Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

I think so, yeah.

Cool.

Feels orderly.

Kim is that way. Rubble rouser, shovel maker.

I know I've come here a lot talking about bike ped stuff, but we are finally getting through our... Mike, are you into bikes? A little bit, but not too much. Never really picked up on that. What do you know? All right. I'm just a little bit into bikes, but I'm into other stuff too, so it's all good. All right, so we're trying to give you an update. Let's see. I wonder if you guys in the booth could get the HDMI cable to connect up there. Oh, there we go. Okay, thank you. What we'll just talk about today is mostly kind of what's in this new draft. I know I sent the text out and there were a lot of words in there and everything, but just kind of initial, hey, here's the draft, but we just kind of want to run through some of the basics of what's covered in that, so... We're excited to finally get this draft coming together, but before we do the final, the whole team has been super awesome helping out with this project, and it's been a few years now, but we're very glad to get it going. But before we put the final touches and the final design of the document, we're like, let's just run this by you guys at the Planning Commission, and then we'd like to take it to the council and see what they think as well. Once we get all the last feedback, we'll update the whole final document and then take that out to the public. Hey, Mike, real quick. Yeah.

Our friends in the booth over there, is it possible to change the view so it's not Mike's back and the whole... Just the presentation? Yeah.

There we go. Oh, almost, almost. There it is. Thank you. All right. Sorry. Proceed.

I mean, I kind of like the.

I was going to say, it is confusing trying to run things in the booth. It was nice.

Two views of mine.

Okay. So, yeah. We'll just walk through the plan and the major recommendations. Sorry. I'm going to sit out here and try to control it out. You're awesome. Thanks. Then discuss kind of the overall direction. We don't have the updated draft map yet because we're still talking through some of the corridors and stuff with the engineering department and making sure it's matching what our master transportation plan is showing. Still working through the map a little bit. We'll bring that at a later time. But just kind of the direction of what we'd like to see. And then, you know, if there's any missing connections you guys feel like we should be looking at, I do have our old map that we'll pull up. You can point that out. And then also we just have some questions for you at the end. First of all, why should we update the plan? We've updated the bike map a couple of times, but the plan itself was originally adopted in 2013. So I was just a baby planner back then. So now that all of us have a little more experience, especially the city as a whole has been doing a lot more planning for this. Definitely learned a lot. And we really want to simplify the plan. The first plan was kind of a thick document that probably nobody ever reads through. So we're trying to simplify the document a little bit and really just drive down to what we're looking for out of the plan. But obviously, as you know, Lehigh has grown like crazy. So the plan up to this point has worked pretty well. But we want to make sure it's still working and will do better in the future. And then we've had a lot of the regional trail connectivity, which has been exciting. Had our first new separate bike lane that's come in. You know, mixed reviews. But it's all part of the learning process. And then, you know, this update's basically the five to ten year horizon. So it has some goals within it. That's things the city should be doing the next five to ten years. So the vision, this is all based on the public outreach, working with the steering committee, the planning commission, the council at the time. I think it was a year ago or so when we came up with the final vision. But basically, the vision is Lehigh is safe and comfortable for families and individuals of all ages and abilities to walk, bike, and roll to their desired destinations. So kind of the key themes that came out of the public outreach was safety, which is probably one of the top themes, comfort, and then Transportation, recreation, people kind of have this idea of connectivity, trying to get to the places you want to go, and then all ages and abilities. So we try to be a good family-friendly community, a dynamic community, so we need to plan for all ages and abilities if we're going to continue to try and do that. So the goals, I won't read through all of these right now. They are in the draft, and these were all discussed again as part of the... Can you talk to goal one, though?

Like, where are we targeting?

So this goal doesn't say where. That's going to be part of the prioritization process. So that's something I think will be a map that we put into the plan as well. But we're going to sit down and talk, you know, staff and obviously see what the council ultimately is going to think since they're the ones that determine the funding. But this would be, some of it's going to happen where development's happening. So development's building some of the infrastructure already. So that'll happen. But what are kind of the key target projects that we should be trying to go after?

So the goal of adding 11 miles is strictly a quantity. We're looking to add 11 miles. But that's not based on projects or areas that we're targeting. Like, why 11?

11, I believe, was a percentage of the total. It just came up to 11. Maybe we should have put a percentage. And it was also based on the number of miles we've gotten up to this point every year. It's like, all right, in the next five to 10 years, what's a goal that, you know, it's not impossible to hit, but it's not something that's like, all right, we're going to put a half a mile somewhere. I'm like, that's pretty easy. So it's like, let's do a good goal, but one that's kind of attainable. So that's kind of the reasoning behind some of that. Then, yeah, of course, the 20% of missing sidewalks is something we've heard a lot about, so it's something we want to continue to work on. Yeah, are there any other goals you want to?

No, I'm just curious. I know it was a big piece of discussion in the last election. What percentage of our sidewalks exactly, or rather, what percentage of our roads are lacking sidewalks?

Yes, I don't remember off the top of my head. I know engineering department did an analysis on that Jason DeWitt, our GIS coordinator. I don't have that number off the top of my head. I have it mapped out. I just don't have the percentage.

I just like to ask you questions you can't answer, Mike.

Is the biggest problem area Old Town, Lehigh?

