Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority Meeting   3/25/2026

No, no.

She's like, are you Charles Hope?

Sally Duncan, Albemarle County.

Great.

a little more difficult now that we have more love to hear you.

So I know conversationally, you can hear one another.

I'm in the corner.

You're facing away from me, so please be gentle.

Do you want to sit closer?

And then is there a motion to accept the agenda?

So moved.

All in favor?

Or do we roll call?

We can do it either way, I think.

All opposed?

Any abstentions?

All right.

Good.

And then we also have to approve the draft for our board meeting notice from Draymond-Garry.

Any adjustments or notes that anyone wants to make about that decision?

All right, I will entertain a motion.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Any extensions?

All right.

And now it's on to matters from the public.

If anybody from the public who's online would like to speak, please raise your hand using the raise hand feature at the bottom of your screen.

Anybody in the room?

Okay.

All right.

Great.

Then we'll move on to the Regional Housing Partnership appointment.

Yes.

So the Regional Housing Partnership has in their charter that they would, in their bylaws, that they have a member, the chair from

the Regional Transit Partnership as a member of the Regional Housing Partnership to represent transit.

I can kick off discussion on this because our county board has already talked about this when we were doing our board appointment.

Offhand, I actually don't know how many

OK. We have found that since our main is the chair, the alternate is basically not used because the main is always there because it's the chair.

And in the past, the Diana was the representative for the

And frankly, we treated this in a way for Albemarle County people on the RHP.

I think we were hoping to be able to continue to have people on the RHP, but I recognize that maybe y'all have a different opinion on that.

So, now it's preparing to roll off the RHP in the near future.

And there will be a two-year appointment that they'll have from Albemarle County.

And these are the two people who are both okay, the parallel RHD.

It would be a county cell that one of the two of us can be the RHD rule appointment.

I was already planning on it,

for staff.

I don't know.

I can get back to you on that.

A net term when it's out.

We revisited it as a question during our

This afternoon was going to be the first RHA meeting that I was going to sit in on, so it is kind of weird to do this.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Any other discussion?

Any other comments?

All right.

Do we have a motion?

I move that we appoint Mike Pruitt as the Regional Housing Partnership appointment.

All in favor?

All right.

I just wanted to talk a little bit this morning about some of the

Transylvania budget items that were considered during the General Assembly session as well as a couple of pieces of legislation that may be of interest.

You're probably aware in the General Assembly adjourned March 14th, they didn't get finished.

Still have this little thing called the next two-year budget that is a long way from being born.

The hang-up is not over how much money do you appropriate for this side of the other thing, it's how much money are we going to have.

to appropriate.

And that's due to a big gap between the House and the Senate in terms of the resources that they are recognizing as being available primarily to Senate Committee 2 to validate the sales tax for data center equipment.

But anyway, the General Assembly is budget comprehensive.

We continue to try to work toward a compromise as of right now.

The General Assembly is going to be coming back to Richmond on April 23rd for a special session on budget, which would be April 22nd is the day that they get back together anyway to consider actions proposed by the governor.

Special session would be in the following day.

A couple of things, budget-wise, and I'll kind of review what was in the House and the Senate amendments that were proposed back in the latter part of February when we did a

transit.

The House had recommended, and a lot of this is going to be focused on Northern Virginia and WMATA, Washington, Washington, metropolitan area transit authority.

Thank you.

House proposed a little over $150 million across the two years for WMATA operating to support WMATA.

That's going to be matched by a like amount

in Northern Virginia from the North Virginia Transportation Commission.

That was the main thing that the House proposed.

The Senate, again, relied on that elimination of the sales and use tax for data centers along with an increase in the transit occupancy tax in Northern Virginia, was able to generate about $290 million that would be put forward transit.

Biggest chunk of that

also was for WMATA, the good news also some additional money that in general funds for transit capital as well as some formula updates for state-run transit.

Again, that's where each side stands with regard to transit funding in general.

That will be part of the conversation

Once the budget conferees get to deciding how much money they have to procreate, my guess is that we'll see funding for WMATA in some safer form.

I don't think that we will see a lot beyond that.

Others may have different faults on that.

But that's really kind of the bare minimum I see that they would need to do.

And I may try to tackle some of that stuff.

It's really hard to tell.

A couple of other things that were included, a language amendment in the House, DRPT folks could speak to this better than I probably, but the language would be to provide authority for DRPT to use reserves from the mass transit funds in order to provide short-term loans to transit entities to backstop 5310 and 5311 funds if there was ability in the

due to activities at the federal level.

And then both plans with the House and the Senate versions of the budget contained language stability for DRPT to conduct a statewide review related to funding opportunities for transit-oriented development around existing and those transit and rail stations.

And that would include an analysis of potential barriers that housing production

and Economic Development.

As you know, there's a lot of focus during the session, both from the new administration as well as from leadership in the General Assembly on affordability broadly.

Housing was one key component to them in terms of what they were trying to address.

Housing, of course, also applied them to Peter being able to have access to public transportation.

That's where we are on the budget.

Again, in general, 30,000-foot view clients

Any questions on that?

And before we move on to everybody's questions, can you just remind us of the key dates?

Yes.

General assemblies reconvened session when they were returned to considering amendments and vetoes proposed by the governor in the same state beginning on December.

Then Thursday, April 23rd, they were actually convened in special session.

