Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode for today's call. Now I look like to turn the call over to Ms. Jocelyn Bauer. Hello and welcome to another talking Operations webinar hosted by the National Transportation Operations Coalition. The title of today's webinar is implementing an active traffic management on the I-35W Mn/PASS express lane. I will be giving a brief introduction before turning the session Darren Buck. From the Federal Highway administration. Darren along with Bob Rupert from the Federal Highway Administration will serve as our moderators. Today's webinar will last approximately an hour. Please be advised that our seminar is being recorded. During the presentation if you can think of the question you can type it into a smaller text box at the corner of the screen. The presenter will be unable to answer questions during his presentation but he will use some of the questions take into the chat box for the question and answer session of the last 30 minutes of the seminar. A file containing that audio visual portion of the seminar will be posted to that website over the next week. Asian, recording and closed captioning of this seminar. We encourage you to direct others in your office who are not able to attend to access the recording on line. The presentation today is available for it, and file them a box in the left hand side of your screen. To download the files, click on the file and click the button at the bottom that says say to my computer. At this time, I would like to introduce Darren box. Karen is the Marketing specialist to the Federal Highway Office of Operations and his duties of include overseeing -- prior to joining federal highway in 2008 he worked with in similar roles within the bicycle community and a small federal program creating jobs for people with disabilities. Daren't received an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland College Park in 2005 and is currently studying transportation planning in the Virginia Tech Masters and Urban a regional planning program. Thank-you Jocelyn. Welcome to the latest in as of special series of webinars we have been doing on the pricing topics. This one is about the active manageable process. On Minnesota's I-35W express lanes. We're pleased to have with us today presenting a status on topic, Nick Thompson. Nick is also Program Manager for implementation of the Minnesota urban partnership agreement. And the congestion reduction program in the Twin Cities metro area. Prior to this, the Quest program delivery Manager for the DOT this matter District, project manager of by 94 Mn/PASS and traffic organization manager at T-8 's Regional transportation center. He has been with Minnesota DOT for the past 13 years. But for us with a few introductory reports is Bob Rupert. He is the leader for the transportation management team here in the office of Transportation management. He serves as point of contact for the Minnesota Bergen partnership agreement. Mr. Rupert manages the traveler Information Program for federal highway which includes 511 traveler Information Program as well as the realtime system interrupt integration Management program. Prior to joining FWHA, he worked for a traffic systems installation contractor for the Virginia Department of transportation. In St. Louis Missouri and a member of FIT and IDS America. Good afternoon everybody. Just a couple of statements about the Urban Park as program which forms a lot of basis of what we're going to be hearing about and efforts going on in the Twin cities. Deere and President congestion reduction program are trial deployments by the U.S. Department of Transportation multi modal deployment. Where we are trying to accelerate real world deployments of tolling and pricing also using technology and transit and even in the Twin Cities area, dealing with Delaware and telecommuting initiatives and looking at how these can all work together to reduce congestion. And a soda has been selected along with Miami, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Los Angeles and Minneapolis to density areas. We are the second one to actually start operations of its project, so Miami was first a few months ago last summer. So we're looking forward to hearing from NEC about the efforts that are progressing to move traffic in Minnesota. Nick? Thank you for joining us on this call today. Just a little bit on our agenda, we started our express Lane Program 394 in 2005, and a lot of that transferred to the I-35W, so I wanted to set that up with some overview and performance data from 394 so we can compare and contrast the two different systems. And we struggle sometimes with terminology of managed lanes, told manes and hot plains, and we have all of those in Minnesota, and I wanted to talk about what we would do over the next couple of years and a couple of other managed lanes that we are planning in their area and closing with that to show that that is something we're interested here in Minnesota canticle cost the opportunity to work with. Starting out with some back history, as I mentioned in 2005, we converted [indiscernible] to the hot line and we had that branded as Mn/PASS. That is our hotline system for both 394 and 395 w. And in 2009, which just opened -- Babbitt [indiscernible] on the 30 first of this year and that will eventually be a 60-mile system. We have 18 miles of that which is converting to HOV and that has been in place since the 80's, and 3 miles of that is our dynamic shoulder, where we are taking the shoulder during peak times and making it a hot Lane, and off-peak, closing at and returning it to shoulder condition. What is different about I-35W is we have managed lanes over all lain with the pricing just on one line. We also have a challenge with I-35W in that the middle of it is still under construction. And lastly, I'll talk about our next non Price Management quarter to [indiscernible]. Give me a second, a system is restarting it looks like. Minneapolis St. Paul is a population of a little over 3 million, with like two central business districts. The 394 system goes from our outer beltway [indiscernible] Outer Beltway even further south across the major river crossing into downtown meaning Minneapolis. Tauton Minneapolis CBD is our largest employer and also the head of transportation network but we also have other transit networks founded St. Paul and Mary University of Minnesota campus and between the two downtowns. But both of these Hotline Systems here that we have our feeding the downtown and transit, and the green areas that you see on this map are the two areas that had existing HOV lanes that were converted. A price shoulder Lane was the number piece and had we not had the UPA program, we would have stopped the hot line after construction in 2010 about 2 miles south of the actual destination of that hot line. So that UPA has been a boom for us in terms of completing that