 Welcome, Sheboygan. We have another show, the Sustainable Sheboygan Task Force, Sustainability Spotlight. Our guest for today is Aaron Brault. He's a planner with the county. And today's topic will be transportation and more specifically bicycles. So Aaron, if you could introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and your position at the county. Again, my name is Aaron Brault. I'm the county planning and conservation director. Prior to that position, I was hired by the county to facilitate the non-motorized transportation pilot program grant that the county received in 2006. So that's early on with the county where I spent a lot of my time and focus working. And now I'm the director of the planning and conservation department. So early on, we had dedicated staff working on that project. Now, we don't have dedicated staff. I mean, we still have staff working on that project, but we don't have a dedicated staff position. So I've been with the county now for about eight years. I've been in all sectors. I've worked in the private sector at an urban planning consulting firm. I've owned my own business. And the last eight years now, I've been with the county. And you're also on avid bicyclists, too. I try to be. Yeah, I know it's hard when you have many meetings, but I still see you running around town. Yeah, meetings and kids. So make it a little more difficult. So the Sustainable Cheboygan Task Force has been around for some time, and I know you've been a part of the transportation committee, which this falls under that. As a member of that committee, what is the transportation committee working on and what have they accomplished? Sure. I believe the sustainability task force started in 2008 at the city. I'm technically the county's representative on that committee. The format of that committee, there's a number of different members from you know, private sector businesses, city staff, small, large businesses, nonprofits, things like that. So even though I'm a city employee, I think I technically represent the county on that committee. So for the past few years, as you mentioned, that committee's broken down into different subcommittees that focus on particular things, you know, what may interest people the most. And I sort of have a transportation slant, whether it be bicycling, trains, cars, rail, you name it. So I'm on that committee. Over the years, our primary focus has been really helping implement the grant. So whenever we need support from the city for projects and stuff, me and the other members on that transportation committee work hand in hand to go through the different projects and things like that, that might be looking to be implemented in the city. So that's been our primary focus. Now that the grant is sort of wrapping up and the projects and the dollars have been spent for the projects, I imagine we'll start to focus more on like policy types of issues. In the past we have delved into some of the policy issues. Some have been successful, some have not been successful. One of the successful ones is to... we got the Common Council from a recommendation from our sustainability task force to consider under new, let's say road projects, to consider installing bike lanes or bicycle facilities and pedestrian facilities as part of all projects. It's commonly known as Complete Streets. You have areas of communities. One of the issues when you don't do that is you have these dense urbanized communities, subdivisions and stuff that don't have those facilities and there's a cost to that. Busing costs for schools, busing is much more expensive than providing a sidewalk. So if you don't provide those facilities, there are costs that outweigh the cost of developing those facilities. It becomes a bit short-sighted. And it's short-sighted, yep. And statistically speaking, I'm a numbers guy, so statistically speaking, those neighborhoods that have those amenities sell out quicker, are more stable, the property values are more stable in the long-term. They're more desirable, things like that. So in my mind, I hate to use the cliche, it's a win-win for everybody. It's cheaper for the taxpayer long-term because they don't have to provide long-term busing. The busing companies don't like that, but that's the truth of the matter. It's diversifying. Yep, and again, those areas provide more stable types of neighborhoods. Excellent. So the City of Sheboygan recently published a sustainability plan. Do you know how the plan addresses transportation? Yeah, it's definitely part of that plan. Like I said, the complete streets, considering all amenities like that, all forms of transportation. People forget everybody's a pedestrian at one point. Whether they drive a car every day, they're a pedestrian at one point. And even if it's getting from their car to the front door, you want to have inviting facilities for that. Otherwise, people just won't do it. Other items in that plan, from a transportation standpoint, transit is a big thing. Not only making connections in a bike facility, but an overall function of the transportation system. Transit, even though gas has been going down, according to the local transit director, their ridership has been increasing. Cars are getting more and more expensive to maintain. I believe the statistic, again, numbers are the average family for one car spends about $7,000 of their disposable income to have that automobile each year. So that's including maintenance, everything else like that, payments. The cliche term, are you working to drive or are you driving to work? Right. It's a good one. And that's only one car. So if you're a two-car family, you're probably upwards of $10,000 a year in those costs to have a car. So younger generations are making different choices. Millennials that are out there, more and more of them are using transit bicycling nationwide. Not only in Shboygan, but this is nationwide the trends that we're seeing. And we're struggling as a nation, locally, state, regionally, whatever you want to say, in maintaining all this infrastructure that we've built over the past 60 years. Car became king in the 40s, and since then, that's where everything is focused around. From the design of our houses, like in the 40s and 50s, the porch was the main feature of the house. Now when you drive through a new