Turn over the meeting to Jocelyn Bauer. You may begin. Hello and welcome to the national transportation operations coalitions talking operations Webinar -- I'll be giving a brief introduction to the conferencing environment before turning the session over to Darren Buck from the Federal Highway Administration. Along with -- federal highway administration. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. 40 minutes allocated for the presenter and the final 20 minutes for the question and answer. If you think of a question you can type it in the text box in the chat area on the left side of your screen. Indicate who you question is directed toward unless it's intended for everyone. Rather than just the presenters. The present her be unable to answer your questions during his presentation but yes, sir in the last 20 minutes of the seminar. A file containing the audio and official portion of the seminar be -- coalitions website within the next week. I'll type that address in the box shortly. Attendees will be notified of the availability of the presentation T recording and the closed captioning of this seminar. Who may not have been able to attend this conference to access the recording. The presentation used for today is available for download in the file download box on the left side of your screen. To download a file click on the name of the file you would like to download and click the button on the bottom of the download box that says save to my computer. Darren Buck one of the moderators for today's webcast. Darren is the marketing specialist. His duties include overseeing outreach operations coalition. Prior to joining federal highway in 2008 similar roles creating jobs for people with disabilities. Darren received an MBA in 2005 and is currently setting transportation planning in the Virginia tech master's of urban and regional planning program. Now I'll turn things over to Darren who will start us off. Thank you very much. Thank you all for tuning in to the latest Webinar. We're honored to be joined by Craig J stone of the Washington State Department of transportation Over the first year of operations of the state route 167 hot lanes pilot project. Craig is director of the Washington State DOT located in Seattle. All statewide tolling efforts which include Washington state bridge tolling as well as the evaluation of potential new express toll lain systems and new -- lane systems and new projects. More than 25 years and spend five years with national consulting engineering firms. His past experience serve as project director traffic system design and operations, freeway operations. And long range highway system planning for the central [ Indiscernible ] Region. Masters of science in several engineering and he is a licensed professional engineer in Washington state. Also joining us is JESSIE Yung who works in my office. For the federal highway Office of Transportation Management in Washington. Miss Yung is responsible for providing guidance and direction in advancing national highway traffic operations and management systems including active applications and HOV and HOT lanes. Bachelor and masters of science at college park. She is a registered profession aleck near in Maryland on HOV systems and freeway operations. But now, I'm honored to throw it over to Craig stone of Washington State DOT. This is Craig. I would just say welcome to Seattle if you could imagine a nice blue sunny sky right now. We're having a wonderful day. It's my pleasure to present to you our first year of operations of the state route 167 hot lane. It's a pilot project and it basically summarizes our first year of operations. I want to start off with a little bit of context for tolling in the state of Washington. We have one facility [ Indiscernible ] Bridge that opened in 2007 and the hot lanes opened in 2008. Basically been a generation here in the state since we've had toll lane. So this is a new endeavor in the standpoint of our users and understanding how toll lane then works. I also wanted to give you context for what we call moving Washington. Secretary Palilia Hammond is using this as her messages on how we look at mobility and that's a three part balanced approach here. We do have major projects that are going on across the state where we are adding lanes, new bridges and we were fortunate that in 2003 and 2005 legislative sessions have given us a gas tax that has put that bonded program forward. We also have operating roadways efficiently, which is the idea of how we operate facilities, how do we bring ITS? How do we bring the idea of congestion [ Indiscernible ] Gets in to the traffic management and some of that European speed control standpoint. That's where we're going to be focusing today. Managing demand and providing choices. Working with demand management and the van pool programs. Working with our partners in transit and how they then use HOV lanes as well as the hot lanes as they provide their service. That's the framework that we come in to. As we mentioned earlier it has been a while since we had a toll lane here. Everyone still recalls that you build bridges and you pay for them with tolls. The concept of bringing -- better performance out of using tolling is really -- I almost would say -- coin it as the show me. People do not trust that statement but they are starting to see how it actually worked. People understand you build infrastructure with tolls. With that, we have embarked and moved forward. I would say that we were -- we've been very well supported by our legislature. In fact, in twilight session, they -- 2008 session they put a toll policy bill and the gov non-signed that that put in place the framework [ Indiscernible ] State of Washington to move forward. I think some other states and jurisdictions may want to think about that. The legislature picks the routes that can be tolled. They put basically the framework around that so they have the authority. Our state transportation commissions who we do not report to anymore. We used to but now we report to the governor. 