 That's good. I want to introduce the project. We know that for a round of who's who. Are you at the zoom folks again are in here? Yep, we've got we've got some like one, two, three, four, five, six. I see six people plus orca. Yeah, so let's introduce the project and go around introductions who's taking time to attend or go from there. You want to start off with short. My name is Tom Badawski with the town of Berlin. This is the Vermont Department of Transportation funded Fisher Road scoping study. And I just want to thank everybody for attending. This is our second really our public meeting. This project will be winding down soon. I think we have a March or April time frame for completion. So I hope we could stay connected and appreciate your thoughts. Hey, Tom. So I'm Chris Sargent. I'm here in the moderator's seat for this. I'm the project manager for this project. I work with the boys and king and I'm joined by David Crichts. No, just love to share. Well, anyway, David Crichts here is with me. You'll hear from him in a second. I'm Bob Warnick, I'm with the BRB. I'm Stig Mead Goddard. I live on Hill Street Extension in Berlin. Becky Goddard is in the same place. Jonathan Goddard also related. I just thought you guys came together. Yeah. So folks on Zoom, I'm going to call on you and if you'd be willing to unmute and just introduce yourself, that'd be great. Becky. Sorry, I'm Becky Thompson. I live on Sturt Road. Michael. Mike Ruschman, a consultant working with the owners of the Berlin Mall. Eileen. Eileen He. I work at CVMC. Theron. Hi, folks. I'm Theron Laysleeper. I'm a resident of West Berlin and I'm on the planning commission with Tom as well. Awesome. And Jim. Hi, Jim Alvarez from Central Vermont Medical Center. Awesome. And that is everybody. I'm assuming we're not going to have the introduction for more. Possibly any person. So thank you, everybody. All right, let's get started off and then I'm going to hand off to David. So let's just talk about what we're doing here tonight. We're talking about what's, we're talking about a scoping study that is intended to look at how to make Fisher Road be more of a gateway for the New Town Center. So really, in the progression of things, we have this New Town Center application. The town went through a great process to sort of say, listen, we don't have a village. We would like to, or we don't have a village center. We would really like a village center. What can we do to make that? And ultimately they settled on a really interesting project that we'll kind of second to build out the Berlin Mall area and make it more a village center. One of the impacts of that is going to be more development, more traffic. And so our job is to accommodate, figure out how to accommodate more cars. And at the same time, also make the road something that is maybe a more inviting gateway into this New Town Center. So this is for, I don't know, folks have seen it. This is a conceptual design of the New Town Center with all sorts of potentially new development that's going to be here over time. Fascinating. It's really interesting for me as a planner in Vermont to see communities to discuss, you know, most towns, we're not creating a village in scratch. So it's really interesting to see this. And I'm going to toss it over to Dave because he's going to talk about the serious stuff and how all of what I just told you relates to the road. And just to orient for anyone that's not familiar with this plan, Fisher Roads on the right hand side here. And you can see in gray existing buildings. So CBMC is on the lower right, the big medical campus there. You've got Berlin Malls in the Walmart. It's the most prominent buildings left in this image of Fisher Road. And then all these buildings in red that would be the new development to create a walkable multimodal center with shared use pathways, connecting places, walkable streets. And the real question is, and part of the New Town Center plan did include some big ideas about how we connect, would it be a skybridge connecting across Fisher Road? Like how do we really bridge this gap? Because you've got a major employer in CBMC. You've got a major employer in the mall, Walmart and everything around there. You've got existing senior housing now. And the New Town Center as it builds out will have even more housing in it. And the real question is, we have all these great uses coming together just like really, really idealized in Vermont about these compact walkable centers. So how do we make that happen? Because anybody that knows Fisher Road today knows that there's something left to be desired as a place to walk and spend time on the street, right? It's a auto oriented road. So that's a lot of what our scoping city is looking at is how do we make this auto oriented road something that could be better and be fitting of a future town center where you have so many great uses coming together. And so the main concerns outside of that is not a lovely place to walk is we've highlighted many of them on the screen. And starting from the bottom up, there's really one little piece of sidewalk along the corridor and that's in front of Vermont Psychiatric Hospital. Really all along the road, you really have parking lots coming right up to it. And so there's even outside the road, there's not a lot of really pedestrian oriented spaces. And then as you get into the main intersection between CVMC and Berlin Mall Road, it widens out to three lanes in either direction. And it's quite a lot of asphalt there creating long crossing distances that aren't safe at the one pedestrian crossing that does exist. And then when you'll get all the way to Route 62 on foot, that's the place that really not supposed to be walking, not supposed to be biking on Route 62. But what about crossing Fisher Road to Airport Road, right? So that's all these things that we're looking at and saying, how could future plans for this roadway address this? As we get into it, I just want to kind of mention a couple of key design considerations that this might be a little bit wonky, but when we're thinking about road design, these things are important. A really unique thing is that this has a tapering, tapering road says on the screen. That doesn't mean much to people that don't work in traffic daily, but that's right of way. And that's basically where there is public domain in the roadway for making changes. And then on the other side of that invisible line is private land. And whenever you're doing street designs, you're designing within that right of way. And so what's really interesting is as you approach basically from the Berlin Mall Road CVMC intersection to Route 62, it's about 100 feet wide, it's a very wide right of way through there. As you go sort of northwest of that and get