Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordination Committee Meeting   9/16/2021

It's a better name than we used to be the 5th Planning District Commission and our boss used to say you can plead the 5th or drink a 5th but nobody knew where the 5th was.

So Roanoke Valley Allegheny is more descriptive I think.

This is Chris with the city.

I think with talking with Amanda Poncy, the city and the planning district also as well and county and others, we've done various, put an intern on a corner and have them sit there with a piece of notebook paper.

We have VDOT level counters from Shane and John that transmit the data into the website services.

We get the like the eco counters and the pyro boxes and things like that.

Some of them have

Tubes for bikes.

Some of them are purely infrared.

I just ordered a remote counter for one of our places that's kind of like Carbon's Cove.

That's our Ragged Mountain area.

It's a very popular trail area just to get an idea of how many people are out there and when they're out there.

I think from my end, and I'm the off-road person, the parks person, I was looking for data to say

Well, you can say there's 327 youth basketball participants because you have a signup sheet for that.

And I go to city council and go, well, there's a lot of people on the trail.

Guess who's going to get the money next year.

It's the youth basketball program and nothing against any of those things.

But I was looking for mathematical data.

I can compare to other things that people have mathematical data for to say what's popular in the parks department or in the city so we could get more funding.

That's that's a big part of my purpose.

And then also as a manager,

What days of the week, what times of day, what times of year are we probably more likely to have to maybe go dump the trash cans or patrol the parking lots and things like that.

So that's my off-road parks view of it.

There's a lot of on-street folks here in the system that might have other desires for the data, like why we're interested in learning how to up our data counting.

And I think reporting to our boards of supervisors and types, how you guys put that report together is something we could probably learn from

Okay, well, I can go through just a brief overview of what we're doing here.

Maybe that's the best place to start and then you all can ask questions.

So I don't know if I can share my screen.

It looks like I can, and you can see that.

All right, so we're using traffic's counters that Shane Sawyer actually helped set up initially.

We have an older system

But this is the one that we went with and I'll show you the website in a little bit.

So it consists of an infrared counter there on the left and then a dock that we're able to download the data from.

So we have to go into the field to get the data.

We do that about every three or four months.

We share our counter system with Roanoke County.

So they own some counters and they go out more often, I think once a month.

So on the left, those little camouflage units, we have about 20 of those.

And the dock on the right, we have one of those.

And I think each thing costs about $500.

So this is a typical setup on a pole, a telephone pole.

And it's just in an electric box that we buy loads for $15.

So we do have to

take the contents out of the box and glue some things and punch some holes to get it to set up.

And we do lock our boxes.

We occasionally lose one.

It gets thrown in the river, vandalized.

Shane can remember some of those incidents.

So this is the network that we have in the Roanoke Valley, roughly, I guess it looks like there's more than 20.

So Roanoke County, I think has about 10.

have about 15 others that we monitor.

So most of them are on paved Greenway trails, the Roanoke River Greenway that goes through the middle of the Roanoke Valley from Salem over to Benton.

And we have three or four counters on that.

Then we do have a few at Carvins Cove, which is a mountain bike area.

And the Roanoke County has quite a few at Explorer Park, which is another mountain bike area.

so the data looks like this it's just a text file that we get when we download it and it consists of header information and then basically a line for each hour so you know here's five o'clock six o'clock seven eight so forth and so on so it's very detailed data for each hour and then we're able to

use the software or the website which I'll show in a minute to generate tables and charts and these are some reports that we generate every year.

So the left side of the screen is Garden City Greenway which is just a summary and has some data by the days of the week and months of the year of course Saturday and Sunday are the highest use days.

The number on the right is a chart that Rachel can talk about a little bit later which compares

The infrared counter, which is counting pedestrians and bicycles to a bicycle counter that was put at the same location.

So we have sort of split mode data for this river's edge, which is in downtown, well, near our hospital in Roanoke,

And quickly, Rachel had sent this to me a few minutes ago.

This is the percent increase from the pandemic.

So these, most of our accounts from 2019 to the spring of 2020 were 200% or more higher, which sort of expected.

Our greenways were closed for a little bit.

And

So let me see if I can share this other screen.

which is very powerful.

And this is where we really get all our information from.

So it has a map of all our locations as we went in and put pictures of where all the counters are.

So for example, I have to go check some counters to be put in Franklin County that I've never been to before.

And luckily we have pictures in here that I'll be able to find them hopefully.

And we have a master summary.

We can quickly go and look at all of our counters and by year 2010, 2011, and the monthly totals for each, if it has data and the average volume for each day.

Some of these, of course, you have to consider are two way counts.

So if it's like,

McAfee's Knob, for example, is a trail that goes up and back.

So it's counting everybody twice.

So we have to take that into consideration when we're presenting the data.

And we have some older counters in here that we have discontinued.

We have some temporary counters that are used for a single event.

So not all the counters have data for every month and for every year, but we do have data going back to 2010

through 2021 on most of our counties.

And as I mentioned, we share this with Roanoke County.

So about 10 or 15 of these, Roanoke County is checking and uploading the data to the same website.

So we can look at their data and they can look at our data.

We can go in and do quick analysis

I'm picking Garden City Greenway.

