Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting   4/2/2026

and we are recording so we can go ahead and get started.

Thank you everyone for your patience.

Thank you Remy for getting us out of a jam.

In the interest of, Tommy had a really good icebreaker for us, but in the interest of time, I think we might just quickly go around the space and introduce ourselves, name, neighborhood, and we'll start with maybe the folks on Zoom.

Josh, Carp?

I'm seeing Hannah or Hannah.

Good evening, Belmont area.

Welcome.

Thank you.

All right, Josh, try new again.

All right, well, Josh Karp lives in, yeah, in Fifeville.

I'm one of Eric and I live in Belmont.

Kevin Sarafak, you would.

Little High, yeah.

Right?

Yeah, I mean, it's by the river.

I'm a UB student from Plattville.

That's me.

I'm Kendall and I live on the UB ground.

I'm Mike Baudette.

I'm in the Belmont-Dade Room.

I'm Kyle Robin.

I'm the city's favorite school teacher.

Mike Baudette, yeah, I live in Rose Hill.

Tommy's Frank, Mark the Jet neighborhood.

And you all know about our next neighborhood walk.

It's on North grounds.

There'll be announcements at the end for events.

Thank you, Tommy.

We didn't meet last month.

because many of us were at the Mobility Summit.

So there are no meeting minutes from last month, but approval of the agenda, are we good?

Anyone have thoughts, feedback?

Okay.

Public comment.

All right, hearing no public comment.

Zoom folks, public comment?

Okay, hearing none.

Okay, so Bike Month is the month of May, but we have just completed a volunteer signup form that's on the web and I also have physical signup sheets that I'm taking over to the summit or social that's happening after today.

So we could pass these flyers and scan the QR code.

So there are many events, more than one event per day this time for Bike Month, which is great.

But most of those are like shop rides or events that individual groups are putting on.

So for example, PC is putting on a bike to work station

the middle Wednesday of the month, Wednesday the 15th.

It's up to PC to find those events, but they're volunteers.

But there are a couple of big events that we're all working on together that we need tons of volunteers for.

And some examples of those are the Fridays After 5 bike valet.

That means like three or four people for a long event,

Six Fridays after five, because we're also doing bike valet for the TomTom Festival, which is in April.

Family Bike Month, sorry, Family Bike Day, we need tons of volunteers.

We need like 10 volunteers for that.

River Fest, we're doing a bike valet.

What else?

This month, for the first time, we're having a proclamation of five month at both the city council and the board of supervisors, which is exciting.

And people should come and be recognized and show up.

So all of these things are on a single form that people can use to sign up.

And then I have a volunteer who will forward all these volunteers' names and contact and post to the groups that are leading

each of it.

So that's the surround.

Or if you don't want the flyer, don't keep it, because I do need them.

But if you're interested, take it or take a picture of it.

There's a QR code on there that takes you right to the form.

We'll be at Eagle Fair as well on the 18th, doing another bike valet actually.

So what's new though?

I think there's a couple small things and still some things that haven't been totally like I'm still in conversations with the bike shops.

and multiple ones throughout the month of May, so that's still kind of undecided on how we're going to do that, but it sounds promising from the bike shop's point of view.

We're going to have a big party at the end with Meredith's Sunday Funday ride, and then we're going to party at Rain and Row and do a Port Forward to raise some money for an adaptive bike camp that's happening in June at Albemarle High School called I Can Shine.

I have a draft email here on that too, by the way, with the Charlottesville City Schools about potentially doing some stuff with the city schools, but that wouldn't be like public information, that'd be kind of like more just working with the schools themselves on some things.

So, but we're going to run back a lot of stuff because there's already a lot of stuff on the calendar.

Oh, one more thing that's potentially still in the work.

The Sustainability Office, they have these climate cafes every, what, three months or so.

And they have one that already lines up with May 8th.

And they are asking if they want to kind of tie into

Mental Health and Viking.

So there's some talk around what that might look like, but that hasn't been totally figured out quite yet.

But I just want to echo the proclamations.

It's the first time that we've got our act in order and we are ahead of schedule.

Both proclamations are in both sitting Board of Supervisors' agendas, packages, and therefore we can really focus on getting

So, also, I don't know if there's a collective press release for a bite month, but the proclamations definitely should be on the media press release because, actually, media is present at both the Board of Supervisors and City Council, so they will run that if they're told in advance that it's happening.

