 Good evening. Welcome to Linking Longmont. My name is Jim Angstatt. I am the Director of Engineering for the City of Longmont, Public Works and Natural Resources Department. When I first mentioned speaking tonight, I always ask my 12-year-old daughter what I should do first. So she said, start with a joke, Dad. You'll like this one. It's the hardest thing about learning to ride a bicycle. The pavement. I was hoping that that wasn't going to be a flat joke. So what brings us together this evening? We are here as part of, to have a discussion about the city's continuing efforts to enhance safe walking, riding and rolling. Tonight you'll have the opportunity to meet with a number of city staff, to engage, to talk, offer ideas, and receive information on our future efforts to improve walking, riding, and rolling in Longmont. And when we talk about Longmont, part of it is also an effort, let's not just talk about how we connect Longmont, but how do we link Longmont, Elder County. We have some speakers here who will talk about a few things throughout the state, we really want to encourage the guests here tonight, which are our residents, to ask questions. So how do we link Longmont? From our city staff perspective, we start with Envision Longmont, embedded in Envision Longmont. This is our planning document for the city, embedded in Envision Longmont is a multimodal plan. One of the plans within that plan is our bicycle facilities plan. So city staff uses that plan, we create, start crafting projects from that, which carries us through a budget process, then we go to design and construction, and hopefully, if we're successful, we will end up with a couple of projects that improve walking, riding, and rolling in Longmont. So I wanted to highlight a couple of our recent accomplishments. The first project on your left is Sunset Street. That was what's called a road diet, where we took basically four lanes of traffic, two lanes in each direction, and basically added a center lane, took out two lanes of traffic, and added bike lanes. We improved the sidewalk, so we are one of the projects here. This is the first phase, we all have a second phase you can see tonight. The center project is our South Highlight that, because this is an example of one of our projects that's included in our pavement management program, and one of the philosophies our staff has in the engineering department is that we look at each project, each road we pave separately, and if there's an opportunity for us to do something different, we will undertake that. When I say something different, we look to expand that roadway, and not just by widening out, but by pushing in. In this case, we took out some of the medians in the center of the road, reduced the lanes, we're able to add bike lanes. The last project is Mountain View. This is an example of what's called an EMUK, Enhanced Multiuse Corridor, where we, in this case we were able to take out some of the parking areas and then add bike lanes. In this case, we also added, we added what we're looking to do where we can, a buffered bike lane. So that's some of our recent work, but there are other ways to promote walking, riding, and rolling. Next I'd like to introduce Sophie Schulman, and she's got a really cool title. It's the Chief of Innovative Mobility for the Colorado Department of Transportation. She will speak on transit, mobility technologies, and electric vehicles. Welcome Sophie. Thanks for having me here. Just a little bit about myself before I go into this presentation. I just moved out to Colorado a little under a year ago. I moved from Washington, D.C. where I worked on electric vehicle charging, and I worked at the federal government on clean transportation and smart city technology. So I had a really high level national perspective, and it's really exciting to be here in Colorado. Building tools that we use on our streets every day. For me specifically, this is really close to home because I don't have a car. So I take transit, I took the LD2 to get here today, and I walk a lot, and it really gives you a great perspective on what's working in our roads and what's not. I just wanted to give a little context there, and I'm going to talk today about how the state is thinking about new technologies and mobility and how those things work together. And I'm just touching on a small slice of what CDOT does, and obviously you guys deal with highways all the time, and there's a lot of other work that I'm not going to be able to cover today, but I'm happy to answer any questions after we're done speaking. So the Office of Innovative Mobility was created again about a year ago when I came on board, and really we started with what's the problem we're trying to solve by introducing new technologies by better you have today. So big challenges that we see that I think folks are probably aware of, this chart on the left here is population growth in the state of Colorado, but especially in the front range. We are seeing massive growth, and we need transportation solutions to help solve that. The chart on the right, which I'm sure you can't read very well, is really showing how transit is also a really important to communities in vulnerable populations that don't have other options to get around. And so when we talk about transit, we frequently talk about RTD, we talk about urban areas, but it's also really critical as a basic transportation tool for some of our most vulnerable folks, and I just think that's really important as we think about other parts of the state, rural areas, this is