Again, my name is Daniel Amstutz. I'm at the town of our LinkedIn Department of Planning and Community Development. I'm the Senior Transportation Planner, and so this is a meeting about proposed bus stop changes on Park Ave and Watt-Chuset Ave, and technically Park Circle as well. This meeting is being recorded. We may publicize a link to this say through ACMI, like a couple of other public meetings we've done over the last couple of months. If you're not comfortable being recorded, your video may be picked up in this.  Like I said, please keep your microphone muted so that we produce any background noise. We're planning to go through the presentation, and then at the end, we'll get good bank of time for comments and questions and so on. On the next slide, thank you. You can ask a question and share comments directly to the host and the co-host, which is myself, members of the MBTA, staff of the MBTA, and also McMahon Associates, their design consultant. We can have questions and comments at the end. There's a way to raise your hand and their reactions. You can see the little toolbar down here on the bottom of this slide. And they put it under reactions, used to have its own sort of place, but they put it under reactions where you can actually raise your hand. That's to ask a question live during this meeting. So I think there is actually, yeah, I guess this is a technical issues phone number. And then if you're on the phone and you don't have a video connection, you can use star nine to mute and unmute and star six to raise your hand. So on the next slide, okay, on this slide, so we're gonna start off with the MBTA. I'm gonna send this over to Natasha Vance, who's gonna talk about the Patti Accessibility Project and then move on from there. Thanks. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Natasha Vance. I work for the MBTA. I'm a Senior Project Manager and the Patti Project. The Patti stands for the plan for accessible transit infrastructure. In a few years back, the MBTA was sued by disability activists and the lawsuit was settled and in essence, this project grew out of that lawsuit. Essentially, not all of our facilities were ADA compliant. And so we have worked on our stations and our buses. All of our buses are ADA compliant with ramps that fold out, but one of the last components of making our system compliant is bus stops. Obviously, the bus stops are generally contained within municipal or state right of way. So we need to talk to the people in the municipality, get their approval for our bus stop designs. And also we are looking at trying to improve efficiency and reliability as part of this project. So in some instances, we opt to consolidate stops, which means removing some stops, sometimes moving a stop or improving a stop where it is depending on what the challenges are to make that bus stop ADA compliant. Some components of an ADA compliant bus stop include a curb reveal between four and seven inches. The purpose of that is to enable when the ramp folds out from the bus, it needs to be at a particular angle to allow people on wheelchairs to get on. We also need a landing area, ideally eight foot by 10 foot. And that's where the ramp folds out and lands. And then a clear zone, which is at the back doors of the bus to allow people to get on and off at that location. In addition, we need an accessible path of travel, which the MBTA defines as an accessible path of travel between paired bus stops and to the closest adjacent path of travel. So if there's a compliant sidewalk on one side and no sidewalk on the other side, we might improve the bus stop on both sides and then provide a crosswalk to get across to the sidewalk that would be considered a compliant path of travel. So we are taking a phased approach to designing construction. So what that means is we have design consultants in this instance, McMahon and Associates who are designing stops. And as the stops are completed approved by the municipality, they go to our on-call contractor who constructs them and then McMahon continues to design other stops. So this is a multi-year project where we're kind of rolling through the 90 plus communities that the MBTA serves. The project is a, it's a $20 million project. The program will end up being probably $100 million when it's all said and done because from the, when we did the PATI audit and evaluated all 8,000 of our bus stops, approximately 1,000 of them were in critical or high priority condition. So critical means unsafe, no safe refuge and no accessible path of travel for the bus stop. So you envision like a patch of grass on the side of the road where there's a bus stop. So you can imagine someone with mobility issues would not be able to use that bus stop. High priority means it might be somewhat accessible but there are barriers to accessibility. Generally speaking, our bus stop, bus stop design costs approximately $17,000 and a bus stop construction costs about $50,000. So bearing that in mind, we're investing approximately $800,000 in the bus stops. We are designing and upgrading within the town of the town of Arlington. And I think that's the bulk of the PATI project. I will turn it over to McMahon to talk through some of the details of what we're proposing a long park drive avenue. Circle. Sure. And right before that, I'll jump in here and just give everyone an overview of the buses that serve this area. So my name's Olivia. I'm a senior service planner with the MBTA. I work on these routes and many others in the area and wanted to just kind of set the scene here understanding what exactly we have serving these stops today. So if we have any 62 or 76 riders in the room today you will hopefully know that the 62, 76 combined which we've been running during COVID is going to be continuing to run weekday, midday and during Saturdays, but we have the 62 and 76 actually splitting apart for the first time in goodness maybe almost two years now, beginning December 20th. So we have, so we have those routes serving this area as well as the route 78, the destinations and origins are listed here on the screen if you all can see that. Those are not changing as part of this project. The routes will continue to serve the same general locations. We will continue to serve L-Wife. We will continue to serve Harvard Station though there might be some specific changes in terms of the stops that we'll talk about further on in this meeting that may impact some of the locations served on these routes. Hi, my name is Natalie Raefel. I'm with the Command Associates. And so I'm going to continue by talking about these specific improvements proposed in this area. This map went out to you. So you may have seen it before in the mail. And so I'm going to go through the proposed changes in a north to south direction. And so the first stop pair I'm going to talk about is at Park Ave at Wallace Denav. You can see here circled these two green stops. They are both proposed to be improved. And so the first one, Park Ave at Wallace Denav, the inbound stop, you can see it here pointed out by the yellow arrow. And so this stop is proposed to be improved in place where it is today. And improvements would include sidewalk improvements which you can see here in gray and then replaced curb ramps at the intersection. You can see across Wallace Denav and then across Park Ave. So continuing on its stop pair is at 116 Park Ave. And so this existing stop is also targeted for improvement but in a slightly different location relocated 120 feet to the north. So the existing stop is shown here with a blue arrow and the proposed location is shown by the red arrow. And so this stop would also include some sidewalk improvements shown here in gray. It's making our way south. The next stop is at Appleton Street and there's only one stop in this location and it's proposed for removal. This is due to several factors, the first being low ridership. And for this stop as well as all the others that are flagged for low ridership, that means there's less than 20 riders a day. So that's the threshold that we use to denote low ridership. There's also short stop spacing from this stop to the previous stop or next stop. And so short stop spacing means that there's less than 700 feet in between those stop distances. Another factor is that it has no stop pairs. There's a stop pair would be the stop on the other side of the street. And so this stop is lacking that. And then we also evaluated stops for pedestrian conditions and if there were better pedestrian conditions nearby, meaning in this case at the stops at either Walliston Ave or Florence Ave, if those pedestrian conditions were better then the stop would be flagged for having less preferable pedestrian conditions and that would be a case for, towards removing the stop. And so you'll see these factors repeated again in the presentation. And so I just wanted to explain them all here on this first one. So moving along, we get to Florence Ave and both stops here are targeted for improvements. The inbound stop at Florence Ave is shown here in the yellow arrow and it is targeted to be improved in its existing location and that would improve the sidewalk. You can see here going from the stop out to the crosswalk at Florence Avenue and then also improvements to the crosswalk across Florence Avenue here and all of the curb ramps at this intersection. And so it's outbound stop pair is shown with the blue arrow and so this would also be improved in its current location and also include an improved crosswalk across Florence Avenue on the other side of Park Ave. So next is the stop pair at Oakland Ave and both of these stops are proposed for removal. That's due to low ridership, as I discussed before. And then they also were flagged as being less proximate to land uses that typically generate transit riders in comparison to other stops nearby. And so examples of land uses that are considered to be transit generators are things like schools, libraries, a town hall, a senior center or a senior living facility, parking rides, train stations. There's a variety of different types of land uses that we consider in this type of analysis. And so here we get to Park Circle which we look at a grouping of stops altogether because their functionality really relates to one another. So you can see in this overview that we have the outbound Park Ave at Park Circle targeted for improvement where it's located. We would propose a new stop at Park Ave at Park Circle in the inbound direction. And then the removal of several stops which would be Park Ave at Prospect Ave, Park Ave, Park Circle at Park Ave and Park Circle at Eastern Ave. This is due to the low ridership at these existing stops and then short stops facing between the stops. And so essentially it would aim to form a stop pair between Park Circle inbound and outbound shown here by the green icon that you can see under the red one and then this darker blue icon over here. And so looking more closely at Park Ave at Park Circle outbound that is the stop on an island on Park Ave shown by the red arrow. And so the stop would be improved in its existing location. There are some sidewalk improvements and also replacement of the car ramps across Park Ave. And so the new stop Park Ave at Park Circle would be located approximately 200 feet south of the existing stop at Prospect Ave. And so the existing stop is located just before this crosswalk