So again, one of the other issues we have to address and work with is the ongoing threat of COVID throughout 2021. Now it's 2022, wherever possible. We've shifted to outdoor events. And we worked with the guidance and recommendations that are of course, coming out of the federal government, the states, I mean the city. So this summer and fall, instead of doing what had been planned as a series of static, indoor focus group meetings, engagement teams shifted to the concept of a walking focus group meeting to try and talk to as many bus riders and business owners and the highest youth transit areas around Durham. So focusing mostly on the downtown Durham station and in and around the village transit center, we, again, we saw consistency and describing the environment at those heavily used bus stops. And this example, the downtown transit emphasis zone, and that includes the core of downtown, including American tobacco campus area, downtown streets, where all the go Durham bus routes converge as they enter and exit the Durham station, traffic congestion conflicts along the curb. The limited amount of right away in this area all presents a growing challenge of getting the buses where they need to go quickly and efficiently on time. But the observations for the daily rider or someone who uses the bus often, what they noticed with things like lack of lighting, or it's not feeling secure or signage and the lack of signage for the lack of benches.

And now as we move into phase two, I'm happy to continue the work for, with the Braggtown community association and the Fayetteville street quarter fellows and the Durham committee on the stairs of black people. We've we are going to add a few more to our list. So the city recently selected grabbed some Bruneau races with DPS foundation and west end lion park legacy project to be community partners that we're going to work with in the future. And we're going to start again with monthly meetings, with our new community partners. And of course our ongoing community partners to talk about ways to engage the community. Now, as we made the weather a little bit, the benefits again of using community partners, it really does help with the familiarity. And of course, these are, these are organizations that are embedded within the community. So they have institutional knowledge and history than any team of consultants will not have. Again, with that lived experience, co comes an authenticity and an ability to tap into distribution networks, to get the word out in a way that we're just not able to do. So. We're excited to plan ahead and prepare for community conversations throughout February. And I, for one, can't wait for a warmer weather and maybe we can go back to chapel hill road park. I think we, this is the one where we, my colleague and I saw Zoomba class. And then I think with some teamwork, I'm, I'm confident we can develop really great projects. I think my colleagues from Mia and Luma consulting actually say it better than

Our team thought about winning all the time. We're more about friendship, teamwork, training hard, and our training skills in the field. We always put our best in every game. And yeah, it's not about winning it's about having fun and just playing, playing a sport that you love. Yes, but it's awesome. So you're a better bus project. And Jackie, thank you for being here. The patient guy, last name yet. What did we win? One pretty good. Maybe with a winning team, but our best product. We're trying to improve the buses, get them

Alright. Well, thank you for giving us update on all of the Adrian. I think as I've been in the amount of area that you guys have been able to cover in cities is pretty impressive. And I think it really, it really takes another level of effort given the COVID condition. So it was really great to see how we were able to still do some engagement in person, even at socially social distance. So now I'm going to go ahead and just sort of walk through the various parts of the, excuse me of the site, and to just make sure that we have kind of an idea of how we started and sort of where we're going, moving from there. So the first thing and your trip to the bus, or as we've talked about for bus access. So we're really looking at, you know, what can we do to make your trip easier, safer, certainly more convenient and just generally more pleasant.

So the idea was to take one quarter mile buffer around all of the go Durham station system, and look at a number of different conditions to figure out what can't be done to make them better. So certainly there are some maintenance concerns. We have trash and debris, the sidewalks there's also issues. If you have open manhole covers or drainage settlements, rather either places or is not even know sidewalk, there's what we call goat paths, where people just walk through and started to read it out in the dark bear. And then the image of the far right is just unbelievably amazing to me how that happened. That it's not a setup that would be very easy for somebody with sight or mobility impairment to, to identify and get around. So we do, as Sean mentioned earlier, have been doing some work at some bus stops over the, in CyberArk over the past few years.

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All right, it looks like we're live now. Welcome everyone to the January 20th, 2022 city during transportation departments, virtual public meetings for the better bus project, I'm Bert Fox from Catalyst Design. I'm here with my colleagues as part of the WSP consultancy I will serve as your moderator and your facilitator this evening. I'm going to hand over the presentation shortly to the director of transportation department. And then we'll go through a few housekeeping items to get you oriented with our virtual platform. Our meeting this evening is scheduled for two hours, but we're going to be respectful of your time. And maybe John prior to eight, if folks want to leave to prepare for bad weather, we will, of course stay longer if participants desire, because we're interested to hear what you have to say. So tonight you're going to hear about transportation department's current initiative to make the bus riding experience better throughout Durham.

In the City of Durham, the Transportation Department is responsible for a broad range of transportation services, which includes traffic signs and signals, transportation, planning, parking operations, street, lighting, and bicycle and pedestrian planning. The department also oversees the GoDurham and GoDurham access services and leads planning functions for the Durham chapel hill. Carboro metropolitan planning organization, which is the regional organization. That's responsible for planning and programming, state and federal transportation projects in the urbanized areas of Durham, orange and Chatham. Sean Egan is here with us this evening. Sean has been with the city of Durham as the transportation director in November of 2019. In this role, he is focused on promoting vibrant multimodal networks that prioritize safety liability, sustainability access and equity throughout Durham. Sean, would you like to say a few words to start us off?

Thanks Bert. Good evening. I am Sean Egan, and I'm proud to serve you as Director of Transportation for the City of Durham. Before we get into the project specifics, I would like to talk about the work the City's Transportation Department has done to embrace the City's Equitable Community Engagement Blueprint, and collaborate with Neighborhood Improvement Services, to utilize community partners, to ensure that transportation plans and projects benefit from the input of communities historically excluded from decision making processes. Here in Durham, we live with the shameful history of the destruction of the Hayti community established in 1868 by Reverend Edian Markham, an African-American Methodist Episcopal missionary, and former slave, so the Durham freeway could offer quick and easy transportation primarily for white commuters. We also know that there are examples like the Crest Street neighborhood when communities effectively advocated for their priorities and reduced the harm caused by the Durham freeway. Our challenge today is to move beyond harm reduction to intentionally seek input from communities before decisions are made to maximize the benefit for communities starved of resources over decades, through previous transportation plans and projects.

