No to ordinance to save Green Cab $4,000 to avoid reapplying for license, wheel tax revocation if RTAs are again allowed and beltline shoulder usage. Complete streets discussion, BRT, a parking study the staff team turned into a Transportation Demand Management study and more.
This is the first one of these meetings I have done a recap for. I realized that while it seems like we have a bagillion people working on transportation and its getting all the attention, that there are, in fact, things that aren’t as worked out as I thought they were. So, i became curious. You can learn along with me!
Here’s the video if you want to watch along:
And here’s the agenda
GETTING STARTED
The chair Thomas Wilson calls the meeting to order. They approve minutes, no registrants for items not on the agenda. Kemble recuses herself from item E2. There are no other disclosures, communications or recusals. The discuss meeting schedule dates and if they should have agenda setting meetings or if they should just do that at the end of regular meetings that are scheduled more often. They discuss time limits.
E2 – Amending Section 11.06(4)(g) of the Madison General Ordinances to allow a license transfer with the approval of the City Traffic Engineer.
There is no presentation, but the staff can answer questions. They have one registrant (John and Jodi Schmidt) from Green Cab in support and available to answer questions.
Questions/Discussion
Alder Grant Foster asks if Alder Tag Evers was planning on speaking to this because its his ordinance. Wilson says he expected him to be there but he did not get any notification that he would not be here. Foster says this does a couple things. It makes a significant change that these are not transferable today. He’d like more info from staff about why they were not transferrable and why we would make this change. The second part is having it being a decision that lies with Traffic Engineer and the current oridinance has new licenses and renewals all go through the Transportation Commission so he is surprised that this is something that would be relegated to the Traffic Engineer. He’s left with questions about the goals, intent and he doesn’t feel supportive of it, he needs more information.
Keith Pollock from Traffic Engineering says he regulates taxi cabs. Under the current ordinance if a cab company is sold or changes ownership the license is not renewable. Right now Green Cab has taken on a new partner, the original actors, the Schmidt family are still involved and overseeing the business but they would prefer the licensee be under the new LLC and not the current company. They worked with the city attorney and they thought that instead of legislating the specific criteria where this would be a good idea that they would just make it a decision of the Traffic Engineer. There are a significant amount of fees if they had to apply as a new entity. As of July when the new license term began they paid $4,000 in fees, if they had to license again as new company they would have to repay those and go through the whole licensing process. If there are not going to be operational changes in the company, that they are functioning the same but have a new name as the owner it doesn’t seem necessary.
Margaret Bergamini says she is puzzled as well. She says that the licensing has always gone through a committee of the city council. She understands changing from one LLC to another but other cab companies have simply changed officers of the corporation and have done that multiple times over without requiring any re-licensing or reapplication. She wasn’t sure what was motivating it – now she knows but the though that comes to her is if it moves them closer to a medallion type system which would be not a good thing. They have been careful to avoid a situation where medallions have independent value and a separate independent market and could be traded back and forth, so she is conflicted about it.
Badri Lankella agrees with Foster and Bergamini that they understand the LLC change but why it was originally restricted needs to be understood before they change it.
Alder Keith Furman says that this would avoid paperwork and fees for transfer. Is there any reason why they couldn’t have the Transportation Commission approve this as opposed to staff. Pollock says it is a matter of timeliness, it would be fine. Furman says we would give it a public process by going through transportation commission and give people the ability to talk about it if there is an issue and the commission could turn it down if there are problem. Staff says nothing besides the timeliness of it is an issue for them.
Foster would like to hear the history from the city attorney’s office. It would be one thing if it were silent on this issue, but the fact that the current ordinance specifically says it is not transferable it would be helpful to understand context of why that was and why our thinking on it has changed. His second questions is that during renewal they had asked for staff to look at our regulations and to come back with changes and he was surprised to see this, is that part of that work? Pollock says there is a separate effort, Keith has been working on it and its more extensive, I have printed out his products but haven’t read them yet, there are quite a few pages. Foster says that he understands there is a specific request associated with this that has prompted the change, but that seems like this would be good to be part of that other discussion and if it came forward as one of the recommended changes to consider and had been vetted by all the companies and put forward as a priority, he thinks it would feel better to him. It feels surprising to pull this one out when that work is going on and to not have it be part of that work. Trying to push it through in order to save a company some money doesn’t feel like good process to him, so he’s not inclined to support it at this time.
Bergamini says that is has been a long time since the city of Madison has welcomed a new taxi company and the last time was Green Cab aside from pedi-cabs. So, she doesn’t recall what kind of process of vetting owners or potential owners of cab companies go through, do they go through criminal background, insurance, etc. She would also like to see this be a more holistic process and understand the ordinances right now. Prior to Green Cab is was Madison Taxi and that goes back to the ’80s so she thinks this needs more review. She also isn’t sure this is appropriate to only have the Traffic Engineer reviewing this, what kind of expertise do we want if it is done on the staff level, would that be included in the skill set that they want the person holding that position to have.
Motion
Furman moves to approve with the Transportation Commission being the approval mechanism instead of the Traffic Engineer. He says as they have seen with Uber and Lyft it is incredibly difficult to be a new cab company in this city and anything we can do that has a good process to make this easier is a good idea. He understands the desire to put this as part of the discussion of the other cab changes but he thinks it could get lost in that discussion and there is no reason not to make a decision now and push it off – other than if we don’t like it just saying no. Eric Sundquist seconds.
Discussion
Robert Burck says he is not sure how Madison works but asks if this is something that would have to go through license and ordinances, is there a change if someone is not going to be charged a second time for renewal licenses or transferring. Is there a cost structure that would have through ? for that? In Middleton they would have to have more than one committee look at it.
Staff say this would be creating the option to transfer, it could create a new fee, but this did not provide for that.
Substitute motion/Vote
Bergamini says that the fact that they are confusing asking questions and stating positions is a sign that they have not thought this matter through and she moves to place it on file as a substitute motion. The chair doesn’t know Robert’s Rules but someone tells him it is ok to have a substitute motion, voices are off mic. She clearly says that she would “like to make a motion to place this on file” Lankella seconds.
Motion to place on file passes on a voice vote, I only heard one no, but there may have been more.
I hear someone whisper if they need to check on the procedure.
[Gah, if that was a substitute motion the vote they took only made it the main motion and they didn’t vote on the main motion!]
