Senate Transportation Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency

Okay. We're calling this meeting to order. This is the Senate Transportation Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency. We welcome the public, and it's nice to see all of you who are here in the room. Thank you for coming today. For today's hearing, we will hear from panelists first and then we will take public comment.

I want to thank Subcommittee Members for being here. Our third annual, our third hearing this year of the Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency. And I want to thank the Transportation Committee for hosting and allowing me to have the subcommittee.

I very much appreciate that. The subcommittee remains focused on ensuring the long term resiliency of the LOSSAN Rail Corridor, improving the quality of services, working towards significant ridership increases, and advancing the necessary reforms to effectuate that change. We held our first hearing of the year in May at LA Union Station, the center of Southern California's rail system.

And it's important to remember that we are just over 1,000 days away from welcoming the world to Southern California for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics, and we are less than a year away from the first 2026 World Cup games in Los Angeles.

I'm encouraged by the recognition and remarks of panelists during the last hearing that regional and inner city rail will be vital to the success of moving spectators, visitors, and local communities during the World Cup and the Olympic Games. We have no time to waste to improve our transportation system.

Our second subcommittee hearing was held in July and included presentations from Metrolink, SANDAG, and the Legislative Analyst Office. They focused on three important components of corridor performance, ridership, capital projects, and services, and financial planning. The LOSSAN Corridor's long term success relies on significantly increasing ridership to levels planned for in the state rail plan.

So this is a really important statistic to keep note of. So we must increase ridership on services, for example, including Metrolink, COASTER, and the Pacific Surfliner, to achieve the state's goal of 20% of all travel on sustainable transit services like passenger rail. Welcome. Thank you for coming.

So I'll just repeat that for emphasis. That we must increase ridership on our services to achieve the state's goal of 20% of all travel on sustainable transit services like passenger rail. We also know that capital projects will need to be a part of long term corridor planning.

I'm thankful for our panelists today that will talk about the type of reforms needed to ensure these projects are completed and achieve their intended service benefits. As we begin today's hearing, I'd like to encourage all of us to engage in frank and honest discussions about the reforms that are necessary in this corridor. There is much at risk.

Transit agencies need both a financial and operational solvency. We see in communities across the state that local communities are the ones hit hardest when we let critical transit services fail or become unreliable. That could no longer be the reality in Southern California, especially when the world is watching.

We've laid the foundation of this important work with eight subcommittee hearings and briefings across Southern California, and we've heard from stakeholders that urgent action is needed. The Legislature approved SB 677 and SB 1098 to better align the planning and strategic vision for the corridor.

We have a unique opportunity before us to leverage local, state, and federal policies for the betterment of this corridor, all of our coastal resources, and millions of local residents. I'm committed to introducing meaningful, lasting reforms through legislation next year.

And I hope everyone will join as we, this subcommittee, work together to support the resiliency and performance of this transportation corridor. In closing, I would like to thank my colleagues and fellow Senators who are here today and who have participated in our previous subcommittee meetings.

I appreciate your time, your leadership, and your thoughtful comments. And I'd like to thank in advance our panelists who are making time to speak with us today. So with that, I'll ask if any of our Subcommittee Members... Senator Bob Archuleta, would you like to make any opening comments?

Yes. Thank you so very much. In today's world, we're all very, very concerned about our environment, but also how to reduce the hazards that are up there floating in the air. And the best way, we tell everybody, take a train, take a bus, get out of your car, and that would all help.

But we can't give the residents of California the best rail systems unless we're able to have the proper funding. And one of the systems we're talking about today, of course, is from San Diego all the way up into Lancaster, I guess. Let me see what the top end is at. San Luis Obispo.

And with that, now, I've got the map here. But it just points out the number of people, especially during the vacation times, the summertime, right now, that are traveling all the way up and down the coast. And rail safety is important. We'll be talking about that as time goes on. Ridership, we'll be talking about the convenience.

And, of course, our responsibility as a state to make sure it's thorough, safe, on time, and we're giving the best service to our communities up and down the coast. So I'm here to learn and listen from all of you who will testify today and participate. So Madam Chair, I'm happy to be here with you.

Well, thank you so much. I very much appreciate it, Senator Archuleta. Thank you. Okay, our first panelist we would now like to invite up so and I will introduce them as they come. So Chad Edison, Chief Deputy Secretary for Rail and Transit at the California State Transportation Agency, also known as CalSTA. And Kyle Gradinger, Chief Division of Rail at Caltrans. Welcome. And we will start with you, Chief Deputy Secretary Edison. You're welcome to begin when ready.

Thank you so much, Senator Blakespear. And welcome, Senator Archuleta, to look forward to addressing you today. My colleague Kyle Gradinger and Chief of the Division of Rail Electric at Caltrans, and I will provide a status update on some key developments in the LOSSAN Corridor.

As we have testified at prior hearings, CalSTA and Caltrans remain fully committed to enhancing the future of the LOSSAN Corridor, as evidenced by our continued planning and investment in the corridor. We continue to prepare to add new seating capacity to the corridor in preparation for the World Cup and Olympics and are working with our partner agencies to get critical capital projects into construction so higher levels of service can be operated in advance of the Olympics.

I would like to start by acknowledging the work we are implementing with staff resources to provide the initial report called for in SB 1098 last year. SB 1098 tasks CalSTA with leading a comprehensive coordinated effort to ensure the performance, resilience, and sustainability of the corridor.

It requires CalSTA to convene a LOSSAN Working Group with representatives from key corridor stakeholders. The first phase of the report will include detailed recommendations and findings on nine key topic areas that report back a baseline corridor understanding and highlight projects and strategies that will make the quarter stronger, better, and more resilient in the future.

While CalSTA is responsible for leading the overall process, we are working closely with our partners, especially the Caltrans Division of Rail, Orange County Transportation Authority, and the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, among others. Our partners will help us lead on various of the key topics that are required to be addressed in the report.

We anticipate launching the public meetings, the monthly working group meetings in November of this year immediately following the conclusion of the Transit Transformation Task Force process. These meetings will be held in person to facilitate productive collaboration information sharing between over the summer and between, you know, now and that first meeting in November.

We have been working on a lot of the background materials that will make those meetings productive. Each meeting will include updates on progress as well as opportunities for the working group to weigh in on emerging findings and recommendations. The final report will be drafted by CalSTA staff, drawing directly from the working group's input.

Our goal is to complete a final draft by January 2026, allowing time for final refinements before submission to the Legislature in February. I would also like to highlight the work that CalSTA, the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, Metrolink, and NCTD are conducting to improve the payments experience for rail customers as well as those using both rail and transit.

Together with the Capitol Corridor, San Joaquin JPA, the San Joaquin Regional Rail Commission, which is the parent of ACE, we are working together in a rail payments alliance that will help us grow ridership and revenue by creating valuable new features related to future enhancements, such as adding reservations, seat assignments, and multi-operator ticketing capabilities to our rail and rail and transit journeys.

We want the many residents and visitors to California, including the LOSSAN Corridor, to have a good experience using the train and easily move from one system to another. Finally, I would like to highlight the importance of studying long term solutions to some of the corridor resiliency issues, especially around San Clemente.

Kyle Gradinger will provide more comments from Caltrans in a moment, but we are planning to advance key elements of our analysis within the Corridor Identification Program process followed by a business case analysis that places San Clemente Realignment, Del Mar Realignment, and other critical projects together to fully understand the corridor wide benefits of these expensive investments.

We are also committed to meeting the Coastal Commission Long Term Railroad Adaptation study requirements by January 2034, and Kyle will provide more details on what we're planning in terms of Corridor ID and the Long Term Study.

All right, thank you. Good afternoon, Senator Blakespear, Senator Archuleta. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'd like to provide an update on the various planning activities in the LOSSAN Corridor. So as I described in testimony to the committee earlier this year, the Corridor Identification and Development Program, or CIDP, is the Federal Railroad Administration's new program to advance rail corridor planning and to develop a defined pipeline of capital projects for federal funding support.

The FRA identified 69 corridors nationwide and selected the Caltrans Division of Rail to lead the Corridor Identification and Development Program effort for LOSSAN and four other corridors in California. I'm excited to announce that we have completed step one of the CIDP. I'm going to use the acronym from now on, Corridor ID Program.

We've completed step one for all five corridors which entailed the preparation of a scope of work for step two, the service development planning effort. So step two will lead those service development plans for each corridor. As I mentioned, they've preliminarily approved our step 2 scope of work.

And we are awaiting the publication of a Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, to request the funding to enter step two of this process. We anticipate that that NOFO will be released in October or November and that we will be able to obligate the grant and procure consultant resources to begin the step two work by mid-2026.

For the LOSSAN Corridor, the CIDP Service Development Plan will determine a unified vision for services in the corridor, including Pacific Surfliner, Metrolink, and COASTER passenger trains, as well as coordinate with the freight railroads that own much of the network and provide critical support to the ports and industries of Southern California.

Once that service vision is developed, the SDP will identify the specific projects that will be needed in order to advance that service vision. So the projects identified in that service development plan will move into eventually step three of the Corridor ID Program, where the federal government will fund 80% of the preliminary engineering and environmental analysis phases for the discrete projects that we identified in those earlier phases.

Once that preliminary engineering and environmental phase is complete, the FRA will include those projects in an annual list to Congress for consideration for capital construction funding. That list is the pipeline that is described by the FRA. This logical and comprehensive process under Corridor ID will serve California and its rail agencies very well.

The outputs of CIDP efforts will also support project prioritization and funding selection efforts at the state and can also support our very generous state funding efforts for rail. In fact, the Caltrans Division of Rail is in the process of deploying a new database that will help us track and prioritize projects based on programmatic corridor and network wide analyses such as those that will be conducted in CIDP to support further project prioritization and selection at the state level.

So Corridor ID is a comprehensive planning approach to look at the opportunities to improve the quality of service and ridership along the entire LOSSAN Corridor. The first deliverable, as I mentioned, is the SDP, which will make recommendations for a phased implementation of priority capital projects really looking at the mid and the long term completion horizons, approximately 10 to 15 years.

The projects there are a combination of investments that will improve reliability, capacity, travel time and frequency. And we really can't go further without doing these focused studies using a standardized methodology across all corridors in California.

We need to improve our understanding of the priorities in each corridor and the appropriate phasing so that we can maximize the benefits to pursue further funding because we're really going to get into higher levels of capital cost and much larger projects.

So we really need a solid foundation for the requests for those additional amounts of funding in the future. In the process, we're going to ask questions like how can we get to a trip that takes less than two and a half or less than two hours from LA to San Diego?

What are the opportunities to reduce emissions and to take advantage of potential tunnels for electrification with hybrid battery electric trains? A lot of opportunities to look at the opportunities in this corridor through Corridor. ID. The LOSSAN Corridor ID Program will not be conducted in a vacuum.

There are a lot of existing studies and projects underway that are going to inform our effort. For example, the Orange County Coastal Rail Resiliency Study led by OCTA and the San Diego LOSSAN Rail Realignment Project led by SANDAG are two studies that deserve special mention.

The outputs of those studies is going to inform our opportunities for how we transform the corridor in the long term. These are projects on the 20 to 30 year horizon, so we will absorb the outputs of those studies and that work into the CIDP Service Development Plan and project identification efforts in the next few years.