As we talk about improving the GoDurham transit system, I want to share some key demographic information about GoDurham riders, more than 80% of whom are people of color, nearly 75% of whom have household income less than $25,000 and more than two thirds of whom live in zero car households. In my presentations to City Council, I have said repeatedly that given the demographics of GoDurham riders, there is no better transportation investment to promote equity than improving GoDurham services and infrastructure. With the support of the Durham County Transit Plan this work is now advancing. Last year, we improved 26 bus stops providing better shelter and access for people of all abilities. And we are working with our partners at GoTriangle to increase this to 75 stops annually going forward. We have also designed improvements to Durham station, the hub of our transit network that serves 15,000 daily riders to increase canopy coverage from 20% to 80% of the waiting area and respond to customer needs by providing better seating, customer information and restrooms on the platform.

We requested federal funding for this project and hope to get notice of award later this year. We've also made a federal grant request for a project to make the Village Transit Center, that serves nearly 1600 riders daily, a mobility hub with improved bus frequency and connections, better facilities and access to other shared transportation services. Building on the launch of our first two zero emissions electric buses last year, as we await delivery of the next six electric buses this year, we are seeking another grant to ensure that the noise and air quality benefits of these vehicles are enjoyed by communities in Durham impacted by noise and air pollution. We also made the decision in March, 2020 to go fare-free for both GoDurham and access services. City council extended this through June of this year, and we are now working to identify the resources to continue this into 2023.

I could go on about everything underway to make transit and Durham frequent, reliable, and free. But today we are here to share updates on our signature initiative. The Better Bus Project. The Better Bus Project will enable the development of the Fayetteville and Holloway transit emphasis corridors, bus access, bus speed, and reliability, and other initiatives we secured funding to advance through the Durham County Transit Plan. The City's project manager for Better Bus is Evian Patterson, a Durham native who brings extensive experience in multimodal transportation, planning and operations. We selected engineering firm WSP to design these improvements. And you'll hear shortly from our consultant project manager, Greg Saur, about progress we are making and how Roberta Fox from Greg's team, is helping us to collaborate with neighborhood improvement services and our community partners to broaden and deepen outreach to communities excluded from previous decision making processes. The goal of these projects is to transform the experience of GoDurham bus riders with high quality infrastructure along major corridors, bus stops, benches, shelters, sidewalk, and crosswalk connections, and safety improvements that prioritize pedestrians and transit riders. Projects such as the bus speed and reliability will work to advance recommendations from previous studies to improve bus transit performance across the network and reduce delays for buses arriving at and departing from Durham station.

We have conducted extensive engagement in recent years and heard a great deal of input from across this community, and specifically from our bus riders. And our team has worked to develop plans to respond to what we heard from you during previous outreach and engagement. Today we need to hear from you again, are we on the right track? Do these plans address your needs, your priorities? If so, tell us what you like, what you would like to see more of. If we got something wrong, it doesn't make sense or it won't meet your needs, we need to hear that too. So we can make changes to deliver what our community really needs. We know that past plans and projects from the Durham freeway to light rail have failed our community and we need to do better. As we move forward with The Better Bus Project, we need to honor the commitment we have made to focus on the needs of GoDurham bus riders for better service and infrastructure. GoDurham provides connections across Durham, and we have an incredible opportunity to intentionally direct resources to communities of color and low wealth households with limited transportation options, communities, historically underserved or harmed by transportation investments. Please help us to do better. Thank you.

That was great. Thanks Sean. So everybody sees a slide up right now that says "How to Participate." Close captioning should be on, on your screen as you have been following me talking and Sean talking, if it's not, or if you'd like to turn it off, you can click the CC button on the bottom right of your screen. If you want to see the captions in a different language, you can click the translate button on the top of your screen and select a language from the dropdown menu. If you're having any issues with your video feed, or if you prefer to participate by phone, you can call the number on the screen now; that's 9 1 9 8 9 9 4 9 0 6 and enter the meeting code 3 4 8 3. Then you'll be given the option to either listen by phone and leave a voicemail comment, which will become part of our public comment, and we can hand that over to all of the engineers and designers, or you can join the speakers queue if you'd like to ask a question during the Q & A. If you want to leave a comment after this event is over, you can send an email to betterbusmeeting@publicinput.com. Instructions to view a recording of this event or the presentation itself will be available on the City's website. Additionally a version of this presentation will be going out into communities throughout February for in-person events. These locations will be listed on the City's website. Information about how to contact us after this event is over will be repeated at the close of this presentation in case you didn't catch this right now. I'll now briefly hand over to my colleague, Ana Santiago, from Three Oaks Engineering. (Repeat of this information in Spanish follows).

Thank you and welcome, everybody, again, to The Better Bus Project webinar. I'm Greg Saur I'm the project manager with WSP, the consultant firm that is working on this project, and we've got a number of other staff members here both from WSP and partner firms to answer any specific questions when we get to the end of this presentation. We are going to give you a walk-through of the overall project and where we are. Ok, so generally when we think about improvements of this sort of nature, we think of it in three kind of distinct steps: The first is the planning, and that's really where we are right now and we're presenting to you this Phase I engagement to the public to hear all of the thoughts, hear the ideas, here's sort of where we've been and how we're going forward. We're going to take our input that we receive along with review by various agencies - NCDOT, GoTriangle are all participants in this as well along with GoDurham and City of Durham - and then ultimately going to construction themselves. One of the things that we've really been focusing on with this project is developing designs that are easily implementable - and I say "easy" but as easy as they can get. The idea being that we want to be able to put out as many projects as possible. So we're going to see in some future slides we're going to be spreading projects around the city as well as in a couple locations really focusing them. Ok, so at its core, The Better Bus Project sort of breaks down into three pieces and um some of this might be a bit jargon-y so we can, you know, kind of talk about simple words. But bus access is basically how do you get from your house to the bus stop, or how do you get from your place of work, your place of worship, your place of recreation, etc. You know, and a lot of that for most people is walking along sidewalks, crosswalks, uh things that might be, you know, important to have curb ramps for people with mobility impairments, etc. Then there's the bus stop itself. Where you're actually waiting for your bus how comfortable are you? um do you feel safe? Is there enough light? What other amenities, shelters, or benches, you know, improvements that would make a more comfortable and convenient stop? And then the bus service itself. We're looking at where there may be delays on the service and trying to think about engineering ideas that would allow a hot spot, if you will, get solved and sort of generally provide better service for the buses. And I think the speed, you'll also hear me talk about bus speed and reliability, and I do want to clarify that speed is definitely important. We want the bus to be able to be moving as quickly as possible, but reliability is maybe underrated in a, um, how transit works. And I always try to think about it as somebody who needs to make sure they get to a job on time knowing that a bus ride takes 40 minutes, that it will always be there on time and take 40 minutes is much more valuable than a bus drive that might take 35 minutes one day and 45 minutes the other day. So I think sometimes people think just about the speed of buses, but we really are looking also at the reliability, making sure that they can stick to the schedule. So we have a lot of work that's going on for taking this larger project and we've broken it up into other smaller pieces. These are the task leads and they're on and be available for questions at the end of our presentation. We have what's called the Fayetteville Street transit emphasis corridor, and that looks at a stretch of Fayetteville Street from downtown heading south; the Holloway Street transit emphasis corridor from downtown heading to east; the Village Transit Center study which anchors the Eastern edge of the Holloway transit emphasis corridor. And this looking at just generally that stop area, if there's an ability to put a better transfer facility or station.

