Okay. Well, thank you very much for coming this morning. That was a great talk we just heard. We're going to be trying to build on that now with these different breakout sessions. This talk is about planning and public health. We have on our panel here Peter Bella with the Illinois Area Council. The government is going to talk on air quality issues. Christine Vina, role of transportation planning from VIA. Azuka Mel about planning and education. John Austin about new urbanism. He's with the Development Services Office. And I'll just be the moderator John Dugan. I'm director of planning for the city and talk a little bit about city planning issues and our comprehensive plan. So to start off with modern city planning and public health practices both emerged to protect communities from epidemic diseases in industrializing cities about 150 years ago. As diseases subsided the disciplines took two separate paths. Planning improved quality of life through provision of jobs and housing and regulations of the built environment while public health focused on disease and treatment, education, health care, nutrition and individual health behaviors. Planning and public health departments today have very different responsibilities and seldom develop mutual policies or interact too much. Today there is though an increasing number of deaths from chronic illnesses such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes and asthma. Research confirms that the illnesses are directly affected by the character of the built environment. Community design can significantly affect violent crime, physical activities, diet, pollution related illnesses, accidental injuries and other health conditions. So the character and the quality of our built environment certainly is of concern to both disciplines and of course that's why we're gathering here today. A renewed cooperation between city planning and public health is about addressing the full range of factors affecting health. Individual health behaviors, lifetimes, choices, improved access to education, employment, healthy working conditions, healthy transportation options, health services and nutritious food. And a quality physical environment and neighborhoods that support public health. In San Antonio we embarked recently on a new comprehensive plan that tries to change the model that we just heard about. Our plan initially was adopted in 1978 and really hasn't been updated since then. So we're way, way behind on incorporating some of these concepts into our development policies. The comprehensive plan simultaneously addresses land use, transportation, environmental resources, public services, economic development policies as they further community health. So our primary goal over this plan should be the development of a city of healthy communities. And that's what we're about. Today we're going to hear from our panel from different perspectives on what a healthy community and a healthy city is about and what we might be doing in the future. And then we'll open it up for questions or comments from you all. So thank you very much and I'd like to first introduce, I'd like you to just sort of let everybody give their presentation and then we'll have 20 or 30 minutes for open questions. So we'll start off here then with Peter Bella from Alamo Area Council of Governments. Good morning. Thank you again. My name is Peter Bella. I am the director of the Natural Resources Department with the Alamo Area Council of Governments and what that means is air quality planning throughout the region. What you've heard this morning so far has a number of takeaways, one of which is the value of incremental growth. I think that one of the challenges we see here in the San Antonio region is that we're really booming in population and there's the economic development factor produced by the Eagleford Development which is beyond or is not within, let's say, is not within that kind of paradigm of contemplative planned growth patterns. There are a lot of issues that have to do with large quick growth that we're seeing here today. However, when it comes to the built environment what I'll do in just a couple of remarks that I have is focus on why the built environment has links to air quality. That's the right button. What I do professionally is I do planning involved with ozone. There is ground level ozone. Our region is currently struggling to maintain our good air quality when you measure against the ozone standards. The first concept is that ozone presents health risks. As you breathe ozone out in the streets, it'll be the elderly, the young, those with pulmonary impairments that know at first when they're breathing levels of ozone, high levels of ozone. It's an important enough health risk that there are federal rules, federal standards, clean air standards that apply. The first paragraph you see above the table is the actual statement of the federal ozone standard. Basically, there are air quality monitors throughout the region, the ones we care about most are here in Bear County. They record ozone levels and the rule says take a look at your highest ozone levels, pick the fourth highest every year, average those together over three years at every one of the regulatory monitors, and that's the number we care about. What this table shows is that while the standard says must not exceed 75 parts per billion concentration in the atmosphere, our most recent full three years of data set against the rule says we're not doing too good. So in fact in 2012 and in 2013 and even now this early into the season because it's a three year average, our numbers are high enough in 2014 for that three year average, that the San Antonio region is exceeding, is violating the federal air quality standards. So that represents health risk and if we cannot find our way to make our own reductions, we will then be deemed in non-attainment, that is it's a status, the federal government the EPA assigns that says you guys had a chance you couldn't quite get there yourself so we will come in and we will apply rules in the region that will be the process for getting you back in. So what causes ozone I'll simplify this in the sense that while there are these two classes of gases as I call them, these two families, the oxides of nitrogen is the ones I'll focus on. The oxides of nitrogen are typically produced by high temperature pressure internal combustion processes. Power generation, 18 wheelers, the cars and trucks we all drive those sorts of high temperature and pressures are what it takes to make nitrogen and oxygen form NOx molecules. VOCs, I