 Good evening. My name is Charlie Baker. I'm the Executive Director of the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission. Really appreciate you coming out tonight. Just going to start off with a couple other welcome statements. First from the City Manager of South Burlington. Thanks Charlie. Thanks for everybody coming out tonight. The future of the Interstate 89 corridor is critically important to this region as you all know and that's I'm sure why you're here tonight. Certainly is for South Burlington. With the intersection we have up here at 14 being the most troubled intersection in the state and other traffic issues. We really need to be planning ahead for the next 30 years to figure out not only what the traffic solutions are for today but what they'll be in the next 30 years. So I know this is just the kickoff meeting for this extensive and bold I think project but I want to thank Charlie Baker. I want to thank CCRPC for hosting this and getting this going. It's really critical to the economy of this area for the years ahead. So thanks Charlie. Thanks. And then I'd like to invite Kevin Marciop representing V-TRANS just who is our partner in this project. Sure. Thank you Charlie. Good evening and good to see all these faces out here. Thank you for coming. From the Agency of Transportation's perspective this is obviously our most heavily traveled interstate corridor in the state. Obviously we keep track of all of the mobility and safety issues that are out there and we're excited to be part of this study and we thank CCRPC for taking the lead on this study. Certainly the interstate system is aging and it's that aging infrastructure not just the mobility and safety for the future that we're looking at but it's also the infrastructure out there that we're concerned about. And as we go through the various alternatives as part of this study the overall condition of the interstate the things that are out there that are as I said aging are certainly some of the greatest concerns that we have out there and we look to forward to being in partnership with the communities with the CCRPC, the stakeholder groups and others and certainly value the input that we're going to hear tonight and through the series of meetings as we move forward with this study. So thank you for coming tonight and we appreciate being part of this process. Thank you Kevin. So just for the the agenda for this evening, let's see if the buttons work when I hit them. Of course now I'm in there we go. Sorry I got into a little weird screen there. So walk we're already through number one. So I'll spend a few minutes on the project background a little bit of overview. David Saladino from the consultant team of VHB will walk through issues and opportunities and then Jeffrey from the VHB team will work through some visioning exercise. But I want to warn you in advance because I feel guilty about it already. We're probably going to talk to you and give you some information. Those first two background pieces are probably going to take a good 20 to 30 minutes. So I'm glad you got some food. Breathe deep. Here we go. So just real quick on the project team. I just mentioned the VHB team. They have a lot of other partner consultants that are working on that team with them. And of course with the CCRPC and Eleni Churchill is actually the project manager. I'm just a not so pretty face wherever Eleni is. Oh there's Eleni right there. If you need more details she's your person. We have a technical committee. So we have some technical agencies. Municipalities. Justin Rabbit from South Burlington is also on that committee. If you happen to be a South Burlington resident and then we have an advisory committee which I chair and the advisory committee has a lot of different people organizations on it trying to represent a variety of transportation interests, environmental interests, development interests. And I'm probably leaving something off. And we also went out to our neighboring regional planning commissions because we're looking at 89 the entire length of Chinden County which you know who uses that people in Washington County and Franklin County and in Grand Isle County and many other counties use a section of interstate. So some background document why how or why did we even get here. The background on this is we are required under federal and state law to do planning for the region. We updated our transportation plan in 2018. VTrans does planning of course for the state and updated their plan in 2040. When we look and do those plans we look at demographics and projections. What kind of growth or not growth? Maybe are we expecting? And this took a while to do coordinating with the state and others. We're looking in Chinden County at still having some population increase over the next 30 years. Maybe another 20,000 people or so. Household size however is decreasing. Those 20,000 people we're looking at needing maybe another 16,000 or so housing units which is that's a pretty low number of people per housing unit. But that is kind of the trend line we're on right now. And then employment and this is also interesting a more significant increase in employment. We'll see if that really holds true but that of course causes a lot of issues if our employment keeps growing that much and our population here isn't growing. I mentioned that we do this long range transportation plan. We look at all kinds of issues system performance needs priorities. It has to be physically constrained so we're not trying to do a pie in the sky plan. We're trying to make it realistic. And there everything has to be in our long range plan except there are some little exceptions there that VTrans can fund without there being in our plan. In terms of how we approach the plan for Chittenden County. You see there kind of a big transportation goal about accessibility and safety and interconnected and secure and equitable mobility choices for our residents and then also a land use goal which is really trying to encourage development in the places where we already have services and infrastructure sewer water transit service sidewalks maybe bike paths. And so we're really trying to direct a lot of growth into the places where we have services for a lot of reasons. Not just transportation issues, public health issues. Excuse me climate change, energy, greenhouse gas emissions, all those kinds of things. We looked at a lot of different scenarios and when we look at transportation issues, we're trying to balance between congestion safety and livability, right? So what came out of that regional planning process? And Kevin kind of made a reference to this. I'm sorry Kevin Marsha from VTrans. The biggest single area of investment for the state is still in just preserving the system. So over 70% of state funding for transportation goes into just preserving the system. On the land use side, we're trying to get to more than 90% of household growth happening in those areas planned for growth, doing safety, HCL stands for high crash location. ITS is intelligent transportation system so using technology, TDM, transportation demand management. And this is the first time I'm really noticing how many times we use acronyms. Please throw up a hand if there's an acronym that I use or that's on the slide that I'm not defining for you because that's bad practice. And then of course walking, biking and then capacity expansion when needed. And that's kind of deliberate that that's at the end. So we really try to make all these investments in our communities to make them more livable and only look at widening a road when it's absolutely needed. And so what are the major transportation projects? Well there's some that have been in the works for a long time. Champlain Parkway, Exit 12, we're looking at improvements there that came out of the CIRC alternatives process. Exit 16, something about appeals, but eventually that may happen. Exit 17 is a safety improvement plan for transit service for our transportation