Hello, the committee meeting will begin once we've reached a quorum. Thank you
All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our
meeting I'm going to call the meeting to order and I would
First like to welcome everybody to the marketing service planning and business development committee meeting on June 18
Before we begin I would like to inform members of the public who may be viewing the meeting on
NCTD's YouTube pages that in order to make a public comment during the meeting you must connect
To the meeting using the zoom link provided on the agenda
You must also register with the clerk by sending an email to clerk at
NCTD org with the name and or phone number and which item you would like to speak on
Now I'd like to ask Taylor deputy clerk to Paul. Whoa, please
committee chair martinez here committee vice chair garcia here committee member o'heara present
committee member joce present this completes the role thank you and taylor will you please
provide us with the safety brief and review the evacuation procedures yes in case of an emergency
i will dial 911 in case of an evacuation please take the stairs do not use the elevators once
Once cleared of the building, do not re-enter unless cleared to do so by emergency personnel.
There are fire extinguishers and first aid kits on each floor of the building.
There is a portable defibrillator on the first floor and staff on hand trained on CPR procedures
if needed.
This concludes my safety brief.
Thank you.
Taylor, do we have any public comment today?
No, we do not.
Before we get to the specific items on the agenda for this meeting, I would like to outline
meeting protocols to make this meeting as efficient as possible.
First, please hold your comments and or questions until after the agenda item has been presented.
And second, when time comes the board member comments or questions, please raise your hand
and I will call on you in the order they were raised.
All right, we'll go to agenda item number one.
The first item on the agenda today will be an update of the fiscal year 26 marketing and
communication program results to date and an overview for the fiscal year 27 marketing
and Communication Strategy. Mary Delver, Deputy Chief Operating Officer, will present this item.
All right, Mary, thank you. Thank you, Chair. So before we get started, I'll do a little bit
more protocol. Sean, our CEO, typically sits in the seat. However, he is attending a very
important family event. So I am here. I'm still your committee liaison for the
Ms. Bitta Committee, even though I've shifted into a new role. So going forward throughout the year,
I'll also be here. I also no longer oversee marketing. However, I've had the
pleasure of working with the team that developed this plan for the past year so
I'll give an overview and then Shawn and I can answer any questions that you may
have after the fact. So as you may recall when the MSBDA committee meeting met
earlier this year and we were discussing the work plan, we discussed one of the
items being the committee would receive an overview of the marketing
communications program and then there was a request to kind of discuss the
long-term plan of marketing efforts. So I'll first give an overview as the
chair mentioned of the activities and campaigns of the marketing team for FY
26 and then kind of a look ahead into FY 27 and then go over what the long-term
strategy is for the marketing department. So the marketing team has been very
busy in FY 26. We have standard annual events that we typically promote. We
encourage riders to take transit to various major events throughout the county. The most
popular one and the biggest ridership driver for us is the Padres. So throughout Padres
season, NCTD staff is present at Petco Park or present on the modes. We do a significant
push before the season starts to remind riders that taking the coaster and then either walking
to the park or transferring to trolley is the most convenient way to get to the park.
We have historically done a very heavy advertising push for Padres, but we've seen, we've developed
that ridership base.
We have a very, very strong ridership base among the Friar Faithful that take the coaster
to Padres Games.
So now we're really heavily pushing on presence at Petco and riding the coaster, tabling
at coaster stations and reminding riders that this is the best way to go.
Another way that we drive ridership is by offering free rides throughout the year.
One of our most popular is for Transit Equity Day, honoring Rosa Parks.
On February 4th, we provide free rides in all of our modes throughout the day.
Similarly, to encourage safe transportation to and from New Year's Eve events, NCTD and
MTS offer free rides after 6 p.m. on all of our services.
We also, a major event throughout for the whole county, draws hundreds of thousands
of people to downtown is Comicon. That's coming up later next month. So we'll
continuously do a push similar to Padres taking the coaster in the trolley is the
best way to get stress-free to the downtown area. Happening right now is the
San Diego County Fair. Also happening at the fairgrounds is the Del Mar Races.
NCTD and MTS offer a combined pass that gets you a transit ticket, a shuttle ride
from the Solana Beach station and then entrance into the fair or the Delmar
races for one combined price. So the marketing team does a lot of outreach
and advertising social media posts to promote those passes as well. The
marketing team also focuses on bolstering some public interest
campaigns and safety campaigns that NCTD undergoes throughout the year. So later
on today the board will be asked to adopt a resolution for rail safety month
every September. NCTD likes to draw attention to the importance of rail
safety. The marketing team posts on social media, they do tabling, we post ads
to make sure that the community is aware when you're at a rail station or around
the railroad tracks that you should be mindful of your surroundings and make
sure that you're watching out for trains. Similarly, human trafficking is a huge
push for NCTD. We want the public as well as our employees to be aware of the
signs of folks that might unfortunately
be subjected to human trafficking
and make sure that they know, the public knows
where to report it.
Lori, in the audience, she is heading up
a new coalition for human trafficking,
and CTD stood up the Southern California Human Trafficking
Awareness and Prevention Coalition.
We have partners with the FRA, local law enforcement,
law enforcement from other entities in southern California to make sure that we
are really that the public and that our employees know the signs of human
trafficking. And then everyone's favorite event, the Holiday Express, the marketing
team puts in a lot of effort to making sure that this is a very successful
event every year. It's a great revenue generator for the district and it's good
to introduce the coaster service to folks that might not typically ride it
throughout the year. In terms of our advertising, so as part of the budget
process every year the board approves a defined amount for NCTD advertising
services and so we always want to make sure that we are capturing existing
campaigns, making sure that we're driving riders to new services that we might be
introducing like NCTD Plus or letting them know what they can take our
existing services too. So Padres is by far the most impressions that we get on
our ads 15 million per season, which is great. NCTD Plus, we stood up the NCTD
Plus zone in Vista last year and we saw 10 million impressions on those ads. We
spend less advertising dollars on the Fair Tripper and Pony Express. We've
developed that ridership base and we have more grassroots campaigns with the
fair and through social media. So we direct less advertising dollars to these
campaigns, so the impressions on the ads are less, but we have a variety of
different strategies to drive the adoption of those passes. Another focus
of the marketing team is making sure that our customer resources are clear
and effective. Part of that is making sure that the website pages that are
most frequently used are as user-friendly as possible. So what they
have done recently is they added a real-time updates map to the front page,
which has been great, and they've also improved our service alert page so that
it's easier to tell if your bus or your train is experiencing some type of
service alert. We also shifted from a printed riders guide to a digital
riders guide and this is great because if I'm a rider and I typically ride the
coaster Sprinter Breeze 101 and Breeze 303, Breeze 350 out in Escondido, I can go
to the website and I can select the services that I most like, I most usually
use. I can download a PDF right to my phone. We still want to make sure that
we have a printed resource for those individuals that might not have
smartphones, so they can go into customer service and request a printed
version of whatever services they typically use. We are very active on
social media as well. We want to make sure that we have a fun presence on
social media so that we're driving that interaction. We have, we're hopping on a
lot of the trends. Brianna, who's our marketing communications associate, is
really good at making sure that our social media is fresh and relevant, but
we also want to make sure that we're providing necessary information to our
customers in the community as well. So if there's a service suspension on the
coaster, if we're having a career event, or any type of giveaway, we use our social
media platforms to amplify that as well. And because of that strategy, we've seen
pretty significant growth in all of our social media platforms year-over-year.
this is a continuous trend since I've been here. I haven't seen our social
media numbers dwindle. They're consistently in the double digits in
terms of follower growth. The only thing that I'll point out with X is that I
think we've seen some the general public I think is moving away from X as a
platform that they use every day and so our engagement and our follower
increases are a little bit less so on that platform. Earned media is also
really important and the focus of the marketing team. There is Sean giving an
interview. We will never turn down a media interview. We always want to make
sure that we're accessible. So we are frequently featured in the San Diego
Union Tribune, Coast News. We do a lot of work with KPBS as well. On NCTD's
website we've seen a significant increase in traffic. We have we've seen
1.6 million users with a total engagement of 1.5 million. Our most
frequented pages are the schedules, fares, passes, alerts, and riders guides. We're
We're really seeing customers come to our website and seek out that rider information.
The users are accessing our website on a variety of different platforms, mobile, desktop.
The smart TV I'll add is if somebody is watching an ad on a streaming service and they click
into it, the metal will direct them via their TV.
The United States and Mexico are the most popular countries that people access our website
from, but I thought it was interesting that we have China and Singapore on there as well.
And then I think most important, specifically to Sean,
and a significantly renewed focus of the marketing team
is making sure that we're out in the community.
In that heart is Lida Galvin, our manager of marketing.
She dressed up in a heart costume
and rode the day before Thanksgiving
and handed out NCTD Valentine's, which was very well received.
So she is incredibly dedicated.
We also have ribbon cutting and groundbreaking events.
To the right was the opening of the Oceanside
pedestrian tunnel that we had a partnership with Main Street
Oceanside on.
We're present in a lot of parades.
We had the NCTD 50th event.
We want to make sure the marketing team's goal
is to make sure that we're present
in every single community at least once throughout the year.
And we try to hit each community multiple times
across a variety of modes, whether we're riding the breeze
or whether we're at one of our breeze transit centers,
Sprinter stations, coaster stations.
It's really important that we get our name out there
and make sure that we're a trusted source in the community.
Coming in FY27, if you aren't aware,
the Breeze Services 50th birthday is July 1st.
We began operation of our bus service
after acquiring the municipal systems
of Oceanside and Escondido on July 1st, 1976.
So we're celebrating that with an employee event
and we're gonna do some social media
highlighting the Breeze Service.
We're also launching the Transit Talk customer newsletter.
If you go to our website, you'll be able to sign up
for news and information about NCTD
will include planned service disruptions,
whether it's a closure on the coaster corridor,
project updates for the community,
and various happenings at NCTD
so that the community can remain aware.
The Holiday Express celebrating its 20th birthday this year.
So the marketing team has a lot of really fun things planned
to freshen up the Holiday Express event this December.
