 Is there anything to start for? Just thank you all for coming this evening to raving the elements. I find it's very helpful to have a lot of input and interest in projects like this. It really helps guide it along. Lucy Gibson is what Du Bois and King, they are the selected consultant for this project. They were selected through, we received a grant for this Trans-Vike and Pedestrian Program to assist with the funding. Du Bois and King was selected as the consultant. Lucy and her team have been looking at the existing conditions through the corridor. And I guess first of all, the corridor is Main Street from the roundabout to Route 2. And it also includes Berry Street from Main Street to the Rep Center. And the purpose of how to get all of them into this. Yeah, I'll get you at that anyway. Well, you do. Thanks, Corey. And thank you all for coming and welcome people. And there's a few housekeeping. There's a sign-in sheet near the front. Please sign in. And leave your email if you want to get more information. We'll be in touch with you as the study goes forward. There's also a couple handouts that you don't need quite yet until later in the meeting. But they're on the table as well. So we've been working through since last winter on a study that's looking at Main Street from Elm to Memorial and then Berry Street from Main to the Rec Center. And you can see kind of the area on the map. I know the distance you have isn't ideal for the slides, but we'll do what we can. We have a project team that includes an advisory committee that's made up of a number of members of the Monpelier Transportation Committee and Monpelier Alive and the City Council. And then we have the staff, Corey Linesman, the City's Project Manager, and along with Kevin Casey from the Planning Department. And then the consulting team is Du Bois and King. I'm Lucy Gibson. I'm the Project Manager. We also have Sophie Sauvay and Julia Versace who both are Monpelier residents. So we have been to the territory and are getting to know it very well. And I come here often enough, but they're here every day. Here's a project schedule. As I said, we started January. I know you probably can't read the words, but that goes from January to the next January. And we're working our way through looking at existing conditions and developing alternatives. Those orange triangles along the bottom are committee meetings that we've had throughout. We've had two so far, three so far. And then we've had a public meeting earlier on around time meeting day where we had input and got a lot of input on what people's concerns were. And then the next blue star on the bottom row is tonight's public meeting. And then we'll have one more public meeting to wrap up the project, which will be most likely out of city counseling if we can get on their agenda. So what we want to accomplish tonight for the next hopefully more like half an hour, not too long, because I know people, by value of the time you're spending here, I'll be presenting sort of the information that we have so far and the alternatives that we have developed. I'm happy to take questions as we go along and then we can also break for questions a few times during the presentation. And then we're gonna have what we're calling a workshop input where we actually have the options we've drawn up on posters at the back of the room and we'll give you some different ways to give us input. I'll get more into the details on that later. And then if people are still here, you can filter off after you've given your input but I'll also go over the next steps and contact information. In fact, I think I'll do that at the end of the presentation. So one of the things that we've been getting up to speed with is all the past work and studies that have been done in the city. A couple that have been really kind of foundation documents for our work are the Montpelier Bicycle Pedestrian Plan is called Montpelier in Motion. I'm sure it's on your website. It was done in 2015, so it's pretty recent. And then another one is called Greening America's Capitals. It was a project that also looked at a lot of areas within our study area and looked at options that would make the city more vibrant, more environmentally sustainable and had some really neat ideas that we want to be looking at in this study. And then there's even some longer go studies we've been unearthing and looking to inform us. One was a study of Memorial Drive and Main Street and it looked at options like around about so we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's a traffic study that was a very detailed look at traffic flow and intersections. And I think that was done during a time where there's a major parking garage planned and other changes. And then the old bike path studies as well of the bike path that's now getting, close to getting under construction. So this is the map that was developed in Montpelier in Motion and I know it's a lot of different colored lines. The area that we're studying, Main Street, Berry Street is a black line and the legend which I know you can't read says needs further study. So that's what we're doing now. But it does help because it has a lot of the network. What will the bicycle network be around the area that we'll be connecting to? And then the Greening America's capitals will show some of the snapshots of the plan but it was basically looking at read and sort of transforming both Main Street and Berry Street with a lot of better pedestrian facilities, more trees and plantings, more stormwater management using plants and natural systems and some other ideas that were developed and this was three years ago now in 2015. And I talk a little bit, we're talking about some roundabouts a couple of times. These are two drawings from the Greening America's capitals report. The left side is the Main Street, Berry Street intersection. Main Street's going up and down roughly and Berry Street comes in and then the extension that will be potentially built as part of a development project as well as a new bike path are going up from Berry Street. That's a, the constant they have was a full-size roundabout that actually the railroad tracks go through the middle of it. So it did take a lot of right away and have a pretty big footprint. The other roundabout that they looked at was one at State and Main Street and that's on the right half of the drawing. So we've been definitely bringing those concepts into our thoughts because one of the things about our study is we're not just looking at biking and walking but we really have to look at the driving and the intersections and how they all interact. So we've been looking a lot at each intersection detail and I just wanted to have you know these concepts are kind of brought into the study and we looked at them and made some changes to them. So I'm going to go quickly through existing conditions so it's not the most exciting but what we've been looking at and finding and obviously what your comments if you think we're wrong about any of these things or there's more information we need to know but we're looking at infrastructure and how people are using it, the volumes, safety and crashes and then we did get a lot of public input too as our first public events. So Montpelier is really very walkable and people really seem to enjoy that and treasure that and walk a lot and in general the city is already pretty walkable and the kinds of additional changes are relatively