Discussing Fremont's Traffic | Featuring Mark Spencer

Welcome to Fremont Focus now, where we're going to be using this podcast and other episodes in the future to focus on various policies that are happening in the city and in the tri city areas, as well as cultural events, small businesses, their challenges, large businesses really shining a light on our entire community in a way that we don't have right now because of the absence of local media. And my name is David Montecorsi, former Fremont City council member and many years in this community is my hometown. And I'm honored to have as my first guest Mark Spencer. Hello, Mark.

Hello, Dave.

Let me introduce you. Mark has worked 35 years in the Bay Area as a licensed professional traffic engineer. Why are we here? Today we're going to talk about why there's traffic in Fremont and the tri Cities and what we can do about it. And I can't think of a better person than to talk to Mark about it. Mark also has his connections to Fremont, Locally in Fremont, in addition to many transportation projects, Mark serves currently on the Fremont Mobility Action Plan, technical advisor, served on that technical advisory committee and now on the Mobility Commission, which was formed in 2020. After serving as chair for four years of the Mobility Commission, he was reappointed and is serving another four year term through 2027. And during COVID Mark lent his expertise to the city at the vaccination site at the fire training center right here on Stevenson, practically across the street from where we are organizing traffic, parking and pedestrian lines accessing the building for several weekends. And Mark, in fact I used that for one of my Covid shots. So thank you. I remember going through relatively seamlessly and now I can.

You're watching late, then you're.

Yes.

So Mark, tell us a little bit.

About what it means to be a traffic engineer.

Well, when people ask me, what do you do? And years ago I'd say, well, I'm a traffic engineer. I help move people from point A to point B, or I move cars through a network or encourage people to ride a bike or get on transit or walk places. And as my career grew, I realized for me, being a transportation professional means I'm helping communities. I'm trying to make a community safer, more livable through mobility options. So every project I work on, whether it's something very small at a corner or whether it's a big development, I'm trying to lend some level of expertise and help that says how can we do better? How can we make sure people are safe and people have options in terms of their mobility choices?

And so mobility at a very Reductionist level is how to get from point A to point B safely.

It's moving people, goods and services from one point to another, in essence. And people say, well, traffic is. What is traffic? People think cars on a roadway. When people say, what do I do? I usually say, I'm a transportation engineer. Which then brings in other modes. It implies multimodal aspects to it. I think of traffic as cars on a roadway or vehicular traffic. That's a definition that I use. Not everyone, but.

And when you say multimodal, what does that mean?

Considering how do we get people to use transit? How do we get people from that first and last mile? How do we get them to and from transit? What kind of bike facilities can we provide for those that want those options? What are our conditions of our sidewalks? People, Every trip that someone makes, when you started today, you say, how did you get to work? Well, I drove to work. Your first mode was walking. Everyone is a pedestrian. You step outside your house into your car, or you go into your garage into your car, Everyone walks. For those that can walk, let's be honest. But walking is the primary mode of people traveling. They don't think of that as a mode of travel. But we have to make sure that walking is safe and efficient and available for everybody. And then those sidewalks also have other purposes. Strollers, people walking their dogs, people in wheelchairs, people in strollers. So you have to think about all aspects and all modes and those choices. And that's what multimodalism.

And you say you're a traffic engineer, but I drive my car. I got opinions about traffic. Everybody you come across knows more about this traffic problem than you do. Right. So how do you. What's your value add to be able to educate people and provide the services that you do?

I'll look at it this way. I'm trained as a traffic engineer. My license is in traffic engineering. My master's degree is in transportation. So I have a level of expertise that I can lend. But I have a sensitivity to what the community is going through. Everyone is frustrated when they're sitting in traffic. When you know the light is red. How long is that light red? Why is there a stop sign here? Everyone drives. Everyone has a driver's license. So they become a traffic engineer, and they have opinions. And I'll talk to three people and I get four opinions. I get that I have a sensitivity. I have an empathy for that. But I look at it from a systems perspective. It's not one person moving from point A to point B. It's what is good for the network, what's good for the city or for the system that is the most efficient for the system? That's, that's really where the expertise and that's really where the professionals have to look at it. And not everyone sort of thinks in that term in those terms, but what's good for the system is going to be good for everybody in the system to be able to move from point A to point B.

