Now is the time and place for a meeting of the Beaverton Planning Commission.

For the record, I will do a roll call to verify which commission members are participating this evening.

Commissioner Holmes.

Present.

Commissioner McAvoy.

Present.

Commissioner Speck.

Commissioner Winter.

Let the record show that Commissioners Adam and McCann are excused and absent from the meeting tonight.

We are now at Commission Communications.

Commission, any communications.

We are now at staff communications.

Staff any communications.

Good evening.

I'm Anna Slatinski, the planning division manager here in Beaverton.

I just have one kind of fun announcement for tonight.

And this is basically an event where the various businesses that sell Boba tea are going to be serving.

There's also going to be some music and some other kind of fun things associated with the phenomenon, which is Boba T.

So again, that's downtown Beaverton on June 7th.

And if you Google Boba Beaverton, you will get all the information on the website.

So fun community event.

Thank you.

The first item on the agenda is a work session on the transportation system plan update, draft networks, and policies.

The order of the work session will be as follows.

We will begin with the city staff presentation, followed by discussion and questions of staff by the commission.

The planning commission will then hear public comments regarding the work session item.

Individual comments will be limited to five minutes and must be directed toward the work session item.

The commission may ask additional questions of individuals providing comments or staff.

We will now begin the staff presentation.

Thank you so much.

Hello, Commissioners.

Just to kind of have a break to see where we're at.

Is that okay?

Okay.

Great.

So this is our project timeline.

As a reminder, uh we have finished the vision and goals and existing conditions work, and we're at a pretty critical point right now where we'll be looking for direction from city council on the policies and network maps.

With this information, when we have that direction, we can go forward with putting together a draft project list and some investment scenarios for them to consider at the end of the year.

2027 is largely going to be dedicated to developing performance measures, performance standards, comp plan changes, teeing up changes to implementing documents like the development code and engineering design manual, and taking things through the legislative process.

So as a reminder, you all are a part of that.

We will be coming to you to be recommending uh action to council.

The full adoption is anticipated in about a year and a half.

So at the end of 2027.

Tonight, our primary purpose is to introduce you to the draft policies and draft network maps and then answer any questions that you might have.

We'd also like your help spreading the word when we get them up on our project website for public review, which we're hoping to do in just a short while and within a week.

So our hope is that you'll walk away from this meeting this evening with an understanding of what these policies are.

Um and then if you have more detailed comments you'd like to provide after you've sat with everything a little bit more, you're always welcome to provide them through the general public common form and just email us directly.

So I want to back up really far and just kind of talk about why what are policies, why do they matter?

Um policies are statements of expected norms and intent.

They help us make decisions based on the impacts that we want to have.

And they do, they're really important because they inform processes, administrative actions, regulations, and investment decisions.

And maybe most importantly, that their policies are dynamic, meaning they can change over time to adapt to shifting conditions and goals.

And our TSP vision goals and objectives have shifted quite a bit from what they were 16 years ago.

And so because of that, we've adjusted the TSP policies to be aligned with our updated goals.

16 years ago, we were much more focused on projects that were about building more motor vehicle lanes that we hoped could have carried more cars and trucks and moved them along streets at faster speeds.

There wasn't a lot of mention about how different users have different needs about how the system should provide equitable access.

We didn't really talk about the quality of experience for community members when they're using the system or their ability to make complete trips when not driving.

This also wasn't addressed very much.

So as a result, most of the projects that were identified and in the TSP were relatively large, expensive, time-intensive capital projects that were very motor vehicle centered.

So where we're headed with this with these updated policies is to shift the focus really to user safety and experience rather than doubling down on that car dependent future where added motor vehicle capacity and those high speeds are actually putting a portion of the population at risk, often the most vulnerable users of the system.

So the policies we're going to go over tonight position us well to adapt that car dependent system that we have today to a future system that provides better access to destinations in Beaverton by walking and biking and taking public transit while still maintaining the near full access that we have to destinations already by car and truck.

So the policies point to a future where we have multiple well connected networks available to people.

That can serve as either their primary travel option or that can serve as a really good backup option.

We're aiming for network redundancy here, where everyone has access to the system and that people can keep going even if life throws a curveball, like high gas prices.

So that's what we're we're aiming for.

To make this happen, we're gonna need to move more quickly than in the past, using less capital intensive means so that we can complete entire sections of networks and make it and make them useful to people.

With that, I'd like to talk a little about at a very high level about what these transportation policies are and what they're intended to be.

They're actionable, so they offer a clear path forward that we can act on when the time is right in an organized way and deliver specific results.

They're responsive, they respond to what we heard from the community last summer.

For example, that people want to walk and bike and take transit more often, particularly for those local trips.

And that right now conditions don't always make them feel like this is possible or safe enough to do.

Then we also really made an effort to make them inclusive and easy to read.

We deliberately used a different tone with these policies.

So they're quite conversational in tone.

There are a lot of we statements in there.

But when we get to code and design standard changes, we'll be much, much more specific.

They're assertive what statements, so they they state what we want to do and the why behind those expectations.

So if you if you looked at the policies, they have a policy statement and then a pretty context-rich narrative underneath, describing how the policy relates to the past, the present, and those future vision goals and objectives.

So they're really serving as a bridge between today and the future as we're transitioning our transportation system and providing a record of the reasoning behind why the city has a policy for this.

There are six policy sections.

We'll review each of them.

We'll start with safety and then move on to each of the modal networks, and then at the end address intersections and crossings.

We broke that out as a separate policy section because they really apply to all modes.

You might notice a general structure and some repeating themes in each of the modal network policies.

We always lead with a complete network policy.

You'll see policies related to keeping everyone safe and healthy and feeling welcome.

Policies tend to describe expected user norms.

We aim to keep things really human-centric, so discussing things like sensory needs of people and physical limitations of the human body.

