Mobility Committee Meeting Transcript –5/9/2016 Title: ATXN 24/7 Recording Channel: 6 - ATXN Recorded On: 5/9/2016 6:00:00 AM Original Air Date: 5/9/2016 Transcript Generated by SnapStream ================================== [8:52:30 AM] Committee [8:58:38 AM] committee. Mobility committee mobility committee. [9:19:11 AM] >> Kitchen: Good morning everyone. As you can see everyone is running late this morning. My apologies for that. I think what we're going to do is go ahead and get started.There are other members of the committee that are on their way, but we can begin with some activity that doesn't require a quorum. So let's see. I'm going to call this toorder. I think -- I'm checking to see if we have any citizen communication. Did anybody sign up for citizen communication? Okay. A couple of you did. So -- all right. Well, why don't you start first. >> Thank you, chairperson kitchen and members of the committee. I'm Gerard Kinney, lifelong austinite/architect. And I'm also, as you may know, president of seemic Austin and a member of the seemic Texas check tif committee. I'm here to speak in citizens communication on the item of billboards. Billboards are a detriment to safety, driving safety, and in addition to blocking views of our city from the roadway, they also pose a danger to driving. Digital billboards are particularly dangerous, and we're -- as you may know, we are in the middle -- I know you know because you were on the council when the council dictated a -- suggested a 120-day community conversation starting in January, which will culminate at the end of this month. So we're 80% through that process, that community conversation. In fact, the poll at speak-up austin.org terminates at 5:00 today, so after 5:00 today the process will be different. It will be -- you'll [9:21:12 AM] probably -- council people will begin -- we've held off asking our semic Austin supporters from contacting council members out of respect for the process that the council dictated, but they'll probably be contacting you between now and the end of may, and I urge you to not only oppose digital billboards but also get back to the 1980 citycouncil objects of getting billboards out of Austin, that you will take that into account. I did not sign up to speak on the vision zero issue, which is your first action item. I did sign up in favor, but I don't want to take your time speaking on that item. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you very much. Yes, please come down. I apologize, my computerdoesn't appear to be working, and so I'm just going to ask who signed up. You can go ahead. >> If you don't mind, I appreciate very much. I have a copy. >> Hi, I'm Mike Levi, I represent the public safety committee on the zero vision task force. We have a very hard time understanding the report. It left out one key recommendation with respect to the fact that 34% of all fatalities involve a driver whose license is either suspended or they had no license. We wanted to extend the [9:23:13 AM] discussion to neighborhood streets as well as high-speed roadways. Our neighborhood was -- rarely if ever sees enforcement, so we retained an -- >> Kitchen: Mr. Levy, you're speaking on zero vision, right? >> As I understood communication -- as I understood the rules, if three that's comment on an agenda item, we're supposed to do it in general -- >> Kitchen: No, no, it's okay, because we might take action on vision zero. You can speak to that when we come to it -- >> I was told. >> Kitchen: If you want tofinish you can or you can wait. >> I'm sorry. >> No problem. Okay, that's all of our citizen communication so let's go ahead with approval of the minutes -- okay, a motion from council member Garza and a second from council member Zimmerman. All in favor? All right. The minutes are approved. Now, my understanding is that we're going to take one item out of order because there was a need to leave early, if I'm understanding correctly. Item no. 7, was it, that we needed to do first? Is that correct, from staff?Yes? Okay. All right. If you'll go ahead and -- we'll take item no. 7 and then we'll go back to taking the items in order. >> Good morning council members, my name is Rosietruelove. I'm the capital contracting officer for the city of Austin, and I'm here to give you a brief update on the solicitation process for the city of Austin street impact fee ordinance. This particular rfq was issued in March, on March 7 of 2016. We had 50 firms who obtained the request for qualifications, and when the responses were received on [9:25:15 AM] April 4, we had two that turned in a solicitation response. Our evaluation period was April 8 through April 26, and we anticipate council action coming to you on June 9. This went through our standard professional services selection process, and so our evaluation criteria applied where we looked at, first did they comply with the mbe/wbeprocurement program and did they turn in the retired documents. Their project approach, their key personnel, their comparable project experience, major scopes of work, the team's experience with Austin issues and the city of Austin's experience with the prime firm. Some of the key items in the comparable experience we looked at were dpoa. Of impact fees with other municipalities within the last ten years. Understanding techniques and sequencing required to develop transportation impact fee programs.We looked at the specific experience relative to that for their key personnel, and whether or not they had experience interacting with multiple stakeholders. Their ability to perform in the major scopes of work included looking at traffic engineering and transportation planning, land development and planning, urban planning, public information services and community engagement, financial and economic analyses and civil engineering. We do anticipate that this item will come forward at your June 9 meeting, and I'm here to answer any questions that you may have. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> Zimmerman: So is this typically what we do, we hire a consultant to tell us what the street impact fee ought to be? Is that what we've done in past years, past councils or -- >> It's certainly an option that staff can take when developing this kind of program, and in this case the transportation department sought to acquire the services of an engineering firm to help with this. >> Zimmerman: The question was, have we done that inprior years with prior councils? That's a yes/no question -- [9:27:17 AM] >> Kitchen: Councilman social security this is the first time -- this is the first time we're doing a transportation impact fee. We may need council -- we haven't done one in the past. If you could remind us the transportation impact fee, what that is and the process? >> Yes, council member. Currently we do not have an impact fee as defined by the state for transportation purposes, and so we do tias to determine the impact of larger developments and through a process that we've used in the past, figure out howmuch participation that particular development needs to participate with. For smaller developments they slip through with little or no participation in the infrastructureprocess, so this is development of a new process. We're looking for firms that have experience in other Texas cities or nationwide that might be able to bring that expertise to set up the new process. >> Zimmerman: I just remember in many cases we had extensive conversations about the traffic impact of certain zoning and site plans and development -- remember the Garza tract? We had a civil engineer come in and talk at length about traffic impact analysis. That's why I thought we had -- we were alreadycharging some kind of fees in some form or -- no? >> There is a form, but many in the community have indicated they feel that that is less effective than moving straight to a transportation impact fee, much like our drainage impact fee provides a base level of funding year-round. But this is a new process, and so that's why we're looking for outside expertise. Following this, council member, on an annual basis, we would treat this like a similar other fees where we would come for approvals from council if that feewere to change, but to set up the initial concept -- >> Zimmerman: So we have a fee right now when we get our water bills, electric bills, right, there's a listing of fees? You mentioned the -- you know, the water -- watershed fee, and we have trash fee [9:29:18 AM] and clean streets, I think it is, clean, whatever it is, fee. Is this going to be another line item on the bill or -- >> -- No, sir, this would be assessed at the time of change or use or development, so it's a one-time fee separate from those user fees. >> Zimmerman: Thanks. >> Kitchen: It's a fee on the developer? >> Yes, sir -- yes, ma'am, sorry. >> Kitchen: And my understanding is it's a feeon the developer and the purpose of the fee is to come up with, you know, a -- an approach to determining the development's impact on transportation -- on traffic -- >> Right. >> Kitchen: And on the traffic infrastructure. >> Zimmerman: So it's kind of like a parkland fee, right? Whenever there's a development, now there's a fee assessed, set aside parkland -- >> I don't know the ins and outs of that fee but yes, it's similar, at the initial development stage. And what we also hope to do through this process is to enable us to use those monies within districts, not council district but within travel sheds, if you will, to better meet the needs ofour traveling public. So -- to take account of the impacts up front. >> Kitchen: Because if I'm remembering correctly the transportation impact fee is authorized under state law so there's a process we have to go through to determine what those fees are, and then it gives us more flexibility than we have right now about how we use those fees. >> Yes, ma'am, it's a different process than what we use right now. >> Kitchen: Okay. Council member Gallo? >> Gallo: So will this take the place of the tia? >> Well, the tia is actually a process to analyze on big projects. It will affect that tia process and hopefully make it more efficient and self-evident, but I would foresee us still doing tia'stransportation impact analysis. We need the developer to identify similar to an impact statement what the impact to mobility would be. So it doesn't take the place [9:31:19 AM] of it. It adjusts how those were used and what the scope of those would be. >> Gallo: So the tia would still be done but then this would layer on top of that or this would be part of that? >> It actually would be part of it, I believe, and it would become much more formulaic, you create this many trips and this is the anticipated impact and this is what the fee is. So it should actually, if I would think, if we're successful, be simpler for developers to understand what their potential liabilities or costs might be. >> Kitchen: And so that would be -- >> Gallo: That would be the process when the 2,000 trips was triggered? >> Yes, or whatever that level gets set at, because I think that's part of the discussion as well. >> Gallo: So we're also talking about changing that as part of this process? >> I would think so, yes. >> Gallo: Okay. >> It is a complete overhaul of the transportation analysis and assignment of responsibility process. Process. >> Gallo: So it would now include where there's a certain trigger that causes the tia to be part of the process. It sounds to me like -- >> Go ahead. >> Gallo: It sounds to me like this will also pull smaller tracts, smaller developments into it, so at what point does that begin, if there is a vacant lot and somebody is building a single-family home, is your -- >> That is certainly, council member, where this could go, but I don't knowwhat the recommendations are going to be, and that's certainly a policy decision. We know that anytime a development occurs there's some level of impact, but I think it would allow us to contemplate do we -- so I don't know the answer to that. I think that that is one extreme possibility, is that there would be a minimum fee, that if you're doing a single -- for instance single residence or single [9:33:20 AM] commercial development that you might be held to a minimum base level. We know that cumulative effects have been an issue within much of the community, meaning thatafter, you know, ten single lots get developed there's -- there's a noticeable impact, or whatever that number might be. So I think that's still to be determined through theprocess, through a recommendation to council for policy. My assistant director, Gordon Derr, remended me that -- reminded me what this would hopefully take the place of at some point is the rough proportionality calculation that really -- go ahead. >> I'll say it directly. [Laughter] By state law, rough proportionality tells us what the cap is we could ask for from a developer. Impact fees is how we get up to that or where we get, and the council sets that based on -- once we get done with this study, in Fort Worththey have a number of districts and some districts they have different ratios of impact fees. So that's an option that we can look at in the future, but the roughproportionality sets the absolute cap. If a developer wants to do their pro Forma based on that, they can do that, but then as we look at the impact fees we'll get down to a number below that, probably, although there may be some cases where it's up close, but it's really developing how all the pieces are going to fit together. >> Gallo: So we've moved -- we are moving into the rough proportionality system because I think the concern when you presented to us before, in the past, was that with the traffic mitigation process -- >> Go ahead. I'm sorry. >> Gallo: No, no, I wanted to let have you a chance to visit. >> No, that's all right. I apologize. >> Gallo: No worries. The concern was that we heard before is with the previous system of the traffic mitigation, that it [9:35:20 AM] was isolated to a particular -- could be isolated to a particular intersection, and until you had the complete funding for that intersection from other development, that money was held. So am I remembering correctly that we've moved to the other system so that the money can be spent in surrounding areas versus just that one particularintersection? I think our concern was that we hold money -- we hold money until you have enough to do one project, but if we hold it too long, then the money could potentially go back to the person -- the entity that you collected it from. >> Right. And so our practice has been to identify specific intersections through the tia where the money will be spent and through rough proportionality figure out what percentage of that is, and that has caused the current challenge. Under the new system what would be envisioned is that you would talk about the mobility impacts in that travel shed district, whatever you want to call it, and we would be