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Q&A
Council Member Louis questions DOT on CHIPS funding and traffic studies
1:20:38
·
3 min
Council Member Farah N. Louis questions DOT officials about the use of new funding and CHIPS grants for traffic control projects, timelines for traffic studies, and school safety measures. DOT Executive Deputy Commissioner Paul Ochoa responds, explaining the flexibility of CHIPS funding and acknowledging challenges with traffic study timelines.
- CHIPS funding is used for various projects, including traffic signals, but not for speed bumps
- DOT acknowledges the time-consuming nature of traffic studies due to various factors like seasonality and data collection
- The department suggests increasing contract capacity to have more people conducting studies as a potential solution to speed up the process
Farah N. Louis
1:20:38
Thank you chairs.
1:20:39
Good to see you commissioner and thank you for deploying borough commissioner Bray to our municipal town hall meeting last week.
1:20:46
I have three quick questions.
1:20:48
I'll just ask them all and you guys could respond.
1:20:51
How will the new funding and anticipated state CHIPS grant funding being be used solely for large scale capital projects or will it also support the persistent backlog of smaller traffic control requests such as stop signs, speed bumps, and pedestrian safety measures?
1:21:09
Can DOT provide a timeline or strategy on how this budget will improve the turnaround of for traffic studies particularly in communities like mines where response delays are measured in years?
1:21:21
And the last one is in regards to a mother and son that were hit by a speeding school bus in my district in early April.
1:21:27
I wanted to know what are the current parameters of the CHIPS grant in relation to school safety such as traffic calming and signal installations.
1:22:55
We have a specific ask that we can talk about after and just in regards to the others.
1:23:39
But how will we make it different in the next fiscal
1:24:06
Alright, thank you.
1:24:06
Thank you, chairs.
Paul Ochoa
1:21:39
Hey councilmember, good to see you always.
1:21:41
We love CHIPS.
1:21:43
CHIPS is a consolidated local street and highway improvement program.
1:21:49
We use it both capital budget and on the expense side, depending on the type of contract.
1:21:54
Chips has very specific requirements on what it can be used for.
1:21:57
It's a lot of traffic signals.
1:21:58
You you hit it right on the head.
1:22:01
Right.
1:22:01
We do not use it for speed bumps, but we do we do program it for in all areas of the of the budget, in particular traffic operations.
1:22:10
The the we did program more CHIPS funding into the budget.
1:22:15
We do that on a yearly basis to make sure that, one, the projects and the programs that are CHIPS funded have enough resources in them to continue.
1:22:24
We also we do program the CHIPS.
1:22:26
CHIPS is actually pretty flexible.
1:22:28
We program it both on the PS side and on the DOTPS side.
1:22:33
And we we work with OMB to make sure that we have enough CHIPS funding on any given year.
1:22:38
Your point about the speeding school, we do from time to time, we do add CHIPS funding to our school safety team.
1:22:47
They do that.
1:22:48
They both on the capital side and on the expense side.
1:22:52
If you have a specific ask, I'm happy to track that down.
1:23:00
Yep.
1:23:00
And then same with the traffic studies.
1:23:03
Listen, we understand the the frustration at times.
1:23:07
It is not something that we can just look at and determine.
1:23:10
There's times of the day that need to be considered.
1:23:13
There's a long period of time.
1:23:14
There's seasonality.
1:23:16
So we do understand that sometimes it's frustrating that traffic studies are not done as as fast as everyone here would like them.
1:23:23
But they do I just wanted to acknowledge that it it takes a long time to actually get the data right to make sure that we're not just installing something because somebody's asking for it, we're installing measures that are actually needed.
1:23:42
can increasing contract capacity is a good example.
1:23:45
I'm happy to either set something up with our traffic operations or look at increasing contract capacity for us to have more people doing more studies is probably the fastest way possible.
1:23:56
An individual study will probably not be sped up, but having more people do them, exactly, having more people do them should have a good result.
Ydanis Rodriguez
1:23:41
year?
Chi A. Ossé
1:23:42
I think we