Hard to tell at this point.

It may depend on where

budget conferees are in their work, if that work is still ongoing, it may be that the General Assembly comes in on that that Thursday and reconvenes and then everybody will be sent back home for the exception of the conferees who will be coming to work.

Thank you.

All right, a couple of bills.

There were companion bills in the House and the Senate that would have addressed transit funding.

House Bill 900 and Senate Bill 730 were bills that were going to also revise the tax structure that we have in Virginia, doing some reductions, proposing some reductions to the sales and use tax, broadening its application to include

Digital Services, Digital Property beginning in January.

That is how we will be posing to generate, excuse me, funding for transportation and transit primarily in Northern Virginia again, but then also for other reasons throughout the state.

There was also a proposal for those other regions to have a regional hybrid use-worthy, which I believe is what we have now for EME.

Is that correct?

I believe so, yeah.

A few other bills would have also, again, focused on funding for Northern Virginia, but also through a highway user fee generated by the state, but did not

and changing things with regard to the tax structure.

They would have generated funds by moving some things around.

That was House Bill 1179 instead of the 638.

First half of the session, those did not go anywhere, as we say, so they died prior to the midpoint of the session.

There was a broad coalition of transit entities

North Virginia and other parts of the state, I was able to kind of latch on and listen in on to some of those meetings that were advocating for those bills.

When they went down, then the attention really shifted to try to focus on the budget and try to get that money included in the budget.

That coalition had largely coalesced around about a $200 million ask in the budget, which would have been

Again, that $150 million change for LALATA and then just under $50 million for transit needs in other parts of the state.

So again, that is kind of still out there, but they would probably be pushing for with the copteries.

But again, it's all been around with this budget conference committee is trying to figure out the budget for the next two years.

House Bill 200 was passed unanimously.

It has to do with DRPT's transit ridership incentive program, the TRIP program, to make that statewide, as opposed to being an urban-only program.

And I thank Grant.

He gave me some good analysis of that legislation as it was coming through, but I think just in short, designed to provide some more flexibility to the CTV and DRPT in the ability to distribute TRIP funding.

Again, that passed unanimously.

House Bill 564, Senate Bill 583, would allow localities to authorize the use of bus obstruction monitoring systems by public transit agencies in order to enforce any local ordinances that you may have related to parking, stopping, standing in bus stop zones and lanes that are resumed through transit.

Interestingly, that passed the House pretty easily.

It was an urban area where we could send it, but it did pass.

and both of those two bills I mentioned there now before the government for consideration.

And then the last pair of bills I'll mention, House Bill 547, Senate Bill 731.

It's a bill we had seen, I know at least in 2025, if we saw in the last two years, passed the General Assembly that then was deflated by then Governor Yumpkin.

And it would stipulate that a governing body or a transportation district commission that contracts

When a private company, to provide transportation services, has to require that contracted company to provide its employees with compensation or benefits that would be equivalent to what they would be providing if they were fully by the entity.

Those passed in the House and Senate on a party line vote, as they've done, again, at least last year.

And they are before the government should operate.

That is all I have.

All right, thanks so much.

Before we move on to the transit prioritization study, I realized I made a little mistake and needed some people behind me.

Great, thank you, I'm sorry.

I'm not great with this.

I think I have to, yeah, because I have to share the screen first, or no, I have to put it up first and then show you.

Yeah, but now you've got to figure out how to figure it.

Good morning.

While Lucinda is pulling that up, I do have two colleagues that are on Zoom with us today as well.

We're really fortunate on our team for this study that we have Emma Stockton and Scott Boone from Cambridge Systematics as part of the team.

Cambridge has done a lot of prioritization work

nationwide, but particularly in Virginia.

So if you've heard SmartScale, if you've heard DRPT Merit, they were on the consultant team for the development of both of those prioritization methodologies.

So we're able to, with their help, to lean into things that are already out there to support this.

I'm not sure how to get rid of that.

Yeah.

I'm not a big fan of podiums anyway.

I can make it work.

Thank you.

Well, good morning.

It's a pleasure to be here today and give you an update on where we are with the Regional Transit Service Prioritization and Implementation Feasibility Study.

Very long title.

So I'm going to start by giving you a quick overview at your last meeting.

We gave you a very rushed overview of the study at the end of the meeting, but just wanted to touch on a couple of things.

Just a reminder, you have a regional transit vision plan that was developed back in 2022.

That had a constrained list of

of services based on the funding that you had available, but also had a vision plan element, an unconstrained network of services.

Your localities, your transit agencies, other neighboring regional transit services all have studies that have been done as well.

So this study's pulling all of that information together, putting it into a common context.

So we're kind of making all of those services kind of the same.

So same kind of

assumptions around benefits, same assumptions around costs, so getting to a common baseline.

We're not talking about providers.

Everything is very provider agnostic, but trying to get to a common baseline so we can then prioritize them based on the technical prioritization process and develop an implementation strategy for you.

that looks at funding that you currently have available, what kind of things can be done in the short term, and then looks at some different timeframes or strategies for mid and long term investments.

Really feeding into what David just briefed you about with the legislative process.

WMATA is going to get funding out of this session, but WMATA had a big study that had been done about regional needs and funding gaps.

And so this kind of analysis, whether it's WMATA or in previous years, it's been

The Central Virginia Transportation Authority really does serve as a backbone for making a case for additional funding investment and being able to articulate what that additional investment could get for the region.

