just stand before you today under the circumstances i can tell you that all three of the select one who are here tonight we're not having an official meeting but we're all here because of our grave concerns about safety in the town including but not limited to the second or lexington street intersection in light of the recent tragedy this like we're glad that the traffic advisory committee is taking up this issue so expeditiously tonight hopefully that you can come up with some recommendations to the board of selectmen because we would like to take those up and act on them as quickly as possible we do have an item on our agenda from monday night on september seventeenth at our regular selections meeting to take up any recommendations should you come up with any tonight i'm not pushing you to do your work in a particular timeline i'm just letting you know that we have the ability if you so chose to do something tonight is a recommendation this like we're willing to take it up a s a p it is we've been taking steps as you know to deal with intersections proactively and crosswalks and other interactions were protesters and vehicles cross in addition to this particular intersection we've recently done marsh street winter street ernest cross street the burbank school area on school street but this intersection is something we would certainly like to take your advice on any improvements as well as the town wide traffic study that's ongoing to address intersections and crossings  and safety for that i should also note you know the borders like an adopted the complete streets program and that is allowing us to leverage state money to deal with some of these issues as well we do have a plan the bigger goal just so the public understands the selectmen has prior to this recent tragedy has had actually been working on coming up with a list of concerns of intersections and crossings of concern and then we would have a public form the intent would be to have a public forum get comments from the public and then prioritize those areas and then get the funding through complete streets and otherwise to start addressing them in order of priority that has been the slogans plan that will continue to be this likeness plan moving forward i just want to make sure the public understands and you can rest assured that the town of the board of selectmen are on this we're working on this and i urge all of you to please stay involved thank you thank you very much we are all here because we care about making traffic safer for everyone in our town and you know devastated that one of our residents was recently hit and killed and killed while crossing the street and across rock rear all here because we want to examine this tragedy and come up with some strategies to avoid accidents in the future we want to hear from all of you and we want to assure you that you will have an opportunity to speak to set your expectations for the evening we want you to know that then have the benefit of sharing the same level of understanding about the accident you may have questions for the police department and i ask you to write these down or remember them to ask after all of the presentations have ended and we have opened up the meeting of public comment and i would also ask that you all come to the microphone at the lectern here thank you next glen clancy our town engineer will provide you with the background and context for understanding how the tom has approached traffic at the end to section where the accident occurred and how we are approaching traffic concerns more general and town again you may have questions and i ask you to hold these until we open up the floor  public comment when mr clancy has finished his presentation i will then open up the meeting for public comment next we will hear from assistant chief really what happened and that we reexamine all of our intersections and see which ones can be improvement improved whether it's through enforcement engineering and education and i think that the or anything like that with we're under strict orders not to talk about one of the frustrating things and this is not anything new this goes back to the district attorney so we do our investigation with the massachusetts state police can collision reconstruction team and the district attorney and it can take six months to over a year for these cases to close and anyone that i worked it's even remotely similar thoughts similar to this people in my neighborhood will remember in two thousand and four we had a bishop at the armenian church was struck and killed a beach in white street and it was frustrating for me i attended many meetings and people all willing to make guesses and estimates and spoke on things about what happened in that crash in one of the things was everybody was convinced it was a speeding motor vehicle and and when it was all said and done speed had nothing to do with with that history and fatality crash so you know we have to when we look at these intersections and we look at everything we have to take everything into consideration and i hope we have a productive night as larry said we all have everybody's interest and safety in mind you know we had answer any questions that you have and if you know historical data or anything like that please feel free to hi my name is glenn clancy i'm the director of community development in the town engineer i'm sorry about the terrible incident that has brought us all together here this evening i think we all hope that something positive will come out of this tragedy i understand that traffic and safety issues are a community concern and that there is a need to constantly and consistently stay focused on the issue i want to assure all of you that we understand that meeting this challenge requires ongoing effort working together with the traffic advisory committee the belmont police department public works the board of selectmen and we've been able to do many things to improve the pedestrian bicycle and motorists experience in belmont the capital budget committee in town meeting have been willing partners funding many of these projects if you haven't already i encourage you to take the handout available at the door listing the work that has occurred in town much of this work was done over the last five years or so specifically related to the intersection of lexington sycamore street  the issue was brought before the traffic advisory committee in two thousand and fourteen specifically the concerns were the high number of motor vehicle crashes in that location and also the speeding on lexington street the committee discussed the intersection over a period of several meetings beginning in the fall of fourteen into the winter of fifteen and ultimately the recommendation was to install the raised intersection as a means of slowing traffic down i think if you look at the crash history prior to the installation of the reason for section and you look at it over the last couple of years you'll see that there's been a significant drop in crashes i do want to speak very briefly to comments i've heard about the lack of a four way stop in this location  you know as the conversation was playing out with the traffic advisory committee idea to valuate that intersection for a four way stop unfortunately the proximity of that intersection to the intersection of church street and lexington street which is signalized makes it impossible to stop traffic with a stop sign at that intersection the reason being if you if you go out to church street in lexington street during the afternoon peak and you and you watch how many vehicles released from the signal at church street during  afternoon peak there's anywhere from ten to twelve vehicles that will clear that signal before the traffic is stopped now if you can imagine ten to twelve vehicles releasing a church street and then working their way along lexington street and then stopping at a stop sign on sycamore street what you realize is that those ten to twelve vehicles do not clear the stop sign at sycamore street before the wave of the next ten to twelve are released to church street so it would take probably four or five light cycles to eventually have a queue of traffic that goes back beyond church street and and at that point is actually infringing upon traffic contrapuntal road so there has to be some coordination in the way traffic moves from church street through the intersection of lexington and sycamore and that is the reason why a stop sign did not work in that location and that is the reason why ultimately the reason for section was deemed the best option at the time because it was aimed at specifically addressing the vehicle crashes and the speeding on lexington street  moving forward just to reiterate some of the points that chairman dash made there is an ongoing town wide study which began last spring and will be presented to the traffic advisory committee at the november meeting this report will help us decide how to manage traffic moving in and through town and also how best to mitigate traffic impacts in the neighborhoods a traffic calming policy will also be developed to provide the tools to mitigate traffic impacts in addition the town has been actively working with the complete streets program and we expect to hold public sessions later in the fall to discuss potential projects  we will now open the meeting for public comment please indicate your interest in speaking by raising your hand i will try to call on everyone who has indicated her or his interest in speaking at least once i will be disinclined to call on the same person more than once until everyone who is interested as had a chance to speak you and let's begin levy my name is jim paths a niece and my wife and i live in lexington saint we've been there for twenty seven years and i've been an advocate for slowing the speed until the stop sign at peachtree went up there was nothing stopping you before you hit the bottom of the street to that cross walk and before you hit the lights at church street so the stop sign at in both directions because it's a four way stop because that night you can't see you can't pick up that stop sign is a mailbox a bus stop sign and then the stop sign so we need something very evident particularly at dusk and at night certainly is this is a launchpad it's quite a bump and if you're going down the hill to that you go twenty miles an hour to go over it people who stay at the stop sign see you slow down they cut across or they go in front of you thinking that you're going to stop before you go over that so we need some sort of other mediation and that it's a section to indicate who's going to stop and who's going to go you put nice sidewalks in twenty years ago so people can walk the streets and cross back and forth they're no not enough glassworks when i have had this conversation when you turn the corner my collection t intersection that stops that right there no cross walk there's no cross walk from the mill box to ripley road to the mailbox on my actions street there is a cross walk to go from the street corner to a cross walk to the church parking lot and now there's a crosswalk at at the stop sign i'm like lexington and beach so we can't do anything about the volume i've been told but we can do some of the about just the speed i would love to have the reputation of this town being hard i tra you good evening this is show no like from force to come or st i know also a town meeting member precinct four thank you very much for allowing us to come and speak here and i really appreciate you guys letting us talk  and i'm sure together we can come up with a solution i do want to mention i'm here also because of losing a very dear friend and if i may take her name such a tunnel of detail no family should have to go through what that family went through first day of school and the kids were out and funeral home not at school so i say that because i think it's important to put it out there i've been living on for sycamore street for over thirteen years and that whole area is extremely problematic i will underscore what the gentleman before me said lexington and sycamore is really dangerous intersection i know so many people who've had an accident me being one of them and the raised table or i'm not sure exactly what the technical word for that it's actually very confusing when just traffic is coming from lexington and it slows down and i'm always crossing from sycamore to lexington and i am one of them wondering is this my chance to cross or not and you almost feel like a mouse scurrying around because you think that lexington traffic is going to stop but they don't stop because of they see the green light they are just waiting for that race table to end and they are launching and i had an accident because it's also a blind spot you can see traffic coming in the same vein the sycamore and white street where the back are schoolers it's a very very dangerous intersection even though there is a cross guard and yes i appreciate that  sidewalk was made on the left side of sycamore if you are facing propeller but on the i'm sorry on the right side of sycamore where the schoolers but there is no sidewalk on the left side of sycamore and even though the school and the police department has put up the sign no parking on this side i understand i'm on pier and i have to pick up and drop off my kids but the rolling everybody is just  they park on the right side and then they go and pick up the kid