 Thank you guys for coming to the presentation. My name is Vincent Helens. I currently work at Alta Planning and Design. I am an engineer by trade senior engineer associate with Alta. I am the office manager for the LA office. So I am from Southern California, not Northern California, but I do have projects here about 15 years of experience in the engineering side, designing infrastructure projects for different municipalities throughout the states. I started my career in Alabama, and then I decided to bring my talents back to California. So here I am. With me, we have Vignesh microphone. Everybody, my name is Vignesh Swaminathan. I'm from the Bay Area. I'm from South Bay, Cupertino to be specific. Many of you may know me as Mr. Barricade on social media. I also run the business Crossroad Lab. It's a company I started about four or five years ago that designs bicycle facilities, quick build, and civil work here in the Bay Area. So we're going to get started, and this is, again, QuickBuild 101, and I lied and said that I had, that was the last question. But how many know about QuickBuilds projects? I don't have a clicker, so you're going to see me walk back and forth. So again, I'm just going to start with the high level about what is QuickBuild. QuickBuild project, it's an interim capital improvement projects where agencies are able to get bike, pet, micro mobility improvements on the ground sooner rather than later. You're able to install QuickBuilds with low-cost materials. The one thing about QuickBuilds is you want to make sure that the material that you're using is durable and long-lasting, meaning a QuickBuild is not a demonstration project. It's not a pop-up, meaning it's not a one-day, one-week program. It's something that's going to last for minimum six months to five years. Why do we do QuickBuilds? They provide much-needed pedestrian and bicycle improvements at a low cost. You can deliver projects on a compressed timeline. It also accelerates the much-needed AT networks throughout most agencies. The other thing that we're going to talk about is this project here, which is on my daily commute to downtown LA where our office is located. This QuickBuild project is about 1.5 miles of Class 4 bike facilities that was installed during the pandemic, which made my ride to work so much more comfortable than what it was. The other thing about the QuickBuild is that this project is now going to become a permanent project which it just broke ground this week, Monday, where they're going to install curb medians for protection, which is a reason for doing the QuickBuilds because you can get the improvements on the ground sooner rather than later with the goal of making the improvements permanent to protect the pedestrians and cyclists. This is a city of LA project, and I don't have that answer for you. QuickBuilds are supposed to be cheaper to install, cheaper to design with the goal is looking for future funding for the permanent project. There's a process with the QuickBuild, and you start in the planning stages, then you move into the design, and then you're looking for the implementation of the project, and then the maintenance side of the project, how are we going to maintain the QuickBuild over five years if that's the intentions of the city? The goal again is to get the improvements on the ground with the plans to implement permanent improvements in the future. Let me go back. Two things I wanted to point out here is one of my favorite clients, the city of Lindora in Southern California, who over the last three years have not only pushed their council to get these AT improvements included in their plan, but they also were able to get a bill and successfully this year. The image on the far right is a QuickBuild that we designed. It was a roughly half a mile of class four bike facilities. It was a class four protected bike lane facility that was originally supposed to be a pilot program for three months, but the materials that we decided to use were QuickBuild and Durable, so the agency wanted to keep the improvements for longer duration, and it was up for six months, and now we're looking at going into the actual design phase to make this a permanent project. But it took Steven Matier, the Transportation Manager, pushing his council, pushing the community to actually get the improvements built. The other one is which is also a QuickBuild or Parklets in the city. During the pandemic, they installed temporary improvements. But then again, Steven was pushing the council, pushing the community, and advocating for permanent Parklets in their downtown village. So we went through the process, which I will share in the future slides, of designing the Parklets, and within six months they were installed. So now they have eight permanent Parklets in their downtown district, and the key thing about that was getting the buy-in also from the business owners as well. So advocating for the Parklets and getting them installed. The process. So you start with building the team. Building the team is developing a group that's looking to really push the project forward. So that's reaching out to the local CBO, is reaching out to your non-profits, reaching out to the community groups, the TAC. Building a team. Also included in that team is your council members, your elected officials, getting them involved early on on the process, because why they're going to be the ones to push for the project? They're the ones with, they are able to reallocate funding to support your QuickBuild project. So getting them to buy-in on the project early on is important. Set and communicate the project goals. One thing we like to suggest is that you have a person who's going to stand alone and provide all the communication to the community. If you have one person, they're able to really put forth the message and provide feedback to the community about why the project is so important. And then for agencies using the existing contract that you may have to get the project's design and implement it as quickly as you can. So if there is a need, I mean, if there's a lack of staff support on the agency side using your own call contracts to establish and be able to get a team to support you to design the QuickBuild project. The last one is to advocate for more funding for the QuickBuild. As I mentioned, getting your elected officials involved early on is the most important thing to getting these QuickBuild projects pushed out and then also getting them turned into permanent projects. The design process. So similar to a permanent project, you have to design them according to the standards. There are guidelines that are out there. They have to meet ADA and Proag requirements. So the thing I want to point out is that when we're working on the QuickBuild designs, we're making sure that they meet the standards for each agency. Specifically, if it's a Caltrans State Highway, you have to go through their process, which it's a little bit more rigorous than a local agency, but you may have to apply for an encroachment permit to actually get the project implemented. If the project doesn't meet the Highway design manual, then you're going to have to include a design decision exceptions for the project. Why is the project important? Are things that Caltrans are going to want to know? So just making sure that you're following the local agency guidelines and the MUTCD to make sure you implement the QuickBuild project appropriately. Continuing on with the design. So when we're looking at the design, so this is the Glendore Parklets, when we were looking at installing the eight parklets throughout their village, we went out to the field, we assessed the site, we wanted to ensure that we weren't doing any reconstruction. You want to avoid reconstruction with your QuickBuild projects. The goal is to provide safety improvements between the existing infrastructure, curb to curb. So you don't want to impact drainage and you want to make sure that you provide detailed design plans and then also traffic control plans are going to be needed to install the project. The detailed design plans are important because when you're out installing the project and if you have a contractor that's actually installing the project is going to make the implementation side of things a bit easier when they're out there in the field. That was the lessons learned that I'm going to share on the next slide that we learned when we put the plans together, we left out dimensions that were needed for the implementation side of things. This is the design plans that we shared with the city for the implementation of the QuickBuild. This was the class four bike facility. So it's hard to see but there's a lot of detail here. There's a lot of how many linear feet is needed of paint in order to get this facility installed. How many ballards are needed to install the curb extensions that were implemented on this project? So we went through a process of going through and detailing out the design and making sure that it met all of the CA-MUTCD guidelines. Moving on to the implementation side of things. Who's going to implement the project for the QuickBuild? Most agencies try to implement it with their local public work staff in the operation and maintenance group. That's an alternative to using a contractor and it's a cost effective way of getting these improvements on the ground sooner. So these two images are us installing the parklets. And when I say us, because it was the local CBOs, it was the conservation core and it was the staff installing the parklets. Again, this is the class four bike facility and curb extensions that were installed on Glendora Avenue. And again, the installation was completed by the agency staff and the local CBO. Here's another image of the curb extension from an aerial view, but again, the project was designed, I mean implemented by local agency staff. And then I'm going to turn it over now to Vigniche to discuss more of the materials and details of the QuickBuild projects. Sure. Just had a quick question. You started out with saying QuickBuilds are supposed to be permanent. And yet there seems to be, well, at least in my city, QuickBuilds are thought to be temporary and supposed to be torn out after a few months. What's the disconnector bridge there? So they are meant to be permanent in the sense that the material needs to be durable to last up to five years. The projects are temporary with the intent to become a permanent project. And QuickBuilds, they do have, they do afford you the opportunity to make modifications. And that's the purpose of the QuickBuild. So if a curb extension isn't working effectively the way it was designed, you're able to adjust it in real time and make those adjustments for the permanent project. So eventually, once the project gets through the three months or six months, the goal is to have it implemented as a permanent project. And I think I'll also have that a lot of times we do pilot projects that are out there for a few months to observe data to convince internal staff of the need of these kind of projects. And internally, I mean, you guys work at agencies, I'm sure you get arguments with your own staff members about what is the right thing to do. And for a lot of very, very technical engineers that are just by the book that are scared to innovate, they need to see the data, they need to see the observation of how that facility is being used, both from maintenance and from the user perspective. Questions? So then where would you draw the line? So the QuickBuild, I think what QuickBuild is, I think is specifically for material that's gonna be out there for a long time. A pop-up can be from maybe even CBOs bring out their own planters, maybe they glue reflective tape to their own planters or hay bales or other types of, like maybe there's some local cultural amenities or artifacts or art that needs to be out there temporarily and that can be out there. And there's not really a maintenance and operations plan to go and re-implement and re-put down the post. In the QuickBuild project, a lot of times the cities will purchase extra posts to kind of keep in stock. So when they know how they work, so they can go out there and re-implement them when they get hit. I would say like longer than a week. Anything that's longer than a week is QuickBuild or should be QuickBuild. So for a, maybe this is to make your question correct. Catstrap, the city needs quality, why haven't, why do, why do we need to spend a lot of time in the last five or 10 days and not be just pretty affordable? You're right. That's too quick-willed, isn't it? That's too quick-willed. For a city that's Catstrap, so they were to do like CIP level, like design bid-build projects, they're gonna put all their investment into like two curb extensions and everybody's gonna want a piece of it. The sustainable folks are gonna wanna swell, the fire truck is gonna want their right turn, like everybody's gonna want a piece of that project. And so you're gonna put all your money into that one project and it might even fail. So doing a QuickBuild project is a really, really smart way of delivering things for small cities. But I would also add, you know, the material that you're going to, the maintenance side of thing, when you put something permanent in the ground, it's less maintenance, right? You put the concrete on the ground, you're not gonna have to maintain it every five years. So I think that would be the difference for, you know, a QuickBuild project versus a permanent project, because you want something that's gonna be there permanent and you're gonna wanna spend less money maintaining that infrastructure that you've put out there. 