Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting   11/6/2025

Awesome, thank you.

Sorry that it's late, but we're going to get started now.

We have a lot of people here and a lot to get through, which is exciting.

We are going to start with introductions.

I think it's important, especially for new folks, to know the people who are here.

But because we have so many people, we'll just do name and neighborhood if that's OK. We'll try to figure out online people.

Tommy will continue promoting to panelists if desired.

But I'll go first.

I'm James Van Vranken.

Hello, I'm Ed Sarf.

I'm Cypress Smith.

My name's Seth and I live on the Radio Ave. My name's Peter Olms.

I live in Belmont.

Guinevere Higgins, I'm the BPAC co-chair.

Sorry, I can't be with you.

I'm not feeling 100 percent.

Don't want you all to not feel 100 percent.

I live in Belmont.

Josh Krom, Locust Grove.

Yes, if you want to introduce yourself, do so now, but no pressure to if you do not want to, if you just want to watch.

I'll give a little pregnant pause for anyone to... Lovely.

Next order of business, approval of the agenda for this meeting and meeting minutes for

and last meeting that was a September meeting.

Does anyone have any comments or objections to either of those?

So moved.

Thank you.

So what?

Okay, next public comment.

Okay, welcome.

Does anyone have any

comment they would like to make to the committee about anything that's not on tonight's agenda.

If you're on Zoom, raise your hand if you would like to speak.

I want to call people's attention again to the slip lane on from High Street on to Long Street

It makes it impossible to safely cross with a bicycle.

It makes it pretty tenuous to be a pedestrian as well if you're walking from south of, well, from high to river road.

And there's a much stronger desire line now that Free Bridge Lane is a bicycle pedestrian way to encourage people or to interest people coming off the river trail to cross at that point,

I have a stronger desire to stay alive and not be stuck by the, not just the hot right, but the barrier to cross that's been added on that hot right.

And that hot right lane affects two lanes, whether you're heading east or north.

It's very dangerous and it needs to be dealt with.

That will be added to the record.

Thank you for bringing it up and continuing to bring it up.

I have one for the county.

Just announcing that our comp plan was adopted, AC44, on October 15th.

So if you can read that, you can go ahead and read that.

And then implementation of it will be on January 1st, right?

The whole process of educating people and making sure that everyone in the county knows kind of

the changes coming in.

So that's exciting and right now we are just starting to talk about our plan to do a multi-modal plan for the county.

Not right now.

We have a lot of stuff going on.

So we have four VDOT studies and things.

So we're a little bit busy.

Cool.

Awesome.

That brings us swiftly on to our first of

Two main agenda items tonight, first of which is traffic engineering.

We've invited Brendan Duncan, city engineer, and Caleb Smith, city traffic engineer, to come and speak to us about this year's quick build program, the quick builds that have gone in, and hopefully about the future of the quick builds, what's in store.

Thank you for coming.

Do you have a presentation?

Just before you do, we have 40 minutes allotted to this.

I anticipate people have a lot of questions about the Quick Builds.

We'd like to keep it on topic to the Quick Builds and the Quick Build program and the future of the Quick Build program.

So I'll start and then I'll turn it over.

I'm going to have Caleb do that one, but I'm just going to kind of lay the groundwork for a lot of the background on this.

So, I mean, you all were kind of instrumental in a lot of this, getting it started.

You know, we asked you, I think you guys even had a subcommittee that did a lot of the, like, rich build suggestions.

So that was a several month, you know, going through that list of yours, combining it with our own staff, you know, looking at stuff, coming up with it.

And it's, I think there may have been some, not miscommunication, but just, you know,

I'm not sure how best to put it, but expectations, I guess the missed expectations are of what this program was or has been.

When city council kind of came to us, they wanted the, they coined it or Sam coined it, urgent infrastructure.

So that was a subset of this larger quick build program.

So that's, that's really, they gave us until the end of this year.

So basically from June until

you know, December of this year, were the urgent infrastructure.

And that was a defined set of projects.

I forget exactly how many were in there.

There's like 30 some, but some of them were like multiple projects in there as well.

So, you know, that was kind of what we've been focusing on for these first six months.

We're through the majority of those.

Some of them, after we started looking at them, were less feasible than we originally thought.

So they've dropped off.

a couple of them like on the Rose Hill we were trying to we wanted to do some major on about stuff there that after we started looking at it we realized it was on the paving plan and it was also part of the Rose Hill like that small area plan that I wanted to do so I know Osei and her group is kind of reaching out trying to do maybe some public feedback there

about what that whole street is going to look like.

So we've kind of delayed these mini roundabouts because we didn't want to repave the road and restripe it for the mini roundabouts if there were going to be other changes that happen as part of that.

So there have been, you know, a few here or there that have either gotten pulled off completely or just delayed.

But that's kind of where we've been up to this point, really, you know, full speed ahead and just getting them implemented.

There have been a couple of them that we've heard feedback, negative feedback from the community more around just not having the input on the front end, which we acknowledge, you know, the, again, these were coined by city management as urgent.

And so it was more, these are paint and plastic, so they can be removed in the future.

So we were just moving forward with them.

And it was much more a change from what we've done in the past where we've garnered a lot of community support around these projects and then implemented something in a very permanent state and then that's the end of it.

So this is a change for the community and we're kind of out there trying to get stuff on the ground and then we're asking for feedback after the fact, as well as we have

brilliant post analytics of those implementations.

So we'll be presenting that over the next several months as well as we're, now that most of them are in place, you know, now we can actually kind of analyze, you know, how effective they are as well as get feedback from our public service folks as to, you know, how are they throughout the winter?