a really critical tool. So those are the two major issues that we're looking at, and some of the challenges that are associated with that are congestion, poor air quality, the Denver Metro North Front Range area was knocked into serious non-attainment for Ozone, and again that hits our most vulnerable populations, that's hits our kids, our aging communities, and we really need to look at transportation both to improve convenience so everybody can get around faster and more easily, but also to make it healthier for our communities. So the Office of Innovative Mobility is designed to really think about those challenges, and we brought in the Division of Transit and Rail, which is an existing team within CDOT, and it operates the bus dang, which I'll talk more about in a second, but really that existing transportation tool that we have, which is transit, which is great and works really, really well to do a lot of things for our communities, and then looking at what are the technology tools like electric vehicles, shared use, and then the future of connected and autonomous vehicles, and how can we use all of these things together to better move people in Colorado. So I'm just going to go through each of these areas quickly. I mentioned the Division of Transit and Rail. Busting is our inner city bus service, which if you haven't taken it you should definitely look into it. We've launched a new service that goes directly from Denver Union Station to three different ski resorts, which we're really excited about, and obviously that's not as convenient for you folks, but we are hoping to expand more of those services, and part of that is showing the success that we can get people to take a and then we can further expand that and sell that to other parts of the state. We're also working on Front Range Rail, which this is very much a study at this point, but that's looking at again that very significant growth that we see along the I-25 corridor. What are tools that we can use to solve that? Part of it is the success that we've already had with bus dang, which runs along the I-25 corridor and has really had rapid growth over the past several years since we launched it, but would there be consumers for that? What would the cost be? That's the process that we're going through right now. Then we're looking at ride sharing and emerging mobility technology. Quick stakeholder process where we brought together industries, so Amazon, Uber, Lyft, lots of other companies that have interests in this. We brought together local governments, nonprofits, advocacy groups to really think about how are these new services impacting our communities? What are the tools that we have, whether that's fees or other incentives to encourage those services to use as many shared? We came up with a report on that and it's available on our website and I'm happy to share the link with anybody afterwards. There's a lot of data in there and a lot of it is really trying to think about what does the future look like? There's a lot of questions out there of how Uber and Lyft are going to grow, how they're going to impact our communities, but I think it's really important for all of us to think about how do we want technology to really play within our communities and what public policy tools do we have to impact that in a positive way? And attention, you may have seen that Lyft announced that they are bringing 200. They actually have already brought 200 Key and Eero EVs to the Denver metro area, which is a progress to show that some of these high mileage vehicles can be converted to electric and that that works in some communities. And obviously, a key part of that is making sure that we have enough charging for those vehicles as well, which I'll talk more about. And then transportation demand management. This is something that has been a longstanding practice and it's something that I'm excited to talk about in the context of technology because traditionally this is employers convincing their employees to bike to work, to take transit, giving them an eco pass. But I think there's also some really exciting new tools to make this app-based to create gamification, which means giving you a couple of cents to take transit, things like that that make this a little bit more exciting, a little bit more engaging and can help us all be convinced to transportation choices. And then on top of that, I think making transit easier from a data perspective, you know, all of us walk around with phones. Most of us have Google Maps and can look at and see when the bus is coming. It's really great when you have that integration. But getting that data from all the different transit agencies across the state, integrating that with Uber and Lyft, which RTD has started doing and will be doing that with busting at some point as well. But really trying to have everything in one place. It makes it easier. We have the tools available today. And it's just putting the time and effort in to make it easy for people to take transit. And then finally looking at what are the tools we have, especially using things like Uber and Lyft to better serve some of our vulnerable populations. We talked about that earlier with that map that I showed at the beginning, which is that transit is really, really essential for these folks. But there might be better, more cost-effective ways to serve people that have non-emergency medical transport needs through some on-demand services. So we're exploring that as well. And now the sexy stuff. This is the connected and autonomous vehicle. So if