 Good morning everyone. So glad to see everybody here so early in the morning. Especially our mayor. So glad to have the mayor here with us this morning as we talked about these really important issues I think critical issues for our city. And I'll talk just really about vision zero. Kathy Tuttle is going to come and talk to you all about it and I had the pleasure of escorting Kathy through our district a few days ago to show her some of the critical areas where we had the greatest problems and I wanted to talk about vision zero because it came to my district very with a lot of emphasis because I was getting contacted by different constituents talking about the their family members who had been killed just crossing the street trying to go to the grocery store trying to go to church in the morning and as I started to really calculate how many people had been killed in my district alone from the time I took office there had been 26 people in my district and so I started to learn what is going on in my district and what can we do as a city to help improve the city-wide because the statistics in San Antonio were particularly staggering and I started to investigate and I came across vision zero which was first comes from Sweden and Europe but in the United States New York is the leader for vision zero so I went to a conference to see how we could implement some of these changes in our city to make our streets safer to make our community safer and and so that San Antonio wouldn't be one of the leading cities in the country for traffic fatalities and of course we got tremendous support from our mayor and from our city staff to try to implement these changes right away for vision zero and what vision zero is is policy that we have zero traffic fatalities in our city and while it's a very ambitious goal it is possible we have examples in our city with our joint base San Antonio of examples where they have zero fatalities 80,000 people go to the military bases every day and they have practically zero fatalities on their installations so we know that it's possible there are many reasons that it's difficult to to enforce but it is possible and it is based on decisions that we make as policymakers that create these problems and then the end can resolve these problems so I'm looking forward to the dialogue here today I have with me a city staff Kevin Barton he's also my husband but is serving as volunteer staff for me here today and Kevin could you raise your hand up right here in front so if anybody has questions to Kevin that we can be directed back to the to the office I'm really open and anxious to hear about all the things that we have today so thank you all for being here and being very very interested in this this issue of vision zero issues of the built environment we know that the built environment is what can ultimately make our city safe the mayor touched on the larger issues air quality water quality transportation related issues and and my focus here has been on vision zero and the reduction of pedestrian and cycling and all related traffic fatalities so I'm anxious to hear what how this day progresses and how our city changes as a result and I have a pleasure of introducing Kathy who I got to know on a more personal level when we went for a bike ride in our neighborhood and I'll just talk to you a little bit about Kathy and aside from being very innovative and giving me some very specific ideas for what we could do on our streets she is a PhD in urban design and planning from the University of Washington and a certificate from Portland State University in bicycle facilities planning and design she received the highest individual award from sustainable Seattle in 2011 and the sustainable path foundation pathbreakers award in 2012 in addition she has served on the Seattle mayor's school road safety task force and Seattle public schools traffic safety committee in 20 2007 total started cascade bicycle clubs first easy ride series called spokespeople rides she is a ride leader and has trained over 20 ride leaders who develop monthly easy rides for all ages and abilities so I'm with it's a great pleasure that I welcome it Kathy Kathy Tuttle to come in and talk to us more about vision zero I'm getting my slides loaded I think yep yep so hello Texas hi this is this is actually my howdy yeah this is my first time in Texas and well actually I was in the airport in Houston about 10 years ago but first time in San Antonio for sure and I'm feeling very welcome here and glad to be here it's rainy cold 40 degrees in Seattle and it's been like so hot in Texas I mean for you it's probably the weather is perfectly reasonable but for me it's been it's been it's been really warm so and I also wanted to thank councilmember Gonzalez and her husband Kevin for taking me on a ride two days ago and I actually will have a little bit more information about that ride and the ride that I went on yesterday but I wanted to start with saying the reason that I came here to San Antonio was that I have a passion for safe and healthy streets and I wanted to come to a city where the streets at least statistically were killing people this is this is a city that is off scale around the country in having traffic fatalities for people walking biking and driving I think the rate is about four times that of Seattle and I really literally wanted to come here to see what there was hold on hold on to see because I wanted to see a place where where pedestrian safety was was at so much at risk so I came here and I saw a lot of streets like this San Antonio is the 18th most dangerous out of 51 large metro areas in the country Seattle actually ranks number one best for pedestrian safety and I expected to see a lot of this and so I've been here for three days now and and what did I find in the last