plan. We're trying to double transit service and getting to much more frequent headways. And again a lot of those other kinds of investments I just mentioned, including noting that in order to achieve our energy and climate goals, our vehicle fleet needs to become more electrified significantly. So about 90 percent of our vehicles need to be electric vehicles to meet our energy goals. That's a $450 million price tag on all those things. And then so then we kind of come, we kind of felt pretty good about our plan for a lot of reasons and a lot of our communities. But then we came to this section of I-89. And for those of you that don't look at maps every day like me, we're Exit 14 there. To Exit 15, this is kind of zoomed in on. This is a period where right now, if you use that corridor, you experience peak hour congestion, right, very particularly coming south in the morning into Burlington and then heading out again in the evening. So at 2015, this is a map coming produced by our transportation model that we run for Chittin County. When we looked at 2050 without doing much on 89, it went to purple. If you look at the legend at the far left bottom there, that was overcapacity. That is pretty significant for us in the transportation planning world. It means things are really probably not moving, not just in the peak hour, but the hump hours around the peak hour. And so we tested a couple ideas when we did the big regional plan, including well, what happens if we widen the interstate between 14 and 15? And I think this also includes if we add an interchange somewhere north or south of 14. And that helped with the congestion between 14 and 15. But one of the things that you'll notice is the section between 15 and 16 turns red. So one of the conversations that happened at our committee of transportation professionals, our transportation advisory committee, was I said, you know, is this a good idea? Like, are we just widening and just moving the congestion? And it's a good question, you know, are we chasing our tail here? And there's a lot of literature out in the world about, you know, whether widening is really the most effective thing to do. So that did raise the question, what should we do with 89 and around exit 14? Do we need another interchange or not? So that was the genesis of this project. And we've just started to get into it. And with that, I will let David pick up with the more detailed work. So that's the background. Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. So David Saladino, project manager, consultant team project manager from VHB. Got the big clock back here. I know some of you are heading across the street at seven o'clock. So we're going to try to try to keep this moving as much as we can so we can get to the the input stage well before seven. We covered two things fairly briefly, just going to do a quick overview of the project. You heard kind of how we got here, what the planning documents that led to this study, touch on the project itself and then some of the background information that we've collected for the corridor itself. I guess just to note, it may have come out and what Charlie was saying, but this this MTP, this document is essentially bookending what we're looking at for the corridor. So decisions about growth over the next 30 years, how much growth there's going to be is not something that we're looking at as part of this study that's been established, there was a public process. So we're holding to those kind of growth numbers and then the the the traffic volume growth that comes out of that. And we'll touch on that in a second. But it's really important to understand that that kind of set the framework for this study. So here's kind of in a nutshell the study that we're doing. We see this kind of in three big phases, the first being discovery, where we are right now. Big ears, mostly doing listening. We have done quite a bit of analysis of data, existing conditions, which we'll show some of that in a few slides. So we're really listening here and we've got two more public meetings after this in Willilson and Winooski over the next two months. We have some focus groups that we're meeting with. So trying to collect as much information as we can. Hopefully those at home are watching the live stream on on the channel 17. So that will wrap up the first phase of discovery. From there we move into evaluation. So we've collected information. We've looked at existing conditions on the on the roadway. We've heard public input. And then we evaluate both interchanges and system improvements along the along the interstate. The last phase is reporting and kind of moving from evaluation to reporting. We go through the assessment phase and ultimately decision making. So we'll have lots of ideas. Put those into the funnel. We'll work with we'll be back for a second round of public input to show you the different bundles or packages of ideas. Get your input on which ones fit with the overall vision for the corridor. Ultimately it's the advisory committee who Charlie Charlie identified that will be making the decision which of these packages is the right one to move forward with. And then lastly we'll wrap that up into a into a final report. Just in terms of timeframe we started this back in in May of 20 2019. We're hoping to wrap up November 2021 if not sooner as we move through the study. The study areas here I know probably nobody can see this entirely. What's shown in the outline this is Chittenden County. And so the entire length 37 miles of the interstate is part of what we're looking at. All seven interchanges along the corridor. And then here's a zoom in to show we're also looking at so basically everything in purple is part of our travel traffic model and analysis that we're looking at. So we're not just looking at the interstate itself but we're looking at the the intersections on either side. And in some cases going a little bit further. So we're going on Wilson Road out here out to Hinesburg Road for example because it's all kind of a connected corridor leading into exit 14. So just to highlight some information we have reams of data of that we've collected. Some of the maps you can see here. More information is on the website envision89.com. But just to give you a little flavor these are some of the some of the information that we that we've collected so far. Had a great drone flight over over exit 14 which was a pretty cool way to look at look at the interchange. This this slide there's a lot of information. It's really interesting particularly for a traffic engineer but I think there's I think there's some important information on here. The different colors indicate traffic volumes between different inner interchanges along the corridor back from the early 1970s up until you know 2019 are the markers. And so exits 14 and 15 so north of Wilson Road. Wilson Road to Winooski sees the highest volume of all of those segments. And it's been increasing as have many of the other ones at different rates and it it's interesting to kind of align those with processions gas price increases. So we did see a leveling out with the recession kind of at the end of the 2000s. But over the last three or four years we've seen an uptick again. Gas is still less than three dollars you know there are we're implementing a lot of the things that are trying to get people out of single occupant vehicles. We've got transit increases we're building bike lanes sidewalks and so forth. But it is interesting just to see this last couple years and no one has a perfect crystal ball. We don't know what's going to happen with traffic. But essentially this these the lines that are drawn in are what the traffic model the the regional planning commission's travel model has forecast out over the next 20 years. So you can see these lines that grow up to you know for that that segment we're up to about 75,000 trips per day in 2050. There's that's probably not exactly right. You know it's the best that the model can