Transportation Commission - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the City of Alameda Transportation Commission meeting for Wednesday, 01/28/2026. We will begin with roll call.

Commissioner Dara Abrams is absent but planning to join us later. Commissioner Kim?

Present.

Commissioner Gloin?

Present.

Chair Weitzey?

Present.

Vice Chair Suthan Thira? Present. Commissioner Johnson?

Present.

And Commissioner Nochtigal?

Here. Seeing that we, thank God, have a quorum, let's move on to any agenda changes. Any requested agenda changes from commissioners? Seeing none, I will move on to item number three, staff communications with Lisa Foster.

Good evening, Chair Weitzey and Transportation Commissioners. Lisa Foster, Transportation Planning Manager. I'll give you a few updates starting with city council actions taken on items reviewed by the transportation commission. We're early in the year, but there has been one item related to something that you all reviewed, which was our, mostly Bay Farm, pavement program. So on January 20, city council opted to take no action on a council referral that asked to consider placing the McCartney Road configuration update on a future agenda.

So that did not happen. Our upcoming transportation commission meetings are February 25 and March 25. And our next meeting will be doing our transportation 2025 annual report and 2026 work plan. So you can look forward to that. For events, Caltrans is hope is hosting three informational events for the Oakland Alameda Access Project next week.

Construction is, you know, coming sooner. And so it'd be good informational events for folks to attend. There's one in Oakland on Tuesday the third, one here at City Hall on Wednesday, February 4, five to 7PM. And then on Thursday the fifth, there is a virtual one in the evening as well. And we have a transportation one zero one and clipper cards for seniors event on February 6.

A couple of updates. One that wasn't quite ready when we went to press with this agenda, but we do have a new security guard and paid parking beginning at Seaplane Lagoon to launch on February 3. So that will be midweek paid parking only at $3 a day to help improve space parking space availability on these busy weekdays where we are seeing parking overflowing in this lot. We did, of course, start paid parking at McCartney Ferry Terminal last fall and it by all accounts has not reduced ridership and it's going well. The rate is $3 a day and we recommend that people download the ParkSmarter app so you can pay while waiting for your ferry or after you get on board.

And the Clement Avenue Tilden Way improvement project, as you know, the construction's underway. Lots of information on the webpage for that. Safe Routes to School Striping project was substantially completed in December. Lots of improvements around a few schools that have had a number of schools that have street safety assessments conducted. The Civic Center parking structure renovation is also underway.

So that is going to increase security and make a a better environment for parking. Oh, good news is that the two way separated bikeway on West Midway, built as part of our Alameda Point adapted for use, was recognized as one of the best new US bike lanes of 2025 by people So for we like awards. Good for us. And I'll stop there. I think that's enough. So thank you.

Congratulations to all who worked on and voted on that project. Great job, everybody. Let's move from staff communications to our next item, non agenda item public comment. Again, this will be items that are not on the agenda that are related to transportation or transportation commission issues. Are there anyone for non agenda item public comment?

So far, I have two in person. And if you are on Zoom and wish to speak on the non agenda item, you will have three minutes to do so. Please raise your hand.

While those are getting set up, let's go to in person. Come on down.

First, we have Jeff Knoth.

Hi Jeff. Good evening. Good evening.

My name is Jeff Knoth. I live on the corner of Lincoln And Walnut, which we will get to shortly. But a general set of observations. Thirty five years ago when I moved to Alameda, people who exceeded the speed limit got tickets. Alameda had a reputation and not so today.

Speed is a huge issue in the accidents that we see across the island. I've spoken to police officers, recently the mayor, city staff, and it comes up consistently that speed is an issue. Recently, I have been riding around the neighborhoods of Berkeley, in Oakland, Livermore, and they have speed homes. You know what they are. Low relief, wide asphalt barriers in the middle of a street that slow people down.

The culture in these neighborhoods in Berkeley is that there are speed humps everywhere on small streets. Not the major thoroughfares, but on small streets. What I would love to see is the culture of Alameda, and I appreciate everything that the city staff and the city has done to mitigate accidents in and around where I live. But speed is still an issue. And so this is one of the ways, a low tech way, for some of the small streets to slow people down. So I just wanna put that out there that there are other cities that do this. It is part of their culture, and I would love to see that part of the culture of Alameda. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Next up in person.

Next we have Jim Strelow.

Hi Jim.

Happy New Year. I'm concerned still about the lighting at the traffic circles at Central Avenue that I've gone there at night and I've seen the improvements, a lot of those reflector things that are up so that and there are better signage to let you know that there's a traffic circle. I still don't know how important it is for safety to have more lighting at those intersections. Number two, lighting, parking meters. When I go and try to put money in the parking meters, it's damn difficult to be able to read the things at night.

They don't seem to have much intensity in order to see what I'm putting in, especially when it says credit card only that I've already lost 75¢ and putting coins in. So that should be addressed somehow. Lastly, regarding the climates, the bike improvements there that I'm wondering why the roadway is not available for Clement between Grand and Hibbard that it seems like there is artificial fences put up for the real estate people to stop people to, you know, try to get you to, you know, buy into their nude property there. But those are fences on city streets. So I'm wondering what gives them the right to block the streets, you know, so that the cars can't use that connector now between Grand And Hibbert that connects Clivet all the way through.

Thank you. Thank

you for your comments. Any other additional in person comments?

No. Now we have one online.

Let's take and go to the online comment.

Jay Garfinkel.

Good evening. Excuse me. Good evening. You know, we've been going through quite a deal about the McCartney project, and it was discussed at the council meeting on the twentieth. But, you know, I think missed the point.

Everybody was talking about we need this bike lane, we need that, all kinds of changes. The issue, though, for me is that the Transportation Commission drops the ball here. You guys tend to accept whatever staff comes to you comes hands you. You don't even look to see if there's community engagement, and that's the was the missing part on McCartney. The the neighborhood did not know that the changes were coming.

The large homeowners association, Harbor Bay Isle, eventually found out about it, and they voiced opposition, which the city engineer ignored. I think that when a project is brought to the commission, you need to find out what the public thinks about it. The engineers do what have a have a general broad mandate to make things better or safer. Then within that, they look at various options, and they they don't look at it, is this good? But it will is this theoretically gonna help?

And they don't give any attention to what do the people who live in the area think about it. It's up to this commission to dig in there. But when they bring it to you, you should have it all cleaned up so that the council can simply ask a couple questions and and pass on it. I know that a couple of you guys are are aiming to eventually move down to the council level, but, this would be a good thing to work on for you and get used to, making some significant decisions here. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Will not be running for city council. Do we have any additional comments in person or on Zoom?

Sorry. Jay Jay Garfinkel has raised his hand again, but we don't get another chance to speak. Correct? Thank you.

Let's move to our next comment.

Thank you. And we have no other speakers.

Great. Thank you for your help. With that, we will move on from non agenda public comment to the consent calendar. Item 5H will approve the draft minutes. Draft minutes of the 12/17/2025 Transportation Commission special meeting. Please take a moment to review the provided copy of the draft minutes. Any changes, any requested revisions, any corrections? Do I have a motion to approve the draft minutes? Commissioner Nachtigal, take it away.

I'll make a motion to approve the draft minutes.

Do have a second for that?

I have a second.

Thank you, Commissioner Kim. All in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. Let's move on to our next item. Regular agenda item 6A, AC Transit Update on Park Street Transit Signal Priority and Signal Optimization Project. This is a discussion item, not a voting item. I believe we will have a presentation. Welcome.

Thank you.

Just a matter of protocol. Should I use this? Okay.

Thank you.

Alright. Good evening, members of the Transportation Commission. My name is Maria Henderson, external affairs representative, legislative affairs and community relations at AC Transit. I am here this evening with my colleague Will Buehler, traffic engineer with AC Transit, and Ryan Dole, engineering design consultant from Kinley Horn. Tonight, we are presenting on the Park Street Transit Signal Priority and Signal Optimization Project.

In the city of Alameda, funded by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Bus Accelerated Infrastructure Delivery Program, also known as bus aid. It is an initiative that reduces transit travel times, improves transit reliability, and emphasizes short term quick build solutions at locations identified by transit operators. This project focuses on improving transit operations along the Park Street corridor between Blanding Avenue and Otis Drive through targeted signal timing upgrades, the installation of of transit signal priority technology at key intersections, as well as the installation and configuration of wireless devices along the project corridor which together serve to improve transit reliability through integrated and efficient signal operations. City staff have been involved since the launch of the project and have provided input since the beginning of our design development. AC Transit staff have also provided regular updates to the city council at the AC Transit City of Alameda interagency liaison committee meetings.

Another update will be provided to that body at the February 12 ILC meeting. AC Transit staff will also keep the mayor and city council informed with regular project updates. And I want to thank the city of Alameda for being great partners to AC Transit. Alright. Tonight, Ryan Dole from Kimley Horn will begin with a brief overview of the project improvements, the project scope and benefits of transit signal priority.

Will Buehler, our traffic engineer, will then discuss the overall project schedule and key milestones. And lastly, I will wrap up the presentation with resources on how the City of Alameda can stay informed and engaged throughout every step of the project. I will now pass it on to Ryan Dole from Kimley Horn who will discuss the project improvements. Thank you.

Good evening everyone. I'm Ryan with Kimley Horn And Park Street is a one and a half mile corridor that is very critical to AC Transit and the city. It's been identified by AC Transit as one of the major 11 corridors throughout the district and so it is very important to them. The corridor is served by lines thirty and thirty one and so this project is looking to help the efficiency for those lines. Following COVID, the Park Street experienced a road diet implemented by the city to be able to provide the bike lanes as well as maintain parklets.

But due to the reduction in vehicle lanes, the corridor does experience congestion particularly during the commute hours. And so together, the city and AC Transit identified transit signal priority and this project, other elements in this project as some solutions to improve overall transit operations. This project will include three key elements to address these operational issues and improve the transit reliability. The first element is transit signal priority or otherwise TSP. That will be implemented along the entire stretch.

There's actually some elements that were previously installed between Blanding and Alameda Avenue, or sorry, Central Avenue. And this project will be installing new ones from Alameda Avenue to Otis Drive. Additionally, or sorry, to explain TSP, how it works, When a transit vehicle approaches an intersection, onboard equipment on the buses will signal to the equipment using GPS and radio technology that they're approaching and ask for additional green time. Through that, once the request is received by the traffic signal controller, it will evaluate whether the time is available in the cycle generally by taking time from unused movements, side streets or left turn phases. And then only at that time grant it to that additional transit movement.

But I want to emphasize that it is only given if there's time in the cycle and it to help minimize impacts overall traffic operations. The second key element of the project is to extend wireless interconnect system that is actually also been previously deployed by the city from Blanding down to Encinal. So this project will be adding wireless devices that extend to San Jose and Otis Drive as well as evaluate and make sure that the existing equipment is operating as intended. By installing that wireless interconnect, the intersections will be able to communicate with one another and maintain signal coordination between them and with main goal of moving traffic efficiently. The third key element of the project is the improvements at San Jose and Park Street.

That intersection is quite old and so this project will be installing a new controller cabinet as well as replacing some old wiring and old underground conduits. That those improvements are really necessary to be able to add the TSP and the wireless and make sure it's up to date and and provide those functionality. So this is just a quick map of the corridor. As explained, much of the equipment is already in place on between Blanding and Central Avenue, but then we're also doing some of the implementation at the intersections between Alameda Avenue and Otis Drive. Something that will build upon this, the last element of the project is going to be the signal timing and coordination that will be facilitated through those other devices.

The signal timing will look at all the different intersections, all the different phases and look for ways to optimize traffic flow both for Park Street as well as the side streets.

So,

just to give the public a little bit of an understanding of what to expect during construction, we kind of want to review some frequently asked questions about what people could expect. First, will there be closures or detours? During the installation of the equipment, particularly the TSP and wireless devices, those do go up on the poles. So there is expected some time where a bucket truck like you see in the photo here, contractors will be working overhead both to aim the radios as well as install the equipment. During that time, the public could expect closures.

Those are expected to be about half day closures with work either in a single lane or in the shoulder. But the most important thing is at the end of the day, all closures will be opened and so traffic will be disruption will be minimized. At the intersection of San Jose and Park Street, closures of lanes and sidewalks are needed to install the new cabinet as well as the underground conduits. So during that time traffic may be lanes may be closed though flaggers may be used under alternating conditions to as as lanes have to close for that work. For sidewalk closures to install that equipment, alternate detour routes for pedestrians will be provided to ensure safety and accessibility around the work area.