you're not familiar with an autonomous attenuator, that's what you're looking at right now. An attenuator is actually a device that we mount on top of a truck and it's designed to basically get in the way in case another car comes along and hits this vehicle. And it's to protect the car in front of it, which is doing, in this case, paint striping. So it's really just a safety measure. It's an extra vehicle that's intended to get in the way and help prevent an accident. And so it seems like a very logical place to take the human out of the equation. And this is a really great opportunity to test autonomous vehicle technology because it's a leader follower technology. So this secondary vehicle is just following that vehicle in front of it. It slows down when the one in front of it slows down. It stops when that one stops. And so it's a really great opportunity where we see a near term safety benefit. We think that the technology is ready to do this now. And this is really the approach we're taking to autonomous technology. There's so much uncertainty and the technology is changing very, very quickly. So in terms of wise taxpayer investments, we want to do things that are improving safety, that are showing near term benefits, and are really helping us learn for the future. In addition, CDOT oversees the Autonomous Mobility Task Force, which is the regulatory body for the state. So if a private sector company comes in and wants to test in the public right of way, they have to come present on what their plans are, what their safety plans are, and then CDOT, the state patrol and the DMV actually have to approve those plans. So it's a short term solution as we have relatively few deployments here in Colorado. But I think in the long term, we have to think about what does that regulatory structure look like for local communities, for counties, for the region and for the state. And one of the ways we're doing that is looking at what are states like California and Arizona that have more of these deployments? How are they thinking about this regulatory structure? And then obviously, what is the federal government going to be doing? So lots more to come on autonomous vehicles. And then finally, zero emission vehicles. And you may hear electric vehicles, zero emission vehicles. There's lots of terms thrown around. This is a CDOT Chevy Bolt here, which is a battery electric vehicle. And we're really excited about the potential here, and especially CDOT's role in helping to provide connectivity across the state so that people with an electric vehicle and a tourist coming in with electric vehicles can get anywhere they need to go. And we're seeing a lot of rapid improvement in the market for electric vehicles. Lots more models coming on, longer ranges and faster charging times. There are new state of the art 350 kilowatt chargers that can charge your car in about 15 minutes. Those aren't that common, but it's really starting to get to a point where it's very similar to the traditional car experience. So one of the things that the governor instructed us to do back in January was to adopt the Zev standard, which requires manufacturers to sell a certain percentage of electric vehicles in the state of Colorado. And what that means is that all of those new models that are coming on, all-wheel drives, SUVs, it means there'll be more motivated to bring those to Colorado because they get credits for them. And so this is not a mandate on any individual, but it really provides more choices to Coloradans. And we're really excited to start seeing those vehicles very soon. And we've actually gotten our first Kea Nero EV here in Colorado, so we're excited that that's already happening. And then the other piece of this is transit electrification. And lots of cities and counties in Colorado have started to sort of think about what does this transition look like, and it's definitely something that we as the state feel like we need to help prepare folks for. It's not something that transit agencies are used to planning for. And so it's really important that we're thoughtful about this transition, that we help them through it, that we don't over-purchase a bunch of vehicles as the technology is improving. And so this is something that that's a huge priority for us because the air quality benefits are really huge, especially in disadvantaged communities that frequently have the worst air quality. And so we're really excited to plan for this transition and help our transit agencies through that. And then finally, charging. I mean, this is the big barrier I think in a lot of places for folks even considering buying an electric vehicle. And so the state has invested in 33 DC fast charging stations, which should be built in the next year or so. Those are across the state and they'll be providing a corridor network. That's in addition to private sector investments from Electrify America and other private sector partners. We're also working with our neighboring states to make sure that that connectivity is across major networks of the state. So lots more to come in terms of charging infrastructure, but it's really great that Colorado is a leader on electrification and we're excited to continue to help build that over the next several years. All right, now I'm going to turn it over to Pete. Thank you, Sophie. Our final speaker tonight is Pete Piccolo. He is the executive director of Bicycle Colorado. Pete will discuss his organization's work in providing a voice for bicyclists statewide and how to further sustainable transportation. I