E3 – Amending the 2019 Capital Budget of Engineering-Bicycle & Pedestrian for the Troy Drive Underpass Project, # 11868.
Presentation/Questions
Chris Petykowski with City Engineering says this is a housekeeping item, when the project was developed they were using their bicycle and pedestrian budget under bikeways project and they go through the design, they split it out to have its own line item in the budget. This would allocate the Bikeways money to its own line item in the budget.
Foster asks how they determine the bikeways projects initially. Petykowski says that it is a portion of the budget for resurfacing and small bike path projects. Staff works on those lists and staff from traffic engineering and engineering meet monthly and go through the lists and talk about the projects and develop them and propose a list each year to work on. And in this case they started with the Bikeways money to get it started but as the project developed and needed more design money and future construction money they pull it out and something major like this would get its own line item.
Foster asks the total amount in the Bikeways program from 2019? Petykowski says 750, but he’d have to check. Foster asks about the list for 2019, is the list available for review and is the 2020 list compiled or when does that happen? Petykowski says 2019 is stuff built this year, the majority of the money went to Portage greenway bike path and a bridge near the Grandview Commons are near Milwaukee St. and Cottage Grove Rd. In 2020 they are planning resurfacing of the SW Path and wayfinding on the SW path and centerline marking. Foster asks if these have gone through Transportation Commission or TPPB (this committee) in the past? Petykowski says that the bikeways projects would have gone to Ped Bike Motor Vehicle commission or the TC (Transportation Commission). Foster asks if the 2019 projects went to TC? Petykowski thinks so, but he could be mistaken, he thought so.
Motion/Discussion
Alder Rebecca Kemble moves approval and Eric Sundquist seconds.
Foster supports approval but thinks they need to figure something out on how this budgeting works. He thinks its on one of the future agenda topics so we can leave it for a fuller discussion there, but this is a bit of a black box and it would be helpful and important to figure out where it belongs, bit it TPPB or TC and then to have some continuity for when changes happen so they can understand why and so that the public bodies have a role in determining priorities for the projects moving forward. Tom Lynch, the Transportation Director says that a presentation on the black box was scheduled for tonight but because of the length of the agenda they pulled the black box off, but the black box should be on the next agenda.
Motion passes on a voice vote seemingly unanimously.
E4 – Creating Section 12.177(5) of the Madison General Ordinances to conditionally repeal the Motor Vehicle Registration Fee if funding is provided by a Regional Transit Authority.
Presentation/Questions
Alder Michael Tierney, the sponsor is there to speak to this item. He says after the wheel tax passed and they met here in session he had a lot of feedback from residents in his district. He didn’t vote for the wheel tax but one of the common refrains was that now that it is there it is going to be here forever, we will be stuck with it in perpetuity. He thought that since there had been various motion about decreases, sunsets and other things and those couldn’t pass because they would cause issues with securing federal funds and having a stable funding source, so he thought if they continue to push for state government to allow us to have RTAs again. The RTA could then be a more stable funding source that would be more progressive and allow us to not rely on a wheel tax, so this proposal conditionally repeals the wheel tax if 1) we are allowed to form an RTA and 2) that the RTA would supply funding that would be equal to or greater than the wheel tax and 3) consensus on part of City Attorney, Finance Director and Transportation Director that the RTA was providing funding and for purposes of obtaining federal government support that the method was sound and would not jeopardize funding. If those conditions were met at some point in the future then the wheel tax would be repealed.
Wilson calls for a motion but it didn’t sound like anyone made one.
Someone asks if the motor vehicle registration fee could be revisited if an RTA was formed? Does this create any problematic situations where an RTA is formed and this automatically repeals the registration fee before appropriate funding mechanism comes in to play.
Tierney says that they would have to have consensus from the Finance Director, Transportation Director and City Attorney that it won’t cause any jeopardy for federal funding, so it would have to provide a stable funding source and it would have to be in place and meet the fiscal criteria. It is true we could revisit at some point in the future if an RTA is allowed to be created. This was a proposal he put together based on feedback from constituents. He had a lot of people walk up to him and say they would be stuck with this forever. A lot of older residents in his district go back to the early 1980s when the state had a surplus and gave away the surplus through tax break gimmicks and then we had a recession and our sales tax went to 5% and it was supposed to be a temporary thing and 40 years later we have 5% sales tax. This was intended to send a signal to folks that it won’t be around for perpetuity and this is something that he and the mayor talked to his constituents about that no one wanted to be in the room doing the wheel tax when they adopted it, their hand was forced by the state. If we can do something like this, it creates a pressure point on the folks in the state capital to want to do something different and get out of our way and let us create an RTA with our neighboring communities because it effectively gives people a $1M tax break if they get out of our way and let us do it.
Eric Sundquist says that Tierney says that we would get rid of a regressive tax, but RTAs are funded with sales taxes and that is arguably more regressive, so isn’t there concern that this would kick us into more regressivity rather than less. Tierney says there are varying schools of thought on sales tax, the people he talked to in his district, especially elderly people, families that have two cars, in his district right now mass transportation options aren’t there and there are a lot of families that need to have two cars to run errands to get to work. When he explains it to them, to look at the numbers between the wheel tax and the purchases they make and what that would be like with an addition of a half percent sales tax. A lot of people like the idea, because of all the events we have in Madison that bring people from other areas of the country and world who spend their dollars here and we’re able to get sales tax revenue from that. If we ever can have an RTA again that would be dependent upon a sales tax. We would capture more funds from people that are coming here and spending money for other purposes. He says its one thing that in 2009 when the state passed legislation to allow RTAs the sales tax was the mechanism that was looked at – at that time and whether that same mechanism or a local income tax or other more progressive funding options in the future – who’s to say. He says in terms of going from least progressive to most progressive, people will have their arguments for which is least progressive. In the future, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it.
Motion/Discussion
Wilson calls for a motion again and there was a long silence. Foster moves to place on file, Furman seconds.
Foster appreciates the intent, but the last statement reinforces his thoughts of “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it”. The idea of current council, with its current knowledge making a choice about what will happen in the future in potentially very different circumstances doesn’t seem wise to him. He doesn’t find value in setting themselves up for something that might cause issues in the future. If they are able to get an RTA or local income tax or other drastic changes to local financing, then everything could and should be one the table and they can reconsider or change the amount of the fee. We can and should do anything that makes sense at that point in time, but right now they just made a decision to implement the fee, it will be a critical part of the transportation work they are engaged on to build out the transit system and they only have $1.5 of $5.5M secured for operating expenses for that, with that modest goal and we need to figure out over the next year or two where the other $4M are coming from. To tie our hands in advance to losing the $1.5M doesn’t make sense. He says it just gives false hope that we will get and RTA and the tax will go away, and he doesn’t think that is realistic.
