Good afternoon. Thank you for holding. Hello, and welcome to the national transportation coalition webinar. I will be giving a brief introduction about the web conferencing environment before turning it over to the presenter. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. The seminar will last approximately one hour and 30 minutes. The first hour will be for the presentation and the 30 minutes will be for questions and answers. If you have a question you can type your question in the chat box and submit it to the person you choose to ask your question to. The presenters are unable to answer your questions during the presentation, but the moderator will use some of the questions typed into the chat box during the question and answer portion of the seminar . If you did not register beforehand for this seminar and you would like to receive that notification, please send your address to me via the chat box and I will be sure to send you the list. The presentation used today is available for download. To download a file, click with your mouse on the name of the file that you wish to download, and then click on the box that says download the presentation. I would like to introduce Daryl Darren. Now, I will turn things over to Darren who will start things off for us. Thank you. This is the second series that we have been doing on the topic of value pricing. It has been proved to be informative specially for someone like me who is new to this type of realm. We hope you find today's seminar very valuable. We are going to hear from the states and how and why they have went through the pricing, what is behind the decisions, how their transportation agencies are routinely accessing the pricing and the managing as the solutions and the suggestions, problems. And what has been included in pricing the roads. (Speaker/audio unclear at times due to loud background noises). Rob has 29 years with the transportation planning experience split 50/50 between the planning and the highway launching. Rob has managed major planning processes including the [ inaudible ] Washington study and the freight program, and the HOB predesign studies. Joining him from Washington State is Matthew Kitchen in the data system and the analysis department. He has ten years of experience in the planning and economic development. He specializes in the planning and economic financial analysis. Recent work is included in the $3 million behavioral research and the data of the drivers as they are driving to -- [ Speaker/Audio Not Clear ] Mr. Kitchen has served on a number of project panel and classrooms and has presented papers at the national and international conferences. With that, I will turn it over to Mr. Fellows and Mr. Kitchen. Thank you. Good afternoon from Seattle. I want to mention one thing about this first slide and that is I heard I was going to be moving to a new division called the washed-out tolling division. When I saw the announcement for this webinar, I got a little worried. It suggested the process for the planning and prioritizing for tolling projects. I have been working with tolling for a year now. I can't seem to encompass it all yet. I hope we can have a serious tolling decision about it. Pricing, now, is a big part of our policy consideration as part of our metropolitan transportation plan. I'm going to spend a few minutes describing the content and the history with the -- [ Speaker/Audio Not Clear ] (Speaker/audio unclear and unavailable due to loud and interrupting noises coming through the audio line). This is including the toll projects and how the decisions are made and then we will turn it to Matthew. Making the progress in tolling is not just the part of the plans and the methods. They have specific topics. It may be a good thing inevitably, it is a slow process containing the specifics. We have concrete and specific plans that go beyond tolling that they are directed us to pursue. It is important to know that much of the projects that we have went through the DOT and the awareness and the acceptance about tolling. Internally, we have a struggle of keeping the concepts in our minds front and center with the tolling options, policies and issues. That is what we focus on internally. There are a lot of immediate deadlines to deliver and it's always a challenge, I think, to inject a systemic look when you have fast-paced delivery schedules. I am sure you have all been through that. We have two facilities and we are working on a third. I will describe that in a few minutes. The legislator wants us to use it when we have to, but they don't want us to automatically toll everything. A little on the history. We have a long history of tolling throughout the state. We have a 20 year period of tolling eras where all of the freeways were free. And the newest tolling facility is breaking new ground. Wanted to describe a little bit how we got here. A few years ago -- this is not passed in 2005, I'm sorry about that. I should have put a decade ago. This is a period of interest with the legislator who are focusing on the private partnerships which include the tolling. That happened unanimously and that happened a good decade ago. And a few projects for the wash-outs that delivered the tolling projects, five of them went by the wayside, and there is a lot of public opposition. I would suggest that, you know, if it was possible that it was never clear to people why they were paying and others were not having to and getting through for free. It did result in one of the projects that survived which is the [ indiscernible ] bridge. That's the picture in this slide. The [ indiscernible ] bridge started out as a public and private partnership, but our legislator became concerned about the aspect of it and they can [ indiscernible ] the project effectively and brought the project back. That