won't focus on them so much the volatile organics, the paints, the thinners, a lot of different gasoline vapors, a lot of different vapors that have organics in them, I won't focus on them too much and the reason that I won't focus on them too much is because as you see at the very bottom there we control ozone by controlling these precursors when these guys go up into the atmosphere and they cook in the sun that's when they become ozone. We've got to control the oxides of nitrogen so I'll just conclude with those remarks on NOx, oxides of nitrogen. This trend shows something pretty admirable this trend shows that as the San Antonio region grows San Antonio region being the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan statistical area as the region has grown in population we can see a downward trend in the production of oxides of nitrogen a downward trend in the production of NOx which is what it takes to help get us there so if I look at let's take a little closer look up if I look at that 2012 there it is that 2012 marker for NOx, okay what's in there well these are the constituents these are the sources and I've taken out and outlined the two largest of them on road the cars and trucks we all drive again 18-wheelers on the road too sure the cars and trucks we all drive and power generation again think of those industrial processes the high temperature and pressure inside your car's engine power generation and others cement petroleum industry and that's traditional petroleum industry this does not include the Eagleford emissions and here's where the point comes very quickly very simply it means something to us because the built environment as you design places that are walkable as you design places that have local infrastructure that supports a dense community on road vehicles and power generation I mean if you're part of the problem that means you're part of the solution so we look to the vehicle and power generation emissions reductions reduce fossil fuel consumption that's not only renewables but that's energy efficiency so energy efficiency in building design the envelope design construction sort of the micro scale compact walkable communities mass transit and transit oriented development master plant communities that are efficient in their planning these are all processes that mean growth doesn't have to mean greater pollution so that's simply my outline and I would welcome you to join with me on the fight to control the fight of well let's fight small thank you very much thank you Peter okay now we've got John Austin talking about new urbanism approaches the planet we've had to speed this up too because we're a little bit behind so but we'll get the focus on all these different talks okay I think this is better this is our first slide with public health and built environment and we heard before from the Chuck that financially we are the way we're growing right now that we might be or maybe we'll be facing some issues down the road we just heard from Peter that the way we connect our lives especially in terms of transportation and related to it of course development patterns that we will be you know facing some issues and right now I would like to focus on the how built environment not in terms of producing gases but just the how we you know function physically in the built environment is affecting our health public health officials experts telling us that physical activity is essential for good health I don't think anybody can argue with that one and it's not I mean obesity is a big problem but it's just simply by product of being inactive and people who's physically active live longer and better lives and even they say it's better to be fat and fit than thin and unfit that I never heard before but this is coming from again from medical experts so basically how can we live actively I mean physically active that's what I'm talking about active living in a way that you know description is that you know we the way of life that integrates physical activity into our daily routines such as you just walk to you know stores or destinations or ride bicycle to work etc but you'll see that there's a kind of like separation here because you know exercising such as at a gym is okay too but there's a big difference between these two approaches one is basically we're making physical activity part of our lives versus that we just you know after work go to gym and work out for two hours we're still physically fit healthy but the way they work is completely different philosophies let's come to the point of what was planning in its regulator arm of zoning and whenever you open a zoning code first sentence or maybe in the first page of it you will definitely see this statement this is zoning and planning is to promote you know health, safety and welfare but the health officials those are experts on health telling us that we as planners or developers are just in charge of this you know built environment we're not doing such a good job with promoting health and that's what I'm going to focus how does built environment impact our our health this is my personal opinion however I think there's probably consensus but whenever we have more automobile oriented low density single use type of you know development pattern with very low connectivity and of course coupling with automobile culture that we have in this country that it's very likely that we're going to have less physically active lifestyle because we'll be sitting in our car all the time we'll be sitting in our offices we'll be sitting at home so the opportunity to become physically active and do things at the same time is getting less and less this is an image from our town it's also a 1604 type area and the actually the neighborhood these are like chain of neighborhoods that they were so large that you know they couldn't fit in the pictures because I want to show you that each house or actually each street here they have sidewalks and their main you know collector they have bike lanes but do we really see people here you know walk to destination just I described before to conduct their daily lives what they can walk to I mean even though there's sidewalks yes I see that but you know probably nearest store is maybe three maybe five miles away from their home so in an environment like this even though all the let's say required infrastructure is in place but the context of this development pattern does not promote walking therefore does not promote really active living lifestyle whereas a place like this this is not San Antonio and also this is in Europe this is in Barcelona