Like, are they holding up?

So some of this stuff, you know, we're holding off on doing

more implementation, especially as it revolves around the speed tables and that kind of stuff.

It's not that there aren't other applicable places we can do it, but we want to make sure one, you know, what kind of efficacy are they having on the, where we're putting them?

And also, you know, the materials that we're using, is that something that we are actually, you know, wanting to do and use going forward?

So that may not say that we wouldn't do them, but we may

go with a completely different material or a different vendor or something like that that we think might hold up better.

So I'll stop there for a second because I want to give it over to Caleb and let him run through kind of a quick demo of one of these, which is the Oakleaf Greenleaf and kind of run you guys through what we did and also a snippet of, you know, like one to two months of

the data that we're starting to get back and how we're kind of using the speed data to kind of determine the efficacy and that kind of stuff.

Great.

I speak better when I'm standing up.

Yeah, that's changing the subject.

More?

Click share.

What are you talking about on the left?

Oh, there you go.

Alright, cool.

Alright, do you want the mouse, Caleb?

No, I'll just ask you to scroll forward.

Alright.

You might have to click the enable everything or something there.

Just hit the button at the top.

This presentation was shared late in August with the community.

Tommy, slide please.

So

I just want to make sure everyone, people can hear Caleb.

Okay.

Can everyone hear?

Okay.

All right.

Yeah.

Perfect.

All right, cool.

Go ahead.

It's an existing four-way stop.

It did not meet volume warrants for a four-way stop condition, which led to a whole lot of people running stop signs, which is not an ideal condition.

A lot of people would come down here and make this right at a high rate of speed, and it made folks in the neighborhood feel unsafe, especially if they happened to be backing out of their driveway.

Next slide, please.

Part of this problem was, as a four-way stop,

Couldn't see everybody, right?

So that made it kind of awkward and also lended itself to folks running the stop signs.

Next.

That's the high speed movement I was talking about.

Next.

Our solution was to try to tighten up this intersection by redefining who had the right of way, right?

So because we didn't have the volumes,

for a four-way stop in order to be at the site distance.

We had to come up with something where we had site distance and we had a very clear assignment of right way.

So in order to do this, we made this southbound to eastbound approach kind of the main line, if you would, making both northbound approaches stop control.

And we did this with paint and plastic, the bollards, hence paint.

Next slide, please.

So here we just had the primary movements.

Keep going.

Again, looking at our safe distances, now you can actually see where people are so that you know not to pull out in front of them, which is helpful.

Next.

Now, part of the intent was to slow folks down going through this curve.

As residents said, people fly.

Our first month, it looked like folks were still kind of flying a little bit.

We compared September 2024 to September 2025, just the whole month.

So that's 24-7, seven days a week.

If I took all the night time out, speeds would probably go down.

And then in October, we noticed that it's starting to come down a little bit.

There are still areas, particularly

down here.

It looks like folks might be going a little bit faster, particularly in September.

But in October, it wasn't great, but it was more in line with what it was in October of the year before.

These are two months, pre and post install.

It's not necessarily enough for us to make any sort of assertion that this is the way to go.

Moving forward, we're going to have another meeting with this community, this neighborhood in January, where we're going to listen to their feedback and make enhancements to this.

According to that, I know that there are some desires for additional pedestrian area, and we want to have enough data in our pocket to go, yeah, that's a great idea, or maybe you don't want to be out in the street here.

I do have one question.

How many of you think speed bumps work?

Yeah.

Sometimes.

It depends.

Well, yeah.

Well, I think they're effective at slowing people down.

So far, our preliminary data looking at several of the locations where we haven't pulled down.

They slow the people down who obey the law.

down by about a mile or two an hour.

So your 85th percentile speeds, which 85% of everybody over it goes down, one or two miles an hour.

The maximum speeds, negligible effect.

And to add on to what Brennan was saying, one other thing or condition we have on where we can put these is we have to get the party marshals quiet.

Even though we are using some of the more lower profile ones, the temporary ones, even at five miles an hour is 60,000 pound vehicle.

Apparently it gives your kidneys a pretty good beating and they wouldn't have to say so.

So whenever we post one, they have to sign off on it.

And right now all the ones we have installed only have interim.

I think it might be a data thing.

The software that we have, we can do just a quick month snapshot.

We can also drill down onto a more daily, hourly snapshot.

It's just more labor intensive.

to look at every hour of every day versus just a monthly aggregate.

So where we see those types of numbers, we're going to drill in and see like, okay, like, is this a speed that we're seeing regularly throughout that month?

I mean, it would, but you know, if you have one,

Sorry, before we carry on with questions, is that it for your presentation?

Yeah, that's a long and short answer.

Just wanted to double check.

But before we get to that, I just wanted to, after that, the next step, like I said, you know, we're going to take the next six months to kind of do this kind of analysis and get more data for all of the ones that we've implemented.

We are working with Tommy and Ben.

to you know going probably not I mean our guys now are doing leaf pickup and they'll be hopefully doing or hopefully not doing snow removal but there won't be a lot of movement over the next probably three or four months on doing any new quick builds but we're working with them to kind of help prioritize what was left of the quick build list not the urgent infrastructure but the quick build list so they come next spring any of them that aren't

putting down the speed tables and that kind of stuff.

We can maybe start moving forward with some of those.

But again, we don't want to, one, we don't have a whole lot more.

We pretty much exceed or used all the 500K that council gave us for the urgent infrastructure stuff.

We have some funds through the bike pet fund and neighborhood transportation fund that we could use for some stuff.

