Today we are talking about the next City Council meeting, coming up Monday, December 20th. We’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items AND some non-agenda items. +10 Internet Points to the person who finds the “Plowy McPlowface” reference first and tweets it to #a2council.
Links we referenced:
– the meeting agenda
– Michigan’s Redevelopment Ready Program
– Ann Arbor’s work legalizing mushrooms
Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFers on Twitter and Facebook. And hey, if you wanted to ko-fi us a few dollars to help us with hosting, we wouldn’t say no.
Transcript
NOTE: This version of the transcript was generated by an automated transcription tool and will contain (sometimes hilarious) errors. When we have time for human editing to clean this up we will update it, but we hope this imperfect version is better than nothing.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Hi, and welcome to this episode of Ann Arbor af, a podcast for folks trying to figure out what’s going on in Ann Arbor. We discuss current events and local politics and policy governance and other civic good times. I’m Jess Leet and I’m here with my co-host Molly Kleinman. We both use she her pronouns we’re your co-hosts to help you get informed and get involved. It’s your city. Let’s jump in.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Today we’re talking about the next city council meeting. Coming up Monday, December 20th, we’ll be touching on a few interesting agenda items and some non-gender items and offer some ways for you to get involved. A quick process note, we record this a few days before the council meeting, which means there will likely be some changes to the agenda between now and then. And we’re going to dive right in with a not on the agenda topic, which is a return to the East Medical Center Drive Bridge. You may recall, we talked about this at a previous episode. The University of Michigan wants to widen the bridge it, the bridge does need to be repaired, but it doesn’t need to be widened that hadn’t been in the city’s plans. This is the bridge that intersects with Fuller Road before leading up to the hospital complex. So originally this came to a city council as an approval for the design stage and some folks noticed, Hey, we’re widening, widening a bridge, aren’t we?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Like, don’t we not want to do that generally when it means we’re making more space for cars? So at the council table, council member Briggs added an amendment requiring that the added lanes support high occupancy vehicles, buses, and other forms of multimodal transit. And I don’t remember if it was in the resolution or not, but also they wanted to refer it to Transportation commission before it came back to council. So earlier this week, the updated plans came to transportation commission and they’re not better it, and it’s not entirely like I’m, I’m not placing blame here, but it turns out that because of the fact that East Medical Center Drive isn’t very wide, it’s one lane in each direction. So widening the bridge means that if you’re adding a high occupancy vehicle lane or a rapid, like a bus, rapid transit lane, it needs a longer corridor to run in terms of best practices.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Having it for such a short stretch, just that’s not something you do. So those options were ended up being off the table. I don’t know why they didn’t use that space for a protected bike lane, but they didn’t. The new plans, they still don’t make any additional space for pedestrians or bikes. They just take some width from the sidewalk on one side and add it to the other side. So that one sidewalk ends up being wider. But as we heard a transportation commission from people who use that section regularly on foot or on bike there widening the what W B W C called the wrong side of the sidewalk because it doesn’t, that side doesn’t go anywhere. So this was a pretty long and heavy conversation that we had at the Transportation Commission. I was sort of like texting Jess afterwards how exhausted I felt trying to moderate that conversation.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
And in the end, transportation Commission voted against both options. It’s still going to go back to city council and we’ll see what council decides they might ask for another round of design. We sort of got a late breaking piece of information, which is that even though a bus lane, like a full on bus lane wouldn’t work on the bridge, what’s called a Q jump lane might work. So this is where buses, when buses can talk to traffic lights, traffic lights can stay green or turn green to speed up a bus’s trip through a given intersection and a Q jump lane is a way for a bus to skip the line to cut ahead. And that widening the bridge might potentially enable a Q jump lane that a T A would want someday. We don’t currently have signal priority. It’s not clear when that might happen, but it may be that they can do some work to make that clearer. In which case I think definitely for me and probably other people on transportation commission might feel differently if it was clear that there was some bus related use in the future.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Well, and from years in my texts that we had, which would be fun to drop some screenshots in the show notes, but we’re not going to do that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
No, no,
Speaker 1 (04:58):
I affirmed Molly’s exhaustion because that conversation being in as intensive as it was at Transportation Commission, is the process working as it should. So East Medical Center Drive is really a transportation question. Having it debated on and decided on only at council means that it’s high visibility, highly politicized, but maybe not as highly as informed as it could be. So having this intensive conversation in committee or at commission feels appropriate to me. And while it’s a really heavy way to spend a Wednesday night, this is a decent R o i on a decision that’s going to impact that area for literally decades. Bridges are harder to change than most kinds of infrastructure. So I understand why the University of Michigan is taking this opportunity to want to change it, but I appreciate that the city of Ann Arbor is saying, wait a minute, what are we benefiting and for whom? And the fact that the plans keep coming back with very, very little provision or care for people outside of cars is telling in its own way. So I just really appreciate your and the entire transportation commission’s work. And I think it’s really interesting and telling that what’s coming back to council doesn’t have TCS approval.