100%, curbs last. So my name is Vignesh Swaminathan. I started Crossroad Lab four or five years ago. Before that, I was a heavy highway engineer doing freeway interchanges, grading and drainage for freeway interchanges. And I kind of grew designing bicycle pedestrian facilities across freeway interchanges and working with Caltrans on getting bike paths and sidewalks across freeway interchanges. Before that, I worked as a parking engineer. I was super excited about parking, which not many people are, and parking and traffic control. And so in the city of San Jose, I managed to downtown for events, festivals and marathons. I shut down the streets for like from the Rock and Roll Festival to when Obama came to town and to like a block party. And that's when I really saw the amount of change you could have in a street from a few hours when it was a busy roadway to suddenly people are partying and even drinking in the middle of the street. And a few years ago, I was doing a lot of these pilot projects where we would go out there and bring community-based organizations and teach them about what we're doing and do a lot of on-the-street work. And that kind of died in the pandemic. So then I decided to go onto social media and I started posting POV videos of how these facilities work and how we're supposed to use them. And I grew on social media accidentally. I didn't really, wasn't really a social media person before this, but now I have 1.5 million followers on TikTok that's a little outdated with over 1.2 billion views on TikTok of people who have seen my face and knowing that I talk about bike lanes. So... And then I said I was a few commission roles in the chair of the Valley Transportation Agency's advisory committee and I'm also the chair of Cupertino Sustainability Commission. So I see this from many different angles. One of the main things that we do is why are we quick building is because we want to change the streets. There's sustainability groups that want to do more slails and more infrastructure. And at the end of the day, we have impervious area, which is our pavement. And so we're all water-based. Our system's always been water-based and we've always been manipulating water for our needs. From the history of time, we've always been doing it and we're still doing that today. And I want to get home that quick build is still just working towards modification of the roadway, modification of drainage, modification of how water goes into the inlets. And it's still, we're still doing that. We've gone through many, many phases in our country of going from, if we were Native Americans, we would live amongst the river and as the river meanders, they would move their lives and move the homeland as nature mess with, but nature did what nature does. And through our history, we've gone from an agricultural society and we've gone through suburbia and then highways have come through and cut through neighborhoods and every single time we're modifying drainage. On the top left, I'd like to point out, this is a typical roadway section where we call something called a clear zone and that's what's supposed to be for a car. If the car loses control, they end up in a ditch or they make sure we don't put hard infrastructure right next to them and that's called a clear zone. And it took only, it took mothers from drug for drunk driving to kind of fight for curbs even, you know, that was a big deal of putting a curb in a street but sometimes somebody's going to hit and now we're talking about posts and other stuff that people are going to hit. But it's been a lot of history of what are we going to put in the roadway and how it's going to mess with drainage over the many years. And now we have a lot of best practices that we try to push in the long run, you know, such as we want to put in more bioswales and neck down to the road and move curbs. We want to put wildlife corridors where there's pollinating plants and trees with bees and butterflies can work their ways from the hills to the waterfront. We want to create a creek trails where rodents can do the same thing. We want to work on historical flooding situations. Right here is area where I'm from. I used to live in East Palo Alto for a few years and for those of you guys who don't know East Palo Alto is a very different community than Palo Alto. There's Palo Alto and there's East Palo Alto and the main difference is East Palo Alto is a flood zone. Okay, and so there's Palo Alto and there's a huge flood zone that goes around all of East Palo Alto and historically has been this investment, not a lot of money, miscommunication about the environmental issues and the poor community there that's a very much a minority low income communities is kind of sidelined in terms of funding in the area. There's also a county border between the two. So one's in San Mateo County and one's in Santa Clara County which people don't really know between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto. What you'll see here is a lot of street trees on one side and that's Atherton which is the most expensive zip code in America and across the one freeway interchange is East Palo Alto which was murder capital of the country in the 90s. So there's a stark difference when we do quick build in different communities and we need to tone that when we work with different communities. Some communities may want different types of quick build and this takes a lot of listening when we do these kind of projects. So some of the things that we do not only do we want to teach people about drainage and move curb extensions and free allocates space for drainage but we also try to work on safety. And so one of the things that I talk about a lot is protected intersection or curb extensions and it's up to ways of slowing down traffic because of the speed differential and this is a kind of a newer concept. You might think like, hey, we've always had feet. We've always had cars there's a big difference between the speed but no, we're only thinking about that more now than we did over many, many years. Right here you have weaving which is a very normal thing in traffic engineering where vehicles or other modes go move up the same speed and they weave to merge but we can't expect cyclists to do that or at least we used to for some reason. We expect a cyclist to be able to ride with traffic, share with traffic all the time at whatever speeds just to go through on the street you have to do this weaving movement every time. And so that's very, very difficult for users and it really discourages a lot of different types of users. People who maybe don't have a $2,000 bike and Lycra and Electric, they're not really, for everybody else who's riding for utility, you're riding for necessity, you're riding with friends this is not really a great way of crossing. And we have some best practices. So we're not, we're working on it. NACTO for many years has been pushing the limit of design and many of you guys have seen NACTO guidelines but here's some screenshots of the best practices that we have up until now. So we have standards, we have an MUTCD. We have how we can read the MUTCD, how we can argue. I'll talk about a few ways that I've argued of a for certain things in MUTCD for such as painted crosswalks and curb extensions. And, but we still have to follow certain standards. What you'll see is right here is this is what Caltrans recommends which is bicycle left turn pockets next to left turns which is kind of ridiculous to me. I don't know why we expect a cyclist to weave over multiple lanes to get next to a left turn pocket and that's what the Caltrans standard tells us to do. What we're really trying to do is trying to push cyclists to encourage more types of cyclists to cross in two stages, to cross more like a pedestrian because they're not riding as fast as the vehicles and they're riding much slower than pedestrians or at least the type of cyclists that we're trying to encourage to ride in these facilities are riding. And so crossing in two stages can be facilitated by many ways such as a bike box or a curb extensions or some sort of protection where they can go and cross in two stages similar to how a pedestrian crosses. And I would say a lot of our quick boat projects are to help facilitate that type of movement because we've learned that having people to be protected having people to have a place to wait and engage with traffic having there be eye contact between the driver and the cyclist is super important. And makes people recognize that they're actually humans on this street and not just baby on board signs in the back of a car. And it's really, really important to make eye contact. And that's what the big thing about necking down the lanes, tighten the radius to make sure that the vehicle comes at turns and faces a pedestrian or a cyclist. And so one of the big things that I talk about is a protected intersection. Alta put together a great guide many years ago called the evolution of the protected intersection. And many other people have been putting out guidelines. I myself have worked on a guideline with NACTO called don't give up at the intersection because engineers like to give up at the intersection because they rather leave the liability onto the user with a dashed line than put it on their license. And so it's a big issue in our industry of how comfortable are you with doing certain standards and messing with the standards. And one of the big things of a protected intersection is we have a place to wait for crossing two stages but you also accommodate for large trucks which is a big deal in quick build. I see too many consultants starting off their early concepts with smaller trucks and then they get to final quick build and the projects get run over. And they're wondering, why did we get run over? Oh, it's because you didn't design for a bus. We should have designed for a bus. We love transit. Why are we designing for a SU-30 or a smaller vehicle when we know a bus is gonna come there and the project will fail if we don't plan accordingly? So there's ways to plan for larger vehicles even with a tight radius. And one of the best ways to do that is you step back to the left turn stop bar of the side street. So you can still have a tight radius but you step back to the left turn stop bar. And anybody who's friends with truckers