Thought I would share the slides I compiled for the webinar. We’ll be broadcasting next week, so I’ll post a link to that afterward.

The good news for my team- the data center stayed up 100% of the time. In fact, we lost only 1 rail communications cabinet during 10 hours of an outage.

This means that our phones were up, even when cell phones were not. Our Internet was online and we could communicate with our customers. Our emergency operations center (EOC) was live and effective. I was proud to see NCTD keep bus and rail service in play hours into an outage that was so significant for the region.

More than anything, I know that without the data center project, we would not have achieved this success.

Not everything was smooth and I don’t want to overstate the positives… but I am confident without our green data center, our EOC team would have struggled that much more. So here is to investment in technology and the ability to see a ROI.

This week I was lucky to be able to participate in the American Public Transportation Association’s 2011 Sustainability Workshop.  This time the workshop really seemed to get its focus around sustainability initiatives that could work for every agency and business partner – not just the really large agencies.  It is always impressive to see what entities like New York MTA and San Francisco Muni can accomplish.  But this does not always translate well to the smaller guys.  And sustainability by its very nature will make greater progress if it is permeated through smaller agencies as well.

I started participating in this workshop just three short years ago.  In that time, the North County Transit District has gone from no sustainability initiatives, to a comprehensive portfolio of work – most of which has driven significant operating cost savings for the agency and lead to smarter decisions and business plans.

To me, sustainability is not a political movement.  It is not a badge of honor.  It is not a marketing campaign.  It is a means to ensure we can continue to deliver on our primary mandate as a company – to provide safe access for our community to their education, jobs, doctors, grocery stores…  It is a means to ensure that over the long run, NCTD can exist.  Good for the environment, good for our employees, and good for our community.

At the end of the day, the concepts of auditing, data quality, and transparency seemed important to our community.  It has become too easy to say one is engaging in projects that are “green” or “sustainable” without some independent validation of these statements.  The Climate Registry requires that all reporting entities be validated by an independent and certified third party.  This means that our communities and riders could have confidence that the data the NCTD is reporting is in fact accurate.  This to me seemed worth the investment.

There is a downside to all of this work; however.  I am afraid to say that our initial baseline year does not measure up well to other industry entities.  In transit, one important metric is the amount of carbon public transit offsets.  So for every ton of carbon generated by our agency in conducting operations, we in theory offset an amount by having our riders avoid independent emissions from their choice to ride our more efficient service rather than driving their own car.  In New York, the MTA is able to achieve an emissions factor of 12 – for every 1 ton of carbon, they offset 12 tons.  Chicago achieved 5 this year.  Philadelphia 3.  The industry average is 1.9.  Unfortunately, NCTD is 1.6 for calendar year 2009.

The good news is that this gives us a new set of targets and goals to achieve to improve this number.  As part of our plan, in 2010 we turned on the green data center, we started deploying solar installations, we installed emissions controls on a segment of the Breeze bus fleet, and in September 2010 we installed a driver feedback system on the buses called GreenRoads to try to improve gas mileage.

Regardless of the numbers we achieved in our baseline year, by measuring ourselves and by having that number audited and verified, our community can now see the progress we make and trust that the numbers are real.