Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting   4/3/2025

Thank you, everyone, for coming to the April VPEC meeting.

As always, we'll start with introductions.

We've got a few new faces here today, which is wonderful.

A few regulars are out, I think, because of spring break.

So just say your name.

to your neighborhood and what brings you here.

Hi, I'm Deb.

I live off Cherry.

I live between Blytheville and Charleston Village.

My name is Dean Hansen.

I am part of the Roseville neighborhood and I'm the Secretary of the Roseville Neighborhood Association and here to speak during the public comment about some of the pedestrian safety issues we're looking to have improved in our neighborhood.

I work for the city and I'm the Safe Routes to School Coordinator.

I'm Emma.

I'm a student at UVA.

We're here for our public health class.

Isn't that nice?

Yeah, thanks.

I'm Katie.

I'm also a connection student at UVA.

I live in Fry Springs.

I work at Blue Ridge Cyclery.

I'm Meredith.

I own Magnolia Rabbit Sign Co.

I work with the city on a lot of projects.

And I leave the Sunday ride for Blue Ridge Cyclery.

And what else do I do?

That's enough.

I'm Herb Levy.

I live in North Downtown.

I am a bicyclist.

I'm Tommy Sifranek, the city's bike and pedestrian coordinator.

I'm also a bike advocate.

I'm Ben Chambers.

I'm the city's transportation planning manager.

I work out at MBS here.

I also live downtown, so I'm quite often a walker, but I've become quite a biker over the winter.

So for a lot of miles, I might need a bike.

I'm going to hold it up any more time.

But I'm seeing memory.

I live in the Loomis Street neighborhood, also a new biker and walker.

Excellent.

Okay.

My name is Bob Holdsworth.

Hey, um,

OK.

I'm my my view doesn't show that I'm a little face, so I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to say anything.

I'm Natalie.

I'm on city council and I hope I try my hardest to be the bike pet advocate on city council.

Exactly.

Or 8 to 100, hopefully.

Thank you for coming.

Why you're here, what neighborhoods you're from, that sort of stuff.

I'm Jen Fleischer and I live in the Belmont neighborhood.

That's great.

Oh, I'm here?

You know, because I like all the biking and the walking and the counts, the advising and all that stuff.

And she's running for city council.

Yeah, I'm Peter Krebs.

I live in Belmont and unlike Bill, I don't have an exclusive relationship with Charlottesville.

I also bike in Albemarle, California.

Also, thank you all for coming.

Next up, approval of the meeting I was from last February, last meeting,

Having the agenda, I want to propose a slight change to the agenda.

We don't have anything explicitly on the agenda as it stands, but we definitely want to talk about walk-see-wheel branding.

That's one of the key things we're going to talk about.

So I just want to make that explicit.

That's the first thing we'll talk about after questions, but if I don't hear any rejections to that, I'll assume everyone is OK

with that end with the minutes from Xavier.

Excellent.

Public Poets.

So hopefully, well, I have this if this is helpful for anyone.

So I'm part of the Roseville neighborhood, which is, you know, over by the photos on Preston and Roseville Drive, of course.

So an issue that we are seeing is that, or the request on

Association is that we would like there to be four-way stops instead of two-way stops at Forest and Henry and Concord and Forest.

So the issue that we have right now, so this is a very long road with businesses here and then houses towards the back, but it is a very easy road to speed down the entirety of.

And if you are, for example,

There's also been a lot of talk about slowing traffic down on Rose Hill because of the school.

So there is the additional concern that as Rose Hill potentially becomes a 25 instead of a 35 or has other traffic slowing measures that is just going to make forest even more appealing to zoom down.

I would say just anecdotally, like if I'm outside watering my plants,

My request here is basically just like, how do we get support to move that forward?

It is popular within the neighborhoods.

You have a lot of children already, and we have new families moving in, so we're looking to get this moving.

I can provide a response or I can follow up with you afterwards.

I'm more helpful if there is a bit of a process.

It's not because what we're looking at is traffic calming and stop signs are traffic control traffic calming so they're treated as a more rigorous thing with engineering.

No, the traffic calming improvement stuff that we're working on internally is we're trying to figure out how we implement that over the next year.

The small area plan is probably going to be a two-year process.

But during that time, we're going to come in and do spot improvements.

We're going to do some traffic calming testing to figure out like, all right, if we put in a speed table, which is sort of a shallower speed hump, if it's four inches, does it do anything?

If it's two inches, does it do anything?

There are some things that we need to test.

Yeah, I will be leaving because I have a little one.

I'll grab one.

Right.

Hey, Dean, just a follow up.

So your neighborhood currently has a traffic calming request to the city.

I think Nels put it in six, 12 months ago.

Yes.

And that's sitting in the traffic engineer's office.

The city hired a new traffic engineer maybe two months ago.

So that is on their to-do list to follow up.

And I specifically asked about the four-way stops.

And that's why we know this answer very well.

OK, cool.

Well, I appreciate that.

Yes, the Community Lab School is at the end of the board.

Thanks, sorry, visual.

Yeah, any sport, because we have a lot of, you know, young kids, probably cute kids that influence all of our things.

And then Nels.

Caleb has a traffic calming request for this specific thing.

So that's sitting in his, you know, to do this, but he just joined and was trying to get up to speed.

Yeah.

And I don't know if this was mentioned when I was out of the room, but we did do a neighborhood walk in that neighborhood in recent months.

So, you know, we've seen it firsthand.