And then every year NCTD participates with MTS
in the bus rodeo.
So that's an opportunity
for pretty significant employee engagement.
Our bus operators get to show off their skills
on an obstacle course for better or worse.
And the maintenance teams also get to their timed
and their diagnostic of particular issues on a bus.
So that's really important.
So in general, the marketing strategy.
So at the MSBDA committee meeting earlier this year,
we discussed getting maybe a three or five year plan
for the marketing efforts across the district.
What we're recommending is keeping it on an annual basis.
Because so much of the marketing team's efforts
are driven by what budget we're allocated each year,
whether it's advertising dollars, promotional item
budget, or collateral budget, printed materials,
things like that, it's difficult to plan
with any level of certainty past a budget year.
We're unclear on how long we might be able to run ads.
We're unclear on how many campaigns we might be able to run
in terms of advertising revenue.
And then promotional items, depending on how many,
what budget we have to purchase promotional items
will dictate where we are in the community
and the level of engagement that we have
in terms of those giveaways.
So we have baseline goals and strategy though,
and that's this marketing structure paragraph
at the very bottom.
We are always going to gear our marketing efforts
toward the promotion of NCTD services.
And we have the overarching goal to increase ridership
and customer revenue in everything we do.
That's consistent with we want to make sure
we're improving the customer experience,
that we're supporting our brand, that we're communicating
effectively and proactively, and that we're
out in the community.
Those are consistently not going to change.
But because we're in a financial situation where
it's unclear what the budget might look
in the next couple years, service is the priority and so the marketing team will
make sure that we're able to promote the service with the resources we're given.
So we're proposing to stick to an annual. We'll continue to give this update to
the Ms. Bit of Committee every year and as needed if the Ms. Bit of Committee or
the full board requests any updates on marketing efforts, the success of a
particular campaign, or the ROI of advertising dollars, we're happy to give
that as well. But the long-term strategy is always going to be promotion of NCTD
services, making sure we're out in the community and educating the public about
the services that we currently provide and are planning to provide, that our
collateral and our correspondence are proactive and effective, and that we're
tailoring promotions and events with what we think will reasonably have the
best bang for our buck in terms of increasing ridership and increasing
customer revenue. So with that I will take any questions. Thank you Mary, that
it was a great presentation.
Taylor, do we have any public comment on this item?
No, we do not.
Okay, great.
Are there any questions from council members?
Board members.
Board members, sorry about that.
Do you go first?
No, go ahead.
No, no.
Thank you.
This is exciting information and update.
I do have a couple of questions.
First of all, a base question.
What does our marketing team look like?
Like how many members, how many folks,
what kind of general?
Small but mighty.
So we have a senior graphic communications designer, Victoria,
that is incredibly dedicated to making sure
that all of the collateral that we publish
is fresh and matching the moment.
Brianna is our marketing communications associate,
And then we have Lida, our manager of marketing communications.
We have the support of an ad placement consultant
that works directly with meta, TV, streaming services,
Odyssey radio for Padres, things like that,
to help us place those ads.
And then if it's something that's
going to have high visibility, we
do have an on-call marketing consultant
where if we're really in a pinch and our in-house resources
can't generate a video or an advertisement
in particular will outsource us that way, but the three-person marketing team is very effective at
completing most of the work that's done by the team. Yes, small and mighty.
Have we talked at all about working with a lot of the reach when it comes to social
is a collaboration. So we talked about doing any paid collaborations with people that have
large reaches here that can really amplify
something that we're doing?
Yeah, so we do a lot of the grassroots efforts
that I had talked about specifically with the FAIR.
We do a lot of collaborations with MTS
and we do a lot of collaborations
with the FAIR and the Padres.
We do drive a lot of engagement that way
in terms of individuals that might have a higher reach.
We do have a lot of homegrown interest in NCTD services
specifically around the holiday express service we get a ton of individuals on
social media that have a very high following that will post about it that
we don't have to pay for which is great. I think we're like tacitly exploring
what a collaboration might look like recognizing that as a taxpayer funded
agency we have to be very careful with who we partner with and so we've kind
of shied away from that so far even though we see that there could be
potential benefits. When we're tying ourselves to the particular individual, we, you know,
lose a little bit of that control over that's a that's a human being at the end of the day,
and they have the right to post whatever they would like that might not reflect what the
values of NCTD are. So we've been a little hesitant to engage in that so far. But in
terms of the homegrown, we absolutely have been able to partner with other public agencies
that have driven our engagement as well.
OK.
And feel free to jump in if you have something
that's similar that you want to add to it.
Because I actually have a lot of questions.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
You said a lot of it is budget driven.
What is the budget this year, or the proposed budget
for next year compared to the one
that you worked with this year, or the team worked with this
year?
Yeah.
I can get you this specific number.
Generally, do you know if it's a big change?
It's pretty consistent with what it was last year.
It's around a million dollars
for the whole marketing department.
That's all.
So that includes salaries, wages.
It's about $200,000 for advertisements,
which surprisingly does not get you a lot,
but we focus a lot.
We tailor the strategy based off
of what we think meets the moment.
A couple years ago, we had a very heavy push
on advertisements for Padres.
We've scaled that back a little bit
because we've grown that ridership base.
We're able to focus our efforts on other things.
So this upcoming fiscal year, we're
going to do a general NCTD campaign.
What are our services?
Where do they go?
And what's the best way to utilize them?
We're going to have potentially a fair change that'll
be going into it back to October.
So we're going to want to direct a lot of our advertisements
towards that, letting the public know
that this is coming, how to purchase passes,
how to ride the service.
So it's largely consistent with what it was last year,
But we're going to be shifting that strategy a little bit.
Well, we're kind of aligning with that.
Is that consistent with other agencies of this size?
That's a great question.
I can get back to you on that.
OK.
I can answer that.
Holy moly.
No, I can't see you in front of mine.
There's no one doing your back there.
And to your earlier question, if we
can get a call from Snoop Dogg, I
think we'll be totally in on that.
I would say agencies of our size,
it's dependent on whether they're specifically bus
or specifically rail or a little bit of both.
And in our case, I think our budget
is a little higher than some of the other agencies
comparative to our size because we have two modes
and they sort of have two different plans
when we talk about marketing.
So I would say it's consistent with what we believe
is the right budget for ours.
One of the things that when we talked about
through the budget was we knew we were going to have to make some cuts, but we were making
a lot of headway on the marketing piece. We didn't want to pull back from that, so we
kept it where it was at. I would say the last place I was at was bus only, and our budget
was a couple hundred thousand lower than that, just because we really had a singular focus
on bus and didn't have the other rail piece sort of tied to it. So I think the reason
that our budget is where it's at and maybe a little bit higher than some agencies close
to our sizes because we have the demand response. We have the rail. We have bus. So we have
a lot of different avenues that we're trying to promote at the same time versus just sort
of one mode. So thanks. I don't know if we should talk to him or not. You know, you have
more questions, right? Yeah, I was going to ask. So you said that
we're going to do some general more general brand awareness, which I think is a great
Great idea.
Are we in the middle of a brand name change?
What are we doing with that?
I really want to get that question answered.
Yeah, so we did for national awareness purposes,
we saw the benefit of tying ourselves to San Diego.
A lot of the times when Sean and I were out in DC,
or even up in Sacramento, it was hard to identify NCTD
as being part of the San Diego region.
It was also important to us to reference the fact
that we are a railroad and we own the San Diego subdivision
of the Los Ann corridor.
So that's why we have started going by North County transit
San Diego railroad.
When we are in the community in San Diego,
we typically just say North County transit
and our acronym is still NCTD.
We wanted to make sure that the customers
that know us by a particular name
weren't confused by any type of name change, so to speak.
But for official purposes,
our name is North County Transit District.
That's the way we are codified in statute,
but we operate as North County Transit, San Diego Railroad.
We have changed our color scheme,
so we are in the process of rebranding the Sprinter
in particular as we're intending to match the Sprinter
with what the coaster looks like
so that our rail modes are consistent.
Do you have a picture of that?
I don't know that we do,
but I can send around a picture of the new Sprinter Rapid
was featured at the NCTD 50th anniversary.
So if we did, where his question's going,
if we did change the name and you did recognize it,
you, would you want to do more of a DBA where,
because one of the challenges with changing the branding
and the name is all, you've got to change it everywhere,
not just on signs, but at the federal level,
at all the agencies you deal with
and all the different pieces that go with it.
So is it, is it, are we talking about a,
when you say a rebrand like that is a agency renaming
or a rebrand like a DBA and I'm just, yeah.
I can, I guess I would say primarily as a DBA.
And the reason for that is because historically
we have not always been North County Transit District.
In fact, for only maybe half of our existence,
have we been North County Transit District.
We've had monikers as long as the North County Transit,
the North San Diego County Transit Development Board.
The railroad is actually the San Diego Northern Railroad.
So we still do, even though that was dissolved,
we still do a fair amount of business as SDNR.
In fact, we still have the SDNR sign down in the basement
if you all wanna take a look at it.
So I think our goal when I came on board was
I knew we didn't have enough money to do a full rebrand.
That would have cost us a significant amount of money.
Really what we heard from the community
and our employees was is that our logo
was significantly outdated.
They commonly referred to us as direct TV installers
because it looks exactly like the direct TV logo.
We wanted to just modernize the logo
and really shrink the name.
So at least in North County,
it's just really North County Transit.
That's how everybody pretty much knows us.
And then I think as Mary touched on at the federal level
and at Sacramento, there were times the first year
I was here where we went to DC,
there's actually a former employee of ours
who is the executive director of sort of NCTD in Arizona.
It's the Northern Arizona Transportation District.
And there's another North County Transit District
in Minnesota, as a matter of fact.
And so I really just wanted to make sure
that San Diego was in there to reference us
when we were doing really joint grant requests
between Sandag and MTS,
that the region would benefit from maximizing the grants.
We were really just looking to sort of subtly update
and make sure we kind of got the San Diego piece in there
so that we were recognized at the national level
for the region we were in.
That makes sense.
Thank you.
So the dark blue is like the main jam
and then the teal, one of the teal?
