January 28, 2020 — City Council Study Session

Transcript

Captions from City of Boulder YouTube recording.

[0:00] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] evening welcome to the January 28th city of Boulder City Council study session we've got three items on our agenda tonight and the first one is the hill hotel and then we will have East Cooter's conversation and the third item will be regarding be cycle so take it

[1:01] away staff good evening Council Yvette Bowden I'm the director of community vitality tonight we're going to be going through an overview I just want to set some context so for the benefit of everybody in the audience and watching as well as newark council members we just want to remind everybody that the project site that we'll be talking about tonight is proposed at the northern end of the hill commercial area along Broadway between University and Pleasant the project is potentially is owned by three private amenities I'm innocent E's I'm sorry all of who planned to ground lease their properties into this one project proposed as a hill hotel in addition the council's role here is as the you jid board specifically as it relates to a you Janome property on the site which is the pleasant street parking lot so by way of

[2:04] overview we're gonna be introducing you a couple members of the team who are here this evening will talk about the project intent and will show a little video to it just as a recap we review the information provided since the last council presentation and then of course offer the questions staff on this project has evolved over time but has always had great representation from David Year from City Attorney's Office members of the community vitality department and finance department Joel Wagner is here this evening we have also got representation in the room from the Nichols partnership don't know that we have somebody here from Sage hospitality this evening but they are part of the project team and of sheers Atkins Roquemore architects so rather than listening to me talk for ten minutes about this project we thought it was an interesting opportunity to use a

[3:01] local talent to tell the story of the hill the hill commercial area was established as a residential district shortly after he was founded at the end of the 19th century gradually shops and restaurants were added to the ground floor of the houses and today the district remains largely the same roughly one-tenth the size of downtown Boulder over time the hill became a destination for music dancing and entertainment its vibrancy attracted customers from throughout the region this tradition continues today with the presence of the Fox Theater the albums on the hill record store and the Innisfree poetry bookstore in cafe but change is inevitable in shifting consumer behaviors contributed to the hill becoming a destination mostly for students in other areas of the city reinvestment efforts reimagined storefronts and Street scapes to meet

[4:00] customers evolving needs plans were drafted to reposition the hill but the district's small size and limited funding have always presented a barrier to revitalization by 2014 one-third of Hill businesses had transitioned to fast-food the district had more barber tattoo and head shops than retail stores that year the City Council made it a priority to revitalize the Hill Council commission to study that identified key next steps first address the perception of insufficient parking second update and beautify its most rundown areas and third leverage five underutilized catalyst sites to attract uses that bring customers to the district when the students are away in 2015 the city was approached by a team from Denver with an idea for achieving all three next steps the team had agreements with owners of three properties located next to a public parking lot at the north end of the hill the Pleasant Street law is owned by the University Hill general Improvement District and the Boulder City Council is its board of directors

[5:01] the team wanted if the city would like to partner to build a public parking garage beneath all four properties above the garage would be a hotel with ground-floor retail all property owners would retain ownership aging properties would be improved the number of parking spaces on site would quadruple in the hotel would bring much-needed year-round customers to the hill in 2016 the City Council formally authorized staff to explore the idea further since then efforts of the hotel team and the city have focused on the needs of existing retailers matching the project design to neighborhood scale limiting or eliminating City investment and most importantly ensuring that the project was successfully contributed to Hill revitalization the city conducted outreach to tenants in English Nepalese vanish and Vietnamese to ensure they were aware of the proposal and to determine their location needs if the project moves forward there have been three public presentations of the evolving proposal in six updates to City

[6:00] Council and councils request studies looked a current use of the Pleasant street parking lot the project's likely impacts on district parking supply and whether a hotel would have a positive impact on district vitality most significantly the outrage has resulted in the elimination of the public parking garage and the city participation has been reduced to selling the Pleasant Street law at market value the hotel team agreed to support the relocation of existing tenants a transportation demand management even pulled her website a larger printout of this video is provided as well as a QR code should people want to access it later at this point I'm going to turn over the presentation to one of the project managers Sarah women think I'm community vitality who will walk us through additional information provided in your packet so we thought we would start off with reviewing the studies that were

[7:00] mentioned in the video these have all been provided to Council over the last year in two batches in April of 2019 in August of 2019 and we'll also review the commitments to date from the development team the first request for additional analysis that was provided in April looked at whether the 20,000 square foot YouTube parking lot might be an appropriate location to develop affordable housing as an alternative use staff provided a preliminary assessment of the site's affordable housing potential under three scenarios first as an inclusionary project on the site with a combination of market rate and affordable units second through a cash in lieu contribution toward affordable housing units constructed elsewhere and finally through a 100% low-income housing tax credit project on the site these scenarios yielded anywhere from seven to forty affordable units the high land value high probability of needing underground parking and the relatively low number of units rendered the site

[8:00] cost prohibitive and staffs opinion for the same level of investment staff estimated that the city could construct approximately 70 affordable units elsewhere in the city the analysis also looked at the affordable housing benefit of developing the site as a hotel estimating that the city's commercial linkage fee requirement would provide a one-time contribution of 1 million dollars staff estimated that this amount could support the construction of 11 new affordable units elsewhere or the acquisition and renovation of 12 existing units also in April 2019 staff responded to a request for a bulk and mass comparison of the proposed hotel with existing hotels in Boulder the comparison included the hotel bull Dorado the st. Julian and the recently completed Embassy Suites Hotel on Canyon following receipt of the two studies council indicated through a nod of five that staff should proceed with negotiating a letter of intent to sell the Pleasant street lot to the hill

[9:00] hotel partners but requesting also that staff prepared two additional assessments the first assessment looked at the impact of eliminating the public parking spaces on Pleasant Street on the total parking supply and demand and eugen the consultant examined impacts both during the construction of the hotel and after completion of the project their assessment found that youjin spaces would be at peak utilization mid day during construction which is measured at 80 five percent occupancy as shown in yellow on the diagram at right and that once the hotel was constructed the additional demand could be met by the 50 space garage that's intended to be constructed as part of the hotel the consultant also recommended that the city look at ways to meet evening demand when neighboring residents currently park in the pleasant street lot for free they also recommended that the city explore opportunities to relocate the current Pleasant street lot employee permit holders staff members are

[10:02] actively coordinating with CU to identify ways to do this either through existing University Hill parking agreements or through the CU conference center garage that's intended to be constructed across Broadway from the proposed hotel the second assessment requested by counsel at the nod of five was a study of whether the hotel could achieve the catalytic economic impacts sought in the hill reinvestment strategy as mentioned in the video the hill continues to experience high vacancy rates with long-standing businesses such as those shown at right vacating their spaces in recent months a study related to the citywide retail project found that average revenues on the hill are insufficient to offset boulders higher than average occupancy costs the economic consultant measured the impact of a hotel compared to three alternatives office commercial use affordable housing and maintaining the status quo their assessment found that a hotel use would have the highest positive impact on the vitality of the

[11:01] adjacent commercial area bringing in nine point nine million dollars in visitors expenditures on retail goods and eating and drinking activities of which a portion would likely be spent at surrounding Hill businesses a hotel used the consultant found would have the highest fiscal impact to the city including 5.4 million in one-time taxes fees and land sale proceeds and an additional 1.6 million annually in sales and accommodations tax revenues a hotel use would have the second highest impact on the broader Boulder economy compared to an office and commercial development measured both in terms of job creations and overall economic output staff will continue to update Council on the Commitments agreed to in by the developer to date these include purchasing you Jude's Pleasant Street lot for fair market value contributing two hundred thousand dollars to a tenant relocation Assistance Fund to be administered by the city providing a transportation demand management program

[12:00] to reduce single occupancy vehicle access to the hotel by its employees guests and visitors and hotel employment opportunities for CU students more recently the development team has also committed to designing the project so that it reflects its immediate context including the hill commercial area and CU con campus this week the development team submitted an application for a public concept plan review with the Planning Board their review will look at the project site plan the general building design and site access following the Planning Board review Council at its discretion may call up the concept plan for additional public input if counsel is comfortable with the direction of the project it may also wish to schedule a public hearing on the sale of the uijik parcel it is possible to make the closing of the sale subject to final site plan review approval which gives the city greater assurance that what is approved to be built on the site meets the intent of the land sale the concept plan submittal includes materials that give the public a sense

[13:01] of the project's massing this rendering shows the project as viewed from the north end of the site on Broadway at University Avenue and here it is as viewed from the south on Broadway at Pleasant Street prior to tonight's meeting there have been three community presentations on the concept for the hotel as the project has evolved and there have also been six updates to counsel staff has provided periodic updates to the impacted businesses both those located on the project site and those located in the core of the hill commercial area all impacted tenants received a mailed letter prior to this meeting and an offer to meet with staff individually with interpreters as requested as shown on the screen the city also maintains a project website with records of past meetings updates on the current project concept and opportunities for public input to city staff members are also available myself and Joel Wagner with fine for any questions about the project as it relates to the Hillary investment

[14:00] strategy goals and to the fiscal impact potential fiscal impact of the project staffs questions for Council tonight include two questions first does counsel have questions concerning the intent evolution and current scope of the hill hotel project including the revised role of the city with regard to the project's potential financing and next steps and a second question does Council is huge its board of directors support advancing the hilt hotel project for planning board consideration requiring if ultimately approved the sale of the Yuja Don Pleasant Street parking lot and I can keep the questions up if that's all that be great thank you Sara do we have questions from Council mark two questions I assume the the slide where you're showing view from the north is simply a indicative of the massing not the actual architecture I am greatly relieved and

[15:04] in terms of the sale of the parking lot are we getting one appraisal or more than one appraisal okay thank you Sara your microphones often I don't think we're catching you would you like me to repeat the answer yes please okay so first the images shown in the presentation are just for massing purposes at this point and the architectural style would be determined through the concept review process with the Planning Board and with the City Council if you desire to call that up and to answer your second question the appraisals for the fair market value of the property would be determined as mutually agreed upon in the letter of intent sir maybe you said this but I

[16:01] want to just confirm that I heard it the hotel s as contemplated at least cannot be built without the purchase of the city's parking lot is that correct that's what we've the development team has indicated to us the assemblage is needed Thank You Aaron that presentation could we request as part of the planning review process that the project be sent to the design advisory board that within our purview to request that council might direct we can pass that along okay thank you any other questions for those of us who haven't served on the Planning Board and when would that come in a visa Vee of the plane boards review of concept well I think it's varied actually in the past but I think the idea would be it would come certainly

[17:03] before site review huh so I'm probably in between concept and site review we can look into that with because I think like sometimes in the past planning board at a site review has requested around with with the design advisory board and that's maybe been a little less productive ideally it happens before the site review so that the concept isn't a hundred percent baked before them presumably David you can answer this - there's only that would be I'm assuming the council might call of the concept review and and so I guess the question is where that fits in visa Vee the council call up well it's done a variety of ways for a variety of projects and I'm guessing on something like this though it would probably have multiple trips to the design advisory board both you know early middle and then ultimately feeding into the site review process thank you thank you David

[18:00] I have a question for David or Tom which is what are the limitations on the conditions that council can place on the sale of the site well it's a negotiation so you know yeah it has to be something that would be within the realm of a willing buyer and a willing Celer so there is some room there and I think that as Sarah pointed out earlier in her presentation there is already a set of conditions in there the ultimate issue for counsel is you know do you ultimately believe that that's a good deal for the general Improvement District so for example one of the things that will be necessary for the developer to pay is to be as to pay the the fees for the impacts on affordable housing as per the the menu of uses and so can council as a condition of the

[19:03] sale then require more affordable housing or more funds well I you know I think that goes the value of the property I think that you know there's a pro forma that will go with that the developer has and I really have no idea how affordable how you know additional resources towards affordable housing what effect their pro forma but in terms of our affordable housing impact fee etc that they they would be required to pay those as part of the project and also with respect to I know that the project will go through a TDM plan but can council put some requirements on the TDM plan for example on the impacts it would have to the employees of the hotel and

[20:00] say for instance a lot of them will probably be minimum wage or there abouts employees and with respect to the expense of transportation sure I so we would appreciate any feedback that you have on that you know at this point the conversations that we've had about the TDM plan are they're pretty conceptual at this point but yeah any input that the council would like to give us in terms of how we would go forward and negotiate a purchase contract if that's all if we go that next step we would appreciate that so my only caution Mary is that the David correct me if I'm walking Lots owned by you jid and you're selling it in your role as the ujin board of directors and the money goes to you Jed you'd have to be careful about putting conditions on the sale that don't benefit the owner so I mean I think suggestions about TDM suggestions about affordable housing are helpful but

[21:01] to the extent that you're lowering the price that would go to you Jed and putting into another city purpose you might have a conflict of interest that I'd be careful about so yeah no I do agree but in terms of transportation demand management that's within the wheelhouse of the powers that are granted in ujin's Organic documents so that would playing in that sandbox would be fine so the the request would need to be limited to affecting just the employees of the hotel or of the district and of the district and yes so when you when you will be acting on the sale you'll be acting as a fiduciary you know you're gonna be wearing two hats and will probably be reminding you of when you're wearing which hat but on the one hand you know it's the traditional regulatory role that the council has in

[22:00] sight review and on the other hand it's going to be as support of the director to the board of directors for the general Improvement District and the general Improvement District is you guys are all aware you know it has a defined set of boundaries and a defined set of taxpayers that support it the use of taxpayers bought the parking lots that are you know in its portfolio now so you just have to kind of keep an eye on which hat you're wearing okay thank you any other questions Adam and then Sam or mark and Bob Adam Sam mark and Bob no okay I've heard this is a statement but I just wanted to see if staff had I did the main building in the large L shape I've heard that that is nearing its useful end of life and would need to be renovated or deconstructed and were you built in a do it in a different way altogether so I just want to see if that

[23:00] was accurate information that's our understanding from their property owners and certainly when you do go to visit the building there's some maintenance that they've been working on but we hear that from the tenants of the building as well okay thank you mark and Bob and then Junie this is for counsel am I correct that this is going to be a combination of ground lease properties and fee ownership properties by the developer is that correct or that's my understanding of how they're gonna structure it does that raise any issues of concerns on the city's part that you're gonna have in effect several ground lessors and the city all having interested in what goes on there well the city will be out of a deal or not the city the general Improvement District I got to be aware of the hats as well but as it presently as its presently

[24:03] structured the sale of the ujin law would go into the land assembly that the development team is putting together so it's simply a problem for the developer yep it's correct Bob and then Junie I just want to play back what I think the chronology is just to make sure we're all on the same page here so if we if we don't give you if we don't put on the brakes tonight the concept plan will go full which sounds like it was just recently filed will go forward maybe the design review board will be involved certainly the Planning Board will be involved the developer will receive that input I'm assuming that Council will probably call this up so that'll come to us and kind of them maybe April May time frame ish and at that point in time we'll weigh on the concept plan and is that the time you would ask us to approve the sale condition subject some conditions which I'll get to in a second is that is that the point in time more or less when we're doing the concept review you're asking asking us to approve the sale is that

