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HomeMy WebLinkAbout09/06/2012 Special Council Meeting - Workshop COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 The Council Workshop of the Council of the County of Kaua`i was called to order by the Council Chair at the Council Chambers, 4396 Rice Street, Room 201, Lihu`e, Kaua`i, on Thursday, September 6, 2012 at 9:10 a.m., after which the following members answered the call of the roll: Honorable Tim Bynum Honorable Dickie Chang Honorable Nadine K. Nakamura Honorable KipuKai Kuali`i Honorable JoAnn A. Yukimura Honorable Jay Furfaro Excused: Honorable Mel Rapozo Council Chair Furfaro: Aloha and good morning. I am very pleased to call to order a County Workshop for Thursday, September 6. In particular, reviewing the notice of agenda, we have presentations from both Planning and Public Works personnel. I would also like to make note that I do have a special excuse letter from Mr. Rapozo, who is unable to attend this workshop on Complete Streets due to a prior commitment. Let the record note his excuse letter has been received. This is a Council workshop scheduled to discuss: (1) Complete Streets update; and (2) planning for livable street design, place-making, form-based coding, and street typologies with Gary Toth, Senior Director, Transportation Initiatives, for the Project for Public Spaces. The workshop proceeded as follows: BEV BRODY, Get-Fit Kaua`i Coordinator: Good morning Council Chair, Vice-Chair, and County Councilmembers. My name is Bev Brody and I am the Get Fit Kaua`i Coordinator for the island of Kaua`i. Get Fit Kaua`i is the Nutrition and Physical Activity Coalition for the island of Kaua`i. We have several task forces. One of them is the Built Environment Task Force and we are here to give a required update to the Council on our Complete Streets efforts. Our last update was in April. Since then we have done a lot of work and I am really proud of our team. We have completed a Performance Measures Report of which you all have a copy of. This report is going to give us a baseline for the County to see how we are improving on our Complete Streets efforts in the future. This took several months to complete. The other thing that we have done was actually taken several hours, months, to prepare for this particular workshop that you are going to be seeing today. The Healthy Hawaiian Initiative, Get Fit Kaua`i, has funded a three day Complete Streets Policy Implementation Workshop for the County staff. Planning and Public Works have been preparing for this workshop which is scheduled for right now, where it is happening. It is led by Transportation Engineer Expert Gary 2 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Toth. We have also done the completion of the Complete Streets Evaluation Checklist for the six-year C.I.P. and we are anticipating that this checklist will be used in this coming year. Another very exciting update is that we have completed a Draft Subdivision Amendment which supports our Complete Streets efforts. The draft has been completed and it is in the approval process now. Hopefully we will be bringing it to Council sometime in the very near future. Council Chair Furfaro: Bev, on that note, may I ask, it is being presented and maybe Planning can answer this question. Is this example of subdivision criteria to be changed, is that in the Planning Department Subdivision Committee right now or is it in front of the full Planning Commission? MARIE WILLIAMS, Long Range Planner: No, it has not gotten that far. It is still undergoing the final phases of internal review. Council Chair Furfaro: Okay. Thank you. Continue, Bev. Ms. Brody: The other thing that we have completed since we met with you last is Lyle continues to get his internal Complete Streets workgroup together as we are going through the L.A. Living Streets Manual chapter, by chapter. We have just completed chapter 10. We meet once a month, so we have been meeting for ten months and we have just completed chapter 10 and hope to have that completed by the end of this year. I think we have done a lot of work since we last spoke. I am very proud of our team. Council Chair Furfaro: Can we go to Planning for some opening comments from Marie and then go to Engineering. Ms. Williams: Marie Williams from Planning. I do not have too much to add to what Bev said except that I just want to acknowledge the work that Get Fit Kaua`i does. Our Built Environment Task Force also gets all departments and staff together with members in our community who are interested in this and make sure that every month we work on some element of our action plan. I think that we have done a good job at moving some of our action items forward such as completing our Performance Measures Report. It is great because it is a forum for everyone who works together and contributes, so the report before you is not just the effort of one person or one agency, but of many different people working together and contributing their knowledge and expertise. LYLE TABATA, Deputy County Engineer: Just to touch a little bit on our progress with the Living Streets Manual, we are calling it the Kauai County Living Streets Manual. It is an edited version of the L.A. County Living Streets Manual. We have been taking a chapter a month and editing everything to fit our needs here on Kaua`i. As Bev mentioned, we have completed ten chapters so that means it has been ten months since we started. We have five more to go. The next three chapters are primarily Planning Department driven, and for the final chapter, 3 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 we will give it to Bev to craft our Communications plan. We are done with ten of fifteen and these are exciting times for Public Works. Engineering has had to evolve. We have had all of our members from the various Public Works Divisions as well as Planning, work hand-in-hand and step together to create the manual. In addition, part of Complete Streets is our Safe Routes to School Program. We have presently nine and we will call it Right-Sizing Projects. The previous language that we used was Road Diets and Gary Toth helped us see the vision. I adapted and we changed the name as he calls it, to Right-Sizing. We have nine projects out there that we are actively working with the elementary schools and three retrofit projects that we will use C.I.P. Funds and State Highway D.O.T. S.T.I.P Funds to produce. Those are all in the works and we have got some exciting times ahead of us. Lastly, I will put a plug-in for Marie. Marie and I are sitting on a statewide update meeting at H.C.P.O. next Friday. We will be giving out a presentation. Council Chair Furfaro: Terrific. Mr. Chang, do you have a question? Mr. Chang: Thank you. Good morning, Lyle. For the benefits of layman's term, for the audience and viewing audience, when we talk about S.T.I.P. or C.I.P. or H.C.P.O., can we let everybody know what we are talking about because that flies through people. Mr. Tabata: Okay. So the C.I.P. is our County Capital Improvement Program, and the Council put money aside for planning, designing, and construction for Kawaihau Road. That is actively in the procurement process for our consultant. When we say S.T.I.P., it is for the State Transportation Improvement Plan, which is federally funded so we are going to leverage the federal funds, 80/20 funding, to pull-off two other projects that we are soon to start, which is also in the procurement process for professional service. Lastly, the H.C.P.O. is the... Ms. Williams: Hawai`i Congress of Planning Officials Conference. It is the annual statewide planning conference. Council Chair Furfaro: Marie, may I comment one more time. The Planning Department did an excellent job in hosting that conference this past year. The entire Council wants to thank you. Vice-Chair Yukimura. Ms. Yukimura: I just had a question. Did you mention the Legislation that got passed as one of your accomplishments? Ms. Brody: No, I did not. But I think that is a very good idea. This was truly miraculous that Safe Routes to School fine based fines that are going to--they have started. It starts September 1, and there is a surcharge on all traffic violations, $10.00. And $25.00 if you are caught in a school zone. That money is going to come back. If you get stopped speeding here on Kaua`i, that money will stay on Kauai and same goes for all the other islands. That money 4 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 needs to be used for Safe Routes to School things such as sidewalks, coordinator, bike paths, or something that is going to make it safer for children to walk and bike to school. Representative Derek Kawakami introduced it. We rounded the troops, educated people on the benefits of this, and it passed on July 10. The Governor signed the bill. That is another huge move in the right direction for us. Ms. Yukimura: And if I may, Chair? Council Chair Furfaro: Yes, go ahead. Ms. Yukimura: Congratulations for that excellent work, both to our Kaua`i Delegation, led by Representative Kawakami, but also to the grassroots work that sent all the emails in support because it really took that kind of broad support to accomplish what you did in such a short amount of time. Thank you to all of you and to all the Committees and those who helped. Ms. Brody: Thank you. Council Chair Furfaro: Bev, on that note, my congratulations as well. But there is something that I want you to be aware of. I sent a question to g Y q Representative Kawakami's office that deals with the responsibility for the audit trail on the collection of these funds. And I think the Planning Department needs to be involved because as a bill, these earmarked portions of the fines--it would be very good for us to have a quarterly update on how Kaua`i's portion is being isolated in what account and what is the audit trail. Ms. Brody: Excellent. Council Chair Furfaro: Just so that you know, that communication has gone over. Mr. Bynum. Mr. Bynum: Thank you all for being here. Thanks for all of the great effort over the last few years. I have a couple specific questions... Council Chair Furfaro: I am going to turn the meeting over to the Planning Department if you can hold that and she could recognize you. Does that work? I just wanted to get through the formalities. Mr. Bynum, you plan to have the presentation first before questions or did you want to ask the questions? Mr. Bynum: Either way. Council Chair Furfaro: Okay. I will leave that up to Chairwoman Nakamura. You need to coordinate your presenters through the Planning Committee Chair which is Councilwoman Nakamura so I am turning over the meeting to her. You have the meeting and you have the mallet. 5 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Nakamura: Thank you. So Councilmember Bynum, you are going to ask your question then the presentation will follow. Mr. Bynum: If it is better to do the presentation first, I am fine with that but it is about some of the things you said. Lyle, you mentioned three retrofit projects and you mentioned Kawaihau. I believe the second one is Hardy Street and the third is? Mr. Tabata: Hanapep5 Road. So we are going to Junction 50 to Junction 50 with Hanapepe Road and hopefully, what we will be doing will—and you will see some of what we call place making in Gary Toth's presentation and that is our vision. To see some of what he puts out, and that is the vision and hope to accomplish revitalization and I know everybody knows about the situation in Hanapep5 on Friday night, art night. We hope that will also allow the whole community to work and live together and be able to embrace the concepts. Mr. Bynum: Great. Thank you. Then I had a question. In the spirit of full disclosure, it was a monumental thing to pass the Complete Streets Ordinance but it currently has a cap on it. As I recall, this ordinance has $10.00 surcharge and a higher surcharge if you are in a school zone. And that will generate, I believe, millions of dollars, but in its current form only $250,000.00 of that will go to Complete Streets activities, correct? Ms. Brody: Safe Routes to School activities. Mr. Bynum: Right. So have we identified who is going to introduce it to Legislation this year to raise that cap? Ms. Brody: We are currently organizing a group. I have been in touch with Representative Kawakami's office and I trust their advice by just allowing them to see what happens during the first few months of this and let them figure it out. Then from that point, we have every intention of again, recruiting people to educate lawmakers on the benefits of removing or increasing that cap, to have a minimum of 50% of the entire funds go to Safe Routes to School. Mr. Bynum: So the expectations would be Legislation (inaudible)? Ms. Brody: I would say yes. That is what I say but I also understand that things take a very long time which can be sometimes a little frustrating. From my point of view, I am letting the Representative Kawakami's office take the lead on this, so to speak, and inform us on what would be the best actions for us to take. Mr. Bynum: If I can make just one or two comments. 6 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Brody: Yes, sure. Mr. Bynum: I think the Legislature created a difficult position for themselves because they create traffic fees, raising considerable amounts of money in the name of, and saying publically that this is for pedestrian improvements in Complete Streets. Yet, the vast majority of the funding was going to the general public. So, I think advocates for you folks will have a probable argument when they realize your intended outcomes. For me, removal of that cap is the right route to go, not the 50% reduction. If we are going to say this then let us do it. I will continue to monitor that in Legislation and advocate it as many of us did. Ms. Brody: Yes. Thank you, both to Councilmember Yukimura and yourself for submitting testimony. It definitely was great. Mr. Bynum: Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Chair Furfaro. Council Chair Furfaro: Thank you, Committee woman. Please also note that you should work with KipuKai. As Mr. Bynum implied, many of us did do some lobbying on that work for you. We will come up with a legislative package. The Council will be introducing that and it should be something that should also be reflected in our package, direct from the Council and to the legislative body as one of those pieces that we would like to endorse. Ms. Brody: Excellent. Council Chair Furfaro: I would take Mr. Bynum's recommendation and incorporate it into Mr. Kuali`i's committee of Intergovernmental Relations. Thank you. Ms. Brody: When do you want to meet? Ms. Nakamura: If there are no other questions, we can go right into the presentation. Ms. Brody: Okay. GARY TOTH, Director of Transportation Initiatives with the Project for Public Spaces: My name is Gary Toth and I am the Director of Transportation Initiatives with the Project for Public Spaces. Council Chair Furfaro: Thank you. 7 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Brody: I would like to introduce him, but I guess he just did. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce to you Mr. Gary Toth who has been an expert Transportation Engineer for over 39 years. I know it is hard to believe. Look at him. He had worked with places like New York, Canada, Dubai, and has been all over the world helping people, also governments, government agencies, communities, and transportation agencies to collaborate and come up with sustainable solutions to their issues. We are very fortunate to have him with us here. As we move forward, that timing could not be better. As we move forward with our Complete Streets efforts here on Kaua`i, it is very exciting to have him here and I would like to introduce to you, even though he has introduced himself to you already. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce Mr. Gary Toth. Mr. Toth: Thank you, Bev. Let me start by saying that I could not be happier to be here on the island of Kauai and it is not just because it is probably the most beautiful place that I have ever been to. The people here are beautiful also. I do a lot of work, as Bev pointed out, around the world and around the Country and I cannot think of another place where you have a collection of talent and energy and commitment to changing things that you do here. You have a cross-section, you have folks in your professional staff like Larry, and Lyle, and Mike who I understand is in Detroit. I met Ka`aina from the staff and Marie from the Planning side. So, you are starting, most places where the engineers do not talk too much to the planners, and here you have them working side by side. I met JoAnn and Tim on a bus tour led by Dan Burden when we were in North Carolina. I understand everybody on the Council feels very much the same way, so you are all committed to it and you have good advocacy here. You also have non-profit organizations and I met a host of your citizens at H.C.P.O. who were talking about the same thing. Oftentimes I will go to places and they are just starting and there is dissention. When you do this kind of work, you want to feel like the people know that you are contributing, that they will take advantage of it, and I have no doubt that here on your island that you are going to be able to do this. You have many assets that a lot of places do not have, and in addition to that collection of energy and talent that you have, you are an island. So, you have a sense of community here, much more so than I have seen anywhere else. Part of it I think is because you are on an island and part of it is because of the nature of your people. Also, I am just amazed. Last October was my first trip to Hawai`i and your sense of attachment to the place and respect and reverence for the place, even though like all of us sometimes, some of us forget that attachment, you still have it there. You do not find it in a lot of places in the mainland. I am just thrilled to be here and have been invited to come over. Let me start by saying that Complete Streets--it is really fantastic that you are moving towards it. We like to talk about Complete Streets as the foundation for community building and place making. Complete Streets covers the first part of it, helps get the streets right, and it helps rebalance the streets. But ultimately, me being a career transportation engineer—and you guys recognize it because you have adopted the L.A. manual as your model for what you are doing, and the L.A. 8 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 manual does say that we are doing this not just for transportation and mobility, but we are doing this because we want to make a better Kaua`i. That is something where we went wrong in the basic transportation system, the system that I came into in 1973 when I was fresh out of college as a starry-eyed, zealous twenty-two year old person, who marched against the Vietnam War and railed away against the Military Industrial Complex. I went into engineering because I wanted to do community building and very quickly, I was told by my peers, "It is not what we do here. We are specialized. Our job is to move people from point A to point B." So, I got co-opted into a culture that—and I have learned later it was all over the Country. We trained generations of transportation engineers and planners to simply move people from point A to point B. We divorced ourselves from the higher goal so it is really good that with your Complete Streets that you are not replicating the mistake and you recognize that there is a higher goal for this. We want people biking and walking for a lot of reasons. (Presentation-Gary Toth's Powerpoint is attached here to as Attachment 1) As I pointed out, we have been building transportation through communities and not communities through transportation. That is the karma. That is the culture that I was brought into. It was not always that way. If we go prior to the advent of the car, street design had to accommodate all users and streets were about community building. In fact, if you go back to late 1900's, there was no such thing as a State Department of Transportation or a Federal Highway Administration or a U.S.D.O.T. All of the transportation, or streets anyway, were built by communities and they were built to serve the higher vision because there was no choice. You could not afford not to do that because you could not afford to be inefficient with where you place things. In addition streets, even today, are still one-third of the public space in most communities and they were clearly back then as well. We designed our streets to multi-task, and that they became great public spaces. There gatherings, there were places of exchange, shops, or stores. Everything was there. Then we fell in love with car. I want to say that I am not anti-car. I do own two cars. I love my car and I love driving around. But the fact we fell in love with the car freed us from this necessity to think things out carefully and to think about how we place things. It freed us from the need to use our streets as public spaces. It allowed us to—we put malls twenty miles down the road and even became—with everything, whether it was our malls, our pharmacies, our neighborhoods. We segmented our neighborhoods and all of a sudden there were not all sorts of people living together. We had subdivisions. It allowed us to put our schools out of the periphery and increasingly our children do not walk to school. We tried to cover a lot of our landscape with asphalt. And contrary to popular belief, New Jersey can be a nice place and there are some very beautiful parts in New Jersey, but not the parts that we covered with asphalt. It breaks my heart sometimes to come to places like here and Northern Vermont where you do see some of the trends where we are starting to cover too much of our beautiful landscape with asphalt. We stopped viewing streets as places and as the whole thing was reinforced with the interstate era, you do not have any interstates here or freeways here. But, we have the whole 50, 60 years worth of professionals being 9 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 trained under the interstate era, which was a military mission. It started in 1956. Our President was our ex-Commander in Chief of our military. There were a lot of people in Government that were all over into military positions and they devised transportation in the militaristic type approach. You had the Military, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Infantry. You had the Army division. You had the Artillery. Everybody was told to just focus in on the objective. The key to success and doing stuff quickly was to just focus in on your goal and let everybody else worry about it. That is what we did in transportation. Community building was not our business. We stuck our head in the sand to unintended consequences and we became very immune to it. That would have been okay if Congress had invested the same amount of money in the other aspects of community building than it did in transportation. But it did not. 90% of the Public Works changes that were made from 1950 to around the year 2000 was in transportation and that whole system was oriented towards high speed roads until recently. It just created this imbalance and if you look around at our landscape, and you do not have too much of it here, But if you go back to the mainland, it is no surprise. If you think about it that what you see is a whole built form that is oriented towards high speed travel, there is no sense of place. We have dealt walking and biking out of it. It just was the natural result of organizing a profession in a way to achieve unprecedented goals but very, very narrow goals. So, we stopped looking at the capacity of our streets for all sorts of things and this is the approach that most transportation engineers around the Country think, that streets are just for cars. The places, walking, and all sorts of activities belong somewhere else. We begin to think there is a concept called "Level of Service." We like to use complicated terms in transportation. I would like to believe that the folks who invented these terms in the 50's did not do it on purpose to create a distance between us and our customers, but it certainly did. All this technology you just heard here. For example, C.I.P. and S.T.I.P. So, what is the Level of Service? The Level of Service was something--and it made sense when you were building interstates, when you were asked to build 40,000 miles of high speed roads and do it in twenty years. The numbers were in the tens of millions that were invested, even in 1956 dollars. It made sense to come up with a performance metric that said, "Are we getting the right level of service out of our investment?" So, Level of Service is a congestion measure. The entire interstate system was sized using it. People would do travel projections 20 years into the future, anticipating growth. Then they would decide whether we needed four lanes, six lanes, or eight lanes between Chicago and St. Louis. This permeated the only performance measure that we ever used. It led to things like this. I wonder if I could engage you folks in answering that question: "Is that a successful street?" I know you do not have anything that looks like that on Kaua`i, not that wide anyway. Ms. Yukimura: Almost as wide, just brand new. Mr. Toth: But is it a successful street? Ms. Yukimura: What is the definition of success? 10 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: Well, that is right. Let us tease it out a little more. Would you say that is successful? Let us think, JoAnn, what some of the definitions of success could be. Mr. Kuali`i: No. Mr. Toth: Okay. Mr. Chang: I would say, it depends on where you are at. Mr. Toth: Yes it does. Mr. Chang: That could look successful in rural America. But our road, as Vice-Chair Yukimura said, is more a necessity, I believe. That looks like any place you could go on the mainland. But I think we need ours for the size that it is at. But this is like—anybody has got that. Mr. Toth: I want to take this opportunity to say again, I am not anti-car or anti-big road. I spent 34 years at the New Jersey D.O.T. Mr. Kuali`i: But is it successful for whom? For the person driving the car or the person walking? I looked at that and thought of myself as walking and there is no crosswalk, while it being also a far way to cross. And seniors with groceries and a cane moving slowly—that would be very dangerous. Horrendous. Mr. Toth: Right. JoAnn, were you going to say something? Ms. Yukimura: Similar to that, if a successful street moves cars it is successful. If it moves people efficiently and cost-effectively, it is not successful. If your goal is to move people, is that the best way? Mr. Toth: Right, and I think you folks have hit on it. It depends. Is this successful? It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Here, if you are trying to accomplish moving people from point A to point B, on the surface it may be successful but—at least cars from point A to point B. But we have dealt pedestrians out of it and bicyclists out of it. We have dealt street life out of it, street life out of it, and commerce out of it. If you look to the right of the screen, you can see some buildings moving along—that is downtown Denver trying to expand outward to accommodate growth. We can see that the ten lane roadway there has basically channeled it and stopped its natural growth out like an octopus. The interesting thing about that road is that this was noon time on a Tuesday. So what it is also saying to us is that we have invested a heck of a lot of money into something for one hour a day, for one dimension of society. We can get away with that in the 70's and 80's, right? But now, in the 21st century, we cannot—the era of 11 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 single-purpose public investment is over. We put that kind of money into something anywhere, then we must make sure that it is helping with health goals and connecting people with activities. For economics, we want to make sure we can engender economics. The other irony of this is that quarter mile down that rise is Interstate 25, and one night at 5 p.m. I tried to go to Boulder. This road was backed up bumper to bumper. Not because this did not have enough capacity but because the interstate did not have enough capacity. Nobody even thought about how this would all fit together. We are going to talk in a little bit, if I could figure out how to get the internet working. I will show you a little video about what happens if we speed up everybody at certain points in time and deal out place making and mobility in a surrounding area. Then they will all pile up at a pinch point. That is what is happening here. Arguably, this one is not even successful in a transportation perspective. Would you say that this one is successful? Council Chair Furfaro: Looks like downtown Hilo. Mr. Chang: It is Lahaina, I think. Maui. Ms. Yukimura: Well, it has a lot of people, a lot of use, and a lot of commerce. Mr. Chang: Looks like a bus stop. They are waiting for a bus. Mr. Toth: I think they just got off the bus. Mr. Chang: I was going to say that they are looking at their pamphlets and it says, "Why did we not choose Kaua`i instead?" Mr. Toth: You may be right. Mr. Chang: They looked bummed out. Mr. Toth: Again, it depends. That is the answer. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. Here, Front Street accomplishes different things. It is the center of commerce. It brings a lot of activity to Lahaina but it causes them some problems in terms of tour buses and taxis. This street has a different purpose and it is quite successful for that purpose. It is not successful for moving cars around but then again, it does not have to be. The State highway is a quarter mile over and if you want to go back in through central Maui, you could get off Front Street as quickly as possible. What is beginning to emerge from these pictures is this whole concept of Street Typology. It is moving towards a lot of the communities around the Country or moving towards figuring out that we need different streets to make our communities vibrant. We need some streets for commerce, some for our children's ability to walk to school, and some streets to get 12 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Larry and Bev home on the other side of the island towards Princeville. We do not want to slow down the traffic everywhere, so we need a pallet of streets. Mr. Chang: This street looks like it can be successful and it is definitely useful because it is going one way towards the wharf. It serves its purpose because it is going straight down where they catch the whale watch or Lahaina tour, et cetera. At least it is not jumping back into Front Street. It is going one direction. Mr. Toth: Right. It serves multiple purposes right because people can still get around in their car but the street is tuned to maximize other societal goals. Again, that is the point. As we look to complete our streets, we are not going to go in the reverse direction. I was trained to tune every street for high speed automobile travel so we do not want to turn everything into a 20 mile an hour, walkable street. We want to balance. Some streets will be tuned for biking and walking while some streets will be tuned for commerce and some for getting us around. This next street is Stockton Street, Chinatown, San Francisco. There is rich and vibrant activity that is going on there. This is a very important street. Is this sustainable? This whole idea of tuning all of our new streets for moving cars around? Can we keep doing this? Is it going to help us achieve our goals in the 21st century? I will toss this back out to you guys. Mr. Bynum: No, because downtown Kapa'a on a Saturday night had a real vibrancy but there was a big backup of traffic for people who wanted to get to the north shore. So, you have got a vibrant town but it does not meet the needs to move people. If you only go towards moving the people, you lose the vibrancy of the town. You do not recognize the need to transport people from A to B and it backs up people. That is why we bring people like you here. Ms. Yukimura: I think it is in the planning if you address both. If it is a bus system, you have express buses to get people like Larry and Bev from Lihu`e to Kilauea without any stops. If it is just to get people from one end of Kapa'a to the other you have the local bus or you have a bypass, which also has some tradeoffs because sometimes a lot of business can bypass a town like Hanap6pe many years ago when they built the bypass. And Koloa has maybe experienced that. If you just do streets based on level of service, then you will not have a successful city. Mr. Toth: Bev, could you come up here. Can you tell us a little about the performance measures? Do you have a series of performance III measures that are being developed? You can even just recite them off the top of your head. Ms. Brody: Yes. Crash. Ms. Yukimura: You need to speak in the mic, Bev. 13 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Brody: Pedestrian and Cyclist Safety. Active Transportation Rate. Safe Routes to School. Mode of Transportation. Public Transportation will also be an issue. Active Transportation. Length of how many sidewalks, roadways, pathways, and how many multi-use paths. Mr. Toth: Why do you care so much about active transportation? What is your angle? • Ms. Brody: Get Fit Kaua`i's angle is definitely the health issue. We seem to have engineered physical activity right out of our lives. People will take cars just to go from K-Mart to Longs Drugs and that is a form of walk. If you are inactive, that contributes to obesity related problems such as diabetes, heart attack, and stroke. There are so many different health issues that are contributed to obesity and non-activity definitely contributes to that. Mr. Toth: If somebody does not want to walk and they are okay with becoming obese and getting sick, why would the island of Kaua`i care? Ms. Brody: Why would we care? Mr. Toth: Yes, I am asking. Ms. Brody: Well, personally, I think it is part of our community as a whole to have a healthy community and it is very important to everybody that they are healthy. Mr. Toth: And it is costing us money, right? Is that what you were going to say? Ms. Brody: Yes, that too. It definitely costs us a lot of money. Ms. Yukimura: I think the percentage of Gross Domestic Product that we spend on healthcare is the highest among first world countries. Mr. Toth: It is creating a drain on our society and getting worse. I hear people say that in 25 years the health crises is going to have a greater impact to our security as a Country than a lot of the other stuff that we are focusing on. Not that the other stuff is not important, but it is getting worse. I will show some slides in a second. There is a philosophy among some folks in America that believe we are individuals. So, why is it your business to change the way that I am eating? Why do you care? Well, because there are a lot of reasons in addition to the fact that here, I am sure you will take care of folks with healthcare more so than a lot of other places and it is just a drain. Plus, productivity loss and people out of work. Where I was going with this in terms of sustainability, performance 14 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 measures, and your congestion performance measures, they are failing. There are no specific statistics that I could find for Kauai. For Honolulu, the congestion numbers, and despite the fact that we keep building more and more roads and we think that sooner or later we will catch up with the curb, the congestion is going to the roof. Look at that statistic and the cost of congestion for Honolulu. There has been almost a 700% increase since 1985. We keep building roads. You mentioned crashes as a performance measure. That is a lot of people for a small island. Research is now showing that this whole idea that every time there was a crash, we would train the New Jersey D.O.T. to make the road wider, straighter, and faster. It works on the freeways but it does not necessarily work in the local streets because you speed up cars and telephone utility lines are there. There e are pedestrians and so on. This whole idea of tuning the roads for high speed travel—it is not making it safer, it is making it less safe. We are running out of money all around the Country. Ms. Yukimura: Gary, can you go back a few slides? I did not even have time to look at your graph here. What is it showing? Mr. Toth: It is showing the budget gap between--just for maintenance alone, the needs that were identified by the Pennsylvania D.O.T. and the amount of money that they were able to raise. Every year, if I were to show a chart on that, that gap gets bigger and bigger and bigger. In the eastern states that have some of the oldest infrastructure and the most population, there are organizations that are starting to say that we need to start shutting down some bridges because we do not have enough money to keep up with it. Ms. Yukimura: I believe that Ray McCormick of Kaua`i said that it is similar to the State Highway Fund as well, although I have not been able to really get the statistics or look at the costs. Mr. Toth: I would be shocked if it were not. I think one of the few states for instance where that is not the case is Alaska because they have all that oil money. But I am going to bet you that 45 out of the 50 states are well behind the curve in terms of raising money. So, it shows that it is not working and we put this money into big roads while it is not solving the problem. From a transportation perspective, it is increasing the crashes. Then when it comes to other things, we start thinking about transportation. These slides speak for themselves. You can see the code in color there in terms of the states and percentages of the people who are obese. These slides begin to show why the Center for Disease Control has declared an obesity epidemic because it is spreading like a virus. This is happening within our generation. Hawai`i has probably had a similar progression, although I think you are in one of the top ten percent of the Country in terms of "the best of a bad situation." The first time I saw this, I was shocked by how quickly this has progressed. Transportation is not the only fall for this but we are a big part of it. So the work that Bev is doing for Complete Streets, and Lyle, Mike, and Larry, is real critical for our health and the aloha spirit. We do care for 15 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 our fellow men. We are all in this together. I heard somebody, when I was in Lahaina, give a talk. He was Hawaiian. He talked about how he and his father used to go around the Pacific in a canoe for six months. When you are in a canoe together for six months, you really had to learn when somebody was having a bad day. In New Jersey, we would throw them overboard. In Hawai`i, you love them more. So we are all in this together. There are many dimensions of it, but that statistic in itself--think about what that means. Because of the way we created our built environment, we have to drive our kids everywhere. In New York, they are spending more time driving their kids around than they are on vacation. Council Chair Furfaro: Before we mention this slide, can we go back to the geographic map. It seems like all of these issues start in the south. Yet, I always see the south as being more rural. Then, it strikes up to the mid-west where a lot of dairy companies are. Is there a correlation there that you can speak more of? Mr. Toth: I am not sure if there is a correlation. Council Chair Furfaro: If you go back two slides, you can see the south, Mississippi, Louisiana, and West Virginia. If I had to outline the economic concerns in the nation, I also would relate it to those states. Then go up one slide and you can see more of these southern states. Mr. Toth: This is not my forte but what I have read to a certain extent is that some of it has to do with access to healthy foods. If you go to the rural areas, it is more difficult. Also, it is that whole active lifestyles again. You have to work harder to create built form because if you were in Honolulu, you could choose, or if we made all of the streets perfect or in Lihu`e, if we made all of the streets perfect, there is enough destinations close together where you could literally give up your car. But in rural America, that is not quite possible. Council Chair Furfaro: If you think about the western part of the U.S., there are overdeveloped freeways and roads. Then you think of the south and Forrest Gump and the ruralness, and the ability to walk. He turned out to be quite a runner but the other piece that we are missing here is the fact that there is an issue with source of food and poverty. It is those two things there. Mr. Toth: Right. This speaks to the fact that there is a combination of things leading to this. It is not just transportation and land use. Council Chair Furfaro: I only say this because we have people from the Health Department here as well. 16 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Yukimura: I want to say too, in rural places there are no sidewalks. Then, cars just became the dominant way of moving around. This wonderful sidewalk, which is the thing I love most about this new highway that is between Lihu`e and Kaua`i Community College, that is going to enable kids from Komohana subdivision and from Puhi to walk to the middle school. It is tremendous and it is just so much more inviting to walk on a sidewalk. I have seen mothers pushing strollers in the middle of `Umi Street and a man pushing his mother in a wheelchair in the middle of`Umi Street. Mr. Toth: So, Complete Streets is a real important part of this. Some of us believe in climate change and some of us do not but burning carbon fuels is contributing to global climate change. We do not all believe in it, but if you do it is a factor. So, if we keep waiting for somebody else to change this for us, that light will never turn green. I want to go through the rest of this quickly so we can have some conversation. We are talking about Complete Streets. Is this a complete street? Ms. Yukimura: Where is the transit? Council Chair Furfaro: I do not see a bike path. I do not see a crosswalk. I like the median because with the median you do not need to cross— you could go half at a time. But, there are some elements missing. Mr. Toth: There actually is a crosswalk. I said this, this is the third time. I have been on three islands and three times I realized that I have not been standing in the crosswalk. I have to go back out there and take a couple steps back and take another picture. Mr. Chang: So is this a trick question? Is this twelve noon like the other Denver deal? Mr. Toth: Do I look like a shifty guy to you? Mr. Chang: Well, are you from New Jersey? Are you one of those guys that would throw the other out of the boat? It looks like a church or shopping center or gathering on the left. It almost could look like that street by Kukui Grove. The only difference is that we do not have a crosswalk and we do not have that median but depending on the time of day, I guess it looks functional. You got a sidewalk. Mr. Toth: It is not a trick question. It is really a question designed to get us thinking about this. There is a five foot shoulder which most manuals will say is the minimum standard for a bike lane. It does not necessarily have to be striped like a bike lane. There is a crosswalk. By the way, somebody pointed out yesterday when we were talking about this with