We know what you're talking about and are trying to figure out a way to

Hi, just had my bees, so you can repeat everything I just said.

Thank you everyone, really appreciate it.

I was supposed to talk about stop signs, but they did talk about the crowdfunding problem.

Thank you.

Yeah, I don't know whether they're in a different category than city streets, but

The streets that the city owns and parks, I'm thinking about the, what do they call it, Riverview Park.

You know, people when they go down there, they're like changing their clothes and rolling their strollers around.

But the road from the design point of view, you look at it and you go, oh, this is a 20 mile an hour, 25, 30 mile an hour road.

And I'm just wondering if you guys could, if there's any law that prevents you from basically posting, you know, a sign at entrance to park saying yield to pedestrians, yield to bikers, and post a speed limit of like five so people can go 10.

And the other thing is, I've got to go to some neighborhood meeting.

Yeah, I think that's feedback that we can pass along, Bill.

I know that Parks and Rec is currently considering going to

Thanks, Bill.

Awesome.

I was wondering if this is the time to talk about trying to calm the road in Rose Hill.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, so I'm going to catch up with Dean separately.

But generally, yes, we are working on traffic calming city-wide.

Yeah, no worries.

Thanks for coming.

OK, and we can talk more about that.

Questions or stuff?

We could do that, too.

It's part of the stuff.

OK. Yeah.

Next up is BPAC officer interim elections in the charter for BPAC.

We're meant to have election every October, I believe.

Last October, I had only, I'd been doing this for maybe six months because the October before that we couldn't find a chair.

So it's been pretty short and I forgot and pointed that out that just for continuity's sake, we should have an interim election and then pick back up in October.

Right, and Guinevere and I, and Guinevere is the vice chair, she can't be here today, we are happy to stand and proposing to stand as Kochis, but we would also welcome anyone else who wanted to get involved, there's also a vacant possession of secretary, which no one has yet stepped forward for.

So this is

Just to clarify, who is on BPAC?

If you've been to a BPAC meeting, you are twice.

If this is your second BPAC meeting or more, you can vote for or nominate an officer.

And if you have been to at least two BPEC meetings, unclear whether this counts as your second one or not.

It's a mixture of so formal and so informal.

Of course, we currently have a nomination from Mr. Krebs and a second from Mr.

Bode.

Yeah.

Bode.

Thank you.

For James Van Raacken and Guinba Higgins as co-chairs, all those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All those opposed?

No offense taken.

Okay.

We'll take that as passing and move swiftly on to more familiar material, which is questions of staff.

We can do.

So yes, we have kind of established this new position of secretary because traditionally it wasn't clear whose job it was to take minutes and it always fell on the vice chair, but the vice chair has a lot of

responsibilities, most of which are unseen.

And they didn't see rights, that should always be their job.

So we're just looking for someone to volunteer to take minutes at the meeting and if they have time, write up those minutes after the meeting and send them out to the group.

I mean, I can definitely do that, but this is my first meeting, so I don't know.

I appreciate it.

Ask the question again next meeting if you feel more comfortable then.

Yeah, I'll ask again next meeting, and then I need to get around longer because I appreciate it.

Okay, so...

Carl Benatomi provided a SARS update.

This is two months' worth of updates.

We have some printed copies, but not many.

Question about the quick build last time.

It finally occurred to me that there's a quick build project that I should have nominated quite some time ago and sent an email about that.

Yeah, we're not expecting any new things on the list right now.

We're trying to figure out how we get them through the public service work order system and make sure that we're designed enough for those guys to get stuff on the ground.

So we're working with the first 20

a good spot where it is.

I may have to say, no, there may be reasons why we can't do it, but that might be something that we're working on in the background right now.

Yeah, I'll catch you after we're done.

Cool.

How does anybody say Hawaii?

That's a very good question.

Yeah.

So part of the reason we have two months of updates is we didn't meet last month at the impact and instead we went to the active mobility summit, had a great time hearing about the three notch trail and all the work county's doing on it, all the great work that other localities in the state are working on their big trail projects.

And Tommy and I were super excited.

We went to this meeting in the afternoon with our utilities crew to talk about

probably a year and a half at this point of, hey, we need to start a restriping project, figure out what we can do between the existing curbs.

So we went to the utilities and public service partly to get an understanding of what's the repaving schedule.

We lined that up with our restriping plans and utilities said, you guys are going to have to hold off on that because we're basically tearing out every pipe along West Main for the next three years.

Yeah, you're going to have some maintenance of traffic plans that we'll look at to make sure that the bicyclists are accounted for while we're doing this construction.

But doing a wholesale thing in the next year, like you planned, isn't going to happen.

And so that was a huge kick in the gut for me and Tommy, who had been so psyched in the morning, walked out of this meeting where I was just like, oh.

And then we were like, man, it was so exciting to talk about the Three Nuts Trail.

And then we realize, well, we have three years to plan for what goes on West Main.

And we've got to get from the west side of town to the east side of town.

And there's a pretty clear street that runs down the middle of the city that does that.

And we just got told we have three years to plan for what the solution is.

We also know that we have issues on Barracks Road that we studied last year with PDOT.

We have issues on Ivy Road.

Those are two entrances into the city for three notch trail that are potentially going to be considered by the county study.

What does that look like from the city's perspective?

Don't we need to be sort of planning for what happens when the county comes in on our west side with three notch trail?

