Bicycle & Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting   8/6/2026

Okay, we ready?

We ready?

Okay.

Can everyone, could someone just confirm that you can hear me online?

Yes.

Awesome, thank you.

So we are a little behind schedule, but thank you for figuring that all out.

And we are having difficulty with the screen in here.

I'll start with quick introductions, just your name and your neighborhood.

And then we will move swiftly on to the first.

My name is John Powell, and I'm visiting my research team here.

James Van Vranken, I live in the Ridge Street neighborhood.

Paul Miller, I live in the Martha Jefferson neighborhood.

And just to save time, I'll say for the record that we have Herb Levy, Sarah Farrell, and Alberic Carinaplan joining us online.

Does anyone have any amendments to the agenda or the meeting minutes from the June meeting?

Excellent.

OK.

So I'm Jonathan again, and I'm here because I have a bit of an issue with cycling across the downtown pedestrian mall.

I've been doing this for over a year, and I saw that signs went up recently saying, get off your bike and walk it across the mall.

So I looked at that.

I looked at the city code, and it actually is correct.

I was a little surprised because I've had police officers tell me, yes, you can cross them all.

on one of the side streets.

You just can't bike on the main street mall.

But it turns out that the code defines the pedestrian mall as the brick paved area between Water Street and Market Street, including the side streets, theoretically.

So I get it.

It's correct by code.

But I'm a little frustrated as a cyclist who needs to get over the mall one way or another to commute to my office every day, back and forth.

4th Street Northeast is one way.

So I can't go the other way.

It works on my return route back home.

And there's really no other viable route for me unless I went to 2nd Street Northwest.

So right now I'm walking my bike across the mall.

It's fine.

It just feels a little bit demeaning, to be honest.

And I know that's not the intention, but that's how it feels.

So I'm wondering if there's any room

Even if it has to be an ordinance change to do something like a yield instead of a get off your bike, like maybe there's, you know, wide crossings like 3rd Street, Northeast.

That was my route.

I've never had any run-ins with pedestrians.

If there's a lot, you just get off your bike or you go super slow.

That seems reasonable to me, instead of cutting off the arteries across the mall downtown.

But I was curious if there's been any conflicts between cyclists and pedestrians.

What was the reasoning for putting up the signs?

Is there a real basis there?

Also, if there's any real plans to get contraflow bike lanes across the mall, which are in the city's pedestrian and bicycle master plan for 4th Street Northeast and 2nd Street Northwest, but they're not currently there.

Staff responds if there is a response.

I just want to check.

Parab, I notice you have your hand up.

Yeah, it makes no sense to me that an automobile can go on 4th Street.

What Herb was saying was that he wasn't sure why a car can go across 2nd and 4th Street, but a bicycle can't go across 2nd and 4th Street.

I don't think there's anything keeping anyone from riding a bike across those cross streets right now.

It's just a matter of a facility that he was pointing out about having a contraflow lane across the mall.

or the other half-streets, the dead end of them all.

Not two ways, certainly.

So are you saying that the signs have been put up recently?

Yeah, so those were in response to some safety concerns that were happening on the mall.

We were having people, you know, as you pointed out, riding up and down the mall seems to be more of a problem.

We were having a lot of that going on.

And the feedback that we were getting was, well, there's no real clear sign.

And there were signs before, actually.

The brown signs were out there before that had

Longer lists of rules, not just to get off your bike and don't ride your bike on the mall.

So about a month ago, we started deploying those signs out on the mall at the request of the downtown businesses and folks downtown.

As for relooking at where the crossings happen, how the network around downtown is functioning, that's the kind of thing that we'll talk about when we start doing our mobility planning over the next year.

So I hope you'll be engaged in that and give us more feedback on how you'd like to see downtown functioning through that process.

This is not the first time this idea has come up and it's just never happened.

I mean, it's a totally logical thing.

Every crossing of the mall should be a bike crossing, or at least a couple of them should be clearly marked as bike crossings.

Because it's insane that it's a barrier that many blocks long to having a low-stress bike network.

I'm looking back, and it came up in 2018 and in 2019.

There's also the Perini discussion.

Should the cars be?

Thank you.

I have been corrected that the chat is not operating.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And I think this can be a part having like really good tech timing infrastructure.

Let's say, okay, there are two core things like this thing.

But other parts of the core thing, I think the problem is bikes can first of all really pop and hurt pedestrians.