and they were built prior to automobile introduction so this is not like an entire day people you know just park on the other side of the building and just walk there this entire city is like this so block after block it's all connected you know the fabric of urban space and in a place like this versus the other one the other one you have to have a precursor to be able to live here is you have to have a car otherwise you cannot function here you cannot live here you cannot go anywhere and so this is what we designed just Chuck mentioned earlier that this is our new experiment in our history and this is the old one and old one is still working while it's thriving and even though we introduced cars after we built this environment and it's hard to live with a car here because it's pain in the neck that you have to find parking it's very hard it's very expensive and obviously you cannot speed here so you know just probably walking faster than driving so these are two different mentalities two different worlds two different type of built environment and I think it's hard it's not hard to say that environment like this encourages people to live in like healthier lifestyles well some more images that after this point I would like to focus on I want to use the word scale of type of development patterns at one end of the scale these are purely pedestrian oriented places these are all from different continents different cultures but they're all speaking very similar language they're all closely in the traffic and the height and the size of the buildings and the public realm is very similar and yet you see that it's full of people that are either going somewhere or doing something but just like Chuck said this is generated in one heck of a revenue per acre versus the one we saw before and also I would like to mention that this is the one that the place that I was born at and some of my childhood went into spent on this very same street and I'm very familiar with the environment and here this is from Texas this is actually mostly from San Antonio this is Dallas I think this is such a shocking picture that I just wanted to put over there but rest of it this is Bandera 6-0-4 area and this is Bandera 6-0-4 shopping center that this is the built environment we created here in this town as you see again here it was a bus stop it was a sidewalk but you hardly see anybody I mean maybe just a few people during the day but most of the people will be obviously driving and this environment is the built environment that we have here right now built on just one focus that is to accommodate automobile and as I mentioned before the more environments we produce it will be harder for ourselves to get physically fit or have a life that full of physical activity here this is a subdivision here's a big shopping center even though if you're living here this nearest house to the subdivision you still have to probably go a mile on the other direction and come back and on this collective to be able to get to this shopping center there's no way people will walk and even though if you're going here you know just going to some other store it's not going to be a pleasant walking experience so in new urbanism movement basically there's not really nothing new about urbanism because basically we're promoting the old one and as I mentioned this is the scale this is one end of the scale this is pure pedestrian and the other one is pure automobile so basically anywhere in between hopefully will be better than this but at the same time Chuck mentioned with the futon example that somewhere in between may not be the best option because it's not going to function well enough to satisfy either of them so in the new urbanism approach that hopefully the scale will be the needle will be closer to this end of the scale and yes there will be some cars there's no way they will go away but as long as we keep the focus on pedestrians in human scale I think we will make some progress and this concludes my presentation. Christine. Thank you John. This is the intermission side of the show here part of the show just we can't really see anybody out there so you're all in silhouettes so I won't tell but how many of you took the bus to the conference today wow two people I thought we'd have a whole handful okay and if you're probably under 25 too and also just want to get an idea of who's in the audience if you're a planner, urban designer, raise your hand health professionals just call out if you're not one of those two groups what are you community outreach okay great parks okay wonderful well Potter thank you all for coming today our keynote I really really enjoyed I'm an architect or at least I play one on TV but more of a planner and I work for VIA as a project manager for urban design but also my background is a lot in community development I used to be the executive director of South Town which kind of influences the way that I see San Antonio because I came to San Antonio from DC which was a wonderful environment I didn't have to have a car walked everywhere, weighed 50 pounds less because of it and then you come to San Antonio and you don't have that kind of environment so I'm going to quickly go through because John actually touched a lot as well this is the only slide that I'm going to have a street car and if you have any questions about street car after this I have a colleague in the back and I'm going to send them all to him when I looked at you know how does transportation and health connect if we just go to SA 2020 and look at some of the language you know an efficient transportation system is critical the effect of transportation on health and fitness transportation can help with placemaking and those that choose to walk or ride a bike are going to be more healthy even though it does say instead of driving or riding a bus but that's the point is that regardless of your regardless of your transportation mode which can be many, whether it's the vehicle, a street car a bicycle, a pedestrian we can all use the roadway and I like the historic picture that was shown earlier this is Houston Street where you know everybody a pedestrian, cars, transit is all operating in the same roadway and quite efficiently there's a variety of types of pedestrians who are all sidewalk users, you have a lot of children some that are not as able as others, many different age groups I'm always fascinated with the discussion of where you place a sidewalk against a curb and I say you know if you're going in a street that's 45 miles an hour and you have a sidewalk that's right against the curb do you