Hi everyone, welcome to a presentation that is a rerecording of the webinar, the Why and How of Protected Bike Lanes. We had technical difficulties yesterday, July 13th, when this was recorded. So we are happy to bring this more cleaner version for you so that you can easily get through the material and make use of it. So thanks for listening in and watching our rerecording. My name is Linda Komushin, I'm with the California Bicycle Coalition, and we will get started today with our agenda. We have our Executive Director Dave Snyder, and he'll be going through CalBikes' role in promoting protected bike lanes. We are happy to have Brian Jones with us, he's with Ulta Planning, and he'll be going through his really informative presentation on separated bikeways. And we had a great amount of questions that were on the live webinar, so we'll be going through those and answering those, and so with that I introduce our ED, Dave Snyder. Thank you, Linda, for that introduction, and welcome everyone to this webinar. The California Bicycle Coalition's mission is to enable more people to ride bicycles for healthier, safer, and more prosperous communities for all. And by more people, we mean everybody, not just the athletic folks who are willing to get into lots of gear and ride really fast in traffic. We mean the average person who really needs some greater safety and protection from traffic. And so we strongly support protected bike lanes, and believe it or not, in California just a couple of years ago, the ability to put a bike lane separate from traffic with some kind of barrier was not permitted in California until we passed a bill creating a new class of bikeway called the Class 4 Separated Bikeway. And now everybody in California is able to install that facility. We're currently working to promote these things much more broadly. We're going to address the topic at our summit coming up in October in Sacramento. I hope you can make it. We are going to work with Caltrans to develop some guidelines to help people decide when protected bike lanes are the appropriate treatment. And we are helping with folks who need some advice on the process to get them approved and designed, which is the why. We have this webinar today. I'm very happy to be working with a coalition of organizations, the Rails to Trails Conservancy, the California Walks, and the Local Government Commission as part of the Active Transportation Resource Team. We are providing help to agencies across the state, especially disadvantaged communities, and helping them with all aspects of Active Transportation, including protected bike lanes. I'm really glad that we have Brian Jones here today to lead this webinar. Brian is one of the foremost experts on bikeway design, including how to get them approved in difficult environments. He has a ton of experience. He served as the Director of Public Works for the City of Fremont and as the Chief Traffic Engineer across the state in cities such as Carlsbad and Fresno. He is the absolute best person to be advising you, and I am very pleased to introduce Mr. Brian Jones. Thank you, Dave, for that nice introduction and for having me present today. We're really excited and ALTA has been helping many agencies throughout the nation implement separated bikeways. You might, and I'll just start off with, you're going to see a bunch of terms, and you've already heard a number of terms, separated bikeways, protected bike lanes, cycle tracks. They're all interchangeable. In California, the legal term for them that was adopted with the bill is separated bikeways, and that's a class four facility in the Highway Design Manual for the state of California. But if you're Googling throughout the nation, you might also look up cycle tracks or protected bike lanes or separated bike lanes. They're all interchangeable words and different jurisdictions call them different things. Just a heads up on that. I will begin with separated bikeways and these are bicycle infrastructures focused on all ages and abilities as Dave alluded to. Today we're going to go over some of the history and current status of separated bikeways and the latest design guidance from Caltrans, FHWA, MACTO, and some other manuals that might be useful for you as you're designing these. We're going to talk about building class four separate bikeways from a local agency perspective and also a lot of times people say, oh, they're so expensive, we can't do this. There's a lot of ways to do them with low cost solutions focused on implementation. I always say where there's a will, there's a way. Sometimes we just have to create the will because there's opportunities to make these happen in every city throughout the state of California. Going to FHWA, Federal Highway Administration, I love this picture right here. This is what we want to see on all our streets, a mother and her daughter enjoying our streets on their bicycles. This is the pinnacle of success when people can choose to ride their bikes and make the healthy choice the easy choice in our community. In 2010, FHWA came out with a design accommodations memo and there's a lot of words on this slide. Provides a link and you can go to that link and find out more information. Focusing in on a couple areas, go beyond the minimum requirements. Oftentimes the minimum width for a bike lane is five feet and that's the bare minimum. Maybe the preferred should be six feet with two foot buffers and your agency can take on those preferred desires and it could be something different for every roadway in your city. We're focused on increasing the use for bicycles pedestrians of all ages and abilities and this is really, really important as we move forward. It's no longer just building roadways for cars, it's about how do we accommodate all modes of users on our streets as they try to navigate our cities and communities and neighborhoods. 2013 design flexibility memo came out and this is really focused on allowing people to utilize their engineering licenses and become engineers and design things rather than just applying standards. I think this is a great opportunity for us to do a not one size fits all approach. Being a flexible approach and really guidelines rather than standards and in this design flexibility memo they said, but we want to support the use of NACTO and IT and other resources that are being able to be adopted even quicker than maybe FHWA can provide the resources or go to other states or look for guidance wherever it is and then document it and I think that's the important thing. FHWA documentation is important when you're making an engineering decision. Why did you do this? And then just put it down in the memo in the document so that if somebody's trying to figure out why you did this five or 10 years ago, it's really easy to find in the project folders. FHWA created the separated bike lane planning and design guide and it was released in May of 2015. It's the premier document in the nation for separated bike lanes or one of them I should say. It's released in May 2015 and so I often say there's been more evolution and progress in active transportation guidance in the last five and ten years than the previous five to eight decades combined and so and every year we're evolving and learning new things and trying new things and failure is not trying to implement separated bike lanes. So the design guidance for the separated bike way is encouraged the use of all appropriate design resources as well as continued experimentation and modification of designs in order to develop safe, comfortable, and predictable separated bike lane treatments. And I think that is an important part. When you're making your engineering decisions, elaborate on, we're trying this out because we believe it will enhance the safety, comfort, and predictability of the bike lane design, separated bike lane design. As we move forward, bicycle pedestrian projects including separated bike lanes are eligible for federal aid, highway, and transit program funding categories. This is super, super important right now. As we are looking at building more bus rapid transit and light rail and street cars, these need to be put into the project descriptions and purposes at the federal level so that your projects are eligible and can be implementing active transportation because after all a transit project is basically the customers are people that are walking and biking and so we need to make sure that the customers the first and last mile can get to those transit stops. But FHWA realized that there were a lot of decades of misconceptions about what their money could be used for and how they could use it and what you could do. And so, back on August 20th of 2015, they created this addressing common misconceptions and the irony was I printed this out and I went into a meeting with a DOT agency two days later and they told me all these misconceptions and then I passed this document across and they said oh we are going to have to change our policies because this is we adopted something at the state level that is incorrect with our understanding at the federal level and how we can use funds. So it was a really informative document that a lot of people didn't even know came out so going back and finding that document is a really important one and the link is right there on the page. And here is a lot of different funding opportunities right here, Tiger, FTA, CMAC, ASIP, you know, in California way of the ATP and it just talks about where the money can be used for different types of bicycle improvements including bicycle parking and racks on transit and bicycle share programs. But this clarifying document really focused on federal funds can be used to build protected bike lanes, separate bike lanes, cycle tracks, however you want to call them. Federal funds can be used for road diets. They are allowed to use design guides other than the Ash Tote Green Book, that is super important. And then highway funding can be used for bike and pedestrian infrastructure and vehicle lanes don't have to be a certain width to receive federal funds. That is super important and we're going to get into that a little bit more in this presentation because a lot of times people say oh they have to be 12 foot lanes. 