good evening tom computer chair of the belmont board of selectmen a minute and welcome everybody i am joining this committee now as a replacement for mark who served here for a number of  months as the chair marc has shared the work that he's done to date in think in his time on the board continued to recognize the importance of this effort and the importance of the community in the importance of the overall project and on behalf of the board want to acknowledge that i think the sitting board feels very much the same way and i want to continue to engage with this group and serve serve appropriately and bring the ideas of this group and of the community obviously to the board so we can make sure they're taken into into account the conversation tonight is predominantly about the trowbridge hidden neighborhood but we also know there are other neighborhoods that are affected in particular the godin street neighborhood is also a neighborhood that we will be as a committee discussing in greater detail and similarly to tonight we were organizing a community forum that i wanted to acknowledge that's currently scheduled for  from the get mitigating traffic in improving bicycle and pedestrian access in the golden street and school street neighborhoods so with that thank you everybody for coming thank you for your input and we look forward to a good discussion this evening i think over you and i think you're chairing as the vice chair correct thank you my name is sam paulson and i'm the vice chair of the high school traffic working group high school traffic working group really got stabbed as a result of a number of people going to  building committee meetings for the new high school and work trying to make sure that we could work with the high school building committee to assure everybody that there would be good especially bicycle a access to the campus father kids who would be going there and at the same time looking at ways in which perhaps we could relieve some of the traffic traffic issues that will arise the high school is going to be much larger because it will accommodate six crates instead of four and that and itself will bring more traffic the high school also will be a busy place and that also will mean that more traffic will entering and leaving the high school site probably at all hours and so i think the high school traffic working group and the town very much want to be sure that we have good access to the high school that we try to make sure that the traffic is not that the neighborhoods are not impacted any further by traffic than they are already and perhaps even maybe we could make some adjustments that would reduce the amount of traffic that's going up and down our neighborhood and about the changes that we are considering the town is considering to make as the high school project moves forward they are actually two phases one is the construction period and then there is the actual high school as it will go forward into the future i am the vice chair of the committee i'd just like to introduce the other members dan amila who is the one to my right who is the chair of the new resides on school street and faces goads street and she knows all about the traffic and marie moni from golden street is in the back she has to leave so she's sitting down in the back jesse bennett is from the area and represents that area on the board this is bill of allo who is the chair of the belmont high school building committee and we all owe him a debt of gratitude i'm not sure how he's doing it keeping it all the balls up in the air as we move along with the project jay mccotter who is the head of the department of public works for the town you can make all your complaints right on that corner  my right giving you the right title i'd like to call you lieutenant but maybe that will be next week sajid male who sits on the board as a great resource for knowing what is going on especially at the opening and closing of school on the streets and belmont and then bill schwartz who was the consultant from nelson nygaard who is the genius who is trying to help us put all of this together so we are going to have hear from a number of people and the  really nice to have this group formed and was saying how it got formed i was going to meeting after meeting talking to people saying the same thing over and people were coming and saying the same thing over and over again finally got coalesced a group that represents the neighbors in the town that can reach out beyond the property lines of the high school because the building committee for the high school is only able to do work on the high school that's all we have so we're now sharing with all the partment and all neighbors together in this working group and it's been fantastic so today i just have four slides here to show you we will have a new school but we have to get through those panes of construction phasey just like if you did a bathroom project in your house and you had to move somewhere else or a kitchen project that we have to go through that so the st slide that bill will flip to is our st phase the st phase of the project starts to get prepared as soon as school is out so school is out today i don't think officially we've been told this yet but we're pretty sure it won't snow again right now is that i hope so although it's been a little cold this week so june th monday we start construction pretty actively on the site tuesday june th we will likely start a week maybe a little earlier putting fences up and working on the periphery of the campus but certainly all activities starts june th the campus will be closed to the public authorized personnel only going to the through the campus all across from hitting your field all the way east to pier co closed when it opens in september at labor day it'll look at the a lot different because the middle of the campus right here the blue is the act of school that all students will  be back in school and in june and in september i mean we'll have a construction fence sort of breaking it apart to the west will be the active construction site to the east will be the public entering and exiting so that's the big difference there is no exit for the public concord out of anymore thus the traffic as and was saying will be impacting this neighborhood which is what we'll spend time tonight talking about phase twelve years starting this summer and taking two summers through two thousand and twenty one construction traffic will be conquered out of and tearing into exiting and traveling back on concord of there will be police details right here at the golden st concord of intersection for the all the construction activity that's happening to be able to safely allow bicyclists and walkers to traverse the entrance to the construction site all while the activities of the construction site stay on the construction site may be i will say for sure different than you see down past the post office right now where that construction site is on to the co concord of everything is happening off the sidewalk off the concord out into the campus plenty of space for that to happen but nonetheless there will be construction vehicles entering and exiting and we will have police details while those gates are open to ensure that people can safely move through their construction vehicles our deliveries will not enter the neighborhood they are directed to proceed through concrete out and i have another slide to show that but before we go there i will say that parking for country construction workers will be along concrete of both sides and that will take up about one hundred dollars spaces we estimate here all while the parking on campus for both teachers and students will occur right here how do we do that the tennis courts will be removed starting this summer and the new entrance and exit drive will start to form right here it will be an exit the entrance will be just like it is today driving down and turning in and there will be bus