[00:00:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to our webinar series that occurs here on our Facebook page every Friday at noon. Today, we have with us John Kaplan. He's been the bicycle and pedestrian program manager at Vitrano since 2009 and has worked in the program since 2000. John is involved with program funding and development policy, technical assistance, safety, education and the promotion of bicycling and walking. He has been involved with bicycle and pedestrian planning and design since nineteen ninety three. Today, John is going to be talking about how we can make changes to bike and pedestrian safety at a low cost.

[00:00:42] So I want to introduce John now. Hi, John. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the opportunity.

[00:00:51] Well, I'm very looking forward to what you're going to present. I'm going to pass it off to you now.

[00:00:56] All right.

[00:01:00] Great. So hopefully folks are seeing my slides. So.

[00:01:07] This is a presentation that I've actually been doing for a while with mostly with municipalities and also through the regional planning commissions.

[00:01:18] Other venues like Vermont Local Roads, which is an organization that works with municipalities on technical assistance, but also kind of put a little bit of a spin on it in terms of some of the kind of changes to the road network that are being looked at and implemented by communities in response to COGAT 19.

[00:01:46] Can go to the next slide.

[00:01:49] So one of the things that the pandemic is sort of resulted in is that I think it's kind of the trying to look at silver linings, kind of an opportunity for communities to look at streets and how they're being used and maybe make some changes so that they work better for bicycling and walking. And some of that is that with a lot less or a lot of people working at home, there is generally less traffic on the streets. And then you've got people who want to be getting outside and moving. I've heard anecdotally and I know that there are people doing counts. There's there's just a lot more people who are walking and biking these days than in the past.

[00:02:40] And so one thing that that's resulted in is especially in busier areas like Burlington, for example, that some of the existing facilities, like the Burlington Bike Path or maybe even a sidewalk, don't really provide enough space for the people that are using those facilities. And, you know, to allow them to be there and then also maintain the social distance, saying that we're being asked to do to help, you know, prevent the spread of of.

[00:03:12] So.

[00:03:15] And then there's the other sort of economic development aspect of restaurants in particular, who've been pretty hard hit, needing to are working on reopening, but not having all the availability of their indoor seats. And so there's a lot of effort to look at like reusing or repurposing parking spaces as extra seating for those businesses.

[00:03:43] Next.

[00:03:46] So in response to that, two state agencies are agency and the Agency of Commerce and Community Development worked on an interim set of guidelines for communities to who want to look at using, say, a parking space for some other purpose.

[00:04:08] So those guidelines are out there currently. And. This sort of happened in the context of our agency was already working on some guidelines for what we're calling demonstration projects or short term projects. And anyway, the interim guidelines are a little bit less detailed. I would say. And there's a couple of communities in Vermont who had already been working on this for several years. Burlington, Vermont, Pillinger. Both have some versions of pop up, pop up project guidance. And so even with all of this, there's a number of communities around the state that are doing projects like this. This is the pick. The other picture in this slide is just from a news story about Brattleboro repurposing some parking spaces for, I think, both public space and for restaurants. So there's some real benefits of these demonstration or pop up projects. One of the things is that one of the really important things is that it offers the community a chance to try out a design before doing a lot of investment and making it permanent. Kind of allows a chance to, like, see how something is working and maybe modify the design before making into a more permanent project. Things can get implemented pretty quickly. So that's another benefit. A lot of times they're seasonal, especially like the restaurant seating, because we're not going have people sitting outside in the middle of the winter. Of course, they're low cost because of the materials that are used so much less than like a permanent installation. Especially when you're talking about things like concrete sidewalks and things like that. And then it's an opportunity to gather some data. You know, like if a community puts in a temporary bike lane, they can do some counts and see how the addition of that facility impacts behavior. And then, you know, part of that data gathering is getting some input from the public. And again, that's a good way to see what might need to be modified with a design to make it work better. So this is a picture from a project I actually just went and visited this project under construction in Rutland. This is on Center Street in Rutland, which is the street right off there downtown. It goes by the Paramount Theater and they're doing kind of a whole reimagining of that street to narrow the travel lanes, provide some restaurant seating for, I think, three or four restaurants. And to kind of calm traffic and make the crossings safer. They're adding a mid block crossing as part of this project. There's some street art that's going in. So I actually just saw some new photos from some work they did yesterday. It's even in the two days since I've been down there, they've made great strides. And this is all supposed to be up and running by the Fourth of July. So there's definitely a lot of momentum on this in this area of kind of pop up or short term projects around the state, which is great to see. Next. So there's a couple of different places where communities can get assistance. So local motion, which is the statewide bicycle industry and advocacy organization there? Well, we're I'm kind of working together with them, but we're both available to provide technical assistance. And I know that is going to put up links to various things that I'm talking about in this presentation. So you'll have that available afterwards. OK, so now just to get into some of the details. And a lot of these things are ideas that I've been promoting for a while, which are, you know, bike and pedestrian facilities sometimes can be, you know, kind of daunting from at a musical level because they can be an expensive project. But I think what often gets overlooked is some of the easier, low cost things that communities can do to make their existing roads work better for biking and walking. So one really simple thing, which our agency has been doing for a while now is just to narrow the travel lanes. So a 12 foot traveling was pretty typical for a long time. And there's actually been some study done that like a 10 or 11 foot lane is actually the safest with on roads that are posted at 40 miles an hour or less. So when a road gets repaved or the markings of worn off and they need to be redone, especially that white edge line, just moving that in a foot or so just provides some extra space on the shoulder for biking or walking. And I would say the cost of this type of improvement is essentially zero because, you know. You will be marking that edge line anyway. So just changing its location. There's really no cost to doing that.

