AI-generated transcript of City Council Public Works and Facilities Committee 10-01-24

[Callahan]: Welcome to the Public Works and Facilities Committee of October 1st, 2024, at 6 p.m. in City Hall. Mr. Clerk, would you call the roll?

[Hurtubise]: Sure. President Bears? President Bears appears to be delayed. Councilor Lazzaro?

[Lazzaro]: Present.

[Hurtubise]: Councilor Leming?

[Leming]: Present.

[Hurtubise]: Councilor Scarpelli?

[Scarpelli]: Present.

[Leming]: Chair Callahan?

[Callahan]: Present. Thank you. Today we are talking about Resolution 24-422, resolution to host a discussion of MassDOT plans for Medford Square Main Street intersection. Whereas the Massachusetts Department of Transportation is planning to make changes to a busy intersection in the heart of Medford Square, which will impact drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians for many years to come. And whereas the Medford Bicycle Commission attended an informational meeting and expressed concerns with the plans made thus far, now therefore be it resolved that a representative from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation familiar with the plan shall meet with the Medford City Council, a representative of the Medford Bicycle Commission, and a representative of the City of Medford Traffic and Transportation Department in committee to discuss said plans. This is a resolution of Councilor Lazzaro. I leave it to you.

[Lazzaro]: Thank you. So per the Medford Bike Commission, I wanted to hold this committee meeting and give them an opportunity to have a public discussion about this intersection. Unfortunately, our representative from MassDOT was not available to meet, but he did send an email that I'd like to read into the record. And I believe that they'll be able to have another meeting there early in the process. I think it was important for us to make sure that we were able to get these notes on the record from the bike commission. They're like 25% planning, and they do sort of public feedback, they factor in the feedback, they go back to planning, they do another sort of public meeting session, and then they do the next phase. So Greg Fraser is the project manager for this. To give some context, this is the intersection of Main Street and Route 16 as it goes sort of under the bridge where Route 16 goes over Main Street by the Mystic River. It's a very well-traveled intersection, and it's also pretty dangerous. It's right by the, well, it's not like, it has potential to be problematic, let's say that. It's right across from the Medford Police Department headquarters. We have a fire station there. We have many medical offices. We have lots of businesses. It's heavily traveled, and it's an intersection of many different modes of transportation. So, uh, the message that I got from Greg Frazier was, um, sorry for a master. Yes. Project manager for this project. He said, I have sent the 25% submission to Todd Blake, who is our, as we know, our, um, city, uh, our what's Todd's title. Todd's here on zoom. He can tell me his title. He'll speak in a minute. Um, and I've sent out a scheduling poll to meet with the city of Medford bike advisory committee. MassDOT highway design complete streets Todd Blake and the consultant Howard Stein Hudson to discuss the design further as agreed upon following the public informational meeting. This meeting will allow further discussions now that the design team has had an opportunity to further investigate the design following written comments received from the committee as well as other constituents following the public informational meeting. With further discussions as at the upcoming meeting, the design team will only have more opportunity to further look into design prior to going to a design public hearing and then continuing further in design. So that that's his statement. It's I, my understanding is there's intention to have this be a really fluid process. They're not going to break ground for quite a while. Um, so I found that encouraging, but I will go, uh, if I may to, um, uh, Emily O'Brien, who is here on Zoom, uh, if that's through the chair. Um, she's the, uh, president of our president of our Medford bike commission, and she and I met and spoke at length about this. And, um, she outlined the thoughts and, um, concerns that the bike commission had with the plans as they were at the earliest stages. So, uh, I would love to hear her, um, perspective on, this project.

[Callahan]: Fantastic. Let's go to Emily O'Brien.