12 foot lanes are what we use on freeways, they don't have to be used on our materials and collectors and our local streets. And it takes leadership and engineers to do things and utilize those Ash Tote design guidelines and use those engineering judgment capabilities. Curve extensions around about the trees can be used on streets and speed limits do not need to be set using the average 85th percentile vehicle speeds, however in California that is the law and so what you need to do is redesign your street so that the outcome is a slower speed and protected bike lanes are one way in which you can lower the speeds of the roadway which has a direct correlation with safety of your roadway. So we'll get into that a little bit more later. But FHWA also came out with road diets and road diets are one way to create space on the roadway by repurposing some of the travel lanes whether it's going from a conventional four lane roadway to a three lane roadway and adding bike lanes or separated bike lanes. That's one way to create space on the roadway. Another way and that's the link right there. Another way of creating space is just by repurposing the lane widths. Oftentimes we have 12, 13, 14, I've seen 20 foot, 24 foot travel lanes in some of our communities and they said we don't have room to put in separated bikeways and I'm like wow you have so much room on your roadways we can put in two separated bike lanes. So when we apply 12 foot travel lanes into our streets we get 55 mile an hour roadways and really our arterials can have 10 to 12, our collectors can have 10 to 12 foot travel lanes. Our local roadways can have 9 to 12 according to ASHTO and so going back to some of those documents and reviewing some of those documents rather than just taking what the standard was for a highway design manual but really looking at your local perspective and how do you build communities and streets that are relevant and profitable and economical and really allow people to be connected and thrive in your communities. And I think you'll find that narrower travel lanes are going to address a lot of those needs and we'll get into that a little bit more when we talk about Caltrans mission, new mission statement. But I think lane widths under uninterrupted flow conditions operating at low speed and narrower lane widths are normally adequate and have some advantages. Wow, that's amazing that ASHTO came out with that in 2011. And then 10 foot travel lanes, consideration is appropriate for interrupted flow, roads with signals operating at low speed 35 to 45 miles an hour.  Well, when you have a separated bicycle lane facility or a buffered bike lane or whatever, there's overhang for their mirrors and so you can accommodate them. But a lot of times we're building really wide travel lanes to accommodate a mirror for a bus that comes down that roadway five, ten times an hour. And what we're really doing is we're enhancing the speed for the other 98% of the roadway users and speed has a direct correlation with safety. And so while we might have to replace a mirror occasionally on buses or on cars, we're often seeing lawsuits for fatalities and severe injuries on roadways and the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars on our roadways. And so I think there's opportunities for us to look at our lawsuits and our concerns a little differently. So mixed results of 10 foot lanes over 45 miles an hour, that doesn't mean they can't be used over 45 miles an hour. You need to use a little bit more engineering judgment on that. And so as we transition from the federal level to the state level at Caltrans, the State of California Department of Transportation, they've been really making an incredible push to transition to all ages, all abilities, active transportation, and we'll get into more of that. But their mission statement says it all. Caltrans improves mobility across California with their old mission statement and their new mission statement says to provide a safe, sustainable, integrated, and efficient transportation system. And that's all focused to enhance California's economy and livability. We're asking transportation to improve California's economy and livability. So we need to start doing things a little differently than we've done before because that's not what we were asking transportation to do for the last five or eight decades, although some might argue that that was the case. So there was also some research and we'll get into the research a little bit more. And there was a blog created that says California's DOT admits more roads being more traffic. And so if you build it, they will come. It's called induced demand. And here's some freeways that show just how parking lots can be created when you design roadways and transportation facilities solely for the use of automobiles and you don't give people choices and options. And that information from the National Center of Sustainable Transportation Increasing Highway Capacity is unlikely to relieve traffic congestion. That was done by Susan Andy, a PhD professor at University of California, Davis, and she's done an incredible amount of research into vehicle miles traveled. And the irony is vehicle miles traveled is the new level of service analysis tool and we're supposed to be reducing the vehicle miles traveled. And so to reduce vehicle miles traveled, we need to figure out how to provide choices, options, and better design so that people can make these other choices, easy choices in their daily lives. And in 2014, Tim Cragg, at the time, was the Chief of the Division of Design and he said he came out with this document that after the SSTI report was done for Caltrans and it really says that a one-size-fits-all design philosophy is not the departmental policy. That is phenomenal. And it was brought out in its own paragraph right there in the document. And when people talk about design immunity, we just need to be documenting our engineering decisions. Going back to, is it safe? Is it comfortable? Is it inviting? Is it creating space? Are we balancing the needs of all users of the roadway rather than just the throughput of vehicles?  And so are we looking at our transportation improvements, whether it's a bridge railing replacement or a retrofit or an overlay project, are we looking at those as opportunities to implement complete streets? And I think that is where, and we'll get into that a little bit more in the presentation, a great way that we can be leveraging our resources and funds when it comes to transportation and changing our practices to align with the policies and directives. But we have some exciting news that's been happening at Caltrans with the California MUTCD and the traffic ops headquarters up in Sacramento has been working around the clock with their very small team but very mighty team led by Dupur to update the California MUTCD and we're meeting regularly. I serve on the California Traffic Control Devices Committee representing bicyclists and pedestrians statewide for the State of California Department of Transportation. And in March of 2016 they were talking about hybrid beacons experimenting with two-stage left turn cue boxes in Sacramento, modifying lane, shared lane markings, the bike boxes, more bike boxes. And in September of 2016 they went to Greenback Share, explored experimentation with Greenback Sharrows, and then Pasadena was looking at more bicycle boxes. And then Los Angeles DOT was looking at two-stage bike boxes. So there's been a number of progresses and if you go to this California Traffic Control Device Committee webpage you can read the whole agenda and it's very educational and informative about and the menace of these discussions of the 10-person panel. And back in 2011-12 Caltrans expanded the eight-person California Traffic Control Device Committee to have 10 people and two people, Mike Salivari from SFMTA and myself are there to represent active transportation. And that was a big change when we were asked to be active transportation representatives rather than non-motorized representatives. And so in 2017 we talked about accessible pedestrian signals and barrier posts and senior plaques. And these are all improvements being focused on the most vulnerable users of our roadway to enhance their design. But we have some exciting stuff coming up at the MUTCD and we're striping the space for bicycle use locations at right turn-only lanes and there's going to be some improvements in the signing and striping of that and then changes in the shared lane marking section to give better direction on where those sharers should be placed in the lane and their purpose. And then in November 2017 the California MUTCD is going to add some more updates on the class 4 bikeways. So I would definitely encourage you to come back to those web pages and follow up on that. But there's been a number of blanket approvals and a lot of people will ask, well can we do this or can we do this? And oftentimes if there's a blanket approval all you have to do is let Caltrans know you're doing it in your city and rectangular rapid flashing beacons were back in 2011 and those have been being put in communities throughout California and throughout the nation. And then we did the green-colored pavement for bike lanes and then the optional use of bicycle signal faces. And that's going to be important for protected intersection crossings and we're going to get into that a little bit more in this document. And then the optional use of the intersection bike boxes done in April of this year. And we're really excited because the two-stage bicycle turn boxes just from FHWA just came out July 7th of 2017 and Caltrans is quickly working to adopt it at the August 2017 California Traffic Control Devices Committee meeting. That will be used as a blanket approval in California so another way of helping people navigate their intersections in their communities. Caltrans also launched this Main Street California Guide to Improving Community and Transportation Vitality. Remember vitality and livability and economy are really important in their mission statement and so a lot of their state highways go through small and rural towns throughout California and they really wanted to give a guide to a toolbox of resources that local agencies can be using to improve their Main Streets. And this is an incredible document that's available online. And then based on the legislation that Cow Bike Health author, the design information bulletin 89 was released on December 30th of 2015 creating the new Class 4 separated bikeway guidelines for separated bikeway guidelines, also known as cycle tracks. And so that was a monumental feat. And shortly after that, Cow Bike created a brochure and you can go to this web link below here to download this brochure on Class 4 separated bikeways and they're approved for use in California. And that picture right there is a really incredible picture by Mike and Phillip, two incredible engineers at the City of Modesto that I get to work with a lot. That is the new Freeway 99 going over the old Highway 99 and they repurposed the old Highway 99 when it was relinquished to them through an overlay project and we're going to talk about this case study of how they did that project later on in this presentation. But that picture is a cost-effective solution of connecting a community and it shows new and old in various ways of our mindset and our mission in California. In that document though that Cow Bike released was what is a separated bikeway? And they can be one-way facilities, they can be two-way facilities, they can have some physical separation of concrete curves, landscaping, parking lanes, ballers and other vehicle elements. And Class 4s are distinctly different than Class 1 and Class 2 and you can go into the MUTCD and the Highway Design Manual and really understand the differences but we're going to try to cover some of those today. And in that document we also identified some concerns because there are a lot of misinformation out there being information being thrown out there that causes a little anxiety or fear or concern of trying something new and so will my city be liable for separated bikeways? And as long as you document your decisions and now that Caltrans has included it, the answer is no. So there's ways to reduce your liability. The separate bikeways violate