 Motion from Commissioner Barr, thank you. I'll second the motion. Second from Vice Chair O'Neill-Vavonko. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right, let's go to a vote to start on the phone with Commissioner Mutano. Aye. Gotcha. Commissioner Barr. Aye. Vice Chair O'Neill-Vavonko. Aye. Commissioner Oberbe. Commissioner Damiani. Aye. Aye for myself. The agenda has passed. Thank you. Moving forward to public forum. See a lot of public participants in the room. Is there any on the phone? Yeah, Chair O'Neill-Vavonko, we have a few numbers of public on the phone, and if you wish to speak during public comment, I'm doing a few things again. You're not promoting for Felipe? Hi, good evening. My name's Felipe. I am hopping on board and speaking out to make sure. I saw the agenda that parking is an issue here, and I just wanted to make sure that the original plan called for a reduction in parking. And now the study has been commissioned to add that parking back on. And I just want to make sure that by adding back that parking that was to be eliminated, we're not sacrificing any accessibility for alternate modes of transportation, pedestrians, bikers, scooters, whatever, that we're not continuing to prioritize motor vehicle traffic through our downtown area. Yeah, that is all for now. Name for our records here? Oh yeah, Hoyos, H-O-Y-O-S. Great, thank you. Appreciate you. Thanks. If no one else signed up. All right, I will close public forum and forward to item four on our agenda, the consent agenda with three items on it, approval of our draft minutes from November, an ADA spot removal, 197 North Wheeler Street, and an ADA spot removal on Hyde Street. I move to accept the consent agenda. We'll get the motion to Commissioner Mutanu. Thank you. And a second from Commissioner Barr. Thank you for that. Is there any discussion around the motion? All right, let's go to a vote then. Phone please, Commissioner Mutanu. Aye. Commissioner Barr. Aye. Vice Chair, O'Neill-Bavancro. Aye. Commissioner Overby. Aye. Commissioner Damiani. Aye. Aye for myself. The consent agenda is passed unanimously. Thank you. Moving forward to item five, Great Streets, Main Street Intersection Control Discussion and General Project Updates. All right, hello. I am Laura Wheelock with the Public Works Department. I am one of the project managers for the Great Streets Project. We're here to continue our conversation on this project as it continues to move forward. Here with me tonight, I have my colleague Olivia Deris, also one of the project managers, as well as Jen Connolly with VHB from our consulting team. Jen's going to give us a presentation overview focusing on the intersection analysis, which is one of the motions that the commission acted on earlier this year as you were recommending the concept plan forward to the city council. And so we're here to give you guys an informational only update tonight. If there is action that you guys want to take coming out of this informational update, we will do that at a next meeting. That is our intent for tonight. Just before we get too deep into that item, I do want to highlight in your memo we give some really brief updates as to where the project is at right now. We do have another communication that we prepared for more kind of broad consumption with a lot more meat in each of the different topics. So that'll be shared out on our website. But if you're interested in it, we can also provide you a copy. But really to be able to kind of quickly go through and honor one counselor request is Councilor Jang wanted to make sure that we mentioned to you the work that is happening on the city's ravine sewer as part of this project. And so if there's any questions as it relates to that work, there's more details again in the other communication or we're happy to kind of talk offline because it's not quite what the commission does, but it was asked to be shared. Other things that we have going on, which I think the caller today was talking about is the parking advisory study and committee and study that are occurring along with this. And really that's not about adding the parking back into the project area. It's about making sure that we analyze where within a five minute walk of the corridor available parking already exists. And then also being able to make and review some current trends as it relates to utilization and whatnot. That'll be coming as a future update. It's more just to let everybody know that it's happening still. And with that, I will. I think the one thing I would love to just be clear about if there is any interest on the part of the council or the commission to add parking in that there will of course be a commitment to protect the enhanced public realm bike and pedestrian space is that we have worked hard to design into this project. So the caller and the public should understand that this is going to be a fully multimodal project as we move forward. Thanks. Thank you. With that, I will let Jen start sharing her screen and introduce herself a little more. Thank you. Again, my name is Jennifer Conley. I'm with BHB and I'm part of the project team really looking at the traffic operations in this case and also participating in the parking study. But today I'm here to talk to you about traffic operations and the intersection analysis that we conducted when we're looking at what alternatives should be considered for the main street quarter. That's what I am sharing. So as I'm sure you're all familiar, but in case there's anyone at home who is not the study area in this case is main street, the main street quarter extending from Battery Street to Union Street. It does include seven locations that we looked at. The goals of this analysis as we were evaluating was the goals of the Great Streets program, which are great streets that are walkable, and bikeable, sustainable, vibrant, and functional. And one of the added things that we really paid particular attention to at the direction of Public Works was prioritizing safety for all of the users in the quarter. And one of the things that was set as a bar right away to help prioritize that safety was reducing traffic speeds in the quarter to 20 miles per hour. And we do that a number of ways through the design. Then we took a look at four of the alternatives which were either roundabouts or signalized intersections. Taking a look at the right-of-way impacts of those alternatives, looking at building structure impacts, which are obviously more significant than just a right-of-way impact, bicycle and pedestrian operations, activation space impacts or opportunities, the resulting heat island effects, the safety impacts of the alternatives and looking at the traffic operations at each of the intersections. So to do that, we started with what the design criteria should be. Now looking at the roundabouts, you'll see on the slide, it's a little hard to get into the detail. There's kind of two different options for the roundabouts. There's the mini roundabout, which is a smaller circulating area and as such requires less right-of-way. And then there's the standard roundabout. Now there were a number of locations that were identified as important to accommodate truck turns out, one of those being Pine Street, for example. We're going to have some truck turning at Pine at Battery and looking at Winooski and St. Paul or the other locations that it was appropriate to have the larger diameter roundabouts so that we could more easily accommodate those design vehicles. Where we could, we looked at the mini roundabout and the mini roundabout is a smaller diameter and obviously then takes up less right-of-way. And that's more appropriate for a location that has lower side street volumes, less truck percentages, turning, and a number of other things. Just to put these in context, the Shelburne Street roundabout is a standard roundabout. So it's more in line with those standard dimensions. And I know there was some materials that were circulated that looked at a roundabout in Athens, Ohio. And that was more of the design of a mini roundabout, just so that you can put that in the context to some of the roundabouts that have been talked about recently. Looking at traffic signals, the design criteria that we looked at was, can we slow the vehicles down and can we prioritize pedestrians? And the way that we were looking at that is we want that pedestrian phase to be called every single cycle. And the way we do that is through concurrent pedestrians so that the pedestrians cross the side streets at the same time as main street is in the green phase. In order to give the pedestrians additional safety, we give them a leading pedestrian interval so that the pedestrian can be out more visible and almost in some of the side streets, almost across the street by the time the cars get the green. So there's an all red phase that those pedestrians get started during. In addition, having that two-phase signal operation really helps the pedestrian every phase they will be called unlike at a lot of the locations now where they have to push the button. And in a lot of cases, all traffic has to stop to process those pedestrians which then impacts the traffic operations. We also took a look at optimizing when we were laying out the traffic signals that 20 mile per hour flow through the corridor so that the driver is not rewarded for going faster by catching that next green light really making it so that band of progression keeps the drivers at 20 miles per hour. So we started to look at what those impacts would entail and the roundabouts versus the signals on this graphic you can see the results for the roundabouts are shown in circles and the results for the traffic signals are shown in traffic signals. The roundabouts obviously, I don't think it's a surprise to anyone take a larger footprint and as a result have larger right of way impacts and in a lot of cases at these key intersections structure impacts and in the memo that was in your packet we get into specifically which of those structures would be most affected by the roundabouts. The signalized intersections we are actually reducing the cross section on which really helps slow the traffic down that the smaller cross section has the impact to the driver's behavior of slowing the traffic down and it also then therefore doesn't have the right of way impacts that are associated with the roundabouts. Then we looked at bicycle and pedestrian operations and we know the operations are important as are the safety for these users. I'm gonna separate safety and talk about that in a minute. Roundabouts do have a significant benefit to pedestrian operations and that you're crossing a single leg at a time and that in general the drivers do yield to the pedestrians and so the pedestrians do have an improved operation. Cyclists end up being a little more challenging at roundabouts because they need to be in with the traffic or completely separated and over with the pedestrians and sometimes that yielding situation can be more challenging. There is a potential, there are studies that crash modification factors have shown that in some cases there's a potential increase for those bicycle vehicle crashes and then the only other thing that we noted is that with the crossing guard situation at South Union we may need to have an additional crossing guard at that location. As far as at the signalized location to improve those bike pet operations as I already mentioned there would be those that seven seconds of all red time and in addition to that the crossing distances would be significantly shorter. As I said, the cross section will be significantly more narrow than it is currently and so the time that that pedestrian is exposed on the street crossing is significantly reduced over what's happening currently and again the cyclist can travel through the intersection or use a separated facility at the signalized intersections as well. So in both cases there is an improvement to the operations for the bicycles and the pedestrians. As I mentioned briefly, as far as the right of way impacts are concerned they're connected to the activation space impact because the Great Streets initiative is really about activating the street