So that's cool.

One more thing, Peter.

I don't know what candidate look, but the big thing is really just try to get more people to sign up for the bike business challenge or the bike challenge.

Yes.

So in terms of Bike Month, you can

Rideshare has a program where they're trying to get folks to report their miles.

Yeah, transit's in there.

Transit qualifies for always for the incentive to pay Rideshare, but I don't know that they get special bike month business.

There's a special program through Rideshare for Bike Month, but throughout the entire year, you can sign up for Connect Charlotte or Connect Virginia, Connect VA, actually.

Kevin had a question.

What are the proclamations?

You don't have to recite them.

Viking's fun, it's sustainable, it's a part of the city and the counties.

It's whereas all these things here now, you know, Juan Diego way.

This is why you might want to sign up.

Number one, it's great to give public comment on the day when that's happening.

Number two,

Somebody has to receive this proclamation, and we're still working through what that looks like, but typically when there's a proclamation, that receiving entity has a chance to make a few comments.

It also happens right at the beginning of the meeting, so if you want to show up just for that, you're not going to be sitting there all night.

Although we do encourage you to stay there.

That's important.

So our thinking was that it would not be a single recipient for either city or county.

Yeah, for the city for sure, yeah.

Then the one outstanding, if we have a few seconds for discussion, Tommy,

One thing I did want to get a better sense of is how we're handling the walk, bike, and roll to school element.

I'm not planning on doing anything, really.

I already have set up certain things to go out in terms of press release and graphics, and that's not on the list.

So noting that Kyle's in the room and I'll stop talking after I say this next thing, but I think our working assumption is

that we included on the calendar, say, go do these things at your school, maybe a line in the press release about it.

But it's way too hard to coordinate so many schools, now multiple districts, public private schools, they don't all have the same means.

That's sort of our logic with that.

Is there a way to get that into the Saferit program in some way?

Just only because it's a nice thing to do.

And I know we've talked about maybe May is not the right time to do it because May is just bonkers in school communities.

There's not a kind of cookie cutter way to do it.

Staff availability.

It's pretty hard to go into a school and ask you to do extra work.

If you do that, they'll probably just kick you out.

So, I mean, the most success that we've had with doing any kind of bike to school day or bike activities at schools have been mostly volunteer or parent-led.

I've been there doing them, but I'm personally trying to capture all the skills that's still part of it to do.

There were a couple of years where we just kind of met with the schools and really tried to encourage them to do their own thing, whether it's just like a welcoming committee with

a snack and a sticker or something like that.

Not even necessarily trying to draw up support for people who have device, but just celebrating people who do, which there were a couple of equity issues with that in the past.

Yeah, I know, because I'd let it for a couple of years when it was hard.

So the approach that I take with that and would take with that is, I think it's a question for the students themselves, to go to each individual school and talk to them, which is a lot of work.

and it's interesting because from year to year, much like education programs and PE, there's a lot of trouble with people and who wants to take the lead on this and who wants to do that.

So it's not real.

So I think that that's our logic of using public channels to just encourage people in their neighborhood to navigate your neighborhood, walk and bike, including getting to school.

Which is which is kind of the approach that we're taking with basically city communications.

We have it on like on the published

That's the communication that we provided to Amanda.

Parks and Rec actually provided that.

I didn't.

I want to try to do that again.

The only last item is that the next five-month planning meeting is a week from tomorrow at 9 a.m.

I'll send the details of that including, oh, it's in person at a TBD location.

I guess one final thought I had was, when we did do a lot of work two years ago, I can only say that at Sunrise, formerly Brown's Ranch, it paid dividends.

I see more people biking to that school.

They have asked for more bike racks.

There are more parents biking their kids.

And I think that's honestly true.

for everything that we've been doing the past couple years.

Yeah, one thing that I need to talk to Kyle about is some of the schools have spring swings and spring events.

In some respects, it's maybe easier to work with those existing events if we're a bike-related thing.

I know Kyle's done that in the past, and I've also done that in the past.

Well, I encourage folks to sign on to Bike Month Volunteering because Peter makes it really easy.

It's very fun.

Yeah.

It's very fun.

Cool.

Thank you so much for the big push.

All right.

Yeah.

In the update, I was talking about

Bike, something.

This is only my second meeting, so I don't know what that is.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, OK, so real quick.

