At this time all participants are in a listen only mode until the question answer period. I'll turn the call over to Jocelyn Bauer with SAIC. National transportation operation coalition talking operations Webinar entitled I-95 express lanes in Florida: A Project Update. From the Federal Highway Administration who we are pleased to have as our moderator for today's seminar. Today's seminar is being recorded. It will last approximately 130 minutes with 60 minutes allocated for the presenter and -- during the presentation if you think of a question you can type it into the smaller text box on the lower left side of your screen. Indicate who your question is directed toward unless your question is intended for everyone. Please make sure you are typing into the thin text box and not the large white area. Send your question to everyone rather than just the presenter. The presenter will be unable to answer your questions during the presentation but Angela Jacobs will use some of your questions typed in the text box in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. Posted to the national transportation operations coalition or INTOC website within the next week. I'll type that address in to the chat box shortly. We encourage you to direct others in your office who have not been able to attend this conference to access the recording. Available in the if download box or it will be soon. To dun load a file -- download afield click on the philtra would like to download saved to my computer. The presentations will also be available within next week on the national transportation -- the recording and the closed captioning of this seminar at this time I'd like to introduce Angela Jacobs, the moderator of this webcast. Held various positions in the transportation planning field. Prior to joining the federal highway administration in 2000 worked for state and local agency. She also worked briefly at a non-profit organization prior to joining Federal Highway Administration. I'll turn things over to Angela who will start things off. Before I introduce Rory I thought I'd give you background information. I didn't want to take credit for this great idea of coming up with doing these Webinars. We generally have a quarterly national pricing call. That's been hosted for several years now. These calls were focused on hot lands only and they occurred monthly. We should make it a national pricing call where we could do information sharing about -- allow project partners to share information about pricing projects, answer question from other states localities, regional bodies that were interested in familiar pricing project. What happened last fall the Washington state DOT additional format to share the -- Serb surveys of Webinars. So over the rest of this year, there's an intent to host five Webinars that will focus on successful pricing efforts. Some of the effort also be projects like the presentation that Rory is going to do today, but some of the other topics that we're considering is also going to touch on relevant topics as well. Without further adieu I'll going to introduce Rory. Was appointed intelligent transportation systems manager for the Florida DOT. In his capacity overseeing the ongoing implementation and operations of its which include the sun guide transportation management center. This roll Mr. Santana has led several roadway enhancements. Introduced the 95 express high -- to the state of Florida. Prior to that appointment, Mr. Santana served as the district traffic operations engineer leading all state highway engineering an operations efforts for more than a decade. Has served the department for more than 25 years, working in various aspects of project management, such as development, design and maintenance. Mr. Santana has been recognized for his achievements and the -- contribution in excellence in the field of highway endings nearing respectively. Mr. Santana is a proud 1982 graduate of the university of Miami. Thank you Angela. That sounded pretty impressive. Thank you everybody for listening in on this webcast. It's kind of a new experience for me. I am going to go ahead an try to cover a lot of information today. The 95 express, there's enough topics relate today development implementation, operation to have a continue use use of webcasts. Aspects of the project so that I have enough time to go through the performance measures. Numbers received updated recently. I have enough time to go through the challenges we have encountered during the early stages as well as some of the challenges I'm currently going through as far as this project, myself and the team. Again real quickly, south Florida is like many areas. We're still congested. Their annual urban mobility report has consistently rated us in the Miami area as one most congested urban areas in the United States. Travel time measures excessive delay. Typical section was for general purpose -- four general purpose and one hot rock -- high occupancy lane. Was only being used 4 hours a day. 7 to 9 an 4 to 6. Probably about a year and a half or two years ago, we actually tried to take the express lane to 24 hours of operation, we're not making the benefits we needed for it. We got as far as putting the signs out before the public outcry has take them back down. We were able to improve the HOV operation. Prior to this project, the peak period -- 18-miles an hour and the move lanes was a little under 19-miles an hour. That was measured this time last year. This is basically saying the same thing as before. It's pretty demonstrative as -- for the future. This shows that the future does not look better for south Florida. We expect to have a 45% growth and the corresponding vehicle miles to go with it. Which looks pretty bad right there. As transportation professionals and working with a lot of the agencies down here we're not going to be able to address all this just building roadways. We have to go ahead and do some management. Efficiency of what we do put out or what we do have out there as far as infrastructure and be selective on the funds and what projects we put them into. The goals for traffic moration officials as well as the project is to provide a reliable transit -- we've had several projects that we've had in planning stage. Early design stage. Wish list that we've always wanted to implement. Again including PDM projects, transit and traditional improvement projects. Of course to provide the reliable transportation, add capacity for less cost. Not impact community and important for us to provide a sustainable travel. A lot 06 times when we go out there, a lot of us say when we build something it's already at capacity. We wanted to build something that we could control and actually be able to adjust flow with. We want it to be expandable. Luckily, the Miami area partners awarded for urban partnership agreement grant in 2007 to implement the management length requirement. The project's focus was primarily addressed congestion in the I-95 corridor. The east west I-95 project was awarded to a concessionary that is afternoon extended network. Consisted of DOT, Miami state and Brauer -- transit, county express way and the Florida turnpike. The funding that was made available through the urban partnership grant was 43.4 million for the highway and 19.4 for transit. That didn't make