minor in scale. There's dealing with some ADA access and mobility issues and the condition of sidewalks is always a constant concern and the city does a lot to keep up with them and then a lot of it's crossings and crosswalks and that kind of thing. Really where a lot of our research has been and what we might want to change. And bikeable Montpelier, I'd say the city's got some great bike paths started but then getting through downtown is a little challenging. There's growing network of bike paths but a lot of gaps in it that we're seeing people riding on the sidewalks or kind of riding, having to ride right in the middle of traffic. So that's probably more of the, there's a little more catching up to do in biking rather than walking because I guess a general point that we're seeing. So here is the infrastructure the city has for biking. Any of the dark lines are either bike lanes or the bike path. I know you can't see the difference in your color but that's on the left side and on the right side is the best state we have available on how many people bike and on which roads. And you can see there's a lot of biking right through downtown. Those greenish lines and the thickness of them is an indication of how many people bike. And there's a lot of people having to bike where there's not infrastructure. And again, it's kind of where the red circles are. That's the gap we're really looking at. How do you connect some of the bike routes to the north of town to the main bike path and some of the other bike lanes? We're looking at traffic volumes. One of the things that we think about when we're doing bike planning is in order to provide a bike facility that feels safe and comfortable for wide range of people and not just the confident people we have to think about how much vehicle traffic are they exposed to. And also is there parking on street parking that people getting in and out of their cars also kind of hinder or can intimidate biking. And so we're looking at that to think about what kind of bike infrastructures need in different parts of town or different parts of our study area. So this diagram, main street's going sort of diagonally up from Memorial up to the roundabout. And the color is a traffic scale to traffic volume. This is vehicle traffic. So the redder areas have the highest volume down to the greener areas with the lowest. So if you look at the lower part of main street where it's in the red zone, that's an area where we want to have a little more protected bike lanes and not just a marked bike lane extra traffic. Where if we get up to the upper part of main street the volume is a lot lower. So a regular bike lane is probably adequate for most people to feel comfortable riding. So we're definitely looking at that. And another traffic related thing we're looking at are the intersections and what kind of changes might be done at the same time to help walking, biking, and driving. There's two intersections that meet the triggers in terms of volume to have traffic signals and so on. And one is main and very street that's probably not as surprised to everybody. We've heard a lot of input that something's needed there. And then main and school street so up above the state street intersection also meets the warrants what we call them for traffic signals so they'll just barely so it's not as clear of a need for a traffic signal but it would be something to consider at that intersection as well. And this is a map showing dots where all the different crashes have been happening. We have been taking a close look at the crash data. This is available from VTrans and it's over a five year period from 2012 to 16. That's the latest available right now. And the darker blackish brownish dots are where bicycles and pedestrians were involved in the crash. So this is other data we're looking at to understand what the patterns are and where the needs are. And main street between state and very is kind of a hotspot for the biking and walking crashes definitely and for vehicle crashes as well. Will these slides be available online? Yeah, we'd be happy to put a, yeah. We're actually recording this. You're also recording it. We're on the website. So if you have neighbors, if you have people that can make it tonight, they'll be able to watch and then comment. So another thing that we did was ask people what their experiences are, where they're concerned, where they think there's a need for a change. And we had town meeting, they were at a table out down a lot of input and that's just the map that was produced from it and the red dots are things that are of concern and green dots are things that people like. So you can see a pattern of main street and main street go sort of diagonally up and down on the south side of the river. And you can see Maine and Barrie had a huge number of red dots. A fair amount at Maine and school and state of Maine. People like the roundabout at Spring and Main Street and then also the four way stop sign at Elm and Spring Street. And then we supplemented that. I won't touch on this but we did an online mapping that we had open for a month or so that allowed the same kind of input online for people that could make it. And that, combined with the town meeting day input really shows the same pattern with a lot of concern of Maine and Barrie being probably the number one issue and then a lot of good comments along. And then a lot of comments along Barrie Street really almost more than Maine Street. So that definitely helped guide us for what kind of priorities we have. And so some of the key takeaways and there's a lot of data we probably concluded on the part that Barrie Street was in very high concern and a lot of it was related to conflicts between people driving in hard cars more than people biking and walking. And that's between getting out of driveways and not being able to see and then driving along the street in the winter, especially when it's a little narrower with the snow and feeling like you're gonna take off someone's mirror or your mirror's gonna get taken off your park there. So those were kind of the biggest issues we heard about. Maine Street and Barrie Street was like the number one hotspot and a lot of comments that some kind of traffic control is needed, either a signal or a roundabout. And for crossing Main Street, that location is really feels unsafe and challenging. State and Main Street would not quite as much and some people thought it worked well, other people were concerned, but there's general feeling that for bicycles it's pretty tough and the waiting time for people walking is also annoying if people then walk without signal and reach habit. School in Maine was another hotspot and the crosswalk there was felt too long by the time you start, cars are coming by the time you finish and speeds are a little higher there and also an encouragement to look at traffic control at that intersection. There was a lot of interest in doing a four way stop at Spring and M and we did look at that and I'll get into it a little later, but it really doesn't, the traffic volumes and patterns are really different so we don't think it would work at that location. So taking all that input, our next step was to look at alternatives and some of the key things that we thought about was pedestrian safety and comfort was probably one of the most important things to both maintain or improve and then to arrive what we call a low stress bike network through the study area