Note: These are my notes and are not the official Canton Community Association meeting minutes.

The meeting kicked off at 7pm and started with an intro from Doug Kaufman asking for calm, and giving a little outline of the meeting. He introduced Michelle Pouraciau, the new director of the Department of Transportation. She has been on the job for a month, and has had to jump in head first on this issue. Around the time she came on, the settlement with the city and Bikemore was just being hammered out, and so she had to hit the ground running to get this worked out before the previously scheduled Canton Community Association meeting.

They first went over the goals of the track:

It needs to be an all ages track that goes from Patterson Park to the Canton Waterfront Park. They mentioned the idea of age 8 to 80.

Potomac St has excess capacity. This effort actually started years ago as a traffic calming measure. They mentioned that one lane promotes slower traffic than two wider lanes.

Shorter street crossing distance. Currently, you have to cross two full lanes of traffic as a pedestrian. They wanted to cut that down.

Emergency vehicles needed to be able to get in. That was the issue that stopped the cycle track in June.

Maximize Parking. Parking is always, always, always a premium in the city (but not premium enough that we want to pay for it).

Loading zones for businesses.

Historic district requirements. The area requires a sign off by the Maryland Historical Society (I think)

Accessibility. Disabled residents need to be able to get to their cars.

The biggest restriction that is being worked with is that the cycle track MUST be a two way, protected track. The grant that paid for this stipulates that. If its not a two way cycle track, then the money has to be returned.

The proposed solution would put diagonal parking on one side of the road, with the travel lane next to it, followed by a buffer and then the 8' two-way cycle track. The width of the road from Eastern to Fait is different than south of that. The only difference would be the width of the buffer between the two sections (I was in the back, so it was hard to tell exactly, but they mentioned that as the difference later in the presentation; wait for the presentation to be posted).

They mentioned that they can do either 8' or 9' wide. Wider spots provide more space, but would take away parking. They showed an image of (what I believe was) Hudson’s angled parking. The parking behind Safeway and that area is 8', and the image they showed had lots of space. You can get an idea on Google Streetview, although that area has been reconfigured a bit since that picture.

The elephant in the room is always parking. They went around and counted 220–225 on the Potomac St corridor. They mentioned that there is a lot of illegal parking in no stopping zones, in front of fire hydrants, and past the end of buildings where parking is not allowed. It was not clear if that 220–225 number included those parking spots.

They have engineering software that they used to determine the amount of parking that would be available after the reconfiguration, and came up with 199 spots with 8' spots. They also identified 4 more spots within 50' of Potomac that could be added, as well as 4 more that were added with the removal of the MTA bus stop nearby. By that math, there are 220–225 spots before the reconfiguration, and 207 after the reconfiguration.

The parking reconfiguration also took into account the turning radius of trucks, and fire trucks. The same software they used for identifying the parking situation was used to make sure that all driveway entrances, fire hydrants, and turning areas were taken into account.

This was in response to much of the feedback from the May Canton Community Association meeting where people mentioned:

Fire saftey: fire trucks now have 19' of clearance

Accessibility: no one has to cross a bike lane to get to their car as cars will be along the curb

Increases visibility of cyclists in the track since cars will no longer act as the buffer.

The buffer is now flex posts that will still separate cars and cyclists (not as well as cars, but this is compromise).

Timeline

The comment period goes from August 8 until September 7.

The week of September 18, there will be an open house for community review

Immediately after that, the construction will start, with a completion date of October or November (weather dependent)

Question/Answer/Comment Section

They then opened it up to comments. They wrote down all of the comments and answered what they could. Note that I did not quote all of these; these are summaries.

Q/A will be marked if it was a question that was answered. C will indicate comments that did not require a response.