(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 469: On the Bus in Boise

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Elaine Clegg, CEO of Valley Regional Transit in Boise Idaho. We chat about how the Boise bus system is changing, the impact of fast regional growth, energy infrastructure and favorite transportation board games.

To listen to this episode you can find it at Streetsblog USA or in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

Jeff Wood (1m 21s):
Elaine Clegg. Welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Elaine Clegg (1m 24s):
Well, thanks for having me. It’s really exciting to be here.

Jeff Wood (1m 26s):
Thanks for being here. Before we get started, can you tell folks a little bit about yourself? Sure.

Elaine Clegg (1m 31s):
So I’ve been working in transportation and land use issues for, gosh, 30 some years. Started as a neighborhood activist, went to work for a nonprofit in that role. Got involved in some of the national stuff around reauthorization, way back during T 21. Met a lot of really wonderful folks nationally who have been mentors and people who have shared ideas with me. I then ran for the Boise City council and served in that role for 20 years. During that time, I served on the board of our Regional Transit authority, and last year the CEO position at the Transit Authority came open and I applied for it and I got it.

Elaine Clegg (2m 13s):
And so I left city council and came here

Jeff Wood (2m 17s):
After quite a while at City Council too. How has it been that transition between being on council and now the head of a transit agency?

Elaine Clegg (2m 24s):
I really am enjoying it in terms of the work. It’s fun. It’s interesting. I had a conversation with one of our senators who also served as a legislator for a long time and then ended up in an executive position now as a legislator again. And we both agreed that it’s really fun to be able to make a decision and be able to take action to move it forward right away, to have people who are willing and excited to begin implementing things that you’ve been working on, not three years from now, but now. And to be able to really direct the kind of work that the agency’s doing in a different way than you can from a legislative seat.

Elaine Clegg (3m 11s):
So that part has been very, very fun and exciting and I think we’re making good progress. I do miss some of the legislative stuff.

Jeff Wood (3m 22s):
Yeah, I can imagine.

Elaine Clegg (3m 23s):
I’m a policy wonk, so there you go.

Jeff Wood (3m 26s):
Yeah, I know. Well, that’s another question I have is like, how did you get into this? I mean, you mentioned, you know, neighborhood activism and getting into, you know, activism at the federal level, but how did you get into this? Were you interested in transportation when you were a little kid or was it something that just kind of popped up later on?

Elaine Clegg (3m 41s):
Well, I’ve always been interested in traveling different ways. I rode my bike, rode a bus. My mom didn’t drive when I was a kid. We lived in Denver, so I rode the bus a lot there, rode my bike primarily when I lived in Boise after we moved back, including to college once I started college. And so I’ve always been interested on a personal level. And then I was a young mother working from home and something happened in my neighborhood that really made a big impression on me and in a bad way, it’s something that I didn’t think should have happened in the way that it happened. So I got involved in the neighborhood association and quickly found that all those years of using different means of travel really had paid off in terms of, of a deep understanding of how cities are built, how cities work, and went from being an art major who was running a little small graphic design business to working for a nonprofit on land use and transportation.

Jeff Wood (4m 43s):
And how did you get involved with people like the Surface Transportation Policy Project?

Elaine Clegg (4m 47s):
Well, through that nonprofit, they were looking for organizations around the country that could be on the ground working on these issues. And we ended up being one of those. And so really some, I think incredible leadership and foresight on the part of the leadership of that organization. Not to just say, Hey, here’s some material, would you pass it on for us? But to bring us to trainings to help support us financially, to making it very real for us to be able to support the issues that they were working on.

Jeff Wood (5m 21s):
Yeah, I just think sometimes I feel like we don’t talk enough about kind of the organizing that went on maybe in the eighties and nineties and two thousands around some of those bills and, and I know that folks wanted to, you know, be where we are now in terms of the amount of discussions we have about the smaller issues that we’re focused on, like transit and things like that. But back in the day, I mean, there seemed to be a lot of discussion about how do we change the system so that it works better for us. And I feel like Tea and T 21 and some of those small incremental pieces that moved us forward were very instrumental in getting us to where we are today.

