 My name's Kate Beck, I'm the City Project Manager. We have our consultant team here as well to talk about the update of the master thoroughfare plan. And I wanted to start by talking a little bit about what that document is. It's the city's long range transportation planning document. And the purpose of it is to set the alignments of the major roadways in our arterial network, and then to also define how wide they're gonna be and what elements need to be included. So it helps us in the future for the next generation, the next couple of generations of development to preserve the right of way that we need for a logical transportation system, and to give guidance about how those roads need to function to support the surrounding development. Unfortunately, this plan does not come with a funding package. And so when we talk about these improvements that we're recommending, one of the outputs of the project is we hope to use the data from the project to help prioritize. These projects and these facilities as funding becomes available, but an output of this project is not going to be a capital improvement plan, for example, with a list of funding. It also doesn't talk about operational considerations. And so we don't talk specifically about intersection operations or intersections in general or street lights or the sorts of things that are the detailed subject of street design. This is a more global plan than that. So in terms of the agenda for today's presentation, I want to talk just a little bit about what we heard in our first round of public meetings. This is the last of four meetings for the second round. And so I want to tell you what we heard in the first round and what we've done with it, and then introduce some draft goals and objectives for this update that we've crafted based on the feedback that we got from the first round. I want to talk through real quickly the overall framework of the project. And then Christopher Kinzel with HDR, who's our primary consultant is going to stand up and talk about some of the technical progress that we've made since kicking the project off in terms of the information that you see up on the boards, the cross sections that we're talking about, the street types that we're proposing, the lanes map that's come out of some of our modeling work. And so he'll go through that in a lot of detail. I'll come back up to talk about some research we've done into peer cities and what they're doing in terms of transportation planning. And then just briefly tell you what's gonna be next in the project and then what else we can do this evening. So just briefly, in terms of the first round of public meetings, we had four meetings, also dispersed geographically in the spring and April. The agenda at those meetings was to introduce the project overall to get feedback on sort of the concepts with this update. I should have mentioned this a minute ago. We update the MTP periodically every five or six years. The last one was in 2009, but this update is quite a bit more substantial than what we've done in the past. We're trying to rethink the fundamentals of the plan. And so with the first round of public meetings, we wanted to hear sort of feedback about those concepts and the ideas that we had for how to reinvent the plan. And so we've categorized what we heard and we've mapped the comments that we got geographically. The bulk of the feedback and what we really wanted there in addition to introducing the project and the concepts was to understand what issues existed in the transportation plan as it's built today and as it was planned according to the last update, what alignments didn't work, where congestion existed, what connections needed to be made. We heard a lot of comments about operational concerns, signal timing, potholes, that sort of thing. We welcome those. This plan isn't gonna address those specifically, but we're happy to hear them because we can pass them on to the correct department in the city or onto the correct agency. And so we've categorized here the types of comments that we heard. A lot about operations and maintenance, a lot about mobility, how difficult it is to get from here to there or what a more efficient route would be. A lot of support for transportation choice to be able to take transit or to walk or to bike to your destinations that have always needed to use your vehicle. And then again, some, a lot of individual comments about sort of areas of safety concern and that sort of thing. So this slide is not meant to be read from where you're sitting. But what it is meant to show is that all of the comments that we've received, we've captured and we've categorized and we've identified who the responsible party is and what the action is that needs to be taken and what the status is. And so if it's a comment about an alignment, then it's ours to handle as part of this update. If it's a comment about a pothole, then it goes on to operations. And so we're keeping track of all of those and the spreadsheet has become enormous. But in any case, this is the way we're tracking the feedback that we get. So we wanna put together some draft or some goals and objectives for the plan. And we wanna tie outcome-based performance measures to those goals and objectives. And we wanna use those to prioritize these improvements when funding becomes available. And so based on the feedback that we got from the first round and from staff and from other partners, school districts and counties and other cities, here's what we've come up with. And this is something that we'd like your feedback on tonight. I'm gonna read it to you for those of you who can't see it in the back and then I'll unpack it a little bit. So the draft vision statement is provide a complete and connected context-sensitive transportation system for all users that supports mobility, healthy living and economic development. And so when we talk about a complete transportation system, we mean a system that accommodates all users that's safe and comfortable and effective for everyone that's using the streets. And when we