drop off and student drop off and this will centrally the little theater entrance the entrance facing east will centrally be the new main entrance to the high school as it exists today for the remainder of that high school for the next  i want to go to the next slide which shows the truck route probably can't really visualize this but i will tell you this is in all the contracts that are being bid for the project and this will be followed because this is how contractors work the city of boston them that so nothing going through the neighborhood is the plan for all trucking vehicles next slide phase two i'm talking about this now but it's a ways off two thousand and twenty one come june we're to flip the switch close to campus again through the summer and it will switch from the new campus now with the blue school being active that's the new school the high school only grades nine through twelve and that allow us to knock down the existing school sort of ghosted in here and build the middle school wing and that will happen starting in the summer of two thousand and twenty one and going through two thousand and twenty three at that point all the public will enter and exit the go  in which case that will be the final final solution which you've hopefully seen before the last lied i have here tonight talks about that construction it's all delivery route and it's almost the same except we now enter belmont right on concord and we take a right to make a delivery right through the trowbridge neighborhood and then they come back out and they exit through cambridge and that will be the path that is used four hundred and twenty  there would be more than twenty truck you know two thousand and thirty plus truck routes going a day in and out when we're doing deliveries of building materials that might be in the twenty per day but it's not every day it's you know activities a construction site i would say the peak could be twenty dollars to thirty dollars i forgot to say something very important construction deliveries are restricted from the school start times ok they're also restricted by our by laws that happened before seven so they have a short window in the beginning of the day but most of them will happen after those drop off they will be gone by the student dismissal so that's that's not an issue but they will start work at seven am and so the construction deliveries will likely there could be a couple early in the morning and then they'll have to wait until the school arrivals have dismissed have subsided and then they'll be able to come into belmont so there's also one hour parking as you move further down towards the intro bridge and so they have to obey all local signs unless those signs have been will be changed there is bus drop offs own search you know there are no different than us the idea is that we're our goal is to keep the construction vehicles out of the neighborhood well that's a good question st thing is they're going to have a hard time getting under the bridge and the nd they're going to have a hard time moving moving through the rest of the rest of the town so that they they actually want they want a delivery route they do this is what they ask for so that they don't have to guess where they're cut they don't they're not familiar with belmont for the most part will have materials coming from different states probably could be from canada they want to know how to get in and out of the site the easiest and so this route allows them to do just that know again coming in off route to getting off at the all life parkway coming down the aisle wife parkway taking a right at the rotary and then coming down concord have from cambridge into belmont known as the truck team of how to mow twice already this year inspecting trucks on brighton street fifty percent of the trucks are lawfully their garage out of businesses are making deliveries to businesses along brighton st  the other ones they took the appropriate action and we have a good relationship with them so we get reports from the neighborhood that there's a problem with trucks not abiding by this plan i have no problem calling the truck team out to do their thing and  we just say that this is a home we trucks that are part of the county contract work that's happening at the high school all the other truck traffic in town this is not what we're saying this is just the trucks that are under contract for the belmont high school construction project and yes this is it trowbridge street will have trucks that will have to go up and down to get in that entrance for that and and we'll have to work on that it may be that we have parking only on one side during that time because it's too tight for that we may have to have a well we will have an officer at this construction zone when that happens and they may hold truck traffic so that only one truck is on that street at a time in any direction so that we don't have that congestion that you're describing we will always have an officer at the entrance to the construction site gate anything times construction is ongoing that always happen that's one more yes lights so let me let me explain what i was trying to say the construction vehicles will be restricted during the time that school drop off is occurring all school time i would never get the project right and we'd have to have it but we're trying to do is when you have all that congestion and people are coming and going we're trying to minimize the impact to the belmont streets and we could do that i mean that's reasonable but it can't be done all day long  and here's the best thing about this that we are trying to stay in contact with the neighborhood we have our liaison then for the building committee emma who's who's not here tonight but she is  trying to stay in touch we can make adjustments as we could we definitely want this to work both ways so we talk to the neighbors and we understand what's what's working and what's not and we will make those changes our construction trailers will go  up this summer and we'll have numbers on those in the we encourage everybody if they have a concern to reach out and talk to us because we won't know what those issues are unless you tell us and then we can do something about it because we're part and part of your community and we want to make this we know there will be no parking for construct so when we switch in two thousand and twenty one the contractor parking on the on campus and now we have staff parking west of the school now ok and the students will end up parking off campus that's the final that's the final solution they will be parking on concord f ok that's what's to superintend or and and west of harris field that's where the student delegated parking will be news good evening once again i'm glad clancy the director of community development the town engineer stated the schedule of the construction calls for the real activity to ramp up this summer as the high school traffic group began to sort of see the schedule flush oh what we came to realize is that really by september st of this year there needed to be some provisions made in the hidden jewel bridge neighborhood to react to the fact that not only is the traffic entering the school from that neighborhood but will also be exiting the site into that neighborhood as well and so back in january we contracted with also nygaard to begin to look at the issues  you know it's taken about three months for nelson meetings with some of the members of the committee who live in the neighborhood meetings with the high school building committee just you know just general sort of work gathering data and that kind of thing it's taken them about three months to get to the point where we are here tonight i mentioned the schedule because you know once we recognize that we needed to do work in the hindu trowbridge neighborhood you know we had to slot out a period of time to do actual construction work what once it was to have everything in place