Yeah so the, like the highlight trim folks listening online won't be able to see but the old coaster wrap that is on the screen right now is similar to what the sprinter looks like right now.
So, coasters haven't been wrapped like that for a while, new coasters we received 2020 2021 were wrapped with the new color scheme that have the blue, the teal on the top, then there's a white line then there's blue, and then there's gray.
I described that correctly now. It's the teal and then blue and then a white line there. Yeah
Yeah, the the current color scheme when they ordered the Bombardier's or when they ordered the
Siemens charger to locomotives
And the new Alston by level Bombardier's the color scheme went to
Sort of iron ore on the bottom with a white stripe and then dark blue with a with a teal accent on the top
The new Sprinter that's wrapped is very similar with the exception of there wasn't enough room to put a teal stripe on the top of it
But the body of the Sprinter looks exactly like the body of the new coaster. I actually
Full disclosure admittedly. I'm not a huge teal fan
Mary's been trying to work hard on me about that, but I love the way our buses look
I think our buses are some of the most unique in the entire nation and I did not want to touch the color scheme on that
they are fantastic. And so the buses still have the same sort of wave with the blue and the teal.
And we wanted to maintain that.
So board member Joyce was just saying Father's Day is coming up and nothing says
Happy Father's Day better than a teal tie, sir.
I actually have one. I, we wore one at the, was it Coaster 30th? I can't remember.
Somebody on the executive staff bought me one and I wore it. And you know what, I just didn't like
the teal on interestingly enough was on the old coasters. I love it as an accent color and I love
it on the buses. I think our buses have been lucky everywhere I've worked. We had some of the most
amazing looking buses and this place is number one of all the places I worked. It's just about the
color scheme on our equipment. Okay, so are we embracing North County Transit to the tune that
that we're going to change all of our handles online
to North County Transit, NCT.
I'm just like, let's go.
Let's do it if we're going to do it.
So we did.
And we certainly appreciated your pointing out to us
that when you search NCTD on Instagram in particular,
nothing came up.
So after you pointed that out, we sincerely appreciate that.
We did change the name on our Instagram.
It says North County Transit, San Diego Railroad parentheses
NCTD.
So anybody that's searching,
they don't have to type in Go NCTD.
For purposes of the acronym, NCTD
is what people know us by locally,
and so we didn't really wanna change that.
We didn't wanna confuse the customer if we didn't have to.
So our social media platforms should be,
the name should be North County Transit,
San Diego Railroad, and then the handle is still Go NCTD.
All right, I mean, I would just say like,
it's probably gonna continue confusion
to have the two different names on the thing.
So I don't know when we cut the court on that or not.
But, okay.
Yeah, I think that's a good point.
And from a name perspective,
we've been all of our new signage
that Chief Development Officer Tracy Foster
and her team are working on through the grant
will have North County Transit San Diego Railroad.
The issue is our website a little bit would go NCTD,
some of the handles on our social media,
but the names on the social media
with the exception of one,
our North County Transit San Diego,
we tried to change our Facebook page
and they claimed that we were trying to hijack the website
and that we were a fraudulent agency
and we're gonna shut the page down.
And so we're working behind the scenes
to try to get somebody from Facebook
to help us out with that.
But that's the only one
that we have not been able to change it.
They were gonna lock out our account
and we didn't want that for customer.
See if they actually have a human
that works there to answer your call.
Yeah, I've actually had that issue before.
At my last job, we had a, somebody put a Pokemon Go park
next to a very unwelcome facility and we had to call them
and get them to remove the Pokemon Go location
because it was not a, it was a historic place
where they had had meetups between people
that the cops were frequently there
and there was some drug use.
And so we had the same issue with Nintendo
when I had to contact them years ago,
which is maybe a highlight of my career
that I got to talk to somebody high up at Nintendo
about a Pokemon Go stop.
So, you know, some of those things when you deal with them,
I think they just want verification
that we are who we are,
especially with everybody getting hijacked
these days and stuff.
So, I'm not really mad at them.
We just need to get it figured out.
Cool.
That's funny with the Pokemon guy.
So, is TikTok not on our list?
Are we not doing TikTok?
TikTok is not on our list thus far.
I think we're exploring what engagement with TikTok might be.
We find that Instagram reels are just as effective at driving
engagement, and a lot of the folks that have TikTok
are also on Instagram reels, so we're
reaching a similar audience.
We have a lot of spaces in our bus stops that are empty.
Can we do a program where cities can access those
and put city events that are happening
that they'd just be ones that are either sponsored by
or co-sponsored by the cities.
That way, folks are getting something to look at in there
that's not, and in some cases,
it's just as like kind of a visual blight.
Yes.
Yeah, we.
Oh, sorry, go ahead.
You wanna go?
So I was gonna say, yes, we're working on that.
The thing that we have to be very careful with
is from a legal perspective,
it has to fall under the association for the public good.
And so we just need to be thoughtful about,
we're partnering with this city
to promote a city-driven item.
We also wanna use that space to really sort of promote
some of the brands as well between rail and bus operations.
One thing that I heard when I came in the door,
shooting, I guess getting close to three years now,
was that people didn't know that we ran those modes.
they thought Coaster was its own company
and Sprinter was its own company
and Breeze was its own company.
And so we're, you know,
one thing I had to do in a past life
was actually put next to the logo,
like Sprinter by North County Transit.
And then we really want to kind of pump that up
at the stations like by the pass
and get a day pass, do the things you need to do.
But we can definitely look into,
and I'm always been a proponent of this,
like the city's got events coming up,
especially if they're city-wide sponsored events,
like Thursdays in Oceanside,
or even things like we're having these groups come down
to help people that need assistance on X-State.
We wanna put those out there too.
We're looking at actually putting video monitors
inside of our buses as well.
And we'll at some point in time be able to scroll through
live feed of our bus while they're on the bus,
but also some of those community engagement things.
Right now we do that on paper.
there's a piece on the media box where we can slide
in a reminder that things are happening in the community
or that there's gonna be a service change.
And that's all part of the stuff we wanna do.
So Lyda's working on that for us with our legal team
just to make sure that we're in lockstep
on what we can and can't do.
Awesome.
The last one that I had was all of our promotions
are on the coaster.
Do we have any Sprinter promotions at all?
Yeah, so that's part of a lot of the major events
that happen in San Diego County
or along the Coaster Corridor in downtown.
So that's where our focus has been historically,
especially as we came out of a
pandemic ridership shift in demographic.
We had those traditional commuters
that were riding at the peak times on all of our services.
Now we're trying to attract more of those leisure riders.
And so we were really hitting hard on those major events.
But that's part of our shift, right?
We are gonna have a huge push for the Sprinter,
especially as we're re-wrapping it,
and especially as we're gearing up
toward replacing those vehicles
and improving the infrastructure on the Sprinter,
and then Breeze as well.
Breeze doesn't get a lot of love,
so we're gonna make sure that people know
that they can take the Breeze to, I don't know,
Grape Day Park or the Vista Amphitheater,
things like that, to make sure that we're amplifying
a lot of the destinations that are accessible
by Sprinter and Breeze.
We've got some good tie-ins with Frontwave too
and we're working on what their schedule for 2027
is gonna look like so that we can promote Sprinter
and then also the breeze route that traverses that corridor.
Yeah, I just saw an SD Strikeforce commercial on TV.
I didn't even know it was a big enough kind of thing
to be on TV, but they were promoting, you know.
So it's definitely worth it.
And then last plug, I'd be happy to volunteer to work on
doing a Dia de los Muertos Sprinter ride
or some kind of thing.
Because the Holiday Express kind of
could also be a Sprinter thing.
It's not a thing that ties it specifically to a coaster,
but I think that would be another version of that.
That could be maybe a lower round,
but we have a lot of people that come to Oceanside
for that festival and the Sprinter
is definitely a use for that.
Yeah, we've definitely,
the only thing that I'll,
We're looking at how we can do a type of special event
on the Sprinter.
The only thing that I'll note is,
with the current Sprinter vehicle that we operate,
because we cannot operate at the same time as freight,
we have a window that we can operate Sprinter service,
and then past 10 o'clock on weekdays,
then it picks up freight.
So, we would just have to work in,
when we would work in a type of special Sprinter,
would it be taking away an existing revenue service trip,
or something like that, we would just have to work
through that schedule a little bit.
That's just one of the things that we're keeping an eye on
as we try to look for ways to do a special springer service.
Sorry, you brought up a question.
Is the Holiday Express, are those trips,
so you said it's like a separate, totally separate thing.
Is it fully paid for by the tickets that people buy,
or how is it off, is it?
It is, yeah, we generate 300, $400,000
from the Holiday Express service.
So it's, it entirely pays for itself with tickets,
and then we actually generate a little bit of revenue
additionally on top of that.
So we should introduce Christmas in July.
That's what I was going to say.
So I do have a question on my list
after board member Joyce asks.
So how many days is the express, holiday express?
It's up rates across two weekends in December.
So it's four total days, and it's 15 trips total.
Since it's so popular in a money maker,
have you thought of expanding that?
We have.
We rely heavily on NCTD volunteers to work the event.
We do hire the characters that are on board.
Santa flies in himself and is so gracious to donate his time
to us, but we do hire carolers and folks
that read stories to the children on board.
So that is an additional expense.
when we scale up, we'll have to scale up that contract
as well, we're considering it.
We just want to make sure that we have
the adequate staff resources that we're not burning
out our staff, things like that to scale up the event.
Great.
Board member O'Hare, do you have more questions?
Yeah, kind of, well, first one is just kind
of something I have grabbed for, I'm really glad
that we're continuing our collaboration
with the Human Trafficking Awareness.
I think it's a highly, highly dusted under the rug subject
that we all avoid and I think I'm really glad
that the agency is courageous enough to take that on
and address it.
Yeah, so I think one of the things that I heard
from board member Joyce I thought was we could really
kind of build on and I hear kind of a bandwidth issue here,
right, of finances and small but mighty marketing team
and to the point of putting up calendars,
I think we were talking about sort of local calendars,
it seems like you could reach out to,
every city has its own marketing person, PR person,
and if we were to just make a boiler template
that's approved by NCTD and put the standard
of what they could fill it out with,
we could ask you to ask them to fill it out
and put it up for us,
and that would be pretty cost efficient and time efficient,
which is a thought process to kind of build upon that
without creating a heavy lift.