So you have Old Town, but you have a lot of the old county roads, too, like 11th West has some missing. Now, a lot of it's been filling in over the past few years, and the streets department did a great job on getting some, like even 9th North has at least a continuous sidewalk on one side. Now, getting over to St. Cademy, which also followed some public outreach, some residents reaching out on that. So we've been filling it in, but there still is a bit missing, and not every one of those roads has it on both sides, too.

I've heard 2300 West doesn't have it on both sides.

Gee, where'd you hear that? I don't know. I don't know where I heard that. Somewhere.

Saw a video about it.

Like is the goal for that ultimately to get the city to a hundred percent at one point for sidewalks or is that not necessarily attainable just based on certain areas?

There are roads that aren't ideal, like 23rd or 100 West is a road that's not super ideal for bike, pedestrian travel. Obviously, it has the sidewalk on the east side, especially because subdivisions come out to it. But on the west side, the original discussion was, Mike, it's all houses backing to it. 2375 West right there is a nicer, safer place to walk than going down 23rd. Yeah. But sometimes people still just go down the shoulder anyway.

Got it.

So, yeah, and, you know, most streets and roads probably should have sidewalks on both sides, but there's definitely a lot of prioritization you have to look at with it. Where's the most risk? Where are we missing complete gaps in the network? You know, try to at least get, like, one side of one road. Connecting schools first and foremost is going to be important. So there's going to be a lot that goes into where we put those improvements.

Yeah, for sure. Cool.

And then, yeah, the goals, it's all in that draft that I sent to you guys. I don't want to, and I think we've gone through these before, so I don't want to belabor.

So I keep jumping into this. Oh, you're good. Tell me about four. What is the recreational trail network?

So I would say that every trail probably serves some split of transportation and recreation. But recreation is, you know, there's maybe more, some trails that lend themselves more to recreation and some maybe lend themselves more to mobility. So I think the, I think it was Council Member Albrecht at the time, she was like, I'd love to see a couple of these trail connections get made, like the Dry Creek Trail where it goes under Pioneer Crossing, for example. It would be so nice to connect to the under crossing there and where our future park is going to be. So there's a couple of these gaps. It would just be so nice to finish a couple of them and make sure we're connecting some more recreational trail network.

Because right now that trail does technically go under Pioneer Crossroad. It does, yeah.

There's like 30 feet on the north side that doesn't connect. But then once you get to the other side, yeah. That one's probably a little bit lower hanging fruit because we own the property on the other side. We just need to pay.

Has that tunnel been tagged? Do we get a lot of graffiti down there?

That one's fenced off. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if there's tagging in it, but there is tagging under I-15 on the rail trail. I always call it the artwork of our youth, but some are better than others. All right. Okay, so this whole plan, and for those of you who have been on the commission a little longer, you probably remember our five principles presentation we did. I don't know if all of you have seen that before. But basically the kind of underlying foundation of the plan is that we should be guided by these five principles. So it's safety, comfort, cohesion, directness, and attractiveness, and they're all kind of interrelated in some ways. I do have a few slides to quickly go through that for those of you who haven't. Can I ask a question? Oh, yeah. Sorry. Yeah.

Speaking of directness and access, through Thanksgiving Point, they don't want people to get off the trail and go through the neighborhood to get over to the train station.

Oh, yeah, you mean like on the west side? Yeah. Yeah, I know there are private streets over there, very joyous streets.

There's lots of signage that says do not come through here, right? Have we looked at ways of trying to connect that area? I think that's a huge deterrent for some people that might want to ride their bike to the train. There's not a real convenient way to get off the trail and over to the train.

Yeah, which the plan certainly would want to address that. Right now, there's obviously some lacking areas. I mean, people do it anyway. Yeah, it would be good to have a designated route that they're supposed to use for sure. Like if you're going to the Jordan River Trail, there is the Murdoch Trail that connects down. But if you're going like south from there, trying to get on the Jordan River, like if you're going to Primary Hospital or something, then you have to cut through the neighborhood.

Can we make some kind of deal with the private neighborhoods there? Yeah, we could always talk to them. Anyway. That was just one area that I thought of immediately.

Well, that's part of that later on when we want to talk about gaps. That would be a gap that we'd want to address. So safety, the idea, which again I put this as principle one since that was the top of the public input, but safety and basically to make it safer you have to reduce risk and exposure to vehicle traffic, stress, noise, all that kind of stuff. So basically if you have speed and mass you don't want to mix them, you want to separate them. So if you have high mass, higher speed, you want to separate it from low mass, low speed. Obviously, cars are higher mass, high speed. And on the car, low mass, lower speed. Now, e-bikes sometimes get a little bit rough. It's not a true e-bike sometimes. They're a little fast.

Come on, a true e-bike can go 80 miles per hour. I don't know what kind of e-bike that was.

But basically, you want to segregate based on mass and speed is kind of the... the basics of it. So when you're looking at network design, the orange line represents like the active transportation route and the car route there. It's not always possible to separate them, but if possible, it's nice to put them on separate corridors. Sometimes, though, the car corridor goes by a bunch of destinations, so you may want access anyway, but maybe your primary bike access or through route is not on the main route. It's not always possible, but that's the ideal.

The idea of safety is here.

Nice bike ride here. Maybe I would have to ride on if I'm going to Turner Station, which I don't like doing myself. But you can tell a lot of exposure to vehicle traffic there. Very nervous around the parked cars and trailers. Now, this is still along the roadway, but at least it's more separated. Obviously, you start to feel a lot less stress here, but you still have some conflict and everything.

