Welcome and thank you for standing by. All participants will be on listen only until the Question and Answer session. I will turn it over to Jennifer Symoun. Welcome to the talking operations web conference, managing travel demand to mitigate congestion. My name is Jennifer Symoun, I will give a brief introduction to the web conferences environment before turning over to Depak -- the session will be recorded. If you have a question you can type it into the chat area on the -- type in the thin text box not the large white area. The presenters will use some of the questions typed into the chat box for a Question and Answer session in the last 30 minutes of the seminar. The presenters may ask questions of the audience, at this type type into the chat pod and send to everyone. The seminar will be posted on the website within the next week. I will type that web address into the chat box shortly. We encourage you to direct others to may not be able to attend to -- the presentations are available for download. A list of useful web links is also available, as well as the presentations from the past two Webinars that have been a part of this series. The PowerPoints will also be available within the next two weeks on the NTOC website, as well as the recording and closed captioning of the seminar. Depak is a research scientist at Patel, technical support and -- contract to the federal highway office of operations. Was one of the key contributors on managing demand services publication, part of the national evaluation team for the urban partnership agreement demonstration. I will turn things over to Depak, who will start things off. Thank you, Jennifer. We have really had a good time during the Webinars, and there's really interesting questions and discussion in previous sessions we have had. The archives are available on the website Jennifer has just put up. Today we are going to be, before we do our introduction, I would like to have a little poll to see if you participated in the previous versions s of these Webinars. Can you just take a minute to answer "yes" or "no," please. All right. I think just looking at the results, there's been about 50%, 60%, attending part 2, and about 50% attended part 1 and 2. I will try to make introductions short, enough background to see what the series is about, and on to the presentation today. Jennifer, could you advance the slide? Today, July 10, we are doing the integration, this is the third of the Webinar series, and in my mind it's the most important models we have, where we tie in the different strengths in strategies in pricing -- and in the previous model, before to identify as an important aspect of demand management, strategies individually have certain effect, but synergistically mixing and matching can have a bigger impact. Today we will talk about integration of different strategies into a comprehensive demand management framework. A little background, again, this is to explain some of the results, findings from the scanning study that federal highway sponsored in 2005, state D.O.T.s from Minnesota, Utah, New Jersey, NTC and federal highways, Oakland. [indiscernible] and London, today's integration case study is from Sweden. Scanning study report is available from the international program website, and link at the end of the Webinar too. Again, demand management for us is about providing choices, travel choices for work location, route, time of travel and mode. It's thinking beyond just mode shift at demand management, more route, time of travel and decision making too. In the broadest sense, demand management for this Webinar series is, in our thinking, is defined as providing travelers effective choices to improve reliability. One of the findings from Europe which will be stressed again during the integration module is the markets are expanding, no longer about work trips, includes, school, leisure, and shopping trips. More than just work sites, just school, special event venues, corridor, sub-areas and regions. Today, the frames we are looking at, conceptual framework, the Dutch model, if you look at it, list of strategies on the right, traffic incident management, lane, speed, control systems, pre-trip information, surprising information systems. Pricing systems. All these strategies can be categorized as traffic management, and -- and both. Demand for the region, traffic and once the mode of destination charge is made, can even move too network demand with the lane choice and route choice. Lessons learned from Europe, again, transportation management is evolving, and the key is integration of travel demand management to planning management operations. Today we have two sessions, the first half of the module, talking about integration of demand management to planning and operations. The second half of the module is a case study from -- Sweden where such integration occurred. This is comparatively -- in the previous Webinar, there's time for discussion. Please type in your questions in the chat window, and I will compile them, have them addressed at the end of the session. First seeker is Graham -- talking about integrating demand management into planning management and operations. Grant? Grant -- Thank you very much, Depak, would you mind opening up the other presentation? Thank you, everyone, I appreciate your time this afternoon, joining us, or this morning, depending on the coast you are located at. I will talk about some examples we observed during our international scan to Europe on how they are integrating, realizing the benefits of integrating many of the active traffic management, demand management strategies we have talked about the in the prior two Webinars. As Depak mentioned, we are going to focus on integration during today's Webinar. Just to set a baseline, something we are dealing with domestically, as well as internationally, but focusing from a domestic perspective, we really have few clear objectives for demand management in our long-range transportation plans. Historically or traditionally we are taking the impacts off the top and addressing that in a more off-model type of approach. It's seldom integrated into the trip generation or -- process. There's an opportunity that demand site