talk about a context-sensitive transportation system, we're suggesting that the roadways should reflect and support the land use that they're adjacent to. So an arterial roadway that's running adjacent to a residential development should feel different and should be designed differently than a roadway that's running through a commercial area. So for all users, again, that suggests a complete system that gives choice about how you get around. So if you're a cyclist or if you're a pedestrian, the street should serve you as well as automobiles. And ultimately we wanna make sure that we're supporting mobility, healthy living and of course economic benefit, streets play an important role in that as well. And so we've put together this graphic that sort of talks about how mobility is a very important goal that needs to be balanced against opportunity to have streets that are active and lively and comfortable and safe. We wanna sustain what we have in terms of the capital investment that the city's already made and to maintain our roadways and to make sure that we're coordinating with our regional partners. So this is where we are today in terms of this. What we would like to do again is to come up with some measurable outcome-based performance measures associated with each of these goal areas that we could use to prioritize projects. Real briefly, I'll talk about the project framework. We have two advisory committees. The first is a task force, which is a nine member panel that's appointed by council. There's a representative for each council district. And their task is to give feedback to the project team about alignment recommendations, about the street types and the cross-section elements that we're developing to weigh in as the project develops at Key Milestones, to hear from the resource panel, which I'll talk about in just a minute, to hear from the public and make sure that that input is being incorporated. And then finally, to offer recommendations about the draft plan to the city plan commission and to the city council in advance of adoption. We also have a resource panel, which is made up of a broader stakeholder group. And so it's organizations across the city that have perspectives on the transportation network from community groups, neighborhood groups, the school districts, the chambers of commerce, the counties, you can see here, some folks that are represented. So that's about 50 members strong. We meet with both of these groups periodically. We've been meeting with them about every six weeks up until now. And so I'll flip backwards. The resource panel has a little bit of a different charge than the task force and maybe more of a technical basis. And so we're kind of vetting ideas and concepts and recommendations to make sure that they make sense from their perspective, that there's not some innovation that we haven't thought of that we might wanna incorporate. And so they've been very helpful to us. And then with that, I'm gonna hand it over to Christopher Kinzel for a few minutes. He'll talk about the progress of the project and I'll be back in just a minute. Thank you. I'm Christopher Kinzel from HDR. And yeah, I'm gonna walk you through sort of an overview of what's on these boards because they're pretty dense, pretty intense. So I'll do that. This reminds me of church because no one wants to sit in the front row. So last night it was like church too because I put someone to sleep during my talk. So we'll see if I can keep you awake. But so the MTP has been around for a long time. And for a long time, it's classified roads in a fairly limited way, I guess. And the current MTP has three different types of roads in it, principal arterials, which are basically always six lanes with a median, major arterials, which are four lanes with a median, and minor arterials, which are four lanes with a double yellow line down them. So what we call an undivided road. And really when you open the plan, that's pretty much what you get. And that's, as Kate says, it's not being sensitive to where you are in the city or what other users might need to use the road. And so we're really trying to expand that as we move forward with this update. As I think Kate mentioned, it's sort of a reimagining of how this system would work. And so Kate mentioned the idea of complete streets. That's something that's coming from the mayor on down. The city is committed to developing street types that are more embracing of all different kinds of transportation, have a little more flexibility in them into what can be provided. So things like bike lanes and bike accommodations, and not just bike lanes, but the different kinds that are becoming prevalent today, like a buffered bike lane next to parking so that people don't open their doors into the bike lane or an off street separated bike facility, which can be applicable in places with heavy traffic and or higher speeds. There's arterials in town. Obviously, this doesn't make sense all over town, but that have parking on them. And the MTP is kind of silent on that right now. And we'd like to set some guidelines for when that makes sense. And what the design criteria are are the general principles. Shared use pads are sort of a wider version of a sidewalk that allow for pedestrians and bicyclists. The T is working on its plan right now for transit updating its plan for transit across the city. And they're looking at special, and there's some of these already in the city, special transit lanes that are dedicated for buses. Also, we're talking about the potential or we want to allow for the potential of maybe median transit, whether that's a rapid bus transit in a median or even some daylight rail. And we just want to, those plans aren't firm or baked, but we just want to sort of allow for the possibility that those occur and start thinking about that. And then down to simple things like what the medians look like. So the current plan doesn't say anything about these two way left turn lanes or different median types that might make sense in different environments. And so all these