Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
Michael Joyce of CDM Smith, along with project team members and city representatives, presented the prioritized safety recommendations for four major corridors in Middletown: Newfield Street (Route 3), Washington Street (Route 66), Route 17/South Main Street, and Saybrook Road. The meeting, part of the Safe Streets and Roads for All program, focused on gathering public feedback on proposed improvements aimed at reducing crashes, improving pedestrian and bicycle safety, and enhancing multimodal connectivity. The presentation covered the analysis methodology, crash data, and a range of potential interventions including roundabouts, lane narrowing, raised crosswalks, signal optimization, and dedicated bike facilities. No formal votes were taken; the meeting served as a community input session.
Yes, okay. So you're not going to be able to do that. Good evening. Let's uh to get started. Um, good to see some of you again. Um, it's been a little while since earlier this year, where we started this journey together to talk about what we can do to make Middletown safer. My name is Michael Joyce with CDM Smith, part of the team of CDM Smith and VHB that was hired by the city to take on this project as a team with the PAC, which involves several people, um, both including DOT, members of the community, um, people from the region as well, um, and then River Cog, so we can help um guide this collectively together. Um, with me tonight as well, holding on handling our public involvement processes, Balen Michelle's. Um, Blen is also here available for translation if that's a need for someone as well. Um, these documents that we will provide both on the website will all be translated in both English and Spanish so that everyone can have accessibility for that. Um, the documents that are going to be uploaded also are going to be five away compliant. Five away compliance is tied to accessibility for all readers and users to be able to access those documents to make sure we're including everyone as possible. Um, we also engage uh flyers for the project to River Valley Transit to help reach their readership or the ridership. Um, one of the things we noticed at some of these public meetings is that we get a lot of people from the community who drive back and forth through the cities, but the people who ride transit don't necessarily always get the notice, or don't get the opportunity to hear about these things because um it doesn't land in their paper, it doesn't land in their in their circulation. So we wanted to make sure we reached out for that. Not always successful as you wanted to be, but we want to make sure we tried as part of that, and we've been communicating quite a bit with Brendan over at River Valley to make sure that we understand their initiatives as well that we're not competing with that. Also with us tonight, Kyle Burnham in the hall who greeted you on the way in, and Anna Germana, who's also here for support for the public involvement process and helped get us to where we are today. I want to take a little bit of a step back. We have obviously with us tonight as well, leading us for the city's merrick. He's been very influential in kind of gathering the troops when it comes to getting all the people together. We had some really, really good in-person collective meetings where we got to down and got into prioritization. What we want to make sure that people understand as far as the project is that with four corridors, there's a limited amount of investigation and projects that can come out of the study like this. So part of the effort was to look at how do we prioritize what's happening in the city already versus what we want to do in the future. And as we dug into the project, it's actually really nice to see there's a lot of investment with federal dollars being invested in in just about every corridor on the project right now. And we're gonna walk through that a little bit because that also helped us shift our focus away from areas that already have attention to areas that are not being addressed. Again, we're trying to include as many people as possible. This is a project that falls underneath uh River Cog's larger regional safety action plan, um which is kind of the framework for moving forward and identifying the metrics and improvements that hopefully the improvements that we come out of this and implement will make to drive safety uh improvements and reduce crashes and impacts to vulnerable users. Uh just a quick timeline here, a little bit, and we're gonna talk about tonight. Um, the larger green dots at the top is kind of where we are today. We've been going through analysis up to this point. We have a website viewer that's gonna be made available at the end. Um the city officials have it right now to take a look at it for the the public to be able to look at the data that we've been able to collect. A lot of these projects turn into a study on a PDF on a shelf somewhere. We want to make sure that this data stays live. It can be updated as it moves forward with the city's future efforts, future implementation, it can be the background for future applications for funding. Um, so part of our organization of the data was to put it in a warehouse in a database that could be used in the future and grown. Um so, and then check off what you've done along the way so you can then support your future projects. Um we had a great public feedback opportunities back earlier this year. We learned a lot from that feedback. Um we'll go through that in a minute, a little bit about what we heard from the public. Um we had a pop-up event also at Pridefest, which also had a pretty good turnout and different um input. We've all kind of compiled that into the database of information we had. We've got comments that have come in from people through the email through the project email, and we're trying to respond to those as best we can. Um require further investigation, some are really straightforward, but we'll continue to try to engage that so that the public is is uh feels engaged with.