You can look at a time period that we select and then it'll generate a graph of whatever we want to look at, any way we want to look at it.

You can look at monthly or days of the week, for example,

But it's very powerful and useful that it's easy to generate these graphs using their software.

So that's one thing that we like about it.

We can go into a little bit more detail on the management of a site.

So for example I can pick River's Edge here.

It can tell me some notes that we put in like there was some corrosion.

We can scan the data set

So here it's identifying days that have very high counts.

And we'll do that each time we upload data to see if there's an issue with insects or if there was a special event, perhaps it was a marathon race on the Greenway or a mountain bike race that may account for very high counts for a particular day.

Yeah, and I think I'd like to start with the same question you asked, Matt, only about the on-road counts.

If the folks who are interested in that

I can just jump in and explain what I've been doing with it.

Sometimes thought a little bit odd that, you know, the way we have that structure, I mean, and it's historical largely, but it's like really split between the Greenway Trail Counts and Honor Counts, that they're almost separate programs.

But I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that and it works.

And I think it, from what I'm hearing, it sounds like it's maybe not at all uncommon to have that.

But there's kind of a fundamental difference in the approach.

Matt talks about

You have like over 20, between you and between us and the county, we have over 20 counters out there.

These traffic counters, you know, they're cheap.

They're $500 a piece.

They're very durable.

They don't talk to the cloud.

They don't do anything fancy like that.

But you physically go visit them to collect the data.

Also, once you put a counter up, you tend to leave it there.

And sometimes we might move it for one reason or another.

they're doing construction somewhere and or whatever but the idea we don't with the greenway counters we're not like constantly moving them around for the way the on-road count program ended up working out is we have some counters that are permanently installed and then we have a couple of counters that we move around the valley and that's nice because we have the freedom to be able to move these around so we

could count.

Theoretically, there's no limit to how many we can count.

We've got two counters and we can keep them moving.

We do need to leave them there at least a couple of weeks and generally a month.

But really the reason they get left in place is because I just don't have time to go out and move them all the time.

I'm a little embarrassed at the moment that I actually have both of the counters in my office.

Sorry, John.

These are John.

John Bolachek has loaned us these counters.

And part of the agreement is that we're going to keep them out there and they're not going to just sit in my office.

So my excuse is I have breakthrough COVID and I just haven't had time to get out there and do it, but I will soon.

Tomorrow.

It's on my calendar.

So anyway, those two counters move around, but then I have these other counters that are, that are

in my mind permanently there.

I mean, there's really no difference between the counters.

It's just these, VDOT has loaned us and these permanent counters are mostly on loan from Virginia Tech.

So that's been really nice to have these partnerships so we can get this equipment because these counters are not $500 a piece like the traffic's counters.

John, how much do they cost?

Yeah.

So we can't have lots of them, but since I have the ones that are permanent, then these others can be moved around a lot.

And the reason those permanent ones are so important is that they provide the reference counts.

So I can use the permanent ones to calculate a day of year factor for every day for an entire year that includes the period of time that my temporary counter was in its spot.

And then

So this is one of the things I was able to do with the counter.

This is actually one of my reference counters that I have on Campbell Avenue.

and I compared for about three months before the pandemic hit and about three months right after and of course everything was shut down.

Well, downtown there's clearly a lot of lunch traffic and obviously those businesses were all shut down, there was no office workers downtown and so that lunch traffic all but disappeared.

This site still gets a lot of traffic.

It's close to the bus station and it's, I mean, it's in the heart of downtown.

There's still a lot of people walking around downtown.

And what I thought, one thing I thought was interesting is that during that three months, you could start to see kind of a morning-ish and an evening peak coming through.

That's not visible in the before line because this lunch peak sort of overwhelms everything.

You could also see that the nightlife just vanished during the pandemic.

I think the downtown location gives me some of the most interesting data.

I also wanted to share, I'll share this next.

I usually place, these mobile counters, I usually place based on requests from localities.

So I had, this was on Melrose Avenue, I had two counters located here and then I ended up moving one of them here.

because the locality had also requested this location across from, that's now the New Horizons, it's a medical location, medical facility.

So after the counters had been there for a while, I write up a report and this originally, it did have some

We did have the counters in the bike lane as well as infrared.

So these, I don't have a picture of it, but this counter, you know, it could count the infrared, but I can also put tubes in the bike lane and attach those to the device as well.

So you can see at these three locations, New Horizons, that's what it was called, at these three locations, this is the raw data, just the average, but then once it's been adjusted based on that day of year factor,

Then now the average traffic in front of errands rented was 56 people per day for the, and I mean, so I can say that's an annual number, even though it was 40 for the month or so that it was in place.

I do typically give the localities analysis on, in this case, this is the side of the road, because I had one on each side of the road.

at each of the locations.

I could, I can do a directional split as well, eastbound, westbound.

Oh, actually that's what this is.

Sorry, Aarons was on one side of the road, New Century was on the other.

So at Aarons, we have a pretty evenly split between eastbound and westbound.

And that's the same at all these locations.

That's not always true, but at this location it was.

I can also do day of the week and time of day.

And then,

I wanted to also share the back end a little bit.

So these eco counters, like I said, some of them talk to the cloud.