Well, you talked about systems and for people that live in the Tri Cities. What are some of the major projects in Fremont that you provided traffic engineering support work?

Well, you know, in Fremont, right from the beginning, when I first came out of graduate school and started working in Fremont, I was working on BART to South Bay before the Warm Springs station existed. Finally it opened and it's continued.

Oh, you're old.

Yeah, well, between the two of us we got over a hundred years of good experience here, Dave, so let's not go there. You know, I've worked on the Fremont General plan, obviously I was involved with the mobility action Plan. I've worked on several of the development projects, residential, commercial. I think some of the ones I'm most proud of. Safe route to school projects. Okay, talk about that. Actually one of the most challenging and stressful was doing a safe route to school project and school improvements at the school where my child attended on the time. And if I mess that up, I'd have to move. That's it. I'm getting drummed out of the community. So that was, and it was, it was pretty straightforward, but it was, it was a good project. And the plan we developed is still in use today. But it was very interesting because the superintendent said, hey, what can we do to make things better? And then over, over a spring break, he's like, we're just going to do this. This is Dr. Morris. Yeah, yeah, Dr. Morris.

And when he's talking about safe routes for people that don't have kids in schools, this has really the challenge of in the morning and then after school in particular, where you have all of the parents that are dropping their kids.

Off, it's a big out at his rates with the regular traffic, without school busing, you know, whenever. School bus, whenever, you know, a lot of kids go getting driven in a, in a, you know, by a parent and they're not carpooling. It's a lot of vehicles in a very short period of time arriving in a single place and that's a lot of congestion, very concentrated in a short period of time. So School traffic's very hard to manage and we have a lot of it in Fremont, particularly at the elementary schools, but even the middle schools and the high schools. But I was proud of what we did and the fact that it worked and knock on wood, it worked out and I got to stay in the community as a result. One of the cool things we did though, after it got implemented, I told everyone, I said, there's going to be a period of adjustment, so just let the dust settle and then we can kind of tweak it. Because you're implementing something in the school year. It's going to be very new, this new pickup and drop off scheme. And it was the first time we used drones and we put some drones up to watch the traffic flow around the entire school campus, which is very hard to do from the ground level. And we saw where things were backing up and where we needed to make some tweaks and I was just happy. It's like, hey, that's really like a new technology at the time and something that we could do that's different. And we've now done that on other projects as well. It's worked out really well.

And I don't know if you get into the larger sociological changes, but when I was growing up, went to public school schools here in Fremont, went to Maloney, went to Glenmore. I used to walk to school.

I would walk.

When I went to Glenmore, I had to bike. It was a little bit further away than from where. And now you cannot tell a parent to have their children walk, even with little. There was some ideas about having like walking buses with an adult with several children. Is that part of your state?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. When we start thinking like, okay, how do we know what are the incentives? How do we get more children? And the parents have to be incentivized as well. And often it's the children who are saying, I don't want you to drive me. This is not right. You know, I want to walk to school, I want to bike to school and giving the parents that comfort level that it's going to be safe. The walking school bus is literally just, you know, imagine just a, you know, 10 or 12 children being led by an adult on a sidewalk on a route to school.

And.

And so it's basically a school bus without the bus. And when they have the events at schools, I remember in the elementary school when my child, they had like a walk and roll to school day and encouraging children to try different things and the reward for that was they got a donut and I thought, oh, my God. I said, you know, part of this is promoting health, all good habits. And I was just, you know, think, well, if it works, it works. That's just like I'm walking. And I asked my child, I said, I can't believe they gave you a donut. I said, you know, they should give you, like, you know, a book or, you know, pencil or, you know, something. And I think she told me, no one's going to walk to school for a pencil. And I got set straight by my child at the time. So I understood the.

