Good afternoon, everybody. It is Monday, September 9th. I hope everybody had a nice recess. This is a meeting of the Transportation and Environment Committee, and we have one item on our agenda today, and that is to receive an update on the right on reimagined program, which has been highly anticipated by a number of folks, myself and our committee members, especially, and is a great follow-up to this morning's conversation. If I could call it a conversation, public event, where we officially open the Great Sonica Transit Network, having the Lyme and Pink Lines officially open in Rockville, Gathersburg, and parts of Up County, and the befitting attire by my colleagues to further support the Lyme and Pink Lines. But for today's conversation, we're going to focus it on the right on reimagined in particular. And this is the result of years of study and analysis. That began back in 2021, I believe, to figure out how we best use our bus network, something that had not been updated in a wholesale fashion for decades. And the county has grown by leaps and bounds over the decades that the original lines and routes were created. And so I look forward to this conversation to not only talk about right on, but also how this program coordinates with the Womata program and their own re-envisioning of the Womata Metro bus service, the two go hand in hand so that we can provide the best, most efficient, safe service for all of our residents. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Kenney to walk us through the packet, or we can turn it over to Director Conklin to kick us off. Sure, I'm happy to give us a lead in to this conversation briefly. So covered much of what we're talking about here today. This is a preliminary briefing from the folks at Ride On and the Montgomery County Department of Transportation on their final report, which has yet to be finalized, but is in the final stages of review. And so they wanted to come in and share what they found. Right on Reimagined is a comprehensive review of Montgomery County's bus network, all bus service that the county offers. It is being conducted intentionally parallel to Womada's Metro's own comprehensive review of their bus network as ride on buses and metro buses are complimentary services in the county that work together to serve the county's residents. in previous work sessions, you'll see how certain changes being made in better bus are being are reflected in the right on adjustments and how we're looking to have a, you know, maintain coverage and improve coverage countywide through the bus network. MCDOT published its draft network concept for the public and council staff to review in fall of 2023 following some existing conditions and bus network assessments. Since then, they have conducted stakeholder engagement and public outreach via eight pop-up events hosted in October 2023 and ongoing feedback received through an interactive web map. You'll see in this presentation but just to provide an overview the changes sort of paralleling the better bus can be split, are split into three, call it rounds, the Vision Network, which is the comprehensive list of recommended changes and expansions to the right-on bus network, which would require additional resources in the future to implement. Then year one changes, changes that can be made without additional resources, but as a first step towards achieving that vision network and then year five changes, which right on believes it can do within five years and this would implement about half of the vision network. So you'll see these all referenced in the presentation. This right on Reimagined is not subject to Council Action. This is a briefing, but we will have other opportunities as the final report comes out later this month. And as right on Reimagined is implemented next year to have additional briefings and for Council Staff to work with right on to make sure we're all in sync in terms of implementing this. Council staff has included discussion questions for inclusion after the presentation. Both at further ado, I will turn it over to RIDON and MCDOT to take us through the presentation. Mr. McLaughlin. Phil McLaughlin, General Manager, Division of Transistences. We actually started this in the winter of 2022. So we're about two and a half years into this. As Chris Benson this morning, you may have heard, Deanna Archie has been our lead service planner for this. She's out on a family medical emergency. She'd be sitting up here. She has done Eomans work on this. We have NAC Greer with us today from VHB. NAC is the lead for this team. VHB has done a tremendous job over these past two and a half years of working us through this process. Collaboration, as Stephen mentioned, with Womada has been really important here. We had to be sure that we weren't duplicating efforts and we weren't competing for riders. We were complementing when we were building this new network. So, Nat's going to go through a presentation and we can go through some Q&A. I don't know if Chris, have you ever anything? Great. So, thank you. Yes, I'm not rare with VHB, the project manager for this effort. So in terms of our agenda, just sort of talking through the presentation we have today to really give you an overview of how we developed the plan. And then as Stephen mentioned, give you highlights of what the vision network might look like, where we might eventually take right on over the years. Talk about what some of the key metrics are that associate with that in terms of increased accessibility access to jobs, etc. And then talk a little bit about how we achieve those vision and that's those year one and year five networks that we were talking about. So I think we've talked about what right on reimagined is it's a comprehensive evaluation of the entire system looking at both right on and MetroBus, and really helps us prioritize routes and try to understand what's here today and what might be coming in the future. And that was closely coordinated if we go to the next slide with the BetterBus Network ReDesign Project, which again, I think you're generally familiar with, which was a comprehensive rethink of the system. It's part of a broader, better bus initiative that Walona is undertaking. We've had really very close coordination as Phil talked about. We have had biweekly meetings with him over the course of the study to understand what their efforts are and align those with the right on study to make sure that, as Phil said, we're not competing for writers. Our service is complimentary. They operate on many of the key corridors. on study to make sure that we, as Phil said, we're not competing for writers, our service is complimentary. They operate on many of the key corridors. Some of that service may change. How do we make sure that we continue to have service to county residents connect to places that they want to go within the county or connect to other service outside the county? And so they are in the process. They have completed their public engagement for what they're calling their year one network this summer. They're in the process of reviewing that, absorbing that. They will be publishing their final recommendations later this fall. And so what we'll present today, it's a living document. And so there's some expectation that some of this may have to change depending on what the comment is. They have been able to start to share a comment with us, but really they have been very, they're still processing their comments, so they don't have changes that they can share yet with us. So that may happen over the course of the fall. They may be some tweaks here and there as they try to go. They're still trying to implement their service in summer of next year. So in terms of the developing the plan that was a two-phase process, the first year or so evaluating existing conditions, really trying to understand how the system was working. As we talked about, it has a chance to take a step back and understand the system that hadn't really been re-evaluated for a number of years. Where do people go? Where are they traveling today? On transit, where would they like to travel? So it was also trying to understand just all movement within the county. And then use that to work feed into the second phase, which was the plan development, which has been the past year plus. Where we first developed a draft network, and that was a very long process we worked with a number of focus groups to try and understand how they might try to redraw the network or try to adjust the network. And then ultimately came out with that draft network last fall. And then that we received a bunch of public feedback on and have additional coordination with WOMADA and operators to really understand, okay, what is this final network going to look like? And then that's what we're here to present to you today. One of the key pieces that came out of those interviews and evaluation was understanding service quality. So this is sort of a layer inside of the plan. So not focusing on where those routes are, but what's the quality of service that we operate? And what we heard a lot, which I think a lot of people have been hearing, especially post-COVID, is that it's not just about, I have a job that I need to leave for in the morning, and I have a job that I need to come home back in the end of the day, that people have medical appointments. They want to be able to go to the park. They want to be able to go to a concert. This is a transit system for our entire lives, not just for getting back and forth between a white collar job. And so trying to evaluate that service, how do we make sure that we establish service quality to be able to provide and support that service for all residents of the county? So we, and so doing, we've identified seven service classifications to really, in five categories, trying to establish service standards by service class. One of the things that we heard from the writers is that, well, there's a policy of trying to provide service within roughly a certain span, the sort of start in the morning end of the day, and certain frequency, especially over time, that's evolved. And then with cuts that came out of COVID, additional changes were happened. So there was a lot of requests for, can we just sort of have a constant baseline. And so part of what we've been doing and as we look through the service growth that we might need to be out there in terms of hours, is trying