of growth in traffic i think of all of the issues that i hear about when i talk to people in our community is their concern about the massive amount of growth they're seeing especially in the downtown and all of the traffic issues that it's causing and will cause as some of these buildings come online so i thought this might be a good topic to discuss in our commissioner's corner today and try  to help you understand what the city is doing and why we're doing it and thank you for rob helping me with that today alex i really really appreciate it you know i want to try to address this in a way that people who are city engineers and you know don't really know the jargon in the lingo of things so you know we want to take it down to the simplest  what what we're doing here in in the city now tell us first what your role is what does that mean to be the city engineer what are you responsible for thank you commissioner and reshape this opportunity being the city engineer basically i oversee things that happen in the public right of way so it can be things from construction and permit ing driveways or traffic detours to evaluating traffic impacts from these developments and so really when we talk about transportation that's looking at the transportation component of these new developments and how does that relate to our existing call plan and the rules that the state has imposed on how we manage and determine traffic ok so so let's let's delve into you talked about the existing comp plan what does that mean what is an existing comp plan so the existing call played a comprehensive plan is basically the plan that the city commission adopts is sort of like the framework for where we want to go as a city what types of land uses should be the areas what we want the roads to operate like what kind of improvements we should see how they interface with that transportation chapter land use chapter environmental chapter and so it gives a guidance  for when we look at doing projects either the city starts or what a developer comes and what they're supposed to do to meet the goals and objectives of the city so the current comprehensive plan that's in place how long has it been in place the one we have in place now has been there for a number of years i don't know the actual adoption date but it's been a considerable number of years since we've redone the transportation plan and the state has made some changes in how trans traffic needs to be evaluated that's the last option and so a lot of what we're doing is trying to make sure we bring the plan consistent with the state and acknowledge what the state is requiring us to do and how that impacts the city's financial obligation one how was th current comprehensive plan adopted what goes into the process of adopting it so in the plan was adopted last time it went through our planning department they had meetings it was of meetings with the community and it also goes to the planning board as a public hearing and also to the commission as a public hearing so the community gets a chance to voice their opinions both of the playing board public hearing at the commission public hearing and when that happens before it goes to the state for adoption ok so the t it's the guideline is basically that we follow now is the overall city comprehensive plan different from the downtown plan correct so there's a downtown master plan that's a separate document died right ok and the downtown master plan i believe was adopted and something like two thousand and two or right ok and how was that determined in the same way with the public hearings and then going before the city commission guess about on a master plan also had community meetings public hearings and adoption by the commission so when you know because i think the downtown  one of the biggest issues because of all the new buildings and hotels and you know that are going up in the downtown when it was adopted did they feel good where was considering this for see all of the high rise buildings coming online i think if you pulled up the old discussions that mr dewani had with the community i think it was his vision that there would be high rises here and i think if you read through the document you'll see a lot of discussion about a walkable downtown wanting to make sure there's sufficient land use options so that people could walk to a grocery store walk to a post office walk to a drug store with the understanding that traffic does continue to get worse it would be a lot of traffic going through the city that's not even based on the city's growth and so one of the things to try to do it downtown is make it basically a one stop shop so that you can live work and shop all in the same location and you wouldn't be required or obligated to have to get into a car to get all of your running around and you could choose to walk or take a bus ride your bike there'd be other choice so there would be less need for cars and parking in the downtown area i think that that was what he was really trying to get to and in order to make a downtown vibrant enough to have all those uses you need enough population to support those uses year round and so i do think that his vision was to have a more dense downtown and more more trips done by foot and less trip by car and and when the public was advised of this or they talked about it now you know you can't say what people were thinking but do you think they really understood that's what it meant i think i think one of the things that mr watt he said was that serious sort of like an adolescent so we have a foot in being a small town and a foot or toe maybe even in trying to be more grown up talent and i think that it's very difficult for folks to visualize the grown up town when we had this young town that had a lot of single storey buildings and we still have a really robust transit system so understanding where he was trying to go i don't think that that was easily understood by the public necessarily or the steps that would be required to get from that point to final final maturity so this right right and for those that don't know can you you know explain to mr dwane is so so he's a member of the new urbanist movement really one of the founders of this idea that communities should