Public Works Committee - Regular Meeting

Hey Denver, it's time for this bi-weekly meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Denver City Council. Join us for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee starting now.

All right, good afternoon and welcome to the transportation and infrastructure committee. My name is Chantal Lewis. I'm the council person for district 8 and today is July 1st, the start of a new era and I am excited that we can go to introductions and we can start online. I understand. We have an avatar online. So, go ahead.

Sorry about that. I'm just going to be a little goofy today, but Kevin Southwest Denver's district 2.

Kevin, and then we can start in the room. I'll start with you, Councilman Hines.

Chris Hines, perfect 10. Paul Cashman, South Denver, District 6.

Laura Alvidrez, Lucky, District 7. Lovely. Thank you. So we have only one briefing this afternoon, and I'm actually going to allow Councilwoman Alvidrez to open this up and intro this because this was a request of hers.

Awesome. Great. Well, I'd like to invite Avi Stopper up with Vamos Bike Lanes. I think this is a very exciting day to have you come present to the council about some of the work that has been done around thinking differently around bikes. I think we all hear a lot around how people get around the city on bikes and who prefers what. And this is an individual who has done a lot of work creating an actual network around our city that connects people outside of our city. And I think has had some interesting conversations with Dottie, so looking forward to hearing more about your work and where you're at today. Thank you.