is a public wash-out project. I want to talk a minute about the efforts outside of the wash-out that brought us to tolling so we can have this discussion. One of those was the state transportation commission. The legislator funded an effort that the commission carry out the [ inaudible ] In that case, comprehensively, it is tolling across the state. They proposed -- they recommended 7 potential tolling quarters. I don't have them mapped out here, but there are stars on the map. Meanwhile, the [ inaudible ] council has done several things to promote the tolling, and they are going to be talking about that a little bit more in a minute. Matthew did a demonstration a few years ago about the tolling and that was very instructive. And it has engaged in tasks for the community and the policy leaders. We have discovery institutes. I can't turn my page. Basically, there is a practical thing that has moved us in to the tolling is that we have expensive projects that we have no money to pay for otherwise. We have a bridge which has a limited life, and it absolutely needs to be replaced. I think people understand that here. The cost to do that is much higher than the traditional gas tax and funding that we get paid for. We have an earthquake here that didn't knock it down, but it crippled the freeway here and it need to be replaced and it has gained throughout this status. This is providing the tax funding process on 520, but the rest of the projects would have been tax funded. And that has failed at the tolls. The second time was for the transit piece of that which passed. But the mega projects are sitting here unfunded at this point and the only way they are going to move forward is with non-traditional financing. A couple of years ago or last year, legislation set up a frame work for the tolling in Washington. They established levy tolls in the corridors, and they have the toll rates and authorities. It is sharing. A couple of things that are worth mentioning is generation of the revenue and also in helping with the traffic management. It allows the tolls to continue even after the levy is built. It provides finance. It leaves it open for the mobile options and improvement projects. I'm going to skip a slide here -- no, I'm not. This is the summary in Washington of the [ indiscernible ] bridge in 2007. The [ indiscernible ] pilot project which was converted to the [ inaudible ] lane south of Seattle. It has been open for a year. Both of those have been successful projects and we are working hard on implementing our unique project on the SR 520 voting bridge where we are part of the urban partnership program and we will be establishing early tolling where we will be starting in October 2010 before the bridge replacement begins and that is intended to not only raise the revenue to bring down the finance cost of doing the actual project, but also to manage the traffic while it is going on. It involves the transit, advance technology, and transportation and management efforts. I going to skip through this. We have electronic tolling and if you are interested you can lead this later in the packet. I want to talk a little bit about the -- how the legislation charged us to make a decision on the SR 520. It was a two-part process. The first part of getting to the toll authority was to establish a toll limitation committee and that is made up of the department's secretary, the CO over here, and the transportation member. And it also had a technical program that models the scenarios and diversion aspects. And the summarizing of the legislature for this -- next year. It is a lengthy process. It seems like -- oh, I'm sorry. They also funded several other projects for the feasibility of the express toll lanes in Seattle. Also, a toll lane in the Columbia river which extends to Oregon, and then there are two other highways to extend to [ inaudible ] These are establishing the line items in the legislation. So I said earlier maybe to strongly that we follow the legislatures lead on the toll implementation. It is not entirely true that the [ indiscernible ] takes the position on the tolling implementation. We have a department called tolling Washington, and that is to help it operate officially and upon demand. We just received a federal value pricing award to the plans of the conversion and the [ inaudible ] B lane system, and there is no grades the express lane. I hope that is a subject of some future webinar. We haven't gotten started on that yet. That is it for my presentation. I'm going to turn it over to Matthew. Thanks, Rob. Hello, everyone. We are having an unusually warm and sunny day here in Seattle. I hope everyone else is enjoying the weather. I'm going to talk about where Rob left off and talk about a regional and planning process that we are engaged in. We are updating our regional plan, and the pricing and the tolling is part of the dimension of all of the [ inaudible ] that we are planning and evaluating. We are going to talk about the planning objectives, the updates, the analytical tools that we have developed to help with the assessment of tolling and pricing, and I'm going to talk a little bit about the actual construction of the planning alternatives where the tolling is a major design element, and then I'm going to present, briefly, some data results from some of the modeling and the economic analysis that we have done and then con include with the broad findings and implementations with the other planning processes. We are here at the [ inaudible ] council. We are not only a planning organization, but we have a role under the state planning and development. So the objectives that we have for any regional plan and updates, like the transportation plan that we are engaged in now are broad and conclusive in those functions. To be consistent with those