But even though I curse all the time, I tend to hit a half.

I'm really dismounting.

But the point is, I think there is an actual potential issue with e-bikes and not e-bikes.

That can actually hurt people.

Although I'm biking all the time, at the current form, it may not be the best.

There's a total of two bikes.

But I think we can have

Every kind of person with multiple bikes with good track and timing so that bikes cannot speed way into the moment.

So that was one response to that.

And I strongly believe that whenever a city does like recaving or any work on that road, there should be

It should be kind of difficult, especially in residential streets because I shared all the evidence.

One of the key results from like all over the world is that rapid climbing like speed bumps and chokers and all these things and to reduce children's injuries death kind of close to half.

And from my house to my son's school, my son's school, there's zero upcoming, more or less.

So it doesn't, it just doesn't make sense.

And also it's super cheap.

That's what I don't know based on the data I have seen.

So I think it just doesn't make sense not to install in residential street.

So, I feel like the city should really justify why they're not in some interest.

Rather than we, kind of our residents, trying to back and justify why we need traffic cutting.

Yeah.

I mean, part of what I mentioned, mobility standard setting what the standards are for our streets and what we're expecting to see on the streets.

So that's where that discussion is going to go.

Um, so yeah, we've done a lot of traffic calming over the past three or four years that I've been here.

Yep.

Yeah.

We're working with the city on trying to get Locust Avenue in a better place relative to all the above.

Cars, people, bikes.

I did see that there was a question of, can we get a copy that has links that work?

So I will be sending that out tomorrow.

Thank you.

And presumably if then we have questions, we can email you as the best person or Tommy.

Yeah.

I know there's a mobility plan, but I don't think we need a mobility plan.

You should read the ordinances and see if there is a prohibition on parking right up at the energy

because then there's a crosswalk and then you can't see the people in the crosswalk.

So then your question really isn't for me and Brennen.

Your question is for CPD.

Yeah.

And the CPD is not going to enforce this code section that only Brennen knows about.

Which we do now.

We have a pretty good asset management tool that shows us where all those signs are.

So now we can sort of understand where those gaps are.

You said a magic word of prioritize.

I'm getting the RFP out this fall.

It's not like we don't have signs at any resurgence.

I could probably pull it up, but I think we're pushing two to three hundred thousand signs across the city.

You're right, each individual one is nothing, but at $150 a sign to get it and install it, you start adding another hundred thousand signs there, that money starts adding up really quick.

That's the reason that it's not prioritized at this point.

Are you saying 300,000 signs about this?

No, no, no.

Just all of our signs across the city that we're managing.

Some of which are?

Yeah, some of them are.

I don't have that specific number that are the no parking from here to the corner type of signs.

You're not wrong about the police officers and how they decide to enforce the codes.

And it's not just the police officers, some of it's the judges that actually do it as well.

If there's not a sign there, the judge has thrown stuff out in the past, which has led to even more signs and more sign clutter.

I don't know if this is still the case, but 10 years ago when I came to the city, you had to have a sign that said no parking wherever there was a gap in the curb.

So between every driveway, you had to have another sign.

Even if you had one that said no parking on this side, you had to have one at every driveway entrance or between every driveway.

So again,

I don't agree with that, but that's the way it is.

So we have a lot of signs.

We've got a lot of signs to maintain.

We have to keep them up for retro reflectivity.

So every five to 10 years, or probably closer to 10 years, we're looking at those signs that they've painted enough that they have to be replaced.

So it isn't insignificant to do that.

Okay.

As far as I know, daylighting is not done with time.

Yeah, I think Hoboken used mostly flexible, you know, yeah, yeah.

You can.

Right.

And daylight can be as long as traffic.

Sure.

But the point is, if you have a sign, there is no police officer, and probably 99% of time there is no police officer.

So it's not enforceable.

It only works if police officers are present.

Relying on police means it's extremely expensive.

But the point of traffic calming and daylighting is you physically block so that it's not possible to park.

I need to share a very similar sentiment because daylighting

Well, what you're describing is much more expensive than what he's describing.

So we really do have to start talking about what are our priorities and where do we start?

So the RFP for the mobility plan is going out in the fall, you hope?

Probably next month.

I hope it takes less than two months for me to get through the procurement process.

To get to the end of the plan, we're trying to align the end of the plan with the beginning of the budget season in 2028.

Okay, cheers.

Thank you.