So the VannaBike policy has been kind of this draft thing that's been talked about within VPAC for almost 10 years now.

and part of that is because of COVID and no one was talking about it.

But we started talking about it when I first retired and as I learned more and more and more what we really need to tie to is some sort of existing city-wide bike registry.

So now that we have an e-bike voucher program and we're trying to get more and more folks to own expensive bikes, I want to make sure that if they were stolen through that program or otherwise that they can hopefully get them back.

So yesterday I stopped by Play It Against Sports and tried to communicate existing bike registries that we all can take advantage of for free and that they can go onto that bike registry to see if a bike was stolen before they buy a bike from a potential person who stole it.

Does that make sense?

So these bike registries, there's two of them that exist nationally.

Project 529, which is owned by an insurance company and

and they, like if your bike is stolen here in Charlottesville and then someone sells it in Chicago, and theoretically the Play Against Sports in Chicago can see that that was stolen, report it, and not buy it, if that makes, yeah.

So we're trying to make sure that, and I would like to create a city-owned version of that and try to promote that.

Since we're not going to be able to stand that up in time for bike month, because that was my goal, and this would be run through the city police office and I would be supporting them, it would all be free, it would all be about helping us and it wouldn't be a requirement or anything, it would just be a way for us to try to

Bike Run.

So I'm just going to be promoting Bike Index through Bike Month as many times as I can.

So at the Bike Ballets, I'm going to have a little handout to talk about all this.

Abandoned bikes came up because originally the library was talking about a need to, there's bikes locked to the bike rack there for weeks or months on time and they asked me, can I do something about it?

I looked into it

The police are unwilling to cut a bike lock or even find out who the owner is of a bike that's been sitting there for months on time and assume that nature will take care of the bike for lack of a better example.

So I'm trying to stand up a abandoned bike policy.

but that's proving to be extremely difficult.

The police want something very specific that's in city code that tells them exactly what they can and cannot do.

Part of this is related to the ordinance that they tried to propose a couple months ago around the homeless encampments and they want to make sure that whatever language they have, it shows

That makes sense.

From my standpoint, the biggest thing is we have abandoned bikes that are locked up to a bike rack that we pay for in the city right away that we can't now use the bike racks because there's abandoned bikes there.

I want to try to either find a new home for those bikes or find the owner to do a bike registry program or try to get those bikes off the bike rack.

So to some extent, I'm not really asking for a lot of input because I've done a ton of research

But if you guys do have input, I'm going to hold us all ears on that.

I'm sorry, I didn't think you were going to ask anything.

But there was like future plans to stand up a city registry as well.

So you can build a city registration through Project 529 and or Bike Index.

So if you register for either one of those, well, if you register through Bike Index, it will just automatically be in the city.

Everyone should register their bike.

So Project 529 also

uses Bike Index, but not the other way around.

Project Price Nine does not open up their spreadsheet to Bike Index.

So I'm kind of telling folks to use Bike Index.

I also am leaning towards Bike Index because it's free, but also because they're a non-profit and I have less concerns about

Yeah, that would be my suggestion.

There is a, if we do do a, Project Price Tonight offers a sticker by Index Design, and you would think that's a sticker, who cares.

When I was talking to Play It Against Sports, that's the first thing they're looking for.

It's like a UVA, because UVA has a bike registration program that's not super well managed, but it does have a sticker and they look for that sticker.

Yeah, you can disregard most of that.

Some of that stuff I did highlight on purpose, like I did highlight the fact that the

The Phase III bike racks have arrived after six months of saying that they're on their way.

So they are here and they have a bike seat built logo on them, which is kind of cool.

And there was like one other thing I highlighted, but the other stuff was from last month that I just never un-highlighted.

I think I highlighted Public Works has purchased a temporary light.

That's not new.

I told you guys that last time.

But what is new is they plan to install the East

are going to be up for six months.

So just FYI, I'll just highlight this verbally, that and many other projects are going to be happening next fall.

So a lot of projects are going to start off in our entrance corridors, especially, which would have been nice if some of that stuff was staggered out.

We are waiting from Traffic Engineer on their proposal to City Council on that.

That's with Traffic Engineering right now.

They had some

Yes.

And we're probably going to get some more.

Not just for bike month, but just by programming money is coming our way in the near future.

It's going to be tight.

The timeline is the budget getting

adopted and whatnot.

It's not CIP, but it's, yeah.