objectives, we have developed a very deliberate process for identifying some of the criteria that we would use for making the assessments for the plans and the alternatives and then developing the final plan that is adopted for our region. That evaluation was fed by the data results, analytical results and those are across the range of the identified criteria. They are listed here. I won't talk about each one of them, but we have specific measures of what we are doing so that those who are involved in making the decisions have the quantitative information on the relationships they have. I am going to talk about the funding measures and the environmental measures with the vehicle emissions and the consequences and alternatives that we are testing. So to facilitate in doing the better analysis, we have a multi-year effort to object to improve our analytical tools. In particular, we have an integrated travel and land use modeling platform where the land use model, [ indiscernible ], and that is a microsimulation model, and the travel model is a trip-based model. We have made specific improvements to the travel-model in the area of pricing analysis. Some of those include the generation model, and this is the first step of the implemented models, and we now have a new -- a new choice model with the [ inaudible ] modes. This is important to our region when we are implementing the rail and in looking at the pricing. We have looked at and updated the approaches of the vehicle -- the vehicle classes and I will show you information for that in a minute. The updates in the value of time have been benefited in the type of researches we were told to do with the imitation of the tolling devices. We have made case of satellite tools with the hot lane optimizing devices. They are controlling the [ inaudible ] east to west. And we have software that helps in creating the surplus as an example that is not taking the aggregate information and putting that towards the cost findings, but aggregating those in the source mass and throughout the frame work. So a quick chart to show you the aggregations for the vehicle classes and the times of day for certain vehicle classes. I want to take a moment to describe the process that we want to develop the alternatives. We knew those were going to be a major design to those alternatives. We started by doing the diversified tests on the hot lanes, various charges, parking charges, tolling, freeway net work, and we have done this in the model without including any of the changes in the networks or the investments and the projects. That was to help us gain the insights and the plan alternatives where we would want to reinvest the revenues in the supply. The process was to first look at the tolling concepts, use the information to plan the alternatives, design the supporting elements to the pricing and the investment packages for each alternative during the evaluation, and that is where we are at this point, and we have not developed the alternatives, but that will be a future step. How this looks for any alternative is something we would be looking into in the rational policy in this case, it's part of the quote by William Victory. It is going to supply the design and the price response, and that is going to give the price policy on the demand. And then we would integrate those in the model and analyze those as a single and analytical package. Briefly, I describe the six alternatives. We have a baseline initiative. We have alternatives and the first one is the price element. The tolling element is a one-lane, hot-lane, network in terms of the expense of our freeway system. There are a minimal amount of capacities on the road way and the transit sides. It has a two-lane net work and that is amongst much of the same in the network, but it also has non related supply, transit supply and that is especially for the rail transit and alternatives. We have issues on the tolling and the freeway network and that is geared towards the highway projects. This is a traditional approach in the highway supply. Alternative four is providing the freeways within our network but it is not specifically to the supply side, it is not just trained to the portion of the network where there are new projects planned. This is a broad application of the tolling amongst the highways. It's a principle as a pilot in the traffic study. What is clear is that I am going to find you information now. The pricing policy can't be completely, independently evaluated with the supply in what is going on now. We have the improvements, reliability, travel time reliability, changes in the operating costs and other measures that are associated with the consumer surplus benefits and costs with those toll payments. We are showing, essentially, the benefits of the toll findings where they are heavily influenced by the alternative three, four, and five by the tolling policy. These are monetary benefits in millions of dollars in the year 2040. We have benefits in the financing and the costs alternatives. These are going to be the cost of 20 to $40 million to allow the direct comparison to the benefit. We are also able to estimate the revenue opportunities associated with it. In this case, the toll policies. The gray bars are the revenues and in the cases of the hot lanes there is a generous amount in the hot lanes. We can also measure and monitorrize the air quality implications and the various pollutants and the case that you will see here and the case that is more of a broad based type of tolling and you see the substantial benefits with the reduced emissions. This is the type of information we are able to generate. We package these along with the other measures that are part of the evaluation measures which were listed earlier. They are being reviewed at this point by our board to make