and making the street more usable for all users. The signalized intersections provide more of an opportunity for that because they are not using as much of the right of way and really set up for the ability to be able to create that more vibrant street where there is the activation space available. The roundabouts lose some of that because of the size of those kind of entry areas as you're approaching the roundabout itself and the flare basically for the approach and the departure at the roundabout. The heat island impacts is a little mixed. The advantage to the signalized intersection of providing additional activation area actually results then unfortunately in greater heat island impacts, not as significant as with the roundabouts but you'll see here on the slide that the impacts to the heat island effect is more similar between the two alternatives than some of the other criteria that I've discussed so far. With the signalized intersections, more of that heat island impact has to do with those activation areas that are created. Now to get into safety impacts, one of the key things in either design as I said is that we're lowering the travel speed of the vehicles and that is a very significant indicator towards serious injury and death is the speed of the vehicles that are traveling and because again, regardless of whether it's signalized intersections around about are going with the design speed of 20 miles per hour that will really slow down what is happening. This is not just signing speed limit 20 miles an hour, this is including the progression and or the design features that will really slow that traffic. Some of that will come from the two phase operation of the traffic signals because now people who are turning vehicles will be slowing down through traffic by being in that traffic stream and not being pulled out of the traffic stream and or at the roundabouts through the design features of how the traffic is entering the roundabout and exiting the roundabout. As far as the only other thing as I already mentioned there have been mixed studies as to the benefits around about as again with through the design speed you do reduce the speed but there is some concern for the potential for cyclist related crashes increasing actually at the roundabouts. Looking at traffic operations, a few things. In general, roundabouts are not typically installed at locations with high pedestrian activity and the reason for that is because the roundabouts effectiveness the usually the big selling feature is that it keeps all of the traffic moving and that all of the traffic continues to flow but in this case because of that incredibly large friction caused by the significant pedestrian volumes that flow is going to be interrupted very frequently and as a result will back up the vehicles. The vehicles are not going to get that free flow condition and at some points it's good. You know, if the pedestrians are traveling in dribs and drabs across the street the vehicles will encounter significant delay and that's what we ended up seeing in our modeling once we included the pedestrians in the modeling for both the roundabouts and the signal at the level of the pedestrian traffic that is out on this quarter we saw that significant increase in delay associated with the roundabout alternatives. Now there is also increase in delay associated with the signals because as I said we are taking away some capacity there by taking away some of the turn lanes with the exception at key locations where turn lanes were determined to be critical. So there are and you can see on this graphic shown in orange is some increase in delay associated with the traffic signals but not to the level that was anticipated with the roundabouts. And so ultimately we did the evaluation of what are those, what is the net evaluation between roundabouts and signals? And what you can see on this slide is there are a number of categories where the results are equal or mixed which is the bike pedestrian operation and the safety impacts but really the signals then take the day as far as minimal right-of-way and building impacts, the increased activation space opportunities associated with the signals, the reduced heat island impact and then the resulting traffic operations. And that is all I put together. Happy to answer if there's a question. Great, thank you for that. Anything else from staff? No, really this opportunity is for the commission to be able to ask questions of the design team and staff as we continue on with the project and continue to work through various issues. Okay, thanks, appreciate it. Check with Commissioner Mutano. Hey there, thank you for the update and I understand that this is a really huge project and needing to consider all of these like different parts is really important and particularly how they all come together. So the question that I'm asking is about that South New Ski Avenue intersection and this kind of includes like all of them on the corridor but that one if I'm not mistaken is like among the most dangerous in the state of Vermont and part of that isn't just Main Street, right? The corridor that's like the main focus of this particular project but also South New Ski Avenue. So I'm wondering if when considering these roundabout versus you know, signalized intersection alternatives in particular or in particular and then also more generally throughout the project how have you like considered like the traffic moving on the cross streets and their speeds and sort of like the area around the Main Street corridor because I feel like when you account for those things that could certainly impact the decision in numerous possibilities. I guess that we really looked at as we did this modeling was not processing the side streets to be an effective through route. What we did is we impacted the side streets so that they encountered more delay so as to not encourage folks to work their way down through the grid in this area again, knowing the number of pedestrians and the fact that this is not an area we want to encourage additional traffic or create capacity on those side streets. In addition, as far as the overall safety is concerned especially when looking at signalized intersections even on the side streets we're looking for those opportunities to narrow the curb width so the pedestrians have shorter crossing distances. You know, when we're really thinking about pedestrian safety if nothing else but truly the speed reduction to the 20 miles per hour I would say is the greatest ad improvement to safety at this location. If I can also just add or remind the project does start at Union Street and even at that as we've worked with the civil side of our design team the limits of how to incorporate to the bike facility goes even to the mid block at Edmonts and so really this look at trying to inform drivers the speed that they really need to be moving through and it really introduced the gateway of the city before they hit Winooski will start around Edmonts. So that should help. Yeah, thanks so much for the update. I would venture to say that both South Winooski and like South Union are quite major through streets especially moving between the South End and the Old North End and certainly considering those intersections is the place where we really want to slow down traffic moving in all directions really to make that facility safe for people moving through is an important consideration. So that's why I would advocate for considering like a roundabout especially for that South Winooski intersection but I look forward to keeping this conversation going and following along with the project. So thank you all. All right, thank you. Krishna Bar. Well, thanks for the update. This was very informative to me and you kind of already answered. My main concern is slowing traffic to 20 miles an hour and knowing how fast people want to try and go during morning and evening, would they just spread out and start going down maybe with cane and all those others but it sounds to me like we're already putting it back. Interesting. And I'll just say for the record that there may be some application for roundabouts there but I do agree with the study that does not make it safer for bicyclists, cyclists going through these. At least with a light, you have a light to stop a car coming in one direction or another and you know that it's okay to go but if you try and go with the traffic around the roundabout most cars are looking at other cars but there are some applications for roundabouts maybe some of the other streets down for the. All right, thank you. Vice-Chair O'Neill-Valaco. Great, thank you so much. So just a couple of questions I think. So do you have the data and I probably should have done this myself, I apologize, how Winooski Avenue has rated in safety with the restriping and I know that was right before the pandemic. Do you have any data on that? Just see how it certainly feels safer as a bike, as a biker and as a kind of pedestrian but. I don't believe because post pandemic we lost our transportation planning staff that we've been able to do a post study on the corridor but that is certainly something that we could check pretty quickly as our new planning staff do start the end of the month and the end of the January. So, okay. And I would just add that. Yeah, great. That with the North Avenue corridor where we did the four to three lane configuration having worked through that traffic modeling and for crash data to get significant crash data to be statistically significant industry standard is such that you want two to three to four years of data to really have robust information. So we're really just at the two year point at this point and I think we're gonna need a longer stretch to really fully understand what the impacts are long term as people have adjusted now to the new traffic pattern. Okay. That said, we can work to get you what we have today. Okay, that's good. I mean, I remember that striping there were some people who thought we were gonna like fall into the earth and think we all kind of survived that and it feels a lot safer. So any information because that impacts that intersection that it's really that main street point that Commissioner Motano was talking about. And so, you know, from your work, Pine Battery, St. Paul and Winooski would need the larger roundabout. And I think about that Winooski one and wonder what are those traffic calming because you come down, so coming down main street, pass union and we're not, I'm talking about going up right now, just passing down and then it's wide and then it's narrow. And I think figuring out, you guys are the traffic engineers, figuring out ways to communicate to all traffic, meaning cyclists as well as vehicles that we're narrowing and removing it instead of that big expansive space that you get right at the bottom of main street as you cross Winooski, so that would be helpful to see how that's gonna work if we can't, if we don't have the space for a roundabout, how's that kind of gonna work? Yep, so the consulting team did just complete the preliminary plans. We're working on getting a set to post online as part of the outreach that's about to happen. So that'll be available very soon for you to be able to see how the curb lines are changing throughout the whole corridor when the council approved the concept study, the general curb line goes from anywhere from 55 to 75 in each block, down to 40. What's that in relation compared to St. Paul Street? St. Paul Street's curb is 35 in the double-marked areas. Okay, okay, 40 I think is the curb-to-curb on Battery Street right now. I'd have to think of a street that actually has- Okay, okay, right, but just, I'm just trying to get a sense of like a street I've crossed that would be- So let me bracket that conversation with the crosswalks are 30 feet in general. Okay. So that's the neck downs that will happen each intersection crossing Main Street will generally be 30 feet. Okay, instead of the 55 to 70 that it is now. Okay, that's significant, significant change. And then related to the crosswalk is, you talked about the two-phase signal operation. I cannot express how important that is to be a pedestrian and to have