be walkable that you can't basically can't build yourself out of congestion that if you continue to widen roads to make traffic flow better the roads just continue to get congested and you're back to where you started from you know a few years later but with more lanes and now a more difficult pedestrian environment so his thought was that we really needed to have a downtown that was fairly dense so that the different uses could be successful all year round the restaurants and the office buildings and the post office and the grocery store and that residential should have a network of roads so that if there are trips through there that there's enough roadway so that the trips get spread out so no one street gets inundated with all the traffic so trying to go to what had been a more traditional neighborhood before subdivisions were you know were considered the way to build so that there was a nice creative network you know sort of a grid of roads so that if there is traffic on this road there's ways to then take a take a side street and get out get off that road exactly rather than the kind of system that you have and in subdivisions where it's just one road you you know you don't have any place that that you can go exactly you know so that's what we're trying to accomplish and i think what's happened is that for years not a lot happened because of the economy and now the economy has come back and now all of these projects that were kind of waiting on hold some of which had been approved years ago are starting to happen so you know it seems like a lot of density all at once but in reality it was buildings approve this year and then i've you know a few years later a few years later that just they never happened and now they're and now they're happening but when looking at that you know how is it determined whether they get approved how is it determined the effect on the traffic by adding these these buildings so one of the big changes that occurred with the state law recently was that the state law has identified that really the transportation system is supposed to complement the land use that that the land use that a person purchases property with certain land use and the ability to do things that they have the right to do that building and the transportation plan should follow suit that the transportation claim doesn't dictate the land use and that if a community has identified a level service for the road network that they're committed and required to make the road network operator that level service and so one of the challenges we have in the city is sarasota is that we don't we haven't widened many of the roads recently and actually the community generally hasn't supported many of the projects when when we started them and so if a developer comes and builds in a congested intersection and it's already had pm peak failing or not me level service that we would end up in a comprehensive plan with the state says is that you know local jurisdiction you should have fixed the road so therefore you have to assume it operates as you've identified and then see whether the road network fails when this development is added to it ok so let's let's go back because i think that's kind of where it gets a little confusing first lists explain what this level of service mean and i know there's an a b c but it you know that doesn't that doesn't tell me anything right so so basically level surface a is a free flow you can pretty much get from point a to point b without being impeded by any other traffic and then when you get to a level service after you're inching along very slowly you know gridlock type means that if there's an incident then you can speak and we look at the which is some true some traffic but still fairly good movement or d which is a little bit more congested than see a little more traffic on the road and so that's where we want our roads to operate at during the busiest time of the day many communities have already adopted level service d n e because they know that they are all gated to make the road operate that way and they can be very very expensive to build roads and generally the way one improves level service is by adding more lanes so that there's more roadway available so drivers can get around each other move more quickly through the corridor and of course in an urban community with narrow rights of way and buildings close to the right of way edge it's very expensive to acquire property and to make the roads bigger so that's always been a difficult thing for the city of syria so it is to widen these roads and improve what would be considered the level service because of the buildings we have there and many folks don't want to see the roads widened more making you know make it more difficult for them to cross from one side to the other so what do we do then to improve the level of services that we're multi modal transportation comes in exactly so you know i think we're still in what mr jordan would say is adolescent stage is looking at improving more multi modal options you know obviously one area that we still have a lot to accomplish is improved transit because you know people really want to be able to have be able to get a bus you know within fifteen minutes every fifteen minutes would improve ridership and that does cost money and that's something we still have to work with the county on trying to really get to ahead ways that are are appropriate but certainly transit certainly making it more come for people to cross so that if they want to get from one side of where you want to the other we want to make sure that they can easily do that so they don't feel have to get their car to drive from downtown to the to  ways or from downtown to you know the red so if they want to walk on the bridge they can kind of comfortably get from downtown and just take their walk without driving to someplace closer to where they start their exercise so that's what we are looking into it was some of the projects that are proposed for is slowing the speeds down now knowing that we still have a lot of traffic through there making it so it's more come for the people to cross or walk up and down forty watt or right there by yes and then also improve bus stop so that if they are waiting for