This is Vice Chair Cardella. I'm filling in tonight for Chair Will Coxen, and I would like to formally call this meeting to order. Welcome to city staff, transportation commissioners, and the public to the June 18th Transportation Commission meeting. Meetings are being
held in person, televised on Cox Cable Channel 12, Channel 11, and streamed online at scottsdaleaz.gov for the public to listen and view the meeting in progress. I'd like to ask for a roll call this evening, Ms. Conclude, to begin the the meeting.
>> Thank you. Chair Wilcoxen is absent. Vice Chair Cardello. >> Here. >> Thank you. Commissioner Marmon. >> Here. >> Thank you. Commissioner Pinkowitz is absent. Commissioner Coffield. He's hoping to join us remote, but we will
keep checking back with him. Commissioner Davis. >> Here. >> Thank you. Commissioner Baker. >> Here. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Spoken comment is being accepted for agendaized and non-agendaized items. The request to speak forms must be submitted no later
than 90 minutes prior to the start of the meeting. Ms. Conclude, do we have any spoken comments? >> Vice Chair Cardello, we do not. >> Thank you. And written comments are being accepted for agendaized and non-agendaized items and should be submitted electronically at least 90
minutes before the start of the meeting. These comments are also emailed to the Transportation Commission and posted online. Ms. Conclude, do we have any written comments? >> Vice Chair Cardello, we do not. >> Thank you. Okay, so the first agenda item is approval of meeting
minutes from the May 21st Transportation Commission meeting. Commissioners, does anyone have any comments or updates? >> I'm sorry. Could you repeat? >> I was just asking the commissioners if they had any comments or updates. >> the minutes of our last meeting. >> Okay, thank you.
>> And I second. >> Commissioner Marmon, and thank you, Commissioner Baker. Um all in favor of approving the meet- meeting minutes from the May 21st meeting, say I. >> Oh, actually >> Oh, sorry. Um actually earlier uh
Chair uh Wilcoxen sent me some corrections. I think the roll call names there were some uh errors there that I'll correct, so I believe that was the only um
changes to make unless anyone sees anything else. >> Oh, yeah, yeah. >> Okay. So, do you amend your motion to approve with the changes submitted by >> Oops. Yes. >> Commissioner Willcoxson? Thank you. And
Mr. Davis? I'm sorry, Mr. Baker, do you second your motion? >> I'll amend my second. >> Thank you. Now, all in favor of approving the minutes with the mentioned changes, say I. >> I.
>> Any opposed? So, that passes 4 to 0. Okay, item number two. We have Valley Metro bus network redesign. This is a general overview of the recent BNR analysis and outreach conclusions with
Mr. Aaron Xavier, who is a service planner manager from Valley Metro. Mr. Xavier, welcome. >> Is this my correct perch here? Excellent. Good evening, everybody. Vice Chair, commission members, thank you for having
me here today. I haven't been here in a a couple years now, so glad to be back addressing the the group here. Um so, as you said, uh Aaron Xavier, service planning and GIS manager at Valley Metro, which is the regional transportation public transportation authority uh for the region. Uh and I'd
like to talk a little bit today about a study that we're doing, which is called the bus network redesign, um more formally known as a comprehensive operational analysis. So, first I'll give a little bit of background on what a bus network redesign or BNR, as I may
refer to it, uh is, and talk about our progress thus far. Some of the key findings that I think relate overall to the region as well as to Scottsdale specifically, uh related to things like our survey, which we got 4,600 uh responses on uh from the
region, as well as an in-depth service analysis overall. Uh as well as how this connects to 479, which as many of you may know is the recent uh kind of reiteration of our sales tax for uh transportation funding. And then I'll talk about next steps for
our study. Uh so overall, what a bus network redesign is is a kind of look at the overall travel patterns of the region. So, I think we have a lot of data as a transit agency on the riders, you know, where they're getting on, where they're coming off, where uh you know, the most highest-use routes are, where the
hotspots of ridership are, how our bus bus routes are performing and whatnot, but we also like to look at the broader travel demand market and say, "How are we we really serving this uh new travel uh demand of the region?" As you know, COVID changed a lot of how people get around, to how they live, how
they work, where they live even. Um but the overall transit network hasn't changed quite as uh quickly, so we wanted to really take a hard look at how well our service maps onto the travel demand of the region. And so this is a holistic review of the
service uh effectiveness and efficiency. Typically, we might do a study in a specific city or a specific corridor on or on a specific mode, but this is really all-inclusive to make sure that the holistic offering to the public uh makes sense from that perspective of
what we understand and be the travel patterns of folks uh in the region. And so, as you can see in the timeline uh below, we kicked this off in last spring uh over the last summer uh summer 25 did an existing conditions analysis. Uh so, that was a really deep dive into
the performance of our routes uh both from a rider perspective, how much demand do we have, as well as how we're performing as an operator. We did a public engagement phase uh one last fall. Uh and as I said, we did a survey that got about 4,600 responses.
So, more uh responses than I think we had bargained for, which is always great news. Um as well as obviously open houses uh virtual and in person and a lot of pop-ups at places like transit centers and uh community centers, as well. Uh this winter we worked over all that
data, put together some service proposals, and this summer we're working closely with city staff such as yours uh present today, talking a little bit about what those service proposals are, what they entail, um and kind of what the alignment is between the proposals
that we had from that previous analysis, and the priorities of the city to make sure that they match before we go out to the public engagement this fall, uh which would be less about, as we did in last fall, you know, what are people's priorities, what are their pain points, what are um their levels of satisfaction
with service, and it would be more about, what do you think about this specific proposal for more trips on this corridor or realigning this route uh or what have you. And the final report is anticipated for spring of '27. So, the key findings that we had,
and I'll go over these um you know, fairly quickly. If uh you know, I do you know, speak a little bit too quickly or you have any questions, I know, you know, doing questions at the end, but uh feel free to to flag me. Uh so, since COVID, we had about 60% of ridership recovery. Um
now it's closer a little bit to 65%, um but still a little bit less than our peers, which is about 80% or so, so uh the message there is uh basically we are recovering but not quite as much as some of our peers and our peers would be regions such as Denver, um Houston, Salt
Lake comparable service levels and somewhat comparable urbanized areas. We're carrying about 12 passengers per hour on any given vehicle across the entire system. That's inclusive of light rail and bus. Whereas our peers are at
about 22 passengers per hour. Um again kind of mirroring that same point that I mentioned with the 60 65% ridership recovery. We have about 30-minute service on our grid, which is in compliance with our current standard, but it does make transfers on grid
systems such as ours a little bit challenging, especially on a day like today where I think we hit maybe 110. Didn't quite look. I stopped looking once it gets past about 105. Um and about 47% of our riders transfer, which I think is interesting if you look at previous uh
studies that we've done on our riders. Um it used to be in the low 60s and it's kind of ticked down for the last about 1 and 1/2 to 2 decades. Um and in other similar grid-style systems, we do see over 60%. So this is kind of indicating
um that transfers, you know, are a little bit difficult, that riders that need to transfer are probably selecting themselves out of the population because uh it takes a little bit too long or it's a little bit too uncomfortable or maybe they're getting a little bit too sweaty going to work or um maybe they're also using, you know,
micro-mobility options such as bikes and e-scooters. Um that they're not necessarily not riding, they're just not transferring. They're just going to the one trunk route and then doing that first mile, last mile on a non-transit option. So there are a couple of areas of opportunity that we identified such as
delivering a little bit more frequent service. Uh frequent service is going to be a theme that I'll talk about. It came through in in survey. It's, you know, not only the number one thing that was requested from riders and non-riders alike and in our survey, I should mention we surveyed non-riders. Um, it was about
one to four, I believe, uh, ratio of non-riders to riders to hear not only from the people that we serve, but from the people that we'd like to introduce to the system. Um, so the frequency would help to make the service more attractive, help to ease the onus of transfers, um,
and also just make spontaneous travel a little bit easier as well as, um, reducing the need to have an intimate understanding of schedules if you can just kind of go out to a bus stop and say, "This bus is probably going to come in about 10 minutes, uh, 15 at most." Um, and there are a couple other things up
here like in increasing the reliability, um, with proactive service management. So, um, not all of it is necessarily changing schedules and alignments, it's also, you know, how are we doing as an agency? Are there things that we can do better to improve on-time performance, to, um, reduce the number of vehicles
uh, that it takes to run the service, which in turn turns into, uh, savings or uh, at least a way to defray the increase in cost of providing service. Um, and involving the community in the planning process. So, we're using the tools and tricks that I think we're learning in some of this very intensive,
uh, public outreach that we're doing for this study and going to make it an ongoing process to focus, uh, customer Um, to increase our focus on the customer basically as we continue to evolve the system. So, on the top 15 routes, if you just kind of look at this, uh, graph, I know
if it's, uh, apologies for a bit of an eye chart, but basically the overall image is supposed to show that about 15 of the routes, which you can see on the left, uh, the access on the left is showing the number of riders, uh, per day. Um, about 15 of the routes in total are
carrying about half of all the riders. So, basically we have a small minority of routes doing a lion's share of the work, um, whereas there are a lot of other routes that need to kind of pull their weight or be readjusted either in their schedule or alignment um
because we're basically pouring a similar amount of money into some of these routes and getting very minimal returns as opposed to some of these higher performing routes. And I've highlighted in blue routes that go in Scottsdale. So six of the top 15, which is a lot for any given city as I kind of go
through cities and and talk to them. So six is quite a bit um for any given city to have those kinds of top-tier routes. So it's something good to think about as you say, you know, where is it best to possibly invest or realign how the city invests money.