The Durham station transit emphasis zone is really looking at Durham station itself, which Sean described earlier as having some improvements, but are going to be ongoing. And this is looking at, can we help buses get in and out of that area better in a more organized way. And then through downtown and out to the corridors themselves. Access to transit study really looks at how do you get to the bus again, your trip to the bus, and then the bus speed and reliability as we described is your bus ride as well. So I just said a whole bunch of stuff, but one of my colleagues pointed out, you really need to say this in plain English. So this project is about getting to the bus, waiting for the bus and riding the bus. How can we make improvements in any of those areas? There's something that we've been working for. So as you go through and we hear the types of information, the different analysis we're doing, we are really, really heavily leaning on public engagement. Bert's gonna speak to that in just a moment, but you know, metrics and data can only take us so far. It's people who use the service daily, the way that stops things like that, who have that inside information you can provide it, it's invaluable. So please do take advantage of the opportunity to speak with us. Send us emails, ask questions at the end of this presentation.

As you saw in the schedule, we completed the first phase of public engagement while the engineers and designers were doing the planning work. And in this sense, when we say planning, we mean reviewing the city's adopted plans and current projects, completing site visits to see existing conditions firsthand, reviewing information with various city departments, working with stakeholders, such as GoTriangle, and working with the community to understand their lived experience in these areas. The first phase of public engagement occurred during the spring and summer of 2021 as part of a robust public engagement plan. And as Sean mentioned, the city's equitable community engagement blueprint served as the framework for our engagement methods and procedures to ensure that historically underrepresented communities were made aware of and encouraged to participate in the planning and the policy, and the decision-making for this project. Phase One engagement activities targeted outreach to transit dependent communities that included the establishment of an engagement committee and partnership with the community partners identified by the city of Durham's neighborhood improvement services department; the development and distribution of outreach and promotional materials in both traditional and digital forms. So we did have a website and also had a social media presence and we used these to inform the public about the five projects and these materials were available in both English and Spanish. Conducting smaller scale public meetings and focus group sessions for each of the five projects were used to collect input on the access to transit, the transit service itself, and stop branding and recommended improvement areas. The development and deployment of an intercept survey - so we used a survey with people as they were getting on or getting off of the bus, and an online survey tool collected information in both English and Spanish. We conducted outreach at pop-up meetings and at community events and conducted stakeholder meetings and documented all of the feedback that we collected. You can see here some of the methods that we used to collect the data included the online survey, an in-person and written survey, a bus driver survey, walking focus group interviews and community conversations.

These types of survey responses received online, or in-person from bus riders and at community events have helped us to understand community needs and priorities. And the public comment today will help focus the design efforts as we move into 2022, it's already helped the city select over 12 miles of project corridors, which we're going to talk about a little later in the presentation, but whenever you do a survey or collect information, it's important to know who's responding. So the in-person engagement and bus stop intercept surveys that the community partners have been doing have really helped us to hear from the communities who we wanted to. We needed to make sure that they had a seat at the table and in a voice and providing some of the input into the better bus project midway through the survey we checked to compare who was responding with the demographic makeup of the bus riders and communities along the Fayetteville and hallway. You can see here some of the methods that we used to collect the data included the online survey or the in-person and written survey, a bus driver survey and walking focus group interviews and community conversations.

The community conversation approach, that favors more, smaller meetings versus fewer, large public meetings. This approach allowed the engagement specialists the opportunity to connect with members of the community on a one-on-one basis. So this is a little bit more informal in nature and allows conversations that that put most citizens and stakeholders at ease with the casual nature. During these conversations we get a sense of community goals, aspirations, and needs and we collect valuable qualitative data. This approach was made possible through the efforts of the City's Community Partners. So during the first round of engagement uh community partners that were selected by the City included Amia, which focused on the Spanish-speaking and latinx communities; The Bragtown Community Association, which focused on the Bragtown neighborhood; the Fayetteville Street Corridor Fellows and BeConnected Durham which focused on Fayetteville Street between Lakewood Avenue and Riddle Road, and the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, inc, which focused on the Holloway Street corridor. One of the early events organized by the Bragtown Community Association was the Bragtown bus tour conducted last year. A presentation to the Bragtown Community Association in April of 2021 eventually led to the community-initiated bus tour in June. The tour allowed staff, consultants, also included some elected officials, allowed the opportunity to hear directly from the community members about the challenges that they faced What we found was that prior to the community partner involvement and the engagement team outreach at individual bus stops, the makeup of the survey respondents were trending heavily towards white Caucasian women with incomes over a hundred thousand dollars. After our focus efforts with the help of the community partners going directly to community events and going directly to heavily use bus stops, the survey results began to trend more inline with support or, and bus stop location demographics. As a comparison, our demographic results are similar to the results for respondents of other ongoing recent planning and transit survey efforts. And this is because of the high touch in-person community-based engagement we were able to do during the warmer months when we could see that outside.