The ones that I have borrowed from Virginia Tech don't talk to the cloud.

And so I do have to go physically visit them.

But I do that with my smartphone.

So it's a little bit easier than it is for Matt.

I don't have to have the shuttle and unlock the box and take things out of the box.

I just wave a magnet over the counter and it connects to my phone and my phone sucks up the data and sends it to the cloud.

So VDOT has all of our counters and we actually have some of the traffic's counters in this as well on this publicly available map.

So that's kind of neat that the public can actually see where these counters are and what the traffic was like there.

These are all this includes all the places I've counted, even if there's no longer a counter there.

Like I counted this location on Main Street in Salem.

I think I had the counter there for about six weeks, several months ago, but the data is still there.

And then this is the

Data Management side for the eco counters.

And so this is something I do and I haven't done this today.

So this is a good time to do that is check just to see what my counters are doing and look, this counter has been counting.

So that's nice to see because this particular counter, this is the one that vanished for a while.

So then I had to do some detective work to get it back.

So that was kind of an adventure.

You could do some stuff like Matt was showing with the and the weather.

That's kind of neat.

You can do some some fun stuff with this through this platform, but I prefer to download everything to excel and work with the data myself.

One thing Eco Counter doesn't do is

so that I could correct for those reference counters, I can calculate day of year factors and correct for the reference counters.

So that's something I need to do manually.

And actually that concept of having reference counters and then being able to move counters around and then correct for that, that is something that some other, so Amanda in our office has been doing a lot of the working with Matt on the Greenway and trail counts and she's not.

Here at the moment, but that's something she's been interested in doing, especially if a counter is only in place for part of the year or something happened and it had to be pulled for a while because of a flood or something.

Well, traffic doesn't do as good a job at doesn't do a great job at handling gaps in data or partial years.

And so to be since you have all those counters,

that are out there all the time, you could calculate, Dave, your reference counts and still be able to get that average annual daily traffic out of that.

Thanks for sharing those links, John, that's helpful.

Chris, we should, yes.

So Matt showed you some figures from, or a little bit from the Trail Counter Annual Report, and I say annual,

It's when somebody has time to get around to it.

And so Amanda had put that an annual report together for 2020 and 2019, but I don't think it had been done for a while before that.

I've been thinking that something like that should be done for the on-road counters and it would make a lot of sense to combine it into a single report.

The Greenway Commission purchased some of those, but a lot of the requests are just from what Chris was alluding to, that the locality will want a number for a grant or to make some justification for expending funds.

Yeah.

For the on-road counts, it's usually locality staff that request the location.

So, I mean, sometimes I just put something in a location because I'm just curious about it or someone else is curious about it.

But generally, I mean, that's nice.

And I love data for the sake of data, but like ultimately I have to justify spending my hours on this.

So I proactively go after locality staff and say, where do you want counts?

And then it's been,

I didn't have a good grasp initially, and I feel like I'm starting to get a better grasp on this, as to why they would want those counts and what they would do with it.

Because it's a little different than the greenways where you are looking at how often should we change the trash and maintain the bathrooms.

And you're looking at kind of maintenance things.

And people, that's not really relevant to a sidewalk and a bike lane.

It's not going to change how often you sweep the bike lane.

That's more related to how much crud

It gets on the road and fills up the bike lane, then what kind of traffic it gets.

So the big question is, yeah, what do we do with this data and how are people using this data?

There are two requests I get the most frequently that I can't accommodate.

One is to know what the bicycle traffic is on a road that doesn't have bike lanes.

And actually I say I can't accommodate it.

I can now.

I do have the equipment and the training and so forth that I can do that.

I haven't done it yet.

I find the bike lane, counting in the bike lane is a pretty big lift.

It takes far more of my hours than just taking this out and mounting it on a post somewhere.

That's easy to do.

But getting out there and pounding nails in the bike lane, first of all, I have to take someone with me.

That's not, and then I have to take my car so I can set up my work zone.

It has to be two people as part of the work zone.

But it's also just more things go wrong.

And I really struggled to get good quality data for counting in the bike lanes.

So one of the requests we got was to do counts on a place that there is no sidewalk.

But there was a pronounced dirt path where people were walking.

This is on Ogden Road.

So the Roanoke County went out and installed a signpost, like only three foot high, no sign on it, just the post.

So I had something to attach this counter to, and I could count how many people are walking across this little dirt path.

And they did put that into a grant proposal.

It wasn't funded.

Some of the data

I think we're, even though it's been almost two years now, I think we're still getting to the, figuring out what to use the data for.

And I'm hoping that as we count more and more places, we can create kind of a more picture of the region and learn more about, you know, so one thing I've learned is that pedestrian traffic in downtown Roanoke is different than anywhere else in the Valley.

So having two reference counters in downtown Roanoke, I maybe want to change that.

Downtown Salem and downtown Vinton are similar to each other.

They kind of share some characteristics, but they're different than, you know, Milrose Avenue.

I think it's important to have

to be able to show with numbers the sense of that the people are walking here.

Oh, and another important thing is I've been dabbling with Streetlight Insight and it's got this bike pad module on it.

So Streetlight Insight is taking, you know, data, it's buying and selling data from like Facebook and your navigation app and you know, Big Brother's watching it, whatever.

