Monday night at the Transportation Planning and Policy Board, the agenda said that they mayor would be doing a presentation on Metro Forward – but she started off by saying that she wasn’t doing a presentation and that she wasn’t only going to speak to Metro Forward. Here’s what she had to say – spoiler alert – its all over the place and not much about MetroForward.First of all! She frequently puts one item on the agenda, and then talks about other things that are not on the agenda. I find it highly annoying. And, depending upon how far it goes, it may even be illegal. I wonder if that has even crossed her mind? The agenda clearly said “MetroForward (30 minutes, Mayor Rhodes-Conway)” I feel like this is a bit of a bait and switch. She apparently thinks public notice is merely a suggestion? Fortunately, this one is on video and you can watch it here, its the first 30 minutes or so:
MAYOR ON (NOT) PRESENTATION/(NOT) MADISONFORWARD
Intro
Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway says that she knows the agenda says that she is doing a presentation on Metro Forward, but that this won’t be a presentation and it won’t only be on MadisonForward because when she sat down this morning to think about what she wanted to talk about, it was a much longer list. To satisfy the agenda, she passes around something, I’m assuming it is this which is now attached to the agenda. She says that its not that she doesn’t want to talk about MetroForward, because she does.
Thank you
She starts by thanking them for their work on the body and the work that they will be putting in over the next year. She hopes it has not escaped their attention that transportation and specifically transit is a significant priority for her administration. As such, this body is a critical part of making sure that they can iron out the policy details on the road towards implementation of those goals.
So what will she talk about?
She says she organized her thoughts into three or four categories, she wants to talk about things that are really actively undeway right now. Mostly for your awareness, I’m sure you know most if not all of them, but maybe some updates or how she thinks about them.
Then there is a set of things that are starting or that she expects to start in the near future that she wants them to know about at a minimum. Some of them she hopes they will have a big role in.
Then she wants to talk about the larger question of thinking about 2020 priorities in transportation. In particular from a work planning point of view because that is what we are all doing right now on the department side. Thinking about what the work plans are, what the resources are that we have available to us and how do those two things fit together, or not as the case may be.
She is also happy to answer questions or have a discussion.
Actively under way
Much of this is from the 2020 budget. Thinking about 2020 Metro service improvements, there is a couple of opportunities. They hired some new drivers, or they are going to hire some new drivers and there will be some decisions about how much we can improve service in 2020 and where those improvements should go. She expects that conversation is in the range of Feb. – Mar. to think about how to allocate those resources.
They funded 3 studies in the budget, one is the fare-box study, one is an organizational study and those are one a time frame of RFPs sometime in the summer. The big one is the route study, staff are developing that RFP now and they might have conversations about that a little sooner. Hoping to get that started in summer. She expects they will see the route study come forward a little sooner than the others.
You also probably know that we are in negotiations for the next phase of BRT consultant contract. That is an important one to achieve the implementation goals there. They are hiring a new metro GM (general manager) and the position is open for another week. If you haven’t already, she would appreciate you sharing the job opening in your transportation and transit related networks. Particularly if you have national reach. It was posted over the holidays, it may have missed some people and she would like to make sure they have a deep pool of options. It’s posted on the city website. It’s on her social media. It’s a really important position. They are asking someone to take over what is already a really excellent transit system and move it into its next phase. If all goes well, it is a very significant expansion of service of the system and so it is important that we get someone that is capable of managing that kind of growth and change. She expects the time frame for the offer to be Feb.-Mar.
She says they will be looking at Small Starts in the fall. She will be visiting D.C. hoping to meet with FTA in January to be on their radar. They are trying to make sure they can be successful there.
The other thing actively before them is the first BRT line and the routing. She says many know that she has strong feelings about various aspects of this and she wanted to talk about some of them so you can understand where she is coming from and what she is pushing on. For the first line, there are three issues.