think I got that right. Welcome, Pete. Good evening. Thanks for having me today. Let's see if I can get this out. So I'm going to jump right in. There are three topics I want to cover with you. The first is so I know that many of you are fans of biking, walking and public transit, but nevertheless I'm an advocate so I want to light a fire under your butt. I want to make the case to you that our transportation system is fundamentally broken and in fact if we don't up our game, if we don't do more sooner, we're going to find ourselves in the midst of a transportation crisis. And if we find ourselves in a transportation crisis, our community, perhaps Longmont as well, is going to be a place that many of us and our kids and grandkids are not going to want to live in 30 years. So that's objective one. Number two, I want to share with you some of the challenges that I and my teammates and others who are advocates for sustainable transportation face on a day-to-day basis. And then the third objective is there's a little bit of doom and gloom in this presentation and so I want to try to end on a high note. I want to provide you a path forward, a path that I hope is part inspirational and part practical to overcome a few of these challenges I'm going to share with you so that you can accelerate your work of building a sustainable transportation system. So before I jump in, how many of you drove here today? Me too. I'm not like Sophie. In fact, I have two cars. So my goal tonight, hey Peter, my goal tonight isn't to shame you by the transport for the transportation choices that you make. The physical infrastructure that we have built really dictates to a great extent our transportation choices. Typically a car is the most convenient way to get around and is sometimes the only way. And again, I have two cars and I drove here this evening. So I am part of the problem that I'm about to describe. And secondly, could you give me 15-minute notice? I'm going to put you to work, otherwise I'm just going to keep babbling on. So we have to start with this. And Sophie mentioned this. It's projected that we're going to add three million people to our population over the next three decades. To put that in perspective, that's the equivalent of adding just over four cities the size of Denver. To provide a little more context, in 1908, when cars were first available to the masses, there were about 750,000 people in Colorado. Almost 110 years later, we've added four and a half million. So we're talking about adding three million people in three decades. And don't think for a minute that all of these people are going to be nicely distributed across our 104,000 square miles. The majority of these people are going to plant roots right here in the front range. And Longmont is in the impact zone of this population tsunami. So many of you know that the number of people living in a community impacts the quality of life. It could impact it in a favorable way, but if not managed, it could have some downside impacts. It impacts housing, it impacts climate, it impacts transportation. So let's just talk about transportation. So I believe it is a fact that a car dependent transportation system has a limited capacity for the number of people that it can move. And as you approach this capacity, life gets pretty uncomfortable. And then at some point, and I think we're getting close to this point, at some point it's not possible to increase that capacity by building roads. I wish I had more time just to talk about that because I'm guessing some of you disagree, but I'm going to have to move on. And let's talk about why our car dependency is a crisis. Let's talk about what it looks like when you start hitting this capacity limit. So first let's talk about climate. If you had to pick the dirtiest form of transportation on a day-to-day basis, it would be driving alone in your car. 53,000 people die every year in America from vehicle related emissions. That's according to a recent study released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pollution from our tailpipe is now the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and is the number two source of greenhouse gas emissions in Denver. I can go on and on with data about how dirty gas-powered, I should be clear on that, gas-powered cars are in the negative impact it's having on our climate and how our air is, the quality of our air is really a challenge. But I have other depressing data to share with you, so I'm going to move on. So last year 40,000 people died on America's roads. That's more people than, that's more people than died by a gunshot. An additional four and a half million people suffered a severe bodily injury. In many cases a permanent handicap. 632 people died on Colorado's roads in 2018. 