NTOC Talking Operations Webinar TranscriptIntegrating Ridesharing with Transit - The Current State of Practice

November 28, 2012 Moderator:

o Larry Filler, Regional Director, UrbanTrans North America Presentations

o Ridesharing as a Complement to Transit: TCRP Synthesis 98 Gail Murray, Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, Inc.

o Integrating Rideshare with Transit: King County Metro Kevin Desmond, General Manager, King County Metro Transit

Division/Department of Transportation, Seattle, Washingtono Ridesharing and Transit at Potomac and Rappahannock

Transportation Commission (PRTC) Charles Steigerwald, Manager of Planning and Quality

Assurance, PRTCGood afternoon my name is Beth and I will be your conference operator. At this time I would like to welcome everyone to Integrating Ridesharing with Transit. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. Ms. Jocelyn Bauer from SAIC, you may begin your presentation.

Thank you, Beth. Hello and welcome to the NTOC Talking Operations webinar on Integrating Ridesharing with Transit - The Current State of Practice, hosted by the National Transportation Operations Coalition (NTOC). I will be giving a brief introduction to the web conferencing environment before turning the session over to our first speaker. Today's session will last approximately an hour, with 45 minutes allocated to the presenters and the final 15 minutes for audience question and answer.

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A file containing an audio and visual recording of the webinar, transcript, and presentation files will be posted on the NTOC website in approximately 1 week.

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I’d now like to introduce the moderator for today’s webinar, Larry Filler, from UrbanTrans North America. Larry Filler serves as the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for UrbanTrans North America. Larry Filler has over 30 years experience in public transit, commuter benefits, transportation demand management (TDM) and organization development. He is responsible for creating the commuter tax benefit industry now used widely across the country. He developed and served as President and CEO of TransitCenter, Inc., a national nonprofit organization that ran the nation’s largest transit benefit program and created several award winning TDM programs. Prior to that, he held several senior positions at transit and transportation organizations in the Northeast. He was a founding member of several nonprofit organizations including the National Transit Benefits Association and the Ridesharing Institute.

With that, I’d like to turn things over to Larry Filler.

Thank you, Jocelyn. I welcome everyone to this special webinar on behalf of the Ridesharing Institute. We are excited with the tremendous turnout—over 300 people having registered. We have a great program; we will explore the issue of ridesharing and its value as a compliment to transit. Before we begin, I would like to provide you with some information about the Ridesharing Institute that organized this webinar. We are in a new organization dedicated to supporting the use of ridesharing including transit. One of our goals is to double the use of carpooling to where it was in the 1980s—about 20% of commuters. Our activities focus is on research, education, policy development and advocacy. For those of you who are interested in ridesharing, I encourage you to visit our website at ridesharinginstitute.org and become members. I want to thank, the NTOC- The National Transportation Coalition and its members for making this webinar possible. In particular I’d like to thank the Federal Highway Administration for their generous support. The FTA, Association of Commuter Transportation, and APTA, who are also sponsoring our efforts today. Finally, I want to acknowledge

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and thank the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Cooperative Research Program for their leadership and support in making this report that we will be discussing today, possible. As you may know TRB, through their web portal, accepts suggestions for topics all year long, as well as accepting nominations for people to participate on its panels. I encourage everyone to take advantage of these opportunities.

Now I would like to introduce our first speaker. Gail Murray, is a consulting associate with Nelson Nygaard Consulting Associates in San Francisco; a firm with six other office focused entirely on planning for transit. Gail Murray is an elected member of the board of directors for the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) district 1, representing central Contra Costa County. She is also a research associates at Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. She has been mayor of Walnut Creek California. She holds her Master’s in Public Administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Thank you, Larry Filler, and thank you everyone for joining this webinar: Ridesharing as a compliment to transit. As Larry Filler mentioned, this is A TCRP synthesis project. TCRP stands for the Transit Cooperative Research Program which is a subset of the Transportation Research Board, which is a division of the National Academies of Science. These research projects are done competitively so the quality is held high. I want to dwell little bit on this, to acknowledge my co-author, Mark Chase and his students who with the survey results and the literature research. A synthesis is not a full Transportation Research Board project. It is a snapshot. In this case it is a state of the practice of public transit agencies that either operate or coordinate with others to provide ridesharing services. The hope is it could lead to further research and the implementation so there will be more cooperation between transit agency and ridesharing agencies or integrating the two together.