To support construction activities, there may be some temporary parking loss or parking restrictions, sorry. And bus stop relocations may also be necessary as vehicles queue up in those areas. But relocations are expected to last less than a day. The last will there be traffic impacts during construction? We do anticipate due to the closures some minor delays along Park Street and the intersecting streets during the specified lane closures.

These closures are expected to occur on weekdays and will avoid morning and evening commute periods to reduce inconvenience to travelers. Also, nighttime closures are not all permitted on this project. Generally, construction will occur at one intersection at a time to limit the amount of impacts during construction. At this San Jose Avenue intersection, the traffic signal may be temporary to switch off or into red flashing mode to facilitate the rewiring and the controllers changeover, so that could be an experience for some people. How long will the construction take?

We are estimating that the construction period will be about three months. However, we do anticipate the active construction to be on a much shorter duration approximately a month and that's when the lane closures and sidewalk closures would take place. Following that phase, the remainder of the construction period will be the programming and the fine tuning of the signal timing and equipment. For all construction activities, AC Transit will send out rider alerts and post notifications at bus stops. Riders can register for rider alerts through the AC Transit website at actransit.org forward slash subscribe.

Next, Will will talk about the project benefits and the schedule.

Good evening. Will Bowler, AC Transit Traffic Engineer. Very nice to see you all. So the improvements Ryan just described on the previous slide are going to result in several key benefits for Park Street users and for residents of Alameda. First, the project will improve transit reliability and efficiency by helping buses move more consistently through signalized intersections to help reduce delays and improve transit time for AC Transit buses.

These reductions and delays will encourage more residents to use public transit and reduce the number of vehicles on the road thus reducing the congestion. Secondly, transit signal priority reduces AC transit passenger delays by minimizing unnecessary stopping at red lights and providing more reliable transit pickup and drop off times for AC Transit riders. Third, by improving traffic signal coordination, the project helps decrease corridor wide congestion and travel times for all users, including vehicles, cyclists, and pedestrians. And finally, these improvements are designed to have minimal impacts on other modes including vehicle pedestrians and bicycles as the green time needs for the transit vehicles will only be taken if green time is not needed for these other modes of transportation. Regarding the project schedule, the current project schedule is in the design phase of the project and the design is expected to wrap up in February and shortly after the project will be ready for the construction contract bidding process.

The construction along Park Street is anticipated to begin in spring and completed in the summer. And after construction is complete at the 2026, additional fine tuning of the traffic signal timing would take place. Place. The planned project closeout and new transit signal priority along Park Street will be ready and in use by the 2026. I'll now hand it back to Maria to discuss additional information resources wrap up the presentation.

Thanks Ryan and Will. So to stay updated on the Park Street project, we've made several resources available online. The primary hub is our project web page on the AC Transit website. That's actransit.org forward /park-street-project. That's where you'll find the latest background and project details as they evolve.

If you're looking for a quick summary, we have a fact sheet that covers the project scope, the timeline, and the specific benefits we're bringing to the corridor. We've also published an FAQ that explains exactly how transit signal priority works and why it was selected for Park Street, including details on funding and the long term benefits for the community. So that concludes our presentation on the Park Street Transit Signal Priority and Optimization Project. We appreciate your time and your continued partnership as we work to improve transit here in Alameda. You can monitor our progress through every phase of this project, again, at a ctransit.org/park-street-project.

The site is available in English, Spanish, and Chinese, but you're also welcome to reach out to us at planning@ACtransit.org. We have a phone number that you can call and leave a voicemail and someone will get back to you. Or you can also send us postal mail at AC Transit's General Headquarters, 1600 Franklin Street, Oakland, California. Thank you again and we're happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thank you for the presentation. Foster.

Just for the purposes of the minutes, I wanted to note that commissioner Dara Abrams joined us during the presentation.

He joined at 06:45. Please note that in the minutes.

You do not have to note that you all missed a really great Orf muse Orf instrument concert by fourth graders. So back to you, chair.

Now I regret being at this meeting on time. Thank you, commissioner Derby Abramovitz. So let's open with clarifying questions. So clarifying questions are just questions of fact about the presentation, not opinions, not questions about what else could we do, but just questions about of fact. Are there any questions of fact from the questioners?

I have one. I wanna confirm my understanding of TSP, and it sounds like I can go to the FAQ and probably get this answer, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. So as I understood what you said, essentially, TSP elongates green signals and that is the extent to which TSP affects the timing of lights, the default settings. In other words, it says, can we keep a green on an additional few seconds based on the all traffic coming into a particular intersection and just perpetuates a green state in a longer way. Is that correct? And if not, please help me understand.

Yeah. It's correct. Along most most of the time along the main arterial, only if the time is available in the normal process of the psych of the of the cycle for all the modes. Only if the green time is available. And I'll let Ryan explain that a little bit more.

Okay.

Yeah. It's not too much different than how you notice with vehicles as they approach at night in Main Street. They'll stop at the stop line and if there's nobody, it will It's switch just using a different technology and it's focused on transit, but similar concept. If a bus is approaching, a lot of times what we're trying to time it is certain ten, fifteen seconds ahead of time. Hey, we're coming. Can you is there any time to borrow? So that is it. Sometimes it might put it on the front end. It might truncate a side street because a side street doesn't have any demand and give extra green on the front end. Otherwise, it may be, hey, I'm approaching on green.

Is there any extra time on the tail end that I can have? So it could do early or late.

So truncating a side street, bringing that green up front, if you will, means there is no car there, and therefore there is not a car that will be surprised by a change to red because there is no car in

the first place.

Or pit. Yeah.

Got it. Got it. It okay. When I I say truncate, it might

just

It doesn't do it if there is demand.

Got it. Thank you. That's very helpful.

Well, and as opposed to fixed time where you're always pull pulling up side street whether or not there is anybody there.

Got it.

And just to let you know, we're only talking about eight to twelve seconds most of the time at the extension.

Great. Thank you. That's very helpful. I appreciate that. Any other clarifying questions?

Okay.

I don't know if this is a clarifying question. Promise I'll

stop you if I feel you that it's not. Go ahead.

How much time for the average bus on Park Street do we think this is gonna save in terms of the journey for the passenger? Let's say that let's say they get on at one end and they're going all the way to the other end, how much time do we think it will save on average?

Well, we hope it saves a lot of time. The before and after is what will reveal that. Sometimes you can save on any particular trip one to two cycles if they get through a cycle which is typically a minute long and so that can save two minutes in one direction, You know, and that's just a hopeful average. Right? But we'll see how it how it turns out.

Can I follow-up on commissioner Glenn's question? Sorry. So in other intersections, though, TSB exists now. Right? And so we have that data. What is that number? That's really what you're asking, right?

Yes. I don't have that off the top of my head.

That seems like a good number to know if we're putting in more. How well the first For ones

those intersections where TSP was working, how well it's been functioning, how whether or not it's even been kept track of. Because I know that when it was implemented, I don't know that it was fine tuned. I just it was a long time ago and, was done by the city as I recall. And I just don't know what the where it was left and its state, but we're gonna bring it up to good current, bill of health.

I I see Scott Wickstrom walking to the corner, which I bet means he has some information on this clarifying question.

Yes. Chair Whitesey, members of the Transportation Commission. Scott Wickstrom, city engineer. Much of the TSP that's in Park Street that was mentioned during the presentation was put in right about 2020, just at the start of the pandemic. As we went through the pandemic, we had some staff changes and turnover.

We really haven't had that TSP fully functional in its most efficient way. So this is almost a what they're talking about is we have the existing equipment in the cabinet. They're gonna add additional equipment, particularly to the intersections to the south, and then we're gonna functionally turn the entire system on. It's a subtlety that is also a huge benefit for all residents, not those just only on the the bus, is the signal timing of the corridor. Anybody who's driven up Park Street right now knows that there's no signal coordination between the individual signals.

The communication that was talked about, the wireless communication, is that so we can get all the signals, if you will, on the same clock so they can run a coordinated signal timing pattern. It's not gonna necessarily get you from Otis all the way to Blanding without stopping, but it will definitely be an improvement over the the disconnected, signals that we have right now. So that's another huge benefit that that factors in. So we're we as a city are looking forward to this project as well. It it will definitely help the buses. It will also help out all residents driving on Park Street as well.

Thank you. Clarifying questions.

Clarify Scott, could I ask this? This will just be clarifying. Has does the city have a target speed in mind if you are coordinating signals along the corridor for drivers?

Yeah. We we haven't got to that level of analysis. And it that's a I will say for the benefit of this group, we are gonna bifurcate the corridor into two sections. We're gonna basically go from Otis to Lincoln or Buena Vista, I guess it is. Otis, to Buena Vista. And then the last two signals, Clement and Blandine, we're gonna basically time separately as a little couplet for those two signals separate from the rest of it so they have a little more flexibility to push the cars through those last two intersections and over the bridge. We do not presume that it's going to be 25 miles an hour, perhaps even a mile or two slower than that, but we haven't got to that level of detail yet.

The clarification question is Vice Chair, Susan Theriault. Go ahead.

Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. Question is, so a portion of the corridor has TSP elements from 2020. And then now the new ones, the rest of the corridor will have new. So the technology is always changing, right? So have this new set of equipments, are they the same technology or how's that?

Yes, it's the same system.

Same system?

It hasn't changed

And since the gadgets overall, all of the systems, are they flexible to adapt to any new changes in the technology, in the TSP technology in the future? Like everything is evolving still.

Yeah. This system is a roadside unit system, right? It's not a cloud based system. Cloud based requires very, very strong communications. We're looking into that for the future. But right now, it's very reliable and it's what we have throughout the rest of our system. And, it's gonna be very it's gonna work really well in this particular Never

say that in a meeting. They'll quote you later. Watch out.

Hey, man. Sure.

So so ultimately, it comes down to, controllers. The controller that operating the signal is the brains behind it. This is a technology that helps communicate to the controller that the bus is coming. And so as Will said, that technology, it's more of a communication device. But the city actually has upgraded all the controllers on the corridor except for San Jose. So that's where we're coming in adding that additional functionality. And so you have new equipment there that provides that the ultimate functionality through the controller. So you you are at least future proof for that right now.

That's the word.

But if better controllers come along, then that's another

day. Got it.

Alright. Thank you.

Any additional clarifying questions which often begin with when you said this, I did not understand this. Any additional clarifying questions? Commissioner Blythe.

The funding for this project, is this coming from AC Transit?

It's coming from MTC's accelerated infrastructure or bus accelerated infrastructure. Delivery. Thank you. Delivery program.

It's okay. I'm gonna move on from clarifying questions. I'm going to move to any public comment on this agenda item. Any public comment?

So far we have two in person and one on Zoom.

Let's go to in person first.

First we have Jim Strelow.

Hi Jim.

Anything again commissioners? I ride the f 51 and the O bus regularly and I'm glad to see things that will improve bus getting through intersections. And reason why I'm interested in this is that because of the Oklahoma to access project that there's bound to be more detours ahead for Webster Street and whether or not it will detour more bus routes to consider going along Park Street in order to get and service Alameda because it may be such a traffic jam through the tubes during the OAP that to see improvements such as this on Park Street is really important because other lines may need to use Park Street just besides the ones that are currently scheduled. So this is rumor spreader Jim here or the seed platter Jim saying, you know what, in the future, we might need Park Street even more in order to service because of the unavailability at other points off the island. Thank you.

Thank you for your comment. Next comment in person please.

Next we have Christy Cannon.

Hi Christy.

Good evening commissioners. Yes, I'm Christy Cannon. I'm with Community Action for a Sustainable Alameda, CASA. And we're, of course, supportive of anything that improves transit. And I'm, in particular, personally, I'm a bus rider.

I ride the 51 mostly, but I also ride the 30, which used to be the 20, but I'm getting used to it. So mostly I have a couple of questions, and I know this isn't really it's time for comment, but something to think about because this isn't something you're voting on yet. I'm curious about experiences on other corridors in other cities. How has that gone? And we've heard a lot of positives, but I imagine there are some negatives.

There usually are. And so I'd be curious about digging into that a little bit, finding out what that might be. I'm also kind of concerned about scheduling. So I assume there will be a transition period. We don't know how this is going to go.

AC Transit is going to have to see if it really improves the speed of the buses. And in the meantime, when I'm waiting for the bus down at Subshore, is it gonna come early and pass me by because the schedule hasn't been updated? Or is it gonna be late because it isn't working very well? And I'm sure AC Transit has experience with this, and we'll work it out. But I it's something I'm concerned about as a writer and would be interested in getting more information about. And then the last point is, if this works really well, how about Webster Street? Good night.

Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Anyone on Zoom?

Yes. So far, we have one on Zoom and Jay, Garfinkel.

Okay. Let's go to Jay. Hi, Jay.

Unmute. I'm back. I'm one of the several thousand second class citizens here in Alameda. Second class in that as far as transportation is concerned, we we drive cars. We've been experiencing increasing barriers, obstructions in the road in the name of bicycle safety.

This is a little bit like the McCartney issue in that I was not aware that this was going on. I was not aware that there were any community meetings to discuss questions, ask questions, or discuss concerns. I'm not aware of whether or not the council approved it. I assume that they might have done it as a consent item. I'm concerned about what would be the effect if, say, somebody's gonna you're gonna give a few more seconds at Buena Vista.

What happens to the traffic that's sitting between Encinal and Alameda Avenue? How are they impacted by this? And also, how soon does a controller get signaled with a request for more time? In other words, if the bus is halfway between Central and Santa Clara, is a decision made, or does it have to wait until the the bus approaches Santa Clara directly? Also, is there any interaction with the police and fire department?

I don't know if they have priority abilities. I had another question. Yeah. I personally, I just I just see that switching the priority to the buses at the at the expense of the people sitting at the crossroads, I'm con confused as to how the controller is going to allot the time between the cross traffic and the, Park Street traffic. The gentleman explained that if and I'm not clear on this.

If there's a car sitting, say, on Santa Clara waiting to cross, will additional time be denied to the bus? Or does it have to have 10 cars sitting on Santa Clara? You know, you get used to the flow of traffic for for the one or two of you who drive cars. You get used to the timing of the cycles. You know that after there's a left turn or there's something happens, you're gonna get to go in a few seconds. Now it could be twice as long to wait. Eight seconds is not long, but when you're sitting at a signal, it's long. So maybe some of these questions can be answered. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Any additional comments?

We have no other speakers.

Seeing no other public comment, let's move on to discussion and questions from my fellow commissioners. Who has some questions or comments?

Commissioner. Great. Happy to go first. Thank you for the presentation. I have two specific well, first I wanna say very supportive of this project. I would love for us to be relatively aggressive in terms of the signal timing changes on park to get buses really moving because I feel like if we're not, it kind of defeats the purpose of doing all this. So love to kind of see us do as much as possible. Two questions I have are

kind of,

I guess, mostly related to the 51 a. Right? The 51 a crosses this corridor, so I'm kind of curious about how signal timing is going to be handled at Park in Santa Clara specifically. And then kind of related to the public commenters question, are we thinking about expanding additional signal timing changes and improvements in other places in Alameda?

With regards to the second part of that question, yes, we're doing these similar projects all over, getting good results, starting with different types of corridors, corridors that don't have any coordination, similar to park to ones that already have. But, we're upgrade up to, you know, like pass program usually did as they come along and then they redo the coordination. And so the the agencies are very grateful for that. And then on the first question, remind me really quick.

The intersection of Park And Santa Clara conflicting bus needs across the corridor? Just Yeah. I'm curious

how that's gonna happen. So when you have competing coordination, I'm gonna defer to Ryan on that one.

Great.

So it it is possible to do TSP for both directions. Typically, will happen is it's more of a first come first serve. So if it is the side street that gets the call, we can we have some flexibility on how we program it. So it it it really just comes down to signal timing programming and what we're gonna prioritize. If there's greater frequency well, in past projects, what we tend to do is defer to the the primary route because that's where you're going to get the most benefit. You have higher demand, you have higher frequency in routes, though line 51 might be more frequent overall.

It all depends on every cycle. And do the buses arrive all at the same time or let's say two directions opposing at 90, right, at the same cycle, then you have a priority corridor. That's the way it generally works.

So then I guess related question, so does 51a actually have priority as it crosses Park Street today?

I I believe that corridor has more frequent usage, so yes, that would be the answer.

We we haven't actually conducted the the signal timing analysis yet. When we get there, we'll probably have to make that decision one way or the other. There was a couple comments about Webster. Actually, Will and I, about ten years ago, were in front of you all. We did that as part of a line 51 project. So there is TSP and there was signal timing done as part of that project to benefit the Line 51. So it's out there and operational. We confirm that whether it just might. Yeah.

It's out there.

Yeah. And this situation of having crossing corridors with TSP and competing demands is uncommon either. We have that in a lot of places. I wonder if I can answer or attempt to remember all the questions that were posed by the public.

And yes, you're actually under no obligation to into Q and A with the public. If the commissioners want to ask a question, then certainly we can do that. Yeah. Okay. Trying to be helpful. Other commissioner questions? Perhaps following up on a public comment. Any other commission questions? Drew?

I'll just say thank you for coming. I also want to acknowledge that AC staff have come here before on this specific project. So all of us members of the public have been aware of this work going on. And also, in the bigger picture, this is happening across the regions. I'm glad MTC is getting a little shout out.

My understanding is this week MTC approved Bay Area wide policy for funding more of this work. And just for everyone's sake, a minute saved is like, that is true value. Like, that is the cost of that driver and the cost of that bus. And so I hope everyone, every minute saved on this corridor adds up to more service for riders, because at the end of the day, that's what we all want. I also wanna highlight, it sounds from city staff like there's a little Easter egg here of like coordinating signal timing for drivers as well.

I know that's not the focus tonight, but this does, this project does sound like it will use regional money, bring some MTC money here, and AC and the city are putting it together to benefit transit riders and drivers. The one final thought I wanna offer is I think the city could do a little better for pedestrians on Park Street. I know this body before I joined adopted a policy on conduct how signals are set. I honestly don't know if that's what's being programmed into those controllers. I don't know how program how signals are are programmed, and I imagine if they're not coordinated, there's work to do.

And that's a little out of scope here, but I I just wanna end by saying that I hope the city and maybe as a comment for Scott Wickstrom that the city will, when the time is right, just take a run through the entire corridor, make sure where ped recall should be turned on, ped recall's turned on. And this really sounds like it's gonna benefit all modes, Bus, bus riders, bus drivers, people driving the whole corridor and pets too. So thank you to everyone involved.

Thank you for your comments. Any other questions or comments? Richard Nachtigal.

Thank you. I wanna lift up all the positive comments that the rest of the commission has said and I wanna say thank you. I also wanna ask for a tiny other bit of coordination. And I'm gonna look to the city for this too. I'm I'm anecdotally at this point aware of some roadway construction fatigue that's going on in the city. And so as and if it's possible when you're doing construction to coordinate with other nearby city roadway construction projects to mitigate that impact on the travelers. Because, yes, transit is important. Yes. Bikes are important. Yes.

Pedestrians are important. And and and driving is important too. All of the modes need to have some some coordination and some some fair prioritization. So just to mitigate the construction. But otherwise, I really am very much in favor of this.

I just want to say noted, Commissioner. And we plan on doing another round of community outreach. And our outreach is continually ongoing throughout the entire duration of the project.

Thank you. And again, I am in

favor of this project. Thank you. Yes. And we will we're closely working with the city staff as well. And so we will continue our coordination efforts.

Thank you.

If it's Okay, I'd actually like to follow-up on that line of questioning. So two things that struck me as guess, I would like to talk about it briefly. Why is work starting at 08:30 a. M? Is that a default choice for transit and construction? Because I hear 08:30, and I don't know that the morning commute is done. We have definitely had an elongated commute here in Alameda. And if we're talking about convenience and traffic fatigue and construction, help me understand 08:30.

It's usually we follow what's usually on the permit in which you as a city issue on that permit.

So the city could push that towards more compressed hours later in the morning if the city made that choice. Okay. That's helpful. Second question on that. I think I heard that these intersections are going to be each worked on individually, not together. And I to me, that sounded strange because it seems like this construction project creates a lot of bottlenecks at the loss of a lane. And a bottleneck inherently is a bottleneck. There's no way around it. Right? And so it seems to me you are at some fundamental level better off creating a longer single lane closure because you create a bottleneck either way.

And you can get this project done faster as opposed to a bottleneck that is then resolved and then another bottleneck is created which is going to cause the exact same problem. Help me understand why we're not working on this all at the same time to wrap up the project instead of having individual bottlenecks sequentially on that road? Well, this is And if it's resources, that could be the answer. That is perfectly fine.

Well, that's the word I would use first. But to explain a little bit further, the way we deliver most of our projects is sequentially, a crew or two crews, whatever the contractor has bid to deliver the project, right? The kind of option you described could possibly cost a lot more if he has to take his entire crew. Remember, our project is relatively small.

A

large amount of people for a short amount of time, he'd have to pay them for however long he thought it was gonna take to get another job to keep these people busy. So they're floating a lot of crews over a lot of different projects. It's it's a little complicated,

but I'm sure it is.

They've done that, and so they might have two or three crews, and they might propose to leapfrog each other. And so the answer the typical answer was that they would do it sequentially. This one's gonna be very simple. We expect them to be able to do three or so every single day or even more, depending on how easily it'll go. And so we're we're giving you worst case scenario.

Okay. Any additional commissioners? Commissioner Sizentera.

So overall, we support the project, just like all other commissioners said here. Clarifying question are actually not clarifying question. The comments are mainly to add value or get further clarification here. And one question is I'm going to go off of the coordination of other activities. One is the high school is right there at Park And Central.

So, and then around lunchtime, all the high schoolers are out. I mean, if you see, you can't really drive through. I mean, it's like everybody's walking around there looking for lunch, and it is just forty five minutes. And so I know it's kind of towards the school ending the time period, but it's not. In terms of the months, it's still you're looking at late spring, so the school is going to be session. So you may want to coordinate that schedule so the kids can have their lunch. So that's one. And my other question is, who maintains this equipment, the new ones that you are installing?

The equipment, the signals, so there's a lot more than just TSP put in there. TSP is extremely reliable and robust. If there was something to happen to TSP, the city would coordinate with us for replacement parts and or the expert support to install and re coordinate, you know, replace. All the rest of the equipment is normal infrastructure upgrade that the city maintains.

So there's an agreement between the city and AC Transit on that?

And all that equipment's passed off to the city. It's only the TSB that we share. And

comment from the public, I'm going to kind of ask here. So can the emergency response be benefiting from this one? I'm looking at our staff here, city staff.

I can start. To my knowledge, I don't think the city currently uses emergency vehicle preemption, but the one potential benefit to the city is this equipment can be used for emergency vehicle preemption. So it's available.

And I'll I'll add that, the last capital budget, the city council approved an emergency vehicle preemption capital project. Really the big thing is getting the transponders on the fire equipment. We have the it's basically transit signal priority, emergency vehicle preemption, the same We module works for have that in a fair number of intersections throughout the city. It's really getting the equipment on fire trucks and getting it all linked together. So that is a capital project we intend to get started in 2026.

Okay. Thank you.

Any additional commissioner questions or Christian Gloyn, Jamie, go ahead.

Thank you. As the other commissioners have said, supportive of this project, I'm excited to see how much time we can shave off that journey from one end to the other. And I would just like to suggest or request, maybe you're already planning to do this, but it would be great to have some data captured on the current time to to travel that corridor before and travel time. And after.

Yeah. Before and after.

Exactly. Yeah.

But one of the biggest challenges about that is the Oakland Alameda access project and when it'll come into effect. So trying to get a clean before and after is gonna be very difficult that isn't impacted by that project. But we'll still look at small segments to try and get some, show

some benefit.

Any additional question or comments? I have a couple of very small ones. Does TSP induce speeding from side streets through a main floor of air? I can understand the human inclination if they know that that's the one that turns because a bus is coming, and I'm gonna speed to get my green light before it is preemptively turned to red. You guys must have some some sort of stats on that. Do we see that, or do we not see that?

In in general, it doesn't TSP doesn't really change the typical operations of a signal.

It

it's it's a little it's kinda behind the scenes. Operations with the yellow phase, all red phase that allows for the the safe clearing of an intersection will operate as, as normal. The public general public won't be able to tell on a given day.

Okay.

You know, the type of driver behavior you're describing is a driver speeding over the speed limit to try and catch a green light. They they really won't really know whether that green light is at its end or at its beginning regardless whether a transit vehicle is there. They'd have to be sitting there counting the entire cycle and know that cycle. So I don't it it's really the question comes back down to is that driver inclined to speed to cap to catch the green light. And, of course, that behavior unfortunately is out there, but we hope they won't need to because they're gonna see that they can travel at the speed and make it all the way through the entire corridor because they'll be coordinated so well.

