Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout2023-08-23-AHTC-min Town of Lexington AdHoc Transportation Committee Meeting Wednesday, August 23rd 2023 1 9am to 10am Zoom Video Conference Meeting Minutes Meeting Minutes for August 23rd AHTC morning meeting Wed, Aug 23, 2023 Meeting was begun at 9.03 am Meeting minutes from last week were approved by Bridger and Varda seconded. It was passed 6 to 1. Sally - abstained as she hadn't seen them The committee discussed the recommendations from individual members regarding next steps for Lexpress. Individual team members were writing sections of the draft report to the Select Board. Deepika raised the concern that the Lexington communications officer had left the town and Ms.Kosnoff said that Bethany Ramirez would be helping do the outreach for the September public forum. It is to be a Hybrid format and Susan has arranged for an OWL. The options for outreach to the community to inform them about the forum were discussed including sandwich boards. Deepika reiterated that before we worked on the slides the draft recommendations had to be complete. As September was also the start of the school year it might be difficult to get people's attention. Susan mentioned that she did not have the funds for much outreach but would be able to procure sandwich boards from the Rec department. Deepika asked Joe if the Select Board can help in a marketing and advertising push to help the TAC recommendation be successful (the unlimited pass). Joe Pato told us that the board had agreed that there should be advertising. There are funds for LExpress for transportation. Those funds are slightly fungible, there is no line item for marketing. But some money can be applied to add assuming that there is some leftover and the Select Board waiting to hear back what the needs are. We don't really have a fund to add money from. But there so we need to get specific. Susan said that they had submitted to the Select Board the slides with some estimated costs. for example: $300 to $500 to print these posters. However it's the same funds that need to be used to print posters for other Lexpress needs as well such as schools, which Deepika agreed with. Ms. Kosnoff said that she would send in her recommendations later that day. She discussed the TDM plan that was just received by her and that it's essentially so the transportation overlay districts in town, there are three of them. It's the Hartwell area, Spring Street. And Hayden. She thought there was going 1 to be a recommendation to the Select Board to start putting some guidelines and recommendations in place for when there's new development about how the town asked developers to mitigate that. She mentioned that Lexpress is not serving those business districts as much as the rest of town and the commuters. If there are guidelines in there, that were done by a professional agency about what the town should be asking for and targeting, with agreements with overlay districts plans. She thought we could look into that to leverage for consistency and rationality across the town. She also needed time to review the school bus contract yesterday. She also received some emails about leveraging the school budget for school transportation. Deepika reminded the committee that these were not about the special education students' transportation which are quite complex. Deepika thanked Susan for sending the Lexpress vendor contract. The vendor contract as calculated in the school system, is by year, but in the vendor contract for L'Express: It's calculated per hour by the vehicle service hours. So the way the unit of measurement is very different, which was very interesting. Deepika's broad recommendations were that in the year remaining on the Lexpress contract the town should try different things. Do pilots, do experiments, and figure things out. When the experiments are accompanied with outreach it builds mindshare in different parts of the community about what Lexpress is and what Lexpress can do for them, potentially. Deepika informed the committee that she and Bridger met over the weekend. Some conclusions during that conversation that while Lexpress is a mass transport system. The Lexington town overlays values that require so much more from just a simple mass transport system. For example, sustainability goals, sociological goals. But these goals are not funded while being aspirational. It's only funded for the job of going from A to B. So there was this disconnect. A separate realization was that using the heat maps and the Tri Town maps one concluded that while Lexpress serves those areas, they mostly serve the town arteries mostly (major connecting roads). So residents who live in the neighborhoods have to walk to the major roads to get a bus. Bridger talked about the waterfall analysis (that explains the complexity hidden in the data). As cause analysis in figuring out the reasons further and further back which can impact current results. SAs he explained: " you start back up with the waterfall, and say, with the right amount of transportation vehicles, to service your area, whatever that area is, you can have more riders, if you have more vehicles, and you have more commitment. And they change their behavior because it's more reliable and consistent. So that means the schedule is consistent, the vehicles are there when they're supposed to be there. And then you end up changing your behavior, so you're less car reliant. Because now you can rely on something else, because it's reliable. And so your ridership goes up because their behavior changes. Because you've removed the barriers to the problem, which are frequent, reliable, consistent services that move you to place". 2 Right. Depending on how we've talked about the places you're trying to get to, that can be an open conversation, because right now, we're basically running a circulator, taking people in Lexington, to Lexington, minus the Leahy Burlington outlet. And then there's a 128, Business Council shuttle that's taking people to LA. But in the wealth of years, we've been doing this, we've also since the school bus change, they're also looking at this quarter mile problem. And so as you do the waterfall, what do you become our sort of backing into is you get down to you have less buses. So you change the schedule. So now it's less consistent, and therefore not as flexible, because it doesn't go as many places. And so you have writers change their behavior, I'm not going to rely on it. Some are reliant on it. So they're still changing their behavior, right, because they have to change their behavior because they are reliant on the bus. But it doesn't mean that the buses, the system is helping them as ideally as it could