Portland committee reviews Vision Zero progress and launches new transportation plan

[0:01] Regina Phillips: Let me know when we're good to go. [0:12] Jeremiah Bartlett: Okay, I'm going to start the webinar and we'll be all set. Sorry, I'm sorry. [0:17] Regina Phillips: We're good to go? Perfect. Thank you so much. Well, thank you all for attending today's meeting. This is the City Council Meeting on Sustainability and Transportation. Welcome, everybody. It's beautiful outside, so I hope everybody had a great day today. My name is Regina Phillips. I am the chair of this committee, and I represent District 3. I'm going to turn it over to our committee member to introduce himself. But before that, I want to let you know that Councilor Bullett, who represents District 5, had to deal with a family situation. So unfortunately, she will not be here with us this evening. She does send her regards. Once Councilor Lee is done introducing himself, I'll turn it over to Troy. Director Moon and go around and we'll introduce the folks we have here from the city and any other guest. So with that, counselor. Thank you, Madam Chair. My name is Pious Ali. [1:18] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): I am counselor at large and a member of this committee. Thank you. Thank you. I'll turn it over. [1:25] Troy Moon: To Director Moon. Great. Thank you, everyone. I'm Troy Moon. I'm the director of sustainability and the city staff liaison to the committee, and I'll pass it to Carly. [1:35] Jeremiah Bartlett: Yeah, sure. So I'm Carly. I am [1:38] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): a sustainability associate within the sustainability office, and I will pass it to Kevin. Hi everyone, [1:44] Kevin Kraft: Kevin Kraft, director of planning and urban development. Pass it to Nell. Hi, I'm Nell [1:49] Jason Schreiber: Donaldson. I also work in the department of planning and urban development, and I'll pass it to Jeremiah. [1:55] Jeremiah Bartlett: Hello, I'm Jeremiah Bartlett, transportation systems engineer at Public Works. And I'll pass it to Mike. [2:02] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): Good evening. [2:04] Regina Phillips: Mike Murray, Director of Public Works. [2:07] Kevin Kraft: And I will pass it up the food chain to the Assistant City Manager, Greg Jordan. [2:12] Greg Jordan: Don't you mean down the food chain? Greg Jordan, Assistant City Manager. We have some partners with us today. Rick Harbison from Chibi Cog and Jessa Berna from Stantec, who will be talking about our transportation comprehensive plan in connection with Kevin. So I think that's all of the staff, right? Oh, Sergeant Noise is with us too, from the police department. [2:35] Troy Moon: And we also have Jason Schreiber from Stantec as well. [2:39] Greg Jordan: So all right, back to you, chair. Perfect. Was that everybody? [2:46] Troy Moon: Yeah. Okay. Cash out. Did you, did we say cash? [2:51] Regina Phillips: No, I didn't think so. Hi everyone. [2:54] Castle Stewart: Castle Stewart, a transportation planning manager for Greater Portland Council of Governments, GPCOG, and I'll be talking about the Commercial Street Demo Project later on. [3:03] Regina Phillips: Thanks. Well, thank you. We appreciate all of you being here. We're going to go ahead and get right to our agenda. The first thing on our agenda is to pass the meetings for the April 13th meeting. And so I was not in attendance, and Council Bullitt is not here. And I don't see anybody from Corporation Council, so should we, I can, I can make a motion and second it. [3:33] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): You can. That was, that was a joke. That was a joke. [3:36] Regina Phillips: How about if we postpone that until next meeting? I just don't want to do anything outside of Robert's Rules, and I'm not Council, I'm not comfortable voting on it because I was not here year. So I apologize. Let's do that. Okay. So we will postpone the approval to the May 13 meeting minutes until next time. Next on our agenda is an update, sustainability and transportation update. And so I'm going to turn it over to [4:08] Troy Moon: director moon. Great. Thank you, counselor. And if I can get my tab back that has my updates it'll be great so now it's opening okay here we go thank you very much counselor this is our normal updates just want to give you an update so Katie Tims who worked with us for four years and staff helped me staff this committee many times is exploring a new career opportunity with a different firm so we wish her great success and we are happy with that she joined us for so long and we're under we're recruiting her position currently and currently doing interviews, so we'll hopefully have a new team member soon. Also a couple updates, we're doing a lot of work on climate resilience right now. So currently we have a team of consultants who are doing shoreline inventory, so like examining our coast to identify, you know, what types of shoreline we have, what condition it's in, whether it's a natural shoreline or built in shoreline. We're getting geographic data, condition data, we're going to be incorporating that into updating our climate vulnerability assessment and developing a lot of information that will help us do resilience planning moving forward. So that's underway. It should wrap the, that shoreline inventory should wrap up at the end of the summer. We also just submitted another grant that will be focused on building resilience on the waterfront. So we're proposing to build a resilience collaborative that's composed of diverse waterfront stakeholders that will be planning to hold a series of meetings in 2027 that will help us identify strategies for meeting the city's commitment to prepare for 1.5 feet of sea level rise by 2030 and 4 feet by 2100. So we'll keep you posted about that, and hopefully we'll be successful in getting that grant. We've done some community education and engagement. We co-hosted Bike to Work Day with Bicycle Coalition and some other partners on May 15th. Even though it was very rainy, we had some good attendance, which we were pleased by. And our Sustainable Neighborhoods program is getting some very positive attention. On May 18th, we had a team of graduate students from the University of New Hampshire who came down to learn more about our program, which is really exciting. So we are also to have a leader from the Bayside Neighborhood Organization join our conversation to talk about how that neighborhood organization engages with our programs, which was informational and helpful for those grad students. students. We also had an opportunity to visit Wadenfleet School, and we talked about the importance of energy sustainability and proper lighting. And let's see, we also have been on Peaks Island doing some work. We did a couple workshops on Peaks Island, one focused on energy efficiency and another one focused on organic land care practices. So we've been busy doing that outreach as well. And that, I think, concludes our updates for this month, Counselor. [7:24] Regina Phillips: Well, thank you for that extensive report. I really appreciate it. Carly, do you have anything to add? [7:29] Castle Stewart: No, I think Trey covered everything. [7:32] Regina Phillips: Okay. Well, we really miss Katie. She just did such a fabulous job. I was able to send her an email before she left just to tell her what a fabulous job that she did for the city and just how much we really appreciated her work and really wanted to wish her luck in her new adventure. So she will definitely be missed. good luck in trying to find a replacement. And also just thank you for all of the other work that you have done. Terrific. Any questions for the director or Carly? Great. Okay. Terrific. Then we're going to move this along. The next item on the agenda is to hear about a Vision zero implementation report. I know the assistant city manager, Greg Jordan, has done an incredible amount of work on this, and we really appreciate your leadership on this. Everything I get from you is so clear and concise on what we've been doing and what we still have left to do. So really and truly appreciate your work on this. Looking forward to hearing what you have to say and giving us an update. So assistant city manager, I will turn it over to you. [8:47] Greg Jordan: Thank you very much, Chair. And certainly the work is being done by a lot of people on this project. It truly is an interdepartmental and interagency and cross-community sort of effort. It really is all hands-on deck kind of initiative because it involves so many different aspects of our transportation system. system. We do have a lot of information for you tonight. It's all in the vein of progress reports about how we're doing across various initiatives that we've established. Just a level set with the materials that are in your packet. So there's a cover memo that kind of broadly describes kind of where we are. The main attachment is a progress report on the Vision Zero Quick Action Plan, which you are accustomed to seeing at this point. It provides you the progress reporting for the current quarter, basically, second quarter of 2026, and a lot of good information in there about progress in various areas. You'll hear about some specific areas in more depth from planning, public works staff, and from the police department. We do want to start out with looking at the actual crash data through the first quarter of 2026. And Rick Harbison over at GPCOG, our partner on this work, has been doing a great job compiling all of the crash data from the main state crash database and putting it into a presentation in analytical form that hopefully gives us good trend analysis, good information on which to base our actions. And so with that, I'll turn it over to Rick. And I think you're going to share your screen to go through it, Rick. [10:22] Kevin Kraft: Yep. Yeah, thanks, Greg. Greg. So I'm just going to share the quarterly report here, the PDF. Can you guys see that okay? All right. I will zoom in a little bit. So yeah, everything in this report covers crashes that occurred in quarter one. So January through March of this year. Unfortunately, the timing of quarter one doesn't line up great with this meeting since we now have April and most of May data available. But I did look it up and I'll I'll provide a brief update of those numbers where I can. And