Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for being here tonight. I'm Chapin Spencer, Director of Public Works and whether you intended or not you are at the Champlain Parkway Public Outreach Meeting for the Greater King and Maple Neighborhood. To help the English language learners in the room tonight there are interpreters present and throughout the presentation we'll be saying a few sentences and then pausing briefly for the interpreters to catch up and what I'd like to do to start off is invite the interpreters to come up say your name what language you'll be translating and where you're sitting for anybody who may need interpretation. My name is Noor Somali interpreter from BRRB, I'll be sitting over there. My name is Sanfarnian Sikyala, I'm here to interpret Lingala and Swahili Sikyana. I'm sitting over there. I'm Sotudo, I'm interpreting for Burmese and current community. Yeah my name is Sotudo, I speak Burmese and current so I have interpreting Burmese and current. Thank you. My name is Bodwin coming from BRP. I'll be interpreting in French and Swahili. I'll be sitting there. Thank you. Hi my name is Illy and this is where I am interpreting Kironde and Swahili. I'm from Africa Association living in Vermont. Thank you. My name is Asuk and I'm representing ALB and I'm for Nepali interpretation. I'll be somewhere in the back row. Good evening everyone. My name is Dehi Kaseem. I work with ALB and ALB stand for African Association living in Vermont if anybody's wondering about it and today I'm here to interpret Somali language. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you so much for being here tonight and helping out with the meeting. Much appreciated. So thank you. Great. Some housekeeping matters. Bathrooms are out the door here to the elevator down one floor and then down the ramp. Emergency exits are behind me in both directions outside this door. I want to thank the elected officials for attending this evening. I also want to thank the community groups who helped us with the event tonight and that includes King Street Youth Center, the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, the Association of Americans Living in Vermont and Champlain Housing Trust and the Burlington Housing Authority. Thank you as well to our project partners and I want to introduce them. If you could raise your hand Federal Highway Administration Rob Secora and Larry Dwyer from the State of Vermont Agency of Transportation Sue Scribner, city staff Norm Baldwin, Susan Molzon, Rob Goulding and Jillian Nanton, consulting team Du Bois and King John Benson. Also consulting team Clow Harbor and Associates Dale Galzikowski, Jim Shields, Jack Scutter and Dave Cowell and Stan Tech, Jack Myers, Mike Paewanski, Kevin Walsh and Allison LaFleur. Thank you all for being here. As it says up here the meeting goals tonight are to provide an update on the project, to provide an opportunity for the greater neighborhood to comment on the project and we have interpreters if we've discussed. So let's talk a little bit about the format for tonight. Clow Harbor and Associates will be presenting tonight and please hold all comments until after the presentation. After the presentation there will be an opportunity for public comments and clarifying questions and Kevin Walsh from Stan Tech will be facilitating. We also have comment forms on the tables for anybody who wants to provide a written comment tonight or who wants to provide comments later in the mail. Comment period continues to October 10th. Tonight is the only opportunity for oral comments and with that I'm going to invite CHA up here to start the presentation. Thanks so much. Glad you're here. Before I jump in the technical presentation one further thought the last slide mentions the comments written comments are due by October 10th to that website or mailed to the addresses above. All right we're here talking about the Parkway project. This is a aerial image of the limits of the project. The project is shown in the yellow old line in the middle of the drawing. The red perimeter is the study area considered for the limits of the project. For reference this is Shelburne Street 189 interchange area. Home Avenue. Up to Lakeside. Pine Street down to Maine. North is to the right. These project goals were established back in the federal document process. The general goals were to improve access to the downtown area. Improving circulation and mobility on the adjacent streets. Generally providing traffic relief in the southwest corridor of the city. Reducing disruption to the neighborhoods. And giving the truck traffic a direct path to downtown. The project history yes it's an older project. It does date back to the sixties. It's been through many different generations. There was a federal document in 1979 and EIS which studied the effects of the project. It was supplemented in 1997. The current project designs EIS was developed in 2009. With a record of decision confirming the alignment. And the project contents in 2010. Beyond that process. We also had numerous public meetings. Some of which are listed on the slide. The city hosted. In May and June of 2010. Meeting specifically targeted for mobility. The neighborhoods. Economic development. As well as environmental. There also was a separate public meeting. For the Pine Street enhancement specifically in November of 2015. We've also had numerous project meetings. For the permits for right away. And other project meetings held on the city held by the city specifically. Involving this project. I'm going to break that big project limit into smaller pieces. And give you some details related to that. Again the interchange area. Route seven one eighty nine. This is currently the abandoned portion of the highway you're familiar with ending at home avenue. We're all familiar with it. It was built and never opened the traffic. This is a photo rendering. Showing what we anticipate the proposed project will change that picture you just saw into. One lane of traffic for each direction. A grass median. With plantings. Historic period lighting in it. And this is your transition from the Expressway that's one eighty nine. To a twenty five on our city street. That's all occurring in this section. The next section is home avenue. On the left. Continuing down to Lakeside Avenue. This section will be new construction. On that existing open area between many of the buildings the right away was purchased most of the right away was purchased years ago. For the construction of the project. Some general details. It is a twenty five mile an hour city street over that entire duration of the yellow I just showed on that last line. It will be two lanes of traffic. There will be extra turn lanes for left turning movements. At the intersections. There will be traffic signals. Synchronized traffic signals. At home. Flynn and Sears Lane. On the east side of the parkway there will be a shared use path for bicycles and pedestrians. That will be constructed as part of this project. That section also has lighting and landscaping similar to what you just saw on the C one slide. In addition. We have added on street bicycle accommodations for shared lanes over that entire section. This is a photo rendering of some of the details I just provided you. This is showing one lane of traffic in each direction. The historic period lighting. The proposed landscaping. The trees lighting the street. The shared use path on the eastern side of the street. And the fence beyond the shared use path on the eastern side of the street only. Some other design elements not explicitly shown on those exhibits. One environmental benefit we are adding with this project design. Is removing the sediment load at Anglesby Brook. We're reducing the sediment load. Pardon me. We are also reducing the stormwater flow. That currently in today's conditions is directed to the city's treatment plant. Which is a big benefit. Additionally we are updating and reconstructing the two grade crossings. In that section. Home Avenue and Flynn Avenue specifically I will show you in just a second. This is the existing grade crossing in Home Avenue. It has a curved median. Gates and flashers. Known as a silent crossing. It has a sidewalk. On the southern side. This graphic shows our proposed design which will remove those raised medians on Home Avenue. We will have gates. On all four approaches. That are synchronized to close to prevent anyone from entering when the gates are closed to allow the train to pass. We'll also have flights flashing lights. There is a shared use path now that will be connected to that existing bike path. Along the southern side. Of Home Avenue. Rail signals and gates will be connected to the traffic signal which will occur at the Parkway and Home Avenue. To synchronize movements and for safety improvements. Flynn Avenue. Similar situation. Curved Island raised median. Gates flashers. Existing condition. A sidewalk in this case on the northern side. Approaching the grade crossing but not through it. We're coming in. Removing the curved islands. Four-way approach gates. Rail signals. Instructing a new sidewalk. With gates. And lights. To protect pedestrians. And allow the train to pass without encroachments. That too will be connected to the signal. Traffic signal. At the intersection of the Parkway. And Flynn Avenue. The next segment of the project. Lakeside Avenue. Connecting to Pine Street. Down to Main Street. This is generally your downtown area. In the hatch box. The general description for this portion of Lakeside and Pine. Is they use the city street pattern. It's not a new alignment. Lakeside Avenue is slightly realigned but it's generally within the alignment that you see today. Lakeside Avenue does include reconstruction. And range improvements. Pine Street. Is simply repaved. Other details. There will be a continuous new concrete sidewalk. On the eastern side of Pine Street. The new shared use path. Will follow along Lakeside. It will go from Lakeside up to Kilburn Street. That is a shared use path on the western side. Of Pine Street. From that point. Where the shared use path ends. A continuous sidewalk. Concrete sidewalk. Will be constructed. From Kilburn Street. Up to Main Street. So you will have continuous pedestrian accommodations. Along the western side. From end to end. We are also proposing raised intersections. At Howard Street. With the Maltex driveway. At marble. And at Kilburn. Alright. There's a Pine Street picture taken recently showing current conditions. It's a busy location. On Street parking. Mass transit. Mid-block crosswalks. We are incorporating on street bike accommodations. In our proposed project. Some examples. This red area here is actually a buffer adjacent to parking. So we will prevent bicycles. And doors. From cars to being of. Hitting them as they go through. It is a shared on roadway. Bicycle provision in that area. Additionally as I mentioned there is a shared use path. Which ends at Kilburn Street. We will create continuous pedestrian facilities. Picture shows the gap. In the current sidewalk along the western side of the project. We will replace all sidewalk and all ramps. Up to current. State and federal standards. They will all be passable sidewalks. Detectable surfaces. The things you've come to know. We do also include the flashing warning beacons. Or mid-block crosswalks. Which are activated by a pedestrian pushing the button. You're familiar with how many exist on Pine Street today. I'll show a couple raised intersection examples. We get many questions about what those are. These are common. Oops. Sorry.  