three days well what I found was you have a beautiful city of course your River Walk is extraordinary but your downtown is pretty spectacular too you've kept your stock of historic buildings in beautiful condition you have small businesses that are doing really well your streets are really well maintained and I'm very impressed with your benches your covered bus stops your curb ramps your traffic signals your sidewalk maintenance your downtown is a very healthy place well except you have a mind-boggling number of parking garages and and I've heard a lot about the wild dogs I have not seen the wild dogs but I'm like terrified by the wild dogs now the other thing I observed was that people in Texas really do observe compared to Seattle at least observe obey road signs people look at stop bars when they're when they're stopping in intersections drivers are courteous I mean it's a courteous place and the other thing I noticed too was that you really respect your elders in your city design you provide places benches all over the place benches at every every bus stop for people to sit you provide covered places for people this is a city that respects its people and I noticed too I went on two different bike rides that drivers respect people who are biking the people really are observing that three-foot give people three feet passing law that that you know I didn't hear as I do when I drive when I when I bike around in other cities you know people like gunning their motors trying to get past us you know maybe maybe bikers or some people on bikes are such a rare thing to see that that drivers just look at us and think oh my gosh there's something so odd in the road I need to really slow down and pay attention to it but but people were paying attention to us as we were biking and I was impressed by that you also have some absolutely gorgeous infrastructure for people on bikes and people walking including this this beautiful bridge and spectacular trails the the multi-use trails on on mission mission reach and then the whole kind of river set of trails is is is world-class so you have a lot going for you and even even in Councilmember Gonzalez's district in district 4 the streets there you know they don't have sidewalks but they're well maintained I mean these are streets that you know the paving is they're not many potholes relative to the rest of America they're not many potholes in San Antonio the the the the vegetation is well cared for it looks a little overgrown I mean it's a poor neighborhood but it's a street that's well maintained it's a street where the city is doing its job so I've ridden now a bike on the east side the west side the mission reach the Pearl District yesterday I did a bike ride with this group of very dedicated San Antonio city staff and advocates and they were all very comfortable riding here and pictured here I just wanted to mention our Yvette who runs the women's ride on first Tuesday's Jillian from city transportation planning Jeff who runs all of the San Antonio Tuesday night bike rides Kristen who runs earn a bike co-op Jack from bike Texas me and Ali Blasowski who's the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator of the Alamo MPO I also spent time yesterday with Burt from San Antonio walks and Nikki and Brandon from San Antonio parks and recreation who are working on your trails program so all together a really excellent group of people that I spent time with I also did a radio show with David strong on the source and so so met a lot of San Antonio got to see a lot of San Antonio and you have a city that really makes people feel comfortable in fact when we were on the source David and I we got a couple of Colin callers who were saying what a terrible city San Antonio was and I felt really really awful because you have a great city I really want to emphasize that that you are doing things really really well so why are so many people being maimed and dying on San Antonio streets why are your streets failing to keep your people alive 54 people died walking in San Antonio last year 800 people were involved in major life-changing crashes in your city these are serious epidemic levels of traffic violence the czar Zamora is an epidemic these streets are engineered to fail at safety most of the traffic violence happening in San Antonio is happening on overly wide streets and often on streets that are owned by the state of Texas to stop traffic violence you desperately need these streets to function as places for people nine people died on the street calibra I think it is in the last two years including two elders who were going to the Basilica and this in this picture all cities need streets that are safe for traveling and thriving cities like San Antonio which is a really thriving city needs streets where people want to linger needs places that make people healthy and needs streets that don't divide us streets can be places that actually root us into our homes San Antonio is really lovely but it's filled with streets like this these are the streets where people die there is so much that is good in San Antonio you clearly have traffic engineers who know how to maintain streets and built safe street crossings they install benches they make a good city and thanks to the mayor and councilmember Gonzales and the rest of the council you've got a vision zero ordinance for traffic safety you've got politicians you've got money from your council and so what I've heard over the last two days is that there's a pushback from so you have the leg of the council and the politicians you'll have a leg of really effective city people but what I'm hearing is that you need that third leg of the stool the community that's fearful of traffic safety improvements in the face of this overwhelming traffic violence so in Seattle we have a pushback