1. One is the question of not stopping the routes at the city limits and making sure we have the option if not the actuality immediately of going to Middleton and possibly Sun Prairie. This is more of a financial questions for those communities more than anything else. It has implications for how we set up our decision on routes and stops. She thinks that they will have to wrestle with if they have a standard for stops in the City of Madison, will they require other communities to meet that same standard and invest that same amount of money in a station, or is there another option. How do we negotiate stations that are not in our jurisdiction and what is the cost sharing split on the line once it crosses over into Middleton, for example. What will we ask them to be responsible for and do they have the capacity to do that. That is very much an interest to her and will remain important as we think about the North/South line as well. We will have all kinds of questions about do we go to Verona, where in Verona do we go? Do we go to Fitchburg? How far into Fitchburg? The other question is that short of Middleton on the West side, our routing options there. She hopes this will come up in the larger route study and whether or not we want to retain all four transfer points? Or might we move them or move away from a transfer point system altogether. In some places we might want to keep one or more of them. She doesn’t have strong feelings about that, the only strong feeling she has is that they should not assume they will keep them, they should ask the question of what we need as a community and where our service needs to go. That is tied to the west side routing because how we are routing is tied to the west transfer point. She doesn’t have the answer but she raises the question because these are the types of things they will be wrestling with.
2. She does have a strong opinion on the downtown routing. She says this is an open question, they are having a process around this, they are getting more information and there is an equity analysis being done and that is all very important. She feels very strongly that the routing should be around the square. She doesn’t know why they would put it anywhere else, frankly. To her gut reaction to having BRT other than the square is that it is the same bad decision making process that gave us the transfer points to begin with. It pushes transit outside the public sphere. It makes transit be something that it for other people, that should be hidden and should not be central to our public life. And she strongly believes that transit needs to be central to our public life. It needs to be part of our public space, it needs to be central to our placemaking. And that if we are running transit, it needs to take people where they want to go, and that is the square.
3. On the north/south line she feels strongly that BRT has to go to the airport. There is just no other option in her mind. We have to be able to get people from the airport downtown and to campus as quickly and efficiently as possible. They have had some conversations with the County Executive about the airport supporting a station, she thinks they are very amenable to that. We will see what that means when we get down to budgets and brass tacks, but she would expect that they would participate. But then that does raise questions about where does it go between the airport and downtown. She also has feelings about that, they are slightly less strong, but she is not sure why they wouldn’t run it down Packers, particularly if we are anticipating a major redevelopment at the Oscar Mayer site.
Those are future discussions but she wanted to say to them what she has said in many other venues so you are not surprised when you hear about that.
Project not actively underway but coming soon
She says she knows they have gotten updates about the work they are doing with the Innovation Team with Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative focusing on Transportation Demand Management and bus access, so she won’t say more except that she thinks it is an exciting process. While she expects to get interesting outputs from it, what has been most important to her in that process is that the team is learning a methodology and a set of skills and tools. She expects them to come out with some interesting information based on the input work they are doing and to come up with innovative ideas, but the most important thing is learning the skills and getting to practice them and they can apply those skills in the future to other things in and out of the transportation realm. That work is related to the MOPES process which they want to sync up better with when they come up with their ideas so that can feed into MOPES so we are not working at cross purposes.
Another thing supported by Bloomberg City Leadership Initiative is our work on Vision Zero. They have been given free technical assistance from Bloomberg Associates and these are the folks that did Vision Zero in New York and they are working with a staff team here to look at our Vision Zero process and what that looks like for the City of Madison. She expects they will see much more information about that. They have the second call with them tomorrow morning. The idea is that they are not going to do the work with us as they are going to try to sprint us towards getting it all started and understanding what our project planning needs to look like, who needs to be on the internal team, how do we think about the process, what components are necessary or desirable. What does our process need to look like.
Another question she expects they will have to wrestle with and she would like their help on is the question of scooters and shared scooters. This hit immediately after she got sworn in. She finds herself internally wrestling with the policy questions, she would like their help in wrestling with the policy questions and thinking about the different approaches different cities have taken. She hears from folks that have safety concerns, public space and use of public space. She also hears from people who have concerns about how people do first and last mile around transit and why are we concerned about safety for scooters and not for cars. This is what she wrestles with and would like their collective help with. How do we think about a policy around not just the technology, but the business model and what is our Madison approach to it that makes the most sense.