20 to 40 year plan out but they also set the tariffs on our W state ferries and the tolerate setting body. The department, we propose and then with authority, build and operate the toll systems that we have here. Look in to the future too. Interesting that [ Indiscernible ] Bridge was our facility to open up. It was put together in the design-build project. Very successful. A lot of opposition to it early. But once we opened the facility up, they are saving 30 to 40 minutes in their compute. 85% of the morning commutes are using are good to go tags. The transponders. So we've gotten high penetration, much higher than anyone had anticipated. I'll come back to that because it will relate to the 167 story. As we get out, we use basically the [ Indiscernible ] Back office functions to build off of to move forward with the 167 hot lanes. The hot lanes themselves is 11-miles of corridor that is south of Seattle up to the upper left down to the bottom left. It goes through probably the 4th and 6th warehouse distribution centers. We have a lot of goods that come out of this area. It's a lot of freight but a six lane facility that has an HOV lane in it. We looked at facilities through the [ Indiscernible ] Sound area to consider, could we put forward a test or pilot and we looked at 280-miles of our HOV system and decided this corridor offered a good opportunity. We had spare capacity. We could then go ahead and put the hot lanes in place or changing the HOV designation off of the 2 plus. That was very important. I wanted to test this, that we didn't have a lot of variables changing all at the same time. We kept the 2 plus HOV designation. We kept the hours of operations. 5:00 a.m. to 7 p.m. In the evening hours they are open to all. So with that, we went forward. We also were good partners with federal highways where we received federal pricing grants of 5.1 million. In the 2005 legislature with the gas tax that provide us the remaining money for this project. We looked at the configuration here, the upper picture shows you the prior configuration where we had continue access to the HOV. It was two plus also be transit in those lanes. In the bottom lanes begin to show that we basically took one foot from each of the adjacent lanes and create add two foot buffer and put the dual striping down. You start seeing that configuration there. Also then, we looked at signing all the elements there. In a lot of ways looked at the nation -- what they're doing in I15, watching what Minnesota was doing at the time and building off of their experiences as they move forward with this. One of the key aspects that makes Washington state a little bit unique is it's a dynamic system with the allege rate rhythms. That was partly different than the California models. But also the access points. SR91 has basically a shoot that you come in to it and you come out on the other end. You have the sandals and the buffer there. My understanding is that I394 is a barrier as well as striping with some entrance points. We had five access points northbound three southbound in addition to the entrance exit points. We then had lots of points for these one-third of a mile sections where traffic would then be able to have the opportunity to see a sign, see the price, make a choice, decide whether they want to move in to that lane. Once they're passed that area they go through the toll zone [ Indiscernible ] That's also where they exit the lane. Setting up that weave situation. Unlike what call trance does in southern California -- HOV with cross over points. This was brand new to Washington drivers. I'll talk about a little bit later this is one of the bigger challenges we've had with this program is the striping as opposed to electronics and acceptance of the system. How does it work? We have the good to go tags. These are the basically [ Indiscernible ] Protocol and being able to have that. We use that because that's what was already in place for [ Indiscernible ] Bridge. We had that saturation. We had that out there for a system. We also then have this ASTMV6 protocol but basically on the west coast or I should say national sea vision to use that tag we want to have dual readers and have both of them out there. We're not necessarily marketing those at this point but they are available and can be used as we go forward. Then you have the toll began tries with the readers. Then also on those GANTRIs the enforcement beacon that's in place. We'll talk about more why there's two readers when there's two hot [ Indiscernible ] There. In the hot lane. We've been using that as our algorithm. We have the ability to look at speed and volume but we have not used that in the selection process of the pricing comes forward. It's a [ Indiscernible ] Five minute average and is looking at the change in volume and the rate of change in the volume speed as to how it looks for what price point to set. Looking at how it works lane discrimination. Basically our contractor is coming in and ETC was the ones that performed the work for us out in the system here in integration. Looking at a requirements to not have false read and GP lanes. We had these 11-foot lanes