able to aggregate those funds todeal with actually delivering projects. The rough proportionality still determines what proportion of the total transportation need that development is responsible for, but the goal would be to unlock that flexibility and allow us to actually make some changes, because having money in the bank for a lot of different improvements without building those improvements doesn't reresult in the outcomes -- result in the outcomes that I think our smtion. >> Gallo: And I agree, I think flexibility is important. >> Yes, ma'am. >> How do you layer into this -- and this becomes, I guess, more of a discussion on the street impact fee program, which we're just beginning to get concernedwith, but I guess as you're talking about hiring a consultant, do we have -- at what point will we know what the scope of the consultant's work is? Because now I'm hearing -- you know, what I'm hearing is there could be a conversation where we talk about increasing the fees for single-lot [9:37:22 AM] residential construction, which of course will affect affordability and the cost of those homes. We're talking about -- and I'm sure there's going to be a discussion here that talks about what if you have a developer that comes forward and is willing to actually do the traffic improvements, how does that layer into this. >> Right. And so if I may mention, the scope of services again is to develop the process, and there is a scope as part of the solicitation. Certainly we will meet with the successful qualified applicant and work out a detailed scope of services, and we have the ability to detail it. I think the scope of services is broad enough that it covers all those different contingencies aswe go forward. In the future -- now, this is not the engineering firm that developers would be required to use in any form or fashion, they would still hire their own engineer to come up with their own opinions as to the impacts, and then we would go through that. What I do hope is that through the process on all of these issues, it will become more transparent and formulaic, if you will. >> Gallo: So the consultant selection will -- the consultant -- is it your sense that the consultant will then be responsible for the stakeholder process as this moves through -- >> Yes. That is included as a scope of work in our solicitation and that was part of the evaluation process that we did. >> Gallo: Okay. So there is actually a scope of work that we could see at this point -- >> Yeah, we have -- I'm happy to provide this to you after the meeting. We have the scope ofservices from the solicitation. It's available, it's public, that kind of details what our initial thoughts were on what the tasks would be and the deliverables associated with this particular project, and that will of course, as rob said, once we have an awarded firm, we'll start negotiations with they will and they will get fleshed out more into something that will go into the contract. >> Gallo: Okay, and I don't notice -- I may have missed it but I don't see any other backup in my -- >> Zimmerman: I don't have [9:39:22 AM] any backup either. I wanted to ask just what the approximate budget and the schedule, the time frame we're talking about here -- >> Kitchen: Let me back up for one second to clarify. So the action you're talking about bringing to the full council on June 9 is the approval of the selected consultant. >> Correct. >> Kitchen: Go ahead withyour question. >> Zimmerman: Okay. So -- yeah, so then if you're already talking about being that close to selecting somebody, we should know, you know, what the expected budget of this would be and what the timing -- the calendar is. >> Yeah, sure. The budget that we have that's been provided to us is $1,175,000, and weanticipate having the council consider the contract at their June 9 meeting with our goal of executing that contract by the end of June -- sorry, the end of August. >> And if I could elaborate, you know, that is based on the experience of fort Worth. Knowing that we're a bigger city, I mean, that's how we came up with the initial budget, and especially, council members, knowing that we're going to have to have extensive public discussion -- it is Austin -- on this and it's the right thing to do, and so a lot of that budget is built on how much outreach to stakeholders as well as the general public. >> Kitchen: I think it would be helpful if we go ahead and get this in backup. I know we're having the meeting right now, but for further -- provide it to the council members and also get it in backup, and I apologize to the council members, I thought that wehad taken the necessary steps to get that scope in the backup, but apparently not. >> I will provide this to transportation and have them provide it back to you guys. >> Kitchen: It also needs to be put in backup for the public. >> Mm-hmm. >> I am assuming that they will handle that for me because I don't -- I don't know that I have thetechnical capabilities to add it as backup -- >> We can attach it to the minutes. >> Kitchen: Great. Thank you very -- >> Or backup, I heard what you said. >> Kitchen: Yeah, gotcha. Okay. That way the public can see it. >> Yeah, of course. >> Kitchen: Other questions? Thank you very much. [9:41:22 AM] >> And thank you for taking me out of order. I appreciate it. >> Kitchen: Sure, no problem. >> Okay. We're going to go back to our agenda order, so the next item is the staff briefing and discussion with possible action on the vision zero action plan. And I have provided a resolution potentially for us to act on. We can get to a discussion about whether the council would like to act on that. But that's just a heads-up, and we also have a couple of citizens wanting to speak. I think it might be helpful to have the presentation first so then the speakers can listen to that and then provide their feedback. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay. All right. Go ahead. >> All right.Thank you, council members. My name is Francis Reilly, I'm with the planning and zoning department. The clicker. >> Right here. >> I'm drawing here by commander fortune from Austin police department and laura durnfield from transportation. I'd also like to recognize that there are several members of the vision zero vision task force as well as members from vision zero vision atx and their audience here. So I'm going to give you a brief overview of the action plan, some of the changes we've made. Like smoking or seatbelt use, traffic deaths and serious injuries are really a public health problem, and similar to those -- those two other problems, you know, we're going to need to raise awareness, change regulations, enforce those regulations, and build safety into the design, and that's really what vision zero is about. So the action plan sets safe [9:43:23 AM] mobility as top priority for the transportation system, and is really built on greater collaboration and using the initiatives and things the city is already doing, building on those. It's a -- you know, there's not a single solution to this problem, so this is something that's going to require land use transportation, engineering, infrastructure changes as well as enforcement, prosecution, and then looking how we educate and change culture, as well as involving public health and equity concerns. One of the things that we've changed in the draft action plan is really more of a focus on design. Street engineering and land use patterns. You know, and there's strong evidence to support that these changes here can lead to a much safer city. We've also looked quite a bit at equity, and we see -- >> Kitchen: Could you back up just for a minute? I want to see that previous slide against for a second. Okay. So what you're saying is these are the types of engineering solutions that can be helpful to safety? Is that what you were saying here? >> These are some of them, yes. >> Kitchen: All right. >> Looking at equity, we see that people outside of motor vehicles are disproportionately affected. We see -- >> Gallo: If we can go back to the previous slight because I think the -- slide, because I think the last time you did a presentation I asked if you could split out -- you've split out the different modes of transportation on the right circle but on the left they're all grouped together. Could we get a slide that's updated with that 6.5%broken out? [9:45:26 AM] >> I don't. I think I provided that a while ago, but I don't have that in this presentation. >> Gallo: Do you off the top of your head know how that 6.5% breaks out? I mean, there's a substantial difference in the death percentage between the different modes of transportation, between pedestrian, motorcycles and bikes, and I think it would be real helpful to see what percentage of the population is actually commuting in those ways rather than grouping them all together. >> Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I don't know that off the top of my head. >> Gallo: Okay. Is that something that we could get? >> We can provide that. >> Gallo: Okay. And I think it might be helpful particularly if this slide is going to move forward in the presentation, continue to be there, if we could break the modes of transportation up on the circle to the left, as you've done on the circle to the right. I think it makes the connection of the usage versus the number of deaths for that usage, rather than grouping them altogether. >> All right. Thank you. >> Gallo: Thank you. >> Looking also at race, we see that black and hispanic austinites are disproportionately affected as a percentage of the population. We also -- we don't have good historical data on this, but looking at 2015 data, of the people hit and killed while walking, almost 40% were people believed to be experiencinghomelessness, and this is something that we see in other cities as well, is that people experiencing homelessness are often disproportionately victims of traffic violence. >> Zimmerman: Could I ask a question? >> Kitchen: Yes, go ahead. >> Zimmerman: I think I saw some of these statistics before. Was it open space that you brought this to?I recognized the slide previous to this but you've presented this before, I think, right? [9:47:28 AM] >> Yes. >> Kitchen: They presented to us when they had the first draft. >> Zimmerman: Okay. And so we planned out back then that a lot of the reason we have homelesspeople is we have people suffering from mental problems, mental illnesses, people that are basically nuts and they would walk across I-35 when a safe bridge was just a stone's throw away. And I made the remark back then, I don't know what we can do about crazy. Some people are nuts, and we can't -- if we provide them a safe pedestrian bridge to go over the freeway and they choose to walk across the freeway, we can't fix that. I mean, what's your reaction to that? >> So I think this is -- this -- particular, this portion of the population is going to require some out of the box thinking on this. I think, you know, when we look at where many of these deaths are occurring, though, they're not within a short distance of a crosswalk. Many of them are on longer road segments. They're on higher speed road segments. I think another part of the solution, though, is really working with those social service providers and figuring out how we best reach their clients and -- >> Zimmerman: Okay. I'll say one thing before you go on.Just one more thing before you go on. I would rather us focus on, you know, the 95% -- the 90%, the 95% of people who are really frustrated and they're stuck in traffic. To mee that ought to be our -- me that ought to be our focus, the 90 to 95% of the people that are still stuck in traffic and we still haven't been addressing traffic congestion relief, and here we are. I don't like this focus. >> Kitchen: Council member [9:49:28 AM] Zimmerman, you're reag a policy issue which is appropriate when we get to our discussion. He's just presenting the report, which is important. This is a report that wascommissioned by the previous council in 2014, so if you could hold that thought when we get to our discussion about if we're going to move forward then we can certainly talk about that. Okay. Go forward. >> I'd like to give a brief overview of the actions. We've -- you know, based on the feedback that we've gotten from members of the task force and some of the boards and commissions we've been to as well as comments from the public, we've reorganized the plan into evaluation, enforcement, engineering, education and policy. So evaluation is really, you know, looking at how do we use the data we have, improve that quality and look at collection of the data and sharing to really inform our actions going forward as looking at analysis and mapping and then evaluation. And I'd say that last point is especially critical here, is that, you know, we're not coming to you today with a perfect plan, by any means. I think it's a very good plan, but through evaluation this plan will get better as we continuously go back and we can -- we can end traffic deaths and serious injuries by going back and reevaluating what's working, what's not. Looking at enforcement, that really focuses on both thelocations that are dangerous, where we -- we see on this map, you know, there are certain locations that really light up as dangerous locations. But then also looking at those key dangerous behaviors. You know, there's -- there's a handful of behaviors that disproportionately contribute to deaths and serious injuries on our roads, and these are allthings that, you know, we can really target through enforcement and education to [9:51:32 AM] change. A lot of those behaviors too occur at sort of the intersection of behavior and design, which is where engineering really plays a big role here, is looking at complete street design, traffic engineering, what technological enhancements and improvements that we see as well as things that capital metro is really working to do, and they'vebeen a very strong partner throughout this entire process. The next grouping of actions relates to education, and that's really focused on creating a strong branded message that focuses both on the magnitude of the problem as well as those dangerous behaviors. It's really, you know, how do we reach out to the people who are most affected by this, so this is -- you know, for instance our black and hispanic communities in Austin that are disproportionalitily affected, our lower income areas, people experiencinghomelessness, how do we -- how do we reach out to those people. And that's something that we're looking to really develop moving forward on this. And then lastly looking at policy changes. So for enforcement, for instance, looking at, you know, our policy for cite and release, which is a driver who is driving with a suspended license or nolicense, you know, changing our policy on this. Bolstering our existing distracted driving ordinance, looking at land use and design, we're really