These are the ones that really give you the biggest bang for your buck. And when you look at it from more of an apples-to-apples comparison, again, this is the cost per passenger chart. So not necessarily the gross number of people that you're carrying, but how many how
many dollars are you spending for every person that's on that. And so this is kind of like golf rules where you want the lower score. So the two there's two routes here. So the 41 and the 17 again that are in the top 10 of the lowest cost that run through Scottsdale.
So the 41 is Indian School, 17 is McDowell. Where you have costs that are less than $10, which is uh ambitious, but a good goal to have for routes. And then you can see on the other side there are routes like the 184 which is way out on Power Road
and that costs a little bit over $30 per passenger. So the point here I think is to focus on which of these routes are costing us the most per passenger and saying we need to look at these and maybe readjust them. And then look at the other side and say, oh, these routes are doing really well.
How can we maybe funnel more attention on these or model how they're succeeding. To some extent, you can take some attributes of these routes and transfer them as far as the service design perspective is concerned, but obviously you can't make Power Road
into Indian School Road, so there are limitations to that. And when you look at So, that previously was just the local route, so mostly functioning on arterials. If you look at the commuter routes, that basically take people from um you know, Scottsdale, Chandler, Gilbert,
and into downtown Phoenix in the morning, out in the evening along the highway, so limited stop service, very quick relative to a local route that's stopping basically at every intersection. Um as well as the circulators or the trolleys. Um some of the trolleys I think are are
doing really well. You have the 68CM, which is less than $10 a passenger again, which is you know, really good. Um and then you have the Mustang on the other end, which is you know, more or less $32 a passenger, which I we talked to the staff as well about you know, how do we um you know, look at that and and possibly
discuss how how that investment might be realigned. And then on the the 514 as well um is on the commuter side. That So, the commuters I think are a little bit skewed to the more expensive generally. So, even the lowest cost of commuter
boarding is about $20, and that's on the 562. So, the 514 at about $65 a passenger is on the higher end, but still it's not necessarily even in the bottom three, so um just some things to think about as we say, you know, here are the here are the actual costs of the
service that we're looking at, and are there justifications for this possibly for you know, you know, social reasons or political reasons, or are there ways and things that we can do to improve these services that we've identified as lower performing. And so, we also looked at the demand and
the supply over the time of the day. So, the purple line is the number of boardings, so basically the demand. And the The bars are supply, which is the number of trips in the day and this is overall for the region. Um and basically what we're looking for
here is a mismatch between the demand and the supply. Um so I think here you'll see uh the left shows a graph of this on the weekday. The right shows the same thing on Saturday. Uh so you see on the weekday we do in the background have uh
differential kind of curve almost like a double-humped camel um with AM and PM peaks having a little bit more service uh but still that PM peak having more demand than supply uh and a similar thing to uh similar thing is occurring on the Saturday as well uh the PM peak is
having a little bit more demand I think than supply um and so you can say either we could just jack up a little bit more service in the PM peak to meet that demand because the lack of supply may be suppressing the demand. Uh and you can also say we can do this in a cost-neutral manner uh where the reverse is true uh at the tail ends of
the day where we basically have demand out- or supply, sorry, outstripping demand and we can basically put some of that service uh into the PM peak to for a kind of a cost-neutral um matching of the demand and the supply, which I think is in the spirit of the whole bus network redesign.
And so when you look at why people are traveling and using transit, on the left we have uh non-transit, on the right we have transit. Um and so all these different sectors are basically showing what people are using uh whatever travel mode they're traveling
for. So usually non-transit is basically uh people in cars, could also include pedestrians and bicyclists, but the lion's share is in cars. Um so you see a much broader kind of spread I think. So the dark blue is work, uh the orange is shopping. So uh as you
can see on the transit side it's very work heavy, whereas on the non-transit side is not quite as work heavy um a little bit more shopping even than working, uh, interestingly enough. Um, so I think the point here is that we have done, I think, a good job at targeting the work type trip with things
like the commuter bus trips and things of that nature, uh, serving a little bit more peak, uh, as you saw on the weekdays, um, you know, getting people to and from work typically during that, um, day shift type, uh, schedule. Um, but as COVID has kind of evolved, um,
and we've seen this in our what we call our origin destination survey, which is a much broader survey, I think, of about 23,000 people. We did this, I think, last in 2023. Um, the share of, um, people commuting, basically, overall and using transit has gone down, so this
share used to be even higher. Um, but what we're trying to do is get more into the non-work type trips, um, you know, people shopping, um, eating, going to visit friends, uh, doing errands, even medical trips, and going to the airport and things of that nature. Um, cuz this is kind of telling
us that, you know, we're doing a good job at targeting the work folks, but not necessarily the school kids or, um, the people going to shop. And I think part of that is it's easy to plan a trip for your commute that you do every day, and you really only have to plan that maybe once and have a contingency plan. Whereas,
oh, if I need to go target this movie time or I want to go meet my friends, I have to basically go look at the schedule and learn the trip every trip. Um, so I think that plays into it, um, and again, a reason why frequency would help because it helps to build the spontaneous use of transit, makes
scheduling, um, or understanding schedules a little bit less important. But I think this is something that tells us we need to do, I think, a better job of targeting those non-work trips and those non-work areas, as well. And when you look at how long people are traveling overall, uh, the
gray bars are showing you the non-transit trips, again, usually cars. The purple bars are showing you the transit trips, um, and how long it takes you basically to get from door-to-door. And you can see, uh, the under 10 minutes is the predominant, uh, time
bucket for the car, whereas the 40 to 80 minutes is, um, the transit, you know, predominant transit bucket. So, assuming that, you know, people on transit aren't necessarily going four to five times longer than the average person that's in a car, um,
you can see the obvious issue that transit is taking a little bit too long. Sometimes, uh, that's caused by a couple of different things. Obviously, the buses are bigger, they're a little bit slower, they have to stop in intersections, um, but it also can be contributed to, you know, not quite looking at all the schedules uh, as rigorously as you can and saying,
"Does this run time for this bus, for example, need to be that long?" Or has there been potentially padding in that schedule so that the on-time performance looks good, but then the bus is basically sitting at a stop for three to five minutes, um, multiple times even on the route,
um, just because the schedule has been so padded because of the uncertainty of things like traffic during the peak time. Um, and is there a way to get around that and say, you know, on-time performance, having a good on-time performance is good, but having run times that are a little bit more realistic and a little bit more
competitive would help to bring more people onto transit. Um, so that's definitely something that we are looking into and actually got a little bit more money to help with some scheduling, um, refinement from our consultant who's helping us with this study.
