Transportation Committee - Regular Meeting

Good. Right. This meeting of the transportation committee, is ready to begin for 3PM on Wednesday, June 11. This time, I will take a phone call to my left. Here. Alderman Pindell Charles. And to my right.

Present.

Alderman Savage is present, and I am present. We are all here. At this time, I'll take approval or a motion to approve the agenda.

So moved.

Second. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Okay. Approved. Next, I will entertain a motion for approval of minutes from five 07:25.

So moved. Second.

All in favor, aye. Aye. Next up on our agenda, five Well, one appointment and four reappointment for transportation board. Do we have anyone here? Yeah. Okay.

Do

we want to talk about them? Are there questions?

Well, I guess move to post I'd like to move to postpone action on a p three twenty five

K.

Until the next meeting, see if we can get them in attendance.

Yeah. So okay. Kirk, that is Kathleen Reedy who is applying for the Ward 2. Does that not looking for reappointment, or will Kathleen come in the

Hi. I'm Kurt Regal, from the Transportation Board. I haven't looked at this these particular appointments, but the fact is that the rules allow appointment of members even if they are not resident of that ward, if there has been a long standing vacancy in any ward. And so Hillary will have to figure out who to assign, to that ward, and that person would sit until the, regular vacancy occurs. And, frankly, I can't remember whether my appointment is Ward 2 or at large.

Okay. Thank you. Well, I'll entertain a motion to I have a question.

Oh,

yeah. Thank you, madam chair. I thought it was my understanding that mister Schacht did not want to be reappointed.

Point point and board three. We have a motion on a p three twenty five.

I'm gonna back up. We have a motion to postpone action on a p three twenty five. Is there a second?

Second.

All in favor, say aye. Aye. We're gonna postpone AP 03:25, which is a appointment. If we go down, we have four reappointments, and other women, Kendall, Charles. It's your understanding that one of them was not interested in being reappointed?

I thought that was my understanding from one of the last maybe the third meeting. Maybe around

March or right. And I I just assumed that if Hillary had put that forward, she had communicated with him. I was not a party to that communication, so you would have to check with her.

Okay. That'll be fine. That was my understanding.

Mhmm. I agree with you.

Mhmm. Alderman Savage?

For the sake of time, can we just move these all as a block and we can work out, who needs to be on or off by the next council meeting?

I just wanted to make sure that I had the information correct.

I understand. I'm just the chair needs to leave by five, so I'm trying to keep things moving.

Thank you.

Are you okay with that?

Are you making a motion to move, a p 46, a p 47, a b 49, and a b 50 as a block, for recommended approval?

So moved. Second.

All in favor of that?

Aye.

Aye. Alright. So we are gonna move those for us to the count. Thank Hi.

Where are we in the agenda?

Now it's general discussion with, ID 20 25 SP plus Metropolis parking update. Welcome.

Thank you. Good afternoon, madam chair, O'Neil and, alderman Pindell Charles and Alderman, Savage.

Good good afternoon.

For the record, I'm Marcus Moore, director of transportation and parking. I just wanna give you some updates before SP Metropolis goes into their update on the information that was requested. But I'll be brief. What we we've been meeting around the community specifically last night. Superintendent Parker and I presented at the Eastport Civic Association, on our, on demand service.

Well received, a lot of questions, and I think we need to do more of that, and we will. We'll try to, you know, get to more events like the senior centers, more bloom again, visit Annapolis as weather starting to, you know, warm up, a lot more visitors coming in. One of the big avenues with the visitor center that's, you know, selling or really providing information on our product about our city. So the more information they have about parking and parking options as well as getting around our city, the better we actually can can do. So mister, Kenny, senior manager with Metropolis, well, SP, a division of Metropolis is here to share some information, with you.

Jason, wanna introduce you.

My name is Jason Kinney. I'm the senior manager for SP Plus Metropolis Annapolis parking.

Make sure your mic is on.

Yeah.

Or pull it closer.

Is that better? I've been here for seven years. And, as you know, we have recently, in the last seven months, converted our garages to a gateless license plate system that has been, I would say, extremely well received, since we've started. We had a little little growing pains at the beginning, but everything's ironed itself out. The residents seem to be very happy with it.

As far as how easy it is to use the residential, two hour discount that works at all the facilities no matter where you are, uptown. So we're gonna move on here. So you had asked us what, like, how long people were using the garage, the length of stay. And you can see here, Dats is in blue, Knighton's in green, Park Place is in yellow. Grace period stays are up compared to the prior period a lot, quite a well, quite a bit, actually.