Where's this at? That's in Ogden. And then just a separate trail or path.

No cars around. That's ideal for your more primary routes. Not always possible, but like our rail trail... It's perfect for this kind of thing. And where's this? This one's in . Yeah, that's what I thought. I was waiting for the gear up to drop. We've got plenty of great examples right here in Lehigh, too, like Murdock Canal Trail. So this is just my copy and paste from that presentation. Also, safety is when you do have those conflict points, looking at how do you make them safer and more forgiving. The car on the left can take the turn a lot faster than the car on the right. So that's building in what we would call low-speed design forgiveness into the system. So people are forced to have to slow down at that crossing. So if somebody's not paying attention, at least people are going slower and there's less likelihood of a worse crash. Next is the comfort principle. You have to design with the user in mind. That means having turn-ready eye, lighting, signage, different things that make it nicer and easier to ride. That includes... That's highlighting where there's a sensor in the path there for the traffic signal. We don't have anything quite like this here yet, but right along you look at the bike signal, you hit it, it turns green so you don't have to stop. The idea of that is, obviously, especially with biking, it takes effort to get up and moving, so the less you have to stop, the more comfortable it is, and then the more convenient it is.

Our example here in Lehigh.

The bridge over Triumph Boulevard, for example, on the rail trail, you don't have to stop at traffic lights or anything. You just keep on moving.

So it lends itself to more use when you have both that convenience and... Other than the dog that's back there.

Yeah. Do you have to watch the dogs? I definitely try to slow down around there. And cohesion is the next principle. Speaking of cohesion. Cohesion. But basically it's the question, can you get from anywhere to everywhere? We all can do that in our cars. Those who can't drive, I feel bad for them because we're still trying to make the system better. But Lehigh is much better than a lot of places out there, as it is. The idea is you have a network spaced in such a way that there's always a good route nearby for wherever you're trying to go or where you're coming from. The recommendation just depends on the context, but between 1,000 and 1,600 foot between parts of the network. Directness basically just comes down to convenience. If you're trying to encourage people to take a bike ride or walk to get somewhere, make it as direct as possible. It all just comes down to convenience. So if you go way far out of the way, then you're like, nah, I'm not going to walk or I'm not going to ride my bike. I'm just going to do what's easy, just hop in the car. So it's not going to work well for every single trip, but as much as we can, especially those shorter trips, that can really help. Directness there's this ratio basically as the crow flies and then you divide the actual roots by that distance and that's your ratio Idea for the main network is a ratio of 1.2 and for the other parts of network a little more detours, okay So an example of this in Lehigh with existing and future trails, you have Thanksgiving Point downtown, which are two pretty big centers for our city. This is kind of our best route right now as far as trying to take the trail network, going up the rail trail, and that has a directness ratio of about 1.43. So it's like three and a half miles as the crow flies, but that's a five mile distance. But our bike plan, which this is already included in our existing one, has this route identified, and that would be a 1.05. So that's going to do a lot better job to convince people to want to take a bike or something to get to Thanksgiving Point from downtown or vice versa.

That's the rail corridor, right? Yeah. Do we have any access to easement there?

Parts, not all. We do have funding to take it from Frontrunner to 2100 North right now, so we're going to be getting design on that project soon. And then UDOT's building a bridge over 2100 North. Going south of there, we still would have to work through using it, so that's going to be a longer-term vision. But we'll have a trail at 2100 and tournament lanes, a little less traffic, so there are some kind of shorter-term routes that can work. Last but not least is attractiveness.

Are you wearing the same shirt?

No, I promise they're different shirts, but they are similar. I don't see any yellow in this one. There's no yellow in that one. I'm actually sad.

Mike is simply a man who knows what he likes.

I don't know which is worse, that you'd have two shirts like that or just have the one.

same one again?

Oh, I think it's a good one.

Um, when you find something, can you step in the side of the podium? Are you, were you wearing gray pants? Yup.

I have like six or seven pairs.

Hey, Einstein had a closet full of the same clothes, so he never had to think about what he wore.

He's a Eliminating the number of decisions in a day. He has to make right?

No, he does have a big decision. Is there yellow?

Okay, you are you're up on the sidewalk, yep, there is a bike on Lame.

Now that's the problem I have with concrete. This is actually a shared use path because it's the wider path. So it is part of a shared use path network, but because it's made out of concrete, it looks like a sidewalk. Yeah, I personally don't like to be that close to the key well in our traffic.

But should... Should the bikes be on the road?

In this case, it's a designated shared use path, so the bike could do either. Usually you're confident faster people like the bike lane, but I prefer not to be that close to high speed traffic myself. The reason I put that as an example here, attractiveness, you know, it's kind of in the eye of the beholder, but generally speaking, green spaces, park spaces, you know, that's a place people love to spend time, so that's more likely to encourage more use. Whereas going along the highway you're gonna lose some people who just really both a comfort safety and an attractiveness thing like industrial areas could be a place That's not very attractive people to use so in general the just the surrounding environment can encourage or discourage people to Then trail lighting it's kind of related to comfort and to attractiveness But if you have lighting at nighttime, you're gonna feel more comfortable and it's not gonna seem so scary and dark So that really helps out with that, too

Is that amount overkill? I mean, it looks like a lot, but maybe not.