Speaker 2 (06:13):
And I mean this is a corridor that has a ton of non-car traffic, lots of people. This is the major route to get to and from north campus, lots of people walking and biking through here. There are major hospital parking lots right there. So a lot of the people walking through here, our staff of the hospital, and I don’t know why we wouldn’t want to protect them. The thing that was really, that I struggled with the most with this plan is that anytime you widen an intersection, you are making it more dangerous for people outside of cars. And that’s what this was going to do it, the widening trade-off might be worth it if it’s for buses rather than individual cars, but it’s making it more dangerous. And this, for me, it was bringing up this thing that Jess and I have been talking to each other about for a while, which we’ve been calling it like urgency gaps. So this idea that there’s something we feel a lot of urgency about that our leaders or decision makers do not seem to feel urgent about. And I mean we have a long list of things where we feel these bega, these gaps.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
We do a lot of them focus around the climate, but that urgency gap exists in a lot of places and in a lot of different relationships. I feel constantly this housing urgency gap where we have an affordability crisis, it’s not a homelessness crisis. So it hasn’t reached that acute issue that Americans are great at responding to and not great at preventing. So it is inevitable that we are going to transition from an affordability crisis to a homelessness crisis and we have an opportunity to head it off now. And there are so many people who don’t feel that urgency or who feel like it something. Every solution needs to be perfect or nothing should be built. And that just doesn’t resonate with what, and a bunch of people feel like is an incipient crisis and that urgency gap is felt in a lot of places. You feel it a lot in transportation.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
Right. And for me, and with transportation, that’s sort of this double whammy because it’s totally about climate. It’s 60 degrees in December in Michigan right now and we’re talking about, which is not awesome. No. And we’re talking about adding a lane for cars and that’s right. And also at the same time, lots of people are dying on our roads. The number of deaths is going up, which is completely unnecessary. It’s unnecessary. It’s wild. The rest of the wealthy world has figured this out and we are doing it backwards.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
What’s the thing I’ve heard you say before, Molly? Every road death is a policy decision.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Every road death is a policy choice, right? Oof. And so to be having a, to be debating this at all just felt outrageous to me because how is this a fight? Why would anyone who has been paying any attention to climate to road deaths think that wide widening this bridge at this intersection is a good idea? Yeah. So I had a lot of feelings coming from this discussion. It’s not coming back to transfer to city council this week, and I’m sure it will be back soon, but staff probably needs a little time to figure out how they want to deal with it. But it’s something to continue to keep an eye on because the university is pushing really hard and they have this whole argument about how this hospital is a number one trauma center and people are coming to the hospital from all over the state and all over the region and all of those people have to drive up to the doorway of the hospital apparently.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
And completely the version of the story that the university is telling completely ignores that this is a major transportation corridor that has nothing to do with the hospital. That all of these people who use it in other ways, leaving aside all the people who do go to the hospital in ways that are not cars. So it’s see what comes back to council. And I’m hopeful that we can get, because there are changes that they could make even without widening the bridge that would make things better for pedestrians and bikes. And I’d love to see those changes happen no matter what. So, and to me,
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Part of what this points up two things. One, we have a real communication issue between the city and the university, which is not news to anyone who lives here for any amount of time is not. But the fact that our strategic priorities, and I’ll say this, the hospital’s strategic priorities, I’m not going to lump this fully under the, you right now are so completely divergent that we are absolutely not having the conversation. The same conversation here points that up, which is, it’s a problem in this project, but to me it’s an opportunity. I’m hoping that our decision makers are looking at this conflict point and saying, huh, how could we be doing this better? How could we have headed off really all of this as a problem to begin with? The other thing this points out for me is the lack, and we talked about this when this came up on the agenda originally, the lack of strategic priority, the hospital in particular, but the university is general, is placing on transportation as a part of its carbon neutrality and climate strategies.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
I am super familiar with the P C C N, the President’s Commission on carbon neutrality. I’m with that multi hundred page report. I am a little bit familiar with all of the work that’s gone into it. I know that they’ve done a lot of thought work and heavy work around putting together their climate strategies and going back through it to point out why East Medical Center Drive was inconsistent with their strategies. I actually couldn’t do it. I could not draw the line between why this is a bad idea and their own state of priorities. So to me there’s also a gap or a blind spot, if you will, in how they are accounting for transportation in their own climate strategies.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