I hope that during that two years, you guys will be so impressed by the amount of construction that is going on, which Brennen is going to walk you through what we're about to see for the next two years.

You won't be worried about the small stuff as much.

Like West Main is going to be a huge deal over the next three years.

And it's going to be a huge construction project, but the small things that we look at today on West Main that seems capable, they're not, we can't do them over the next three years.

I think

What I'm hoping for, as well as, like, that's a nobility plan, we've got to talk about it in a nobility plan, is some sense that, and I think this is just a communications issue, not a doing issue of, like, we already have priorities, like,

Peter's asking to change your priority to move something up the list.

So we have ADA improvement plan.

We have sidewalk priorities.

We have paving plan.

We have all of these plans that we've already committed to building these things.

So that's really what we're focused on for the next couple of years.

While in parallel, we're doing the planning for what comes after that, what comes after the stuff that we've already committed ourselves to.

The problem that we've been facing with staff is we've got a huge backlog of stuff to do.

Okay, thank you.

Sure.

I'll do my best.

If there are screens and people can gather.

No, I know.

Yeah, I'm trying to check who can share.

As myself.

He's on as people.

Well, now I'm not the host.

Who's that?

Well.

How's your management?

I can try and email you the stuff.

Hopefully that works.

No, I think we're going to get out.

No, three different things.

That would be 2015.

So it's now 11 years.

We dated.

It's just so exciting.

Which would be somewhat better.

Do we want to ask people to rejoin?

Let me see if I'm...

If you're not scheduling it at least let's get that conversation.

I got it.

Then again, they'd be on a lot of road in here, but they wouldn't have all their work here.

It's pretty fortified.

It's just that you all find it's the good stuff to function.

We also have the three of them.

Yeah, sooner.

Yeah, I can't bring it up.

You're lost.

It's just the beat.

I'm hosting it all.

Are you not able to email it to me, Vernon?

No, I'm for you.

What's my phone number?

Well, I guess I can send you the link for...

I cannot send this message.

Trust bugs do.

I won't.

I'm tired of this event.

Maybe you should put a call.

It sounds good.

What's the matter with you?

It's just that you know.

Morgan, meeting policies.

Can I do this right now?

It was an email.

We've gotten them back, but now we're going to make Brennen the host so he's not able to share.

Okay.

Like I click on it?

It's on your C folder.

It's on your folder.

You have to edit it in Metanoia or something.

And it also isn't giving me the option to promote him to panelists.

Oh, wait.

I promoted you to a panelist.

Thanks for being with us officer.

Alright, we're seeing your inbox.

I'm getting there.

Okay, so

So this is a presentation that we had put together for management.

It's a GIS tool that we had put together for management just so that they could kind of get an idea of all of the projects that are to be going on.

So all the projects are over on the left.

And then we have a map with kind of what what the limits of those are highlighted.

So on the bottom, I'm going to scroll through time.

So

We're up, I'll go ahead and get us to current because this was from a little bit ago, but currently

We're in August.

So West Main, the utility project has started.

They're starting kind of on the west end of that project right now.

So they're up on the corner trying to finish that up before UVA students come back.

They are not going to be working linearly through the corridor because of the students.

So when they're done with that, they're probably going to jump up and do the end closest to Ridge McIntyre.

Then they'll kind of jump back and forth.

So I think they have four phases of that right now.

We also have the Central Water Line project that is going on, the Rivanna Water Sewer Authority project.

So that has started up kind of O Hill area over by Fontaine.

They started off just with one crew.

They've split, I think they've got two or three crews working right now.

They're currently on Cherry Avenue.

That project is going to be going on

for quite some time because that goes all the way through the center of the city, all the way out through the zero I Street property that the city bought that goes back kind of parallel or

over there by East High Street all the way out to Long Street 250.

So that project still has another two to three years that they're going to be disrupting the roadway.

If you've kind of gone over there, you know, it'll be, you know, they're obviously not shutting down that whole stretch throughout the whole project, but they're working on, you know, 100 to 200 foot segments at a time per crew that's out there.

We have a couple private development projects that are still going on for another year.

So the Verve project that's on the corner of Stadium M at Jefferson Park Avenue has had significant road closures, bike lane closures, sidewalk closures that are going on there.

Timing wise, that will be completed around this time next year.

So we've got about 12 months left on that.

They want to have it open for students to come in.

I'm guessing they want it open so that students can come in July, August, summer next year.

