- Administrative Updates:
- Boulder County – changing county administrators.
- Mobility for All will now be under Community Planning & Permitting instead of Transportation
- Why the change?
- Continuity & oversight since there are term limits and turn over
- Not a lot should change as the LCC goes forward
- Intros & Updates
- LCC Meetings
- 2nd Monday of each month
- 2:00-4:00pm
- Rotate meetings between Boulder & Longmont
- Meeting Friday (1/17/2020) – Age Well Planning Process
- Follow up from their summit
- Report will be out in May
- 2020 Priorities
- February Meeting – Medicaid Transportation Panel
- Ride Free Longmont is 2 year contract
- No need to petition this year to keep it
- Pathway to Inclusion
- Goal is to empower their clients to use information themselves going forward without help
- Ambassador program getting ready to kick off
- 5 workshops held (2 meetings for each workshop)
- 10 Mobility Ambassador Training Sessions
- 17 ambassadors trained
- Now moving into meetings open to public where ambassadors will be training others
- Tammy – PEAK Ride
- Planning committee
- Investigating paratransit gaps in rural towns because each town’s need is so different
- Had 7 meetings held monthly in differing towns
- Gathering info from communities
- How to schedule rides? Technology is limited in these areas
- Residents are excited
- Driver training will be needed for paratransit etiquette but don’t want too much since these will be volunteers and you don’t want to bombard them with time commitment.
- What’s next?
- Take info and form transportation plan
- After reviewed take to the community for RFPs and funding opportunities
- Keep talking with small towns to keep momentum
- City of Boulder Equity Index
- GIS technicians looked at variables for vulnerable populations within the community
- Where are people living and where are they going?
- Population Density
- Employment Density
- Transit Stops
- Goal: to find where these underserved populations are living and make sure transportation projects are a priority in those locations
- Transit Planner (Alex) talked about RTD cuts
- Next Meeting 2/10/2020 – 2-4pm – Longmont
- Boulder County – changing county administrators.
When the bus rolls up at 6 a.m. in the crisp mountain air, Christian Tichy often is among those who climb aboard to head to work, snowboard in hand.
“A lot of times, I can’t bum rides off my friends in the morning, so I’ll take the bus from Granby,” says the 23-year-old lift operator at Winter Park Resort. “I’ll get to the resort at 7, do all my stretching and whatnot, and get ready for the morning meeting.”
The new 21-mile Granby route debuted this year as the latest expansion of Winter Park Transit’s nearly 4-year-old system, called The Lift. It connects several towns and the ski resort with free rides — providing more than 523,000 of them last year in a valley with just a few thousand full-time residents.
Its success isn’t an anomaly. Even as transit systems in big cities such as Denver struggle with declining ridership, public transportation is thriving in many of the mountain towns of Colorado. Increasingly, from the Telluride area to Steamboat Springs to the communities of Summit County, these bus lines are as focused on moving around tourists as on transporting the far-flung service workers who make the towns and ski resorts run.
The state isn’t exactly a transit mecca, but Colorado carries this little-known distinction: It leads the nation in rural public transportation, with local agencies in areas with fewer than 50,000 residents serving more riders than any other state.
Colorado’s dozens of local rural systems reported 16.7 million boardings in 2017, according to the Federal Transit Administration — more than twice the totals for rural systems in second-place Michigan and third-place California. And Colorado’s figure doesn’t include the Vail town bus system, a rare service that doesn’t report its figures to the FTA because it doesn’t receive any federal funding. Its 3.2 million annual boardings would push the state’s total that year to nearly 20 million.
Mountain resort communities, which struggle with parking crunches and have workforces living across wide areas, are the drivers of Colorado’s ranking, accounting for its 15 largest rural transit systems. The leader, the Aspen-based Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, is the highest-ridership rural agency in the United States, with more than 5 million boardings a year.
Granted, rural agencies account for just 16% of the state’s transit ridership. But they excel by following the most elemental law of public transportation: Take people where they want to go.
Ridership, often free, spikes during the ski season as visitors flood resorts and their nearby towns. They also have grown outward in response to local housing affordability crises.
“This is really critical employee transit — the people who can’t afford to live in those communities kind of rely on that transit to get to work every day,” said Sophie Shulman, the Colorado Department of Transportation’s chief of innovative mobility.
More than two dozen of Colorado’s 40 fixed-route transit systems are in rural areas, according to CDOT-provided data. The rural ridership figures also include several providers of transportation for seniors.