a light turn you have now a target on your body and the vehicle is the assault weapon. So I think that two-phase, is that what that's called? The two-phase signal operation where the pedestrian has the comfortable lead instead of having a parent drag in a kid or hauling granny by the elbow that we really have a reasonable time to get to the end of the road. So thank you for adding that as well. Crosswalks, I think that was one roundabout question is it looked like Church Street may have been the one that kind of hit the marks on a possible roundabout location. It recently had the green circle on a couple of the pages. Is there any, except for one, activation space? Was there any consideration to try to situate around about somewhere in the corridor either start and end, battery, Winooski or somewhere in the middle? And what would that possibly look like? Yeah, if you wanna speak to kind of the one off for how single one would do. We were asked that question as we were doing our analysis and the benefits of once most locations are gonna be signalized are to have the whole corridor be progressed and get all the way through. And so to put a roundabout in the middle of that splits up those platoons. So then you would end up on either side of the roundabout with the potential for longer queuing and in challenges. And our challenge at church is although the traffic volumes are very low, the pedestrians are also very high. And so then you do end up in that situation that I said that the pedestrians may end up kind of gridlocking the intersection just because they're constantly crossing. Okay. Was there also an occasion where the side, the adjacent signalized intersections queue backed up through the roundabout? Yeah, well, given the size of the diameter of the roundabout, then the queuing side for the signals on either side would be that much smaller. So we would end up with then that congestion kind of through the roundabouts if it were isolated in the middle of the signalized. And that also would have potential impact or for more vehicular traffic than skirting and going down seeking street. I would encourage side street cut first. Okay. All right. That's all for now. Thank you so much for this presentation. Thank you. Mr. Overby. All of mine have been answered so far. Okay. I just didn't want to make sure that I was affected. Go for it. To start with, I know my first we talked about this name. There were actually three different design options for those intersections. The first one was the roundabout, the second one was signalized and the third one was the all-way stop like we have at Pearl and Wunewski. So that one, the one that's the all-way stop, right now that isn't in any of the materials here or am I missing something? Oh, the all-way stop for the pedestrian phase. Oh. When all four directions are stopped so the pedestrians can cross and finish that cycle. Right. So the challenge would be if we called that an exclusive pedestrian phase. And the challenge with the exclusive pedestrian phase is then that is added on to then the vehicular phases which really ends up increasing your cycling and increases then your delay for the pedestrians because they have to wade through all of the time that the vehicles are going whether it's the main street or the side street and then they get their time and it increases the delay for the vehicles as well. So your operations suffer on both sides. In addition, usually when you have an exclusive pedestrian phase you make it push button so that in those off-peak times or at like, you know, tonight there might not be as many people out there. You wouldn't necessarily call it every single phase. It wouldn't be on what I call recall. The advantage of the two phase with the leading pedestrian interval you can have that on recall so that I know anytime I walk up to that intersection that when those cars get the green before that I get seven seconds to cross the street to get started, you know, before the vehicle start I don't even have to push the button. I know every single time and the driver knows every single time that I'm going during that time as well. So the exclusive phase can be effective especially in a situation where you know you're going to have a lot of diagonal movements or there's, you know, a reason to include it but here on this quarter again to get progression we want the driver expectation to be where the pedestrians, when the pedestrians are gonna get to go and we want the pedestrian expectation to be and we want all of their delay and operation the delay to be low in their operation to be good and the best way to accomplish that is through the two phase cycle. Yeah, I've just noticed that that intersection at Pearl and Winooski is, it feels like one of the safest intersections for a pedestrian to get through and it really does clog everybody up and we all go at once. So I don't, I understand what you're saying about that people thinking it's gonna take longer and people have to wait but that is, that has some other consequences. Anyway, so that answers my question that you just thought there was too much delay for the drivers and too much delay for the pedestrians to wait to do a, everybody walks at once and okay. The questions that I have, I've got some other comment but I just wanted to, I had made some notes on my document that you had sent us in advance. And you talk about the design is to make sure that it's 20 miles an hour flow through for the drivers to get through down Main Street. That's the goal. What is the current average speed right now on Main Street that you are trying to reduce it from? In the downtown core between Winooski and Battery it was 24 miles an hour. It's the reported speed of vehicles. So right now it's like, so you're gonna, you want it to go down from 24 to 20. And okay, so that was one of the questions that I had. And on your page one of the, I think it is page one, I had a question about the projected anticipated an increase in traffic. And there's like three different numbers. You have in one place it says traffic volumes were increased by 7% to represent background traffic until 2037, which is what we're trying to design this thing for. But then a little farther down it says the conservative approach results in volumes approximately 40% higher than the traffic volumes originally modeled for the Champlain Parkway project. And then later on right after that it says and 90% higher than the CCRP C2040 regional model. So what are we anticipating this design is gonna handle the 7% the 40 or the 7 or the 90? Well, they're all actually the same number. So we looked at what was available for traffic volume projections for this time period. And there were a few things. There was the Champlain Parkway future volumes. There were the CCRP C regional model volumes. And then we developed volumes based on that we went out and did counts and showed how volumes compared to those other sources. We increased them by the 7% and then we also added the traffic associated with permitted developments. So then we did add in how is the really art enterprise going to affect downtown traffic? How is Champlain Parkway going to affect downtown traffic? How are all of these small condo developments going to affect downtown traffic and added those all in. And our point in that last sentence that you read was just to say when we built it that way, we ended up with volumes that were higher than was predicted when the Champlain Parkway was permitted a long time ago and when the 2040 regional model was created a while ago as well. So those folks weren't anticipating what we're seeing as potential traffic levels in 2037. And that's really to present that worst case scenario. Let's just make sure let's use the highest volumes. And so that's what we based our analysis. So are we anticipating 90% increase on the traffic on Main Street or 40% or 7%? I could find out what that exact number is. But what we did is we increased that traffic by 7% and then added those particular developments which at every intersection affected traffic differently. Because as you know the Champlain Parkway is going to change some traffic patterns is how people get through. It isn't just along the entire quarter a set percentage increase. The 40 and the 90 are just comparing to what people thought 20 years ago traffic would be. It's not actually what's happening out there. It isn't an increase over today. Okay, well that's why that was what I was trying to figure out because it's relevant to your charts which have projections. I assume the numbers include that 7% or 40% or 90%. It's the 7% plus those other developments are the numbers that are in those charts. But we don't really know what they are now but that's what you're assuming they will be. Partly, there's another question I have later that relates to this and I just want to make sure. So we started by instead of using those projections from other projects we started by counting the traffic. We went out and counted the traffic or in this case we actually looked back because it was COVID when we started this analysis we looked at the 2019 counts that were available for the quarter and we used those pre-COVID numbers as our baseline. So that would have been like the existing chart? That would have been like existing. That's the one that's listed existing. And then quite possibly yes. Okay. So we can't, so it's not really for 90 or 73. It is not assuming 40 or 90% over what's there today. No. That helps with that. If I can just kind of regroup and clarify that and maybe just kind of quantify it in a different way. We started with exactly what was our network in 2019. We added in everything that has DRV permitting. So everything that already has a permit to construct we took their traffic reports and added that in. And then we added the growth factor on top of that. What is the natural growth of the region that is going to continue to add possible vehicle trips? So this is very conservative. Even Parkway or VTrans or regional planning would say this is really conservative. At the same time what's happening in the downtown as it relates to adding residential units to our downtown wouldn't have been reflected in regional models because we didn't have residential units. There wasn't a lot to factor up, but there is substantial growth of residential units and other development in the downtown that's kind of creating the spike. But we're capturing that and making sure that it still works. Yeah. It was just sort of confusing to me that there were those three different percentages and I was trying to figure out how much more traffic are we talking about between now and 2037? Yeah. So one of my questions was about comparing the Shelvern Street dimensions so that one was like a 130 foot diagram. Just for the sake of comparing. Yep. It's similar to that more typical roundabout size, not the mini roundabout. Yeah. And one of the things you mentioned that I was wondering about is do it obviously it would seem like it would be adds work to do right away work. So that would be a factor that was mentioned if you had to do a roundabout and that it would add costs to like acquire property at different points. But just see. He's in the same spot here. I know you just to speak a little to the right away acquisition piece. The design team did work on trying to mitigate as much building impact with the positioning of the roundabout. So as you looked at the different examples that they've laid out for us, they are not an exact dead center line of Main Street just going down through to take four corners of four different buildings. They did work to strategically minimize as much right away impact as possible with citing each of the different roundabouts. Yeah. There was a mention of like three buildings that you said would have to be taken or demolished or something like that in the way that you had proposed the sides of the roundabouts that you had suggested. I'm still looking at, I think I'm at page four here on the safety impacts. And I know you sort of mentioned some of the safety things, but it doesn't really, maybe your document, I mean some of it you mentioned, but in here it really talks about more preventing head-on crashes