Of approximately three and a half inches. A flat surface. And ramp back down. It includes concrete pavement. Stamped pavement colored pavement. To provide a contrast. It helps pedestrians cross and help slow traffic down. All right. This graphic this aerial image shows the King Street and Maple Street neighborhood in general. These are consistent with all the boards. We've all had a chance to talk to and ask questions about in the previous part of the meeting before the official meeting started. And show the project details. Some of the design elements. Include synchronized traffic signals. Which optimize the traffic flow through the corridor. As mentioned there are continuous pedestrian facilities along Pine Street. In this general area that graphic showed. It's a continuous sidewalk. There will be brick colored crosswalks. At Pine and Maple. And Pine and King. To provide contrast. We also will have on road bike accommodations. With shared lanes. And we will maintain on street parking consistent with city wide ordinances. Current midday picture of traffic conditions. Associated with a four way stop. That's looking. From Pine Street to Maple. This graph shows the volumes of traffic. That currently use Pine Street. This is from Lakeside to Pine. The middle from Maple to King. The right from King to Maine. You will notice. The blue bar is existing. Without the parkway in the green bar shows the traffic volumes when the parkway is built. You will also notice the volumes do go up. But they're able to go up because of the synchronized traffic signals in the increase in the efficiency of the traffic flow. Compared to the smart signals compared to a four way stop. Okay. The same aerial image. I will show you the graphics here. And call attention to a couple of colors in particular. The green dots refer to limited or no congestion at intersections. The yellow dot refers to moderate congestion at intersections. And the red dot refers to more congestion at the intersections. The colors of the lines refer to volumes of traffic that travel on that route each day. The specific volumes that I don't need to get into at this point but it will give you a representation of where the traffic flows well. And where it is harder to get traffic through. This graphic is for the no build volumes before the parkway is built. That's what the existing conditions are today. I'll focus specifically at maple and pine being the lower and congested intersection. It gets better for maple and king and main and pine go back to green. Same graphic. After the parkway is built. You'll see those green references the green dots. And the greater maple king area. Are predominantly green. And concluding low or no congestion. Maple and pine has limited congestion. Let me zoom in. Looking specifically at the volumes. These are the lines with the volumes. Before the parkway is built. These are the daily traffic volumes on each of those sections. After the parkway is built. What we're seeing. Is a different pattern. That the traffic will follow because the signalized intersection is there. That helps the efficiency of the system. It also helps distribute the traffic over the available routes. Design elements specifically in this area. Include. The pedestal style signals. At pine. And main as well as pine and king. All signals on the entire projects. Will have exclusive pet. Phasing. When a person pushes the button. All vehicles will stop when they get their turn in the cycle. No vehicles will be moving. While you're crossing the road. We also have added curb extensions. To minimize the distance a person would need to cross the road. These smart signals have both. Emergency vehicle. And transit mass transit. Considerations I'll show you those in a second. So the traffic signals historic period one similar to what you see in the city today. The pet countdowns. Including the timer. Transit signal priority. Uses a smart signal. And recognizes. The mass transit. Approaching. That coordination. Tells the signal controller. It needs to help the bus get through the congested traffic. So it gives a priority to the bus in the direction the buses traveling. Similar for the emergency vehicle preemption. Different system different purpose but the emergency vehicles also will get the priority to clear traffic. Couple design elements specifically in the maple in king area. We did protect some mature trees. That were identified specifically by the arborist. And we are able to relocate some aerial facilities underground. Those from the area probably recognize a large tree. What we did in this case was extend the curb around it. So we didn't disturb the roots. Allow that tree to remain. All right. So that generally concludes the specific technical portion of the presentation. And this will give you perspective on on where we are in the process at this time. Tonight we're going to collect comments. We can take oral comments we can take written comments. We're going to assess. And compile those comments. In responses to the comments provided tonight. And separately written. Mailed or emailed. Will be posted on the cmplane parkway dot com website listed there. Regarding comments. You'll see a number of display boards. The green display boards near the door. Show the information that was on the slide. If you want to take a picture on the way out. Or copy down the information. For your own use. All right. I'll turn the presentation over to Kevin. All right. Good evening. I'm Kevin Walsh. I'm with Stantec. I'm just here to facilitate the comments. The public comments. Verbal public comments with the microphones. But I wanted to grab the wrong. To say you can either provide written comments if you prefer. And there are comment sheets. Somehow I didn't end up with one. If we make a comment tonight. Can you still make it be a member of the King Street area. You don't need to be a. We are. We would like to hear from. Yes. This meeting has a specific purpose. It's designed to get input from people. Can I go up to the mic. Yeah. So what we're going to do is we'd like to hear. From the neighborhood as much as possible so we're going to encourage anyone from the neighborhood to. To if they would like to provide. A comment verbally. To come up first. And then we will ask you to sign in. With your name and your your street. You'll have. We'd like there are a lot of people here so. We want to give everyone a chance to speak so we're going to. Try to limit those to three minutes. And. I'll have a timer just to help. And once you get to the end and we'll. Thank you. We'll take those comments into consideration. And. You'll see them posted on the website. And with our responses. So. My name is Steve good kind I I don't live in the neighborhood. But I'm one of the people that probably. Instigated the meeting. This meeting was designed to get input for a very specific reason that's environmental justice. I didn't hear any explanation. As to what. You're looking for what people should be concerned about because there's a lot of things. That were shown tonight but I suspect when you get the comments on him you're going to say. It has nothing to do with environmental justice and that's your answer. I think you owe an explanation. Tonight as to what. The criteria you're going to be looking at is and what are the implications of it. And they also think. Having one week to get comments back is unreasonable. I don't know what the. Brushes. But it gives you a base one week. I think a lot of people are seeing this for the first time and. It's asking an awful lot I think you're going to get back something meaningful if you really want it. So I think you got to do some explaining as to what. You're really looking for this meeting and what. You're not looking for. And not. Waste time but let people focus because I don't think most people have an idea of what's going on here. As far as this meeting. How do you count weeks. It's the fourth. A little better. Anyway I think you should explain what this meeting is really about. The purpose of this meeting is to hear from. All the communities what your concerns are but we're specifically targeting. And I'm trying to hear from the neighborhood. It's. Whatever your concerns are with regard to the project. The federal requirement does not limit the scope. You're supposed to be talking about this is providing. An un. Proportional burden on the low income neighborhood. That it goes through that's what this is about. Disproportionate impact that's what this is about right. We're not here to discuss whether or not there's a disproportionate effect. Any neighborhood just disproportionate adverse effect here to hear your comments. Understand those taking into consideration. Hi. Could you go back to the map that shows where the bike path ends in front of Curtis Lumber. Please. One of my concerns is that bike paths. My name is Rick Sharp. I run Burlington segues. Our business is located to 77 Pine Street. So we're very familiar with that area. And the needs of the people there including the farmers market. A lot of people are going down that street in that area. Okay. So I want to like to see the area. Yeah the wrong way. Area the map where it goes in front of Curtis Lumber. Yeah that's it. Okay. So one of my biggest problems with what's going on in the city today is that the bike paths that you install are disjointed. Okay. And then you dump people in the middle of nowhere. Okay. And that's exactly what this is doing here. Okay. So my belief is that there is enough space. I understand that further up Pine Street you cannot put a 10 foot path in there because there isn't enough space between the building and the street. At specifically at the carpet place there. But you can extend the path. Most of the people that are coming up that pathway they're going to go all the way into Burlington. Okay. So don't just dump them onto Pine Street here. My feeling is that you can extend that pathway all the way up to the entrance to Curtis and the other businesses there just before you get to the carpet company. But when you rebuild the car the sidewalk from there up to Main Street don't put it a three or four foot sidewalk. It should be as wide as possible. Okay. And if you got to take out the green strip to do that do that so that we can run our segways up Pine Street into downtown. Okay. And everybody else can come up and down there particularly on Saturday mornings if the farmers market is going to stay down there. There's a crowd coming down there. So don't just dump people onto the street there. Make sure that the sidewalk and you got to think about people coming all the way into downtown. Don't just dump the McKilburn. Okay. Thank you. And I should have said this at the beginning. I apologize as you're speaking. We do have interpreters here. If you can speak slowly that aids in the interpretation. We have any other folks who would like to speak. And have we heard from anybody from the neighborhood at this point? Anybody from the neighborhood who would like to speak? I just want to give them the opportunity. Okay. My name right after this. My name is Andrew Simon. I live one block east of Pine Street. Not in King and Maple but in near Callahan Park. I'm a senior. I am award five steering committee, NPA steering committee member. I am low income. One of the things I would like to know about this plan. Not so much about the Parkway plan because I've seen the plan before. But this process that we're going through right now is how else will you be gathering data from those affected by the Parkway? Low income people, seniors, people who are not in the King and Maple area. Because there's certainly people in my part of Pine Street who are in those categories and are affected by this. I'm one block away from Lakeside where in the proposed plan all of the traffic will be dumped onto Lakeside and then onto Pine Street. So our neighborhood is going to be sort of ground zero in a certain way for the influx of traffic, the increase in traffic. My life will definitely be affected by this plan. I don't have a car.  So all of those things are impacted by this increase of traffic. So I guess I would very much like to know what the rest of this gathering input process is in a step-by-step basis. The one that the slide that was up there about this really only said we're gathering comments, but didn't say where that's going to happen, when that's going to happen, how that's going to happen and to what extent you are consulting people in other neighborhoods other than King and Maple because there's certainly people who are low-income people affected by the Champlain Parkway Plan seniors and others who live in further down Pine Street all the way down to Flynn Avenue where the Flynn Avenue co-op is Jackson Terrace just around the corner from me, many, many people who will be touched by this. So I guess besides just registering this comment, I'm actually asking a question about this. Thank you. Thank you. My name is Susie Taylor and I live on Lower Maple Street and I have a hard time with this because I really do respect people's hard work and I am not a traffic person. I am not an engineer. I am a biker, a walker, a dog owner and a longtime Burlington resident and I do find it sort of curious that it never really has been made clear to me why this meeting is focusing on Maple and King Street. My opinion is that it's focusing on Maple and King Street because we are the lowest income neighborhood around and understanding that I come from a place, I'm educated, I'm privileged and I can't figure this stuff out. I go to the website and I come away with a headache.  