do. It's a very well calibrated model but it's hard to know and there's so many things happening with technology with you know who knows autonomous cars. We have flying cars by 2050. Lots of unknowns but our best our best guess right now is that this is how it will grow. This is important on the sidebar here. You can see the LOS stands for level of service and things start to really break down as you get into the upper levels of level of service D and E. That's when you start to see backups form on the interstate. And so as Charlie alluded to before you know you can see we're kind of crossing over that threshold somewhere between 2030 and 2050. Assuming these numbers are correct. So that's that's kind of an impetus for looking at we want interstate improvements don't happen overnight obviously. So we want to make sure that we're planning ahead of time for some if if the answer is some large infrastructure improvement. Now the trend line could be much flatter. You know the there could be a gas price spike or there could be some other reason why there's fewer trips being made. And so when we get to the implementation plan of this let's say we want to add an additional lane on this segment to accommodate this. Well we're going to make sure to tag that to a certain threshold a certain volume on the interstate so that when volumes if they get to a certain point then we move into the design phase and move forward with the project. If those volumes never materialized there's no reason to move forward to that stage. So that's a way to ensure we don't have a perfect crystal ball but we want to be planning and set those kind of trigger points for when different things need to be need to move forward. Just a couple of just some data here. This is also very hard to see but just to note this is kind of safety related information. All of the orange if you can see the orange bars these are all high crash locations. So there's segments of roadway that have crash. There's a crash rate higher than a certain expected value for other similar types of facilities. The ones that have the outline are in the top 200 of the worst of the worst in terms of segments. It is interesting to note on the interstate we've got one right around the band at X of 11 as you're coming coming north. We've got we've got a fairly high rate of crashes at X of 11. Then as we come into the urban area the section just north of exit 13 across the bridge heading into Winooski and then the segment of Route 2 and 7 in Colchester. There's there were 11 it's also hard to see here but the the donuts the circles are fatal crashes. 11 fatal crashes recorded over as over a five-year period. We won't go through these we have information and and certainly as questions come up we can we can address these but we wanted to kind of move forward and listen open it up for discussion but just a taste of some of the things we've looked at. One quick just a deep dive on one of the interchanges so this is hopefully you can see in the background this is exit 14 the interchange. The mall is down here Staples Plaza the Double Tree Holiday Inn. So we've we've done this for each of the interchanges and the interstate itself to really identify what are the current issues and as they break down across you know under congestion safety some geometric deficiencies and so forth. So just to highlight a few things in terms of congestion we do have some over capacity conditions on this ramp here. The Dorset Street Wilson Road intersection which I probably don't need to tell many of you is level service the E&F in the future years. We've got queues spilling back on the off the southbound off ramp. We have two high crash location segments so north of kind of in front of the Staples Plaza. This intersection the Dorset and Wilson Road is a high crash location intersection. Looking at geometric deficiencies we do have insufficient distance to weave so as people are coming in and off underneath the underneath route 2 as we're getting on and off route 14 exit 14 there's insufficient distance to do that and to accelerate up to speed. The bridge here over the overpass is has been designated based on structural valuations as function functionally deficient and lastly we looked at bicycle pedestrian connectivity through the interchange. This is one of the better interchanges along the route as it has sidewalks and green bike lanes for most of the year but it was deemed we pulled some of these designations out of the the CCRPC and VTrans is bicycle and pedestrian plans. These are identified this is a high priority connection. There's lots of people who'd like to be able to bike and walk here but it was deemed uncomfortable for most users because of the volumes that are out here. Those who may have heard a plan potentially for putting a bicycle pedestrian bridge over the interstate would certainly address that and provide more accommodations for cyclists across the interstate. So I think with that I'm going to turn it over to Jeffrey. So tried to level set everyone to get a little bit of flavor of the background information and we really want to kind of hear from you. Excellent. Okay so I'm going to try to venture away from the podium if we can. So again my name is Jeffrey Morrison Logan I'm working with David and the team and really excited to be here tonight to talk to you a little bit about the visioning the issues and the opportunities as well and what we thought would really be helpful in during this part of the process is really try to get the group engaged as much as possible. The more that we can hear from you tonight obviously the better. In terms of just some of the logistics I just want to make sure that everybody has the handouts that came in on the way. Does anyone missing any of the handouts? Right so I think Kim if you could help me go around and look at these that would be great. What's important about this is towards the end of the evening we're going to come back to some of these handouts in terms of some of the objectives and the goals as well as some of the evaluation pieces that are in here for the meeting tonight as well. So just want to make sure that everybody has that and Kim you'll go around and hand those off so keep your hand raised as she goes around that would be great as well. Also just to let you know we've got a couple things going on. We have a live stream that's going on tonight as well so maybe during this process we might be actually going back to the live stream and see if there's any questions that are coming online as well and then also just want to point out that we have Matt over here in the corner. Matt is one of our very talented visual artists and what he's going to be doing if you haven't seen around the corner here he's been taking all of that white paper hopefully hopefully filling that up as much as possible tonight so as we're talking about your words your vision he's actually been trying to capture that in very visual way as we go through the evening tonight. So we're going to start with asking these these questions up here about issues and opportunities and really trying to hear as much as possible from folks about what you see out in the corridor and how this really can set the stage for some analysis that we're going to be doing over the next few months as well. So in terms of issues obviously many of you experience the corridor drive it probably on a daily basis I would imagine. Let's talk a little bit about congestion safety about accessibility maintenance. Where do you see these issues happening along the corridor. Where do you think that we can make improvements along this and also want to point out Diane over here so all of the comments are actually going to be recorded tonight as well so that'll be the homework that goes back to the technical team after this evening. So let's throw it up a whole bunch of ideas. What are those issues. Let's get them out of the table. Yes sir. Directly related to the interstate per se. It sort of is. Because I see