and that means something that people who are not confident riders feel comfortable with so protected from traffic if there's high traffic. We wanted to maintain, well looking at traffic circulation we're looking at how each intersection operates and how they work together. We're trying to maintain as much parking as possible because any discussion of bike lanes affect parking and then just considering all the different users together to try to develop some recommendations so that was our intent and we really want your input tonight if we have that right or what more needs to be done. And I'll go through some of the design elements that we use so when we talk about bike lanes or protected bike lanes you have an idea of what we are talking about. So I'll go through a few of these that's roundabouts and mini roundabouts. You have one roundabout so you know what they're like but the concept of a mini roundabout's a little different. So I wanna talk about that. There's shared lanes and share roads, bicycle lanes, buffer bicycle lanes and protected bike lanes. I'll go through kind of the spectrum. There's one of the tools that we looked at was converting some of the diagonal parking to parallel to get more room for bike lanes and fewer conflicts with biking. Another thing that's been especially in the greening the Capitol report was to convert the head in diagonal parking to back in diagonal parking. That can also be safer for bikes and bike boxes and race pedestrian crossing. So those are some of the tools that we are using. So to talk about a roundabout versus a mini roundabout this is a slide from Manchester, Vermont. And it's not ideal with the view to show both the roundabout and the mini roundabout but there are one of each in the slide. The roundabout is on the left near the top. This is what used to be called malfunction junction, terrible traffic, it works really well in terms of traffic since the roundabout went in. And then over on the right side it's a little bit screened by a building roof is a mini roundabout. And the difference is it's much smaller and it doesn't have raised islands. So if a large truck has to go through it can drive right through the middle of the intersection. It doesn't have to negotiate around tight turn. Where that is on that slide? Oh, yes, I think I can, I'll try using the pointer here. I'd go up there if I could. So, okay, shot, oops. So I'm going right to the middle of the roundabout. You can see it's partly the mini roundabout, it's partly screened by the roof. But it's kind of a bumpy textured thing but a truck can go over it. And it's sort of otherwise like a miniature roundabout. For that intersection you really, if you have one roundabout and another intersection at close really also has to be a roundabout in order for traffic to flow through and not get backed up. So that was kind of a, and it was a very tight spot with a lot of old buildings like what you have up here. So, a mini roundabout was the answer that worked in that spot. Do you know what the reaction has been of the first responders, particularly the fire department with these kinds of roundabouts? Well, they're definitely designed with that in mind. I know the one here in Elm is a real problem for the fire department. So, yeah, so I guess we, I think that was one of the first, that was the first roundabout in the state. And I think it has issues that it's pretty tight yet it has the raised island. I think if that was being done again today, it would be done with a mountable island because that's a much, it's almost too tight for large trucks. It's right on the edge. Have you had input from the fire department? I haven't, no. So I think that will be something that we'll be looking for their input in the next days as well. Thank you. But mini roundabouts are designed for any large vehicle to get through when the booting fire comes out. So here's a few other examples of roundabouts. The lower right graphic just shows a truck making a turn right over a mini roundabout that's in kind of a downtown area. And so that's, when we're looking at any of the intersections of our study area where we thought really a mini roundabout's the way to go there. They work well for the vehicle, the motor vehicle passenger cars, but they also serve the trucks more easily. And they take up less room and when we have the old architecture here, that's really probably the most important reason. Now one thing, however, to keep in mind when we have roundabouts and we have bike lanes is that the way they interact is that, and there's a diagram on the left. I don't know how clear it will be, but if someone's traveling this way on the bike lane, there's a bike lane at the lower part of the street, when they get up to the roundabout, the bike bicyclist has to either decide to ride through the roundabout in the middle of the traffic lane as if they were a car and the more confident riders do that. Or they can bail out and ride upon the sidewalk and then ride around the roundabout. And that's how they're designed. And so one of the concerns in a place like state in Maine, it's there's not a huge amount of room so you would have bicyclists getting on the sidewalk and fixing the pedestrians. It'll probably get slow speed. It's not that fatal flaw, but it's something to think about. And if you have a lot of pedestrians and the bikes really have to get out and walk their bikes, so it doesn't make that continuous network for the less confident riders. So these are, there's a lot of different types of bike lanes and we're using a number of different types in the plan. So this is kind of a diagram showing the range. Let me get that thing over there. So from the far left is just a shared lane where bikes share the lanes with traffic and you might have share of markings. I know you have some of them probably have an on-helier. Just riding on the shoulders, the next one over. But then next door, and that is a bike lane where you have a four to five foot or more dedicated lane for bikes alongside cars. Then next over is a buffered bike lane where there's a painted buffer that gives you just a little more room and comfort. And these are all giving riders increasing comfort, especially in conditions where there might be increasing road traffic. The next one over is where you have a parked car and you want to have the bike lane on the outside of the parked car. So they're more separated from moving traffic than you need an additional buffer for people that are opening their doors to the cars. They don't track the bike in a tough spot. So that's the protected bike lane in the parking. The next one over is where you have a raised bike lane next to parking, which is just kind of a variation. And then the last one over is a cycle track with a hard escape barrier between the two. So these are all different families but again different ways to get the comfort and safety to be higher. So one of the designs we're looking at here is a parking protected bike lane and because of cost and storm water and right now just on the same surface of pavement. So this is a design guideline that's now used commonly for that. Where you have the parked cars and then the painted buffer and then the bike lane all on the same surface of pavement and then the sidewalk beyond that. So that's one of the types that we're, you'll see in our plans. Then another thing that we're looking at how to incorporate our bike boxes. A bike box is a place that would