So we have some pretty good aspirational ideas of what we would like to see at a number of places. So certainly sidewalks provide separation from the road for pedestrians, curving gutter as appropriate. So it puts it somewhere flooded. It flooded out at a station itself, having space to wait for your bus on the inside. And if you want him to sit bench under the shelter or outside. And then I think the image on the far right is one that a lot of people recognize important is having safer pedestrian crossing this particular location outside of an intersection, but it's still utilizing signals and others to provide a safe crossing. But again, these are the places where a transit rider could be considered the most vulnerable getting to a bus stop. So again, want to make it safe and easy. So you look at every single route, every single stop and the system, and look the at over 12 miles of corridor improvements.

And you'll see in a slide or two, the view space geographically throughout the city, as Bert mentioned earlier, we had some questions to the public about what were most important aspects for prioritizing improvements, brought seven different factors, Russ ridership, the equity and the essential destinations are flagged as the ones most important for public and working with other staff, the city and other agencies, we've narrowed that down, that larger list, a five. So again, most use equity youth, seniors, persons with disabilities stop serving that safety where there many are bike collisions or pedestrian exits today, and then connection. How can we fill in gaps of sidewalks or make a more direct path? So that's sort of how we ended up with this. Each one of those maps represents a unique analysis for that particular faster. And when combined together we're able to create four different clusters.

And within the clusters, there could be just a small individual intersection improvement or stretches of length depending on what the locations are. So right now our current draft recommendation list has 30 different locations. I am not going to be able to speak to all of those right this moment, but in the question and answer, period, if you have a questions about the particular one, you can go into a little bit more detail about the extent. So what are, what, what would be a sample project that we're kind of, you know, let people understand what we're talking about from access improvement standpoint and the Rainer street sidewalk project is a very good example on this graphic. You'll see the red or solid red is new sidewalk. That's going to be installed along Rainer street to my own backyard and all the way out to harvest this year, I'm creating both a safer environment for individuals to walk us through the whole place for them to be also more direct connection and visual active walking along the edge of the roadway.

And, and then this is the type of thing that's going to allow. Some of the well in Zoe's neighborhood have better connections to mind bowls are. And I think it's really great about this design and one of the things that we're bringing into all of the access work, we do that there's a understanding that has to be on to make sure that we have curb ramps and other access points that are accessible for individuals of all mobility or other the control impairments. And so the city and NCDC are taking a really good approach to ensuring that there are accessible facilities along this project. And again, similar to what we'll be doing as we move forward on ours. We can, sorry. I can speak a little bit more about the range of project and QA as well. Okay. So that was the large first piece that you get to your bus stop, right?

And we've identified places where we think we can improve people's access to transit. And now what about the staff itself? So, you know, those of you who have waited at a, a stock for may have had some very different experiences, depending on where you work, you may have been in unfortunately, a location that is sort of in a ditch. You look on the far left that support to sidewalk access, not very inviting override. The center image is from the village trend center, which these more seating and more shelter, very compassionate to find at this point. And then again, on the far right, you can see that sometimes the bus stop is really just what we might call a flag. Literally just the sign out there showing that a bus is coming. So, you know, these are, these are uninviting possibly for different reasons. And then there's oppor opportunities to make improvements.

Again, drawing upon from the recent improvements to the city of germs are done. So we would be looking at applying context-sensitive improvements as the stock. Not every single stock will be able to get a shelter, mostly that's due to just space constraints, but we would like to provide shelter lighting, say feeding, trash, recycling, things like that. And we've got different ability depending on how busy a stop is and or how much space is available. So we want to have a shelter at every station. That's the goal. We start off, but that's not necessarily going to always be the design.

Okay. So you've gotten to your station, you've waited at your station. Now, what can we do to help you get to your destination or convenient, whether it be fast or reliable way. This is really looking at some street design improvements, or even some changes to traffic signal timing. So how much green does a particular movement get versus the other things of that nature? Here's a map that shows a little bit about, I know, downtown and kind of the south Southeast, the red area is where the most delay is occurring. And green would be where there's very low delay. So what we are doing, particularly on this sort of analysis, and then for the entire route, or to access to transit and tried to find where are those red locations are? Where are those orange locations that are in between two green stretches? We could just get in and make a quick little fix, would be able to, you know, have a very reliable stretch of, of Iowa John Marshall.

That was sort of what we're looking at, where those hotspots, so we can go in and make some improvements. And the bus speed reliability. A lot of the improvements that we were looking at are not necessarily easily identify as a bus improvements for a lot of people because they just don't maybe understand sort of the nuance of, of something. So I want to doctor a couple of potential ideas, just so you can see how a minor design change can be impactful to the speed and the reliability whose first image I'm showing you is two ideas. One is called a boring old stock. And so you look at this with no notice. If the sidewalk comes out all the way to meet the travel, basically the sidewalk is approximately where the parking is, and that allows a bus to just pull up to the curb, open the door load and unload it.

Doesn't have to pull off to the side and then try to pull back into traffic. That's a very easy way to do save a couple seconds here or there also one of the things that you look on the left-hand manage, another idea would be if you take that same bowl concept, both boarding bolts, stop concept. And instead of having it on, what's called the near side of the intersection, move it to the far side, which would be after you go through the stop sign or after you go through traffic, the benefit of that is you try to have a bus get through a traffic signal and then stop afterwards. There's nothing quite as frustrating as having a bus stop load on mode. You get on, you're ready to go. And then there's a red light. So, you know, little things that you can do picks up little time here, or there does start to make a difference, allows you to be more reliable, another concept.

Cause we know that there's a lot of locations within the city where there's bicycle that would be accompanying. Some of the transit corridors is figuring out a way to have a shared cycle track stop. I do want to go in and point out that this is a street car. We are not advocating for street cars, but this shows the type of design, which basically takes a bike lane and brings it up onto curb level where pedestrians have walks and walk into kind of a mixing zone and then allows them to go back down the street level after they passed in the station. Real benefit of this is the bikes are no longer in conflict and they're not trying to make passes in the, in the bus. Driver's blind spots. That's really where a lot of transit and bicycle collisions occur in that blind spot. Excuse me, then one of the more doable for things that can occur is something called transit signal priority, which looks at giving extra green time.

If you go to transit vehicles and then even if you take that, the next level is this concept of transit signal progression, where you try to set up intersections, traffic signals in a manner that it's easy for the bus to flow from one to the other. Now that timing that it takes the bus to get between intersection a, B and C maybe, and is likely to be different and maybe even slower than the general purpose travel today. So there, you know, there's some trade-offs of doing something like that, but again, desire traffic to move with the bus. You can have a very reliable bus system, know exactly how long it takes to go basically program.