It is pretty zoomed in. The power department helped us with this project, and they were awesome. They kind of set the spacing based on what the criteria on the light bulb types were showing. It seems like there are a little bit of dark spaces in between, but I don't know if we want to turn too close. But, yeah, I think what they've put in there is pretty good. And they're looking at doing the next phase going kind of south and east from 12th West. So they want to keep working on this slowly. That was kind of the foundational principles and a quick brush up of the five principles there But now back to the plan we have a section on our existing conditions. It's probably just interesting to know that we have and we're actually closer to about 86 miles of paved trails now in the city about 18 miles of on street bike lanes and And two miles of this is about two miles of separate bike lanes. We have 26 grade separated crossings, just like the bridge there you see in the picture. But the challenges we still have are the sidewalk gaps. A lot of our roads don't have separated facilities or trails of any kind. And then crossing barriers of major roadways. So it's all those things that we'll still have to continue to work on and prioritize which our next steps are going to be. And then we did talk about this a little bit already, but what we've heard from the public, we did outreach between 2022 and 2024. We had several surveys in the Gage-Lehigh. We had a public open house here at City Hall. We even met with residents and advocacy groups that would reach out to us with businesses and developers. Like, you know, we went to Young Living and talked to them and Adobe and, like, what are the kinds of things. that we as a city can do and work with you to help encourage more use, what they would like to see in the community, even Alpine School District and all the city departments. So we're trying to open up different means and ways to get people to engage, not just in open house and not just online. So we're trying to find ways for everybody to be able to give input and all the stakeholders too. And then, again, the most common themes are safety, connectivity, trails, better crossings, and maintenance concerns, especially you've heard a lot about the Durham River Trail being so bumpy. Sorry, this map's not the proposed network, but the idea with the proposed network is we'd have kind of like you do arterial collector and local streets for your road networks. We would have like through routes, primary and secondary routes for the active transportation network. So the idea is, you know, maybe some are classified as through-routes, some may be primary, some may be secondary. So kind of put a classification that maybe helps us with the prioritization, but also what design different things should be. If it's a secondary route, maybe we're not going to put as much investment into it as a primary or a through-route. Through-routes are usually going to be more be able to get like MAG funding or UDOT funding or something, whereas primary routes, maybe not always. So that kind of ties into funding as well.

Mike, about two minutes ago, did you say that the Jordan River Trail is bumpy?

Yeah, it's got all the little cracks.

I agree with you. I just said never heard anyone actually say that. Oh, yeah.

Now, north of 2100, they just repaved it, so it's nice that way. But as soon as you hit 1500 north and go south from there, then a lot of cracks.

Yeah, okay.

I know you're saying this is not the proposed network. Oh, yeah. But there are a couple of things on here that stand out as interesting.

I was going to say, if there's anything that stands out here.

So 700 south. which already has some facilities and improvements we've put on it. I'm curious to the part where it connects and potentially goes under my aircraft.

Is that under or over? The phase one, which looks like we're going to be getting some funding from MAG to complete it from 5th West over to our city boundary. But right now, it's a NAC grade crossing. We'd have to come back to try and get a grade separated crossing.

For sure, we'd love to see either bridge or... At grade crossing right there on Pioneer Cross.

Well, they have a signal that's planned to go in right there. That would be ultimate Frogger with that signal. I do still have safety concerns even just with an at-grade signal. We just don't have the funding for the grade separation at this point.

When can we address it?

And it's on UDOT's radar, you know, at some point, you know, maybe they can help us with grade separation as well. Because that's going to be really important, especially with the front end of the station right there. There's a lot of potential for creating that access to transit, which is a huge generator for active transportation. So I think it's going to be really important at some point to get grade separation in there. Yeah.

I have a question that's maybe a little bit of a tangent.

Sure.

So let's pretend I just moved to Lehigh and I want to bike somewhere and I don't use, I know Strava was like used and I know that's a popular app, but like if I'm not a Strava user, like how would I find these trails? Does that get updated with like Google and Apple Maps so that if I want to take bike as my transportation, it will direct me towards these or is there some other way for somebody to find that out?

Honestly, I don't think there's a very great way. Some cities, like MAG has a regional map that they've done. I just don't know how user-friendly it is on the fly. Yeah. So they keep theirs pretty updated. Usually once a year they're updating that. Okay. Our city GIS is really up to date. That's usually every month or so that we're trying to get that updated. But Google, they're very disappointing lately.

Apple has done me dirty many times, many times. Yeah. So that's just my curiosity is like we're putting all of this effort into it. How can we make sure that just a casual biker that's not somebody who's going out and using Strava and bikes all of the time would be able to find these and we make sure that they're accessible and they know where they're at and getting used.

There's going to be both the strategies trying to do it on apps on the phone, but also on the ground, you know, but some people may want to look up their route before they go. Yeah. Otherwise they may not be comfortable doing it. Yeah. but also wayfinding and other things on the ground too, which we've been doing more, especially around the Thanksgiving Point area. MAG helped us out. We've got a bunch of wayfinding signage put up. So that's been good, but there's still a lot more that can be done.

I'm definitely going to be the one that looks it up first before I ever attempt to do it, just to see what the safe route is. For sure. Yeah?

