Okay.

So with that, they will be approved as submitted.

Moving on to public comment on non-agenda items.

I only see one member of the public.

But I have to, I have to officially open it just in case.

We are now taking public comments and item number four, non-agenda matters.

This is the time when any person may address the commission on matters not listed on this agenda, but which are within the subject matter jurisdiction of the commission.

If there if you are in the chambers and wish to make a comment, please make your way to the podium and please state your name for the record.

You will have three minutes for your comment and a countdown timer will alert you to the conclusion of that period.

Seeing no one ride, we'll go ahead and close the public comment and read this, go on to 5.1, our statement of purpose.

Planning commission is charged with carrying out the California planning and zoning laws in the city of Santa Rosa.

Duties include implementation of plans, ordinances, and policies relating to land use matters, assisting in writing and implementing the general plan and area plans, holding public hearings, and acting on proposed changes to the zoning code, zoning map, general plan, tentative subdivision maps, and undertaking special planning studies as needed.

That we'll move on to commissioner reports.

Are there any commissioner reports?

Do I have a report or I just need to uh let it know that I'm going to have to excuse myself for the second item?

Thank you.

Any other commissioner reports?

Okay.

If you are in the chambers and wish to make a comment on Commissioner Sanders' report, please make your way to the podium.

Seeing no one, we will close that.

And we will go down to department reports.

Good evening, Chair Weeks, members of the commission, Jessica Jones, Deputy Director.

I do not have any reports for tonight.

Okay.

So any public comments on the non-report report.

Okay, so item seven, statements of abstention recusal.

Do we have any?

Hopefully not.

Okay.

So we'll move on to the show, the star of the show tonight, Dan Hennessy, and this will be a study session on transportation impact analysis requirements.

Purpose, limitations, and considerations for updating local guidelines.

Thank you, Chair Weeks and members of the Commission.

Um discussing the questions that you frequently have or that come up during items that you hear.

We thought that it would be good to just do an overview of what traffic analysis actually means for us, what it does, what it doesn't do.

So this is about a 15-minute overview.

Gives us the opportunity to answer some questions and maybe prompt some from you that will help answer future questions.

I know that for a long time you had Deputy Director Rob Sprinkle here to answer your questions, and in the last few months, you've seen me, you've seen our transportation planner Terena Wilson, you've seen Acting Deputy Director Mike Van Middy, all trying to fill in Rob's shoes.

And there's been some evolution in the thinking of how we're using these, and I want to provide some information for all of you to provide some context.

So the purpose of this presentation, we're going to talk a little bit about what a transportation impact analysis actually does, what's good and what's bad about them, what they can do and what they can't, how this interacts with land use and patterns and development outcomes, and then how we align these requirements with city goals.

What we want to do is make sure that these analyses are actually providing useful information and not making development overly complex, making it cost more for the sake of uh doing paperwork.

So transportation impact analyses are forecasting tools, and broadly they are used to determine the impact on the transportation system.

That is about as vague as you can be.

Um we as staff and we as a community get to decide what an impact actually is.

So this is we're gonna get to this a little bit later, but these are not uh value neutral studies, right?

They are intended to reflect our values and as a result of the analyses that require and the thresholds that we have reflect our city policy goals.

So these studies, they typically evaluate the travel demand generated by a new project, the impact on operations in California specifically.

We're now required to do an environmental analysis related specifically to transportation around vehicle miles traveled.

We evaluate the access to the property and any internal circulation issues that might uh arise and how that might affect the public right of way.

We also do this both with the transportation network that we currently have that we know and the one that we're planning in the future to make sure that these developments are consistent with both.

And then we're looking to identify potential transportation improvements.

And this all is serving to help us make better decisions around the impact of the development and tie in nexus between the development to any potential transportation changes.

TIAs though now serve multiple purposes.

Focused a lot on vehicle travel time.

And in particular, vehicle travel time at intersections.

That is where capacity is constrained between intersections.

Vehicles typically travel without much interruption.

And so we focus on the delay at intersections, we work to mitigate impacts there.

Typically that means adding capacity, sometimes that means signalizing the intersection, sometimes that means changing the signal operation, but the vast majority of the time it means widening the intersection to provide additional capacity.

As a result of that, the intersection can handle more traffic, but wider roads also create more traffic.

It's a concept called induced demand.

It's been shown over and over, both United States and throughout the world that you open up a new transportation facility, the next day it fills up the demand on your roadway network expands despite the fact that the land uses were the same as the day before.

Now, what's required of us is the same conventional analysis tailored to our specific goals.

So we're looking at a broader focus on mobility access, transportation safety, land use outcomes.

We're still doing that conventional analysis, and we're looking at it through the SQL perspective related to vehicle miles traveled and the impact of the development on the environment.

These analyses are valuable because they allow a consistent framework.

Again, the applicant can know on day zero of their project before they've even talked to us what we might expect.

They can engage a consultant to help them.

They can call us and walk through the guidelines and the thresholds with us.

They establish a methodology for how to estimate project travel demand.

We'll talk a little bit about how that's done in a couple of slides.

And then also where our thresholds are for what might determine a significant impact and how we might mitigate those things.

So again, all of this information is helping to inform our judgment as stewards of the transportation system.

It is not replacing it, it is not black and white.

There are many, many shades of gray with respect to these analyses.

Putting that in a list form, they are great screening tools.

It's an excellent framework for identifying potential needs and improvements and great as an input to decision making, but these are not precise forecasts.

We'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.

They are not any guarantee of future conditions, nor should they be the sole determination for any decisions with respect to the project.

When we talk about estimating travel demand, there are a number of things that play into that.

