well. Mr. Lloyd says it's ready now. We can post it. We can send it out if that's -- >> I think it's really important from a transparency standpoint that the draft be posted well in advance of the discussion at the planning commission meeting. It gives the council a chance to see it and also the public to see it so if they have concerns they can visit with the council offices. We're trying to come up with a policy procedure that feels like people have time to be able to actually review ordinances, draft versions coming through. Understanding they may get changed through the process, but at least be [3:57:46 PM] able to be transparent with the community and Austin to allow them and us the opportunity to have enough time layered on to the million other things we're doing too to be able to get those. >> Kitchen: It would be helpful so that by the time it does come to council we're less likely to be faced with requests from stakeholders that they didn't have enough time to look at it. So that can help us avoid a lot of postponements. Okay. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: I think we had one person. Let me see if that's -- anybody wanted to speak on this? Yes. David king, did you want to speak? Pipes, >> David king. I think this is a good step in the right direction. I just hope we can get there as quickly as possible because it sounds like we already know we're not charging the impact fees this we need to be charging and projects are going through right now that are gonna be grandfatherred into the current fees and we're gonna lose how many millions of dollars? So I know -- I appreciate your attempt to expedite this and get this through the process but also have a fair and transparent process for the public. I just encourage us to keep moving along so we can get the fees in there to help with the traffic problems that I know y'all are working hard on as well. I do have a concern, though, about the traffic impact analysis being triggered only at 2,000 or above because in my own neighborhood I see many projects that are just below that threshold and they never get into this analysis. So they go under the radar, so to speak and then when you add up the cumulative effect of those smaller projects they have the impact that a 2,000 trip project or more would [3:59:46 PM] have in cumulative impact. And so I think that's part of our problem, that we're not really look at the impacts and over time the cumulative effect of that is not being paid for. And so I really think that we need to be looking at lowering that threshold no to a lower number so we can catch those smaller projects and look at the cumulative effect. If we're not going to lower the threshold we should at least look back and see all the smaller projects that went through in the last six months and see what impact they've had. Add up the impact and then charge them an impact, some kind of proportional impact because like I said I think those going under the radar are causing some of the problems that we're having with our traffic problems in the city. And in terms of the uses affecting the amount of the impact, you were talking about that earlier, about in correlating the uses to the impact itself, you know, there are some businesses that have heavy duty trucks. That's going to have a different impact than, you know, other types of businesses. So I think uses are important, and they need to be reflected in the fee. And then the fee in lieu, I'm always concerned about fee in lieu because when we look at fee in lieu in our other programs oftentimes we see that the fee does not cover the actual cost to go and build out or mitigate the impact somewhere else. The sidewalks, we've seen that the sidewalk fee is woefully inadequate to actually build a sidewalk that would otherwise be required and we never get the sidewalk. So I'm concerned about this here, using a fee-in-lieu and I would say if we're going to have that option there be clear criteria and potentially a super majority of the vote of the council to approve that fee-in-lieu so that you have a real opportunity to make sure that it's thoroughly explained. And then the neighborhood traffic impact analysis, I'm glad I was here, I never heard of that before. I'm glad to know there is one but I never heard of that one. [4:01:47 PM] I've seen many, many cases in my neighborhood and never not once have I seen a neighborhood traffic impact analysis. It's always if it doesn't have 2,000 or more, then there's no analysis necessary. I hope that we will utilize this feature more because I think that will help with some of the neighborhood problems we have with traffic and development along our transit corridors and the basket that has on the neighborhood. I would suggest that the mta, neighborhood traffic impact analysis be done by trained transportation staff. I really appreciate your work on this and thank you for listening to my comments. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Okay. We will now turn to item number 4, which is the briefing with discussion and possible action on transit lane and signal prioritization. And my colleagues, we have a briefing on this and then we also have a proposed -- a proposed resolution that I'll bring at the right time and I'd like to propose we recommend to the council. Go ahead. >> Good afternoon, councilmembers. Thank you for your time. We're going to do a joint between appears transportation department and capital metro. Todd will lead off talking about why we do transit priority treatments and general overview of those and then I'll close by talking about what we're doing today in Austin and also looking at some of the future activities that we're pursuing. >> Thank you, Jim. Good afternoon, chair kitchen, members of committee, I'm vp of planning with capital metro. Glad to be here today to talk about this item. Starting with the why, why transit priority, and this is one of our favorite pictures. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. [4:03:48 PM] And the point here is that in limited urban rights of way, congested cities, it's simply a matter of geometry in some cases, how many people can you move. And we're through to improve person through put, maximize the use of our limited rights of way and public transit is one very effective way to do that. These are some of the key points in terms of why, again, emphasizing person through put. We can reduce the time our buss are stuck in traffic and we'll show you benefits of that in just a moment. We have a more efficient transportation system overall when we can improve that person throughput. We can have faster and more reliable service and that in turn helps improve ridership. Here's a visual of the most recent partnership effort that Jim and deem and capital metro have done and this is at lavaca, northbound at martin Luther king, and just this little video hopefully will help demonstrate the benefits of it as well. So you can see we have a -- what's called a queue jumper, buses coming out earlier. And that bus could easily have in the peak hours up to 40 people. One of our metro rapids up to 80 people. And those buss are moving ahead, that 40 or 80 people are moving -- well, didn't quite work but the point being that there was one person in each of those vehicles. So you're moving large masses of people more expeditiously through than the single ongoing pant vehicles. In terms of direct benefit, here's a good example, we believe. It shows an example of a single route. If you have a transit priority and if you do not. The first road there is without. If -- the hypothetical route [4:05:49 PM] had ran every 15 minutes, took two hours to make a round trip, add 50 trips a day, equates to about 600 hours of service, $75 an hour, $45,000 a day. If you have transit priority on that corridor where you're operating and you can reduce the time by just 15 minutes on that round trip, that reduces your daily service hours by 75, saves you about $5,600 a day. So on a daily basis that may not be that much but if you break that out over the course of a full year that could yield a cost savings of 1.7 to $2 million and you can provide the same level of service with one fewer bus, which could be a capital cost savings of up to $600,000. Another way to look at this is we could provide more frequent service, better quality of service with the same resources. Either way you cut it there's substantial savings for the taxpayer, for the community at large, as well as the travel time benefits. Just a little bit about the what, what is transit priority. The generally accepted definition I think would be this. It's priority bus treatments that improve the operations or the environment that the buses operate, in reducing delays and benefiting bus operations, improving critically important, again, reliability and attractiveness to patrons or customers. As you'll see momentarily, there are different tools in the toolbox we can use to achieve that. These are probably four of the bigger ones that are in use across the country and I'm glad to say that just within the past several years we've deployed all of these in Austin, Texas. Four or five years ago, we had none of these. So we have made significant progress. Exclusive or priority bus lanes are kind of the gold standard, if you will. That's where we get the big benefit but admittedly comes [4:07:51 PM] with some of the big environmental challenges that occupies a lane and in many cases we can demonstrate that by doing so we're actually moving more people in that lane than in the parallel lanes that are open for general traffic. But in terms of public process, engaging the public, getting feedback from the community, when you do these, these can be some of the most challenging. You'll notice in the graphic they have actually painted the bus lanes in this case, this is in San Francisco. We have not gone there yet in Austin, but that's something that we'd like to look at for the future. Some of the other attributes, these can operate in peak hour only in some cases where appropriate or they can be all the time. Our neutral success, which Jim will talk about are Guadalupe and lavaca corridors in downtown. Another