The way we approach this research was through use of three methods: we reviewed the relevant literature; we conducted an original 52 question web-based survey; then we followed up on with interviews on agency profiles with successful models. You will be hearing from two of those successful models. When King County Metro, and PRTC in Virginia as two of the successful models that we profiled in the report. The literature research found that there wasn’t very much research on integration. There were a lot of vanpool programs that we found as case studies, but not on how it was all integration with transit operations. We did find there

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were 384 ride matching programs in the US, but only 32 of those were integrated with transportation agencies. As Larry Filler mentioned, ridesharing had its heyday in the 1970’s and 1980’s when it was over 20%. We are now down to less than 11%. One goal is to see how we can create opportunities when it is integrated with transit. As I mentioned, we did a web-based survey. We found the people to survey through literature research, from our own knowledge at Nygaard, and also there was a technical panel that oversaw the study and had good input into the study. We sent the survey to 49 agencies; we had almost an 84% response with 28 transit agencies and 14 non-transit Agencies responding. This is a map of the transit agencies who responded to the survey. As you can see, the most robust responses are in the northwest and northeast. One of the questions that we asked was, “what is your program comprised of?” You can see looking here what people are using in their programs. I want to point out that 24 of the 28 respondent have carpool matching. And 20 of them market ridesharing to businesses. We also asked, “What are the top reasons that ridesharing and transit should work together?” All 28 agencies said, “To bridge service gaps not filled by existing transit.” They have a lot of requests from their customers. 10 of them actually created their program because of customer request. We also asked, “If it is to fill the gap, then how do you do that?” and 12 of the 13, said the ridesharing was for areas that did not justify transit. Four of them actually used ridesharing to pilot a route before they put in a route, and three of them substitute ridesharing as a cost-savings measure. One of the profiles was about filling a gap. PACE, in suburban Chicago, was a good model for that. There is a train, the Metra train, which pierces into the suburbs. At the end of the train PACE parked vanpools. Those vans take people what called “the last mile”, actual it can be up to 10 miles in their program. They take people to the business parks at the end of the route. This way they get to keep their transit riders because the transit riders do not have to get in their cars to do the whole route by car. They have a way of getting to their destination after the train ends. I know King County Metro will probably mention that because they have such a model program.

As far is substituting ridesharing for transit, this is a good example for rural areas. The Kings County Area Public Transit Agency, in Hanford California, has a vanpool program that serves agricultural workers. Kings County is in the bread basket of California in the central valley. They have a lot of vanpools 110 of them that serve these workers. The workers may not work one day because it’s raining, or they may go to a different field with different hours, so it didn’t make sense to have bus routes trying to serve them. This was cost-effective to use this program, with a subsidy of $2.19 per trip than to subsidize buses for these trips.

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I also mentioned we had 13 respondents who were non-transit agencies. Looking on the East Coast, look to New Brunswick, New Jersey. That was a Transportation Management Association, a TMA, call Keep Middlesex Moving. In the middle there was Denver. That was the Denver Regional Council of Governments. Moving to the San Francisco Bay area, another non-transit agency that has a robust program is the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. It has a lot of functions; a lot of functions dolling out money. They also do operate the 511 and regional ridesharing and bicycling program. They provide staffing in each of the nine areas that that are involved. Staffing who will go to businesses and promote ridesharing and cars pooling at big business and office parks.

Another question we ask, “How do you evaluate your program?” You will see, the top reason, was to measure the number of carpools or vanpools measured against a goal. For example, we have an annual growth goal of 10%. Did we meet that or not? Also the number of participants measure against a goal—for example we have a goal of 200 new registrants per year. Look at the bottom, eight people measured their successful in ways we didn’t think of. Some of them measured by successful matches made, others by customer satisfaction, how are people reviewing the program. Some of them actually measured the reduction vehicle miles traveled, provided by carpools. Look right above that at avoided cost of transit service not required because of rideshare. Only one said they actually look at the avoided cost. That was the RTD in Denver. They actually subsidize the regional vanpool program, which is called Ride Arrangers and it is promoted by the Denver Council of Governments, they actually subsidize that based on an annual peak/off-peak marginal cost analysis they do. They look at whether to put in a new express route or if it would be more effective to use a vanpool. As you can see on this slide, a vanpool is far less expensive than a new route. This is one of the determinants in making their decision. Also at the top, another way to show cost effectiveness, is by DART Des Moines area. They are in an area that has 200,000 population or more. The FTA allows them to count their vanpool miles as well as their transit miles in getting their formulas done. Doing that, they generate an additional $3 million for their agency by reporting vanpool miles. They use it to subsidize the van pools buying new vans to replace old and they have some left to use toward their transit agency. They definitely think vanpooling is a cost-effective measure for them.

