Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordination Committee Meeting   12/17/2020

Okay.

And I think that we'll start with just a few quick introductions.

I know staff know each other, but our members of the public might not know staff.

So I'll start.

My name is Jessica.

I am a transportation planner at the TJPDC and MPO.

Let's see.

I'm just going to go across my screen.

I'll start with staff and then we'll have the public introduce themselves.

Thanks, Jessica.

My name is Tim Padolino.

Thanks Dan.

Sure.

My name is Dan Butch.

Yeah.

Hi, Bill Palmer with the University of Virginia.

I'm GIS planner in the Office of the Architect there doing a lot of land use campus planning work.

I will probably have to jump off this in about a half hour, and then I may be able to jump back on, but we'll see.

Well, we're happy you made some time for us.

Hey, good morning, everyone.

Amanda Poncy.

Right.

And that's all our staff.

So we'll do members of the public.

You're still on mute, Annie.

Thank you.

Right.

Annie Stafford.

Thanks, Annie.

Kath, go ahead.

I'm Kath Welch.

Thanks for joining us.

My name is Bill Emery.

I live in the Willow Mills neighborhood, and I'm on the Rivanna River Basin Commission, I think.

We're sort of a sleepy group.

Thank you, Bill.

And last, we have Steven Bach.

We're just doing introductions.

If you want to just introduce yourself and maybe mention why you're interested in joining these meetings.

Hello.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Steven Bach.

Great.

Thanks for joining us, Steven.

I'm Chris Gensic.

Great.

Thanks.

All right, everyone.

I'm going to share my screen, which is just a PowerPoint that helps me keep track of everything.

Let's see here.

OK.

So this is our agenda for today.

It was the same agenda that was online.

So we're going to start by talking about the Rivanna River feasibility study and crossing, the bike and ped count results, and then a Three Notch'd Trail update, and then some roundtable updates and comments.

All right.

So this is a small group.

Feel free to just stop me if you have any questions.

Throw in any comments.

This is for both staff or members of the public.

You're all free to contribute.

I'm just going to go ahead and minimize

All the people I'm seeing over on this side here.

So, okay, beginning with the potential bicycle and pedestrian crossing of the Rivanna River.

So a while ago, the Virginia Department of Transportation consultants conducted a feasibility study on two potential routes across the Rivanna River.

These are bike and ped routes.

TJPDC staff, VDOT, City of Charlottesville, and Albemarle County worked together to host a public workshop on November 12th to inform the public of the results of the feasibility study and gather feedback from the public.

TJPDC staff also received over two dozen emails on the project between November 8th and December 1st.

So we took all of the questions and comments from both the workshop and from those emailed comments.

We went through them all and decided that they fell into the following categories.

So we had also made the consultant's feasibility study, the technical document available on our website prior to that workshop.

And people read it and people engaged with the content.

And that's why they had a ton of technical questions and considerations that they brought up in both the emails and the workshop.

People had questions and comments a lot about project cost, about the accessibility of the project.

Was the slope too much for folks in wheelchairs or other users?

The connectivity of the project, environmental concerns.

A lot of people were concerned about the impact of constructing a bridge in the waterway.

And there were also comments about the concerns about viewshed.

What would it look like and feel like to have a bridge in such a nice natural area?

Also, there were parking concerns, especially on the west side, but really both sides of the project area.

Just taking one second to admit another person to our meeting.

And there was a very big chunk of comments that talked about the impacts of increased use on community character, again, especially on the west side of the project area, so in the city of Charlottesville, Woolen Mills area.

One of the takeaways from all that feedback was that public feedback has illuminated a desire should the project move forward for the project design to respect and maintain the character of the neighborhoods near Riverview Park.

Discussion around this project offered residents an opportunity to voice pre-existing concerns regarding the overuse of Riverview Park and related parking concerns, as well as traffic concerns related to new commercial uses in Willin Mills.

So basically that is all to say that this project is and concerns about community character related to this project are symptomatic of like a larger issue that people are concerned about and not just related to this particular project.

So in summary, while neither of the two route options garnered clear support, those who stated their feelings about the project spoke positively about a bicycle and pedestrian crossing of the Rivanna River.

And this is consistent with previous public engagement done to create earlier planning documents.

So to tally it up, in the workshop there were 63 comments and questions.

A lot of them didn't speak either positively or negatively about the project.

They were true questions or true comments that didn't really say how people felt about the project.

But three of them did speak very obviously positively about the project and two of them spoke very obviously negatively about the project.

Of the 25 emailed comments, those were a little bit more clear.

15 of those 25 emailed comments spoke positively of the project.

None of them were like super clearly negative and the rest of them were, you know, just they didn't have a clear positive or negative vibe to them.

All right, one question that came up repeatedly.

Through the workshop and in the emailed comments and questions was this idea that there might be other places that the crossing could cross the river, not just the two locations that the consultants looked at.

What we can share with people is that initially the consultants identified six potential crossing locations in the study area, not just the two that we looked at.

They presented those six locations to staff in February of 2020.

Two route options were chosen from those six, and the four options that were omitted were those that were infeasible to construct because of property ownership,

accessibility issues, known protected resources, and steep grades.

And those reasons all came from our local staff who are really familiar with the area who had that information that the consultants were looking for, that the consultants didn't know themselves when they put together those six potential crossing locations that they originally presented in February.

All right, so to wrap this up on our website now, there is the feasibility study from the consultants.

That's that technical document that people have been able to see for a while.