the buses going. I see one or two people on the buses. The buses will only one or two people on it. And I think you would do a great service because we're talking about projection of more and more cars which I think would think that's debatable. But that if you could somehow as an organization create more interest in people riding buses and one little story years back I was commuting in the Berlin where wearing a suit. So I went from South Burlington into Burlington. I got on the bus there are two other people and a fellow behind me and he leaned over and said do you want. He thought that I had you know a challenge driving my license. That made me think I said you know there's a perception and there's a culture that we all have and guilty that bus in going on a bus may have a cultural stigma. So I would you know I think if we're talking about more and more cars maybe we can lessen more and more cars by having more people feel that a bus is culturally acceptable. Yes. So the common just to repeat a little bit. So the idea of like not many people having the ridership on those buses. This idea about riding the bus is it really as nice as being in my comfortable vehicle every single day. And how do you really advertise it brand it and make it more commonplace and attractive to those users wanting to ride the bus as well. So it's almost like a campaign around it as well. We've seen that happen in many communities just trying to realize how do you get people on the bus and really take away those barriers as well because not a cultural as culturally significant here in the United States as many other countries as well. Right. So let's go in the back. Yeah. Very professional ride like everyone there was some sort of professional commuting at laptops out and you know where it was wearing suits. So there are certainly buses that have positive. So that's a great point that actually this probably does vary depending on the time of the day having a location in your just destination as well. So just really making people understand that dynamic. Great. Yeah. I also wanted to follow up on the bus comments. So I drive up to Georgia pretty regularly for work and smooth sailing. No issues whatsoever in terms of congestion going in that direction. I do take the bus sometimes during the summer because I'm willing to ride my bike home. The you can write you can take the bus up to Georgia but you can't take the bus back. And I think that one thing in terms of infrastructure that would really help with these bus connections is if you had a pull off ramp and a bus stop right there so the bus doesn't have to get off the regular ramp and do a couple of figure eights and get back on the highway 10 minutes later. Right. That would be really helpful. And I think a lot of people who use these parking rides would really appreciate some better bus connections in other parts of Vermont outside Burlington. Great comment. I think there's a person over here waiting and we'll make our way back across. Yes sir. I've noticed that when I'm exiting especially exit 14 West 14 West 14 West that's where I want to go. And the cars that are coming from the big loop are going really really fast. I just think if they think it's a little slower than once they get closer to the exit. Otherwise we're going about the same speed and I'm trying to get to the right and they're trying to get to the left. The whole idea of the weave and who's faster and slower. Yeah but I don't trust their weave. Sorry. That's right. Well as you raise a point point part of this process is identifying some of those safety issues. Some of those sight distance issues and trying to bring some of these places up to standard and so forth. So very good. A little bit of controlling the speeds as well. Different mechanisms in different places for different. Sir. I'd like to speak about congestion on Williston Road and the effect it has on the I-89 interchanges. When we back back a few to several years ago we did that section of Williston Road and put it on a road diet between Route 16 and at the time Kennedy Drive and a little further. There was too high a traffic count from Route 16 west toward the I-89 interchange to allow for that road diet. When we were doing a traffic study out at Williston Road where Kennedy comes in at about four o'clock when technology part plus all the other businesses begin to empty out there is real gridlock coming into Kennedy Drive if you've left technology part turning right north to go towards what Williston Road and then turning left and going down Williston Road to get on the interstate in most cases. There's a huge amount of traffic that is dividing South Burlington neighborhoods into two halves because it is going down Williston Road. It is blocking the bike pad committee for South Burlington from proposing a road diet through to I-89 and the traffic counts at the time were not that much too hot. So if you can bleed that off which comes back to what a neighbor of mine who couldn't be here tonight asked me to emphasize is looking at and building 12B and looking at and building an on-ramp ramp here at 13 right outside our door practically. Sure. It would make a huge difference and it would allow us to improve safety and meet the safe streets goal here in South Burlington for Williston Road. It's my second second. Other folks observe the Williston Road thing. So you raise a really good point in terms of this idea of broader connectivity. So when you have all these different modes of transportation bikers, walkers and vehicles and transit, sometimes with these best of intentions, some people get disconnected as well. So we're going to be looking at some of the land use the growth projections looking at some of those multimodal connections. And we think about the road dieting of some of these areas to be able to neck things down to make it easier to cross where the right locations for that as well. So we'll be looking at that stuff as well. Absolutely. Yes, sir. pitch that we significantly consider demand management. So my employer, for example, it costs us quite a lot to park. So this is a way of reducing the number of us driving there costs us quite a lot to park. The bus is free. We have a guaranteed ride home if we miss the bus. And there's a bunch of other incentives. And for that reason, where I work, we have some of the lower percents of people driving every day. And so I would really like to see some effort in the study to think about ways we can reduce, help people, enable people. That's right. You can raise a great example that's not it's not going to work for everybody. But if we can enable more people to drive less, then that will address some of these congestion issues, and probably be a lot cheaper in the long run than adding infrastructure. You raise a great question about education, awareness and working with employers, especially when there's large population exiting maybe one peak hour timeframe. How do you work with those different demands on the system as well? Great point. I think there's there's a few folks over. Yeah. First, I wanted to say thank you so much for doing this. I have two points. One about buses and one about bikes. I just wanted to take you back on what everyone's been saying about how I'd love to see more investment in public transportation and making it easy and convenient for people to really incentivize people to take public transit and hopefully head off to need for more wider roads and things like that. And also, I love the idea of pedestrian bike bridge over exit 14. Pedestrian bridge? Okay. Bike everywhere unless I'm coming over here, because that feels just too unsafe to be crossing the interstate. Sure. And it would be great to have that access to shopping, airport, groceries, everything over here. Yes, that connectivity issue again, right for the pedestrians. Excellent. Are there more comments over here this summer? No. Let's keep going in the back next to your back, certainly yellow. Yeah. I'm waiting for the day