With that, you can introduce. Thank you, Councilwoman. Thank you all for having me. We're going to talk today about taking the next step with Vamos, and we'll get into that in just a sec. First, I want to introduce myself. I'm Avi Stopper. I've lived in Denver for 14 years now. And for most of my adult life, I've been an entrepreneur in the for-profit world. I founded and built a tech company between 2007 and 2018. It was a Denver-based company. There were 75 people, and we sold, and I left that in 2018. And I turned my attention to social entrepreneurship to try to figure out ways in which we can make our cities, our institutions stronger and better. I've worked on initiatives involving voting access during the pandemic election. Rewilding Denver is a personal passion of mine. But the most substantive work that I've done is with an organization that I founded called Bike Streets. And I've been working on that since 2018. That has been the core of my work from day to day. I spend almost all of my time thinking about how Denver can have a complete network that anyone can use to get to any destination. in our city. At the core of the Bike Streets Initiative is what we call the Low Stress Denver Bike Map. And this is a crowdsourced effort that we have been working on since 2018. It is a bike map at its essence of more than 400 miles of existing trails and infrastructure, as you might imagine, like protected bike lanes, but also chill, quiet residential streets that exist all across the city and are the types of places that people like to ride their bikes with their families already today. So we have taken as much input as we can from all over the city and published this map, distributed it, and tried to make it available for as many folks as possible. We lead group bike rides on this. And what's amazing, and this is a really important thing to know about Denver, is that there is a complete bike network for people of all ages and abilities that is hiding in plain sight. And so what we're here to talk about with VAMOS is how Denver can have a formal bike network and be really the first in the country to have a complete connected bike network that anyone can use to get to any destination in our city. We published this map now primarily less the old school way on paper maps, but with iPhone and Android mobile applications that are free for anyone to use to navigate to any location in the city. And we have made this technology platform free for advocacy groups around the country. So we are currently working on these low stress bike maps in communities from coast to coast. More than 30 cities have these maps in one state or another, really trying to make it possible for people to navigate their communities as they exist today. What we're going to talk about today is Vamos. And Vamos is basically an extrapolation of the low stress bike network in terms of we're looking at how a city can take this bike network that is hiding in plain sight and codify it and formalize it so that we have for the first time ever a real complete bike network that anyone can use to get to any destination. And we're talking about how we can do that for what is a fraction of the conventional cost, time, and conflict that plagues these types of projects. We think that the first version of Vamos, version 1.0, can be built for $5 million, $5 million for a complete bike network in three years or less. If this sounds familiar, many of you have heard about it before. We talked about it during the last campaign, and I'm thankful to all of those members who lent their support to the Vamos initiative. The mayor made it part of his platform, his campaign platform as well. And what I will say is that at this particular moment, we are getting a very encouraging response from the mayor's office, thinking about how we can make healthy, low-cost, active transportation possible for anyone in this city today. We are really making good progress with this, which is why I thought it was an opportune moment to come and have a chat with you. One thing about Vamos that you should know is that a lot of bike infrastructure is really oriented around divisiveness. We end up having these conflicts between people on two ends of the spectrum. And with Vamos, what we have really worked to do is to find common ground and to make a Venn diagram that overlaps between people who want bikeways now neighbors and business owners. And what I'll just note is when we talk about neighbors and we talk about bike enthusiasts, we should really be talking about the same group of people because we're not just building bike networks for a few people who ride already. We are trying to make it possible for anyone in any part of our city, if they so choose, to hop on a bike and take it to whatever destination they're going to. So what I'm asking of you and of city council broadly is I just want you to sign onto a very simple letter. We just want the mayor to take the next step with Vamos. And what I'm gonna tell you over the minutes to come is that we are not proposing that we build the entire network now, rather we wanna create as an entrepreneur would in an innovative form, what we call a proof of concept, a small scale indication that indeed this concept works. And so that is the next step. We're not talking about building the entire network right now. I want to take a step back just real quickly and talk about what we see as the future with Vamos to put it into a more pictorial type of presentation. This is my family on Father's Day, and to indulge their bike, their maniacal bike enthusiast father, my kids, who are both high schoolers, and therefore spend very little time with me, decided that they were going to take me to this really awesome Aboriginal art exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. And this is just one family, this is just one trip, but it's representative of what is possible in this city today. If you know the routes, you can go to all of these places. And what I'll just emphasize is that most of the people in this picture are not super confident on bikes. They are not hardcore cyclists. And so if you start to extrapolate and think this and think about the people in communities across the city enabled to ride their bike to any destination, the possibilities start to abound. I'll show you a couple more pictures that illustrate that. This is the Jewish Deli bike tour. one of the great bike rides in Denver that we co-lead with the JCC. And what you can see here is we have a gaggle of folks stuffed with bagels, lox, and the such. I think Call Your Mother is probably the third or fourth stop on this trip. We hit five or six delis. And bikes are just a great way to get to local businesses. We think about cities and people's desires to have walkable cities. A bike is basically just another form of walking. A friend of mine calls it pedestrian plus that allows you to expand your radius by miles in 15 minutes on a bike. You can cover about three miles and that means you can cover an enormous swath of the city and delightfully, joyfully with your family patronize awesome local businesses. For people in communities across the city, this is with Westwood Unidos, we took a group of their young people from Garfield Lake Park down to Bear Creek, down to Bear Creek Park on Raleigh and Hamden. And it was a revelation for them. We went down there. We played in the creek. We had a chat. We talked about bikes. And it was incredible to see their eyes open up about the possibilities of how they can navigate their cities already without depending on their parents. This is the future that Vamos represents. And I think you're probably aware of this. Voters for a long time have been, at least in the abstract, asking for bike networks to be a reality, for people to be able to use whatever form of transportation they seek to get around the city. This is, at its essence, low cost, healthy transportation for everyone. And I want to underscore that point of lowering costs, especially in an environment in which affordability is such a central issue. I think at its