Yeah, and just for the abandoned bike, it sounds like it would require an active bike council for an ordinance or something.

Yes.

Yeah, I'm going to write all the language.

And I think the process that I'm going to propose is either I see or I hear from somebody about a potential band of bikes.

I go check it out, I put a tag on it, and it says, hey, does this bike belong to someone?

You'd have two weeks or whatever to remove it.

I come back, it hasn't been removed, there is no communication, and I call the cops and I say, can you cut this lock?

Bring it to the police impound, it sits there for 120 days, no one claims it, it gets either donated to Community Bikes, if Community Bikes wants it, or it goes to City Auction, where currently a lot of abandoned bikes

But those bikes aren't locked up?

Is that...

Correct.

Yeah.

The abandoned bikes that are going through the auction are not locked up.

They're found off the Red Banded Trail or whatever.

But probably what happened is someone else has cut the lock and they're done with that bike.

Okay, any further questions for Tommy or Kyle?

Yeah, I mean basically they aren't sold as a permanent project and they want to do a quote demo project.

All along it was spec'd out to use quick build materials

but it was never designed to be like a quick build project.

If they can fit the fire truck down it.

and I think that part of the conversation has always been part of the design process.

I would just say what's interesting is recently Richmond is looking at our Belmont Bridge project and they're asking us for questions about

and essentially saying, do our emergency services, have they taken advantage of mounting those curbs to get around traffic?

And so far, the answer from fire and police is no.

No one's had to do that yet.

But Richmond is looking at our project and potentially replicating it in Richmond.

So one, I guess, request I would have as a committee member is that

Whatever switch happens for it to be now comfortably a temporary trial project, it still needs to be a robust project that's not flimsy and falls apart.

Thank you for your time.

Well, from our standpoint, the duration was permanent.

I think honestly there was confusion over

I think maybe we could have done a better job of highlighting that, but at the same time, I think a lot of you all knew this was supposed to be a permanent thing that we were doing.

But there was confusion.

So y'all, when this thing gets built, we got to be out there using it all the time.

Josh has his hand up.

Okay, I can say some things about, so I have a question about this Fifth Street project as well, but also some flavor.

I ran into Brandon Duncan, meaning I found him at Peter's event, if you

weeks or a month ago, and traffic's plan last I heard is to do a short pilot of a non-bike lane on Fifth Street.

So six months max, and they're proposing to close a car lane, but not call it a bikeway.

So that's interesting to me.

I am afraid that it's a plan designed to fail because they aren't going to tell anyone, you can ride your bike here.

So that's just some color from talking to Brennan.

My question is, and Tommy, this is a question not for you, but to go through you.

I think Brennan's got to come to BPAC and show us a plan.

And it's gotta be soon because construction is supposed to begin this summer.

It's April.

That does not give a lot of time to review a design.

So I'm going to send mail and not ask you to do stuff over voice too much.

But my request for the staff in the room now is bring us traffic to this venue to discuss this plan as soon as possible, because I don't think it's a good plan right now.

And I don't think it's

Frankly meant to be a good plan.

Because it's not a bikeway, it's just closing the lane and not calling it anything and doing it for a short duration.

Let me see.

I'm looking for my notes.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, it also sounds like if we're going to close a lane,

and not tell anyone that you can now ride in the area that's close.

The results of the data, in my mind, would be more traffic and less people biking, no increase in biking.

That's what's planned.

Yeah, so this is what I would like to get Renan and that was what Renan told me verbally, informally a month ago, right?

So hopefully it's better since then, but I think we need to get him and Caleb here soon before they go to council because council has many things to think about and that might not include details of a plan like this.

Other than this group, I don't know who will do that kind of thinking in the public, so I would like to get them here to present as soon as reasonable.

I'm sorry, I have more questions.

I'll try and be quick with them.

Again, Tommy, I'm saying this to you because you're our liaison, but it's really a question I want you to pass to other people.

Tell me if this would be answered later in the call because that would save some time.

We're talking today about traffic calming, which is great.

I'm excited for that.

but there is also last year's list of traffic calming projects and I haven't seen progress on them for six months or so and I want to know the status of the projects, specifically the 30 or 40 projects on the 2025 ClickBuild list.

Well, what I'm saying is that there's been a renewed interest over those projects while talking about how to update the traffic calming manual or create one essentially.

Tell me, I'm sorry.

I just want to save time.

Yeah.