There's a recording of the November 12th workshop.

There's the summary of the public feedback, both the feedback that we got in the workshop and from the emails.

It's kind of like a longer version of the slides I just showed you guys.

There is a Q&A sheet for questions that remained unanswered at the end of the workshop.

So for anyone who attended, you know that that workshop was intended to last an hour, but there was so much great engagement from the public that it ended up lasting a bit longer than that.

And even so, we weren't able to get to all of the questions that people typed into the question box.

So the staff, we worked together to answer all of those questions, put them in a document, and now those are on the website.

We also emailed them out to people.

If you are one of the people who got multiple emails from me with this information, I'm sorry, I had some weird issues with my email.

So a couple people got a few emails about this.

All right.

And lastly, we have a PDF of the original six options that staff narrowed down to two.

So if you wanted to see what were those six options and why staff might have had some concerns about the feasibility of the four that they dropped, you can look at that original document from

the consultants.

So next steps.

Next steps, it's really up to the localities.

If they feel that they want to pursue the project, they can ask the MPO to help.

We're happy to help.

And just a heads up that the MPO will begin our new SMART SCALE process where we're trying to include more public engagement on projects that might be a little bit more controversial.

That process will begin in January or February of next year when

We hear back about the existing SMART SCALE, or the last round of SMART SCALE stuff and what was funded.

Can you hear me?

I was just gonna, on that last note, just put a timeline of SMART SCALES every two years.

We just submitted applications in August of 2020.

So, you know, that will give us enough time to initiate that process with both localities and the MPO and start early and see where that takes us.

That's great helpful information, Dan.

So just to add a little bit more to it.

So the PDC has taken a look at our whole SMART SCALE process and revamped it so that we have this opportunity to get more engagement on projects that would be considered controversial.

and the whole point of us asking the localities to move it, I guess, ask for the PDC or MPO's help this early in the game when it's a two year application cycle is just really so we can get all that extra engagement.

Hey, Jessica.

I had just an assumption based on what you said, but I want to get to fact, not assumption.

You're waiting to hear what's happening with the last round of SMART SCALE because some that were not chosen in the last slate might want to be retried in this next slate.

Yes, that is exactly the reason why.

Thanks.

Annie, I see your hand up.

Yes, thanks.

I just want to say, if you looked at the summary, the public feedback, that's my quote in there.

The one that starts, I either walk along the river or bike along the river almost every day, which I did this morning.

Chris, it was just beautiful with all the ice.

And what wasn't included here is that I too am very excited about the thought of having a bridge across the river.

I've lived here for almost 20 years and gosh, what a fun thing it would be to connect with a trailer on the other side.

I have a question, but then I also just want to state that for those who may not know, the city is also considering possibly a boat launch also at the end of Chesapeake Street.

So I think that that just

I understand, Jessica, that there are processes and, you know, there's like these two different streams that are going.

One is the planning district, one is the city, but it seems that that is at the very heart of planning, that there should be awareness that this is possibly on the horizon.

And then I do have just one specific question about the locations.

I just remember years ago, there was talk about creating some sort of a bike and pedestrian bridge near Free Bridge or even hanging off of Free Bridge.

Great.

Well, thanks for those comments and questions.

It sounds like there's two different things.

You have your question and the comment about the boat launch.

So Chris, I'm going to pick on you to talk a little bit more about the boat launch and its role in the process, or how it's being considered with the bike and pedestrian bridge that we've been talking about.

And Chris, you might also be the best person to answer the other question, or maybe someone else, some other staff member who's been here longer than I have regarding why the study area was chosen for this particular project.

Okay, for the Riverview Park, any anything related to Riverview Park, that's probably one of the reasons I'm on all of these committees is I am the kind of the make sure all the things on the city side are known by all parties.

And we with the COVID this past year, and I think Anne is pretty very aware of this Riverview Park, all of a sudden,

While we've been trying to get the community to recognize the river, they all recognized it on April 15th and they all showed up on April 16th.

And that's created some issues at Riverview Park because it's really one of our only public fronts to the river other than Penn Park.

So we became aware this summer that it's not tenable to have quite that much action going on in one spot at Riverview.

We started discussing the possibility of

Because that one boat access and water access, a lot of people use that water access that aren't in boats.

They're just families taking their kids down.

Particularly with COVID, I don't know if it would have been such a big deal in a non-COVID environment.

They were all jammed up on that one little staircase going down there and we started thinking, do we need to?

And we've looked at a few technical things about what that would look like, but there's no

No decision's been made about what we do too.

If we were to do that, we would have a public meeting.

We know there's sensitivity to where the old pump station used to be underground and they were going to put one above ground and the neighborhood said that's not going to happen.

We want that place to stay relatively open and natural in that general feeling.

So the update is the boat launch went to Palmyra two weeks ago.

The flood ate it.

We have no

staircase, boat launch, water access at Ruby Park anymore because the flood picked it up and we can't find it.

I went walking down through Monticello a couple of weeks ago.

We can't find it.

So we're going to have to rebuild a boat launch.

We walked a little bit the other day and we've been considering we could probably just rebuild it where it was.

We have some access options that would help keep the

Cars with boats separate from the people with boats that don't necessarily involve a new parking lot.

So in terms of how that's all going to come together, we're looking at this bridge project.

Certainly if this bridge narrowed down to it's going to come in through the Chesapeake entrance there in that general area, that would certainly affect anything we then did in terms of river access at Riverview Park.