and broadside crashes, but there isn't any real mention specifically about the pedestrian safety. I mean I knew you mentioned a little bit about the roundabouts, but there's a footnote in here too, and I think you mentioned it in your comments about this footnote study that says this CMF Clearinghouse says there's going to be an increasing accidents with vehicles and bicycles with roundabouts. Yeah. This does show that some studies have shown that there can be an increase in that type of crash between vehicles and cyclists much like in this part. Yeah. And how did you get that number that says here in the footnote that it says an average of increase of 38% if there's a roundabout? I can provide you with that link. When you go into the Clearinghouse, you do have to go into the tables. I did do that, and actually I communicated. Maybe you didn't get that, but I'm happy to follow up. Yeah. And that was a study that was done in the Netherlands in 2017, and it doesn't have very much specificity about it. And I sent quite a few links about safe roundabouts for bicyclists to the two folks. So I just wanted to know, since you created this, where you got that 38% more accidents, because it's a very ominous figure that I think is not supported by the document that I looked at online at the citation that I was provided. So just, I think that's something you guys can look at. Fortunately, we're at the phase here that we're just assessing how best to do this. And I realize there is so much complexity. I'm taking a digression here. It is very complex to decide whether you're using what you're talking about of trying to get all of the signals lined up so that everybody goes 20 miles an hour, which is what they've tried to do on Shelburne Road to make sure that you know that you can, you know, design a 30 mile an hour you're going to keep going. That's one technique that is interrupted when you have what you talked about, which you called the all stop or something like that. And it's also interrupted by the roundabouts. So you have different things that can conflict. I totally get that. I've probably studied more about this than I really want to know about all of this. But in fact, I'm sensitive to what you're trying to do. However, you know, I just feel like there's some questions that this document doesn't, isn't helpful in helping us decide how to do things. So that's why I'm asking these questions. So let's just see here. Blah, blah, blah, blah. You had mentioned on page six of your thing under signal operation that Battery Street, the intent is to have at the Battery Street signalized location a red arrow display when the walk signal, you know, the one of those no right turn kind of things. Yes. And because, frankly, one of the difficulties is people getting hit when a person makes a left turn or a right turn and they're looking for cars and they're not looking for people. Is that possible that that could be done at more than just the Battery Street, Main Street intersection? Is that something that is possible to be implemented at any of the intersections? It's something that we considered, but what we really wanted to do at most locations is an appropriate battery because of the heavy turn volume. At the other locations, we want that turning traffic to be in with the through traffic so that it creates that friction that keeps that driver speed down. We don't want someone to be in their own lane to take the right turn and get an arrow and be able to end that through traffic to speed by it. That's really what we don't want. And that's the benefit of adding a turn lane and protecting it and stopping it for pedestrians does help traffic operations, but it also, by helping traffic operations, increases speeds, which is really what we don't want on this court. I don't think I understand what you're saying. You're saying that you only use those do not turn right arrow things. Like there's one now at Maple and Battery. And so there's certain times when the right turn coming west on Maple, you cannot make a right turn or you're not supposed to the red arrow to go up Battery Street north. So you're saying that that is not used when you have a straight through lane and a right turn. I'm not sure I understand how you are differentiating this. Yeah, I think it's important to highlight the uniqueness of the traffic flow that occurs at some of these locations. Battery and Maple, it's a very heavy single turn lane. Because the side streets, they're not through destinations. They're not high use destinations. Commuting traffic is making a very specific move. Battery and Main is the same thing. Main Street is going to come down and prominent traffic is really going to split different directions and really actually does the same movement that Battery and Maple does. It's a very heavy single direction turn. Whereas the rest of Main Street's corridor really has a very predominant higher volume through movement from the counts that we've done. Yes, there's still side street traffic that peels in and out, but there's still higher volumes of through cars, which changes the way that these recommendations are. So you don't use them in an area where the assumption is people are mostly not turning. Correct. And or there's only, there's one lane. There's no separate way to do it. Correct. So you have to stop. Okay. So that answers that question. Let's see here. Just see here. I'm going to skip the heat island effect thing because I think that's sort of a bit of a non-informational kind of piece of information. Let's see here. Okay. So the signal progression. I think you answered the question about that. One other thing I know that is relevant at some intersections is sensitivity to actual traffic. And some cycles are skipped for a particular direction. Is that also going to be incorporated in on Main Street so that when there is, you know, the cycle doesn't just automatically cycle through and there's nobody to go in the other direction and people are sitting there and waiting and getting impatient. Will it be sensitive to the traffic that's actually needing to get through the intersection and also the people, frankly? We are fine tuning the design in that regard. I understand your frustration, especially that happens say late in the evening when, you know, you're on the side street and it's staying on the Main Street and you want to turn to you and it's not coming too quickly. What we want to do in this quarter though is set it up so that again, that pedestrian has that expectation that they're going to get the walk signal. And so chances are we will set the phases so that they do again at each of these locations, it's only two phases. It's either Main Street is green or the side streets are green. And so we would likely still keep everything on recall. So it does keep switching back and forth. But instead of waiting for 150 seconds to at some intersections, our cycle length is going to be at 100 seconds or less, which really makes a big difference. It really reduces the amount of time you're waiting for that green to come up for you. Well, yeah, one of the comments I'll make separately but is the perception of how long people are going to wait with regular users of an intersection, the longer their sense of it being await, the more likely they're going to step on it when they see a yellow line. So I'll deal with that separately. But the Elmwood and North Street intersection, which has also got an intervail avenue coming in on it. I don't know if you're familiar with these because, okay, that one is sensitive to not opening, not turning on a green for intervail avenue when there's no car sitting there. It's very important. And I walk through that intersection. I've been walking through there for 30 years and that made a big difference. The cycle is sensitive to the traffic. So when there's a lot of traffic on North Street, North Street keeps going. Green, green, green, green, green. There's no time. It's not on a timer apparently. Right. And that conflicts with your other goal of the... I've got to ask this question because maybe I misunderstood that too. When you say all Main Street is green and then all side streets, are you meaning the entire all seven intersections we're going to have green for Main Street and then they'll all switch and all the side streets? No. Okay, I didn't think so. But the way you said that, I thought maybe I was getting it wrong. But the details you're talking about is really fine tuning that we'll get into in the final design and we'll be making, you know, we would make those decisions as to whether it makes sense. And like in some locations, folks do make the choice that no, in 11 to 6 a.m., you know, 11 at night to 6 a.m., it's going to rest in the Main Street green and only change the side streets or pedestrians if there's a call. I mean, those are decisions that can be made. That was not our assumption though. That was not because we really wanted to meet the goal of really processing those bicyclists and pedestrians in a reliable, regular way. So we were really thinking of, you know, all day being a two-phase operation that it'll keep cycling to the side streets. And the information that I'm trying to share is that I don't think that that expectation that people will feel like there's a certain rule and it's all going to cycle around and I will wait is going to work. It works as safely as when it's on call and it's sensitive to the traffic and people are not sitting there. It encourages bad behavior, which I'll mention separately. So that's a separate thing. I know that I had sent a spreadsheet that I assume got sent of the different delay times and the delays and the queues between, you know, and I just, my quick question about that is from the data here, it looks like the same number of cars queued up are coming up with grossly different durations of weight. And I know, so just, and this is all posted so you'll get this. You can look at it between when we have to make decisions. I'm just referring to my fellow commissioners here. So I don't understand that and maybe you can explain that, that, you know, like your comparison, your performance comparison of 2037 says that in the eastbound or heading for I-89 at that intersection of Winooski in Maine, there's going to be a backup of 15.8 vehicles roughly. I just estimate 25 feet of vehicle. And the existing condition is that that takes a minute and a half to get through for a car. And that westbound, you know, in the afternoon, a peak hour heading for downtown on Main Street at that intersection, your statistic that you provide is that it's going to have, you know, a 19.4 vehicle backup, but it'll only take a minute for each car to get through. So that's one thing. And then you have the new one, the signalized in 2035 with those numbers, it's going to have a backup of 13.9 vehicles during the morning commute and it'll take just 3.2 minutes for a car to get through. So it's doubling. Yes. So happy to answer that. And then, yeah, as you increase, as the traffic volume increases and congestion increases, what ends up happening, you know, is someone may not be in the leg, may not be in the section, they may back up, their queue might back into the next intersection, in which case they're counted then as being part of the queue for the next intersection. Although that vehicle's delay is still associated with what's causing the problem, which could be the downstream signal. So your queue length is maximized by how long that length of that leg is, but your delay can be longer than that because you might get stuck further upstream and it might take you longer to get all the way through the intersection. And the roundabout option for the same thing, it's saying that it'll still have an 18 vehicle queue. So the other one was 15.8 and 13.9 and an 18 vehicle queue, but it's going to take five minutes to get through that same intersection. Yeah, that pedestrian fraction is that much higher because the pedestrians are pretty much consistently walking across the street. So between every car, it's pedestrians crossing. At the peak, at the peak period. These are peak hour data. That peak hour. And then when the westbound one, it's like the same 18 vehicle