On on that, we agree. We all hope for better drivers. My other no. My other question was covered. I am fine. Any other additional questions, comments, suggestions? Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for answering questions. I'm going to close out this item, if that's okay. Let's move on to our next agenda item. Next agenda item, item 6b, review and discuss proposed quick build improvements to the Lincoln Walnut Intersection. This is a discussion item, not a voting item. We have a presentation with our own Scott Wickstrom.

Yes. Hello again Chair YC, members of the Transportation Commission. Scott Wickstrom, the city engineer. Tonight before you we have a proposed diverter island at the Lincoln And Walnut Intersection. A little bit of agenda, we'll talk a little bit about Vision Zero, policy and action plan really from early twenty twenty era.

We'll look at some of the improvements that were done in 2020. We'll come back to some Vision Zero actions, some preliminary data review, what was done in 2025, and then kind of lead into the diverter island for that discussion. So as we start talking about a data driven approach, this figure should be hopefully familiar to the Transportation Commission. It is our high injury corridor network. It's based on, roadway collision data from, I believe, 2009 through 2018, a ten year period.

It identifies high injury corridors, which are the lines that are in yellow, red, and orange, And it also identifies high collision intersections, which are where either severe or fatal collisions have occurred or just a large number of collisions have occurred. The stat on the lower left corner is always kind of telling seventy three percent of crashes occur on twenty percent of elevators roadway. So we did really want to focus on, you know, this is a basis to where do we start focusing our efforts for traffic safety throughout the city. The little red arrow, that's Lincoln And Walnut. It wasn't too hard to find out that Lincoln And Walnut stood out, as having a high number of of collisions.

And so we took a crack at it in 2020. Right? In 2020, we basically if you remember back to pre 2020, it was a four lane road through this intersection that Merge actually took place East of Walnut Street as you approached Oak in front of the the well, as you get to the police station, basically. And what we did is basically did a road diet from four lanes to three. We pushed that lane merge west of the intersection, so between Willow and Walnut.

We added left turn pockets. We added red curbs to improve visibility so you can see the cars coming either way, painted bulb outs, and high visibility crosswalks. And and, that was kind of our effort. It it was a fair amount of effort to put in there and, you know, it it was absolutely the right decision to make at the time. And then we sat for a little bit.

So I'm going to jump back here now to a little bit about Vision Zero and maybe this talks a little bit to the construction fatigue that Commissioner Nath Tagal was referring to. But, if we look at our high injury corridors, I've highlighted here in green work that we have done on those high injury corridors, that's complete. In yellow, that's in construction, including Central and now Tilden And Clement. And then blue, what's in design and has funding, includes Lincoln Marshall Pacific, Stargill, the second phase of Grand Street. It's $120,000,000 plus or minus.

$40,000,000 constructed, dollars 40,000,000 in construction, 40,000,000 coming that's in design. That's a lot of work that we've been putting into our high injury quarters. It's something to point out. Yes, it does lead to a little bit of collision fatigue, but we've been charged to kind of do the best we can to kind of reduce, collisions and improve safety. So we've we've kind of, done this here.

We also went through intersections and I love when it's blurry and you can't read, that's kind of deliberate. We've done safety improvements at 48 of the top 75 intersections. This would be through a combination of corridor projects, your Central Avenue, your else we do, Lincoln, we did Clement. Our annual paving projects, we've done slow streets on Pacific, in San Jose and Versailles. Those are now being converted over to neighborhood greenways.

And we've also done some very targeted safety projects as well. Why do I bring this up? We have a preliminary data set that we've got from APD that is basically nominally a fifteen year period between 2009 and 2024. And I somewhat arbitrarily just said, okay, let's separate the data between 2009 and 2019, an eleven year period between and then nominally five years between 2020 and and and 2024, nearly the 2024. So overall, looking at that data, there's about a little over 10,000 crashes throughout the city, and there's overall about a 9% reduction in collision rate.

We start looking at corridors with road diets. It's been pretty significant. So Main Street had a road diet in 2019. Data is not quite exactly right. Otis Drive was 2020. Park Street and Webster because of the, commercial slow streets was in were also in 2020. And I'm only looking at the the the areas that were reduced, if you will, the road diets. And then to come here with, some of the intersections, those 48 of the 75 collisions where we've made improvements, we see a 39% reduction in the collision rate. It seems to be that a lot of the work we're doing is starting to show some results, which is which is good. Zooming in here, you could read this one.

I I was hoping you could be able read some of this anyway. I'm gonna I'm not gonna let you spend too much time on it, though. So these are the top 20 intersections within the city based sorted by collisions in the anomaly fifteen year data period. You know? And what's important is you have a a a collision rate in the first phase and you got a collision rate in the second phase for the first eleven years and then the the last five years.

And you either have a reduction in your collision rate or an increase in your collision rate. Right? And the about the fifth or sixth column over there is a a when I add in there, collisions avoided. If you basically take those two rates and do your math, you can basically say that this many collisions did not occur. For these top 20 intersections, we basically there's 40 collisions that theoretically haven't occurred during this five year period. That's a good number to have. We could also look at this data a little more closely and and start pointing out a few things. There's a few streets here. Main Street and Willie Stargell. That's one of the early kind of road diets.

Now granted the ferry terminal is, you know, the the seaplane, the Goon Ferry Terminal has changed the traffic patterns in there. But there's been a dramatic reduction in collisions. Otis and Westline, it's kind of tough to say how we went from 24 collisions in the first eleven years to zero, but it's still a pretty impressive reduction. Right? You can also look at this data and tease out, well, we've got some areas where we have issues. And you look at these things, well, it's Park And Blanding. It's Park And Clementi. So the the intersections that we were just talking about in the last presentation about how we wanna do some traffic signal timing improvements. Perhaps the backup is creating a little bit of frustration, people trying push through a light that they shouldn't. Tough to really understand, say.

And then we've got, Clement and Oak and a couple others there. So these are ones that we look at and say, okay, we need to try to understand what's going on here. Our presentation tonight is about Lincoln Walnut, which is up here on the top. And despite the efforts that we did in 2020, we really didn't see a significant traffic reduction. It's a bit of a surprise. I frankly would have thought the road diet, the high visibility crosswalks, everything else would have made more of a difference than it did. And it's just basically made a relatively minor difference. You could almost say it potentially is in line with the rest of reduction throughout the city. Alright. So we are in 2025.

There was a pedestrian fatality in 2021, and so the city is part of our fatal collision response program. Look to do some additional enhancements out here. Flashing beacons have been installed. They're on both sides here. The lane merge was moved further west, such that the lane merge starts almost immediately as you cross Willow and starts merging over to to to try to prevent people from racing to get ahead of each other to get to the merge and then get to this intersection.

We have higher visibility bulb outs. The longer, the brighter. That was all put in, with the effort to kind of, if you will, try to do what we could to further reduce collisions. Again, we talked about before there's only been a 7% reduction in collisions. And I think most critically when we look at this in here, as you start looking at the collisions, there were 38 reported in that nominal fifteen year time period, 30 of which were broadsides.

Broadsides are fairly common when one car is trying to go straight across the road and another one hits them in the side. Broadsides are T bones, sometimes you're referred to as. It's indicative of a vehicle trying to cross the cross Lincoln and and being hit, is what we see. So, we'll see how well this works here. Is it gonna is it gonna play? Oh, there we go. It's playing a little bit slowly here. One of the neighbors has a Ring doorbell camera and took some videos. And so it just is a little bit glitchy here. Here we go.

The red car. It it was a little bit glitchy there, but the red car hardly even stopped as they're crossing Walnut. Walnut is on your right there going kind of north south. We're looking southbound on Walnut. That was in August. Here we are in November. And you can see one car is stopping to make a left here. And one comes through. It'll play out for a few seconds. You kind of get a sense of how busy the traffic is, but there's that southbound car coming through.

A second car is coming through, or they're going right. And it's not that terribly busy of an intersection. But whoops, there's our collision right there. Right? And it's, again, it's another broadside, someone trying to cut through intersection. And then we got one more here. Then, yeah, if you can push this one up to about 28. Yeah. They're about yeah. Save us a save us a little time here. And you might have to push the play. There you go. Is it going? Alright. Well, let's oh, we'll we'll give it a second.

If it doesn't work, we will jump on. You'll you kinda get the idea. We've got three collisions in a relatively short period of time, all almost immediately after the city council accepted the second round of improvements we did in 2025. They're all broadside collisions here. Advance to the next.

Uh-oh. This is the first time I've ever tried to do a video inside of the might be the last. Apologies. Alright, there we go. Yeah, we'll go and skip that one.

I don't want to tempt fate. Can you go to the next one? Yeah. Alright. So, it would have been a third broadside collision, very similar to the other. So Lincoln Walden options, yeah, we did traffic counts. We took traffic counts again this fall. We did recognize that there was a slight increase in the amount of traffic from the traffic counts that we had from 2019, maybe 10%, 15%. Anecdotally, you know, there's been a lot of talk about Park Street with the commercial slow streets that happened there, the road diet on Park Street that maybe additional traffic is being funneled this way. There's a slight increase in traffic, Not a significant amount.

Not enough to meet the warrants for a stop sign. If there was a stop sign at this location, it would be the only stop sign on the entire Lincoln Corridor, at least a section of Lincoln Corridor as you most traffic kinda continues up through Tilden. And you'd probably anticipate you'd have some fairly low compliance for that stop sign. Similarly, it doesn't meet the warrant for frankly traffic signals are very expensive. They're about $800,000 when you include design and depending on the mast arms and a few details, maybe 6 to 800, but they're they're expensive any way you look at them.

So we also in the past, there's been discussion about a one way couplet with either Willow or Oak. So you'd have a one way northbound and a one way southbound to help kind of improve traffic. That's certainly a much larger area that would be impacted and many more residents would be affected. And it really doesn't address the broadside collisions. Somebody is still going be crossing either northbound or southbound on Walnut at this location. So we basically kinda worked our way towards measures to prohibit through and left turn movements. And we've been calling this a diverter island. And really the intention is again to to to limit the exposure to broadside. Right? So we jump here to this proposed diverter island.

It's a little bigger picture than what was shown on the first slide. We construct a a an island in the middle of the road that allows the it basically prohibits the through movement and the left turn movement, but allows the right turn movement to continue. The way this one is designed and laid out, it also allows the left turn movement from Lincoln onto Walnut, whether you're going northbound or southbound. And I think this would be the preferred option that we like to start with as an early quick build option. What are the impacts?

So our traffic counts from earlier this year, these are both AM peaks. They're both the little bit higher counts for either direction, AM or PM. The AM was a little higher. And, you know, if we if we start looking at these numbers, you've got 75 people going northbound in the peak hour. Right? This is a one hour count. And you saw the videos. It's a little less, obviously, other times of the day. And you have 34 vehicles going southbound. Of those, 56 northbound movements would be affected.

So it's not insignificant. I mean, that's a fair number of people that are gonna be forced to turn right or make a decision earlier on about whether they're gonna stay on Walnut or take some other parallel path. Similarly, the southbound, you have 32 people that would be affected by this based on those counts from that one day. So it's not an insignificant impact, but what it would do is it would basically really limit the exposure to the broadside collisions that we've been seeing here. So that's the recommendation we're making.

Proposed diverter island, you know, obviously reduces exposure. It would allow bikes and peds to continue to use Walnut Street. Bikes or peds would use the ped crosswalk, the ped push buttons or the flashing beak would remain in place. The bikes could ride just to the right of the diverter island or or walk across in the sidewalk if they so chose, maintains the left turns. We have talked this through with the fire department.

They do not use Walnut as their primary response route. They never go to a fire on Walnut. They if if call is on Walnut, they're on Walnut, but they don't use Walnut to get through the city. So this this would be acceptable to them. And it could be quick and relatively expense relatively inexpensive, something we could do as a pilot to evaluate it, try to get an understanding of what the impacts would be.

We did as we collected traffic data earlier this year or late this fall. We also collected traffic data at Willow And Lincoln and also Oak at Lincoln. So we have a baseline for which to to compare that to. So alright. So a couple of things about the proposed diverter island.

It does alter vehicular access and operations. I guess I just talked about the the baseline traffic counts that were already collected. Because it alters the vehicular access, we no longer allow through movements. This isn't an item that we are gonna bring to city council because it is a fundamental change. There was a lot of discussion last week about authority of that's been delegated to the public works director and effectively the city engineer versus what is explicitly reserved for the city council.

I can be very clear that the delegation does not does not allow the public works director to restrict a through movement without some legislative body to weigh in. So this would to council. There's a couple of general plan items that we want to, keep in mind just so you're aware of as we talk through this. Mobility element goals to safety, eliminate fatalities and severe injuries. Right?