transit network and the [indiscernible] Mn/PASS customers are going. And that Orange area was an area when it was indeed but we have no funding identified for the next 20 years so we knew that was a help for us. The challenge was, the middle section here was a project to probably, the crosstown project, the intersection of 35W and 562 has that number one bottleneck in the entire state. It has been a congestion point for decades, a high crash area for decades. Basically when you forced to it freeways to get their various major capacity constraints. We started the construction of the replacement of that interchange in 2006 prior to and prior to us knowing that we're going to convert that court or to a hot network. We were planning on building a HOV plane within that a 4-mile long project and that was under way had that UPA grant. Soak Midway we switched to that component of the design from HOV two HOT using existing funding and modifying contracts. Unfortunately, we had no way to possibly finish the project at the same time that we were finishing the HOT Lane north and south of that section. So we have opened the HOT lane on the green and orange sections there as of September 30th but that this section does not open until fall of 2010. So if it is obvious that we have our whole in the middle of our network for another year. We know it is there and it will affect our performance and will be off to is Laura Start in performance and utilization that were on 394. And I will get into that more theater. This last piece is the red piece is a part that we have agreed to, as far as [indiscernible] that is currently congested part of their freeway that does not have a HOV. So those that want to use that did pass or the HOV have to sit in congestion or 15 or 20 minutes before they can get into that lane, so we are extending that as part of Eric UPA agreement so they don't have to sit in the congestion. And that opens in 2012. So that is a 50-mile corridor. The piece in Orange is northbound only as part of the UPA. Getting back 2394, I wanted to set this up because of similarities but some of the differences between what we have learned -- we have learned a lot from 394, adopted what we thought was working well and made some changes based on operations and flight geometrics. The 394 is unique in that it has a 3-mile section that is irreversible and that does not exist on I-35W. In the Diamond Lane section of that, we are restricting access with striping and double white lines and modifying and opening those up with skips stripes where would want a car to enter and exit build lane. Carpools, trances and a motorcycles were free prayer and they are free today, for both 394 and I-35W and they do not need transponders to use the lane which creates some enforcement issues but that was a key condition put in place by our local officials. It is a fully electronic and dynamically priced system, so the prices change responding to traffic. Here is a graph of 394. What we do with the access point, with the [indiscernible] at the access point, we get the pricing science. We have developed them into to praise an ounce per corridor. So if they are entered from the general purpose Lane, they know there is an access point ahead and they see the price they would be charged if they enter at that point. Once they enter the brain just downstream of the access point, the transponder is red and we use technology that allows read / write capability to the transponders. Those access points are also point where you can leave the lane. One major change that we have done on I-35W is removed the advanced warning sign. We have changed our regulatory and pricing signs and as you see in this example we have both the regulatory and who can use the sign and the pricing on the same sign. We now have pricing on the same side with a green background and regulatory and other signs throughout the corridor. That was a major change based on some rethinking our signing Plan for the corridor. Some innovations for Mn/PASS in Minnesota and some other key HOT lanes is allowing tolling on planes next to of the purpose lanes, that was in 2005 and a lot of people are moving forward. Dynamic pricing of multiple sounds, and fully dynamic pricing that prices for each entry point which can be different from downstream. And then some of our enforcement technology which I will show allows mobile rates of transponders by enforcement as Vehicles Drive by them, and it can tell whether or not that pay a toll. 394 got off to a very good start and has somewhat plateaued. We basically had a pent-up demand for it use of that plane. We saw growth of 3 to 4% in years two and three and in our fourth year of operation ending in April, it basically stabilized compared to year three. That stabilization and this economy is fairly good compared to numbers I have seen in other toll facilities. I think we did very well in here for considering that external influences on travel the eight years. We did see drops in ATT as many cities did, although articles did not drop, they just flat mind. We have sensed an increase in that and I will talk about that later. As we started to market I-35W we have seen an increase in use at 394, putting positive spillover and more signups for trips being utilized on 394 because of our opening of I-35W. As I mentioned, we have the users sign up with in the first six months of this system and then it plateaued fairly flat land until the past year when the market did it, but then, the first week of operations, before we even opened a route that first week, we had 1800 people signed up and it could not even use the road yet. So there was a lot of demand for this system. We had underutilized carpooling and an underused corridor and that was a product that people responded well to. We have also had strong customer satisfaction of both from customer satisfaction standpoint corridor users. They are satisfied with how it works and how the pricing works. Also, we just recently surveyed 394 and Mn/PASS users had a very satisfied reading of the value they receive for the money that they paid it, so that was a strong indication that things we're working well in the corridor. A little bit about how we set the toll price, because it is similar for an identical between the Toll Road. We have a minimum toll price of $0.25 at an maximum of $8 which was sent. Which has for the maximum two I-35W so you could pay $8 for either corridor. Some traffic patterns allow people to travel on both quarters and they paid $8 each per given trip, not $8 per day. It is pricing based solely on conditions of traffic within the expressly in. And we only look at -- Lee is receptors every half mile getting data every three minutes. It did not look at the conditions in a general purpose main to use the value of that lane. It has worked well to maintain our performance major of having speeds above 50 miles per hour 90 percent