and i can understand that but it's extremely dangerous now you throw in two three four five six in just eight inches of snow the snow banks you can even sneak secrets coming and actually i have called the principal personally saying i'm afraid i'm going to run over a kid i'm trying to back or kids are so tiny they're running everywhere that intersection like lexington sycamore and then lexington and very white and beach very very very dangerous despite cross guards it happens all the time i would very quickly give an anecdote just happened on the day after such as memorial when william brownsburg was there mom with two kids was trying to cross from lexington site to the site she's on cross walk waiting and the car coming from the dunkin donuts side i don't know where that gave the indication it's going to stop or not and as the mom with the to get started to walk this car just zone by i mean you know it's another tragedy waiting to happen little kids everywhere and the fact that our town is a cut through town i'm not sure why belmont has no one does anything about preventing stop at the cross the police car went around and went up to hawthorne to lighten up the situation that was very afraid like is the car following me but it wasn't as soon as the car didn't stop for me to cross the cops went after that this is a regular patton cars do not stop for traffic do not suffer but history and it doesn't matter it's come to the point that we are telling our kids you cannot trust their cars that they will stop them and we should say that but it's come to the point that i mean it's almost like you step and then you step back will i go will i not be able to go so thank you for taking the time to listen but that sycamore and lexington and sycamore and white it's another tragedy waiting to happen that much i can sa a lot of confidence having lived there for so many years thank you good evening my name's playing soccer i live on the corner of peach thomas and we believe this is not specific my comment to sycamore i've been here for sixteen years at that address and the things i want to say quickly are where i live it is a no right turn on red that is regularly bored by lots and lots of drivers on a daily basis there was one day i d p w truck ignore the right turn on red and almost hit me and my son and the driver stopped and he was freaked out for probably the reason that he almost heard us and probably worried i was going to like report him return a man which i didn't do instead we had about a five minute conversation about that intersection and i asked him at that moment could he please tell everybody else who works for the town among white whatever department to please and i'm not sure how do you know all that i love traffic is not there's no traffic calming i don't like but to this day it's about enforcement to a large degree to me and i'd like to see greater in foresman specific to where i live of course you know that this is a cut a ticket written where i live for any of the three of the four ways that you can go at my intersection beach thomas we really are no turn on red and not once have i ever seen a ticket written or anybody pulled down for doing that so my biggest concern is during school hours i'm concerned all the time my biggest concern is the risk pool hours and although roads like common street can be very treacherous there are crossing guards at  and and common and up by the by the middle school lots and lots of kids walk through my intersection to get to first the high school and then the middle school and then the wellington and i know the police have limited resources but if once in a while a police car could just be stationed there visible to everybody that's go slow people down at that intersection is going to prevent the right turn on red and it's a slow everybody down cause that's also a very dangerous hi my name is kate caffrey i live at sixty three sixty more street i'm a neighbor of saatchi's and i am intimately aware of sycamore in lexington because i can hear it from my living room window when the windows are open in the summer but i don't necessarily want to talk about the cars i'd like to talk about people i think in belmont were known as the town of homes and there are people in those homes and i feel as if we're focusing much too much on cars and not enough on people i think many many people in belmont are pedestrians we walk we like the fact that belmont is a small town and we can walk to places and i think we have crossed some crosswalk we don't have enough signals to drivers to let people know that there are cross walks i work part time at u mass boston and i drive a bell street in south boston and i become really aware  of signs and signals that are there every time there is a cross walk there are white poles i don't know what they're called and there's painting those are inexpensive things that we could do for all of our cross walks and in every single pedestrian cross walk there is a sign that says state law requires requires that you yield to pedestrians in a cross  k i have seen some of those in belmont center but i see none on the butler side of belmont i walk i but i don't think this is a butler issue i think this is a town white issue because i'm sure there's other cross walks i walk that intersection every day and this morning  woman was in the cross walk crossing the street and a van zoomed down lexington street didn't stop she was in the middle of the crosswalk he beeped his horn and kept going so and that's with saatchi's memorial right there so we need to make people aware that there is an intersection there i think people it comes on people the speed bumps come on people you can look at the scrapes and the speed b ump you know you can hear the sound of the trucks i think that's part of the other issue i don't know much about this accident but i know the size of the band that hit if you're in a van or a truck those speed bumps student nothing they fly right over those speed bumps there's no damage to their car there's damage to smaller cars but the trucks and the vans and i don't i doubt that speed was was part of this accident because of the way that it happened but people also when you talk about the traffic backing up people can't see people in the intersections drivers can't see the drivers drivers on lexington can't see people coming up lexington street so i've had drivers say to me i put my foot on the gas and i just hope and pray no one's going to hit me so who knows what happened with this accident is that what happened with this accident because it was eight thirty in the morning when there was all this traffic backed up in the end the person couldn't see i don't know but i know that's an issue i think at the least we need a pedestrian light there that will make drivers stop when people want to cross a street that's not a stop sign and the traffic can flow if there are no pedestrians but if you're a pedestrian you want to cross a street i think you should be able to feel safe stepping out of foot thank you would hear six to seven carts screeching honking and cars losing control of that intersection i've made it a habit forget about the intersection not even take the crosswalk sidewalk because i'm so what it is going to lose  where you just don't know is the part slowing down is he stopping and invariably they're not stopping and you just don't know so the point i'm trying to echo is you know you can do all the research we can look at the historical data but i think a tragedy did happen and that's one too many and i am wrong but i think something else might happen there again soon so whatever was done in the past nor fingerpointing but it's a badly designed intersection you can't change driver habits but really i think something including my eight month old daughter that are thirty to forty kids at any time of the day on doc to treat that is not a speed bump that is nothing and that intersection unfortunately is not helping ease two kids are the same age as my boys and we spend a lot of time together so it was it is really like using family i've been living in and around the neighborhood streets of concord avenue right  school district for the last ten years and i can tell you that it has gotten the traffic in that area as in all of belmont has significantly gotten worse over the years talking specifically about the neighborhood that i live and school district and a lot of kids are walking to school right in front of my own house and there is no sidewalk on either side of that street  everyone is trying to cut across to try and get to brighton and so everyone is cutting across newcastle which is a dead end street on one side it is so bad that me and my neighbor  cannot even get out of our drive in the morning i have pictures from this morning at eight o'clock and traffic was backing up all the way from through newcastle and i am right on the junction of elliott and  newcastle and i can't even get my car out and there's kids walking at the same on that road and there are no sidewalks on either side my neighbor next door neighbor she's been living in the town for thirty years now and i was talking to her and she is like you cannot even imagine how the situation has force and over the over the years so the larger point that i really want to make is that money is not a hive a betterment is not a free parking lot for  you know for people to cut through the town and get to cambridge or boston and and specially zipping through our neighborhood streets where there are little kids and and family staying and just do you know perhaps you know give voice to what some others might have might be thinking as and certainly i've been thinking this i attended the selectmen meeting last week and i think one of the gentlemen mentioned that we've been looking at this problem for for nine years and  someone mentioned that we looked at this intersection of lexington and sycamore four years ago and we're still looking at it and just listening to that somehow makes me feel that urgency is missing that if it takes us nine years to look at a problem and we still have a tragedy like this clearly if you're not doing enough and clearly if you're not doing the right things and i really feel that this is just  of i feel like this is just the kind of slow bureaucratic decision making that you know makes people just stay away from getting involved and distrust government all over the place like if this is what a small town government behaves like like  have can you be more transparent and how their resources are being put to use how these things are being prioritized and specifically in terms of managing traffic including everyone right my name is patrick starman sullivan paul three wrote which is a very well known shortcut between common street and to apollo over the years and i've lived in town for nine years over the years we've seen an increasing amount of traffic coming down paul free trying to avoid the intersection between common interpol oh cutting through our street two years ago to old was resurfaced and at that time when there was construction on going i talked to one of the police officers from the belmont police department who was posting there and he said like well now that the roads been resurfaced we will be posting here a little more because people will be speeding down the road so in the two years since the road has been resurfaced at least during the hours that matter which is rush hour traffic i've seen any number of police cars on shore palo wrote watching traffic coming down to local going up to palo i've never seen a car looking for the shortcuts i have a five year old and a seven year old across from us live and not a family with a six year old and an eight year old above is another seven year old these boys play out in the yard all the time my neighbor and i have gone to the point where when the boys are playing outside we both pull our cars out of driveway put them on the street right across from each other and create a funnel it's wide enough for a fire truck to pass don't worry about  however we try and force to slow traffic down i have had to step into the street numerous times standing in front of a rushing car coming down the hill with somebody on the phone trying to shave off two minutes from their commute waving them down more often than not i get i don't honk that many people do slow down the fact of it is what is being done about the shortcuts one of the additional things that could very easily and cheaply being done is put a couple of speed bumps down that hill when people start spilling their coffee during the morning commute don't stay on common they'll take the intersection not to mess up their clothes the other thing is it's very how do you say it it's very unclear on all the intersections where one road one side road has a stop sign the other side does not get any indication that they have the right of way now i know that in the us and i'm not from here i mean i grew up in the netherlands we have signs indicating when you have the right of way at the same time the other side has a stop so it's very clear which way you can go which way you should go so i know there's been a lot of investigation done on how to improve the traffic situations don't try to reinvent the wheel look outside not just our little town cambridge has some great solutions for some of the traffic issues they're not perfect but you know they're they're doing their best the other side look at europe northern