subdivision, the garage is the main feature of the house. So down to minute details like that, everything has been auto-focused. And the location of jobs and schools. Location of jobs. So building that infrastructure, as we keep going further and further out, there's a cost to the society on that. And so now we're struggling with, well, how do we pay for all this stuff we've built? And the cost of the environment and our health. I mean, we could go on and on. I completely agree. That kind of leads well into my next question. And you can help define this. You've touched on it a little bit. Why are multi-modal transportation options important for a community? I guess explain that term. It's kind of a hot term right now. Sure. I'm going to caveat this, that I'm not against the car. I like to drive. I like cars. And multi-modal doesn't mean one thing. It means everything. That's part of the point. You know, I'm a car guy. I get car and driver magazine. I like that kind of stuff. But I guess I'm... I also realize maybe it's because of my background in planning. There's a cost to that. And I guess I'm one of the guys out there willing to pay the true cost of, you know, having an automobile. But back to your question on multi-modals. Multi-modal. Yeah, various options. Again, everybody's a pedestrian at some point in their life. There's no denying that. So bicycling, transit, and the automobile and potentially, you know, in some areas of the country, trains, having a multi-modal system. So, I mean, that's essentially the definition, is that you have different options for you. Right. Yeah. And you touched on this a little bit, but if we can go into when it was awarded in the amount. But Sheboyin County received a large grant several years ago. Can you give an overview of the grant? What did it accomplish and what the status of the grant is today? Sure. We were one of four communities in the U.S. to receive a pilot program grant. Typically in the past, Congress, and even at state granting levels or even at private granting levels, it was project specific. You know, we'll give you some dollars for one project. Going back to the whole maintenance issues and sustaining a transportation system, Congress said, well, rather than having little projects here and there, what if we had a targeted investment in a community? What kind of impact would that have on a community if we had a targeted investment where you would essentially complete the network? If you think about a road network, you know, you wouldn't drive somewhere if there wasn't the network. You know, same thing for bicycling and walking and transit or what have you. If you don't have the network, people aren't going to use it. But if you do, what happens? Right. And so in communities that have invested in this, you know, especially, I hate using Europe as an example, but they've invested in this for some time now. They took a different direction in the 40s and 50s. And, you know, it's one of those, if you build it, they will come types of things. So that was the goal was, you know, what does this targeted investment do? So we had to have your, I think it was a, we had to, per Congress, and this was rare too for our grant, we had to have reporting. So we had to have baseline information. We had to do counts and things like that halfway through. And then at sort of the end, you know, they gave us some time period, even though all our projects haven't been completed and they didn't really fit, we had to have these reports. And even with that, even with the grunt of big push of our projects not moving forward, I think through some of our outreach efforts and things like that, we saw numbers start to tick up in our accounts. So we had eight defined count sites that we've been counting every year, even till now, where we've taken counts. How many people have walked or biked by during a time period. And they were, those eight sites were, you know, they weren't just randomly chosen. They were site specific based on where we knew we had some projects going in. So it was before and after. And then we had 12 additional count sites for three years where we got sort of a more complex view of the entire county. And I should mention that too. It was a county-wide grant. It wasn't just a city of Sheboygan grant. So we have projects in almost all of our municipal communities or incorporated communities, including the city of Sheboygan. So, yeah, so that's, again, it was up to $25 million as what each of these communities got. So Sheboygan County, Columbia, Missouri, Marin County, California, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. They specifically chose four very distinct communities too. We're all different. Marin County is a bedroom community to San Francisco. So Suburbia type of thing. Also one of the more wealthy communities in the United States. Marin County, excuse me, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Big Dense Urban Center, Columbia, Missouri, Big College Town, and then Sheboygan. Sheboygan County. Blue collar, sort of, down home roots type of community. And what would this targeted investment in each community have? And we had to provide back to Congress lessons learned. What worked, what didn't work, things like that, so. Awesome. And I know bike paths were part of it, but also bike racks were another. We're part of the grant. If you still have bike racks available, how can a business request one? Sure, they can give our office a call and we have a few left. We had a, we splattered about 700 bike racks throughout the county. Again, throughout the county and commercial areas, destinations, employers that requested one at that time, churches, essentially destinations. Again, going back to the network, if you didn't have a place to park your car when you got here, would you come? Probably not. Right. Or would you go to that store? Probably not. You know, same thing for a cyclist. You know, they're not going to take their bike, you know, which may have cost a thousand bucks and then... Tie it to a tree. Tie it to a tree. You know, that's just not inviting. So for a very minimal cost, the bike racks don't cost a whole lot. We were able to provide those parking spaces. How many did you receive? We put in about 700. Okay. Throughout the county? Yeah. And I think we ordered an extra 50 just for