Same thing with the Bloom plan IV.

That's the one right at IV and Copley.

That's not the UVA controlled property there, the student housing that's going in.

So both of those have roughly a year left on them.

Coming up here shortly, I think they've already put it out to bid, but the second phase of Locust Avenue, so north of 250, is going to be starting here.

I'm assuming by this fall.

So that'll be coming online.

We have a couple of smaller city projects that are underway right now.

So ADA improvements that are going to be there going in at 4th and Preston, as well as Preston and Grady Ridge.

10th and Grady, and then Monticello 2nd, they're doing ADA improvements, realignment of all the crosswalks there and actually closing down that slip lane and replacing one of the signal heads there or signal mast arms.

It's the same contractor that's doing all three of those smaller projects, ADA projects, so right now they're working on the Preston and Forth.

I'm not sure order-wise if they're going to go from that one to the other one on Preston or if they're going to jump over.

I know they're waiting on the mast arm for the signal pole to get kind of produced.

I think that one

I think they put it in in March, so I think that one they'll get the mast arm sometime here in September, because I think it was about six months lead time.

So that one, I would imagine that once they finish it fourth, that they'll go to the other one on Preston and then go this fall over to the other.

Like this week.

Yeah.

That one just started this week and they've, they've been pulling new conduits in through.

One of the biggest parts of that was opposed to just doing the ADA ramps was getting all the push buttons compliant and that kind of stuff across there.

So we didn't even have conduits to run the line.

Hopefully not too much.

So that's going to be Paris and Preston and 4th and Preston.

It's just Paris and Preston.

Alright, misspoke here.

So that's kind of what's immediately on the horizon.

The next ones that are going to start coming online, not all of them are

Ours, I've got the black one if they're kind of on the screen.

I know not everyone can see the screen in the room here, but the Fontaine Avenue streetscape is going to be starting construction here in the next couple of months, I would anticipate.

So that one, they had combined it.

VDOT is managing those projects.

We had the city project that went from the city line to the JPA.

And then there was a VDOT project that was from

Raisey Hunt, entrance to Fontaine Research, and thank you for staying unchanged.

Yeah, so there were two projects.

There was a gap that was done as a design build project that came in under budget.

So they put in a request to the contractor to give a quote to fill that gap.

So they've got that now.

And that's a shared use path, JPA.

But I don't think the shared use path doesn't extend beyond there.

Does it?

It does.

It's part of the design.

Okay.

And then, yes.

And did the bridge?

You mean the bridge that goes over the creek over there?

Or the interchange?

No, the 29th.

Oh, it goes past that.

But that'll be, that'll be some significant traffic impact there.

In order to... stuff around for a large portion of that as well.

There'll be impacts there.

We have the Emmett Street streetscape project that is hopefully going out to bid here in the next couple of months and will be starting hopefully this fall.

But we've been getting some crazy bid prices.

We already have had to, and I adjusted on here because we've gotten them and had to deny bids.

But the East High Street project has been delayed.

We had to kind of go back to the drawing board.

That one, revise the scope, get rid of the undergrounding of utilities because that was an $8 million price tag just to underground the utilities.

And then the barracks and Emmett, the bids came in about a month ago and those were over

overpriced as well, so that one they're revising a couple of minor things and we'll be going back out to bid with that shortly.

We've got the Emmett Street one that hasn't been bid yet and will be going out on the street shortly.

The other VDOT project that's down there is

The roundabout down by PVCC at 53 and 20.

So that one should be, I believe, starting construction here relatively soon as well.

The Emmett one shows up on here as going south of the Ivy.

So this map is not just the limits of it but the traffic impacts of it.

So this is why it's spread more than a lot of these projects because these are kind of what the traffic impacts that we're anticipating are going to be.

All going on at the same time.

Yeah.

City.

Well, it'll work.

It's not as bad as it was.

But.

So I still have a good example.

We're hoping to get that back up to pay here in just the next couple of months.

So hopefully that will be the construction this fall.

The next big one that's going to have a put on the traffic impacts is the Darien Bridge.

So the pedestrian and bicycle pedestrian bridge will not be taken down.

So that will remain in effect.

So from a bike pad standpoint, that should remain open, shy of like, you know,

a day or two here or there where they're like doing work right in that location and they need to cut it off.

But that is going to be roughly a 10-month project with detours that are going to impact Grove Street all the way down Melbourne, 250, Rugby, like the main kind of detour for this is going to be using

Hydraulic to the new Hillsdale roundabout.

