Public Comment

Transcript (~15 min @ 1:40)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 1:39 Cory Thomas: committee meeting where we have public comment mr clerk committees are there anyone here that wish to speak before the committee for public comment we did have one uh

▶ 1:58 Speaker 2: We do have a few participants, I believe, that have their digital hands raised.

▶ 2:08 Speaker 3: Hi, everybody. Can you hear us? Yes, I can. Can you hear me? Yes, you're good to go. Great. Thank you. Fin McSweeney, 160 West Wyoming Avenue. Just a couple comments specific to the agenda item tonight. To start, I think that, I don't know who was on the meeting last night, but Something I really want to stress as a resident is that I'm so appreciative of the fact that the city did this pilot project. I think it's great and I want to encourage the city to be more proactive doing pilot projects with the goal of traffic calming in Melrose. There's actually one of the action steps that was recommended in the city's most recent master plan was to develop the capacity to do these. We all know that traffic safety is one of the biggest concerns, maybe the biggest concern that people hear around Melrose. And to have the ability to pilot interventions which can make people feel more comfortable in their neighborhoods, I think it's awesome. During COVID, the city developed a sort of like a pilot program called Shared Streets, Slow Streets that was funded via a MassDOT grant that's been super popular with the residents. As I understand it, there's a lot more demand for that program than the city can accommodate, but it's only for streets with lower traffic volumes. And so when you have neighborhoods that are along collector roads, like Main Street, say, if they were to apply for that city's program, the city would say no. And so if we're committed to being more proactive, and I think we need to be, then we need the ability to operate pilots on collector roads, and that's what the city did here. And I think it's great. The specific operational aspect that really didn't get touched upon last night that I'm hoping can be part of tonight's conversation is the ability to use safe hit posts in these pilots. The city contemplated doing safe hit posts on Main Street and in their narrative they said they didn't want to do it primarily, I think, because of snow removal concerns, which is a totally legitimate concern. If those things are up, you have to make a decision. Are you going to plow with special equipment around them or are you going to pull them out of the road and then plow and then put them back in are you just going to take them down for the winter and then put them back up in the spring there are questions that a lot of other cities and towns around us are developing answers to and it's not clear to me what the city's specific operational concerns are or if the city's looked at like a gap analysis of what it would take to be able to operate projects in Melrose using safe at posts it's really important to remember that this is not like a bike lane thing this this is a they're applicable in a lot of different contexts the city actually appropriated money over a year ago to do a pedestrian median on West Wyoming it's still not in I don't know what the status of it is but you know you can use them to to to create more defined medians you can use them to create pedestrian bump outs you can use them for short and turning radius intersection um there's a lot of different ways that you can use these um and i think that it will be really popular with residents if um if the city started to do these more so i'm hoping that if there are specific snow removal concerns those can be discussed tonight and we can figure out what dpw needs um to be able to to use these around melrose thanks everyone for the time i appreciate it um thank you thank you miss mcsweeney and thank

▶ 6:05 Cory Thomas: you very much for your continued involvement in civic matters and melrose i just want to let the record reflect that i wanted to move by unanimous consent to open public comment um barring any

▶ 6:21 Speaker 1: objections um we'll open public comment i put the cart before the horse but that's how i roll

▶ 6:29 Speaker 2: sometimes mr clerk committees do we have anyone else uh we have mr gordon uh he emailed the council earlier uh wishing to speak uh mr gordon can you hear us yes yes i can hear you thank you

▶ 6:44 Cory Thomas: for uh uh mr gordon i'm sorry welcome can you just state your name and address for the record please