In addition to those two studies, there's the upcoming Long Term Railroad Adaptation Study, LTRAS. I'm going to make that an acronym. This study is a condition of the California Coastal Commission's emergency coastal development permit that was granted on April 10th of this year for emergency repairs along the San Clemente Coast.

The Coastal Commission permit requires the study to make recommendations for the future of rail service through Orange County by January 1, 2034. That study will progress alongside the CIDP Service Development Plan and it will focus on the significant challenges associated with relocating a railroad. This work will drive the analysis for a business case for realignment and provide preliminary alternatives analysis Iterating with the Service Development Planning work.

The Corridor ID program will ask us to update our SDP plans every five to 10 years and evaluate how to complete any projects that are still left to deliver from the previous SDP and how to advance new projects, which gives us an opportunity to bring in the analysis from the Long Term Railroad Adaptation Study and scope the first set of projects required to support corridor realignment or hardening, depending on what is determined in that study.

So we'll continue to work through this coordinated process and advance the significant capital program in Southern California through planning and project delivery with support from the FRA and local partners, including agencies, and support from you as well. Thank you for the opportunity to share an update with the subcommittee.

Okay, great. Thank you. I really appreciate both of your testimony. And it seems that you are seriously grappling with what needs to happen on this corridor. And I appreciate that. There are things that you said that I didn't know already. And so I appreciate the work that's being done. I think one of the things I want to say as feedback is that there are certain values that I think are the most important, and I hope that they are guiding the decision making when you're thinking about what projects are highest priority.

And I really want to focus on reliability. Because if the route, for example, from San Diego to Los Angeles is three hours instead of two and a half hours, that is not going to be determinative for whether someone decides to take it as much as if the person knows they can rely on that three hours to be three hours.

And also they can rely on the fact that they're not going to have to get off and take a bus bridge or that they won't be able to take that trip at all. So, you know, the very serious situation that happens when the rail line is down, when it's not working in, well, really anywhere along the corridor.

But we see that most acutely in San Clemente. You know, I think that that really sheds ridership and the perception of the trains as just not being reliable. And we have to keep that in mind as such an important North Star when we're thinking about what projects are going to be prioritized.

And I appreciate that you're doing prioritizing, looking at the whole 350 miles and saying, where are the places where we need these projects that should be the highest priority. And there's a lot of process associated with that, which you both just described. But, you know, this question of reliability and then also frequency.

You know, somebody's not going to take the train to work if there's only one train that comes home, and if they miss it, they're out of luck, you know. So the reality of having enough frequency is another thing that is just so important. So, you know, I'd like to ask you both or either just to reflect on those two issues of reliability and frequency and what you're doing or how you conceive of those two values when you're thinking about the work you're doing.

Yeah, I'll start and then I'll let Kyle also add, if he'd like to. I mean, both of those are cornerstones of the entire state rail plan process and are really critical to our goals in the corridor. Since 2014 and 15 when we were first looking at what are good performance measures to use, one of those was reliability.

And we focused specifically on very high on time performance, like 95% plus versus the kind of standard that we've often seen in the past of 85 or 90%. Kind of a lower number that means that like one in every six or seven trips is getting delayed significantly.

So this, you know, has been both a focus in terms of developing capital projects in the corridor as well as a goal we've actually given to our intercity rail agency there, LOSSAN, and it's something that we'd like to see them continue to work on on the operational side. And we are also investing to make those the corridor more reliable in the capital projects that we've chosen and will choose in the future. So this is very important.

We're also proud of getting a lot of the work going in San Clemente with OCTA that we believe will help keep that railroad from being closed in some of those locations on the frequency that it was in the past few years. Frequency continues to be very important here. Right now we have the rights to run up to 84 trains between Los Angeles and Fullerton on the southern end of the corridor.

And then those disperse between going towards Riverside and going down towards San Diego in southern Orange County. Getting up to that full number will be a critical piece of getting to the kind of options that people need to get home from work. And so I think we're working towards getting a very robust level of service throughout the day. And that continues to be important.

Working with both Metrolink and with the LOSSAN Rail Corridor agency there. The north end actually has the bigger frequency challenges because there's real gaps in service once you get out of LA County going north and the frequency level there is much lower. And so I think, you know, in terms of making the corridor usable on the north end, we continue to focus on adding capacity there and adding more trains going north. So do you have any further comments?

I would just add that... Thank you. We talk often about fast, frequent, and reliable, but I think you're right. Frequency and reliability are the two cornerstones. You have to have those first before you really get any gains from going faster. In terms of reliability, there's various factors there. One that we've been able to, that we're getting a handle on and taking more control of is the equipment reliability.

Do you have the trains to actually put the train out there that day? And so that's something we've been working very closely on with the JPA partners and also coordinating with commuter rail agencies like COASTER and Metrolink to improve maintenance practices and procure equipment that's going to be more reliable in the future. That's something that we have within our control.

The mother nature aspects of reliability are essentially a fairly new aspect in the last decade or so in California. And so we need to begin focusing on how do we make sure that the railroad itself is reliable. But I just wanted to echo, I think we agree frequency and reliability are the cornerstones of getting people onto trains.

Yeah. And also the relationship with the freight. If freight has delays that then delay our passengers. You know, it's all the same to the passenger. Right. So prioritizing the negotiation with our freight partners so that that happens as little as possible. To me, that seems like another really important piece. Yeah. Senator Archuleta, would you like to make some questions, comments?

Yes. And we heard, of course, there's three passenger operators and two freight operators that independently owned and operated. How do you oversee the public safety issues? You mentioned emergency in your presentation. How do you quickly take care of that emergency?

And when you've got these entities that have their own, you know, their own assets they've got to worry about. But who actually gets in there and supervises the whole thing? When you've got a freight and, of course, passengers, and there's a fiasco going on and we, the general public, are watching it on TV and we're wondering who takes charge and makes things happen and get things moving again.

Senator Archuleta, thank you for that question. In terms of the safety elements of the corridor and in responding to incidents, there are a number of different agencies involved and there are safety plans that both Metrolink and Amtrak have. Amtrak has its own police in the region, as do the freight railroads.

So Union Pacific and BNSF have their own police forces, and they are part of the response team. But all of our agencies are also have relationships with local law enforcement and those that can help in the corridor, and they have plans for getting in contact with them when an incident happens.

One of the ways to minimize the number of incidents is to is to finish critical grade separations in the corridor. And we've really been working hard at that, especially in the busiest part of the corridor between LA and Fullerton over the last 20 years. So the Rosecrans/Marquardt grade separation is one of the most recent to be finished.

And there's only two or three left, I believe, between LA and Fullerton. And that reduces the kind of incidents that, you know, the vehicle crashes with trains that have often caused some of those emergency situations. So, you know, keep investing in those kinds of things and then make sure that all of our different law enforcement levels of, you know, at the different levels of government are well coordinated.

And we return to Caltrans to oversee everything that's happening. Or again, who's the lead in this situation? Hypothetical, of course.

In terms of emergency response, as Chad described, it's a panoply of agencies, beginning with the railroad police authorities themselves and close coordination with local police agencies. So that's something that we need to continue to... I mean, there are processes in place and coordination activities that take place all the time. Federal and I imagine also state requirements to do training, familiarization.

You know, on the freight side, fire crews are very aware of the manifests of the trains and what needs to be considered when fighting that fire. On the passenger side, the FRA requires coordination with local responders and rescue crews to understand all the equipment that's out there on our railroad and how to rescue passengers, where escape exits are, and things like that. So that, I would say that's really very much a local police and function that is supported by federal regulation on the railroad side and perhaps the Public Utility Commission.

And the reason I bring it up is the comfort level of the general public knowing that if something happens quickly, it'll get handled, we'll get back on track and moving once again. And when we only have one or two, as the Chair mentioned, having additional cars moving, it just the whole system has got to keep moving. Not because there's a small incident, you know, small fire right off the tracks or whatever.

And because if we're going to emphasize the movement and the ridership, we've got to also emphasize safety and reliability. And of course, the cost. That's all important. And the professional that we have, no doubt it's the best I've seen out there, and I commend you on that. But I just want to make sure that you understand that we have to take it to the next level, and that's what we're all trying to do. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. So I just wanted to ask a question about solvency because we hear about the fiscal cliff for transit agencies. And I recently was meeting with MTS, which is a transit agency that is in San Diego County, and they're doing more things around collecting fares and making sure that people aren't not paying, basically.

And I think that's important. And I appreciate, as you described Chad at the beginning, that you're lowering the barrier, the barriers people have to paying. So making it so you don't have to get a specific app for a specific... And then the discomfort of that. Those are really important. I think that we get kind of a more modern payment system. Like so many things that we buy are so easy to buy. It should be easy to get on transit.

But so to the point of farebox recovery versus state support and where you see that picture going and how the Legislature could help, but also what you see in the future. Because it does, it's always seemed to me like it's aspirational that farebox recovery is going to be able to get to 100% of expenses for operations. And so we need to be realistic about that. And so I just wanted to ask about, you know, what is your current perspective on the fiscal cliff for transit and those other concerns that we hear?

So Kyle and I can speak mostly to the inner city rail side of this because that is the part that the state has the most direct involvement in. And we are seeing continuous improvement in the farebox recovery of the system as they start returning to ridership levels that we saw in the past.

So as service gets added back and ridership continues to grow, we are getting better financial performance out of that in terms of farebox recovery. I think part of what I was talking about earlier with the enhancements to what you can do when you pay for your travel, part of that is also people knowing that they can sit together when they get on the train.

It's being able to reserve a specific seat, know that they have an ocean view if they want an ocean view, et cetera. And some of these things should raise ridership, filling more of the seats on the same trains. And so that gets us into a better financial performance picture as well.

On a statewide level, we've been taking some actions that get the trains out there more consistently, get to the reliability of maintenance. And that's really critical to the state's bi-level fleet that runs in both Southern California and Northern California. And it also comes at a lower...

It comes with both a lower cost of maintenance as well as a higher reliability of the train sets, which means we can put more cars out there in service each day and get more revenue out of those while spending a similar amount of money, you know, maintaining the fleet at what had historically been a lower reliability level.

So really, that kind of focus on actions that help us both get more riders on the train to pay more fares, to infill the train up to a higher load, as well as cost savings, you know, and things that drive down the cost of doing the activities that have to be done to run a train.

And you're talking about Amtrak, Pacific Surfliner specifically?

Surfliner specifically, yeah, yeah. So that's kind of where, you know, because the state has a finite amount of resources through the diesel sales and use tax that supports those services, and trying to make sure we use those well is critical.

On the other services that are in the corridor, again, they are also having good recovery of ridership, as far as we understand, and that does help to improve their financial performance. We continue to make the kind of investments that should help them carry more riders at a lower unit cost. And so some of those things should help over time as well.

But do you have any bigger picture thoughts on farebox recovery versus state investment and the financial solvency of all of the systems that operate? So Metrolink, COASTER, and Amtrak?

Yeah, I don't think that the two have to always be in tension with each other. If you're, you know, we've seen, as you grow your ridership and give people more reasons to ride the train, we see dramatic financial improvement even in the regional rail services. I'll use the example of Caltrain.