to sort of level that playing field and be able to say, okay, here's a policy. If this route is classified in this particular type of route, let's make sure that we have that service there as a minimum standard. And so we have, I think, the next slide is, for example, these are the seven different classifications that we've identified. And then a policy span, for example, saying that service needs to be able to start at least by, for example, the BRT, start by 5 a.m. and run to at least 1 a.m. The local routes on the other hand, they might start by 5 30, but run until 11 p.m. and do that basically seven days a week. And so again, that's part of also what we see is that some of the service today only operates weekdays, doesn't have saturday service, or doesn't have sat and Sunday service. So trying to be able to even this out so that it's available all day. So with that, sort of switch gears talking about the vision network. So this is the vision, this is a long-term vision. You'll see, look, this includes the framework and you can go to the next slide. Includes the long-term framework for the county's BRT vision which obviously is a long-term framework for the county's BRT vision, which obviously is a long-term vision in the county And so some of the projects in here are very near-term very short-term and some of these are long-term But this is where do we want transit from what we heard from the county But also recognizing that this is a snapshot in time and so that there are things that are going to continue to evolve as transit changes are evolves, there's ridership patterns change in evolve. One of the beauties of a bus system is that we can move the buses where we want them to be, where the riders want them to be as things evolve in the county. So in terms of the vision, it's as I said, a complete build out of the BRT and the GST network identified 41 modified routes, 19 new flex zones, we'll talk a little bit more about what that means, new local routes, and improvement to both weekday and weekend service. So if we look at this and sort of try to build it up, because there's a lot of lines on this map, and the framework really is the BRT and what we call these high capacity routes, the GSTN service, and this becomes the backbone of the service. And you can see that also in our service standards in terms of we expect that to be the highest frequency, highest fan service that would go across the duration of the day. And this becomes a framework and these are on many of our major corridors. And this is a plan that's well-in-and process, right? But then the vision is that we try to feed service to this and we support this and enhance this as much as possible and then also make sure that we're not duplicating service. We want to make sure that people as much as possible take advantage of the investment that the county is making in these services. So the next classification that we talked about are express routes. So these are, we heard a bunch from constituents that, that, especially if the idea and the goal is that transit is competitive with all modes and it may be even the mode of choice, that we, there are times where we need to get across county and we need to make a long distance trip of point A to point B coverage. They have perhaps long stop spacing. So it might be a mile or more between stops. Their key nodes that they're serving in the county. And they come at some relative frequency that is, you know, amenable to schedule without sort of balancing costs and all of that. And that then they provide this sort of dorsal east west county connections. And then we start to talk about the flex routes. And we actually have two kinds of flex routes that we're proposing. The first is what we call a fixed flex route, which is essentially a normal bus route, but that when it gets to, in most cases, the end of that route, it can flex. So instead of when we go to Damascus and Poolsville, instead of just having to go to a spot, hit a stop, and turn around, it allows us to get into the community and then flex. And so that then we can pick up people where they are and then bring them back to where they want to be to connect to other services. So it's really trying to be a writer, focused, a writer, oriented type of a system that recognizes these are lower density communities, they're small areas so it's reasonable for the bus to be able to serve that area and be able to cover that in a way that is just more user friendly and hopefully attracts more riders. But that it then has key time points at the end so it's really trying to connect to other service at the end. The other half if you go to the next slide are the traditional flex zones, these are micro transit zones that are really designed to cover a range of services. One of the key things that we heard in the public feedback was that, and we also showed in the analysis of the trip baking, was that a number of the trip, the vast majority of the trips, are these short trips that are mile, mile and a half, they're sort of starting in one area of the county and staying in that same area of the county. And that makes sense because people often, you're either going to go to the grocery store, they're going to go to dinner, they're going to do so somewhere close to where they live and would like to do, make those bus system, it's just, it's incompatible with those types of trips because of the way we have the densities where we're trying to get A from point A to point B. And so that the vision and that this was really strongly supported by the feedback was to try to establish these flex zones throughout the county to serve pieces of the county, allow people to make those short trips, but then connect to higher frequency service. So they can connect to the BRT service, connect to metro rail stations, connect to other bus transfer stations to be able to say like if I'm going to make a longer trip I can take my short trip that's sort of like a big Uber right and it comes and it picks me up somewhere close to where I am, takes me to that other either to my destination or to that other point where I can then transfer. And does so with a reasonable weight, right? It's not going to show up as soon as you request the service, but it's also, it's not going to say, well, I'll get there sometime in the next two to four hours. And so we have these. We've identified a number of zones. These are generally bigger than the zone that's been operating as sort of the test environment, the pilot environment, with the idea that we're trying to connect more locations. We're trying to also then provide that sort of catchment area to get to the metro rail stations or get to other pieces that obviously has some increased cost but it provides increased flexibility for those riders. I should also mention too. During our public outreach sessions, not only are existing customers were asking for an expansion of this particular program, but the people who are not in the network today. This was appealing to them. They had, they, you know, they're not traditional transit users. This was appealing to them as Nat mentioned, it functions a lot like Anubir left with a higher capacity vehicle that can penetrate the neighborhoods. One of the things that it allows us to do is that in many cases those flex zones allows us to take local routes that have sort of moderate to low productivity and turn them into a flex route. And so then it allows us to transition some of that fixed route local service to a flex service. And so, but at the same time we heard, also loud and clear in the public engagement, the people actually really like the routes. They feel like there's really good coverage. It generally goes where they want. There were a handful of places they wanted. It was much more about, I can't do it at this time of day, or I can do it, but it takes me three transfers. Can you make it faster? So we're seeing, if you look at this network for the most part, it actually looks fairly similar. And the coverage is fairly similar to where it is today. It's more about trying to do take some of that service and make it more efficient or provide better connections. There are lots of small tweaks. And this is what we'll be highlighted in the report, as you can see, there are some places where operators, for example, would say, hey, it's really can't get a vehicle back in there. It's really hard to make that turn. Or there's this one little deviation that costs several minutes, but we just don't have the ridership on that deviation. Do we really need to? So we had a number of those places where we were looking at stream letting the service provide generally the same coverage, but make it a little bit more efficient for both to operate, but also for the passengers on those routes. But then overall still provide the very similar coverage. I wanted to highlight one other piece of this because we heard a lot about east-west connectivity in the county. And so part of what the plan envisions is sort of creating this ladder across the county so that we have the purple line at the south as that east west connectivity, but then as you start to go north, the Randolph road BRT provides another sort of wrong in that ladder and then two services to the north of that two routes that provide service so that we have a continued service and then we also have one of the express routes would provide service actually from Silver Spring up towards the ICC Park and Ride in a then up to in Germantown. So providing again a network that allows people to make those services cross county recognizing that those are some of the hardest trips to make even in a car today so let's try and make them better in a bus. So in terms of summarizing, what does that mean in terms of the overall sort of commitment right now, we're at just over a million, 1.1 million revenue hours, and that clues the GSTN service that you just kicked off. And with a goal then, that would be in the vision network of just over two million. So it's about a doubling of service. So obviously it's a substantial investment to get there and that's a lot of that is that fill in service in terms of the midday and the weekend. But I think one of the things that's also really important to see in terms of the peak vehicles, it's not a substantial increase in additional vehicles. Again, it's trying to do more with the vehicles that we have and trying to fill in those holes in service today