Elaine Clegg (5m 54s):
Oh, I would absolutely agree. And in fact, I think, you know, we took a few steps back in the authorizations after that and we’re now making up that ground. But boy, that training really paid off when the bipartisan infrastructure law came around and being involved in making sure that some of the clauses in it really served us better, including a lot on the rail side. ’cause I’ve been working with some on that.

Jeff Wood (6m 18s):
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about Boise. It’s a place that I am not super familiar with, but I’d love to learn more.

Elaine Clegg (6m 25s):
You know, I grew up here, I lived in Denver as a kid for six years, and I think that’s really where I learned to love cities because Boise at that point was only about 35,000 people when we moved back to Boise. However, had it grown tremendously, it was almost 70,000 people. And since then, it’s been among the fastest growing regions in the country over the last three decades. So it’s now 240,000 people. It really is Thriving urban area. It has an incredible downtown. In the eighties, I still have a T-shirt that’s black, has a little square on it and says Boise after eight o’clock downtown.

Jeff Wood (7m 4s):
And

Elaine Clegg (7m 6s):
And it really was that way because the strategy of urban renewal was to tear everything down and rebuild new stuff, but they got it all torn down and then nothing happened. And so there was really nothing downtown for a four square block area for almost 20 years. And I think If, you came to Boise today, you’d be probably unbelieving of that because even Dan Burden was with me one night in the middle of what used to be that wasteland marveling at the number of people, the activity, the kinds of activity, the number of restaurants, the people on the street. And that really is what downtown Boise has become. One night I was riding home from city council on my bike and stopped in one of the blocks.

Elaine Clegg (7m 51s):
There were 91 bikes parked in that block at 10 30 at night on a Tuesday in October.

Jeff Wood (7m 58s):
That’s awesome. Yeah,

Elaine Clegg (7m 60s):
So the, you know, that’s the kind of city it’s become now surrounding. It is a big suburban area with all that growth. It’s not just Boise that’s grown. The region is now almost 800,000 people. One of the smaller communities just west was 2,800 people about 40 years ago, and it’s now 125,000 people. As you can imagine, almost all of that growth is very suburban in nature, not very walkable, a lot of drivable suburban kind of style. However, having said that, all of the downtowns in the larger cities are now beginning to thrive again and redevelop the westernmost city in the region.

Elaine Clegg (8m 40s):
Caldwell has a downtown that had a creek in it. Originally it was covered up because Stockyards made it untenable to be around. And over the last 25 years, they’ve uncovered it and made it an amenity in their downtown. They have walking paths around it. It’s now a Thriving vibrant downtown with a lot of activity every night. So I think in that way, the region has really embraced a new way of building, but on the edges of all of those cities is a lot of suburban drivable development that is very hard to serve with. Transit is not very walkable, creates a lot of traffic congestion, and yet the region is a wonderful place to live.

Elaine Clegg (9m 22s):
It’s got a four season climate, but it’s pretty temperate. It’s got foothills that have been protected as a public resource. It’s got 52 miles of bike walking path along the river, so got a lot going for it. You can fly fish in downtown Boise on a nice fall day and just, it’s wonderful. Regularly, I don’t know what the numbers are, but the river is a place where people recreate and there are thousands of people every day on the river in the summer floating about a five mile stretch.

Jeff Wood (9m 55s):
Oh, that’s awesome.

Elaine Clegg (9m 56s):
So it’s a great place to live, but clearly, you know, challenged with all of the things that growing Western cities are challenged with.

Jeff Wood (10m 4s):
Well, I wanted to ask about that too. It feels like, you know, Boise’s often mentioned as one of the places where people have moved because of the pandemic and that migration that’s happened from, you know, western cities, from San Francisco and Seattle’s and such to, you know, the smaller large cities like Boise, Austin, et cetera. And so I’m curious what that’s meant for the discussions about growth in the city and the region overall and what that means for a transportation too.

