 Welcome everybody. Thank you for coming to the first public meeting for the Fort Worth Active Transportation Plan. We're really excited to be kind of kicking off this planning process with you all. As Julie mentioned, my name is Darren Flushay, and I'm a senior planner at Tool Design Group. We're the lead consultant on the project, along with Kimley Horne. And the city of Fort Worth and the North Central Texas Council of Governments are the kind of the project team for this plan. And we're being supported by the Blue Zones project, and we appreciate their support and involvement. So the format of today's meeting is I'll be giving some brief introductory remarks, working through some slides, talking about what's the background for planning, for bicycling, walking, and trails in Fort Worth, and discussing a little bit more about active transportation broadly, and then the elements of this plan and this planning process. And then we'll break out into the public meeting boards where we'll really want to hear from you all about your priorities for biking and walking and trail use and connections to transit in Fort Worth. So there are three ways to provide feedback for this plan, this planning process. The first is interacting with our interactive boards, and that'll come at the end of this presentation where you can talk to the planning team and provide your input. The second is completing an interactive survey that's online, it's a cool map, and you can label the locations in which you want to walk, want to bike, currently do in some of the barriers, and that'll really help us in our planning process to identify some of the priority areas. And then the third thing you can do is fill out a comment form that's located at the sign-in table and give us your feedback that way. So background on planning for active transportation in Fort Worth. The first thing I want to do is sort of describe the goals of the plan. The purpose of the plan is to coordinate a strategic approach to planning for biking and walking in the city that supports people who walk, who bike, and that includes people with disabilities. The active transportation plan for Fort Worth will serve as an update to Walk Fort Worth, the pedestrian plan, and Bike Fort Worth, the biking plan, and it'll be the first ever city-wide trails master plan in the city. Throughout all of those three elements, we're going to be focusing on connecting people to transit, so helping people get to bus stops and train stations. So over the last eight years, the city has made a lot of progress on developing active transportation facilities to improve health, safety, air quality, and to maintain Fort Worth status as a clean, livable city. So the progress has been made through a series of plans. We've got the Bike Fort Worth plan that was adopted in 2010, and the Walk Fort Worth plan that was adopted in 2014, and a lot of the coordination of the various activities around the active transportation initiative in the city has been coordinated through the Blue Zones project, which was kicked off in 2014. And then more recently, we've got the Complete Streets policy and the Master Thoroughfare plan update, both of which are going to be heavily coordinated with this plan. Once the Thoroughfare plan was completed, it was clear that the biking and walking plans and the trail plans needed to be updated through this process so that everything was in line and working from the same assumptions. So a quick snapshot of where some of the funding and investments have come from Fort Worth. The sidewalk investments have come primarily from a 2014 bond, so $10 million for sidewalks, and with support for $3.2 million awarded through the Safe Routes School Program supporting children getting to school safely in seven schools in the city. On the trail side, the city has been working closely with Terry County Regional Water District and Streams and Valleys to build and maintain trails in the city. On the bike side, since the 2010 Bike Fort Worth plan was adopted, the city has installed 80 miles of bike lanes in the city and more recently has developed separated bike facilities with a vertical separation or buffer between the bicyclists and the automobiles. So we've made a lot of strides in planning for biking and walking, but still a lot of the planning that's happening is opportunistic and reactive rather than proactive and strategic. So the goal of this plan is to develop a, find out what the community priorities are and then develop an overall master plan and strategy so that we can prioritize the investments that we have really carefully and get the biggest bang for our buck. So before going into the specifics of this planning process, I just want to kind of talk a little bit about active transportation in general. So what is active transportation? Well, it's walking, biking, trail use and transit access, and that includes wheelchair users and people with other mobility assistance devices. And who does it benefit? Well, it benefits really broadly the community, everybody, anyone with children, biking, walking to school, families, people trying to get to the transit station, people with disabilities who need curb cuts and smooth pavement and sidewalks, people who walk and run for transportation or recreation and people who bike. So in this active transportation plan, who are we planning for? Historically, there's been an idea that if you build the roads a little wider, then the people that want to bike will bike, and I think we're coming around to the idea that people are really demanding more comfortable separation from traffic and a different kind of approach to planning. So the kind of the core objective of this plan is to plan for all ages and abilities, everything with children, adults and seniors, people with all different ranges of abilities, so that it's a plan and it's a transportation network that works for everybody. And this is supported by public opinion. The North Central Texas Council of Governments recently did a survey, primarily focused on bicycling, but included this question on pedestrian safety, which half of the respondents said it's essential or very important to have lower traffic speeds on community roadways to improve safety of pedestrians and bicyclists. And a survey that asked people, not just bicyclists, but the general population where they preferred to bike came in really clearly that relatively few people are comfortable on a major roadway, four lane road, that has no designated location for biking. But as you start carving out space, a standard bike lane or a separated bike lane or trail, people become more and more comfortable and this is reflected in research all over the country as well. This just happens to be from this region. And then similarly majorities of people say that there are currently too few trails, too few bike lanes and too few bike racks in the city of Fort Worth, or in the region rather. So again, who are we planning for? All ages and abilities. So there's a convention or a way to evaluate streets that