We typically are looking specifically at the future development itself, its land use and its intensity, but there are other things that change those.

We can look at surrounding transportation network changes, we can look at different travel behavior or things that might affect travel behavior.

We can look at economic conditions that might change how people move in a city or a region, and broader population growth within a city or a region with respect to changing travel demand for a particular site or land use.

We also know that the impact of these different wedges of this pie can change.

Most dramatically, we saw this with the COVID-19 pandemic when on March 1st of 2020, we had one set of transportation assumptions, and on March 20th, we had a very different set of assumptions that ebbed and flowed for the next two and a half to three years.

We've since come back to a period of relative stability with respect to that, but it's not what it was in 2019.

We are firmly in a new normal with respect to transportation patterns.

As a result of these analyses too, they often focus very specifically on one set of numbers, right?

There are 89 new trips, the intersection delay here is 27.8 seconds per vehicle.

It communicates a level of precision that is not there.

Everything that we use to develop these estimates has air bars.

We again, in order to provide simple analysis that people can understand, don't communicate the level of uncertainty with respect to these estimates.

So that comes from the volumes, that comes from the delay estimates, that comes from the analysis of the intersection itself, and us doing our best job to model what's happening there and model those changes without having seen them yet.

This is not true just of transportation forecasting.

This is true of any number of circumstances.

Real world conditions constantly change.

Models contain uncertainty that's built into them.

As an example on the screen, I've showed what happens with hurricane forecasting in that bottom left, you know, very near to where a hurricane is at, you have a level of predictability about its location that it expands.

We become more uncertain as you project farther out in distance and time.

That same thing happens for us too.

We are using past data with respect to travel demand, other similar sites.

We're using current conditions that we've collected at a small sample of time, and we're trying to project some amount of time into the future to model what can happen.

There's a lot of uncertainty there, and that's uncertainty compounds with each of those independent variables.

So, you know, like I mentioned, we try to communicate things simply, but I think that simplicity over expresses a sense of uh precision that that does not exist.

Alternatively, we could communicate all of that uncertainty and express to you exactly, you know, what the margin is, what what the air bars look like, what is the range of scenarios that we expect to be possible?

That becomes very difficult for the layperson to interpret, to communicate to the public.

Um it becomes a mess to try to analyze, frankly.

Um, and so there are there are definite trade-offs to acknowledging that that level of uncertainty.

I used the term um significant impact earlier, and that has a very specific meaning to us as it does to you, right?

Within the realm of transportation and reviewing development projects, we're looking at thresholds that either we or the state has set uh in order to determine where a any any metric that we have crosses a line to determine a significant impact.

So that has a very specific meaning to me when I when we use that term in neighborhood meetings or communicating to residents about you know who have lived on a residential street for 20, 30 years and see a you know 12 unit apartment complex being built at the end of that street, significant impact has a different meaning to them, right?

Conditions are about to change irrevocably.

Whether that actually changes anything to the level that we would want to fix or actually becomes a problem in terms of managing the transportation network is an entirely different conversation.

So I acknowledge that our language creates some um barriers to a common meaning.

Um, unfortunately, that's that's where we're at, and and it's important reason why we need to have these conversations.

Um of the issues that we have is that even even some of those small impacts, we have difficult communicating what that means to people.

So you know, somebody sees some number of new trips on a street, it's hard to communicate that in terms of context for how that will feel to them, right?

If they hear 50 new cars in a peak hour on a street, do they know that it already serves, you know, 1,000 in that peak hour, and it's a very minor difference?

Um, do they know that it only serves 50 and it has more than enough capacity to serve another 50, even though it's going to feel quite a bit different in the future?

Like there, there are different levels to what impact means to different folks.

And that is part of our challenge in doing these uh types of studies, and our response to the public when we have questions about the the nature of the changes to the conditions after development will occur.

One of our other challenges is that people will frequently ask for more analysis, more background data, um, wider scopes, that level of additional detail doesn't necessarily produce any more precision, any give us any more answers.

One of the reasons why we're doing these presentations and considering additional changes to our study thresholds and requirements is that we looked back at the last several years of transportation impact analyses that we've required, and very rarely did the analysis tell us anything that we didn't already know.

There are a number of situations where we found an impact, but we knew we would, or where we already had identified a potential improvement and just haven't identified funding or a mechanism to make it happen yet.

And so we don't want to do, again, paperwork for paperwork's sake.

We want to answer real questions for people about the impact of developments.

We also have another challenge about this discussion in public forums.

We frequently joke that everybody's a traffic engineer, right?

Everybody has experienced traffic.

This is not a geotechnical report, this is not a water resources report.

Everybody sees what happens on the streets, everybody experiences it every day.

And so this often becomes a proxy for other discussions around growth, around neighborhood character, around broader development policy.

To be frank, people, this is not specific to Santa Rosa.

Um very frequently, people think the best day their community ever had is the day that they moved into it, and it progressively gets worse with every additional change throughout.

We also see that traffic is very frequently a catch-all term for change.

Um it, you know, has frankly some connotations that are not particularly flattering.

There have been recent research efforts showing that these studies tend to, or these types of comments tend to happen more around multifamily residential developments in areas where there is a significant population of higher income people, of white people, of different types of privilege, and it becomes a um proxy for closing the door behind you, and you know, not wanting growth of any kind and blaming it on traffic.

It's a it's a secret term for I don't want this land use or I don't want more people next to me.

Um it's important that we as a profession are acknowledging that, right?

It is it is we need to understand what this type of analysis communicates to people.

Um to the point now that the American Planning Association and the Institute of Transportation Engineers have identified this as an issue related to impact analyses and development studies that they are frequently cited beyond their intended purpose.