Elaine Clegg (10m 26s):
Great question. The first thing it’s meant is that it really blew up our housing market. We were always a pretty affordable housing market despite all of the growth. And we had the largest increase in housing prices anywhere in the country after the pandemic. Boise’s now a very unaffordable in terms of housing market as is the rest of the region. And there’s not enough housing supply. We’ve done a lot of housing analysis and know we’re 27,000 housing units short, all of those things. And so that’s been the first impact. And out of that, of course have grown a lot of discussions. Well, do you shut the door? What do you do? Oh gosh, now the freeway’s a mess.

Elaine Clegg (11m 6s):
What are we gonna do about it? We don’t have any more room on it. It’s gonna be $2 billion to add another lane. Is that worthwhile? Maybe not, but maybe we should look at a bypass highway. Does that make sense? You know, all of those discussions are starting to pop up. What hasn’t been part of the discussion, frankly, for the last 10 or 15 years is what is the role of transit? I think one of the reasons I got hired in this position is that they knew that I was capable of making it part of the discussion again, and that it needed to be. And so over the last year we’ve done a lot of outreach, a lot of awareness, raising a lot of, gosh, what’s Transit’s role as an answer to some of these challenges that we’re facing.

Elaine Clegg (11m 52s):
And there’s still a fair number of people who say, oh gosh, you know, this is the West. Everybody loves to drive. I don’t know why anyone would wanna do transit. But there’s a growing number of people who are saying, wait a minute, riding the bus is actually pretty cool. I can get work done. I, you know, don’t have to be white knuckled in traffic. I can sleep, I can listen to podcasts, I can do whatever I want without being distracted, things I shouldn’t be doing while I’m driving. And oh, by the way, if I don’t have a lot of money, it really can be a money saver. The bus I ride, I try to ride as frequently as I can. Has a young engineer, for instance, who rides regularly because he and his wife made the decision that they wouldn’t buy a second car and he could get to work on this bus and it worked just great and he loves it.

Elaine Clegg (12m 43s):
So it’s not just people who don’t have any other choices, it’s people who are looking at this choice saying, Hey, this is something that could make a difference in our lives if we make it. So we’re trying to highlight those kinds of stories so that the decision makers who still have the perception that transit has a very limited place in the discussion can begin to understand that no, in fact, Transit could have a really big place in this discussion and really If, you look around the country is the only thing that truly mitigates traffic congestion in any meaningful way. We know from long experience that just adding more lanes only induces more traffic.

Elaine Clegg (13m 23s):
And if we’re going to make a difference in moving more people in less space, how can we do it? Transit really is that answer.

Jeff Wood (13m 31s):
I was really impressed by looking at maps the other day. I noticed that the geography is such that it feels like it’s very conducive to a grid network. And I’m wondering, you know, the system is laid out and how it might be better serving the region as a whole.

Elaine Clegg (13m 44s):
You know the, the system right now, you’re right, we’re, we’re kind of a linear valley. We have mountains on the south, we have a river running through it. We have desert on the north and a desert to the south. And so we have kind of a compact space that we’re limited to in some sense, at least in the eastern edge of the end of the valley on the western end. There’s a lot of farmland to the south that could be developed, but it’s one of the most important economic drivers in this region in terms of the agricultural industry out there because it’s one of the four regions in the country that grows a lot of seeds for all of the world. And so it has this great microclimate that we really shouldn’t be just building houses on.

Elaine Clegg (14m 28s):
So given all of that, we’ve tried to make the growth more compact. And you’re right, it is pretty conducive to service. We don’t have a stable funding source as a transit agency. So right now we’re dependent on much like the Washington region, but absent the federal money, we’re dependent on our local governments to give us a contribution based on whether they think that it’ll be worth it to them or not. City of Boise is our largest contributor. The rest of the cities are beginning to understand that, oh, there is reason to contribute more and get more service, but it’s very challenging. So as a result, when I came on board, I ask us to take a deep look at what we could do to make that bus system better despite not having more money.

Elaine Clegg (15m 16s):
And you hit on exactly that thing, which is connections between the bus service that we do have, and then of course always with bus service frequency. And so we’ve embarked on a process to redesign the bus system around those principles and are beginning in June of this year to start service that will take advantage of the grid, connect things in that way, and also take advantage of the places where there are already a lot of people who could ride or will ride by increasing frequency on those routes.