California Highway Design Manual rules and the answer is no. Especially since Caltrans created design flexibility you need to just document your engineering decisions and we'll separate bikeways be more dangerous at intersections and driveways. And the answer is no. There's ways to address intersections and driveways and enhancers and one of those is protected intersections and protected crossings of intersections and we'll get into that a little bit later. And then there's signing and striping that can be used to enhance the awareness and we'll talk about those. And are separate bikeways more expensive? And the answer is not always. They can be. If you really want to give a Platinum solution you can design something to be very expensive. You can also do things very cost-effective and we'll get into some of the ways that you can do that. But back in 2016 these were some of the cities in California that were implementing separated bikeways already. And here we are almost a year later and there's two to three dozen more cities in California that are planning, designing, and implementing separated bikeways throughout California so it's a really exciting time for mobility in California. And to be an engineer and a planner and a landscape architect and the urban designer. So the latest design guidance. Here are a number of manuals that have been released in the last decade, maybe even in the last five years most of them have been released. So there's lots of guidance out there that if you went to college 20 years ago and haven't been going to continuing education there's a lot of information that has been evolving that you can use at your fingertips and a lot of this stuff is available to download online or you can purchase for a nominal fee. So these are just some of the covers of some of the books that have come out. But for separated bikeways the FHWA guide, that's what the Design Information Bulletin 89 for Caltrans really points back to. It is a very thorough document. The Urban Bikeway Design Guide from NACTO is another great document to talk about separated bikeways. And then here at Ulta we created a white paper to enhance the profession on the awareness of protected intersections. And there are five such protected intersections or at the time of this offering in North America and or in the United States I believe. And so you can just type in Evolution of Protected Intersection in your Google search and it will come up with this white paper. And it really talks about the nuances of separated or protected intersections and that's really to help you with the crossings and how to handle the approaches that intersection. So I definitely encourage you to go check that document out. And then here recently FHWA just came out with the Small Town and Rural Multimodal Networks and this was in response to a lot of local agencies throughout America. And when we saw say Small Town and Rural Design that's cities in town, 250,000 people are less, right? That's 95%, 98% of America's cities reflect this. They were seeing the tall buildings of NACTO and saying we can't do that infrastructure and so really this manual is really focused on the Small Town and Rural Designs. The two or three story, the one story streets and showing how a rural context or in a suburban context, some of the principles can be applied in FHWA releases which is a great document and just came out in 2017 so it's hot off the press. But when you're doing design for separated bikeways it's really important to be informed of all the design guidelines and have a cyclical informed process. And if you're starting with FHWA using their guideline and then the manual and Uniform Traffic Control Devices and then the Urban Bikeway Design Guide and all those other manuals and really looking for the context. So you have context sensitive design for the needs and values of your street and your community in which you're trying to design.  There's a lot of permutations on how you can design needs in your communities. But it really comes down to who are we designing our roadways for? Are we designing it for the super athletic, the top 1% or 2% of people using our roadways or want to be using our roadways on bicycles? Or are we designing it so that maybe a young lady in her dress and everyday clothes wants to ride her bike because there's not parking available in downtown or it's easier to ride a bike or it's healthier to ride a bike or she just wants to get out and experience her community. One way, I have a friend, Howard Blackson that said biking kills apathy, right? If you have a lot of people in your community that are apathetic, build bicycle infrastructures. Get them connected with your community and get them connected with each other and businesses and really create the connected community. But are we really being relevant to our public? And ITE came out with this article, Creating Great Communities Through Transportation, a perspective on becoming more relevant to the public. And biking is one of those ways and separate bikeways are one of those ways to build great communities through transportation rather than transportation through communities which we've been doing largely since post-World War II. So trying to cure traffic congestion with more capacities like trying to cure obesity by loosening your belt and trust me, I've tried to loosen my belt a number of times and really you have to change your lifestyle, you have to change your practices and you have to change your food intake and you have to change what you're doing and I think that's another message is we really need to change our design and how we're building options and choices in our community so that people have an opportunity to do something other than drive in their car. And it doesn't take that many people doing that to reduce congestion and to change congestion. So we've seen a number of buffered bike lanes and this would be a Class II buffered bike lane and you can see them on the door side to protect a bicyclist from being doored or on the left side you can see the buffer between the travel lane and the bike lane and those are buffered bike lanes and we call those Class II facilities and here's some of the dimensions and what you can be doing but really those buffers for bike lanes really help with the new 3-foot passing law in California. So without a buffer, here is the distance between the bicyclist and a vehicle and as you reduce the lane width of the travel lane and you create a buffer, you can now create 3.8 feet which is in excess of the separated 3-foot passing law and if you put a little bit bigger buffer, you even have more shy distance between you and the most vulnerable users of the roadway and this really has a great impact on people's willingness and being welcome and invited to the roadway so that they're not right next to a very large vehicle and it helps slow down some of those larger vehicles so that they're more part of your community rather than driving through your community and here are some examples of a left side buffer changing to a door side buffer for a bike lane in Carlsbad that I helped design. And then in San Diego, they took out an entire travel lane and changed it to a left side and a right side buffer and look at the space that that bike rider has to ride up that street and buffered bike lanes are often to the left of a parked vehicle and if we just switch the bike lane and the parking, we created a separated bikeway and the irony is back in 1968, I believe it was, Davis was experimenting between this and this and they ultimately chose putting the bike lane out next to traffic and here we are 40 or 50 years later and we're bringing back the separated bikeways and we've seen how a lot of success and they've been implemented in many cities throughout the United States with lots of great success and lots of great mode splits and rideshare, especially as you create a network of them. So building class for separated bikeways. As I said earlier, also known as cycle tracks, protected bike lanes, separated bike lanes, you can Google all of those and you can get a lot of great information out there but a lot of times we say, well, where should separate bike lanes go and really places with many bicycles or where you want to attract bicycles to and anywhere you want to reduce the stress level of bicycling, downtowns are great locations, multi-lane streets, streets with double parking or loading, streets with high parking turnover. Those are all great locations for separated bikeways. Really any street can be a great location and we'll get into that a little bit more about what kind of streets should these be going on. Here's some of the different materials that you'll see separated bikeways. It could be painted, it could be concrete, it could be parking wheel stops, it could be vertical delineators, it could be planters and just anything creating separation between the moving car and the bike riders. Those are both one way in both directions, so one way on both sides of the roadway and then you can create them separated horizontally but you can also separate them vertically and raise them up to the sidewalk level or you can create a vertical barrier of concrete. I will say that sometimes pinned down concrete curbs in these situations are a lot more cost-effective than tearing up the roadway and impacting the structure of the roadway underneath to put in these curb barriers. Just pinned down concrete curbs are really easy to do and I'll show you an example of where we created slots in them so that drainage can go through them and get back to the other gutter that has always been collecting the storm water so you don't have to have a secondary storm water treatment. Here are some of the dimensions and you'll see the word minimum but really as we go back to FHWA and Caltrans we should be going beyond the minimum and we should be looking for preferred widths and we should be looking for preferred dimensions and where we can get those preferred dimensions that's what we should be striving for. Here's one of those intersection crossings in Denver, Colorado and you can see they just use let me go back to green paint and they created a bike lane crossing on the side of the crosswalk or pedestrians. Here is one in Minneapolis and this was before Bollard's you can see the parked vehicles encroaching into the separated bikeway and then they added the vertical delineators and all of a sudden the cars stayed out really nicely and the raised cycle track in Missoula, Montana is a sidewalk level separated bikeway. And then two-way protected bike lanes are another great way and that 8 to 12 is just a minimum dimensions. We're in the process of designing one for Sandag down here in San Diego on Pershing Bikeway that I believe will be about 14 feet in width. So intersection control is important and we'll get into that a little bit but three foot buffers so the car doors can open and here's an example of implementation and that picture that we were talking with is exactly what we're showing in those graphics and this is the result of implementation people using separated bikeway facilities and that's what we're striving for. Two-way concerns, you'll see here that a lot of times a car will be parked there site visibility issues and whatnot so there are some