It's all capturing you and it knows exactly where you were and it aggregates that data.

So I don't know exactly where you were, but I can see exactly where someone was.

or some peoples were, a bunch of people were.

But I can calibrate their bike.

They have the bike ped module.

So I can calibrate those analyses with the eco counter data.

I can enter an AADT for bicycle traffic or for pedestrian traffic for that particular site.

And then Streetlight Insight can use that to calibrate and say, and without that calibration index or calibration data, it gives me a bicycle index.

or Pedestrian Index, which is relative to other places.

You know, you could say this number is higher than this number.

That means more.

But you can't say that 56 means 56 bicyclists a day.

My power blipped out for a second, so I'm sorry I missed a little section of that.

Are there any other questions?

I got a quick question for Matt.

This is Chris again with Parks Department.

And I can talk to you offline, but when you do a Parkland's Cove type area, I've got another area I manage in Nelson County.

And the question they're asking is, should we be counting

The cars that come in or the people on a particular trail because you have a lot of cars coming in to do multiple activities that aren't all just hiking and you might lose half of your count if some people hike one way or the other way.

Do you ever count just the cars coming into a park unit?

And I saw you had a boat landing thing.

I want to talk to you about that one later.

But Roanoke County has some magnetic counters.

We have one that we don't actually have deployed.

It's sitting on a shelf.

So they do count cars at a mountain bike area and at another park.

So they count the cars entering the parking lot as well as having counts on the trail.

So that probably gives them a lot of detailed information provided that it's recording correctly.

I guess you would want to test it and calibrate it to make sure it's picking up every vehicle.

So the Roanoke County does have a few magnetic counters that they use in parking lots.

And the bike, the boat ramps, we did have some counters at boat ramps.

That's way more difficult because you have a lot of different users, you know, you could have fishermen.

If somebody is kayaking, they may make 10 trips to the car for the cooler and the poles and the life jackets.

are not really useful, meaning because one person can make 10 trips, you know, getting the, putting in a canoe.

I think it was more just comparing the number, I guess the, not the number per se, but the amount of use that each of the landings.

I think we put it in a few landings and you're right, flooding was an issue.

I had to remove the counters.

More than one time, I think, to avoid them being submerged, but yeah, limited success on that one, but you could see it did record the activity at each landing.

You know, that's true with a lot of our counters, especially the ones like in mountain bike areas, it's not counting all the users, it's just

Yeah, generally when we talk about it, we say counts, not users, because plenty of these things people are doing out and backs and they're getting counted twice.

But generally the count shows you how busy that location is.

Have you had done any, before we built it, after we built it counts to prove that a facility

had the value that it was expected of.

Again, I keep speaking to how do we get more funding for bike lanes and things or trails?

And if we could show this dirt path you spoke about, Rachel, had X number of users, but once we built the right facility, boy, it tripled overnight.

That is a request we've had.

Yeah, the key on that is actually getting the before counts.

One thing that we've noticed on the greenway network, it started out small, let's say 10 miles, and we had very high counts, but as more greenways have been built,

Stayed the same or even gotten lower in some cases as people have dispersed and used different parts of the Greenway network.

And that's actually a good thing because that central section was very, very busy and too crowded.

So by having more Greenway available, people are now using other sections and that central part is not as crowded.

So, Peter, about ground truthing the counter.

We, when we set up the counters, when every time I go set up a counter, I, you know, check it to make sure it's working.

So I walk past it and my phone is connected to the counter.

So my phone actually chimes.

In fact, it's got a really cute little bicycle bell sound when I'm testing out the bike lanes.

It's really cute.

And I make sure that, well, and I have to do that also to tell, so the counter tells me

So many people were walking in and so many people were walking out.

Well, what does in and out mean?

So that's the directionality.

So I have to figure out, OK, in is north and out is south for this counter at this location.

And then the counters that transmit to the cloud, I do check them frequently, but once a week, actually.

I mean, because I can do that at my desk.

I should do that Monday morning during staff meeting because I'm not listening anyway.

So I could just check it at my desk.

And I can notice if there's something weird going on, like those counts have changed dramatically.

And that's how I discovered that one of the counters had vanished.

And so the story behind that was it vanished.

I went out and looked at where it was supposed to be and realized that

The sign that it had been mounted to, it was a new signpost and a different sign.

It had been a speed limit sign and now it was a weight limit sign for that bridge.

So I contacted the sign crew and said, you changed the sign.

What'd you do with my counter?

And it turned out that someone had actually hit the sign, broken it into two pieces.

And so the sign crew had been intending to change the sign anyway.

And I took that opportunity to just go ahead and change the sign.

I said, okay, now where's my counter?

And so we ended up talking to the police department, did a whole bunch of detective work.

I was even like calling AT&T.

I called Eco Counter and said, what?

Because this counter is still sending me counts, just not very many.

It's like crying out into the wilderness.

So I called Eco Counter and said, what?

What carrier is this counter talking to?

And they said AT&T.

So I called AT&T and said, so I saw it in CIS, they did this.

Like they could triangulate where someone is based on, right?

And they said, well, we could tell, we could tell eco counter where it is.

They are, maybe it's VDOT.

I don't know.