replacement and things like that. Okay. So we have a few left. Yeah. Oh, that's excellent. So another part of this, I've seen this. I think it's excellent. You organized bike corrals at festivals in Sheboygan County during the summer months. How does that work? Where will you be this summer and do you need help with that? Yeah. So in the past, the bike corrals, really, that was all volunteer-based. We built the racks with our dollars and some of our marketing dollars. But that was it. The rest was just volunteer-based. So bike corrals, bike valets, whatever you want to call them. We had them at different community events. So to promote biking to that event, rather than, again, having a decent space to park and not have to worry about it just like you would on your car. We had these corrals set up where people could bring a bike. You tear off one edge of a card. You'd give the other person the other edge of the ace of spades. And that's how we know whose bike is whose. We shove it in the spokes or what have you. And so we were at a number of events throughout the years. The Kohler Arts Festival we've been at, Earth Fest, Holland Fest, down in Cedar Grove has been a good one. We tried broad days one year, but the crowd tends to bring other kinds of bikes to that crowd. Those were more bikes with motors, but yeah, so this year, the grant's starting to wind down. So in years past, we sort of organized and got the volunteers. Now we've led it up to each of the events. We'll give you the racks. We'll provide you the racks, but if your event wants them, you have to come up with the volunteers and coordinate it. And that's always been sort of a goal of ours, too, with like the bike corrals, bike and walk to work week is, you know, we started it, but the grant dollars aren't going to be here forever to help out with it. So we really wanted to try to promote the community buy-in and things like that. So in communities where they've had successful increases in, you know, bicycling and walking as a form of transportation, that's, you know, the grassroots sort of effort has taken hold and they're running those events. And made a big difference. And they've had a non-profit that's come on board or to be the champion of that, not so you have government pushing it. And so that's always been one of our goals. So the government planted the seed in this case and you're hoping other people. Yeah, and it started in certain instances. You know, we had some events last year for the bike corrals. They used them and that was great. Rebike, one of our more popular programs. Again, I think that the grant provided $100 in seed money in the beginning, or maybe $150. And that's a program in paradigm coffee shops basement. Paradigm donates the space. There's six, seven guys every Wednesday night that are down there that are wrenching on bikes. And it's an earn a bike program. So early up front, they targeted kids from like boys and girls club or big brothers, big sisters, kids who might not be able to afford a bike or have a bike. But they had to learn a skill. So it wasn't that they were just donating a bike. The kids had to work on the bike, had to figure out what was wrong, put on replacement parts and everything like that. And after three or four hours of teaching them that, then they were able to take that bike home or sometimes it took longer. They might have, depending on the bike, they chose to work on. So that's been a great program. And I talked to one of the guys who's down there every Wednesday night. And so far, I think they started in 2010 or 2011 and they've donated or kids and adults. We've worked with Salvation Army families. They have earned over 1400 bikes. Oh, that's fabulous. So every summer or so or spring, we'll have an ad in the paper just saying, hey, if anybody wants to clean out their garage and donate an old bike, bring it down to Paradigm. And it doesn't have to be on Wednesday night. Paradigm's gracious enough to take them throughout the week. They prefer it if it's on Wednesday night. But if you can't get there on a Wednesday night, yep. You know, you can try to get down there and donate a bike and it'll go to good use. Some of the better bikes that don't need as much work, that's how the re-bike, they'll sell those for a minimal cost. 50 bucks or 40 bucks or something like that. You can support it by purchasing a bike also. Yep. And that's how they buy their supplies and things like that. So it's been a great success story. And again, for $150 in seed money, it's been super successful. There are other programs in Milwaukee and Madison that have sponsorships and stuff like that. The logo here has been all pretty much volunteer based. The logo was donated. You know, some artistic person came up with the cool logo. Right. So it's a cool story. And it lives on. Yep. So you mentioned bike and walk to work week happened. It actually does happen throughout Wisconsin. Can you tell us what you've done and what's planned for 2015? Yeah, again in the past, we tried to plant the seed and so we organized the events. We've had everything from coffee stops in the morning to come in and grab a coffee on their way to work, whether biking to work or walking to work. And those were always fun and successful. And again, over the past couple of years, we've had employer challenges, Piggly Wiggly. The headquarters has been great in that regard. Rockline has participated. So there's been good participation that way. Again, the grant's going to go away. So we've been trying to have other champions take it over. And so last year, I know there was a couple of things at Paradigm, I think, had some things. And then also we had an employer challenge last year that we had a website. So I imagine that's what we'll do again this year. We typically do ours in June. I think the national events in May, but with our weather here. I agree. We try to keep it in June. Get more people on board. Yep. Okay. So we do have bike lanes in Cheboygan, which I love. I remember biking in the city before those lanes were there and I would be honked at. And people, there just wasn't this awareness that bikes could be on the road. I just wanted to acknowledge that. So my question, follow-up to that, is how often would those be repainted with the grant going away? We paved or strived about 60 miles, again, throughout