And even if it doesn't come through there and affected anything we do every park, we'd have more public input and discussion about scale of any access improvements or expansions or parking or anything like that.

So they are being done in concert, but neither one of them is at a point where anybody knows for sure what's going to happen.

So given that the boat ramp disappeared and that the water staircase disappeared, city believes we're going to have some meetings this winter with the neighbors and park users.

because by summer we'd like to have something back in place.

We don't know yet what that something might be.

And in terms of the bridge down by free bridge option, there's definitely, there's been a free bridge study going on for quite a while.

I don't know exactly, but my thoughts were putting another bridge right next to a bridge when probably free bridge could be improved for bicycle pedestrian travel, it would seem

a little bit duplicitous and the idea being there's always been a plan to put one up by Penn and Darden and the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center and that one might be, you know, 10 years on the horizon where one down in the Woolen Mills over to Pantops area, it's a more direct connection to things on Pantops side, things on the city side.

So I believe, and this is just my belief, I don't remember the technical reason, that Free Bridge was left as, Free Bridge project might still build an independent bridge and or improve

sidewalks, bike paths or whatever on the existing structure of free bridge in some way.

And that this downstream option by whatever this is about a mile downstream was to spread out your desire lines in a certain sense.

So they're not everything's bottlenecked up at free bridge, but I may not be stating that correctly.

I mean, I think you covered most of it, Chris, but I think just wanted to add with the recent Jeff Cinerio Bike and Pedestrian Plan update that was last year at this time, it finished fall of 2019, that had its whole public outreach process, both localities involved, and I believe from that plan, it did highlight more of a

Mike Pedestrian connectivity across the river in that location within the plan.

Thanks, Dan.

That's definitely right.

And then correct me if I'm wrong, and I'm sad we don't have Chuck here because he would be able to give a better answer.

But I think I recall something about how there were thoughts about improving bike and pedestrian access across Free Bridge.

But that bridge is like up for being redone at some point, but not in the near future.

So there was this idea of like, we don't want to

Wait, as long as it's going to take for that bridge to get redone with state money.

But we don't want to put any investment into it to improve the bike-ped connection now, knowing that maybe a decade from now, it's going to all be torn down and redone anyway.

It does sound familiar.

I think, yeah, the concept was if there's any update to Free Bridge, we would want to keep a bike pedestrian bridge parallel to that on the same timeline.

I remember that type of conversation with Chuck.

And there may be some notion that Free Bridge might not be the most audibly comfortable area to be walking across or even riding a bike on that one side.

It's got a pretty wide sidewalk.

But it's doable.

It's kind of like trails next to Route 29.

They might be perfectly safe.

It's just you're next to a whole bunch of moving cars and it's not a real calm, natural setting, but you could ride a bike or walk across Free Bridge now.

And again, there might've been a theory that, you know, if you build a whole nother bridge there and you haven't expanded things in other areas, you're kind of being duplicitous.

So yeah, we do, we all do hope that Free Bridge gets even better for bike ped.

Thank you.

Thanks for your question, Annie.

And I'll also add that just for people who don't know, best practice is to have a great density of bike and pedestrian routes.

So different facility types are going to appeal to different people.

I think that's what Chris was talking about.

Some people like how free bridges right now, they feel comfortable biking on it, walking across it.

That's fine for them.

It's the most direct route.

And for those people, it's great.

But having the multiple options, having something really quiet and secluded,

what's being described for this bike and ped crossing near Riverview Park.

That's something that's going to appeal to a different set of users and we want to have all those options available so that everyone feels comfortable getting around however they feel best.

Okay, any other questions or comments related to this bridge project?

I have one quick one.

Jessica, I've got a quick one.

I asked Bob Brown, one of the questions had to do with the grades of

Chesapeake Market, I think Broadway, leaving the bridge area and heading towards downtown.

Bob Brown, our GIS guy is going to provide us with a piece of information that's a GIS map that shows those grades.

So we'll be able to insert that into the, answer one of those questions and just add it to the pile of known information is, you know, how steep is Chesapeake compared to Market compared to Broadway?

Great.

Thanks, Chris.

That'll be a great addition to our answers.

Hey, Jessica, real quick.

Since you're telling questions, I heard one at the Belmont Neighborhood Association meeting this past week that I was not able to answer.

Does the study speak about the grade from the street, the Chesapeake Street, to the peak of the bridge?

and then to the other side.

I couldn't tell from looking at it, like, is that gonna be a level thing?

Is there gonna be a slope from one side to the other, et cetera?

I think I do have a very simple answer for you, Peter, but you can tell me if you were looking for something more detailed.

So basically, the feasibility study does say that there will be some slope, but that slope will always remain below a 5% grade for the entirety of that particular option from Chesapeake to Pan Tops.

Thank you, that's super detailed.

Anything else?

Okay, great.

All right, I'm going to share my screen and move us on to the bike and pedestrian count.

I think Kath and Steven were definitely some volunteers who helped us with this.

So thank you guys.

And let's see here.

I'm trying to bring us over to

Here we go.

Hope everyone sees this.

Can someone audibly say yes, you see it if you do?

Great.

Wonderful.

So this is my lovely spreadsheet.

So for the bike and pedestrian count, this committee came up with a bunch of locations

where either work, bike and pedestrian infrastructure work has been done recently, is going to be done in the near future, or is going to be done in the

distant-ish future.

