Thank you and hello and welcome to the talking operations conference on Managing Travel Demand to Mitigate Congestion: Part I – Pricing and Institutional Strategies to Manage Demand. My name is Jennifer Symoun and I'm going to give a brief introduction before turning the section over to Deepak Gopalakrishna, who will be moderating today's seminar. Please be advised that today's seminar is being recorded. This will last about an hour and 45 minutes and the final 30 minutes for audience question and answer. During the presentations if you think of a question, if you can type it into the smaller text box into the chat area on the lower left side of the screen. Indicate who your question is directed towards unless it is directed towards all presenters. Make sure you send your question to everyone. The presenters will be able to answer all of your questions during the presentation. There may be a few times during the seminar when the presenters ask questions of the audience. Please type your answer into the chat box. The file contained in the audio and video seminar will be be on the website within the next -- I encourage you to direct others in the office who may have not been able to attend this conference to listen to this. Web links is also available for down load. Please follow the instructions above the box to down load the files. The power points will be available within the next week. Attendees will be available of the availability of the recording, power points and closed captioning of this seminar. Deepak is a research scientist. He is a deputy program manager under contracts for the federal highways administration office of operations. He was one of the key contributors on the managing demands to travel information services publications which provided some of the content for this workshop series. He is particulate of the national evaluation team for the urban development association. I will now turn things over to Deepak. Thank you, Jennifer for organizing the seminar and the intro deduction and she has been extremely useful in coordinating these seminars. Thank you all. I would like to start off with a to the affiliations we have in the audience today. Jennifer, can you open up the phones? This poll should be showing on everybody's screens right now. Select the organization that meets your needs. Click on the circle button and that's it. Jennifer, maybe a couple more minutes. Sure, maybe we can leave this up if you want to start up talking. We can leave this up and give people more time to respond. That's a good idea. Again, thank you all for coming. This series is called managing travel demands to mitigate transportation. It is primarily intended to share the results of our thorough highway scan to Europe -- summer of ' 05 and went to several places in netter lands region and the United Kingdom. We are intending to share some of the findings and approaches that they were observing in Europe. Are you on the right side now? Yes, the first of which is today. It talks about findings from Europe on the pricing and institutional prices to manage travel demands on June 26th the same time we have two more sections of strategies under infrastructure and operational areas and the last on July 10th we have an entire session devoted to what I think is one of the key findings of this is the notion of integration of all these strategy, performance. Get ready for these two seminars. The information should be on the website. We have two speakers today who were part of the scanning study, the summer of ' 05 we had representatives from several state DOTs, Sweden, Jordan and London. The report for this scanning tour is available for this international highway website. A few introductory remarks before I turn the stage over to Eric and grant. The need for demand I think is pretty obvious to all of you. I think actual the growth and travel demand is far out dating our ability to accommodate to increasingly capacity the supply. This is normally confined to our major metropolitan area so does the cost of congestion continue to increase. In this context managing travel demand defining it is really about providing travel choices, not just in more choice but in world location, route, time of travel and in the broad EST sense, management is giving them choices through liability. An important finding from Europe was the markets and applications. They have been significantly broadened to just the use to different travel markets for schools, leaders to different application settings. It is not an exact list of settings but you will see that demand management is now being applied to a wide generators and gee graphic settings and as we go through these these. As a way of travel demand management with this traffic management, there was a Dutch model which was adapted for these web NARA version CDs. If you look at the figures, there is travel demand to the far left. That feeds into more destination choice which then results in traffic demands. Several strategies you might apply are travel information, pricing systems, all those address different aspects of transport, traffic and demands. Some of these strategies are pure Lee traffic management. Some of them are purely demand management and some of them are a combination. This is the constant framework that the Dutch follow that was for the scanning report. Some of the key lessons learned and there will be more lessons as we go through the individual sections of the webinar, one of the ways it is evolving is the demand management and traffic management. One of the key findings that is has been been integrated into finding this in a much more cohesive demand integrating it into the planning, management and operation. With that, I will not take up more time. I want to introduce the speakers today. We have Eric Schreffler who is an independent consultant from San Diego. He reviews traffic and improved air traffic quality. He has performed work for major US corporations including work in netter lands, UK, Germany. , transportation engineers. Please welcome Eric as he talks about the first module of pricing and institutional strategies to manage demand. Thank you very much. I was -- first of all, I'm very impressed with the range of folks that we have calling in today. We didn't really go over the