on Park Ave. And the new stop would be to the south of that with the fire station right where this crosswalk is. And so that would include longer sidewalk improvements as you can see here, the crosswalk improvement and realignment and then curb ramp improvements. So the next stop pair is at Watch Use It Ave. And both of these stops are proposed for removal due to the low ridership, the short stops facing and then having better pedestrian conditions at nearby stops. And then looking at this going up Watch Use It Ave, the first stop pair is at Hillside Ave. And so both of those stops are also proposed for removal due to low ridership and having better pedestrian conditions at nearby stops. So our last grouping here is the group of stops on the southernmost section of this corridor. And so that combines the stops at Cedar Ave and West Service Road. So you can see the existing inbound stop at Cedar Ave would be improved. And then a new stop would be its pair at Park Ave at Glenburn Road. And that's in the dark blue. And then the existing Park Ave at Cedar Ave outbound and West Service Road at Park Ave would be proposed for removal, although essentially they are consolidated into this one new stop in dark blue here at Glenburn Road. Because these existing two stops flagged for removal have low ridership and short stops facing. So looking at Park Ave at Cedar Ave inbound, it's shown with the red arrow here and the stop would remain in its existing location. Improvements would include some intersection realignment that you can see here with this crosswalk in the green coloring. So improvements to the sidewalk, crosswalking, curb ramps for this crossing that goes across both Cedar Ave and Waverly Street. And then the new stop Park Ave at Glenburn Road is shown with this blue arrow. So you can see that it is located approximately 150 feet south of the existing stop at Cedar Ave, which is shown with the yellow arrow. As I said before, this essentially serves to consolidate the existing Park Ave and Cedar Ave stop and the West Service Road at Park Ave stop. And one of the main goals is to improve the stop spacing between this string of stops and to also bring the stop closer to the signal. And then this would also include some sidewalk improvements and install a crosswalk across Glenburn and Chester and improve the curb ramps at Glenburn and Chester at this crossing. So this again is the same map that I started up by showing and it's a summary of these proposed changes. And then this map here shows the proposed network. So that eliminates the existing stops that would be proposed for removal and just shows what the resulting stops would be under this plan. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Daniel to go over the process moving forward. Thank you very much, Natalie, as well as Olivia and Natasha. So, yes, I've gotten a few questions in the chat and we'll address those in just a minute, but I just want to go over this for a moment, just generally where we are. So right now we're really in the sort of collecting comments and feedback phase and getting questions answered. Last week at the Transfusion Advisory Committee meeting, I also met with the members of that town committee to talk about this project. We're obviously collecting comments and answering as many questions that we can at this particular meeting. But we also have a survey out that's on the calendar page for this meeting and also went out with the butter letters that we sent to basically everyone, Fronting Park Ave between Route 2 and Mass Ave. This survey, which you can see here, surveymonkey.com, slash r slash Park Ave bus stops, you can fill it out until the 24th at 5 p.m. is when that closes down. And then after the holidays, we'll take a close look at that and talk with the MBTA, potentially look at adjusting proposal if necessary. So talking through more of the questions and comments that came through. And generally, the select board is the ultimate traffic authority in the town of Arlington. So they would need to approve the changes here since they affect parking, they affect traffic flow. We just plan to do that in January, maybe more likely February. And the board, that is another opportunity to sort of bring your comments to the board. They would approve, you would make a recommendation and they may approve the recommendation, they may not approve or say approve some modifications. So again, that's another opportunity to kind of comment on the process. And then once that is actually completed, once we get approval or direction on a way forward, then the T would actually start finishing up the construction plans and documents for the stops that are remaining or that will be improved. And then working with the public works department on the actual construction administration. And I think we have a slide about that a little bit later, but that's sort of, that's again, further down the line. So I think on the next slide, we actually get to one of the main reasons we're here, as I said, to answer questions and make comments. So as I mentioned, so there have been a number of questions coming into the chat. So I think I probably start with those. There's also an option to raise your hand and ask a question live. I'll probably jump between those if you'd like to ask one live. And I will go ahead with that, like I said. So there have been, we start with to say that there have been several questions about the 78 and Park Circle. So I think like there's a question about if these changes are made, if the number 78 outbound bus stops, sort of the, I guess the, let's see. Will the closest sort of outbound bus stop to Park Circle, would it be Park Ave at Glenburn? Cause I think there is some question about whether the 78 would still sort of make that turn around. Yeah, we can go back this way. You know, if the 78 would still make that turn around Park Circle, you know, whether it would stop at that new stop at Park Ave at Park Circle or whether somebody would need to go down to Park Ave at Glenburn or Wachucet at Oakland in order to take like an outbound route. So I think this is a question maybe for Olivia or Natasha. Sure, I can answer that one. So as some of you might know, the 78 right now basically heads up Park Ave around the Circle and then kind of moves back around and serves the stops shown in yellow on the West area here on Wachucet Ave. This is not always what we've done with the 78. In fact, before COVID, we only went around the Circle off of rush hour periods. During rush hours, we determined it would be more beneficial, provide better reliability to kind of skip the Circle. So we looked at ridership along the Circle on the 78 as well as the stops nearby. How many folks were basically on the bus as we were going around the Circle that experienced longer travel times due to the fact that we were going around it. And with all those factors involved looking at pre-COVID ridership and COVID period ridership, we've determined it's probably a better way to go if we decide to basically skip the Circle. So what that would mean is it might be a slightly longer walk for folks depending on where your origin or destination is. It could be that your closest stop would be the one on Prospect Ave or it could be the one in Cedar or Glenburn. It kind of depends on where you're located. But basically it's the understanding that by doing so, we're gonna be able to provide higher frequency service because it will take a shorter time to run the bus and greater reliability. Typically every time we look at consolidating stops, we're looking at ways that we can improve our service for our riders. And in this case, we determined that it benefits more people if we're able to skip that Circle than the ones that were boarding or getting off the bus along the Circle. So I hope that's a helpful answer but also open to additional questions and welcome a conversation about this. Thank you. Just sort of on this topic, also a question from Carla and then I'll go to the hands raised. There's a shelter at one of the stops that is on Park Circle. I think the one that's near to Prospect.  Do we know what's gonna happen to that shelter that if that stop was removed? Hi, this is Natasha, I'll respond to that. Yeah, so we would, right now it's my understanding that the shelter faces Park Circle and it would need to then be flipped to face Park Ave. So we're not very far along in design obviously but we would flip the, we would figure out a way to have the shelter serve the stop on Park Drive. And I guess also depending on ridership because the purpose of shelters are at high ridership stops. Okay, thank you. So I'm gonna go to hand raised now. So the first one I see is that Ligia? Or did I say that right? Yes, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, and you said my name properly, that's amazing. Thank you. I will try to keep it short because I've been in with emails in correspondence with a number of you already but the major problem with, I live on the corner of Park Ave and Glenburn so that would be right in front of our house. The major problem in winter is that there is no, absolutely no access from the sidewalk to the street because DPW plows come around the Concord Ave corner after every snow and they plow snow around the corner onto our corner, which we laboriously shovel as best we can, a tiny path. My husband takes a snowblower, I shovel as well and just leaves it all in that intersection. So that is the DPW intersection for snow, the corner of Park Ave and across but there is the existing bus stop which was the corner of Park Ave and Cedar. I don't understand why the bus stop can't be on the other side, they do not plow all the snow onto the other side of Glenburn but it's all on the corner where our house is. So I've perceived that that is gonna be a really huge problem every winter. So other than that, I'm all for bus stops and being accessible but that plus the traffic jams which will be caused by being the third house off the highway, that's gonna be a problem at rush hour evening of people coming out not having good access to seeing cars coming around the corner, shooting around the corner, may I say. So I think it's wiser to consider, as I've said in all of my voluminous information that I've sent you to actually consider the corner cross from us better which already has a large area for a bus stop as well. The snow and the winter, it's up to four feet high on either side of our driveway and the sidewalk. That is a dumping area. I'm sorry, I probably can't see my husband. That's a dumping area where trucks actually pile the snow on purpose because what you can see from on that map because the trees are covering that's quite a large square actually. And all the snow from the square is piled on that corner because that corner is downhill and the plow can easily plow that snow downhill and they pack it on that corner. And also all the snow that comes from the bridge across the route too, that's also a large area brings the heavy snow and that all gets piled on our corner. So number one, you will have accessibility problem. Number two, people who come to this station they'll have to cross the streets, number of streets crossing these banks. There is a question, how much these banks are gonna be cleaned? And number three, if I may say is I believe this is too close to the intersection right in front of the bridge. So the moment the bus stops in a rush hour they'll back up all the traffic. So if that station can go a little up the hill it will probably closer to the center of gravity of people coming to the station anyway. And it will be easier for the bus to stop and the traffic will not back up that badly. So thank you, sorry. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. I don't know if anybody at the T wants to respond or just take note of that for later. I think that's probably something we would do tap to. I mean, obviously we're not aware of what the DPW in Arlington does with the snow and if there's another place for them to put it. So we can certainly just take that into consideration. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Sorry, I've been asked to put some materials in the chat so I'm just gonna do that real quickly. Okay, so I just put in the, or pardon me, I will in a minute. So there was a question about some of these, some of the bus stops that are sort of getting improvements are also like 116 Park Ave are moving a bit, maybe one property over or so. I think there was the T did send out some, I think some messages or some letters about that several months ago sort of an advance of this process. I think there was only this question about Park Ave Glenburn where there was some issues received. I guess the question is whether the people that have, where some of these bus stops will move have received direct information about that. And I can say that we could, we can follow up with that. So thank you. That was a question from Jane. And then can we go to Paul next? Hi, Daniel, thank you very much. My name is Paul Paravano. I am one of the co-chairs of the Arlington Disability Commission. And let me say that I'm a little disappointed at the inaccessibility of these presentations, referring to colors and maps without exactly naming, bus stops is a little complicated if you can't see. I know this is not intentional, but I would appreciate it if people could be a little more exact in when they're describing where bus stops are. I have two questions, Daniel. One is, I didn't quite understand the comments about the 7662. I know they're being rescheduled and the routes will be split up, but I didn't quite get from the comments that were made. If they're gonna be split up in the middle of the day or during rush hours, I wonder if that could be repeated. The other thing is I still don't understand, I use this stop at Eastern Ave and Park Circle. So I understand that my stop is gonna go away, which is disappointing, but I understand it's only a couple hundred feet to the shelter Park Circle, but I understand that stop is going away as well. So I guess my question is, what stop am I gonna take for the 78? Where will I have to go for the 78 inbound to Harvard? I just don't understand where that is. And one problem I need to point out is that in the winter, another snow issue, in the winter, in order to get across Park Ave, if that's where I have to go, I assume that's where I have to go. I have to walk up to Park Circle and walk either through Park Circle, which is not shoveled at all. So there's a little sidewalk around the water tower itself right next to the water tower. That's not shoveled. If I walk around the outside the exterior of Park Circle on the circle itself, I find myself out on Park Ave with snow banks, with cars whizzing by, really quite a dangerous situation. And then I get to the pole where the pedestrian button is on the circle side across from the fire station. And one has to climb over the snow bank to get to the button and often the button is frozen and you can't push it. So I worry that to get across Park Ave, these plans are gonna have the effect, the impact of having me having to navigate this pretty precarious and dangerous situation. And I don't think people have thought about that. There is no opening to get to the pole where the pedestrian button is in order to cross Park Ave. And the button I think is an older style button and freezes occasionally in very cold weather so that you can't even get the light to change. So I'm worried about difficulty in crossing Park Ave, but I still need to know where the heck the stop is gonna be from the presentation. I don't understand where I'm gonna pick up the 78 to go inbound. And if someone could again, repeat the 62 76 changes, I would appreciate that too. Thank you. Sure, Paul. So this is Olivia Mubin from the MBTA. I can go over the 62 76 changes in more detail. I apologize. So beginning December 20th, which is next Monday, the route 62 and the route 76, which had been combined for approximately two years, is separating during peak hours. So morning rush hour, evening rush hour, during midday, it's gonna continue its combined routing as it does today all day. During Saturdays, as it always has, it will also continue as a combined route. So is that like nine to three? They're gonna, it's gonna be combined during the week? Roughly. Closer to probably around 10 to three, although, you know, we're starting some trips that are combined while other ones that are separated are just finishing up. So this is something where I would suggest referring to the specific schedule for your stop. Okay, that sounds good. I can do that. Yeah, okay, excellent. And in terms of the stop locations, so the two closest route 78 stops, assuming that we would not be serving Park Circle, heading inbound would be Wachooza Ave at Prospect Ave or Park Ave at Cedar Ave. Park Ave at Cedar Ave. So that's one street down from Wachooza. So one would have to get across Park Ave over to the fire station, which I've already described as being relatively impossible or difficult in heavy snow. And then walk down a sidewalk that's not in great shape across Wachooza and down to Cedar. That is a major change, I would say. And I'm distressed at that level of significant change. And I plan to raise further concerns about that. Thank you. I would also maybe like to combine this question a bit with another question in the chat regarding the signal at Park Circle and Park Ave, which I think is currently an old-style pedestrian signal, like flashing yellow. Is there somebody that could speak to that? Yeah, I can speak to that. So in terms of that signal, it is an outdated style of pedestrian signal. And we have considered new types of pedestrian signals like rapid rectangular flashing beacons as part of this, but it's at this point and still in the conceptual phase. And we'd have to evaluate how it would work with the fire signal and the crosswalk just to make sure that it would all work. So it's still something under consideration. Okay, thank you. Okay, so I think let's see, let me go to the messages or a number of messages in the chat. So if you can hold on for just a minute, so let's see. There's a question I have about the stop at Appleton Street directly across from being a nursing home. I guess there is a point that there are some employees who use that stop, but that's one at Appleton and Park Ave that doesn't have its own stop payer with it. I guess is there any consideration for that being that it is across from the nursing home on Park Ave and I think Appleton Street? Yeah, I think so, I can address that. I think part of this evaluation was considering multiple factors. And so given that the stop is located in between the stops at Walliston and at Florence, it's still within the reasonable spacing guidelines. If people use either of those two stops and then we remove the Appleton Street stop because it doesn't have the stop payer, it has lower ridership and then there were better pedestrian conditions at those other two pairs of stops. So we would expect the riders to either walk a little bit further north or south in order to have a route that the bus route operate more efficiently and stop less along the corridor. Yeah, I can understand that's a difficult stop to, I mean, difficult to cross at that location too. Just before I get to the next hand, just a question about clearing snow by stops that is under town bylaw, that is the responsibility of the butter to the sidewalk, to clear the sidewalk that's in front of them. So that would mean clearing the sidewalk for people that may be waiting for the stop as well. For some stops, I think just the key bus routes are the ones that the T would actually have people send to clear those stops, but otherwise any of these other bus routes that is the responsibility of the next door of butter or the immediate property owner of butting that sidewalk specifically.  Hi, so, and I've got my daughter here too. There's actually four of us in the house that use the bus. In fact, one of my other daughters who works at MGH is coming home on the 78 right now. So we've lived here for 25 years and the bus has gone around Park Circle. We live at Park Circle and Park Ave. that entire time. So this is a big, big change to take away the bus stop on the 78, the outbound 78, which it sounds like that's the one that's changing. So it sounds like what we would have to do is for the outbound stop, which will no longer be near Park Circle and Park Ave, we would have to walk down to Glenburn or walk up. And I also have concerns about that one, it's far and two in, I mean, yeah, we've lived here for 25 years. Not everybody plows their sidewalk. You can't force them to do it. They just don't. And it's slippery going down the hill. I think that's gonna be a big change for us. And I think that's a more dangerous place for a bus stop than here at Park Circle and Park Ave. And what I guess one of the things we don't understand is you call that a pair. And I'm probably combining Prospect and Park Circle, but those are kind of, so Park Ave, Park Circle goes off one side and Prospect goes off another. So that's right in the general area, but Glenburn is not very close at all. So I'd hardly call that a pair, even though you're calling that. And it probably looks like that on this map, but it doesn't, it's not really in real life like that. And going down to what she's at Oakland would be further for us as well. There's no sidewalk on the first part of the street to get down there. So that's also downhill and also slippery in the winter. So these are big changes. And I, we're very concerned about them. Daniel, if I may interject, just to clarify. So there is a proposed stop on the Circle. It would be on the west side of Park Ave, opposite the Circle, just south of the fire station. So you wouldn't have to walk all the way to Glenburn. Well, that's only inbound. It would serve both directions. So- Okay, so it doesn't say that. And I will agree with whoever, just let me just say real quick, I'm sorry to interrupt, but whoever has said along the way, I think it was Paul, that this was a very confusing presentation. I completely agree. We're, there's four of us here, all college graduates who need and understand it. So on the press, on the piece of paper we have or the information we have, it does not say what you just said, Sandra. So it looks to us and also from the, it's just unclear to us that there will be an outbound and inbound 78 stop near Park Circle and Park Avenue. So tell me what's different from what the information we received. Can we go to the plan sheet instead of this map? So first off, I just want to apologize to everyone that we were trying to make it very simple and clear and it seems like we did not accomplish that. So really