be at a signalized intersection and it's painted green. Cars are not supposed to be waiting on it when they're stopped and it allows a bike to slip by the parked cars and get out in front. And that's really helpful if they're trying to either make a left turn or if they're, the bike lane's ending and they wanna get out ahead of traffic or a number of different cases where they're really helpful for people to feel like they have place in the road and they're protected again from moving cars. So you see those a few of the intersections here. Angle parking, there is some angle parking in the downtown and we looked at could we have a bike lane next to it and what we found is there's really not room so the angle parking they have is pretty much incompatible with having bike lanes both in terms of space but also because people are backing out blindly and they're really particularly hazardous for biking. So any questions so far? Moving along good. So now I'm gonna talk about the alternatives that we've come up with for Main Street. We looked at Main Street and then Berry Street separately and the alternatives among the two can really be mixed or matched. So they're not, they don't have to be paired up. So and again, because we're looking at both the intersections and how they operate in the traffic we are looking at both, you know, signalized around about intersections and bike lanes. So we have start with M1, the first Main Street alternative is traffic signals with bike lanes where we add a traffic signal at Berry Street and go into it and then have parallel parking where there's room. The next one is roundabouts with bike lanes. So that's converting the intersections to roundabouts which gives a little more room for more parking and bike lanes because you don't need the turning lanes of the intersections. So there are some advantages to that but you know, frozen cons. The third one is we're calling it a hybrid at some roundabouts and some signals. And then the fourth one is an alternative where we really relied on the Greening America's Capital Report and because that didn't provide a bike lanes on Main Street we looked at an option of trying to get bike lanes on Elm Street and we'll get all into these in detail as we go. As I go through and explain these I'm just showing you the different segments that we looked at or that we'll zoom in on starting at the bottom. So Main Street's going up from Memorial to Elm. We're looking at Spring Road. We'll look at first Memorial to Berry Street then Berry to Langdon right through St. May and then from Langdon to the library which has sort of different conditions a little more width and then the last section of the library to Spring. So as we go through that's kind of the order we'll be looking at. Okay, so this is just a diagram of the existing conditions. As we've drawn them there might be a few peaks here and there of Main Street from Memorial to Berry. So just kind of for reference and again some of the issues were the crossing at Berry Street was deemed quite challenging. There's plenty of concern or conflicts around the Shaw's entrance and visibility and people walking the sidewalk that are not very easily solvable but we certainly are aware of them. There's a bus stop right in front of Shaw's as well and one of the things that we understand is that now that's a very busy bus stop. A lot of buses stop there. Some of them wait for a long time. When the one Taylor Transit Center's done it'll be much less used. So those kind of which will likely be less of concern. Before you switch up that's like it looks like we have, you put a crosswalk on the Shaw's parking lot side of Berry Street. We put it on the other side. It's on the other side. I was wondering, yeah. Is that a suggestion or is that? No, it's a. Okay. So here is the M1 option which is traffic signals with bike lanes. So a couple of things that we're looking at doing and maybe I'll try using this for the basically the section in front of Stonecutter's way and over the bridge. We looked at the traffic volumes of how many are turning and we think that that left turn lane can actually be kind of shared realign because right now there's a full left turn lane the whole length to Memorial Drive and the way the light works you get about seven or eight cars out and then the rest of the people have to wait. So we have enough stacking to get more than that many cars out and also left turns in the Stonecutter's way and then we have a shorter left turn lane into Shaw's which doesn't, as far as we've observed never backs up too far so it will be enough capacity for those left turns. And that gives us that basically the width of an extra travel lane because right now it's basically four lanes across the bridge to get bike lanes on each side. So that would be really just restriping the way to get bike lanes all the way out to Memorial. And then we have a bike box out there to help people who might be riding up the bike lane and turn left or go straight even. And then a traffic signal at Berry Street which would have bike boxes because again the new bike path will be coming right in around here so there'll be probably a demand to turn onto the bike path in either direction. And then what you'll see onto the right side here is in order to get bike lanes we need to take parking off one side of the street. So I'll give the numbers of how that looks later on. That area in particular. That would be a wonderful thing to do when that's kind of a. But that wasn't part of your analysis. Well we haven't, at this point we're looking at the broad range of options and I think in the next stage of our study we'll drill into some of those additional needs more and then that will really affect how much parking is too because every time you have a driveway. But it's at this point we're not really, we haven't gotten those details but it's definitely something that is important to address and we have a limited amount that we can do in this study but we can either explore that option and also make recommendations. Kind of a chicken or egg problem because do you assume you have to have the curb cuts that have drawn certain design choices and if we can get rid of some of them? Yeah I would do a lot and for both biking and walking and parking I've never been done this before. And we heard a lot of complaints of some of the alleyways that look like people walking and stuff like this, something that we'll be discussing. So here's the option that's roundabouts with bike lanes and this includes, you know, fairly larger roundabout because of the high traffic and that there's more room than Memorial and Bain. And then a roundabout at Bain and Berry, we've done a, and I'll show in the next slide with some mini roundabout one of the smaller kind rather than what was done for Greening America's capital. And then you can see the pinkish line near Berry Street is the coming in from the north is the bike path that's under construction or soon will be under construction or on its way. And then our Berry Street options which we'll be getting into later but continuing down Berry Street to the rep center. And then you can see on the right and you'll see more on the paper that we fit parking on both sides of the street because the roundabout doesn't need the left turn lane. So. Lucy, you should have asked it why you were talking about roundabouts. Can you speak to about the manner which visually impaired pedestrian can locate the