The Community Planning and Transportation Committee convened on October 23, 2025, to review the September public transit ridership report, discuss proposed updates to the city's parking management plan including potential food truck leases and rate adjustments, and consider the vacation of an unimproved alleyway causing safety and sanitation issues for residents. Staff presented data indicating steady fixed-route growth alongside a decline in demand-based on-demand services, proposed significant changes to parking fees to address operational deficits, and outlined a legal strategy to vacate a problematic alley to benefit abutting property owners.
How about yourself? Same. Actually, I have to work it with Terra. All right, everybody, it's four o'clock, so we'll go ahead and get started with the community planning and transportation committee for Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. We have three items on the agenda. The first one is our regular presentation of the monthly public transit ridership report. This one for September. We have Taylor here from staff to go. Thank you, Mayor and Council members. Yeah, I'm Taylor Johnson, your transit and parking program manager in public works. As always, we have a few updates here on the memo in your packets, as well as some ridership numbers. We can uh go over and answer any other questions that you guys have. Um the memo here, I just want to highlight a few things on the maintenance and vehicle procurement. Uh we appreciate council approving uh acceptance of grant funds, moving some monies around, and then the authorization to purchase of three large buses last Tuesday. So we're busy uh getting all that paperwork done um with the Washington state contract folks and getting that PO issued and getting those on order. So those will be the last three big buses that we need to replace as a since we've inherited the system. So and it'll be a while before we need to replace them because they're 12-year buses. So we will have replaced all of them in the last five years. Correct. Yeah, because we inherited all the buses we inherited, were old pretty much, and we've replaced all of them. And then I did get a question the other day from someone about I guess one of the older ones was in service, and they asked about when we were updating all the buses. I was like, actually, there's only two left. So we're almost there. Which you know, some of those older ones, yeah, they're still on the road, they're still they're not as nice on the inside, but they're still performing fairly well. So yeah. Um, and then uh moving along to the bottom of the first page on the Central Oklahoma Long Range Transit Plan. Uh, we came to council last on September 23rd to give an update, and that was uh likely the last update to you all. Uh it'll go through a few more committees and then on to ACOG, likely in November, where we're anticipating adoption of that. And then uh ACOG staff is is uh we're gonna be working with them on looking at how the implementation plan or action plan for that long-range transit plan works. So uh just a reminder it's uh culmination of all the local planning work for transits, uh making some recommendations, but um at a high level, what can we do to move transit forward um collaboratively in the ACOG region uh for into the future? So we'll be working on that in next uh calendar year. And then on the back page, uh it's the last bullet at the top, uh, technically under the grant section. We talk about the T SEC grant. We um came to council a few times to talk about embark well, and so we are pursuing that grant. Uh it's the physical activity section of T SET, which is the the uh tobacco settlement endowment trust, and hoping to launch a pilot program for that embark well, which is senior focused transit to you know help encourage health and wellness uh for that population over 60 is what they do in Oklahoma City right now, and as we discussed, we could change that if council um wants us to, but we're at least gonna pursue that grant funding. It's a hundred percent, which is great. If we we could possibly get some additional points if we asked for um less than 100%, but we felt like that was the most prudent thing to do at this at this moment, and we'll be going to you on October 23rd with a grant resolution, um, hoping to get that approved so we can submit that. The deadline's November 18th, I believe. So and then lastly, on the Norman Transit Center parking lot project. Uh, that we had a final walkthrough on Monday, so that project is it's good to go. It looks great. We're we're pretty happy with it. And if you drive by or stop by and look at it, um hope everybody everybody else is happy with it. Uh something we knew we were gonna have to do, but uh we were hoping we could limp through with the asphalt a little longer, but it just wasn't becoming yeah. Moving on to the ridership. So uh in September for both uh embark uh the fixed route service and plus we had 47,643 riders. That's a little bit more than last September, which was 44,679. Um so again, like last month, we're starting to see uh what I would call uh good regular growth. The last couple years we've seen 20, 25 percent ridership, so now we're still increasing, but not nearly as much as that, which is still fine in the in the industry. Um I would like to point out on the table on the right there, uh just some of the the 112, the 121 and 122 are over 30 percent over last September.