to about traffic safety improvements I mean every city in America is going through this kind of growing up of turning their streets into 21st century places but we've made a lot of progress and I wanted to tell you more about what we're doing in Seattle to see if there are any lessons you can learn from us I mean I'm offering them humbly because you can't export one city's ideas to another you know a whole late but but I think there's some probably good ideas of what we've done in Seattle that you might want to think about in your in your in your city I wanted to tell you about our model of community engagement because that is the leg of your stool that you're missing we have really good politicians really good finances good traffic engineers in our city but we also have really good community who are kind of joining the cause of building safe streets so this is more about what we're doing and I also wanted to tell you a little bit about my organization which is called Seattle neighborhood greenways a very long name and my my staff keeps on saying make it a shorter name you know call it like you know good streets or something like that and I haven't made that change because we are very neighborhood related so first of all I wanted to tell you what a greenway was in the Seattle language in San Antonio your greenways are the the beautiful trails that go along your your creeks and in Seattle neighborhood greenways are residential streets that are slowed to 20 miles an hour this is a typical Seattle street very parked up with cars and in fact one of the ways that streets are slowed to 20 miles an hour is by narrowing them these parked cars actually serve as a way of narrowing the streets so people can't go much more than 20 miles an hour on it and you'll look at our street maintenance or our sidewalk maintenance we don't do nearly as good a job as you do in San Antonio I'm looking at that broken broken pieces sidewalk there but how we how we maintain streets at 20 miles an hour is adding curb bumps or speed humps people not curb bumps speed humps usually two along each block and they're engineered to slow cars to 20 miles per hour when they first go in people who drive don't like them very much people don't like to go 20 miles an hour but it's the thing that you really need to encourage people to do on residential streets where children play where elders gather where people want across the street it's a reasonable speed for people to go in a residential area we're working on getting a 20 mile an hour blanket speed area in Seattle on all residential streets and a 25 mile an hour speed limit on all arterial streets which is pretty radical but it's actually what New York City has done to so we would like to have that happen in Seattle on the next two years or so and there is pushback there's definitely community pushback to that happening the other thing about neighborhood greenways these are residential streets the residential streets are located one off of the main arterial street so that they they they go along the commercial corridors where people have businesses where the schools are where the libraries are where the transit stops are so that people can walk or bike if they want quieter more traffic controlled way to go in a parallel way beside the busy the busy commercial street they work really effectively we have about 20 miles of neighborhood greenways in Seattle we're scheduled to get another 60 over the next few years and I'll tell you a little bit more about that oh the other thing about neighborhood greenways is their stop controlled so the people walking and biking are controlled by the people driving can't go zipping across the greenway and then the big cost of putting in neighborhood greenways is when they come to intersections it's it's expensive to put in traffic signals in Seattle we pay probably twice what you pay here in San Antonio we pay $500,000 for a traffic signal we're fighting about the cost all the time but but it's a it's a pricey thing to get across a big commercial street and so that's the big cost of putting in a greenway is because you're doing that one off of the main arterial you still need to get across all of the other commercial streets as you're going and actually Kevin asked me about greenways if they were Kevin Barton here if they were effective they're incredibly effective at this is a chart of how many more people are biking on the greenway over a year so the red line is people in 2013 I think that is and then the blue line is people in 2014 biking so it's quadrupled the number of people biking on these streets this is another one so my organization Seattle neighborhood greenways is a community coalition group that's divided into 19 very micro level neighborhood associations we also just as of this year have council districts seven council districts and so we've kind of clustered all of those community organizations into their council districts our organization is just four years old we've only got three full-time staff but we've got hundreds of volunteers we have a mailing list of five or six thousand and we're always focused on that micro level community organization of affiliated people who are passionate about safe streets and reclaiming streets for people so what do these groups do last night I pulled up a Facebook sampling of a random set of these these local coalition groups to see what they're up to this is Lake City greenways it's turning a street right of way into a park Queen Anne or actually that's Rainier Valley greenways is talking taking their district council member on a walk and also Queen Anne greenways is taking their district council member on a walk these are newly elected leaders so they want to meet them and you know show them the the traffic safety issues in their in their communities the