Call to Order

Roll Call
 

NOTE: One or more Commission Members may be in attendance telephonically or by other technological means.

 

James Martinez, Chair              Monica Attridge, Keith Becker, Sarach Dorman, Rachel Simukonda, and Stephanie Birdwell

Recommended Protocol for Members and Other Participants

All commissioners should have their microphones on mute to keep the background noise out of the chat room. The chair of the meeting should ensure everyone has an opportunity to speak if they would like. Commissioners should use the chat function to inform the Chair they would like to make a statement and the Chair will announce the Commissioners to speak in the order they appear in the chat. 

Public Participation

NONE

 

Information Items To/From Inclusion and Adaptive Living Commission Members

None

Staff Participation:

 

Alan Keay: I liked to have Russell Randall our vice chair who has ended his service with us talked a little about his leaving us. Staff Liaison

Estella Hollander Staff Liaison, NAIPTA
The Mountain Lion go is a micro transit pilot, so micro transit is different than the fixed route service. It's using our para transit vans or smaller bands, but it's flexible in real time. Hailed so you can use an app or a calling option or a website to book a trip.
And we are focusing on the Huntington Industrial Corridor. So this includes like the shelter, the guidance center has Joni and the Food Bank as well and locate on this map is basically this kind of rectangle shape, which is in gold. And that's where people can get rides throughout that area, but also connect people to the fixed route system so people can get picked up and dropped off kind of at any of the bus stops nearby, as well as Walmart on the east side and our Mall Connection Center. So really the goal.
Is to bring better access to this area and this service launched on November 1st, and it's commingled with para transit, meaning 1 van. So those para transit vans can pick up both a pair of transit writer and a micro transit writer in the same vehicle, and they might even be in the same trip together.
Fair is a dollar for this.
So a couple of performance measures. So since November there's definitely been an uptick each month which has been great. It dipped down slightly in April. We've had several kind of constant writer had about 10 people actually permanently moved to the new hotel the that opened on 66 with the shelter which is great, but just kind of so having to kind of do some more outreach to get some new people involved. But a lot of the top kind of origins and destinations shown here is really at the shelter to them all connection center which has three different fixed route buses.
Walmart is a popular place as well as like Route 66 and Fanning, which is the closest bus stop to the shelter as well as yeah, Route 66 and 4th St, so definitely the shelter right now is definitely the predominant.
here. So our paratransit so in February it remained the same, but actually in March you know there was a slight uptick of 17% and then April is 8%. So it's kind of it's starting to increase the number of trips per hour, which is great that's meaning it just makes that the vehicles out on the road are more productive.
 
And and you can see here you know it's fairly low, the percentage of commingled trips, only about 3% of all the trips are, meaning that a paratransit writer and a micro transit writer in the same vehicle. So that's showing that a lot of these trips are happening kind of during downtime or when maybe the driver just finished a paratransit ride. And then sometimes it can sit down for half an hour to an hour waiting for its next pick up. But it's kind of showing that these trips are filling in that downtime, which means.
 
For more productive trips, which is great.
 
Uh, another update. So we've been working on doing a writer satisfaction survey of people who have used the service, and overwhelmingly again, this is on the scale of one through 5. It is high marks, which is great. I think there's a couple of places, maybe we can improve, which are maybe access to services and destinations, things like that to maybe get that more. There were a few threes that people rated, but luckily overall satisfaction is kind of again like fours and fives.
 
Which is great to see.
 
As well as this question, so does mountain go enable you to access locations? You would have trouble getting to otherwise. So overwhelmingly you know it was yes, which is great to hear. And we're in the middle of doing this survey. So again, I think we've only had about 20 responses. So it's not a huge pool of people, but it's at least giving us some indication that we're in the right direction. So only one person had no and then one chose not to answer.
 
And lastly.
 
It's just showing, and this is a self-identifying question. If it is a person with disability, older adult, or both, or neither, and it's showing that majority of the people who are using the service either are identify as up. Yeah, personal disability, older adult both, which is great to see. So, it's showing that this program and this program is really help was planned with inclusion in mind. So, I had several older adults.
 
With disabilities in the planning of this pilot and so showing kind of through planning efforts, you know that we are creating a program that is usable.
 
By people with disabilities and older adults as well. So, I do have another update that is we will be going to our board in June. Technically, this pilot we have is grant funded one-time grant funding. It goes through the end of June, but we are going to go to our board to hopefully extend this pilot and become more of a permanent program. So, we feel confident that through the commingling we'd be able to kind of sustain the program after the pilot period.



 

Michelle Eisenberg, Student Liaison HOZHONI

Hello, everybody. Yeah, I'm Michelle Eisenberg. I'm the employment manager over at the Hozhoni Foundation. I'm also the liaison between this committee and our Northern Arizona Community of practice team.
For updates from that right now we are working on our leadership for next season because all the kiddos will be graduating here pretty soon.Umm. And so that's one thing we're working on right now that we do a little summer retreat to set ourselves up for the next season of what types of things we want to focus on, that type of stuff.
And then the other update I wanted to share was that the Arizona.
The Arizona State Commission has put out a transition resource guide that's very information, it talks about all kinds of things, of how to's, and explains what DD services are, how to apply for those and how to go about doing post-secondary education. I will put a link I the chat.
 