elements are things we're trying to incorporate into the updated plan. So how do we do that? So this is where I kind of start walking through the boards a little bit. On this first board defining street types, we've thrown out the old classification of principal arterials, major arterials, minor arterials. And this is something we've worked together with, we've even talked a little bit about this at the first public meeting. And then we have worked with our resource panel and task force back and forth to kind of hone these and come up with these five street types you see here. And they're explained in more detail on this number one board over here. But they are more based around, and I'll show you this in more detail in a second, but where they're surrounding context as opposed to just how much traffic they need to carry. And so things like activity streets which are very, very pedestrian oriented and slower speeds, commerce mixed use streets are more of the business type streets but also still very pedestrian oriented. Some streets you see like this aren't always arterials and so they don't belong on this plan but there are many, many in a city that do carry, they're important for traffic carrying purposes but they run through these areas or will in the future of where the context is like this. And then moving on up to neighborhood connector which Kate was talking about, there's a road that may run sort of around the edge of a residential area connecting neighborhoods to services and those kinds of things. A commercial connector which is usually set in retail areas there'll be more driveways and different characteristics on those streets. And then system link which is of all these the most about moving automobile traffic although all of these were working and you'll see this in a second, we're working to incorporate all the different transportation modes but you would see these in areas where you're getting near a freeway and you're starting to carry a lot of traffic bound for that or if the major regional system kind of road. But all these are arterials, they're all major streets and so it's not like this is the only kind that carries a lot of traffic but they have that sort of more specific function. So the next board is after you've defined what these sort of look like then the next question is where do they go? So the first thing we did is we took the old, the current MTP and sort of reimagined, all right if we used all those different colors that are blue is activity and orange is neighborhood and so on, how would that, what makes sense based on the land use in the city and the future plans? So on this board over here, we actually have a map of the city's future land use plan and we've really had that as a guide as we've been working through what makes sense for these different streets and how they support that land use and these things get out of date. I mean, this is fairly current but we've been talking also with stakeholders and city staff who know about future development plans that are gonna change that map a little and so some of these reflect things that aren't even on this map yet but are known to be future projects. So it's really tied to the area, what the land use is gonna look like, whether that's residential, commercial, industrial, all those kinds of things, it's tied to that. And so this map is definitely something we want you to look at tonight. We've got a single version of it here and I think most of you in the back have already seen that we have blow ups of the city and quadrants and so you can look at that. We've been through this in detail with our task force and our resource panel and so this has already been through some and city staff and other folks have all kind of weighed in on this and we're certainly interested in what you have to say about it. So I say this because this one's fairly baked. I'm gonna show you a map in a little while that we're in the middle of developing and we're showing it to you it's sort of as we're developing it. So that's step two. So here's where it gets a little crazy. Step three is this complicated board over here and once you know where the roads are gonna go the question is how wide should they be? Well how wide should they be depends on what elements you have on them. So if you can imagine each of these blocks is I use the old traffic engineer way of if you're trying to look at how a road lays out and whether striping lines up you kind of get down on your, you get down and you look at the street kind of this way that's kind of what these are. They're like looking at the street and each of these is a different street section. So this one is 130 feet wide and it's got a 34 foot median in it and it's got for transit and it's got two 12 foot lanes and all these different elements have the different colors that are described on the sport. So the orange is bike related. So these are bike lanes and purple is transit. So you can see the different elements over there and this is a two way left turn lane and this is a median. So this is just a really compact way to kind of represent we're trying to allow a lot of flexibility and so it makes the plan a little more complicated but this is a way to kind of show those and to show you how this kind of works out. So again it's sort of like you're looking at the road here and you can see on this side there's sort of a pedestrian zone this six foot sidewalk, a buffer, this buffer area, the bike lane, the six foot all these numbers are widths and then the auto lane and then the median and so you can kind of get a sense of how that is and this is really important to plan the whole plan pivots on this because we're, as Kate mentioned we're trying to set the rights away for the future. We don't want to make the roads too wide because the city doesn't want to waste a lot of money building roads that you don't need and you don't want to reserve a lot of, waste a lot of land reserving right away for that. We also don't want to make them too small because and so roadway capacity is a really important piece and so having