Excellent. So my name is from Ward 3. I am calling to order the North Main Street passport. Can we
please call roll? Chair Antoine? Here. Vice Chair Bahigian? Here.
Marathon Lopes is absent. Rachel Peterson is absent. Peter Camara is absent. Thomas Bagway is absent. Ms.
Engel? Here. Ms. Lance? Here.
Sean Raymond is absent. Rosie Jaswell? Here. We have seven present and five absent.
We have informed. Awesome. Thank you. And Peter is technically absent for record, but he's on Zoom. So thank you, Peter, for being here with us.
And as always, we're joined by our amazing clerks, so thank you guys for being here. And our friend in the solicitor's office, Leo Felix, thank you for being here. Awesome. So our first oh, actually, can we do the thing where we go around and say our name out out loud just because there are people who sometimes watch that room and then can't really see our name tags as well. So if you could just say your name and then who you represent or what you represent, all over our student and of law accounts woman ward three chairperson of the task force.
Nate Hirsow, Providence Traffic Engineering.
Jess Lance, director of special projects for the planning department. Leon Lundy Lips, law department.
Kyle Delgado, city council.
Marissa Capaldi, city clerk's office.
Claire Girard, city clerk department.
And Rosie Jebel, the Greenwich and Flute Streets Advisory Council representative.
Jamie with the Broadband Speaks Coalition, also vice chair of the task force.
a motion to take two out of order?
Okay. Because our our plan for number one is not yet arrived, I would like a motion to take number two out of order and start there. Motion to seconded. All in favor? Excellent.
Any opposed? Okay. Cool. Well, I'm really excited because number two is a discussion with the province news and we have Elizabeth Bettis, the core administrator here with us today, who is fantastic. And so, yeah, he was like welcome.
Thank you so much for being here. So if you wanna join us at the table, Elizabeth and I and Pat talked a bit about NorthMain and some of the things that she's doing at the court and then also some things that Elizabeth has seen with her very own eyes because she spends time on NorthMain. And she was just gonna share a little bit and then be open to questions. She's watched some of our meetings and seen some of the questions we have. So I'll stop talking, and Elizabeth is amazing.
And if chief judge of party is watching, I just want him to know she's a gem, and we appreciate her doing that. Yeah. I appreciate that. So my name
is Elizabeth. I'm a board administrator, and I also unofficially kind of spearhead our cameras for the city for red light and speed as well. So North Macon, I know that in Hassam. I get to review that footage pretty often either in court or through the approver staff when they want me to see something that's going on. And I I wanted to speak today about things that I've observed, but also about how that system kind of works because it has very beneficial points to it, but then also some of the technology is just not where it should be.
So some we have the North Main Street cameras. We have two of them that I can think of offhand right now. So one is the one that's in in front of McDonald's in that shopping plaza that's between a very large housing development and the things that they need in life, the essentials. So it's a grocery store. It's a pet store.
It's a coffee shop. It's cheap food. And there's not a lot of infrastructure there to safely cross, especially at night. So that's where we've seen several pedestrian strikes. The RedLINK cameras are only as good as the deterrents around them to support them.
So something that I observed as well as the province police department and the approver staff who's also the auditor staff. They audit the cameras to make sure that they're working and that they were beneficial to the areas that they're servicing. So that camera in particular only works if it's a red light. So when you have a situation like all of those red lights being green without a trigger, they're not gonna do anything. So someone can be speeding through there.
So from South Water Street, what we observed is in the evening time, if there's not cross traffic, all of those lights are green. It's not gonna trigger the camera to do anything because there's not a runway to run. So it's not doing anything that's beneficial, and that's something that I believe somebody's reached out to the state about. And then now we're gonna partner in the fact that the crosswalks that are there don't talk to those lights. So those crosswalks will tell someone to cross when all of those lights are green.
That that's not gonna be beneficial to those pedestrians in trying to make a safe cross. So I have a piece of safety equipment that's telling me, go ahead. Walk. Cross. And then the individual that's behind the wheel has had three or four red lights to pick up speed.