They just fully put it, they put it aside. I think I talked about this before, this idea that it’s a level three emission. So it’s scope three, scope three, there we go. So the university is like, oh, transportation scope three. It’s kind of connected to us, but something outside of our control and that’s false, very in their control. There are many things the university could be doing to reduce commute commuter emissions and they’ve left it out. It’s just not in there. And if it’s not in there, it means that widening East Medical Center Drive and the bridge doesn’t conflict with their plan.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
No. It’s a natural extension of their actual priorities, which is facilitate the unimpeded progress of cars as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Correct.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Alright. I know heavy stuff, but I’m really glad we’re talking about it now because talking about it honestly, in another six months it’ll be too late. What’s done instead? So yeah, good to have it. While all we’re changing is Lions on a page.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Another thing that’s not on the agenda today, but we wanted to pick it up because we didn’t touch it on it. And the last agenda where it was, and it will be coming up again soon, is a resolution to amend the stormwater and soil erosion part of the code. The amendment is going to move most site plan approvals to ad administrative control, which basically means staff and most of what’s left to planning commission. So for people who aren’t familiar with the development process, typically what happens is a project is by or it’s not by right means what you’re asking for is consistent with all of the legal constraints already on the site. It’s consistent with the zoning code. It’s consistent with everything that we’re asking the site to do site plan approvals for. Most projects still have to go up all the way to council for approval, which is really not consistent with development being quick or affordable, which I think we have kind of intu intuitive sense in Ann Arbor. I can affirm for you that sense. It is it neither quick nor affordable and in fact the Ann Arbor factor is an actual thing when it comes to development and construction pricing and they don’t mean it in a nice way unfortunately.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
No, and this is something you’ve been talking about for as long as I’ve known you. I think this idea of getting rid of council site plan approval as
Speaker 1 (14:59):
A That’s right.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Go ahead.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
Yeah, that’s right. Getting eliminating site plan approval for buy right projects. Right. So we still should have oversight for projects that are asking for variance in some way. And there’s a lot of ways that the code accommodates for that. But the problem with council having site plan approval for something that should be a rubber stamp is that decisions get politicized and then we’re responding to constituent concerns that may be inconsistent with the policies that we’ve already got in place, the strategies that we’ve already got in place. We have wraparound plans for how we want to use our land for how we want to be responding to the climate emergency. We’ve even got a resolution on the books talking about how we should be responding effectively to the Black Lives Matter movement. So when you’re asking for a permission every single time, when you’re elevating it to that level of visibility and conflict, every single time you are inviting a slower, less transparent, really inefficient development process, which ends up making everything more expensive.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
And then council members sometimes believe that they can reject things but they really can’t. Right. And then that’s caused problems for us too.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
For sure. Yeah. So rejecting a voting, no voting gown a by right project typically immediately invites a lawsuit that we typically immediately lose.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Oh, fun.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
So there’s a lot of reasons to move by, right? Project approvals away from council. So it’s exciting to see this happen. This is also another step bef towards being what’s called a certified Redevelopment ready community. This is a Michigan program that’s in place through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. And essentially it’s a label for developers and other business industry building industry professionals to be able to look at a municipality and say, does this community offer a transparent, predictable, efficient development process or does it not? Because transparency, predictability, and efficiency all translate into either dollars or time. And even with time, that generally translates into dollars. So being a redevelopment ready community is a signal to building industry professionals that Ann Arbor is a friendlier place to work than it might otherwise be. And we don’t have, as far as I know, we don’t have that certification. It requires a certain number of points, let’s say 10 points that a municipality has to fulfill on the policy and process side in order to be certified, redevelopment ready, and by right approvals going to council is a huge red flag against redevelopment ready. So this is another step in that direction, which is great.