So I've talked about a number of individual concepts that we're looking at and hotspot programs and digital projects at the whole system wide level. And that was great. And that has set us up for some specific projects as part of a better bus project. And I think what's really exciting. This has created a framework for future projects to come online, to do what we call transit corridors or transit corridors. And this is really taking these bus concepts, these access to transit concept, stock amenity improvements, focusing them on geographic. So part of better bus project, we're looking at two corridors that are really emphasis versus Holloway, which goes from downtown out to 70 with village transit center, Shannon BTC on this graphic being the second most used stop in the system, a very key anchor point of that, or looking at improvements, there's been sort of it's so sub project within hallway and then core up goes from downtown to the south and down in terminating that riddle.

Sure. So I think as most people know, in 2011, there was a referendum in Durham county for a half cent sales tax to fund transit improvements. And so that's the largest source of funding. About 90% of the funding for the Durham county transit plan is coming from that half cent sales tax. So what we have been doing with the better bus project while the transit plan is in development, we don't want to wait on the improvements that we know our community needs. So we were able to secure funding awards from some of that Durham county transit plan funding to advance these projects because we, that these improvements are urgently needed in our community. And we know that there are, there are a lot more great improvements coming over the next 20 years. And the Durham county transit plan will guide all of those investments over the next 20 years. But we wanted to make sure that we got to work as soon as possible on improvements that we could deliver quickly in our community.

It makes sense. Another question coming in, what efforts are being made to expand the community partners involved in this important work I'll start off. And then Sean, I'll hand to you because I know this is something you're very passionate about. So we use the community partners. We relied on them extensively during the phase one of engagement, and I'm excited to work with the new community partners that the city has just identified. It's, it's really helpful. Again, for us, I can make the information we can put together all the graphics. I can translate the engineering, ease into a regular English for people, but it helps me to have people give me feedback directly. What's going to resonate in their community. How, how is that information going to be received? What type of questions to do you know that your neighborhood is going to have? So working with community partners, again, we're going to start up our monthly meetings to review the material that we're going to be taking out and to review the draft recommendations on. And I'll take information back to the engineering team. If we have questions about technical components there and how things work, or if we think there's a little bit more education that needs, that needs to occur on either side of the equation. Sean, I don't know if you want to talk about community partners and kind of your ongoing relationship.

Sure. You know, as I just talked about, we're looking at a plan for transit investments over the next 20 years, the city has a 10 year capital improvement program. What we want to do with the community partner program is really build lasting relationships with, you know, trusted members in communities across Durham, so that as we move forward with projects, you know, whether it's next 20 years and the transit plan, or the next 10 years in the city's capital improvement plan, we know who the right people are to talk to. We know how to connect with those communities that have been historically excluded from these decision-making processes. So we really want this to be an ongoing conversation and really, really build the capacity of these organizations to help us reach the folks across our community, who haven't been able to participate in government and specifically transportation decision-making processes in the past.

Thanks, Sean. I'm also reminded too traditional engagement efforts really focus on that nine to five. And I think what we've learned with people working from home, people who have alternate alternative schedules, most of our writers don't have that type of schedule. And so they're looking for more services and frequency at different times, and they're available at different times of day for us to be able to ask them questions. So we've made an effort to go during off hours to hit shift schedules. If they're a shift worker, and then we've also made an effort to go out on weekends, like you saw the chapel hill road park just and to community events. So again, they're going where the people are to ask the questions. I have another question coming in. How have concerns from transit writers evolved in recent years, I'll start us off and then I'll take the Sean.

You might have a little bit more history than I do on this particular project. A lot of the, a lot of the comments we received and then going back through previous plans are questions about ongoing maintenance questions about sidewalk gaps and questions about cleaning things, which I think is great. It was just posted in the chat. We were invited to participate in transit equity day on February 4th by helping to clean up bus stops along Fayetteville on Holloway street. And then there's actually a sign up on action network.org. If you look at transit equity day bus stop cleanup, thank you for that comment. That does tie into a lot of what the here and a lot of the comments that we hear from folks, they want bus stops freed up. They want garbage is emptied more often, and they want things to function properly, broken lights, real time signage. That's not working, obviously things that help you get to work or school or wherever you're going on time. Sean, I don't know if you had any more background on that one, how concerns involved.

Yeah, I would just add, you know, as we've seen through the pandemic, you know, our writers have non-traditional schedules. So making sure that our service starts early in the morning, early enough in the morning so that folks can get to work, that our service runs late enough at night so that folks can get home. And that our facility support that, that we have appropriate lighting at all of our bus stops so that our customers are safe and comfortable and waiting. And so we really need to use kind of that input to help us with the engagement, but then also to help us design services and facilities to meet our community's needs.

Excellent. Another question coming in, please explain how the transit emphasis corridors were determined, what investments will be made in these corridors and why was route nine that's Dearborn drive, not designated as a corridor or combined with the route four Roxborough corridor? I guess my question too, as well as you guys look for your answer of how the transit emphasis for doors were determined. Talk a little bit about how this project, your intention is for it to become a program as we move on Evian. Do you want to start out with that one?

Sure. I'll start out and just saying that we've what we've learned from this engagement. Then the plan is said we have a lot more work to do, and the tools that have been developed with the access to transit and the bus speed and reliability studies have been applied are being applied to the transit corridor quarters. It's this corridors and it's helping us to, you know, make decisions for future locations to improve those services and improve, improve the reliability of the, on those routes as well. So if we haven't gotten to that corridor, the one that was just mentioned route nine, we, you know, there's, we're still in planning stage and started to look at that the feasibility to apply the same tools that we have learned in the project thus far to those locations.

I'll just add that, you know, we've made a, a big investment in our frequent transit corridors. So right now we have frequent transit on every 15 minutes on Holloway and Fayetteville going out east main street, going out west main street and then down chapel hill road to south square. W what we're now that we have 15 minutes service, we're looking at how do we get to 15 minutes or better in those corridors and then which corridors are next. And, you know, as we look north from downtown, the route nine and route four corridor, the, that those, that pair of routes is a really strong candidate to be the next 15 minute service. And we're working through the Durham county transit plan to try to secure the funding, to offer 15 minutes service. And then as we offer that 15 minute service, we wanna pair all of our frequent corridors with the high quality infrastructure like we've been talking about today.