So not acknowledging these limitations of the study or how they can be bent beyond their meaning is just as important as understanding the specific findings themselves.

Again, like I mentioned earlier, these are not value neutral.

The things that we require do have specific impacts on both the development and the transportation network, so we want to reflect the city's goals with our transportation study requirements.

Delay focused analysis makes by its nature uh in fill development appear more impactful.

There are already people there, there are things happening, whereas if I build on the edges of town where nothing is happening and roads might be vacant, it looks just fine.

That's not the kind of outcome that we as a city that is reflected in our general plan that responds to our transportation safety goals.

Um so we need to understand the implications of that.

Um, what we don't want is to be incentivizing roadway expansion that is in conflict with the ability to have a more productive land use in some areas, or again be counteractive to our safety goals, where we're making tremendous progress.

And the goals used the goal used to be traffic engineering focused.

How do I get as many cars through a location as quickly as I can?

And as a result of that, we have the worst um transportation safety record with respect to fatalities in the developed world.

Um we have uh a real struggle incentivizing any kind of alternative transportation, and it has an especially high impact on transit use with these land use patterns and how the transportation network is built out.

And so we're shifting beyond that congestion focused analysis threshold to make sure that we're incorporating all of our broader transportation goals, and that they're reflected both in our analysis and in the developments themselves, recognizing that the congestion relief that we're going to require or that we might generate is very likely to only be temporary.

On the left of this slide is called the safe system wheel.

And it's been adopted by the state of California in its most recent strategic highway safety plan, and it recognizes that there are a number of wedges in a pie that have an impact on transportation safety outcomes.

We as a state are one of the first to include the sixth wedge that says safer land use.

Compact development, development requirements, development standards all play a role in decreasing the number of serious injury and fatal crashes that we have on the transportation network.

Compact development, fewer driveways, more controlled access, all very important.

So these all of these play a role, and what we want is that reflect our broader policy choices around the council's established Vision Zero goal, around the adopted general plan, and the number of specific plans to be reflected in our transportation policy.

Which metrics do we require to be analyzed, which ones do we require to be analyzed and mitigated for if there's an impact, we just want to make sure that we're consistent with the rest of city policy and not just 50 years of traffic engineering standard.

Again, repeating here that aligning ourselves with city goals with compacted infill development, with safe transportation choices with accessibility, that needs to be reflected in our in our analyses and our decision making also.

On the left is a slide that's frequently shown in classes and seminars around this topic around.

On the left, you see an empty street that a traffic engineer would call level of service A.

And on the right, you see a busy street that a traffic engineer would say it's level of service F.

Our planning department might have different definitions of the success of those streets.

An economist would have different definitions of the success of those streets.

We need to acknowledge that empty, free-flowing roads is not our end goal.

And when we require that to be our end goal, we sometimes end up with the image that's on the right.

You see there a five-lane road intersecting a three-lane road at a ex-urban intersection that I did a traffic study on more than uh 15 years ago.

As a result of that study and their requirements and their projected growth into the future, they expanded that intersection to accommodate all of it.

It's going to end up a nine-lane facility by a five-lane facility.

And you see that it eats into three different corners of that intersection, limiting useful development potential on each of those parcels.

I can also definitively tell you that this intersection is less safe.

It is not people centric in any way.

It is intended to get vehicles through there as quickly as possible, despite the fact that you can clearly see there's development happening on at least the bottom two corners where those lots have been graded for the development that's associated with this project.

So again, our values have consequences and our decisions have consequences too.

So, and just in summary, these are technical tools that are providing estimates.

They're not predictions of the future.

There are certainly not good predictions of the future.

They are the best estimates that technical professionals have at our disposal.

We're using historical data to the best of our ability to have some understanding of what the anticipated changes could be.

And they do impact development outcomes.

Our required mitigations are required designs of sites with respect to ingress and egress, have real impacts in terms of development potential and costs to applicants.

We really want to focus our more detailed studies where we have real questions that we want answered.

We don't want to be doing these just to again do them because they're expected.

We also understand that the community does expect transportation and traffic engineering analysis to be done, but they frequently want to that to happen so that they can use it either as an opponent or proponent for the project to support their already held positions.

And we need to be careful again that traffic is just a staple of community comment and often gets misused or used as a proxy for other things.

One other thing that I want to mention just broadly around this topic is that as many of you know, we as staff are trying to do as much as we can with as little as we have, and the demands on all of us are getting larger.

And so I, in particular, am really trying to find ways to decrease the burden on our staff.

And this is one way, this is one area where I see a burden that does not need to exist, or that we can decrease the level of analysis and the level of review necessary.

That doesn't mean not providing information to this body, that doesn't mean not being available to answer questions, just means that very frequently we already know the answer without requiring, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of analysis and many hours of staff time to answer those questions.

So again, I appreciate the time to talk to you about this topic, and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Are there any questions?

Commissioner Sanders.

Thank you for the presentation.

You said something that sort of struck a uh memory from some of the projects that we see.

It kind of boils down to no one wants any traffic in the house that in front of their house.

We want zero to slow to zero, but I want to be able to get across town as quickly as possible.

And that bike lanes in my way, and that building that you just approved is going to add more traffic.

So it's almost like a no-win situation.

Yeah, I mean I think people think that the city that they know is stuck in amber, right?

It's always gonna be what it is, and it um very frequently policies change.

What we as professionals understand changes, um, you know, the people who did my job in 1990 had a very different understanding of what they were doing than I do now, and it'll be different in 30 years too.

So you know.

So just two questions.

How do we, you know, communicate, I guess, to the public?

