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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2016-09-19 City Council Summary MinutesCITY OF PALO ALTO CITY COUNCIL TRANSCRIPT Page 1 of 120 Special Meeting September 19, 2016 The City Council of the City of Palo Alto met on this date in the Council Chambers at 5:06 P.M. Present: Berman arrived at 7:03 P.M., Burt, DuBois, Filseth, Holman, Kniss, Scharff, Schmid, Wolbach Absent: Study Session 1. Study Session on Motor Vehicle Level of Service (LOS), Multimodal Level of Service (MMLOS), Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress, Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), and CEQA Changes Related to Transportation Impacts. Mayor Burt: Our first item tonight is a Study Session on Motor Vehicle Level of Service, also Multimodal Level of Service and Bicycle Level of Traffic Stress and Vehicle Miles Traveled and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) change to transportation impacts. Mr. Mello, welcome. Joshua Mello, Chief Transportation Official: Greeting, Mayor, members of Council. We did a similar presentation back in June for the Planning and Transportation Commission, got a lot of great feedback from them. We've been planning this for about six months. I'm excited to finally have this day here. With me tonight, I have Ron Milam, Sarah Peters and Robert Eckles from the firm Fehr & Peers. I also have Hugh Louch from Alta Planning and Design, as well as Nayan Amin from TJKM in the back there. They are all here to help you with this discussion. We'll have a presentation by Sarah, followed by Ron and Hugh, and then we'll be able to answer any questions you have. With that, I'll turn it over to Sarah. Sarah Peters, Fehr & Peers: Thank you, Josh. I'll be presenting tonight on the transportation impact analysis requirements for Santa Clara County that are put forward by Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) and level of service standards. First, let's talk about what is a transportation impact analysis. As you all know, a transportation impact analysis evaluates the effects of a proposed new development on the transportation network TRANSCRIPT Page 2 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 that serves it. Typically, they're conducted to inform land use decisions here on the local level made by city councils, and their development is guided by city staff. For larger developments, a separate transportation impact analysis is required to meet CEQA requirements, but that requirement differs from what's required at the local or county level. Ron will get into that later. Traditionally, Traffic Impact Analysis (TIAs) have focused pretty much exclusively on traffic congestion resulting from added project traffic. However, here in Santa Clara County transportation impact analyses are required to evaluate all modes, including transit, bicycle, pedestrian modes. That's because in large part focusing just on auto-related impacts really leads to a very narrow focus, and it leads to some side effects on bicycle and pedestrian modes that are really undesirable. Within Santa Clara County, TIAs are required to meet standards that are developed by VTA, which is the County's congestion management agency. In addition to providing transit service, VTA monitors congestion at major intersections and on freeways. It publishes these TIA guidelines to make sure that analysis is done in a consistent manner across the entire county. VTA also comments on TIAs that are prepared by cities. When does VTA require that a TIA be prepared? For any project that would generate 100 trips or more during any weekday or weekend peak hour, a TIA must be prepared. That's a VTA requirement. Cities including Palo Alto will typically require TIAs for smaller projects that generate fewer trips. While TIAs are developed by consultants, the entire TIA process is actually led by city staff to make sure that the TIAs meet the city's needs. The first step is developing a scope of work for the TIA. The consultant will propose a land use category and trip generation rate that are appropriate for the development. The consultant will also identify likely traffic patterns to and from the proposed project and, based on that, will identify the extent of the study, including any intersections that are likely to be impacted by project traffic. At that point, city staff review the scope and propose changes to make sure that the final study addresses local concerns. Then, that draft scope of work is circulated to VTA and also to any other agencies that might be affected. If a development goes in at Charleston and El Camino, the scope of that study is going to be circulated to Mountain View because traffic to and from that development is likely to travel through Mountain View. Once the scope is determined, data is collected and study intersections are modeled under existing and future scenarios. City staff review and provide comments on a draft report. Those comments are addressed; the administrative draft report is then circulated so VTA and other agencies have a chance to review. The final report is presented to the planning commission, city council and members of the public. When a TIA analyzes future conditions, they look at conditions with and without the project, typically under three scenarios. The first is existing conditions, so just existing traffic, what you see in the counts. Background conditions are existing traffic plus traffic from projects that have been approved but not yet TRANSCRIPT Page 3 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 constructed. Cumulative conditions, which you see here, have existing traffic, the approved project traffic and then expected growth. That expected growth can be forecast either from specific developments that are anticipated but not yet approved or it can be forecasted using a travel demand model, for example the City of Palo Alto's travel demand model. How do we define a transportation impact? VTA defines impacts for congestion management program facilities, for major intersections and freeways. Those impact thresholds are defined in terms of auto level of service which, as you know, is a measure of delay at intersections or congestion on freeway segments. Auto level of service is graded between LOS A, which is free-flowing traffic, and LOS F, which is major delays at a traffic jam. VTA publishes LOS analysis guidelines—you see the cover here—to make sure that LOS is analyzed consistently throughout Santa Clara County. For congestion management program facilities, Level of Service E is the standard, and an impact is identified when project traffic decreases level of service from LOS E to LOS F or if the intersection is already operating at Level of Service F, if traffic would add four or more seconds of delay. Historically local jurisdictions have used VTA thresholds to identify impacts to local intersections. In some cases, cities have adapted those thresholds to their own conditions. Here in Palo Alto, for local streets level of service is actually set a bit higher than for congestion management program intersections. Palo Alto set the threshold at Level of Service D, but it has the same threshold for identifying an impact if the level of service is below the standards that the City sets. Additionally Palo Alto identifies a few other ways to understand impacts from new development. That really looks at a bigger picture than just traffic delay. If there are queuing impacts, if traffic is spilling back from one intersection to another, if project traffic would impede the operation of transit, make things unpleasant for pedestrians or bicycles or create cut-through traffic through neighborhood streets, that would all trigger an impact as well. Palo Alto's level of service standards are pretty consistent with its neighbors in Santa Clara County, Mountain View and Los Altos. However, its neighbor to the neighbor, Menlo Park, has more stringent standards for local streets. For collectors and residential streets, Menlo Park has an impact threshold set at LOS C rather than LOS D. Additionally, adding 2-3 seconds of delay to an intersection, even if it doesn't drop the level of service below LOS C, would trigger an impact. If intersections are operating below the threshold in Menlo Park, less traffic is required to trigger an impact. In Menlo Park, instead of requiring four seconds of delay to trigger an impact at an intersection that's operating below the threshold, only 0.8 seconds of added delay are required. That means that in Menlo Park if an intersection is operating below the standard, just a few trips during the peak hour can trigger an impact. In addition to looking at level of service, VTA does require some expanded requirements for looking at other modes. Note that while this analysis is TRANSCRIPT Page 4 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 required for transit, pedestrian and bicycle modes, there's actually no threshold set. The analysis is simply required; there's no impact triggered. Per the 2014 guidelines update, TIAs now have to evaluate whether added project traffic would create delays for buses on local streets. They also need to evaluate pedestrian and bicycle conditions using a quality of service metric. Hugh, later in this presentation, will get into one of those metrics. Finally, the 2014 guidelines update encourages a much broader approach to understanding a project's trip generation than has typically been the case in Santa Clara County. Traditionally, most TIAs have used rates published by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, but these rates are often taken from really standalone suburban developments that are not typical for what gets developed here in Palo Alto. For a mixed-use project like you see here, the trip generation should take into account cross-over between the residential upstairs and the retail downstairs. City of Palo Alto Staff have also required that TIAs use trip generation rates based on local traffic counts rather than simply applying IT trip rates, where they might not be appropriate. The 2014 guidelines update has also added a new approach to accounting for trip reductions that would result from a project's TDM program or from Transportation Demand Management (TDM) policies that have been put in place at the local level, which you see here in Palo Alto. I'll hand it over to Ron Milam next to talk about how impacts are evaluated under CEQA. Ron Milam, Fehr & Peers: Thanks, Sarah. A lot of what Sarah just described to you, especially the part about vehicle level of service, is about to change. That change is something that we in the industry are referring to as an evolutionary change in practice. The reason for that is that we've introduced a new law, SB 743(743)—the Legislature passed this back in 2013—that basically says vehicle level of service can no longer be used as the sole basis for identifying a transportation impact for CEQA purposes. Instead, we're going to use a new metric, and that metric was handed over to the Governor's Office of Planning and Research to select. They selected vehicle miles traveled, VMT, as that metric. They were also directed to provide us guidance on how to calculate it, the methodology and also how to set thresholds. That doesn't take away the discretion that the City has in setting thresholds, but OPR is going to be providing guidance on that topic. The reason we consider this an evolutionary change—if you look at the last decade of CEQA changes, there's only been a couple of big ones. One of those was Senate Bill (SB) 97, and this came on the heels of Assembly Bill (AB) 32. That's when the State basically said greenhouse gas reduction is an important objective of the State. SB 97 is basically when the Legislature basically expected us to start analyzing greenhouse gases in CEQA. They basically gave us our first metric. Fast forward to 743, and the Legislature is actually becoming even more proactive. They've not only given us a new TRANSCRIPT Page 5 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 metric, VMT, but they've taken one away, the vehicle level of service that Sarah was just talking about. They've provided direction to OPR to start influencing the methodology and the threshold setting. That's quite a bit different than what we've done in the past where a lot of the methodology questions, all the threshold questions were usually left up to the individual lead agency, cities and counties for example. It's important when we think about a new law like this to take a close look at the legislative intent and try to understand what the Legislature was doing. They really fundamentally, if you look at Objective Number 2 up here on the screen, wanted to change the way we approach transportation impact analysis. Instead of focusing on congestion relief, meaning reducing delays and increasing speeds, it's much more about balancing multiple objectives. Three very important ones here: to encourage infill development; promotion of active transportation, that's walking, bicycling; and then also the reduction of greenhouse gases. Now, passing this law, they did not intend for other aspects of transportation analysis to change that are used in safety analysis or air quality. When you look at those other sections, if you change the transportation analysis, it can have a ripple effect. You can actually end up influencing the way we currently practice those other topics. We'll get into some of those details if you have questions about that. Here's the Twitter version, if you will, of what is basically an eight hour class on this topic. We tried to boil it down to just the highlights. If you don't remember anything else from the presentation, remember the pictures on this slide. If you think about the way we practice transportation impact analysis today, the photo in the upper right-hand corner is basically what happens. Development occurs. It generates new demand in the form of vehicle trips. We typically expand intersections and roadways to accommodate that demand. All the impacts and all the mitigation are on the external network away from the project. The development community is pretty used to this practice. They're used to paying impact fees or paying for the intersection to be expanded, but 743 changes that. Basically it eliminates the use of vehicle level of service and delay. It's introducing a brand new metric. You can think of VMT as basically an efficiency metric, especially if it's expressed as something like VMT per capita. You can compare two projects or two different areas and understand how much vehicle travel is required. By adding VMT, we're changing the dialog, if you will, in how we evaluate projects. Instead of worrying about their impact on that external network, we're going to focus more on the project itself. Why does it generate VMT? How much VMT does it generate? Can we change the project in some fundamental way that it'll generate less VMT? That's the real important thing here in terms of the mitigation focus. We're going to actually try and identify ways you might be able to change the project design or add programs like a TDM program, Transportation Demand Management, to further reduce its vehicle trips. This new focus is something that everyone's going to have to get used to. TRANSCRIPT Page 6 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 As it relates to how cities and counties function within the development world, it changes some of that dialog with the development community. When you're talking about the mitigation, if you're trying to change their project, which they may have spent a lot of money developing that project in a certain way, you can actually experience some resistance with that. Those are some things to be prepared for. Finally, in terms of what the schedule is for implementation, I said earlier the law was passed back in 2013. We're very close to implementation now. The Governor's Office of Planning and Research expects this fall to have their final draft being submitted to the Natural Resources Agency. That starts the formal rule- making process, which will take about six months, give or take. From that point, they've offered up a two year opt-in period, a grace period if you will, for lead agencies to opt into the new law. One thing to be aware of, though, Caltrans is also involved in implementation of 743. They've already started to update their internal guidance, and they are a commenting agency on a lot of projects. Sometimes they're even a responsible agency, meaning they have a role in approving the project. In those cases, Caltrans will start here very soon commenting on projects to expect VMT analysis today. They're ready to move away from vehicle level of service and are potentially accelerating implementation of 743. With that, I'll turn it over to Hugh. Hugh Louch, Alta Planning and Design: Thanks, Ron. I'm going to switch gears here a little bit and talk about bicycle and pedestrian comfort and stress. While the VMT conversation is about what's legally required to be done in terms of CEQA, we're much more talking about the types of analysis that you want to do when you're thinking about investing in your transportation system and the types of benefits that you might have from that. There's just been a lot of work really in recent years to think about, both from an automobile standpoint but also for bicyclists and pedestrians, how they use the transportation system and how we can design transportation systems to benefit all users. There's a lot of work, of course, at the national level and at the State level as well, thinking about taking a performance-based approach to the decision-making process that you all have to go through and having the kind of information so you can assess the tradeoffs that you have to make across different choices. That would include choices on which modes you invest in. These kinds of metrics can be useful for helping you do that. Let's start by talking a little bit about multimodal level of service. As Ron was talking about level of service over the last number of years or decade roughly, there's been a lot of interest in having comparable methods to the automobile level of service for bicyclists, pedestrians and transit. There's work through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, which develops the highway capacity manual, which is used as the main methodology for establishing these different level of service grades that allow you to say is this free-flowing or congested. TRANSCRIPT Page 7 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 They've developed some complementary methods that go along with that, to think about bicycle and pedestrian travel as well as transit. You can see from the pictures really the concepts that they're after, where you're talking about from free-flow level, Level of Service A-B, to congested, Level of Service E-F, with similar concepts applied for bicyclists and pedestrians as well. Do you have a lot of space? Do you have a little bit of space? Is there traffic that's conflicting with you or do you have your own space? Questions like that. It's a great kind of concept, and one that certainly, I think, sets off a bit of a revolution in terms of thinking more systematically about how we do analysis for these alternative modes. One of the nice things about it is really this sort of comparable picture. We can grade every mode and understand for any given street or highway how it supports different modes of travel. It certainly considers interactions across modes. It's consistent. If you could use this, you would use it consistently across different analysis levels. A couple of the challenges with it are that the meanings across the levels for different modes are not necessarily clear. The whole congestion and space concept that makes sense for automobiles might not make sense for pedestrians. On the one hand, if you're walking down a very crowded sidewalk, you might think of that as a low level of service. At the same time, you might think of that as a busy downtown area that you want to be. Those are very different kinds of concepts and issues you want to think about when you're picking your metrics for doing this kind of analysis. The modeling itself was really developed around typical automobile modeling, which is more arterial, major collector focused as opposed to local streets. Of course, a lot of bicycling, a lot of walking really happens more on local streets. Just overall, there's a little bit of a lack of connection to that user perspective that we think is pretty important. Just quickly, give you a couple of examples of what these kinds of analyses look like. This is a bicycle level of service map for Jacksonville, Florida. It gives you a sense of the way different links are rated to understand are they higher or lower level of service. It can be great, because it identifies where some of your needs are. These are areas. If you wanted these to be areas where people are bicycling, they might identify some of the challenges and problems that you would have. You can do a similar map for pedestrian as well. Some other related methods that are similar to the multimodal level of service. Charlotte has a method that's really about evaluating the impact of roadway projects on alternative modes. If you're going to have a certain type of project, how will that impact the likely safety and comfort of bicyclists or pedestrians using that facility, and what are maybe then some mitigating strategies you might want to use? San Francisco has this thing they call (inaudible), which is about how the physical environment impacts where people walk and bike, looks at traffic and street design and land use and perceived safety, a lot of different characteristics that go into determining how and where people like to bicycle and walk. Just one quick example from TRANSCRIPT Page 8 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 this that's—we skipped right over this. Switching gears. Level of traffic stress is sort of an alternate method that's arisen recently. One of the main places that came out was San Jose State actually, which did an important research project, which really looked at trying to tie how people use the transportation system, how bicyclists in particular use the transportation system, to these kinds of metrics that we're talking about. What they did was look at these different classifications of users, from the completely fearless user all the way down to folks who are more enthused and confident or interested but have concerns, sort of a classic classification that we use in the type of work that we do. Try to develop facilities that really tie networks together. This map, which is a map of San Jose, you can kind of see where there are gaps in the network, where you might want to make improvements to help make connections. Where you have little bits of green that are all connected, that's a part of the network where you can get there at a particular level of traffic stress. Where there's red, that means that's a gap that you need to make your way across. It starts to really tie, again, that measurement of the system to the user experience directly. Something that we've been working on a lot recently, that we think is interesting, sort of extends the level of traffic stress method and starts to ask the question about where are you trying to go. It's great to have these connected networks and trying to make sure the parts of your City are connected together. When you think about the destinations that people are getting to, whether that's work or recreation or otherwise, you can start to ask the question how would you measure folks' ability or likelihood to bicycle or walk to those destinations. We've used research out of Portland State that looks at the relative distance that people perceive their trip to be when bicycling compared to the actual distance. If you drive or bicycle on higher stress streets, you typically perceive them to be longer. The little curved chart is meant to indicate the actual amount of distance that people perceive relative to the actual distance that they're traveling. On higher stress streets, it's much higher. You can build facilities that help connect people's experience about how they perceive that distance to their actual travel patterns. This is one example that comes out of the Google Bicycle Vision Plan that we worked on last year. What it shows you is how—there are a number of different metrics that we've used, that take these same data. How far out can you go and experience a low level of traffic stress along that route? If you're getting to one particular destination, you could take this type of analysis and understand and see where some of the gaps are. If the level of traffic stress was—as you would expect because it changes by distance, you would essentially have concentric rings. To the extent you don't have concentric rings around your destination, that's a place where you have a gap and a challenge. You can use that to help identify for a destination- based approach potential gaps that you might have. One way we've used that recently, that we think is pretty interesting, is something that we've TRANSCRIPT Page 9 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 done for the City of Cupertino. We took that same basic approach and essentially asked the question from a city perspective, You might want to look at multiple different types of destinations. Those might include work, and they might include shopping, school and recreation destinations. If you lay those all on top of each other, you can start to ask the question where do we have multiple different gaps that we might want to try to fill with infrastructure improvements. Mr. Mello: Thank you. That concludes our presentation. We'll be glad to answer any questions that you may have. Mayor Burt: Thank you, Josh. Before turning it over to my colleagues, can you dive a little deeper about how these changes will affect how we go about reviewing projects, and maybe some examples or give us some greater flavor. This is a lot of the correct technical information, but I suspect that we're struggling to put it into context. Mr. Mello: I'll let Ron build off this. Under the SB 743 changes, we'll still be allowed to look at level of service as we do today as part of our local development review process. Any Environmental Impact Report (EIR) or any action related to CEQA will need to instead look at the vehicle miles traveled that are generated by a particular development. I'll let Ron talk about the comparison that they're going to make with already built neighborhoods in the surrounding area and how that's actually going to work on a functional basis. Mr. Milam: An important part of the new change here is trying to understand what's acceptable VMT versus unacceptable VMT. The way the State has set up the structure is that the first step in your review process will probably be a screening process. The State's recommended that for projects located in low VMT-generating areas, for example places that are around high quality transit stations, they should basically require no further analysis. You would literally verify the location and check the box. You would also have the potential to screen if you have evidence that the area is low VMT-generating even without transit. The example there might be using forecasts from regional agencies or doing your own forecast and demonstrating that an area generates 15 percent less VMT than the existing citywide average or the regional average. It might be another way that you would screen these projects out. The intent is for infill projects or projects that meet those objectives of 743, to encourage active transportation and promote infill, should require a lot less analysis than you currently do today for vehicle level of service and any other impacts. Josh is right. If you still want to analyze those other effects, you can do that as part of your entitlement process. Consistency with your General Plan would be one of TRANSCRIPT Page 10 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 those options. What the State has set up is really a much more streamlined review process for the projects that meet the State's objectives. Mayor Burt: That helps. I'll have follow-up questions later. Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. My question for Staff. The County guidelines for triggering a TIA sounds like a project with 100 car trips. What determines—is that Palo Alto's guideline as well or what's our standard for what kicks off a TIA and also what kicks off a CEQA? Mr. Mello: For a TIA, we typically start—we look at whether it's going to generate 100 trips during a peak hour. That would immediately initiate a traffic impact analyses. We are typically more stringent and, if we think it's going to have an impact on the local roadway network, we may require it even though it does not meet that 100 peak hour trip threshold. Regards an EIR, I'll let Hillary answer that question. Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you. Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. As the Council's aware, the decision about when an impact is significant versus less than significant and, therefore, when an EIR is needed is a complicated one that really varies by the topic. In the case of a transportation impact, we've used level of service and the thresholds that were explained, Level of Service E for local intersections and Level of Service F for the CMP intersections, as the way to determine when a significant impact would occur and, therefore, when mitigation or an override was needed. Council Member Filseth: Thank you very much. That's helpful. Let me ask it a slightly different way as well. Is it likely that we're going to have projects that require a CEQA that don't require a TIA or is it the other? Ms. Gitelman: That would be unlikely. Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you for the presentation. As I read through the material and things I've read before, how VMT, vehicle miles traveled, is actually calculated and how it shifts over time and how that's addressed isn't really very clear. I may have follow-up questions to this. Can you explain how is VMT calculated? When is it calculated, and what do you do as a result of VMT analyses? Mr. Milam: One of my favorite questions. Let's start with trying to measure VMT today, the observed condition, what's on the ground. We have a TRANSCRIPT Page 11 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 variety of sources that we can use. If you think of land use projects, which is the most common type of project you're going to probably deal with, VMT is just a two variable calculation. It's the number of vehicle trips generated by the project multiplied by trip length, how far are they going. Where do we get that trip information and trip length? We have a variety of sources for trip generation. Some of those come to us from industry standard practices. Some of them come to us from travel models like the VTA model or the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) model. We can also go out and just count the number of cars going in and out of a Trader Joe's, for example. We have lots of ways to get the trip generation information. Trip length can be a little more difficult, because you'd have to keep track of the trip from where it started to where it's ultimately destined. We do have information, though. We have the California Household Travel Survey. We have a similar travel survey at the national level. We also have those same models I mentioned. They give us estimates on trip length. We also have something called big data now. Big data is basically tracking your mobile devices or keeping track of trips based on in-vehicle navigation systems. We can purchase that data and get an even more refined estimate of trip length. We can use all those different sources to come up with estimates or forecasts of VMT out into the future. One of the things to be aware of, though, is when you think about VMT and trying to set thresholds— thresholds really are expectations about performance. One of the challenges with VMT is the level of influence that a city has on VMT really comes through your land use decisions and your transportation network decisions. There's a lot of other things that happen in the economy that can change how much people decide to travel by vehicle. Those can overwhelm the local influence on VMT. One of the things that OPR did in their recommendations—their threshold is actually tied to a legal term called baseline. Basically under CEQA, baseline is the time at which the NOP for the project was released, the Notice of Preparation. If we're doing a project today and released an Notice of Preparation (NOP) today, basically September of 2016 would be our baseline. They're measuring this 15 percent reduction from a baseline condition. If we were to go out in the future two years and have a new project coming forward, their baseline is two years in the future. It kind of accounts for fluctuations in the market, economic activity and some of those other variables that cities and counties don't influence. You could also choose to just have a hard threshold. Not to recognize the influence that the market forces play with VMT would probably not be advised, because there's so much that you don't control for. Council Member Holman: A follow-up to that. I warned you I might have some follow-up to that. Palo Alto has this jobs/housing imbalance. We have all of these people that come to Palo Alto. We want people to come to Palo Alto but not in the means that they are currently, necessarily. If we're using TRANSCRIPT Page 12 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 bases that have been determined by the County for some other entity, how do we know that they apply to Palo Alto projects? We have faced this before, and we used a—I won't pick on any particular standard—some standards that don't apply to Palo Alto in the least. How do we determine what standard really we should be applying here for Palo Alto for a project? Because the markets change—this happens for LOS or for VMT too—you'll have a different impact today than you will five years from now, 20 years now, but we're approving a project today. Did that all make sense? Mr. Milam: It makes a lot of sense actually. VMT actually makes you think differently about your transportation network and the performance you expect. When you look at level of service in contrast, you just look at the individual intersection or roadway segment and you look at how much delay is being caused. When you think about VMT, you can think of it much deeper than that. You can think of it in terms of travel markets. When you think about everyone that's coming into Palo Alto, what are they coming in for? Those are different travel markets if they're coming here to work versus shop, two different markets. If they're coming here for educational purposes, that's a third market. When you think of travel markets, you can actually look at each of those and influence them differently based on again your land use or transportation decisions. That's one of the things that also big data is helping us to better understand about individual communities. We're doing some work, for example, at UC Davis right now, where we've been looking at where do all their faculty and staff travel from and then where do the students that live off campus come from. That was data they didn't really have a good source for. Now we do by tracking these mobile devices. As you start looking at VMT, you can start asking yourselves questions. Are there certain travel markets we're trying to encourage? Are there other travel markets we're trying to discourage? Are the transportation and land use decisions we're making aligned with that? You're going to have a little bit more influence if you start thinking in those terms. As it relates to the data, the models, the tools, what happens in a lot of communities is they don't have the resources oftentimes to create all the data they want or to develop the best models, and they'll defer to the county or the regional agency. Not all communities do that. If this is an important community value, how much vehicle travel are we generating and by what sources, they'll typically build their own model. They'll go out and pay and collect their own data. That's an option that any city or county has to create those better tools. Council Member Holman: One just really quick one. Do communities do that based in large part by Business Registries or—just give me a couple or three examples of what they use to do that. TRANSCRIPT Page 13 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Milam: On the land use side, oftentimes they'll be purchasing employment data, for example, to understand how many employees exist all the way down to the individual parcel or census block group level. They might buy some of that big data from companies to understand those travel markets. On the transportation network side, they'll probably spend a lot of money on the GIS side to make sure all the roads are mapped, all the bike lanes are mapped, all the sidewalks are mapped. You can build network models that really understand all the issues that Hugh was getting at, how accessible is all the land use parcels in the community depending on what mode you're using. Council Member Holman: Thank you a lot. Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: This is really pretty dramatic and really brings about huge changes. I was fascinated that it really concentrates on infill, greenhouse gases, and then interestingly enough in one part of you talked about public health. I'm going to start there, Pat. I've got some more questions. I just want to push on that public health one for a minute, because I found that so interesting. Mr. Milam: Just the reasoning behind it? Council Member Kniss: I can pretty much see in the Minutes from the Planning Commission what the reason behind it is. Do you think the way that it's structured will actually do that? Clearly that was one of the intents. Correct? Mr. Milam: It is definitely one of the legislative intents. Office of Planning and Research (OPR) has definitely put a lot of emphasis on that in their technical advisory and in the guidance they're providing. To the extent that you are changing the metric and you're setting thresholds that are aligned with that objective, yes, it has the potential to change the decisions that you're making, that would encourage those active transportation. Any time you put more land use in closer proximity, which is an infill objective as well, it just makes it easier to walk and bike. If you complement that with the way your General Plan is set up, where you're making sure that all the land areas are accessible by those modes, there's a synergy to that. It can have a very positive reinforcement. Council Member Kniss: We have a Healthy Cities initiative, priority for us. I was intrigued by that. Several other things that are—it looked to me like you went into this in a little more depth with the Planning Commission, but maybe you didn't see it that way. On Page 49 and several other places in TRANSCRIPT Page 14 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 this, you bring up a regional model to track the trips. I'll bring up Menlo Park in a minute. Mayor Burt: Are you referring to Packet Page ... Council Member Kniss: I'm sorry, Packet Page 49. It came up in a number of places, where you talked about—I want to make sure I read it clearly. Mayor Burt: Page 27. Council Member Kniss: VMT allows it to be easier to judge a project regionally, if we wish to do that, than it would have been to do LOS. That's how I read it. Mr. Milam: That's a reasonable interpretation. When you think of measuring VMT in the way OPR has specified it, we're supposed to do what I'm going to call a full accounting of the VMT, keep track of the trip wherever it started and wherever it ended, even if it ends outside the City limits. From a regional perspective, you're evaluating projects on a much broader scale. When you look at level of service, it's pretty myopic. It's intersection by intersection or road segment by road segment. There is a difference in the scale of impact that you're considering. Council Member Kniss: I have often thought of that. We worry a great deal about traffic in Palo Alto, but we have cities on either side and a university that are adding substantially to their square footage. I wanted to ask about that. You had a long discussion about Facebook's growth and what would happen to Menlo Park. I think by 2040 they will be at 45,000. I know that's what it says in the notes; you don't need to look it up. I know it said that. That really begs looking at this regionally long-term. If you're going to get that amount of impact just slightly to the north—we know there's a lot of impact coming from the south—I would really urge us to look at a regional solution or at least a regional evaluation of what is happening. It looked to me like VMT was the most obvious. One last thing on this at least for now. Looking at the LOS in Menlo Park, maybe you could explain it a little further. I have a daughter that lives slightly north, and I drive through Menlo Park all the time. It's the worst possible traffic. I think it's worse than we are on El Camino in Palo Alto. The length of time I wait—I think they even still have their red light photos that go off; although, I've gotten very careful about crossing those two streets, believe me. Maybe you could say a little more. Ms. Peters: Certainly. I think the distinction here is between what the city's goals are in terms of policy and how they determine the effects of new development on their roadways and what triggers an impact versus the actual, lived experience. I think in response to maybe decades of growth TRANSCRIPT Page 15 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 and a lot of local sensitivity to that, Menlo Park has set some very strict and stringent standards. That doesn't mean that the intersection ... Council Member Kniss: That they're following them? Ms. Peters: That doesn't mean, first, that they are able to put the genie back in the bottle. Second, it also means that no city is immune to growth happening outside its borders. A lot of the traffic in Menlo Park is traffic coming across the Dumbarton Bridge and passing through. That traffic filters onto Palo Alto streets, and it goes on up to Redwood City. Just because the city has very stringent standards for the growth within its boundaries doesn't mean it can really control all the traffic passing through it. Council Member Kniss: I really appreciate your saying that. I think there's so much through-traffic. If you're dealing with waves at the same time and they're cutting through the back streets, it really makes it very difficult. That was my question, but I think the LOS question is very interesting, observing both places and driving in both places. Ms. Peters: It's certainly very interesting. Council Member Kniss: Thank you. That's enough for now. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I have quite a few questions. Maybe we can go for brief answers. This is for Josh. Just looking at this chart you gave, there was—I think it was the County has D-plus and E-plus intersections. What are those and do we have those in Palo Alto or do we just use a straight letter? Mr. Mello: You're referring to the table of the congestion management intersection? Council Member DuBois: Yeah. Mr. Mello: I can check on that, but it may mean that it varies and it's E or better if it's E-plus. Council Member DuBois: Usually when we talk about projects, we don't do a plus or minus on the intersection. Mr. Mello: Typically you just speak of the letter grade. TRANSCRIPT Page 16 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member DuBois: I was just curious about that one. I think the report mentioned the increased use of cell phone GPS data and that's going to help with VMT measurement. It seems like you could track miles with the GPS. You could also track time to travel. There was some discussion about the accuracy of the model. With this new data source, do we expect the accuracy to actually improve? Mr. Milam: As data increases over time, you expect the accuracy to definitely get better. One of the things we can do with the data, though—we do a sample-sized check and verify are we getting a representative size or sample such that we can draw conclusions from it. That's one of the things we actually look at when we purchase the data or even before we purchase the data. It's interesting; we're doing that now for VMT purposes. For a long time, most traditional traffic studies will collect traffic counts on a single day for an intersection level of service calculation. It's also a sample trying to represent maybe a typical year. Realistically you'd need multiple days of traffic counts to know whether or not you have a representative sample. As we look at VMT under this new lens, a lot of questions that maybe should have been asked even about the methodology for level of service are starting to get asked, which is a good thing because some we're better prepared to answer than others. The ones that still need a little bit of work will be areas where we focus our time and energy. Mr. Mello: If I could just add. We have started to use big data in some of our analyses. For example, the MTC has a library of all the INRIX, which is the GPS data from people's Garmin devices. MTC has purchased the regional INRIX data for the last couple of years. We're able to use that to actually look at what travel times are along certain corridors. I could see a future where we maybe get away from level of service and we start talking about the actual travel times along a segment of roadway or a corridor, and we're able to look at that at different time periods during the day and see how specific projects influence that travel time. Council Member DuBois: With big data, you won't even need the sample. You could just look at all the data. I saw in here also kind of a new requirement to consider transit delay impacts as well as trip reduction impacts. I wonder if there's been much discussion about how those could interact. It seems like they could impact each other. If you had a TDM that relied on transit, but your transit's overloaded, are you fighting against each other? Has that been discussed? Mr. Milam: That has been discussed. In OPR's technical guidance, they've tried to walk a very fine line between adding demand to transit generally not being an impact. That's under the presumption there's capacity available. TRANSCRIPT Page 17 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Once you're over capacity, then if that new demand results in delays to travelers, that also leads to potentially the expansion of new facilities that will have an effect on the environment. Those type of impacts do need to be disclosed. You do have this tug of war, if you will, under those issues. Under CEQA, we are required to disclose impacts of mitigation measures. Even if we recommend more transit, that could generate some type of environmental effect that we need to disclose. Council Member DuBois: I think you started to touch on this. I'm probably not the only one that's still confused about VMT. It seems like there's different kinds of VMT measures. You could talk about VMT per capita. I think we're predicted to double our senior population. Just as people get older, that number could go down. You could have VMT per employed people. Like Karen said, if the market turns down, your numbers just get better because fewer people are working. You could look at, I guess, total VMT for a city. Are we going to start to see different metrics like that? Mr. Milam: Yes. There's already a lot of different versions of VMT out there. We use VMT for lots of other purposes. This is going to be one of the challenges that we all run into. If you picked up an EIR today, you should see VMT in at least three other sections, not transportation. The energy section, because the amount of mobile travel to and from a site demands and consumes energy. Air quality, when you drive around you're generating air pollutants, and greenhouse gases. We already have VMT in those other three sections. We're going to put it over in the transportation section. Are we putting it in, in the same exact form as those other sections, because there's different methodologies used in those other sections as well? When we set thresholds, again what is an acceptable level of VMT is usually easier to think about when you tie it back to air pollutants or greenhouse gases because there's Federal or State laws that tell you how much of those things you can emit. With transportation, we don't have quite the same direct connection to an environmental resource. It's tied really to your transportation network. If you express VMT as per capita or per employee, it does serve as an efficiency metric. It's actually hard for people to think about and understand what's good VMT versus bad VMT in that case. Council Member DuBois: It's going to be interesting. You started to touch on my next question, which is how do we start to think about congestion. If somebody's sitting in traffic for 30 minutes to go two miles, it's a two mile VMT but it could be a lot of greenhouse gas. We're not really capturing the efficiency of the network anymore. Mr. Milam: To the extent that a community still values traffic and level of service-type calculations, you can still do that and include that information TRANSCRIPT Page 18 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 as part of your entitlement review. We're seeing a lot of communities that are going to do that. They basically have vehicle level of service in their General Plan; they have level of service expectations they want to continue to be met; and they're going to require projects to complete traffic impact studies that look at that in that separate planning channel. They can even condition those projects under the General Plan consistency findings, for example. When you get to VMT, you really are talking about the environmental effects because of that connection to greenhouse gases, air quality. Council Member DuBois: I'm saying even regionally if the entire Bay Area is congested and it takes you four hours to go what would have taken you 1, you're creating an environmental impact even though your VMT is the same. Mr. Milam: When you get into those nuances, one of the things I think you're going to want to think about is not all VMT is equal. If you take it from an emissions standpoint, if everyone's running around in electric vehicles and that electricity was produced with hydroelectric power, not much environmental effect from the driving at that point, but there's still the effect on congestion, there's still the effect on people being able to get around reliably. I think you're going to want to parse out what constitutes an environmental effect versus what constitutes part of your mobility questions, the ability for people to get around reliably. Mr. Mello: If I could also add. I think it's important to think about level of service as more of a symptom of too much VMT. If we reduce VMT, we're going to be reducing the number of trip segments on specific roadway corridors, which could eventually lead—if we have a static roadway network with no improvements, a reduction in VMT over time could eventually lead to a better level of service at a lot of intersections where those trips were passing through or would have passed through if a development didn't implement mitigation measures to reduce VMT. Council Member DuBois: I think you mentioned, Josh, we could actually start to measure time spent on a trip. That was one of my questions. That seems like the perfect measure. How come that's not really the focus, for each mode of transportation how long does it take? Mr. Milam: You could add that as a metric as part of your planning process. If it's related to travel time or delay, the way 743 was structured by the Legislature, you couldn't use it for the purpose of an environmental impact analysis. They have drawn a pretty clear line there. The other thing that Josh has pointed out here, that's really important, is that when you think of congestion, it is a problem, no doubt there. It's also a symptom, and it's a TRANSCRIPT Page 19 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 symptom of the fact that we drive relatively large vehicles with pretty low occupancy rates. If you looked at during the peak periods how many of the vehicles that have five seats only have one driver or maybe even one passenger. We have a seat utilization problem; that's another metric. We started to measure that recently on freeways. Our freeways during peak periods might operate at close to 35 percent of their seat capacity. We have a very inefficient network that's largely caused by the fact we don't conserve trips. We don't really conserve trips because the price of travel just isn't high enough that people are discouraged from making them in the first place. You've got this combination of effects. Some are symptoms; some are problems. If you really want to get to the source of what causes these symptoms, it's the amount of travel and the length that they're going. VMT does become a useful metric to kind of add to that equation. Council Member DuBois: Two more questions. When I looked at this, I didn't really get it. We have our kind of very rural (inaudible) bike paths up here that are in the high stress area. It just really seems—how close are you to Google headquarters seems to be this map. Is that ... Mr. Louch: Yeah, that's right. Essentially it's a distance-based metric. It's relative to that one destination. The further away you are, the more stress you're going to experience on your trip. Council Member DuBois: Even if we have really good bike paths? Ideally you would show those as lower stress, right? Mr. Louch: Just imagine you drew concentric circles at every mile out from that spot and then you were to draw these things in, they'd become shorter if you put in bike paths. They become longer if you put in arterials, streets with no bike lanes essentially. That difference between what it would be like just with concentric circles moving outwards is really the kind of difference that you're talking about. Mr. Mello: Imagine a scenario where we selected a specific parcel within Palo Alto, and then we looked at the typical three mile biking distance around that parcel. We would be able to identify where barriers are within that three mile distance. There may be a very inexpensive project that would expand that biking radius to three miles and capture another 100 or 200 households or business destinations that would then be included in that bike (inaudible). Council Member DuBois: It just seems like optimizing for that one destination isn't as useful. Again, you might have some really nice bike paths that are 10 miles away. That doesn't mean they're stressful bike paths. TRANSCRIPT Page 20 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: Now that we have advanced modeling techniques, you could actually do this in real time for a specific parcel, because you have all the data already input into the model. While this map just shows the Google/North Bayshore campus, once the model is constructed, you could actually look at this in real time for any specific parcel that you were interested in. Council Member DuBois: Seems like that's what you really want, actually a simultaneous, multidimensional view with multiple destinations. Mr. Louch: This is sort of one metric that we use among several that you could get from the same kind of analysis that's done. Others have looked much more along the path and other kinds of questions that you might ask. This is just an example of the kind of thing it can produce. Council Member DuBois: My last question. Thanks for the time. This section on incremental impact and just thinking about incremental impacts. In looking at North Bayshore in particular and Mountain View's thresholds, over time that's gotten to be probably one of the worst—on Shoreline, those intersections are probably some of the worst in the area, just incredible. It's kind of a general question. What went wrong? Why didn't it work? Mr. Mello: Each particular development is being judged as a standalone, when you're looking at the impacts to level of service and to the transportation network. We're not really set up to look at things holistically and look at the ultimate build-out of an area. We tend to look at things very piecemeal. As this development comes forward, what are its impacts going to be? We try to do our best to anticipate development that's already been approved, but that's a difficult thing to do. Over time ... Council Member DuBois: These incremental (crosstalk). Mr. Mello: These small, incremental impacts to level of service and the transportation network are going to add up. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Mr. Mello: Hillary has one thing to add before you move to the next question. Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. Hillary Gitelman again. If I can just add one dimension to that. I'm not super familiar with all of the planning that's been done around Mountain View, the Shoreline area. I would say that when a TRANSCRIPT Page 21 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 General Plan or a specific plan, an area plan is implemented, that's the best opportunity to do a comprehensive and cumulative look at an area. I think Mountain View has done a lot of planning around the Shoreline and West Bayshore area where they've done a comprehensive look at what the impacts would be and then come up with mitigation regimes that would apply and attempt to address some of the impacts that you're referring to. There's always the possibility that at the end of the day they can't mitigate all of the significant impacts, and they adopt overriding considerations when the planning documents went forward. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. A couple of questions. The first is it seems to me that—correct me if I’m wrong; I want to make sure I understand this right—what VMT does is for CEQA. Cities may still have their own level of service. We may also approve, deny or make changes on projects based on level of service. The difference is now this is about a CEQA challenge to a project. Once we move to VMT, I wanted to understand exactly how that works in terms of a CEQA challenge. There's two things I read on the Packet Page. First of all, it said—there was one thing you said—parking impacts will not be considered significant impacts on the environment for select development projects within infill areas served by frequent transit service. Under CEQA with this law, am I reading it correctly that if a project is under- parked for instance or has lots of parking impacts, those are no longer CEQA issues if you're close to transit? Mr. Milam: Yes. One of the changes in 743 that went into effect was that basically parking supply or aesthetic impacts both were basically eliminated as environmental impacts. Again, under your own planning entitlement though, if those are issues for the community, you could still analyze those. Vice Mayor Scharff: It's different. I've noticed we keep talking about under your own you can do it. The question is we can do all of it and analyze our own, but there's no CEQA issue then. No one could sue based on CEQA; basically that comes off the table. We wouldn't have to do overriding considerations under CEQA or any of that. We could have separate standards for parking in our General Plan and say you either meet it or you don't. If you don't meet it, we're not going to approve your project. That's separate under CEQA. Mr. Milam: Correct. Vice Mayor Scharff: What these changes do is they take CEQA off the table in terms of doing overriding considerations and all of that when we talk about VMT. I just want to make sure I'm understanding that correctly. Parking is one of those issues. It said near transit. I guess I wanted to TRANSCRIPT Page 22 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 understand in the Palo Alto context, is there any part of Palo Alto that's not—I'm assuming Downtown is covered, I'm assuming California Avenue, I'm assuming El Camino when we say served by frequent transit services. I'm assuming all those areas would fall within it. Is it a half mile of transit, a mile of transit, or what's the granular level of this stuff? Mr. Milam: The general definition under 743 is a half mile. It's very specific to rail or ferry stations or bus stations where you have at least 15-minute headways in the A.M. and P.M. peak hours. It's a statute kind of definition, so you kind of get a better sense for what's actually included. Vice Mayor Scharff: It's unclear on El Camino for me. Mr. Mello: That would include El Camino. The 22 and the 522 run very frequently. It would also include areas within a half mile of our two Caltrain stations. Vice Mayor Scharff: What about the half mile of the Mountain View San Antonio station? Mr. Mello: Yes. Vice Mayor Scharff: Most of the places where development is done in Palo Alto—not all, but most—would count for that. I wanted to get back to the VMT. I guess I don't understand how VMT actually works. When we look at a project, if it's within a half mile of the fixed rail station, does that make a difference on VMT, how we address—you said something that just caught my ear, check the box without further analysis. When we do a CEQA analysis for a project in Downtown Palo Alto, no matter how much traffic it creates, would you basically just check the box because it's right near the rail station and it's Downtown? Mr. Milam: That is the recommendation from OPR. Basically it's projects locating within that half mile of a high quality transit station or within these low VMT-generating areas that you have the option of verifying that it meets the screening criteria, and then no further analysis is required. The presumption is there's a less than significant impact. There's nothing in the OPR guidance that prevents a city or county from creating a higher threshold. If you don't want to use that and you want to ... Vice Mayor Scharff: Let's go back, and let's assume we don't want to use that. If we don't use it, what is the analysis then on VMT in a Downtown Palo Alto area? TRANSCRIPT Page 23 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Milam: You have to decide your methodology and you have to decide your threshold, what level of VMT change from baseline or current conditions would constitute an impact. A good example is to think about a Trader Joe's. Let's say a Trader Joe's wanted to locate Downtown. If you looked at a Trader Joe's and measured all the trips going to a Trader Joe's and the trip lengths, it's going to generate new VMT. You can measure that. However, if there was no grocery store like a Trader Joe's Downtown and people were having to drive further away to the nearest grocery store, the VMT effect for the neighborhood or for the Downtown community could actually be less, especially if you measure on a VMT per capita basis. Those kinds of nuances in your analysis methodology are going to make a difference. Those are choices that cities and counties will need to make. Then, you'll have to decide what amount of change constitutes a significant impact. Vice Mayor Scharff: Is each city going to get to decide what constitutes a significant impact under CEQA if you don't want to check the box? Mr. Milam: CEQA already allows lead agencies, cities and counties, to have a lot of discretion in setting their thresholds as long as there's not a Federal or State law that governs the environmental topic. We already have some cities and counties that have adopted thresholds. Pasadena, San Francisco, Yolo County, Sacramento County all have slightly different thresholds. San Francisco basically accepted the OPR recommendations on their face. Other places have done a little bit more analysis to figure out what's appropriate for their community. Vice Mayor Scharff: I understand at Trader Joe's. Let's take either an office or condos Downtown or within a half mile of transit. If you build an office building for instance, how would you analyze that? Who knows where the employees are coming? Do you have models that say on average 40 percent, 50 percent is the mode share Downtown or, if it's rented to a tech company, it's 70/30 in terms of the mode share? Do we use historical mode shares? How do you say—you could say so many people are likely to live close by and so it'll have less traffic impacts. I'm just trying to figure out how you'd analyze that and how you'd analyze a residential project, which you could argue has less traffic. Mr. Milam: All of the above would basically apply. Just like they do today, when you do a level of service calculation, especially if you're doing it for the cumulative condition, 2040, your models have to take into account as many of those variables as they can. Our models are simplifications of reality. Oftentimes, a number of those variables are just frankly not included. The same limitations that models have today they'll continue to have for VMT purposes. Those are all legitimate questions you could ask. If you express TRANSCRIPT Page 24 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 VMT on a per capita basis, you may even get into questions as to how many people are going to live in the house that's being built. Is there going to be the standard census number that we got or is it going to be some other number that the developer is trying to justify? Those kinds of questions will come up. Vice Mayor Scharff: It's all about the assumption of where they come from because it's vehicle miles traveled or where they're going if they're (crosstalk). Mr. Milam: Your office example is an important one, especially in the tech sector. As you start getting into offices where the occupants could be very high income occupants, they have the ability to live further away typically and may do so. Not all offices are going to be equal. You have to think about are we going to treat offices all the same. Right now a lot of office projects, if you think of the trip generation estimate, oftentimes will just look up what does an office generate in this area versus trying to differentiate that across a lot of different types and thinking about who the occupant will be. Oftentimes, once you approve that office, unless you've got Conditional Use Permits or some other way of addressing tenant changes, you could have a tenant change over time that could increase the VMT dramatically, that you don't control. Mr. Mello: I think this is going to add a whole other level of discussion when we talk about these development proposals and projects. We're going to be talking about where people are coming from, the trip lengths and the travel market, which Ron talked about earlier. That discussion doesn't really happen when we're talking just about level of service and traffic impacts to adjacent intersections. Vice Mayor Scharff: We could put that aside and just look at our TIA, because we could do a TIA for these projects. That would be based on our General Plan and conditions of approval, and then you wouldn't have to worry as much about the CEQA analysis if you didn't want to. You could just check the box. That's what you said. Mr. Milam: If you wanted to adopt the OPR guidance, they give you a number of screening options that streamline the review if a project is located in the right place. Vice Mayor Scharff: That's most of Palo Alto, so I think we have that choice. I'm trying to understand if we really are concerned about traffic in the City and congestion and all of that. We're obviously going to have the choice. I just wanted to make sure we do in my mind, that we have the choice to TRANSCRIPT Page 25 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 then tie it to our General Plan, continue to use levels of service or look at our own vehicle miles traveled in a TIA rather than in a CEQA analysis. Mr. Milam: You're definitely on the right track. When you think about transportation impact studies, ideally what they would do, whether you're doing them for the General Plan purposes or CEQA, is that they're reflective of your community values as expressed in the General Plan. The discretion that CEQA gives lead agencies to set their own thresholds is why we have Level of Service D in some communities and F allowed in others. You have a lot of discretion there. The idea is that CEQA would help you reinforce your envisioned future and try and point you in that right direction and give you another opportunity to mitigate. What the Legislature has done here by taking away a particular metric and adding VMT, is maybe they've tilted the field a little bit to say there's some State objectives we want to make sure are addressed in your impact analysis, but we're not going to step into the local land use authority or your General Plan. They didn't make any changes to those aspects of other laws. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks a lot. Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Just to follow-up a little bit on the same line. Heard clearly—I think it's in the document—that the choice of methodologies remains with the lead agency. We can continue to set standards as such. You say also that SB 743 is an evolutionary change. Sort of feel like Robert Frost on a winter morning, coming to a pathway. He looks back and says, "My whole life might have been different if I'd taken that other path." I think this is quite a significant change. It changes incentives, how you measure things a little bit, taking out loss of service. I think there were comments in the Planning Commission, congestion a little less of an impact. The VMT tends to work well where densities are higher. The options for mixed use and infill and cutting commute might increase as density increases. As we do our General Plan, that's an important issue for us, how dense are we, how dense do we want to be. We know we are less dense than some of the big cities around us, certainly than San Francisco, than Oakland, than Berkeley. Do we want to be less dense? What's the virtue of less densities? We are the Council Members for Palo Alto, so we have to ask that question for Palo Alto. We're coming out of the 50, 60-year period of flourishing of innovation in this environment. If you really try and describe what that environment is, it's a low density environment, commercial and residential mix, people living and working in the same community 24/7, a tremendously high level of movement of jobs and ideas and an emphasis on face-to-face communications, again 24/7. True for Palo Alto, true for our TRANSCRIPT Page 26 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 neighbors; although, our density is still 30 percent the average of Silicon Valley. That would indicate that for this community to do what it has—note the Silicon Valley revolution did not take place in a center city, where economies of scale and big players dominate. It could not have happened there, and it didn't. That would imply that keeping LOS measures of congestion is a critically important aspect of how we think about our future communities. I think in a way SB 743 for us at least is missing out on something that is critically important to us. Talk a little bit about LOS. LOS, we've had problems with, a lot of complaints with. There's some admissions in here that queuing data, streets, busy streets with single—close to each other don't get measured very well through LOS, and yet that is a chronic problem on some of our streets. Four or five years ago, the recommendation was made to use time from Point A to time to Point B as a way of measuring the impact of congestion on people. I notice in our existing conditions report there is one table that has that, but I've never seen it in any other City document. Why do we have that? You talk about the wonders of technology and what we can do with the VMT. Why can't we do that with LOS? Cumulative impacts, another critical problem with LOS. Long-term cumulative impacts come from the VTA model. How much is the whole region growing and what does it mean? There's no way of accumulating projects that we vote on and the impacts it might have in the future. All of LOS is based upon the data generated by the traffics model. I notice Page 7 says traffics data is outdated. A slew of problems exist with LOS, but I think as a Council Member from Palo Alto I would say that we absolutely need to maintain and enhance our ability to use LOS. Our goal should not be necessarily to move back towards the scale economics of the 19th century central city, but rather to enhance mobility in a balanced and mobile community. Let's keep an effective and an improved LOS in place. Mayor Burt: I had a few follow-up questions and comments. One I share concerns and questions of my colleagues as to why the VMT is not also looking at the time of travel of a given distance. It's interesting. When we look at that legislative evolution from AB 32, you made the point that we aren't looking at the type of vehicle. If we're looking at greenhouse gas emissions as a primary driver here, then we need a more nuanced approach. If we look at congestion in the region and locally, then we also may need a somewhat different approach. We need to not look at just vehicle miles, but how congested each of those miles are. It sure looks to me like this has got an important element to it of having us examine vehicle miles traveled. It's inadequate from a global level. I mean by global really State level looking at one size fits all. You've said that within cities we have this ability to layer our own requirements. That, I think, emphasizes—we have a later session tonight on our Transportation Element of our Comprehensive Plan or a General Plan. These changes will elevate, I think, the importance of getting TRANSCRIPT Page 27 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 that right, because now that's the primary tool or the other entitlement conditions are the primary tools rather than CEQA by which we can assure projects mitigate their impacts. That's a change, so we have to figure out how to do that. Josh, have you been thinking about this? Does it change how clear we must be within the Comp Plan on some of these as opposed to guiding principles that they need to become more concrete? Mr. Mello: I think because we're still in the midst of the changes that are being driven by SB 743, our Notice of Preparation or the EIR for our Comp Plan was filed before these changes took effect. Hillary can jump in, but I don't think the EIR for the Comp Plan looks at VMT outside of the sections that Ron mentioned around greenhouse gas emissions, energy and air pollutants. We're certainly here tonight to hear any feedback you may have as to how that integrates with the Comp Plan and the Transportation Element of the Comp Plan. Ms. Gitelman: Just briefly. Hillary Gitelman again. In the Comp Plan EIR, we did look at a wide variety of metrics because we knew this change was heading towards us. In the transportation section, if you look at that, we looked at intersections, level of service on links, vehicle miles traveled and other metrics that might help communicate our existing transportation environment and then what we think the environment will be like in 2030, which is our horizon year. On the question you posed about the importance and relevance of making our General Plan or our Comprehensive Plan clear when it comes to these issues, the Citizens Advisory Committee (CAC) is recommending, as you'll see later this evening, that we memorialize our desire to maintain a focus on congestion and level of service in the planning realm, even if it's not there in the CEQA realm. The CAC is recommending it. In the Transportation Element, we articulate that desire to do both things, vehicle miles traveled and level of service going forward. Mayor Burt: I was mostly referring to how the Comp Plan will now provide conditions of approval for projects and that the impact of that will be more important in the absence of CEQA looking at level of service. Is that generally the direction we're headed if we're wanting to do that? We've got to be more explicit that way? Mr. Mello: The CAC, as Hillary said, has been clear that they want to maintain the performance measures that we have related to congestion, even in spite of the changes that are occurring to CEQA. Mayor Burt: Let me give one more stab at what I'm trying to convey. I hear that the CAC is recommending that we retain those, and that seems like an appropriate thing. In addition to retaining them, their importance in TRANSCRIPT Page 28 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 terms of reviewing projects and to assure that projects minimize the impacts that we want them to avoid, those Comp Plan—I don't know if I call them conditions—aspects become more important than they have in the past. Ms. Gitelman: You're absolutely correct, Mayor Burt. We're taking this study of congestion and the standard around level of service out of the CEQA context, where it's very clear, and putting it into the context of General Plan consistency. When the Council considers a project, you will be considering whether it's consistent with the Comprehensive Plan. If it isn't, if it deviates from the level of service standard of the congestion levels that the Council wants to see, the Plan consistency will be your hook to impose conditions on a project. Mayor Burt: Historically we've had a Plan that had a lot of competing interests. I can certainly see that if we continue to have that level of competing interests, then whether projects comply becomes even more discretionary. The suggestion to me is that we're going to need to have the Comp Plan or other conditions of approval become clearer than they are today. Council Member Filseth, did you have another? Go ahead. Council Member Filseth: I'm sorry. I wanted to ask a quick follow-on question. Are we going to be commenting on this later or is this (crosstalk). Mayor Burt: At this time, we have two speaker cards. If anybody else wishes to speak, please bring a card forward. What I can do is if we're kind of wrapping up this round, I could go to the public, and then we could come back for any final comments. Council Member Filseth: I just had a quick question I meant to ask. Under CEQA with VMT, do we delineate between vehicle miles traveled that are sort of within the city limits of Palo Alto versus the region? For example, if it's five miles from Sunnyvale to the JCC and five miles from Mitchell Park Library to the shopping center, do we delineate between those or is it both just five miles? Mr. Milam: For purposes of 743, the OPR guidance suggests that you do not truncate the VMT based on political boundaries. The idea is to have as full accounting of the VMT being generated by the project as possible. That's also similar to what happens in greenhouse gas analysis. It can be different over in air pollution. Air pollution, dependent on the pollutant, there's different regulations that apply. Sometimes we look at just the VMT around an intersection if it's for carbon monoxide, for example. Council Member Filseth: If I understand what you just said, for CEQA purposes, then VMT is just VMT. For traffic impact analysis purposes and TRANSCRIPT Page 29 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 General Plan purposes in Palo Alto, you might have a VMT within a city limits metric if you wanted. Mr. Milam: Yeah. If you think about your General Plan, VMT is a composite metric. It comes out at the end of the planning process. Once you've put all the land uses that you want in there and you put in your transportation network, we run these models and we forecast the future. What comes out of it is the total amount of new VMT that you're going to generate. You can express that as VMT per capita or some other form. You can also think of it as a VMT budget. Every city and county in this state right now has a VMT budget based on the allowed amount of growth in their General Plan. Whether they want to convert that to a CEQA threshold is part of the equation here with 743, because they haven't had to think about it in that context before. Council Member Filseth: Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois, did you have something else before ... Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) Mayor Burt: Sure. Council Member Kniss: I just want to go back to this regional issue for a minute, which is Packet Page 48 and 49. It says you go further and say that "while a regional model has a boundary, the MTC" and so forth. Is that one that you would suggest using in this case or are you just saying this is a possibility, it could be used? I don't know how far you were saying something like this. The regional issue is so interesting. Mr. Milam: It's one of the models available. The VTA model, the MTC model, they're both regional models encompassing a large area, basically encompassing the entire Bay Area. There's also the California statewide model. All those models do have a boundary. The statewide model stops at the state line. To the extent that we're trying to do our best of accounting for all of the VMT, you want to use the best available data or the best available model. Those may happen to be the best available at the time. In the future, we may even have better models. Council Member Kniss: Thank you. I appreciate that further answer. TRANSCRIPT Page 30 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: We now have four members of the public to speak. Each one will have up to three minutes. Our first speaker is Arthur Keller, to be followed by Yoriko Kishimoto. Arthur Keller: Thank you very much. This is a very interesting discussion. I am speaking as an individual and not in any official capacity. Firstly, the presentation talked about the traffic impact analysis being based on level of service thresholds and discussed how Menlo Park's thresholds are more strict than Palo Alto's. We could adopt their standards. They're easy to measure. It's just substituting one set of numbers for another once we convert level of service to being a General Plan or Comp Plan level of impact. Actually, I would create a law that would implement that. That's actually very easy to do. The other thing is that there's another problem with our traffic impact analysis, and that is the baseline for comparing the impact of development. When you look at traffic impact, you compare the baseline with the traffic being proposed by new development. We typically use the highest theoretical use of a building, even that's empty, even if the building has been empty for years. For example what happened with Alma Plaza. We considered that baseline as if it were fully occupied even though it wasn't occupied for years. That's kind of crazy. That level of baseline can be higher than was ever achieved in terms of the amount of traffic by that existing development. The baseline, I think, should be the actual measure of traffic generated by the existing development within the last two years. Doing so would discourage kicking out the current tenants in anticipation of development, which is also a bad thing to do. We know that Alma Plaza was allowed to go to ruin because it was basically empty for years. We want to discourage that. Congestion also has the impact, as Council Member Kniss mentioned, of harming public health. As cars are idling, they actually put out a lot of pollution. When they start and stop and start and stop, that actually adds more pollution than if cars are just flowing. Also, the assumption that reduction of VMT necessarily leads to LOS is not the case. For example, let's suppose you consider putting a big housing project along one route or putting a big housing project along another route but a mile closer. The mile closer along a different route would reduce the VMT by the number of people times one mile. That second route would have greatly increased level of service impacts. It may in the aggregate work out, but in terms of what the impact on the people along that other route is, they will certainly feel the increase in congestion. It's not necessarily the case that reducing VMT reduces LOS. It could result in local impacts to LOS where you make it worse for some people and perhaps better for others. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Former Mayor Kishimoto, to be followed by Neilson Buchanan. Welcome. TRANSCRIPT Page 31 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Yoriko Kishimoto: Thank you. As you remember, I was the Chair of the Transportation Chapter for the current Comp Plan. I do want to take the opportunity to thank the Council and Staff for all the work that's been done in the last five or six years on Residential Preferential Parking Program (RPP), TMA. A lot of great work has been done. I'm here actually—want to reinforce the letter that you got from Adina Levin. It was sent to you by email. She always has very good comments for us as Friends of Caltrain. Her first comment has to do with the level of stress metric for assessing bicycle network. I guess that's really just to adopt them sooner rather than later. They will lead to better outcomes and identify weak links. Second has to do with the LOS versus mode share and VMT issue. Maybe this one I will add a little bit of my own editorial comment. I may disagree a little bit with CAC on this one. I do agree we should collect LOS data for local impacts. In terms of what you do about it, because we know LOS is terrible at most intersections, we use more the mode share and the VMT per capita. A number of you mentioned travel time as well. Those three are probably the most important analytics in terms of what you do. Hopefully we don't want to expand intersections and roads. Hopefully we gave that up. It'll help us analyze more what we need to do. I think what we all agree on is reducing traffic in Palo Alto. I would love to see us adopt no net new trips or no net new VMT overall for Palo Alto. It really doesn't need to get any worse than it is today. If I don't stay all evening, I wish you the best. You're doing a good job. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Neilson Buchanan to be followed by our final speaker, Arthur Liberman. Neilson Buchanan: Thank you. I don't want to get into the nuances of the evolving transportation sciences. That's way beyond almost everybody in the room's capacity of coming up with which way traffic is going to be managed and measured. I want to get more practical, to some operational issues. I still argue that the Council could direct that the Business Registry be enriched. We've got Transportation Demand Management being well run by Stanford. We have an evolving transportation management at Stanford Research Park, the Medical Center. All those big pockets can be able to really measure all these things about where their employees come from, how often, what time of day or night. We have 24/7 operations to make it just even more interesting. I think it's time to move the Business Registry from the development side of the Planning Department to the transportation professionals. What I think should be done simultaneously is to require that the employees' home ZIP Code be collected. With that origin data, another big cluster of employment in the City would be measurable. The TMA is still languishing. It doesn't have a budget to survive on. It's buried in the very back of the agenda today as an information item. I searched to even find TRANSCRIPT Page 32 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 where it was. Until you put some money into the TMA, there's no sense in asking the employees where they live. Somewhere it's not been integrated, and I urge you to create some changes that operationalize management of the traffic. Just for common sense, it just seems to be neglected on one quadrant of our employees, those that don't fall into the aforementioned employee groups. It seems to me it's just a wasted opportunity at very low cost. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our final speaker is Art Liberman. Arthur Liberman: Good evening, Mayor and Councilpeople. My name's Art Liberman; I live in Barron Park. I want to focus on one aspect of the presentation, which was the concept of stress for cyclists, which I understand can be very useful. It also can create erroneous perceptions and false measures. Specifically, the analysis in the report ignored the question of pedestrian safety largely. Specifically, pedestrian safety on multiuse paths, also called shared paths. I'm as happy as anyone to see so many people on bicycles these days. For many people, a shared path is a destination in itself. It's not a transportation corridor. It's particularly true for heavily used shared paths that are in or through or alongside a park, the ones in Barron Park, the Baylands and Shoreline Park in Mountain View. These are places for outdoor exercises, for jogging and walking by pedestrians for enjoyment of the environment, for relaxation and for cycling. Google contributed to the formulation of stress in this report. As stated, Google focused on commuters. It ignored the other users of the path and the importance of the other uses of the path to the community. As a consequence, shared paths are viewed by the transportation people as having the lowest stress. I think that's a mistake. It's how it is written. The lowest stress, called LTS-1 "is assigned to multiuse paths and these are paths," the report goes on, "that demand little attention from cyclists." Little attention from cyclists. That ignores that cyclists must (inaudible) to watch out for a kid running out, a dog stretching its leash, a pedestrian turning around, an elderly person have difficulty, mobility problems that in fact may not be able to be diagnosed by a speeding cyclist. In summary, saying that there's traffic stress for all multiuse paths, as does this report, can send the wrong message to cyclists. I call upon the transportation people to clarify this. I challenge them to consider and compute pedestrian stress and not just bicycle stress on multiuse paths. I'd like to see—actually when I came to see measuring bicycle and pedestrian comfort and stress, something that actually had to do with pedestrians' comfort and stress, there was really nothing very much presented this evening. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. We'll now return to the Council for comments. It's almost a quarter to 7:00 P.M. when this item is scheduled to be ended. If I TRANSCRIPT Page 33 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 can encourage people to budget their comments within that timeframe. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I'll try to be efficient. To start out with a negative just to get it out of the way. I really appreciated, because it's very telling, the separate Attachment B that you provided. It's very telling because if you look at Palo Alto's LOS ratings, we don't fare very well. Consistently we don't far very well. Those are on Page 3 and—I marked the other Page, but I'm not going to come up with it as fast as I want to. We're consistently Ds and Es with a couple of Cs thrown in. We don't fare very well. What have we been doing isn't really that helpful. I look on the other hand at Menlo Park—this is on the presentation. I really wish—can I ask you guys please to put page numbers on these presentations. They continue to come back, so it's very hard to refer to a page. The one that says nearby jurisdiction thresholds. Menlo Park has an LOS C at collector and local intersections. That's the best of the ones that are presented here, Mountain View, Menlo Park, Los Altos and Palo Alto. They've been doing something that's better than us. Someone else said—I agree—that just because the VMT gets better, it doesn't mean that our LOS is going to get better. The example that Arthur Keller gave and I could give a couple of other examples. One thing doesn't necessarily lead to the other. I also look at—I think we'd be prudent to work towards no net new trips. If we're really going to look towards stringent TDM programs and an effective TMA, I think that's where we ought to be headed. I agree with Council Member Kniss and her comments about—somebody else said something too about the LOS isn't just about greenhouse gases. It's also about stress, quality of life, frustration. If I look at whatever page it is, multimodal levels of service that was in the presentation also, that looks at LOS for automobile, bicycle, pedestrian and buses, this one that has the grid of 12 images. I just want to point out and want people to notice that the AB LOS for pedestrians, look at the width of those sidewalks. They're nice, wide sidewalks. They're not stressful to traverse. That's something that we have not been doing very well, but I know we can get there. Baseline, I absolutely agree with that. There are other examples I could give too. There was a project in East Bayshore that used the existing baseline for an empty building. That uses a baseline when it was occupied, but it was an empty building. Baseline for existing conditions and not grandfathering what was there before. I think when we're implementing, as we're required to for CEQA purposes, the VMT, one of the descriptions that was given for that is it's an efficiency metric. I'm not sure if I understand what that language is meant to be. I think as we try to describe VMT and how to utilize it and the impacts of using it, not using it or using it conjunction with LOS is really critical. Having our own standards, I think, are going to be important. Sorry to say that because it's more work, but I don't know how this—in the ways that we are unique as TRANSCRIPT Page 34 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 described earlier, I don't know how we could not be that. One other comment, which I think is my last one, trying to be very quick and efficient here. Our Comp Plan talks about not expanding roadways. It was mentioned in the Staff Report either to us or to the Planning Commission—I don't remember which—about if we do this, this and this, we won't have to expand roadways. We ain't expanding roadways. That's not our community character or standard. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: To keep us on schedule, I think I'll send Staff my lengthier comments, just to focus on a couple of things. One idea we haven't talked about is exploring some ways to put maybe some teeth into our traffic studies. I think we should explore methods to motivate more accuracy over time. For example, if we had a follow-up after a project was completed and actually compared the forecast to the actual, something along those lines. I agree, I think, with a lot of the comments that were made. I'd like maybe an item to come back to Council at some point in the future to evaluate our LOS thresholds. I do think we should really try to get to time spent traveling per mode and really look at impacts. If we make a change and it lengthens bike travel time, that's the most important thing, or if we make other impacts and it impacts car travel time. I think with this GPS data from smart phones that's going to be very possible to do. A couple of years ago, I actually spoke to the VP of Business Development at Waze. They are providing real time data to some big cities. I think we should continue to look at data sources that may not be traditional traffic management companies, but could have some really interesting data sets. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: Slightly different way to address this. I remember sometime during the past year at the League of Cities we had someone who spoke to us, whose name I don't remember at the time. His emphasis was on how LOS is actually determined. Can you describe that, one of you? Mr. Milam: Presuming you're talking about vehicle level of service maybe at an intersection? Council Member Kniss: Yes. Mr. Milam: What it's trying to measure is vehicle delay. That delay calculation consists of a number of factors, the volume of cars going through the intersection, the geometric design of the intersection, how many lanes does it have and also how the traffic control operates. If it's a traffic signal, TRANSCRIPT Page 35 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 how much green time is allocated to each movement? We take all those variables into calculation. If we use really advanced models, we might even take into account the types of vehicles as well as the types of drivers. Council Member Kniss: To interrupt, what time of the day? Mr. Milam: Typically it's for the A.M. and P.M. peak hours, the commute hours 7:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M., somewhere in that range, and between 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. You can do it for any time of day. Some people like to look at the lunch-time hour, because that can also be a peak in a lot of communities. Traditionally what you're trying to do is size your roadways using vehicle level of service. The p.m. peak hour is the one that tends to get the most focus. Council Member Kniss: My point being what you're making. These are done at the peak hour of our traffic. If we were a really persuasive Council with the public, we might say, as we have done with the TMA particularly at Stanford Research Park, "Is there some way you can change people's hours?" Is there a way that you can use something like Scoop or Lyft Line or something like that more effectively? Maybe there's another way that we can look at this to say—I know when I travel Alma, if I want to travel Alma south at 5:00 P.M. and there isn't some reason to do it, I'd be foolhardy to do that. That's an awful time to go south. In many ways, if we could get people to not go around elementary schools in the morning, which is really a distressing time to try and drive anywhere. Maybe it's us that needs to say, "Can you work together," which is what TMAs do. Is there another way that we can approach this? Our traffic, as Yoriko said, is pretty bad. The perception is that it's pretty bad. There are times of the day when it's also extremely light. Just another idea. I did want to point out that I remember whomever it was who spoke to us spoke a lot about when LOS is taken and how you can attempt to persuade your community to use it to their advantage rather than their disadvantage. Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. I thought this was a fascinating discussion. Thanks for teeing it up. I think the most interesting thing in my mind is this whole when we now look at CEQA documents, they're most likely in Palo Alto not going to find a significant impact on this stuff, which means that it really does come down to the General Plan and how we tee up what we want our community to look like in terms of congestion. In some ways that's liberating, because now we can do—it seems that we can do something that's very local and very important to what's important to people in Palo Alto as opposed to having a rigid structure of CEQA. It also takes away—if TRANSCRIPT Page 36 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 we do approve a project, there's unlikely to be a successful CEQA challenge based on either parking or level of service or congestion. I think what would be really interesting is we could just as a Council focus on LOS. It seemed that there might be better metrics for congestion, which is really what people—which I think Tom hit on it quite a bit. I agree it's how long does it take me to get from A to B. I was wondering how easy it'll be for us to develop how do we get from A to B when we look at new development and when we look at projects that come before us and whether or not we could build those in as opposed to level of service frankly. We could have mitigations. Frankly, that could create all projects. I think it was Hillary who said that. It could be a hook to get TDM programs for all new projects basically and provide that nexus, which would be a real positive step forward. Do you have any reaction to that in terms of better than LOS or is LOS really what we're stuck with if we want to try and still deal with congestion issues? Mr. Mello: I think we have the tools to look at historical travel times along a specific corridor by time of day, day of the week. Many of the modeling tools that we use would still tend to look at intersection operations in order to determine the travel time along a corridor. You'd probably just be looking at a collection of intersections and looking at the level of service and the amount of delay. I don't quite know that the tools are there yet to predict travel times for a corridor as a whole without getting down to the intersection level and doing exactly what we do today. Perhaps, looking at it as more of a collection of intersections and maybe looking at a more—the VMT tools will give us maybe a better handle on where trips are originating from and traveling to and help us with our trip distribution calculations that we use in TIAs. I don't know that we're necessarily there yet as a science to predict, to get to the level that we need to get to. Vice Mayor Scharff: Even with all the big data you were talking about, being able to buy from Waze and being able to model it, looking at what actually happened? Mr. Mello: I think we're close. I would like to see us get to a place where we have a dashboard, if you will, that shows the real time performance of our transportation network, and we buy some of the data we need to look at how our roadways are performing in real time ... Vice Mayor Scharff: Can we have it next year? Mr. Mello: ... and not have to do this historical audit that we typically do when we're doing these kind of analyses. TRANSCRIPT Page 37 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Milam: If I could just add. There are better models available to forecast travel time in the future. Josh is right. They do require you to actually model, though, individual intersections because those are the bottlenecks or constraints in the network. Not a lot of cities have those kind of models built. We've built one, for example, in Pasadena where their street system is relatively built out and the kind of development they have is infill. It basically moves traffic around and creates delays. The freeway also has an effect. Those models do require more data and a lot more investment in the tools than a lot of communities have been willing to spend. The question for the community is really how much do you value being able to manage your traffic, because it does require a whole different set of tools than a conventional TIA typically requires. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. Mindful of time, I'll try to be quick here. First of all, thank you very much for coming and conducting this with us tonight. This has been very interesting. I think it makes perfect sense for CEQA to drop LOS as a metric. LOS and VMT are two very different things. LOS is more of a quality of life thing, and VMT is (inaudible) anyway more about emissions and greenhouse gases. CEQA is supposed to be environmental, and VMT is an environmental thing. LOS really kind of is not, other than as some people pointed out the second order effect of people idling at intersections and stuff. I do think from a practical perspective the Vice Mayor has kind of an interesting point about you can sue under CEQA, and you may not be able to under other kind of things. With respect to the quality of life issue, everybody knows traffic's a problem. The thing about LOS—it's really trip time. If we can get to better measurements of trip time, that's a step forward too. For the moment, what we've got is LOS. That's really how the community measures the problem. They say, "It takes me this long to get from California Avenue to Meadow on El Camino." That's how the community defines the problem. There's a bunch of dialog in the Minutes and floating around the ecosystem of people saying we're moving away from LOS, we're not going to need that anymore, and so forth. The risk there is if we drop LOS as sort of a key metric, we're kind of moving away from the community because that's how the community sees it. There's been some discussion here tonight and also in the Minutes of meetings and stuff like that, that there ought to be some correlation between vehicle miles traveled, if you do it the right way, and LOS. I hope that’s true. If it is true, then we're going to see it in LOS. I think we need to keep LOS, and I think everybody here agrees with that. I do agree with Council Member DuBois that we ought to look at thresholds as well. The TRANSCRIPT Page 38 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 other thing in here that I actually thought was pretty interesting was some of the discussion about bicycle LOS and LTS. I thought some of that was very interesting. The point about it's hard to compare car LOS versus bike LOS versus pedestrian LOS is really important. Until we figure that out, we ought to be looking at pedestrian LOS as part of our pedestrian infrastructure programs, bike LOS as part of bike infrastructure programs, and so forth as opposed to trying to do a real fungible multimode LOS thing. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Just my final thoughts. One, I don't want to have us think that our Comp Plan or General Plan is the only way in which we will be essentially setting entitlement conditions, because the other is that the Comp Plan will drive changes to the Zoning Code. That's probably where we'll have even more clear conditions than the references to Comp Plan consistency. I just want to make sure everybody's thinking along those lines. Our prior Comp Plan was a process of a half dozen years after adoption of the Comp Plan before we had the Zoning Code changes catch up to it. This time Director Gitelman has been talking about having those things roughly align. That'll be a challenge, but it seems like it's going to be even more important to not have a lag between the Zoning Ordinance updates and the Comp Plan adoption in light of what we're talking about here. One other final thought. I am really intrigued by this bike level of service and that the Google bike network looks at—it really looks at it similar to how we're saying we should with automobiles, which is not just distance but time traveled and obstacles to movement. The other dimensions that we'll want to be thinking about is, at it starts becoming a major player, the role of electric bikes, which extends the bike range, has different travel patterns and may be a major new mode share if we think of it as somewhat different from biking or an extension of biking that will significantly expand it. We need to be giving those considerations greater emphasis. It's a bit hard to do it because we don't see it yet, but I think it's really on the horizon. It would behoove all of us to be thinking about how to plan for that. Thank you very much for a very informative if still somewhat challenging topic. Where do we go if we want to change State law? All roads lead to Sacramento I suppose. Thank you all. TRANSCRIPT Page 39 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Special Orders of the Day 2. Selection of Applicants to Interview on September 27, 2016 for the Historic Resources Board, the Parks and Recreation Commission, the Planning and Transportation Commission, and the Storm Drain Oversight Committee. Mayor Burt: Our next item is selection of applicants to interview for our Historic Resources Board, the Parks and Recreation Commission and the Planning and Transportation Commission and the Storm Drain Oversight Committee. I want to make sure everybody's seen that at our places the City Clerk gave us a handout. We had, I guess, three applicants who had their applications come in essentially the calendar day of the deadline, but after the close of business. Upon looking at our Code, the Clerk has some discretion on being able to extend the deadline. Beth, do you have anything that you want to share as far as a recommendation? Are you looking for Council guidance on this? How do you want to proceed? Beth Minor, City Clerk: Beth Minor, City Clerk. I'm looking for Council direction on this. In the At-Places item that we sent you today and is at places tonight, we did include the three additional applicants for you to review for this evening and to include them in the balloting. Mayor Burt: If the Council would like to allow these additional applicants to be considered for interviews, we need to give the Clerk that guidance. It's actually, I think, the Clerk's discretion. The Council could reopen applications, but that would delay the process. The Clerk has discretion to extend the deadline at her own volition. She is looking for our thoughts on that. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I would move that we authorize the City Clerk to utilize her discretion to keep the ... Council Member Kniss: I would second it. MOTION: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member Kniss to authorize and request the City Clerk to include the additional applications received for the recruitment and included in the At-Place Memorandum, for Council’s consideration for interviews. Mayor Burt: Let me just make sure that's in order for us to actually take a Motion on something that's within the Clerk's discretion. It'd be only advisory. TRANSCRIPT Page 40 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Molly Stump, City Attorney: In that spirit, I think it's a legitimate way for the Council to express its view. Mayor Burt: Just want to make sure we're following procedures correctly. Council Member Holman: Just to finish the Motion. To authorize and encourage the City Clerk to utilize her discretion to include those three applicants whose applications were received on the calendar date of the deadlines. Mayor Burt: Did the seconder want to comment at all? Don't need to? Council Member Kniss: Only that I think it's wonderful that Beth gets to make the decision. Mayor Burt: Thank you. I see no more comments. Please vote. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Burt: The three additional applications at our places will be included within our discussion of which applicants to interview. The reason I frame it that way is that we have most often interviewed all applicants, but we now have 16 for the Planning and Transportation Commission. Is that correct? Ms. Minor: That's correct. Mayor Burt: With 10 minutes per Commissioner and no time gap in between for shuffling chairs ... Ms. Minor: Mayor Burt? Mayor Burt: Yes. Ms. Minor: Planning and Transportation interviews are 15 minutes. Mayor Burt: Fifteen, excuse me. Ms. Minor: All other Boards are 10 minutes. Mayor Burt: We're probably looking at Planning and Transportation Commission 4 1/2-plus hours if we interviewed all 16. Council Member Kniss: A question, Mr. Mayor. Mayor Burt: Yeah. TRANSCRIPT Page 41 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member Kniss: Is it required that it be 15 minutes or can that be at our discretion? Mayor Burt: Good question. I believe it is at our discretion. They're typically 15 is my recollection. While you're looking for that, Council Member Holman, did you have something? Council Member Holman: I'm going from memory here, because I didn't look this up ahead of time. I do remember that we specifically made the decision to interview the other Boards and Commissions for 10 minutes, Planning and Transportation Commission (PTC) for 15 minutes given the gravity and breadth of their purview. I think it's codified, but I can't swear to that. It may be in our Procedures and Protocols. That's probably where it is. Mayor Burt: That would be the place. Those are discretionary, but that is certainly our practice and has been our intention. If we have any questions at this, but before entertaining a Motion, I have one speaker who wishes to speak. If we don't have—we'll go through—are these questions or comments? Council Member DuBois: (inaudible) Mayor Burt: Go ahead, Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I just wanted to comment. I agree with the 15 minutes. I saw the Clerk had suggested that if we don't interview everybody that we see who gets five votes, then we'd interview those people. A little bit concerned about that. I think it's almost—that's the same number of votes they would need to be on the Commission. I was actually going to propose maybe we do four votes and see how many people there are. It's not a Motion, but it's ... Mayor Burt: Let's wait until we hear from members of the public generally. I do share your concern. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I would actually be open to interviewing everybody and breaking it up into two separate meetings. Mayor Burt: I didn't see it. It's not on here. Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. There's another way we could do this. We could actually break it up, and they could—we could have three Council Members or four Council Members. We don't have to all interview together. Then, it could be on and we could look at it. That's another way we could TRANSCRIPT Page 42 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 interview all people if we chose to go that route. I also think there's a difference between voting on the Planning and Transportation Committees and the other one. I know, for instance, I'd probably like to definitely interview all the people for the Historic Resources Board (HRB) and the Parks and Recreation, because there's not that many. I guess after we hear from the public I'd like to make a Motion that we at least interview all those people. Mayor Burt: We have one speaker, Rebecca Eisenberg. Welcome. Rebecca Eisenberg: Hi. I'm not really speaking. I'm just saying I'm one of those 16 people who applied to be on the Planning and Transportation Committee. Because I don't know any of you personally, I just wanted to go up here to say I think I could really be an asset, and I hope you'll consider interviewing me. That's all. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Now, let's return. If someone wants to propose— Council Member Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: I'll just move that we interview all applicants for the HRB and the Parks and Rec Commission. Mayor Burt: We also have the Storm Drain, right? Vice Mayor Scharff: Do we? I haven't seen the Staff Report. Mayor Burt: I didn't see applicants. Where do we stand on that? The Storm Drain Oversight. Ms. Minor: The Storm Drain Oversight, we've made the decision not to interview. This Committee will be disbanded in the spring of 2017. If the new Storm Management Fee is approved, a new committee will be formed. MOTION: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Kniss to interview all applicants for the Historic Resources Board and the Parks and Recreation Commission. Mayor Burt: Who seconded? I'm sorry. Council Member Kniss: I did. Council Member DuBois: Council Member Kniss. Mayor Burt: Did you want to speak to your Motion? Vice Mayor Scharff: No. TRANSCRIPT Page 43 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: You want to speak to the second? Let's vote on the board. That passes unanimously. We will interview all applicants to the Historic Resources Board and the Parks and Recreation Commission. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Burt: Now, we'll entertain a Motion on how to proceed on the Planning and Transportation Commission. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I'd move that we interview all applicants. Council Member Schmid: Second. MOTION: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Council Member Schmid to interview all applicants for the Planning and Transportation Commission. Mayor Burt: That's Motion by Council Member Wolbach, second by Council Member Schmid. Do you want to speak to your Motion? Council Member Wolbach: I think for all us, there are probably some people we're more inclined to support at this point and others who we each might be less inclined to support. The point of having an interview process is to move past just having the written applications. I think we can manage this. I think the gravity of the PTC is significant enough that we owe it to ourselves, the applicants and the community to hear from all applicants. Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Just to reiterate the point that PTC is extremely important for us, for the City. People have volunteered their time and effort, and I think we can only make a good choice by hearing from each one of them. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: I have often argued that we shouldn't interview everyone. I've looked at the list of these candidates, and it's actually really hard to say who shouldn't be interviewed. There's actually very competent and impressive resumes from most of the candidates frankly. Most of these people, at least I don't know who they are. I've met obviously a few of them. I think it's really hard to say that we shouldn't interview everyone on this. Given the time, I'm actually really concerned about how much it takes. It is an important Commission. I just think maybe we should go down to 10 minutes and interview everyone. I'd make that amendment, that we do it in TRANSCRIPT Page 44 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 10 minutes. I don't know if that would be a friendly amendment. As opposed to 15. Council Member Wolbach: I'm reluctant, but I'd be comfortable with accepting that as a friendly amendment. Council Member Schmid: I would too. INCORPORATED INTO THE MOTION WITH THE CONSENT OF THE MAKER AND SECONDER to add to the end of the Motion, “with 10 minute interviews.” Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: I would be comfortable with that as well. Maybe we need to separate the two, but I would be quite comfortable with 10. As I read through them, I thought we are a very fortunate City to have the quality of those who applied. Many of them I haven't met, but they have incredibly good resumes. I think we have an embarrassment of riches in many ways, to have 16 people who want to serve on our Planning and Transportation Commission. A fair amount of time, a good deal of energy will be spent. Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I know this is going to sound like a picky little thing. The Planning and Transportation Commission is such an important body, and we did set and very deliberately set 15 minutes for interviewing them. Sixteen times five is what? What is that? It's an hour. Mayor Burt: It adds another hour and a half. Council Member Holman: It's an hour and a half of our time versus the many hours that these Commission Members are going to be spending working on City projects and reviewing Staff Reports. I think if we can't spend an extra hour and a half to interview these folks, kind of shame on us a little bit. I would offer to the maker that we go back to 15 minutes. Mayor Burt: I think proper procedure, given that it's already been accepted as an amendment, you can offer it as a standalone amendment. Council Member Holman: I'll offer it as a standalone amendment, that we go back to 15 minutes, which was our established preference and policy. Mayor Burt: Is there a second to that? It appears to fail. TRANSCRIPT Page 45 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 AMENDMENT: Council Member Holman moved, seconded by Council Member XX to replace in the Motion, “10” with “15.” AMENDMENT FAILED DUE TO THE LACK OF A SECOND Mayor Burt: I'll just add that in principal I was open to winnowing this down. As I went through the applications, I was having a hard time finding very many that I wasn't interested in sitting through an interview with. I want to echo what Council Member Kniss said, that we really are fortunate to have such a great pool of applicants. Frankly it's been a long while since—we've never had this sizable pool of applicants for the Planning and Transportation Commission in the 20 years I've been involved with it. It's great. I'll just say that we've often out of applicants for a Commission have had people who obviously won't get this appointment, because there aren't enough spots. We've found that these people see it as more of an opportunity to engage in the community, to serve on other ad hoc advisory boards, which we have a great need for committed people to do, and even apply for other Commissions subsequently. I just want to kind of frame that in advance for the candidates, that we welcome your participation, whether it be on the Planning Commission or in other avenues. We really appreciate your applications. On that note, we can vote on the Motion. That passes unanimously. MOTION RESTATED: Council Member Wolbach moved, seconded by Council Member Schmid to interview all applicants for the Planning and Transportation Commission with 10 minute interviews MOTION AS AMENDED PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Burt: We will be sending out notices to the applicants on the date. We had originally had September 27th scheduled for all of these folks. We'll still be retaining—Beth, have you figured out whether the 27th—what would occur on the 27th, which categories of applicants? Ms. Minor: At this time, we had all the Boards and Commissions scheduled for that night. Looking at interviewing all of these, it'll probably be four hours or more that evening. If you want to break it up into two nights, we can doodle for a second night. Mayor Burt: We'll definitely need two nights. My question was do we want to be clear tonight on whether—it seems it'll be either trying to do the Planning Commission all in one night and then the other two in another night. Which of these would be on the 27th? Can we let people know right now, so everybody starts planning? TRANSCRIPT Page 46 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Ms. Minor: My suggestion is to do the Planning Commission on the 27th, and do the other two Commissions on another night. Mayor Burt: We'll go ahead on that route so everybody knows that the Planning Commission will be on the 27th. Council Member Wolbach: What time are we starting? Council Member Kniss: Could we start at 6:00 P.M.? Mayor Burt: Let me just ... Council Member Kniss: 6:00 P.M. is our starting time, correct? Ms. Minor: We were going to start at 6:00 P.M.. That's our normal time, 6:00 P.M.. Mayor Burt: We will plan on starting at 6:00 P.M. on the 27th for interviews of the Planning and Transportation Commission. That's now on my calendar. Thank you all. That concludes this item. Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions Mayor Burt: Our next item is Agenda Changes, Additions and Deletions. We have none that I'm aware of. City Manager Comments Mayor Burt: We follow onto City Manager Comments. James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the Council. Each week we get closer and closer to the October 2nd, 7th Annual Bike Palo Alto event on Sunday, October 2nd, from 1:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M. It will feature something a little bit extra this year. A new bike and roll expo on the Civic Plaza Downtown at City Hall. The expo will be a highlighted destination on our Bike Palo Alto's northern route map and will showcase innovative bicycling and car-free options for residents to get around Palo Alto. Very appropriate announcement after the long discussion we were just having about LOS and VMT. All of those numbers will be better if we get on bicycles. Come out and test the latest in low carbon transportation alternatives including cargo bikes, electric assist bikes, scooters, three-wheel bikes and more. There will be a station where you can trick out your bike and a parklet for relaxing with music and food from local vendors, turning a parking space into a little park for the day. The City will also be testing out parking-protected one-way cycle tracks along Bryant Street between University and Forest Avenues. Cycle tracks, which are also known as Class TRANSCRIPT Page 47 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 IV separated bikeways, provide the comfort and safety of bike paths but efficiently use the existing roadway space. The Bryant Street pop-up cycle tracks will include parklets, planters, temporary striping and signing and other elements that help simulate a real riding experience. Bike Palo Alto itself will start as usual at El Carmelo Elementary School on Bryant at Loma Verde and offer three bike-friendly routes headed to the north, east and southwest from the school, each with short or longer options and stops for free treats all along the way. Originated in 2010 by a neighborhood green team volunteer, this free event provides a fun way for community members to leave their cars behind and try getting around using Palo Alto's great bicycle routes, bridges and underpasses. More than 600 riders hopped on their bikes last year. For more information, go to www.bikepaloalto.org or go to the City's website. This is a big event. The pressure will be on for everybody to show up. It's a very politically correct thing to do, to be out there at this event. Get out of your car and try out some new modes of transportation. Our household hazardous waste drop-off set new records during Fiscal Year 2016 which ended on June 30th. A record 4,920 households dropped off 125 tons of hazardous waste at the City's household hazardous waste station at our wastewater plant. This means that 17 percent of households participated in our program during that year, which surpassed all other jurisdictions in the state. Santa Clara County usually reports a participation rate of four percent, and the statewide average is three percent compared to a 17 percent participation rate in Palo Alto. About two tons of our total were high quality products that were taken by residents from our reuse cabinets and directly reused. Another 85 tons, principally paint, was recycled by our hauler. Folks can visit our hazardous waste station and drop off unwanted products and check out reuse cabinets every Saturday from 9:00 A.M. until 11:00 A.M. Dropping off unwanted materials protects your family, pets and our environment from exposure to toxic chemicals and medicines. The location of this is, of course, down at the Regional Water Quality Control Plant near the Baylands. Trash clean up. On Saturday, more than 40 volunteers and City Staff removed over 200 pounds of trash from Matadero and Adobe Creeks. Plastics from food items and packaging made up most of the trash again this year. The City continues to lead efforts to restrict single-use plastic products that end up in creeks and endanger wildlife. The first photo shows our newest watershed protection staff member, Joanna Tron [phonetic], briefing volunteers. The second shows our boom cleaning team. The third shows our team compiling data. The last one shows two veterans of this work, Kirsten Struve and Joe Teresi, together for the last time as City Staffers as Kirsten will be moving on to a position with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Their gain, our loss. Joe's looking good there. I must confess I forgot that we were doing the clean-up. I was running in the Baylands. I was then running down East Bayshore, saw some guy kind of standing out in the street doing something. TRANSCRIPT Page 48 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 It was Joe, of course, picking up trash all along the way. We have a great bunch of Staff people who spend their weekends also volunteering to make our community look lovely. Just a brief little update on the Baylands Nature Preserve happenings down there. On tonight's Consent Agenda, we have two items related to the Baylands Nature Preserve. One is the approval of a contract for improvements to the Baylands Interpretive Center, and then there is approval of a contract for design and environmental services for the Baylands Boardwalk. Given the importance of the projects, I just wanted to speak to them briefly to the folks at home watching and those in the audience who may not have access to the packet. The construction at the Baylands Interpretive Center will begin in October and end next April. The project includes new decking, siding, guardrails, exterior lighting, swallow nesting boxes in areas favored by birds, refinished interior flooring and accessibility and restroom upgrades. Community Services will continue education programs during the construction period at East Palo Alto's Cooley Landing Nature Center during the construction under an agreement with East Palo Alto. We're expecting a minimal impact. Design for the new Baylands Boardwalk will begin in October with an alignment and configuration similar to the existing Boardwalk. An environmental assessment will be prepared and circulated in the summer of 2017. Our Staff will work with community stakeholders and the Parks and Rec Commission during this design process as a lot of work not just on the design but the environmental reviews. Depending upon the pace of the environmental reviews and the agency permitting—we're very familiar with the projects in the Baylands—we don't anticipate completion of that project until 2019 or 2020 depending upon the environmental review and the agency permitting. Obviously, that's something the Council will want to follow closely. An update related to the Evergreen Park RPP District. Our Transportation Planning Staff is responding to the recent email that Council received asking for a status update. We are currently coordinating a meeting with local merchants and employees at a business focus group regarding parameters of the Evergreen Park RPP. The meeting, which is tentatively scheduled for September 29th, follows a similar meeting with area residents and will give the business community an opportunity to share their input on employee permits and pricing and other aspects of a future Evergreen Park RPP program. Following the focus group meetings, Staff will host a broader community workshop in early October to share a draft program design. We'll also be mailing a survey to neighborhood residents to gauge interest in feedback on the program, knowing that we have the responsibility to try to reach out to every neighbor directly. Based on this, Staff expects to bring a draft program resolution to Council in November, so please stay tuned for more details as we hear from the community. A Caltrain report. On September 12th, the Federal Railroad Administration awarded $25 million in grants to increase safety at railroad crossings, train TRANSCRIPT Page 49 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 stations and tracks across the country. About $1 million of this was awarded to the Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board for improvements to grade crossings along the Caltrain Corridor including Alma Street and Charleston Road in Palo Alto. Caltrain staff has been coordinating with our Staff to design minor signing and striping improvements to these two grade crossings as well as the Churchill Avenue and Meadow Drive railroad crossings. The improvements at the Charleston Road crossing will be consistent with the Council-adopted concept plan for the Charleston- Arastradero Corridor project. This Friday, September 23rd, at 11:00 P.M., the railroad crossing at Churchill Avenue will be closed for track maintenance work and will not reopen until Monday, September 26th, at 4:00 A.M., well before school starts. That's all I have to report. Interestingly enough, though, while we were here the Police Chief stopped by to tell me that we had a car that was struck by a Caltrain at the Meadow crossing. Apparently perhaps trying to get around and go across. I think there was maybe an injury associated with that. I do want to tell you that that is unfolding this evening. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Holman, did you have something? Council Member Holman: Yes. Always illuminating, and thank you for all the comments. I was wondering if City Staff might send out a Nextdoor notification to people about the Lucy Evans Interpretive Center and Boardwalk, just for an update. It's been a topic of great public interest. We've heard from many, many people over the time that that's been closed. If City Staff would that, that's be great. Mr. Keene: Happy to do so. Council Member Holman: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Oral Communications Mayor Burt: Our next item is Oral Communications, and we have four cards. If anyone else wishes to speak, they need to bring one forward now. Each speaker has up to three minutes. These are not agendized items, so that the Council does not have a prerogative to comment on the speakers. Our first speaker is Richard Yan, to be followed by Neilson Buchanan. Welcome. Richard Yan: Good evening, Council Members. I'm a representative of the IMED Gunn Club. We tackle groundwater contamination. Over the past few years, we've noticed that not enough is being done about the contaminant TCE. We have written out our demands in the form of this petition, and we TRANSCRIPT Page 50 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 hope you guys take required action as soon as possible. In the past summer, the City of Palo Alto did action at University Terrace. They relocated 29 families and also approved several preventative vapor mitigation measures in University Terrace. However, we believe that that's not enough. There are still many groundwater plumes that exist in Palo Alto, including the HP and Varian Superfund site that has caused TCE to accumulate in College Terrace homes. Another big plume is the COE plume, and that is bordered by California Avenue, Olive Avenue and also Emerson Street. Every single one of these properties built upon these plumes is at risk of vapor intrusion. Many existing homes such as those at College Terrace are in need of vapor mitigation, renovations and indoor air sampling. There's also many properties such as Birch Plaza that are constructed above groundwater plumes. The homeowners on these plumes are not aware of this. Having said that, we therefore request several demands. First, the City of Palo Alto must adopt a Citywide VOC Ordinance. VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compounds such as TCE. This will require vapor mitigation systems in all construction over contaminated areas as well notify residents in existing properties of the presence of these VOCs. Doing so will prevent future VOC exposure from occurring and also encourage the current at-risk residents to install vapor mitigation measures. The City of Mountain View already has such a policy in place, and it protects the homeowners' interest and safety. Lastly, the City Staff must also include TCE in the City's annual water report for consistent screening and public accessibility. Groundwater contamination and vapor intrusion should be an ongoing topic during these meets, as it was for University Terrace. For the protection of Palo Alto, the City Council must enforce the above measures without delay. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Neilson Buchanan, to be followed by Jeff Levinsky. Neilson Buchanan: I'm back again to talk about Palo Alto Council's favorite orphan, and that's the TMA. I was dismayed to see the TMA relegated to the very bottom of the agenda for another information item. I've been attending as many of the TMA Board meetings as possible. It would be fair to say that the last TMA Board meeting was struggling with its financial future. Some sort of decision does need to be made by the Council in the relatively near future to keep that baby alive. If I had to use my professional experience, I would say the TMA is in the premature nursery intensive care unit. It's struggling for life. What's worse, it's an orphan. Nobody seems to want it. The business community, you would think, would be here talking about the value of having a TMA. You would think that the TMA Board would be here, and they're not. Only I seem to be the one to be repeatedly asking the Council to give it seed funding and have enough funding over three years, so it can maintain a really, nice, slow, steady TRANSCRIPT Page 51 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 return on investment. We talk a lot about reducing single occupancy vehicles. No one thing in my opinion has longer-term capability than to address the segment of our working population that's not covered at Stanford, the Medical Center and the Stanford Research Park. It's a deep investment, and it's time that you take it out of the premature nursery. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Jeff Levinsky, to be followed by Shani Kleinhaus. Jeff Levinsky: Good evening, Mayor Burt, Council Members and Staff. I'm also here to talk about the TMA. The report includes a business plan prepared by the TMA organization. It's good that they've done so, but there's a number of problems with the goals in the plan. I'll talk about three. Number 1, the report says most Downtown car commuters don't take the train because it doesn't go where they need or they stop at other places between home and work or the schedule doesn't work for them and so forth. Just five percent who drive by themselves say the main reason they don't take the train is cost. That five percent translates into about 275 workers Downtown. The plan proposes to subsidize transit passes for a time to eliminate the price concern. So far so good. Incredibly, the TMA says that doing this will get 700 to 1,000 workers to switch to the train. It just doesn't add up. The goal doesn't match their own survey numbers. Problem Number 2, the TMA goals don't explicitly include getting long distance express buses to serve Downtown. The VTA already runs express buses between the Stanford Research Park and various cities to the south. These are new, comfortable buses with Wi-Fi and reclining seats. Over 300 people take these buses every day. The fare works out to about $128 a month, less than what the business plan says it is. Getting the VTA, SamTrans or private carriers to operate similar buses Downtown should be an absolute top priority in the TMA business plan, but it's not. Number 3, another goal missing from the business plan is reducing commercial parking in Downtown neighborhoods. This room has filled many times with residents who live nearby seeking relief from commercial parking intrusion. The TMA folks must know this is a concern. The City already tracks how many commercial permits are sold as part of the Downtown RPP, so it's an easy way to evaluate how well the TMA is doing. One wonders why this goal was left out. We the public, and that includes residents, are the biggest single funders of the TMA, and yet the TMA's goals aren't aligned with ours. Please have City Staff work with the TMA to establish more realistic goals for train ridership, prioritize having long-distance buses serve Downtown, and evaluate the TMA by how many cars disappear from residential streets and by how cost effective the TMA is. Thank you very much. TRANSCRIPT Page 52 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our final speaker is Shani Kleinhaus. Shani Kleinhaus: Good evening, Mayor Burt and Council. I'm Shani Kleinhaus. I'm a member of the CAC. I do not speak for the CAC; I speak for myself. In the earlier discussion, you mentioned that in the future CEQA will not find significant impacts of new projects. Soon the Comp Plan Land Use Element process will offer you alternatives that propose a set of performance measures or now they're evolving more into standards and requirements to apply to projects. That would further marginalize the process of CEQA. This means that much of the discussion around new office development projects will be opaque at Staff discretion, and we may not always have Hillary here to make sure that that process is sound. Monitoring compliance is expensive. Code enforcement has not been our strongest element. Measuring the community indicators will also be very expensive. Above all of that, when you find adverse impacts—potentially what Jeff was talking about—there's not always a nexus between that and development. I think what I'm asking here is to keep CEQA strong. CEQA is the public's window into what is coming. It provides the granularity that Mayor Burt was talking about earlier. How would you know that this level of service here and here is the same? How do we do that? You get that through CEQA. If you replace CEQA and its power with standards and requirements, that is gone, the ability of the public to respond and ability of you to judge to a large extent. I think the problem with bypassing CEQA and streamlining development is that it creates a lot of frustration in the community. It really leaves the community with only referendums to go after projects. That's not a good process for the community. It's very divisive. It's a problem when the only method the community has is to go for a referendum rather than comments or a CEQA that can improve this. When you get the Land Use Element, I hope that you really think about CEQA and how to strengthen our ability to use it rather than how to streamline everything. I know this would not be the favorite opinion for Staff and for many others on the CAC. I think people don't understand this the way I do, because I use it. Most people really only see that when there's a real controversy that results in a lawsuit. They don't see how CEQA works for the people on a project-by-project level. I don't think there's lawsuits all that often. I think there's research that showed that there isn't. Think about those tradeoffs and find ways to strengthen rather than weaken CEQA. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. We have one late card by Stephanie Munoz. I'll allow you to speak. Stephanie Munoz: Thank you very much, Mayor Burt. This was my third minute from last week. What I wanted to say was we've been in all the TRANSCRIPT Page 53 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 cities, not just Palo Alto, the habit of doing whatever kind of zoning or arranging will make the most value for the land. People have been understandably (inaudible) of a system in which developers get a freebie in density, and everybody else has to pay for it You have to give up your fireplace. You have to give up your lawns. You have to give up your house. Anyway, I wanted to suggest that if you have this unusual situation of a property that is zoned Public Facility, you not only get the Public Facility but you get a quid pro quo. In exchange for the density that would make a lot more money for the developer, you ask for rent control. You ask that essentially Prop 13 be extended to renters. The developer gets the permission to have rental units that rent at a decent profit, say 1 percent over the Treasury bond yield. I don't know; something reasonable. Just like Prop 13, it can go up one percent every single year. I think that would be fair. It's really not fair to have the developers get more, more, more, and everybody else get less, less, less. I think that's something you could really give some thought to. I have to tell you I've been a landlord or part of a landlord's family. That sent me to private school, and it sent me to Europe. I'm getting kind of tired of—I think we do need rent control, but I'm getting kind of tired of hearing about greedy landlords. I wish you'd think about that. You could have those micro units that you talked about on that property. You could have rent control, and it would be fair. It would be a quid pro quo, a contingency. You want this extra, extra, extra, good, good, good. Pay for it with the rent control. Thank you very much. Mayor Burt: Thank you. That concludes our Oral Communications. Mr. City Manager, in response to some of the questions raised about the TMA, do you know when we'll be having the Downtown Parking Comprehensive Study report come back to Council? James Keene, City Manager: Yes. As I think the Council's aware, there are a number of factors that are in that report including how we're going to look at free versus paid parking and the development of other potential revenue streams that could be useful. The Staff expects to come back to the Council by January of 2017 with that. Mayor Burt: I thought it was coming this fall. Mr. Keene: That's where they told me the schedule is. If you have some concerns about it, I'll visit with them and get you more details. Mayor Burt: Also, are we going to get data on utilization of Caltrain Go Passes by City Hall employees? TRANSCRIPT Page 54 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Keene: We can do that, yes. We also have a directive, I think, to come back to the Council with follow-up issues related to a transportation funding source task force or whatever shortly. Mayor Burt: Thank you. That concludes Oral Communications. Minutes Approval 3. Approval of Action Minutes for the August 29 and September 6, 2016 Council Meetings. Mayor Burt: Our next item is approval of Minutes. We have Minutes from August 29th and September 6th of this year. Do we have a Motion to approve? Vice Mayor Scharff: So moved. Mayor Burt: Second? MOTION: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member Berman to approve the Action Minutes for the August 29 and September 6, 2016 Council Meetings including changes to the September 6, 2016 Action Minutes outlined in the Staff Memorandum. Mayor Burt: Please vote on the board. That passes unanimously. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Consent Calendar Mayor Burt: We next have the Consent Calendar, three items for approval. Do we have ... Council Member DuBois: Move approval. Council Member Kniss: Second. MOTION: Council Member DuBois moved, seconded by Council Member Kniss to approve Agenda Item Numbers 4-6. 4. Approval of a Contract With Buhler Commercial in the Amount Not-To- Exceed $586,803 for the Lucy Evans Baylands Interpretive Center Improvements; Approve and Authorize the City Manager to Execute Contract Amendment Number 1 to Contract Number C15157772 in the Amount of $60,730 With FOG Studio for Design and Construction Administration Services; Amend the Fiscal Year 2017 Budget TRANSCRIPT Page 55 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Appropriation for the Baylands Interpretive Center Facility Improvements, Capital Improvement Program Project PE-15029; and Find the Project Categorically Exempt From the California Environmental Quality Act Under Section 15301 (Existing Facilities). 5. Approval of the Third Amendment to the Agreement Providing for Implementation of the Santa Clara Valley Urban Runoff Pollution Prevention Program Between Santa Clara County, Santa Clara Valley Water District, and Multiple Santa Clara County Cities to Extend its Term. 6. Approval of the Baylands Boardwalk Feasibility Study Report and Direct Staff to Pursue Replacement of the Boardwalk, Approve and Authorize the City Manager to Execute Contract Number C16163750 in the Amount of $439,992 With Biggs Cardosa Associates, Inc. to Provide Design and Environmental Services and Amend the Fiscal Year 2017 Budget Appropriation for the Baylands Boardwalk Improvements Capital Improvement Program Project PE-14018. Mayor Burt: Motion by Council Member DuBois, second by Council Member Kniss. Please vote. We just picked up some time there. MOTION PASSED: 9-0 Mayor Burt: The Council began their meeting at 5:00 P.M. tonight for a Study Session actually on transportation-related items. I think we'd like to take a break before commencing our two long items. We're going to do that for we'll call it a five minute break. Please try to not to extend it much beyond that. Thank you. We'll be back shortly. Council took a break from 7:47 P.M. to 7:57 P.M. Action Items 7. Discuss and Identify a Preferred Alternative for Roadway Improvements to Embarcadero Road Between El Camino Real and Emerson Street and Direct Staff to Complete the Environmental Analysis and Plans, Specifications and Estimates for Construction. Mayor Burt: Our next item is Item Number 7 which is to discuss and identify a preferred alternative for roadway improvements to Embarcadero Road between El Camino Real and Emerson Street and to direct Staff to complete the environmental analysis and plan specifications and estimates for construction. Mr. City Manager. TRANSCRIPT Page 56 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 James Keene, City Manager: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just before Josh and the team get going here, I would just point out—let's see. We're only like 20 minutes behind our schedule for tonight. It's transportation night. You've got this item. I just would remind the Council as a whole that the next item, Number 8, is a review of the draft Transportation Element scheduled to at least start by 9:15 P.M.. That was an item that was before the Council back in August. If you recall, we got towards the end of the meeting, and you could only have a very abbreviated conversation. You asked us to set it for this. I'm hoping that—we were targeting 9:15 at the latest to start. As they say in the airline industry, if you can make up some time in the air here, so that we can arrive at that time, that would be great. Thanks. Mayor Burt: We're looking for a tailwind. Mr. Mello. Joshuah Mello, Senior Transportation Official: Thank you. Josh Mello, Chief Transportation Official for the City of Palo Alto. With me this evening, I have Jason Mansfield from BKF Engineers as well as Gary Black from Hexagon. Shahla Yazdy, our Project Manager, is also in attendance. I'm going to go through a brief presentation, and I'll go as quick as possible and reserve more time for questions and answers at the end. Tonight before you there's two concept plans for Embarcadero Road. The section we're looking at is between El Camino Real and Emerson Street. I'm sure most of you are very, very familiar with this corridor. El Camino Real is a State Caltrans facility. On the other side of El Camino Real, Embarcadero Road becomes Galvez Street. Midway through our corridor, there's a three-lane underpass that goes under Caltrain. There are two westbound lanes and one eastbound lane through that underpass. On the other side, we intersect with High Street and Emerson before the end of our corridor, which terminates at Emerson, our study corridor. The history of this segment. Back in 2012, Council authorized the initiation of a concept planning effort. The results of that study were brought back to Council in September of 2013. That Staff Report included four recommendations in order to make some improvements along this corridor. I'm happy to report that three of those four recommendations have been completed since that report went to Council back in September of 2013. Since then, we have completed Phase 1, which was the Embarcadero Road traffic signal improvements. This was one of the recommendations that was brought to Council back in 2013. We've also begun on Phase 2. Phase 2 is really the primary reason that we're here tonight. As part of Phase 2, we've developed two pretty different concept plans for this segment. Just to recap what the elements of Phase 1 were. It was completed back in August of 2015. This was a complete replacement of the traffic signal equipment at the Town and Country/Paly (Palo Alto High School) driveway intersection as well as the equipment at the TRANSCRIPT Page 57 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 crosswalk just to the east of the Paly/Town and Country driveway. Both of those signals were connected to one signal cabinet, which now allows them to operate as one signal. I have a video, if we have time later, that will actually show you how that works on the ground during the lunch rush at Paly. That allows for those signals to be better coordinated and for the movements, when the driveway is moving, for the signal at the pedestrian crosswalk to work in coordination with that. We've also done a little bit of follow-up on Phase 1. This really wasn't part of a project. This was just ongoing kind of work orders and Staff work that we complete on a regular basis all around the City. We did continue to focus on this corridor because there was recurring congestion that we were noticing. Some of those elements that were able to follow up on since the completion of Phase 1 back in August. During the data collection for this particular phase that we're talking about tonight, we noticed that westbound traffic was being severely delayed by folks exiting the Trader Joe's driveway, and they were taking over the right curb-lane and not yielding to folks that were coming from the underpass in that right curb-lane. We went and added some new white striping and some raised traffic buttons. We basically realigned the Trader Joe's driveway to be more of a 60-degree angle intersecting that right-hand curb-lane. Observations show that people now seem to be yielding a little bit more consistently when they exit the Trader Joe's driveway. We also recently implemented completely new signal timing during the morning and afternoon peak along Embarcadero Road from St. Francis to the Bryant Street signal. You may notice there's a lot more logical progression when you're leaving the City in the afternoon and coming into the City in the morning. The next phase of that coordination plan is we're currently in the middle of adding a wireless communications device to the signal at the Paly and Town and Country driveway. That will communicate using cell technology to the Bryant Street signal. That will link the Town and Country traffic signal to our master traffic control system. That's currently the only signal in the City operated by the City of Palo Alto that's not linked into our master traffic control center. After that's completed, we'll be able to get the timing plan from Caltrans for the signal at El Camino Real, and we'll be able to build our coordination plan on Embarcadero off of the Caltrans signal. That's not currently happening. You'll notice one of the biggest issues out there today is the El Camino signal is not in coordination with the Town and Country/Paly signal or the crosswalk. You'll get a green at Town and Country, and then you'll be stopped immediately at El Camino. We can't completely eliminate that, but we can make it a little bit better by syncing with the Caltrans clock. Mayor Burt: When would that occur? TRANSCRIPT Page 58 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: We're currently testing the wireless connection to Bryant right now. The equipment's been installed. We've already sent a request to Caltrans for their timing, their clock timing. We'll be able to update that as soon as all of that stuff is live. Phase 2 began back in September of 2015. We conducted extensive data collection and also completed a survey for construction. We held two community meetings, one in December of 2015 and one in March of 2016. We also met with several stakeholders including the Paly administration, Town and Country management, and the School District management as well. Through that process, basically two concept plans emerged. I'll talk a little bit about those concept plans later. We brought those concept plans to Palo Alto Bicycle Advisory Committee (PABAC) in May 2016 and also in September of 2016. PABAC at first voted to support Alternative 2, and then they reconsidered in September and voted to support Alternative 1. Stanford provided us comments in August. They did not elect to favor one alternative over the other, but they gave us very constructive feedback that we'll be able to integrate into the final design regardless of which alternative we move forward with. In August, we also went to Planning and Transportation Commission. The PTC voted to support Alternative 1. Our schedule moving forward is we're here tonight on September 19th. After you select a concept alternative to move forward, we will jump right into the preparation of environmental documents and begin the preliminary design. We're hoping to complete final design by mid-2017 and then begin construction in late 2017. If you remember, the adopted Capital Improvement Program includes $3.4 million for the construction of this project, beginning in FY '18. Prior to beginning any kind of design work or even starting to develop concepts, we went to the community. We talked about what some of the goals and objectives should be for this project. These are several goals and objectives that kind of guided us through the process. You're all very, very familiar with some of the issues out there and what some of the goals should be. The first was to improve traffic operations. The second was to support mass transit. There's two shuttle stops along the segment that we studied as part of this project. Third, we wanted to improve bicycle and pedestrian comfort and safety along the corridor. Those were kind of the three guiding principles as we started to develop our concept plans and develop our different alternatives. During the data collection phase, we collected motor vehicle traffic counts. There were a couple of surprising findings here. We collected, as we always do with traffic counts, during a typical weekday. We made sure that Paly was in session when we collected these counts. This is a little bit different for this project, because we had three peak periods. We looked at A.M. We looked at the school peak in the afternoon, and then we looked at the typical P.M. peak when everybody gets out of work. El Camino Real, we found, is busy in both directions. It's not really a directional roadway during the peak. Embarcadero is slightly busier going into Stanford in the morning and from TRANSCRIPT Page 59 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Stanford in the afternoon. Left turns from Embarcadero westbound to El Camino Real southbound did not warrant dual left turn-lanes. The previous study back in 2013 actually recommended dual left turn-lanes for that movement. We found that there were actually higher right-turn volumes going westbound than there were left-turn volumes. There's currently no dedicated right turn-lane if you're going westbound on Embarcadero approaching El Camino. We also collected bicycle and pedestrian counts. We counted 50 bicycles per hour going into Stanford in the morning; 171 bicyclists going towards Paly in the morning; and then an average of about 20 to 30 pedestrians per hour walking along Embarcadero Road. One of the highest pedestrian counts was across the north leg of the El Camino and Embarcadero intersection. This is important because those pedestrians crossing the north leg are also conflicting with those right-turn vehicles that I mentioned earlier. You have a lot of right-turners being delayed by pedestrians as they cross El Camino. They're also delaying through- motorists because there's no dedicated right turn-lane. We observed quite a bit of westbound delays. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of it was due to people exiting the Trader Joe's driveway and also the lack of coordination between the two signal cabinets, the one controlling the pedestrian crosswalk and the driveway and the one controlling the El Camino signal. This shows some of the merging issues. Coupled with the vehicles exiting Trader Joe's and cutting off the vehicles in the curb-lane, we also have a shuttle stop that's located in that same area where people are crossing from left to right across that curb-lane. We saw lots of bikes on sidewalks, and we continue to see that. I've talked to a lot of cyclists in town, and this is one of the few roadways in the City where even the most adventurous cyclists feel uncomfortable riding in the travel lane and often ride on the sidewalk until they get to the bike lane within Stanford campus. We saw unsafe pedestrian movements. This is on the east side of the underpass over near Kingsley, on the south side of Embarcadero. Sorry, on the north side over near Kingsley and Emerson. As I mentioned, we got a lot of great feedback from the public. All of the notes and the drawings from the community meetings are included in your packet this evening. We got lots of constructive feedback. We sent mailers out to any residences along the corridor. There's not a great deal of residences, but we had good attendance from those folks that live on the north side of Embarcadero near Kingsley and Emerson. They offered us some great constructive feedback at the two meetings. This is an overview of the pros and cons of each of the alternatives. This is included in your packet as well. I'll jump right into the alternatives and, in the interest of time, try to move through them as quickly as possible. The first concept is Concept Plan Alternative 1. The biggest component of this is a Dutch-style protected intersection at the intersection of El Camino and Embarcadero. This works sort of like a traffic circle for bicyclists. They circulate around the intersection under signal control, but TRANSCRIPT Page 60 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 making a left turn is very easy. You're very comfortable in these type of intersections. This provides great connectivity between the Stanford Perimeter Trail, the existing bike lanes on Galvez and what we're proposing as raised, one-way cycle tracks along Embarcadero Road. There would be separate space for pedestrians and cyclists. Both the cycle track and the sidewalk would be elevated above the road. This is what's called a Class IV separated bikeway. In this concept, there would be one-way bikeways on each side of the street. If you were heading west into Stanford, you would be on the north side of the street. The southeast corner, where there's currently a channelized right turn-lane and pork chop island, you can see on this concept plan we would be elevating the crosswalk and the bikeway across that free-flow right turn-lane and installing what's called a raised crosswalk. That would encourage drivers that are turning right from northbound El Camino onto eastbound Embarcadero to slow down and yield to both bicyclists and pedestrians. It would maintain that radius that's required for large trucks and other large vehicles to make that turn. Getting closer to the underpass, we would maintain the separate raised cycle track and sidewalk condition. This concept would install amenities for the shuttle on both sides of the street, shelters, signage, information about arrival times, things of that nature, trash cans, benches. One important element of this concept is that we would square up the Trader Joe's driveway a little bit. That would further encourage motorists exiting the Trader Joe's driveway to yield or stop, ideally stop, before entering the traffic on Embarcadero. Once the cycle track and the sidewalk enter the existing underpass, there would be no changes to the existing underpass. However, we would add medallions and some minor striping to better delineate where bicyclists should be and where pedestrians should be on both sides of the tunnel. It's essentially a wide sidewalk through the tunnel, but we would try to better delineate where they should each be as they pass through. When you get to the other side of the underpass, we would pick up the separate cycle track facility again. Going eastbound, we can get people all the way to Emerson Street. Ideally, we'd like to continue another block along the south side of Embarcadero and get people to Bryant Street, which is our designated bike boulevard, so they could head north and south. The movement going westbound is easier because folks can use Kingsley Avenue to get to the one-way cycle track that brings them to Stanford in the westbound direction. One thing that we're recommending in both concepts is to create more of a 90-degree intersection with Kingsley on the south side of Embarcadero. There's a lot of asphalt out there today. It's kind of an acute angle with a lot of paved area that could be repurposed for vegetation and trees. On the north side, one of the biggest issues we noticed out there—we're actually addressing it with a temporary spot safety project right now—is if you're driving westbound on Embarcadero and you're exiting to go to Alma Street just before High Street, you can make that at a very high speed. TRANSCRIPT Page 61 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Pedestrians waiting to cross at that crosswalk cannot tell if a motorist is going straight or if they're taking the ramp to go to Alma Street. This concept would actually create a dedicated right turn-lane where drivers could decelerate, check the crosswalk. Pedestrians would actually know that they were turning right, because they would be in the designated right turn- lane. The driver could proceed across the crosswalk when it was clear. Moving on to Concept Plan 2. I'll go through this one a lot quicker, because there's a lot of elements that are very similar. The big differences in this one is that instead of two one-way cycle tracks on the north and south side, we have one two-way cycle track. Bicycles would be riding in both directions on the area that's shown in a dark gray there. It would be on the south side, coming from Stanford on the south side of the El Camino intersection. You would still have the raised crosswalk as you cross the turn lane that comes off El Camino northbound. Another major difference in this concept is that we're adding a dedicated right turn-lane for motor vehicles. Going westbound approaching El Camino Real, there would be a dedicated right turn-lane. If you remember earlier when we looked at the traffic data, one of the biggest issues that we noted out here is there's a large number of pedestrians crossing on the north leg. There's also a large number of motor vehicles turning right at the same time. By creating a dedicated right turn- lane, you get those right-turning vehicles out of the through-lane that's going into Stanford. They can then stop and allow pedestrians to cross without delaying cars that are in the through-lane just to their left. This concept also includes a dedicated bicycle lane between the right turn-lane and the through-lane that would connect directly to the existing bicycle lane going westbound on Galvez into the Stanford campus. Moving down, eastbound towards the underpass. The two-way cycle track continues on the south side until it reaches the existing pedestrian crossing, and then the two-way bikeway crosses over to the north side of Embarcadero and goes through the underpass on the north side. This concept includes a dedicated right turn-lane for the Town and Country driveway as well. We also noticed a high right-turn volume at that driveway as well. This also gets motor vehicles that are turning into the shopping center, right into the shopping center, out of the through-lane and frees up that through-lane for people moving towards El Camino. On the other side of the underpass, the two- way cycle track continues on the north side, and it ties directly into the stub end of Kingsley Avenue, which connects to the Bryant Street Bike Boulevard. Folks on the Bryant Street Bike Boulevard would have a two-way connection directly into Stanford. They might experience a little bit of delay while they're waiting to cross Embarcadero at that signalized crosswalk in front of Trader Joe's. Other than that, it's a fairly seamless bikeway connection from Bryant Street into the Stanford campus and connecting to the Stanford Perimeter Trail. One element that's also included in both concepts is a switchback stairway that would bring you up to the Caltrain path. If you're TRANSCRIPT Page 62 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 walking from High Street, from Emerson Street on the north side of Embarcadero, currently you have to climb up a dirt path up an embankment or you have to walk way out of your way to the end of the ramp and then back up the ramp. This would provide a stairway that would bring you directly up to the path that leads to the Caltrain station and the Homer tunnel northbound. You could also head south to Churchill along that path. That concludes our presentation on the two alternatives. I've also posted the alternatives on the wall, if you want to take a closer look. With that, we're open to any questions or comments that you may have. Mayor Burt: Thank you. I saw Commissioner Waldfogel here. Is he here representing the Planning Commission? Mr. Mello: Yes, we have Commissioner Waldfogel from the Planning and Transportation Commission. We also have Robert Neff from PABAC in attendance this evening. Mayor Burt: Commissioner Waldfogel, were there any comments you wanted to add? Asher Waldfogel, Planning and Transportation Commissioner: Thank you. Commissioner Waldfogel from Planning Commission. We had a pretty thorough analysis of these two proposals at the Planning Commission. I think a long discussion about it. The advantages for cyclists in Option 1 to us outweighed the advantages for vehicle traffic in Option 2, just the improvements that we could provide, given the goals that were stated and also given some of the constraints that we didn't talk about, basically budget constraints and land use constraints. We can't grab additional space for roadway. If we could, then we could probably come up with an Option 3 or 4. Given the constraints, given the objectives, we had a very strong sentiment around Option 1. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Mr. Neff, did the PABAC have any additional comments? Robert Neff, Palo Alto Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee (PABAC): Thank you. I guess the one thing I would point out—I think when we first looked at this, we looked at the bike lane that was in the street in Alternative 2. Those of us on PABAC who are vehicular cyclists and have been bicycling in the street forever, said, "That'll be fine. It's no problem at all riding right in between two lanes of busy traffic on Embarcadero Road." When we reconsidered it in September, we thought about not everyone has been bicycling in the streets so long. New bicyclists want to be separated; they prefer that. Having the two separated bike lanes on the normal side of the street seemed like it would appeal to a lot more bicyclists. TRANSCRIPT Page 63 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Thank you. Let's return to Council for questions, and then we'll go to the public, and then come back to the Council with comments and action. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you also to the PTC and PABAC for all the work that you've put into this, and everybody from the community who went to the community meetings and also reached out to us with their communications. I actually have four questions or areas of questions. I'll try to blast through them quickly so we can get going. I want to make sure I'm clear about this. It sounds like the most significant fix for those of us who drive is the signal time, which is really dependent on Caltrans, if I heard you correctly. You've already changed our hardware; now you're just waiting for the data from Caltrans. Once you have that, then we can start playing around with our timing to coordinate with the Caltrans light that they control at El Camino and Embarcadero/Galvez. That might be the most significant improvement to car traffic for this whole mess of an area. Is that correct or am I overstating the balance between that improvement for car traffic versus what these changes might improve for car traffic? Mr. Mello: We do anticipate that that'll make a significant difference. We can't really estimate how much of a difference that will make to everyday folks that are traveling through that intersection. There is quite a bit of delay occurring from right-turners into the shopping center and right-turners onto El Camino. Those won't be allayed by improving the signal timing. Gary might have a little more input. Gary's the traffic engineer on this project. Gary Black, Hexagon Transportation Consultants: I would agree with the statement that the signal coordination would make the biggest change and relatively easily without expense. Adding the right turn-lanes in our calculations would also make about the same level of improvement, but obviously there's a great deal more cost and effort involved in doing that. Council Member Wolbach: Looking at the difference in—I guess the real question before us tonight is kind of Alternative 1 versus Alternative 2. Looking at the difference between them, I'm looking on Page 8 of the Staff Report, Page 317 of the packet for my colleagues. If I'm reading this correctly, the LOS—something we were talking about a lot earlier tonight— improvement for cars—Alternative 1, it says negligible improvement. Not a whole lot of improvement from what else we'd have. With or without the information from Caltrans and the signal improvements, Alternative 1 would have a negligible improvement. Alternative 2 would not have much of an improvement either. It's only about 2.5 seconds. TRANSCRIPT Page 64 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Where are you? Council Member Wolbach: I'm on Page 8 of the Staff Report; that's Packet Page 317. There's a chart at the very top, which it says criteria. Alternative 1 and Alternative 2 are the columns. Am I reading that correctly? Mr. Mello: Yes. Alternative 1 does not include any capacity improvements for motor vehicles. Alternative 2 includes the dedicated right turn-lanes at both Town and Country and El Camino. There'd be a small improvement with an average reduced delay of 2.5 seconds with Alternative 2. Council Member Wolbach: I just want to be clear. What we're really looking at is, even with the added right turn-lanes, you're looking at only improving the average car trip by 2 1/2 seconds, which is—given how bad the congestion there is and how the trips are, 2.5 seconds is not monumental. Again, I just wanted to make sure I was reading this correctly before we move on. Next area of questions. Actually they weren't numbered. You're pointing to the risk that currently exists for pedestrians and bicyclists on the northwest side of Embarcadero as they have to cross what's essentially an exit from Embarcadero for people coming off of Embarcadero either onto High or onto Alma. You've shown that you're going to add even in Alternative 1 a right turn-lane, which improves bike and ped safety on that side, the northwest side of Embarcadero. I'm wondering if it's planned to be included or is there a possibility to include or a plan to include any kind of press button, flashing lights of any kind for that crosswalk for bicyclists or pedestrians. Is that something that's planned? Is that something that could be added easily? Mr. Mello: There's an existing rectangular, rapid-flashing beacon at that crosswalk. If we added a cycle track, we would want to think about how that detects bicyclists on the cycle track. Right now, it's push-button actuated for pedestrians. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you for reminding me about that. We received a letter from the public, from Steven Rosenblum, that raises a question that relates to a lot of other conversations we've had on this Council, the question of Caltrain grade separation. I don't want to preempt the work of our Rail Committee on this, and I don't want to go too deep into this. I know that one of the most popular, discussed options for Caltrain grade separation eventually is simply for the southern half of Palo Alto to grade separate at Embarcadero and—sorry, at Charleston and Meadow but not at Churchill or Embarcadero or University. I just wanted to ask is there any discussion at this point about potentially grade separating throughout the entire length of Palo Alto. TRANSCRIPT Page 65 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Sorry. Embarcadero and University are grade separated. Council Member Wolbach: Sorry. Let me rephrase. Is there any discussion about suppressing the rail to be below ground through the length of Palo Alto still, which would mean a redesign of Embarcadero, University and Oregon to bring the road up to where the train is now at the higher level? I'm just asking this, thinking about the cost of doing it once, doing it twice. I guess really a two-part question. One, is there still a chance we might end up doing that form of change to the grade separations of Caltrain? Two, if that's going to happen, might it still be worth the cost to do this now because that's so many years down the road? A question maybe for colleagues and also for Staff. Mr. Mello: I have two kind of reactions to that. The first is our rail program management services contract, which we'll be bringing to you shortly, includes a task to conduct a circulation study, which will look at all of our grade crossings, even Embarcadero and University. It'll look at what capacity needs are there in the future for each of those grade crossings. Then, we're going to move into a context-sensitive solutions process that will be a pretty robust community engagement study effort to look at all of the grade crossings and prioritize them. We don't know what's going to come out of that study. We will be looking at all the existing grade crossings within the City. My second reaction is that this project, we're not touching anything in the underpass except for adding medallions and some markings and the stairway. In all likelihood, whatever is done in the future at this grade crossing would really deal with just what's within the underpass. The approaching roadways that are really under study as part of this project would probably not need to change that dramatically. Council Member Wolbach: Again, what I'm asking is, is there any possibility in the future we'll bring the underpass up and put the train below. Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach, that's what he intended to answer. Council Member Wolbach: I'm sorry if I wasn't clear. Mayor Burt: The context-sensitive solution and the circulation study will be looking at a full spectrum of alternatives. The impact on what we're doing here will not be significant. That's what I just heard from Josh. Council Member Wolbach: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth. TRANSCRIPT Page 66 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. I think just two questions. The a.m. peak hour westbound on Embarcadero, I should have looked this up. Do you know what the LOS is for that intersection now and what it would be after the stop lights are optimized? Mr. Black: Our report shows that the level of service now is Level of Service D, and it would remain Level of Service D with the project. The D would have, as was stated before, a 2 1/2 second improvement in delay. Council Member Filseth: As long as it's not E or F, it's less than four seconds, but it's more than Menlo Park's. We're at D, not E or F. Second question is the structure in Option 2 where the bike path cuts across the right turn-lanes—there's a couple of those. That's a pretty similar structure to Sand Hill Road westbound at Highway 280; although, it cuts across the lane a little more. That's a pretty scary place to cycle. Is there any safety data on that structure? Mr. Mello: Under Alternative 2, there would be two conflict zones created in the bike lane that runs westbound. There would be a conflict zone before Town and Country driveway, and then before El Camino where right-turning vehicles would have to cross. Council Member Filseth: Those are the ones. Mr. Mello: It would be very similar to the standard design around the country, where a right turn-lane begins to the right of a bicycle lane. I don't have any data on hand on the safety of those. We can look at that. It is important to note that Alternative 2, cyclists that were not comfortable riding in that bike lane could also cross at the pedestrian crosswalk and use the two-way bikeway to ride into Stanford. The bike lane is not the only option for cyclists that are heading westbound in that alternative. Council Member Filseth: Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: When I looked at the report, I hadn't seen a lot of pedestrians turning right on El Camino. I noticed in your slide presentation we now show 54, but in the Packet, Page 379, it was showing 9. Most of the other numbers stayed the same. I was wondering what changed with that number. From reading that. Mr. Mello: You're referring to the north leg of the El Camino/Embarcadero intersection? TRANSCRIPT Page 67 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member DuBois: Pedestrians going north on El Camino, yeah, on the east side. Mr. Mello: Which Page of the Staff Report is that? Council Member DuBois: It's 379. It's a graph again. It looks exactly like this. Mr. Mello: It's the traffic report. Council Member DuBois: It's this slide in the report. Mr. Mello: I have that, but where is the conflicting number in the Staff Report? Council Member DuBois: This number is different from the number in the packet on the same chart. It's this one, existing ped and bike volumes. Mr. Mello: We can continue to look for that. Council Member DuBois: Page 11 of the Hexagon report. Mayor Burt: How about we let them look while you go onto your next question. They asked for that, Tom. Go ahead. Council Member DuBois: Do you see what I'm referring to? Mayor Burt: Josh, if you want to loop back to ... Mr. Mello: I do. I see the typo. I can't tell you which one is the accurate number. We'll look into it and try to determine that before ... Council Member DuBois: It's kind of a big difference, the whole thing about a lot of peds crossing there, and it goes away depending on which number is right. Mr. Mello: The crossing conflict is actually on the north leg of the intersection, not the east leg. Council Member DuBois: The north leg. I'm looking at the ... Mr. Mello: Across El Camino, between the northeast and the northwest corner, that's the movement that has the conflicts with the right-turning vehicles coming off Embarcadero. Council Member DuBois: That's 20 pedestrians? TRANSCRIPT Page 68 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: It's 20, 16 and 23. Council Member DuBois: I thought you were talking about the other corner near Town and Country. It's about 20. Mr. Mello: We have—the correct numbers are 9, 13 and 19. It's in the traffic report, not on the presentation. Council Member DuBois: It's a lot less. That looked like a lot in the report. You talked about syncing with the timer on the County traffic light but not actually syncing with the lights. Is there any change the way the County operates that would actually enable us to sync in any way? Mr. Mello: I've asked my traffic engineer to talk to Caltrans about whether there's a possibility of us actually maintaining the timing at that signal. I don't know if there's an option to enter some kind of an agreement with Caltrans. There are cities across the state that have an agreement similar to that, where Caltrans basically delegates maintenance authority to a local municipality. That could be an option. That would actually enable us to tie into the signal cabinet at the Caltrans signal, and then actual run true coordination. Council Member DuBois: Which would be a huge difference, right? Mr. Mello: Yeah. There'll be a noticeable difference just by syncing the clock. Right now the two clocks are totally out of sync. There's no coordination whatsoever. Council Member DuBois: Have they done that with anybody on El Camino in Santa Clara County? Mr. Mello: We can check into that. I know there are municipalities around the state—I don't know which specific ones—that have entered that type of signal maintenance agreement. Council Member DuBois: You mentioned a two second improvement. I wondered if that included both the syncing of the lights and the right-hand turn-lane or it was just with one. Mr. Black: It would be about a two second with each of those actions. Council Member DuBois: We could get four seconds. Mr. Black: You get four seconds, yeah. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. TRANSCRIPT Page 69 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. On the syncing of the light, just so I understand it. If we just do the timing, are there some negatives to that? I assume we set our lights up in some way that has some sense. There's no negative to that at all. We just don't know what it is, and that's why we can't sync at the moment. Mr. Mello: There may be some pedestrian delay and some delay coming out of the driveways because we would be coordinated with the Caltrans signal, which probably has a longer cycle length. I'll let Gary talk a little bit. Mr. Black: The reason that they're not synced today is because of the two different jurisdictions. Because they're so close together, we really see that there would be benefits of syncing them. I can't really think of any downsides. It's just the logistics of syncing them that's the reason they're not synced now. Vice Mayor Scharff: When I drive that, it seems to me that it's probably one of the most congested places in all of Palo Alto. It's really the people coming out of Trader Joe's come right into my lane, and I get stopped. You're right; there's the turn lane on the other one. Those two play into each other. We're talking about a 2 1/2 second delay. I've counted my delay; it's like 10, 15 seconds sometimes to get through that mess of traffic when people— it's not even time dependent. I went to dinner on Sunday night at Mayfield. It's probably at 6:30 at night on a Sunday evening. The same thing with all these people coming out of Trader Joe's. It took 10, 12 seconds to get through that and navigate it. I'm having a hard time understanding the—my experience which is not two second delay there, and yet it says 2 1/2 seconds. Maybe you could explain to me what I'm missing. Mr. Black: The 2 1/2 seconds is an average. At times, you would have, as you experienced, a 10-second improvement. Other times you would have no improvement at all. It just depends on when you come along. Right now, if you come along at the right time, you don't get delayed at all through there. You get a green at the driveway; you get a green at El Camino; there's no delay. Other times there's a long delay. The 2 1/2 seconds is just an average of all of the time periods or all the cycles of the signal. Vice Mayor Scharff: The 2 1/2 is just an average? Mr. Black: Yeah. TRANSCRIPT Page 70 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Vice Mayor Scharff: With Trader Joe's doing this, it's not always peak time. Is that correct? Mr. Black: We analyzed three time periods for our traffic study. You're right that there's a problem, as you described, that could happen at noon or 10:00 A.M. in the morning or pretty much any time. Vice Mayor Scharff: What I do notice there that's really different is most of our traffic congestion is driven by commute—it strikes me—in the City. Whereas, this traffic congestion is driven by Town and Country, a lot of it. On the weekends, it's as bad if not worse, frankly, than during the week. I just wanted to validate that. It's because, I think, all the people are shopping there. Is that ... Mr. Black: You are correct. We didn't do any weekend counts, but the counts that we did throughout the day showed exactly what you're describing. There wasn't a marked peak in the morning and peak in the afternoon commute like you see in a lot of locations, where it's the commuters that are out there. The traffic that's out there is pretty much busy all day long. That's more indicative of a pattern where you have a lot of shoppers on the road. Vice Mayor Scharff: Option 2 solves this problem, and Option 1 doesn't. That's where that 2 1/2 second delay ... Mr. Mello: Option 2 removes some of the friction that occurs from people exiting the Trader Joe's driveway at the same time people are moving over to the curb to turn right into Town and Country, and also the friction that occurs at El Camino with crossing pedestrians, right-turning vehicles and through-vehicles. By providing those two dedicated right turn-lanes, you're eliminating some of that friction and enabling people to move through the intersections a little bit quicker. That's where that 2.5 seconds comes from. Vice Mayor Scharff: When you take the bike lane, you either cross the side or you take the on-street traffic bike lane, either way. If you're going what I think of as northbound on El Camino—is that westbound? I think of it as northbound, going towards Downtown. They call it something. It's westbound, right? You don't know. When I consider going towards University Avenue on that, there's no bike lane or way to get there on the non-Stanford side. Most people, I would assume, would cross and take the Perimeter Trail. That's a Class IV bikeway path. It's completely dedicated, and you can go forward. Do we have any counts or sense of that? Mr. Mello: Coming from where? TRANSCRIPT Page 71 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Vice Mayor Scharff: Coming from Emerson Street, you come along and you have two bike paths. You could take either one. Are people tending to use the Stanford Perimeter Trail, which is what I'd use frankly, or are they tending to make that right turn frankly and go along El Camino there to get to Downtown? Mr. Mello: In bikeway planning there's really two types of cyclists we try to plan for; the vehicular cyclist, which Robert touched on a little bit. They'd be more comfortable riding in a lane or using the bike lane. Now, we're trying to design our facilities to appeal to more of the family cyclists, the 8- 80 group. In this alternative, they would probably stick to the two-way cycle track and the Stanford Perimeter Trail. Vice Mayor Scharff: That wasn't really my question. Mayor Burt: I'm sorry. To Downtown, the route is to go to the off-road path by the tracks and Homer tunnel Vice Mayor Scharff: That's what I would take too. I guess the question is why would you make that right turn and go up El Camino then? I guess if you're going to go to Downtown Menlo Park, but I'd still take the off-road track. I'm just trying to figure out why you'd make a right turn there as a bicyclist. Mr. Black: I can shed some light on it. We did count the number of bikes that turned right from Embarcadero to northbound El Camino. The number was zero; there weren't any bikes that did that. The predominant movement of bikes that we were seeing out there is to and from the Stanford campus, going straight on Embarcadero and across El Camino and vice versa. Those are the heavy bike movements. Vice Mayor Scharff: That's what I figured. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member Berman. Council Member Berman: Thank you very much. We received a couple of emails, a fair amount of emails, from the public which asked Council to explore two amendments. One is to explore extension of both protected bike lanes to Bryant Street Bike Boulevard. If my understanding is correct, they already—going eastbound, there's connection to Bryant through a block of Kipling. Is that correct? You're coming down—if you're coming from the east to west, you can go from Bryant, go right on Kingsley, and then cross into the protected bike boulevard to go through. Is that correct? TRANSCRIPT Page 72 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: Alternative 1, which is the one-way separated bikeway is on both sides. Coming from Bryant Street is fairly easily. You go down Kingsley, and then you're fed directly into the one-way bikeway that goes into the Stanford campus. Coming east, you would dead end at Emerson unless we could get a cycle track along Embarcadero between Emerson and Bryant. Council Member Berman: You mentioned the goal of that. To what extent have you guys looked into that possibility and is it achievable or are there certain things that totally eliminate the possibility? Mr. Mello: Today, it's fairly constrained. There are some trees in the planting strip, pretty significant trees, so we couldn't use the planting strip for the cycle track. The sidewalk is only about, I think, six feet wide. We'd either need to repurpose part of the sidewalk or we would need to acquire some right-of-way along the school frontage in order to get the cycle track all the way to Bryant. Council Member Berman: Another kind of a requested improvement was switching the pedestrian and bike path configuration east of Alma to be consistent and continuous with the pedestrian and bike path on the west side. Am I right that that just means having the sidewalk in one place and the bike path in another and vice versa? Mr. Mello: That's very easy to do. That would be a simple change. That only applies to Alternative 1. Council Member Berman: There's no downside to doing that? You guys have looked at this. Is there an upside or is it just consistency? Mr. Mello: The upside would be we could keep cyclists on the same side all the way through the corridor from beginning to end. Council Member Berman: You guys kind of view this as something that makes sense to do? Mr. Mello: We could definitely make that change. Council Member Berman: Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: I know we should be asking questions, so I'll make it into a question. I think it's the obvious. Mayor Burt: No. If it's a comment, let's just save it and we'll get to it later. TRANSCRIPT Page 73 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member Kniss: I'm going to make it into a question, and then I won't have to make it a comment. Looking down, is there any other area you can think of where we have absolutely no control over Town and Country at all? That's a private shopping center. We have no control over Paly High School. We do not control the schools. On the far side is Stanford, over which we have very little control. That was a question I think. Mr. Mello: This is definitely a very constrained corridor. We had to think very deliberately about what the obstacles were on all four sides of this corridor. Council Member Kniss: That way I don't have to speak again. Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I can't find what slide number it is. If you look at even what's up here on the screen, whether it's 1 or 2, on the (inaudible) the cursor is. Drop the cursor down a little bit onto the Paly—no, a little bit. Hang it right there. I know that's—where'd it go? It left. Anyway, that's where it was. I know that's Paly land. If I look at where trees are being added in Alternative 1, if I look at where trees are planted there, we all know that trees are traffic calming elements. Just a quick question, because other good questions have been asked. Why would we not work with the School District or have we worked with the School District to try to get a tree planted sort of around where the bus shelter is? Mr. Mello: We could certainly do that. This is just an illustration of where we think we could likely accommodate trees within the right-of-way. Council Member Holman: Would you view that as a positive thing? Mr. Mello: Yes, definitely. It would provide shade for shuttle riders and enclose the roadway a little bit more, which would definitely provide a traffic calming effect. Mayor Burt: This is really quite a project that's going to turn a very chaotic and inefficient and unsafe area into a greatly improved one. In that context, we'll have a lot of improvement to bike safety. Have you looked at how these improvements in efficiency and safety would result in any estimated mode shift of more bikes and fewer cars in this section? Do we have any estimates on that impact? Mr. Mello: The science around this is pretty incomplete right now. There is a recent study that looked at several cities in the United States that added TRANSCRIPT Page 74 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 separated bikeways. They saw a fairly significant increase in bicycle ridership as a result. Chicago being one of the cities that saw the largest increases. I think this segment is a missing link in our network, especially with the opening of the Stanford Perimeter Trail. It's basically connecting two very high quality shared-use paths that are currently very disconnected. This is one of the main gateways into Stanford. If you look down at the Park Boulevard entrance into Stanford, you can see the number of cyclists that are riding every morning into the campus. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw similar numbers given that this is a very important gateway and really ties into the heart of the Stanford campus. Mayor Burt: In that vein, whether we have those estimated numbers or not, Stanford has a constraint on peak hour trips into the campus. They've got a very strong program to reduce trips for both that reason and because it alleviates parking costs. Are they part of the planning of this? Mr. Mello: They provided comments, which are included in your packet. They would not take a position on one alternative over the other. They provided very useful comments to us, and we'll bring them more into the fold as we move forward on this project. Mayor Burt: I think you had the data here. Out of these bike trips that move in this section, what portion go onto the Stanford campus? Mr. Black: Almost all of them go onto Galvez or come for Galvez. That's the Stanford campus. Mayor Burt: There's a lot that go to Town and Country as a destination or over to Paly. I was trying to break that down. Mr. Black: Of the ones that are riding up and down Embarcadero, almost all of them went to Stanford. The ones that go to Paly use the crossing by the railroad tracks, the bridge there. They just ... Mayor Burt: They actually get there from—many of them get there from going under the underpass, looping back to that. Mr. Black: That's what they did. They went under the underpass, and then they looped back. Mayor Burt: If we're saying the project emanates from Emerson and goes all the way to El Camino, I think a good number do have Paly or Town and Country as destinations. I take it that most are Stanford. If most of those trips are going to Stanford, is Stanford offering to participate financially in this in any way? TRANSCRIPT Page 75 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: I would have to go back and look at the funding source for the CIP project, but I think we may have used some of the fees that were collected through various developments around the Stanford campus. I'll have to check on the exact funding sources. I think we did look at an opportunity to use some of that funding. Mayor Burt: A couple more technical questions. The queuing where we're going—we'll call it westbound onto Galvez—I couldn't tell how much space is really there for bike queuing, which can at different times have a lot of bikes and hopefully it'll be a lot more with this. Do we have adequate queuing space? Mr. Mello: This is for Alternative 1, the protected intersection? Mayor Burt: Yes. Mr. Mello: The design details of the protected intersection would have to be refined as we move into final design. There's some guidance that was released recently about how to design these, but it's a very new field of practice in the United States. Mayor Burt: This is still on, I guess, principally Alternative 1. As we look at the area between High and Emerson, are those one-way or two-way tracks there? Mr. Mello: Alternative 1 are one-way tracks all the way from Emerson to El Camino. Alternative 2 is a two-way cycle track. Mayor Burt: I'm kind of curious on a hybrid here. If I’m going onto Stanford, I have no problem going one way and staying on this—we'll call it north side—and coming back on the south side. If I'm going to Town and Country or if I'm—yeah, principally Town and Country, I come back on that. I'm going to be going against a one-way. I guess if we've improved the route on the south side and the ability to get over to Bryant, which right now is pretty hairy, maybe that's some improvement. I don't know if we—is there any potential for looking at a hybrid, where we have the one-way everywhere from coming out from under the underpass, essentially the Town and Country section. On the east side, it's a two-way like it is now but an improved two-way. Mr. Mello: We would take the first sheet for Alternative 1 and combine that with the second sheet from Alternative 2 essentially. Mayor Burt: I guess so. I hadn't because I couldn't tell from the sheets clearly what that intention was. That becomes a real question for me. I TRANSCRIPT Page 76 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 don't know whether you or others who bike this—I bike it a lot. I'm trying to now think through with the improvements that you're going to do on the other side, does that reduce my need for a two-way in this section enough? I'm not sure. Mr. Mello: I ride that quite a bit as well. Right now, coming out of Stanford crossing the south leg of that intersection is extremely hairy. There's lots of right-turning vehicles. The existing pork chop island is very difficult to navigate on a bike, and there's lots of poles. You have to go way out of your way. All of that will be ... Mayor Burt: I'm meaning even east of the underpass. East of Alma is what I'm kind of concentrating on. I know you've got west of Alma greatly improved. I'm talking about east of Alma. Right now, people don't ride it very much because it is just so bad, and trying to hook up to Bryant is almost impossible. Mr. Mello: I don't think Alternative 1 works without that connection between Emerson and Bryant that's not shown on this plan in front of the school. Mayor Burt: I'm talking about once again east of Bryant. Mr. Mello: Yeah, east of Bryant. I don't think that Alternative 1 works unless we can get all the way to Bryant. What's shown on here is the eastbound cycle track ending at Emerson and leaving you with no way to get to Bryant without basically backtracking on Kingsley. I can pull it up on here. Mayor Burt: I'm good with the—I don't think we need two-ways on the south side of Embarcadero from the underpass to Bryant or to Emerson. I'm saying on the north side is really the challenge, whether your improvements on the south side solve the problem well enough that we don't need two- ways on the north side. Mr. Mello: That would be the goal. It would really depend on how easy that connection to Bryant is. We don't want people to feel like they're riding along a sidewalk on an arterial street. We'd want to make that really comfortable. Mayor Burt: Is this hybrid of just using the—if we only took from Alternative 2 and used that for the north side of El Camino between the underpass and Emerson, would that be a big problem? TRANSCRIPT Page 77 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: Just to clarify. The sheet that's up here on the screen, we would take that and we would combine that with sheet 1 from Alternative 1, which has the one-way cycle tracks. Mayor Burt: I think that's what I mean. Mr. Mello: It would be one-way cycle tracks west of the train tracks, and then a two-way cycle track on the north side east. That would work. Functionally it would work, because you could make the crossing at the signalized intersection, the signalized crosswalk. Mayor Burt: Between now and when we get back for discussion, I'd really value whether there's problems with doing that, that I'm not envisioning. My "seat of the pants" is that that might be a better combination. We've had all these comments from the public, and I want to know whether they think something's wrong with that. Mr. Mello: Another option is to just move forward with Alternative 1, but to make the cycle track on the north side of Embarcadero between the underpass and Emerson two-way, and then keep the one on the south side. There's enough right-of-way to actually ... Mayor Burt: That's what I meant. Yes, that's actually what I meant. I'm sorry. One other thing is that when you emerge from the underpass in front of Trader Joe's or if you come off of the bikeway next to the tracks, it's a tight radius to turn there. There's a little dirt oval right in front of Trader Joe's that just makes it too tight. It's a tough bike radius. That's a minor issue, but is there any intention to improve that? Mr. Mello: We can add that to the final design certainly. The stairway would have bike runnels as well, so you could bring your bike down the stairway if you wanted to get down there quicker. Mayor Burt: As you loop back—if you come up from the underpass and you loop back and go to the bike path on the train tracks, that route is a way that you have a grade separation and don't have to walk a bike to be able to get on that bike path. As we're improving the whole Park Boulevard, it's becoming a preferred route. The merger between that and the bike path along the tracks is pretty dangerous. We have both a lot of Paly pedestrians and bikes on both. We have bikes and peds on both those paths. Every time I take it, it's kind of worrisome. Is there an intention to make improvements to that—I'll call it an intersection? TRANSCRIPT Page 78 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mr. Mello: I've experienced that first hand as well. We can certainly look at that when we move into final design as well and see if there's any geometric modifications or better signing or striping that would help that. Mayor Burt: You have the stairway on the north side. Is there any consideration to a stairway on the south side going into Paly? Mr. Mello: We could look at that as well. We did look at the option of adding a ramp on the south side that would mimic what's on the north side. That would actually require significant grading and/or acquisition of property from Paly. We can look at a stairwell; that might be a little less impactful than a ramp. Mayor Burt: At the top of Page 4 of the Packet, there's a bullet. This is part of the project constraints. One says that pedestrian crossings at El Camino are too far for the students to walk; therefore, requiring a controlled crossing in between. I have timed the—if a student or anyone waits for the pedestrian crossing in front of Trader Joe's, we'll call it, for the signal change, it is a virtual wash versus walking up to the path and coming back around and having no signal wait. I'm not sure I agree that it is the constraint that was described there. Mr. Mello: I've observed, when the signal does turn to "don't walk," quite a few students actually do make the decision to just walk up and go over the overpass. Quite a few stay. I do have that video if you want to take a look at that. We could do it now or we could do it a little bit later. It actually shows how that—it effectively shows the signal timing that I was explaining earlier and how the crosswalk is really not the cause of the delay out there. Mayor Burt: Part of the problem with the internal—the circulation at Paly feeds to the crosswalk. It doesn't feed to the path. Paly didn't design their circulation to really facilitate this. Maybe some of those improvements could be made. Let's see. I think that covers my questions well enough. It'd be great to see that video real quick. We're going to start with the public right now. Mr. Mello: What you're going to see in the video is the—we're looking towards Stanford, and you'll see the crosswalk in the foreground and the signal at Town and Country in the background. When the signal at Town and Country turns red, as soon as the queue from that signal backs up to the crosswalk, the crosswalk signal turns red. There's only one car that is delayed by the crosswalk. He actually would have been delayed by the Town and Country signal anyway if he had made it across the crosswalk. The green SUV is the only car that's being held up by the crosswalk. TRANSCRIPT Page 79 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Everybody else is stored between the Town and Country driveway and the crosswalk. Mayor Burt: What time of day is this? That's a lot of kids. Mr. Mello: This is lunch time. You'll see here they're still being delayed by the driveway signal, not by the crosswalk signal. Now the driveway signal is red again. You'll see right about when the queue backs up to the crosswalk, the crosswalk signal will turn red. Mayor Burt: Just one historical note. My recollection is that up until the 1960s Embarcadero, which is three lanes, had A.M.. peak hour two lanes going westward and P.M. peak hour two lanes going eastward. I didn't mean to open a can of worms here. We have five speaker cards. If anyone else would like to speak, please bring a card forward. Our first speaker is Judd—is it Vozino or Volino? Judd Volino: Volino. Mayor Burt: There we go. That's an "l" after all. Welcome. Mr. Volino: Good evening, Mayor Burt and Council Members. My name is Judd Volino, a resident of the Community Center neighborhood. I'm also the Safe Route to School champion for Palo Alto High School; although, I'm speaking on my own and my family's behalf tonight. We all use this corridor, using all three modes or the three modes of transport that we've talked about this evening. My children also ride their bikes every day on the very section that we're talking about, on the north side of Embarcadero leading into the underpass. After reviewing the alternatives presented, I think that Alternative 1 will bring the greatest benefits to drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. In particular, I think it'll increase the attractiveness for casual cyclists and pedestrians using foot and pedal power to reach this busy block. By separating the various users most clearly, I think Alternative 1 will best achieve the goal of increasing comfort and safety for pedestrians and cyclists and frankly for public transit users, which is something we haven't talked about a lot tonight. That's noted in some of the improvements to the bus stops in this plan. In turn, more people would be encouraged to leave their cars at home and hopefully reduce the numbers of cars arriving and passing through this area, particularly for some of the examples we've cited of coming from our own neighborhood that are easily within a mile. It's hard to come up with an excuse to use your car, especially if you can avoid doing parking at Town and Country, for example. In addition, Alternative 1 has a greater set of improvements at the El Camino Real crossing, which will also benefit those commuting to Stanford, attending events and headed to the Stanford Perimeter Trail. Alternative 2, TRANSCRIPT Page 80 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 on the other hand, retains a fair amount of competition between cyclists and motor vehicles crossing Embarcadero. In addition, crossing Embarcadero would continue to be a tough sell. Crossing Embarcadero to use the cycle track on the other side by going on that crosswalk in front of Trader Joe's would be a tough sell. I thank City Staff and contractors for listening to the community and developing these plans to improve this important corridor and for balancing the needs of many different community members. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Judd, can I ask you a question about this kind of hybrid thing that I was bringing up? I hesitate to throw in a design change in the middle of a Council meeting. Do you have any thoughts on whether that particular segment—retaining Alternative 1, but that segment staying two-way would be good or bad? Mr. Volino: I think it would be good to have it two-way. To be perfectly frank, that's exactly how I personally use that block right now. I go to Town and Country, I go to Stanford, I go to Paly even on that side, and then I take the bridge. When I'm coming back, it's most comfortable to stay on the north side frankly, because I'm also ending up on the north side because I'm heading into Kingsley to get over into the other part of the residential area. I think making that two-way would be frankly good. I want to be open to everybody's ideas. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Our next speaker is Penny Ellson, to be followed by Amie Ashton. Welcome. Penny Ellson: Good evening. I'm Penny Ellson, 513 El Capitan Place. I'm here to support improvements to the Embarcadero, El Camino to Emerson stretch and to express my preference for Alternative 1. I'm going to cut this short in the interest of time, because Judd's really covered a lot of stuff that I was going to talk about. Let's see. Students and parents are going to like the visibility and separation from cars of these improvements, the protected intersection, the separated bikeways on both sides of the road. I guess I want to talk about this more generally. We really need better bike and pedestrian facilities on east-west cross-town residential arterials. These arterials currently function poorly as the backbone to our Citywide bike and pedestrian network. People who walk and bike in Palo Alto have few east- west options because of the rail barrier. Our grade-separated expressways, Oregon and San Antonio, serve cars exclusively. People who walk and bike are left with few options, so residential arterials take on very special importance as east-west connectors for all modes. Embarcadero and Charleston-Arastradero already carry large volumes of bicyclists and pedestrians, including hundreds of Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) TRANSCRIPT Page 81 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 students. We want the numbers of people who bike and walk to grow, but they need a safe place on the street. This plan provides that. The improvements in Alternative 1 are an excellent response to the needs of all road users at this challenging location. I want to thank City Staff for their rigorous community outreach. This is a good plan. Thank you, City Council, for considering my comments. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Amie Ashton to be followed by Elaine Uang. Amie Ashton: I'll make this quick too. Just anecdotally I was at Sawyer Camp a few weeks ago, which is off 280. I don't know if anyone's ever gone up there. I went there for a run. I couldn't believe that on a Saturday morning I had to park almost a mile from the trailhead for all the people and families and kids that had driven there to bike. It was just unbelievable. At first, I was excited and this is fun and everyone's here. Then, I thought this is the saddest thing ever, that all these people have to get in their cars, load their bikes in, load their kids in and drive to go enjoy a protected bike path. I'm happy to support any bicycle improvements. I bike daily. I drive maybe once a month because I live in a community that supports these kind of improvements. I'm here to support Alternative 1. Keep these connections going. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Elaine Uang to be followed by Bruce—I'm sorry, I can't make it out. Elaine Uang: Thank you. Really excited to see this. This is a very innovative and potentially great addition. Four comments since I've already written in. I think Alternative 1 is a much safer alternative. I know a lot of you have been deliberating on Alternative 2 and the car improvement. I also wanted to encourage you to think about the potential bike and automobile conflicts that might arise with Alternative 2, even if there might be some time improvements to automobile traffic. Second, biking to shop, especially even to Trader Joe's, is increasing. I'd hope that you would consider cargo bikes, trailers, tricycles and different types of cycles that are now being used for everyday activities and to make sure that access for those types of cycles is preserved even at the underpass. Mayor Burt, I do really like your suggestion for the two-way cycle track on the north side. I think that is the natural way for people to head back up to the neighborhoods. I think also given that these improvements don't connect all the way to Bryant Street, I think that's actually a more stress-free way to access the Bryant Street Bicycle Boulevard, preserving that two-way cycle track on the north side. Finally, regardless of whatever option you pursue, I would love to encourage you to think about wayfinding as a crucial component of this, especially as the final design comes forward, especially TRANSCRIPT Page 82 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 signage connecting Kingsley to the Bryant Street Bicycle Boulevard and any signage at the grade separation to the rec trail and the overpass. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Our final speaker is Bruce. I'm sorry I can't make out the spelling of the last name. Bruce? I'll never know. That concludes our public comments. We are now at 9:15 P.M. I think we've had a good deal of sounds like consensus. Let's see if we can perhaps move quickly to a resolution. Council Member Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. First I wanted to say I think Staff did a great job on this. I think both plans actually give a lot of improvements to bike riders. I think I would be happy if I was bicyclist with either of them. I think that the protected two-way track works just fine. I don't see an issue with that. If people want to use the other one, they can. This intersection, though, and this roadway is probably the thing I hear most about in the community. I'd say for at least the last five years people have been asking me, "When are we going to fix Embarcadero?" What they're really talking about is the traffic delays and the mess of the traffic and the way it comes out of Trader Joe's and the way signaling has been a problem. I've got to say four seconds is a lot. That's basically that limit of where we start talking about a level of service improvement, and we make people under an EIR go fix it, if I recall from our last discussion. I think this is a question of balance. I think Option 2 provides that balance. A number of speakers said that Option 1 provides improvements for motorists, for bicycles and for pedestrians. It actually doesn't. Option 2 provides it for everybody and balances out competing interests in a way that everyone gets an improvement. Whereas, Option 1 really just does it for bicycles. With that said, I will move that we adopt Option 2. Council Member DuBois: Second. MOTION: Vice Mayor Scharff moved, seconded by Council Member DuBois to identify Alternative 2 as the preferred alternative for the preparation of an environmental analysis and plans, specifications and estimates for construction for Embarcadero Road between El Camino Real and Emerson Street roadway improvements. Mayor Burt: That is Motion by Vice Mayor Scharff, seconded by Council Member DuBois. Do you want to speak further to your Motion? Vice Mayor Scharff: I do. We talk a lot about listening to the community. What I hear from the community is that they are really unhappy with this stretch of road, and they want improvements, and they want traffic improvements. I think Option 2 takes care of the bicycle issues and does a good job with it. I think the protected two-way bicycle track makes it easy TRANSCRIPT Page 83 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 for families, makes it easy for people to get to Paly. People can choose to use the bicycle lane if they want. I don't see an issue with that at all. Whereas, I do see a huge issue with not making any traffic improvements in this that are significant. Getting that fixed with Trader's Joe coming out and having that right turn-lane will be a huge improvement for people, and they'll really notice it. For once, they'll say the City actually did something about it. If we don't do that, we're going to have the same traffic. After this is all done, people are going to say, "You didn't fix it." We're going to hear in the community, and people are going to be really angry about it and unhappy. I really think that we should go with Option 2. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I think one thing we didn't talk about tonight is where's the demand coming from. Clearly we have a high volume of bikes to Paly. Both alternatives do a good solution there. They focus on that. We have fewer bikes going on to Stanford. Again, I echo what Council Member Scharff just said. I've seen bikes back all the way up to Lewis in the morning commute. That actually seems worse on the commute time than it does at football events. Talking about a large number of drivers, 1,100 cars an hour on Embarcadero, 1,100 an hour each way on El Camino. That's kind of the silent majority. Those drivers didn't show up here tonight. As Council Member Scharff said, I think the community's going to be quite angry if we don't improve this intersection. I think we're clear that the plan is not to put bikes on El Camino. Both the alternatives seem good, and they both seem feasible. In Option 2, we still have the dedicated cycle track, but we also increase the car flow with the two additional right turn-lanes, one into Town and Country, one onto El Camino. We don't have any bikes turning right onto El Camino and relatively few pedestrians. Compared to many other places in town, this is actually a place where we can improve the flow for all modes of transportation. It's really something I think we should take advantage of. The other thing we should think about in terms of demand is for those people biking into Stanford, we could talk about bike VMT. We were talking about VMT earlier tonight. Stanford's providing increased housing which should lower that commuting into Stanford itself. We may have some commuters using the neighborhood park and bike plan, parking in the neighborhood and then biking into Stanford. I don't think that's something we necessarily want to encourage. Again, I think this is a great opportunity just to improve all modes of transportation simultaneously. We don't see this very often. I think we have an opportunity here to make a really good traffic decision for everybody. Mayor Burt: I'm going to jump in here and put forward a Substitute Motion which is to adopt Alternative 1 with the exception that from Trader Joe's to TRANSCRIPT Page 84 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Emerson we would utilize the two-way configuration of Alternative 2 on the north side of Embarcadero. Council Member Berman: Second. SUBSTITUTE MOTION: Mayor Burt moved, seconded by Council Member Berman to identify Alternative 1, with the change to utilize the two-way configuration of Alternative 2 on the North side of Embarcadero Road, from Trader Joe’s to Emerson Street, as the preferred alternative for the preparation of an environmental analysis and plans, specifications and estimates for construction for Embarcadero Road between El Camino Real and Emerson Street roadway improvements. Mayor Burt: I'll say that both are decent. It's very clear from all of the input that we've received from the public—we've had many dozens of emails supporting Alternative 1. I don't think I've seen a single email supporting Alternative 2. With this design which—I just want to say this is a really constrained area. I want to really express the appreciation of our Staff and consultants for coming up with solutions that are so good for an area that I hope for marginal improvements. I didn't think you would be able to come up with designs that are this good. It's really quite an accomplishment for something that has so many constraints on it. I think this is going to make this area where basically the best way to get to Town and Country, Paly or Stanford is going to be by bike or foot. It'll be the most convenient and fastest way to get there. I think we'll see a lot more people taking it. I already have a hard time finding a bike rack at Trader Joe's when I shop there by bike. This will just make it so much better, including to Stanford. We look at Stanford events. The whole notion of driving on the Stanford campus and trying to get parking there, Stanford wants to discourage that as much as possible. Now we have a way to align their discouragement with our encouragement. I think this is really going to be a great breakthrough combined with what we're doing. We've already approved for Churchill. These east-west corridors are going to be a big breakthrough connecting to not just the Stanford Rim Trail for Stanford but think about all of the high schoolers who live in College Terrace or even other areas that will be crossing there and just the whole community. We look at the Dish and everybody who drives to the Dish to take a hike. This is just all opened up by these two different routes. This is a big accomplishment. Those are my comments. Council Member Berman: I just want to follow up on Mayor Burt's comments and say how impressed I was by first the outreach to the community and then the thoughtfulness that went into a lot of the improvements. You guys thought of every nook and cranny of how you can TRANSCRIPT Page 85 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 make this stretch of Palo Alto better for everybody. I was struck by when questions would come up, Staff had personal examples of, "yes, I watched that also" and "I saw that happen" or "I experience that when I bike that." There's intimate knowledge about this stretch of road and the challenges that it presents for vehicles, for bikers and for pedestrians. I was also really struck by the comment from Mr. Neff from the Pedestrian and Bicycle Advisory Committee. He said, "When we looked at this from a 'we're all expert bikers, what would be best' position, we chose 2. Then we realized the goal is to get as many people from the community riding their bike. How can we create a protected bike path that incentivize everybody to get out of their cars and to start biking. That was when we reevaluated it, and we said actually Number 1 is clearly the best option to get as many people out of their cars and biking." That's the goal of our $25 million Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan. We have that opportunity to achieve that goal, at least for this stretch of road. There are other improvements that are being made to the vehicle traffic through coordination with Caltrans and others with some of the complicated intersections and relationships between their timing and our timing of the different intersections all the way down Embarcadero. This is an opportunity to really create great improvements meant for bicyclists and pedestrians. It would be a shame not to take advantage of that. The one modification I would propose—I guess amendment I would add—is there was an issue of switching the configuration on the east side and the west side in terms of where the bicycle track is and where the sidewalk is, the only issue. This was something that was emailed to us. Staff said it made sense for ... Mayor Burt: Okay. Council Member Berman: If that would still be possible with Option 2 on the north side. I asked those questions before Mayor Burt proposed his hybrid. Mr. Mello: It should be possible. Just to clarify, on both of the options, on the west side, the cycle track is on the inside of the sidewalk. On the east side, it's on the outside of the sidewalk. What we will do is move it to be consistent on both the east and west sides. Council Member Berman: That'd be great. Mr. Mello: It'll be on the same side of the sidewalk on both sections. Council Member Berman: Figure out which one PABAC thinks makes the most sense or whoever's input you guys get. One of my colleagues talked a lot about public feedback. This went through our Planning and Transportation Commission, and they suggested Option 1. It went through PABAC, who revised their suggestion after looking at it even more TRANSCRIPT Page 86 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 thoroughly and much more thoroughly than we did tonight. They suggested Option 1. We received dozens of emails from the public that all suggested Option 1. The choice is really clear for me about what our community is asking for. I think that we should approve what they've asked for. Mayor Burt: I neglected to make one additional comment. If it's okay, I'd add in the concern as to how will car drivers benefit. I asked the question earlier. We don't have an estimate. Switching to significantly more bike riders here reduces the number of cars in this roadway and should benefit the automobile traffic as well. I recall County Supervisor Simitian a number of years ago, now 20 years ago, from the dais when they were discussing bike initiatives. He was championing it, and his closest friend, Gary Fazzino, said from the dais, "Joe, why the heck are you caring so much about bike riders? You haven't ridden your bike in 20 years." He said, "Because Gary every bike rider on the road is one less car I have to compete with and one more parking space for me. I'm all for it". That's something that we often lose sight of when we think in a narrow way in terms of how drivers benefit. They benefit from every bike that formerly was a car. Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: I'd like to associate my views with those of Council Member Berman and also Mayor Burt. I'll be supporting the Substitute Motion. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: I'm still thinking about this. Here's sort of how I'm thinking about it. The comments in the email campaign—by the way, most of them are the same email, which is a "get this one, push and repeat" thing. The ways I'm thinking about this. First of all, as Mr. Neff pointed out, an expert biker is used to cycling down these stretches. I'm probably not as expert a cyclist as Mr. Neff is, but I'm uncomfortable when cycling down those things, especially in crossing over to get that lane. I think everybody remembers there was a gentleman that was killed out on Page Mill on one of these things where you've got to cross over the lane into the bike lane last year. There was the white ghost bike up there for a long time. That one seems to me to be on one side. I think people will bike down that stretch. To the extent they get out of their cars, I think they will. I think a lot of them will bike on the sidewalk. I think that's going to be the response. That's on one side. The other side. I think the 2.5 seconds is significant at an LOS of D. 2.5 seconds and an LOS of D, that would actually register as a traffic impact in Menlo Park, because their standards are more stringent than ours in Palo Alto on a construction project. I actually think that Palo Alto should look at adopting Menlo Park's standards. It makes no sense to me TRANSCRIPT Page 87 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 that this level of impact is an impact in Menlo Park but not in Palo Alto. That makes no sense to me. That's the tradeoff that I'm sort of thinking about. One is that scoop in the center and the in-between lane that Mr. Neff was talking about. The other is the LOS impact. I'm still waiting to hear what the rest of Council says and thinking about this. That's sort of what's going through my mind right now. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. I just have to react to what the community is asking for. I know that there's probably been in the last seven years 50, 60 people or more that have asked me about how we're going to fix the traffic on this. Yes, there's a coordinated email campaign of 10 or 11 people who have sent us emails on this. That's not what the community is asking for. Yes, the community wants improvements in bikes. This does a huge improvement for bikes. This does both. This is balanced. Whereas, what we're doing otherwise is ignoring the community on the issue of traffic, on the issue of being stuck in that intersection, of having to drive through that every day and experience the frustration and the anger that people have when they have those traffic conflicts and the traffic issues there. That is one of the worst stretches to drive on. At the end of the day, we'll have done all this, and everyone will come back and say, "You didn't do anything for the traffic." Whereas, if we do Option 2, people will be happy with the bicycle improvements. The bicycle improvements are great. People will be happy with the traffic, and everyone will be happy. I think Option 2 makes so much more sense in terms of keeping it balanced and really solving the problem that the community asked us to solve when we started looking at Embarcadero. Mr. Keene: Mr. Mayor, I just would remind you guys it's 9:35 here in my role as timekeeper. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: Real quick, because I do want to get on to the next item. We didn't talk a lot about Alternative 2, but Alternative 2 does have the two-way separated track to Stanford. I think if you're not a confident cyclist, you have that as an option. If you're more confident, you can go straight through on the green pathway. The other thing just to clarify. What I heard is we get a 2 second timesaving with a right-hand turn-lane. We potentially could get another 2 seconds or four seconds total if we continue to work on synchronization with the El Camino. To me that was a huge improvement, a four second improvement. Again, I think we're improving it for everybody. TRANSCRIPT Page 88 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach, you wanted to come back in? Council Member Wolbach: Yeah. First, actually on this question of synchronization that DuBois just mentioned, that goes back to what Vice Mayor Scharff was talking about. What we're choosing here is between 1 and 2. We're not choosing whether to do the light signal synchronization. That's a completely separate issue. Staff is already moving on that. We've talked more about how they can move faster, other options they might explore such as taking, perhaps under an agreement, local control over that intersection. I'm sorry. That's really not relevant to this conversation. There's no four second improvement suggested by 2 over 1. There's a 2 1/2-second improvement, which under our rules in Palo Alto is not a major impact. That's about the length of time you have to stop when you're at a stop sign. Taking the length of time essentially to stop at a stop sign to significantly improve bicycle safety and to increase the number of people who will want to bike based on all of the feedback we've gotten through our PTC and the PABAC, I'll be sticking with supporting the Substitute Motion. Mayor Burt: Just in response to that claim that we would not be doing anything for cars. In addition to the traffic reduction, we will be having the synchronization which will benefit automobiles. On top of that, this is not only about improved bike efficiency and mode share. It is about bike safety. The issue of whether we're going to have a safer alternative here really does matter. Now both of these improve bike safety significantly over what we currently have. Alternative 1 is the safer mode, and that should matter a lot. I think we're ready to vote on the Substitute Motion. That passes on a 5-4 vote with Council Members Schmid, DuBois, Vice Mayor Schmid and Council Member Holman voting no. That passes. Thank you for your participation. Either way for some really outstanding alternatives that are going to benefit our community. Thank you. SUBSTITUTE MOTION PASSED: 5-4 DuBois, Holman, Scharff, Schmid, no 8. Review of the Draft Transportation Element Prepared by the Comprehensive Plan Update Community Advisory Committee (Continued From August 15, 2016). James Keene, City Manager: I'll turn it over to the Staff as they're sitting down, Mr. Mayor. I'm sure you're going to have a lot to talk about. I'd just remind you all that these same folks are going to be at the Citizens Advisory Committee meeting tomorrow night supporting their conversations on land use. Mayor Burt: Our next item is a review of the draft Transportation Element for our Comprehensive Plan that's been prepared by the Comprehensive Plan TRANSCRIPT Page 89 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Update Community Advisory Committee. This item's been continued from August 15th. Welcome, Director Gitelman. Hillary Gitelman, Planning and Community Environment Director: Thank you. Mayor Burt and Council Members, Hillary Gitelman, the Planning Director. I'm joined by Elaine Costello and Elena Lee. You are familiar with the process we are engaged in to update the City's Comprehensive Plan. It's a three-pronged strategy with the Council, the Community Advisory Commission and the Staff activities happening concurrently. The middle prong is the Citizens Advisory Committee. They've been working incredibly hard to provide you with draft work products for your review, like the Transportation Element that we're going to talk about this evening. Tonight, what we'd like to do is share the draft with you; answer any questions you have on the updated schedule that we've provided; and see if we can't get from the Council some big picture input on this draft work product, so that we can bring it back at a later date to address any comments you have this evening. The CAC, as I mentioned, has worked incredible hard, many, many meetings as a group and as subcommittees. They recommended the draft you have before you unanimously at their June meeting, recognizing that it's a draft, still going to need some editing going forward. It was, I think, significant to us. We had all anticipated there would be a majority opinion and a minority opinion on multiple policy issues like there will be on land use. In transportation, the group just kept at it and reached consensus on the draft you have before you. The Element uses the vision statement that the Council refined and directed. It also uses the organizational system that the Council recommended with two changes. One is that the traffic congestion goal, which is Goal 2, was moved up. When the Council talked about this originally, I think that was at the end of the list. It was just so interrelated with some of the other topics that it moved up on the list of goals. The other change is the goal related to the airport the CAC decided they would defer to the Land Use Element. You'll see that in November when the Land Use Element comes to you for discussion. In terms of the themes of the Element, I hope you had an opportunity to read through. I'm sure you'll pick up on the fact that many of the themes are quite recognizable from the current Comp Plan Element. Some of them are newer. For example, we've carried forward the theme of reducing reliance on single occupancy vehicles. That will not be a new idea to anyone who's familiar to our current Comp Plan. We also have a lot of support for transit and first-mile, last-mile solutions. Some of the terminology is maybe different, but I think again that theme is carried forward. We've talked about in this Element a phased approach to addressing parking demand. I think that was kind of a new concept that took a lot of work on the part of the committee. The idea was that today we should be meeting our parking demand, but in the future we hope that all of our efforts to shift modes, to TRANSCRIPT Page 90 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 reduce traffic, reduce parking will be successful. We should provide a system for reevaluating and reducing parking over time as we are successful with those other efforts. We also talk in this Element about the use of VMT and LOS. As you discussed earlier this evening, we're in an evolution in the CEQA process. We've included policies in the draft Plan about using both of those going forward as we evaluate traffic. Other themes. Prioritizing pedestrian and bicycle safety, I don't think you'll find that to be new. That's a carry forward, but there is also this idea of identifying transit-dependent communities, people who may not have options other than transit. That's discussed at some length in the policies. We're carrying forward many of the policies and the focus on collaboration on regional solutions. As I mentioned, this is still a draft. We recognize there's some opportunity for condensing and editing what you have before you. The CAC also provided some additional comments, which we've forwarded to you as one of the attachments you received this evening. In taking their vote to forward this draft to the Council, the committee really wanted you to know that it is a draft. They understand that things are changing as we move forward. For example, the VTA proposal to reduce bus service in our area they felt like wasn't addressed fully. As the VTA moves forward with that, we should circle back and make sure that's addressed in a significant way in the final product. Mayor Burt: I'm sorry. On this, can you explain the colors? Ms. Gitelman: I'm getting to it. Mayor Burt: Sorry. Ms. Gitelman: The other thing that I wanted to mention is one of the gaps in the document—it's just a placeholder right now—is the list of physical improvements that will be undertaken during the life of the Plan. It's not going to be a surprise to any of you; ultimately we'll fill that in with the grade separations that you know we're working on, any of the County expressway projects that the Council ultimately wishes to support and include on that list, including intersection improvements along Page Mill Road, and any other Capital Improvement Program (CIP) projects. That'll be coming as part of the next draft. One other interesting note is the attachment we provided with a summary of the analysis that our collaborators at Stanford have done. They're really developing and testing this idea of tracking crowd-sourced comments through a complex planning process like this. This graphic is a first take at some of their analysis, trying to show all of the comments that we sourced through the Digital Commenter and the public comments coming into the process, how the CAC massaged those comments, and then how the final product stacks up. What you're TRANSCRIPT Page 91 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 seeing in those different columns are some of the topic areas and how they shift from comments to the CAC to the work product. I think it's a work in progress, but we wanted you to be aware of that collaboration as something interesting that will bear fruit hopefully as we move forward. For this evening, we're suggesting that you start by inviting any members of the CAC who are still here this evening to speak first. We'd, of course, like to hear their comments as well as any members of the public who are here tonight. We're hoping that we can get the Council's comments or observations about the themes, the scope, kind of the level of detail, immediate next steps on this Element. Importantly, if you see anything missing here, we would very much like to hear that and any comments or questions you have about the schedule that we've provided. In terms of next steps, as Jim mentioned, tomorrow the CAC will be meeting to discuss the Land Use Element. We hope it's going to be the last meeting on the Land Use Element before they recommend it to you for your consideration in November. The committee's also starting tomorrow their work on the Natural Environment and Safety Elements. With that, we'd be happy to answer any questions. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Colleagues, questions of Staff? Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thanks very much. When we looked at this before on scheduling, if I remember right, there was a desire on the Council's part to have another chance to look at this after we'd seen the Land Use Element. Do I remember that right? Mayor Burt: I don't remember the full discussion. Does Staff remember that? Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. Another desire to see the Land Use Element? Council Member Filseth: We were hoping to see the Transportation Element again after we'd seen the Land Use Element, because they are sort of linked. Do I remember that right? Ms. Gitelman: I don't know that we reached a resolution on that. Right now, we're queued up to bring land use to you in November. We could potentially schedule the transportation to come back to you at some point after that. If you see the schedule we sent in last week's packet, there may be an opportunity to add another Council session early in the new year after you've seen land use. Council Member Filseth: I'll guess I'll defer that one to the Mayor and colleagues (crosstalk). TRANSCRIPT Page 92 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: I'll add that it's kind of—we certainly want to see that integration. In this sense, what we get is when we do review the land use, we'll have the benefit of having gone through this. Council Member Filseth: (crosstalk) transportation. Mayor Burt: I'm not quite sure. Ultimately we want to make sure they're integrated, when we've seen them before. Council Member Filseth: Right, that's the goal. I had one question. One of my favorite policies from the existing Comp Plan I didn't see in here. It was previous Police T47 which reads "protect residential areas from the impacts of nearby business districts." I didn't see that one in here. I was wondering is it in here or did it get excised or why. Ms. Gitelman: I hope this isn't a theme, but I think we have at least two policies in the draft Element that address that one idea from the last Element. I know there's one in the parking section that talks about ensuring there isn't intrusion into residential neighborhoods. I will find that for you. I think there's also—T5.10, it's on Packet Page 432 at the bottom, is the one that's specific to parking. I think there's also one about traffic intrusions and traffic calming. It'll take us a moment to find that one. T4.2 on Packet Page 428. Council Member Filseth: T5.10 says minimize spillover parking into residential neighborhoods. Is that the one I'm thinking? All right. That's probably the limit of my question. Mayor Burt: Other Council Member questions? Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Thinking about the space in mode types between bicycles and cars, there are a couple of steps in between. One is electric bikes, which are becoming more popular. The other is scooters and motorcycles. I'm looking for more in here about safety in road design, to consider those, especially considering that now State law provides that lane sharing by motorcycles is legal. Before it was de facto legal; now it's explicitly legal. I think that's important when we think about roadway design, etc. It's a question. I'm wondering if there's anything about that in here that I missed. I'm also wondering if there's anything in here I missed about parking and charging for electric bicycles and also parking spaces and charging for electric motorcycles and scooters, which we'll see more of between now and 2030. While you're looking for that, the third area of question. Basically, roadway design, parking and charging facilities. The third area of question for electric bikes and for motorcycles and scooters is— I was just looking for anything about improving our signal sensor sensitivity TRANSCRIPT Page 93 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 that are based on weight or whatever. When you pull up at an intersection, waiting for a red light to charge, a heavy car will trigger a sensor, so the light will turn green. Whereas, a bicycle who's operating as a vehicular bicycle or a motorcycle or scooter might not be heavy enough to change it. I was wondering if there was anything in here that I missed about making sure that we continue to update our sensors to be more sensitive. Elaine Costello: Do you want me to answer that? Ms. Gitelman: Yeah. Ms. Costello: Elaine Costello. We did discuss that at the transportation subcommittee. When I look at the policy—it's 6.6.3—it's really focused more on students using scooters. As I recall, that is what we currently have in the draft on that issue. I don't think we have anything else on scooters and stuff. I know we did have a discussion of supporting those alternatives as well. Ms. Gitelman: I think that's a good example of something that might be missing from here, that we could emphasize in future drafts. We did get a lot in here in Goal 6 about bicycles, but there's not a section on e-bikes or a policy on e-bikes specifically. I think there's an opportunity to address that new phenomenon, both from accommodating them but also the charging. Council Member Wolbach: That's it for my questions. Mayor Burt: Anyone next? Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: I've been on this thing of late because it's come up and there's been reason to be. The thing about the El Camino/Page Mill under-crossing. I don't see any reference to that in here. It seems like we ought to investigate being able to utilize that. Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. This is your idea that we would reactivate the pedestrian crossing under El Camino. Is that what you're referring to? Council Member Holman: Yes. Ms. Gitelman: We'll have to look into that. I think it's closed for a reason, but I don't know what that reason is. I'll have to look into that. Council Member Holman: It's not even considered in here. I'm sorry? Ms. Costello: That's right. It's not mentioned in here. Council Member Holman: Yeah, it's not. TRANSCRIPT Page 94 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Ms. Gitelman: We'll have to look into that. Council Member Holman: The only reason that I know that it isn't is because—I think it does need some improvements. Why wouldn't we consider doing those? I know it's not Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessible, but there's also access at grade so it doesn't have to be ADA accessible, I don't think. To ignore it, I think, is not prudent. I have some other comments. I think that's probably my only—actually, I didn't see RPP discussed in here very much. Can you point me to that? I didn't see much reference to it. Ms. Costello: It's in here. Ms. Gitelman: I think that parking policy we just looked at with Council Member Filseth ... Ms. Costello: Neighborhood Impacts, Goal T4. Council Member Holman: Yeah, 5.10. It just says in residential neighborhoods work with neighborhood associations to prioritize residential street parking and minimize spillover. It's work with neighborhoods, but aren't we working with the commercial district as well as neighborhoods? There's not a specific reference to RPP. Ms. Gitelman: There is a policy here. I'm sorry, it's just taking us a minute to find it. In fact, there's probably more than one. It's Program 5.10.1 at the bottom of Page 432. Coordinate with neighboring groups to evaluate the need for Residential Permit Parking areas outside Downtown Palo Alto and College Terrace. Council Member Holman: I kept looking for RPP and didn't even—isn't that silly—notice Residential Permit Parking Program. We may come back to that. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Just a couple of questions. I guess I too was astounded that this has come without the Land Use Element or there hasn't been some dialog between this and the Land Use Element. We have been talking in the scenarios of the difference between 7,000 new jobs and 15,000 new jobs. I can't believe that the CAC wouldn't look at this Transportation Element with quite a different viewpoint between those two alternatives. Yet, it's not reflected in here. Has there been any discussion of that wide spectrum of alternative outcomes? TRANSCRIPT Page 95 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Ms. Gitelman: Council Member Schmid, it's always difficult tackling a huge project like this that has interrelated and interlocking pieces. We had to start somewhere. We started with the Transportation Element. I think the CAC has done their best to think ahead and have been very interested, as some of the other Council Members have suggested, in circling back at some point and making sure that we have full integration between the topics. The schedule we're showing is asking the CAC to get through every Element once, and then to circle back and look at the whole thing as an integrated piece. We really just couldn't figure out a way to do it all at once. That's the way it's been planned out. Council Member Schmid: I would assume they would need to look fresh when the Land Use Element is discussed. I guess the second striking thing was the introduction. The introduction takes up half the 52 pages. It has big statements in there of conclusions, like help people choose not to drive, support economic development. Those are assumptions that would be part of the land use and the economic side. Yet, they're put in the introduction as basic assumptions. I just find that very striking. Is that introduction meant to be a statement of assumptions? Ms. Gitelman: It's really meant as an introduction to explain some of the background, to allow the reader to really have a little bit of foreknowledge before going into the policies and programs. We fully anticipated one of the Council's questions would be to prune that back a little. It did get a little long and windy there. I expect that one of your suggestions—we've heard from others—will be in the next iteration to do what we can to trim that a little. Council Member Schmid: The third element is there's a big piece in here of TMA and the impacts of TMA. I know we got an information report on the TMA. I did note, in looking at the documentation from the VTA on transportation impact analysis guidelines, they have a big section in there on trip reduction strategies. They mention effective TDM programs having an impact up to five percent on the financial analysis. They state pretty clearly that this might be conservative, but it's the number that should be used. Why are our TMA numbers so far off the numbers in the VTA? Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. You're talking about the goal for a mode shift? You're saying the VTA is suggesting five percent? I think we think we can do far better than that in our transit-served areas like Downtown, where we already have a very high mode share to transit. We think that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit to encourage far more than a five percent shift with a reasonable amount of investment. TRANSCRIPT Page 96 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member Schmid: We are being very aggressive in our base assumptions. Ms. Gitelman: I think it's really because of the character of our community versus a more traditional suburban development pattern. There may be areas of Palo Alto where five percent would be aggressive, and that's what we would assume. For areas like Downtown, we think we can do much better. Council Member Schmid: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I had a question about—East Meadow's listed as an arterial. Was that a change? Ms. Gitelman: I don't think so. I'm afraid that I'll have to consult. I don't know whether any of you know offhand. Ms. Costello: I don't think it's a change. We'll double check it, but I don't think so. Ms. Gitelman: We don't think it's a change. We'll double check. Ms. Costello: No, I don't think we changed any of the classifications of streets. Council Member DuBois: It just doesn't seem like it's the same class as Oregon, Charleston, El Camino, our other arterials. If you could look at that, I think East Meadow is more of a local collector street. One other quick question. This is Program 1.2.2 on Page 27. Under the TDM, the very last bullet point is talking about having organizations trade trips between developments. I just wondered where that came from and what's the thinking behind that. It seems like it could be abused. Ms. Gitelman: I think the idea was something like the Stanford Research Park. If we had a project in the Research Park which couldn't reduce all its own trips, but it could participate in a Research Park-wide program like the one Stanford has set up, and reduce trips in another part of the Park or through that collaboration, I think that's what this is talking about. We talked about a similar opportunity in other areas of the City. If you couldn't reduce—you could do some reduction for your trips from your project, but you wouldn't reduce all the trips, you could basically help fund the TMA or alternative transportation system to offset. TRANSCRIPT Page 97 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member DuBois: This isn't the idea like a TDR, where people could stockpile and have a whole bunch of traffic with no TDM. Ms. Gitelman: It's not really a TDR. It's more like offsetting trips that you can't reduce on site. We'd want projects to meet aggressive standards for trip reductions onsite and then offset trips that can't be reduced onsite. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. Just some quick questions. On Page 437 on Policy T7.2, I know it's nitpicky. It says discounts for taxi fares. It doesn't talk about taxis or ridesharing services. I just think someone should catch that. On Page 449, I was just curious. Program T3 in the current Comprehensive Plan which locates high-density development along transit corridors near multimodal transit stations, does that go away then or is that just incorporated somewhere else where I can't find it? Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. Could you tell me where you are again? Vice Mayor Scharff: Sure. On Page 1 of the—where we do the—Packet Page 449. It's where we compare the current Comprehensive Plan to the CAC draft Update. I didn't see where we had—in the current Comprehensive Plan, we have locate high-density development along transit corridors and near multimodal transit stations. If you cross over to the CAC draft, it says in appropriate locations encourage a mix of housing units, which doesn't have anything to do with locating near transit. I was just curious what we're doing with that. Ms. Costello: I think it got moved to land use. Ms. Gitelman: I think that's the example of a policy that moved over to land use. We can confirm that. Vice Mayor Scharff: I don't think we want to lose the concept. That was really sort of all I had for now. Mayor Burt: I have a few questions, and then I'll reserve the rest for comment. First, Hillary, you were going to explain these colors and these bars on ... Ms. Gitelman: I'm sorry. I mentioned in my presentation it relates to the handout from the Stanford folks we're working with. It's Attachment E. What they've done—there's a brief memo that explains they're sort of beta testing this idea of using a computer to assist the community input that TRANSCRIPT Page 98 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 we're crowd sourcing and how that ends up being reflected in the work product. What they have is an initial presentation here. It didn't get copied in color, so it's hard to see. If you look to the slides towards the end, all the slides show different issues that were raised in the public comments, and then how they were dealt with by the CAC and in the final work product. If you look at the slide towards the end on Packet Page 478, you'll see the genesis of the PowerPoint slide that I showed this evening, that little picture. They're comparing these concepts, special needs to senior citizens, private transit opportunities, public transit opportunities, and how each of those topics were raised in the crowd-sourced input, like what percentage of the input was in each category and then how the CAC's input varied from that and then what the final work product. I don't think it's a final analysis. I think this is something that we're working. We thought it was interesting enough to show you that this is a collaboration that we're continuing as we try and generate more and more input through the Digital Commenter and other means. Mayor Burt: Thank you. My next question is, I guess, directed at the City Attorney. It's the flip side of Council Member Wolbach's question on motorcycle lane splitting. Do we have jurisdiction to regulate motorcycle lane splitting on City streets or is that superseded by the State law? If you know. Molly Stump, City Attorney: I'm scratching my head because we looked at this maybe a year ago. I'm going to have to go back and check again. I'm skeptical that that's a matter for local regulation, but we'll do some research and get back to you. Mayor Burt: One of the questions at a higher level is I see in the various programs to fulfill, I guess, really Policy T1.2 some pretty modest initiatives on addressing first and last mile. I want to know what level of discussion there has been within the CAC on a much fuller embracing of solutions to that challenge. I'll add a second half to this question. The City is moving aggressively in smart mobility initiatives. Between those and transformations that we appear to be on the cusp of in transportation, I'm really questioning whether what we're writing is coming across more as a 20th century Transportation Element. We've had in our past Comp Plan different antiquated components to it. We say we don't sell fax paper anymore or whatever it might be that is outdated. When I read these, I have the question of whether we're really thinking hard about writing a plan that is trying to figure out how it can be written in a way that will anticipate at some high level the transformations that are happening while acknowledging that they're not all visible or clear to us at this point in time. How much discussion has been going on around both the breadth of first and TRANSCRIPT Page 99 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 last mile technologies that are already emerging and these other emerging transformations in shared, autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles and what that means for the Transportation Element over the time horizon this is being written for? Ms. Costello: Elaine Costello again. There was a lot of discussion of that at the transportation—it may not come across, and that's important for us to know, that it might need to be a little more oomphed up. There was quite a bit of discussion about that. On the first-last mile, there was a lot of—that was really one of the focuses of this. The kind of concept that the transportation subcommittee and the CAC were looking at was trying to make the Transportation Element sort of poised—we used the phrase poised for change in our discussions, knowing that we weren't quite ready to make some of these changes yet because they're still evolving but to have the General Plan being anticipatory of those and be ready to implement them as they came along. If that isn't coming across, that's something that we would definitely look at. It certainly was, in this Element in particular, really a lot of the thinking and a lot of the discussion. Some of the wordsmithing that went in was with that intent. We're happy to take a look at it and say maybe we wordsmithed too much and not enough big picture. Mayor Burt: I'll hit it mostly in my comment period. I would say emphatically my feeling is that this is very tepid in terms of embracing transformative changes that are either happening or on the horizon. We have to walk a line. Are we embracing something that we don't have enough clarity on yet, but do we anticipate these changes will be on the horizon and that we're saying we intend to embrace them as they emerge. I don't know what it is. I don't get either of those messages. I don't see any other questions from Council. We have one speaker card, Robert Moss. Welcome. Robert Moss: Thank you, Mayor Burt and Council Members. I was a little hesitant to get into this because the programs are kind of general, and I had a very specific issue that I wanted to raise. That's local transit. You may not be aware of it, but about 45 years ago Palo Alto had its own bus system. We ran buses through local streets. Ran them on Middlefield, on San Antonio, Charleston, Arastradero. There was a bus stop, for example, on Los Robles at Amaranta and on Los Robles at Laguna and Barron. In the early '70s, Palo Alto merged the bus system with VTA. It took about a year before VTA eliminated almost all of the local bus lines, and they never brought them back. Their proposal to reduce buses in Palo Alto is nothing new. They did it to us before. Local shuttle systems are touched upon in a number of programs. For example, Programs T1.5, 1.5.1, 1.10.3, 1.13, 1.14.1, 7.6, 7.9, all of those mention shuttle programs, but they never talk TRANSCRIPT Page 100 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 about really implementing them. I suggest expanding Program T113.1 to say investigate a pilot program to substitute taxi, rideshare, expanded local shuttle services for transit programs. That's one example of emphasizing that we would actively look at putting in our own local shuttle system. Some of the local shuttles, by the way, were on demand. I don't know if you're aware of this. We had a system where you could call up and ask for a bus to come and take you from your house to a destination. My oldest daughter was the first one to take that bus. She called and had them pick her up in front of our house and drive her to Gunn. The bus service only lasted for about a year; they had problems. One of them was that the bus drivers union insisted the workers get paid for eight hours a day even though most of the actual bus service was only for a couple of hours during the morning and evening rush hours and just a little bit of bus service during the middle of the day. There was a large period of the time when the bus drivers were sitting around in their offices just relaxing. The system was uneconomical on that basis. I think we can do better this year, and I'd like to see us take a look at having a local shuttle system that actually serves the community. Mayor Burt: Let's return to the Council for discussion. I'm sorry. That's right. We have one more card, Arthur Keller. Arthur Keller: Thank you very much for looking at the Transportation Element. I'm speaking for myself, but some of my comments reflect experiences being on the CAC. This has been a long and imperfect process. We've been at this on the CAC for somewhat over a year now, about a year. I had experiences dealing with the Comp Plan since, I think, about 2008 where it struggled on the Planning Commission. The City Council ignored it for a period of time. Finally, it's coming to fruition somewhat six or so years late. The committee is sunsetting at the end of—a lot of people expected that they would be on the committee until the end of this calendar year. It's now continued to next year. Some people said they might not be able to continue. I think that's a concern. I'm also concerned that the comments that were provided to the Council from the committee seemed to be rather abbreviated. There were a number of documents that were submitted in July to the committee by members that were not forwarded to the Council. I think I forwarded you mine a couple of weeks ago, but a lot of comments were not forwarded. You did not get our Minutes of our meeting. In some sense I'm hoping that that will be improved for the November review of the Land Use Element. I'd like to close with one final comment, and this is about the schedule. One question I have for the Council to think about is who is it that chooses among the scenarios and the alternatives, especially those that will be defined for land use. Is that done prior to the choice of the PTC reviewing the Comp Plan? Is there a single definitive Comp Plan with a single set of choices? Is there a FEIR that incorporates those choices TRANSCRIPT Page 101 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 or does the FEIR come with a whole bunch of alternatives? It's not clear (inaudible) single alternative. This is an open question I think the Council needs to weigh in on, to give input to Staff on this process. I would encourage you to think carefully about the schedule and who makes the decision among the alternatives and when that's done. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Now we'll return to the Council. Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: First of all, I really appreciate the effort of Staff and the CAC. You guys have really been working hard. We started this conversation previously. I think we should use this meeting to maybe provide some direction for revision. It's a really good cut, but there's some places that could use some edits. As people have said, it really is interconnected with land use. I hope we have the opportunity to see both Elements with edits before the final versions. The last time we talked about a desire to see the changes, not necessarily track changes but to see the old policy and the new policy. One example I wanted to point out is on Page Page T37, Policy 3.3. It says no change. Mayor Burt: What Packet Page did you say? Council Member DuBois: It's Packet Page 424, Element Page T37. It says avoid major increases in street capacity when constructing or modifying roadways. No change. The previous one said unless necessary to remedy severe traffic congestion. Seems like a pretty major change. I'd like to see those words back in. I think the other really important factor in this Element is there's a lot of talk about TDM. How do we measure and enforce and deal with impacts? It's been mentioned that the introduction has expanded quite a bit to 25 pages. There's 50 programs. I bring it up every time we have an Element. I'd like to see a way to pare it down. I'd actually like to challenge Staff to take it from 50 to 25 or give us a prioritized list. There's no way we can fund 50 programs. The other thing that I'd like to see is how the six scenarios impact the Element. There's no indication of how the growth scenarios would impact the policies and programs. There's little acknowledgement and few policies that talk about improving the flow of automobiles. The Element says 98 percent of households own a car. Again, I think we need to strike a balance. We need to be open to electric vehicles, these point-to-point transportation networks, self-driving cars as Mayor Burt said. I think this ignoring of our roadways and the flow of vehicles is shortsighted. With autonomous vehicles, I think it's going to come back. At the same time, we seem to be focused a lot on fixed-route transit. I think next week we're eliminating one of our shuttle routes because we don't have enough people using it, on Consent. Again, I'm a little bit concerned we're TRANSCRIPT Page 102 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 kind of locked into maybe some older thinking in terms of transit. One of the things I'd like to see added in that area is clearly stating that we want to encourage innovation in support of trials of things like self-driving cars. The other one I wanted to bring up—it's a little bit of a nuance. There's the theme in here of prioritizing pedestrian and cyclist safety. I don't disagree with that, but I think we need to focus on types of streets. Some streets should be pedestrian and bike separated like we saw tonight with Embarcadero. I feel like there's an almost an over-reliance on the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) guidelines. When we adopted those guidelines, we said we wanted them considered in the context of Palo Alto. I do think not every street should be a complete street. We have some streets that should be more separated and focused on reducing congestion. Finally, we talked about level of service tonight, which was great. I'd like to see a program in there that looks at reducing the threshold for a cumulative impact, because that seems to be a very hard thing to capture. Thank you. Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Before I go into comments, I just want to ask a question about process. We're looking for motions here or should we just offer individual comments and leave it at that? For mostly the Mayor on this one. Mayor Burt: Hillary, what were your thoughts? This is framed for us to review and discuss. If it's treated as a Study Session, there might be certain directions. Absent a Motion, you've got a bunch of opinions that haven't necessarily come together. Ms. Gitelman: Given the lateness of the hour and the length of this document, I was anticipating that we would get individual comments. As the Mayor points out, they would just be your individual comments. If there are areas of disagreement, it would be nice if those are fleshed out at least. Mayor Burt: The general intent was individual comments. If we see certain areas that we need to see whether we agree on or not, then it may be appropriate to have a Motion. Council Member Wolbach: I'll leave Motions aside for now. That was my hope, to do it just like this. The things I was referring to earlier, let me start there. The spaces, the types of modalities of individual travel between regular bicycles and cars, whether that's electric bikes or electric skateboards, which a lot of people are riding now, or little scooters or motorized scooters, motorized motorcycles whether they're internal combustion or increasingly electric, as we see this shift as with regular cars. TRANSCRIPT Page 103 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 I'd like to see electric bikes, motorcycles, scooters discussed a little bit more; a little bit more explicit call-outs when it comes to safe road design for those modes; parking facilities for those modes and charging as well for electric versions of those modes. I think a call-out would be nice to make sure that we're—unless Staff assures me that it's already on the way—our traffic signalization sensors are sensitive enough to detect motor scooters, motorcycles and bicycles that are operating as vehicles on the roadway. This issue of being poised for change, I think the Mayor in particular was alluding to this earlier. This is important. I'd like to see greater emphasis on this, more emphasis on flexibility to adopt to changing technologies. A lot of us will understand that transportation technologies will be quite different by the end of this Comprehensive Plan than they are today. Some of those we can anticipate; some of them are more difficult to anticipate. We want to make sure that this Comprehensive Plan does indeed help the City become poised for change. I, speaking for myself, would like to see that more explicit, more emphasized throughout. If there's an opportunity based on new technology to improve safety, to improve mobility for people in cars or using other forms of travel to get around Palo Alto or to have better enforcement of TDM requirements on developments or on businesses or better enhance our TMA, we won't be constrained by our Comprehensive Plan. Instead, the Comprehensive Plan will encourage us and drive us forward to seize those opportunities. I'd like to see stronger emphasis on things like the TMA and other TDM measures, whether it's the TMA for Downtown, the Stanford Research Park TDM working group or things like that in specific or general terms. I think that's a major shift that we've been moving towards over the last couple of years. I'd like to see that with even greater emphasis. I'd like to see also stronger support for the City shuttle as Mr. Moss was pointing out. That is an important part of our City and an important facility that, of course, we'll be discussing more in the coming months. How it operates may change substantially, again based on new technologies and demands and shifting demographics as well. Picking up on what Council Member DuBois was referring to during the earlier comments before we went to the public. The idea of trading trips and having a cap- and-trade or some akin system for single occupancy vehicle trip reduction is a phenomenal idea. I absolutely support that. I will leave my comments at that. Mayor Burt: Thank you. I don't see other lights. I can wade in while others ... It'd be good if people would hit their lights. Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: One of the noticeable things is the time spent on goals. The Sustainability Section Goal T1 takes up almost 10 pages. Dealing with congestion takes up two pages. Don McDougall summarized it by saying without question the implied priority for sustainability and TRANSCRIPT Page 104 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 efficiency rules over congestion. That's a comment by a CAC member. There was a clear priority given to sustainability over congestion. Yet, when you look at surveys and citizen issues, the congestion issue is really near the top. Why this imbalance even to some of the members of the CAC, and should there be a discussion amongst the CAC that we can see here of their feelings about that? Point Number 2 is the VTA guidelines. I guess you gave us a reference to the transportation impact analysis guidelines, where they discuss TMAs. They are very, very strict in their requirements. They say these are requirements. TDM programs should be based on financial incentives which have the greatest effect on reducing trip generation. Use of trip reductions will depend on the level of financial subsidy applied to employees and the number of employees eligible. They say the standard five percent reduction means that all employees have to be given the offer. That just continues over their discussion of it. These aren't recommendations; they call them requirements. They say you need to be very strict on them. I read through the mentions of TMAs, and it's things like we must cooperate and work with and so on. I would think that the VTA is asking for a different kind of language like do not grant TMA trip reduction goals until the methodologies have proven records of success, are fully funded, have rigorous, independent monitoring programs and include substantial annual penalties. That's the type of language they are looking for and ask to make present in each T1A. I think somewhere in our programs and policies we should have effective, clear language saying if we're going to take reductions, you have to show who's paying, what the goals are, what the monitoring system is and what the penalties are for coming short. With our RPP program, it seems clear that our TMAs should be trying to solve existing programs before it justifies future growth. One key thing is there should be discussion in the CAC about the relationship between growth in density and single occupancy vehicle trips. Are we committing to increased density in order to achieve the types of goals you're talking about in your Transportation Element? Finally, I guess there is no discussion of office limits in terms of achieving the types of goals, whether it be sustainability or congestion, whether the best tool and most effective tool is a limit on office growth. I didn't see that discussed anywhere. Yet, that is a key part of our land use. I guess the Land Use Element includes both the land use programs and policies, but specifically L-8, so we will have a discussion on growth limits. I would think the Transportation Element should reflect that. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you, Council Member Schmid. If I can just point out— thank you for referring to Don McDougall's comments. There is an attachment—this gets to Arthur Keller's remarks—that contains some late comments from the CAC members. I think that's what you were referring to. I wanted to stress that these goals aren't in competition with each other. TRANSCRIPT Page 105 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 The length of them—it's not like they're fighting with each other, one of them has to be longer than the other. The idea is that they build and collaborate to communicate the Council's and the community's collective vision on these topics. The fact that sustainability happens first and leads into congestion—if you look at those sustainability possibilities, they're very much about TDM, alternate modes, things that are going to help ultimately reduce congestion. One is meant to build and complement the other. Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: I think some of our comments are predictable, which is—it's disappointing to see this huge audience. I'm sorry we didn't hear from Don McDougall even though I know he was very involved in this. The only one I want to comment on in particular is the part that deals with Transportation Demand Management. People spoke to this earlier tonight. This describes it. It's on Page 390. We are not going to discuss the report that came to us. At the same time I want to say that this is a little bit—it doesn't have much thrust to it, which is difficult. I think that if it's going to be involved in this, it needs to have more thrust than what it does. I think that this TDM plan is going to be one of the things that makes the most difference in the Downtown. I'd like to see more emphasis put on it, more description and so forth. We have one that is, as somebody said earlier, in an early form, even had a further description than that. That's troubling, that we are looking at what has worked in many other communities very well. I don't think we're putting enough—I frankly don't think we're putting enough funding into it or enough oomph as well. My comments. Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Thank you. So far I haven't heard anything that I disagree with, if that helps Staff. A few things. One is going back to the vision statement. I do have one comment on it. Palo Alto will build and maintain a sustainable network blah, blah, blah while protecting and enhancing the quality of life in Palo Alto neighborhoods. I don't know why the word neighborhoods is there. Shouldn't it be enhancing the quality of life in Palo Alto? Later we talk about neighborhoods. That would be a comment. On Packet Page 414, at the very top it says establish a list of acceptable TDM measures. I don't know what that means. Wouldn't we want to be adopting effective TDM measures? Page 414 at the very top. Establish a list of acceptable TDM measures that include transit use blah, blah, blah. I don't know why that wouldn't be effective TDM measures. Council Member DuBois mentioned earlier the bullet after the third—I don't know what we're going to call that. It's the one with the bullets. It says allow contracting between developments or organizations so that trips to or TRANSCRIPT Page 106 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 from one site can be offsite by reductions on another. I think that is opening a whole can of worms. I don't think that's a good idea at all. Vice Mayor Scharff: Where are you, Karen? Council Member Holman: That's also on Page 414. It's about in the middle of the Page. It's the only bullet, per se, on that Page. It's right about Program T1.2.3. I think that is opening a whole can of worms. Mayor Burt: (inaudible) can you repeat (inaudible). Council Member Holman: I'm sorry? Page 414. It's the bullet right above T123. I think maybe there's a good clarification that could be provided here just to get it out of the way for later. On the next page, 415, Program T141—I'm going to leave out the dots because it's just faster. Review the Zoning Ordinance and update as needed to ensure compatibility with the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Ordinance include parking technology improvements such as vehicle lifts and electronic monitoring. I think we want to be clear here that we don't want to—I have heard the Architectural Review Board talk about this, the public talk about this. Vehicle lifts are not appropriate for retail. If we're going to talk about vehicle lifts, let's make sure we're aren't utilizing them for retail. I guess this could be used under— on Packet Page 421, Policy T121. If anybody from the art community was here, they'd know that this is something that is important to me. I put this wording together, but I don't know if it's the right wording or not. I'll just put it out there. Consider public art especially in alleyways as a way to encourage walking and provide connectivity between and among businesses and transit/parking infrastructure. I can provide that to you later. I'll repeat it quickly here. Consider public art especially in alleyways as a way to encourage walking and provide connectivity between and among businesses and transit/parking infrastructure. I think we've been missing the boat on that for a long time. On 422, I just think there's some awkward wording on Goal T2. I'll just leave it at that. It's a comment including school traffic. I just think it's awkward wording. Maybe that could be clarified. I don't know how far the Council wants to go tonight. Program T231 talks about regularly update LOS regulations. I don't know if the Council wants to go any further than that right at the moment. On the next page, on Page 424, I think Council Member DuBois may have mentioned this one too. Policy T33, avoid major increases in street capacity when constructing blah, blah, blah. The previous policy, T27, was much stronger than that and clearer in intention. It says avoid major increases in street capacity unless necessary to remedy severe traffic congestion. I think this new 3.3. is much weaker. I'm troubled by—on that same page, 424, Program T341—evaluate the feasibility of changes to Palo Alto's through TRANSCRIPT Page 107 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 truck routes and weight limits to consider such issues as relationship to neighborhood jurisdictions, lower weight limits, increased number of routes and economic and environmental impacts. It sounds to me, if I read that correctly, like we're going to be allowing commercial trucks on more streets. That's how it reads to me. Changing Palo Alto's truck routes and weight limits, what does that mean? Are we going to increase truck weight limits in residential neighborhoods? It's just unclear. I don't know what the intention is here. If the intention is to something contrary to that, we need to be clear about it. Ms. Gitelman: I think that's a carry-over policy, but we can look at that and make that more clear. Council Member Holman: We get a lot of cut-through right now for commercial trucks on residential streets that aren't appropriate. Next page, 425, I think we could be a little clearer—Policy T37, encourage pedestrian- friendly design features such as sidewalks, street trees. This kind of goes to three different things. I'll just mention the policies, and then you can roll them together in another way. Policy 37, Policy 38 and then on the next page, Policy 311, talk about tree plantings, sidewalks, planting pockets and the Grand Boulevard Design Guidelines. I'm talking about three at once. Those are on Page 425 and 426. It seems to me that what we're looking for is wider sidewalks that the community has been asking for. That's consistent with the Grand Boulevard Design Guidelines. We're talking about pedestrian-friendly building design, not interesting architectural details. We're talking about adding planting pockets with street trees as opposed to increasing our tree canopy overall as a traffic calming measure. I'm just trying to comment on those three policies at once with those comments to be incorporated. Agree with comments that have been made previously on Packet Page 428. The new Policy T41 is not what it was before, which was Policy T47, I believe it was. If I can find it quickly enough. Policy T47 said protect residential areas from parking impacts of nearby business districts. It seems like it's been diluted greatly actually with the new Policy T41. I would revert back to Policy T47. Goal T4, I don't know what it means. I think we could be clearer about—going to packet Page 432—the purpose of RPP and who to engage there. I think I'm getting close to ... The other couple of things I would say is we do have reference in here, of course, to VTA. I think the language could be stronger given some of the things that are happening off and on with VTA. We need to advocate with VTA, not just coordinate, work with. We need to advocate with VTA to preserve existing and enhanced service to Palo Alto. I did not see in here working with VTA and SamTrans to coordinate services. That also should be included. I am going to put a plug in here, because it exists and we're not addressing it or even considering it. Study the feasibility of and consider utilization of the El TRANSCRIPT Page 108 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Camino/Page Mill under-crossing, that should be added. I think that ends my—yes. One more comment again with Council Member DuBois, going back to him. There's nothing in here that I see that addresses cumulative impacts. Lastly, I think we should also look at no net new trips, how we might work towards that. That concludes my comments. Mayor Burt: Council Member Filseth. Council Member Filseth: Thanks. As we all go through our lists here, I think we should not overlook that in this rev, although it departs significantly from the existing Comp Plan, there is a great deal to like in this document. I think the CAC sort of drifted from their direction of just do a tweak on the old one. This is substantially better for what they've done. I, like all the rest of us, appreciate that very much, what they have done here. I'm going to keep mine, I hope, fairly limited here. I'll come back to the issue of T47 and parking at the end. I have a couple of observations on some of the other ones. One of them is—I think we talked about this before. This seems familiar. One is T62 which is pursue a goal of zero roadway fatalities within 10 years. Did we talk about that before? I can't remember what we said. Mayor Burt: It came up recently. Ms. Gitelman: It was the League of Cities Resolution on last week's (crosstalk). Mayor Burt: That's where it was. Council Member Filseth: Is that what it was? Council Member Berman: That's what it was. Ms. Gitelman: Vision zero. Council Member Filseth: I think we should—I can't remember what we said. I'm not sure that really belongs in the Comp Plan, at least like that, which is interesting. I think there's a program underneath it, 621, which actually looks pretty good. The policy, I don't know. I'm not sure that really is the kind of thing that should go in the Comp. Plan. I think we had a discussion about how many fatalities are there and all this kind of stuff. Program T643 is Track Watch. I kind of don't think that should go in the Comp Plan. We're doing it. There's a lot of discussion going on about how long are we going to do it and are there going to be other mechanism to do this. We're looking at technology and so forth. I'm not sure we should put Track Watch in the Comp Plan. TRANSCRIPT Page 109 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Vice Mayor Scharff: What Page is that? Council Member Filseth: I think it's T643. Council Member Holman: 435, Page 435. Council Member Filseth: Provide adult crossing guards at school crossings— you know what? Mayor Burt: That's not Track Watch. Council Member Filseth: Did I misread that? I may have misread that. Mayor Burt: That's school crossing guards. Council Member Filseth: School crossing guards. Thank you. Sorry. Let's see. There is—thanks. That's simple. That simplifies it. T311 is consider Grand Boulevard Initiative (GBI) in design decisions and so forth. First of all, I think it's premature to put grand boulevard initiative in the Comp. Plan. I suspect the reason it's worded sort of weakly like that is because there probably was disagreement on the group as to whether that actually belongs in the Comp. Plan. The compromise, I'm guessing, was put in some really, really weak language about GBI, that way we can have it in but not have it in at the same time. I'm not sure how valuable it is to put it in like that. We're doing comments here. Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) last week. Council Member Filseth: I don't think so. Was it? Two more side comments and I'll come back to the parking one. First of all, I agree with Council Member DuBois on the importance of cumulative LOS impacts. I think it would be good to have something like that, a reference to that in here. On the issue of the exact number, because we're talking about VTA's thresholds versus Menlo Park's thresholds, I'm not convinced that there should be an actual number in here. That makes more sense in the Code. The City might choose to change it from time to time. I don't think it should be in here. Second, I agree very strongly with Council Member Schmid on the need to really validate and prove some of these innovative alternative metrics and approaches to do wholesale zoning changes based on them. There's some very interesting things we could do there. As Asher Waldfogel commented in the Minutes on one of the different topics, those of us who have been burned by this so many times have gotten used to things really take—they don't really happen as fast as you think they're going to and quite the way you think you do. We need to be really careful about that. That includes, by the way, Council Member Kniss' comment of adequate investment in these TRANSCRIPT Page 110 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 things. We just assume it's going to happen, and then we don't fund it and it doesn't happen. Now we come back to T47, the old one, which the original language was protect residential areas from the parking impacts of nearby business districts. That's an outstandingly worded policy. It's clear; it's unequivocal; it shows a real priority if there's a clash. Mayor Burt: You said T ... Council Member Filseth: The old one was T47. The new one is T510, I think. It's sort of a combination of T510, and then there was another one that Director Gitelman found. The new language talks about ... Mayor Burt: What Page is T5 ... Council Member Filseth: 432. The one says in residential neighborhoods work with neighborhood associations to prioritize residential street parking and minimize spillover parking from commercial centers and employment districts. There's a program that's coordinate with these groups. There's another one that Director Gitelman mentioned, that had to do with—I don't know. It was outreach or something like that. I think the new language—I agree with Council Member Holman—is squishier. If we're not going to protect residential neighborhoods from the parking impacts, then why would we not do that? It like as a resident—at the end of the day, all of us in this room work for residents. As a resident, you want assurance that your neighborhood is going to be protected from the parking impacts of nearby business districts. The new language sounds like an assurance that you get to go to a meeting somewhere. It talks about associations, priorities and some of this is about stakeholders and stuff like that. I really think that the original language should go back in. It's very, very clear, and it tells you exactly where you stand. Thanks very much. Mayor Burt: Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thank you. First of all, I'd like to say I also read through this, and I thought it was really a great job. I think there's some nitpicky concerns I may have. On the whole, if we adopted it pretty much the way it was today, I probably wouldn't lose any sleep over it frankly. Maybe we could just do that and be done with it. Let's just adopt it the way it is and save a lot of hours. Mr. Keene: No, let's lose sleep. Vice Mayor Scharff: All right, let's lose sleep. Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) TRANSCRIPT Page 111 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Vice Mayor Scharff: I know. On Page 388, I actually agree with Karen. Where we say enhancing the quality of life in Palo Alto neighborhoods, we clearly want to do that. I agree it just should be in Palo Alto, because that's what we want to do. I actually think that was a really good catch. On Page 422, I think, under Goal T2 where it says Policy T2.1, I personally think we should take out red light and speed enforcement cameras. We don't have any in Palo Alto. There's been no push to put any in Palo Alto. I don't think we should be putting that in the Comp Plan. I also agree with Tom on T3.1 that we should put the language back in there, avoid major increases in street capacity when constructing or modifying roadways except as necessary to reduce traffic congestion. I think that's important. Page 434. On Page 435, Program T6.1.2, develop, distribute and aggressively promote maps. What we really want to do is promote people to know where the Safe Routes to School is, shopping, etc. I don't think anyone actually uses a map anymore. I think we could create paper maps; I think that's sort of what that looks like. I think we might need an app or something. I don't know how we phrase that, but I really don't see how handing out maps to people is going to actually do anything, other than maybe create litter in our streets. I'm concerned about that. Let's see. On the adult crossing guards, I think it's a good idea to have adult crossing guards. I'm happy to pay for them at this point, but this is a long plan. I'm not so sure we should lock into us paying for it rather than sharing the cost with the School District. "Provide" may be—maybe add some language in there, provide with the School District. Have them there, but I don't want to lock into that Palo Alto pays for it forever. On Page 438, I underlined encourage MTC to base its regional transportation plan on compact land use development assumptions. I don't think necessarily that's a bad thing to say. I just don't think it really means anything, given where MTC is going to be—where it is now and where it's going to be in the foreseeable future. I think there's zero chance that MTC is going to be out there saying, "Let's go build down in Gilroy and beyond, and let's build in the Central Valley." I think it's more things like do you favor a big cities scenario where all the growth goes in the big cities or do you favor more growth being spread out in the big cities plus the Peninsula and the East Bay. Those are really the discussions that are had there. I don't think this hurts anything necessarily, but I think it's completely irrelevant. I mentioned T72 where it says discounts for taxis. I just wanted to make sure we catch that on Page 437 earlier. Council Member Holman mentioned something interesting. She said when we look at lift parking, lift parking doesn't work for retail. I think I'd agree with that, it doesn't work for retail. Retail is actually more complicated than that. I think we want to have policies that encourage retail. In the Land Use Element, for instance, I would say policies that encourage ground-floor retail throughout the City where feasible or something along those lines. When you look at transportation, for instance, I think in the Downtown parking TRANSCRIPT Page 112 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 requirements for retail are one thing. On California Avenue (Cal. Ave.), they're another. I'm not sure if we have a lot of people who are already Downtown that they walk to a lot of retail. I actually think when we look at transportation and parking, our parking requirements for retail are often stuck in a suburban model, where people drive to retail, where you have walkable, bikeable things. I don't want to discourage retail due to heavy parking requirements. I think we should think about that and take a look at how we encourage retail and we don't discourage it through having too heavy parking requirements frankly on a non-suburban model, which is what we really have on Cal. Ave. and Downtown frankly. I think those were primarily my concerns on this. One other thing I did want to mention. We talk about the TMAs a lot. We specifically call out working with Stanford on their TMA in terms of the Research Park, and we call out Downtown. Then, we say sort of create TMAs where necessary. I think we're going to need a TMA for Cal. Ave. Since this is a forward-looking project, I think we should say something more explicit like explore creation of a TMA for Cal. Ave. I think we should have one by the end of this plan, that's funded and going forward. It may not be the first priority. I think we should do that more than just a broad concept about having TMAs throughout the City. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Before going into comments on specific policies and programs, at a higher level I wanted to return to this theme that I was speaking briefly about in the question period. What's the relationship between our Transportation Demand Management Program and our TMA agencies and our Citywide goals to have a sustainable community and our adopted goal of an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030? I see very little correlation except in—they're not misaligned in terms of themes and general direction. I don't see any correlation in terms of actual objectives. First, I don't see the cross-referencing between the Comp. Plan and the Sustainability and Climate Action Plan (S/CAP) and vice versa, and the S/CAP to the Comp Plan that I think is essential. These documents should be aligned. Second, I just don't see where these measures will achieve the objectives that we've adopted. I think they're also too modest in terms of the quality of life objectives that we have. I think Council Member Holman mentioned no net new trips. That may be from individual, particular development. Community-wide we have too many trips right now. I actually think that the goal should be a reduction in, first, single occupancy vehicle trips and, ultimately, car trips and vehicle miles traveled within the City, not just getting to the City. That aligns our quality of life issues around traffic congestion and parking with sustainability and climate action issues. A few years ago, even a couple of years ago, the notion that we could have a future of fewer car trips seemed farfetched. It's rapidly emerging as a reality on the horizon. We are almost week-by-week seeing things that are just illustrating this, whether it be Uber already rolling out their shared TRANSCRIPT Page 113 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh, or that we are looking at all kinds of other means where we will not need to increase our roadway capacity. This goes back to questions that were raised on wanting to reinstate—have an implication to increase roadway capacity. I certainly understand that sentiment if we look backward and define the future by what has happened up until now. It's not easy to embrace an inflection point like we're in. It's really understandable that we would assume that the trend lines that we have had for decades are the trend lines that will continue. I don't believe that's what we're on the cusp of. We're writing a Comp Plan for the next 15 years. I think it needs to be aggressive and embrace the very positive opportunities that are before us in transportation. One of the problems is that our Staff is doing some really phenomenal things in the smart city and smart mobility movement with Jonathan Reichental and Josh Mello. To my knowledge, there's been no presentation on that to the CAC or the PTC. We really haven't had a recent update by the Council. All of us saw from Stefan Heck's presentation a year ago—we were bowled over by it. He said to update it basically, because the transformations in many regards are happening more rapidly than what he presented a year ago. That doesn't mean that we have a crystal ball as to what's going to happen and when. That's part of the challenge. I don't think we're really fully embracing these transformations. This is a big deal. I also think that this has a relationship with the issue that Council Member Schmid brought up and Arthur Keller has in different ways. We need to figure out the process by which we will identify a preferred alternative, and then how the Plan aligns with that preferred alternative. Right now, our CAC and the Staff are kind of stuck of having a Plan that has to be kind of generic, because at the present time it has to kind of cover any of those alternatives. That kind of forces it to be fuzzy. If there was one preferred alternative, everyone would know we have to have a Plan that aligns with that. I think that's an important issue. Hillary, what would be the opportunity for the Council to establish the process by which we would decide whether we're going to select a preferred alternative sooner rather than later and what body would do that, whether it's the Council, and then what the implications of that would be for the balance of the Comp Plan process? Let me just ask that question. Ms. Gitelman: The schedule that we provided to you shows us providing that supplemental analysis of Scenarios 5 and 6 to the Council and the public for review in March, so early in the new year. Our expectation is that that's the point at which the Council could select a preferred alternative. If you felt like more process was needed to get there, you could identify that at that time. I'm hoping that, once you see the supplemental analysis next to the analysis that's already been done, the Council will be able to make some swift decisions about their preferences. TRANSCRIPT Page 114 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: I wish it was sooner, but I understand the challenges there. Let me wade into a few more specific comments on primarily programs with policies and programs. This is on Page 418, Program T1.2.2, which is Citywide TDM programs. We've talked about TMA and TDM. I do agree that we need these programs to be Citywide. I'm anticipating that our TDM programs for existing sources of trips will need to be through a TMA. We have different approaches that we can take for new development. I think we need to recognize those distinctions. One of the real problems with moving forward and establishing community trust that TDM programs can actually achieve what we hope and think they can is that historically we have had too weak of reporting and monitoring and meaningful measurements and enforcement with consequences that matter. I would like to see those elements added to Program T1.2.2, which says how compliance will be reported, monitored and then add keep measured and enforced with impactful consequences, or some equivalent language. Basically, teeth. That's one area. Over on the next Page, the bullet that Council Member Holman had talked about and her concern with what I'll call a cap and trade system on trips. That's what that bullet is describing. I think we should not so readily object to that. In fact, if you're going to have no net new trips, if you're talking about no net new trips even from a new project, how do you have any project—that project onsite will have no net new trips. The only way to really achieve this is to have that new project own trip reductions elsewhere. I think this concept, however it is flushed out in detail, is actually a really important one. It's innovative, and it ultimately gets to this issue of how do we actually have new projects that won't have any impact. It's not going to be internal to that project. We can have really great programs that drastically reduce the trip impacts of a new project, but it won't get all the way to none unless it can reduce trips external to that development. There's also a lot of places where we have language that is very qualified, support and review and all those things. I would like us to reconsider across the board where we can have more concrete language on what we will do. That goes back to this other issue that Council Member Schmid spoke about. We really won't achieve most of this in the TDM measures across the City through TMAs if there isn't funding for it. This was one of the problems with our last Comp Plan. We put a lot of good aspirational goals, and they're still there. I want to see goals that have plans for achievement. We won't necessarily always be able to have precision, for instance, a program description that says we'll have these things and they must have ongoing funding sources to achieve them. It doesn't say exactly what that funding source will be, but it does state a critical reality. A bunch of whims and wishes without funding really don't get us anywhere. We've got to have a way to implement this. There could be funding or actual implementation measures, which go to places where we talk about working with business to incentivize different things. We leave TRANSCRIPT Page 115 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 out the alternative of mandating. Even things like bike racks, we talk about incentives. I think we ought to say that we're going to have adequate bike racks on public and private property. There's no reason that a City couldn't require that private property provide those services. I don't know how much we can have that—which of those things we can do retroactively and which ones prospectively. We need to identify that as clearly as we can so that we aren't just being wishful or saying that we're going to ask businesses to do the right thing. We need to look at where we have leverage to make the right thing happen. I also wanted to touch base on—Council Member DuBois, excuse me, Filseth in raising the issue that ended up being around crossing guards caused me to realize that we don't have language relating to the safety of our Caltrain transportation. I think that does belong in the Transportation Element. I would agree with him that if we put something in, it shouldn't be referenced to one particular approach that we may have today, but that we need to provide safe and secure tracks. Another question is whether we also should be moving toward quiet zones. I didn't see anything—is it there already? I missed that. I think we should have a program to have safe and secure Caltrain tracks. That leaves it open on how we're going to achieve that. I had alluded earlier to our S/CAP goals. For instance, we have reducing greenhouse gases. We say that we're going to meet City and State goals. We ought to say what that goal is. We know that is a goal. We haven't said it's a hard and fast requirement. That's a distinction between a goal and a requirement in my mind. It is something that really drives in part these objectives. The other driver is to make our community more livable and to keep it that way for future generations. I think those two things are actually well aligned. There was one thing I only mildly disagreed with. What Don McDougall was quoted on was—it was something; I'm going to not get the wording right. I don't see the conflict. I think that the sustainable initiatives are to achieve a more livable community. The same things that provide the livable community create the sustainable community. There's just not a difference between them. We talk about them as if they're different. We need to explain why they are fully aligned. I think that's a really important theme that we should be doing here. It's part of why we're really not struggling to fully integrate or align, I should say, the S/CAP and the Comp Plan. I think they serve each other by doing that. By aligning them, the S/CAP will support the Comp Plan, and the Comp Plan will support the S/CAP. We will have two critical guiding documents for our community that aren't sort of aligned. They are aligned. I don't think they're in conflict. We just haven't worked hard enough to explain why they're aligned. On Program—this is Page 415, Program T132. It talks about work with transit providers including SamTrans and VTA to encourage the adoption of electric, fuel cell or other zero emission—I take it transit vehicles, that's what that's referring to. I think that's a really great idea. It doesn't talk about our local shuttle needs to hit that objective. It TRANSCRIPT Page 116 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 doesn't talk about all of the private—frankly, it's not just SamTrans and VTA. We have other public agencies. It doesn't talk about all the private shuttles and buses or, for that matter, the increasing prevalence of common carriers. We need to look at how we move all of them toward zero emission vehicles. Council Member Kniss: (inaudible) Google buses and stuff? Mayor Burt: Huh? Council Member Kniss: You're thinking Google buses? Mayor Burt: I'm thinking about Google buses and UPS and FedEx and all those folks that are sitting idling in the streets. I think the future should really deliberate programs. Those are major transportation providers, and we should be looking at deliberate ways at which they begin to move toward clean vehicles. Sooner or later, I think everything is going to move that way. This is more of a deliberate plan. If we're going to talk with VTA and SamTrans, it ought to be the others as well. That doesn't mean we have the answers on how to do that. Maybe once again it falls into the regional solutions. Can a single city best do that or should it be through collaboration. I tend to think it'll be the latter. I think these are objectives, and these are places where we can lead by putting these kinds of goals in our Comp Plan. Other cities will go wow, good idea, let's get together on it. I think that covers most of my comments. Program T371 says conduct a study of Palo Alto roadways to identify needed pedestrian improvements. Is that something that we haven't done? It would be a single study? Ms. Gitelman: I don't remember where that came from, but we will look into that and find an answer. Mayor Burt: Right below it on 3.9, I wasn't clear what it meant. It said identify and establish performance measures for the road network in Palo Alto to support Citywide sustainability efforts including the street canopy. Those kind of seem disconnected in some way. Are those throw-ins? Ms. Costello: Something happened there. We'll check it out. Mayor Burt: Glad I'm not going goofy at this hour. Maybe I am. I think that covers my comments. I see a couple of colleagues have some follow- ups. Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: Just a couple of things. The only two areas where I heard any—at least that I heard—disagreement were on the bullet on Page 414 to allow contracting between developments or organizations so that trips to and from one site can be offset by reductions on another for a net TRANSCRIPT Page 117 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 reduction within Palo Alto. If there was maybe some clarity provided around that, that might be—that could eliminate the big snare that, I think, Council Member DuBois and I were referring to. Maybe some clarifying language around that. Ms. Gitelman: We'd be happy to work on that language. I think it can be more clear. What we're talking about here is that one project could offset its trips, but it has to achieve the reduction somehow, even if it's off-site. Let us take another stab at that. Council Member Holman: We just don't want to impose at some place where it could have a negative impact. Ms. Gitelman: Understood. Council Member Holman: We just don't want to transfer the mess from one place to another. Ms. Gitelman: Understood. Council Member Holman: That's one. The other place—two other places. I agree with Mayor Burt as he disagreed with me. That has to do with no net new trips. I agree about reducing the number of trips, not just a net new trips goal but actually reducing trips. I wanted to clarify I absolutely agree with that. I hate to say it, because I'm not sure it happens very much. I agree with my esteemed colleague to my right, who was talking about not incorporating the El Camino Design Guidelines, thinking it was too early. I'm not sure ... Mayor Burt: We're all to your right, so we don't quite know who you're pointing at. Council Member Holman: Immediately to my right. You're all esteemed colleagues, but on this occasion I'm referring to the one immediately to my right. That was a comment having to do with the Grand Boulevard Initiative. I just want to remind Council Members who were here and inform those who weren't here that either in October of 2012 or early in 2013 there was a Colleagues Memo that came to the Council, that talked about incorporating the South El Camino Design Guidelines, the principles and the grand boulevard initiative. It provided background. There was reference material provided. The direction we were given at the time is that would be incorporated into the Comprehensive Plan discussion. We already made that decision. If we want to revisit that decision, then we need to have a further discussion about it so people know what we're talking about. Vice Mayor Scharff will remember that. Council Member Schmid will remember that. TRANSCRIPT Page 118 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 There are a lot of aspects to it. Maybe there ought to be a little bit of a discussion about that, because it incorporates many things, the grand boulevard initiative does. If there's a way to provide some clarity around that, that would be good too. It was promised to us, that we would be looking at that in the Comp. Plan. That's why it was deferred. I think that's it. Thanks. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: I wanted to thank you for the updated schedule, which I think came out separately. I promptly left it at home. If colleagues are interested, I think there's been some interest in seeing this Element after we see the Land Use Element. I don't know if there's time like mid next summer before the final Elements come out. I don't know if you need a Motion for that. I'd certainly be interested in seeing all these edits come back. Ms. Gitelman: Thank you. I don't know that we need a Motion. I think this schedule has been a work in progress. We're going to need to think about a number of things. We can certainly accommodate the request to see this again after November. Council Member DuBois: I think see transportation and land use together after one more pass. Ms. Gitelman: Let us see how we can work that in. We've also—just so the Council's aware—had a request from some Planning Commissioners to move up some of their review of the Element. We're a little overwhelmed in terms of all of the CAC meetings and subcommittee meetings to start going multiple times to the Council and multiple times to the Planning Commission. We're going to hit overload. We're going to take another look at this, and we'll consider it in another round of review with land use and transportation for the Council. Council Member DuBois: Thank you. Mayor Burt: I think that concludes our discussion of this item tonight. Thank you all very much. Hopefully we're moving forward. Thank you. NO ACTION TAKEN Inter-Governmental Legislative Affairs Mayor Burt: Our final items are Intergovernmental Legislative Affairs. I don't think we have any updates there. TRANSCRIPT Page 119 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements Mayor Burt: Council Member Questions, Comments and Announcements. Council Member Schmid. Council Member Schmid: Just to report from the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency (BAWSCA) meeting. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) commented that the State Water Board introduced a suggested 40 percent sustainable flow in the Tuolumne River from January to June. If that happens, since the SFPUC is a secondary holder of rights on the Tuolumne, it might affect the flows into the Hetch Hetchy and from Hetch Hetchy. Their update is due in 2018, and we'll probably hear more about it. Mayor Burt: Council Member DuBois. Council Member DuBois: Just real quick. I think most of us, if not all of us, were at the Midtown ice cream social. It was a great event this year. I just wanted to call out (inaudible) and thanks to Sherry Furman and Midtown Residents Association. They did a really nice job. Mayor Burt: Thank you. Vice Mayor Scharff. Vice Mayor Scharff: Thanks. A couple of things. First is that Ezra Rapport of Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) resigned as Executive Director. Brad who is the Assistant Executive Director, will be the Acting Director in the meantime as the merger completes itself with MTC. I think that's good enough for tonight. Mayor Burt: Council Member Kniss. Council Member Kniss: We did all go to the social. It was lots of fun, and it was really hot on top of it. The same thing I've mentioned a couple of times before. The Peninsula Division of the League of California Cities is having their dinner this Thursday night. It'd be wonderful if more than I go. Vice Mayor Scharff: Have fun, Liz. Council Member Kniss: That's what I thought. Marc said he'll come to this event. The last thing. Because we have discussed it a lot tonight, an informational report tonight on the TMA business plan. Please take a look at it. It really does need funding. It really does need to be kept live, gotten well, grown up and so forth. It will make a big difference in the long term. I'm not going to make quite the plea that Neilson did tonight, not quite as colorfully put. It needs our help, and it needs to survive. TRANSCRIPT Page 120 of 120 City Council Meeting Transcript: 9/19/16 Mayor Burt: Council Member Holman. Council Member Holman: The Giants blew another lead they took into the ninth. Mayor Burt: Council Member Wolbach. Council Member Wolbach: Picking up on something the Mayor mentioned last week. I saw him speak at the peace walk and rally that at least a couple of us had participated in. Peace walk and picnic, rather. Having noticed the comments on Palo Alto Online on the article about that after the fact, I was disturbed. I'll just put it out there for now. I think we might want to consider a City Resolution condemning Islamophobia in America, in our community and more broadly. Mayor Burt: In addition to the various events that others mentioned, Acterra had a really great electric vehicle event on Saturday afternoon. It was very well attended with a whole series of different Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturers. The enthusiasm was there. One of the things that I have brought up before and would like to see us look for an opportunity to do is to survey whatever sampling of our populace to find out what form of vehicle they intend to have in their next purchase. Here we have within our S/CAP an anticipation that we'll have a certain level of adoption. We really don't have any data that would tell us whether we're on the right track. I strongly suspect that not too many people are expecting to buy a gas-powered vehicle in their next purchase. It'd be really nice to know what that data is like. That doesn't determine what they will buy, but it certainly gives a sense of the mindset. Finally, just note that Stanford really dominated SC on Saturday. It wasn't even a game. Before the game even, the SC coach noted that SC now aspires to have a program like Stanford. Adjournment: The meeting was adjourned at 11:36 P.M.