But having said that, my neighbors don't have time or ability. They are feeding their children, they are cooking their dinner, they are trying to just live their lives. What I hear from many of my neighbors who do not have cars, the children who wait for the school buses in the morning, the parents who try to protect their kids is you take your life in your hands because cars don't stop, they don't pay attention, people around their cell phones, we sit on our porch at night when the traffic is backed up from Pine Street down to South Champlain Street and yeah, they're not going fast but they're all on their cell phones, nobody's paying attention to the pedestrians and what the answer is to fix that, I don't know. And I do have a couple of questions and I've really, I can't get the information and some of them is the traffic numbers. It looked like roughly 3,000 increase. Where do those numbers come from? The EIS, hey, come on, it's outdated in my opinion. I don't understand, I think if we did an EIS currently, it would look very different from what you all are working with. And I would really, I think we should have a new EIS. You mentioned curb bump outs. Interesting, we just had an experience with curb bump outs at the corner of St. Paul Street and Maple. They had to take them out because it doesn't work for traffic. I respect again, you want green streets, you want, I've forgotten the right term, but we do want people, we want people walking in, we want people biking, we want people driving, but we want them all to do it safely. So where are the curb bump outs? Where does the sidewalk end when you go down Pine Street on the west side? The railroad crossing at the bottom of Maple Street, the sidewalk stops there now. There's not a sidewalk to get across to the lake. Thank you, Perkins Pier. Trucks now can't make a left-hand turn from Pine onto Maple. I've seen traffic backup, I've seen accidents with cars, children, bicycles, walkers. So, and I understand that there is no that left-hand turns are still going to be allowed from Pine Street and King Street and there will be no dedicated lane. I just want to say it's a nightmare and there can't be any restriction of any increase of those sidewalks and any restriction of that road there because trucks can't do it now. And I'd like to yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for your comments and if you want to provide further written comments to expand on those, we welcome those. Thank you very much. Can you please state your name? My name is Donna Walters and I live on at the intersection of Maple Street and South Champlain. I live in Burlington Housing Authority property called Warf Lane Apartments and I am speaking tonight on behalf of the Steering Committee for the Warf Lane Residence Association. I also, being on the Steering Committee for that Residence Association network closely with resident leaders at Decker Towers and Bob and Mill. And so Bob and Mill is on South Champlain Street and Decker Towers is on St. Paul Street. It's mostly well the building I live in is a multi-family unit. There's people with disabilities and elderly people and families with children that live there. And Decker Tower has mostly elderly and people that are disabled. It's actually the tallest building in the city or in the state I guess. So the environmental concerns for families with children are mostly centered around biking to school safely and to the park that's down on Pine Street and kind of like what the gentleman from Segway's had to say the disjointed bike and walk path is a problem and a concern for parents. I would not let my children ride down a shared bike path. Kids are like goofing off when they're walking to school and somebody who's buzzing along going 15 miles an hour on a bicycle. I mean a kid could just likely like jump right out in front of that bike because his buddy pushed him out. It doesn't seem like a safe alternative for kids coming and going to school or to the park. And so it really seems like those need to be separated in order to be safe and it seems to work on the bike path along the lake but we're not dealing with traffic there. And on Pine Street you're dealing with traffic and there's no the other thing is is it protected. So I'm not sure is it protected the length the bike shared bike path or shared use path. There is a buffer. There is a buffer that's considered that's a protected shared use path. The whole length of the street from main street to the school. Can we ask questions and get answers or we're just giving comments just giving comments tonight. OK so the concern that the whole length of the street to and from school for anybody who lives on Pine Street or in one of the neighborhoods that would feed on to Pine Street is a concern. The other thing that is a concern the environmental increased health concerns for the elderly and disabled who are walking using electric wheelchairs and breathing car fumes. So for folks who are using electric wheelchairs and scooters they're more inclined to actually ride in the road because it's safer for them to ride on a pathway that doesn't have a bunch of cracks in it like a sidewalk. And I've heard many stories of people that are on a scooter or electric wheelchair that either tipped over or sustained like a substantial damage to their their wheels because of going over a curb or hitting a crack that dumped them over and broke their axle. And it's not like a car where you can just go to the garage and get it fixed in a couple days it takes a lot longer to get electric wheelchair or electric scooter fixed when you have an accident like that. So they're more likely to ride on the shared youth what you're proposing as the shared youth path which is like a road. Is that correct. I mean if it's like a sidewalk where you have blocks of cement that heave with the frost that would be problematic. But if it's more like the road like the bike path along the lake that would be preferred alternative for them. However if it's not protected that's a problem because you got cars buzzing by and and and people on bicycles who are going faster than someone on an electric wheelchair. So and I apologize. I say yeah we need to move on to the next speaker. There's like two other points I would like to make. One is the elderly who are walking. So I can give you a little bit 20 seconds. We just have a big line behind. All right. I just want to touch on breathing fumes from cars that are idling. And so right now it's a big problem where I live on Maple Street. I have a neighbor who lives on the Maple Street side of the building. She suffers from asthma. A lot of old people have more sensitive respiratory systems and they get more sensitive as they get older. Many of them have COPD or asthma. And so they can't open their windows if this traffic idling underneath their window or it could literally send them to the emergency room and has. So for exchanging stop signs for traffic lights does not solve the problem for the idling traffic. And it seems to me that round abouts would keep the traffic moving a little faster and from people prevent cars from idling underneath windows. Okay. Thank you. We are welcome to provide written comments. I appreciate that. Thank you. And I if you would like to Would you like me to talk? When everybody else has a chance to to speak if you want to come up again you're welcome to. Hi everyone. Thank you very much for your time to do this. It was a lot of energy you had to put into this. I one very importantly think that you must have more than one meeting. This is a forty three million dollar project. And it's going to disrupt the entire south end. Especially I'm sorry. I'm Carolyn Bates. I'm a low income track eight. I used to be low income with my business in track 10 on maple street. I've been here since 1973 with my businesses. And also I've been partially disabled four times when I've had to be in a wheelchair. And one accident happened because of a bad sidewalk and I ended up needing a new hip from it. This whole plan is not safe. It's slow. Unsafe expensive. And a lot of it is unnecessary. Just look at how the bikes go. Have you really studied that bike path. Maybe you want to take a close up of this. Going north. There's one part of your Champlain Parkway that doesn't even have a space for a bike. So does that mean they have a portage their bike or carry them north. Completely illogical. Completely illogical. And completely unsafe for any children trying to walk. You do not want bikes with pedestrians on some points. They're on the right hand side and some points they're on the left hand side. Then they're with the cars and then they're in a separate bike lane. Please. You must not use your present plan there ever. Now we also have the King Street Maple Street which is a very low income the lowest income I think for entire Burlington. We have 200 section 8 residents in this neighborhood. 21 different housing districts in this neighborhood. Are you paying any attention to them. They walk. If they need to get to city market they need to bus and what have you done. You dead-ended Pine Street was around about that the buses can't go around. So it doesn't that mean then that the people south of Home Avenue will no longer have a bus to take. What about all those people in South Meadow. They need buses. A lot of them are disabled. I have a maps also to show you at the housing. Now we get into stoplights. You know the federal government has said in safety laws since this EIS and when safety laws say do you need to get something. The safety laws say no federal highway can be built unsafe. A stoplight we know is unsafe. We've had two people killed in the last 20 years in the city because of a stoplight. Roundabouts have had no death anywhere in Vermont. And roundabouts are 8 seconds to go through and stoplights 30 seconds. And you're adding six more stoplights. So that estimates three more minutes slow time on Pine Street. I think you should get a roundabout any place you want to put a stoplight. They're faster, safer, 50% less money they're greener because there's less pollution and none of us want more bad air to breathe. The maintenance is nominal where a stoplight it's 5,000 minimum a year. And left hand turns will be able to be made on King and Maple because the buses and trucks can go around a roundabout and not a stoplight. They're also bike friendly and pedestrian friendly and stoplights are not. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments. And again you can provide written comments. And we'll take your figures. Yeah, I will. I was waiting. Yeah, my name is Spencer Smith. I live at the Flynn Appian U Cooperative Homes on Flynn Avenue across from where the new city market is and a block or less from Pine Street. Is there any chance we could see an image of that neighborhood the Flynn and Pine and where the plan is to go through as King and Maple. Flynn Avenue and Pine that area. Okay, that's it. That one we just saw. I think. Let's see. Yeah. So no. The one unfortunately this is an old thing. It doesn't show city market which is a big presence. You can see the railway across at the top. Then those gray roof buildings are old industrial buildings that now have offices in them. Then there's parking and then you'll see there's a green space and across from that green space if we could see what's there was a question. What was that? Okay, so we see that intersection of Flynn and the proposed parkway. And it up on the left is the city market. If you know just this side of the railway is the city market. These were all old buildings that were torn down. So we have a concern that the pollution of the neighborhood is going to become worse for our children. We already have very heavy traffic now on Flynn because of city market and also the large tankers and all the moving vans that are down the other side of the railroad. So the problem is that these are when I moved here into the Flynn co-ops from Montpelier in 2007 there were very few children in the co-op and that's the way it was from the founding but because of certain legal issues that came up we now have had 20 children for a number of years and they range from birth to teens you know people 15 and 16. So I'm very concerned about that and I thought there was going to be a meeting where we could bring in the area probably at city market they have a large space we could use where our members could come because they all work they have little children they couldn't come downtown at this time of day they're busy feeding their kids and laundry and everything so I just feel very concerned that there's not going to be a chance for people in that neighborhood and also there is the the Raymond place the South Meadow housing which is also largely low income there are many children in the neighborhood because of the Champlain school and they're walking to work and walking to school I mean the kids are walking to school and it's the traffic is very heavy and I'm concerned that it's going to become worse also we'll lose that wildlife area which is we see fox we see deer we see of course you know squirrels plenty thank you very much for your comments thank you hi my name is Kyle Creason I live at 174 home avenue I speak for myself parent who works with young children and a lot of my neighbors lots of them have young children as well neighbors from Scarf Avenue Home Avenue South Meadow that sort of area okay so if we want to talk about safety for kids we try to walk our children to school as well as a lot of our friends right now there's so much tractor trailer traffic on home avenue trying to turn on the pine same thing with Flynn basically we have a system when a one of these gargantuan trucks comes to the intersection where we're waiting across we have to back up because multiple times people have almost been hit this is the reason the project's going in okay to try to get traffic off these streets right also the noise the pollution you know all the studies have shown that Home Avenue Flynn and that area of pine was not constructed or ever intended to handle the kind of volume of traffic he gets now there's so much traffic huge tractor trailers FedEx you know everyone's online shopping there's all kinds of things trying to get down to the industrial part of the south end that is extremely dangerous and loud for people who live there the Champlain Parkway will help to alleviate that is absolutely necessary I'd also like to mention because people who don't live in the area probably don't know this there are a lot of people who live around us who are in wheelchairs okay there's no good the the sidewalks are up on Shelburne Road and then intermittently down on pine but there's always potholes there the sidewalks down Home Avenue are so rough that they can't use them so I've actually have a couple of my neighbors who use wheelchairs who come by that I go out when they're coming through because they have to go down Home Avenue in their wheelchair numerous times there's been tractor trailers there that have almost run them off the road people are in a hurry commuting it is so unacceptable the current situation and I don't think that's something that people who keep protesting this and want to speak about it understand it's as if you know things are operating as they should right now and this road is going to bring traffic onto these neighborhood streets it's there and it's not good at all finally I'd like to say that the city in trying to keep larger businesses in this in town to pay taxes like Burton higher ground city market was similar there being able to build in the places they are is predicated on the Champlain Parkway right so there's so part of the argument is the Champlain Parkway is coming in all of these traffic studies it's going to be okay it's going to get better once that's built okay that's probably true but it hasn't been built and if it's not built all of these things are getting done in the name of money on top of falsehoods and I so I'd just like to say that if higher ground comes in the same kind of traffic 1200 person music venue these people are going to be coming in at night so 1030 11 traffic starts getting better right or probably yeah 930 1030 11 so that's going to fill up that time we will get no respite from the extreme amount of traffic coming down home so thank you all right thank you for your comments my name is Lynn Vera and I live at the other end of all this at the end of Pine Street where it becomes Queen City Park Road in the neighborhood of Queen City Park and I've lived there for geez 30 something years I've used Pine Street I've seen the changes in Pine Street the traffic that tries to get down Pine Street there is no way for me other than by water to get to Burlington without dealing at some point with Pine Maple King all the mess the longest that I really have tried to study this connector tried to make some sense of why there would be a through way to bring even more traffic just still to get dumped before you can get into the city when Chapin took his job I hoped that that meant there would be a little sanity levity to the idea of increasing traffic to get dumped down there I live where there's lots of parking now the connector that never got built and I always fantasize that people of I don't want to be I don't want to use a poor word I fantasize that people and I Chapin put you in that group that would think of that as a spot to park cars and create something that Vermont could be proud and excited of an aerial tram to haul all these people and bring them downtown I hear the gentleman in front of me certainly I've looked at all those neighborhoods I have friends in all those neighborhoods you got to get trucks out of there you have to fix sidewalks we need some way to get those vehicles into town but it doesn't need to be the road for every vehicle going into town and most vehicles don't need to go into town and wouldn't if there were a sane accessible place like that ugly Kmart that's now becoming another huge parking lot why not plunk all those cars there and bring people downtown in another way there's so many unpolluting ways of moving large numbers of people and if we're going to even talk about spending this kind of money we should be getting people out of their cars who need to get into town and just let the trucks and the cars that have to go go if I lived on any one of those streets and saw 4,000 car increase and I'm just supposed to swallow it I would be crazy tonight and I do agree with everyone this one meeting although it's nice you got to get to where the people are not expect them to come here if you can do that but come on Chapin we're looking for you thank you thank you for your comments okay I'm Sandy Hennaburger I live in Colchester and I'm part of the group that would love for you to do roundabouts instead of traffic signals I think they're mostly safer I was a hard sell on this and I'm convinced now they're safer and maybe they're not even I haven't looked into that much but one thing I do know about are these multi-use paths they're a joke you're you're depending on almost no one using them that artist picture there was no people on that walkway no people no bikes and yeah people say that it works on the bike path while I live I use the bike path and it does not work if you have a volume of people using it supposedly bikes can't go well like the bikes that you get in the town can't go more than 10 miles an hour 10 miles an hour is fast for a pedestrian I've had friends that've had really bad accidents on these multi-use paths and in Colchester they just put another one in and it looks lovely it looks peaceful it looks wonderful and no one uses it as soon as you have you're depending on people not walking not using their bike hey you if you're what we really need to have are designated bike paths that are separate from people walking or you are creating accidents and that's really all I have to say this sounds like a complicated project good luck thank you for your comments hello my name is Charles Simpson I live in Burlington but up at Summit Ridge and I'm a retired professional sociologist with published studies of work in lower Manhattan including highway planning and I have to say that while in speaking in all with all due respect what you've presented here is an exercise in magical thinking you talk about shared youth youths for paths we've already seen that when you add together the segues of folks on wheelchair access the parents pushing children in carriages old elderly people add that to bikers it just doesn't work you have to know it doesn't work it's not a solution you talk about synchronized signals speeding up the one third increase in traffic that you predict that the king end of pine street and yet you talk about pedestrian at will signals you talk about emergency vehicles that can change the lights there will be no synchronized signals you have to know that you talk about connectivity you're breaking off you're asking the the low and moderate income people and in south meadow that may not have cars to you you've broken their connection to south burlington and all of the shopping in south burlington that doesn't make any sense you talk about this that this is somehow free money because we're going to be getting you know 95 percent of this from the federal government without realizing that we have to as taxpayers in burlington we're going to have to retrofit this road because it's a limited access highway and it doesn't fit into our industrial district and those those jobs those those those employees will not have access to that road unless curb cuts are made and at the same time we have to maintain this road in perpetuity so it's not a free road you talk about servicing the needs of downtown the original rationale for this for this highway it doesn't make any sense every one of you purposes and needs is not served by this highway you talk about getting around you talk about lost my place here okay you talk about enhancing economics in the city you have taken six acres and paved it over in the enterprise zone you've precluded that from from being a job creator you talk about environmental enhancement you have put in 200 feet of of culvert to to channel angles v brook one thing after another it seems to me is is in contradiction to the the rationale and the the public relations that surround this this highway it simply is in the wrong place it's overdone all you would need to do to solve the problem of trucks is to enhance the the c one section from home to the interstate put in a roundabout at at the terminus of pine street and you would have all of that truck traffic out of those that neighborhood and it's a simple solution it's half built already it was abandoned but it could be certainly enhanced thank you very much thank you for your comments my my my what a huge project my name is steven marshal I'm a resident of burlington I'm very interested in community development as a driver I would love to be able to cruise down 189 and keep on going into town down that parkway boy that that would be a really nice experience I have to question though whether we really want to be investing so much money into a project which is intended to help people drive cars okay we need to deliver trucks in the near term the next 10 20 years I suppose we're still using all that transportation infrastructure it's our style it's our culture it's what we do but we really do need to be looking at how to escape our dependence on fossil fuels and this encourages fossil fuel use okay so more more detail going down the scale here if you look at burlington geographically you notice that it's kind of captured by its geography it's got a