up the cost of the first phase of the project, which is at 35 million at this point. We had another 35 million provided by the Florida legislature and the balance is coming out of the DOT's work program. All right. On the bigger picture, the 95 partners committed to a 21-mile facility intended for long distant trips that could connect regional facilities from Miami to -- this is the actual stretch of the road. For those not familiar with south Florida, the lower end in Miami toward the opposite of Miami beach. We're looking at 20-miles of road right there. Along with the project we committed to use electronic toll collection system. Bus rapid transit which included allowing for multicounty transfers which currently we do not have. There is a transfer required for one county to another when you go to the full root. We're going to provide presumption -- we're going to need new buses. Registration is a unique thing with this project. There is requirements for registration for free rides to use the 95 express. This includes three plus car pools, van pools, hybrids who can be free as long as they're registered. The purpose of this was to try to reduce trips versus continuing with family pools as most places. If you have three plus and you happen to have two people with you you can use the HOV lane. Unique project. But very successful. Complementary strategies. 95 is a great corridor for us because we've always tried to do improvements on this. When we started putting in the infrastructures for IT six. With this project we were able to put in traffic management cams are, added additional road rangers which is the service patrol vehicle. We created a couple incident manage response teams that help clear incidences quickly. We weren't ahead and provided a specially equipped response vehicle and a flat bed truck to also help clear these incidences quickly. As another improvement to the corridor, we went ahead and implemented the ramp signaling shortly after the [ Indiscernible ] Opening. We went -- the ramp signaling. This confusing slide basically says from the constraints we had to deal with. First off we were required to keep four general purpose lanes in each direction so that the citizens would not be or drivers would not be losing any of the free lanes they currently had. We would not toll anybody in the local lanes. We were to minimize impacts to the residents and businesses along the corridor if you lock along the area it's pretty close to the roadway. We were limited to the funding we had an we were supposed to do it quickly. To accomplish this, we took the existing I-95 and narrowing all the lanes in the inside medians we were able to change to 12-foot lanes to 11-foot lanes provide and extra lane. Along with the exists HOV was able to create two express lanes. To meet the schedule funding needs the project was broken into two major phases. Phase one would cover the stretch from downtown -- 112 up to the very top of yellow band which is the golden glades interchange for us. It is a major interchange and connects I-95 to turnpike and another couple roads with 70 plus movements. It's one of the biggest constraints in the corridor. To accomplish the schedule, we also had broken up phase one, this portion right here into two sub faces. One -- phases. Phase one 1 covers the northbound portion of most of the yellow portion you are looking at right now, which basically goes from the 112 from the bottom to the glades interchange. That's what we now have open and we've been open since December 5th. They are currently building the rest of this section which will take us to the golden glades to downtown Miami. Phase two, which the plans are not complete for, will take it from downtown Miami all the way up to I-95 and fort lauder deal. Giving us the full 20-miles we're looking for. Speaking of schedule -- we opened the lane the new lane on the I-95 facility May 2008 and we actually commenced tolling December 2009. So it all happened quite quickly. Currently, the cost we're looking at for the first phase of the project when we opened up, we had spent roughly $25 million for the implementation of ITS and tolls equipment an MOT and some design for phase 1A. We had also spent by that time $45 million total. Some of the costs you're going to look at is going to be a little -- not clear because this project is being built by the same contractors, a lot of resources for 1B are being done with 1A. Some of our costs are going to incur from both faces that's why I call it construction casts for 1A. Same for my O & M costs. Right now I'm looking at O & M costs for 1A being above 3 and a half million dollars. Software, operators, road rangers, the instant response vehicles, the ITS maintenance for the infrastructure. The IT supports software support. Now what's important, some of these costs doesn't cover traditional O & M costs, doesn't include utilities. Those are being covered by the actual contractor. Some of these costs like staffing the same people covering 1A will be covering 1A and 1B. I won't need additional staff. This is O & M costs for what I call phase 1A. Here is the interesting part for a lot of people. This is the revenue projections that was expected for phase 1A after it had been in operation for a period of time. Not the initial but after a period of time, the normal range would have been 25 cents to 265. The weekday average dollar 8. Now I talk about PMP more us down here. There is no southbound peak to speak of in -- there is no AM peak period in northbound direction. We have a PM peak period and we're using it 4:00 to 7:00 as the peak period. That's really when we have most of the congestion which is an hour longer than the HOV hours. Was 23.75 and the average weekend day traffic volume was 3640. As you can see our performance numbers from the last month we've surpassed a lot of these already everybody though we're early in the ball game here. There's enough here for Webinar series. A course of schedule, the funding. The funding requirements for phases one and two is over$300 million. We really had only $78 million before we tapped into the farming transportation program. There was items that -- if anybody is looking at this -- we had to do in parallel that would have been better in series. One of those is actually be and get the authority to charge I-95. Go ahead and get legislative approval to how we would toll the facility and how we would actually enforce it. We had a short period of time to go do a lot of serious public outreach. Talking a few months to tell people take the free state an start charging them to use it even if it's a portion of it. The software development. There was no software to operate this facility. So we can have realtime information exchange. Rough estimate of the software development for the first year -- before we opened is a little over a million dollars. Enforcement. We had enforcement resources already for our facility but we knew we would need more because of the unique requirements of the express lanes. There's a shortage of HP officers but we were able to work out resources for them and get them in place before we actually opened. Then another implement challenge for the project was who got access? The first -- early parts of the project there would be more than one access point as we developed, we