ways with curb extensions like bowl valves, tighter curb return radius signing and striping and bringing sight lines in for all users that you can enhance those crossings so we'll get into a little bit about that but then the guidance of bicycle facilities and you can see there's a bunch of tools to move people on bicycles throughout the community you can have bicycle boulevards in neighborhoods you go from class 3 to class 2 to buffered class 2 bike lanes to class 4 cycle tracks to class 1 pathways and where do they make sense based on daily traffic volume speeds of the roadway, is it collector is it arterial, separation minimum, maximum there's all sorts of information here that you can glean from this slide and we created this as some information for some of our clients but low cost solutions and I think this is where we can make a lot of progress really quickly in California we don't always have to make the platinum solution we can implement this and then we can come back and it can evolve over time so we can put it in quickly with paint and vertical delineators and then we can come back to beautify it or enhance the streetscape and so I use this saying a lot low speed kills when it comes to delivering projects to improve safety so we need to be identifying ways to deliver cost effective projects faster to align with community values and needs. We don't need to be always identifying a hundred million dollar solution or a billion dollar solution and it takes 10 to 20 years to get that project from concept to construction. We need to be looking for how do we get something from concept to construction in six months, six weeks, a year and how do we move a little bit faster to address some of our safety challenges in our community especially as communities are focusing on vision zero and vision zero is reducing or eliminating fatalities in our communities so one way to do that is to resurface and repurpose and back in 2010 the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had a lot of money that a lot of communities used and when I was a city traffic engineer and president we did about 30 miles of new bike lanes and 15 of them through road diets where we just removed a traveling and created space for bike lanes on streets but we did that as part of our routine maintenance and that's mixture of money through ARA and identified five mile stretches of roadways that connected people by schools and shopping centers and on collector roadways and we made a lot of improvements in our bicycle network especially in areas that were socially and equitably challenged with bicycle infrastructure but as you resurface a project in a roadway I say it's like giving an engineer a blank canvas or an artist a blank canvas and then we can use the Etch-a-Sketch to create our new solution and so as soon as you put the roadway the new asphalt down what was there is gone and so what would you do now since you have a new roadway and we've seen communities like Fremont for three years they adopted a 10 foot traveling policy and they've been using that extra space they've been created to do buffered bike lanes throughout their community and they have now 15 miles of buffer bike lanes just in three years by through their routine overlay projects City of Carlsbad has also done that but it's really cost effective to do it while you're resurfacing a project it's on the order to magnitude half the cost of implementing it with just striping when you're overlaying it or slowly stealing a roadway and I think we need to be opportunistic you know a lot of our aging infrastructure like sewer and water are going to be tearing up our roadways to replace infrastructure and those are great opportunities to use utility maintenance dollars to put a new overlay on your roadway and to allow new striping for separated bikeways or buffered bike lanes that never might be in your community however you can get more space for people to ride their bikes in your community. Here is an example that we did in Carlsbad this is across the Buena Vista Lagoon and it was connecting the City of Oceanside and the City of Carlsbad across the Lagoon and it was a three lane roadway that was built back in the 60s much to the highway design standards of the era and you can see two northbound lanes those are fog lines those aren't even bike lanes but sometimes you have 3,000 bike riders going across this roadway and a lot of pedestrians and there's no space for either of them in the top picture and so we just used the same edge of payment to edge of payment and we did one lane in each direction for traveling bike lanes in both directions, class 2 bike lanes and then we really created a class 4 facility to the right over there and you can see those are just some concrete curbs there where we doweled into the existing asphalt and then formed up the concrete curbs and those slots that are 12 to 18 inches wide allow the storm water when that roadway might flood on a high tide or on a storm in the lagoon to just flow across the river and back across the roadway like it always has rather than creating a whole new storm drain facility and making a roadway maintenance or a bike lane project into a storm drain project and so this is a great example of a community really figuring out a cost effective solution to mobility challenges between two communities but I often say can we really afford level of service and level of service practices creates sustainable economically, environmentally and health wise and we'll get in a little bit about that but the roadway on the left is the main roadway that's moving 9,000 cars at 30 miles an hour the roadway on the right is also moving 9,000 cars at 55 miles an hour we know speed has a direct correlation with safety but one has more space and is more inviting has less exposure to the vulnerable users and the other one has a lot of exposure and so a lot of times the one on the right was created by a travel demand model and projections out 20 or 30 years that never came to fruition and so it'll never move more than 9,000, 12,000 cars and yet it's a five lane roadway and that agency has to maintain 40% more asphalt than they would if they would have just built a three lane roadway or a two lane roadway to move those 9,000 cars so can we really afford level of service it causes extra asphalt to maintain barriers for pedestrians to cross faster speeds which require more enforcement and our law enforcement are already taxed to the max faster speeds, higher severity of injury when collisions occur so we're trying to achieve vision zero but we're building really high fast roadways and then it's also a poor utilization of our infrastructure over the last four or five decades we've seen transportation and roadways go from 20% to 40%, 50% of our land in our communities which is non-taxable but it also results in higher development impact and I'll say the disclaimer it often disconnects people and communities from their potential and I think that is a really important part when we look at enhancing economy and livability and vitality in our communities. So level of service these are the same roadways just different times of the day and to address versus a driver but how do we make these roadways better for people and how do we address congestion if we don't have bicycle lanes, if we don't have separated facilities, if we don't give people choices and options to their vehicle they're always going to be in this picture on the right if you were riding a bicycle you could get through that corridor a heck of a lot faster than even at 5 or 10 miles per hour than all those cars that are stopped in congestion it gives people say you know what I don't want to be in congestion I want to go get my exercise rather than driving home and then going to the gym I might just ride my bike home and get a little exercise and raise my heartbeat and become a more active healthy lifestyle in my community. Here was one sidewalk level separated bikeway facility and it was back in the Massachusetts area in Boston or Cambridge but it was a utility project that reconstructed this roadway and instead of putting the roadway and sidewalk back identical they just put in new, they extended it out and put it in a separated bikeway facility and here's how they handled the crossing, they did tighter curb return radii, they delineated space for a bicyclist across the roadway you know a lot of times you'll see that you'll do a ramps or an elevated crosswalk or something like that to allow the motorists to realize they're yielding to somebody else when they're turning into those roadways and so there's a lot of different design treatments that you can do, you can see the sign that says turning vehicle yield to bicyclists and pedestrians up there right behind that pole. Down here in San Diego, Sandac has their regional early action bike program and one of their projects is an emerging bikeway which connects North Park to downtown San Diego and it goes through Balboa Park and this is the old State Route 173 which was going to be a highway or a freeway through San Diego and it never got built and so this roadway is going through one of the top five urban parks in the nation Balboa Park and it has really minimal lanes and the speeds out there are 50 to 60 miles an hour and there's a lot of collisions and crashes and it's just not a roadway that's designed for a park and so we said well what if we put in a separated bikeway facility and we changed it to a one lane in each direction which the traffic volume will allow and we can repurpose the lane and then we designed it for more of a 30 to 35 mile an hour range for the vehicles and we create a 14 foot wide two-way separated bike lane we had sidewalks and we had a decomposed granite so it's more trail like and then we took a picture and we looked at it what would it be from a user perspective on a bicycle going up here and is this a pleasant experience, is this inviting and we're excited about that project and this project up here in the left corner is one of the crossings at Florida Pershing and 26th Street and you can see instead of just doing an entire protected intersection we're just doing a protected crossing of one approach or leg of the intersection on 26th Street the one on the bottom right is one of the first separated or protected intersections in the United States in Salt Lake City and then again the evolution of the protected intersection white paper is up there if you'd like to learn more about protected intersections and if you have questions feel free to reach out to me about them in San Francisco they just installed this protected intersection and you can see some different color paint and raised medians and whatnot and creating bikeway crossings and sidewalk crossings and a lot of times people say well we don't have space for a protected intersection and sometimes you may or you may not but I think this is an opportunity to say why didn't we put in this right turn lane so that the throughput of the travel lane could be faster well what if we said that right turn lane is more valuable to move people so let's create a protected crossing and here's an example of changing that roadway and then you add trees and you add redevelopment and enhancing the livability and economy of this community and here is