europe is one of the safest countr for traffic or safest places for traffic that you can find because they spend a lot of time studying these and coming up with solutions let's learn from some of those solutions that they already have in place another thing is if it's a short cut to go from common down to past gilbert to palo maybe put a couple of flower bats in the middle of the road cut the road in half for the people who live on that street it's not a big hassle we come from the in one way or the other way for people using it as a shortcut it would at about five minutes to commute because they have to sneak through the neighborhood nobody will do that they'll stay on the main roads and you can funnel them down to palo the way you want so that they stay out of the neighborhoods there's any number of things that could be done and i didn't come with a very nicely prepared speech like some of the other folks that were here in prepared it well but please look at some of these situations that don't involve cross walks that don't involve traffic lights or intersections just look at the neighborhoods where the kids play we're so focused on when schools in session people getting to and from school how about after school when all of skits are out on the street playing the way they should be when i was living in germany for a couple of years and my kids were growing up they learned how to ride their bikes without training wheels ever since we've returned to the u i've not been able to let my kids write their bicycles on the sidewalks on the streets because i don't trust the motorists to see that most people here and i mean the police officer mentioned pedestrians the problem is people here don't even use their mirrors they don't use indicators they are always on their phones which is something i still don't understand those are things that can be addressed and it has nothing to do with education people just need to you know traffic is something that you participate in it's not the time between being home and being at work traffic is something you need to actively participate in you need to be aware turn on your radio down a notch or two maybe open a window because your ears actually help you know you can hear things calm you can hear kids scream those high pitched five year olds you can hear across a mile i mean there's so many things we could do that don't cost any money it's just a matter of like do some you know proper thinking and just put things in place that have worked in other places we don't need to reinvent the wheel as i said before there are solutions out there let's start using them thank you so it was mentioned that there was a study at one point to look at a stop sign four way stop there and that was impractical because of the way the traffic would back up i guess i was one would wonder if they considered putting a light there coordinated with the light or the lights up into the intersection of waverley to consider if there was a way to make traffic flow through there with a stop light as opposed to just having a stop sign there so i mean if you know if that was considered maybe that's a solution or one potential solution  name of the gentleman funny but i think he had some really good ideas about there are other methods i think that we don't know so i have to resort to stop signs and traffic lights to control traffic there are ways by narrowing streets similar to what he does when i live come and even though would come is not really a cut through street it's mostly it's all residential traffic people come in off the end of town or on to wycombe very quickly so we my neighbors and i do the same thing we pull our cars out to the end and put them because enough that as cars come around they see them and they slow down and the speeding around that well i was speeding but people come in that corner very quickly at times because they're just not paying attention but also because a lot of times there's fast moving traffic on lexington kind of pushing them and you know cuz i turn on that trail the time i put on my brakes and cars come right up on you because they're trying to get down to belmont to go someplace else to get to watertown or wherever they're going so you know we resort to those kind of things too we regularly put out cones if our kids are playing in the yards and sometimes if they're biking in the streets on wickham which which we do regularly in we're fortunate enough to have a low traffic street there but that particular intersection is can be can be questionable for  kids to go along with what my neighbor jim said there is a mailbox at the corner of what come in lexington and there's no cross walk there people do pull cars up and stop there all the time they cross all the time to get there i cross to get to ripley to go down to p q park i think that the lexington in general would benefit from more cross walks and that those cross walks have signals of some sort whether it's a individual flashing light you know i would be nice to see some of the lights that actually light up in the road themselves but i understand with snowplows and considerations that's really tough in our area of the of the the country but a signal where somebody could hit a button and there were two lights would flash on the side of the road at the cross walk i think that would be worthwhile intersection i think you know we understand that you're looking at ways to fix that and we understand that before we crossed four way stop at beach i mean i and i appreciate the belmont p d being there there's regular fauresmith there i see police there all the time and i mean they pull people over and fro neighbor's house i'm on all the time so i really do appreciate that level of force but there but i think that i think we're slowly fixing the problem clearly we still need to address what's going on at sycamore we no longer have the runway coming up the hill going all the way to belmont or vice versa coming down the hill from lexington but but now it's sort of you know they come up to the hill they stop and then they accelerate all the way up development so i think something else in the middle there would help control traffic even more and i also want acknowledge that you guys have a tough job there are three ways to get through belmont and they're all focused on how to get past the commuter rail so if you change one in one place you going to shift traffic to another i understand you've got to do that  but you know it was mentioned that there's a comprehensive it sounds like the town wide study going on and i would hope that that's looking at coordinating that and considering that you know is that there are there are really there really are only three ways to get through belmont and that's where you're going to get all the traffic and i've lived previously on lexus and i lived on lake street so i've lived in two of those big three zones and yeah there's a lot of traffic there and it would be nice if we could we could come up with a solution to to figure out how to do that and i do understand we've been working on this for a long time but i hope we'll consider some of those other traffic means one of the things actually would help a lot i think is one way streets you know directing traffic not allowing maybe maybe the street b look at that again aren't stop signs and they're not stop lights they're not going to really freeze traffic but they're going to guide traffic through belmont to places where we wanted to and at the speed i'm also a city planner a transportation engineer so i have some idea what i'm talking about  i would say you have a really tough job but if i just put a different hard on and say words maddow why are you the traffic advisory committee why aren't you the transportation committee why aren't you the committee that takes care of it austrians bicyclists transit and cars why is traffic the one thing that gets prominence over everything else i hope that's not the case but your title does that it is i appreciate what the don't engineer said about having studying the stoplight or a stop sign at the intersection of sycamore it backs up traffic or it will back up traffic from our friends in cambridge so what it will prevent people from using become more as a as a cutter or sort of lexington as a cut through it will make sure that people don't think that this is the fastest way to get through town you back up a few times you realize that isn't the best way to get through don't you find different ways everything slows down everything calms down and leave on one thought that you have done an amazing job on the portion of the vertically and summer or that entire section of waverly where you have tabletops there raised intersections with defined cross walks in brick in a different color that tells people that they are transitioning from a road to a place where people walk that people cross and then they go back into the street that intersection of lexington sycamore could do with something like that right now yes you have a raised crosswalk but it's more than hindrance than actually telling people th better people crossing here so i hope that you take on something like this and think about that intersection for  site of the new construction that's going on that snakes around with the old municipal law was around the corner into belmont street there were there's no sad walk on that side anymore so people are forced to cross at will don't stop cross there quite often and you can enter the crosswalk and no one stops there's about twenty kids who live in the neighborhood who have to cross to go either to the channer or to the high school so it's been a major area of concern i sent a note to adam noting that in last winter in needham there were two girls killed at the crosswalk that was near the high school and that was marked with the blinking pedestrian sign as a way to mitigate and cause attention to the fact that there is a crosswalk there and so i had suggested that i do the same ahead of any tragedy happening and of course now that we have had a tragedy that has occurred in a crosswalk so my ask is  that point that the town didn't have funds to produce that kind of marking so my ask is that we do some level of marking in these crosswalks on these busy streets especially in the path where children are crossing to go to school i pay attention children don't often so thank you hi my name is kathy rush i also live on horn road jen and i did not share notes so i'm going to try not to reiterate what she's already talked about and i want to start by expressing my sincere sympathies for family and friends of the woman who was killed at sycamore in lexington one tragedy too many of my children went to the butler and i taught myself early on not to sycamore so that i would end up in that for some other marker at the intersection sorry the crosswalk of willesden interpol road and i'm going to loop it back into a pedestrian issue which has come up a few times already very eloquently by other people and cafferty i believe was referring to this sign it's my little show and tell there's one on common street i believe near the neighborhood of this gentleman from the netherlands who spoke something as simple as this state law yield to pedestrians in crosswalks something as simple as that to start with we understand that there are financial constraints to put up lights et something has to give something has to be put in place in two to continue my loop back to pedestrians the development which john also referred to which broke around january twenty seventeen before that development was the ground was opened there was no plan put in place for pedestrian access around the entire site we as a neighborhood lost our sidewalks we lost our safe access to and through cushing square our kids used to be able to walk to starbucks and cross at that light and it's a tricky square for those who walk through it it's a five way intersection the two polar road corridor project did a fairly good job but now we have islands islands are a little bit of a distraction when it comes to cross walks there's a sign in front of the island at the williston interpol crosswalk which sort of there's a lot going on there i just walked my dog around the neighborhood two hours before the meeting and i i wanted to take a picture of it but it was too dangerous i couldn't go back and take a picture of that cross walk to show you that there  a sign that shows there's an island right so so there's an arrow that goes off to the right and you're looking at trees and it's all very pretty and beautiful but it's not there hasn't been a lot of thought put in for pedestrian access so going forward  i think that people on foot matter a lot and people who live in neighborhoods around development matter a lot in a little bit of planning ahead would go a long way with neighborhoods and a buggers who have to live in our case probably for we've already gone for eighteen months and what i'm thinking there's another eighteen months worth of development happening  if if residents are brought into a plan to create other safer pedestrian access around development which is happening this is chatter in other parts of belmont now that development is in the works involve the neighborhood involved residents and i don't know how exactly that would happen but it looks like it maybe it could come from the developer to start a plan that is  researched by a developer and then in conjunction with police and you the