We did also look at dynamic ridesharing in other words real-time ridesharing. Most people were interested in this, but they were waiting to see if there were any demonstrated results. The only program that we found that was actually in operational was by the Washington State Department of Transportation. They

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funded a program called “go520.” 520 refers to State Route 520 which is a is a 15 mile corridor in the Seattle area. WSDOT contracted with Avego who gave drivers a GPS enabled SmartPhone which could connect with riders looking for a rider. This is an on the fly program could be an hour before or the same day. All they had to do was sign up to be riders or drivers. The riders had to pay the drivers one dollar plus $.20 a mile. When they signed up they gave a credit card and it was charged against their credit card in an electronic fare. At the time of our research this program was ongoing. Microsoft has a big campus there and they were using the dynamic ridesharing from that.

The Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which I mentioned earlier, is also funding a pilot program in three counties in the San Francisco Bay Area and have also hired a Avego Corporation. They are using a $1.5 Federal climate initiative grant but we do not have any results from that yet since it’s still in the design phase. I want to mention, we looked at casual carpooling. This requires a lot of people going from one area into a single destination so it isn’t applicable for a lot of areas of the country. It is less formal than dynamic ridesharing in that you do not sign up at all; you just hop into somebody's car—a stranger. We did look at that. Some agencies, like BART who I am involved with, are not very supportive of casual carpooling. In fact they kicked casual carpoolers off of the BART parking lot because they were taking up parking spaces but not using the transit. I mentioned that because PRTC in Virginia is actually promoting casual carpooling as a way to increase capacity along the corridor. I think Chuck Steigerwald will bring it up in his presentation.

I want to end up by telling you what the challenges are to get ridesharing to compliment public transit. First of all, 46% of those responding said rideshare is a competition to transit and I just gave you the BART example. So that attitude is that they do not want to be involved, because it feels it will take away from transit ridership. 40% said that it wasn’t important to their agencies mission. I think that is because transit agencies do not think of themselves as mobility agencies. That is looking at the customer and the trip the customer wants to make, but rather as a mode-specific provider. 29% said customers do not accept it as a substitute for transit. I want to end on a very positive note; I think there are lots of opportunities for ridesharing as it compliments transit. One of the first is economics. A lot of agencies are suffering from cutbacks in funding. Rather than cutting it route and leaving people high and dry, if they thought of themselves as mobility managers, looking at getting the customer to a destination, they could embrace ridesharing as a way to soften the blow of having to cut transit routes.

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There is also a practical reason in contingency planning; ridesharing can be a backup. For example, when hurricane Sandy hit, when the NJ trains weren’t running, ridesharing was popular way to get people where they wanted to go. Out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, whenever there is a transit strike threatened, there are a lot of people adding on to that 511 database. Having transit embrace ridesharing for contingency reasons, is a very practical reason. I gave you the example of PACE that solving ‘the last mile.’ That has the benefit of attracting a lot of new riders to transit. There is creating capacity with slugging or casual carpooling because if casual carpooling reduces the demand on one corridor, it could allow opportunity for transit efforts in another corridor. There is a new dynamic ridesharing here in the Bay Area, we didn’t cover it in our study, but I just want to share it with you. Using technologies, some companies have been connecting casual riders with casual drivers on one-time basis. Unfortunately the California Public Utilities Commission is trying to squash them because they are competition for taxis. Finally, there is the opportunity for the state and the department of transportation to do more legislation. Washington State is the leader here. In 1999, they told major employers they had to reduce their commute trips but they gave them incentives; they gave them tax credits, they excluded them from liability if there was a accident. So I think Departments of transportation, when they are looking at how they are going to handle all of the cars we expect in the years ahead, they should be looking at how they can use integrate ridesharing with transit in a more overt way.