So, when we did our survey, uh, there were a couple of categories again when we asked folks, "What is the most most important thing for you um, as a rider and what are you least satisfied with?" Um, again, frequency was the top, on-time performance as well as on-board
safety was, uh, three of the most important. Uh, so I'm a service service planner, I don't, uh, wouldn't pretend to be a safety guru by any stretch, but all of the elements that we hear about our service that aren't necessarily related to service design and scheduling
like safety, wayfinding, apps and how they work are all being directed to the the correct division basically. So we're keeping a list and working closely with those divisions like our safety group for example to say you know this is important for folks and then
honing in on you know what routes people are are identifying as you know having low satisfaction on of safety and things like that. And then the the categories of lowest satisfaction bus stop amenities, on time performance, and availability of weekend service. So a couple of things to point out here on time performance
both one of the most important and one of the lowest satisfaction kind of goes back to what I said about on time performance. You know it's hard to know exactly what people think when you say on time performance to them. It could be the bus is late, it could be the bus is too slow, it could be the bus is not reliable or you're missing the
trips that I need to make. But I think looking at that kind of overall reliability is critical. And the availability of weekend service I think is also critical because again going back to too much work travel, a lot of non-work travel, a larger proportion of that is happening
on the week ends as opposed to the weekdays. So you'll have a a higher proportion of you know shopping and seeing your friends and things of that nature which I think it's kind of obvious why that why that would be. A lot of people are kind of working on the weekdays and kind of living for the weekends basically. Um
So giving a little bit more weekend service I think would allow us to get into that market that we're not necessarily serving quite as well. And when you ask non-riders what the most important things are, they also key in on frequency. So I think you know it makes it a little bit easier for folks
that don't ride the bus necessarily to say okay I can just go out to this bus stop and the bus will probably come any interval of 15 minutes from the time I wake up to the time I go to the bed go to bed. So it's not necessarily like I have to have a strong command of how do I read schedules or what app do I need
to look at for real-time bus locations. They also wanted more direct service with fewer transfers, which again, on a hot day like this is easy to understand why. Um, you wouldn't mind a bus that deviates a couple times even if it takes you a little bit longer to not have to go and transfer and sit maybe at a bus
stop for 5-10 minutes even, um, when it's like 100° even 90° after the sun sets. Uh, and then more shade and heat protection as well. I think it stops was was critical and again, going back to the previous, uh, slide about, uh, low satisfaction of bus stop shelters and
amenities. I think really amenities means shade and protection from the sun largely, um, more so than things like trash cans. Um, so those are just some things to keep in mind about what would attract people to the system. Um,
briefly I'll kind of touch on this. This is a little bit more inside baseball stuff, but basically there are ways to shave down the amount of time that we spend, uh, getting to and going from the beginnings and ends of routes that can help to make, um, the costs a little bit lower without
having to necessarily reduce service. So basically just running the service more efficiently. This is broken down by the different depots or garages that we serve, um, that you know, some of these, uh, do have a little bit more wiggle room I think to meet the target of 15% basically, uh, time that it takes to,
uh, not serve a route, but to get to the ends, um, appropriately kind of operationally and um, I think you can see here that Scottsdale, you know, do a pretty good job. You're basically at the 15% with your trolleys already. So, when I look at the satisfaction and
importance ratings for Scottsdale residents specifically, we had 139, um, for the subsample. Um, you look at the largest gaps and the smallest gaps, uh, often just to see, you know, the smallest gaps would indicate, okay, these um,
the level of importance and the level of satisfaction are are pretty good, which is a good sign. Um, which was the ease of transfers. So, in Scottsdale, it was the ease of transfers as opposed to the region, which was the distance to stops. Um, so I think in Scottsdale, people are happy with their the ease of transfers. I think the trolley system plays into
this, um, where you have basically service that is weaving through other, um, routes as well as having, um, again, some very high productivity routes, like the, uh, McDowell and the Indian School route. Um, they're fairly frequent and, uh, fairly highly used.
And then the largest gap in Scottsdale was the the frequency. So, uh, even though the services are, you know, high performing, there could be a little bit more frequency, I think, uh, as far as the perception of the residents is concerned. And when you look at, uh, preferences, when you ask them, uh, as a follow-up,
what kind of frequency increases would you want? Uh, in Scottsdale, you had the predominant answer being the, uh, weekday AM and PM peaks, um, at about 30%. So, about one in three folks, uh, in Scottsdale said, uh, AM PM peaks, but you also had an interesting, um,
high number on the, um, midday weekday. Um, so, you know, easy for me to say, you know, just add a bunch of service on the weekdays, but I think if you were ever looking to add any kind of frequency, um, probably AM and PM peak would be the the number one target, at least, according to the riders.
And when you ask them about span expansion, so, span is the amount of time a bus would run, like, you know, 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., or whatnot. Um, the answers were a little bit more spread out, um, but the highest choice in Scottsdale, uh, again, was the the
weekdays on the evenings. So, I think, you know, 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 a.m., that's I think a little bit rich. Um, so, I think even to, you know, 11:00, 11:30, um, to add service, cuz I think some of the service cuts off about an hour or two before that. Um I think what helped also facilitate
those non-work trips that we were talking about earlier. Um and interestingly enough, the mornings were very low. So, if you were ever to um you know, not, I guess, do a span expansion, it would probably be weekday mornings cuz that ended up being quite low, especially compared to the region,
as you can see uh in the chart. And so, the connection with 479, um this has been a really fast-evolving situation, and I'm, you know, kind of in the middle of the outside and the inside on this, uh trying to coordinate with MAG as as best we can,
um to basically make sure that all of the service that we have remains whole and that we're being as fiscally responsible as possible. Uh these two bars basically show the original uh estimation for different buckets of money, like the base allocation at the bottom, which is
really the biggest one. Uh and the base allocation is the allocation that keeps all of the service currently running whole. Um so, it's all kind of baked in, and you won't have to say, um you know, we have to cut this or that based on uh how the formula pot is
growing, because the formula, as you can see, the orange uh slice basically got decimated by the growth of the other few slices. So, that was largely in part due to rising costs of bus service operations, as well as the rising cost of ADA uh service uh growth. So, I've
heard some encouraging news recently that it is um much higher than I think uh estimates even in the early spring were. Uh I don't think I'm at liberty to discuss that, but I think um the formula has slowly been clawed back with some
um kind of efficiencies that we've been finding in the way that we can do operations, um and some possible changes to uh the service actually from the bus network redesign um that some of the cities have already said, you know, we're interested in doing this because uh some Some cities, I think, see that
what they've done in the past is wasn't sustainable um as far as you know the financials are concerned if they weren't going to put more local money in which is kind of a political non-starter. And so I think it's suffice to say here that we're in the bus network redesign very cognizant of wanting to find
efficiencies and not wanting to um you know feed into this cycle of you know ever rising costs for service. We're trying to find efficiencies as well as target as I was mentioning uh mostly earlier uh the areas of opportunity for growth and how we may have to um
grow in some areas and possibly dial back in others uh as is appropriate. So the next steps uh as I mentioned engaging city staff through the summer to talk through uh some of the concepts. So we've been meeting I think since May. So we met in May, met in June, we'll be meeting in
July and August as well. Uh so the July and August meetings will really be hashing out all of the specific proposals in preparation for the fall outreach period. Um that will all be presented to our board in September. Um and of course uh presenting the final
plan to the board in early '27 after the public engagement phase. And I would uh you know to make a final note um the cities always have the final say, final discretion on the service that's in their city. I think you know that goes without saying but I did want to say that. Um and that's why you know we're working
especially closely with your staff building those relationships and making sure that uh again the priorities that your city has the and the funding realities, the political realities are matched up with the proposals of the bus network redesign and the findings of the bus network redesign so that we're working hand in glove.
And that is all I have. Thank you. >> Thank you Mr. Xavier. That was wonderful. Commissioners, what questions and comments do you have? Commissioner Marmon. >> Thank you. That was a really good presentation.
>> [cough] >> Pardon me. Does the uh Park and Ride at Thunderbird and Scottsdale Road figure in the future anywhere? >> Uh yes, Vice Chair Commissioner. Um it does. I think we've had discussions with the uh staff that um
I think currently we have service uh from Rural Road uh at that Park and Ride as well as I believe another uh East-West arterial route that serves that Park and Ride. Um I think that is still up in the air as far as I've heard uh from the city, but we may
we I think we can go either way on that, you know, based on the feedback of the city. Um so, I don't think it will necessarily derail any of the plans. Um it just depends on what the city's plans are in the future for that facility. >> Thank you. >> Commissioner Davis.