There's always a development policy, setting the expectations that additional modifications and contributions will be expected with development as it occurs.

And then finally, I just want to note you'll see a fair amount of repetition between the policy sections.

And again, this was also intentional.

And this was done to really reinforce the importance of the interdependence between the modal networks.

So let's jump into the sections.

As I said, we start with safe travel for all.

I'm not gonna read all of the policies verbatim.

Instead, I'm just gonna go over specific themes that they touch on.

Under the Safe Travel for All policies, we have a vision zero policy.

Vision zero is a statement that says that we're working towards a future where no one dies or suffers serious injury in a traffic crash in Beaverton.

The policies talk about the need for safe speeds, good visibility, the reduction of conflict points in the system, and they talk about safety as a right.

No matter how a person travels, walking, biking, taking a bus, driving.

Everyone should be able to travel in a manner that is safe and feels safe.

So as we move forward, we always want to keep an eye out and an ear to the ground for how things are working.

So there's a policy stating our intention to do this, both through data and community informed methods.

And then finally, there's a policy setting ourselves up for shifting to a more safety and access based set of performance standards that can be applied at the time of development so that we can begin to shift from to this and away from our current motor vehicle capacity based standards.

The pedestrian network policies.

We start with completeness again.

And when we talk about pedestrian network completeness, we're talking about working towards an all ages and abilities pedestrian network.

The all ages and abilities part is really important.

You'll see that come up again in the bicycle network as well.

The policies highlight the importance of enhanced pedestrian facilities along priority transit routes and in pedestrian districts.

We're going to talk about both of those terms when we get to the map section, but for now, I just want to share that the locations where we'd expect enhanced facilities, those pedestrian districts, are areas where they should be very walkable places.

They're places that we want people to stay and spend time, not just not just get through.

To that end, there are also policies that talk about what can make the pedestrian experience positive.

So those get to a lot of the placemaking elements, like having places to sit and rest and visual interest or cover from the elements.

Then we have a development policy here that begins to set ourselves up for requiring pedestrian walkways on private property and walkway connections to the larger pedestrian network and the public right-of-way at the time of development.

And then finally, we have a maintenance policy that discusses the importance of sidewalk maintenance.

We heard a lot of that from community members last summer.

If a side if a sidewalk is poorly maintained, it can become unusable for folks.

And we we want to not only make sure that we have the infrastructure in place, we want to make sure it remains usable.

Under the public transportation policies, the completeness policy talks about the need to work with service providers like TriMet in partnership because a complete transit journey requires both the transit service and access to the transit stop to actually be useful.

And while transit service decisions are not the cities to make, the pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure, including street crossings leading to stops, are generally within the city's domain or one of our other jurisdictional partners.

And they're extremely important to anyone when they're using public transportation services.

There's also a policy that talks about giving priority to transit service in the public right-of-way along those priority transit lines.

Priority transit lines are the ones that are currently carrying the most number of passengers, or that we would expect will carry the most in the future.

So if you think of things like trimets, frequent service bus lines.

There's also a policy that talks about encouraging more housing and key destinations, walkable environments along those priority transit lines because making sure that these things align both helps community members make those short local trips by walking in transit more easily, but it also keeps the transit service running because it's being used.

More transit supportive built environments begets more transit usage, which which begets sustained and sometimes even upgraded service frequency and amenities when the resources allow.

So again, um we have a policy about setting ourselves up to require transit stop investments and associated walkway and sidewalk connections to transit stops at the time of development.

Um and then we have some policy language in there that acknowledges that our community really benefits from access to the greater, much larger regional public transportation networks because people's lives and trips they don't always begin or end in Beaverton.

Let's move on to the bicycle network policies.

Um as I stated, they begin similarly to the pedestrian network policies, talking about the expectation for a complete all ages and abilities bicycle network.

Um the policies talk about the needs people have when bicycling, not just during the trip, but also before and after.

So, for example, secure bike parking.

Um again, you'll see a development policy that sets ourselves up for requiring bicycle network and bike parking investments at the time of development.

Um, and like in the public transportation policies, you'll see acknowledgement about the importance of connecting Beaverton's local bike network to networks outside of the city.

Um, so our neighbors, and this is important, as you know, we have kind of uh wonky borders.

So this is a pretty important thing to be able to connect to the system outside.

Um similar to other modal policies, we have a policy that talks about the importance of maintenance.

Um, this is another one that we heard from the community last summer.

Um, it's very important when cycling to keep in order to keep the network usable to keep it maintained.

Motor vehicle completeness is largely about making the existing system even safer and keeping it maintained.

Um, which safety front and center, the policies talk about designing for safe target speeds, which we'll talk about later as we get into the maps.

Um, they talk about restoring and sustaining a culture of safety and caring for one another as we're we're using our streets.

There are policies related to traffic calming and repurposing of existing right-of-way, um, and this is to allow to have uh for a higher degree of protection when walking and biking.

There are also policies like in the the safety policies about reducing conflicts in the system through operational adjustments like traffic signals and access management adjustments.

There are policies that set ourselves up, or there is a policy that sets ourselves up for requiring safety enhancement measures and new street connections and traffic homing at the time of development.

And finally, there's a policy around coordination with other jurisdictions, um, particularly around the streets that are in Beaverton but not owned by the city.

We have quite a few streets like this that are either owned by ODOT, so like BH Highway or Canyon, um, or the county, like Murray, Walker, Scholes Ferry, Jenkins.

Intersections and crossings.

Um the policies talk about the need for regular and frequent crossings, um, that crossings need to be ADA accessible as short as possible.

And they begin to describe what's expected of priority crossings.

Um we'll talk about that in a map as well.

That includes having enhanced protection of these crossings.