I want to turn it over to the next speaker which is one that we actually profile in our report. I also want to also let you know, can get this report at www.TRB.org if you want to read what I went through in a very fast way. Now I am going to turn it over to Kevin Desmond.

Hi, this is Larry Filler, thank you Gail Murray. I’m just going to introduce Kevin Desmond. I want to thank you very much—that was a great presentation. Now we will hear from two agencies profiled in the report that have embraced ridesharing as a way to supplement and enhance service. Let me first introduce Kevin Desmond. Kevin Desmond is the general manager of King County Metro Transit serving the King County Metro. King County is one of the largest transit systems in the country with annual ridership close to120 million, 1400 buses, 1000 vanpools. They also run a light-rail service and the city street cars. Kevin Desmond started his career in New York City working on transportation issues in the Mayor’s office, then as assistant commissioner of administration with the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and Chief of Operations Planning for New York City Transit. He was also vice president of operations and development

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at Pierce Transit. He holds a master degree in public administration from NYU. He was chosen as a member for leadership class of APTA and he is chair of APTA’s sustainably committee.

Thank you, Larry Filler. Good afternoon everyone. It is a pleasure to be participating. We are delighted that we were profiled in the TCRP report you just heard summarized. When Larry Filler asked me to participate I think it was for two reasons; speaking from the perspective of the general manager, policymaker-type, but also to lay policy groundwork for why a public transit agency would be involved in ridesharing. You heard from Gail Murray that the State of Washington has been a leader in this for many years. Not just King County Public Transit, but the State Department of Transportation as well our partner agencies. This is the context for my remarks going forward.

First, if you are not familiar with Seattle region, you can see here we are bounded by water. The service area is the dark area on this map. Seattle is the largest city in the State of Washington and is the economic engine. The City of Bellevue has a major dynamic center as well. Just north of Bellevue is a little place, Redmond where a small company called Microsoft has its corporate campus. We also have the Boeing Corporation throughout the area with various facilities. It’s a large metropolitan region. King County alone is about two million people. The overall Puget Sound area is a little over three million people. Whatever organization those of you listening belong to; you probably have any strategic plan. Like everyone else we have a strategic plan. King County Metro is a general government organization so my policy board is actually the elected King County Council. My boss is the elected King County Executive. We also have another committee called regional transit committee, which is made up of appointed elected officials. Our strategic plan is developed with our regional transit committee and eventually adopted with the King County Council.

As you can see on this slide, we have four different strategies that speak to, and legislate, our participation and role in ridesharing. You can see in strategy 2.1.1—key word there variety of public transportation. Right off the bat, we define ourselves as not just the bus service. This suggests there are a number of different types of ways that people can move around besides in their own car or being on a bus.

In strategy 2.13 Geographic Value—I can go on and on about the background on this. How our fixed route bus system works, and how it’s financed is rather complicated. Much of the bus system exists in Seattle, but the tax revenue is

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generated throughout King County. So, it is important that we provide some amount of equity across the county and provide mobility to folks even if they don’t—if the land use can’t support fixed route buses. We want to make sure that everyone gets service.

Strategy 3.11. Key words here: investments and partnerships, alternatives to driving alone and maintaining King County’s economic vitality. We talk a lot in our region, not only with the transit system, but also with the State DOT, that maintaining transportation capacity is key to the ongoing economic development of the region and the State. Fourthly, 3.12. Key here: Partner with employers. We’ll come back to that. This is a huge element of the success of the entire system. Metro is made up of a variety of different types of products. We have our fixed route bus products—local buses, express buses, buses serving exurban and rural. We have ridesharing program which we’ll come back to. Like other transit agencies we’re required to provide paratransit to those with disabilities. We have alternative demand response (DART) which resides as a fixed route transit family and is funded that way. And we have a variety of other specialized programs, whether it’s giving out taxi scrips to providing community access transportation.

