Pedestrian Safety Board

Morgantown Pedestrian Safety Board Meeting Minutes Public Safety Building – Training Room 1 4:30 – 5:30 PM August 14, 2017 The Morgantown Pedestrian Safety Board’s mission is to promote a walkable environment throughout the City by developing safe, attractive, and accessible walkways that connect neighborhoods and destinations. 4:30 pm Call meeting to order I. Introductions: Members (Quorum: No): Matt Cross, Christiaan Abildso, George Lilley, Jimmie Simmons, and Jessica Bladow Ex-officio: Captain McCabe and Bill Austin Guest: William Blosser, William Hutchins, Pat Hutchins, Penny Kostka, and Janet Fraser Absent: Bill Reger-Nash, Gypsie Denzine, Stanley Cohen, Jen MacDonald, Jan Derry, Dwight Harshbarger, Daniel Shook, Maria Smith, Kim Hartsell, Ella Belling, Damien Davis, Amy Boggs, and Drew Gatlin II. Approval of July 10, 2017 Minutes. Motion by Jimmie Simmons second by George Lilley Passed by (unanimous voice vote). III. Officer’s Reports  Jessica – Fred (DOH District 4 Traffic Engineer) said that he ordered type V marking to be installed at the right turn lane (for the Westover Bridge) and will install it as soon as it is delivered. Christiaan took a picture of it as it was being installed last Friday (8/11/2017). o Thanks to Pat and William Hutchins (active community members) for coming to the last meeting to vocalize their concern over this intersection. o Matt to formally thank Fred for his efforts on our behalf  Matt – o Will ask formally who will be our new representative for the city council o Sent out PSA announcement with footage he shot with a voice over from Krista Baker. This announcement is on channel 15 right now. Matt will link this to our Morgantown City pedestrian website. Nice work Matt! o Martin Dombrowski, from the Traffic Commission, put together an idea for more media coverage with the WVU media school. Matt wrote them an entire list of subtopics to cover and we can expect more PSA announcements over the coming school year. o Matt asked if anyone present knew when or how the signal upgrades for downtown will be implemented. Bill said that Damien is the point for this information.  o Matt observed a vocal warning at the exclusive crossing signal on High Street and Walnut which said something along the lines of: “Cross, cross, cross, turn on red is allowed – cross only during walking phase”.  This lead Christiaan to ask if anyone knew who would be responsible for maintaining the new signals once they are installed. Bill said that he didn’t know, but would assume that the DOH would maintain ownership, unless the signal is on a city road, in which case, the City could acquire it. Bill said that the DOH has already installed a flexible timing system on the Beechurst corridor as well as on 705 all of the way to Granville. He said that he expected the downtown system to be coordinated with the Beechurst system with 3 timings: AM, PM, and non-peak. o Matt confirmed that Penny is interested in joining Pedestrian Safety Board as a member. We will hold a vote for her the next time we have a Quorum. IV. Action Item Follow-up  Jimmie Simmons – walking routes in Wiles Hill: o Matt said he wasn’t able to go view these yet and mentioned that there are PDH maps available for some of these walking trails. He said that he will plan on pursuing this in time. o Jimmie says that there are only 2 obstacles in the trails that she has walked 1. From Overhill to Morgan 2. There is a walking trail from Eureka to highland blocked by a chicken coup or housing for ducks/geese. It seems like property owners/neighbors were taking over this space. There is a parallel route in this area; so, we might not want to push removing this obstacle. o Jimmie further mentioned that the Overhill route involves a lot of steps and is still in pretty good shape; so, it would be a great place to get your steps in!  Matt mentioned that there is a possibility of widening North Street near University Ave and adding a sidewalk. This is something that the Traffic Commission is working on. i. Matt asked Jing to do a pedestrian count in this area. ii. Penny mentioned that there should probably be a crosswalk along University across 8th Street if we add the sidewalk on North Street. 1. Bill said that issues along the University Ave Corridor will be studied in the corresponding Complete Streets Study which is currently awaiting funding. 2. Bill further clarified that University Avenue is City owned from the Mountain Lair to 705 and is primarily State owned for the remainder. V. New Business  Education campaign ideas for school students return: WVU & Mon County public schools: o Matt mentioned that the PSA Announcement is currently running on Channel 15 for the general public and asked if anyone had ideas for where this type of video could be publicized on the WVU campus.  Penny reiterated that it is a great idea to have the WVU media school involved in creating additional PSA videos because they can help teach their peers more about pedestrian safety. She then suggested that Matt could ask to post a video like this to the TVs in places like the PRT or Towers. Christiaan responded saying that these TVs are mostly on a slide show and you might get up to 15 seconds total; so, he suggested that Matt modify the content to fit within this system. o Matt noted that it is walk to school day on Oct. 4th and asked for ideas advocating that more students walk to school.  Christiaan suggested finding a parent who is already walking with their child to school to take the lead on helping walk more kids to school.  Matt then reminded everyone of the importance of keeping an eye out for kids on the street now that school is starting up again.  Potential intern for the Pedestrian Safety Board from Public Health (curtesy of Christiaan and Bobbi Sykes, the internship coordinator). o Christiaan says Bobbi is in charge of the intern program. He indicated that interns in this program are required to do somewhere around 100 hours of work in a semester. He further mentioned that this generally entails a large project or an education campaign. He said that now is the time to start brainstorming for a project for a spring intern.  One idea Christiaan mentioned was to have an intern observe and catalog crosswalks. He said that there was a bike study performed in Colorado that interviewed bikers to determine what was causing them to disobey traffic laws. He then mentioned that a similar study for pedestrians could be performed here in Morgantown where an intern could interview pedestrians who are obeying or breaking the traffic rules and make a map of what behavior is occurring where (obeying laws vs. breaking laws). Dan Shook could be involved in this process as well.  