your engineering staff that the fact that there is not a crosswalk does not mean it is 17 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 illegal on Kaua`i to cross the street. It is implied even if it is not striped that there is a crossing at every intersection. Here is another picture. Is this a complete street? The Irish, by the way, are doing what you do here in Hawaii. They are going back to their traditional language. I guess "lana" means "lane." Of course, this is a complete street in the technical sense because it is accommodating all of the modes and it has got a cycle track and the sidewalk. It has got the bus lane and accommodation for the cars. But this is in Dublin, one mile from downtown, Saturday afternoon, and it is 65 degrees. Where are the people? This speaks to the whole idea that ultimately the complete streets have to be tied together with some of the work with Marie and Lyle is talking about in terms of land use. The model street guide that you are emulating from Los Angeles, the chapter that I think Lyle is on right now, is getting this whole idea of place making destinations. You could have the greatest cycle path and sidewalks in the world and have great weather. In Ireland that happens probably around eight days a year, and in New Jersey that happens around 20 days a year. Over here, it probably happens 362 days a year. But if you do not have the destinations, senior citizens are not going to walk to a pharmacy if they have to walk four miles down the road, even if there is a sidewalk. The picture on the right is my home town. There are three senior citizens walking down the street. There is a section in this street that has no sidewalks whatsoever. There are people walking on it and biking on it all of the time. The picture on the left is Lahaina. There is a kid comfortably skateboarding in the middle of the street. There is only one sidewalk on one side. We took a tour of Maui and you have a lot of streets here like this too. There is the answer from the National Complete Streets Coalition. It does not say anything about having to have a bike lane or a sidewalk but what it is saying is we need to build it into the design in the built form of something that makes it comfortable for everyone to move forward. So, this part of the conversation is designed to say that there is not one size fit all. Ms. Nakamura: I think that is what we heard from people in rural areas from this island that the design in Complete Streets in rural areas might be different from urban areas. Mr. Toth: Right. Look at that picture from Lahaina. You would ruin that street if you tried to put a bike lane in. You would ruin some of that rural environment if you tried to put a sidewalk in. So, Complete Streets takes us to the traditional highway and street design approach is all about the cars and moving them fast and quickly. Complete Streets adds in the other modes and it literally, this is coming from the National Design Manual that everybody uses, there are some words about accommodating pedestrians and bikes but all of us were trained that way. Complete Streets seeks to do this, and then place making seeks to do this which is a greater vision for your community. Think about all of this upside down. Our engineers are great problem solvers and our transportation planners are great problem solvers. Let us give them the vision for what you want 18 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 for a great Kaua`i and these fellows will figure it out. They already have. You have got three prototype projects already that are wonderful. Ms. Yukimura: Community or corridor? Mr. Toth: Well, say you did a stretch of—is it Route 30 that is the road that goes over? Route 50? The big road that goes all over the island? Ms. Nakamura: Kuhio Highway? Mr. Toth: Is it 50? Ms. Yukimura: We do not know numbers. Mr. Toth: I am not going to try and pronounce the name. The big road that goes all the way around? You might do a corridor study for instance. On the mainland or in Honolulu, we might talk about the corridor vision. Here, I think the neighborhood and community vision is more appropriate. Ms. Yukimura: A car vision? Mr. Toth: A corridor vision. Ms. Yukimura: I think in terms of a corridor... Mr. Toth: Yes, I do not think it is really applicable here on Kaua`i because you do not have places, only Lihu`e, where you have the grid system where you just want to pick a street and emphasize on it. Ms. Yukimura: I thought grid systems without rigidity are appropriate for all towns. Mr. Toth: They are. Ms .Yukimura: It does not mean they are really grids but there are many ways to get from here to there. Mr. Toth: The principle applies to Kaua`I; I just think realistically, most of your communities are rectangular. They are elongated. There is not room to spread out in a big square like Honolulu. Ms. Yukimura: I do not know. As an island, we have a corridor which the belt highway reflects and the large macro of it is that you have towns connected along that corridor with one offshoot to K5loa, to Poi`pu. Right? 19 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: Right. Ms. Yukimura: And, you would think in terms of the town and regional movement and then you would think in terms of the corridor movement. Mr. Toth: Sure. If you do it upside down and you think that out first, so if you were going to do a corridor type thing, it is almost done like a string of pearls. How do I connect the towns with the corridor that works? Ms. Yukimura: Okay. Corridor? Sounds like you are saying car. Mr. Toth: It is my New Jersey accent. Then you go to the pearls, towns along the way, and you develop a vision. Then we work with our transportation folks to say, "How do we best achieve that vision?" As Tim was pointing out in Kapa`a, you have to work with your engineers to find that right balance between moving people through the town and making sure the richness of the town is still there. There may even be solutions that would be put on the work because they are very clever people to find ways that we can have the road function differently, certain times from others. Ms. Yukimura: In terms of Kapa'a and the problem with through traffic, at least two solutions come to mind. One is a bypass, which we do have but you have to be careful that the bypass is not too far off from the town. Then, you do these links into the town like a park and ride and easy walks into the town. That is one way. The other way is to just put more people into transit which would really cut down in the through traffic. Mr. Toth: Part of it is getting rid of the congestion too. So, part of Complete Streets is if we could get 10% of the people off the road because we have created a whole series of destinations and places and streets and walk able street infrastructure. You just chip away at it. It is never going to just go away. I hate to break it to you, but you are never going to end up with no congestion on this island because you have the big road going through so many towns. You can make it better and you can give people options. Ms. Yukimura: In the performance measure, you have trip mode share. If you shift more trip mode to alternatives like biking, walking, and transit you will begin to reduce the number of cars on the road. Mr. Toth: Absolutely. So, yes, everything you are doing is perfect. Ms. Nakamura: If we could go through the presentations and then we can do questions. 20 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: Okay. It is just my opinion that sooner or later you are going to have congestion here. So, we talked about two steps and I want to flash through this quickly because I want to have discussion. But the first step is the Complete Streets. What we want to do is create a situation on Kaua`i where you do not have to get six or seven of your friends to help you cross the street. That is in Sydney, Australia. Without much comment, I am just going to roll through. Dan is ambitious. As you can see, those trees grew in overnight. In New Jersey, it would take 20 years. Over here, it might take 20 months because you have such a lush environment. As you go from your rural stretches to your roadway into your pearls and villages, do something that announces to the driver, coming into town— Ms. Yukimura: Like Hanalei Bridge. Mr. Toth: Right. It was out there. Next week, I am going to the Pro-Walk, Pro-Bike Conference which P.P.S., Project for Public Spaces, is running. I have been talking to all the National bike path organizations and we are all now talking. That successful bike infrastructure is the one on the bottom left hand corner. We are comfortable letting our children ride on it and getting far enough away. You do not see a parent right next to them. Most of our places, if we ever allow them on a bike, we would be right alongside of them. So, with road diets or right sizing, some of our streets are just too tuned towards the car so you take out a lane and put in a bike lane. You are sort of doing it here on Rice Street. The experiment four lanes to three lanes. There is a four lane to three lane conversion which makes room for the bike lane and makes room in the middle for protected pedestrian crossings. There is a fixed object in the middle of that. But you make a choice, I want to protect the pedestrian. Historically, our design philosophy is to not put trees and fixed objects near the roadway because a car can crash into it. Now, there is a shift to say we want to protect pedestrians too. In Long Beach, where we are holding our conference next week, shows a wide array of different ways to add bike lanes in. This is a protected bike lane that is protected by parked cars. That van is parked and it provides infinite protection for the cyclists. There is something called a green lane where they painted a stripe in the middle of the lane and announce that bikes and cars have equal rights to that street. And, it works on four lane roads where you have frequent traffic lights and the cars are going slow, five or six hours a day, because of the congestion. On off-peak, there are so few cars that the cars go to the left lane and the bike stays in the right lane. It is a way of leveraging your money and getting more for your dollar. I actually felt safe enough that I am on the bike behind him taking a picture with my smart phone. Bike boulevards. This is where there are no bike lanes but what they are doing is they slow down some streets. They put in mini circles which signify to the driver that they are in a different kind of space. The second part is the place making part. You folks are well along the way with your Complete Streets—many dimensions, performance measures, and pilot 1 21 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 projects. We need to put the people back into the streets. There is a whole philosophy on that. I am not going to spend a whole lot of time on this presentation but we can talk about it in our questions later. A lot of this stuff is on our website, pps.org. It is the way of thinking about how the buildings—you mentioned form based code in the introduction. Form based code is a big part of this because there is a huge difference in the sense of place if you have a Strip Mall or Wal-Mart, the modern trend is to put a lot of parking between the building. Envision yourself walking down that compared to a street where the buildings are up on the front. So, this whole idea with creating a sense of place, the buildings in the form based code were a big part of creating a sense of outdoor spaces. The research shows that people like being in places with edges. They like to have some framing, whether it is the buildings or vegetation. This is the extreme. I am not going tell you to have a street on Kaua`i to look like this, but notice the concepts and activities on both sides of the street. That will also slow down the cars. Humans are probably the nosiest species on the planet. If we put stuff there, like activity in addition to creating a street that is a place, it will slow down the cars. Ms. Yukimura: I also notice in there that those buildings are three or four stories high so they are not that high actually. We have two stories here; you could go three because you have capacity then. Mr. Toth: Right. The common misconception about density in America is that it could either look like certain places like Manhattan or Honolulu. Two stories or three stories will do well in most places. Ms. Yukimura: I mean in towns. Mr. Toth: Right. That reflects community identity. It is real important, I think particularly in Hawaii, where you have got this strong sense of place. You put blinders on and some of the places where I have been in Maui and O`ahu and I could be in Oklahoma or New Jersey or be anywhere. So place making puts some sense of identity. In New York City, they are completing their streets in ways that actually have plazas in. So you may have an opportunity or two in Kaua`i to put some public space in and the bike lane complements it. A lot of this is going on. So, again, the first part is to complete the streets. The second part is to work with your land use and redevelopment with people like Marie and the other folks to bring activities in and take advantage of the reallocation of the space that Complete Streets does. It is just another example. Those buildings are not very high. Ms. Yukimura: Can you show the former? Mr. Toth: Have you got anything that looks like that in Lihu`e? 22 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Yukimura: Yes. (Inaudible) Mr. Toth: Do it right, and work with the private sector, do not put the money and energy into it. Shopping centers, right. Shopping centers are still going to be a big part of your destinations. If that is your destination and you get there, you still feel unsafe. Who wants to ride your bike in the middle of that and if you are walking, you have to have your head on a swivel. You would need to be looking everywhere. There is little, subtle things that we can do that will not only make it a better environment but now you have more ratings. And, what you are doing is you are conserving hope and space in Kaua`i. Any new growth that you need, you want some new commerce. It makes sense to fit it into the areas that are already developed so us tourists can come and look at the beauty. So, what is place making? Council Chair Furfaro: Before we go there, I need to make an announcement. I need to step out and have been called away for a moment. Just to remind the Committee Chairwoman, we still have to take a ten-minute break at the two-hour mark. Mr. Toth: I am