know that truckers are truck whisperers and they can be able to oversteer and turn. And if they were to do with this a smooth turn in auto turn, we're talking about 10 miles per hour which is pretty fast. I can still kill somebody. But if we do an oversteer but it forces them to bulb out a little bit it comes down the speed to a five, three miles per hour and the fatality rate goes down significantly. Yeah. Can you say that again slower? Can you say that again slower? What are you installing? Yeah, so right here when a vehicle turns around this corner, you see this blue shape right here we set back this left turn for the side street so that the truck can make that turn. The trucks make a wide turn and that way they go around the protection. If we don't plan for that left turn and we don't push that back the truck is not gonna be able to fit in and they're gonna run over your project 100%. So if you give them that space truckers know how to navigate small streets. The street wasn't small before it's small now. So they've been around small streets so they know how to navigate this. So this is something very normal to most truckers. And so setting back the left turn stop bar you'll see that on these one-way streets and two-way streets, but it's really, really important. When we might just think tightening the radius is the right thing to do, but there's more to it and we have to plan for all modes. If you don't plan for all modes including the trucks, your project will fail. There's a lot of people in the city, city engineers who the main thing that they grew up in value is trucks. That's how I was trained as an engineer was trucks is the main thing that we have to plan for. And so we can still plan for protective facilities with that. The fatality of the local city came out of the factory. Yeah. So we had a fatality recently in a local city where a truck was stopped at this and didn't see it was in a blind spot. The pedestrian bicyclists got in front of them and they ran them over and killed them. Is there any design in the protected intersection that can help prevent that kind of occurrence where these trucks have monstrous blind spots and they can't see what's right in front of them? Yes, I didn't miss that, but this type of oversteering eliminates that blind spot. So the truck would not oversteer. There's a huge blind spot. I don't know if you guys have seen there's a famous video on YouTube of how many cyclists can fit in the blind spot of a truck. That's because a truck is just turning straight. But if they were to oversteer, we do a side oversteer and exit oversteer so they actually go out and go around. And that way they come and they have eye contact and they come and they cross more perpendicularly. Perpendicular crossing is much more important. This was a slightly different situation. This was actually, they were stopped at a stoplight. They were looking for a red light. They're looking for traffic to their left and someone actually was right in front of their truck. You just move the stoplight way back so that they can't, they can see what's in front of them because they actually literally pulled into the crosswalk and killed the person. So they're also in a right turn. So right here. So what happened here is it was probably a bike lane and the cyclist went and got in front of the... Okay. So they're right in front of the truck and it's below the hood of the truck, right? So what this does, the person who's crossing, whether crossing the street or where... Across the movement, not with the movement. They're coming this way and they got run over straight. There's a couple of strategies that the protected intersection does not solve that. Head-on collisions of somebody right in front of you, the truck hood, the protected intersection can slow them by nearing down the lane, but if they're already at a stop, one of the things that we can do with protected intersection is raising the actual intersection or raising crosswalks so they become more aware of some sort of vertical feedback that comes up. You can pull the stoplight, stop the through stoplight back as well. There's not much wrong with that. We're doing that as well. And you can create some space in front to kind of give a little bit of a buffer there. But if somebody's not paying attention and there's somebody below the hood of the truck, it's very difficult for children or small, the hood of the truck is very, very high. And so I'd say that you need some sort of raised features or some sort of bumps on the crosswalk or something that gives them sort of vertical element because you need so many things that we can use to slow down vehicles. Horizontal deflection and vertical deflection. So we can move them side to side and neck things down or we can move them up and down, right? Signs don't work, I'm telling you. You put up a sign, people don't look at signs, you know? We drive fast. A lot of these engineers love signs because it takes away the liability. You put up a white sign saying that these are the rules, you put up a warning sign and it's like, I put up a sign. But I think that type of engineering is flawed. I think it's just not the right way we should be doing approaching people. And so protected intersections help a lot. And you can do stuff, I've been working on a few projects where at every single driveway we put in a speed bump in front of every single driveway, we can put speed bumps in front of crosswalk. So there's ways of doing quick build with different types of materials to help give that kind of feedback. But in the end, it's about applying for old types of feedback. So what I would recommend there is maybe putting some vertical speed bumps on you side of that crosswalk, if it was in a quick build kind of project. And that way they would feel that when they go over and some engineers might have told them to be like, oh no, you're putting it in the through movement, but if it's a heavy downtown and people aren't supposed to be going that fast anyway, then I think there's certain times that you can prioritize that. But there's a lot of flexibility in these type of designs and it's important for engineers to kind of over design and under design. One more question, Morho. If you go back to that intersection, so when it helps the left turn to put the stop sign further down, but most of the time, if they are not signaled, the intersection pulling that back would hindrance the visibility. If you are a biker or a bike, even cars, it's good for the buses and track to have that radius. That I see a lot even around here. You can now see there is a track car park there, a track there or a building even. So how do you deal with that? That is one of the conflict areas in their intersection. Even putting it further back is put them people dangerous in there. Yeah, when you sight line is very important for through movements. And so pushing back to stop around for the through can be a difficult conversation. For the left turn, they may already be slowed down and they're already focused on one movement. But sight lines is how we learned as engineers of what to prioritize. A lot of times, in a lot of guidelines, honestly, there isn't, here's the thing that nowhere in any guideline, even the most innovative guidelines, anybody talked about how to deal with protected bike lanes and stop signs, it's not there. I'm working on so many of those and every time it's different because there isn't any good direction on that in any of the guidelines from any consultant or any city about how to do protecting intersections and stop signs when there's no signal. We would do it in a few different ways by kind of accommodating for both types of cyclists, cyclists that want to mix the traffic and cyclists that want to be protected. And so we plan for both in the projects I work on. So we have a protected area for people who want to and a mixed area for bikes to get in front. But this is a difficult thing to deal with. But yes, you have to balance in the sight lines, any of the balance of truck turns, any of the balance, the grading and the ADA. And a lot of times the projects that I'm working on, we don't have room for these refuges. So we actually tell the bikes to yield pedestrian zone and they have this big colored arc in the zone and tell the bike to act like a pedestrian. So it comes in different forms. But the main things to prioritize is the stop bar location and the turning these type of intersections. Yeah, I'll take one more question and I'll move on to the next slide and maybe. Yeah, so I had a question about the, having two ramps would help you if in a situation you just described, a lot of times they just put a single ramp in the middle. So then going up, it's into the refuge and then you have to sort of backtrack. It's hard to sort of get back around. So I guess that sounds like an argument to have double ramps instead of a single ramp. I guess that was my comment. These ones are typically, we try to put single or double ramps in most situations. I'll take one more, one last question. So we have a bunch of different guidelines about how to do these type of intersections. The reality in California, all we really have is this diagram on the left here. This is DIB 89. It's a Caltrans amendment to the highway design manual that tells you that you can do protected bike lanes. Along with this, I didn't show it because it's kind of embarrassing. It's a picture of a protected intersection that looks like it's made in Microsoft Word. And that's all we have as engineers of how to plan out these infrastructure. But this basically tells you what type of separation is. It's DIB 89, it's a good read. I think everybody should get familiar with that type of document, it's a few pages. We have documents that have come out from the federal government of separated bike lane guide. And this is probably one of the most robust documents that I've seen. It's from Massachusetts. It came out in 2015. I think Massachusetts only successfully delivered very few like a handful of intersections with this guideline over the last five, six, seven years. But this has the most amount of material in there about what a protected intersection is. We took a lot of that information and I studied it to death that it really helped develop the don't give up at the intersection guidance, which I think is very, very thorough. I recommend the old cities take that in. What I made sure that happened that don't give up an intersection book is to actually have details, engineering details that engineers and city staff can adopt. Because there's too many times that cities get hired to do a bikeway design guideline by some consultant. And it's just pictures of Seattle and other cities without actually an engineering stamp detail that is planned and can be approved very, very easily. And looking at pictures of different cities and other stuff is not as important actually knowing what can fit in your city. And so this document has that, but for a lot of cities, city staff getting to the point of understanding what that detail is is so important. When I work with my cities, I've learned that I talk to each person very, very differently. When I talk with my engineers, I don't tell them about bicycle facilities. I come with a detail in their cat lines with their numbering, because they're used to that. They haven't seen different cat styles ever. And so they're just used to looking at it in a certain way. So you have to communicate with everybody on a different level when you work with different folks. We worked on this really great pilot project in Mountain View. This was a few months, this was a few weeks. The city engineers were very scared about putting in protected bike lanes in Mountain View. On this project, this was done at the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition. This was on California Ab. So this project has a long history. I worked on the original planning study for California Ab many years ago at my previous firm. And then I went to this first