strategies could be a component as we start to see how operational or supply management strategies coexist as Depak mentioned in that central framework. So going across the Atlantic into the Netherlands, we were introduced to how the Dutch really embrace the idea of demand management and paragraphic management. They have a policy really focused on reliable travel times for the traveler from door-to-door. They are not having a focus on just a particular corridor or just a sub-set, but their overall policy is driven by the door-to-door reliability. One of the opportunities and one of their goals is to really focus on increased network performance. In order to achieve that, they are integrating through cooperation of modes, jurisdictions and multiple technologies and the public and private sector. What they are striving for is a good mix, a balance that really supports what the needs are, and they try to have these strategies driven by the needs themselves. When we were in Rome we were introduced to their policy, they were focused on a reduction of traffic congestion and air pollution, as well as a concern of the acoustics. In particular, in the historic area, but as well as throughout Rome. They are trying to modify the -- split in favor of public transport, activity promoting strategies and services that support public transport. I will show details on that in a moment. They are interested in traffic safety, as I am sure everybody in the call is, wanting to realize, rationalize the public space, safe guarding the citizens' health, due to interaction with vehicles, and also environmentally, air quality, noise, and livability perspective. That was all reflected in their policy statements. Being a very historic and popular tourist area, they were quite concerned about the historical preservation, preservation of architecture. That was driving several of their initiatives in their policy itself, we gained an appreciation of how they are seeing changes occur as we talked about during the prior session, where they really gained a benefit from air pollution perspective, they gained -- changing to Mopeds or scooters, because of those particular vehicles they realized an increase of pollution, they are revisiting and focusing on that that as well. Access control and marking management, really integrated into the overall transportation management program, the operations of the arterials, they on the right you see arterial based signs that allow them to provide information to the drivers. They have institutional strategies to share that information, to public/private partnerships. They use measures that tie back to land use and the use of clean fuels and the planning of those facilities, they integrate the car and bus technologies for real-time information, so the individuals are allowed to -- Eric, would you take over for a moment, please? I had it on mute, sorry about that. The overall mobility policy in Rome is really meant to bring together a number of policies, both land use, where they are trying to better use land use and rationalize where people live and work, also bringing clean fuel technology, mobility management. For example, they have pretty well E electrified a lot of their rail fleet, had to come up with a new type of hybrid bus, trolley bus to come into the center city so they were using less and less internal combustion engines. Finally they operated mobility management. Italy has a policy all major employers have to have TDM plans. Rome's mobility plan integrates land use, clean fuels and management, they provide information, use technology to provide real-time information on buses and traffic as well. One of the basics of Rome's mobility policy is they sort of rationalized things as a set of consent Rick rings. As you get closer to the core, the controls of the automobiles become strict you are and stricter, if you go all the way to the core, the historic core, the middle, we talked in earlier sessions, you have to pay to gain access into the core. So the nonresidents have to pay to access the central core, discouraging the number of cars coming into the historic center. As you go to the next ring, the purple ring, they implemented aggressive parking pricing in that area, and high polluting vehicles are not allowed into that area. Again, through a permit system, non-catalyzed cars are not permitted in the area. In the green ring they continue to do parking management to discourage people bringing cars into the area, and really, cars are meant to stay outside the very outer ring, that belt way all the way around Rome has a series of suburban park and ride, and they have redone the rail and bus system to encourage people to use suburban park and ride. Again, higher polluting vehicles have to pay a higher permit fee as you get closer to central Rome. They are both tackling air pollution and congestion at the same time in the consent Rick ring concept in the t in the mobility policy. The sngd part of integration has to do with management and operations. How well is demand management integrated into day-to-day operation of the transportation system? In the U.K. the federal equivalent is the highway agency, the motto of their agency, safe roads, reliable journeys and informed travelers. That's what drives their policies, those three statements. Indeed, what they are trying to do is help people understand travel, and the choices they make about travel before they get into their vehicle. They also link service providers to system operators. In other words, people that operate the public transport system, talking with people that operate the road system to make sure the system is efficiently managed. Finally, one thing the highway agency does I was impressed with, talk about travelers as customers, focusing on travelers as opposed to vehicles. They really do try to put a focus on putting customers first in their business plan. Eric, I am back, sorry everyone. Grant: As Eric mentioned in the United Kingdom they how deal with it, they are influencing the travel behavior. You will see here in the right a schematic of how they are trying to have many aspects of transportation services relate to travel behavior and the individuals, from land use to use of