Thanks, Tonya, almost answers. The next question I was going to ask here, coming in, in the chat, is it within the scope of this project to consider increasing frequency or adjusting routes anywhere in the system?

It's not, but we want to hear where the foot, where folks think that additional service would be the most beneficial for, for them, for their neighbors, for their coworkers. So, you know, as, as we move through this process, we want to hear that kind of input about both services and infrastructure, because we're going to be developing new service plans. We're developing a new bus plan for Durham coming out of the Durham county transit plan process. So that kind of input will be really valuable to us as we move into those planning processes.

Thanks. We have a compliment coming in on the line. I'm going to say that's rare to public meetings. So I'm going to take a moment and just appreciate it. And I'll just read it out to everybody. You all are getting it right, because you're showing that you are actively listening and then you take action. We get frequent follow-ups from Evian Patterson. And if, whenever we call on Sean, you get to talk to Sean within a short period of time. We need to know you're going to be consistent with that right now on the Fayetteville street corridor, there are more trash cans, although we would love them to look better and not have yellow trash bags hanging out of them and, and a bus that's consistently on time, every 15 minutes for a resident to rely on transit, to get to work to John, John and Evian let's work on the yellow trash bag of question coming in. This might go to Jamie. What are the types of tools that you use to make the buses beyond time better?

Hi, I'm Jamie Henson. I'm a part of the scene reliability team. And so there are a variety of tools that we can use to help make the buses show up on time and actually help improve the speed. The most basic thing is to help get the signal timing, right, and make sure that the signal timing works with the buses in particular, when buses are making movements, Greg actually talked through a few of those showing things like the bus bowl bouts as well. So really taking a hard look and being very thoughtful about what are things that make the buses go fast to things like getting the buses on the far side of the stops on the far side, making sure that the stop is actually necessary trying to limit the movements and turns of buses while providing access. So those are the main sorts of tools that we use to make sure that the buses move quickly through the system.

So we have budget approval through June of 2022 for fair free service on both our coder and bus or fixed route buses and our access demand response, a system that serves primarily people with disabilities. So we're working through the budget development process right now, but we're hopeful that we'll be able to identify the resources to continue this into the 2023.

Another question coming in this one seems to be a little bit more site-specific. How does this plan work with what NC central is doing on campus? Rachel, are you available? So I am Rachael dealer miles with WSP, and I'm focusing on the St. Middle street corridor. So NC central is a key institution along the corridor. It's a location where there's a lot of pedestrian activity. There's also numerous bus stops that are part of the study. That's part of our existing condition work. But again, we're hit head on during the presentation, we made sure that we reviewed their campus master plan, which was just completed in November of 2020. So in that master plan, it was able to provide us the project team with a really good understanding of how the campus may grow over the next 30 years. And also give us an understanding of the campus priorities for bicycle and circulation, along with an understanding of any transit or rugby projects that they have in mind. And so we've already been coordinating with NP central leadership. I've led key stakeholder, and we'll continue that coordination as we move into the design phase. And as we begin developing our recommendations.

Thanks Rachel. Another question. I know you mentioned a timeline, but when did you say we're going, you're going to build the things that you showed tonight in the list of improvements.

Some of the types of projects like the, a few jumps signal at NC 55 and Odyssey, we're able to implement those types of bus speed and reliability improvements right away. We're looking at other types of improvements, whether it's changing, how often the, the green light comes up at a traffic signal to help us, we can make some of those changes more quickly. Some of the big infrastructure changes looking at building sidewalks or making sure that there's a concrete pad and a curb ramp at the bus stop. Those are going to take additional additional time. We're going to have to go through an extensive design process over the next year, and look at construction two to three years from now, but we're trying to identify as many of the small improvements, whether that's, you know, the marketing of a crosswalk or changing the timing of a traffic signal and front load as much of that work as we can, so that we continue to make improvements. As we look at the larger infrastructure projects over the next two to three years,

And I'll, I'll add, we're also working with our partners at go triangle to identify locations that can be improved. We're working to improve the amenities like bus shelters and signage in, in lighting. So that's those plans in operations are, you know, occurring at a sooner pace than waiting for the final plan. We're trying to get those in within the next couple of years.

Thanks. Next question. We have, I'm guessing we can never be sure what will result when we make changes. So how will we measure and report the results over time so that we make sure that we benefit the most writers, not just those who might be the most vocal, I'll start out a little bit, and then I'll pitch to my colleagues at the city of Durham. So one of the really important things that we need to do is collect information from people, and that's why we ask questions and we do surveys. And then as part of those surveys, we ask questions, the demographic kind of questions like age, sex, race, et cetera, because we can then compare that information to the profile of the riders to see if they're matching up. So like the example I used when we pulled the demographic information, kind of midway through the survey, and we noticed it's a bunch of white ladies who make a lot of money answering the survey that wasn't matching up with the demographics of all of the writers. So we could focus our efforts to make sure this wasn't about who was being the most vocal. And at least that's within the confines of this particular project, Shauna MB. And I don't know if you want to follow up on this consider.

So I'll say, you know, we started, we identified sharing information on the performance of our system as a key priority. Two years ago, we developed an agreement with a team of university researchers that will help us to develop performance measures that can inform how we operate and maintain our services. But also that really will identify opportunities for us to improve things like on-time performance. And so we've developed a set of performance measures, and we're now at the point where we're using them to help us identify weaknesses in our system, identify areas for improvement. But the next step in that process for us is to start sharing that performance information with our community. We want to hear from you does this, you know, this on-time performance number, does this reflect your experience? And if not, what are we missing and how do we improve our measures to capture the information that's really critical for us to not become a high performing system?

Hey, looks like the questions are kind of winding down here. I'll just give a second. If anybody who's watching the feed still wants to ask a little bit more in detail about anything we've covered tonight. You can go ahead and put your final questions and after this project is finished, how do I know when the next one is going to start? I'd like to stay involved to see when my best route might get improvement. So part of that, you can sign up on the city's website on the better bus project page, the city of Durham, to get more information, information will be pushed out by the city of Durham, either through that web page or directly to you. If you sign up with your email to get more information, I think, I think those are final questions. So again, please, everybody, I encourage you to take a look at the, at the website at the project website and to make comments it's on this presentation and anything you see, and I want you to stay posted just to be aware of any of the community conversations that will happen in your neighborhoods route February one big, long question or comments.