big roundabout, a crosswalk and a roundabout in the Hawks signal system? Say that again, I'm sorry. For the visually impaired to locate the crosswalk as a roundabout, find the crossing. So well, there are designed, they're considered accessible if it's a one lane roundabout because the person who's vision impaired needs to cross one lane at a time. And the larger roundabouts we have two circulating lanes and therefore two lane approaches are not really, and they built them and they're done but they're not serving visually impaired people well. And one of the other options that any of this roundabout is you could have at the crossing, which would be right here where that pointer is, you could have a pedestrian beacon that would start flashing for visually impaired people to use, or anyone could really use it. So that could be combined if there's any concern that the design isn't adequate. So there's a locator button as well as an indicator of traffic. Right, yeah. Yeah, there'd be like a rapid flashing beacon that would probably be the thing that would. So, yeah, that's definitely something that needs attention. Is the roundabout at Memorial and Bain at one or two lanes? Just one lane is what we looked at the numbers and that's more than adequate for. And you can sit it in the space without taking out buildings? It will be a little bit of impact on the edges, but not, you know, not unreasonable by any means. Did you look at the study that was done by Harold McCullough? We did, yes. He had two lanes. And that was, well, that's a good point, yes. So that was done at a time where there was a huge amount of development and they projected a lot of traffic growth that they indicated needed a two lane roundabout. But when we look at the actual numbers we're really hobbling along and not much growth. And even with some growth, our look, you know, there's also, I think there's just more conservative analysis done then. And now with more experience in roundabouts we have a more refined way to say, do we need one lane or two lanes? So we feel very comfortable that one lane would be enough. Another option? Yep. So you don't know the plans or how we will? Well, it would need some kind of, you know, whether they need to go to gates or not. But it would really not be much different other than that traffic's moving. So, and actually, I'm gonna go to the next slide because this is just a little bit of a close up. So where my pointer is, is where the railroad would cross what we're proposing is a mini roundabout. And I just showed the diagram on the left, which was from Greening America's Capitol where they had a much larger roundabout where the railroad actually cut through the middle of it. And then you kind of stop traffic on either leg of the roundabout. And that's, you know, one option, but we feel that mini roundabouts are really a better fit for the urban area. It'll be lower cost and whatnot. So we would recommend considering a much smaller footprint that could be out of the railroad. Yeah, and this is something we haven't worked out all the details either, but at this stage. The left roundabout does have very main, but the mini does not have a crosswalk on the Shaw's side. We're thinking probably not on the South side because it'd be right over the railroad tracks. So it would have crossings. Maybe if I go back to the other. So there'd be crossings on the North, well, I'm saying North up to the right and to the South, but not on the approach that goes right over the railroad. Just give it a call into tricky. And again, these are very conceptual. So things could change a lot if any of these really move forward, but this is where we are. Okay, and then the hybrid option was, as we have talked about some of these days, there's a lot of interest in the mini roundabout at Main and Berry, but could it work with the signal? And I think it would most hours of the day. So here's a hybrid option where the main and memorial is signalized and Berry and Main has the mini roundabout. And the only concern for this kind of thing is there during peak hours, when there's a lot of traffic backing up from the memorial, the roundabout will get a little bit locked up and people won't be able to move. No one will be able to get out of Berry because there'll be people waiting there and maybe waiting backing up from the state as well. But on the other hand, is that any worse than what's there now? And the rest of the hours of the day, it should work pretty well when there's lower traffic than not standing here. But that's definitely one of having a both signals moves that can be tied together traffic kind of pulse out or usually so. With the mini roundabouts, do people at high traffic volume, do they tend to end up stuck in the circle itself? Or do they stay back from that? So that for instance here, if they stayed back from it on Main Street, then people on Berry Street could execute a left turn. Yeah, and you'd hope, if people are courteous. Well, that's the problem we have now. Exactly, yeah. I mean, in some intersections in New York City, it's a big exit, it's a box out. Right. And you can be fine if you're stuck in the middle. Yeah, and I think that that would be, we can help people a little. And because it's a low speed environment and there's generally people are pretty courteous, there's always a few turns out there. I think that that would probably, people would likely not want to block the roundabouts of their stuff. One of the real challenges with roundabouts is that particularly in the US, a lot of people are not familiar with how to use a roundabout. And I think we've seen that happen now that route, 302 and 2, you've got people stopping, you've got people blasting through. So I would think there has to be some sort of, if we were to go the roundabout route, some sort of education for people and stuff, how they go through these roundabouts, particularly if you have bicyclists going both ways, that could be a real danger to the rider going straight or cutting to the rider to the left. Right, right. So, and that's a good point, yeah. I mean, there's more and more roundabouts around the country and if you have a couple here, but you probably see the best of them on, yeah, right, so. And that's the, I guess the other point is that, there'd be bicycle routes around the roundabout as well as the option of riding right through the middle. And we'd assume that people going on the bike path to the north or west, whatever, would probably wrap around the crossing and then wrap back in. Okay, so now we're gonna go from Barry Street to Langdon Street, which is, we're right through the heart of downtown. This again is the existing pavement markings. You know, one of the things we asked to look at, there's a lot of crosswalks along Main Street in front of City Hall. Are they both needed? It's hard to say yes or no. They're both certainly used and we don't really see an issue with keeping them and they don't seem associated with crashes and whatnot. So that's kind of a little bit more of a discretionary call. For now, we'd assume they both could stay there certainly and then the state and main intersection has the sort of funky crosswalk arrangement where you're kind of missing the diagonal gap between right in front of City Center to say, right, the Howard Bank. And so those are some things that we were looking at of how those could be addressed. And the other thing we heard quite a bit about and now we'll get