Recommendation to receive and file a presentation from Long Beach Pilot Program The Free Ride and their models in other cities; and Direct City Manager to report back in 120 days on a feasibility study of implementing The Free Ride model in Downtown and Belmont Shore and identify options for special events to utilize The Free Ride throughout the City.
And with that item 30. Communication from Councilmember Pearce, Councilwoman Gonzales, Councilman Price recommendation to receive and file a presentation from the Long Beach Pilot program, The Free Ride and their models in other cities and direct city manager to report back in 120 days on a feasibility study of implementing the free ride model in downtown and Belmont. Shaw as fares winners. Thank you. I want to just make a couple comments before we receive and file the presentation. I want to say that we have worked with Free Ride for since the beginning of the year to implement a free ride pilot program in our downtown mainly. The first goal was to try to meet the needs of the Grand Prix and really the idea was that residents or travelers or anybody could hop on this free ride and get wherever they needed. They could wave it down, they could use an app and that we put that in place to meet the needs of the Grand Prix and I think that it was a huge success. I want to applaud staff for turning it around really quickly. And so tonight we're going to hear from them. The second part of this agenda item was to have staff come back. What I'm going to ask and I've talked to the chair of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee is that we agenda is the second part of this conversation for the Transportation Committee. Since this item has been agenda is I know that there's several other conversations. So I want to make sure that we use our committees to kind of tease that out before it comes back. So with that said, I hope that I can count on everybody's support for the agenda item tonight. And I'd like to invite gentlemen down to introduce themselves and give the presentation. Do you guys have the clicker? Is it on the back? Staff. There's somebody we need, like three of these. I feel like this is always the fun part. So if you could introduce yourself a little bit about the history first and thank you. Yeah. Good evening and thank you, council members. I thank you, Councilwoman Pearce, for for bringing this to the agenda. I'm James Myers, co-founder of the Free Ride. My business partner back there is Daniel Kramer. And we run the free ride on the West Coast, as well as where we started on the East Coast in New York. We've been running the company for about seven years now and have really transformed the company into from an advertising based model to a true transportation mobility solution that we've applied again across the country in different cities through different partnerships and relationships with those municipalities. This is pretty much our system in one slide. What we need to do is provide fleets of fully 100% electric shuttles. We do that at no cost to the rider, and we also do that through fully W-2 employees that are the drivers of the shuttles. And the idea of the system is to innovate and really solve the last mile gap. That's been a been a constant issue in cities around the world, especially here in California and New York, where I'm from and where Daniel's from, Long Beach here. The goal always is to create a system that fits the city's needs. No city is one size fits all. We have a service that we like to consider interchangeable and adaptable and flexible to each city into and to their needs. I think what this slide shows and what was great to see here is that every item tonight seemed to connect to this on one level or another, whether it's access, employment, parking issues, environmental issues, getting people to and from where they need to be if these programs and cities programs exist from there. What we try to do beyond what the system does is when we come in, we like to be flexible. Let's start in phases. We start with the pilot in Long Beach, which we'll get into in a second. But the flexibility is what really allows the system to kind of, you know, take on a life of itself. We can adjust the level of service income incrementally, which reduces our costs and makes it run more efficiently. And our job is to really have the least amount of cars on the road at the at the at the least amount of money. Our next thing we want to complement existing and other forms of transportation. There's no one size fits all transportation solution for a city. There's many different needs by many different people, and from residents to workers to visitors. What we need to do is become multi-modal and complement those other forms of existing transportation. That's at the core of what we do and really is what drives its success. It's really our niche to fill that last mile gap that others can't or they shouldn't, and it's more efficient for it to be done with a smaller electric vehicle. The only thing we're trying to replace is single occupancy vehicles. Everything else is a is a compliment and should be put into the same system. Reduction is the obvious one. We're here to reduce emissions congestion, single occupancy vehicles and vehicle miles traveled, which are the main factors in pollution and congestion problems down the country. Data driven technology. So we use an app. You can have the car multiple different ways, but it's all tracked by the driver through a mobile application. We can then use that data to see how people are moving historically and in real time when they're moving, where they're moving. And we can adapt the system to kind of learn as it goes and become smart and not only to run most