Before they electrified and before the pandemic, that system between 2004 and 2016 more than tripled its ridership and they lowered their unit costs of carrying passengers by 50% in actual dollars, in inflation adjusted dollars, by much more than that. And so we saw a very solid response that improved the financial picture of that service.

And if you look at Caltrain today, after finishing their electrification, they're now having rising ridership that is then bringing in more revenue and also improving the financial performance, even though they still have a ways to go to get past all the fiscal cliff issues. But it's definitely, you have to focus on many different things at the same time to try to get to good results.

And I think we're doing everything we can to support the kinds of investments that will help turn the corridor into a stronger financial performing place where we can then, with the same money, run more service and get more riders. Or we can do things like we can lower fares. We can do all kinds of things based on where the priorities are at that time and the resources we have available.

Okay, I appreciate that. And I'll just say that I would be willing to pay more for a train ticket that had an ocean view to be on the western side and to know that I was going to sit with my family member. So I do appreciate that that's a direction we're going. I wanted to ask about the relationship... I was just reading in my newspaper this morning about the DC Amtrak station that's being taken over by the federal government apparently.

But the way the article described it is it's not the commercial uses of the train station, it's the actual train operation itself because Amtrak is the railroad of record for the US. So I was wondering if there is an effect that we're expecting from the federal government given their relationship with Amtrak.

Amtrak has very little, very few assets that they own out here in California. And so we don't expect those kinds of things to take place here in the same way. In the East Coast, most of the assets are owned by Amtrak that are used in service. And so that's a very different story.

Okay.

As Chad mentioned, they don't own many assets out here, but they do own a portion of the, a significant portion of the Surfliner fleet. And so one of the projects that we are seeking to undertake is an overhaul or an upgrading of the existing state owned fleet so that we can have vehicle reliability increase, but also have the cost of maintenance go down and we can extend their useful life.

So we had conversations with Amtrak this morning about their willingness to support a similar project on their portion of the fleet. So that's something where we could certainly use some support in the months ahead to ensure that Amtrak can contribute to that and that we can have a uniform fleet for Surfliner across state owned and Amtrak owned equipment.

Okay, interesting. Okay, great. We're about to move on to our second panel. But I wanted to ask Senator Richardson if you would like to make any comments now or if you'd like to move to the second panel and then you could make comments or questions at that time.

I'd just like to make one comment. I just want to applaud our Chair for taking on this very important issue, keeping the public informed of the progress and everything that's being considered. Thank you.

Well, thank you for participating. I really appreciate it. Okay, well, thank you so much to both of you, and keep up the good work.

Okay, great. Now we're moving on to our second panel. So we have Philip Ploch with the Eno Center for Transportation joining virtually. And we have Gillian Gillette from the Caltrans Integrated Travel Program, or Cal itp, joining us at the table.

And we have Darby Berry, the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative, and Kerry Watkins, UC Davis Professor, who are also joining us virtually. So you're welcome to come forward and. Okay. And we'll start with Mr. Plotch first from the Eno Center for Transportation.

Hi. Hopefully you can see my slides here. We can. Yes. That's great. Excellent. Okay. I'm delighted to be here today. The principal researcher at the Eno Center. We're a nonprofit and we're independent and non partisan based in D.C. we have a lot of information on our website. It's EnoTrans.

Enotrans.org about designing and planning and constructing large transit projects. We've compared projects all around the world and we've identified some best practices and found there's lots of room for improvement in the United States. So it's more expensive to build transit in the United States than any other country, whether you compare ourselves to France or Japan or Germany.

And it takes us longer to build projects too. I'm going to talk about three key lessons that we've learned. One, it relates to permitting an environmental review. The second, about managing projects and the people who manage those projects. And third is governance. So first, the permitting and environmental review process.

So both the federal and state governments need to make sure that agencies involved with the environmental review have the time and resources to prepare and review documents in a timely manner. There's a long list of agencies like in California that get involved, like departments of Forestry, Housing and Community Development, parks departments, Water Resource Department, historic Preservation Department.

If there's just one agency at the state or federal level that has a staffing shortage, they're going to slow lots of transportation projects down. Second thing is agencies need to start coordinating early in a project to avoid delays. They need to set common and realistic expectations with each other. The third is utilities.

That's one of the actually most important and complex parts of a transit project. You have to move phone lines and power cables and all sorts of things. It's a challenge because maps are often outdated and inaccurate. So again, with utilities, and the next one, also land acquisition, the earlier you start planning coordinating better.

The second refers to people who are managing large projects. So you need talented and experienced people to do it. If, if you want to keep a project on schedule, if you want to minimize expenses and if you want to satisfy all the stakeholders. But agencies often lack qualified project managers for a number of reasons.

First, you can make a lot more money in the private sector than the public sector. Project managers typically have engineering backgrounds and there's a national shortage of engineers. And last reason is there's just not that many people who involve manage a large project.

So the next slide somewhat persuasively shows you some of the skills and attributes you need to manage some large projects. You got to be really smart, got to be very patient. You have to negotiate with lots of different people and companies and communities. You got to be savvy, great organization skills.

And the last one is you have to keep your ego in check because a good project manager lets others get all the credit at the groundbreaking and the ribbon cut. This is an organization chart for just one project in Seattle. So lots of people, lots of skills that are required.

So there are some slides that are available on the website, but I'm going to skip those to save some time. So these are snowflakes. I'm in the northeast here in Southern California, so maybe you don't see them very often.

They're all different from each other, just like agencies are all different from each other and projects are all different from each other. Every agency, before they start a project needs to make sure they have the people and the processes they need for the type of project they're undertaking and the kind of contract they're undertaking.

And they're all different. So different kinds of skills are needed and different kinds of processes are needed for different kinds of projects. So the consultants and the use of consultants is a really important thing to think about because every transit agency needs consultants.

You might need somebody with extensive experience building tunnels or maybe building bridges or possibly estimating costs. But some agencies over rely on consultants and the real benefit of using full time employees. What we're talking about one is the that sense of ownership you have of a project if you're going to be there full time.

Better understanding and relationships within an organization and outside the organization. Also, you're going to be around when the project is done and you have to operate and maintain it. It's great to have that person who knows how to build it also being around to operate and maintain it.

So this slide refers to the idea that agencies need to have some formal training programs if you want to get people ready to manage large projects. And then there's something I'm really curious if the legislators have an idea about this one. It's important Something important, our research is revealed.

Ideally, after a large project is completed, a transportation agency would document the lessons they learned so that others and their successors at the agency wouldn't make the same mistake. But agencies are not doing that. They're not documenting their mistakes. There's a whole bunch of reasons they're not doing that. They don't want to make their staff look bad.

They don't want to make their institutions look bad by revealing their mistakes. They're afraid that if they reveal information, it could be used against them in some litigation that they have. They're afraid if it looks like they're making mistakes, it's going to hurt their ability to get future funding. Because agencies aren't documenting those lessons they learned.

We're losing a lot of institutional knowledge that would be so helpful, not just within a region, but also across the country. So the third one is governance, relating to the institutions that are building transit projects. So there's no best way to organize transit agencies.

A lot depends upon history and geography and lots of other factors that have created the kind of organizations and bureaucracies that we have. And every type has its pros and cons. Typically, you'll find five different ways that transit agencies are arranged in the United States. Sometimes counties get together.

So Santa Clara, San Francisco, and San Mateo, they set up a board to manage Caltran. Many counties in the United States operate their own transit services, especially buses. Some cities, like San Francisco, with muni, they operate their own services. And sometimes there's a regional authority like BART in the Bay Area and in New Jersey.

That's where I'm from. The state can operate service, too, operates all the transit services in the State of New Jersey. So if you look around the country and around the world, you'll see sort of the way that transit agencies have evolved over time.

At first, private companies built and operated streetcars and trolley cars like you had in Southern California. Then when cars became more affordable, those companies went bankrupt. Oftentimes, cities took them over if they continued to run at all. Then you have this intra urban service. But then in the 60s, this explosive growth of suburbs.

And then you have regional agencies that were created across the country, like in Washington and New York, Atlanta and many other places. Now today, transit agencies need to be more integrated across the region because they're competing with rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft.

So no one taking transit should need to look at multiple schedules in a region and multiple fares to figure out how to use transit. So integration is just important, and customers are expecting that kind of information. So this slide helps us think here about whether something should be centralized or decentralized.

So these are different functions that transit agencies need to undertake. So they need to operate servos, they need to get funding from outside sources because as you talked about before, the farebox is not going to pay for all their expenses. They need to figure out what the fair policy is.

They need to build new lines, upgrade their new lines, repair their new lines. Then there's this administrative aspect of managing entire agency. If you just think about that capital box here, who should do it, what agency should do it should be centralized or decentralized.

You can think about whether regions transit agencies are centralized or decentralized will definitely make a difference in the kind of priority they would have. So one regional agency will have more resources, but they're going to prioritize things that are very different than the local municipality. So this is the last slide.

No matter who manages a project, it's important to make sure that that entity has autonomy and resources it needs. It needs to be able to enter into contracts. It needs to be able to make decisions. It needs to be able to set salaries and issue debt and use eminent domain for the property it needs.

Without that power, it slows the decision making down and it slows down projects. Some regions, and I'm necessarily saying this is the best thing for Southern California, but some regions have created agencies that just build projects.

So in New York, New Jersey and Seattle, the state has created these entities that are constructing transit infrastructure and then letting some other entity operate it once it's done. So that's all I have to say now, but I am looking forward very much to hearing what other people are going to be saying today. Thanks.

Well, thank you, Mr. Plotch. We appreciate your presentation and being here virtually with us. Next we'll go to Ms. Gillette from Caltranscal ITP. So I'll hand it over to you.

There we go. Good afternoon, Senator Blakespear, Senator Archuleta, Senator Richardson and Senator Durazo. Thank you for this opportunity to make comments today. So today I will update you on the strategic customer experience initiatives that the California Integrated Mobility Program, which I manage at Caltrans undertakes statewide and why we do what we do.

The program implements to strategic initiatives derived from adopted policy and coordinates closely with the Division of Rail under oversight from California State Transportation Agency Chief Deputy Chad Edison, who you just heard, whom you just heard from. I'm going to call California State Transportation Agency Calsta going forward because it's a lot of work.

Our first three initiatives were determined by several informal market surveys and market soundings, followed by a few feasibility study in April of 2020. So our three core and initial initiatives are advancing the statewide adoption of the first and really only data standard in transit and rail. It's called the General Transit Feed specification or gtfs.

Publication of basic schedule and geographic data by each transit agency of correct and complete data allows Google Maps and Apple Maps to import that data into their maps so that a customer can plan a travel trip.

So I don't know if you've used Google or Apple Maps that way, but if you want to plan a trip on transit from your house to mine, you can do it for free anywhere in the world. And you can plan a trip in Southern California as a tourist, a potential tourist in Japan.

It's an amazing global free amenity. But to do that, Google and Apple rely on accurate and complete data from every transit agency. So There are about 3,500 agencies that do it. Almost all of the transit agencies, I think we actually do now have the schedules of every fixed route agency in the State of California.

So if you're trying to plan a trip on Google Maps or Apple Maps in California and there's no service there, there really is no service there. That's because there's no service offered there because we have helped the agencies show their products on Google and Apple Maps.