the judgments on the utility and the various applications on the tolling and pricing. All of those pieces can be brought together in a benefit cost. As a result, these were no longer constrained to looking at the benefits and the analysis. You can see that we can give the information to our boards about, essentially, the production opportunity for the economy associated with different transportation alternatives. So in brief, just to wrap things up, what have we learned so far in the analysis of tolling and pricing in terms of regional planning [null] analysis. Setting up the toll rates to maximize the benefits of the users within the system and not to generate or yield large revenues. That brought us up to analytical challenges. And in the case of tolling parts of the network, you have to provide the conversion processes and you have to make adjustments to the toll rates and this is in application of the Ramsey pricing. We also face the challenges in the aspects of the modeling and we have to have reasonable treatments in this time of day and response. We have to make sure there is reasonable feedback in all of the elements of the modeling. In our case this is the potential changes in the land use. In the case of the hot lanes you have to think carefully about the alternatives of what the hot lanes would be . That may not be reasonable for a 30 year out analysis. We also did work on coordinating type pricing, parking pricing, and it should not be a particularly refined approach to providing benefits to the system. Almost any variability in the price and the type of day, it attempts to approximate the prices by the low conditions which are producing sizable benefits to the users. A few of the findings that are broadly related to the planning as opposed to the [ inaudible ] In developing the planned alternatives, we found that there were practical advantages to sitting the pricing policy first and then to apply it. It frankly helps to resolve the potential design problems. Anything to do with pricing, the question of how you use those revenues matters significantly, and in the toll questions, that is answered for you. In the question of the broader planning analysis, this is a major determinant of the toll policy. We found that it is important and we have done it already. We have the mis-sized capitol investments and it becomes redundant in the face of pricing. We do know that more -- in a more refined manner than we are able to represent in our modeled environment, having some variation of the tolls in the specific classes. Finally, there is no real substitute for the proper accounting [ inaudible ] This is some of the disaggregated means of being able to apply the consumer surplus math. We got the next steps. Those are developing the new alternatives and the jury is still out on whether this is going to significantly help the decision makers come to the judgments about whether the pricing should be a greater part of our future or not. We will keep you posted as we find out. Thanks very much. Thank you, Rob and Matthew. Next up is Dan Lamers for transportation planning with the Texas council of government, and he has been a [ inaudible ] since 2005, and he has received his bachelors and he has subsequently received his masters and he is a registered engineer in Texas. And joining us from Dallas' district is Matthew MacGregor . This enabled Matt to work in the urban 25 and the congestions in north Texas. He is engaged with the regional partners, [ indiscernible ] studies, [ indiscernible ] and environmental analysis and pricing objectives. Gentleman, the floor is yours. Thank you. We are going to go through north Texas' experience and the capabilities over the last 15 or 20 years. Yes, it is not morning in Dallas right now, but this is what many residents of the Metro lex wake up to every morning morning. We have not been able to keep up with the capacity of growth that has happened over the years in our region. We are not going to solve our mobility problems as we have in the past with the line of revenue and trying to build our way out of the congestion. The reason they have turned to the toll roads and the capacity, we are receiving a funding short fall of $30 million to operate and maintain the [ inaudible ] system. That is not to add to the [ inaudible ], it is just to operate and maintain the system we want to make sure we are including the HOV component inside our opportunities to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. The opening slide gave you the idea of the type of congestion that we face. This slide is geographically showing you where we are today. Ft. worth is on the left, [ indiscernible ] is on the right, and Dallas is in the center there . If we spend all of our money on maintenance, which looks like what we have to do, and we don't have the money this is what the picture is going to be. It's going to expect to lead to a grid lock in our area. If you plan to build, the picture looks better, but it is still not close to what it was in 2007. This should be noted that the 2010 picture is $18 billion worth of projects in the toll roads and managed lanes. So what would happen if we had to cut $18 billion out of our roadways and our plans? In other words, if we didn't get the $18 billion worth of revenue of toll lanes, this is what the picture looks like. We get congestion which is fairly worst. You can see the metropolitan plan which was developed in 1987. It is abilities and mobilities. That is 130 center line miles with roadways and prices on them. We have the mobility 20/30 which is containing $18 billion. It and the analysis been easy. Literally, in the educational effort to get the money from the sorely needed capacity, it has come from the state legislator who has allowed us to continue to explore the roadway options. It