And then if it comes down Ivy Road, that helps us deal with some issues that we have with

UVA developing a lot of their property over there, us having a lot more traffic coming in on Ivy Road.

And that sort of takes us down the road to, what's our next big problem?

Well, the corner has a lot of problems for safety, for pedestrians.

It's a major thoroughfare.

It's a major destination for people.

We might be braved over something tucked to this regional trail network.

And then that leads us to the West Main.

And then that leads us to downtown.

And we've already made that connection.

And then we started thinking about what happens on the east side of town.

Do we go down East Market?

Do we go down East High?

And we started like, this was Friday afternoon after we had been at a mobility conference for the past few days.

So we were really thinking big thoughts.

And we're like, there are all these issues from east to west in town.

We've got this big trail project coming from west of town.

We've got this time.

Shouldn't we figure out what our alignment is?

Shouldn't we figure out what this project is as it comes through town?

Maybe the opportunity that we thought we had for doing a West Main restriping isn't there anymore, but now we get to build an iconic fail project and figure out where it goes.

So we, you know, went home.

Now we get a little bit happier after thinking that.

And then I think we came back Monday morning and realized we had to explain that to everybody.

So right now what we are working on is sort of figuring out what are the next steps for that process.

We're going to be meeting

effort.

And then the other opportunity is, okay, while we're doing all that, we can still be doing a restriving project somewhere.

We still have needs for protected bike lanes.

We still have places where there's lots of space curve to curve.

There's still places where we're trying to bring speed limits down from 35 miles per hour in the neighborhood, 25.

So if we're not looking at West Main, where else can we be looking?

And so we've started to look at

All of those different corridors through town, sort of paring back, are they assigned to an existing study?

Is there something in the works that's coming up that's going to deal with this?

And as we were sort of paring down and prioritizing, we looked at the next places that we probably want to look at every striking project would be Milhorn Road in front of the high school.

Right now it's a 35 mile per hour road.

Pretty important east-west connection across the north side of town.

and then on the south side of town we also have a 35 mile per hour entrance into the city coming up Monticello Avenue.

We've got a lot of space, a lot of unprotected bike lanes coming through there and it's really difficult for us to slow people coming down off the interstate as they're approaching Summit Elementary School.

Maybe this is going to cut back on revenues for

school zone enforcement cameras that are going in later this spring, but we would love the speeds to be lower on that area.

We would love there to be easy bike pet access in that area that people felt safe in.

There's an opportunity there on the south side and then we have Melbourne on the north.

So we're going to start moving forward with scoping those two projects

So it wasn't the update that I was hoping to give you guys when I left in February, but I think this sets us up for a lot of interesting work for the next year or so.

One other thing about the event is that in between the Three Nights Trail meeting, we had to bump our meeting with public service because

West Main and Ridge.

So in between those two things, we walked all over West Main, Ridge, Monticello, Preston, and just saw all the needs in that whole corridor.

And then we went and talked to the Park Service.

Hey, what's up Peter?

So it's sort of been the city's approach typically to do restriking when you do repaving.

Yeah.

And we knew that the repaving in West Main would be a massive thing that had to be done anyway.

So having the streetscape not happen had this little silver lining.

But when they do the utility work,

Is there a way to make sure that the repaving that happens will probably be segment by segment, not comprehensive across the entirety of West Main Street?

Yeah, that's a question that I still have asked.

utility plans for what goes in the ground underneath.

They haven't come up with the maintenance of traffic for what happens while they're doing a construction.

The other thing we're talking about with them is is there some sort of interim step like you might need to still come back through and do a full

Once you get to the end of that three-year project of tearing out every pipe and putting down new pavement, then you need to come in and probably put it in a top layer that keeps everything consistent across the entire corridor.

Maybe, but I wouldn't count on that.

That's where we're at.

I'll also observe that with the Belmont Bridge redo, we did use that as an example to show that the world did not end when

Lane's got an arrow, or in this case, parking will go away, probably because of the repaving.

And that is an opportunity to say, hey, can we manage with less width of road for cars?

Well, some of the gift that we already have with West Main is we have a lot of space for bikes.

It's just not comfortable space.

And so if we can move that space to somewhere that it's comfortable within the curb to curb area that we have,

We might not have to take much parking in order to keep the bike lane protected.

Sure, there might be some places sort of towards the ends that you'd need to move some parking around, but we're not talking about large-scale parking.

Can I interrupt and let Natalie go first?

Hey, so my question was kind of

Following up on what Peter was saying about parts of the the road are going to be closed for construction.

Are we do we have some kind of like formal?

Or less formal study on watching what happens to traffic as it's rerouted elsewhere and paying attention to how maybe that could lend itself to.

Closing down West Main in a more permanent way.

I don't know that we have that sort of study baked in to their maintenance of traffic plan.

So usually when you're doing something this big, you have to come up with a very detailed plan of how traffic is going to be maintained because VDOT loves cars.

Basically, they want to make sure that the cars are going down the roads.

And even if you're constructing things, you have to make sure that they

So there's going to be that plan.

I don't know if there's going to be something in that plan of monitoring.

So I think, Natalie, what you're saying reminds me of when

Water Street was closed for a while and it changed traffic patterns.

And if we had done a better job of collecting data during that project, it could maybe help inform some things now.

I think if we had street light, there's a way to collect some of that data later, but also I think now that Ben and I are in this position, we can collect at least some stuff to answer the questions that you're asking.