over towards paying Turnpike, it has a tapering section. And then it's a 50 foot right of way as you approach paying Turnpike. So very different road profiles that we have to accommodate. And that's actually one of the reasons too that you see these lanes really get wider as you get to Route 62, because there's just more right of way there. Related to someone is my joking label of bullet access. It's a party for cars off of Route 62. There's a lot of use, a lot of heavy traffic there. And it's a lot quieter on paying Turnpike in terms of traffic loads, in terms of how safe it is to be out there as a bicycle pedestrian in terms of crash records. So there's sort of this two-sidedness to Fisher Road that we're considering in these designs. One thing I should mention too is that we are, as part of this coping study, we are not looking at making changes to the Route 62 intersection. It's not part of this particular project. We may have some suggestions as part of this project of things that we should do, but because that's a state-owned, that Route 62 is what's called a limited access highway, which means that only the state can do things on it. And only they can fiddle with it, so it's not a significant focus. We could argue that we need some fixing, but... This study will make recommendations in CAN and should probably make a lot of recommendations for how it can be improved, but the actual design work really focuses on what is town control on Fisher Road. And so when we talk about these designs, I'll jump into it in just a minute. These are sort of our goals that we want to really put together to make a good design for Fisher Road. And the way these scoping settings work as well is I'm about to run through three different designs that could be applied to the roadway. And we don't have to just pick one and say, that's what the study said. We picked this one. We can pick pieces of them. And really, that's where I appreciate everybody coming in on Zoom, people coming in person, because that's really where your input and your neighbor's input becomes important. And we've got a survey to get there as well. But the goals we're trying to get to in all of this is, you know, I've talked a lot about making it a better place to walk and bike, but it's also knowing that we're building a new town center here and we need to manage traffic volumes. You know, we can't put an alternative board that is an amazing place for people to walk and bike and it's a traffic jam the whole time. But that won't work. That's not what we want to do. So we have to balance that. We also need to really balance recognition that we live in Vermont and we have a wide range of seasons and we need to be able to plow this and maintain it just as well as enjoy a shade of the trees in the summer. And at the same time, I think what's really exciting about an opportunity like this where you look at a road that is perhaps over wide in some places that has 100 foot wide of land at one end that has a future town center coming around it is how can we find opportunities to create a sense of place and not just this is a roadway with parking lots on it. So those are our design goals we're trying to get to. So what do we think we can do? Well, one of them, here's the cheapest option. We can do nothing and just leave it there. All scoping studies that we look at that are funded by VTRAINs, I think importantly have a no build option. And that's something that we're not going to spend a whole lot of time discussing it because everyone knows it. But it's in there just to say sometimes communities say, you know what, the right thing is to leave it alone. But then the three other options that we're looking at, two very closely related, but it's about their application. A paint only road diet is how we would look at saying what improvements can we do with paint alone and just really defining the spaces in the roadway differently. And that would be extremely low cost. It could be implemented, you know, likely on town budgets not trying to go for significant grants from the VEDS or anything else. But it could test out really, you see the relationship in this diagram between the dashed lines on paint only road diet and the next one down of lane reduction and sidewalks. Where the paint only road diet does sort of this temporary paint based application of the same design that we explore in lane reduction and sidewalks. And the big difference is when you're doing full construction of lane reduction, adding sidewalks, you're spending a lot more money to build these things permanently. It'll have better effect, it will also last a lot longer and you get sidewalks out of that. And then the third option that we'll look at tonight is a roundabout and pathway. And so exploring a different design for an actual intersection right there in the middle of Fisher Road at the CBMC and Mall Road intersection. And instead of doing sidewalks on either side of the road saying, look, we want this to be a multi-modal street, we want commuters that are coming from elsewhere in Berlin, coming from Montpelier up to the mall or up to CBMC or the Newtown center to be able to bike there. Let's make a shared use pathway. I should actually also mention, I should mention it in a minute, but lane reduction and sidewalk also has pipelines. So I'll go through these categories as we should try to present the alternatives in sort of these four categories of reference. So we're going to look at what improvements happen for bicycle and pedestrians on the street compared to that. We'll look at green space expansion and sort of what square could we have fine opportunities for rain gardens, street trees as part of this road diet and changes to the roadway. We'll talk a bit about our intersection designs and what changes are proposed there. And we'll also talk about the impacts on traffic modeling. We run this through some pretty advanced traffic modeling to look at what, based on what we anticipate being full build out of the Newtown center, what that could look like. And this is, this is a little bit about our traffic modeling. Our engineer that ran this isn't with us tonight. I will do my best to answer any questions I can on these. And I have a good sense of sort of the overall effect and impacts based on traffic modeling. But what this is, is it looks at the traffic volumes a couple of years out, you know, just using basic increases to regional traffic load and knowing what's happening in the next couple of years at the town center. And then it also forecasts all the way out to 2045, assuming this town center is proposed as fully built. And there's 300 plus new residential units. There's over 5200 square feet of new commercial services. There's improved walkability here within the Newtown center. And it