phase and then suddenly they backtracked and they said that we're scared to take away a lane even for a week. And they said, we have to just observe how people are gonna use the facility. And so there's just a lot of fears. And when you have those fears, that's when you end up with pilot projects. But it really takes about communicating to each person individually. This is very different from how we typically do projects. And so for everybody who's advocating in their own city, you really have an uphill battle because your city engineers are so used to design, bid, build. And everybody's pointing at fingers at each other every step of the way. And quick build is different than that. What I mean by design, bid, build is you have your, do your design, Cadillac design the best way you want. Your city engineers bid it out but they also value engineer it and cut out stuff and then they bid it out. And then you have a construction, somebody who's hired after that to go deliver that project. And there's not really any ownership over the project. And quick build is all about ownership by the city. So this is the process of kind of helping politically move things along. You do start doing these pilot demonstration projects with CBOs and art and different materials that are donated. This project we did in front of city hall. It was a wrong way protected bike lane in front of the city hall parking garage. So all the city staff could turn across it. They didn't believe that it would work. And so we took away a lane in front of their daily commute and made a bikeway go the opposite direction and show that it was gonna work perfectly fine. Now we all the politicians and engineers could be like, yes, I turned left across it, everything's fine, right? But they've never seen that before, you know? And so this was really, really important to pick the right location. We actually never even built this facade in long run because they wanted to wait for our developer to come through and build it. But we use this project to build 16 miles all around the downtown. Do you use a traffic tape or actual tape? It depends on the material, club materials. Traffic tape works well. 3M has many, many products that work well that you can move and flex and stick on different things. I really haven't found 3M products. But you can work in different ways. I say with regular paint, it may not be seen as well. This is a 3M material and 3M material can be reused again. But the pile of projects can happen in different ways. What's really important is how is it going to be implemented? We talked a little bit about traffic control. But traffic control can be more costly than your quick build project, even, you know? What happened with the Mountain View Project is we were going to work with volunteers who was going to have bicycle collision work with it. I have insurance to have volunteers out in the street, but there was sudden resistance from the city and they wanted us to hire an actual traffic control provider. So we had to scale down the project and teach a traffic control provider how to build a bike lane. And it got really hairy. And it just really, really costs a lot to hire those folks. What happened here is a city with their own insurance, their own staff brought their own staff out there to go bring out their own materials. And you have to do it that cost-effective way. It depends on who's going to build it and how you get insurance to have people out on the street and how comfortable your city attorney is on approving that. So it really varies city by city. And you can have very conservative city attorneys that just don't want anybody in the street unless it's a traffic control trained person who's done everything. Even if there's even staff monitoring that. So it varies quite a bit. If you do it the other way, then you end up with this design bid build format and it gets to a very, very costly project. And those projects will get Frankenstein or cut up into different pieces and phase and it can change quite a bit. And then they can lead to actual permanent installations like this one in Cupertino where we put down a curb down the hallway in Cupertino or this one in Fremont where we, I'll talk about this later but we purchased some electrical units that were very, very unique for quick build. And I'll talk about that later. So the main goal of it is to try and help the crossing interaction safer, better and more visible. This is a screenshot of the don't give up at the intersection guide that I've talked about a few times. This has the details of explaining what everything should be, what radius things could be, what distance and how it varies just the stuff that engineers love to read through. And so I recommend checking out that guidance and sharing it with folks. One of the things that I do is I make TikToks to talk to people about this. So I'm gonna play one of my TikToks. Hopefully this works. It's something we have sound. Well, basically, I'll just play it and I'll point out to what you, I'll explain what I'm saying, but like, hey y'all, Mr. Barricade here. I'm at an intersection in San Jose. This is a protected intersection that I designed. Let's check it out. And then this stop bar for the vehicles is right back here and the bicycles wait all the way over there. So you can stake it. They can be well seen by any vehicles that approach them. And in that way, the blind spot is taken away and they will take it to go ahead before actual vehicles and so you're able to get through the intersection before a vehicle even crosses their path. There's, we put a tight radius so they come around and they can turn perpendicularly and they can actually look back at the actual bicycle facility. And when they cross, they come all the way up to the second box and they wait before they cross a second time. And it helps facilitate this movement and helps them be seen. It's very well, you see it much, very much seen at night. And to be honest on most of the projects that I work on with actual curbs, we ended up putting posts on top of the curbs anyway because people are hitting the curves because people didn't have a quick build phase first. If they had a quick build phase first where they got used to posts, got used to traffic control, saw it and then it became concrete. They might've been more used to it because I know when they get on that street it looks a certain way. But we ended up putting posts on it all the time first because they get some love, some black stuff on the curbs. And in my opinion, quick build works great and even in long-term projects. So here's an example of a quick build detail just for San Jose. You can see the amount of double detail for one intersection. We built 58 corners in the downtown, 16 full protected intersections over 18 miles of corridors throughout the downtown San Jose. This happened, this project was a great project. It was sponsored by the Knight Foundation to kind of help rush things really, really fast. This project was built right when the scooters came out and San Jose is the only city in the country that did not ban the scooters as soon as they came out. They came out and they were like, I think we can work with this. And so we quickly built the project and then by the time three, four companies came out the project was done and it became a scooter city. This eventually leads to fully built out raised protected intersections. So here's a civil plan of a fully raised protected intersection in Fremont. It has been rated the happiest city to live in the country. It's also the one of the safest cities in the country where it had the significant decrease in fatalities and crashes throughout their entire town during the pandemic. It's the only city that had that during the pandemic. And it's because they've been putting huge raised protected bike lane facilities started with quick build eventually led to fully built out ones in the suburbs in not in the urban area. They just built it there because Fremont for anybody who's from the Bay Area is the Bay Area's cut through, you know? Everybody gets off the freeway of 88680 and cuts through Fremont's streets and it gets back onto the freeway. And the Fremont city was against that. The strategy that Fremont use and everybody take notes on this is they needed to figure out how to reduce the speed. So through pavement maintenance they put in quick build bike lanes and reduce old lanes to 10 and 11 feet. Then they did their traffic study and they observed the 85th percentile speed and they showed that, everybody's slowing down now, wonder why? Let's lower the speed, you know? And it's when they lower the speed and they came and they built up fully raised protected intersections. So that's how they were able to lower the speed secretly of their entire town. By through maintenance they've narrowed the lanes down still keeping everything open. Didn't sometimes design the intersections sometimes didn't. And then they did the traffic study but too many honestly scrub traffic engineers just do their study, right? And then they be like, oh, we have to take away the crosswalk because everybody's speeding. What? You know? But no, I'm serious. I have friends who are like this traffic engineer for the city and they'd be like, Vignesh, I have to take away the crosswalk. I did the study. I'm like, why are you doing the study when your lanes are 14, 15 feet wide? Of course people are speeding, right? And so there's a, what is our long-term goals here? And Fremont, I'd say is a great city who's done this well then quick build to eventually lead to fully build intersections. It's a great case study for people to look at. So like I said earlier, we go from design build, which is 100% owned by the contractor and the consultants. The consultants take the city for the ride. The contractor takes the city for the ride. 100% no ownership by the city because you do your design and hopeful 100%. The city engineers value engineered and then it goes to a contractor. And this is how we deserve a project in the city government. One way is that building owners deliver projects is design build where they want to know everything, operations, maintenance. I own this building. The same architect needs to tell me how I need to replace the windows when they break. And it's full ownership over the building. And that's called design build. It's a different type of project delivery. What we're really trying to get at is integrated project delivery where the city staff is enabled to actually go implement this stuff themselves. And it's an ongoing process because what you don't want is you don't want to have a consultant who's just the one who's the bridge between the community and the city. You want the city to be that connection. So they kept continuous feedback. If there's a change, if there's a crash, if there's an issue, the city can respond. They're not strapped by a consultant in between. And that's what we're trying to get to. But it's really hard to unlearn this and eventually get to that. It's not easy for a lot of cities because they're so used to their way. Their entire policies, every department is designed to build. Can some ways of doing that through augmented staff, some ways of doing that through enabling the city but really if you have one person who's really, really pushing it in the city, you can get integrated project delivery where the city maintenance crew knows how to implement stuff. Everybody's working together. The best way that I know the communicate engineering is we talk about it in plan, specs and estimate but these are really fancy words for an exhibit memo and cost. So if you have an exhibit, you have a little bit of a write up of what's gonna be impacted. You have a cost associated with that. You can move mountains. I sit on a few different commissions. If I have an exhibit memo cost in front of me in those five minutes that I have to make a decision in front of a Zoom meeting, I can make a decision. But if I just say, hey, this is bike lanes. This is what