central Seattle greenways is hosting cranks giving which is a bike ride food drive and Greenwood Finney greenways is planning is actually collaborating with Lake City greenways and Licton howler greenways and they're planning to audit to safe routes to school engineering audits for five elementary schools with hopes of getting sidewalks around those elementary schools in the next two years all of these people all those last set of slides are volunteers those are all people who are passionate about safe streets so my organization Seattle neighborhood greenways is really a hardcore lobbying organization masquerading as a coalition of community groups in the past four years we have directly influenced 40 million dollars in engineering improvements in Seattle we've got new signals new greenways road rechannelizations or road diets some people call them and new city safety programs and staff our power as community groups to make change comes from our grassroots and from being focused on the local needs the very local needs and representing very local interests of our 19 micro groups to city government we have educated literally thousands of people on the ideas of complete streets and vision zero we managed to get a bicycle master plan adopted with 250 miles of safe streets and that plan was developed almost entirely with crowd sourced mapping that means that the community developed a bicycle master plan and we're getting about half of those bicycle master plan miles built with 930 million dollar transportation levy that we have to define and get past just last week that's that moves Seattle levy so who joins this community organization of safe streets well it's a lot of parents particularly people who have been biking in Seattle so we have about four percent of our population bikes to work and people on bikes once they have children or often men once they have girlfriends say I can't bike anymore with my girlfriend I can't bike any more with my kids because the roads aren't safe enough and so they come to our organization and say how can we work with you to build a safer place parents also really care about their kids getting safely to school we have a lot of elders who want to walk safely we have a lot of health care professionals in our organization and then because we're Seattle we have Facebook we have Amazon we have Microsoft we have a lot of technical people coming to us and saying we want a city where we can put down some routes we want a place where we have a place where young people want to actually kind of grow from their 20s when they first join Amazon and Microsoft and Google and we want them to settle here and the way that they want to settle here is not with cars but with the city of where you can walk and bike and ride a bus comfortably and then when you need a car you can get it from over or lift and you know you're done so people in in this generation in Seattle at least don't want to own cars and in fact they don't want driver's licenses either which drives me crazy because I have I'm I have a 18 year old 21 year old and my 21 year old boyfriend and none of them have driver's licenses and so who ends up driving whenever somebody needs to drive in my in my household it's me because again this is this is a trend among among young people especially among the kind of the high tech community people don't want to drive anymore and so we need to build the cities that can actually help help that so so these are the people who are part of our coalition and these are people who really care about the city they live in so I wanted to talk to you about two of the programs that we're working on that I thought would be most applicable to San Antonio one is about our Memorial Walks program and then one is about the language that we have been teaching people to use about traffic violence so the Memorial Walks and Solutions Meetings program is something that we do for all fatalities that happen on our streets in Seattle in Seattle we have 15 at the most I think last year it was 13 fatalities on our streets we don't have the kind of carnage that you do in San Antonio so we actually it's true but but Memorial Walks and Solutions Meetings have been our most effective advocacy tools not only because they make change but they've actually changed the way people think about traffic violence so I'm going to tell you about first of all the very first Memorial Walk and Solutions Meeting that we organized and it follows this very classic arc of a terrible tragedy an effective solution and some positive outcomes that came out of this terrible tragedy this story has story started in the spring of 2013 when Dennis and Judy Schulte went on a walk with their daughter daughter-in-law actually Karina and her infant son Elias this was their first grandchild and the Schultes had just relocated to Seattle it was a beautiful clear day and the mom the baby and the grandparents crossed busy northeast 75th Street across four very ill-defined lanes that drivers routinely woven sped on a drunk driver with multiple DUI sped towards the Schultes instantly killing the grandparents and leaving Karina and her infant son in critical condition we're an advocacy organization and you know we'd only formed about a year and a half before this and when we saw this we saw a terrible tragedy but we also saw an opportunity to educate the community about traffic violence and to not blame it on a drunk driver to actually talk about other conditions the fact that there was a four-lane road where people routinely sped and this four-lane road in fact exactly the spot where the Schulte family had been killed was right in front of a middle school it was a place where there were frequent collisions where there were frequent serious injuries and so we approached the Schulte family and we asked their