shows about the 17% growth in trips along Fisher Road, based on that. That's also because a lot of the trips generated in Newtown center would also flow out away from Fisher Road is why that number sits there. So that's kind of what a lot of these numbers are based on. And if I can add to this also includes a certain level of, so we've done work with CDMC for other related projects. And we do have some potential growth numbers from them as well. So we corporate some of that. At least the reason. Yep. And today's and today's numbers were based on physical traffic counts of what's happening out there today. So we try to base this in reality as best we can. So Noville, I said it wouldn't spend much time on this. And I won't. So there is an option that if anyone thinks the right thing to do is Noville, you can give feedback in the survey that Noville is the right thing. But let's move on to the next. So a paint only road diet. What would this look like? So this is a plan view of the proposal. And overall, one of the ways you use paint to narrow roadway down is to put bike lanes in. And so we have bike lanes for paint turnpike, which is at the upper left of this image, stretching all the way down to the central intersection. And then even having a bike lane pointing towards the Route 62 intersection, he wouldn't continue it all the way there because we need to maintain multiple lanes for that intersection as it is today. But you put shared roadway markings and make sure that people understand that they can take the bike not on Route 62, but across the airport road. And then otherwise, and it's hard to see on this screen, but we'll dive into the intersection designs. There's a lot of spaces that are in the white hatching in the center of the area, as well as a median area on the southeast side of the central intersection that would be painted as hatched lines to, again, just sort of right size the roadway as you come into this intersection and also make a lot more clarity for drivers, cyclists, or anyone else using the roadway about coming in. Sidewalks would be exactly as they are today. Street trees would be exactly as they are today because, again, this is sort of proposing it as what's a really low cost sort of solution that could be implemented quickly. Here's a zoom into the intersection of what we're looking at. And like I said, some of the biggest areas for sort of road diet, there's really a lot of extra room when you look at the Berlin Wall Road side of the roadway, as well as the receiving sort of lanes. Really, right now, and I'll get to this slide in a moment, but there are three turn lanes, you know, a right, a through, and a left at either side of the intersection on Fisher Road. And so you really should have one receiving lane on the far end of that. Well, right now, you've got, I think it's like 24 feet of asphalt there, which is easily two full lanes. And there occasionally are conflicts about cars kind of emerging to that same space, somebody making a right out of the Wall Road, somebody kind of through from Fisher. And it should be more clear that there's one lane there. So this paint really kind of clarifies those receiving lanes as one lane. And then it also takes those three lanes instead of left, right, and through it gets it combines them. And again, another piece about this is in an effort to use paint to make it a more bike safe zone is we put a bike box at this side of the intersection, and that does a few things. The bike box design, the closest example we could find is Union and Pearl Street in Burlington, where they've implemented this. And these allow cyclists in areas where you're trying to promote use to get in front of automobiles at those turns. It reduces the right hook conflict where a cyclist will come up to the end of the bike lane, and a car will come up to the same point, but maybe be a little ahead of them and not see them and out of green lights. Cyclists go straight, car might have had its blinker on the cyclist didn't notice car might not have its blinker on and go right anyways and sort of create this right hook conflict. It's a way to make this the intersection just a little bit more safe for the vulnerable road user. So those are those are sort of the main pieces of it. And here's diagram two to show you what you know again trying to reiterate what we were talking about about lane changes. This and the next one where we say lane reduction, this is really the big move about lane reduction. Right now on the left, you've got your current design, and that is again a dedicated lane for each. But if you combine these, what that really frees up, you know this frees up, you know, 11 to 15 feet of space in the roadway on either side, that then can go to these expanded green spaces to sort of tightening up the road so it's more clear for drivers and anyone else using the road where to go. And there are no proposed changes for the current configuration of lanes at CBMC and the hospital ball road. So that's the that's the change for sort of the four way. And you know what's it all mean when we when we throw it into the computers and say if we had all this traffic coming in here, what would it do? I'll walk you through this quickly. But basically, we've got when we compare it existing conditions to this column on the left, and the pain only road diet performance is on the right. And I think the subtle thing to take away here is that in a couple of years, the pain only road diet, even though you're taking a lane away, because that's reducing some disparity of turn movements. And because this this pain only road diet, I failed to mention also would include signal optimization. Our traffic modeler looked at the way the signals are timed currently, and saw based on volumes ways that those times could be improved to increase their output. And so based on that signal optimization, and the changes, you know, right away, we could improve we can improve the performance by 2025. And what you really see in a full build out scenario of this one is that it doesn't make it doesn't make things not get worse in 2040, but it it solves them from being as bad as it would be if we don't do anything now, just to be clear to you that so the way that there's level of service thing where a is the best, right? So about level of service, it's a mode used by traffic engineers to measure the performance of an intersection. And it's very much a yes is the best. And just like your grades at school, ABC, unlike your grades at school, in urban contexts, and I'm not going to say that Fisher Road yet is an urban context, but I think a new town center is aspiring to that. You don't want to walk through a city where all the intersections function at A, right? Anyone walking is going to go through a city where