So like we have some money, but we don't want to, again,

invest a whole bunch of money in speed tables that one either maybe they don't survive the winter and we decide we don't want to put these down anymore or two the fire marshal is like yeah like you know we're not going to let you put these everywhere so we'll have to work together on that to figure out what the prioritization of what's left of that list looks like for the new year but that's kind of I guess the plan for the quick build the the greater quick build

Okay, thank you.

Yeah.

Do you mind if I just do Ethan's question?

He's commented it, so I'll just read it out.

Ethan, feel free to jump in.

But he said, what are you doing to capture data on bicycle and pedestrian safety improvements on locations like this, the speed limit?

It's nice, but we care here about bicycle and pedestrian safety, and they're not synonymous.

So he's pointed out they're not synonymous because it's possible for speeds not to change but people to feel a lot more comfortable.

And that is a win for a quick bill.

It does.

I mean, we're trying, like, feelings are hard to quantify.

So feeling safe, just like, I mean, people raise their hand, they feel that speed bumps are effective, and it's almost a placebo effect.

But how do you know it's a placebo?

But a rumble strip might cause the driver to drive more carefully without reducing their speed.

This is true.

So, I mean, even within the driver behavior.

I would suggest that you don't need to quantify, the qualitative data is still data and that that's the sort of data that

we've used to identify the locations to put these in.

And so the city has heard the people say, I feel unsafe.

And I get it that people don't always, they're not always accurate in the causes of their discomfort.

Their feelings aren't always right.

But there are ways to hear, to

We're hearing from all of the neighbors we speak to.

I feel more comfortable here.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously if we had, I mean, we've, we've not heard that much from the community.

I mean, there've been some, especially when they first went in, I'm like, Hey, thank you for doing this.

But it hasn't been a, you know, constant flood of like, you know,

It was an instantaneous thing and then it's just kind of fallen off.

We can probably try and do, I think Jose's got her survey stuff now that we can tap into to possibly do some stuff.

Again, closer toward the intent of this was to build it in the first six months and then kind of gather data in the last six months of the year, fiscal year here or so.

Sure.

Thank you.

I'm seeing lots of hands, so I'm realizing belatedly that I should put an order on that to keep track.

So we'll do one here.

2 to Ethan, 3 to Josh, if that's okay.

Remember your number!

Two comments going forward.

The first is with the numbers that we've shown, I do want to just consider that it's nothing to sneeze at.

I do think that it does show that some speeds are decreasing and it's not effective for every cross section, but it is still doing something.

And so I'd like to just voice approval or

appreciation for the idea of a yes and approach of like this is still doing something.

It is still improving the traffic in this area and still decreasing a good number of the speeds that we're seeing.

And so I do think that a yes and approach to any further developments does sound like something that I would consider effective.

And also your comment on trying to accommodate for the idea of feelings

If we need to, if nothing else, add a quantitative value.

So just like ranking how you feel, like, do you feel safer?

Can you put a number on that safety?

Can you rank this as a five out of 10 going to a

7 out of 10.

And I think that as much data as we can pull from the neighborhood that's most effective by the change is going to be the one that I'm the most interested in.

Not just because people who are walking in that neighborhood are often the people who live in that neighborhood, but also because you made the comment earlier of another big concern is, oh, I'm going to feel this when I'm trying to pull out of my own driveway.

And if that's the target for a good deal of that feelings-based data, then getting a number out of them isn't an impossible task.

I think it's rather achievable and something that I would be happy to see in the future.

Was it Ethan too?

Yeah, thanks James.

I guess, first of all, I would take issue with the idea of the placebo effect.

I agree that qualitative data on this kind of thing is every bit as valid as

Speed limits changing or not changing and if people feel safer, their perception is the reality in the city and their feelings are what drive them to vote for things and support for things, so that really matters.

I guess my main question is about kind of the charge of traffic engineers and how much of

The work that y'all are tasked with doing is about moving motor vehicles through the city versus moving people through the city and I think there's a real distinction there and I'd like to see like whatever we can do as BPAC to encourage

everything in your office to be more focused on the ladder on how people move throughout the city in all of the different ways they do so and less about how motor vehicles move through the city and the speeds at which they do it.

I feel like there's a lot of people on this committee that will be happy to kind of

shepherd that process and encourage folks to continue thinking that way.

Because like I said, the feeling of safety is a valid feeling for a lot of folks.

Josh?

Yeah, so I think everyone knows this, but some of these projects

are not meant primarily to reduce speeds.

And I don't know why we're talking about it as if they are.

So RFVs are not meant to reduce car speeds, right?

You're meant to make pedestrian-visible crossings.

I think we have on here several projects adding bike boxes, right?

Bike lanes.

These are about making people who are not in cars more visible and safer on the roads.

So if you, first of all, I hope you actually want to do these things in spring.

speed cushions or chicanes or whatever, there was paint.

But if you put in a striped bike lane and say speed didn't drop, you wouldn't call it a failure.

The RFBs, I think, I don't know how you measure it because hopefully there are very few deaths to measure.

But we have an RFB at Elliott and, sorry, let's say RFB.

But I think

If you ask me to guess, for what that's worth, not a whole lot, I think we wouldn't have had a fatality on Elliott last year if that hadn't been there at the time.

I can't prove it, but I think those are...

If you say speed didn't drop because you usually don't press on the button, that's not, I think, the right evaluation.

So I get more time, more data on things like the speed cushions.

Everything else I hope could continue on the list.

So the...

And I'm sorry, I didn't make that distinction.