Motion passes to place on file, seemed unanimous.
E5 – DOT Beltline Proposals
There is no presentation on this. Wilson asks if Alder Foster or Committee member Bergamini would like to give an update from the MPO meeting.
Presentation/Questions
Foster says there is an attachment from the City Department of Transportation. Wilson says that there is a proposal to add dynamic part-time shoulder use on the beltline. He thinks they probably read what that entails. This is a decision to amend the TIP (Transportation Improvement Plan or 5 year plan that all transportation projects need to be in) and this was in front of the MATPB (MPO – Metropolitan Planning Organization or Madison Area Transportation Policy Board) last month and it will be up for a decision this month and the goal was to bring it here and make sure this body is aware of what the proposal is and get feedback from a Madison lens for this proposal.
The chair calls for a motion.
Eric Sundquist asks about the other project by the Ho Chunk Area – Safety Improvement. He isn’t sure what the goal of the discussion is here. Are we looking for a motion in support, or is it informational sharing.
Wilson says the intent was to have a motion in support of one or both pieces or in opposition to one or both pieces. If there is not a motion . . .
Tom Lynch says he prepared the briefing memo, not necessarily . . . perhaps the flavor of this might be different than what others in this group might feel is appropriate in terms of the memo. He says that the issue that is ripe for discussion is the Beltline Shoulder, the County AB discussion is something they are working with the DOT on, that is the second highest injury intersection in the city and because it is on a freeway-ish facility, they are looking at freeway type facility. If this body wanted to take a position on County AB he would like to provide more information on that, because the injury rate is so high at those intersections, he would like to inform them more. However, this Wednesday, as Alder Foster mentioned, the MATPB will be voting to add the beltline shoulder running, so that is something ripe for discussion or if you wanted to take a position on it.
The chair says the immediate question is if the body wants to take a position on the Dynamic Part-time Shoulder Use Project.
Bergamini wants to clarify that there is no need for this body to take a position as part of the formal process of amending the TIP. The chair affirms they have no formal role. She says this could have been added as an informational item or if someone had a motion prepared, which maybe one of you does . . . she assumes someone has something prepared since it was put in the business section of the agenda, but we’re not required to do anything here as part of the formal process.
Motion/Discussion
Sundquist moves to recommend that WiDOT go back to the drawing board and put this project back in to a broader beltline study and put it on hold. Implicitly then, also the MPO board could make that their vote. He would direct the motion at WiDOT. Kemble seconds.
Sundquist says there was for several years a beltline study that was being undertaken and then was cut off by WisDOT under the previous administration that was looking at a wide variety of things, multi-modal solutions, land use, all kinds of things. Whether that would have led to an outcome that he would like or not he does not know but it was at least an attempt to scope broadly and figure out the corridor as a whole. After that got cut off WIDOT came up with this quick fix solution to do shoulder running, which sounds pretty appealing and a lot of people have applauded this idea, it sounds practical. Will take the shoulder for peak hour and make it into a travel lane and they will get more people through and raise our speeds. On the surface that all sounds really awesome. But, it really raises a whole bunch of questions about safety, reliability. Even if our average speeds are up when we don’t have places to pull off and clear incidents, what will that do to reliability. Reliability is in some cases more important than the average speed. If he can predict that it will take me 10 minutes to get from Fish Hatch to Whitney Way, even tho it is slow, if it is reliable, I can plan around it. If its 10 minutes one day and 30 minutes the next that is a problem. It precludes the idea of managing traffic through HOV or hot lanes which is what they are doing around the country, rather than adding general purpose lanes. And, as people have pointed out and to the extent is succeeds in raising speeds it will induce more driving which fills up the road again. While it is highly unusual for State DOTs to show up at the MPO level with a pot of money and the MPO to say no, and he is not sure that will happen in this case, there are really good reasons for them to pull this back and think more holistically about it, there are places to spend that money in our region with deteriorating roads right now. While keeping this one still alive as part of a rejuvenated overall study. The motion would be to have WisDOT pull back, do the study again and think about it in that context and then come back with a more holistic corridor plan and implicitly for the MPO to also follow that.
Chris McCahill says that the City’s priorities are clearly more oriented with improving transit flow and transportation demand management, which could be HOV lanes on the beltline and given that WisDOT is considering making changes to using the beltline more efficiently it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to look at the options there, such as using the shoulder exclusively for High Occupancy Vehicles and Transit and things like that. He will support the motion.
Sundquist says one last point, should the shoulder running go through and we get more cars coming through at peak times, that will have an impact on all of the city streets that feed into the beltline or where cars are coming off the beltline. Neighborhoods around the beltline will have more traffic. That is something that we could have looked at or should look at in terms of whole corridor approach, but in this proposal they are not. That is just one other little point.
Bergamini says that her recollection is that the beltline study, in its first phases found that the there was a significant amount of traffic hopping on and hopping off, going one or two exits. That speaks to Eric’s point about what is the impact of increasing Beltline traffic on the feeder and frontage roads. Are we ready for that if this increases vehicle miles? She supports as well.
Foster shares some of the same concerns and this feels at odds with all the rest of the work they are engaged in such as item 8 on the agenda (TDM and MOAPS) which is one of their key transportation priorities for this body and one of the attachments there is modernizing mitigation report, it’s sub-title is a demand centered approach to reducing car travel and is talking about a complicated suite of control mechanisms that we can use as a local municipality to start to shift things in the “right direction.” It’s getting people out of cars and into transit and walking and biking. It feels like on the one hand our focus in the City is towards that and then to have a beltline expansion project that absolutely will bring additional cars in and as has been stated, bring them on to the rest of our cities road network. He can get to a place where he might understand why we might want to do that, and maybe there is a rationale to do doing that as a stepping stone to a future transportation state, but he doesn’t think any of that has been reviewed or discussed. This is a stand alone project that does follow a very traditional – if there is too many cars on the beltline the solution is create more capacity – and he thinks the fact that we would go down that path on the one hand with the beltline and then put so much effort on the other hand to go in the opposite direction feels at odds to him. And secondly, he was on the Long Range Transportation Planning Committee when the beltline study was happening and he remembers the conversations were really focused around a number of different things – car congestion was one of those things, but access across the beltline and getting improved pedestrian and bicycle access across the beltline which is a major barrier right now was one of the key pieces of that and to sort of jump forward with a solution from a study that didn’t get finished and is on a shelf. If we have $30M at the state level to spend on this, how do we know that reducing car congestion is the priority out of that study. It feels out of step to him and he thinks WisDOT’s goal is to reduce congestion, but that is not the transportation future we have settled on here in the city, so it feels at odds to him as well and he will support the motion.