Jeff Wood (15m 53s):
What was the process like for designing that new system that’s coming on in the summer?

Elaine Clegg (15m 58s):
Well, we started with a survey. We said, what do you think would make the bus system better? And got really overwhelming response that said, frequency and expanded hours, also better bus stops and better amenities on board, but not quite as high as support. And then regional rail, which we’ve also been working toward, was the next highest item in terms of support. So we started there, then we said, okay, we are gonna make changes. We started from a place where we didn’t think we had enough money to actually provide as much service as we had been providing. So if we cut service rather than just cutting it, why don’t we consolidate it in places where it’ll be the most effective?

Elaine Clegg (16m 40s):
What do you think? People philosophically said, sure, yeah, of course we should do that. And then we showed ’em what it looked like and they said, well wait a minute, that not my route. I really like that one. You know? Yeah. But as a result out of that, then the local government said, oh, our people do value this, and what can we do to preserve some of that less frequent service while we still do lean into consolidating in the places where we’ll have more ridership. And so an iterative process back and forth with the public and with a, a local decision maker saying, okay, you said this. Here’s what we could do. Oh wait, you didn’t want that? How about this?

Elaine Clegg (17m 20s):
Here’s how much it would cost. Is that worth it? And landed, frankly, in a place where we got support for almost 15% more service. And so we were able to consolidate and really provide more frequent and extended service in those places where we knew we needed to. At the same time, we preserved service in almost all of the other areas, even though in some cases it was less frequent or less extensive.

Jeff Wood (17m 48s):
I read somewhere, I think it was you that said that you’re the only city in the country that doesn’t have a dedicated source of funding from a state agency or federal for that matter or federal. Yeah. And so I’m wondering if this bus network redesign and the surveys and all the stuff that went along with that, is building a case for you all to actually have dedicated funding?

Elaine Clegg (18m 8s):
We hope so. That’s what I’m trying to do as the leader of this organization is say, here’s the resources I have today, here’s what we can do with those resources, and we’re doing everything we can. In addition to the redesign, we’re really leaning into directly generated revenue through advertising and other things. We’re trying to increase ridership and thus increase fares. And so the case I hope to be able to make out of all of this is, okay, we did what we could. We’re doing everything we can. We’re increasing ridership, but it’s not enough to serve this growing region that has needs that frankly have outstripped our ability to serve them.

Elaine Clegg (18m 48s):
We need your help.

Jeff Wood (18m 50s):
You also mentioned regional rail. I’m curious about the process for thinking about that as well and what the line might look like, who we would serve. It’s an interesting kind of thought process for putting those things together.

Elaine Clegg (19m 1s):
Yeah, you know, everyone, almost everyone says, gosh, when are we gonna get light rail? And I like to say to them, when we have enough demand, we will, because it’ll be obvious that we need it. But right now the demand isn’t there for that kind of an investment. On the other hand, we have incredible asset running right through the middle of our valley. So we have a main line, it’s all owned by Union Pacific that handles a lot of freight that skirts. The valley on the south does run through the middle of the two most Western cities, Nampa and Caldwell. But at Nampa there’s a short line that takes off and that short line then runs through the city of mood and the city of Boise, the two other biggest cities in the state of Idaho.

Elaine Clegg (19m 48s):
And we did a little, you know, WIC and dirty analysis of the 10 most likely station areas on that 25 mile corridor plus the eight miles between Nampa and Caldwell. And there’s 320,000 people and 190,000 jobs within two miles of those station areas. That’s almost half the people and nearly two thirds of the jobs in the region. It happens to parallel the freeway and large degree and the freeway is becoming very congested and people are beginning to, you know, get activated about trying to do something about that. But there’s not many choices. And because it’s an existing heavy rail, there’s an opportunity to run a heavy rail vehicle, much like the front runner in Salt Lake City, which people are somewhat familiar with on the existing track.

