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HomeMy WebLinkAbout12/02/2024 - Meeting Minutes SALT LAKE CITY TRANSPORTATION ADVISORY BOARD Minutes of the December 2, 2024 Meeting Present from the Transportation Advisory Board Daniel Mendoza, Johnnae Nardone, Jon Larsen, Josh Stewart, Justice Morath, Steve Wooldridge, and Suzanne Stensaas. Electronically present from the Transportation Advisory Board were Craig Buschmann, Greg Sanchez, Matt Gray, Matthew Morriss, and Miranda Bradshaw. Absent from the Transportation Advisory Board were Isaac Astill, John Close and Julie Bj ornstad. Present were Becka Roolf, Dave Iltis, Julianne Sabula, and Unknown Member of the Public. Electronically present were Martin Cuma, Matthew Morriss, Julianne Sabula, and Heather Mclaughlin-Kolb The meeting was held both electronically and in person and was called to order at 4:03 p.m. by Johnnae Nardone. Welcome and Introduction of Guests — Johnnae welcomed everyone, and everyone introduced themselves. Motion: Daniel Mendoza moved to approve the minutes of the October 7, 2024 TAB meeting. Suzanne Stensaas seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously. Public Comment — Unknown Member of the Public commutes from downtown by bicycle and is super thrilled with the improvements on 200 South. With the improvements to that bike lane has come the addition of leading pedestrian intervals. He's a huge supporter of this, however they create an ambiguity of right of way in terms of whether cyclists are supposed to go with the pedestrian or automotive right of way. That's not ambiguous on the 9-line for example, where they use lighted signals for pedestrians and cyclists whereby, they have rights of way at the same time. All the changes on 200 South created one near accident for him on his commute through the intersection of 20o East and 200 South. He thinks it could potentially be safer to either have a no right on red sign or he thinks more appropriately, a lighted bike signal to be paired with the lighted pedestrian signal. Becka asked for more details of his near accident. He explained and said that he hopes that cyclists' infrastructure makes it so new cyclists can use those facilities safely as he's still not confident if he or the vehicle is correct and he's a relatively informed and confident cyclist. He feels it's going to be a continued source of potential collisions. He thinks there should be more LPI's and this should probably be disambiguated because it creates a lot of confusion. Dave said you have the right of way because if you're in the crosswalk,you're technically a pedestrian and you have the right of way. Becka disagreed. Dave said the car has a greater duty. Jon said the person driving the three-ton vehicle does have the duty to not run people Pagel of 5 TAB 12-02-2024 Minutes over, but the bike lane isn't the crosswalk, they're different. Jon said if it's not clear enough and Transportation needs to review it. Suzanne said once it's figured out, this should be added to the driver handbook so people must test and know that a bicyclist can go with a pedestrian signal whether they're in the bike lane or crosswalk, or something like that. They need to be educated. Johnnae said this is a topic they will bring up again at a future meeting with some clarity. Dave said at 3200 West and the 2100 South freeway bridge, UDOT is going to make the crossing at 3200 West bicycle friendly. SLC is supposed to be reviewing the plans, Jon said they are. That's something that UDOT agreed to, it wasn't on their radar and things like that should be, it would be great if TAB got a new UDOT representative here. At this Is The Place State Park, there's a pathway that goes from Sunnyside to Research Park. Hopefully there will be a meeting on that next week, all the cemetery path, there's supposedly attorney's talking so we'll see what will happen with that. Dave's been pushing SLC to leave the 110o East bike lane from 1st Avenue to goo South and he still hasn't gotten an answer from Transportation. He wishes they could get this started this spring and even if there is one block that the pavement is a disaster on, you could go in and put bike lanes on the other blocks. Then you would have a continuous route from the Avenues all the way to 3300 South if the area from South Temple to goo South was fixed. Salt Lake City has an ordinance that doesn't allow food carts to have motors and electric bikes have motors so Hatches chocolates can't use their very nice electric bike for their ice cream cart. He also came home last night from the airport and the TRAX stops running and there are no buses after like 11:0o p.m. There are piles and piles of people coming to the airport that way and taxis and people and there is no mass transportation. That is a failure with UTA, SLC, and the Airport. There's a City Thread report so hopefully we can see the full report that's apparently done. City thread was a grant that SLC got to look at creating bike lanes and transportation improvements and he's seen the executive summary but not the full report. Lanes are still not being restriped by Streets, like on 3rd Avenue. It's an utter failure and cars end up parking where the bikes would be so it makes it unsafe. The last thing is at 200 South and 300 or 40o East the leading pedestrian interval there are situations where there are 4 reds and the walk cycle doesn't go on so you have to press the button. It doesn't make sense, if you have LPI, have the walk signal