permission to do a memorial walk and the solutions meeting this is the first time that we did one of those we're very good Seattle neighborhood greenways is with PR and this tragedy brought together hundreds of people we produce this event within a week after the the collision we invited the media the mayor police traffic engineers the family and friends of the Schulte family now remember this street was one where people routinely were weaving where there'd been multiple acts of traffic violence and where there had been pushed back from the community on making changes to this street we looked at this as an opportunity to actually address what was going on on that street and to turn something valuable out of this this awful tragedy so one of the first things we did was that we made sure that the mayor of Seattle could meet with the family something we've learned through doing now 15 of these memorial walks and solutions meetings is that we won't do them unless we have the the full and complete buy-in of the family I mean it's it's about the victim and the victim's family it's about respecting the the fact that somebody has died here and that they're willing to take this step to actually put themselves out in public and one thing I want to say about at least in Seattle that people who die they're hounded by the media again we don't have the same level of traffic violence as you're doing San Antonio but you know this is actually a way of people controlling the media a little bit after after their their families have been killed but at any rate we brought the mayor along he talked to the the man who had his family gricked from him in this in this act of traffic violence and then another thing we do is we actually take the same or a block or so of the same walk of the person who died so we actually go some of that distance we walk in their footsteps so we understand what happened we see with our own eyes instead of looking at what happened on a piece of paper we explore it what what happened with the whole community and we ended the walk at the site where Dennis and Judy Schulte had been killed again I really want to acknowledge the suffering of families who've had their lives torn apart by traffic violence and I also wanted to call out families who allowed us to put their grief out in public because change has happened because of these these memorial walks and solutions meetings so this was the first time we did a solutions meeting it immediately followed the walk so we did a walk with a family we had the media we had the mayor and then immediately after we went to the middle school that was beside the the place where the Schultes had been killed and because of the raw power of grief and the presence of a very broad cross-section of community leaders and I wanted to actually have you take a look at this chief traffic engineer Don Ho Chiang because he'll show up in a later slide but we were able to hold the city accountable for quick and effective solutions they had seen the place with their own eyes they had walked with the family and their footsteps and because we had reacted so quickly the community was not well they still pushed back a little but there was not as much pushback about re-channelizing the road slowing the road from a you know crazy four lane you know super highway through this community into a very moderately controlled well I'll think yes and the street that we did this work on had five walking fatalities in the past seven years and the community that we approached about this said oh you know we've had memorials we don't think anything will come of it yeah sure we'll go again the light vigil I said oh this is being accompanied by a solutions meeting so the man that's not a cowboy anyway he's a he's a elder himself and a shaman he did a kind of a blessing ceremony at the area and the person that was very instrumental in making things happen is City Council member Tom Rasmussen who also chaired the Transportation Committee of the City Council actually made it happen and again this street of this is the solutions meeting following with James St. Clair's relatives the mayor's staff city staff reporters and this street is currently being re-channelized in much the same way with two travel lines one center turn line and yeah it's it's it's in construction as as we speak so it takes a year of course you can't always expect a six-month turnaround on a dangerous four-lane street but but it happens it happens because the power of the community is earnest in a very effective way with the media the the local community the politicians the the police and then other interested parties who all come together to actually work work on solutions we also have done these events for people who like so led by bike riders going on the same path that the person traveled this one was very close to the port of Seattle you can see that in the background and the port got very involved with this has made changes to its roadway actually did a whole workshop on how people who do truck deliveries for the port see bikes or don't see people on bikes and the each partner making a safer area for commuters here for bikers and of course we had the media and of course we invited the mayor you'll notice too on the signal where it says the tour route there's a white bike a ghost bike and this is something that typically goes up in Seattle after bicycle fatalities and we've been looking around for things to put on the ground after pedestrian fatalities and this is actually from New York an organization called red web this is what they put on places where people died walking on the street and we're working with an artist right now on something to put on the street for people to die I think it's a it's a great kind of reminder for people to pay attention on the street and also a way of