I'm just saying maybe as part of our implementation, you could add something.

Here's how to find it.

We do have our kind of map viewer on our planning page. I could work with Jason to get our existing bike network, at least on that, so that's at least somewhere people locally can hop on there. But some people, again, I think if we spread the word, hopefully people will be able to find it. For sure. But some people are always going to just default to Google or whatever else.

Yeah.

Which Google frustrates me because I did a bunch of free work for them, and they have a little edit feature, and I'm like, hey, here's all this stuff. Yeah. They still haven't updated it.

I know we put in that bridge at Willow Park across the river. I think that's been a huge gain for Willow Park. A lot of people are using that because of that access. Are there any other choke points or points along the river that we've looked at creating another crossing?

Yeah. I've referred a lot of demand trying to get from Holbrook Farms to the Thanksgiving Point area. So there is a little bit of an improvement being made on that. So UDOT, currently the trail is that picture where you have to go along the roadway. It's not ideal, especially, you know, like some of the students who go to Liberty Hills live over in like Cranberry Farms and all that. My parents don't want their kids walking along a major highway. So even knowing there is a connection, it's not totally all ages and abilities. But UDOT is going to be installing a ped bridge over the river a little bit farther north from 2100. So that'll be a much nicer place to cross. But there's still, if you live in the north end of Holbrook, you don't want to come all the way down and around to get up to the Thanksgiving Point. So I think somewhere to the north of that, we're going to want another bridge. I would love it if we could work at Thanksgiving Point and just strike up an agreement to use their golf cart bridge up here. But we haven't been very open to that in the past. But never say never. And at some point, we might just have to look at doing our own bridge somewhere else.

And then 1700 West, that's a plan to make a separated bike lane?

Yeah, so it's been on our plan for a while. It's on the MAG's plan now, so we got it on MAG's, so we could go after MAG funding on that one. That one's going to be a good north-south connector. So we've heard a lot of comments like we need something on 2300 West to get up to Thanksgiving Point area. But currently 17th West doesn't connect through, so that's either you go 23rd or you have to go all the way over the Jordan River Trail. Some people don't like going that far out of the way. Kind of the idea on that one is we're not planning a route on 2300 West because, first of all, the right-of-way is really constrained. That is one of our primary arterials for the car network. So 17th West, kind of like that safety slide, that's a parallel route we'd rather see a much better bike facility on, less traffic and everything. So eventually it will be able to connect all the way up and kind of connect you right with that new bridge going across 2100 that UDOT's building. So yeah, it's on the plan. That'll stay on the plan, at least on our draft plan. But it's just a matter of when to go after funding or something like that.

So on 700 South, the plan is to build out the rest of that bike lane.

Yeah, the idea is, wherever we can, is to actually move it behind the curve more like a trail. Rather than being out on the street, I think a lot of people would be happier and more comfortable with that. And then they don't feel like the design is quite as different. It's more what we're used to. So we actually got funding to take it from 23rd West to connect into the Jordan Willows Trial Network. So that connection, I believe we start design on that next year.

i'm funding that dotted purple trail right there at the end of 700 the blue oh this one that that trail does not exist no no but that's part of our funding is to build that coming off of seven south there and then uh there's a bunch of homes there so

Yeah, we preserved a 20-foot. We did preserve a 20-foot right-of-way to get behind. You have to kind of go up a couple houses, and then there's a right-of-way that we preserved there. And then we own all the open space behind us, so we'll take the trail behind the homes for a short section there. And then in this latest round of MAG, we don't have the full final governing board approval, but MAG's recommendation has the funding to take this to the boundary. And a lot of us, anytime we're building a new area of road, we're going to basically do as a trail behind the road wherever we can. American Fork actually got funding to take a trail to 850 East but they've had a lot of troubles with right away over there and there's an ag protection zone and everything so they've had a hard time trying to finish that one off but we'll at least get it to our city boundary over there hopefully American Fork can there was actually a sign out there once to say hey new roads coming this year but then it never happened because they had all the right away issues It's been a little bit of a challenge for them. But it's exciting that we'll get that whole connected route from Jordan River Trail toward American Fork through that south end of town.

When you look at this, again, I know this is not official. What are you most excited about?

You. Oh, me?

Which one of these corridors?

I'm pretty excited about all of them.

You're asking him to pick a favorite child.

Or a favorite plaid aqua shirt. Apparently I need to get some more of these. More plaid shirts. But I am pretty excited for that Forerunner Trail, especially with UDOT working with us to get that bridge over 2100. That's a pretty significant barrier to get it. So you can go from the south side of 2100 to Forerunner Station without ever crossing paths with a car. So I think that's going to be huge. The bridge over 2100 and the bridge over Triumph will basically be like you're riding flat on the trail. So the roads dip down. So it's going to be super smooth and seamless. So south, once that connects all the way through.

Will that bridge have cars too?

No, so those are just trail. So from south side of 2100, we have both sides of 2100 are planned to have trails. UDOT will be building portions of the south side. There's some areas we'll develop and we'll have to come in and finish it. And UDOT's actually building an under-crossing or water-buryway dead ends right here, so there'll actually be a trail that goes under that as well. to connect on this west side. So we are getting some good crossing points with that whole project, which is really nice, but it is exciting having this trail here completely grade separated, not next to cars, just going all the way up to the Furniture Station. Which whenever Thanksgiving Point starts building out their whole mixed-use center, then that's also a connection from neighborhoods to the south to get up to, I know they're hoping to get a grocery store and some other stuff up there.