They're talking, we're talking about where to get the funding and where to, and how to move forward with those projects during those discussions, but there have been limited and I'm asking the same questions.

Yeah, and again, I'm not

I'm impatient, but not with you.

I'm impatient with traffic engineering through you, so sorry for that.

Nothing to do with your work.

Let me see.

Oh yeah.

Tommy, this actually is a question for you this time.

First of all,

I'm really happy with all the work on sidewalks and all the money for sidewalks, so great.

I appreciate that very much.

The sidewalk priority list on the website is really, really out of date.

I was looking and it says we're going to begin construction on prospect in 2024, fiscal 2024, which obviously we're not.

You can definitely ask that.

I've been asking the same thing.

All that's also with Public Works, not engineering, but the project managers.

The OSA is coming next month to BPAC with Ben on

I can't remember what, it's already on the agenda.

Citywide Mobility Plan, I asked her to talk about connecting Charlottesville and how to improve a dashboard through Connect Charlottesville.

OSEI has a new job as of this week in the office of Communication and Public Engagement.

She is our new public engagement person and she is going to work with all departments including Public Works especially and I'm trying to get her or she's going to work with Public Works on many things including hopefully this dashboard.

Yeah, I think we need to ask Evan as well.

Where's the dashboards then?

Anyway, so sorry.

I apologize, Tommy.

That question was not for you either.

It's again for someone through you.

But thanks for the references.

I'm really sorry.

Very last thing.

This is for Kyle.

And I might my question for you might be, can I have 10 minutes of your time another time?

I loved seeing your talk at the school board meeting.

Thank you very much for that.

Everyone else go watch it.

It was fun.

I would like to get more granular data about the speed camera program, and I don't know what your dashboard shows you.

And so I don't know if I need to ask this question to you, Kyle, or to CPD.

There's a little information that I have, like all the information that I shared last night, I don't have access to.

Okay.

Show Josh email.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you so much.

Okay, okay.

It is almost six, so we're going to keep moving with the agenda unless there are other urgent requests or questions for Tommy and Kyle.

Anyone else on Zoom?

OK.

Hearing none, we are going to shift to James is going to walk us through some discussion of proposed traffic calming projects.

And I don't know if it's possible to make James.

Yes, great.

Never mind.

Hi.

Thank you.

Okay, I'll try to be quick with this because I'm looking forward to the discussion about it.

This is a kind of successor to the quick builds program.

We've been told the city wants to move away from the term quick builds, which is kind of flex posts, restriping.

The city did a lot of quick builds.

last year, which is great.

And now they are trying to figure out internally what is an ongoing quick build program look like?

How does it work?

How do we keep implementing these things?

How do we decide where should get improvements?

How do we review them to see if they're working?

And so we wanted to kind of do a similar process where we ask those questions of ourselves so we can present to staff a list of things that we would like to see from the program.

And you can see here they have pointed us to Harrisonburg's program, which is a model that they're looking at as inspiration.

as a good example and I'll go through that quickly, give a quick overview before we start.

You can see eight questions here that are not necessarily complete but I've tried to break down the various

parts of a program to think about and some questions to be thinking about.

We don't have to discuss all of this today.

It may be that some of these we don't really have an opinion on.

We just want it to work and make it work however it works.

Others, maybe we really do have an opinion or multiple opinions.

So before I leave it up to the floor,

Just wanted to give a quick overview of Harrisonburg's program.

It's a fairly new program.

Residents can apply for improvements to streets that they feel are unsafe.

There is a scoring metric, a public scoring metric, that scores those streets based on a lot of different factors.

Obviously things like speed and traffic volumes, but also I think things like proximity to parks and schools.

There are a lot of things.

I'm not remembering them all.

But they're given a score.

The scores are publicized.

And each year, staff looks at the roads that have been applied for and unsuccessful roads from previous years

and chooses one neighborhood to focus on that year.

And I thought that was an interesting decision.

Residents apply for streets, and streets are scored, but one neighborhood is picked.

And then once that neighborhood is picked, they do a public input process and look at all the streets in the neighborhood, not just streets that have been applied for, and

Design Improvements, put out the improvements, and then 12 months later review them.

I'm less clear on how they review them, and that's one of the questions we could be talking about.

So I think that's all I have to say.

These questions are just kind of to start the discussion.

There are lots of other questions we could be asking.

I just thought we could put these up here

Thank you, James.