into it. So is the Langdon Street crosswalk which is very much on the very edge of the drawing. The concerns are that, let's see, I'll go to that. These aren't the greatest photos but basically, traffic's often backed up through the crosswalk. So one danger is if people are crossing and there's cars waiting, the cars in the other lane can't see them and so it really exposes them to potential risk which especially for younger kids and people who can't see. So there's definitely safety issues within. There's also issues of traffic getting through the intersection of peak hour and then having to stop again or feeling like they don't want to stop because they don't want to hold up all the people behind them and kind of put people in this dilemma. So there's definitely been a lot of concern about it. There's also been like a thick folder of different studies and emails and reports that have been discussed. So it's kind of a thorny issue so we'll put out our ideas that we have on it and we'd love your input on these. So what we've identified so far are really three different options and we've incorporated them into the different M1, M2, and M3 but they can definitely be mixed and matched so they're not exclusively assigned to that. So M1 is to, there's two yellow lines. Those are potential locations for new crosswalks. M1 would be to move the crosswalk further from State Street to Cays and Glace which is a little alley and it might be in front of the alley or near the alley depending on parking and other issues but somewhere in that location it'll really still serve the same desire to get to that block of Main Street. It gives a little more space to be further away from the intersection but it probably won't solve every problem but it should be sort of measurably better than the other option and two is to make a whole raised crossing. This was inspired by the greening of capitals and I'll show drawings of what these look like but that will hopefully make more clear areas so there won't be that backed up traffic. Hopefully people wouldn't stop on the raised crosswalks so that pedestrians would have a lot more visibility. And then the third option M3 is to basically get rid of the crosswalk between East State and State and move it up there and make a bigger intersection area and that will make it more convenient to get from city center over there without going too far out of the way and it also would allow the signal to operate differently where there'd be less delays and that's one of the objections people across at Langdon rather than at State of Maine is the long wait gap there so it would address some of those and I'll show a little more on this. Okay, these are pros and cons. I'm not gonna get into these too much yet but they're all written on these handouts so later on we can get back one slide. The southbound lane of Main Street at Langdon would be another place for a big X because if you keep that area free it's just the southbound lane then you have visibility, you don't have problems with left turns onto Langdon Street. I mean, it solves a lot of problems. Yeah, and that could be a cheaper way to do it than if that's the same idea, right? It's making it more of an open area. So anyway, there's pros and cons with each of these and I don't want your thoughts on them but I think for now we'll keep going to interest of time and you'll get to weigh in on the end. So here's the M1 signals bike lane so there's a signal at Berry Street and a signal at State of Maine and one of the things we're showing which is really something that can be done with paint or something more textured is just reinforcing the whole, all the different crossing options that would be possible with the scramble signal which is the kind of signal where all the red lights go on and then pedestrians can go every which way and to allow that kind of diagonal movement as well as part of that because that's something that, you know, otherwise you'd have to really do the two movements and it's not, nobody does it so it kind of recognizes how people are using it. There's parking on one side of the street. We chose the upper side, so the west side of Main Street probably worked out to be either side but that seems to allow more parking saved and then here's the roundabout with bike lanes so we have the mini roundabout at Berry and then the mini roundabout at State of Maine and again that allows parking on both sides and then the bike lanes are on the outside of the parked cars so they have that protection and then they'd have to kind of choose what to do when they get to the roundabout and then we're showing the sort of wide open area at Langdon Street which, yes, could definitely be paint or something more less expensive. This was envisioned as being kind of raised and textured and I just want to talk about the State of Maine roundabout that this was, the diagram on the right was from Greening America's capitals and we kind of replicated it on the left and it's a mini roundabout first of all that wouldn't, nothing larger would fit but because of the offset intersection the way they designed it requires anyone coming in from East State cannot get into the roundabout so that becomes a right turn only approach and I don't know if that was really discussed much in the report but it really would have a big effect on traffic control accessibility and whatnot so that's a big negative with this and there's really no way to get that lane safely into the roundabout kind of try a lot of different machinations that's really what the best we can do we're gonna skip over that one. All right, so here's the hybrid option M3 where we have the mini roundabout and then this is where we pushed the crosswalk to the north side of East State Street so that then you could have the crossings happen at the same time as the traffic and there's some details on that I won't get into but it would make the intersection cycles quicker and actually be better for cars and capacity and it would make the waiting time less but you do have the people turning right have to deal with the pedestrians which is a pretty common scenario in those places so and then the next section is from Langdon Street on the right up to the library and School Street, this is the existing condition there's diagonal parking, the road ride is quite a bit here and bends so there's probably just for that the main and School Street intersection was a big hotspot, the difficulty crossing as you're crossing three lanes there's a left turn lane and traffic's moving a little more especially sometimes to the day and we did look clearly at the numbers for traffic control, it does meet a signal warrant so it could qualify to have a signal put there and that would help the crossing because they would have that protective phase the idea of putting the all-way stop really doesn't work because there's way more traffic on main and way less on school than the intersection of spring and elm which were much more balanced so we looked at the two of them side by side and those numbers at spring and elm work really well for a four-way stop but this would not so we don't recommend that but so M1 is signals so we could put a signal there at these, the way it's laid out could be signalized or unsignalized it really doesn't have a, could be, go either way and all the parking, the diagonal parking is converted to parallel and then there's plenty of room to have the bike lanes outside of the park cars for