And we have seen a decrease, and the grace period is fifteen minutes. But we have had seen a decrease of illegal parking around the locations, for people, door you know, DoorDash drivers and people just running in to pick up their mobile order and so on. So it's good that now that people have registered that they're just, you know, pulling in real fast using the facilities instead of parking on a red curb or in opposed to no parking area. And we've seen, those of you that are familiar with the problems on Colonial Avenue, we have seen a a real sharp decrease in people parking on Colonial Avenue other than a quick pull up, somebody jumps out of the car, they drive off. So that's good.

And then this covers a little more than the first quarter of the year, and you can see that legislation has really pushed the longer, eight plus hour stays there. And then, of course, Park Place always has the the most long stays because of the hotel, three, four days. And you also asked us for validations. And, as far as use goes, that has proven to be a little more difficult weeding those out as far as the information goes, but this is how many have been issued. So we have three bread and three bed and breakfasts in town who have requested their 50% bed and breakfast validation for their guests.

41 businesses have, gotten the either $5 validation for Gotts or the $3 validation for Knighton and Park Place for their employees. We have 68 businesses who have, some form of the Park Shop and Dine. As you know, you can use, it can be used up to four times. So you can get up to four hours off in a facility, and, there it that is that 68 is a mixture of one to four hours. And that also is purchased by the business.

It's 55¢ per hour for the business to purchase validations. Business and organization comps are like non restaurants. So like Moore Park Place, your, you know, realtors Merrill Lynch, wealth management companies that are there, who do have people come just for business and do comp, some or all of their parking. And then we have issued 602 residential two hour citations, and that number will just continue to grow.

One second. That's site patients or passive?

That's validation. Validation. That's the the two hour resident. Yeah. Two hours free parking in in a facility per day.

That seems slow.

102 people per day utilized.

No. We have issued. So we have had six zero two households, residents come in to get their two hour validation. If you remember the old days as a resident, you had to come see us and get those yellow coupons. Well, now we have six zero two residents who have come to get their new QR code.

It doesn't seem very high for 40,000.

It'll it'll grow. Yeah. It'll grow. Good. And we have a lot of residents who never use it at all.

So it's only been really pushing since the first of the year, so it's five months, five months and a bit, you know, it's a good number. Okay. And it'll grow as these people use it, see how easy it is, tell their neighbors, and people will start you know, it'll it'll go up. Great. And then, for the first quarter, January through March, and this was sent to me on April, all of the facilities combined were at a mystery shop score of 98.1%.

And I brought a sample if you'd like to see what they look for in the mystery shop. And that's all I've got.

Sure. That's exactly what I asked. Thank you. Alderman Savage.

Thank you, madam chair. And so I don't expect answers to all these because we do have limited time. But if you could get back to me with some of these, no rush, but just perhaps for your next presentation or the next meeting. So so I'm just gonna list them out. First question would be, how many failures paid you have per garage?

So I'm just curious how many people end up not utilizing the app that you have to enforce them on. Second question would be, like, to see how often the garages are at capacity. Like, what kind of day, what days of the week? Third thing would be, you need me to slow down?

All good.

Okay. Third one would be, I'd like to see how many of those it looks like there are quite a bit of people staying for one to two hours or one to three. I'm curious how many of those utilize the residential discount voucher. Because I'd like to kind of eventually figure out how much revenue we're giving up as a part of that. Because I'm not quite sure how the if there's an associated waterfall with your contract, but I'm assuming a portion of that revenue comes back to the city.

It all goes Oh, back to the

because you've got your set contract and all?

We're, yes.

Okay. Well, so my point would be with that, again, how much revenue do we actually lose by having the voucher program? And related to that, my last question would be well, not a question, just a statement, I guess. As we build out some of our improve some of our transit. Right? And this is one reason why I was kind

of If I could just clarify. Do you just strictly want to know with the two hour residential, or do you want to know how much? Well, no. Just two hour residential. Right? Because they pay for the

Yeah.

The businesses pay for their park shop and dines. The employee parking is also Okay. Free to employers, but the employees do pay either 5 or $3. So just the two hour residence, how many hours you're giving up equaling how much revenue you're losing. Okay.