coaches, various modes, tourism, travel to work, and other services. They are striving to focus on the districts throughout the nation, and integrating them together. One thing that we observed in our discussions, through actual examples, you will see here one of their marketing campaigns. They really were striving to relate to the consumer, to help them understand the cause and effects of their individual choices, but also to raise awareness of what services were available to them as a consumer in making choices. The highway agencies are proactive in working with developers near freeways and interchanges to try to find a balance between access and operations and choices; and making sure those services can be truly integrated so the land use and demand management strategies are integrated with the overall operations. They are independent of the capital program in that they see a specific need to make that linkage and it's not an afterthought. When we were in Rome, it was actually just several months after Pope John Paul the second had passed away, the Romans shared their experiences of how they truly leveraged, utilized the integrated system they built. As you may be aware, the influx of mourners was overwhelming. Millions of individuals coming to Rome in a very short period of time. One of the immediate issues was getting individuals just from the terminals, from highways, rails, buses or even hiking into Vatican city. They realized in order to do that they had to do something to manage demand, as well as the supply available. So they had the infrastructure in place, they took their transit services and developed a shuttle service system that ran 24 hours a day at a very high frequency. By going to a Saturday schedule they were able to shift resources and bring vehicles in to adapt the change in origin, destination and demand requirements, so the consumers, travelers within Rome were able to get to the Vatican city. They also integrated that with a very strong public awareness campaign. The public that utilized the Roman infrastructure, had places of business, living on a regular basis were aware of what was going on, what services were available so they could go to or from their jobs; or actually telework, not go into the city during that particular time. They felt like it worked really well. Another example is in Cologne, Germany -- they used parking lots, combination of resources that enabled them to provide transportation service says for this international event. another example, demand management and technology, during infrastructure sessions last time we spoke about CIVITAS, I will send what the acronym means, stands for, but they utilized a February nesh number of systems we are familiar with in the U.S., but the use of the various services, they demonstrate a greater balance in the use of the multiple choices they make available; from clean vehicles, electric buses and scooters, and that is a by-product of what they learned about the two-cycle mopeds they originally observed with a mode shift. Integration of demand management as an overall concept. That was quite interesting to observe firsthand. How do we understand the benefits of all these impacts, strategies, techniques, benefits of integrating them versus doing them in an isolated manner, we see that in the Netherlands they are utilizing archived data quite heavily to measure the benefits of what they are doing to trace the cause and effect of initiatives and activities. We talked about that previously with regard to providing pre-trip travel information based on archived data. In Italy we talked about how they use performance-based contracting services for service providers, so there's actually a criteria, and a threshold of expectations placed upon the transit operator, but they do have the integrated relationship with the operations of the transsignal systems and the overall transportation program so there is an accountability that goes in both directions. In Sweden we observed and they shared their standardized evaluation methodologies. That is something that can be quite useful when you are trying to do a benefits analysis, also an evaluation with alternatives and strategies that are of interest in the future. Again, might be of interest for domestically to explore in the future. Don't forget user satisfaction. Throughout the scan we were afforded a great insight into how they correlate the customer being the focus, not the delivery of a project. That was insightful. Domestically, one example was within the highway capacity quality of service at it, TRB where they are talking about the perceptions of the traveler and how it may contribute to the level of quality or -- in the future, signs of that being integrated into practice here in the United States right now. With that, I will turn it back to Eric. I appreciate you stepping if for me. If you would, take over, share the cause study for -- Eric: This module is about bringing it altogether. Really, about the need to integrate demand management into the overall planning process and management and operations. I wanted to provide a case study of a place that had pretty well done that, and to try to provide it as, if not a model, sort of an illustration of a place that made decisions, and most importantly what were the factors for success. Why were they able to truly integrate demand management into their overall scheme. I will talk a little about a town in Sweden, it's in Southwestern Sweden. Some of you may be familiar, a new bridge was opened linking copenhagen, Denmark, with Southwestern Sweden, which was largely a non-urban area to, try to help develop that. One of the towns that's really been one of the high-growth areas is Lund. It's a very very old city, but it has a university, well-known university in Sweden, so it's a relatively medium-sized university town in this high-growth area. Back in 1969 they made a decision to not build a new arterial into their downtown area. Back in 1969 the city council decided they didn't want to invest on a new road coming into the city, and there was a variety of reasons they made that decision back then. Part of it was they were fearful roads were taking over this historic town, and in 1971, two