Their real concern that you know, we're saying that this traffic study for this particular street roadway intersection has a we'll add 50 cars, and they're sitting in traffic, they're on Shenate trying to get through.

And we're saying, well, it's it's it's not that big of an impact, but they're waiting.

Yeah.

How do we communicate that?

How do we make that make sense?

Yeah.

Um peak hour congestion is the sign of a healthy city, frankly.

Um I have lived in communities that don't have it, and those communities are dead, right?

People are not moving around.

Um, what I don't want to have happen, I talked a lot through this presentation about transportation safety.

I've made no secret that that's my priority.

Um I don't want to have happen is people experiencing unnecessary delay as a result of the changes that we're making.

Um, if you look at a lot of the recent projects that we've done on North Dutton, on college, on steel, um, we have reduced lanes, but we've kept all the lanes at signalized intersections to keep the same number of people who can get through the bottlenecks the same.

Um, what that does in between those intersections is slows everybody down.

Um, and that's really the goal.

I do want your trip to take a minute or two longer, but I want it to do that because you're driving five to ten miles an hour slower, not because you're waiting longer.

Um that is something that we are very attuned to because right now we're we have um a lot of freedom to make changes to the roadway network, and that is because we've done it with relatively little pain to people.

As soon as we mess up, that changes.

Like we are going to get scrutiny to the point that projects are gonna take three times as long, we're gonna have to do a level of analysis on a threshold that we're not doing right now because we know we're we're getting it right.

Um I wanna keep that freedom as long as I can, and then we're really trying not to mess that up.

So you're right, that it is it is hard to communicate, but my real answer to that is direct them to me to Torina, because some of this is very technical in nature, right?

I mean, you look at a lane reduction on West College Avenue, of course.

How are you gonna get as many people through?

Exactly the same number of people get through now as did at the same time last year when that roadway was twice as big because you're not getting through the roadway, you're getting through the intersections.

Thank you for that.

And my last question is um, when is a traffic study on a particular project considered old?

And you need to get a new one.

Yeah, within two years, you're definitely safe.

Um, in our standards, it says after two years, we want to talk to you about if conditions have changed.

We are regularly collecting data both at intersections and on roadway segments to understand are conditions changing, um, our volumes changing, have we changed the signal timing?

Does that require any change?

Have we changed the signal operation?

Um, so if you're within that two-year period, it's good.

If you're outside of that, you need to come back and talk to us.

Doesn't necessarily mean full full reblown study, just needs review to make sure that the assumptions are the same, or what it what change that we need you to check.

And that answered my next question about how intensive is the study gonna be.

So two years, give or take, and then we're needing to revisit.

That's right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Vice Chair?

Yeah, thank you.

Uh thanks for the whole presentation and um all the good information.

Uh so a couple of questions I have are um, now left my brain.

Uh one of them is um, so especially you mentioned COVID and the pandemic and how that changed things.

And is ITE revising um things around that, like the number of people working from home, and now how it seems like you can't really predict when rush hours gonna happen on the freeway, for example.

Yeah, two of the things that we've seen specifically um with since COVID is that our morning peak hour has diminished.

That is a nationwide phenomenon, and we think that that's specifically reflecting people not working from home anymore.

So our it was it was very common in the past that our AM peak hour would be as um congested or as have as many people moving around as our PM peak hour.

That's not really the case anymore, with the exception of in the proximity to schools.

Um, but what we have seen is as a result of that work from home, that work from home gets a little uh finicky in the afternoon.

And so the peak period is now extending, and you see more activity starting at 2 30, 3 o'clock, where it used to be more centered after four really close between five and 6 30.

Now we're seeing a less of a peak, but a longer peak that frequently leads to frustration because people used to are used to being able to move around at three o'clock or three thirty in a fairly free flow environment.

That's not the case anymore.

Um, it looks more like the five o'clock of 2019.

Okay.

Also, my my first question did come back in my brain.

So, what's your best advice for people like us when we get a traffic study?

Let's say it's a brand new development, and we've got a consultant telling us that that this is you know, this is gospel.

I did the study, and this is what it shows, and we've got a bunch of neighbors who don't want the development, and they're here telling us that.

And we're not traffic engineers.

Like, how can we sort of sift through all this information and try to make our best judgment?

Yeah.

Uh it's an excellent question.

The traffic studies that you see before you are prepared on behalf of the developer by a private consultant.

They are the scope is determined by the city, the review is done by the city, and it does not get approved and sent to you until we sign off on it.

So it is a reflection of city staff.

This this the traffic study that you're reviewing, whatever's in there, is our traffic study, right?

It's just done by somebody else.

We would not send it to you if it wasn't.

I know that that's hard to take, especially for members of the community who hear a traffic consultant that they've never met who appears to be a hired gun and accept that this is objectively the traffic study as best as we know.

But that is the case, right?

I think it's pretty infrequent that you would hear us come to a hearing like this and contradict what a private consultant would say with respect to their traffic analysis.

What you might hear us do is add some additional context that they may or may not have, and I think that's probably our best role when there are questions.

But to have us show up and say the same thing as the private consultant.

Um I do think that as a body, um, it would it would benefit everybody to lend some additional credence to what the private consultants do tell you in respect to their testimony on the project.

Okay, thank you.

Any questions?

Okay, I have a couple, and I'll piggyback on what Vicky just said and what you said.

So it sounds like um when we have a project with a traffic study and the neighbors are upset by the traffic, that it would help if we reiterated that this traffic study before us, uh prepared by consultant X had been reviewed by staff and was signed off by staff, or to ask that as a question to staff.

Was this traffic study reviewed and approved?

I don't think it would hurt.

Yeah, okay.