We could tell the owner of the counter, but we can't tell you.

I think it was eco counters.

But before I got that far any further with that,

I talked to the police again and they're like, okay, here's the number of the guy who hit the thing.

Why don't you just call him?

And I'm like,

Okay.

Really surprised he had shared that information with me, but I called him and two hours later he had dropped the counter.

He just like tossed it in his car.

He didn't know what it was.

He was just sort of like, Oh my God, I, you know, hit the sign and broken the stuff.

And I'm just trying to like, kind of clean up the scene, which wasn't his job, but he didn't know that.

Like I wouldn't know that, but he's actually, that would have been the sign crew's job to clean up the scene.

But anyway, he just sort of panicked and was throwing everything in his car.

trying to kind of fix it I guess and didn't realize even what it was so anyway that was my detective work so I don't know about ground truthing the counters exactly but we certainly I'm making sure that they're counting me and if the counters are going way high so that actually happened at Ogden Road is that my counts were suddenly going way way high so I ended up going out and looking and it turned out a bush had grown over the entire counter so I was counting a lot of leaves

And so from the moment that those counts were going way, way high, I just discarded all that data.

So I was at least saying I knew what had happened there.

Sometimes I put a counter out.

It counts me just fine.

But I go back and I'm like, there's no way 10,000 people walked past that point.

I mean, there's nowhere in the valley that 10,000 people would walk past the point.

And it was because

If there's a glass window at all, and I thought it was pointed so it wouldn't be picking up, but the glass reflects all the cars going by.

So I was getting reflected auto traffic.

I was counting autos, which actually there shouldn't have been 10,000 autos a day there either.

Have you noticed or factored in, mostly with pedestrian counts, not this wouldn't be with really bikes, but with the infrared encounters, perhaps when people are walking side by side, you're not picking up all the people.

Yeah, there's a way, I mean, you could sit there for an hour and watch people and count them and see what the counter is doing.

And then you can put a calibration adjustment into these traffic's counters to account for that.

We haven't done that in many locations.

I don't know about the traffic counters, but the eco counters seem very sensitive to that.

I mean, cause they actually have, there's two cameras there and they actually have, this is slightly offset and that's how they do that directionality.

So they're pretty sensitive to that.

That's good to know.

I didn't know that they set up the cameras like that.

Peter makes a great point too.

It's just an issue when it's very, very busy.

So, you know, on things that are sort of like maybe single track and mountain biking, people are kind of one behind one anyway.

You're probably not going to have that problem.

If you're on like a busy downtown sidewalk and there's huge groups of people walking by, you know, that's where it could be a problem.

And there's methods for doing the correction count and actually in the software EcoCounter has, there's a way to like plug in a factor to change what you're displaying.

This might be for you, John or Shane.

BIPED counts, is it the same weekday formula to get the AADT as traffic counts, road vehicle counts?

Because what I'm going with is maybe commuting wise, it could be the same peak on Wednesdays, but for recreational use, it might be the opposite.

How is that factored in with the, is it the type of infrastructure you're counting on?

That gets back to what Rachel was talking about with the reference counters.

So if you do a short duration count, we do them pretty long.

We're not just doing it like two hours.

We'll do at least

like 15 days and then we'll call it down and it'll be at least two weeks.

So that's a lot of data.

So we get the weekend data.

So we get 24 seven data for 14 days.

And then if it's like the middle of the winter and you have a reference counter for a similar location, you can kind of look at the factor and say, you know, it's probably twice that in the summer or whatever you're trying to do.

And also getting back to the ground truthing, John and I and some folks in the office, we have, we need to do it more often, but for the Capital Trail counters, we did go out and do two hour counts and then compare the data to the same period in the cloud to make sure that it is

that it was the same.

And we also captured some demographic data while we were out there, just because we were out there collecting, so we did it.

And somewhat related, it might be if Charlottesville continues to do manual counts, it would probably be a good idea to make sure that every permanent calendar or every calendar that is installed in Charlottesville, Albemarle, or whatever,

that if you're going to do manual counts, do a manual count at those locations to that will serve as our ground truth.

If you're already there, you know, do a two hour count at the exact counter location.

That way we've got the manual counts and which we can compare to the online counts.

Thank you, Matt and Rachel, for taking the time out of your day to share some of what you're working on.

I know there's a lot of interest in this.

You all are welcome to stick around for the rest of the meeting.

Thanks so much for having us.

I'll just write a quick note here, and then I'm going to sign off.

The next topic that I have put on the agenda was just to share an update on the MPAIR SMART SCALE process.

This wasn't a

very necessarily a very rigid agenda.

So we are getting a little beyond the time that has been allocated.

And I do wanna make sure that we have time to have a good discussion.

So, but we can talk about SMART SCALE to the extent that you all are interested in having a discussion.

I'm not sure if we met since the last time that the MPO met already, but the projects that they selected to move forward with for the MPO's projects are the District Avenue Roundabout,

which was developed as part of the hydraulic project.

The Rivanna River Bike and Pedestrian Crossing, and that's the project that was identified as going through this additional stakeholder engagement process that the MPO had committed to as part of their policy.

And then the other two projects that were picked up were looking at the street doing some intersection improvements at the 5th Street Station intersection on 5th Street and then extending the bike and pedestrian infrastructure north into the city.