be. And then you get to the barriers of geography. So if we're trying to serve the residents of Lexington, to do things in Lexington, that is you are serving the people of Lexington in the best way possible, because you've increased the barriers, meaning now you have less infrastructure and you can't get to them all. Here because they're not within a quarter mile or a half mile of the actual stop, which actually now doesn't exist because now it's like flagged down you know, these other variables, right. So the waterfall of, of 15 years ago, has led us to a point where people make the and this was this happens in corporate shuttles all the time, which is there's no one on it. So it must be ineffective, so I should cut it. And I think what the group is sort of said is like, that's a false, that is a way to think about it. But it might not actually be the outcome that you, you could cut it. And it might not be the outcome you want. Because you didn't, you didn't solve any problems, you may have exacerbated something that you didn't fully understand. And what you're trying to accomplish, which is serving the people that need to be served, not serving the people that could change their behavior, because they didn't actually need it. They just used it because it was consistent, reliable. Okay, another way of looking at it is that ridership was artificially high. If you run it the other way, and you say you were double counting people who got on a bus, then the chances are the bus will get to the same place. That's because the system requires you to transfer, not that you finished riding. It's so it's not two rides, it's just you had to ride two buses to accomplish one task. So one might, under this premise, look at it and say, if you go back to the six and underline things, or you just go back to what if you had six buses, you know, and you're running the same system, most you don't have more riders, you had the same amount of riders that had a more difficult experience to do the same thing they were trying to do." . Ms. Kosnoff questioned how a pilot could be done efficiently with nuance, thinking about the actual operational ization of the recommendation, like on a per route basis, per vehicle basis. Sally expressed her willingness to think about routes which don't have enough ridership such as Route C, but not to entirely remove those routes but to tweak them. Adding an additional vehicle to look at unmet needs may be the better solution. However, opening up a demand response to the entire population may not achieve the goal of serving the seniors and the mobility challenged community. 3 Varda liked the demand response system for people who need it. However, she questioned the size of the population of seniors who would be served. Even if 25% of the population of Lexington are seniors, most may not need it. She would like more data about the population who would need and rely upon a demand response system. She was against taking away route C as it would make the problem much worse. She would rather spend the effort on figuring out how to improve the mass transport system for all. Howard agreed with Varda and Sally and thought that a demand response pilot should be limited, at least in the pilot phase, to seniors who can no longer drive but are ambulatory. And also for the mobility disadvantaged population, regardless of what their age is. Vehicles should not be eliminated, especially those serving East Lexington. Ideally the route should be reconfigured to better serve our town. He also told us about a senior citizen who was due to a sudden medical condition unable to drive and would benefit from a demand response service. Deepika asked Sharon and Susan if they had the data about senior citizens' resident numbers as well as other mobility challenged people beyond the remix map. While the remix maps are color coded. However, the Select Board may need more concrete numbers. Susan had some data and explained how they tried to layer on to the resources that are on remix, just to come up with some assumptions. She would also send the team a pyramid that shows the type of services needed for people at different ages. She also mentioned a COA van which could be called akin to a demand response system. She recommended that routes aren't cut. Especially, many passes had already been distributed . She would like to see what happens when school starts. Also there is data that's coming with this new limitless pass right now. as people are filling out forms so they have their addresses The riders are from Lexington, Waltham, Arlington, Billerica, Chelsea, even Burlington that are using the service as a connecting service. This would position us to get more grant funding Deepika pivoted to discussing the mid September meeting as it would also help us get feedback on our recommendations. Meeting was adjourned unanimously at 10.11 am ZOOM CHAT NOTES Susan Barrett to Everyone (Aug 23, 2023, 9:22 AM) You may all like to refer back to the Peer Review as leveraging TDM was discussed in those professional recommendations. Also, the initial intent of the TDM policy was to have a holistic TDM policy, not segmented by certain portions of Town knowing that traffic in any part of Town impacts other areas. Bridger McGaw to Everyone (Aug 23, 2023, 9:46 AM) I appreciate the budget question SAlly is raising --the SB has specifically asked us to show which routes are not performing as well as others. and if offering Funding options --we could do that. 4 The LexConnect and pumping up Marketing/ awareness with Marketing recommendations should happen. or moving the funding into LEXCONNECT? Susan Barrett to Everyone (Aug 23, 2023, 9:48 AM) The cost of rides on LexConnect is very expensive. I would not recommend moving money to that. It would require significantly more drivers to do this. Bridger McGaw to Everyone (Aug 23, 2023, 9:48 AM) That Route C really has to be in the report...because it's the fact. but we don't have to recommend cutting it --we just need to acknowledge it per the charge. Bridger McGaw to Everyone (Aug 23, 2023, 10:01 AM) I have a hard time rationalizing keeping LexConnect at its current configuration if it's too expensive and transitioning it into this pilot. I support grant applications. I have to head out. I am not supportive really of a wait and see on pass use behavior. I do not feel that our taxpayers are worried about serving all these other single commuters. It's fine as a vision -- or a note in a narrative but I do not see it as the reason the community needs LexPress. We need to position our recommendations and the tradeoffs. That's the goal. and if the Town's goal is plugging gaps in the state transportation network -- that's a different ballgame. 5