So if you're going one direction, you're going to get off, go around that, come back.

And then the opposite direction, you'll be using the rugby interchange there at McIntire Park.

So those will be the kind of the main big impacts.

But I anticipate other people are going to find the other routes and use those as well.

So I anticipate, you know, the lower rugby, dairy, gentry and Grove kind of all kind of be being effective there.

So those will be kind of the next ones that come on.

Then we've got the next VDOT project that I've got on here is up there at Belvedere Park, Rio, where that comes together.

They're building around about up there.

So that's probably going to have some significant traffic impacts that come down John Warner, come down Park Street, go up Rio.

Well, they're doing preliminary work out there right now.

They're not starting the roundabout work yet.

So they're doing utility relocations and some of that other kind of rework.

But from a traffic congestion standpoint, that's a little bit later on into the early part of next year.

So again, early part of next year, they'll also be starting construction on the roundabout at

Cedar Hill, District Avenue, and Hydraulic.

And I don't know if you have the impacts of

I do have that kind of coming down there, but that one should have pretty minimal impact.

A lot of these projects were part of one bundle, so that's on the same bundle as the Fontaine project as well as 53.

So there's a limit to the change order value they can do.

Yeah.

That doesn't happen this year.

It happens the year after, or I guess not 27, but 28.

Right.

After the roundabout stuff.

Right.

Yeah.

So VDOT has been very helpful to us on this one and is trying to figure out how do we actually do that work for you while we're doing the District Avenue roundabout.

Yeah.

I asked, we had a meeting

change order since it's not really change order to the that project like we're just combining another project on there like the funds are coming from a different source anyway so I don't know I didn't get a final answer on that but I was thinking I've heard the word yeah the next one that'll start I guess how many how many more years

So, there's not that many more projects that come out.

If I'm giving too much information, just tell me.

I can just run through really quick which projects are coming online.

Is this tool going to be publicly available?

So VDOT is actually, we had developed this, VDOT is actually doing a separate one for the whole Culpumper area that because there's a lot of projects just not in the city, they're hoping to go live with I think theirs with a full public portal and everything in the next couple of months.

This one was not intended to be public as it's envisioned right now.

Okay, so the next one is the East High Street project that I mentioned, so that'll be kind of

late spring, early summer next year, hopefully.

You know, I think removing the undergrounding of the overhead utilities will bring us back within budget and that'll allow us to get the bike and pet facilities along that corridor and transit.

Sorry.

So then we start having projects fall off.

So starting summer next year, we'll start dropping the private development projects.

No.

The original plan was to build a sidewalk.

Well, no.

So it would stop at Huntley and we would end up doing, like we've done on a couple of other streets, kind of a wide shoulder to connect the 240 development to this.

There's kind of a few gaps of sidewalks in there where people can kind of come in and out, but kind of give them a shoulder space.

there.

The delineation there is really most of the other, like that section with the addition of 240 Stripling, the section from Huntley to JPA has too many vehicles to kind of do a really shared space there versus the area north of there with only the 240 Stripling, you kind of, there's not enough traffic or light enough traffic that you can kind of let vehicles kind of yield and have that space

As kind of a pseudo pedestrian space that they can walk with a little bit wider shoulder.

But does it end when it turns into a strip link?

Well, so that is actually going to be being closed as part of the other, the bond painting project.

So that will, yes, it's going to, like the city line stops just past there.

So I'm in April of 2028 now and at this point the Dairy Road Bridge falls off.

That'll pretty much be completed.

Well, it falls off the map as far as construction.

By July of 2028, the Fontaine project should be kind of wrapping up.

The Barracks and Emmett wraps up September of 2028.

So 2028 is really where a lot of these start falling off and we don't have a lot of larger projects that are

The Central Waterline is going to be underway until 2029, West Main Street is still probably 2029, and then East High Street kind of

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know.

I didn't see Fifth Street or Rose Hill come up.

I mean, it's a repaving project.

And Ben doesn't want me to show the actual impacts from Fifth Street.

Yeah, the reason that we tied.

Yeah.

situation or do we want to wait for some of the situation to clear so that we can actually evaluate it on its own merits and not have it muddled with any traffic impacts?

Another couple projects that you don't see in here are a lot of sidewalk stuff.

So we've got a sidewalk project on prospects.