almost done. Council Chair Furfaro: No, what I am saying is I would recommend when you finish this presentation to take the break then, and come back for the questions and answers. That would be my suggestion. I hope to be back b q Y gg p by then. Mr. Toth: Okay. So, what is place making? It is very simple. The principles of place making go back to research done 50 to 60 years ago by the person by the name of William Whyte, who was commissioned by New York City and said, "We are putting all of this money into public spaces and some of them are working and some of them are not." They were mystified as to why some were working and some were not. So, this is what he found in his research. It is not very scientific stuff. We do not have to go get a PhD. to figure this out. The people will sit where there are places to sit, people will go to places where there are things to do, and people love to be around other people. Nobody wants to go to this fantastically designed place and sit there for three hours and be the only person there. It is very simple. These are our principles that we look to take. William Whyte's nickname was "Holly," and so we took Holly Whyte's principles. The community is the expert. We do not come in with a design philosophy. We do not come in with a solution. We come in with and engage the community. We engage the neighborhood. We are creating a place, not just a design that the Government has to get out of its head that it is just our responsibility to do things. We need to find partners, leverage neighborhoods, and work with Bev's organization. I do not know if you have a bicycle/pedestrian organization on Kaua`i. Ms. Yukimura: Yes. P.A.S.S. 23 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: You need to do well at it. You can learn a lot just by keeping your eyes open. I want to go through this real quick. For principles of what makes a great place. You can find this on our website but I will leave the slides with you. For fundamental principles and sociability, we are social people, most of us. I did this in Honolulu and somebody said, "Do you have to make everyone be sociable? Can there not be places with solitude." Yes, for sure. In general, too much of that and you want to go to someplace where you can hang out with other people. Even if you have a loving husband, every so often you will want to go to somewhere and hang out with other people. They need to be comfortable. There needs to be uses and activities. It needs to be connected to other places. We are finding, and there are places like the State of Michigan—the Governor has come in and he is a businessman and he comes in and he issues an Executive Order and said that he ordered all his cabinet officers to come up with place based principles. That place making is the foundation for everything dealing with Transportation, Education, and Environmental Protection—turned it upside down because he recognizes that if you turn it upside down, we get more out of our investment. It does all that stuff there. The health. It helps everybody. All of the different individual movements we have are helped. It supports the economy. We need to stop thinking about all of our investment and public institutions and private institutions. Most of it is done separately. We need to pull it together. Upside down planning and come up with what we want all of your string of pearls to be and start to think this way. There are all sorts of opportunities. You do not have train stations here but you do have bus stops. You have your transit agency in our workshop for two days. There a lot of ways to think about this from Power of Ten, which is the macro vision down to the smaller stuff. The Power of Ten is a principle that says on the island of Kaua`i, you need—and there is nothing magic about ten, but you need a lot of cool destinations. And you have that. I was at your canyon at one end, I was at Princeville and Hanalei Town. So, you have lots of destinations on your island and you have certain places that have a lot of things to do. A lot of different places, so that little beautiful town, Hanalei. You could wander around. There are a dozen or so things to do. Then, at each place, you want to have lots of things to do. So, you got many solid examples of it and then you got many other places, perhaps here in Lihu`e, where you can take these principles and enrich it without fundamentally transforming it. In Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, we went out. It used to be a very vibrant place going back 50 or 60 years ago. That is the ferry landing that takes you into England. There is a lot of history at this particular location but like many places, over time, it got passed by communities who are more oriented to the car and the mall and so on. So, we went back to Dun Laoghaire and worked with them and used the Power of Ten principle to figure out—you can see the different colors. Some of the places were streets and some were places. We went in and did an exercise with them and said, "Okay, let us pick one of those." We did all of them but just for this, I will show you one. We went to the East Pier which is basically the only thing you can do on that pier, is to walk out and go look out into beautiful landscapes so that was a great thing to do. We did not tell them this. We gave them flipcharts, sent them out, and gave them a half hour to be back 24 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 in the room. This is what the community said, "Boy, I would love to see this happen here." And a lot of that is not going to cost the Government a lot of money to do. You build it, it is organic. You build it over time. In Singapore, we have done this dozens of places. You take the same principle, Power of Ten, and it cascades down and you ultimately get to the particular site. Even in a very small or tight place like this. Maybe this is kind of a corridor thing, JoAnn, it is short for corridor. But you end up at the places but they are still separated and so people would get into their car to go from one end to the other. So, this is where Complete Streets begins to come in. You can begin to knit these places together so this is how they work back and forth. Complete Streets sets the tables for streets as places. Then streets as places come back in and help Complete Streets, and helps the traffic. Ms. Yukimura: Seems like you could do that with Kapa'a Town, or LIhu`e, maybe. Mr. Toth: You probably could do that in a lot of places. I do not know your island that well. I was down at Po`ipu Beach because that is where you had your H.C.P.O. Conference and it seems like there were a lot of things that were spread out down there. Ms. Yukimura: We have a proposal for a shuttle. Mr. Toth: Okay. There are different ways of knitting them together. So, the last thing I want to talk about here is this whole concept of Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. And it is a philosophy—PPS did not coin the term but we adapted it from—I forget who it was that first used it. It is a whole thing of Planning and in the profession that I came from in and in Government, we always come up with these big plans and try to solve everything at once and make them capital intensive and permanent. And it takes us ten to fifteen years to get it done. Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper says that stuff that I showed you from the Dun Laoghaire Pier, a lot of that stuff can start to happen tomorrow. And it does a lot of things. It gives the community a sense of, "Wow, we really can get something done." It shows progress and inspires investment. It breaks down resistance. When you do some of these projects and if you start off with paint, people will be, "Okay, if it does not work, we can take it out." Ms. Nakamura: Chair Furfaro has a question. Council Chair Furfaro: Could I ask you to look at the Kapa'a Bypass Plan during your visit because as pointed out by Vice-Chair Yukimura, there is a plan where we have the ocean residence, we have the mauka residence, and then we are supposed to have three connective routes that connects the bypass. People coming in for grocery shopping can access Foodland and Safeway. That people can access the credit union and service station. Then people can access on Kukui Road. So instead having them travel in the corridor, they can just come down from—I am sorry, I said mauka—from the mountain side. It is actually saying towards the 25 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 valley. That is what it means. Anyway, so that these people can come down from the inland pieces and do banking, fuel, and go right back. They can come down from the valley areas and access groceries and finances, and go back. We have not put any urgency on those connectors, but if you could just look at that for us, that would be very nice. Mr. Toth: Sure, I would be happy to do that. Ms. Yukimura: It is a great idea. Mr. Toth: Some of us are talking about, with the road system, we have developed a well thought out network. We think if we are going to build a freeway, what the other streets that feed into it are and how does it all connect. We have this hierarchy with a movement towards institutionalizing that kind of thinking for pedestrian and bicycle planning. So, for the separated bike path, or even this painted bike lane, that might be thought of as a road. Then other streets need to fit into it. And, going back to what we were talking about earlier, you do not need to have a bike lane at all those connectors. Some of them might be just that we slow down traffic or create a bike boulevard. Some of it may naturally already be that way. Council Chair Furfaro: If you could, I would like to put that request in. Thank you. Mr. Toth: So, here is how the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper stuff works combined with the Power of Ten. Everybody—if you mention Harvard Yard, in Harvard, Boston—actually it is Cambridge, but everybody thinks, "Wow, what a spectacular place." Physically, it is a spectacular place. The beauty of it is amazing, but it was all form. There is no function there. If you go to Harvard Yard, it is some of the most unutilized space in America. It is a transportation corridor. People are walking back and forth. It is all you see, at least last year. So, they engaged PTS to come. We did the Power of Ten exercise and identified the ten potential places you can see—actually there is fourteen. We worked with folks to come up with a conceptual plan of what could be done, places to sit, places with shade, and where you could bring your food in, all of the fundamental principles that Holly White discovered 50 years ago. And in six weeks, that is what Harvard Yard looked like. The place was transformed with almost no money. And a lot of the money came from people who could make money on doing it. It is just Government or the University or the school district setting the table. Lyle and I were talking yesterday about how we can create public spaces and streets that set the table and get people permission. Ms. Brody: We can do that right here. Mr. Toth: People are using street experiments. This was a community group in Philadelphia. You might think that Philadelphia is very 26 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 walkable and it is in many ways. But, they felt that some of their streets were— this street is pretty narrow. I am not quite sure of why they picked this but they picked this to show a concept of a chicane. That is burlap, and there are some plants that they borrowed from a local Home Depot. They went with this for two weeks and they promoted it also. They put that sign and wanted to make sure that when people walked by, they were not just thinking who threw some burlap out there. They wanted them to know that this was part of an experiment to get them to think about their streets differently. There at the corner, which had just been painted with the stripes and no parking, they put the burlap out with some tables. There is a little meeting house. You can see downtown Philadelphia if you look down the street. Not far from downtown. Mid-walk crossings. We put them in for two weeks, and said, "Hey folks, we need more of these." This was a low cost neighborhood group that came up with money for it. The Home Depot cooperated by letting them borrow the plants. The Mayor of Philadelphia is a bold guy, and for 40 years people have been fighting over this project to take Market Street, which is the main street in Philadelphia. He said, "It is too big, too tuned for cars. We want more good stuff there." So the new Mayor of Philadelphia ordered his Public Works Department to go out and put barrels out there and shrank it from six lanes to four lanes for two weeks. He did not do it in the secrecy of night. He called the big newspaper, The Philadelphia Enquirer. He held a press conference and made sure it got on the paper. He announced to the people of Philadelphia that we are going to shut this down for two weeks. The barrels will come away in two weeks and he said, "I am going to move my desk over to the window overlooking this so that if four, five days into this experiment, a crack opens up and Philadelphia downtown falls into the crack because of the loss of the capacity of the street—I may not be the first one to go into the hole, but I will be one of the first." Two weeks later, everybody said that nothing happened to the traffic and everything was fine. Now, they are moving to make it more permanent. So that is the Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper concept. In New York City, all the work that is happening now, started with these kinds of street experiments. It is hard to see in this picture but there is people looking at them. They are sitting out there and there is nothing. Other than places to sit, shade, and the fundamental principles of Holly White, there is not a lot of infrastructure there. The shop owners around there said, "If it causes chaos, we can tear it down tomorrow." Now, I wish I brought the picture. They formalized it. They made it like a mini park there. You guys might think about doing a parking day in Lihu`e where you go around and pick certain parking spaces—you get a community group to do it and everybody does something different. You guys could have one place as Get Fit Kaua`i and a block over the school district could have whatever it is, certain food, maybe poi? In Maine, we worked with them there. There is a four lane main street and we tried to shrink it down to size. The merchants were going nuts. If we make it two lanes instead of