apologize for that. I think the next one that is that, is that the best image we have that shows? Okay. Natalie, if you're able to exit presentation mode, if you zoom in on the Park Circle, could everybody see differently your part you have in time or the flyer that Daniel did? Yeah. Yeah, and let me just say that for the material that the town or that myself sent out, it didn't include specifically, it did include a list of things where, you know, which stops served which route, but there's a little bit of, I guess, discrepancy and information about this Park Abbott Park Circle new proposed stop, whether or not it would serve the 78 or not, you know, technically if it went around the circle, I think right now. We're not asking for to go on the circle, so we can leave that aside, understand your point about that. I'm just saying that it looks like there's an inbound stop on the 78, that's Park Circle and, I don't know if it's Prospect or Park Gap, but there's no outbound stop that corresponds to that, except Dan and Glenburn. There's no inbound stop at Park Circle, that's what I was told, just told. Yep, so just to clarify, as laid out here with this, if the 78 does not go around the circle, there, the 78 would serve Park Gap at Cedar Ave, inbound and Park Gap at Glenburn, outbound, and then it would also serve, watch use it at Prospect and watch use it at Oakland, outbound. So how about this, I'm sorry. If we live at Park Circle and Park Avenue, where is the 78 inbound outbound stop near us? Don't tell me what's going away, just tell me what you're proposing, please. Cause it's still confusing to us. 78. As this is without the 78 around the circle, the choices are watch use it at Prospect Ave, slash Oakland or Cedar Ave or Glenburn. So that's what I was saying. So that's what I was saying, and someone told me, then Sandra, you said that's not true. So what I said, it seems is true. So we are very concerned about that, because none of those are near part the intersection of Park Circle and Park Gap. Okay, thank you. Yeah. Anything else to say on that? Just want to clarify that there will be stops at Park Gap at Park Circle heading both directions, but they would be served by the 62 and the combined 62.76. We're trying to get to Harvard Square, not Iowa. The 62 comes a lot less frequently than the 78, and that's the concern. Okay. Just wanted to be sure that we knew that. So it doesn't matter, like I understand that you're saying there is a stop there for the 62, but I'm not worried about the 62. I'm worried about the 78. Which is what we were saying. So there being a stop for a bus that comes every hour and often not even when it says it's gonna come, I'm not concerned about that bus. We're concerned about the 78. And you said those are big changes. So we'll be, I guess we'll need to let our voices know. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Just, I'm gonna go back to the chat for just a minute. So I will save all the chat messages here so that I have them. Some of these are comments, more discussion about the Park Circle stops and concerns about that. Let me see here. Excuse me, may I just say something in related to what the ladies were just bringing up? Okay, go ahead. So here's the thought, okay? When you look at the map, it all looks nice and flat. In reality, this is a very steep, steep street and it is not easy, especially for older folks to go either up or down the street when it's especially when it's snowy. Regardless of the obligations for people to clean the snow, we all know that that's never perfect and it's slippery and it's hard. And if three people having problems with mobility, it's a challenge. So looks to me like the old locations of the stations were purposely closed. So to take into account to the steep street and now we're spreading it and forcing people to go up and down the street and we are moving all the way down to Glenburn. Look at the gravity of the people that are coming. They're all gonna be coming down. That means some will have to go up depending in which direction they're going.  They're the same hill. Also people in this area, and I have lived here since 1970, I grew up here, Park Ave 78. That is the important thing. Many, many people go to Cambridge and take connections from there. So it's important to keep that route as accessible to as many people as possible, I believe. Thank you. Thank you, sorry about this. Okay, thank you. This is Natasha. I'm just wondering if everyone, when you start speaking, if you could just identify yourself so we know. Oh, I'm so sorry. Yes. I thought it was on the screen. Totally. That's Ukesha Khristanovich and Ligia Grigoris. We're at the corner of Park Ave Glenburn and have been taking care of that house since 1970 and all of the sidewalks. So we keep them clean, but you know. But you should really see, you should see how that looks like in the wintertime. It is a narrow, narrow path. If somebody is in a wheelchair, there's no way they can pass, okay? So that's what we're talking about. So all we are asking is for people to be realistic. Because when these guys plow, they don't care. They don't really care, really. And you're not gonna make them do any different. So that's just it. Thank you again. Okay. Thank you very much. I'm gonna go back to the raised hands. I was going through the chat. There's a number of comments there. Again, we'll save that and I'll share that with the MBTA. So I'm gonna go to Jane now. On mute. Hi, this is Jane Connor. I'm down 116 Park Ave. I know now you're planning to move it. But part of what your improvements were supposed to be to create a platform for the ramps on the buses. And again, back to this being a steep hill that gets, it's a wide street that gets four or five feet of snow pushed to the side. The bus stop for the past 20 years since I've been here has been my driveway. The bus stop is my driveway. That's where people have to get out. And now you move it down to someone else's driveway. But that's the only way, if the MBTA doesn't, I didn't understand what you said before, sir, when you mentioned that the MBTA or the town does take responsibility for clearing some spots, but not others. How I couldn't understand what spots they did clear. But up until, as far as I've lived here, no one else but our house, do we take care of that bus stop? And that's through clearing our own driveway. And again, this is a crappy sidewalk that's all bumpy because of heaving. And I'm wondering, I'm just saying yes, yes, all these other folks who say they don't want to try to have to walk on park have during rush hour or in the snow. I'm aligning myself with them or wherever you're moving the spot to away from the front of my house, it's gonna be the same issue if the plows can't take into consideration what they're doing to the bus stops. Thank you. Daniel, did you wanna clarify the thing about the key bus routes or did you want me to do that? If you could do that. Which means key versus unkey? So I don't know the, these are not key bus, these are not part of the key bus routes. So the only bus stops that the MBTA clears are those that are on the key bus routes. And I'm not sure what routes those are. Olivia may be able to speak to that. But in generally speaking, the MBTA service area is across many municipalities and we do not have the ability to clear our bus stops. It is the municipality's responsibility to keep their sidewalks and the bus stops clear when whether that's the a butter or DPW. I fully understand and appreciate everyone's concerns about the snow clearing. There's just unfortunately not anything that the MBTA can do about it. But I do take the point about the number of bus stops and the difficulty of walking down a steep slippery sidewalk. So we've definitely heard your concerns on that aspect. If I could just add to the 116 Park Ave stop relocation. In the image there, I know it's a little bit small, but you can see that there's three trees between the driveway. So it just makes it more difficult for the bus to be able to pull in between the trees and accurately pull up to the right spot. It's also gonna make the sidewalk really difficult. They're very mature trees, especially that one in the middle. So it's a few of those reasons are why we're planning to move it further and also closer to the signal as well. So there's a little bit of a shorter walk to get to a signalized crossing. I also think it'll be, it should be a little bit easier once the landing area is paved and also the town has asked that we pave the back door. So there should be two new concrete paths that will allow for door access. So it'll allow for easier snow removal in those areas as opposed to when it's just a long stay thing. Oh, that, well, we can't, I can't, I don't have, I can see it on the screen here, but that's not what I was sent. So I don't have the information about where it's moving. But yes, we did point out to you that there were trees, a fire hydrant and a pole all in the way of the current location at 116. We made, we, we pointed that out. There was no change proposed in the paperwork we received. Thank you. Yeah, I apologize. These, the, some of these specific changes were not or these bus stop changes weren't in the materials that I sent out. They're a little bit confusing until they're explained to you. But yes, thank you very much for that understanding that this is a little, a little different or didn't maybe give the full picture to what was, what was in the mailing. I wanna go to Andrew next. Karen's had her hand up much longer than I have. She should go before me. Oh, I'm sorry about that. Is that Karen Sidley? Thank you, Andrew. My name is Karen Sidley. I am in a wheelchair. And if you change the park circle bus stop, I mean, first of all, in the winter, it's very hard getting to the 62 bus stop because the plows all dump things where the slope is for me to get on. I can't get over the curb. Number one, but if you change the 78 bus stop and 62 bus stop so that it's on the other side where the, see it's at one side of the circle now. And the way it looks on the route is when you go around the circle or you first enter it, that is where the new stop will be. And yes, it will be on the side of parking. I don't have closest to me, but it's starting to go downhill. In the winter, when things aren't plowed, I'm going to have to stand and not stand, sit outside at the side of the road when the cars are speeding up, going downhill, toward route two. And it's not really safe. And I mean, like right now, technically, okay, if that's not plowed 62 or 78, 78, the circle's not that busy. So I can sit at the side of the road. And 62, I can always wait by the entrance or exit to park circle and just flag down the bus when it comes around.   That's average, but so the light doesn't mean that much until after, I mean, once they see a wheelchair, sometimes they'll stop. Sometimes they'll just keep going, no. Like, well, I was halfway across and the car was coming from the other direction and it was a walk light. It just blew right through in front of me. So, oh, well, that's my major concern is changing the parking bus stop from the island because the island is much more convenient for both. I take both 78 and 62. I admit 62 a lot more right now. It used to be 78 a lot more, but I really need both bus routes. Thank you. Thank you very much, Karen. Yeah, so I've heard about that, the signal at Park Circle is also yet difficult. So I think that's something we need to look at more carefully. That's the least of it. It's more about changing the bus stop. Yes, yes. Thank you very much. Okay, so Andrew, do you want to go now? Sure.  