It talks about expectations where heavy large vehicles are expected pretty regularly, and that we want to accommodate this while still retaining priority for vulnerable users.

Um then finally it makes protected intersections the default type of intersection in Beaverton at locations where there are high motor vehicle volumes, and we have the space to be able to provide that.

I'm just gonna sit have this slide up for a second in case you haven't come across the term protected intersection before, I wanted to give you a quick idea of it, what it is.

Protected intersections typically provide enhanced safety measures using a combination of things.

Um there are corner refuge islands, you can see those there, forward stop bars.

Um, and high visibility and setback crossings, and oftentimes there's bicycle signals as well.

This all leads to more visibility for everyone.

Um, it reduces turning speeds, it and it gives those added layers of protection for people when they're walking, rolling, or biking.

So with that, that covers pretty much the policy sections, and I wanted to pause here before we get into the maps to see if you had any questions about what we just covered.

Uh Commissioner McVoy.

Thanks, Vice Chair.

Um thank you for that presentation, or the first half of it, anyways.

Um I guess first I just want to commend you all on uh on a really thorough and very, very approachable document.

I mean, I I think to the extent that your goal, as you said, was uh to write policies in plain language that are you know really communicate a strong vision.

I think you've done that.

Um so that that all is fantastic.

Um I guess one of the questions I have, the overarching questions though, um, has to do with sort of how these policies will be referenced in the future.

I mean, I I you know, as someone interested in planning and that kind of thing, I think this is a great vision document.

But when it comes time to implementation, who's actually gonna refer back to these policies and how will they actually be, how will they resurface in some of that decision making we can expect in the future?

Yeah, so I'd say there's always layers, right?

So it will be in our comprehensive plan.

Um and similar to other comprehensive plan language that is a bit uh, I don't want to say just visionary, but it's a little bit more broad language that's in there.

Um that is what we use as a basis as we go forward to make changes to development code, engineering design, manual, city code, those are the places where I mentioned it's not going to be not have that, it would be very clear, right?

Because we want to make sure that we are very clear on what our expectations are, and that um staff can look at that and make a very um clear decision and they can understand what the expectations are as long as well as the public, right?

So as development comes in, we want that to sh to be able to be very um clear to everyone, and that will be accomplished through the other work that we have that we will bring forward with the comp plan changes um in 2027.

Is that answer?

Yeah, no, that's that's really helpful, yeah.

Um and then I also you pointed out that compared to I think you said 16 years ago, uh, that there's been a pretty significant shift in these policies towards public safety and accessibility.

And can you just say something about why you think there is that shift?

Does that reflect changes in Beaverton's population and demographics, changes in the road network and use itself or the transportation network?

Why this shift towards safety?

Have you seen more accidents per capita?

I think we've always had um safety top of mind, right?

So I want to make that pretty clear that we have we have had safety in mind as we make decisions.

I think um where this really expands things and there's just more awareness, I'd say, of sort of what those um well, one, what the costs have been, right?

So when we did the existing conditions analysis, it's becoming much more common to take the crash data.

I think we're collecting more crash data and making and ODOT is making that more accessible to the community and to planners to be able to do that type of analysis and really kind of look and see where things are happening, what those patterns are.

So there is a more um awareness, bigger awareness at all levels of government, all the way up to the federal government, um, really putting an emphasis on vision zero.

There's a federal vision zero policy, there's a regional vision zero policy.

Um so it's pretty it's pretty pervasive at this point.

Um and then I'd say a big thing, I don't want to just make it all about regulations, but uh the transportation planning rules, which what this plan must be consistent with, um that's state law, had a major overhaul a few years ago and put a it was the the initiative was called climate-friendly equitable communities uh work, right?

I think you've heard about it through the walkable uh designing walkable places.

That was part of that um package of rule changes that happen.

And but a large portion of that was all related to the transportation system plan and what's expected of that.

And it really shifted the focus to what you're seeing here.

So going forward, there's an expectation at the state level that TSPs should be in line with that.

Brian, did you have anything to add?

Yeah, I think the other thing that I've noticed is um there's been a lot of uh work in the transportation field on trying to under to come up with new designs to uh address some of these safety issues, especially for pedestrians and bicycling, uh people bicycling.

And if you travel around the country and the world, you actually see a lot of that on the ground.

Uh, there's been a lot of uh innovation and trying things and um some success that like we could borrow.

We can we can borrow from um and apply here.

So um all the things that Jessica said, and there's a lot of you know, really things happening in cities where we're there people are trying to make it better.

Gotcha.

I just have one more question.

Um when we're talking about safety, uh, you know, there are a number of comments there, in particular in as relates to pedestrians and bicyclists about um the importance of speed limits or the the speed at which a car is traveling.

Um just out of curiosity, can you say a little bit about um the challenges associated with changing speed limits?

Because on one hand, of all the sort of possible implementation schemes, it seems on a surface level like one of the easier approaches.

And I'm sure that's naive for a million different reasons.

But you know, compared to major capital projects where we're redesigning roads and intersections.

So can you talk a little bit about the barriers to um to changing or reducing speed levels to be more appropriate or more safe?

I think I I we're I was going to talk about this a little bit more with the maps, but I think it's a good time to jump into it now.

I you know, when we talk about target speeds, that's really about the speed that we would like people to travel on the street, right?

Those safe target speeds.

How does that influence other speed indicators that we have, right?

So we every every street is designed with a speed in mind.

It's called a design speed that really dictates the geometric features and kind of like what you'd actually expect for people driving on it.

Right now, our design speeds are actually higher than the posted speeds in some cases on our bigger um streets.

So this is basically saying we want to set the design speeds to be the same as the target speeds to be in line with what we want people to actually be um driving.

You set the posted speed with the design speed in mind, right?

So it all sort of cascades down.