where we don't have that service. A lot of that growth, all about a third of that is the BRT. So again, that's a program that generally the county has committed to. And then if you look at the breakdown, there's actually, well, there's an increase, for example, in local service hours, there's a substantial decrease in the local vehicles. And a lot of that then is a shift towards the flex vehicles or towards service that might be provided by a BRT type service. So in terms of the key metrics, we really wanted to try and understand, well, if this is a substantial investment in transit in the county, what comes about what's the benefit for that investment? And so one of the things that we looked at is the existing population in jobs. And you see that there's an increase across the board, but particularly on weekends in terms of access to population jobs, probably a number of different individual groups. And the right, just sort of for context, the graphic on the right in this, is showing where services gained or services lost. And what you can see is that the red segments or the places where service would be discontinued and those are essentially all within the flex zones. So we're really trying to not decrease coverage, increase coverage, and there's a noticeable increase. But one of the things if you go to the next slide that because the county actually has really good coverage overall, the plan is not about increasing coverage. The plan is really more about increasing access and speed of access. And so the much more noticeable is you look at the number of jobs, for example, that would be accessible within 30 minutes. And you can see that there's a substantial increase. So like weekdays AAM, we would have 74% increase in access to jobs by the general population and 81% increase in access to jobs by minority populations. So the plan is really about the speed and efficiency of that, but that's also in crew's weekend service, right? Again, it's just because it's the weekend doesn't mean there aren't people working on the weekends. And so in trying to be able to provide access, timely or access to jobs on the weekends. And then I think if we go to the next slide, we can see, again, just general accessibility improvements. It varies by place in the county. But for example, like at Wheaton, Medestro, we see almost 150% increase in access to jobs within 30 minutes. Some of that's due to BRT. A lot of that's due to BRT, but it's also due to the structure of the network and the other service and underlying service that's out there. And so this is really what the plan is about trying to push that access and that speed of travel forward. Yes. And we talk about the years and the sort of horizons, but one of the other things we just wanted to show is that there's continued growth. And so that at each stage of investment, there's additional coverage, there's additional access to job, additional coverage population, weekdays and weekends. And a lot of this as the bullets notes is driven by the flex zones that overall the zones would cover at full implementation, 85 square miles of the county. So really sort of an unprecedented level of access via that type of service. Really trying to serve those needs that we heard. And in terms of key locations, always of interest in terms of, well, what about my grocery store, what about my school, what about my park across the board, substantial increase in access. I think one of the things we heard a lot about, in particular, were for high school students trying to provide access. And so we've tried at all possible. I think we hit almost all or all, but one of the high schools with either Flex Service or Fix Service. And I think that's one of the pieces that as we look at the plan, we also had a bunch of conversations internally about we recognize that in some cases it's really hard to know what those demands are going to be. And so it may be that a Flex Services proposed to provide service to the high school, but if they're the demand is warranted, it may be that we need a fixed trip right around dismissal time to be able to pick up all of those students who were then trying to get to some other. So part of the FlexSones is trying to say, well there may still be some fixed service to be able to, we're not necessarily a band in the idea of fixed service, we just know that every day there's going to be 35 students who are going to want to get out of the bus and be able to go to someplace. And so that's one of the things that Brian then would be trying to monitor. But that the rest of the day, it may not be cost efficient to have that bus going in a circle because we surely hope the students in the middle of the day are not getting on the bus to leave campus or go some other place. And so then trying to just sort of provide that flexible service to respond to the needs. So how we achieve the vision, we'll talk about this, it's a sort of, it's a two-year plan. What we started with was trying to understand what those key drivers were. So that's the will-modern network as we've talked a lot about, the BRTE, Purple Line, the GSTN, and then trying to understand from a customer perspective, if we're going to make a number of changes in part one area of the county or associated with one change. Let's try and bundle those that we're not trying to piecemeal and say, okay, well, every year we're going to change a route in your neighborhood. Let's try and get all the routes at the same time. And similarly, then trying to prioritize improvements on those higher priority activity routes or other equity populations so that let's try and say the people who are using the west where there's lots of service make sure that they have that good great or great service that They want and need before we start working or deeper into the county And that is possible as much as possible bring the policy in span headway up You know to that policy as we're making those changes. So let's just if we're gonna touch around Let's say we're gonna try as much as possible to say we're gonna make that investment to be able to get it to that minimum service classification minimum service standard. Yeah, and real quick, I mean, you know, what Nat was talking about here with the phasing paying great Seneca is in there. One of the things we've done on the fixed drought side to support the new network is we reduced the local service and made some modest adjustments to expand the coverage area within there. Because you don't need the high frequency service that you once had on the locals, now that you have the high frequency on the extra service. So many of the future changes we'll be making will have similar adjustments to the fixed route to support the high capacity services. Absolutely. So we'll talk about the year one and the year five changes. As Stephen mentioned, this is largely about responding to a modest proposed service changes. And so this is the best we know right now, recognizing that that may change as they finalize their network and they work out things internally. And really the focuses are in trying to maintain coverage and do so in a resource neutral way. And so that there are a number of changes that they have proposed. And I think the biggest of those in terms of the impacts on residents is the proposed discontinuation of the Z2 and so far as that is there would see service on New Hampshire Avenue north of 29. Well, the Womata Z2 is what provides coverage. They also have the CA also provides coverage, but they're shifting that to Randolph so that they're sort of upper county piece there. Right on has some service there, but right now it's peak only so it's Yeah, north of Randoth there would be no service It would be much reduced between Randolph and 29 So one of the routes we were proposing is to that's one of our first fixed flex routes is proposing to provide some service on there to provide that Make sure that that service continues recognizing that there is a long-term plan for BRT, but that's obviously still very much in the planning stages so many years away before that would come into provide that service there. So I think that then moving on to year five is a much more comprehensive. So this allows we're looking at growth in the system and so it includes as a basis, the VAERS-MILBRT, the 355 Central Phase segment of the BRT, as well as the purple line. We have assumed Womada's vision network. Obviously that's optimistic in that we know that they have, they don't have a deadline for that, but they have said publicly that there are goals that that that's within five years. They tried to, their vision network, they tried to constrain theirs to what they feel is achievable within five years. So it's still subject to ongoing funding for WOMADA. Most of the changes that that would represent is, for example, additional service to Tyson's and some better connectivity into the district. That's within the county, that's largely the changes that they're talking about. But what it allows us to implement is about half of the vision plan. So it would include 27 routes with improved service, 23 rail line routes, and eight new flex zones. So in terms of the summary, it's about a 33% increase in service hours, and but only 16% increase in miles, and a modest increase in the peak vehicles. The vehicles are largely accounted for within the BRT, so really the investment is in the time, the platform hours out there providing that service. And some of that's in BRT, but a lot of that's in the Flex service that would be introduced as well as some of the local service. So with that, I'm going to sort of pause for a second. I'm talking with Steven. What he asked was to sort of provide a little bit more of a detailed walkthrough of what will Modus propose changes are for year one. So this is some information we pulled together in the spring. This is reflective of what they took out to the public this summer. So that's the caveat is that this may change as they try to revise and respond and absorb their public comment. But as of this summer, this is what they were proposing for the network and how it interleaves with write-ons changes and our proposed changes. And I just want to say real quick, I mean in the county, write-on provides two thirds of a service, Metro bus provides one third. So we don't want it to sound like it's the tail wag in the dog here, but we do think it's important for county residents that we have a network