decided to put the second antenna out over the GP lane. Depending on the strength of the signal you can decide whether that vehicle is in the hot lane or the GP lane next to it. I will say that this created some doubts by some citizens. We knew that you were planning on putting more lanes out here to toll because we can see that you have the [ Indiscernible ] Out here so there's a wall of trust we had to work through. Not a lot of people but there's been some that picked up that as our agenda. How does the system work in it's design in we created this two foot buffer. We did not rebuild any of the shoulders. We didn't want to go into that cost to doing this. We have a desire here in Washington State to put four foot buffers on some of our other corridors. But here again, just because of practicality we went with the two foot. You also can then see the loops that are there that do part of the reads along with the antennas overhead. How does it work? You can kind of see the antennas with roadside where we had structures over the facility. We tried to use them, but in most cases we actually put in the began try locations. From enforcement standpoint we use the beacons. You get the read, it's a valid tag, go forward with this. The way that we set this up, because we did not want to change the HOV operations here, you can still be a 2 plus HOV and not have a tag and use this facility. So it's only when you are in SOV mode you actually have to have a tag to use that. Some others are going to say no everybody has to be tagged to be in the facility. You start thinking about your enforcement and how you do that. Basically, the on the ground Washington state patrol doing enforcement is basically using the white light to be able to say was that person, did they have a valid tag? If the light comes on they -- then they've got to do the next step which is look at the vehicle and say do I see multiple persons in that vehicle or not. So from that standpoint pretty low tech. That was how we were enforcing the HOV to start with. I will say that Washington state we have a pretty high compliance rate with the HOVs to start with. Everyone with this program, we felt that with additional patrols out there we had very high compliance with the system. Maybe it's just the northwest culture out here. We also have one of the highest seat belt uses as you go down -- wait for the walk signals and in the lanes of traffic is not there. So we're pretty compliant up here so that's been a real benefit to us. How does it work? Roadside cabinets at each location. There's a field cabinet with power supply coming in. You have the UPS there in case there's any power outages. You have lane control and readers. Has gone to a redundant lane controllers. If one goes out, we have redundancy in the system. That's given us reliability as we go. From the standpoint, we do daily downloads at midnight back to our back office for what was basically the tolerate and those accounts data. We upload twice a day from the back office basically status of the tags. Basically people understand. Do they have enough money on their tags to allow a legal passage through the corridor. So from the standpoint of performance measures, I'll go back to what our legislature put forward in 2005. These are what were required to measure and report on. So we are required to do annual reports. Part of what I'm presenting today is from the first annual report. The goals we're looking at freeway efficiency and how they can improve freeway safety. They want us to evaluate the effectiveness of the transit and 07 rations. Look -- operations. Ability to finance improvements and transportation services through tolls as well as looking at impact tonight highway users for a sense of general purpose. What you don't see here is the general requirement that this system to operate in the black and so that's been an interesting non-written element here. We've had a couple of offenders who have inquired. We're working with them. Were forecasted through our consultant that in the first four years we'll be able to go from a deficit to having surplus in operations here. But at the time that work was done, that was prior to the gas prices going on prior to the economy going off. In this first year of operations we brought in about 350,000 or so in revenue and our costs have been probably in the range of four times that much. So this is grading a little bit of a policy conversation that we're anticipating which is going to be for a dollar invested, what's your return? So we're looking at an economic investment dollar invested in to a transit in return, dollar invested in to additional lane capacity in return, what is the best return on dollar? We anticipate though that over time, again our goal here is to get ourselves in to a recovery cost and operations. There's a lot that goes in to that for those in the tolling world. You'll know that a lot of times the industry talks about cost per transaction. There's huge economies of scale that happens in there. So just to think about that, we have 40,000 transactions a day that happen in [ Indiscernible ] Bridge. We're having about 1800 transactions happening. Doing all that back office and distribute them out to those casts. We're bringing on 115,000 transaction bridge that will change the whole equation about how we're distributing costs. We fully expect that our cost also go down dramatically once we get a new back office get up how we can redistribute those costs back out. The other thing we're doing is providing enforcement. They are great partners with us in all aspects. They have been