yeah, our goal is to have these reports provide these reports to the city on a quarterly basis. So we'll have a quarter two report should be completed by late July. The crash data is from Main DOT and there's typically about a two-week delay for when the data becomes available and then it also a little bit of time on our end to put the report together. In case you're wondering, this image right here, this is a pedestrian crossing Congress Street and Four River Parkway. We took it earlier this year to support the city's safe streets for all Libby town application earlier this year. So the first graph is looking at people involved in crashes by injury level. So the focus of vision zero is really on identifying where serious injury and fatal crashes are occurring on the network. But that said, I think it's also helpful to understand the broader context of how many crashes are happening. So between January and March there were 564 crashes involving just over 1100 people. So most crashes involve more than one person. So the graph to the right shows the breakdown by injury severity. Fortunately, most people, about 88%, reported no injury at the scene. Another 7% had possible injuries, 4% had minor injuries, and 1%, or six people total, experienced serious injuries. Unfortunately, we've had no fatal crashes so far this year. And please, if you have any questions as I go, don't hesitate to just jump in. So this next graph is specifically looking at the number of people that are seriously injured or killed by year in Portland. And so when you think about Vision Zero and that zero goal, these are the numbers that we want to reduce to zero. So as mentioned for quarter one, we had six people seriously injured, and then you can see the last five years. In the past five years, we've averaged about 29 people seriously injured each year and between three and four people killed each year. And I did pull the data for April and May, and so we had three people seriously injured in May and none in April. And the three people injured, there were two pedestrians and a motorist. So on the year, we're up to nine people seriously injured so far as of the end of May. And then this is our crash map. We updated this at the turn of the year to incorporate all of calendar year 2025 data. So there's a lot going on, a lot of information in this map. The underlying heat map, this shows the concentration of fatal and serious injury crashes over the past five years. And then the thick black lines are what we call Portland's high injury network. So this is based on an analysis. It's based on the same 2021 to 2025 data as the heat map. And these are the road segments that are the top 5% of where serious injury and fatal crashes have occurred. I don't know if you can see my mouse. Hopefully you can. But, you know, this is Riverside Street right here. We've got a segment on Washington Ave. near Tukey's Bridge. A lot of Forest Ave. lights up here. We have parts of Brighton Ave, parts of Congress, and then a lot of major roads on the peninsula. So the icons in the map, these are specific crashes that have occurred just in January through March of this year by injury and mode. So there were five crashes. So one, two, three four five they're all dark blue so they're serious injury crashes. And then the icons are the mode, if it was a bicyclist, a motor vehicle. And the reason there's five crashes and six people is that one of the crashes had two people that were hurt. And that was this one here, this vehicle crash on Washington Ave. And I think in the next update to this report I'll just put a label there that says there are two people as part of that one. But yeah, so far we've had no fatal crashes so there's no red dots on here. You know, we'll continue to update this map as we go and placing the crashes that occurred this year on the map overlaid on top of the historic data. The reason we're not showing all the historic data is there's a lot and it creates a very busy map if you're putting hundreds of dots on this map. So kind of using the heat map and the high injury network to show past crashes. The three crashes that occurred in May, there was a pedestrian over here on Franklin Street. There was a pedestrian over here in the Bat Cove neighborhood on Ocean Ave, sorry, down here. And then there was another vehicle crash here on Riverside Street, just north of Warren Ave. And then going to the last page here, just more details on the five crashes that did occur. This table, it's sorted by date and we'll update it throughout the year. Similar to last year, most of the crashes are occurring on major roads. There is a over-representation, I'd say, of cyclists and pedestrians. So for this report, three out of the five crashes involved a cyclist or pedestrian and then looking at this last graph this is about crashes by travel mode so this is showing a year-to-year breakdown of the number of people that are seriously injured or killed in crashes by whether they were a cyclist pedestrian or motorist 2021 kind of stands out as a particularly bad year for motorist involved crashes i gotta think that there are some covid bit related factors there maybe people driving faster with less congested streets. But overall, I don't see any downward trends for any of the modes in particular. Last year, pedestrian, it was a especially bad year for pedestrians in the city, but we'll continue to update this graph throughout the year as well. And that's really it for the report. We're trying to keep these updates concise so that we can prepare them quickly, and then on the user end, they're easy to scan and kind of easily see how the city's doing. So we'll be doing two more like this, one that are kind of condensed, and then at the end of the year, we're going to put together a little bit more of an in-depth report that has more analysis to it, and we'll break down the crashes into more factors. That's all I have. Greg, I don't know if you wanted to open it up for questions now or later. [18:28] Greg Jordan: Chair, do you want to go to questions on Rick's report, or do you want us to go right to the next stage of our presentation? [18:37] Regina Phillips: We can open it up for questions. I don't have any at this point, so Councillor Ali, do you have any, or does anybody else here have any questions? [18:50] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): No, Madam Chair, I just want to thank staff for this in-depth presentation, and I'm looking [18:57] Regina Phillips: forward to working with them to get us there. Yeah, Rick, thank you so much for this information. It's very helpful. I am a visual learner. Everybody knows it. And this was just, again, I just love it when there's really clear things that I can understand. And so this was really helpful information. So thank you. If there are no other questions, Assistant City Manager Jordan, I'll turn it back to you. [19:22] Greg Jordan: Okay. Thank you. I'm going to share a slide deck and I'll run the show here for my colleagues. And Kevin Krap, I think you're up first, or is it now? [19:35] Kevin Kraft: It's going to be me, but thank you, Greg. Good evening, Chair. So I'm going to present on a couple of projects that the Planning Department's been responsible for as part of the Vision Zero Quick Action Plan. So one of those actions was to actually onboard a consultant and commence work on the city's first comprehensive transportation plan in over 30 years. And we are happy to share that action item has been completed. It. We've retained Stantec, who's going to present to you later on tonight. As our consultant on that work, we started working with them in early May, and today we actually had our first stakeholder group meeting, and tomorrow is our first public meeting at the Ryan's Auditorium at the Public Library. So we're excited to share that work has commenced. And as a quick reminder, the strategic objective of that is really to develop a comprehensive plan that's going to establish a long-term vision for our transportation system and really help us guide our future investments, particularly ensuring that our transportation system is safe, efficient, and accessible for all moods. Greg, if you could go to the next slide. The next action we were responsible for is to update the city's technical manual to ensure alignment with the Complete Streets Policy that was updated last summer. So that work is in progress. The goal is to aim to get an updated complete technical manual or complete streets guidelines completed by the end of the year. Our staff in planning has been working closely with DPW on looking at our standards in our technical manual, which really guides the requirements around how our streets and sidewalks are constructed. So, again, we've started some draft provisions on that. We've had several internal meetings. We're working through some different directions at this stage, and we're looking to bring forward some drafts to the planning board in the fall and aiming for adoption in the winter if everything works out correctly. And that concludes my presentation for planning. I think DPW is next. [21:40] Greg Jordan: Thanks, Kevin. And I'm going to introduce Jeremiah here and just want to emphasize that in your materials, the quick action plan, there's a lot of items in there for public works. There They're a heavy hitter in this work, and Jeremiah is going to touch on just a few of the – do a deeper dive on a few of those initiatives in his comments tonight. So go ahead, Jeremiah. [22:03] Jeremiah Bartlett: Thanks very much. And, yes, I will do my best to keep this reasonably brief, but as with all the other presentations, if there are questions afterward, please feel free to ask. We'll start under Vision Zero with Safer Roads. The primary categories we'll be talking about this evening are high-risk pedestrian crossings, areas that have a lot of risk involved for pedestrians, school zones, which has been a key area of interest, safety through signal and lighting work, and then some other efforts underway with different processes, programs, and data-driven efforts. So with regards to public works efforts on the crossings through our ADA and sidewalk programs, we did strategic targeting with different data sets, including the information GPCOG has put together, as well as pedestrian injury information put together by Maine DOT. DOT. We're also now working with the new