a river on the north it's got a an interstate highway on the east it's got an interstate like highway on the south end and so there are very very few ways to escape except through these major highway channels you got 127 you got williston road you've got shelburn road one of the really nice things about pine street right now is that you you can escape four different traffic lights by going straight down pine street and I want to say to anybody who lives in that neighborhood I do feel sympathy for your you might be rejoicing that you're going to escape from all that traffic and I'm sorry about that I don't know how we balance this but it looks to me like a perfect location for a roundabout right there where pine meets this new road I was just in Britain experienced a lot of roundabouts maybe a few too many but it's a good location for that I'm really really disappointed that that intersection over there shelburn road in 189 that that's not a roundabout highway administration has got to look at roundabouts to replace clove relief they work beautifully those are the roundabouts that I encountered in Britain that really worked anyway please do not close pine street at its conclusion down there put in a nice roundabout let us continue to be able to move through there my final question is what's happening to the property on Sears Lane I'm part of the homeless camp down there and we're anticipating having our camp bulldozed we noticed a pattern that the city is developing property after property after property and we end up not having a place for people to camp and that's the last thing thank you thank you for your comments could you really state your name my name is Claire Leonard I live on South Champlain Street I I came to this meeting with questions and a number of times in response to people asking questions instead of providing comments you've said that this meeting is for giving comments so I suppose that my main comment here is I would really like an opportunity to not just offer comments but to ask questions in order to be able to offer more informed comments maybe I just missed other meetings though it sounds as though many of them happened several years ago so I might have just missed them but this is the first meeting I've seen that is addressing the concerns of residents of these neighborhoods and I would I have a lot of questions about the methodology of the traffic studies stormwater issues economic concerns for the neighborhoods and I would like an opportunity to ask those questions before I can offer more informed comments so I suppose my comment is that I would like a chance to ask better questions thank you okay thank you for your comments hi my name is Laurie Smith I live in South Burlington and Queen City Park and I want to comment about this planet that we're living on last Friday there was a strike for the climate our planet's on fire and we're building more roads we have plan BTV which is talking about creating a bike and walk friendly community but we're building a road that brings more cars into Burlington what are we doing we have an existing road from I-89 to home avenue that could be opened up get truck traffic off the ground streets we don't need more roads we don't need more cars in Burlington we've been talking about this since the 70s we want to take car parking off the streets in Burlington so that it's more bike friendly but we're increasing our dependence on cars please we're killing ourselves and maybe it doesn't matter let's build another road and that's it thank you thank you for your comment please clearly state your name and your rest street my name Charlie Messing I live at Pine and College so whoever's roaring down Pine if they continue past Main Street they'll go past my house sorry about these glasses I had an eye operation and everything is totally glaring driving me nuts pardon I've always looked at the dead end of Pine Street at Bank and I've been skeptical of making that street go through reconnecting the street at this point it seems to be between the arch that used to go down to the parking garage in the free press building and it will become a street one way one lane either way and the bikes and people walking will be 20 feet to the left that's pretty surrealistic to me but reconnecting the street so that it can go to Pearl Street I don't see the point I agree with everybody 20 people before me yes building a road it is my dream I mean there's a reason that this thing is a stack of filing cabinets worth of material extending 60 feet up I mean it's a beautiful sculpture one of my favorites in town and it's about the folly of this and we as as developer-minded people looking forward to the future and activating all kinds of stuff we love this idea because it's an idea it's a building something it costs a lot of money these are qualities it is my dream that we do not build this that we do not increase the traffic on Pine Street that we try to keep cars out of town and Pine Street shouldn't dead end I would like nothing more than all the changes that have been mentioned tonight or just forget the whole thing and fix all the sidewalks in town thank you so much thank you for your comments my name is Laura Waters I just have a very quick comment I'm confused because I thought this meeting tonight was built as an outreach to get comments from the King Street and Maple Street neighborhoods although you said that's not really what this is about which you brought in all these translators to help people from those neighborhoods to understand the project to comment on the project there's no one here and you've got one meeting so where are the people that we're supposed to be providing outreach to to discuss the project to let them express their concerns about the project and I think having one meeting where all you have are translators and nobody or very few people probably from that neighborhood certainly no one from that neighborhood has spoken is really a very inappropriate and that you need to have more meetings you need to have more outreach you need to find out where these people are so that you can clearly outreach to them and talk to them about what this project means and how it's going to impact their neighborhoods thank you very much for your comments state your name and your neighborhood your street yeah hi I'm Ron Krupp and I have the solution if anyone's been to Portland, Oregon you might have noticed the light rail system that takes people in to town and back believe it or not we have railroad tracks very close to the Champlain Parkway and we could use those railroad tracks to take people from Shelburne Road right into town right to the waterfront and then we could have jogs that would go up to the medical center go up to the university go up to the downtown and if we didn't have light rail we could use buses that would take people and we have a large parking area right up near Shelburne Road so we could combat pollution we could use the parkway to build housing to have shops because we certainly have a housing crisis in this town so we could do all those things with some simple solutions some of you may be out of a job but I'm talking about the people that are wearing the anyway that's my solution I live down in Queen City Park the idea is to close off Pine Street right where Queen City Park hits Pine Street you know what that's going to do it's going to send people down Shelburne Road that's going to be a mess so there is a simple solution if you just listen to me thank you for your comments clearly state your name and your street hi I'm Vicki Smith a south end resident Crescent Road but I work smack in the middle of the King Street Maple Street neighborhood I'm the director of King Street Center and I want to thank all the interpreters for joining us this evening and I'm disappointed that more families couldn't join us but I do want to say that there was an outreach effort made to our families interpreted materials translated materials so they could join us it's a difficult time of evening and I'm hoping we can pull together an outreach endeavor at King Street Center so that more of our families we have one of our families joining us this evening so they can join us I guess what I have heard from families is less about the actual project and more about phasing we use the words we've been under siege with road work and construction in that neighborhood it has been untenable and that impacts quality of life it impacts children's performance in schools and at the center and in their neighborhoods it's just been a lot so I hope that whatever you know magical project is comes forward we're lucky to live in a city that can address infrastructure issues but we have to be sensitive to really well thought out phasing for the children and families that live there many of whom do not they speak five languages but English might be five and it's difficult to articulate just how difficult the noise and the danger the danger of walking among these construction projects brings to bear on their lives so thank you and we'll let folks know when there's a meeting at the King Street Center we look forward to it thank you thank you for your comments now actually before you I want to say one thing the current pine street part of this project is trying to get this traffic off the road that runs right in front of Champlain Elementary everybody keeps talking about we need to save the children from this all these cars go right in front of the elementary right now it's going to move it down away from that all these kids from all these neighborhoods go there and go to school so I just want there's so many things that seem to be missed by people when they talk about this and I don't know if people even realize that because Champlain Elementary wasn't shown on the map I don't think thank you very comments pardon me yep sure thanks for having me here today my name is Dehir and I'm an interpreter and I'm engaging to the community every day in my life for the past five years and what I actually know is about we talk about all these ideas yes but there's also some positive too out here I was like a couple weeks ago we were at the old folks home and we were discussing about bike line to be increasing and there was a lot of support was in our group that we did agree with that one and the rhythm that is for the safety yes there's going to be a vehicle all over the place correct but what I'm thinking about it is if I speak on behalf of my community my people most likely is an African family that don't have just two kids or one child I'm speaking on behalf of my people and this is like literally is you will see a mother with the eight kids trying to cross the road then I even comfortable to drive their vehicle from the pine street all the way to south metal and that is like it's been a major problem since day one and I've been hearing about this and this is a good outcome yes I understand that we're trying to renovate our roads we're trying to fix our sidewalks and all that stuff but do we actually talk to expand the sidewalk and also have a specific road for just the bikers and people to be considerate with other civilians that are who's actually like on a wheelchair or what so on so what I'm thinking about it is like for me and for my people out there I would like to ask two more meeting not one two more meeting and I would like for you guys to come down the family room I will volunteer to organize some families and I also want them to be heard by their voice I'm not the one that who's going to speak out for them and and most of them people their low income as what I heard yes is correct but the majority of amount of the kids that is makes large difference and a lot of the drivers that don't pay attention was maybe driving with your phone or maybe not watching where they're going for it there's a police for reason and also there's rules and law out there so if they break it yeah it could be a good civilians that who's walking down a road he could get some information but we want it down a pine street to be renovated because we already seen it down the Noswyniski Avenue and it feels great to see that also bicycle like bicycle have a right to share on the road but I'm talking about people that who