They re-read the motion “recommend that WisDOT place this project on hold until it can be included in a broader beltline corridor study”
Passes on a voice vote, I only heard one no.
E6 – Complete Streets Scoping Discussion
Presentation
Renee Calloway says they came up with bullet points to start thinking about complete streets implementation plan. If they were looking at the work items related to this type of the study, what would they like to include. She says the budget reality is a concern. It was $160,000 in the budget which sounds like a lot of money, but when you start thinking about hiring consultants doing these work items and community engagement portion can eat up a lot of money. She says there are different areas of the city that have different types of pedestrian and bicycle access and we are annexing other parts of the City – such as the Town of Madison pretty soon which has more of a rural sort of feel to it. There are already parts of the city that are the same as that. The idea of different modes, we only have the space we have on the streets so when you say complete streets and you want to have something for everyone that might not be realistic and you have been grappling with that already if they are adding BRT, how will they fit that in. How will they have everything they want in that space. Which streets will you prioritize which modes. How would you accommodate that and what would it look like. She says that they would prioritize around equity and social justice because that is a key starting point when we think about places that haven’t had the investments that other neighborhoods have had. As well as access to all, how will we insure the disabled community has access to the city. As well as youth and elderly. There are a lot of people in the city who can’t drive, as well as people who choose not to, but for people who can’t drive, how are we ensuring that access for them. The started some of this work with Madison in Motion. They looked at design concepts for certain kinds of streets but didn’t go too far with that project. So do they have some design standards that they can start with. The idea is to make their jobs easier and make it easier for citizens to know what to expect when their streets are constructed. Right of way trade offs fits into that as well. Obviously as they mentioned there is only so much space, and when it comes to pedestrian and bicycle facilities they no longer have eminent domain for building those facilities so they can’t just buy the land that they need for sidewalks or paths. The city has also been talking about Vision Zero and they want those to be thought about together so they are working in concert, not against each other. Involving residents and engaging with them to get their idea on what they want the city to be but also educating them on why we’re moving forward with complete streets so when they get to projects and neighborhoods there can be a little less arguing because there has been more education and understanding about the City’s values up front. She also thinks that they have policies and procedures that could better foster complete streets. She says they should look at if there are things they are not doing that are best practices elsewhere. And then performance measures. These are the things to get the ball rolling that she though was important. It’s already a lot of work, but important to decide what the future will look like in the bigger picture instead of project by project or block by block.
This is what I think they were looking at on the screen?
Possible Complete Street Consultant Scope 12/2/2019
Develop a Complete Streets network plan that allows all modes to access attractions, businesses, and neighborhoods in all parts of the city.
- Identify areas within the city that have substandard access for each mode.
- Develop a multimodal street network (Complete Streets) that provides access to all parts of the city. Because on many streets there is a finite amount of space, certain modes may need to be prioritized on streets to access to all portions of the city (street typology). This may involve establishing a modal hierarchy.
- On portions of the network that require typologies, indicate the level of prioritization and/or accommodation.
- Establish racial equity and social justice as a core principles as well as access for all regardless of age or ability.
- Refine and add to the street typologies and design guidance included in Madison in Motion to serve as design starting points and assist in project decision‐making. This may include the use of design decision trees.
- Provide guidance regarding use of right of way for modal travel vs environmental objectives, and how to balance the tradeoffs.
- Incorporate Madison’s Vision Zero goals and strategies.
- Involve and engage residents in the implementation study and educate residents on what Complete Streets means for the future of Madison.
- Review documents, policies and processes related to implementing Complete Streets and recommend changes.
- Develop practical performance measures to track implementation progress.
Questions
Foster asks if they have any sense of big picture timeline for the RFP.
Calloway says they want to get started on this right away, its in the 2020 budget. It would be nice to get the process going early in the year. Optimistically 8 weeks.
Tom Lynch says that they have to clarify how much money is actually available, there may be some carry over money from Madison in Motion that they might be able to use. This started as a pedestrian plan update, so they will have to right size the scope to the funds available. That may require a couple discussions with people in the industry. Once they did that, they would have to do an RFP, there would probably be a couple specialized firms that would be interested in this type of effort and they might use additive alternates, so they can get prices for different portions of the plan. Maybe we can’t afford it all now, but we could afford portions of it later. Being realistic, BRT phase 2 and a bunch of things going on, he thinks the soonest a consultant could be on board is March. That is assuming we use December to right size the scope, the body would want to see it, that means it goes out late January the soonest. The city doesn’t select based on price, but they have cost based proposals. If you are a consultant that submits on that, its one thing to submit a proposal saying that they are great, but its different to commit to a price. So that requires a little more effort and you provide more time to put a price to the scope. He thinks late March would be the soonest.
Calloway says that there are requirements that you have to have the RFP open for a certain length of time.
Foster asks if they would have a draft RFP in the second meeting in January?
Lynch says it has been a busy couple weeks with the budget, Renee and he just tossed this around before Thanksgiving. Do these bullets include the key things you want, or are there things that are missing.
Bergamini says that she thinks of the list of studies that has been done by the city, county, MPO and who knows who else in the past 10 years and wonders to what extent some of the work has been done or the ground work has been laid out worthy of review to make sure it is still in step with where people are at. And whether or not that might help narrow the scope of work for consultants.
Lynch says Madison in Motion was created over a broad time, there are about 250 recommendations, but they are all kind of nonspecific and the document, perhaps because of the political environment, didn’t make some of the hard decisions. It didn’t say this is a transit street and this is a bike street. We may find that we can’t make those hard decision either. It would be nice if this document would provide guidance so that when Fair Oaks gets reconstructed we know if that is a bike street or what kind of street is it, which modes take priority on that street. They have some of those, the MPO has done a lot of good work, so there are things that have been done. He started to mention Wilson street but stopped.
