Consider Providing Direction to Staff on Transportation Priorities in Advance of the Active Transportation Plan Work. (Vice Mayor Knox White and Councilmember Oddie)
I okay. That passed unanimously. Right. Okay. And there is a second council referral on providing direction. Uh, do you want to read that one out and. Consider providing direction to staff on transportation priorities in advance of the action transport? Active transportation plan work. Maybe I can't read, but this is placed on the agenda at the request of Vice Mayor Knox White and Councilmember. So I'll quickly open and then pass it over to my colleague, the vice mayor. The impetus was to make sure, as we do, planning for transit priorities and these projects that we emphasize or re-emphasize as the case may be, that safety, pedestrian safety and especially bicycle safety is our primary focus. We're very concerned, and some of the activists in the bicycle community are concerned that, you know, we keep the bicycle safety foremost. You I started my public service grade 16 on the Bicycle Safety Council. This is a critical issue to me. So, you know, and streamlined processes and make sure that, you know, we can get these these issues addressed quickly and promptly. But we had the issue with the, you know, Atlantic Crossing and all that that just took eons. So I'm going to turn it over to the vice mayor to kind of go into a little more detail. Sure. So thank you. I think also from my standpoint, it was important to just check in with the council because there are a lot of conversations happening around some of these issues and making sure that there's council buy in on on this. As mayor, as he Ashcraft knows, we've met with the Otis neighbors, two sets of them, to talk about their concerns about street safety and speeds. I met with the neighbors and Fern's side. There have been the neighbors on Sherman. A lot of neighborhoods are having concerns. And, you know, we talked during the transportation annual report about a lot of a lot of this. This was really just kind of coalescing kind of all the different things we've talked about for the most part over the last five months or so about creating a safety toolkit that was going to come back by the end of the year as part of the active transportation program. So kind of traffic calming tools that we can do. The idea here is not to give direction to write these policies, but to kind of just start fleshing out some ideas. So the idea of actionable toolkit, so not just a long list of things that people can start picking and choosing, because my experience and not just here is that everybody chooses the easy stuff and says, well, that's hard. And the hard stuff is often that's what we need. We I have heard from a number of groups about just kind of we need that. We need some sort of streamlined process. We right now, we have our groups ask for permission to talk to the staff. And then six or nine months later we meet and then they put together a 2 to 3 year plan. And three years into it, we've done the first two phases and phase three is so big and expansive and everybody's kind of forgotten about it, which is the inside plan. And those first two phases are usually things that everybody could probably guess are not the things that are going to make an impact. So let's go to phase three. Let's figure out a way to go cheap with paint and posts and things like that and start doing cheap but effective things as opposed to expensive flashing signs that don't change behavior the way again, staff can come back with how they how best to do that. The idea about the policies that we've talked about. So we've had conversations multiple times here about the lane widths, policies and whatnot for for reducing speed around the intersection. Access equity. The parking policy started tonight the Vision Zero policy. Councilmember Odie and I talked a little bit. I'm sorry. There are some. I would. I sent you the wrong version of this, but it is automatic automatic speed enforcement cameras. There are some things that are happening to the state right now. There are conversations that are happening between now and the end of the year that are not on our legislative agenda. So the idea of adding automatic speed enforcement, talking about 85th percentile speed reform, that the estuary bike agreement will be coming back on October 1st. There's a move right now which we talked about as a part of the carp, but rebates for e-bikes. Right now, we give eBay. For some reason we're only rebating cars. So there's a movement and some bills being worked in Sacramento around the idea of supporting and giving the same kind of support for electric bikes and then bringing back something that was going to come back within a year. And I think we're past a year now. But the E-bike and E-Scooter policy, which at this point in time so many cities have those, we should be able to just cut and paste from somewhere else, change the city name and and be there. And then the idea was to really try to bring back by next fall the active transportation plan to really kind of set this council's like expectation that that thing is on a on a fast track. So those are my. Yeah. So with 7 minutes to go, does anyone want to comment further or perhaps make a motion or both? So I'm going to make a motion. To the microphone a little. Bit. I'm going to make a motion to to do just that. But I also want to just comment that I think a lot of this is about the impact to existing neighborhoods as much as it is about making sure that the roads we're creating in our new developments adhere to these values and are doing, you know, the most forward thinking things possible to make sure that we are making it safe and accessible for our cyclists and pedestrians. So I think that there is a timeliness element to this, and I think that and I think my colleagues for bringing this forward. Okay. So we have a motion who's going to second. I will. Seconded by Councilmember Ody all in favor I opposed abstain. State for now. Motion carries for to with when four in favor one abstention. Okay. So then we have council communications. I. Yeah.