walks down the down the street that we need that expended our sidewalk thank you thank you very much has you've spoken before well I had a question about your process I have a question about the project now that was just okay meeting yeah and I was gonna I just want to make sure that everyone had an opportunity to speak before we brought up another but you're right you you asked about the process so please go ahead and state your name and Steve Goodkind ten years ago when we last did the an EIS for this project the city was vehemently opposed to this version of the project specifically where no longer goes through the rail yard but it goes through the neighborhood of Pine Maple and King as part of our efforts to discourage this option and push for another information was prepared regarding environmental justice which is what this meeting is about tonight back in those days we were told well that really wasn't a criteria and it never made it into the EIS as far as I know but this information exists in other words the city has a request and supporting documentation that talks about environmental justice and I think even in the last 10 years those concerns are even greater some of the consultants here tonight in fact probably worked on that and what I'm requesting is that that document be made available people can look at it and have a better idea again what the issue is here because it is environmental justice and the city was on record trying to make a case that environmental justice precluded this particular option being selected so I would appreciate it if that could be made available and I couldn't agree more with the gentleman that said more meetings I went down to public work last week and asked them about their process and I was told there probably would be more meetings it was just like one so I think more meetings definitely thank you thank you thank you for your comments yeah Tony Reddington I live on North Winske Avenue I'm a resident of the old North End and along with the Pine King Maple area we have over 80 percent of our residents who are low and immediate income and low income and poverty level income it's a key point about what these two areas are like it's not just that you're low income there's something that goes along with that and that is about 40 percent of the folks who households that live in the King Maple neighborhood and the old North End do not have a car and have no access to a car but we don't hear much about that so when we talk about the importance of walking and biking this isn't just a nice thing to go scurrying around to enjoy life it's a necessity and quite frankly the biggest defect in this project as you will know is the fact that this plan has no protected bike lanes anywhere in the project paint does not protect the bike lane physical barriers do not only is there no protected bike lanes there's no separate sidewalk anywhere in this project that's being built we're taking away sidewalk on parts that's existing right now in the front of Chapin's own office they're taking sidewalk away and making it a shared use path that is it's irrational but this isn't just my thinking it's also the thinking of the plan walk bike of the city and also the regional plan for active transportation just two years old they call for separate bike protected bike lanes from the top of Pine Street at Bank Street all the way down to Flynn Avenue you can look it up just as well as I can and one of those plans what are we doing with this project we're not being providing one inch of protected bike lane we're spending $47 million and not getting a quality bike lane anywhere in the project number two we're also not getting any sidewalk we're actually degrading the ability to walk and bike I'm not going to go into roundabouts as you know the city pointed out that you have a 30 second delay with a signal versus eight seconds to the roundabout the roundabouts the downtown roundabouts in Vermont there are five have yet to have a bicycle crash have not had a serious pedestrian crash we've had three we have about every seven years we kill a pedestrian in a traffic light not confusing roundabouts are safe I'm part of the Pine Street Coalition about 200 people who are supportive of a new EIS process because this project was really put in the can about 2006 Carolyn Bates is here has been here tonight and spoke she was at the 2006 hearing in this location about 95 people that was the last real public hearing that put this project to bed 2006 was a year before the iPhone was invented a year before the first protected bike lane network was put in Montreal and here we are today the point is the walk bike coalition of the city has been a council has been opposed to this project from the beginning because of that very thing and the city has refused to respond to that in the design that we have here I guess finally my major concern is safety but it's also for the neighborhoods we are concerned about the safety and the health and the air quality of our neighbors whether we live in the old north end or the south end and yes the sidewalk along home avenue is terrible I'm a biker but I only could do sidewalks now because this is not safe to be on the street and I must admit it's one of the worst sidewalks in the city is trying to get up and out on home avenue thank you thank you for your comments do we have any more folks that would like to make any comments just going to hand it back so thank you all for coming tonight as if Dale you could pull up the slide of recapping comments are accepted until August excuse me October 10th there are comment forms out back so feel free to fill those out on your way out and I want to thank everybody for coming thank you to the interpreters who are here tonight there was one comment tonight of seeking to ask some clarifying questions the crew will stay here for another 10 or 15 minutes out at the poster boards if there are some clarifying questions that folks want to ask thanks so much for coming appreciate it thank you


like I can see you lot. Don't know what anyone's out doing over there. Probably for the best that you can't see me, but you can see Georgie and Job, so that's the main thing. They're the stars of the show on this panel today talking about building products that people love.  The ones they don't love. The ones that cause them the problems we don't want to think about. I think it's probably important just to start by saying that between the two of you, you have such a wealth of experience that it would be kind of remiss of me not to start by asking you about some of the experiences you've had just in terms of, you know, we have FinTech, Transport, we have Git Labs, we have now Remote Work. These are four huge sectors that pretty much everyone has some experience in. So maybe Georgie, I'd like just to ask you about what some of the key lessons you've had just generally in your time now across so many startups, if there's like one thing that you would say is like the main learning that you take into every new role. Yeah, so my career is a bit all over the place. If you look at it from a vertical perspective, I've worked in advertising, I've worked in marketplaces, finance, transport, but the commonality has always been scaling products globally. And one of the things that I didn't realize going into multiple different verticals, I was always like, oh, there'll be a challenge of learning the new industry. And there is, you know, you need to understand the space that you're working in. But if you're building consumer products, consumers have a psychological attachment to the products that they're using. And so if you can actually think about when we're here to talk about product love, right, but what is love? And that can be different for lots of people. And so I think if you take a consumer first mentality and you put the product over here and you start with the user that's using it and you work out like, what are the drivers? What is the value that they see in it? And then you can work out what the product needs to be, which can be different. So I think the commonality is that if you always start from the psychology of what the user is trying to achieve, then the industry can shape itself around that problem. Absolutely. And you've basically gone from, we were just saying, you know, a team of just around 60 people at the start of the year to over 600 now, nearly 700 people. It's hard enough to scale a team generally, but a product team as well. Can you talk to me a little bit about how it feels to go from being, you know, VP of product to now running the show, but with product in mind? Yeah, it's definitely a different thing, right? Like I think one of the hardest things is that when you start a company, you have a particular vision and you want to execute on that. And if you lead products, you have this luxury of essentially controlling that, right? That's the one thing you focus on. And if you become a CEO, if you run more things than just product, it's very hard to sometimes have to step back and say, maybe, maybe I shouldn't try to do all the things at the same time. And I think that's definitely one of the hardest lessons for me the past year or so. Yeah. Absolutely. I know we're talking about love and you said, well, what is love? And that's a song that we could sing along to a little bit later, but or maybe last night if you're at back party. But I'm interested in sort of how you assess that from a product side of things like, you know, you have MPS scores, but I want to maybe just ask a little bit about customer and how you assess customer feedback, how important it is to listen to customers and how maybe over time you've iterated how you listen to customers and how you take that feedback on against what you believe to be the right course of action. Yeah. So I think that, you know, Henry Ford said that if he'd listened to customers, he would have built a faster horse, but and that's that kind of is grounding from a product perspective, because if you're building a pioneer product or something that is changing the way that consumers are going to do something in the future and that they're the products that I gravitate towards because you cannot rely on what people are going to tell you because they don't know how do they know what they want to do in the future? How do they humans are humans rely on things that they understand already, which is why spaces like crypto and and and biodiversity and transport are really interesting spaces to be in because we don't know how we're going to operate in the future. And from a tier mobility perspective, we're changing the way that people move around cities. But a lot of the time people are okay with how they move around cities at the moment. They have a car. It works. It's convenient. The pram is in the backseat. It works for them. But you need to connect that convenience with the other things that they're concerned about, which is the kids can't play in the streets because the cars are always there. Or the CO2 emissions in cities means that you're thinking of moving out to the suburbs or to a regional area, but you'd really love to stay in the city. And so you need to understand the holistic psychology of it so that you can then show people what life could be like in the future. And banking in 26 was was very similar. So people already banked. It wasn't something that we were reinventing. What we were doing was showing them that they didn't have to do it in the high street. They didn't have to do it in a store. They didn't have to have the constraints of open hours and bank tellers. But if you'd asked them, they would have said that I love my bank teller, right? When I have a problem, I go in there. Same with audible, with Kindle, right? If you'd asked a book nerd like myself 15 years ago, that I wouldn't have a library anymore and I wouldn't go to the local bookshop. I would have tell you dreaming because I loved going to the bookshop and getting the advice from the manager. And I love having my books there, but I move a lot. And I've, you know, now we have it's more likely that people are going to read a book on a Kindle than they do with a real book. But we couldn't have predicted that those things are going to happen. So