The next push on this particular data standard is to assist in advance statewide adoption of what is called Real Time GTFS Real Time GT Data.

Real Time GTFS is a combination of hardware and software that compares a transit agency's published schedule with where the vehicle actually is and then gives you as the customer a prediction about when the vehicle is going to be at your stop.

So if you use Google and Apple Maps frequently and you plan a trip and you're offered different trips, sometimes some of the trips will have red or yellow markings on them because they the bus is late or the vehicle is late. No worries. That is a transit agency that is able to speak GTFs real time.

About 43% of the agencies in California can produce GTFs real time. And they're almost all exclusively the large agencies. Because when we started there was this program was started by calsta. There was no commercial product on the market. But place for small and rural agencies, of whom there are hundreds in California, could actually produce real time information.

There are many product gaps in the marketplace so that lots of agencies can't do things that customers expect. Okay, the second thing that we do right is we support in advance payment by debit and credit cards statewide on transit.

The global debit and credit card network, so like Visa and MasterCard can support merchants charging for any product or service on earth. And they are regulated for privacy, security and consumer protection globally by the banking and payments regulations of each country.

So they're private secure networks that are also regulated unlike the patchwork of systems that we have for payment in California. The third, the third initiative that we work on is automating and supporting each agency that accepts debit and credit cards to avail themselves of the California Department of Technology's Digital Identity program.

The program allows participating agencies to offer their customers a way to associate their appropriate eligibility, like senior or persons with a disability that verifier with their debit or credit card account so that they can get their discount every time they use that transit agency without signing up and submitting invasive paperwork separately at each of the more than 250 agencies in California.

Right. So that initiative helps us try to put transit on par with cars. So if you have a driver's license from the DMV in California, you can use it in Massachusetts. If you have got a blue placard from the DMV in New York state, you can use it here in California. Car rights are portable.

Transit benefits until we started are not. They're limited to each agency. So, you know, we're working really hard on this particular initiative to make sure that somebody who, a senior who registers in California can know that they're going to get their discount in New York City, which is already accepting open payments.

I mean that's, you know, we can do these kinds of things. They're not taxing technically difficult. So together, these three initiatives begin to address the consistent payment method called for initially in the 2018 State Rail Plan, as well as in the enabling legislation for high speed rail.

They also begin to address the discounts required by the Federal Transit Administration in the Federal Transit Act. So seniors, Medicare cardholders, persons with disabilities, those are required by the fta, but the fta, the Federal Transit Administration has never provided, provided a way to do it.

So we're working on that from moving outwards a little bit to try to answer the question about how do you make this all sing from private sector consumer trends.

Our three initiatives begin to put transit and rail on par with the way most Americans pay, plan their trips and pay for most things regardless of their age or income. Most people pay with debit and credit cards, cards. It's really important that transit be able to do that too. Because that will increase ridership.

Finally, these three initiatives allow us, as an industry in the benefits provision business, to address the fact that not everyone in California has a safe, reliable digital payment method.

Addressing this issue in partnership with the over 200 transit and rail agencies, as well as the over 500 on demand services, allows California to introduce, test and optimize digital benefits delivery across transactions that are well below $10 in most instances, as opposed to the higher volume benefit transactions of, say, unemployment benefits or monthly electronic benefits transfer benefits.

While Caltrans may seem to be an odd agency through which to address financial inclusion, Caltrans is squarely in the middle of all of the transportation modes which require payment, transit and rail, certainly, but also tolling, parking and the rapidly approaching electric vehicle charging space. In short, anywhere that most Americans pay by debit or credit card.

And the UN and underbanked are increasingly. The underbanked are increasingly left behind without a strategic program like the California Integrated Mobility Program program. So in closing, we try to help answer some basic questions in the consumer space. What is your product? How much does it cost? How do I pay for it? And where do I find it?

Thank you very much.

That's great. That's all very interesting. Thank you. Okay, next we have Darby Berry from the Regional Climate Collaborative.

Wonderful, thank you. Hopefully folks can see my screen. So hi everyone. My name is Darby, I use she her pronouns and I'm the Director of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative. Just briefly, we are located in San Diego County and we are a region wide collaborative in San Diego.

We've been around since 2011, so supporting our Members for almost 15 years across our region on coordinated regional climate action that both includes mitigation and adaptation and resilience building. We're committed to building a green and prosperous community within San Diego. County.

We do this through a couple of methods and so just highlighting a few of those is engaging our Members, which I'll highlight in a moment. Strengthening our climate resilience hub.

So we are situated at the University of San Diego, which gives us a really great opportunity to bridge that academic research with our community practitioners across the San Diego region, leveraging our collaborative capacity. So we are of living, breathing, working of not going far by going together and establishing strategic partnerships across the region to work across agencies.

This is just a list of our Members.

So we were founded by cities and public agencies, sandag, our metropolitan planning agency in our region, being one of them, with the goal of, you know, making sure that folks are connected, coordinated and integrated, working to share best practices, plans and planning projects, but also serving in the role to align on coordinated goals.

What we do is intentional trust building. So we work with practitioners across all of the 18 cities and 19 municipalities, including the county, as well as our special districts in the San Diego region to coordinate planning and coordinate planning practices from, from different climate action perspectives. Acknowledging the unique challenges of the San Diego region.

Specifically, as part of this, you know, regional dialogue, we are the one of the busy. We have one of the busiest border crossings in the country, as well as really great beaches and coastlines that folks love to come and visit. So understanding our unique challenges here in San Diego, also creating a safe space for problem solving.

Recognizing that a lot of these challenges that, that we're working through are new, especially in the face of climate change, and so understanding how we can facilitate those dialogues and then most importantly, supporting a shared vision. So not going across against the vein, we really focus on the benefits of working on a regional approach.

So that's what I'm here to talk about. Acknowledging that the impacts from shops and stressors as it relate to climate, as well as just disasters writ large, extend beyond our political jurisdictions and boundaries across multiple dimensions of planning, land ownership and land use.

And so in order for us to actually address these challenges as they relate to our communities and our communities of need in particular, we have to be working on them at a regional scale. So multi sector, multi regional. And understanding that a lot of our planning is integrated.

It might be housed within a specific Department or a specific agency as the lead, but we can't, you know, we can't talk about housing without talking about transit. We can't talk about climate without talking about transit. So these are really important conversations.

I'm here just to give a few examples of some of the work that we've been leading with our partners that is related to efforts within the Slo San corridor.

But a few years ago, we worked with 150 individuals across the San Diego region and all of our planning agencies to develop a, a regional vision for our coastlines, much of which has a lot of implications for infrastructure.

But we, you know, work through an integrated planning document that came out with 76 actions, projects and opportunities across six principles for our region to pursue and address.

We published this in June of 2023 and our work over the last couple of years has been trying to work with our agency partners to facilitate funding to, to implement these projects. Over the last two years, we've applied for over $75 million in funding for projects that through federal and state grants to move projects along.

And we also do some of the, you know, simple data gathering and understanding that we haven't had a coordinated space for just looking at what plans related to climate action or related to transit and these other programs.

So this is a new tool that our organization has facilitated the development of, which is San Diego Regional Plan Tracker, just to create, you know, an online database for plans and information.

Some of what my colleagues have talked about earlier, but understanding who's doing what, what are those lessons learned and where can you access them easily can really save a lot of time in these processes.

So just to close, I know I have a short, short moment here, but our goal is really to focus on this, building regional capacity and the essential component of that to these larger scale processes, elevating regional leadership, acknowledging that there's a lot happening in a lot of spaces on a local scale and how to elevate those opportunity areas and lift them up, and developing regionally responsive research.

I think there's a lot of great lessons that we can learn from national and statewide programs, but there's a lot of unique challenges within the Southern California regional context that are really essential to understand. So that is all I have for you today. Thanks.

Okay, thank you very much, Director Barry. We appreciate that. Next we have Kerry Watkins from UC Davis.

Great. Hopefully you can see my slides.

We can. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me, Senators. I'm a recent transplant to California as of a few years ago. So I often say at the beginning of presentations like this, forgive me, as I am still learning California and there's often a lot to learn about specifics.

So my comments are actually going to be a little more big picture rather than specifics for the LOSSAN Corridor. Although I feel like I should point out that I recently had a college aged daughter move to San Diego and so I hear about her vision for this Corridor all the time.

As a potential user that sometimes gets frustrated with the very topics that I'm going to talk about, I want to talk to you about two things that I entered for the record.

One of those is a report that I worked on a number of years ago that was not specific to regional rail, like what we're talking about, predominantly in this corridor, but to transit in general.

The Transit Cooperative Research Program, which is an arm of the Transportation Research Board, which is a large national research organization, international research organization even, they periodically do reports on various topics.

And there's actually others that might be interesting to you that have come out recently about commuter rail and such, and I'm happy to pass those on if they would be of interest. The one that I worked on that I wanted to talk about was about declines that we were seeing in public transportation ridership, even pre Covid.

And we did a lot of work trying to understand what the causes of that might be and what the responses should be. So we looked at factors contributing to ridership decline.

So what causes high ridership or does not, causes ridership to disappear, and what are the kinds of strategies that we can use to mitigate or reverse declines that we were already seeing pre Covid.

So that's the first that I'm going to talk about and I'm going to skip over all the great work that we did, but with only five minutes, I'm just going to drill into the lessons that we learned from this and the ones that were a little bit more specific that I think are more specific to this corridor.

One of the biggest lessons that we saw across all the agencies that we were evaluating with this work was that service equals ridership. So I already heard the words frequency coming up.

And as a geeky academic, I love it when I hear these first principles, words that come up, the more service that's in the corridor, that is what's driving ridership. If somebody is unable to plan a trip at pretty much any time of the day without having a very long delay.

Then across all of these kinds of services that we're talking about, they're not going to be able to rely on it, they're not going to be able to make use of it. I personally use Capital Corridor here in Northern California all the time.

And inevitably I will try to plan a trip during their three hour gap that exists as part of their service schedule. And that's really just not sustainable that we can't have these services where you're trying to build ridership and you have these long delays and gaps in the schedule that's being put out there.

The other thing that we found as we were looking through all of this is that we often have these metrics in the transit world like ridership levels, and they don't really think of all of the missions that transit has. And there are really two main missions transit often has, to respectfully serve those who rely on it.

So people in the region who don't have the option to be driving somewhere, like my daughter, they may be relying on a corridor like this in order to be able to get them between major cities like San Diego and LA and further north.

And we have to think about how do we serve those people respectfully and how do we measure the fact that they have access to places that they might not otherwise. And that's a totally different measure than ridership as something that is at the core of what we're trying to achieve.

But then in addition to that, transit is often trying to efficiently provide mobility in urban areas. And so it's really critical that we are also measuring qualities like ridership and how well we're actually providing mobility and how much of a mode split we are attaining.

So how many people are making that choice to be using services when they have other options available. The second major thing that we found in this report was the use of fare discounts and how important it is to rethink fare policy.

Both pre and post Covid. We found several different fare discount programs that were increasing transit ridership and in particular tied to rail type services.