>> Um >> [clears throat] >> when you're talking about potentially pruning routes based on low ridership or high costs, I was wondering if there were any kind of um either obligations you had as an organization or goals about providing um transit service within a certain I guess
um you know, distance of of any given household in the in the valley, and if so, what what are those requirements and what what is that what is that distance? >> Yeah. Vice Chair Commissioner. Um we don't have any hard and fast rules. I think really it comes down to, you know,
what the city has an appetite for, what the city has a budget for. We don't necessarily have any kind of hard and fast rule um about the amount of service. There are very broad, I think, um guardrails on our side about you know, if we end up cutting you know, 10% of service, which would be or adding 10%
of service, that would bring us into a new tier of contract um scale, basically, and that would change the rates with which we um are operating and and getting charged by the contractor that operates our service. Um but again, that's a very wide berth, and I doubt we would hit that based on, you know, the
work that we're doing. Uh Um, there's also Title VI requirements, which um, basically we have to look at any impacts of service changes that we do um, based on the impacts to Title VI communities, which are basically minority and low-income communities, and saying, uh, okay, if we're going to take
service away on this route, is this, number one, a major service change? And even that is a wide berth. So, basically that is you'd have to take or add 25% of service uh, from a route, either along its alignment or over the total amount of service hours
um, that it's run. Um, and so, as long as you're under that, you don't necessarily have to do any kind of mitigation uh, to the service um, change that you're making. Um, so again, another pretty wide um, goal, I think, there. So, overall, I don't think we have
really any um, like hard and fast rules of, you know, we we must retain this service, or, you know, you Scottsdale must or must not do this. So, again, it's really up to the discretion of the city, how much money that you all have to spend, how much the region is also giving you. Um,
and I think, you know, one thing to be cognizant of, um, which I think we ran into in Scottsdale a couple of years back, was the service on Shea Road, where we cut that service, and then there was the Mayo Clinic at the end. Um, and so, any fixed route on a line, uh, any fixed route on the map, rather,
um, has basically an imaginary or uh, invisible buffer of 3/4 of a mile, and that is your ADA buffer, where anybody can basically call and say, okay, I need a paratransit ride door-to-door, um, anywhere within the region up within which that buffer lays. Um, and so, when
you cut that buffer, or you add to that buffer, um, there's kind of that implication to it, as well, where if you say, oh, I still want this facility to have ADA service, but I don't want the bus to be there, the city would basically be on the hook if they wanted to retain that ADA
service. Um So, I think those those are just be some of the um basically the little tripwires in in the system. So, I think it does give the the city a wide berth. >> Thank you. And then one uh more question. Um how often did you say this this button
bus network re-planning is done? How How often is it done and and assuming it was done like in the last I don't know four or five years, what changes were made and have you seen I guess some some positive impacts based on those changes? >> That's a good question. Um
when So, we have a new CEO. She came on about three, four years ago. Um we haven't done a bus network redesign or comprehensive operational analysis like this um I believe in 15, maybe 17 years. So, we were well overdue for this, especially after COVID and and all the changes that have happened and
you know, just being in one of the fastest growing dynamic regions in the country. Um so, we really haven't done it uh in a very long time and I've only been with the agency about uh eight years now. So, um I don't know that there's a whole lot of record on on what happened the the last time, but um
yeah, basically we're we're well overdue and I think the cadence really should be about every five to seven years for something like this. >> Very good. Thank you. It was a great presentation, very uh data packed. So, I appreciate that. >> Yeah, I know it's uh especially on a hot evening, it's can be hard to stay awake
through some of the dense data stuff. So, I appreciate it. >> We're a group that loves data, so you're fine. >> Great. >> Um Mr. Commissioner Marmon, do you have another question? >> Thank you. Has there any consideration been to get a bus stop on the Mayo campus instead of out on the street?
>> Is that So, I'm uh Commissioner, I'm only familiar with the Mayo Clinic on Shea. Is there another one that you're thinking of? >> The one in the Phoenix on the Mayo Boulevard and 56th Street. >> Huh? Oh, yeah. Not that I've heard of,
Um but I can ask the city of Phoenix uh if they're planning on doing anything like that. >> I'm sorry. >> Sorry. I I hadn't heard anything from the the city of Phoenix uh as far as plans are concerned on that, but I can uh check back with them. Um and cuz we're kind of in an an interesting
situation where as a transit agency, I mean as you well know, um all the cities are basically in charge of their own bus stops, the the location, the creation, the maintenance. Um And so sometimes it's for better or worse a bit of a hands-off approach uh for us, but I'd definitely be glad to
to get that information for you cuz we do maintain a pretty robust database of bus stops and amenities and things of that nature. >> Yes. >> Um so kind of piggybacking on that, so uh you said Scottsdale makes the ultimate decision in what our routes look like, but our routes then go into
Tempe, go into Phoenix. So, what is that collaboration look like and how is the balance of decision-making when each city's going to impact each other? >> Yeah, Vice Chair. Um we have been going through a series of basically individual meetings where we've been meeting individually with
cities like Tempe, Phoenix, uh and then coming together for what we call subregional meetings, which is basically uh you'd be in the East subregion, so anything East of Phoenix is in the East subregion. Um and then kind of doing this uh iterative cycle basically of individual meetings, subregional meetings monthly from May, uh which will
occur through August. Um And so the coordination is mostly uh trying to see in an iterative process what the cities are comfortable with, what the financial situations look like, what the political situations are evolving to look like. Um I think you're kind of on the edge of
two of some of the more interesting ones in the um group as far as the political situation. I think a lot of the other cities have uh more or less been a little bit more open to saying, "Okay, we're may not be able to commit to, you know, the list of changes, which we're not asking for at this point. We're just
saying, would you want the public to weigh in on what they think is the best or the worst among these for future consideration and funding and whatnot. Um and so we're working through um discussions with the city of Phoenix, who may as you may know is going to a ballot measure uh for transit tax, so
that is a bit of a sensitive situation over there in city Phoenix uh trying to balance the bus network redesign proposals with their T2050 uh pre-standing kind of promises to the public that was uh voted in a couple years ago. Um and so as we work through these
meetings, we're basically trying to slowly identify, okay, what are the cities uh amenable to having the public weigh in on, what are they not amenable to um in those individual meetings, and then coming together at the sub-regional meetings um in these next two rounds in specific and saying, okay, you know,
Tempe said that they are or are not open to this. City Scottsdale, what do you say about this and vice versa, and we kind of hash it out. Um and that isn't necessarily a new structure to us. We have what's called the short-range transit program, which is basically a 5-year look ahead and a list of the transit changes that are going to happen.
Um and that's a process that we did every year basically in in a similar fashion at the sub-region and saying, okay, here's the list of proposed changes. Um this route goes through three cities. What do these cities think about basically each one of these changes? Are
they still amenable to it? Do you want to push the date back? Do you want to change what the proposal is and so forth based on funding or new developments or things of that nature, so um working very closely with with the cities basically to make sure that um
what we're proposing, what we've seen from the public, and what we've seen in our service analysis um is fully understood by the cities and also is uh producing proposals that are in alignment with basically their political realities or funding realities
as well. >> Wonderful, thank you. Any other questions, commissioners? Okay, thank you, Mr. Xavier. >> Thank you. >> And then up next we have our pavement program overview and update with Scott Ziprick, who is our senior street
operations manager. Welcome, Mr. Ziprick. >> Good evening, Commission, Vice Chair, Commissioners. Um tonight what we're going to talk about is our our pavement maintenance program. And as you said, my name is Scott Ziprick. I'm the senior
street operations manager, so Um first we're going to start off with uh what is this street maintenance program? It's to preserve our transportation network, which is probably one of the city's most valuable assets. If you start looking at
value of what the city has to what the city has to maintain. Um And our street transportation system, it it's very visual. Everybody sees it. Everybody rates cities by how good their streets are. So that's why this is such
a priority style program. And this pr- uh this preventative maintenance plan is to preserve the life of the infrastructure that we have. To keep it at a at a high level rather than let it degrade where you have to
uh replace it because that gets very expensive. Um our transportation network is also a high priority to our Council. We actually have two Council priorities. The first one is to create a five-year pavement improvement plan. And that is
how we're going to preserve and maintain um and then also improve our pavement condition index. I'll get into pavement condition index here in a little bit, but our goal is to to get to a rating of 75 within the next 5 to 10 years. These
are specifically in the council goals. Um how are we going to meet these council priorities? Well, currently we've started we've developed a 10-year maintenance plan. Um that is published. Uh we are we are focusing on that that
75 PCI goal and how we get there. And we're going to try and balance our treatments with funding, with the age and level of degradation of our current streets. And then we're going to continue have a
continuous maintenance program to try and keep elevating that over time. So the pavement condition index, this is a rating system that was put in place by the Federal Highway Administration. It's a national style rating system.
Um scale rates from 0 to 100, 0 being worst, 100 being best. Um it looks at anything that can be wrong with the pavement. Cracks, rutting, potholes,
uh and just general surface degradation. And we use this number to support what types of treatments we do on what types of roadways. Here's the uh the rating levels. Of course, our goal is to get everything up in the green. Unfortunately, we're not
there. I can report that we are completely out of the failed section, and we are going to be very soon, probably after this season, out of the serious section. So again, our treatment program, we don't just
look at the worst roads, and everybody thinks, "Well, you got to fix the worst roads, and then that makes everything better." Well, the problem is it takes time to fix those roads, and a very large budget, but the better roads are also degrading at same time. So, you you're losing
you're losing a age and serviceability, no matter what you do. So, uh our goal is to treat at different levels, maintain the higher levels, but also bring those lower levels up. And
it's a balancing act, to be honest. So, what roads are included that we look at? Well, any road that's paved. Um this doesn't include our alleys, our uh dust palliative roadways. Um
And as you can see, we've got about 2,700 uh lane miles of roadway in Scottsdale. That's a pretty sizable system. Um and we're fairly balanced between arterials and collectors compared to residentials.