the county of bike lanes. And you're right. They provide awareness. It's amazing what that little white line will do. Right. And it provides a sense of space for not only the cyclist, it defines for the motorist who, hey, be aware. And so, again, for not a lot of cost, there's an impact on that. As far as maintenance, that is up to each municipal community. So the nice thing about the paint we put down, rather than just normal paint, is it lasts quite a while. So I think that project went in 2009, maybe, or 2008. And at nighttime, it still has a reflectivity. So we paid a little more upfront for that to have less maintenance. Right. So over time, it's more cost-effective. So the communities will have to pick that up afterwards. That's with almost any federal or state grant. Right. It's not forever. We're not going to do the maintenance. That's the communities buy-in. OK. So as the painting programs in each of the communities, and so far, they've all been pretty good about it. OK. OK. So you mentioned this a little bit, and we know the grant is coming to an end. So what are the long-term goals for Sherwin County with respect in their involvement with multimodal transportation projects? Well, I think you mentioned awareness. I mean, our community is now, there's other options out there, and we're hearing from employers that even from a quality of life standpoint, it's helping them recruit. People want this in their communities. Young professionals. Young professionals, they want this in their communities. So from that aspect, it's provided awareness from just engineers in the local community. Now they're designing these things as a matter of course in their projects. Right. Which didn't happen. Rather than an afterthought. An afterthought, yep. It's much more expensive to put things in retrospectively. So that's been one of the goals, was to provide this long-term, again, awareness. And then the bottom line was, will these dollars increase ridership? And again, we've done those counts and from compared to our baseline, from where we're at now, we've seen a steady progression. There's dips and valleys and just like any kind of graph you normally see, it's not one straight line, but over the trend line has been going up. So the use of our bike racks on the buses, for instance, the first couple of years, we track that. Every time somebody put a bike on the front of the bus, the bus driver would track that and we saw a steady trend line going up. Once people learn and saw how people are doing it. And that's the same for our trails and everything. Moving forward, we have some automatic counters that are on the trails. So we know time of day that people are going by, which direction and the number of counts, the day of the week and things like that. So those are interesting to see too. We have those out on the old plank and the new trail that we built through town a couple of years ago, shortland 400 on the old rail trail, so around the old rail line. So we have data and we'll continue to have data to show that our efforts have been a success and good for the community. That's awesome. So a fatal bicycle crash occurred recently and that's kind of what prompted this topic for me. It occurred on County Highway A and this was the second fatal crash in the same location within the past few years. What is Sheboyton County doing to improve bike paths in our area, especially the north-south paths? Yeah, so I mean, that crash as any crash is unfortunate. And again, as far as what are we doing, that road from the county standpoint, it's a county trunk. We were actually reviewing that road to be redone. It's unfortunate that it will happen too late. But in overall, again, statistically speaking, the more ridership you have on the roads, it's an inverse line as far as crashes and accidents and things of that nature for cyclists. So the more mass you have on that road of cycling or more awareness nationally and it's shown in our statistics in Sheboyton too that as cycling or use has gone up, crashes have gone down. So again, this was an unfortunate situation, but that tends to be what happens. Right. So they are being looked at. There's plans potentially moving forward. Yeah. Unfortunately, not soon enough for the situation, but it is being looked at. And what we look at, we have a comprehensive plan, the county comprehensive bike and pedestrian plan. And it was just updated this year. So the first one we had was essentially out of date, the day we published it, because we had so many projects coming online. So we did an update this year. And one of the things we look at when we're going through that planning effort are the areas of concern we call them. So we look at crash history and things like that at the intersections and we identify those areas as areas that need, whether it's a perceived issue or whether it's a real issue through, again, traffic. Design. Yeah. We look at those intersections the next time they're up for design and things like that. Traffic calming. I know. Yeah. We've done traffic calming around some of the area schools and those have proved to reduce speeds, which was the intended goal. Great. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for your time. I think we can both agree our messages continue to use multimolar transportation, be it a car, be it transportation by bus or bike or walking. It's cheaper. It's cheaper. At the end of the day, that's what everybody's concerned about is what's in their wallets and there's no more efficient way to get around town for short trips. Right. I'm not saying get on your bike. I mean, it's great if you want to go out for 25 miles door to door. But if you have a short trip to go down to the grocery store to grab that gallon of milk, it's certainly more cost-effective and much more efficient. Good for you, too. And the benefits are endless. From a health standpoint, putting less stress on our roads and maintenance and whatever else. I mean, hands down in those short trips, there's no more efficient way to get around. Right, a little more. So thank you so much for your time again. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Stay tuned for our next feature, which will be about water. And until then, it's nice outside. Get on your bike and be safe. Have a good time. Thank you so much. Thank you.