total time: 16.93 minutes
total words: 2313
[Matt Leming]: Hello everybody, this is City Councilor Matt Leming just offering another update on one of my projects that I've been working on behind the scenes. It's a term that I've been throwing around a bit in some of my blog updates and communications. It's called the Transportation Demand Management Program. For this video, I'm just going to spend a little bit of time explaining what it is, the purpose behind it, and why I think it's important for the City Council's zoning recodification that we're currently undergoing. So, I was at the West Medford Community Center last week, just talking to folks there and just trying to understand more of my constituents' concerns, and something that they brought up, which, you know, you very frequently hear about, is the City Council's traffic. Greater Boston has too many cars. This can be dangerous sometimes. This can lead to congestion. People really don't like to wait for long periods of time when they're on the road, and they don't like to see so many cars on the road during rush hour, which is just a problem that's getting worse and worse over the years. Now, one thing that they were bringing up specifically at the West Medford Community Center was traffic going through West Medford. Now, a lot of that is due to the fact that we have a ramp that goes right off I-93 and sort of drives traffic through Medford Square and from there into West Medford, so the traffic patterns are really not that great. And the other issue behind that is the fact that in Greater Boston we just have too many cars on the road, period. And this is related to the fact that our MBTA is really not uh the best um there's a youtube video there's a youtube channel that i'm a really big fan of called wendover productions which went into the problems with the boston's subway system specifically it's kind of a radial design so if you're commuting into downtown boston um it's great But if you're trying to get from one part of Greater Boston, so the suburbs Outside of downtown Boston and you're trying to get from one area to another You basically have to go into downtown Boston then go out of there to the another part of Greater Boston So oftentimes people just opt to drive instead of use the subway so I'm pretty aware of the nature of a lot of these problems. The issue is that as a city councillor, there's only so many levers that I really have to work with, you know, I don't really have power to reduce the number of cars on the road immediately, and trying to find another, trying to redesign the interstate highway system so that we can get an alternative ramp off of I-93 is just a state and possibly federal project that would take years and years of advocacy and work on both my part and the part of our state and federal delegation. So those are issues which could come up in the future when there's sort of a political window for it, but for now what I'm trying to do is focus on the things that I can focus on, and that's where transportation demand management would come into play. What the heck is this? A TDM program is something that city planners often learn about during their master's degree, so it's a bit of a policy-want kind of a thing that is a little bit tricky to sell to the public and to get them to and to get everybody to understand, but basically it is a method to account for demands in traffic in any sort of new building that comes into Medford. In other words, if somebody wants to come into Medford to build a very large residential building that'll bring in a hundred new people, then there's going to be presumably demands on the traffic patterns going through the area that that building brings along. So you can imagine a hundred new people could bring in, you know, 50 new cars to the area, which will obviously just congest the roads more. And so a transportation demand management program is a way to get developers who are impacting traffic in this way to come up with concessions as well to offset the presumed demand that their new developments would bring onto the area. This is a program that they've implemented pretty successfully in the city of Everett and in some of our neighboring communities. And the way that it looks is if, for instance, you wanna build a casino in the area, then the people that are designing the casino and developing that, they could decide to either say, you know, this is a normal development, we're gonna go through the normal routes to do this, or they could opt to say, no, this is a transportation demand management development. and if it's a TDM development then they would do then they would perform a study that would anticipate how many new cars and how many new like basically just and how many new roads would be required by the new casino and if they find out that if they find out as a result of the study that this casino would you know put 100 new cars on the road during weekend hours, then they could offset that by paying for a shuttle that would presumably be able to encourage some people to take a bus instead of going in their cars all the time. Now, these sorts of concessions, these sorts of demands, they can take a number of different forms. You can measure demands on traffic and transportation in terms of the parking that a building requires. You can measure it in terms of the number of bike racks that a building has by it. You can measure it in terms of where its location is on the road, and therefore how much its location will affect the timing of the time it takes certain cars to get around it. So there's a lot of different ways that new developments can impact transportation. So these sort of things get complicated in the actual implementation of it, and that's why it ends up being a little bit difficult to explain to the public exactly what goes into these programs. From my perspective, I see the benefit of TDM as being 1. It gives developers a way to predict exactly what variances they would need in zoning. And they tend to like that. TDM programs are implemented in a sort of credits and debit system. So in other words, if they come in and they say, okay, we know that we will have this kind of negative impact on the traffic, therefore we're going to offset that by you know, offering a number of credits. And so maybe we're going to offer, you know, a hundred MBTA passes to all of our residents that are in our new building. Or maybe we're going to put