And the point of this particular bike and ped count, as opposed to some other counts where you're trying to get a broad sense of where people are biking and walking and what the rate of biking and walking is in a community, our bike and ped count was a little bit more focused where we were just trying to better understand the locations that we picked.

In part because of the infrastructure work that either has been done or is going to be done there.

So we ended up with nine locations.

I had so many great volunteers that we added a 10th location, which was Riverview Park.

We had morning and evening weekday counts at every single location.

We did not have any weekend counts.

What we did, and here I'll pop over to something very straightforward.

So this is one of the more straightforward intersections.

What the counters did is that they went and sat out at the intersection for the two hours in the morning or the two hours in the afternoon.

And they counted the number of people coming from each of these directions.

So either from the north, from the south, from the east, or from the west.

Things are not a perfect grid in Charlottesville and surrounding up Brown County.

So these are like approximately from the north, from the south.

And we told people what direction, what roadway they would be coming from to correlate to that particular direction.

So anyway, they counted the bikes, they counted the pedestrians, and they counted some subjective characteristics about those people.

So if it looked like, and what I told people in my little training was if you're more than 50% sure that the person biking by or walking by is a woman, go ahead and tally them in this female category.

The same thing for we were counting the number of children.

So people under the age of 16, people who appeared to be non-white, people who appeared to have some sort of physical disability, people who are wearing a helmet and people who are riding their bikes the wrong way.

So you're supposed to always ride with traffic in the bike lane, but sometimes people would be riding against traffic and that was something we wanted to pay attention to.

So what I did was take everyone's account sheets, put them in for each account location, broken down by a 15 minute increment, broken down by the direction they were coming from,

And then I added it all up.

So this is our final grand totals.

So we have for each location the number of bikes who went through that intersection for the whole day.

So for the four hours in the morning and the four hours or two hours in the morning and the two hours in the afternoon.

and then a total of the bikes and pedestrians that went through that intersection.

Then we have the total women who went through the intersection, the percentage of the daily total that were women, the number of children going through the intersection and the percentage of the daily total that were children, same for non-white and then for

Physical disabilities.

We just had a much lower count.

And I'm not sure if that was because that can be a harder thing to tell if someone is not using if someone is not using like a wheelchair or a walker.

Do you put it if they're having a hard time walking?

I think most people would have chosen no.

Helmets and then wrong way riding.

We saw so few people wrong way riding at these particular locations.

I'm almost tempted to get rid of the category in the future just to make a cleaner count sheet, but

Maybe that'll change at different locations in a future year.

And then over here is our category of motorized bikes or scooters that came through the area.

So if a kid was riding a scooter and they're just using their feet, that wasn't counted.

That was counted as a bike.

That was not counted as a motorized thing.

Whereas, let's see here.

Whereas if someone was riding like one of the VEO rides, scooters, those, or a motorized bike, an electric bike of some kind, they would have been counted here.

Jessica, the Monticello and 6th with the wrong way of riding is kind of interesting to me.

I wonder, do you think that is

Somebody riding the wrong, because we have that contraflow lane and then we have the shared lane.

So that's a good question, and I'm not 100% sure what our afternoon counter did.

I put on the count sheet instructions for that particular intersection that the contraflow lane was not riding the wrong way, but that might have been overlooked because it was definitely overlooked by me when I was doing the one-on-one tutorial.

So that's a good question.

Was that Carl by chance?

I know I saw him one day.

Yes, it was Carl.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, great.

Thanks for saving me some work.

All right.

Anyone else have any comments or questions?

One thing I'll quick add is that we are planning to make this available on our website.

So like the entire Excel file.

So people, if they are better with data than I am or something like that, you can go ahead and take a look at each intersection.

You can play with the data, whatever is helpful to you.

So any general comments or questions, especially from our volunteers.

I'm curious what you guys thought about the process and any points you have for improving the count sheet in particular.

If not, or while you're thinking of that, I'll also, oh, Annie, go ahead.

I wasn't aware that this count was going on and it makes me ask the question.

So in Riverview Park, sort of at the inner loop, there are two wires across the path.

What are those?

Those are for counting and those are out there all the time.

Amanda, if you wanted to add a little bit to talk about that counter.

It's an automated counter, but we did have the people counters out there.

In part, it was initially designed to kind of validate the data that Amanda and the city is getting from that automated counter.

But it also, obviously our people counters are able to get more information than an automated counter was.

So the automated counter isn't checking if people are children or women or whatever, but our people counters can do that.

Sure.

Yeah, so that is one that's out there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it counts bicycles and pedestrians and is able to distinguish between the two but doesn't provide the same level of, you know, information what Jessica was saying about, you know,

women, people of color, are they wearing helmets, children, that kind of thing.

So we have 10 counters that are in different places throughout the city.

And there's actually a website where you can find all that information.

VDOT hosts a web page that has all of that information for all of the different counters, automatic counters that are deployed throughout the state.

Oh, I really appreciate that.

So I don't want to belabor this point.

Yeah.

So there's two different pieces of equipment.

There are the tubes that count the bicycles and then mounted on a sign pole is a box that has an infrared counter that counts

Anything that's kind of moving past.

So it doesn't double count because of the tube counter there.

It does its own math and sort of figures out which are people versus bicycles.

The one thing it doesn't do is, for example, if people are walking in groups, we might not get an accurate count because it might only count one.

It might not count three if it only senses, you know, one person kind of walking by.

It also might pick up something like wildlife.

Also, I might add that I was at that intersection counting and I'm not a technical person, but it looked to me like it was not functioning the day I was down there.