Speaker 1 (17:52):
Part of the reason that I care to talk about this is that making things more affordable to develop means making them more affordable for tenants and users. I want us to stop for a second to think and talk about who redevelopment ready, what a program like that really benefits and what even benefits me because in community conversations, especially places like Nextdoor or deep in the comments on Facebook, I love you Facebook, I love you wonk. But we leave with our feelings sometimes less with our facts. We often focus on the profit accruing to the developer as the person who en or entity who owns the land. And we only talk about that, but that is only one piece of any given project or development. Developments mostly benefit the people who use it and the people who are around it for homes and apartments, that’s neighbors for offices, people who work there for all of them.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
There are people who eat and move around in and make our city vibrant in so many different ways. So making it possible to work and live in different places means making different kinds of community different possible. You drive or bike or bus, you get coffee and soup and dinner, you work, you go home to your family and your neighborhood and your school and e for each one of those activities and interactions is a part of what it means to be in a community. And every single one of those contributes to the vibrancy of our city. Each one of those constitutes a benefit. So when we have these conversations about what it means to effect, effect development, I don’t want us to be so myopic that we dwell on the developer as the only person or entity who benefits because the reality is so much richer and more interesting and more complicated than that. So our tagline for the podcast is get informed, then get involved. I invite you listeners to write your council members about this. Like I said, it’s not on today’s agenda, it was on the last one. It will be again soon. And let them know that this is something that you’re excited to see and that you’re glad that they’re considering and moving forward,
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Right? Because we do expect that there will be some pushback to this change. There are folks who want to see development development happen more slowly and they want to be able to impede it as often as possible in order to prevent more housing, more neighbors, more vibrancy. So they need to hear from the folks who actually want these things because it wasn’t really particularly a controversial discussion at the last council meeting, but there is a decent chance that it will get, that the opposition will get louder as it gets closer to passing.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
And this is one of those things that we have to figure out ways to get to stop supporting a harmful status quo. And having counsel approve by right developments is an extremely hurtful status quo. So email your words to council members or just shoot a message to council@atogov.org. Either way they’ll be delighted to hear from you and let them know that this really boring but awesome thing about stormwater and soil erosion is something that you’re glad to see for our city.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
I’m going to correct the email address real quick. It’s city council a2 gov.org.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
I was just too excited to say the whole thing.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
I have no idea where the council one goes. But anyway, yes,
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Probably the city clerk Jackie Bore in my mind, she gets all the way word emails in this city and she’s just like, all right, let’s send this one where it’s supposed to go. That’s probably not real, but that’s how it’s in my head.