years later, they closed down the center of town to traffic. This funny picture you see on the right is the first day of traffic being closed off into the city center, and those four gentlemen are -- the one is chief of police, one is traffic engineer, the other is the mayor, city council men for downtown lund, having their coffee in the middle of the street. Later you will see a picture of the same street today. Back in 1971 they decided to give priority back to people walking and bicycling. They didn't want to the automobile to be the primary focus of the city center. This is another reason Rome also decided, because in Rome many of the historic pi ass were filled with cars. A sea of cars, they didn't want their downtown area to be viewed as a sea of cars, they were giving priority back to bicycles and pedestrians. Then in the mid-90s they took it a step further and the local planners, politicians and folks from the university decided to put together a sustainable urban transport plan, the acronym is LUNDMAT -- the conceptual framework, and on the outside ring are the five components of their sustainable transport plan. First, they wanted to implement, introduce sustainable planning, and sustainability really has to do with making sure the plans for the future don't negatively impact the economy, social interaction or the environment. The idea was to introduce sustainable planning in Lund, recognition as having a focus on the bicycle, extending public transport as integrated with land use. You will hear about that in a minute, but they were trying to make transportation investment link with smart land use decisions. If there was car traffic it would have to be friendly, and work with large trip generators, schools, employers, implementing what we call more traditional employer trip reduction, opening a -- center, and this is the overall transport plan. To implement came from federal government funds, the other two-thirds from local funds, the point here the locals weren't taking a very large federal grant and trying things; they were investing their own money. 35 % from federal money, the rest from local. The other thing that's important to into, they decided to do them all at once, rather than try they specific project, evaluate, move to the next, or even more common, we tend to do, implement the most popular, the thing that seems to be hottest at the moment, try it. Put all resources there, five or ten years later move to the next technology, project, they decided in an integrated fashion to do everything at once, more importantly, evaluate everything at once. So, the four projects, in addition to the BRT is mobility center, a walk-in place where people can get travel information, and mobility counselors, employer, transportation reps to go out, work with schools, and employers. Also, this focus on improving bicycle infrastructure, bicycle information. Those were the four key components. Their goal, they have a specific performance target. That was to maintain traffic levels at 1995 levels. After 10 years of implementation they wanted to see if they were able to maintain 1995 traffic levels in if their horizon year of 2005. That was the first phase, the second phase is currently ongoing. So, what were some of the impacts of LUNEMAT, they had a goal of maintaining 1995 levels, if you look at the histogram, they normalized levels at a level of 100. 100 equals traffic, in this case it's per capita vehicle use, or kilometers of travel per person. The red line shows car use over the 10-year period actually went down slightly. Car use went down 2 to 4% over the two phases in 1995 and the end of the period, beginning of 2005. Car use actually went down, but the area continued to grow. It was economically very vibrant, the region continued to grow, and they were able to accommodate the growth through public transport and use of the bicycle. Those modes had continued in a per capita basis to increase, using public transport and bicycling, car use down. The two things I really wanted to emphasize here, first of all, this isn't just a reduction in the growth of travel, this isn't reduction in the growth of EMT. This is an overall net reduction in VMT. Travel actually went down, travel levels went down in the city, yet travel demand continued to grow and was handled through the other two modes. The second thing I wanted to really emphasize was the need for evaluation. They did a very good job of doing ongoing surveys of surveying representative sample of all their citizens, not only to see how the individual measures worked, but how travel behavior changed over time. This is a very telling indicator. Tells us you can decouple transport growth from economic growth. Lots of people are afraid to put in car restrictions or demand management measures, afraid it will be bad for the economy. Here's a place that continued to grow vibrantly in terms of population, employment, yet they were able to put a lid on car use while continuing to grow economically. One of the things we asked when we visited Lund, were when the keys to success, others have not been as successful. First, they said education was very important. They spent a lot of money going door-to-door. In many cases they did go door-to-door to give individuals on the choices they have, smarter choices for travel. Many people filled out travel diaries of how they currently traveled. Suggestions were made of how they might be able to travel in a smarter where a using the car less. Education of residents was a huge part of what they did. They involved politicians early in the process, not a plan conceived, gritted teeth, trying to get in through the local process. Local politicians were involved all the way through the process. Politicians, this has gone through more than one cycle, traditional four-year city council term, and politicians, this policy is sustained beyond multiple elections. Now days it's really ins for politicians to support sustainable travel planning to be reelected. It's very much ingrained with the political fabric of the city. Finally, they very carefully, thor thoroughly evaluated the process for -- evaluation is my area of expertise, and I was somewhat suspicious to go in, finding the