Discussion uh Mr.

Hewitt.

Uh right.

Have the engineer, Mr.

Reeves.

Yes, sir.

How are you doing?

All right.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Um, so today we're gonna talk to you about uh market house pedestrian improvement and traffic mobility.

Um this kind of builds upon what council has already uh seen earlier this year.

I think back in February it was presented uh as part of the market house repurposing study.

Um I think two options were given for kind of the footprint of the market house.

Um I won't read it word for word here.

Um but on one way you could have uh extended the circular brick promenade, the other you could put a square, what we're calling a square about in.

Um so these were kind of two areas of what that rendering looked like.

Uh council's direction at that time was to uh further analysis and look forward, look more toward the square about.

So uh what we're gonna talk to you about is kind of what we're proposing the next steps for this to be.

Um, some project considerations uh for this or constructability.

So what we want to look at is existing utilities and surface features that are around the market house.

Uh also want to talk about structural evaluations and vibration monitoring.

That's not a big part of what we're scoping out today, but it is something to consider down the road.

Uh, when PWC did a project downtown a number of years ago, they had to do or they did structural evaluations and vibration monitoring on some of the historic buildings.

So that's something that you need to consider moving forward as construction takes place down there.

Again, functionality.

Uh really want to talk about pedestrian mobility versus traffic mobility.

Uh the more pedestrian friendly you are, uh, the more difficult it will be for traffic to get around uh the square.

Uh traffic control type's gonna be a big one.

I've got it bold.

I'm gonna talk a little more detail about that on the next slide.

Um current and future traffic flow.

So we want to look at not just what's going through the market house today, but what's going on out into 2050?

Um again, we'll look at stacking and queuing, and what I mean by stacking and queuing is uh now you have kind of free flow going into the roundabout with yield signs.

Um how does how does changing it to a square affect the stacking and how cars are backed up in that intersection and if they are backed up a certain length, how does that affect side streets that we have?

Uh then emergency services and tractor trailers.

Um, one thing we want to make sure is that we can get our emergency services through this new square.

Um, the largest fire engine needs to be able to get through there.

Uh another consideration is I don't know if you've seen, but tractor trailers like to go around the market house instead of using MLK like they should.

A lot of a lot of those tractor trailers come downtown, so how do we deter that?

Uh and then um we of course we want to stay on budget.

So all we have right now is a very high-level um conceptual cost opinion uh that's based on uh lump sum items.

So to talk about the traffic control type.

One big question that we want to make sure council is aware of being the direction was to go forward with the square about is will the traffic entering a square about will it will it have to make stops at a stop sign or will we be able to maintain the yield signs?

So if you think about it, if a if a vehicle is entering in the square, it may have to make four complete stops before it makes a left-hand turn.

So how does this impact the stacking of traffic and are other streets impacted?

You can imagine going through the square now or going through the circle now and having the stop at each intersection.

How does that back traffic up?

Uh are we considering future downtown development and growth uh with this approach?

And then again, emergency response impacts.

If you if you now have an intersection that's congested with traffic, how does that affect response time?

So these are just considerations to think about as we move forward.

So what we're proposing is is that further evaluation is is needed uh before we move this project forward any.

Uh first we want to talk about survey.

We do need some field survey out there so we know what's on the ground.

We need to know where the underground and above ground utilities are.

We need to know where the street signs are, the change in elevation from the bricks and steps that are all around the market house.

Um so that's where we're talking about picking up above ground features, steps, curbing gutters, planners, the changes in surface.

I don't know if many of you have walked out there, but there's certain ways you can't get down depending on where you're walking.

Then we're gonna um look at a traffic operational and safety analysis.

So what we're gonna do is we're gonna do traffic counts under various scenarios at these locations, these three intersections.