this suite of options allows us to do what we call right sizing and make the roads the size they're gonna be which really means we need to do some good forecasting and I'll talk about that in a second. As I mentioned, this is kind of crazy. We have 60, 80 different roadway sections here where today we have three right and so a developer comes into the city and says, well, I want this really narrow one. This is great and so people have that question. Well, how can you ensure that the right one gets built in the right place? It's not, Kate likes to say it's not a cafeteria plan. You don't walk in and just pick the one you like. We have a process that actually gets you down to one section and that's what board four is talking about. So what we've set up and we're still, we're still getting this nailed down and refined but we've run it through our committees and they kind of like it and we're making little tweaks here and there but it's a process where you look through a bunch of different lenses at the elements that you want in the street and by the time you're done, you've ended at one section. So I'll show you the elements and then how this process works and then a quick example of it. So you start off with the street type. So we have these 80 different cross sections over here. Immediately by picking a street type, you've narrowed it down to one of these little groups. So in this, I'll show you an example later where you look at the map and say, oh, this section of heritage trace is a neighborhood connector. So this is all that's open to me is this possibility, those sections. And then we have developed what we call a lanes map and that's the other map that we have tonight. We talk about it on that fifth board and we have quadrant versions of it back there. But this is the piece that's different. That's really different from the old plan. The old plan said a principal arterial is always six lanes, major arterials always four lanes. And this plan actually looks at, well, let's think about the fact that there might be something that needs to not carry as much traffic but it moves through a business area. So maybe it only needs one lane in each direction or you might need a six lane road in a commercial area but you might need a four lane road where it works just as well. And so we're setting the context of these roads and saying this is a commercial connector but it can vary in width from a one lane in each direction to four lanes or two or three lanes in each direction. And so what we're doing is we've developed a travel forecasting map. Our trial forecasting model, this is a really common thing that's done in cities all across the country and it takes that same land use that I was talking about over here, the future forecasted land use in the city and looks at, well, what does that mean from a traffic perspective? How many cars does a residential subdivision develop generate every day and how does that play out on the roadway system? And so we're using that model which we started out with the one that's a regional model that's built by the council of governments and we've kind of worked on it for Fort Worth's specific demographics and working out some of the kinks of it and looking even longer term than some of the traditional models looks that we really make sure we're not ignoring or neglecting some growth that we're expecting out in the future and that sets this number of lanes map. The thing is, as I said earlier we're in the middle of making this map so we're showing it to you when we're in the middle of it but that's just where we are in the process and we wanted to show you where we are in the process and so we're certainly interested in your comments just be aware that we are still fiddling with the model and getting things just right. And at the end, I said this last night it's not just push a button and the computer tells you how many lanes it's you've got to do that but then you got to think you got to use your brains as well and so we're using our judgment we're running it by different folks who know the city know the growth, know how things will work so that's what the lanes map is for so that's step two. The step three is a little less complicated the T is developing their plan that I mentioned earlier and they're actually going to be developing a map they're in the middle of doing that right now as we're doing our plan they're developing their plan a map that shows where they think the high capacity bus corridors might need to be and where exclusive bus lanes might need to go and so our plan will essentially point to their plan and say in this selection process we're going to look at what they're saying what the transit needs are in the future and have these and so it's again just looking at someone looking at one more map to determine to help narrow this down. Medians so I mentioned there's a wide variety of medians that can be on a road from a two way left turn lane so that we actually ask a series of questions and it's based on data that the city has that's pretty well available how much traffic is on the road how fast it's going, number of lanes some other things like that and that dictates what kind of median makes the most sense if there's a lot of turning movements and it's in a business area you may need a two way left turn lane those kinds of things if it's on a corridor that's really busy you might need a median that's wide enough for double left turns at some intersections those kinds of things. Parking a couple of our sections include parking the activity and the commerce mixed use that we talked about those are more the sort of have a downtown flavor they don't just belong downtown but that's kind of the flavor they have and so they have on street parking and there's some choices there about whether it's angle or parallel and again that's based on looking at traffic volumes if there's too much traffic and maybe you don't want to do angle parking because that causes a lot more conflicts and those kinds of things and so we look at the number of lanes on the traffic volumes and