Autonomous technology, mobile payments, electric vehicles and virtual reality are just some of the things the Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) of Washoe County in Reno, Nevada, is using to make public transportation a convenient, efficient option people want to choose.
Reno is a rapidly changing community, seeing millennials moving in, as well as a lot of high-tech companies. The tech-savvy workforce is one that’s looking for transportation choices, RTC Chief Executive Officer Lee Gibson said. “We want to be at the forefront to provide the information to this new customer base so they are aware and have the information they need to make the choices that they want to make.”
RTC was formed as a result of legislation, consolidating the Regional Street and Highway Commission, the Regional Transit Commission and the Washoe County Area Transportation Study Policy Committee.
As the MPO for the transit authority and the street and highway building agency, Gibson said of RTC, “We are able to take a much more comprehensive view of financial and programmatic issues that allow us to perhaps do things in a more comprehensive administration framework.
“I think having all those functions wrapped into us is an advantage.”
Like transit agencies across the country, funding is one of the biggest ongoing challenges. The cost of providing transportation services is rising faster than the revenue sources. RTC has a quarter percent sales tax that is designated to transit and an eighth percent sales tax that’s dedicated to transportation, which could be either for the state and highway program or transit.
Community Development
Gibson mirrored the slogan when he said, “We are a big little city.
“We face a lot of significant challenges with respect to our economy, our social fabric, our physical environment, which includes substantial historical resources.” He continued, “We’re a great microcosm of all of the variables all of our big city partners are faced with and we have designed, in my opinion, extraordinarily effective solutions.”
They have two projects underway, building off the current RTC Rapid bus rapid transit (BRT), which runs along Virginia Street, the north-south spine of the Reno/Sparks metropolitan region, between downtown Reno and Meadowood Mall. Once up and running, Public Transportation Director David Jickling said the public response was very good; the perception of the 4 or 5 minutes it was faster to go up and down the corridor with people was huge.
Jickling said of the time, “Where we saw service declining with the economy, the rapid corridor increased.” Michael Moreno, RTC public affairs administrator, pointed out, a double-digit increase.
The Virginia Street extension is in project development and is a 1.8-mile extension to this existing Rapid line. It continues from the 4th Street Station to the University of Nevada-Reno. The initial RTC Rapid route was intended to go to the university, but because they were funding it with local monies and Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds, RTC wasn’t able to get that phase in place.
Douglas Maloy, P.E., project manager for the project, said they were anticipating getting into the president’s budget for this fiscal year, but with a new presidency, there’s always uncertainty. This summer they will finish the NEPA process and then it could be December of this year before they know about additional funding.
The second project underway is the 4th Street/Prater Way Corridor, which is about 10 percent under construction. It runs parallel to the Interstate and the 3.6 miles runs between RTC’s 4th Street Station in downtown Reno and RTC’s Centennial Plaza in downtown Sparks.
Today it’s two lanes in each direction and the design takes it down to a BRT project with a road diet, along with adding bicycle lanes and widening sidewalks, making it an ADA-compliant corridor said Planning Director Amy Cummings, AICP/LEED.
Gibson said, “It’s going to come out as a model of how you can leverage a roadway project, a transit project, a pedestrian project and a utility project all in one and deliver to your community a substantially improved built environment that the businesses and resident along that corridor are going to be immensely proud to have.”
Joe Harrington, public information officer, mentioned a local reporter referred to this street as “the ugliest street in Reno.” Going from where it’s at today, to a new road, new sidewalks, new streetlights, underground utilities, this project will transform the street. Jickling stressed, “It’s more than what a typical transit project might be around the country; it’s a complete road.
“We’re really going to transform this street; what’s there not to like?”
The sidewalks were put in, in the 30s and 40s and are in terrible shape. Where not broken, there are street poles placed in the middle of sidewalks, which are in some places barely wide enough for one person to pass.
In addition to the corridor transformation, Harrington said public outreach really helped build project support. “We met individually with all of the business owners on a regular basis … in addition to all of the public meetings,” he said. “We have a dedicated project website, we push information a lot of ways, but we really went above and beyond to make sure they felt personally involved in this project.”