[25:01] right that's our understanding is that at that point we've heard interest in having a public hearing on the future yes well idea so public hearing concept review and and approve of the sale and then that's that's rose in this but the sale would be conditioned on ultimately site review because we're not going to want to sell and they're probably not gonna want to buy unless we all know that the thing that we think is gonna get built there is gonna get built there right and so the closing of the sales we have a contract for the closing of that sale where we're selling to the developer and developers giving us money won't happen until after SCI reviews done and we all know that that this was gonna happen the way folks are trying to play is that did I get the chronology right yeah that's presently our understanding in terms of how we would proceed through with the transaction okay so you're not necessarily asking us to approve the sale tonight but if we had a lot of heartburn with it you'd like to know that now before people go through a lot more cycles but we're the approval the sale won't happen

[26:00] well maybe the spring timeframe when we're looking at the concept preview is that right subject to those conditions okay so just to clarify though if we do call it up for the concept plan that hearing for that would be around the same time as the hearing about selling the land but those would be two separate hearings right because in the one case would be the City Council considering a development proposal in the other case would be the huge board considering selling the land but they'd be near to each other timewise is that fair yeah yeah they could be sequential or they could assume you could do them the same night and I think one of the things also to remember as part of concept review you know there's no regulatory approval that comes out of concept review it's really a public input process and so you

[27:03] know the process is set up so that you cannot in fact talk about things other than the regulatory requirements that are going to apply to the to the development so this might work well with that good things juni okay Sam this is just I'm gonna ask this question it's a bit rhetorical but because this will be the first concept plan with this council when we do site plan reviews quasi-judicial when we do concept plan review tell us what the rules are for like what we can comment on and how you think you can comment on anything in a concept review and you can go beyond the regulatory requirements that will be considered in site review so if you wanted to talk about the tax implications or things outside of the normal site review that's fine it's just knowing that not everything you say if

[28:00] it isn't anticipated in our regular regulatory structure will necessarily get implemented but I do think that in terms of talking about that you know the contract in the context of the concept review I think that that would fact that could work well okay and then council members have different opinions about how they choose to work with developers and discuss with them but for concept plan there's no ex parte communication disclosure or anything like we have when we get to site plan review is that correct that's correct but I would still recommend that council kind of use their normal kind of quasi judicial hearing standards and you know be prepared you know I just think in terms of transparency it's great if you can keep track of those types of things and disclose them so that everybody comes to the table at the same set of information great just trying to make sure that we all understand that of the difference

[29:00] between site plan review and concept yeah thank you thank you for those questions Sam any other questions all right so do we want to answer their questions for counsel here are we ready to do that Sam so I have some comments I wanted to make before we got to answering the questions I have shared these comments with the development team but I want to bring it forward for the public and council to hear there's two main concerns that I have with this around the hill hotel design itself one is and it's mentioned in the presentation I just want to call it out that we have a few contexts that were operating in one of the context is the building character of the hill there's some nice older buildings that have nice roof line treatments and window treatments and so on and I think it would be very useful if this Hill Hotel was able to make reference to the

[30:02] history of the hill particularly the buildings that were built between the turn of the century in the 1930s because they have some character to them that's a little different than what we see in many other parts of the city and the second thing is I remain concerned about approaching this development project from the north to the south coming up the hill the tallest part of the structure the bulkiest look if we look at the presentation the more to look at the view from the north side that is going to be somewhat imposing and so that we might concern a concept plan and it will carry through the site plan review which is how does the public experience the building as you approach it from the north side so contrary to that when you look from the south the pleasant that looks really you know in context whereas I think the view from the north side looks bulkier more massive and so on in what we've seen so

[31:01] far so I just put out there that those are going to be some points of concern that I will carry forward in the concept plan I just wanted to get them out on the table right now it doesn't effect that I think this should go forward it's just more design than it is about the project itself and I would agree with those statements Adam and then Aaron yeah this is a similar type of concern I don't have any idea about planning right now but all the new building adopted just last meeting I don't think this project would probably fit under the deadline that those would start going into effect no they would those codes would apply to this project okay I just want to doubly verify because I think that's really important and all the rest Aaron I wasn't thinking to hold

[32:01] off can I jump into the question or to other people you know I just wanted to make some comments before similar to the kind that Sam made before we jump into the question so I understand that the hotel model will be the have the highest contribution to the economic vitality of the hill but it likely also has the highest externalities and so I was interested in having the TDM plan address some of those externalities with respect to the people that are going to be coming into work now I understand that there will be eco passes that will be explored but as we know with downtown a lot of those jobs will be shift jobs evening jobs so they're likely won't be

[33:00] the public transit and likely as with a lot of other minimum-wage jobs people do not live in Boulder so I would like the TDM plan to consider those externalities and make sure that the the the jobs that the people that take the jobs that are result of this development are not vulnerable to just though the the commuting that they're gonna have to do and just make sure that that's addressed yes please that's a great maybe pile on a little bit or maybe add a contribution to that know that there's discussions going on now between I guess us or maybe it's the developer on the one on the west side of the street and in the university which

[34:00] is building a very large parking garage on the east side of the street and about accommodating those employees of the hotel on the west side so they could park across the street in the in the new University and so we have this really great program that we launched here a few weeks ago that's the three the three dollars after three o'clock and and I think that the types of employees that Mary is referring to a lot of them would benefit from a program where they can you know their shift workers are working the evening or working in the hotel's restaurant or whatever it is if they could come in and park at a discounted flat fee all evening long have the safety and security of bowling having to go across the street as opposed to wandering through the hill you know late at night that would be small I know we don't have a control over that but to the extent that you're negotiating or somebody's negotiating with the University for parking for employees of the hotel would be great if we could have that discounted flat fee secured type of parking arrangement thanks for bringing that up both of you and thank

[35:01] you for acknowledging the work that we're doing in community vitality in terms of the parking negotiation I think we will certainly continue our conversations with the university as well as their partners to see how that can evolve as you might imagine as much as we need different kinds of modes our work with transportation has us considering all of these evolutions the construction timeframe right now of all of these projects is our primary thought to make sure they have mineral minimal disruption in the neighborhood and for existing businesses but we will certainly make this a very high priority in the negotiations and will be thoughtful around that thank you and yeah thanks for bringing the three from three to three up it's an excellent program the other thing I wanted to bring up is the the possibility of providing emergency housing for people that might get stuck

[36:01] doot-doot weather events things like that if if a giant snore snow storm comes for example and people can't drive home or get otherwise get home that the hotel will provide housing for them a room rooms we can certainly ask them well I would like it if possible to be a condition of the sale or the TDM Sam I'm just thought we may need to start with 33 program with the university at first but with the proceeds of the sale of the pleasant street lot there's also the possibility of expanding the 14th Street lot and then that would be within ujin's control to be able to implement a 3-3-3 program

[37:02] so that wouldn't happen right away but it's something that we can keep in mind going forward that we might be able if we expand that lot to offer that to the people who work at the hotel and other employees on the hill thanks Sam all right any other comments before we go to answering the question all right who wants to kick that off at arond anybody else wants to go first but just before I go into that I would say Mary thanks for bringing up those issues with around the TDM for the employees so I think particularly around the commuting patterns I think and parking was really important point the room idea is an interesting one as well it's worth exploring but I'll just say that I absolutely do feel like we should move forward on this you know as somebody who's been on council for four years we've been considering this variations of this concept for four years now and it's I felt like the the approach has

[38:02] gotten better at every step and so I feel like we have the opportunity before us to move forward on a catalytic project that will also have huge synergies with the conference center that the University we'll be building across the street in a way that will really help the hill district and then have that tight connection to downtown as well so I'm excited to move forward I look forward to the next steps with the concept plan coming to us I'd like to see us proceed I am like why supportive you know we've been promising the hill for decades I think that we would do something to help revitalize the hill and finally we have an opportunity in front of us it matter fact it's the only opportunity in front of us we did it we have explored over the last couple years alternatives but none of them seem to make a whole lot of sense and they're all hypothetical in any event this is a project that's in front of us it is catalytic and we all received a letter from the University today we all might remember that back

[39:02] around 2015 or 2016 we strongly urged the university built its conference center on the hill and not overrun Folsom Street and they observed back to us today that given the size of the conference center that won't be enough rooms hotel rooms on their side of the street to accommodate all of the conference attendees that they anticipate so this hotel is synergistic with a conference center which is what we insisted on and so I think it would be probably inconsistent for us not to support a hotel that in turn supports the conference center which we very much wanted there on the hill so I think this is a great project I really want to compliment staff I know this has been years in the making I know we're not making any final decisions tonight but I think this is a stepping stone to ultimate decisions I think Murray and others have raised some really great points about some guardrails we can place on this if this is what this is meant to be we do want to be very thoughtful about this it is our property

[40:01] we have a right to sell it or not sell it this is a pretty significant used parking lot and you guys have done some great studies about this lot and so it's it's probably an underperforming asset in any event and if we can get a fair price for it and contribute to the revitalization the hill I think we should do it Sam a little bit I do think this is an important project it's a good project it fulfills that we made to the University I also believe that it will be very complementary to the conference center I'm actually quite eager to have this conference center come in because I think we will have a lot of very interesting technical conferences that highlight the work going on the labs here the work going on at the university I mean there's just a lot to be able to have these kind of technical conferences and right now they're held outside of town you know we can't do the convening that we'll be able to do with this conference center so I think it's a really important amenity culturally and

[41:01] scientifically for the community that we have at the University and having hotel rooms that are close by meets a lot of our climate goals because people will be able to use public transit should they choose to get to that hotel and then walk across the street to the conference center I believe that the combined both hotels still won't hold the number of attendees that could be held if a conference is full and so there will still be spillover that's gonna go into the downtown and elsewhere but I believe that this is a great way to have many of those attendees not have to have either network traffic networks like lyft and uber or you know a rental car and so I think that it serves that end as well plus of course the revitalization work that we have thought about on the hill I mean it will help mix and blend populations on the hill and it will provide support for different kinds of retail within the hotel itself as well as different kinds of food service

[42:02] rather than just fast-food on the hill it will help promote and support some of the other types of restaurants up there so I am supportive of this project going forward we need to do our fiduciary responsibilities make sure we get a fair market value price for that service lot I don't think it's particularly great use for that space in the city as a surface lot and if we can replace it across the street as far as parking for employees or in the 14th Street lot eventually I think those are things that we can look to do with that money huge it is underfunded compared to cages so having this infusion into you Jude will at least allow us to have conversations about what our options are on the hill so in general I think this is a really good project we need to get get it right you know I think passing and design elements are going to be really critical because if it's gonna be a catalyst project it's gonna need to be something that highlights the entire

[43:00] hill area including the conference center across the street and however the university is going to do their architecture so my understanding is some of the people involved with the design of the hill hotel are also part of design review of the conference center so there should be connectivity there as far as an understanding of the themes that are gonna be present both in the hill and in the conference center so I'm looking forward to seeing how the design involves as we go through concept plan I think it's really important for counsel check all up concept plan on a project that's this visible and so I look forward to hearing what planning board has to say and us looking at it as well but generally speaking I think it's important that we move forward with this as best we can all right anybody Rachel I'll be brief I agree and also support and just want to say that I think that it has been a long road for community

[44:00] members and small business owners on the hill and so I want to thank people for their patience and I'm happy that this council is probably instilling some hope tonight by moving forward so I'm honored assuming that we have the majority here to be moving forward with that mark and then Adam I hope I am incorrect but I tend to be a little bit of a skeptic as to the extent to which this will actually revitalize the rest of the hill but having said that I think the project stands on its own merits they he'll require some plan of action there is no plan B I agree with Bob and then Sam about its synergistic effect with the conference center and I don't believe it would be appropriate for us to turn to the Uni hill community and say see you next year this is this you know we're just not going to move forward on this I think this project has its own merits and I support it all right well I'm

[45:00] gonna oh I'm sorry Adam it's okay I don't know if you remember but I actually came and testified against this several times when it first came up but over time as I've seen the plan and the involvement and gone and spent time on the hill and you know became more aware of the actual situation and seen the back-and-forth I can comfortably say that I'm becoming converted to the entire concept and I think it's becoming a very very good potential project I'm still just very much looking forward to the design because I think of most importance at this point is going to be that this is accessible and friendly and open to all members of Boulder not just strictly serving as a hotel that you know accommodates travelers so that's sort of what I think this space needs to be so

[46:00] that you know it's it's a focal point for everybody those in Boulder that was on the hill those coming just to spend a little time in Boulder so that's what I'm looking for out of design and hope we can reach something like that thank you Adam so all these comments actually raised another question for me which is the $200,000 for relocation of the current businesses I'm wondering if that is still enough and and so I if necessary because it's been a couple years a few years since that number was developed and I just wonder things have changed in a couple years so if that number is not enough it should be adjusted and so I'll weigh in as well I share marks skepticism and also the

[47:01] optimism in there as well that the project stands on its sole own but I'm not sure that it will solve all the problems so it's a wait-and-see but it it it does certainly introduce more traffic to the hill I agree with the comments that have been made with respect to the design and the importance of the view shed as you're coming south from the north and those are my main comments I think yeah it is an important catalyst project as has been said and I think it will have important synergies with across the street and I think they have to play off of each other so good work anybody else want to comment juni I agree with everything that's been said already I don't want to add too much to it so it's moving forward I'm for it I

[48:02] think it's an opportunity for the community of there for revitalization but also we also have to look into the transportation system as well how will that work so those sort of things that I'm interested in thank you oh just what I said if I can just make a request out of my question before just to make sure that this does go to the design advisory board in between concept plane and site review know if I could just respond to June and juni gondola the G word did we answer both questions I believe so and we appreciate councils attention this evening thank you thank you thank you over time thank you all right next item

[49:03] we'll just give a little time for staff switchover yeah thank you well the the staff is getting situated I just wanted to explain why I'm running the meeting and not the mayor Sam at the retreat we had a suggestion that we rotate leadership on the study sessions

[50:03] and that that rotation be tied to whoever is on rotation with the council agenda committee and so that fell on me I'm on rotation and that's why I'm leading the study session and not that Sam Sam still mayor that's all that is to say is that Sam is still mayor there was not a coup all right just cuz he's mayor doesn't mean we have to wait for him though well I think we can get started it's it's we have a quorum and we don't need in any way for a study session so our next topic is bolder actually the micro mobility program is that gonna go first or are they kind of mixed together they're mixed together b-cycle will go first all right then

[51:00] right so thanks for having us tonight I'm Carlos Fernandez I'm the new director of transportation and mobility and I'm gonna do a quick open Ning and then I'm gonna pass it over to DK so first I wanted to thank everybody who's been involved with this this is my twelfth day on the job and I really AM get any understanding of projects like this how many departments were involved in this conversation so community vitality parks Police City Attorney's Office the communications group and then external stakeholders like see you probably most importantly the community has weighed in on this and so this is a really comprehensive set of ideas that have been brought forth there are some big wins that have happened since the packet has been issued and one of them is around funding I think this notion of trying to fund things collaboratively is a reflection of how hard this team's been working across lines so I'm really excited about to show you that tonight Chris Hagelin