want your 80 year old mom or your 2 year old child against that curb in no way John already kind of showed you what our development pattern has been thus far and what we're trying to transition to in terms of going from a very suburban environment to an urban environment that promotes walking and different types of urban development and we look at that in terms of what does our public infrastructure have to do with that, how can it connect neighborhoods and what are the building forms and densities that help support public transit which then helps support a very walkable environment so the idea is more people and fewer vehicles showing the same number of folks they're on the road is the same number that you can get in one vehicle so the next time you're behind a bus and you say dang I wish that bus would move because I'm stopped behind it imagine if every person in that bus was in a car you'd have cars in front of you instead of one vehicle so again showing how much roadway single occupancy vehicles take up so if we can reduce the number of folks through public transit and other means by walking and bicycling we've got a lot more space on the roadway for things like parallel parking that supports local business and is much safer for the pedestrian traffic development that are focused around transit or what we call transit oriented development or TOD we try to cluster those areas along a corridor so the trips that you take every day can be much more aligned and you can get you can take public transit on one line and get off at different stations that you don't have to go all over the city for that and then at the station area we want to focus those uses that are much more around that quarter mile or half mile radius for FTA purposes which we live our lives by the general rule of thumb is if you're within half a mile of a transit stop they consider you accessible to transit or if you're within three miles you're accessible by a bicycle so again looking at the core diagrams that you within that quarter mile you can have basically about three different neighborhoods or within half mile about 12 neighborhoods the frameworks that help support TOD and I will tell you that Avia and the city of San Antonio are working hand in hand right now to help develop policies that are going to support transit oriented development which looks at how land use can go hand in hand with transportation the densities that are going to help us accommodate all the new growth that San Antonio is going to have over the next few decades what that urban design place making looks like and what do we do about parking and reducing those parking requirements there's a great book called the high cost of free parking that whenever you have lots of areas with low cost or free parking it encourages driving so the more that we can raise our parking rates the more we're going to have a lot more successful transit just to compare a square mile each of an inner city neighborhood I believe this happens to be on the left which runs basically between San Pedro and I-10 just south of Hildebrand and a suburban neighborhood I think that is somewhere in Stone Oak look at the number of the population you can serve five times the number of people in that same area double the number of parcels because you're going to have a lot more density within the left side grid system and the way that that pattern of development affects transit is that when you start looking at how you operate transit vehicles through a neighborhood and how people and households can have access to public transit you want to make sure that you've got at least that half mile distance so in a square mile everybody can have access to transit when you're on a basic grid try doing that I can't even bring in another layer on the right because it just doesn't work so that's what John wanted to reiterate was he was talking about our new development patterns and how those more suburban sprawl type of patterns just simply don't support transit and that's why you will see a lot of the outlying service that we have at only one bus an hour because it's very very difficult to get through those areas and then if they're gated communities we can't get there at all so what we're really trying to do is transform the public realm and these are all thought of as of San Antonio to something that's much more walkable this is Fred Road prior to BRT we did do some improvements with rapid transit along Fredericksburg Road but if you see the type of pedestrian path that someone has to go through it who wants to go through that and the distance between intersections or signalized intersections where it's safe to cross the street is so great because your block link is so long that you become as a pedestrian or somebody in a wheelchair really becomes human targets and we've seen a lot of evidence in that around the city so this is you know what we're trying to do and I both love Barcelona so we've both independently picked photos of that city but having the pedestrian environment that supports vehicles bikes everybody together but does not place the focus on the access to the pedestrian I look at two examples where you have very minimal which is often times in San Antonio we have very very tight constraints about what we do but as you can see in other cities you can have a small amount or a very narrow amount of right away and still it's a beautiful place to go through sharing the road I think as we become more and more accustomed to bikes and pedestrians using the same roadway we're going to see more of these types of signs just one example locally this is on South St. Mary's right there at the river a bus stop look what's going on I mean if we look a little bit closer you've got somebody reading you've got the transit information pile on there you've got some trash cans you've got the weenie man selling hot dogs and everybody just kind of hanging a little not too orderly and the people who are not at the bus stop that have to pass through there get a negative impression about what's going on at the bus stop when that really shouldn't have to happen so here's a prototype in Paris that they did what if you provided places where people could go to the bus stop and park their cars and then you added beautiful areas to sit with the map behind them maybe a little community library where if you want to read to stop whether you're a transit rider or not you can do that the weenie man can come in and have his own little stand under cover you've got great up to date transit information on your screens there and everybody's happy and so it