a bus they can do that more comfortably well when we're talking about forty one what are we planning to do to make that easier to cross a no you know we're doing roundabouts i think there are a lot of people who are really skeptical about doing that that's one of the things so would you explain why having roundabouts will help so one of the things with roundabouts is that they're chance for anyone who's trying to cross at forty one and go straight right now you know there's a left turn lanes in this right turn lanes and there's a pork chop and then there's through traffic and then fruit through traffic the other way so when you're crossing there's many many directions you have to look at to make sure that you're safe when you cross even with the walk sign you know there are some movements that can still continue so you know you have to look in all directions when you're crossing a roundabout there's only one direction in which the vehicles will come towards you so you can just look one way and make sure that the road is clear and then you cross and then you get to what's called the you know the island in the middle and then you look through the other direction and again from only one one direction then you cross the rest of the way so you only have to worry about traffic in one direction so it's much safer the pedestrian and roundabout slow speeds down so on the single a roundabout usually when you get to about twenty five miles an hour vehicles are much and so if you've tried the new main and orange roundabout the cars are very good about yielding to pedestrians and so now the pedestrian can cross much more quickly than they used to because they just come up there they wait until car comes to a stop and they cross one lane then they look the other direction cross one way but the main in orange roundabout are in the downtown where you know people are really going slow and that's not a major rely on us forty one along there how does it make sense then to slow the cars down to twenty five mph isn't that going to add to the backups so so overall and if you were to time how long it takes when you come to a signal and you wait so if you're the last the first person there at the red you can take you know a couple of minutes before that cycle comes around so with roundabouts even if you're up a you know several cars it's slow but but costs and movement and so if you were  time yourself from point a to point b going through the roundabout versus being stuck the signal over all your time can be better or about the same but frequently a low peak hours are can be much much better because you're not stuck waiting when there's no other traffic at hi peak times you know you still you go slowly but you still continue little by little to get through so it's a different concept completely but generally overall for up until the very most congested intersection that failure you will get through more quickly than if you get stuck at a red light and have to wait for the cycle to go through with the pedestrian again they cross in that case two lanes and way to cross for two lanes one thing that will happen is that because there's more than one lane the state is looking at this time with a hog signal which is a signal is cross walk so that people that are visually impaired know when it's safe to cross because it can be difficult to know where the traffic is coming from either the roundabout as opposed to a more traditional intersection but then again traffic only stops for the protest across two lanes as opposed to six eight or ten lanes depending on how large an intersection is so it's still a much shorter time period for the individual vehicle to wait and a shorter time period for the pedestrian to wait and this half hour is going so fast that i don't want to even though i can't get into all of the things i would love to discuss with you so we may have to do  a continued version but i know that the biggest lightning rod for people is the view at the corner of you know gulfstream and forty one how did that get approved and you know how was its effect on the traffic determent right so if you recall we talked a little bit about the changes of the state law so the state has said is that before you can determine whether the view has an impact you have to  make the intersection operate as you in your comprehensive plan said it should so if you say that intersection should be operating in a level surface do you with a certain speed through that area or the roadways around there are operating a lot of service d then you have to program that so that intersection operates that way and then you put in the traffic of the few adds to the network during the pm peak the busy time how do you program that what do you mean you program that so you  operating so the consultants will evaluate the functionality of that intersection they do counts they see how it's operating and what the geometry is and if for example it's operating below the level service and then what general what a traffic engineer would do was say what we need to do to fix this in a section so it works properly so maybe it's adding a turn lane or maybe it's adding a through lane but they have to develop an intersection that operates to the level of service that we say it should operate at and we can't hold the developer responsible for making the improvements to get it to the level surface we say it should already be operating at once we have a fictional intersection that operates that way a computer generated intersection operates that way based other parameters that are there we put in this new traffic and then we see if the intersection was operating like it should cording to accomplish and does the developer add so much traffic that now it's failing and if that is failing then we have to see what kinds of improvements they should be obligated to do to make it work better and if they do if their traffic does make the intersection operate below that level service then we have to see what improvement is required to bring it back up how many trips that improvement adds to the interest to that you have to that segment and then how many trips to that developer take so say for example we added the lane and  lane we can put one hundred more cars in