has not been easy. We are reminding our elected officials that money did you want come from the trees and they -- it is not going to fall from the sky. It depends on the time of day, the pricing, the congestion. Not all of these are going to be implemented right away, but they will be phased in to adopt to a future condition. You will see how we are going to introduce the pricing from the first only functional lane which will be introduced next year. The challenges towards this is the [ inaudible ] It's one thing to put this in as long range plans and maps, et cetera, but quite frankly, it's putting them in the [ inaudible ] It's scary and uncomfortable at times, but it is rewarding when you see those who are skeptic of the [ inaudible ] Matt will walk you through the process that we have went through and the policy and how we are putting this type of pricing into practice here in the DFW area. Thank you Dan. I want to slide chairs just a little bit . On a mobility plan, it's important to integrate these too. We can't implement them unless we have good congruence between the project planning and the mobility process. It is kind of like the [ inaudible ] question that is further illustrating the aspects of the regional plan with the air quality and policy direction. Which came first? The chicken, the egg or the road. We would like to know also, which came first, the policy, the practice or the law. You have to revisit each of these over time because one of those have build on the other and in Texas we visit with our legislative sessions every two years and that gives us an update based on where we go through the practices and the research and other technical sides of the equation. We have had five major legislative actions over the last decade or so. They have laid the ground work, initiated the program, refining the program, and it is too early to tell what the definition of the refinement may be. It will be depending on the progress that we can make with the tolling and the pricing. What I want to focus on is: Dan mentioned a bunch of strategies in this region to implement the congestion pricing. We had the [ inaudible ] lane concept and policies. We have a lot of facilities that can be a price-type of project . On these various policies which have been written since 1993 all the way to 2006 where we have adopted the specific managed lane policies, and I will go into that in more detail, but they each build on each other confirming the fact that we want to [ inaudible ] If you have the access revenue, what do you want to do with the revenue? If you have the contributor of the project, then you should share within that game to apply that back towards the transportation. Working through our toll authority, we are developing the policies on the toll roads and that is used for the [ indiscernible ] on the toll roads. We -- we think that we can buy the managed lane facilities in three ways. The top way on the managed toll roads those are on the [ inaudible ] and that is going to implement the congestion on the toll road that can traditionally be done. You can charge more during the peak hours and off-peak it can change a little bit so it is more revenue specific. We have not implemented that on the local toll roads yet, but we have future triggers that may make more of an incentive to do that. On the initiatives of the HOV, that is your hot lane networks. We are looking at that in more detail as we move forward. And the managed express lane is what we are going to employ on the projects and the initiatives. We have the [ inaudible ] express, and we are expanding the facility and we are reconstructing the facility and we are adding money on each of the projects and that has helped to leverage the remainder of the project. We began the process three years ago to develop the policies. We had to ask what the purchase of the managed lanes, what is the elements of the managed lanes, the time of day, the occupancy, is it fixed, scheduled or dynamic, what should the rate be, and how do you vary it by the corridor. We had to take the leveraging and the market-base pricing and we have developed what is called a boxed cap. It allows you to adjust the price below the cap to allow the traffic to move appropriately. You have to have that cap move so it is above the conditions all of the time. The operator can operate under the cap, but if there is a need to meet the cap, they can raise the cap. As they change, you have to reduce it to underneath the cap. We have a 19-point policy. I'm not going to read all of the points, but in the PDF version of the PowerPoint presentation, at the end of it we included the 19 point policy. We have that for you. After six months we think we can have a dynamic pricing. The soft cap can come in to play after you move forward. We are going to have the [ inaudible ] during the peak period. We need some consistencies for the operator. As far as the revenue type of concern, if they are going to return it to 50% to the [ inaudible ] The HOV patron will pay its 50% out of the account. They will keep track of what the rest of the toll is and we will pay the developer or the operator the 50% returned toll. What we mean by that is no transit buses are allowed. The van pools get a 50% discount, we have a low emitting vehicle, the green vehicle, per se, we are not giving you a discount at this time. There is a minimum feed of 50 miles per hour. If they are dropping below 30 miles per hour, there is a return that is going to go back through the region to be distributed to the region. We don't have the funds to return yet, so that is subject to be amended. It was in 1996 that we got this approved. Not all of the policies are in place, but we have a provision. Not all of those in place as far as the regional plan. Those programs provided a better mechanism