efficiently, but move the most people. The real time solution is the bottom line. It's here. We ran the pilot program. It exists. You know, we're there's plenty of time and ideas and stuff to work into the system, including autonomous vehicles and the such. But right now we've run a fully electric shuttle service that is a last mile solution. And we can look at some of the data here from the pilot program to show its success. A few pictures here. So we ran a pilot for eight weeks. And a little bit of background on that is, as Councilwoman Pierce said, we started from the beginning of the year discussing with herself and public works on how to make this happen. We landed on, for budget reasons, eight week pilot with eight vehicles. And this is kind of the result. The only thing to mention here is that we actually launched in one week. Usually we require 90 days to launch a system and we launched this all in one week. So that's where you'll see on the first step there about riders, the tremendous jump from the first four weeks to the second four weeks. You learn the system. We train, staff, the drivers. It's a very much a living system that learns on itself and only gets more efficient. So with time, we could see those numbers go up. So again, in May, in the last four weeks of the programs, we gave about 11,500 riders. Wait time was five minute, 14 seconds. The 17 jobs created again are full W-2 employees. And depending on the situation, it ranges from, you know, our average is about $15 per hour. You can see the emission reduce that and that's based on mileage and people driven. The increase in ridership, again, shows the trend and what it can do. We haven't even seen its potential eight weeks where a pilot is is is a pretty big feat. Most pilots we run are six months to a year and you'd only see that number grow at the same amount of assets in the same manner. Expenses. The five star rating I want to throw in there, what I really saw on Long Beach was to see in another couple slides, which I'm not from here, but I don't have to tell anybody here, should be proud of it. I've never seen a community react to a system like it was their own and they were part of it. And it was really cool to see the feedback like we've never seen before. And even people, you know, when we launch coming up to a street, just wondering what it is happy it's there just it was real community feel more than other cities I've walked into so it's good to see this is you know in quick what we learned we can expand the coverage area we currently we started in that was again for the pilot program see where it left off and to learn from it. In our experience, that's also the best way to grow it, start incrementally and grow it to where it should be and grow it how it should grow rather than guessing what's going to happen. The trends in that ridership and in support show they can only grow and become more efficient. And from the data and what we'll run through here is definitely used by by all parties in the city. We have a ton of traffic from the hotels, but just as much of of people reaching out now asking where it went. And I live downtown and how I don't have a car or I can't ride a scooter or, you know, it's it's part of that system. And I think we really noticed that in the pilot. This is some of the feedback. I'll go through these quick. This is from the app feedback just straight from the app, from the rider. No surveys or anything from us. It was again, this is really where we saw probably 50% more response rate than in any other city that we were in. And most of it was either suggestions as the bottom rate to expand a couple of blocks or to show their support. And there's more of this. There's hundreds more of these, but just want to show some of them. And then after email feedback, I know we were pointing that to public works at the time because we ran through it, but we received a lot of phone calls and email support as well. This is part of the dashboard. As you can see, the the this is our internal proprietary dashboard. We run these heat maps based on different times of the day, the month, all of those good metrics and then from a pickup point of view and a data and I've drop off my view. So this is pick ups, obviously. I wish this was an actual computer screen so I could zoom in and show you where, but you get the idea of where the heavy traffic is and then drop off close to the same. You see a lot more spread out and drop off. Usually people centralized pickups and spread out drop offs. But again, all data we can report and makes the system stronger and also shows who's using it, who's benefiting it from it, what stakeholders should be involved in the program on top of a public works or another funding source . The press that comes with it. It's a it's a free electric shuttle service. It tends to line up well with press and hopefully positive press at that. This is Long Beach. It was $100,000 for eight cars for a two month pilot. Again, that was kind of I mean, it was actually just under that. But we rounded up the goal was to first start with Grand Prix and launch for that, and that's why we launched in a week. But from there, really show the range in the system from when different events are in town and to when it's really just a regular Tuesday, when it's more of a resident and workers of the city type shuttle. The results which we saw the other piece to think about this and that I didn't mention is a lot of times we as a company, we set up a relationship with a municipality, whether that's through a city, CVB traveling, tourism, convention center directly, hotels, whatever group it is, business improvement district, downtown associations. We set up that relationship to see where