[00:10:02] And then, you know, if there's if you already have shoulders that are four or five feet wide and it's in a more busy area where you want to sort of designate the space for bicycling, marking those shoulders as bike lanes.

[00:10:18] That's a pretty relatively inexpensive improvement. And it can really make. You know, improve the safety of bicyclists by kind of designating that space.

[00:10:33] So.

[00:10:35] In addition to just, you know, marking the shoulders, making them a little bit wider, potentially, Martin and his bike lanes maintenance is really important. So if you have a nice wide paved shoulder, but then you either have brush that overhangs it or a bunch of gravel and glass that's accumulated there, you kind of lost that facility and bicyclists end up having to go out into the travel lane. So maintaining shoulders is really important. So just having good visible signs at crosswalks is another important feature. And so there's a fluorescent yellow green background which is shown on these school signs. That's a requirement for that type of sign. But it can be used for bicycle and other bicycle industry and signs. So our agency uses the fluorescent yellow green as a standard for all of our pedestrian signs. I've seen a lot of signs in my traveling around the state that are just faded. You know, not necessarily properly located. And so just getting the right signs or newer signs put up with this fluorescent yellow green background. And that's really minimal added cost. You know that the cost of the sign doesn't change because of the color. So another thing that you can do is if you have a location where there's some, you know, data that says that motorists maybe aren't paying attention to the signs, you can add a sort of like a plastic insert that goes on the signpost and it's the same color as whatever the sign color is. So those are about twenty five dollars per sign. That's a good way to enhance the visibility. They really do stand out because not all signs have these extra plastic strips on them. And this is another sort of maintenance issue. It's a little hard to see in this picture, but the there is a crosswalk sign where the blue circle is behind the tree. And. Well, so, you know, just looking or kind of evaluating the signs and seeing where there is some maintenance needed to trim tree branches back or brush that that might be obscuring the visibility of the sign because it's you know, it's great to put up the sign. But if the motorist can't see them, then they're not really doing their job. So just providing crosswalks or and keeping them up to, you know, remarked every year. That's a really important pedestrian safety feature. The crosswalk in this picture is the block pattern, which is that's our state standard that trans uses on the state system. And that is one of the more visible crosswalk patterns. There's there's several different cross crosswalk patterns that the MUTV d allows. The MUTV is the sort of national manual that be trans and towns are supposed to follow that spells out like different signs and paint markings so that the block pattern is very visible. One of the reasons we switch to it is that cars can travel in, you know, between the markings a little bit more so they where they tend to wear a little bit longer. So having good visible crosswalks is important. And then sort of parking related to crosswalks, so, ah. So there is a state law about not allowing parking within 20 feet of crosswalks at intersections. We use that 20 foot dimension or offset at all of our crosswalks in the state system. So there actually is someone right behind that white van who's trying to cross. There is a crosswalk here. I think it's actually the same crosswalk where the signers obscured by the tree. So kind of a lot of things going on here. And you can see because the parking is right up against the crosswalk. The problem with that is that it makes it really hard for drivers to see pedestrians who were waiting. Plus, it makes it hard for the pedestrian to be able to look and see if there's a gap in traffic. So these in street signs, these are another, you know, relatively low cost feature that can be added to a crosswalk just to help reinforce that motorists are supposed to be yielding to pedestrians at a crosswalk. We do have a process at B Trans if a town wants to install one of these on a crosswalk on the state system. But towns can do it on their own, on their roads. Of course, they have to have jurisdiction over their own roads. So pedestrian refuge islands. This is another feature that is kind of a big bang for the buck. I would say especially if you have a multi lane crossing. Or like a center lane, that's a turn lane. Having this refuge island where pedestrians can kind of cross the road in two stages. These are a feature that federal highway is actually encouraging as what they call a proven safety countermeasure. And you can see in the last bullet there, these can reduce the crashes by almost 50 percent. So they don't have to cost a lot of money or be very extravagant. It can be a real benefit.