four, nobody will come to the Brunswick anymore. So, they were bold there too. They went out and picked their busiest weekend of the year, and they said, "We are going to right size this on the busiest weekend of the year." They told the merchants, "If it fails, we will abandon our plans to right size the roadway." And it did not fail. Dan Burden and I went back a year later and worked with them to convert that to a two lane 27 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 roadway with bike ways. So, that is Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. In Times Square, it is a tacky substance and it is just a sandy thing that goes on top. We left it out there for three or four years and nobody complained about taking it out. They resisted it before we did it. They said, "You have got to be nuts. You are going to shut down three blocks of Broadway in the middle of Manhattan?" It turns out that they put G.P.S. devices in taxi cabs and found out that it improved travel times. It improved travel times because it untangled a knot in the city streets where cars had backed up and it forced the cars to be more creative. There is a lot of capacity in New York streets but the things that cause these chokepoints, is probably the simple biggest thing that is causing congestion in cities and in other places. Now, they are coming back in with a ten million dollar project at Times Square to make it permanent. They waited three years. I do not think we need to talk about this anymore, right? Other than I put this in for Lyle's benefit. Lyle and Larry. There is a picture of Lyle and Larry here sitting, on the phone. Do we have time to take a break then I can put up the video, and that will be it? The video that talks about this whole concept that we are all tuned to think that if we want to get to someplace faster, we have to widen our streets and there is emerging movement in America recognizing that is not necessarily the case. There is a video that shows it better than I can explain it. Ms. Nakamura: Okay. We are going to take a ten minute recess and come back and watch the video. Thank you. There being no objection, the meeting was recessed at 10:49 a.m. The meeting reconvened at 11:03 a.m., and proceeded as follows: Ms. Nakamura: Mr. Toth is going to walk us through the video. Mr. Toth: Right. I do not want to talk or show much more presentation because I think I have worn myself out in terms of just talking. I would like to show this video because when we talk about Complete Streets and reallocating street space and right sizing, a lot of people, we intuitively feel, that by shrinking some of our roads, we are going to slow things down. There is an emerging understanding in the engineering profession, and it is just emerging so this is not widespread, but there is an emerging understanding that a lot of the times by speeding things up, we are causing a problem because people are piling up at traffic lights. So in this video, this gentleman is the former Head of Washington State D.O.T. This is not an environmental group, this is the State Department of Transportation trying to explain that their customers had this phenomenon of slowing down to get somewhere faster can be better. By slowing down your streets, you can create more place making, livability, and more economic value on the streets. Let me just show this. (Video presentation—"YouTube" Video, Doug MacDonald, Rice and Traffic Congestion.) 28 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Obviously, he was thinking more of the big freeways but it shows that this principle works more effectively on urban streets with traffic lights. It is the traffic lights, or places where we go from two lanes to one lane, or when roads cross. Ms. Nakamura: We are going to open it up for questions. Councilmember Yukimura. Ms. Yukimura: So, what this brings to mind is this concept called "metering" or something where at an entrance to the freeway, there is a light that lets the cars go off onto the freeway in a metered way. Supposedly, that gets more cars through the freeway. Mr. Toth: Correct. Ms. Yukimura: It is that principle? Mr. Toth: It is that principle but there are principles that could be implied where if we slow down our streets, even the big highway that goes into your different towns, they are going to get where they are going to go at the same time at the worst. And they may actually get there faster because when you start backing up people at traffic lights, it takes so much time to unload. And roundabouts have solved some of the most troublesome congestion problems in the Country. There is Dan Burden who forwarded an email from somebody that said, "Already this year in 2012, 500 more roundabouts have been built in America." There is a place in Indiana called Carmel, Indiana. It is now the roundabout capital of the world. There are 60 or 70 roundabouts in the town with maybe 50,000. Ms. Yukimura: Okay. But you can even increase that capacity, if you will, by having collector streets that have these in and outs only at certain places because wherever you have an in and out, there is a request for a street light. Mr. Toth: Yes. There is a whole series of ways of doing g this. But this whole idea of metering is that four lane to three lane projects and roundabouts, things that slow down. A lot of these streets, I flashed through them for the sake of brevity, I did not cover them all, but a lot of the streets, when we slowed them down—there was one example in New York City, 75% of the people in the street were breaking the speed limit. When we slowed them down, we brought them back down to this limit that we wanted to. By doing that, they did not pile up at the lights. They progressed through more evenly. So, without even putting a roundabout, there is an example of how that works. Ms. Yukimura: Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Bynum. 29 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Bynum: Gary, I am glad you brought up roundabouts because we have a couple in our future here on Kaua`i and we have a couple now. I think the first one, I do not know if you visited in Kapa`a, was put in by the State. Everybody knew that it moved the cars through but they designed it with no pedestrian elements and we have low-income housing and a big housing area there in the park. So, they retrofitted with pedestrian elements and on Kaua`i people started saying that roundabouts are good for cars but they are not good for people. I am worried about that because I know that roundabouts are good for people when they are designed properly. Our second roundabout is in Po`ipu and it is a showcase. It is beautiful and it does have pedestrian elements and it is also not a typical roundabout in that it is sized to be this showcase. But you are making the point that with roundabouts, you do move slower and you get there quicker. And both things can be true. With a signal, you are going 35 miles an hour between signals and you are going zero miles an hour while you are sitting there waiting while in a roundabout, you might go 15 miles an hour the whole way but you get there quicker. That is safer for pedestrians. Do I have this right? Mr. Toth: Absolutely. Perfect. Ms. Nakamura: Gary, could you introduce the woman to your right? Mr. Toth: Kate Rhode, from Project for Public Spaces, working in our Transportation group. Ms. Nakamura: Kate, would you like to say a few words? Ms. Rhode: Sure. Thank you so much for organizing this. It is fantastic to hear about all the work that you are doing and all the support you have on the island for these issues. So, I work with Gary and like he said, I am on the Transportation team at Project For Public Spaces. My background is working in Urban Planning, Smart Growth Policy, and Transportation Policy. Previous to PPS, I worked for Smart Growth America which is a national coalition of groups. A lot of my background is in advocacy and organizing and I have been pleased to join PPS recently. Mr. Toth: So, Lyle and Marie are not the only engineer planner pair in America. Ms. Nakamura: I have a question regarding metering slowing down for our highways where many areas are four or two lanes. How does that work? Mr. Toth: I have pretty much rode the entire length of the big road because I went to Waimea Canyon, went all the way through, passed the coffee estate and through a couple of cool, little towns. Then I went the other 30 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 way to Hanalei. So you have these stretches where there is maybe five or six miles and it is fairly rural. There, you do not want to be in traffic. I am not going to encourage speeding but the bottom line is that it is okay because that is where you want to pick up the speed. But then you get into some of the towns and you want to slow them down. I think going this way heading up towards Princeville, you found more an example of villages that are closer together as you go the other way. There, as you begin to approach the villages, you really want to begin to slow people down so that they do not pile up. When you get into some of these places—I remember going through places in Kapa'a where you actually had two miles where there were traffic signals every six or seven hundred feet. There is really where the metering principle really comes to life. Then, if you slow it down, you can right size the roadway or you can bring in bike lanes or you can foster more place making and so then you get more value out of the street without taking away the value from the motorists. Ms. Nakamura: So, are you suggesting reducing speed limits or staggering work hours? How would you actually get the cars to slow down? Mr. Toth: Being an Engineer, I am reluctant, having driven on that road once, to sit here and tell you that I got the answer. It occurred to me as I drove through there that getting the speeds through that area more equal so that people do not speed up, is going to make things more livable and get more value of it. You could actually help the community. I do not remember what the speed limit was to be honest with you. So I do not know whether the speed limit is 35 and it is a problem, or whether the speed limit is slower, or whether the people are breaking the speed limit. There is a tendency where you get frustrated and you are stuck at the traffic light and then the light turns green and you get a chance. Then you see a patch of road for 1,000 feet in front of you if you speed up. So, I do not know. Do you have a speeding problem in some of those towns? Mr. Chang: Yes. Ms. Yukimura: Yes, we have. Mr. Toth: A lot of these examples, you are not forcing people or dropping people to fifteen miles per hour. You are trying to get them down to the speed limit. Ms. Rhode: It might be helpful for you—I have heard you talk before about the difference between slowing people down using the design measures of the street and then more operational measures and the benefits of each of those. Maybe you could talk a little about that. Mr. Toth: Are you talking about some of the land use kinds of things? 31 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Ms. Rhode: No, like management or signalization or the difference between more technology strategies or speed limits versus designing the streets to encourage people to actually slow down. Mr. Chang: Why don't you explain, Kate? It sounds like you are on a roll. Mr. Toth: Yes, you explain. Ms. Rhode: I will try. I think what Gary was talking about before sort of fits in where there are ways that you can design a street. The street is fundamentally your design to support a specific design speed and that if you make changes to the designer street, whether it is reducing the lane width or reducing the width of the street, or adding things like sidewalks and bike lanes, things that will create opportunities for motorists to see things within their line of sight that is closer to them. Those are all things that help people slow down. When you have the traditional transportation approach of designing streets that are wider and longer and really have nothing in a driver's peripheral view that is close to them, so there are clear sights right next to them. Those are all things that encourage drivers to speed up because they are looking at their line of sight ahead of them and there is nothing that is close to them. There are no curves in the road. There are a lot of things that you could do just in terms of the design of the street. Like Gary was saying, the thing about that changing the design versus things like metering or changing the speed limit is that you could also get other benefits from doing that. If you are adding sidewalks or bike lanes, you are making the street more multi-modal. If you are adding things like trees and landscaping, you are making the street more attractive for people to walk and bike on. There are different places that may be appropriate for those strategies, but there is a lot you can do just on the design side. You can actually get other benefits besides just slowing people down from doing those strategies. Mr. Toth: Yes, what she said. It is a context sensitive solution. There is not one formula. If I recall, there is a town called Waimea, right? Ms. Yukimura: Yes. Mr. Toth: If I recall what it looks like, it looks very different than the town of Kapa`a. Ms. Yukimura: You think of it as "a/a." Pronounce the "a" twice. A`a. Kapa`a. Mr. Toth: Kapa`a. Right. Very different settings that Waimea if I remember was a little more wide open. Even though there was a main street and there were buildings there, it was a little more spread out, whereas Kapa`a had a lot of stuff going on and a lot of things closer together. We need to put 32 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 engineering back into engineering. You have got some talented folks sitting behind me. What we need to do is say, "What do I want to accomplish? How do I do it?" How Larry, Lyle, and Mike would address this in one town is going to be different in another town. There are different solutions. Ms. Nakamura: I think the additional challenge for us is that the main road is a State-owned road, so there is jurisdictional issues and design control. I have a question for Lyle about that. Mr. Tabata: For the record, Lyle Tabata. I am the Deputy County Engineer. Ms. Nakamura: To really make this operational, knowing that we have got Kuhio Highway that serves the State highway, but also is the main street of many towns along the way. Lyle, how do you see implementing some of the measures working with the State of Hawaii, Department of