Elaine Clegg (20m 40s):
Improved, of course there’d have to be improvements on it and not make the kind of investment that we’d have to make to move to light rail in the region and frankly not the investment we’d have to make to, even if we took the right of way that the rail runs in and paved the whole 33 miles and ran bus on it, while the operations might be a little cheaper, actually getting to the point of being able to run the bus would be more expensive than just using the existing rail. So given all of that, and I happen to love rail, I grew up moving between Denver and Boise in the summertime on rail and really learned to enjoy just how wonderful it is to travel that way.

Elaine Clegg (21m 22s):
And so I’ve always been interested in trying to figure out a way to use this rail line. We had rail service, Amtrak, long distance rail service up until 1997 and there’s long been a movement to try and reintroduce that. So I got involved in that movement during the pandemic and, but the ulterior motive for me, even well before I took this job was that that would open the door to this regional rail that could make such a difference in this region. You know, a freeway lane can move a thousand cars an hour, maybe 1500 if everything’s running perfectly. And a rail line like we’re talking about, can easily move 10,000 people an hour. So If, you look at the investment per movement, you can really make the case financially that it makes sense.

Elaine Clegg (22m 7s):
Not to mention that there really isn’t anywhere else to try and move people in this valley without double decking the freeway or you know, the kinds of things that you see that we now just don’t work. Yeah. So that’s where the movement came from. We’re at a point where we put in for a quarter ID program grant, did not get it, but got a lot of input that we had a great line, there were technical problems with the application, not the application itself, administrative problems, and we should continue to move forward. At the same time we’re in the works for a reestablishment of their long distance line through an FRA study. So we’re continuing to work on all of those.

Elaine Clegg (22m 48s):
And then as a organization, valley Regional Transit is pursuing what it would take to use the corridor for regional rail by doing a planning environmental linkages study on that rail line with our local MBO.

Jeff Wood (23m 2s):
That’s really interesting because I feel like the infrastructure bill and all the money that’s there for inner city passenger rail has really kind of opened up a lot of discussions lately about what it means to connect places around the country. And I imagine that that discussion, like you said, is something that got you thinking more about the local aspect of that too. I’m wondering other ways that maybe the infrastructure bill or maybe the Inflation Reduction Act have kind of impact your thinking on getting funding for certain projects or expanding service or anything along those lines that you’re working on.

Elaine Clegg (23m 32s):
Well certainly we’re trying to figure out what our climate strategy is, and we serve a two county region and in Ada county we are electrifying our fleet. You may have heard by now that there’s a lot of challenges in doing that. On the infrastructure side, we’ve had to make big investments in electrical infrastructure to be able to offer the kind of charging we need for an industrial fleet. The rate structure isn’t great in terms of serving those kinds of EV fleets. So a little bit of headwind there. It is not gonna stop us. It’s still the right thing to do. And the buses themselves are incredible. They’re quiet. People love them, they’re really comfortable.

Elaine Clegg (24m 13s):
The ride is great. So we’ll continue to do that. Our other county to the west is a little bit different. We’re in a location there that electrifying would be even more expensive we think. And it’s possible that in that county we’re gonna lean into renewed natural gas. It’s a big dairy producing county and the dairies out there are working right now to put digesters on all their waste systems and produce natural gas out of the methane. Pretty cool. Rather than putting that methane in the air, using it for fuel and a fuel that actually is quite low emission and very efficient.

Elaine Clegg (24m 54s):
And so we’re looking in that county about leaning into that. So the infrastructure bill has lots of grant opportunities for both of those things. We right now have almost 30 million in grants in ADA County working on the electrification and working on a bus rapid transit line to take advantage of the electrification. And we’re looking at what are the grants we can apply for this year and next that would move us forward in the other county and continue to move us forward here. The rail portion of that is also, I think, a, a really big opportunity. The line here will need a lot of infrastructure work. We need some grade separated crossings, especially on the main line.

Elaine Clegg (25m 36s):
So we’re looking at, and in fact, I helped advocate for many of the things that are in there looking now, how to figure out how to use those.

Jeff Wood (25m 45s):
I just find it really interesting. And actually, I thought about you the other day when I was writing my newsletter and you know, there’s a whole discussion about direct pay and how the Inflation Reduction Act allows cities and transit agencies and other nonprofit organizations to apply for funding to do a lot of, you know, get 40% off basically a lot of this electrical infrastructure. And I’m just, I’m thinking about all the things that transit agencies could do that’s not necessarily related to bus operations, but even buildings or, you know, figuring out how to, how to charge the batteries or whatever it is. But it feels like there’s an opportunity there for greening up a little bit where you might not have had that opportunity before because there’s so much funding available for it.