[00:16:54] So if you think back to that other picture with the van and the pedestrian behind the van putting a. Yeah.

[00:17:06] So putting a valve out at that location where you have on street parking. That kind of gives you the option to put in a ball out. And what those do is it kind of gets pedestrians out past the edge of the parked cars where they can be visible and where they can see traffic a lot better. And these actually this is this one in this picture is in Northfield. And they did a demonstration project probably, I don't know, 15 years ago before sort of pop up projects was a thing. But they put some cones out there to kind of. You know, demonstrate how the ball bats would function and they move the cones around to make sure trucks could still get around the corner, and then eventually they they made these bailouts permanent. So that's made a real difference at this crossing, which used to be really long. So this is these rectangular flashing beacons. This has become kind of a popular enhancement to existing crossings where there's some either history of people not yielding or other factors like who is using the crosswalk. That's a lot of schoolchildren or, you know, elderly population that where there's kind of more of a need to make sure that vehicles are aware that there's a crossing here. So these are push button activated. They don't stop traffic necessarily. You know, it's not like a red light. But they are very visible and, you know, helped to enhance the safety at an existing crosswalk. So we're kind of kept going up in cost as I've been going through these different features. And, you know, we're trying to use these flashing beacons strategically around the state so they don't get overused. But, you know, certainly there's some some locations where they're where they're warranted and and communities are interested in using them. So just providing sidewalks in the first place is a big safety enhancement. And, you know, if you see something like a worn path in the grass, that's a pretty clear indicator that pedestrians are already wanting to walk there even if there's no facility. So putting in sidewalks is a good way to enhance the pedestrian environment. And then just another kind of maintenance issue. So once you do put in sidewalks, then they do have to be maintained in the winter, especially if it's a sidewalk that's serving like a school or, you know, a downtown area that is going to have business around. So that's that winter maintenance aspect is very important. And then bike parking. This is something that I think communities are starting to look at a little bit more on this part of their development review standards, but just providing some bike parking, especially at like public buildings, like libraries or in front of retail businesses. So people have a place to to secure their bike if they've got there that way. And then, you know, if it's a longer term parking, like at a, you know, apartment complex or an employer, often that's covered or sometimes it might even be like part of a parking garage. So it's, you know, covered and more secure that way. So as did a presentation earlier this week with one of the regional planning commissions where we were talking about how to require developers to provide some of this infrastructure, and towns definitely have it within their sort of power and and local development review process to do this. I think it's somewhat, you know, making sure they're aware of the fact that they could do that. And, you know, so a lot of that has to do with, like connections from the where the development is out to the road network and making sure that there's a way for people to walk into that, whatever that development is.

[00:22:09] And so a lot of this is all in the sort of general context of complete streets.

[00:22:17] And there's some great resources. The Department of Health several years ago developed this complete streets guide, and this is one of the links that we put up. So that's that's there is a great resource, lots of good, you know, diagrams and photos of different facilities. And then this federal highway publication that came out two years ago, maybe, which is, you know, focused on small towns and rural areas, is really perfect for Vermont. And again, it has great. It's not. It does have the technical information, but it's kind of boiled down into a very concise way and with good illustrations and lots of like case studies. So I definitely advise towns who are interested in biking and walking facilities to to take a look at this, especially for like our small towns. All right, so that's kind of a whirlwind of different ideas and, you know, I think a lot of those things could be used as part of a pop up or demonstration project.

[00:23:37] And yeah, I guess if there's any questions, we can we can try and tackle those.

[00:23:44] Yeah. Definitely. Thank you so much for that presentation. And we have one question right now. I have a few questions and I'm sure a couple of people will chime in as well. But our first question is from Kara Benson. And she says, Rapid flashing can seem overused, ineffective and expensive when compared to more community driven solutions that involve paint, bollards, planters and other strategies that fundamentally slow down drivers. She's wondering how what your view is on directing that money to local groups to solve the problems for creative solutions that can be improved incrementally.

[00:24:24] Yeah, I think that's a that's a good a good point. You know, we've been trying to, like I said before, use those flashing beacons strategically and actually we're just starting are going to be starting a research project that UVM is doing for us starting this fall to look at the effectiveness of those flashing beacons around the state compared to just the regular marked crosswalk. Really, there's some national data, but not a lot in a state like Vermont. So that will be interesting to see. And definitely what I always advise communities is, you know, start with the lower cost. Don't don't jump right to the flashing beacon, which is what some of them tend to do. But, you know, start with the lower cost improvements, you know, if there's no crosswalk there. Now, put the crosswalk in first with the proper signs and then see how it's working. And then you can kind of incrementally add to it to see if that changes drivers behaviors and and whether it can be safe or not.