we need to do. I can't make a decision, right? And so for your city council, so that if they have that information in front of them at those times they have that meeting, it's really bite-sized for them to just go and make a decision. And so what we have is we have community leaders that try to push city staff to do a significant project what we really need is city staff enabling community leaders to have ongoing project delivery. So we need the city staff to educate, teach, enable, CBOs, minority CBOs, cultural CBOs, advocacy groups, to be able to go and communicate what their needs are to have ongoing project delivery. And maybe bike lanes, maybe art, and maybe parklets, maybe all kinds of stuff. Thank you. You're mentioning city staff. And I think this is a key element to get a project running. We need leadership, city staff willing to do it and money. What do you do when your city staff is back, you know, has been training in the 80s has an old mindset and for them the best route is to have a median in the middle with a tree and no, of course, no bike lane and no protection whatsoever. How do you fight the deeply rooted car-centric vision? Thank you. It's a lot of work. And I'd say you start off with getting them to come to meetings and conferences like this, getting to travel outside of their city. For a lot of city staff, their engineer learned from their supervisor who spent 40 years in that city until retirement, right? And they learned from another city staff who spent 40 years in that city until retirement. And so that knowledge is very ancestral and it hasn't really learned more beyond the boundary of the city. Until you go to see videos, you go to other conferences and you see how other cities are working then the things start churning. But for a young engineer, they learned everything from the city of whatever the standard details and that's what they're used to and that's what they built their entire career off of. So to go in them and tell them, hey, do something new with green bike lanes or do something new with posts is a little scary for them, right? So, because that's their entire career in reality. We may go traveling other ways and bike around but they've never jumped on a bike and they've only driven it to work and they've only done road car-centric facilities. There's a lot of theory behind medians and stuff for that but you can start to argue the same theory on how to protect bike lanes. So one of the theory behind medians is when you drive, you have trees and you can see the trees go past you and if you feel like you're going fast because the trees are going by you fast, right? So you can do the same thing with posts and you can argue the posts are going by you fast and you see that. So there's ways of leveling with them to argue the same principles of day find value in different facilities. Marrying the lane with the median next to the left could be the same as marrying down with something next to the right of them, right? And so talking to them on their level is really, really key because I've been to cities where there's just some key staff member that's just so disengaged from it and everybody in the city is waiting until that staff member retires until they can actually move forward with projects, you know? And I'm sure many of you can think about that traffic engineer or person who's like that and it just takes, do you can level with them and get them convinced or you just wait it out? But I think you can level with them and get them convinced by explaining theory and bring them to conferences and a lot of them are excited to learn from other folks who are working in this space and so I think these kind of events are really, really critical. We got two more. This is just a tag on what you're saying is I haven't tried this with engineers yet but I've done it with city council members, supervisors and other city staff is take them out with me on a bike. Take them for a bike ride on the area so that they actually see what we see because most of the time that people making decisions about this stuff from whatever level don't ride so they don't even know what it's like from our experience and I've had some really good success with that. So this has been very good and I hope it encourages more of us to get quick builds in place but I have a criticism and it may sound like a small one but it's important to us who helped with the legislation which created class four bikeways. In California there is a requirement to use bike lanes. When you refer to a class four separated bikeway as a protected bike lane you are misrepresenting that facility and I wish you would change that. We wanna preserve the choice to be able to use the class four facility or the open roadway and to the extent people get confused and think the class four is a bike lane that reduces that choice. So if you will consider changing that. Yeah, I agree with you and to explain what the point he was trying to make is the difference between the designation of way or lane so a way means that you have the option of using that if you don't want to and lane means that's your space and you're supposed to be there. And so we refer to these things that protected bike lanes it kind of tells the car driver and legally that if a bike is not in that they're at fault and if it produces a protected bikeway then people who do ride fast or do need to get out of the protected bike lane because there's debris or trash or maybe it's just easier to make a left because the facility is not designed properly or maybe they're on an e-bike and actually going with traffic, right? And they're going as fast as traffic designating as protected bikeway is a proper way of calling these facilities. The two many times in standards we call protected bike lanes but that's because we're trying to do a lane but you're correct, a separated bikeway or the word way is critical for the legal perspective and we work on a few facilities where there's a high e-bike usage and so we're actually talking about even implementing a secondary shoulder on the inside so that they can just, it's like a three foot thing but they can kind of wiggle around that to go around traffic and even afford bike box for those folks who do ride with traffic that way because there are a lot of folks who just ride fast folks who do a lot of bike touring just be like, I'm never going to be in that facility it's a dangerous facility because I have to look down more than look forward and I totally understand that in that respect. So two questions about bikeways. First, how do we get them cleaned more regularly? And also people really like to be side by side and they also be able to pass because otherwise a single file I wish all car drivers had, you know they didn't, you couldn't have pass through side by side. Sorry, everyone has to be front to back in the car, their cars, I mean really narrow like a bike so they get appreciate that you can't talk if you can't be side by side. So how do we get bikeways wide enough to be side by side as well as getting them cleaned? So with Quick Build, we have our constraints because it is Quick Build, right? It's not a rate, it's getting a street sweeper to where it fit through there or you're making it wide enough in the Quick Build way is sometimes hard to do. There's other, the class three facilities or shared facilities you can ride side by side and we can do ways to slow down the vehicles enough that it's actually helpful to do so. But no, this is a difficulty in terms of the maintenance of those things. A lot of cities buy a smaller sweeper or they make agreements with the local businesses or a business district to do cleaning. In downtown, we had the Groundworks crew who does a downtown sweep them until the city purchase. Then I forgot to chain the channel but there's a TikTok channel of a guy who's just riding the streets for protected bike lanes all day. And it's a great channel. He just goes around and be like, what is this in the protected bike lane? Who left this? And then someone stole a Cadillac and then he has a screen. He can go down there and grab stuff. It's such a cool little device. And I recommend everybody go check out these little small street sweepers. Similar to the Zambonis, you see in small ones, you see in parking garages. A lot of parking building owners have small street sweepers but yeah, those are one of the things that can be purchased by the city. And city engineers will sometimes be like, oh man, I can't purchase a street sweeper until I build a street sweeping network. And build a bike lane network and then we can get a street sweeping network for the whole city. So we'll get there. You talked a bit about legal liability and correct me if I'm wrong everyone but I believe that Berkeley just indemnified its traffic engineers so that they don't have to incur that legal liability. I'm just curious to know whether you think that is a major game changer and if there are any unforeseen consequences of that move. That scares me a little bit. I'd rather have the engineers work hard to try and figure out how to do things the way that with some responsibility, the whole point of the PE is to have responsibility on facilities so that does scare me a little bit. But I think it helps give more freedom in design. But I remember I was seeing a report on 90th Avenue here in Oakland and it's a great project. Really when we spoke, I was speaking about it tomorrow if you guys come to Lunch Plenary we're gonna be speaking about that tomorrow. But that was a great project because the children in East Oakland they ride in groups and they ride and to be seen and they ride in the center of the roadway. So instead of putting a bike lane on the side that they can get ticketed for when we put a facility in the middle where that we seen and observed. But I have seen during that news report there was a crash right at the same time as a news report. So testing these facilities is great but we still have to have the engineering principles to do so and if you have to value both. And I'd say the traffic engineers need to work really well with the artists and the planners to get these facilities working well. And you can't take away one just because we wanna get stuff done. You know what I mean? And so I feel for what Berkeley is trying to do and but I do think that there is value in figuring out how to the whole point of engineering is you have objectives and constraints. And you're trying to come up with solutions. And if you take away that constraint it may open up more solutions but I think those constraints are still important. Quick question. Have you worked on a quick bill of project that successfully took away parking? It took away parking? Yeah, street parking? Never. Every day. Oh, every day. Yeah, I take away parking a lot. Oh, and it works? Okay, that's a lot more common than I realized. But there's a lot of constraints that come with that. And San Jose, we work with the businesses on where they can get additional parking. We worked on the bike parking that can be facilitated for there. We try to do a lot of convincing that say the only people who have wallets in their city aren't people who drive. There's other people who have wallets in their city that are parking is a wallet delivery system according to the city. It brings money to the city, which I think is silly, right? Transit can bring people to the city. Bicycles can bring people to the city, right? People who don't have to drive have money, right? And so for a city to think that our economy is gonna go away from just parking loss is a very old school way of thinking and there's ways of prioritizing things differently. I have a good example of a restaurant in San Jose that was really against the projects we built and they came out and they brought him to their entire meeting with their entire family and they were fighting for it. And then they came back and asked for more bike parking after because they were like, people are biking and we want them to come to our