And then the last one was

Extending some of the bike and pedestrian infrastructure along Avon Street.

So looking at where the bike lanes drop off, going from the city into the county and seeing where there could be some opportunities to transition from the bike lanes on the road into a shared use path that was identified as part of the county's study when they were looking at Avon Road.

For the Rivanna River SMART SCALE project, we met with the Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee last night.

We reviewed a list of potential stakeholders that should be involved in the process.

I'm going to share my screen just really briefly.

This is the list that staff had developed of potential stakeholders that should be included.

And then the CTAC had a few additional suggestions.

At least one of these citizen representatives, my thought is that that would be identified as somebody who was involved in the Charlottesville Bike and Pedestrian Committee already.

So that was one of the suggestions they had.

They also suggested potentially the Rivanna Trail Foundation, Charlottesville Albemarle Greenways, Willow Tree,

And they had also discussed having a planning commissioner included as part of the stakeholder group.

So I think

You know, we could probably add a few more.

I want to be mindful that we also want to manage the group size so that it's a meaningful process and people are participating and we're making sure that the feedback that we're getting is helpful.

Basically, we didn't think it was necessary for state foreign property to be represented on the committee.

Yeah.

I'm not asking you to tell me that one way or the other, but I think that's why that was initially on there.

I think that's a great question.

And I would actually, for me personally, kind of maybe defer that to someone who's wiser and has been doing the work much longer than I have.

It could kind of go either way.

So for example, I wonder, should Brian Roy be part of that group?

But could that also be a conflict of interest, having him be in the group?

But there's no doubt that

The landowners need to be regular, you know, parts of the conversation, but whether they should be on the steering committee, I think might be a little bit of a different question.

Cindy, I'm developing a big list of stakeholders just so we make sure that we don't miss anybody.

The steering committee would be a subset of that universe of stakeholders.

So that's going to be a Google Doc or a Google Sheet that I'm just starting.

I'm going to share that list with you.

Keep it updated with what you're working on here and vice versa.

This is an amazing start though, no doubt.

Is the CA, is the CAT, is that the Charlottesville Area Transit or is that the Charlottesville Area Trail Runners?

Because if it's the latter, I'd say no way.

Yeah, it is intended to be the transit provider cut.

And the reason that we think it's important to include them is because there's been a lot of discussion about parking and managing access.

And also as far as the other studies that we've been a part of, in addition to the feasibility studies, making sure that we are providing as many alternative modes of transportation to help people throughout the region access

That's super, I think that's so smart and it's good to extend that invitation and you're right that we want to capture that thought process so even if

If maybe they decline because they're so busy bringing someone from the RTP or someone.

So we're thinking about that like regional connectivity and solving congestion rather than creating congestion.

Sandy, you mentioned that the Ravenna River crossing, would it have additional public engagement?

I mean, what is the status of that?

I haven't heard much about it.

I know a while back there was

a public, some type of public meeting, but I don't think it was a super well attended.

And I know there are two specific choices, alternatives that have been developed with considerably different price tags that I think that would need more input than just whoever's gonna show up at a public meeting.

Cause again, that will be relatively limited and will be full of advocates.

Yeah, I think the first step is going to be to identify the stakeholder committee, which we hope will represent a wide variety of interests and not just people who maybe are personally interested in this for a specific reason, but make sure that there are a lot of different

stakeholders that are involved in the discussion to make sure that we're weighing those.

The next thing that we're going to do is start developing this list of factors for consideration as far as evaluating the project.

So this was another conversation that we started with the Citizens Transportation Advisory Group last night.

This was the list that we started with, and they added a lot of other really good, thoughtful suggestions on potential factors that may be important, like

Resiliency, Water Safety Impacts, Maintenance Costs, Environmental Impacts, etc.

So I think as part of this public process where we need to really start prioritizing which of these factors are going to be the most important and create

I mean we'll have a matrix but we really need to figure out which of these priorities do we need to focus on so a lot of this work is going to be done in the stakeholder committees which will be open to the public and we'll have opportunities for public feedback as part of those regular meetings.

I think we'll really need to think through whether we can do something like a MetroQuest survey or if not MetroQuest, maybe a simpler format for a survey to really try to get as much opportunity as possible for us to understand what the community priorities are.

And then I think we were very successful in getting a large amount of attendance when we did these overviews for the SMART SCALE application.

So I think we can go through a public process and then wrap up by presenting any sorts of recommendations along with the other projects that are moving forward within the MPA region publicly and making sure that we just have a very transparent process.

Right.

I think also from like a timeline perspective I think you're right on that like right at the start you want to be identifying what are the questions rather than finding answers or even weighing one question after another so you know where you have like the virtual version of a whiteboard get it all on a whiteboard and also know that new items will need to be added to the whiteboard maybe at the last minute but we start to lock in

Find out who's gonna have the answer.

And then perhaps even the public can be a part of that conversation about what is the weight.

So I don't know, this is just an arbitrary, but folks may be willing to pay twice as much for a better aesthetic, or they may not care at all about aesthetics.

And I think that is something that we can collect some data on.

And in the end, it will be a small number of people who make the decision, whether that be the MPO Policy Board or whatever.