important tool is transit signal priority. This is basically buses working with the traffic signal system we have, automatic vehicle location systems with gps on all of our fleet and so they basically work with the signal system and allow the bus a little extra green time to get through in the case where the light might have just about to have been turning red. We'll talk about that more in just a moment as well. Another one, which the video demonstrated, is what's called a queue jump. That gives the bus with the separate signal the ability to jump ahead of traffic. We do have to have extended right-of-way back from the intersection to allow the bus to access it. The cost is relatively nominal, but it depends on how much right-of-way is available and then there's the signal and the software and hardware behind the traffic signal priority. One important point is if you have a bus pull-out but don't have a signal, we have some folks in the community that favor having the buses pull out of the lane of traffic and [4:09:52 PM] we come to a stop, which can make sense but if the bus is on a major, busy roadway and it pulls out of the lane of traffic and it's just bumper to bumper oftentimes the bus cannot get back into the metro and it actually slows things down. A bus stop placement is another -- not as exciting as those first three but very important in terms of being able to make the bus move more quickly through congested urban environments. There are basically three options. You have near side, meaning before the intersection, far side, after the intersection or in the middle of a block. The recent research has shown far side stops are the ones that help speed buses along most effectively but these are very complex things. We work them on a case-by-case basis with close coordination with the city. Again, they can significantly impact performance. So just to wrap up our portion before we turn it over to Jim, a few points. Again, I believe the national research as well as what we've seen in Austin would indicate that transit priority in its multiple forms can yield significant benefits for not only the city, transit agency but the riders in the community. It's one of the most effective ways to improve mobility in urban environments where we don't have right-of-way to build out a larger roadway system, for example. The partnership we've had with the city has been productive and is much appreciated. We certainly recognize that every one of our buses that is operating on right-of-way so that partnership is very critical to the success of public transportation in this community. And then, finally, and you'll hear more about this, but there are many opportunities we believe to do more and actually increase some of these benefits. The success we've had so far has been very good and, again, we look forward to working with the city going forward. With that, turn it over to Jim and then I'd be glad to answer [4:11:52 PM] any questions. >> Kitchen: Did you want to go ahead? >> Or questions now. >> Gallo: I do have a question. >> Yes, ma'am. >> Gallo: Not necessarily on the subject matter but I'm curious, so does capital metro have a system where by you can tell the number of riders on a bus at any given time? You know, your presentation talks about the value of buses that are full of 40 or 50 people related to a lane of traffic that's not allowing vehicles in that lane. And so I'm just curious if you have -- do you have the metrics that show that those buss are full at certain times? >> Yes. We -- there are very few systems in the country that have that in realtime so like you could go on their website and see how full every bus is. There's very few if any of those but we do have what are called automatic passenger counters on almost our entire fleet, we're counting how many are getting on, how many are getting off and we know the net difference between the two is how many people are on board at any given time. So that information is available. We track it across our full system. >> Gallo: Okay, great. Thank you. >> Zimmerman: I want to take off on what councilmember Gallo said. I get a lot of comments from constituents about how the buss are empty the vast majority of the time. I mean the dark tint on the glasses have helped so people can't see their empty but at nighttime, off you-peak hours generally, it's really bad. I frequently see in district 6 on our 383 route one or two people on the bus routinely in the off-peak hours. In the morning and rush hours, morning and evening, there may -- maybe it's a third full, maybe half full but it doesn't look good. There's a delay in front and one guy in the back. [4:13:53 PM] And when they see that day after day after day, it grates on them. That we keep putting this priority on what I consider a failed bus system, and it hurts. I'm just giving that you feedback from my constituents. >> Sure. >> Kitchen: Let me just say one thing and then if you want to say anything, Todd, that would be fine. You know, there is -- well, first off, I think it's important to understand that capital metro is in the process of its connections 2025 planning process, which I think it would be important for constituents that you all hear from that have concerns about the bus system to participate in because that is -- that is a process of looking at the routes and the service and that kind of thing and that's an and that's what I'm doing with folks that lays questions to me about the bus service. They need to participate in the process. The second thing is I think there's a lot of misconceptions in the public of an -- and expectation that's every time they see a bus it needs to be packed. That is not an indication of whether a system is working. So -- and you're much more -- you can speak to that much more effectively than I can. I'm not saying that our bus system is not as optimal as it could be, and that's the purpose of the connections 2025 but I don't think that the an exdotial stories that we here from people that they don't see a bus full is a measure. You know, that's not the metric. So, anyway, I don't know if you want to speak to that, Todd. >> Sure. You know, we -- I've been in this business for quite some time and this is certainly one of the big questions we often face. One of the interesting points is that if a roadway is empty, people celebrate that and go, yea, I get to go very fast and there's no one else on the road but when the bus is empty it's a terrible failure. So roadway is a public [4:15:55 PM] investment and will just -- as well and just like buss in the peak period they're full and in off-peak they may be empty. Not that much different on a bus. Second the nature of bus service itself, the bus has a beginning and end on its route. As it starts it's generally close to empty. It starts to fill up as it gets into the -- if it's a one running through the city it fills up as it gets to the city and as it moves to the other end naturally it starts to empty out again. That varies completely by the type of route, by the nature of the service, et cetera. But I think your point was well made, is that it's not just as you -- you would never see Rodriguez completely full all the time, it's not -- you would not expect to see buses full all the time either. >> Kitchen: Okay. Thank you. And let's move -- >> Zimmerman: One more quick note on this because the information we were presented, it showed this highly congested roadway and then there's a bus like everybody is going to get out of their cars and get on the bus. Let me read from the capital metro website briefly since we're on the subject. The 2012 ridership data, spring, summer, fall, in the disciplining of 2012, 128,129. That's in 2012. This is from website. 2015, 106,376. I think those are shock Numbers in a city that is growing very, very dramatically that we have a very significant decline in ridership. It's kind of shocking. You know, but anyway. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, I look forward to you participating in the connections 2025 process. And, you know, of course the capital metro board and the whole community is looking at how we can improve our bus system. So, you know, I think you should -- I don't think you're [4:17:56 PM] suggesting that we should never have any buses at all in our community and I hope you're not suggesting that and I know you're not. >> Zimmerman: Do I have an out of the box thing I can mention, we take the money, hundreds of millions of dollars we're spending on a lot of empty bus that's don't pick you up when and where you need to get picked up, don't drop you off where you need to go and issue vouchers for ride share companies and they do Uber X and get picked up when they need to get picked up, dropped off where they need to be dropped off and we save 100 million. That's all. >> Kitchen: I think it's time to move on and we can certainly educate you on the fact that capital metro does have voucher programs in place right now. So let's move on, Mr. Dale. >> Jim dale, assistant director for transportation department. I'm going to talk about what we're doing today in Austin to get - - get more examples here. Before I do that I want to talk to you, just how do we -- kind of our philosophy or culture and we're working with our partners and trying to manage the arterial system, and so we do see it as multimodal, especially at the signals, that's where all these different modes come together, pedestrians, bicyclists, general purpose traffic, emergency vehicles and so forth. What we're trying to do at each intersection is balance the needs of those different modes. And we also approach that in a very collaborative manner, working with our different partners. So in terms of transit lanes, as Todd had mentioned, Guadalupe and lavaca, they run from city council up to mlk and all of the transit buses use those lanes. All right. So we also -- so exclusive lanes is one thing we do for transit. One of the tools in our toolbox. Transit queue jumps are another one and I'll spend [4:19:56 PM] more time on this one. All buses can use the queue jumps and we have three locations in town now that we have queue jumps. The first one was