It's kind of a low hanging fruit,
but it seems like a really good place to start
and to build on that suggestion.
The NCDD Plus, the 10 million impressions is really good.
The positive 15 million impressions to comparison
is obviously a good, what is the cost,
like the cost for impression of the return on investment,
that we look at on that and we're like,
were you investing 15 million on the body?
I know we're not, but one million NCTD Plus,
because that makes a difference in those impressions.
Yeah, so we look at,
I just happened to note off the top of my head,
we spent around $50,000 on advertisements
for the NCTD Plus service in Vista.
We did that because we were standing up
an entirely new service and we wanted it to be successful,
especially in an area that the community
hadn't seen this type of service before,
and so we wanted to make sure that we,
you know, full-court press.
So we do see a pretty successful ROI.
And in terms of our metrics, so we track cost per click
on social media advertisements.
We track cost per completed view on ones
that are streaming services and other types
of video-based advertisements.
And we are consistently well above industry averages
on the return on those investments.
So very successful campaigns.
And then how do we track impressions to ridership?
Is it just parallel curve or is it a direct number?
So we do, the easiest ones to track are the past sales.
It's difficult to write a typical marketing department
in like an Uber, for example,
would be able to directly click on an advertisement
and then they're able to track,
yes, I clicked on that ad
and then I completed a trip on Uber.
Ours is a little bit more complicated
because usually what we do
and why we track website impressions
is we can kind of create a correlation to,
okay, they're getting information on us,
and that might translate into ridership after that.
We do look at the general increase in ridership
year over year as a good gauge of our marketing efforts.
However, the cleanest one is past sales.
For the Fair Tripper and the Pony Express in particular,
we've seen double-judge increases year over year,
so that's the most clean way to manage the effects
of the marketing.
And then we really focus a lot on the,
I don't know if I was gonna call it the Polar Express,
the Polar Trust, the Padres, all of those, the fair.
All those programs seem really good.
When we capture those people and have them
on the coaster, for example,
it seems like that's the opportunity to get them
to realize like, hey, this isn't just a ride
to the Padres game.
This is a system wide piece and it's beyond the,
because ultimately that's what we want,
we want them using this, we want to transition them
from that to day to day users across the whole facility,
whether it's the Breeze, NCD Plus, or Coaster.
Is that a place where we capture an attempt
to make that connection for them,
or what are we doing there?
Yeah, so we do, because we're a small but mighty team,
we do target opening day 100%.
we're on board that train trains that are transporting people down we're at
the stations we're talking to people about making sure that they have a good
experience in that ride that's the best way we can do it is providing a safe
reliable and convenient trip for them if it's convenient and they enjoyed their
time they're gonna come back they're gonna see all the stations along the way
where they can go but we want to make sure that we have staff presence on
those really really high ridership days so that we can have that conversation
with people, make it as convenient for them as possible,
and talk to them about how they can continue
to use it going forward.
Hoover, I think those are most of my questions.
I appreciate the work of the small but mighty team.
If you think of any other, just let me know.
This was very thorough.
Thank you.
It was great.
I'm glad that we had this discussion.
Padres, I've been a user for years,
but I always took it from Old Town.
I love the concept of parking and then going,
and I don't have to pay $50 million for a parking space,
drive around town to trying to figure it out.
I always found a space there.
But it was always difficult to ride from Escondido
all the way over there, which I did do that,
But then I ran into issues coming back after a game.
Yeah, I could get here, but then I couldn't get home.
So I'd sleep here in Escondido at the station.
I'm just kidding.
But I did have once where the bus left.
I don't know who was late or if somebody left early.
And I ended up having to wait from 9 PM to 10 PM
for the next bus to take me closer to home,
and I still had to walk about a mile and a half
to be able to get home.
So I decided not to do that anymore.
So as you work on that,
or thank you for doing it,
that you're working on it now,
because I think that's so, so important.
Last night at the council meeting in Escondido,
we got a presentation,
and it certainly seems like we're moving forward
with some grant funds with something similar
to Fred, downtown San Diego,
that would help us for the last mile.
And I think that'll be great for us
as that continues to come together.
Human trafficking, thank you,
because it is something I won't speak much about it,
but I love it that we are at the forefront
and that we're making it visible.
we're making it visible, thank you for that.
And then I'm really, really excited about July the 1st
for the 50 years, and I didn't know that Escondido
was one of the two first ones that did that.
So I'm really looking forward to a great celebration,
both in Oceanside and in Escondido,
because I think we should let everybody know.
So thank you.
Yeah, if any board members would like to join us,
we do have some staff events on the 1st,
so I can send over the schedule.
We're bringing out food trucks
and we're best way to bond is over food.
So we'll send the schedule over.
It'll be at our bus yards and ocean side in Escondido.
All right, I just have a couple of questions.
So for the fair tripper, do you get,
does the 20 second ad do anything for us in advertising
or is it mostly what this agency does?
No, we do have mostly social media collaborations,
but we do, they obviously have their own ads for the fair
and they will mention taking coaster.
It's, I don't know that I've seen it specifically mentioned
in the ad, but when you click in,
in like a know before you go email or page
about getting to the fair,
they do have information on the fair tripper pass
and getting, taking the coaster
and the trolley for coming from down south.
I mentioned that because we've had,
even though the fair is fairly new,
We've had a couple of days that have been really difficult,
particularly opening day.
June 10 is going to be another day,
where the city just gets just gridlocked.
And the biggest concern I hear from residents
is that's a hassle.
But if emergency vehicles were needed,
it could be really critical.
And I think we have a new CEO at the 22nd ad
and four new board members.
But I think they're feeling some pressure already.
and anything they could do to help more, help us more.
I can see they're being challenged there though, right?
Because they make a ton of money off parking, I mean.
Yes, they do.
But the problem is that they don't have the capacity
of parking that they need.
Right.
And so people drive around and drive around.
So I think they can easily fill both of their lots
and they still have a lot of vehicles
that have nowhere to go.
So I think that they should be advertising more
because they have a problem on their hand
and they're hearing from a lot of vocal residents
and council members.
So I'm glad to hear that Padre is very successful.
The other thing that happens a lot at Petco
is they're doing some really big concerts.
Do you see a responsive ridership during that time
and do the hours align with what concert go is with me?
Yeah, so we do.
So for Padre's games and for major events,
we run what's called a 699,
which is this extra coaster service at the end.
So it'll leave one hour after the end of the game
or after the special event.
We look first at where the event start and end time falls
within the regularly scheduled coaster service.
So if it's a Saturday, you're usually gonna be covered
by the last trip of the night on the coaster.
But if it's a Sunday or a weeknight,
then we might add in an extra trip.
We work with Petco to try to be featured in the emails
for that concert so that people know
that there's extra coaster service or just coaster service
in general, it can take them there.
And then we also promote on our social media,
Take the Coaster to Pink was one recently,
where we ran extra coaster service.
Have you seen the advertising they do on behalf of NCTD
services?
I have not.
I just think maybe they have.
The Padres, yes.
Padres, absolutely, yeah.
Some of the concerts.
concerts, not so much just because they're sort of managed differently I think at Petco but on
Padres, we're all over the radio I hear quite frequently when they talk about getting to the
Padres games and even during the Padres games I've heard them on 97.3 the fans talk about
utilizing Coaster to get to Petco Park. Yeah it'd be really cool if one of the Padres would
take the route and push that on social media. I think that would be really nice.
Yeah, I would tell you, I was listening to 97-3 one day and they were giving another host on 97-3
a lot of grief because he didn't take Coaster to Oceanside to take Metro Link to Angel Stadium
to work the Angels Padres game and so I thought that was pretty cool.
Can I piggyback on that have we have we and I'm not sure how to ask this question, but
So I'm just gonna screw it up and go for it
The the so have we thought about a hey party pass
Promo like hey, you're gonna go downtown you go to the pink concert and we know you're gonna have too much fun
so do it safely and maybe in doing some sort of a promo where we we
co co promo promote with like uber who's then
attracting people to get on the coaster to come back and use our service to go home
We can certainly look at we have a good partnership with uber in terms of
If we have like a service disruption or unfortunately our coaster service isn't able to be running for a particular time
We have a partnership with uber and lift where we will give a discount code so that somebody can still complete their trip with us
I think we can certainly look at how do we can expand that partnership?
Or even just playing the seed of in the knowledge that there is a relationship and somehow I think that is because that's that's a big
Challenge here at NCTD right is whether it's the breeze or anything. It's the last mile, right?
Would say we do have a partnership with not really a partnership, but we're having conversations
we were actually at a conference a few months back and I got approached by a
friend of mine who used to run the New Orleans transit system, and she said, hey,
do you guys talk to your San Diego Tourism Council about how to build a pass? And I said,
well, we do for Comic Con, but it's built in differently. So you can buy like a hotel pack
with a coaster pass and a MTS pass. But that's kind of the only one we do that for. And really,
what we were looking at was getting in contact with someone, and they did get back with us about
what sort of like a pass sale would look like in terms of contract goers or
through part of booking a room at a hotel, like how do you get that
correlation. So that conversation is happening. There's some things that are
complicating it a little bit, but we're working on that. And then my last is
really a comment. I like the idea of having some video capabilities because
when I've gone to medical meetings they always have in the buses a video and it
really educate you on things going on during these three or four days that you
would never know and they're driving attendance. So I think that's probably
expensive and something in the future but I think it could be really effective.
Yeah and as Sean mentioned it in terms of kind of under the guise of a
security measure we've found that some folks will comport themselves in a
particular way if they think they're being watched and so that can help with
security purposes. That'll unlock some grant funds potentially that we're
looking into to try to get the cameras inside of our buses and that screen, but
while it's not displaying the interior of the bus, kind of like that fish eye
back on you, I think we can definitely explore what would look what some type
of ad or NCT information or something like that could be playing.