found out that there would be no access points it would operate smoother. What has occurred since then is that everybody wants a piece of the express lane. People are quite happy with it an they want to have access midstream. This slide, I tried to erase it, would not go away. This is a shot of the express lanes as it is right now. It doesn't look as bad as you look at the dimensions but this is 11-foot lanes. Those are on a one foot separation. Originally they were 20 feet a part. There was problems with people going through them and we went back and put them 10 feet a part. We also gone back to change them to orange so they have contrast between the concrete pavement and the stripes themselves. That helps to reduce the problems. Before we go to performance measures one thing that comes up, this is the PM speeds for the project if you would look at the diagram, the far right column on each one of them is what speeds were before we dead any improvements. The red color would be the express lanes, but no tolls, the blue would be the express lanes once we started tolling and the purple is the express lanes with tolls and ramps and signals. If you look at the preimprovements it was basically 18-miles an hour. Eventually become the express lane that increased up to 44-miles an hour once we added the additional lane. That's the biggest jump we saw on the table. A lot of people say why toll if you can keep the extra lane and keep the speeds up? Truthfully, two reasons, one we wouldn't have gotten permission to put another lane in which is fine. If we added another lane the capacity would have loaded up from around the system. By doing two lanes and putting in congestion -- after we went ahead and -- the general purpose lanes, again, also weren't up after we added additional lanes. You can see there they went to 38-miles an hour. They had significant increase when we had additional lane. All the lanes went up to a little over 40-miles an hour. Going back -- I'm not going go through this in too much details if you go back to the express lane speeds, after we went and started tolling, speeds came up again past 55. The ramp immediately came up a little more. This goes across the board for all the lanes. The average speed went from 18-miles an hour to 50-miles an hour. Needless to say it's pretty significant. This shows the same information a little different format. The orange is the general purpose lane speed, the yellow is all lanes and the green is the express lanes. Dramatic increase. Okay. What I'm showing you here is again performance is very important to us. This is part of our daily performance report that my staff generates. If you look at the first part it's got to event summary that keeps track of how many incidents we have in a 24 hour period whether crash, disabled, debris, how many times we had a lane blocking event. Our volumes are from about 240 up to 300 along the corridor. The tolerate changes. You'll see the PM hours. The minimum rate we charge during that time the maximum rate, the speeds we had in the general purpose and the express lanes and the volume. As you can see here from 4 to 5:00 we had 1.35 an hour. Average speed in the express lane was 60. The volume was a little higher than general purpose lanes. There will be days that you see the volume higher but the twice will be twice as fast as general purpose lanes, which is one of the selling points we had when we first started this project. Okay. February. My last numbers were February. I got them last week. Our toll revenue for February was 384,000. Our toll range was a quarter to $3. Last night was $3.75. We've gone over 3.50 this month. A lot of our performance metrics are going up monthly. They are still not stabilized. The average operating speed was 15-miles an hour over the local lanes. The average toll was 88 cents and that was for the full day. Average PM toll was $1.71 this. Is for February. I think all these number also be going up in March. Real quickly, this is a table that we use for ourselves to look at the speeds for important periods of time for ourself. The delta, the type of speed difference we have -- keep in mind that the weekend difference is 7-miles an hour and the weekday off -- full week is 7-miles an hour. If we get later into the presentation you our going to look at some of the volume and I think personally it's kind of surprising how many people are enjoying on the weekends and off hours it's got value to them fen they don't have that increased speed. The next table shows the number of customers charged what rate. Bottom line the big spike is most customers pay 25 cents or in that range. Very few people -- this is February -- very few people in February paid [ Indiscernible ] That part of the range. This will change this month. I expect a lot higher on the right side and through that hump in the middle range. Another one of the performance measures is make sure the facility is available. Last month, we had -- February, the facility was open for the public to use 94% of the time. We only had it closed for incidents basically a half percent of the whole enter month, which is within -- entire month which is within the range we rant to stay. One of -- range we want to stay. One of the things we're selling is we're reliability. This almost looks wrong but these numbers are what we have. Our local lanes or general purpose lands have averaged 54-miles an hour and the express has averaged 61-miles an hour. That's 7-miles an hour we see from time to time. The p.m. speeds have actually changed a little bit. Some of the trends we're looking at here is people getting used to the express lane facility and the operating characteristics of it, but if you were to look at the local lanes -- we were 38-miles an hour in December. We dipped down a little bit in January and we opened up ramp metering in February. As you see our speeds have gone up in the local lanes or general purpose lanes to about 42. We've only got 2 and a half months worth of data. I'm trying not to make a lot of decisions of what's happening or what we expect from the data we have. I'm going to give you the data and you may want to look at it differently than I do. The weekend speed, we have weekend speeds, again not much different. 