it's all function at A. Think maybe if anyone's been to downtown Houston in areas or just a very, very suburban area that's very auto dominated, really easy to drive, really scary to walk through those intersections, those are a level intersections, really in contexts like like a Burlington, like a like a Browbro function, functioning at C or D is perfectly acceptable for urban areas. And that's, you know, that's kind of the standard we go by. When you get to levels E or F, there are real problems there. And that's where the intersection is no longer letting people get through an optimal time. And so same thing for delays, you know, we really just see that the PM, the PM traffic load in this area is the hardest hit. But in the four way, you know, the takeaway here is that we can get it, we can get it, no changes really at the paying turnpike slightly better at the central intersection. And at the, at the, at the mall road, there's a slight, there's a slight decrease to at Route 62 in terms of queuing that's going up, going up slightly. So does that be any questions about the first design, the pain only concepts? I'll pause at the end of these take a couple minutes of questions. And if there's any more, we'll be intersection delays. Yep. That's the same scenario as above, right? Yeah, it's presented in seconds. One is one is delays, the other one is level of service incorrect. I'm surprised that she has so much delays. Yep. Yeah, that's, that's kind of the, it's comparing to these delays are comparing from the baseline, like what it would be now to, you know, in the, in the morning, the intersection would perform maybe even slightly worse, but it'd be better in the evening compared to baseline. And that's kind of what you're seeing in these, but the, but the worst delay of 0.9 seconds is pretty marginal. So we're not too worried about that. What this, what is, is saying though, is without a signal change, you've got significant delays now. Yep. Yep. AM and PM. Yeah. And an important thing to study will include is, is some detail on those signal optimizations, because the kind of neat thing about that is there's a change that can be made, you know, pretty quickly, no cost, no infrastructure changes, just timing the lights. So, okay. Well, everything was going to the next one. So this is, this is formalizing that paint only design, right? Yep. Sorry, question. Mike? I had a question about the prior one. What you didn't look at was the signalization changes in the existing format and how that compares with the lane reduction and the signalization. Is that correct? It's correct that I'm not presenting that here, because I really wanted to present the baseline of what is out there today with what we're proposing is sort of a full suite of changes, but we will have that information in the report. And I think anybody that has more questions about traffic modeling, feel free to drop an email in the chat if you're on Zoom or contact me directly if you're in the room. And I can follow up with all the details there. I just need my traffic modeling engineer to answer the questions more directly. And with the improved timing, it is a benefit. There's a benefit from that. And we have all those numbers studied as well, just not presented as their own alternative. Anything else? Cool. Okay. Thanks, Mike. Yeah, thanks for the question. So lane reduction and sidewalks. So here's what you see taking that paint only and then extending a system of sidewalks all along the roadway. And the main sort of new construction, you have existing sidewalk conceiving of seat down to the main crosswalk. But in this scenario, you have an opportunity to add sidewalk all the way along the roadway, connecting all the way down to paint turnpike. You basically look at five foot sidewalks along the whole of the corridor, some small additional space for street trees, and then maintaining a buffered bike lane. We didn't do a small, smallest bike lane we could fit. We're thinking an eight foot lane with the opportunity for seasonal bollers to go in there when it's not snowing. And that's just going to ideally give a good corridor from paint turnpike all the way to sort of the entry to the new town center to CVMC. And then the bike lanes don't carry on as you go towards Route 62. That just turns into a single lane, which widens out to multiple lanes at the Route 62 intersection. And again, that three to two lane here, this would also formalize a median in the middle of the road. And so again, these are the pieces. The other aspect to this is that sidewalk, we're envisioning that any of these would dovetail with an ongoing project that they're looking at the shared use pathway as part of the new town center. And from this intersection forward, it would no longer be a narrow sidewalk, but it'd be a 12 foot shared use pathway that would connect with other destinations within the new town center. And that green space expansion, the real vision for this side I think, because your change in road configuration is really spent looking at adding sidewalks, adding bike lanes, and tightening up road profiles on the side between the central intersection and paint turnpike. The entry from Route 62, we really envisioned is the sort of green entry. Because where we're using the space here is the existing trees and existing green space that front CBMC now would remain. There would be a sidewalk connecting two points of the campus. But then those three trees plus a similar rhythm of trees in a medium and rhythm of street trees on the southern side of the street, would sort of create this green entryway as you drive in, drive into the street. And then here's a diagram we just wanted to show. So what is the advantage of having the median in the middle? Having the median? A couple. So this is actually good timing for that question. I think it's good timing because I can see this. I'm not sure if everyone can. But a couple advantages to this is shortening pedestrian distances. You know, when you're talking about connecting a hospital with goods and services, there's opportunities here to make this just a refuge place. If you're moving slower, if you're using a walker to get across the walk, that's one of the main advantages of the median is having that pedestrian safe zone in the middle. The other advantage of having it really is a traffic calming. It's in general, what a lot of the studies show is that not necessarily that medians directly will calm traffic, but street trees are shown to calm traffic. The median gives you a place to put them. And they also have a lot of studies showing that as roadways get narrower, people will slow down their cars down a little bit more. So it's a little bit of a traffic calming effect because one thing we don't want to do in these