lineup and it's supposed to take eight and a half minutes to get through the intersection. You're just saying that's because there's all the pedestrians or they're slowing it all down. At the roundabout, yes. So there's just a constant flow of pedestrians. At some of the intersections, there is really constant flow of pedestrians. So it is the pedestrians that are making it difficult for the cars. Correct. Okay, so that's what I was sensing, but it wasn't clear to me what was with that. I think also highlight that those delays are for intersection. So you may get through one intersection after five minutes. You're going to hit the next intersection. It's five to eight minutes. It is 100% gridlock in the downtown during the peak hour with the roundabouts because nothing can move. Side streets can't move. It's a really tough location for a roundabout application with our pedestrians that we're encouraging that already exists today. And I don't know how those are actually factored. No, we did not do any factoring up of the pedestrian volumes. So the pedestrians are factored the same way the vehicles are. And we're encouraging more pedestrians to come use this area. Well, and it doesn't help that you have a stoplight at UVM, which is what backs it all the way up down to downtown. Right now. I mean, it is backed up all the way down to South Winooski every night from the Main Street North Prospect intersection. So we know there's a problem. Anyway, so I... These are some of the things that make me concerned about the information. And I'm not trying to shoot down what you're suggesting. I'm just saying there's going to be some... There's some things to think about that I don't think are quite clearly addressed in this memo and can be addressed better in, you know, further information. So let me just see if I know it's... Sorry, I'm taking a long time here, but... So your numbers that you have on the signalized performance chart on page eight, that includes the seven-second advance walk times for all those intersections. For the signalized, yes. The signalized ones? Yeah. So that does... And just a lot of curiosity. How do you define an A level of service versus an F? What's the... How does that... Yeah, there's a range in the number of seconds. So an F is anything... So that's just seconds based on... Yes. So an F is anything over 80 seconds and A through E are various intervals that are less than that. Okay. I didn't know what the... I figured it was. It doesn't really matter A through F, but because we've got the times anyway. So let's see. I think... Let me just see if this is... Okay. So that one, we've got that. Get that. All right. So make sure that I've got that. Did... Everybody gets 20, 23 questions. 23 questions? 23 ones. 23. Is that where I'm at? Good. No. Sorry, sorry. I knew it was going to be... I knew it was going to be a lot, but I tried to get rid of some of them earlier and I've been, you know, I've been struggling with this. So, you know, I have one, a couple of last things here. You had mentioned that you were saying that there was intentional to slow down the side street, increase the delay on the side street so that people don't try to, whatever, use an alternate. Okay. So I think that also, you know, could also feed into this problem of people thinking, oh, it's going to be a long way. They better step on it when I see the yellow. Okay. So then my last point, and I've got this all posted so that you guys can look it over, is that there's quite a bit of, I think there was a document that was provided in May and even before that about how expensive it is to have accidents at these intersections and that it is the number one most crash location in Vermont as of the 2012, 2016 data at that Winooski and Main Street location. And a recent piece, Tony Lorettington would be here and it would have spoken to this, that, you know, the cost is, you know, injuries and property damage is significant to the population. So the goal of reducing traffic to 20 miles an hour doesn't really solve that problem. It reduces it, but it doesn't remove, it doesn't cut back on crashes. It just cuts back on the intensity of them. And according to one of the documents that Tony Lorettington put together, I didn't verify whether this is accurate, but this is what he provided, that there was literally, there's like 78 different injuries that have taken place over that 10-year period and it's like $15 million of expense for the population that those poor people that got stuck with that. So this is an important decision for us to be making because I have a little bit of a concern that we, and this is why I asked the question about, is it 7% increase or, you know, if we've already recognized that we've cost people $15 million over 10 years in accidents on Main Street, what are we doing to make sure that we're not going to be continuing that just because we're continuing to have the same method of intersection control? Yeah, it's really a serious question. It's, you know, we're spending $30 million on this and, you know, it's going to be a bill that we're paying debt on for 2035, 3037. Safety is a critical issue. One thing I want to point out, and I don't have, and I can look up a reference for it, but I'm quite confident that when traffic is moving at 20 miles an hour, it is much easier to avoid a collision than it is when you're going 25, 30 miles an hour. So there is still, not only is the severity decreased, there is the expectation that, you know, crashes are easier to avoid the slower the traffic is moving. So, you know, I can't quote a source on that, but... Well, obviously that's why the roundabout, the example that we've used about the 15 mile an hour approach to the one in Athens, Ohio, you know, you do have time to be looking for pedestrians separately from looking for cars, which doesn't happen at a signalized intersection. The cars are looking to make sure they can get between the cars, and that's when the person gets this pedestrian that has, you know, used more than their seven seconds of free time gets hit. So that's a big worry for me. I walk everywhere, and I've been walking everywhere for 30 years. So my last thing, I made some concerns and comments in May. The four of those intersections are on the top, you know, the top 50 crash locations in Vermont, not just Burlington, we're talking Vermont. Number one is that main, in South Unuski, the 24th is main in St. Paul, 31st is main in Battery, 52nd is main in South Union. This is across the state. These are the most crash-prone locations. And then obviously that one at Perlin, Perlin, Unuski was one, but we don't know the statistics now. But I'm going to just mention what I had said before, and you can factor this in however you want. I had said that that roundabouts do provide 24-7 traffic calming. They create a safer intersection for both pedestrians and bicyclists, and I think if you look at those other statistics about the bicyclists, I think there's more information there. They keep the traffic flowing while there is traffic, and they don't hold it up when there isn't traffic. This is really important. The negotiation between vehicles at the intersection is separated from negotiation between drivers of vehicles and pedestrians making for a safer passage for everybody. Eye contact is facilitated between all users passing through the intersections resulting in safer passage for all. Roundabouts avoid forced greenhouse gas emissions caused by vehicles idling at signals when their movement is prohibited, even when there are no competing vehicles or pedestrians or bicyclists in the intersection. Roundabouts cut CO2 emissions by 20-30%. That's Tony Redding to the statistic. I have not researched it myself, but I'm passing that on. Signals at intersections are challenging to program pedestrians waiting to cross. Despite there being no other vehicles in an intersection, there's this intersection waiting experience that can induce drivers and pedestrians to unsafely ignore the signal and move through the intersection without regard to the signals. I see this happen all the time at Main Street and Church when people are trying to get over to the Flynn. I see it happen in other places. I do not see it happen at the Pearl and intersection where you have to always stop. That's why I think that's a good design thing. Compared to the Roundabouts, the signals actually unfortunately induce vehicles to step on the gas at yellow signals causing collisions with other vehicles. I've seen a decrease in the number of people going through the Elmwood, North Street intersection who step on the gas when they see yellow since that cycle has gone. There's more sense of fairness than ever. Even though you're saying that the design you have is predictability of weight, the people are, you know, you never mind read what's the most comfortable wait time for people and so people are going to go yellow, I've got to get through this, I'm going to hurry. Compared to the Roundabouts, frankly the signals lead pedestrians vulnerable to be hit by turning vehicles. Absolutely. The cars are looking for other cars are not looking for pedestrians. Compared to the Roundabouts, signals leave motorcyclists and scooter riders vulnerable to being hit from the rear while turning or they get rear-ended. Frankly, Roundabouts in the long haul are less expensive to maintain. They don't require electricity costs and can of repairs and equipment upgrades year after year. So that's just my last pitch after I've had some questions about the content of what you're presenting. So just things to consider we have time for you to think about it. I recognize, like I said there are competing ways of dealing with this problem of cars and people trying to get through Main Street. I recognize you have challenging a challenging thing to do. And I just feel like we have an opportunity here to spend the $30 million that we're borrowing and we'll be in debt until 2037 on this stuff to get it in a way that is not old school. You know, signals as usual we just use the same old, same old nothing new. I think we do have an opportunity. I don't know what we're going to do. I don't know what you're going to do. I just feel like this is our opportunity to do something that's going to actually be good. Otherwise, we wait until 2037 and try something else. And that's an expensive thing, an expensive experiment. So thank you for humoring me on this, but I feel like there's information that you should have and that we should all consider to make it a really great street if we really want to make it a great street. So, thank you. Sure. I just have a few quick questions. I appreciate Commissioner Overby's questions and comments that you've provided this evening. The cross streets, the pedestrian crossings at the cross streets is something that I'm personally really interested in and I saw that the memo references a seven seconds advance for folks crossing the main street, but is that the same number for the cross streets? Yes. Just for the shorter distance. We still are going to have that leading pedestrian interval at seven seconds for either. So they'll be able to get across that much further. And is the in the 2037 future traffic volume analysis is the city's ordinance around parking minimums along transit quarters factored into sort of those numbers? We made no adjustment for that. We really just looked at those traffic studies and traffic analysis for any of those permitted developments as well as those infrastructure projects and the anticipated traffic relocations. So we did not factor in any potential benefit from increased TDM, alternate modes, etc. And then I think just sort of based off of the comments tonight and I think what has gone on in the past, I think it will be helpful in future communications around this particular project and specifically the traffic intersection control study portion of this for staff to sort of elaborate more on why staff is recommending all signals versus some mix of roundabouts and some signals. Just I think that's going to come up a lot in future comments. Just sort of getting ahead of that. I mean to really briefly summarize it at this point in time staff is recommending