TACTC Meeting notes from July 29, 1999

The July 29 meeting of TACTC was quite energetic. Sedge Thompson started the meeting by reading the changes that he suggested in the City Plan at a recent city meeting to gather such input. We will include this material here went we get it typed in. Prominent in these changes was the suggestion that speeds on neighborhood streets (as distinct from primary or secondary traffic arteries) be limited to 15 miles per hour. He also included text to encourage traffic calming efforts such as ours for neighborhood streets.

Progress was noted on the effort to get four way cross hatched cross walks painted on the intersections on Ashby. It currently appears likely that this will happen.

Many other topics were discussed. A proposed meeting on August 12 was a focal point. We were trying to decide what we wanted to have done by that time. Particularly whether to make that meeting another development meeting for TACTC or whether we will have gathered enough signatures on our proposed petition to present them to our local politicians. We decided to see how far we get with the writing of the petition and gathering of signatures in the next few days before deciding (e.g. by the middle of the week of August 2.

Two specific action items from the meeting were:

1. Jed Donnelley volunteered to write a draft of the petition. That is now done.
2. Sedge Thompson volunteered to write an initial version of a flyer to be passed out as background information when we canvas the neighborhood to gather signatures.

A major development in this meeting was concensus on immediate pursuit of traffic calming using mid-block street narrowing. While there is considerable interest in other topics - even other means of traffic calming (e.g. barriers) - we came to the joint conclusion that starting a trial use of mid-block bollards for traffic calming was our most promising near term means of getting relief from dangerous and otherwise noxious high speed traffic on our neighborhood streets. We agreed to pursue this goal on a block by block basis. That is we will write up the petition and informational flyer noted above and then gather signatures with the idea of getting block consensus to proceed with installing trial bollards.