All right, good evening, everyone, and welcome to our special town council meeting this evening, and we are going to be discussing and receiving a presentation on the proposed Broad Street Road Diet Project.

All of our counselors are accounted for.

Counselor Smith will be unable to join us.

Counselor Glauc Hoffman is probably in a route because 6:30, you know, still travel time coming from work, so we'll expect her shortly.

All right, with that being said, I'm going to turn over to our town manager, Mr.

Sousa.

Thank you very much, Madam Mayor, and appreciate the town council setting aside a uh evening to talk about road diet.

Road diet, um, if you will came out of the um Windsor Center transit-oriented development uh master plan and redevelopment strategy.

Um there's been a wide variety of conversations over the years about how to slow uh traffic down on Broad Street, how do we enhance public safety?

Um how can we add on street parking, all with the overarching goal is to strengthen the town center.

Um it's small businesses, current small businesses, and future small businesses.

Um, this evening uh we will like to uh go through a presentation.

Um council members have um attended previous public information meetings, um so some of this may be repetitive, but the goal this evening is to walk through the um overall purpose of the physical suggested physical alterations um to Broad Street, and when I say Broad Street, essentially the from Sycamore to the south up to the um broad broad Palisado and Biquanic um area.

So this is a little bit of a background.

Um excuse me, before I get into the background, we're looking for the town council to be able to narrow down and develop a preferred concept based upon the con the concepts that we're going to be providing this evening.

Um we'd like to be able to have that um ideally in the uh October and November time frame so that we can provide specific design um direction to our consulting uh engineers who we have with us this evening, and I'd like to introduce them at this point.

Um just so you know who they are.

Bill uh Anderson from VHB and then Charlie Baker to Bill's right.

And they have been the primary uh consulting engineers on that.

With us also at the table is Suzanne Chote, our town engineer, and Patrick McMahon, our economic and community development director.

Um as we all know, Broad Street is a state-owned road.

It is very much auto-centric in its design.

Um often have speeds that exceed the posted speed limit of 30 miles an hour.

Um we did do some speed um data collection for five-day period back in May of this year.

And just for um a little bit of a little factoid, is that we have um over 35 percent of the traffic in that time frame was going 10 miles an hour or over the post-speed limit.

So that was you know 36% during that five-day period.

Um 36% of the counted trips were of which there's approximately 48,000 trips in that five-day period.

About 36% of those were 10 miles an hour or over.

In part.

We're also trying to provide parking, which is to make it more convenient to both our civic institutions, our businesses here in town center, and for our neighbor, and to make it easier from a pedestrian perspective for folks visiting town center as well as those that live here in the center.

And so we have three different um proposals that we have developed with the assistance of our consulting engineer, and we've shown these to the public.

And so we're going to do now at this point is ask the consulting engineers to provide an overview of first of what a road diet is and what a road diet isn't, and then be able to talk about the then come back to me.

I'll talk a little bit about some of the input that we've had from public and we'll walk through the options.

So Bill, will you lead off?

Sure.

Again, thank you, Peter, for introducing us, and thanks everyone for joining us tonight.

Um Speeder said, we've been a partner with a town trying to come up with a solution.

What's the best um solution for this section of four day corridor with the objective of you know trying to come up with a solution that is equitable to the fairest road road users that include you know reduce also reducing speeding through here, provide um uh pedestrian, and also uh where possible bicycle facilities through the area.

So, in terms of what is a road diet, essentially a road diet is looking to repurpose a cross section of a roadway to reduce the number of through lanes and also providing for designated left turn lanes to avoid any friction as vehicles are traveling.

So, one of the larger uh reasons for accidents over the years has been you know, vehicles that are changing lanes.

So if I'm driving on the street um in a left-turn lane, and I someone is trying to go right behind me.

One of the natural things is that you want to get out from behind me, get in the right turn lane, and a lot of times you end up with side swipes.

So, you know, one solution to that is if you provide designated left-turn lanes, that would reduce um the number of accidents.

This cross sections does provide the opportunity in addition to um on-street parking, is to provide um designated left-turn lanes and also the opportunity for um bike lanes throughout a project area.

So I'll um pass it on to Charlie to go through the various concept that we've put together so far that we think can achieve uh the objective of this project.

Uh all right, thanks, Bill.

Um can we uh display the uh the three the typical section, please?

Um, those are loading.

Just wanted to give a little more background about uh road diets.

Um FHWA guidance uh indicates that road diets can be considered on a road that has uh a daily average daily traffic of 25,000 vehicles or less.

And uh as Peter mentioned, the uh the average daily traffic on Broad Street is only 9600 vehicles per day, so that's significantly lower than the FHWA guidance for a road diet.

Um, so the current traffic volumes on Broad Street don't really justify a four-lane cross section, and the road diet should work well with only one traveling in each direction.

Um example of a recent road diet in the area was uh West Hartford, uh North Main Street, North Main Street and West Hartford has an average daily traffic of 15,000 vehicles per day.

Um so again, that's much higher than Broad Street is, and that road diet's been very successful in West Hartford.

Um I've been to some of those public meetings, and it's been very well received by the public.

Some other examples of uh successful road diets in the area are on Farmington Avenue in West Hartford and Main Street in New Britain.

So one of the uh the biggest benefits of the road diet is that it it slows down traffic with a four-lane cross section where you can weave and change lanes whenever there's a vehicle, it just encourages higher speeds.

Um this slide shows um really the the safety benefits of slowing down traffic.

Um a pedestrian hit by a vehicle traveling at 40 miles an hour has only a one in ten chance to survive.

If you can slow the traffic to 20 miles per hour, then that pedestrian has a nine and ten chance to survive.