come on automatically. He would love to get a good solid answer on 110o East. Report Out — by Members Suzanne would like to ask Transportation to have some sort of systematic specifications for speed bumps. Some of them are so high, they're almost dangerous, especially as a lot of the cars now must be more efficient and are lower to the ground and some of them are so high you cannot go over them at all. She said it's more like 12 mph in a 20-25mph zone. Something needs to be done as to the height, if you were going to have something that was a real barrier, crosswalks for pedestrians should be higher than the speed bumps. The City Divisions need to get together and have specifications that say if the speed limit is this, the height should be there. Jon said there is a multi-departmental team that is developing standards for this. Greg said on the south leg of boo North and 1200 West the curb has been extended into the intersection which shortened the crosswalks as a great improvement, but when it was restriped, the previous yellow paint wasn't removed all the way. This causes people to not know where the yellow line is, so they end up stopping at the stop bar on top of the bike lane because that's where the previous yellow line. There are two yellow lines, a new one and a half scratched out old one which people still obey which causes them to stop in the bike lane. He feels like there needs to be a better process of removing the old striping. He also noticed this Page 2 of 5 TAB 12-02-2024 Minutes when he was driving on goo West between 600 North and i000 North. You can still see the white dashed line down the middle of the road that was not fully removed. It probably doesn't matter because nobody's going to treat it as two lanes, it just kind of shows that it wasn't fully removed when the road was restriped. He wonders if there is a better process for cleaning up those stripes. He also said that the i000 North speed limit was lowered to 25 mph which is great as there are schools there but, he has a concern because it caught him off guard. He usually doesn't see speed limit signs on the stretch of that road he uses so he didn't know it was a reduced speed limit until he went beyond where he usually travels. He doesn't know if there was a good public outreach to let the community know or if he just missed it. He's usually tuned in to know that a speed limit will be changed. He said there were people behind him that were trying to go 35 mph because they likely also didn't see signs in that section and the road is not currently designed for 25mph. It creates a little bit of concern for him and additionally, when the 600 North reconstruction happens and people use i000 North as a detour, the additional traffic there with 25 mph and 35mph people are driving on the same road will be a concern. Johnnae said it sounds like the speed limit changed recently and could use a little bit more communication, maybe even a stand-up sign to let people know. Greg said yes, there are just a few blocks where there is no speed limit sign. Jon said it might be good to get this area in the queue for a speed board. He said they lowered speed limits on collectors and arterials. They did an evaluation basically citywide, pretty much everything east of Redwood Road and lowered speed limits on dozens of streets this summer. That made it hard to do outreach for each street individually because they literally did dozens of streets. Johnnae said it would be a good thing to consider when the work happens on 600 North. Suzanne said she has another request; can they extend the time on the signal at Foothill and Stringham. She said you can barely walk across that intersection and the cars are going 45mph. She had to help an elderly person across twice as they cannot get across in time. Jon said it is a UDOT road,but Johnnae said she shares that concern at other locations within the City and is something she'd like to circle back on at another meeting. Josh said he'd like to shout out that they have median trees on Foothill now and State Street and they're very nice. Matthew said the light timing on 800 South going east/west, it's highly dependent on the time of day, but the light timing doesn't really provide you with a leading green light. You can have your light turn green and watch the next light turn red so you're instantly going to hit another red light. It takes him around half an hour to go from the west side up to the U of U hospital for instance because he hits almost every single red light whether as a car or cyclist. He wonders if the persistent stopping leads to more emissions and it also just holds people up in traffic. It goes across 2 or 3 UDOT roads,but he wanted to mention that the light timing seems very inefficient. He's talking about from the interstate all the way to Foothill. Jon said that it's a tough corridor because the team went with shorter cycle lengths to keep all directions moving since there isn't a platooning of cars. Justice said regarding the new changes to 30o North on the west side, there's not enough signing to make it clear what's no longer parking so everyone's still parking in the bike lane. It's unclear and rampant, people just don't know. There's one parking sign at the end of the block,but it's unclear and there needs to be a bit more communication. Jon said they can add more signage. WFRC Fall Meeting — Report Out Johnnae said many of the members attended the WFRC Fall meeting and were able to share their thoughts