[O'Brien]: Sure. Thank you. And thanks for having me. When we first saw these plans, it was in the first time we ever saw them was in the public meeting. And one thing that's challenging about that format is you don't ever get a chance to look at it in depth ahead of time and kind of take your time and pick it apart and really see what you're looking at and you get your one chance to say one thing in the public comment period. But especially the more we looked at the plans, there were a lot of major problems with the way that bicycles were being handled in this design. I don't want to get too granular at the moment because I don't, we did send a detailed description of some of the issues. We didn't, I didn't want to write a whole long list of all of our problems with it because we figured it would be so long that nobody would read that. So we listed some of the biggest problems and requested a meeting where we'd like to go over the rest of them in person. I have just gotten an invitation for a meeting as of this morning. In broad strokes, our issues with the designs as they are originally presented. And by the way, this is really three intersections. I can post a link to the presentation materials from that original meeting in the chat. if that's helpful, but that it's really three intersections. The first at the south end of the Craddock Bridge before the underpass, if you're leaving Medford Square. The next is after the overpass. So at Main Street and South Street, both of those places and both of those Route 16 ramp exits. And then the next thing, the next one is where Riverside, not Riverside, Mystic Ave and Main Street diverge. So kind of the three big junctions that you see that are closest to the police station, it's really a corridor of three intersections. It's not really just one. And so they had different plans of different drawings for each one of those spots. In broad strokes, our concerns were that Not all of the motions, the movements that bicyclists would need to make through those intersections are being accounted for. We have the Contraflow lane on South Street. We have the Clippership connector that isn't finished yet. We have another pathway that is planned, but not there yet on this side. So there'll be a lot of ways that bicyclists and also pedestrians will be trying to cross in the east-west direction that is a big challenge now, and trying to make connections that don't exist yet, but we hope will exist in the near future, and certainly by the time they break ground on this. So, part of it was that not every movement was being accounted for. Part of it was that the designs involve A lot of additional delays so that if you're trying to bike in a straight line through this intersection if you were in the travel lane like a car. You would be able to go straight through if you basically if you waited for one red light you wouldn't you would probably not have to wait for all of them and. the way that they had outlined the bike facilities, you would end up having to pick your way through various crosswalks and probably end up waiting for several cycles of multiple lights. And these things do add up, and they make people frustrated. When those delays add up, it makes people more likely to cheat. Bicyclists aren't really any different from anybody else in that regard. So that's frustrating. It also can end up getting dangerous where you have a very short time to get across. And then if you have cars turning right on red, now you've lost your short little time. And so now you're trying to squeeze by and that can be a problem. We were also concerned with how they combined bicycle traffic with pedestrian traffic in what they're calling kind of multi-use path situations. These kind of pathways often are really narrow. And if you think about it in terms of design speed, this is a commuter who's biking to work and is in a hurry is probably going somewhere between 12 and 18 miles an hour. a person walking their dog is probably going two miles an hour. And that's a really big speed difference for a really small amount of space. And so we already have some issues where the routes that bicyclists need to use, particularly immediately in the Medford Square area, are not wide enough to pass people going opposite directions, for example, or are not wide enough for a person on a bike to pass a person using a walker or to pass a person with a stroller, regardless of which direction you're going. So we're concerned that the amount of space that's devoted to car lanes is increasing while the bicycle and pedestrian traffic is being combined, which is only likely to increase conflicts. And this is particularly the case as more and more people get e-bikes. which means they can go faster more easily, probably not quite fast enough easily enough to not get harassed if they choose to use the road instead. This is the other side of it. If you decide that you don't want to ride at pedestrian speed in order to be safe on these kind of side path areas, and you want to use the road, that's perfectly legal, that's perfectly allowable. except that the drivers behind you get really, really pissed off. And nobody's enforcing the forefoot passing rule or anything like that either. So we're concerned that this is, that we get kind of the leftover space and that it's setting the situation up to fail. It's setting people up to be frustrated, run out of room. Some of what they designed also And I don't want to go too into specifics because I hope that they have changed this by now. So I hope that this description is moot. But one of these places they had created this kind of weird chicane in a pedestrian island where it's like this kind of a situation in an island. And this is at the place where there are currently barrels to stop people from going straight onto the ramp from South Street to go straight across Main Street. So I do understand why that was there. But what they put on the plan ends up being this really narrow space with tight corners that now needs to be shared by multiple travel modes. And that is also exactly the kind of place that probably is not going to be adequately kept clear of debris, or snow, or ice. And so that means that the actual usable space will only shrink. So we have some concerns about the maintenance of facilities like this too, that they end up being less than usable for large parts of the year, even at the point when the roads are completely dry and the roads are completely fine, some of these side areas often don't get as good treatment, and so they can still be filled with snow or ice or debris and so forth. So those are all our concerns, and we really are hoping that we can talk to the design team as soon as possible. We know that they're early in the process, and we just want to get at them while they're still early in the process. We also know that this is only one intersection and it has one specific scope of work. But if you are a bike commuter going from somewhere in Medford and you'd have maybe a five mile trip to somewhere closer into town, maybe Boston, Cambridge, Watertown, something like that, there's a good chance that this is not the only intersection with this kind of treatment that you go through. So we can say like, oh, these compromises are important here for this reason and this reason and this reason. But adding to people's level of frustration and adding to the amount of delays is that on an actual commute, you would go through a bunch of these. And those delays add up and the frustration factor adds up. And ultimately, we're hoping that we can tell people, you know, biking is viable, it's efficient, it's fast, it's easy. You're not going to just be late to work if you do it. And 90 seconds at several different places each time, if you have four or five places like that, that adds up. And if you have a half hour trip, now it gets to be a 35, 40 minute trip. And, you know, and in the meantime, it's kind of forcing you into a much slower speed than you otherwise would be going to. And again, we understand everybody has to go slower on city streets than they want to go. And people in cars have to go slower than they want to go to. Um, but we end up that the most efficient speeds for biking are too fast for bike paths and too slow for the road. And not really welcome anywhere. So these are, those are basically our concerns. Um, and so we're hoping that we can get in while it's still early in the process. So thanks.