looking at going forward, aswe're working on codenext, as we're working on the transportation criteria manual, how do we build safety into those. And then legislative [9:53:32 AM] changes. You know, there are some things looking at, you know, best practices in other places, looking at speed cameras, which are not currently allowed in Texas but have a very good record in the places where they are allowed for improving safety, as well as things like lowering the default speed limit, which again has seen very good success inplaces where that's been done. And then really the last section of this plan is focused on implementation, and it's really two parts. It's establishing a vision zero program within the city of Austin that will really help continue that interdepartmental, interagency and community coordination, as well as continuing the visions of our task force and having those key representatives from community groups participate in this. And I think we've seen a lot of -- a lot of gains from -- from that task force, is, you know, it's a lot of diverse viewpoints on traffic safety coming together, and I think a lot of really good ideas and new ways of looking at this problem have emerged from that. That section of the plan also talks about a report card. So this is really a way of showing progress to you all as well as the rest of the community on, you know, how are we doing on this, and really holding ourselves are we making progress or aren't we. In the appendix of the action plan that you all have in backup, you have an action table of the actions as well as costs associated with those, which is something that we had people ask for, you know, how much is this going to cost. And so with that I'd open up to questions. [9:55:33 AM] >> Kitchen: We may ask you to come back up, but does anybody have any questions before we have our speakers? Go ahead. >> Zimmerman: Thank you. So the transportation commission, I watched the recording of the transportation commission discussion on this, and I think it was moved and seconded to pass it, but after some intelligent questions started being asked it was -- I think it was tabled. And so did they -- are they going to bring that back at their next meeting, transportation commission? >> Yes. So we'll be back at urban transportation commission tomorrow, actually. >> Zimmerman: You go back tomorrow. >> To continue. >> Zimmerman: And did -- has any information been provided for some of the questions that were asked there? I noticed that one of the things they were talking about was the reduction ofthe speed limits, which I think you touched upon, a 19 miles per hour potential speed limit. >> Yeah, that -- that was from a wikipedia page and is not in the action plan. >> Zimmerman: Okay. Where did this -- did this come from us or did -- this yellow page -- >> Kitchen: That's one of our speakers, we'll get to. >> Zimmerman: It was one of them? Okay. So this one, it's sitting here in front of me and it says right here, nine to ten healthy adults hit by vehicle traveling 20 miles per hour will survive, but at 40 miles per hour those odds are reversed. >> Yes. >> Zimmerman: Well, that's called the laws of physics. Kinetic energy is one- half, mass times velocity squared, so it's the velocity that's more important than the mass. It's just laws of physics, and -- >> Mm-hmm. >> Zimmerman: You could -- sure, you could slow all the traffic down to 19 miles per hour so that if anybody got hit the statistics of injury or death would be smaller, and -- but it would grind transportation, that is moving people and things, from point a to point B -- [9:57:33 AM] basically grinds to a halt at 19 miles per hour. So this is why I keep pointing out that I think it's -- it's a ridiculous idea. The point of transportation is to move people andmaterials from point a to point B, not for people to never have injuries. That's not the point of transportation. If the point is never to have injuries, let's just not have any transportation. So there -- I just see this whole thing taking us in the wrong direction, and I don't support this at all. >> Kitchen: Okay. Any more questions before we have our citizens come speak? Okay. Thank you. Let's see, Mike levy is our first speaker and after that we'll have nick Moe. >> I gave you all these -- ma'am, did you get yours? >> Yes. >> Cool. I'm Mike Levi, I represent the public safety commission on the vision zero task force. We -- the task force was frustrated because -- I mean -- the public safety commission was frustrated because we had not heard anything for a year since the inception of vision zero. New York took three or four months, and at the top of their list was enforcement, enforcement, enforcement, and the result was a significant drop in fatality rate. There were a couple things we really emphasized. Number one, 34% of all fatalities involved drivers without licenses or suspended licenses. It's mentioned in there but not considered a priority. There are 66 items on that, but we were told -- we asked the question, hey, you recommend extending -- reducing the number of years between renewal of driver's license from six years to four years, and we said, hey, that's the state's responsibility, not city, [9:59:34 AM] and we were told, oh, yeah, that was a mistake. When we're talking about bicycles and pedestrians, and I would add children, one of the things we asked was to reduce -- change the conversation from high-speed road race to neighborhoods. Our neighborhood association was so frustrated in not getting enforcement that we went ahead and hired a constable at $60 an hour, I think we had $5,000, and we had a lot of enforcement, and he also drove around, he was highly visible, he reached out to the community.We had to pay for community policing. He got our speed limit as high at 50 or 55 miles an hour on Perry lane, where the speed limit is 30. Traffic department met with our neighborhood association, and we had all sorts of ideas. The traffic engineer took no notes. One of the ideas was simply to reduce the speed limit from 30 to 25. There are in other neighborhoods 25. On every suggestion we had, including putting stop signs on cross streets, what we heard was no, no, no, no. There was there was never, hey that's a possibility. The engineer didn't even take notes. One of the things we had in there was working, coordinating between departments. There was a damning report oncoordination between stakeholders and departments. One of the things that the audit said was traffic does not play well in their sand box with other departments orstakeholders. >> So Mr. Levy? >> Yes, ma'am? >> If I'm understanding [10:01:36 AM] correctly the item you mentioned first, with regard to the suspended licenses, that's an item that you would like to -- are you saying it's not in the vision zero. >> Not a key recommendation. >> You would like it to be a key recommendation. >> Yes, actually, we're saying take a lethal weapon away from a driver who has suspended or no license. >> Thank you. Mr. Nick Mo is next and then after nick, Lauren Cresswell. >> Thank you for addressing this important safety issue in our community. I'm on the advisory task force and most of the chair of vision zero atx, a grassroots group here in Austin pushing for limiting traffic fatalities in our roadways. The point is to get things from point a to point B. Withe can do so safely I think. We deserve the freedom to get around Austin for the things we want and need to do. Right now, people can't do that without the risk that they will get hurt. In the last decade, we've have more than 600 people kill in Austin traffic. We represent many community groups, as well as city departments, a ton of opportunities for interdepartmental collaboration as Mike just mentioned, better data sharing and data collection so we can understand what the issue is and where and for whom. To be able to provide tools to empower our city engineers, and our law enforcement officials to be able do what they need to do to make sure we can get around [10:03:39 AM] safely. We recognize this is an equity issue. There are communities much more affected than others so they need to be at the table. So being able to create a policy in which we have ongoing discussions about traffic safety is pivotal. And incorporating the voices to discussion is vital. So this action plan is a smart, safe way to get to the sharedvision that nobody needs to die, needs to get hurt in Austin traffic. That's a value we all share as austinites. We want to be on the number one list for everything. And I think that safety can be one of those things. Let's get there safely together. Move the action plan to full city council and make Austin safer for everyone. >> Thank you. Next we have Lauren cresstell. >> Good morning, hi, my name is Lauren, I'm president of central Austin and a member of vision zero atx, the organization that nick just mentioned. I wanted to express my personal support for the adoption of the zero vision adoption plan and its implementation. I was in a recent meeting when someone made a comparison between infectious disease and traffic violence as public health issues and they made the comparison by saying that if we had an infectious disease in Austin affecting people the way traffic violence up affects people now, we would be running, not walking to find a remedy. There are different variables that contribute to trafficviolence and safety issues in Austin. Coming up with a plan and implementing a plan is one way to address those different variables and I think the action plan has been a great start in getting us moving in that [10:05:40 AM] direction. That pedestrian council is finalizing a resolution. A minor tweak that recommends that city council adopts and implements the action plan. The action around vision zero and they've been supportive of it in the last several years and working towards meeting this milestone. I can contribute copies to you once I'm done. One thing is the traffic safety solutions must be addressed wholistically through education and culture change, enforcement, prosecution, land use and transportation engineering. And I think the presentation spoke to this. Be uh the action plan will be most effective if we consider the ways that it can also reach across silos and departments in this city and coordinate other efforts that are going on with this. Thank you very much. >> Tell me again, I'm sorry. You mentioned that the committee was going to take final action on it. >> It recommends adoption and implementation. >> Are you suggesting any additions? >> I'm not, just giving you the copy and let you know the proposal will be in this week. >> Okay. Okay. Our last speaker is Gerard Kenny. Mr. Kenny? I think we have more questions for your staff. Francis, if you would come up? If you could just review for us again which councils and committees this has been in front of and what action they've taken. >> Sorry, didn't quite hear you. I'm reading that. [10:07:40 AM] >> Which councils and committees this has been in front of and what action they've taken? We talked earlier and utc and you going back to them tomorrow and we understand it's been in front of the pedestrian advisory council. Could you remind us? >> Yes, we've been to the bicycle advisory council, the pedestrian advisory council.Both of those groups have made recommendations in support of. I understand about being finalized. But they help to make recommendations and support. We're going back to urban transportation commission tomorrow. We were there last month. We've been to the public safety commission. They have made, I think now, a couple of recommendations that they provided to y'all. >> Okay. All right, other questions that folks have? >> So the -- it looks like we have spread out all over the dais here, the pedestrian council's recommendation, the bike council recommendation. I'm looking for the public safety and is there one that came from the urban transportation committee? Do we have recommendations of either of those two committees? >> The urban transportation committee will hear it tomorrow. The first time they heard it. You ask about public safety. Is there a -- what action did they take? >> So public safety commission, a few months ago made a recommendation to include the thingses that Mike mentioned. -- Things that Mike mentioned. >> We have a copy of the recommendation? Does anyone have that? [10:09:45 AM] >> We don't have that. We don't have that here today. >> I think that was also contested, wasn't it? There wasn't a unified vote on that action. There was dissent on the public safety commission, correct? >> I believe that's correct. >> There was dissent. You don't remember what the dissent was about? >> I don't recall without having that in front of many. >> Mr. Levy just testified to us there was one item in particular that he wanted to be moved. It was in the report but he wanted it moved up as a keyrecommendation. But I understand correctly that they did vote. To recommend I want, right? >> They made a recommendation. It was a recommendation with qualifications and we've addressed many of those concerns. Okay? Okay? >> Other questions? >> I -- as we're trying to -- as this goes through the different -- as this has gone through the different committee structure, which is good, very transparent, and allows both of the committees and the citizens to come forward at that time to voice their concerns and give their suggestions, I think it's really helpful for us if we're in a situation to be asked for a vote to have that information in Toronto of us. I don't see it from the publicsafety or the urban transportation. I understand they're meeting tomorrow. But even the information that came from them before would be helpful. I'm uncomfortable taking that kind of action without having all of that information first in front of us. There has been some discussion about, some police departmentsed here. There are obviously enforcement items that are completely enforced and so it would be from the police department's perspective, you know, their -- >> Let me make a suggestion? [10:11:49 AM] I'd like to lay out my resolution and explain how I dealt with the different levels of recommendations. That might be helpful. Did you have a question for the police first? >> I think as the conversations going through the different commissions and public safety is when that voice is represented that it looks like a lot of the enforcement issues that are addressed are actually things that can already be addressed through enforcement. But I just -- I want to give the police department the opportunity to be I believe totalk about the suggestions and concerns to talk about it. >> Yes, I'll say one thing and then -- the recommendations many of the recommendations are already existing actions. The recommendations are to enhance them or to continue funding them. Not all of the recommendations -- a lot of the recommendations are already in the process.So