can become a very different place in the environment on the street which is a little bit better urban design I would be remiss in not bringing up at least one via project as of 2015 which I guess is next year the west side multimodal for those of you who don't know as you take Houston west to dead end into Atlanta we do own the where's the red one the transit center there is the 1907 historic transportation terminal there at the axis of Houston we have acquired the entire city block there to transform it into a transit plaza focused on the pedestrian so this is expected to be a place of destination where you can get the best stuff from the northeast at Frio and Travis through the plaza to the dome of the transit center the little areas on the right underneath a circular canopy that serves as waiting areas for the bus around the entire block can be used by food trucks so it'll become a very very vibrant environment where you know cars, bikes, pads and all intermingle public art signature piece there's going to be an 85 foot high lighted tower there great photo at night be all very safe right next to the county jail and so this is the story regardless of transit modes everyone starts as a pedestrian and if we begin to change our development patterns to focus on pedestrian access instead of the vehicle we can begin to design our road networks I won't read all of this but all of this as we design better will result in better air quality as Peter mentioned better TOD and economic development opportunities better and more places to walk on a daily basis better and less expensive environments for our future generations and make for a leaner and healthier community so those communities that do have better pedestrian access which are traditionally in the inner city there's the documentation that shows when you add your housing and transportation costs as part of your total expenditures you're going to have that much less and so your transportation costs for example if you lived in downtown $376 a month versus Stonoke at $1045 a month which you're paying on transportation so the idea of connecting what you pay in housing and what you pay in transportation has to be part of the same equation so I invite all of you to join the FABFOR who are our most famous pedestrians and get on board thank you thank you Christine now we have professor Kamal good morning everyone you hear me well okay great what else can we start with other than the Highline New York what this presentation is about is actually to wrap up the professional and multi-discipline approaches and how we prepare our students for joining the job market and helping the professionals and be prepared to tackle urbanism and planning issues in cities like San Antonio so I'm officially actually addressing urbanism and planning because not only all the planning are just about urbanism we have suburban everywhere so I'm talking a little bit here about the APA but also not only the American Planning Association kind of specialization or areas of concentration but we're going to start to see how the boundaries between disciplines started to dissolve and not only between the disciplines within our college and education and architecture and urbanism and planning so starting with what the APA defined as a common set of specialization or areas of concentrations for programs prepare students with a planning degree we have land use planning environmental planning economic development planning transportation planning housing and community development planning and recently we started seeing a specialization on geographic information system kind of equip students to tackle all these five specialization with more credible and reliable scientific approaches for assessing the communities we also started seeing public health and healthy communities as separate specialization or areas of concentration and sometimes we see them as a sub-discipline or sub-specialization under number five which is housing and community development which we also see in neighborhood analysis in that discipline basically we started focusing this particularly in my classes I'm talking about myself but not only the planning discipline or the planning organization we started seeing the sub-discipline of health and public health and community health just two weeks ago and Design and Health Summit in Washington DC we might see in the health issue started to be addressed kind of strongly in an ocean by everyone and the keynote speaker who's the US Surgeon General by the way who showed up as a keynote speaker and a strong message coming from the AIA itself talking about the health is not anymore is not a health care building is not clinics not hospitals so we're not waiting until a problem happens and then we solve it as architects I'm an architect myself by the way by practice as well and here's I'm kind of getting some excerpts from the quotes addressed in that conference and first one is the paradigm and I'm quoting here the US Surgeon General the paradigm of recognizing the health effects of every space and building and speaking to foster health is a critical next step for the building professions quoting again or quoting more the president of the AIA who said the strong message architecture profession is thinking about health either as a typology of hospitals and clinics or simply as disease mitigation and prevention we talk about communities as a mindset as an architect doesn't mean that it doesn't happen but the typical mindset is stuck into the typology and on the other hand we started seeing also this notion of inter-professional and multi-disciplinary kind of speech about tackling health issues coming also from the health public health professionals so I'm quoting here also the task force of the association of schools of public health two years ago saying that growing importance of inter-professional approaches to the education and practice of health professionals is coming up so we started seeing this paradigm shift and the boundaries between urban designer, urban planners architects started to dissolve and not only that we started seeing collaboration and research and teaching and here we are in the second year we have students outside presenting their work on smart growths and walkability and assisting how we can make our neighborhood more workable for healthy and active living and we have a project last year just assisting the components of active living on the neighborhood scale and in a minute I'm going to give some examples of their work but what do we do in our curriculum to address the public health issues what