Speaker 2 (21:26):
The Office of Wayward emails
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Sounds like a Hogwarts ministry.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
Right, exactly. Okay, so we have more site plan approvals actually on this agenda, but these are not by right site plan approvals.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
That’s correct. So actually I think Mill Creek Town Homes is, I don’t remember whether it is or not. So I just wanted to highlight the two site plan approvals that are coming for a couple of different reasons. One ref is holding down three council agenda items, pH one P two, oh, sorry, four B one and DB one, and that’s the Mill Creek Town Homes Development. These are, as you can tell from the title townhome that are coming, it’s a density of approximately 11 units per acre, which for those who are keeping score, and thanks to the behind the scenes elves who helped me do my math real quick before the episode, you know who you are. Thank you. 11 is an unexciting number. It’s more than one, it’s more than a single family home or even four or eight. But it’s really not enough to support transit or great business around there.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
And for folks that are familiar with this corridor that’s kind of between Packard and Ellsworth, that will maybe not surprise you, which is full of people, but not quite full of people. So this one’s coming. Mill Creek Town Homes, it’s another first Martin development. It’s unexciting, but it’s fine. The other one is a slightly more interesting. So this refers to on the agenda items pH three and b2. So there’s a public hearing for it. This is a second reading if you’d like to call in. And you might, I encourage you to do that. So the reason that I’m laughing is that the Mill Creek Town Homes project is coming to council with as usual full planning commission approval, eight yeses, zero nos. Dominic’s is coming with zero yeses and eight nos. And I think that’s really interesting and fairly unusual and kind of funny.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
And this is this site plan approval. This the second one, pH three for Dominic’s is related to. So Dominic’s is a p u planned unit development, which I sort of mess up these words all the time. I’m looking at Jess. But it’s a planned unit development that was approved like a decade ago. And as a part of this approval, they were going to get rid of some curb cuts. So curb cut is like where there’s a ramp coming up from the road for a driveway and there’s a driveway and a curb cut that they were supposed to get rid of and they just haven’t. And in the past, they’ve managed to get approval to continue to not get rid of this driveway. The reason you might want to get rid of driveways and curb cuts is that they create conflict points with pedestrians who are on the sidewalk and people biking and driving on the street. And I guess planning commission was like, no dudes, this, it’s enough, dude, it’s time to get rid of this curb cut. But there’s been some resistance. And so there was a discussion, discussion at the last council meeting. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this, but it is, it’s interesting to see unanimous opposition from planning on this one.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah, for anyone that wants a little civic laugh, I encourage you to get into this specific agenda item because reading the back and forth between Dominic’s and the city and the is we want you to do x and Dominic’s is like, well, I’ll do Y. And the city’s like, no, we really want you to do x. And Dominic’s is like, okay, I’ll do Z instead. And it’s just this back and forth where they continue to not want to fill in the curb cut for various reasons, none of which are consistent with any of the city’s goals or how they’re talking about it. So it’s a little bit if you told a person, I’m not going to do what you’re asking me to for this very good reason, and they’re like, but I need you to do it because I need you to do it. It’s a little bit like that.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
We’ll see what happens. So next thing on the agenda that we wanted to talk about today was public hearing five B four, which is an ordinance to repeal and replace chapter one 13. And it’s the part that’s the regulation of the use of model glues. This is something that we sort of chuckled about episode but didn’t really follow up on what this was. It’s a part of this ongoing project by the city’s attorney, the city attorney’s office, to review and update all of the city’s ordinances to modernize language, make sure that everything is aligned with state law. And this one is about the use. It’s related to the use of model glues as a drug.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
And I think one of the drivers for the update, this specific update is that the list of materials hadn’t been updated since the 1960s, so we really did need a more modern list of materials that fell under this ordinance.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
So there’s lots of new glues that have come out since the sixties, I guess. But I think the thing about this, the update as it is now is that it’s just sort of nibbling around the edges. It makes the language gender neutral. It’s updating the list of blues, but it’s still ultimately about the criminalization of substance abuse. And this could have been an opportunity to move in a different direction. Ann Arbor in general has in some ways been a leader around the decriminalization of drug use and substance use. We just last year decriminalized psychedelic plants and fungi. So why not glue? It’s, it’s a drug, it’s a drug use issue, it’s a substance abuse issue. We know that we don’t want to criminalize these things, we want to treat them, we want to prevent them, but that’s not what this update does. And it could have. So it really feels like a missed opportunity to achieve some of our goals around the criminal legal system. Instead, we just up, we’re updating the list, we’re putting more glues on there, and I wish that we were doing something different with this.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
It’s another urgency gap where folks are like the upholding a harmful status quo is easy, the check the box thing to do. I have updated the list and made the enforcement part of it gender neutral, but that does not actually bring us all the way into the 21st century the way that it could.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Right.