I believe.

I can't remember the exact dates, but yes, we were having some issues with that particular counter and it should be up and working now.

I think it was kind of beginning of November that we finally got everything fixed and connected.

And another nice thing is those are out all the time.

It's been really useful in our world.

You can say that 350 youth signed up for our basketball program.

And when council says, well, how busy are the trails?

And you say, kind of busy on Tuesday, doesn't help you get funding to expand trail systems where you can say 927 people walk the Riverview Trail on Tuesday.

They can start to see the story that, well, A, we need more trails and

This is actual scientific data.

And the other thing we noticed this year kind of gave us some COVID data where we were thinking like, man, the trails really got busy.

Now we know some of them quadrupled overnight because we had those 24 hour counters out.

So that kind of data above and beyond how this group uses it has been really helpful for, in some senses storytelling, like see your surveys are right.

More people use trails than maybe

You know, play lacrosse or something like that.

And we have real numbers now.

We move them all over town.

We put them up at Ragged Mountain.

It's been kind of mind blowing to me to see when we opened the new Hayward Trails and without even a press release, those things were packed.

Oh, another anomaly about that location is, and it probably doesn't apply to other locations, is that people were going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

And I noticed in particular about my helmet count that I counted this woman with no helmet four times, but there was only one of her.

I had a similar thing over at Monticello and 6th where there was a guy who was like walking laps around the block.

So he was counted multiple times.

To your point, Annie, about the accuracy, I would say they're about 90 to 95% accurate as a whole.

Thank you.

I have a question for staff about this overcounting question.

I'm curious about your thoughts.

So my initial thought about the potential overcounting of people who are doing laps or going back and forth over the park is that it's okay to count those people multiple times.

That's what I told the counters to do because even if it's just the one person, they're utilizing that

That trail or that infrastructure repeatedly within that time period and I think that that counts and it's worth counting that.

I think it does really skew our more subjective data like, you know, if it's just one woman doing laps around a block that's not, you know, five women in that two hour period.

But I still think it's valuable and worth counting, and it would not make sense to ask people in the spring to try to keep track of everyone and not count them again.

I'd like to interrupt as a non-staff person for just a second, and as a user of Riverview, what it means to me is the thing is too short.

Yes, I go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

If I want to do 10 miles, I got to go back and forth, you know, five times.

That's what it means to me.

So that means I think it's good to be aware that that's happening, but I'm just like a broken record.

We can't be judging the worthiness of one trip versus another, right?

If someone, you don't know, if he filled up his pocket with pennies that he's hurrying to someone on the other side of the block, we don't, you know,

That's transportation.

That's freight hauling.

We don't get enough.

And I would just put it in like an asterisk, like the Riverview counter counted this asterisk.

Some of those might have been deer.

So you tell people who read the data,

We know there's going to be some anomalies here and there.

Like I noticed it was one lady walking around the block during this hour.

I think as long as you're transparent about it, you keep the numbers in because if it was a car going past your house, it would be traffic making noise, whether it was the same car or 20 cars.

But if you made an asterisk at the bottom, you know, like there's going to be deer at Riverview and this lady was walking laps around this block, then people can draw their own conclusions, but keep all the data in the same data set.

Great.

And I will comment, Chris, that people did do that.

So I think Amanda put a little note at the bottom of her count sheet saying that there was someone doing laps.

And Kath, I think you did the same thing, or at least notified me in your email.

And I try to take any of those kinds of comments and keep them in the spreadsheet.

So under the big chunk of data for each intersection or for each count location, below that, there's some highlighted stuff

that are the comments that I pulled from those count sheets.

So that information hasn't been entirely lost even if it's not captured in the numerical data that you guys saw on the grand total count sheet.

Okay, any other comments about the process or about the data itself?

I'll bring back up the data because I did have one comment for people.

Okay, anyone else have any comments?

The one thing I noticed, and I'll preface this by saying the reason I was so excited to include this more subjective data about women and children was because I think that

making sure that we're investing in areas of town where we get a wide variety of users.

We're not just catering to the loudest people or whatever.

So we're meeting everyone's needs.

One thing I'll notice is that there were not as many children being counted at Riverview Park.

And I know it was a weekday, but I was still surprised by that because that seems like the safest place to take kids to do lots of biking and walking.

Where we did see the most children, at least by category or by percentage of total users, was Emmett and Angus.

So that's a really busy intersection and crossing Emmett there are 29 there feels like really stressful.

So I was surprised to see so many children making that crossing.

And it just kind of highlighted for me why having this data is really important because it shows that when you're thinking about people crossing 29 or crossing Emmett, it's not just adults trying to get to work or to shopping.

It's like families and kids too.

Anyway, that was just my little soapbox.

So any other questions or comments about the data itself?

Well, that was fun for me.

I hope it's helpful for the localities.

What I'm going to work on next is taking all of that directional data and putting it on a map.

So you'll be able to see by roadway how many bikes and peds are coming from each direction for each intersection.

So I think that'll be a more visual way of looking at it and might be more helpful for you guys.

I'm also going to work on a methodology document which we talked about when I put together the scope for this and the purpose of that methodology document is so that we will be consistent in the future as the PDC counts other locations will be really consistent about how we're doing it and make sure that the data makes sense over time.

And also if the localities have other locations that you want to count at that don't fit into the fall spring timeline, you'll have that methodology available and you'll be able to do it consistently and then it'll just make a lot more sense to compare it to other data that the PDC has collected.