Um other question uh on the key conclusions, um, the one, two, yeah, fifth one, it says detailed study should be focused where meaningful transportation issues may exist.

So what's meaningful?

Where we as staff have real questions that we want answers to.

Um, there are, like I said, every jurisdiction has their own documents detailing what the scope of a study will be, what the thresholds should be.

Some of them are um, we're lucky here.

We have licensed traffic engineers on staff, we have a specific division of people dedicated to this.

Other jurisdictions have um a much smaller staff without dedicated transportation planning and traffic engineering professionals, and so they are really relying on very conservative analyses, conservative requirements to answer questions to give them a level of defensibility that I think we as staff have more uh to answer those types of questions.

Like we can have detailed uh discussions about complex issues without needing a detailed study because we're doing lots of analysis in the background.

We're looking at the transportation network every day to see if it's working like it's supposed to.

How can we make it better?

Um, whereas some jurisdictions don't have that analysis.

Frankly, some jurisdictions have transportation impact analyses requirements to either incentivize or deincentivize, disincentivize development.

Um we could make these thresholds very painful, make everything make everything required for analysis, make everything identified as an impact.

Who's gonna want to develop here?

Um, we could also have no requirements and let everybody develop and have a transportation network that becomes a mess as a result, right?

We're trying to balance that line.

So that goes back to what you were talking about before, the goals of the city and the general plan that it needs to be consistent.

Right.

I don't want I don't want to go too far to either end of that spectrum.

I mean, I mentioned the transportation safety goals.

Like we could sign every street at five miles an hour and not have any fatal or serious injury crashes anymore.

We'd ruin the city and I'd be fired tomorrow for that.

Like it would ruin like the economic engine that is Santa Rosa to do that.

So like there is a balance of goals that we're all trying to you know work through.

And I like your comment about safety versus faster.

Um any other questions?

Okay, so in closing, uh I'd like to thank you very much for being here and for Trina for sitting through this.

Um, and also just to reiterate how important it is for us as a planning commission to have you present when we have a project where traffic is a huge issue.

Um, and I know you're um stretched really thin.

I understand that, but I think it would be um better all around if in those cases there was somebody here to be able to address those concerns.

You know, I'm talking about like El NOCA and Sinead and even um the one we just had.

Benjamin's road.

Thank you, ma'am.

Thank you.

Um, that's really helpful because um you guys are the experts, and so for the public to hear from you as the experts uh is helpful, but we will be mindful of theft's time and uh thank you.

Okay.

So uh Ms.

Jones, Chair, my apologies for the interruption.

Um, despite the fact that we have very few folks in the audience, we do need to open it up for public comment.

So, in case our one public member has a question or comment, please make your way to the podium.

Seeing not rising, we will close that public comment portion and bring it back to the commission.

Sorry to put you on the spot, Tom.

Um, so with that, thank you so much, Dan and Terina.

I really appreciate you taking your time.

And I'm glad, you know, we can point this study session to our fellow commissioners who were not here today for them to take a look at it because I think it's uh informative and important.

So with that, uh we will say farewell to Commissioner Sanders.

And move on to number nine consent items.

We have none, and our report item, which is oh, Terina.

Hello.

Um, 10.1 report public outreach for the Greenway Connectivity Study.

And Terina Wilson, Transportation Planner, will be making the presentation for us.

That is me.

Hi, Chair Weeks and remaining planning commission members.

My name is Torina Wilson.

I'm the city's transportation planner.

I did sit through Dan's presentation, but I would have done that anyway.

It's not because I have this item.

Let's see.

Do I need to share screen?

I need help every time.

Thank you.

We're a teamwork city.

Thank you.

Are we in presentation though?

There we go.

Okay.

So I'm here to present the Greenway Connectivity Study.

I want to give a little bit of background before I dive into the reason that we're doing this.

One thing we know in the city of Santa Rosa is that we have a fabulous creek system.

And on those creeks, we have a ton of multi-use paths.

And as I hope you're aware, we're also looking at other opportunities to expand our multi-use path system within the city.

One of the most notable right now is the Southeast Greenway.

So the city is now in possession of the Southeast Greenway site.

The one thing that we know for sure is that we want to have a multi-use path along the entire two-mile stretch of that property.

Very soon there will be a master planning process that kicks off to determine what else is going to be on that property, but we do know for sure multi-use path.

So with that, city staff understands that there will be a large gap in downtown and heading east towards where the Southeast Greenway will go.

So I want to show on this map right here.

On the left-hand side, there are two red very long lines.

The one on top is the Santa Rosa Creek Trail that turns into the Prince Memorial Greenway, and it ends in downtown, right next to where we are at City Hall right now.

Just below that is the Joe Radota Trail.

As you probably know, that goes out to Sebastopol, it links up with the West County Trail.

You can get to Grayton and Forestville.

I do it all the time.

It is lovely.

But we have this really amazing comprehensive trail system to the west of us.

To the east of us, you'll notice another red line.

That's where the multi-use path on the Southeast Greenway is going to go.

And then again to the east of that, you see these huge green areas.

This is Howarth Park, Spring Lake, Anadale.

So we also on the east side of town have a very wonderful park and trail system.

And right in the middle, where that yellow circle is, is where we don't have a plan of how to connect those two places.

So we as city staff, knowing that Southeast Greenway is now a reality, need to close that gap.

How great would that be, right?

We would have a full east-west connection across town, multi-use paths, low stress.

You could get out to Forestville, you can get out to Annadale, you can go to Sugarloaf if you're feeling ambitious.

And so that's what we're doing right now, and that's the reason that I'm here with you today.