So that's where we will end up in about six months.

So we're really building off of the regional transit vision, not only for the list of services, but also reflecting back on the guiding principles of that study and the goals that were articulated in that study so that we're capturing those elements in the prioritization methodology as well.

Additionally, we've looked at, I think it's 21 or 22,

plans across the region and cataloged all of the transit service improvements that are proposed in those studies.

I think the Excel table, when I have a planner on my team, when he got done, it was about 40 pages long.

Zoe's nodding because everybody's like, that's a lot.

When you pull all of that information together in one place, the good news is a lot of those things overlap.

The bad news is they overlap, but they're not exactly the same.

So we're starting out, we're pulling all this information together, then we're gonna optimize it before we prioritize it.

So we're making some refinements on those strategies.

When we look at the type of improvements that are outlined in those studies, they really fall into three different types of improvement.

Probably the biggest bucket or category is expanded route coverage.

So that is new routes, extensions of existing routes, realignments of existing routes, introduction of high capacity transit, bus rapid transit, and also

Introduction and Continuation of Microtransit.

So that's sort of the biggest category, but there are also two other categories that become very important.

That's improving frequencies at different times of day.

So that's changing the characteristics of service that then changes things like ridership and access, and also looking at extended hours of service and providing service at times of day that you don't currently have service.

So as we got started, one of the things that we wanted to do right out of the gate is really engage key stakeholders, get input and feedback as we started to think about prioritization.

So we started by meeting with several groups, and I would say in some small focus group type settings.

So we started with a small focus group with county staff, we did something similar with city staff, and then the third one was

more of a regional group with the PDC staff and with Jaunt.

We talked about what's important.

Is it coverage?

Is it ridership?

What resonates?

What do you want to see reflected as most important in the implementation strategy?

We took what we heard in those three small groups, refined our approach a little bit, and then we met with a broader set of stakeholders that included DRPT, we included school transportation representatives from both the city and the county, UVA, the Charlottesville Area Alliance, and the Piedmont Environmental Council to broaden that net, get some different perspectives, and to continue to refine what that prioritization strategy could look like.

So coming out of those discussions, the top priorities that we heard was the importance of growing ridership.

Ridership's important for a lot of reasons.

That's the backbone of the service.

We're helping meet those travel needs, but ridership's also how a lot of funding that comes to the region is determined.

So the more riders you have, the more funding that you get in terms of a federal formula and state formula.

We also heard about the importance of providing transit access

to more people and to essential destinations.

We've heard a lot of that from the school systems about the need to move people between schools and job locations and activity centers.

We also heard a lot about increased frequency.

So we took that information and we worked to turn priorities into prioritization criteria.

So taking those concepts, how do we then measure impact of individual transit

Services or changes measure those benefits to be able to prioritize them.

And we really got to two key criteria.

We're either increasing the intensity of service or we're increasing the footprint of service.

So first with increasing the intensity of service, we achieve this primarily by increasing frequency.

by introducing more high capacity transit options, introducing technologies that allow our systems to move more efficiently on our highway network, things like transit signal priority.

It does include a focus on serving communities that rely on transit.

Again, we're trying to tie back to those goals from the Regional Transit Vision Plan.

Providing convenient alternatives in congested areas and providing service that is better than hourly.

in outer areas where that's possible.

As we look to increase intensity, increasing intensity is more likely to increase our ridership because you're more frequent, you're more regular.

It is driving that increase in ridership when you look at experience and at research.

The second criteria that we're looking at is increasing our footprint.

And so we do this primarily by extending or modifying our route structure, adding new routes, really kind of stretching our systems out in terms of service area, but also in hours of operation and introducing or expanding microtransit services where you cast a broader net where maybe you have less density of population.

So these types of measures, we're focusing on making sure everybody has some type of access.

So really looking at coverage.

Again, providing convenient alternatives in congested areas, and also making those connections to activity centers, jobs, education, and healthcare.

So when we talk about increasing footprint, when we increase footprint, it's more likely to increase access, but not necessarily ridership.

So how do we measure those?

So those are concepts, but how do we turn them into numbers?

Because we need to be able to quantify what each of these services does in order to prioritize them.

So when we talk about increasing intensity, so increasing frequency and that kind of saturation of service,

We're able to measure that by measuring or counting the number of people with access to increased frequency of service based on that specific service improvement that we're looking at.

In doing that, we would look at providing a bonus for being able to serve a larger proportion of low income households, providing high frequency service to people that don't already have it.

So if you're in an area that has maybe 60 minutes service, but we're able to get you to 30 minutes service, that would be a bonus in terms of scoring or prioritizing.

And then again, that goal of moving from 60 minutes service.

For increasing footprint, again, we're gonna measure by based on people, but we'd be looking at how many more people have access to transit service across the week based on those individual service improvements that we're looking at.

We would provide a bonus or extra credit where we're able to provide service to a larger number of low income households again.

And this is where we would tie in those activity centers or be a bonus where we're able to connect

schools, healthcare, recreation, those big activity centers.

If a particular route or service improvement we're looking at improves that service, there would be a bonus or something to account for that as well.

The goal in looking at measures is, you know, we could make this very complicated and come up with something that's really technical, but we want to come up with some measures that the data is readily available, it's something that's easy to baseline,

We don't deal with big issues of data quality.