all signals with the exception of Sasha Plain that would still stay as it's to you know side street stop signs. But I will let questions complete before I kind of regroup on that. Sure. I'm all set. All right. Thank you. Shifting gears for a minute. Can you briefly describe microtunneling? I am not an expert on microtunneling but basically the work that's going to happen so Mr. Logan is referring to the update proposes microtunneling as a way to replace a portion of the ravine sewer from the back of the firehouse actually out to its connection on the streets of the ravine sewer is about 20 feet in the ground a little shallower on the back of the fire station because that's so deep back there already and basically you're going to dig a hole in the ground and we're going to put a machine in there and we're going to core four foot diameter hole through the earth out to main street and dig a receiving hole and grab that there and pipe through it that's that's like the five-year-old I like it very clear but that will basically take the flow off the existing section of the ravine that goes kind of in this odd angle across the park a lot put it in a purposeful way across the parcel so that if and as that parcel redevelops it can be worked around in a meaningful way and it's a resilient piece of infrastructure great, thank you I guess the comment on which I gather at this level of planning here we don't have a lot of specifics for things I mentioned and I suppose the traffic is controlled with signals I think there's a lot we can do there and mention of course like the leading pedestrian intervals but also in terms of the treatments for people on bikes the current signalized intersections I've had close calls getting right hooked by people and they're not the only one there that if we can introduce elements of protected intersections there that's to consider it's really like as we're we're making this generational investment in our main street with per protected bike lanes on each side see what we can do about squeezing in some per protection at the intersection not only are people on bikes more visible with like the clear space the bump out of the shore and the crossing distance for pedestrians you're preventing people from cutting the corner and it's not plastic bowlers that need to get replaced that's where you're at a little bit of a disadvantage not having seen the preliminary plans so we will be posting those hopefully very very soon and then we'll lay that out to wishers great thank you look forward to that and the other concern I have with the protected bike lanes is the ability to turn and turn left I gather part of that is like a sort of a queuing area at the intersection to be able to cross and then turn yourself wait for your turn to cross go again very good I look forward to further details there out of curiosity why is the afternoon peak so much worse than the morning peak that's a great question and I'm going to guess in the morning peak what you don't have is the commercial trips that you have in the afternoon peak I mean think of even just I know from doing the parking study there's a bunch of parking available in the morning that is not available in the afternoon because you have those commercial trips that are occurring you have the reverse commuting trip home you know from workers but you also have then those shopping trips and that other activity and that's pretty typical in most locations yeah theater, dinner, restaurants I mean industry, national standard you know institute of transportation engineer's guidance the PM peak is is historic unless there is an interesting land use that happens once with the high school downtown actually was there that is the morning peak in the sanity of the high school that was actually worse for an hour it is very rare yeah great I would say just you know as an aside on the the documents spoke a lot to vehicle level of service inside of a love of sea sort of into a rounded and qualitative terms of love of sea level of service for best trans transit level of service is part of that as well vehicles are not the only player worthy of measuring the impacts here for just a comment on the sort of like the round about thing I think certainly we have the benefit of seeing the Shelby Street round about is a fantastic piece of infrastructure especially for drivers that's what it is and like the images that Commissioner will be shared from Akron Ohio and elsewhere if you zoom out there like those are suburban locations those are not urban places with a lot of pedestrian traffic I appreciate some in the Jeff's back others in the urbanism world caution about roundabouts in urban locations there's never really that full stop cleared phase for pedestrians to cross pedestrians they have shorter crossings and more of them in a longer roundabout way to get across primarily infrastructure fantastic in some applications and those applications are more likely suburban locations I appreciate your respect the analysis here certainly look forward to seeing the details as the designs evolve looking forward to seeing the data from the parking occupancy and turnover studies as well nothing else on my can't make a correction the Athens Ohio roundabout is on the campus of Ohio University it is not a suburban area it is in a highly traffic student crossing location so it's not that just didn't happen to me when I took the picture it wasn't anybody walking it's not a suburban roundabout just for clarification more like at the athletic campus trying to think what would be a comparable crossing let me think about it I'll tell you what it would be like let's let's check and see if there are any public interested speaking on this item sure okay hey it's me again I want to thank this yeah hello I want to thank the speaker for the excellent presentation I think it was really well done I think it demonstrates that the signalized intersections are the best option for main street I recognize I acknowledge the concerns that the other counselor had and they're strong advocates for roundabouts but I really think they're not congruent with an urban setting that should prioritize pedestrians one thing that a roundabout really does it very effectively is that it totally separates corners from each other right crossing diagonally is just a lot more difficult to the designers I wanted to ask if they're considering if they have considered already raising the intersection I think that would be extremely effective in meeting their goal to reduce the flow of traffic to 20 miles an hour and also to prevent that any collisions that might occur when vehicles are turning at the intersection at this point in time within our corridor we have a curblous section between church street and church street but that is really the only kind of raised intersection area that's being proposed okay I guess I would strongly advocate for you all to consider raised intersections they really increase the safety for pedestrians and cyclists and health event collisions they will regulate traffic flow to be slower at that situation where somebody is gunning it for yellow because there's a big speed hump in the way yeah that's all I have but I'm glad that the council sounds like they're going to go forward with recommending the signalized intersections that's great I think it's appropriate and I just urge you to consider raising the intersections to increase that safety and further your own goals for public comment on this item Jack I was just going to bring up the same point that Felipe brought up but I just wanted to be a plus one for the raised intersections as someone who is a daily pedestrian and very frequent cyclist and it's something that I think would be very much appreciated from a safety perspective when navigating that area of the downtown that's it thank you hi thanks I just wanted to first you know there are my support behind raised intersections for both cyclists and pedestrians and then also ask if any attempts are going to be made to add transit signal priority since the traffic times are going to be increased through these intersections and bus speeds are already extremely slow through the downtown corridor have you considered installing that thanks thank you as it relates to that type of preemption we're working with GMT we've been having conversations first about consolidated stops any rerouting that's happening the transit priority intersection hasn't come up as a topic yet but we can certainly make sure to cover it thank you do you have someone back in the queue who spoke to you Felipe yeah sorry I was waiting for so long to speak and I kind of forgot one major point and that's exactly what Michael Arnold just mentioned which is signal priority for mass transit I think that's going to be extremely important the committee's own own projections state that vehicular traffic is above trend so we want to be able to as a city encourage alternate transportation modes and part of that means giving them priority that's all noted thank you all right great we're clear we're not taking any action on this item it's time final if I can just wrap up and let you guys know where we're going with this with having recently received the preliminary plans we've distributed those to many internal city stakeholders but we're also going to be posting on the city's website and pushing that out to all the stakeholders who we have kind of engaged already through our process that are interested as well just letting people know that it's out there and available the comments that we're collecting are coming back to the design team mid-January so there's still time to be able to have this out there we're going to have our larger communication more than what's in your memo direction study and where we're at with everything so that's going to be out there I do want to highlight to the point about what our recommendation is in this memo seeing the impacts that come through with the signals versus the roundabouts staff does have very strong direction towards keeping the corridor signalized the right away impacts alone would make create streets main street project name inaccurate removing large portions of some of the downtown historic and oldest buildings would be a non-starter to moving this project forward that's my opinion obviously we've not done any outreach as it relates to that so specifically but just even from the businesses that we have engaged in some of these properties they're concerned about just the construction outside of this to say not having a home so with that thought the design team is on hold until mid-January at which point they will check this back up with our comments in any directions that potentially could change the course of where we're going but really the direction we're appointed is advancing with signalized intersections at this point time and we'll start looking into some of those other concerns that have been brought up to really refine this forward towards 90 percent the long-term schedule and that's not long-term is final plans and going out to bid in June of this year so we would then procure for contractor and work towards starting construction in September and obviously the plug of this project involves a lot more than just traffic and bike lanes and trees this will also refresh all of the water mains that remains under the ground the services that go to all of these buildings as well as the ravine work which will take a significant flow offline both in the immediate vicinity of the project but also as well as the blocks between Maine and Maple Street with the really long-term goal of being able to allow some of those properties to disconnect from that piece of infrastructure and allow the city to not rely on it so that's kind of the last peanut there thank you, appreciate it thank you very much for the welcome to the presentation if you have more questions for Jen we can keep everybody connected you know yeah, I appreciate the chance to have this dialogue here alright moving forward to item 6 on our agenda, it's a record report thank you for the commission for meeting this month and being able to focus the bulk of the meeting on this important issue for Maine Street I just want to echo