lighting standards set forth in 2024 by Maine DOT as part of their pedestrian risk crossing guidelines information. Our work must be done in compliance with ADA, and we also work in compliance with PROAG, even though that hasn't been made full federal guidance. And again, we're looking at the most benefit for the funding here. How do we mitigate the most risk with activity that we do. Next slide please. So the key locations that we're currently focused on are St. John's Street north of Congress, a swath of Congress Street, Avon Park and Dow and then over at Weymouth. A commercial union that is not a that is a signalized intersection unlike the others that will be done through a separate project but it has been determined to have pedestrian risk. Marginal Way and Intermed, Trader Joe's, Congress Street at the Agency on Aging, which is out over near Unum across the street, Stevens Avenue, Ratcliffe Street, Congress Street at Walker Street, Commercial Street at Maple Street. These projects are now currently in the design phase. We had our survey staff pull together a bunch of existing conditions information. We're also partnering with folks at Acuity and Hall of Fame with regards to getting lighting designs pulled together. And essentially, once we get through later this year on the design phase, depending on the budget, we'll have sufficient budget for a number of these. And we'll probably just keep moving them into the hopper as next successive rounds of funding become available. Next slide. We also have crossings done through our traffic operations group, and so these are a bit more targeted and a bit more straightforward as far as what goes on, a little less design. The program components are existing locations that are crossings with significant constituent feedback, typically on the high-risk, high-injury network. Our traffic operations group works with contractors to install the concrete bases for rectangular rapid flashing beacons, the RFBs. And this year we are slated in ideally the next couple weeks if possible, Allen Avenue at 9th Street, which is right near Allen's Corner, Baxter Boulevard at Dartmouth Street, and then Auburn Street at Lambert Street, which has actually been coordinated with the DOT paving project that Coastal is doing possibly as we speak. Next slide, please. So we had done a lot of work internally setting up electronic surveys through Google Forms and geo-referencing information, and our construction inspection staff set out and did a number of school zone safety reviews, and there is a ton of information that they collected. I am not going to drag you folks through all of it, this is a very high level, but they certainly found after reviewing the school zones that there are a number of sidewalk segments in the school zones that do warrant maintenance due to their condition and cracking. Some of the areas for these school zones will probably benefit from additional traffic calming. We still see issues even where there are signs with vehicles parking too close to intersections, and they violate the regulations. And the biggest problem with that, of course, is impeding sight lines. We do have concerns sometimes when especially pickup and drop-offs become a bit chaotic with that. And related to that with arrival and dismissal, they did note a fair amount of chaos in some of the school zones with regards guards to schools on management, parent behavior, to be honest. U-turns was a commonly observed action in a lot of pick-up-and-drop-off locations, which is highly risky. We will note that based on our observations, however, that if there are ever unsung heroes in the city with our young people, it is crossing guards. The crossing guards have proven to do an excellent job helping to make sure that students cross safely. So that's a real feather in the cap for those folks. So based on that, we are pulling together a punch list of various efforts going from new signage to sidewalk replacements, and then look at the possibility of traffic calming measures. Once we combine some of this with speeding data, we want to see how people are actually behaving in these 15 mile an hour zones, and we'll touch on that a little bit later here in this presentation. Next slide, please. So here we go to some of the signal work we've been doing lately with our signal, actually signal contract, in our single contractor. There was actually a press release that went out with this, Franklin Street at Congress and Carmel, and those are two of our higher risk locations, and by some measures, actually Franklin at Congress is our single highest risk location. And so at these locations, we have the contractor, electric contractor, place what are called bimodal blank out signs, and as you can see on the images, these signs are capable of doing two different displays depending on what is going on at the intersection. One of the messages that goes to motorists is for turning vehicles to yield to pedestrians, and the other is when they get to red, they are told not to turn red, and these have generally been shown to be more effective than and the static signs because they're active when it's appropriate. When it's not relevant to what's going on, they stay dark. In addition, we also recently reprogrammed these to have what's called lead pedestrian intervals. So when folks are going down Congress on foot or going down Cumberland on foot, they will get a period of time before vehicles can turn where they're crossing that they will be able to start crossing the intersection. And that has certainly been shown to have a significant safety benefit. So we're hopeful that this will start to move the needle at these challenging locations. Next slide, please. Stevens Avenue, a pleasant, nice intersection, terrible bit of signal equipment. This started off as a replacement because of the need that the traffic signal was falling apart. It ultimately is turning into a full intersection section signal replacement project. But as part of that, we're going to have update modern secure support structures, better hold all of the equipment. Right now, they're on some fairly flimsy equipment. They will be networked. We'll be able to respond to them more quickly. Improved lighting will be done as part of this. Lighting is an important part, as we referenced earlier, with pedestrian safety. And the pedestrian accessible equipment, the APS equipment will be fully updated to current state of the art practice. We'll also be able to collect data and know really what's going on at this intersection at all times, which is something we're also trying to do. Being data driven is important. Next slide, please. Similarly, Congress Street at Frost Street. This was a project that sort of happened with some projects or by planning. planning. Some projects are by fortuitous events, and when we found out Maine DOT was doing resurfacing here and was able to provide us with updated physical ADA improvements on their dime, we responded by partnering to provide updated signal equipment. We will be moving the crossing of the intersection along Congress Street from the east side of the intersection to the west side. This will allow us to make this intersection fully ADA compliant for the first time well ever, which has been a huge complaint by Mobility Challenge community. This too will have all the other features that we mentioned at the other location, and we'll have the ability to track data here, which is, again, something we want to do. Not on this slide, but something I was told about a day ago. We also have started updating some of our equipment to exclusive pedestrian phases where it has not been and you can check that out most recently at the intersection of foreign union that was just done the other day next slide please so this is a much more comprehensive effort the street lighting project we are currently working with troy's office on issuing an rfp to enlist a consultant to essentially help us completely review our lighting system, not just in its management and operations, but also where we should be targeting future investments. Where does it actually make sense to invest in lighting? Where do we get the most benefit? And so we're certainly hopeful that over the course of the next year or so, we'll be able to start having some recommendations from that can go into future funding requests. Next slide, please. So we have a lot going on with asset management. Vision Zero and all of the things certainly related to transportation safety are data driven, as we've talked about. And so we do a lot of data management here at Public Works, in particular with transportation assets. So from an infrastructure maintenance standpoint, we have maintenance and updates of every single pavement marking in the city of Portland in a GIS layer, which is, we believe we are the only community in Maine, if not New England, that does that. We also have street pavement condition data, sidewalk data, and we are rapidly building up our street lighting inventory. And that will be updated further with the RFP we mentioned. Traffic safety and data. We have traffic control inventory updates and maintenance. We work closely with our own data sets, bringing in or ingesting crash and injury data from the state data sources. And similar to what we talked about with the school surveys, we have the ability now to do fairly detailed field data collection apps for safety audits. You know, hopefully as time goes on, we can certainly use the school zone audits for other types of similar programs citywide if other departments want to do things. We've started establishing ways and means to do just that. Next slide, please. Just very, and I'll do this very quickly, we have a number of software packages and platforms that we either are working with or will be working with to help us continue to gather information and make decisions. CityLogix is what we use to do the deep dive on our roadway conditions, and they can also help us predict where we need to make investments. Cyclomedia allows us to do very high-level LiDAR-based measurements. Measurements, NIRMAP is aerial information that's at very high resolution, which allows us to do easy designs on things and present things graphically in a very meaningful way. ESRI technology, that is the basis of all of our asset management and really all the city's asset management tools. And then last but not least, there's