essence, Vamos is the fastest way that we can make Denver more affordable. It's great for local businesses and if you have tried to park downtown, you know that it's challenging and if you're trying to access challenging neighborhoods, being able to ride your bike as I did recently and lock it up literally in front of the Paramount and go to a show there It's incredibly empowering and makes you want to go to these types of places a lot more. You don't have to incur the extra expense of all sorts of parking costs, the time, the stress of sitting on Speer. You just roll down the Cherry Creek Trail, you make your way to the place that you're trying to go, and you park. Let's talk a little bit about infrastructure in the abstract. The classic problem that plagues these projects is that we build one disconnected bikeway at a time. So we never have a network. Imagine if you were trying to drive to West Denver from here and there were no bridges across the Platte River. That is the basic state of bike transportation in this city and really in every city across the country. It's piecemeal, one at a time, and what we end up with is this disconnected archipelago of bikeways. And yes, some of them are really good, and the engineering is great, but having all of these gaps basically makes it impossible for the vast majority of people to actually consider using a bike to get around. The gaps are really critical. So we need a more systems-thinking type of approach. one that is oriented around what I would think of in a sort of housing first context as a network first. How is it that we create a network first and foremost? And that's what Vamos really contemplates. As you know, probably more than I, these projects are too slow. They take many years, decades in some cases. They are way too expensive, and they cause way too much conflict. And that conflict really hampers development. It hampers our ability to advance and progress. I would contend that the number of people who have been against particular bikeways is astonishing when you think about the number of those people who also say that they ride their bikes. It's incredibly difficult, and we need to find a better way that aligns interests rather than creates conflict. And we think Vamos is the solution to this set of problems. We think this is the actual glide path into finally implementing Denver Moves Bikes. This needs to go from a plan, which it has been for decades now, to on-the-ground reality. And we think Vamos is how we actually get there. And what I'll just note is we're not creating anything from whole cloth here. We are talking about using existing precedent exclusively, things that already exist, both processes and designs that are on the ground. Denver has an incredible network of quiet neighborhood streets as a foundation. That is how we built the low-stress Denver bike map. We also have a number of designs that DOTI has already used on streets across the city for low-cost changes that reduce what everyone dislikes in their neighborhoods, which is cut-through traffic, high-speed cut-through traffic. And this is how we start to think about alignment between different constituencies. If you have neighbors who want reduced high-speed cut-through traffic and you have neighbors a desire to create comfortable bikeways that anyone in those neighborhoods can use, that is a win-win as opposed to the classic divisive types of approaches of building infrastructure. I acknowledge that sometimes this conflict happens in the creation of bikeways, but what we have to also acknowledge is that it just has a radically reductive effect on our ability to actually get the job done. We have materials that people like, emphasis on like there, because we all know how people feel about plastic flex posts. We have precast concrete, we have signs, and we have paint. A bike is a light vehicle. It is a vehicle where you can create a network for it that uses light interventions. And what I'll just note is that People need to feel like the creation of these bikeways is additive to their neighborhoods, whereas we constantly find ourselves in these totally gratuitous battles over things that don't look nice. We need to get beyond that. It needs to blend in with the neighborhood aesthetic, and it needs to be something that people are really excited about adding. We have a map of all the chill bike routes in Denver. That's what I shared with you before, the low stress Denver bike map. And critically, we have this precedent of temporary shared streets. Dottie's, one of their greatest inventions or innovations during the early days of the pandemic, they took quiet residential streets with very low cost, lightweight interventions. They turned these quiet streets into even quieter corridors. And most importantly, this is not just a project about building miles of bikeways. This is a project of activating people. And temporary shared streets were wildly popular. There were thousands and thousands of people who used them on an ongoing basis. We have the ingredients to do this already. We just need to do it. We need to think about combining those into a coherent collection. The result is a complete network that covers the entire city. Within three years, people from across the city can be riding between any two points comfortably for a number of $5 million that really meets the moment in terms of budgetary constraints. So here's our current proposal to the mayor. As I said before, don't build the complete network yet. That would be irresponsible from an entrepreneurial stance. We are asking him instead to take this current diverter pilot program and think of that as an atomic unit, which is to say we are currently, Dottie's doing this work as we speak, trying to figure out low-cost ways that we can align interests and make it possible to reduce high-speed cut-through traffic on neighborhood streets. What we are asking for as the next step in 2027 is to take those atomic units and turn them into molecular units, which is to say a series of atoms in sequence to create a corridor, basically to reconstruct the success that we had with temporary shared streets, to show that we can make neighborhood streets better for everyone, that neighbors are super stoked to have them, that people are actively using them. And what we're trying to do is to simply establish a proof of concept. We are, again, not interested in creating the complete network right now. We are talking about a small-scale proof of concept. So the next year, I can come back. We can have this same conversation and say, this is what we've learned. We believe we now have the elements that it takes to assemble a complete network. Let's think about building the complete network. We want to show that people use it, the neighbors love it, and that the math pencils. I think, just in sum, this is a great opportunity for this city. First off, to deliver affordable transportation in a realistic way. I'm not suggesting that everyone is going to reduce car ownership. But to give people a realistic opportunity to go from three cars to two or two cars to one, the implications of that could be colossal, up to $15,000 in savings per year per family. This is, at its core, an affordability opportunity. It's also about boosting local business and about making downtown more accessible. And just in the abstract, we have an opportunity, I think, here to be a national leader and to truly deliver on an abundance agenda. Yes, scarcity is kind of the situation with the budget. I acknowledge that. But if we're smart, if we're clever, and if we're determined, we can deliver abundance. So, again, my ask of you is simple. We're not trying to build a complete bike network. We're trying to prove that we have the tools to actually accomplish that. So I'm asking of you to just sign on to a very simple statement that says. To the mayor in your 2027 budget, I encourage you. To take the next step on.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the presentation. With that, we do have a few members in the queue, of course, so I'll have you start.