Some stats for you; you always have to have stats in a presentation. This year we will be close to 120 million transit boarding. What you see here is the 2011 performance. We have over 3.1 million in our overall van program in 2011. This year we will probably be just shy of 3.5 million. Paratransit you can see is about half of our ridesharing. And, our rideshare online searches—that’s for people who want to carpool—47,000 searches. Much of metro’s farebox revenue comes from employers. These are employers who purchase fare medium for their employees through various different programs. A single smart card is good on seven agencies throughout four counties. For our vanpool program Metro alone has 1300 vans. If you add in our partner agencies, our region has about 2300 publically provided vanpools. This is a huge investment and is a huge part of managing capacity of the roadways of the central Puget Sound. Without the transit system, in our region that is heavily constrained by water in one direction, and mountains in the other, there is not a lot of room to build roads, so managing capacity is important. Much of that is the supported by HOV lanes; we have a HOV lane on our north-south interstate coming in and out of Seattle. Here are some historical milestones: For our vanpooling program and our ride-matching program you can see it goes way back to the early 70s. This started with the city of Seattle that started the commuter pool in 1973. Soon enough King County Metro continued that program. Some of this involves state legislation that was mentioned earlier. We continue to show various milestones of development of our vanpooling and ride-sharing program. As

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mentioned earlier, the State of Washington has been instrumental in helping support and facilitate a healthy and vibrant ridesharing program here in the state starting in 1979 when they passed legislation that basically defined the ride-share/vanpool program. We did receive, and have received for years, direct money from the State of Washington primarily to buy our vehicles. They remain a large partner. From a policy perspective the state legislature understand that part of their mission is managing the capacity of their roadways—that they manage it through their budget. So there is a direct State interest in filling up high occupancy vehicles on their roadways. As mentioned before, the commuter pool –eventually merged with Metro transit. 1991: Landmark legislation—Commute Trip Reduction Efficiency Act—or CTR as we call it. This brought the employers into the game. Employers who have over 100 employees, who report to work during peak hours, are required to have a CTR plan. That really opened the door for businesses start working directly with the transit agency to find ways to reduce their drive alone trips to their worksite. Depending on where their businesses were located. This is the foundation of why we have such a strong relationship with the business community. We have this ongoing relationship with the State and we all have a common mission associated with ridesharing. The ridesharing program is multifaceted. The vanpool program is the largest element of it as I mentioned before, with 1300 vans. We have the vanpool program itself linking people from their point of origin to destination. We have a van share program which is more of the first mile, last mile concept where they made park the van at the park and ride. They all take the train to that site and they get in the van-shares and take the van the ‘last mile’ to their work site. We have a metro-pool program, our newest program, uses a plug-in electric Nissan Leaf. We also have various other transportation demand programs you can see listed here and other programs where we work directly with employers. Much of our staff is funded by contracts with various jurisdictions. Many of these programs work on partnership with jurisdictions that have an interest in managing their roadway capacity, or if there is not enough parking downtown. Speaking of financing, Metro has an operating budget of about $600 million. Out of that we spend about $13 million on our ride matching program. The vanpool program—vanpools cost about $1.70 per trip before fares. After fare—fares cover about 80% of the operating cost. We actually have fairly low subsidy for the program; the fares pay for the capital costs, and as I said, the State pays for the vehicles, as well as some local money. What you have is a cost effective transportation alternative. People who don’t find the fixed route system convenient have low-cost alternatives. Incidentally, we also have a large park-and-ride network with about 23,000 parking spots. This is a major element of service associated with our vanpool program. Our fare program, which I mentioned before, we have about 1600 employers regionally that are by passes directly from

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Metro for their employees. A little less than half of them buy what we call “passport”. This is an innovative program where the company provides fare cards to all of their employees.

Wrapping up. We are engaged, through our policy board, working on an alternative services plan. As Gail Murray mentioned we are all very, very stressed financially, and may not be able to grow service. Alternative transportation services may be able to meet the needs of people currently using buses. Here are the different types of product that we are looking at. And we are looking and working closely with the communities to develop these programs. To give you a sense—there are many ways to skin the cat—we believe in providing choices. It could be a carpool, Van, car, bus—but we want to find solutions. If you want to know more about our program, you can contact Syd Pawlowski at the phone number or email on the screen. Syd runs our rideshare program and he definitely would love to hear from you. Now I will turn it over to the next speaker.

Thank you Kevin Desmond that was tremendous. Quite a range of services. I would like to turn it over to Chuck Steigerwald who has a unique program. He is the manager of planning quality assurance program at PRTC in Woodbridge, Virginia. He provides oversight day to day of bus operations and Omni-match rideshare program and employer outreach. He has worked in transportation for 30 years, with Amtrak and the PRTC since 2006.

