jimmy peluso no clapping necessary um good evening everyone thank you for for coming out here i know it's relatively late on a thursday there's a lot of things going on this evening so the fact that you want to show up really means a lot to me it either shows that you are are very if you're like me you're hopefully very supportive of the idea of more bike pedestrian friendly communities and neighborhoods especially in our urban core and maybe you just have questions about the project maybe there are some concerns maybe there's things that can make this project even better but regardless i'm so grateful that you're all here this evening um when when i when i first campaigned for office one of the things that i talked about was a more bike pedestrian friendly city i've lived in a lot of modern cities um and if you go to some of the oldest cities on earth you can go to paris or you know you can go to some some places that were built hundreds upon hundreds of years ago and they have made bike pedestrianism far more a part of the fabric of their society and so naturally i figured jacksonville florida can do can definitely do the same thing um these are projects that are low cost um these are projects that can make a resounding difference for the community and as we talk about the emerald trail this connects to that as we talk about slowing down traffic it can do that as we talk about making sure that neighborhoods are more connected to each other this does that as well and we just put a ton of money and attention into um the mccoy's creek project daylighting the creek and to the uh the the river walk on the north bank i mean there's a reality here where you can wake up in the morning in brooklyn and walk all the way to the other side of the south bank to where the district is and the dcps building that kind of connectivity is something that this city is now going to have which i find very very like great that's progress beyond that if you look at the monroe uh project um what's great about that is we've just opened up um the new la villa heritage trail right there's these beautiful markers that are celebrating the history of an incredible part of our city la villa and what better way to to get from one part of the trail than to the next getting on a bike or getting off getting out of your car and walking from one to the next to see what has happened in this city i mean these are the kinds of things that that that big cities do and and and i'm i'm just grateful to to lee to chris to to everyone here this evening to osiris who who put this together um and and i'm i'm interested to hear what your questions are if there are any concerns and uh and and i hope to uh to to see us break ground on this break ground it's really just paint uh pull out the pull out the paintbrush i suppose in a couple of months and get this going
thank you so much thank you all right so why are we here uh we're going to talk about why we think these projects are good ideas we think there's a lot of benefits to them but we want to know what you think you know we we miss stuff we make mistakes so if you think we missed something or that we made a mistake please tell us you can fill out a comment card you can send us an email we'll have time for questions at the end and if you like these projects please tell us as well your your input is very important so everybody here you know has some connection to these neighborhoods uh you might live there uh maybe you work there or maybe you just visit but i think everybody's here because you're interested in in making these streets better so how are these projects going to make brooklyn and lavilla better so they're going to provide better access to local businesses so on monroe street we're going to two-way monroe street so that means drivers will have an easier time getting places it'll also make businesses more visible because drivers will see them when they're going both directions on riverside avenue and forest street we're adding lots of on street parking making the bike lanes better so that'll help people get to local businesses and attractions these projects are going to make the the sidewalks better it's going to make crossing the street better we're going to put in safer bike lanes and new bike lanes that aren't even there at all right now and this builds on other recent successful projects that have happened downtown projects like the road died on park street that was just finished the shared use path on the fuller worn bridge the emerald trail on the skate park all the we thought about how these projects will connect with all of those attractions these projects are also really low cost we put a lot of thought into how we can not spend a whole lot of money on these and and make a really good investment with your taxpayer money and they're a fast timeline this isn't something that you're going to have to wait around for 10 years to enjoy we expect all these to be done next year sometime in 2027 so this is monroe street and some there's there's some issues with monroe street right now so it's it's three lanes and it's one direction of traffic so when you have a road that looks like this it encourages drivers to go really fast and they don't even think about it they just see this type of road and and they go faster so speeding is a problem here also the one-way traffic you know makes navigation confusing it makes businesses less visible there's no there's no bike facilities and all this high-speed traffic is right next to the sidewalk and if you cross the street you have to cross three lanes at one time so how can we make monroe street better so what we want to do is make it two direction two lanes in two directions of traffic and install bike lanes and what this is do this will do is it'll slow people down because it'll make it look more like a neighborhood it's not going to feel like a highway where drivers are supposed to go really fast when drivers see a street like this they'll naturally slow down there's no bike lanes there now but these bike lanes are going to connect directly to the emerald trail and they'll go almost all the way to the courthouse so it'll be a nice connection from the emerald trail you know into the heart of downtown and you know this is just going to make this a much nicer place to walk around we think so here's a here's a