implemented at the crestview station when the red line went in the alarm and airport boulevard, southbound. We also have Guadalupe street and fourth street and implemented one and that's the one Todd showed was a video at lavaca and mlk for northbound buses. So how does queue Justin work? This is the one the alarm, southbound at airport, crestview station. Looking at this there's the buses and bus pull out there, very similar to the illustration that Todd showed. You can see in -- so the bus pulls in there. They -- passengers board and Deboard and also board but as the bus is sitting there it also, if you can see on the ground there's a black rectangle on the ground. That is a loop detector, basically a piece of wire in the road that detects that bus, only that bus pulls up there. So it detects the bus, let's the signal know the bus is there and then when the bus -- the signal will bring up this white bar you see off to the right, basically telling the driver they can pull forward and go in front of the through traffic there, makes it more -- easier for the bus to get back into traffic once they've pulled out at this particular location. So the queue Justin now at lavaca and mlk, this is one we implemented a couple weeks ago. At the top, before scenario, this were the lane assignments. We have parking in the far left tain, two left-turn lanes for general purpose traffic. Buses were also in those left-turn lanes. We had a bike lane, ride turn lane and another bike lane. In looking at that our traffic engineering group they looked and said how can we reallocate the space, working with our active transportation, bikes and peds program, how can we [4:21:57 PM] reallocate this space to assist the buses getting through. This is one of the more congested locations for the buses. An average takes about three minutes to get from the stop just upstream to the downstream. During peak periods that average goes up closer to nine minutes and sometimes approaches 12 minutes or more. Very congested location for the buses. What we do is repurposed -- reallocated the space on the roadway here on the right and took away a bike lane and by reallocating the space we were able to continue the bus lane on up to -- mlk, stale maintain a bike lane, and then there's also a right turn lane so bikes making a right can get in there with the cars. So this is -- we'll see if this video did -- if we can show this video, very similar to what Todd had shown earlier from our transportation management center, but the bus there in the bus lane -- we can skip through it if it doesn't come up here but the bus is making a left turn in front of the other traffic. This is exactly what the queue jump is. The queue is the line of through cars here you see in the other two lanes waiting to make a left turn. What this queue jump allows is this bus to turn in front of them and then it goes down and takes a right on Guadalupe and goes up there. That's all right. We can move on. So right now today -- today we provide -- I'm talking about signal -- we're changing topics now, another tool in our toolbox, transit signal priority. We provide this for metro rapt routes, 801, 803. 130 signals have transit signal priority. We're doing a green dissension by seven seconds when a late bus arrives, behind schedule by one minute or more. We get about 4,000 requests [4:23:57 PM] for signal priority every day across both of those routes. About 13%, little over 500 of those on average. We actually grant signal priority, and the reason is there's already a lot of green time on, say, for Lamar, for example, and as the bus comes through, they maybe late but the signal may already be green and they get through on a green. So we don't need to grant signal priority. The streets -- most of the buses run on too, especially Lamar and congress and so forth, there's already a considerable amount of green time given to that main street and so there's not -- there's a lot of opportunities for the buss to get through on the green. So how is a tsp green extension work? Little techy but worth mentioning to explain what we're doing today. Normal signal sequence, we have just left and right, east to west there, 40 seconds of green time. This is a fictitious intersection, yellow and all reds. Then we have different movements at the intersections, northbound lefts, north and sound Beth left, north and South Bend throughs and east and left wests. We have a -- for green extension we have a bus that comes toward the end of the green for Lamar boulevard, that bus arrives and we detect it and use a virtual detection. I can go into more details on that. The main point is that bus arrives late. What does the signal system do? In this case it extends that signal, that green signal by seven seconds to allow that bus to get through. So as we sort of -- that 72nd extension. So then other -- you see the other movements here. Two points I want to make. Signal priority, it's not all created equal, the type of tools we have. For the green extension you can see we do a 72nd extension but if you look at the Normal signal expense, say that bus didn't get through at the top part there in that 40 seconds and got to the end of the 40 seconds and had to wait, there would be four seconds of [4:25:58 PM] yellow, second of red, ten seconds of green that that bus is sitting there waiting until the green comes up again. That equals 60 seconds so that small 72nd extension basically reduced the delay for the buses by 60 seconds. So the green extension is really pretty powerful. But the second point I want to make is looking down on the bottom if you start to look at the north and southbound lets and throughs and east and west lets that seven seconds if you're going to give green time to someone you have to get it back. If you think of it if I give -- we always get requests for need more green time, need more green time. Well, more green time means someone has more red time so we have to get -- in this case we have to get that time back and what we do is take time away from other movements to provide that preferential treatment for transit. So early green, this is something we're working with capital metro on and we hope to do in the future. But early green is basically when the bus arrives -- this is a east-west bus again but it arrives here just at the end of the north and southbound left turns. What happens is for those following movements that have a green signal we take away a little bit of time from each of those and bring up the time for that east-west movement by six seconds. Here we've taken away six seconds from other movements given the bus a 62nd benefit. So how did the buses talk to the signals? This is pretty innovative for Austin, working with capital metro, it's all wireless. And so what happens is the bus we monitor the bus' location, and as that bus moves through a network we monitor when it's late, when it's late and it's approaching a signal, what that bus -- sends wirelessly over radio waves a request for priority to capital metro's servers, if you will. Those servers then send a message to our servers at the signal system saying the bus is here and we need signal [4:27:59 PM] priority and then we send that message out to the signal controller, that's the silver box on the sued of the road through a fiber network and let that controller know the bus is here and needs priority. That controller makes the decision whether to grant the priority or not. The one thing that just as someone on the city side who is responsible for purchasing equipment, operating and maintaining it, we really like this approach because it avoids putting equipment in the field that we now have to maintain, we have to purchase and maintain it and operate it and there's costs that go with that so this is something that we're looking at doing for some other things that we can talk about too. A project right now we're in early discussions about emergency vehicle preemption doing something very similar, but removing capital metro's house from there and putting in A.P.D., fire, ems. Last three slides here are basically want to stress the point of continued cooperation and Todd mentioned this earlier today. We have a transit priority working group led by Eric bull lock, doing a tremendous job leading that group and meeting every two weeks are traffic engineers, folks from active transportation program, sit down with capital metro's folks. There's probably about a dozen folks in that room or more and we start looking at where are the pain points for transit operations in the city? And we start looking at what we can do. One of the first outcomes of this effort is this northbound left turn queue jump from lavaca onto mlk. So transit lanes, in terms of the transit lates -- I jumped to my -- jump to my -- give me just one moment here. I wanted to look a little closer at some notes I made. So for our transit lanes we're really looking at where they're appropriate. Transit lanes are not appropriate everywhere. [4:29:59 PM] I think capital metro would admit to that as well but we need to look at it in context of where they're being recommended, what are the benefits and what are the impacts. So every location is different. And very important for us to acknowledge that. And so in terms of us doing analyses, again, those benefits to transit riders, very important but also the impact on traffic to provide those lanes, impact on parking. There's the community engagement piece that's very important that Todd had mentioned earlier, to get that feedback. Queue jumps are very similar. We want to look at increasing the amount of queue jump locations around town but where they're appropriate, where they make sense, and doing analysis to make those determinations. We can do some analysis before we implement to estimate benefits, but what we're working right now at lavaca is actually measuring what those benefits are with transit in the field. So in terms of transit signal priority, one of the things with transit signal priority we're doing right now is basically treating every intersection the same. Every intersection gets up to a maximum 72nd extension. In my work and other staff around the