Uh So, basically, we've got a lot of roads to maintain in Scottsdale for the size of the city. So, how do we select the roads that we're going to treat, and how do we select the type of treatment on those roads? Um first, we start with the PCI. Like I
said, that's rates our roads, tells us where we need to be looking, and we can also match treatments to certain levels of rating. Um we look at roadway classifications, the amount of traffic on the roads.
Um Ultimately, it comes down to how many dollars do we have this year, and how do we balance uh which roads we actually maintain. Um we also try and coordinate with utility companies, as well as capital
projects. We don't want to go and do a maintenance on a on a roadway that somebody's going to come tear up for utilities, or a capital project. And even we coordinate with development, as well, um to stay out of the way of of areas of development.
Currently, this is our pavement preservation toolbox. We have three main types of work that we do. We do preservative treatments, surface renewal treatments, as well as rehabilitation treatments.
Being the most severe. And like I said, each treatment type is tied to a range of PCI values. And those are assigned each season to each of the roadways. Um Our goal is to extend the pavement life.
Um Some people some areas have theories that we build the road, we let it fail, we rebuild the road, we let it fail. Um unfortunately, that's a very expensive option
in roadway maintenance. So we use preservative treatments and the goal is to keep the level of degradation on our pavement to a minimum. So those pavements that are
that rate really high, we want to keep them really high. So we use the appropriate treatments to keep their rating high, to keep them as a at a better roadway. Um but at the same time, we need to do more aggressive treatments to get the
lower roadways up to a higher rating, thus extending their the life of that roadway. Um this improves the overall network and it's also a more cost-effective way
of doing pavement maintenance. This is a life cycle graph of a roadway. And the red line represents a road that you construct, you let age, you don't do any treatments to it. And as you can see, that our goal
when we design roadways is to get a 20-year life out of the road. Um our weather out here is very harsh on roadways. Um we hope to get 20 years out of those roads. But if you don't do any maintenance, your
reconstruction costs can be somewhere in the 10 to 15 times what maintenance costs can be over the years. So, we try and avoid that. We try and our program is trying to follow that
blue line up top to where the pavement's brand new, it ages, we put a treatment on it. We bring the rating back up. It ages some more. We put the same or maybe a little more aggressive treatment on it. And then it ages some more.
Then we have to do uh in the areas where you see where the blue line jumps up, that's a more aggressive pavement maintenance like a micro seal or something like that. But we're we're trying to push that PCI back up
uh to keep it up uh to where the road is in good good working condition. Eventually, we're going to have to do more aggressive treatments as you can see about halfway through the map. And if we can get a road to 30 years, and that's when we do a mill and overlay on it,
that's doing really well. Um and as you can see, uh this graph goes out to 65 years. And if you tell somebody, "Well, our road's going to last 65 years, and all the the most treatment that we've done on it is one or two mill and overlays."
They're going to go, "Wow, that that's a great I mean, this is a great pavement maintenance." Uh so, that's our goal in this plan is to treat these roads and to keep their their level of rating high.
Not to let them not to let them age aggressively. So, some of the things that we're doing that in this in this program we did a full city reading of PCI about
a year and a half ago. So, we know the reading on all of our streets. We also most recently have a complete pavement model of all of those streets. That's how we ended up making that 10-year pavement maintenance
plan. We're taking a different approach than has been taken in past in Scottsdale on pavement maintenance. When we go in and we do these treatments, we just don't come in and treat the road. We go in and we assess the road. We've got the rating, but we
go visually assess the road and we do all of the repairs necessary on the roadway. We do any patching, we do any structural repairs, we fix any rutting, we fix any major cracks. We don't just go in and quickly crack
seal and then just coat it and and hope for the best. And I'm learning that not this wasn't always done in the past in Scottsdale on as aggressively as as we're we're doing this. So, when we get done, no matter what treatment we do to a
roadway, we leave that roadway completely structurally fixed. And that is a big step in this in this program and extending the pavement life cuz anytime you've got a weak spot, the entire road has a weak
spot. And how are we going to measure our success on this? Of course, the easy part is uh the PCI rating. Our goal is to come back and look at these roads and have them re-roaded,
re-evaluated on a certain frequency. We don't know exactly what that frequency's going to be, but that's what's going to let us know whether our treatments are matching with the level of roadway need at the time we treat it.
Um that's going to help us assess the longevity of the treatments. Um it's it's going to give us a better cost efficiency. And then this, again, we need to keep the council goals in mind. It's going to get us closer to that that those council
goals. So, kind of summary on on our on our program, uh this is a a top infrastructure priority. I mean, we've been given uh budgeted funding for pavement maintenance.
Um well, like I said, we have a data-driven approach. We're not just picking streets. We have ratings. We have a a model that we're using. Um honestly, uh
I think City of Phoenix is the only one out only one else in the valley that runs a PCI model on the entire city. Um so, we're trying to be front runners in that on our pavement maintenance program. We have multiple treatment strategies. Like you saw, we have three that we
currently utilize. Those are what's under current contract. We're going to try and expand our toolbox on treatment types as we move as we get further into this program. And again, we are keeping the council goals in mind uh
and have a sustainable pavement maintenance program. Um So, measuring our successes, that gets back into the PCI ratings, long-term re-rating the streets, uh showing that where we're putting the
funding is helping out, doing the most good for the streets. Um making sure that the effect that treatment effectiveness. Now, since we started this program recently, treatment effectiveness is going to come over
time, seeing how these treatments last on our streets. There is industry-standard treatments out there. We know how much how long they should last, but that's how we're going to measure our success in their program delivery and how we use the
funding that is uh that is given through the budget to this process. I think we have an extra couple of slides. Um this is a uh skew to our QR code to our
payment treatment map. We have both a mobile and a desktop version. So, we're going to we use this as getting the word out about our payment treatment map, and I believe this will work. This is the current uh
payment maintenance map that's up on the city uh web page, and you can see that we've got year 26 all through 2035. You can clip click through here and see each of the programs for each of those
years. This is our current year. Um and again, this will change as we add treatment types. Uh we're going to expand this map. This is where kind of where we started. This we're going to keep putting more information and more information as the
program grows out here on this map. And I believe that is the end. Do you have any questions? >> Thank you, Mr. Zebrick. Commissioners? Commissioner Marmon. >> Thank you. Excuse me. That was a good presentation. Could you go back to the slide where you
list your alternatives? It was an early It was early in your There. Go back. The crack It where it said crack and seal. >> Oh, yes. >> I'm I'm I'm just not sure what crack and seal
is doing for us. I mean, you did it on the street in front of my house a few years ago and immediately the whole surface reflects right back through it. >> So >> What what's the goal of that? >> So the crack seal So
two things that are the harshest on the pavement one is the UV rays from the sun. I mean, everybody knows that >> Would you mind speaking into the mic, please? >> I'm sorry. >> Thank you. >> Sounded like I was really loud when I was staying really close to the mic. Um
the crack seal Uh there's there's two two things that we're trying to protect the pavement from. The first thing is the UV. Um and the second is water entrainment getting into the sub base. So what crack seal does is we go out and
we seal all the cracks in the road with an elastic an elastic an elastic americ uh sealer. It's basically a flexible caulk, if you will, for a of a better term. And the goal of that is when we put on a
treatment such as liquid road or micro seal, those treatments can only do so much when you get to a crack. They don't fill it. And those cracks will come through those treatments. So,
what the crack seal does is it seals that and then we put the the the treatment over top of it and that crack seal bridges so we can seal that roadway to keep water from getting into the sub base. And I know the treatment that you're talking about
and that treatment is a polymer modified master seal. It's a called PMM. And there are some treatments that if you follow the crack seal too soon and you don't let it uh age and what we call off-gas and cure,
they'll come right through the treatment and you can see them. If you notice the that treatment type is not in this list cuz we pulled back because of that exact issue. Um but the we have to keep the water from
getting under the pavement. So, crack seal is an integral part of any type of treatment that we do. Um so, and I understand the visual effects of that with that type of seal, but that's not why we're not doing that seal
currently. Um as the program becomes more aggressive and we can get out and we can crack seal 6 to 8 months before we put a treatment like that on, we can go back to those treatments cuz that treatment will cover it and you won't see that that material coming through
the surface. >> Well, you know, I agree with you that water is the number one enemy of the pavement base. Would you go a little more detail about liquid road, please? >> So, liquid road is a polymer uh
fiber reinforced material. And it is a much thicker type treatment. Trying to describe it. Uh It goes on literally we dump it on the
road and the machine squeegees it out. We do it's a two-coat system. And we get about a half a gallon of material per square yard. And it's not a long-term type treatment. It's about a 5-7 year
wear surface. But because it does have aggregate in it, it's got sand, different type two different types of sand in it. We get a good skid resistance. But what it does is it keeps it seals the asphalt so we don't get any water in
the actual surface of the asphalt. And it is also 100% UV resistant. So, the UV roads are not getting into that oil-based material that holds our asphalt mat together. And when you have those better those
higher PCI rated roads, this is a good I don't want to say cheap, but it is a cost-effective option to come in and to seal that pavement and to keep the the UV and the water out of the surface of the roadway.