that's not competing with each other and that's really what we want. We want complimentary network and that's why we're really working closer with Womata to make sure that we're tuned into what they're doing and we have an idea of when they want to talk about implementation. A lot of their implementation plans are they're fiscally driven. So we're staying close, but they're unsure at this point as well. So I think actually mostly said what was on this slide. So this is just, it reflects, the maps reflect what we knew there year one to be as of today. But we pulled these slides together. So just for context, they have produced some comprehensive maps showing what their proposed service is in the county. And they, in their materials, they actually great out the entirety of Montgomery County because they recognized that the right on Reimagine study was underway at the same time. But their study was so rather than either of us getting ahead of the other one and trying to presuppose what was going to be out there, they had comments and were really then focused on trying to get public comment on their proposed changes. And if you look at the map and you sort of squint a little bit, it largely will look the same as it is today, and really in terms of their primary service quarters, they're not suggesting any substantial change to their service corridors with, I think, really one exception. But they are the connectivity and where those routes go and how they connect to each other is really what they have been evaluating as they've been trying to streamline their service. One of their charges is to really simplify the routes. That was their direction was to try to simplify. So instead of having multiple variants of queues, multiple variants of y's, trying to multiple variants of C's, they're trying to get to possible one route that does A to B. But by necessity, then that starts to mean, well, then is one of those terminus I not served or is it served by a new route so I can then walk through these. They have adopted at least for now this naming convention because you may see this some more the M is indicates that it's Montgomery County or primarily Montgomery County route. The second digit they have named well, well, numbered the corridors, one through nine, I think, or maybe eight. Some of the corridors are very clear. Some of the quarters are a little bit put together. So for example, University of to to various mill is one corridor in their planning. But so these are ordered by their route numbers. So the and then the zero and so on is relates to the routes within that quarter. So the first one, these are just presented in that order. The first one is the M10, which is the Veer's Mill line currently in just to orient you on this graphic. The sort of dashed orange lines is the existing service that is operated by Womata. The solid blue in this case is existing right on service, the root 55, and then the darker red are there proposed new routes with the red circles representing the proposed term and I of those routes. So in this case, what they're proposing, there's the three routes, the Q2, the Q4, and the Q6, which collectively provide service between Silver Spring and Shady Grove, covering different portions of that overlapping on the central segment. They have proposed splitting that into two routes, the M20, which would provide the service from Silver Spring to Wheaton, and then the M10, which would provide the service from Silver Spring to Wheaton, and then the M10, which would provide service from Wheaton to Montgomery, New Rockville. The M12, which is then north of Thesda, Heisfeld Crossing, largely replaces the C2 and C4. Most of the changes on this route are in Prince George's County where they have reoriented some of the ends of the C2, C4 in terms of how and what they service. Within the county it's largely the same. They would propose that all the service terminated in North Bethesda with none of the service terminating at Twinbrook, and then some of the trips operating only between Wheaton and Tacoma Blangery Transit Center, which is again sort of how they have the service operating today. That's their busiest segment. That Georgia Connecticut Avenue corridors, M20 and the M22, so as we already talked, the M20 and the M22. So as we already talked about, the M20 provides the service on lower Georgia Avenue. The M22, their proposing, would run from only down through Glenmont to Wheaton and then continue on to Bethesda. It's sort of a combination of their existing L8 service, which they operate in conjunction with right on, as well as some of the existing Y lines. So this is one where we've worked closely to make sure that service is continued because they've proposed to discontinue the L8. And so we've proposed to modify the 34 extended up currently only some of the trips on the 34 extend up upper Connecticut. So in this case, we proposed that all of them continue on Connecticut to make sure that there's continued service on Connecticut Avenue. The M42 and M44, these are replacing the C8, which currently provides service from College Park over to North Bethesda. They've proposed two changes here. One would be just splitting the service so that they have more demand east of Glenmont. And so they've proposed splitting this into two routes trying to make it so it's not quite such a long route improve their on-time performance But then they've also proposed shifting the service away from New Hampshire Avenue and White Oak over to Randolph Road The M52 replaces all of the Z's, 6, 7, and 8. So again, attempting to simplify service up Route 29. So in this case, they would have just one single pattern, the M52, which would be similar to, I believe it's the Z6, that then most of which terminate in Burton'sville, but then some of those would continue on to lower all the way that the Z7 does. The one thing that then is lost in that is that the service on Old Columbia, which is currently served by one of those, but no longer reserved. And so they proposed to extend the P11 to provide that service. In the vision plan, they have this idea that there would be a second 50 series bus in the corridor. But as they were going together, the year one plan, they didn't have, I feel like they had money to be able to make that trip. And then the sixth corridor is the White Oak Medical Center. And so this is the K-6 and the K-9. These are very similar actually to the service today. The K-9 would be unchanged, which is the express route. But they are proposing to extend the K-6 up to Adventist at the hospital. That's you notice in here that's a note that they have become very keen on and are trying to put more service in around the White Oak Cherry Hill area. The M70, this is the J1 and J2 proposing to simplify to just one service, the M70, that operates primarily along the same alignment today, but that would no longer serve medical center and some of that's driven by the lack of the ability to make the northbound left onto West Cedar in the peak grade so they can't do that so they're trying to have one route that does one thing all day long. So some of that would then part of that route would be covered by the 33 but there would also be some change that would be some hole there. And then I think the last one of these is the M82, which is the T2, that they are proposing relining that service to Twinbrook instead of Rockville. And so in this case, we've worked closely with them to align the local bus service over that we would realign the 37 to provide the service on Upper Falls Road in order to provide that connection. And then as I mentioned, the Z2 would be discontinued, so we're proposing the 918, a fixed flex, which would largely follow the same alignment as the Z2 from between the White Oak Transit Center and Olning, so that it would provide that connectivity but then would flex up in the sort of sandy spring area. Again, that's one where depending on timing, it may be that it first rolls out as a fixed route. Depending on how quickly we can solidify all of that and have the resources in place, but that then as the vehicle and technology comes on board that we then add the flex area. Because the flex is area that historically was serviced, that sort of slowly been lost service as Walmata has chipped back on the Z2, so but this would be something we'll be trying to introduce service back to that area. So thank you. I am still digesting all of that. There's a lot there, so thank you for the presentation for anyone who's following this. There is your PowerPoint presentations in the packet. So highly recommend folks go there so they could see the maps and all that data. Let me start with, I think, the 60,000-foot-level question. And it is, in order to achieve all of this, I think it was noted that service levels would essentially double, or is it the budget that doubles? Could you clarify, Director Conklin? It was the hours of service that doubles. So, I mean, that is the predominant cost in providing the transit services, the operator driving the vehicle and the vehicle in motion using fuel. So, the hours are the closest core of our area to the budget, but it's not a major expansion in the fleet itself. So, Phil, you may have more insight on that. Yeah. It perhaps not double double because a good portion of that expansion is in the flex. And there is a modestly lower operating cost for the flex. So it probably doesn't quite get the double. But in the vision plan, the service hours do very close to double. So probably 90% higher than where we are today, something along those lines. 90% budget increase where we are today, something along those lines. 90% budget increase? Yeah. Okay. In the vision. In the vision, right? Yeah. So that's close to double. 