Transportation? Mr. Tabata: Part of our strategy, needs to be, and do not get me wrong, Ray McCormick is doing a fantastic job, but to bring in our concerns and be an integral part of their planning process and take our community as you saw. The people know and the people have a lot to say and we need to be able to conduit that information to him and his superiors. We need to be able to leverage ourselves onto the long range plan to make changes, and communicate the needs of what we see. One of the things I have been advocating is (Dan Burden, Gary, and Michael Mo rubbing off on me) is that I dislike traffic signals and to look into the opportunities to install roundabouts for traffic circles. Ms. Nakamura: And is State Highway receptive to that concept on a State highway? Mr. Tabata: I think they are. However, to evolve and go from the traffic signal to the roundabout, usually roundabouts take extra right of way. I just came off traveling last week in Carson City, Nevada, and I keep getting told multi-lane and roundabouts will not work. I drove through several with no problem. People keep saying when visitors come, they are not going to know how to drive through a roundabout, but as Gary just mentioned, there are roundabouts being installed daily and weekly across our Country. I think it is going to be more of a commonplace as we move forward. As long as we do the proper education for our people here, I do not worry about the visitors. I think they will know what to do. Ms. Nakamura: I think Ray is very open to ideas. I was just wondering about the State D.O.T. 33 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Tabata: We just need to keep working with them closely. When we go to the State level meetings, Larry and me, with Planning if we go in as one voice and with the Council's help, I am sure we will make headway. Mr. Toth: If I may jump in, I think what Lyle just said, going in as one voice, having worked inside the State D.O.T. for 34 years, oftentimes a few people from our community would come to us and ask us for something and you would go to the town and there was no unified vision and other people would say something else. I think the most compelling thing would be that whole unified vision where you do some of the visioning things they have been doing and get the Council behind them and everybody you can. If you turn up at the Hawai`i D.O.T., it is a lot harder for them to say no. Ms. Nakamura: This is a follow up question. If we have our County Priority C.I.P. projects, which are great, and then separate it into different areas of the island, that is good. Something also good is we have a list of those State D.O.T. jurisdictional projects prioritized to see where we might begin to have those conversations with the State on where they would want to start committing in this concept on the State highways. Mr. Tabata: And we have that. We are in the middle of the whole process of renewing the long range transportation plan. We are working with Planning. We did a review already together with Planning on the reclassifications of our roads. Ms. Nakamura: It would be interesting to see that. Mr. Tabata: Yes. There are solution based projects for problems that have been brought to the D.O.T. over time, and criteria for measurements and selection have been established. If we disagree vehemently then...we are in a process of trying to create the comments to send back. Mr. Toth: Let me jump in. I am sorry. Forgive me, JoAnn. One of the things we began to figure out in New Jersey D.O.T. is that the community has a right to determine how much congestion or what the nature and the speed of the road is, unless it was a key part in the State highway system. In New Jersey, we had roads that even though the community would say, "I am okay with the congestion, please give me the kind of road that I want," we would come in and say that there is a higher State need. But you are on an island, right? That big road is yours, even though they have custody of it. If your Council would say, "Here is what I want and I understand the tradeoffs that I might be doing." They may still be a little stubborn but there is far less reason. That road is not connecting anybody to Maui, Lanai, O`ahu from getting around. Ms. Yukimura: Well, we have been trying to talk to the State D.O.T. about the land transportation plan. We have asked that their consultant 34 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 come before us to speak and we have asked twice now. They said no, twice. There has not been a whole lot of communication between—at least this body and the D.O.T. That is my concern because there is so much interface on this small island and functionality relationship between the State highway and our County roads. It is not just the State highway, in the long range transportation plan, they are primarily looking at widening roads and level or service. They are not looking at a combination of transit and highway improvements as a way to look into the future. They have admitted that they have more projects on the books that they can possibly ever build. There is a lot of concern there but there is a real communication block and I think perhaps the Mayor and the Chair need to help in this matter. Council Chair Furfaro: I think you might know that I have signed both of those letters to send out. Ms. Yukimura: I know. So, we are in somewhat of a jam, but I am hopeful we can break that through. I also want to say, with respect to Councilmember Nakamura's questions, at one point the D.O.T. said, "If you want to take the part of the road that goes through the towns and make them into County roads and take jurisdiction?" They said they we are willing. That just takes away part of their maintenance. They actually have said that over the last ten years. They want to give away the parts of the roads that go through the towns. I do not know what the present Administration which has been in just for maybe two years at the end of this year. We have not asked this question for a while and I do not think we were even asking to take over sections of the road. We were just in Kapa'a town, for example, trying to negotiate with the State in terms of their plan, was to put a four lane highway through Kapa'a town. Merchants and others were concerned about that. It was in that discussion where they would say, "Well, if you want that stretch of road, you can have it." Anyway, just some background information on that. Ms. Nakamura: Chair Furfaro. Council Chair Furfaro: Yes. As we talked about earlier, you looking at the alternate routes on the bypass in Kapa`a; I think that is a big part of this. Also, I want to take this in the spirit which I offer it, we have a French speaking engineer. I do not know if you knew that or not. If we want to compare ourselves with anyplace dealing with roundabouts and so forth, the fact of the matter, Tahiti is probably the right comparison for us. You go into Papeete, Faaa, Punaavia, and Mahina and there are all roundabouts where these villages connect. These mid- sized villages to Papeete and so forth. French Polynesia is about 400,000 but Tahiti is about a 125 000. That is the kind of comparisons we need population, p because those roundabouts work. They work. I would say that we need to have an opportunity to show some of these examples where we can expedite connections through different towns and so forth. 35 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: I would be willing to go to Tahiti and take some pictures if— Council Chair Furfaro: Well, we have a Sunday and Wednesday flight. Like I said, I spent time in there as a student exchange and my host family happened to be the head of Public Works. But it is the right kind of comparison— an island having traffic issues. I appreciate Chicago. I appreciate New York. But I think we need to be a little more specialized. Mr. Toth: Okay. Fair enough. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Kuali`i. Mr. Kuali`i: Thank you. Aloha and mahalo to all of you for being here. I think Lyle said it best in his opening remarks about it being exciting times. The potential of the things that could happen and I think one of the things you talked about that resonated with me the most and I wanted to learn more about, it was this Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. I have been looking on your website. Surely the State has financial difficulties and they do not have funding for anything, so we probably cannot ask them to do anything with the roads, but I think where we have control if we do little things. For example, working with the community and these temporary experiments that start showing the kinds of improvements that are possible and have community buy-in because they are experiencing it and ultimately investing in the long term so those changes can come slowly, but come because they are necessary. I agree with what the Chair said about roundabouts. In fact, in Anahola, when the community worked on the town center plan, one of their biggest concerns was that their neighborhood—one side of the highway, and the other—and it is all subdivision and residential, but it is fractured by the road coming through. Even though there are speed limit signs that say slow down to 45 and 35, there is no element other than a road that goes through neighborhoods. People never follow the speed limit there. There are no crosswalks and no lights. There is nothing. No median, nothing close to the road. It is just open and human nature tells people that it is okay to speed. They ignore the sign that tells you as you are coming into the neighborhood—there are several signs like 35, 45, 45, 35. But if you stand in an area after that 35 mile per hour sign, people are going 45 and 55 because they are just passing through. There is no reason to stop there unless you live there. In this new design that the community came up, with the help of consultants like you, in being green and having walkways—there are roundabouts but I think it was just kind of wishful thinking because I do not think a lot of people do not believe that the State will actually allow it. But, ultimately, we are the State too. The citizens are the County and the citizens are the State so in the long run, it is about pushing things in the direction where it needs to go. I appreciate what you are doing and I am excited to hear about the specifics of what is in the making for us and see pictures. This right sizing project is in the line of this Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper. 36 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: It is. Mr. Kuali`i: Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Yukimura. Ms. Yukimura: Yes. One area where I would like to ask for some help is in our existing Traffic Calming Ordinance. Maybe that is going to come up as you folks review our ordinances, but right now, the only thing a community can ask for in slowing down speeding is a speed hump. There is a process. It is not allowed on collector roads. A certain percentage of the neighborhood has to ask for it or within a certain radius. But it is so limited given the wide array of traffic calming possibilities from these mini circles to traffic tables, speed tables, to street narrowing, to all those wonderful possibilities you showed there. Right now, basically, the only option is a speed hump. We cannot even ask for a speed table. I have been thinking, we have to redo this ordinance. I do not know exactly how to do it. Off the top of my head, it seems like because many of the requests come to the Council, we would have to refer it to Public Works for a certain kind of analysis. These are retrofits now, these are existing communities. It is not about new communities—I guess that is what you are looking at, are subdivision laws. I do not know if you know of other jurisdictions that have ordinance rules and regulations that help us help our citizens where speeding is a problem in the neighborhoods. Mr. Toth: I know of a couple policies from the State D.O.T. and how they approach this and where they apply it. Off the top of my head, I do not know or point you to a particular community that will look into that. You talked about two things there. The second part, the 75% acceptance rate, I think that is fairly common. It makes sense. You do not want to put them in and tear them out because as soon as you put them in, what it is doing is forcing somebody. Ms. Yukimura: That is not the problem with the current, because you will easily find 75% of people who want to slow down the traffic and stop the speeding. Mr. Toth: The best resource I have seen on this is on the Institute of Transportation and Engineer site. Lyle, we could probably figure out—I will help you find it. Usually, if you go to "it.org" and type in traffic calming, they have got a ten chapter manual on it. In there is a whole chapter on local ordinances and so they would tell you how the people are approaching it. Also, they have the whole pallet. As you point out, JoAnn, there is a whole range of things. Let me just offer a comment. My inclination would be to not limit it by the function of the road, whether it is a local road or a collector road, but more by the operating speed. You can have some collector-distributor roads that are functioning at 25 or 35 miles an hour. We talked about this a little bit yesterday that somebody was talking about putting a speed table in on Rice Street. What I said is that we do not 37 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 want to put a speed hump and people are going 35 or 40 miles an hour. If one person out of every 100 people that do not notice it, it is going to be a problem. So, you want to put them in on slower streets, but that could be a collector. Ms. Nakamura: Councilmember Bynum. Mr. Bynum: I am just going to discuss this in terms of how much things have changed on Kaua`i in just a few short years. We actually have a bill pending, a traffic calming bill, that was brought to the Council by the Administration several years ago. Lyle may not even know about this because it was beforetheir revenue. Basically, the bill said, for a new developer, if you are developing a new subdivision or new thing, give us a traffic calming plan that can have these elements and at a minimum does certain things when this was before the Council. Public Works at the time, Engineering Division, got up and said, "If you pass this law, we do not even know how to do an assessment of what they delivered to us." I think that has changed in our Public Works Department. The idea of traffic calming and how it