[52:01] was supposed to be here but he got sick this afternoon and I told him to go home so that was for you and and and for Chris too and so he's watching this tonight hi Chris and he's gonna email a tough questions come up DK's got most of them covered but just in case the idea is that what we have two topics tonight Boulder bike sharing and then we have shared micro mobility and if I checked in right we have two hours for this topic hopefully we get done sooner but we want to do is at least do Boulder the bike sharing part first the case got about 10 12 minutes worth of slides I'd like to let him go through his show he's been working really hard you send me emails and Sunday night on this so I want to give him his twelve minutes to go through the show and then we want to open it up for conversation we'll have that part and then hopefully we can get in the second part which is largely about heat scooters right last thing I'll say is tonight we have two members with us from transportation Advisory Board mark and Alex are here there was a great suggestion at the CAC meeting about I'm having tab members here that were part of the conversation

[53:02] and I want to make sure that you know that we're like this is an evolving conversation we had a great meeting before this we have many to come we want to make sure that if there's an opportunity to let them speak tonight as well we want to make sure that's incorporated with your permission so that's that's it for the housekeeping I'm going to turn it over DK in 30 seconds I just wanted to also tell you that I had a really great week this is my 12th day on the job and it was awesome to be at the retreat the energy and the conversations that you had were like so solidifying for me to be part of this and then Jane said something the other morning she said that she was gracious for the work that I've been doing it was really motivating so I just want to thank you it's been an awesome transition into this and and and so regardless how this goes tonight I'll still show up tomorrow but it's been just an awesome first couple laps so thanks that's what you think hopefully I didn't just jinx it so nevertheless I'm gonna turn it over to DK thanks Carlos and it's been great to

[54:00] have you on board so far your Energy's been wonderful thank you my name is Dave Kemp go by DK I'm a senior transportation planner and let's get started oh should say good evening mayor and city council thanks for having us so Boulder biked oh sorry let me see me make sure you got the right there we go okay sorry about that so the purpose of tonight's presentation is to share the results of our analysis and to get tabs input specifically on two items one is the overview of older B cycle operations and review the proposed 2020 funding plan and the second item is to review staffs shared East cooter micro mobility ordinance recommendation and just a quick note we'll be discussing at the February 11th City Council study session where private and/or shared lightweight electric and human powered vehicles should be allowed to operate in the city so that's coming up in a few weeks now and so in terms of B psyche on

[55:06] the current status we're looking at 300 bikes 45 stations they are a valued community partner they do a lot with mobility for all have an affordability program I just helped us out with a lot of our promotions a library pass program and currently they're funded by a couple different sources here corporate sponsorships City subsidy and then also through several different past programs and while b-cycle is an older system and has proven itself to be very reliable and predictable and safe and b-cycle is a non-profit contracted by the city rather than a for-profit business and so we've been able to really work closely with them and weighing in our direction and align our goals excuse me this next set of slides will help you get a sense of current be cycles trends this particular slide is

[56:02] the rider categories per year and you'll see that the green and gray boxes are likely driven by visitors and tourism and the yellow boxes indicate see you affiliated trips and you can see how much this category has grown especially in the last quarter of 2019 and the red and blue boxes indicate monthly and annual passes which are largely comprised of community members running through the city do you question this like you want us to ask it now or do you want to come back to it that'd be fine okay thanks okay this is a interesting map this is a heat map as requested by Mary young this is only see you affiliated trips and so we use their email addresses to understand who's a member of this but it really shows you the vibrant activity around the University and several shopping areas too Folsom Street at Canyon and then

[57:01] also along Arapaho as well and it also look at baseline in Williams village there and and so you can see there's quite a bit of activity taking place was to you students which is great and this is a quick snapshot snapshot and it's hard to read so far away but it kind of gives you an idea of the activity at several of the different stations actually all 45 stations and with the the top stations of know to include a Folsom in Colorado intersection Williams village pearl Place Broadway and Euclid and 21st and Arapaho being the highest checkout stations there's a correlating return map as well or a chart that also talks about where the bikes are coming back but it's very similar to some degree of what the checkout looks like them so a lot of return trips and also one-way trips and here is the monthly use by the years 2017 through 2019 now

[58:02] the bell curve before you is variable Matic of overall cycling activity in this n city today and is mostly due to winter precipitation and colder temps but again take a close look at late 2019 and then a lot of the new activity that's coming up in and around campus and so mmm here we are today unlike many other early bike share programs Boulder bike share has been operating in a non sustainable funding model the current model is reliant upon sponsorships for ongoing onm and in 2019 b-cycle lost its presenting sponsor which is why they were in the prick admit predicament that were in today and transportation and community eyetality stepped in in late 2019 to prevent the system from shutting down which could have been in late November of last year and so the potential loss of B cycle then or in the near future would cause an extended gap

[59:01] in our bike share service we don't want that B cycles reserve funds that they have today would have been used to notify users issue refunds to members and essentially closed the system they would cover the displays of the stations and the bikes would have been needed to be stored or the bikes and the stations would have likely been stored at the MSC yard along with a plan for removing the stations and potentially liquidating the equipment that's in the field today and so we've been hard at work with our partners and staff proposes that's a city Cu and B cycle collaborate on developing a strategic operations plan for the next three to five years which will be shared with tab and council and the community for input in q3 of 23 2020 let's talk about these cycles current equipment as I mentioned it is an older system it's aging but it's still working it is safe reliable and predictable a

[60:02] future path forward with beat Boulder B cycle would need to gradually phase out some of the older bikes some of those bikes and them in the system right now are almost 10 years old and they've been holding up and they've done a great job of maintaining them they've lasted a long time but they're getting old and so converting or phasing those old bikes out to new bikes both human powered and electric assist is potentially one of our goals moving forward with the company and so we look at some of the benefits of e-bikes you know we're looking to get more types of people on bikes they can go further on ebikes they're great for our terrain around here and hilly getting up to Chautauqua Park or up into North North Boulder and some of the concerns of e-bikes is that well you can go a sustained speed longer over a traditional human powered bike and they're more expensive from a capital upfront cost and then also maintaining the bike and so this leads me to the

[61:03] last slide of this section here and this gives you kind of a breakdown of the funding that we have where we're proposing tonight and we again coordinated with all of our partners internal and external to cover the 2020 v-cycle funding and deficits so the question tonight for you is should we proceed with B cycle and its partners to prepare a strategic plan for city council to consider and q3 of 2020 so I'll just add one thing before we ask tab and then we can do the questions if that's okay so I asked staff last week when we heard this if there's any way that we could ask our partners Plus look internal to fund this without asking for a new funding request and so what you see tonight is a lot of effort among staff and our partners to do that so the the $275,000 is the bow to add some beat

[62:02] electric be cycles into the system I think the number was 440 or so e bikes into the B cycle system is that right Ark yeah exactly okay so about 40 bucks in there and to keep the system going so were doing some modernization not just kind of keeping the baseline so cu-boulder is up 40 percent in their contribution of what they historically have done so that was a really great letter to receive in a partnership to receive that left us with 165 K to fund the number at the bottom if you go to the bottom right is 50,000 that was the number we previously budgeted so that's not like new money we had to go find within turn only so all those numbers in the middle from that 33 to 42 is what we found internally I want to thank community vitality they reached out to their partners in the district and asked about this and those partners said yes P cycles key to us I think believe was be jad and then downtown Boulder DMC and so they they

[63:03] upped their contribution so then that left us with the 15,000 seventy five hundred seventeen thousand and 42 so Bob you rightfully so asked about this and now I have that we have answers for you tonight so the $15,000 is coming from TDM programs and that we have budgeted this year but that we want to repurpose this money to save B cycle for there's some bike planning money that was gonna happen within a group that's the 7500 bucks there's some community planning efforts that we're gonna happen that's 5 and then we don't have a goal bowler or manager right now so that salary is not being allocated right now so we're able to use that money since we don't have a colder manager right now to get to the ultimate number that you see at the top so that's how we went into the couch cushions and got it funded so that we could keep going and moving ahead right so that's a funding breakdown I want to make sure I'm being allowing our tab members and I believe

[64:01] Alex you wanted to talk about this tonight so I'm gonna get out of the chair let you talk and then we're gonna go back to you if that's okay evening council evening thank you for coming up tonight of course we're operating in an era of uncertainty first Alex Weimer transportation advisory board that's on tab we face a lot of uncertainty with micro mobility we don't know if or when we're gonna get doclist bikes what the future of scooters are for a decade now Boulder bike share has been a good partner with the city so as tab tries to solve our first mile last mile challenges throughout the city Boulder bike share and B cycles something that we we know working I've seen their operation firsthand they're pretty efficient

[65:01] they're really good about relocating the stations around town summon gun barrel and North Boulder weren't working as well they've moved him to see you they're working he's come in as a as a funding partner or increased their their contribution as a funding partner so there's a lot of things going well with the system and they've been a reliable partner for a decade I've ridden probably a dozen different systems across the country and they're not nearly as reliable as far as bikes being at the station and the bikes being in good condition the way they are here so tab certainly supports the continued investment and partnership with Boulder bike share as we wade through the other challenges of bikes and scooters and so the additional funding would also I think expose a lot of people to the benefits of e bikes 15,000 people last year used the B cycle system so in a city known for bicycling it's a good way to give exposure to both residents and visitors give them an opportunity to

[66:01] bike around the central part of our city quick question for mark and Alex is the this tab field that the ridge money is gonna provide be cycle with enough time to be able to come up with a plan I believe so and it also buys us time as we sort out the other modes if scooters and Dhokla see bikes were to come in for a couple years and we were to get rid of B cycle but then those private companies decide this market isn't viable for them we're left with nothing so I think it's certainly worth continuing for at least a year see what as far as an action plan to make a more sustainable model goes and I think Thursday if we were to get the private companies then the cost is

[67:02] really placed on the user in a way that B cycle isn't always a lot of employee employers provide B cycle memberships or the annual expenses only 88 dollars a year so for someone who uses it a lot that's not a ton per trip if you were to pay with some of these other companies charge per trip and you're a frequent user the cost would be a lot more I'm setting up a query component to it as well that I really like with the b-cycle model two questions the first first in the absence of a manager how is the program going to be managed we actually do have a inner rim go Boulder manager right now Chris Hagelin and then of course I would I'm a serve as a project manager for that and working with Carlos and Chris and I and the rest of our team I think that's what you mean about is

[68:01] there a cost to that yeah so I want to make sure I get the question right mark so there will be a manager of the Boulder b-cycle system the manager that's not on there is our internal group goal Boulder manager so that that's their two different ends so there will be somebody actively managing v-cycle my second question can I follow up Marc do you mind yeah so I get that but are we essentially sacrificing a headcount there's somebody in the department in order to do this we have somebody acting right now Chris Hagelin sure because of Chris's current role and then the goal Boulder role we're not paying a full salary because Chris has existing salary as an ft in our current system so the difference between those two is how we're gonna fund this so it's not a long-term solution it's actually a situation right now that presented itself we are going through a process to determine what that role is how it looks like how it fits in and so the say that we advertised that job in a month or two we would even if we did that we would the savings that we got from that having

[69:00] it and maybe q1 and maybe q2 would cover this soon in other words you would still be anticipating filling that position but so the the reason why this isn't a full year's full-time salary is because it's not a whole year correct thank you my second question is what portion of the 275 thousand dollars represents the acquisition of cycles sure so right now again we're looking at a 4060 split with cu-boulder in the city and about 185 is required for operations and maintenance in 2020 and so the rest of those funds from the 275 would be used for refinement of the current system and then also looking at how we pilot ebikes in the city and the the exact number still is to be determined about how many bikes those would be and if we would own them or if we would lease them but the goal here is to get us started on the I think of the right but if you will to begin experimenting

[70:01] with ebikes and help begin to evolve the organization thank you excuse my unfamiliarity with the system what type of data is collected and is any of that shared and or sold sure so a lot of the slides that we looked at here is constitutes a lot of the data it's all public and it's not sold okay and we use it for planning purposes with the city and of course for them to refine their operations so if we ended up going with a private system then we couldn't that's almost a community benefit in itself in that yeah their data is shared or sold when they have used this system it depends on what kind of data we're talking about there's a lot of there's a lot of valuable data that can come from the private sector to help us understand where people are riding bikes or scooters within the city to help us understand preferred routes that's

[71:01] valuable data and we can add that in the regulations to be required as part of the contract with the city but we don't have control over some of the backend stuff about why some of the companies are collecting your information about your where you go your consumer behavior now to your private information is at stake credit card information but metadata is potential for that data to be sold yes Sam you have a series of questions mostly about the presentation so if you want to go back to slide 4 which is the number of trips I was trying to figure out what the numbers above the bars are 836 2261 it's them I'm sorry Sam that is the gray the bar that is the likely tourism I believe let me just double check here yeah the green and grey boxes so they're

[72:00] very small slivers so the numbers above those grey boxes in the KC obviously thank you the next slide I just wanted to double check you said that the heat map is derived only from the student rides correct that's right through a special relationship of cu-boulder they were able to you see you affiliated emails and create this particular heat map so it is only showing Cu activity at this point it'd be great if we can advance and and show a heat map that's representative of all trips but this is what we got right now and the reason that that's really important is because the first impression of this map is this Boulder B cycle heat map is this is all rides and so forget it the next slide then we can get some clue as to what isn't university-affiliated by things

[73:01] like pearl place so where's the pearl place station so I think that's a pearl injunction and that vicinity there okay and then we've got Boulder Junction so so I guess the the takeaway here is it's not all students it's just that we have a lot of student information but that there are plenty of folks who are non tourists and non students who are using this in one way or another that's correct and really the funding split emulates to the ridership so we're seeing about 40% of the rise generated by Cu affiliated members and then 60% coming from residents and visitors okay good and then another question I mean I have an e-bike that I've had for a while and I haven't noticed any particular onm and I ride it a fair bit I do a lot of my commuting by II bike now and you know I have to lube the chain I have to replace the tubes

[74:01] every once in a while but as far as things like the battery you know range reducing or anything in four years I haven't seen that so you talk about I know there's an additional expense for you bikes they're a little more expensive even though the price is coming down but I was curious what the claim for increased onm was about what is that right so a lot of the shared key bikes out there today do have a battery pack and sometimes that battery can be removed from the bike and the bike can be left but the battery needs to be recharged and so it's about going out and servicing the battery to make sure that that's got juice in order for the next rider that's a big part of it and it's also about the reduced distribution or rebalancing of the bikes within the system that can also I guess I can see you needing spares so that you're taking and swapping batteries whenever you move the bikes back and forth or whatever but