side-by-side before and after you know picture of monroe street okay riverside avenue now what are some of the problems on riverside avenue right now so there's it's six lanes so a six-lane road encourages lots of speeding there's no one street parking at all the bike lanes are are too small and there's no protection for them and the you know these high-speed cars are really close to the sidewalk so this is a really nice sidewalk in this picture um this bench looks like a nice place to sit except for you know just a few feet behind you you have really fast moving traffic so if we could move that traffic further away from that bench this sidewalk might be a nicer place to be so what we're going to do on riverside avenue is take the outside lane and convert it to parking this is going to add 61 new on-street parking spaces it's going to slow down traffic a little bit and the parked cars will be between the moving traffic and the bike lane so the parked cars will protect the bikes on riverside avenue and they'll also move the fast traffic further away from the sidewalk so it'll be nicer to walk around so this is a before and after picture of riverside avenue okay forest street forest streets got a lot of the same problems that riverside avenue has it's six lanes uh there's a lot of high speed traffic there's no protection for the bike lanes but one thing that's really interesting about forest street is that there's at magnolia street there's no crosswalk but people really want to cross there i see people crossing there all the time and if you look in this picture and it's kind of hard to see but you can see in the grass you know where people where the grass is gone because so many people have been walking through there so as part of this project we're going to put a pedestrian crossing there and that'll be a really nice connection for brooklyn we we are going to like we are we're on riverside avenue we're going to convert the outside lane into parking the parking will protect the bike lane for moving traffic um and again this will this will provide just make this a better place to walk around so here's a before and after picture of forest street okay so we're taking away these vehicle lanes you know so what is that going to do with traffic how is that going to affect traffic you know how much longer is it going to take me to get to work or to my house or wherever i need to go um so we did a detailed traffic study and satch is going to talk about that good evening everybody
thanks for coming out here um so like lee was mentioning uh the first question everybody is going to ask is okay we are repurposing some of the lanes how will that impact traffic am i going to be sitting in and this lights longer or how is my operations going to be uh if it's a am pm peak hour or it's a weekend when you're trying to use this facility so in order for us to do that we did a very detailed study each one of these three projects the reports are available with the city we need to first establish the area of influence we call it where traffic is going to be influenced with this project we looked at the traffic data on the project corridor we have to look at each major junction where traffic is turning left through right document that we have to go out into the field we did a thorough detailed field evaluation understanding how this uh corridors are functioning both with uh vehicular traffic as well as pedestrian bicycle and transit operations a lot of these pictures that you actually are seeing are our drone videos that we collected when we were doing the study those were the ones that we had actually used from live conditions so once we developed a thorough understanding of how the corridor is operating right now under existing condition we uh we want to look at how they're going to operate down in the future so we look at the growth in the area all the establishments that are going to become what we look at is a 20-year window we look at a opening year and a design year we establish the traffic volumes for those and run detailed operational analysis to finalize how the operation is going to be on these project corridors once these changes are implemented and obviously we don't want to jeopardize or promote any unsafe behavior so we look at these and come up with solutions to address problems so this just gives you a detailed overview of the process that was used in the study how we looked at things and how we enhanced operations and safety on the project corridor um the metrics that we presented in the report is called a level of service it's almost like a report card a is good level of service a you can see in this where you have enough gaps through f they measured the traffic operations a through f f is bad meaning that it's extremely congested and you need to add wider lanes so that in a nutshell we wanted to present a through f is how uh the evaluations are going to be presented on each one of the corridor so let's talk about munro that lee just presented the top row is showing existing operations bottom row is showing 20 30 year horizon and 2050 20 years down the line how it's going to operate as lee pointed out those three lanes that are out there's the traffic on munro itself is very low so we are not seeing any traffic operations impact all the level of service that we have documented through the 20 year horizon is level of service a or b which is extremely good that's the reason why taking away that extra lane is not going to cause any detrimental impacts on the project corridor so it keeps the travel times the same with the proposed uh reorientation of the lanes we are also providing uh the much needed pedestrian bicycling enhancements on the project corridor so now i'm going to talk real quick about riverside avenues uh this matrix by the way are aggregate on the project corridor it's an average per intersection uh our detailed report shows how each intersection is going to operate again we are looking at level of service c or better operations uh through the design year life cycle we are not seeing any significant increase on the travel times uh we are also providing the much needed pedestrian bicycle features on the project or along with parking so here i just brought in a quick simulation you can see hopefully you can see the little cars moving this is riverside avenue from