Jessica mentioned that another idea would be to have an intern look at crash rates around town and write a report to determine why some areas might be worse than other areas.  Christiaan to email Matt Bobbi’s contact information.  Comprehensive planning with the Bike Board/Mainstreet Morgantown/ Green Team o Matt says that he has no progress on this item yet.  Create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time bound) goal team for bringing a consultant into Morgantown  o Matt said that he has been thinking about goals – higher community goals for when we talk about bringing a consultant in to focus on our specific needs/issues. o Jimmie asked if goal setting could be wrapped into the intern program and Christiaan said that goal setting is more a role for Public Administration than Public Health. o Penny said that she sees huge potential benefits in selecting small goals that are attainable that we can start working on immediately. Penny further reiterated that she thinks this is a great idea that we keep glossing over and we should really be focusing on creating small, measurable goals to begin marking our progress as a Board.  One example would be to send volunteers out to take note of what lightbulbs/signals are working and which ones are not working. Then we can work to get these items addressed and fixed.  Matt mentioned that his current goal is to work on getting the sidewalk on North implemented. One of his small goals leading up to this is to get a pedestrian count in the area before the sidewalk goes in and again after it goes in.  Jimmie added to what Penny said and suggested that by creating these small, measurable goals, we could supply the math to apply to reality. VI. Old Business  Sidewalk improvement incentive still available? o Matt says he talked to our city planner who mentioned a 60/40 program that the City had previously; however, Matt did not recall if there were any current incentives. He said that he will look into this again to figure it out for our records. Matt then said that he might ask our new Council representative to look into this on our behalf.  Prioritize sidewalks for the 2018 paving plan. The City intends to give a one year compliance period for code enforcement. o Matt said that to create a sidewalk request list just go to city website: http://com3.govtsystems.com/MorgantownWV/Request/AnonRequests/Re questForm.aspx?FormId=21 and fill out a complaint about the sidewalk so that the city can put some pressure on the property owner to fix the problem area(s). o Penny asked if there were any federal programs (like the Highway Safety Improvement Program) that might be available for funding for sidewalks. Bill responded saying that most federal funding is still held in Charleston and is difficult for the City of Morgantown to obtain. VII. Reports  Mountain Line Maria Smith: absent  WVU Kim Hartsell: absent  WVU Dan Shook: absent  Rail Trail Ella Belling: absent   MPO Bill Austin: There is a lot of work going on with the referendum for road improvement projects which could have a really positive benefit for pedestrian and cycling issues. If the state can get this bond referendum to pass then there will be a lot of new building projects. o The state has a hard time finding projects that are already developed for which to apply funding – they want to fund projects that have been in the pipeline for a while; however, if they fund these projects, then there will be a gap between the funding being applied and the projects’ execution. Secretary Tom Smith (coming from Federal Highway Administration) is looking for small footprint projects that can be built within the existing Right of Way and bypass additional permits so that they can be built quickly and put people to work immediately. Bill says there is a potential for getting this philosophy to work for pedestrian and biker projects.  Jimmie asked if alleyways could fall into this category and Bill said no.  Matt asked about the city artwork project around town and Bill said that the grant for this idea was not approved.  Penny asked how we could get Morgantown set-up to get this funding, and Bill said that the right people are on the job. o Bill then mentioned that for this referendum to pass it really needs to pass in Morgantown. Bill further mentioned that the MPO is scheduled to work on the pedestrian plan update and then asked what we thought about them updating this concurrently with the Bike board plan which would result in one set of public meetings to tackle both related plans at the same time. There was no definite response one way or the other and Bill suggested that we think about it, and let him know our thoughts at our next meetings. Bill mentioned that the last bike plan update was in 2014.  City Engineer Damien Davis: absent  City Council: absent – Matt will ask the Council for a representative before our next meeting.  Police Lt. McCabe: nothing new to report  Traffic Commission Matt Cross: See updates above. VIII. Action Items  Matt: o Formally thank Fred Shoukry for his efforts on behalf of the Pedestrian Safety Board o Get the PSA announcement linked to the Morgantown City website (on our Pedestrian Board page) o Get meeting minutes and membership updated on our website. o Get in touch with Damien to ask about the details of the signal upgrade implementation downtown. o Ask the City Council about who our representative will be.  o Determine if there is any sidewalk improvement incentive for City residents. Potentially ask our new City Council representative to look into this on our behalf. IX. Upcoming Events  Oct. 4th: Walk to School Day – might be a good day to gauge who has interest in walking to school (Jimmie’s idea for getting #s for a SMART goal). Jimmie says that the schools are now required to keep track of how students are arriving (including whether they walk/bike to school); so, it could be as simple as just calling and asking the school administrators. Penny said that we could gather some cold call volunteers from our Board to call the local schools and ask them about their numbers. It was suggested that we organize this group in our September meeting. i. Matt mentioned that he is thinking about asking Dr. Devono to come to one of our upcoming meetings to provide us an update on the local public schools.  Aug. 27th 2-4 PM: Meet your Neighbor – George invites everyone to this event at the Farmer’s Market Pavilion; there will be free food and activities for Morgantown residents to promote meeting and engaging with neighbors. Next meeting: September 11, 2017, Training Room 1, Public Safety Building, 4:30 – 5:30 pm.