of the time or greater and we are actually achieving that 98% OR greater all the time with this pricing algorithm, so it works very well. The times we don't achieve that are mostly related to snow events. We do get some snow in Minnesota and in those conditions that general-purpose cranes are traveling five or 10 miles per hour but the basic HOT bling can operate that way or better. -- there is a lot of value but it cannot achieve that 50 miles per hour and people do pay that $8. It goes $8 almost every week and it does only stay there for a limited time frame. We Genesee, after $4, received a big drop in the use of the lane. So for dollars seems to be the price point where people start to make decisions not two use the Elaine so we don't get into the 4 to $8 range very often. We do not Polaris systems 24 / seven. These are peak. HOT planes with the exception of the reversible lanes. In the off-peak, they are general purpose with the exception of the shoulder. Are Peak periods are -- or some other benefits on 394 that we fully expect to see transferred over to I-35W including safety, tracking crashes, overall crashes, not just in the express lane, but we have declined crashes in the quarter since it was opened. The latest data shows [indiscernible] again and the fourth year. With I-35W, we will see a decline in crashes for a multitude of reasons. Number one is we are adding or removing the number one bottleneck for the capacity of expansion and the other improvements we made it through UPA, so I do not want to lead people on to say that the crash reduction was from fully opening the express lane, but one of the positive things we have seen, especially when they open the system and even on I-35W there was a general perception by many that there could be safety issues because of restricting access and pricing and some other technologies out there with lead to a driver confusion, but I think the data has proven and the customers have said that this can be operated in an adjacent facility very quickly. Corridor conditions improve and we saw a big increase in utilization Mn/PASS lane. But also sought travels beats drop in a regular purpose and [indiscernible] plan and after opening her express Lane, we know at this last point that that will happen I-35W also. And we will dramatically increase the expense transit service from the park and ride that is free to the downtown where parking is expensive, and so we expect the Express Lane and others to not have and negative impact on their readership. We expect that to help with vote shift on the corridor. My system is doing a little restart here. Hang on for a second. The enforcement strategy which is key on these express lanes, both on 394 End I-35W we had a major violation rate. We knew that those paying customers would expect a much lower violation rate within those rains means in order that they knew it was a fair system. There were also major changes imposed upon us to allow carpools and users to use the lane without transponders, and in Minnesota we are not allowed to do video enforcement so law enforcement had to be able to read whether they have paid tolls. [indiscernible] for days when they don't have a car pool with them and want to use the lane, so are transponders can turn on and off. Which in itself can create an enforcement issue. They're happy to say that we took a violation rate and have knocked it down 10%. Our goal is to go under 10 percent there also [indiscernible] and I will tell you how that will be. The reason that we believe we have reduced our violation rate is a few key reasons. Number one we have converted violators to toll paying customers because now they have a legal reasonably priced way to use that land whereas they did not before. So a lot of them have converted to paying users. We have measured compliance and targeted problems as we have had enforcement issues and people change how they are violating and try to get around some enforcement strategies and we look around how we enforce those. We also make sure that enforcement is present. Whereas if it was just HOV in this course, it was rarely enforced and it was a low priority. We have made a commitment or repay State Patrol to be out in each court court every peak. So there is an expectation of being caught that did not exist before, and I think that was key to reducing enforcement and will be on I-35W to reducing violations. And Leslie reinforce transponder and toll years. We're not able to increase our fine structure which remains at $142.2 key components to its successful enforcement, if we could get violations under 10 percent it was hard to justify needing those other video and [indiscernible] structures. The picture which is outfitting a two per vehicle, which spent on a 394 roughly $25,000 per vehicle to out fit them with mobile readers, but what this allows them to do is, if you drive by trooper with one of these in your car, they can tell if you take a toll in the last few minutes, and to tell whether the account is a valid account, or whether it has been part of service [indiscernible] bounces up or whether or not it is stolen transponder. These allow them to read the transponders as you drive by them or they Drive by you in a system that has no video tolling. We have been able to do some enforcement on the scoreboard with this technology. So our conclusion is, as we develop I-35W [indiscernible] is that you can convert these and it can be very good. The number one reason coming from customers by the use this system is it gives them a choice that they didn't have when it was just a HOV facility. We found that has very publicly accepted, where it skeptical public in 2005 but it was a non-issue as we developed on I-35W. As everyone knows, it makes HOV, with underutilized them and it makes spillover and it does seem to make better transit and carpools and it really is as up well for I-35W in that I-35W we had a very tight timeline to implement and having 394 in place helped out. Now getting more detail into I-35W, as I mentioned before, we had these four areas, and I will talk in detail and show a video of the price Lane here and here is the traditional conversion of the HOV lane. The difference between the two is in lakes and traffic patterns are slightly different West 394 almost appears suburb to CPB. And there are few real traffic patterns, but distribute belt to belt and a suburb to see beady. So it will have a different traffic pattern. It also has a much higher ADT on the 35 w. And because of these traffic patterns, it is [indiscernible]. It does not have its highest trans survivorship yet but I expect that to be equal or higher within a year or two. And the designs are different going from this note Reversible Road and having I-35W where all lanes are managed and then having the shall remain open. The other key difference is, that double flight line striping caps on 394, roughly 80 miles of diamond lane, roughly 75 percent of that is closed off access with double white lines. And on I-35W, we have reduced this to make it mostly open access, but to accomplish this, we have added more tolling infrastructure so there is more pressing signs and more price points. But I think that was a key lesson learned. We believe it will work successfully on 86 under that scenario but we will really have in some sense two different corridor design options and we can study and monitor to see what the pros and cons are . And it is restarting again. Give me just a minute. The other differences and similarities is on 394, Air Express plane was only a and the I-35W was the only ones we're managing actively. 