Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout2004 11-16 PreCITY OF MERIDIAN PRE -COUNCIL MEETING AGENDA Tuesday, November 16, 2004 at 6:30 p.m. City Council Chambers Roll -call Attendance: X Shaun Wardle X Christine Donnell X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird X Mayor Tammy de Weerd 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Approve 3. Update by Tom Hudson on Downtown Meridian Transportation Management Plan: Presentation by Tim Tayot ("25 minutes) "Approximate allowable time set for agenda item may change depending on discussion. Please use the designated minutes as a guideline only. Meridian City Pre -Council Agenda — November 16, 2004 Page 1 of 1 All materials presented at public meetings shall become property of the City of Meridian. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 16, 2004 The Meridian City Pre -Council meeting was called to order at 6:40 P.M. on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 by Mayor Tammy de Weerd. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle, Christine Donnell and Charlie Rountree. Staff Present: Brad Watson, Bill Nary, Anna Canning, Gene Trakel, Kenny Bowers and Will Berg. Others Present: David Bivens, David Wynkoop, Sherry Hubert, John Franden, Terry Little, Gary Inselman, Kelli F., David L. Item 1. Roll -call Attendance: X Shaun Wardle X Christine Donnell X Charlie Rountree X Keith Bird X Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: I would entertain a motion to adopt the agenda. Rountree: So moved. Wardle: Second. Bird: It's been moved and seconded. All in favor say aye. Opposed? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Update by Tom Hudson on Downtown Meridian Transportation Management Plan: Bird: Okay, I think this is Steve Siddoway, or did you have to leave? Canning: It's me. Bird: It's you Anna? Canning: Yeah. President Bird, members of the Council and Mayor I am just going to do a brief introduction to Tim Taylor, who is a member of Faire and Pierce who is the transportation part of the Tom Hudson team and with that I am going to hand it over. Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 16, 2004 Page 2 of 5 Taylor: Thank you I appreciate being able to have about five minutes. We will go through this quickly for you. My goal is to just give you an update. We came; we were here the 19' of October and gave you an update. I want to give you a feel for what we have done now and what we are learning. One of the key things I want to point out again, is the importance in this process of making sure that we have set the proper priorities and goals that we have collected and reviewed previous research and data and that we are really following a process that allows us to get input from the community. That's been so important in what we are using as a multi -criteria evaluation that allows us to get that input and to develop these alternatives and actually go through and do a detailed evaluation of each of these alternatives. As you know, we have set some very specific goals and objectives in three primary areas. The first one is in relation to the downtown marketing strategy, making sure that any of the alternatives that we are looking at, any of the options fulfill these goals and objectives clearly and that people are aware that we are trying to do a balanced study here that blends not only downtown marketing strategy ideas, but also issues related to the Ada County Highway District and the need to blend these alternatives into a regional transportation network system to minimize congestion and to get that balance between through traffic and to traffic and also then the last one is to balance those first two with our fiscal priorities to make sure that we have reasonable project costs, reasonable maintenance costs and that we can provide an alternative that allows us to do phased implementation if that's appropriate. So, having set these goals and priorities, we are going through this multi -criteria evaluation that allows us to wait these priorities and then evaluate the alternatives based on those specific priority criteria. Just real quickly, there are actually four alternatives. The first one as you remember is just a baseline alternative and the baseline includes all the long-range improvements, the Ten Mile Interchange, which is extremely important. The crossing of Linder and Locust Grove over 1-84 and some other refinements that are going to occur over time. So this baseline condition is what we are using to compare all the other alternatives too. The first alternative and these might be in a little bit of a different order than you remember seeing them, but this is — the first alternative is the one way couplet from the 1997 study. You know it's interesting we've looked at this corridor. The primary disadvantage to this particular alternative, in addition to advantages is that this number of 15,700, which is the two-way daily volume on this facility through the downtown area and really we have studied this as a consulting team. We really have started leaning away from this particular alternative because we don't feel like it is in harmony with the goals and objectives of the downtown environment. The second one is taking and widening Meridian from the section it is now to a five -lane section from Central up to Fairview. And also reconfiguring the intersection of Central and Waltman and providing for a better operations at this very congested intersection. One of the key advantages to this alternative is that it shifts the traffic from Main Street, which is now currently the higher volume street to Meridian and allows for this movement from Franklin to the freeway to occur in an easier transition manner. The other thing is that it takes traffic off of Main Street to a point where we feel Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 16, 2004 Page 3 of 5 like the daily volumes are consistent with a type of environment that downtown is looking to provide. So, that 75, 100 is an important point of this particular interchange or alternative. You know as we have gone through looking at these alternatives, we keep uncovering all kinds of different specific items, that in fact, one of the things that we met with and talked with the Steering Committee about today was some of the issues regarding project costs and right of way issues and those