memorializing someone in the place where they died so this is going the first time we use this is for Leo Al Mazar who was a janitor who worked in downtown Seattle was hit by a speeding vehicle this is his family you know to kind of summarize what's going on with with memorials it's they're really challenging to do they take a lot of time 40 hours of either a dedicated volunteer or sometimes 20 hours of dedicated volunteer and 20 hours of my time to actually make these things happen because you need to be working with people in a very sensitive way but they obviously result in in excellent outcomes we actually have a sort of a how-to do memorial events on our on our website and do remember that the idea of memorials is first honoring the victim the challenges of doing them of course are saying the same very sensitive grieving families and then getting information in a timely enough way to actually produce them in a time where you can touch the community which means that you need to know about the tallow these things that what happened around within a week or so after the other thing that Mary who probably appreciate this too is that if you're an elected person you like to speak usually and so we always make an opportunity for whatever political leaders are there to speak this is our current mayor Mayor Ed Murray and this is the former mayor Mayor Mike McGinn but we always give the mayor the microphone it's a way of owning what happened and it's a way of honoring the fact that a politician cares enough to be there to help once they get voted about this traffic violence act they get involved so it's it's very important to keep the mayor involved I just this is also our Mayor Ed Murray and our new transportation director Scott who plays the sort of folding guy on the right side of this slide I also wanted to say that an unexpected benefit of this has been getting to know the city and the cultures of the city in a very intimate way I've met people from Plengid from Oromo from the Hispanic community and it's also kind of a great way to bring break cities out of the silo silo kind of thinking and finding solutions that work really quickly and it's also a great way to get people who engineer streets and first responders to get them honored and noticed this is the result of that that last it's again another road rechannelization that came out of that that tragedy this is another road rechannelization this is a Nepali woman who died about a year ago so traffic violence so it's its biggest threat is not actually the instance of death but the fact that people don't use streets anymore for active living we avoid walking and biking in places that we perceive as dangerous our memorial rides aimed to change the cultural paradigm that defines the automobile is the only normal way of getting around we adopted vision zero in Seattle we did this in February so we're not that far ahead of you just some more ideas about vision zero I'm looking at the time and I only have another 10 minutes so I'm gonna cruise through the rest of my slides but I hope you got some ideas about how you might turn the tremendous number of tragedies that you're having in San Antonio into something more purposeful I mean I'm sure you're thinking about that but but I hope that you got some ideas about solutions meetings and memorials and using them in a way that respects the victim the victims family and actually makes change in the city the other thing I wanted to quickly talk to you about is road tested language how we've been talking to people about traffic violence and how we've been talking to them about alternate tones of transportation we don't call when a car runs into a person and kills them we don't call it an accident we call it a collision or a crash very important we don't say the car hit the person because the car didn't hit the person the person driving the car hit another person crashes into a crib probably not a driver crashed into the crib the Bellevue baby was unheard the only time the cars actually act by themselves are self-driving cars police cars don't kill police driving police cars sometimes the other thing is people who bike so I slip into it myself sometimes and call myself a biker but I'm not a biker these are bikers these are cyclists these are people who bike people who bike are people and it's important to call that out because it's a way of humanizing who we are as we use the street if we call people bikers if we call them cyclists if we call street violence an accident we suddenly change the whole language of how we're approaching vision zero how we're approaching traffic safety and I think we can make that change in our language pretty easily these are pedestrians these are people who walk out so watch yourself when you're riding when you're speaking and start to talk about people when you're talking about road users we often talk about transportation options it's a very fuzzy Germany word I think the best way to talk about it is saying that you're choosing the best way for you and your family to get around the city it's good to use familiar and concrete words like I'm parking my bike at the library I'm waiting at the bus stop I'm dropping the kids off at school this is the language of transportation options it doesn't overwhelm people to think about it cruise through this the other thing I want to mention is that these are some of the signs that that are our streets are changing and some of the work that we've done is really changing so we're putting a lot of parklets and street areas and parking places painting rainbow crosswalks and actually we had a whole crosswalk gorilla crosswalk painting action that the city decided to sort of own which I'm really glad for this is a protected bike lane 2,000 feet of it actually that was built by the community out of