But also, since the MOT hasn't been established, we can work with public service and kind of see how that plays out and how that maybe affects all types of traffic along that corridor.

And I don't know if Penn wrote this in your updates, but some of this construction is going to go all the way up to Rugby, so all up along University Avenue, not just West Main.

It's a maintenance and traffic plan.

So when you're construction, you have to have a plan that says we can keep things moving around.

Oh yeah, parking on Main.

I don't have a parking study that verifies that.

Based on the number of people that I know and seeing their cars on West Main every day, that's anecdotal.

But UVA is building that giant garage in La Fontaine, which should help parking

and apparently there's going to be a big garage at the corner where they're tearing down all those apartments.

That's maybe River as well.

Sorry, which corner?

Oh, the new building?

That's an apartment complex.

That's not going to be a UVA parking deck.

That's an interesting.

Yeah, that's a very large apartment complex.

They are looking at putting a Part B deck in North Grounds at the intersection of Copley and Massey, but that's more servicing like JPJ and the sports facility up there.

The Fontaine one is actually going to be an interesting

I think they're going to be moving some folks from the hospital who are parking at the hospital, but also folks who are parking ahead in the Ivy garage.

So it may not impact West Main parking as much, but sort of the traffic flow coming from an Ivy garage across the corner might change a little bit, and then maybe some of the parking

are trying to get a parking spot in the hospital garage, and then they realize, oh, it's over-parked.

And it already is.

Right.

So some of that might get fixed or at least addressed with the Fontaine garage and the bus services that they're going to be running from Fontaine to the hospital.

But I don't know that it will be enough for us to be like, yay, the parking problems on West Main are all fixed.

Well, I was just in the vein of eliminating a side of, if you cut the,

with eastbound side and just like have people like some Maya in the butcher shop and like all those businesses can still have like some parking.

But yeah, that's where my brain was going.

Yeah.

Basically riding down Main Street for the next four years is going to suck.

Because I'm sure they're going to pave horizontally across it when they tear up a pipe.

But a lot of this, as most of you all know, is kind of

work that had been planned when the West Main project was supposed to get done.

That project never got done.

So they've been pushing this off for quite a while.

It's been about a decade of them talking about this project.

And now that we're ready to move forward with the project, they're like, all right, time to go.

Did you have a second question, Peter?

Is that likely to happen?

I'm not sure how the ADA transition plan and the construction on West Main are going to interface with each other, but I'm sure there's a discussion between.

I had some quick questions.

One for you, Kyle, about the summit pilot.

Was it planned to be over?

It was planned to be over after spring break, which is this week.

And we have a meeting with the school system admin, school staff, and also police department

We were talking about this, was that yesterday or the day before, sort of the big takeaway that we've had is the volume has decreased.

There have been a lot of complaints and issues coming out of the backside of that school for

It went from complaints from families and parents saying,

me and my child or children walk or bike to school and we've almost been hit by cars and then also teachers seeing their kids being dropped off by cars in two-way traffic and those kids almost being hit by people doing three-point turns in the middle of the street so those were that was the bulk of the complaints that we were getting safety complaints and now the bulk of the complaints are

The street's too narrow for the delivery truck.

And when I park my car on the side of the road, I open my door and it hits a flex coast or it hits like a, like the hill in front of my house.

Those are the complaints.

Yeah.

So I was getting some, not too bad either.

It's like safer, yeah.

Well, at the end of the

community meeting?

We don't know.

That's something we need to talk about.

Yeah, we're going to go over that when we meet about it internally.

So we don't want to schedule that.

We don't want to get ahead of ourselves before we discuss it all.

So it could happen.

I think I missed where are we talking about right now?

In front of someone.

I get them.

I was kind of scrambling this afternoon with our communications team to get that posted.

There's a project web page that sort of lays out what the issues are that we're trying to work through.

There are several options at a few different intersections that we'd like to get some feedback on, but the gist of the project on

Southbound Lane.

So that's coming from Cherry Avenue to 5th Street Station in that direction and turning that Southbound Lane and the existing bike lane into a protected bikeway.

Some people call them cycle tracks.

I'm calling them bikeways because that sounds nicer.

So we're taking feedback starting today through the end of the month.

There is a survey online that you can get the link from the project page.

We're also going to be doing a public open house at Jackson Baye Elementary next Wednesday at 5.30.

So that's the 9th at 5.30 at Jackson Baye Elementary.

We'll have some boards up.

I'll be there if you want to point at things and ask questions.

up to this point is not city funded.

This is actually a VDOT study.

So VDOT's got a central office that deals explicitly with bike bed stuff and they were working on a road diet and protected bike lanes project in Harrisonburg and they actually did not spend all of their money.

They had about $150,000 left over and they came to one of our

We still have some money left over if anybody has a project.

And I grabbed that money as fast as I could.

Thank you so much.

The next step will be, though, the next step will involve city funds.

So I do want folks to go on and give us feedback so we know what to invest our city funds in.

We've gotten a free ride from BDOT so far, and we should use that to our advantage.

So I'd like to get feedback.

from as many people as we can by the end of the month.

We'll refine the design based on that feedback.

And then we're aiming to take it to council either in May or the first meeting in June to get their sort of sign off on it and directive to go forth and put the stuff on the ground.

The questions in the survey don't explicitly ask what kind of materials do you want and that sort of thing.

They just ask you sort of

design refinements of should there be a right turn lane here or should there not be.

But if you want to add details like would be great for there to be some sort of protected barrier here, please add that in.