And just, again, the big picture I'm thinking is just as we develop out some of the the transit, and this is one reason why I've been kinda pushing to think about reorienting some of our transit on downtown instead of just taking people to employment centers, is, you know, allowing people to have two hours free incentivizes them to drive downtown, where once we, I think, make some of the improvements that the directors laid out and some of the other ideas As we improve the transit, hopefully, we'll get more people to use it and actually incentivize them to use transit, and that goes back to making transit free. Why are we allowing it to be free to come drive downtown and contribute to all the chaos, air pollution, etcetera, etcetera, when we should be encouraging people to use our buses and our free circulator. Right? Just something to stick in our minds as we move forward with trying to coordinate the efforts between parking and transportation. That's all I have.

Thank you.

Exactly. Questions? All the no questions? All right. Thank you so much for that report, and we will look forward to maybe next month a couple of those questions answered. Appreciate that.

If the chair so desires, what we can do, be ready for the next one, which is July 9, I believe. Then we can ask those same questions that have the same type of presentation from premium parking and then we'll follow-up. They'll have the benefit of having Alderman Savage's questions to be ready to answer those at the same time when SP delivers as well.

Great. Thank you. Do you have any further updates from Transportation Department while you're at the table?

That's basically all that we have. What we're really trying to look at is how we better advertise our service to be used. You know, we got the smaller cutaway buses that we may have talked about a little earlier. They're only eight passenger sized vehicles. And it's a perfect application for our ADA and our on demand service.

We did get those in just a matter of weeks ago, and they're being outfitted with the stuff that we need, like radios and all that kind of stuff there. But how do we really, continue to grow that on demand, service, that we're not just riding around because it's on a schedule, but we're moving around because we're needed? And that's that, delicate mix. So one of the things that superintendent Parker was looking at for our measurement, what makes us on time is if you hit the inner button and, got your trip secured, that we're able to get you within twenty minutes of that trip time. And a lot of times, we're able to get it between that ten and fifteen, but sometimes with, you know, Blue Angels or the practice or whatever, it's taking quite a bit longer.

But that's our goal to really serve as best we can. So sometimes when we have just the purple out there, which is the evening, because remember this service replaced the orange and the purple, to cover the whole city. So we're looking at where we used to operate on Housley Road all the way to Edgewood from the western part of the city to the Far Eastern Annapolis Neck. We may we need four buses to to build that supply. So when we look at a headway, what's convenient was thirty minutes.

When you get above thirty minute wait, you know, headway would be how long it takes to get from one end, let's say, the mall to the turnaround point in Eastport. So if this on demand is able to do it in fifteen to twenty minutes, it's very successful. And some of the things that we heard last night with ECA, we'd use it more if it was more available. And to make it more available means more, you know, buses out there in expanding the route. But some of the things that we've done that we have our amendments and hopefully we can look at those studies and what that really says and what we really need to do to support this fixed route, which would be the, you know, the on demand, you know, micro transit kind of supporting as a feeder system into it.

So that's what we're really looking to do. As Alderman Savage says, how do we make those little tweaks, you know, with our studies, with our TDP, and what this county is doing on the transportation planners, providing some information of what we wanna do as a collective event. So that's where we are right now, and I hope to continue to keep those conversations going and really getting the word out to let people know. Because some people said I've never heard about the on demand in certain pockets of our our city. And some of those don't that have a two car household, and they would really like to get out and use public transportation when it's gridlocked to other places.

And that's what we want, people that have an option to use this as that option, first up. Convenient, safe, reliable.

Thank you. I am wondering with the as an idea, I'm wondering if the places where we have identified as pickup locations for the micro mobility. Would it be possible to put a sign there with a QR code for Annapolis Go?

When we first started out, as you know, we started our pilot on July 15. So prior to that, in almost a month and a half or more, we were hitting the the routes and sharing that information with riders on the purple, riders on the orange, we have that are still up there, we probably need to take another look. In some of our shelters that have the the larger version of that card that has the QR and all. But there's some things that you're right that we gotta okay. We did that as a splash as a start out, you know, as a marketing effort.

What do we need to go back and do again? You know, revisit, because some people weren't there that could have benefit from it. It's not a one and done. So you're absolutely right. And that's something we will take a strong hard look how we can better advertise and make it easy and convenient.