20 of those, 22 of those people were on a bicycle and that's up from 9 in 2002. If we were to have this trend line for pedestrians it would look the same except the number of deaths are much greater. So every one of these tragedies it just breaks my heart and I'm sure it impacts you as well. But it also makes me angry because almost all of these deaths are preventable and I'm guessing some of you may disagree with that as well because people have challenged me on that and I'll come back to it in a minute. Driving around is the most expensive form of transportation we have on a day-to-day basis. On average it costs 8,500 bucks a year. It's the second highest cost for us behind housing and it's a cost that many people can't afford. So ask yourself this question. Ask yourself if you had to design a way to get around town that can accommodate the greatest number of people what would it be? And this picture hints to it. I can tell you it's not driving alone in your car. So on the foreground is 50 people and on the left are those 50 people on bicycles and the amount of space they take. On the right is if those 50 people were in a bus and then the middle is if those 50 people were on a car. And this picture is actually pretty generous because the cars are parked they're bumper to bumper so you know the train would be much longer if they were if they were moving. This is congestion right here this middle picture. So if you're a Denverite you can expect to spend on average 83 hours a year sitting in traffic. It's about two and a half years over the course of an adult's life. We also pave over an extraordinary amount of land to drive and park our vehicles. In most urban areas Denver included roughly 60% of public space is allocated to cars. So this is an aerial of Denver and what shaded in green is the real estate that is allocated to parking. And I know Longmont allocates quite a bit of space to cars as well. I've done my homework. It's not this bad but there's quite a bit of real estate we allocate to cars. Space that could be used for affordable housing, parks or how much is grass. So I would argue this is what a broken transportation system looks like. And I have to be honest with you it's it's beyond me why we accept the fact that going from our homes to our jobs or going from our homes to school or to the grocery store requires that we pollute our air and take our life into our own hands. We can do better than that. We really can. So my view on all of this is summed up neatly for me by this person, Eddie Anna Krug from the World Health Organization. She said if motorized transport did not yet exist no seeing government would permit it. In other words if we had a white canvas and if we could just start from scratch what we have today we would not have going forward. So let's just turn our attention to the to the future and begin to wrap our head around what sustainable transportation is. So this is my definition of sustainable transportation. This is what we talk about it at Bicycle Colorado and it's essentially the flip of what I just went through. It's a transportation system that's not dirty. It's clean. It's not deadly. It's safe. It's not expensive. It's low cost. It's space efficient. So therefore it's time efficient. I haven't talked about active transportation and we are all designed physically to walk and you know I don't have time to get into the health challenges we're facing but ideally we would be moving more and it would be equitable. It would be available to people of all ages, physical abilities, genders and so forth. So how do we go from what we have today to something like this quickly because remember three million people are coming to Colorado. So this is a September 10th article that provides some indication of just a few of the solutions and solutions that I recognize make a lot of people uncomfortable. So this is a piece that covered a potential punitive plan by the Environmental Protection Agency that involved banning on-street parking certain times of the day, dedicated bus lanes, not just in Denver but the surrounding suburbs, all to address air pollution. This article was published in 1973. Downtown Denver got its first dedicated bus lane this year. So A, it's too slow and why are we moving so slow? So there are a long list of challenges and I'm going on to my second objective. There are a long list of challenges that that I can speak to that I face and my teammates face on a day-to-day basis. Some of them are policy, some of them are economic, and some of them are just a reflection of who we are as human beings. And I find that that last category those are the toughest challenges and that is a long list as well and I don't have time to go through all of them but I will do a few. So we go through life building mental models to make meaning out of the world that we live in. They're implicit, they're explicit, but we're processing information and we're making judgments on what people look like and conclusions about what's right and what's wrong. We have a mental model about transportation and for most people today this is the mental model they have. This is a hierarchy of priority and when you ask most people what are streets for, they will say for moving cars as quickly as possible. At the top of the priority list is me driving alone in my vehicle and at the bottom of the list are the people who want to walk, bike and take public transit. Have any of you been to a bike lane meeting? A couple of you. So I've been to a few too and I mean there are times I've been bike lane meetings. When I first started this job, the first meeting I went to, I thought it was in the wrong meeting. You would have, it was so contentious, you would have thought that we were haggling over a slice of land on the Gaza Strip. It was it was really unbelievable and part of the reason there's disagreement is because I have a different mental model. It's basically the opposite. Then when we're designing our physical space including our streets you start with the cleanest form of transportation, the most active, and our most vulnerable users and then you work down. And I'm not suggesting that cars don't have a place in the world, they do. It's just not at the top of the hierarchy, right? And so part of the change that we need to wrestle with is shifting our mental model, which is