All right, any other comments before we move on? Yeah, thank you very much. All
right, this was informational so no vote is required. We'll move along to item
number two the next item on the agenda will be a summary of the trends and
observations from feedback received from customers to date from fiscal year 2026
Alicia Pete Watson director of customer service will present at this time
Alicia you have our attention thank you hello committee members board members
Let's see, does this thing work?
All right, so this is going, and we'll back up,
this is an overview of data presented
from the period of July 1st, 2025 through March 31st, 2026.
It encompasses the first three quarters of Q1
of the fiscal year 2026 and comparing them
to the corresponding period of fiscal 2025.
This is a system-wide compliment on FY 2026,
are trending 1.2% higher than the same period in FY 2025,
are reflecting continued positive customer experiences
across NCTD services,
coaster customer service lift facilities
and right-of-way maintenance of way,
all experienced increases in positive recognition
when compared to last fiscal year.
Of the 1,831 customer feedback reports
received in FY26 through Q3,
roughly 58% or 1,053 are specific to modal operations,
which includes breeze, coaster, lift, flex,
and CTD Plus and Sprinter.
The remaining 42% or 778 pertain to customer experience, right of way, maintenance of way,
service planning, security, facilities, and to a lesser extent safety.
In FY26, system-wide feedback weighted by ridership is trending above our FY26 goals
for all modes except flex and sprinter, which are trending below their goals.
You can see this is feedback aggregated against 100,000 trips,
so it's aggregated against ridership, breeze, coaster,
or sprinter are against 100,000 trips, whereas lift, flex,
and CTD plus are aggregated against 1,000 trips.
The next couple of slides are, you'll see,
are going to be bucketed into core categories.
Within those core categories, there are subcodes.
This allows us to see at a trend level of where
we are experiencing core category trends.
And then we're able to drill down specifically
in the subcode category to see and tell a better story about
what's happening on our modes across the service.
So this page defines what core category has what subcodes.
So the increase, this is our system-wide customer feedback.
This is, again, a comparison of core category
and then drilling down, you can see subcode.
The increase in customer feedback
is primarily driven by higher volume
of information requests and service planning inquiries.
We also experienced modest increases observed
in reports related to pass by left passengers,
operator courtesy and unsafe driving conditions,
as well as damaged or unclean vehicles,
but these were not significant.
So system-wide feedback is up 13.4% higher,
and then all departments experienced more feedback
except Flex and Sprinter, which saw decreases.
So now we're gonna look at the modes.
Breeze customer feedback is trending 0.3% higher
when compared to last year.
Majority of the feedback received
is regarding service issues and or operator behavior.
Our top four subcodes continue to remain
the same year over year, however,
no claims and accidents and policy disputes
are experiencing increases as well.
Coaster customer feedback is trending 5.6% higher
this fiscal year when compared to last year.
The increase is due to more feedback regarding
damaged and or dirty trains, as well as IT requests.
Overall, Sprinter system-wide feedback is trending up 47,
I'm sorry, trending lower 47.2% this fiscal year
when compared to last.
This decrease is due to fewer cancellation complaints
and capacity concerns.
Last year, service-related feedback
was significantly higher in Q1 and Q2,
so we're happy to see those decline.
Lift customer feedback is trending up 16.4%
this fiscal year when compared to last year.
issues with reservationist and or dispatch and late service make up the
majority of the feedback received thus far. For flex, flex feedback is trending
58 percent less than where we were last year. The decreasing feedback is related
to fewer pass-by-left passenger concerns, service late issues, however dangerous
driving did increase when compared to last year. I should also note that as
As Mary mentioned in a previous conversation,
NCT plus VISTA was added last year.
That feedback was included in the FLEX department.
It has thus been pulled out
and NCT plus now has its own department,
which is why we're seeing decreases, right?
Customer experience enhancement.
So customer experience conducts monthly meetings
with our modal operations teams.
these meetings, we focus on trends that we're seeing either in the customer
feedback or when we're out there on the modes supporting this is an opportunity
for us to discuss things that are happening within our operations and then
look back to see where we've got improvement. We also conduct robust
community outreach. We partner with community centers and senior living
centers we've been out at community resource fairs and pop-up homeless pop-up
courts and then we continue our youth opportunity engagement which has been
fantastic. We have been on 34 campuses just this year each event during lunch
or after school could generate anywhere between 10 and 150 new youth in our
Youth Opportunity cards. This year we successfully conducted youth opportunity
events and tabling at every single school district within our service area
which is the first time we've been able to achieve that. This past May 2nd we
participated in the San Marcos Unified School District Fiesta for the Future
and we are finally able to be on our San Marcos school campuses this year which
is which was the last school district we were we had been fighting to get on
there we got on there finally. Additionally we've begun to see an
increase in interest from our corporate organizations utilizing coaster for
employee and group travel as a result we just completed our first bulk sale of
over 220 coaster day pass ticket with several additional corporate inquiries
coming in we've got two more slotted so that was very exciting it was a group
about Indiana were staying at the Seabird,
and all 220 of them bought coaster regional day passes,
and they took the coaster down to an event
that they were hosting on the SS Midway,
so a lot of great time.
That concludes the presentation,
and if you have any questions.
Thank you, Alicia, for the presentation.
Taylor, do we have any public comments or?
No, we do not.
Okay, having no comments,
we'll close public speaking right now,
and we'll move on to any comments or questions
from our board members.
We wanna start with you, yeah, go ahead.
Board Member Joyce.
What's a, what is a typical policy feedback
that you would get?
Like no dog policy or something like that?
A service animal is very frequent.
Also, luggage or baggage and aisle ways,
how many bags you can actually bring on board
and store safely.
Most of it is related to our rules of writing.
Okay, just curious, I just couldn't think of that.
Yeah.
And then you had, when you did the visual,
the squares that were on the screen,
I don't remember which slide,
it was like two or three, I think.
Yeah, I.
It looked like you had it separated out by mode
and then you also had it,
were all of the comments double tracked?
So like a breeze comment about customer experience,
would that show up on both of those first two squares?
So this is our total,
this screen represents all the departments at North County
that receive feedback.
So that breeze square is represented then
on the next slide with, well, here we go.
So this feedback, the total feedback
represents that square, if that makes sense.
Does that represent it twice?
Yeah, if I can just add.
The customer experience square is comments specifically
for customer experience staff, or an information request,
or something like that.
Pretty much all of the comments that we receive on Breeze
are customer experience related.
So the visual with all of the squares
is department-based.
Right.
It's just showing you the total feedback
of where it falls into each department.
OK.
I'll follow up after.
If I'm providing a, you know, if Alicia takes my call
and I don't like Alicia, I'm going to say,
I don't like Alicia.
And that's going to be logged as a customer experience
because it's related to a customer experience employee.
or if I say, what time is my breeze bus?
That's an inquiry that would go into
the customer experience bucket
because it's really just an information request
about a particular service.
Okay.
Board Member O'Hara.
It seemed like service was always like one of the top two
on all these.
Mm-hmm.
It kind of feels like a catch-all bucket.
So it's carried a little bit of.
Sure.
So under service, it is all feedback involving service late, service early, pass bys, missed
off requests, no shows, and service cancellation.
There's also some categories that cross over that so just kind of like before I can, we
didn't quite fit into the bucket over there so we went in this bucket.
No, everything's got a bucket.
There's one where it says service and one where it says late, and they want to look
under service.
It's one of the categories is on time and wait.
Yeah.
Sure.
Which screen?
Good question.
Sure, yeah, so service majority of that so you can see 346 customer feedback reports were received this quarter versus 358 of last of that.
That could be service late.
You can see the next category, it's drilling down subcode so pass by left passenger makes up the bulk of that service related feedback, as well as service late and then missed off request so.
Of that 346 there are sub codes in the next in that next category that make up what is service related.
Okay yeah.
I think yes, we're good.
The screen on the right is feeding
into the screen on the left.
So yeah, it's the core category is the top umbrella service
and then everything underneath is the subcode.
Yeah, yes.
It's very hard to quantify and put it in the bug.
I get it.
It's a good attempt at it.
And it's about, I think, as close as we can get.
Thank you.
Board member Garcia.
Great presentation.
Getting the customer feedback, I think, is very important.
Unfortunately, as humans, when things go great, we're saying,
oh, this was great, but we don't tell anyone.
So I just make it a point.
If I get great service at a restaurant,
call the manager over.
My server gets very nervous.
I said, don't worry about it.
I'm going to let them know how much of a great job you did.
And I'll undoubtedly say, most people call you to complain,
Yeah, all right, I just wanna let you know
you did a great job hiring this person and this is why.
So most of our feedback is gonna be like that,
but we need to continue knowing what's going on.
There have been times where I've been driving
and I see one of our drivers and I do something
and I'm like, oh my goodness, but out of driving,
I don't have time to look at the bus number,
the license plate, whoever it is, and make a report.
Sometimes I should, maybe.
But there's been plenty of times that our drivers
have been awesome, too.
So I saw a lot of the negative, but that's going to happen.
Other than that, keep on doing what you're doing.
Let's keep making our service better.
Oh, this is one thing that, yeah, I almost forgot
that I wanted to mention.
A lot of the times, customer feedback is going to be,
the rider will get their first impression from our staff.
And I personally had issues with staff where
I was under the impression that with the,
with my Escondido Police Department badge,
I was allowed to be able to ride at no cost
on transit in the county.
So when I showed my badge to staff member,
he just kind of looked at me and said,
so literally, literally.
And I, and we tend to just kind of show it.
We don't like, you know.
And I remember that I explained to him and then he said,
no, I don't think so.
And I said, we'll call your supervisor.
And the supervisor came or the driver, whoever,
somebody else, and then said the same thing.
I don't think so.
And then I said, oh, okay, I'll then pay as soon as I,
then next stop, I'll get off and I'll pay.
So I just wonder if,
What are we doing for education to our staff
to make sure that they're aware
and make the customer experience better?
As an NCTD board member, you ride free.
Yeah, I know that too.
No, we do.
So Alicia actually in partnership
with our security department
and our senior legal counsel for EEO and civil rights,
they actually put on a regular customer interactive training
where they talk to a group of operators.