a software package called AutoTurn, and that helps us make decisions about designing intersections so that we don't over-design them to make them safer for all the pro users. Next slide, please. So just quickly going through the cycle of media, this is the LiDAR measuring. This allows us to do things, and very importantly, it's going to allow us to do things as detailed as mapping and identifying all of the signage citywide. It also allows us to do slope information. It allows us to do remote measurements to a very high level of detail. And we'll also be able to use that to help us do post crash analysis and use tools that they provide to help us build all of these sets to do future funding requests. I certainly think this will make a big change because we'll be able to get a lot of information about the city at a level of detail that we just can't, and it will also mean that our survey staff don't have to do quite the level of field work that they do today, so they can get more done with the same staff. Next slide, please. This one We're very excited about Urban SDK. This is a virtual transportation data collection. They work with third-party providers to get travel information. It's anonymized, you don't know who does what, but it does something in particular that will allow us to track speed data city-wide. So if someone asks us how fast was somebody going last month in the afternoon on Forest Avenue north of Morrill's Corner, we'll be able to find that information out very quickly and easily. To date, when we've gotten speed information, we've had to send traffic operations staff out to set up devices, which is very helpful, but it doesn't allow us to do a really network-wide assessment of what's going on in the city. We just get snapshots. This is going to be a real, we think, game changer for us to be able to make some real informed decisions about where we need to target investments. [37:04] Greg Jordan: Next slide, please. Jeremiah, real quick, that 's obviously aggregated data that gives you very aggregated ability. [37:13] Jeremiah Bartlett: Not you're not looking at individual people. That's correct. It's aggregated and anonymized. It's basically just it has points and it puts the points together. together. There's a lot of packages out that do that, but this one appears to have a very good ability for us to get really usable information. Some of these platforms, it's really hard to get, to be honest, really helpful information. Next slide, please. So the tools that I just referenced and the CycloMedia in particular, it's going to allow us to do a really detailed level of mapping all of our no parking signage, and this is going to allow us to set up work orders to start really moving aggressively on intersection daylighting, and so we're really looking forward to having those capabilities and being able to do something quite comprehensive with this program. So that's it's it's a lot But there's a lot of other things we're doing. This is the highlights. We can come back next year and tell you about all the other great things we're doing, but this is the stuff that's active right now. Some of it. [38:31] Greg Jordan: Last thing, Jeremiah, I know it's sort of on here, but can you just help define what daylighting really means? Absolutely. [38:38] Jeremiah Bartlett: So daylighting is when you ensure that vehicles are far enough away from intersections so that people interacting with the intersections have the ability to actually see what's going on around them. If vehicles are parked very close to where the intersection curb lines intersect, you can't see anything. And that isn't just motorists. Depending on the vehicle, a pedestrian may not be able to see anything as well. So those pose very real risk to the traveling public. And so being able to get the mapping done and also combine it with risk data, we'll be able to target, you know, how we how we structure this daylighting program. But it should be able to allow us to make a notable difference on where those conflicts exist. [39:26] Greg Jordan: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jeremiah. Jeremiah. We can come back for questions later if there are any, but I want to move to the police department and Sergeant Ben Noyes, who's last week on the job is this week. So going off of [39:43] Speaker I (unidentified): the bang here, Sergeant. Thank you, Greg. So just a real brief history of how we arrived where we're at here. In the third and fourth quarters of 2024, we began to track an increase in the number of injury accidents. And then as a result of that and our staffing shortage, the chief approved us to do an enforced traffic enforcement detail as an overtime detail to get officers out there stopping cars, writing tickets, and try to, whether it's slow people down or, you know, the distracted driving, those types of efforts. And then we had, unfortunately six fatal crashes between November of 2024 and March of 2025. So we connected with the main Bureau of Highway or the Bureau of Highway Safety. and we were able to secure a grant to fund those, traffic enforcement details and step up the numbers that we're doing. which I think has played a role in the success or the reductions in accidents we're seeing compared year to year. So here in this first slide, we're looking at, sorry, our goal in our traffic grant application was to try to get a 10% reduction in overall crashes each year or each grant period. So in this comparison here, we're looking at the first five months of 2025 compared to the first five months of this year and you can see we 've dropped 14 and a half percent in the number of reported crashes so it seems so far we're tracking things are going in the right direction and i don't want to jinx it but as somebody as rick harvison said you know we haven't had a fatal accident this year so let's hope that continues next slide please great thank you so we didn't end up quite hitting our mark of 10 percent in 2025. We got close to seven percent, which still, you know, I think with all the Vision Zero efforts and the additional enforcement efforts, I think, you know, it shows that we're on the right track, and you can see from the blue bars there's been a steady decline over the years, but we did spike back up in 2023 and 2024, probably due to cars getting back on the road from COVID and, you know, post-COVID efforts. And our, unfortunately, we've had two years where we've spiked with the fatal crashes as well. And I'm not sure where we can contribute that to, but. So as part of our, next slide, please, Greg. So here with our traffic enforcement efforts, so with our enforcement grant and our officers have been directed to stop cars in areas identified through traffic data, crash data, that are where we're having the highest numbers of crash incidents. incidents, and so we also were able to plug in some of the side streets, so it gives them a little bit of latitude if they, you know, were stopping their car in a place that wasn't in the grant. We also are focusing on any kind of violation that we, that the officer feels could impact the safety of vulnerable users, things like failing to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, or running a red light, or not giving the three feet of leeway to a bicyclist, those types of violations. And we also include violations committed by the vulnerable users. If we have a pedestrian that's not using the crosswalk, or a bicyclist that isn't staying to the right, or, you know, we're looking more for the serious violations than the really minor stuff. But you just about 1,600 in 2025 to 2,200 in 2026, and our ticket writing went up pretty significantly from 605 tickets, and this is a year-to-date comparison, to 882 tickets. So we're on the increase. We're getting more officers to sign up for these details, and they see this as important. And I think some of the numbers that we're seeing are reflected, at least partially reflected, in these efforts. Next slide, please, Greg. Here's a comparison of our traffic stops and citations written year to year for the last 11 years. And as you can see, there was a pretty significant jump in the number of tickets written between 2022 and 2012, 2025. And I think we're significantly higher than that in 2026. I don't think I have that number, but I want to say we were. I don't even want to guess because I know, but I think we're headed in the right direction. And, you know, this grant that we have now will end in September, and hopefully my predecessor, Sergeant Knutson, will reapply for a grant for the 2027 fiscal year. And that was the last one, wasn't it? Yeah, last slide. You're muted, Greg. Greg, you're muted, yeah. [45:32] Greg Jordan: Sorry about that. I'll stop sharing. sharing. I just have a few points I want to note from the quick action plan before questions. And there are a couple of new objectives that we have integrated into the plan. They're on page three of that attachment, just to orient you. And I'll just very quickly note that we're going to be doing a review of our demonstration project, our transportation demonstration project program, which Jeremiah does manage for the city. This is a program where neighborhood groups, other groups out there in the city can propose a you know pretty usually pretty simple demonstration project to make a street safer usually with flexible posts some paint things like that to make it a bit safer and we're looking at ways to make it even easier to participate in that program so that's on deck for probably the fall to take a hard look at before next year's season. The next thing I just want to highlight that, as I think most of you know, or all of you know, a lot of our transportation system is under the jurisdiction of the Maine Department of Transportation, all of our major arterials, and a lot of our collector streets in the city, we have to coordinate and work with Maine DOT on any kind of change or modifications to those corridors. And so the objective here is just to continue, as we have been for a long time, but to continue working on the relationship with our with main dot and also with pax our regional transportation planning agency really to master the process to make sure that our priorities and our needs are being heard in augusta and that we can try to influence their decision making as best we can to improve the system down here in portland