Councilwoman, I'll be addressing. Thank you. One of the things I think is probably in all our minds is how is this different, if you can talk a little bit, from what the city is doing? Because the city does have a plan for bikes and bike lanes. So can you talk about how do those two things interact or how do you...

Yeah, I think it's a great question. I think it's actually very much the same, right? Because Denver Moves Bikes is a plan that calls for a complete bike network. And there are, as they say in the vernacular, recommended facilities. We don't know how we're actually going to get there. And what VAMOS attempts to accomplish with this versioning approach, version 1.0 is about creating a, we have to have, for people to be able to ride places, they have to have a complete network. And so what we're trying to do is figure out how do we work our way into the full vision of Denver Moves Bikes, but have a complete network now, rather than at some indeterminate point in the future we're gonna connect the archipelago. Instead, we're gonna start with a complete network, figure out how to activate lots and lots and lots of people, and then bit by bit over time it gets better and better. And I would say that the work that Dottie is doing right now, this Diverter Pilot Program, very much to show that this work is indeed happening, is very much aligned with this because that is, again, the atomic unit for how we get to scale. The next step is to take atoms, assemble them into molecules, then we come back and we have a conversation about the larger network.

So, I mean, you're kind of saying DOTI is already doing this.

I mean, there are elements of it, right? There are components of the diverter pilot program is very isolated locations. And what we're trying to say is, okay, this is fantastic that we're creating this tool. How do we use this tool to create that elusive complete network? That tool is incredibly powerful, but that tool in and of itself is not going to make it possible for people to cross the gaps and to make these trips. We're saying let's take this and take the next step, and that next step is to assemble a series of these into a corridor.

I appreciate that. That makes more sense. So basically, you're saying they're not being thoughtful about connecting all of the projects to have a way to get around the city. I think one of the things that I really appreciate, there's two things that I really appreciate that you've brought to the table, which I'm looking at the DOTI website right now about the bike lanes, and I see the neighborhood bikeway. And I think what you're also saying is let's focus on the neighborhood bikeway Instead of these huge, more costly infrastructure projects to get that momentum going and get people using their bikes more safely more. I like the way you reference it as less stress because I personally want less stress in my life and having a less stressful bike ride sounds really nice. So, is that kind of what you're saying or.

The critical enabling condition for people to ride bikes is they need a network. If you don't have a network, you can't go places. I mean, you're not going to ride on Colfax if you're a normal person, right? You need a network. So given incredible budget limitations and the cost of... some really complicated big projects on arterials. I'm certainly not against those, but I don't see how, given the budget constraints, we get to a complete network with that type of facility at this moment. Perhaps in the future, built on the backbone of a complete network, but the way that we arrive at a complete network today is by thinking about how do we use the limited budget that we have to make light touch interventions that actually can have an outsized impact. We're talking about a totally disproportionate return on investment to the actual cost of the facilities, especially as compared with things that can cost five or ten million dollars per facility. We're talking about per mile costs of ten to twenty thousand dollars rather than per mile costs of millions of dollars.