some time you know early may to be able to meet all these schedules and so it's been a little bit of a challenge for us to to meet all these but the reason why we are where we are is because this is neighborhood that will be impacted st and foremost with the changes that we made on campus i know we have members of the committee that i mean the golden street school street neighborhood and just by the way hitting your drawbridge when i say that i mean a lot more than just hitting but it's kind of an easy way to recognize a neighborhood say they would school and go and when i talk about school and go to there's a heck of a lot more real estate than just school and go in that we're focused on but we've begun to do a similar path with school and go down as we did with it in your intro bridge consultant that's working on that actually did a town light traffic study for the town so i'm hoping that with the familiarity they already have of the town they'll get a little bit more of a jump on this than nelson nygaard was able to do and we it is is to bridge the two bills here if you will bill of allah presented the high school building committee information and now bill schwartz the representative from nelson nygaard is going to go through a presentation and in lay out some of the concepts and ideas that have to talk about some things that that bill of all some mentioned and give you sort of just some numbers to go along with the sequencing that he showed you i'm also going to talk about some ideas that we have so the  the there's another team of also some folks from my firm that have been looking at the plan for the high school campus he may have been to some of those meetings my colleague elson fletcher has been presenting at those and there are so we've been collaborating just to  sort of know what what the other team is doing so we're focusing on the area and white for our project there if you will and i apologize the screen graphics are graduates to show you what's again the terms of on the so basically i'll just talk about the sort of assumptions that we made for this analysis that st of all this new school driveway opposite trowbridge is going to be constructed as soon as school closes  underwood will stay as it is today one way northbound so the entering traffic to the high school campus will be the same as it is today the exit in traffic that is currently using the one way high school driveway however will traffic represents a regulatory change because right now seven to nine am says do not enter even though we know that that is not adhere to fully we have some data that shows just how many people do that but it is something that will have to be taken up as a change  in terms of traffic management we looked at a couple of options for trowbridge in this one of the things we want to hear from you tonight about the st one is to change the streets are just one way so you would have underwo north bound and trowbridge southbound and from a planning standpoint it makes sense from impact standpoint those people who live on the street maybe not such a good idea but with the amount of traffic that we're looking at we felt that it was either that or removing parking on the west side of the street and that would facilitate two way flow because i think for convenience having traffic going both directions is a positive but because of the width of the street if this car is parked on both sides this is not enough room for two way flow to flow well so that those are the two options for trowbridge we're suggesting that that signs need to be added to prevent all turns on to baker and all left turns on to trowbridge so right now this do not enter the trowbridge but anybody coming from certainly coming from the high school driveway the new driver will have to be able to access the street and we think people coming from underwood who are circulating or may want to turn it that's a decision to be made by you guys another thing that we're talking about is the importance of adding some signs on the brighton blanchard card or both sides of hidden or informing people that you're not supposed to go into the neighborhood right now there are no regulatory signs or warning signs saying this and so what happens is if you enter the neighborhood today if you turned on hit injure and you wan law you end up driving to the high school campus to get out to concord but i'm sure people don't but that's not that be that is now we're trying to set this up correctly so the best thing to do we think is to put signs on  on both sides of hidden you're saying this restriction so possibly warning sign that says do not enter during these periods local traffic school traffic only something will get to that a minute but just one of the sort so there's some other ideas so the blue represents the entering traffic into the campus today and the red orange color represents the exit in traffic so for the sake of discussion really we're looking at these two hundred and ninety two dollars vehicles that will no longer be able to exit the campus in the during the construction period so if you move to the construction period that option is gone away and this is the traffic pattern and we've just assigned the traffic to trowbridge so just going back there was zero now the two hundred and ninety two has moved moved over here and we have much more data than this for a lot of these intersections that are numbered this is really just focusing in on the high school in the future in the morning  t the driveway has moved from the location there you see the two hundred and ninety two at the eleven has moved over to sorry to the new location over here and you can see the vimes are quite a bit higher because now you have the all six grades and you have a dramatic drop in terms of the amount of traffic coming in from this direction so that's the am and i just i can we summarize it on the table here to sort of it'll be at four hundred and sixty four dollars in the future so it'll be up by two hundred and fifteen but underwood which has three hundred and thirty four today will be down to twenty so that's a big drop in underwood's of good for the folks on underwood and then  numbers fifty four today is the construction number and the future number is a little bit more than say so that's the am and similarly in the pm we have this want to quickly go through these you can see the one hundred and ninety six over here and then you have the sort of the differences that environs change from today on the three streets in the departure so before i go any further does anybody have any questions about what i've just shown of any confusion right the question was you know the concern is who's people are going to end up on baker street and it's a very legitimate concern that that won't be the case you know it was and we covered the we counted the numbers and we have already informed the committee that we are concerned about impacts on on tobago where people will i'm part of the way to address it is to have a plan for accommodating traffic that's coming out of  out of trowbridge and then what about to show you a couple options for that but i think we need to discuss tonight and get your input we don't want to come forward you know here's what every everything that we recommend want to really hear from you because that is a very legitimate concern and there are ways so let me get into some of the options and so i will say that just because you're a baker i don't want to let you feel like you're ignored we were not showing anything for baker tonight but we want to hear about it ok so  so so the sort of the ideas in terms of the construction period improvements i were already mentioned installing signs on both side of hinge or street the it could be high school local access only seventy nine am or some something along those lines the nd one construct improvements on underwood street which is for those of you on under would have been part of the high school project there