100% would be double, right? Okay. So just want to say that because this is clearly an ambitious and much needed goal to better connect our residents and do so in a way that does not overlap with Womata and clearly that has been taken into account. And then also recognizing new areas for residential units and new areas of economic opportunity. Bottom line, that's what we're trying to do. And I applaud all of you for the deep dive here in reviewing all these routes and all of the stakeholder engagement. I know over the last number of years folks have been reaching out to me about some of the listening sessions. I've received emails about people questioning the Z bus lines in particular. That's in my neighborhood, but those up and down Colesville and New Hampshire, some other bus lines regarding the 73 and 75 and parts of Bethesda closer to the Potomac. But I wanna just ask about a few different things. I'll start with the fleet in the requests that you have for new vehicles. Is that repurposing old vehicles? What is the vision there? Because as we're talking about 90 or 100% increase in funding for the bus operators. What is the capital that might be associated with this as well? No, that's a good question. So our right on bus fleet PDF is our project that does the fleet replacement, is predominantly fleet replacement. So that is mostly getting our buses to transition to the new fuels or retiring them at the end of their 16 plus or minus year useful life. So as we're doing the bus rapid transit projects, we are including the costs for the fleet components in those projects or identify where they're handled elsewhere. So for example, the Veer's Mill project, which is the first project being implemented. The bus fleet is not part of the federal project, but it's being funded by the low emission, no emission hydrogen fuel grant we received, where those buses are the ones that are going to serve that. When we get to the 355 BRT project, we will be including additional buses that are needed to provide that BRT service, but we're likely to offset that with some reductions in the other bus fleet so that it's not a one for one. But our intention is when we do a new project, like the one we launched today, there was, that's a $26 million is the fleet. So we're trying to identify that fleet growth with the projects. As we get into changes to the service that aren't accompanied by a capital project, we'll have to be more specific about identifying when we have fleet growth or whether we're buying a different type of vehicle to provide that service. Right now we haven't had to do that, but they'll have to be some change in the way we carry those fleet costs and those PDFs. I don't have a sense for what the additional capital reflected in this plan is compared to current levels. I don't, it's nowhere near as large as the operating budget component with the hours. If you go back to the division summary slide. It might be 56%, but a big component of that is BRT, which is already going to be carried in capital budgets. And the primary increase in the vehicles, aside from the BRT, is actually in flex, which is a much cheaper vehicle. And part of also what's been driven with that is, we looked without trying to get ahead of the bus fleet transition plan. We also looked at that information at the same time that that study was finished up a little bit earlier this year as we were trying to finalize our work. And one of the restrictions right now is that that smaller vehicle, there's not a good vehicle on the market. There's a battery electric bus, but they have somewhat limited range. There's not a hydrogen fuel cell version of that. And depending on those zones and how big they are, it'll just depend over time on how many vehicles, but one of the things, so we're very conservative right now in assuming that you might actually have to have multiple vehicles within a zone in order to be able to service that zone. So that's part of that growth is included in that just how many vehicles might be out there. But yeah, I think it's it was later this frozen. Well, just to give you an example, what we launched this week, the great Santa as Chris mentioned, that was 13 additional buses. What we didn't call out is a reduction of two buses on the local side as, you know know reducing the frequency there. That's not highlighted there. We did attempt to do that here. That's called that. And I believe this number is going to show plus 56% for buses while the service was 96%. So it was a little bit less, a lot less on the buses. But the hours are what's driving it. Yeah, in important context. I have a slew of questions, but I'll limit it to one more so my colleagues could ask theirs. I want to dwell on the dive into the flex a little bit. Can you? We all do. Yeah. So good on tray into the committee discussion. But could you share a little more insight into how you identified the 19 zones that you've listened here? I'll let not match up in a minute. I just want to give a little bit of history on the flex. So we started two pilot flex zones in the summer of 2019. Okay. We did expect them to just be a couple of year pilot, gather feedback, and then we fully expected. Our intuition told us we were going to grow that program. And that was Aspen Hill and Wheaton or Rockville. Wheaton Glenmont and then another one in Rockville. Right. right? Relatively small zones, as Nat mentioned, compared to what we're proposing in the future. We launched that summer of 2019, March 2020, pandemic came. They're very small vehicles, social distancing. We didn't run those buses for about two years. And when we relaunched it, folks hadn't come back to the network yet. So we had good information for the first eight months or so. So that was helpful and useful. But really what we learned about the Flex program came out of our focus groups and our meeting with the public. And I'll let Nick go into that. So it's Phil saying one of the things that we heard repeatedly in the focus group meetings and other public engagement. And then also was born out in the survey data in terms of where those trips are. It was just a lot of really short trips that if you look so one of the things we looked at is the trip patterns throughout the county we carved the county up into 50 odd zones and sort of plotted you know where they start and where they end and if you look predominantly it's all along that they start an end in the same zone overwhelmingly and so looking at and then and talking with the the public it was became clear that there is really this desire for these relatively short trips right it's like I'm going to the grocery store I'm going to someplace to eat nearby maybe my doctors nearby and or want to go to the park but not the park near me. I want to go to the park a little further away because I want to for example go to Wheaton Regional. How do I get there? And so as we looked at that service we under tried to realize that sometimes the local fixed routes work well for that but oftentimes they don't right because there might be a lot of different places people want to go. We can only put the bus on one cord or, and also many of those services that we have that operate, sort of like that, those circulator services that we have, they're okay, you know, they touch lots of things, but it's sort of playing connect the dots, right? And so that if it goes where you want to go, it's great, but if it doesn't go where you want to go, then you may not use it. And so, really, where we ended up with the Flex is trying to provide zones that are a size that's manageable for the users, so that it's, it connects a lot of like destinations, but that it's, and make sure that we have coverage because in many cases where you look at where those zones are, it goes fairly deep into residential neighborhoods with the idea of being that the service is probably may not be door to door, it might be corner to corner and so that we ask people to walk a little bit to get to the bus and that then where those deep residential neighborhoods are, there's probably very few trips that are going to be there. So providing that sort of expanding the boundary doesn't cost a lot, but it gains a lot in terms of the public willingness to use it. And that, oh, hey, maybe I can now actually take that bus because it's going to come close enough to me as opposed to I've got a walk five blocks and then pick the bus up and then being able to provide access to both similar sort of end uses as well as I was mentioning those high density activity centers. So we really wanted to try and make sure that it all possible a zone provided connections back to either a transit center or a metro rail station or some other similar kind of hub so that folks had a ability so we weren't introducing say like a second transfer so that if they could take the micro transit the flex to get to a higher frequency service, make the bulk of their trip and then either get to their destination or worst case, you know, take another flex on the other end. But the other thing that we heard repeatedly in the public was we'd like where it goes, but we have too many transfers. And it takes us too long to get there. And so we can't provide a one-seat ride to everybody. But by trying to have a number, a really short ride that then gets you to a longer ride, and then shorter ride that then tries to sort of piece that together, recognizing that some people might be able to walk some of the distance and other people might not. So that's the idea and that we can't cover the whole counting because there's certainly portions where there's just not enough density. But let's try to provide access to as many of the regional activity centers and other areas of focus. And so looking at the map that's now on the screen, clearly you see where the flex zones are, you see where there are not. But if I'm hearing you correctly, it is, it really is the last mile approach, trying to connect folks to either another metro hub, right, whether it's purple line, metro rail, another right on bus, something like that, rather than connecting a flex zone to a flex zone to then another hub. Correct. Okay. Yes. Yeah. In the two flex zones that we have today, Wheaton Glenmont, which is a larger zone, about four square miles, and Rockville. We have two buses in the Wheaton Glenmont zone, one in the Rockville zone. Both the average weight times are around eight to ten minutes. Okay? The flexibility that we have with the Flex Zone is that, you know, if the zone is larger than perhaps what we anticipate, it traffics a little bit different. You can add another bus to help reduce weight times or provide additional capacity. If you need to, and if you grow strong enough in that zone, maybe then you consider a fixed drought service at that point. Very helpful. Councilmember, welcome. Thank you. Thank you. All day, all day transportation day, which is great. And so yes, I wanted to talk a little bit about the flex a bit. Although I do want to mention for people who are following along, there is an interactive map. The link to the map is on the front page of the packet. So in