There are, there are several items on the urgent infrastructure, like the RFBs, like the no right turn on red, like the stop signs on the slip lanes.

Like those aren't going away.

Like we're not testing those.

Those were just, we put those in.

So like even within the urgent infrastructure, there was, there were things that we wanted to do because they need to go in.

and then there were things that we wanted to test.

Yeah, let me just add in there real quick.

We wanted to test because in part we had to get approval through the fire department.

So we wanted to make sure that those were new to the city of Charlottesville.

But there are things that aren't new that, like to Brendan's point, could just go in.

That's good to hear.

All I would say for now is if there's a pause for evaluation

Good countermeasures when they are appropriately applied.

And, you know, we can't, I have people ask me to put them everywhere all the time.

You know, at some point they become so saturated, they become meaningless and they are ignored.

And, you know, because you're hitting a button and you think, oh, now everybody sees me, I have the right of way.

especially around UVA I watch people hit the button and just they don't even look they walk right out into the right out into the crosswalk I use the RFB across Ridge or by the McDonald's nearly every day walking from my office over here to City Hall and every bit of wants to be you know there's a bus and somebody on the far side upward lane might not see me

They don't stop, even though the lights are flashing.

They'll come by just as fast as practice.

So it's important that we're to realize that those can engender a false sense of security on the pedestrian's part, and that if they are overused, they become just part of the background, at least, by the way.

And we just have to be very selective, and it's not something that

we can necessarily do because somebody goes, I really feel like we need this here.

Because it could actually be more dangerous than not.

Do you think we're saturated on those?

You mentioned a risk of saturation.

Do you think we're close to that point?

Across the city, no.

And again, we're not saying we're not doing what's on the quick build.

That's not what we're trying to say.

We're just saying like,

I know people have so many questions, but wouldn't it be safe to say, Caleb, that RFPs working with other means, like it's a tandem thing, like I said, yes and situation.

I think a good example of that RFP on

on Ridge combined with the stop sign and the slip lane off Preston might work well together, right?

Like multiple different...

It's more effective because there's pedestrian refuge in the median.

Right, or that.

I mean, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's, it's not the only thing we should be looking at.

Thank you.

Thanks, James.

I had two questions.

Let me lower this hand.

We started the discussion talking about managing expectations, and I appreciate that all of these quick builds are in a list on the website, but is there any

Yes, definitely.

Again, part of this is the disconnect, I guess, between NDS and Public Works.

NDS has the website that has the list up there, and it included more than just our

urgent infrastructure projects.

So, I mean, really when, when we got the green light to move forward with the infrastructure or urgent infrastructure, it was, you know, full steam ahead, all hands on deck to get them all done as quickly as possible.

And so there was less focus on the community outreach part.

I think definitely going forward with the quick builds, I think once we're able to meet with Tommy and Ben and kind of

Get that priority list and figure out, you know, start putting up, add additional columns to that that have like, you know, what the number is on the priority list, when the expected completion is, and then, you know, work better to fill those out as they're actually completed.

So there is more transparency that we've definitely talked about that.

That's something we will be doing for the kind of next stage of this going forward.

So it was more going to get it out there, let people know where stuff was going to be happening.

Got it.

Thank you for clarifying that.

Oh, sorry.

I did if it's possible, but I can put it- Go for it.

So thanks for that, Brennan, because it is a little disconcerting to see that safe routes to school are not urgent, like from a layman perspective.

Right.

Well, and my intersection is there.

But the but he's scrunching right now.

But so I look forward to that being updated.

And then the second question was, when you talk about qualitative data and capturing this, I'm wondering what

Yeah.

So if you're going to try and really find out how people perceive the quick builds, what does it mean to you?

What do you mean when you say to me, we'll go to the neighborhood and find out, like, what does that look like?

What are the.

I mean, for the Greenleaf Oakleaf one in particular, I mean, that is, we have an actual community meeting set up because they were very vocal about not wanting those improvements after the fact.

So that one will be a very defined way of doing that.

That's going to be a formal meeting.

We're going to have a couple of different variations of how, you know, after looking at the data,

how we might be able to change stuff there, you know, whether we widen out, you know, some of the radiuses because there were concerns at the meeting we had with them back when was it?

August.

So, you know, as far as it's on a bus route and how does that, you know, work with the people coming through there and stuff.

So, you know, that one will be maybe a little bit different than, you know, just doing a survey.

type of thing for the rest of these.

Again, I think we'll work with Ben's team and possibly even solicit you all to help come up with some questions that you think would be good to include in that survey.

And again, probably do that more towards the end of it so that we've had several months of people experiencing it and they've gotten used to it, cars have gotten used to it, bikes have gotten used to it, pedestrians have gotten used to it.

How is it working?

Because again, we could do a survey the day after we put it in and people are like, oh, this is awful.

Or they could be like, hey, it's great.

Cars are slowing down.

But six, eight months from then, cars have figured out, oh, well, I slowed down because it was new, but now I can speed through here again.

So we want to give it time to actually level out and everyone be able to experience it.

before we go out and do that survey.

So I would anticipate that'll be sometime in like April-ish that we would shoot to do that so that we've got a good chunk of data or a good chunk of time that people have experienced it.

Probably.

What are you thinking more like?

Well, no, I don't want to hog the floor, but I would say maybe we should learn from our Fifeville situation that's going on right now about how about a failure of engagement.

And again, go back to the managing expectations.

And if you really want true qualitative data that is from a broad breadth of folks, that's accurate, like statistically sound.

We got to do better than one meeting and a survey that's online.

that you know people who are already engaged would get in.