to implement the management policies that we are looking to develop. The [ indiscernible ] project is in the HOV first. As Dan mentioned, probably about two years from now we will be able to open that up for pricing. And then the [ indiscernible ] in express are the first two pricing lane projects. I have the [ inaudible ] express, [ indiscernible ], and the [ indiscernible ], those are all large projects. Each of the projects if you sum them up there is $3 billion worth of money to be spent on the projects for the construction entities or [ inaudible ] over time. There is a private sector over a [ inaudible ] time frame. This is another map that illustrates that we are making progress within our regional plan. The brown facilities are the managed lane projects. The dark maroon ones are the toll projects, and there are some projects that considered a big major loop that is called loop 9, and that is a long-ranged study. We are making progress on these to have a more forward priced facilities. Some of the future possibilities as Dan mentioned in his strategies, and there is a whole list of strategies we can use. We have the HOV system which is introducing the [ inaudible ] over time as they are getting congested. We have the employer base incentives to reduce the congestion. We want to demonstrate the toll lanes and two to five years from now, we will update and monitor these yearly as required for our future prompts. One of the things we are finding and Dan will echo this as well, but we have a common theme of pricing . We have leaders, transportation agencies, and what changes is the [ inaudible ] to find solutions to the problems. In any of the groups, they are changing every two to three years and some of those in the industry are being maintained and we are talking about those over time to maintain our stuff. We have to stay in an educational mode. That's our biggest challenge is to continue to look in the mirror and answer questions as we move forward. Do you want to echo anymore on that, Dan in. I think Matt is exactly right that the future of where we are going, technically, we can figure out how to make all of the facilities how to work. We can figure out the sweet spots so to speak as far as what to charge under the various conditions and that is the easiest part by the hard part is to help sell projects to the various pieces in the puzzle we have to figure out a way to help them understand the pros and the cons of what we are trying to do. Technically, we are in good shape. Right legislatively and public policy wise we are in good shape, but as we move ahead with the implementation, that can all change. Stay tune as we are moving forward. With that, I think Matt and I will done. Great. Thank you. This is Darren again. We will start hitting some of the questions you have submitted. If you have further questions, please feel free to type them in the chat box. I have been joined by Wayne Burman who is the program evaluator here. The first question is echoing the last point that Dan was making regarding the selling of congestion pricing. Congestion pricing needs to be sold. Is there funding available for the officials to travel to that piece on an application. I ask the presenters if they have concrete examples of the legislators or the administrators who saw a successful application of priced or managed lanes and if that swayed their opinion on it or made them -- converted them if you will. I would say that here in Texas we could probably come up with several examples of legislative champions of toll roads, managed lanes, for example an example, we can come up with a long lane of those who have opposed it, but if you are interested, we can point in the right direction to have you talk to the local officials and the legislators who have strong contact with. I wish there were money to send folks out to see how it really works. There is some misinformation on how it really works. It would be nice to have the elected officials talk to the peers so they can understand it better. We know the examples in Minnesota, Denver, California, and elsewhere across the country, Seattle, and we have our first project in Houston, the freeway, and it seems to be working well in the pricing and the projects that are out there and the time in between, but it is hard to get people out there to see the success in each of the communities. This is Rob in Washington and -- I think there is a lot you can do without travel, of course, to fill people in and show people what is going on in other parts of the country, but we also had back before we had to fill out the state travel forms, but we had people to look at Minnesota. It may be a FHWA question, but we have programs that can be used to raise the awareness with the electives and the policy makers. I know there is a program with the TRB to quantify the performance measures with the toll roads and the managed lanes and the system priced facility and there is a lot of research going on with that. As I said earlier that is the easy part and it only goes so far and it is really help -- I will just pick on this right now, but it is the elected officials and they are concerned about the political livelihood, and I think it would benefit for them to see that the projects work technically and make sense, but politically they are not a death sentence to the elected officials. I think that is the portion where there need to have effort put into it. Okay. The next question is with regards to the revenues. How is that shown with the MPO and the financial stipulations. You are out of my league on that one. That is a good question for Matthew, maybe, but the steps are a big organization that is handled by a small group handled in Olympia. How is the transit and the highway costs split. Sure you know it's -- depending on the alternative, there