So approximately a year and a half ago, I want to say, we got a federal grant from the United States Department of Transportation for technical assistance to help us figure out how to close this gap.

Technically, as city staff and someone who walks in bikes and lives in this community, I could probably have come up with an alternative that I thought worked the best, but I didn't feel confident that what I would think was best is gonna be the same as what the community would want to see, especially because a full east-west connection across town is foundational, right?

That would be such a like generationally significant accomplishment for us that I wanted to be sure that we got it right.

So we got this grant for technical assistance, and we came up with three alternatives.

We have had these for about a year, and in the beginning, we did host a listening session with a group of a bunch of stakeholders in the community, so leaders of nonprofits, bike advocacy groups, local partner agencies, and we asked them to take a look and just let us know is there anything that we're forgetting here, or is there something that you would rather see?

And so we came up with these three alternatives that you see on this screen, and we're now in the process of a public outreach period.

And we are asking the public of these three alternatives, which are the ones or which is the one that you're most interested in seeing us tackle, and I'm gonna walk you through these three alternatives, and then at the end I'll let you know how you can, as planning commissioners participate in the survey, participate in some in-person activities, and how you can advertise to your constituents because again, I don't wanna be the one choosing, I want the community to choose which of these alternatives they're the most interested in.

So I'm gonna do a brief walkthrough, and then I have some images after these that'll give you a little better idea.

And we're gonna go from one to three.

So alternative number one is on the top, it is that orange line.

We're gonna go uh west to east for all of these.

So if you look towards the left, you'll see City Hall.

This is where the Prince Memorial Greenway ends at downtown, it's where the Prince Gateway Park is.

If this is the alternative that the community would want to see, you would come off of the Prince Memorial Greenway, you would make your way south just a little bit where we put in a cycle track, the two-way cycle track with the green bollards, and then you would go east on Sonoma Avenue, and you would go all the way, you would pass Farmers Lane, you would pass Montgomery Village, and you would go south on Haman and then on Hoen, and then just south of Montgomery High School, you would link up with the Southeast Greenway site.

Uh, the majority of this alternative, so all of Sonoma Avenue, we know that we could, within our right-of-way right now, accommodate parking-protected bike lanes on both sides.

So that would be an enhancement where the bikes are completely separated from vehicle traffic.

Pedestrians are still completely separated from vehicle traffic, and a parked vehicle would serve as the buffer for that.

On Homan Avenue, between Sonoma and also on Hoenn until you get to the Southeast Greenway site, there's some locations where we might be able to do some buffered or protected bike lanes, but a good chunk of that will also need to be something like a neighborhood greenway.

And I have images that'll explain this in a little bit more detail in a couple slides.

That's alternative number one.

Alternative number two is the blue one, and it starts the same.

So you'd come off of the Prince Memorial Greenway, you'd go south on Santa Rosa Avenue on the cycle track, and then you would go on Sonoma Avenue.

Again, it would be parking protected bike lanes.

But then when you get to Doyle Park Drive, you would move south, and you would kind of meander through Doyle Park.

It's a beautiful park.

We would have to make some enhancements there, but there's already very mature shade trees, and it's very peaceful.

And then you would go to the east, you would link up with Hoenn Avenue, and then you would go and you would take that all the way over to the Southeast Greenway site.

Of the Hoenn locations or segment, there are some locations where we do believe we could do either, you know, extending of the sidewalk so that it's like a raised multi-use path.

There's an opportunity where we might be able to fit in some protected bike lanes if we wanted them separated.

So there is some separation of bikes and vehicles that we could do on certain portions, but other portions where we have limited right of way, it would look more like a neighborhood greenway with traffic calming, really making sure that vehicle speeds are lower so that if you are riding your bike, you feel a little bit more comfortable.

And then the third alternative is the yellow one on the bottom.

And this alternative is almost entirely on residential streets.

So think of a neighborhood greenway where we do meaningful traffic calming.

Again, bikes would be sharing the travel lane with vehicles, but we would hope to slow vehicles as much as possible so that that's a more comfortable mixing zone.

But you'd go south when you come off of the Prince Memorial Greenway on Santa Rosa Avenue.

You would meander through neighborhood streets, mostly on Vallejo Street.

When you get to Farmers, we would not throw you to the wolves.

We would have some sort of improvement there, probably a raised bike lane, so that you're if you are walking or biking, you're elevated higher than the vehicles are.

This just gives a little visual.

If you're if you like alternative one or number two, you would turn on to Sonoma, but if you liked alternative three, you would continue going south on Santa Rosa Avenue.

This is the one that I think is the most helpful to see where you can see where they truly diverge from one another.

So Doyle Park is the green spot in the middle, and you see how for alternative one, the orange one, you just it's a straight shot down uh Sonoma Avenue, and then moving down towards Montgomery High School.

Alternative number two, again, you're meandering through Doyle Park, and then you meander a little bit more on Hoenn, and then alternative three, the yellow one, also meandering, just a little bit different, and then they all come together at the same point.

One thing I think I forgot to mention was for alternative one and two, both of those cross farmer's lane, and we are very well aware that there would need to be intersection improvements at those locations, so that you know, if you are on either of those alternatives, again, we're not throwing you to the wolves, there would be an improvement there.

So this is a rendering of a parking protected bike lane.

One thing that I do want to note, and that we do note in the survey that we're asking people to take is yes, we know with our given right-of-way that we have now that we can fit parking protected bike lanes, so we can maintain parking on both sides.

However, there would have to be a reduction of a couple parking spaces, particularly to keep sight distance at driveways.

So there would be some removal, but I know that parking can be kind of a hot topic.

And so we do know we can maintain on both sides.

We would have to remove a few spaces.