poll but we really have a great cross-section of folks from state DOTs, from MPOs, consulting firms, people that operate demand, management programs, people that are involved in the policy. And so it is a very, very exciting group. We have been doing these workshops around the US to audiences of 30 to 40 people which is about the right size to have a dialogue. It is great to see that the word is getting broader and I thank you all for spending your time with us today and I hope many of you can join us for the next two modules. Before I actually move ahead, I wanted to reinforce something that Deepak said about the concept wall framework about traffic management and demand management. To under score it. A lot of us have a lot of confusion we were using those two terms interchangeably. Traffic management and travel management. The Dutch helped us understand the difference. Travel demand is attempting to influence travel before using a private vehicle. Once the decision is made to use a private vehicle then you are talking about traffic demand. Travel demand management also affects weather traffic people and what mode they use of whether they are going to use a private automobile or use alternative mode. For our scanning group of DOT, federal and MPO folks, that was a real AHA moment where we sort of understood about the key differences between those two concepts and how they lead us towards different solution strategy as you saw on the right-hand side of that box. Today we will be talking about both pricing strategies and then grant will talk about institutional facilitate at this strategies. I will start out on the pricing side. We are talking about pricing and institutional strategies related to demand management and we will be talking about infrastructure operational in the next seminar next week and finally integration which really is the key to the whole thing of how you bring all the pieces together to create an integrated approach both on the planning end and on the operational end. So to talk about pricing and financial strategies. Before we get into this, we would like to do another poll. This poll will be up in the chat box on the left-hand side. The question is what makes up the cost of driving? So if you want to take a second and put in what are the components of the cost of driving? What makes up the cost of driving? I would be really interested to see what folks feel about. What makes up the cost of driving? What are the cost components of driving? If anybody wants to type in some responses and then we will talk a little bit about what the cost of driving really is all about. We have some responses time is a definite cost. The cost of technology, fuel, obviously is a big concern here. There are some environmental costs. Parking as a cost often forgot about in terms of keeping up the infrastructure. These are some great -- opportunity costs. Offset opportunity costs. Let me move to the next slide and this is something from the Victoria transportation institute where these guys put together of what the full cost of driving is all about. When they think about driving we think about the variable cost of fuel or even more fixed costs of the ownership of the vehicle but the full cost of driving a vehicle has many, many more components than just the cost of the vehicle itself, fuel. We have noted that one of the largest costs somewhat early on talked about travel time on a cost per vehicle mile the travel time which is often the opportunity cost is a very big component. But again parking, there is a cost to society which is when you start to get into some of these red dish or cost, there is a cost of society of having to provide for the vehicle in parking. Some of you know that half of the land in most major downtown areas is made up of streets and parking. Half of the available land goes towards a vehicle. There is also cost of safety of accidents. There is cost of the opportunity of land use, noise, air pollution. You guys were very, very good at picking up a lot of these costs. We often don't think about the full cost of driving, not just to us as travelers but to society as well. This was a useful graphic and useful exercise to help us realize the broad range of cost components. To move to pricing, there is a lot of interest in Europe, now in the United States with the urban partnership agreements of pricing. In Europe, we went over there and we looked at a number of examples of pricing and the two we will talk about today is London and stock home. There is also a relatively less well known example in Rome. If you want to learn more about, I will ask that you return for the next couple sessions because we use it at a key to integration and also that Rome. We will spend a little bit of time this morning and afternoon talking about London and Stockholm. Stockholm to me is sort of the interesting story. We will spend a little more time there. First London, many of you know are aware of the London congestion charging fees. There is a cordon around the center of London and now the west end of London. It was implemented in February of 2003, quite controversial at the time. It was the election promise of the incoming mayor who said I will solve traffic problems but you have to let me try pricing. It involves cameras, a photo of your license plate is taken as you enter the zone and you are expected to pay the charge within 24 hours. It is currently 8 pounds a day. That is about $16 a day to enter central London with a private vehicle. In the first four years of operation, the pricing scheme is responsible for 21% reduction in cars entering the zone. 30% reduction in average delay, traffic was moving at less than 10 miles an hour in central London, increased speeds for all vehicles including transit vehicles. Number of peak period trips made by public transport is is now 8 out of 10 peak period trips are made by peak public transport the revenue is largely used to improve the bus system into London, new vehicles, new routes, new service. It generates about $240 million in net revenue. That has changed a little bit. London is a famous example of a charging scheme. I want to spend a little more time on Stockholm because it is a little bit less well known perhaps. It is a little bit newer and the story of Stockholm that