designs, we want to make sure people can drive there. But we're in Vermont, people need to drive their cars. We want to make sure people can get where they're going. But when you're arriving at Newtown Center, we don't want to treat it like a highway. We don't want that level of service A. It's just easy driving fast. We want this to start to feel more like a Newtown Center and sort of slowing down and reaching that. So those are the intentions of that. And what this graphic on the screen is showing here is that it has relatively few impacts over what's built today. I mean, the way road redesign works, if you rebuild these, there'd be a lot of construction way outside these red lines. You know, everywhere you have new sidewalks or new median would be construction. But in the end, analysis of what's built today compared to what's proposed is that it's only these really red stripes that would be where there'd be any additional impact, which is really important when you consider 802 Toyota over here and how close their work is to the edge of right of way and edge of pavement. So it's all pretty compact impacts over here. And then again, looking again at these impacts, I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because this is exactly what we looked at on the prior one. In terms of traffic modeling, again, this is formalization of what the paint does. So there's no real big changes. In overall, same the same effects in 2025 to 2045, a paint turnpike, slightly better performance at the central intersection with these changes and slightly longer queue lengths at the other round at the Route 62 intersection. Any questions on that particular section before we get to the next one? Anyone on Zoom? And we all have the opportunity to ask more questions later too. So roundabout in that way. So I'll walk through a lot of these changes here, but this is an opportunity for placemaking and it's an opportunity for improved traffic management because the big thing about the roundabout design and why it was proposed here is looking at sort of that this has a reasonably balanced series of turning movements in the area. They're not all one direction coming out of CVMC or anywhere else. There's kind of a general distribution and there's a lot of benefits to the way around about fit reform considering these future traffic loads. So for bicycle pedestrian improvements, the big thing here is that pathway that we referenced in because that pathway is in the Newtown center plan, that's really why it was included in that four-way alternative. And then here you'll notice there's no bike lanes anywhere on the street. This is a separated facility. It's off the roadway by about a 10-foot green strip in most places that that buffer narrows significantly as you go down into the narrower part of the roadway. But there is enough room to carry that pathway all the way through it's a pain turnpike. And that sort of two-way facility focuses that pedestrian and bicycle movements off the roadway in a shared 12-foot wide pathway space. You did get a fair bit of feedback in our first public survey that we had to do a very in a shared use path. And then there's minor sidewalk expansions in this that would link up basically where you have existing sidewalk, bringing it into other entrances to CVM's campus, both to the north and to the south. And those are the major improvements. The other thing, again, about the benefits of a roundabout from a, you know, on a cyclist who rides as fast as I possibly can standpoint, roundabouts can sometimes be a drawback because they have to kind of go around and slow down through these crossings. But for most of us or really the people I think we're trying to design for, which is all edges and abilities and all comfort levels, roundabouts have a lot of benefits for these crossings because if you don't mind the slight detour from this point over to this, your crossing distances are significantly lower, right? Instead of crossing, you know, now in the previous design, there's three lanes of traffic. You're really only crossing two and you still have a small median island in that to come through. And then green space expansion too because this really narrows down now this is cropped so that you don't see how in the in the design moving towards Route 62 that two lanes will slowly taper out to the full configuration where it is today in order to allow queuing and to allow more cars to move in that direction. But for the most of Fisher Road, this is a two lane roadway and you have a lot more room for street trees and not just street trees, but really healthy street trees. Where there's existing street trees in front of the CVMC campus, they would all remain sidewalk would go, I guess towards the roadside of there and we could install another row and just really make this green space all along the streetscape, which I think ahead of any redevelopment of these parking lots is a really wonderful way to buffer the sort of visual impact of all these parking lots, create higher land values all across this corridor and really create a nice place to be. That's the green space expansion piece I want to talk about. And here's that's a similar diagram just with the roundabout super imposed on the aerial today and where you see the impacts. We looked at where to place this and how to shift it. There's no way to put a roundabout within the existing configuration of the roadway and avoid impacts, but this can stay largely within the right of way and overall the largest impact is to the undeveloped land that's really south of that intersection. So that's what we're anticipating there. And the traffic analysis, there's a reason you see a lot of modern roundabouts being constructed today. I mean, if you go out west in Colorado, they're rounded up crazy. You go around I think I think Burlington is building one on Shelburne Street right now. It's really because as we deal with more people coming into our communities, as we deal with more people moving through them, they move traffic well, like you don't have to stop and wait behind a car who waits behind the car who waits behind a car. And so the main thing we saw here is that throughout throughout the corridor, you're getting better performance at that central intersection by a site and that's including, you know, if we leave things today, we have level of performance E at this central intersection. If we put a roundabout in, it ups to A and that's with all the Newtown Center traffic added in. So we see a lot less delays on it, a lot better movement at that intersection. We even see slight improvements over at the paint turnpike intersection. And this is sort of represented in these maximum queue lengths at the bottom. And then the big challenge is what's the impact here? And we've