Avenue, sidewalks, crosswalks, etcetera by 2035. We started out by saying Lincoln Walnut is the second heaviest or second highest collisions, of any intersection in the city, And it it is it is certainly by far the the highest of any non signalized intersection. So it's it's it's kinda stands out there. So, you know, to to look at this goal, we're it's kind of imploring us to do something. A little bit further in the general plan mobility element policy, so not a goal, but a policy below it.

The Alameda Street Grid, manage and extend the street grid to maintain the character of Alameda, which kinda tends to imply to maintain that kind of street grid network, you know, reducing traffic, maintain but and and also for safety of all modes of transportation. So we are kind of fracturing that grid a little bit if we do not allow that through movement to go or that left turn to go. But our our, you know, city staff, our our judgment and our recommendation is that the impact, the potential positive impacts to safety, are much greater in that way, the the breaking of the grid, so to speak. And it's our recommendation to bring this forward as a quick build. And as a quick build, we can, again, evaluate the evaluate the data and if DB, we can we can go back to its previous configuration as well.

So, bringing this to commission, hear the presentation, provide feedback, recommend any alternatives you may have as appropriate. You know, this is as I kind of say before, we thought we had this figured out in 2020 and it turns out maybe we didn't and it's still a challenging intersection. So open to hear suggestions and thoughts. And then ultimately, we would love for you guys to endorse this to go forward to city council as appropriate. Available for any questions.

Any clarifying questions? Questions of fact about the presentation?

I have a clarifying question.

Lisa Lauz, do have

a clarifying question?

Discuss. Are you looking for an action from the commission?

An action would be desired, yes. Know it was agenda that says review and discuss. It's relatively late that based on last week's kind of McCartney discussions that we decided that this should definitely go to city council.

So sorry. The recommend so the the request is for us to recommend this to the council?

To endorse it?

To endorse. Yeah. To endorse.

That's the word.

To endorse. Thank you. Okay. This is no longer a discussion item. This is a voting item. With that, I should then mention, I believe Commissioner Kim is recusing himself from this now voting item based on proximity to the project. So just for the minutes to have them there. Any other clarifying questions?

Commissioner Kim

has to leave.

Commissioner Kim, we will miss you.

Okay. Well, I guess I will go home then.

You can go home.

Mhmm. No.

Think he I mean, you can you can we have we you I have to come back. You are you Okay. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. He's he's allowed to he's allowed to leave if he needs because we still have quorum, but we recommend you stay.

Yes. Let let me know when I can come back.

Okay. We

will. I'll come let you know.

Thanks. We are not prisoners here.

If you

need to leave, can leave. It's okay. I have a clarifying question actually. So the diagrams exhibit one, exhibit two, I think it's item six. Yeah. Exhibit one, exhibit two, it does a great job of talking about the diverter or demonstrating the diverter from above. Help me understand what does the diverter look like from the driver's point of view. Is it a six foot thing? Is it a two foot thing? Is it a what is it?

It's gonna be a six inch thing. That's gonna be out of concrete or some other kind of plastic material similar to what we did the traffic circle on Pacific and Lafayette. Is that perfect? Pacific and Chestnut. Right? Either some sort of material that'll be about six inches in height, and then we are gonna have some vertical elements on top of that, some bollards that can be collapsible. Fire department would like the to maintain the ability to drive straight through if they needed to. But that is not going to be their primary mode of transit. We're not looking at a solid wall thing, it's something that is going to basically cars will go around it and they'll have some vertical elements as well to kind of

highlight. Does this build include some sort of signage that says no left turn somewhere? Where does that go? Does that go on the diverter or does it go on the corner of each of those two corners on the street?

It's gonna go on the corners of the street and we'll also have, we'll probably also have striping as you approach the intersection as well.

Okay, thank you. Any additional clarifying questions? Commissioner Nachtogal, you have a question.

Clarifying question. Oh. It can get punted, but it's related to a slide that I didn't have the question until we were past this I'm sorry. Hi. Can you hear me now?

Better. Go ahead.

Sorry. I didn't have a question until we got past the slide. And so I think it's a clarifying question as it relates to one of the slides and it was the Vision Zero work with the all of the colors. Can we bring that one back up, please? That 100 some odd million. Yep. Keep going. Keep going.

That one. Yeah.

Is the blue in the middle in design Lincoln?

Lincoln Marshall Pacific, yes.

Okay. So, it is part of this intersection is included in that project?

Yes, that is correct. And at the moment, there's we are looking at the same design team that is looking at the larger corridor is helping out in this intersection as a method to advance some potential kind of things that we can implement now, evaluate how they function, and then incorporate into the larger project as appropriate.

Okay, so it's not that it would be built now and then rebuilt again necessarily. It could potentially be integrated in.

There's a slight offset in the centerline, so there will be some work that has to be redone. That's unavoidable unfortunately. But what it does for us is nothing else. What you can almost think about it as pilot project, it's a quick build item that we can get out there quickly and understand how it functions, how well it works. Hopefully have a year, perhaps even two years worth of data to kind of get a sense of are we getting the desired impact and then incorporate it permanently into the larger project or look at again other alternatives for the intersection.

Thank you. I have another question but I can wait Please. On No, can wait on it.

Cool. Any other clarifying questions? Questions of that? Commissioner Drew, go

ahead. Well,

thank you for the data dump. This is fascinating. I won't ask about it, but I just want to thank for the thorough Vision Zero update. I did want to just understand a little bit more about the potential procurement and construction process because the in hindsight, it looks like that last project took a really long time. Don't want to open it up for discussion.

But the 30 ks number you're bringing up here is maybe something that could fit into existing contracts and so on. And so my question is just, did the previous project and its delays due external factors maybe present some options so that whatever whatever the staff and council decide to proceed with now, could that get in the ground more quickly? And if so, what would the do you have a plan?

It's a very good question. And the improvements that were done in 2025 exceeded the threshold in which we had to go to city council. We also had some staff shortages about two years when this was going through design. So there's any number of reasons. It doesn't excuse it, but it took a long time to get that project done.

There's no two ways about that. When we have thresholds less than $75,000 we have alternate construction methods that we can use that can expedite the bidding process and the contract award process. So that is another advantage of the quick build and keeping it on the relatively inexpensive side. We do also have some on call contracts that can we might be able to piece parts of it in there as well, but we have to look at that. Definitely keeping the value down less than $75,000 is significant in terms of us being able to implement quickly.

Okay, thank you. That's my one question.

Cool. Thank you. With that, we'll move on from clarifying questions to public comments specifically to this agenda item. Are there any public comments in person or on Zoom?

Yes. So far, we have three in person and two on Zoom.

Let's go to in person.

Up first, we have Bill Wylan.

Hi, Bill.

Hello. Transportation Commission members and Alameda City staff, my name is Bill Nyland, and I am here to ask you to approve the proposed diverter islands at Lincoln And Walnut, which is the item that we're all been talking about for the last twenty minutes. My wife and I have lived on Walnut Street for about forty four years and are four doors from the intersection of Lincoln And Walnut. I was also going to point out that my kids used to play on Walnut Street when they were small. I wouldn't recommend that now just because it's become kind of a speed center and the traffic is way too busy to do that.

But points made that there have been a lot of changes since we've lived on the street. As you may know, the neighborhood is within blocks of many day cares Alameda High School, Love Elementary, and is where a young woman was struck in the crosswalk on September 2439 by an auto that was traveling east towards City Hall. And a pedestrian crossing Lincoln was killed in an accident on 06/27/2021. Over the years, there have been many multi car collisions. And in some cases, cars have crashed into homes at the corners of the intersection.

We have very much appreciated the time and attention that the Transportation Commission, city staff, and city council members, both past and present, have spent consulting with us about the safety concerns at the intersection over the years, especially the flashing lights for pedestrians installed at the intersection recently. We are also very pleased that the time has come for the proposed diverter islands on the Transportation Commission's agenda tonight, and we wholeheartedly support the proposed changes to the intersection. According to my records, there were seven collisions at Lincoln And Walnut in 2025. Those were on January 3, a hit and run on February 22. The crash that ran over a fire hydrant ran into the fence of a neighbor's home on June 26, a two car crash on July 10, a two car collision on November 2, a crash on November 7, and a two car collision where multiple police, fire, and ambulances came to the scene because of injuries on December 5.

In that case, at least one driver was taken away by ambulance.

Thank you your comments. Unfortunately, three minutes are up. Okay. Thank you. If you can also submit that to city staff for the record as well if you'd like us to read additional. Alright. I'll Thank you.

Thank you.

That. Absolutely. Thank you for your comments. Next public in person comment.

Next, we have Jeff Knoth.

Hi, Jeff.

Hello again. Just as point of information, I used to be on the transportation commission years ago when I was working for the Alameda Unified School District. I really appreciate what you do.

Thank you.

And I appreciate Scott and that presentation. There's a lot of data, lot of information for our one intersection among many in the Island Of Alameda. I'm

here

to advocate for this diverter and I'll tell you why. I live on that corner and my living room looks out onto that intersection. I've got a ringside seat to the carnage. I've had one car totaled. Recently, a car went through my fence this close to going into my house. Took four months to get the money to repair the fence. I've lost a brick wall. Every single corner, every single house on a corner has had a car run into it. The house across from me on Lincoln had a car crash into the house where a woman and two young children live. The neighbor across from me on Walnut had a car come around and crash through his fence.

He's lost two cars. I'm a witness, a personal witness to this. I'm terrified to back out of my driveway. This is an experiment that needs to happen. It will impact other streets, but it has to be tried. They've tried a number of things. I really appreciate what the city has done to restripe twice. It hasn't worked. I spoke earlier tonight about speed. People go down Lincoln at 45 miles an hour regularly.

Please, I really encourage you to pass this. I want it to go to the city council. I wanna be I wanna see it done. It's not expensive, and it's an experiment. We deserve to try this. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Next in person speaker please.

Next we have Jim Strelow.

Hi Jim.

The statistics do not surprise me at all. The city doesn't get it. The engineer doesn't get it. You're punishing good drivers for the results of bad drivers. You actually saw at least two incidents where it was the driver going down Walnut, violating the traffic code and stuff. I'm dressed in black right now. I often see people crossing Walnut dressed in black. Don't push the button to cross, you know, to say I'm here. They don't wear anything glow. No nothing white or, you know, glow to be able to be seen.

People cause these accidents and you're spending money to try to fix a problem that is a social engineering problem. The city of San Francisco, well, should be. You see on the highways, on the freeways where they have traffic fines are doubled or tripled in work areas. And San Francisco has put up signs that difficult, dangerous intersections along Van Ness or other places that say we're doubling or tripling the fines there. Punish the people that are causing the accidents.

You're actually gonna create a huge inconvenience to good drivers around the island. You're spending money to try to solve a social problem. I am so bad at Vision Zero, at the city, adopting, thinking that you can engineer away bad behavior. Were those people, those drivers that caused those accidents, you know, fined, you know, to prison, you know, doubled, you know, then gone to civil court, you know, to have to pay additional fines to the neighbors that are inconvenienced. Sure, the neighbors need solution but you might need to adjust, might need to look at this at a different way that just spending money on a little thing that's going to probably look just as silly as that traffic circle at Chestnut And Pacific that people are just going to go right around.

I can imagine people looking at whatever thing you're going to build there and say, well, if there's a left hand turn lane there, I can still go straight ahead and kinda get around the thing because that's what they're doing now at Chestnut And Pacific. So you're gonna be wasting city money on things that need to be addressed in a different manner.

Thank you for your comments. Any additional public comments in person?

To speaker.

Just put a slip? If it's okay, if you'd like to speak, go ahead and put in a slip and we'll go to Zoom first and we can come back to public comment in person.

Yeah. First, next on Zoom, we have Jay Garfinkel.

Hi, Jay.

Hey. I just can't stay away. I would second what Jim just said. Anybody who's driven, especially at night around Alameda sees all these people walking in black During the day, I've seen families where the father and mother are pushing a carriage of some kind. They don't look.

They just go right out into the street. I've seen them crossing Fernside that way. So I would say, yeah, we do need to get a little bit more responsible pedestrian and bicycle users. If a car is stopped to let you cross, make sure somebody isn't gonna be coming along on the right side of them. The pedestrians have to be a little more responsible.

You mentioned that, Chestnut and what was it? Chestnut and Pacific didn't qualify for stop signs, didn't have a warrant for it. What does it take then to qualify for a roundabout? It it just seems like the roundabout is a workaround for the failure to qualify for a stop sign. I drove through that intersection a while back and navigated around the roundabout.

