Slides That Follow Your Voice: Arabic Accent Town Hall

Slide 1: The tram, phase two

0:17Good evening, and thank you for coming out on a weeknight, especially those of you who came by car and are now wondering where to park, which, I promise you, is on slide six. [laughs]

Slide 2: Angry tonight, not surprised in March

0:28My name is Layla. I am the director of the city transport authority, and I am here to talk about the second phase of the tram, the nine kilometres from Sidra Square to the university, which starts construction in February and which will, for about uh, twenty-six months, make some of your lives harder before it makes them easier. I am not going to pretend otherwise. Honestly, I would rather you were angry with me tonight than surprised in March.

0:55Let me start with why. The corridor between Sidra and the university carries about eighty-four thousand trips a day. Eighty-six, actually, in the last count, but the slide says eighty-four, so. seventy-one percent of them are in cars, with an average of one point three people in each one.

Slide 3: Why: 84,000 trips a day

1:13At eight in the morning the journey takes forty, no, forty-two minutes for nine kilometres, which is a speed I could manage on a bicycle, and I am not a cyclist. [chuckles] My husband is a cyclist. He has timed it. Thirty-one minutes. He arrives looking like he has been in a fight with the weather, and he is proud of that, and I have asked him not to come tonight, and I can see that he has come. Hello.

Slide 4: Sidra to the university, 9 kilometres

1:40The tram will do it in nineteen minutes, every six minutes at peak, with five stops, and each tram carries three hundred people, which is roughly two hundred and thirty cars.

1:51Now, your questions, which I have read, all four hundred and twelve of them. The top three were parking, trees, and noise, in that order, and I will take them in that order.

Slide 5: 412 questions: parking, trees, noise

2:02Parking. The line takes one lane in each direction along Sidra Avenue, and one hundred and eighty on-street parking spaces go with it. We are adding two hundred and forty spaces in two new structures, behind the market and at the university end, and we are converting the dead space under the Khalid Street what is it called, the flyover into ninety-five more. So the total goes up, not down.

Slide 6: Parking: the total goes up, not down

2:28Sir, I heard that. Yes. The parking at the market. I will come to you in the questions, I promise you, I have written it down. Where was I. Yes. The spaces. The spaces will be a bit further from the shops, around a hundred and twenty metres on average, and I understand that for an elderly person in August, a hundred and twenty metres is not nothing. We are putting shaded walkways along both, and misting at the crossings. That is the parking. I know it is not everything you wanted.

2:59Trees. forty-six mature trees are in the path of the line. We will move thirty-one of them, with root balls, to the new median, using a machine that we have already tried on six trees in the north, five of which made it.

Slide 7: Trees

3:13The remaining fifteen cannot be moved, and we will plant one hundred and forty new ones, of the same species, along the corridor. I know that a new tree is not an old tree.

3:24I was born, I grew, I... I grew up under one of those on Sidra Avenue, and I know exactly which one, and it is being moved, not cut, and I checked, and I checked.

3:40Noise. A modern tram at forty kilometres an hour measures about sixty-eight decibels at the kerb. The traffic it replaces measures seventy-four.

Slide 8: Noise

3:49So the street gets quieter, not louder, except during construction, when it will be worse, and we will stop work at seven in the evening and not start before seven in the morning, and there will be a telephone number on every barrier that reaches a human being, not a recording. I will be one of the human beings, on Tuesdays. [laughs]

4:09Twenty-six months is a long time to trust a plan. So here is my commitment. Every three months, in this hall, I will stand here with the schedule, the spending and the complaints, and you can tell me what is going wrong. [sighs]

Slide 9: Every three months, in this hall

4:25If the trees are dying, you will know. And one thing that is not on any slide. I have lived in this city my whole life, and I have never once crossed it without sitting in a car thinking how it could be different. This is the different. I would like to get it right, with you, and honestly that is all.

4:45Thank you, and let's begin with the parking.