>> Okay, thank you. >> Commissioner Baker. >> So, how do you keep track of what where the cracks are the potholes? Do you have a systematic process of investigation
that you go through? >> Um we do once we have well two answers to that question. As part of the As part of the pavement maintenance program, once we select the roadways that we're going to do in that season, we go out
and we walk each roadway. And we'll mark up and take notes of where all the cracks are, where all the potholes are, where all the base failures are, um where it's pulling away from the curb. Um there aren't We've got areas to where we have cracks that are over 4 in
wide. So, we'll take note of all of that. That'll be summarized, and that will go into the pavement maintenance program, because before we do anything with that street, we're going to go in and fix all that. No matter what we're doing with that street, we're going to go in and fix that first.
Then we come in with the treatment. Potholes in general in Scottsdale, we have our our work order system, and that's how we track just general potholes in the city. >> Okay, but how do you know that where the potholes are?
>> Um we have a lot of concerned residents about potholes that that call us on a daily basis. >> John John knows the inside joke on that one. Okay, so there isn't a what I'm thinking we should have a systematic
plan where like when you first started answer my question, you said, "When we When we've decided to fix a road." Well, how do you decide when to fix a road? >> That is the the pavement maintenance model that we have that we've
that we've put all of our uh PCI data into, and it is an established model that uh the city had procured a number of years back, and we've now got it up and operational.
And you can go in uh because there's never a lack of streets to do each season. We can go in and set criteria, and one of our criteria is how do we get the PCI on the overall network to get to meet the council goal of 75.
Well, that's one of the criteria that we put in our model. And it and it comes up with a list of roads each year. Now, could this road be substituted for that road, and we still get to the the same end result?
Absolutely. But, this we have to rely on something that's going to keep track. I mean, 10 years of planning, 2,700 lane miles of roadway is a big job. So, we kind of rely on the model, and then we massage it each time
we get to the season. Um but that's that's how we've came up with that 10-year model. >> Okay, so uh you're So, you're saying you have a computer model, correct? So, and in that computer model, you know how uh garbage in, garbage out, right? So,
uh and where So, where did the compu- computer model come from? >> Um it is part of a maintenance software that we have. Um it is also uh there uh is a company called IMS that
does PCI ratings. Um they're a national company. They've developed the degradation curves for Arizona that we use inside this model on how the pavement degrades over time.
Um we also have reset values or repair values for the PCI when we do certain types of these treatments, uh it'll raise the value of the PCI. So, if we go in and we crack seal and we patch
and and we do all of these things, and then we uh then we put a micro seal on, that's going to raise the PCI a certain value, depending upon where the road is and where the where the road's current PCI value is and that type of reset value. So, it's
taken quite a while to get this model to where we can trust it. That's the That's the garbage in, garbage out. So, we think we're there. Um
we recently did a small PCI rating in a very controlled area and we're going to use that data to go back into the model and look at, "Okay, we had a treatment. We started this PCI value. We did this treatment.
These are the kind of industry standard assumptions on that." And we're going to compare that. And that way that lets us reassess how the model is working. So, it's going to be a constant iterative process as we do maintenance and we can get out there and
we can get the funding to do the PCI readings. We're going to come back and we're going to make that model better each time we have a treatment season. >> Okay, so you you actually have the capability to update the model. >> We do. We do. We We have full control of the model.
>> Great. And then so, the backup is the concerned citizens who call you and >> That That is the backup. That That's That's a part of the selection process. >> Okay. All right, sounds good. Thanks. >> I have more questions about this model. >> Yes. >> So, you said you procured it several
years ago. So, it sounds like it's from a vendor. >> It is. >> And then is this the first time that the city's been regularly using it? And then is that vendor assisting in cuz it seems like it would need a lot of analytical expertise in order to make sure that
it's good data going in and what sort of analysts within the city are helping assist with that? >> Yes, Vice Chair. It's It's part of our Central Square system that we're moving our work order system to. It's a It's a very large encompassing
work order I work order doesn't do it justice for the type of software that it is. But, the pavement modeling is is one piece of this. And I'm not I I was I'm not privy to when we actually purchased that software.
But, first thing we had to do was get the software. Then, we had to do an overall reading of the entire city. Then, as you say, we need to have an analyst that understands what's going on. And we do have a very good analyst in transportation that is very dedicated
to just basically making the Central Square software work um and getting it implemented. And this pavement maintenance model um I can say we've probably spent the last 8 months working
to where we could just get this first iteration of the 10-year plan out >> of it. >> Mhm. >> And you know, as as everything else in a municipal government is, everything is subject to change. So, as we learn more,
we've learned how we can go back and not just put information in and go, "Well, I hope that works." We've learned how to go in and to make strategic assumptions, I'll say. Um
And I think right now, we've probably ran that model uh before we came up with this 10-year plan. Uh myself and the analyst, we've probably went through 30 more or more model runs before there was something that we felt comfortable with. >> Mhm.
>> Just you change one thing, and then the whole model changes. So, we do have an analyst in-house. We have direct access to the uh the company, the software company. He's on the phone with them anytime we
run into anything and they've been very helpful in us getting this model ran and we've learned a lot. >> Thank you. Um and then in terms of funding, so I know the council has put a bunch of money in the current budget, much more than in years past and I
haven't followed it close enough to know what's the future plan. So you have your 10-year plan, have you estimated how much money that's required and what's any guarantee that that funding will be there? >> Um that is it as we all know >> a year by year.
>> it's a year by everything is dependent on the budget process. >> Right. So you will know though based on our plan, we know we need X dollars and then that's the ask from the council each year. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> That that was the that was the main goal of getting that 10-year plan out for the
city managers. This is backup when requesting that type of payment maintenance in the future. >> Mhm. >> We now have a plan for it. >> And will it require that same large number that was given this year or that's just a get a good head start and
it should be less in future years? >> That's the hope and we have two things working against us, especially in the valley. Uh nothing ever gets cheaper here. >> Mhm. >> And we always have the sunshine and the heat that is just detrimental to
pavement. >> Um and then on the PCI, so you said the goal is 75 and >> Yes. >> I know the current number is much lower than that. So what is the current month number and then historically has it been 75 or is that much higher than you know,
20, 30, 40 years back? >> Um I can't speak to historic. We don't have any records on PCI. Um this was this was something new. If we do, I don't I don't know what they I don't have them. Um
but I can state that we're in the low 60s. Um and we are hoping and this sounds terrible. We are hoping for a PCI of one increased each
fiscal year. >> Okay. But so to say that the PCI now is worse than it historically has been, there's no actual data to >> No. >> back that up. That's just a >> If there is, I don't know that we have any. >> perception or
opinion. >> It's I think I think you know, there's a I've always heard that uh you know, when you go down to DMV and you get your your driver's license, this is my experience that they also give you a transportation engineering degree with
it. So, we've we've got a lot of transportation engineers out there that like to look at our roadways. Uh so, a lot of it is actual perception. I I can tell you from other parts of the valley, uh structurally, Scottsdale roads in
certain locations are very good. But we have not done maintenance on them, so they're starting to age quicker than they should. So, perception is a lot of that when you get down to doing actual analytical data.
>> Mhm. >> Uh Vice Chair Cardella and members of the Transportation Commission, um going back to pre-COVID about um mid-20 teens, um
we had a PCI rating relatively high into the 70s. Um I don't believe we would categorize that as Scott has alluded to multiple times, accurate with the with the reporting
and the the model that we showed. Then we ran the the trucks that go out and actually measure the PCI. Um I think that was 2021 if somebody can correct me about and that showed that we
were at the 60 the low 60 grade. So, we found that out about then. Uh reported that we were at that that stage. There were treatments that were happening over the last over those couple years that we thought were more modeling that we were increasing the PCI up. We ran the
numbers again, ran the the the the trucks to measure the actual PCI and we were still in the low 60s so we had made no progress. So, that was the that was the last about last 10 years the history behind it was that pre-COVID we had probably overinflated
numbers, got a real realistic perspective of what the numbers actually were and then I've made no progress. So, I think that was a reflection of the model and and as you guys have been working on the model, hopefully we'll get better numbers as we move forward in the future.