Now you're the same guys doing all the engagements so I think it is a good idea to say and Tommy again will roll eyes at me like let's bring in other folks as we can if I was operationalizing that.

But and so I know that logistics and resources might be an issue, but I don't know that that's going to get you less pushback from responses if that was all that we could do to capture the data.

Perfect.

Gwyneth and then Natalie and then

Guinevere, then Natalie.

Does anyone else have questions that they would like to ask?

Not promising that we'll have time for them.

Thank you.

Thank you for the presentation.

Thank you.

I want to like plus one all the comments.

I've been nodding along.

My question is around how do we go from, and this is kind of like building on Jen's questions, like how do we go from, I guess what I'm concerned about is that we're like, oh, the speed limit only dropped by one or two miles per hour.

So like, we're just going to scrap all these things.

And I think we are here to say we want like robot, we want hardened infrastructure.

We want these quick builds as test cases to see what we can do to slow things down, to make things safer for bikes and pedestrians.

But the end goal is like overwhelming improvements in our infrastructure.

Obviously, big price tags involved with that.

and a lot of planning and other resources.

But I'm curious, how do we move from this speed cushion, these flex posts, how do we move from, these are working and now we're going to make them permanent?

We're going to do quantitative where we can, we're going to do surveys and gens, we're going to get on the doors.

but like how do we move from like what I don't want to have happen is that these things just start to disintegrate over time because indeed they are quick builds they're not meant to be permanent infrastructure and then like nothing happens and we are right back where we started and then the other thing I'll just add is that BPAK has a survey

We did a survey.

The Quick Build Committee did a survey.

We have not published it.

James and I put a lot of time into putting it into a Google form.

So we can give you that if you want to start someplace, and we can work with you on how to harvest the right kind of intelligence from the folks who are experiencing these Quick Builds.

Love to have it.

As far as the main part of that question, the hardening of these,

I mean, ultimately that's going to be council funding decision.

So, you know, we'll take this data back to council and it will go in as a CIP request of like, hey, these are the ones that, you know, we think were successful.

And, you know, either they fund a portion of them over time or they fund all of them being hardened in one year.

I don't know.

But the intent is not for these just to sit and disintegrate.

That, you know, that's not our intent either.

You know, there's always the intent that these would be tested, refined, you know, maybe moved, maybe, you know, maybe we find out.

I mean, part of what I'm looking at with the speeds is, because I mean, we talk about the 85th percentile, you know, not changing that much, but in my estimation, if we can

greatly lower the max speed on a road like that is a more quantifiable and like I would rather see you know the average speed or 85th percentile speed stay the same and the max speed dropped from 45 to 35 like that's a that's a big change for the people walking and biking on that street so you know if we can show that hey like

this type of characteristic of road or whatever or you know whether it's a speed table or it's you know the the chicanes or something else like if we can show that that's actually having a very dramatic impact then we we might say hey like yeah you know rather than doing a speed table on this road we actually think if we do a chicane on this road we're gonna have more efficacy and so like what might have been a speed table before might change and we might try a new

Some of it might be able to get hardened in the first year.

Some of it might be a more iterative process over a two or three year period until we kind of finalize how we want to harden that.

Yeah, that's helpful.

I guess I just want to put it on the record that BPAC is very interested in ensuring that these are not temporary and that we don't go back to a place that was all just a waste of time and money.

I think that's where I'm coming from, and I think we can be helpful.

I'm reminded there were flex posts that went down in Johnson Village.

Gosh, this was like years ago now, where the curbs have now become hardened and the intersections gotten a lot narrower, crosswalks are shorter.

And like people I know who I kind of maybe thought maybe would know better were like, what are these ugly flex posts?

Like what's going on here?

This is like BS.

And I think there's like beep back.

There's a lot of like hate in the world for flex posts.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I think the quicker we can turn around from quick build to permanent infrastructure, I think we'll change that narrative going forward if people know it's not going to be in place for 10 or 15 years.

Because we have had some, I mean, the first round of Safe Routes to School stuff that we did,

was back in 2020, 2021.

And it's been there for some of its four or five years now.

And you know, so you know, we do some of it is we just need, we need funding in order to harden all of the projects, all these quick bills that we're trying to do.

So we have we have a lot of priorities in the city.

And you know, it's not not easy to balance all of those and where those dollars go.

So

I would love to be able to just do all those at the snap of a finger.

I think to add on to Brian's thoughts, you know, Charlottesville wasn't built overnight, right?

It's been a growing city over the course of the last 100, 120 years.

So these problems with the infrastructure didn't just show up overnight.

They were built over time.

It will take some time to dig back out of that hole, and hopefully we don't create problems for folks 100 years from now.

Some of these bump-outs and things that folks want, they are desirable, and they might look deceptively easy to do, but then when you start getting into things like, oh, there's drainage here, there's a drop-in right here,

There's a poll that we need to relocate.

And then private property constraints, right-of-way constraints, you know, some of those things can add up very quickly.

And what looks like, oh, that should be a $50,000 project turns into a $300,000 project.

And that's just for like one corner on one intersection.

So, you know, sometimes it's easy to ask, but then it's a lot

We will away.

Yeah, I'm just thinking we can carry on for a little bit longer.

I don't want to get to work plan, but that can expand into December if need be.

and questions for staff can also be condensed and can be done via email.

So I think we have time for, I have one more question.

Natalie, Josh, Herb, you've

So I just briefly wanted to touch on the communication aspect, not just soliciting feedback, but also providing information.

