BIKE: Fort Worth TTC Meeting July, 2002

[Andrew Wimsatt]

I've attached a portion of the Texas Transportation Commission Meeting 
in Fort Worth back in July, 2002.  The full transcript can be found at:

http://www.dot.state.tx.us/transcom/transcript.htm?pg=0702t

Andrew

-----------------

Our next presenter is Mr. John Bartosiewcz, the president and executive 
  director of the Fort Worth Transportation Authority.

(Applause.)

MR. BARTOSIEWICZ: Good morning and thank you for this opportunity to  
talk to you about some of the jewels of our transportation system that  
Wendy mentioned in her presentation. I guess we're starting off with 
the  non-highway portion of the Transportation Commission's duties this 
  morning, and I'm glad to tag into that as well.

I'd like to speak to you this morning very briefly about one of our  
highest profile, most successful projects in public transportation, and 
  then talk specifically and give you some examples of how the 
community,  the city, the transit authority and many other players in 
our community  are working together in partnership with TxDOT to 
achieve the kind of  quality of life issues and mobility and 
sustainable community issues that  Wendy talked to you about a minute 
ago.

The first biggest project that we've worked on and have now completed  
is the Trinity Railway Express. Several of you got a chance to ride TRE 
  yesterday which is a partnership between The T and DART. Trinity 
Railway  Express connects Dallas and Fort Worth along the old Rock 
Island Railroad  corridor with nine stations along the way, including a 
link to Dallas-Fort  Worth International Airport with currently a bus 
shuttle, but in the  planning I'll talk about in a minute, a rail 
connection to the Dallas-Fort  Worth International Airport. Each of the 
stations in the county contain  free park-and-ride facilities which 
help reduce congestion on the most  congested freeway corridor in Fort 
Worth, the Airport Freeway in northeast  Tarrant County. In fact, 
Trinity Railway Express, with its more than 1,200 park-and-ride parking 
spots in Tarrant County and close to almost 2,000 in  Dallas County, 
create the additional capacity of one lane of freeway  during the rush 
hours in our community. This has a tremendous impact on  air quality, 
has a tremendous impact on congestion in the corridor, and  it's 
something we're very proud of.

TRE is a partnership not only with DART, our transit authority to the  
east, but with both cities of Dallas and Fort Worth who had the 
foresight  to purchase this corridor with a federal grant back in 1983, 
and as you'll  see in a minute, there's also been a lot of partnership 
with TxDOT on the  project. In addition to the things we've talked 
about, ridership on TRE is  exceeding expectations; we're currently 
carrying more than 8,000 riders on  an average weekday, and during the 
summer on weekends on Saturday when we  have service, we're approaching 
9- to 10,000 riders as people use it to  access both great communities 
on either end.

There are a number of interesting and innovative portions of the TRE  
project which I want to highlight for you. We have been very sensitive 
to  historic preservation and other environmental issues on the 
project. We've  preserved two historic warehouses on the eastern end of 
our downtown in a  very unique way: our train actually goes through the 
historic Hunt-Hars  Warehouse -- or what's now called the Alarm Supply 
Building --  in a way to preserve the facade of that building for the 
community for the  future.

You, of course, were in our Intermodal Transportation Center yesterday  
evening for the reception. We were very pleased to host you there and  
we're really glad that you got a chance to tour a little bit of it; 
we're  very proud of this. ITC is the hub for all forms of 
transportation in  Tarrant County and in our downtown: it houses the 
Trinity Railway Express  operation; it is our new and one of the most 
modern AMTRAK stations in the  country; it also houses the largest bus 
transfer facility so people can  get easily from the public 
transportation system to AMTRAK and to the  commuter rail system; we 
are in the process of negotiating with Greyhound  to move the Greyhound 
facility there as well.

It is the hub for all public transportation in our community, and it's  
a place where our community celebrates. On weekends in the bus canopies 
  which are pictured in the lower slide here, we host a farmers' market 
on  Saturday mornings which is done in conjunction with the rail market 
and is  another example of the kinds of public-private partnerships 
that have made  our transportation system, we think, one of the best in 
the state.

We also currently have at the western terminus of the site --  which 
you didn't get to see this trip -- our historic Texas and  Pacific 
Railroad station. We want to thank the commission and TxDOT for  the 
work that you've helped us do to develop this facility. Most of the  
restoration was funded with an Enhancement grant that was received 
several  years ago where we have taken the original waiting room in the 
T&P  building and restored it to its 1929 grandeur. I know a lot of you 
have  already seen that, but if you haven't had a chance, we'd love for 
you to  go there and see it as well.

T&P is also the site for one of our most popular park-and-ride  
facilities which is a little counter-intuitive. We have a large  
park-and-ride facility at the T&P in downtown Fort Worth that serves  
folks who park there and ride the train to Dallas. The train actually  
replaced a bus service that we had operating from that site to downtown 
  Dallas which was one of our most popular and successful bus routes, 
and as  soon as the train operated, we doubled the ridership from that 
site.

The other unique thing about the parking facility at T&P is that it  is 
actually constructed on TxDOT right of way. We utilized the right of  
way under the new freeway, the new I-30 freeway for a 200-space 
park-and-ride facility that was done in partnership with TxDOT at some  
additional cost to TxDOT. Not only did you allow us to use the land, 
but  the freeway was redesigned under J.R. Stone's leadership and 
really under  Steve Simmons' leadership when he was here to allow us to 
use that land  for a productive purpose as opposed to just leaving it, 
and God knows what  would have happened if we didn't.

Today more than 200 commuters use that facility every day. It is also  
the site of one of our major downtown bus transfer facilities. 
Immediately  adjacent to the freeway structure here is part of an 
integrated system of  four downtown transfer facilities, along with the 
ITC and two others we're  developing downtown, that facilitate access 
to our downtown and help  reduce bus traffic downtown and make the 
connections for our customers  much easier. And as I said, there is a 
parking facility there as well.