Um so when you're thinking about changes to the speeds, there's some streets that yeah, you probably could, like on the local network and other jurisdictions, Tiger's done this recently, um, switched all the local roads.

20 is plenty, right?

Their campaign to 20 miles per hour.

But there are on other streets, you know, when you're driving, you get a lot of visual cues about what the behavior is is telling you to do, right?

So just think about if you're going down a street and you're like, whoa, like you might be going faster than what you actually expected, but that's the cues that you've got right now.

It's totally open, and you know, it was honestly probably designed for that, right?

So it can go the opposite direction too, right?

Where it feels like you should be going at different speed.

And I would we would expect that the design changes happen sort of incrementally over time.

It's not just slapping a new um speed limit sign on a street to get people to go that speed because the all the other cues are not giving being given.

So it's basically making sure that the designs align with that.

And it's not there again, there's no switch, I think that we can that would be effective in that way, especially for some of the higher speed streets that we have out there.

But as we touch them and we go forward with investments, and I think there's an opportunity, we think that there's an opportunity to be very proactive in what with achieving the speed that the safe speed that we would like on that segment.

Does that no, that's really helpful.

Thank you for that explanation.

Thank you for your presentation uh so far.

Um policy F monitor and respond to transportation safety concerns.

Um talking about using uh data-informed approaches to evaluate issues.

Um what are the or do you have metrics that you're targeting uh to use there?

Well, so as I mentioned, we did do a lot of analysis of the past five years of crash data, which was very helpful to kind of understand where there are patterns of severe, we're really focusing on the severe injury and fatal um crashes.

So I I would expect us to continue to refresh that information as we get it to see if there are any changes in that.

When we go into looking at the maps on our priority intersection map and safety enhancement measure map, that's really being informed by the analysis that we did looking at the past crash data, it's a lot of other stuff too.

But um that's one way that I would imagine that we would use it, would be a very data-informed process.

As we go forward with specific interventions, right?

There's an opportunity to see how things are working.

Are we, for example, um being able to actually achieve those target speeds, right?

Like is the intervention actually working?

Um do we see different just different patterns changing where we've are where we try to make some changes?

I think that's that'll be really important on a project level to be able to do that type of performance monitoring as well.

Are you looking, you know, you you mentioned what other factors uh and metrics that you're looking at beyond crash data?

Are you looking at like traffic throughput or pedestrian and bicycle uh cyclist uh metrics like once you get there?

So I it for this, yes, we we do have traffic volumes that we have considered throughout as we've been making some determinations about where um to to put lines on a map, for example, if we're on the bike network.

Um so that definitely plays in to like information that we are taking under.

I would say bike counts are a little bit harder, like those are not regularly collected at this time.

We've done them a couple times, point in time.

There are other sources that we've looked at, like Strava is one where they um provide that information to to public agencies.

We we got that and looked at it, but those tend to be really strong and strong and fearless riders that have the Strava app, so also keep that in mind.

You know, we always but it's it's a piece of information and it's a good one to have, right?

So you kind of need to always take what whatever you can get and um and and be able to sort of like put it pull it together, right?

To see what it tells us.

Yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

I I would just add really briefly that um qualitative data is also important.

So the conversations we've had with with uh community members so far, and then of course in the future about feedback about how the system's working are gonna be important as well.

Yeah, that's huge.

I mean, that's the experiential information, and we talked about that last time when we were here.

I mean, there's one thing, there's like the actual literal like crash data, but it's really hard to know if somebody's not using an intersection because they don't feel as safe as they'd like to right now.

And that's what we asked the community over the summer, um, because it's not gonna show up anywhere for us, you know, uh unless we ask.

Cool.

Um, I guess the one question I had in your motor vehicle transportation policy B.

It's stating that um basically you want no more than 30 miles an hour on all surface streets.

I mean that I guess I don't know if that's gets sort of lost in we're not looking at the map yet because there's so many other streets that are not city of Beaverton, and maybe those are the ones that won't be changed, but that just seems like a bit extreme to get everything that low.

It's a big shift for sure.

Um 30 miles per hour is the speed that we know um where there's a a pretty dramatic reduction in your chance of survival, or it going up from there, um your chance of survival really declines quite fast.

So that is a speed that is, I mean it's it's quite frankly physics, and there's a lot of other co-benefits to it, reduced noise, things like that, but it is a huge shift for sure.

And that's one where I wanted to talk about like there's no switch, like that can't just happen, right?

So, and that is working with our partners and they have control over many of the streets.

And so whether that happens or not, that's their their decision to make, but we can um communicate what we think the appropriate safe target speed is given the context that it's going through, because it is going through the community.

Now we didn't when I get to the map, you'll see that we didn't put that on any of the the streets that aren't in Beaverton, right?

So if it's outside of the city, you know, that's that's not on there.

Um but you're right, it is a big given the very high speeds that we have on some of the streets in the city, particularly some of the big arterial streets, um, like Murray, you know, that's a huge shift.

Um, so you're right.

Yeah, I don't know.

To me, it seems like the statement is quite bold and quite blanketed where it needs to be more focused.

Like it's one thing to encourage pedestrian access to locations and places and things and wanting a lower speed in those areas, but to just yeah, I can't imagine 30 miles an hour on Murray all the way where it's kind of built in a way that you can you're still safely able to walk on the sidewalk and people can still go 45 miles an hour and not be in conflict.

And there's a lot of people that use that as a main pathway through the city.

Uh so I just feel like it to me it just seems like a little bit too much of a blanket statement at the goal, maybe, but it just doesn't seem viable for us that are commuting through it on a regular basis on some streets.

Yeah, I mean, you'll hear you'll we heard a lot from the community, I'll just say about really being unhappy with the speeds out there and it being a barrier.

So I'll just it's I would um like just in terms of crossing over, right?