it's been great. I've been paying attention, but I've also been looking at this interactive map, which I think is fantastic. So to stick with the flex zones, I would think that half of those trips are predictable, and I don't know if it's half and half, but we have predictable trips, somebody who goes to visit their mother someplace every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon at the same time. Or they go to work Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But then there are unpredictable trips. They want to go someplace this afternoon. They hadn't thought about it. So I think I like the idea of the fixed flex trip, or is it the flex fixed trip, either way. So, and I would think that there would be this potential for crowdsourcing of saying, okay, anybody out there who's going to, if I'm thinking of, of the pools, somebody in Poolsville who wants to go to the Kentlands or something. So is there any way to kind of schedule this out where the community could form some kind of communication structure where there's like a group of people going to the same place at the same time. Yeah, I think that's actually technically done, right? Because we don't receive the calls ourselves. They go into an app and the app programs where the bus is going to go. So if multiple people around that same time, perhaps not at that same location, are going, the system will know, let's go pick up this person here, that person there, that person there. I think it kind of happens on its own. The hybrid piece that I think you might be referencing like a hybrid piece. The fixed flex zone that we're talking about in Poolsville, we're ultimately working its way over to Germantown, okay? Connect to the hub there, around 100 takes you to Shady Grove. That's one option. I think you may be suggesting what if that hub is in Germantown for that day, but it is the Kentlands? Right. I don't know the answer to that. And then also the issue of, so what if someone wants to go to Germantown at 10 o'clock on a Monday morning, but they could go to Germantown at 1 o'clock on Monday afternoon if a group of people kind of got together to say let's do it. I think that I love the flex system and I'm really looking forward to being up my way. And I think that that is really going to be the solution for so many areas of the county that doesn't that don't have the density. So I think it's really, I'm 100% supported. I'm just wondering if it could be more efficient than a one person kind of thing. Or what is the rest of the world doing about this? Yeah, and that's the idea I think with what you were talking about in the dispatch is that typically the way that the Bikro Transit works is that it's not Uber or Lyft in terms of we pick you up, we drop you off, we pick up somebody else, we drop you off. It's more, and you know, if you've taken the shared version of that, it might be more like that where I have somebody who's going from point A to point B, and it might pick somebody up along the way and take them part way or job the person A first, and then continue on to take person B. And so a lot of what this is is in that dispatching that technology solution that's supposed to then optimize those right patterns because it's all about the cost to optimize it. And so those dispatching software will actually figure out, okay, where are those trips? How do I minimize them? And you can have the you know, I'm gonna request it right now But you can also have pre-requested trips and so that's again. That's the kind of thing that you know the county could look to is Maybe there's a discount for the pre-ride trip or if you it's a pre-booked trip We're guaranteed that will be within a certain time frame of when you request it versus if it's an ad hoc trip We have a lower threshold for when we there's a lot of those things that you can do within the dispatch software and that's really what that's intended to do and that Although it the claims may be Seem impressive that they largely seem to come true in that there are a handful of vendors who specialize in this, and that they're the claims they make in terms of the operating cost reductions by using their software as opposed to some other, you know, they largely realize those because it's all in that back end dispatching of trying to group the trips together and trying to make it as efficient as possible. So there is a lot of to be said for that software. Okay, thanks. I think it's really exciting and fascinating about that. Just a couple other things is, you know, one, you know, the rollout, I would guess that for them, for the majority of the people who are either taking a transit or will in the future take transit, this will be an improvement. However, there will be some people for which the changes are going to negatively impact. So in terms of communication and how is this rolling out in terms of to make sure that everyone kind of knows what their options are? I think that's going to be a big communications lift. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. There's never a zero impact. There's always somebody impact that we have to be aware of that. Prior to every service change that we implement, right on re-imagine, or whatever, we hold a public process, and we solicit feedback. People, they have about a month to tell us how this works for them, what does, what does not work, and we can factor that into the decision-making. Oftentimes, we will make adjustments to the original plan that we had presented based on the feedback that we received. So there will still be opportunities for those individuals, however we implement this plan to provide feedback and we can make adjustments based on those comments. Thank you. To emphasize that there have been other bus network redesign projects in Richmond, for example, in Baltimore, where there's been a light switch approach, where on Friday the system looks like something and then on Monday the entire network is something different. That's not the type of structure we've identified here, we've identified packages of improvements that go together. So for example like the changes today there were a series of other root changes. There were 22 other scheduled changes that were implemented today. About five of those were related to this new service so that we're trying to have a digestible amount of information for the public to understand with each service change rather than saying everything related to transit in the entire county is going to change on Monday and good luck with that. Let us know what you think about everything changing all at once. So we're not doing that approach. I'm not saying that approach is wrong. Other places have had success with it. But given the different needs in our county and it's we're not a Metro-centered hub in this county, that sort of approach didn't seem to work for us. We're going with this package-based approach. Okay. And then just lastly, the budget implication. And so this is great and it's visionary and we certainly need it. There's no question about whether we need it. We have to fund it. And so have you looked at prioritizing what changes should happen when, if for summaries and we can't double your budget? Have you looked at some crazy idea, right? But have you looked at just sequencing and staging and what ones are more important than others? Yeah, we let real quick. Yeah, I'll let that in in details. Absolutely. That five-year vision is not meant to be implemented immediately. We're going to have a phasing plan and it'll be based on where resource is available. We do have to buy some new buses here. Buses take two years to manufacture. So a lot of this can't be done immediately. We'll have to be done over time, sorry. Absolutely. It's exactly as Phil said. So we've tried to, we started looking, we have some basic prioritization, but part of what we realized in trying to implement this as we said, lots of these changes maybe want to have light with light. So for example, when the purple line comes online, eventually, right, that then in Silver Spring, there's a number of changes to buses there that are all closely interwoven. And so that ends up being a package that we've suggested to say, really, you should touch all of these at the same time. Parley for user convenience, this Chris was talking about, but that also, just in terms of operationally, like if you pull things off of one street, then you have to make sure that you still have service on that street. And so we've identified a number of packages that say, these is what's there to be able to make it a little bit more digestible. And then the year five in particular tries to sort of group together a sense as hey, these are some of the high priority packages, but you could easily pull some of these out, you could put some back in. The other part of that, and we've tried to leave it flexible as well, recognizing that budgets, you know, money just doesn't rain from the sky normally, that it might be that while we want to be able to reach the service standard for all of those routes, it might be we do that incrementally. So it might be for example that we say our new policy is we want to make sure that all service weekdays goes until at least x time, but we can't deal with Saturday and Sunday service yet. Or we want to make sure that all routes have Saturday service, but we can't add Sunday service yet. And so that trying to provide that flexibility. So part of this is also about giving right on a toolkit so that as they start to look through the packages and as they start to move forward to understand, well, what is reasonable in terms of service? What's how do we line that with a budget that's available? What can we achieve going forward? Thank you. Thank you. Vice President Stewart. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Best President Stewart. Great. Thank you. I want to go back to the flex for a second. Thank you for talking about how the request time works. One of the things I'm interested in is if folks are going to request it, I understand that, but if they're going to something that has a time, like a doctor's appointment, a movie, or something like that, as we're looking at the zones, are we able to tell them approximately what time they will arrive at their destination before they get on the flex press? Yes, that is projected for them. However, it does change. And that is a qualifier that the user knows. Because if you request a ride and then all of a sudden, Nat requests a ride. And so on the way or just modestly out of the way, your arrival time will change, not dramatically, but it does change. And those who use this system are aware of that. Yeah. And they would be able to see that in what you talked about on the app and things like that. So they could decide to switch. Oh, no, absolutely, absolutely. That is there, and it happens. It happens on a regular, every day, as we speak. Yeah. It's likely to be a little different on those fixed, flex zones, because those will have sort of planned departure point times from the flex portion of the zone for the fixed drop point and planned times at which that bus will arrive at the flex portion of the zone. So there's a fixed schedule for a component of that will determine how long the flex window is in those service areas. So those might be a little bit more schedule, reliable. I mean, that's not the right word, but it's thick to better key to a fixed schedule than just the pure flex, which doesn't have a time table at all. Right. Yeah, that's a very good point. And if you notice where the fixed flex zones were, they're in sort of our more remote areas, poolsville, Damascus, they're out there. And part of the reason for that is because there's not a significant transportation node in those two communities. So we still want to get those folks to a transportation node so they can get into the network. Great. And on that, I just want to go back to a point that was made regarding around the schools and getting young people to a fixed destination, like a rec center or a library or somewhere else. And I think I heard you say like you're going to look at the demand and see if that needs to go to a fixed flex versus the zone. And one of the things and you may be already doing this, but it's sort of like what's the chicken and the egg kind of thing here is like if you build it, they will come, but if you actually give it to them, will they then use it? And do we get more kids going to rec centers and other places if we have that? So I don't, I just, I was curious like the conversations that might be happening with like MCPS and our rec department. Yeah, and I'll answer about the planning portion and you may want to. I think, so I wouldn't necessarily categorize it as a fixed flex because the idea of being that that has a fixed portion and a, and a flex portion, I think it's more likely what might happen because we had a number of these conversations as there's some fixed route service that serves some of the particularly the high schools today, where there's some high schools that are not served at all today that we're trying to add service to by adding them to within a flux zone is that we just as that is implemented, you have to watch what that ridership is because it's not going to be helpful for anyone if you have 30 students as there's, you know, as soon as they get out of class, they hope when they happen, they they say, I need a ride, and there's two buses operating that have ten-person capacity, because then you have whoever's left is stuck, right? And so part of that is, I'll try and understand is there a pattern and then also where do they want to go? But it may be, for example, that it's a dedicated service because it might be that they want to go from the high school to the transit center. And so it might be that what's most effective is that we know that that's happening every day. We ask them to schedule in advance, so we know what those buses are. We say, okay, we're going to actually put 30 foot bus there. It's going to show up. It'll leave five or ten minutes after school's out. It's going to make a dedicated trip to some other thing because it's way more cost efficient to do that one trip than to have a whole bunch of buses that are riding around empty or that are having to bring extra buses to the zone just for that 15 minutes outside of school or that we have parents who are calling and saying, my student is late to their activity because they, you know, pressed request ride 30 seconds after the other. And so it's really much more about planning appropriately and trying to make sure that we understand before we take service away or before we add service what that impact is. And then also being very transparent, right? Because there is a certain level of service. It's associated with the flex zone. And it doesn't mean we're going to as soon as you press the button that the bus is going to show up and it's going to guarantee that it gets you there within a certain amount of time. So it's trying to be able to provide that service, especially for people who don't have an alternative and then try to understand where is it most, what's the most cost effective way. And so that's the nice thing about a flex zone is if you say there is no schedule It's always easy to add a schedule for a portion of it if you need to as opposed to saying we have a schedule It's always gonna hit these trips and then it's running empty for 95% And I think in terms of Notification and partnering with our county agencies that That's incumbent upon us to do that. As we make these incremental changes, it's important that we reach out to the Rec Center and let them know, hey, this particular opportunity may increase your number of attendees because it's serving this school district. And they may want to do outreach. They may do some marketing, knowing that the transportation network is there. That will be incumbent upon us as we get to the incremental changes. Not to go too much further with this, but the other element is that it's also relevant to the high capacity in local root planning. So for the Great Senate Cup project, again, the opening of Crown is going to be a significant event for that. We located a station to serve it. But obviously the needs of those students are quite known yet. So when that school is ready to open we need to do some work to understand where they're going to want to go. And for the North Bethesda Transitway project, we've got Walter Johnson and Woodward on that route. So we know that's going to be heavily, heavily influenced by student activities trying to get to either end of that service to the North Bethesda and Pike and Rose and other job opportunities or opportunities that are further north and east or to the Westfield Wheaton Montgomery and Tyson's which will be that service I think is launching next week. So, you know, that school pattern is going to have a heavy influence on all types of service in this plan. Yeah, great. A couple of other questions on, see which ones got answered already. I'm really glad to see the connectivity that chart you showed, particularly for the Tacoma Langley Transit Center and the Montgomery Mall Transit Center, those going up. On, I know you all talked about connecting with Wemada, Better Bus and as they're doing it, I really appreciate that back and forth. I think one of the things that is on my radar as the District 4 Council member is the Kensington area and making sure that's being continued to be serviced by transit just given the struggles we have with expanding Mark and no metro rail there and looking at that. Anything else that you all are seeing in that area now any concerns yet in the Kensington area? I think that in terms of there is no, most of the metro service is on the major quarter. So it has some impact in terms of the changes to the L8, for example, which is on Connecticut Avenue, that they propose to eliminate. There's existing right on service that we're proposing to make sure is largely similar to that. It has slightly different patterns, but with, and then I think that's one of the areas, sort of that South Kensington, Central Kensington, is been one of the high priority areas for flex because of where it is, it kind of, there's some fixed route service that we're recommending to maintain through, you know, portions of Kensington, but then there's also, it's one of those kind of like, no brainers in terms of, there's downtown, but then lots of people are going to want to go up to Wheaton. And so then saying, well, we make sure that the flex zone includes, gets you to Wheaton. So that way you can either go to Wheaton if Wheaton is your destination, or you can get to Wheaton, and then you have access to any number of other transit opportunities if your destination is someplace beyond. So trying to provide that sort of double layer to be able to say if you can take a fixed route, that's great. It's gonna be a lot faster, a lot more efficient, but that we also then still have the flex service that we provide additional coverage. Kensington's one where I think it's on the boundary between two zones and so that's where we had to kind of make some determination as to how far, you know, as somebody going to tip towards Bethesda versus to Kensington, how do you make it so that you don't have too big a zone because part of what we were trying to do was also from a cost perspective, it's not supposed to be over. It's supposed to be transit and supposed to get you to a close pie destination, but that if you're trying to go a long destination, we really want you to either take another transit route that's going to be much more cost effective. So the zones, we had to make sure that they didn't get too big and that they were allowing us. So that's one where neighborhood leads into another neighborhood, but that's one where it's roughly along that sort of southern edge of Kensington, in tip-side, there's a path that's done or to lead. Great. My last question just as just thinking overall as you're doing this work and this has come up with some of our colleagues asked me to ask this question is also How much is we're looking at this the service is also looking at the placement of some of our bus stops and the conditions of them? You know, I know I think all of us probably can point to different places in our jurisdictions or near us where there's a bus stop and you're like really that's a bus stop and I know in Up County there are some places that particularly council member Luky is race concerns about and other folks is that in when we're looking at these plans woven into this? Yeah there's a there's a little bit of that. We've identified heavily used bus stops with zero amenities. If you go back to our bus stop program, which really started, we've had bus stops in 1975. But our bus stop improvement plan started in around 2004, 2005. We had