first place to put a lid on car use, but their evaluation was very thorough, well-done, and I am convinced the impacts they reported really did occur, that evaluation was important to convince their politicians, residents of the -- of LUNDMAT, it's now the norm in Sweden, all major metropolitan areas are required to do transport planning, use a consistent approach to evaluating, as grant talked about before and use common metrics for doing so. One thing I wanted to talk about now, if generically we talked about a city in United States or anywhere in the world with management, what would we see to indicate they were doing a good job of demand management. On the team we put together ideas of those things. This might be another area for discussion. One is a genuine desire to reduce car trips. A thing I find looking other places in the world, policy makers and technicians are not afraid to talk about reduction of car use. It's very normal now days, especially with the energy crisis, but for people to talk about the reduction in car use. I read an article in an international paper saying now that reduction if use of car is declining, still increasing in chain China, and I thought wait a minute, we would never say that, policies be set to reduce the use of car. We talk about fuel efficiency, about conservation, but seldom in the context of demand management a long-term imagine of reducing use of car. Second, there needs to be a belief that you can have a vibrant economy, and have some restrictions, access controls, or to encourage the reduction of demand in certain corridors, times of day. Doesn't mean the car is going away, certain policies can reduce the most congested and polluted areas. The third characteristic of effective integration is there's some buy-in by politicians, technicians and the public. The public is often not a part of the discussion in the U.S., demand management strategies. Less serious treatment of demand and supply solutions, characteristics would be a place that talk about demand solutions as much as supply. I am running low on time, I am going through this next quicker. Maybe the way to talk about it is to end up at the bottom saying that really, demand management and IND graduation of demand management becomes the norm, not the afterthought. It's one of the key strategies for addressing traffic, air pollution and energy. Maybe that's a good way to wrap up these characteristics. Finally, there was a case study in the United States that we looked at where they used TDM during highway reconstruction. This state D.O.T. came back with information of why they felt it was a cost-effective use of money to integrate demand management into their highway reconstruction project. I believe the second bullet is the most important. The TDM strategies reduce the risk of the owner to bring the project in on time, on budget, the risk of adverse impacts, safety impact. It was viewed as an integrative part of risk management, and the public perception ever the positive public perception of TDM really was very useful in helping with other TDM strategies throughout the region. So coming back to the overall conceptual framework, we talked about different strategies in demand management, talked about traffic and travel management, but again, it comes down to choices. There are feedback mechanisms from the strategies on the right-hand side that help users make decisions about choices, on specific facilities or choices of their ultimate mode or destination. I think this conceptual framework helped at least those of us on the scanning trip, the need for choices, feedback loops, and maybe this framework can help you as well. With that, I will turn it back over to Depak for the discussion and apologies for running a little bit long. Depak: Thanks, I think we are okay on time. We have about 14 minutes. We have questions, let's also -- we had discussion items we wanted to present to the group, but let's just go to some of the questions we have so far. I will see how many discussion questions we can get to. The first question is a clarification for the Sweden case study. The focus on pedestrians in the summer, what about mid-winter? Is that a concern in Lund? Travel options in winter? that was an obvious question we had of our host in Lund. In talking to both planners and individuals that use bikes. We were there in the summer. The shift is to public transport. People that would normally bicycle all the way to work will walk or even bicycle to a bus stop, use a bus or BRT to get to work location. In Lund they have secure, weather proof bike park, at bus stops, even in winter. Doesn't shift from bike to transit during the winter. Couple more questions. One of them is, is the role of centralized government planning powers, how important was that in some of the examples cited in Lund and others? How important to have strong central planning government presence? I will take a crack at that. You know, my perception of Europe before going over there was that there was highly centralized government, there was high control of land use, everybody lived in city centers. That didn't turn out to be the case. I found the European situation to are much like the U.S. In Lund, two-thirds of funding came from local level. The initiative came from the local level, not the national government. In the case of Lund it was local decision-making and money that went toward that. Actually, they have the same land use controls where at the local level they make decisions. One thing I didn't mention about Lund, the city bought all the right of way along the BRT line. They are making sure that the land uses are consistent with minimal car use along that line. The city didn't use eminent domain to take those, the city bought the land in the private market in that right of way. So a lot of preconceptions I had about central government didn't turn out to be the case. Having said that, one big difference is the European union, the commission, they make policy. The European union, commission, provides a lot of research toward research and demonstration projects, and sets environmental policy. Most of these are being done for environmental, not congestion reasons. The commission as governing body