have been discussions about making improvements to the the pond side of the street and we'll show you those in a minute and then concord that we developed and showed at a previous meeting and what we basically do is take the existing cross walk here and move it to the east side of the intersection and then extend the median right here so what that means is that everybody coming d so that's the basic concept that we came up with for the initial plan and we the other option is to essentially not do that you still prohibit the parking on one side of trowbridge but you provide police officer control at this intersection during arrival and dismissal i still feel like you need to move the cross over as we showed before and prohibits u turns on underwood but it would having a police officer at that location during the during the arrival of dismissal periods because the amount of traffic coming out of the intersection would back up the whole street if you didn't have a police officer there absolutely sorry about that so let me just go back and show that the reason that we're proposing an island in a right turn only here is that this street with the amount of traffic coming out of here if we were to allow people to turn  and then try to get some bright road we just don't feel comfortable with that those of you who know the street right now right well that's why this is an option and what i said when perso the the reason we came up with this idea was that if you didn't have police officer control here the amount of traffic coming out of the high school want to turn left here combined with the traffic that's coming through in the morning would not work and it would back up the whole street so the only way to make it work operationally was to do that i didn't say it was a good idea i just wanted to show that was one way to address it we were already told that that's probably not what you want to want but we want to show it because the do thing about police officer control is that if it doesn't happen to somebody as a show up now you've got sort of this situation that is going to create problems on the street when one question  i just wanted to explain the movement the moving of that crosswalk from one side of her bridge to the other and what the thinking was behind that so the  because of the movement of what would be a potentially very heavy right turn everybody being forced to turn right there we just felt that it was a better place to for people to cross that's the main reason for it and also i think there's a we're also talking about the possibility of moving the bus stop this is other features of this that we're looking at but that was the main reason because of the amount of traffic that would be coming through there so that would be conflicting with as many vehicles if we had the police officer control there instead of the median which would you still recommend moving the crosswalk let's look at that ok if it's something that i mean i i would lean in that direction anyway just because of the amount of traffic and the fact that it's a wide open space i don't not wild about that location for cross walk anyway but  it my only concern about it is that most of the users who are using that crosswalk at watson are then using watson to go up the hill to get to burbank and so and then people coming down the hill to get to the high school from that neighborhood the neighborhood up around those two schools and when you say ok so they're not typically going over to prate road to walk which you know would require them crossing the driveways for the gas station and as such is less desirable  they're getting right into a neighborhood when they cross on lots to get to watson if you what i'd love to see there that would be some time it's just wide open space and i am not so wild about that from a design standpoint be better to have some protection for pedestrians there so because you don't have a median today yeah ok so i showed you this the the so that's to be determined the relocating the cross walk but the police are for control at the intersection so that's it for i'm just going to go through the rest of the presentation and we can go back to it but that was sort of the the two options because we want to i'm sure there will be a lot of opinions about what i just showed but i want to get through the rest of this if you don't mind so underwood what we've done here we're going to show you some options of possible ways to lay out the street so what you have today so sidewalk parking bike lane travel lane and grass so there's nothing that this is not just part of the green space and that's the current configuration approximately thirty nine dollars and a half feet we looked at a possibility of moving the bike lane on the up to the other side of the street and what that accomplishes essentially is it creates right now the the bike lane is sees me the bike lane is not protected in the same way with from cars that might open their doors parked cars that might open their doors so we know generally speaking then and given that the desire to see if my school campus of that so this is option one you and put a sidewalk in on the pond side of the street option  two you're asking about whether people would be in danger there's a bike lane there today right moving it to the other side of the street would i mean this is a similar risk but there over by the side of the the far end of the street the option number two is we looked at the possibility of having bike lanes in both directions so you have a pretty basic bike lane next to the curb a buffer one travel lane and then a reverse bike lane and a sidewalk and that would eliminate parking on underwood option number three is to have a sidewalk  parking lane as you do today and then have a travel lane and then all of the biking and walking takes place on a path that is at the sidewalk level what that leaves you with is a much smaller street  in terms of travel way but you have a full facility on the side of the street so those are the three options for underwood and then on hidden juror what we have done and i apologize for this because it's nice and sharp on my screen but i could not get this whole people can see this but basically we're proposing that you ensure that you have a continuous sidewalk the entire length of the south side up to this property here which is has head in parking underneath the building the so but we would propose tightening up the driveway here putting curbing in at this location and trying to have  a different sidewalk treatment to make it clear that this is a walking path on the south side on north side of the street basically taking formalizing driveway space here were people go in today  another one at the far end of the property and then have a continuous sidewalk all the way in between which means that this fence that is here right now in the parking that takes place right now is impacted but it would be continuous sidewalks all the way up to the high school property  that's it for this or that the ideas that we've developed so far the future tasks are to develop specific improvement plans for trowbridge street which are to replace sidewalks and curbing and the planting strip were it needs you know the length of the street and then we will be working with the town to develop plans for the south side of concord avenue separate discussion so  that's it for the presentation i'm happy to go back and show any plans that anybody has i think it be good for the purposes of people who are doing this recording for a for you to come up to the microphone to ask your question or pass it around so it could be it can be c i mean there are other streets and belmont where there's a bike lane on each side of the street well almost all the streets a fairly narrow but that's that's a this is i agree with you that this would really be you know making  t much more complicated i think just as a personal aside having people ride their bikes against the