some are brand new. Some are items to be enhanced or adding funding to. Go ahead. >> I'm commander fortune, Austin police highway enforcement command. To answer some of you -- your questions, a lot of what you're hearing is it's already being done. Dwi enforcement. We're asking additional dwi officers added or some sort offunding for that. We find impairment to be one of the biggest issues. Then the question is have additional staffing we looked at. We've done that in unmet needs and other things, asked for night shift officers to help out where they're dedicated to traffic enforcement. But the overall plan that we've asked for and I think commissioner levy from public [10:13:50 AM] safety commission asked about it, they did vote on it. But the question is they wanted at the forefront the driver's license issue. So that's why they left it in there. This plan is basically -- the way I look at it, it's a living document. It will change. There will be things that move. There are things that we do that we look at like policy changes.Currently the policy changes. I talked to the commission before about the driver's license issue. That's before chief Acevedo if we do decide to tow vehicles based on people not having a license or a license suspended. We decide not to arrest them, cite and release, let the people go, be uh withe tow the vehicle. That's up for the chief to look at.He'll be reviewing that. The recommendations we made, I think commissioner Zimmerman brought it up as far as we do have a large amount of homeless and transient population. You're right. Someone walking on the roadway, we might not be able to do anything. But pedestrian ordinance as far as we have a lot of people if you drive around Austin you see shoulders and medians walking around. That's an unsafe behavior we may be able to look at the policy change and say, is that particular -- is that neighbor hindering safety here? We have people in travel lanes walking up and down shoulders and medians. We're looking for policy changes for that as well. Some things we've taken and moved along, the dwi. We worked with our tx-dot partners and we're well aware we have no refusal days. People are arrested under probable cause. We're able to expand those days to 368 days from the grant. So we're taking some actions. There's a lot of recommendations in there. The biggest thing is the [10:15:51 AM] cooperations amongst all of the different stakeholders to make sure we're on the same page moving forward. That's the biggest thing we've gotten to the last year or so that we've been working on this, just working together and looking for the solutions for the three E's, the education, the engineering, the enforcement. Because without one or the other, it doesn't work. Withe have to get everybody onboard. That's what we've been able to -- I've been able to see that. Things have gotten -- my perspective, I aye - - I have only been over there in the last year and a half. But we're moving in the right direction. >> I'm going to go back and -- thank you for the comment on the update on the license dish the unlicensed and suspended. It seems like the purpose of this is to reduce the fatalities and we're looking at metrics that say 34% of the fatal accidents are involved on license suspended licensed drivers. My understand is that is not -- towing the vehicles is not part of the current policy. You say it's in for review so -- >> If the person is automatically arellsed, then the vehicle gets towed. The policy that occurs right now when it comes to unlicensed drivers or suspended drivers, it's that for years this has been considered a nonviolent crime. But it's got the potential with the traffic fatalities as we seed the lead to violence, traffic violence. So if we impound the vehicle and not arrest the person, we can cite the release. Still give the person a ticket saying you were driving while your license was suspended, so we're going to impound yourvehicle. That's the policy being looked at right now. Nothing that says with can impound the vehicle right now. The vehicle can be left on the side of the road, the person can [10:17:51 AM] get back in to it and drive off. So we want to assure that that person is not going to go back to that vehicle and drive off. >> What is state law? How does state law addresssomebody driving without a valid license? >> Basically, they can be arrested. >> Says can be, not should. >> Right, right, up to the municipality to decide that. Versus just towing the vehicle. If we make an arrest, the impound poll spi comes to place. But if we decide to do a cite and release or field release citation, we would have to make a city ordinance change that will allow us to on a nonarrest situation, technically, we're not taking someone into custody that we could impound that vehicle. >> That becomes a city council policy or a police policy? >> Department -- >> Police department. You mentioned it's been sent to review by the police chief. >> Chief is looking at it. I haven't heard anything about it. They did come back with the focus safety division. My assistant chief asked me questions but I don't have a time line. >> Since you served, do youknow? >> My question for my colleagues here. I don't understand why that decision could be left to the police chief. That seems like a city council policy decision, an important one. That should not be left to staff to decide if they're going to start towing cars if there's no driver's license on the driver. >> Could we -- >> That's a question we should ask ourselves. >> And that's in my resolution. So if we could -- it will be all right. Let melee out the resolution and I think that will raise the concerns I'm raising.Councilman Zimmerman, the way this is written, some of it would come back to us. Let melee those out. [10:19:52 AM] I have some questions. >> Before he goes, let me -- this yellow sheet I was handed here, let me just read number four. This is interesting. My talk to what you're going tocome up with later. Since 34% of fatal accidents involve unlicensed suspended license drivers, when ever a car is stopped for any reason and the driver is unlicensed orsuspended license, the car must be impounded. Now, as the rational person thinks for a living, I would lay it out saying 34%. When ever a car is stopped for a fatal accident, not for any reason, but for some accident if there's injury or fatalities and the driver is unlicensed or suspended, the driver who's responsible for the collision should be arrested or attained -- he or she should be attained. It's not the car's fault. If you have an accident, is a car malfunctioned, probably less than 1%, right? If the car does something wrong, the brakes fail, something. Usually it's the driver. Right? So -- the driver is responsible. Not the car's fault if it's involved in an accident. Typically it's the driver. So if you wanted to assign the responsibility, you would look at the person driving, not the vehicle. Here's why it's very important. This is why it's really, reallyimportant. If we adopt this policy, what will end up happening is our APD could be incentiveized to pull people over as it says for the car stopped for any reason, taillight is out. Pull them over. You don't have a license. Take the car. The car could be sold later and the money goes to the tow company and to APD. So I don't want us to go downthis road of towing people's cars when there hasn't been an accident and no one is injured. >> Councilman Zimmerman, your point is taken. I'm going to go back to the [10:21:54 AM] resolution. The way the resolution is written, it doesn't create the concern. It doesn't create the problem you're concerned about. Let me go over to the resolution. It's in your pact. -- Packet. The resolution is divided to five be it further resolved. This is a way to approach the recommendations that are made in the action plan. The action plan is in the four categories presented before. It's organized by more immediate actions, short term, more immediate actions. And by medium term and long term. In other words, it's organized based on time frame, okay? It's also organized based on what I can do right now with existing resources versus something that takes more money or something that might take longer. So I set forth in the proposed resolution, the first be it resolved says that the city management is directed to adopt and immediately implement the elements that have been identified as actionable using existing resources and existing partnerships and then provide an accounting back to the council by August 2. So what this does is the first resolution focuses on what we can do now. Doesn't cost us anymore money. Doesn't take us anymore resource or partnerships. These are the things that we can do right now. We're sitchly saying that by the first be it resolve do it, go ahead, get it done, account back to us how you did it. And account back to us by August 2 with a list of what you did. That's the first be it resolved. The second one is to say now there are some action elements that will take additional resources.So this -- we're not asking for any action to be taken on those. What this asks is for directs [10:23:55 AM] the city manager to bring us back an implementation plan to identify those elements. Well, they're identified in their report. But pull them out of the report. Give them an implementation plan. And then at that point, the council would make a decision on whether or not to proceed and that's designed to come back to us right around the budget time. So, for example, I think that we've heard from police that additional resources may be requested to address the DUIs enforcement. That's one of the things that's a request for additional resources. What we would say in it passing this is bring it to the city manager, how would you implement that, bring it back to us, and what additional resources do we need? What's the dollar amount. That's an example of the thing that would fall into this second bucket. The third bucket relates to -- it pulls out another item that's particularly important that's been brought to my attention to address. And that has to do with posted roadway speeds. It's to analyze existing practices ase it relates to posting roadway speeds. We heard some testimony earlier about concerns, I think it was Mr. Levy, about concerns or someone else about concerns inneighborhoods. And this -- this speaks to looking at high-speed roadways, secondary streets, and neighborhood streets to come back and specifically focus on that. Identify for us message and opportunities to reduce posted speed limits. Again, that's another item. That's a longer one that will come back in October. That one we're asking the citymanager to move forward in analyzing what the practicing are around posted speeds. The fourth one speaks specifically to what Mr. Levy brought forward in what we'retalking about in terms of [10:25:55 AM] suspended licenses. And so, again, this asks for analysis in what's happening in terms of relationships between accidents and suspended licenses and our enforcement andprosecution practices and to report to drill down on that problem, drill down between what's happening, what's the relationship between these suspended licensees and comeback to us with recommendations of changes that we may need to make in terms of enforcement and prosecution. But that gets to the concern that you were raising,councilmember Zimmerman about what's the relationship between the enforcement of towing, for example, and a case where it may be a suspended license. So, this fourth be it resolved doesn't take action. In asking for more information on specifically what we can do. And then the final be it resolved is just to recognize, take a look at the populations, the enforcement and education strategies. They're in this report. Now, I would like to urge the committee to go ahead and move this forward to the council. I understand that utc may have further recommendations. They're meeting tomorrow if they have further recommendations, we can certainly incorporate those when this gets to council. The reason I would like to move forward is because of the time. We're in may now. We only have one more mobility committee meeting before the budget. And I would like to be able to get as soon as possible our city staff and our city manager working on the recommendations, particularly under the first item where the things they can immediately recommend, immediately act on, and so I would prefer to move forward with this with the understanding [10:27:56 AM] that utc may bring forward some things that they may want to amend before it ends up on the council agenda. That's why I'm bringing it forward today even though wehave a meeting tomorrow for utc. So, thoughts? Further questions? Go ahead. >> Thank you, that was thoughtful, Ms. Kitchen, I appreciate the way you laid that out. I could support the fourth be it resolved drilling down on the statistics of the no license or what's going on there. The people who were never given a license, did they lose alicense, were they immigrants that didn't learn to drive in their foreign country and still don't have a license there here. I would like to drill down on the statistics. Now we've been on the dais now about 16 months. And I still don't have a vision from our very intelligent and well trained traffic engineering group on how we would handle congestion.No vision for tackling traffic congestion but we want to have a vision to not have any accidents. It says here, eliminating transportation related deaths and serious injuries.And I've said before, I think if you talked to any honest engineer, it is an impossibility to have a goal of zero accidents, zero injuries, zero -- it's virtually impossible. And I'm also an aircraft pilot. I fly airplanes. Airplanes fly at high speeds when there's an accident with an airplane, it's fatal because of the speed. The only way we could achieve zero death in air transportation would be to stop flying. That's how you get to zero death, stop flying. The way you get to zero depth, [10:29:59 AM] you stop transporting zero and things. That's how you get to zero death, you stop transporting anything. So it's just -- again, the frustration I have here that we don't have a vision for improving traffic congestion but we do have supposedly a vision for eliminating serious injuries and defts. The priorities are misplaced. Obviously, if we had a plan for traffic congestion relief, obviously traffic safety would be a huge part of that. Obviously. But with no plan to relieve the congestion and only a plan of an unrealist goal of zero transportation deaths and injuries. I have to vote against the whole thing. In principle, I think we're doing the wrong thing. >> Kitchen: I respect your perspective. I don't think it's an either or. I don't think we act on one thing and not on another. But I would remind you we have a congestion action plan. The first thing that was done last year. Around January