traffic advisory committee come up with a plan and meet with the neighbors before hand let them know what the plan is when sidewalks are taken away where we adults and children are supposed to walk if we want to to get from one place to another from our neighborhoods you don't i don't think it's a good idea to just blacken over a white cross walk in not give any notice because if you're standing say at the light at the winter's hardware corner in what used to be eric's gas station this still a light situation that points you right at the site and you can't go there right so there are still some folks who who try to do that they skim ever so quickly along the edge to maybe get up to belmont street or to get around as fast as they can all that still happens so maybe i wandered a little bit but i think you get the idea that that for our purposes in our neighborhood we would like to see going forward with the other development that's happening in belmont involve the community involve the residents involve the butter's come up with a safe stream plan put it in action let people know what it guards if there were a parent who wanted to go out and direct or at least wear a fluorescent vest and stop traffic so that six or eight or ten kids can cross safely i don't need an answer now but i just wonder if that's ever happened some we can look into thank you me and man i live on al ma i remember meeting jamie make isaac at butler elementary school when i was p t a president fifteen years ago we invited him to talk to the parents about safety in jamie i don't know if you remember this but i remember it because you scared of saul when you told us about the number of people that had been hit by cars in the butler neighborhood and we were all shocked and we said jamie what can we do and we said we've got to put lights up at hawthorne we couldn't get an adult crossing guard who was willing to cross children because they were so afraid for their own lives that that took years we have wonderful guy derek now but i don't know how much longer he can stay but the point is the what jamie what you said to us was i think you quoted what the cost was to get a traffic light at that point and we all gasped because we realize that belmont is very tight on funds we hear about it all the time from mars like men so i just grabbed this from kathy because she brought it up but businesses like mine would be willing to donate these and if you if you want to put me in charge of something like that collecting funds in we don't need a logo on it or anything like that because it's in the best interest of the belmont businesses to have control traffic and happy  if you want to talk to you about that later we can work on that and then the second thing i wanted to bring up was i just came from a meeting which is why i was late to this one but there were several people there that talked about the photographs that were used in the belmont tony and the belmont status and harold around the accident and it's all over social media and we're worried about the children seeing these and the memorial that people have put with flowers and things like that is a much more beautiful memory and we were hoping that the social media would change those photographs out and put the memorial instead thanks well there are lots and lots of cars who stop i understand there is the after school tour there where parents stop and pick up their kids and go but that's how it should be there are parents lined up fifteen minutes twenty minutes before the kids are coming out they're on their call finishing up their meetings or whatever whatever they are doing but that can't happen because as soon as their kid gets in the car i've seen many times they just push on the gas pedal they don't pay attention if any other  crossing the road or not the second thing i want to point out is when the capello was made i have been here nine years but when the truck bellow was redone there was a there was a parking spot added right if you go from two sycamore side to on and trying to take a left on the top palo there are two parking spots which are very very close to the carb and comes know that from sycamore to cross so if you just remove those two spots of the parking that would make it so much easier it's not an expensive solution it's just removing those parking spots the other thing if you want to make it is that the cross walk of the cars are blocking thank i'm actually here because she was an acquaintance of mine someone that i recently came to know and i was deeply affected in spite of not knowing her for too long but this actually made me think about an intersection which is close to my neighborhood i live on shah road in the burbank neighborhood and the intersection that's washington and darlington and that's where a lot of kids actually cross to get to the burbank school and that's again an intersection which doesn't have a stop sign and there are lots of cars which do speed by and i actually fear for my eight year old if i ever have to let her go on her own that's one of the biggest reasons i wouldn't let her walk across that road so that's one the second traffic because people want to look at b s and then they see that the no traffic routes and that's how they cut through and also with the increase in the number of right sharing services that's also increased the traffic through the  so those are my two things good evening my name is russell hackle and i live at seventy five lexington street the house that my wife and i live in we are not longtime residents of belmont we've lived here just over three years but we are one house removed from the lexington and sycamore street intersection and just a couple of observations and i'm not a traffic engineer not a city planner  i don't have any necessarily technical solutions to offer but for many years i am a skier and to me the analogy is lexington street from the stoplight at the two churches st luke's and the church across the street down to sycamore is effectively a ski slope by that i mean when you're coming down a ski slope and you've had to perhaps you know slow down a little bit you get into your snowplow a little bit as you get towards the base of the ski slope human instinct is to accel e and that's exactly what happens my wife and i hear this every single vehicle because we are one building removed and you don't have to have your windows open you can close your eyes and just listen when traffic is going down this down the slope converse lee when traffic is has cleared that intersection you can clearly hear the acceleration it is not subtle ok it's dramatic particularly some of the smaller cars people have been frustrated they perhaps have come through four or five traffic lights within a quarter of a mile if they've come off to repel road they hit one stretch of relatively free street and as far as they're concerned kitty bars the door we hear it i don't need to do data analysis i don't need big data all i need is my ears ok and what my ears tell me is that ninety percent of the traffic by the way not only my wife and i but everybody who lives at least in our two elling which is three different families at seventy five lexington we all have to back out on to lexington street all the time so we walk the neighborhood and lexington street is our way out of our driveway you hear the excel aeration so my analogy is i don't know learn from the ski industry i'm not trying to be facetious and i'm not trying to be kind of you know  but the the behavior and frankly again and it don't really the introduction of that raised intersection based on anecdotal casual observation as a resident forty yards from that in a section is that the it has exacerbated the worst of driver behavior it is not a meal you rated the situation it's made it worse so those are my observations the other thing that i would mention and i don't know again whether state regulation and state law or whatever oversees the cut through traffic but one of the things i have been really struck by in the three plus years now that paul and i have lived this is the volume of heavy commercial traffic we know about the buses the buses a fine that's a bus route but there isn't two minutes that goes by that i'm not looking out our living room window on lexington street and you're not seeing a commercial vehicle that's you know major league summit not to mention all the other small to medium size working trucks in my opinion there is far too much commercial traffic why you know why semis have to go through you know have have to cut through lexington street to get over to watertown a wall to him it just seems to me i don't know whether the town can regulate that i don't know whether there can be a vehicle weight limit but it is absolutely astounding to me and i lived on the north shore lived in two very dense congested cities for about thirty years i lived in salem and then for about ten years i lived in peabody i'm used to traffic i'm used to living in communities where there is heavy heavy traffic including a lot of commercial vehicles i am absolutely amazed at the derelict traffic behavior in the town of belmont i grew up in arlington now many years ago so i'm familiar with this area it is stunning to me and there's no question that when i cross sycamore street or lexington street which we do all the time is pedestrians the boy you're senses better be really alert because  for all intents and purposes you're walking across the bottom of or the beginning of a ski slope where people are excel orating as a matter of habit and nach almost natural behavior you can almost hear the frustration in the acceleration of the drivers who've either intice a pated having to get through that second more street intersection well the drivers who have to slow down a tad to get over that speed bump it's almost like i'm going to make up corner and a half a block either direction just listen to what goes on at that in a section it is absolutely stunning thank you for listening and i'm on grant avenue in waverly square i just want to thank you very much for having this to to listen to our concerns and into our opinions i'd also like to thank the gentleman who shared the analysis that when the very thoughtful analysis that went into the decision not to put in the four way stop right at that intersection i think that it's you know it really does a great job of illustrating the challenges that you have in trying to balance traffic efficiency with pedestrian safety  what i would ask of you in the future is to put a greater emphasis on  simultaneously a much much weaker emphasis on traffic efficiency i think that it's no secret that much of our traffic issues come down to congestion and the congestion is a direct result of pass through traffic so i think it would be great if you could work with us to try and make belmont a less desirable place to drive through not a more desirable place to drive through so let's let's decrease efficiency and make it less attractive not had relating to mostly children safety in the schools and the impact the extension of gun street in the high school might have on that and glenn you've been very generous with your time and whenever some federal traffic regulation or guideline manuals with me and so i appreciated both the time you take and also some with the challenges that that you all face i guess i really had three primary points you know you've talked to kind of my neighborhood as a religion the high school and obviously the neighborhood that's here because of the tragedy and what i was wanted to encourage is that you think about ways you could be even more proactive i know i know you're being proactive because you share with me the list of improvements that you want to apply to the state grant for so i know there is productivity already but to the agree we can reach out to other residents other villages that may have concerns that may not be on your radar think that might help anticipate and improve areas and prevent further tragedies in town and just make the neighborhoods safer i guess my second observation is just that you know for those of us who don't use their cell phones while we're driving what we end up seeing as how many other people are using their cell phones while they're driving that's pretty clear and so my my primary concern is that some of the guidelines that the federal manual ly have and elsewhere haven't really caught up to how people are actually behaving in their cars right now and so i guess my sense is that to some degree our traffic calming measures are somewhat minimalist and that what we might need is more overt signaling so more stop signs at te intersections more stop lines more cross walks that are bold and going for example you on gooden street you recommend or maybe you know instead of just a speed limit sign it's one of the ones that flashes that you're going too fast so that that's the kind of thing you know the you know the sign in the middle the crosswalk reminding people that they have to see yield to all of these things which you know to someone who's kind of on their phone and looking up every second or two is the thing that catches their eye that might slow them down and that might be important in this kind of new age of cell phones and then i of wanted too encourage you all to be comfortable asking for money i personally think it would be a great investment or slackness here so i would i think most people here would feel good about belmont because it was