working with the media, public education. We're paying them the overtime situation out here. We would like to get away from the overtime and get direct billing costs. We're covering some of our traffic management staff. I mentioned the back office recovering. We also increased response truck and staff in the corridor and to help balance we're doing instant responses to give a quality trip. As well as we've invested in the communications staff to work with the public and the users. Highlightings after one year. We're feeling pretty good about these and they are showing measures of success. That in the general purpose lanes we see speeds increase 10%. During that same time our volumes have increased the 3 to 4%. The economy has been dropping 1 to 3% that corridor is not seeing that drop in traffic. Then the hot lanes themselves we've seen speeds increase 7 to 8% while volumes have increased 1 to 3%. If you are looking at speed and volume used across this corridor we're getting a better usage. We're meeting some of those goals that legislature has put out for us. HOV operations here as well as across the nation, looking at a standard of 45-miles an hour 99% of the time. So again we're able to guarantee that reliable trip, which is a very important part of this. We've had 30,000 good to go drivers. Vehicles out there where they have the tags. People have used them. Some of these are people from the [ Indiscernible ] Bridge have come up and used this occasionally. We have come down to how many are using it on a daily basis. If we have 1800 users a day on the corridor, you can see that there's a smaller proportion. We also find that the proponents of people are using it 2 to 3 times a week. They're not using it every day type of thing. They're making choices. That's part of the process, as we look at it. Going on the travel times, the corridor, it's interesting here and if you think back to the map it's 11-miles northbound because that's how many miles we had. The northbound is more desirable it's a longer route. You get more travel time savings and you basically bring yourself up to interstate 405 that leads you further up our corridor towards bell view, Washington. Where you are starting to see the standpoint of 8 minutes of travel time savings on a peak hour basis for about a dollar. So for return of investment they're getting a pretty good return. Southbound you are seeing a 4 minute time travel savings. Where we go from three lanes and we drop down to two lanes because of the configuration works and now the hot lane ends. We'll talk a bit later about this. We have constraints on both ends. We knew we would have constraints on both ends but within the corridor itself, we're feeling pretty good about the operation numbers. Traffic volumes. There are some fluctuations with ADT. But you can see over time, looking at the before chart compared to the after chart, you might see we have volumes that have dropped but we have picked back up very close to previous years volume. If people are really astute they'll look at our December volumes and say what happened here? They shut down the city for two weeks while we had a big snowstorm and hot lanes did not work. A lot of people did not use them. We also had the secretary of transportation say go use them. December was a non-data month for us at that point. Average daily trips has increased. These aren't huge numbers but we're still seeing continual increases as we.gov this is a point where we were very cautious as how we marketed the hot lanes. We -- on [ Indiscernible ] Bridge on 2007 we wanted 50% of our trips to use a transponder because we didn't want to have cueing at the cash collection site. That was a very aggressive approach. Well we basically opened up 60% of the people have transponders and now our transponders are very high use. So we are actually concerned, we heavily marketed the hot lands we had so much usage on day one our tolerates would be high. [ Indiscernible ] Trying to manage that. We did a lower key talking about how you use the facility, getting out without a lot of marketing. We had a plan, a slower launch you might say. We're continuing to see some growth but we made a conscious effort not to heavily market the corridor when we started off. It was a pilot. We wanted to see some success and move forward with it. Another chart that we have people are very familiar with speed volume or the boom range chart. What this is showing here is basically between the three lanes that we have, the green dots if you can see them is the hot lane usage. You can see again, we're staying way above the break down point so that speed flowchart in saying up in the 60 to 70s. It's posted at 60. I'll sigh at this pend -- say at this point we get from people. It's the left lane. Dual striping. I'm not supposed to cross the dual lane. Those people in front are going so slow that I can't get around them. This whole issue of passing opportunities of a single hot land. I know there's a lot of conversation that go in to a dual hot lane to give people opportunity. You can see some of the speeds here. You can see the speeds I believe would be -- the pink here which is the inside lane to it are staying higher. You can see the outside lanes where you see some of the break down that happens as you go forward. But again, this is real data looking at kind of a good point in the corridor. Our tolerates, I mentioned before -- toll rates. Working with us and looking at our traffic and revenue as well as looking at toll rates. Maximum of $9. Some of the commissions a little more free market individuals say if somebody