or February of right after we took office, the staff brought forward a congestion action plan. And that plan that they brought forward at that time wasspecifically focused. That's on congestion problems. That's where we got the don't block the box. And they have been reporting back to us on a regular basis, the status of the actions that they're taking in the congestion action plan. So it's simply not accurate to say we don't have any plan to address congestion. Are there other questions?Councilmember Gallo? >> Gallo: It would be really helpful. We have an appendix that talks about that, action, short term, I'm sure there's medium term and long term but not in my backup material. So it would be very helpful to know is under the different be it resolves is which of those actions within those short term, [10:32:05 AM] medium, long term, would fit in the areas of the be it resolved. The basis is great. It would be helpful to know how those two connect and what pieces we're talking about that will go underneath each of the be it resolved. >> Okay. >> Gallo: I think we want to move forward on this. I'm concerned about making a recommendation because we still have one commission that's due to meet. I think the information from the plan and how it ties in to the resolution and the different be it resolves and it would be helpful particularly as it comes to the council so they can make this connection since they have heard this less than we have in our committee. I would be happy to vote to move it forward. I'm uncomfortable to move it forward with recommendation because we have one commission that needs to meet and it's helpful for me at least to understand the connection. >> Kitchen: I think we can do that. I asked the staff to -- the resolution sets forward the categories broadly stated. So I think the -- the -- to then identify, to take the document, take the list and say okay, the first be it resolve is X, Y, Z, second is the things that take longer, X, Y, Z. I'm seeing you not your head. So that can be done, right? >> Yeah. >> I think that would be helpful for people. >> That would be great, thank you. >> Kitchen: Any other comments. Okay. Then I'm going to move -- I -- I would be comfortable moving to the recommendation. But I certainly respect and understand that the relationship between, you know, the -- there's a lot of detail in here. So so if you want to make a motion, I will second -- I will move that we -- I move that we move this forward to council. And we provide additional information that we just asked for in terms of connecting the specific recommendations to the be it resolved and we'll also [10:34:06 AM] address -- we'll get the feedback on what utc may do. Is that -- does that encompass? So I'm making that motion. Do I have a second? Second. Councilmember Gallo. All in favor? Council member Zimmerman. All oppose? All right, thank you very much. >> It would help to have an update from the police department. Because obviously that one item is a concern. It's a concern, I want seems like express in the public safety meeting but I think having a timeline on that would be really important. You know, and it's interesting as I've looked at the recommendations from the different commissions that are a part of this, you've done a great job on the information. If I can get that one graph so it breaks it down prior to coming to council. Since I include motorcycles and vehicles and all of the analysis and including pedestrians and bikes as we've gone through this and looking at the recommendation, it's interesting to me we don't have a vehicle motorcycle council and an advisory council. We addressed the concerns of thebiking and pedestrian community. As part of this report, there's a big component that involves motorcycles and there's a big component that involves vehicles such as what is interesting. It's nice if we had commissions that could address all four. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Garza? >> Garza: Police staff person -- sorry, I don't remember yourname. >> Commander fortune. >> Garza: Commander fortune. There was a statistic of the 34% of fatal accidents involve unlicensed or suspended drivers. Did you say a good portion or a [10:36:07 AM] majority of the 2015 fatalities were because of impaired driving? Do we have an exact number or percentage. >> I don't have it with me right now. I don't know the exact number. But I believe all modes of -- people who passed away last year in traffic fatalities, it was upwards to like 80% were impaired. >> Garza: Is there a way to get a statistic. I'm assuming there's overlap of those that were impaired, how many of those had a suspended license. >> We have all of that data. We sent it up to the chiefbreaking down all of the suspended drivers licenses, why the license was suspended. Was it due to insurance, past wis, how many suspensions do we have? We have all of that data to provide you. We can let you know how much are dwi and basically how they were categorized. >> Yes, if you could send that, I would appreciate it. Thanks. >> Kitchen: The other item may be -- this may be for our staff. May be for our transportation staff, if you're putting together the correlation of the resolution and the list ofsuggestions, if you could create a separate sheet for us that calls out for us the recommendations that relate to DUIs, because we've all recognized that that's a hugeproblem for safety. So if you could help to highlight those for us, the different kinds of recommendations that address, you know, enforcement or other issues related to DUIs, that would be helpful also. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Okay. We'll move on now to item number four which is the briefing on the south Lamar corridor final report. >> Good morning, I'm Anna [10:38:08 AM] martin. I'm an engineer with the Austin transportation department. I'm here to give you a briefing on the south Lamar boulevard corridor improvement program. To give you a bit of history, the transportation department has completed four studies. These started from the funding from the 2010 bond. Each of the four corner fundings are in various levels of implementation as funding becomes available. Two studies under way now. South Lamar, we're here to give you a briefing on which we're just completing and Guadalupe street is under way. You'll hear about that at an upcoming mobility committee meeting. So our study area was the segment of south Lamar from Riverside drive to Ben white, approximately 3.3 miles. It's generally a four-lane roadway with a center turn lane with limited accommodations for bikes on street as well as mostly completely sidewalks on the corridor. So I'm here today to talk about the purpose of the study, the proprocess and the applications. It had become a growing concern of all users in transportation modes along the core tore. Couple that with ongoing, expensivish high-paced redevelopment on the corridor, it drives a need for a vision, a plan, and implementation strategy. When I talk about future development, it is really happening very fast. We have about 2500 dwelling units that have either been recently constructed or coming on line in the near future so that equates to a 25% increase in population along the corridor itself. And if you've driven it recently, you've noticed alsothe restaurants, bars, entertainment district, all of the things that are just changing rapidly. [10:40:13 AM] The city has driving documents. Regional plan, designate south Lamar. We do have metro rapid in place, campo also designated the entire quarter as high priority forpedestrians. And a high immediate imparity for a bike corridor. In addition, imagine Austin indicates south of March to a compact walkable activity center and corridor. So our process. We did the existing analysis. Cars, autos, pedestrians, and bikes. We have 40,000 vehicles a day that use south Lamar that use Riverside drive. We have bikes and pedestrians that use the corridor. The trips are limited because of the lacking infrastructure. The bike lane provided is really a narrow strip. But the only protection is thesolid white line. The bike lane is also in conflict with buses when they're stopped at the transit stops. For pedestrians, sidewalks are mostly available but there's segments that have missing or broken sidewalks. You often see utility poles smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk forcing wheelchairs to go to the travel lane to move around. We also have curb cuts up and down the corridor. Makes it an uncomfortable experience for a pedestrian to walk along there. There are a couple of conditions. They looked at crash data from 2009 to 2014 that reveal add few hot spots along the corridor. Number one on that list was the intersection of butler road to Lee road which is betweenRiverside and Barton springs. It provides access to the slot skis. If you can envision that. That was a hot spot. As a result of this study, htd is taking action on that right now.There was a traffic signal being involved in tumi road and [10:42:15 AM] following that, we're going to close it at butler. That's the immediate outcome of the study that we are implementing. Pup lick engagement is a huge part of the study. With a you can on it with the entire corridor of the team. Two open houses to solicit feedback. At each open house, we have between 100 and 150 folks attend and give us feedback. We attended multiple neighborhood association meetings as requested throughout the study. In using the survey, we asked folks, ho do you use south Lamar on a daily basis? And the number it shall the top purposes were shopping and errands, connections to home, and connections to work. I want to note, though, that this is a heavy commuter corridor and we had a lot of folks respond they used south Lamar to commute downtown. Nay use it to pay void mow pack. Especially when there's an incident happening around mow pack. We asked folks what are your priorities for the corridor. We gave everyone five blue stickers and asked them to rank their priorities for the study. Tied for number one, pedestrians and bicycles and following closely was transi want. -- Transit. So using all of this information, the other steps in our study were really to define a community vision for the corridor, conduct a thorough transportation analysis, review and reck men land use and urban design components, perform a health impact assessment. I'm going to go to that a little more detail, because that's new to us, and finally to identify improvements. So health impact assessment. This is an innovaive approach. This is first for the city, new nationwide. So the thought is that our built [10:44:18 AM] environment has an impact on physical, social and mental health. Any changes should explicitly consider health in the process. So, for example, an increase in pedestrian and bike infrastructure, connectivity and public space will then lead to an increase in physical activity as well as social interaction. So that could potentially decrease traffic has hards and air pollution. So taking that a step further, as people are exposed to greater physical activity, green spaces, and community interaction, some long-term outcomes may be pa decrease in obesity, diabetes, depression, and overall increase in physical and emotional well being. So a health impact assessment is a process designed to take these factors into consideration when we're planning projects and public investment in our infrastructure. There are a lot of lessons learned in the health impact assessment.But I want to highlight a few of the summaries and recommendations that come out of it. So using demographics, resident surveys about travel patterns and land use information, the key takeaways is we have a high density of residents that are reliant on autos, even further within corridor trips. This population is also extremely interested in walking or biking. But less than 5% use that mode on a regular basis because of a lack of infrastructure. So we have some significant barriers to public health. For the recommendation, our team recommended we design to facilitate high volumes of walking panned biking. They noted the intersection of Lamar. There's a lot of factors there.We have zilker el meant rip up the road. [10:46:18 AM] A protected bike lane on bluebonnet and kids that attend zilker elementary on both sides of the corridor. They noted a big barrier to connectivity which is the railroad that rubs parallel to Lamar on the east side. There are no connections for several miles in a stretch. So the study recommended prioritizing a bike and pedestrian connection underneath the railroad to connect the Bouldin and south Lamar neighborhoods. So, I want to move to our recommendations of outcomes. They're grouped to two categories short term which are things that could be completed within five years, within existing right of ways. Then medium to long term which might take up 2020 years to fulfill the ultimate vision of south Lamar. So for vehicular improvements, we acknowledge this is the heavy commuter corridor. Likely to continue to be for the foreseeable future.We're not talking about adding lanes to south Lamar. Along the length of the corridor because we're constrained right away. It will be an impactful to distinct businesses. We have a bridge on the lake that's over the four lanes right now. There are things we can do. Access management, along with the median that will reduce vehicular conflicts, decrease the potential for crashes, provide a reliable traffic flow along the corridor. Intersection improvements such as the decision of turn lanes that are recommended for Barton springs and bluebonnet. Three new traffic signals to facilitate safe movements from the side streets as well as installation of an adaptive signal system to better respond to realtime systems as well as traffic signs with travel time info. For transit improvements, one of the things we node noted is we [10:48:22 AM] have a great service but that is stuck in traffic like everybody else. So the improvements of the study really point to how can we get the transit moving faster? The study recommends queue jumps which the bus is going to bypass the wait and jump the queue. Those are recommended for the most congested intersections in the corridor. The goal to make the transit ride faster and more reliable to track riders. In addition, capital metro is exploring the park and white down to the corridor at Ben white. If we can move it faster, the park and ride is going to help facilitate. More folks are going to come in and use the bus. Pedestrian improvements, sidewalks are mostly available.Recommendation is to fill in the gaps in the sidewalks to make a safer environment for pedestrians. We would like to see pet crossings every 1,000 feet along the core corridor. Two ways in the three traffic signals in connection with the pedestrian weekends to make crossings frequent so we can enjoy the mid lock collisions we sometimes