a residential town kid could walk to school we liked the idea of people walking around senior citizens kids dogs everybody in the neighborhood and i think it's a great town from that perspective you can bike you can walk and where and where encouraged to do that however it's no longer feels as safe as it used to be before particularly in the towns and it's very hard to cross some of those sidewalks people don't slow down and especially in during rush hour so the comment i wanted to make over there was that why don't we think of something think of a solution where said let's think of technology and let's think of the future this is only going to get worse we're going to see more and more companies moving into the area more and more people finding jobs in the area more and more students staying off to college so the traffic situation or the transportation situation is only going to get more congested so let's think of some long term solutions and perhaps charging for parking will prevent people from parking all day long  main streets well prevent them from cutting through our side streets and trying to find parking near the train station when the bus lines i don't know if they're in the legal ramifications to that but it might be a way to we've noticed the adoption and speed of cars driving down concord if that could be more enforcement around town and especially around schools i think that would make a big difference thank you you i my name is chris o'connor i grew up in this town class of ninety three i've seen it change the law grew up on a bike i live near p q on bartlett three locations i want to talk about and then one larger action item for the whole town as far student safety during travel times the first one is more in lexington watertown's doing in palfrey and church with the flashing light if there is a temporary flashing light that we can put in place  would be great until the consultants can come in and come up the solution location number two i'd like to talk about is near the old kendall senior citizen center during the soccer seasons if someone from your team could be president i mean beach street is downright frightening to drive in especially when people thank you very soccer season i love the sport i absolutely hate the sport especially being near  so if we can get some local enforcement during that time so it's just it's out of control that's going to at least with p q field being redone right now this would be a great opportunity of barley at the intersection of jeanette it's a three way often there's parking on both sides of the exit p q the park area on the bartlett in those cars are often family oriented so they're a little bit taller and there's residents leaving and getting to their cars and there it's a point where their children are short and small people are going down bartlett around twenty five maybe we reduce some of these streets from town twenty five to town fifteen be open to that and then last in a lot leas e the big issues are really here for that like some people from this committee and elsewhere to look at our bus routes especially from your team as well to make sure that children safety is there i see a lot of people running past the buses  when the stop sign comes out the commuters are just driving right past their some corners that the children are standing on in large community areas side would really like for the committee to sit down with the bus committee and maybe have the police department kind of do a check on that yes ma'am yes ma'am and i mean that we change the routes on a regular basis and what type of safety is done on those routes changes absolutely thank you echo what other residents have been saying in their respective neighborhoods that there's absolutely no doubt that the volume of traffic has just gotten a lot worse and the last ten years and in our neighborhood in particular i'd like a like to echo what some other other folks have been saying about how we need to pay attention not just to the traffic on the main thoroughfares but to the places that have become cut through because right now the way that bright backs up every day it commuting hours people have discovered that trowbridge baker and hamilton are essentially like work arounds around the intersection they're at concord in brighton and i can sit in my living room at the bottom of trowbridge street next to next to the municipal light station there and you know every multiple times a day here exactly what that other man was saying a driver come tearing around the street gone it because he's got a straight way for the first time in the last like one knows how many miles and just hear the engine excel rate right up the street people can get up to fifty sixty miles an hour before they get to the street and right now there is a limited do not enter sign at the bottom of the street for just seven to nine am because of the high school traffic but the lettering on the bottom of the sign has been faded for years and people mostly ignore it and there isn't much enforcement there so i'd really like to sort of echo what some of the other folks who've been speaking here are saying about there there are neighborhoods with tons of kids in them who are just just gaining independence walking riding their bikes on their own not with their parents anymore mine are ten and twelve and right now we really need to put in short and long term measures to change the behavior of drivers because we're not going to change the volume in the long run but we need to channel them in creative ways and look for those kinds of solutions thank you good evening my name is garrett lee i live at eighty nine whole street i walk my kids to butler elementary school almost every day and frankly it's frightening how little concern there is of people driving through i've seen people honking crossing guards because the crossing guard was letting too many kids through people just like patients i'm also an attorney i represent a man named richard slyness that was hit in a crosswalk  september first here in belmont he wanted me to come here tonight to express his concern since he could be here i'm self mr slimy has been here with his wife for twenty five years he believes there should be more police presence he believes that there no no fear from drivers that they'd ever be pulled over for doing a rolling stop or for failing to stop at a cross walk they've seen it over and over so what they'd like to see is more people being pulled over for breaking the law and hopefully that will make a difference thank you all for the job that you do  fred paulson precinct one lesson does some excellent recommendations made about safety and have a vivid information about the problems that people face in the town of belmont and the big issue is you know what is the time going to do about these things and i'd like to focus on one immediate aspect and that is enforcement and several speakers already indicated what kind of research what is the level of resources that we have in terms of dealing with high speed cars or improper going through walking areas and turning turning on no places in the in the town and the question is what are the resources and i would ask the police officers how many officers do we actually have they are working on enforcement ordinary day glad you asked that because i'm counting right now i have fourteen recommendations of areas in need enforcement right now we and we don't like to advertise it out there but staffing during the day is usually about four or five officers on the street staffing on a evening shift which is four to eleven you can go anywhere from for a minimum staffing is for you when you are from four to six so on your average day let's see a walk in the morning we if you know barring we're not doing a court run we're not covering across some post crossing post or the and the traffic and the increased traffic that we have and the need to provide safe walking to our schools and even a bigger problem of having walking to the new high school we it goes without saying that we need more offices doing that work and more walking guards and other ways of providing safety and are you providing a budget to the town that would achieve that goal every year you know we go through the budget process and we competed with comparable communities and right now i think a staffing is sufficient for this community it's a policy decision on how much you know we do we want to you know if you see the city of boston if they looked at their traffic enforcement the same way they might have fifty you know fifty thousand police officers so we have to you kind of have to gauge it is to how much is enough if you want you instance we might put somebody it might not be very productive for the offices you know cars might come down and see him they might slow them down you know the officer will clear the assignment how is that assignment pelfrey nothing going on in pull any body over count on getting a certain number of tickets to the other times i would have people like on hastings road i would say people speeding through my street and i would sit on hastings road and i didn't get anything you know i live on ripley road people cut you know  zoom around the corner on lexington to to miss the light white away and i see it and it makes me nervous but it's simply not enough to have a cruiser sit there it's just it's too intimate and it's not that steady yet  not the one more thing i just want to add to about signs and everything and we've done this in a no go and still that we have people want one way signs or we know right turn only and all caution you because people then ways i think the only thing i would add about that i mean obviously we have members of the boy's life and here we appreciate your coming and hearing this testimony but belmont is not known as the so traffic it's known at the time that you can pass through quickly and i think that something like additional officers are definite signs people have to respect a twenty five mile per hour speed limit and they have to be warned and i think once that comes across then the problem will be cut back but right now it's too many cars that are going about twenty five miles an hour but i appreciate your responses and i hope in the future and the budget time with that can be solved and worked out we're in we're in the process right now where a boat probably four or five months into it it's a program it's a trial program but i think it's going to work it's called  which is data driven approaches to crime and traffic safety obviously in belmont traffic safety is going to bali far away the crime activity and one of the one of the components of the d d x program is that we take community input and i'm sitting here and we were getting to that of approach where we want to take community input and look and think and we might get overwhelmed and i don't want to create people a false sense of you know i will come in w pelfrey road and will do edge more will do here and then we just don't get there so that's something that's going to we're going to look a little bit more and how we can effectively engage the community and take your input right now we do take input from the community and traffic e mails and things with this is more of a plan that measures outcomes and things like that and you know we're going to after this meeting we're going to talk about accelerating that portion of it good evening my name is sarah i live it forty eight thomas street with my husband and four and a half year old son we're relatively new to belmont and there's three things i wanted to bring up one thomas street as the other gentleman mentioned is a relatively short street  but the speed with which cars seem to go down does seem pretty excessive considering how short it is they've got a stop sign at royal road and then a light it at waverley and then coming the other way from beacher waverley down to royal road which seems like a free for all finally to get down the hill also there's a cross walk at where royal road and thomas and clark converge but as you come up royal road you turn corner and there's the crosswalk so people have left the stop sign there accelerating up the hill and there's the cross walk there so it's it's visible but i don't know what it's like signage or just letting people know a cross walk is waiting for them as they go around the hill i stop to let a teenager cross with two cars behind me who both put on their horns i you know there's a creek teenager crossing the road thomas street i would say more at least half of the homes have children under the age of thirteen and then another quarter probably have seniors we also have the housing down there with veterans people with disabilities and lots more children so i appreciate the idea of traffic calming i don't know if that's something that  could be on thomas street there's no shoulder it's a two lane road with no shoulder so when trucks park or other people have cars and from their homes people then go fast and go around cars not seeing what's on the other side so  that's thomas street the second thing i wanted to talk about there's three areas where we walk as a family and all three of those areas have either missing sidewalks or sidewalks in such horrible disrepair but i asked my son to get out of the stroller and help me pull it down the street and that's heading down into town center on royal road so you have to cross the street back and forth to get from thomas down to