orange columns duct tape and green butcher paper actually this is on the most dangerous street in Seattle this is another community-led project where they collected evidence that people actually stopped this is built by the by the city because the community actually put it up and said this is working really well so we do a lot of these kinds of projects the city then adopts and puts into practice this is the best indicator of success in Seattle we have a Seattle family biking group that's now up to 1200 members and people are feeling safe enough to bike with their children in the city so San Antonio Gavin Burton made me take this picture said it's the best traffic safety calming that we have in downtown and it is I think that you know people stop here this is a place where people driving respect people walking you actually control traffic here and I also wanted to mention that we've given over the shaping of our cities to engineers with rare exception we defer to traffic engineers rather than to you your voice and your vision of San Antonio matters if you're the parent of small children an artist a small business owner a doctor a historian a nurse a scientist an honored elder or a public health practitioner there are so many voices that are muted by the overwhelming voices of traffic engineers we need the traffic engineers they solve our problems but the problem that they need to solve is getting you a more safe and livable san antonio they may not know the albuary MPO developed a pedestrian safety action plan in february of 2012 I was curious whether you received a copy of that I have not read that no I'm sure that a lot she's in here we'll get you a copy but we had at that particular time we were tagged the focus city because 12 percent of all roadway fatalities in the united states are pedestrian but in san antonio it's 20 percent and it has a definite impact on funding and so we used to consult that your head to a tool associates for a year and a half developing that but I will make sure you get a copy of that okay thank you and you know we have a branch of tool in Seattle so they're very firm good morning Kevin when I saw that in the street section we talked about street diets reducing down reducing the mouse problem on the streets one thing that we've I've in our street we live in downtown it's kind of a development street we're asking almost to do the same thing why you are sidewalks and the one thing that we kind of run into in the city is that you know there's always a certain of the fire trucks you know how does how do we get the fire truck in this space when everything is sort of narrow and I was hoping you could just kind of talk about some of your experiences with sort of the back to the scenario sure we work with fire safety all the time and so what they need is if you're doing a curb that's one of the things they don't like is to make it narrow enough so that it's a fire road that their wheel makes to go over I mean that's the simplest thing and and you know the fire fighting establishment they are first responders and they're very interested in in traffic safety and and vision zero I mean they've pulled enough dead people off of roadways that they don't want to have to do it again so they are actually incredibly supportive of this this action they just need to be accommodated and actually turns as well this is something else that would work on with them so we do road curves for them to to make those turns on fire roads there was another question yes I is it okay to this is primarily a common though so but you might have ideas too thank you this is a great conference I absolutely love it and the past 10 years I have had the honor and an opportunity to be involved in a lot of conferences like this and and community discussions you mentioned community pushback last year there was a pushback from a small contingent of citizens who didn't want the bike lane on south flora as in district three the city of san Antonio staff it was based on MPO a study that costs a lot of money there was all kinds of support technically for this bike lane a few citizens decided that it slowed down their morning and afternoon travel and so the council would and I want to say thank you very much to city council member Gonzalez because she was the only one to my understanding that voted against it the council allowed the pushback of a few individuals with and they use money that it's my understanding and I hope I'm wrong that the money that they used to remove it was identified to build bicycle facilities now I might be wrong with that I hope I am and bicycle facilities we know slows down traffic there's two schools on that portion of south flora there's an elementary school and there's a high school so I did hear about this situation and I you know it we have that similar situations in Seattle where people pushback and don't want change in fact every one of those river channelizations those road diets that I showed you there was plenty of community pushback what I'm talking about is developing a strong enough advocacy community to actually influence the other council members to say yes we are strong enough this is the kind of city we want to evolve into we want to be a safe city we don't want to be a city you know we want a place where we're new tech businesses in Seattle we want to and then this is only going to happen if you have that other community that's speaking up against that I mean you can influence your mayor and city council by actually showing you of those voices I understand the situation I understand that you know according to the data that lane shouldn't have been pulled out but I also understand that they're responding to the politics of it and that's rational too so you need to build up the other side of the political equation all right thank you