 

APPROVAL OF MINUTES

Minutes approved by Monica Attridge and second by Rachel Simukonda.

Date of Next Meeting - Tuesday 06/28/2022

ACTION ITEMS

Introduction of New Commission Members.

REPORTS/DISCUSSION ITEMS: 
 

Lone Tree Overpass presentation by Jeff Bauman, Traffic Engineer and Christine Cameron, Project Manager, City of Flagstaff Capital Improvements Program.

Hi everyone I'm gonna be sharing a quick presentation with everybody if I'm able to.
Appreciate everyone's time today to present, so my name is Jason Carla Optus. I am the design manager for this project.

So downtown Flagstaff is up in this area and he's down here on the South Lone Tree, comes up on Lone Tree Rd. This is Butler running East West BNSF Line is running east West here. And then Route 66 is just north of here. So Lone Tree is going to start a South at Sawmill Run north to Butler and then a new section of Lone Tree Rd will be constructed between Butler and Route 66.
That's the major features that are it's going to be crossing is the real flag project, which is an Army Corps of Engineers project and then a realignment of the BNSF Railway finally connecting to Route 66, which is a 8 dot facility. So that's sort of a high level.
Overview of what's being provided. Load Tree Rd itself will be a four lane roadway through this corridor, two major intersections that Butler and at Route 66 and will be grade separated between Butler Ave and Route 66. All that means is we will be elevated through this corridor so that there is no interruptions with trained traffic or conflicts with the the channel, which is part of the core project. So it's that having an upgrade.
Crossing where you have to stop whenever there's being self trained like you do at San Francisco or Beaver. Modeled great separated like you guys have it built in in 4th St.
So a quick project summary what this project will ultimately provide. You can sort of see a roadway typical section.
You see a Broadway title section down here on the bottom. This is the section between Butler and Route 66. Up on the elevated section.

We will have 1.8 miles of new bicycle lanes, so off roadway, every all the bicycles are pulled off the roadway system along Lone Tree on the West side of the road is the Foots Trail connection. So we have a bicycle lanes both North and South.
On the east side, we also have the northbound bicycle path following the direction of traffic. It's 1.2 miles of new pedestrian sidewalk on each side of the roadway, buffered a away from the vehicles.
And then we'll have a .6 miles of new bootstrap connection between Route 66 and sawmills. We are providing that connection with full north South like the project.
All pedestrians are protected. Bike and pedestrian facilities. The full length of Lone Tree between Butler and Route 66. There will be barrier protection once we're on the elevated section of roadway. Once we get closer to at grade, I'll just be a virtual curve protection for veterans.
The roadway itself will provide ohh just a little over a quarter mile of new roadway. Again 4 lanes, two lanes each direction between Butler and Route 66.
And there's .3 miles of roadway widening along the existing Lone Tree Rd between Butler Ave and Sawmill Rd. So going from a two lane roadway to a four lane roadway. So all in total 1.8 new roadway lane. Miles. We're writing as many roadway lane miles new as we are. Multi modal facilities, bike lanes and sidewalks.
One new intersections I mentioned at Lone Tree in Route 66 and then three rebuilt intersections of Butler sawmill and Frequent Ave.
As as mentioned, we do have two lanes in each direction, just to restate that, let's trail connectivity on the West side and then the bridge will span over BNSF. The real flag running East West. Again, that's that flood control project.
And we, our city is starting having a future footstep connection coming in from the north on the north side of the 1st 66 as well. So it's really gonna be a really good multi modal connectivity project in the long run as well as a vehicular connectivity project in the downtown flagstaff area.
Samuel Butler again, it's a roadway widening the Futs Trail on the West side. Again, there's also an East West Trail plant connecting to NAU down between Franklin and sawmill. So again another connectivity.
Opportunity for for the city, so really providing with the mobile connections as part of this project is really been a big focus of the project.
And then we are doing a warrant analysis. Currently Franklin is signalized on those knots. So we are studying both intersections and and investigating whether one both or flipping the intersection signalization of the intersections is referred in more efficient way to synchronize Lone Tree.

This is a typical section South of Butler,  so you can see we have vertical curb separation, a buffer zone. So again try to protect pedestrians and cyclists, get them offset from the roadway full length of the roadway, two lanes each direction, similar northbound path cyclists on the East sidewalks, both directions, the northbound southbound.
There will be bicycles on the West for the Foots trail connections.

The intersections is we're really bringing our multi modal focus, our safety focus for PEDs cyclists and and users at the intersection. As you can imagine, bringing in a new four lane roadway into Butler, which is already an arterial intersection, it's going to be pretty heavily traveled as most users in this area know, Milton's already fairly congested Butler's congested. We're providing a new link in the network system, which will improve vehicular travel times.