As much feedback as you'd love to give, we'll take it and try to address our designs and our plans as necessary.

I'm really excited about this project.

Do people need to get there at 5.30, or is it just kind of walk-in?

Could you send that website to me?

Excellent.

Cool.

There's going to be a pushback on that.

So this is about the third or fourth time that we've gone to the public with an alternative for this.

There can be an answer in the survey of hell no don't do this there is that option we'd update that into the

going down that way.

And so it's a matter of how do we get that done.

And this is our latest iteration of trying to figure that out.

The last one was probably 2021, 2022.

We came forward with a solution that would have taken out a lane in both directions.

And that one did get a lot of pushback because the traffic models showed, especially in the morning, all that traffic coming off I-64, coming into town, coming into UVA hospital or downtown,

was backing up from Cherry all the way onto the interstate.

So this alternative, we were like, okay, not the northbound, can't take that away because that causes a lot of problems, like even on the interstate, which is a mile and a half away, but the southbound

Okay, we know that taking a lane from both sides is way too much for everybody.

But how about just one side?

That might work.

I hope it works.

A longer turning lane to Wegmans will probably fix the pushback.

Yeah, and that's going to be one of the first questions you'll run across in the survey is what is the extent of this project?

And part of what I've

consider when you're thinking about that is VDOT is about to come in right behind us and do their project studying from Harris Road to Old Lynchburg Road on the other side of the interstate and can we extend our temporary bike lane all the way to 5th Street Station or should we stop at Harris Road and sort of let them do their business south of there and figure out what is the solution for that intersection at 5th Street Station because we know from our traffic models in the long term that's going to be the problem.

that left turn lane, but also the straight lane.

If, if we don't have enough capacity there, it's going to back up enough to shut down Harris road intersection.

And then it's going to start backing up further.

Cause it already does.

It already does on the worst days, but we don't want to make every day the worst day.

But do we want to like do that in the short term?

Is that a sacrifice we're willing to make in the short term to get people to this free station from our fancy new bikeway or

Is that a big enough issue that we want to say, let's pump that to VDOT for another six months because they're going to start up a study towards the end of the summer dealing with that stretch.

So that's sort of a planning decision where I don't want to make that decision.

I'd love you guys to know what way to go with that.

Cool.

Yeah.

What's the timeline once you guys get feedback with the next steps and things like that?

The timeline would start being dictated by what materials we're using.

So we would look to go to council to get that approval for whatever design we're moving forward with at the end of May and go change them.

And then once we have that approval, we're running to figure out what materials we can get on the ground and how fast we can get

Thank you for sending out the materials a few days ago to the email list.

I hope everyone had a chance to look at them.

I did open.

I know Tommy is going to want to say some things, but I would just like to say this is not like you're choosing between one concept or the other.

It's that we have to choose one to then make iterations to.

So we just love to hear what you do and don't like about each of them, what's working and what's not, or what you'd like to see that's not there.

And we'll take that back into our next round of iterations.

So yeah, we want to get something stand up soon ahead of leg months.

We brought this to the Piedmont Mobility Alliance on Monday, but you guys are probably a more important group to get feedback from because as I told James earlier, we're planning on getting

a ten by ten tent that says Bike Walk Seaville.

We're planning on getting a tablecloth that says Bike Walk Seaville.

I know BPAC wants to go to different communities like West Haven Day or wherever to kind of maybe make the city and BPAC more representative of the city and therefore you're going to be representing yourselves whatever branding and marketing you choose here.

So I do have opinions, but like I did for Monday, I think maybe I'll keep those to myself and get some feedback from you all first.

So option number one.

Sure.

This is all one concept, essentially.

This is the page that shows the child brands of Bike Seville and Walk Seville.

But the original Bike Seville logo is a circle with a little path and some blue sky.

But it was much different colors.

And so I think what I heard was, could we see what it might look like to update that a little bit?

And so this whole system kind of

still nods to that and appreciation of that and carries that in, but it's a little bit more updated.

I think the colors are a little bit more modern.

And then we're also adding this like movement that feels like freedom and getting outside and it feels a little more friendly and welcoming for people who might not like already have involvement in any groups that walk or bike or maybe they've never been to be packed or they're new to town or whatever.

So it's kind of like a little bit more inviting.

I will say I showed that logo to a couple of my co-workers and they all said it felt very friendly.

This is a city managed project as of today, but we're wanting this to be very much like a regional program.

So we've got the state of Nevada.

I like this.

I think it's kind of cool.

I mean, again, I kind of feel like not everybody has to know that this is Albemarle, but those that do, like, I think we'll understand the context and why we have it that way.

And then obviously the city of Charlottesville baked in in the middle there.

That will really incite a lot of anger.

I mean, it's a cool design, but man, it would piss off the board.

Well, what doesn't piss off the board?

It's a cool logo, but.

It either makes Albemarle County bigger or makes Charlottesville smaller because that would not.

It looks like you're making a statement.

So if you're bringing it in to mollify Albemarle County, don't do something that'll piss them off, right?

Like that's kind of the thing.

Like they didn't ask for having their shape on there.

So this one is

basically taking all of the materials that we did for bike month last year and just saying, oh, what would that kind of look like as an identity?

And so I didn't change, I used the exact same colors, the stark black and the green just to get like a very different look.

And we've gotten a lot of feedback already, but I'd love to hear from you guys that we haven't heard from already.