that location but the developer only put fifty trips there so then the developer has to pay half of the cost of that improvement and the city would be responsible but you know they're hanging the other half so even if they break you know break the intersection they only pay there what they call proportionate fair share of that improvement and i know the other issue besides the traffic at that location is people cannot understand why the building is right up to the sidewalk in fact you know a number of buildings downtown can you address that issue so so with the building layout it's actually more related  towards the land use and so i think codes they talk about what a setback should be for a private property so when the view was developed they weren't in the public right of way right there the public right away as they are for sidewalks and the road improvements that we're doing they're building on their private property and in the downtown master plan many of the land use if there's different categories but it will it will dictate how far back you can be and most of the downtown land use is say between zero and five feet setback and so that's why you see a lot of the properties in the downtown area built up to or very close to the right of way line on their private property but close to the to the why doesn't that though add to the walkability isn't one of the things of the new urban ism is that the building should be really at basically at the sidewalks so that people are encouraged to walk by them is that isn't that what what adds to walkability right so one of the things that mr do want to talk about is the feel of the street so you know unlike a lot of suburban areas where you have a parking lot and then the structure of the structure should be pulled closer to the road so that you've got sidewalk and maybe some street furnishing but that the next thing it's a building and not an expanse of asphalt so so you are sort of curious is in the back parking would go in the back or you know some areas there's a parking garage but you don't have a big open asphalt area you have some kind of structure  and making it attractive so that it enhances the pedestrian experience but usually the parking is in the back and the building is right there with windows and ways that the pedestrian can really feel engaged with the buildings that are nearby and the sidewalk there is going to be approximately how wide it varies a little bit but approximately eight feet wide through there so once once the construction fences are down and everything it shouldn't feel like it's right at the street right right they'll be a nice sidewalk there so that there will be room to walk around comfortably and some landscaping maybe or something there will be some trees there as well so that's what you add a little buffer to that ok we've got about three minutes left so is there anything else that you feel like you should add that you feel like you know you get questions i'm sure all the time on all of this stuff so one thing i think people should be aware of us even when development like of you comes in and their trips the trips added to the network don't require specific site improvement to be constructed they are required to pay into the multi modal transportation fee for the impacts to the overall network so so they still pay for the additional trips that they put on the network even though a specific improvement was not it isn't right at that is right at that intersection i am just really quickly when we talk about multi modal what kinds of things are we going to do with that money to add so with a multi modal impact fee fines that's money to enhance a system so we can't use it for or maintenance so we can't use it for a bus driver but we can use it for a new bus shelter we can use it for like you jobs if it makes the system work more efficiently we can use it for improved bus shelters we can widen sidewalks and bicycle the cillit is for bicycle commuting and we can add capacity for vehicles as well so we really can't add like we can add buses themselves or like  connector or anything like that with this multi modal we can and i believe a bus would be considered a bus or a trolley is expensive enough to be a capital item but we can't add the driver so once the equipment is there still needs to be cost to maintain that piece of equipment and to operate it that comes from other funding sources other than the transportation and you have to say i think you know as many people say in this especially summer time people aren't going to be getting on their bikes or you're not you know usually generally riding to work on your bike or other ways of getting around or you're going to the grocery store you're going to have all the bags that you've got to carry so you know i think when we're investing in the multi modal we do have to add other ways for people to get around just adding bike trails i don't think is is going to do it right and they do but also i think you're more apt to maybe ride your bike one way if you knew if it's raining you can get on a bus but if you know you have to be able to get there and back then you you know you might be less apt to ride if you don't know what the weather is going to like in the afternoon or if you decide to go shopping and you have more stuff so they all work together if we give people the ability to walk one way and take the bus back or walk one way and you know have maybe a some bicycle facilities or they could ride back so we're looking at trying to get you know all these put together and have a more robust system with more options now and is you know what trolleys to the beach i would think would be very helpful especially for sure as you know somebody is telling me they just came back from savannah georgia and they had all of these straw is that when you got there as a tourist you could park your car and never have to take it out again and get to all of these things so you know i would like us to move and that direction so that we can do that or get from the airport to a downtown hotel all of these things we are almost out of time i want to thank you today alex for coming in this is such a big topic we need another session and i want to thank all of your today for joining us