But they'll be making a decision that's informed based on the vast universe of knowledge that's coming from democracy.

So then it can be legitimate.

Then it can be wise.

And I think that's what we want to come out with is legitimacy.

Yeah and I also caution folks from what I understand the study again I wouldn't post it or pose a question as where do you want the bridge because I brought this up with several people they're like oh it needs to go somewhere else.

So again, the study looked at two locations, had costs for two locations.

So I guess you gotta be, when you have the public meeting, is it gonna be oriented around which of these two are you choosing from?

As opposed to throwing it out there, hey, where'd you guys like a bridge across the Robana River?

I mean, that's, we passed that in terms of, you know, there's two alternatives that have been developed from a study.

Yeah, we did have our Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee recommend considering another orientation.

So I think the right way to do this is to identify what the priorities need to be outside of looking at the actual projects and then go to the constraints where, whether or not there is another orientation by,

you know, does a better job maybe of even addressing the highest priorities that we've identified before we could even put resources into maybe considering, you know, an additional study.

But I do hear what you're saying and I do agree that we need to make sure that we are setting this up in a way to move forward and not constantly having to go backwards and re-address

Yeah.

And I also do think that to what Shane pointed out and it harmed the Route 20 processes, there were non-feasible options were always brought in as sort of paper, whatever,

things that aren't meant to advance the process, but to stop it.

Why not make a tunnel?

You guys were talking about making a tunnel for the Rivanna River sewer pipe.

Why not make a tunnel for the bridge?

That kind of stuff just isn't helpful at a certain point.

It can be.

I will continue to keep you updated.

I'm sure many of you will be involved in this process as we move it forward.

The policy board will hopefully be appointing the list of representative organizations at their meeting next week.

And then I can start reaching out and trying to identify who the specific individuals will that will serve on that committee.

Just to, I looked it up.

I want to correct what I said.

State Farm is the property owner.

They have the interest of leasing or potentially moving is what I understand.

And I don't know where things are with that.

But it might not hurt to invite and see in any interest.

We might have to have a list and it might shrink down by who wants to be involved.

I will certainly be in touch, Dan.

That's really a summary of what's going on with SMART SCALE right now.

So really the rest of the agenda is just for you all to have the floor to be able to let us know if there are things that we need to be working on to coordinate for these meetings and then just to share updates.

Do you want me to call on you or do you want to just hop in?

I mean, I apologize that I missed the beginning of this.

I'd be glad to share.

We got

We were awarded a grant, or not a grant, but free technical assistance from EcoCounter to analyze some of our bike and pedestrian count data, which I'd be glad to share the report that they provided to us via email to everyone.

We are working still through the Preston Barracks bike lane design.

Hopefully that project has been implemented, or pushed back to April, May timeframe for repaving.

So, you know,

See what happens with that.

We are submitting our transportation alternatives grants for the October 1st deadline, the Safe Routes to School Coordinator position, and Chris has the Meadow Creek Valley Trail project.

We have this afternoon and next week we have some route corridor pop up meetings for some public feedback showing the it's in stage three development, I believe some

recommendations, but it's really together feedback.

And today's going to be at the center.

We'll be there off Belvedere this afternoon.

I'll send the link.

And then the other locations are at KTAC and Putt Putt Place.

I think that's next week.

And then I had a note here for something else.

I'm sorry, one second.

We're evaluating the revenue sharing applications for submission.

Again, it's Avon Street bike ped share use path improvement.

That's gonna be one that we submitted for a pre-app and the Eastern Ave connection as well, but that's on the radar coming up next month.

Pretty much that's kind of the month, what's going on for this month right now for a One Map update.

I know that there's been conversations with mostly technical background discussions with between the city and county GIS teams.

I think that it's not,

I think it is moving along but maybe not at the speed we hoped for but with everyone's you know that's being involved with this that was not in this project early on you know I know it's Brian with the county committing a lot of time to it I believe with the GIS manager with the city

Some discussions and some technical guidance and being able to keep it moving and coordinating that, but I really don't know any expectations.

deadline or progress with that.

With the county, as Brian's helping me with this, we're kind of ready with the data.

So I think we're going to try to initiate our data to be accessible on our county web viewer, at least a step toward that.

We also was able to, I think VDOT's doing a

Similar initiative, a consultant reached out to us and we sent RF County data over for QA, QC purposes.

Maybe Shane Killison reached out to us.

I think it's good to be asked about it.

Keep it on the tape, on the back burner, meaning like keep it updated.

But, you know, I don't know if we were able to give an exact kind of expected end date or anything, right, if you agree, Amanda.

Right.

Yeah, just to follow up, VDOT, we are developing a statewide sidewalk inventory, much like we did with the bicycle facilities inventory, which is pretty close to being, we feel very close to being complete, other than some more recent things that have happened in the last six months or so.

But we do have a process for updating it.

But of course, a sidewalk inventory is a much heavier lift.

in terms of data.

But as Dan said, we've reached out to MPOs, PDCs, localities, looked online to try to get a base data to add to one that VDOT had for, I guess, VDOT-maintained roads, not the independent cities and towns that maintain their own roads.

So we're trying to build off of that.

So we will eventually have it.