So I can only imagine what it's like for someone who isn't fully able. My question is a couple of general questions. How many of the new improved stops will have shelters and feeding off some of the other comments about the spacing of the stops when you compute, when the MBTA computes the distance between stops, does it take the grade of the road that they're measuring into account? That is a level flat road could have stops that are X distance apart, but as an optimal or usable distance. But if there's a steep grade, it might be 0.75X or half X as a useful distance between the stops. That's all. I think that's a really great point about the grade impacting spacing. There are general guidelines that we ideally want people to be about a five minute walk from their bus stop. So we will take a look at how the grade on Park Ave impacts that spacing. I would also just respond to your question about shelters. So we're really just at conceptual design. So we don't know what amenities will be at stops, but I do not think we're proposing shelters at any of the upgraded stops. Generally, that is a ridership determination and Olivia, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you have to have at least 50 on boardings at a stop to require a shelter. Or Sandra, do you know the number for that? Yeah, it's not solely based on- I'm sorry. Oh, it's based on varied things. You know, if we have a route that doesn't come very frequently, we are more likely to put a shelter in because we know folks might be waiting longer. If there is very low ridership, it's less likely. You know, we take equity concerns into account. So there's a lot of different factors involved. But Natasha's correct, at this point, I don't think we've identified an additional location or two that would be taking a shelter in this scenario. There was also a question in the chat that I sort of missed, but could somebody, you know, from the T or McMahon, I know there's the bus stop guidelines. I guess they updated like 2018. I think that's the most recent version. People would be interested to see those. I think you could find those on the MBTO website. So if somebody wouldn't mind sharing that in the chat, that would be helpful. I will put it in now. Thank you. Okay, so again, I think most of the comments in the chat, or most of the chat, I think is more about comments. So I'm going to go to Tom now, who has hand raised. Hi, my name is Tom, excellent points made. I happen to think that improving certain things like the sidewalks and whatnot is a brilliant idea. However, I'd also like to express my support for keeping the MBTA bus stops where they are currently as is primarily to promote the ability of disabled people and elderly people to access safe transportation. I haven't read the ADA, I'm familiar with it in concept. And I'm guessing that one of the main functions of the ADA is to increase access for disabled people. And I'm afraid that some of the promotions are some of the things that are being promoted here, such as eliminating stops and relocating stops might have the exact opposite effect. So I'm deeply concerned about that, particularly the one moving, it is a park and prospect down the hill, which other people have made excellent points about how that, not just from winter, but like for people in wheelchairs such as my sister, it'd be incredibly difficult to go up and down the increased traffic as a concern. So I feel pretty strongly that that stop should not be tampered with. I don't think I need to go through and talk about the importance of access for the disabled and the elderly, how the access to the T is incredibly important to get to work, to shop, to socialize, to go to medical appointments. I think we all agree on that. How can we best provide that access? I think, again, some excellent points have been made and I think that's about it. Oh, finally, I think moving the stops would do not save access and impose a heavy burden on those who are able to sustain it. Again, the disabled and the elderly, excuse me. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tom, for speaking about that. So I wanna go to Joe next. Yeah, I just wanted to share my anecdote story and then ask a couple of questions. I used to take the 79 to ALWIFE, that was removed, but then because of COVID, I didn't have to take the bus and as I've started going back, I've been taking the 62 and 76 and sort of been enthralled by the fact that there was a bus lane put in at ALWIFE to make that journey faster. But now I'm finding out that the stop closest to my house is on the list to be removed. So it's sort of a little whiplash going on. I'm just curious, what timeframe was used for the boarding data? And is it taken to account, the pre and post 79 route existing, pre and post COVID, the onboarding of services that McLean is doing to the property just up Ableton Street. And I was also curious, how do you capture the off-boarding data for the nursing home and for places in the area where people come to Arlington to work? Sure, I can answer. Natalie, go ahead. I was just going to answer a question about the year of the ridership data that we looked at, which was 2018. So pre COVID and pre some of the bus routing changes that have been implemented since then. And so how do you, I guess I'm not sure the 79 editing point is going to be re-implemented, but how does that then impact the reduction of service on sort of the fallback route that would get people to ALY if we're looking, pre that change? That's something that we can take into consideration moving forward. But we did, at the time we did this analysis, that was the data available to us. And so it does, there's been a lot of teachers since COVID that were unanticipated at the time. And so part of the reason I'm having this meeting is to just understand other concerns and things that we can look at as we move forward with this. Okay. Yeah, I would, I just also would follow up with, the forging ahead, which was directly, the reduction in service directly related to the impacts to COVID. And the MBTA relies on fares as a big part of our revenue. So it's definitely a factor that we are looking at and sort of still trying to figure out how to incorporate into our planning. And then I did just want to respond to a couple of people have asked about like why eliminate stops, why not improve all the stops? And the reality is that we do have to look at the PATI program through an equity lens as well and we have to spread our funds as evenly as we can across the system. So we, you know, in an ideal world, we would be able to improve every single bus stop that we have and we wouldn't have to pick and choose which stops make the most sense, which are what, so we're looking at which ones are the easiest to design and construct to make the improvements to. Because as Mr. Sidley, the point he made, literally the whole purpose of the PATI program is to make sure that mass transit is accessible for people with disabilities. That's literally the whole purpose of it. So I do appreciate all of this very great feedback. It's very helpful to know how people who live on these routes and ride the bus, use them and which stops are useful and why those stops are the ones that are preferable. So we are very much listening and we do appreciate the feedback. But I just wanted to add, unfortunately, we can't afford to improve every single stop on the, and so we have to make decisions about which ones are the right ones to improve and we need community feedback to know which ones, if we've made an incorrect decision. I hope that clears up a little bit. So you can't leave an unupgraded stop? No, we can. But the goal is to, because the PATI audit identified a thousand stops that were both either critical or high priority, our goal is to get all of those addressed or eliminated as quickly as possible. Because we do file a biannual report with the judge in the lawsuit to let him know the progress that we're making and also disability advocates are very much focused on the process, the progress that we're making as well. So we can leave a stop that is not fully accessible, but it's just not ideal. So sorry, I'm just. No, I appreciate the question. Okay. Thank you. As part of this, what's the reduction? Okay, go ahead, Joe. Time, sorry, just what's the reduction in time from whatever your start point to end point as a result of removing these stops? How much faster is it going to be? What's the increase in efficiency for the route? Yes. Yeah, Natalie, can you answer that question? I mean, as a general ballpark, we would estimate an average of 10 seconds savings per stop at the stop is pulling into the curb waiting for passengers and then coming out. So I don't have a number of the total savings for this particular route. Okay. All right, I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I just wasn't sure the. And I'll actually, I'll quote the bus stop design guidelines. I put the PDF into the chat. If anyone would like to take a look, it's a very fun 77 page document if you're interested. But we identify actually on average in that report, an average of 15 seconds savings. Obviously this is very variable depending upon if there are additional people boarding or if people are just getting dropped off depending upon if it's before a lighted intersection or after. So it's all about different types of reliability things. It really depends, but this is also, these approximations are for essentially eliminating a stop along a route. What we would be proposing on the 78 is actually slightly altering the route as was indicated before by not going around the circle. So that savings is not accounted for in just an average stop decrease. So it wouldn't just be 30 seconds because we weren't serving two stops around the circle. It would be additional time because we're actually then not having the bus travel that portion of the roadway. Okay, thank you very much. We'll get through the next, I guess the last few questions here because it is about just noting the time is at 8.15. We plan to finish up in the next 15 minutes or so. So I wanna go to Elizabeth who said her hand up for a little bit. Thank you. A couple of things. I think one of the things that's causing some confusion about the 78 bus is the proposed changes show the bus still going around Park Circle when you're saying that it won't be. So if you go to that next page where the keep going which shows the where it's actually what it's going to look like when it's done or at least the one that was shown. The final slide. Yeah, it doesn't have any of the red on it. You went by it, there you go. It still shows it going around Park Circle when it's not going to is what you're telling us in your proposed plan. So that's one thing I wanted to point out and I sent this in the chat to Daniel is that the Park Circle stops, they service both the Brackett School just down Eastern Ave on the lower right hand corner of the plan there and Robbins Farm Park, which is that big green spot. Those are both real generators for bus travelers. And if it was eliminated, that would be a big problem. Not to mention the neighborhood. And let's see, there