that Skynet takes over all of our movements on public roads. Skynet taking over all of our movements? Yeah, I mean, a cell phone can communicate with any back server process, right? So literally, I mean, if you're if your phone is connected to your car, you're in your car, and we're talking a few years out, your car should be telling you based upon all your sensors on your road saying, for the next four miles of 89, you should go 40 miles an hour starting now, right? And you control the flow. If you have the ability to communicate, and this is the important thing, is to communicate effectively with people about the optimum speeds to flow through the roads to get them to their destinations without getting caught in traffic jams. That can help, right? And on the other hand, you might be able to tell people, you know, wherever you I know where you are right now, I would suggest you leave in the next five minutes, you especially because we know where you want to go because we track you every single day for the last morning system. These problems are already being worked out right now. I mean, the thing is, I can't even imagine what technology is going to be available in 10 years to help with this problem above and beyond the problem where everybody wants to be a single driver in a car all by themselves, so nobody else is disturbing them, right? So the next thing is to get at least two people in every car, right? And there are there are apps to help us with that, or get them on bicycles or whatever, or get them in buses, but maybe the buses should be smaller because there is a demand for a 50 person bus. You need a 20 person bus, you know. But that's another instance where you need to tune your system to the demands of the transportation environment. So I think we're actually kind of living in an interesting time where this whole idea about emerging technology and all those things that you just mentioned how that really impact how people are mobile and where they go and all information that they can gain. If you even think back a few years ago before GPS systems, before being able to call up the Uber that couldn't arrive in a couple minutes, all of those different modes are out there and how do we tap into that? So looking out to 2050 and beyond, recognizing that technology might be a pretty big part of this, I think we need to look at some of those issues too. So a really good point. Yeah, ma'am. It has to do with destination parking availability. If you know there's no parking, boy that sure encourages me to say can I go to the high school and hop the bus to get downtown? Because it's going to save me a lot of anxiety about I can't park. You know, feeding meters, you know, getting tickets, not having your credit card, whatever parking should be much harder for the commuter. And you should have apps that kind of give you an easy alternative to getting there and a reliable alternative. So do you think part of this whole, you know, multi-mile corridor, having some awareness about where people getting done off, where the parking options might be and how that might affect your trip and be able to get some data on that. So you can make a smart decision each morning. Was there another question? Yes. Yeah, following up on that, I think what we're talking about is that it seems like your assumptions going into this is that we're not going to have any changes in our behavior. And I'm just wondering whether it's possible to do some modeling because we already see that younger people are not getting driver's license at the same rate as previous generations. And so really, all of these things we're talking about is trying to model some behavioral changes. And we're talking about solutions, you know, with knowing about that there are no parking. But I really think that you need that it would be helpful to go back and see if you modeled some of this, what other implementation we should do, as opposed to this investment. And, you know, as somebody once told me when I first started coming to these kind of meetings was, yeah, mostly transportation planning is done by looking in the rear view mirror. And that's pretty much what we're doing because we're just seeing that same that graph go in the same direction and that there's no we're not trying to really influence behavioral change. That's a great point as well. So I think I just encourage people to that comment, looking at one of your handouts here, thinking about the different goals and objectives, and maybe the different perspectives in the study that we're trying to focus on from things like resiliency, efficiency, economic access, vitality, having those important filters and really questioning the demographics and some of those trends will be important, especially with millennials, with the baby boomers and some of those changes and preferences about how people move around. Very good point as well. Very far back. Seriously pricing along Exit 13 pricing. I don't think that's no. The answer is no one. Pretty good. Like we see in other countries, for example. Yeah, paying the toll to New York City. Yeah, but it's kind of the opposite of demand management, which was kind of brought up before. Well, that's a form of demand management, I would think that. How about we do a couple more on the issues, which is always the fun stuff to talk about. And then let's talk about where the early opportunities are. So maybe a couple more in the back, sir. So the benchmark assumption traffic capacity building at certain hours is related to employment when people are trying to get to work. Why not work with some of the employers or to stagger that shift? So, you know, people get out of that comfort zone. I have to work eight to five employers. And I know we want to be creative and help our employees get to work safe and on time every day. And that's something that would not be discounted by, by employers, I'm sure, if you stagger that time frame. It should help without changing anything. And it's really free. Right. That's a good comment. Let's go up here and up there and then we'll move on. One of the issues is if we don't do anything for a long period of time, which is obviously the case because it takes 20, 30 years to build an exchange here, is we're pushing a tremendous amount of traffic into the secondary and tertiary roads and changing their character quite a bit. And I worry about that side effect. Yeah, part of this is kind of understanding exit by exit and along the corridor, some of those growth indicators and how the transportation systems move through the receiving end of that as well. Everybody finds their special route. That's right. Their secret sauce. Yeah. So it might be the road in front of your house. So it might be interesting to talk in line of that, are there certain issues that are affecting certain parts of the corridor or most than others with that in mind? Or are there areas that are maybe growth areas that you can almost try to anticipate some of those issues to maybe better plan forward as things go over time as well? So very good comment. Let's go over here. Sir. Yeah, I think with such a complicated problem, there's probably going to need a combination of many of these things to solve with that. I'm personally, you're just because in looking at, you know, the businesses, you know, on one sixteen middle and business part till we drive the technology part in matching individuals, you know, I am for the 12 B to be built just to get people off the roads of, you know, Wilson, Dorsett, you know, the congestion of, you know, a lot of those workers that are trying to get to work are using many roads that weren't designed for creating the congestion. But a lot of areas have already been designated as business parts and things that are going to continue to be developed and are being developed quite rapidly. So the congestion to do those areas that we've already designated will get higher, which would, which is around the 12 B as well. So those plan growth areas that we know are