Because I know that was one of the, just to add specificity to what Jen mentioned about Fifeville, where we had, you'd done the door knocking, did the presentation at Fifeville Neighborhood Association, but then knew about it for another year.

And

I was at both meetings and a bunch of people were like, oh, I've never heard about this before.

I said, well, you weren't at the meeting last year.

But they should have to be at the meeting last year.

And so having the landing pages on the website not only exist, but stay up to date.

And having when the quick build goes in,

I don't know who you would task this with exactly, but here's a picture of what it looks like finished and add that to the thing so people kind of know what they're looking for.

I think that's going to help with people being aware of what's going on and gives us a chance to help justify it a little more as well.

Because infrastructure is where people meet their government the most frequently and the most visibly.

The communications side, I don't know if that means getting someone in Public Works slash MDS to do communications, adding that to Aptance task list specifically, but making sure that like the painting list had been updated since 2022 that, you know,

But yeah, that's something I think if whatever I can do to help push for that, I'm happy to do so because I know that's not like your expertise, but you know, helping be a voice to support whatever requests you're making in that field.

Like, you know, Jen and I have talked about that already too.

Josh, do you still have a question?

Yeah, I think, to be mindful of time, I want to ask a question and figure out how to hear back about it later so we don't get into it too much now.

As I understand it, I know this is wrong,

The ultimate goal of the quick build projects, like one of your said, is to become hardened, to become permanent.

But at a bigger scale, the point is to reduce speed limits, right?

We reduce people's actual speeds, and then we reduce legal speed requirements.

And I know I've seen emails from your office about planning on this.

I would love to know where BPAT can hear a plan and engage with a plan about lowering speed limits citywide.

and that can be a best for later question.

We can talk about it when this is done.

But we are working on that.

And these are actually separate.

The speed limit discussion and these quick builds, most of these quick builds are on local, lower speed roads.

That is probably just going to be a statutory speed limit reduction on a lot of those roads to 20 miles an hour.

The design changes needed to reduce speeds on where we've got above 25 miles an hour, like 30, 35, 40 in places.

That is a much larger discussion, but we can talk about it later.

My comment was also on speeds and that's a sensitizing comment.

You truly said reducing speeds from 45 to 35.

I was once struck on my bicycle at 10 miles an hour

Were I not wearing a helmet, I wouldn't be talking to you today.

So the speeds need to get way down to be safe for pedestrians and bicycles.

And that means 25 being a maximum.

No, we hear you.

We can hang the sign that says five miles an hour and people will still disobey it without robust intervention.

So the more you want to get the number of those maximum speeders, which are statistically generally outliers, right?

You know, the more you try to drive them down to absolute zero.

the more the higher the cost everybody else is paying.

So it is a problem.

I mean, if I could hang up a sign that said that thou shalt not kill, and then all the murders in town go away, then I, you know, that'd be awesome.

Right.

Speeds and speed limits.

Understanding that people tend to drive 10 miles above whatever the posted limit is.

That means bring in numbers significantly down, recognizing that there still will be numbers that exceed it.

I just want to say for the recording, Peter Kreb, just want to read out Peter's comment to this case that communications should go out with the intervention, the quick build.

Then a follow-up at a set time, say six months for evaluation purposes, it should be a package with the quick build.

That's a good suggestion.

I agree with Josh.

That's exactly what I was thinking.

But there is a cost to that.

So like I said, you can get 85% of safety pretty cheaply.

that last 10 to 15 percent gets more and more expensive to do.

So, yeah, we could have cops out there 24-7 ticketing people.

It's going to lower, but there's a cost to do that.

So, yes, there is a benefit to it, but there is a cost as well.

The financial cost?

Yeah, I mean, you know that people don't want flock cameras or like there's there's

There's ways to do that, but there's a cost, whether financial or, like you said, security, societal, like, you know, there's a certain, you know, you have freedom to do something.

Well, freedom to walk down the street is awesome.

We're not advocating for people to drive at a high speed.

I think the comment was that it sounded like Caleb was saying if 85% of people are obeying the law and we set the law to be 10 miles an hour, then 85% of people are going at 10 miles an hour and that's a cost to them and it's that we would

And the data that we have seen thus far is by and large on the local streets, people travel below the posted speed limit, well below it in the 85th percentile.

Particularly in Fifeville, the 85th percentile speeds between 16 and 19 miles an hour when the posted speed is 25.

So when we lower the speed limit, people are just going to be driving the speed limit.

And I don't know that that will really take that one person who decides that they want to tear up the road at 45 miles an hour in the middle of the night, that's going to take them off the tape.

I had an extremely methodological question for you.

So when we say average speed, does that average take the amount of time you spend accelerating and then sitting perfectly still at a stop sign?

I mean, they're very slow and very fast, and both of those are new for me, but some television.

And it's a point in space, and I wouldn't mind that anyway.

It's a point in space, I'm sure.

It's not like over the course of your day, sometimes you go fast, sometimes you go slow, and that averages to the medium.

Well, it's, you know, I mean, it's using the, it's using the travel path.

The full corridor.

Right.

So there is some of that, but again, the average is averaged out because the time where they're slowing down is usually less time than where they're traveling.

So point in space, you could get the same exact thing.

If we have a speed counter out there, you should get somebody that's pulling out of their drive load.

And they're going five miles an hour.

It's going to count that data versus this.

We're getting all of it.

So we're, we're getting more data points, which would give you theoretically, it averages out to about the same.

That makes sense because you get more average of the high traffic or the normal traffic and more of the low.

So would this data show that 29 North has a low average speed?

No.

We can provide some snapshots of kind of what we're looking at.