We don't know how we're going to

We will update the information that we received.

Not really, but I would just remind folks that we do have

Roadway reconfiguration of technical assistance available.

Roadway reconfigurations is a way of saying road diets without saying road diets.

So if you think that there's any candidate locations that where you could basically drop a lane and put in a bike facility or maybe even narrowing a lane versus dropping one.

Let us know and we can look at it and if it's feasible, we could do, the consultants would do a striping plan as that would be the deliverable and hopefully it could be implemented sometime, maybe when the next paving schedule comes along or sooner.

Thank you, Jake.

Ideally, we would get out in front of the paving schedule.

We would look at all these locations well in advance of the pavement because it's very easy to miss that paving schedule.

And when you do, you're locked out for like 10 years because it's not going to be repaved, chances are.

So yeah, it's great to be proactive.

Look at any places where it could happen and we can do the study and the striking plan and have it ready for

You know, should something come available either through the paving schedule or some other project that might be in the area.

Just, it's good to know.

I have had these conversations with you in the residency.

I struggle with finding that list and having it prior, you know, ahead of time.

I think the issue this past year was this year's routine paving schedule, so it was really hard to be able to accommodate any requests that we had.

But maybe this might be a discussion that I'll be able to, is this information, is this available online?

Well, one thing, the roadway configuration information is on VDOT's bike ped website.

There's a link at the top.

I will say that the paving schedule, you know, getting it out in advance can be a challenge, especially for if you're outside of VDOT.

But again, that's why, you know, if by the time the paving, by the time the public sees the paving schedule, it's too late to do anything in that paving schedule generally.

That's why.

You know, we got to do this a couple years in advance because they sign contracts and do the road, you know, which ones are going to be maintained and what they're going to do well in advance.

So, you know, again, once I understand your frustration, because once by the time you see the list, it's probably too late to have anything done.

So that's why we need to get out in front of this by a couple, you know, as much as we can identify some locate potential locations, if there are any.

And, uh,

You know, have it ready for if it works in terms of an upcoming paving schedule.

But we can work behind the scenes to get a longer term.

I think we can get it out to like three years in advance internally.

Sure.

We had a public meeting last week for Route 29, the corridor study.

It's like kind of north Route 29.

So it starts at Airport Road and it goes up to Rutgersville, Deerfield Drive in Rutgersville.

There's a couple of intersections there that have been on people's radar.

Frays Mill Road is the most popular intersection.

And then there's also

Lewis and Clark Drive.

So both of those intersections had an R-cut planned and the public made such an outcry at the last SMART SCALE applications that it didn't get funded, that project didn't get funded for Frays Mill Road to put in the R-cut.

So we had a public meeting last week and we had about 50 participants and most of them were

up in arms that we were considering, that VDOT's considering to put in the archive again.

So we're hoping that VDOT will reconsider.

People were asking for like mitigations that were much less expensive than making a whole new intersection like putting in rumble strips and splashing lights because

I think the main accident that happens there is between vehicles and its rear ends.

So if people are more aware or there's like maybe traffic enforcement or something.

So we're moving forward with the study where you just finished the existing conditions report and it's available on the website or I can email it to anybody who's interested.

And now Kennelston and Associates, the VDOT contractors working on alternatives.

Yeah, and even though it's not explicitly a bike ped study, that is coming up a lot about how we can integrate, you know, bike ped crossing facilities.

I think one of the big things we talked about last time was making sure we understand where people are trying to go.

that requires them to be crossing 29 in certain places, especially for recreational facilities.

So Lucinda is doing a really good job of making sure that that stays on the radar for the consultants.

Hey, can you guys hear me?

Yeah.

Sorry, I wasn't multitasking.

Nothing new, just that

We're sort of continuing to, now that Monticello owns South Lego on the other side of the Rivanna, we're really entering into the right of way discussion with the county and working with Tim Padolino on that.

Planning for possibly some leadership kind of level county Monticello visits this fall to really start to see the future potential of that extension of the Old Mills Trail.

There's one other.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Yeah, sorry, two quick things.

Thank you, Sandy, for pulling this together.

I know that it was a bit of a mystery for you.

And I think it's been great.

And that presentation was amazing.

such that like once the recording's up I'm going to share that because people are going to want to see it.

So this idea of having a good learning experience as part of the meeting was really smart.

And then the other thing that I was going to say is that if folks are interested in what's on the minds of both state assembly and senators, tomorrow the Virginia outdoor caucus is gathering at 8 o'clock

That reminded me of one last thing is that Jennifer Wampler reached out to me.

They're updating the statewide outdoor plan.

And so we are going to be scheduling a meeting.

I need to get more information from her to send out a save the date, but in November to look at their plan.

And so I think, I haven't spent a lot of time in that, but I know that that will impact some of you all.

I will make sure to get that on your calendars as early as possible.

If you all think of anything that you want to make sure that we cover in our meeting next month, certainly feel free to reach out.

But otherwise, I think I'm mostly going to leave these agendas really driven by you all and what you have happening.

So if nothing else, we can leave it on the calendar.

And if we decide that we don't need to meet, we can certainly make that decision about month by month.

But I'll go ahead and schedule it for next month.

All right, thanks everyone.