6-miles an hour. I'll tell you this last weekend, we were heavy into the teens as far as volumes for one of our weekdays. So there is a desire for people to use it on weekend and off hours. Here is one of the performance measures, how often we keep it above 45-miles an hour. The operation goal is about 50 to make sure we stay above 45 and in February, we were over 45-miles an hour 100% of the time. That doesn't sound right but there was times that we weren't 45-miles an hour, but you take into account there was only a few minutes we were actually over 100% when you round off to a 10th of a percent. That includes peak. Express lane traffic. Our volumes we started with 374 in December. January we went to 590 and February we went to 569. So your volumes seem to be holding pretty much to the same. Since we opened up -- until February we were over 1 and a half million vehicles have used it. I'm pretty impressed myself. Average weekday traffic. This is one of the ones we do monitor. The increase is showing as far as people using the facility. In December, again when we first opened we were pushing 20,000. By the time we got to the end of February we were averaging close to 23,000. I expect it to go up significantly. People are realizing they have to register to use the facility and they are seeing the reliability and benefit of it. This is the average p.m. peak traffic. They are available for you to look at. That is the volume for 3 hours. We're moving slightly more vehicles in February than when we originally started. Some of that is basically again, people learning how to use the facility. Those of you who deal with a lot of traffic, when we first opened you could see the speed slowing down, as the speed's -- as the facility has gotten more reliable, you can see people are not that pensive going over vertical curves an it's much better. We've had days already that has gone into teens, close -- our official numbers come from our partner from the turnpike. I try not to give numbers, but we have again over 14,000 on the weekends and times charging a dollar. That's a dollar per trip with no incidents, speed differences, 5, 6, 7-miles an hour. They do like driving the facility mostly because they don't have to deal with weaving. You get into it and put the cruise control on. We've got to express lane percentage of average weekly traffic. It doesn't mean that much to me as far as this is the one I look at, a lot of my cohorts. How much of the traffic of the express lane traffic is used during the p.m. peak of the express way daily traffic roughly 28% of it occurs during the 3 hours. So people are using it during the p.m. period much more than the other hours of the day, which is good because that's when we want them to use it an get out of the general purpose lane and more capacity. The highest hour traffic has been 2700 for the two lanes, which again, is about 1350. We have had it go over 1400 her lane. This is -- per lane. This is also something I expect to see change this month. Highest weekday traffic, you can see where it's increased every month. It has already gone past this, 25,000. You can come back next mobility and get the new numbers. The monthly revenue. We've collected up to the end of February a little more than a million dollars. January, February pretty consistent about 386,000. This is one we actually look at. Again, what the revenue is on the weekday. So even though we're collecting the same amount of money, you we see that the weekday revenue has increased between January and February. Significantly since the first month when people were getting used to it. Again, this is peak hour revenue, peak period revenue. Weekend revenue. Not a lot of money. A lot of them are a quarter. The last few week's we're seeing a dollar and -- revenue going up next month. Of our trips, these are numbers as far as toll exempt trips that are using the facility. We hope to have more registration and van pools coming up. This is one of those numbers that we expect -- I need to point out, we only have 6. 2-miles northbound at this time. Once we have the south bound we -- they get both trips of the inbound and outbound free. Once we go to 20-mile facility it will be that many more people that will want to take advantage of the toll exemptions so we're -- this is one of our performance measures. Total registration. Through February was almost 3700. Most of it is hybrids. The biggest chunk is hybrids. We do allow hybrids on this facility. Whether that will occur in the future will remain to be seen depending on the traffic and registrations and the volumes operating. We have 40 van pools. If you notice, we have 1700 state county school buses and 900 Miami day school buses. We also allowed over-the-road buss registered for the facility. I'm going to come back to the paren -- recent issues with it. As far as enforcement, we have hired -- we did have extra law enforcement put on board to assist us. We work close with them to figure out the safest way to do the enforcement. How to work with the road rangers so they're safe and the people being stopped are also safe. We have had since the beginning of the project -- just before the beginning until middle of March, we have had -- we offered 1045 assistance from the FHP. We investigated 35 crashes. Speeding 150 and others where you would see things such as the HOV violation. Now, the car pool violation. We cannot really have it divided out the way it is right now the way the FHP provides it but we're trying to define what others are. These numbers are only representing the six mile facility express lanes are in now. Southbound and northbound for the low rangers, we did not necessarily put in dedicated search patrols or response vehicles or FHP for the managed lanes. Reason being we have the experience dealing with -- once something happens on such a crowded facility everybody is affected. Something happens on the general purpose lanes you might as well get them quickly before the express lanes are affected. You don't stop the facility or have to keep it closed for a very long time but also the whole facility including general purpose lanes don't detriment. Leakage. I'm an engineer. Luckily we've had great team members working on this project T Florida turnpike, people who deal with tolls, planners, engineers, operations engineers and design engineers. Some of the words that you all have gone through facilities. Some words you have to be careful. Operation to me meant traffic to me and so forth. Collecting the money an how to process them and so forth. There was a lot of discussions, sidetracked until we were talking different items. Violation is one of those items. The violation of not paying the toll or skipping the toll versus the violation of HOV requirements. Department -- like any other toll agency or facility, we have the same problems that others have which people are not paying their tolls whether intentional or not intentional. Being a new facility we have a lot of people who don't know how to operate the facility. Don't know that they got the wrong path or put the path in the wrong place or other concerns. We're doing the same thing that a lot of other facilities are to stop this leakage as we call it. First off we're using electronic violation enforcement. The -- have them use the facility and still collecting tolls. Enhancing our equipment to try to make it for tool proof if you would. We're also having a very extensive public outreach -- that was very helpful in not just the education but also they helped us as far as registration for the core pools, van pool over-the-road bus etc. Taking more calls to learn about the toll lanes. Constantly talking to customers and others to get that information out, to make sure they know we're trying to make the facility as good a facility as we can. Lessons learned. This could be a whole series of webcasts by themselves. I'll give you the highlights. First off, if you start, you -- most important thing you can do is figure out a concept of operation. How you're going to do it and what constraints you have. Signing the marking was one of our lessons learned. There was not really a clear standard for markings of such facility. Couple of things that cape up with the use of color purple. Do we or do we not use the HOV Diamond? Could it confuse things or not? In the outreach, we had a little issue when we first went out there