394 general has eight people foot shoulders where it was easy to pull over vehicles. It is a much more challenging environment for enforcement on the I-35W. Cost structure for calling on 394 was roughly $10 million for the tolling infrastructure. I-35W was much slower in some sense and the toll for the system was put in for $3.5 million including R startup costs for operations, but we also have this managed blamed infrastructure and you will see 171 dynamic message signs which were not cost sensory with 394. So roughly we are investing $20 million in technology and polling infrastructure on the corridor. We did at General purpose capacity before opening the express lane which reduced [indiscernible] which means there will be slower growth in Mn/PASS because there is not as much congestion on the starting point. And the controversial [indiscernible] open-air second toll facility purses the first. And other managed Lane infrastructure, the left lane is the price Lane and this is what you see in the shoulder Lane, and then we have a dynamic message "over the left lane, roughly 4-foot by five which allows us to let dynamically managed speeds for its speed harmonization, and it is different for speeds in the price lane. And this tells whether the shoulder is open or not it goes with the contention of the pricing above. What you see here is the ideal geometrics of the price Lane, and we have 10 or 12-foot shoulders. During peak times we have 5-foot lanes in the section and in the before case we had for, but we have narrowed up hour left and right shoulder is considerably, to really basically no shoulders. We are able to maintain a 2-foot buffer within this still remains section. The 12-foot lanes are not the standard on 35. In other areas we had to go to the 11-foot lanes with a 2-foot buffer and 11-foot across the general purpose and the shoulder lanes. So it varies between 11 and 12-foot lanes. Now we will show a video of the animation of the price dynamic shoulder lane. We are adding bus rapid transit to this corridor and the first online station is what you'll see here. This is part of the across town project that has not opened yet but it will add even a new dynamic where buses will exit the price Lane to the left and picked up in the center median and then entering the price lane. PC overhead gantries here that are spaced about every half mile which have the message signed, consigned and show the advisory speed limit and you see a green arrow over the left lane. Here is a quick animation about how that bus rapid transit facility will work as they pull over and pick up traffic from above. And we mixed in this scenario both the open condition and the closed, so right now you have the open condition. We have not answered the section yet of the shoulder layman, this is a standard area of Mn/PASS on the left hand on the side, coming up is a breach which kinda marks the start of the UPA shall remain project and the kind of the transition point between the standard Maine and the shall remain at how we transition the two. And this is message two. Before the time it says lane closed mile ahead. So right now, it is the open condition in the video and it is treated just like an open condition. We wanted it to act just like [indiscernible] and so driving into it, they are in the express lane and they just stay in the express lane. Because women of the exposures on this to my section of road, which did build the emergency pile offs, there is one of the right. Right now is the transition point, and there is in Road lining we have placed in the road. When the lane is open at the lighting is escapes strike between the general purpose Lane and shall remain [indiscernible] and when it disclosed it is tapered yellow stripe getting people out of thus Mn/PASS Lane and to the general purpose lane. And I can't every half mile of the entire court court with slightly less than every half mile in the shoulder area. And this is the closed condition and a [indiscernible] red X is over the Mn/PASS Lane and the shoulder Lane and but the right hand side those are repeated in half mile and every third mile. The other message signs are a plank in this condition and generally we would only show advisory speed limits when speeds are not free flow conditions. So there's a lot of messaging not going on to drivers and the striping is somewhat dynamic at the transition point and that really is very different than what we did on I-35W. This section that is the in the open condition is essentially five lanes of the corridor. For general purpose and one express lane. That is five lanes and it opens today, it opened September 30th. Are are only three lanes open. So we did not nor do we expect to see congestion in this first section so we didn't set expect to see a lot of use and that Mn/PASS shall remain in this first year of operation. Next year when the across town is completed, it will be five lanes of traffic with five lanes of shoulder. So the tree demand for this will remain really comes into play next year. Will come up to this bridge and that will mark the end of how we ended this lane. We ended with Elaine designation sign and this goes into a split Road and I-35W continues on the right, North, and three lanes continue north but split up into the downtown. So most of the Mn/PASS customers will be heading downtown in transit and this marks the end of the express lane and pricing as they get into these downtown axis of Minneapolis. And we can go back to the presentation now. Now just a few field photos since we opened, to give it more of a real-life perspective than the animation. As you see, I mentioned earlier that our pricing science are different than a 394 and this is going towards separating a regulatory message from the hours of operation message, where you see a regulatory sign here, and we are putting the diamond Signal up with a pricing is on. We do not do that on 394 but I think that is a good reinforcement cool and very simple to do. You can see that we do have a shoulder and this is leading up to the start of the system in the morning. But the length of the shoulder gets down 23 to 5 feet so it is a tough environment for enforcement. We do still have capacity