that this $30 million generational opportunity is here because of TIFF, TIFF has a timeline the property rights and acquisitions that would need to be managed would flow out of the water the timeline you just heard so we definitely appreciate the input tonight and I think the comments on you know making sure the intersections are designed appropriately whether they're raised, how we manage the bike, left turning movements all those things we look forward to working with you on as we progress with the design I just want to thank the team for all the good work and our efforts to coordinate this with the south end construction coordination plan because this is yet one of many projects and we believe if things are successful with the federal budget bill in the next couple of days we will have additional good news for more big great streets projects for us all to tackle together in my director's report we talked about the Chittin Solid Waste Drop-off center, thank you everybody and trying to move ahead with that the stuck issue that we've been struggling with for years as you know currently the CSWD operates compost only at 339 Pine Street which is a sub-optimal range of services for our Burlington community we have worked to try to unlock this issue by offering the CSWD to have the city purchase outright the Flynn Avenue parcel which is three acres behind Metalworks 195-201 Flynn Avenue instead of entering into a complex 20-year lease purchase agreement for that property that could be revoked that would enable us to move our soil management operations we are currently happening at 339 Pine over to Flynn Avenue which could open up the potential to have a drop-off center at 339 Pine or at Flynn Avenue to give the community some choice so we're very bullish about this step board tonight I just got approved by the council earlier this month and that's good because the option to purchase the Flynn Avenue expires at the end of this month so I very much look forward to working with you all to improve drop-off center services for the public as well as our own soil management I included an update on the GMT budget FY24 I serve on the board with another commissioner Meg Pulit as well as two alternates and the budget coming forward staff has done a very good job in trying to make the best of a challenging situation the proposal is to increase Burlington's assessment 11% there is the reinstatement of fares all this with the reduction of federal support but the COVID funds have slowed still results in a 3% reduction in service over pre-COVID times one of the things I would love to get your support with moving forward is how we prioritize regional and statewide funding for transit because having it rely on the property tax in Burlington we pay over 53% of all assessments in the region is not a way to grow transit because we all know the property tax is regressive and a limited source of funding so challenge for us all to work on moving forward there were a few last project updates but happy to answer any questions in the commissioner comments great thank you for that moving forward item 7 on the agenda commissioner communications commissioner Damiani sure my only one is excellent job on the winter cleanup this past weekend I think really well I had sort of a three part sort of question to that is one is could you just briefly summarize what the department's communication plan is for winter parking or winter parking band specifically second is do we collect any data when folks pay their ticket online go pick up their car do we collect any data on sort of why people miss the message about that and then third is I didn't write it down it's okay just two parts then and I'll preface this too is that I live near where all the cars that get towed so I hear the tow trucks all through the night and that's not a complaint that's just a comment and this is sort of my first time being on the commission winter parking band and sort of sort of making that connection we'll hit the first two and if the third one comes into your mind we'll hit that one too and this is great timing we just had another kind of debrief of how this last snow band went internally which focuses on everything from decision making to the operations and communications so we had a pretty healthy debrief as we do after any kind of big event I think we consider snow bands always a big event even though they happen a few times a year in terms of the communications plan I'll just walk you through strategically we want to reach everybody we want to use many different modes to reach people even though in ordinance the official way is the overhead parking band lights we recognize you don't go outside because it's snowing or if you're out of town somebody's got your keys you've got to have other methods to reach people so tactically we have a bunch of things in our wheelhouse that we use first most powerfully probably is the VT alert system that is a state system it's a pass-through grant from the federal government that the state makes allowable makes the technology allowable to municipalities thankfully free of charge it's allowed us to reach you know depending on the issue between a few people to about 14-15 thousand people for really high profile events when we're trying to reach everybody in the system VT alert goes out for snow bands via text via email and via robocalls which we use for snow bands given that we're trying to help people avoid $150 fine as well as we want the streets to be safe we want the opportunity to clean them so I think Saturday morning the decision was made rather early to go out with snow bands so VT alert went out about 9 a.m. I think that morning hopefully giving people who got that enough time to prepare at the same time once the decision is made our operations teams kind of disperse and so the overhead parking ban lights are going on we have some challenges with the technology there to get them on all at the same time but basically we're getting them all on throughout the course of the day leading up to the 3 p.m. deadline by which time they have to be on we're trying to hit them early though we're trying to get those on as early as possible we've got three pretty active social media channels Facebook Instagram and Twitter and we've more than doubled our followers on two of those channels we're starting to get more active on Instagram just looking at the demographics and the trends of how social media is going nowadays so we are now posting to all three of those channels the Burlington BT.gov website for any really high profile event including snow bands we'll have a yellow kind of red alert on the main site that will transmit to every Burlington BT.gov site so that's only applicable for things like snow bands or boiler water advisories where if you go to any Burlington BT page you'll see the message there'll be a link with more information there's some DPW specific messages that you've got to come to our pages for just giving you details just in case you see things sometimes on one page or another we're also sending a press release out pretty much with the VT alert that goes to all the main television channels, radio channels high profile stakeholders who might have a large network where they can disseminate news such as yourselves, city counselors things organizations like the BBA Champlain College emergency management team at BT alert folks like that and I may be missing a couple off the top of my head but tactically we're oh and then we've also translated our some of our most important messages into a couple different languages we're at now I think seven for snow bands and in fact one of our internal employees was just able to translate into a new language so for the next snow band we'll have both Zanski if I'm saying that correctly translated to hit that that's important for us we've just taken on the pine street team side our first tele-language call the water resources teams now had about three or four of those that's an opportunity where people can call in and get real-time information interpreted patched through immediately to an interpreter that worked really well myself and Val Charm our customer service supervisor was able to talk to a new resident about setting up the recycling services trying to get everybody that's kind of relevant to that trained up so that more and more of us can speak such as calling the enforcement the parking services enforcement team about where their car might be we want them to be able to help anybody have a language barrier so that is an important tactical goal of ours but we've expanded our communications to have the snow bands translated into a couple different languages those go out a few different ways we've tried to encourage the media to push those out haven't seen a ton of success with that but we're hoping that they can be good partners on pushing out translated languages I think tactically that's probably where I can leave it for our communication to your point to your next question about have we tried to unpack how people are missing this you know one of the things we realized for this unique storm is that first night when other municipalities did call the snow band operationally we didn't see the need for it we did put out a message through all those channels except VT alert because we can't use VT alert for non urgent things so that didn't that didn't allow us to send one out on Friday but we did let the community know as broadly as we could through the media other channels that we wouldn't be doing a snow band but we would reconsider one for Saturday morning I think for this recent round a lot of the anecdotal feedback we got through our parking services team is that folks didn't think we would call one when there was no more kind of snow falling throughout Saturday even though the cleanup was clear the operational team that they needed the curb to curb cleanup so we could collect that data anecdotally but I don't think formalize the approach yeah I was just curious just to try and figure out how a lot of people potentially missed that message and I guess the third part was sort of when they do pay the ticket are they reminded of all these you know these numerous options that they could try and get that message yeah one of the things that the new parking the interim parking services manager and I kind of unpacked was that elevator pitch on how to avoid these things in the future so yeah awesome thank you all right thank you I just had a couple questions on what the status of the marketplace garage construction is how's that going you have any information on that I unfortunately don't have full details work is underway I know the work is critical there's some beam patching that will enable the garage to extend its lifespan but I can get you more information after I talk to Jeff and Matt part of what drove that is a friend a person asked me about the employee downtown employee discount or free parking at the new downtown lakeside slash cherry or cherry street garage or college street garage and expanding the whether or not it would be something that could be considered expanding the employee free parking to the marketplace garage and with the construction under obviously not but I also thought it's that wasn't possible anyway and and I noticed that bank street is now like one way and has had the parking meters removed what's with that that something was on agenda that I completely missed I think what you're talking about is the encumbrance for city place partners to construct city place on bank street between saint paul and pine and the developers anytime the adjacent property owner wants to use the public right of way they need to go to the license committee and then go to the full city council and so city place partners did that for this first phase of work on their foundation and there will be right now there is no reduction in parking on street they have reduced travel lanes but no parking to date their second request for an encumbrance coming in several months not imminently will likely have parking impact is that are they paying for those spots then the ones that have been but the people are parking it without having a meter so if there is a meter obstruction then