so that's something we're very much looking at and the third thing is we're going to take a hard look at the traffic calming ordinance and so this is an ordinance on the books it's been on the books for quite some time that allows residents in neighborhoods to by petition or to petition the city to request traffic a traffic calming study and if city staff study determines that their an improvement is merited then we would work on ways to install that and it's a process that's probably a little bit outdated and could use some streamlining to make it more accessible and effective in the end. So we're gonna be taking a look at that too. So just a few more things on deck, excuse me. And last thing is we are planning a press conference in cooperation with the State Department of Highway Safety tomorrow. We will be in partnership with the state launching a statewide messaging campaign around driving you know safety pedestrian safety driving safety across the state following that work Jessica Grandin in our office here or in the city will be working on a more specific Portland focused follow-up campaign to bring it more locally to Portland and so another communications educational messaging effort that we're trying to advance also and so I know that was a lot chair and committee members there's more to come with the next two items but we'll stop there and take any questions if you have any. [48:53] Regina Phillips: That was fabulous. Thank you so much for that. I appreciate everybody who had a hand in doing that. The presentation was great. Before I ask any questions, Assistant City Manager, can you let everybody know, I know where it is, but can you let everybody know the time and the place of the press conference tomorrow? I know there's nobody here, but if somebody's listening, I want to be able to give them a chance to attend. [49:17] Greg Jordan: Yeah, it's in Lincoln Park, almost right across the street from City Hall. And you got me on the time. I'm going to have to look it up. 10 o'clock. [49:26] Regina Phillips: You have it? Yeah, it starts at 10 o'clock. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it starts. Hold on one second. Hold on one second. No, I'm pretty sure it starts at 10 o'clock because I have to switch a meeting so I can go. So I'm pretty sure it starts at 10. So would love to have anybody from the public there. There. Again, I just want to reiterate, really great presentation, lots and lots of hard work that's going into this. Councilor Ali or anybody else, any questions at all for Assistant City Manager or anybody else that provided any information to us? [50:04] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): No, I don't have a question. I just want to thank Assistant City Manager Greg and his team for an amazing presentation. Presentation I'm looking forward to how this turns out. I have a few questions but I will hold [50:18] Regina Phillips: Them for now. Okay, I just have two really quick questions for Jeremiah. You mentioned the ADA sidewalks and then you said depending on funding. Is that something that we should look at in the CIP or are you saying that there's money in CIP but it's not enough for this? I'm just trying to figure out how the council can be helpful in helping with that, with that kind of funding. [50:41] Jeremiah Bartlett: Sure. So, I mean, we've gotten a pretty good round of funding in this CIP for projects. What we're trying to do right now is leverage both internal and external design assets, so the consultant community as well as our own engineering staff, to try to design more infrastructure than we have the ability to pay for right now. And what that's going to do is a couple of things. One, obviously, it'll get us keyed up so that the moment we get additional funding, we can rock and roll with it. We want to be able to essentially move fairly quickly with things. The other thing that does is the more things that we have designed, the more opportunities we have to potentially go shopping for other sources of funds. So, you know, we knew coming into this budget cycle what our various CIP funds would be. We know what other forms of funding in terms of MPI and UPI and other funding sources through the state are. But we want to be in a position where we've designed more infrastructure than we're going to do in just one year. That just gives us more flexibility to continue moving. And the reality is it's a little bit of a moving target because now that we're starting to really embrace and integrate these new lighting requirements from DOT into these projects, we're still sort of finding our way with what those types of costs are really going to be. So there's some mysteries. We have a reasonable idea, but it is a cost. So it's not really an issue that we don't have any money. We certainly have it. It's just we're trying to really take off as much as we can with these designs. I mean, the same thing with our signal and lighting program. We have a consultant under contract now who's probably going to design, you know, at least a couple of years worth of infrastructure for us so that I mean, it's also going to help us be informed for when we're doing funding requests. You know, we make a lot of assumptions, rough estimates, but this is going to give us a lot more ability to be exact about things. It's also just going to let us coordinate with other projects. Like we're going to try to get out ahead of a paving project on Brighton Avenue with a signal project on Brighton Avenue. So like we're trying to make sure that everything's matching in as we move into these different construction years in a way that makes sense. And ultimately it will it will save us money because different parties will do different components of work. We got really lucky this year with Frost Street. We realized that signal needed updating. And when we found out a whole chunk of that work would get done by the state, and we wouldn't have to pay for any of it, we jumped on it. So it's really just us trying to be as aggressive as we can with being ready for opportunities. [53:22] Regina Phillips: Opportunities. I appreciate that. And if there's something that you think that the council can do to kind of help with that, please let us know. I don't have any other questions. I do want to acknowledge Sergeant Noyes for your retirement. I don't know how long you've been with the city, but appreciate your work. We're going to miss you and everything that you did for the police department. Tell them you want tomorrow and Friday off because you did such a great job tonight and just really good luck in the future with your retirement. Thank you. [54:04] Speaker I (unidentified): counselor almost 29 years with the city and really of a lot of fond memories working here working for a lot of great people with a lot of great people so thank you lots of chiefs yes. [54:20] Regina Phillips: Yeah, 29 years. You go, wow. Yeah, you go back a ways. Well, again, thank you for your service. We really and truly appreciate all that you've done. Greg, I don't have any other questions. Counselor Ali doesn't have any other questions. So I think we're ready to move on. Did you have anything else that you wanted to add? No, we're good. We're good to go to the next item. Okay, terrific. And again, thank you, everybody, for all your hard work on that. Really appreciate it. The next thing on our agenda is a commercial street safe street update by Jeremiah and Cashel. Sorry, I just messed up your name totally. I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to do that. And so I will turn it over to Jeremiah. [55:10] Jeremiah Bartlett: Hi again. I'm just going to introduce this. Cashel will be doing the majority of this presentation, but you know, a little bit similar to what happened on Washington Avenue last year, but in a, frankly, a bit different roadway context. This is a, another effort that GPCog had done, it through a Safe Streets for All grant, and certainly, you know, we're looking forward to what's happening this summer out on Commercial Street with that. Take it away, Cashel. [55:40] Castle Stewart: Great. Thank you. Can everyone see my slides? Yep. Great. Yeah, so how did we get here to Commercial Street and the money for the demonstration project? Chivicog received a Safe Streets for All grant in 2024. This was quite a bit of money that we broke into subprojects throughout the region. Four of them were in Portland, so Jeremiah alluded to the Washington Now project last year. We also looked at Allen's Corner with Stantec and Jessa on the call here. And then we're looking at Nason's Corner for a roundabout design. So, you know, we are using this money for all sorts of things, but it really does provide an opportunity to do some of these demonstration projects. The, you know, quick build, high impact, safety oriented projects that the grant hoped to accomplish nationwide. wide. And really their main criteria for awarding the grant was reducing serious injuries and fatal crashes. So that will be central to our goal on Commercial Street. Why did we select Commercial Street to begin with? Mostly stemmed from this Commercial Street operations and master plan that the city developed in 2021. There were many, goals, as you can imagine, for Commercial Street that ended up in that plan. We zeroed in on two, primarily the multimodal safety and the visibility of cyclists and pedestrians on Commercial Street, and then the truck loading, so where trucks, which there are many, are loading and unloading on Commercial Street. It bears mentioning that both staff and GPCOG have identified Commercial Street as a critical safety corridor. And this is based off injury crash trends that have happened in the last five years. Four of the 14 injury crashes included bikes and pedestrians along the stretch that we're looking at. So it's a problem. And the design itself also sort of puts it at high risk for more crashes similar unless there's improvements made. So we developed design improvements that aim to improve the safety and disability of pedestrians, designate these truck loading zones in the center lane along Commercial Street, remove six dangerous parking spaces that are out of compliance with the city ordinance, and I'll get more into that, and then add some placemaking features, because why not? We did open a survey about three weeks ago. It's going to be open for another couple