when you're building love products, you need to think about like, what are the drivers of love in the industry? Because depending on the industry that you're in depends on what people are going to love. I think I think one of the interesting things is and I think this is what you alluded to is that there's this big difference between the things that your users that your potential customers tell you that they want and the feedback that they give on the thing that you've built. Yeah, and this is such a big difference. Like, I think love can be expressed as someone saying, I love what you're doing. It doesn't necessarily mean that you should build whatever that then tell you, Oh, I would love it if you did add 13 more buttons to this interface, which is something that I encounter very frequently, which is that, Oh, yeah, I want to have all the options and everything in all the checkboxes. And we're like, yeah, maybe it wouldn't be the best solution, but we're happy that you like what we've made so far. And I think this is one of the big learnings from my side. You know, I've been working in B2B things, which many people consider very different, right? B2B, you're building for businesses, they want boring things. Everybody has a strong association that business software has to be boring and gray and complex. And in my experience, this is the opposite. Because who uses those that software, it's the same people. It's the same people that are your users. It's the exact same people. And if you make something that's truly delightful, a simple and accessible, they will give you that feedback. And that is the love that I think at least I see when people use my products. That point around simplicity is actually a really like nice jumping off point for one of my pet peeves, which is when companies do something really well. And then for an inextricable reason, they add every bell and whistle you can think of, it becomes clunky, it becomes unusable, it's probably inefficient, it probably causes many long hours and long nights for developers and others to actually put it together. I wonder how you kind of almost how that works from your experience is like resisting that urge to just do more because an investor or a customer or someone says it's a good idea. This is to what you just said, right? And I think that we get caught up in solving problems for everyone, right? And we talk about this a lot at here, which is that you cannot build solutions for everyone. It doesn't work, right? What you'll end up with is a solution that no one really loves. Because if you're trying to please everyone, then everyone is going to get a watered down version because love is a strong feeling, right? And if you don't hit all of the elements of it, then you don't get there. And so you really need to focus on who is your target user. And I have a lot of conversations with founders about, yeah, but if we want to be mass market and if we have a target user, how are we going to grow to the level of scale that we need to to be successful at our mission purpose investor pitch? But if you don't have a target user and really focus on building for them, so that first product, right, that you loved, that they then kind of watered down because they wanted to make everyone like it. The problem is, is that while you loved that product, you're an advocate for that product. And you were telling people about it. And in this world, we talk to people, we look on social media, people don't look at brand anymore to work out what products they want to adopt. They talk to their peers, they talk to social networks. And if you don't have advocacy represented for your company in those networks, then you have a lot of trouble acquiring customers and it costs you a lot of money. So you really need to make sure that you're like, okay, this is the target user and I'm going to make that user like adore me to the point where they're going to go and tell people that they need to get this product. And then you'll get auxiliary benefits associated with that. But you need to win the hearts and minds of that particular user that you're trying to achieve. And I think this is probably more relevant for you in a way, you're because, you know, two years ago at Slush, it was certainly warmer than it was this time around. But, you know, the the dreaded C word wasn't on the horizon in anyone's minds. And we didn't know that we were going to be working remote and maybe even using remote. So you're building this transformational product. And I suppose there is an argument that says that, you know, you could do more things in the future, obviously, but you have to build the initial thing to get people to come in the first place. So to that same point around adding more things are like, how do you stop yourself from doing too much at once? Yeah, I think I think it remote brain and really strange in a way luxurious position where the thing that we're trying to solve is so immensely complex, because part of our solution is the fact that we are everywhere, every country in the world. And way more so than we thought it would be when we started out. That's really hard. That's really hard. It's hard to not to get even to get to the point of lovable. It's hard to get to the point where it just works. And so every time we feel the itch that I think many product leaders have, or people building new companies, like, maybe I could do that as well. And I see this thing there and I could probably do it better. We are reminded by the fact that, well, for one, we're not everywhere in the world yet. And that is the core thing that we're trying to solve. And second, it's not there yet. Like we're not at a point yet where we believe that this is the thing that we set out to do. This is solved to the degree that we feel like, well, we can actually move on because we've done this better than anybody else. We have such a long way to go in that sense. But how do you balance? Because that's interesting, right? Because you're in this unique position where your market is being created before your eyes, right? And everyone needs the solution. So you have this commercial opportunity to scale insanely. How do you balance taking that, grabbing that commercial opportunity and going into 100 different markets with making sure that every market loves what you're doing? It's honestly very difficult. I think one of the things that we did really well, early on is we had these fundamental principles that we built upon. One of them was we are going to build in a particular way. In our case, it meant foundations up. And in a payroll space, it means owning everything, running operations ourselves. And we're not going to make exceptions to that because we've seen other people make exceptions to that, which are always disastrous. And so as long as we stick to those principles, we essentially have like this almost a forcing function to restricting how fast we can roll this out. We can go only as fast as we can build it. No faster. There's no shortcuts that we can take because that's the principle that we build everything upon. Within that scope, we're trying to go as fast as possible. And that means that we scale the team. In the last three months, we hired more than 300 people for a team. Where did you hire them? Well, I mean, that's the mission that we have. Where did we find them? Well, everywhere, because great people are everywhere on the planet. We get more than 24,000 applicants a month. That's crazy. It is crazy. And that's actually my next question. Very good segue in guys. We now are in a time where, you know, we talked about people working remotely, but there is probably seemingly every article I read a war for talent, you know, this kind of hotter than ever market for the best people in startups be they in, you know, Boston or in Boston Lancashire, perhaps. And the weird sort of dynamic that causes is that everyone can compete for jobs. Everyone is very well funded. I'm just interested between the two of you when you come to like finding team members and people you really want to back to like deliver that product. Like how important is it that they are on board with that? And can you maybe just talk a little bit about the composition of teams? And if that's changed as a result of the experience we're having now with the job market? Yeah, for us, when we built a company, we said these are core values. And we make sure that anybody that we hire aligns with those values. Your team is everywhere.  And so if that group is not good, if you're not happy with that group of people, yeah, that's it's not going to go anywhere. It's the most important thing. The highest leverage thing you can possibly do when building a company is building a really strong team. And so that's where we focus all of our energy on them, making sure that's good that we reward them well, right? They get paid well, we provide a great experience for them. That is fundamental. And then they are structuring the team. That's an ongoing exercise where depending on the size of your company, you have to change things. And one of the things, and of course, we discussed this briefly backstage is like we want to bring people together so that they collaborate. And in our case virtually, we don't have any offices. But we do make sure that people from different departments, from different disciplines, work closely together to build great things. And that makes it more fun to do work as well. Yeah. It's people often ask me what are my product principles? Like what is my foundational product? What are your product principles? I don't have it. I only have one, to be honest. And it's not I'm not going to write a book on it. Let's just say that. But in the end, people build products. And if you don't have the right people building your products, and this goes to the love as well, then it doesn't matter what framework, what system, what process you have, if you don't have the right people building them. And that also goes to diversity. Like if you're building a product for a global market, you need that representation in the people that are building that product. Because a group of people that look and feel the same, there is no way that they can build a product that is representative of the diversity of your audience that you're trying to achieve. But also, I think that it's difficult to scale. Because if people build products, and like you said, you focus on making sure that you get the right people into the team, at the same time, you have commercial opportunity to grow as fast as possible, or you have numbers that you need to hit which require more engineering teams and more performance marketing managers. And then you add this warfare talent on top of it. And you can start to panic a bit. Because, you know, you need the people to build the thing, to deliver the outcome, but you can't get the people. And then the price goes up. And then, you know, and I think that as an industry, we also have a responsibility not to feed this situation. So we try very hard not, I mean, we're very transparent about the prices, or not the prices, the salaries that we offer in roles. And I don't go over them, right? There can be some adjustments in things like ESOPs and other areas. But I think if we end up in this price war for talent, no one's going to win, right? Because it's not sustainable. So this is the other thing, like we're going through an insanely, insane era of funding. That's a Berlin where I'm based is insane, right? The company's just raised billion dollars in cash, right? Two. I mean, my old company N26 just raised 800 million dollars in a funding round. Gorillas raised almost a billion dollars. This is not the amount of money they've had in their existence. This is just the last funding round they had. And so, of course, they can go out and buy talent. But then we need to keep the idea of the industry in mind and how do we want to grow and how do we want to grow people and grow talent and not just buy developers or engineers that are coding for us. Because that will work for a year, right? And then someone else will offer them 15 grand more to do the same job and they will go. And it's not scalable and it's not sustainable. So I think it's something that as an