the adjacent property owner through that encumbrance agreement has to pay for the lost revenue yeah I wasn't sure if you'd put in like one of those little kiosks somewhere else so that the those spots are now on a kiosk and not the meters because the meters are missing it's a lucky spot to park if you know about it park on that stretch of bank or I just was curious because I hadn't seen I hadn't noticed that until I went I was talking about if they encumber the parking space that they need to pay for what you're discussing is that the public parking is still available but that the meters are not at the space and therefore what is happening to that revenue I was just curious yeah what happened of that because usually we that has come to the it's come to the commission and I figure I missed whatever meaning that happened at that's a good question I'll follow up to good questions okay thanks that's all Commissioner Mutano just a couple comments yeah I thought the response to the storm last weekend was outstanding and especially the Riverside Avenue bike lanes and these other so-called like main bicycling corridors I was surprised I was pleasantly aware and was happy to find them like all readied up before all of the other sidewalks and all around I found that the pedestrian rights way were clear and I think that's a good signal for residents people who use those modes that the city really does care and I hope that we can keep that up that's all happy new year everybody thank you Commissioner Mutano Commissioner Barr I'll echo the prep and cleanup we heard them all night long and I almost suspected that maybe college students and maybe that's why all the cars were there my street is predominantly college students but other than that my only comment or question is on the intersections that have the white ballards plastic ballards and it might be because it's new on my street and maybe the plows came by and took them out but it all of them are gone now and I didn't see like fix to see it but I'm just curious if that might become if that is just a phase thing I'm not remembering if we were actually going to do a bump out there and this would go for anywhere if we try these stage events yes we are evaluating that intersection bump out for whether it design or the geometry of it works for a permanent installation same thing we did in other quick build installations like five corners so yes they can be a challenge and we've struggled with ballards and plowing around them on our narrow streets and that's why ultimately curbing is our best friend because the plow follows the curb line instead of plowing through it and I'm not sure if it was that are coming down they just don't see it we will reinstall in the spring alright vice chair on the other side yeah I was looking for the usually UVM sends an email as well but I have all my public works in UVM I don't know Commissioner Mutano if you got a UVM one about the snowman and I don't know if it was because it was technically the end of the semester but I was just checking my deleted email and I didn't see it in there because when we get it from UVM that can also hit the students when they do a blast because it was the end of the semester maybe right I did have a competition with the first management director during our office that confirmed that he was going to encourage them to come in and where to have them tap or to see if there was any way that tap into the kind of products communications really good conversation so I know they're on it they did say they would have to sign up to some of their web pages film and it's on my kind of project from the one office I think I have a few officials I did learn that my presence on so I was on that list and the conversation had me off clear that we prioritized not enforcing addressing students we want them to know about this so I understand that snowman information is a little bit more broadly disseminated online and that there's already some place that we're sharing information so I don't think so. Commissioner Mochano, you're at U of M, right? Yeah, I also had a little trouble hearing that last part but I got an email man I had the date not about the specific parking ban so on the 14th just like a reminder that hey it's wintertime there might be parking bands but not for the particular weekend one but I think in the past I've gotten regular and dependable for all students and staff faculty members anyone that can be reached that way would be outstanding advance notice. I think we missed if you made a recommendation we might have missed if you made a recommendation on how to reach faculty and staff. Yeah, I can get the exact name I'm on campus right now and I guess the internet just went out but let's see what it's called essentially like a mask like a mask email they send it like it's a student alert they often send it with regards to like crimes that occur off-champus might as well use it for something that's directly applicable for individuals Well I will say one of the reasons we are trying to be more proactive on Instagram is to reach just looking at some of the demographics there's a younger crowd that's much more active on there so that was one reason we wanted to make sure our information is out there too just to recognize there's a trend line in how social media is being used we're seeing way more feedback there than we are on Facebook which used to be our big platform so that was one approach to try to reach some of the younger folks who might see this online but be happy to follow up to see if there's more connection we can make with UBM to see it proactive I can share with you my former position I got all these messages and then I would put them out through my both the parking emails and through our transit we have an online app that allows us to send out information what you're talking about Commissioner Mutano is a email which I was told while I was there that they don't want to keep doing that all the time because if they do it every time somebody wants to then you get inundated and people stop reading it so they use that for only massive critical things so what I would do is I would send out emails when I got this message I would forward it and then we would send it out to everybody who owns the vehicle or has a permit with us and then we put it on our so if you reach out to the interim director Taylor.page at UBM.edu and I can give you some information but they can send it through the parking.edu that's free thank you we'll make it out alright so two non-snow ban related issues I know thank you one is could we add meters to South Union by the old YMCA it used to be the drop off spot for preschool and I think there are like three spots there that have no meters maybe three or four on the right in front of the old Y on Union street before you get to city market and there's like a bank of four of us anyway yeah and I'll just yeah I'm full of them um good thoughts you're all full of it I know I know she meant it a good way finally the mid-block crossing at main street I just saw the RFB go in the rapid flashing beacon go in on main street by summit which is a main corridor for the O'Neill-Vivonko family and many others should we take it out and the Weinberger family but I saw that go in and my 13 year old was like oh my god it's going to be so much easier to cross there when everyone stops but really appreciate that I know that has their issues around where and how to place so that they are affected so thank you great thank you couple things heard a report of a sketchy left turn at the Shelburne street roundabouts coming down the ledge not familiar with the area probably following GPS guidance to turn left at the bottom of ledge this was a couple weeks ago I looked at the maps at that time and I think they weren't quite caught up I checked again yesterday on Apple Maps and Google Maps and they both seem to be up to date at this point for my cursory look in terms of it if you ask for directions from ledge to get down that way it's telling you to go down, turn right go around the circle as would be there's no errors just a note on like infrastructure changes how that makes it through to third party uses and navigation things yeah concerned that the the white crosswalk crosswalk markings in the Shelburne street roundabout are pretty tore up already it's not it's to be kind of for the longevity of the materials or insulation methods used there I don't know if that was like a temporary thing that we're planning to do next winter but it's been plowed on like twice and they're gone yeah yes we have noticed that issue and we will be following up with the state and the contractor I believe that there are warranties on those installs and we'll be addressing in the spring excellent thank you winners are negative reports that pass along for recycling and trash receptacles ending up in the bike lane on Willard street usually some of the city blue ones and some private things I don't have timestamp pictures or anything to go with those anecdotes but just a reminder for all of our service providers in town to be respecting that right of way thank you for the update by email today about what's going on with the construction portal and future directions of getting project status updates out to folks to follow along on that future meetings we're interested as well and lastly speaking of reinstalling plastic things in the spring can you give your sense of what's happening on Union Street protected bike lane is that intending to replace that or are we waiting for better ballards or money for curb or we're struggling with that one as you pointed out we are seeking to install this year the north Champlain street two way separated bike lane with concrete curb and we are hopeful that this will be a much more viable separated design technique that better withstands bowing and is much more durable given the narrow right of way on Union Street we've really struggled to keep those ballards in place and then frankly we've been struggling with summer staffing we've had a number of open positions that's limited our production so sidewalk production this year by the street team was down significantly and we had to get the contractor our contract team to step up their production in order to get the sidewalk production we needed so this the we're coming to the realization that either we need a more durable tool that is more resilient or we're going to need to add FTEs positions to be out there much more regularly reinstalling ballards that get knocked over so we don't have it right yet I acknowledge that we're trying to learn from north Champlain and we're going to need to be working with you if we want to install the ballards and maintain them better we're going to have to figure out how to fund some additional positions sure thank you just one quick reaction there in terms of more temporaries and pouring concrete seeing elsewhere like plastic ballards helped out with some sections of curb stop other things like interspersed in there so it's not quite as pleasant to drive over otherwise I mean certainly vendors market other horizontal vertical delineators as well but like something like cheap concrete sections in there like reflective tape I think that the problem that we've found and I'm open to continue the conversation is that unless the concrete is fully installed and not just pin that it will come up and we have not found an installation we tried the armadillos on north avenue and we have tried some pinning but hasn't been a match for the ballard short of jersey bearing not going to move that but it also doesn't look very nice better ride in a jersey barrier protected lane than imaginary ballard protected lane great thanks for that update I appreciate it I'll think further on my ends with that I will close commissioner communications and move forward to our next agenda item adjournment January 18th we have a motion from Commissioner Barr I'll second the motion second from Vice-Chair O'Neill-Levanco is there any discussion around that motion alright let's go to both then on the phone Commissioner Mutano Commissioner Barr Vice-Chair O'Neill-Levanco Commissioner Oberby Commissioner Damiani I for myself we are adjourned 836