Great. And then in your presentation, you referenced specifically $5 million. And how did you arrive at that dollar amount?

That is based on a set of extrapolated calculations from what these atomic units can cost. we think, and if we can get the cost down in this next step pilot program, this molecular unit corridor level pilot program, we think that those costs can be indeed delivered. I recognize and acknowledge that those are numbers like we're talking about orders of magnitude less than the conventional costs. And so that's one of the reasons that I don't think we should build a complete network right now. I think that with a nominal amount of money, a very small project, we should demonstrate that indeed the economics are there, that we can make this happen, that neighbors are stoked about it, and that people actually use them.

Do you have a proposed idea of where we would start with that $5 million?

Well, sorry, the $5 million would be for the complete network. And yes, there are a number of already identified corridors where we would run these sort of molecular unit tests. There is a set of what Dottie sometimes describes as underperforming neighborhood bikeways. And so that is probably, that is one potential place to start in your district, South Pearl, for example. Still, there's a tremendous, during rush hour in particular, there's a tremendous amount of cut-through traffic. Neighbors are very unhappy about it. People are not riding bikes at the levels that they should and are scared for that reason because it is a shared lane on what is a de facto collector right now that could be turned into a neighborhood bikeway through this. That's an example of one such project. And what we would be doing in that process is trying to prove the economics, prove that that the neighbors are delighted by the changes because they never have this cut through traffic and they have a great little bikeway in front of their houses and that indeed people are using it. This is not about infrastructure in the abstract. This is about usage and human activation.

Great. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. Good questions. Thanks. Appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. We'll go online to Councilman Flynn. Easy.

Male Speaker 1 Thank you. The Zoom screen was frozen there on me for a minute. Female Speaker 1 Hello? Male Speaker 1 Got you.

Okay, Internet connections struggles on our end. We can hear you for now, but you may go in and out.

I will continue speaking then and let me know if I'm cut off. I'll just get back in the queue. Thank you. And I do know that there are a lot of underutilized. structured bike lanes, one on Jewel Avenue here. Specifically, we get a lot of complaints. People don't use it. They don't want to ride on Jewel. But one thing I'm interested in is the organic nature in which you map. And tell me, because my understanding was that it was mapped based on where people are actually going. And to do that, do they do that with some sort of an app on their phone that tracks it for you and allows you to map where people are actually going? And if that's true, can the network grow that way or change that way if people change their biking habits?

Great question. So we have been working on the low-stress Denver bike map since 2018, long before we had the opportunity to have sort of rich ride data that would inform what the network actually can and should be. the majority of the network as it stands was developed by people just sharing their favorite routes and telling us this is how i get from point a to point b and we would take that information and we would try to assemble it into a coherent map so that not only could they get from a to b but other people who are trying to traverse similar types of trips would be able to use those facilities so the network line might not it wouldn't start of course at their house and end at their place of work it would instead encapsulate what we would consider to be a useful section of the network that maybe had a gap previously. So this was developed through meetups, through coffee shop gatherings, through conversations, through people sending in emails with their favorite routes, and bit by bit, tons and tons of riding. I should acknowledge as well lots of really good group rides. We always end a group ride with ice cream. I'll just note. biking to ice cream is like one of life's great joys. In terms of continuing to advance our understanding of where the network can and should be, what you're describing in sort of urban planning would be considered desire lines. And so, yes, as people are riding with the apps, you know, riding with a way for us to sort of understand where there are disconnections in the network, we are able to continue to expand the network. And what's significant about Vamos is that because the costs that it contemplates are so low, we believe that filling those types of gaps, there are always going to be gaps in our network, but filling those gaps is a lot easier if you're able to say that the unit economics for creating one incremental bike lane or bike facility are much less than the conventional costs. And of course, we're not going to have the conflict that's going to slow it down for the next five to 10 years.