to fill on this quarter, I think this photo was taken at the peak hour, so there is some benefit to using this priced lane. Here is the pricing Lane shown in the closed condition and telling people to emerge out of that plane. And it is also reinforced with a closed message. And one half mile down is the red X over that rain and that red X is repeated. So it is very bright to the drivers and reinforced redundantly throughout the status of whether they should merge or whether they can continue on. And here is a full traffic motion of the LED when it is closed. You can see the tapering away of that lane, and it ends at the red X, and this latest now a shoulder for breakdowns or pull off areas for crashes during the off-peak times. And. Is overhead with it open. You can see that we have turned off the yellow and we have that might White skips trading idiocy the green arrow on in this case. And just pass this bridge, there would be another green Carolina. And this is early in the morning, the morning peak. A little bit of performance early data from October, in general where reconverted thank you 7 to HOT, we are easily achieving our speed standard, it is a posted speed varying from 65 to 60 so it is operating very well so far. Shoulder blade is not getting much used yet because of the bottleneck upstream, so we are seeing variations in speed between 40 and 60 miles per hour but a lot of that Steve to the lack of use and, of times when they are connected in speed, when there is low volume, there is some unusual data that is not evident of the speeds. And when there is the most demand, we're seeing Batchelder operate writer and the 50-mile per hour time frame. It is not broken down yet but the full test of it won't occur until next year. And this is [indiscernible] much quicker for signups than 35W, so we are at about half of the Senate as we did at the same point on I-35W compared to 394. And quickly, what is next, I know we are running long here. We are extending that Lane in 2011 to the south, studying Mn/PASS expansion two many other quarters in our region and the next one will be tougher because we don't have any other HOV plans to convert. In extending that with dynamics be over all lanes occurring between I-35W in the future and future years but we are using the technology. We are implementing high-speed bus egress which will allow buses to go 45 miles per hour on the shoulder with them and the screen technology and looking at another Mn/PASS Lane using a movable barrier. And here is enough of where we are studying expansion. The red and blue are future course we are thinking about. That is the end of the formal presentation. Here are some websites for more information. Let's head right into the questions, there are plenty of them. So first, public transit, I believe you said that public transit riders has increased in the corridor. Do we have any sense by how much? I believe it is in the 10 or 15% range. Part of that was the gas prices went down and stuff like that, but there was a big year in Minnesota that we would have a big drop in transit when we opened this and that people would convert but we have seen none of that. Transit riders have been positive about this. The big thing they see is that it is being menaced and enforced and only valid users are there. So I think writers are the 10 or 15% increase. Okay. You said carpool spreaders had increased? Yes, we had been flat and we have not seen much increase in the quarter auric I-35W. At 394, it wasn't a major increase, but it increased more than I-35W in the same time frame. And we're not sure why, but it has been good politically because a lot of people said it would be the same-four carpooling and we have shone through data and sampling that it has not been. But for years, we had no growth when it was just the HOV lane. We have had a lot of questions where they reduced the shoulder down. Can you talk about how you handled the incidents during peak hours when the shoulder line is open? -handles no events or accident tied incidents? Yes. The I-35W was one of our highest managed in terms of incidents because it was one of our key corridors in the incidents. So we have our highways Service patrol that was operated by DOT that was there before and now we can deaf are helping them patrols through that at a even a higher rate. And that benefit of having them out doing Mn/PASS enforcement is that is an extra unit that can respond to incidents also. So what we're finding is a combination of those to reduces our incident response time, Chris is the before condition because there are more responders out there. We had these corridors heavily instrumented with cameras and detection, and ERA Cellular 911 calls are answered by State Patrol dispatch within our Traffic Operations center. So those that are dispatching the troopers and responders and managing the cameras and managing that managed plane infrastructure are also the ones receiving the 911 calls, sore response time is very quick which is the number one key for managing incidents. In national area, the incidents to still occur. So in that shoulder area we built in these emergency pilaf areas were places of refuge. There are roughly five carvings in place so they can handle two cars, a trooper, a tow and an ambulance. So we have a place to put them and store them in an incident occurs. And then [indiscernible] there is a crash in a right brain and we close off that with [indiscernible] and warned drivers with the advisories before key management and getting them out of the lane in the pants. So the technology allows us to manage this scene far better than the typical corridor. And we also feel that just the investments being made in capacity and reducing congestion really reduces the incidence in itself, with congestion being the number one cause of crashes, whatever we can do to reduce congestion will be an incident benefit in itself. And so far, we have had no crashes have any consequence related to that shoulder operation. You might have touched on this in the presentation but I might have missed it. You talked about a traffic volume in that general purpose planes, as that remained static or has that increased? Now. We have a fairly aggressive ramping on the scoreboard, so we are achieving in the general purpose lanes pique our volumes, 2000 to 2500 per Elaine. So we were maximizing our volumes there. The HOV plans for having volumes prior to conversion of under a thousand. So there is a lot of capacity left there. We're trying to manage our pressing to get a goal target not to exceed 1750 vehicles per hour in the express lane with that single lane, and then the ATT as I mentioned it is in the 394 area. We had a few more questions about speed enforcement. How is the enforcement institutionally handled? We're there any sorts of issues in the interface between the highway patrols to make sure those speeds where being enforced? The