via map input. She wondered if anyone had any thoughts, insights, or comments and if they felt it was worthwhile use of their December meeting time. Page 3 of 5 TAB 12-02-2024 Minutes Greg really enjoyed it; these projects were more regional, and he thought it was very worthwhile. Matthew agreed and thought it was helpful for the Board to be seen in that sphere of networking with folks from all the different groups. It seemed very valuable to him. Suzanne thought it was great, and they should be motivated to go to it, but not necessarily have it replace a regular meeting. Johnnae said they could wait to decide whether to go again next year,but it sounds like there is generally a positive sentiment about participating. Transportation Updates document Becka shared this spreadsheet document prior to the meeting. She said they have started an internal update document where all their various staff that are managing projects or working on programs provide a monthly update of progress. She has circulated it to TAB a few times and wants to find out if the members are interested in it, would like her to continue distributing it to them, and what's the best way to make use of it. In the past, she was hoping they could attach a different TAB member to each project so members interested in particular projects could follow that project and give input. Johnnae thought it should be a public document on the City website where they might vet it with more public eyes and people might be able to answer their own questions instead of having to ask. Becka said if anyone is interested in these projects, e-mail her and she'll add their names to the list for that item. Jon said he doesn't mind having the document with names and projects online. After some discussion, they asked for it to be included with the agenda each month as they found it to have very helpful information. Johnnae said if the members want to hear more about any of these projects, to let her and Becka know so they can get it on the agenda. Becka said they're trying to get TAB and BAC more focused on themes, standards, and guidelines rather than diving into the details of projects. That's why ideally, they want to have members connected directly with the projects and the public outreach process for the relevant community rather than having staff members give constant updates. Retreat — Committee Mission & Focus for 2025+ The idea of having a TAB retreat came up. Many of the members have been on the Board for a while and they thought it might be a good idea to step away and have dedicated time to talk about what they would like the meeting time to be. It would still be a public meeting but without staff. It would be a time for them to talk about what they would like to accomplish in the future and maybe what one thing they would like to be different. They can discuss how they'd like to use the TAB time and where they would like to focus. Johnnae suggested a Saturday morning, a time that is not their normal meeting time. She asked if members would be open to having retreat time to make their time in TAB meetings more focused, and if they are in favor of that,when would be a good time. The feedback was positive, and a doodle poll will be sent out to confirm the best availability for the members. Members/ Strategic Recruitment Becka said there are currently two vacancies on TAB, the first has historically been reserved for UDOT. UDOT Region 2 has decided that instead of having one person officially appointed to serve on the Board, they want to have staff rotate through attending. Becka asked if the Board would like to ask UDOT to appoint someone, or since it's a representational seat, it can be for some other organization. The group agreed they would like a single consistent person from UDOT participating as a member. Johnnae will draft a letter asking UDOT for one consistent person to be an Page 4 of 5 TAB 12-02-2024 Minutes official TAB member. The other seat is D2 and there has not been through natural processes, anyone from D2 apply. Daniel will attend a Community Council meeting in this district and other members as well as SLC Transportation will network and work on recruitment for a D2 representative. Johnnae said she it would also be good to have someone representing people with disabilities on the Board. CIP Evaluation Criteria Johnnae said the Board has talked a lot about CIP in general and they've also talked a lot about the evaluation process. They talked about how it changed this past year and how that possibly shifted some of the outcomes negatively towards things they are concerned about. She would like to draft a letter to influence the next round of evaluation. The evaluation process is currently being reevaluated, and she asked the group about their thoughts and concerns and what they would like to emphasize in this letter. She will bring this draft letter back to the Board to discuss and vote on at the next meeting. There was discussion of the topics the Board felt should be emphasized and Julianne explained how the CIP projects are now being evaluated. Johnnae also wondered how this all relates to Vision Zero. Motion: Matthew Morriss motioned to adjourn the meeting; Justice Morath seconded the motion. The motion passed unanimously. The meeting was adjourned at 5:31 p.m. and the next meeting will be a joint TAB/BAC meeting scheduled for January 13, 2025, at 5:00 P.M. Approved by the Transportation Advisory Board 02-03-25. Page 5 of 5 TAB 12-02-2024 Minutes