country, every intersection is different so there is an optimization where we can squeak out more value for transit performance with what I would expect to be very minimal impact on traffic. And so what we'll be doing in our fy17 budget ask that we have in there right now tentatively, a signal engineers that going to focus on transit, bikes and peds. We already do that. It's spread around a number of people but we're getting more and more requests conspirator those needs and we're at a point where having someone focused on those modes of general purpose traffic will be helpful. Capital metro also has supportive contract with university of Texas for transportation research which may bring resources to bear in [4:31:59 PM] helping us optimize signal priority. So in terms of expanding signal priority, again, where it's appropriate, I think probably the easiest example to talk about is if you have a Lamar say north-south, several number of buses running along that route but then at locations where buses cross east-west, how do we handle that, prioritize those? So we want to -- that's part of the conversation and discussion and analysis that we need to do, is to figure out how much green extension or how much preferential treatment would we give to Lamar, say, over 38th street. So one of the things that we're doing -- not asking here but just in terms of expansion we can continue expanding signal priority and working with capital metro and providing this green extension like we do today and do some optimization of that but what's happening is that we're asking the firmware or software that runs in that silver box on the side of the road we're asking it to do a lot already and doing it to do more in the disport it's software that we purchased back in 1999/2000. If you want to think about the iPhone or android phone you have now and think about going back to an iPhone 3. You don't have the features, you don't have all the functionality that you have today. And so that's pushing us to some limits in terms of as we expand how much we can do there. If you along at the signs down Cesar Chavez, these signs that come up in the P.M. And provide another left-turn lane from Cesar Chavez westbound coming towards city hall turning on to southbound congress, those require some additional load on our signal controller software and we also have the -- looking at this emergency vehicle preemption, new strategies there that will reduce equipment in the field and be able to rove more coverage around the city, just talking about that right now. But we're looking at needing [4:34:00 PM] new firmway and also the firmware or software is no longer supported by our vendor is another issue sob it's not being improved and we're falling behind in functionality that some other cities have. One of the additional tools we would need as we move forward we're doing a lot of spreadsheet work, manual work. We want to automate some of those activities so as we make changes in the field on a daily basis we can come back in a couple days, basically press a button and find out the impacts and changes for that signal priority. It's that balance of trying to optimize each intersection. We will use A.P.D. Staff to implement signal priority. We're not asking for anything right here. But don't see asking for a consultant contract for that. Very important we train our staff so they know how to work with signal priority. Not only if we do get that one staff member focused on it we will make sure that distill set is across our signal engineers. One of the other things that's part of the conversation we're working on, both internally and we've done some work on this already, but in also working closely with capital metro is looking at some new criteria of really prioritizing the movement of people and not vehicles, moving away from that. I think a number of presentation that's y'all have heard, that's just, again, the culture in our department, looking at how do we move people. And so that's another part of the conversation that we're working on with capital metro. And that's the end of my presentation. I'll be glad to take any questions. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. If there's no pressing questions, we have some testimony. Yes, go right ahead. >> Gallo: I do have a dumb questions. I'm trying to understand, rather than keep siloing things we, do how we can integrate better with other systems that we're using so I actually have two questions. One is, it looks like the city is getting ready to spend money and is test piloting the adaptive signaling program. So is that not a program that [4:36:00 PM] this could be incorporated into? >> That's -- it's a completely different approach. For the -- it -- there are some relationships, but for adaptive signal control what we're doing there, this system is more -- you saw the gps location of the bus and how that signal went to capital metro's facilities, then to ours and back out to the signal. What we're doing for adaptive signal control is all at the intervention. We're putting the detection, the smarts at the intersection so we can detect the traffic there with video detection and that decision for the adaptive signal control does the part that is in common is that does go through our center. So there's a decision, we're taking the detector data that's going back to our center and then the center there our Toomey road facility, the servers are making the decision how do we change the signal timing to adapt to traffic conditions. There is commonality but little different approach in where the technology resides. >> Gallo: I guess trying to think about systems we could use one system with a bit of change versus several different systems, could that not be programmed to recognize the buses or could the buses not be part of that program when it comes through the engineers to determine whether the signal is going to change or not? >> Well, part of -- >> Gallo: And I know it's probably a level way above my ability to understand. >> You're asking the right question. >> Gallo: It seems like we have traffic signal management that we're talking about with the adaptive and we're talking about another fairly expensive program that would do it for the buses. So I'm just trying to understand if there's any way that one system could do both instead of two systems. >> We do -- it is -- it is one system, but it's just some of the technology -- so the brains that's making all the decision is one system and that's been our investment in our advanced transportation management system, kind of the [4:38:00 PM] brains of the system. With that we can do signal priority, Aprils, because the decisions are made there and sent out. It's just to do additional things, since we don't have the gps location of all the vehicles using the street at least today, we have to have equipment that detects the presence of those vehicles and how those traffic conditions are changing. In the future we see that changing, and us being able to monitor where all -- or know where the vehicles are at and make those changes without additional equipment in the field but today we do need two separate systems. There may be advancements that come -- that we see coming down the road that may be able to allow us to maybe reduce the amount of equipment that we have in the field and we'll definitely take advantage of those. >> Kitchen: So is the extra cost is simply for the equipment at the intersection? >> For -- >> Kitchen: The rest is all the same system. You don't have new computers, new servers or any of that kind of stuff. It's just the equipment at the intersection? >> Right, for the signal priority it's the cost for the software that's running at the intersection. For the adaptive signal control it's the cost of placing detection equipment at the intersection. And -- yes. >> Gallo: So the detection equipment that's putting -- being put at the intersection as part of adaptive signaling that can't be -- that can't be software written to be able to recognize the buses as part of the -- >> It can recognize buses but another really important piece we need to know is if the bus is late and that's on capital metro's side so we can't distinguish one bus from another bus. We can basically tell it's a long vehicle. And so with our detection equipment. So those -- tying those two pieces together hats led us to the way we're doing it now and kind of integrating capital metro's system and our system. >> Gallo: Okay. All right. >> I'd be glad to talk to you more about it. >> Gallo: Thank you. Like I said it's really high level but I'm trying, I'm trying. >> Thank you for your patience. It's like -- I like this because it challenges me, how do I explain it in a different [4:40:02 PM] way than I can talk to Brian back here. >> Kitchen: You're trying to be as efficient as possible. >> Gallo: Right. I would prefer one system instead of two systems. >> Kitchen: It costs more. Sometimes two systems from an electronic perspective makes no difference whatsoever, you know, from a time or a cost or whatever. But sometimes it does. >> Gallo: So I had one other question too. Currently does our emergency service vehicles, do they have the ability to change signal lights? >> Yes, they do. It's about 100 signals or so, but that is using, I would say, our older approach. It's putting that equipment at the intersection so as that emergency Veen has sirens and lights on and is moving down the road it also has an emitter that has a strobe light on it and receive a receiver at the intersection that sees that and basically says, all right, terminate the other movements and give the green for this bus -- I'm sorry, for this emergency vehicle to move through. We're really -- one of the things we're looking at is taking advantage of existing investments we've already made in our advanced transportation management system and like I showed earlier in that slide where there was the bus and the two houses and then the signal, bead like to replace that -- we see efficiencies not having to -- again, purchase equipment -- there's some costs, upfront capital costs but maintaining equipment takes a lot of time and there's costs with that