Looking at family and friends type discounts, things where you're looking at if multiple people are traveling together, they need a discount for that second, that third person and beyond, or it's not going to be competitive with taking an automobile instead. Furthermore, rethinking fares as travel patterns change.

We have long looked at things like monthly passes when we're entering an era post Covid, where people are only commuting to work a couple of days A week, that monthly pass no longer makes sense.

So thinking about things like fare capping, where instead of you paying one price for a month of unlimited travel, you pay one price for your first trip and it gets a little bit cheaper with every additional trip that you make over the month.

So it encourages you to use the service more and more, while not making you have this initial outlay when you're not sure how often you're going to use it. The third principle that we came up with out of this was giving transit priority. This is something that is to a certain extent already true in rail.

Although on these corridors there's a lot of competition with freight and we've already heard about the reliability problems that come along with that.

When the freight operators are not running services they are supposed to be, then often passenger services are being caught behind them and that reliability disappears and suddenly there are large gaps in time people are not making appointments or critical events and they won't keep taking the corridor the first or the second time that that happens.

It's also critically important to be giving priority in access to more rail based services. So in station areas, making sure that it has been assured that people can get in and out of those spaces, that connecting bus services and such can get in and out of those spaces is key.

Reliability, as was already mentioned of service is one of the major keys to ridership. But speed is also critically important and so achieving priority enables speed of service to make it more competitive against other modes. And then again, station design is really, really critical.

Having priority in stations where access modes have priority to quickly speed up those transfers and such. In this same study we talked about new mobility providers and that you have to be very careful with partnerships in the interest of time. I'm not going to go into that.

The last one I wanted to talk about though was encouraging transit oriented density. That I think one of the key roles that the state has in talking about transit in general in this corridor, in every corridor, is ensuring that density and development is supportive of transit.

That the links between housing and transportation, we cannot do enough at the state level to ensure that new housing is being built that is easy to serve by transit.

And so this is the kind of thing, there are many things that you can be doing as Senators that go beyond just us thinking about this as a corridor and thinking about the principles that we should be putting in place to ensure that we're doing things like developing in transit friendly ways.

The second study that I wanted to talk about a little bit was actually an issue brief that I entered into the record as well. This was co authored by Brian Taylor at the University at UCLA, myself, and Laura Podolsky who works for us at the Institute of Transportation Studies.

And this was broadly about the future of public transit. So again, public transit in general, but I'm going to try to be a little more specific to this corridor. One of our biggest insights was that ridership was already in decline pre pandemic, and a lot of that was because of increased incomes and decreased costs of automobile use.

At the same time, cities have become less self contained and are fewer workers who are living where they work. And this creates a real problem for being able to serve those people easily by transit. In addition, we know that ridership recovery has been uneven. Commuter rail in particular has been the hardest hit due to losses from telework.

So other services like bus, more bus based agencies and such, they've rebounded post Covid, but commuter rail services often have not. And what we need to do to try to regain ridership there is to think, to rethink the roles of that particular service and how you attract new types of riders and trips.

So if it's a service that is still running a schedule that is very commuter based, despite the fact that there are not a lot of commuters being served, trying to pivot towards how do you attract new residents, customers, tourists, and what kind of schedules do they keep so that they would be attracted to the service.

We're actually doing work right now for Capitol Corridor and I'm happy to provide the results when we get far enough. But we're looking at how do they attract new markets, how do they change their span of service?

So it's not just frequency, but it's that train that runs at 11 o' clock at night so that if you're in a show in an urban area that you still have the ability to get home after that performance. There are many cases where something that was more commuter based is not allowing those trips to happen.

And there's many people who would like to be making those trips and if those schedules were altered. So we're looking into all the different kinds of trips that are made and how we can serve them better on these corridors. We know that the fiscal outlook is mixed.

The highest pre pandemic farebox agencies are the ones that were hardest hit. And we have to be thinking about new financial streams, including land Value Capture. This is something that we're talking about a lot with the Transit Transformation Task Force, on which I also sit with Chad Edison.

It was already mentioned and it's critically important that we start to think about where new revenue can come from other than fareboxes and state subsidies and taxes. And then finally, the policies that you set highly influence ridership. We need to have policies that are going to focus more on creating higher density, walkable, transit friendly places.

And we need to learn how we manage private vehicle travel through pricing. These are two much bigger picture things that you may not think tied to the LOSSAN Corridor, but if you're trying to increase ridership, they very much do. So that is what I wanted to talk about.

The only other thing I would mention is that when we think about first principles, there are eight things that we really have to be doing in transit service. And I heard many of them mentioned already. Frequency is critically important, but as I said, span is important as well.

Speed and travel time, very important, but reliability is really a key aspect as well, as was mentioned. I also heard Gillian talk about the importance of information and informing your passengers of how they get to services, how those services are running in the moment.

That real time information that the bread and butter of my research and it's critically important to ensuring ridership on these corridors. But then finally, and then fares, I touched on a bit as well in what I was saying were more innovative fare programs and thinking across different types of users.

But finally there are two aspects that I feel like were not mentioned yet by anyone. One of those is access. And so ensuring that people can get in and out of stations efficiently and, and easily is really critical to building ridership. And then civility. We talk more and more about safety.

Safety from a security point of view is an issue that we're having more and more in transit and things we can do to improve that are key to ridership growth as well. Thank you.

Well, thank you very much. That was very interesting. You also, I think you didn't say something about rethink fares or no, it wasn't that. It was something about congestion pricing that was at the end of your slides that we received, but I don't see it now.

But anyway, I appreciate all that you shared right there and I'd like to thank Senator Durazo and Senator Cervantes for joining us. And I have a couple questions or thoughts, but I wanted to just turn it to you first if either of you wanted to ask any questions of the panelists. Senator Durazo.

Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair. Just a couple of questions. Ms. Gillette, on the, I really, if I understood right, the whole notion of being able to travel at least across the state, maybe across the country.

To have access to that, like in our phones or through the Internet, but mostly through our phones, is how does language fit into that? Different languages. I've never used one in the way that you said. Sounds great. How does language? Is that a consideration that's being given in all of these? What are they? Apps?

Thank you, Senator Durazo, for that question. We could do better with making the standard more reliable or, sorry, more international in terms of languages. Right? It's a global standard, so you would want it to be communicated in each language where it is. However, Google and Apple Maps are trying to solve a global problem that works for everybody.

So if you use Google Maps or Apple Maps to make the trip, there is very intuitive information. They try as hard as they can to design sort of in a universal way where language isn't really necessary.

And they do, because they're a consumer product company, they do incredible amounts of customer research and then before and after and during. And so they know that customers of all languages are using it the way it is. But you know, we could do better.

We could work on having a different or additional trip planner in the State of California. But it would probably only work in California. Right? And we could build such a thing. But our focus, at least initially, since when we started, not all transit agencies had published their schedules. Right?

I mean, there's the basic issue here first, which is please tell the customer what you're offering and then we can talk about fancier things. But it's a phenomena. I'm happy to meet with you after the meeting and show. We can plan a trip between our houses and show it to you.

Previously, a lot of the transit agencies were buying their own custom trip planners and they were very expensive and they were paying a lot of money for them, but they're only good for that particular transit agency. This is much better because literally you can plan a trip anywhere in the world.

Yeah. And it also came to mind because of the Olympics coming. A World cup, all these international sports and events in addition to other kinds of events. But it's becoming more and more important to be able to attract and give service even if they don't come to live here. They're visitors. And then when you talk about research. Not you.

I'm sorry. Ms. Watkins, I think it was you talked about fiscal outlook is mixed. In LA, as I understand it, we've actually increased, gotten back to pre pandemic ridership levels. I can't remember the reasons why or what they think the reasons were for.

But it would be good to compare and contrast areas where ridership has increased and why and what's worked and where it hasn't and why and what's worked. So just something that we can use some real tangible examples.

I'm glad you brought up, Ms. Watkins, also the safety issues, because I know that you get one incident that gets publicized and then it just scares everybody to death about wanting to go back if you have the option. If you don't have the option, you still have to use the, use the transit. So anyway, lots of just comments like that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Yeah, thank you. You know, I appreciated hearing some of these examples which I hadn't thought of before that Ms. Watkins brought up about, for example, a group discount.

So if you are trying to bring your family on the train that the third, the second, third, fourth tickets need to be reduced in order for that trip to be financially worth it versus driving if somebody has that choice. And then also monthly passes no longer making sense and price capping.

And so what I was thinking about in relation to that was the things that you were saying, Ms. Gillette, at Caltrans, that you're. Caltrans seems to have a role in getting transit agencies to put schedules on the website publicly and then also have them feed into Google and Apple maps so that it is easy for people, which is really a great role for the state.

So I wonder if your looking at this next level of things like are you looking at considering having transit agencies do these things that were just mentioned that are having fair discounts for the second, you know, monthly passes, these kinds of things that are more operational but are really core to driving improvements for transit in the State of California.

Senator, thank you for the question. So we have shied away at Caltrans from talking about fare policy because that's a local discussion. Right? And transit agencies set their fares often based on their books.

I will say I have a personal opinion which is everybody knows more or less what the price of a gallon of gas is and more or less what the price of a gallon of milk is, nobody has any idea what transit costs. And in fact, we regulate gas stations. We in California regulate gas stations.

Those big signs that they have before you go in the Department of Agriculture, those signs look like that because that's regulated. The letters have to be no less than 6 inches high. You have to specify everything that you are selling.

And the sign has to be visible before the customer enters your lot so that the customer can make an educated choice. We don't regulate transit that way. So one of the things that GTFS, the maps thing, allows is there's an extension of it that is fares.

So Google and Apple could present the full price of your trip even if you were going across multiple operators. They can only present one fare though, right? They're not going to pull down a table of all the things if you're 60, if it's Tuesday or, you know, whatever.

So they're going to present one because they are a consumer products company and they know that simplicity is better. So I think that there is a fair policy discussion that it would be great to have.

I know the Bay Area has begun one there to try to harmonize the fare so that people kind of get what transit costs. But that's not our purview at Caltrans. However, we are in the business of making it as easy as possible to implement the fare policy, including these additional features. So I pushed fare capping.

All the agencies that have gone open payments with us use fair capping. They've moved to fair capping from passes. And again, a fair cap is you as an agency can make a decision about the maximum you're going to charge somebody in a day, say or in a week.

So somebody can tap their debit or credit card twice and you can say that your fair cap is five bucks. Let's say that those two things are five. And that's where you're going to cap. So anytime the customer taps their debit or credit card anywhere on your system, again, that that day they're not going to pay more.

That's a digital idea as opposed to a pass, which is a paper based idea. So we are new at this and you know, the transit industry has been very slow. It was really Transport for London that led accepting debit and credit cards in 2014.

They wanted it to be part of their Olympics bid in 2010, but the transaction speeds weren't there yet. But they immediately did it when it was available. So they led with fare capping. And we are also working on these additional features like family passes. How are you going to do that? In a simple way.

Anaheim, we work with Anaheim. They went open payments with us and they're very interested in this issue obviously because of Disney. So I think some of those features are coming.

We need as an industry, when we adopt features like this and plan them, we want them to to be understandable to everybody the same way that Google Maps is understandable to everybody. So stay tuned.

Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, this panel's topic is delivering projects and services that grow ridership. So the entire point is to grow ridership.