and put the delineators that separated the general purpose lane from the express lanes, it would have been helpful to have more information to the public, when you come into work you're going to see a few more delineators. Don't get caught in here where you can't go over to the adjacent exits. When we did the public information, we needed to make sure that we were having a consistent and strong message that people could go ahead and easily accept and gets what they need from it. It's important with the timeframe that we had, we had a lot of people work on this project. Probably here all the way to Washington. I don't think there wasn't a consultant or agency that wasn't involved locally. It was a lot of coordination and it was real important to try to keep that message the same across to everybody to make sure everybody was still working on the aspects and the same goals. Another thing we learned is you have to keep the contractor as part of the risk owner. Some of the fun stuff we're dealing with now. As I mentioned before I wanted to come back to the registration. After we opened, we had a whole lot of other requests for registration. Bottom line there were people coming out of the wood work. Illustrate add few of them here. Of course we had law enforcement, they are allowed to use the facility when they are on an emergency call. Taxis of course if I have somebody in the car, can I use it? The answer is no. Medicare fraud unit that wanted to have access. Department Justice and prison vans that want to use the facility. Department of correction wants to use the facility for their prisoners. The upper left hand corner is families. We have people who take their kids to school, not necessarily driving age, take somebody off if you would with a license but they happen to be a family and they want to have the facility to go back and forth to school. This is one of the reasons we had the registration is to avoid this. That the HOV capacity is being used by people who would normally be driving in separate vehicles and by encouraging them to get out that separate vehicle an car pool with the free facility. That's how we planned to meet some of the sustainability and the future of the facility. Another concern we had, we've had vehicles like [ Indiscernible ] Speak was and buss that want to go to the airport that are not necessarily public buses. We've recently had some issues with handicapped requests for this facility. One of the goals was to help on the peak hour spread and try to have people use the more to the shoulder time or off peak times to do the travel. What we've done on our website and this is something that's on our website right now. We showed the predominant rate for each hour of the day from the previous week. We also show what type of speed benefit the express lane had. If you look at this one right here, you will see that basically the highest rates was from 5 to 6 and for$2. The person had left a little bit -- at 4:00 he probably paid $1.75. Encourage the drivers to pick different times. Here is another lesson we're trying to learn. Ideally I'd like to say the facility is going 55-miles an hour across the entire length of it. It's not. If you look at this diagram, my operators manage and monitor the facility. The left hand side would be the southern [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear. ] the north side would be the northern terminus. They are actual detectors, they're a third of a mile apart. The blue color is the express lane average speed. The greenish gold color is the general purpose lane speed. If you look at this chart, the express lanes are doing real good. They are staying above the general purpose lanes in the early part of it. We're looking at twice as fastment at the very end it comes up and slows down for the exit to the golden glades interchange. It is congested. It's always been a bottleneck. One of the advantages that we know that people on the express lanes are getting is that they get into the express lanes if you would, they're a queue jumper -- they can get -- I-95 earlier on was sort of separated as they built an HOV fly over separate from the main line I-95. If you are in a general purpose lane or express lanes you basically stay on the left side you get to use that facility and go right over where as the people in the general purpose lanes are delayed. Now there's delayed -- not everybody is going to take the HD I-95. There's still delays on the north end but that delay is lesser than the general purpose lanes. The question is in this example, the rate was $3.55. The average was 49-miles an hour. The general purpose lanes was 23-miles an hour. The question we are now dealing with is this a value or not a value? I'm not going to try to answer here because that's within we're working out with the public an getting their feedback and so forth. But this is the type of issues we're now working with. Here is another example. A little worse. 357. They're paying more. The express lanes they were down to 33-miles an hour but the general purpose lanes were down to 14. So okay. We weren't 45, we definitely weren't 50 but we were twice as fast as the general purpose lanes. In a case like this what normally -- when we go back and look there was various incidents along the general purpose lanes. So people would jump in, they'll see -- we have extensive ITS systems. If we have an incident on the ITS lanes we'll put in the sign two lanes blocked on the right. People come up, they see the sign, they see the general purpose lanes are blocked an they jump over to the express lanes. The bad part is where we're trying to educate the public, with that increase in demand the rate goes up. As the rate goes up as demand goes up the speed goes down. We can try and toll it greater and keep the speed up but one of our overriding goal is to keep that throughput as high as possible while keeping an acceptable quality of flow. So if we can keep the volumes up, keep the speeds moving without going to stop an go we'll continue to do that. In this case 375 to go 33-miles an hour. We have belt with some concerns with the public an we're still dealing with them as they come in. The few times I have a chance to talk to the public, they sort of understand this. They realize they weren't going 45 or 50, but I was doing better than the guy next to me. Okay. I guess this is my final thought. There's nothing there. With that, I thank you for your time. Hopefully I answered everything and nobody's got a question. Can I be that lucky? Couldn't get that lucky. All right. How do we start? There is a question on -- one of the questions that was asked would like for you to explain a little more detail about the how people get registered to use the lanes. Certainly. The easiest way is to go to the 95 express website and there's a link to the south Florida computer service that's taking care of the registration. They're send you a form. You can register online with a form that will require each driver's information, where they live, where they work, what time they start to work. They look at certain requirements. You've got to basically -- the car pool has to be -- two miles from home end within one mile from work and your end start time those be half hour from each other. You work that close at the work area and your start up