I mean, your presentation touches upon several concerns, such as sidewalk gaps and bus fall out. I'd like for the committee to consider longer bus pull outs for multiple buses when possible areas such as the hillside high school or the bus stop in front of NCQ communication building are areas where we have high transit boarding. And off-boarding, I'd like for you all to consider improvements and stop and incorporate neighborhood characteristics and or colors, et cetera. That's a great idea. So what this respondent is actually referring to something that we call placemaking. So can you use a bus staff as a way to identify a particular neighborhood? Can it become a place going to become more than the, the place I go just to stop and wait for the bus? Is it something that has a lot more meaning in my neighborhood? So they've even made some recommendations about colors and characteristics that you might use in and around TCU. I think those are great ideas. I'm actually gonna steal this and put those in the recommendations. Thank you. Thank you. Whoever made them very lazy and very thoughtful comments. All right. I think that's our last comment. I appreciate everyone's time. Please stay safe. And our weather event, which is supposed to start tomorrow again, a better bus project, email address that we shared with you. Please continue to send us comments and recommendations and any questions that you have about anything you saw or heard tonight. Thanks.

If you'd like to ask a question during the Q and a, you want to leave a comment after this event is over. You can send an email to better bus meeting@publicinput.com instructions to view a recording of this event, or the presentation itself will be available on the city's website. Additionally, a version of this presentation will be going out into communities throughout February for in-person events. These locations will be listed on the city's website information about how to contact us after this event is over, will be repeated at the close of this presentation in case you didn't right now, I'll now briefly hand over to my colleague, Ana Santiago in three Oaks engineering. It's a premium translate and but I had in vehicle real electronica, a better book meeting at public input. . I will hand it over to Greg now.

Thank you and welcome everybody again to the better best project, whether or not I'm Greg Sauer and the project manager with WSP there consultant firms that is working on this project and got a number of other staff members here or from WSP and partner firms to answer any specific questions. When we get to the end of this presentation, I'm going to kind of give you a walkthrough of the overall project and where we are. Okay. So generally, when we think about improvements of this sort of nature, we think of in three kind of distinct steps, the first is the planning and that's really where we are right now. And we are presenting to you this phase one engagements, the public here, the thoughts here, the ideas here's sort of where we've been and how we're going forward. We're gonna take our input that we receive along with review by various agencies in the CVOT triangle are participants in this as well, along with go Durham and city of Durham, and then ultimately going to construction themselves.

One of the things that we've really been focusing on with this project is developing designs that are easily implementable. And I say easy, but as easy as they can get, and the idea being, we want to be able to put out as many projects as possible. So we're going to see some future slides are going to be spreading projects around the city, as well as in a couple of locations, really focusing then, okay. So at its core, the better bus project further breaks down into three pieces. And some of this might be a little bit jargony, so we can kind of talk about simple words. The best access is basically how do you get from your house to the bus stop, or how do you get from your place of work? The books of worship in place of recreation, et cetera, you know, and a lot of that for most people is walking along sidewalks, crosswalks, things that might be, you know, important to have programs for people with mobility, impairments, et cetera, then there's the bus stop itself.

We were actually waiting for your bus, how comfortable you are, are you, do you feel safe? Is there enough light? What other amenities, shelters, or benches, you know, improvements that would make a more comfortable stop. And then the bus service itself, we're looking at where there may be delays on the service and trying to think about engineering ideas that would allow maybe a hot spot, if you will get solved and sort of generally provide better service for the buses. And I think one of the speed, you also hear me talk about bus feeding reliability. And I do want to clarify that, you know, speed is definitely important. We want the bus to be able to be moving as quickly as possible, but reliability is, is maybe underrated in a how transit works. And I always think about it as somebody who needs to make sure they get to a job are on time knowing that a bus ride takes 40 minutes and that it will always be there on time and take 40 minutes is much more valuable than a bus drive that might take 35 minutes, one day and 45 minutes the other day.

So we did have a website and also had a social media presence, and we use these to inform the public about the five projects and these materials were available in both English and Spanish, conducting smaller scale public meetings and focus group sessions for each of the five projects were used to collect input on the access to transit the transit services itself and stop branding and recommended improvement areas, the development and deployment of an intercept survey. So we, we use the survey with people as they were getting on or getting off of the bus and an online survey tool collected information in both English and Spanish. We conducted outreach at pop-up meetings and community events and conducted stakeholder meetings and documented all of the feedback that we collected. You can see here. Some of the methods that we use to collect the data included the online survey on the in-person and written survey, a bus driver survey and walking focus, group interviews and community conversations, muni conversation, approach that favors more smaller meetings versus you or large public meetings.

This approach allowed the engagement specialists, the opportunity to connect with members of the community on a one-on-one basis. So this is a little bit more informal in nature and allows conversations that put most citizens and stakeholders at ease with the casual nature. During this conversation, we get a sense of community goals, aspirations, and needs, and we collect valuable qualitative data. This approach was made possible through the efforts of the city's community partners. So during the first round of engagement community partners that were selected by the city included AMEA, which focused on Spanish speaking and Latin X communities, the Braggtown community association, which focused on the Braggtown neighborhoods to stay at bell street corridor fellows and be connected Durham, which focused on Fayetteville street between Lakewood avenue and riddle road and the Durham committee on the affairs of black people, Inc, which focused on the Holloway street corridor.

One of the early events organized by the Braggtown community association with the Brad towns bus tour conducted last year, a presentation to the Braggtown community association in April of 2021, eventually led to the community initiated bus tour in June, the tour allowed of staff consultants also included some elected officials allowed the opportunity to hear directly from the community members about the challenges that they faced getting to and using the go Durham bus system. Last summer was the big push to collect what we call a quantitative data. So the number side, we went out into communities around Durham, together with community partners and local youth groups, my colleagues and I conducted tabling events and collected responses to a survey at locations near the Welland village neighborhood. And the village shopping center last will be some markets. The third Friday live from Fayetteville and duke hospital, as examples and total, we had over 350 responses to the survey.