What is Bicycle Boulevard?

Bicycle Boulevard is basically a low traffic street, and you do basically circulation limitations for cars, but allow bikes and pedestrians to go through, so it keeps traffic volumes low. But it is shared with cars, but basically it's a traffic-calm street, and that doesn't allow us through traffic for cars. So those are usually on, like, local streets. You wouldn't want to do that to, like, an arterial road or something, but...

Additional pedestrian bridges over Timpanogos Highway, specifically the one at Center Street.

So Center Street, that's part of the MAG's proposal this year. Assuming the government board approves it, although it was the highest rated project through the MAG process this year. But we propose a little over half the funding, and then we're working with EDOT to try and hopefully get the other half of the funding. The only problem is the MAG funding is not available until about 2029, 2030. But if we know the funding is coming, it's possible the council could always decide to bond for it and then just get reimbursed when that comes in. Yeah, that is.

It is and it isn't, right? It's only three years away. It's only three years away, but.

I mean. Yeah.

Okay.

It would be nice to get a scene of it later, some of the footage I showed Mag to get the funding on it, showed semis running red lights and kids waiting across the street. We've got to do something here.

Okay.

Yeah. That's kind of one of those prioritization things. I'm like, already, even before Sky was building, I'm like, this is going to be such a need when that thing starts blowing up. And now we're at that point.

Yeah. Yeah, any other places in town that you guys are Definitely related so as far as transit goes about what's coming online is there was a lot of chatter and For a while there, especially with our former mayor, he got involved with putting in some op-ed pieces about his opinions of where the rail trail should go or the rail corridor. Yeah. Whatever came of all that discussion.

So the states, well, there was that. Point of the Mountain Transit study. And they did an update to that. And part of that update was both further defining the corridor and the modes and how the modes tracks from our hospital here, the Holy Cross Hospital, all the way up into the point project in Draper. So what they're showing is the tracks connections going up Going down into the point project and connecting the front runner. I believe at that new Bluffdale station that they're building So that's kind of the current plan what the state's planning on It is gonna cross i-15 and then go back which means it wouldn't come up to Lehigh I It'll come to Lehigh. It's just the Lehigh route has always been the same because UT actually already has all the right of way through here. But it's what happens when it goes to Draper was the issue because taking it down to the point of the front runner, it does give access between Lehigh and the point. But that's limited access because we don't have the connection to the blue line. So that whole east side of Draper and Sandy, we don't really have access to with that line. So that was kind of the big stink. I'm like, we already have access to front runner, so the tracks... Yeah, it connects Traverse Mountain and some of those places up to the point in Draper. I guess you could take it to Froner up there if you wanted. But it's a little bit more limiting on the mobility over to, like if you want to get to Draper or Sandy, like say you live in Traverse and you want to get up to the Expo Center up there, you can't really do that very easily from Froner because you're on the other side of the freeway. So that was kind of a big stink on that which I wholeheartedly agree that we should do that But I think the latest from the state was well our first phase is we want to connect the point project But we're not gonna rule out a future connection to the end of the blue line So I know when they went through the public outreach process all the Draper residents came out in arms like we don't want this transit line through here, but it's already there and it was already been planned for a long time they were upset about it so they're basically telling us they're not going to rule it out but there's less motivation to do it though if they already connected to the point project So then as far as other transit goes, the Central Utah County Corridor Project transit study, that one still identifies it as bus traffic transit starting at Holy Cross Hospital going down to Provo. I would imagine at some point they may revisit that if the north one ends up being tracked.

Are we aware of any of the Olympic funding? That's going to be dumped into UDOT. If that's going to bleed into Utah County, or is it mostly?

I have not heard anything specific on that, although we are going to obviously push to advocate for it.

You've got to build a big ice rink.

You have a destination down here. So there's a reason for it. And Adobe still accepts that they didn't get their transit connection. They feel it was promised back in 2012. No.

Sorry.

No, no, that's good. I was going to say transit and the active transportation plan is a really good symbiotic relationship. We can get some things right there. So, yeah, that was just an idea of how we can classify the bike routes there. So some of the major recommendations, and we've kind of already talked about this in some of the goals, but like basically sidewalks, trying to do more of the protected or separated bike lanes, trail lighting, safer crossings. One of the goals was more pedestrian-oriented gathering places, so that's where like in downtown or TODs, getting plazas and other stuff like that to create it. a little bit more sense of community, places to walk to, of course, and then looking at updating our code and design standards in a way that helps achieve these goals of safety but also works for maintenance and stuff like that. That sheet right there is one of the draft sheets in our final PDF kind of graphic design there. So just to give you an idea, we're kind of going for more of a We want the plan to be a little more simple than our existing one, just really get down to the point of what we'd like to see. Then implementation, obviously there's going to be all kinds of ways to fund. We'll have our prioritization plan that we want to get together. Then, yeah, whether it's impact fees on some projects or it's the city doing some budgeting on some probably smaller projects or going after MAG, UDOT funding, the trail network funding. So there's just going to be all these different sources that we're going to try and go after to help implement the plan. And then design-related stuff or anything else, we want to make sure we're always including all the departments and having everybody at the table. Okay, so maybe some additional questions for you all is, you know, do you feel like the vision and everything that this plan is trying to do, do you feel like that's in the right direction for what Lehigh should become? And if not, are there any comments on that? I feel like we're heading the right direction.