but this would allow us to remove that equipment from the intersection so we no longer have to maintain that. It would also allow us to expand our coverage rather quickly to most of the signals throughout the city. And so by that we would basically replace that bus with the emergency vehicle and as that emergency vehicle we'd know the location of the emergency vehicle and there's other details in there but really exciting for us, but know the location of the emergency vehicle and we can turn those signals green even further in advance than what we can now, clear out the traffic so there's not that little shuffle of folks [4:42:02 PM] deciding what do I do as this emergency vehicle is coming but just get the traffic out of the way is what we're looking at doing. >> Gallo: So this is a third system or is this the same system you're talking about using for the buss? >> Right. It's the same investment we've already made so the efficiencies are there in our central software. This ability. It's the same system. But the part that's different because like capital metro has a separate system we need to integrate with that, so does emergency services. They have a different system too and we have to be able to know where their sleek is so we can turn that light green and also very importantly once that vehicle gets through the intersection to make -- bring the signal back into Normal operation. So it's different systems but there's considerable efficiency gains by not having this equipment in the field and actually bringing these systems -- and we're actually bringing the systems closer together by working with capital metro and emergency services. So I think there's tremendous efficiencies there. >> Gallo: All right. Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> Kitchen: Did you have a question? And then Zimmerman. >> Garza: I sponsored an item I guess two weeks ago and it addressed fire's desire for a newer system, I guess, not the opticom system, is that the same system? >> Yes. >> Garza: It is. I'd hate for us to invest in that and it's a different system. So it is the same. >> It is the same and doing that gps location, like we know the gps location of the bus, the gps location of the emergency vehicle and changing that signal to help expedite that emergency vehicle getting more quickly to the scene of the emergency. Ongoing did you have a question? >> Zimmerman: A follow-up on what I think councilmember Gallo was getting to. In defense of the engineers that do these very, very complicated systems that are very expensive and very [4:44:03 PM] complicated and there are several reasons why you might want to actually duplicate the sensors, as crazy as this sounds it makes sense in some cases to have exactly the same sensors duplicated on a pole because the sensors are not that extensive but the software systems that surrender and integrate them are very expensive to maintain. Another thing about the systems, you don't necessarily want the bus system connected to emergency, you know, with the ems dispatch because somebody screws up the bus system and it goes down, that's not a life or death situation, but the ems dispatch is. So there could be some reasons to separate them. But probably our biggest concern is -- our biggest efficient is also probably our biggest concern, which is the bandwidth. We have fiberoptics? Because the fiberoptics are high speed and awesome but it makes sense to share that light pipe, right, with all these systems. Well, if our fiberoptics go down we lose everything so there's still probably a single point of failure. But you might have wireless backup, right? >> Right. >> Zimmerman: So, again, these with complicated and expensive systems. I wish it were that simple and I appreciate your question, you're asking the right question but it's a complicated mess. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Okay I am going to just like in very, very quickly lay out the proposed resolution and then ask for our speakers and then we can have a discussion on it. So basically what we have posted and everyone has a copy of is a resolution that just asks our city manager -- asked our staff to develop recommendations for a policy. As we've seen, these are -- this transit priority is something that capital metro and our city staff are already coordinating on and have already done a lot in this regard, but what this does is just brings forward recommendations for an actual transit priority policy so that we can help provide some [4:46:05 PM] guidance as these -- as these mechanisms progress and we can use them more and more. So there's various language in the resolution to do that, and so we can talk about that more after we hear from our speakers. I think our first speaker is Andy Cantu. I would ask y'all in the interest of time I'm going to name two people so if the second person could be confused up. After Andy is going to be Dan. Let's see, we immediate to start the timer and y'all have three minutes. I would ask you many the interest of time because we have a number of speakers to try to keep it to two if you can. >> Okay. Good afternoon, chairwoman kitchen, councilmembers, my name is Andy Cantu, the regional mobility director of the Austin chamber of commerce. Over the years the chamber and opportunity Austin investors have supported efforts to -- from capital metro's all systems go long range plan that first introduced metro rapid to the region in 2004 to 2014's light rail bond proposal. Our members recognize that Austin's economic health relevant on providing a high capacity transit system to meet needs of our growing population. We can no longer afford to just accommodate the automobile at the expense of every other mode. We need to find balance in our investments. Given the choice between transit or single occupant vehicle the consumer needs incentive to choose transit. Such a system must provide meshable value not only in terms of cost but convenience and reliability. This is to your point, councilmember Zimmerman, expanding the network of priority access lanes and signals will provide those benefits and hopefully, you know, we could, you know, prevent those situations where buses are running, you know, empty if buses become the option of choice for consumers [4:48:07 PM] in the future. So on behalf of the 3,000 area businesses, civic organizations, nonprofits and institutions the chamber represents I urge you to support this resolution. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Dan [indiscernible] And after will be Betsy Greenberg. Betsy, if you want to come up to the podium. >> Hi, I'm here -- I'm a downtown resident and on the downtown Austin neighborhood association board but I'm here actually to present a study that I did as part of ora -- that ora did -- >> Can I bring it up? >> In order to look at one particular transit priority lane or potential transit priority lane, which was the drag. We actually -- we thought, hey, you know, how much is the drag? How much is this actually being used already as it is for bus riders and how big of a difference could this make? And so -- so we got out there. This is a picture of some of us. We actually got out there for one hour, from 5:00 P.M. To 6:00 P.M. On a weekday and boarded every single bus and counted all of the passengers and also stood on the street and counted all of the passengers in every car going by. What we found was that we had the -- about 50/50 split, it was about 53-47, if I ren correctly, between cars, passengers in cars and passengers in buses. Even though 94% of the vehicles were cars there, was a tiny percentage of the vehicles were buses, but about half of the passengers in all of the -- including the drivers in all of the -- in [4:50:09 PM] all of the lane were riding the bus. It was 53 and 45 with a little sliver for the bike. And as you can see, buses have a lot more people per -- had a lot more people per vehicle. And this was -- it was split out over all the different bus services. The rapid and all that. So the -- so I strongly support this because right now it's not every street. There's not every street is totally congested. Not every street has a ton of passengers in buses but we have streets now where already half of our people -- half of the people using the street are already in buses now. And they're sitting there in traffic and we could get much more throughput out of the exact same road if those people were going a little bit faster, like staff said. So thank you very much. >> Kitchen: Thank you. After Betsy will be James laycut. Could we be sure and start the timer for the -- could we? Okay. All right. Go ahead. >> My name is Betsy Greenberg. I ride busses and I'm also a member of the capital metro customer satisfaction advisory committee. I am hoping that you will support this item. I know that a big part of the solution to Austin's traffic problem is to get more people to use public transportation and the only way to make that happen is to make public transportation convenient. The proposal encourages the use of priority bus lanes and transit priority signals to reduce trip times. Reducing trip times is helpful but it is as important if not more important to reduce wait times as well. I live one belong from Guadalupe but not near a rapid [4:52:10 PM] stop. When the metro rapid buses started service we saw a significant reduction of service. Sometimes I walk towards the bus stop. I see the bus drive by. And I can't run fast enough to get there on time. When that happens I know I've got a 25 minute bate during which I'll be sitting there thinking that I should have just gone home and got in the car. My point is that reducing the trip time won't compensate for the additional wait time. As part of the proposal I really would like you -- to encourage you to specifically say that the efficiency gained to -- should be used to increase bus frequency rather than just as a way to save money. If the increased frequency isn't in the purview of this committee, then I'd like to encourage those of you who are on the cap metro board to specifically work to restore the frequency on route 1 and route 3 buss so drastically reduced two years ago. Thank you for listening and your service to the community. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Next we have James laycock and -- is James here? No. After Jeb will be Roth. >> Good afternoon, councilmembers. Thank you for this opportunity. I'm here representing the alliance for public transportation. We're here to speak in support of the proposal for all the reasons staff mentioned. The efforts to improve through transit priority policies. It will help to have a comprehensive policy here that we can go forward and apply citywide. As we implement a variety of projects. The alliance membership today adopted a resolution relative to transit priority lanes as part of the proposed bond election. We're recommending funding implementation -- I'm sorry, expanding the dedicated transit lane north along Guadalupe and then also south of downtown and out Riverside drive, in addition calling for fund to go the bicycle plan, sidewalk plan and other active [4:54:11 PM] transportation projects seek funding for implementation of the corridor plans for burnet, south Lamar, airport boulevard, Riverside drive. In general we're asking any funding for roadway projects should not diminish funding for the projects I've mentioned and that any roadway project should include a significant transit benefit. Thank you very much. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Is -- okay. After roger reason Eric Goff. >> Thank you, councilmembers. Again, my name is roger [indiscernible]. I am on the board of the downtown Austin neighborhood association. And I'm speaking on behalf of Dana right now. First of all, I wanted to applaud those folks who including councilmember kitchen last night at the transportation forum who gave, I think, was probably the biggest applause line, which which was moving people over moving cars as being our emphasis, appropriate emphasis. Dana took a position back in 2014, after the Guadalupe lavaca transit priority lanes were installed. We took a strong position in favor of it. And supporting it. And we saw it as helping to implement the imagine Austin comprehensive plan as well as the downtown Austin plan. Speaking of the imagine Austin plan, it's good to see in this particular resolution a lot of citations of what the imagine Austin plan calls for and how it supports this -- the measures in this resolution and the notion of transit priority. There are a couple of complete communities carrots, which are -- indicators, which are the indicators or metrics by which we define success in implementing the imagine Austin plan that speak to this as well, vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership and this giving transit [4:56:11 PM] priority can help with both of those, and I would urge that the criteria used to determine where transit -- these transit priority measures go are based on those kinds of metrics and based on the people-moving metrics that we're talking about as well. And I hope that it would allay maybe councilmember Zimmerman's concerns that you would -- it's probably the better idea to implement these transit priority measures where there is high ridership already. So I would imagine that part of what staff will do and incorporate in its criteria will be moving more people at a lower cost, which would necessitate that the buses be -- have high ridership. Thank you. >> Kitchen:thank you app. >> Hi there, Eric Goff, I'm on the board of aura. We did that study that we saw Dan talk about earlier that shows under the right conditions dedicated right-of-way and signal priority make a lot of sense. We can increase ridership because as you see the bus moving quickly past you in traffic you start to wonder why you're not on it. And that can lead to greater compounding benefit over time because then you might want to live near a stop. So it all adds up to a more transit oriented city and a less car oriented city that has all kinds of benefits such as reducing smog, reducing time spent in traffic and making big strides in this year of mobility. It doesn't make sense to have dedicated lanes. Everywhere a bus goes, [4:58:13 PM] obviously you have to go based on efficiency. And so like roger mentioned you should use data to determine the best places to do this and figure out how to create a network of high frequency grid that can be a foundation for moving people around the city without a car. This is a great first step. Also by having staff develop a plan we can take some of the potential politics out of it, by saying it meets the criteria rather than saying this lane arbitrarily because we just know. So this is a great place to be. We really applaud the council for considering it and it's an efficient use of our infrastructure. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Mr. Woodley -- did you have a question? >> Zimmerman: Quick question. Eric, thanks for coming here. I'm going to flash up something and it may be a little bit hard to read. >> I can see it. >> Zimmerman: What is your take on the declining Numbers of the rider ship. This is from cap metro's website. I think the -- just this is just the university of Texas rider ship so the students are gone mostly in the summer and that's why we have the big dip in the summer. That's why we have that. So how can it be that our population is growing and the population falling. >> First of all, that is an indictment of our current cap metro system and one of the things to address in the envision 2025 plan is that we can have a city that makes it easy to be on a bus or easier. There are also some key indicators that cap metro would say and for the most part I agree with. We've seen a lot of students move away from west campus and Riverside. We've seen declining gas prices and competition from tncs. [5:00:17 PM] That said we should move to a city that has a goal of a ridership increase with our population and increase at a higher rate of population and we can do that with systems like this. >> Zimmerman: But in principle, what would be wrong with -- I think the tncs and theirtology, especially the Uber X, more of the carpooling, let's bundle a bunch of people in one vehicle as we move around and the gps technology being used. Do you have any objection and principal to going to a system that gets you door to door faster. That's really what people want. They want to get from one dezavala to nation and -- destination and the other and that's what kills people in a bus system like in Austin because we can't get people door to door when we need to get there. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, you are raising a lot of questions that are really great question for our discussion with cap metro, connections 2025. They're a little bit beyond the scope of what we're doing here in our meeting. >> Zimmerman: Fair enough. >> Kitchen: If you would like to answer questions, that's fine, Mr. Goff, but I want to point out you're a little bit beyond the scope of what we can do at the city. >> I'd be happy to briefly answer that direct question. The buses are basically moving a lot of people in one direction and then you can transfer and move in another direction. We've seen cities do a great job of that, moving in another direction and this is another step in that direction and there's no reason that we can't have choices. Thank you so much. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Mr. Woodley? >> I'm John Woodley, an advocate for disability access. I want to point out when the presentations were up on the screen there was no closed captioning. When the downtown guy was speaking in his presentation, there was no closed captioning. [5:02:17 PM] >> Kitchen: Okay. >> I just wanted to have a quick comment about the one slide that they put up showing martin Luther king and lavaca. You can see on the before picture they put a bicycle in the middle. That was actually a shared use lane between bicycles and buses. Since they've made the change to the after just recently, I consider it actually more dangerous because it's not that -- that picture does not show the entire scope of the entire intersection. When traffic is turning here, they're turning on to martin Luther king in order to get into the turn lane to go north on Guadalupe. And when they put the bicycle all the way over on the other side, one, it does not -- the traffic light does not sense the bicyclist is over there where it did previously in the bus lane. And two, there is no [5:04:17 PM] bike lane, the bike lane ends on martin Luther king for the turn lane, the turn on to Guadalupe. So when the bicyclist is all the way to the right here, the automobile can't see the bicyclist when they're making that turn. They're just trying to merge into traffic. So that's what I wanted to say about that. And I also want to do this -- what some of the decline and rider -- decline in ridership might be is that it could be because of the affordable housing is not affordable in the city of Austin. People are being forced to move further out. And that moving outside of the capital metro service area. So that could be a possibility. I don't know, I haven't seen that data. So what I would like to see when it comes to transit priority are more -- better access to the capital metro access, the paratransit service, so people with disabilities can get on the bus. Currently it's being limited to three-quarters of a mile from the nearest bus stop or route. So I would like to see that improve greatly. [Buzzer sounds] >> Kitchen: Thank you. That is all our -- that's all our speakers. So I -- again, speaking to the resolution, what the resolution does is it asks the city manager to develop recommendations for transit priority policy, to provide guidance for the different -- for the provision of various types of transit priority treatments on streets and roadways. And then there's some guidance provided here that the recommendations should consider a range of things, including goals and metrics, cite [5:06:17 PM] and conditions to identify where we should consider transit priority. Potential agreements with cap metro for transit service level commitments. So that would be part of it too. Alignment with our existing plans and policies, for