was one more thing. Oh, well, most of the proposed changes make sense to me. That's the only one that I really think needs to be rethought. So, oh, one other thing, when I was a member of the TAC here in Arlington we worked on the 77 and there was a lot of question about all the different bus stops and there was a whole group of us from the Transportation Advisory Committee that worked on that with the T. Is there any sort of support that we have as individuals coming from the town or is it, are we pretty much on our own here? Daniel, do we have an answer for that? Sorry about that. My computer was running out of battery. So I did. So could you, I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you say that again, the last part? Okay, when I was on the Transportation Advisory Committee years ago, we did a review of all of the stops on the 77, made improvements and made recommendations for moving stops, things like that. We work with the MBTA and as well as the public. It seems that we don't have that support from the Transportation Advisory Committee here. I just wondered if there's any chance we could get their support on maybe some of the things that we're concerned about. Sure. And I did, as I think I said at the very beginning, I did share this with the Transportation Advisory Committee last week. They did share a number of similar concerns that have been brought up at the meeting. I think it could be brought back to them with if there was a different proposal on the table. I would say the 77 being the key bus route in town. That's sort of heaviest, most high-frequency route in town may have brought in a bit more scrutiny. But yeah, I think, so I have brought it to them. As I said, they did bring out some concerns again similar to what was brought up here. And then again, I'll apologize for this map. I think when we created this map, this is a town-created map, we did not really know about the status of the 78 or the potential that it would not go around the circle. That was sort of later information that we gathered. So yeah, so that's sort of why it's still showing here or why it appears to show here is still going around circle. All right, thank you. You're welcome. So again, we're almost getting to 8-3. I do want to go to Robin since they've had their hand up for a while to ask a question. So please go ahead. All right. So I'm at the on Park Avenue right across from what to say right near the bus stop now. And I just want to say that I agree with a lot of the points that have been made. I also want to mention that when it snows here, it's true the plows just push all the snow right there at the curve. And it's very hard. Well, along that whole stretch, it becomes a huge wall of snow.  It gets plugged up immediately over and over again and I have to keep going out and redoing it. And it becomes solid ice and really hard to keep it clear. But that whole area from like Park Circle down towards route 2, it's very slippery. It's very hilly. It's going to be difficult for people to have to walk that stretch. And it is hard to keep it clear. So I agree with people's comments about that. I also think it's not great if we're not going to increase service given that climate issues are going to loom large and we're supposed to be meeting like net zero goals within the next few years to try to convince people to take best transit more and cars less. I mean at one point on the weekend I tried to take a bus to meet people in town and I was going to have to leave 3.5 hours in advance in order to get there for something that I could drive in in 20 minutes to a half hour that is just like beyond. So I don't know you're going to have to do better. I think that it's terrible that you have to fight for funds and trade off one set of standards against another. I think they're going to have to at some point someone's going to have to increase the budget. So anyway, those are my comments. Thanks. Thank you very much lips to the Legislature's ears. So I want to finish up on the last 2 I know I see Carla and Andrew have their hands up for additional comment or question. So if you call you can go ahead and then we'll finish with Andrew. Yeah, I just want to start off by saying that I totally understand what you're basing this on and that data that you're basing this on. But I do want to emphasize that when you're talking about oh, we have to change the stop or get rid of the stop due to low ridership.  So I feel like that is I just want to emphasize that that's not. But that's not hard to hear you telling us that oh, we are not. You're not worthy. We're not important enough to, you know, keep the buses. So yeah, good point. Yeah, thank you very much. I understand you're saying that's a good point. And then I think last word to your 2 Andrew. I was just looking at the map and you've eliminated the stop on what you said at whatever that. Cross Street is what if the 78 went up Prospect Avenue to Mass Ave. Instead of continuing down, watch use it to Mass Ave. Then it could drive by Park Circle and pick up that stop that's at the top, more or less at the top of the hill. And is the area is still relatively flat. So I can just speak briefly to say when it comes to Prospect Avenue, I'm aware that it is part of it is a private way. Meaning that it's not a public way. It's it's owned by the butters. I think it might be the section between hillside and watch use it. So that does not mean that the bus couldn't go down that direction. However, I don't think the pavement condition is very good through there, which is not uncommon for private ways throughout the town or probably in other towns, too. So that might be something that would be a consideration. I think it would be bad pavement condition would really slow things down. But I do appreciate it. It's an innovative idea. Natasha, I don't know if you want to say something I did. I just I wanted to respond to Carla and say I really do appreciate that was a really good point that you made that when we were talking about low ridership, we are literally talking about people who ride the bus and which is why we're all here. And I also just wanted to say thank you to everyone who attended. I usually when we go to these we the paddy team when we attend these meetings, everybody wants us to get they don't want bus stops in front of their houses. They don't want bus stops at all. They want us to just kind of go away. And so it's really refreshing and enjoyable to be with people who actively want to keep bus stops and want transit service. So that has been really nice. And so I will say we have heard all of your concerns. We're taking notes direct throughout the meeting. There is obviously a survey that Daniel mentioned where you can put your comments and writing and and then we can talk with Daniel and I assume he's going to make recommendations to the tack based on a lot of the comments that you guys have made if you can go back to the other slide. So generally speaking, we are, you know, we want to move forward with design. We won't do that until we come to some sort of consensus with the with the town. And then but generally speaking, ideally we're trying to complete design this spring and do construction in the fall. And so and again, I just want to reemphasize we have heard all of your comments and we will take them into account. And I think that's all I had to say is Olivia or McMahon. Is there anything you guys want to add? Or OK, we'll turn it back over to you, Daniel. OK, OK, well, I think we're at the end of the presentation end of the meeting. So yes, thank you everyone for coming and really it seems like everybody stayed for the entire time. So I appreciate your patience getting to questions and speaking about this. So I do appreciate it. We will go through. I'm going to OK, there's still people chatting. So I'm going to save this chat so that I have it on record and we can share it with the MBTA. I guess if either Natasha or Olivia or Sandra, the co-hosts, if you can, you could save your chat as well. I think you sent some of them to me, but I don't think they will be saved if they end the meeting right now. So you just go ahead and and do that. So again, thank you very much. We will be looking at this information. Please you can spread the word about the the survey that we've got out, which has got to the similar information and sort of different questions. So please go ahead and do that and send that to your neighbors and people that live along Park Ave, Park Circle, which you sit and in the neighborhood and everyone. So again, thank you very much and I hope everyone has a good rest of your night.


Mathematics teachers and numeracy coordinators from District 3 seem elated to share ideas and best practices with the goal of refining strategies designed to help students understand and master mathematics. The symposium was held at the Finance Administrative Building recently under the theme, Mathematics is Real. Education Officer for District 3, Fransylet Lawrence, is excited about the release of a new District 3 policy on mathematics and the impact of the symposium on the schools within the education region. Let us strive to make mathematics experiences as real and relevant for students so that they see and speak and breathe mathematics on a daily basis. Remember the following. Mathematics is a journey and not a destination. It is a process and not only a product. Give a man to fish, rather than a real man. Give a person a fish and you feed him or her for a day. Teach a person to fish and you feed that person for a lifetime. Organizers think it's important to build excitement around the mathematics subject to ensure minimal stresses related with students' ability to advance and eventually become successful at passing mathematics examinations. District 3's numeracy coordinator, Rochelle Jabati says the cries for attention from students in the subject of mathematics are being heard and symposiums of this nature give a sensible reply to their needs. So teachers, we have to collaborate. We don't know it all. Some of us know a lot. Others know other things and we need to help each other. So we're here for this and to continue in our quest to get our students to perform better in the subject of mathematics. Of course the other subjects collaboration as well but we're here to look at mathematics. Teacher, artist and animation filmmaker Ted Sanderford gave the feature address at the 2023 Mathematics Symposium for District 3. He disclosed his earlier difficulties with mathematics and how he was able to rise above it. He said his love for art was greater than the hatred for mathematics. However, he encouraged teachers present to make mathematics instruction engaging for students to keep them focused and give them a fighting chance to make progress. Lack of hands-on activities that's neglecting to use manipulatives, interactive materials and practical examples can make maths seem dull and unengaging, especially in this day and age. Can't teach maths on a blackboard, makes no sense. Them kind of children are born and they can use a tablet already. Sanderford discouraged the use of fear and punishment to force children to do well at mathematics, saying this can create mathematics anxiety and push children further into disliking the subject. From the communications unit of the Department of Education, Innovation and Vocational Training, I am Chris Satney reporting.