So that's the point of that.

And like I said, we'll put that whole spreadsheet on our website so that you can do whatever is helpful with it.

All right, and then lastly, or almost lastly, we are moving on to our three notch discussion.

So this is most, Chris was going to give us an update.

Peter, it would also be really helpful if you chimed in with a couple of updates.

And then I do hope that my colleague Sandy is going to join us shortly because she had some comments about how the PDC itself would be involved.

Okay, this is,

A statewide trail concept that I think most of us on the panel here are aware of, but a long time ago when they proposed opening the Blue Ridge Tunnel for bike ped tourism traffic 15, 20 odd years ago, a couple of us thought it'd be really cool to put a bike ped trail from Charlottesville out to and through the tunnel to get you to the Valley.

And we've kicked some ideas around and walked the corridor and kind of always thought about it every five years.

We'd say, yeah, it would be really cool to put a trail out there.

Well, the tunnel's open.

We've had our eyes to the west for quite some time and probably a little further along, but not very far along in that general idea of where it might go.

But the idea is it's a paved trail like the Virginia Capitol Trail between Jamestown and Richmond.

Probably 10 years ago, we kind of turned our eyes east and went, you know, they've got this Capitol Trail that just opened.

Wouldn't it be really cool if we could connect Charlottesville back to the Capitol Trail and through the tunnel?

We would have a trail from Jamestown Williamsburg all the way through to Stanton

Do some of the most scenic, historic, beautiful area in the country.

This could be a economic tourism generator as well as a lot of people, particularly professors and things move here.

They get a house in Ivy and they're like, when I was at UC Davis, I could ride my bike.

I mean, it's four miles to Charlottesville and I wouldn't ride my bike.

You couldn't pay me enough.

What's going on?

So there are transportation, local transportation needs for this in our area.

And then say in the Louisa, Goochland area,

probably more of a recreational system.

Through Zion Crossroads, the locals could use it.

But we are now engaged with Louisa Goochland, Henrico, Fluvanna, Albemarle, the City of Charlottesville, the Central Shenandoah PDC, Stanton, Fishersville, Waynesboro.

Obviously the Richmond section is built all the way back to Jamestown, but the Capitol Foundation has been a really good resource in terms of how did you get that thing built?

How do you maintain it?

How do you use it?

What events do you have?

and there's a growing excitement among the localities in the state to see this as a big piece of the state system so we are currently in a phase of working to get some big fat line that says Richmond to Charlottesville through Zion Crossroads or do we go through Scottsville and stay along the James to start to thin those lines down to

have the localities adopted into their comp plan so that when roads are improved or we get opportunities to get easements, we can start piecing this thing together that we know is a 15 year, 20 year plan, unless the governor comes in and says, here's $50 million, go crazy, get it built like they did for the Capitol Trail.

But it's neat to see that what was sort of a small group of people had a dream starting to become more of a bureaucratic reality and we hope soon

starting to become something you can write grants for and get asphalt and trucks and install the handrails and the kiosks and get the public to actually have this thing built.

My role is not so much in the city because the Three Notch'd Trail through the city is Market Street, the downtown mall, West Main Street, University Avenue.

It's probably gonna be mostly a bike lane sidewalk system.

The Rivanna Bridge would probably be along the lines of the old Three Notch Road, the original Three Notch Road.

And then it would go through kind of the Monticello Shadwell area.

And then we got to figure out where to go.

So my role on this project is more not my professional role.

It's just as a trail person who really likes these things.

And I won't ride a bike much in traffic, but these kinds of trails really excite me.

I rode the Capitol Trail this past summer and it's kind of experience I think more people would like, particularly with an electric assist bike, more of the population can do this long range transportation and fill the Airbnbs and go to vineyards.

And I think it's going to be kind of the wave of the future.

Some others might comment on that, but we're basically trying to move from a foggy dream to a misty, humid rain and eventually get the thing built.

But we're kind of early stages and we're just working on that as a group.

I mean, Chris pretty much covered the exact state of where we are.

A few specifics in there that he didn't mention, the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation has been more than just supportive of this project.

They, surprisingly and joyfully for us, they see it as

an extension of their own mission.

So they've really taken some ownership of this idea.

So it could be thought of no longer is a Three Notch'd Trail, but truly a Bay to Blue Ridge extension of the Virginia Capitol Trail, which is a much easier story to tell because the Capitol Trail is a thing.

It's so successful.

Many people have good experience with it.

There's that, and then also Kat Anthony, who is the director of the Capitol Trail.

And I are both making a very short presentation about it on Monday at the Virginia Outdoor Recreational Caucus meeting, which is hosted by the Virginia outdoor

Virginia delegate David Boliva and Virginia Senator Emmett Hanger.

So this is a statewide project.

Staff from the various localities are working on it.

And now even legislators are starting to be interested.

They asked us to present about it.

So that's super exciting.

So it'll be an opportunity for you to learn more and also have

A tiny amount of FaceTime with legislators.

I'm about to post a link for that event in the chat.

Peter, actually one thing I'm hoping you'll talk a little bit more about.

So the last meeting I was at in regards to the Three Notch'd Trail was the PDCs were coming together to talk about how they could work together on this fit.

Peter, you guys talked about creating some sort of narrative so that it would be easier to talk about the project.

Great, great point.

And the answer is within my head, yes.

and I'm sure also within Allie's head, yes, but we haven't put anything on paper that we can share and I'm writing down right narrative so I can share.