going to happen, we already planned them, we've already designated them, we know that we want people to build out there and, but because there isn't a leaf out, you know, people are going to go to Wilson Dorsett to kind of do back roads or just whatever they can to come back from the road. So you raised a good point that maybe the solutions that would come up here have a lot of different tools in the toolbox that what you do in one exit might be different than the other understanding local issues. If you want to have growth in certain areas, how you're reinforcing that. So I think you're going to probably see a lot of different strategies in place to address some of those issues. Okay, so let's talk about some of the opportunities. So it's, again, it's great to talk about the things that you live and see every single day. Where are those opportunities that our design team and technical team should be thinking about, about unlocking some of these issues? Yeah. The town of Bessex has done a pretty good job in creating an infrastructure, creating an infrastructure to connect to I-89 by way of I-189. The assets get into the 189. Yes. All right, now Suzy Wilson gets backed up quite dramatically and it's not built for that kind, that amount of traffic. But if we're able to connect 189 to 189 on both ends in Colchester and Williston, that could help. Great. Other ideas? Yes, sir. Make exit 15 a full exit. Exit 15 a full exit? Both directions. Both directions. Yeah, it's like, I can't tell you how many times I drive through Winooski because I wanted to go north. Right. Can you get there from here? Exactly. Yes, sir. Let's keep them going. Drop the speed limit on 189 to 45 and put a U-turn that's westbound that puts you back on eastbound so you can get on, you can get off it. Can you drive and get down south on the interstate? Good idea. You can do it about half way if there's enough land there. They do that on 24 or 25 just south of the Bourne Bridge. There's like a reverse direction on the inside of the median. It's a little hairy, but it does work. So that's going to be a challenge for the technical part of the team to make sure those distances work, right? Exactly. Let's keep them coming. We're going to have a few more of comments. There's got to be more opportunities out there. Yeah, in the back. It's probably pretty wild, but the interstate's a pretty wide corridor. And could there be opportunities to include bike pad of facilities separated from the main travel lanes to make connectivity from Wellesdon around to Winnowski. Within the corridor itself. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Great. In the right of the road. Along with that from, I think it's West Lebanon heading, I'm not quite sure how far, but there's a bike that goes on, and I've never seen anyone on it, but it looks like a fabulous in part of the corridor, so it's available land to be used. That's right. So obviously, check me about where that could happen and some of the challenges along the way. Host communities. Just to piggyback on that, we should consider dedicated bus lanes on the freeway and on the ramps. Dedicated bus lanes on the freeway and the ramps. Right. So that if you're, if there's a lot of congestion and the cars are clogging up the roads, at least the buses can get people places. Now to follow up on that idea, would that be 24 seven? Would that be through the peak hour? Would that be movable? What's the strategy behind that a little bit? Well, I would think definitely peak hour and you want to enforce it with cameras. Yeah. And to maybe tie it back to what the ridership is and the frequency to understand the utilization. I think part of what we found in doing these studies is that there's demand for all these different the right of way of that section, right? Like who wants what lane for what reason? The bikers, the pets, the transit, the buses. So just understanding the optimization of that as well and not forgetting about the buses too. Right. You're looking. Excellent. Yeah. Right. It would be good to study the trap between the hospital until you drive there in terms of medical care needs and see if something creative like he was talking about the bus and the community to have some some option. OK, great. What other opportunities? Let's let's go here and then right behind you. Yeah. This is pushing it way out there. So excuse me. But by the interstate when I back about 10 years ago by from San Diego across the south and then dog leg up to Vermont in West Texas because there are no alternatives. I was required and encouraged to ride the Texas interstate for about 300 months. And I felt safer riding the Texas interstate for 300 miles than I would feel on say route two between Waterbury and Montpelier. I'm seeing a lot of heads. The reason is they have 12 foot shoulders and they have a rumble strip right at the right hand edge of the travel lanes. So you're way separated from the traffic that is roaring bots. Yeah, it's not. You know, we have that corridor and with some adjustments, that's not totally out of possibility. We just aren't thinking along those lines. You raise a really good point about what do you have the room to do, right? And who has the control over the room to be able to do it? And when as a certain user, do you start to have the user of comfort that goes along with it as well in the feeling of safety as well? We do a lot of work in downtowns and historic settings and they don't have the luxury of thinking about that extra four or five feet that will address those issues, too. So here, how are we creative about that home network, putting the people in the right spot and dealing with that comfort issue? That makes a lot of sense. And has any other people done 300 miles on the Texas highway system? I think it's probably pretty unique as well. But if you ride route two out towards Grand Isle, you get the same experience. You feel safe in terms of your amount of space you have, but it's very loud. Excellent. Yeah, let's go on the way back. Yeah. Listen to a lot of comments about pedestrian access and bus traffic. Speak up, please. I've listened to a lot of commentary about pedestrian traffic, bike traffic, and bus traffic, in addition to automobile traffic. I don't take exception to any of them. They're all sort of well thought through. My only point is I don't think that's mutually exclusive with extra safety, capacity, environmental sensitivity for car traffic. Our traffic is here to stay for the foreseeable future. And many of us have a lens of current reality. You know, we experience the day because this is where we live. But what we're talking about is 30 years from now. We've seen some graphs and charts about the theoretical additional current capacity. So whether we can encourage additional bus traffic, bicycle traffic, to and from work and so forth, the man management all should be done. But I want to encourage all of us not to make it to the exclusion of appropriate planning for additional safe capacity for automobile. Thank you. If everyone heard that about the let's not forget about the vehicles, too. While that might not have been as much of the topic tonight, there's many things that you can do to make those operations better for the vehicles. And if you're thinking about the capacity issues and the safety issues, if you can solve that part of it, maybe it frees up other things, too. So I think that there might have some of our challenges, right? Yeah, let's go here. Let's come up with a few comments. But I still think we could do way more to implement effective TDM strategies by working with large employers or other employers to enable people to drive less. And there's a whole suite of kind of creative things we could do that are going to be way less expensive than building new infrastructure. For example, this guy raised the point. If we were able to double in some way get more people to ride in the cars that are already driving around, you would double the efficiency of the system