Elaine Clegg (26m 23s):
Absolutely. So one other initiative that we’re undertaking right now is a review of our existing energy reduction plans, but also an expansion of that to more of our facilities to see what we can do to lower our car, our footprint in all of those facilities. In terms of the energy we use, we think there’s an opportunity to put a solar array on the roof of one of our facilities, for instance. We think there’s opportunities to use solar in other ways. We know that changing our heating system is gonna make a big difference in the amount of energy we use. So we’re right now doing the analysis to figure out what those things are, and then we’ll be looking at which of those grants we’ll be applying to, to do those things.

Elaine Clegg (27m 10s):
Because we have old facilities, we’re gonna have to, as you pointed out, we’re gonna have to spend money on ’em anyway. We ought to be spending that money in a way that reduces our use of energy.

Jeff Wood (27m 20s):
Yeah. And and not just reduce energy, but reduce your costs. Right. I imagine that there’s, there’s a lot of money that’s spent on operations that could be reduced just by going to that side of the generation spectrum.

Elaine Clegg (27m 32s):
Yeah, well we think leaning into even the renewed natural gas could save us $15,000 a month.

Jeff Wood (27m 39s):
That’s a lot of money.

Elaine Clegg (27m 40s):
Yeah, it

Jeff Wood (27m 41s):
Is. Is that more service or like how is that money get reinvested?

Elaine Clegg (27m 45s):
We haven’t determined that

Jeff Wood (27m 46s):
Yet.

Elaine Clegg (27m 47s):
It’s a great question. Yes. More service would be my inclination. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (27m 53s):
What did you have to do as an agency to get ready for, I mean, you mentioned the electrical infrastructure for the buses, but I’m, I’m wondering like kind of what the process was for getting ready for putting together a service plan for electric buses, putting together the bus barns and everything that went along with that. It seems like it’s a big discussion around the country right now.

Elaine Clegg (28m 12s):
It is. And you know, as great as it is to have access to the funding directly instead of through state departments of transportation. I think one of the challenges we found with the infrastructure law is how do you take advantage of that access? In our case, we’ve been using consultants, we’re a very small agency in terms of staff, and so the Consulting world has been incredibly important to us in offering the capacity that we don’t have to do the studies and produce the plans that make us competitive to actually get those grants. That’s one strategy. I was just reading the other day that, you know, as a city council member, I was very active in the National League of Cities, the National League of Cities put together what’s called the infrastructure hub.

Elaine Clegg (28m 56s):
And that hub is designed to help train cities how to go after these grants and actually help them with technical assistance to do that. The article I read said that the cities who were part of that were 80% more successful in getting the grants than cities that weren’t. So as great as the infrastructure law is, there is kind of a learning curve with these local agencies trying to figure out how to access it. In our case, we’ve used the Consulting world to bridge that gap.

Jeff Wood (29m 26s):
This is kind of a fun question. What’s your favorite bus route in the city?

Elaine Clegg (29m 30s):
Well, so the one I ride most often, I would have to say is my favorite one. We have, as I mentioned, the the region has a number of different cities I live in, almost in downtown Boise. My new office is in downtown Meridian, which is 12 miles to the west. We have a bus route that gets me there. I have to make a transfer. And I’ve gotten to know the bus drivers. I get on board and they say hello and we talk about kids and you know, life and all the great things. As I said, I’ve made a friend with one of the young engineers that rides one of those buses. So for now that’s become my favorite route. My second favorite route is that we have great service to the Boise airport.

Elaine Clegg (30m 12s):
It doesn’t serve early or late yet, so some of those early flights and late flights can’t use it. But we have an underground bus station in the middle of downtown Boise. It’s one of our most amazing assets. And from that station, I can grab a bus to the airport that takes me 15 minutes to get there, costs a dollar 50 if I fly into the airport in the hours the bus is running, it costs me a dollar 50 to get downtown in 15 minutes. And I ride that one quite a bit. So that’s my next favorite route.

