Good afternoon and welcome to the Hampton City Council work session.

Madam Clerk, will you call a roll, please?

Councilman Bowman.

Present.

Council Vice Mayor Brown.

Here.

Councilwoman Campbell, present.

Councilwoman Fairby.

Present.

Councilwoman Harper.

Present.

Councilwoman Muggler.

Present.

Mayor Gray.

Present.

And we have several presentations on agenda this afternoon, so I'm going to turn it over to City Manager to introduce the first one.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

And Council members and those watching, we're very pleased today to have with us Ray Amaruso, who's the Chief Planning and Development Officer for Hampton Roads Transit, our regional transit authority.

We wanted to review with you the system optimization plan, which sort of leads into the routes that we will be considering funding in our upcoming budget cycle.

And so this is really an opportunity.

Thank you.

And good afternoon, Mayor Gray, members of council and city manager Bunting.

I'm happy to be back here again to talk about the system optimization plan.

I know that your own staff has briefed you recently about the work that we're doing together.

I'm here today just to talk broadly what is the SOP, why are we doing it, and what the next steps are going to be.

Yours is the re remaining member city in terms of a briefing.

So the SOP, the system optimization plan, and what is the purpose of it.

In its most basic form, what I could say it's exploring how HRT can put its limited resources to its best use by seriously looking at underperforming low ridership fixed bus routes and reinvesting savings both in human resources, translation bus operators, and financial resources to routes that are waiting for operators.

We you you all know I've talked to you all in the past about our chronic issue about uh not enough bus operators to have the number of routes to serve the number of routes that we have today.

So uh reinvesting operators to routes that are waiting for more service while looking strategically at underperforming routes and how we could perhaps serve that transit demand in a different fashion.

So the SOP definitely is an outcome, uh, the system optimization plan will increase ridership by putting service where it's most needed.

We are, as a point of fact, in the bottom quartile for an agency of our size in terms of passengers carry per revenue hour.

Uh definitely improve reliability.

Um just in the month of June at the end of the fiscal year last year, we were missing upwards of 1,200 trips in the month due to the lack of operators.

Um result in the after implementation and overall more cost-effective bus network.

You all heard about our uh regional transit system, regional backbone network of 13 routes serving um areas of employment and with high frequency.

Those routes uh perform, you can see the low-income route, the low performing routes, uh the local bus routes cost six thousand and forty-three cents more per passenger trip than our high performing routes, and that's significant.

So the context for the system uh optimization plan, bus operator shortage, and HRT is not alone in this.

Every transit agency in the country coming out of the pandemic is struggling with having a large enough workforce in terms of bus operators to operate the system that we have today.

We do have 68 total bus routes.

Uh some of them are the RTS routes, some of them are the MAX commuter routes, others are the peninsula commuter routes geared to the Newport News uh shipyard.

But chronically, right now we're suffering from a lack of about 50 operators on any given work day, uh, such that we can't reliably put out every trip.

We put out about 2,000 trips on any given weekday, and and we're short about 50 operators.

As you know, the RTS network will be delivering high frequency service at 15 minutes.

That requires on top of the 50 that we don't have another 45 operators to bring the remaining 10 routes into the high frequency service.

So basically, the context is we need to match our resources, resources being the operators, with the number of routes that we operate.

We need to also keep a compact with our customers, our people who use transit, they're depending on us to be there when we say we're there, and they really don't want to hear about oh, we don't have enough operators.

But uh we can lose our customers quickly if we disappoint them too many times.

68 routes has been in place for many, many years now, since the merger, actually, and it's time to take a hard look.

Not all routes have the same performance characteristics.

You'll hear a little bit today from me about microtransit or demand responsive service.

It's a new option for serving lower market demands rather than serving it with the most expensive type of transit, which is a fixed route running on a fixed schedule.

We have two pilot programs, one in the city of Newport News and one in the city of Virginia Beach have demonstrated we can effectively serve that transit demand uh with demand responsive service that you would make a reservation via the phone.

So it it will become a key linchpin of mitigative strategies if we recommend some routes for elimination.

To fully implement the remaining 10 routes in the high frequency network, we need to free up more bus operators, that's the bottom line.

And eliminating underperforming local bus routes can do that.

Uh RTS routes, as I've said before, are have a higher ridership productivity than HRT local routes, and that's important because the way we fund services, you all recall, is that we get formula funds from the federal government, but the state is by far the largest uh contributor to funding uh providing operating funds, and they measure us based on a couple of key benchmarks, which I'm gonna talk about.

So eliminating service on low performing routes will help us with obtaining additional state funding.

We're also looking at streamlining consolidating routes that are either near each other or duplicate some uh portions of their route with the other, and then realign some others to eliminate route deviations and keep them tighter in terms of route performance and on-time delivery.