just down on the accosta bridge near leila street where the whole foods is all the way down to forest street and across forest street uh this is this is showing the uh additional lane being taken away however this is pmp cover pmp cover was the significant peak that we uh we thought for the region so we are showing pmp cover operations all the traffic is flowing pretty fine we're not seeing major congestion so effectively taking that lane away and repurposing is not causing any major uh impacts to operations forest street here are the metrics for forest street one of the key things on forest street that was causing some failing operations is park street and forest street uh there is a significant northbound left turn in the pmp cover that's why you can see uh there is level of service e on there with a orange shade on it that improvement i believe dot is looking at it it's a project outside of our realm so that's why you will see a level of service e but outside of that influence of that intersection the corridor is functioning very well there is no major critical locations that are backing up on forest street itself and your travel times are unchanged between the two when we do the job or when we don't do the job the travel times are exactly same so i'll pass to matt to talk about some of the safety features
hey everyone i'm i'm debbie downer i'm gonna tell you how dangerous jacksonville is so i apologize for that in advance um but yeah the the impetus behind these types of transformative projects is really that jacksonville the data doesn't lie really with jacksonville the latest dangerous by design came out this year and jacksonville was ranked the 16th most dangerous city in america for pedestrians and this is based on reported fatalities so that's that's a bad position to be in although it is an improvement from last year we are actually 15th and we've been really moving in the right direction with all of this for a while now we're actually on a three-year downswing in pedestrian fatalities which is really great i mean the traffic engineer folks public works all of us planners you know we're really excited about those numbers but we don't celebrate too long because we know that this really means that we have a lot of work yet to do but we are moving in the right direction with this um due to the the nature of our roadways right now um in 2025 we rolled out our safety plan our vision zero action plan we have a couple of banners here if you want to read more about it and visit our web page it's it's a really good plan and and there's a lot of great recommendations in there for actionable items that we can take to start to make things safer one of them is great designs like this so what you're seeing in the photo here is what's called a parking protected bike lane and this puts the cyclists over on the passenger side between the sidewalk and the vehicle lane so you have that extra added buffer of vehicles that are protecting cyclists as they go by and we all know every car has a driver so 100 of those folks are going to be opening a door on the other side there but when you put them over on the passenger side give them a little buffer it really reduces the chances of a cyclist getting doored as they called it and thrown in the wrong direction and if they do they don't get thrown into vehicle traffic they end up on the sidewalk which is not great but it's a lot better than the other consequences but yeah the designs that you're looking at today on these storyboards really have so much of those great safety measures that are simple and cost effective and and move jacksonville in the right direction so i'm really excited and supportive of this project so thanks for showing up today and giving us your opinions all right so to summarize these projects will provide
better access to businesses and attractions downtown we're adding new parking we're two-waying monroe street which will make it easier to drive around it'll make businesses more visible it's going to provide friendlier walking conditions it'll make these streets a lot nicer to walk around on we're providing safer you know more comfortable bike lanes these build on the success of recent projects like the skate park the park street road diet the emerald trail and these are low cost you know each of these projects is only going to cost about a hundred thousand dollars you know we've really thought hard about how we can you know do these projects and make them good investments and not spend a lot of money and there's a fast timeline so do we expect them to be finished sometime in 2027 so with that uh we will we will answer questions for the next 20 minutes and and then we'll have an open house again yes sir we're not resurfacing it's just striping and that's part of the reason the cost is so low yes sir yes sir so they yeah so when we do the traffic study we apply a growth rate so we project
traffic growth into the future and the growth rate is a small business in jacksonville so we understand how uh the growth is planned around here we are also aware of the haskell building also that's empty right now but there are plans for maybe a redevelopment there so we accounted for all the unforeseen circumstances that could happen that are bringing more traffic or adding more to uh to this corridor so that growth rate that lee has talked about and also been looking at uh scenarios where some of these development could redevelop into a different land use is what has been planned already uh and the numbers everything have reflected our evaluation and analysis takes in factors into that uh however it's a factor uh if it's lower than what's projected you're good if it's two ten times what's projected then it might show up
it's open but we did five three separate projects right now we are able to afford all three of them
so what we're going to do is put concrete we'll put little concrete islands at the beginning of the parking lot that we'll also put green bike symbols at the bike lane and that'll tell drivers you know don't come here this is not for you the where a driver might mistake it is mistakenly drive down it so yeah it's there's a a better rendering here you know where a driver makes a turn that's where they're most likely to
make a mistake and drive down the parking lane that's where we would put the concrete
uh