Sundquist says he is curious about what the deliverables are supposed to be, is this a map? Sounds like it will be specific to links and intersections and will call out where the projects are happening (perhaps and overlay) and we will know when we are going into Odana Rd this is a key link where we should be doing x, y and z. He thinks it would be really helpful and go beyond the previous spaghetti on the wall type stuff we have gathered and gathered. He asks what is meant by “all modes” is this active transportation or are we talking micro-mobility and shared use. Are we talking Uber and Lyft and drop offs and freight loading and are we getting into curb management stuff, or is this an act of transportation.
Lynch says if it is just active transportation is wouldn’t include transit.
Sundquist says we are talking – walking, biking, transit and wheelchairs. That is what we mean by “all modes”. Lynch says yes, primarily. Sundquist says they should pin it down.
Lynch says that there is one other thing that is a big bullet in there that perhaps it would be nice if it was incorporated. In the discussion of the neighborhood plan in the North East . . . over by . . . watching the board deliberate, there is a variety of opinions on how we value the right of way. Are trees important or are they not important. How is green space, when we have boulevards we have less density, when we don’t have boulevards we have more density. Those are big questions. The city has a lot of different philosophies on that, we’re for more trees, for boulevards, for higher density, for multiple types of accommodations for different modes, but we we’re for 2 times more stuff than we can fit. And there has not been an internal resolution, there is merit just to say we have identified its a problem. Who doesn’t want to increase the tree canopy. We all do, but that comes at a cost and how do we do that. It would be nice if we could fit that into this, but that’s a pretty big rock that might need a separate effort.
Sundquist says it would be not only the modes they just discussed but the placemaking or something like that. Lynch says that Chicago’s complete streets where they go into the different types, this has more to do with the environmental objectives (4th from the bottom, but I think its 5th) Sundquist says trees are not modes, but say “do trees get in the way of our modes?” He says it was him that has brought that up and the ad hoc decision on the one neighborhood plan they looked at with staff we felt pulled in different directions, but if that is part of this that could be great, but he doesn’t think we need a consultant for that. That seems like a community decision.
Wilson says this is not an action item, questions, comments, feedback can all be given at any point.
McCahill asks about the Chicago complete streets being design guidelines and this is framed as a plan, and he wants to know if this could lead to design guidelines. Lynch says the Chicago brings in typologies that include the character of the buildings and we are not doing that. The Chicago one does have a typology that could be useful for us, it would be helpful if we had a typology. Chicago also has decision trees, that might be helpful. Often having “typical sections” are not helpful because he has never run into a typical roadway. Every complete streets play has a bunch of typical sections that will never be used because nothing is every quite typical. The details is where we would save money, if we don’t go into the details.
Calloway talked to Boston who has a complete streets design guide, it seemed useful when they did it, but now they feel like there are other guides out there from NACTO (?) and some places like that and now that is not how they would spend their money, they would focus on other things. Given the pool of money we have, we would have to make sure of some of the other guides that already exist to save money while trying to address getting the city on the same page around complete streets.
Wilson asks if the city has design guidelines now? Lynch says Madison in Motion has some typical sections at the end.
Kemble says the one thing not referenced in there is the work in E8 – the issues of on-street car storage. We are talkign about the modes of people moving through the streets but not the use of the right of way for storing vehicles. Since this is something we have been working on as a city and its a big issue for us, in the RFP we might want to call that out as something that is kind of a “live wire”. Calloway agrees.
Foster says they should be clear in the RFP and with the consultant about “establishing our values” and we have historically dodged that questions and its a big part of why we are in the spot we are in and we talk about things we like, but we haven’t had the courage to say . . . this might be in the modal hierarchy, that might be a way to have that explicit conversation. We are going to prioritize some modes over others. Some modes over car parking or other non-modal components of the right of way. He says that will be critically important that we have a serious conversation and decision that is formally encapsulated in terms of how we proceed. Once that is established, then he would like to see two other big pieces come out of it – one is a map or plan. We need to identify where there are missing sidewalks etc, and look at crossing and come up with priority plans for walking, biking, transit etc. That would be a really valuable outcome. The other is around clear guidance for engineering staff for street reconstruction projects. He doesn’t think it necessarily is a typical section, but we need enough explicit and clear guidance that the starting point for reconstruction project isn’t here’s how the street is today and requiring input from whatever source to change it but having the starting point being encapsulated in the complete streets framework so the starting point is that if we decided walking is the number on priority, regardless of it there is or isn’t sidewalks, the first goal is to move people safely and comfortably on foot. Establishing it to the level where it will give clear guidance for the engineering staff so they know what the will of the community or policy makers is. The other things he would add is the concept of all ages and abilities, particularly in the biking framework is important, but it holds true across walking and transit and other modes as well. Its kind of in the social justice side of things. We really need to be designing for our whole community in these different modes. The last is related to modal hierarchy, but designing from the outside in, rather than starting with how much space we need to move x amount of cars and what’s left and having the other modes and trees and everything else fight over what is left. Starting from the outside with how much space we need for people to walk, bike and have transit, and with what is left, how will we prioritize moving and parking cars.
Lynch says that the 3rd bullet is understanding the level of prioritization. Let’s use Wilson St, the plan has it as a bike corridor, but what is the level of accommodation. Is it all ages and abilities. At Fair Oaks, that is different, there is bike accommodations on Fair Oaks, is that sufficient, or should it be all ages and abilities. The MPO sort of did some footwork by laying out priority and secondary.
Calloway says they have primary and secondary – they also have gaps and barrier maps from some work during the bicycle planning for Dane County. Plus they did low-stress network evaluation, so there are a lot of tools to start that process, particularly there is a lot of bike stuff. There is a (?) of pedestrian related facilities, but we haven’t done that same level of analysis. And she won’t speak for transit.
Foster says the first bullet is identifying areas in the city that have substandard access for each mode. In order to answer that question we need to know what the standard is. Your point about levels without pushing ourselves to answer that in a general way we’re likely to continue to solve this project by project and find out how hard it is to do anything different than what we have today and it will be the same conversation about trying to balance things. What he has seen from good and effective complete streets programs is that they are very clear about their modal hierarchy as a starting point – so walking, transit, biking, taxi and then private car and parking is not even on there because its not a mode and they are not even considering parking cars on the street until they have gotten through the whole list. He wants to get to something like that and whatever that sequence or order is – is what they need to decide and if they shy away from that or don’t do that, if we don’t follow it, we’re going to miss out. That would be his hope, to focus at that starting level. He doesn’t think as a community we are ok to say – this street doesn’t need to have safe walking facilities. You could go over to another street, but we don’t have that same standard for moving by bicycle and why is that and should it be. That is the kind of question that he hopes the complete streets work will make this body wrestle with and come forward with a recommendation.