is of interest is why they were able to implement charging where many areas have not been able to and the shift in public opinion. So in Stockholm, the Stockholm trial was mandated by the national government. The City of Stockholm and the local transportation folks did not want pricing because they knew how unpopular it would be but the national government said you are do pricing to help address the environmental issues particularly air issues. They decided to do it as a trial between January and July of 2006 they implemented congestion charging. One of the things they did was three months prior to the institution of pricing, they radical Lee expanded their suburban bus system. They put suburban park and ride lots around the map that you see. They put in high frequency so-called one seat service where people could go from these suburban lots to the center of Stockholm and they put that into place three months before the charging started so people had an alternative and a I can't believe alternative prior to having the charge. Then there was a referred dumb, people in the city and county of Stockholm were able to vote on whether they wanted to keep pricing or they wanted it to go away . They did pass it. The congestion charge in Stockholm has become permanent . Stockholm is a cordon system. As you enter, a sign says this is what the current price is. You are entering a toll station and again the cameras take a picture of your license plate and that is used to create the charge. The average charge is about $4.25, substantially less than the London charging scheme and they mainly use cameras. The only things the transponders are used for are to identify the vehicle and for some payment. The actual identification of vehicles for the purposes of enforcement is done purely through the cameras. One thing that delayed Stockholm was -- the decision was made by Sweden Supreme Court that it was a tax. It was not a toll. It was actually a tax so it was a tax decision by entering central Stockholm you are make ago decision to pay a tax. It is all done through the equivalent of their internal revenue system which ads the layers of complex tee that the planners did not want to deal with. It generates about $100 million in revenue, again most of it going toward public transit improvements. A few other items as well. This graphic shows you traffic coming in and out of the congestion charging zone. It is a little hard to see. I will tell you that the yellow line at the top was traffic levels the year before in 2005. Then all the bars in this show traffic levels after of the implementation of the charge on the second of January of 2006. You can see how immediately traffic dropped with the imposition of the congestion charge and so for the entire period of January through July, traffic stayed significantly lower than in the year before. There was a dip in the middle of July as part of their national holidays but then on the end of July when the charge came back, within a week the traffic levels were back up again to the levels from the year before. This is a way to show that charging works. It works immediately and when you take the charge away, people go back to their old behaviors. So again, there was about a 22% reduction in cars entering and exiting the charging zone. When looking at the objectives that they put together, they had four objectives in this overall trial. The first was to reduce traffic volumes by 10 to 15%. They realized a reduction higher than that of 20 to 25%. They wanted to increase average speeds in the area and travel times were reduced by 30 to 50% except for one road that was exempted for political reasons. That road wasn't charged and everybody switched over to that road to try to get a free ride but delays increased dramatically. To me one of the more interesting findings is the reduction of pollution. The key criteria there was carbon dioxide and there was a 14% reduction of that in the city's center but there was a 2.5% reduction of CO2 in the entire region. It did have a region that will impact on the air quality. They looked just a couple of key issues involved in pricing. Of course political and public acceptance is the key to pricing. The London charge was a campaign promise to fix public transport and that's how the mayor got elected and was able to get reelected by expanding the charge to the west end. There was a lot of people who didn't like the charge but he was reelected twice. Stockholm was legislative mandate where the national government said we need to clean up the air and locals are going to do this and Rome which you will hear later was driven by historic preservation. One graphic is public opinion from Stockholm. They had a panel survey as part of they're valuation. They tracked people's behavior and opinion over time. There was a flip flop of opinion where the majority of folks thought it was a bad idea prior to implementation of the charge but after the charge was in place and they saw what happened to traffic, public opinion shifted toward more people being in favor or at least half the people being in favor and that's what led to the referendum so folks could realize the result to make the charge permanent. The other issue is payment has to be easy. The whole point of cameras or transponders was that people don't have to stop at tollbooths. The majority of people have a bank account where the charge is taken out of their bank account. In both Stockholm and London you can go to a convenience store 7-11s are a place you can go pay on a one time basis for your charge and indeed, in London and Stockholm you can also pick up a transponder and a service agreement at a 7-11 store. They used existing convenience outlets so ease of payment is really important. They have made a few changes. In London you can pay a day later. Instead of 8 pounds you pay 10 pounds if you want to delay it by a day. The use of the revenue again the systems ten to recoup the pricing cost in just a few years. London generates $420 million of which 180 to operate it. One thing I will mention about London in terms of use of the revenue which I think is quite -- the new mayor of London is a huge bicycle advocate and someone told me the other day since the charge went into place the use of bicycling has gone up over 100%.