She says she would also appreciate their collective thinking on what principles they should rely on in making this decision. One question is a question about routing bike paths. A recent example is a question about near the arboretum where Capital Newspapers is. Do they route the path behind or on street? There are pros and cons, different users that would be served better by one or the other and it feels like maybe not the best way to proceed to choose what to preference (people who don’t feel safe on a dark path behind a building) so therefore we should (cross more driveways). That is her personal opinion but that is not a data driven way to make a decision, so some sort of rubric that would address that kind of question would be one place for work.
The other is policies around locating bus stops. Particularly how close together, some questions are traffic engineering but some are more public policy decisions about how frequently the bus should stop that would be good to have rubric around.
Farther out items
She expects they will be taking up the questions around modal hierarchy and street typology. Which needs to be very much synced up with the work around complete and green streets. That is a big and sprawling conversation she that she wants to make sure they manage well. This body needs to be deeply involved, but we probably need plan commission, one or more public works bodies and council will have strong feelings about it. It’s a big conversation they will have to manage and she wants them to know she sees it coming and is very interested in it. She hopes it will force them to think and make some hard decisions. And recognize that not every piece of right of way can serve everyone equally all the time, and that we need to make some choices and preference different types of use in different places, but then if we are going to do it, we need to really do it. What does that look like and how do we make those decisions and what does that mean about implementation and maintenance and blah, blah, blah, blah. (her words, not mine!)
Another big conversation that is related to that is how we prioritize infrastructure projects. She had initially written the TIP (Transportation Improvement Plan) but maybe its broader than that. There are questions about Public Works Coordination and other sources of money and all sorts of things implicated in there, but right now they prioritize on one factor and they probably need to look at more than that. That is another “big conversation” that she sees coming. We aren’t quite ready for it, but will be.
The other big long term thing is implementing Metro Forward. A substantial part of that is Bus Rapid Transit, but that is not everything. That will continue to be a significant piece of work, less for this body and more for staff, but its important that you know that it is happening. Part of the reason it is important for you to keep it in your mind that that work is going on is that while they added a significant increase in funding for transportation, we did not add a significant increase in staff. So, we have very small number of staff managing a very large number of transportation projects and the weight of most of it falls on Tom’s shoulders. She doesn’t think Tom knew that I was going to come in and give him 7 or 8 large new projects all at once, but she is very mindful that Tom has three people, which is a totally insignificant number of staff to manage this amount of work. Obviously we are pulling on Metro staff and staff from other departments as well, she is trying to be mindful that although there are a lot of things related to transportation that she wants to get done that she needs to be very clear on her priorities and communicate that clearly to staff so they can stay focused and not be overwhelmed by starting a bunch of different things at once. She would ask them to think about that as well. Her priority is MetroForward and getting that implemented. The other list of things she just talked about notwithstanding. Your help in thinking about that and helping staff to maintain their focus would be very much appreciated.
Wrapping Up
Tom is working on a work plan for the transporation department, as are all of the other departments. And she expects to see that relatively soon and she expects they will see that relatively soon. One of the things she will be looking for is a sense of priority. She asks that when they come to the shared sense of priorities they stay as they can on them, so staff can also stay focused and we can get things done rather than putting a bunch more onto their plates.
QUESTIONS/COMMENTS
Public Comment
Bob Schaefer agrees with the mayor that transportation is important and how we plan for that. One of the problems he sees is that we are not getting a good look at the facts. He looked at the 2018 annual report for Madison Metro and the approximate daily trips per fixed route bus is 2.41. Now that is not impressive. In the documentation itself, the trips per revenue hour are 32.56. Now that is not necessarily pointing out the good progressing. He says when they look at 1979 there were 14,000,000 trips but the population was 171,362. In 2018 the population was 255,000 and to be comparable to the same percentage in ’79 the ridership ought to have been 20 million. What has happened is we increased our population in the surrounding communities so that right now the population is about 427,000 and then the ridership ought to have been around 248,051 riders. There seems to be a declining interest in bus transportation according to these calculations. We need facts before we make decisions.