So we are upfront about that in the survey that we have people taking.

But this gives just a general overview of what that could potentially look like.

This is a rendering of alternative number two going through Doyle Park.

We currently have the park closed to vehicles, so I mean it's already really peaceful.

I wrote it yesterday.

I'm gonna ride it again on Saturday at a community ride.

But there's a chance for us, you know, to add signage.

I think that's one of the main things that we would do so that it's very clear what way you're supposed to go to link to where you want to go.

And then one other improvement that we would need to do, but is not shown here, is widening the pedestrian path.

So through Doyle Park right now, it's a standard sidewalk length, you know, it's maybe six feet.

We would have to widen that so that it was more of a shared facility, and there's not a conflict in the space.

And then this is a rendering of what a neighborhood greenway could look like.

There's no one right way to do a neighborhood greenway as long as you really reach your stated goal, which is that your vehicles are moving slow enough that you're not creating a mixing zone that creates a safety issue.

So what you see in this image, there's a speed bump, these landscaped areas, they have a couple names.

I guess I'd call this a bulb out, where you take a couple parking spaces and you reallocate it to something else.

It could be pedestrian space, in this case it's a landscaped space, but it serves a couple functions.

One is that it narrows the roadway so cars are driving slower.

It also is helpful because it shortens the pedestrian crossing distance.

So you'll notice that the crosswalk above the speed bump is a lot shorter than if it were if that landscaped area is not there.

And then we also show improved signage, which would be something we do with any alternative, but it's nice to show it there.

So that's the end of talking about the three alternatives.

Let me just give you some information on how we're doing the public outreach.

We have a project web page, it's listed on this slide.

We have a QR code for our one member of the public if you want to scan it.

Um, on that web page, we have a survey in English and in Spanish.

The survey is written in a way where if somebody has not listened to this presentation, I really hope that it's clear what we're trying to do.

It's more of a storytelling type of survey where we do walk through each of the alternatives.

I show those same visual simulations that I showed you.

And the questions are designed in a way where I'm trying to invoke certain reactions.

So I ask things like, do you ever travel with somebody who makes a little bit harder to get around?

A child, maybe you yourself, you have some sort of mobility limitation.

Maybe you like to go grocery shopping by bike, and it makes it just a little bit harder because you're bulkier and heavier.

I ask people questions like: if we put in something like a protected bike lane, would you be more inclined to go to your neighborhood park?

I'm really trying to get at the heart at what are the type of improvements that the community would accept to help shift their behavior and make this a facility that's really interesting for the general public to use.

We do have a list of in-person outreach.

So we there's um presentations to all the advisory boards.

Uh, you're all my first one, but we're also going to the bike pet advisory board, uh, city council is getting a study session, waterways advisory committee, and the community action board.

Um we're doing an in-person workshop that's gonna be on July 29th at City Hall.

Um let's see.

This Saturday, we're doing a community bike ride.

Dan and I um at 10 a.m., we're meeting people at the fish at Prince Gateway Park.

We're gonna ride two of the alternatives.

We're gonna ride number two out, so we're gonna meander through Doyle Park.

Um we'll probably have a rendezvous there to talk about where the paths diverge, and then we'll meet again at um Montgomery High School to talk about and kind of show people okay.

Here's where the greenway will come out.

Um and then we're gonna ride alternative number one back, which is gonna be really exciting because on Sonoma through Montgomery Village, we are almost complete with our road diet protected bike lanes project, and we're gonna get to ride on the new modular busboarding islands.

So if that doesn't convince you to come on this ride, I literally don't know what would.

Um it's gonna be a blast.

So 10 a.m.

at the fish statue on Saturday, we'll be there.

Uh we've also done a series of pop-up events.

I'm also gonna be at Juilliard Park on Sunday for the free music, um, taking some surveys and just chatting with people.

We already have over 500 responses to the survey, which is fabulous.

Um part of that is because we sent out 10,000 mailers, which you know, a lot of people responded.

I was impressed by that.

Um, and let's see.

What's helpful for me from you, is if any of you have an opinion on any of the alternatives and you want to provide that opinion, I would request that you take the survey online.

That would be very helpful for me.

That's where all the data gets compiled for me, and it's really easy for me to transcribe and move forward.

And then for any of your constituents, your friends, your family, your enemies, anybody who you think would take the survey, I would appreciate if you sent to them.

Um my goal is we could get one percent of the Santa Rosa population to take it.

I don't know if we'll get there, but if I keep saying it, perhaps that would be great.

Um, and I think with that I could take any questions.

Thank you.

Any questions?

Vice Chair.

Yeah, thank you for all this.

Um I have a couple questions and a comment.

I actually, full disclosure, did take the survey, and it was um, it didn't tell a story, and it was very easy to follow and understand.

And in fact, I actually misunderstood one part of it on alternate two when I got a question about that.

So um alternate two goes through Doyle Park, Doyle Park Drive, and then through Doyle Park and then connects to Howan Avenue.

And was there any consideration um having it turned down Hoenn Avenue at Sonoma Avenue?

And sort of miss the park entirely.

I just say that because I think um like women alone people after dark might not want to ride through the park.

That would be a wonderful comment on the open-ended section of the survey.

I put it there.

It's better.

So I'm gonna know which one's yours.

Yeah.

Um so that's that's one comment, and then um the second comment on alternative three, um, with the treatment on Farmers Lane.

Is there um do you have any idea of because farmers is also partly highway 12?

Um, is Caltrans amenable to that kind of um change or addition to the facility?

That is one of the downsides is we would have to go through a collaborative process with Caltrans, which sometimes proves a little bit more easy than other times.