We're like, Mike, get this plan out of here.

I mean, I love this stuff. Yeah, it's great.

I don't have any, like the five principles and everything, the foundation and everything you guys feel like is logical.

I've been getting some good answers to the goals, like why on the mileage. I appreciate Tyson pushing on that. Yeah. No, I don't really have any notes or criticisms.

Yeah, we talked about connections and you can always feel free to email us even after this if you're like, hey, I thought about this or that. Of the map, I know you mentioned a couple things for prioritization. Is there anything else in there you feel like is a priority?

I guess obviously there's been a lot of public input on 700 South. So just clarification on what the facilities are intended to look like when they become more permanent.

That was definitely a lesson learned. There was good intentions to do some good public outreach.

I don't hate it anymore, but it does take getting used to, and it is a little foreign when you go on there if you're not used to driving around that area. It looks weird. I still see people blow through that stop sign on... shoot i don't know what it is 17 no it's anyway one of the stop signs i feel like there's to the right road it's here oh yeah people blow through that all the time i've done it i've gone through that stop sign without stopping and noticed after i'm like oh that was just some of the signage and things are a little unclear in that area and i understand people's trepidation to that. But I think it's a great facility. I mean, I feel good when I know that my kids that are trying to go to their friends that are on a different part of the city that's a little further away. I feel good about them jumping on that and being in that protected space. I feel better about it. And if it was more of a permanent structure, I think it would be better and whatnot.

definitely are some things we'd consider the next time we do design like that. And there are some things that we've done since public outreach, like, didn't happen that often, but sometimes, you know, cars would turn into the bikeway and they're like, oh, whoops, and they go over and get out. But we put little yellow delineators in the center line, so like, sorry guys, you're not supposed to come here.

And it's kind of weird that we put the facility on the north side of the road instead of the south side where there's a park or some other things. So if they're on that and they want to get to a park, they have to go down and then back around. Just some things like that that could be potentially thought out a little bit better as far as bringing that pedestrian and the biking facility to more of the recreation purposes. But it's exciting. I mean, I like that we're doing it. I just want it to succeed.

And I will say we've been collecting a lot of data on 7 South and it does show some safety improvements compared to similar intersections elsewhere in town, like higher yield rates at the crosswalks, people are catching themselves. You know, there's footage of a car turning, but then they, because there's a little yield zone there, they turn and then they see the crosswalk and they can see somebody's in it, so they wait, versus, you know, having to look in your blind spot, basically, to see someone on the street corner. So there have been some, you know, it's not perfect by any means, and there's obviously better ways to do it. But for what it is, it has, I do believe, had some positive impacts.

Yeah. I'd like to see as many connections as we can get from the Traverse Mountain area up and over Timpanogos Highway. It feels like we're a little bit of an island up there, and you kind of have to get in a car. I mean, my daughter's been swimming at the rec center for the last six or seven years. I would have loved it at five in the morning. She could have hopped on a bike and ridden safely down to the Legacy Center instead of me having to drive her, but those days are over because she can drive herself now. You know, it doesn't mean that I wouldn't want to see that for future, right? Safe ways for kids to be able to get up and over that highway, whether they're going to school or they want to come downtown and, you know, just hang out at parks or things like that down here. Just that's what I would love to see eventually to just make that a little bit more interconnected and let the kids be a little bit more independent as opposed to having to have mom drive you across the highway because she doesn't want you hit by a car. Yeah.

so you understand which when you think about our traffic issues not that we'll ever solve all of them no but all these little local trips can also congest the big roads so all these little things can help yeah they add up for sure yeah there's not just one way to solve it all yep 1700 west the north south corridor is is nice for mobility as far as distance and connecting some places

However, Center Street is the prime where people want to be, right? You've got the Legacy Center. You've got some other things. You've got the library. You've got all these other things that are here. And it almost feels like that should be the prime corridor of where we're building these facilities out is because there's things that people want to go to, right? There's not a lot on 1700. There's a school. There's two schools on 1700 West, which is great, right? Yeah. That's kind of it. Am I missing something on 1700 West? I mean, I guess, again, it's a good corridor. Helps with the longer trips.

Yeah, I think it's going to bring people towards the center, but then you're right. Then we've got to get some good connections going east-west so that people can get to the different spots, yeah.

That'll be the, and feedback like that is great because as we get the, start working on the prioritization plan, like here's what our priorities are, you know, we're hearing a lot that like things like Center Street should be a high priority, then obviously we're going to want to take a look at that.

And maybe that's just me being selfish, but there's things on Center Street that I would like to bike to that I don't feel comfortable buying.

I'm always looking over at the Legacy Center my how many bikes are on the rack and sometimes there's a couple and sometimes There's like ten bikes over there, so I see a lot of people trying to get over there doing that so I Totally agree that downtown downtown is one of our least connected parts of town right now We really need to get some good connections down through here So what's the process with some of these?

I mean, we're losing our big vacant parcels now, right? So what's the process? Do you go to the landowner? You just put it on the master plan and say, okay, this is what we're going to do. When you develop, just know what you're going to have to put.