Hi, good morning everyone. How are you doing today? Great. So I hope your day one at root con was really exciting and you guys learn something new. I hope to kickstart day two with a topic which is close to home. I'll be speaking about culture and strategy of SRE and things that we did at my current company and how we built the SRE team from ground up. Certain decisions and solutions that we took and that helped us build a good team which was able to scale with time. So I like to start with a brief outline of things that I'm going to cover today. First I'm going to give you a overview or a background of the scale at trusting social, what we do and the data that we deal with, what's our scale, the essence of SRE according to my experience and certain war stories that we dealt with at trusting social which will help us cover five main backgrounds. One is why do we have to reliably manage infrastructure. I'll be speaking about infrastructure management to start with. The art of access control, how to make debugging easy, right? And why remove the admin from administration? Why do you have to even automate certain tasks and when do you know the right time to do it, right? And when not to manage your storage versus how to manage it, right? So these will be some of the key takeaways today and let's start with the talk. Yeah, so what we do at trusting social, right? I had this opportunity to be a part of the SRE team ever since it started and we started off like last year and I find myself in the position to share my experience and I hope you guys can take some key points out of it, right? So we started off as a four-member team and in a span of eight to nine months, we could expand to 15 people. We operate out of four countries, mainly based in Southeast Asia and we have our production code running in five data centers and expanding with time. We have, we work across three cloud providers and there are a dozen products and services that are running right now. We ingest around one TB of metrics per week, which means that there is a fair amount of scale that we're talking about and the current team has been the same ever since it inception. So the attrition rate is really less. Yes, so when I speak of essence of SRE and many people have this question as to what an SRE is or what does a site reliability engineer do, right? I think we need to get back to the core principle of what SRE is and there are three things that come to my mind. One is automation. When I speak of automation, I would say that as a site reliability engineer, we are basically the bridge between developers and operations and in order to make development easy and to streamline operations, we have to come up with certain workflows and processes which automate the entire flow, right? That is where automation comes into picture. Maintainability, let's say tomorrow, trusting social grows, right? And in any company which is growing at a fast rate, the main problem that they face is scale and to make sure that scale is managed, you need to be sure that the processes that you've put in place are repeatedly applied and they can bring up infrastructure and deployments can be fast and at the same rate, no matter what your scale is, right? And that's when you have to have maintainable workflows and visibility. As a site reliability engineer or as a DevOps culture is, we have on-call schedules, right? And every single person keeps rotating. You won't have one particular engineer dealing with one product. So in order to make rotational on-calls easy, you need to have more context into what was the issue and how do you solve it if it comes again. For that, you need visibility into the systems. You need to know how the service is speaking to each other and you need to know what was the first thing that the on-call engineer did. That's where visibility comes into picture. So let's go ahead and see the five things that we did ever since we started off at Trusting Social. And the first thing that I'm going to talk about is infrastructure management. I think that's the core of site reliability engineering in any way, right? If you have to take code to production, you need infrastructure and you need to come up with different environments such as production staging and dev and you have to manage these in a way which is not manual and automated. You have to be able to reliably ensure that infrastructure is brought up and maintained. So usually what people do is end up using infrastructure as code as a tool that is available out there called Terraform. People use Terraform to bring up infrastructure almost quite commonly these days, right? I think most of you have worked with it. Okay. So we also started off with using Terraform. What Terraform does is just it's a CLI which ends up bringing up infrastructure in cloud. But there were certain problems that we were able to identify with this process, which is if I have to reliably maintain my infrastructure, there were certain key things that I had to do. First, I wanted to ensure that I have I can manage concurrent access to the infrastructure that's there. I want the ability to know who or which engineer brought up which infrastructure. I want the ability to ensure that there's access control over there. There should be retries and rollbacks. Retries and rollbacks in Terraform are quite manual and I want an automated way to do this. And there should be an ability to maintain versions of your infrastructure with time, right? So that I know when my infrastructure has changed and how can I manage it? So for this, we thought of a small data model. We identified what were our key pointers that identified any kind of infrastructure that we brought up. So trusting social as an organization operates in cloud and data centers, as I mentioned, and there are different cloud providers that I would speak of as the key. I would any time have I would identify the infrastructure with the intent that is if it's a dev or a production for staging infrastructure and which region it has been brought up. So these three key fields like helped us identify or segregate infrastructures. We needed the cloud provider or the data center key, the intent and the region. And that's how we were able to identify which product went in which workspace, right? So they were, yeah. So the first thing was workspace that we identified in the data model, which helped us tell us that, hey, which cloud are using which region and who all can access it. And that's how we were able to also have ACL on on top of it, right? A layout, I would say, define the Terraform files that define what service boxes or what machines did I bring up? What was the flavor, the other key attributes of any infrastructure? There was versioning on the layout files that we were able to maintain. And we are also able to add success and failure hooks, like if this infrastructure is brought up successfully, then go ahead and run a playbook which provisions tools in the new infrastructure. Or if it is not, then just clean it up in a very graceful manner and rollback. So these were some things that we identified as a solution to reliably maintain infrastructure. And the first tool that we built was called tessellate. What tessellate? So it had two aspects, the client aspect of it and the server aspect. The tessellate client was a small binary which would sit on your local machine, or in one central machine, which is accessible to everyone. We could have, we could just basically invoke it using CLI commands, which would apply, destroy or do certain cloud operations on your infrastructure. Apart from that, you would provide certain fields such as which workspace and layout, and what web hooks do you want to add, right? So this was the first thing that we built. If I have to speak of the workflow, we would submit these JSON files via the tessellate client, which would talk to the server. The server would then schedule these infrastructure jobs. And using a scheduler, it would bring up the infrastructure, right? And there was a backend which we use called consult, right? That's where we maintain versions and rollbacks and states everything. So that was the first thing that I wanted to talk about, how to reliably maintain infrastructure. And the next problem, the next problem that we faced was controlling access across different deployments that used to go out. Being in a team of 8 to 15 people now, we need to know, we have to give everybody the same kind of access for any kind of deployment that goes out. And there were certain mess ups that keep happening, right? There were certain incidences which caused us to question how do we streamline the process and make sure that the right kind of service is getting deployed out there. Now, for this, I'd like to give some background. For scheduling or bringing up services in production, we used something called as Nomad. And the reason for this was we wanted to maintain homogeneity across all deployments that went out, be it a virtualized environment or a dockerized container service, we wanted one wrapper which worked well for us and made managing deployments easy. So that's when we used Nomad. It was it matched our scale and as well as gave us homogeneity, right? So let's say there's a SRE who's on call and there's a new deployment coming out and he wants to deploy a service A, right? But accidentally because because there is a problem, he ends up deploying another service or causing some problems in that. So, you know, if we have to ensure that these things don't happen, then we thought of, how can we do this? Should we just maintain give SRE one the access only to service A and not to service B? But then how do we manage on call rotational on call schedules, right? So that's why we thought there should be another mechanism which made sure that there were two people involved in any deployment. So the on call SRE would get a 2FA or an OTP token from let's say the product owner who knows that his service is going out there. And if he tries to accidentally deploy service B, the OTP obviously won't work because it's for service A. So this was one workflow that we thought and we thought that hey, I think this is great and it matches the scale. So we went ahead and implemented this over and above Nomad, which we use for scheduling our services. So let's say there's a product owner who uses this small CLI tool that we built in house, which is called TS 2FA. He will generate OTP for his product and then there's an SRE who has to deploy the service in production. He will ask for an OTP from the product owner and that's how he will just using Nomad deploy the service, right? So this way we had two people involved and that's how we made use of a 2FA token to ensure that everybody is on the same page and mess ups don't happen. So how we did this was by building a small proxy in front of Nomad which would basically read the token and which would like check if the token matches the service that is going to go out and if it matches then it would go and go ahead and dispatch it. If it doesn't then it would just throw an error, right? And this worked really well for us in the initial days and it still does. So that helped us manage access really easily. We didn't have to go out there and hunt for different tools. We could just come up with different solutions and designs over and above the existing tooling that we were using. The next one is how do we have the right information to debug any piece of code, right? And every time you want to go ahead and see what the system is at the current state and what has been going wrong, there are multiple certain pointers or sources that you would look for. You would look for logs or metrics, pages that you get, right? So how do you know what's the right thing to look out for, right? So how would you know what the first on-call SRE did and what were the key steps that they actually implemented when they were trying to fix a particular piece of problem? And to get that kind of visibility, you will have to manually go and talk to the person who fixed this or you'll have to look at a piece of documentation which might be hard to maintain when you're newly starting an SRE team, right? So what used to happen initially was that if there are three SRE people who are accessing different networks, they would always access it via one admin account. Using an admin account, they would then go ahead and fix certain things, right? What I'm talking about here is any kind of manual effort taken to debug any problem, right? So in this situation, it's very hard to track down and to understand why a particular command was done and what was the intent behind implementing this particular action that was taken, right? And we don't even know that who did it. So how do we know who's the person who knows how to solve it? So there was missed context for any recurring issue that occurred and you can never trace back actions to the person who implemented it. So for that, we used something called as LDAP, a protocol which was helped, which helped us gain more visibility into our systems. What we basically had was, let's say all these SREs would connect to a common VPN client and then they would access their particular networks. So the VPN client would help us understand the the identity of that SRE, right? Because it's tracked with the email and there would be some central network where there's an LDAP server running, which has the list of all the users and when the, when that SRE would access the network, there would be one box on which on that particular box, whichever machine he's accessing, there would be an LDAP client running, which would connect to the server and then that's how we would know that that SRE one ran a particular command and because he wanted to do certain things and this is how we got LDAP for better debugability. We were able to track how which SRE did what and that's how recurring issues were easy to solve because the context could be maintained over time, right? So this was the first step that we took towards gaining more visibility. Yeah, after this, I'd like to talk about a little bit about networks and things that revolve around it. So in any particular network, if we have multiple machines, this particularly applied to us in our use case where our machine, our piece of code was running in data centers and these machines were just handed down to us. Very little control could be established by us and all the firewall settings or different kinds of accesses were already defined by the vendors. So how would be would be as SRE ensure that is this particular port accessed from another subnetwork and if I have to go ahead and deploy a service, will I be able to do it? Will I will this database be accessible from another subnetwork? For example, right? So can a