So, yeah, so you mentioned or I mentioned about your background. One of the things that I was proud of on my term or tenure on the City Council is I was there that voted on approving the Mobility Commission. Former Mayor May had pushed it. And I can tell you what, when you talk about the Mobility Action Plan and creating a new commission, we had to deal with a lot of institutional pressures from the city manager. They don't like more commissions because it's staff time. But this is really, I think the former mayor had run on this issue. This is really important to the community. So you are our most recent commission, to my knowledge, that was created by the city of Fremont. So talk about the Fremont Mobility Action Plan. That was the precursor to the Mobility Commission and your involvement in that.

Sure. The Mobility Action Plan, it kicked off, I think around 2017 or so. Staff, actually, who I know a lot of staff in many places, including here in Fremont. And I remember having a lunch one day and the idea of the Mobility Action Plan came forward. And a Mobility Action Plan is really a transportation plan for a community. So it includes, how can we. What are our priorities? How are we going to fund transportation projects? What are our challenges? What are our opportunities? What are our constraints? Taking all that into focus and first, understanding why do we have traffic? When people say, oh, God, there's traffic. In that sense, traffic means congestion. Why are people frustrated? Why is it growing or why is it outpacing what we can do to help manage that and what can we do to help ourselves? What is Fremont's role in the region, within the county? How can we do better? And as someone who's been working on these types of plans, I was invited to apply to be on the task force for the Mobility Action Plan. And it was a group of individuals that represented every council district. We had people from transit agencies, we had people from industry. I was the professional representative on that. Through that process, when we were working through these different issues and there was a consultant team that was providing the technical expertise and analysis. And we were reviewing that. But I kept mentioning Fremont is the largest city at the time in the Bay Area without a traffic commission or a transportation commission, no oversight body as a commission. Smaller cities had them. I said, Fremont is at the point where we're overdue for this. So I was pushing for that within the Mobility Action Plan. From that we kept bringing. I think I remember Dave, one time when we were presenting the council, I had mentioned this and I think you had said, hey, then you should be like the first person to sign up. And I was like, thanks, Dave. I need more night meetings in what I do for a living. You weren't wrong. And then. And then, of course, I did wind up being appointed to the first Mobility Commission. Thanks. I guess so, Mark, and thank you. And I'm glad if you talk about.

Systems that benefit the community. Well, if you're the traffic engineer, you're benefiting your community through your public service. And I commend you for.

But if you were to talk to.

Somebody that's never heard about the Mobility Action Plan, what is your elevator pitch to describe what it does?

It's a list of priorities. It's a blueprint for the city to follow in terms of what are the transportation priorities, what are the programs and funding to go after that will have the most impact for the community as a whole. Whether that's a freeway project, whether it's local roadway projects or signal timing, it could be anything transportation related. But there's a series of action items in the Mobility Action Plan and priorities that say, here's where what we should focus on and these are the goals and here's how we measure success.

Let me talk about one of them that kind of interested me. When I was looking at it when I was on the Planning Commission, I was amazed that the planning staff was basically surrendering to traffic congestion by saying, we're no longer going to accept levels of service C, but we're going to go down to D and E. And it's like if you're A, B, C, D and E is like grading A is, you know, you're flowing in traffic and there's no congestion at all. D and E is gridlock. And so I remember staff saying, we're going to be designing around failure. We're going to design around congestion. So that. That frustrated me enormously. It frustrates our community. One of the things, though, I thought that the Mobility Action Plan had as a, as a real way of reducing traffic was to reduce the percentage of Drivers on our roads, from 73% that are driving alone down to 50% at a percent per year. So that was like a 2040 goal, but it was at least a direction. So talk about that goal and see in the five years that this plan has been in effect, what, what steps have been taken?