X number of bike racks next to our building in order to support the bike infrastructure and thereby take the, reduce the number of cars that are on the road. And this credit and debit system is, uh, made very clear from the outset. So by putting x number of buy cracks, you can incur one credit, which would offset a debit that is incurred by having 100 extra units in a particular area. The benefit for a developer is that there's sort of like this automated way of dealing with zoning variances, which otherwise they would have to account for by going through the Zoning Board of Appeals. So the Zoning Board of Appeals basically means that if a developer wants to, for instance, reduce parking minimums that are required by the building, which would be a debit because that would mean that those cars would need to go somewhere else. They would normally have to go through the Zoning Board of Appeals, which is a board that meets monthly and it can be a little bit subjective and it could really draw out the timeline that these projects take. With a TDM program, all of that is handled, all of those variances are handled at the staff level. So you end up having a very predictable system for developers that ends up shortening the timeline it takes to get variances in zoning that they require, and therefore it helps them to predict how long it's going to take for a development to get off the ground, and then saves them money, and that really incentivizes them to build in the area. I met recently with a group called the Lower Mystic Transportation Management Association, which is a group of developers that supports each other and sort of allows them to collaborate on different TDM initiatives. Now, they're mostly active sort of in the Sorry, backing up a little bit. The TMA is a method for developers to contribute and get credits in this TDM system. So, in other words, if you want to offset your traffic impact, one way to do that is to pay for a shuttle. Paying for a shuttle completely on your own tends to be very expensive, but if you have three different developers that collaborate through a TMA, then all of them could just contribute a fraction of the cost to the same shuttle and therefore offset their development impact in that way. So it's sort of a system that allows collaboration in that way. And the Lower Mystic TMA has been pretty active and successful in the Everett area, so they've been able to encourage a lot of development over there. But they haven't really been able to expand very successfully over to Medford. And that has some pretty definite consequences for Medford. So they have currently an on-course shuttle, for instance, that runs mainly between Everett and Charlestown, because those are two areas that are contributing actively to the TMA. But Medford, even though it sort of contains the most land area of the Lower Mystic, TMA jurisdiction, it really doesn't get any shuttles coming regularly into our area because we don't have a lot of developers that are sort of actively contributing to that. So what is actually required to get a TDM into Medford? And this is what I'm currently dealing with right now. From a city council perspective, they're sort of like the high level encoding of the, they're sort of like the high-level writing of the TDM into our ordinances. And this is what would require these automated zoning variances that TDMs typically allow. And so that's what I'm working on right now as part of our zoning recodification plan. We had a planning and permitting committee last week where we're just sort of going over some of the parts of the, some of the zoning recodification projects that would happen over the next year, year and a half, and TDM was one of them. And so just writing, writing it explicitly into the ordinances that TDM is a method for, is a legitimate method for zoning variances by which we could get around the Zoning Board of Appeals for those applicable projects is what is necessary at the City Council level. Concurrently, The details of our specific credits or debit system, what this actually looks like in practice, most of that is implemented at the staff level. So it would be sort of a project between Medford's Transportation Department and our Office of Planning, Development, and Sustainability to conduct a study that would sort of get into what specific credits and debits would be most beneficial for the city of Medford, as well as sort of getting into the practice of encouraging developers to join the Lower Mystic Valley TMA. So that's kind of where we're at right now. I think the practical issue that I'm kind of running into this is that These studies tend to be pretty cost-heavy, they tend to incur a lot of staff time, and Medford has a very low number of staff compared to other cities as it is. So I'm currently trying to encourage the staff of PDS, for instance, to do some nexus and linkage fee studies, which will be very beneficial for bringing in revenue in the future. but it also is costing a lot of staff time and a lot of money to do that. So part of what I'm doing is touching base with the lower Mystic Valley TMA, Trying to sell this idea to the public Explained explain it to explain to staff how this program has benefited our neighboring communities And why I think it's applicable applicable as well and would bring similar benefits to developers in Medford while also balancing that with the realities of being a city that has relatively low staff to implement these projects because we have pretty low revenue per capita compared to a lot of these neighboring municipalities that are able to support these programs. So this is just one project that we're getting into and that we will be pursuing over the complete zoning recodification process that City Council is pursuing over the next year to year and a half. There will be plenty of planning and permitting committee meetings about it that are all open to the public, plenty of room for public input, public feedback. and plenty of room to allow other folks to offer their ideas, to get input from residents, staff, developers, other interested parties. And yeah, no, that's about all I have. For this update. I hope that this helped to explain the one of this like very wonky sort of programs and Have a great two weeks Later bye
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total time: 16.93 minutes total words: 2313 |
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