Speaker 1 (28:08):
I had a similar thought. So I was driving down division a few days ago. This is not a glue conversation listeners, just so you know, I was driving down division and saw that the bike lane construction, the two-way bike lane construction there is fundamentally complete, there’s some bits and bobs to finish up, but it’s close to opening and is somebody who sits on the board at the D D A and is really excited to have played a small part in making this manifest and come true and is generally super excited about bike lanes. I was only 30% excited about this because most of my feelings were dread about the Amazon and U P s and delivery trucks that are going to squat the bike lane. And then I immediately got frustrated at that and I was like, God, I wish cops would ticket it all the time. And then I yelled at myself in my head for having that reaction and it got me thinking about what better use of the bike lane looks like that doesn’t rely on enforcement. I have no answers listeners, but I am bringing this as attention that I see we’re not doing as well as we could have. And I don’t think we have a good response. Molly, I’m curious about your thoughts.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
Yeah, I have. Unsurprisingly, I have many. Yay. And I, it makes me so sad that seeing the bike lanes made you feel sad. But I totally hear that because the blocking of the bike lanes is so frustrating. And I think the solution is a mix of things. Part of it is phy, it’s physical infrastructure. There are ways to construct and Ballard bike lane, can you use Ballard as a verb? I’m going to verb it. We just
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Did.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah. There are ways to Ballard bike lanes that make it very difficult for cars and trucks to drive into them. And we could be doing more of that so that physically cars and trucks can’t get in there and then they can’t block the bike lane. We’re mostly not doing that. A lot of cities in the US are mostly not doing that. But I think it has to be a piece of the solution is to just make it impossible in places where we can’t make it impossible. I do think that enforcement, we can approach enforcement in a different way. So first of all, enforcement doesn’t have to live under the police department. There are cities in the US where they’re moving parking enforcement out of the police. And there are also ways to prioritize bike lanes in parking enforcement, which is not currently how things necessarily work.
Speaker 2 (30:38):
And then there’s another piece which is to improve the loading zones around the city. So there are parts of the city where there just aren’t good places for trucks to pull up and drop stuff off. And del, the numbers of deliveries have gone way, way up. And as I understand it, that’s a conversation that’s in progress. I think possibly with the D D A as a part of it to sort of look at our curbside management is what we’re calling this to create more loading locations so that these trucks don’t, these drivers don’t feel like they have to park in the bike lane because they have nowhere else to be. There’s also just this cultural thing of it’s okay to block a bike lane and it’s not okay to bike to block a car lane. And that would be something we could also be pushing to change. But that, I don’t think that’s sort of way down the bottom of the list of realities that we might actually get to. I think physical blockages plus more loading zones is the near term realistic solution.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
I think that’s a near term realistic solution, but I do think that cultural shift is important. I was thinking a little bit about the sixes of transportation engineering, which I am absolutely not going to get right now, but it’s something along the lines of engineering enforcement education. I don’t remember the other all of them, but I was thinking about the education bullet point. And I think that there is somewhere close to functionally zero education for drivers around bike lanes. I haven’t looked at Michigan driver’s ed, but I’m guessing that there’s close to zero education for drivers around the proper etiquette towards bike lanes. I did take a look, and this was super fun at in employee training manuals for Amazon Prime and U P s. I didn’t get to FedEx or U S P S because I wanted to know what are they saying about bike lane And specifically what they say is take the ticket hit because you’ll develop, you will deliver faster. They explicitly say that.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
So I think it is a huge missed opportunity for bicycle leagues to be advocating with our develop delivery services. So bike lanes are taken over by a number of different actors and there’s a lot to hit just Ann Arbor and Washington County utility vehicles, enforcement vehicles. I see cops and bike lanes all the time. That’s its own problem. But if we were to kind of break this down into bite side, bite or sized chunks and say, let’s work on delivery services. Let’s talk to the big four, let’s talk to Amazon Prime and their various contract services, U P s, FedEx and U S P S and do training for their drivers around how and why not to use bike lanes. I just wonder how much difference that could make because then we’re relying a lot less on education and enforcement and we’re relying a lot more on changed behavior. So it’s not the nearer term solution, but I think it’s the more sustainable one.