And there's speed bumps there, but if the car is of a certain size, you just go right over it. It's not something that's going to save anybody who's trying to get Starbucks trying to get to the grocery store. So as much as the red lights are beneficial, they have to have the infrastructure surrounding them to be productive and to serve their purpose. So what is happening in that area and adding those walkways, adding that well lit area is is going to be so beneficial in conjunction with the traffic engineering points that we have to make to make the everything kind of a cohesive map of this is pedestrian safety. We're at the forefront of it.
We're working on it. Because it is that infrastructure, that physical infrastructure that we need. It is the technology that we need to work with. And it is gonna be also of the community, making sure that they're giving that feedback, like, as a pedestrian. So I I really love that we have this and we have that feedback because I I watch these movies from my.
And some of that feedback that I'm hearing is exactly what I'm observing. And I do see those individuals. I spend a lot of time with me. My son's doctors and supports are actually at the problem center, so we're there a lot. We come in there once every other week, once every week, and all times of the day.
I can tell you that when it's raining out, that middle median is mud. Who wants to, as a pedestrian, walk across the street through mud, and then you're running because you're trying to get through it as quickly as you can, you're so not necessarily paying attention to the driver who's also not paying attention. You're not paying attention to that driver that's had those three or four rev lights to pick up speed and go over those medians. There's there's a math equation there, and I really love that we're taking that equation and adding more into it, giving them further support to that safety infrastructure. And the cameras are only a component of it, but it's not a solution.
The red light cameras, for example, they only travel with the car if it's above 14 miles an hour. That's the threshold in which the camera can record a violation. So if you have a heavy congestion area and you're worried about those cars taking that ride on red, the infrastructure for the camera and the technology is just not there to be effective, especially in high congestion because those cameras at that point are not catching anything. They're not recording. They're not working towards anything.
They're not following any cars even if they do make that no. It's not gonna be something that's helpful. Technology has not caught up with what we need for accuracy, and that 14 mile per hour threshold is the calibration needed to effectively get those violations from that right hand turn. Heavy congestion just doesn't have that. Or if someone stops and then goes Yeah.
They're no longer being recorded by that camera. It's just not happening. And the the speed cameras also have limitations, but there are certain sites that we've identified, and we actually have
the law department before because the law does state any school, and it doesn't it doesn't designate the definition of what a school is. So when we reached out to the state, they said it could be a preschool. It can be a day care facility that offers state pre K. It can be an elementary school. It can be a high school.
It can be private. It can be public. Some questions that I had was, does the Providence Center count as one because they have a day care component to it, and they do have child care? The police department identified another school that is a quarter mile up from that same intersection that could be a red light camera area. It could be a speed camera area.
Excuse me. We're we're trying to work with the technology that we have and the vendors that we have, but there are those limitations where we want it to be effective, but we also don't want it to be just a stopper. We we want it to actually contribute to a solution for the problem. And so we are working on that. It is something that I know court Hopkins is working on in those expansions into cameras because some of our technology, as as Nate knows, is twenty years old, and some of those cameras are the original cameras from the contract.
So there could be more out there. We're out for RFP for it right now, and I'm excited to see who's bidding on it because the technology is out there for red light speed camera combos. We had a vendor that came down and told us, you know, some states have the same situation that you have where they want a red light and a speed camera, and they have speed and metal camera combos now where it serves two masters. And site wise, that's amazing because they're they're above the ground. So they're up there where the other cameras were on right now instead
of on the ground like the mini RPGs. Yeah. The mini RPGs are only as good as the car that's not parked in front of them. Yeah.
The vehicle that's not obstructing the laser, that's what tracks the vehicle. So as much as we see tons of violations, issuance is low on a lot of them because of the tech, because of those environmental factors. Mhmm. So we have this theory that, oh, you know what? It's gonna solve the problem.
It's not the practicality of it just isn't there. We have this theorization that it's going to work, and, you know, we'll put it there and people will see that they're getting $85, $50 fines, and they're gonna get a court appearance, and the judge is going to, you know, tell them what's up. And it's it's just not always happening just because of that vendor limitation. So I do wanna give, like, that realistic expectation that we would love to camera the entire street, but the limitations of those environmental factors are a real contributor as to what we can actually productively produce from those violations. And I do want to add this as well.