another two ways that the cycle track and the striping that was used for there and I think it depends on every roadway and every intersection and every crossing how you want to handle this this also has a bike face to the signal and you can do that in California as well so I think understanding what your opportunities and challenges are and the context in which you're designing and how what makes the most sense to get people across the roadway in Modesto they were focused on connecting two campuses they have two junior college campuses they have the east campus and the west campus and they're about two miles apart which is about a 10 to 20 minute bike ride for most able bodied people on their bicycle and so as resurfacing this two mile corridor they said well why don't we put in a separate bikeway and this is Michael and Philip in the city of Modesto and if you're ever in the central valley in Modesto look up Michael and Philip they're doing amazing things in the city of Modesto and really enhancing the safety and mobility and connectivity of people riding bicycles and active transportation in their communities but going over the over crossing they put in a concrete barrier and I believe it was just a pin down barrier but you can see when there was no one coming in the opposite direction people were riding side by side and if somebody was coming in the opposite direction they would just move over and it's been great to observe how well these have been working and here's the old state route 99 corridor in which they took one travel lane away and they put in wheel stops and then they put in 20 years and created the space and you can see there's a student with his backpack going to campus and here is that famous picture with the new freeway going over the old highway and how transportation has evolved over the years in the central valley and in the state of California from focusing on building freeways and highways to now building separated bike lanes and this is an incredible picture that shows the contrast of all of it and then they created a brochure campus connection and highlighted what to use and how to use it and then showed on a map and it's that blue line right there in the middle connecting the west campus and the east campus and that's available on their web page but I really want us to get back to focusing on what are we trying to do? We're trying to connect people and this is a mother and her two daughters that rode their bikes to a downtown setting to a business for frozen yogurt to spend quality mother-daughter time and spend money in the community and so we're really connecting people with businesses and destinations and that's how we enhance economy and livability in our communities and with that I'll open it up to questions. Thank you Brian. Excellent presentation I'm sure that we have a lot of questions. A lot of questions are sorry go ahead. Go right ahead. Well no I mean I have divided the questions into various categories. There are design guidance questions that you might be reluctant to be too specific about. Let me lump them all into one and ask you for your advice on what people can do to get specific answers. People are especially curious about how to deal with two-way cycle ways at intersections because it's more difficult to deal with them at intersections than it is one-way cycle tracks at intersections. People are That's a great question. Go ahead. And I think it really depends on the context and the space on the roadway that you can create. You can create a two-way cycle track with less space and with two one-way cycle tracks. And sometimes it doesn't make sense to have two one-way cycle tracks because everybody is wanting to be on one side of the roadway. So if you have a lot of people that are what we call salmon bike riders that are riding upstream or the wrong way on one side of the roadway. Oftentimes it's because they don't want to cross over to the roadway on the other side to go up three or four blocks and sometimes when all the land uses that they're desiring to go to are on one side of the roadway it just makes sense to put the two-way cycle track on that side and allow them to be connected where the land uses and where they want to be. And so I think that's where the desire path and having an understanding of the user and the user's experience that you're trying to create. So I'm not sure that it's necessarily just what you're trying to achieve. But there are... That's why you would put a cycle track on one side but when you get to the intersection motorists are not necessarily expecting to see a bicycle coming from the opposite direction. Where can people go to find design treatments that can mitigate that danger? Well, that white paper on the protected intersection crossing that Alta Planning and Design authored is a good location and then for protected intersection crossings and then looking at the signing and striping that's available in the California MUTCD and the Highway Design Manual and then the FHWA guidance on separated bikeways there's a lot of information in there on how to enhance and sometimes it's varying degrees of treatments. It could be arrays across it could be green paint, it could be tighter curb return radii, it could be a number of different treatments to enhance the awareness of drivers anticipating somebody riding in a direction that they're not expecting them to ride in. But what I will say is these things are already occurring in our communities. People are riding the wrong ways on sidewalks because they're not riding in the streets next to cars. So part of it is education and part of it is just designing it in such a way so that there's an awareness of something unique or different at that intersection. With slow speeds as a key point. Quickly developing. Quick design solutions to slow down or I should say fast design solutions to slow down traffic. People ask about the variety of vertical separation and delineators that you can use. Where can they go for information about what kind of separator is appropriate for which kind of street especially with regard to speed. Well, you know there's information that you can go to in the FHWA guidance and as more and more documents and manuals are being updated like the Massachusetts guideline that's another available tool. But I think as these questions come up we're going to have more and more guidance to them and as we build more of these separated bikeways we're going to have a greater understanding and awareness of where are those thresholds and can we quickly implement something with paint and vertical delineators and then work towards doing something long term that is more structurally separated. But I think the key thing to remember is we didn't build curbs and gutters for sidewalks to keep cars off the sidewalks. We built them for storm drain. We designed our roadways. Sometimes we say we need to have 6 inches or 8 inches to keep the car out of the separated bikeway and that isn't always the case. I think you can use parking protected. You can do a number of different solutions but changing the characteristics of the roadway and also the speeds of the roadway are through the physical design of the roadway as you're implementing the separated bikeway. Just like that example we did for Sandag taking the roadway from 55 to 60 miles an hour and designing for something in the 30 mile per hour range. Brian, I have one more design question and then maybe four more questions about policy and politics. The last design question is opinion on the difference between a cycle track at the curb level on the sidewalk versus a cycle track at street level. Well, the cycle track at the street level can be a lot more cost effective because you're not moving curb and gutter at sidewalk and the like. It really depends on your available funds and what you're trying to achieve. The vertical separation is great and we've seen vertical separation that is half the height of the sidewalk and then we've seen it at the same height of the sidewalk and so there's a lot of great ways to do all of that. I think again it goes back to the context of what you're trying to achieve in the city and what you're trying to work. I don't think there's a one size fits all answer to should you do street level separated cycle tracks versus raised cycle tracks. Got it. So now I have a clarification question that points to policy and politics and I'll answer that one myself before asking you about cycle tracks. The clarification question is cycle track, separated bikeway, class 4 protected bike lanes why and where do you use those different terms why does it matter? So I'll start by saying that all of those terms refer to the exact same thing it is a bikeway separated from motor vehicle traffic by some kind of physical separator which is the definition in the California law and for public consumption it doesn't much matter what you use the surveys have shown that the easiest thing for people to understand is to call them protected bike lanes so you will hear us and many refer to them as protected bike lanes on a regular basis because that's what they look like and what the public understands but legally we don't call them bike lanes because by law when you're on a bicycle you have to use the bike lane if it is present and we don't want that requirement to apply to roads with class 4 separated bikeways because some people don't want to use the separated bikeway and there are many good reasons why you might want to use the main roadway so legally they're not bike lanes they're separated bikeways the term cycle track refers the exact same thing it's what they call them in Europe so you hear a lot of people referring to them as cycle tracks I hope that helps clear things I don't think it matters much except that legally they're not bike lanes so that you don't have to use them when you're on a bike if you don't want now to move to political question Brian how did the communities that you work with how did they react to the development of changes especially when it involved the removal of travel lanes well you know we've worked with a number of communities through pilot projects and demonstrations projects and full on concept of construction documents and you know it and I can remember in Fresno I had a lady call me up when I was the city traffic engineer and said you're creating all sorts of congestion on this roadway by putting in these bike lanes when we did a road diet and I said you know she was like the 14th caller that had called it congestion and so I went out there and we drove it in the AM peak hour we rode our bikes in the PM peak hour we were out there for a number of days looking at it and we never saw congestion and we saw people driving slower but we didn't see them because on a four lane you could pass and whatnot and so another person called me up and said it's congestion out there and I'm like can you describe what congestion is I'm not able to drive as fast as I want to and having known that our traffic enforcement would did a lot of enforcement out there I said have you got any citations out there and they're like yeah three in the last 18 months and I'm like that's kind of expensive to be driving as fast as you want to be and the person said yeah yeah yeah and I said well you know what we're trying