Good afternoon and welcome to this meeting at the Denton City Council.

Today is uh Tuesday, August 19th, 2025.

It is 2 p.m.

Call, and we do have a quorum, so I'll call the meeting to order.

First thing is citizen comments on the consent and consent agenda.

Seeing none, that takes us to request for clarification of agenda items on the agenda for public hearing or individual consideration.

Any uh requests for clarification on agenda items on the agenda or for public hearing or individual consideration.

Seeing none, uh, that'll take us to uh but before I call our first work session item.

I want to say item please note item F has been pulled for a separate vote from the consent.

Uh we'll take that up then.

And I think that's F.

Is that right?

Yep, thanks.

And then I'll also ask we we do have quite a bit to get through today, so I would ask that we we keep our questions succinct.

Um need to explain the question unless there's confusion, but otherwise, uh please just try to hit the question head on and kind of process that information on the fly best we can so that we can get through everything on time.

We do have quite a bit.

So I'm gonna be um watching that closely to make sure we can get to the chambers at 6 30.

That said, first item 3A, ID 25, 1439, receive report whole discussion regarding an update from the Denton County Transit Authority.

Good afternoon.

Uh thank you, Mayor Hudsteth and members of council.

It's very good to be with you.

My name is Paul Christina.

I'm the chief executive officer of the Denton County Transportation Authority.

I'm joined by Mr.

Pat Smith, our board member alternate representing the city of Denton and Miss Jackie Bronson, who's our vice president of engagement and administration.

Um's going on with the agency, but to the mayor's point, we'll move briskly.

I did get some questions before the meeting that I'll uh weave into my overall presentation, and so we'll step off from there.

First, uh we we have formed our approach at DCTA around results related to safety service and ridership.

So here you see a slide capturing our safety performance year to date on our three major modes: the go zone service, the bus operation service, and then the A train.

We measure these things, incident frequency ratio is measured in incidents per 100,000 vehicle miles.

And so where you see 0.27 on go zone and 0.77 on bus, that means 0.77 incidents per 100,000 miles.

These could be an incident, could be anything reportable to the FTA, Federal Transit Administration, like a traffic accident, or it could be something like a driver with a negative interaction with a passenger, what the industry is now calling um operator assault, although that word may not accurately reflect the the um severity of whatever that incident is.

So in the bottom, we show you how we performed last year because we're always trying to improve.

We're just about flat a little bit better on the go zone service.

Had a had a rougher start to the bus operation at this uh beginning of the year.

However, we've been trending in the right direction, and then so far, if you're a baseball fan, we're pitching a perfect game on the A-Train zeros across the board is exactly what we want to see, and uh we're hopeful for that outcome to continue and have put the things in place so that it can.

On the service performance side, again, looking at mainly the access service, the bus operation, and go zone.

On access, this is our elderly disabled paratransit service.

We're running 99% on time uh for the entire year.

Great um great outcomes driven primarily by um dispatchers who are really dialed in, and we have this great software platform that allows us to most efficiently dispatch the trips so that we can get as many people moved as efficiently as possible.

On the on-time performance front, in the upper right on fixed route, what you see is we started the fiscal year um in the six 70 to 80 percent range, and we've steadily marched our way up.

And there was a question that says, is that normal?

What should we expect in the future?

Uh I will remind you all that uh last summer we did the transition from NTMC to DCTA with all of our bus operators and directly hiring uh those bus operators.

Last summer, our on-time performance was even lower than that.

So basically the the in sourcing of that operation and the hiring of a lot of new operators, a lot of new supervisors, a lot of great teamwork has allowed us to make that kind of progress that I'm really proud of.

UNT the UNT service for the main semester started yesterday.

We were above 90% on time.

I we're expecting that to continue.

We also appreciate the work that we've done with your staff on road construction.

A lot of the roads that we operate over have been under construction, and so lots of core excuse me, coordination happens between our dispatchers and our drivers and your staff to make sure that we've got buses on detour where they need to be.

On the go zone front on the two bottom bars, what you see is seat unavailability and then wait time.

On seat unavailability, our standard is 17.5% of people who try to get a ride.

We we need them to be able to get that proposal or have less than 17 and a half percent of the people say they cannot get a ride.

We are far exceeding our goals on seat unavailability and at wait time, our standard is 24 minutes, and we're right there.

And so we're we're really pleased with that.

I could expect that number to fluctuate somewhat because it always does in the fall when people come back to school, and then it settles out as the semester goes on.

So last component of our uh measurables for success is ridership.

And I'll show you in the middle of the slide.

Overall, we're down about 9.5% year over year.