I think that would be helpful for the people to see.

But yeah, I mean, again,

And I'm not just looking at the 8.5 percentile either.

OK.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for answering those questions.

That was very helpful.

I think I'm going to end it there.

But these folks are available by email.

They may not thank me for saying so.

Feel free to follow up with them, with us.

Thank you.

Please feel free to stay, feel free to leave.

We won't be offended either way.

We are at, it is 6.07, so I think we've pretty good time.

Thank you for that, Tommy.

I bombed my grandpa that just before we went to my teacher cousin's wedding.

Excellent.

Okay, we're not going to go into this or explain it.

That would take the film an exciting three minutes.

I think I want to

Move the order of the agenda slightly and just say the important announcements we had before we go to the work plan, just to make sure we cover them.

If we need to then discuss the work plan through to the end, I think we're fine to do so.

So those announcements are that we will have officer elections in January.

We'll remind you again next month, but please be thinking about if you

are interested in standing the three officer positions, a chair, vice chair, or two co-chairs and secretary.

Can I make a point of order to that?

Of course.

So this could be a discussion item, but we can leave it as a point of order for now.

So the preferred date for the mobility summit, again, coincides with BPAC.

So it would be March 5th and March 6th.

So that's a Thursday the 5th.

As a separate discussion item, I would love permission to combine the two like we did last year.

Let me tag onto that.

I truly appreciate the sensitivity to Passover, but the first night of Passover is actually April 1st.

Jewish days begin in the evening, so the first night precedes the first day.

I see, so it would be April 2nd is fine.

The second evening passover would be the meeting.

The V-neck meeting would fall on the second evening of the passover.

The Seder that some people have would be April 1st.

Okay.

Okay, great.

Let's do it.

Can I just also offer that that is also school vacation week?

We can continue this discussion if needed and clarify in December.

Okay, now we'll move on to the second agenda item, which is the proposed

BPAC work plan.

We suggested this at our last meeting in September that BPAC has built up a lot of momentum and in the past has often been quite reactive and we wanted to get to a situation where we're being more proactive.

So a small group of us

formed a subcommittee to talk about what such a work plan might look like, what sort of goals we might like to have in the work plan as things to focus on.

And as part of that first discussion, we identified the need to become more comfortable with voting on official EPAC opinions such that we can represent them to council and planning commission

which then prompted us to look at the charter and decide that it needed a rewrite and a refresh to make it easier for us to do that sort of official business.

So we sent out before this meeting the draft proposed work plan and the draft revisions to the charter.

This is an opportunity to discuss those.

They're not asking for a vote to adopt this meeting with

I think depending on how the discussion goes, we might be ready to vote to adopt next meeting in December.

It would be nice if we could have those on screen.

Y'all seeing this?

Yeah.

So the draft work plan includes five strategic goals, which are not intended to be exclusive, not limiting us to only these, but these are things that we would try to organize around

Some of them, maybe all of them would have subcommittees that would kind of dive into them.

We would keep coming back to them to try to make sure that we're making progress and we're getting updates and they don't drop off.

And we also have three operational goals, which we think will help us achieve the strategic goals.

So just brief summary to highlight.

The strategic goals that the subcommittee came up with to propose.

The first one is to... Who was on the subcommittee?

Good question.

The subcommittee was myself, Guinevere, Herb, Kevin Winchell, Kevin Sarp, Josh Karp, Josh Krahn, and Ethan Tate.

Thank you.

So the first goal would be to look at how we can intertwine bike lane and pedestrian improvements with repaving schedule and advocating for perhaps a more formalized process and better way that when streets are repaved, perhaps there's already a restriping plan in place that can go down

when the crew repaves the street.

The second one is to be involved in the transportation master plan process.

That's a process that Ben hopes to get started in the spring.

Is that right?

Soon.

And there'll be a lot of opportunities for people to weigh in on what a transportation master plan looks like.

Three with

started it tonight in some ways hearing about the quick bill process and trying to help the city to figure out how it's going to be formalized.

How can it keep moving as is?

How can we make it operate in a way that serves the city's residents?

Four is to be more active advocates, especially around budget season.

We've heard of the importance of city council allocating money for these things.

And fifth is to continue our efforts to be present and available in the community at community events and to do more outreach.

You can read the operational goals, I won't go into them.

Does anyone have any

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, is it, yeah, like,

It seems to me like having notwithstanding this conversation, vehicle speeds is one piece of a really large pie.

Do we have off-road infrastructure that connects meaningful destinations and meaningful origins?

That's what our transportation master plan should really definitively say.

We should come out saying, yes, we have a roadmap for that.

I would be fine if we have a city where every car drove way faster and I felt way safer, right?

That would be a win.

Does that not fall under Meaningfully Centered's non-card parenthesis?

Yeah, we can do it by transit.

Yeah, transportation.

Just want to make sure.

We're doing speed limits, right?

But if it's non... No, it wasn't meant to be narrow.

If I could just interject, part of the reason we're bringing this to all is to add more bullets here.

So by all means, blame on us.

No, it's more if you want to have a lower speed limits as a good, but we're already doing it.

If you want it on there, that's fine.

We're happy to have things on there.

Well, and I think another piece of this is I think we all have a somewhat high degree of confidence in staff that they're going to put forward a draft plan that is not like, add more car lanes and increase.

We know we're going to get something that's pretty good.

I think this is really almost like a placeholder

to say, this is going to be a piece of the work next year.

We don't know exactly what's going on in that plan right now.

We want to ensure that we are a part of how the plan gets developed, that we're taking the plan into the community, that we're getting feedback on the plan.