to design this roadway for the safe and prudent driver to be leading the way because we know there's a direct correlation between safety or speed and safety on our roadways and by creating space for bicycles we're also giving people the choices and options to avoid the congestion and ride their bikes and so I think part of it is education and awareness and changing the story and the language that we're using to talk with people and really understanding where are they coming from you know we had one community where they were a 15,000 person community and they were used to zipping around in their community and they grew to a 50,000 person community and we took away one lane and they said oh my gosh it took me 20 cycles it took me 20 minutes to get through this intersection and I said well with all due respect how many red lights did you wait at and they said one and I said well that's interesting because one red light is about two minutes at that intersection and I said I'm not saying you're exaggerating what you're telling me is your level of tolerance for congestion it is very low and so I think it's about balancing safety and changing the language and conversation so that a culture and a community can be realized and providing choices and options in a healthier community and understanding those benefits and it's a lot easier to maintain roadways that bikes are riding on than trucks and buses and so reducing the amount of asphalt that is being wear and tear of vehicles is a good thing for communities Well I have a maintenance question but first I'll address a couple of issues that people ask that can help them convince their policy makers and their neighbors about the the potential positive impact of these somebody asked about safety statistics and somebody asked about the projections about an increase in the number of bicyclists where can they get information on that I would recommend peopleforbikes.org they have a statistics page on their website that has all of the latest and greatest information and it is the best place for data about American facilities and American impact on the issue of maintenance Brian, what do you do about maintaining bikeways? Yes, street is cheaper to maintain if you don't have heavy vehicles running over as much of it but you still have a separated bikeway that has special maintenance requirements what do communities do to deal with that? I think there are two different philosophies to it one is you can size your streets so that your maintenance vehicles can be as efficient as possible or you can size your streets so that your community can be as economically vibrant as possible and then buy equipment that can be used for that and I think a lot of times we're seeing cities with separated bikeways saying our street sweepers 10 feet wide or 8 feet wide so we can get our street sweeper back there and we're also seeing other cities that are maintenance crews that are going out and purchasing a CJ7 Jeep and attaching a street sweeper onto it and sweeping the separated bikeways situation where they get to once a week do the separated bikeways in their communities and so I think it takes leadership, it takes understanding what the challenges are and it really takes not designing your community to how you've always done things in the past but really understanding what are their challenges and we buy really big street sweepers and we don't have to make as many trips to the dump but if we can buy one smaller street sweeper that can do the street sweeping on the separate bikeways it can be a lot better or some agencies are even contracting that out to a special vendor that can have all the equipment so that the agency doesn't have to have multiple different vehicles they can just contract the street sweeping out on the separate bikeways to a contractor that goes out there just like a shopping center swept by a street sweeper vacuumed by a sweep cleaner they're doing that so we're seeing lots of different ways that agencies are addressing cleaning separated bike lanes. Got it. One more operational question and then I think we're done. Okay. Shoulders are often used for vehicles that are broken down and delivery trucks etc. How do we get around this issue with protected lanes? Can we still use protected lanes where there's a high amount of shoulder use? Well you know it's funny you know on many of our highways and freeways we have 8 to 10 feet dedicated to disabled vehicles on the roadway and a lot of our urban areas now have these 511 or all these different services where a tow truck can get there really quickly and a lot of the metropolitan planning organizations have tow services on the freeways that are patrolling the freeways during their peak hours but I think the same thing can be done in our local communities and do we so if a separated bikeway is used for an emergency situation for a little bit is that the end of the world if it's used for the other 364 days you know that's a policy decision that an agency has to make I think that there's ways that we can be addressing these if the lane breaks down you know is at the end of the world I was on my way home and there was a fire on the freeway and they shut down the entire freeway because of the fire so that the emergency personnel could put the fire out so you know while there was a shoulder there and 5 travel lanes on the freeway we couldn't use any of them and so you know things happen and I think we need to be designing for what we want rather than... I might add that in a situation where you have a lot of shoulder use and I think the question would apply to regular class 2 bike lanes as well when that bike lane or shoulder which is used by people on bikes is commonly blocked you are imposing a hazard and a safety hazard on the group of people you're especially trying to encourage by creating a separated protected bike lane that's not usable for broken down vehicles most people are going to find their way off of their roadway and those who can't are going to be imposing on one of the traffic lanes and not on the bike facility that you're trying to protect in the first place so... another reason why it's good to have a protected lane I bet your people have more questions Brian that we didn't hear in this webinar so I want to encourage folks to go ahead and send them to me and I will ask for your expertise Brian if I can't deal with them myself my email address is www.bike.org and with that I want to thank Brian for your expertise thank you Linda for running this behind the scenes and thank you everybody for listening in


I'm Subish. I'm a finally a computer science and engineering student at National Institute of Technology Varendra. So and I was a Google summer of code student with Fawcetia working on the project low-clack. So what is low-clack? So low-clack is a back-and-search-and-storage infrastructure that is actually out there. It's a peer-to-peer based scraper. So it scrapes Twitter. It stores all the messages that are being posted on Twitter. As of now we store one out of every 200 messages with the servers that we have and we can basically to use low-clack it's public and you don't need to have authentication like how Twitter needs an authentication for you to start using their API. The low-clack API is public so you have complete open data with you. You can use it for a lot of purposes. So as of today I would be speaking on what all different things you could do with low-clack API. Some user-centric applications that you can build. It could be visualizations. It could be research purposes. It could be some search portals that you want. So let's dive into them. So the first thing is you can use low-clack to store any open social network or micro messaging information. So it could be Twitter. It could be the Chinese Twitter alike the Vibo or any other micro messages. And there is sentiment analysis as of now which is running a live by a same classifier on the low-clack server. So every tweet has some amount of sentiment that is recognized either as joy or fear. You can use it. You can make it better. So since all of this data it's coming at massive scale. There's a lot of volume of data that is out there. The speed of the data, the velocity with which it's coming is really really high. It classifies under big data. So what can we do with so much data? Can we make some sense out of it? This is the main question. And if we want to make sense out of it what are the different ways in which we can do it? So one obvious way is to have visualizations. So visualizations can help give people a better understanding of what is happening out there. And there's something they can closely relate to. Something that they don't need to look at a log sheet or a JSON file for. So there are lots of people that are currently using big data platforms like Uber or our Facebook. So how they can leverage low click is one of the main questions. So what is the technology stack that's running? It's running a Java Jetty server. It has elastic search, one node integrated into it. It has lots of shell and its front end is written in JavaScript. And we also have lots of APIs that are written around. So we have a Ruby API. You can directly install the gem. We have a Python API. You can directly get it from pip supports Python 2 and Python 3. At the same time we also have a node JS API. You can use it for building lots of applications around there. So the easiest way to actually get started with low click is fork the low click repo, the low click server, clone it and run Ant. So Ant is the build tool that we use. We also support Gradle. But it's preferred. It's easier to do it using Ant. So you can run Ant and then you run the start shell file. So I can just show this to you. So this is the low click repo. You can pull the changes. So once you clone it, you can set up stream. You can do it. So the easiest way to compile it or build it is by using Ant.  