see. Finally bike improvements as we realize a new cross section of south Lamar, the recommendation is for the separated bike facility on both sides of the street. This will ultimately connect to Pflueger bridge to the downtown trail system as well as destinations downtown. All of the recommendations roll up to a provision to support people who live and work on the corridor as well as those who commute using south Lamar to downtown. The study will be a living tool to guide the city as redevelopment occurs. And we plan for future transportation infrastructure investments. One of the key components of the study is implementation plan. [10:50:25 AM] We acknowledge that it's costly and likely impossible to rebuild south Lamar, the cross section in its entirety and one big project. It's interim, ultimate, and hybrid cross sections so we can chip away at this vision. Leverage redevelopment as it occurs and we've been doing it already. This plan is both flexible and adoptable to different siteredevelopments as they come on-line. So the costs. We put estimated costs on all of the improvements. The short term improvements, which I mentioned which are at the intersection improvements, new signals, pedestrian hybrid beacons, the bus queue jumps as well as the new cross section on south Lamar for the first segment is estimated at 20 million. So long term, it's going to be getting the ideal cross section through the whole length of the 3.3 mile corridor is estimated at 40 million for a total of 60million. So funding options, the study lays out various options, some are going to be funded by atd's operating budget, that's what we're doing with the road signal and the median closure that's under way right now. We're going to look for grants, bonds are a potential idea as well as public/private partnership. The next step is to continue toprioritize the short recruitments, IEPD if funding, releverage development, and that's something we're doing with sever site plan and zoning case that comes in. Continue detailed design for the long term projects. And continue to engage and update the public. They reached out and engaged with us over the last 18 months. They want to keep them apprised for what they're doing, the progress we're making, and keep helping with that as well. That's all I have, I'd be happy [10:52:26 AM] to answer any of the questions. >> Thank you very much. That's right along the neighborhood that I live in. I'm familiar with south Lamar. It's may job major corridor tosouth Austin. We appreciate all of the study and time that's been spent on this. So questions? Go ahead. >> Zimmerman: I was going to touch on that. One of the great things to me about 10- 1 is the constituents that are in district 5 and councilmember kitchen's district. This is why we would effect somebody local to decide that 'S the best way to use the transportation funds in district 5 versus something else. I would like to -- I would like to get to the point where we could have these good engineering studies, we could have budget estimates. We could have several plans of what we might do for congestion relief or get people for mobility solutions and leave it up to the councilmember to prioritize those. So I know in district 6, our crisis, if you will, is our rancho 620 and 2222. It's killing us. So in the same way that this Lamar project might be the best way to use 60 million in district five, in district six, it could be something else. So I appreciate the presentation. I like the way you laid that out, analysis and stuff to the priority of the elected councilmembers to where we put this on this scale of things to do. So I would be happy to support whatever councilmember kitchen would like to do there. >> Kitchen: Thank you. Other questions or comments? No. So this is not something -- we move forward with this, right? For these plans, dhient have to be approved by council or anything, right? >> Right, they are not approved by council. >> Kitchen: We have corridor studies now that have been completed -- I can't remember [10:54:27 AM] them all. Airport and burnet and -- >> Correct. >> Kitchen: All right, thank you, thank you very much. Okay, we have two more items. The next is item five, a briefing by the save our springs alliance, regarding an analysis of the campo 2040 regional transportation plan. As you all recall, this is a request that was made to our committee to a allow for this and so we move toward with it, councilmember Garza and I so -- go ahead. >> Yes, thank you, madam chair. Members of the committee, I'm bill bunch, executive director to save our springs alliance. Thank you so much for making time for this presentation. And thank you for your work on proposition one and congratulations.It's nice to get back to other important transportation other important transportation matters. Could you put the presentation up? ?That's the report. The bulk of this presentation centers around the report that's part of the backup by norm marshal of smart mobility in Vermont. He was the main transportation advisor to the envision central Texas effort back in the early 2000s, where there was a real comprehensive effort to build consensus around what should go into the 2030 plan. That was backed by the chamber of commerce, the conservation community, real estate council, and all of the governments in the region. And one of our key points here [10:56:29 AM] is to see how far off track the 2040 plan went from what we did in -- for the 2030 and 2035 plan. Was there a question? >> Kitchen: I'm sorry. We were just looking to see ifwe had this in backup. It was in backup. >> Yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. All right. Please go ahead, mmhmm. >> Okay. Thank you. So, sort of titled this stranger than fiction, because there's some really, sort of, eye-opening points to be made. The first one is this chart right before you. Perhaps one of the most pervasive and harmful myths, orbits of misinformation about Austin, is the idea that those pesky environmentalists got in the way of road- building. And that's why traffic's so bad. And we've got to catch up.And, you know, we tried that "If you don't build it, they won't come." And it failed miserably. So we have to build like crazy now. This is the truth shown in this chart. Blue population growth starting back in the early '80s to recently. Red, the lane miles that we built. We built roads slightly faster than population growth. The green is vehicle miles traveled. This explains why -- [ laughing ] -- Traffic is so bad. The roads we built were to help people drive further and further, longer and longer commutes. So quite literally, the roads rebuilt caused the congestion that we're suffering from today. That's the starting point. Oh, do I click this forward? Can I? All right. Lets see. How do I do this? There we go. Okay. So, what does imagine Austin, our plan, say about our future? [10:58:30 AM] Consistent with previous Austin tomorrow comprehensive plan, direct our growth north and south along I-35 to the east with major centers. And that's basically what the2030 campo plan and 2035 campo plan said. But you'll note this is our pl plan. And presumably, we haven't abandoned it. The road network to sort -- support that sort of vision of growth here. As you might expect, calls for our major investments in transportation being where we want the growth to go. And then if you take -- next slide -- take that local vision and spread it out to the larger region, and we want Austin to be a regional leader, what it translates to is preserving our water supply watersheds andendangered species habitats to the west, over the Edwards aquifer, the most vulnerable drinking water supply in the state of Texas, directing growth in a corridor more or less along 35 between 35 and 130 from north of Austin all the way to San Antonio, and then further east, having a protected zone over the Carisa Willcox aquifer, andperhaps having development in those areas where there is groundwater supply. So the next part of this presentation is that report from Mr. Marshall. You might ask, why did a vision central Texas, why did sos go to somebody out of state. And there's a reason for that. And that is that most of your experts locally, you know, they have to work with txdot and with the toll road agencies. And so you really almost have to [11:00:30 AM] go out of state to get somebody who's independent and not tied into the road-building machine, for lack of a better way to put it. So, how completely messed up is our plan?And this is another point of stranger than fiction. And this is on the title. Our 2040 plan calls for spending $35 billion -- mostly on road-building -- and congestion gets more than ten times worse according to the campo model. Total and utter failure at enormous financial cost. It's broken. We need a different plan put on the table right away. And that's my primary request to you. Let's get started right away with an alternative regional plan to the 2040 plan. Let's not wait until five years from now to do that. The top part of this slide is lifted directly out of appendix G. They don't advertise it in the campo plan. They hid it back in appendix G to show what a mobility disaster this plan really is. The chart below -- it just sort of converts the chart on the top, reproduced from appendix G, into a bar graph where you can visualize it. A.m. Congestion, P.M. Cocongestion, 2010 in blue, 2040 in yellow and red. The yellow is the "Do nothing" scenario. Don't spend a dime. The red scenario is spending $35 billion. And then if you translate what that looks across the region, on the left, congested roadways in [11:02:32 AM] 2010. On the right, congested roadways in 2040 after we spend $35 billion. And if we take the actual most recent real-world experience of the 183 north toll road tripling in cost, you can probably at least double the 35 billion price tag to get to, sort of, realistic actual Numbers. So we have a financial disaster on our hands, a mobility disaster on our hands. How do we get there? The first thing they did -- this slipped past us, unfortunately -- is the campo starts with some building blocks for the actual plan, projectingpopulation and then projecting job growth. And then distributing that projected population and job growth across the region. The state recommends -- the office of state demographics recommends planning scenario -- their middle planning scenario for planning purposes. And that's shown in this chart in the middle column, is their 2040 population growth projection, the different counties of our campo region color-coded there. Our campo plan didn't do that. We didn't -- and we didn't even choose the high scenario of the office of state demographer. We chose the high, and then we added a little bit more. Very likely not the future that is going to happen. Not impossible, but not really the likely scenario. [11:04:35 AM] So that's the population growth. And that's an enormous difference. How that was distributed is even more important. The percent of increase over the middle range of the office of state demographer projection for 2040 population, hays county is the most off. 245% higher than the state demographer's projection. And then Williamson county, also off the charts higher. You can see Travis county is somewhat closer to their middle range. What this means is they use this to justify a road plan that envisions massive sprawl across the region. To put that population growth out in the hinterlands. So the other key component of projecting transportation demand and traffic in the future,besides population, is the labor force and job growth, because so much of our -- especially peak driving -- is to and from our workplaces. And this is where the plan is even more indefensible. The labor force participation rate looks at what percentage of our population is likely to have jobs. And in 2040, our state demographers and othersprojected the percentage of our population actually commuting to and from a job will be a lower percentage than currently. Instead, what campo does is predict even a higher labor force participation rate, extremely high. So that if you took the top [11:06:36 AM] bar -- actually, the second bar would be sort of the realistic but also a little bit aggressive aggressive. Taking the middle population growth from the state demographer and the 2010 labor force participation rate, projecting new jobs of about a half a million. -- 1.5 million new jobs in the 2040. Not even close to a reality that we should be planning for. So then I'm going to skip over part -- a couple of key points that are in the document. I hope you'll take some time to read it. I don't have a slide for this. But it's a really important point. When we did the 2030 plan, and envision central Texas made a huge effort to build consensus across the region for what kind of plan that we wanted, and they did surveys, and what they found was they had four different scenarios. And overwhelmingly, 14,000 respondents to their survey from across the region.And it was consistent. It wasn't central city versus rural or smaller town, or Travis versus Williamson bastrop, across the region, people wanted the more compact future withcenters. That was the consensus that we wanted. The 2040 plan threw that out the window. And not just throwing it out and distributing the population and the jobs, and the road-building to sprawl areas, but also to move it into exactly the areas [11:08:36 AM] that we don't want them to go. This is figure 12 from the report. Each red dot shows -- represents a thousand households, a thousand new homes, that is present in the 2040 plan that was not included in the 2035 plan. Conversely, the blue dots are a thousand households that are in the previous plan that are missing from the new plan. So you can see they erased growth in centers and along our growth corridor and put an enormous amount of new households in far northern outlying Williamson county, andthen our primary concern, in western hays county. That's the Barton springs watershed, all those red dots in the lower left. That's -- this is utterly in direct conflict with the -- our imagine Austin plan. >> Kitchen: So, Mr. Bunch, let me ask you a question there. >> Sure. >> Kitchen: So what you're saying there on those dots -- >> Yeah, I'll go back there. >> Kitchen: The blue dots are where they were -- it was taken away, right? >> Right. >> Kitchen: Okay. So these blue dots in the north -- I'm trying to seeexactly. So there was growth in the north and west of Travis county that was not accounted for in the 2040 plan. In other words, the assumptions took that growth away and put the growth just, really, it just looks like far north and far south. Is that what you're saying? >> Far north, and far southwest. [11:10:39 AM] >> Kitchen: Okay. In hays and Williamson. >> You can see with the blue dots to the east, those are disappearing projected households, households that were projected in the 2035 plan that are not. You know, they actually went in the opposite direction, even though we've had five more years of growth since the previous plan. >> Kitchen: So that could impact the -- for Travis county, that could impact the western and northwestern Travis county? >> Right, yes. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> And then where it translatedinto is the proposed road-building. And this focuses, you know, on our primary concern, again, western Travis and western hays county, and Barton springs watershed, and then also the -- down into the blanco river watershed. So these color -- red, yellow and green are road projects in the 2040 plan. The red are the ones in the first batch of the plan, the first five years of the 2040 plan. And you can see that's the oak hill parkway project, the mopac south, mopac intersections, 45 southwest. The big ones, the expensive ones, primarily. So 1.4 billion with a B, billion dollars of pavement targeted for the Barton springs watershed in the first five years of the 2040 plan. I think that's a nightmare for our community. Is another really critical thing that people forget -- the toll roads are only partially funded with debt backed by future toll collections. [11:12:39 AM] Anywhere from 40 to 60% of these toll projects are paid for with our limited tax dollars, grants, and taxpayer-supported loans. Only that other 40 to 60% are from bonds on the private marketplace. So this is what the plan calls for. And that is 180° from our imagine Austin plan where we call for investing those dollars in our preferred growth areas, the areas where we want economic development to go, not in our road areas where we don't want it to go. So, just regionally speaking, we'd like to see the 130 tollroad debt paid off and make that road free so that it becomes an economic development corridor as well as a bypass for I-35 to focus on fixing I-35 and to not convert mopac into the western I-35, or the fix for I-35. It won't work, in part. I'm going to skip through this part, but I'll come back to a little bit of that. I'll just briefly -- y'all are pretty well aware, but, just to put an emphasis on it here, the campo and the rma have chopped up this south mopac 45 southwest toll loop into four pieces. Y'all have passed a resolution to oppose that and ask for a comprehensive study first. That's now an issue in the courthouse. And we'd really like to have [11:14:42 AM] y'all's help making that happen. I'm going to skip over a little bit on some of this harm to the Barton springs watershed. Wanted to mention just briefly, though, in addition to the threat to Barton springs, zilker park, the Austin science and nature center, the zilker botanical gardens, Austin high school, it's a threat to the wildflower center. They believe that the proposed 45 southwest toll road and mopac expansion threatens their very existence, because of the additional traffic, noise, visual, aerial, water pollution.That would be a tremendous loss to our community as well. And you'll be hearing more about that in the near future. But that's another important reason that we haven't talked about or paid attention to on why we need to shift our spending to other parts of the watershed -- of our region where we want to invest in our transportation infrastructure and to pull back and not ruin things before we've really paid attention in the southwest. I'll skip that. So this is not from Mr. Marshall's report. This is a preview of a report that Steve biers is about to complete. Obviously, this is a little bit of a stretch, an illustration. But we wanted to talk about it for a second, because we don't want to do our transportation planning in a silo. We want to think about water and open space, and the other issues that matter to us. And one way to think about the [11:16:44 AM] land we've purchased in the southwest is as a demand-side management for traffic. So forget about the water quality benefits, the open space benefits, the quality of life,and outdoor public health benefits. If you just think about the land we bought as a transportation investment, by erasing trips that would've been generated had the land developed, what you come out with is an investment that pays off ten to1 in erasing car trips per day versus what the proposed mopac toll lanes and 45 southwest toll road would spend to accommodate trips per day. And there's a lot of machinations back and forth and details that you can argue over, and we're not trying to put an exact dollar figure on this. But it's accurate to scale, and that is that we can expand these roads and they'll fill up instantly. They're not going to reduce congestion. We're going to spend a billion or more doing that. And we're going to have all the harm that comes from it. The other alternative is to buy more preserve land, erase more develop, erase the trips that that would generate, save dollars and achieve multiple goals rather than suffer multiple types of harm. We'd like to learn from our neighbors. This has been getting more attention. Houston spent $2.8 billion over a relatively short period of [11:18:45 AM] time to expand the Katie freeway west of Houston up to 21 lanes, if you count the frontage roads. When they got done, traffic was slower. Travel times were longer. And the $2.8 billion included a $1.6 billion cost overrun. This is what we're looking at for mopac if we stay on the course that the rma and txdot would have us pursue. We cannot build our way out of congestion. You can't add enough lanes to mopac to make, really, a dent in it. And that's especially true if you loop it over to I-35 and convert it into an interregional parkway rather than a local commuter highway. Then we have the future to look at. This is a recent -- just excerpt from the New York times. Barclay's capital, the international bank, looking at what the autonomous vehicles mean for us. It's going to mean a lot fewer roads -- cars on the road. Using the pavement we have far, far more efficiently such that, you know, paving now is an enormous waste of money almost across the board. So let me wrap up, conclusions and requests to y'all. First, just the conclusions, campo 2040 plan, financial, traffic, economic, and environmental disaster. Road map to failure across the board. It kills imagine Austin. It kills envision central Texas, Barton springs, and really, the economic well- being of our [11:20:46 AM] region into the future. We need to develop new scenarios with different population projections, different population and job distribution scenarios, and an updated traffic model that meets current standards. Campo's still -- the model itself is still working on an extremely outdated view. And we'd like the city to join with us and Travis county and pay Mr. Marshall and smart mobility to do essentially the same work that they did on the 2030 plan for a fraction of the cost that you would spend somewhere else with all the Independence that comes with it. Roughly a $120,000 study where we can put an alternative vision or two on the table and start building consensus around a regional plan that matches the imagine Austin plan. So a new plan based on imagine Austin prioritizing vmt reduction and having smart mobility use their expertise from the envision central Texas effort to do that. And then we can be -- we can drive the discussion. We can win over the folks who are opposing us on campo by putting a more compellingvision. We can overcome the polarization on the campo board by putting a better proposal on the table. We can do it relatively quickly, and we want to work with you to do that. So, thank you very much for your time in hearing us out this morning. >> Kitchen: Thank you, Mr. Bunch. Do we have questions? Mr. Zimmerman. >> Zimmerman: Thank you, Mr. Bunch, for being here. It would've been terrific if we could've had somebody from campo at the other podium and give equal times to both sides, and then have an animated [11:22:47 AM] discussion. That would've been awesome. The one-sided discussion is not that useful to me. >> Thank you for saying that. If you'll put it on the next agenda, I would love to do exactly that. Because we've got to have that interaction. And not just campo, but your own city staff. I'd love to hear what the Austin transportation department says in response, point by point. Find out where do we agree, where do we disagree, and then let's move forward from there. The very first slide you put up that showed the vehicle miles traveled, right? It's taking off a lot faster than population and lane miles. >> Yes, yes. >> Zimmerman: Yeah, if we could go back to that. It's interesting to me -- Iguess I would like to have seen prior to 1982. Because it looks like back in the early 1980s, they were kind of matching up. And if I went back, say, ten years prior to that, would they all be synchronized, moving together, or not? It just shows where they start to diverge. I was wondering if I went back another decade, if they had been, you know, together. Or do we know? >> We thought -- we didn't go back that far. And I'm not sure if the data is that good going sooner. Presumably, there's some information there, but I don't know how reliable that is. >> Zimmerman: The point is, if you're going to show a trend, it's good to show -- if something is separating, it would be good to be able to show where it was consistent. But be that as it may, to me, what this chart shows -- >> That's 30 years. It's a pretty good window. >> Zimmerman: It is. But what this shows to me is that the reason people are being forced to move into other Williamson or hays county is because of the unaffordability of residences, of building herein Austin. And I know you're going to [11:24:49 AM] disagree with me, but I argue that the land use controls and environmentalism makes people be forced to move into farther-away counties. People are being forced out of the city. It's not deliberate. It's not that council sat here and said, "How do we get rid of people and force them to move to suburbs." That's not what we did. It was an unintended consequence of the land use restrictions that are in place and the high cost of building in the Austin area. So, to me, that line that's gone up just shows that it'sunaffordable to build and live in Austin. That's the number 1 point here. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, I would agree that we have a problem with affordability. I wouldn't agree with the reason for it, but I would agree that that is a factor in why we have people moving out, which does create lots of difficulties with the transportation system. >> Yeah. And the fact that it is cheaper further out is indisputable. But, I would say, part of what's driving them out, by building these roads, we're heavilysubsidizing living further out with taxpayer dollars. Supply and demand. When you have hyper-growth and you can't add housing supply fast enough in a closer-in area that takes more time, and you have to be more careful, then of course it's going to get way more expensive. And then any growing city. The central city, attractive areas, by necessity, they're limited in supply. You can't increase the supply of land close in. So I would say it's supply and demand, and subsidizing sprawl. [11:26:51 AM] >> Zimmerman: So one place we would probably agree is that we should eliminate the city's so-called economic development department, because we didn't have a development problem to solve in the first place. We never had a problem with too few people moving to Austin. >> Right. Right. >> Zimmerman: . [ Chuckling ] So why the heck did we come up with a development department to subsidize companies to move here. I think that's the one area we agree on. >> Absolutely. Companies that come here should pay their fair share. If they want to be here, they should come. We shouldn't put fuel on the fire. >> Zimmerman: Everybody's paying an unfair share, exceptthe subsidized companies. That's one thing we agree on. We shouldn't have been subsidizing growth in the first place. >> Kitchen: Councilmember Zimmerman, that might be an area partially that I would agree with you on, in terms of our subsidies. So, thank you very much, Mr. Bunch. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Appreciate that. We now have our last item, which is a staff briefing on the manchaca/slaughter lane intersection. And the other five dangerous intersections that we funded last year. This is an update, I assume, on the progress. >> Yes. Good morning, committee members, Eric Pollock, managing engineer, Austin transportation department. Yes. I will talk aboutmanchaca/slaughter, but also the top five, how we decided the top five, where we are now, the things we've already implemented, and next steps going forward. So, roughly last fall, more or less last October, is when council contributed to funding of the top five analysis and construction. So taking a look at the information, we've got crash data from the Austin police department looking at historical crash. We looked at not only the frequency, which is more or less the raw number of crashes at a location, but also crash rates, also looking at the number of [11:28:51 AM] vehicles going through an intersection or an area. Because you would expect an intersection having more volume would probably have more crashes, which in general, that's true. But also looking at the rates, kind of allows us to take a look at some locations that might have been off the radar in the past. And we look at casualties, fatalities and injuries. Fatalities get a lot of the attention from the community and even staff, but it's also important to look at the injuries. You know, a lot of times injuries may be pretty severe, but they might not have resulted in a fatality. Once we're able to look at the other criteria, we are able to look at crash clusters and patterns. This is going to become pretty say, crashes are happening because of rear-ends, maybe people fail to yield when turning. Those crashes become apparent when we look at the data. We wanted to focus on the engineering improvements. We talked about the other Es in the other presentations. Knowing that contributing factors tend to be speed, distraction, impairment. But we did want to take a look at what can we do from an engineering standpoint. And it's a little bit of a misnomer to call these the top five dangerous.Granted, when we were selected -- selecting the top locations, they all have a problem with crash and safety problems. But we wanted to make sure that anything we did, mentioning, could be done within the scope, the budget, the time that we were allowed. And what you'll see is a lot of these are on txdot roads. And so we did want to be sure that anything we implemented could be done, and wasn't necessarily in conflict with bigger, larger- scale improvements that were safe for I-35. So, the areas north to south, [11:30:52 AM] Lamar and palmer, Lamar rundberg, 183 and Cameron, 35 and martin Luther king boulevard, and then