These are things we can analyze pretty regularly and easily with GIS tools.

And then that's something that CARTA can then replicate in the future to look at how do you prioritize down the line, whether it's for funding or for other purposes.

So kind of twofold.

We're trying to come up with a plan for you, but we also want to leave you with a solid methodology to grow from.

So if you have two criteria or two sets of measures that you're looking at, how do you weight them for prioritization?

You could make them have the same value and make them 50-50, like points would be awarded the same for intensity and footprint.

But based on what we heard from stakeholders and the emphasis on ridership,

What we are recommending is a 60-40 split.

So a slightly heavier weight towards intensity, but not leaving behind the need to expand coverage as well.

I will say this is, you look at any kind of system optimization effort, any regional transit planning effort, you always come down to a coverage versus frequency conversation.

So this is a very common point in transit planning.

There are different ways to split it, but this is fairly common and it is reflective of what we heard from the stakeholders.

So with that, I've rattled through a lot of stuff.

So I want to pause and see, kind of take a temperature for the group because

We're taking this strategy or this methodology and are ready to start applying it to services so that we can come back to you at your next meeting and start showing you what a lineup looks like.

Actually, two questions.

First, does anybody know if the vision plan

Did not.

Okay.

No, I don't think I have.

So we looked at the short plan of system optimization plan.

We designed around

taking the existing footprint and maximizing rash.

That was the primary focus there.

That was because we were, one, trying to get out of that spiral we were using around the ship, 1,000 radders per year.

So that was just a little, you know, foundational component.

But the growth component is where we transit.

CAT specifically sees the growth in that

George Twentynine, we've got to get out of that corridor, how we need that area.

Potentially, not necessarily going to the airport, but all that corridor is where a lot of the activity centers are that people want to go to.

And we know there's a lot of activity coming down that corridor going to the university.

So we don't want to ignore that, but we also understand that there is a need that is, depending on what group you ask, they want more ridership,

High frequency ridership on some of our most popular routes, five or seven, trialing, and then when there are problems that we can't ignore because of no trans-independent ridership characteristics on other routes.

So we've had this conversation a lot.

And so again, that's something that we can run at 60-40 and we can easily pivot if it's not, if a list doesn't come out kind of reflecting what you think your regional values are.

Grant, to your point, I think when we pulled the project list together, it's probably pretty evenly split around frequency enhancements and expansion.

I would think that our region benefits planning in the way we are designed, it benefits friends and planning, and it's naturally inclined toward an intensity-focused design just because we're, at least in the county, we're very intentional about the places we have people and the places we show.

Even if we did happen to have, in the middle of the Whitehall district,

Not even though it was a disproportionate concentration of people, as a matter of policy, we would not deploy transit to that area.

Because we say very prescriptively, this is where development is and this is where development is.

And we are very, I would say, also conscious about, and outside of our development,

even if they do happen to have a higher percentage of people.

Can I ask a clarifying question?

So you said a matter of policy, is it the policy that in the past, because you haven't generated a certain level of

people in a certain corridor that you don't want to deploy on transit because I think even in the rural model where you have a concentration of people who want to just be light in the mood and attractive and congestive where you can get to choose between an anchor line and that connection to get them to, whether it's a healthcare issue, grocery shopping,

Even as I age in place, even in the real session, at some point in time, I think it will be a need for transit.

I would say our rural urban divide, I feel like this doesn't always get communicated to our neighbors in the city very clearly.

But is as much a cost saving consideration as anything else.

And I agree we are quite explicit in the system saying that the urban areas receive a level of service, record them, of course.

And then we are not, it would never even cross our minds to extend micropat, for example, to a part of the rural area, even though there are certainly people who would want to get fixed with a letter.

But I hear your point at some point.

You are not trying to encourage that level of sprawl.

It might happen anyway, but if it does, I think if I understand what you're saying, those folks have to understand that they're not going to have the same services as you.

Also, I should just add,

I'm currently trying to speak descriptively, not normatively, from my own position.

Something I've been kind of, I think, squeaky wheeled out is that I don't think, especially in the more working class rural Southside, that that is how everyone thinks.

I'll just say, you know, when we say there is not transit, you're equating transit with fixed route service.

There is transit in Alton County and it's there seven days a week for ADA and five days a week for the entirety of the county.

That's a good point.

I was originally preparing this again in response to that.

It is a level of service, it's not the same level of service.

It is absolutely a valuable service.

It provides that extension, but it is not the same level as being able to hop on a fixed-child bus.

To me, if I may follow my comment, which is this kind of weight feels like a thing that you do for a short term

Saab Gap sort of thing like you were talking about.

We need to do what we can to increase our ridership as quickly as possible.

If that is intensity and frequency, not only is that a benefit to the ridership that we have, but ideally it will increase ridership, then we get money and we can do better things that are more expensive.

Because I think what this graph doesn't show, and it's not trying to, is the investment needed to do both of those things is also different.

Challenging because you are resource constrained and you are doing things to optimize what you have now and the answer very well may be different.

If you have, if there's more money that flows through DRPT, if there's some kind of regional based funding source, like that whole discussion starts to sound very different.

But what we're trying to get you to is here's some things that you can do in the short term that are quick wins to show CARTA and the region is working.

to really boost transit in the region.

And here's what we could do if we had more and what that looks like out into the future.