Avi, I like that you used the term desire lines because I think planners often spend their time sketching out and installing where they want you to go, whereas the public is spending its time telling the planners where we want to go. A great example of that would be a riverfront park where people didn't want to walk in a big circle around that big space to get from here to there. Instead, we had to build an intermediate path. The State Capitol is another example where they expected people to walk up Colfax or 14th and enter from the side doors or to go up the stairs in the center of the block. Instead, people were walking up from the corners of Colfax and 14th or I'm sorry, Colfax and Lincoln or 14th and Lincoln and cutting a dirt path in the lawn. Finally, the state built those wonderful curving staircases from either end of the block because they got tired of people saying, we want you to, we want to walk this way. And they were ruining the landscaping. So I think your project has a lot of merit. and uh and the fact is uh the return on investment for a lot of our most expensive bike lanes are like broadway uh has not been uh has not been robust uh it's very underutilized and i think your plan would be much more utilized thank you manager thank you so much really appreciate that councilman plan uh councilman hunt

Hey, thank you. You're welcome. Good to see you. I think the last time we talked was in the before times, before COVID even. And after we had our conversation, I reached out to Dottie, and I remember that Dottie had some thoughts and comments. That was for... I mean, that was now seven years ago. And so I'm curious, what are the results of your conversations with Dottie? I could probably dust off the cobwebs, but a seven-year-old conversation with Dottie, I know they had some significant reservations, but that's so long ago. Maybe you've addressed them all. So I'm curious about your conversations with Dottie and their thoughts or comments.

Yeah, I mean, we've been working really closely with them on this diverter pilot program. There's a stakeholder group in which I've been participating. We've had a number of conversations separately offline as well that have been really, really constructive and encouraging. And I don't think we agree on everything. I think we agree on the need for there to be a complete network. That is sort of a universally understood reality. And what we're trying to do is figure out, I think, mutually, how do we actually accomplish that? And I would say that a really important point of convergence is on these neighborhood bikeways and the opportunity to to upgrade those neighborhood bikeways that exist already so that they achieve their full potential, and then to use those as a scalable tool to produce the complete network, I think that there is a tremendous amount of alignment, especially against the backdrop of a really austere budget.

Yeah, also seven years ago, we had a different mayor who didn't have Vamos as part of any sort of commitment or conversation. And so it's interesting to hear that, and this isn't the first time I've heard, but that the mayor, our current mayor, has made it one of his campaign platforms or one of the planks in his platform. So that's interesting to hear too. I wonder, so I completely agree. I think transportation planners have said that a hub and spoke system makes a whole lot of sense. That's why RTD has Union Station and Civic Center Station. There's a whole bunch of stuff that connects to them. There's another arterial, the Broadway Station connects trains and buses. and the very popular zero line. So I don't have to be a transportation planner. I can look at routes that a whole bunch of transportation planners have planned and see that a hub and spoke system, i.e. a complete bike network, makes a lot of sense. And that was my biggest challenge ding with the last mayor who said he wanted 125 miles of bike lanes to be built in five years. He achieved it, but that's because he found the easiest 125 miles of bike lanes to install as opposed to gaps, particularly in the center city where there are lots of conflicts of different mode types. And so there'd be a protected bike lane and then four blocks of nothing and then a protected bike lane again. And I would say those four blocks, the reason why they weren't there is because it was a tough conversation. Well, that's where we need to protect a bike lane. The most is where we've got all these conflicts. And so having a complete connected protected. By clean network, I think is, you know, I would say is that ideal. Ideal and reality are not the same. I think that's kind of what you're saying is that we lean more into the neighborhood bike way model. I think Denver's kind of moving away from. and moving more into neighborhood bikeway um signage i where i joined the disability community was at 18th and logan so not really you know a neighborhood bikeway area also not a high injury network area and so i I want to make sure that we're coming up with a complete network, which I think is part of the Bamos plan. I also, as one of those 5% of writers that was willing to ride on the street all the time because that's the law even in, you know, right down. Because it had a bike lane or, you know, whatever. So, I guess I am curious in another conversation with daddy to see where their thoughts are. And the only other question for you is, you mentioned that you've been working on this since 2017 and so you didn't do a lot of data analysis. We've had the opportunity, you know, we've got more technology now with, like, Placer. There's a... There's an advocate, I think, out of San Francisco that does a lot of data analysis for non-car transit. I'm curious to know if you've incorporated some of the technological advances since 2017, or... Yeah, I mean, we built a complete technology platform.