business. Can you get bike parking here? And so culture can change. It just takes time. Parking is really close to people's homes. Another example is I was striping the particular biking with the city staff and this guy came up to me and he pulled this truck right into the protective bike lane and came feet between us and he was like, who put this here, right? And all the city staff curled up and I was like, oh, I put this here, like let's talk about it. And then he and saying, I have a dumpster. My dumpster needs to come out to get picked up. You didn't plan for my dumpster. I was like, okay, well, what if we narrow this parking spot and put a little bit and get through your dumpster space? And he's like, you can't do that? And we're like, yeah, we can totally do that. So there's a little bit, they may not be parking exactly, which is irking them, but there may be other things that irk them and if you work with them on easy people, is it your delivery? Is it trash pickup? No, what is it? But there may be different things that irk them than just parking. But it takes a lot of communication for that. It's tough about parking. Another thing is if you have a protective bike lane on a residential street with 50 foot lots, you wanna put it in a bike and protect the bike lane, it's probably not the best idea because you're gonna take away everybody's parking. So I repeat, if you have a residential street, with small lots, because you need to plan for site distance 20 feet on either side of the driveway, you have to take away parking. So you can see a protective bike lane. If you're 50 foot lots, you're taking 20 feet from these driveway and you have a driveway which is 20 feet, you're taking away everybody's parking right off the back. So as much we love protected bike lanes and we love residential neighborhoods, they don't work well together. One last thing, the two projects in the city of Glendore took away parking. The class four bike facility was diagonal parking originally and we turned it into parallel parking. And then the parklets was actually, we just removed parking to install the parklets. But I think going back to one thing that you mentioned was the communication and the engagement with the community to get them to buy in to the need for the safety improvements. If you don't get the buy in, then obviously they're gonna push back on the project. So having that early on is gonna enable you to push that project forward. And also the quick build, it's an opportunity to test it, right? To see if the parking is really and get the data to see like, are they really parking, is it really a problem? And then if you learn in three months that there's no problem and you haven't received any feedback or negative feedback on it, then you have your data to say that the improvements, the safety improvements are more valuable than the parking. Early is key. Talking about this project is not as bike lane projects may even be a good idea. Talking about it as quick build projects or parking adjustment projects or some other word may be a better idea because everybody, if they feel it differently, you communicate to each, if you communicate the truck turns in the parking early on, then people will understand that people are ready for it. But communication is key to everybody differently. On this side of a few different examples of some interesting success stories, but you have, this is a project I did in downtown where we put in a double white line to legally separate them. So just like you want a fast express lane, which is how I made it here, express lanes work. And I have it here on time, but if the double white line, you can't cross. And so doing a double white line is key to having protection. If you want to do art in your street, making sure you have the two white bars on either side is the easy way of getting it to prove. If you take away those two white bars and you try to colorize a continental crosswalk or a ladder crosswalk, your city engineer might go and quote the MUTCD and said, hey, I need two white bars on either side. But if the white bar and the white bar effectively you can do whatever you want on the inside. And it's still a legal facility. So that's the easy way of getting art, especially the local cultural art, making sure you have that white bars, maybe making them two feet wide for now. And doing that is a key thing. Oakland did a huge effort of painting the town, but it wasn't very well maintained. So if you come around, you'll see that a lot of these ones have been built up and there's dirt and debris in them. And it needs to be repainted, rehired artists come back out there to go put it back in there and having continuous engagement, but it can't just be a one-off and then lose contact with an artist. You have to bring them on and have a plan to continue to reimplement that. This was done with the PTA's help. PTA did a lot of organization for crossing facilities and more, and I'll show this real quick. So this is an on-street trail we did because it was a trail on one side that dumped people onto a residential street and picked up people a few blocks away up here in Emeryville on Doyle Street. And what we did is we converted the street into a one-way and took away a few blocks from car traffic. And this is because this road was a major cut-through with two arterial streets on either side and the neighborhood didn't like the cut-through, but they were scared about the parking loss. And so we convinced them of the parking loss by doing a pilot study for a long, long time and observing it for a few months. And then we went and implemented this on-street trail. It's a major connection for the folks. It was built very quickly and now it's a glorified spine of the town. And so these don't have to be bike lane facilities. They don't have to be protected intersections, but about reallocating space for the right type of users that are there. And bikes don't have to stop and cars have to stop as they cross this facility. And so we basically extend the trail through out. Here's some images. How do you get cars to have to stop and bikes not to have to stop at the same? So along that route, there's no stop. Across that route, there's no stop. Oh, so it's just good? Yeah, just cross track. We also, in the same way we put bumps and we put a tight radius. And so they're fairly offset from there. And so they slow down when they cross for that. So there's some sort of vertical feedback. But they're just so aware. You're seeing this huge facility. It's taking off half the street. It's not something that just pops out of nowhere like a lot of facilities do. And these can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be made in one connection. This was a connection between two trails as well in San Rafael. And I want to show this one which I think was very cool. This is a crosswalk we did for a tech campus here. It's just one crosswalk. But the tech campus said that we need a crosswalk and we need it now, right? Which we've all heard before. But they got it done in three weeks, four weeks with our help, right? Where they said that we wanted because our buildings cross and how could they do it? And the cities can, the volunteer organizations can't because we work with every single person about what their issues were. The city quickly said, hey, we need to do a lighting study because there's no lighting on that project. We weren't going to do a lighting study because it takes too much time. So we found this really cool unit. I'm really proud of us finding this unit. It's made by Tapco. When you press the push button, it shines a beacon down on the crosswalk and illuminates the entire crosswalk. The area up and down the crosswalk and the area where someone's sitting and it speaks to you in English and Spanish. And it's a great unit. And that way we were able to implement the crosswalk with quickly within three weeks. We just paint and post. And just talking to each person of what their issues are and not taking that as an as, oh, lighting study. Let me give you a scope and fee for that. Instead of doing that, being like, hey, this is how we can solve it. It's a very different consultant approach that most consultants don't do. Most of them would be like, lighting study, let's go. More study, right? But no, at the end of the day, I want to get a crosswalk done. We have to deliver for our client, which is a tech campus, and they need to get something done. And the same type of push can be done with advocacy agencies, with CBOs. It doesn't have to go through this long winded route. I have a quick question. You said signs don't work, but do flashing lights on signs and lights work with signs? Yes, lights work really well, you all. We have a few different types of lights. This is an RRFB. When you press it, it shines flashy yellow lights at you. It's warning you. There's another one, which is a hawk signal, which is more expensive, where it shines red lights until you stop. But the flashy lights do help a lot. If the flashlight's on all the time, it doesn't help. It's got to be turned off and it'll be on at the right time. And yes, those are some of the materials that we can use. We're here to answer any questions to you all. Thank you all for coming here. We will take questions. I don't know how many quick book guideline books we have over there, but Cal Bike and also put together the quick build guidelines. So we brought a few booklets over there that goes through the whole planning process design and maintenance of quick build facilities. I have a question. I have a question for Mr. Barricade. 1.5 million followers, well done. You're probably the most well-known urban planner ever. I'm gonna say he just arrived and I had a selfie with him. And I sent it to my son who was studying urban planning. He said, I'm cool. So thank you. My question for Mr. Barricade is, what did you learn by becoming a star? What did you learn from your audience? What are the take away? What are the best way we have to talk to people who simply don't know or don't understand or are not even aware of urban planning? Thank you. One of the first things that I learned on social media is not everybody's interacted with Indian people before. Okay? And so that was a big let, because the guy grew up here was very diverse and suddenly I went on social media and all the middle school bullying came out. And so I learned that the hard way. And then after I learned that, after I went through that, what I learned is a lot of people find different things that, that irk them. And I've helped me when I read through the comments, understand what issues are and it helps me learn how to explain things better to folks. And I find it's a very valuable tool to me because whatever I do, people dissect on social media. They take it apart. They say whatever they wanna say and it helps me also grow a thicker skin and also learn how to explain different things. Another thing is I feel very blessed to be in the Bay Area where we've been innovating in this space for a while. I've been innovating in this space for a while and a lot of cities have not seen this before. And so being able to show that and it's really been really rewarding for me. And in addition to that, it's just seeing all the feet and seeing in the TikTok, there's a duets that come up if people can respond to your video and stuff of that. And I remember there's one stitch that this guy did or this video that this guy made and he tagged me. My account got banned for a short amount of time because I had too many car-centric people and too many people who'd never met Indian people before. And I had so many reports that my account got removed and then I had to go fight and talk to Chick-Toc to go get it back. But during that time, I remember these videos, people who were making videos being like, bring Mr. Barricade back. And one really struck out to me of this trucker and he's in his truck and he's like, where did Mr. Barricade go? I used to hate bicycle facilities but now I learned