I will add to what James shared, that we are looking at making it a standing part of our monthly meetings to be revisiting

what it will now be called traffic calming, not quick notes, kind of moving forward as a way to kind of keep this as a persistent drumbeat of BPAC activity beyond like, oh, we'll put it in a subcommittee and let them kind of move things forward, which we've done in the past to some degree of success.

But I think it's

It's important enough that it deserves kind of focused attention from the whole group and focused input.

So I think, James, what we can do is put this on the agenda for next month.

and urge people to take in the Harrisonburg approach.

It's not onerous to read through their traffic calming procedures and manual and come with some ideas.

I think the other part is just at some point, or maybe if we get Brendan at our next meeting, which I have invited him to, we could talk about this as well.

How do we make sure that we're informing what traffic engineering would like to do and making sure that we're

We're able to work with them.

And we also have public works coming.

Oh, great.

OK, super.

I had a couple additional information.

In our office, we've got three accounts, or four, really.

styles account now, but bike improvements, which is designed for infrastructure projects, new sidewalks.

These are CIP accounts of money, infrastructure money, and then neighborhood transportation improvements.

And that's the account that we're using for like traffic calming or for bills or whatever.

I think it's $200,000.

that goes in there every year.

I have to go double check that it might be $100,000.

But there's at least $200,000 in there right now remaining after the 2025 transportation fund.

So that's part of the conversation that we're having with traffic engineering that Josh was talking about, about those remaining 30 projects that we had identified.

Can we use

And then the other thing I just want to highlight as you guys think about this is you just heard a lot of questions coming through me and not to me.

So maybe think about who's receiving project ideas through this process.

Because currently it's basically traffic engineering.

right.

So we have a traffic petition right now that neighborhoods can apply for and those petitions go directly to the traffic engineer.

You know what I'm talking about Mike, right?

Yeah, in a different location.

Well, Mike also put that petition just for your reference on the Viking & Walking webpage just to kind of highlight it a little bit more.

Great.

But I think that's part of the problem.

We own an account that's supposed to be worked on these projects, but the project idea is coming up outside of our office and this committee's and going either directly to traffic engineering or honestly directly to city council.

and then making their way down.

In the build environment, how are you?

Or virtual environment?

I was going to say there was a result in Fifeville, but no one was happy with the result, which is nothing and a lot of talking over the course of a year and a half to two years.

Technically you could say the Fifeville, technically you could say the Rose Hill petition from a couple years ago with Nels and

and Dean, didn't result in something, but it kind of works through the version of transportation.

But that project was prioritized because of the petition.

It wasn't a direct one-to-one, if that makes sense.

And it didn't ever answer some of their questions on that petition, i.e., can we get a four-way stop sign here?

Right.

There's a point.

This whole process is... Black hole.

There's $100,000 per year for neighborhood transportation.

There you go.

Go ahead.

Yes.

And I think one of the most important things is that if you're a traffic engineer, and this is not to disparage traffic engineers, but you're mostly concerned with things like traffic, like the quantity of cars and how fast they're going.

And I think we all might take a slightly different approach that it's not just 85th percentile speeds.

and traffic volume.

It's perceptions of safety.

It's how close are you to a school, to a park, to places where more vulnerable street users are potentially going to be using the infrastructure or not.

and so I think our influence would be how do we, those things that are a little harder to measure, they're not hard data.

It's hard to tell a traffic engineer that they should pay attention to that stuff, or we can tell them, but it's hard for them to take that in because they're used to models and mathematics.

So the more that we can inform that process, and the Harrisonburg

James, I don't know if you can go to the Harrisonburg, if you can screen share that or Tommy, but to just look at how, yeah, the pie chart down here.

And I'd be curious, like this is how they, these are the factors that they weigh.

And I don't know if y'all can read that back there.

Yes.

So speed is the largest factor and volume.

So we're still satisfying the traffic engineers for 50%.

but then we have these other factors here and they're weighted so you can every project is scored and then they're weighted according to these percentages so even if you're not totally like satisfying the traffic engineers you a project might still be able to be implemented because it satisfies these other considerations so I think that's where we can have a lot where I would like us to have input

Yeah, and just as like a point of reference to where we were 10 years ago before I even moved to Charlottesville, Locust Avenue, which has come up a couple times recently, the current traffic engineer was looking at potentially raising the speed limits on that corridor.

and at the same time we were doing our bike bed master plan, there was a petition, a traffic calming petition, I think, I don't know if you know.