I think some of the feedback we've gotten is like, I like the clear,

like all caps lettering, I like the iconography but the color is just too stark or maybe try a different font or like round some corners so it's not so like aggressive.

But then some other people really like it because it's like feels like an imperative like bike Charlottesville, walk Charlottesville, like get out there, do it, like we're here, we're allowed to be here, all that kind of stuff.

My take on it is that the left one, the Bike Walk one, seems a lot more of a touristier, recreational one.

And then the right's a lot more of actual transportation.

And I know from a county standpoint, we already have a very healthy recreational scene for biking.

I like the colors of the left one.

I like the kind of in between.

I really like that point about it being leisure versus the transportation necessity or choice.

I agree that the left side is friendly.

I wrote it down as a note to say before you even said it aloud because I think it is a nice way of feeling

Yeah, sure.

So then the but if we did like the one on the left I just had a note for where it says bike slash walk Seville if the slash is on the bike line then the walk lines up and that might kind of look a little nicer but then I on the the right side the

those square letter ones.

I really like the bike walk icon with the slash in it.

I thought that's very effective to have the slash there.

Yeah, I think I love the icons on the right, the left with the bird and the mountains.

Yes, Charlottesville has trails, but we also have buildings and we are a city.

And so I would like to see that reflected in the friendlier, the friendlier

died and I do wonder what would the right side look like with the left's colors so it would have that friendlier feel.

I was just thinking about that same thing that Natalie just said about the colors and you know I'm kind of the same mind here where the blue and the green is very touristy and it's very friendly.

But you go back to the side by the way and you know

I think it's cool but I'm with Alberic where the kind of more bold and simple design on the right kind of sends more of like a like a like an exclamation point on what's what's happening and just for just from like a design standpoint I think that the the right I mean there's so many options you could do with that I mean like

Like that one up in the corner, like bike wall can be pink and yellow or the side by side can be like blue and orange.

It's around UVA.

Like these, the color palette on the left is, or on the right is kind of endless.

You know, I mean, you could have so many different versions of that for whatever shirt or poster or sign or anything like that.

My sense is that the stuff on the left is a little too

Question of Visibility to make a statement.

Those colors are going to be pretty invisible at a distance.

The words are going to start to melt away.

I like the contrast on the right.

I especially like when there's a green outline on black.

It makes it bold, makes it visible.

It says something strong as opposed to, oh, is that bike?

Yeah, I really like, just to hit on what other folks have said, I think I really like the iconography on the right.

I think it lets you kind of shrink down the words and still read them really quickly of what's going on, what's happening.

And then the circle logo on the left-hand side, it's almost giving beach to me rather than mountains.

and like what I would associate more so with like the Charlottesville landscape if that's what the goal was.

Yeah, I raised it again because I did want to note that when I first looked at these, I was like, oh, obviously left.

And then the more I've thought about it, I do appreciate the kind of boldness of the right.

But I do want to kind of bear in mind that we're trying to get everybody on a bike from 8 to 80 and beyond.

And so the kind of like more

like punk rock of the right side, I don't want it to feel like that's too niche where you have to be like militantly pro-bike in order to join the group.

So that's why I do kind of still like the friendliness of the left.

I prefer that better, honestly, than

Yeah, so I just want to make sure that we're keeping in mind that like, well, all of us in this room are like, yeah, bikes.

We also still want to be like, hey, oh, my gosh, please come join us on a bike.

So when you say that you're talking about like who would wear this T-shirt or are we talking about like

who the attention that this poster is going to get.

We talk about the people who prefer this one or this one, meaning the public, in what context is that preference?

Is it like I'm going to wear the shirt or I can see that poster over there?

Well, I was thinking, I'm envisioning this as like, you know, we have brochures printed.

We have this, it's a city website affiliation.

There's, wherever this is visible is someone who is not already our audience.

Like all of us are already interested in bike walking.

So who are the people who we need to pull in with this?

And are they going to feel comfortable and welcome?

and you know like let me go check on the website and if it's like oh is this a club I'm allowed to be in feeling versus oh this is friendly and nice let me look into it more oh I can bring my kids oh my grandmother can join because you know like so I'm not quite sure where this is going to be used but for you know bringing people along for signage I think

We, you know, anytime there's curlicues, that is going to be harder to read from far away.

So if we're talking about labeling paths versus bringing people on board, I'm not quite sure where this is going to be used.

I'm curious if we can potentially use, you know, the font, nightmarography of the right side, but use color palettes to make it more friendly.

I would say when I was talking about this with my co-workers, they kind of all universally saw the right side as both like aggressive and a little bit like Jim Broey, which, you know, is fine.

Can I share the flyer that Meredith has used previously?

Because I think keeping in mind, again, what you guys have been talking about, how we're going to use this is important.

And the context that everything's going to be built around.

We have talked about if we're using the right side, for example, the words and the content that are on the website, how we communicate and the words we choose to use are going to be important to support a more inclusive, welcoming environment.

So there's a lot going on here.

Hey, Tommy, while you're sorting through that, I love that you went into the focus group.

That's why it's a focus group, not a universal study.

What about you all?

Like, what do you think?

Yeah, I actually don't know how to bike.

But the one on the left, the blue and the green, I think is more inviting.

That one makes me want to learn how to bike.

more than the black.

And I do agree with, it does give Jim Crow a little aggression.

And street out of Compton vibes.

A block, a t-shirt.

And I think a lot of people I've talked to really like the blue and the green because of the bugs nature and being outside.