traffic because it's going to be a one way street because it's a one way street i think that that is a complication  so to get back to this question the two ideas right so so start out with once again existing you have a bike lane and you have an eleven foot travel lane and a nine foot parking lane so for all intents and purposes you have a twenty feet of drive car space right now ok the idea that we showed that this sort of last idea it's eight hundred feet of car space that is two feet less that is not you have more pavement because you have a bike lane in the middle there but it's a one way street and we feel this would be sufficient and what it does is it shows it basically is taking the sort of the edge of the street and bringing it out and turning in this is that what's being shown on the left is raised up it is not street level so it is a path but we've also shown other ideas here for the same street where you would have a sense basically this option which is the same roughly the same amount of car space and we just move the bike lane to the other side of the street and out of the sidewalk so that's the st option the nd one is common it's both bikes in both directions it's all paved it is street level but it is just a traveling for cars and two lanes for bikes and those buffers are there to protect it to delineate where the bike in the car travel is and the that again the rd option is me the rd option is this path so i think the committee would really like to hear what people think about these different options it really would help if you came up to the mike because otherwise the people who are watching this on cable won't know what you think the bike lane is now you know my name is diane tokyo and i live on and it with street in coming out of my driveway i almost hit people daily because there's always high school cars parked there and i cannot see in a biker is always racing down so the bike lane should be moved to the other side i'm krista nelson patel i live at the bottom of trowbridge tree very close to where the new entrance to the high school is going to be i am wondering st of all if these slides are going to be made available publicly because i feel like there's a lot here it would help to really spend some time processing the different phases of what's going on also i would ask i'm aware that some measurements of real commuter traffic have been done with work around this project as well around the neighborhood tonight you showed numbers that are basically just the high school traffic and i'm curious as to how these options integrate to the other commuter traffic flow modeling don that's a great question and so the reason we did this this way was to because it was really important to come up with a plan for the construction period but we're also using the data that we collected from our counts that we took put took for the high school project and supplemented by additional co that we did to figure out the overall plan for the future like the post construction period really have to look at it i think two different pieces because you have to make the construction period work in the accepted plan  and try and figure out what we might be able to advance this constructions road construction season that would work under the future condition as well right would be seem a shame to make all in a big investment and then say well it's only for the construction period and take it out so the answer is we have data for that we have we are looking at those numbers for example we do have counts on how many people turn down a legally on to that it's not big numbers as mor well that's that's exactly what i was thinking i was particularly in the st option you presented for the top of trowbridge it at concord avenue with the median in forcing people to turn right there are times now in the afternoon during commuting hours where belmont center traffic is backed up baker street you can't think about the school project in isolation without thinking about the commuter traffic because the commuter traffic impacts how much volume you can possibly have with the school with that when you talk about a plan of one hundred and fifty four cars coming out of here but five hundred commuter cars are already there you actually you have to plan for six hundred cars you can't be planning for one hundred and fifty right i apologize if i'm giving you the impression that we're not thinking about the whole system we do know we do have accounts that all these intersections the fundamental challenge of the traffic is already there what's the in the in the exit in traffic from the high school is really moving from the concord avenue exit right the current over to trowbridge right and the the morning situation cars coming out of there i've already sort of described the concerns we had about that the the traffic that exists on the street in terms of analyzing what it is i'm not really sure i mean i think we have to mitigate the solution to the situation for construction period and if you have a police officer controlling it it's sort of like having a traffic light at the intersection during those periods it's not the afternoon rush hour by the it's not the pm peak it's the exit of schools that had earlier than that the pm rush hour overlaps with schools exiting every day but we have those numbers and we have those numbers right i'm just saying that like the commuter period is it is worse later right to the there's more people on the road at five o'clock than there are at three o'clock pm so the when you saw the numbers and this will get posted i'm sure that the numbers that post construction go way down right on  trowbridge the and so we will show it in the future this was really to talk about what we can focus on for this coming season but i will be happy to come back and present to you guys again to give you more numbers but it's not something we don't have them we haven't studied them and the related question that i had earlier about forcing you turned further down concord closer to belmont center when we are talking about that that afternoon hours and as everybody is saying the traffic is already backed up all the way up to underwood and trowbridge forcing people to continue down for a longer period of time to make turn isn't necessarily helping situation so is there and i'm and i'm hearing very clearly that the median extension and right turn only off the table i know ok can you clarify why no you turn at underwood and how far down you would expect people to make a u turn if there's any other flow because i do see that we're not quite solving for the conflict points for pedestrians getting back and forth across concord and the turns from concord on to underwood or trowbridge for those folks who are walking parallel of the mouth of the streets so i'm not clear on the u turn you know where that would happen and why we might not happen at the mouth of underwood and then also second to that is what point does a signal make more sense if we're talking about a police detail that's only for certain per know what happens when they're not there and how or how are people in the neighborhood getting back and forth so i don't know if you've been in presentations like this before but the way that traffic signal considerations work is following a set of standards that all people studying this and evaluating this go through it has to meet what are known as warrants so it's just a function of volume function that crash history and you have to sort of go through a whole detailed analysis i doubt that you would be able to meet any sort of warrants for a traffic signal a trowbridge there's certainly a possibility that someday you'd be looking at bright and conquered but i again we haven't studied that particular thing the consideration right here essentially is a matter of safety  so you you come out of the street you clearly wouldn't want to make a loud somebody make a u turn right away it doesn't make any sense whatsoever