Our models are showing that the day Lone Tree opens will be pretty heavily used. It does help provide network connectivity. When I say that.

It means there'll be a more efficient way for vehicles to get around the downtown area. It's it's really intended to improve the way vehicles traverse around downtown Flagstaff. 

It provides multiple opportunities without 33 major ways to get around downtown Milton Lone Tree and then Ponderosa over to the east. And you can basically balance the vehicles through all three quarters.

We do have residences in the South side community on the northwest area of this intersection. We got a big commercial district on the Southeast Corridor and we got redevelopment opportunities on the Northeast Corridor corridor. You got foot trail going on the West side up and down. So how do you get people across these intersections safely? It's been a priority of our team. It's been a priority of the city and the project manager, so it's really been a focus on the intersection you're seeing here is what we one of the intersections we presented back at Mayor and Council way back in January.

On there have been refinements since this is a little bit old, we will be presenting more updated.
Intersection layouts at our our Council meeting in June on June 7th.
 So there are eight intersection that requires a traffic impact analysis and this is how do you get vehicles through the intersections and and what level of service. And that's an analysis of of vehicle delay times through the intersections.

So this is one of the concepts we originally started with from an engineering standpoint. 

There's a double left turn lanes, North Lake and East Lake, channelized rights at all four legs and you see we have fairly large intersection. Now crossings 91 feet with seven length 7 legs or lanes coming through on the north or East lakes and six legs on the South and West.
Later on, I'll show a smaller intersection that we've been asked to look at was sustainability Group and mayor and council, but this is sort of I'm sort of going to show both sides and then sort of show some of the intersection concepts that we're bringing in for, for pedestrian and cyclist safety.
Just again representing some some data we present mayor and Council. This is sort of a rendering with that intersection look like in the Street View level. So we're looking at West and east in this graph.

Looking West, we have a four lane intersection going westbound and collapse of traffic's two lanes cause two lane roadway.
East are also going westbound on the east leg. We have a 5 lane and a two, so both directions we're about 90 feet from curb to curb and then we looked at crossing times for users, both cyclists and pedestrians, and we want to judge how long would it take to for a typical user to cross.

Like I said, multi modal users and how they get across these intersections, it's been a focus of our design team as we've developed these intersection concepts.

Just a similar look at the north South Lakes, again the North lake is the wider intersection. We got 5.
Lanes of the southbound direction 2 through lanes are right and double lefts, and two in the northbound direction then South is again as S6 Lane intersection and again this is sort of like a worst case scenario that our teams been looking at and we have a crossing distance of about 90 feet for both. The South is as wide as the north because we do have a raise protected refuge island.

Users, so if they cross her were to cross halfway, they have a protected area where they can stop and and refocus. So when they cross for instance, the northbound traffic, they can focus only on northbound traffic. Enter the refuge island, reorient themselves to be aware of the southbound traffic. Right turners and really refocuses across.
That's we'll see later when we talk about Refuge islands. That's what I'm talking about is that median islands.
Again, we looked at walking times, crossing and writing times for cyclists.

And then we compared it to the green time available. So this was a summary of that intersection. We saw that the average crossing time was right around 26 seconds. There are some highlights available green time in a direction in the shortest. Green time in all directions was 33 seconds.

So there was a valuable time for for processors to cross the intersection safely.

We are separately bicyclist from pedestrian,  there are high visibility crosswalks. Safety is one of our feature focus on this project. Other safety features we are looking at bringing in advance signals and advance timing, extended crossing times for slower crosser. 

Chair person Jamie Martinez: Thank you Jason for that great presentation I did have a quick question is there a way that as Commissioner we can get access to the powerpoint?

Jason: I think we can provide that for you guys.

Commissioner Rachel Simukonda: A couple of different questions, we there be any auditory signals for hearing people.

Jason: yes I believe there will be audio and visual features can be utilized, with bluetooth.

Commissioner Jame Hapsis- i like the safety features, particularly for our aging community, and in about 7 years over 50% of our community will be in that group, and we need to start planning for the future, i like the safety features, iI love it. 

Chair person Jamie Martinez: Thank you Jason. we will look forward to updates on the project coming in june. 
 
 

 
 

Alan Keay staff Liaison: How people who are differently abled are represented as City of Flagstaff employees City Voluntary Identification Form Update.

The biggest thing was sending it out to the Commissioners, to look at the cities voluntary identification form we have 5 new commissioners some Jamie if we can move forward with this in our next meeting i will get that sent to commissioners. All new members can take a look at the form and see what opportunities are there for inclusion so they we can see about adding those opportunities. 

Chair Person Jamie Martinez: Please do. We will place that on the June 28th meeting. 
 

AGENDA FOR NEXT MEETING

 Chair Person Jamie Martinez: For our next agenda items please see me or alan keay and we will make sure it gets on the agenda.

ADJOURNMENT

Chair Person Jamie Martinez adjourned the meeting at 12:54pm May 24th, 2022