From school buses to a proper system
Winter Park’s Lift transit system took root after local voters approved a 2% sales tax for transit and trails in late 2015. The town took over a smaller resort-operated shuttle system that had relied on old school buses, and it’s drawn on financial help from the resort, neighborhood associations, and the towns of Fraser and Granby to expand rapidly, said Michael Koch, Winter Park’s transit manager.
Winter Park’s The Lyft bus system uses U.S. 40 as a backbone and also connects with Granby, Fraser and the ski area. (Click to enlarge)
The Lift system uses U.S. 40 as a backbone, with buses arriving every 30 or 60 minutes on most of the 10 winter daytime routes. They pick up riders at stops that incorporate old ski-lift chairs. During the quieter summer months, service is streamlined.
Town officials promised a more robust system that would serve more places with upgraded buses, run them late into the night, and be more accessible to the disabled and the elderly.
Despite occasional grumbling about the area’s steep sales tax rate, several locals said in interviews that the $3 million-a-year system had delivered on those promises.
“Heck, yeah, I’m always on this,” said Tichy, who is among the area’s archetypal Colorado seasonal workers. He spends his summers working as a rafting guide in Kremmling.
On a snowy December weekday, he jumped onboard at the resort on his day off, carrying a snow-covered board. He had plenty of company that morning.
Next to him sat Dave Tindall, 56, a computer programmer from Pittsburgh. He said he chose Winter Park for his ski vacation in large part because he could get there from Denver on an Amtrak train, which lets out at the Fraser station during the week, and get around on the bus. Earlier, Lauren and Corey Schwartz, former Denverites who were visiting from Cincinnati to ski a few days, said the bus enabled them to stay at a cheaper hotel in Fraser, farther from the resort.
“(The stop) was right outside the hotel,” said Lauren Schwartz, 30. “There’s the tracker (app) that he used, so we didn’t have to stand outside very long. … When you’re coming out to Colorado, with the high price of going skiing, it’s a nice way to kind of minimize costs.”
Winter Park Mayor Jimmy Lahrman has even grander goals in mind, including expanding the weekend-only Winter Park Express ski train to weekdays. It was revived, with Amtrak’s help, three years ago.
“The transformation has just been wonderful for our community,” Lahrman said of the bus system. “It’s providing so many opportunities for employees and young people to come up and live here and not have the expense of a vehicle.”
A gondola and commuter service
Elsewhere, mature mountain transit systems have built up a combination of services. Telluride has its own bus system, while Mountain Village — at the base of the nearby ski resort — runs a gondola up from town that, with 3 million boardings last year, ranks among the state’s most-used rural transit systems.
Summit County’s Summit Stage agency has supplemented its extensive free bus routes between its towns and four ski resorts with paid commuter buses to Leadville and Fairplay, where more and more resort-town workers live. Likewise, Leadville residents also can take an Eagle County commuter bus to the Vail area.
Recent years also have brought new movement on transit at the state level. CDOT, aided by the state legislature, started the Bustang and Outrider network of regional bus service in 2015. December brought the start of “Snowstang”-branded service to Loveland, Arapahoe Basin and Steamboat ski areas.
The state is in the process of doling out $192 million in transit money that will beef up Bustang, create new “mobility hubs” connecting that service with local transit, and buttress local agencies’ transit investments. On top of that, $18 million in recently announced federal grants will go to transit agencies in Colorado, with $12 million awarded to Winter Park to cover 60% of its planned bus garage and maintenance facility.
Still, despite the outside support, smaller transit agencies face some of the same budget and operating challenges as their larger cousins, including the Regional Transportation District in metro Denver.
“What we’re having a problem with, along with many places across the state, is the shortage of drivers,” said Summit County Commissioner Elisabeth Lawrence, who serves on Summit Stage’s board.
Local snowboarder and lift operator Christian Tichy, left, from Granby, helps ski tourist Dave Tindall, who was visiting from Pittsburgh, with a few ideas on where to ski at the Winter Park ski area while riding The Lift bus on Dec. 5, 2019. The Lift is a free bus service in the Winter Park area.
Some bus services go back decades
Lawrence, an Arkansas transplant, lives in Breckenridge and says she relies on buses provided by the town and county, especially because street parking is sparse during heavy tourist seasons. It’s also a godsend for her 14-year-old daughter, Zoe.
“Here, people are working so much, and you don’t have a lot of ability as parents to run your kids around all day,” Lawrence said.
As in several mountain areas, Summit County’s bus service goes back decades. Voter approval for a dedicated sales tax in 2001 led to more intensive service, building more ridership.