[Callahan]: Thank you, uh, Councilor Lazzaro.

[Lazzaro]: Thank you, Emily. There are a few things that I want to highlight in what Emily said, which are that efficiency of cyclists is not just a matter of cyclists getting to work on time, but it's also the fact that we want to make our streets we want to make it easy to follow the laws of our streets. If we make it too difficult to follow the laws, then it just becomes more logical for people to break the rules. And then cyclists are like anybody and they would just go around it and it becomes a dangerous situation. And sometimes when you're on a bike, I can speak for myself because I ride a bike sometimes, but I get scared. of something that could happen to me. If I have to go too slow, it's more likely that I'll wobble, lose my balance and have to step down. And then if I step down in the middle of the street, I become, it becomes very dangerous. My daughter learned how to ride her bike recently and now she wants to ride her bike everywhere. She's seven years old and she's often like really wobbly and she wants to ride her bike to CVS to buy candy all the time. I'm afraid to ride to the CVS on High Street because there's nowhere to ride. It's like cars packed real tight. And that's on the way to, you know, this connection here with, you know, 16 and Main Street and it's If we had to slow down too much, it would be scary and wobbly and, you know, it's easier to ride on the sidewalk, but when people are walking their dogs, it's not a safe space. Another thing I wanted to mention is there was a deadly accident recently in Cambridge where it was a shared space. It's not the same situation, but it was on Memorial Drive, I believe, and it was like, a bike path that merges into a sidewalk and they become a shared space. And people have been talking for a long time about how dangerous it is and something that had been on the radar of people wanting to change it. But we don't want to increase the opportunity for fatalities to happen, obviously. So all of that being said, I know that we sometimes these kinds of meetings can move forward things that are maybe going to happen anyway but you know can increase the urgency so now that the bike commission will have a meeting with MassDOT that is excellent. And maybe some of this doesn't need to be as pressing that we discuss it right now, but I do, I would offer director Blake, if you have any, any response or anything you would want to add to the discussion that might be something that we wouldn't have thought of necessarily. I would, I would love to hear from you if you have anything that you'd like to add to it.

[Blake]: Thank you, Councilor. No, I think Emily covered a lot of what their concerns are and were. I think I believe the Bicycle Commission and others will be pleased at the progress, even since the public information meeting. I do assure you that all of the points were taken seriously and that the team, the design team in Massa are taking that seriously and are trying to incorporate as much as they can. So I don't want to present or say anything that they're going to present. It's their project, but I do believe it's incorporating a lot of the elements that Emily had described. So it's a good thing.

[Lazzaro]: That's very encouraging. Sorry, through the chair. Great. Well, I am happy to hear that the meetings are going forward. I'm comfortable with how this is moving.

[Callahan]: Thank you. Do we have any other councilors that want to speak on this topic? Councilor Lennon?

[Leming]: Just a question about, so to be clear, this is the resolution, host a future discussion, invite MassDOT to it. What would be the logistics of that? Would that be another committee meeting that they and the Bicycle Commission are here? Would it be a public forum, open meeting? Can you clarify that a little bit?

[Lazzaro]: Well, I think that it would have something to do with the progress. They have a very specific, I think there's a specific route that they have to take based on, sorry, the... Councilor Lazzaro. Sorry. Yes.

[Callahan]: If I may. Yes, please. This is the meeting we're having right now. This is this meeting. So this resolution isn't to have another meeting. The resolution which got passed through the city council was to have this meeting right here.

[Leming]: Just asking for clarification on that. Cool.

[Callahan]: I will ask for any public participation. Anyone in the chamber? Anyone on Zoom? It is Council President Zac Bears. The floor is yours.