integrates with all of the things we were talking about today, few years ago, it was just too a novel of a concept for our County to handle. That bill is pending. It is still alive and we can resurrect it to see if it still works because I believe we have moved that far. It is a real testament to the current leadership that they really have embraced these concepts. (Inaudible) Mr. Toth: Tim, with your permission— Mr. Bynum: Are you aware of that law pending, Lyle? Mr. Tabata: No. Mr. Bynum: We can talk about it in the future because it is a time for us to relook at that and it is something that we are in a process of doing. What are the messages we give developers of new subdivisions, new roads, what our expectations are. Mr. Toth: Can I suggest one amendment to that message. Traffic calming is a technique, and I think JoAnn started talking about this. It is a technique to apply in existing places where we did not get the street design—we did not design it in a way to get the cars to operate the way you want in the first place. With a new development, you have an opportunity in addition to traffic calming to talk about right sizing the streets. So, I would just make sure that it is clear. Do not build a 36 foot wide street and then come in and put speed humps in it. Mr. Bynum: That was the intent of this. And then in terms of our current ordinance, it is illegal to put any traffic calming device like that on a collector street the way our ordinance is currently written. We did it on Weke Road but we had to make it a special project and find work around for that. 38 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 In terms of the retrofitting, our neighbor island of Maui went along way with that and installed many speed bumps in many communities. We never got there. Some of the speed bumps that we put in cost us a huge amount of money because if you just gear up for one project and fire up the asphalt and put in one speed hump, it is a lot of money, where the Maui group did it all in one contract. From my experience in being on the Council for almost six years, we really took a stab at this about four years ago but our Administrative structure was not prepared to respond to these concepts. I am celebrating that. We are in a very different place now in terms of the commitment and capability to resist some of these things. Mr. Toth: You are doing a lot of cool stuff here. Ms. Nakamura: Any other questions? Councilmember Yukimura. Ms. Yukimura: In terms of the performance measures, one thing that seems to be missing is financial performance. I just wondered if there are measures that can measure cost-effectiveness of solutions. Mr. Toth: It is hard to turn it. It is a lot of work to turn some of these into pure numbers. But there are things we could do like making sure that you measure the speed of the roadway before and after. And you measure the crash rate before and after you do these types of projects or plans or programs. You could if you chose, for instance if you did it in one of your towns where there is retail and other things going on, measure some of the economics of what happens in your shops. Ms. Yukimura: No, what I am talking about is this especially applies to our long range planning for our State transportation system. It has taken us 40 million dollars to widen the highway two lanes—well to go from two to four lanes. 40 million dollars for what is the distance from Lihu`e to the community college, about one mile? So it took us 40 million dollars to widen that and then it is going to take another 40 million dollars to widen the bridge by the mill which is about less than an eight of a mile. That is 80 million dollars. What were alternative solutions to this that might have cost less? I am looking for criteria—I guess it is Planning criteria, because if we had been given 20 million dollars for our Kaua`i Bus system, we probably could make the busses come every fifteen minutes with 20 million dollars. That might have solved the congestion problem, but that assumes—that should be done in Planning, of our long range plans. We need to see those cost alternatives. I am having a hard time even starting the conversation about this. Mr. Toth: Because they do not do it. Ms. Yukimura: Pardon me? 39 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: Because they do not do it at the State level, in any State level, the way you are talking about it. They do not. Ms. Yukimura: And why not? This is taxpayers' money. Mr. Toth: I am not saying they should not, JoAnn. I am saying that is why you are having a hard time. We have gotten away from that in the transportation profession. In 30 or 40 years ago, we used to call it "cost benefit analysis" and it was only travel time and crash rates. We have gotten away from that and never replaced it with anything. You could cobble something together. You folks would know how to do some of it. Some of it probably will look old enough to have been around during the days of the cost benefit analysis. You can do the same thing that we used to do to justify widening a roadway in terms of value. We would estimate how the crashes would go down and then you could put a value to that. There is also American Public Health Association has got a series of data that you could cobble together to begin to talk about health and obesity. Ms. Yukimura: I do not know if you even have to get to those more subjective measures. I am just talking about pure financial measures. Ms. Nakamura: I am not sure if this is the proper forum for that discussion that we are talking about Complete Streets and place making. Ms. Yukimura: Well, I am looking for what the Complete Streets solution is for the highway system. Mr. Toth: Okay. We can talk. Then I will talk to Lyle and Larry. We can figure this out. Ms. Yukimura: Great. Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Are there any other questions? Councilmember Chang. Mr. Chang: Mr. Toth, you went to Maui. Was that for business or just to— Mr. Toth: Yes. Through Heidi's program. Mr. Chang: On Maui? Mr. Toth: Yes. Mr. Chang: So, you saw Front Street, but did you go to Wailea or I�ihei on the south side? 40 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Mr. Toth: We did not get to IChei. But we went to Wailuku. We spent a lot of time there. We went to Makawao. As Alan put it, we did not see all of Maui but we saw a lot of Maui. Mr. Chang: I was just trying to think. Did you see any roundabouts in Maui County, anywhere? Or were there any talks of roundabouts? Mr. Toth: There is one in IChei, right? I did not see any. Y Mr. Chang: Because I do not think I really heard of an educational component because I know we have our issues and our problems but like in Lahaina and Ka`anapali is horrific as far as the traffic is concerned, as does Kiihei and Wailea so... Mr. Tabata: Councilmember Chang, we have sent several of our engineers to training for designing and building roundabouts. We are moving forward on Kauai. Gary Toth is just another in a series of workshops that through Bev Brody, the University, and Department of Health that we have brought in. We brought in Dan Burden, Michael Mo, and we are working with our Engineering and Planning Departments together so that we are being taught the principles and the concepts. We are loading up our toolbox, so to speak, and we are creating a vision together between Planning, Public Works, Engineering, and the Transportation Department, and also various other agencies of what we can do in our areas. We are responsible for the County roads. I hear what JoAnn is saying and it could be great if I could walk sidestep with the State but we can control our County roads. So we are working in a County jurisdiction. I am taking longer than I want to, but I think you are going to see some results in at least the first seven of our Safe Routes to School projects at the elementary schools. You will see results of traffic calming devices that we are going to implement. There will be extra signage. I had feedback from the principal at Koloa school, from what we did do over there already, just very low cost before we relaunch the in-road lighting crosswalk and so forth. In the same time, we redesigned that to also include bicycle lanes and more pedestrian facilities, and at very low cost. We cannot eat the elephant in one bite so we are taking it one bite at a time. We are working with schools, the principal, and parent association and we are getting their feedback. We are creating these plans and like I said, you will be seeing some work really start rolling in the middle of September forward with the low cost options. Mr. Chang: I understand what you are saying. My concern is, we just chatted about the Hanalei Bridge yesterday. You slow and you stop. We are on Kaua`i and it is such a mellow place that everybody works two or three or four jobs and it just seems as though everybody is in a rush. When you are in a car it is a different story because you do not realize how fast. It is almost like a weapon but I think when you jog, walk, or bike you realize how fast people are going by. I just really think there needs to be a public educational component out there 41 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 that we all have to slow down and be careful. Like you say, when there are long distances without people near you, but even with people near you, it does not seem like the motorists care. They just fly right by. I just was thinking that maybe there is an education component out there that maybe we might be overlooking, something that we can implement. Mr. Tabata: We have that component. It is with Get Fit Kaua`i. We have got several—four or five different task force. Mr. Chang: Thank you. Ms. Nakamura: Any other questions? Councilmember Kuali`i. Then, afterwards we can wind up. Ms. Yukimura: As you think about it, Complete Streets has a lot to do with not just moving people on the streets but what is happening around those streets. This discussion about place making is very important of what draws people there in the first place. What I tend to then wonder about is we are talking about Government, County, State, but the partnership with private industry. Right now, I see places like in Wal-Mart, the McDonalds. Everybody gathers there. The old people have coffee for hours and socialize. It is a gathering place. It is one of those places. The bowling alley. Outside of the bowling alley there is a tiny little area with a couple of tables. The Pho restaurant. People gather there too, but it is all private, so how does the street and what happens around there connect with private and improve that and move it in the direction you are talking about. Mr. Toth: Right. That can be done. I know that Marie and some of the other folks are already working on a—she had to step out but we were talking yesterday about working on dealing with development and redevelopment and how to take these principles and make it seamless. Ms. Nakamura: Chair Furfaro, then we are going to wrap it up. Council Chair Furfaro: One of the pieces I am most concerned with is really the number of pedestrian injuries. The City and County of Honolulu has huge issues right now as these inner streets get connected. The presentation that you made for us with the little island where you can walk from one section of watching traffic to an island with a treat seems to be a really unique concept. You talked about Kihei. They added one roundabout. But Kihei is a city I referred to when I was General Manager at Wailea. It is the city of no left-hand turns. You will wait forever. Mr. Toth: How do you say that in Hawaiian? 42 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 Council Chair Furfaro: But it creates a pedestrian problem for people coming down blind streets and turning right. Those are the kinds of things that I am very concerned with. Kahului and Wailuku. Wailuku is the old town, Kahului is the new town. Here we have Puhi as the new town and Lihuce as the old town. You have those kinds of issues that I would think we would want to get the old towns as walk-friendly as possible. You cannot use these crosswalks here on the corner of Rice Street by the museum. Yet, we have a lot of foot traffic. I just wanted to say that pedestrians and safe crossings are extremely valuable in anything that we do in our walking streets and where we want to be. There is a lot of issues of safety. A lot of issues. Mr. Toth: You folks are off to a very good start. You are making a lot of progress already. I was talking to working with your engineers yesterday, folks like Larry, Wally, Lyle, and Chris. I do not remember all of the names that are in there. They are getting this. We were talking about the possibility of a mid-block crossing on Rice Street. I suggested something, Wally was not that comfortable with what I had suggested, but he came back with an alternative. There is that creativity. And you have that talent amongst your staff. There are all these other resources like the living street guide and bike guide. Council Chair Furfaro: I am glad to hear you say that they are getting it because in this corner right here, this is not a crossable walkway. At lunchtime, it is almost as bad as the city of no left turns. Mr. Toth: I would like to say that it took us 50 years to mess up some of what we have. It will take us, like what Lyle said, we are not going to eat this elephant in one bite but yes, you are right. I saw it. We walked around Rice Street. I would not come back here as a tourist to walk around Rice Street. Ms. Nakamura: Well, maybe when you come back in a few years it may be a different experience. Like Gary, Kate, Lyle, Bev Brody; thank you very much for helping to organize this presentation. Thank you so much, Larry, for being here the whole time and showing your commitment to this. We really want to thank Get Fit Kauai Built Environment Task Force for all of the work that you are doing. This is a huge shift for Kaua`i and the resources you are bringing to this island and to this County to educate and train so that we have the internal capacity to carry out this Complete Street policy is incredible and we thank you very much. For the leadership of the County and actually the community to carry out this is very deeply appreciated as well. We are building that internal capacity and working towards actual results so thank you very much. Councilmember Yukimura, thank you also as well. 43 COUNCIL WORKSHOP SEPTEMBER 6, 2012 There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 11:59 a.m. Respectfully submitted, Mb/ / oi & Codie Yamauchi Secretary