They go through ADA instances, a passenger that
might have a mobility device, how to manage that,
a passenger that might be getting a little rowdy,
how does the operator manage that,
and then customer interactions.
So Alicia will walk through some common customer
interactions.
She makes it a point to say oftentimes it's not
what you say, it's how you say it.
So it's a continuous education to make sure
that we're providing good customer experience.
We do utilize, if that happens again,
please fill out a report.
We would like to have that information
because we would just wanna make sure
sometimes it's just a miscommunication
or maybe somebody's having a bad day
and they just don't present themselves
in the best way possible.
But we try to make sure that our operators
are given the tools to provide
the best customer experience possible
because you're absolutely right.
They're our frontline, they're our face.
They have among the most important jobs
that we have at the district
and making sure that somebody is a continuous writer,
oftentimes it's just because of that first interaction.
I'll piggyback too on to what Mary just said.
I think it's also a two-way, right,
that as NCT staff we're offering the policy overviews
and examples, but on the flip side of that,
we get a lot of feedback from our frontline teams
on how we can actually cascade this information
to them better.
There was just one yesterday and they said exactly that.
confused about our fares. So how do we make that easier for an operator? What's the best way to
get that information because they're out there on the street? And so we had great dialogue. We
discovered window dispatch is the best, so we're going to create a tool for them to quickly pick
up from the window when they grab their runs, and it'll be really simple. So that two-way dialogue
of between our front and now that we're all one.
And it's really helpful for us too,
to figure out how to get this information to them
because they're not in front of a tablet
or a laptop like GAO staff.
So, and aside from us being in person all the time,
it's not always easy.
So we appreciate getting in front of them as well
to hear from them on how best to serve.
along those lines two things first Joe if you've got that receipt and maybe they
could tell you who to submit it to from that trip
now on a slightly more serious note do we we do a lot of we have a lot of great
employees I am I'm very grateful that I've never had a bad experience on any
of our and I've had nothing but outstanding riders who greet me with a
smile and it's been a fantastic experience. I've had a few where it's
definitely the end of the shift and I think we all recognize humanity in that
and it can recognize that and do all of it. But I'm curious we also have a lot of
times here we have we've had employer of the year, bus driver of the year, those
great employers. Do we ever take them and pull them on hey in these
categories, what makes you excel in this category in your words and how can we
teach that to the rest of our staff? We do do as I mentioned in the monthly
meetings, we do have a slide dedicated to staff who receive customer complement
feedback. Each mode does something, I will say each department does something
different in terms of recognition for their frontline staff but I'm sure we
you can explore a larger district-wide recognition as well.
Well, not necessarily the recognition,
but the polling of service.
Like, a lot of these people are, they're intentional.
And that's why they're so good at what they do, right?
And getting them to say, hey, what
makes you really excel in the service or the operator
department here that we are seeing a lot of feedback on?
What is it that you do that you see other drivers maybe could
do that we can then transfer to them?
I guess that's kind of what I'm saying.
So taking the input from the success
and seeing if we can transfer it.
I think that's part of the two-way communication
that Alicia mentioned.
So as she and as everybody interacts with operators,
we're gathering those insights into what really works best.
We have a lot of very senior operators
that take it upon themselves to coach newer operators.
In the training department, they talk through,
what does it mean to provide good customer experience?
It's very important to know what's preventing them
from providing good customer experience,
because a lot of the time,
they don't know what the fares are.
So we have a really significant push
to make sure that our frontline is given the tools
to provide that good customer experience.
Just information on a lot of the questions
that they're getting asked.
When we hear from them,
I got asked about this project in Oceanside 10 times today.
What is that?
We want to make sure that they have information
so that it's not like they're just brushing off
a customer because they don't know.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you, Alicia, for the presentation.
Couple of quick questions.
So could you go over for us what the procedure is if someone
has a complaint?
How do they know where to make the complaint?
How is that communicated?
So we do have a Contact Us page on goinCTD.com,
which allows customers to submit their feedback via the web.
Majority of our feedback is called in.
Our phone number for customer experience
is one of the only phone numbers that's
printed all of our materials and advertised 966 6500 but we are seeing
that trend of customers submitting their feedback via the web it's starting
to shift but I would say majority of the feedback that we receive is via call
center it is the only phone number that it's printed everywhere we handle all
calls for anything North County Transit District related it comes through that
number. So yeah, but there's a small portion that will come through either in
person and they'll hand write their verbatim. There's also small percentage
that comes through on social media. Someone will make a comment that's a
little bit harder because we do want to follow up with them and I don't have a
way to contact them back. But a lot of times they'll be already in our system.
So, we see a handle in there, we're familiar, we can check maybe first and last name, either
on Pronto, through Salesforce, or they may already have been in our system and have offered
feedback before.
So, I know there weren't many, but when somebody views the transportation mode as dirty or
unclean, that might not be attended to probably until the end of the shift, right?
So is there any other way to so I know when I was in Europe and taking the train
They have someone sweep through it
I learned one was for security to make sure there's not a bomb but they would also pick up things and tidy things real quickly
I mean they did it really quickly and that takes a lot of staff
I realize that but if we're trying to get people out of cars and feel comfortable on
Transportation something like that could be kind of off-putting. So just wondering if there was any way to address that before the end of the
the shift.
Yeah, actually, I can jump in on that one.
That is part of our plan, I think.
The current budget cycle delayed that a little bit.
We're trying to find ways to put individuals in the field to manage those.
I would say from a customer service perspective, typically, we get that customer service complaint
after the fact that somebody's already taken the ride.
And so if it's the same day, we'll try to get that bus out of service.
If they notify the operator, they'll call it in right away, and we'll either switch out
the equipment or we'll have someone meet them to deal with that issue. One thing that I'm
accustomed to that I've had at other places are people that are on the platform that just
sort of walk around and, you know, clean a bus every third time it comes in, or clean
the train when it comes in. Our coaster schedule is pretty tight. One of the things we get
complaints about probably more frequently is the restroom on the coaster. And so it's
difficult for us occasionally to manage that in real time. But our long term goal is to
have people at the transit centers for the late AM and the early PM to catch sort of that first,
you know, catch them in the middle of a shift and then catch them at the end of the shift so we can
keep the equipment clean. The folks at the divisions do a great job at night cleaning them
up, but you know it only takes one person with a soda can to, you know, make a mess in there and
then we're working backwards from there. So definitely on our list of things to show her up.
and I will say too that if we are seeing something hot come in on calls we'll notify dispatch and
get a hold of either our bus operations or rail operations in that moment so if there is something
that's egregious we've got great relationship with all of our departments. So I would imagine that
would be a someone's perceived and unsafe driver that would be escalated correct? 100 we have
procedures that we follow but more on the cleanliness side if there's someone that's like you know
you've got biohazard or something of that nature on maybe a rail or a bus equipment if they call
it in we've got procedures where we notify dispatch right away and facilities gets being
used well every so yeah. Any other comments or questions before we move on Alicia that was
wonderful thank you. All right this was just informational so we'll move on to item number
three. The next item on the agenda is an update on the NCTD plus micro transit service since
implementation, Mary Dover, Deputy Chief Operating Officer will present this
item. Thank you Mary. Alright thank you, me again. So similarly at the last
Misbitta Committee meeting when we were discussing the work plan there was a
request to provide more of an in-depth overview into the NCTD Plus
microtransit service and how it interacts with our other fixed route
services and its place in our larger transportation system. So I'll provide an
overview of the service as a whole, the two zones it's currently operating in,
and then sort of the future of NCTD+. So just for a bit of background, a few
years ago as a region in San Diego, a lot of jurisdictions were exploring how
to fix that first last mile connection problem that sometimes impedes folks
from taking transit and really adopting transit as their main mode of
transportation. So NCTD endeavored to complete the microtransit pilot program
suitability analysis where we analyzed 14 potential microtransit zones based off
of these four criteria. So equity in the population that we could serve, transit
connectivity, what transit services are existing there or lack thereof, the
efficiency of a potential zone, and then what points of interest are present in
in any particular zone that we might wanna model.
As a result of this suitability analysis,
we determined the top four in tier one
of micro transit zones that we might wanna implement
in the near term that could be efficient and feasible
and a successful service.
So the first was the San Marcos zone
that was opened, launched in 2024,
then VISTA that launched in 2025.
And then the two remaining in tier one
are the Fallbrook-Pala zone
that are kind of in the downtown core of Fallbrook
then go over to the Pala area and then the eastern core of Oceanside. When we're
talking about microtransit we're looking at a particular set of use cases that
make it a suitable service. So if the area is traditionally hard to serve by
more traditional modes of transit like fixed route, so this is the perfect use
case for the Fallbrook Pala Zone. It's further away from our yard. It doesn't
have the density that some traditional communities have
where we would want to put a fixed route service.
Maybe it's over a hill that's difficult for a bus.
Maybe there's something with a topography or the geography
that makes it difficult to serve by traditional transit.
Then we look at first last mile connectivity.
Is there a lack of services to get to and from
like a major rail station that would prevent somebody
from taking those fixed route services?
Or if there is limited pedestrian or bike infrastructure
budding a particular station. So in the Buena Creek area for example there's not a lot of
pedestrian connectivity to that station so that's one of the things that we look at when we're
considering launching a micro transit zone. So for the NCTD plus two zones in particular
this is inclusive of data from the San Marcos and Vista zones. I'll just run through some of
the top things that we track to determine the success of a particular service and the efficiency.
So total boardings, this is through May 30th, so the last completed month.
Across the two zones, we've seen around 43,000 boardings, which is great.
One of the things, an efficiency metric that we look at is pooled trips.
We want to make sure there are at least nine seats in an NCT plus vehicle.
So if we have folks that are coming from a location going to a particular location, we'll
want to make sure those are pooled.
So 61% of our trips on NCTD Plus and both zones
are pooled, which is great.
We also are seeing a significant adoption of the spare NCTD Plus
microtransit app.
98-ish percent of trips are booked through the app.
The alternative is calling into our reservationists
and making a trip that way.
