 The City of Portland has begun a major repaving project on Outer Congress Street. In addition to resurfacing this important traffic corridor, the number of lanes will be reduced and other changes will be made to make the roadway more pedestrian and bicycle friendly. Brian Naugh Block spoke with Portland's Director of Public Services, Mike Babinski, about the project. Mike, what's going on on Outer Congress Street, repaving and re-marking the lanes? What's going on there? Yeah, indeed. The project is related to a partnering project between the City and Main DOT. Very unique opportunity for us to work together. Main DOT had plans to overlay Congress Street from Stevens Avenue to Johnson Road as part of their normal summer arterial work for this year. They came to us in the spring of this year and advised us of that project. We, in turn, advised them that we wanted to work with them on implementing some phases of the 2007 Congress Street corridor study, which basically looks at providing some lane configuration changes, left turning movements, some bike accommodations, and some improved pedestrian features to help mitigate some of the speeding and the problems on that stretch of Congress Street. And what specifically are the changes that are going to be made as this gets forward? So the overall project has some unique features to it that are building off of the 2007 corridor study, and they generally include maintaining four 11-foot travel lanes west of Garrison Street to Johnson Road, so that farthest west part will maintain the four. In the eastbound lanes at Westbrook Street, we'll create one through lane to a point just west of Westbrook Street, and it will provide a dedicated left turn lane right on Westbrook Street at the intersection of Congress and Westbrook. That lane tends to function as a left turn movement anyway as you're traveling eastbound, so I think that will function as well. Throughout most of the corridor, there will be two travel lanes, a lane in each direction with the center turn lane to accommodate a left turn movement at Waldo Street, at the Stroudwater Village Medical Offices, and then as you're heading easterly toward Hobart Street, depends on which direction you're going. Those will provide, in those locations, left turning lanes for safer traveling as well. In addition, we'll also have bike lanes or at least shoulders that provide a two-and-a-half-foot shoulder lane for biking as well. West of Frost Street, that hill area, we will actually have a bike climbing lane as well, and so that's sort of a unique feature. We've been working with our Bicycle Coalition with respect to trying to accommodate that stretch of the city. There's a lot of bike activity, and so this will be one of our first opportunities to actually experiment and install the bike climbing lane as well. What impact do you expect this to have on the cars that are using it now, 25,000 cars a day, use that stretch of it? It's quite significant, yes. It's very significant, and so to sort of account for that or measure that, we're actually doing this project in phases, it's very unique. So the first phase, which is going on now and due to the nature of traffic, as you mentioned, all the paving work that's going on, the resurfacing, is going on at night to accommodate what's the heavy traffic. This week will be, I would call, sort of week one or phase one where we will literally do the overlay, and then toward the end of this week, we actually will put down the first layer of the lane markings, and then we'll be able to do some data gathering and understand what's the impact. What are we hearing from the public? What are we observing out in the field? What kind of congestion is that causing? What kind of problems? Or no problems, particularly during peak times, AM and PM peak times. And then the third week, we will gather all of our data from that experience, and then hold, our plan is, or at least our third phase, is to hold a public meeting, probably in later July, with Maine DOT and our staff, and then the community, and get some feedback. I'm sure we'll hear from commuters, we'll hear from the Stroudwater Neighborhood Association, the Hobart Neighborhood Association, and that'll inform the final layer of the paint markings that we'll put down. So we're going to do it in two different phases. And people could participate in a survey online about this as well, is that right? They can, very unique, and we, again, that was a feature of our partnering arrangement with Maine DOT. They will host that on their site, and all commuters, residents, anybody can actually go on that particular site and identify their thoughts on how they like it, their concerns, and other comments as well. Great, thanks very much. Okay, thank you.