Cummings said it was very time-intensive but the time was well worth it. Another outreach tool she mentioned was the 4th Prater History Project. “We worked with a local historian and went and interviewed a lot of the long-time business owners, residents, some in the corridor, some no longer living in the corridor.
“It got a lot of people engaged,” she said. “They would sit down and tell us their stories but then learn about the project in the process of doing that — people that would normally not come to a transportation public meeting.”
The stations incorporate images from the history project, including postcards of some of the old motels in the 60s, portraits of people and a photo from the Jack Johnson versus James J. Jeffries boxing fight, which took place at the location of one of the stations.
Gibson stressed it is a historically rich project. “We’ve been able to take that history, weave that into the story of the corridor and translate that story into the design and development of that corridor.
A challenge with the project has been the overhead utilities. It takes a lot of coordination with the businesses and the traffic control and construction activities meshing together. When they move the wires below ground, they have to trench everything in and there’s an individual connection to every property. “We’ll literally be touching every single structure,” stressed Wilbrecht.
Energy Management
RTC has four Proterra electric buses for the Sierra Spirit, a downtown circulator, and running up and down two different routes. They’re short-range buses, charging at a high rate of charge via an overhead charger. The range for the buses is about 30 miles.
Cummings said they will be getting 5 more electric buses this fall and then there are 15 diesels they’ll need to replace within the next year, which they intend to replace with electric.
David Carr, facilities and fleet manager, said the next round of buses will be longer-range buses of about 200 miles, and will charge at a lower rate overnight.
When it comes to operating electric buses, Carr said as a fleet manager, you have to understand the energy. How you charge, how much it costs, when is the best time and what is the best way to charge are all key considerations.
Jickling elaborated, “We’ve got our bus garage over there with gas pumps that have been pumping diesel for 35 years. We’re already looking at changing buses that we’ve only had for three years. It is changing rapidly which makes it a little bit of a challenge. Perhaps contrary to what our President was doing yesterday, there are those of us who think the future is clean technology and oil-based petroleum products are definitely a thing of the past.”
When looking at charging the buses, Carr said they have found that charging at a high rate very quickly in the middle of the day is a pretty premium way to fuel the bus.
To keep the demand down, they’re looking at smart charging, ways to plug in all the buses but not charging all of them or not charging them all at the high rate.
The original prototypes they have connect the charging to the existing infrastructure; the building and the chargers are integrated. When you start working with high amounts of power, the existing infrastructure’s not built for it, Carr said. They’re working with the local energy company, Proterra and an engineering firm to come up with ways to mitigate that.
“We’re separating out the power so the charging doesn’t impact the building infrastructure as much,” he said. “We have to have larger transformers, larger feeds to the building and we have to manage that power.
“If you line up all the buses, plug them all in at the same time or in a series, it’s a pretty high electric bill.”
ChargePoint, the manufacturer of the charging equipment, has taken a lead on some of this demand management, Carr said. There are ways to manage charging, to cap the demand peak. Using what ChargePoint developed on the automotive side, RTC is working on the high voltage DC charging to see what it can do to manage that on a fleet.
“The buses we have now charge at 480 Kw. The buses we’re going to get are going to charge at around 62-1/2,” Carr explained. “We’re not going to try and get this big surge of power; we’re going to spread it out and disperse it. There will be ways to connect two chargers and charge at 125. There will be ways to plug them all in and only charge a certain number of them.”
The infrastructure they put in, they made scalable. The biggest cost is running cable long distances so they built a switchboard, like a power distribution center, inside the bus barn and can plug in chargers to that switchboard. Instead of running 15 cables to 15 chargers, there’s one cable to the switchboard and then they can distribute 15 cables from there.
As for current costs, Carr said diesel is pretty inexpensive right now but RTC is still operating just below the diesel cost with its electric buses and even less on the diesel hybrid.
He also said there are less parts, less maintenance, fewer systems to break. “All of those impacts, when you start calculating them into the overall equation, the bus is a better bus,” he said.
Autonomous Technology
The Proterra buses are equipped with cameras and sensors, which are used to gather data to be used for improving safety and efficiencies. RTC and Proterra have partnered with the University of Nevada, Reno and others on the Intelligent Mobility project. Kostas Alexis, assistant professor at UNR, explained the driver is still in control, but he or she is augmented with more information. The data will also be used to investigate the possibility of automating such a big machine in a city setting.