about 30 minutes, no greater, you can really truthfully car pool. You have to be a registered driver, licensed driver is to take off other license drivers. Once you get registered you get a sticker, which you display on your windshield. To go real quick on the enforcement, I'm going to add more here. With your registration, your license plate gets added to a database which goes to the turnpikes database. And your registration of the license plate is how you do not get charged when you come through. You do not put a transponder on and when the license plate is red by the cameras they'll be compared by that database, it will sigh you are registered for car pool an you don't get a violation for not having your transponder on. You do not have your 3 plus then you are required to go ahead an put up your transponder so you can be tolled for that ride. Next question. Thank you. Given the current global economy, do you still for see the increases VMT from 1920 to 2030? I guess my first comment would be yes. I have never seen it stop growing. We're already congested and we're going 2 to 3% a year. There's the current economy, project that goes out 25 years. One thing I'll try to look at is the next two or three years may not necessarily project out for the next 25 or I should hope it doesn't project out for the next 25. Either way we're already congested an this is only going to make it better. Thanks. The next question asked, where existing HOV lanes [ Indiscernible ] No. They were 2 plus. Originally they were only two hours a day any direction. Northbound it was only 4 to 6 in the afternoon. Southbound it was 7 to 9. After we tried to do the 24 hours a day, we had to recant -- we did leave it as far as four hours a day in each direction. That's the only improvement we were able to do. We could not go past 2 plus. Do you want to tell them how you weren't from 2 plus to 3 plus whether you had to have legislation or how you got approval? Actually that wasn't that difficult. As most of you are all aware the federal requirements aus to determine what the actual needs would be and if we can justify a 3 plus is needed to operate the facility, efficiently we can do that locally as far as from our own DOT engineers management. We had justification. We looked at the distribution of what we expected. We saw that if we had 2 plus we would not quite have the operation we needed. Just way too many people or way too many 2 plus and we wouldn't be able to provide the service we wanted to for transit and van pools. Now we may come back and have 2 plus with a fee in this facility. Were contracts design build or design bid build? Design bid build. Why did the speed on the express lanes increase once tolls were added to the lanes? Well the free ride -- once you add the tolls people shifted over to general purpose lanes. The free ride was gone if you would. They shifted over to the general purpose lanes. As the facility opened an it was working for a while, people were -- not trying to be a psychologist. People were seeing that it is reliable in the general purpose lane. That's what's important. Some days are different in speeds because only 5, 7, 8-miles an hour. But other days it's 20, 25-miles an hour. I can stay in the express lane and get a consistent ride. Talking to the flips. We're going to do surveys and find out what's actually happening. That's what we're finding out with people we talk to. So bottom line the free ride was over -- The question was have you found the 11-foot lanes cause any problems versus the 12-foot lanes? No. Actually we haven't. Of course it's too early to do a thorough analysis of crash and analysis. We've got an extensive ITS program here and we do monitor the facility. It doesn't appear like we've had any increases as a result of the express lanes as far as any crashes at this point. Including sideswipes or anything that might be expected with the reduced lanes. How often do you change the tolerate through the PNP period and what is the criteria you use? We set up the software we developed. Basically that is a configurable item, how often we change it. Realistically we're changes every 15 minutes. We can go down to a minute if we wanted to. We don't. A very important issue in the early part is to make it a dynamic tolling facility. What was dynamic? It didn't make sense to change every minute because it takes a few minutes for the change to take effect. We found 15 minutes is to start with and it seems to be working for us. The methodology is interesting. We're using the density along the facility, the speed and the throughput to determine how the facility is operating, but we're actually changing the rate based on the increase in demand. To better state that we're not necessarily changing the rate based on what the occupancy is right now, we're changing the rate on how fast the occupancy is increasing. If the speed -- the occupancy density is increasing at a fast rate, we will put in bigger chunks of increases to try and keep the facility from breaking down or slowing up to the point that we can't recover. If it is actually slowing growing, we will put very little, if any, rate change. The facility is decreasing and less people are using it we'll reduce the price to encourage people to come into the facility. It seems to be working well for us. For the next question, if you get a chance can you -- hold on a second. That's not the next question. I'm sorry. Getting out of order here. What percent of out of state plate vehicles used express lanes an how do you track them down? Out of state plate vehicles? Yes. Well, they really would not be in there unless they actually have a transponder. That's one of the reasons why our partners with the turnpike is working with the rental car companies to have transponders then they can use the facility. But if you are an out of state visitor to the area there's no real way for you to use it but you have to be a registered HOV. If you're not register you can't be on there or you have to have a transponder. Play devils advocate an you don't realize you have to register, but you know that you have three people in your car, let's say it's a family an they went down there and they're familiar how easy pass works, how would you address that? They're from Virginia an they come and they have the transponder what happens? That's one of the reasons we recommended removing the Diamond from the facility, we were afraid people from other areas would use that as an HOV elsewhere if they got enough people they would be able to use it. We went ahead and put the Diamonds on there but we are removing them at this point. So that we don't have that type of confusion from people from out of state. If somebody gets on there with a transponder we try really hard on the signing that [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] transponders and so forth. But it does happen. People make the mistake, they get on the facility, they can actually come back and determine what the rate might be and send in a check or they can actually go ahead and talk to the turnpike sun pass people. You give them a Grace out because it's recorded. I'm going to try to simplify it. With your prior HOV data that you had, how can you track whether there's been a growth in HOV users or deterioration since you changed from 2 plus to 3 