And on the survey, we asked questions about bus riders, experiences getting to, and from their bus staff, the conditions at their individual bus stops and what their bus ride was like. We also asked about the community preferences on how and where to prioritize improvements. The results showed consistent opinions in general. Most writers wanted us to make improvements like adding or replacing sidewalks or filling in the missing pieces of sidewalks called sidewalk gaps or adding or repainting crosswalks. So it felt safer crossing streets. And in general, there were a lot of comments about just cleaning up and maintenance around bus stops themselves. When we asked where we should focus in on selecting areas that needed improvement, the results were a little bit more spread out, but there was a clear preference to look at the bus routes and bus stops that have the highest number of riders and bus stops that serve lower wealth neighborhoods or communities to learn in total.

And so what's nice about these particular corridors is we were looking at those bus fee, reliability improvements, access to transit, et cetera, along the entire corridor. We think we can get some great improvements with spot projects, but if we have a linkage of a number of projects, all in a row, you could start to finish east the west, walk along the hallway, have safe crossing sidewalks and all the other amenities like that. That would be incredible. So these two transit corridor projects are going to set up other corridors within the county. And again, the hope is that we really created a framework where, and Sean said, we can start to get out there, do 75 bus stop improvements a year. You know, these hourly miles improvements, depending on what you're putting in sidewalk. So very exciting to, to have these focus. And I think maybe the one or one of the differences between this project and maybe prior planning exercises that people will participate in is there is dedicated money to actually go ahead and build this, not just as the planning work of this, but the construction of those, the hallway and the Fayetteville transit quarters, and that is tied to the county tax plan.

So it's really exciting that there is an ability to take what we're, we're planning and go out. So if I'm going to let Burke close out,

So as we're putting it all together, what, like what happens next? Or you're probably wondering, like, what's the next step on our way to actually seeing these improvements on the ground. You might have seen us out walking along the corridors during November and December, we'd been out along Holloway and say a bill, collecting more information and watching how the buses operate in real time. I'm watching how people use the street in real time and comparing us with the information that we already had. And this is, again, this was a follow-up to engagement that we had done in the spring and the summer in 2021. But what we need to do now is, is compare some of the options compared to the information that we've collected again, back with the community. So our next step will include going out to the community to verify what we've seen and what we've heard previously. And we'll be sharing draft recommendations later this spring, and then working with the community and our stakeholders to get a final set of recommendations during the summer of 2022.

If you, again, like to leave us a comment on your ideas or anything you saw or heard tonight, and you can do that now, or if you are watching a recording of this event, you can do it later as well. Just send an email to better bus meeting@publicinput.com. I also encourage you to visit our website and you can see that listed on the screen here. The website will be updated to include instructions on how to access this recording. Or the presentation also provides you a way to sign up, to hear about events happening in your neighborhood. And those upcoming events will include a version of this material that you saw tonight in both English and Spanish. And these will be scheduled throughout Durham during February of this year. So during next month, we appreciate your time this evening, and we'd like to open up for questions.

Now we have members of the transportation department staff and the consultant team available to answer your questions. You can access the chat now to send a question, or you can call the number that was shared at the start of this presentation. I'll repeat that 9 1 9 8 9 9 4 9 0 6 and enter the meeting code 3, 4 8, 3, and listen to instructions to join the secret to we can stop the share. And then the team that's available to answer any of the questions. I'll start off. We had a question come in. I understand you explained there's dedicated funding for these type of projects. Is that part of the transit plan or how is this different from the county transit plan? Do they work together or are they unrelated? Shawn, do you want to start, start us off?

I'll just add on to that. You know, we're not waiting to implement this type of improvements. We've already last year installed a what let's call it a queue jump signal at NC 55 and Odyssey. And what it does is the bus pulls up to the intersection to serve the stop passengers can get on and off. And what typically happens is when the light turns green, all of the other vehicles on the road go first, we have to wait for all of those vehicles to clear the intersection before the bus can go. What the queue jump does is it gives a special green light that only the bus can use. So that way the bus gets to pull out into the intersection while all the other vehicles headed in that same direction, still have that red light. And so rather than the bus waiting for all the other vehicles to go and going last, the bus gets to go first. And that, that queue jump is in service right now at NC 55 and Odyssey.

Thank you. Another question coming in, how does these types of improvements, support local vision, zero goals. Jason, do you want to talk about that? And maybe it might help some of our viewers, if you define what vision zero is.

Sure. Yeah. Jason Ray is with auto planning and vision. Zero is, is a policy approach that different cities across the United States and even different parts of the world are using to think about safety in their cities, particularly leave for people walking and biking. And the goal is to have zero fatalities or serious injuries on your street network. And so the way that this project helps with that is when we think about transit improvements. And we think about access to transit. Lot of people are everybody really who's riding the bus system is a pedestrian. At some point, during that trip, either they're walking to the bus or when they get to the destination, they're walking to a destination for that final piece of it. And so reducing, reducing the chance of injuries to those people, I think is, is how this project really fits into that. And one of the ways we did that for the access to transit work, if you remember Burt and Greg were talking earlier about some of the key factors that we use in determining priority improvements and one of those key factors of safety. And so we looked at the number and severity of pedestrian bicycle and car crashes within a quarter mile of each of the bus stops in Durham and let that be a factor in how we selected some projects. And, and then we know that certain types of improvements like sidewalks and crosswalks ultimately reduce those chances of injury.

I think you're

On mute. There we go. Thank you so much. Another question coming in, what number of folks in Durham on average use the go Durham bus system every day or every week,

I'll take that long. So you, prior to the pandemic, we were seeing about 20,000 riders per day on our go Durham services. You know, we know that there've been some really significant impacts to the pandemic. And in many cases, transit systems around the country went down to 10% or less of their traditional ridership as a result in the early days of the pandemic, that didn't happen as much in Durham. We fell to about half of our traditional ridership early on. We had to adjust some service levels because of staff availability. And we've continued to do that, but we're right now around 14 thousands, or a little over 70% of our pre pandemic and we're working to grow and build back that ridership in and exceed our pre pandemic, that ridership pelvis,

Following up on that, I noticed that the buses are free right now. How much longer are you going to be doing that?