We also want to track wait time to make sure
that it's a convenient service for people to use,
and the median wait time is 15 minutes, which is right in line
with what our goal was.
We tracked this, and this is an important metric
when we're talking about the barriers of the zone.
So we don't want the zone to be too big
because then if one NCT-plus vehicle
is on one side of the city of San Marcos,
it'll take them a significant time to get on the other side,
which would increase that wait time.
We also are seeing a lot of repeat riders.
So the average number of requests per rider is 28,
which is great.
They're using the service, they're enjoying it,
and they're coming back.
We also want to make sure that the hours
and the span of service that we're providing is efficient.
And so we track the amount of passengers
that we're moving per hour.
So on average, every weekday,
we're moving about four passengers per hour.
And on the weekend, it's a little over three on average.
So for both zones, they're comparable
in terms of ridership.
The San Marcos zone, it was our flagship.
And so in the very early days of San Marcos,
we had lower numbers.
VISTA, I think, had the benefit of San Marcos
already being in adoption and so the general writing public was familiar with
the service so we started out and Vista was almost on par with San Marcos and
now they're both hovering around the 2,000 boardings per month. In San Marcos
these are typical ridership generators so as you'd expect Palomar College and
Cal State San Marcos are huge ridership generators as well as San Marcos High
School and Mission Hills High School as well as the Walmart and Costco area on
eastern side of San Marcos and then that Las Posas shopping center in the city of San Marcos,
as well as the two Sprinter, the three Sprinter stations that are present in the zone. Sorry,
four Sprinter stations that are present in the zone. One of the things that we're tracking is
that first last mile connectivity. So we want to make sure that NCTD Plus is interacting well with
our fixed route services, which it is in both cases. Thirteen percent of the trips completed on
on NCT Plus in San Marcos connect to one of those four Sprinter stations, which is great.
Riders can also get a discount if they're connecting to the Sprinter service, so that's
a benefit to them as well.
NCT Plus in Vista, schools similarly are huge ridership generators as well as Sprinter stations,
but we also see the Stater Brothers Shopping Center off of Vista Way, Vista Community Clinic,
And then the VISTA library as well are ridership generators and typical destinations.
In VISTA, we do see more trips connecting to Sprinter.
21% of all trips on NCTD Plus and VISTA connect to Sprinter stations.
And this is a map overlaying what other fixed route services are within the zone.
One of the reasons why we are so selective with the NCTD Plus microtransit service is
because it is a more expensive service to operate.
So we want to make sure that the use case is there,
that it's serving its intended purpose
and that we're able to get the adoption that we need,
connecting to our fixed route services
or just providing good connectivity
among the riders that we do have.
Breeze is by far our most efficient mode.
The cost per passenger is around $11.
But then when you get to those more demand response
or on-demand services, NCD Plus and Lyft,
Paratransit are the most truly on-demand.
flex is deviated so it follows a fixed route
but it can go off route within a particular buffer.
So those costs are typically higher.
Our paratransit is door to door largely.
NCTD Plus does have virtual stops.
There are thousands of them so you're not gonna have
to walk too far to catch an NCTD Plus trip
but that does bring down the cost a little bit.
The cost per passenger for NCTD Plus
is around $57 per passenger.
And Lyft paratransit is $126 per passenger.
I also just wanted to highlight the budget.
As you heard from you in last month, costs are increasing.
And so similarly for the two NCTD plus microtransit zones,
we are seeing both of them.
And the FY27 budget is a little over $2.6 million to operate.
And with that, I will take any questions.
Thank you, Mary, for the presentation.
Suhil, do we have any public comments on this agenda item?
No, we do not.
Okay, at this time we are ending the public registration
to speak on this item.
I'll go to our board members to see
if they have any comments or questions.
I'll go, sure.
Okay, so this is kind of a, I guess it's a double question.
The three zones that we look at,
the primary use cases,
the limited pedestrian bike infrastructure,
And I'd almost be curious to see an overlay map of some of the other maps on here.
If we could lay them all on top of each other and see where usage maps and ridership maps.
And these areas that we target, I feel like pedestrian and bike infrastructure,
or lack of, is generally in rural areas.
People who live in rural areas generally want to drive their car.
And I'm curious, I guess the question becomes,
is that where the grant money is?
Or is that where we think we're going to pick up riders?
It's also less dense, so there's fewer riders to pick up.
So it seems like by having that as a target,
we actually increased our costs.
I'm trying to understand why that's a focus
other than either pushing people on their bicycles
or getting people out of their cars.
But talking to a group of people
who live in a location likely because they prefer
their independence in their cars
and they opportunity to drive their car.
So I'm just curious where that fits in all this
and because when you go to the other maps,
you get into the percentages
and it clearly becomes local use versus long distance,
I think the percentages were 20% like 13%
or something like that.
And so it seems like we're servicing local
and if I live out in the country
or I live in someplace more rural,
I'm not looking to be local,
I'm looking to be long distance.
So just trying to mesh it together
so that I understand why that's our push with this program,
which seems to be very successful in those areas
where there is actually a tighter population
that we're seeing that.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I would say it's a combination of both.
I think there are very specific areas
within our service grid,
especially in cities that have been established for decades.
And I've seen this, this is across the nation,
not just in North County, but like TakeVista, for example,
There are geographic constraints for people that live on the hill that have poor walking
infrastructure or poor bike infrastructure, or it's not safe for them to be able to walk
down the hill to the fixed route, right?
Vista is probably one of the, in San Marcos I would say too, where I'm at, it's very difficult
for some people to get to a fixed route stop, just even with some of that infrastructure,
geography is just tough. The weird part I think about our system is we've got this in San Marcos
which does a little bit of both and then we start talking about places like Fallbrook where there
is a desire to have it in the more rural area where there is sort of less established unincorporated
county activity, less bike and pedestrian infrastructure especially up the hill going
going toward Fallbrook and then sort of connecting all the way across the Paula.
But I think that's a great question.
It's a little bit of a combination of both.
I would say in the case use case for San Marcos and Vista,
there are places directly adjacent to Sprinter stations that are not easy to get
to because the city has been there for 50, 60 years or 30, 40 years.
And there just wasn't there was so much
growth that the infrastructure just didn't catch up to the population explosion
that happened, like especially in San Marcos.
And so while we're trying to work those things backward,
there's a little bit of a lack of infrastructure
for some of our folks who may need to use accessible devices
or our aging population to get to the Sprinter station.
So that's a little bit of both, I would say.
And Mary, I don't know if you want to add to that.
No, I was just gonna say the exact same thing that you did.
So particularly in Vista, there are a lot of areas
where there are no sidewalks.
and one of the reasons why we look at that as a metric
is because it's that first last mile piece.
If somebody doesn't have a safe way
to access a transit center, even if it's close,
we still wanna be able to provide them
with a safe opportunity to access the transit.
So it certainly is present in rural areas
where, you're right, some folks live in the rural area.
They like to drive their car.
We're certainly not asking people
to get out of their cars by any means,
but we wanna make sure that we are still providing
that service, if it is difficult for Fallbrook,
for example, it's not geographically convenient
for us to get up to the Fallbrook area
and serve in that general geographic area,
or there are a lot of people that live in Fallbrook
that might want to go to the new Palomar campus
on the other side of the freeway.
So there are a lot of variety of different use cases
that we look at.
And then I was really encouraged to see
the student participation, and I think that's really big.
And I'm guessing in some of the areas like San Marcos,
where there's a college campus to supplement it,
there's not this issue, but as you try to expand this out
to other areas like Encinitas, right,
if you were to do a school program in Encinitas,
the challenge would be you'd be really busy
and have plenty for a number of drivers to do
for two hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
And in the middle, you got a very drastic drop off.
Is that, how does that use of students,
well, it's a positive play out to stretching this out
in the future to other communities
where that could be a bonus,
but it could be also be an anchor.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
The colleges are a great,
NCTD Plus and Microtransit in general
is really good for serving colleges
because of exactly that.
Not everybody starts at one particular time.
There are classes throughout the day.
There are night classes
where we might not typically have fixed route.
We do see that for K through 12,
well, really middle school and high school,
the best transportation option for them
in terms of public transit is a fixed route.
And so we do add extra service
and we do match our bus routes to the bell times
of the schools that are along the bus route
because that is the most efficient way to get, right,
that crush load of people on the very early morning
and the very mid afternoon to serve the school.
And then the lift, at what point does that cost become,
we'll just buy people their own vehicle.
So we do, per FTA guidelines
and the Americans with Disabilities Act,
any entity that provides public transit service
must also provide paratransit service.
So we do get some funding from the FTA
to supplement some of that cost
because it is incredibly costly.
But yeah, right now it is a requirement.
I guess what I was really kind of going over is how do we bring that?
How do we how do we sustain that cost or keep it there from going?
Because obviously these costs are going to go up and that's going to be going up
really quickly because I'm sure that's one of them.
It's expensive to provide because of the usage,
but also because the expense of that particular service is higher. Right.
Yeah, I think one of the problems that we have is
San Diego County is huge and
You know, we were essentially required by law to sort of offer where we can, you know, not that many people on the bus, a very specific ride time and that creates some complications if we're going from
You know, asking Dito to take somebody to their doctor at UTC or taking somebody to Encinitas or something like that.
you know, I think last time I checked if San Diego County was
a state, it would be like the 48th largest state in the nation
or something like that. So we get a lot of transfers,
especially of out of Escondido down to MTS partners along the
line. I think that's where you see a lot of that cost kind of
come into play. One of the stats that I always kind of throw out
is when people get mad at fixed route, and they and they want to
hate on fixed route a little bit, I always say, well, you
know, like paratransit accounts for less than one half of the
percent of our ridership but almost 25 to 30 percent of our operations budget and you know
we don't really throw that out there as a negative we throw it out there as like it's a complement
of services that that as an agency we should provide to the public as a function of good but
you're absolutely right that cost continues to go up I think it's a lot higher here than it has been
in other places that I've worked at just because of the geographical nature of you know someone
moved to North County to cut down on their potential costs of living or they've moved
even to leaving a little further out to like Menifee or Temecula and so they'll come down
and utilize the service to get to their doctor they had for 20 years it's in Encinitas or Vista
or Oceanside. I mean there's just like a cost associated with that that widespread a mileage and
we were actually working to redirect our electronic system a little bit in the back
office to help us sort of manage that a little differently and strategically kind of place
drivers based on where we have historical locations of pickups through call lines.