I agree with CATEC.

But I do also agree about the circular one with the bird.

So I guess I'm wondering like,

How much of option number one is going to help truly get someone to decide to go on a bike?

Like if they see this logo and they're like, you know what, I'm going to give biking a try.

Or is it the actual programming that we're deciding to build around it, i.e.

what we're going to get into with Bike Month and all free bike ride and clinics and instruction

e-bike vouchers and all the stuff that we're building around it is actually going to make our community a more bike friendly community and therefore what is going to represent that?

Our community is an urban environment.

One of the things I think is super cool about our community that I don't think gets enough love is the idea.

I was talking with Todd Stansberry, who's the president of the Charlottesville

bicycle club and they do a lot of country riding on Monday and he found himself starting to do more biking in town and he was like telling me how he came across this dead end and he found a connector over there and that he didn't know that these two roads connected and this idea of getting to know your community better and your city better

through this urban environment.

And to me, option number two speaks to that more than option number one.

I want to get our neighbors out on a bike exploring Charlottesville and all the awesome nooks and crannies that we have to offer.

I totally get that

We need to be, I mean, you can see some of the ideas that Peter, Meredith and others and I have talked about, which is being inclusive and welcoming is very important.

But I also want this committee, this group of people to also be demanding.

And I want them to like demand to have ride away on West Main for a bike lane going down.

And I think we're trying to

do a lot with this branding.

It may not be that we please everybody.

So I guess maybe a question is, and maybe Natalie, you can answer this question since you have your hand raised.

I just want to say really quickly, we don't have to go exactly what's on the right or exactly what's on the left.

The point of this feedback is to take that and iterate.

So I think we can come up with something that solves for a lot of the feedback that we've heard today and on Monday.

So I love all this feedback.

I don't think that, yeah.

So I don't think we're having to decide, oh, we're hurting ourselves by going this way.

So that's the direction.

Tommy, I do think that we could hurt ourselves by going with option two.

And, you know, Meredith just said we don't need to do that.

So clearly we're not going to do it.

One other thing is that we don't need to have the circular logo.

Like BPAC has a pretty new circular logo, which is totally separate.

It's a BPAC thing.

But, you know, there's no requirement that we have around logo.

Like it is very,

Interesting to hear that that bike slash parrot footprints thing is quite a strong statement.

Why would we make a beach shield when we have that, you know, for example?

So, because I've heard a number of people like

20 people say that option two is a turn off, and I've not heard anybody tell me I must have option two.

I've heard people say option one is rather weak, so maybe we shouldn't probably go in that exact direction either.

But the negatives attached to number two are a little bit higher than the negatives attached to number one.

And I came in preferring number two.

So I'm like, OK, well, this is people telling me that there is a little more listening that needs to happen.

I'll do it now.

We're not in a bad place.

And also, it seems like the

The concerns about number two aren't possible to address.

I'd love to see number two with like a million different color palettes.

One thing that was said in the mobility alliance that stuck that I'd be interested to hear just counterpoint

Has one person said those footprints look like exclamation points, as if that's a bad thing?

Yeah, thank you.

Just for that recent one, I didn't think they looked like exclamation points until you said it, and I still kind of don't see it super clearly.

I think it's a really strong logo, and I like it.

I'm trying to tell, I think the left side sans serif font is different than the right side just with different kerning, right?

Okay, so I would be interested to see the left sans serif with the right sizing to see if maybe that looks a little friendlier because kind of, Tommy, you framed it a little bit as like advocacy versus inclusivity.

You know, are we using this to be the people who

March and charge and ask for things or are we using it to say, hey, we're here, like join us.

And so I think the.

In that sense, it's I would say it's probably more important to be inclusive because we already are going to be advocating and the logo doesn't need to

to speak for us.

We'll be there and we'll be loud on our own.

And also two people have used the term touristy in what sounded like a negative way.

And I'm a little curious about that because of a couple of things.

One is Charlottesville has tourists and they help pay for stuff, which is great.

But also when we want tourists to come to town,

This is something I talk to people about all day at my job where I'm talking to people who are coming from out of town for events.

I always say, hey, we have a train station.

It's a thin walking distance of the hotels you're going to stay at.

So you don't have to rent a car.

You don't have to to to worry about that because I want people to walk when they're here.

I want people to bike when they're here.

And expanding our biking network for tourists, I think would be great.

And so

I don't know that touristy is necessarily a bad thing because to me that is part of the inclusivity of it all.

Like, oh, welcome, here's a bike.

is good.

So I'm not necessarily I'm not confident that touristy is a bad thing in this in this connotation.

It's unavoidable in our area where we have lots of things that people come to for touristy reasons.

Badly.

So just to that point, I mean, I've always looked at this website project as a resource for everyone, especially tourists.

You know, when I go to a different city, like I'm going to go to Roanoke next weekend, I'm looking for resources.

And I come across websites that I'm like kind of unclear, like, are you the definitive guide to biking and walking and running in your city?

And it's always unclear.

And it's funny because while I see the left is more touristy, I feel the right is more definitive, like more.

It gives me the feeling of like more

Yes, this is the definitive bite, walk resource in our community.

But yeah, continue on what you're saying.

Well, I would.

Yeah, I would.

I would if I was looking at the website, I would see, oh, is it a dot gov?

And then I know that's the definitive guide.

Yeah, I would be the opposite of that.