The route map for the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority, providing service between Rifle, Glenwood Springs and Aspen (lower right). (Click to enlarge)
It’s a similar story in the Roaring Fork Valley, where the RFTA now operates town bus service in Aspen and Glenwood Springs, buses to the four Aspen ski resorts, a summer bus to the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, and growing commuter services to communities as far west as Rifle, nearly 70 miles from Aspen. Some of the system is free, but other routes charge fares.
Six years ago, the agency launched the VelociRFTA express bus service — hailed as the first “bus rapid transit”-like service in any rural area in the country — between Aspen and Glenwood.
“I like to refer to our system as a three- or four-ring circus,” said Kent Blackmer, the RFTA’s co-director of operations, adding that the agency has adapted to economic challenges facing workers. “The workforce has continued to move further and further down the valley, and now there are affordability issues in Glenwood Springs.”
As Blackmer takes stock, he sees the bus system — and the reduced need for parking that has resulted — as indispensable to townies and tourists alike.
“If everybody drove their private vehicles” on local roads, he said, “it wouldn’t work.”
Starting tomorrow, the Regional Transportation District (RTD) will be providing more advance notice of the light rail trips the agency expects to cancel due to its ongoing operator shortage, a change requested by the public that will help riders plan ahead.
Beginning Friday afternoon, RTD will post canceled light rail trips for the coming week – spanning Sunday through Saturday – on the Rider Alerts page of the RTD website. Patrons can sign up on that page to receive route-specific alerts by email.
Then, at 10 a.m. every Saturday, Monday and Wednesday, the agency will send rider alerts by email to subscribers for the already posted trips RTD expects to cancel over the next two or three days. Saturday’s emails will address trips on Sunday and Monday, Monday’s will cover Tuesday and Wednesday, and Wednesday’s will include trips on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Additional alerts will be sent each day in the event of additional canceled trips, for reasons that cannot be predicted in advance.
RTD last month debuted a new rider alert system that better informs the public about changes to light rail trips. Canceled trips are shown as “canceled” on Next Ride, and they are not included in same-day itineraries in Trip Planner or third-party apps (e.g., Google Maps, Transit) that rely on RTD’s real-time feed for current arrival and departure times. The new platform is tied to RTD’s data feed and allows employees to write alerts automatically and within seconds based on mode and cause.
WEDNESDAY, JAN 15
MLK Jr. Community Celebration – “The Words Ring On”
Sponsored by city of Aurora Community Relations
Featuring a performance by Grammy-winning artist Dorinda Clark-Cole. Admission is free, and no RSVP is required. “The Words Ring On” also will feature:
- Human Relations Commission MLK Jr. Legacy Award
- City of Aurora Community Relations Division Community Spirit Award
- National anthem by saxophonist Harold Rapp III
- Reading by Aurora Poet Laureate Assetou Xango
- Announcement of The Words Ring On Art, Poetry & Essay Contest winners
6 p.m., Heritage Event Center, 14401 E. Exposition Ave.
Voice personalization is now a feature on Amazon Alexa for public transit riders. Sean Barbeau, PhD, research faculty in the USF College of Engineering’s Center for Urban Transportation Research utilized a new personalization feature for Alexa to upgrade the OneBusAway skill. The skill can now recognize a user’s voice and link it to a specific bus stop and route. This allows passengers to simply ask “Alexa, where’s my bus?” and get personalized real-time information on arrival times.
OneBusAway is an open-source app that services ten cities, including Tampa, Fla. The corresponding Alexa skill previously couldn’t tell the difference between users’ voices. It can now provide multiple people status updates on their individual routes.
“This really enhances the user experience for households with multiple transit riders. No more switching back and forth between profiles,” said Barbeau.
Barbeau worked closely with Amazon in the feature’s preview program. Barbeau said, “It’s exciting to see OneBusAway being used as a platform for innovation and to collaborate with top talent in the industry.”
Customers can create voice profiles through the Alexa companion app, allowing Alexa to recognize their voice on most Alexa-enabled devices. Users can then access the skill by saying, “Alexa, enable OneBusAway,” followed by “Alexa, learn my voice.” Once their voice profile is set up, the skill will refer to the user by name, helping ensure they catch the right bus. OneBusAway is maintained by the non-profit Open Transit Software Foundation and can regularly be updated by transit agencies, universities and developers.
As the principal of an alternative high school, Stacey Streussel deals with plenty of paperwork. Each year, the same document catches her attention.
It’s the standard form for service animals at St. Vrain Online Global Academy in Longmont. Most years, one or two students apply to bring a dog to the school — always a dog.
But there’s another option on the paperwork: miniature horse.