of the European union has -- want consistent environmental policy across all of Europe, so they pay for a lot of demonstration projects that, for example, raise the awareness of people about places like Lund and try to create additional places where other cities can try what Lund has done in sustainable transport planning. That's where I see the role of central government. Question: Do transportation professionals in Europe actively promote telework options, as ways of managing demand? Is that a strategy proposed? I would say that is, but it's actually not just the professionals, it's organizationally we saw a very strong commitment to public awareness. For multiple strategies, whether it was teleworking, ride sharing, transit, traveler information, choices. That was very apparent, the idea of promoting ideas to the traveler, to the customer, so that customer was more informed of what their choices were. I would like to move to probably some questions relating to the first half of the presentation regarding integration of planning into -- why do you believe there are no clear objectives for demand management? Because the plans in the U.S. focus on capital investment and demand management as more operational, and if so, how could that be changed? That's a great question, because it is a reflection on perhaps the state of the practice today. Historically we focused on capital improvements from a national perspective we have been looking at building the interstate, all capital driven activities. I think we are beginning to appreciate the capital investment side, but also the operations and management of that investment is being mainstreamed into organization all around the country. Example is through Highway we developed guidelines on congestion management process that looks at how do we plan for operations in the planning process that is attempting to draw out the conversation of what operational demand management, active management strategies could we exercise that may not necessarily be high capital activities, but actually may have very high operational or mobility benefits. So I think that conversation is beginning, but I think the question is reflective of the state of the practice, and not necessarily the state-of-the-art. Recognizing there are states of the art going on domestically as well. A follow-up from that question is, have there been experiences on how demand management has been integrated into the four-step traditional process. Is that the best model or are there other approaches being used with demand management strategies? I will take a start at it. Rather than proving it doesn't work, I would say do we have good examples where it has been done. I think we are hard-pressed to see examples where it's integrated into the four-step model. That's why practitioners tend to lean towards doing more off-model type of efforts. There are initiatives underway within federal highway, integrated demand management more on a personal level, the TRANSIMS project, looking at choices individuals make that might involve multiple modes or choices. It's next-generation type of things, activities, beginning to be embraced by some jurisdictions, but a lag where we would like to be, every be on the call, and where we are. Maybe others on the call want to share their experiences. The next question, related to the case study and in general, is the level of participation in travel surveys, in European countries comparable to those isn't in the U.S., do they get more response rate? I will take a stab. We didn't get into that issue. It's of great interest to me, we are having a harder and harder time. The question came of the frustration we have trying to get travel surveys, through the telephone or Internet or in person, it's becoming more and more difficult to get people to do that. One thing I was a little bit surprised about, both the Netherlands and Sweden, their willingness to pay for face-to-face interviews. We don't do that, extremely expensive on a per complete basis. Some some they do in Netherlands and Lund, face-to-face, very expensive, but gives you an incredibly rich data set, and gets you to get around some of the misinterpretations, if you explain to people. I don't know why, if there's research in Europe that said it's worthwhile doing face-to-face, but I was surprised in a couple of cases they were able to afford doing face-to-face one-on-one interviews in a number of places. Question from Andrew Rodney, if I don't get the question write, please clarify in the chat window. Our agency was confronted an issue where locals feel accommodating bicycles on the road network are an unfunded mandate. What has been used to combat this issue? It's not intended to take a poke at the question, more our philosophy here versus there. The way the question was fielded was, accommodating bicycles on the road network, like shall we let bicycles on to our roads. As opposed to saying what is the correct mix of modes and choices, what is the demand for those things, and can we accommodate those with a variety of both intelligent infrastructure, but also with other types of services. So I don't know what it takes to change the philosophy, the mindset, but it is sort of, gee, the bicycle is a nuisance from a system operator. It causes -- there are more deaths by pedestrians and bicycles in an urban areas than vehicles. It's a mindset, until policy makers or head of MPO or D.O.T. says we will give equal weight to various choices and options, it will be more important with what the customer wants, rather than the most efficient way for us to operate the system, or the easiest way to operate the system. It will take a change in mind set so we don't view things as we have, we're protecting our are road system, what does it take for us to accommodate others that want to use the road system in other ways. I hope that is not an unfair poke to the question, the participant, but it does seem to be the way we do thing about things here in the U.S. If I might add, I think it's a mindset or perspective issue, because when we actually came back, reported back to NCHRP and ASHTO, our findings, one remark during that session was that we were really going to have to wrestle with more