weeks, and I'll throw a QR code up at some point. But wanted to show some early results. We've had 270 responses already. This is a word cloud of how people feel about Commercial Street, and you can see pedestrians rising to the top, and then just a lot of synonyms for chaotic and busy and crazy and unpredictable, and we're not gonna be able to solve all those problems, but we're gonna, we're gonna try to do some of that with this project. Also wanted to throw up a couple of the questions we had in there. Again, these answers are still rolling in, but wanted to show this one. Is it easy to see pedestrians when traveling along Commercial Street? Pretty overwhelmingly, no. It is hard to see pedestrians when they're trying to cross the road. And then I feel like I have to wait to cross Commercial Street. So this is a question that just pedestrians answered. And despite the many, crosswalks, pedestrians agree with that question or statement. And then I mentioned the truck loading. Here's just a couple shots I took while I was out there the other day. You know, again, no fault of the people, you know, dropping off goods to the many businesses along Commercial Street and down the wharfs, but they often will park well within the restricted area next to a crosswalk. So you can see this truck's probably parked about 10 feet off the crosswalk, making it very hard as a pedestrian to be seen by oncoming traffic coming down the other way. And then the picture on the right there, they often will park where it's in the middle of the lane or just right on the middle of the double yellow there. Why a demonstration project? I won't belabor this point. I think we're all familiar, but there is real opportunity to do something here with limited funds. We are going to be able to revert it, change it as soon as it goes in. We fully expect comments and feedback to roll in immediately as soon as it goes in. And we'll be on hand to make changes if needed. And it will be removed by the end of the summer, well, before the winter, I should say. And we'll be able to look at the results. So I mentioned these goals, but there's a couple others in here. So really, we're trying to reduce crashes, specifically injury and bike ped crashes. Is we're trying to improve compliance of delivery trucks in the center lane and compliance of parked cars to the city's ordinance of being 20 or 25 feet from a crosswalk, improve pedestrian yield compliance. So state law says that if a pedestrian is in the crosswalk, a vehicle needs to yield to that pedestrian. We were out there the other day doing pedestrian yield studies, and about 60% of time, at least one car did not yield to the pedestrian in the crosswalk. So we're going to try to improve that compliance, improve the feeling of safety and the comfort for all road users. Sometimes it's not just the crashes. It's also how people feel and their willingness to take Commercial Street on their commute, that kind of thing. So we'll get a lot of that information from the survey results. And then assess treatments and collect data that can inform next steps. So final report that will be provided to the city and they can decide what the next steps are. As part of all of this is a lot of data collection, collecting speeds, volumes, pedestrian yield studies that I just mentioned, crashes, specifically disparity crashes, and then the before and after survey. And all that will go into the final report. Port. Maybe should have had the slide earlier, but we've had quite a bit of, you know, partners on this project, mostly City of Portland, GPCOG, and Maine DOT on the bi-weekly calls. Jeremiah has been a great point person on the project for us, but we also have Portland Downtown working with us, and they've offered to provide a number of placemaking features that will go into the parklets that we're proposing and things like picnic benches and planters that will spruce up Commercial Street this summer. Bike Coalition of Maine and Neighborways are our consultant partnership, mostly boots on the ground. You know, they'll help us paint and put down flex posts and get the word out for volunteers and things like that. And then Federal Highway does have to approve this project so they've been you know in the design room with us timeline roughly following the calendar year of 2026 we spent the first few months doing preliminary design and going through a lot of what you'll see in a second we are finalizing design now and starting to prep for actual install in july but obviously need to get through the last few rounds of approvals here. Installation in late July, followed by a period of monitoring and maybe slight tweaks, and all the post-data collection, and then assessment and reporting later in the year. So we're looking at Dana Street to roughly the standard baking, parking, pull-in, almost to Franklin Street. And as you can see in this diagram, very high level, and I'm not going to get into the gritty details with design here, mostly give you the overview, but I'm happy to answer questions. You can see we've got eight curve extensions, and those are those little red curve extensions on mostly the water side on the bottom side there. There are actually a ton of curve extensions already on Commercial Street. We're really just adding curve extensions where there aren't already, and curve extensions are proven to make pedestrians more visible. They put them in a safe way closer to that vehicle lane so that, you know, they're out outside of that line of parked cars, often parked trucks and delivery vehicles so that should make them more visible on the water side. Then we've got 11 pedestrian median refuge islands. One of the big things along here is that there's no signals. And so there's no way for a pedestrian to, you know, press a button and be able to cross the road and have a designated time when they're allowed to do so. There is on Franklin Street and there is on Union Street, but not these 11 crosswalks through here. So by adding a pedestrian median refuge island, we will be able to at least provide them the space so they can cross the first lane of traffic, have a refuge in the middle, and then cross the next lane of traffic. Again, creating visibility, creating traffic calming through the whole corridor, and some other added benefits. One of the main added benefits is that we'll be able to specifically put those so that they set back where the trucks will park and we'll have these loading zones that are demarcated in the middle of the road. So there's five of those all throughout the corridor, and these will be marked with markings that I'll show in a second. And then we've got proposed parklets. So these are the parking spaces that are out of compliance with the city's ordinance, really a safety measure. And in the in the survey, we had a lot of people mention this exact point that these angled parking spots actually back into the crosswalk. There's already a lot of safety concerns with these parked cars pulling into vehicle lanes. But add on top of that, they're pulling into the crosswalk and it really does create a dangerous situation out there. So pulling those parking spaces and replacing them with parklets. And again, you know, parklets have been seen all over Old Port with Parking Day and things like that. And we'll work with Portland Downtown on various placemaking features that can go into them. These will be revertable. You know, everything we're doing here is all being tested. Didn't keep that in mind. The last thing is that actually isn't listed on the bottom here is the end of Dana Street where we're proposing a mural to go in. This is a plaza that is already blocked off to any through traffic. There is vehicle loading zone like, you know, commercial vehicle access through here, but for the most part it's blocked off, and there's a real opportunity to create, you know, a real placemaking mural feature here, and we're we've been working with local partners and public art to get somebody on board to do that project, and I think we have somebody, but I'm not going to say it just yet because it's not finalized, but that will be a kind of an anchor placemaking feature that we want to do here. That is also the site of the Portland bike share or one of one of the hubs right there. So I'll just mention some of the materials we plan on using. Again, it'll probably all be familiar, but both the painted curve extensions and parklets will be painted. The curve extensions will be brick red. So kind of a continuation of the existing brick that we have on the sidewalks there. The parklets won't be painted. They'll sort of stay as parking spaces, but both will be demarcated with the flex posts. Those will be white, similar to the one photographed there. And then things like temporary planters, the ones pictured down there filled with plants and all sorts of nice things. And then for the middle of the road, we're going to have these rubber speed bumps. They are not the highest, most vertical element available to us. But what we wanted to ensure is that big trucks could still maneuver around Commercial Street. They make all sorts of crazy maneuvers in there to back down the wharfs and turn into these truck loading zones. And we really weren't trying to impede their ability to make turns. And, you know, if you put enough flex posts out there they'll all just get mashed and you'll have to replace them and you didn't really solve anything so we're gonna use these rubber speed bumps they're mountable and we're gonna fill in around them with what are called raised pavement markings these are reflective market markers that go in the ground so they'll be very flashy especially in the evening time and then we'll also have this 3m tape that's the name of it, but it's, it's sort of, reflective, thick tape that goes down on the road and is used in lieu of a painted marking, but it's way more visible and is also peelable, you know, so you can take it away and move it if, you need to alter the line. Whereas paint, once you paint, it's much harder to, move that line. So we'll be using combination of those materials and then we will be using stencils, as pictured on the bottom there to literally write out vehicle loading zone in the middle of the road. Yeah, any symbols that need to be removed will be painted over, can always be painted back on if needed. I think I mentioned all those things. So here's