is a mix. Each of the alternatives over a 30 year period, essentially, have projects in them that range between 100 and -- about 150 and $2 billion. For instance, alternative five, an aggressive investment in the transit capital, and there is nearly $24 billion in the transit abilities of the capital in our funded baseline. And there is $8 billion in the highway capital and it is a transit to of $35 billion roadway capitol package beyond the funded baseline in the smaller transit. It varies quite considerably. And in the cases where there are modest tolling in the hot lanes and the networks, that's going to have a benefit on the lanes rather than the toll policy. Revenues in our planning process as it is distinct in the tip, but it is not really something that we have to worry about yet. We have the minimal toll projects in the operation. They are the cost benefit problem with the transfer, essentially, and that is from one portion to the other. There are cost implications not necessarily for the beneficiaries of the given problems. That is an interesting area. We have had a few questions with the transit. Can you characterizing, if you haven't already, the roll that transit does play in your plan . This is Rob. I think in the DRC scenarios, they are looking at the toll revenues and using those for a different purpose. That is one area that comes into play. The transit areas are in accordance of the projects and the partnerships within the 520, and, you know, it is hard to know exactly when you are nailing down the connection between the transit and the tolling except through the [ inaudible ] question and the managed lane question. This is Matthew. I think there is a strong opportunity for sinner Gilberto -- synergy. What we do is work with our local transit authority and we try to marry where they have the parking right stations or the light-rail stations with access to and from the managed lanes. Sometimes it will be a [ inaudible ] where you have to merge into the traffic, which will help to incorporate the routing when they are open. They are not going to put the bus routes on the freeways, that is not acceptable. We are operating at the 50-mile average. That is a long-term benefit while they open. We have a van pool where the employers can have a van and pool their employees and there is a benefit there. There is a transit and passage for the HOV employees, and you can arrange the buses within that capacity. That is the benefit of it. This is Dan. I will add to that and say that specifically the speed guarantee that we are offering in the managed lane and essentially the ability to manage the traffic to any type of the tolling or the price structure on the road system that you might have the transit on you may provide an ability that is going to go hand in hand on what the transits are. A lot of the corridors are looking at the potential, uses of the managed lanes as they are perhaps expressed by [ inaudible ] It is maybe even a bus-type of rail corridors where you want to have and try some of the long range transit corridors in the roadway before you invest in the rail corridors. I think the benefits of pricing goes hand and hand with the [ inaudible ] I don't see why we can't pull it together. In our area, pull it together. In our area, we have partners in the managed lanes process. One more problem that is relating to the revenue is that the cost of this is so large that there is not a tremendous amount of money that can be returned immediately. It has to go back for debt, operations and maintenance. There may be excess revenue, and you want to ideally put that in the transportation as the needs may come up. Okay. Next question is with regards to Matthew to -- with regards to tolling and whether or not the toll revenue that is coming out of people's pocket, is that disposable income, and were you able to assess that through the economy as a multiplying effect. Not directly. The other way to think about this is: In no case are we generating the revenues in the excess of the costs and the investments that are involved. If you didn't generate that from tolling you have to generate it from other financial instrument those are likely to have a larger distortionary effect extraordinary if they are displacement of the economic tax increases. We have accounted for the revenues as a transfer and precisely in the way that the taxes are referred to as the toll revenues. It's interesting. In any of the facts where they are a benefit or a toll paid as a transfer, those are likely to be capitalized in the other markets. Transportation is a drive to man, so they are going to be capitalized elsewhere. Frankly if you ask a dozen of commuters you will get two dozen answers, so I am not sure that we have a good answer for that. Okay. I would -- public reaction. For each of the representatives, how did the general public who is driving react to this and how they have initially and over time. Do you want to start in Washington? We have only the two operating projects and I will say that there has been a significant success and that is because up until the bridge was open, it was one of the worst places to be any where in the region. You could sit and wait for a long time and if there is an incident on the bridge you wouldn't be able to get home in the evenings. When the new bridge opened it was completely clear. I think those who are die-hard components of the -- owe phone opponents of the projects have turned around and have seen that it is a net improvement. It doesn't have the use that we were anticipating. We people this is an event of moving it out of the congested lanes and move it out and expand it for more capacity. People are acceptable to it. We got like 60% of the people who we polled are in favor of tolling that facility. They are more in favor