Sherry, you know, we use, we use these goals in transportation quite a bit. And we're, we are sometimes idyllic and aspirational, sure, but we have to shoot for these things. Reducing single occupant vehicle trips, which, I mean, you're driving solo in your car with no one else in your car with you. That's the biggest source of traffic congestion. People alone in a car, because every car takes up a certain amount of space. If you carpool now, you have two people in a car or three people in a car. If you're on a bus, you may have 20 or 30 people in a bus taking up the space of two or three cars. So it's about space and how it's utilized. So the goal is say, hey, let's reduce single occupant commute trips, or maybe all trips, to 50% of the total number of trips. It's very ambitious. The way to do that is what kind of alternatives can we provide? How do we incentivize folks who can say carpool at the time, we're like, hey, Warm Springs is going to come online. We're going to be able to provide better options for people in that area. With Tesla growing and other businesses growing in that area, Warm Springs can become a transit hub. We already have the Fremont BART station, so we have two very active now rail hubs which are very important so that you can concentrate development around that development decisions and land use decisions. And housing also concentrated near transit allows for reduction in trips. The more that you can use transit or the more that you can walk somewhere. Take for example, your office. You happen to live next to a giant commercial center. You work next to a giant commercial. You do live in your office. We know that. But when you're here, I mean, you could walk to go get lunch. You don't need to hop in your car, for example. That reduces a trip. Similarly, you know, if you can walk to go buy groceries, or you can just walk for recreation and you don't have to drive someplace, and it reduces trips. So it's about land use decisions and trying to push that land use and transportation planning together so that you can reduce those trips and you can measure that. You can do surveys both passively of just watching what's happening and counting cars. And you can also survey large employers in terms of what are they doing within their own programs to help reduce the number of employee trips coming to that work site. So the mobility action plan is actually set in motion a lot of really good things. But it's not just about reducing trips and saying, well, now everyone's going to have to ride a bike. That's not what it's about. We heard that a lot. Not everyone wants to ride a bike. Not everyone can ride a bicycle. That's okay. But we got to provide choices because as we continue to grow, we can't keep building our way out of congestion. It won't happen. You can add more lanes on a roadway if there's space, and then those lanes just fill up.

They just fill up. That was a misconception. You have a lane.

If you, if you build it, they will come.

Right.

And that's induced demand. That's a hard thing to kind of swallow because we can't keep building our way out. We have to provide options or the community can't grow and add people. So the question is, how do you have smart growth options so that you can grow but not choke on your own congestion?

Right. I remember when I was on the planning commission, there was a very controversial project on Walnut, very near the BART station. And one of the arguments opposed to it by the surrounding neighborhood, they didn't want to see this high, higher density housing was that there's no amenities close by. Well, here's again the chicken and egg problem where you are creating traffic trips. And there was an effort by the developer to have some coupons and other things to encourage bart. And it's frustrating because if you don't plan ahead for the amenities to support the higher density, you do create some congestion, at least initially. Isn't that true?

It is. And it's hard to incentivize the commercial development first when there's nobody there to support it. Covid, you know, obviously changed a lot of things. And now there's. There's other options where we have grubhub or folks who will deliver directly to your house. There's this, you know, the way shopping and consumer spending habits have changed and moved online or through various types of services also affects travel patterns, quite frankly. And that's an interesting challenge for us. Something that we never would have envisioned when I first started working was getting basically anything I want delivered to my door. That's. That's, you know, when I was in college, it was pizza. That's what we can get delivered. And I understood that it's a really good model. I think it still works to this.

Day, by the way.

But it really has changed, you know, Amazon and those types of services, meaning. And also things like Uber and Lyft, those kind of mobility options being in the mix changes how we assign space on the curb, for example, do we need the same number of parking spaces? All of this is. It's an interesting challenge, but as transportation continues to evolve, we have to evolve with it. I think, through the mobility action plan, by the way, we allow for that. Because you would say, look, not everything is set in stone and this is the way it's going to be for the next 50 years. You have to be proactive to set things in place, but then you have to be malleable enough to say what's working, what's not working, and how can we adjust that?

Well, let me. Here's the $64,000 question that we led with. Why is there so much traffic in Fremont?