plus in terms of usage all the caveats you put in there about distance and everything else? Wow. Have you been able to track how it impacted the HOV use? We're doing that type of study this coming month. We're going to do the survey. We've got a pass data. We're going to come in now and do an occupancy count using the facility and see how many three plus we had. How many two that are paying an then compare it with our past experiences. I don't know if I answered that question or not. Well yeah, you did. You don't really have the ability but you guys are trying to get the data. You are still very new and when you get it you'll share it with all of us. One of the short falls that we have in technology is trying to determine how the people are in a vehicle. We can know there's a 3 plus going through registered vehicle, we may not know of two plus but we're going to do all that analysis and see how we're doing. My guess is we're going to be doing better than we were. The value is there. Is there an actual limit on express lanes or can trucks use it? Trucks can not use it. That's defined as a three Axal truck or greater. Trailers can use it. Some of the thank yous we received is from businesses who as we were hoping, use the facility an they can make appointments in other parts of south Florida that -- I bring that up right now because I have a note here from a gentleman who's worker got a ticket for driving a two Axal vehicle. The gentlemen that got the ticket are very happy with the facility. In the pasta were based in Miami. They did a-- 45 minutes to travel up there because they want the workers to be late to the appointments. They can change that. First off the employees are little better off -- Do you -- nationwide trends of lower vehicle miles traveled? How much of the speed increase do you attribute to that instead of -- sorry the you attribute to the additional lane, the speed increase? The two additional lanes? What was the first part of the question? It was a two part question. First part was do you think that the average general purpose lands would have increased anyway [ Indiscernible ] How much of the speed increase do you attribute to the additional lane? The first part is easy. We're not seeing a drop in vehicle miles traveled here. When we looked at the speeds we've gone back and looked at the volumes corresponding with the speeds. We'll have the same volumes before and avenue but with aigrette -- after but with a greater speed now. But that would take out the issue of any reduction travel miles that might be occurring as part of the economy. The second question was attributable to the additional lane? Well, when we added additional lane we went from 18-miles an hour to 38-miles an hour, as far as the general purpose lanes. What percentage of violations are your currently experiencing? Right now we're not really quantifying that number because we know we near a period of start up. We're trying to take care of a lot of our system issues. We're also trying to be -- I should say, we're all on a learning curve, the drivers, ourselves, it's not one number we're looking at right now. We're trying to minimize the leakage as I pointed out before like in any other facility. We are comparable to other facilities though. Okay. Where and how did the express lanes terminate at the [ Indiscernible ] Project and are you experiencing any traffic operation issues? Yes. That graph that we showed you where it slows dun at the right hand side is the north end and there is some geographic concerns there. We're also trying to address additional projects. There is two choices when you get down to the bottom, to the north end. Depending on whether you want to go -- which option you want to take, we may not have a lane balance 50/50 at that end. Another facility versus going up over the I95 extension. So there is an operational issue there and we're trying to take care of it now. Still the overall trip and we're trying to determine where the value is. The trip over all beneficial experience even if you have to slow down or go stop and go nor the last quarter mile if you had an overall speed that was greater than the general purpose lane say twofold. That's stuff we're trying to work out now with the public, what they accept and what's appropriate. How many [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] opportunities exist along the facility to get into the express lanes? There are three different ways to get into the express lanes into the beginning of express lanes. There are no midpoint opening. Just three options of how to get to the beginning of it. One is a mane line on I-95 another is a fly over that comes from the east/west facility at the southern end, the existing one. A left hand fly over that use today be the move lane and forms one of the managed lanes. The other within is the northbound lane coming from I-95. The third one I mentioned is actually a small minor entrance on one of the arterial streets coming from 112. That's just a minor one. There's no midpoint openings. There is quite a few questions so I think you can answer this all at once. The legal authority to define your car pooling or ride sharing, was there anything special that Florida had to do in regards to how you place limits on what qualified them to use the facility? No. We've always had that capability as transportation engineers and the state's always been -- agency has been allowed to do that locally, to change the requirements on the HOV. I think -- okay. It didn't have to go to legislation. It's done -- like changing the speed limit for us. Some people are wondering, they say that children qualify as passengers so I should get that specific with you. You guys are talking about computers. Right. That's like between issues we're dealing with now, the whole idea was to get vehicles off the road. Car pools would have to be created by drivers versus family pools where you just happened to be driving with your kids an friends for lunch and you take advantage of the facility that. Is not being encouraged here. We're encouraging actual trip reduction, which taking your kids to school would not be considered that. Sounds good to me. Are you -- has transit ridership changed on the facility? Well, that's not -- that's not part of the study we're doing. This coming month when we talk to the transit people, but I can tell you we've gotten feedback that there are people happy with this current transit service. The patrons are now getting consistent travel time each day. They like the reliability and the quick speeds. I'm hoping that will encourage people to take transit. Again, once we extend it from downtown Miami to Ft. Lauderdale it should be a valuable -- Are you measuring greenhouse gas emissions? We are supposed to do an evaluation. I'm not quite sure of the details of what they're going to be doing on that one. I may have to default on that question. If someone wants the answer I can gift to them offline. Do some investigation. How does your actual revenue compare with your traffic revenue estimate prior to the opening? Okay. Unfortunately there's one slide there that I gave the projections an I weren't off those other slides so it's hard to compare them. I've got the advantage of seeing stuff right here. Actually I don't have the -- I can tell you we're close to