Great. I'll just I'll give an anecdote. Last Sunday I think it was Sunday. Maybe it Saturday. I was walking through my neighborhood, and I know that there's a stop at, the corner of Cedar Park and Bristol where the city pump house is. And there was a resident who was sitting on the curb on that, And I walked by, and I said, are you okay? And she said, yeah. I'm waiting for go time. She said, said to somewhere around here, don't exactly know where to wait. And I was like, well, you're in the right spot.

She was probably on the opposite curb of where she'll be picked up, but I said, you're in the right location. But it just got me thinking, like, maybe if there were signs, at least short term, so that people started to get to know where some of the stops were with the QR code that actually said, it will be twenty minutes from the time that you call from here, but it would get them thinking about that spot.

No. You're absolutely right because as we spread and we started going more into West Annapolis, where basically the only service that we had over there was the state shuttle. And as close as we transversed that area would have been Rowell Boulevard. Now we're going across Rowell Boulevard to places that don't have a bus stop. So where in this area of Annapolis Street do I need to

go? Yeah.

So looking at things like that, you're absolutely right. We'll take a strong look and get things there that we can put up. Very good point so people know where they're supposed to meet their ride.

I'm hesitating because I'm like, well, do we want a bunch of extra new signs in the airports that people aren't gonna pay attention to? But at the same time, maybe it was something that was somewhat temporary. Like,

it's Yeah. If we can do something temporary that's clever, that's not as big as a stop sign or a normal bus stop sign, but it's like, you know, look for this kind of thing. We can, see with our sign shop and, you know, even within our own shop as far as developing something that would be eye catching. Almost like what we did with a magenta shuttle. You know, we we color coded it. We made it very easy to find, you know, this magenta bus stop with a QR code, where's my bus, to be able to do something like that. And that wasn't too big of a sign at all. So that's a great idea we can explore.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you.

Did you have a question? Oh, no. Alderman Savage?

Thanks, madam chair. Yeah. Just wanted to know, have you received or when do you think you'll receive the up those tweaks for the transit development plan?

Yeah. You and I caught up a couple days ago, and I said it was one the things I forgot to send. We did get it last Thursday, and I we can I can send that out to you tonight or tomorrow? We did get that all Okay. As promised by the transportation planners. I'll I'll send that to the whole council.

Yeah. If you could send that tonight because then we could talk about it if we need to at tomorrow's environmental matters meeting.

Definitely will.

But we'll definitely need that for Monday night. Okay. Because I post we postponed the trans development plan approval until Monday.

I'll send that out this evening.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Our next on our agenda is the transportation board update. Regal, welcome back to the podium.

My name is Kurt Regal, and I'm representing the transportation board. I thought I was being so sly in relinquishing my chair to another member of the board, but it turns out not to be very effective. Here I am again before you. Not much to say. I have one item that's very important, and you'll be happy to hear it if you haven't already.

But let me just begin by agreeing vociferously with a point that you made about incentives for driving offered by the city to our residents versus incentives to use public transport. And the point that you made about free parking for automobiles and no similar incentive for using transport is exactly the one that we put forward in one of the arguments from the transportation board for free transit. So thank you. Then the other item is just a news item. The bicycles on sidewalks legislation which you passed for the city was picked up then by the county and replicated in the county, carried to the state for incorporation in the into the state code, passed the house of delegates three times but failed to be considered by the senate.

So it failed for lack of consideration for three consecutive years. This year was the fourth try. It was passed for the fourth time by the house of delegates, went to the Senate, and it was cross filed because we found a member of the Senate who would pick it up. And so it went to the Senate. It passed unanimously in both houses and has been signed by the governor.

Yay.

And I'm very happy. This is something that Annapolis has done not only for itself, but for the state. And I thank you for your support.

Great. Thank you for keeping on that. Thank you

so much.

A comedy thing. We thought if we were going to run into any difficulty in the House, it might be on the Republican side of the aisle, but it turned out that one member, one Republican member, was triggered into a childhood memory. He had been riding his bicycle on the sidewalk. A policeman came along, chastised him strongly, and confiscated his bicycle. So he had a a burning memory in his brain that made him especially favorable to this legislation.

So favorable that the law, as passed by the legislature, is now called Jay's Law. His name is Jay. Oh.

Fantastic. Thank you so much for that update. Great

news.

Alright. Thanks for joining us today.

You bet. Thank you.

Alright. Is there anything for the good of the order?

I I should've asked more questions now.

Nothing else? No.

Today, I will entertain a motion for adjournment.

So moved. Second.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.