REPORTS - RULE 53

Transcript (~13 min @ 33:31)

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▶ 33:19 Robert A. Boisselle: Boisselle I have a report from the traffic Commission which was held the last week of March and it had a number of agenda items that I'll go over and give you an idea of what's going on in this city with all the traffic first on the agenda was a review of data collected for requests to change the intersection of Dell Avenue and East Foster Street to a four-way stop sign instead of a two-way stop if you're traveling on Dale Street and going north on that you will have a stop sign at East Foster but there is a petition to request for a four-way stop sign and to do that there are certain requirements and they studied a number of vehicles that were up and down the street for three or four days and a number of vehicles did not meet or pass the test requirement also that one of the requirements is that the corner has to produce five accidents per year and on the average there were only nine accidents over a five year period. So two of these qualifications were not met and the petition was denied but a number of recommendations were made and one of the some of those were a possible of a warning sign on the East Foster Street side and tree trimming when when you go up go north on Dell Street and approach East Foster you'll see some of the bushes or trees are really pushed out and you can't see up so that was recommended for trimming by the DPW and to work around and possible put a warning sign up there to stop but slow down at that point the next item on the agenda came up discuss the traffic circulation at Highlands commuter rail stop nascent Drive Ashburton place in the steel house now this is all occurring at the Highlands Railroad Station and basically you have the Greenwood Street is the main problem when you approach Franklin Street from

▶ 35:22 Speaker 4: Greenwood Street you can't get out either way because there's so much

▶ 35:25 Robert A. Boisselle: traffic going up at specific times of the day basically these are early mornings late afternoons burn schools are you have the Wakefield school you have the other schools middle schools and high schools all getting getting out and people are traveling up and down what some of the people are doing they're taking shortcuts as you go down Greenwood Street there's what we call nascent nascent Drive and Ashburton place which you take a left brings you down to a Belmont Street which is parallel to the steel house and you're in the parking lot of the steel house and the mvta and it goes straight down to franklin street and you have it seems a lot of these people find it easier to get out into the traffic and go either north or east or west on franklin street uh there there was a table there was still a lot

▶ 36:23 Robert A. Boisselle: of data was missing there was talk of traffic or cars parked along franklin street at greenwood so the motion was tabled and and asked the commissioners to go out at different times of the day and to look at the situation and see what's really going on and the days that were the hours that we're particularly looking at is between seven and nine between 1 30 and three quarter three and between five and six or even 4 30 to 6 30 to get a so the commissioners can get a better idea on that so that was that motion was tabled the next item on the agenda was similar area the reduced traffic it was a request by the residents to reduce traffic or restrict buses on Woodland Avenue for the past six months in the Highland train station area National Grid has been working and from past experience of any projects going on in Melrose once you block main arteries people start looking for shortcuts and what they found that if you start at Franklin and go up Greenwood about a half a mile Willard Street you take a left on Willard Street and it takes you all around the construction up to upper part of Franklin Street so there's been shortcuts the buses have found an easier way to get through this instead of taking that tight curve that tight curve at greenwood they're taking the shortcut up woodland and getting up to franklin and then going in their specific directions that was well right now national grid is moving into the area of woodland street to do construction and add that area that particular petition was tabled for more data in the area uh before and after the construction of the national grid area so that will take care of that i think the biggest item on the agenda was the prohibition of heavy commercial vehicles truck signs and engine braking um being on a traffic commission you can learn a lot about the mechanics of the vehicles and the traffic patterns in here in melrose and so forth we had an open comment area for a number of individuals stepped forward talked about heavy trucks the amount of heavy trucks coming through the area on upham street

▶ 39:05 Robert A. Boisselle: the speed seems also we put up a new sign on the east and west side portions of upham street put a 25 mile per hour and it shows your speed and so forth it seems that after going eastward after they hit the catholic church the incarnation church becomes a racetrack vehicles going east really head up towards saugus and there's also been other speeding issues and really it's turning out to be an enforcement aspects and the chief who's on the uh and some of the police officers are on commission we're going to this coming spring increase enforcement activity on upham street to see if they can curtail the speeding activity but the prohibition of heavy commercial vehicles the individuals on the street are saying it's become a truck highway so it's trying a study was done a 24-hour study the total number of vehicles in that 24 hours was registered at 17,000 715 vehicles that was this in my impression was amazing but walking on Upham Street on Sunday the traffic is there I mean just within a minute I counted 20 vehicles just passed me while I was walking but the Concept was 97% of that 17,715 vehicles were either passenger vehicles or small commercial vehicles. 454 were actually heavy vehicles of trucks, 16 wheelers and 18 wheelers and so forth, represents about 3% of the vehicles. The Chamber of Commerce was presented at this presentation And they represented the business views because these are food and service trucks that are coming in to supply these stores in the downtown area or along Main Street from Wakefield all the way down to the Malden Line.