town center because the sidewalks disappear there's some paint on the ground i hope that means the sidewalk is going in on the inside of the curve the other one is going down clark street to get to common street there's no sidewalk there which makes it seem like a quiet country road but that's now not how folks drive on it and then the sidewalk in front of the church and the global montessori school again just pavement that's not smooth enough to bike on or walk on or survive a stroller the last location street on clark going down there two churches on either side there's one sidewalk to one side nothing on the other and my right but it's clark street ok and then the third thirty are we are where you walk is on school street right in front of underwood park so there's also missing sidewalk or sidewalk in disrepair so hard to push a stroller and given that there's underwood park the pool wellington school the church and my son's daycare right there plus the global montessori as someone who grew up in southern california where there's amazing sidewalks and wide streets but nobody walks i'm happy to live in belmont where we can walk around but it's just hard to get around where there's no sidewalks  then the last thing was the intersection of waverly common and school it seems like all the lights stop and so it's a very large intersection but all light stopped and it seems like you can cross diagonally there's a crossing guard there in the morning but it's a huge intersection so i don't know if there's a way at least on weekday mornings to make the los lights the walk lights last a little bit longer to allow people to get across in time because it's confusing you think everything stopped and i crossed agnelli but once you're in the middle you realize it's a very large intersection you might not get across all that way and then the last thing certainly not all the folks driving in belmont come from cambridge right so i've certainly become more aware with this tragedy and the meeting that's been called perhaps all of us can walk away from tonight's meeting valley to honor the twenty five mile an hour speed limit and to be good neighbors cloying precinct four i live it two zero one lexington street just up the hill from this intersection most people know my house says dr abel men's old office that's still how i describe where i live to be pull into about this intersection and you know we've been using this for eighteen years and i mean i applaud the concept of traffic calming measures i think the raised table was a good idea i've got to say first of all i mean i'm an architect and i have a degree in urban design also and i've got to say that this raised platform is seems insane i think it was you know engineered to be too tall we all know other platforms that are around town that don't you know require the sort of bumping you know that everybody has to do you see all of the god just taken out of it and it's because obviously people hit it too fast probably everybody has done that once and now now when most people that have gone through this intersection before approach it we come to almost a complete stop so really it becomes it's like a fake four way stop right  now and so the people that are part on sycamore think they can squeeze in a really fast because they think oh there's they're slowing down for me i can get in here and they got to you know from the sycamore stop signs to get in and i don't know if that contributed to this accident my deepest sympathies to saw she and her friends and family by the way but i have a feeling that it did and i really some of the ideas that have come across today i think are gre and i think you guys i see everybody taking notes and i think a lot of the ideas that were mentioned are awesome i just hope that we do get the light that you're talking about glenn you know i'm encouraged to hear intersection so thank you very much hi everyone my name is kyla fallen and i live at seventy four monroe street in the windbreak neighborhood and i have many thoughts on the traffic in the town in fact it's my kids say i'm sounding more and more like my mom and dad because all i do is talk about the traffic all the time and i think my biggest concern is living on monroe a lot of the cars are cutting through our street or when street they're the only i think two streets that they can directly get across and they're not moving at a slow rate i mean they are to use the ski an analogy again they are literally skiing down my street and you know my husband grew up in belmont and assured me that this was going to be a wonderful town to raise our children and lately i have been so concerned because one of my son's friends got hit by a car last year and thank god is ok but that was very eye  opening we i saw someone got hit in belmont center my husband was the first person on the scene and in took care of her until the ambulance came and my children with me and that was a horrible situation and now this you know very sad situation of this young mother and i so appreciate the steps that you all are taking just listening to us makes us feel like we have a voice in this community i don't know what the solution is f monroe i know i have sent several e mails and sergeant may i hope has been wonderful in listening to me the last few years but i'm just wondering if you know we could get a raise table and row no i don't i know there are so many different rules around that but my concern lies with the street that my children ride their bikes on and walk to the center on so i don't know if anything can be done on monroe street thank you for listening journal conor precinct five thirty five oakland road i'll be as brief as i can the i've had a conversation with people from different towns around surrounding and it seems it's not a belmont problem it is ours tonight but it's a bigger problem that everybody agrees in the last few years how traffic has become in cambridge watertown medford somerville it's just increasing and i just wonder at a higher power  won't solve it tonight but with the amount of development that's going up everywhere around what is the breaking point for for traffic you know i know we hear about governor baker wanting more housing units and the  building everywhere but what's the knock on effect is anybody looked into the amount of cars it's going to put on the road in greater boston metro boston that's just one thing to solve it  locally one thing i would like to see was i know we brought the speed limit down to town meeting from thirty down to twenty five possibly even in so mary is bringing it down forward or if you can look at isolating areas where it's more appropriate to have a twenty or fifteen if that would help and again education and enforcement driver education and force meant i think it brings in you know education at schools where people are parking at schools it's a bigger problem people on the road but we have to look at ourselves as well what we're doing where we're parking you know kind of starts with ourselves couple of simple things too i'd recommend  if i had lots of recommendations here tonight is i see i think we did open up near generally and i see it in arlington is possibly if you can keep them there is a flag holder you know where you there's like so many flags put in so if you're crossing the road kids are crossing you can take the flag out to give you some awareness of traffic of stopping probably hard to keep them there but i've seen the going on something else i've seen in ireland they've uses is they supply kids but there's more probably walking kids maybe longer distances supplied about high visibility vests if children have to walk home or whatever how much is a vest a high visibility vest to give to kids to make them as visible as possible  again it's probably hard to solve that are so many things to do with just a few things thank you for your time has an interesting you tube video and he talks about the traffic in you know in belmont and how we can't prevent it from coming here and he mentions at the state level the regional what they're trying to do it's trying to teach people the different means of transportation to get into the city and what not but you know i think we're fortunate to have him as a state senator and he's this is an issue that he's he's on top of and you can see that on his website senator brown's burgers work at the state house on this i in the context of the fact that if we're going to prioritize this we need to all be really involved with this process we can't walk out of this meeting and think that because we've said something in this meeting that that's the end of it we need to all be heavily involved with making the neighborhoods around our schools safer as parents we need to be involved with promoting safe walking prioritizing pedestrian safety as far as the the idea of having volunteer crossing guards go we actually have a position posted for full time crossing guard for a crossing guard right now and a back up crossing guard position they can talk to our officer milhaud this morning and nobody's applied the existing crossing guards that we have are all and we you know this is this is in part because we're a culture where mothers used to do that job we can't go back to a culture where mothers are volunteering to do that job that's not the society that we live in now but if we want to prioritize pedestrian safety we need to prioritize paying money i'm sorry that i didn't mean to have a dig at your age by the way you're an excellent crossing guard you do incredible work at and i applaud you for that so we need to be prioritizing it in town that might mean money that might mean coming to meetings that might mean you know being part of task forces and working groups to increase safety around town i want to applaud and clancy for the work he's done to mitigate some issues of the town caused over many years by not putting money into into sidewalks that we were saying well when we  commit any money at sidewalks and i know glen that you were instrumental in changing than so i wanted to thank you for that work i want to thank the board of selectmen for making that change this past year please be involved and please get involved  school committee if you have children in school get involved with your p t s p t o s to encourage walking to encourage safe walking to be if we do training at burbank for second graders on how to walk safely may have a walking field trip volunteer for that be part of it and keep putting pressure on our state legislators to improve public transportation in this area because that is vital to solving the transportation problem thank you so much call i guess i hadn't heard officially that that no sidewalk repair policy is that truly gone or do we have a different policy in place respect to that because as jesse mentioned we had ten years of not touching sidewalks as part of road reconstruction i know you were looking at the buffer zones between existing sidewalks and coming up with a new policy around that so is there a new policy what is the policy where can we find it i guess briefly stated the policy is that the paid management program has some capacity to allow some sidewalk construction when roads are being reconstructed certain types of roads i have priority those roads essentially are roads where there is no obvious buffer between the sidewalk in the roadway so example bartlett avenue which was a road that you had raised the issue that avenue is now part of that policy by all that avenue is going to get curbing engressia holders to create a buffer but and sidewalks to create a buffer between the roadway and the walking surface other roads that come up in the paper mansion program that have well road connecting to the sidewalk down past done by in that segment is one of the segments that was identified early on as needing to be close up that close up that gap so we will be addressing that not likely this fall because we do is we're running out of time but certainly next spring that's great i think connectivity is key we're not i think many people said we're not going to eliminate traffic but we want to make sure we don't have to get into a car to safely get from one end of the neighborhood to the other we want to be able to walk down the street and feel like there's a safe place to do it and i i think we have to flip the funding the funding has gone to just the road and we need to pedestrians first with the funding we have funding i know there's always some constraints but we do have to make a significant investment in in traffic calming it's not ok to change the road and know the speed is going to increase and not do anything to calm that traffic you've heard people talk about how they park park their cars i'm someone who made sure i put in a sidewalk curbing in front of our house when when our road was reconstructed because i knew the speed would increase and i knew if i didn't pay for it it wouldn't go and of course the neighbors came and we petitioned to have greater sidewalks but i put it in because i knew about the neck down and the traffic calming that happens when you park at that curb and make the road an hour and i'm hearing other people doing that and i'm glad so parking management is a very easy to will that we can be using to make s canes to make those neck downs it's at our disposal and it doesn't cost anything but a little bit of signage and enforcement of course but that is at the ready and i hope that's something