types of impacts where we have been able to move from a fairly general look at things to into some really specific items. This last alternative is what we were calling that split corridor. It's unique in that we know that this southern half of the corridor from a land use standpoint is really a freeway oriented business area where there are a lot higher traffic volumes. Their businesses are oriented towards automobile usage, rather than a pedestrian uses, like our downtown area. We find that the volumes here are greater than they are in the northern portion of the corridor. So, this alternative actually provides a couplet, but only from the railroad corridor south to central. With all of these alternatives that I have just showed you, one of the things that we have done is included an option for providing access to this Waltman Lane parcel, which is a substantial amount of land and so each of these alternatives is looking at specific intersection operations at that intersection. One of the benefits we had just two or three weeks ago is that ACHD went out and did brand new traffic counts on all the intersections within the corridor for us. We will go through all these in detail, but the numbers that are in white show what the existing traffic volume is. The numbers that are in blue show what those volumes are expected to be in the year 2030. So, you can start to get a feel throughout all these corridors about how much traffic is anticipated to grow over the next 26 years. Where you don't see a lot of growth is because these facilities are already at capacity. These volumes are a P.M. peak hour volume; before we have been showing you daily volumes. So, that is just to give you an idea of the fact that we were able to get these new traffic volumes and start looking at things on an intersection by intersection basis. I am missing a slide — I apologize. One of the things that we have done with these traffic volumes is gone in and done a very detailed intersection analysis where we are looking at the amount of delay that motorists experience going through the intersections on an average basis. We have done that for each alternative and you are familiar with the level of service criteria. It's a skill that goes from A to F; A being the best where you have not a lot of congestion, fairly free movements; F being where you have severe congestion; you are maybe waiting through two or three cycles to get through a light. So, what we have done is — here is a list of all our intersections that we are analyzing as part of the corridor and then here is the existing conditions, with each intersection being listed from A, the worst intersection here being Central and Main, Meridian, which is at level service E, a failing condition. Our baseline condition, which is again just the long-range improvements with traffic growth and then our three alternatives. Now going back again to our priorities in those three areas, this is only one particular element of those multi -criteria evaluation. But, it's an important one from the perspective of the Ada County Highway District as well as the city as we start thinking about providing for to traffic verses through Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 16, 2004 Page 4of5 traffic. What we were finding is that the one-way couplet alternative from the 1997 study operated fairly well, but we did realize that at some of the key junctions at Fairview and Main and some other streets where we have been asked to look in more detail that there are some issues there, particularly with the alternative B, widening Meridian at Fairview and Meridian and Franklin and Meridian. The split corridor — the consultant team is leaning mostly towards this alternative C, this split corridor, again, just from the perspective of the traffic operations. As we met today with the Steering committee, it became clear that what we are going to be doing to move forward is be more specific about the criteria we are using. So we are going to start quantifying that criteria by doing things like having a level of service at intersections, knowing how many homes are being impacted, the right of way that is going to be required and some of the project costs and so Ada County Highway District is going to be helping with the project costs and some of these other issues as we continue to move forward, getting into more of the specifics of these three particular alternatives. One of the things that came out of our meeting today and it's the one recommendation that we have for you tonight is that we hold a joint meeting with the ACHD Commissioners and use the Council and some of the representatives from the Steering Committee. We would like to try and do that either the 14th or the 15th of December and I believe that Steve is going to be coordinating with you on the specifics of a meeting to go over some of these additional issues regarding funding, regarding right of way costs and construction costs. That's my update. Did I make it on time? Any questions? Bird: Council any questions? Rountree: Mr. President. Bird: Mr. Rountree Rountree: The difference in all the service at the Cherry Lane or Fairview in Meridian between the split and the widened in Meridian seems to me that they should be closer than a — Taylor: Yeah and that is a good point. One of the things that we do in this particular software program is optimize the cycle length, so you know, from the time you get a green light it turns red and then you get a green light again. What we found in this particular situation, the whole corridor is timed such that all of the signals have a 90 second cycle length, whereas in this particular situation they have about 125 second cycle length. Now that's what it optimized on for the corridor, but based on our meeting today we are going to look more closely at this particular situation. Rountree: Thank you Meridian City Pre -Council Meeting November 16, 2004 Page 5 of 5 Bird: Any more questions? Thank you, very much. That concludes our Pre - Council meeting at 6:55 P.M. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Rountree: So moved. Wardle: Second. Bird: Ifs been moved and seconded. All in favor? Opposed? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:55 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: TAMMY "EERD, MAYOR ATTESTED: WILLIAM DATE APPROVED OF G. BERG, JR., CITY L