of a social engineering issue, how we perceive, approach problems, as opposed to let's go out and deploy X, on this particular question the context is how do we deploy a bicycle system, bicycle lanes? Rather than going at it with the approach of, what's the problem, needs context and balance to provide choices. My question on what strategies to combat the issue would be to either follow-up with us or your division office or hit our website for the congestion management process guidelines that give suggestions on how you have, facilitate the discussion of operational strategies, planning, various needs for multiple modes to perhaps make it more performance driven, needs driven, as opposed to solution driven, part of the shift in mindset Eric referred to. The next question is about the scope of TDM. In our presentations we assumed TDM as passenger travel, demand management, what about freight and -- thought ins Europe about freight demand management as parted of the overall TDM? We didn't focus on freight as a specific program area, however, I would refer individuals back to, I think it was the second Webinar where we did talk a little about freight and good movement from Germany and the observations of how they are dealing with the by-products of the towing program they have, trucks are no longer running across the country empty because of the pricing structures they have in place. That was one example. Another was in the delivery of packages to residents in suburbs, having more of a centralized point of pick-up, the third option talked about was idea of consolidated delivery where multiple providers or shippers would consolidate their deliveries and have one vehicle make the delivery to a particular block or neighborhood to accommodate the delivery and , also deal with the congestion concerns. Perhaps the PowerPoint presentation would be of interest. One question before we go to some of our discussion items, we witnessing the same effect on reduction in car travel due to dramatic change ins fuel prices? Maybe more than Europe? Then we don't have choices do accommodate that -- go away from cars, but where do we go to question. I was interested, there was an article, I don't know how widespread, in the newspapers last week that New York experienced a 4% reduction in cars going across tunnels, presumable due to gas cost hikes. The comment was made gas is doing what the pricing initiative politically failed to do in New York. The article was implying that sometimes these things just have to take their -- let nature take its course. I don't agree with that, because I don't think demand management should be reacting to the next crisis, it's the reason for talking about demand management and long-rage planning. That's not a policy, so we are seeing a lots of the impacts through gas prices that, in terms of reduction of VMT, but that will likely be short-lived, or we don't know what impact, because we've never been down this path before, but really that's no way to run a railroad, if you will, to react to crisis. It's better to have an integrated program, and as the question implies, to make sure the choices and options are in place, so that when people make the choice to reduce demand there are other ways to do it other than feeling like they have no option and are being captured by the system. I think that's all the questions we had. I am going to start posing some of the discussion questions we talked about before. Please, chime in as ins. The first discussion question is sort of, talked about demand management, examples from Europe, but I really want your input, responses, who do you think are the key players and agencies integrating demand management in the United States? Type in your responses into the chat. Maybe I will ask a follow-up question since we have such a diverse group. Do you see there's a consistent engagement in your locality of the page offer players being identified or only a sub-group of these individual agencies engaged in maybe a proactive manner? Anybody missing from this list? I see that Carol Perry said that the public is a key participant or stakeholder, if you will. This has been an interesting discussion item recently, because a lot of people that do traditional demand management, carpoolers or -- 15% of commute trips, really aren't a constituency, not like, necessarily all travelers or transit riders or even bicycle users. So how much does the public need to be involved in demand management policy and how can we engage the public in the discussion? Part of it is carpoolers and van poolers don't see themselves as a unique constituency. How can we involve the public? While people are reflecting on that, it's interesting, one responded they don't see display of active players, probably based upon everybody's individual definition of active. Obviously if one person has a perspective, I am sure that others on the call, maybe, share the sentiment or understand the context of how that individual reacted. Hopefully this type of dialogue we are having will bring everybody's understanding and level of engagement to a more harmonized level, so that there is maybe a perception and from a reality standpoint, full engagement. There was one response talking about smart growth -- how do you see their role -- some of the operations strategies and -- TMA for development district? One thing I would say about smart growth policies, some of the ones I am familiar with in California, a lot is tied to public transit'd, trying to link transit infrastructure with complementary lands use. We sort of do less with some of the other modes. There's often a point system put together for smart growth, the community given points if it they are approving development. Here in San Diego you can get regional grants if your community meets certain criteria. Most of those are based on public transport support in suburb an areas, less on -- particularly less on things supportive to ride sharing or working from home. I think part of the key to integration is integrating all choices into smart growth, not just public transit, although that is probably the key. There's often not attention played to other choices. We had a couple more questions pop up. The article about