Thank you, Larry Filler. Good afternoon everybody and thank you for joining us today. To allow time for questions, I will breeze through as quickly as I can. Here is the little bit of background first. PRTC is made up of six participating jurisdictions between Washington DC and Richmond Virginia. Three of these jurisdictions sponsor bus service. Within these three jurisdictions PRTC also provides ride-matching and employer outreach services. Prince William County is historically an outer-ring suburb—bedroom community with local employment of service sector retail. Over the last decade there have been more professional, higher-wage jobs entering the county. For us this presents a challenge because we have been focused on a movement to the core. In the last few years we have to focus on inter-county movements. This continues to be a challenged. We are learning how to make allowances for other movements in and around counties. Prince William County has a long history of effective ridesharing. There was a significant activity prior to the establishment of TRC. We have an extensive network of independently owned and operated vanpools. This is one of the unique things about this area. The vanpool program is not centralized. It is independently owned and operated. People own their own vehicles and providing services.

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Around 1990 there were some trends that began to appear that began to diminish traditional carpooling and vanpooling in the area: The expansion of transportation fringe benefit, commuter bus service, introduction of Virginia Railway Express service, increase slug activity, and workplace changes. This began to diminish the popularity and the effectiveness of carpooling.

PRTC is broken down into a family of services; we have the OmniRide commuter bus service that provides service to the core employment areas (DC and Arlington) as well as metro rail feeders, which are more traditional fixed route services. There is a local bus service within the sponsoring jurisdictions – OmniLink is the product name for that. OmniMatch is our ride matching service. This includes not only ride matching but also vanpool support and assistance for new vanpools and for struggling vanpools. Then we have the OmniSmart commute employer outreach program. The OmniMatch program is a member of the Regional Ridematching and Ridesharing group, Communter Connection network. The program provides basic ridematching and comprehensive commuter information. It also administers vanpool subsidies for new and struggling vanpools and does a good amount of outreach, representing PRTC at transportation fairs, employer events, etc. There’s a strong organizational belief in PRTC and a holistic approach to transportation. We really seek to be a one-stop-shop for travel and commute information – we realize the importance of that in the decision-making process for individuals. We really want to try to reach them and get them to change the modal behavior. There’s recognition that a variety of options are necessary to encourage the use of alternative modes of transportation to achieve the regional goals, congestion management, and improvement of air quality. These are shared goals whether you’re talking about transit or ridesharing. The program will use an individualized marketing approach which allows for better-informed behavioral choices, the idea that you provide as much information as a person wants, let them request what they want to know, and provide them with as much information as you can to help encourage the behavioral shift. There’s been an increased focus on the promotion of ridesharing for area employers. The OmniMatch ridesharing program and the employer outreach program work hand-in-hand. There is a special emphasis locally on those activity centers where transit is simply not an option. The development pattern here, as an outer ring suburb, large campus-style commercial developments where it’s not necessarily possible to put transit out there because of density. Promotion of ride-sharing among employers proves to be a strong option. That can help minimize the need for local investment in those areas lacking density. I think this has been pointed out a few times today, using these ridesharing solutions as a method to concentrate the transit service where the

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density is. The last point is that we are researching potential ridesharing solutions for other local commuters, potentially inter-county trips where that density lacks. It’s always been sort of a failing in traditional ridesharing programs where if you don’t have the critical mass it becomes more and more difficult to match. We’re researching ways to use new technology to enable us to match a little better for those less dense commutes.