Um, that can add expense and time and money.

I said expense already, but it could add complications.

So usually that is something that we can work with Caltrans on, but it is one of the cons of that option.

And also on the um survey and trying to get people to answer it.

I know it was on the um Santa Rosa Cycling Club chat list this morning to get people to respond to the survey.

So hopefully that'll garner a lot more responses.

And also my last question, I just have I heard this this week, and I've not researched the whole comment, but I understand that our Federal Transportation Secretary made a comment this week about bike lanes being DEI facilities, and they want to claw back some of the funding for them.

So is there a potential that this is going to be impossible to fund once the studies completed and we want to build this?

That's a great comment.

And I also saw that and I chuckled.

No.

So right now, all that we're getting helped with is technical assistance.

So things like the visual simulations that I showed you that's the technical assistance.

That's not something that I'm able to do, and I don't think I have staff who can.

And that was a contract that was signed about two years ago.

So we're good to go.

The only problem potentially moving forward is if we wanted to apply for a federal grant, it's now more competitive, and there's different goals of this administration.

However, one of the benefits of this project is that it helps support a generational project for Santa Rosa, which is the Southeast Greenway.

And so there's probably opportunities for us to maybe link those two projects with construction funding in the future, or maybe we can use pavement maintenance dollars to help, you know, two birds, one scone, kind of situation.

So I'm not particularly worried.

Okay, thank you.

Commissioner Sisko.

I have a feeling this hasn't been done, but I'm kind of wondering if you as staff have looked at or estimated the cost of each of the alternatives, and if you have, can that information be given to the public as part of their decision making process?

I mean, you know, our budget funding, all of this stuff is is really critical.

And um, you want when I looked at the alternatives, I don't ride bikes and I don't ride at night, but I was thinking the Doyle Park one looked like it might be the easiest and least expensive as opposed to building parkways on all of you know residential streets and stuff.

So just wondering is there some way to calculate that and give that information to the public so that they can keep in mind not only you know what our ultimate goals are, but what are reasonable goals given our budgets.

Definitely, and we did that in the beginning.

So the way that this started was several city staff members, including Dan, got in a room and we said, what are all of the potential options to link these two spots?

And we got crazy, you know, drones someday might be cool.

I don't know, they might work, so you could just pick people up, not actually, but we did think about what are all of the possible alternatives, and then we said, okay, let's be realistic about this, and we narrowed it down to the ones that we knew fiscally would not be excluded from ever happening.

So we did do a very loose internal calculation based on here's what similar capital projects end up costing.

Um, I could publish that.

The problem that we're finding with a lot of our projects is you post a cost, and then maybe three minutes later, it doesn't last long.

Um so we do sometimes have a hard time posting estimates or releasing estimates because they're not always realistic.

But what we did do is make sure that all of the alternatives are ones that we as staff feel comfortable that we can complete.

Um, some of them are a little bit cheaper than others, but then there's also opportunities within each one of them, right?

You could do a full road bed reconstruction of how an aven Avenue, and that would be very expensive, or you can do some sort of cheaper alternative where you can roll the project out faster.

So things can also be broken up into different phases if they needed to be.

Thanks.

So I kind of follow up on that question.

Um I know you it's hard to put the exact cost, but could you say, you know, alternative three is the most expensive alternative two is the middle, that kind of thing.

Um so it's not actually a cost, but it's like rating them as to which is the most uh economically feasible.

Yeah, I would say alternative three would be the cheapest because we can we would have so much flexibility on what type of traffic calming materials we put in, how frequently, whether they are um, you know, a little bit more temporary in nature versus like big capital project with a bunch of concrete.

So that one has the most tailored approach, I would say.

Um I would venture a guess.

I'm very curious if Dan would agree with me that alternative number one might be the second cheapest, uh, mainly because Sonoma Avenue is such an arterial for us that it's in we keep it in a little bit better condition than a road where like Hoenn that might need a little bit more intervention.

And so while alternative number two does include, you know, some park improvements and um neighborhood greenway type facilities, traffic calming facilities on Hoenn, the pavement there is a lot worse for wear than on Sonoma Avenue.

So I would venture to guess alternative number two might be the most expensive, but again, we can design this project to be what we want it to be as long as we know that our number one goal is accomplished, which is if there is a space where bikes are sharing the space with vehicles, that it is as safe as possible.

Thank you.

Um, and with the upcoming closure of the French American Charter School, how does that play into uh alternative two or does it?

Not really.

Um, because I mean, of course, we love safe pathways that are near schools, but we love safe pathways that are around any land use, and who knows what that could be in the future.

It could be another school, it could be redeveloped into something else, and we would still want to provide a good safe facility there, and then my last question has to do with the with the work that's currently being done on um Hohen right now in front of like Path Colleen and then uh the high school.

Uh how does that play into this?

Or does it there are some traffic improvements that are happening as part of that?

So there's some curb ramps, some crosswalk improvements and things.

So it's already already some improvements are going in, similar with how on Sonoma between farmers and Homan we have that project.

So one thing we did also weigh when we were creating these alternatives was what are other things that are already going on?

So the Sonoma and then down Hannon was actually the first alternative that we felt confident about because we knew those projects were coming up.

So we said, hey, we're doing some of this already.

Why don't we throw that alternative out there?

Thank you.

Are there any other questions?

Okay, so with that, I will go ahead and open the public comment portion on this.

If anybody'd like to make a comment, please go to the podium.

Seeing no one rise.

I will close it and um bring it back to the commission.

And thank you very much, Tarina.

This was really interesting, and I will encourage everyone I know to take the survey.

Thank you.

So with that, we have no public hearings tonight, and so we are adjourned.