City Council Work Session

Chloe Ritterstaffand David Summers from Public Works. So with that, we'll go ahead and get started. So here's our agenda for this evening. We're going to give an overview of the project. We are at the beginning of the project, so we want to give an overview of the project background, the goals, and what we're looking to achieve with this project. and what we're looking to achieve with this project is to develop three separate plans and we'll go over each of those plans in a little bit more detail for the safety action plan, pedestrian master plan, and the Old Town Circulation Study. And then the Old Town Circulation Study is the most detailed of the three plans and so we want to have a more in-depth discussion about what that project is going to involve

and what the trade-offs are, what our priorities are for that study. And then we'll wrap up with some next steps to talk about the community engagement plan and have some questions and discussion and we want to hear your feedback on on these plans and the priorities for this project so project overview the first question I want answers why are we doing this project and so I'll answer that by saying we have several long-term plans in the city that are looking to improve pedestrian safety and safety overall throughout the throughout the city and we so we have the comprehensive plan and we have the bicycle master plan all call for improvements to safety and pedestrian improvements and walkability.

And the Old Town Small Area Plan, of course, looks to have improvements to walkability and connectivity and improves traffic circulation in Old Town. What these plans don't provide is specific project priorities. And so that's what we're doing with this project is to take these long-term plans and move them to the next step of identifying our priorities for how to implement those goals and visions for improvements of safety and pedestrian improvements so as I said the purpose of this project is to develop these three plans and so we have an umbrella project called move Fairfax City and that project is going to develop a citywide safety action plan to identify priorities for safety improvements across the city a citywide pedestrian master plan to prioritize

that we're looking at these things comprehensively and another reason that we're doing these projects together is because we're able to leverage funding to do them more effective more cost-effectively so we were awarded a four hundred thousand dollar grant from the federal safe streets for all program and that's matched with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in local funding now what we're doing is we're leveraging local funding that we'd have previously identified to do each of these plans individually to do a pedestrian master plan as a single project and the Old Town Circulation Study as a single project. And now we can take that funding and address several planning needs at once for a more cost effective way.

Speaker 5Okay Thanks, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about the pedestrians say or the pedestrian master plan. Excuse me, so Pedestrian mobility and safety are very interrelated Better pedestrian mobility will often result in we usually result in hand safety for all modes you might have better crossing facilities, better facilities at intersections generally. And this pedestrian master plan is going to coordinate with all the other efforts, as Chloe mentioned. And the need for this is well documented in the comprehensive plan. There are a variety of actions that specifically cite increased and improved pedestrian mobility. And ultimately, similar to the safety action plan, the pedestrian master plan will result in projects

that are slated for that are recommended for implementation and that should be the next steps and those will be coordinated again with the safety action plan findings and also as you'll see the old town circulation study as well and a little bit about the approach so first the pedestrian master plan will the analysis will take cues from the findings of the safety action plan so the analyses that Ryan mentioned the high injury network the crash profiles those will be considered in the pedestrian master plan to see where there might be pedestrian safety issues that could be accommodated through improved mobility but there will also be a separate kind of parallel focus on pedestrian comfort improving pedestrian routes to get to where people need to go and a couple of

Ryan Sharpand again holistically looking at a pedestrian master plan and the impact on speed for pedestrian safety and comfort and looking at Old Town as well right how speeds impact comfort safety economic development all these factors right here in Old Town all of that is gonna be really important and things that we're gonna definitely gonna consider as part of the study

Speaker 9I would just add to that that you know when we look at traffic volumes and pedestrian volumes today we also are going to project that out into the future taking in mind the county complex master plan and some of these other developments this traffic need these plans need to work into the future as well not just for what the volumes of all sorts are today