then last is but not least is bike facilities you have to know the answer to a couple of other questions here before you decide on your bike facility that's also based on track traffic volumes it's based on the bike Fort Worth plan that's been developed and but also it looks at things like parking type because I mentioned earlier you know just if you determine you want a bike lane on the street but there's parking there then you want to make it a little wider so there's that buffer for the door buffer door zone as we call it so this is the general process and here's kind of how it works so I mentioned earlier so starting again from the beginning so let's say we're gonna be applying this process as we develop the plan and then ultimately as a process that can be used down the road when people are updating the plan or amending a plan for a specific development that kind of thing there's various things that can cause a change in the plan but so you look at the you're talking about your segment of road okay my map says it's gonna be a neighborhood connector so here's my or I narrowed down my choices here the number of lanes you look at the lanes map and you say okay one lane in each direction so that narrows down that takes a whole bunch of sections out basically transit okay well I look at the transit plan it says there's no purple line on the map basically so that takes a few more of these facilities out I'm down to four potential ones a median so I do my calculations and it says two way left turn lane makes sense here so we're down to just two sections left and then parking this kind of street has no parking on it so it doesn't really affect our decision and then I do a couple calculations look at the bike plan and it says conventional bike lane which is a six foot wide bike lane and boom we're down to one section so that's how you can get from this massive amount of sections down to a single one so we've allowed a lot of flexibility through this plan but also we say flexibility but predictability so that people know it's not just this random set of streets that's gonna be out there they all fit their context and their use so the major street plan is basically two pieces as Kate described earlier it's kind of what should the streets look like and then it's sort of what kind of right away should we preserve and where should the roads go essentially so the first part of what I've said is about these first five boards and that's what should the roads look like and how wide should they be quickly we're also looking at alignment so we have technology that really wasn't available in previous iterations of the plan now a computerized mapping technology where we can actually look at well there's just a line on the map here but does it make sense? Does it cross a large amount of flood plain are there environmental hazards in the way? Does it hit a gas well? Is there a hill in the middle? And some things that sometimes in the past when you drew these lines on a map you really couldn't look at in that much detail I'll show you a little bit more about that this is talking sort of about this last board but what we did is Kate showed that map of all the comments we got from you at the last round of public meetings we've pulled those together we had some in-depth means with city staff who also know what their constituents are asking about in the future and some other folks our resource panel and task force have weighed in and so this is what I call a blob map it's got these red blobs all over it and these are all issue areas where that have been identified it's different than the map of everything you told us at the last meeting as Kate said there were things about traffic signals and potholes and that kind of thing and those are being routed to the correct place but this is our map to evaluate where these roads should go should there be a bend here because of this hill or those kinds of things or is there a connection missing or is there a city nearby that's updated their plan so we need to connect with their plan and so these are all we're going through these systematically one by one and so we're interested in you kind of taking a look at those as well and just but tonight we don't have all the details of that as well we're sort of telling you where we're going and this is what we're doing is we're looking at the roads and if there's a lot of roads in town that are already built and so this plan affects the most roads that haven't been built or roads that are two lane dirt roads or rural roads today but we know in the future they're gonna be serving a lot of growth but we are also looking at roads that have been built and you'll see that we have colored we've assigned road types and our street types to those roads what that doesn't mean that as soon as the plan is done we're gonna go out and start rebuilding all the existing roads in town that's definitely not the case we're kind of developing a process for what do you do about a built road and it'll be the plan would guide you in a case where a road there's a project being done on a road and either there's a redevelopment project or something like that and so this plan would tell you the general principles for that but most of the things we're doing is looking at these future roads and there's a lot of them on the map and we're using what's called GIS our computerized mapping to look at that and look at issues that people raised on that blob map and then we evaluate them and so if we look and see is this a major issue is it something we need to worry about some of them and many of them are no I mean some of the issues you see on this board are things like can you check whether this makes sense to realign or just clean up the map a little bit there's just a mistake on the map or things like that so a lot of the issues are just pretty simple but some of them are more major and we're looking at well should a road be taken off the plan or should a road be realigned and so for those kinds of issues that's what this map book the last picture on the last board over there we're