It's going to have traffic impacts.

Do we want those traffic impacts to be muddling with what's on 5th Street?

Because you know there's going to be cut through traffic trying to get around both of those projects.

So we're trying to avoid that timeline being mixed up by moving it to next year.

So, it seems like we're heading into 5th Street.

I think that seems reasonable, and then leave some time for questions for both things at the end.

I do see Sarah online has her hand up, so I want to give them the opportunity to speak to your mate.

Okay, perfect.

Now, I'm quite, I'm so scared.

And the one thing we've noticed, not to travel over, like also on temp and to get to Breson.

And we've noticed that sometimes the traffic management is not

The best you would want around a construction project.

And one of the things I've noticed is, you know, sometimes the cones are missing.

Sometimes these people don't even have signs to help direct traffic.

Yeah, I can answer that.

Can you repeat the question?

So our traffic engineer and traffic inspector are doing that.

Our traffic inspector had left the city a few months ago, so we've been without one for a few months.

I know there's been stuff that's kind of slipped through the gaps without somebody out there checking these sites on a regular basis, but we do have somebody they started literally this week.

So we're getting them up to speed and hopefully within the next two, three months, they can kind of take over that program

get people online.

But that's something that we run into all the time and usually the bigger projects, I say usually the bigger projects are better, where we see a lot of issues are the smaller contractors, smaller projects where either they don't know how to do it or they just didn't get a permit at all and they just decided to go out there and do traffic control.

I'll say the exception on that is the private development projects are usually trying to cut corners.

I know the VRV and the bloom on IV we've had significant issues with.

I think they're under a nose to comply on the IV one right now.

It's an ongoing issue that we're dealing with.

So we are looking at it both on the design side and then on the implementation side.

If you see something that you think is wrong, please put in a MyCIVA request or send something to traffic at Charlottesville.gov and we'll go out there and take a look.

But we only have one inspector, so they can't be in all places at all times.

And that's better than we had because that position didn't exist three years ago.

So my concern right now is school starting in what, 10 days or less?

Is it next week?

And so you're going to have a lot more pedestrians and children, particularly children who are trying to get to school.

So maybe, I don't know, focusing on around the schools, just making sure that we're increasing safety around

and near the schools, particularly to our kids.

You're just going to be seeing a lot of conflicts.

You know, right now in the summer, it's been pretty quiet.

So if you wouldn't five minutes or three minutes or wherever, it's not a big deal.

But there's been start increasing, as you know, better than I do.

I've only been here a year.

So anyway, it's just I have a little focus on that.

We do actually have a fairly unique focus on schools compared to some of the other cities in Virginia.

We have a Safe Routes to School Coordinator that does look at safety issues around schools for kids who are biking and walking to school.

And we've done quite a bit of traffic calming and

Other safety improvements around schools specifically.

If you are seeing issues around the schools that your students are involved with, make sure that you're talking to your schools.

We meet with them pretty regularly, if not, you know, it's monthly, if not weekly, depending on how many issues are coming up.

And

We have a pretty good sense from the schools like what kind of issues they are running into based on the feedback that they're getting from parents, from teachers, from students.

Thank you.

Hey, yeah, I have a question for Sarah, actually, which is, you mentioned you've only been here a year.

When Ben says, check out My Seville, do you know what My Seville is?

Yeah, if it's a Facebook thing, I haven't been on Facebook in over 10 years.

I don't think I've seen anything.

Yeah, you can find My Seville on the Seville webpage or the Charlottesville.gov webpage.

Yeah, Sarah, I recommend the app.

It has kind of a guided feature where you can leave remarks or report things and then it asks you, like, is this a traffic safety issue?

Is it blocking the road?

So you can answer the questions and then it gets sent directly to the staff member who would respond to it, sort of.

Yeah, it's just a friend of mine who's still with Fifeville.

It's another state where we're located.

One of the issues we kept running into was construction debris and affecting bicyclists and just making sure that the contractors are cleaning up, you know, daily because that has also caused accidents or can cause accidents.

And I'll stop there.

I'll go through this relatively quickly so there's time for questions.

I've got up on the screen now kind of the scroll plot of what the public materials were, kind of where they left it.

So this was done as a concept plan for what this was going to look like, kind of the two-way bike lane on the west side of the street going down.

When we went

So there's two aspects to this.

One is, you know, there were concerns about if we just fully implemented it, what does that do to the actual vehicular network?