example, the strategic mobility plan and imagine Austin. And as well as we've included language that would have recommendations for a policy that includes a process for how the community would be informed and engaged. In other words, when there's a consideration for a transit priority treatment somewhere, what's the process for making sure there's communities informed and allowed to provide some input. Let's see, finally the request is that the city manager collaborate with all the various bodies, including cap metro and the relevant city boards and commissions, and give -- bring us back a final report with recommendations by October 5th. The reason for the October 5th timeline is because our transportation department has just a few other things on their agenda right now. [Laughter]. So we wanted to -- not to mention the budget, upcoming budget. So we wanted to provide enough time for this to happen. And of course, you're already engaged in this activity so we're not waiting for this to -- for you to take the actions that you're taking. It's just that this seemed like an appropriate time. So I'm making a motion. Do we have a second? Second. Any -- any questions or comments or anything? Just one other thing I forgot to mention. We did have -- this may be a question for you, Mr. Dale. We had a question about whether we could consider transit priority policy that would also relate to school buses. So I don't think that [5:08:18 PM] that's anything we're doing right now but I would like to include that as part of what the city manager -- what you all might look at. Our committee has talked about school buses before in the context of the express lanes on, you know, that the rma manages, understanding in that context anyway it was important to consider school buses. So I don't know how or if that would work in this context or even if it's needed, but I'd like to suggest that be included in the analysis. Do you think that can be done? >> Yes, it can be done. We'll take a closer look at it and look around the country and see what other places are doing. But I think also what's important is the problems -- working with cap metro, the problems that aid is facing with ontime delivery of students to school and home. And working with them and there could be something that that we could come to implement and help. >> Kitchen: I'm not suggesting there's a need, it's just a question to investigate. >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. Yes, go ahead. >> Garza: Not for you. You're off the hook. I know we made some committee changes and so there were -- there's two required to bring it forward to a committee, and you have that. >> Kitchen: Yeah. >> Garza: But I thought there was still a minimum needed to take it to council. >> Kitchen: I don't think so. We talked about that, but I think we left it as either a vote of recommendation out of committee or four. I don't think we adopted the it yet at four on the committee. >> Garza: I was going to say if we did I would be happy to be a co-sponsor. >> Kitchen: If I'm wrong about that we'll double-check it. Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant four to vote it out of committee. You mean four to then put it on the -- okay. If that's the case, then -- >> Garza: Add me as a co-sponsor. >> Kitchen: All right. All those in favor of moving this forward? [5:10:19 PM] It passes. All right. We'll now move on to our final -- okay. For the minutes that was passed on a 3-0 with councilmember Zimmerman absent. Okay. So our last item is an update on -- progress update on mobility projects. And I think if I'm remembering correctly, this relates to -- you all may remember that earlier in the year we -- we had a press conference and an announcement of projects that were slated to be -- transportation projects that were slated to be done this year so this was an update on those. >> That's correct. >> Kitchen: Go right ahead. >> Good afternoon, I'm Annie van zandt, the capital program manager in the public works department. And also presenting today is anik Boday with the transportation department. She is the transportation system for system development division. So yes, we are here today to provide an update on mobility-related projects and initiatives that are opening in 2016. And we are going to go through several slides that show project accomplishments, ongoing construction projects, projects about to start construction, and then initiatives. So you can see several projects are listed on this first slide as completed between January and March of 2016. The picture on the bottom right corner is of the east sixth street and waller street intersection improvements. We have some area projects that have been complete, a neighboring partnering program project, some interim safety improvements at the top five [5:12:20 PM] intersection locations. And then repairs to 11 bridges throughout several district. Also you have already seen a presentation on this project, but here is another representation of the transit queue jump at lavaca street and martin Luther king boulevard. And those are the different symbols that the transit -- the buses can see that are specific for the buses. And then circled in red you can see the actual signal head. We also have completed group 16, a.d.a.'s sidewalk and curb ramp improvements, and group 17 is ongoing right now. The pictures below are of west Powell lane and those were completed as part of the group's 16 contract. It's just a before and after. We also have several safety and mobility improvements on and near east 51st street. These improvements include intersection improvements, signal timing, detection improvements such as upgrades to signal detection. And lane configuration changes as well. And then anik is going to take over. >> Thanks, Annie. >> Kitchen: Wait. We have a question. Go ahead. >> Gallo: Actually, it's a comment more than a question. I really appreciate you putting the districts that these projects are in, but what jumps out at me pretty vividly is that the projects that have been ongoing and completed are a little lacking in some of the districts, and district 10 probably being one of those. So as we all strive to -- and that's one of the benefits of the quarter cent fund is that I think it has allowed us to be really conscious of making sure we spend money ewittably [5:14:21 PM] across the district. That's not a negative, I'm just saying thank you for putting the district in there because I think it's another reminder to all of us as we determine policy and as we work with departments to make sure that we're getting projects in all of the neighborhoods and all the districts because all of the people in all of the districts are concerned about us being able to move forward. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. That's very helpful. >> Kitchen: The other thing that you all are doing that has just been so great for us, is the mapping that you're putting together. And I don't know if you've had a chance to talk to the councilmembers yet, but the mapping you're putting together that's going to show the projects in each district. >> Yes. So in January I related to the press conference held on January 28th. We produced maps by district of mobility projects happening in 2016. And we are currently in the process of updating those maps to include quarter-cent projects because they had not been improved at that point. So we are right now preparing wall maps for you all for each of the offices and then we're also going to have an update to the 11 by 17 map so you can hand out to constituents. >> Kitchen: And have you shared that with all the councilmembers? >> Not yet. >> Kitchen: Not yet. So that's in process. Okay, great, thank you. >> Thank you, Annie. Moving on, you know, our mobility improvements are kind of the cycle of life. We have things we complete, we have things underconstruction and we have things planned to start construction. So I'm going to start where Annie left off, things we just completed, things that are under construction right now, a big long list, but in the realm of complete street reconstruction, tod lane, third street to name a few, west third street and west campus. We have neighboring partner program, a specific project, lighting the shoal creek trail is underconstruction right now. We always have ongoing, [5:16:21 PM] completed sidewalk work and then we have sidewalk work going on throughout the city currently as part of group 17. We have also ongoing signal work as well through Austin transportation, trail improvements and bridge capital renewal project. So always in the queue stuff being completed and stuff being under construction. Is there a question? >> Garza: Yeah. What is reconstruction? Is that basically redoing the road? >> Yes, full depth reconstruction the road itself is being completely renewed from the pipes underneath all the way through to the thickness of the pavement. And then that also allows for operational changes if we need to change the width, if we have the right-of-way of sidewalks or what have you. And it's different than routine maintenance of just resurfacing where we're not doing any maintenance to pipes underneath the road or major repair to the thickness of the road. So full depth reconstruction is a lot more expensive than regular maintenance of resurfacing. >> Garza: I guess I have a question related. I'm not sure if you would be the person to answer. But in the conversation of development must pay for itself, you hear that more in the context of when development is going out to the suburbs and how we ask developers to contribute to increased infrastructure. Do the new condos around here contribute to a reconstruction of a street? Because they're contributing to the use of that street? Is there any requirement for -- >> That's a really good question and I'm going to attempt. The answer is that we typically go out to the bond market for these big projects to borrow money to go ahead and do these big reconstruction projects. That -- we pay that back through property taxes primarily. So as development is going in, that's the method by which the new development would pay [5:18:22 PM] for capital renewal