It depends on a couple of factors. First of all, if we're talking on-screw stuff, then most of it we would have to look at our existing right-of-way. We're looking at the trail network, which are newer communities. Obviously, we've had the opportunity to plan that ahead of time. So they're like Holbrook Farms and Inverness and all that. Traverse Mountain, they're pretty well connected with trails. So in the new areas, we've been doing great on that. But we have trails, and there's some parcels that haven't developed yet. Obviously, when they develop in the city, we have to reimburse them for it. The toughest ones are the ones where nobody has any intentions of developing. We have to purchase right away or an easement or something. Not that we want to go in and force people to do things, but you have to have them agree to sell it. So that's part of our prioritization plan. We're going to want to take that into consideration. Front our trail coming down crossing 2100 north it's kind of our phase one to get that first connection down But phase two is probably going to be guiding people to turn them in Lane Maybe there's some things on Truman Lane. We can do to help people feel more comfortable But for now it's gonna be that's gonna be one of the tougher sections is that trail behind all those houses over there Right away is gonna be tough on that

So I think in the end, we would rather have more bike paths off of roads. So if you look at some of these vacant parcels or undeveloped parcels, it would be nice to get those right-of-ways secured and at least some kind of agreement.

undeveloped that's where more of the opportunity exists to try and get some good corridors like with that new edge subdivision out west of 23rd and west has a connector trail that's going through that but because it was on the plan we're able to have them incorporating the development but I will say that anytime you know maybe it's 50 years from now but every road has to get rebuilt at some point and that's where there's always an opportunity to take it to an off-street type of bike facility, but we just don't have the money to go do that all at once right now, but every single road at some point is going to have to go through that, and that's a good opportunity to make it a better design.

Yeah, and to your point, if it's vacant or undeveloped right now, and if we put it on our plan, and when it does come into development, we say, okay, you're required to But then we would either reimburse voluntarily or we'll do one of these. We're going to give you two additional lots.

Like a density bonus kind of thing. So we could do it both ways.

So we have the tools that we can use. They're not developing. That's where it's more difficult. You have to have them agree to it.

And then once it comes in, then we can require it if it's on our plan. If it's not on the plan, then...

Okay. Yep. So the important thing is having the plan in place. So like as far as the implementation goes, wherever development's occurring, we'll require them to put it in if it's shown on the plan. But then there's a lot of the projects where, whether it's an on-street bike lane or something, that we'll have to find other funding sources for.

What are the chances of getting a trail down Dry Creek?

That's going to be another one of the tough ones because you can't force it. It's an independent right-of-way, so it's a lot easier to get trails along roads because usually you're building a road in the first place anyway. That one will be nice once it's done through there.

It would be awesome, right, to connect whatever the name of that mud puddle is up behind Smith's. All the way down through Family Park, down to Dry Creek Park, and then Center Street and into the middle.

That will probably be one of our hardest trails to get there right away on in town, honestly. Now, getting from 6 East going down, that might be possible in the near future, especially since Vivian Estates is developing there, and they're getting the trail through that part of it. And the trail's almost up to Center Street, so there's just a little bit of a gap in there that we'd have to work on some property, but Yeah, going east of 60s up to 12th East that's gonna be one of the hardest trails in town to get It'll be a very nice one, but Yeah Yeah, that'd be a great connection it's on the mag plan it's on our plan Yeah, you just gotta work the property owners Cool yeah, there's nothing else. I think that's all we have for you tonight, so I Now, Kim, do you have any other business or anything?

I was just going to mention

We have a new traffic engineer. You guys all remember Lou.

And unfortunately, he left for UDOT. But yeah, I guess at some point you'll meet him. His name's Matt Seal. And we have a new assistant city engineer. I think you guys all know Lauren retired at the end of June. So Brad is now the city engineer. And we have a new assistant city engineer who's sitting right there.

Yeah, there's a he just he hasn't even started yet is August 17 he'll start a week Monday and

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

But we know who's senior. Yeah. We know who's senior. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. We know who's calling the shots.

You know what. Yeah. What about, are we replacing Kate?

I think you're in the, you're trying to, right? Replace, get a new deputy recorder.

Yeah.

It's great because we never get philosophical or

Drag out a point.

Any other city business?

No, other than your next regular meeting is a bigger one. So you've already seen the packet, or at least it's out there now. But it's kind of a two-for-one since we canceled the last one in July. So it always stacks up a little bit.

And I will not be here for it.

Okay. Hopefully. He's like, I'm out.

He's like, I'm out. I was going to be. I'm just going to tap out right now. Over five items, I'm out. I'm afraid of God. I have a conflict up in Salt Lake that night.

And then if there's any other ideas for work sessions, we wanted to cover this one so that when we bring it back, we'll hopefully bring this. We're going to do the same thing with council, and then we're ready to get this thing adopted. So we'll probably bring this back to you in September, I'm guessing, maybe late August, probably September for public hearing. But, yeah, if you have other ideas for work sessions or you want to go look at something again, let us know. We're open to, if there's a burning topic, you're like, man, I really want to learn more about this or let's, this is an issue, let us know.

Okay.

Yeah, that's all I had. You guys think of anything else? I think we're good. Okay. All right. Motion to adjourn.

Second. Motion and a second. All in favor? Aye.

Any opposed?

Wow. Wow. The Assistant Senator is taking some liberty.