really hard to do. So as human beings we really suck at envisioning a radically different way of configuring the world in living our lives. We do. There's a quote that I'm sure many of you heard that's attributed to Henry Ford. Some people say he didn't say it, but it's relevant nonetheless, which is if you ask people what they wanted at the turn of the century they would have said a faster horse, which I think captures this thinking really well. But think about it. From the moment we took our first breath on this planet, from the moment we looked out the window and had our first memory, it's cars, right? People move by cars. We expect to see that visual of Denver with all of that payment. That's the way the world works. It's as if it's this, I don't know, this immutable law of nature, right? Sun rises in the east, suns in the west, sky is blue, equals MC squared, and humans get around by driving. So we're in this mental cage, mental cage, it's really rigid and it's hard to break out of. And when you sit in that cage for a long time, you get this feeling of futility or a lack of hope, which is the next thing I hear a lot about. It just can't be done. And I hear this most often when I'm in conversations about vision zero, which is the global initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities. Boulder's embraced it, Denver's embraced it. I think you're talking about it if I'm not mistaken. But people, you know, no one wants to say, like, well, our goal should be to reduce fatalities from 70 to 50. That's a good number and we could celebrate 50 deaths. But people have said to me, it can't be done. So I just want to dispel that myth. Not by this graph. Denver embraced vision zero in 2016 and deaths have increased. But if you look at a city of comparable size, Oslo, they have about 670,000 people, last year they had one death. No kids, no pedestrians, no people on bikes. This was a car crash. Now I know there are going to be people who say, well, they're European, you can't compare Oslo to Colorado. So I've been there and I can tell you that the human species in Oslo is the same as the human species here. And the reason they've made gains is because they have that hierarchy that I shared with you with pedestrians on top. They drive smaller vehicles, they drive slower. It's a function of our infrastructure. It's a function of the world that we want to build. It's possible. So the last barrier that I want to cover is just change. And we talk about it all the time and you know people often say, well, I'm adaptive, I'm flexible, I like change. And I don't, I don't believe that. So I want to tell you a quick story to underscore my point that change is hard and particularly changing car culture and moving from what we have today is something different. And while I tell this story, just to make my point that change is hard, I want to ask you to do something. If you're wearing a watch or a bracelet, take it off and start putting it on the other hand. Just wear it a little bit and let it sink in how uncomfortable, I'm serious. I see watches, try it. And I'm going to tell my story. So I live in a wash park, plant park, which is a suburb of Denver, about four miles outside of the city. And it's kind of, I have wonderful neighbors. They're pretty progressive in their views of the world. They're early adopters for everything, from technology to cultural norms. You see the signs, all lives matter. I mean, they're all in on everything. So one morning, a Sunday, about a year and a half ago, I look out the window and there's this commotion next door. A bunch of neighbors are huddled in a circle just off the sidewalk towards the curb. So I walk out to check out what's going on. And this was all the commotion. So at that time, Bird dropped a bunch of scooters in downtown Denver. One of these scooters landed in my neighborhood. And this scooter was on that patch of grass between the sidewalk and the curb, right? And my progressive enlightened neighbor was really upset. A lot of scooter hate going on, those scooter riders, you know, it's the apocalypse is coming. And they all know what I do. So my neighbor looked at me, kind of tongue in cheek, but serious. And it's like, what do you think about this? What are you going to do about this? And so I said, I go Vinny, I go look up and down this block from one end of the other, bumper to bumper cars on a Sunday. And I said, the four cars in front of your house are not even yours. How come you don't have a problem with the 50 cars parked on our block, but you have a problem with this one scooter resting against the tree. And he said, well, their cars. Car culture is so embedded in our view of the world that sometimes we don't even recognize our natural bias. So how do we break that? So let's talk about that. So this is my final point. I'm going to try to end on a high note. Talked about, so first you have to start with, like, we got a problem. And if you don't think we have a problem, then, you know, what I'm about to say is pointless, because you have to accept that we have a problem and we've got 3 million people coming and the problem's only going to get worse. So think about the mental cage. Think about the difficulty of change and how do we move forward? So you got to just start by asking yourself, how do you want your community to look and feel today in 30 years from now for your kids and grandkids when millions of more people are here? And then, you know, think about the hot spots in your community that may drive you nuts, where the traffic is, you know where