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.