And one other specific that Chris didn't mention that is of relevance to this discussion is this Woolen Mills pedestrian bridge would be a part of this

Yeah, once you get that narrative, I'd be happy to put it, you know, share it as much as I can, so.

Any other comments or questions about the Three Notch'd Trail from either the staff or public?

OK.

So if Sandy joins us, I'm going to have her pop in and talk a little bit more about what the PDC is, how the PDC wants to get involved.

Really broadly, I'll state the same thing that she stated at that meeting of the PDCs that Chris and Peter were at.

which is to say that we as a PDC MPO can be very involved in transportation projects because that's part of our purpose is to facilitate transportation projects with the localities.

We can be less involved if it's more exclusively a recreational project.

That takes us to our last agenda item, which is just a roundtable.

If staff want to share any particular updates about stuff they're working on or any public engagement you have planned, if the public has any just general bike questions or pedestrian questions, that's what this time is for.

And we moved really quickly through everything, so we have time for this.

Sure.

So yeah, we're I mean, just finishing up the whole process with the PDC with the Rivanna River Crossing Study, and definitely anticipating next steps with that, which this meeting will be definitely updated.

on that.

Internally for the county working with Parks and Rec also on our plate is starting some discussions with VDOT for some land use permits, access easements, for some potential trail connections with that would be crossing VDOT right away or underpasses of bridges and stuff.

So, you know, we're trying to start the conversation with that.

thinking ahead and planning ahead for some technical research with that.

We're also just developing a sidewalk program for funding, maintenance funding with VDOT, looking at some GIS analysis towards inventorying existing conditions.

So those are some projects that I have on my plate right now.

you know, besides what has been mentioned with our city county collaboration on some previous projects.

I'm just trying to look through my stuff here.

So that basically kind of covers some behind the scenes projects that are not so upfront.

I don't know if anybody has any questions.

I think we also should be having kind of coming near an end or at least getting an update from the city on the One Map data initiative.

I think, you know, that's been a project in the works for probably it'll be going on two years now.

So I think we're ready to kind of make that

Hopefully, I'm hoping come spring summer, a public publicly accessible tool of our infrastructure.

But I haven't really been too involved with that recently since that bends.

Passed on for more QA, QC updating within the city.

But I'm definitely anticipating that as well, getting a lot of requests for that.

Yeah, as I understand it, I think some of your GIS

person and our jazz person are trying to kind of come together to meet to figure out how it'll be hosted.

Yeah, I figured that they're doing some more technical emails and probably update us when we need to be updated.

But I haven't really heard anything, but I just kind of know that they are working on, they can collaborate, both city and county at GIS team.

So I'm sure it's a hefty collection of data and figuring out how to present this.

Great, is that everything for you, Dan?

Okay, great.

I guess one thing that I'm excited about heading into the new year is we're gonna be hosting a right-of-way book club.

So this is, we have purchased some books from that Angie Schmidt

discussion and are hoping to have kind of a community read sometime in February.

So invite anybody who's interested in that topic to join us.

And then we're also internally looking at there's a recent grant opportunity that was announced through the OIPI.

I honestly don't know what that stands for, but it's a

It is a state level grant for some gap technical assistance.

And so we're looking at applying for a grant to kind of take a look at all of the different transportation planning documents that we have and try to help figure out how we can prioritize those and fund those in a performance based kind of way and figure out which of those really align with

VDOT's goals and can fund through state money versus what we should fund through local money.

So that's something that we are hoping to put together and submit here in the coming weeks.

It's a pretty quick turnaround as I understand it.

So that's kind of the next thing on ours.

Oh, and I'm sure folks have read the article about the Preston Avenue bike lanes.

So basically we, you know,

Preston Avenue between Madison, let's say, and Rugby is going to be repaved.

And so as we always do, we look for opportunities to add bike lanes with the repaving.

Our initial analysis was that bike lanes would not be able to fit just by narrowing all of the different lanes to parking lane widths to be able to provide the needed

Five to six feet, obviously six feet is better, but the pavement width varies throughout that section.

So we did post a notice about removing parking on Preston in order to accommodate the bike lanes.

That has been met with a lot of negative feedback.

So we're kind of taking a look at that.

It is part of a larger project in our bike and ped master plan.

We do

I have a priority sidewalk on that stretch as well.

And so longer term, we would be looking at ways that we could accommodate the sidewalk and a bike lane by adjusting the width of the road.

But for the repaving, we're kind of limited to the pavement width that's already out there.

So working through that process in a public way, we'll be doing that in the spring.

Did anyone have any questions for Amanda?

Great.

Great.

I've got projects all around town, mostly VDOT grants we're trying to finish up that have been on the table for a while.

The Rugby Avenue entrance into McIntire Park, that project should be going to construction soon, building a multi-use path there.

The connection where Amanda was talking to Preston, where Madison Avenue

comes through Washington Park or would have, they had the right of way to do it, but they never built it.

So connecting Madison Avenue to Madison Avenue, kind of down that hill from Washington Park, that's another VDOT grant.

We've got a few projects on Meadow Creek for a bridge and trail system in the Brandywine area.

I've been doing a lot of work up at Hayward, the new Hayward property to put some trails on that new park land by Ragged Mountain.

And I've got three property acquisitions that

I think we started the week I got hired 13 years ago.

Might actually sign closing deeds on them in the next month or so.

I've been joking that my dry erase board should probably go to the Smithsonian because it's petrified at this point with names that have been on it for so long I can't erase them anymore.