wants to pay $38 they ought to be able to pay $38. We don't want to be on the front page of pick your favorite newspaper that would say, the price is going to be whatever. They are going to go for the highest number. We got a little bit reaction to the $9 but not a lot in public perception. We look at what the maximum toll rate had been. We hit 9-dollar as couple of times in the first couple of months of operations but everyone those numbers were very small. You can also see as people learn how to use the system kind of that balance what we're getting to and you can even see this last April here around 275, as I mentioned earlier about a dollar during the peak hours has been what the maximum has been. People are making choices as they go forward. We set the algorithms -- it's all about traffic performance. In fact, you see a point here in September of 2008, basically as we review the first summer of operations, I connected the team to -- directed the team to free up the [ Indiscernible ] To increase traffic and get better utilization of it. You can see that as it comes forward here. You can see the revenue and the generally running about 27 to 30,000 a month in revenue that we brought in for this. Safety. We all like multiple years of data but for our first year of operations that is the best information that we have. I know there's lots of conversations. I know there's been a number of studies done especially in the California discussion between is it bet tore have a barrier with a gap or continuous access and what is the best situation for safety? So far what we've seen is we actually have a drop in the accidents that are in the corridor, but this is only for that period of time since we opened so the jury is still out on that. It did seem to resonate though with some of the folks we would talk to continuous HOV lane. The driver is always looking for one to pop in and pop out at any moment in time. There was a perceived safety -- coming in and coming out of the cross over location. We also have not seen a big concern about the cross over location as we've looked at the corridor. But again, we need to continue to look at that. Hot lane enforcement, Washington state patrol. You can see the number of traffic stops and citations. The state patrol officer has three choices when they are out there enforcing this facility. All of them are $124 ticket. One would be a violation of a core pool definition -- car pool. That's the one they give out the most. If you are in there and your car pool. No problem. You don't have to have a transponder. But if you are in there as a single occupant and you do not have a tag on your windshield. It's easy to give a citation. It's easy for them to continue that and that's what they do in other facilities we have. When it gets to district court that helps stand up with that too. There is the idea of refusal to pay the toll. Toll avoidance which is $124 fee. That's harder for them to control. When wafers set this system up, we got from our vendors basically a wand. Like you can go to the transponder and do a read on that. We were given back some of those by the state patrol. Have the technology and you actually do that recognition of a tag was read and the deduction was made from the tag. The second most frequent violation is a failure to obey a traffic control device. That's the formal title. What it means is it's illegal to cross the double white stripes. It's brand new to Washington driver what that means on the hot lane. So people would say okay. They're going to drive in and drive out of that hot lane. We're evaluating that. State patrol is looking at that. As my chair, I'm not concerned necessarily about the violation we have. I frequently do that anecdotal, to see how it's going. I do hear from individuals saying that driver up there crossed that double white line. They ought to get a tick. So we have people coming back with that. That question of enforcement, but the state patrol is there as they look at the system. We also have a her row program that's -- hero program on HOV violators. We kept that in the corridor. You can see it in the graphic here. The calls have gone down in the core. To I don't know if people are behaving for traffic or more difficult to tell if someone was violating or not because of the hot lane operations. We always get questions over low income, equity, the environmental Justice questions. We've been doing environmental Justice work with other facilities we have. This you might say is statistically doesn't mean a lot. It's a great slide to show individuals and it's worked very well in our public relations standpoint. Allow me -- are in the corridor as compare to the chevrons and fords. And how many were driving down the road with gun racks. That worked out very well. The standpoint of interesting that at least we've done focus grouped before. We've done focus grouped afternoon ward. Some of the observations, it's fascinating to me working this area. The low income individuals do not complain about the price necessarily. Their ability to afford it or not. They want the choice because they have a commitment, things that they need to do. It tends to be the higher income people that are very concerned that it is not equitable for the low income people. I've seen this other corridors around It's an interesting human dynamic. More work needs to be done in this area. Looking at some of our survey information that we have, 75% of the drivers are in the 35 to 64 year age. 60% of the drivers are in this 50,000 to 25,000-dollar income range. Give you milestone there. Geographic patterns.