[75:00] that seems like that's a fixed upfront cost and then at least my experience has been that the batteries kind of like you know when I first bought a Prius I was told I'd have to replace the battery pack in the Prius at five years and the truth is that you know it's been 13 and nothing has really changed as far as mileage so it's just a question it doesn't seem to me that there should be a whole bunch of additional OEM but maybe there is some as far as swapping to that I'm happy to follow up to and get you a more precise answer about all the specific costs but that's the major ones that I know about today okay and other communities that have a bike share have they had any increase in accident rates or injuries between the e bikes and Ani bikes not that we've seen all the data that we've analyzed we haven't seen ebikes as a factor and increased injury rate or conflicts with other users great and

[76:01] then you know the last thing I would just ask there's I guess type 1 type 2 and type 3 e-bikes and those have to do with the governing of the speed what do you console like type 3 or 25 miles-an-hour type 2 mine is 18 miles an hour give or take and then type 1 or like 12 to 15 miles an hour so what would you contemplate for the type of e-bikes that you would use for recycle sure just to clarify the different classifications of e-bikes a type 1 is essentially a pedal assist and so you only get the juice when you pedal type 2 it involves a pedal assist and/or a throttle so have a little button next to the handlebar grip and that can be activated either way and those 2 bikes are governed at about 20 miles per hour and it's part of a federal definition of what constitutes a electric assist bicycle and in class 3-e bikes are can

[77:02] be both pedal assist and throttle but they have a higher speed of about 28 miles per hour yep and so it's about the the wattage and so class 1 and class 2 looks up at about 1 horsepower in class 3 walking will go up further than that would you contemplate height that you would you would think of 4 B cycle class 1 class 1 so pedal assist ok and then in terms of being able to monitor the speed that can be adjusted through geofencing so personal bikes no they can't but 20 miles an hour is the top speed but if you say you wouldn't to have a shared ebike system you could regulate the speeds to be anywhere from 12 to 20 miles per hour and the speed limit on our paths is 15 correct Thank You Rachel thanks I I'm sorry if this is tucked in and I just didn't see it but looking at

[78:00] the colorful graph I think Sam said slide 4 again and see you member trips have gone up like almost double from 2017 to 2019 is because we move stations or what what result what cause that that is correct yeah we repurposed some of the stations that had low-level or performing and we put them in in areas where we thought were where b-cycle thought that they would have better peripheral higher performance or higher activity and then the non Cu member trips are down but that's because they're not as readily available in Gunbarrel other places where we moved him from it's not like a loss in interest would you say well actually 2019 numbers are down a little bit because we think it's due to the weather had a particularly rainy year and so that it will influence accept see you like but see use one up at the latter part of 2019 so not in the spring Erin oh wait a minute Bob and then Erin

[79:03] so stay on the slide cuz I'm still trying to understand the 60/40 split first of all what um so that the let's start at the bottom the blue is is non Cu affiliated members members right people to buy annual memberships that are not affiliated to use Erin's well it's it's possible that they could be might be some see you in there there could be yep and so the yellow is strictly strictly see you see you email addresses so let's let's just say for sake of discussion that all 32,000 of those are not see you folks in 46,000 are see you once now the green is walk up day passes and the gray is paper trip passes so those we kind of presume or either tourists or I suppose they could be residents who just don't want to do a membership is that right okay and then the red the monthly members what who is that and so the red here just me look at

[80:01] my notes a lot of boxes those are monthly and annual passes and I think that the monthly passes are read so so our monthly monthly monthly are also non Cu affiliated or there could be some to you and they're also there be some see you in there as well so how do we get to 60% for us and 40% for C you help me with the math there are we putting all the tourists and all of the Reds and all the blue on our side of the equation is that how it is getting to even there it still seems to me it's about 5050 because it's like right at about a hundred thousand rides in 46,000 but a minimum we know our Cu so that's approaching half how do we get to forty percent if we could ask Kevin Krauss executive director to come and speak to that number that would be by my math

[81:02] it's about 43% RCU if we just count the see you yellow interestingly enough we received an email from somebody who's a Cu employee who has a monthly membership so yeah what are the chances it's true may rivers map is exactly how we had done this is that it's basically the total of trips is just over 106,000 for last year - the 46,000 Cu trips and what remains so basically this is a proposal the the P cycle made not necessarily negotiation we'd be nice to see you we certainly provided all the information both to the city and to see you about who was riding the bikes and the the Cu offer was based on their percentage of rides yeah okay and so how much negotiate was that light they said we'll give you 40 we said sure or was there like some back and forth there I would say that they came we weren't even sure

[82:00] that they were coming to the table they offered $15,000 to the system last year is that right so when they came with a letter that said they're gonna give a hundred and what is the number now we didn't start negotiating we said thanks we'll get back to you okay so we didn't begin negotiations but we were really thankful that they went up from 15 to a hundred and whatever it is only see you affiliated ones but doesn't if I look at the station station a lot of those places on the left-hand side with a lot of usage are either on or very near campus and so that would seem to bear out that you know it may be approaching half maybe even more than half cu student writers I just my comment I guess following on these questions this planning question is is just I'd be interested in a negotiation with Cu about whether there was forty sixty is the right fair split there I mean from be cyclist ever sampling you're just looking for the money you don't care where it comes from but we do and if we have a lot of students using these

[83:00] stations and I'm a lot of student among or of see you affiliated folks that are the actual writers and that seems to me would be fair to have a discussion we'll see you about increasing that forty percent contribution and they have made it clear that they are they will discuss future allocation of dollars based upon the numbers of riders so if it does increase in future years then they will increase their funding I have just a couple more questions on a slightly different line so I understood the the extra I don't call a hundred thousand bucks for for the ebikes and that's intriguing who would own those e-bikes because you know we may fund this this year and then maybe things are still not looking so good and and we visit this in six months or nine months and it's just not looking like there's a solution here or maybe there's a wonderful solution because some sponsor runs in and wants to give you a hundred 150 thousand dollars that'd be great that'd be great

[84:01] situation but but who since since we're spending about a hundred thousand bucks on a bike is the university onnum that we own them is a 60/40 split like you know what happens if if this kind of all doesn't go forward in a year or two like whose bikes for those I think that is to be determined still a movie part of our strategic planning process it is difficult to say right now if those bikes will be owned by us or leased by us and then if they if the money is split between the two different entities then which bikes would go back to see you and but I think that it's part of our plan to work out how that arrangement with DVDs and then final question that I'll stop for now have a few more later and this is for be cycle okay vehicle is actually know that you've you're in the process or it may be have closed your Denver operations is that right the way it works actually is it we're a separate nonprofit from Denver bike sharing and so Boulder bike sharing we have b-cycle brand equipment but ours is operating as long as well choose to

[85:01] operate it and then Denver bike sharing is closing the recycle system so there's a I know they said they're local nonprofits but there's kind of a big corporate umbrella right there's a little bunch of it's nationwide right yeah be cycle LLC is a fully owned subsidiary of Trek okay we equipment in license their software you sure you're in a bunch of cities is that right shutting down what's what's the experience of some of the other bike-share systems across the country are they facing some of the same headwinds that we're seeing here and Boulder in Denver that's a great question I'll talk this briefly as I can so basically doc based bike sharing it's still pretty live and well in the densest and largest cities the cities that seem to be having some trouble whether there be cycle Hardware other hardware providers tend to be smaller mid-sized cities basically it does does cost more to buy and then to run a system like that but the you know trade-off is the kind of predictability and reliability so you have everything

[86:02] you have a mix of huge city systems that are profitable have for-profit operators that are hired by the city or transit agencies who own the systems and then you have a lot of the b-cycle brand systems are owned and operated by a local non-profit and there's a mix across the board there too because really the wild thing is you know a single or several larger sponsors totally change the game for us and that can be really positive and then when the bottom drops out it's not okay thanks Aaron can you go back to the slide about usage per station please you know there we go right so one of the things that I think sticks out from this graph is that there's some very small numbers over at the end and new targets talked about the repurposing those ones with very low ridership have they already been repurposed thank you the

[87:05] question yeah on this chart it basically shows all of the trips by station in 2019 everything at the lowest end let's see Broadway an iris Table Mesa xxx and diagonal I'm actually going up those were all removed during this year so it's I guess it's not an apples to apples comparison in that they're at the very bottom but we proposed ones for relocation that were either the very bottom or you know a few steps up but for some other reason where I'm making sense okay good so do you feel like you've kind of cut out the the really underperforming stations or where I guess part of what I'm getting at is like do you feel like there could be some additional efficiencies by cutting out other stations that really aren't performing I do I think it comes to my mind to more repurpose them again yeah because really you know we've relocated stations to denser parts of the city but then we also have situations where where if there's a great past program in place

[88:01] we're more optimistic about how many people arrived I really meant relocate rather than like get rid of yes absolutely you do think that would be wise to do what is our you're talking about putting together a plan this gives time to put together the the next phase of the plan right and I guess the I guess we'll get to we're doing comments next I'll wait maybe the presentation that if the cycle were to shut down we the city would take over the docks and the bikes and put them out at the MMC and so how would that be any different with the electric it may not be and that is the current situation is that through our arrangement through our partnership with the profit builder bike-share in the

[89:00] beginning that through the contract that we would be the owners should the nonprofit have to close its doors and so then our options would be to potentially find another service provider do it in-house or switch to a different type of system altogether and liquidate the current system I see and so that's completely open for negotiation if we go forward with the $275,000 and part of that is for acquiring ebikes there would be an arrangement at least worked out that would determine where those bikes would end up should the system fail correct if we owned them okay right if we bought them it certainly seems like that if we buy that MuRF or sign up for the lease or whatever and the lease term is longer than maybe the nonprofit lasts then we would still have maybe not ownership but commitment on the lease okay that's my only question you may

[90:00] just add to that we are we're trying to get Boulder bike sharing off this I guess the reliance of sponsorship dollars but it's not to say that we're gonna forego the sponsorship model and actually if it's possible we can augment the system with additional dollars and what's appealing to a lot of corporate sponsors is to do something new and so getting behind something like new e bikes it could be a way in which we could also generate more sponsorship revenue which would go back into the system either refining it or operating and maintaining the current system or purchasing new equipment alright I have some questions Oh mark did you want to respond to that microphone please could you go to the funding slide and mark please introduce yourself I'm mark McIntyre current

[91:00] member the the only thing I wanted to say here is that I just wanted to make sure that you as counsel understood that this has not come before ten this is happening very quickly and Alex and I heard about it tonight ELISA I heard about it tonight my first time in a meeting heard about it tonight in a meeting with with Carlos so which is not to say I do support this I support not having a catastrophic failure to the system a precipitous failure I prefer to buy the time here and so but I think we need to be ready to evaluate completely different systems as we spend this money and keep the system going for a while but I just want to make sure everyone understood that this was not something that has come before tab and has not been voted on thank you mark that was a

[92:04] question I had is whether tablet weightings I know this came up very very quickly for us and for sounds like you guys haven't had a chance to meet so we won't presume that other than the comments that you guys are making individually but let me ask that question maybe this is something to take back to tab when you guys next meet because there's really there's really two halves here right there's the 185,000 to keep the program afloat and then another call $100,000 to go out and buy some ebikes and we haven't it doesn't feel to me like we've done a whole lot of analysis about the e-bikes and how successful they are in other cities and tab hasn't weighed in you could it be possible that we could approve $185,000 tonight likes to like to send you back to see if we can negotiate a better split we'll see you in in punt on the and that keeps the ship afloat keeps the program going and then really have tab drill into whether

[93:01] it makes sense to spend another hundred thousand dollars on ebike sounds like we've got some questions about ownership about how viable they'll be what what's the experience in other cities and really value input obviously holistically but particularly on the ebike system that's not needed right now to keep the system afloat right that's something that can happen a month from now six months from now a year from now whenever has an opinion about that you can come back to us and ensure that so I just want to throw that out as a as a possibility of breaking this into two different decisions I very much support what Bob has just said it seems to me that going out and spending a hundred thousand dollars on a bike switch mmm every report I've ever had are the greatest thing since sliced bread but in the absence of a funding model we're kind of doubling down we're you know we're being asked to increase our

[94:00] contribution by an order of two and a half times and we still don't know what the longer-term prospects are for this I don't want to turn the lights off I want us to be able to continue to have a viable a bike sharing program but I think stepping out in the absence of knowing where we're going to go and how we're going to do it I'm committing $100,000 to ebikes if we don't have a good solution we're gonna have to spend the same money next year to defend our capital investment I'd like to find out what we're doing before we spend that money mark if we could we would like to clarify the additional funding and how it's being allocated because we're using the hundred thousand dollar figure to purchase a bikes but I think there's more than that or to that so yeah absolutely I wanted to say that you know the nonprofit has been through plenty of rocky times before and we've been you know almost a decade into figuring this out last fall when we were six months

[95:00] into our presenting sponsor having having discontinued or finished their contract our board took a look at how much we would need and reserves to responsibly shut down the system basically get out of the business if we need to and the number they identified was $60,000 we've never gotten through the winter with how much money in the bank before and so in September when we really brought forward our need and request to the city staff the request was for it was for closer to $300,000 a full replacement of our sponsorship model acknowledging that that was kind of fundamentally unreliable between you know between now and then as we've made it through this winter so far you know and trying to just help chart out what our course could be I produced a model showing we'd probably end 2020 with that exact $60,000 figure in the bank if we had only 185 thousand dollars in funding that could put us all back in this exact same room in January of 2021 in this exact same

[96:00] situation and so basically I was trying to under the model that our board put in place try to make sure that we're not only making it through the end of this calendar year but with especially with see you on board as a larger committed partner planning through the end of the academic year of 2021 which also sees the system through its full 10 years of operation and it's a sensible time for us to between now and then plan whether it's for a new system for a new funding model just gives us more time than just running it through new years of 2020 all right I have some questions what you know referring to the funding models what kinds of ideas are on the table for something like that that's a great question when we talk with cities that are we kind of I call them their kin to Boulder but they're not exactly peer cities there are cities as a alluded to that have very successful sponsorship models all of those cities are larger and

[97:00] denser and so it's hard we looked at them we think how could we emulate this and then when we talk with we've explored working with media buyers and they tend to say you're a pretty small city the number of impressions you generate really isn't what you'd hope it would be and that's a big thing that's changed since when the system started and now is that almost all ads are being delivered you know hyper targeted and with better tracking on mobile devices so it's still intriguing for someone to maybe pave to sponsor the program and have you know durable asset visibility downtown but it's not as compelling as it might have once been that's a good reason to look at it and then in a lot of cities there's either different ways that the either city or transit agencies are committed to it and leave their models to where there's a the primary goal is a sponsorship and system revenue model but the city or a transit agency undereyes operating losses if they occur to have some sort of safety net to protect the investment