manchaca/slaughter. That's been going on since last fall. To kind of give you an overview of the budget, the way the process works is atd engineers, we're kind of in charge of looking at the data, coming up with the concepts, kind of the vision of the improvements. And we're working with our sister department in public works to actually design the plans, come up with the plans that need to be approved. And then we also have a project management group from public works, is also helping us out. And so that's kind of, if you will, the second and fourth columns, the third one being theconstruction cost, which tends to be the bigger price for all of these. So all total, about 3.8 million. So, to go into more of a little bit of detail, the areas, this is slaughter and manchaca. This is the highest-priced location, only mainly because it's -- we were able to come up with solutions that more or less have higher dollar amounts, but we really see a lot of benefits here. It's kind of the main traffic generator in this area is the HEB in the northwest corner, but there are a number of driveways and other businesses in this area. I know you can't see the details. I'll call out the highlights. Speaking to councilmember Zimmerman's point earlier about what are we doing for mobility, once we started looking at the improvements here, we realized we have the right of way and these fairly wide streets to add left-turn lanes, each approach. So currently, where there's one turn lane turning left, we can actually fit in a second one. And with our traffic models, we do see mobility improving quite substantially. And I think what we find is that [11:32:54 AM] people tend to, if you want to say, not make wise decisions when they're stuck in the light for the third red. They say I'm going to take my chances and take a left acrossmany lanes of traffic. One of our improvements is to add a raised median up and down manchaca road. So, recognizing that, taking away some access, we do want toimprove movement at the intersection. So, it's kind of that trade between mobility and safety there. We're also allowing for bike facility -- adding a signal and monarch drive, north of the intersection, where we've documented quite a few bus riders taking their chances and crossing this very wide street. So that has the ability to help safety, pedestrian improvements across things, but also just general mobility. And we're also making some improvements on ritle to the west of the intersection. Here's a zoom- in.The first day of the program, we were able to work with txdot, because this is a txdot road, manchaca, we put in the temporary measure of delineators, the sticks that come up from the ground, to discourage and eliminate most people from turning. We've had some good feedback since that. Here's a picture of what it look looks like today.Recently in March, we completed a change in the lane assignments at the signal. It was already existing. It's a neighborhood collector that lines up with the main driveway into the shopping center, recognizing that we restrict turns out of HEB on to manchaca. We realized that more people would probably be turning left left -- onto slaughter.We changed lane configurations, improved phasing, I think we've seen improvements already. That's what we're calling the phase one improvements. A lot of these intersections, [11:34:55 AM] phase one tends to be signal or ped-hybrid beacons, because they don't need as much review and oversight from txdot, because the city of Austin takes over the operation and ownership. But also, our city crews can actually put them in so that's something that we can address sooner. And concurrently, we can design the other improvements.So, overall, txdot is actually contributing to this one. They had som safety money already designated for manchaca road. So because of that, we will enter into an advanced funding agreement with txdot. We're working on that right now. So, the phase one, those cig --signal improvements, the one at monarchal, the small wheel. Phase two, there's quite a bit of construction with the raised median and changing some of the turns at the intersection. That'll take a little longer. But at least we're able to see some improvements at this point. So then going to Lamar and Parmer, much like manchaca and slaughter, we are changing -- we're not raising any medians along these roads, but we are changing the turn lanes, what we call a smart right turn. And that's a way of taking drivers more safely through the intersection. So if you go slower through theintersection in terms of a right turn lane, it lines up the driver better so they can see oncoming cars a little bit better. It also slows them down if a pedestrian or bicyclist happens to be crossing their path. So it's seen pretty good success rates in other cities. But just to point out some highlights, on the north end, the pedestrian hybrid beacon, to our knowledge, this is the first phb going in in the txdot system, so we see this as a good [11:36:57 AM] way going forward, because a number of our streets in the city still belong to txdot, but the high school, we've observed a number of pedestrians crossing there, after school, going over to the shopping center with the Lowe's and Walmart are. Right now it's under construction. We're waiting for the power to be turned on by Austin energy. They control that schedule. And then another traffic signal a little farther south, the main driveway into the shopping center. We saw a number of collisions that could be mitigated by a signal. There's a series of bus stops there. We can provide them a safe crossing across Lamar. And that's just, kind of, more details about the smart right turns. Again, phb under construction. Next few weeks, it can be turned on, barring any unforeseen delays with Austin energy. And then the other signal that's in the plans completing in June. That's a couple more. And so phase two. I should add that fairly recently, txdot indicated for their project delivery group that they would like to see advanced funding agreements not just on manchaca/slaughter but all of them. This was a different approach than we had gotten when we first met with txdot seven or eight months ago.We're trying to figure out if that's truly the approach they want. If it does, it will add a few months of delivery. Our goal is to get as much constructed by the end of thisfiscal year as possible. So, hopefully we'll figure out soon about where txdot stands with that. So, moving a little farther south, here's rundberg and Lamar. Rundberg came up pretty high in our list of safety locations. As we looked a little bit more, Rutland wasn't that far down. We figured let's try to address as many problems as possible. [11:38:58 AM] To the west side of the corridor, there's the public library. It has crossings to the HEB, and vice versa. There are quite a few improvements we can make. Phase one, there is a pedestrian hybrid beacon there with the library and HEB. But part of our solution, phase two, is to have a raised median up and down north Lamar. When that happens, more and more drivers will be pushed to the existing phb. So we figure it's a good way to accommodate that new demand there. And then we also have quite a few pedestrians crossing Rutland. So we can add a pedestrian hybrid beacon to access some of the bus stops in that area. Those are both scheduled for July, the phb and signal to be constructed. In phase two, like I said, it's a raised median running south of rundberg up to Rutland, and we're doing a bit of improvements at the phb at the signal.We've seen people driving the wrong way out of convenience. So we're going to raise a little piece of island at the driveway to control those movements. And we've completed about 60% of the design. We're coordinating with txdot for further construction. Moving farther south, here's an interesting one. Here's 183 and Cameron road. We found two hotspots here. We found a lot of drivers heading eastbound on the frontage road getting into crashes at that intersection with Cameron road. What we found were a lot ofdrivers -- they didn't really seem to be acknowledging the signal. You know, particularly when it's red. They weren't stopping in time. They didn't see it altogether. [11:41:00 AM] They were running the light. And what we -- just driving the corridor, what we realized was that for a good half mile or so along that frontage road, it almost feels like you're driving on the main lanes. There's a few driveways you can probably go 60 miles an hour easily. I think drivers weren't realized a signal was coming and they had to pay attention and adjust behavior. We suggest an advancing warning flasher that will flash only when the signal's about to change. We don't want it to flash all the time, because then the message gets lots. -- Lost.on the northeast corner, westbound, there's a large retaining wall that blocks vision for pedestrians who are waiting to cross the street, sowe're going to make changes there. There's kind of what you would expect from the advanced warning flasher. Again, another summer construction timeline. This one, we're going to add a raised island. There's quite a bit of space, asphalt, as you can see. So if we're able to create a pedestrian refuge that they can more safely wait, and also kindof control the speeds through there, we see that as a win, and also do some ramp improvements in the area. The next location, we've already done some improvements here.This is I-35 and martin Luther king. Again, the intersection that came up more in the rankings was the southbound frontage road, but as we looked at things, we realized there's a pattern of other incidents happening, and we were able to address them a couple months ago. So we found a lot of this southbound traffic leading up to mlk, weaving within a short distance, drivers are trying to get into the lane they want. It's just off the image. Here's an off ramp, the exit is off I-35 onto mlk. So, currently, the right lanes [11:43:00 AM] are two right-only lanes. We found a lot of people trying to get in the right lane, the correct lane, I could say. Or they're still trying to travel straight through, and through one of the right turn lanes. So, we're able to -- part of the proposal is to change the lane designation and also add some concrete work to reinforce those movements. So one of the phase one that we've completed in February was looking at the single timings. What we found were during the peaks, a lot of drivers were turning on what we call thegreen ball without an arrow. It's not protected, so you have to wait for a gap. Quite a few drivers just weren't able to properly gauge those gaps. So they were being hit as they were turning left. So we added protected only arrows, not just the southbound, but also the northbound directions. But only when we really found the history of crashes. So it's not all the times. But, you know, prior to that, we modeled it. We didn't see it being a problem with mobility. And it turns out it's operating pretty well. And, again, whereas in the past, some of the other intersections where we were modifying and putting in, you know, a smart right turn, txdot was a little less comfortable with these locations, so we're going with a raised crosswalk that will slow drivers without reconstructing those right turn lanes, and that's part of the phase two, along with some of the other concrete and ramp work I mentioned. And before I open to questions, I just want to acknowledge that, you know, our team -- this is kind of a first for atd to have this type of focus. But we were able to get staff in with this expertise. Our lead engineer is actually here right now, just leading the concepts, just working well with our public works department to get, you know, these projects [11:45:02 AM] 60% or almost completion by this time. It speaks a lot. And I think we've made a lot of good partnerships and connections with txdot. So. >> Kitchen: I want to thank you also. You know, as we went down this road last year as a council and funded this work, we were very concerned about focusing in on some key safety issues. >> Mmhmm. >> Kitchen: And so we really appreciate all the work that you all have put in to move this this very quickly. >> Thank you. >> Kitchen: Do we have questions? Anyone have questions? Again, thank you very much for this update. It's very helpful for us to let our constituents know in the different parts of the city what's happening with theseintersections. >> Sure. Okay. Thank you. >> Kitchen: Thank you again. The last item is discussion of future agenda items. Does anyone want to highlight anything? Yes, councilmember Zimmerman. >> Zimmerman: Thank you. So, where are we on the taxi co-op discussion? I think it's coming up on a year now that we first started talking about that. >> Kitchen: I think that that is -- I don't know if that's scheduled to come back in front of us. Here's what I recall. There was an rpf that was put out. The companies have responded to that at this point. And that's the last I'm aware of, because we were provided that update. But I'm not sure -- is that something we can answer right now, or do we need to get that information to everyone? >> Austin transportation department. I believe there's a memo that's being prepared to go to all thecouncilmembers. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> To lay that out. >> Kitchen: Okay. >> It's kind of involved with what we do with all of the franchises as we move forward in the future. We could put it -- >> Zimmerman: Put an agenda item placeholder for that. There'll probably be something to talk about at our next meeting, I would guess.Thanks. And I think we have our constituents come in. They probably would like to visit with us, because it's been [11:47:04 AM] a while since we talked about it. >> Kitchen: I'll look into that. We have a pretty tight -- our next agenda -- let me just lay that out for folks just to remind y'all. You know, on June 1st, at a budget work session, the staff will be presenting to all of us the information related to the potential for bonding capacity in this year, as well asrecommendations regarding, you know, what projects we might consider. So, that's not for action, but it's a briefing at our June 1st budget work session. Then at the next meeting of this committee, which is June 14th, I believe it is, we will have a public hearing on the information that was laid out to us on June 1st. We can decide whether or not at that point we want to take any action to bring back to the full council. And then the full council has two meetings which are the . . . I guess it's the 19th. Let me look at my calendar -- has two meetings in June if the council determines that they want to take any action on that -- on those recommendations and the potential. So, that would be June -- yes. June 17th -- no, 16th and 23rd in front of the full council. Okay? All right. If there's no further action, we are adjourned. Thank you.