the needs are. Try to execute on that and get some secured funding in place in order to roll out the program. And then we use the program's kind of benefits to then hopefully and over time reduce the net cost of the system to the original funding party. We do that through advertising. We also do that through the efficiencies of the program as well as the constant building on the technology, as well as the staff. For example, here in San Diego, we've running for two years now and we're every month we. Of ridership to date. And that's all with the same amount of vehicles. Speaking of San Diego, that looking at different ways, we have partnered with cities in the most successful ways. This was a public private partnership in its truest sense. Civic San Diego is a public organization that handles the parking meter revenue from the downtown community parking districts. There's very defined geographic borders there. And since our funding is from there, that is the geographic border of the coverage area. And that came through an RFP in San Diego. They were looking at a traditional trolley system, but to move people short distances in a congested downtown area, they did had a few consultant studies tell them that just didn't make sense. The cost of it, the infrastructure, the size of the vehicles, all of that good stuff's. We ended up winning the RFP. That was two years ago. We want a couple of awards. Since then, we've extended the program and it's really shown its value. And one of the biggest things that we didn't see going into it, this was a transportation system for the residents, residents first and workers and then visitors of the area. And that's what we focused on. The biggest thing we saw was the increased utilization of the service from the transit hubs. I don't know if you've been down San Diego on the Amtrak or the coaster. You come in on the west side of the city, getting to the rest of the city, besides support from there is is a walk or a taxi or an Uber. And we've seen a lot of increased utilization of that for different reasons to go to to go to work, to go to ballgames, all of that good stuff. Same thing from the MTS trolley lines. And we work hand in hand with them in order to make sure we're complementing them and really focusing our efforts on where their transit deserts are, so to speak. And again, that revenue and the money for the system is from the parking meter revenue in the downtown area. Recently we got approved to move that uptown and expand the entire system from downtown to uptown, using the same funds just from the Uptown Community Park District. On the other side, but same, you know, general idea of service in Santa monica. We work with Santa monica Travel and Tourism, which was previously the Convention and Visitors Bureau. This is more focused on the hotels and the visitors of the area first, residents second, and we're working to expand that with the city. But the program with City is an annual contract. It's from the time assessment funding that they receive. And from there we have each hotel which you'll see on the top of that, which who wants to participate in the program, can sponsor their own vehicle. We've grown that from three cars to eight cars over the past two years, and we continue to have more demand. And it's been a huge, huge success for them in this case. What they wanted with their program is to have destination general destination branding on the vehicles so we don't sell much advertising, but on the back boxes it's a little bit different. So we don't share that that revenue with them. But this is this is where their funding goes. So they own the vehicle and they can do what they please with it. So that was the other way. They've also won awards for the best new idea, which is a pretty general category, but I think a good one. And we've also again keep growing that service. In West Palm Beach. We've also worked with the Downtown Development Authority, which runs a complimentary trolley system in the city. We use our vehicles. They co-branded just on a regular advertising contract in order to increase the mobility in the area. And that's it. I think from here that what our job to do is we saw the mobility solution work in Long Beach and we wanted to bring it back and bring it back for the long term. It's our job to do that and find the funding to do that, and that's why we're here to ask for your help in doing that. And, you know, our goal and Daniel over the past couple of months as well as going forward is to really identify the stakeholders in the city that we can draw those funds to . What our plan is to do. And what we need to do is create one system. Whether that's involving different groups and their different goals is is only more beneficial to us. But making it one cohesive system is really the goal. Thank you very much. Thank you. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. You can go ahead. I really appreciate the presentation. I wanted to make sure that all of our council members had the same information that I had. As we move forward in this discussion, I think I also want to let folks know that at the very beginning we had the CVB as a part of the conversation as well. And so I think trying to work with the CVB and the hotels, at least in downtown, but I've heard a lot of requests from other areas of the city, which is why we wanted to bring it to a public conversation. Again, just for the record, I hope to receive and file this today and then to have a fuller conversation on the second week in November at the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where we can engage with some of those other stakeholders and continue the conversation around how do we have a solution to that last