and then having them make a u turn right here with the traffic entering the school just didn't make sense to us so we said we really would want to bring them farther up and if you want to an opinion we wouldn't want people making any u turns that it's just not safe that's and that's an opinion i don't it's not the answer yeah and i had expressed concern in the meeting that we had last week that what many residents would do with it would be to take a left turn on to back at loop around to watson and come come out that way which would probably be intolerable to the people in that neighborhood because it's just not built for that kind of traffic it's very narrow and there are insufficient sidewalks it's just i think we'd be getting into a lot of issues right so the thinking that we had at one point was that right now people who are making u turns and left turns are doing so from the high school driveway to go to and so you could i'm not saying this is what you would want but you could say that is where you're left turns and u turns could take place forcing everybody to make their moves at that intersection and you could actually implement the future lane configuration for that's going to happen it go to sooner rather than later putting in a left turn lane removing the parking so that you have to through lane moving the bike lane or you could do that today i'm not saying that is what people want but that is what if you were looking at it from thirty thousand feet and you didn't that's really care what you all thought that's what we might recommend but that is not what we're suggesting it's just wanted to give you that that was part of the the thinking that we said you know that would if it were a preference because we don't like u turns in this environment because you have a meeting of trees it's pretty tight you have bike lanes on both sides of the street it's not ideal so having a police officer at that location for at least for the construction period is certainly something where it's functioning like a traffic light when the police officers there that we didn't consider it no no we didn't consider it i mean because of the railroad tracks in the limited ways of getting from the north to this neighborhood you if you made it one way in say that would enable people from the neighborhood then everybody coming back out would be forced very secure this route i think it would be it would create other problems i haven't really studied it but i'm concerned about it because you have very limited north south connections because of the railroad tracks i don't know if you have anything you want to say about that just say i don't i think that you know whenever used take a street make it one way where it was two way you have to consider the effects for the people who want to travel in the live side now i'll have less conflicts now with this one and i think it will make safe for us and for the p r people on the bike lane too and the next option without the parking some of us fight with the parking spaces and whatever we have currently so i think this is this will not work for us so folks i just wanted to explain that you know one of i think the primary charges of the high school traffic working group was to improve pedestrian and bicycle access to the high school both during construction in post construction and so one of the challenges we have at this moment is you know currently under which street you have a bike lane there doesn't seem to be any dispute or any question that we can't maintain that bike lane the question is how do we get them out of the high school and back into the neighborhoods and back home again right now there's a bike lane that takes you down under wh street but there's no established bike lane to get you from the high school back home and so the reason that you see some of these concepts on underwear that are showing to a bicycle or are better accommodation for bicycle is is this idea that we are trying to get people to walk more to bike i'll say it again the walkers and bikers that leave the campus today walk through the loop road and they get out of the car that we're maintaining a pathway for them to continue to do pay so that walkers and bikers that want to get to the school street go to street neighborhood common street all of that can do so the way they've been doing it today to just be no cars and that it's just sort of like what you say here it's a shared use path so this just remind me of forgot to mention that phase one has a shared use path going from the school site as it is today along the actually if you go around and it goes along mansion and it will come out here so yes you'll need bikers and walkers here but not everyone will be coming here a lot of people and reminds me how many people are in this neighborhood that go to the school  be the permanent solution it would be the long term plan even though you would have really good circulation on the campus in the future it was just part of the sort of the amenity improvements for the for the the the green space on the west side of underwood and one more thing in phase two we're going to do the same thing for the journey street you know when i said it's shut down this is for only construction vehicles and what my concern is very here is crossing the driveway is there and so with the new exit directly across from trowbridge what are we looking at in terms of enforcement for the overzealous parents that are trying to get out of the lot too quickly in the morning and for also the kids that are crossing at this section the the pedestrian connection is up through i don't know actually ed i don't have the site plan i could get it essentially the that choke point right there with all the exit traffic and knowing what we're dealing with right now it's current day with the exit on the concord it's not a nice crossing there is a light there without a light there in this case we're going to see issues there will be potential for i don't know injury potentially we can't put a and the high school side you'll manage both work on it in addition to one thing to consider is that the sidewalks in this area are so poor that you likely discourage walking and biking in this regard front and you see kids likely driving to school from the wind right neighborhood so this is a main concern for the exit of traffic it's not only on to concord but it's at this point as well right one this is why the proposal is to reconstruct or build sidewalks the length of the street and to try and tighten up those driveways as much as possible that's the exactly why directed us to develop the plans to do that when you speak to the you have there the six foot wide sidewalk in the thirteen foot wide lanes relative to the other streets so essentially what's being proposed here is what you have today it's just the real so you have situations where there's pretty good sidewalk and curbing and other places where there's were sidewalk or no sidewalk or sidewalk and no curb with all kinds of combinations right so this would essentially have a typical sidewalk which is forty four dollars and a half feet with two foot planning strip and a curb the entire length except for where you have driveways of course  the idea here was in terms of we did look at the possibility of some sort of buy school combination on the street but the long term plan to extend the the bike way across  as essentially share the road markings for bikes that use the street with cars but the majority of bike traffic in the future would likely stay on the community path and access the high school through the new tunnel connection so that's why can we can build this in two phases we could cut it to keep it smaller so that the crossing of students is not as far as you think that might be an option to reduce that risk  we should definitely consider it and hopefully people will develop over time where that we could why did this still pretty calm can i just get clarification on what the regulatory