“I’ve had people make comments. Why is there a mini horse on that paperwork?” Streussel said. “And I say, ‘I don’t know, but you know something happened.'”
The answer gets deep into civil rights, disability law, and a surprising story about the power of citizen activism.
First, a little trivia: A mini horse is smaller than a pony. They’re up to 34 inches tall and 100 pounds, according to federal regulations. But they are shaped exactly like a regular horse.
Maybe you know one from pop culture. One of the Denver Broncos’ first mascots was a mini boy named T.D., for touchdown. On television, a mini horse was the breakout star of Parks and Recreation. (Rest in peace, Li’l Sebastian.)
What is a service animal?
Now, the reason they appear on school paperwork is pretty simple: Federal regulations say that miniature horses are acceptable service animals.
Service animals are a federally guaranteed right for people with disabilities. They are “specifically trained to perform tasks for people with a disability, because of their disability,” said Kevin Williams, legal program director of the Colorado Cross-Disability Coalition.
Guide dogs are perhaps the best known kind of service animal. They’re allowed on planes, in schools, in restaurants, in taxis — pretty much any publicly accessible place. There are a few “reasonable” exceptions, such as hospital operating rooms or places that a mini horse doesn’t reasonably fit.
Also, just to be clear: Service animals are different from emotional support animals. Emotional support animals have fewer requirements. They can be any animal, and they don’t have to be trained; they’re allowed on planes, but they have weaker rights than service animals.
The backstory
OK, so why is service work limited to dogs and miniature horses?
The real answer to Streussel’s answer is rooted in the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The ADA didn’t include many details about service animals when it was signed in 1990. Over the years, people claimed they needed service snakes, service ferrets, service parrots and service sugar gliders, according to the ADA National Network. There were legal battles.
“It was chaos,” Williams said.
And amid all that chaos was a posse of mini horses — there were about six of them in the 2000s, according to trainer Dolores Arste.
She had trained a mini named Mexicali Rose — nicknamed “Cali” — back in the 2000s. Cali is “is less than 30 inches, so she is about the size of a Newfoundland dog, height-wise, which isn’t very big,” Arste said.
Cali’s owner, Mona Ramouni, is blind. She had never had a service animal, in part because of her family’s cultural preferences against dogs. And that meant she didn’t have the mobility or independence she wanted.
It turns out that Cali was a great alternative. Mini horses can be potty trained, they have good eyesight, they’re protective and they can live to 40 years old. Ramouni and Arste even trained Cali to notice “interesting” things — a skill the horse uses to point Ramouni toward lost keys and other miscellaneous items.
Crucially, Cali understands “intelligent disobedience.” It’s the idea that she should resist her handler, for example, if they’re about to walk into traffic.
“It was like I could see when I walked with Cali,” Ramouni said. “It was as close as I’ll ever be to see in this life in this life.”
The reckoning
Ramouni’s new way of life came under threat in the late 2000s, when the Department of Justice announced that it was rewriting the rules for service animals.
It was rumored that dogs would be the only allowable service animals under the new rules. Ramouni quickly launched a lobbying campaign to protect Cali and the others.
“I was like ‘No way. No way,'” Ramouni recalled. “‘They’re going to have to pry the leash and harness out of my hands, because I’m not going to do that.'”
It wasn’t just the half-dozen-or-so people with mini service horses. Ramouni convinced hundreds of others to write letters to the DOJ in support of mini horses.
They had no idea what to expect but, a year later, it turns out they had won. The new rules said that dogs were the principal service animals, but they carved out similar protections for mini horses.
Kevin Williams, the attorney, was initially surprised to see the equines listed.
“I stopped and went, ‘Miniature horses? Oh my God, the ADA’s just going to be the laughingstock of whatever,'” he said. But with a little more research, he came around to the idea.
And last summer, the Department of Transportation affirmed that service minis should be allowed aboard airplanes. Ramouni and Cali were featured in the article.
Life after Cali
Meanwhile, Ramouni’s life has changed. A year after getting Cali, she left home for school at Michigian State University. “My whole life expanded. My whole world,” she said.
She met her husband, became a mother of two, and eventually decided to dedicate her life to horses and the people who need them. She’s trained five mini horses.
“Not everybody should use a miniature horse. Not everybody would be willing or able. But for those people who really want to and can afford to do so emotionally, financially, I think they’re great alternatives,” she said.
Still, they remain exceptionally rare. Ramouni estimates there are 20 mini service horses nationwide. They’re used by people with low vision, balance-related disabilities, PTSD and more.
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