>> Okay, interesting. Thank you. Um Commissioners, any other questions? Commissioner Davis. >> So, Nathan, you you partly answered the question I was going to ask, um which is regards to how we're measuring PCI. So, that's the first question is I've heard you mention like about the PCI of a road. >> Mhm. >> I'm assuming that's an average number
across its whole length. Do we measure PCI on a a half-mile basis, a mile basis? How how how granular do we get when we're doing that measurement? >> PCI is measured from intersection to intersection. So, if those intersections are 100 ft apart, we have a PCI for a very
short roadway or if they're a quarter mile apart, we have a PCI for that roadway. And when we get into uh larger roads that don't have a lot, like say you're going up Pima and there's not many access points, we'll break that about every eighth to
quarter of a mile. Just so you have a better representation so you don't get this very large average of the roadway so it's more accurate. >> And it's done by by by truck with some kind of scanner? >> It is done by uh it's actually a van and it's a LiDAR scanner. They've got LiDAR
camera. And they also have structural testing for the roadways. It's a falling hammer style structural test that they use. Um, so it's visual and it's LiDAR.
Um, so you get very accurate readings from those. >> Okay. And when we talk about the number for city level, that's that's averaged out, so >> Yes. >> A lane mile on Shea counts the same as a lane mile on Miller counts the same as a lane mile on my home street. >> Yes.
>> Okay. Um, how do how do our numbers compare to other cities in the valley? Um, or have they not done, I guess that this this true measurement like we have? >> Like like Nathan uh alluded to
it's it's like asking your buddy how big the fish was that he caught. Um, nobody wants to report to your neighboring cities that your roadways are bad. Um you know, we've heard
that Mesa has a PCI in the high 70s. But I mean everybody here's driven through Mesa, you know, they how do and the roads aren't any worse than or any better than Scottsdale roads. So you go in and
and you look at that, it's very hard to tell because you know, so I know some cities out there they rate after they do treatments. And some don't take into account their entire their entire street network. They
only rate their arterials and that's where they focus most of their maintenance money. You know, so it's all dependent upon the program. I know the city of Phoenix, like they like I said, they do their own modeling. They've got a staff of of about eight people I think that work on
nothing but their payment model. Um and I believe they're in the high 50s. Mid mid to high 50s in the city of Phoenix. That's about the only number that I trust. Uh but
not a lot of other cities publish that. >> Okay. And this Vice Chair Cardella and members of staff, this came up when we when Maricopa Association of Governments came out with a new funding source with federal funds for pavement reconstruction or roadway
reconstructions where how can we fairly evaluate all the cities across the street cuz I don't think they would assess that all of our PCIs are using the same um criteria for how they are assessed.
So, they came up with a roughness index to fairly evaluate all the cities when they were looking at allocating out these federal funds. So, that that was one of their criteria's for that federal funds to um for the roadway reconstructions. They came up with a a roughness index to
compare us cuz it's it would be hard to compare the different PCIs to each other. >> Thank you. And then one final question. So, the topic of I guess UV degradation has come up as a big driver. Um maybe this is more of a question for Nathan, but have we considered I guess
looking at some of the cool pavement studies that I think Tempe and Phoenix have done which I'm assuming right helped to reflect some of that UV um uh you those UV rays and and incorporate some of those findings into our >> The The The cool pavement program that
that's out there, um I'm familiar with what the city of Phoenix has done or what they've tried to do. Uh unfortunately, when you get into something like the cool pavement program, it's basically a paint. Um the first test area that the city of
Phoenix did, They put it down what they found is because it was a type of topical treatment. As as it wore, it got really slick. Um just because of what it was and because when you do a whole street
it's different than like doing a like like we have paint on the roads in Old Town where we have the painted crosswalks, but we're only talking something that's 10 ft wide. Um when you do a whole street and and that wears as the street wears,
um it gets very slick. Uh and honestly the pavement temperature reduction has not been the greatest. And the cost is quite high. Um so they ended up milling off their their first couple of test batches.
Um Phoenix hasn't given up on it. But because Phoenix has a lot more money to spend than most other cities in the valley, most other cities are kind of sitting back waiting to see what they test out that actually meets that. Um
because there's not a really good cool paving out there. Until you look at things like uh like the pervious pavement that that that's done normally in parking lots that's concrete. That's significantly cooler. Um but not with asphalt it's very
difficult. >> Vice Mayor Cardello and members of Justice to add on to that. Um yeah, so there was minimal impact to the heat island effect and then a slight increase to the heat for the users. So if if you're biking on one of those
pavements, they saw that the immediate reaction to being on there it was hotter than than it would be on regular asphalt. So you're improving the overall heat island effect, but making the user a little more uncomfortable. And that was one of the things we heard that we
were um not very interested in. so like Scott said again, let's see what Phoenix can play around with and if they can make that better than maybe we can get interested. >> It's since you brought the topic up of of I guess Phoenix's large budget, I understand, right? Bigger city, more
lane miles. Do you have an understanding of how their budget on a on a lane mile basis compares to ours? Um, or other cities in the Valley for instance, I mean, are we I mean, with this new 30 some 30 to 40 million dollar yearly
budget, are we spending more than other cities are on average? Again, averaged out per mile. >> Yeah, I I don't have any exact numbers, um, but I do know, you know, City of Phoenix has is kind of difficult to gauge against
because they've got that T2050 plan. That's a over a two billion dollar pavement it's got more than pavement maintenance in it, but that's really helped out their maintenance program, so, you know, again, it's very difficult to
uh, nobody publishes those numbers and they're very difficult to find. Um, uh, but no, I I don't have a you know, we've got 2,700 lane miles and we're doing around 40 million dollars
worth of work. I know City of Mesa's uh, uh, maintenance budget I think is around 75 million uh, for pavement maintenance, but again, they've got a lot more lane miles than we do. >> Very good. Thanks for the presentation.
>> Thank you, Commissioners. Any other questions or comments? Okay, thank you very much much, Mr. Sebridge. >> Thank you. >> And then up next, we have Mr. Delme, our senior transportation planner
planning manager, who will talk about projects and programs updates. >> Thank you. Good evening, Vice Chair Cardella and members of the Transportation Commission. I'm going to go over generally two topics uh tonight and then go into depth about one
of the projects associated with those topics and then just a reminder of several projects that are going into construction in the near future. So, two topics I want to cover is the budget and and the capital budget in particular and then the ALCP program. So,
um going into the CIP, so Council just approved the budget. So, now it's a perfect time to start talking about the future budget. So, it's a yearly process for us to um evaluate and approve and prioritize these projects. And so, we're just getting into the
swing of starting for fiscal year '27. Um Is it really '27-'28? Um next one that we're Yeah, that's startling to me. Yes, fiscal year '27-'28 is the budget now we're starting to get the projects in a list and start prioritizing as a department. Send it
over to the city manager's office for their review and then start going into the committees and stuff. So, here is the schedule that was from last year that will be very similar to the schedule that we we follow for this upcoming year. That starting in the summer, we start doing this review process, get the list
together, start seeing what can float to the top, start getting prioritized, get the rough list together, and um get some approvals. Then we start going into generally the fall, October, November is the kickoff and then the database opens around that October-November time
frame where we enter all of the projects into the database. And then the first crack at looking at it from um the internal reviews as well as the management review, the the the budget review committee, as well as Council is in the spring. And so, then they take
the full spring to evaluate and give their assessment and their priority of it. So, it is a full process for us and And starting right now um in July to get that list together. So all departments are going to submit new projects annually for the five-year
plan. So as the five-year plans are some stay when it comes to our yearly accounts, we're just usually adding the fifth year onto those projects or we're adding new projects into the to the the five-year CIP. So
the internal CIP committee's review for the alignment on city priorities, funding constraints, and capacity and deliverability and phasing. So the new process generally is looking at not just overloading our project managers, but looking at what capabilities and capacities do they
have to deliver these projects as well as a little more focus on funding constraints and capacities. Trying to make and refine the CIP into a list of of producible products is really what it's coming down to.
Coming to the future for transportation commission presentations, I'll be sure to bring in actual actionable items to this commission starting the fall. Before we submit in that October fall presentation like I did last year, we'll present
what's on the list and what is our priorities so that body can can approve and and vote on that and then an update in the spring on the status of those projects going forward into commission into council. The framework for us, so this was adopted into our transportation action
plan. These are the metrics or the the guidelines that we use to evaluate our capital projects as they come in from being a proposed project to an actual project and these are the general in no ranking and no priority over these just the the guidance that we have. So when
whenever we're assessing a project for its its feasibility or reasons why it should be adopted into the CIP, we look at the asset condition or the state of good repair. Are we needing to do a full reconstruction or change or modify that
asset? So, we're not talking about just regular maintenance, we're talking about a a physical change to the condition, making it a capital asset. Um safety or risk reduction. So, obviously, whenever we're talking about transportation, we're looking at at improving that that
safety for the roadway as well as any of the other transportation um infrastructure pieces in the network. So, that's a big factor for us is is are we improving safety or reducing risk on the network? System operation and reliability.