we need to create space for our feet. We need it, where is he? And so there's a lot of people who have not been exposed to this that are from community, we're all products of our built environment. I'm a product of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley Bay Area. And I'd say that learning all the different perspectives has been very, very valuable to me and it's gonna be a process that I continue to grow with. My question is about bike ladders. If you can speak about those, crosswalks give pedestrians at every intersection in California the right of way, if I'm not mistaken, as long as they don't dart out into the intersection. And a bicyclist, if they get off their bike, they can use that privilege anytime they want. But if you're on your bike, some cities have different laws about them. But what about these green crosswalk ladders? How, it seems like that could be a really amazing tool, especially if bikes could elevate slightly above cars in terms of right of way, still below pedestrians, hopefully, we can legislate that. Can you talk about the ladders and whether they're helpful or not? Yeah, so when we do these dash points and conflict markings, it's because that's where the interaction is gonna be shared, right? No, I'm saying when the crosswalk and then a green line looks right. Yeah, so when we have these dashed lines, it's where they're gonna be shared. So most bike lanes, it gets shared before the intersection because cars are getting into the bike lane to make a right turn. And putting it through the intersections, a lot of engineers would argue against that because the conflict actually happened before the intersection because the car got into the bike lane. In a protected bike lane, in a protected bike lane, we took that conflict and put it into the intersection. So that's where we do these dashed green through the intersection to similar to a crosswalk. Because the conflict is not before the intersection, it's now in the intersection. I think I'm missing the wrong route then because what I'm talking about is where the crosswalk itself is happening. Yes, yes, so because a pedestrian is on a sidewalk and when a car turns, they interact with the pedestrian after the turn. That's where the conflict is. In a protected bike lane, that interaction happens the same way because they're protected up until the intersection and then they cross. So engineers would want to do that crossing when you have a protected facility because that's where the conflict is. But they don't necessarily like to do that when in a bike lane because the conflict was before the intersection. I don't agree with that, but that's what a lot of cities do. The reason you see it shorter like a crosswalk is because when they interact with it and they cross it perpendicularly, it looks like dots, right? When you look over a merge, if you see the dashed line, we call that a 39A, but you see that dashed line of before the intersection, when you look at it from this angle and you're weaving, it looks like dots. You get me, right? But when you look at it from the side, those dashed bike lanes are actually blank eight foot, solid four foot blank eight foot. They're huge. When you look at them up straight, it's a huge four foot block. When you look at it from a vehicle, it's dots. Similar to how when you look at a crosswalk from sideways, it comes as dots. So an engineer would do that shorter ladder crossing for bikes when it's protected facility because that's where the conflict happens. And we need more of them. We call them cross bikes, if you wanna call them. Like a crosswalk, you have a cross bike. That's why I'm cross road lap. You know, that's in the church. But cross bikes are very important. We need more of them. But for an engineer, they would argue against that because the conflict happened before the intersection in the bike lane. But I always take, sorry, but I always talk about how different people would argue against things because I'm so used to that. So I'm used to like being able to say, oh, this is how you usually do it. This is how we're gonna do it in the future. Anything you wanna add about the conflict markets? I'm just gonna say that they are recommended. We can recommend them a lot more. We got one, two, three. First off, I wanna say thank you for the TikTok videos. They're really handy to share, to explain things to people. Oh, thank you. Love them. And second, I wanted to ask about what kind of options exist for green infrastructure, quick builds. Can you talk about these things? They can be six months to five year projects. And then even maybe having those just be repeated going forward for, you know, indefinitely. What can be integrated? Like rain gardens or do you have any suggestions or break time or information? So to be honest, rain gardens are hard to be in quick build. I would say they're more of a capital improvement project because they mess with impervious area, okay? Impervious area is very critical for engineers. It's pavement that the water does not pass through. And water used to go into the soil naturally and now it has pavement. And so when you do a swell, the reason you do a swell is because you're adding more impervious area, you have to filter 30% of the water into a swell. So that's more of a capital improvement project than quick build. And still in right now, there's a lot of money in sustainability. Sustainability is a new division and it's separate from your, if you look at an orchard of a city, it's public works, the DOT, other folks and the sustainability is a separate group. And they have more money than everybody else. So there's a lot of projects that can be piggyback on bike lane projects that have swales. What about some of those rate, like maybe not necessarily swales but raised planters just to get it started and get trees in there? Or I mean, have you found anything? Have you tried any of these or have you seen any successful projects like this that are quick buildable? So they do have Zecla planters that you can use as like buffers within your Class 4 bike facility. So that could be a part of getting some of that green infrastructure on site as a quick build project. But it would need to be turned into a permanent project at some point. But they do have the large planters that you can add that green infrastructure to your project. There's a bunch of different types of planters we can use but there's a key thing that you have to do with planters. In Oakland on Telegraph Avenue, they had some planters and anybody remember what happened to those? They got moved by somebody, somebody moved it with their truck across the street and it ended up blocking a funeral home on the first day and the mayor got involved and it became this huge thing because the planters got moved. So you need to lock them down somehow. You need to make sure you have maintenance on them so they become trash bins eventually. So you got to make sure that somebody in the city knows to go remove them and stuff for that and watering them is also a key thing. So there's some planters that can be watered themselves. They have a reservoir in it that you can refill and it stays in there. There's ways of taking a bottle and putting it upside down the planter and going out there and replacing that. There's different agreements that can be made with local community that the community goes and replaces that and so you can do an agreement with them by working a few traffic circles where the community is going and watering them and maintaining them and putting in what they want and there's an agreement with the city and they won't go too crazy for what they want to do. But there's different levels of doing that. Yeah. Thanks for talking about different types of separation like planters. And so I'm seeing in a lot of your projects a lot of plastic posts and a lot of class four bikeways that we see are using plastic posts. And what I'm hearing a lot from communities is I don't want those plastic posts. Those look terrible and they're gonna get knocked down and I don't really believe that you're gonna maintain them. I have an aesthetic concern. Are you hearing that? How are you dealing with that? And are you looking at other products? Yes, yes. So the product you see in a lot of our pictures and videos is a K71 post. It's called a K71. It's a big tall, thick one. It looks like a big candlestick. The reason we like using that is because it folds flat. So the fire truck can go over that emergency and it folds flat in the countertop. We also don't like it because it folds flat. So when there's a runway vehicle they can run over that or distract a driver. But to a driver at night it looks beefy and every Uber I've been to they're like, what, that thing's made out of plastic? Like they don't realize it looks like something that's beefy that they don't want to hit. But then they realize it's a plastic thing. So they're like, okay, that's a good idea. But the K71 post is the one post that we use a lot. There's a new post on the block called a K72. Okay. And the K72 is, I saw it first in LA and we put a few of them in Emeryville but it looks like a pawn piece. And so it's a little bit more ornate and it's a little bit of a thicker plastic than the other ones. But it still also does fold flat. But the reason we make them fold flat is because of emergency access and other things that we need from the fire department. The fire department, what a lot of people don't realize the fire department is why we have the curbs because a lot of fire departments, their budgets are based on response time. And so when they say, hey, you're putting all this stuff in the street and they're like, our response time is gonna go down. And then you can be like, oh, we'll give you signal priority. I'm like, okay, you know, right? So there's like different ways of talking to them. Fire trucks need 20 feet and they need 26 and 12 buildings, 135 because their ladder needs to access them. So you can tell them, hey, your ladder needs to access them. So you actually don't want to be right next to the curb because of that ladder, but oh yeah, that is our standard, you know? And like, they'll backtrack a little bit. There's ways of talking about looking through their standards and be like, hey, this is how you actually operate. You're being closer and further away from this building so you can angle is actually smarter for you. I mean, right next to the curb. And then, but you have to go to the standards and understand what their priorities are. Armadillos are great, but the city needs to know and read how to install them. San Jose installed all of them at 45 degrees, which is not what you're supposed to do. They have different angles, depending on the speed of the road. So the vehicles don't, when they hit it, they can bounce back. And so they're great products but the fire truck doesn't like them very much. I'm working on a project right now where we're building a two-way facility that's wide enough for the fire truck to go through. And the armadillos are being used. In San Jose, we use the armadillos to hold the dumpsters up from rolling down into the gutter. So we use them up there, but it's a good product. But there's pros and cons. We use the armadillos on an OHI project, which was a Caltrans facility, State Route 150 and State Route, well, actually it was State Route 33. And they were good. The Zecla products are great. I want to wait till they start manufacturing them here in the U.S. though, because they are come from Spain, they come from recycled plastic from Spain, and you want to use our recycled plastic. And then, so I love the products, they're great, but I think we'd love for them to manufacture here in the States. Sorry, one question from the virtual audience. So Taylor was interested and curious about the money coming just by cars, the false claim, and your story about the restaurant owners and wanted to check in if it's been checked that connecting business owners and local business orgs that are opposing projects