It's really uh that that came up a lot.

So I I hear you, I totally hear you.

Um I think right now, especially the way that it's designed.

Again, you can't just put a different number on a sign because all the other cues tell you or tell everyone to go a different way, right?

So I um you're right, it's gonna take a lot more, and there's nuance.

So let's let's let's get to the map, and we can maybe rekindle that at that point if um if you'd like.

Does that sound okay?

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, actually, is there anybody else?

I don't want to cut that off.

Sorry about that.

Okay, thank you.

Okay.

So I'm gonna start with the pedestrian network.

You'll see um a sort of a rainbow heat map underneath.

These are the key desk, these are key destinations.

So it's a reminder, key destinations, things like grocery stores, parks, major retail, schools, things like that.

Um then you'll see locations where we still need to make things functional.

So red and yellow lines, those are sidewalk gaps.

Red lines mean that there's a sidewalk gap on both sides of the street.

Yellow means there's a gap on one side of the street.

Um, uh, do you have the do you have the this is a more legible, I would say.

The PowerPoint.

Can you zoom in?

Thanks.

Um then the pedestrian districts are the green hatch marks.

So those are in our centers and near clusters of key destinations where we'd want to create places with a higher quality walking experience.

So some of the things to note on this map, of course, it's a zoomed-in portion of it, it's not the whole thing.

If you if you want to zoom in to it, we can do it with that PDF.

Um, I think you should be able to see it maybe on the screens in front of you, I'm not sure.

Um all of Beaverton's regional and town centers are are pedestrian districts.

So the regional and town centers are shown with a purple uh a purple um outline around it.

Some of them, you know, I just acknowledge again, pretty big stretch of the imagination.

I just, you know, our Washington Square town uh regional center down towards the south.

We share it with Tiger.

That is the full regional center, and and um that is that is one that we have made an entire pedestrian district, and that's really in alignment with a lot of those transportation planning rules as well.

They're intended to be walkable districts.

Um there are several pedestrian districts along existing frequent service bus lines and planned uh frequent express FX bus service corridors, future corridors.

Um these are high activity locations where there are already a lot of key destinations, and that we would expect more residential and um businesses to locate nearby.

So, like BH Highway, for example, there's a lot of key destinations there.

Um some pedestrian districts are smaller, more neighborhood-based, so not as accessible by pedestrian or by public transportation.

And those are locations where we expect people would probably access them by walking or biking or driving.

Um, so it's not always necessarily accessed by transit.

Um while the map doesn't have topography on it, one thing to note a lot of the sidewalk info needs really go together with topography.

So, for example, over um not shown on the zoomed-in part, but like West Slope area has a lot of sidewalk info needs.

That's not always the case, also in our downtown, right?

Where the topography isn't as much of an issue.

Um, and then finally, just note safe crossings, really fundamental to the pedestrian network to make it fully functional for people to use.

Um, and we have those in a separate map.

So they're not being forgotten.

We're really just addressing them and giving elevating the intersection importance in a separate map.

Public transportation lines shown on this map are really reflective of a lot of great work, uh strategic planning work that we engaged in with TriMet over the last few years to help think uh everyone think about like where fixed route transit service may be viable in the future and where it might be possible to increase frequency levels of existing service when when resources allow.

Um of the bus lines are expected to gain more frequency in the future, um a transition from sort of standard bus service to the frequent service bus or frequent service to frequent express service, the FX service.

Um the FX service changes, you'll notice those on TV Highway, Cedar Hills Boulevard, Hall Boulevard, BH Highway, those are those green dotted lines, Farmington, portions of Farmington.

And then generally it shows a better, like a more comprehensive grid of public transportation service planned for Beaverton in the future.

And this really would allow for more opportunities to transfer, right?

To transfer to various lines.

There are blue hatch marks on this.

These are community connector focus areas.

That is the term that is used in some of the metro work that is happening right now.

And these are places where there would be access to transportation through sort of microtransit or shuttle service because they can't really support fixed route transit yet.

So it's sort of a transitional type of service that could be provided.

And we have that happening right now, sort of by the mountainside high school area with, I believe it's called spot, but as a pilot project that Washington County is leading.

This one is the most incomplete network that we've got today.

So I'm gonna walk you through three different graphics because it's it's gonna it takes a little bit to walk through.

Up on the screen, we have really an annotated key to what I'm about to share with you next.

Um, and it's showing a vision for how we could start to build out a complete crosstown bike network over time using three different types of bike facilities.

So we have trails, those are off street, um shown in green, low volume, low speed local streets, those are um the orange segment segments, we're calling those neighborhood bikeways.

Um, and then protected bike lanes shown in blue on segments of streets that have more traffic.

So some of the protected bike lanes would be included on a priority all ages and abilities network.

Those are the dark blue segments there, meaning they're on streets that we we think we can adjust things on relatively quickly.

Some of the protected bike lanes are shown on more major streets that often aren't in our control, like Murray Boulevard.

Um, that's in the light blue there.

And these are in streets where we'd want a protected bike lane, but it would take a lot more investment to bring it to the level of an all ages and abilities facility.

Um, so it is not included on the all ages and abilities priority bike network.

We go to the next slide.

This is the spaghetti map, as I call it on the left, the future bike network.

Um, what you'll see here is that that's the proposed future full bike network.

The city has a lot of local streets right now that provide pretty safe and comfortable bike routes for for folks, or that could with a little bit of traffic calming.

Um, those the orange is the neighborhood bikeways.

Um, about 50% of the priority all ages and abilities network shown here are neighborhood bikeways.

But you'll also notice that they are often broken up by stretches that feel less safe because they have a lot of vehicle traffic on them or intersections that aren't don't feel very safe to cross, especially for kids.

Um the map on the right shows how if you took a marker to the map on the left and tried to make a crosstown grid using just the priority all ages and abilities network, you could do that.

