Recommendation to Authorize the City Manager to Execute a Contract Amendment with Ray’s Electric for the Park Street Corridor Safety and Operations Improvement Project, No. P.W. 03-15-03, in an Amount Not to Exceed $99,750, Including Contingency, for a Total Expenditure Under the Agreement, of $429,830. (Public Works 91170)
Recommendation to authorize the City Manager to execute a contract amendment with res electric for the Park Street Quarter Safety and Operations Improvement Project and an amount not to exceed 99,750. And who pulled h. We have a speaker and. Okay. Oh, okay. Oh, so we have a speaker. Hello? So you're probably wondering why I'm up here speaking out on a public works electrical contract? Because it's actually because the devil is in the details. You might remember I spoke at the last council meeting about the need to implement complete street designs. If we're going to make any headway in both reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, which 40% of which come from personal transportation. And if we're going to make any headway in building safer, slower streets, streets where parents can feel safe walking in a crosswalk with small children without having to literally push them out of the way out of the crosswalk to avoid traffic violence, as happened very recently here in Alameda. I want to thank Vice Mayor John Knox White for drafting his call to action this weekend. I hope all of you have had a chance to see it, so I won't waste any more of my time listing his recommendations. I just I want to urge you to do all those things, do all of them with the same urgency that you would give an emergency that you said that we're in. I appreciate that. As a council, you really don't have a lot of opportunity to affect change as much as you'd like or really as much as we would like. But there are things that you can do. You can do the things that the vice mayor recommended. So please do those things. His first recommendation was that we do no more repaving without complete street design and increased safety for people crossing the street. I'm here because I respectfully suggest that we actually expand that recommendation to include all projects, too, that define how we prioritize pedestrians relative to cars. And a big button project is a great example of that. I asked that these contracts and that the final work product are evaluated relative to your mandate that we prioritize people movement over car movement. I what I don't want to see is us ending up with the same type of back button configuration and signal phases that was pretty recently implemented at one of Vista and Sherman. That's a that's a real mess for pedestrian and it clearly prioritizes drivers over over people walking. So if we don't review projects, including the two paving projects that are also on the agenda tonight, from a complete streets perspective, we'll end up with more projects like what Caltrans just did on the other side of the Park Street Bridge. The Park Street Bridge is the first safe estuary crossing for the west half of Alameda. For people who are walking or biking and it was just made exponentially more dangerous because no one did a design review from a Complete Streets perspective. The best way to ensure that all of these projects are reviewed through a complete street lens is to act on the vice mayor's third recommendation, which is to hire a new traffic engineer who gets safe, who gets street safety in cities. Please do this with the urgency of the emergency that you declared. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Mr. Pena. And do you have any other speakers on this item? But I saw the city engineer. Mr. Wickstrom, did you want to come up and say a few words about this item? Why it might be too strong a verb. I tend to. And it's certainly. Good evening. Madam Mayor, members of the City Council. The item that has been pulled is item five H. It's for the Park Street Traffic Safety Improvements. This project is, I'll say, a bit of a legacy project. It dates back to 2011 based on the CP number. The transportation engineer who was previously working on it is no longer with the city. I'm here to kind of bring this forward to see what we can do to push this, I'll say, across the finish line and satisfy all the original grant requirements. I understand there are some considerations about how this signal operations are will be brought into affect once the project is complete. I personally as not being a traffic engineer, I'm not qualified directly to speak on that and would suggest that that's not an appropriate topic for tonight. However, if that would be the direction of the council, there's something we could bring back to to the to this body at a future date prior to. I think those are improvements going operational. Thank you. Any questions on the staff report or any questions for Mr. Wickstrom? And go first. Comment. A comment would work. Vice Mayor So I just thank you for that explanation and thank you to the Speaker. I had a chance to speak with public works staff before we are in one of these difficult places where the the entire staff that worked on this project and brought it to the Council for original approval is no longer here. But I do want to reflect that before that project was approved, the issues that Mr. Pena raised related to the pedestrian pushbuttons were agreed to not go into effect, whereby we will not have lights where auto triggering happens and pedestrian triggering doesn't. And so we have that in writing that was promised by by the both the city engineer and the public works director before it was brought to council as a part of the support that bike walk Alameda did for this project originally. So happy to bring it back to council for further discussion on that. But I just wanted to make sure that we pegged that for the public speaker that those issues were addressed before this project moved forward. And my expectation is when it goes in operations, it will go in as as agreed to. So could that be translated into direction to staff to make sure that that. Yeah, I don't I mean, I don't think it needs to come personally. I would suggest it doesn't need to come back as long as the, as long as the agreement that was made. And I'm happy to send the emails that show what was agreed to basically that all modes are given equity when the light is triggered, whether it's triggered by signal or by signal, car actuator or pedestrian button. Okay. Well, and perhaps just to report back to the council when that takes place would be good. Okay. And Councilmember Odie. I had a question on one quick comment. So the speaker kind of triggered something. Is it? I believe it's possible, because I think it's happened to me in San Francisco. Is it possible that you could time crosswalk signals so a pedestrian could just, like walk nonstop over a long period of time? So instead of timing it for autos, you could time it for pedestrians. Right. It's just coincidental that in theory. Yes, in theory, yes, that is possible. The difficulty is that the distance between intersections is so great and the walking speed is so variable between one person and the next. It's really tough to say whether it's going to be 45 seconds or 52 seconds between someone who would get between intersection. So while in theory, yes, you could in practicality, you really can't do that. Okay, maybe I just walk average. And then the other thing, I think the issue on the Park Street, if memory serves me correct, I think that was a city of Oakland design, not a Caltrans issue. So if you want to direct your your anger at anyone, it belongs at the city of Oakland, not at Caltrans.