So it's probably something I think you're spot on that you would want to adjust as you start to move towards something that's more where you have a steady dedicated funding source to be able to do that.

Ben looks like you.

With your qualifier of the short term,

Right, and I don't know if that's setting a specific metric or goal for ridership specifically in the region, but we do have to sort of think about when do we have enough investment in that ridership where we can start making decisions.

Garland is fine.

I don't have the spirit of anything Ben just said.

But I also want to remind everybody that from a fixed route transit component, we really haven't done the full investment on frequency for all of our routes yet to really get a fair assessment on whether the ridership is safe.

What I mean by that is some of our routes are still 60 minutes.

You know you can't roll a ridership if it's 60 minutes.

And that's impossible to do.

A 30-minute baseline is where you start.

15-minute is great.

It's really good, robust service.

10 and even better, five minutes, we'll never get there, but that's out of the gold standard.

Whether, you know, we're being trained with agencies.

But 30 minutes is where I think you would start to have a real discussion, at this level, about whether we made significant investments and whether we are

because where we have, you'll see in my presentation where we have the highest frequencies, we have the highest ridership, right?

That's the correlation, but we haven't done that once again in the other rounds to really assess where they would have higher ridership and we had better frequency.

So that's the piece that we are trying to get to, but we can't ignore this thing before we split because there's areas we haven't really touched

So like when we put micro-traveling plays, we use paint-cut demand.

We know there's paint-cut demand for services up on 29.

We know that.

People have asked us for it.

We get emails all the time about, can we get service up on 29?

I started my career in long-range planning and there's a reason transit planning is done in shorter increments because things change and you have to be able to adapt and so to Garland's point I think there is there's a logic that's already built in that we do this every five I'm looking at Grant but it's like every five four five there you go

Just as the board considers this balance between

It is important to acknowledge that there is a financial incentive at the federal level to increase ridership.

I know Jen's been looking at this with Garland very closely and says CAT specifically is considered a small urban agency or 5307 funding, which is the federal urban transportation funding.

And there's this like set aside for small transit intensive cities, state funding,

And if you meet these performance objectives, you get financial bonuses every year.

And so that just makes the case for maybe considering more intensity improvements potentially, because there's a financial incentive.

And then on the state side, our formula is changing, but currently it does favor agencies that perform better, have higher financial.

I would say I think there's a potential to lead the independence of the organizations, but creating a method for us to share our flagship information voluntarily, and I think it will relieve everybody in their autonomy.

And I don't wish we needed nothing to do.

So we're actually looking at that.

I actually have the same plan, looking at a possibility of trying to figure out how to get that done.

We're getting close.

I don't want to say anything like that.

A lot of you hear it.

Well, I'm not sure if that's where we're getting at.

There is definitely a space where you combine numbers and it has real tangible financial benefits for the region, not specifically for CAT, but the federal funds are allocated or portioned to the region.

The state funds are portioned by system, but the federal funds are portioned to the region.

So if there is definitely, to your point, a high benefit in working collaboratively,

Great.

I have a question.

Yes.

Why not 70-30?

I'm not sure of it.

So it's a balancing act.

No, do I really want to answer it now?

It's a balancing act because as much as we heard about ridership, we also heard about the importance of

Connecting Activity Centers, and you need the coverage aspect to do that.

That was particularly important in talking to, I'm looking at Tonya, talking to school folks, you know, having access, transit access in areas that don't have transit access now.

I think we did 70-30, maybe second or third generation, because this method will change.

But it will never stay 60-40 because that will build up the model.

We will have increased the intensity and frequency on routes.

Can I ask a quick follow-up?

What strategies are prioritized?

It's going to be more frequent service.

It's going to be maybe smaller extensions of existing routes.

It's going to be less reach further out.

Does it affect your daily workflow?

Or are you just kind of like, okay, we've done this for a while now, especially this.

Is there like, okay, when we get this funding, 60% goes here, 40% goes there.

No, not at all.

So this is just how you prioritize projects to kind of put together an implementation strategy.

I'll give you a real world example.

And Garland can correct me because I think he was probably part of this.

So when the Pulse opened in Richmond in 2018, at the same time GRTC redid all of their route structure.

And they had this conversation around frequency versus coverage.

They had a very coverage heavy system.

They went to a very frequency heavy system and kind of contracted around the Pulse as a spine.

I'm pretty sure it was pretty close to that.

So we were charged with such a thing.

So to your point though, that is what launched with the Pulse and they're constantly adjusting their service profile and they've kind of,

leaned back into a little more coverage and restored service in some of the areas.

And I mean, they pulled back service in some areas, which is a little different than the conversation we're having.

But to your point, it's not forever.

For prioritization, it will be quantified in terms of looking at the number, basically the number of people that have increased frequency on that, very much simplified.

We'll just go to number of people with increased frequency on the blue side, number of people with increased access on the red side to get kind of impact, but then we'll weight those two measures to get to a final kind of prioritization score and we'll weight the intensity side more than we'll weight the coverage.

So every service improvement is gonna have numbers in both categories and then it's do you average them or do you

Okay.

There's people for both.

Either people now served, otherwise not served, or people served by region.

But it's really saying how long do you use this before you recalibrate?

Because if we went bold and said 70-30 because it gives us the cash to then really expand access,

shortly thereafter.