The apps that I showed you in the outset represent a complete technology platform that allows us to identify where gaps are, where desire lines exist, and consider adding those to the network.

Okay. Thank you.

And I should just note that map of the U.S. that I showed, that technology platform is now being used in 30 plus cities around the country.

Sweet. Thanks. Thank you so much, Councilman Hines. Councilman Cashman.

Thank you, Committee Chair. Good to see you. Likewise. So what I'm wondering, I see two main communities of cyclists. There's folks like me and my grandkids, recreational at best, and then there's the folks that are speeding down our trails at 25, 30 miles an hour. Serious cyclists. Does Vamos accommodate both of those groups or who's it aimed at?

Great, great question. What we are trying to do is, this is fundamentally an access project. This is trying to make, I'm already comfortable riding my bike anywhere. there are a handful of other folks like me in the city. We are trying fundamentally to make it possible for a group of people who are often described in Dottie vernacular as interested but concerned, 60% of the population, we are trying to make bike transportation possible for those folks. That is at its essence what this is about. This is not about fitness or performance cycling. This is about if you're a woman and you want to go out for a night on the town, You can get on your bike in a dress and go to the place that you want to go. And maybe you don't even need to wear a helmet because you don't want to mess your hair up. This is about kids comfortably going to school. This is about safe routes to school. This is about the people who have largely been left out of biking. Because, I mean, it's my family. It is those kids from Westwood Unidos. It is a lot of the people on the Jewish Deli bike tour who are not confident riding their bikes. in the city as it exists today and so what we're trying to say is that there is a way the city has the tools the city has the capacity to make biking possible for people of all ages and abilities and if the more confident people want to ride those routes every now and then you know that's great if they want to ride them often that's great but this is at its essence about

enabling a vast majority of people who have just who say theoretically that this is something that they want to do but that they don't do it because they don't know how to get there and they're scared yeah i i fully support your idea i i do wonder about the potential conflict of high-speed cyclists on neighborhood streets and how we manage that, you know. But I've often wondered what the heck are we doing with as has been said building these disjointed expensive systems when we've got these when i think the vast majority of people wanted wanting to ride or as you were describing you know uh that's 60 or whatever number you use and the system you describe it would seem to be ideal for them so thank you i appreciate that a lot Thank you so much, Councilman Cashman. It's my pleasure. Thank you, Madam Chair. It's all mine.

Councilwoman, I'll be dressed. Yes, I think that's a great point and I think kind of the key to what you're talking about here is that we're building infrastructure where people don't want to ride. A lot of times it's a big concern that I hear from my constituents, so I appreciate that research. I think the part I'd like to hear just a little bit more about is how have your conversations with DOTI directly gone and how receptive have they been to this idea? And I do think, I don't know if I got to this earlier, but one of the things that you have highlighted before is how putting in some pop-up infrastructure can get that feedback in a much quicker way. And I think DOTI's learning from that. Part of the reason they're doing the temporary experiment on Alameda is because I mentioned we have community members that have done these pop-ups. I've attended your pop-ups. And we've talked about maybe doing one between 6-7, District 6 and District 7. that maybe we still need to do, but thinking about how has that been a partner? How have they been receiving this information? I know I mentioned, I think it was, I was talking to you earlier about this other podcast that did a bike survey and how does all this fit together? I think is part of my concern.

Yeah, good question. I think they are really energized by the diverter pilot program. I mean, that is the word that I have been hearing that that has really animated a lot of the, we were kind of stuck on a lot of this stuff and I've, I've heard that that has really animated a lot of folks and. We are kind of nearing the conclusion of that. And so the question has been hanging in the air. What next? How do we use this that we have learned from this project from which we have learned? How do we take the next step with it? So it's not like we just built a few isolated things here, there and everywhere. And so I think that there is. There is a big question about how can we continue this, and that is the void that we're trying to fill. And I think that folks have been receptive to it. It still needs to get locked in by the mayor. But I think the idea of taking this thing that people are pretty excited about, I don't want to speak for Dottie, but taking this project that people are excited about and scaling it up My read is that there is a lot of interest and enthusiasm around it. Second part of that question was, sorry.