seen basically in our models, we're not showing significant negative impacts at the Route 62 intersection. But one thing we want to make sure we're doing our due diligence on the study is understanding if more traffic is able to move towards that intersection more quickly, what's that impact to queue lengths and how many more cars are stacking up at a light at Route 62. So any significant change like this would absolutely need to be designed in conjunction with VTrans to ensure that those the signal timing and everything else for Route 62 intersection maintains. But like we're seeing in total queue length 2045, 13, if we don't change anything, 13 cars stack up at like the worst time of afternoon traffic. And with a roundabout, we're seeing the same number. So it goes up a little bit, but not much. So for Jim and Eileen, since we talked about this on Friday, we did do some more modeling to look at this. And ultimately, although initially our first path had some numbers that had us concerned, once we re-ran it several times, the numbers became much more into what we consider a very reasonable amount. And I do think though, that just like Dayton said, there's opportunities for us to talk to VTrans about what, how could the signal be timed differently? You know, I mean, the current intersection at 62 is not designed with a roundabout, it's not configured to receive traffic from a roundabout. So they may be able to go, okay, if there's a roundabout there, how would we change the signal timing and how could we improve that? Or is there something that you can do to reconfigure it? They can help me here. I mean, earlier on, I think this slide is somebody in conflict, what you said earlier, that in urban areas, you don't want an A, A, A. And now we have A, A, A. So help me here. That's fair. I think that's my course description to say that a focus on A performance at all expenses is problematic when we say like, we need, we need A performance at all times. The roundabout design, I think if you have A performance, the traffic's moving very slowly, you're fine. There's a lot of people are moving through very slowly. And so I think it's, I think I should definitely eat the couch what I said earlier in that it's not an A level of service that's poor, it's when A level of service is coupled with high speeds, right? I'm saying we're going to move. And where the pedestrian infrastructure isn't built in a way that sort of offsets that, right? Thank you. Absolutely. But yeah, A level of services, good thing. You can do a lot of people's questions. Yes, sir. I assume the traffic modeling is also rejecting some growth at the Central Medical Center. Oh yeah. Yeah, you know, we don't have, we don't have numbers from their like most recent plan, but we talk when I talk to those folks, the numbers we have that we had from the last work we've done with them, they were like, yeah, that's pretty close. So I think they felt comfortable. I do think that the numbers will probably be my guess. And they might be a little higher than what we have. But I think it's pretty close. So conscious that they've had plans to make significant pieces of insurance and a lot of traffic that goes there. And this can't ignore that. Yeah, and for that reason, I think in any of these, we're not proposing changing or closing any access configurations. I mean, there's multiple places that we narrow the driveways to right size them to allow two vehicles to pass in and out. But we don't remove any, we don't narrow them down beyond that. So yep, I'm sorry. Well, another question. The configuration of the roundabout, I wasn't able to see exactly what you did. But it looks to me like you moved around about south. Correct. Yeah, I mean, from the pure center of where we have it today, we did move it slightly south. And I think that was looking at where can we impact the least? Because I think if it moves up here, we get into street tree impacts. We get into some concerns about some of the roadway up north west of here. So yeah, we were kind of looking at these zones as maybe the most expendable perhaps. But that can always be adjusted. So that addresses the grades then going into the... That's the thing is, so you're concerned about the grades, Bob, that you're slightly lower as you're leaving the CVMC campus than the center of the roadway. You would undoubtedly have to get a few feet of field coming in here. So again, this doesn't represent the only spaces that would be constructed, right? I mean, this whole thing would be reconstructed. But the moving it this way allows you to sort of establish a better grade so that traffic queuing up here to the incoming direction can see where they can see what they're getting into. Yes? Well, on your diagram for the roundabout, I was having a difficulty understanding the pedestrian and the cyclist lanes. So are they more safe in something in the roundabout as opposed to the other one? Yeah, absolutely. So I would tell you this, you know, I've got a six-year-old who's learned to ride his bicycle on this, you know, I'll ride him through downtown Lockville here, kind of cautiously to his school. But I'd be much more comfortable with the roundabout with him than before. So they're basically nowhere near the roundabout? Yeah, so let me walk you through that here. I think the 3D might be a little bit better of a vision for this. So the pathway, if you were, say, if you were, you know, leaving our meeting, this was built today and we're leaving the meeting hall, we're meeting right there. There's us. You would cross the street here at Paine Turnpike and hop on a pathway and walking or biking, if you're coming down Fisher Road, you'd come all the way through here if you were visiting Vermont psychiatric. We'd be maintaining the existing crosswalk to that bus station and you'd be on this pathway walking or biking up here. Now from the intersection, say, you need to go to the major door of CVMC that's about where I'm standing, I'm standing on the building right now. You would pick your direction but you'd either cross the Fisher Road leg and then walk around a sidewalk over here and then cross the CVMC road leg and then walk to your destination at CVMC or you'd come up towards them, towards the mall, cross this leg, walk around, come in that direction. Does that help? Sorry, anybody on Zoom? I'm doing a lot of that with my finger, but hopefully you can follow the pathway around the intersection in the blue. Are there any controls associated with those crosswalks? Typically not. Typically it is a, they can have RRFBs in them and we haven't gone so far as to identify what controls. RRFBs, sorry. Sorry, thank you, acronym alert, alphabet Zoom. You see these in downtown Montpelier when you drive through, but these are there, the pedestrian