A lot of it is simply a supply and demand question, but Fremont is unique in the sense of we have pretty good job housing balance within the community, but the surrounding areas do not. So we sit in an area where every day there's travel coming from San Joaquin County, Contra Costa county, other places in Alameda county, say north and east of us, but passing through Fremont to get to Silicon Valley. Jobs. Some of those are. We have job centers here, but they're going to Sunnyvale, they're going to Santa Clara, they're going to San Jose and Campbell and so on. And there's a limited number of routes and choices to make that trip that comes through. And that affects us because that makes it harder for us to get out of our community if we're going to those same job centers or if we're going to San Francisco or Oakland or San Jose. So the job housing balance and the fact that we sit in this nook that captures the travel going back and forth is part of it. And that has a lot to do. And that does affect local congestion. Two, we're blessed with a lot of really good schools and people want to live in Fremont. And the congestion around school areas, very concentrated as it is for short periods of time, does have an effect. Can we do better with managing school traffic in the morning and in the afternoon? It's more concentrated in the morning, but that's. That's another effect. I think the other aspect. Fremont early on was one of the first communities to really be impacted by WAZE and navigation Apps, people using this. Now, remember, before COVID traffic was growing seemingly by the day, 6:80 from 3 o' clock in the afternoon until 7 or 8 at night. Going northbound back towards, you know, over the Sonoa grade was very congested. People would pop off at South Mission and come up Mission Boulevard or find other ways through the city and then try and get back on at North Mission. That wreaked a lot of havoc locally, which then impacts our ability to move around locally. You know, it makes it tough to bring your kids to soccer in the afternoon or run an errand or get where you need to go. It affects our quality of life locally. So those navigation apps resulted in a lot of staff time saying, how do we counteract those? Do we put in turn, restrictions, stop signs, how do we discourage that? And I have a lot of beef with navigation apps in terms of their value and where they're good and where they're not. But it does, even to this day, still have a lot of effect on travel behavior and patterns.

You've done a good job of defining what people are experiencing. As to why we have traffic in Fremont and in the Tri Cities, what are the major solutions to reducing the congestion? How can we get rid of the traffic?

Well, I'll reframe your question. You can't get rid of traffic. What we try and do, and I'm being honest about it, what we try and do is manage it and try and say, look, what can we do so that we're not just stuck in gridlock. We don't want to be, you know, the 405 in LA and you're just sitting there, not moving. I don't think. No, I can't imagine in LA they want that, but, you know, that's their life, that's their issue, their podcast, their problem.

Right.

Cross. You know, I, by the way, I get to interject.

In la, they don't talk about how much, how long it is to travel from point A to point B. It's how many minutes, Right. I'm an hour away, it could be two miles.

That's exactly right. Yeah. There's a great scene in the movie LA Story about that where he drives next door at the single occupant car. What can we do here? I'll tell you, I think there's a couple of things. One, we can do better with providing options for people, but also we can do better educating people. There's a lot of frustration in Fremont. They see a lot of green bike lanes. No, no one's riding on bike lanes. Why do we have all these bikes, bike lanes, you know, we're wasting tons of money on that. We could do better. How come you took out the right turn channel? You know, those right turn lanes that we used to have? You know, I can't. It takes me an hour now to get to the hub. You know, I go down that next door rabbit hole sometimes. I know what the frustrations are. What can we do about it? Well, we're doing a couple of things and the mobility commission is doing a lot on this, where we look at these projects and provide direction with staff. One thing is technology is getting better every day. We're doing better with timing of traffic signals and using technology to keep things moving on key corridors like Fremont Boulevard. Having transit options, having bike options, having walk options that are safe, efficient, reliable, cost effective, that helps. Again, doesn't mean that we want everyone to suddenly take BART because you know you're not going to be able to drive. No, we want to provide options for those that are able and want to do that. It has to be a more balanced system. Not everyone is going to be able to drive every trip, every time, every place they should go, nor should they have to. I should say.