with the peers in communities and other cities where this has worked out. Is this a thing that you're also doing? We need to clarify your question, you're asking me. That's a continuous process that we do with businesses. So if you're going to plan a project where you're going to take away probably a few parking spots, and then you're going to, you need to convince the opposition about that loss of parking space. Taylor was interested and curious if it would be possible to connect those business owners with successful projects in other cities to learn from them because they went through the same transformation. I'm a little nervous with that because that's not their role, right? That's their role is their business. So I think talking to them on their level is important about what the issues are there locally. Sometimes if you show them a picture from Seattle or some other town, it might just go over their head and be like, this is not ours, my city and you have to be careful about political thing. But going in there and listening, why do they care about the parking? Is it because they need their beer truck to come in every day? Is it because they're scared that the customers are not going to be able to park short term? Is it because their dumpster needs to get picked up? Is it because they have an event? Maybe you say, hey, we'll give you a parklet or this is actually your space or you have a space to have dining or something like that. But talking to them on their level is really key when you talk to local citizens. We can talk that way with the ideas of different cities and success stories to the city staff. When we're talking to local citizens, that sometimes in my experience has actually angered them more, you know? Because they're just like, that's not gonna work in my town. And that's the NIMBY mentality, right? And so like we gotta be careful about how we don't do stuff that can detract from our goals. Yeah, a real quick one about the flex posts. So I live very near the Upper Telegraph Project in the Temescal. Really love the project, but what I hear from all of my neighbors is that the visual distraction, especially because they have the white posts there that especially at night, people are very disoriented by all of that reflective stuff all over the forest and they don't know how to then translate that into what am I supposed to do? So is there anything? No, no, no. And people have slowed down, absolutely. And it's generally working, I would say. But that's what I, and I perceive that myself. And I heard, yeah, I mean, it made sense to me. So is it spacing or is it just living with it for the quick build interim? It's the spacing. It's the spacing of that design. If I can be, is anybody from the city of Oakland here? But that design, there's so much parking there and there's so much difference consistency that when you look down the street, it's not a continuous line of posts. That's how it is in traffic control. When you look down the street of a construction site, you see a continuous line of posts that's not what's happening on Telegraph Avenue. So at certain locations, there may be more frequent posts. Replacing the posts frequently is key to have that visual thing. If you go down the roads in San Jose, there's frequent posts and you look down the street, it looks like a wall of light and you can see where those conflict points are and you know to prepare for those conflict points. And the city's continuously maintaining those things. Another issue that I see a lot is cities are tightening it for a smaller truck too often. There's big trucks out there and they're gonna run over your post. And what happened with Telegraph Avenue is they ran over it first day. And so planning for the larger trucks, I inherit a lot of projects from other consultants. A lot of projects from other consultants that don't get delivered, I inherit. So from all my competitors. And all of them, I see them use tiny trucks and push it to the max because they're coming from the planning realm into the engineering realm. And for me, I would say, let me plan for the largest truck and still make it safe. And now I have planned for both. And that's because I come from the highway realm. And I talk to my engineers there and they'll be like, yeah, we work with planners. That's what they want. I'm kind of stuck. But no, we have to plan for the worst case scenario. And it's really, really critical. And trucks can do well. They truck whispers. They can go around big turns and do all kinds of stuff because that's their job. They're not trying to damage their truck, right? And so I think there's a lot of credit we can give them and a lot of planning can be done to this together. So I know we're in the thick of it and it's like really getting good. But I was told to inform everyone that 1740, the rooftop happy hour is happening soon. So I guess make your way to the rooftop happy hour. But Mignesh and I are still here and I know Ari had a question. So. Thanks. Amazing presentation, by the way. My question is about, you mentioned how city staff have different way of organizing in relationship with the consultants. You had like three different methods. Is it, how is the best way for us to help city staff get to the optimal setup? I forgot what the name was. It is a integrated project delivery. I'm opinionated about things, if you haven't noticed. But I say, augmented staff is a really good way. Augmented staff. So a city person can hire a consultant as a staff member and have them run the show and boost everybody up. You need a local champion. You need somebody who's gonna take that heat and putting it on a planner is unfair because Pee has a liability, right? So I see a lot of planners running around trying to get by-school facilities and they're not able to speak up against the engineers. And so having an engineer there who's ready to take it on is key. And as a consultant, you can take that liability on. So I say that's one of the secret strategies of getting a lot done in the city. The main thing that's missing in cities that I feel is that there isn't standard details for this stuff at all. And I repeat, there is not standard details adopted yet. If the city can adopt standard details about how to deal with a protected bike lane, how to deal with the right curve and conflict, how to deal with the cross bike, then it becomes normalized as a standard practice. But if there's just something else that happened in some other city and this is always experimenting and always pilot and always testing, it's not gonna do what we're trying to do. So adopting standard details should be one of the first things. And I get so angry when I look at master plans that I don't have anything about the detail. We can copy a detail from different city and have details in there, but there's too many of them that are just, that push that detailing to an actual project. And if you have that only on an actual project, we only have those details on that project. It's not something that's incorporated into the whole city. In your presentation, there was an image with the K71's on both sides of the bike lane, the left side between the vehicles and then on the right side as well. I was wondering why that was. Was it? I think that may have been in the location as you approach the parking, because we had parallel parking. We turned the diagonal parking to parallel parking. I think that's the one, the city of Glendora image. I don't know. I think it's like a little near, but maybe that was it. I'm not sure. I saw the image as well. That was the best piece. So this is the city of LA. This wasn't my design, but it's just in front of our building, our buildings right here. But this used to be, I would say a parking lane. But it's red curb there. It seems like something more to maintain that. I don't know what that's for. But I do know that the new project is going to push this over and they're going to have a concrete median here for the entire stretch of this 1.5 mile corridor. So this was... I have proposed on both sides when I have a right turn pocket there. So there's been a few times where we have a right turn pocket to the side of this. And I've done posts like this with a bike box a few times. So common to left turn and one for the right turn. There's a heavy right turn there. But I'm not sure what this one is trying to do. Last question maybe? She goes first, yeah. I'm holding the mic too much. This backpulling of two... When you, as it mentioned about engineers resolving themselves of liability with signs. So I was just curious, why is it when... In a situation where, okay, there's just one safety infraction. Once in a while, that's okay. But when that happens multiple times, why is it always so put on the user to be responsible? There's no what? When multiple safety infractions occur at the same place, why is the responsibility still put on or blamed on the users? It shouldn't be. It should be that it's happening in the same place frequently. It should be looked at that we should go do an additional design there. And the design there should not just be putting up a sign saying that the warning or something like that. It should be actually working on some sort of design. But the city engineers can't get away with putting up a sign saying it's up to the user. But I fundamentally disagree with that perspective. I think we should be out. Continuous project deliveries, looking at where the locations are and working on those intersections. San Jose is where I'm from. We work on this huge project for them and they have not continued the protected intersection delivery after that project. And now San Jose has very, very high fatality rate on many of these facilities that would have wanted protected intersections. And so City of Fremont, on the other hand, has implemented protected intersections even where there isn't a lot of bicycle facilities and they've had no crashes and no fatalities. So there's a stark difference in how cities approach different things. I'd say it's really important to kept city staff on it and integrate the project delivery instead of just waiting for, oh, let's wait for our full master plan to study all the fatalities, to eventually put thick lines on paper, to eventually apply for grants for those thick lines, to eventually, you know, we gotta start having ongoing project delivery. All right, so this is the last question. And we're done. Happy hours calling our names, rooftop 1740. Last question. Thank you. I don't know if it's a question or a rant, but it feels to me that, not intended here, we are reinventing the wheel. I'm a big fan of Not Just Back, a YouTube channel that's fantastic, I recommend it, I'm a big patron. And over there, it seems like they've figured out a lot of stuff that we're trying to figure out here as well, but they did it 30 to 40 years ago. Would it be simpler to simply either invite them or go over there and learn from what they did and their mistakes instead of reinventing the wheel again? Do you wanna hold on a little bit? So we've been talking about protecting intersections as a part of their core design and eye contact is part of their core design and making users interact with each other and have human interaction as a key element of their design. They went through a major fatality time when children wanted to play in the street and they weren't able to play in the street and so they advocated to go have safer streets for people and they went through a phase like that. In the U.S. we're starting to do that and we are not trying to reinvent the wheel, we're using a lot of their best practices. The Evolution of the Protected Bikeway Guide at ALT together, brought together a lot of the best practices and all these things are working towards the same type of facilities that they have out there. But to be honest, there's been, with AASHTO they've been waiting for five, six years and it still hasn't been approved a new design guideline so we are still trying. Thank you, thank you, thank you.