But when I got to the next block, I think it was Lafayette, totally blown away. Pacific had a stop sign. The cross street did not. You expect the main street to if it has to stop, the cross street needs to stop. There are several places in Alameda where the much less important cross street does not stop, and that sucks the other driver into going ahead, thinking that there's going to be a stop.

I would also encourage the placement of reflectors on these various obstacles that the city is placing. I remember on, I think it's Atlantic, where Atlantic approaches towards Webster, It splits. There's a divider, and you're sucked into going left, and you go around the divider in the wrong direction. There are numerous places that could benefit from reflectors on the various intersections. Also, at Duo And Island, you could put a reflector on that concrete there, although that might be Caltrans.

I don't know. But there are plenty places that we need reflectors. I'm not against making the area safer. I'm all for that. I note, though, that if you have three accidents one year and two the next, that is not a statistically significant decrease. I would ask for a statistical analysis of these numbers.

Thank you for your comments. Any additional public comment online?

Yes. One more comment online. Christian Kazakoff.

Hi, Christian.

Here we go.

Any luck with Christian? While waiting for Christian, if there's been a public speaker submission for in person comment, why don't we move to that?

Here here we

go. Oh, there you are.

For some reason, for some reason, it muted me. I hear you.

Anyway Call you.

I have I have one of the I'm one of the homes on the corner there. And and I've been here about twenty years, and I've seen a lot more accidents in the last five or ten years than than I have from the the previous ten before that. I have had my house hit by a car, but, you know, driving through the intersection very fast. And I like the idea of this experiment of the media or the the island in the middle of the intersection. I would also like to see a little bit more visibility.

And to comment on a couple of the other guys that were up there earlier, speed is a major factor. I think pedestrians are also a major factor of just not being aware that the intersection is can be lit up. But the idea of it being kind of an experiment to see if this can work, think is worth the time to do that. And that's all I have to say. Thank you.

Thank you for your comments. Any additional online comment?

We have no more online and our last in person speaker is Tyler Yeager.

Hi, Tyler.

Hi. Sorry about that. First time here and I was not familiar with the process.

We welcome you. Thank you.

Good to be here. I guess first and foremost, I want to say thank you all, commission and chair for being here today, taking questions and looking at these issues that are on so many residents' minds. I myself have been a resident of Alameda for about five years now, five years come May, and I'm currently working for Caltrans as employee engagement, so different. I'll try to keep this short and simple. I'm not too familiar with the issue on Lincoln and Walnut, but it sounds like it's been a pretty large problem for quite some time.

Kind of looking at some of the different solutions, it reminded me of a problem that my own hometown back in Arkansas faced. We had a main thoroughfare that was constantly plagued with side swipes, t bones, different things. And they implemented various solutions, brighter lights, different sort of crossing lights, they even put an island in the middle, and all that served to do was as a ramp to distracted drivers. I'm not saying that it doesn't work, but a solution that worked for my hometown was actually removing said island, and they implemented kind of speed bumps and rumble strips on the kind of main cause of the path, of the roads. For instance, if they were finding that most of the t bones were happening to cars driving on the highway, they decided to put kind of segmented speed bumps leading up on the perpendicular road.

That way it brought attention back to the drivers as they were coming up to that intersection, making them more aware that hey, this is an intersection I should be mindful of. And to my knowledge, that sharply reduced the amount of accidents at said intersection and it was a much more cost effective solution. That's really all I've got on my end. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. We hope to see you again. Any additional public comments?

We have no more public comments.

Having no more public comments, let's move on to commission discussion and questions. Do any commissioners have a discussion or questions? Commissioner Gloyn, take it away. Jamie.

Thank you. Thank you, City engineer for the very thorough detailed presentation. That was very helpful. I have a couple of thoughts on this. The first thought is obviously we are very keen to reduce the collisions at this intersection.

This treatment that we are considering seems to me very unusual which is not to say that it's necessarily wrong, but because it's very unusual, I wonder if people are going to be confused by it at first until they, you know, develop new habits and new routes to get around. And I wonder how many of them might try to drive around it initially if they're not familiar with how it's supposed to work. So that's one thought. The second thought I have is we watched a video of one of the collisions in which a vehicle looked like it was going south, I think, on Walnut, tried to cross and was hit by a vehicle that was traveling east on Lincoln. When the vehicle traveling south was at the stop and pulled out, it should have been able to see that there was a vehicle traveling east on Lincoln and it should not have pulled out, which made me wonder and I happened to I just looked.

If you're driving down Walnut, when you cross over Buena Vista, there's a four way stop. When you cross over Pacific, it's Pacific that has to stop and you have you can continue. And then of course when you reach Lincoln, it's Walnut that has to stop. And so and I noticed this when I travel here along Pacific. The way that stop signs work, it's not super obvious unless you're really paying attention which ones are two way stops and which ones are all way or four way stops.

And that means that when you reach the stop, you have to think is the other direction, do they have a stop as well? Because if they do, then potentially you can go, if they don't, you have to wait. And I wonder if that particular collision, if that was a factor, perhaps the vehicle on Walnut thought that Lincoln also had a stop because they had not realized. All that is to say to the extent that we can improve signage for these kinds of intersections, I think there is potentially a lot of benefit in that. At the risk of chair Whitesse telling me I'm going off topic, maybe this is a broader issue in the city.

I'll actually stop there. Okay. But yeah, as I say, I'm just thinking signage is important and I wonder if that's a factor in this particular intersection and I hope we can improve the signage to make that much more obvious what people are supposed to be doing. That is all.

Let me follow-up on your question, your comment. My understanding is this stop sign, these stop signs that are actually on Walnut do not include the fairly common cross traffic does not stop sign. It's just a stop sign, correct? There's no additional information. Okay.

I thought we had added those in 2020. Yeah. I thought I had cross traffic doesn't stop.

Well, it created controversy. Sorry. Not that. Commissioner, Alisha, go ahead.

Can we see the, design and the intersection again, please? So, I mean, I I will agree. I know that this has been a problem intersection for a long time. It it needs help and I'm open to incremental improvement for sure. And I think that there's the opportunity here for incremental improvement and potentially folding it into this other

Which slide do need? Which slide do you need?

Sorry. The

one that shows the one that shows the the design from overhead. Yeah.

Great.

Thank you. Okay. So I understand it's not. It it is incremental. It may or may not fold into the larger Lincoln project later. I have I'm I'm interested in seeing improvements at this intersection. There's too many collisions. There's too many problems here. I'd let's do it right, however. So to commissioner Goin's Goin's comment, it's an unusual one.

Doing this is unusual. We don't want to end up with some of the odd problems we've had, for example, at Grand and Otis where we we have people trying to turn right from Otis into Grand in the the bike lane because it's unusual and you can't see, drivers can't always see. So let's make it, if we're going to do this, let's do the best iteration of this that we can. So one of the questions that I had was how tall is this

The bollards in here.

The you know, how tall is this island? Not that tall. Well, we don't want people driving over it. We don't. We we wanna make it as visible and and signage doesn't always work. So how are we gonna make sure, you know, is is signage going to be enough? Is it going to be clear that people can't go forward? Right? So, it's thinking of these things to do the best version of this can that we can, that the city can with the money available. Also, looking at this people turning right from Walnut onto Lincoln, how visible are the oncoming cars going to be for them?

Is there been, you know, has there been enough daylighting of the intersection there? Because we don't want to make something worse with collisions there because of lack of visibility. So these are some of the the concerns I have. I'm not against this, but I do want to make sure that whatever does go in, if it does, that it's the best version that it can be to properly divert traffic and not just make a nuisance.

Can I also follow-up on that question because something was said that I just want to sure I understand? So the diverter is six inches tall, it's a piece of concrete, but then I thought it was said that bollards will be placed on it on top. And so bollards are two feet tall, two and a half feet tall, something like that. The kind of the ubiquitous white bollards are the one we're talking about. Correct? Is the entire diverter covered with bollards? Or is it is there space I'm gonna go somewhere later with a question. Is there space on there for a pedestrian? I wanna I wanna know how close the bollards are. What's the plan? I wanna know what's gonna happen with this six inch tall thing.

We have not gone to that full level of design. Part of the reason you put the bollards up there is they have reflective elements on them as well. So at nighttime, that they will reflect off the car headlights. Presumption is that they'll be probably two feet apart on center. You probably got about a 20 to 30 foot width there. So yeah, you'll have enough bollards that is highly visible.

Lisa, did you feel like your question got addressed? Keep going.

I just have a follow-up question relates to that. But only if you're done.

No, all you.

Okay. So are those bollards tall enough that they're going to obscure pedestrians? So when a pedestrian is crossing, are they going to be obscured and not visible from oncoming traffic?

We would almost certainly be using the shorter, what we call the K71 ballers. They're about two

feet tall. Okay.

Another concern though, right? When you're looking at safety, it's safety for all modes.

Yeah. One of the you know, when you start thinking about sight distance and stuff like that, you typically look at I believe it's 36 to 42 inches, one of the two up there. We we'll definitely be below that so you can see over the top of these things.

Okay. Thank you.

Commissioner Susan Saravala, go ahead.

Thank you for the presentation. And as others said, I like the Vision Zero and all the rating comparison and how what we had potentially avoided in terms of collision. We have this proposed potential solution for a problem, very pronounced problem. And we are kind of wondering around this is basically because this is new solution. You know, we haven't seen it. Has this been implemented anywhere in the Bay Area?

There are examples. We are working with Parametrics, who is the design engineer for the Lincoln Marshall Pacific Corridor. They're obviously helping on this. They have done these implementations in Berkeley, and I think there's some other ones in the East Bay as well. So they're they're not very common. That is correct. But there there are examples that are out there that we can look to.

And the results from that?

Did it work?

Yeah. I mean, it work? Like people, I mean all the comments you heard about how people could move or drive over that in a different direction and all that and drive over it.

Don't have that level of detail or that information. But they do vary in whether there's actually a crosswalk there or not a crosswalk there. And so there are some, each situation is going be a little bit unique. But there are examples where there are diverter islands in place that have functioned successfully.

So having I mean, this being relative different, okay, I'm using the word, have we thought about doing a pop up

I know what you're of where you're going at and our dilemma sometimes we have is it kind of goes back to exactly what Commissioner Nastagal said is basically if you're going to do it, let's do it well enough that it's visible and obvious. When you say pop up, you're talking about doing it for like a week or

something They have it without any concrete work on the ground, just temporary markup and then keep the bullets for about a week or a couple of days and then you observe how the traffic is behaving?

Haven't really considered that. What I'm afraid of is that it's not going to be a long enough period of time to what you'll getting at is public acceptance, but you're not necessarily going to be getting at is it effective in reducing the collisions in that short of a time period. I think that's our concern. There are sometimes we do pop ups. If we start putting in there was discussion at City Council a little while back about Gibbons Drive and NorthwoodSouthwood and possibly getting a roundabout in there.

That might be a case where we put a roundabout there as a pop up because that will get people to potentially to kind of get used to the idea of it. How do they like the idea of a roundabout? I think for a pop up in this case, it would be up there for a week or two, people might get used to it, then they would be gone and think we're leaning more towards doing something that's a little more permanent as a pilot, but something that's still relatively inexpensive in terms of all the different options that are out there.

I like the word pilot.

Yeah.

Okay. And because we don't know the word unintended consequence may be, right?

Correct. I'm hearing what Commissioner Nottnikal said is that want to make sure that as you approach this intersection, there's adequate striping that someone goes up the intersection. They know that they're not allowed to go through or left, that it's a right turn only. So we have the appropriate signs on the ground, we have the appropriate signage in place to get that level in there. Now granted, it is a little bit of a cost, but considering the number of collisions at this intersection, I think it's a small cost, the impacts that it's had on people who are in collisions and the neighbors at large.

Yes, a pilot. And the way to think about the pilot and the duration of the pilot is we do have the larger Lincoln Marshall Pacific corridor project coming on the heels and that will be the time to either go all in with a full implementation or consider something else.

Okay, thank you. Thank you, good questions.

Thank you, Vice Chair. Additional questions or comments?

How long would the pilot be?

At this point, we have not really set a timeframe on it, renew for six months and then remove it. Our intention is to get it installed, to collect some traffic data probably two, three months after installation when people are fully accustomed to what it is. It's gonna take a little time. I think one of the callers basically said that one collision less one year is not statistically significant. You kind of have a little bit of time.

But I think we'll get a sense of what the public appetite is for it. We'll get some indication of what the diverted traffic is to the adjoining intersections. I would look at the pilot being from when we get it installed presumably and hopefully this summer until when we have the Lincoln Marshall Pacific project come through. And at that point is when we make a decision, does it stay and be made permanent or do we look at some alternative? So perhaps a year to year and a half.