developing one of these for each of those situations and so what it is is this is Avondale Hazlet I think and this is a few different options for where road alignments could go there and then we're running them through our computerized model looking at things like well land values and population sensitive population groups the land use here's an excerpt from the Hazlet land use plan all the things you see on the map gas wells and flood planes and then we're comparing them we're letting our analysis sort of machine tell us some things well this one hits more flood plan than that one and ultimately it's all about cost this is we're trying to make cost effective decisions for the city in terms of these future roads and so we're showing you one example of sort of what our product is gonna be tonight and again it's a very detailed thing we're rolling up our sleeves with a couple of our committees in a couple weeks to go through each of these one by one and it's gonna be painful because this is really detailed but it's an important process because it affects future development areas and future developable areas and so we really wanna make sure we get this right so that growth occurs and we're sort of following the growth in a sensible manner. So just real briefly I mentioned that a part of the project is to look to other communities and try to understand what they're doing with transportation planning and if they have any good ideas that we would wanna capture that might be applicable in Fort Worth. So what we were looking for were concepts, policies, processes and then also lessons learned we realized that the implementation of this plan is going to be really critical to its success and so where other communities have done something similar or we wanna see how it went if there are things that they would have done differently. We were looking for communities that had recently been involved in transportation planning and that had used either innovative or progressive approaches or we're using some of the approaches that we're considering again to understand if there are some lessons learned in the implementation or in the development of the plan that would be helpful to our project and then also we were looking for communities that were comparable to Fort Worth both in terms of land, area and population. So this is a listing of the cities that we looked into and we started first by doing a literature review where we looked at what their policies and their processes are but then we followed up with in-depth surveys with the staff to really understand, make sure that we fully understood what we were reading and looking at. And what we found were a number of practices that we thought may have application in Fort Worth. Not all of these that would be implemented through this plan but that would complement it. So for example, there were communities that under the area of complete streets, there were communities that rather than using a traditional sort of level of service measure for automobile traffic to determine how many lanes they needed, they had developed sort of tailored level of service measures for streets like the activity streets where they would look maybe at the level of service for pedestrians or for other modes or they would recognize that additional congestion in those areas was allowable because you wanted to try to encourage activity on the street. So that was an interesting idea. We saw tools that staff would use, especially in constrained environments to try to understand where it's not possible to expand the right of way but you still wanna apply some of these comments. They had checklists and guidelines and decision trees to think about how to prioritize the components of the street that would be incorporated. There were communities that were doing what we were trying to do in terms of tying the goals and objectives to a prioritization of the projects for when funding became available. There was some information about safety considerations for some of the treatments that they were using that I think is useful to us. And then finally, there was good information about putting the plan together and keeping it up to date because the plan that we're creating sort of ties together a lot of transportation plans, the bike plan and the T's transit plan and our Walk Fort Worth plan. And the land use plan, anytime those are updated, it's gonna trigger an update of this rather than just doing one periodically every five or six years. And then briefly in terms of next steps for the project, our next task force meeting, those are public meetings, is scheduled for October 19th and the agenda then is gonna be a presentation of the draft plan. So we'll have recommendations at that point regarding street type assignment and the lanes map and an outline of the policy document that'll accompany it. And then we're anticipating a third round of public meetings which will be the final round in December, early to mid December, to talk again about the draft plan before we move into the adoption process which will start after the beginning of the year. And between now and then, we're going to be working on refining and finalizing the street types, the cross sections, the alignments. We're also gonna begin working on an access management policy that the city doesn't have now but that will contemplate median treatments, driveway spacing, that sort of thing to think about the number of conflict points and the effect on capacity. And then finally we're gonna be developing cross sections for the lower level streets that are not included on the map. So your neighborhood streets, collector streets, that sort of thing. We wanna develop cross sections that are not as detailed but that incorporate the same complete streets concepts that we're building for the arterial network. And then in terms of the rest of this evening, after the close of the presentation, we'd be happy to answer any questions and the staff and the consultant team will be available and we can talk about each of the boards and each of these steps in more detail.