[Christopher D'Aveta]: Good evening. Uh, Chris Davido, 67 West street. Um, the person who spoke a couple of people before me basically said what I was going to say, which is the, the narrowing of that roadway is really the only way to properly slow cars down because, um, and especially for people trying to cross at the crosswalks where we've all traveled that road, we know you can't really see the person as you're traveling the roadway. It's wide enough. so that it's out of your peripheral, it's in your peripheral vision, just at the edge. And if you try to, of course, edge out onto the roadway between cars, even when there's no parking at the bus stop there, you're kind of blocked coming down High Street. I did wanna say that, and maybe I missed this earlier, got here a little late, is that there seems to be no signal on all of High Street until you get to Medford Square, essentially. There are two pedestrian signals, one at St. Ray's and one at St. Joe's in front of the library. But I don't think there's any signal until Medford Square there, essentially. So that whole stretch of High Street, people kind of see as a way to go through. Of course, the railroad signal. So I just want to emphasize that. And this is not a new issue in a way because some of us parents had been working with the prior administration on getting a traffic calming measure there. And those speed sensors you see now are the result of that. Mayor McClain put those in. I think one is functional and one is not at the moment. Those are part of the solution, but not the complete solution. Obviously, we need to slow traffic down to prevent what happened about a year ago, which is a truck driving up onto someone's lawn, traveling too fast, trying to avoid a collision. That could have been a deadly accident. Luckily, no one was hurt. So that's all I want to say. Thank you.
[Christopher D'Aveta]: Good evening. Christopher DeVita, 67 West Street. I've spoken on occasion before this council about pedestrian safety issues. It's become an issue. Everywhere, as I think you are hearing now, I think you could probably pretty much have every single resident in Medford come up here and talk about how pedestrian safety and traffic problems here are just a little bit out of control now. I live on a street that's a one-way, but that doesn't prevent people going 40 miles per hour the wrong way down my street, because somehow going faster means you won't get caught. But I can tell you that I'm a city planner by trade, and I've worked with a lot of transportation engineers, and I support the creation of the position, but I have to say that if you just put the transportation engineer out there on his or her own without any backup and implementation monies, they're just gonna give you a lot of data, and unfortunately, data that we already know. So we have to have a holistic approach to this where we really support the creation of a proper traffic and engineering department here and put the monies behind it to change this behavior. And if it requires hiring more police to do enforcement, I think we should do that. And if that's the issue, I'm not really sure it is, but if it is the issue, then we should look at that. It's sort of about the how you know, what kind of city do we want to live in at this point? And, uh, as you can hear from everyone who's spoken, uh, it's not the one we currently have right now. Thank you.
[Christopher D'Aveta]: Thank you, Chris DeVito, 67 West Street. I would like to add my voice in support of Councilman Knight's resolution. If you all remember back less than 20 years ago, late 90s, Tufts laid off a lot of janitors from its actual employment roles and then hired the company, I believe, that these people may work for, the second company following up. So they outsourced their janitorial staff. following, uh, in second way and, and, uh, downsizing, uh, even more. And I can say this as a Tufts alum, because I'm getting bombarded with solicitations from the university to give money. And I'm, I'm really disappointed in actually the, uh, the direction they've been going lately. So, um, I fully support this and, um, I hope it passes.