And that's actually the entire point of the Subcommitee is to say, you know, this is a really critical rail line, this LOSSAN Corridor, 350 miles from Southern California up to San Luis Obispo. And recognizing that the state has this goal of 20% of all travel being on transit, including passenger rail.

And so, you know, the question of what are we doing as a state to try to drive increases in ridership, to me, that has to be the central question that we're always circling back to.

And Caltrans role in, If you're not setting fair policy, but maybe you're doing best practices or you're putting out to all the different transit agencies that aren't communicating with UC Davis about the latest on their studies, you know, that they're able to get this information from the state about what we think, the state thinks would be best for transit agencies.

To me, that seems like it could be a really important role. And one of the questions that goes around in my mind is what's the legislative role versus the regulatory role in creating that and making that happen in a more clear way?

Because I think one of the things that I was thinking about this as Darby Barry was presenting, that there's a lot of discussion of these aspirational words like coordination and collective and collaborative and integrated. But to me, the question of, like, where are we going with all those things?

And the point being that we're trying to grow ridership. We're trying to make transit be a reasonable alternative option to driving the car and to figure out all the pieces that are needed to make that happen.

And so some of the things, I think one of the parts about Ms. Barry's presentation was that there, which she didn't exactly say, but basically there are multiple goals that are trying to be achieved.

So especially on the coast, there are things like that we run into where there'll be like sand placement on the beach or living shorelines projects, which are a different value or a different goal than rail, the rail line.

And so how do we integrate partner to have all these different stakeholders at the table. But they're all at the table with that question of, like, what are we doing here? Why are we sitting around this table? And the point is to grow ridership.

So, you know, my hope with this Subcommitee and with all the different conversations and strategic plans that we're getting in line is that we are really focused on that.

And it would be great to have Caltrans internally coming up with these suggestions about things that you think the transit agencies could do, because ultimately, you know, you are in the center of that vortex of being able to make those suggestions. So anyway, I wanted to. Senator Cervantes, do you have any questions or statements? Okay.

Well, I think that's it, actually. Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate the participation and information provided by that panel. And we'll go to the third and last panel. This is called Making It Work Governance, Funding, and Service Goals.

So we have Juan Matute, Deputy Director of UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, Genevieve Giuliano, Public Policy Professor at USC Price School of Public Policy, and Frank Jimenez, Senior fiscal and Policy Analyst from the LAO. So we'll start with Juan. There you are. Great.

Hello. Good afternoon, Chair Blakespear and Committee Members. My name is Juan Matute. I am the Deputy Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, where I do research on public transit and transportation finance.

I also serve with earlier panelists, Kari Watkins and Chief Deputy Secretary Chad Edison on the Transit Transformation Task Force, which will be releasing a report that will include a policy process for updating the Transportation Development Act. I think that process should consider changes in funding structures for regional and inter regional services and connecting transit services.

Nearly all of California's regional inter regional rail predate the Transportation Development Act. The state didn't even start subsidizing caltrain on the Bay Area Peninsula until after this passed. So now combined with SB1 state rail assistance funds, there is more funding available to support regional and inter regional rail.

So there are more possibilities to consider in this corridor's funding model than there have been in recent years. But there's also a huge need for funding, as you all know, and because of the scale needed of capital investment, it's in the tens of the billions of dollars. I was encouraged to help you all think big.

So really big, perhaps too big, would be state ownership of the railroad. And so Virginia and North Carolina have actually purchased freight railroads and they are using them for transit and commuter services. And then that sort of flips the relationship for the areas of the trackage where there's a freight owner now.

And I recently traveled with my family to Alaska and used the Alaska Railroad, which was transferred from the Federal Government to the state in the 1980s. And this is used for both tourism and transportation purposes, which got me thinking about broader applications of economic development in the LOSSAN Corridor.

Could the LOSSAN Service Corridor and integrated transit agencies being used more for tourism purposes? Yes, there are beautiful views up and down the coast it's the train trip I most recommend between Santa Barbara and Surf Station on the LOSSAN Corridor. It's a through beautiful section of the California coast.

But when you think of this linking the City of San Diego with its convention business, beaches, the zoo and Balboa Park. North County San Diego with Legoland and Orange County with Disneyland and Beaches. LA with Hollywood and the museums and even Santa Barbara and beyond. It starts to, one starts to understand why this is already the second biggest passenger rail corridor in Amtrak's portfolio.

And all of these localized facilities are increasingly linked by local and regional transit. And notably as LA's regional rail network would soon be connected to LAX, Southern California's predominant international airport and the airport with the most origin destination traffic in the world.

If just a fraction of those who currently fly in and get off at LAX and rent cars or other airports in the corridor move to transit, this could easily double Surfliner ridership, providing both more funding and and more frequency, which as Dr. Watkins suggested is important for more ridership.

So providing a tourism benefit can create additional spending and supporting hospitality jobs. And I looked at whether or not existing studies in the corridor had looked at those impacts and they're generally localized like the Caltrans District 11 North Corridor, North Coast Corridor economic impact analysis did note tourism impacts but didn't think of the full integrated corridor.

Just a piece of it. But if the state were to start thinking about those larger benefits, the corridor could continue being an asset into the future, a resilient asset that works for residents but funded in part by tourists.

And if an interest in increased tourism support in Southern California is one of many economic development strategies to be considered as a result of changes in US trade policy and the exposures of Southern California's logistics and goods movement sectors, the LOSSAN Corridor could be a part of it.

Of course, key to attracting this tourist market will be as Gillian Gillette of the California Integrated Travel Project recommended, this open loots payment system. So this is the tap to pay credit card option, how people interact with transportation payments in the rest of the economy.

This may seem small, but it's actually a really hard lift as it requires coordination for multiple transit agencies to be successful, seamless integration for regional and statewide travel. And because it relies on the global payment system, it works really well for people with limited English proficiency or who have foreign phones or foreign bank accounts. In addition to multitudes of people within California doing a research project about this now.

And so a big way, but perhaps much more achievable to and in line with the remarks of Chair Blakespear about how to operationalize the coordination and cooperation would be to consider a public private partnership model of transit integration that's common in Europe for the LOSSAN Corridor, perhaps even piloting with the LOSSAN Corridor and connecting mobility services.

So this exists throughout Europe and Germany. It's called Verband Deutscher Verkehrsunternehmen, which is known as VDV. But it's a proven model for multiple transit operators, private, public, everything in between, working together to seamlessly meet transit customers needs.

It is definitely next level beyond what Gillian Gillett covered in her remarks, but is within the capabilities of Caltrans and the California Integrated Travel Project to support. And I think it would work well for boosting the attractiveness of transit options for everyone, tourists and residents of like.

And the reason it works is it's a combination of something like an air traffic control or a California independent system operator for those of you who know California energy markets and something called the International Air Transport Association which enables multi airline coordination and ticketing for air travel trips.

So if you go on two airlines, your bag connects between them and you don't have to do anything. Of course in Germany they bring in German level engineering and efficiency and they apply it to this. And they have multi operator standardization. They advocate on behalf of the common interests of both private and public mobility providers.

And it's even evolved to the point of coordinating national defense movements, which I understand are also very important for the LOSSAN Corridor. And the way they achieve this is by having everybody come together and agree essentially on standards. Standards for interoperability for process, but increasingly standards for data. And Gillian Gillett mentioned many of these.

There are data standards. The challenge is getting adoption within a court or a related agency. So you really see the benefits of the data flowing between agencies.

So if a bus or a train is going to be late, rather than having a person have to make a phone call or send an email saying hey, it's going to be late, the data just flows automatically between systems. Maybe they will make an operational change as a result, maybe they won't.

But at least that becomes possible with having that automated data flow. And that's just one of many things that this association has agreed to in order to make the user experience better for people who are using one provider or switching in between providers.

So this would be the basis for schedule coordination between commuter rail, Metrolink, and inter regional rail, integrated ticketing and payments with local transit providers and other mobility services, even enabling group discounts.

So describing the fare policies in a standardized way that everybody's agreed to so that it becomes something that if isn't surfaced from Google, is presented to people and then having multi agency fare discounts. So if you're buying one of those tickets that's using multiple operators, you can pre buy that and perhaps get a discount.

And of course, many of us California residents also are sometimes tourists in our own state and we would benefit from easier travel between the cities in this corridor from something like this.

So I think I would encourage you to consider this association approach, this public private partnership approach and then I also recommend considering transportation pricing as mentioned by Kari Watkins.

I just wanted to point out that there are two areas on the LOSSAN Corridor that are really unique in the state and how ripe they are for road user charges to reduce congestion and enhance resilience. And that's because you basically have a controlled access highway and the LOSSAN facility and nothing else.

So that's the Interstate 5 through Camp Pendleton and US 101 between the cities of Ventura and Carpinteria. And so that creates possibilities on the order of having a bridge between two areas which are really important for thinking about managed lanes and managing congestion while raising revenue.

And then I think it's also important, and it's already been addressed in other hearings, but a capital planning process that supports a pathway to full or partial electrification I think would be one of many measures that helps move along the way towards having both electrified freight but and other electrified movements.

And that would, I think given the position of the corridor and where freight travels in and around this corridor on other railroads, most benefit those in disadvantaged communities with high environmental burdens. Thank you.

Well, thank you. We appreciate that. Next we will move to Genevieve Giuliano from USC.

Thank you very much. And I will share here in just a second. And. Can everyone see?

Yes.

And can you hear?

Yes, we can.

Oh, perfect. Okay, first of all, thank you for inviting me. This has been really interesting and I've learned a lot just sitting here and hearing the other presenters. And so some of what I had just, you know, you've already talked about.

And I'm going to try very hard to start, you know, to stay within my five minutes so that you have a lot of time to actually discuss. So I'm going to just talk very briefly. I'm going to skip through slides so that I can stay within about five minutes.

But I want to start here with kind of what I was thinking about in thinking about the services in this corridor and as we sort of go forward to think about how we're going to move, improve the corridor. How we're going to increase ridership and so on.

Ms. Giuliano, if you could pause for one moment. We want to get the slide deck up. We currently cannot see it.

Oh, dear.

If you could just give us one second, please.

Sure. And I can't see any of you at this point. I don't have a...

What we'll do is hold for a moment as we figure out this technology portion. If you don't mind, just to keep time going, we will move to Mr. Frank Jimenez, in the meantime. Mr. Jimenez, you may proceed.

Thank you, Committee Members. Frank Jimenez with the Legislative Analyst Office. I've been asked today to provide an overview of state funding for the LOSSAN Rail Corridor. I'll be making my comments from this handout, what the Committee should have received. If not, should be making its way around the room.

And then, for those that are listening to the hearing online, this handout is available at our website at lao.ca.gov. So, turning to page one of our handout, just to provide a quick overview of the rail corridor, LOSSAN Rail Corridor accommodates both passenger and freight rail services.

The passenger rail services include Pacific Surfliner, which is a state supported route, but responsibility has been transferred over to the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency, but it's still under oversight of the state. There's Coaster, which is operated by the North County Transit District, Metrolink, which is operated by the Southern California Regional Rail Authority.

And then there's Coast Starlight, which is an Amtrak supported route. For Coast Starlight, it's supported by federal funds provided to Amtrak and fare revenues, and we don't spend much time in this handout focusing on that track. We focus on the other three lines.