It builds the complete repo. So it took four seconds. And you start the server, then slash start.sh. So it automatically opens up the browser with low click that's running on it. So yes, here we go. So it keeps storing messages from Twitter. You can actually make a search query from right from here. And it gives you a JSON response for this. So you can use this JSON response for doing a lot of tasks. So one of the tasks that I'll be showing you, a few of them that I'll be going through in this workshop is building one of the visualizations and one of the tools that we built around it called lowclick.net and support for apps. So apps is something that we support. And you can use the API. You can build lots of apps around them which can directly be plugged in into lowclick.org. So we have, for example, this is a heat map. So you just search for the tweet that you want. So let's say we're searching for Singapore today. Plug the tweet. It's taking some time. So there you see, you know where there are lots of people tweeting from. This is only from the data that we have. There is a lot of data that is still out there which we can still collect. And having a peer-to-peer infrastructure, it basically helps us out in ensuring that... So if you're polling Twitter and if you're trying to collect all the tweets, there is a point of time when they would actually block you out. Having a peer-to-peer infrastructure kind of beats that. And since there is obviously no OAuth token or something that is needed, the API is completely anonymous. There is no IP address that is being tracked in the API. So you can use the API for your own purposes. So let's just head back. So I think this number is old, but we have more than 700 million tweets that are on the localite.org web server. And you can speed it up if you want to contribute to it. You can post your own server and keep localite.org as your backing and contribute peer-to-peer data to the server. So what can you build with this? So we've spoken about what the server is, what the server is, how it works, what is the kind of response that you get, what is the data that we have. So what can you build an enhanced Twitter client? So we know that Twitter does not allow us to upload maps. So it doesn't allow us to tweet a map. So using localite.net, which is... So this is localite.net. It looks like Twitter. It feels like Twitter. Except that you can do a little more things than Twitter. So first thing you can do is you can get your location. So I'm at Singapore Science Centre. You can drop a marker and I can post a tweet. So it converts this into an image and it posts the tweet onto Twitter for your other followers so that they can actually see where you are. So it's basically one of the additional features, the plugin that you can actually generate. Since Twitter doesn't have that functionality and if you need that functionality, you can build that by yourself. So this is one of the things that you can do with localite. Other than this, you can also have a messenger bot. So I can go through that. So this is my telegram. I can start off with slash start. So ideally that's how it should start off. So the server has replied to us and you can actually search for something. So let's say we search for Fawcetia. It's going to give us one of the tweets telling us one of the most. Okay, so this has Fawcetia photo taking fun. So this is probably one of the most retweeted picture that's out there. So it gives us the image back.  So this is one of the very simple use cases that you can do with this. So another thing that we can do is we can use Twitter. So you can use lowclack.org to do all your data and data, you know, collecting the data, mining it, running the algorithm that you want to run on it. And you can interact back with Twitter using the official Twitter API. So we don't support posting to Twitter from lowclack, but you can use the Twitter API or your particular bot and you can reply to it using that. One of the things where this could be really used is in customer service. So there was one of the applications from Mozilla called Army of Awesome. So how many of you know that? So they used to do service support for Firefox. So the Firefox support used to happen using that. Similarly, you can use this for passive governance. That is what we've used it for. So in a product that we built with IEEE called Gear Systems for Government Resources, we gave the government data, public data from lowclack.org for people posting in that particular country in that particular city and the complaints that they're facing. So if someone is facing a complaint of broken road or the manhole which is not covered or any problem like that, most people don't want to go to a government office and really do it because they don't really like governments a lot. So they prefer ranting about it on social media, Twitter being one of their favorites. We can collect all of this information and use it for doing something really, really productive. So that is where lowclack keeps pulling the data. It analyzes it and you can have a bot which replies back to it in case there is less information. So in case, for an example, if I post a tweet telling that there is an open manhole in this particular address, it misses out the picture as a proof. So it also needs a picture as a proof that there is an open manhole there. So it's going to tweet back to the user telling, can you please provide me an image? So once you provide an image to it, you can reply back to it and the lowclack can pull it back and you can check. Okay, so probably we can do something about this. So this is just one of the other use cases that we have. So the web client, so this is the so this is the lowclack.net. It was the Google Summer of Code project. So other than just giving you something like Twitter, it also has a map feature integrated in it where you can see your followers, where you can see the people who are also following you. And you can post a tweet to Twitter, obviously using your Twitter login. And at the same time, you also have reports which can be generated for different users. So this is mine. We can probably go to find Harish. So it analyzes the data, it generates the charts for you. There are lots of plugins that you can make by lots of plugins that you can add to this. So this is because the internet speed and the client is passing it slow, there's actually no problem with the server as such. You can also add data sources from your IoT components directly into it. So if you want to add information of all the routers that are around Singapore, you want to find out where they are, you can actually add data from all of them into local app. And the geo coordinates from there can be utilized on an OpenStreetMap directly because it's just data. You have data the way you need it. You can use it for whatever you really want to build. Maybe we'll get back to that. So let us just try going through building one of the simple bots that is there. Here is a sample file that we will be using. Let us call it a tweet.py. We're importing JSON, the requests library, the OAuth libraries, and we're importing a file called Twitter constants. So Twitter constants basically has the API key, the API secret, the access token and the access token secret. So to get this information, you go on to Twitter, you create an app on Twitter, and you can put your API keys and consumer keys over here. So what this function does is it sends a request to Twitter from your ID or from the ID that's logged in or the bot, and it posts a particular message by the particular user. So in this scenario it's going to be the bot. That is why we have the strings of the tokens and the secrets present inside the file. It's not dynamic. It's not based on a session token. It appends the message to the URL and it does a post request so that you can post something. At the same time, this is how the polling system really works. It's an integrated app within Django. So what we can do is, so let's start off from here. So this is a dictionary telling the different types of governmental problems, the different types of governmental set ups that is out there. So municipalities are the smaller at the small city based governmental organizations and the punch ads go to the villages in India. Similarly, what? So this is where it starts. It's always polling for a user called gear systems. So we can show this way. So I've just posted a tweet. Let's check. So we are still polling the API. It's going to take a little bit of time before we can grab a tweet. So yes, so you see the truth is grab it. It says processing a tweet at gear systems. There seems to be a broken road with a powerful limit. And it's trying to make a request to Twitter to post a reply back. So the reply message is basically so it says it has replied, but it has actually not because there is no API key. So what it first replies is you can you can set it. You can actually set the configuration as to what you wanted to reply. You can use NLTK. You can parse this parse the string that the user is giving you check the sentiment or to check the type of the type to check for specific keywords or specific lexical icons. And you can use it for different purposes. So for example, I can show you one previous. So here's how it replies back. So this is one of the complete. So there is a pothole on the road. That is what I had pushed to it. And it says thank you for the complaint. Please type the description of the problem. So I tweet back to it telling the pothole is big and dangerous. And it says thank you for the complaint. Give us a type from the following. Either it's a municipality that means it's a city based problem or is it something related to the new Narendra Modi's campaign of Swachh Bharat, which means clean India. What exactly does it correspond to? So this list is extendable because it's just a JSON dictionary. And similarly, we can see some more. You can post an image. Since the image is already there, the type of response that comes back to it is going to be different. Now it's not going to ask you to supply an image to it as a proof because it already knows that the image exists. And it can directly say thank you for the complaint. Type the description because the description of the problem is actually missing. So this is just one of the applications that we are using low-clack for.  So this is an app inside low-clack itself. It's a tweet wall. So you can directly make a search query. And it uses the low-clack API searches and just displays the information for you. You can use this probably at an event so that you have a live tweet wall which is running throughout the event. Similarly, this is a query browser inside low-clack. It shows all the different types of queries that are being made, what is the count, how many times this query is made, when was the latest query that was made, things like that.  You can make a request to low-clack public API and you can download, you can get the JSON response. Use the JSON response to do whatever you really want to do with it. Like in this scenario, it was just displaying the tweets and the links to the tweets. So this was done in the Google code in by one of the students. Similarly, we have low-clack apps, which is an app in itself. So there is a specific, there's a way in which you are supposed to contribute apps. In case you have a new app idea, which uses low-clack as it's backing, you can contribute a new app. There is a fixed way to do that. So let's try doing that. So it contains three different, so this is how you do it. So you can create an app in the HTML apps folder. It needs to have something similar to a manifest file that we have when we build mobile applications. So similarly, we have a JSON file named in app.json. So the low-clack server automatically searches for all the app.json and lists them out for as apps that you can use. Similarly, so this is the API. We have lots of APIs that are available publicly. So there are different access modes. So the first one is open access, where anybody can use this without any authentication or without any restrictions. Then we have limited access where you can still use it publicly, you can still query it, but you will get less results than the ones who are using it from the local host. You have some things which are strictly restricted to local host, like the settings API or something like that. You can allow course, if you host your own server, if you host your own low-clack server, you can allow course. So there are different applications that can request cross-domain. We have an API to check if the server is actively present or if it is having a back time, if it's giving