[98:01] and to give the nonprofit the consistency knowing that if they sign up a sponsor they might not have to cancel six months later so as far as what would work here what we found long-term has been really helpful it's really driven system use has been these larger programs and so you know when companies both purchase passes for their employees we have some great engagement around that and I think the system both gets more use and more revenue than it would if were just trying to court those employees individually and then the same thing can be said for see you it's a combination of relocating stations to campus but then also see you stepping forward our mental center and funding a past program that's enabled us to really ratchet the number of students using it another question what happens to the human powered bikes once they're decommissioned that's a great question what I know I can speak you a little bit from what Denver V cycles doing so you

[99:00] know again separate nonprofit organizations but we share a lot of information because we have comfortable hardware they are gonna give about half of their fleet to a local nonprofit and they're gonna be repurposed to be individual bikes for people who could use them that couldn't certainly be a viable model here most of our bikes are still in great rideable condition even though some of them are 4,000 miles into their life and so that would that could work here certainly they're heavy but they're very durable I did want to add one more thing from earlier with councilmember Yates was speaking to Denver bike sharing I think it might be important to point out that there Denver bike sharing is closing the Denver b-cycle system but the nonprofit is remaining in operation while the city of Denver works out their regulations so the regulatory environment has a lot to do with what any for-profit or nonprofit is choosing as their course forward at this point thank you and I have a couple more questions and these are related to the

[100:02] e-bikes so first of all are what the e-bikes utilize the same stations so that's one question and then because they're ebikes would there potentially be a possibility to have fewer stations and yes so those are my questions on ebikes yes basically the hardware provider we have right now be cycle makes ebikes one system we've gotten to look a little bit in at how it's been performing so far as Madison Wisconsin they're almost the exact same size system as we are here and their roof had their users like gone through the roof with e-bikes so they're on course to potential triple triple their usage in 2020 that they had in 2018 the difference a key difference is that Madison's a larger denser city and home of track

[101:04] so yeah be cycle brand equipment absolutely if those bikes dropped out of the sky they would plug into the station's right now and anyone could check them out we could choose how we price them ebikes can have a surcharge or not and then with other vendors the short answer is no they would not plug into the stations yeah because of the the longer distance that you could travel possibly with a with an e-bike would it have fewer stations was your question if because of the longer distances they would require fewer stations well could could it be possible that there would be a need for fewer stations I suppose so I think if you if we got kind of clear on what the use cases we are trying to serve and potentially serving you know when I think of serving longer distances I certainly think of

[102:00] north of downtown all the way to North Boulder and south to south boulder and then east as well clustering your you know if they're not stations at that point with just hubs fostering them along multi-use paths as you'd intend for people to get in would certainly be away hmm thank you yeah let's see we have looked at models of equipment that are either doclist but tethered or the e the B cycle ebike model that would plug right into our stations cannot be run talk lessly it is only a dock paste model okay thank you Erin yes ooh coming back to your earlier clarification I didn't quite get the clarification which is you're talking about what you were spending the money on that additional hundred thousand and I didn't actually hear the explanation of how that would be ratio between equipment versus operational sustainability um I think of it as being almost fully operations because in our mindset we

[103:00] aren't looking to make a large we're not looking to purchase ebikes we're looking to like demo them under a loan perhaps from trekker b-cycle I mean there are equipment provider now and would love us to you know eventually replace our equipment with the next generation of what they offer or lease them under a shorter term so also my mindset being that with this this far into the system most of our costs are all of our costs are operating the system so I guess I'm really trying to focus in here and how much of that money would be allocated towards purchasing new equipment purchase at least I'd say no more than thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars okay great thank you can I are we making comments or where are we here we're asking questions still but I think at this point if we don't have any further questions we can go ahead I'm sorry I'm confused on the numbers now because I understand that you had a sponsorship from Kaiser was $80,000 a year okay and that and that precipitated this problem so I'm having

[104:01] a hard time understanding how we go from an $80,000 loss to a $275,000 knee can you break down the 200,000 about what you would spend for one I understand I think you talked about more than a 12-month cycle so I kind of get that part of it but let's just just so we can have apples to apples can you just do 12 months and say how much would it take to keep the ship afloat not buy new B bikes not do anything new just keep doing what you're doing why would that be more than I know that we we contributed so money already right we were considering what fifty thousand a year right fifty thousand so we were see we're sixty-five and in eighty thousand one-way so that gets me one hundred and forty five can get us from 145 to 275 what's next one hundred thirty thousand dollars going for sure I'll do this from my memory but certainly some of it is planning longer than just operating through the very end of this calendar year but then also we're being relatively conservative around sponsorships as that as it's gone down

[105:00] over time we don't know necessarily if we're going to land another $80,000 sponsor or losing another $20,000 sponsor so we're being conservative there we're also budgeting pretty conservatively around system revenue which to tie back to the regulatory side of things we've been doing this since 2017 and we haven't known if dhoklas bikes might land and cut into our revenue stream so every year we've been basically projecting to get less thinking that we might face competition and this time you know our board is taking this approach of saying well we don't know if scooters are coming so we need to budget that our system revenue is going down as if they are will answer that question within the hour uncertainty isn't it it's not good for anybody comment or final question comment alright I thought that fundamentally were Bob and Mark was a good place which was you know to say yes we want to support beauty cycle we want to make sure the system stays in business and it's sustainable but hey

[106:00] let's do a little bit of a deeper dive into what the next steps look like and go to tab and have them take a look at that and say okay before making significant additional infrastructure investments how is this going towards the long-term sustainability the model for one to two plus years I mean is that kind of more or less what you guys were saying I think that makes great sense that if that's the consensus we're happy to to do that to take that approach Council how does council feel about that Sam I just wanna say a couple things first of all I really think we need to make sure to support recycle at this moment of need it's been around a decade and not all of our transit options make money I went out again that farebox revenues for RTD a roughly a quarter of their overall 700 million dollar operating budget and so it is the case that if we want to support options for transit and this option you know as

[107:01] 100,000 rides a year it's 25 metric tons of avoided carbon emissions a year presuming that it would be done with scooters which are not as good as our bikes or or cars I just want to make a pitch that we absolutely want to make sure that it can survive I will we now that see use jump here is massive from $15,000 a year to being willing to put a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year towards this I'm not gonna quibble with them over forty forty five or fifty percent because this is such a huge jump that it is you know I would like us to participate in this I will say about e-bikes one of the reasons that Madison may see this big increase is it changes your perspective on getting around so if people some portion of these are business users who are using it for last mile connections or first mile connections the difference with an e bike is you don't arrive sweaty Hills become much less of a concern and so

[108:01] these are big heavy bikes you know I was a member for a year and my challenge with them was they're big and heavy and he bike gets you around both the heaviness and the Helenus and other challenges so the reason that I'm really pretty and I think taps should weigh in I don't disagree before we allocate money for additional lease or purchase of equipment I do want tab to weigh in on this but my personal opinion is that the ebike changes people's perspective of what be cycle will be and so one of the reasons I mean it's a decade in and so you have to refresh and renew you know and so one of the things might be that besides Taurus and students the perception of this as a travel option is that its older and heavier and a little clunky whereas if they're pedal-assist e-bikes it may change a lot of that barrier to

[109:00] being able to do it so I don't want to leave that out of the conversation and I don't want to leave see use willingness to contribute to this out of the conversation so if we back off and see you backs off proportionally I do want to reserve a conversation for tab to have around you know the pros and cons of being able to do this I don't know about reducing stations I mean there's there's a chicken-and-egg concept there because you want people when they park there by dev a short walk yes to where they're going so if you reduce stations even though it's easier to get a longer distance they may still have a longer walk if there are fewer stations so I just want to put a full-throated support out for b-cycle it's clearly been a benefit to the community and I think we need to make sure to at least give it a chance to you know find the sponsors that can do it I mean there's a lot of tech companies in Boulder these days and you know some of them are expanding even beyond what

[110:00] they've announced to us as far as campuses including Apple and Google and some other companies so it's a long way of saying I really support recycle I think we need to at least make sure that they get through the next year and I would like tab to talk about what we might think about for refresh to be able to kind of reinvigorate people's enthusiasm I'll ask a question then Rachel that does raise a question for me with regards to the transit subsidies so correct me if I'm wrong transit is federally mandated is that correct I'd really mandated yes that's a question if away like is it required is it required yes yeah there's transit administration has districts and they have allocations based on population in employment we receive that allocation through RTD so that money is distributed for the formula formula Matic help me formula manic there's formulaic

[111:01] we thank you very much yes so that so that is but there's no similar subsidy right now for my crew mobility from any agency that was my next question there is a local example to of how much we subsidize transit in the hop is a good example right now the city subsidizes the hop by two dollars and sixty cents per ride provider and it's also subsidized by RTD and also the University okay thank you as compared to the what would be potentially the 165 allocation which is a dollar sixty-five for a ride Rachel I'm the first thing I wrote down was his tab looked at this and so I'm grateful that members of tab came tonight to voice anything but um this whole thing has felt a little bit haphazard and clunky to me like we had this study session set up for East scooters and micro mobility and then we sort of tagged you know tagged us on and

[112:01] kept building on it over the last I don't know a couple of weeks I think so it doesn't feel like we've had a thorough review and chance for somebody to look at this holistically and also I think it's a one a dollar forty five subsidy for each maybe under the new dollar amount and I appreciate it in tabs annual letter that they were looking at the neighborhood eco passes and equity considerations and I'm not sure you know what demographics or socioeconomic status benefits mostly from subsidizing this so I hope that tab will look at that as well Erin we just wanted to say I'm think you were the full-throated support I just wanted to echo that yeah I think I think by saying you know look at this a little differently in no way two tracks from I think councils supportive be cycle ISM entity in the program you're implementing any other comments uni I

[113:01] wanted to go back to you Rachel's concern is it that these two things cannot coexist is scooters and ebikes so could you repeat the question Kenny scooters and ebikes coexist absolutely I just need a little clarification if that's okay when the time presents itself okay um go ahead okay I just want to make sure I understand the motion I'm new to this so he just be patient with me I really appreciate it so what I understood from the conversation tonight is we would proceed with I believe it's the hundred and eighty five thousand dollar mark to keep b-cycle going and that would not be to lease or buy or do anything with the e flea it would just be to keep it going and then after that we would spend a

[114:01] quarter two and three working with tab to understand what role II or the future of b-cycle looks like so tonight you're saying 185 to keep B cycle going and not the 275 to introduce the leases or what else with e that'll come in a later date and when the clarification for me is we can keep going tonight and get this funding transferred over to be cycle to keep them going so that they're up and running past March first and then also we'll go back to tab not in February because we have a pretty full agenda in February will we go them in March and start talking about what the process is to understand more of the details related to the e part of the fleet plus the future of the fleet I believe that's right and the one thing that I'm not sure that we have consensus on is the asking Cu for more I mean I heard Erin

[115:04] and Sam in support of the full-throated support and others haven't weighed in on whether or not the support that Cu as providing going from 15,000 to 110,000 should be renegotiated I I don't think that's necessary Rachel and then Aaron and then Sam I don't feel like we need to argue with Co see you it's a fairly small amount of money for a short term so I wouldn't I don't need to renegotiate it no I don't either the one thing I would just say Carlos that that to what you said I was not necessarily this specific number but to say that do what it takes to keep the system healthy and then but don't start on major infrastructure investments additional ones without going through

[116:01] tab first and coming up with a long term plan so I didn't s I didn't hear that necessary that was 185 but Roger that yes thank you I mean you guys have to figure out what the number is it sounds like there's a fair amount of conservativism built in this I know there's some reserves for East Cooter's we didn't stick around when I talked about that you'll have the answer by nine o'clock on that I suppose the dye clip dhoklas thing you know we approved those regulations two years ago and they haven't shown up so I think the risk of that is probably relatively small if they would have shown up that would have shown up and I get the fact you're trying to do more than a 12-month budgeting but I'd say I'm fine with the 60/40 split for now but but but maybe Drive a little of that conservativism out I don't know if that's 185 maybe it's 165 maybe it's 200 you guys will figure out what the number is but let's let's just kind of do what it needs to be done to keep the ship afloat whatever that number is you guys can do the math

[117:01] on that get 40% of that number from Cu and then kick it over to tab for an evaluation of supplemental equipment whether the sea bikes or other things and the future and then maybe have tab come back to us in three months six months whenever you guys are ready and talk about what tabs recommendation is hey Sam so just to give us a little perspective on that say it is 195 just for discussion purposes that would mean to use portions about 75 which would be a significant chunk of that you know reduces our not too between 100 and 110 thousand but also say that if CEO is willing to pay the difference you know after we go through tab and we're talking about how to improve the system if she is willing to pick up 40 percent of that I think we need to really consider that as the serious kind of partnership offer because that's a pretty significant chunk of whatever improvement we try and

[118:00] make and the point of the improvement would be I think is as you said it's a pilot it's to test would it move the needle on demand at all because if it does we have an interesting answer for how we might make the system more healthy all right so does staff have what they need absolutely thank you all right thank you real quickly one thing that I think would be interesting to find out as you're looking at what ebikes might do is would it extend instead of making the last mile connection would it be the last miles connection I just wanted to say thank you for the hunting and the couch cushions exercise is great to see you know that was right there the credit should go right there thank you for the question imagine after we raised that at CAC it at 8 o'clock on Monday morning that at sam at the staff agenda meeting at 10 o'clock that day there was like a

[119:01] happy and passed around and community vitality through a night the fire department weekend that was passed around and thank you for that yeah thanks very much all right scooters okay all right transitioning now something that's very relative to be cycle is micro mobility I know that's the term we've been slinging around it's an industry term but it you know it does represent a number of different types of vehicles and so just as a reminder we are referring to microvilli we are talking about both human powered and electric powered lightweight vehicles such as

[120:00] bikes and scooters these shared devices could be dock base like be cyclist today or dock less and that they don't require a docking station and so the why in all this why we're looking at this and the over Archery's overarching we're using is to improve air quality and decrease greenhouse gases by reducing their independence Motor Vehicles reducing sov trips in the city single occupancy vehicle and the other reason is that many shared micro mobility options are considered active transportation which also provides a health benefit for users when they're getting around our city but getting exercise and being healthy so since the the moratorium or inferring to the study period it's been very helpful thank you very much for enacting that it really has allowed us to dig deep on this whole subject and work closely with our partners in the community and really very closely with cu-boulder as they are

[121:00] a major partner and then also with the boulder chamber too it's been a great process I think and we've been very collaborative with them through the the whole process and including hosting of many demonstration events and conducting a community questionnaire and we've also are thankful for the coordination with the mic mobility providers we've been very transparent about our process the entire time with all the for-profit micro mobility providers these are some of them actually all of them that we've coordinated with and they've helped us understand the industry and they've also participated and a lot of demonstration events and through it all we've bounced ideas and regulations and I back and forth and and so we are definitely thankful for their partnership and what's been interesting about this too is that although some of these providers here some of them do only scooters and then some of them will do both bikes ie bikes and scooters so