We made a tiny runway of using this methodology to inform all of our prioritization and said, okay, we hit that benchmark within this time frame.

Let's recalibrate back to 60-40.

And then we'll use this methodology to prioritize a little more access.

And then you recalibrate.

So let me caution everyone from how we acted within

GRT students, chain leads, at TA.

When you talk as a board about making the decision to change a model where you have transit service today and you pull service from them, be careful about being sued for disenfranchising the area that has service.

It doesn't matter whether it was terrible service or not.

You need to pull the service from them, and if you're going to pretend to be, well, enriching it, you would be getting sued for doing whatever.

League of Women Voters, NAACP, or any other group that would come up and aid the group that wanted to challenge the service planning that GRTZ did.

So I'm just saying, you got to be careful about the balance.

I know everybody, it's great to try to put all your eggs in one basket to get that money.

But you can't leave people stranded when they've had service before.

Because the moment you do that, now you're going to get the FTA to force you to put it back, and potentially put it back in a higher level of service.

So be careful about you lose control of your system.

That has happened to our systems.

It almost happened to DRPT.

We were very close.

We had to be filling everything we did from the folks to all of the redesign.

And I physically went to the FTA

and on two or three calls trying to defend what we were doing to make sure that we were okay making those changes.

And I appreciate you saying that.

And I think that I was one, well, let me ask my second question and then I'll come back to that.

I think I might have had a moment in one of those meetings going, are you talking about school buses?

It's more of providing additional access that there are a lot of people at

Tanya and Zoe can correct, please jump in and correct me.

But it was, not everybody is going to school and leaving school on the same schedule.

So school transportation meets a certain age, but there are a lot of kids that have an early dismissal and have jobs or stay late and do other things.

And I guess my question back to that is,

Can you not go bold and still provide a not CAT but public transit service at a crappy 60-minute service to not get sued to fill that gap?

So if we said, uh-oh, we're going to 70-30 because we want a quick hit before we recalibrate to 60-30 for our methodology.

And you're like, that means to make 70-30, it actually does stop.

The 60 to 75 minute service I've got in this one neighborhood.

OK. And you're worried that that's not because it's going to be a red flag for the lawsuit basically.

So as long as you, so when you say remove service, removing the fixed routes, you could do that as long as you suffer with something else.

I didn't doubt it.

I just thought if the service there is 75 minutes right now and that's what you're worried about, it has to match that because you said it doesn't matter how bad the service is, it's just that it's available.

I was just curious about that.

Because everyone, you'll see in our, we built a round ship, right?

We built a round ship.

Every single round has a round ship, right?

We may not want it to be where

we would like it to be, but there are people who are dependent on that service in that area.

There are almost seven new crowds, first of all, you can't get it, there's 60 new crowds in our system, but those we constantly get asked for improvements for those rounds to make them through the most very busy.

And I will say Zoe, she walked around, she was like,

Yes, so much of our system goes clockwise around downtown.

You can come in from the northeast side and transfer downtown and go up to the northwest side.

And part of that can be improved with frequency.

Part of it, I would say, it just is other modes.

It's small, can you define anything that's clockwise?

Yes, we're there and we're connecting some public transportation model that allows you to connect.

I've got to wrap up for you on this.

If you're good with the measures, think about this as being in a spreadsheet.

We're going to take all these measures and then it's the equation you put at the bottom.

So to go from 60-40 to 70-30 or to 50-50,

is not, like it's not a heavy lift from a calculation standpoint.

So at the risk, my friends online will let me know later if I promise that they'll do something that they were planning on.

But I think we can look and see like what does it do in the framework of what does the project list look like to go from 60-40 to 70-30.

If that will give you some comfort, my sense is it's probably not gonna change it a whole lot, but we can look at it.

That's not a big ask.

So, next steps.

Getting the sense today that we've got consensus on moving forward, we'll go back and work on that methodology, apply it to the list of service improvements.

Along with that, we're developing consistent operating costs, but we're also developing capital costs.

So that is assuming that where we're having

New service that we would make sure that we'd have things like bus shelters and appropriate facilities at a bus stop.

So we're trying to capture all of those costs.

In May, we'll come back with a draft prioritized list of service improvements and do another presentation for this board.

It would be online and so it would be

kind of envisioned a couple of pop-ups, but maybe with some local events.

And then we were able to do QR codes that can either go out in community newsletters, can go on CAT and Jaunt vehicles so that somebody can scan and capture information.

I think the only unfortunate part is in the summer, we lose a lot of the student population.

So we've, as a group, we've really kind of struggled a little bit with the timing on that, but

Quick questions about engagement.

So that was, we worked with Taylor and Lucinda, really pulled from the previous regional transit partnership folks that if

Yeah, this is Emma.

I can hear the front of the room clearer.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah, we have external lights, so they should be coming.

What the hell?

I don't, I'm having trouble again.

I don't know how to, I need to get back to share the screen, but I can't seem to get out of the full screen mode.

Well, we've got some kinks to work out coming back in here, huh?

Sorry about that, folks.

Oh, now there's nothing there.

You're sharing it with Zoom.

I appreciate the humor.

Yeah, I can't see it on here though.

You know what I mean?

Like it's not duplicating the screen the way it's supposed to be.

Are you able to share that up here if I plug you in?

And then, Garland, if you will just say, please advance the slide.

Yeah, like this is, and this is a brand new computer, so that's fun.