Fifth Street is one of the highest vehicle accounts in the city coming in and out.

And we're not just worried about Fifth Street, we're worried about Cherry, we're worried about

all the ones that tie into it, Cleveland, Cherry Avenue, and even how that would kind of domino into West Main and Monticello.

So we were like, okay, well, before we would do this whole thing, let's put in a pilot.

Let's, you know, do this with some, don't do all the pavement markings.

It was, forget how much we were talking for the estimate that we were

It was significant to do all the eradication and pavement markings.

So we're talking $650,000 where we'd be investing it and if it didn't work and we decided we needed to take it out then we'd have to

Also pay them to eradicate all that and then go back.

So we said, let's take a measured approach here.

We can see how it functions and do it that way.

The other part of this is, like I said, this was only a concept plan.

So I'm going to highlight like a couple of things here that didn't actually work when we started looking at it from an implementation.

So one of them was up here at Cherry Avenue.

So this was kind of designed with the bike lane as it is today remaining on the inside southbound next to the curb line, but that's not allowed with a right turn only lane.

So like we had to kind of figure out, okay, we need to switch that over.

So like that was one of the issues where we'll address that with kind of the pilot.

Brennen, when you say you're going to switch that over?

So it had to be between the through lane and the right turn lane.

So when you have a, like today, it's a right and through.

So you, as functions, the default is the through lane.

So you want to stay on the outside of that.

But when it goes to a right turn only, you don't want the cyclist on the inside of the right turn only.

So that was one of the things that we had to modify in order to do it.

And then the other one,

was at the other end.

So up here at Harris Road, for instance, they had this in concept of continuing the shared use path all the way through and turning that kind of

The right turn only lane up onto Harris, the free flow lane there into a bike only.

Well, what that doesn't account for is the fact that that corner is too tight for the fire engines and all that kind of stuff.

So in order to do this,

In a final scenario, we would actually have to redo that triangle completely and move it, you know, widen that radius out so that larger vehicles could actually make that turn through there.

So those are two of the things that I'll kind of highlight as I go into

So this is kind of our draft MOT plan that we have right now for what this would look like for the pilot.

So here you can see we've, you know, we all, we would be kind of doing the eradication just in this one intersection here to make that a right turn only lane, put in, switch the bike lane over in between the right turn and the through lane there.

Most of this would just be done with either flex posts or barrels or a combination thereof from a temporary standpoint to utilize that lane.

But not do it in such a way that we would have to rip out a whole bunch of stuff if it changes.

So that continues on.

There would be, with the reduction, we would also propose kind of a construction speed reduction from the 40 miles an hour to 30 miles an hour throughout the pilot here.

Would that be both directions?

Yeah.

And then, so that continues.

Sorry, I'm trying to get down.

We do have, I think, the buses shown on here.

So that's the other thing that we'll have to do with the pilot is probably get some more of the Ziekla bus stop things there, modular bus stops, to get from where the current

Sidewalk is to where the new travel lane would be.

That'll allow the bikes to kind of ramp up and over that.

Because in the ultimate scenario, I don't know that we would need that, but we would have to construct a ramp down so that someone who's on the sidewalk could get to where that bus stop is.

We could do them as the full you can get all the way across, but we wouldn't have to.

I'm talking about just doing like an actual curb ramp in the sidewalk to get the pedestrian down.

Not the ramp up and over.

Yeah.

And I wanted to get to the last kind of piece here up at Harris.

which is the biggest change.

Okay, so once we get up here, let me zoom in so people can see.

Yeah, and this is just the temporary scenario.

But once you kind of get up here to Harris, and again, this will be, we're still working through this design, but the pathway would continue on through here.

And I think this has actually changed since this one.

I don't have the most up to date, but that would continue on.

You would use the pedestrian signal to get across there, but that free flow lane would have to remain open for fire to get through there.

I apologize, I thought I had the most recent one on here and I don't.

So there's going to be an area basically from where that taper starts where you're going to have an unprotected two-way kind of like lane there where that traffic that's in the single lane, just like a right turn lane on the other end only it'll be a two-way where that traffic is going to be able to cross

that area.

So we'd have the green conflicts, you know, paint and everything through there.

But there will have to be that area there.

And we were planning to not because we're not

We don't have the two lanes there.

You know, we would limit it so it's really just the one lane.

There wouldn't be the taper.