we might consider as a practical application i'm glad to hear about this data driven program i don't have the terminology it's new to me but i'm glad to hear because that was my question where do you start to look at these intersections when i looked at the crash portal site mass d o t and i could capture the whole town and identify data from two thousand and two to two thousand and sixteen it was very obvious to me t lexington and sycamore and had ninety five crashes and that was the most in the entire town so i'm going to get emotional here but how could we have ignored it for as long as we did it's just the cart is there and we have to remember can see three more about that i'm just feel so horrible for this poor woman who has died  i just want to say one more thing about enforcement it should show that we care about those people walking on the sidewalks it's not ok to not ticket somebody who's parked on the sidewalk as a policy to have thirty percent is when you start to ticket them it's not ok we are modeling the behavior we want to see and if somebody is parked the wrong way on the street or parked on the sidewalk that's an easy ticket i don't know what the answer is to that why would why wouldn't you maybe there's some other logic there i'm not sure but we have to model that behavior to say three specific crossings that i'm concerned about in the butler neighborhood and i certainly have a lot more data on this and i know glen participated in assessment around butler we've identified a lot of dangerous crossings and intersections there and you have those and i know i know you have a lot of pressing issues i'm most concerned in addition  roadway and they have some difficult visibility when people are in the beginning to cross the crosswalk the better example which i'm very grateful for in front of the fire station  crossing i feel safe in fact i that is the preferred crossing for me to send my child because i know and we know from research that when you only have to look in one direction and you have that safety in the middle of the roadway that it's much easier for the pedestrian to navigate i hear the woman's concerned about signage and maybe there's distractions but in terms of the pedestrian looking to see the on coming traffic simpl ying those decisions for them is critical we have to put pedestrians first and let people speak thank you  so i come with so much more concern that i had four weeks ago for their daily daily commute shall we say but later we were all devastated about so i have concerns about butler neighborhood i think they've been spoken around the high school i know there's a lot of free periods and kids are walking all the time at the high school and i just i feel like she was an adult in a crosswalk doing the right thing and even if all those kids are large and visible and crosswalks we could still risk risk something and so i'm concerned i would like to advocate for signage i just think no one's really brought a video camera enforcement and i'm not sure we were able to do that but when i visited my dad a couple years ago in maryland i was helping him move and  tons of runs back and forth and then i got home and i got a letter in the mail with forty five dollars fine and then the next day i got one and the next day because i was like seven miles over the limit every day but  you know that's sort of like an impersonal and you can put it everywhere but it's a nice revenue stream if we can somehow do that to all these cut through people i'm generally you know welcoming but you know maybe we should make ourselves a little less welcoming and then finally i just think this is yet another reason to advocate strongly and quickly for the community path mother of five and seven year olds i also say for its corner i have my doctorate in public health and have had the privilege for the last twenty years working to promote health in communities and with urban planners by my side i know that this is a small town and we often talk about limited resources and it's a problem the a lot of small towns are facing all over the country i think that there are certainly ways around that we have a lot of very rich knowledge well informed individuals just in this room tonight and i think that we really need to stand up and to partner with all of you to come up with solutions that are cost effective and put pedestrians  first i really appreciate your time and i know for those that are on the advisory committee you all have jobs and this is something that you do in your free time you know and you know glen also wears many hats and i think that it's not fair to ask all of you to make these very important decisions that are a matter of life and death and that we need to have a committee that is well informed i have had the privilege of working with really smart organizations across the country like america walks like walk boston like smart growth like complete streets alliance there's so much information and i'm happy to give it to you for free no cost if you will please you know consider using it to make some really important decisions for our belmont community i hear a lot about enforcement and i think enforcement is important but this is a complex problem and forstmann is like a recipe it's like baking a cake that's one piece of this really complex problem and you know i think i would i would say that if i went to a candy store and someone said to my daughter who's five you can have whatever piece of candy you want and however much candy you want and if i wasn't there to say no no that's not good for your health she would eat the candy and they feel like that's what enforcement is on our wide streets and belmont that we have now paved over we are just the candy store for these cars that are cutting through our neighborhoods these are neighborhood streets these are where we come to live in belmont for the family feel and now because our families our children can't go out on our streets to play because our fear that a car going down our roads forty fifty miles an hour on our neighborhood streets that's not why we live in belmont and i really really encourage you to consider some low cost solutions like narrowing the street take the candy out the elmont we need to narrow the streets we need to put in truck restrictions trees i've been asking for a tree in front of my house for three years now it's not a high ticket price but it will certainly provide some street narrowing for drivers that come up and down walnut street planter boxes to help narrow their street i'm sure the schools be more than happy to have kids come and plant flowers and to to make the streets appear to be more narrow i applaud the town for passing a complete straight policy i have seen that there are five critical element in making sure that the policy is successfully implemented and i want to share that with you we have to have an implementation plan and it's easier to understand the world of possible activities by addressing an understanding that current procedures and processes the planning for clear next steps in establishing a group of well informed individuals to make these really important decisions that have education and up to date education in these areas we need to have a review of the policies and procedures that have been guiding our decisions you know i know that we've talked about the rules and regulations but they're outdated we can't use the eighty five fifth percentile speed measure anymore that's not putting put austrians first that's not making our streets safe i really think i really think that a successful complete street initiative is about far more than helping engineers learn how to incorporate bicycle and pedestrian facilities into our projects it's about having planners and juniors and consultants the consultants that we used to even know what their priorities are because it could very well be the cars in the traffic it blakeley not the pedestrians just based on some of the things that have happened around belmont i really think that we need elected officials and ongoing engagement in understanding the up to date information about how to put pedestrians first i also feel like we need to  make sure that the street design manual and that is our rougher it's is flexible that it's considers multimode and that this can have a very positive impact and then finally we again we have to be able to measure our performance and not measure by the number of cars that go down our street and how fast they're going but rather how to feel how many pedestrian near misses do we have  know someone mentioned earlier that you know opening up comments from the community can feel like we put you feeling overwhelmed and if i were you i'd be feeling overwhelmed i did collect over one hundred  ten stories from my neighbors in the butler and surrounding neighbors and i want to share them with you in this big packet for tonight but i also have the hand outs of these recommendations associated with completing or implementing a successful complete change policy and please call me and ask needs for resources i have a whole slew of them and i want to help belmont this is my home i actually had you last on the agenda for your press thank you no i felt like people were getting tired and i needed to speak  science at mit who works closely with google and ways and i heard from him that downs can petition duties map providers if you take certain streets off traffic routing and that's not something that lastly about the video surveillance i understand they go the legal or don't understand all the legal complications but oftentimes just the fact that you know there is a camera there changes people behavior a lot so if you put like some cameras even if we didn't use them to take a damn or whatnot or to enforce the law just put the cameras it and say you know that surveillance in progress just the sign being there really dissuades people from doing bad things and not everyone's going to be an expert on the law they want even know that they can take it on that but it might change behavior  thanks i thank you for listening to our concerns for a journey and i live on newcastle road i grew up in belmont on common street and i walk to the wellington i walk to the chen arena i walk to the high school and it was all possible because we had great sidewalks available to us so today when i live on newcastle road my hope was to walk my children to the limber up and i can't do that because of the area being a giant cut through section i live in between where statler newcastle and elliott and every morning cars are whipping across the corner from statler to newcastle back over to elliot we don't teach our children to play in the middle of the street why do we ask them to walk in the middle the street to go to school it comes to the point where cars and children going to school are coming head to head pedestrians belong on the sidewalk cars belong on the street it's just safer that way so i come today in ask you for consideration to put a sidewalk on newcastle road and around the neighbor and it run the neighborhood of the one brook elementary school so kids can get to school and back home safely so thank you for keeping our ok go ahead miss hi my name is paula fan one i live it ninety seven sycamore street i've lived there all my life and we won't just because he is on that but i never knew sashi but i go to her memorial frequently to say a prayer it makes me cry to see this is what had happened to get some attention for this intersection that is horrendous it's congested the speed limit coming down lexington street is twenty five twenty twenty five coming into the intersection the speed on sycamore street is twenty five they're not going out if it's posted twenty five they go in thirty thirty five so to less than the posted speed maybe to ten or fifteen hopefully they'll do twenty to slow down the traffic with posted signs of the other thing is they get to that intersection and nobody knows what to do or it's an angry honk if you don't get the angry horn you're going to get a finger and they're not there to tell you you're number one so it's maybe coordinated lights with waverly square or a four way stop with the blinking lights on the stop sign watertown has those and hopefully that would be effective also but it's a very congested street also because we have all day parking there and although the signs that say no parking eight to ten am there at seven thirty and they can be there till ten o'clock at night so it's a whole congested area adding to the confusion of the intersection of second more and like seem to so please you know that the sign issue's been taken care of what happened is when we re posted the when the town reports of the new speed limit signage there was an old twenty five mile an hour sign that was mistakenly left up so i got with the d p w earlier this week if it's not ripped out already i'm told it will be by the end of the week so you have the twenty five by the first one as you're coming down the hill then there's the yellow intersection sign that has twenty and that th you i'm julie crockett i live it two three two trip pelosi road that is the intersection of propel and slate and bartlett and harriet in general i think that hue and butler neighborhood needs a lot of help  much and a few specific things and then make a couple of points so the intersection was talked about jeanette and bartlett there is no indication as you cross there that there is a park