we did is like we have students engaged with communities with public health professionals engage also through a problem solving approaches having a project based curriculum developed around a certain issue to tackle and we hope to get to what Peter talked about like the ozone and looking at air quality and maybe looking at just the multi-modal kind of assessment or where buses are that's as an issue or one project at a time and unfortunately like also we still developing the curriculum around multi attributes variables so the students could be prepared for whatever the discipline but maybe we're going to get there when we have like more specialization on environment quality or transportation planning. We have students all the time interacting with professionals we address the needs for job market but also we care a lot about what scientifically and credibly the students will use quantitative analysis measures and software to be prepared for addressing issues credibly and scientifically. The way we also create the technology through to address the curriculum that address all these disciplines and prepare students we use different computer technologies we use softwares we have lab instructions GIS we have a good partnership with ISRI Environmental Science Research Institute that the creator or the founder of the ARC GIS we use a lot of quantitative measures student tests their measures so they can work out of real data from multi actually partnership with agencies the appraisal district the city of San Antonio is a lot of the data that you have on the web or we acquire from your people so we have them work in real projects and they look at what the city is up to and they respond to those in their classrooms. They do statistical analysis I'm not going to list those but I want to walk you through the number of images produced actually last year by group of students individually so we have them look at strategic assessment of healthy hubs this is part of the metro health kind of notion started on the west side correct me David clear he's here correct me if I'm wrong but we started looking at number of projects of assisting what are the healthy hubs how they define it how we can have a good strategy for food desert areas so we work in collaboration and partnership and building on what the local government and local initiatives are so we're not going to have students who are dreaming with projects they they're actually working for reality projects they do create their own quantitative measure on the far right you see a graph of the quality of bike lanes within the neighborhood so when we have these numbers and their location visually addressed in a map and give it to the community and many times we present to the community associations or bring the community association staff and board here to the campus to talk to our students throughout the process and by the end they can have these numbers and this is really accurate it's scientific and it is there and then you can use it maybe to allocate the resources to ask for more money or to to have their own strategies for improvement. The second one from the left you see that's one of our star students Nishma she's done an active living assessment for one of the west side neighborhoods Avenida Guadalupe last year and what she has done basically she used multiple colors to combine multiple attributes or multiple variables of the physical activity plan that could be measured and addressed to see where are the gaps in the area within one neighborhood to provide that fit or the possibility for people to be fit as John Austin was just talking about. So we have them engaged together as teams also part of the skills they need to acquire before joining the job market but also to work with community I was just told by the way by my students outside that they were asked by the council woman that she wanted them to present their work that's out there in the garden neighborhood which is what we want out of an event like this one and I'm going to wrap my presentation very quickly with this kind of intro sheet this is available outside if you could just chat with the students and grab one of these sheets it has on the other side some instructions or how to make an assessment for the posters outside and we can select a winning project by the end of the day. Thank you. Okay we have a few minutes for questions, comments by our audience. Yes sir. Canada for about five years and the Nova Scotia Motor Vehicle Code says a pedestrian just has to hold their arm out and all the cars must stop anywhere. And I'm wondering if we are not bringing up this issue that we need to talk to the Texas Legislature we need to talk about wait a minute within our communities it's shocking and I've already heard the huffs but we need to start talking about if we're going to have this serious conversation we need to have it addressed at the legislative level as well I'll let anyone address that. Okay I didn't really hear the first part of it but let me see if I can rephrase the question how are we as a community going to start looking at the likely conflict between the ped and motorist okay thank you I was putting it lightly there was one of the photos that John showed up there that had the vehicles on the crosswalk I've often wanted to take a survey in San Antonio and to see how many people understand what a stop bar is when you come to an intersection there's a solid line that's called a stop bar that's where you're supposed to stop your vehicle and as a pedestrian you really do take your life in your own hands here in this city both as a pedestrian and as a cyclist if you go to Europe and see motorist drive they are constantly looking over their right shoulder to see if that cyclist is coming behind them or if that ped is coming from the right side crossing it is not for the most part innate in our culture to consider the pedestrian if you go on San Pedro right in front of SAC and look at that pedestrian crossing every car must stop by law once there's a pedestrian in the street it's amazing that we have not had a lot of deaths that it is and the one here as well I think this one is a little bit more protected because it's so close to the intersection a lot of times the traffic is not going as fast but I think there's a paradigm shift in the city that must take place as to how we address the pedestrian not as a low life that doesn't have a car but that somebody is either being healthy choosing to help the environment perhaps doesn't have a vehicle or wants to take advantage of a commercial district that does exactly what