Slugging has been mentioned today a few times, casual carpooling. It is a significant system in our service area. The most significant slugging activity centers are in our service area. There is a symbiotic relationship -- if you read the FHWA report that just came out that’s been mentioned in the chat box a couple times -- you will get it good understanding, that transit and slugging have to be hand-in-hand with a very symbiotic relationship. It does have operational concerns, because you have co-locations of service points and shared space. That can be operationally difficult. Slugging has undergone an increased acceptance by local governments and planners, maybe not officially. The concerns of slugs and casual carpoolers are more and more being taken into account, at least discussed, for instance in the planning and development of commuter lots and making sure there is space allowed for slugging activity to take place safely. Current challenges that we are facing in terms of our ride-matching program: the causes of the diminished activity are still very much in place and in play. Many of the longtime vanpool owner and operators are nearing retirement age. There’s not necessarily anyone to pick up the slack. There have been recent changes to provision of transportation fringe benefits by federal agencies, specifically those administered by TransServ program out of DOT. This is presenting a barrier to the continued operation of the smaller, independent vanpools. They’re issuing a debit card now and there’s no way for the smaller operators to take that debit card payment without an increased expense. There are also potential market changes coming soon as toll facilities are being built in Northern Virginia. We had the 495 Express lanes toll and HOV facility open just two weeks ago. The I-95 corridor HOV lanes are being converted to HOT lanes and we’re not sure what market changes those will bring about. There are opportunities as well. The BRAC process grabbed people from transit-rich environments and dropped their employment locations in less-transit-rich locations. This is an opportunity to promote car sharing, carpooling, and vanpooling in these new locations that are not well-served by transit and may not be for a little while. As I mentioned earlier there is an increased focus on vanpool formation at employer sites locally and as part of BRAC changes. The market changes due to toll facilities are as much an opportunity as a challenge. And finding appropriate uses for new technology: how can we use those applications for dynamic ridesharing most effectively? How much use we can get out of car

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sharing and the app-driven, smartphone-driven applications for ridesharing. The last thing to mention is that PRTC is administering a regional vanpool incentive program. This incentive program we expect to launch in the spring. It will organize existing and newly formed vanpools for reporting to NTD. This is similar to DART’s program – it will provide a monthly payment to each participating vanpool for collecting and reporting data that they’ll provide. That program is administered by PRTC but will encompass all of the Northern VA regions. This is not a centralization of all the vanpools that exist – they’ll still be independently owned and operated. We’re just organizing the data collection. And that is my presentation. I think we can open it up for questions.

Larry Filler: Thanks Chuck Steigerwald, that was interesting. It looks like we are almost out of time but there was a lot of activity in the chat box. Maybe I can select two quick questions and turn it back over to Jocelyn. One question had to do with liability issues. Maybe Kevin Desmond and then Chuck Steigerwald can address this. Do you face any unique liability issues from promoting or operating rideshare services that you do not encounter in normal transit operations?

Kevin Desmond: We do not have any unique issues. The extent to which we provide the vanpool program and there’s an accident, there is a certain amount of liability for the agency. The liability is no different from the liability we have for accidents and injuries for the fixed-route system. We didn’t go into this thinking we could indemnify ourselves to the extent that our volunteer King County drivers are involved in an accident driving a King County vehicle. It is the same with our traditional transit. This is part and parcel of running the program. The safety record of our vanpool program is extremely good. We screen the drivers and involve driver safety programs. We pay attention to that, it’s not a large cost to us. The ride-match system and the carpooling system, I am not aware of any liability issues with that.

Larry Filler: What about you Chuck Steigerwald?

Chuck Steigerwald: It really is not an issue. We are not actually operating the vanpools.

Larry Filler: Another question is: Who is driving the van for the last mile use? Do you have a van that you operate for last-mile service?

Chuck Steigerwald: I think that question should go to Kevin Desmond.

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Kevin Desmond: These are all volunteers and citizens. They apply to be part of the vanpool, and then we set them up with other vanpoolers. The rules are pretty much the same. There are no public employees involved in the operation of the vehicle.

Jocelyn: We can get some of the questions answered in the follow-up e-mail that I will send out in about a week. It will point you to the recording and the transcript that will be on the NTOC website. Moving on to wrapping up the webinar – I’d like to give you a little information on the National Transportation Operations Coalition (NTOC). On this slide, you'll see the member organizations of NTOC. We encourage you to go to the NTOC website listed on the following slide to find out more about these organizations. The NTOC website contains information about upcoming webcasts. It also contains a webcast archives page with transcripts and recordings from previous Talking Operations webcasts. As I mentioned, we will have the recording and slides from today's webinar up within a week. There is also a new discussion forum for the talking ops webinars. You can also sign up on the website for the NTOC newsletter that is e-mailed out twice monthly.

In conclusion, I would like to say a special thank you to our speakers, Chuck Steigerwald, Gail Murray, and Kevin Desmond, and to our moderator, Larry Filler, and to all of our participants for your active participation and questions. We hope you found this informative, and please enjoy the rest of your day.

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