zero shelters in our network at that time. We grew to about 525 shelters over that time and how we prioritized where those shelters went was based off of ridership. We were using 50 riders per day at a bus stop. Since then we've made other improvements. We've put knee walls in to help better define the stop. Provide a little bit of a respite from from from standing trash cans, other other type of amenities. We have to grow our shelter program. We've really do. You know we haven't had a contractor for shelter for about three or four years now. The pandemic threw us off there. We have to grow that program. It's mentioned in there. It's not a major highlight. Okay. Yeah I I would just say, you know, as we're trying to get people to use buses, that part of that is the shelters making sure that they have a place where they can stand and wait, that is, you know, a friendly place that they can do that. So looking forward to continuing that conversation. To extend that, just a little bit more, there is the ADA component of that. Phil and his team are going through and looking at the stations and stops and reprioritizing, which ones are gonna be dealt with first in that ADA access component. And we have been seeking Vision Zero related grants to do bus stop assessments and relocations. We have bus stops that are in ideal locations to serve their adjacent land uses but terrible locations in terms of crossing the streets or trying to deal with that. In the other major influence in our ability to improve the bus stops is property availability in the willingness of the owners to cooperate. And us improving those in a lot of times we have locations where we go to look and make enhancements or find a better location, but can't make property available easily there. So that's a limitation and an ability to make some of the changes you're talking about. OK. Just also just for a year in your constituents awareness, Lumata is part of their study. They are actually looking to do bus stop consolidation. So part of their public outreach this summer, and I think it's still ongoing, is there looking to eliminate, I think it was like 500 bus stops across. It was a substantial number that they're trying. They've established as part of their standard, stop spacing as well as then sort of ridership criteria. So there are a number of bus stops that along their routes that they are looking to eliminate that they feel like they are redundant and otherwise underuse because they're trying to then prioritize where they're invest and be able to provide a higher quality. We did not, as part of our plan, we did not look at that. We sort of reviewed their stations that they were proposing. And then as Phil said, very early in the process, we did look at just sort of basic past, understand, where there's a sidewalk connection, where there's a shelter, where there's lighting. So that's sort of a baseline inventory to help the team as they go for it. Yeah. sort of a baseline inventory to help the team as they go for it. Yeah, and in terms of removing underutilized bus stops, I'm not, I don't usually support that because, you know, the way bus service works, if there's no onboarding or alighting at that stop, because it's underutilized, the bus doesn't stop. So that goes a little bit to your point. That's not an area you'd want to make an investment, but you still want to leave it there for the one person that uses it every other day. Because it's closer to their home or whatever it is, or it's a safer crossing across the street as per a reference. So, Wemada has proposed this. I personally objected to that. I don't think that's a good thing to do. We, for a seldom used bus stop. Make an investment might not be a great thing to do, but having a stop that's convenient for somebody you seldom, you soundly use the bus, I don't think it's a bad thing because it doesn't stop if no one's getting on or off. And I'll note as well that as part of the growth and infrastructure policy review, the LATR improvements related to bus transit are almost always bus shelters. And this GIP is proposing extending the distances for bus shelter improvements in yellow policy areas, part of the away from our growth quarters where you just had to look at a narrower radius and adding those requirements in green policy areas, mostly the aggressor. So reaching more parts of the county is something that the planning board is recommending in the PHP committee, will be discussing as part of this work sessions. I appreciate you raising that. I think based on this conversation, anything related to the transportation policy of the GIP, we should be included in that. If only for those specific policy discussions, so I look forward to speaking with the Council President about having the joint committee. So thank you, Mr. Kenny. I do have two quick follow-ups in addition to my appreciation of my colleagues' questions. Going back to the flex, I'm curious if you could paint a picture of the users of that service. If they are individuals who, if there's a core group of individuals who, you know, you could say are frequent flyers, frequent riders here, or if it's a genuine mix of folks. I can't speak to the current riders. I can speak to the first eight months that we had the service. We were carrying about 130 people a day, not a huge number. And that was one 30 between the two zones. Between the two zones. Half of those people had not used transit before. Half were transit users. That's what we know about them. The dynamics been a little bit different since we returned and we didn't run the service for a number of years. I'm not sure about the existing riders. OK. You know, it's, I think, an important data point to understand who's utilizing the services because we not only want to expand ridership, that's the goal here, right? Get more people to choose public transit as an alternative, but that would require the users actually be new, right? Not folks who are existing, who might have other means to get around. So we can continue that conversation. And then the last point I have is back to schools, which was mentioned and glad that in this redesign, schools capture areas going from 41% to 66% of schools, are all of the high schools captured in that or is that how do you classify the schools? I believe it's either all or all but one. Okay, and that was something we were trying really hard to cover because we also, there were a number of public comments to that effect. So we were trying to make sure that there was coverage. Again, it's hard because some of those are covered by flex. So it's hard to know whether that, you know, as we talked about, there's a huge big push at one point in time, but the goal is that we would have that coverage and then that could have all, if there's need for... I would strongly suggest that at least the high schools be captured there as clearly as much as possible, if not all of them. And the reason I say that is because when we move to make right on free for all kids all the time, one of the goals I had was that it would be better integrated with an MCPS and within the yellow school buses. And we know that there is a demand for drivers across the region, across all platforms. And so if we are able to shift some of the kids ridership from the yellow school bus to any of these, whether it's flex or one of Womada or our buses, I think that goes to help the entire system. And so having that as a potential goal and coordinating with MCPS to see how we can integrate those two, I think, while maybe not a direct focus is a very strong, corollary goal. Yes. Interesting. The one flex zone in Rockville, the virtual Montgomery. Say that again, the flex zone in Rockville. The virtual Montgomery. Say that again, Mr. Pop-up. The Flex Zone in Rockville, the virtual Montgomery kids really drive those numbers over there. That's great. Well, that's part of the demographic data I was looking for. So I'm glad to hear that. OK, clearly really interesting stuff. I mentioned some residential feedback. My colleagues have mentioned residential feedback as people start to digest this. I'm sure we'll have more. And so it's something that will definitely continue and you'll keep us updated, at least in that first year, how it's being implemented. And are you able to do that without or much budgetary requirement, or are you... Or are you planning for the next fiscal year? The first fiscal year is expected to not have a significant budgetary requirement or are you already planning for the next fiscal year? The first fiscal year is expected to not have a significant budgetary requirement if there is one at all knowing that it's very difficult to introduce increases that haven't been planned for. So that's looking to be roughly neutral in terms of the resource requirement. So we should expect to see some of these changes implemented with the FY 25 budget. 26. 26, that's correct. Yeah. I mean, technically, great Sanika, we're considering that part of the ride on real magic. Yeah. So we just want to stay yesterday. So you guys, back to that. How soon we forget. That's right. That's right. Thank you for bringing you back home. Well, as Councilmember Balcom said, it certainly has been a bus filled day from our morning and afternoon. We appreciate everything that you all are doing, Director. I just wanted to make one more highlight in case it didn't come across in the earlier presentation. One of the main focuses of this was to increase accessibility for residents. And if you saw that table, I know one of two of you mentioned that. There's very, very substantial increases in access to opportunity, particularly jobs as the metric we used across the entire county. So that was the main goal here. And then filling in those gaps to get out of this pattern, this pre-pandemic pattern that was purely focused on commute patterns, where we know that's not the patterns today to have this all day pattern. And this network I think does a good job of that. Of course, everybody noted the fiscal issues and it is designed in a way that we can meet our out the implementation along with the county's capacity, although I would hope that there is some priority to making these changes happen. That's what it's all about, getting people safely, traveling throughout our community, and thank you for all the work that you and your teams do towards that goal. Without any further comments or questions we are adjourned. Thank you.