the crashes are, your city folks have the data, or think about the places where you'd like to be more people-friendly, a park or a plaza, right? And then envision it. Don't just envision it in your head, but put it to paper. And when you put it to paper, start talking to your community members about it, right? So I just want to give you a couple of examples. I know for those of you who are in this line of work, this is old news, but I just want to give you a couple of examples. I was trying to remember where I got these from. I think it was, maybe you will know when I go through, I think it was Fort Collins. But this is an example of a street where if you think about the pyramid and the hierarchy, single occupancy vehicles are on top. Two lanes in each direction, parking as well, no place to ride a bike, pretty tight sidewalk. How could that look? 20 mile an hour speed limit, protected bike lane, and this is cheap. It's cheap to test this. Again, two lanes in each direction, no place to ride a bike. How might that look? Sketch it out, talk about it, make changes if there's something you don't like. This is made for speed. Three-way, three lanes, one direction, plus parking. How might this look? Just paint and ballers. All right, so you've sketched this out, you've talked to your neighbors about it, you've worked through some of your disagreements, and now let's test it. Don't put in the heavy cement right away, but let's test it and experience what's possible. So here's a traffic circle, chalk and pylons. While you're testing the traffic circle, you're collecting data on traffic flow, community sediment, bump outs, narrow the distance for pedestrians to cross, slow traffic, again, paint and plants. Just test it. A bike lane. So you've envisioned it, you're testing it, and then let's say, you know what, I like this, I want to make it permanent. So I'm going to wrap up with a quick case study. Putnam Triangle. So this is in New York. So for those of you who are saying New York is New York, and nothing in New York applies to Colorado. You may not believe this if you've been in New York, same human species in New York as well. So this is a mess. It's been this way for decades, it's a cement ocean, a lot of crashes, police car typically perched right there, it's a mess. It's mixed use as well. There's some residential and commercial here, but the community was fed up. A couple of people said, how can we make this better? So they started drawing it, and they started talking about it. And they began to settle in on a vision of what it could look like. And then with spending virtually no money, they started testing it, just a pop up community event. And then it went to movie night, the music night, and reading day, all temporary, and all virtually no cost. Turns out people liked it. And they decided to make it permanent. Here's what it looks like today. Dad and his kiddos sitting where there was traffic, and where there were traffic crashes, bunch of friends catching up in the middle of the road. Crashes are down, pedestrian injuries are down. The one downside of this, it took six years. It should take a year. Roughly 15,000 square feet, not that big. So I'll wrap up by saying, what do you want your community to look and feel like? Not just today, but 30 years from now. And are you doing enough, quick enough? And you have to answer that honestly. And then all it takes is for one of you to pick a spot in your community that you know can be better for people who bike and walk, and just ask yourself, you know, what if? What could this look like? Vision it, test it, and then do it? Thank you for your time. You didn't give me a 15 minute warning. I went way over. Thank you, Pete. So where are we going to go? What's next? Some of our city future efforts are listed here tonight. And we have tables out there with some graphics boards. We'd like, we'd like you to take some time, go around, walk around, ask questions, talk to staff. We also, somewhere around here, I had a comment card, which is basically we went real high tech. It's like, just a plain blank card. So, so fill out some ideas. Tell us what you think. What, what, where do we need to improve? We have a plan, but that may not cover all the needs of the community. We'd like to hear from, from the residents who, who, who grace us here tonight, who came out in a lovely evening. Take their time. We want to hear what you have to say. So please, ask questions to staff. Fill out some comment cards. If you see something missing, let us know. But we can't do it all alone. Part of the reason we're here tonight is, is to get residents take on it. But we also have to be truly successful. City Longmont needs help. So we have some community partners. We've asked some, they, they, they again came out tonight on a, a nice evening. So they're out here, out here as well. So we'd like you to stop by, ask some questions. We have some, some people from our, our public safety because we want to have safe walking, riding, enrolling in Longmont, in Longmont. Boulder County's here. We've got Walk to Connect. Commuting solutions. Bicycle Longmont, Bicycle Colorado. So we'd like you to stop by and stop by their booths, chat with some people. I'm going to do a shameless plug now real quick. And I was asked to do this earlier. It's, it's census time. So when you get your forms, please fill them out. And on that I would like to, to late, I want to thank everybody for, for coming out to linking Longmont. And please stop by or some of our booths. We'd appreciate it. Thank you much.