type projects. Does that help to answer the question? So through the development process we're looking at operations and with that whole discussion we just had over trying to increase our toolbox for tools to have mitigation related to the operations and then the other avenue is that when those properties are put and more units are put on the property tax role that helps us pay our debt for all kinds of things, including capital renewal. >> Garza: Okay. Gordon would like to add to that. >> Gordon durr, transportation department. I'm thinking over the last 15 years I'm not aware of any development project that's been asked to participate in reconstructing the existing streets. There may be minor improvements, widening, signal installation, but in terms of full depth reconstruction of the street, thinking back I don't remember any. But that may be something to open up and talk about in the future. >> You read my mind. >> So here's a snapshot. I will say too that we did our best in updating this. We're looking -- Annie and I, public works and transportation are looking to increase our capabilities and how we have realtime extracting these updates so that we can be more accurate and more thorough with a website to be able to look -- there's only so much we can put on a slide. We tried to pick the highlights, what we can grab out of the program manager's minds before we prepared for this. So there may be some more that we're not -- that we don't have on the slide today. We just tried to pick up highlights and examples from a lot of different categories that increase mobility. Another one under construction that you may have seen if you travel south of the city are two major bike ped bridges, phase one and phase two over Barton creek and over 360. And it's important to [5:20:22 PM] note that when these are completed this year that the phase one project over Barton creek is going to include the repurposing of the southbound shoulder to a vehicle lane, which will help to ease peak hour congestion in that direction on the bridge. This is a partnership project with txdot through campo and also city funds. And then moving to what we'll be starting in the summer, again, more sidewalk and curb ramp improvements. We have another street reconstruction project starting on Justin lane. We have multiple local area traffic management or traffic calming projects that will begin. And then more capital renewal related to our bridges. Again as Ms. Van zandt mentioned we will be working to fold the quarter-cent projects. We've already done great progress from the administration end of loading these 22 our different systems so they can be folded into our project coordination processes and we can get going on starting construction on those projects and we'll be coming back to this committee and to council with updates as per our -- as per question committed to when we presented to you all and we had the list finalized. And then I want to end on -- >> Kitchen: We have a question. >> Gallo: So just to tell you how excited the community is, particularly because we reached out to them and they were part of the process on the quarter-cent and so they are anxiously awaiting the start of some of their projects. What information can we give them -- obviously everything is not going to be done at the same time, but when can we indicate that at least some of the projects will begin? >> That is -- every neighborhood association we go to and every school that we've reached out to, they're really anxious. >> So right now we are coordinating those projects that are overlapping in the same areas. So the ones that are the low- hanging fruit for us [5:22:23 PM] to implement quickly are the sidewalk projects that standalone and do not overlap with other improvements because we want to make sure we're sequencing the work properly. So because group 18 was awarded the contract on March 31st, they're using group 18 to start building, start identifying some of that low-hanging sidewalk fruit -- projects. And then they can start building those projects. But we will be giving you all an update as soon as we have more of an update for you on specific projects. I know you all approved the list on January 28th and then we had to notify cap metro and they had 45 days to to respond and approve the projects, which they did. After they approved it then we can start setting up our system and the funding sources, so that's where we are right now is setting up all the funding, having the coordination meetings and identifying those sidewalks that we can build quickly. >> Kitchen: Will you be able to give us sort of an order of magnitude timeline for most of these projects? Like summer, fall, next year or whatever? >> I think because we're so early in the implementation, if we could provide you an update, another date at the latest. In August, I'm thinking June we would have a status update on the program as a whole. >> Gallo: So some of the questions and some of the interests have been I know in district 10 we have multiple locations for pedestrian hybrid beacons and some cross walks, school zone changes. So is that -- versus transportation, does that move into public works? Is that -- some of those -- they're not sidewalks, but I'm not hearing you address anything but sidewalks. >> Right. The sidewalks are the low hanging fruit that have been identified right now. The school Zones need to [5:24:27 PM] be I guess assessed by the traffic engineers in the transportation department and then they identify what the improvements will be. I'm not too sure about this. >> So we're working as Annie said on the administration processes of putting them into the system and then we are prepared -- Annie and I have been looking at an update schedule so we're here today updating on projects and we'd like to come quarterly. And we're thinking that August is the next interval and we'll have a lot more information. So what we're doing is folding those projects in to the programs that manage the planning and implementation of signals phb's. They're all done not in a silo, but by different folks within both departments. And so by August we should have an idea of how we're going to fold those in or coordinate those with stuff we already had in the queue. We certainly don't want to bump other things that folks have been waiting for as well for a quarter cent. We're trying to say how do we fold this in and what makes the most sense? So by August we should have a better sense of when and how the specific quarter-cent projects across all the assets will be coming forward. So we just ask for your patience in continuing to plan that because we can't really say right now when. >> Kitchen: We can talk about this. In the city time August is a long time, so maybe we can think about some interim kinds of information that we can provide to people that may not be the complete information, but give us some way to speak to our constituents because if we just tell them August that's going to be hard. We can talk to you about that and see what's feasible. >> And we would be happy to let you all know which projects are moving forward before August in those interim updates as well. >> So maybe we could ask for a monthly at our meetings? Maybe we could get a brief monthly update? >> Kitchen: Maybe a brief -- >> Holistic. [5:26:27 PM] >> Kitchen: Brief monthly. Doesn't have to be something that you -- we'll just talk about it. We'll see what's doable for you. We know that you have a lot on your plate. See how we can match that with what we need in terms of letting our constituents know what's happening. >> Gallo: There is enthusiasm and impatience. >> We understand. >> Kitchen: The other thing too about that, and you all know that too, is we with the mobility talks project, we are wanting to capitalize on the enthusiasm that was -- that came out of the quarter cent process. And it's -- because the quarter-cent process gave us the opportunity to provide some education as well as you guys and gave some education as well as build enthusiasm in the districts. So part of what we have in our minds is keeping that going. >> Garza: I absolutely agree there's enthusiasm and patience, but we need to weigh that with making sure our staff is ready to make those calls because I hate to provide wrong information. We'll have this by this and staff is saying actually, that might change. >> Kitchen: We need to be realistic, yeah. >> Garza: I think it's important to be realistic on the process and because I guess it takes time to understand those projects that are overlapping. >> Absolutely. There's a lot that goes into looking at the coordination and the right-of-way closures that might need to happen and the different types of things. We will strike a balance. We'll work with you all to strike a balance, absolutely. This is last slide talking about non- infrastructure projects. Councilmember kitchen you just mentioned mobility talks. That was at the top of the list. There's a lot going on around keeping the excitement around transportation. We just talked about the rfq that actually closed this week on street impact fees so staff is evaluating the responses [5:28:29 PM] to that rfq, which is very exciting. That we'll add again to our toolbox of financing mechanisms and mitigation tools we have for helping to pay for transportation -- impacts related to growth and then the mitigation ordinance that's making its way through planning commission, codes and ordinances, on its way to council KSAT 12 news soon in ma.you have the update to the sidewalk master plan coming your way and then the strategic mobility plan as I said earlier is looking at different procurement methods that can get that plan going as well. And so that concludes our update on what's going on mobility projects and planning initiatives. And we're happy to answer any questions. >> Kitchen: Any questions? Thank you so much for all the work you all are doing. We know y'all are pedaling as fast as you can and we really appreciate it. Let's see. I think we now have -- our last item is just discussion of future agenda items, if anyone has anything at this point in time? All right. We are adjourned at 5:29. Thank you.