TxDOT was also a key partner in helping us get TRE to the T&P  station. 
This is a picture of a railroad bridge which TxDOT not only  helped 
fund but actually did construct through their contract on the major  
downtown facility work. It is an excellent example of how we work 
together  to make our downtown better. TxDOT allowed us to grade 
separate the  railroad from Lancaster which was a key choke point for 
the railroad which  we have now solved, and you've constructed a 
beautiful bridge which has  some neat art deco features and historic 
lamps that provide a great  gateway into the downtown area.

TxDOT and The T and other members of the community are not only working 
  downtown together but working in several other locations. TxDOT is  
currently constructing a bridge over the TRE in the vicinity of Trinity 
  Boulevard which will help us eliminate a couple of unsafe grade 
crossings  and improve the capacity of those intersections. The bridge 
will also  allow us to give much better access to our Hurst-Bell 
station which has an  almost 300-space parking lot which can increase 
its capacity now that  people will be able to get to it more easily.

We've worked in some behind-the-scenes ways together to make the  
project a success. A lot of people don't see this but this is actually 
an  underpass and drainage project that TxDOT helped fund that brings 
the  train into downtown Fort Worth right under I-35 and the Spur 280 
freeway.  We worked together here not only to solve a problem for the 
train service  but to solve a serious erosion problem that TxDOT was 
having with the  freeway structure in this location. We've partnered 
together with some  funding from TxDOT, a community facilities 
agreement with the City of Fort  Worth, and our federal and sales tax 
funding for the Trinity Railway  Express project, not only to improve 
access to downtown but to solve a key  problem in the infrastructure of 
our transportation system downtown.

TxDOT has also been very generous allowing us to use TxDOT right of way 
  to facilitate this project. Not only did we use that right of way for 
the  I-30 bridge and the parking at the T&P but the actual access into  
downtown is on new right of way that was constructed in this Spur 280  
right of way on the east side of our downtown which not only saved us a 
  tremendous amount of money but helped beautify that part of our 
downtown  and put what was previously fallow right of way to good use 
for the public  transportation system.

And it doesn't end there. TxDOT is currently working with us in the  
widening of the 157 project in eastern Tarrant County to reconstruct a  
railroad bridge, but not only have we reconstructed it but the 
leadership  of TxDOT in our region has had the foresight to do it in 
such a way that  when it's finished, we will actually increase the 
capacity of the railroad  at that site to allow us to improve schedules 
and have a further impact on  congestion and air quality issues in our 
area.

Congestion and air quality issues are also areas where we work in  
partnership together through innovative grants through TxDOT. We are 
now  in the process of completing our conversion of our bus fleet to be 
100  percent CNG, compressed natural gas; we're taking delivery now of 
our last  order of new buses which will make us just virtually 100 
percent  compressed natural gas fueled. The T and TxDOT have been 
working together  on this for years; we've been a pioneer in compressed 
natural gas  technology and had the first buses in Texas operating on 
CNG and some of  the first in the country back in the late 1980s. We're 
very proud of this  as well.

We're also working in other innovative ways together. TxDOT is taking  
the lead through the Transit Division to coordinate the use of 5310  
funding. This is the former 16(b)(2) funding that went to social 
service  agencies in a very disjointed and uncoordinated way that led 
to a lot of  inefficient use of those funds. That is now being 
coordinated in  innovative ways by the TxDOT administration through The 
T in Tarrant  County to make sure that those funds reach the most 
amount of people and  maximize the impact of transportation with those 
funds. There will be more  about that in a subsequent speaker's 
presentation.

We're also working together on new projects. One of the most important  
ones is how we're going to get the commuter rail service into the  
Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and TxDOT is a key player here 
as  well. This is a partnership between the COG, the DART and The T, 
the  airport, two cities and TxDOT to make sure that we develop a 
system that  will eventually bring rail to the central terminal area 
which is kind of  in the middle of this picture. The key TxDOT link is 
at the top of the  picture where it says Cotton Belt. TxDOT is now 
designing and working with  us to make sure that the gateway for the 
rail into the airport through The  Funnel project -- something else 
you'll also hear a lot about later  in the presentation -- is preserved 
so as we get the funding and the  infrastructure for rail into the 
airport, there will be a way to get it  there, again in a cooperative 
and very important way.

We're also working together on several new partnerships which are just  
in the development stages. Wendy did an excellent job talking about how 
  we're working together as part of the regional rail plan to try to put 
a  light rail streetcar system in place in Fort Worth. We're also 
working  together to build a new park-and-ride facility at the north 
end of town,  one of the biggest developing areas of our community. 
Right at the  intersection of I-35 and Basswood there is some surplus 
TxDOT right of way  which we're working together to develop a 
park-and-ride facility on.

We've talked about the regional rail plan. We're not only working  
together at the airport but on two other corridors: the Cotton Belt  
corridor and the Union Pacific corridor going from Fort Worth to 
Dallas, to work together to make those as successful as the Trinity 
Railway  Express project. And we're now in the process of purchasing 
the right of  way and making sure that we can extend the Trinity 
Railway Express project  to the southwest which will be a key 
complement to the development of the  121 freeway.

I think the key message that I'd like to leave you with is that we are  
beginning to work together in innovative ways to make the Texas  
transportation system a true multimodal system. In a lot of ways and a 
lot  of ways that people don't understand and see, we've worked 
together for  years to make that a successful system, not only with 
highways but with  public transportation and other modes. The future is 
very bright for that;  the future is very exciting, and as Wendy 
pointed out, it's also very  challenging, and we look forward to 
working with the commission in making  that a success.
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