There we go.

I think she's done it.

Test.

Can they hear us now?

It's us.

Yes, I can hear you all now.

All right.

So, Charlesburg Transit System 1975 to 2010.

In 2010, it became what we know today as Charlesburg Area Transit.

I'm going to go through a little history about kind of some of the major milestones in the system.

1975,

started off as CTS, the city took over the school bus system in 1985, 1999, the free trolley came with the connection between downtown and the university, 2007, UTS and the city basically created an agreement to allow ridership agreement between the university and

and CAT to allow for their students and faculty to use the system.

Also, the Transit Center was constructed, which was a major milestone for us, getting us a Transit Hub Transfer Center.

CTS was renamed to CAT in 2010.

We bought our first hybrid buses in 2011.

We were really bleeding edge there, not cutting edge.

So that was first generation hybrid buses.

2020, we moved to a zero fare system.

We have not returned.

That was COVID.

2023, we introduced microtransit, one of the fastest growing microtransit products in the Commonwealth.

2024, we became unionized.

So we're feeling the effects of that.

We have our first contract, which we're in the second year of that contract.

We will start the third year this July, and then we will actually probably September, October, start negotiations for a new contract.

And then 2026, this year, we'll have our first fully electric

School buses and transit buses.

Transit buses should be delivered early May, late May early June.

So I want to give you a breakdown on the transit systems, how many folks do we are employing.

We have 109 transit staff and 39 on the pupil side of the house.

You can see the breakdown, 66 full-time drivers on transit, 10 full-time drivers on the pupil side.

And just a note, today we have, of those 66, 62, because we just had one retirement, are filled.

We just sent all four letters to three two days ago.

And I'm assuming that they're probably going to accept.

So we'll have 65.

And then we have a wait list for five to six right now.

So we should be able to fill the last position fairly soon.

All right, our services.

We do fixed route.

And we also oversee the microtransit product.

And we also oversee through a contract with the schools for pupil transportation.

Fixed route.

We have 11 routes, key components for us.

11 routes and a free trolley system.

We call it free, but everything is free now.

It makes that major connection between us and the university.

We have services in Charlottesville, in the urban parts of Albemarle County.

All of our buses are ADA accessible.

And we're classified as a small urban direct recipient, which means that we don't have to necessarily go through DRPT to apply for grant opportunities.

We're allowed to do that on our own, which means we also have to follow all the rules in the larger transit system and when we're receiving that.

One.

Help.

One.

That's all I did.

Thank you.

So you need to go forward, right?

One, one more.

All right.

So I'll give you the mapping of where we are today.

What you see is the full system map on the left-hand side, and then the free trolley route on the right-hand side of the free trolley route.

On the left-hand side is the full system map.

All right.

Three-year fixed route ridership.

I wanted to highlight the fact that when I first got here, our ridership model was declining.

In COVID period of time, FY20, our number had dropped to roughly around 600,000 riders.

Just a little over 600,000 riders and we've been steadily climbing out of that.

We're not back to full strength.

We were about 1.9, 1.7, 1.8 the three years before declining ridership before COVID hit.

So we're steadily starting to increase and you can see in our next slide, can you do the next one before I mess this up?

So we got the 5-7 in the trolley, which basically accounts for 53% of our total ridership.

That's on weekday, and then 55% those two routes on Saturday.

If you look at the frequency on these, the 5-7 are our highest frequency routes on the trolley also.

The ridership on the 7 is the highest, and you can see the ridership is basically 1400 per weekday, a little over 1100 on a Saturday, which averages out to about 23.6 riders per revenue hour, and 13.4 on the 5 per revenue hour.

For a total ridership on a daily basis of 5,279, decent numbers, we can do better than that.

We're striving to get our numbers up.

So CAT fleet breakdown, wanted to show you how we have been using the federal money to buy vehicles.

So right now in our system, 33 of our vehicles are diesel.

We had 10 hybrid vehicles in our system.

We have been able to retire seven of them.

So we only have three today, and then we have two electric buses that are on their way.

So that big breakdown to 29, of the 33 diesel vehicles, nine of them are 29 footers.

And 23 of them are 35-footers.

We also have four trolleys.

We have seven body-on chassis.

Those are smaller vehicles.

Mm-hmm.

Any hybrid?

No.

OK.

Even though, so you said bleeding edge as they are.

We know technology improves.

So when we did the alternative fuel study, what was put on the table was the full transition removing diesel as an option period.

So if we wanted to revisit that, it is actually very possible.

That is a decision that council would have to make.

We'd have to increase our funding to do so and have a discussion with DRPT.

In the next funding cycle, not this one cycle, we're outside of that window.

And that is something that council looked like.

So if you wanted to, so really what I'm saying now is because the funding decisions, we have a model that we actually tell them how many vehicles we're going to buy.

Depending on what type of vehicle, it changes their funding request because a regular diesel vehicle used to be $580,000 for us.

It's now $740,000 and that is a significant increase in one year.

We don't know what that number is going to be next year, but we do know

that the hybrid models used to be about $100,000 in difference.

They are now almost equivalent to the fully battery electric ones.

So it's really no difference in the amount of money we're spending.

And so it's about $100,000 less than what we would be paying for a battery electric vehicle.

Hybrids can bridge that gap.

We still have, we have hybrids in our systems today and there's still a little challenges.

So we're, we're going to build out the facilities.