a 502 gateway problems or if it's giving a page not found or something like that. So we have the server API status. So the search that JSON is the API that you have just seen, it gives you a complete JSON response of exactly the same information that Twitter gives you in the same format that Twitter gives you. So Twitter's JSON structure, so it has the tweet ID, so here we go. So it has the status as object, the status as added. So each of the status contains a created at the screen name of the user, the text of the tweet, the link of the tweet, the ID string. So every tweet has an ID string. So it has, it gives you that place where it was saved from. So it was saved from Twitter. You can also, since I said in the starting that you can use multiple other backends, like you can use the Chinese Twitter equivalent also, the Bebo. And it also gives you the number of retweets that are on it. Similarly, it gives you the number of favorites. If it has any links in it, it gives the links out to you separately. If it has any shortened links in it, like big.ly or goo.gl, it actually de-shortens them and it gives the links to you directly. It gives you the length of it, so in case you need it for some, you know, machine learning purposes or in case you need it for something like that. And it gives you the profile information of the user. Exactly the same information that Twitter gives you. You can directly change, in case you're using Twitter API for something, you can easily change from Twitter to the look like API without a lot of effort. And there also, there's also aggregations that is given. So aggregations are basically the number of hashtags, the trending statuses, things like that. So here, in this example, we have SpaceX, Elon Musk. So the query has been made for SpaceX. And the most mentioned is SpaceX followed by Elon Musk, followed by Space Station and so on. So you have this information also that can be given to you. It's not restricted just to the limit of six that you see here. It's a variable. So you can have limit of 100 probably, you will still be able to get it. Okay. I think it's old. So there is an official Python API. In case you want to really use it, it's very simple. So you create an object of low-clad. And then you directly make, if you want to make the search query, you make the search query for this. You can store it into a variable X. For example, yes, print X. I have all the information. So it's quite easy. If you want to display it, so you actually see the total number. You want me to shrink it? Shrink the window to half the size of the model and not the size of the model. All right. I'll do that. Is this all right? Yeah. All right. So this was the previous command. So X equal to L.search for Cessia, where L is the low-clad object. So it's this simple to actually make a query. The most used for this is in case you're a researcher. So that's what I found very good use for in case you're a researcher. You can directly use this. You can run your NLP. You can run different machine learning, data mining algorithms on the tweets that you have. At the same time, as I showed, so there's lots of visualizations that is possible. Heat maps for events. So for social events like Fawse Asia or Fawse Den, you can have tweet walls that are running around. You can also have different other apps that are built on top of it like the Gear Systems app. You can have a telegram bot in case you're a DevOps person.  You can directly integrate them. So low-clad has a lot of possibilities. It has a lot of scale and it can do things. It can work magic with its large amount of data, with its large amount of, you know, with the stability that it really has. It of course needs more work that we are in the process of doing. So we are, as of now, as I said, collecting one out of every 200 tweets posted in the world. And probably the rate will improve with more servers and better infrastructure. But at the same time, more peers, more contributors, and more people running the servers and contributing to the backend will make it even better. So I think I would end it here and I will open it for questions. It crawls the latest. That is, whatever people post, it keeps crawling it. So I'm not sure if it can really crawl all the historical data that is out there.  But it will not be able to go back to the user's first tweet for sure, unless the user's first tweet has come after the look like services. So that is one of the limitations that is out there. So, I see that the API itself can post about one page. You can take it for months. You can take it for months. So, in case you just want to use the API. So here's your query structure. You have the query content, what you want to search for. The date from when you want to search for and the date to which you want to search for. So this could be anything between one month, two months, three months, whatever it is. If there is data, it is going to give the complete data to you, no matter how big it is. It's probably like, even if it is like 20 MB minified, it will probably give it to you. Yeah, I think the QB2010, but what I mean is how do I ensure that the data will be there to crawl just to ensure that. So, do you want to crawl something very specific? Yeah, I think for example, I want to crawl something related to some particular keyword, which is very specific to Malaysia. So, I just try to accept the use of luck to do it. I end up with a very poor dataset. So, I end up just being too busy with it. If they can't just download the Q&A for a bit. So, how do I get access to the data? So, what you can do, one of the things that you can do is you can keep polling for the data. You can keep polling. And you can, there is a push API that we have. So, you can push the dataset that you have to localize. So, since you're polling only for something very specific, like how we were doing here in this case when we were actually polling for your systems, we kept polling only for that specific keyword. Because we wanted it to start with that or contain that specific word. So, you can do that and you can store those information into your local server. In case you're running your server and if you run this on the background with local host as your query, it will be able to store only those information as a majority. So, in case you do a query from the local host only for something specific to Malaysia, most of the tweets that could be present on your server would be the ones corresponding to that. Because your server has been trying to search for that more times. So, I think, yes, it does need some training if you're looking at it that way. It can't really go ahead and scroll whatever it does. How does KSS work? Does it send data to the domain? Yes. So, as of now, what it does is it takes this information that is there. It registers them as a complaint. So, I think I can probably show you that. The city of Hyderabad. So, there have been two complaints which have been made. You can just register the complaints through a mobile app or through Twitter or anything like that. So, basically what we want people to use is we know people will not really download a lot of apps because apps is almost like a real estate on your phone. And you don't really want to download lots of apps, apps to do something which is only very very specific. So, people would rather prefer moving over to social media or moving over to apps that they already have. Something like Telegram or something like WhatsApp or Slack, Gitter, something like that. So, all of these they allow bots to be running on them. So, even through Telegram you can actually register a complaint into this. But what we've been trying to do is there is a lot of data that's actually available in public which the government can use to do something really really productive. So, we decided to give it a shot to see if something like that is possible. So, people just tweet. They follow the instructions that the bot keeps replying to them with in case you have information, the bot is happy. It registers the complaint. In case most of the information is not there, it asks you for the information that is missing. So, I can run through the code. It's pretty straightforward. So, we have something called a state list which has six or seven different zeros. Basically, we want to use these as boolean bits. Each of the zero corresponding to one of the fields that it needs to register a complaint. So, the first one is their name. The second one is the type of the complaint. The image in case it is there. The location. Things like that. So, in case it finds out using NLTK. So, we are using NLTK in the background. In case it finds out that this place, this is probably the name of a place. It cannot be the name of a person or it cannot be a complaint specific word. It takes that and it automatically makes that one. That bit. So, I think I can do that here. So, here is the update. It takes the state lists. It goes to the specific state list that you are referring to and it updates that state list to one. It returns the complete array back. And similar. Now, at the end of one iteration, you know what is the data that you have and what is the data that you don't. So, using that, you can, the bot will automatically ask one of the questions. So, in case there is two data that is missing, it will ask the question either together. It will automatically concatenate all the strings that is required for the query and it will post it back to Quitter as a reply or it's going to ask questions one by one. So, depending on the user's reply to that, it updates this. So, how does it update this? Every time a user posts, there is a parent TweetID. So, it uses that TweetID as the primary key and adds all the other replies as a map to it so that at the end of the tweet session, you have the list of tweets that is already there to be stored inside your either your MySQL database or Postgres database. It architecturally supports. So, when it comes to productivity crawlers, it just has to be in the Java output or it's just a Python thing. So, the server is written in Java. So, I think it would be easier if you program a new crawler and integrate it with Java with the data access objects that are already there on it. But, in case you want to just contribute data to it, you can make the other crawler as an app and you can contribute using a push data. So, here is a push API. So, the push API is localhost only. Okay, it has a few limitations. Sorry. So, it has a few limitations. But, if you are on localhost, obviously it's going to do it faster and you won't face any problems with that. But, if you're trying to remotely push to some back in, a remote low-clad back in which is probably not yours, it might cause some problems but it's definitely faster. So, locally they can share the problem and they can express it in the format. Sorry. They push API and express it in the structure. It expects the data object, the object similar to Twitter the object format. Yeah, the Twitter format. So, it's the same fields that you need just a few of the fields. You don't need all of them. It just needs a few. So, things like time. The time when you're pushing it, it automatically records it from the server time. I have not tested that. Anything else? Alright, thank you very much.