when we talk about the variable tools because they think it will help the traffic, and they are more -- if things were a little bit counter-intuitive that is on the end of tolling, but it tends to help with the public attitudes. There is quite a bit of support -- again, this is a question that has been polled and we have two crossing is that I-90 and 520, and the question was: Do you have -- [ Speaker/Audio Not Clear ] It depends a little bit on the public, where it is, who is impacted, the alternatives, not paying the toll, whether they feel like they are being tolled fairly compared to other people who are getting other improvements without paying a toll and those sorts of things, conditional. Here in Dallas, Ft. Worth area, with go back 4 and 6 with the tolling. We have the road pricing and that has been a part of their lives for a while now. We are able to capitalize on that. In fact some of the early successes on the toll road expansion has been pretty extraordinary. We have some of the roadways that are expected to be freeways. The communities came to us and said, boy, we really need that roadway, but we don't want to wait around for 15 or years to have funding can we have it built as a toll road and we don't mind paying it. We have had several successes with that over the years on the time line. It wasn't really anything that we had to sell the public on. They understand it and they get it. Many of the supporters come from the public. They want the option. They want the reliability. And they like the idea of the direct user fee as opposed to a general tax or raising of the taxes. We have had that type of experience. This is Matt Macgreger, and we have used the [ inaudible ] pricing with the managed lanes because we have told everybody you are going to pay more during the peak period, less off-peak, it's going to be a higher price, but you will be able to go through the implementation and the executing over the contract. The regional policies that we have developed, those were taken to the community to get the buy-in on the policies and before we incorporated them in the contracts to be sure. It has worked on both sides of the equation. Another question mentions the experience of I-Pass lanes. The managed lanes has a greater queue than the toll lanes and he is wondering if that has been an experience in these toll projects as they grow more popular. I'm not familiar with the project, so I can't comment on it. It seems counter-intuitive that the managed lane would be [ inaudible ] with the unmanaged lane. Yeah, this is Dan. I have the same opinion. Without knowing the project specifically, it seems very odd that that would be the case. You know, perhaps it's a case where we are trying to shoe horn in the capabilities that don't work work with the rest of the facilities I can't comment on it since I don't know much about it. The policy down there, is is it 2 plus or something like that? We have the national pricing conference calico co-hosted with our orgasm I know they have been trying to go to the open road all electronic tolling because they have had the lousy cash toll booths back there and this is to improve the operations and to reduce the levels of congestion. I'm not familiar with it either, but they are doing it to move away from the cash toll lanes and the congestion, and there may be some aspects where you have the problem, I'm not aware of it there is not an HOV back there, it's a toll-road system. We can do some research and follow up with that if there is an interest to that question. There is somebody on the call that knows the answer but they can't say it. We can follow up with them on that question. Somebody just sent a point of clarification that the I-Pass lanes are expressed tolling rather than the regular tolling. How exactly do you quantify the reliability? How many minutes do we have left? No. The short version. We have estimated the statistical relationship with the observed data on the freeway network and that is between the mean speed and the measures of variance across the range of conditions on the road way. We have used that to our advantage to be able to incorporate it in our modeling and the benefits cost and accounting and that is the equivalent in the changes in the -- b essentially in the unreliability of the travel under various conditions and what that means in laymen terms is that it is not like paying for a insurance policy to guarantee a speed condition, if you will, or a performance condition, and that allows us to quantify that in the monetary terms. This is in terms of the travel time and savings. The right answer to the question is technically involved, but that is the basic principle. It turns out to be important as it is not probably surprising to people. It is an abstraction, we are not doing it in the assimilating models and the time period and the variation of the micro simulation context, but we think it is a good method. We have some writeups on this that we can make available to people. Thank you. I'm going to give you information on the national operations coalition end talk. We encourage you to go to the website at www. notc.com. You can see the end talk website there are other webcasts. This is on weather information and traffic management and operations and it is proved to be very interesting. This contains the webcast archive page with the slides and the previous recordings of webcasts. We will have the slides around the recording of this presentation up in about a week. We have two types of discussion forms and one of those focuses on the ITS performance issues and lessons learned. You can sign up on the website for the end talks newsletter that is mailed out monthly. Thank you for joining us and thank you most of all to our presenters. All four of you did a fantastic. Thank you very much. (end)