controls are in that area i'm assuming a stop sign crosswalks and sam ok ok so i'm jason video i live on i have a bunch of questions really and comments but st i would like to ask is there going to be a restriction on student parking now i know other towns don't allow students to park in the park school parking lot like lexington doesn't allow students to park there  ok and there's ample parking we estimate today about one hundred and eighty dollars spots of student parking and that's being maintained and i could say with pretty darn good confidence that the th and th graders that everyone here will be driving because they've been held back a few times but i do want to say that they use a permit system of some sort and they're still looking at that because maybe that maybe there could be an increase in cos they can you know it's all the parking lot would be open to the public and students are there but during school time i think what you're talking about in the point is that in the future the high school campus is moving farther away from the neighborhood so it's unlikely employers are conquered out numbers that you posted are just for faculty and students don't include the residents are right that what i showed tonight was to just give you an idea what was going to happen during the construction period where the traffic was going to be moving to sort of like here's today here's what's going to happen during construction and here's what the high school traffic going to be in the future so no i don't i didn't show the actual other vehicles that are on the road at those locations because as i explained earl we're trying to sort of figure out what can we propose for the input for the shorter term this construction season improvements that would address construction issues and get your input on those and as i said we can come back and show more volumes but the the some of the concerns that i'm sure you have are sort of longstanding issues related to i mean part of you know we talk about traffic calming right so that there are if there are other issues that you wan see addressed within the neighborhood or sort of traffic going in and out of your neighborhood welcome i'd love to hear what some of the things are that you're still severely concerned ever guards the primary drop off site which is going to be coming  overall feel right so the it's two way flow so from the from the east from the hidden or neighborhood that is the main access point but then you have this other one here and you can circulate throughout the campus in both directions so just for make sure that that's clear how is that going to be phased that's the permanent state where i'm showing the red arrows right so the majority of the traffic will be at this just made some suggestions about potentially changing the bike lanes underwood and to those configurations had the bike lane shifting to the left side the street and i just want to note that currently the best way r you're fighting with the cars to turn right on the heading or whereas before you can just turn right and not to worry about them i agree with you i said the exact same thing to my planner working on this and what we're talking about basically is if you in the future you coming up the right side of underwood today if you want make a right turn you just make a right turn because you're at the intersection in the future if you're coming up the left side and making a right turn there are cars that can be making right turn as well so you're going to be dealing with conflict point there so that's right so yeah so what we will look at it there are ways to design it so that well i mean it's through the neighborhood no matter way yeah yeah right so i mean we're going through the neighborhood we're just we're isolating it to one street is what we're doing we have to go through the neighborhood to get to the campus can make it difficult to use that if they're approaching it's a really sharp turn for them but we had talked in the last meeting about possibly if we were going to limit the parking to one side doing kind of a  where we had parking on one side of the street half way down and then on the other side of the street the rest of the way down but it seems like that would be an issue if we were going to be doing if we were going to be having the trucks coming through i don't know if you want to weigh in on that there was a speed of trucks is something i want to do reasonably well which maybe a management issue in terms of talking with those folks who are coming down to be mindful of going slow i don't know how many controls just point examples where you have parking on one side of the street and the traffic is on you know in the open space and then you switch the parking to the other side of the street and move the travel lane over so you're creating a deflection that is intended to slow cars down if you want to see that my colleague gentleman has different brookline and walnut street in brookline between high street in cypress which is quite a long street has that treatment and there are several streets in the cambridge i think this is the i'm not sure there's enough room to make this effective entrepreneur plus you need cars parking in the spaces if you know it's not that it's not fully parked for obvious reasons which is but so i'm not sure it would work in the sort of the similar thing the length of the street doesn't give certainly not a loaded vehicle you know much opportunity to get much speed up i guess that when they're driving empty they might well my concern is the empty trucks coming in st thing in the morning flying down the hill late because it's a ski slope kind of street so so st thing in the morning when everybody's coming in i be concerned with the vehicle speed they are in so i assume that would be something that the police department would have to be aware of you know i think the residents will all need to have phone numbers on hand to make complaints when it happens because basically if i see somebody truck going down the street at three thousand five hundred and forty miles an hour i'm going to call and they better not do it again it's my feeling and so you know i want to i want the construction companies to be responsive to this is my you know that's my concern so have ample sidewalks and i think six feet is just too little it's it's lower than what we have on anywhere around town where we do have sidewalks engines are closer to seven feet which yeah so talking about the with the sidewalk on hidden or six feet seems to now especially where we have a straight away we know people get going quickly there was a accident there think we remember where the car was just ran up the telephone pole so thirteen feet i'm thinking we have a standard glam for the sidewalks best so the the standard for a forty foot right of way which is what he just read is is twenty six feet of pavement and then seven feet on either side within that seven feet is a four foot sidewalk and a three foot shoulder you know i would say that in the high protests train areas you would want to go wider when you sidewalk if you could what's being proposed here is six feet if you do the map thirteen foot lanes that gets you twenty six feet so we it looks like just by the way the map as we're going to the measurement in the was eight feet on one side and six on the other so there's a total of fourteen it may have been when just right was constructed because of fencing and other things like that the the the back edge of sidewalk was not necessarily put exactly with a limit of the right of way is that something that we may be able to fix so how much does each line have to be or how narrow can we make the travel lanes well i mean i think he would tell you that you don't want to go and you know within ten and a half feet you could go to ten and i think in a one way direction that you run up against really is from a first well you have utility poles on the north side of the street and