[122:03] you get up combination and so we want to recognize the opportunities with micro mobility they help provide transportation options particularly as first and final mile transit solutions which is an action item in our TMP and there were certainly a large number of micro mobility trips generated in 2018 84 million trips nationwide the 2019 data has yet to be released that we don't know what that figure looks like but we're imagine it probably doubled because there was an influx of additional vehicles deployed within the on the streets throughout the US and the technology is evolving to ebikes are now equipped with a lock to capability as you recall from our licensing program that we put into effect in 2017 we wanted and you can see the picture in the right-hand corner we wanted to have a bicycle that was able to lock to a bike rack we didn't want self locking bikes in install or you

[123:03] know active around the city to be placed in crosswalks or sidewalks areas where people could potentially get hurt and the the technology of particularly the East puter to is also changing the the wheels are getting bigger now they're they're adding seats some come equipped with a helmet as you can see in this picture lower center of gravity so they're responding to some of the issues that we are concerned about too and there's ways in which we can park these more orderly within the city too and looking at micro mobility hubs where we're parking a combination of different types of vehicles then there's a challenges that still exist today a primary concern is the safety for pedestrians safety for pedestrians on sidewalks and multi-use paths the safety for the users on the streets and we don't want to over saturate our

[124:00] community with vehicles are not being used so having a demand based cap in place is key and issues with parking generally with them on the sidewalk and so the next set of slides decides describes the highlights of our analysis and five areas of concern which are safety mode shift sustainability equity and demographics the first we want to talk about the Community Engagement a lot has been done this time has allowed us to coordinate with all the community partners that you see up top there and it's been a mixed review from all the different stakeholders about which direction we should go some are in favor of ebikes actually most all are in favor of shared e-bikes and there's mixed reviews on on e scooters and that comes out and both the questionnaire and through our conversations with our

[125:00] stakeholders and specifically with tab we wanted to share their their input they do support the inclusion of shared bikes ebikes on a citywide basis and sometimes also support a citywide program that would include these scooters but all tab members say express support for a pilot program including a scooters but limited to the East Boulder area in order to serve the Business Park such as Flatirons Business Park East walnut Airport Road you see the problem with some of these areas is that once you do get there by car you're kind of stuck there you can do walks but to get to places for lunch or to run errands it's hard to leave without a vehicle and so the chamber and tab and staff are all very concerned about how do we provide Michael mobility options to these islands out there to help give people additional options for transportation other than their vehicle and also how do we influence first and final mile transportation so we knew that regional

[126:01] transportation is of a major concern and so how would my permeability serve as that first and final mile solution to get to their place of employment so no that's not a very popular recommendation it's difficult to make and it's taken us months of analysis and internal and external outreach and coordination to get to this point it's important to know it as Carlos mentioned earlier that this recommendation is not just coming solely from transportation but it's coming from many departments including the police department community vitality the city's Attorney's Office parks and recreation risk management the city's Attorney's Office in the city manager manager's office so I'll read the recommendation in order to in order to in addition to Boulder bike sharing be cycle allow only

[127:00] commercial shared electric assist bicycle providers to operate within the city staff does not recommend allowing commercial shared East gouta route providers to operate within the city and now we'll get into the the slides of analysis so of paramount concern is safety this is a slide from Austin Texas Public Health in cooperation with the CDC of the injuries that they analyzed one percent of those folks that were riding a Easterner was wearing a helmet and 45 percent of those folks suffered a head injury what is alarming is that almost 30% of people writing a you scooter are injured on the first trip now I think you passed the first trip probably gonna be ok to get to the second and the third but it's that first try on the east scooter that could lead to a problem and this is percentage of people who are injured in

[128:00] some way so in other words 45 percent of the people who are injured on these scooters suffered a hand injury 29 percent of the people who were injured on a nice scooter it was their first trip right so that's the pool here is all people who were injured on the new scooter that's correct ok thank you over what timeline I don't recall the exact timeline but it was several months thanks thanks Carlos and and this the the bottom pie chart helps us understand like the percentage of those that were injured at night 40 percent and actually 61 percent of those folks were injured during the day and then we talk about alcohol use and a scooter use combined as absolutely an issue and and so there was been a number of floating around that the 79 percent of the injuries were people were

[129:03] impaired that's not exactly true it was of the 79 percent of patients admitted to the hospital that were tested for alcohol half of those almost half of those had a notable v8 blood-alcohol content and that was from the BMJ study and then from the Austin public health again 29 29 percent of those patients reported consuming an alcoholic beverage prior to crash yes of course together like I guess I would have thought that was more at night because there was so much alcohol consumption implicated but is that do those numbers go together people day drinking and writing these things or in some cases no it's a combination I mean I would we assume that a majority of the crashes that did

[130:00] occur at night the people were had we're drinking but it's hard to it's really hard to put the finger on that but there is a split between the crashes it's not just happening at night but it's happening during the day and the night is there was there any data on that to correlate the number of crashes to the condition of the sidewalks and streets no so the data around this - is really interesting because it's not necessarily system IIST or systemic at this point it's kind of all over the place we have to kind of reach in different locations to find information we need to do you know - in order to analyze what we're seeing and so does the state of disrepair of a road lead to a potential crash it's hard to say we don't have access to

[131:00] a lot of the accident reports so we don't know if it was a contributing factor but if you look at some of the models potentially specifically avi scooters they do you have a smaller wheelbase and so at this point we make the assumption that the condition of a road could affect how a scooter would operate you have more slide so want to roll through those sure thank you thank you so we'll hold your questions until DK's done Thanks so since 2010 there have been since 2000 2010 there has been four bike share related fatalities yet since 2018 there has been 21 East gouta related or yes re scooter share related fatality so some to us was very alarming which was pretty much the impetus the main primary impetus of a recommendation it definitely affects our vision zero goals and so that is of concern and so we are making the I guess more the prudent decision to say this is not a risk worth taking staff did conduct an analysis of the

[132:03] East gouta fatalities and 16 of them didn't happen at night 76 ball five of them happened during the day and most of the crashes appear to be caused by the user of the scooter making a sudden turn into traffic and running a red light or falling off a scooter and into traffic anywhere we're comparing bike share to scooter share and this is a typical way in which we measure exposure and per 100 million miles if you look at the fatalities for bike share it's been a little over one fatality per 100 million miles but and and so if you look at the scooters we're talking about 20 3.4 100 per 100 million miles okay I'm gonna move on to mode shift and so one of the

[133:01] one of the benefits the presumed benefits of a scooters is that they are providing a mode shift and so what we did is we analyzed the evaluation reports from six different cities across the u.s. and we paid special attention to this question if an e scooter had not been available for your last trip how would you have made the trip and you can see the split here and when you condense that down essentially it's replacing 37% with a prime vehicle trips most of those being TNCs but we're also replaying at replacing active transportation trips which definitely goes against our motor goals and our desire to have a healthy community and then we look at each scooters and sustainability so in 2018

[134:01] there was a study that was done that showed that this used the e scooters were lasting around 28 days and so quick turnover but the companies are claiming that they are improving the lifespan which is a good thing but we haven't seen the data on that in terms of how long a lot of them say it's you know now they're lasting three months now they're lasting six but see they're they're keeping the the vehicle ID private and the data specifications so we don't know for sure and so we can't make an assumption that that is a true statement in terms of East guta operations they are resulting a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions and you can see there and really it's the manufacturing of the ski the e scooter and then also the rebalancing the east user that comes into play in terms of increasing the GHG get gases so if the if the company's decided to start requiring zero or lower emission rebalancing fleets that would

[135:02] help and then also reducing the distances for rebalancing fleets to travel would help out a lot and then equity and demographics all the micro mobility companies will provide us that percentage the fleet to be deployed underserved neighborhoods but when the discount membership are available they are rarely accessed unfortunately for example only 6% of the trips in Portland were accessed by underserved community members really we needed better promotion through these affordability affordability programs and the cities to augment that outreach but surveys show that most people using e scooters are white young men and that they earn more than the medium income and they tend to be a little C less than 35 years old ok thanks and so regardless

[136:02] of which way city council decides to go staff has prepared a set of regulations to govern both e scooters and e bikes before you are the regulatory categories and some of their specific components the draft regulations were constructed based upon stakeholder input in active guidelines other input sorry other city programs an input from the micro mobility providers themselves and so it's not our intent and to create a set of regulations to prohibit shared michaelmi operations but rather to find the balance of what works best for our community and the private operator to maximize the potential and so this is our proposed approach we want to integrate the elements of the current doclist bike share licensing program take out those things that were prohibitive for the for the companies to do business and adjust some of those regulations we would propose to continue our public investment in boulder bike share and we encourage the regional

[137:02] coordination this is really important for our first and final mile solutions particularly with regional transportation we need other communities that are embracing micro mobility so that a trip on the other end is being satisfied by a vehicle other than a car and part of this process depending upon City Council's direction tonight would be to conduct a request for proposal process to select a vendor or vendors depending upon which way you guys want to go and I think we're almost yeah just want to give a minute if it's a Kate and let the tab members also in the blanks Alex and mark please come up state your name oh yeah I mark McIntyre transportation Advisory Board so this is kind of an awkward position for me tonight

[138:00] and I say that because as a board tab we had a unanimous vote to disagree with staffs recommendations regarding these scooters and so rather than to focus on that I went to focus on a prior unanimous vote where we agreed with staff and that was to approve our current 2019 transportation master plan update and as stated and as a council you guys unanimously approved our 2019 transportation master plan update as well and I refer to that because the goals as stated in the TMP are and I quote here our transfers our transportation system will be safe be equitable be reliable provide travel choices and support clean air and our climate commitment so and I state those

[139:01] because being safe providing choices and meeting our climate commitment should be the guiding principles for the decision-making in regard to a scooters and other micro mobility programs but they're really so related though especially those three choices safety and media our climate commitment that they're just they're just intertwined so as DK said our primary tool to meet our climate commitment is getting people out of cars shifting the mode and if we it's the board's consensus that a straight-up ban on operating a scooters as a micro mobility tool in the city does not help us meet those goals so as a city as a group as tab we talked at

[140:00] length about first and last mile solutions yet we have effectively over the last couple years blocked all dhoklas bike share possibilities and East scooter possibilities Wow our peer cities have actually been implementing either pilot programs or or simply regulating and allowing and managing these modes and I spent some time talking with the senior planner in Fort Collins in charge of their micro mobility program so they've been operating a knee scooter pilot since late October so essentially three months into the program they but before they implemented this program they partnered with their University so this is all very familiar I mean Fort Collins similar size similar sized University a little different geography but a lot of

[141:00] things are very similar they developed so they partnered with the University in and so in developing the regulations and selecting a vendor and they have there are three months into it now they have about 40,000 rides to date all winter rides now about 9,000 unique riders and they're expecting this to pretty dramatically increase as as bike ridership and everything else increases in the in the summer months they also reported an initial set of complaints as when you introduce a new element into a traffic situation you always get that but their complaints have really diminished pretty dramatically and that's partly due to a pretty strict set of regulations regarding parking speed limits geofencing in specific areas they

[142:00] do allow them in their downtown area but not on the sidewalks in down but the other thing that they did and this is something salmon I talked a little bit about the other day was they to try to create clarity they pretty much said a bicycle and a bike and an e scooter in terms of where you can go it's pretty much the same thing so so there's clarity there in terms of what's allowed and what's not allowed if you if you can't ride a bike on the sidewalk in a zone if it's a dismount zone for a bike it's a dismount zone for a scooter etc they have no reported injuries to date and so in general they consider this their initial movement on this to be a success as a board we discussed where there are some great needs for micro mobility and we really discussed

[143:00] the East East City area flat irons industrial park the need there for people to connect to transit coming in on a rapaho or other routes with somewhat infrequent bus service and then the ability to go to lunch there's a it's a it's a lunch desert out there for for a lot of those people and so you know we said we did support the idea of a pilot somewhere out of outside of downtown and we gave that at the staff as a way to as a possible way to move forward other than just saying no and the other thing I want to say is that I want us to be aware about the way we talk about e scooters and the questions we ask about them because it's completely many times it can be completely different than for other modes so we lifecycle concerns for

[144:01] instance lifecycle concerns are real and life cycles are being improved with e scooters because it's an economic benefit to the east scooter company but we don't ask the person driving a single occupancy vehicle to explain when their car will magically make up for their climate impacts we don't hold them to this standard that we do other other micro mobility modes so just finally we also believe that the that the safety concerns pointed out by staff are real and and but there will there will be crashes and bad behavior in in every mode and and I know I'm going to speak in absolute terms here versus a number of miles traveled or whatever but I want to remind us that everyday 100 people or more died in car

[145:04] crashes and that does not include the 100 does not include the 17 pedestrians killed every day by cars and trucks which is those are the numbers from your your your report so again as and and and I know of no I can't state this for sure but I know of no e scooter killing anyone other than themselves so we don't have a scooters crashing into pedestrians and killing them or cars and killing someone in a car so there there is a a difference in in the way we talk and evaluate these micro mobility solutions and I think we just need to be aware that we tend to kind of give some other solutions of pass cars and and we evaluate these solutions differently so that's my remarks thanks

[146:04] mark Carlos you look like you wanted to add something to that absolutely not okay thank you so we've got Adam and then juni sure just for Aaron full awareness it was the last council that actually unanimously unanimously approved the TMP by seven oh so just so everyone is on the same page there that was not this council thank you I just wanted to say that bigger as I asked you mentioned that scooters and eBay could coexist and I understand as well you mentioned the omission between East scooters and and bike and it's much higher but I can see as well that it is half of cars the emission so to me that was very important to see that and I definitely

[147:02] support tabs on the pilot program and the regulation system because I think it goes back when I was looking at your slides as well with the 1% 1% with not that one but the people with the helmet so I okay my question is how can we regulate regulate for the safety concerns that you have because they are important and the thing is people who died in cars that's not something it's it's very hurtful we don't want people to die we want to keep people safe so how can we ensure that we protect people while allowing this opportunity for the community and also you mentioned equity which is something that is very important to me and to a lot of us here as being part of care what can we do to ensure that we we infuse that equity

[148:04] within that program so that people of different socio-economic can have access so to me I want to look at more the opportunity because we can say yes there is a safety concern and it is valid we want every person to be protected and I think what you said earlier about vision zero you viewed that on we don't want any person in this community to suffer any type of injury but at the same time we want to create this opportunity and how can we do that and that's where I am today Thanks all right thank you Aaron yeah I think thanks for that Jenny I agree with those statements too I did have one question here so I definitely get your points about concerns about safety and I think you know really a key way to look at this is in terms of relative risk right because cars as Mark eloquently pointed out are not safe right and they cause many many

[149:00] injuries so the question is what introducing East scooters make the relative safety of our community our transportation users worse and and so what I'm wondering is like I know that some other cities that have tried this have have found that the the safety concerns are that the the safety of the mode is not worse than other modes so looking at Portland for example right which is a city that we have a lot of shared values with and they did they did a pilot and their health department evaluated and said you know we we don't see that there the injury rates necessitate shutting this down we could continue so they start back up again so just where's the discrepancy there between like our analysis and some kind of pure city's analysis of those safety issues involved so you know they valuation reports are all different there are some stories of success and there's other stories where they have an