From the mayor, yeah.

Well, no, that's from a couple years ago, but from 10 years ago, before you and I worked here, Amanda and Brennan worked with the neighborhood to see what they could implement for traffic calming.

So they went from potentially raising it to like 30 or 35 miles an hour to try to implement ways to calm traffic.

The speed limit hasn't changed, but they implemented some buffers to the bike lane to try to narrow things down, but there wasn't a whole lot that they implemented.

And they were supposed to kind of go back later to see, and I think Brennan may have looked at some data later, but I don't honestly know if that slowed speed.

So there is a new petition for Locust Avenue and 250 specifically, and that's been in

That whole she was referencing at Year Plus over there.

So there's got to be a better way to do this.

Especially since there was a utility project that ripped up that entire corridor.

Yeah, that context is definitely helpful I think.

Well, and keep in mind that there needs to be a follow-up with these projects, right?

We did 30 projects out there in the public.

The snow chewed up a bunch of those.

That's the thing that we don't have a process for.

That's kind of what you're saying.

These are meant to be installed on a temporary

We didn't have a way of measuring the success of it, which is what we talked about before, but also we don't have a process for

So the one distinction that is important is in Harrisonburg's program, we are not talking about flex posts and restriping.

We're talking about chicanes.

We're talking about raised crosswalks.

We're talking about pretty hardened infrastructure that would be permanent.

And I appreciate the question, James, around

community input.

I mean, I think probably everyone is like, yes, the community should have input.

And that adds a lot of time.

And that also pulls up the haters.

So, you know, if we can develop policies where it's like, these are the criteria, all the criteria are met.

We know that fire departments on board.

Let's just put it down.

Let's not spend a lot of time asking people their opinion when, like, they're not experts on traffic coming.

and we have this body that can weigh in and represent the interests of the public, the non-motorized public.

I think that's good to think about for sure.

I love that.

that kind of like, well, we've done our homework.

Like someone could argue the bike plan master plan was that.

We did our homework.

Why can't we do this stuff now?

But some of that stuff was recommendations and not like this is what we're for sure doing.

But there are still always going to be projects, I think, that we're going to want to try to do sooner than the concrete crew can come around and actually do.

Yeah.

like maybe like a pilot period, but then having a clear follow up of how do we measure success?

How does that happen?

And by the way, success is not necessarily volume or any of that.

Success is like, the water, the drainage isn't gonna change.

I know that's not important, but like, that's a huge thing.

Yeah, again, I'm new to this.

Maybe I need a biped, like remedial class or something.

I don't know the history of the Quick Builds, but were none of these questions kind of answered in the Quick Build program?

Like, what did we learn about community engagement, about how quickly something can be built or

I mean, we were the community engagement.

I mean, there was one notable exception, which was over in the Greenleaf neighborhood where there was a very quirky intersection that required a lot of handholding and kind of walking alongside the neighborhood because it was a very difficult location and the solutions that were offered needed to be adjusted.

And what were I mean, thinking about the pie chart, I read through the

those sites determined?

Some of those locations were put forward by a subcommittee of BPAC.

So we were able to make recommendations given a set of overarching criteria that came from Ben Chambers.

So we were looking for certain locations that met certain criteria.

and then a number of them were actually just produced by staff.

So that's what comprised the full list of quick builds, not all of which have been implemented as we've heard.

But yeah, but that was kind of the process.

And that was, I mean, really that also emerged from a terrible tragedy, which is that someone was hit and killed in a crosswalk.

you know, had that driver been going more slowly, would that person still be alive today?

Maybe, we don't know.

But there was a period at which the city was very animated around making some changes quickly.

I think we've lost some of that momentum too.

You know, it's like the worst possible thing to have to experience a tragedy like that.

And if you don't make

If you don't go and make changes after someone has died, you're missing a huge window of opportunity.

So I think it's on us to try to keep this momentum going.

And I will say that Cam Smith, who's the assistant traffic engineer, he is a traffic engineer.

Sorry, thank you.

He's open to this and he's looking at Harrisonburg as a model.

I've heard that there has been progress on this, yes.

Yeah.

Timothy, you're not really behind the people here.

None of us.

There really wasn't much of a program.

We started to try to work on a program with BPEC, but then there was this urgent transportation fund that got dropped on our lap.