Um so this approach is really allowing us to weave together what we already have and then look for ways to strategically make adjustments to street segments and intersections so that community members can start making some of their short trips if they want to by biking some of the times.

Some of the key things to notice on this map is 125th.

Um here, there's a dotted line.

Um is a newly proposed multi-use trail connection.

This is replacing a planned arterial on the street functional classification map.

And I'll point that out again when we get to that map.

Um, and then there are two major THPRD projects that are advanced in their planning and funding and shown on this map as planned.

Um, and they're expected to be constructed relatively soon.

There's the trail bridge over US 26.

Um, this is a major protected north-south connection just east of 158th that will get people safely over US 26.

And then the Beaver Creek Trail is adding a segment near the Nike Woods, um, extending east-west from the West Side Trail to Hawkin Avenue.

And one of the great features about that is that it will provide safe passage underneath Murray Boulevard, and then lead into our cedar the Cedar Hills crossing area.

Um, you'll also notice that there are some conceptual trail lines.

Uh these are like there's one going up to 17, um, and then the railroad line going through uh the city.

These are in the regional transportation plan.

These lines allow the state and the metro, metro and local jurisdictions to really take advantage of any opportunities if something comes up, right?

So they are aligned, the alignments are not determined for these trails.

They're conceptual, they're not expected to be built soon, but we want to be ready to take advantage of any opportunity if one were to arise.

Yeah, I think that you'll notice that there are some protected bike lanes on arterials, but generally we tried to keep them off there.

If there is, it's only because there was not much connectivity without being able to use them.

The street classification map, it did not see a ton of changes.

It was really more of a cleanup.

There have been streets built since the last TSP update.

So those are now shown as existing.

So there were sections of 170th, 173rd that weren't there 16 years ago.

Community mountain community plan streets were added.

The 125th arterial, as I mentioned, was removed and replaced as a multi-use trail.

The Millikan extension east of Lombard was changed from a planned collector to a planned neighborhood route.

So that's up here.

And then some previously planned collector and neighborhood route connections are going to show up as a bike peg connection or a local street connection, and those are those are in different maps that we have in our R TSP where it just shows a general arrow in the vicinity of where connections should be made.

Does not specify an alignment.

So the target speed map, here we go.

So transforming the system so that if crashes happen, they won't be as devastating.

So the policies in the maps, they point toward a city where people are driving between 20 to 30 miles per hour tops because those are the speeds that can help keep everyone safe.

And they come with a ton of co-benefits, including less noise, better environments where people can relax, talk, connect with one another.

So as I mentioned, I'm not going to go over this again in too much detail, but the target speeds are expected to align with design speeds and eventually posted speeds once design modifications are made.

The target speeds are applied to the county and ODOT-owned streets.

Again, we don't have control over those, but we wanted to communicate expectations.

And then streets with target speeds of 30 miles per hour are not common on the city-owned facilities.

If we go to the intersections and crossings, the crossing and priority safety measure location map.

This map shows where the community told us they wanted it to feel safer, right?

So the orange blobs this time, the heat map underneath, those are places where the community put a point on a map and said this is this is where it's not it we want it to feel safer.

It also shows priority intersections that could help us complete the networks.

Those are the green dots up there, and sections of streets, red lines that could benefit from uh extra safety enhancement measures.

Much of what is shown are barriers right now to folks who want, who would like to walk and bike and making them better would really expand people's ability to reach those those destinations, especially across the busier streets.

So key things to notice here, all our trials are shown as needing enhanced safety measures.

Um and this is because they carry the the largest amount of traffic.

Um and they are also where nearly the vast majority of our of the serious and fatal injury crashes are happening.

Lower volume streets that have a concerning crash history are also shown as needing enhanced safety measures.

Um then when it comes to the priority intersections, there are a couple of things to think about.

Um we looked for uh passage points on the bike network, so any time the that priority bike network crossed over an arterial or collector, those are shown as priority intersections for added safety measures.

We looked for public transportation transfer points, so where two public transportation lines intersect.

Riders are gonna need to uh get on and off a bus to change direction, those are shown as priority intersections.

We worked um we looked at the recommended walking routes that Beaverton School District has for every school, they publish those.

Um that crosses over major streets, those are shown as priority intersections.

So I'm happy to have a discussion and take any questions on the maps.

And in one of the previous maps, you were designating the walk pedestrian zones.

And I thought it was interesting that you have uh the Washington Square area as a pedestrian zone.

I would think of that more as a multimodal zone.

I mean, it's it's not particularly pedestrian-friendly around that area.

Yeah, and there's not a lot of commentary about safety measures needed along there.

So I'm just, have you started to reassess some of these um guidelines based on other information that you've gathered?

I mean, that one definitely sticks out for sure.

And like I said, takes a pretty big stretch of the imagination.

That is um the regional center is a pretty major planning geography that we need to be um working with, particularly as it relates to those transportation planning rules that I was just talking about.

So in the Portland metro region, that's essentially what they call the climate friend friendly areas, right?

So there are areas where they would expect development to be concentrated, and they would expect um very walkable environments.

Um it might not be there today, but that is sort of the conceptual regional planning geography, and it is tied to the state rules and um to regional rules as well.

So that's why that that area is.

I don't disagree with you.

Uh or yeah, I mean I do agree with you that that is not what it is today.

Um, but that's the reason why that area in particular, yeah.

That's helpful.

I I didn't pick up on that in the in the uh commentary.

Yeah.

The other thing, this is more probably more of an observation.

I'm really interested in seeing how um the implementation moves forward.