Lynch says that the reason why the gaps are there . . . his son had to take summer classes at Memorial and he wanted him to bike there and I tried to bike there from our home and it was near impossible. So, now does that mean that on the neighborhood streets does he need a bike lane, no. But on some key portions of destination, there just wasn’t a good way to get there. We’re not going to necessarily that we need bike lanes on every residential street, but we have some major gaps that are difficult. You know where half of them are.
Foster says they have two big opportunities to improve things, one is through identifying major gaps and barriers and working on them. The other is taking advantage of all of our reconstruction projects. He would like complete streets work to inform both of the processes. So we are identifying priorities and working on them. But then also not continuing to reconstruct the kinds of places we have had if they aren’t meeting a standard that we have set for ourselves. He would like this to help them with both of those things.
Baltazar De Anda Santana likes that we are mentioning involved and engaged residents in the implementation study. We have a great opportunity here to probably do it the right way. In his experience sometimes we approach neighborhoods and residents the day before the project is going to happen and there is a huge need for the community to understand what is complete streets and what it will do to Madison. For instance, folks from the Latinx community are only renting housing, if you don’t have a house you might have a different opinion. He would like to purposely engage the residents. He doesn’t know how, he has some ideas, he knows it will cost money. The City of Fitchburg did a study where they invested money to do outreach in the community, the Census is doing some outreach and there is money as part of that. He thinks there is great opportunity for us to do these things. He says instead of late in the project, bring a consultant that has experience working with other communities.
Bergamini says that the this is the scoping discussion and when she looks at the list she sees a desire to make difficult decisions with some hard guidelines, hard compared to the multiple neighborhood plans that we have done in the past decade plus. When she hears the consultant or staff, to what extent are we just deflecting the difficult decisions on to consultants rather than grappling with it as a community and making a decision, knowing that making a decision is saying no to some things and yes to other things and not everything we want can fit in the same 12 foot right of way. She looks at this and asks if that is what they are biting off with this projects. (Some says “yeah”) Or are we doing something narrower or are we doing it as a multi- . . .that’s a lot of work. That is a lot of going back and looking at what the community has already said and taking it seriously and deciding who gets to weigh and measure and make the decisions. If we did that for our entire street, bike, pedestrian, freight, bus network, that is a lot of work. When we look at what is the scope, how narrow are we going to make it. I think a lot of us are hungry to move forward, we have been talking for a long time, lets make some decisions and move forward on those knowing its going to be contentious.
Lynch says originally this was scoped as a pedestrian study update. The city spent a half million dollars to do the transportation plan Madison in Motion. So, we won’t be able to do everything. He knows what he wants out of it, he says he won’t tell them but – Bergamini says “no, tell us”. Lynch says if we could have street typologies, if that is all we could afford, he would go with that. Then we can use our staff as we redesign streets and say this is a priority. What does meaningful interaction look like, it might be more than just a public involvement meeting, but the problem is that meaningful interaction costs money. And they have maybe $160,000. Calloways says Ames Iowa had $160,000 but it is much smaller, so the budget is a concern. Lynch says we are 5 times the size of Ames Iowa. We need to right size the scope to the fee.
Bergamini says that goes back to the point that Alder Foster was making, she agrees that establishing a modal hierarchy and establish and equity and social justice core principles are the two most important phrases up there, but making the hard choice. Someone asked earlier about curb uses, freight and all of that.
Lynch says that is another $100,000. Bergamini asks how you say this is going to be a BRT street with a dedicated lane without dealing with the issue of loading zones on University Ave., practically speaking its not working. Lynch says they will have to continue with our other projects while this is in process. Things won’t be perfect, we will make informed decisions and the decisions we make two years from now maybe will be made easier because we will have something.
McCahill says that he wanted to echo teh importance of modal hierarchies. If those didn’t come out of this that would be “not good” – often complete streets gets tacked on to the status quo of making the road function for cars, and then seeing what we can do on top of that. He thinks that is really important.
Burck says that after everything he heard today he agrees with what Margaret said, going to a consultant is the easy way out and it costs money and while it will be contentious, he’d like to see them take a first stab at it before they start spending money on consultants, because he doesn’t like to spend Madison’s money that way.
Lynch says a lot of this is our capacity. What you do is review our stuff and we have Vision Zero, Oscar Mayer, BRT and MOPES and there is a limit to what we can do. We could do this, but then there is Wilson St, Shenk’s Corners, all the other corridor studies.
Burck asks if the consultant will set the overall informational direction or are they supplementing the city staff on what they can do. How does going to a consultant help city staff in managing all their priorities.
Lynch says there are firms like Alta and Tool Design that this is what they do, they do complete streets programs, they can do the GIS work. $160,000 is 1,600 man hours, or person hours. That means that its a person for a year. So we can’t hire a person for a year to do this, this helps us with that. It helps us in that we are hiring someone with expertise and had done this in 4 other places.
Foster says the objective of using a consultant is not to do this for us, none of the decisions will be made by the consultants. What they will be able to do is be project managers and get the work started and get us to the end point that we choose or can afford and to do all the background work so we don’t reinvent the wheel. Other cities have done this, some have been more successful than others, they can bring this together and show us different ways we can go. They will want us to confirm our priorities and get direction as we go along. It will be the work of this body, and staff, but without paying someone to lead and coordinate it we can’t expect it to happen with the current staffing level. We aren’t just paying for it to get it done, all the hard work and decision making is still going to have to happen and we’re going to have to take heat for making hard recommendations he would expect.
E7 – Downtown BRT Station/Routing Update (Decision in Jan or Feb)
Downtown
Lynch doesn’t have much to update. He says that it can be quick. They had put together a report that looked at 4 alternatives for BRT routing downtown. The staff recommendation was that they felt pretty good about 2 of the 4, but a lot of the downtown organizations were moving towards one of the alternatives we didn’t feel met everyone’s needs. They asked the downtown organizations that before they went forward and voted on things they felt weren’t good, to take a pause. They have been working a little on it, the staff had vacations and they had the budget, its been a busy couple of weeks.