expected. We're having more volumes than expected and the rate might be less than expected. Again, we haven't normalized it. We were up to $3 as a maximum. Our average per month has gone up a few cents. So we're still balancing out but looking at it in the big picture we're still consistent with what's predicted. I was very impressed with how close they came. What is the maintenance experience with the delineator so far? Okay. Depends on if you are maintaining them or not. If you're maintaining them, they AOR not very good: I've done research before we did the project looking at some of the other agencies around the country. I guess the experience they were having is about 115% a year. I was a little concerned with us going to one foot buffer that we're going to lose a lot more than that, but it seems like we're not far off than what was happening with other facilities. They're losing more -- 115% a year at least. But not as drastically as we expected. Changing to orange in the beginning was such a narrow buffer, it's not like you have paper and then you are in the facility and five feet away is delineator. One foot separated. But the orange seems to help. People see them. Okay. I think that is all the questions I'm trying to scroll through and make sure I didn't skip one that we received so I appreciate that. Thank you so much Rory for answering all of our questions. As I mentioned before this is the first in a series of pricing projects. I'm going to pass it over to jobs line at this point. Thanks Angela. We did mention that we would open up the phone lines for any questions over the phone that folks may have. We have a few more minutes left. If Rory can hang in there with us. Let me change to the other ear. The first one is going numb. Operator can you instruct people how to enter in the call if they want to ask a question over the phone line? Yes. If you would like to ask a question please press star then one, unmute your phone and record your name when prompted. Your name is required. To withdrawal press star two. One moment for the first question. Looks like the first question comes from Leon good man, your line is open. Hello? Can you hear me? Yes. I can. I used to be with the board authority in New York. First a comment, I think it's very significant that you are getting some of the speed increase because you have two lanes. There are very few facilities around the country that have two lanes and people complain because they get behind a slower vehicle. I think that's a positive thing. But my question is on the taxis an the [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] here, we have a lot of public transportation to the airports in the New York area and we would welcome taxis going in priority lanes so I'm really surprised that you don't allow taxis. Some of them vehicles might be going to or from airports. Yes and I guess the answer to that is we haven't precluding it in -- right now we just want to settle down with what we have and then reevaluate everything. Okay. Thank you. No problem. Our next call is from Joe roar. I did want to follow up on the question regarding the conversion from the 12-foot to 11-foot land. Does FDOT have any design standard for requiring a 12-foot lane and did you have to go through an exception process to narrow the lane, if so how difficult was that? Yes, yes and yes. We did have design standards. We have the federal, state standards. We did have to go through [ Indiscernible: Speaker/Audio faint and unclear] 7 of them. I'm sure depending on who you who ask it was difficult or not difficult. I'll say it was difficult. People had to overcome a lot of reluctance to minimize standards, reduce standards. There was a lot of concern among myself an our peers but it worked out better than we expected. There were things that had to be looked at. Some of the horizontal curves when you start reducing the shoulder width how that's going to work. How the trucking were going to track on the curves. A lot of widening on that for some of the locations for the trucks to track. If you want you can contact me offline and I'll give you more of that information there. One of the things that help to get it approved is everybody wanted to try this. That includes from the support we have from USDOT, ourselves and our local partners. We were willing to give a little more than we normally would an it worked out. That's how we got this project done so quickly. Hopefully that answered your question or at least avoided until you could call me later. The next question comes from Robert. Your line is open. Yes. I was curious if you had hybrids as a category in the register, I was wondering if you had any operational data from -- tag data, what is the percentage of vehicles that are hybrids versus say HOVs? Just from a tag data standpoint? For February there was 4300 hybrid trips for the month. Not a great amount yet. Okay. I'm sorry. I might have given you some bad information there. I don't know the answer. I really don't. But again that's another one of the things we'll be looking at in the coming months on what the make up of the vehicles are. Sense you put so much emphasis on the HOV3 and all the restrictions, yet -- I presume that hybrids can be a single occupant vehicle -- Yes. They can be. Yet you give them preferential treatment over say a family car pool. They do at this point. It's not that they do, it's back to the original requirements, the federal code that certain vehicles are allowed to use HOV facilities, the Moe for cycles. The so we kept with those same categories as far as for exception, we investigated the HOV and hoping the HOV goes past everything else. But realistically, if I get to the point that my operation is detrimental we'll revisit the hybrids, as being the first one to be considered for restriction. So we can encourage the other rides the HOBs tan buses transit and van pools. So if you would they're first off the list when we go to revisit. We may put ignites in for the airport but not have hybrids. Thank you. All right. Well time is reasoning out now, so it looks like we're going to need to close up at this point. Thank you so much for those great questions an thank you to Rory. I really -- wonderful presentation. Thank you for the opportunity. Great. Let me close out here with some slides on the national transportation operations coalition. As you can see here on the first slide, you can see the member organizations and we encourage you to go to www.NTOC. com to find out more about these organizations. On the next slide here you can see the web address that I just gave you this also contains information about upcoming webcasts as they are planned. They'll be posted there and you can click on the link there and sign up for the webcasts as they come up. Also, the site provides the recordings of previous talking operations webcasts so you can go and research what was done over the past four years or so. We'll also have the slides from today's presentation up there within a few days or rather next week. NTOC has two discussion forms on the high level or strategic issues. You can sign up for the NTOC website for the newsletters that can alert you to any Webinars. That concludes our webcast today. Thank you to Rory an to the audience for your questions. Have a great rest of your day. (end)