Like that lane would just kind of continue onto that radius of the free flow lane rather than like you get over and then you go.

So you would just kind of be in there and then it would just be cross.

So it wouldn't be like a 200 foot taper where it's a conflict.

We had looked at three different ones.

One was that long term.

So, feasible for me.

We had something that was short term that was similar to what Brennen was describing and then there was another short term option that closed down the slip lane and made people make that hard right turn around the island but it took away the left turn lane of people coming out of Harris Road in order to create that space and the folks that lived in that area said

No, that's going to be really hard for us to get in and out of our neighborhood that way.

And so that was one that we got pretty clear feedback on.

So you can't move?

I guess I'm surprised that

This sharp right is not possible given all the other sharp rights that exist in the city and the kind of left turn lane is all the...

I'm thinking, for example, going west on West Main and you turn right onto 4th.

by a beast and the cavern and then just a 90 degree thing and the yield line on fourth is pushed back in order to allow big vehicles to turn.

Why is it not possible on this 90 degree?

It's not the 90 degree of the bridge.

So it's effective radius, because if you're only looking at the sidewalk radius there at 4th, you're right, that's super tight.

But the actual tracking of a larger vehicle trying to make that, they're using part of that parking lane that's in there, and that receiving lane on 4th Street is actually really wide as well.

So they're able to, the turn that they need to make, fire needs 28 foot radius.

In order to do that.

The other issue is not just fire, but there's an elementary school bus.

Right.

Fire and engineering standards.

The segment between Harris and Elliott, the mile or so, is the most dangerous place to bike in the city of Charlottesville.

The bike lane that exists is permanently covered with debris, so the bike that wants to use the lane has to bike closer to traffic.

Traffic does not respect a painted line.

Even at a red light, the traffic is in the bike lane, it's not in the travel lane.

I understand that some of this pushback or the start date got pushed back because of a sidewalk project on a side street.

Somebody's gonna die waiting for that sidewalk to get finished.

Somebody's gonna die waiting for the test to be done so that this project can actually be put to play.

We need to get started and we need to get started.

We were supposed to get started this summer and now we're talking 2027 and not the winter of 2027 to put the test out.

You will be able to name the bike lane after the bike bicyclists who's killed waiting for you to do this.

Sorry, so were you for a moment.

Just a quick note, Fifth Street, the design speed of Fifth Street is dangerous for cyclists, period.

You earlier were talking about traffic calming and that definitely is road.

It's not having a lane in there.

There has to be something else done in the design that may have to do with mediums or something else.

This street is one of the fastest design school streets that you have, you know, other than Emmett and then going out.

to the county areas.

So, you know, taking another look at that.

But, you know, at this point in time, I understand what the gentleman who was just on is indicating no more planning.

Let's do something done.

But at some point in time, maybe in that mobility plan, a look at the design speed of that road.

Thank you.

Thanks.

And Natalie.

Nope.

Sorry, that was left over.

But I am not piling on, but I don't want to I just think it's worth noting that there already have been I think it's four people who have died on this road and I don't want to forget about them.

Just heard the same people will.

People already have.

There's going to be too many cars to speed on that street if you stay with us.

And also whenever I see bike lanes, sun drips in the car lanes, I think about this meme of go ahead and die.

So it's kind of creating lots of conflict points.

So can we not handle bike lanes?

Can we create bike lanes somewhere else?

I mean, going back to 2021, 2022,

or actually, was it 2019 I think when the original study was done?

I mean that proposed basically doing a shared use path separate from the street, but that requires right of way, that requires construction.

That's a multi-million dollar project versus this is 600,000.

Is there any, I mean that the standard, for instance, not so, that is, to install every intersection.

The reason it may be in NACTO standards is not made it into our standards yet.

Because we're still working off the 2015 Bike Pet Master Plan.

I mean, we are proposing that.

Essentially, I mean, we do.

It might be a protected facility.

But they still have to be open to vehicles.

Otherwise you don't have an intersection.

Actually, it looks dirty, so we're kind of be wrapping things up here.

So you can certainly email about West Main or comment in public comment next time.

As I want to mention that I clean, cleanse the plane.

are between four to six times, they can carry between four to six times more people than coming.

Very quickly, thank you Brennen, but those two things.

It took so long, that's okay.

I'm not going to fault.

The neighborhood walk this weekend is not the normal time.

Where is it?

It's in Fifeville.

They're meeting at Forest Hills Park at the bike racks.