[Bears]: Hi there, sorry about that. I am currently sitting at the intersection of Main Street and South Street. So subject matter expert at the moment. I just wanted to note a thank you, Councilor Lazzaro. Thank you to the Bike Commission and to Emily O'Brien for your work on this. And thank you to Todd for being our liaison with MassDOT. But I also just wanted to note I think it's essential that we get this right. Medford wasn't built for the level of car volume that we have now. And just because we pasted an overpass of Route 16 and the highway through it doesn't mean that the rest of our streets can actually handle the car volume that we have today. And that's why it's essential that we move in the direction that we're moving to make Medford more accessible for all, not just people with cars. I'm one who uses my car all the time, but I would use other modes of transportation if I felt like I could get where I was going in a reasonable amount of time. The Craddock Bridge is the only crossing of the Mystic River for about a mile or more on either side of the east or west. And we know that it was deeply impacted by the massive volumes of car traffic that have been throughput through that bridge and through the intersections that we're talking about. by Interstate 93 and by the overbuilt Route 16 overpass. And I think it's essential that we get this signalization and rebuild of Main and Mystic right, because what we're talking about in Medford Square and what we're talking about on Mystic Ave is returning to a people-centered era, not a car-centered era. All of the spots on Mystic Ave just south of the bridge and just south of the 16 overpass used to be a vibrant walkable neighborhood. Medford Square used to be a vibrant walkable neighborhood. The car supremacy and the building of the highway destroyed so much of the community that was built there. And now that we're trying to restore it, this isn't the essential link. to making it work. So I appreciate the bike commission's work. I appreciate everyone's conversation here in this meeting. I also think putting that layer of what do we want our community to look like and how do we want to make sure that it's safe for everyone to have community and link together in our squares is an important part of the conversation, too. I don't think the 25% design hit that mark, but I'm hopeful that upcoming designs will. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[Callahan]: Thank you. Anyone else like to speak on this topic? Yes, I do see Emily O'Brien. If you want to speak one more time, go ahead.

[O'Brien]: Thank you. I just wanted to make one clarification on what Councilor Behr has mentioned. You said that there isn't another crossing for about a mile. That's not completely true. There is a crossing that bicyclists and pedestrians can take. The pipe bridge or the Adrian Hand footbridge goes over the river. And there's a pedestrian crossing across Route 16 right there. This is at the end of Shipyard Way at the bottom of Governors Ave. That is another possibility. But I bring it up because, unfortunately, it's also a very problematic possibility. The pipe bridge is divided in half. And it has one half with stairs and one half with a ramp. That's really narrow. So if there's two people coming opposite directions, it's a little awkward for two people on foot coming opposite directions. I take that way often, and I often have to wait for somebody to finish crossing before I start across the bridge. And then I get to the pedestrian crossing across Route 16. And this is a DCR road as opposed to MassDOT, which is what we're talking about in this main intersection project. But this DCR crossing is the alternative. And I see multiple people in motor vehicles running that red light. after I wait a long time for it, every day. So this is, there is kind of an alternative, but the alternative is also part of the larger problem here. So I'd also like to just draw your awareness to the fact that we have a lot of these state agency controlled roads that really are critical links through all of our neighborhoods. And we need to think about how to address all of those in a holistic way. We need all of them. The state agencies are as much of a part of this as the city is. So thanks again. I appreciate your attention to this.

[Callahan]: Thank you. And I see that Todd Blake, Director of Traffic and Transportation, is raising his hand as well. Go ahead, Todd.

[Blake]: Hi, thank you. I just had a couple of procedural clarifications as well. So MassDOT typically has one design public hearing at 25% design stage, but at the city's request, they held the public information meeting, which was actually a pre 25% meeting. So now what they're working on is the 25%. So we're still early enough. So that pre-meeting allowed us to have all this conversation and lead to a better 25% design. Normally they go straight to the public with 25%, but we were lucky that they agreed to have an extra process prior to that, which is where we are now. So the next, the meeting that the bike commission has with them will be about the 25% submission. And the next time they go to the overall public, will be the 25% design hearing that they typically do. Hopefully that makes sense.

[Callahan]: Thank you so much. It's amazing that you're there to help us facilitate the extra meetings. Any other comments from the public or from councilors? Well, thank you so much to everyone, Councilor Lazzaro, to Mr. Blake, Ms. O'Brien. Sorry, Councilor Lazzaro, do you wanna go ahead?

[Lazzaro]: I was just gonna motion to adjourn when you are finished with your thankings.

[Callahan]: Wonderful, thank you to everyone. And Councilor Lazzaro has motioned to adjourn. Do we have a second? No one is seconding the motion. Great. Seconded by Councilor Leming. All in favor? All opposed?

[Bears]: Yes.

[Callahan]: That is an aye. Okay, thank you very much. The meeting is adjourned.

Callahan total time: 2.5 minutes total words: 397	Lazzaro total time: 7.51 minutes total words: 1116	Leming total time: 0.4 minutes total words: 66	Scarpelli total time: 0.0 minutes total words: 1
Bears total time: 2.74 minutes total words: 444