say is it comfortable for everybody? Is it fully separated from traffic? Is it comfortable for people that may be interested but concerned? Or is it only going to work for the really brave and adventurous folks who don't mind sharing lanes with traffic? And so our goal here is to really focus on the first and the second populations so that everyone, so if you make it safe for children to ride it's safe for everybody to ride. So what trips are we planning for? Where do you like to bike? Where do you like to walk? Is it always going to be that long commute to work? Or is it more those local destinations? And so this is going to really drive our planning process trying to understand what are the destinations that people want to go to and where do we prioritize those investments and those facilities. So a little bit about the planning process. You're in it. This is it. One of the first steps is stakeholder engagement and we're doing that in a couple different ways. One is the, on the right hand side there, the interactive map that I mentioned. So that's something that we can do at the station in the back after this presentation and everyone can follow that link and again just identify the locations that are most important to go and it will help us understand where the community priorities are. This meeting is part of a series of public meetings that will be held. So there will be three rounds of four meetings each and so you can see the dates there for the upcoming public meetings. This is the first of four of this round and then we'll be coming back in September to say here's what we heard from you all and here's some of our initial ideas for the networks and then in December we'll come back with a draft plan and say what do you think and gather public input on that before we finalize it. So another early step that you'll see some evidence of today is the existing conditions analysis. So we've been gathering information on where people are riding, where the crashes and where the existing facilities that will really help us think about where the demand is for future investments. So this is an example of one of our crash maps and you can kind of start to see where some of the corridors that are just have a lot of killed and seriously injured crashes and non-KSI non-fatal crashes as well. You can kind of see some of the key corridors and some of the concentrated clusters where the crashes are occurring. Then we've mapped the existing bike facilities. We've got the trail corridors here in green. The brown are the unpaid trails and blue are on street bike facilities. Then we've got the sidewalk and transit network as well. So you can kind of see where the clusters of sidewalks are and where some of the gaps in the residential neighborhoods are as well. We're also looking at some equity issues. So in kind of in coordination with the race and culture task force that the city has undertaken we're analyzing where the majority minority neighborhoods are and whether or not they have access to trails and on-road bike facilities. So the red here is not within a half a mile and the yellow is within half a mile and then for access to bike share the purple is not within and the yellow is within half a mile. You can kind of see where there's some work to be done to make sure that the whole city has access to safe and comfortable facilities. Then we looked at where the zero car households are. So if people don't have access to a vehicle in their house they're going to be more dependent on walking safely to transit and to their destinations and biking as well. Then we looked at the share of the population who bikes and walks to work and the share of the population that takes transit to work and where some of the hotspots are in the city to help us look at where the demand is currently. And so using all of those maps and all that data we were able to come up with where the top demand is for biking and walking in the city. So you can see here on the left this is the full range from low demand to high demand and you can see highest in the center and kind of tapers out as the population gets more diffuse and then on the right we just said let's just look at the hottest of the hottest the highest of the high demand and you can see those kind of those pockets in those neighborhoods and these are the factors that we used to determine this demand analysis. So where's the population where's the employment where are the transit stations, the bike trailheads schools and zero car households. So once we complete the existing conditions analysis we'll move on to developing the network. So we'll take the existing transitions, we'll start developing some initial ideas that's the September meeting I mentioned and then we'll make recommendations preliminary and final. And from that the really key step is we've talked about being strategic and with the limited resources that any city has we want to make sure that we're hitting the top priorities and so we're going to develop an implementation plan that scores each of the projects and says these are the ones that really need to be done in the short term big bang for our buck and then kind of out to a 20 year time frame saying these are some of the other aspirational projects that the city should be thinking about as well. You're all here today not to listen to me but to talk to us. So we want to hear from you. We've got several activities we want to hear your vision for biking and walking so there's a board back where you can grab a post-it note and say you know whether it's safety or a connected network or whatever being able to get to safely to get to breakfast tell us your vision and then community priorities so is it about improving the existing facilities that we have existing sidewalks or building new sidewalks same for trails and bike facilities and intersections. So let us know that'll be really critical for us to wait the improvements because there's a million things we can do we want to hear what you all think is most important and then there's a question of where are you going where do you want to go where do you want to be able to go safely so you can tell us the types of destinations you walk to or want to walk to or want to bike to and then you can show us on the maps exactly where those destinations are and then the other thing we're interested in is your typical trip distance when you get on your bike are you going for 20 mile recreational rides or shorter utilitarian trips how long is your typical walking trip again that's going to help us think about the distances that we need to be planning for finally there's a station where you can complete the interactive map that map is great you can tell us about all of your destinations and desired routes city-wide and then you can go on and answer more detailed questions about the Trinity Trail system as well so that's it and thank you for thank you for listening and that's the reminder of the next public meetings and please do tell your friends about the interactive map as well thank you for listening