Um a couple of things that you've spoken about are like um streets being designed to the desired speeds as opposed to what there are there, and then there's uh a crossover between you know, if you really want to slow down certain streets, do you start dedicating uh amount of real estate along the border to safer safer bicycle and have you started looking at cross sections for these areas and what that implementation starts to look like, as well as you're talking there's been talk about expediting kind of the implementation of this, but then you're there's a lot of um cross-conversation that has to happen with other agencies such as ODOT and TriMet, and what are those conversations look like?

Um is there connectivity in place now, especially with some of the issues that some of these agencies are going through, like with the gas tax not passing and what's going on in TriMet's world at the moment because partially because of that, but yeah, we're all hurting.

You're right.

Um I think I always I I forgot to lead with this as a 20-year plan, and hopefully we're not always in this situation, but um so it's more it is the strategic vision for it, right?

Um that being said, I think as we move into the next phase of this project, talking about where our investment priorities are.

We're always gonna need to be working with our partners because they are just in that they have streets in our community, right?

Like that's a pretty major, I don't think that it's that's not avoidable, right?

Um, but I think there are places as we talk about what do we want to do first, right?

Where are there areas maybe that we do have more control over it, right?

Are there certain things?

That's gonna be a really interesting conversation to have with um with council about what what does that look like, you know, and where would you want to start first?

I think um in terms of how to do things quickly, we're really shifting towards more of a quick build approach, right?

So not looking at those big capital projects that have been taking an immense amount of money, a lot of time, a lot of staff resources, and that is one where um a lot of other communities have been able to roll out network scale adjustments to the existing curb to curb like pavement, right?

So working with the pavement that you have and looking for ways to make adjustments to um traffic home streets, reallocate space, um, and and think about how you can use what you've got already and make some quick adjustments that are nimble too, right?

And then observe is it working?

Are we having the effects we want?

Do we need to adjust I'd like to see those uh because it is a very complex problem that's here, I'd like to see what uh the priority zones really are because I mean at the end of the day, you're probably looking at two or three as a starting point and then expanding from there based on resources and conversations.

Yeah, it'll be a good conversation to have in about six months.

I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you.

Welcome.

Commissioner McBoy.

Thanks.

Um you touched on some of my my initial sort of questions about prioritization and that kind of thing.

I don't know if you want to say any more about if you I realize that council will have a lot to say about it, but um if you have any ideas about how you would prioritize initial investments, you know, if you were if you were given the authority to decide where we go and what projects we do first, if you have thoughts, I'd be curious.

Um and then the second piece would be if you could just give a few examples of some of those.

Um I forget the phrase you used, but those some of those sort of lower lower investment uh curb to curb changes that we can make and updates.

Uh if you could just give a few examples of what those might look like as opposed to the really large capital projects, that'd be helpful.

Yeah, I think one of the easier ways to do that is through the bike network.

Um you know I I'd not we have thought about ways that we might want to slice and dice or like begin to talk about investment, like where you start, right?

There are lots of different ways that you can do it.

You could think about it in terms of like the actual key destinations that people are trying to get to, right?

So would you want to focus sort of at a neighborhood level on that school connectivity, right?

Getting students to their zone schools, right?

Is that sort of an area that you want to focus on?

Do you want to um focus on a couple of like cross-town routes where you've got a lot of the stuff that's pretty much already there?

If it's a local, we tried really hard to kind of make those lines on local streets that are already pretty good to ride on, but just focus in on some of those segments that are a bit challenging, right?

Or that people don't feel as safe on.

And that's where I could imagine, right?

Where when I say protected bike lanes, we're talking about both horizontal and vertical protection, right?

And so doing some traffic calming on there, trying to get the speeds a little bit lower, but then also adding um dedicated space for cyclists with that horizontal and vertical protection in the area in those segments, right?

So that's one of those places where you could imagine that might happen.

On some of the bigger streets, we are looking at a few of the corridors that are in Beavertons, like big arterials that um or collectors that are in Beaverton's control.

Um, and just trying to see what what might be possible with the space that we have.

Um, those are we're taking a little bit of a deeper dive with those because we think that they're good opportunities to tee ourselves up as corridor projects that we would need to go get more funding to actually do more planning work.

Um, but we need to we want to do an initial look to kind of give a feel for what might be possible, um what those trade-offs could be if we repurpose lanes.

So the three that we are looking at are Milliken from basically the nature park canyon over to here, City Hall.

And then uh Cedar Hills Boulevard, we we own it from basically Farmington up to Walker.

Then from Walker up, it goes to the county.

So we'd be looking from Walker to uh Farmington, and then Hall from 5th to 217, that's ours from there, and then it changes back again.

Uh yeah, a lot of different ownership changes.

But those are areas where we're gonna be taking a little bit um of a deeper look to see if there's a bigger project that we want to at least put in a project list to be able to advance for future funding.

Brian Dean?

Yeah, um it's I I appreciate the questions, and it's really exciting to think about implementation.

I just wanted to make sure everyone stands uh understands this project's not approved or funded at this point.

Um and working with the community in the council over the next year or so uh is gonna is really exciting because we get to understand um you know what folks in the council want the plan to be, and um we get to have conversations about well, how will we implement over a 20-year period?

Um so there's a lot there's a lot of exciting things to do.

We'd love to do them.

Um, but we understand that um you know things there's not a lot of funding available at the moment, and so though we'll have to have a conversations about uh how that will work.

Um when implementation time comes.

Um yeah, thanks, Brian.

And I also I would just say that uh one of the things that we're trying to do with this is really provide the the structure to have those conversations, right?

And so what you're seeing here with the policies and the maps is providing um a structure uh a way to have structured conversations about that.

So to say, you know, are there some cross town routes that are that seem like you would want to have, or do you want to?

And then we'll have um be able we're uh you know be able to cost estimate parts of that based on what we have here.

So this is providing us with the components to be able to have that conversation um later this year.