Jeff Wood (30m 44s):
Are there any other projects that you’re super excited about that have been happening with you at the Transit Agency?

Elaine Clegg (30m 50s):
We do actually have another project that I’m very excited about. Every Transit agency has access to funding to serve older adults and persons with disabilities. Many of them use those funds to help fund services from senior centers, for instance, or services from social service agencies that serve persons with disabilities. We’ve done that for a long time. We own all of the vehicles, but we subgrant to various organizations such as senior centers or service agencies to provide the drivers and actually provide the service. We had an incident last year that troubled us because passenger was injured and ultimately died and we couldn’t, we couldn’t control it because we didn’t hire or supervise that driver.

Elaine Clegg (31m 40s):
And we were already exploring changing that service. And it really prompted us to look at, not only is there this liability issue involved, but could we provide better service if we consolidated all of it into one thing. So previously we had five service areas and 12 different agencies with different access points, both phone numbers and websites, different scheduling that didn’t overlap, so you couldn’t take advantage of trips that might actually overlap. And the zones created barriers between moving around within the region. So we consolidated that all into one service area and we are operating the majority of it.

Elaine Clegg (32m 23s):
We have a couple of partners that are continuing to help us operate, but all of it is under one service, number one website, one scheduling system. And we have already provided almost 2000 rides in three weeks. We’re pretty confident that as we kind of shake out the issues with it and really get it up and running, that not only will we provide more rides than were being provided previously, but we’ll provide better rides because people can move across the region and across those barriers and boundaries, we’ve already gotten contacted by a number of other transit agencies that are going, oh wow, how’s this working?

Elaine Clegg (33m 4s):
What do you think? And we think that it probably will be a wave of the future. We’ll see. But just really excited about the possibilities and providing services in places we couldn’t before. Providing services in ways that allow people who otherwise are kind of stranded and isolated to get more places more often.

Jeff Wood (33m 26s):
Yeah, I feel like those connections, we’ve been talking more about the isolation, focusing also on getting people to healthcare and and appointments and those types of things that are necessary. It’s kind of this evolving discussion in the transportation world that I think probably should have happened 20 years ago, but it’s coming to the surface now and I think that’s really important.

Elaine Clegg (33m 44s):
I agree. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (33m 46s):
State Street, I’m curious about that as well. I saw a couple of articles on it, but I wasn’t sure where it ended up.

Elaine Clegg (33m 51s):
Sure. So State Street is the northern most arterial in the valley. It runs East West, runs from downtown Boise to the community of Middleton, which is on the western edge of the valley near Caldwell. And right now it’s our highest ridership route, the highest ridership route in the state of Idaho. We’ve done a lot of studies on it over the years and determined it should be a bus rapid transit route and have been moving to increase the frequencies so that the service level matched that vision. And at least inside the boundaries of the city of Boise, we’re at that service level now we got a raise grant to provide some of the infrastructure such as raise platforms and amenities around stops and better pedestrian bicycle connections to it.

Elaine Clegg (34m 39s):
The last thing that we lack is a true vision for how the roadway itself is gonna be configured consistently over the distance that we cover. We’re in the process right now of an addendum to the document that was originally produced that talked about that, that we think is a better solution. It’s still a seven lane profile, but it has a multi-purpose lane that includes the buses in inline stops and then turns in and out, and then two through lanes. It also separates both bike and pedestrian from the roadway in multi-use paths behind landscape strips, so protected from the traffic.

Elaine Clegg (35m 22s):
And so we’re really excited to move that vision forward as we’re now getting it adopted. But more importantly, we just got the NEPA clearance to actually begin building the bus stop amenities and the pedestrian amenities that we were awarded in the RAISE grant. So we’re starting construction on the first of those bus stops this spring, and within we hope three or four years, the corridor will both be more efficient in how the buses themselves run, but also much more attractive and easy to use.

Jeff Wood (35m 55s):
Have you had problems like trying to build bus lanes? It seems like that might be an issue in the state of Idaho.