a good part of the way then eventually it's towards the right as you go north on main they become regular bike lanes so here's another option would be a mini roundabout at school in main it fits really easily within the curve so it would be relatively inexpensive fix it would slow down cars and provide a good crossings for the best friends otherwise similarly the bike lanes go through the parking's all parallel and then the last section from the library up to Spring Street we basically bike lanes, well this is existing so there's parallel parking now when it kind of becomes unmetered as you go further north and on one side so for really all of these options we didn't see much we're trying to stick within the existing curves so we weren't trying to widen the road or anything it would just be conventional bike lanes along the traffic lane instead of a parking on one side so we're kind of redistributing that space and the volumes are lower and whatnot but this is a good facility and then eventually the bike lanes take her into the roundabout and then make a transition to the next sections and then M4 which we've kind of sketched out is based on the Greening America's cap though which doesn't have bike lanes on Main Street it has shared lanes and so because we're intending to really try to make that low stress bike route we looked at Elm Street as an option before having more protected bike lanes so we've taken a close look at Elm Street and how could that work and it has right now two-way traffic and parking on one side so either it's take out all the parking and put bike lanes or another option we want to put up for discussion is making Elm Street one way and then there's room for a two-way bike path on one side so along the bottom there's a cross section where from left to right you have the buildings and the sidewalk, the parked car the one-way direction, the moving car and then a buffer and then a two-way bike lane so that would be something that could fit in that without losing all the parking So one way into town or out of town? Well that's a whole other discussion and it could happen either way and there's pros and cons so that is definitely another big disruption to the traffic flow so this is just kind of what it looks like I'm going to skip over this slide so these are different options you could have it go south and then you're sending more traffic in the yellow lines through State Main which is congested and not great although in this whole option that's around about so that's a couple of that that puts more pressure any one-way street kind of puts pressure somewhere else we're assuming it would be two-way north of school because that's such a long route for people to get around and having bike lanes on upper main is relatively doable so and then going the other way then you're putting pressure on that direction so there's pros and cons of each and we haven't, it's up for discussion if this alternative even goes anywhere which is probably, all right and here's the summary of pros and cons I'm not going to go into it because we have it on your handout so for Berry Street, a little bit simpler we looked at three different options and this is Berry Street between the rec center and the main street one is to a shared-use path I'm just going to get right into them so basically what you can see on the bottom is the cross-section you have parking on one side, two travel lanes and then just widen the sidewalk to be a shared-use path so you have walking and biking missed and that's sort of consistent with the shared-use paths on either side so that's kind of a nice thing about this is it makes that more seamless you do lose one side of parking the other option that something that was recommended in the greening America's capitals and it could also be something that could be done much more quickly in the short term is basically similar you have parking on one side, two travel lanes and then you squeeze in a two-way bike lane on the pavement, road pavement and then the sidewalk so this is all something you can get with paint and the concern is it's a little tight so it won't resolve the conflicts with people feeling like they're going to run into parked cars for at least the side that still has parking and with both those options would that then connect through the alley and the rec center? Yeah, exactly, yeah so that's our destination and there's be some improved crossing there to make sure but this would be on the north side of Berry Street because of the driveways and then a third option which we think probably is not going to be too popular is taking parking off both sides and putting off road bike lanes so which would be low cost in terms of paint but it would be a fairly big parking impact given it would go from two sides to no side but it definitely addresses the concerns we heard a lot about of parked cars so those are the options and some pros and cons so we looked at parking and again we don't have this final, final design form but we've done enough to have a pretty good estimate of where we think parking would be so on that chart the existing is on the far left and it's about 120 spaces with the M1 which is traffic signals that would go down to about 60 and the loss of 60 so kind of cutting it half of just those streets this is the on-street parking on Main and Berry and we're not affecting any other parking there's lots of parking on the street the M2, the roundabout option boosts up the parking a bit because you can have parking on both sides for some of the streets and the M3 is similarly about the same the M4 option has more parking as they maintain they don't have bike lanes on Main Street so we lose it on Berry Street but not on Main Street and then we've also looked at traffic operations and all the intersections to just give an idea so this is a chart showing delay at each intersection I know it's probably hard to read but the flunts are memorial then Berry, then state, then schools are going up and then the different colors green is existing and one, the traffic signals is orange two, the roundabouts is yellow and three, the hybrid is pink and four, the green cabins is purple and the quick story is that maintaining signals at the intersections and putting a signal at Berry the higher the number basically is the worse it is so we like to have the lower bars where it can roundabouts which is the yellow option has the lowest delay overall however, the traffic signals will be tweaked and this doesn't count as tweaking it could be due to the signals aren't it but nothing really gets worse than it is now I guess I could say the details except for well, School Street and the greening cab is counted for all the traffic winding around and getting rerouted that also kind of took a hit so can I wrap up there any more questions before we get into underline assumption seems to be that we need to have some sort of protection for bikes right and so was consideration given to how to more effectively integrate bikes into traffic rather than creating separate I would be very uncomfortable particularly making statements I think we need to think about how people behave on their bicycles and I don't think we would be wanting to get it by the lanes because of where they're needing to go on their bikes which means I might be in traffic in order to make that left turn at the big block or whatever yeah, right so now you've got frustration and you've got this special lane over there