machine access an HTTP port or a port where TCP can run or a port where UDP services can run and how do I make sure that this works? So one way is to actually go inside the machine or run Linux utility which checks all ports and returns the result, right? But we have to do this in a in a very different permutation in combination way, which would mean that if there are n number of machines in a network, there's an there's a complete mesh of ports that you need to check for access and doing this manually can be tedious, right? So there will also be manual error and back and forth which we didn't want to happen and maintaining context again, right? So to deal with this particular problem, we wrote a small utility called extra. What extra would do was depending on which protocol do you want to check for which port is accessible across the subnetworks. We would provided file adjacent format and file which would check if these protocols and ports work, right? So example on X, let's say machine a there would be an extra server running which would start a process on all of those end ports for that particular protocol and from machine B that's where the extra client would run and it would go and check if all these processes or all these ports are accessible, right? This was an automated way of doing it and this worked really well in mesh kind of an environment, right? And also made sure that the results were maintained and could be carried forward in again an automated way. So how extra works is there's a server on a client. The server would only take an input. Jason and the host IP where the machine on the machine that has to run and extra client is where you would say that this is the machine from which you've to check all the ports, right? So again, a small piece of utility that helped get us started. The next problem that was there or an incident that occurred was sharing storage across machines and it went away. Yeah, sharing storage, right? And every time you have a service or an API service kinds running in a reliable manner, you would want all of them to write to the same database or access the same stateful service, right? If most of our deployments go out as dockerized containers, you would want to have a dockerized solution for your stateful services as well and maintaining that in a reliable manner was an overhead and it had its own challenges, right? So you would probably have to manage the clusters and different databases. You like would probably need one dedicated DV admin of sorts and we at that scale didn't think that was the right choice. So we explored a little bit more and we went through the problems that we had. We saw that we wanted a particular piece of solution that was that was platform independent and also provided a first first hand citizen for dockerized containers. So that's when we came across a tool called Portworks and what Portworks helped us do is ensure that stateful services can be reliably managed in dockerized containers and it would basically lay out a volume across machines and which would be then utilized by your database that is running in one of the machines, right? Portworks was again something that we thought fit well for us and we didn't necessarily have to go out there and write our own tooling or anything and that's how we picked Portworks as a great choice in this scenario. That's regarding state sharing of storage. So let's quickly go back and look at what is the essence of SRE that we first saw and at a team of our scale, we understand that automation, maintainability and visibility. These were some of the problems that we identified and fixed at the start at the event when scale of trusting social was pretty less and today where we are at, we didn't really have to change our tooling or stack. We could just go ahead and use the same and also have scale, you know, coming in. So my point is that if you look at these essences of SRE and keep certain key things in mind, the culture that you build is what is going to help you identify the loopholes. We in our initial day spent a lot of time solutioning and discussing where a particular system could break. What were the failure points and what were the risk factors identifying those helped us come up with solutions and tools which today help us scale better, right? So tooling is something that will obviously follow if you have the right mindset and that's what I would like to say when I say that culture eats tooling for breakfast. Yeah, so we used technology for anything that was repeatable and these were some of the three questions that we found ourselves asking every time that, hey, is this particular problem repeatable? Can it be reliably applied? Is my solution reliable? Will it fail at certain points and is this an economical solution and will there be a better way to do it? Right? So another thing is all of these tools that we have decided designed in-house like tessellate extra and TS2FA and so on. All of them are open source. We intend to make sure that what worked for us could also work for you and I hope you guys can go ahead and check it on our trusting social organization and see how these work for and see if they work for you. If you think you can find value in them, you can always submit an issue or contribute as well, right? Yeah, that's about it. That is my GitHub handle on Twitter and feel free to reach out to any of us at the booth. We have all of us are SREs and we can end up having a good discussion around solutions that might work for your problems. Thanks. So the difference between DevOps and SRE DevOps is a bigger. It's like a discipline which is more like saying something around its theory and SRE is one part or a subset of DevOps where there's a particular mindset that you apply to the day to day activities that you do pretty much overlaps because SRE follows a DevOps culture in a manner, but over and above what SRE does is basically sees if there's a better way to do something. That's the mindset you wouldn't really distinguish between the job profiles or engineers as such. It's a particular mindset that you need to build with time. I guess in a very short way, if I have to answer. Hi, Talina. Hi. Great job. Lots of information back in. That's a quick question. Like you said that your SRE thing is pretty big. Yeah, it's looking at the hybrid stack. It cuts across three multiple cloud providers, couple of data centers. How do you ramp up like new engineers to have any process? Do you like how do we onboard them? Yeah, like how do you onboard them? How do they ramp up? Okay, so we keep improvising with time. It's always hard to get to provide so much context to someone who newly joins us, but I think the key factor here is that we have this one room where all of us sit and there is context or there is a context which is usually discussed openly. There are no silos of information that we believe in keeping, which would mean that and anybody can just come up and ask, hey, how did you really implement this and how does this work? How does this piece of code even work? If they come up and ask some of the core members who have been working for the past few months, that's how context is usually passed around. We have a process of maintaining RFCs and proper documentation, which is again accessible. Another thing is we try to involve all SREs in different products or toolings that we have built and we keep switching context for more visibility. That is something that we think of like, let's say we keep rotating it. You would have to be on call for four to five days for a week or two and we do shifts of morning and evening kinds and it's separated like there would be a runtime platform that we have as our in-house tooling that we've built. There'll be a non-call for people who directly talk to products, right? And people who are in operations. So three to four on-call cadutes. Hi. Although I haven't worked on it, but maybe because it kind of gives you a extreme map of the entire network. Yeah. Hi, from my understanding, SRE, there's a bigger aspect to SRE, which is application development and bug fixes as well, right? Along with a number of improvements. Do you have an application team integrated with SRE? There's one team which encompasses both infrastructure and application folks, right? Or you have a separate application team which works, which has a clear boundary from infrastructure team because this looks more like an infrastructure operations team, just leveraging the DevOps tool CICV and a number of automations, which are any way there in any normal infrastructure operations. But in the core concept of SRE should be one team with everyone capable of doing everything and a fixed number of hours or a lot of effort is devoted towards improvements and enhancements in the operations. So when you say fixing application bugs, do you talk about the product related bugs or do you talk about the internal tooling that we build for different? No, whatever product you are running in the platform, right? So you have one team which understands completely infrastructure plus understands the nature of the application plus business and application as well, right? So they are able to take care of anything and everything. Right? So as the SRE team at Trusting Social, there are two aspects to it. One would be people who are directly talking to basically handling the business line are directly talking to the product owners. If there is a bug that ever comes in production, they would be on call and they would just communicate it to the product teams and the product teams go ahead and fix them. We never really go ahead and fix product related bugs. We are mostly there for reliably maintaining the product in life or production services. Second is someone who's working on the tooling aspects which help these product line like the people at like operations help them to make sure that deployments are done faster or in a reliable way. These people who built in-house tooling keep enhancing the tools depending on the requests that come up from the operation heads, right? So that is how it's usually managed. So we'll take the last question. Yeah, I think he can. Yeah, hi. Is this working? Okay, cool. Yeah. So I had reliability engineering at Trusting Social to answer your question. I don't know where it came from. Who was the guy who asked it? Oh, you did. All right. Cool. Yeah. So the SRE essence is exactly what you said it is. So what we try to do is we have multiple teams. One is a team which we call as someone who is responsible for understanding the entire company's need because we have around two dozen products that run across multiple countries and data centers. Somebody has to keep the bar of excellence at understanding that, hey, these are the common challenges that I see on every day. How can I take this back into an engineering room and build something which is going to work you uniformly for everybody? The question is not just build unique solutions for every product because then you will end up maintaining large teams which have a different onboarding as well. So you build something which is common. Now this is pure engineering here. So it is possible that you might find that a lot of things that we do are repeat of what you may say, hey, there's an open source tool for this, there's X for Y, there's Z for Alpha, there's P for beta or something like that. But bringing this all down to one single roof is first thing. Then there are special teams which actually integrate with the products. Their only job is to act like how an AWS guy would work with you and to help you do a pre-sale cycle so that your product gets onboarded onto it and their entire job is built around customer empathy. If you are a product of mine and I want you to onboard it to my platform which is running commonly for the entire company, the entire team is dedicated towards that. Then there's another team which only and only focuses on how can we optimize operations because traditionally what has happened is that we only see as DevOps as, okay, we'll click a few things, we'll install X, we'll install Y and we'll maintain it and this tend to forget how do we take this back to the boardroom and keep extracting the benefits into a central tool chain not at the cost of overengineering but also to understand how can a product and a business benefit from it and this is a cycle of teams which keep working together. End goal being there's one single team as we all call it as and by their factors that you're not considered here these because the talk is small. I think this talk should have been an hour long so but they didn't give a sponsor slot for that long. So anyway, so there are other aspects as well security. Nobody talks about security in DevOps, right? That is also one of the key ingredients that goes. So there's a team which is dedicated only thinking about that whatever product is running out there on a public domain. How is data being leaked? Is there any PII information which is going out? Are the API is working strong? Am I leaking anything on get path which should not be our proxy is going to case this request. So there's a lot more than just this. This is just a tip of the iceberg. I would say you want to know more come check us at the booth. So he was just the head of engineering at Cytolability Engineering and he can definitely help any of you answer any questions that you have not related to SRE even like you can just go have a chat with him.


Let's begin with the FreeRTOS and what it is about. In general, we will speak about what the FreeRTOS is as an operating system. We'll describe basic features, the two APIs that you can use to access its functions, linkage with the STM32 Cube MX, and we'll have a couple of examples how to work with that and some live demonstration. We will speak about the setup of the FreeRTOS, how you can add or exclude features to save memory space. We will speak about memory allocation. This is a very important topic because you need to give some memory to different tasks. We'll speak about how the scheduler works, how it gives time to different tasks, and we'll speak about the communication between the tasks, what a task is and what it is not, how the FreeRTOS manages its resources, and we'll speak about other items or objects that it supports. There is as well a chapter about advanced topics like implementing different safety hooks and functions that can report stack violation, memory exhaustion, and so on. We'll speak about debugging and support in different tools, and as well about the looper, which means that the FreeRTOS can give you some free time, where the microcontroller doesn't need to kick and doesn't need to be alive to save typically the battery lifetime. And we will as well speak about the footprint in terms of flash and RAM size.