State Patrol is the chief agency in charge of speed enforcement on the interstate. We sometimes -- are Department funds speed enforcement off-peak for high speeds, but not for these types of corridors. So we are somewhat involved. The speed limit signs are all advisory speeds and not enforceable speeds. So as we reduce the speed toward speed amortization or try to slow people down, it is not enforceable. We don't have the authority for that yet and we knew that it was chest the nonstarter at this point with their current legislators. So what we thought we reduces its start with the advisory speed limits for the safety and efficiency of the roadway. And we felt in the future, we felt we would be able to adjust variable speed limits that would be regulatory so we nature that are dynamic message signs which display the speeds would have the technical capability to display an enforceable regulatory speed limit, so basically they could display white on the dynamic message Simon, so we are planning for the future when we could have enforceable speed limits using technology with variable speeds. Okay. Could you talk to the extent you are able about how exactly those variable speed limits get set and under what conditions? We are going to start slow, start with more of a, reducing speech in advance of incidents and real slow traffic so that -- and the speed increments will be in five minute increments. We will not displace speeds above the posted speed, so it is 2 miles ahead and traffic is stopped and go and traffic is coming in at 60 miles per hour, we will step down the advisory speed into that 2 miles ahead, for example, 2 miles or a mile and a half and half a mile we reduce it by five, so the variable speeds are trying to step cars down for safety. But they would also be monitoring the speeds at the signs. We're trying not two display a speed that is higher than a current condition at that point. So we are doing using a sensors to feed into using our algorithms so the stepped down speed can if progressively. We are trying to reduce crashes so we are deploying it in that limited fashion. And we will learn how that can increase the capacity of Uruguay 10 accrete 15% if you can harmonize those speeds. We're still working on that side of how we best want to do that, but it is all in our existing sensor systems with their existing traffic software to manage those speeds. Messages, read Exs and Green heroes and such, should there be a crash, that would carry the messages also. So there is a difference between his bid limit and rain blocked messages, so we have a series of operational rules being developed to set the guidelines for how the software works. It is generally going to be an automated process of speeds for the operator to override both systems and override the neck monitor the systems. Someone asked a clarifying question about the station in the animation you showed. Would those be against traffic flow? They are in the median and the buses crossed each other. And where the buses Cross is within the station area. And they did that so that people get out, right side of the bus. So there are gate systems that control when a bus can cross the path of another bus. And may re-enter the freeway with the flow of traffic. If that answers it. Eventually there are plans for three or four of those stations on the corridor. The first one is the one funded at this point. Going back to the vehicle's speed, someone had asked about speed differential between York toll lane and your general-purpose lane. D.C. any sympathetic slowing effect where the told me that drivers are traveling at a previous beats Florida in it otherwise would do to the slow speeds in general lanes? What kind of character is in some of speed differentials? I don't have like a number of when they start to slow down but we do see some sympathy slowing especially when it is very congested. I'll go back to a picture here and the first thing they do before they slow is, they shy toward the inside shoulder as much as they can. But you definitely see that first, so you try to create some gap between them. And then as it gets really slow, that controls Gillespie of the express lane more than rebellion does. -- that controls the speed of the express lane before [indiscernible] says. So it does have an effect, but not too bad. It is manageable. You see the picture up now, you see People's nine points the left shoulder in this condition. The traffic on the right in general purpose is probably in the 20 or 30 m.p.h. range. So they are achieving 50 miles per hour on the expressly by just trying to keep away from the stop traffic. There were a couple of questions about the transponders, and here on the East Coast, we are all about E D past. But and are you compatible or have you considered that? And Do users have to pay to lease transponder is? We have an open technology that we could integrate with you see pass, but right now, we don't have the interagency agreement to do that. It is probably the number-one question that we have received on I-35W is, can I use this with easy past, partly because of the fairly decent connection with Chicago here the fact that it seems to be worth Minnesota's that just make a few trips to Chicago to have that passed system. A high entry there and relative to that market share that we have resisted that to this point but I think that will be something that we have to address, a think there is a growing need especially as we add more and more quarters. Sell down atomic . So that is honor to do list next to see if there is a way -- that is on her to do list next. The cost of the transponders. Will lease them to the users for $8.50 per month. Generally it costs us about 24 or 20 bed dollars for the transponder and then a couple of dollars for the kit and a mailing cost to get it too somebody. So when these in for a dollar 50 a month and that is part of their account management, and then they have a general shelf life of about five years, battery life, on the transponder. Above Donna Nick, I saw one question and I was curious also, do you have any thoughts about the percentage of the free riders, HOVs in the HOT Lane? I do, but I am for getting the number. I think car pool is still higher than paid users. But I do not have that Denver of hand. Could you describe a little bit to the extent you are able two relationship that you have established between traffic density and price? Basically we have a level of service, ABC DEF kind of system that has two things, a minimum and maximum level of service. And the level of service starts out from the highly manuals of basic densities for level service A, minimal 0 to 11 and then 11 to 18 density, so those are our base rates. And we adjust rates based on the density plus the rate of change of conditions. Cell pass as traffic is degrading quickly, will increase the price quicker and if it is gradually increment