Quickly Alternative one uses a downtown square and the outside square during events is about 10% of the time.
1A uses the outside square all the time, they had some concerns with the staff regarding the distance between the complementing stations, they were about .4 miles apart and they don’t see that in other places in the nation.
1B takes care of that by moving the stations to the edges of the square but the consultants say that we are eliminating our highest use stations. So, when you think about it, it makes you wonder a little bit. They went out and thought there might be some merit to this.
Alternative 2 used Henry/Broom and a Doty/Wilson
Alternative 3 which seems to have more support from some of the downtown businesses use only Broom with a contraflow.
One alternative they are looking at is 3A which is similar to Alternative 3B and 3C. This one seems to capture a lot of what 3B and 3C capture. It has stations on the south side of the square, it gets us pretty close and its already used as one of the detours by Metro, the hairpin turn on Hamilton which looks difficult is already occurring on some of the detour routes so it is possible.
They are trying to look at different factors. Some have thought where are our jobs? And so they are looking at the job density graphics and if those blue lines represent the two portions of where BRT is going, we have 4,300 north of the lines and almost 20,000 south. It shows that the job density is weighted towards the south. They are also trying to look at walking distances using GIS spacial analysis. The spacial analysis just uses absolute distance and not walking distance, so they need to figure out some more ways. 
Other considerations is that the RESJI analysis, they are trying to schedule it before Christmas and that is difficult to do, and they have some staff on vacations. They would like the RESJI analysis to include intercept surveys. Intercept surveys are . . . .there are many organizations that have a desire, not many, I shouldn’t say that, sometimes those organizations don’t represent the transit user. And a transit user may not come to meetings, so using intercept surveys is a way to talk to people on bus, at the bus stop. Why are you using this bus stop? On a different project a few weeks ago he interviewed 13 bus users and a lot of them were transferring on the square. I didn’t think of that being a high need. Actually one out of 5 on the square is transferring, so all of a sudden the ability to transfer to BRT becomes a higher priority. 1 out of 5 is a fair amount. They would also like to take into consideration non-peak hour riders. One of the greatest benefits of the BRT is not going to be to the people that are traveling at 7am or 5pm, because bus service is pretty good then, its the 11pm that bus service is not. Accessibility was an omission that DMI pointed out. We didn’t include accessibility in our report and we should. Access to other destinations, some suggest that different routes favor access to different things and if you are going to a hotel from the airport, which route would be the best? If you’re going to a job, which route would be the best. And also there are several organizations that would prefer that BRT is off the square. What ends up happening is that there could be a trenching in of opinions. Rather than that, we’re trying to understand what are some of the real factors that are desiring people off the square. Alot of it has to do with station space and how that impacts visibility and the ability to put up cars and everything, if they can understand some of the reasons that many people don’t want it to be on the square maybe they could address some of those in the design of the alternatives.
They aren’t that much further than last time they spoke. Mostly they had Thanksgiving, the holidays and the budget. They are trying to organize the RESJI analysis.
West side
Alternative one and two. One thing they are exploring and would like to explore with University Research Park is kind of doing a hybrid of alternative 1 and 2 and putting in a small connection between Toki and Rosa Rd. That would allow them to touch the west transfer point and get back up to Mineral Point Rd where they already have bus lanes. Right now this portion of Odana Rd has lower density uses.
Alternative 4 might be an option. They turn or stop at the West transfer point and move on to West Towne later. That’s that. Very small update.
Questions
Foster suggests another consideration for the downtown impact on other modes, depending upon the routing, think about inner square vs outer square vs Wilson/Doty couplet and how the different alternatives vie for space. He’s sure its probably being considered by maybe calling it out.
Lynch says that it was in the initial report. Everyone read that differently. “This one is the best for biking, no, this one is the best for biking”, but that is a good comment. He has many slides. He didn’t show them all. Hopefully they will have more information in January and February.
Kemble thanks him for getting that data on the jobs and having all those considerations and especially for talking to and planning to talk to transit riders. “Imagine that, novel idea” says Lynch.
E8 – TDM & MOAPS Update
TDM = Transportation Demand Managment
MOAPS = to hell if I know, I tried looking it up and got lost. I know it has been referred to as the Mother of all Parking Studies – but that is not the title. I think this is supposed to explain it, but you can look at the other items connected to this as well. This is a description of the staff team and what they are supposed to do.
Presentation
There is a hand out. Elenor Anderson says wants to talk to them about a new city project staff are undertaking that has some potential to align or not align with MOAPS. She will give an overview of the project and Lynch will talk about how that will fit in with MOAPS. She is on the city data team in the Fianance Department under Laura Larson. She says this project is called the Bloomberg Innovation Track. They were signed up by the mayor and it is about taking an innovation approach to a big problem in your city.
An innovation approach stresses qualitative and quantitative research, assessing actual local conditions on the ground, innovation and being responsive to resident need, measurement, being cross-functional and cross-divisional (if you have a traffic engineering problem, you want traffic engineers but also other people to bring additional perspectives) and it stresses at its heart what they call human centered design.
Human centered design focuses on framing the problem with the idea of how you approach the problem will affect how you end up solving the problem. It stresses having a deep understanding of a problem (maybe things you wouldn’t otherwise consider) and it puts people at the center – putting residents and people who experience these problems as the experts.
An example is blight in Mobile Alabama. There are a number of ways to approach the problem – you might say the problem is property values, or garbage being dumped on land or abandoned houses. Those are all valid. Which one you choose affects where you end up. There are a number of different people who are affected by this as well – it might affect elected officials, building inspectors, nearby residents. Who you focus on determines where you go. Some examples of what other innovation teams have done are looking at affordable housing in Boston, they did some kind of intervention that I’m not sure about that affected the murder rate in New Orleans, hopefully made it go down. And a team who has been working with the same set of people who went just before us has been looking at Transit in Souix Falls, (north or south – a) Dakota. They had a bus service that wasn’t serving people so instead they are experimenting with transit on demand. You can see the graphic.