[150:01] experience that and so I guess you can draw from whichever evaluation report you'd like to define where the successes or where the issues are and we were focused on finding out where people were getting hurt and because it is a real possibility and from our research that East Cooter's over a bike share is that's that's the primary essence of our evaluation here is higher risk than Mike's sounds like we've gone into comments is that okay okay and tell her to comments you've got comments yeah I have a question one of the first slides that you buy maybe it was the first slide that you put there showed the evolution of scooters I

[151:02] think very very first it was like black and purple evolution of scooters oh oh this one that one right there the the bottom right I find it really interesting that that's starting to look like a bike and so what can you it's a scooter so I guess my like so my question is is what is the evolution what you said that they're starting to get bigger wheels and getting saddles and what time frame was that and and how much more evolution that's how fast this whole industry is evolving you know a lot of the companies that started out in 2018 they've got different models today they have been working on the robustness of their vehicles and they've moved from

[152:01] hard rubber to wheel some of them they're all different there's several different providers to more pneumatic it's just you know suspension the wheels so air-filled tires some half shocks sometimes a battery can be taken out for charging the time that's left in there's a hole now there's a variety but I think what some of the companies are hearing and what we're seeing as a result some of the crash statistics is that it's the high center of gravity that's associated with the typical East scooter today the stand-up and the smaller wheels that make it more prone or more susceptible to being involved in a crash and so a lot of the companies are not a lot of them I shouldn't say but there's there's so much technology evolution with this right now and this is one company that appeared in in 2019 there's actually a couple companies that have come out in 2019 that offer a larger wheel sit down

[153:00] option and then some of them have the helmet that is as part of the the the device itself and so there's no there's no petals on this there's no chain drive but there is the yeah it's hard to see you know there's no petals so right now the dividing line in other cities is whether it has petals or not Los Angeles is going through a debate about classifying these and the crank and petal are the dividing line as a short answer thank you for that and so any in your analysis and your your search for data did you look at what the dynamics are basically of the person scooter system versus the person bike system and I was trying to understand that and I I'm just curious to see if

[154:02] you all looked at that and included that in some of your analysis so make sure I get the question right so the question is how do bikes people riding bicycles and people using scooters interact together no it's it's the system and how people get hurt right so so when when a person on a scooter crashes the forces acting on that are gonna be different from when a person on a bike crashes so I think part of it is that you're giving up your ability to self propel a device versus being fully reliant on a device that is electric powered and so II scooters are able to create a sustained speed with the push of a button and whereas a bike share a bike you have to pedal in order to get the juice in order

[155:01] to go so I think there is something definitely evident and how its propelled and the sustained speed of it and then also the the design of the device today so I'll add just one thing we don't know I wish I could tell you I always in Denver but the City Council meeting a year and a half ago when I had my consulting firm having this exact same conversation and we looked at all the data that was available at the time which was less than now and you're asking all of the same questions or the right questions but I can tell you going through that we don't know right I worked on the downtown Denver access and mobility plan and I can tell you that the data doesn't slice it enough to answer these questions the reports that come in through the hospital that eventually gets filtered into these reports it depending on who writes them and who funds them there's a bias also Brocket said and that's true there's depending on if lift is lift fund some of these studies so you have to trace

[156:01] the money back to who's doing the studies I would not feel comfortable as a professional telling you tonight that there's one way to decide whether they'll be safe and unsafe I think that there's a lot of questions out there that we don't know and I would hate to be on the record tonight referencing one study or another we just don't know and I wish we did but we don't we're doing our best to piece together would have you know what information is available today it's hopeful that knack toes 20/20 micro mobility report National Association for City Transportation officials which we produce the last report will provide some clarity around the different types of vehicles they're designed and crashes and injuries and and also usage so just one more question and then I'll go to Rachel sorry so is it safe to say then that due date the

[157:00] data is kind of cobbled together and not entirely reliable yes thank you Rachel I think the best way for us to get data is going to be to pilot it here because we don't have all the data and I suspect that we might be inline with places that do have really good infrastructure and paths and and things like that so my question is on if we do pilot it and I understand it would be Flatirons park area east folder and I have written I enjoy these scooters I've written them so I know generally how they work but it's trying to think of how that would work like with geofencing so I am out in the industrial park and I want to scoot over to Wendy's for lunch or something I park it usually when I park it like in another city somebody takes it so I want to make sure I can get back to the

[158:01] industrial park first of all and second how how is it that nobody's gonna be able to pick it up and take it you know outside of the pilot area so I just want to understand sure if we pilot it how we can be sure that it's is it only a certain number of people who have jobs and those parks can use them or what does that look like well a lot of details to work out around the usage who's able to use them in those business parks and the round trip aspect do they get picked up by someone else we has an app on a two so that's a question council can pick whichever area they would want to pilot this program and then also we can talk about geofencing that particular area so that if the bike are sorry if the scooter was to leave that boundary then the power would then go off on the east cooter it would still be able to be ridden manually but essentially if you went outside that line then the East our these scooter would power down but to get outside of the desert the lunch desert you kind of

[159:01] have to leave there so we weren't really I was referring to the Flatirons industrial park area but certainly the whole goal would be to get people from the park to Wendy's although I don't see you going there but it would be a broader area than just the park okay just something I think maybe we need to think through and then you know by piloting it somewhere like that I think we can also like you know I assume and and I guess I'm asking wouldn't we expect that the mode shift numbers would change like if we're specifically looking at people who are in that desert and and drive to lunch and their you know their alternative is not gonna be walking to snarf thank you for that much better there they're almost surely going to be changing into a more

[160:02] active mode if we're gonna call these active right these scooters aren't active modes that are more passive because it doesn't require okay so but they're going to be going from from driving to not driving and not walking right thank you for that Carlos so yes I'll be a lot clearer now because my question to you may be there's no answer to it how are how are you looking into enforcement and I think it goes back to what Rachel said because I've been to DC I've lived in DC and people do leave these hooters around so if in Boulder we want to be safer and people not to trip on them what can we do to ensure enforcement and also you mentioned in your slides there were 21 deaths from scooters and I think my question for you would be what were the geographic

[161:00] locations and what were the characteristics of these roads because I would imagine that probably plays a role into why there's so many fatalities thank you which let me respond to the enforcement piece okay okay absolutely and so I earlier comment around the helmet use I would say that the micro mobility providers all of them have been very enthusiastic and encouraging around getting their users to use helmets getting them to wear the helmet the user itself as another it's another thing we there could be a regulation or a Norden or an ordinance that we require people who riding scooters to wear a helmet but working very closely with PD and also code enforcement it's difficult to allocate enforcement resources towards enforcing rules upon e scooters due to the other various obligations they have

[162:01] when they're on Patrol we want our officers out on the arterials catching speeders because when you were involved in a crash at a high speed is a severe or an increased chance of a severe injury and so to be very very strategic about how we use our our resources is important and so and then the other the piece around understanding how the crashes have taken place and in again when we did this analysis we found that I think it was but right here there was 76% of those crashes happened at night and so a regulation around curfew of operation would be helpful so we would say you know potentially hours of operations for East Cooter's maybe from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. or 9:00 p.m. or you know whatever the appropriate time is for that and so that would I think eliminate potentially some of the not

[163:01] being seen on our streets because it is a smaller vehicle and then also hopefully eliminate some of the crashes that they that include impairment alcohol impairment as well and then we're gonna talk about this in a couple weeks about where they should be ridden right and so if we find out tonight what counsel would like to do a couple weeks from now we'll come back and discuss what are the appropriate locations the facilities should they be allowed a multi-use path to be allowed on sidewalks the street or in the bike lane so that's a future conversation and I hope that helps to answer your question okay thank you so one more question and then we'll move to providing our direction all right then would somebody like to kick it off Sam and then Bob so this is a pretty complicated one it's complicated by a couple things in my

[164:00] mind one is the safety concerns 20 times the accident rate per mile driven versus bikes is notable Aaron I just looked at Portland just an FYI they ran a four month pilot out of that at a hundred and seventy-six emergency room visits and four-month pilot they said there were many more accidents than this but most of them didn't require emergency room visits but a hundred and seventy-six in four months so Portland has not said these things are okay they have set up a year-long pilot starting in 2019 going to April 2020 to get better data and to evaluate this more seriously the short lived lifetime is a huge concern right because if you compare it to bike sorry bikes or other alternative modes which get people out of cars as well that really short lifetime the embedded carbon emissions and building them battery disposal you

[165:01] know everything that goes along with that is a great concern compared to what I think our longer lived options and the fact that many of these are not used for last mile first mile connections many of them are used as toys many brides are taken between Friday evening and Sunday morning and you go down to Denver and you can watch them being used as toys and some of the plazas down there and not being used to connect they're just being taken for joyrides which is not necessarily a bad thing but it's not actually solving a conductivity problem that we have so when it comes to the East Boulder concept I'm pretty open to that so I've worked out there for 13 years I know very well what that area functions like and I would make it everywhere east of foothills actually to be honest because and because some folks along to go to baseline there are some restaurants there but there's also walnut cafe and there's the stuff out

[166:02] there so I would start east of foothills and see how it worked and take some measurements of injuries and that would be mostly replaced in car trips and I do believe that if there are scooters out there I've ridden them too I find them to be much more dicey as a mode of transport than a bicycle I mean the handlebar short and narrow the wheels are small so potholes are gonna be a bigger deal you can easily end up jerking the short handlebars around and going pretty quickly one way or another but that's not to say that people won't get good at them and and be safer as they gain experience so I'm interested in the possibility of a pilot but I think having them downtown or on campus as the first place that we start would expose us to a lot of potential injuries and so because there's such safety concerns I

[167:01] really would like to see it out ease first towards mostly business focus there are a lot of people out there there's roughly speaking 40,000 employees in East Boulder that's second only to downtown as far as the concentration of employees during the day so I think that's a good place to start and I think we want to monitor I mean Portland for you know they point out the upsides to them as far as replacing car trips and so on but they also acknowledge the downsides which is why they did a second pilot so if we're saying Portland's a comparison city I think we should say that they've been cautious about it as well and that they had paid close attention to things like emergency room visits crashes and the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions so I could support during a pilot I want us to go really slow and make sure that we're looking at the data a couple three times in the first year so that we learn what we can learn I think that's the

[168:01] best suggestion for where to do it in town if we're gonna undertake it at all I'm gonna support the staff recommendation and not even have a pilot East Boulder and I'll say why first of all I went up in Fort Collins myself and met with the folks in downtown Fort Collins on January 10th and a couple things I learned from them first the geofencing does not work simply technologically does not work it's supposed to be writable in certain places and not other places they said doesn't work for panes so anybody who wants to rely on geofencing should know that that's the real world experience in fort collins ii they picked one vendor for their pilot and that was lime and lime is now in the process of going out of business a lot in fiber didn't see Bieber Thank You Bert but Berta's Bert is I think having some pretty severe problems and I think for good or for bad we're catching the tail end of this

[169:00] I think the peak on scooters happen probably six or 12 or 18 months ago and I think we're now seeing the long tail and I think we need to look to other cities for this experimentation rather than experimenting with their own residents cities as diverse as New York City Chattanooga and Breckinridge and lots and lots of other cities you can google it have banned these scooters they're willing to take a step back and let cities like Portland experiment with their residents and they're waiting for this data and they have taken a cautionary view of this they're concerned about the health and safety of the residents could you put the graph that shows the alternatives what people would do if they weren't on scooters yeah that one so this is this is touted as a way to get people out of their cars but let's take a look at that if this is asked of people who are in cities that are renting these scooters what would you do if you didn't have an e scooter what you see only 13% of them actually

[170:00] said that they would drive a car the rest of them as to where cannibalizing transit biking walking by far and away is the biggest and so people would go back to walking if they didn't have and so I think the CMS observation that the large extent these are being used as toys as opposed to truly a last mile solution is absolutely true I get the fact that if we piloted this in East Boulder there's probably less drinking because not many drinking opportunities in East Boulder and if we limit it to daytime use maybe maybe there'd be even less of that but we also I think need to be realistic that people are not gonna use helmets if this is truly a last mile do we really expect people to walk around with a helmet take it from their home on the bus get off the bus get a nice scooter put the helmet on and take it to the last mile of work hang on to that helmet and then get the office and then get back on a scooter and get back to the bus and get back home I think the answer is no and I think Junie asked a really good question about you know how are we gonna enforce

[171:01] whatever rules we put in place our cops are already overextended right now doing fighting crime and getting the bad guys and I don't think that we want to divert our police officers to give me people tickets we're not writing wearing helmets we're riding on the sidewalks were doing whatever thing that we we put in place there so I think that that a nice Boulder pilot sounds tempting is probably not going to get us a whole lot of benefit I'll just close by saying that I am so impressed by that 20 times the fatality rate when Marc read off the the goals of the transportation master plan I couldn't help but the first notice that the first word was safety safe that's our number one obligation as council members to our community is the safety of our community transportation alternatives are great and we should certainly pursue them as long as they're safe but we shouldn't let anybody hurt themselves or god forbid kill themselves on these scooters I keep coming back those of you were on council last fall

[172:02] remember that brother and sister who came in in stood right here and told us the story of their sister who left a game I don't think she was intoxicated she was leaving a chorus game they had a long walk back to their car and so instead of getting the car they jumped on the scooter and she caught a caught an edge and she she fell down and I think she's still in a coma they say that she's brain damaged she's she's effectively no longer with us and in my opinion one death is one death too many that's what we call it vision zero because our goal is to make it zero and it seems to me that if we are going down this path and allowing people we've seen the statistics from Portland to go out there and hurt themselves in the sake of maybe an alternative mode of transportation we're not living up to our standard of vision zero which is to reduce injuries and deaths not to provide opportunities for those so I think we need to apply the precautionary principle here and I think that we need to apply safety if other cities want experiment and give us the data I'm

[173:01] happy to receive it but I'm not willing to gamble the people in Boulder mark and then Rachel well first I'm very deeply disappointed to find that I appear to be outside of the core demographic for riding East scooters I I wasn't aware but now I am I support the staff recommendations many of the same basis that that Bob just articulated a 22 x is actually 22 x difference in fatality rate is astonishing to me and and really not not acceptable and a 25 x difference in the rate of emission over bikes and the concept of a 28-day useful life for these devices even if it goes to six months with new developments our bikes in our bike program are lasting 10 years

[174:00] so now you're at 5% of the useful life of our bike if in fact the useful life of these scooters is improved from what it is today and lastly is the issue of enforcement it's not going to be enforced and that means we're going to have East scooters on sidewalks and other safety considerations arise from that I agree with what Bob said if I'd rather put a hold on it if we get contradictory data that that indicates that these these devices are safer than we assumed or that the information tells us they are today we can revisit it but I am not attracted even to a even to a pilot program at this point I I really don't want to do I like experiments I like experimentation but not in terms of I don't want to pay for it with with hospital visits an emergency room visits on our population so I support the staff