Yeah and one of the things that when I was running for council someone called and said hey we just got back from Pittsburgh and they have this incredible biking map and we want to show you and so I met them and they gave me the Pittsburgh biking map that they give to tourists when they come and it had here's all the protected lanes here's the dot dot dot

Cheros, here's the just painted lanes.

So it was like a get around by bike.

And obviously that's going to be useful for locals as well, but especially encouraging people who aren't from here to get on a bike.

So again, I don't know if the font is going to drive that or the support system we have outside of that, but I would agree that the right side is a little more aggressive, almost in a clubby way where I think it's not as it is not as welcoming

or if someone is, you know, I'm thinking about the kids and I'm thinking about the little old ladies.

What's going to draw them in?

We're already in.

That speaks to us.

That's kind of what I was thinking when you asked that question about what's so bad about touristy.

And then also, I think about like, you know, who is that that like softer logo for?

You know, I looked at that logo and immediately thought,

of every other outdoor like white course and attended festival that I've ever been to like that kind of looks like the branding for that you know and I don't mean that it's bad branding but I'm just saying it's kind of on par with a lot of like outdoor touristy just like I mean when when if I don't think I use the word touristy but when I think about that that

iconography and touristy, I think of specifically outdoor touristy.

Yeah, I would be interested to see touristy or like, or like, you know, you know, visiting the city, you know, as a city, it's like that.

And it's just because of, you know, where, where that kind of vibe has been in the, in

American culture, you know?

Yeah, and I would love to see that kind of softer sans serif on the right side and see if maybe that does the trick.

I think I'm going to stop as I know people have more things to say.

We have six minutes left, Tommy.

Do you have anything you want to talk about?

Yeah, very quickly.

I'm going to send out an email to BPAC here in a minute with the volunteer sign up for Bike Month.

And if you are interested in helping us out, we're trying to do a bunch of stuff and we need some volunteers.

One thing I think that would be two, well, maybe two things that might be super helpful.

Brides After Five Bike Valet.

It's a pretty simple gig.

We need two people.

You take bikes, but you also promote V-Pack and Bike Month at the Bike Valet at Fridays after five.

It's usually pretty fun to do that.

I can provide more details if you're interested, but just sign up on the Google form.

We're also going to have free guided bike rides on Saturdays out of the farmer's market.

The easy routes, the parks and recs.

And we're going to have a tent and table.

It won't be branded probably by then, but that would also be a good opportunity to promote BPAG and BITE Month.

So yes, sign up if you're interested in there.

And you'll see other opportunities there to engage if you're interested.

And we have a Bike Month meeting on Monday 11th.

So if you're interested in joining the planning, just reach out to Peter.

Sure.

Yeah.

So National Bike Month is like historically kind of like a thing that the League of American Cyclists

The Globe now will do different events and programs all about just, you know, feeding more people on bikes, promoting bikes, programs, infrastructure.

I think it probably started with Bike to Work Day.

And this year, that's Friday, May 16th, I think.

So that's another option.

So Bike to Work Week, the whole week is Bike to Work.

And it's also Bike to Work Week.

For a few years there, we had gone down.

I think Peter and others were the main leaders of just doing Bike to Work Day.

And that was successful.

Last year, we brought it back to Bike Month, and we had a whole calendar of events, and I think it was pretty successful.

So we're rolling with that this year.

So the increase by the next year, the year of the bike.

What's that now?

to celebrate bicycling.

There's going to be one thing that is not in that Google form.

TJPDC is going to have a, Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission is going to have a business bike challenge that you can sign up for.

So if you are part of an organization like the county, the city will have a team.

So if the county wants to have a team, you can set up teams and you can kind of compete, you know,

People can accrue mileage for a team.

Last year, the city won.

I just wanted to point that out on BEREC.

So yeah, it's all fun.

Those details are still forthcoming, but we'll make sure to share them with BPAC.

And part of the reason, and I'm going to say this and you guys can disagree with me, we all use different apps.

That's what app we want to use for biking, so there's probably not something we're going to dive into this morning.

There is an app actually, it's called Connecting VA and Brideshare is going to use that for the business challenge.

travel demand software that they're using to track rides.

So our next meeting is the first day of May.

And so we have some time to kind of still talk about, you know, fight on stuff at our next meeting.

But that app will

Yeah, so I'm sitting in the city meeting with county and people are going to go there.

So there's a STAR study happening in the city, that's rich MacIntyre stuff.

Those two happen in the county, and they're going to have surveys released from VDOT kind of asking what kind of improvements you want, like safety stuff.

Similar to what you saw, and if you did the one for STARS in the city here.

And secondly, we're deep in the... Albemarle, say where those studies are.

I don't know where they are yet.

I think they're coming very soon.

Okay, so they're in the 29 corridor.

29 corridor and the 29 and 250 interchange.

There's two different ones, but the 29 corridor from hydraulic up to wood brooks up to the lows.

The folks here are interested.

Yeah, if you all go to Trader Joe's and whatever.

Secondly, we just sent our transportation chapter for the comp plan to get kind of edited and made pretty before it goes to our planning commission next month, I believe.

So if you're also interested in that, that kind of outlines the vision we have for transportation in our county.

Again, I know we're city residents, but we all go to the county for stuff and it's pretty intertwined.

So I just want to make that aware that

our little cocoon that we have here.

That's all I have.

Unless there's anything else, I will propose that we adjourn.

Bye, guys.

Bye, Natalie.

Thanks, Bill.

Thanks.