But as you can see, the agencies that provide services on the rail corridor, there's a mix of agencies that provide intercity rail services and commuter rail services. Some agencies operate on the full extent of the corridor, some operate on a partial component of the corridor, and others provide rail services outside the corridor.

And some agencies even provide bus and light rail services in addition to providing inner city or commuter rail services on the corridor itself. So, turning to page two, you'll see a bar chart that shows funding for the three agencies that I mentioned. This represents operation and capital funding for the agencies in total.

So, this isn't specifically funding for operations or capital projects on the corridor. It's for the total agency. And as you can see, these agencies are all funded through a mix of federal, state, and local sources, and they all vary in their dependence on fare revenues to support their operations and capital services. A couple things to point out.

On the far right, the LOSSAN Rail Corridor Agency is highly dependent on state fairs, I mean state revenues, and fare revenues that it generates, and this is largely because it's a state supported route that's the responsibility of the state to support and fund.

If you look at the North County Transit District and Southern California Regional Rail Authority, they are supported by a significant larger amount of local sources. However, I will point for the Southern California Regional Rail Authority—a little bit more dependent on fare revenues relative to the North County Transit District.

So, there's a mix of fund sources that are going to all agencies, and they're all depending on a different percentage of their total operating costs and capital costs on these revenue sources. So, turning to the next page, on page three, the state has various formula programs that support transit and rail across the state.

The table on page three provides an overview of all of these programs. Some of these programs are very broad in what they can support, such as just general operations or capital support. Others are a bit more specific in what they support. They can either—are more focused on GHG reductions or basic maintenance and rehabilitation.

And the amounts are the statewide amounts, so not necessarily the amounts going to the agencies on the corridor, but just to give you a sense of magnitude of total funding for these programs. But on the far right, it shows the recipients that receive funding for those programs on the corridor.

And as you can see, not every agency on the corridor receives funding from every program. Traditionally, these programs have been split across funding that supports local transit agencies and then a group of programs that support commuter and intercity rail. So, there's a split between the funding programs that we have and the agencies that receive funding.

In addition to these formula programs, the state supports transit and rail through the Transit Intercity Rail Capital Program, which is the state's major program for providing competitive funding to transit and rail broadly, but it can also support improvements on the corridor.

And other state programs can support improvements as well, such as the Solutions for Congested Corridors Program, which is a competitive program the state administers, and the State Transportation Improvement Program, which is a formula program that goes to counties in Caltrans, and those programs are eligible to support improvements across the state, but also on the corridor itself.

Turning to our last page, there's a couple options that the Legislature could consider in increasing financial assistance to the LOSSAN Corridor while also advancing state policies. We've mentioned a couple of these before in previous hearings.

So, the state can always look at providing one time funding to address revenue shortfalls that agencies may be having coming out of the Pandemic, providing them a pathway to sustainability. It could also look at supporting key infrastructure projects of statewide interest, such as those related to responding to sea level rise or other climate change impacts.

Outside of one-time funding and programs, the Legislature could look at providing ongoing funding through either augmenting existing programs or establishing new ones and looking at this new funding and allocating it in a way that aligns with state goals. So, taking additional funding and allocating it based on ridership growth or service level improvements.

So, taking those new funding opportunities on an ongoing basis and trying to incentivize actions through those revenue—or funding streams. The Legislature could consider various fund sources to provide additional funding, whether that's the General Fund, Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or other state transportation accounts.

The Legislature could also look at increasing revenues as well to increase funding, whether that's increasing transportation taxes and fees, broad based taxes are looking at taking out transportation bonds. However, as we've discussed before in previous hearings, anytime we increase revenues through transportation taxes and fees or through the General Fund, that represents a cost to residents.

On the flip side, taking funds from other accounts, that means that those funds aren't available to support activities that they would otherwise support and providing funding from the General Fund could be difficult given the projected General Fund deficits the state's projected to see over the next few years.

And at the same time, Special Fund accounts will likely be needed to shore up core state operations. That ends my remarks and happy to take any questions after the panelists finish.

Okay, thank you very much. Now, we will go back to Genevieve Giuliano and if you would just try again to reshare your screen, that would be great.

Are we working?

We can see it, yes.

Perfect. Okay. The previous speaker just took care of something, you know, a good part of what I was going to talk about. So, we can, we can be very efficient. I'm going to just move to where I wanted to start.

And that was kind of thinking about who is operating in this corridor and how different they are, which is, was a point that was just made by the previous speaker. And I was thinking about core operations and the Pacific Surfliner is a true intercity passenger rail service. That's its core operation. It's connected to Amtrak.

That's what it does in its core service. Metrolink has been historically a regional commuter rail, but in response to the changes in demand and transit ridership, transit demand, they are moving to the kind of model that several of you have suggested in terms of becoming more of a general service provider and focusing on different, different submarkets.

And then, Coaster is really part of a transit, you know, a suburban public transit operation. So, each of those organization has different kind of core objectives. And for Metrolink and Coaster, the coastal part of the operation is only one part of a larger operation and network.

As was just noted by the previous speaker, the funding sources are actually quite different across the different providers and that creates different incentives, when you think about trying to get enough money to actually expand your services and retain services. And then, the track ownership issue is rather enormous.

I've just listed all the owners of tracks for each of these operators. So, you know, Pacific Surfliner runs the entire 350 miles. So, it has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 different track ownerships in that stretch of miles, and that, of course, makes things really complicated. These have already sort of been referred to.

The fact that these all have surface areas that are overlapping. There isn't yet a high level of schedule coordination and there isn't yet a high level of fair integration.

I wanted to bring up the issue of local sales tax funds because remember that local sales tax funds are, are paid by locals who also want their dollars spent locally. And so, when you have a situation like that, it's much harder to think in the broader region framework. And of course, everybody has to accommodate the freight traffic.

If you were to kind of identify the major challenges, I think this is what we would say is that first of all, although ridership is increasing for these particular operations, at least according to the numbers that I saw, everybody is still operating below pre-Covid levels.

And so, that target for 20% mode share is really ambitious given what we're seeing on the ground. There's increasing demand for subsidies. But as you just heard from the legislative analysts, there's a lot of uncertainty regarding where these funds might be coming from.

And that's of course made even more serious by what's going on at the federal level now. And then, we have the impacts of climate change that are requiring both long and short term repair and reconstruction. So, somebody mentioned very early in the hearings about are we near a fiscal cliff?

And in some ways, I think you could argue, yes, we're pretty close, due to the three things that I have here on this slide. First of all, federal funding. There's a threat of losing current funding. Who knows how the next Surface Transportation Act will fare in the current political environment.

And we have to consider the knock on effects of other losses. And probably the best example right now is the loss of $4 billion for the High-Speed Rail Program. And now, California is trying to figure out where are we going to get all those billions of dollars.

In terms of operations, I would say that the Pacific Surf Liner right now is in the most stable situation. It has a stable source of state funding. So, what it really needs to worry about are all the other pressures that are there at the state level.

Metrolink has a really large gap in fair recovery, compared to where it was pre-Covid, and it's competing with a whole lot of other things for those local sales taxes that are supporting it. NCTD has a really very, very low fare recovery rate. It's on the border of 8 or 9%. It's heavily dependent on TDA funds.

And so, it's probably, you know, from an operational standpoint, has—is—the most challenged at this point. We heard a lot about capital improvements. Pacific Surfliner has a $16.5 billion program that is currently unfunded. Metrolink has a 10 billion score program that's largely unfunded and so on.

And as we know, traditionally, the Federal Government is a major source for capital projects. So, all of those—I was very happy to hear about the CIPD Program and the opportunity for some 80-20 money from the Feds. But I think overall, we're looking at very large dollar amounts to raise here. What should we do?

The preferred thing to do, of course, is to increase other funding service, other funding sources. And I think everybody involved in the LOSSAN Corridor has been working very hard to try to find where these options for subsidies might be. But the reality is they're going to be really hard to get.

So, could you reduce service costs by consolidating some services? Might be worth looking at. Service quality was discussed extensively already today. Certainly, fare integration, seamless systems, at least historically we know, really helps ridership. Can we increase revenues? There's something, you know, the economists talk about in terms of elastic elasticity of demand.

In some cases, we could raise fares and get more revenue. In other cases, if we raised fare, we'd get less. So, it would be very important to understand the nature of that transit demand curve in the corridor to be able to maximize revenues.

And then, there's also the, you know, the sort of unhappy thought about services to meet constraints and maybe it's important to at least think about what if Coaster or Metrolink service went away? Could the Surfliner fill the gap? Could some of some other form of service close that gap? Who knows.

But I think it's important to at least think about the consequences to make a good decision. The same kind of thing would be on the capital side. I, as I said, I was not aware of the CIPD program but if we had a 20 year plan and a price tag, that would be really helpful.

Also, when we are thinking about the price of things, we should also be thinking about what if you don't do something and in the long term, what would happen if we didn't, if we weren't able to move the tracks or repair them? And then finally, what are the options?

If we're talking about a very large multi-billion restoration program, what are the options for actually financing that? Could we think about a bond measure at a state level? Could we think about a multi-county authority that would be able to float a bond measure?

And being very radical in the spirit of...before me, could we, could we shift at least some of the priority from high speed rail over to this coastal corridor, which, over the, you know, the next 5, 10 years, would certainly generate far more savings in terms of CO2 than whatever the high speed rail could do in that period of time.

So, just some final thoughts. Is the current governance structure a good match for current challenges? Should we really be thinking about something else? Juan provided another idea. Should we be thinking more seriously about consolidation and streamlining?

Should we even think about—is the whole corridor what we should be thinking about, given that the northern part is actually quite different from the southern part, and who should lead the charge? So, those are some of the things to think about as we go forward. And again, thank you very much for having me here today.

All right, thank you. Well, there was some interesting out of the box thinking that you were proposing there. We live in a political world, and you live in a less political world, so some things might seem like they're possible, but I think some of us think they're not.

So, yes, I guess I'll just start by saying one of the things from the last—well, so you said, is there a 20 year plan and a price tag? And I guess I would just point back to the first panel which was from Calsta and the division of rail at Caltrans.

Those two speakers were really talking about getting more deeply involved in making the business case for this rail corridor and understanding what it is that we need to do to prioritize capital projects and to make sure that governance structures are aligned.

So, I think there is some—there is work happening, there's movement on this, which I'm hopeful to hear about. And I think also I had a bill that is being worked on right now that creates a strategic plan and an assessment that hadn't been done before for this corridor. So, that's underway right now.

One of the things in one of the slides, I think you actually might have ended up deleting this slide, but it says on here—it's the slide adding to the challenges—where you said, and this is Genevieve Giuliano from USC, your slide, that says long term fixes are very costly, complicated, and subject to local preferences and concerns.

And I guess I would, I would just invite any reflection on this question of we did devolve decision making to local agencies on purpose. So, the state used to be more in charge and then we had the idea that it would be more responsive to local communities if local communities were in charge.

And so, what we see, and I see this particularly in my own County of San Diego, county, where we have a fairly sophisticated MPO SANDAG that has 18 members, 18 cities in the county on its board, and very highly professionalized staff with great expertise.