it's supposed to and provide a variety of services in a short walk period but you're right on target I don't have a solution for it except for public education I know we at VIA have had to do a lot of that in terms of how you interact with a bus and a bus stop and the pedestrian traffic around a bus stop but I would certainly welcome ways in which we as a community can start that dialogue I appreciate the question though. Okay but running short on time does anybody else want to ask a question or make a comment? I just wanted to follow up on this point because I think he made a really important point that maybe didn't quite sink in and his issue or his question is that law really disadvantages pedestrians and when we look at pedestrian safety the way it's kind of implemented it's by adding additional restrictions to pedestrian movement and so even to say that the stop bars are not respected implies that the pedestrians need to be in the crosswalks and what he was pointing out of it is that in other cultures and cultures that are less auto dominated the pedestrians have the priority and so shifting the culture mindset from saying auto transit has priority over pedestrian transit to really take care of the pedestrians pedestrians should have the priority. Okay I'll just make a little comment on that the city of San Antonio just adopted a complete streets policy and our definition of complete streets is where as many modes as possible can coexist on a roadway safely. The safety part is part of the challenge for urban design transportation planners and urban planners to be sure that that new complete street has that ability and that will have that outcome. That's our policy we have an objective of tripling the number of complete streets in the city in the next five years so at least there's an objective assessment and an objective proactive approach to that although of course we're only talking about 15 or so miles of streets out of thousands but it's a start. Any other questions or comments? Yes ma'am. Can I appreciate the work that all the folks from the city of San Antonio are doing on this issue but and I mentioned this to you earlier I live very close to the Broadway Hilda Brand Intersection we've just spent 16 million dollars on that project 16 million dollar investment to move traffic faster and yet the sidewalks that were put back in were 32 inches wide with light standards in the middle of them so we spent 16 million dollars to make it easier to get traffic through downtown because Broadway Hilda Brand is downtown and made it much harder for pedestrians to use that intersection. So it's great to hear all these things and it's great that the city's adopted a complete streets policy but when does that action this really isn't a question it's just an editorial comment. When do we actually see that in projects that are being constructed? It should be in the next round of Bond Issue projects that one was from the last round when that wasn't a policy. Okay we need to move on to the next session but thank you so much I hope you enjoyed the comments and thanks for participating.


December 2018 I reviewed the Oranic Aries G1 that at first glance looks identical to the Aries G2 on review here. But don't be fooled, the Aries G2 is in a class of its own. The initial Aries streamer was the first that showed the world how important a clean digital feed to a DAC is. I considered the Aries G1 to be the successor of the initial Aries. The Aries G2 on review here is in fact a cost-no-object version of the G1. Functionally they are almost the same, the most significant difference being the optional 2.5 inch internal hard disk in the G2 as where the G1 needs an external hard disk. Let's see how the Aries G2 fits into your stereo. The Aries G2 is a so called digital transport. It reads music from a network share, internet source or optional internal hard disk. It needs to be connected to a digital to analog converter that is connected to an amplifier driving loudspeakers. It also needs to be connected over your home network to the internet to receive streaming services and internet radio. That connection can be over a network cable or wi-fi. If you want to play music from your computer or NAS, that needs to be connected to the network and switched on. Normally you would use Orelik's own Lightning DS app that is only available for iPhone and iPad, not for Android devices. Next to its own Lightning GS operating system, the G2 can also be used as a DNA renderer, Roon Endpoint, Airplay renderer, Bluetooth player and Spotify Connect renderer. The cabinet measures 340 x 320 x 80mm and weighs a hefty 7.2 kilos. Dominant on the front is the 4 inch 300 pixels per inch high resolution color screen that offers very high quality album art and info. On the left side the standby button and on the right side four buttons for play, pause, menu, skip forward and skip back. 40 coupling feet on the bottom are spring loaded. On the rear we see the power switch with fuse and IAC power socket. Then the network connector, a USB B port for storage media, the clean USB B port for hooking up the DAC, a special lightning link on HDMI, a Toslink output, a SPDIF output and an AES EBU output. Two antenna sockets for the supplied rubber antennas offer Wi-Fi diversity reception. The G2 housing is machined from an aluminium slab like products from Air and for instance the Apple MacBook Pro. This way a very strong and stable housing is created that together with the decoupling feet reduces microphony in critical components like the crystal oscillators to a minimum. All components are mounted against the 9.7mm thick top. Hence the cabinet needs to be open from the bottom. The first thing I noticed was the primary power supply board that looks identical to that of the G1. The same goes for the PCBs that hold the display and the front controls. But that's where the comparison with the G1 ends. The G2 can house a 2.5 inch hard disk, preferably in SSD type, where the G1 can't. Despite almost identical looks the housing of the G1 is built from metal panels that are screwed together rather than using a machined aluminium cabinet the G2 has. And the electronics is not internally shielded from the primary power board like in the G2. The circuit board on the G1 is also considerably smaller, holding clearly less components. When we have a closer look at the G2 board we see three clearly marked areas. This area is the general electronics. Remarkable are the two USB interface chips. Apparently a separate one is used for the silent USB to DAC output. The WiFi and Bluetooth radios are as