Speaker 2 (33:44):
This is a very intriguing idea to me. I tend to be really cynical about our ability to move the behavior of these big corporations rather than trying to get them to sort of not tell their drivers, actively telling their drivers to park in the bike lanes feels like something that’s going to be a really hard thing to get them to stop doing. But we could ban delivery trucks downtown and we could force them to use smaller vehicles. We could force them to use cargo bikes. This is not a super wild thing. There are cities around the world that have started to do this, that have done this for a long time. Cargo bike technology is getting spectacular. There is no reason to drive an 18 wheeler down the middle of downtown to deliver a couple of kegs to a bar. We could just keep them out altogether. I realize that that’s also unlikely to happen politically, but I think it’s important for us to remember how many options exist if only we were willing to seriously consider them.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
I got to say, listeners, if you want something fun to do, go Google cargo bikes or electrified cargo bikes, especially for U P s. They are so freaking cute.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
They’re so cute. Functional.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Totally functional, but so freaking cute. And it’s also interesting that there are a number of city regulations involved around designing for our largest vehicles. Yes. So loading trucks and fire trucks are the two typically that when we’re talking about turning radii at intersections or the width of lanes, those are the two that we’re typically accommodating for. If we had to accommodate for smaller vehicles, we could have people friendlier streets.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
What’s bad about that? Plus they’re cute.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
They’re so cute. Fire trucks do not need to be as big as they are here. You could smaller firetruck exist also. It’s not like we’re saying we shouldn’t have firetruck. We can just have smaller cuter firetruck.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
That’s right. That’s right. I know one person in the city who advocates not only for these smaller vehicles, but also putting googly eyes on them. And I will just say right now that I am party googly eye. Totally.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Totally on board. Yep. Then we can give them cute names. Likey mc face or like.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
All right. And that dear listener is how we got from glues to bike lanes. All right. Molly, what else you got on your plate?
Speaker 2 (36:12):
This is a quick one. Yeah. Not nearly so much of a journey, but I wanted to point it out. This is C2 on the agenda. It’s an ordinance to amend chapter 14 about purchasing, contracting and selling procedure. So what this is doing is it’s updating our city code to match the proposals that passed this past November proposals a, c and D, which were Charter Amendments authorizing the passage of a city ordinance, which is the city ordinance to regulate emergency procurement, increase the limit for city administrator purchasing, and to require the city to award contracts to the bidder that provides the best value to the city. It’s this best value purchasing as opposed to fully cheapest purchasing. And so I just think it’s really cool to see how this process works. So voters voted and we said, we want to change these city rules. And so now city council is changing the rules and going forward, these will be in place. And it’s notable too that it’s not, the vote wasn’t enough to make the change. There’s some stuff that we have to do to update our various codes. And so that’s happening now. So for all of you who voted for these proposals or campaigned for them, now we’re going to have them. And that’s pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (37:29):
It is the work of the work,
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
Oh, there’s one more thing that I wanted to say and now we are back to things that are not on the agenda, but I wanted to thank the folks who reached out and said nice things about the last episode. We had done a new thing by organizing an extremely full agenda by topic instead of going by agenda order. It just felt like a better way for us to be able to get through a lot of material in a reasonable amount of time without putting us all to sleep or making lolly and I horse for a week. So it was a big departure for us, but based on what we heard from you guys, it resonated. So thank you for listening. Thank you for Feedbacking. Just thanks.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor af. Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, ann arbor af.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AF efforts on Twitter at the A two council hashtag and Facebook in the Ann Arbor Humans Who Wonk Group. And hey, if you want to send us a few dollars@kofi.com slash ann Arbor af to help us with hosting, we always appreciate it. We are your co co-hosts, Molly Kleinman and Jess Leeta. And thanks to producer Jack Jennings. The music is, I don’t know, by Grapes. You can reach us by email at ann arbor af pod gmail.com. Get informed and get involved. It’s your city.