[00:25:35] Definitely. And will that data be on Vitrines website?

[00:25:40] Yes, once they. Yeah, I think the study that UVM is doing or the research IBM is doing is going to take a little over a year. So we'll be some you know, they're just starting this fall. So probably be available like end of twenty one.

[00:25:54] OK. So the next question is from Jack Hanson and he asks, why is it that so many complete streets don't have dedicated bicycle infrastructure?

[00:26:07] OK, that's an interesting question. So, you know. One thing about the term complete streets that I think has been kind of problematic is that there's no like one particular thing that is a quote unquote, complete street. You know, it is all kind of context driven. I would agree that, I guess as far as different bike infrastructure. You know, I think the Cadillac is kind of something that has physical separation between where bikes are and where cars are, whether that's a separated bike lane. Like, I know Burlington has done some or installed some of those where there's like a like a painted area that also has some vertical element between where cars are and where the bikes are. And that is what is going to make people who are kind of on the fence about biking feel more comfortable. But you also have to you know, sometimes that involves like a tough decision about whether you have to remove some on-street parking or get rid of a trampoline. And those are you know, those are challenging tradeoffs that like public works, folks have to have to get into. So I don't know if that really answers the question, but.

[00:27:34] The next question is from Jacob Weinstein, who's an intern at CVT.

[00:27:39] And when having discussions regarding complete streets, he's often heard a response along the lines of the streets in New England. Are Burlington especially are too narrow?

[00:27:52] Do you what's your view on.

[00:27:55] Well, that's I mean, I kind of just address that. I think that is a challenge. You know, it's pretty rare, I would say, although we do have some cases where we have like so much with that, it's hard to figure out how to re allocate it or we have a lot of flexibility. So then you do get into those kind of tradeoff questions of, you know, on-street parking potentially, or, you know, if you have like a four lane road, can it work as a two lane road, that kind of thing. So. Yeah, I think it's we do have some narrow right of ways where it's tough to fit everything in and sometimes, like, you know, just use like downtown Berry is an example. You know, there's really no bike infrastructure there. There's fairly wide sidewalks. There's on-street parking on both sides. But the traffic moves through there so slowly that, you know, I think a lot of bicyclists could function just out in the roadway pretty safely.

[00:29:03] Why the next question is from Dave Cohen. And he's wondering if you have any thoughts about areas near schools and parks where we have more parents in Vermont are taking their children by road. As the founder of the bike and having a sense of the pulse on what is happening around new bike tech and design, I see in the next two years a massive growth in bikes and cargo flights. How can we get ready for this?

[00:29:31] Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I, I just, you know, anecdotally, I would definitely say I've seen a lot more bikes in the last couple years, and I think that does have the potential for a lot of growth. And, you know, I think there's some good momentum in a lot of Vermont communities are who are, you know, working to make things more bike friendly. You know, Vitrines has been trying to do that, like with our paving projects where we add. With to the page shoulders. So I think we're we're certainly aware of that hand. You know, trying to look at making improvements whenever we have a project out there.

[00:30:18] Definitely. And I think this is the last mission.

[00:30:21] But how can individuals advocate for improvements like these?

[00:30:28] Well, a lot of it is. You know, I think a lot of the bicycling infrastructure really does happen at the local level. So, you know, getting involved with your local government, whether it's through if there's some kind of a bike or pedestrian committee or just, you know, finding out who's on the select board and starting to talk to them about, you know, how they're investing in different things like sidewalks and bike infrastructure potentially. And then that other avenue I mentioned, like the development review. I think that's another I think that's kind of a missed opportunity a lot of the time to have that infrastructure get built as part of, you know, when new development comes in.

[00:31:15] Definitely. Well, thank you so much for being here and sharing your data with us and answering our questions.

[00:31:22] Sure. Appreciate it.

[00:31:25] So I'm going to just switch over and announce our speaker for next week. But if anyone has other questions for John, if you want, this is probably the last time that you could post in the comments section and he'll be able to answer. But thank you for being here. And I'm going to switch over an announcement speaker next door.

[00:31:47] Thanks again.

[00:31:50] So next week, I'm just going to share my. So I just want to make people aware of our Web site that shows. What speakers are coming up? And then also this Web site also gives you access to any of the past talks that we've done, as was captions. And I will post the link in the comments section. But next week, we're going to have with us Beco wife, and she is a Vermont state legislator on the House Transportation Committee.

[00:32:29] And she's going to talk about the future of transportation. So tune in next Friday at 12:00 here on our Facebook page to hear Beco talk about the future of transportation.