Committee Questions/Comments
No questions for the Mayor.
Mayor says “really, none?” and giggles.
Robert Burck, the representative from the City of Middleton thanks her for the plan to make MetroForward happen and get behind BRT and he also wants to see it come to Middleton and other outside communities, so just a thank you for your vision here.
Mayor says that one thing she didn’t say that she should add it that much longer term if we are successful in getting Bus Rapid Transit in Madison, one of the questions we have to ask our surrounding partners, what does that mean about our potential to expand regular service outward farther. If we can get BRT to Middleton, that just pushes the boundaries out farther potentially. She thinks there is the possibility for interesting discussions around – once they have two types of service – bus rapid and regular bus service, do we not want a third type of service? A more suburban transit option or do we just take our regular bus service farther out and what are we able to collective, as a region, support? These are not “now” questions, but she thinks they are a couple years, 5ish years from now, that we want to wrestle with that. It isn’t just Madison that needs transit, its our region that needs it. If we are going to be successful, from a number of different perspectives, we have to think regionally about that.
Eric Sundquist says on the chicken and egg issue of the transfer points and the BRT routing, how do you see that working out? It doesn’t seem like we’ll have the consultant report on the local routes in time for Small Starts.
Mayor says that is right, so we are probably just going to have to make a decision on the BRT basis, which is fine, but she thinks its useful to understand that there is a potentially broader range of possibilities in that decision than just what relies on our current configuration. The decision is going to have to get made in absence of a larger study of information on routing, but if we were to decide we didn’t want to hit the west transfer point, its just useful to know that is a possiblity. That the transfer point could move or we could go to a different system and that would then have to roll into the larger study and be taken into account.
Sundquist asks what she is looking for from this body to help. Will we get questions from staff that will lead us to one outcome or another on this or is this something you want this . . .
Mayor interrupts and says I expect that you will all be asked to weigh in on the final routing.
Tom Lynch says that they are in discussion with different consultants that do routing studies and it is likely that the scope will include different scenarios so that we will be able to understand different ways. One range would have no transfer point and the other end of the spectrum we would continue with them. We hope in February to have kind of a modified report for the downtown BRT as well as some of the West routing factors. The West Transfer point is the only transfer point that is directly affected by phase 1. We also are likely to put in the RFP that if the consultant were to have a suggested refinements to the current BRT routing that they could provide those as a suggestion. That would allow us to continue to move forward the Small Starts application and start to move through the process and if we have to tweak three blocks here we tweak them a year or two from now.
The chair says that the mayor list is all on their list of future agenda items that they will be discussing later in this meeting, so it is good to hear.
Mayor appreciates that, thanks them again for their service and the work they will be doing and that the things that are in their purview are very much of interest to her and so she expects and hopes that this is the first of many conversations and that as you dig in to some of these and as we dig in to some of these things that she or her staff will be back to talk in more depth about them and to hear in person from you collectively as you wrestle with some of these conversations as well, but they should also always feel free to reach out to her deputy mayor Leslie Orantia who has transportation in her portfolio, she is often here, so don’t hesitate if you have thoughts or questions or input or whatever, she is probably the best way to get them to her. Tom does talk to her on a regular basis, so you can route things through him as well.
NEXT UP???
Housing? Does the mayor have an equally impressive list of issues that staff are working on for affordable housing? Will she be visiting the . . . the . .. the . . .what committee??? . . . to discuss them? And will she be visiting that group frequently and offering up her staff and department head to be conduits to reach her on issues of importance? Will she be bringing in technical assistance and experts to help guide processes for affordable housing as well?
I’m not holding my breath. So lets just stop saying that her top priorities are transportation and affordable housing. Clearly transportation is getting ten times the attention of affordable housing. I’m not saying that is a bad thing – because transportation is a vital issue. Let’s just call it what it is and stop pretending it is anything different.