usual mounted on a piggyback board. Often you see a small board computer mounted piggyback too that handles the streaming. Nothing in this case. Aurelac uses its own Tesla platform integrated on the board. In current products like the Aries G1 and G2 it is a second generation Tesla that is 50% faster than in the original Aries. It uses a 1.2GHz quad core processor with 2GB system memory and 8GB data storage. The second area is for the Aries 3 output. It appears to have its own Femto clock oscillator and offers galvanically decoupled Aries EBU, SPDIF and Toslink. The third area holds the clean USB output to the DAC. It also has its own Femto clock oscillator. Between the three areas digital isolators prevent noise leaking from one area to the other. And of course there are two separate power supplies using toroidal transformers and there is local voltage stabilisation. The circuit board looks very structured and well designed, which is a part of a good digital audio design. A short word about the Aurelac lightning link. It is intended for use with other components in the G2 range. To quote Aurelac, lightning link is different from other HDMI-based I2S connections, because it is bi-directional it opens the door to jitter-free operation of all the devices in your system. End of quote. According to Aurelac, it does not provide a better audio quality than the silent USB output but offers system control when using other G2 products. All Aurelac network transports can be operated from the free Lightning DS app, which is only available for iOS and iPadOS. But if you like, you can also use open home or DLNA software like Bubble UPnP, Bubble DS, Lin Kazoo and Lumin. I would spend another 10% of the price of the G2 to buy myself an iPad. Airplay, Soundcast and Bluetooth are supported too for those that are forced by the family to compromise audio quality for convenience. I rather stick to Roon or Aurelac's app. The G2 accepts all popular PCM audio formats ranging from 44.1 kHz to 384 kHz sampling rate and 16 to 32 bit depth. DSD is supported from DSD64 to DSD512 in both DOP and native format. If needed the Airis G2 can upsample and downsample PCM files and convert DSD to PCM. And there is a DSP section that lets you apply equaliser settings. Multiroom is supported too, like Gapless Playback and memory caching. Over the years Lightning DS has become very mature, quick and stable. Let me show you the most used functions. This is the main screen where you can select the player you want to control. As you can see I have not only the Airis G2 in my network but also the Airis Mini. You can put both to sleep, power on, mute and unmute. Opening the menu on the left shows sources in the most left column and the options within one section to the right of it. This way you can browse composers, artists, albums and so on when choosing your own music collection. Go to internet radio and you have the usual selection tools leading to stations of your choice. If you are subscribed to Tidalocobus or both like I am, you can play music from these services too. The Lightning DS server in the Airis G2 receives updates automatically so you are always up to date. A nice feature is the learning infrared function. You can teach the Airis G2 to accept infrared codes from any remote, like for instance the buttons on your remote of your amp that are intended to control a CD player. The Airis G2 is clearly in the premier league and not only price wise. It is amongst the best digital front ends I have heard up till now. Switching from my SOtM-SMS-200 alternio, which is very good, see my review, the stereo image opens up further, is wider and deeper while instruments are better focused. Resolution was so much better too, as if there was just more time to render the music better. It leads to a very well defined texture while transient sounds faster and more powerful, but the most striking improvement was on voices. Any voices. I like the words to explain, perhaps more natural by lack of better words. Because of the better transients, a glockenspiel sounds free and sparkling, may I say analog. I know you want me to compare it to the SOtM-SMS-200 alternio with the SCLK OCX10 external clock I reviewed 10 weeks ago. So I will, but only with the disclaimer that at this level of sound quality, I am not fully sure I can with our direct comparison. And the SOtM set has already left. Most properties of the Aries G2 I mentioned are about equal. The highs of the SOtM combo might have slightly more filigree like highs, while sounding a bit more technically correct. The Aries G2 is slightly more musical and surely has the best voice reproduction I have ever heard from a digital frontend in my setup 1. By the way, info on my reference setups can be found below my videos on YouTube by clicking more. The Aries G2 has a lot going for it. It's a one box solution that can play music from the optional internal SSD and or from one or more shares in your network. It does this multi-room and also supports DLNA, Airplay, Bluetooth, Spotify, Connect and functions as a Roon endpoint. All without extra boxes. It looks and feels great, at least to me and works fine. I also love the infrared learning solution. Okay, it would have been nice if the knobs on the front would have been better visible in low light conditions and if adding an internal drive would have been slightly less cumbersome, like a slot loading solution. The European price is €4200 including VAT but excluding internal drive. Aurelix offers a 2 TB SSD at €400 extra. Currently 4 TB is the largest SSD I could find for mounting yourself. It costs just below €500. You might find this all a lot of money and I agree, but don't call the Aries G2 expensive for what it offers is really a steal. It opens up normal CD recorded a decade ago to a sound level many won't believe. It does that already in my setup 2 and fully shines in my setup 1. I've said it before and I say it again, digital audio develops at an enormous pace. And with this statement we come to the end of this video. There will be another video next Friday, as always at 5pm Central European time. If you don't want to miss that, subscribe to this channel or follow me on the social media so you will be informed when new videos are out. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up. Many thanks to all that support this channel financially. It keeps me independent and thus trustworthy. If you also feel like supporting my work, the links are in the comments below this video on YouTube. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. Whatever you do, enjoy the music.