Well, one of the technological advances that intrigued me. Again, this is maybe not something that's going to move the needle, but I think it could. Which is the Waymo concept or the autonomous vehicle? Because I think in our society, you and I are of a certain age with American Graffiti, that having a car is especially for young man right off passage. It's a life bright of passage. But once you detach ownership of a vehicle with transportation and make it just a mode of transportation, maybe four people will get into a Waymo. It'll be cooperative driving and you can have apps to say, hey, I need to get to this place. Can I get three other people to their car? Is that something that has some promise?

It does, but I'll take it in a slightly different direction. The concept of car ownership, I think, is what you're bringing up. If everyone doesn't need to own their own vehicle, if you have shared mobility, it would free up parking spaces. Why do we need so many parking spaces? I've read so many different things on this. Why are there eight parking spaces for every car that someone owns? You know, at your house, at your place of work, at a shopping center, at a school, at a gym, at a park. It's. It's really amazing how much space is devoted to that. If you had that type of shared mobility where you don't need not. Maybe, you know, a family can get by with one car instead of two or three. That is a. That's an interesting land use question, first of all, but also allows for different. It can be managed different from a congestion point of view, and I'll tell you why. And I actually just did my first Waymo trip just a few weeks ago. I'd been in demos before, but I actually was in San Francisco and did a Waymo. When you think about when we drive, you drive a certain way and maybe you've got a lead foot, maybe you're light on the pedal, whatever it may be. But. But everybody is random. We don't all drive exactly the same. That actually causes a bit of like an accordion effect when people are driving on a roadway. It's not a smooth transition where everyone is going in the same exact pace and driving the same way. We try and smooth that out through signal timing, coordination, and some other factors. When you have autonomous vehicles like a Waymo, you can get more uniformity in the way that the vehicles travel on a corridor, and that will be more efficient and allows for more throughput. That's a, That's a great word, throughput. And that's what we're trying to do. It's maximizing your person throughput through a corridor. That's the best thing you can do within a system. It's the randomness that happens where someone's going a little faster, someone's going a little slower, someone breaks a little heavier, someone sideswipes somebody. There's different things like that that disrupts the system. That, that makes it a lot more challenging. So you can be more space efficient with what you have on your roadway. If you had more uniformity in the way things travel. That's a, that's one of the big upsides with autonomous vehicles that potentially is coming. Having acceptance of autonomous vehicles is a separate issue I don't know about. Have you tried a Waymo or not yet? You think you'd be nervous in a car with no driver? I would go with probably somebody that's.

Done a Waymo before to.

I had nobody to yell at, but I. I wasn't. I wasn't as nervous as I thought I would be. And I. I can be a pretty nervous person in situations like that, but I found it very smooth and. And it was okay.

Yeah. No, it's gonna be a cultural shift. And when Sam really, truly is safe, I think it's gonna be. I think we radically change driving habits. Talk briefly as we're wrapping up here about Vision Zero and what that is and for people that don't know about it and what's the sure.