one screenshot of the design. Again, I'm not going to go through all of them, but here's an example between Custom House Street and Standard Baking. This is somewhere where there is not right now a loading zone. There's just a very wide vehicle lane that widens up because eventually you get to Franklin Street and there's three lanes, queuing lanes there. But really, we don't see queues back to this crosswalk ever. And so creating a, you know, loading zone here, adding those curb bumps at each of the crosswalks, and adding a curb extension in front of Old Port Spirits, and then removing one of these parking spots. There's actually a white car parked where there's not a parking spot there right now, which does tend to happen too. But that blue car is also, that's the one parking spot that will be removed here because it is within that 20 feet of the crosswalk. It also bears mentioning that the Route 8 is going to be rerouted along Commercial Street this summer. I think that's maybe not finalized, but certainly even being proposed by Greater Portland Metro. There is not currently any transit service along Commercial Street, and this would be the first that would be happening. So we've been working in coordination with them and just call out where their proposed bus stop is up here, up in Bellevue Park. Yeah, so next steps, we got our approvals from FHWA. So they've seen our draft designs and feel good about them. So now it's back in our court. And, you know, really wanted to get in front of this committee and get your endorsement of the project before staff and GPCOG make some final decisions and get city managers sign off. Following that, all the materials will go to DOT for their review and approval. That sometimes requires some back and forth and slight changes, but they've been in the room the whole time. So hopefully that all goes well. And then we'll put together sort of press release materials, make sure we're getting in front of people with what's happening, and do that later in this month and early in July. Materials ordering, local permitting for all the artwork and the parking spaces, coordination with Public Works, and when we're going to do all this volunteer and partner coordination for day of an install. Lots still to get done, but we're aiming for installation in late July. So I said I'd throw up the QR code for the survey that'll be up until June 19th, and I'm happy to take any questions. [1:13:21] Regina Phillips: Cashel, thank you so much for that presentation. It was really good. A lot of information. Love the Commercial Street project. Think it's time and definitely a lot of those things that are needed. I will open up to questions. Councilor Lee, any questions for Cashel? Or anybody else on the... [1:13:50] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): No, I don't have any question, but that's it. Okay. [1:13:56] Regina Phillips: I'm still going to thank you again for that. I don't have any questions. Only a comment that I'm still going to fight for a bust up on the other end of commercial for right in front of the VA. I know you don't have anything to do with that. I'm just, you know, every chance I get, I get them, you know, I got to keep plugging in for stuff. So has obviously nothing to do with your presentation. But this I'm excited. I'm excited for you. I'm really glad that you've got great partnerships with the city. Of course, we have fabulous people working for us. But it looks like you also have great partnerships with a lot of other folks. And you've really taken some time to really think about what's best for Commercial Street and pedestrians and our bikers. And so really, appreciate all the work that you and the committee has done on this. So thank you. I don't have any questions and neither does Councilor Ali. So you're more than willing to stay on. [1:14:49] Castle Stewart: Thank you for the kind words. [1:14:51] Regina Phillips: Sure, absolutely. Thanks again for joining us. Seeing as how there are no questions, we're going to move it, keep moving along. Our next item on our agenda is the Portland in Motion. It's the Comprehensive Transportation Plan. And I'm going to turn that over to Kevin Kraft and Nell Donaldson. [1:15:12] Kevin Kraft: Great. Thank you, Councilor Phillips. We're going to, I think, close you out here tonight. but I want to note that I'm with my colleague, Nell Donaldson, and we also have with us Jason Schreiber and Jessa Berna from Stantec, who are our consultant on this effort. And as I mentioned earlier, we're really excited to officially kick off Portland in Motion. We're very grateful for the council's support in the CIP last year to help fund this project. And as I also mentioned, this is Portland's first citywide transportation plan in over 30 years, and it really represents an important opportunity to establish our long-term vision and strategic direction for our entire transportation network. And hopefully, we'll be a document that's going to really guide kind of our future investments and policy decisions related to kind of overall mobility. Real quickly, to support this effort, just in terms of process, we conducted a competitive RFP process. And following proposal reviews and interviews, we ultimately ended up landing on and selecting Stantec. So with that, we're going to allow them to give you a little brief overview on the project and just make sure you're informed. And I'm sure Jason will touch on this. But again, put a plug in for tomorrow night, 4 to 6 p.m. at the Rhines Auditorium at the Public Library will be the first major public event related to this to this project. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Jason. [1:16:30] Jason Schreiber: Thank you, Kevin. And nice to see and meet some of you this evening. My name is Jason Schreiber. I'm a senior principal with Stantec out of our Boston office, and I'm the principal in charge on the consulting side. I'm joined by Jessa Berna. Introduce yourself. [1:16:49] Troy Moon: I'm Jessa Berna, the deputy project manager for this project, and I'm a transportation planner based out of our Portland office. us. [1:16:58] Jason Schreiber: Thank you. And I don't have a ton of slides and a lot of information to go through will be pretty fast. I just wanted to say it's great to be working in Portland again, and certainly for a place that is so, as we've seen this evening, well-focused on safe and sustainable transportation. We're happy to be a part of all of that. I'm just going to briefly talk about our team and then introduce you kind of at a high level to what the project is but in particular what our approach is and where we're going next stantec as you are familiar of course we're we've you know been doing work in portland recently and this team has folks including myself who've been doing work in portland on and off since at least 2010 so very familiar with its workings but we have some really good specialists on this team who are going to be focused on all aspects of transportation. And in particular, we've partnered with two firms. One of them is Spec Dempsey. The picture here is of Chris Dempsey, former Undersecretary of Transportation in the state of Massachusetts, who's an excellent policy-oriented person, particularly in talking with stakeholders to help get everybody on board with complex ideas. And Nelson Nygaard has recently completed a transit comprehensive assessment for the Metro Bus, so it's going to be very helpful. It's an important part of this analysis. And as you may know, the other half of Spec Dempsey is Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City and Walkable City Rules, and he will be part of one of our engagements this fall. He really commands a great following, but also has an excellent perspective on making communities a lot safer and walkable, which I understand will probably be a big part of this. Our work is going to span almost until the end or at least the middle of 2027. So, you know, we're talking about another good 12 to 14 months. Maybe things will go a little further depending, but we want to move at a pretty brisk pace. The very first task at the top here, besides our orientation, task number two, is public engagement, and that's going to be very essential throughout this entire effort. We're extremely focused on getting the public involved, on making them a key input to the plan, as we spend the next several months pulling together our analysis for transportation conditions. That public engagement, which again starts tomorrow, we'll have another round in October. Jeff will be there as well. That feeds into not just visions and goals for what the community wants, which is what we want to hear, but the actual metrics of analysis, the things that will drive how we look at data. And that's really important because as we look at the needs for the community and we start to crunch through lots of numbers and we'll draw from great resources like many of which we've heard here today, that's going to really be important. So we're not just looking at coming up with traditional transportation recommendations. We reflect a lot of the goals that we've heard from projects. We have metrics that fully support them. And so when we're developing a final plan next spring and summer, it's going to be something that's truly reflective of what we hope is of what the community wants. And most importantly, we have a treasure trove of great information to draw upon. In particular, Portland's Plan 2030 has a lot of important goals, as I was just stating, but also Vision Zero has tons of great information. A lot of it is sobering, but it's excellent and important, and we suspect that safety will be something that comes up repeatedly in the public engagement. Obviously, there's also other great planning efforts that talk about the pressing need to be a little bit smarter and more sustainable, and hopefully have a more diverse approach to land development to continue a more sustainable growth pattern. Who we are is actually really tied into our approach to this project. We don't like to look at transportation through a traditional lens. We know if that we were looking at this from the perspective of just where is the congestion? What is the capacity of the networks? You're going to wind up looking at very traditional level of service calculations and how many lanes or how much capacity this has. And it leads to very