So hopefully we'll be able to get that number down a little bit.
Sure.
Appreciate it.
Any other comments or questions?
Okay.
Board member Joyce.
The number that you gave for Sprinter Connections
in San Marcos was 13%.
Do we have like a target percentage
that we're aiming for with the service?
Because I know that it is one of the primary drivers
just to get people connected to our services.
So I would've thought 13% sounded low
for what we would be shooting for.
Yeah, I don't know that we have a specific target, especially
since the service is in its infancy.
It's been operating for two years
in the city of San Marcos.
I think we're certainly looking at how
we can drive those connections.
Part of that was giving riders a discount.
Make your connection to and from the Sprinter.
What we found is sometimes people
will just walk over to a Sprinter station
and take a ride to get the Jeep across.
but nothing we really do to control that.
So we are consistently looking at,
when we launched the VISTA service,
that was one of the focuses of the campaign
and our advertising is reminding individuals
that this is really important
and a great way for you to connect to the Sprinter.
We do see a lot of people who live in the city of San Marcos
and are interested in staying in that zone.
It's still a viable use case,
but we are consistently trying to drive that adoption
of the service for the connections to Sprinter.
So when you say a viable use case,
like what does that mean?
Like we can manage it in our budget or I mean,
because if we focus on it,
like we can manage a lot of things in our budget.
Viable, how do you do find viable?
I think our general goal is to increase ridership
and adoption of transit in general.
So we're looking at the pooled trips,
regardless of start or end location
as an efficiency measure.
So we're continuing to try to drive those too.
60% for that is great.
That's improving the efficiency of the service.
We are also looking at partnerships with the cities
within which we operate.
We've started a conversation with the city of San Marcos
about potentially sharing those costs.
If we do see a lot of people that are staying
within the city, that's a benefit to the city.
And so we're kind of having those conversations
about the service, but in general,
we want to drive ridership across the board,
even with our fixed route,
even though the costs are lower to operate,
it's still, somebody buying a ticket
is not gonna be enough to entirely subsidize the service.
I think in general, our goal is to try to increase ridership
and provide those transportation options
to anybody that is interested in taking transit.
I guess I just, just real quick,
because it's based on what she was just saying.
So I think we could, just in theory,
we could increase ridership if we just became Uber,
because we would be having high ridership, right?
But the further we get away from the collective modes,
the less we are actually still within our mission, I think.
So I'm flagging it, and I'm sorry it's coming at you
because this is like,
I think this is gonna be a hard conversation
that we need to have at some point.
And I'm trying to maybe bring it forward
because this is also focused in two very specific areas
in our broad, large district as brought up by CEO.
17 states are smaller by population than San Diego County.
And so we serve a lot of area
and it's a high concentration of resource
into small areas.
So I think just going off of the other information here,
I mean, there's a big difference between 21% and 13%
in a connection to the sprinter.
So I'd say that VISTA is making, you know,
that's making a really good case,
and maybe that's based on who uses the sprinter
and what the locality.
And maybe that should be one of the things that drives
whether or not we continue or sustain a service.
I think I would really like us to think about what are the mode, what are the signifiers
that we're looking for to say this was an experiment and it wasn't an experiment that
we want to continue because it's costly.
I mean, the driver of the cost here is hugely, I mean, $867,000 one year to $1.3 million,
that's just Vista, right?
So that's a massive increase in cost, and I'm assuming this is the cost to maintain
the same service that we're giving now.
So I mean, those are huge drivers of cost.
So the future, I think we should really get our hands around the future of NCTD Plus,
what it looks like.
I think if we have cities that are providing something just like this that's connecting
to the last mile already, then we should be making commitments to supporting those programs
too.
Oceanside, you know, selfishly, speaking about Oceanside that runs one right now, that connects
a lot of folks to the coaster and sprinter at the Oceanside Transit Center, and, you
know, we're struggling to cover that.
That's on the chopping block every single year with our funding as well.
So if we're doing this to truly connect people to those services, then we should be partnering
with any of the cities that are running programs that do that connection to our modes. That's
my opinion. I would say I don't I'm sorry. No, please. I don't think that I disagree
with your assessment. I've been doing demand response became when it became a big thing
10 years ago. I would say there are definitely some benefits to it. The cost occasionally
is not one of them to sort of answer your earlier question.
I probably wasn't too surprised that connections
to the Sprinter Station in San Marcos were 13 to 20%.
That's kind of where I thought they'd be.
I'm actually surprised that VISTAs not higher.
I thought VISTA would probably be in the 35 to 40% range
just based on the amount of fixed route service
that we have in VISTA.
San Marcos historically has had the 347.
There's another couple of routes
that have touch points in San Marcos,
but as big as San Marcos is, is a city
that had relatively little fixed route service.
VISTA on the other hand has a significant amount
of fixed route service and a hub that's in VISTA
that connects at the Sprinter station.
I sort of expected Sprinter connections in VISTA
to be probably closer to 30%, 35% in the first year,
and then probably balloon a little bit from there.
I ride NCTD Plus in San Marcos.
I can tell you it's a lot of students,
either going to the high school or to the college
or transferring between, if they miss a 347,
they'll jump on it to go from Palomar to Cal State San Marcos.
They use it a lot in the evening to get to the grocery store
and a few other areas over there.
The high school students in the morning,
it's hard for me to get a trip booked in the morning
because the high school students are using a lot.
In fact, I was on there the other day,
yesterday or Monday, and there were out of the four of us
were in the van, three of them were going to Cal State San Marcos from the neighborhoods.
And so it kind of goes back to, and I think, I remember when I interviewed here, one of the
things we talked about was statistical analysis. And if you look at a route like the 347 on our
fixed route side, it is statistically one of the worst routes we have in the fleet. But I would
argue it's one of the most important ones because it's the connectivity piece between Cal State San
Marcos and Palomar. We do have Sprinter service that also sort of does that, but it helps get the
college kids throughout San Marcos to live in the dorms or be able to do some of the
things they need to do. So we kind of quantify that a little bit when we're looking at what
routes probably should move. But I don't disagree with your assessment at all that the cost
is a little concerning and what does that mean if we expand it and how do we manage
that in real time. And so I appreciate those comments.
The only thing that I'll add to Shawn's comments is that I forgot to mention at the top of
the presentation, as this is intended to be a precursor
to a larger service overview conversation
that we expect to have at the July workshop of the board.
Yoon's budget presentation last month,
we talked about potential deficits
that we might have in the coming years.
If we're unable to close those and push comes to shove,
we wanted the board to be able to have some pre-existing
knowledge of all of our services, the purposes
of all of our services, and then some of the costs associated
so that if we get to a point where we have to make some
and have those really challenging discussions
about our services, what's worthwhile to continue to provide
and what we might unfortunately have to let go of,
we will certainly be starting that conversation
at the July workshop next month.
I was just kind of into the point of the 13 and the 21%
and the big shift from district,
I feel like we're still at the point with this program
where we're trying to figure out where it fits, right?
And so the information, well, yeah, we want everyone to get on all modes of travel.
But in the end, we need to give them the vehicle to use in the way that they're going to use it.
And so with this information, it's more, it's a work in progress in my mind
of developing efficiencies within it and not trying to get them to go and use more.
If this is how they're going to use it, how do we provide it efficiently, right?
And I think that's what you're saying, too.
but just kind of realize.
So I, the 13 and the 20% are great feedback numbers,
but I don't know that they are reasons
to evaluate success or not.
I think they're guiding numbers to look at,
and they're really useful in that regard.
Okay, I just have one question and one wishful thinking.
Question is, what are the hours of operation for NCTD Plus?
It varies across zone and across weekday and weekend,
but it's around 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. on the weekday,
and then I believe it's eight to eight on the weekends.
And then, is it possible that,
since it's such a service for the two colleges,
that they could help with funding?
We've started conversations with anybody
that will take our call about potential funding streams
for the NCDD Plus service, so, you know,
you know this as a city official,
and everybody is a little bit constrained at the moment
in terms of finances.
So we're starting the conversation.
For this we've gotten is with the city of San Marcos.
They've been a great partner
and they recognize the viability of the service
and the benefits to their residents and visitors
of the service in the city of San Marcos.
So they're willing to chip in at least a little bit
in the interim and maybe scale it going forward.
But yeah, we're continuing to have those conversations
and starting those conversations
with anybody that might be interested.
And then I also-
Yeah, we've got a good relationship with Palomar
and Cal State San Marcos, we're being,
we're in a really good partnership space right now
with Palomar where we just started an apprenticeship program.
So we want to be thoughtful that we don't hit them
with another one right out the gate.
But Cal State San Marcos
is definitely an opportunity center for us.
We have a fair amount of students that utilize Sprinter
with the state elevated station there on campus
as well as bus service between the 347 and NCTD Plus.
So for the paratransit, is it possible to everything
that maybe Medicaid and Medicare might cover
some of those fees for transportation for individuals
who are on disability, for instance?
It does, actually.
We are able to build the county for a small portion
of reimbursement through Medi-Cal.
It does not cover nearly what it maybe should,
but that's neither here nor there.
And you built per rider or just a global fee?
So we're very careful because also per FTA guidelines,
we cannot, we're constrained in what we track
in terms of destination and origin.
So this is intended for anybody
that is a registered paratransit user.
It doesn't matter where they're going.
It could be going to a friend's house
or a doctor's appointment.
It doesn't matter.
It's just complimentary paratransit service.
However, where they are going to a doctor's office
or a hospital or anything like that,
we do track that data and we are able to submit it.
So it's per rider, but it's based off of a location.
Got it.
All right, so thank you for this session.
Thanks everybody for your input.
This was informational only.
Do any of the committee members have anything to report?
before we close.
All right, so our next meeting will be scheduled
a board workshop Thursday, June 18th at two o'clock.
And I believe now we can call the meeting a join.