signal that has, I gotta say, RRFB, rectangular rapid flashing beacon. And that's what those are. Good way to signal to drivers, pedestrians are crossing the roadway. You could have signal activations for those. You've also got many examples of these across the United States where they're built with good sight lines and it's a yield to pedestrian sign and that's what it is. But the crossing distances on these are much shorter and a much more comfortable space to walk through. So and include a landing area at midpoint. So each of these have that landing area in them. And so that's that media that creates a divider between the two lanes, narrows the roadway down and slows the speeds down as they approach the roundabout. So last thing you want is people getting into a roundabout fast. So Theron has a question. Theron, if you want to unmute and ask, go ahead. Folks, thanks. I know that this is primarily about this particular intersection. I'm curious how the bike and pedestrian path interfaces as we approach pain turnpipe and Route 62 and what happens there? Yeah, great question. So not illustrated here, but as you, the pathway would not reach or cross Route 62 as it's designed. This would loop sort of round internally to the New Town Center. And I think we want to make recommendations in this study for Beatrice to consider that connectivity across Route 62 at this point. You know, you've got a good precedent even though it's not particularly the lovely pedestrian crossing. If you go, you know, Route 62 towards the interstate on ramp, there is a pedestrian crossing there as pain turnpipe hits the road. So we make recommendations for that. But as this design is considered, that pathway is sort of self-contained at that end. And then as you reach pain turnpipe, we're envisioning that there would be, you know, the pathway would hit the edge of pain turnpipe and have access from the road onto this pathway for people walking or people on bikes to get onto it there. And that would basically be the entry point. Okay. And then just over like where the, where the Subaru or 802 Toyota or whichever project or ship that is, where that comes out from the parking lot further towards pain turnpipe. Does that bike path continue through there to, do you see where I mean? Well, I'm looking at this current slide. Yeah. So if you're looking at the drawing, there's, it does all the way through the roadway, right? So the pathways envisioned a lot between this proposed roundabout intersection and pain turnpipe, you'd have other than brakes in for access points to the national guard point there, to the 802. It just picks up on the other side of the driveway. Yeah, you'd go across it that way. Great. Yep. And those driveways. Thanks, Mark. Thank you very much. Yeah, would there be a reconfiguration of how those driveways were to really identify that pathway and have it be a consistent corridor across? Yeah. Any other, any other questions? Over here. That does it. Thanks. Thanks, there. Now, even with the discussion, we talked about this at the time meeting the other day, using that Stewart Road, right here, Stewart Road as a connector kind of to the rest of the recreation facilities and the community like Berlin Pond and everything. I'm still not terribly confident that there's a very good crossing to Stewart Road from here. It's going to be our connector to town from the town center. Yeah. We should probably put some more thought into that. Into that, into that intersection. Yeah, it's a minimal, minimal as currently sketched out, but that's like we're in, like I said earlier, we're in this phase of saying, here's three designs and comments like that are great to kind of get into the record because I think we can as process to get into this as the preferred design. Take a second look at that and say, what's the most we can do to make that Stewart to Fisher a good connection? Yeah, it seems like it would be a whole heck of a lot. It just needs something. Yeah. And thank you for your context here. When we, on the town of Berlin, applied for this project and the in this multiple use path, first of them all, excuse me, the hospital has a current recreation path down there and with the multi-use path in the town center, we wanted to connect that to our assets over in Berlin Corners, you know, the Berlin Pond. And our initial vision was of Route 62 crossing, but in retrospect, we were thinking that because that's going to take time, money, effort, that one, that as Jeff was saying, you would cross with Fisher Road, you'd cross pain term by going to Stewart Road and that's a traditional Vermont gravel road, right? Yeah. And with maybe bike stations along the way. And so. No, thanks for those mentions. I think that is a lot of reason as we develop this to really look at what that what that language looks like because that's actually well within both of the scope of this project. And Jeff's on the recreation committee and the planning mission are jointly just starting those discussions now. Great. Yeah, if I could just add to that too quickly, we live up on Hill Street Extension and we've been up there 15 years or so now and we are seeing now within the last, first of all gravel riding, I'm a big cyclist and gravel riding is taking off all over the state, all over the country, all over the world really. And we're seeing more and more bikes all the time going by our house. I mean groups of four, five people loaded up bike pack, so I think you guys are on a superior route. But yeah, but I mean, but so so having connectivity to this space from Stewart Road or people that I need to go get something, whatever I need, I got to go to the mall to buy something for my trip or whatever to be able to just ride in from Stewart Road. It would be fantastic. Well, I get to be down to that. The second last slide here too is that what we're really looking for and thinking for all these comments, you know, this is all the stuff we need to really be able to take this study to a revised approach is that we're looking at saying, okay, we've presented, you know, I'm going to say four here because we always include no bill. But, you know, we have we have these options. How do they perform? And this is real conceptual, like I made I made up these scores really briefly, but saying, you know, in traffic performance, you know, no bills, pain only road diet would get better, lane reduction and sidewalks would get better, roundabout pathway should actually be an A is doing great, right? And bike head safety, you know, it's terrible today, we could do a little better, we could do even better than that and we can have a whole shared use pathway. Great, right? For complexity, hey, today is great for complexity. Yeah, but we're not going to do anything, but no reward