From: Emil Abraham <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, August 31, 2024 9:57 AM
To: , Public Works <[email protected]>
Subject: 9/3/2024 Council Transportation Committee Item 5.1 Active Transportation Plan, Project 21-36
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Members of the CTC and Staff,
It's fantastic to see ATP updates.I applaud the staff's work and careful thought at how to push this plan forward. I really like the approach of identifying a holistic network and then applying projects onto that network. I think that should help with identifying which projects to prioritize.
I'm a little saddened to see the delays. But I trust the staff's judgement and that the delay will only strengthen the ability for this plan to lead Mountain View towards a modal shift away from cars. I'm especially excited for the additional round of community feedback.
Emil Abraham
Resident of Mountain View
From: Cliff Chambers <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, September 1, 2024 9:10:07 AM
To: Kamei, Ellen <[email protected]>; Hicks, Alison <[email protected]>; Matichak, Lisa <[email protected]> Cc: Whyte, Brandon <[email protected]>; Lo, Ria <[email protected]>; McCarthy, Kimbra <[email protected]>; Arango, Ed <[email protected]>
Subject: Item 5.1 Vision Statement and Revised Approach of Active Transportation Plan
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Chairperson Kamei and Council Members Hicks and Matichak:
I provided testimony on the Active Transportation Plan Scoring Criteria at the May 28 2024 City Council meeting. The following are my comments on the staff memo on the vision statement and revised approach to the Active Transportation Plan in response to Council direction in May.
I am very pleased with the vision statement as I feel it reflects much of the community input received to date.
The addition of the project phase in Figure 2 Holistic Network with Modal Priorities not only reflects the Council direction but also extensive input from the public on the desire for a network approach to the analysis. I support the street typology approach as active transportation treatments are quite different on major arterials compared to collector streets, for example. The addition of a round of public input for the network vision and another for the prioritized list of projects is applauded and I’d like to praise staff for this inclusive approach.
For some reason, the May 2021 AccessMV Final report is not included in the list of previous studies on memo page 5 that can be utilized as benchmarks for the development of the holistic network. Modal priorities was a key element of that effort and should be extensively incorporated into the network vision and analysis. The finding for these modal priorities should be a foundation for this work.
The inclusion of benefit/cost analysis was a direction by staff and something I personally advocated for in the active transportation network analysis. I respectfully disagree with the staff conclusion that benefit/cost analysis is too expensive and time consuming. Yes, it would extremely expensive if the approach was to develop a benefit/cost ratio for every specific project that could number well over a hundred. Instead, what could be done is to develop a normalized benefit/cost ratio for typical projects to guide the prioritization of projects. For example, a comparison could be made for a mile of a typical project such as a mile of protected bike lanes, a mile of a bicycle boulevard, a mile of filling sidewalk gaps, a mile of green complete streets with protected intersections, etc. This could be done with perhaps 20-25 illustrative projects by street typology. It is very challenging to develop the quantification of benefits in particular, but the City already has good cost data on typical bicycle and pedestrian improvements. If not, neighboring cities like Palo Alto has a real world example of the benefits of a bicycle boulevard, for example. Providing such illustrative benefit/cost ratio will an important criterion for the prioritization of active transportation
This is something I have professional experience with and am confident that the illustrative approach is achievable and desirable for comparing the benefit/cost ratio of different project types. I was the Project Manager 25 years ago for a National Academy of Sciences Research Project through the Transit Cooperative Research Project (TCRP Report 49) , that developed Chapter 4 Guide for Economic Analysis of Transit Projects that provides practitioners with a 5- step process of calculating benefit/cost ratios. In a quick Google search, I found several more relevant guidebooks for benefit/cost ratios for active transportation projects. The most recent (2024) is a guidebook from the well-respected Victoria Transport Policy Institute Evaluating Active Transport Benefits and Costs. If the scope is limited to illustrative benefit/cost ratios, I am very confident that the Nelson/Nygaard consulting team has the technical expertise to develop benefit/cost ratios for illustrative projects for a reasonable budget allocation.
Thanks you for the consideration.
Sincerely,
Cliff Chambers
Resident of Mountain View
Cliff
From: Lada Adamic <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2024 12:18 PM
To: , Public Works <[email protected]>
Subject: CTC meeting 9/3 agenda item 5.1 ATP
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Dear CTC,
I write to support revising the project scoring criteria for the ATP to include feasibility and the project's role in completing the active transportation network of our city.
Once the scoring criteria are revised, I think it would be valuable to see a few sample scores, including for a few completed and in-progress projects. This would help the community/committees/council sanity- check that the scoring is surfacing projects that will have the greatest benefit where it is most needed, especially if there will be hundreds of projects in play, as the memo claims, rather than a smaller number that could be derived from community feedback, the vision zero plan, etc.
Complementary to finding the most impactful individual projects, I also support adopting policies that will reduce the likelihood of vehicle and bike or ped collisions throughout the city.
Hopefully these can be pursued even before the ATP is complete.
To highlight the importance of a network, I'll digress a bit. I recently helped at a "Carbon Free Commute" info table at Mountain View High School for a parent event. We had a poster printout of safe routes to school and discussed possible walking/biking/bus routes with parents.
For some neighborhoods, we could suggest "They can bike on the Stevens Creek trail," or "They can catch the bus here." For others, we could not suggest a safe and quick route, and nodded our heads as the parent said they would keep driving their child to school.
Many parents were happy that their children already made their way to school without driving.
Although the recent Surgeon General's warning about parent stress (In 2023, 33% of parents reported high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults) does not explicitly mention school commute, I can't imagine it is not a factor with parents juggling stressful, congested school drop-off along with everything else.
At the first Carbon Free Commute event of the schoolyear at MVHS, 474 bikes were counted (plus more students arrived on foot and by bus). I would estimate a quarter to a third of the students got to MVHS on foot/by bike/by bus that morning. But our city would be a happier one if it had a decent active transportation network so that most of the middle and high school students could do so. Not only would it help their physical and mental health (and learning performance, according to science...) but it would allow them to then be able to go over to their friends' houses and other destinations independently.
This is all to say, it would be great if our city permitted people, especially youth, to move around without a car. The pace of addition of bike facilities has been slow. I don't understand all the reasons -- is it escalating cost, is it insufficient staffing, is it an inefficient process (where each segment becomes a big project with several expensive and time-consuming steps). I was afraid that coming up with another list of prioritized projects for the ATP, that might "check all the boxes" but not be accomplished in the next ten years, or if they are, not contribute significantly to mode shift because of lack of connection to other facilities, would not move us forward quickly enough. The students today will not be students in a few years, the climate today will not be the climate in a few years. So we need to transform our city now to one that is active transportation friendly, and I hope this revised, longer-ATP timeline will still bring us closer to that goal more quickly. On the other hand, I never know. Maybe this will use up staff time that could have been applied to pushing along much needed in-progress projects.
Thanks!
Lada Adamic
Mountain View resident