I would suggest that the speed limit would be advocacy target number four.

Probably it would be better there.

Have number two be just top of level, vague.

It's all about getting around without a car.

That's all we're trying to do.

And then specific items you're advocating for might be citywide speed limit reduction, things we're already working on.

But no one should ever walk in here surprised that we're talking about speeds when they've seen this thing.

It's like 4B or whatever.

Wouldn't this be a bullet point under that?

And then also it can still fall under number four, an advocacy.

Yeah.

I think we wanted this document to be a kind of

It's not meant to be his or the things we... Well, it's kind of an umbrella of like the stuff that we've been talking about and the stuff that we look at when we look ahead, where does all that stuff fit into?

So we've been talking about outreach.

We have been talking about the master plan to some extent, you know, here and there.

We've talked about QuickBuild quite a bit.

But we're trying to like, how you say it, formalize processes.

And here, you know, this group's advice, that's what it's meant to do on these things.

And I think to Brenna's point, like, you know, nothing really gets, nothing ever really is going to get done just by one entity coming to city council to get something.

We're going to need the community support.

We're going to need staff support.

I think this is good.

I think it's good to focus things in.

I would wonder if there might be somewhere we could mention the University of Virginia as the elephant in the room that keeps not working with the city or working in some ways with the city.

I don't know what it is we would want to say.

Is there a specific

way in which you want them to work with us.

Just, you know, coordinate, coordinating is good.

Because I will say we do coordinate with them.

So like, for me, I know this is your work plan, but like maybe specifying how that court, like, what is it you're trying to actually cut?

Right.

Your level is like, you should know if they're about to put green on the street, you're about to repay.

Our level is more like,

So, as an example potentially, Peter, that, what's number one again, James?

It's the bike lane infrastructure.

West Main is going to get torn up.

Utilities are going to go in there.

And then at some point,

That project is going to go by UVA and grounds and there should be some coordination with UVA and grounds and what gets put back in afterwards.

It's not going on grounds.

We can't do everything.

I just wonder if it could be mentioned under one or more of the existing five focus areas.

It's not really, to me, there's not like examples that come to mind per se, but it's just, you know, I think what Peter's trying to say is that it's, when I look at the Rivanna Trail, for example, in Lupteville, we had to work with all the land managers.

UVA is a land manager that's not fully engaged with that event.

It really should be.

It owns a third of the trail, right?

So they should be engaged in that event and the whole processing of the network of trails throughout Charlottesville.

We've had areas where we want to improve bike pet infrastructure that a lot of the residents are transient.

They live there for a year, maybe two years.

They're not people like us that lived in our neighborhoods for 10, 20 years.

I think there's just a level of communication.

And I think of it also in terms of UVA prioritizing connectivity within and across grounds because it's part of a larger community.

It should never just look like its own little bubble because people cross it.

And the more, you know, things like Shumway Hall go in and you can't bike through anymore.

There are other improvements that are that are nice about that, but it has blocked a bike link that was a low stress connection.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a great, I think that's a really good example, especially if we're looking at our quiet routes.

Um, Peter grips, you know, if you look at our quiet routes, there are places where I would love to be able to show low stress bike routes, you know, on either side of grounds, you know, and getting through grounds is a critical link.

And I would love to be able to make that a formalized thing within their network so as I don't have to worry about them ever potentially removing it, right?

I think this might follow a conversation we had a couple months ago about engagement with

Engagement outreach to community versus being part of community and having community part of VPAC.

I'm curious if you guys have conceptualized what audience you want VPAC to speak to the interests of and where cyclists and pedestrians who use transit are in that audience.

There are shared interests and people who bike explicitly and people who walk exclusively and people who walk to transit.

And there's also particular interests

of the connectivity to bus stops for folks who are transit dependent or who choose to use transit.

And something I'm going to put on your agenda for next month is I think I'm going to have a draft parking plan from VEO that you all are going to have the opportunity to review.

Yeah, okay.

We're getting close to the end, which is why I'm interjecting.

That was helpful.

I think we'll, Quinev has been taking notes, I think we'll try to

make a second draft and talk about it again in December.

We didn't get to the charter, which I don't think is a massive issue.

I just want to give people, we can do that as well in December.

Does anyone have any big concerns or questions about the charter that you want to perhaps say now to inform a second draft?

Yes?

The singular comment I wanted to make was that it seems like the amount of work that was put into this charter is thorough to an extreme point where the amount of effort and

Thank you.

Okay.

We didn't get questions for staff.

Tommy sent out staff updates.

If you have questions about it, please email him or whoever the relevant staff person is.

All right.

And James, can I offer actually an alter, like if people could actually use the Google group, I think that would be better because the benefit of having questions from staff in this forum is that we all get to hear Tommy's response.

But yeah, so let's do that.

I think that's a great point.

And other people might be able to chime in to answer instead of me if they see it first or if I don't have the answer.

Because it's not just me, by the way, filling out these staff updates.

It's Kyle, it's Zoe, and it's Ben.

Thank you so much for making sure that we get these every month.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to update real quick.

Just to say it was the first day of e-bike voucher pickup, and eight people picked up their voucher.

Wow.

And real quick, I issued 37 vouchers this round, because the previous rounds, some vouchers were not redeemed.

So there were more vouchers to issue out for the last round.

And I just came back from NBC in 29 promoting our neighborhood walk on Sunday at Trailblazer Elementary School, one o'clock, and we had the bike rides.

Thanks, y'all.

Thank you, guys.

I'm being the one going to McIntyre Park there.