and I'm not in it because I need to be turning left because that's where I'm going cars are very frustrated with bikes don't behave properly and I will appear to not be behaving properly they're not solving so you're concerned if there is a bike lane people will get more unhappy I can see the bike lane being good for moving people it's a growth of the biking and that's really what we're hoping to achieve and I think having it be more comfortable for a broader range of riders just a lot of people are not going to ride in traffic so it's really, we feel like providing that dedicated infrastructure is really important for a lot of people they'll probably at least say you can ride two main street as well as through so it will help people get through to the bank path but then they can park their bike and then walk around downtown and not try to ride right up to the doorstep that's what a lot of people do if they're not comfortable doing because you're right to where you want to go you might need to make a lot of money the whole reason I ride my bike and the hope is the more people are riding the more drivers will be used to it but I guess I've never read that there's an issue that there's more of a road rage against bikes with bike lanes but I'm certainly looking to sit out and there's just a question on the fact so I could be in the pedestrian and it'd certainly be allowed to ride if the having a bike lane doesn't require all of that it's something we can certainly put some thought into that again the goal is to have that get to the large group of riders who are the idea is to lower the speed limits in town so that more people feel comfortable riding in traffic maybe in addition to bike lanes but if the speed limit were 15 it's a 25 more people could get too close to the speed limit on a bicycle whereas a 25 it's even possible through town to keep up with traffic and to keep up with traffic so it's definitely another thing to look at is the lower speed limits and the bike lanes might stay long I think if you look in a design downtown and you know the concern becomes can you enforce it or what kind of measures are you doing to make that follow because you have a great option but certainly designing for lower speeds and I think that's probably like the greening America's capital they have a lot of traffic coming a lot of texture and stuff that can slow people down and make it the volumes are pretty high though and that's again would you want your kid riding a 10 year old wouldn't ride them yeah so we're a little bit trying to design for a bigger range of people that would be comfortable all right well now thanks for your patience and serenity so long we have we'd like to get your input on the maps and back we have a couple different ways we'd like to do that one is we have these sheets here that give these give pros and cons if you want to provide more detail you don't do it tonight if you want to send it in later are there additional pros or cons or do you have any comments on these or things that we missed on these options we'd love to get you to write them down and share with us and then the other thing is on the maps themselves because there's a lot of different pieces of these alternatives that can be combined in different ways we'd love to get your input with we have green dots and red dots we'd love to put green dots on things that you like and would want to see in a final alternative because that's what we're getting towards is coming up with the best solution that we can put together and then red good things that you don't like and would not want to see in the final alternative can't guarantee everybody's wishful thinking maybe nothing left but anyway we did want to get a sense of the room you've taken the time to learn about these we'd love to get your feedback and then we have room on each sheet to write any other comments you want us to think about for each option so there's four tables back there and it's M1, M2, M3 and 4 and then they have the different Berry Street options which really can be mixed or matched as well so thank you very much of what I'll do before so we can kind of I'll quickly do our next steps which is we have a committee meeting we haven't scheduled it yet but it'll be probably sometime in October where we'll be compiling all that we've learned and developing a recommended preferred alternative for the report and then we will get a draft of report and it will eventually be presented to the city council and then one other item that we're going to be including in our report are some short term things that can be implemented cheaply but paint and other easily attained and removable materials so we can try some things out and not wait for as many years as it takes to get some of these things built so that's definitely one other sort of maybe it doesn't fit in but it's overarching question would be are there ways that the first off what kind of traffic shows up on Berry Street especially coming into town and are there ways to reduce that further out so you don't even have to deal with it at the intersection well that's a good point we haven't really looked at the bigger demand we are aware that there's potential for growth in traffic from development cause other people coming through to go a different way you know we think that if anything if we had a signal or a roundabout of Berry in Maine it might increase the amount of people using Berry and maybe decrease on East State if people are choosing to because it'll be an easier way out it could definitely shift traffic and it's probably a lot of trucks that come through there are a lot of big trucks coming down Berry Street every day yeah so we'll try to you know consider those options as well but so and then it'll eventually get presented to City Council where they can get in December and there's certainly possibly that some of there's grant programs or maybe some short-term mutations that happen maybe next year and I'll leave here is my email and Corey's email feel free to get in touch with us any further ideas yeah John mentioned this earlier if if these slides that we just saw can be online somewhere that'd be great I want to share it with other people the project has we have a project website here on the city website so we'll post both the presentation and the recording of right tonight there's also going to be a place where people can comment like you can back in the back of the room so we'll leave that open projection years for traffic used I'll have to I have to get back to you but there were some projections that were done in a recent study it was a it's a recent traffic study was done that you know included some amount of growth that's planned but in general the traffic has not been growing significantly so we and some of the other studies I mentioned earlier we're assuming there'd be a lot of growth that hasn't been seen on the ground and so we're counting some growth but not a surge of growth yeah and it's you have the peak hours so you're trying to look at the worst time of the day is going to be enough do you have any thoughts on anything you want to make sure we make sure then it's going to cover 10 years down the road or so at least probably although this isn't a great big project right I mean one thing we're the at 10 is not so like wide in state and Maine so everyone can get through as much as have to get bikes and everything so you know we're definitely trying to accommodate what's there