without adding any new capacity. How do you do that? There's lots of creative, thoughtful, innovative ways out there. You can pay people to drive less. You can pay people. There's all sorts of things to do. And I'm just not seeing it mentioned here as one of your strategies is that help enable less traffic. And probably the thing I should have pointed out, you'll notice is probably a draft on some of these things as well. That's the reason why. We really want to hear from you about some of those goals, objectives and build a better set of goals. It would be great to see that as you go. Yeah, in a sense. Mr. I think you have one or three, four. This fellow mentioned bicycling on the highways. I was just in Columbia and they have bike paths and the median. Look at that big wide strip between the two different directions. Monstrous, tons of people use that. Yes. And it's not everybody has... Sorry, I just started speaking without you calling me. Well, not everyone has the stamina to do 300 miles, but e-bikes are really effective. We rented one this summer and I'm not in shape, I got little kids, I can't exercise anymore, but I can ride all the way out to Colchester without breaking the sweat. You know, I just plug it back in when I get home. So e-bike in encouragement should be really effective on that. Yeah, so combining for those different types of vehicles, even if it's a motor scooter, those things and how do you deal with that, right? Excellent, let's do like a couple more and then it'll be great again to shift gears and think about the broader vision about less about specific opportunities and more thinking ahead 20 to 30 years, if all of these wonderful things were done and built and improved and those partnerships made, what would that start to look like as well? So let's do a couple more opportunities. So a quick question about environment and stormwater permits for the interstate, it's gotta be one of the largest pieces of impervious surface in the whole state. So I don't know what requirements this ANR has on the interstate itself and to what degree we are handling the stormwater from that road because it's not good water that comes off of that, you know. Dave, can you maybe touch on like the whole permitting stormwater requirements about that as well? That might be helpful though. So you may have noticed this past construction season, there was some work in the Wilson by the rest areas. That was specifically to address some of the stormwater along the interstate. The next phase that VTrans is tackling is up towards St. Albans and so they are slowly working towards, there is a plan for addressing stormwater just like municipalities and businesses have to deal with. And we're seeing that in other states too and in Massachusetts it has a whole program in place that's called their impaired waterways program, their watershed areas as well. So hopefully similar issues here. Yeah, so one more and then we'll switch over, yeah. We're going to call V, I certainly appreciate the fellow from Meadowlands interested in having that exit there make sense for him but it's a trade off because it's going to have implications to the neighborhoods out there because already a lot of cars are coming on 116 taking a right on Van Siklin Road. Now they'll continue down past Butler Farms and so on. So there is some impact but the biggest concern I have is we're looking at 14 right now and how to make it safer for people to go across. Now we suddenly do another interchange where we're going to do another cloverleaf and have the same issue. So if and whenever it is built, I really hope that it's creative this time. That bike, it's a real flyway for a lot of bikers. I'm part of a bike club and Don is as well and that's used to fair amount. So just make it the same amount. So the opportunity is if you're going to build another one let's look at the most innovative things that you can be doing. Absolutely. Okay, great. All right, so let's talk about some visioning here and just to set the table. Really we'd like to think about it in terms of the 15, 20, 30 years and this is less about maybe adding one of these little lanes or one of these fixes but if you can maybe start to describe what does it look and what does it feel like? Recognizing that Burlington in this whole region really serves a lot of different users, different time of year, just different customers if you like to think about it that way. If you're thinking about this as a long facility what does it look and feel like? It would be great to have some words about what that looks like. Yeah, a lot of EVs in 2030. Right, charging for those electric vehicles especially if they're increasing the percentage of those over time. What does that look and feel like? Yep, great. So some other ideas, yeah, yeah. Leave your vehicle there and then hop on the bus. And the bus along the whole corridor. A lot more parking ride stations along the whole corridor. Okay, excellent. What are some other ideas? What does it look like? Do people enjoy their ride going down the corridor in the future? Less stress or more opportunities? More multimodal? What are some other ideas? Yeah, let's be here. One other question is what is it going to be like when there's a tremendous amount of autonomous truck traffic? Okay, autonomous trucks along the corridor. And are we going to be boxed in by trucks that are going exactly the speed limit not a mile over or less? That's right. Are we going to be boxed in amongst those when we try to do our travel? Right, so what's your vision for that? I don't know, I wonder what life will be like when it's full of autonomous trucks. That's right. We may not have less control of what happens, right? In terms of where we go. All right, I thought I saw another hand over here. Yeah, maybe we'll all be driving, right? Are we in the corridor now? Is this all part of this? Yeah. Like where we are now? Well, my vision would be like it would be, you know, like I came here on my bike tonight which is weird, I know, but it was terrifying. Yeah. It would be so wonderful to be in a place where you could actually have other ways of getting around besides driving. And we're all kind of the way to get here and there's no bus that leaves here tonight. Luckily my good neighbor is here and I can get a ride home. But, you know, we're just being wonderful to be in a place where we had options. Not for everybody, but where there were actual. Actual options. Rounds. Okay. Are there more opportunities for that in different parts of the corridor, would you say? Is it equally distributed? Might it look slightly different along the corridor? I'm just asking. I don't know what other people think, but I think it's pretty terrifying in most places. I mean, there's like little sections here and there where we're working on these things. Okay. Great. Let's throw out a few more. I thought that's what's on the end over here. Sorry to be sad, but go ahead. Well, I would say that, you know, this isn't exactly transportation, but I'd hope to not see all these one-story buildings. Yeah. You know, so that we have a little bit better land use planning in these areas and higher density and buildings that, of course, we built on soils that can support them and multi-use districts. Okay. So that really our land use pattern is changing and our architecture. That we just have to get out of single-story buildings. Yeah. Well, it's an interesting comment. I do a lot of land use planning myself. And interesting when you think about how land use and where those uses are distributed and how they're organized actually help reinforce the mobility patterns as well. So tying the two together where you can and making them work with each other, that's kind of interesting observation too. Yeah. As a general point, and this relates to everything we're doing in regard to moving vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, I think there's truth in the fact that if you build it, they will come. And to the extent that we