The first step Alexis said, is they will augment information to the driver about what is around the bus. "This hopefully will mean it will be easier to make safer decisions," he explained. "This is still the human in control.
"As we do that, we also have access to the main information from the bus: odometer, pressure of the wheels, so then the next part ... is to estimate the dynamics of the vehicle. This is going to be tested in teh city very soon."
More information on the program at MassTransitmag.com/12326485
Mobile Payment
Another way to make the service more appealing, particularly to a generation that often doesn’t carry cash, RTC began looking at mobile payment about a year and a half ago. Transit Planner Ed Park said they were also looking at this as an important cost-savings measure.
They were down to four vendors Park said and in the end, three gave price estimates. They went with Token Transit for a number of reasons, including a lost cost per transaction and it didn’t require a monthly fee.
A learning curve experience of the launch was the need to educate the riding public about the basics of using an app.
A lot of the riders are low income and while some may think that means they don’t have smartphones, a lot have and use smartphones as the primary access to the Internet. However, Park said, they found many have more rudimentary smartphones, not many features or memory, and a lot of their riders don’t use apps.
The app has a picture, color border and code word that changes every day that is posted each day for the operators. The picture moves on the screen so operators can see it’s live.
While passenger convenience is a definite benefit, another benefit to the rider is that RTC can do something about capping. Park said buying seven-day passes costs more in a month’s time than buying a monthly pass.
“With capping, we don’t have this now but we’re working on it with them [Token], you pay up to a certain point and that’s it. If you’re buying seven-day passes and you reach $65, the price of our monthly pass, you don’t pay any more than that. That’s a huge thing for economic justice for the people that really need it.”
The app launched in December and as of March, accounted for 5 percent of fare revenue.
In-House Assessment
In an effort to improve customer service and become more efficient and cost effective, RTC is moving its eligibility assessment for paratransit in house. RTC is also soon awarding a new contract for paratransit that focuses on a turnkey brokerage approach.
Jickling said while they oversee providing service to the community, they might not be the ones providing that. “We may not be the ones providing that in the future, but we’ll help you get it. Paratransit is the first big starting point for that, using taxis or TNCs, brokering things out instead of it having to be one of our cutaway access vans that has to pick you up. I think partnering is a big part of what it will be going forward.”
A new mobility center was built at RTC’s Centennial Plaza in Sparks, where in-house eligibility and travel training will be conducted. There will be multiple floor surfaces, a bus mock-up and when the weather is nice, they can use the outdoors with the fixed-route buses right there at the center.
Susi Trinidad, paratransit specialist, said there will be a lot of efficiencies bringing the travel training and eligibility assessment in house. From previous paratransit studies, they’ve seen their denials have been very low and the conditional availabilities have been below 15 percent.
Going forward, Jenna Jacobs, paratransit & eligibility mobility specialist, said people can access a PDF online or can call to get one mailed. After completing the PDF, they call to set up an assessment, do the assessment and go from there.
RTC will also have the ability to even provide them an ID card right at the time of coming in for the assessment if applicable.
A Bright Future
In a mid-sized metropolitan area, an area where revenue generation may have an opportunity in joint development, Gibson said there is potential around BRT stations and RTC has some surplus property resources.
“We’re going to look at affordable housing opportunities and joint development where we may be able to partner with the developer to address the critical shortage we have in this community of affordable housing,” Gibson said. “Those are the kinds of strategies for revenue generation ... and demonstrates to the public that we’re maximizing, to the extent we can, all of our opportunities to raise revenue and devote that revenue to the system.
“I think that’s the big issue that we’re going to be facing here in the next couple years.” Gibson continued, “How do we partner in the affordable housing solution? Does joint development and developments around transit stations offer a way for us to capture revenue and help be a partner to deliver the critically needed affordable housing the community needs?”
Jickling said of RTC, “We’re the biggest little transit agency. I hate to use that silly little thing but we always compare ourselves to our peers. We’re consistently in the top four in just about every measure that is favorable in that peer group and that’s pretty important.
“We’re not afraid to try new things.”