▶ 6:47 Speaker 4: i am william gordon i live at 178 main street melrose which means on the south uh bound side of main street um and until august of this year um and i don't know exactly why we were up in maine and we came back and our parking on main street was gone we hadn't received no notice this was going to happen um and we we have no idea what legal process was uh up until today to take that away without notice um let me talk to you what this configuration has done to us and others on the southbound side of Main Street or on we have concerns here and and I want to thank the mayor and the director of Public Works and I know a couple of other staff members came out to meet with us several weeks ago but it was already too late because we had lost our parking and Main Street had been made dangerous and we explained there were a couple of different dangers one them was going northbound by putting the parking outside the bike lane they put the parking in what was traditionally a travel lane we said this isn't going this is going to invite an accident and the next night two cars were totaled because the car was trying to make a left turn on lodge a car behind it went to the right and crashed into a a car parked in one of the designated parking spaces so that was unsafe and then the response has been well we saw the accident now we're going to do away with that part of the plan now on our side of the street what we explained also is um it's our custom and some people will pull directly into the driveway and then pull back out and do it carefully we we found that it's probably safe for when when going onto main street which is a busy thoroughfare to back in to pull over to the curb and back into your driveway and then pull out well because of the change the configuration southbound the traffic was moved closer to our our our side of the street but if you remember main street it's tree line and if you try to look down main street at the iron company you can't see them so we and so that was one problem the other problem is when we pull over to back in with bike lanes cars coming down northbound side wouldn't stop they would cross over as a practice cross over the yellow line and just go around us as we were stopped there to wait for traffic to go by so we can pull back in so one of the things we asked was to put the yellow line back to where it was so that if we pulled over cars would have plenty of room we were told the other lines can move but not to where it was so that's simply unacceptable because it's an unsafe situation and there was no analysis about sight lines i worked in a planning department 40 years ago you don't make a change like this without figuring out what's going to happen to sidelines not at all and people were explaining they could not see on both sides with what had happened with this configurations so i don't know what kind of planning other than finding data which supported putting in bike lanes it was cherry-picked data which which really uh loaded the the the process um and the current administration seems to want to do this no matter what and i understand the need for the bike lanes but this community lower main street wasn't involved in the conversation we we came one day and saw that our parking was just dramatically altered our lane configured configurations were dramatically altered this is a this is a dense populated area a lot of single homes one after the other followed by an apartment building followed by another apartment building followed by another apartment building and in the current configuration three of those apartment buildings have these bike lanes um and they at least in the new proposal are only going to do that one parking building there's one person pointed out yesterday people who live in apartment buildings tend to be lower income and this felt uh or was represented was was explained you know this is not welcoming to low-income people if you're going to take away their on-street park it makes it more difficult for them now let me talk to you about other people and the difficulties on our side they want to permanently take away the parking some of us are over 65 i'm in that class some of us have medical disabilities and i know them and i have some of my family so it becomes difficult because now if you know there are two of us who have cars if one comes home before the other and that one who comes home is not going to leave first thing in the morning um then that car or is the one who's only first in the morning the one who comes in later has to pull in what we do in the past in the evening you could leave your car for an hour or two or three because if it's after six you could do that on the on main street and people could um and then you you could leave your car there and the other partner could come in pull their car in and then that person could then pull the car in we can't do that anymore um now if we want to do it we have to be on the other side of the street so you're forcing us to be pedestrians on a very busy street and the one thing i learned um i had i'm a lawyer and 30 years ago i had a uh uh case terrible uh accident where three people a mother a seven and six-year-old were hit uh by badly designed crosswalk they were in the crosswalk um and two of them died the mother and the six-year-old and we brought in an MIT engineer and he said what you want to do is keep pedestrians in outside the road as much as possible you make your your crosswalks as perpendicular and because it's the shortest way across and you you reduce your opportunities pedestrians and cars because guess what physics whenever a car collides with a person the car wins the person loses and that also happens with bikes too because there's no way the mass of the bike is going to be able to deal with the mass of the car traveling at a certain speed legal speed um so if we want to uh if we have to park on the street so the other one has to come in we have to now cross over main street so you're endangering us you're increasing our risk we have people here my neighbor is is a cancer survivor he's near 80 years old he can't cross main street he did not go to the butters meeting he wanted to because he and he was right across the street from us he cannot safely cross main street he has a family who comes to visit him they can't do on-site parking he has landscapers who do his what he used to be a re he used to take care of his property diligently all the time now he's landscaped where are they supposed to park there's no parking there anymore he has people come and snow and remove the snow they come with a truck and and snow blowers and a crew where are they supposed to park now they're forced to park on the other side and and they're going to have difficult his is just an example i have a neighbor to the other side whose first language is in english i don't think anyone reached out to them about the inconvenience to them and i've talked to a number of people on main street um this is the safety concerns of the of the people who live on main street is simply discounted and not taken anything to put in these bike lanes on this busy thoroughfare without talking to us first and then trying to mitigate the damage that this pilot project has created so those those are our thoughts and let me just end with one thing with the manual and uniform traffic control devices which is supposed to guide it's put up at federal highway administration and section 1a02 of the manual of uniform traffic control device So anybody who does pavement markings, and I learned this years ago, this is the text that you go with, the guide. And it says, to be effective, a traffic control device should meet five basic requirements. And the fourth one is command respect from road users. When you design pavement markings where people will routinely cross over the double yellow line, you have not created the appropriate markings because they're not being respected. It is a bad plan that has a bad impact to the butters here. And let me just say one other thing that there was a very good speaker yesterday who made plain that we don't appreciate that we're put in an adverse position to bike users. We think something has to be done to help them, but we have been an afterthought. have been in a an obstruction we're viewed as an obstruction to bike lanes rather than uh a conversation being had before this was imposed upon us thank you for giving me the time

▶ 16:15 Cory Thomas: to speak mr gordon thank you very much for for speaking before us mr clerk committees are there

▶ 16:23 Speaker 2: anyone else here at this time at this time i don't see anyone with their digital hand raised

▶ 16:30 Cory Thomas: Seeing no more in attendance for public hearing, barring any objections, I can move by unanimous consent to close public comments.