there and with that part being redone there will be kids coming out there and you can speed down bartlett and you have no idea that there is a park there i'd like to see that entire intersection of bartlett and jeanette painted white with no parking i would hope during soccer's well and bartlet mabel effectively acts as a four way stop people are really nice and they stop and they let whoever got there first go even though it's not a four way stops apartment in maple as  d just quickly the identification of school zone signs is spelled out very specifically in a document called the manual entry on uniform traffic control devices which is a federal document but also has a memo and specific to the commonwealth of massachusetts i think i looked at this actually at one time because we have more current public works to make a concerted effort to go through all the school areas and upgrade the school zone signage i don't believe that you can expand the school zone of the butler on such we might be able to put them you know i can look at the documents and see if there are things missing in that neighborhood ok and then the last thing i want to say is that this tragedy happened the week before school started and i wanted to know what we could do by that next wednesday when school started and so i'm just asking that you if you have a idea of what to do that we expedite that changes ignore in lexington if it backs up traffic and we need to do the traffic analysis that's fine but we need to stop right there and we need stubley there soon as possible so please expedite this change and please you moving on the other changes thank you discussed how much the traffic has become a real problem here not only for tragic accidents like we have witnessed but also for the fuel on the beaulieu ocean that all the students at all the children are breathing so we had to like reduce the traffic situation and that's why i'm addressing this i actually maybe you weren't in the room but i my opening statement i mentioned the fact that that study is ongoing there is still some data being gathered this month september  october they'll draft the report and then in november at the traffic advisory committee meeting the consultants will present the report ok thank you you the title of this committee may be the traffic advisory but most of us came on board because they're concerned about walking the streets of belmont really my only comment is that increased traffic is a problem in the whole of the town twenty years ago when i moved to long avenue there was a street hockey game in front of my house while school was not in session twenty four seven you can't pack the young parents on my street have difficulty just crossing the street now with their children i can't get my driveway i live on long avenue and that's just and that's just a crust i mean it's become a cross street and so for the people that live in areas that there are people others are trying to get from point a to point b and in the middle is belmont is really a problem  much as mary said many of us have been on this committee for pedestrian reasons i've been on it probably as long as glen men i know selectman plough at one point was its chair we had pedestrian committees before we have people who are working on safe streets we're grateful for all the suggestions you've made this is a very tragic situation  i think you know there is too much traffic i like the idea that's not to say we're going to adopt it but i do like the idea of ways in google assisting us i think that's an interesting idea so we thank you for coming and will do the best we can authorize the town engineer glen clancy to make sure that the warrants are met so that we can put full signal ization in at the intersection of second more and lexington right says  that to hire a consultant to do the analysis to determine if the warrants are met just as by way of explanation i mentioned just recently that the manual and uniform traffic control devices which is the bit the governing document for all things traffic related there is are set procedures and set warrants that are laid out in that directive that have to be met before an intersection can be signalized and so the idea of hiring the consultant is the consultant will gather the data the churning movements the traffic volumes all of the data that's necessary for them to do the analysis to determine whether that intersection warrant signals that my goal here is obviously false signals with a with a separate us tree in phase so that all traffic would stop when pedestrians are crossing the road made it take a good shot at explaining why a four way stop wouldn't work in that location people are still talking about that as well i guess what i would also want everyone to be aware of is that when i hire the consultant i will ask the consultant to determine whether or were any things that anything that can be done immediately in the short term to make the intersection safer because  the reality is that a process for determining that the intersection is a candidate and then doing design and then securing funding to ultimately install traffic signals as you know is a process that's going to probably go a year  anyway and so i think that we have an obligation here to look and see whether there are some short term things that can be done to make it safer i received an e mail message from someone i'm not sure she's present but she sent me a picture of a sign that it's puffery in church i'm assuming this is watertown but they have a section that i think so sort of function similarly to the one that we have at lexington and sycamore in what watertown do is they added a sign under the stop sign so this is a sign that would be added on to the stop signs on the sycamore approach and the sign simply says cross traffic does not stop so that is at least a tip off of the traffic on sycamore street that just because traffic is slowing down on that approach it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to stop you know that is a very simple thing that we can do right now to help  prove conditions out there and as i said i would ask the consultant to see if there's anything else that we can be doing as well or reason why i did not vote for this i think what i would like to see done is we can do it immediately is put in a four way stop in an intervention i probably would like to see a blinking red light street well if we queue up the cars going on a search and we make them anough of a mess or that there's going to be less people are going to want to travel through that area which is going to quiet down the traffic for the neighborhood which is one of the things that this could do and i think it's something we could try first if it doesn't work then ok i give up we've got to go through glen suggested but i think this can be done quicker and easier and it might work and see what happens to those guys that queue up there queuing up is a theoretical i'm not at all comfortable with the notion that i have to spar with a member of the traffic advisory committee my role is really here as a consultant to the board and don i say this with the utmost respect the reason that i don't support the four way stop is because of that killing and there's a couple of reasons i don't support the idea of allowing the cuing one is that it's going to add to the level of frustration of the people that are entrepreneur road some of those resit some of those motorists are belmont residents my other concern is is that it may have the effect that you that you hope for which is that people will not want to get on lexington street but if they have to move in that general direction then they're going to go down white street and so we're going to be transferring the problem to another roadway a roadway that has a school immediately abiding it  i just i just think that the the practical the pragmatic thing to do is to look for the long term solution here which is signals try to do the best we can with that with a short term solution to make it better i do not think the four way stop is the answer and let me just say one other thing if i could when we were designing the propellor road corridor we recognized that the intersection of pleasant streams of hell road was going to be tough real estate you really need if you want to manage traffic through there and i know that this a lot of this is counter to some of the things we talked about but understand that when you're when you're asking for the state and federal government to fund fifteen million dollars of road improvements there are certain standards they except they expect you to meet managing traffic through the corridor is certainly one of their priorities and so when we looked at the intersection of pleasant enter pellow we realize that you really need to have two lanes going straight into waverly square at that intersection well because of the property uses the land use is immediately adjacent to that intersection that second lane was not available there's a dedicated left turn lane from to palo up to pleasant street and there is one single through lane that takes you into waverly square part of the thought process of at the time was well you know maybe if we make it difficult for people to get into waverl square they'll find a different way to go it didn't happen it didn't happen and so i am very hesitant to sort of have that as a philosophy heading into situations that require some type of solution the idea that people will find a different route if the actual evidence on the ground has not demonstrated that and so i'm very reluctant to try to put it to try to put in place something that's going to rely on that i just don't see it happening there is this in there is something can be tried if it doesn't work it doesn't cost much to do it to see what happened to see if you know if there isn't you know there is going to be very well right but i think we're dealing human beings and human beings are very hard to predict what's what's going to happen that's why i think it's a quick and easy thing to to do if it doesn't work in a few months aig throw it up but it doesn't cost much to trying to tell you you know what i can do is i'm happy to have that conversation with  consultants and if they recommend that that be some kind of a short term experiment i'll let them make the call the other thing that i want people to be aware of is because we had a state and federally funded reconstruction project in that corridor there may be things that in the traffic control agreement that the town was required to sign in order to secure that funding there may be things in that traffic control agreement that preclude us from allowing an intersection to queue back up into the we don't know how much that you know how it would determine all that and if there is if there's a way to move forward with an idea like that i assure you i will pursue that with the consultant and we'll see what happens you know your theory might be right and then cueing might not get to appeal road it might media things that we might do glenn i know you have that idea what about one of the people here recommended some sort of flashing lights you know on the approach or maybe further down from lexington from coming from watertown you know midway down and also coming the other way flashing lights that form you that there is a crosswalk ahead standard crosswalk signage that has a flashing light that flashes on the perimeter those of solar powered they were reasonably priced that was a great application for them at that location and from the burbank i can i can once again i can have a conversation wellesley there are some in cambridge cocket avenue as one package avenue and broadway and some of the as another one that's quite fantastic so i think we have options i just think  need to go with a consultant but yeah if we can get this to the board they can act we get to consult them and this soon react but i think we learned a lot of things tonight especially about cross the burbank and what we're doing the one who broke the speed read back signs of speed read back signs of the signs that have radar in them and show that you're show your speed according to meno uniform for half control devices they have to be paired with the speed limit sign lexington road lexington street has a dual established speed regulation and i recommended the board that a speed feedback sign be placed on the twenty five mile an hour speed limit sign that's going down that hill so be paired with that sign going down the hill to kind of alert drivers of their speed as they're as they're making that travelling downhill there to try to get their attention to slow down before the intersection you have to make a motion for that  the speed feedback so to speak feedback time in that area would you have a specific location you'd recommend i'd recommend on not on the downhill portion  think across from family it's across from chandler and as you're going down lexington street ok as a twenty five mile an hour sign that's where the speed limit changes from thirty to twenty five on that road the recommendation is that i don't know what the cost is but you know it's something it's i'd say it's something that could be done i would imagine on the short term if we have a second i have found them to be there we've got a lot of real positive feedback from areas that so there are two motions that are going to the board on monday right ok good so thank you all very much i think