But you know, five years ago, four or five years ago, that agency received $300 million in the state budget to do planning and then also the environmental clearance and design for relocating the corridor away from the Del Mar Bluffs.

But now, 4, 5 years later, we're basically the agency is still doing analysis of possible routes and doing community meetings and doing analyses and trying to figure out how to get it seems like a local consensus on where would be the possibility for an underground tunnel that's about 1.2 miles long, if I recall correctly.

So, you know, this project is extremely slow going so far, so the idea of having a 20 year plan, you know, when it takes five years to even just get out of the gate, and that's not even done yet, I'm very concerned about the governance structures we have and their ability to deliver projects that might be needed.

And so, you know, I wonder what, what you might see as a solution to this, or if there's any thoughts on the realities that we're in right now, which is that local agencies do have a lot of—and their preferences and concerns do have a lot of weight on what ends up being proposed.

So, I'll just, and I'll ask any of the panelists who would like to address that. But we can start with Ms. Giuliano, if you'd like.

Thank you for the question. And, and at the risk of kind of bringing up another "third rail," some of this goes to the environmental process and the process that we use for developing and vetting major projects. And there's no question that there's tradeoffs.

If, if we are going to try to reach consensus over something that is going to have negative effects on somebody somewhere, it's going to be a really long and expensive process. So, are we in the mode of dealing with some level of streamlining so that we can move projects a little bit faster?

The other part of my point was that it's sort of unnatural for a local community to say we need a tunnel because that's the only thing that will mitigate all of the environmental problems that this moving a rail will have. But that tunnel means you're multiplying by billions for the project. So, is that the best solution?

Are there any compromise solutions? And how do you, you know, who's the forum? How do you give people sort of authority to be able to make those tough decisions? So, I'm sorry to not have a great solution here, but I do think that it's partly, at least, our process that tries to be—that tries to achieve an objective that actually cannot be achieved in the sense that there is no such thing as a major capital project that doesn't have some level of impact on something.

Right. I appreciate your words of wisdom on that.

And I mean, it is really true that we do have an appetite for streamlining because you see it in the housing space where the CEQA reforms that have been proposed and adopted, which, I mean, truthfully, were really led by a couple members of the Legislature, but also importantly, the Governor himself.

So, I think the reality of having leadership around process improvements that were talked about for a long time in the housing space and now, you know, are getting underway, so, you know, streamlining in the transportation space for big projects like this that are important for our state goals, you know, is something that might be, might be on the horizon.

I'll turn it to my colleague, Senator Archuleta, if you'd like to make any questions or comments.

Yes, I apologize. Evidently, we had to present a few things there at the Capital. But it comes back down to ridership. And could you elaborate a little bit on the item, "large gap in fair recovery, " "large gap in fair recovery"? Are we finding that across the board? What's going on with that?

Thank you for that question. That was specifically in the case of Metrolink, because Metrolink actually had a fairly high farebox recovery.

One of the other speakers pointed out that it was, it's the—it's the operations that had the highest fare recovery ratios that have suffered the most from the drop in ridership because they are so dependent on fare revenue for operations. So, that was—that was the point.

And the different operators have very different levels of fair recovery at this point, with Pacific Surfliner, I believe, having the highest fair recovery and Coaster having the lowest. Another thing to think about—well, I'll stop there.

Okay. No, I, I think that that was something that caught my eye. But again, it goes down to public relations, publicity, promoting the rail systems that we have and the fact that they're so vital to our State of California.

And if you're going to go from Los Angeles to San Diego or from San Diego to Anaheim, or even going up further, this is a good way to travel and make it a convenient. And I understand we've got some new trains that are coming out for the passenger side of it all.

And so, I'm hoping that the public relations side of everyone, whether it's Caltrans, whether it's Pacific Surfliner, or whoever it is, that they promote as much as they possibly can during these summer months. It's so important. I think I just wanted to point that out. Madam Chair.

Yes, thank you. I wanted to make sure that I asked the other panel members that question that I had asked about governance and local decision making, if any—either Mr. Matute or Mr. Jimenez wanted to respond. Did you have anything to add to that, Mr. Jimenez?

Not immediately off the top of my head. I think it comes down to what's the state's role in this space? A lot of these decisions and the funding goes to local entities and they're the decision makers on how they want to make improvements on the corridor.

But I think, pointing back to the Legislature, what's the state's role in this? As a state, it could provide a large oversight role, either through coordination or through providing additional funding to the state and providing the state that leverage and being a larger player in making these improvements.

Cal State over the years has increased its role in the rail space and that's an area that the Legislature could provide, you know, further directive to the agency in taking this either major funder role or as a convener role.

Okay, thank you. Mr. Matate—Matute?

Yes, I've been thinking about this question a lot lately. I'm working on a policy agenda, abundance policy agenda for transportation, as part of a grant from UC Berkeley. And often, the input that the government gets is different at different scales. So, at the state level, people might want affordable, reliable, predictable mobility.

And then, when you go down to the local level, that state level goal that people may even vote on, it becomes more diffuse against local specific interests with regards to how land is used.

And I think sometimes there's an overemphasis on the role of local concerns that may make the mobility less reliable or less affordable and sort of lose that original goal for the project with those.

And I've seen that with the multiple studies in this corridor, where you can probably always appease more people by spending another 20% or 30% on the project, but if, if that is the case, then you get to the point where the project may be too big to complete with available resources.

And I think having the project fits those overarching goals more than having the project meet the needs of all local stakeholders. So, it's really figuring out the balance, which is a political question.

But when in local hands and local boards making those decisions, the local view is more represented than perhaps the state view of having the reliable, affordable mobility for all.

Yes, thank you. I mean, it's notable because high speed rail is being essentially run—basically by the state. It created an agency, but that's not Caltrans and it's, you know, its funding is coming directly from cap and trade. And so, it's just—that's a much different approach to building a rail service.

And in many ways, it's not integrated in with the other rail that we have in the state. So, you know, it's an interesting counterpoint. Okay, well, I think we may be nearing the end here, so I wanted to make sure that we allow time for public comment.

And so, if you have a public comment, please come forward to the microphone and go ahead and make it.

Good afternoon, Chair Blakespear, Senator Archuleta as well, and the rest of the Committee Members. My name is Mark Vuxovich, on behalf of Streets for All, a biking, walking, public transportation advocacy organization. Just wanted to, first and foremost, as always, appreciate the fact that we have these Subcommittee hearings and I think they're so vital to the region.

And I wanted to really highlight, and I won't dwell on it, the letter that we submitted to the Committee with Californians for Electric Rail and just sort of briefly highlight the highest points of it. First and foremost is the—really, the significant need for governance reform.

It's really clear that having sort of this disparate, parochial system doesn't really work.

And you know, I think if you think of an analogous system, which is a highway system, you don't think about what the hyper local interests are of San Juan Capistrano is when you think about that whole system, right? If you're going to have a system that works for the state, works for a whole region, you have to be looking on it at that scale.

And so, while I understand there's always disagreements, there's local concerns, it feels like our governance systems are really—over rely—on that parochial nature, rather than the thing I think I've said on every public comment here that if, you know, you're a representative from Santa Barbara and your constituents can't get to San Diego, you should be mad, you should be upset, and that's not really the way our governance system works now.

I'll also echo the other part of our letter, which is a need for state capacity.

Too often we're having really small agencies or even medium sized agencies do really complicated engineering and planning work that should be done by a larger agency or could be done by the state in a way that they develop expertise and hold on to expertise and don't just like lose them to consultants.

Not that I have anything against consultants. And then lastly, some sort of levels of consistent funding are quite important. And then, also, you know, and those consistent fundings can allow for best value engineering and also long-term planning and long-term thinking as well.

You know, one of the things I would be remiss to mention is that, you know, right now the Del Mar Tunnel or the Del Mar Plan right now does not account for or allow for electrification of the rail line. There's not a plan for electrification of the rail line.

I wish there was, but we should not be building a tunnel that's going to last—that's going to cost—billions of dollars, last 100 years, that cannot be even potentially electrified in the future. So, those are my comments. Really appreciate the Subcommittee and thank you.

Thank you for that comment. And yes, please come forward.

My name is Steve Roberts. I'm the President of Rail Passenger Association of California. I want to thank you for this meeting and as myself, as well as you, I found out some things from Caltrans that brought me up to date on certain projects, so, and I thought the presentations were excellent and brought up some very key points.

I think the bottom line here is you've got a conundrum. You talked about the goal of 20% mode share. You talked about there's discussions of revenue recovery. Well, we know the answer to those two questions. You run reliable service, you run frequent service, you have a travel time that's competitive with the automobile.

Amtrak just today is launching the Acela 2 Service in the Northeast Corridor. That service right now has a revenue cost ratio about 1.5. For every dollar of operating expense, they get $1.50 in revenue. A seller will do better than that. And so, we know the answer. And the conundrum is how do you get there?

And how you get there is the capital projects. And the longer you take to do the capital projects, the longer it's going to take for you to meet the goal of the VMT and the goal for revenue recovery.

So, you can subsidize the service forever or you can invest now and have the rider pay for the operating cost of that service. So, I would recommend anything you can do to streamline to look at the governance to get those capital projects underway sooner. Thank you.

Well, thank you. Yes, I think that comment goes to Mr. Matute saying that he's working on an abundance agenda for transit. So, that's part of, of course, getting out of our own way and delivering our projects faster. So, thank you for that. I appreciate both public comments. Thank you for coming and participating today.

I'd also like to recognize the many panelists we had today and their great presentations. All of them were very high level and I very much appreciate the expertise that was brought. I also want to recognize the Subcommitee Members that we had here today. Thank you so much for coming.

We had five different members come today and that really shows a level of engagement. Even people who are not on the Transportation Committee are coming to the LOSSAN Subcommittee, which is great to see. We really are at an inflection point here for public transit and rail in Southern California.

We can choose to maintain what is our current status quo or we can choose a different path. This Subcommittee has heard from subject matter experts, public agencies, and interested stakeholders that bold action is possible. We know more now about the science of coastal hazards and best practices for the management and governance of the LOSSAN Rail Corridor, and we do have momentum on our side because there are many people who would like to see an improvement.

However, reforms and improved performance of the Corridor are not inevitable. So, we have to choose together that this is a priority, and these are steps that we want to be taking. The timing is key.

The Legislature is set to receive recommendations that are required under SB 1098 in early 2026, so that's just a few short months away. And the Statewide Transit Transformation Task Force will conclude its work in just two months. So, we're eager to see the results of that Transit Transformation Task Force.

The State and Federal Government, they are actively contemplating policies that will directly impact rail and transit in California. Some for the good, possibly some for the bad. And it's important that California be bold, visionary, and ambitious in the reforms that are necessary for us to reach our shared goals.

So, you have my commitment to continue to work together on this Subcommittee and otherwise, to advance meaningful, lasting, and transformative reforms that are necessary for the LOSSAN Corridor's long-term success. I look forward to those conversations ahead. And with that, we are going to conclude, unless Senator Archuleta wants to make any concluding comments. No?

I think it was very informative and your leadership as Chair has been so impressive and I'm so glad you're there. Thank you.

Well, thank you very much, and with that, we are—our agenda is concluded, and we are adjourned.