team, [indiscernible] is looking at that price point and the level of service and retains at that point. And because people tend to leave the lane after $4, we have kind of extended [indiscernible] upper level D and E, we could put more cars the $8 is much harder to achieve, [indiscernible] changed plus two. And that will take the place of the same tables and moved it over to I-35W and it seems to work very well. And sometimes I like it because it is a fairly simple system to understand what is going on, and it meets the objective. So we have been very happy with it. Just a quick detail. Are both of these roads HOV two? Yes. I just have one real quick verification, if there are any truck restrictions or commercial vehicle restrictions on the managed planes? On 394, we are restricted to trucks no greater than 36,000 tons. So basically the large trucks are restricted from that. 35W we have not -- well, we kind of have the same restriction in our marketing material, but there are no regulatory signs on the road that state that. So in essence it is not possible for us to write a ticket for that. However, we do not have a track densities here like many cities, so they generally avoid paying a price or avoiding the peak hours, sell they have in a sense self restricted themselves. It hasn't been an issue to us. I-35W 's court court is a higher truck court courts than 394 -- I-35W 's corridor is a higher truck corridor then 394. So it has been hard to enforce that on I-35W and at this point, it is not an issue. If they are to use it, then by themselves they would obviously have to pay toll. There just by using one lane during peak periods and it is not an issue here in Minnesota. Someone just ask if there was a statutory limit on maximum polls, and related to that, someone asked if you run an operating surplus, what is happening with that? There is not a limit on the maximum toll, but we came to that a dollar toll through a task force of selected community leaders that were charged by the commissioner at the time with establishing that. And that is not set in law, but we are utilizing their recommendation. They did give us the full ability to adjust prices between that 25 and $8 which is nice, and when you have a dynamic pricing, if you need that. That are legislature, but they give us approval for these managed Elaine, they clearly established where revenue goes. On 394, is that we must pay back the construction costs before we can use it for operations in transit services, which has been an issue to pay it back and also pay for operations, but roughly after that is paid back, revenues above operating costs are split 50 / 50 between covenant and Mn/DOT, and that can be used for existing improvements within the 394 court. Soak a specific revenue is generated from a corridor and that is the same process and [indiscernible] that one restriction that would basically have to pay back the toll infrastructure costs first, so you have is little bit more structure there that they have basically pushed more revenue to the transit service than they did on the revenue. So there is a sharing of revenue and it has to stay in the corporate that it is generated. It becomes a little bit more of an issue now because it is easy to track [indiscernible] useful scores and high do you allocates revenues from one court or to another and Heidi allocate operating costs or not match and during operations, so have some challenges in separate costs from corridor to revenues for corridors and meeting our legislative mandates for how we distribute revenue. Joslyn, if you are still on the line, a few people have asked about getting that video. Is there a way to put that up in the final share box? I think so. I guess one question would be for neck as to whether or not it is okay to share that. Yes, you can. You can also put our website in there that has the alternative for downloading and I will put that in here. I think we have it in a few formats now. I know the web site is out there. And there is a shorter video like I showed, a seven minute video that talks about our overall UPA program that has the smaller video embedded in it. So there are a couple of different videos in there out there on the web site. Okay. I am up footing the clip now. But just as a warning, it is about 21 megabytes. Well well people try to swallow that, to what degree was the transit service [indiscernible] on 35W? We have added with UPA funds, we're able to add 2700 new park and ride spaces. And of those, about a thousand of those were in the northern part of the Metro of I-35W, so roughly 1700 were in the part where we have the Mn/PASS plane. And we had the odd rule that we have a transit tag team district that does not tax Oliphant communities in their metro area, so basically if you are not paying a transit task, then [indiscernible]. So with UPA funds will be able to convince other communities in further southern part of the quarter, and that is where we expanded the service further south and added new [indiscernible] so up to 2700 new spaces and new writers strictly through UPA and there was some capacity in the existing trips and I expected it to be greater than that. Obviously with the economy we have seen some downturns with their downtown Minneapolis diplomat said that is one thing affecting transit ridership. [indiscernible] ... expects some growth. Someone asked a question with an abbreviation that I don't know but I will throw it out there. Well, were part and right improvements implemented along with a shy T? And your answer was? Yes. Although from 394 we did not come abetted Barry could park and ride already, and [indiscernible] downtown parking structure. So for 394, we did the add service that we had a service before we open the Mn/PASS. I-35W, we had pretty good service but we added service also. Any documented effect of HOT on next full lanes? Well, we had 394 [indiscernible] and that is a major thing they're looking at. But with I-35W, we haven't studied it yet. And then a question about transponders and how many of this transponders just do not get any use and how much it costs to carry them? Eric utilization rate, on any given day roughly 30 percent of our transponders are used. And generally a transponder, I used transponder, someone that is a frequent user uses it maybe four days per week. They're very few that use it every day. And some that don't use it much by summer, they turn it in in the winter. And very few of the transponders are not used in a month. And it cost, number one of two purposes [indiscernible] processing fees per account, so if it doesn't use, it doesn't cost us any money and gas other than the light of the transponder. If they played in the transponder, and then deactivated its for the battery life of that. Somebody just asked about incident numbers and whether or not they still show a decrease in terms that if you represent them in terms of [indiscernible] rather in terms of the absolute number of incidents as a soccer earlier. I think that would be bigger because of our VMT is up on the quarter because we have seen increased volume. But that would probably even look better. Although I don't think we have studied that. That is an assumption make based on volume and others. Questions on [indiscernible] and if any of these have changed at this access Point? The 394 access points were set in coordination with existing transit groups and where they're coming from. So for the most part we did have to change any routes. I-35W because it is so much more open access, which didn't even consider that issue as an issue at the time. They have changed some but only based on demand. Purely on a transit demand for capacity for change and park and ride locations an increase in service, but not that I am aware of related to access points. Someone asked about an adjacent neighborhood, is that came up in either project. Yes. Noise of course. On 394 Noise was a long standing issue on that score for one particular neighborhood, so we did do a noise for after analysis and it showed new change. On 35W we did construct quite a few noise walls. On the shoulder wall issue [indiscernible] has a tremendous neighborhood impact itself, so just because it was a dramatic construction project. So neighborhood issues are high number of issues in that area related to that construction project, but they get mixed in with our HOT lien also. And I think some of the issues are damp and this time because it was the second time around and they were building, so I think on 394 there were more fears of the unknown that did not have those this time. But some of that standard construction noise issues did come up. Somebody passed asked about, what happens at the merge .20 leads merge back into general-purpose? There is not, for a couple of reasons that we have not realized aspect on 86, generally the access points on 394, either operate as an entry point for an exit point. You can enter and exit at this access points, just the way traffic patterns are and destination patterns, there generally longer trips using Express lanes and generally entering or exiting at an access point, and generally they learn how they should enter and exit relative two positions and we have not seen an issue. And one of our fears was that we see a major issue of people jumping input into slow traffic and [indiscernible] but generally, we have added enough volume to that express lane that there are enough big gaps and people are taking that risk. But on 35W, by having far more open access, it allows people to choose where they want and access better. They are not choosing more [indiscernible] than have to find an exit ramp in that vicinity where they will try to get out a fact plane at a further point, maybe upstream of where they want to but at a point where they feel safer. So so far a think they are operating well. Somebody asked a question earlier and a think someone in the chat pod answered it, but I just wanted to verify the answer with you. When the price is changing, do people get charged for their entire trip at the time of entrants or do they feel the impact of any variable Rate change or read the three minute adjustments? Our message is, if you see the price and you and treat at that moment, and what we do in our pricing has generally their readers are up to a half mile, in some places three-quarters of mile away and in our pricing algorithms, we look back at the lower price displayed on that in the last two pricing cycles so that we can guarantee [indiscernible] and we are locked in where we enter and we will see a lower price downstream of that were higher price but we are assured that when he made the choice to enter the lane, you are charged more than what you saw. And if has been proved to work very well that way. And how far apart are your tolling points? Well that is somewhat variable. There are a lot of entrance ramps and high congestion and they placed the readers [indiscernible] and in some places compass their brief possible road which is 3 miles long has only one reader right in the middle. So it really is variable. It isn't standard spacing, it is based on where the demand is coming from or where they want to go or where there other obstructions are. And that is infrastructure every half mile, so at the most temperate I think it is actually a mile, and they can go up in half mile increments and spacing from there. But it is based upon local conditions is how we determine their spacing. And finally, noncompliance, does the fine structure look like? We did not create any new fines. There are too finds that our officers give out. Number one is crossing a double life line which is obviously a violation that has been on the books for a while. The other one is violating the HOV carpool. So if they did not pay a toll, they are not violating the laws, they are violating the carpool laws. And County by county those signs are said, so there is a little bit of variability because two counties are in place, but generally it is around $142 for the HOV violation. There is another violation the issue of blood hundred $18. But there are moving violations also. Cell they aren't just a fine, they also go on your insurance and your record. So they are probably enough to help lead they are not real steep. Ideally a steeper fines would be better. Okay. I think we are about to run out of time so I guess at this point we will wrap it up. Thank you everybody. Thank-you Darren. To wrap up the webcast, I will give you all a lot of information on the national office of Transportation coalition, and on the first slide in the CT member organizations. We encourage you to go to the website listed on the following slide to learn more about these organizations. The NTOC website contains information about upcoming webcast and also contains a webcast archive page that I've listed in the [indiscernible] operations webcast. We will have the slides from today's presentation and recording up with in the week and, NTOC also has two discussion forums that you can use for the discussion was going on today. One focuses on high level or strategic issues and the other focuses on the ideas deployment and lessons learned. On the third slide, if you can see that you can sign up for the NTOC newsletter that will give you information on other talking seminars and that this letter is emailed out twice monthly. That concludes today is talking operation webinar. Dear Ed, would you like to sign it off? -- Baron, would you like to sign it off? I like to thank everyone for showing up. Block off on her calendar January 20 seventh for our next talking Operations webcast which will not be regarding pricing. We don't have anything on the schedule yet, but with a court to see you again. Thank-you. The concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect this time. (end)