Any more questions for um I want to I want to congratulate whoever it was that came up with the with the timely addition of changing 125th from a sunk cost to what might be the best use that we could possibly find for it since it'll never be a thoroughfare.

So whoever came up with that idea needs needs a race.

Number two, um I'm really I'm really thankful that there's a paradigm shift going on in the transportation department.

I this is not my first TSP.

And I was part of the crew that was always been concerned that moving people through P Beaverton as fast as possible wasn't really a good idea, but that was the way things used to be.

And now it seems to me we're being more careful and maybe filling out what we where we can economically and address this this less city, more townish side of the city of Beaverton.

I think people are much more appreciative of the fact that they are able to walk more.

I mean, I mean ten years ago, riding a bike through the city of Beaverton was you were a you were a warrior.

And I've been on that side of the w the war before.

It wasn't a pleasant experience, it was dangerous, and it's good to see a lot more people Brave Souls still, but at least they're not being threatened every time they get on their bike and ride down the street.

So I'm very, very supportive of that.

Now I'm less supportive of dropping the I'm a I'm concerned that you're gonna turn half of the citizens in Beaverton into lawbreakers by expecting them to drive 30 miles an hour on city streets.

Because there's I can use this as one idea or one to buttress my support or my idea.

There's a section of fifth from Western to Lombard that winds through and um bimbo bakeries has a s across the street from Bimbo Bakeries is a mile per hour sign, and it's it 30 now or 35.

I think it's 30, but anyway, it shows you the mile per hour as you go by and it's constantly flashing.

Constantly flashing.

I drive down the street a lot.

No one ever drives the speed limit.

And that's on a side street where you would hope they would drive closer to the speed limit.

It's not on Western or Hall or anyway, pick your street.

Three miles an hour, I think is very, very, very aspirational.

So good luck.

Brian has a great story.

I'm just gonna turn the mic over to Brian because he loves to talk about this, so I'm just gonna give it to him right away.

Well, I mean this is just an experience that I found really interesting in the context of um the target speed and the in and the changes to the road and the behaviors that result.

So I happen to have to go to the airport a few times in Portland, driving down 82nd.

Um so 80 seconds and the either already has or is in the process of being transferred over to the city of Portland from the state.

And uh as that's happening, the state is well, the I think the money came from the state.

Anyway, they're making changes to the street.

Um so they put in a lot of uh mid-block crossings so people could get across between intersections that are pretty far apart.

Um they put a uh median in the what used to be the left turn lane um where they could, you know, where there's not turns.

Um just the just to those changes.

As a driver, it made me feel like going more than 30 was uh like risky.

Like it just didn't feel right.

Um because uh you could see like the flashing beacons going on and like people kind of being a more pedestrian activity, and you had a narrower environment to drive in, like the median is right there.

Um and it in the time in the few times that I've taken it since the interventions have come in.

I I mean I noticed most of the cars are kind of doing the same thing I am.

They're going 30, I don't know, maybe 35.

Um that's all to say I think it's possible to change the the cues that drivers get um in the design of the road and like um and the environment to make it seem normal to drive that speed.

Um, uh as Jessica was saying before um that's not gonna happen on the whole city at the same time.

Um it will be in those like well, these priority streets that we start with, we'll be able to try some things and um put in interventions, possibly the less costly temporary ones to like try to figure it out to make sure it works.

Um and monitor those behaviors and see if we can get closer to where the traffic's moving safe uh at a safe speed.

So if somebody makes a mistake or there's a bad situation and a uh pedestrian or bicyclist is uh involved in a crash with a motor vehicle, they've got a really good chance of making it because the the crash data that we have now is pretty sobering.

Good luck.

Thank you.

Any more questions for staff?

Thank you.

Oh, sure.

I I can just give you next steps real quick.

Thank you.

It's pretty quick.

Um so we are gonna be putting out the draft policies and the draft network maps for public um comment in just a little bit.

So if again, any help you can to spread the word, that would be great.

That's gonna be in in so it would be open in June.

July 7th, we have a city council work session to talk about all of this, and then we will be busy at work getting things ready to come back at you to to you all and to council um again at the end of the year um really to talk about uh project lists and project prioritization.

So that's what to expect next.

Thank you so much for having us.

Really appreciate it.

Um looking forward to coming back again soon.

Thank you very much.

Any questions on next steps from any of the commissioners?

Thank you for your time.

We are now at the public testimony portion uh for this agenda item.

We will take testimony from those attending in person first, followed by those attending via Zoom webinar.

As a reminder, testimony is limited to the work session item.

Now is the time for testimony.

Any yellow cards?

For those of you we have no one testifying in person.

We will move to the Zoom webinar.

For those viewing via Zoom webinar, please communicate by using the raise hand feature in your Zoom menu bar.

If calling in, press star nine to alert the chair that you would like to speak.

Staff has stated that we do not have any public testimony via the web.

Does staff have any final comments?

Nope.

Okay.

The final agenda item is the approval of the meeting minutes from May 6th, 2026 and May 20th, 2026.

Do I have a motion?

Chair, I move to submit as I move to approve is submitted.

Vote will be taken by roll call.

When your name is called, please say a yay or nay.

Commissioner Holmes.

Yay.

Commissioner McAvoy.

Yay.

Commissioner Speck.

Vice Chair, I'm sorry I missed this, but we didn't get a second on the motion.

Formality.

Yes.

Is there a second on the motion?

I'll second.

All right.

I will.

We have a second.

I will retake roll call.

A vote will be taken by roll call.

When your name is called, please say yay or nay.

Commissioner Holmes.

Yay.

Commissioner McAvoy.

Commissioner McVoy, sorry, I did not get your vote.

Yay.

Thank you.

Commissioner Speck.

Commissioner Winter.

Aye.

And I am a yay as well.

Motion passes unanimously.

We are now adjourned at