Internet based social sites, opportunities share trips. I think also, in D.C. there's the SLUC slug lines, self-organizing -- have you seen these? The two places I am aware of, maybe three, I would consider to be grassroots shared ride options that aren't part of the traditionally ride share suggest done through computerized matching, interactive matching on the Internet. Three places where matching has happened. The first is within an employer, intranet sites, places where an employee, through certain measures, aliases with their intranet site can match each other, even on a short-term basis, like I need a ride, my car is in the shop. In San Diego, Qualcomm is a big employer, had a system for years under the radar, people didn't know about, just done by a number of employees. The second is, I know Facebook is often used to match trips among college students. We used to have ride boards, anybody going from this town to this down, my son's university promotes Facebook as the place to match up rides for people to get home. There's also more systems being put together to allow people to do on-demand matching. There's a number of systems around the United States to allow a person to go in, register, then do, find shared ride trips on a casual or regular basis. Maybe we see points for the system. Some of the research I have seen or some of the conclusions I have seen is those systems are quite good at matching occasional trips but are used less heavily to arrange ongoing trips. They meet a new market niche, but may not be the primary vehicle for matching trips or arranging shared ride trips. They are a new adjunct to traditional tools. The way I view them. I see there's a dialogue here revolving around the issue of public involvement or input for regional transportation plans. Something I have taken away from our scan to Europe, the issue of engaging or relating to the public about what we're doing from a service provider perspective, service provider being the agencies that provide the infrastructure, the services, the information; the perspective and the motivation of the initiative of that public outreach activity, and the transportation plan outreach, I will put up there, perhaps our motivation is more to get input from the public on what their interests or needs are. Taking that from another perspective, with the Europeans, rather than them asking for the input, they are pushing information to the public to share with them information any about what this service does, what this choice can do for them, how it relates to them as an individual worker. We have this teleworking program, use it if you want. Did you understand your employer participates in the teleworker program, making it tailored to the individual. The standpoint of engaging the public, the degree and perspective is coming from a different direction. My perception, than how we do it here domestically. Would you like to ask other discussion questions for the group? Any other closing thoughts or comments? I don't have one that comes to mind, Eric? No, we had discussed observe how do we measure the success of these programs. Particularly for decision-making purposes, as we get into more integrated packages we are not arguing over fund this project versus that as an overall approach. We tend to fund, evaluate and even defend things on a modal or project basis. We are supporting a transit initiative or a strategy road improvement, or a bicycle program, or traditional TDM program. One of the questions is how do we evaluate all mobility options equally, what are the measures we can use to evaluate? Is it travel time reliability? Some combination of user satisfaction? The technical time and cost variables. Our ability to be able to compare apple and apples across a range of soft and hard measures is going to be a challenge in this area, so if there's any discussion about how do we measure on equal terms demand management strategies versus others, that might be of interest. forgive me for taking a minute to read this comment -- That's a very good comment, observation. I would agree that we are definitely opening the door. I think I know we are doing this workshop in southern California a couple weeks ago, absolutely, with your conversations in California and with the hot lane topics, pricing, that definitely is something that is opening up the dialogue, perhaps in more of an information sharing two-way approach that is perhaps driven in part because there's a cost associated with it, given the nature of it, that will directly impact individuals on a daily basis potentially. I think that's a great observation. The next comment -- [indiscernible] transportation and how we need to decrease it. Might be an interesting way of getting the public involved. Okay. All right, I think we had a really interesting session, discussion. I would like to remind everybody the three Webinar series are also offered as an all-day workshop. Please contact your federal highway office or resource center, if your agency is interested in hosting a day-long workshop, going pretty much through the three modules and brings in a local case study we develop with the help of the agency hosting. Thank you for your presentations, grant and Eric Rick. They are available on the Webinar. Jennifer will send information on the archives, which will be available today. Thank you all again for the session, it has been a lot of fun to do these Webinars. We hope to do it sometime soon. Jennifer: Before we close out I want to show a few slides about the national -- the member organization, the NTOC website, you can learn more about the organization. The website also has the webcast archive page with slide and recordings of previous talking -- currently parts one and two are up and available. The website has two discussion forums, one focusing on high-level or strategic operations issues, the other on ITS deployment, lessons learned. You can sign up for the NTOC newsletter you would receive by e-mail twice monthly, contains calendars, training events, and a set of operations and ITS deployment resources. We do not have a date set for the next talking operations Webinar, likely be in August. Thank you everyone, have a good rest of the day. (end)