Elaine Clegg (36m 2s):
Yeah. Well, and we’re, they’re not bus lanes per se. Right? Right. As I said, they’re multimodal lanes. Multipurpose lanes. And as it was originally conceived, it was conceived as an HOV lane. And we actually think that this is a better solution than that because it allows us to be curb running. It allows the stops to be more accessible to people, even though they now have to cross the whole street. We recognize that hurdle If you will. So yeah, that has been probably a big point of discussion in how we handle that. We think we’ve landed in a place that’s gonna allow us to go forward, maybe not bus rapid transit as it’s defined as gold standard across the country, but certainly in our region.

Elaine Clegg (36m 48s):
I think it’s going to be amazing in terms of how it runs compared to other bus lines. We’re also doing some Q jumps and we’re doing some of the signal prioritization, those kinds of things that will help the buses run better, moving all of the stops far side, all of the things that make it work.

Jeff Wood (37m 6s):
Yeah. And my reference was related to the state legislature not allowing bus lanes in the state, which is something that’s actually happening more often in states around the country. I know that Texas has done some stuff saying, you know, no complete Streets and things like that, which has made it harder for active transportation activists to do their thing. Yeah,

Elaine Clegg (37m 24s):
So far none of that here. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (37m 29s):
Well, I’ve got one last kind of fun question for you. What’s your favorite transportation related board game?

Elaine Clegg (37m 34s):
Ooh, you know, my family and I played tons and tons of board games and anything train related is always the best. So which of the, which of the boards do I like the best? Of the ones that are train related on Ticket to Ride, and I’d probably have to say USA mega, although the one that has New York City and has both buses and taxis and rail is kind of fun as well. But Ticket to Ride, I’d have to say is a favorite.

Jeff Wood (38m 9s):
That’s awesome. I went to, I think I mentioned this to you last time I saw you was I went to Zion on a man trip with some friends. We do this for every three years or so. And what we do is basically we’ll go hiking during the day and at night we play board games and that’s like kind of what we do. And so one of my friends brought this game called The City, and basically the whole idea is to like build a city out of, it’s a card game. And so you build the city, you know, and if there’s fountains, it’s more walkable and if it’s car related. So you want to get more of those. And so they add up these points and stuff like that. And so you can go the walkable city route, If you want, which might actually end up winning in the end. Or you can go the car oriented way, If you want, and you can go, you know, as long as you get all the cards right, it’s kind of a luck game for the most part.

Jeff Wood (38m 50s):
But I thought that that was really fun and interesting and, and a different way to think about cities was all these board games. We also play another game called Power Grid. I dunno if you’ve ever heard of about that.

Elaine Clegg (38m 58s):
Oh yeah. Oh, I love Power

Jeff Wood (38m 59s):
Grid. It is a crazy game, right? It’s, it’s

Elaine Clegg (39m 3s):
Absolutely, we’ll have to look into the city. I love that.

Jeff Wood (39m 6s):
Yeah, it’s fun. I

Elaine Clegg (39m 7s):
Have five kids and 14 grandkids, and we sit around a lot and play a lot of board games.

Jeff Wood (39m 12s):
That’s awesome. I love it. Well, how can folks find out more about what you’re doing at the agency and in Boise?

Elaine Clegg (39m 19s):
Well, you know, you can go to our website, valley regional transit.org or ride vt.org is our new one. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Instagram. I haven’t probably been posting as regularly as I should. We need to step that up.

Jeff Wood (39m 39s):
Who knows how much you actually should, right?

Elaine Clegg (39m 41s):
Right. Yeah. There’s that. There’s that. Right. And anyone is welcome to contact me and ask me anything they want. Awesome. And we have a great communications department, by the way. My communications director is sitting here with me and I have to give him a plug because being able to say, Hey, I have this great idea, can you help? And having someone say, absolutely, let’s get it out. There is a wonderful gift. Yeah. That’s

Jeff Wood (40m 6s):
The best. Well, Elaine, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Elaine Clegg (40m 10s):
Well, thank you, Jeff. It’s so good to visit with you. And it was good to see you at Impact. I really enjoyed our talk today and looking forward to the future.