there either. You know, and so how's that bearing complexity? And the thing we don't have filled out really yet as part of this process other than the initial meeting on the topic is, you know, what is what is people's reaction to this? What is sort of the public and stakeholder support? You know, when we're having lots of conversations with business owners along the road, if that's really important group to target, but everyone here is listening to this meeting. Y'all are important. Text your friends, everybody who you know that uses the area, whether you live in Berlin, or just passing through, we'd like to hear from you, we'd like to hear kind of what you what you think of these. And so this information is all going to be up on, I think it is now up on the project website. And we have this is a QR code to the survey, it's a real simple, hey, thanks for listening to this presentation. And if you haven't listened to this presentation, here's a link to it. Take a look at the presentation, tell us what you think is best for the future of Fisher Road. Why? And we're going to be going back to our desks, sharpen our pencils, and really refining this to try to get it right as part of this effort. And so this survey is open for the next month, we, you know, and I think I'm really encouraging everybody here that's here on Zoom, that's here in person, you know, casually talk to your friends about this, send them a text, being like, hey, you know, you work on Fisher Road, or you pass through here all the time, you're my neighbor. Take a look at this, because that word of mouth is one of the best ways to drive input from these studies. And I think we can come up with a good design, we don't hear a lot, but our design will be that much better if we really build off what the community is saying. So definitely love to hear a lot of responses on this. And that's, that's more or less all I've got for my pedantic presentation, I hope it was reasonable. Folks on Zoom, I just dropped a link to the survey into the chat. Nathan, when you start showing costs? The cost on this, you know, and we can really, we can really kind of go back to this and apply order of magnitude costs, free for no bill, paint only road diet, let's give that, you know, $2 signs, $4 signs for lane reduction and sidewalk and $6 signs for roundabout and pathway, right? And I know that's not showing costs like you're asking about. We'll be getting into that. I think as we get to a preferred alternative, we kind of hear one of the heavy duty numbers on the preferred option. Yeah. And we'll have a full cost estimate for that. But I, there's a couple revisions in here. I noticed a couple slip ups in the way the, some of my, not the numbers representing, but the graph slips in there and a couple of them. So I'm going to have an update to this. And one thing I'll do with that update is it won't be exact dollars and cents, but we can add like an order of magnitude costs to this comparison chart on this page. Because I think that's an important thing when people are reviewing it and saying, this one best to recognize that we may all want to roundabout and pathway, but that, that will be the most expensive option. So that's just the cost to answer at this point. I just, I just thought of, maybe it's a question or more of a statement, but it's my understanding that as part of filming the new federal highway and some of the new priorities coming down from the feds in terms of project building that like pedestrian projects are a higher priority than let's say they have been in the past. And so perhaps there may be, there may be federal dollars available for projects. Yeah, guarantee. There are federal dollars, always been good federal dollars available. It's always, you know, the interesting thing is when you talk about multi-million dollar projects, it does a cover 80% and the town covers another 20, which when you're talking about multi-million dollar 20%, it heads up real fast for that rock town. So, so it's there. There's, it is interesting when there's the new Safe Streets for All initiative that is a brand new funding source specifically for your bike path and place making initiatives. There's some really fascinating stuff about tearing down three ways, which is not what we're doing here, but the route seems to be too big to put it all underground. So, yeah, they're there. And that's definitely something, as any of these scoping studies are implementation chapter in this final report, we'll finish with kind of a complete recognition of like, here's the resources we've kind of looked at mining going forward. And I think it's fair to say whatever the vision that the town decides on is that it's not all going to be done at one time, right? It's going to be done in pieces. You do the engineering design first, you know, and, you know, come up with those dollars and then you look at these other, and so it may take, you know, a good five, 10 years before you get a lot of this done. However, without doing this and having the vision, it'll never get done. I mean, that's a guarantee. Exactly. And I think, and I think in Tom, I think y'all outside the table can speak to this better than I can because you're involved day to day. But I see kind of the final product of this being a community-driven design that really sets the vision for the future of this road, where this really going to come in handy is ideally this new town center effort really takes off and there's some new development in the town center. And then all of a sudden someone's saying, you know, that old armory, I'm going to buy that, I'm going to put up these houses. And then they say, great, we know exactly what needs to go in the frontage there, you know, because we have scoping study for this. And it sort of guides the development of the road as well. Here we go. Anyone on Zoom have any questions, comments? Well, thank you all for your time. Please don't hesitate to take the survey if you haven't already. The link to the survey is on the website. We will update the slides are on there right now, but we'll probably update them tomorrow just to give them a little more detail. And those will be up there. And then the survey closes on November 25th. So, spread the word if you can. And thank you, everybody, for your time. Oh, Chris and Dakin, just thank you for the professionalism of this presentation. Our pleasure. It's a good opportunity. I can't wait to see the future of this road. I can follow the steps. Jim, do you here on mute if you have a question or something? I was going to say thank you and, you know, goodnight. Sounds like we're going down. So I appreciate the presentation and the invite. Thanks, Jim. I'm going to appreciate it. Sure. Reach out to me if you have any other questions. Okay, thank you.