No, I just was asking about the pop-up.

Oh, the pop, right, the pop-ups, yeah. Yeah, so I think the most important thing about those pop-ups is that they give us the opportunity to observe real human behavior. And to Councilman Hines' point, what we want to be seeing here is not just the creation of infrastructure. The infrastructure is a means to an end. We want to see actual activation and usage. And so whether it's something, irrespective of the permanence of it, whether it's very short-lived, like the block parties that I've done, whether it's longer term, a few months, or whether it lasts for a year or two before As long as we are observing the actual outcomes and seeing how people are engaging with it and learning as a result and making adaptations and adjustments. And that is the entire reason that what we are proposing to the mayor right now is not to build the whole network. It is to build just the next incremental step on what we have already learned to see does it indeed produce the types of behaviors that we seek. Most significantly, in terms of actual people writing it to Councilman Cashman's point, the people that we want to see using it, that there are kids that there are women out there using it, that there are people who are typically less confident, older folks are writing and and that driver behavior is is indeed. what we would like for it to be. And I'm not going to, again, having done this innovation work my entire career, going to suggest that our design on day one is going to be perfect. We want to see this and we want to optimize it and improve upon it. We don't want to just build it and leave it and go on to the next thing. We want to work on it, refine it, and bit by bit make it incrementally better until we feel like we have this scalable proof of concept that we can take more broad.

Great. And then the last thing I'll ask is just around, you mentioned the cut-through traffic in some of these neighborhood streets. And how does that work? Because I think you may or may not be aware, as someone that's had lots of bike lanes built in my district, I think there often is this conflict between I need to park, maybe they don't have driveways, maybe they don't have alleys, the bikeway, and the car traffic. So can you tell me a little bit about that piece and the diverting piece? No, I mean, OK.

So what's critical in terms of reducing conflict is that it looks good. People don't feel like their neighborhood looks like it's decaying or made of chintzy plastic. So that people feel like the aesthetics are acceptable. they can still drive to their houses and they can still park in front of their houses. And so the way that Vamos contemplates that is that local traffic is still totally fine. It is just people who are trying to use neighborhood streets. There's a term for it called rat running. People who are using neighborhood streets to cut through to avoid a signal or an arterial stretch when it's backed up that they're prevented physically from doing that. So the street still remains completely accessible to the neighbors. This is how we accomplish this alignment. The street is still totally accessible for the neighbors, however they need to use it. It is just we are reducing or entirely preventing high-speed cut-through traffic.

Wonderful. Awesome. Thank you. That's all I had.

Thank you. I'll just note is that this is not something I'm just imagining. There are precedents for this already in the city.

Wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for your work. I'm excited. I actually don't have your technology, so I have to look it up. I'll get it. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this presentation. Love the app. And I was just writing in here that I don't know if I was clear about how we work with you all to do the pop-ups in the district, because I'm exactly who you described, where I would love the opportunity to ride my bike, but it's absolutely intimidating on these streets. And so we'd love to figure out how we might be able to get our community and District 8 involved in some of these conversations and folks on their bikes as well.

Cool. Thank you. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Sounds good.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for your time.

Did you have anything else to share?

I just thank you for your time.

Okay. We really appreciate you being here.

Thanks.

And with that, we have 14 items. Oh, I did want to pull off an item. Sorry. Can I still do that? Yeah, go ahead. Let me look at the agenda. I'm glad you mentioned that. Thanks, Avi. Thank you so much, Avi. Yeah, thanks, guys. I got so into the presentation. Thank you. Take care. You know what?

I'll reach out after committee. Sure.

Yeah.

Thank you. Okay. So we have 14 items on consent. We may have one pulled off in the future, but not right now. And with that, we are adjourned. Heidelberg.