A number of those will either reopen trails that people thought were open and got closed due to property issues or allow us to finally connect

You know, the last property in a segment where I've got seven out of eight, then this is the eighth that's finally going to come on board, which would allow us to build trails, open trails and things like that.

Yeah, I had a couple of items.

One is I wasn't quick enough on the mute button task, Dan Butch, this question.

I thought I read in the paper that the old Lynchburg Road slash Sunset slash Morris Creek suite of projects did survive

It was partially funded and so we're having internal discussions on how to proceed with that, what the project scope is going to look like and Chris that's the conversation that Kevin and Chris need to hold and kind of update on.

The update I have is we're kind of still scoping that out and see how to proceed and bring that to the board and see what they decide because of

COVID and just how all the funding through VDOT, it came out partially funded.

So we need to see how much we're initially putting into, how much we want to.

And yeah, so this was for Morse Creek connection.

That would have been a shared use path from, what's that bridge?

On Sunset.

Yeah, the pedestrian bridge to Old Lynchburg Road, which would have pedestrian infrastructure within the county on Old Lynchburg Road around 64, under 64, and then connecting to Azalea Park.

So it kind of is broken up into two aspects.

Thank you, Dan.

In this budget environment that we're in, any progress is actually quite welcome.

Thank you.

and from a, again, following our logic of prioritizing connectivity where there's none rather than upgrading connectivity.

If I were to vote between the pieces, I would imagine the getting past 64 on Old Lynchburg Road would most likely be the high priority, but that's only, that's just my opinion, of course.

The Active Mobility Alliance has two upcoming dates to write on your calendar.

And for those who aren't aware, the Active Mobility Alliance is sort of the advocacy, non-profits, citizen sister to this gathering where we talk about regional Charlottesville, Albemarle active transportation issues.

Our next regular meeting will be on January 21st at 5 p.m. We're going to talk about finally choosing an actual name for the group, and also the Active Mobility Summit, which will be a larger annual event.

And we do have a date for the Active Mobility Summit, and that'll be a half-day workshop on Friday, February 26th

It'll have a morning session from 10 to 1130 and then an afternoon session from one to three.

So I'll write those dates in the chat.

Thanks, Peter.

And we just had Shane from VDOT join us.

Shane, we're just doing round table updates.

First I'd like to apologize for joining late.

I had another meeting that I jumped off of as soon as I could.

Nothing specific from VDOT per se.

Well, thanks for joining us, Shane.

And one thing I think that you might be interested in that you missed from earlier is that we finished the bike and ped count.

We have data for every intersection and for the grand totals, that's going to be up on our website.

If you wanted to follow up with me later, I'm happy to chat more.

All right.

So also, Annie, Kath, Steven, as our members of the public, are there any questions you have at this point?

I would just like to say I really appreciated the time that everybody took to answer my questions.

Thanks, Annie, for asking them.

The whole point is to get lots of public feedback.

So thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

No, I just enjoyed listening in and seeing what's going on.

It's very heartening.

Wonderful.

Stephen, just let us know if you have anything to add.

Otherwise, we will start wrapping things up.

And one thing I want to put to staff, and I'm sad that Chris already left, but I'll mention this to him and to Bill as well.

So the PDC, before I came on, they finished the Jefferson area bike and ped plan.

That's in a good place right now.

We're a little ways off from our long-range transportation plan, so we're kind of in this

We're also going to be working on our UPWP, our work plan for the next year very soon.

So my hope for our January meeting is you guys before then talk to your leadership and your departments and let me know at our January meeting what it is the PDC can do to help you guys with your bike and ped planning.

Hopefully the bike and ped count is really helpful to you guys, but I'm sure there's other things that we could be doing to help you.

Think about those, talk to your leadership, and come back with some very specific asks that I can try to work into our UPWP with Sandy.

I see a little comment from Shane.

Yeah, I just wanted to bring this up to you guys.

Actually, I'll put the link in as well.

We recently had an inquiry from Cat Anthony with the Virginia Capital Trail Foundation, and apparently in the governor's

Budget amendment that is being reviewed or will be reviewed.

There was 5 million put into that's proposed in the budget amendment for the support of planning, development, and the construction of multi-use trails.

We are not really familiar with what this actually entails, but it is something that

We just made aware of, and it is listed as VDOT is the entity that I guess this money will be or potentially given to or allocated to.

So again, we don't really know much about it at this point, other than it's, I think the priority is trails 35 miles or more, which there aren't many of those that are

that are much further along than the, I guess the idea or the wishlist other than the Fall Line Trail, the Ashland to Petersburg Trail, and maybe the Eastern Shore Trail that was, VDOT just completed a study.

So I'm sending out a couple of links just to, sorry for the multiple chat responses, but this will send, this will let everyone know at least what we know in terms of

This is something that could potentially be good for multi-use trail planning and development across the Commonwealth.

Of course $5 million is not a windfall of cash when you come to

developing trails.

However, it could possibly do some preliminary engineering or something.

Great.

Thank you so much for that, Shane.

That's really exciting.

There's a comment from Peter about the Secretary of Transportation.

Yes, this is very exciting that there is a new Secretary of Transportation.

If you aren't aware, Pete Buttigieg has been picked by Biden to be the next Secretary of Transportation.

Cool.

So thanks, Shane.

Thanks, Peter.

Thanks, everybody, for joining us today.

Last call for comments or questions.

All right.

We will see you guys in January.