Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It was to maintain the safety and access for drivers, to reduce crashes along the corridor,

to enhance safety and comfort for pedestrians and cyclists, to support transit services, and to support business access and activity.

So this is a messy roll plot graphic of the partial lane repurposing, which is the design we have right now.

And then below is the full lane repurposing.

And I have a slide after this that kind of goes into more details.

But just so you know, from a higher level, the partial lane repurposing has two lanes in the eastbound direction.

This just shows one intersection.

And then one lane going westbound.

And it also provides middle turnpockets.

pockets. And why we decided to kind of change it to the two lanes and the eastbound while one lane

keeping the reduction westbound is because our data showed that that was where the problem was.

That was where the crashes were, mostly left turn crashes, side swipes, things like that. So

The full lane repurposing was the original design, and you can see it's one lane in each direction with the middle having turned pockets.

So what does that all mean?

Here's more details into the project elements, what we're talking about, and where there's changes.

So I want to highlight that a lot of the pedestrian safety improvements have been kept, no matter if we're talking about the partial lane repurposing or the full lane repurposing here.

And that's important because we certainly don't want to, we want to, one of our goals is that pedestrian safety, certainly.

lane. Where you can see the difference, again, is that we would have to do some signal upgrades

because of just the way the partial has the signals overhanging. And then those signal

upgrades would cause reconstruction and ADA ramp upgrades at Emerson Street specifically.

And then the partial lane repurposing also pulled out signal timing and protected left turns on Virginia and Downing to mitigate side diversion.

And let me explain kind of why that is.

So the full repurposing, the original design that was published in March 2024, 2025, I'll get to our timeline, was really looking at Alameda specifically.

And with Alameda, we felt that the full lane repurposing was the way to go to, again, address the crash picture, the turn crashes, and the side swipes.

But then when the partial repurposing really dives into looking at the neighborhood from a more holistic point of view, because that full lane repurposing causes congestion along Alameda.

And now that may not seem like an issue. And honestly, it's not until we look at what that causes. So the congestion causes side street diversion. And most of our side streets throughout the city can handle diversion, right?

I think in this situation, when we're looking at Alameda, First Ave can handle it.

We're not worried about Cedar was brought up, not worried about that.

When we look and dive in, and we'll go into this, about where we are worried about the problem, it's specifically along Virginia Avenue.

And that's the street that butts up against Wash Park, where we already have a lot of cyclists, a lot of pedestrians.

We have some crashes that involve pedestrians and cyclists already there.

And we really think the partial lane repurposing would not push cars onto Virginia, therefore not exacerbate, basically create another problem on a side street and would be better for the neighborhood as a whole.

All right. I'm going to go into community engagement now because I think this has been a process that has forced us to evaluate how we do engagement.

And I just want to explain, you know, in a perfect world, how we see this happening.

Often our world is not perfect, and I'll kind of use Alameda to talk through this.

So, you know, at first we ask people to identify the problem.

not the solution. And I think I've talked to all the council members I work with normally hear me

say this, because we want to know what the problem is and get at the root of that. There are things,

not everyone clearly is an engineer. And so sometimes there's things in our toolbox that

the public doesn't know about, which is why we ask it to be framed that way. And how we identify

problems varies, right? We work with you all. We work with R&Os, the mayor's office, and 311 is

still a very useful resource for us to identify problems. And then once a problem is identified,

we will do further data collection, right? We look at the crash history, the vehicle volumes,

look at historical engagement in the area, what's going on with our partners in CPD or what their plans have to say about the area, and again, that 311 history.

If it gets elevated to the point of, you know what, yeah, engineering can find a solution here and be a solution, we then identify those solutions.

And we do do that through community engagement often, where we have, and in the instance of Alameda, this was definitely the route we took, we have public meetings.

This hopefully happens through the design and concept development phase.

We do traffic analysis and traffic modeling, which also happened with Alameda.

And then oftentimes we do bring a consultant on board to help us with that modeling, with the safety analysis, with the existing conditions, which also happens with Alameda.

So once we come up with a solution, there really is sometimes a lag time between coming up with a design, which is our solution here, and then implementing it.

And in Alameda specifically, the lag time was because of funding, it often is, as well as COVID.

So if you look back at a webinar that we did about Alameda in 2021, where we first unveiled the lane repurposing,

our engineer and our team really thought this was going to be in the ground in 2022.

That obviously did not happen.

So, you know, I think that's where some of our communication, miscommunication happens, because then we have a gap, right?

This design really sat there for quite a bit of time before myself and colleagues and the project team went back out to the community saying, okay, we're ready now.