For their team the application submitted by the mayor will be familiar to those who have read the MOAPS charter. “As the city grows we faced increasing problems in transportation access, we require new and innovative solutions and a shift in city culture and we would specifically like to focus on innovation in transportation demand management.” Madison’s team has 2 goals. One is to learn the new methodology and spread it across the city and one is to focus on one specific issue of Transit Demand Management. After some time working on this the goal is to facilitate equitable outcomes in measures of quality of life by providing transportation options that are responsive to the changing needs of our growing population and align to resident and city values.
This methodology has three parts – one is to understand the problem. This stresses a deep understanding of the problem and one of the things they stress is that you understand the problem before you begin to think about solutions. They are at the beginning of that phase. They will be there for about 2.5 months, after which they will generate ideas to address the solution and then they will pilot some of the most promising.
For MOAPS some potential areas of collaboration – right now the innovation team is focused on the problem and not the solution, so they may align with MOAPS, they may not, its sort of amorphous. They are in the research phase for 2.5 months and they are doing field work, interviewing a lot of people, they are getting out there so they may be able to assist MOAPS with any research questions they might have and they met with them about it. They may be able to reassess afterwards how they are or are not aligning.
Lynch says that he handed out a piece of paper that kind of showed the . . . [the man has a real problem completing a sentence and its really hard to follow!] He knows Eric doesn’t like the work MOAPS . . . side discussion about that . . . Lynch says it seems like MOAPS was heading more towards a parking ordinance that started moving towards TDM and looking towards a TDM ordinance and some of the measures that are similar to what the new mitigation, that were mentioned in the mitigation . . . Bloomberg-Harvard could or could not be something that does a lot of our work for us. Its seems as tho some of the initial meetings are a little bit broader, they are taking 3 steps back and they may not get us to where this resolution is asking us to go. The mayor and the process is just saying to wait 2 or 3 months and see what alternatives the Bloomberg-Harvard comes up with. And then at that point there might be a point of collaboration or they might be two separate efforts and they will do them separately. The best way to say with MOAPS is that we are in a marking time phase for about 2.5 months and end of February we will probably decide what next. That will probably require an amendment to the resolution that allows more space because now they are supposed to have a deliverable in April which is very soon and if they are taking a 3 month or 3.5 month break we might have to just push both deadlines out three months or so.
Questions
Foster asks about the project goals of Bloomberg – “facilitate equitable outcomes and measures of quality of life by providing transportation options that are responsive to the changing needs of our growing population and align to both resident and city values” – can you speak about how we landed on that and what that actually means for the project team.
Anderson says that rather than project goals they are calling this their framework, so the way in which they approach the problem and it’s flexible. That is how we are approaching it now and we may through our research choose to approach it slightly differently. Where this came from – ca consultant flew in and she led a group of 15 or so city staff in 2 full-day bootcamps where they started from the idea that there is a lot of traffic and people are unhappy with parking and transportation. It was a broad idea and she helped us narrow in to this through various exercises. One of the ones they did involved going out and speaking with folks as Tom was referencing earlier. In terms of where this may take us, as you point out it is very broad, but ultimately the goal is to have an idea that they can test, if only on a small scale. A good example is from Souix Falls and piloting other types of transit. Does that answer your question?
Foster says “sure” and the italicized phrases within here, does that have any special meaning or is that a formatting thing? Anderson says that is pulling out what they identify as the key parts the framing. Their research is divided into 4 buckets along with each of those – what do people actually think quality of life is? What do people actually think transportation options might be? What are the changing needs of our growing population and what are resident and city values.
McCahill says there is an innovation team and a MOAPS team with some overlap, but not entirely and they might diverge or they might align? Is that correct? How is the innovation team formulated?
Lynch says that the innovation team was based on city staff, it is a problem solving process that the staff will learn, the city team came up with the Bloomberg-Harvard objective. He put in his, he liked “reduce motor vehicle travel while minimizing neighborhood parking affects” – he was thinking of reducing my workload. So if Bloomberg-Harvard adopted that, my life got easier, but I’m just one voice in the group so this is what the group embraced. It’s very broad and he doesn’t know where it will go or where the group goes. Where it ends up may align with what MOAPS is doing and it may not.
Kemble says it may align with the complete streets RFP process, listening to the 4 points and about how our discussion was that the sticky part is values. And people’s awareness of transportation options. I wonder if that might feed into . . . Lynch cuts her off and says “or even the route study too”. He says that is the other thing that he didn’t mention. Seems like most of the discussions have been transit oriented so they seemed most applicable to the route study, but I guess we don’t know where it will end up. He can’t seem to steer it, its got a life of its own. Someone says “that is part of the process”
Foster says it sounds like it may not solve our MOAPS problem and if we need to revisit and amend that resolution, if nothing else for the time period but if we are going to do that it might be worth their time to review the whole text of that and review what the ask was because I think that was created before anyone on this body was here and if we are going to make changes or updates to it, we should re-affirm or change what the goals of the MOAPS study was as well. We can wait to see how Bloomberg shapes up, but if and when we think about making an amendment he would like to open it up a little bit broader.
Anderson says that they really stressed not to have a solution, but she would guess that they are unlikely to have a fully formed parking ordinance spring out of this. She thinks that we can offer something helpful and informative to MOAPS but it wouldn’t be MOAPS.
Lynch says he was hoping for a fully formed parking ordinance.
E9 – Vision Zero Update
Lynch says he doesn’t have an update.
Tentative Items for January Agenda
a. Tree Pruning in ROW (Policy/Practice/Service Levels – Streets, Bikeways, and Sidewalks) – chair says they will get an “here’s where we are” presentation
b. Micromobility (technologies, business models, policies)
c. Metro Forward Presentation – chair says they will get a presentation from the Mayor on Metro Forward
d. 2021 Budget Scoping – possibly starting this discussion
e. BRT and University Avenue
f. Low-stress bike network / MPO Bike Plan Review by Quadrant
g. Should TPPB receive referrals for vacating public ROW?
h. Sequence of public meetings (neighborhood vs. board/commission)
He says these may or may not end up on the agenda, but these were the lastest thinking at the last agenda setting meeting.
Wilson says that is a big list and not all of those will likely be on the agenda, it looks like a 3 hour + meeting, but that is where the thinking was.
Sundquist asks if they are in the practice of agenda setting now, as we discussed earlier. Wilson says they don’t have a meeting set in January, so he doesn’t see why not. Sundquist says this is it, this is our chance to do something. Kemble says they do have one, Sundquist says if that is still happening he will hold off. Wilson says as of January they will be doing this.
Adjourn.