Obviously, one of the key things that we focus on is making sure that our system is as efficient and reliable as possible. So, big components to why we're going to be putting anything to the CIP. Um external funding and leveraging of those funds, that's a big key part is is there a
project that has that federal or regional funding that is that is allowing our local dollars to stretch as far as possible. So, if we have a project, if we think it's a very valuable and reasonable um project to put in, have we exhausted our efforts to find different uh
resources? The reconstruction of Thomas is a project that we found valuable to the city to do a full reconstruction of of Thomas. We went and found federal dollars to maximize our our resources and provide that project as well as other projects
on the list. And then multimodal benefits. So, looking at the biking, walking, transit, and ADA accessibility throughout the community is another one of the factors to look at. General requests for new projects that we see come across our
our list. So, these are just over the couple years, the broad types of projects that we we incorporate, get requests for. So, it's that traffic signal ITS state of good repair projects, roadway reconstruction
and corridor design projects, intersection safety design projects, shared use path design and multi-modal connectivity. Um the annual accounts for small projects, so we have our our Y accounts or our annual accounts that we add the
5-year our pavement um preservation program is one of those pretty hefty Y accounts that um is less for small projects for but for massive overall of the PCI as you just saw the presentation for. But then we have
several other annual accounts that are small funds for us to go and um as quick as possible go and make small improvements into the network, whether it's the roadway capacity account that John has for any kind of of slight
modifications to signals or to um to the roadways that we can go out and get done as quickly as possible. So we have those Y accounts that usually go in. And then any kind of vehicle purchasing we have, whether it's trolleys or whether it's anything on the street operation side that we need, will go into generally the capital
um list if needed. We just put in something for our street operations as well as as the trolleys went in last year. So funding so plan alignment and funding constraints. So always making sure that
we are in line with the Scottsdale General Plan and the Transportation Action Plan are key considerations that we always make sure we are in line with those. Um always keeping cognizant of our our transportation sales tax. So we have 2% sales tax,
which is our general transportation sales tax that that funds most of our stuff. And then the 1%, which is that local match to those arterial life cycle or those arterial reconstruction projects. And then any kind of regional funding like Prop 479
as we talked about with Aaron as well as the arterial life cycle projects have Prop 479 and then any grants that we have. Um so then the then I wanted to talk a little bit about the arterial life cycle program. So um for as a refresher for
um to talk about it, it's a defined list of of arterial projects that um are funded through MAG or our Maricopa Association of Governments or MPO. They have funded with the regional sales tax of 0.5%.
Um 70% of these arterial life cycle projects. So every we've done this twice now as a city. We The last time we did it was 2019. We provided a list of projects that we thought were acceptable to the arterial life cycle program. MAG ran models and
and did their formulas to figure out if there was acceptable. They accepted a large portion of our projects, prioritized them, and now have moved forward into the proposition, that being prop 479, and that was accepted. So they fund 70% of those projects going forward and then
those cities have to find the 30% local match. The goals of the arterial life cycle program is to widen existing roads, improve and intersections, do construction of new arterial alignments, or bring existing streets to current standards.
So it's a pretty wide and general scope that we can put towards these projects, mostly for the widenings, but definitely for standardizing and modernization of roads as well. I gave an example of Pima, north of Indian Bend, um showing
the road before being two lanes going northbound, one lane going southbound, and then the changes being a median, a curb gutter, uh four lanes, two in each direction, um bike lanes, and then um a multi-use
path and a sidewalk on each side. So that is generally what our ALCP projects do is they convert a roadway like that, put in all of the fixings to make it a modern standardized roadway.
This is a list of the last 40 years, 45 years of projects, 20 years coming up in the future, and 20 years looking back of the roadways that will or have been improved during the ALCP program. So, the blue is
the Prop 479 future projects, and the yellow is the Prop 400 previous or soon to be finished projects on the roadways. So, pretty comprehensive changes done to our arterial network in our city, at least, as well as various
other cities in the valley, um using this program. Um so, Prop 400 had 76 67 um projects with capacity improvements. Prop 479 will have 66 projects with capacity improvements. That would be adding
additional lanes. The remaining projects were safety improvements or accessibility to other modes. So, providing those safety features that limit and reduce those accidents that have serious injuries or fatalities would be the ultimate goal. To highlight Scottsdale Jomax to
Dixileta, this is completed in the fall of '26. We're getting very close as we're as I was talking to Scott and several people before this presentation. I just went up there yesterday. It's coming very near to to completed. Um construction is center construction now is centered
around the Scottsdale and Dynamite intersection. That's the main part that's still under construction. That is getting um raised for both drainage, but will also come with better sightlines and better better turning movements to improve the safety of that corridor, I mean that intersection.
You can see here a little bit of a model of what it looked before, and then what it's going to look like after, or what it like now, just not fully open yet. Um where it has done exactly what I showed for Pima Road, adding those medians,
adding um bike lanes, adding uh a multi-use path on the east side, a sidewalk on the west side, as well as uh several other key features like the lil loos at the at the non-signalized um intersections, for lack of a better
term. Um all these safety features to improve the roadway. So, that is nearing completion. Um significant amount of drainage improvement was done on this corridor to limit the amount of wash over the road. And then curb and gutters, as well as a
right turn bay at Dixileta Drive. I don't want to ever forget that that that is there now. And so, as you turn east, there will be a right turn bay to get into and then turn east onto Dixileta Drive. Coming up, and I just talked about this last month, but want to keep reminding
that three projects are going to start construction, I mean start design, start design in July. Um this is the first start of Prop 479 ALCP projects for us, our phase one, which is going to be these three projects. Dynamite from 56th
to Pima, it's going to be a massive project and starting design coming up in less than a couple days. Um we're going to start with just preliminary designs and then get a new cost estimate of how much it's going to take. Um then Pinnacle Peak, very much just to
the south from Scottsdale Pima, um looking for a roadway widening um design and cost estimate as well. And then Legacy Bridge to add that additional bridge um just south of the existing bridge and finish off that connection. So, those are the three projects that
we're starting up for Prop 479. And we'll hear about plenty of times from me in the upcoming presentations. Then three projects that are started construction, as well as nearing construction, Cactus Trail enhanced
project. This is from 96th Street to Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard. Um it will add this fence, as well as improve the trail right there. A pretty heavily used corridor for this kind of activity, as well as we've I've seen several horses, since I live on Cactus,
on there. So, I know somebody some people will say, "Is do horses or questions really use it?" Trust me, they do. They're out there. And so, it's a really good and enhanced feature for that corridor. Um so, we've had our public meetings and we're starting construction.
Um I know Greg was out there yet today. Has it started construction or was it still just field verification? July 1st, we're starting construction of the fence. So, it's it's right there at the doorstep. 68th Street sidewalks is very much starting construction very soon. I think
we have a notice to proceed meeting coming up right now. And so, we will start construction very soon and get that sidewalk in. And then the Indian Wash path renovations will start as well, as soon as possible, to get those path
renovations done and widen out that that multi-use path in the McCormick Ranch area from 8 ft to the 10 ft with new concrete. And so, with that, I will open up for any questions or comments. >> Thank you, Mr. Dalmay. Commissioners,
questions or comments? Okay, you were thorough. >> Thanks. >> Thank you very much. And then moving on to our last agenda item, which is Transportation Commission identification of future items. So, we do have a list provided that are items
we have discussed previously and some tentative meeting schedules. So, if there is anything you would like to add And note, we do not have a meeting in July. So, our next meeting will be in August. Commissioner
>> I guess I just have one question. I'm happy to see the proposed uh e-bike and scooter restrictions in parks on there. It seems like hot on the heels of a discussion about e-bikes, the Gazette article came out with an article about it became much more of a a public comment. But, I did read I thought that the city was imposing a ban on three
parks. Was that or is that again is that I could have thought it was proposed or is or is happening? >> I think Susan has more information or we could say uh um we'll put it as a teaser. But, Susan, do you have any >> Vice Chair Cardella, Commissioner Davis,
um the article you saw was on this topic. It will not ban the main path through those three parks. Um I don't think it gave that level of detail, but these will be high traffic areas adjacent to the playgrounds,
tennis courts, the restrooms, so kind of off the main path. Um but, that's what we're working on right now with an internal group to post the signage in in those zones. >> Very good. Thanks for having it that already added.
>> Thank you. Okay. Then with that, I will call for a motion to adjourn. >> So moved. >> Commissioner Baker, thank you. >> Seconded. >> And seconded by Commissioner Davis. All in favor of adjournment, say I. >> I. >> I.
>> Opposed? We are adjourned with a vote of 4-0. Thank you, everybody. >> Mhm.