mile? Thank you. Thank you. Councilwoman Price. Thank you. I, too, want to thank you for the presentation when this project was first rolled out in downtown. I contacted the city manager and I think our mayor at the time and said, this is fantastic. I really want this in the Belmont Shore area. So I'm glad that Eric and John are here. I really think there's an opportunity for us to think about utilizing the service to connect Belmont Shore to Alamitos Bay, especially with Second and PCH coming and we've got Ballast Point and Boathouse on the bay and all those businesses. And if we had a system like this in place, we can keep keep the transportation corridor, the primary transportation corridor, a second street, and avoid going up and down the residential streets, which has been a major concern for residents who live on some of those densely parking impact, densely populated parking impacted streets where they don't want any transit vehicles going through it. We could just keep it on Second Street and go back and forth between the shore and second and PCH. I think if there's a way and I know that's one of the things and I think Council Member Pearce for bringing this forward and for allowing us to put some language in there that says let's look at whether or not we could use some of the money from some of the self-assessments that we have or some of the meter money that is collected in those areas to put towards a program like this gentleman, Gabriella Yates from my office is going to come and give you my card, if you wouldn't mind reaching out to me via email tonight or tomorrow, I would like the two of you, if you're okay with it, to present to the Belmont Shore Parking Commission about this program. They've been looking for an idea like this for a long time. So, Eric, is that okay with you if they come and present to the Belmont Shore Parking Commission about what this concept is? Because really that would be a partner that would have to have some skin in the game if we're going to move forward with a concept like this. So I love it. I think it's great. And I think, you know, we're going to have. Thousands of new spots created in terms of parking with the development of Second and PCH and the reconfiguration of Marina. There's a real opportunity to have that be the parking center and have people just be able to leave their cars there and go back and forth using transportation like this and keep Belmont Shore active and thriving as a experiential corridor. So thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman Pat. Councilwoman Mongo. So I'm really appreciative that this is going to go to the Transportation Committee. I think that's a great place for it to start. I think that. By Boccia over the next few weeks, the last few weeks said to be consistent with that, making sure we know what we're talking about, feasibility studies at all of those things, what they cost. But I tell a huge supporter of this, just in looking at Douglas Park and the number of individuals who wish they could get on scooters and or bicycles to get to and from either Doris Way, our newly improved and more traditional business corridor or to Long Beach Exchange and the number of businesses that have six or more people who are all going there at the same time to be able to coordinate large pickups and drop offs because the parkade is already just at capacity. You not get into Jersey Lakes, you not get into California Fish Grill. You're literally waiting for a parking spot for 15 minutes. And so some of those businesses could have more business if we had a trams like this. And I see either a luggage exchange management company or any of those businesses looking to be sponsors on the sides of the vehicles to be able to provide that funding. So I'm really excited that this is going to committee. Great idea and very supportive of the ideas overall. So thanks so much. Thank you. Councilman Cipriano. Thank you for bringing that forward to committee. Our our first meeting in November would be the 13th. I see we have a surf JPA meeting, Native American Heritage Month and Housing Authority at 430, but I'm willing to try to work that in at 4 p.m. if that works for everyone. Otherwise we'd have to go all the way to the 20th. So we'll work with you on that date. Also, just one question, general destination branding. Would that include like a phrase like go forth? I'm just just going to. Yes, it's a. And anymore comment. Good stuff. Yes, fine. I see. I have a first and second respondent, please. Any public comment? I, i public. Know that this. Presentation. And any public comment. When people come here for when they bring this back and have public comment, they should know that if they have a transparency like it, that we're on a transparency, they will be able to show it. I have discovered that some mental twit summarily made the decision that no longer our transparencies are allowed to be used. The city tax staff says they have no problem whatsoever. If somebody comes with a transparency, they make the arrangements ahead of time and let them know that what they want to display can be displayed, period. It's been done for years. And so, as I say, just recently, apparently, I was just told tonight some metal to it made a decision, it's my words, not theirs, that you can't use the transparency and it can be done very simply. Just why I say it. And it's not limited to next week's presentation. It's limited to it includes every single presentation somebody wants to make during their comment, public comment time. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Goodyear. Know what type of comment she can? Please go for the vote. Motion carries. Now we move to item 12 with the clock. Please read the item.