traditional recommendations that are often what we see many cities building as a result of very traditional metrics. There will be some of those traditional metrics used, I'm sure, but what we really try to do is use the engagement to instead be listening to the goals of the community. To be very clear, as we just were through the school zone project earlier this evening, for instance, if child safety is a big part of what people are concerned about, use measures that relate to the safety around schools and the protection walking on a sidewalk or crossing a street that leads to the right kind of solutions. Solutions. If folks are talking about job access, for instance, you know, measures that relate to economic development and getting to work safely, but by as many modes as possible, especially when things are not direct and clear. But we're also open to other things, not just can I get somewhere, but can I better my life or can I get to cultural venues? We want to hear all that from folks. We want to be able to know that it's not just about transportation. Transportation is actually there are in service of these other goals. And we can measure how well the transportation networks are satisfying those needs through different kinds of measures. And that's really what we've been employing in our transportation projects throughout the Northeast, frankly, as much as we can across all of the United States, to wind up with solutions that are much more multimodal, much more walkable, still serving the local economy of places, like in these examples in Vermont and New Hampshire, but ultimately are driven by what the community has to say. But using those same metrics, it allows us, as in this example from Newport, Rhode Island, to be able to actually come up with an implementation plan. That's going to be one of the key outcomes here. There's lots of great ideas. There's lots of competing things to do. But if we measure them based on the values that are important to the community, not necessarily these, they will be the values that we hear through that engagement, then we can actually see what rises to the top and hopefully get more people to understand why some things are being done now and other things need to be done later. And a lot of that has to do, hopefully, with reflecting these great goals and many others. Tomorrow night's engagement and our discussions with stakeholders are going to work on refining these goals, maybe hearing additional goals, leading us into the right kinds of metrics to guide our analysis. Of course, multimodalism is first and foremost to us, but it's about quality of life and being sustainable and doing that. And that ultimately does make economies better. And safety is a big part of making a city like Portland work even better than it already does. So that's kind of how we will operate. That's kind of our ethos. We do encourage you not only to come, but to spread the word as much as possible. We want to hear from hundreds, if not thousands, of residents, merchants, students, and everyone. This is just our first public workshop, but it's really,, really important. It's been pretty heavily advertised for tomorrow evening between four and six at the public library. We're trying to make it so that you can come at any time whatsoever there's not going to be a speech or a presentation even as short as this one we're strictly going to be letting people interact we've got a lot of great boards set up information and data but also what do you think tell us where the problems are tell us which goals that we should pay attention to what is your vision for the future we'll be coming back to you again sometime in the fall to report out on what that engagement is to get you excited for our next engagement with Jeff in early October. Definitely go to the project website. There's a lot of good information there. We're happy to take any questions that you may have right here this evening. I would love to know what your top goals are and what's working well, what isn't working well, and particularly from your constituents' perspectives. But we also encourage you to just come tomorrow and tell us that directly as well. So thank you very much. I'm happy to, you know, have a little discourse if you like. Turn it back to you, Kevin. Thank [1:26:07] Kevin Kraft: you, Jason. So we're happy, as Jason mentioned, happy to take any questions you may have and hope to see you tomorrow night. Boy, [1:26:15] Regina Phillips: another fabulous presentation. Thank you very much, Jason and Jessa, for that. I don't have any questions. What? Actually, I do have a question, but Councilor Lee, do you have any questions? [1:26:34] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): No, Madam Chair. You go ahead and ask your question. Thank you. [1:26:39] Regina Phillips: Can you tell me a little bit more about the needs assessment? First of all, I love the idea of lots and lots of public engagement. We just love, we, like you, want to hear from the public, anybody and everybody. And so what does that needs assessment look like? I know that you said that you were going to look at some of our comprehensive plans, The Vision Zero. Oh, my God. What's the other plan? We have it with South Portland. One Climate Future. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Kevin's always coming to my rescue. And so is it like, is it like a survey or interviews or anyway? I don't know why I keep. [1:27:17] Jason Schreiber: We will be doing a survey. That's something we're going to be releasing. Actually, I think we're putting it out tomorrow, that is out there for folks to provide the exact same input that we hopefully will get at the open house. That input is really essential because it drives how we set up the needs assessment. So the needs assessment is going to be very focused on where people see problems. We have lots of data that identifies problems, but folks are going to say, this is more of a problem for me, or why haven't you looked here? And there may be places is where data is missing and we need to pay more attention to that. But that whole needs assessment is very geospatial. We will be creating maps. We will be using the geographic information systems to query the data and particularly hopefully using the metrics, as I talked about, that are responsive to what people say. So, you know, if folks are really saying, I'm very, I feel very unsafe, and I need to be able to improve my commute by this particular mode. We want to be able to see along the entirety of Portland where there are holes and gaps in the safety or the capacity or the directness or whatever else people say. Like, I want to be able to encounter more things in my neighborhood. Are they in your neighborhood? Those types of geospatial relationships will be what we look at. We'll use that to directly drive recommendations. We'll come back in the fall, and folks who've said safety is a concern will be able to say, well, here's all the safety gaps. We know that from Vision Zero for the most part, but when we start to talk about access or different modes of transportation and where the facility is, and folks are really focused heavily on a jobs focus or a schools focus. We'll be able to map and show that these are the things that really came to the surface that should be prioritized, because that's going to be an important part of this. We can't do everything. We can't make a utopia overnight, nor can we make it even over the course of sometimes decades, but we can set ourselves up in a direction that takes care of the more important things sooner than later. And that's hopefully the outcome that we will get based on that needs assessment. [1:29:44] Regina Phillips: Thank you very much for that, Kevin. Have we done a press, I was just looking at my emails, have we done a press release? I'm assuming we have about all of this. Yes, we have, actually, we have done. Okay, terrific. Any other questions for Kevin? Now, Jessa or Jason again. [1:30:08] Unidentified speaker (Sustainability Associate): I don't have a question. I just want to thank Director Kraft for being, how do we call it, up front. He reached out to me and asked me to find someone from the community who can serve on the transportation. And I was able to find one person. Unfortunately, because I've been traveling, I was not able to connect them. But I did that this evening. Hopefully the person will be able to attend the meeting tomorrow. So director, you and your team, thank you. [1:30:42] Kevin Kraft: No, thank you. And we got a lot of good suggestions from folks. So I think we have a really good stakeholder group that's developing and hope to get more and more people out as much as possible. [1:30:52] Regina Phillips: Thank you, Counselor Lee. And thanks, Kevin. Well, Jason and Jess, I really, again, I just want to thank you for being here and going through that with us. i'm i'm excited you know i 'm actually excited about the whole meeting and truth be told it was assistant city manager jordan and director moon who actually had to put the agenda together tonight because of other things that i had going on but lots of great information and your presentation was part of that so thank you for being here and doing all the work that you're planning on doing in the city of Portland. We really appreciate it. If there are no other questions and we don't have anything else on our agenda, I will take a motion to adjourn. So moved. And I am a second. Councilor Ali, how do you vote? Yes. And I'm yes. Again, I really and truly want to thank everybody that came and gave a presentation. Really helpful information regarding our transportation and what's happening, the great things that are happening in the city, not only for our streets, but also to just put a plug in for all of the partners that are working really closely with us to help us reach not just our Vision Zero policy, but our transportation policy and everything else we're trying to do in the city to make it safer for our pedestrians, for our drivers and our cyclists. So I can't thank you enough. And with that, please let it be known that we are ending our meeting at 634. I hope that there's, you know, there's still a little bit of daylight out there. So I hope you're able to get out there and enjoy some more of that weather. So thanks again. We will see you next month. [1:32:45] Jason Schreiber: Thank you. Take care.