Vision Zero is a concept that originated in Europe quite some time ago. And it's basically a goal that says we should have zero fatalities related to traffic. And it's a goal. Achieving that is very difficult, but it should be the goal. The goal shouldn't be, well, we should only have like three or four fatalities. That's not a goal. You're still accepting that we should accept zero fatalities. That's what Vision Zero sets out to do. And it's a safety program. How do we get there? Fremont is a national leader in Vision Zero. It's been recognized nationally by the Institute of Transportation Engineers. People have come to Fremont to learn what has Fremont done to make this work. One of the reasons, by the way, we have a lot of green bike lanes, is we've repurposed space on streets that we've made slower. So we had a lot of right away, if we start to narrow the lanes, which will slow down traffic, or repurpose lanes where we don't need as much capacity, we then have space for those bike lanes. That's a trade off. It's not a really, it's not an expense. You have to, you know, then repurpose the space that's there. But it's a real, it's an interesting reallocation that slows down traffic, that makes things safer. It's also how do we make things safer for pedestrians crossing streets? In Fremont we have protected intersections. Those are these, you know, you'll see the. At like Walnut and a few other places around town. We're probably, we might have up to a dozen now where they're where we used to have big sweeping right turns, we now have. We've shortened the crossing distances so that it's. You don't have to walk a hundred feet. You now only have to walk maybe 60ft to cross the street. These are things that are all safety related. Fremont's done very well with reducing not just fatalities, but the severity of crashes and the injuries that we have. It's remarkable. But everything is aligned to make that happen. City council, direction, staff, the health services, school programs, safe routes, all of it, police enforcement, all of that aligned towards a single purpose of reducing fatalities and reducing severity of crashes. Nationally, this has taken hold and recently the biggest success story internationally. I recently read Helsinki, Finland, not like Fremont, but a bigger city, recently went through a 12 month period without a single fatality related to traffic. That is an amazing Stat. And granted it's bigger city, it has a lot of mobility choices, so their travel habits might be different. But as a goal, it's very worthy. It, and I find it cringe worthy when I'll read something and say, oh, this Vision Zero program's not working. It's like these people have zero vision. You know, it seem it, it's why that just, it seems silly to me to hear that. But as a practitioner, it bothers me. I understand the frustration people have when they're not quite following why we're doing this, but safety is at the top of the list. And what I do for a living, I'm trying to move people throughput, all of that, but safety is number one at the very top of the list. I will say, look, if things are moving a little bit slower and it takes you a little longer to get someplace, I will accept that trade off up to a point. If it's safer for people to walk, to have a stroller, to walk their dog, to be able to go someplace safety, I will make that trade off every single time. Well, Mark, I want to thank you.

For your time here. But before you leave, a couple of things. I want you to list or identify some resources at a very high level that we'll be posting with the publications podcast. I also want to encourage people to, if they have any questions for you to email us fremontfocusnow@gmail.com and we'll be able to forward those questions to you. If there are specific traffic engineering questions I'm sure you'll be interested in, happy to do so. Yeah, and so talk about some of the resources for people that want to know more about traffic and Fremont or traffic related issues.

Sure. And I'll give you links to all of these. You know, I'll start at the higher level. Caltrans has excellent resources. If you've got concerns on a state highway, something you want to report an incident, you want to file a claim for whatever it might be, there's Caltrans, that's our state department of transportation. So in Fremont, when you talk about 880 or 680 or 84 or Mission Boulevard, those are Caltrans routes. They control those. The city is a cooperative partner. But understand that those are state highways. Then at the county level, there's the Alameda County Transportation Commission and there's Alameda County Public Works. They are handling other aspects, but they're mostly a funding arm in terms of what happens here in Fremont. Similarly, our transportation Metropolitan Transportation planning organization is the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. Or mtc. They're also a funding arm. So when we're writing grant applications and figuring out how do we pay for all of this, Fremont's very good about leveraging different opportunities so that we pull money from different grant sources. So it's not just coming out of taxpayer dollars links for all of that. But in Fremont, you can look at the mobility action Plan, you can look at our active transportation plan, our trail plan, our general plan, our bike and PED plan. These are really good information sources, but also trip planning. So it's a long winded answer, but I'll, I'll end it this way. There are a couple of really good trip planning tools. When people say, what's the. What can I use? 51 1, which is available as an app or online, is run by mtc. It's a regional trip planning tool. If you want to know, hey, what's the travel time? How can I get to the hub in the most efficient way? Right now you can use 511. Org. You can call it on your phone and it's voice actuated. It'll tell you, hey, you want to know how to get to Santa Rosa? 511. Org will give you your options, whether it's transit, biking, driving, whatever it might be. So I use that one quite a bit and I find that very effective and also very reliable.

Mark, thank you very much for your understanding and sophistication and skill that you brought to this very complicated discussion in a way that I think people will understand and providing us the tools that we'll be able to understand the issue even better. I would encourage people to, to look at. We just had a meeting, I think last night for the Mobility Commission, but that's another opportunity. If you have concerns about traffic, show up at the quarterly meetings at the Mobility Action Plan Commission holds and get involved and engage. And again, I encourage people to have any questions to email us at fremontfocusnow@gmail.com. And thank you very much, Mark.

Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it.