industry we really need to think about because it's very detrimental to what we're trying to achieve. I feel pretty strongly there's a solution for it, which is to just hire people from anywhere. We employ many people, hundreds of people that their previous job, they earn maybe $10,000 a month a year, sorry. And now they earn $10,000 a month. That's not uncommon. We literally have hundreds of people that have gone from such a situation because the reality is that if you live anywhere but Berlin, London, New York or San Francisco, you're probably not earning these massive salaries. The opportunities are there and the talent is the same. Incredibly talented people. And this is the democratization of access, right? I mean it's happening. I invest in a company in the UK called Sudo, which is a fitness platform. And one of the cool things about it is that personal trainers in London can charge 100 pounds an hour, right? But actually if you have a Zuber instructor or a dance instructor from Brazil, I promise you it's a better class, right? And they're getting three pounds a class. And so by making it removing the need for location-based, which is what remote is doing, you're really equalizing the world. But then what are we going to do with the people in Berlin and London who are on these insane salaries? It's a market, right? It will resolve itself. If there's the same talent elsewhere, delivers the exact same thing for less, then that is what the market is going to move towards. For those people there, if you live in Mumbai, for example, it becomes more competitive in Mumbai. You can't afford to hire a developer for $10,000 a year anymore. You're going to have to pay them $10,000 a month. And it's a good thing. And then, yeah, if the people in London are going to earn 20 percent less, that's 20 percent less of a lot. There's still a lot. It's okay. Yeah. Georgie Smallwood, killer of the UK Zumba teachers. You heard it here first. If any Zumba teachers here at Slush, you know where to find her afterwards. I feel like it's interesting. We talked earlier about like, you know, being in a transformation industry. And I feel like N26, more or less, was the same thing. And tier is much the same for you, Georgie, as well. But one of the things that I guess we were able to do now that, you know, when I think about if I was, you know, not that I ever would, but if I was going to build a product, I would want all my team members in the same room to see the, like, probably terrible design that I had and tell me how bad it was and critique it as a group. But you don't have to be in the same room anymore. But I am interested just in how you communicate across teams now when you are using different platforms. And also, you know, if you have any sort of almost practical advice of, like, how you think about managing teams remotely and making products great across geographies, time zones, all of those things. Yeah. So I joined tier in COVID. So I joined as the first CPO in November last year. And my usual style, although I didn't realise it until I couldn't do it, was to walk the floor, right, and join stand-ups and try and understand context and feeling. And I couldn't do any of that. In hindsight, that was a good thing, because, you know, anyone can go and join the stand-ups and learn context and learn the work that's going on. But I had to step back and say, OK, well, what am I going to do first? And so I asked what I could add that would make things easier. And it was really work on the company strategy and make sure that that was consumer driven. But I think what's really interesting is I had to learn how to build relationships without being able to go for coffee in the kitchen with someone. And the only way I knew how to do that was to use technology in the same way that I do things in person. So I set up like a million 20-minute coffee chats. I did some with empty coffee cups because no one can drink that amount of liquid. But it was the only way I knew to to form those connections. And I think the length that COVID has gone on for now, and I'm interested in in your thoughts on this, because we didn't really go remote. We just sat at home and did the same things that we did in the office. Right. And I spend eight, nine hours a day on video calls. Right. And you can't do that. Like it's impossible. And I personally am a very observational person. So if I'm in a meeting in a board room and there's 12 people there, I'm kind of I'm watching you and your body language. And then I'm watching you and I understand that you're not that interested. But OK. And on a screen that completely overwhelms me because I'm looking at 12 people at the same time and I'm going I can't focus. I can't concentrate. So I think what we're going to start to see now is actually the change in way of working because we can't you can't sustain what we're doing. Right. People need to work out. We need to work out. What are our boundaries at home? Right. How do we know when to switch off? When do we close the computer and how do you not look at slack when you're trying to order your dinner? But from a tooling perspective, is that changing? Is that something you're seeing from customers as well? Yeah, you know, I feel about two ways about this. One is that we've had the tools for many years to do the work that we're doing today in the way that we're doing it today. Right. I think the main thing is that you have to start working asynchronously, write things down more. If you are just sharing information to record it or write it down instead of having a meeting and having the overhead of all of that. The other side of it is that the part where you have to be really intentional about bonding and getting to know each other and coffee chats, I feel the same way. I don't want to be on Zoom calls all day, but you still want to form a connection with people. And so I think, you know, it's not going to... There's not going to be a major shift in the next year, but I think it's slowly we're going to see ways that we can connect with each other beyond just Zoom and Slack. And I have good faith that in, you know, tools like VR and AR will slowly help us cross the threshold. It's going to take a while and you're looking for a skeptical journey, but... We're edging to the meta world and I'm not sure about that. Everybody that joins our company gets a VR headset. And that's not because we're working in VR. That's because if you hang out with someone in VR, you can play a game together. It removes the thing that you're looking at your screen, you're looking at yourself the whole time. And it gives you a sense of presence. And so we might be playing a game together and we can chat and it removes the context of work as well because I'm not getting notifications. And so essentially we created a way to want to connect better because there's more sense of presence because you can see each other move. There's somewhat of a body language there. And the other part of it is that, yeah, you're sort of forced to disconnect. You're forced to stop thinking about yourself and seeing yourself in a little Zoom window. It's really nice. And no, we don't use it for work, but that's OK. Like we used to connect and that's part of like working in a place. Isn't it interesting that we're going to adopt this new technology so that we can we can form. And I think that would be great, right? Like if we... Because you don't play, right? And one of our core values that tier is play. And we... I mean, even at the end of every exec meeting, we have a think on how we went and the values that we think we need to work on. And play comes up a lot.  Like, you know, if you could at the start of the meeting, it's always like, what's your holiday destination and who would you take? Just so you can start to create these connections with people. But so that's interesting, right? So we're not moving as much anymore. And I think about this a lot, right? So if we have a VR office and we're sitting at our desks all day and we don't get out and then take the other kind of world of love at the moment, which seems to be an obsession with convenience. So we're not going even out the door to go to the supermarket. We're getting everything delivered. Is the next wave of products that we're going to need to love? Health tech. Because, like, we're not... We're not moving. We're not... We're not engaging in a face-to-face environment. We're not going to shops. Ecom is booming. You know, you can even get your medicine delivered these days, right? So which is probably the only one that you really should get delivered. So what is the next love product?  So you're not talking. I know you're the speaker, but you observe everything. What are the trends that you see? Wow. Throwing it back on me. Day two of Slush Guys. Real, real party on stage. I mean, the main thing that I see is just, like, the crazy amount of opportunity that people have now to start something and build something, you know, anywhere in the world. And that previously would have taken you so much longer. I think it's just the speed of iteration has completely shifted. Companies that, you know, people I meet at a conference, you know, three weeks ago or a year ago who were sort of, you know, bumbling around or two years ago, bumbling around, like trying to figure out how they would do one thing or another.  And that allows people across industries to think, well, why wouldn't I do that? Well, you know, I think this product is terrible. I could definitely do this quicker and easier. And the technology is being built at such a speed as well that some of those barriers, perhaps, that, you know, maybe would have caused an issue before being eliminated. And it's really great to see. I mean, it keeps me going. More to write about. Yeah, more to write about, which is always good, keeps my editor off my back, which we love just finally, because we are sort of ambling towards the end of our fun. I just wanted to talk to you just briefly about some of those points around the technological challenge, but also just a little bit about how you see going forward, this kind of growth at all costs, you know, kind of build, you know, go fast and break things, kind of mentality. Is that changing slightly, do you think? Because I wonder, you know, we talk a little bit sometimes about, you know, you go fast and break things, then you have to go back and fix some of the things that got broken along the way, like, do we think that that as a hack is kind of changing as a mentality? Is that maybe a European thing that you're noticing more? I think that this obsession with growth is, is it's not, is definitely not going away, right? We're very obsessed with growth, but it's also being tempered. I just did a presentation on product market fit, right? And desirability is is a huge element of that. And growth is in that desirability, right? It has that virality that pushes things. But the reality is that we have gone through some cycles where we see companies that just haven't hit product market fit, which also includes viability. So I think investors are asking more questions about you can move fast and break things, but you need to know what you're doing. And I think if you don't know what you're doing, there is a light being shined on those companies. I think the market is ruthless. If your company is well funded and you're running at negative margins for a long time, eventually it's going to end. You want to bring your company public. You're going to attract investors. At one point, people are going to say, this is no longer functional. And if you're an Uber, you have to raise prices at one point. And that's exactly what we're seeing. And so I think there's a lot of delays that we removed. You don't have to open an office anymore. It's much easier to expand across the world. It's much easier to build infrastructure. IT is getting better. So we can build companies significantly faster. So if we attract more capital, we can do things faster. But eventually the market is going to make or break it. Fantastic. Well, that's what we've got time for, guys. We could have probably done this for another half an hour, but we won't. Please give a big hand to Yorba and Georgie. And thanks for all coming.