the other thing is that when you're starting to move the gear dealing with drainage and a more complex construction project so that impacts the ability to design and construct in the time frame that you're interested in that had bike lanes on the street and looked a different bike accommodation options but because of the anticipated extension of the the community path the expectation is that the desire in the future would be to stay on the path and not to use this as the connection that it's used as today because the community path ends right so the so the vision was to basically maintain the existing pavement area and market for shared use so it's essentially what you have today fixed up with paid markings and with better sidewalks that was the that's what this plan is shot in is there any parking at all on i mean i would i would have deep concerns especially with a shero siyad like that or short stretch of road to have share as is not that unusual to have narrowed lanes with shows but my concern is really for the kids coming down to the end of the road and then traveling sidewalk getting to the school that you want a good sidewalk in until the path is actually built people are on both sides of that street for sidewalk and six feet  so you're saying you'd like to see the sidewalk a wider in the road narrowed i'm not saying i don't agree with you but if this is a sort of looking at it from the standpoint of expediency and you know implementable of the end we also have some other things we have to work out with  i don't know if that would necessitate for the full length but certainly coming out in places certainly you can work i don't see any working around sewers i know there's some treatments you could do to accommodate the sewer drainage  basically curb to curb say you know to twelve foot lands right you could still have that be a shared space the anything there are than that it wouldn't work for shared space so now you're basically having mixed traffic right cars and bikes sharing the same space and so this is it basically you're deciding whether you want to temporarily accommodate bikes i mean there will always be bikes on the street but i mean in terms of like the better connections so the i mean we can look at how many people are walking on the street today we can look at what was its forecast for pedestrian volumes there's the you know as somebody who pays a lot of attention to sidewalks it's actually most important that the experience of walking feels good that you have nice landscaping have something decent look at along the way that you don't feel threatened by cars the width of the sidewalk and this is not a dense urban environment where you have dozens and dozens of people walking and abreast so i'm not too concerned about it i mean i understand there's a desire for it but i think it's all about good urban design and having so one of the things that would come from this would be to actually have a decent space for landscaping along the edge so that it can be done within that space i'm not concerned about it but i understand there's a desire for but the downside of that is you start impeding on the amount of space you have for shared space on the on the paved area and the whole construction timing because it gets more  there's a couple houses that face out into that you know i mean look this is the this is the design challenge that we have all over beaumont we have generally we have a forty foot right of way that was pretty funny there's a statement being made there i think the challenge that we have in belmont is that most of the roadways are forty four right of way twenty six feet of pavement we have competing interests with bicycles parking travel and when you're working with twenty six feet you just can't get everything you want and so what do you do on a hidden just treat was twenty six feet of pavement if we're talking about some kind of bicycle combination we can put a bike lane down there probably it's going to be a one way street if we do that and there's going to be no parking on that street if we do that because you going to take ten feet of that twenty six and put a bike lane on either side that's going to leave you sixteen feet which would generally be a one way traveling well unless you live and you want to park in front of the house which is one of the challenges that we get as well so this is one of the patterning in when you have a public forum like this you know that the competing interests are all there and then we're kind of left to sort of find the right balance here i can tell you the transportation advisory committee right now is looking at common street because we're going to be reconstructing common street this summer and we're trying to determine whether or not we get bicycle combination on common street and so the committee is at a point right now where we're ready you invite the about as of common street in to discuss that they'll be a trade off there if there is support for a bike lane on common street it's going to mean there's no parking on common street whether the residents of common street are going to allow that will find but that's that's the challenge here and so when you see the concept that bill is presenting you know the thought process behind the scenes is just as i've laid out for you is that all of these competing interest and trying to find a way to get  here i'm actually ok with the length of the sidewalk believe it or not i'll hear about it later but at the way at times are there with can you talk a bit about the right of way with the commercial property right there and if we actually have the space to do that as proposed and also what that means for the commercial trucks that are entering that building the ones that are going all the time and is that is that actually is that plan feasible with that property and that location and their right of way so our zoning bylaw they will support this idea or whether we're going to have to have a different conversation with them around i was owned by a lawyer in forcing me out by law it doesn't work i mean any concept plan that would allow us to do that one way or another we need to get to something that looks like this as i said i think we have the zoning in our favor here i would like to this to be a more a more friendly discussion with the plating company and that's a conversation i'll be having with them soon it point think everybody on this committee has taken a lot of notes and i think we'll be having a long conversation again with our town employees and also our consultant a lot of to try to make this work and so our high school traffic working group meetings of course are open to the public we generally have them at eight thirty in the morning but they're not always at a distinct time so you'd have to look on the town website or call one of the members to find out when the next meeting is but we welcome people to come and we will really try to resolve some of the issues that have come up tonight we have them we know how complicated it is i think everybody on the committee lives on a street that has the same complications and so we are sympathetic to what's going on but we would like to make sure that the children can access the high school safely and move around the town safely and i would just add as a final reminded that because the speed limit in belmont is twenty five miles per hour if everybody drove at twenty five miles per hour we would have a town that was really safe for biking and walking unfortunately not everybody drives at twenty five so i'm urging the people here tonight to continue that pattern we're really working and i know that the d p w is working hard to make sure that all the town trucks are at twenty five so we're going to make a push on this and really see if we can't really keep the speed of traffic down in the town if we can do that we will make it a safer town so we thank you for coming and we hope we'll see you again and we will report back thank you