move forward aggressively with the safe streets idea and you make it easier for people to actually bite to this meeting without feeling threatened and you make it easier to walk to this meeting as I did without, you know, having to kind of wander around on ice and so forth. More people will use those healthier options and that will naturally tend to reduce the demand for vehicle travel. Yep. Thank you. Other comments? How about if we just tried a few seconds worth of maybe one or two words? What does it look and feel like? Are the words that describe this? Is it more aesthetically pleasing? Does it look a certain way? Does it feel a certain way? What are some words that you'd be saying? Safe. Safe. Safe. Quieter. Quieter. Slower. Slower. Safer for everyone. Safer for everyone. Idealistic. Idealistic. Oh boy, I think we're gonna be circling back to that one. Okay. What else? What are the things? So these are aspirational words. Yeah. I see signage about if there is an action up ahead. Morning. I didn't tell you. There's a 10 minute block at Jan or whatnot. Did you see a lot more urban areas? You could make a decision about getting off a prior accident. Decision making and right signage and awareness, right? Creative. Creative. Efficient. Efficient. Ooh, that's a good one. You're autonomous. Ooh, autonomous. That would be interesting. How about a few more before we go on? All right, so maybe let's take a quick look over at what Matt has accomplished. He's been probably busy with all of us over here as well. So we've got the issues and the opportunities. And I think ideally he's trying to capture just some visual cues for the team to be thinking about in terms of all the different modes that I think you see up there. Capturing certain locations about, you know, build 12B, for example. You know, innovative design is up there as well. Thinking about autonomous trucks in there as well. Safe streets, less traffic. So we really appreciate, Matt, you're working pretty hard over there to do that. I think it's gonna be as we were on the last corner. There's more paper on the bend over there as well as we talk about goals and objectives as well. Right in the wall. That's right. So that's really helpful as well. Just for a few, place on the way out. I like that. That's right. And before I hand it back over to Dave, I just wanted to remind folks that on the way in, we had some of those boards out in the sign and table area that talked about some issues, opportunities, and maybe one or two of those critical improvements. We have a second set of boards out there that really relate to the goals and some of the things that we're gonna talk about next. So make sure on the way out that if you can do those post-it notes out there, that would be really helpful to us as well. So Dave, back to you. Excellent. Great, thanks everyone for that, that was great. All right, just a couple last items. So Jeffrey had confirmed everyone has the vision goals and objectives, the draft document. We're not gonna go into detail, everyone has the document. Wanna just kind of lay it out and then kind of send you home with homework if you have some thoughts. The vision goals and objectives, the vision statement is really kind of, as we just went through this exercise with Jeffrey, really kind of painting the picture of what the future of the interstate will look like. And so it's an important statement of the kind of the collective ideas for the future of the interstate. And then the goals and objectives support that vision. If you've read it already, you've seen this, this is the draft vision statement. This was developed cooperatively with both the advisory and the technical committees. It's very much draft. The idea will be, this will be staying draft as we go through the three public meetings, our focus groups will have a technical committee and then an advisory committee, probably sometime in the summer to finalize these statements. This probably looks pretty dry, it's all words, it's not as exciting as some of the maps, but this is a really important framework because as we're throwing out ideas, how do we test whether those are good ideas or not good ideas? It's really the goals and objectives that we'll use to screen out the good ideas and the bad ideas. And so it's really important as we go through the word choices and the objectives that we've chosen. So you can see here the vision statement, some of the words that we're throwing out say resilient, reliable, efficient movement of people and goods. So that's kind of the overarching vision as it's crafted right now and it certainly is up for discussion. The goals here, probably nothing too earth-shattering and especially if you've looked at your sheets, but the goal is kind of focusing on safety, mobility, environmental stewardship and resilience, economic access and vitality, livable, sustainable and healthy communities, and then finally system preservation. There's some descriptions that go along to kind of describe what those goals are seeking. And then lastly, this is the sheet that you have, but the letters underneath each of the green lines are the objectives. And that's really what we're gonna use ultimately to evaluate some of these ideas. So we've heard about 12B, is 12B good or bad? You ask three different people, you get three different answers, but we wanna try to be as objective as possible. And so as we look through, is it improving incident response? Is it reducing congestion? Is it improving livabilities? Is it improving healthy communities? Those are kind of the tests, the questions that we'll be asking of each of these ideas and bundles of packages of improvements. So probably bore everyone if we went through these one by one. So the idea really, if you have comments tonight, feel free to write them on here and you can drop them at the sign-in table. Also feel free to bring them home. We have online, we have a copy of this. We've got comment feedback forms that you can plug in. If you have any comments, we have links to Diane who's accumulating all of those comments. We're looking for input by the end of March. So you've got plenty of time to take this home and share it with your loved ones and give it some thought. Cause this is as maybe as uninteresting as the piece of paper may look, it's a very important to the overall direction of the plan. So encourage you to do that. Let's see, Charlie's way back in the corner. I may just touch on the wrap up in next steps. So unless you wanna, okay. All right, so we made it to the end. In terms of next steps, I mentioned additional feedback. We have the website, I encourage everyone to go. It's Envision89, E, E, Envision89.com. There's a number of, a lot of the information this presentation is up there. And a guest book survey. There's a map, online map where you can put dots where you would like to see things happen or not see things happen. So we've got that open until the end of March for this round. I mentioned we've got two more rounds of public outreach, so we're here tonight. We'll be in Williston next month and then Manuski in March. We'll be back in this room on the 18th of February to present a brief a version of this at the City Council, South Burlington City Council. And then as we showed on the chart before, back towards the end of this year, winter of 2020 to 21, we'll be back this time with the ideas that have come forward, the bundles and packages and recommendations for you to weigh in on and comment on. And then finally, we'll be back in the fall of 2021 to present the draft report to get your input. So here's where you can find us online, social media or in person if you need to find us. So anything else before we wrap up tonight? Yes, please, so to your left, hopefully everyone filled in on the way in. We've got new questions. Some have dots, the other ones are posted notes. So please take a look at that. Grab some food on your way out. I think we'll probably have some extra. And thank you again for coming out tonight.