▶ 41:18 Robert A. Boisselle: and the benefits businesses benefits from these trucks and so constantly supplying them with the necessary needs of the community and the community really needs this life of different types of stores that we have and these people really need those vehicles and there was a effort to buy the chamber to

▶ 41:44 Robert A. Boisselle: talk to the stores to to talk to them to educate the drivers to either cut down on their speed find another way into the community but there was also plans to reroute these particular vehicles to different ways on different highways individuals on Howard Street were worried because the traffic will be redirected towards them also to reroute vehicles through other communities you have to be more of a regional traffic planning aspects of it so that was called

▶ 42:24 Robert A. Boisselle: so that was the placing of the signs of truck routes and so forth was not there the majority was not there and it failed the petition failed to do anything but research was still going on and to help out the community to monitor more enforcement on Upham Street at that point. We also have engine braking. Many of you who've had standard vehicles and put it into second gear to slow down your vehicle, you do that with an 18 wheeler and that makes a lot of noise and it becomes a noise problem especially when you're coming down Upham Street towards Lebanon and towards the Main Street area so there was more of a noise to it's sort of a noise notice that should be given and the heavy loads of engine but usually they had bigger trucks are the ones involved with the injured engine braking because if you use the brakes too much the brakes themselves could fail and you could really have the DAP disaster so by downshifting and using the brakes easier you save it in possible of a future accident in that area so they're going to be looking at more of a noise ordinance to cover that and that's going to be reviewed and that should be discussed at the next meeting which will be sometime in June we also discussed

▶ 43:55 Robert A. Boisselle: the four illuminated speed signs similar to what we have on Upham Street. Three streets that have been identified were West Emerson, Grove Street, and Sylvan Street and these will be evaluated in the coming months for the possible placement of illuminating signs at that point. And most of the traffic that you're seeing on Upham Street usually is occurring between 630 and 930 in the morning and between 4 o'clock and 630 in the evening and sporadically during the day, especially on Saturdays and so forth. People are listening to traffic reports. Route 1 is backed up. They move over to 93. 93 is backed up. They move over to Route 1. If both of them are backed up, they move down to downtown Boston and 8 o'clock in the morning trying to get through Melrose from West Wyoming to Porter Street, you're crawling at a really slow speed. So that's why the buses are late trying to get you to Oak Grove and so forth. And that completes my review of the Traffic Commission for the month of March.

▶ 45:14 Speaker 1: Thank you, that all the boys all appreciate that.

▶ 45:22 Scott M. Forbes: Any other Alderman? Alderman Forbes. Thank you, Mr. President. Water and Sewer Committee met last week. Basically tomorrow night at 7 o'clock we're going to be presented with a bunch of rate options and models. Because the collective bargaining agreement was recently settled, now we can have real numbers being inserted into the models and get actual data. Been waiting on that for a while. We were presented historical data from fiscal year 2012 to fiscal year 2018, basically showing our water and sewer rate information to kind of figure out, kind of show us how we got to where we are right now. There are plans for upcoming work schedules and projects for the I&I program that will be presented to the Water and Sewer Committee later on this year. We're hoping to get a schedule of work so we could submit those to the MWRA for the grant program it's 75% grant 25% is an interest-free loan from the city city engineer showed us the interactive spreadsheet that was originally used by the consultants so now we have the capability to forecast properly given seasons of either high or low water use we can kind of plug some numbers in and be able to forecast out which I think is is important for moving forward to get good data and be able to try to stay ahead of the curve but again tomorrow night 7 o'clock in the upstairs conference room we should have a few model options being presented to us and I'll report accordingly thank you sir Thank You alderman Forbes any other

▶ 46:47 Michael P. Zwirko: alderman William to report on subcommittees that they're members of