Once we get that information from the pilot, do we go back to the community, to the people like gentlemen living in the neighborhood for forty years and saying this

is

what we have, this is how we're going to move forward in terms of like doing outreach?

We haven't gone through that level. It's a very good question. We could come back to it's always easy to go back to the community members, we can also come back to this body if that would be your desire. We could certainly come back and present several months later after we have traffic counts and we can reach out and do the same noticing to the community and invite them to come to this forum as well.

Commissioner Johnson, additional comments, questions? Drew, go ahead.

Oh, I guess I missed first name basis this evening. You are. Thank you, Chair Scott. So, well, thank you. Just, I know I'm going last.

Thank you to the public commenters here. Also, I just want to say, I think staff did a really useful presentation, just the granular detail videos. It's helpful to see if that's possible in the future. I think that would help with our discussions. What I'm hearing, and I'm kind of agreeing with a couple of the other voices here on the commission tonight, is I think staff and the public and the just the track record establish a very good case to take to council to remove some auto movements through this intersection.

The I think everyone knows that that's a move that affects the whole transportation grid, and it shouldn't be made lightly. And it shouldn't be overdone like I did for a while live in Berkeley where, you know, those diverters, if they match with where you live and where you're going, they're lovely. But it's a zero sum. It's zero sum. So but super selective use.

Like, I I I think staff and the members of the public and just, you know, the headlines too. Like, the headline from '29 2019 or 2020 of the the six month olds in their bedroom? Like like, I think that makes us makes the case for removing some auto turn movements here. I would like to hear maybe, Scott, if you could speak more to like this proposed solution doesn't seem to do much for pedestrians. And I'm curious to hear what options you could share with us that would either give pedestrians refuge in the middle or reduce the crossing distance.

I'm sure there are lots of constraints, but like, you know, the pedestrians hid in the middle and the fellow killed. We know there are other factors there. This project is not gonna solve, you know, drunk driving, but we need to add in layers when possible. And could this think the layers being proposed here get at the broadside issue. So I'm curious to hear if you could maybe talk us through some options that could maybe benefit pedestrians simultaneously.

Yeah, that's a fair question to bring up. And in 2025, adding in the flashing beacons is a substantive improvement and that's relatively new. I would also point out while there have been a couple of fatalities, looking at this intersection over the course of the fifteen years, the bulk of the the at collisions, 30 of the 38 are are broadsides and and most of them are car on car. It's not known as a high pedestrian collision or crash location. Adding the flashing beacons definitely helps.

When to get to layering additional things, I would basically probably suggest that, we would go forward with this diverter island as a layer that's added on to the layer that's already existing, which is the PED push buttons. And then if we have maybe have some additional considerations, that's done with the larger Lincoln Marshall Corridor Pacific project. When you start talking about pedestrian refuge islands, it gets challenging because we have the dedicated left turn pockets. That's one of the main safety features that we're installing on the entire corridor from Lincoln Marshall Pacific. And it's tough to put a pedestrian refuge with that there.

You put a pedestrian refuge island in, you then also then have to put a ped push button in. Electronics and vertical things in the middle of the road tend to get hit knocked over and need to be replaced regularly. So yeah, maybe there are some things we can look at, but those kind of solutions also if you add a refuge island, you're suddenly re striping pretty much from Willow to little bit past Oak to get our alignment to work out. I would suggest that would be done with a larger corridor project. And maybe we look at this as a layer where We did improvements in 2020.

We bolster those improvements in 2025, adding in specifically the flashing beacons. This is just another layer on top of that to kind of address the broadside collisions. And we still have the larger project coming down the road as well. I will say that most of the other intersections we haven't considered pedestrian refuge islands, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about it internally.

Thank you for that detail. The word layer was maybe trying to I didn't mean to imply separate things. So I'm kinda wondering, can this concrete island accomplish multiple goals? And I just wanna say also, the the flashing beacons are have been hit and knocked over on the sides too. So,

Yes, they have.

For better or worse there. And I'm also kind of riffing on, maybe it was Chair White Sea just asking a crosswalk were to reach this island, I'm just wondering, have the the engineers involved in the plans tonight, did they consider any variations that could possibly do double duty? The one this one, you know, island being installed or the diverter being installed, could it do double duty to benefit pedestrians somehow?

There were a few different options that were looked at and presented. If we wish to keep the the left turn movement from Lincoln onto Walnut, you get into the position where you can't extend the diverter island to cross the pedestrian. That really is the issue that I think limits it, right? We were looking to maintain that left turn movement from Lincoln onto Walnut. If you take away that movement, you're restricting even more access to people who use Walnut, people who live on Walnut.

And so if you looked at the different options, one of the things we were trying to maintain was that left turn movement for ease of use and really looking predominantly at the collisions that we are seeing. The problem we're trying to solve is the broadsides, and that is the through movement.

Sorry, could I interrupt on that?

I actually don't understand that comment. So could we put that overhead view picture up that we've gone back to a couple of times? The item one, you you yeah. One of these.

Yeah. It's always down there. All those arrows. Oh, you went fast. Yeah. There you go.

Yep.

Okay.

So You can leave it on the title.

It's It's fun with PowerPoint today.

Wasn't it the one that we

It's yeah. It's the overhead. Oh, the overhead view of the proposed diverter.

After the third video.

I promise I won't make this one again. This oh, go back. Go back. Go back. Love it. Yep. Perfect. Great. Got it. Okay. So this is the part I don't understand, and I and I'm trying to support, I think

Yeah.

Part of what commissioner Abrams is talking about. So So you said that we're trying to maintain the left hand turn from Lincoln onto Walnut, and we can't extend the any part of this diverter. We've also heard I actually agreed with the public comment that said, well, some people are gonna come at this from Walnut. They're gonna basically sneak around this thing so they can go the direction that we don't want them to go. Help me understand why I cannot just extend the two tails of this thing, which are skinny, which give plenty of room for vehicular passage.

They also prevent a sneaky left turn. They also enter the crosswalk, which kinda talk gets a little bit at his refuge island, although I wanna talk about that in a separate way. But, like, tell me why I can't do that. Because from this diagram, if I just extend the skinny part, those two ends, it seems to accomplish a lot of those things.

We we obviously are not gonna have a six inch high raised median component in the crosswalk itself. Right? Because that that then we get into accessibility issues. So we have to then create a pedestrian refuge island. By code, pedestrian refuge islands are six feet wide minimum.

So I'm suddenly six feet wide as I so that tail, that little tiny tail that might be a foot wide or 18 inches wide that you're seeing butting up against a crosswalk now has to be six feet wide in order to go through the crosswalk because if I have a pedestrian refuge, you have to make it wide enough to feel safe for the pedestrian. You have to have truncated domes on either end. It's a minimum of six feet. There's just no two ways about that. And suddenly we're into restriping the whole street here.

You're taking six feet or eliminating the left turn movement. And so if we wish to keep the left turn movement, it's a choice. We were leaning towards maintaining the left turn movement. Again, the broadside collisions, the primary issue we're trying to solve here are the through movements predominantly being struck. To add the refuge island, you would functionally have to eliminate the left turn pocket here or restripe a substantial distance on both sides to accommodate that.

That's well outside of our quick build pilot, dollars 75,000 or less, let's go quick on it. It's a bigger it starts unraveling as a bigger project.

Commissioner Abrams, thank you for letting me piggyback on your question. Back to you, please.

No, appreciate it because I hope I'm echoing some thoughts here and wonder here. I will, and you know, I also appreciate the con the kinda conflicting goals here of, like, keep it keep it small, keep it targeted, keep it achievable. At the same time, this is at least the third time the city is addressing this place. And so just from a high level strategic perspective, this would seem to call for a larger response to effectively address the issue. Yes, we're dealing with a societal issue here.

We're dealing with people looking at their phones, people drinking, people speeding. But concrete is the tools available to us. So if I know this I'm curious to know, in terms of directionality, if the city considered closing one of the left turn pockets, which could accomplish more overall for the safety of this intersection.

Would you have a if I may, would you have a pedestrian refuge only on one of the two crosswalk legs then if you closed only one of the left turn pockets?

Per perhaps. I I know I'm asking this as a non expert, but I'm hearing

I was gonna say

we thoughts that

are Yeah. Haven't we haven't looked at the the the traffic counts data. We were looking predominantly at the Wall Street movement. We do have the traffic count data, but I don't have it immediately in front of me to look at what the opposite directions are.

Okay.

And I will if if I may for some of the other commissioners, I'm and I'm curious to hear thoughts. I like to consider making a motion that would endorse the overall approach here but would maybe give staff some some direction to do some research on into options here because I think we've raised some some questions that could be addressed by making with the solution, but making it bigger. And maybe that does mean opening the question of removing a a left turn pocket, but it sounds like there's there would be questions that would need to be answered in advance to even address whether that's relevant. Correct.

Including reaching out to a fire department for their emergency response as well.

Understood. Understood. So, yeah.

And and just just for everyone that's on the commission, yes, we can, given this will become a voting item, yes, we can vote to endorse, and, yes, we can amend that endorsement to include conditions that can go to council, that can go to however we wanna do that. So just just for clarity on that. Commissioner Abrams, there Abrams. Any other questions, comments?

No. I I shared my thoughts.

Well, thanks, Drew. Other commissioners? I have a couple brief ones. Sorry, Scott. So it's funny. I understand the pedestrian refuge approach and why that was an item of discussion. I also kind of have the opposite concern because we've put this island in the middle of the road. It's gonna have a bunch of things on it. And I kinda look at that, and I'm like, are we creating people that just want to skip diagonally across a pretty busy intersection in an unconventional way because now they have a place that they can sort of I'm a kid. I'm busy.

I want to get I want to get across this thing fast. I'm just gonna go right through the middle like we're in Japan. And so, like, is there some concern about that? Because it seems like this sort of creates a place that would invite people to step in the middle so that they can just go diagonal. Like, has has that been thought of as a concern?

Frankly, no. It it hasn't.

Second comment. I actually wanted to I'm gonna echo what's been said here multiple times. This was a great report. Like, the stats were interesting. All the questions that came up when I read it were immediately answered by a table. It for the members of the public, you should totally read the executive summary, which is publicly available. It like, the background is good. The discussion is good. The alternatives are good. The the fiscally all the stuff you want in a in a city report about what are we thinking about doing and all the stats that support that.

Genuinely impressed. Just wanted to put that out there. So put that I think that's important to also talk about. The other thing that was good about this, the city said the thing that they did didn't work, and they provided stats. And I think that's a super valuable thing because when something doesn't work, it's good to try something else after you collect a certain amount of data. But it's also like that's good for transparency. It's just good for like, we looked at a thing. We tried a thing. We thought it was gonna work. We collected data. We clearly see it didn't work, and we're gonna try again. And honestly, if this doesn't work, we're gonna try again because it's a bad intersection. We gotta do something about it. So I just I think that's that's good governance and good city work. That's what I'm trying to get at.

Yeah. I don't have I guess, again, I think this is gonna create a situation where some bad drivers are straight up gonna come from Walnut, and they're gonna skip around this island. They're gonna treat it like a roundabout, and that's actually gonna cause some accidents because it actually becomes less predictable that someone is gonna cross in front of you because they're gonna skip around. You're gonna see that person driving that way, and then they're gonna cut back because they're annoyed. And you're not gonna see them coming in.

There's very little time between them seeming to go that way, but they're cutting around illegally. I think we should look at that. I don't have a way to solve it. But I think that that is going to happen occasionally, and we should think about how to reduce that possibility as much as possible. I generally endorse the idea of this. If I had a better idea, I would say it. I just get a little bit worried. Commissioner Gloyn, you look excited. Tell me. Please, go ahead.

Well, I have a thought on that topic.

Please, please.

And I was, which I was sort of thinking about anyway because we've talked about the fact that speed is an issue here particularly on Lincoln. And one way to reduce speed is to make the road feel narrower and a way to make the road feel narrower would be to potentially put divider posts between the lanes close to the intersection. And if you put them between the left turn pocket and the and the Yeah. Okay. Through traffic lane and you could even put one, I think, perhaps without causing a accessibility issue on the crosswalk,

you might Put them outside the crosswalk. You put them onto the outside. You put them to the outside of the side where the diverters in the middle.

But you might even put one in the We might be able to fit one in the crosswalk and not cause an accessibility issue. Maybe, I don't know. But regardless, is that possible Is that something we could consider to address the concerns that have been raised?