And then Ben, Kyle, Brandon and I, based on our knowledge in community engagement, the neighborhood walks were a big influence for me and what I saw and heard

There was no processes.

However, Ben, Kyle and Tommy had always planned that there would be some sort of survey that was attached to this and that was not implemented.

That was a real unfortunate thing.

Rose Hill's gonna be where everything happens.

Something, I don't know if this is pertinent to this discussion or not, but I've been making, charged with making promotional materials for the Rose Hill repaving project.

And I don't know, I feel the need for some kind of visual rule.

Flashcard, talked about making a manual or a booklet or something like that.

Just pictures are going to be better.

I don't know if that's something.

Look at the Milwaukee traffic calming program.

Yes, what I think would be really cool, Mike, and we can talk later, is we have some examples now in town of a lot of this stuff.

So let's start using those photos and some photo album.

I have photos of all that stuff now, basically.

One little thing I'll just say, we use new flex posts for a lot of those projects, and those are real brittle, and they did not hand up hints.

That was something I think that we've learned.

I don't know if that's been written down anywhere, but that's just... And can we move away from flex posts and towards armadillos?

They're so bad and they just fall apart.

MUTCD for Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

Make it real hard.

But they just have to not fall apart.

Yes, please go.

So in terms of the questions we should be asking, after number seven, how do we tell if it's working?

We should be thinking about the question, what do we do if it isn't working?

Because from what Brennan was talking when he visited this committee, it seems like if a project doesn't meet whatever criteria someone decides for it, it's done away with.

Well, the other approach would be that if traffic calming doesn't slow down traffic enough, well, then you should have more traffic calming.

I think similar to that is the design for a quick build with flex posts might be very different than the concrete version.

Yeah, North Avenue.

It's currently kind of this like

Circle, it's not a roundabout per se, but there's just this massive amount of asphalt and it was unclear where the travel lanes were and there was no sidewalks for pedestrians to cross over to the park.

So by building this ginormous circle, it defined the traffic lanes.

But if you're going to build a concrete version, I think it would actually be building the sidewalks and then eating up space to define the travel lane and teeing up that intersection.

Having a Sidewalk, we decided that design, if that makes sense.

So there's a, did this work?

That reminds me of what we were saying about Fifth Street.

Right.

Or if all the flex posts get knocked over in the first month.

Yeah.

Thank you all so much for caring about traffic calming.

I think hopefully we can have an impact here.

James, is there anything else you want to offer or add?

No, that was helpful.

I would say a lot of this is in like Caleb and Brandon's ballpark right now.

So I'm just going to keep you all updated.

And we have a direct line to Caleb too.

And we've had this conversation, James and I have had a conversation with him so we can keep that, keep that moving.

All right.

It is 6 25 y'all.

This is what I was asking about a few meetings ago when I was like, hey, how do we build roads?

Like, start to finish?

Yeah, hopefully we don't, actually.

But yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

We'll pass this around.

There's a QR code there if you want to put that in your phone.

Oh, did I?

OK, great.

The FY 2017 budget is going to be voted on at City Council next week.

So if you have any comments that you want to send to our elected officials, the time to do that is before April 6th.

and then I don't know how public this is but we've been told that there's an event especially for folks who live in the downtown area to talk about West Main and Water Street Ridge, the whole intersection there.

Does that apply to anyone in this room or anyone online?

We can make sure

I mean downtown, maybe we can think of that as a broad category of neighborhoods.

But yeah, wanting to make sure that this is a meeting that's also bringing the downtown business community into the conversation around what we want to see in that intersection.

So we're hoping that we can get some good

inputs and helpful, you know, we want to make sure that we're bringing those folks along as we think about necessary improvements to that huge corridor and really important infrastructure.

So basically, this incident has not been scheduled yet.

I thought it was.

I thought it was April 27th, but just let us know and we can make sure you get the right info.

All right, cool.

Anything from the Zoom?

Anyone else have an event?

Next neighborhood walk, we leave these once a month in different neighborhoods throughout the city.

They're actually going to be at UVA.

We're going to explore UVA grounds, like at Darden and some of the new facilities over there.

I didn't set the route this time so Bill Palmer

Thank you for being here.

Come back next month, please.

Thank you to all the new folks and the students who are with us.

So I live just over in Florida, and I go still to the Florida API over at the intersection almost every day because I work out at the City Gym on either my bike or running the app.