[175:02] recommendation entirely Rachel I'm going to push back a bit on the notion that we would be experimenting with lives in Boulder in some sort of devious way because what we're doing is getting people out of cars and people are dying in cars and from cars so it's it's not a situation where we can only compare the scooters to bikes I think a proper comparison also includes cars and we need to look at the fatality rates there and the emissions rates there and so it's pretty unfair to to only compare bikes and scooters and we're seeing right now that there's a clamoring for it in East Boulder and elsewhere and I think that's because the solutions that we have there are not working or for many people for lunches like the heavy b-cycle

[176:00] bikes if they're out there are not getting high utilization I don't think so I'm supportive of the pilot I think it's going to save lives not cost lives and I'm not insensitive to an individual person's injury in Denver and don't want to be read as saying that but every day in this country we have people dying in cars and and our goal is to move people out of cars and a small pilot to see if that works is favorable and progressive and to me it's what boulders about I think we are creative and leading-edge and I would like to see us continue in a safe thoughtful way and I think a lot of us have ideas for ways that we could make a pilot safe we could have people in the in the office parks get lessons before they get their passes and also just want to mention I think that we have bird representatives here today who

[177:01] could maybe clarify if they are going out of business or not Erin yeah I think thanks for that Rachel I'd agree with everything that Rachel just said I did just look I have no idea of really about bird but I just there's a news article from yesterday that said they just raised additional money and bought another company it seems like they're still going can you go to the the slide on alternatives like what scooter users would have used otherwise there it is right there it just so clearly not every trip would replace a car trip but I just want to point out the the TNC category there so that's the people who would have gotten a rideshare is it 24% you know the ride shares typically you're driving two miles for every one mile that somebody travels or more right so that the TNCs are actually the biggest category in terms of driving and and miles traveled and I thought Rachel so that's 24% of that alternative

[178:01] and 13% on personal vehicles so not a hundred percent replacing car trips but those are pretty substantial numbers and to Rachel's point that when when you're not in a car then you're not a you're not in a mode that's dangerous to yourself but that cars are also dangerous to other people that was Mark pointed out right so that that if you're doing alternatives to car than you're making kind of the system safer for other folks as well I think the way to approach it would be to look at where the safety issues have happened and work on mitigating those so we saw that first time riders were a large percentage of injuries and I think if we're focused on East Boulder so I thought tabs recommendation was great I thought you all did a great job you know which is a nice Boulder it'd be less tourists and more reuse errs I imagine and so there's more of an opportunity to train people to give them lessons you know and in how

[179:00] it works and if you restrict hours as well a lot of the I think all 75 percent is something in the fatalities or nighttime related so if you restrict the hours then you're you're talking about daytime and I'm guessing they'll be a fair amount less drinking involved right because of where you are and at the time of day so if you if you did a pilot that addressed we're the largest causes of accidents have been then I think you could come up with something that would probably be substantially safer than the current transportation system for your average user so I think it's it's worth giving it a try in that kind of business focused area of East Boulder so I kind of land somewhere in between the two developing narratives here I also agree that this doesn't seem ready for primetime just with the amount of unknowns and the amount of inability to

[180:00] control it the way that we would like to but I'm still open for the concept of a pilot program maybe in a year we look at this again and see where the industry is at and what changes have been made and if it looks like it's trending towards a much safer environment because I agree right now like the the injury data is kind of startling to me and that's coming from one of those people who's under 35 and white dude from the core target yeah from the court demographic here I would not set foot anywhere near one of those things I'm gonna get injured just by tripping over it so it's not a major interest to me at this very moment but I'm very open to looking at it again a little bit down the line to see what the improvements are in the

[181:00] industry you know it seems very much like one of those move fast break things industries it was designed to be that and we're still in the breaking things part and once we stopped being in that part it could be a really viable alternative that we're all hoping it will be but right now it still feels a bit broken Sam I just want to inject a little bit of data that I pulled from the internet just now according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration vehicle crashes including pedestrians and cyclists who are killed so the number of fatalities is about one and a quarter per hundred million miles traveled so it is still in the same range as bicycles but 20 times less than the reported fatality rate for a scooters per mile traveled so for what that's

[182:01] worth I just thought I really inject a little bit of of context here yes cars kill people we're well aware of that there's also many many many vehicle miles traveled in automobiles as well so for what it's worth the rate is about one and a quarter per hundred million miles traveled fatalities of all types involving automobiles joonie would you like a way in I have already okay great thank you so if there are no other comments I will weigh in i I'm kind of where Adam is not kind of I am where Adam is and probably the biggest reason is that photograph of the evolution of East Cougars to put people out there at by 55th an Arapaho

[183:03] on these scooters currently so I ride my bike on the sidewalks out there I know I'm not supposed to it's a commercial area but I ride it out there because it's really unsafe to be on the bike lane and not only do I write it on the sidewalk but I write it on the wrong side of the road on the sidewalk and the sidewalk is in really poor condition so imagine somebody going from Flatirons Park in in the heart of the park trying to get over to snarfs they have to come out of the park and then somehow they either ride the wrong way on the bike lane on the street or they get on the sidewalk which is really windy and in really poor condition they get out to 55th and Arapaho which is a really high accident rate I think one of the higher ones in the city 55th and Arapaho they have to cross that and then they're on

[184:00] the multi-use path or on the wrong side of the sidewalk again going on a windy sidewalk and and if not they have to cross a wrapper to get over to snarf so it's not real safe conditions it sounds like a really great idea but I just I don't think it's ready for primetime I would wait until the scooters have evolved into something that lasts longer has a lower center of gravity I believe that's probably one of the reasons they're putting seats on them and and I'd be open to it having a discussion about a pilot out there after they evolved further thanks 05 and there is another piece of the direction that we were asking before this evening which really is related to e-bikes so there's a second

[185:04] part of this tonight was related to ebike so there's a scooter any bike and so this want to make sure that we don't leave off that part as part of the conversation thank you whichever direction council goes if they choose he scooters or does not choose these scooters there's still the option of looking at ebikes as an alternative as well as part of a share michael mobility program from a private provider have a question about that refresh our collective memory we did allow Dhokla see bikes we have certain constraints on them and no one has shown up correct can speak to that so in 2017 we did adopt the doclist bike share licensing ordinance program and it was a time when the industry

[186:00] specifically one of the company's most lime was producing these self-locking bikes and we had a lot of concern about these bikes being left in all different places and so as part of the ordinance we required the lock - and another piece of that ordinance because we were trying to be delicate going into this new micro mobility mode as we had an introductory fleet of around 100 150 if you included electric assist and it was too low and so the new regulations that we've drafted increased that fleet starting number up to about 500 with options to increase the fleet if they meet the demand based cap that is two rides per day per bike if we're achieving that with that fleet then we increase it further if we're not then we don't and so we've taken the I think the important elements of the doclist bikes

[187:01] your licensing program and we fused it into this new regulatory scheme that we've created for the future Michael mobility program so we're taking the old putting it away taking the good stuff out and putting it into the one where we think it's going to work and be not prohibitive unfor the providers to come in and do business in the city so help me understand is that change a staff level change or is that change going to come to Council for approval that would come to City Council for approval what's the timeline so that so the curt that's in March in March yep so the curtain current ordinance is will sunset in August of 2020 this year and and so we can extrapolate those elements of the current ordinance and infuse them into the new one that you would then have a

[188:00] couple readings to consider and there's tab we're doing on this tab has not weighed in on the the regulations itself because we're waiting for a City Council direction on which way we would move with the Mike robe ability program but we are planning to take this to tab in February great so you're looking for an answer from us on do we want tab to look over your proposed changes and then bring it to us after they've had a look in March right the actual ordinance will take a little longer to draft so what we would do is bring the elements of the regulation - tab for consideration and saying getting their input on these are good these aren't let's change this and etc so I mean I'll just is located make a comment I mean to me that seems like a far healthier thing for our community to be looking at I'm not only from our greenhouse gas emissions standpoint assuming that the e-bikes last longer than the East scooters do but from an

[189:01] injury rate as well I mean unless something is different than we think it is as far as the ebike rental Andy bike share programs in other cities it looks like the fatality rates and the injury rates are much much lower than scooters so it seems like as far as trying to advance access to my I mean do you consider you bytes micro mobility let me just ask that oh absolutely yeah either personal or I know it's a it's a it's you know an industry term and it's a buzzword but yes he bikes bikes scooters are all forms of micro mobility even one wheels and elect electric powered unicycles and those are all considered whether personal or share or considered forms of micro mobility because we're seeing a lot of personally owned Electric skateboards personally owned one wheel I don't know if I called hoverboards or whatever but on the path I see many more of those now than I have in the last 18 months so my opinion is

[190:02] that that would be a better way to go to increase shared micro mobility rental micro mobility would be the e bikes and increasing the number so that it's attractive to a company to come here rather than the east scooters so I'm saying Devils give me the detail and I want to hear what what the numbers are obviously that what the numbers we picked a couple years ago we're too low because no one came into town so that we cannot make stay in work outside I I would welcome tabs input and then bring that back to us with some recommendations and and and so I want to marry together what Sam said and with what Adam and Mary said I I'm not saying that a scooters are never gonna be a solution here maybe someday they will maybe the dad maybe people get better at writing them maybe people will figure out how to use helmets and whatnot I don't know but I'd rather not

[191:02] experiment but I would like to experiment with with e-bikes and and so what I'd like to suggest is is is continue to our paws on a scooter rentals I don't know if that's six months or 12 months but continue that pause because I think Adams right I think they're not ready for primetime yet maybe they will get ready for prime time or maybe they'll never get ready time time the things that are breaking are people obviously and we don't want to bring people but in the meantime let's let's have to have give us some recommendations and staff give us some recommendations on how we can crank it up with the e-bikes and maybe that is our solution and maybe we're all going to be happy and we're not going to kill people and we're going to have a really great micro mobility that's something we can revisit you know down the road as the time goes on one other thing to say but it was so I just want to bring it back to council and it sounds like there might be a compromise here to wait on a pilot for a while longer and as these evolve and we get more data and but to

[192:02] start with Sam and Bob suggestion to try and get more micro mobility through the e-bikes and is that something that we could get more support on because it seems like we're split right now I mean I think what you have is a disagreement so I mean I think there's an it sounds like there's not majority support for a nice scooter pilot right now so you can just say that there's no majority support but then I think moving forward the ebike updating to those regulations sounds like a great idea and go for it alright what Aronson one thing you guys should be prepared of so you know we keep seem to be be surprised by these things and maybe you guys are already aware of this but I know in many cities including New York mopeds rental mopeds are the new thing okay this is the new thing that you guys are going to deal with and Rick recommendations these are rental mopeds it's a one-time fee of 19

[193:00] bucks and then it's like $1 every 10 minutes they do come with helmets there's two helmets as a boot and there's two helmets in them I don't know if they're safe or dangerous I actually drive them up at all time I own one myself and I've never had a problem but this is a thing that's coming down the road and we're gonna have to figure out whether we want to try to regulate those but they're sweeping the country and it's just a matter of time before they start showing up on our streets and people were jumping around the mopeds and probably not know what they're doing so just be ready for that one you're in Denver yeah okay yeah he says I really appreciated the conversation tonight and I just want to link it back up right so the two actions that we talked about tonight is everyone comfortable at how those are now wed together right because we kind of had to have them independent to get to here so is there anything that now you that we've done that that were where everyone's cool still I guess I want to ask good well I mean if we make it

[194:00] easier to bring ductless electric bikes into town that may impact be cycles viability and I'll just play devil's advocate just from one moment I'll tell Mary being devil's advocate right but we do have her proposal on the table from CEO this whole why we were not totally crazy we're just a little bit crazy but the idea was if we could take our current system and not sacrifice it which is the b-cycle system and invest in it with some money that we have it's almost looking passing the plate would that be the place to try the ebike pilot thing and get that going right could you said yourself I get that a bike places where we want to go so given given that right that was aren't I kind of well maybe if we have this money we could try it through see or see where it goes get some data this year to see what it looks like when we enter we induce those ebikes into the fleet we can get data from that pretty easy about their usage who's using them we can query that a little more so this fall we could come back with some informed data about

[195:00] ebikes through the current program by also offering subsidy to a local provider that we kind of broke heard from Cu I'll try to go back and get the 60% if that's what makes it happen 50% sorry sorry but that's those things come together and I hate to retract back but if there's some direction that we could actually try to take that extra investment that we outlined to get the e-bikes going this fall that would be what I made even trying to bring together I'm happy to be supportive of Morrie bikes but I wanted to be done in the context of a financial plan for B cycle that gives it a life beyond March of this year or August of this year I'd like to see it be put on a better footing yeah I think you've got a choice between supporting B cycle or

[196:00] supporting a commercial venture we obviously want to support B cycle ahead of that it does kind of beg the question though why why B cycle would require a subsidy and yet others would come in here and spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of their own money and think that they're gonna make a profit so you do have to start running the math there and sheet and say our are those businesses crazy is B cycle run inefficiently what's the disconnect between B cycle can run he bikes but we have to give them a lot of money and all these other companies are clamoring to come in here and make money so we have to kind of somehow round that out startup still make profits that's it simple as that yeah the revenue model is different right the data piece that's embedded into that conversation is key and Los Angeles is going through a legal conversation right now about what the prorated rate is for the data that they're actually gonna decipher from those systems so data and how it's applied to those which be cycle

[197:01] doesn't you saw tonight like we don't track all the data within B cycle and those other for-profit companies are not out there for a transportation function they're out there for a data function when that app runs on your phone yeah so M that's right we collects a whole bunch of information that is the proprietary part not to its proprietary it's also the fundamental part of why they're collecting the data and that's why B cycle locally is saying this is transparently and we'll keep digging on it how much it really costs but that's why it's gonna should we seem like it costs more so let's wrap this up did you have one more comment to make sense was basically to say that I think what our instructions were if I understood the first part of evening was do what's needed to preserve recycle as is and then go to tab and talk about the ebike part of it and here from tab and bring it back to us within

[198:00] a few months but this other set of changes that you're talking about also needs to go through tab and then needs to come back to us and so I don't think one necessarily supplants the other they may be part of the same kind of conversation because what be cycle will do will have access to the data and will understand it and it's part of you know will have transparency on the costs whereas with a private company that comes in we won't have transparency on the data or the costs and so they may be doing loss later kinds of stuff they may be doing you know they may be charging more than be cycled would charge for the same ebike because there's a profit requirement in there somewhere so I think we'll only find out as we do both so I thought our instruction was clear which is do what's required to keep me cycle alive and get a tab about the ebike portion and come back to us you get what you need perfect all right you

[199:00] great yes thank you very much all right are we adjourned we're adjourned thanks Mary [Music] - parasol felt like that