Yes. We've talked internally. We we often just refer to a centerline hardening. And so, you know, on Central, if you've been on Central and and Webster, that's a pretty extreme case of centerline hardening. It's a vertical and and and very severe. We do need to be mindful that to allow a fire truck to turn left, they need to be able to go over that. Their trucks are too big that they can't stay in that narrow spot. But we can add vertical elements there that would further discourage cars from doing that loop around maneuver. You know, it doesn't preclude the fact that we have a 10 foot wide sidewalk and most cars are going to be about seven feet wide that they could just drive in the crosswalk. That's kind of hard to preclude.

There's not a lot of ways around that. But yeah, that is something we can consider or should say are considering and we'll be looking at in detail.

Chair Weitzey. Scott, I think we might have David Parisi available online he could insights if he would like.

Hi, everybody. I'm not sure if you can hear me.

We can.

I've been here the whole time and trying to figure out how to put my hand up as a panelist. But I do have a few follow-up thoughts. The proposed diverter island that Scott has presented tonight, it is a tool and the access management toolbox is pretty common. It's been designed many places throughout The U. S.

And it's often referred to under the category of reduced conflict intersection. And I'll add a couple other points. Besides the K-seventy one post, the short ones that Scott also alluded to, the curbs of the island would likely be painted yellow, and there could be reflectors on those as well to really increase visibility. A question was asked about how the treatment could also benefit pedestrians. While certainly if left turns are not allowed, that potential conflict would certainly be reduced across the crosswalk.

And of course, if broadsides are also eliminated, any pedestrians that may be nearby would be less susceptible right to a crash. I think one of the commissioners brought this up just a moment ago. A question was asked about extending the islands to help better prevent drivers from unwanted from sneaking around. I think that's what I understood. Again, hardening or putting some devices up by the left turn lane could certainly be looked at as well. And then I think that covers the points I've been thinking about tonight.

Great. Thank you for jumping in. Actually, while we have David here, do any commissioners have follow ups? Any other additional thank you, David. Appreciate that. Thank you for jumping in. Any other questions or comments generally? Commissioner Nachal, Alicia?

I just want to be clear on what we'd be voting on. That's what I wanna understand. I mean, if we're voting on it being a general concept that we're okay with and it needs improvement, that's one thing. Right? But

So yeah. So we so we could do this lots of different ways. We can so as written, it would be something like move to endorse the proposed quick build improvements to the Lincoln Walnut Intersection to the Lincoln Walnut Intersection and then a condition. If you want to add a condition to that, data to be provided with additional hardening of to be examined, etcetera, etcetera. That that would so I'm gonna read that again just so we're and, we can do what we want with this. But it would be something like move to endorse proposed quick build improvements to the Lincoln Walnut Intersection, perhaps a condition, and then we would vote that that is what we'd be voting on.

And potentially even the condition could be considering the concerns raised tonight.

We we can do that. I my opinion is it's generally better in this kind it's better in emotion to be very specific about. General conditions like, general concerns are they're gonna have to go back and watch the entire video and then, you know, good luck. But it's like, so what if there's a specific concern that we want them to address when this goes to counsel, we should attempt to get it into the language here as the thing we're approving. Because there's lots of concerns, some of which we actually don't agree with, and there are some that we do. So we should be precise about what we're voting on, I think. So are there conditions we want to add to this or just move not to endorse it? We can do that, too.

Move to endorse as a pilot and the data collector be presented to us in terms of how it is performing after three months or six months? Yeah. Think I'm thinking aloud and also proposing.

Yeah. No. That's great. I that came up actually as when we were talking about pilots and the time frame of this idea, I would ask for staff guidance on this. What is a good what's a good we wanna we wanna see this again. We wanna know what the data looks like. Is three months too short? Feels short. Is a year too long? Feels about right. Is two years way too long? Like give us in your mind what a number would be if we want to see did this work?

There's two separate data points you could look at. One would be traffic diversion. We would understand that within about three months because traffic would kind of resettle into a pattern and follow that pattern. If you're really trying to get at are we making a significant improvement as it relates to collisions, the true answer is you need a fairly long time period, at least a year, right? And I think a year, I would ask for at least a year before we come back to say, have there been any collisions, as Mr.

Nyland was saying, he had a record of seven this last year. You know, statistically, this is something that point that another caller made was, you know, you gotta be very careful about statistics between one year and very short data points. But, to answer your question, if you're really looking at the traffic diversion, we could have that information within three months. If you're looking at the reduction collisions, I would say we need at least a year to come back and ask that. So it's a bit of a question to the transportation, what kind of data would you like to see and what's most important here.

That's good. So how do you feel about that? Mean, so one way you could do this is we could just so three months from now, we could bring this back as traffic diversion data. And then we're going to have that discussion here when that data comes back. Then if we decide after that data is available, we could say, well, nine months from now to meet the guidance of did this actually avoid accidents, that would be that could be an additional motion we make in three months after we have that initial data. Does that sort of get at your concerns? Does that get us to a yes, I guess, as an endorsement?

I think the three months for traffic diversion is reasonable. And also because only in the last three months we saw a lot of collisions, I mean the broad side, right? So we can do a comparison, same the next three months of how is the behavior, right? In a driver behavior? You have the videos, it's like the cameras around. We have our neighbors over there, right?

They So there

you go. So I mean, if anybody is really you know, supplementing the whole thing and then going in the wrong direction and then worse broadside accident. So that's that's my thinking. Okay. So

That's fine. We can look at traffic diversion rates and see if there's an accident rate and then decide if we if three months is sufficient data to feel good about it or if it's changed. May not, but that's fine. We can look at it. Does anyone else have anything that because I'm trying to wordsmith this here. Does anyone else have something they wanna add without we wanna we don't wanna write a book. We wanna write a discreet thing here. So so

Go ahead. Targeted. Commissioner Gordon.

I was going to propose that we endorse the proposal with the condition the specific condition that staff consider lane hardening or whatever words we wanna use to take into consideration our concerns around traffic going around the diverter.

So Or something like that. Go ahead. Commissioner Nachtko.

And I just I feel like that's one of the concerns that was raised, but there were other concerns that were raised, and maybe we won't get to include all of them. And so that's why I was going for the concerns, the general concerns that were raised because there was improved signage. There was making sure there was visibility. Right? There's the safety related concerns that can't be impacted by this change.

I I guess where I get sorry. I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm just trying to get us to a discrete statement. I I get a little worried that when we say we're endorsing this, but also we have a we have a fifty five minutes of concerns, which is the opposite of an endorsement. And so I think that we kind of fundamentally need to be like, we endorse this direct city staff to look at additional options to reduce blank or increase blank and come back with data in three months. That's those are three discrete statements, but, like, the thing in the middle, like, what's the thing we're asking for? And if the thing is all the concerns we just talked about, then we actually should not endorse this because we don't feel comfortable with this as proposed. Commissioner Dabry sorry. Drew, go ahead.

So I I I just to reiterate, I I agree with the I think we can endorse this plan in terms of it removing some auto movements through the intersection based on what we've been presented with. I I agree with the way sorry, I went on first names tonight. Commissioner Saravana is suggesting this is an opportunity to come back with comparison data because, you know, we've been presented with a good amount tonight, I leave it at your discretion to pick the time frame. I think Commissioner Gowing really sorry, Commissioner Jamie put on a finger on, I think, calling out centerline hardening and some vertical elements. And I'd like to propose for consideration asking staff and consultants to evaluate before they take to council whether considering the left turns off of Lincoln if that would open up additional design possibilities for their consideration for and review before they take this to counsel, because it seems like, again, this needs to be a quick targeted project.

At the same time, if this is going to take the full cycle of going up to council, I would like to propose that as a way for staff and consultants to internally consider some some options and at their discretion bring bring something to counsel based on that.

So you want additional you sorry. You want additional options to be examined that provide give me a word. That provide hardening of, behind what?

So I heard return with return with return with data as specified. Yep. Include centerline hardening. And staff consultant team evaluate options that include one or two left turn pocket removals and at their discretion bring designs to council based on based on that evaluation.

My opinion to be continually difficult, I'm sorry, is that is asking for six things. That is asking for additional hard hard line sorry, additional hardening of the central line, traffic diversion rate data, traffic accident data in three months, examine if we're getting rid of left turns or not and provide additional options. And that is not necessarily an endorsement. That's a list. And can So I guess what I would propose is something a little simpler.

We all agree this is a pilot. I think that's the first thing that we need to get to. And so if a pilot is just come back with traffic diversion and accident rate in three months, provide additional options for centerline hardening, then the city council has a much more discrete project that we actually looked at, the thing we did. And it's not saying that, oh, and also come up with different ways that we might get rid of left turns because then we didn't do our jobs looking at it first. That's our job. And then we should decide if we agree with getting rid of left turns or not. And then it should come back to us before we send it on. That's that's our commission job.

So this is what I have. Endorse the recommendation, including improved safety measures and bring back the data after three months with comprehensive data on comprehensive performance of the it diota or What

are improved safety measures?

On this what you said. So I didn't want to say that. I'm not being general. I'm just saying, you know, they heard. There there can be list of safety measures. So

But the sorry. The the the proposal as written and as essentially presented to us is left hand turns with a center diverter that is doing certain things, and we can ask for specific alterations to that. But if, again, if the all I I I'm sorry to disagree with you. If the alteration is also get rid of left turns potentially, but we don't see it first, that is our role. So I actually more agree with you than that, to be perfectly honest. I also think we should just ask for a specific discrete thing to be added so so that the department has a has a thing to look at, not safety measures. Okay.

What can be the safety measure

here? I heard consistent Signage.

Better signage is what the only thing I heard. And then do you want to add the center line hardening?

How about sorry. Move to endorse proposed quick build improvements in the Lincoln Walnut Intersection with with data on traffic diversion rates and accidents to be returned to the Transportation Commission in three months and providing additional options for center line hardening period. That is a very simple, discrete, doesn't it leaves out the other things. I agree with that. But it's also we haven't looked at those things. We haven't we should either not endorse it, bring it back next meeting. We have another meeting.

I know just a basic thing I feel.

Okay. Commissioner Clyde.

I was going to say, I think staff probably has heard all the things that we have said and proposed. Yep. And will take those into consideration

I agree with

that.

Before they go to council regardless what we write in here.

Oh. I actually disagree with that. Okay. I think our I think our actual job here is a sorry. I think our actual job as a commission is not to provide to not provide nebulous guidance and have a discussion that then is not specifically codified in something we approve. Our job here is to approve something or not or to reject approval.

Endorse. Endorse.

Endorse. Thank you. Endorse something or not endorse with discrete conditions that are then carried forward. I listen. The the the department has a lot of work already, and we should give them specific things to work on, period, and not say, take this conversation, review it, come up with the 50 bullet points we just discussed here, and work on them in a way that fits back together. I just I just I don't agree with that approach because it it's our job is to give them a a discrete approach. I'm sorry I'm being difficult tonight. I just I I feel that we should that is part of our job.

I will say, as a commission, we probably shouldn't get in the way of ourselves too much. Right? So if in general we agree that we want to endorse endorse it Mhmm. Even if we only said we endorse it and want to see data later

Great.

And react to that data later

Love it.

That that moves it forward so that we can hopefully see what the success rate is and see some benefit. And if that benefit isn't realized, then react to it then.

I I think that's very well said. So things like centerline hardening and all the other options we talked about, that is something where I agree with you. That is something where if the data indicates this is continuing to not work based on the initial data, then this commission should come back and say, well, what else can we do, centerline hardening, killing left turns, etcetera. That that's very well said in my mind. So how about this? So let's simplify this down to the move to endorse proposed quick building improvements to the Lincoln Walton Intersection with data on traffic diversion rates and accidents to be returned to the Transportation Commission in three months, period. In Three months after completion of the project. Lisa, you're telling us we're wrong. Tell us why.

I just wanted to make sure you that three months is the you wanna give such a detailed time frame and that's so short. But, you know, collisions, like like Scott said, you need more time to see a trend in collisions.

I agree. But I also think that Commissioner Suthan Thera's point is that if we suddenly see in three months a how about this? We would not want you to withhold accident data. And so I think we're directing to see accident data. And if the answer is zero, which it probably will be given the shortness of the time frame, then great. But if suddenly in that three months, which we're looking at diversion rate anyway, that should be part of the reporting that we see.

I just wanna add, like, in terms of staff and what we are able to do with the direction that we receive from you, I think, you know, if you were to choose to endorse the staff recommendation plus a few stipulations or things you want us to explore, I think that's fine. We can work with that. It's still useful to us. It's not kind of an all or nothing thing.

Is the laundry list good? Is is that what we're asking