We just need to, we're trying to focus in on whether we're building our facilities for battery electric or hydrogen, or now if we're going to,

The hybrid model then that potentially changes the model because you will set up the mechanic shop for a diesel shop different than you set it up for battery electric or hydrogen.

So we do need to have those decisions as we move forward.

And that changes the calculus and it changes the profile of what we'll be building out when we build the new facility.

So those decisions need to be made pretty soon.

Next one.

All right, MicroCat, one of my favorite subjects.

Great study that was done by this body in conjunction with the county.

The product is wonderful.

We've had a lot of folks ask us how we've done it.

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears, right?

But I would say, can you go to the next slide?

It's app-based.

And one of the things that we'll talk about in the next couple of slides is that there's two corridors and we're basically focusing on 29 corridor and the pan tops.

Corridor service is out on the 29 corridor.

They made adjustments from the original footprint.

It does hit the airport.

It does bring in the school.

which was also something not in the original footprint but working with V who was a great partner and they made the adjustments that didn't actually cost the county any more money which was awesome in the footprint model.

So one of the things people always ask is that, how are people using the system?

Provides you with two heat maps, origins and destination.

The blue and the origin, you can see that it's pretty, services are being asked all over the place.

And there's not really one major focus area, as you can see.

It's pretty well spread out, which is great.

That means people are using the services to get to where they wanted to do in the original model.

It was contemplated that you were not going to be able to go between the two zones.

That was one of the first things, even before we launched the service, we were able to accomplish that and go between.

And you can see because of that, there's activity from paying tops all the way out to the airport and in all points in between.

And the ridership is increasing pretty dramatically.

That 24,000, it was at the bottom there, it was 25,000.

Our numbers start because of when we lost the service.

It's November.

And then the 12 months, the period of time.

If you're looking at November of last year, 2025,

There was about 11,027 requests for that month.

If you look at comparable January, as the numbers go up, the numbers continue to increase about requests.

And if you look at percent of met demand, which is that bottom one,

We've gone from November 25, 78%, 75, 64, and that's because more people are asking for the services, and it's just not enough hours to purify everything they need to get done.

You had a question?

Oh, okay, great.

I'm almost there.

Ridership numbers are increasing pretty great.

People rate the system 4.9 out of 5.

4.2 passengers per revenue hour, which is great numbers.

You can see the ridership model continue there.

Yep.

You can see average weekly request is over 3,000 now.

The MEMS is about 75%.

Average wait time is 23 minutes now.

and the total cost is almost 1.3, 1.275.

Wanted to show you, this is just how you access our information, whether it's through our website, SPY, Google Maps.

On the MACCATS side of the house is the app, phone or website.

You can go to the next slide.

And then I'm gonna talk a little bit about schools.

There's gonna be a quick couple of slides just showing you since 85,

We've had our breakdown.

The assets actually belong to the city.

So the vehicles the city owns, we buy them on the school's behalf.

I'm going to slide through that because most people are not really interested in the schools part today.

It's 40 vehicles, seven passenger vans, two wheelchair accessible vans, and then we only have really two staff vehicles in the system.

Next slide.

We're going to go to upcoming projects.

This is one of the things that my colleagues did in their presentations.

Everybody's aware of the feasibility study, this site evaluation and transition study that CAT completed.

with help from Kimley Horne.

A major project we're working on now is trying to get our facilities to accommodate whatever alternative fuel vehicles that we're going to buy.

So that's a discussion that we literally just had a couple seconds ago.

The existing CAT footprint looks like this today.

What it potentially could look like, this is our window architects did a possible rendering.

We were applying for some grant funding opportunities, and then we needed to show what it potentially could look like.

And then what you see here is an active project that we're working on today.

And this is the charging stations for the infrastructure that we're getting in place, the two.

battery electric ones.

So on our existing lot, we've identified eight locations for the battery electric vehicles.

That was a part of the study that says that the footprint will be no larger than eight as a part of our model.

So that project is active.

Everything looks like it's going to culminate probably early

May, first week of May, getting everything installed, which is great because the vehicles will be here at the end of May, early June.

We'll just go through this one.

There's a lot of.

Yep, there we go.

So one of the other things I want to point out is that we're spending a lot of time and I think Zoe's come right behind me on infrastructure.

Just want to give you a flavor for the cost model in our product.

It can be very small.

like just a footprint for a landing pad, just some concrete work, something that could cost us as little as $15,000.

It could be larger projects like we did for Midway Manor.

We did actually a bump out in the railroad.

That project actually cost us about $85,000.

And then the next project we did was the granddaddy of them all, which is the

Belmont Park, this is worst case scenario, we had to move some water pipe, so we had to cut the street, the utility relocations, we had to build stairs, there was a grade issue, slope issues, and that cost us about $120,000 after we had already spent $100,000 to get the site ready.

Major projects, these are one of the ones, this picture I like a lot because Ms. Carey in the red there, she was a constant caller to the city manager's office and CAT for over almost a year and a half to get that bus stop.

And we were active, we were able to accomplish it.

So I feel really great about that.

And that's pretty much it.

Any questions?

We have to be very careful to make sure we keep those two.

All right.

Thank you.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, same questions at the end.

Even then off of those presentations.

I think that to be the

All right, hi folks.

So we spent a lot of the last couple of minutes talking about frequency and service.

And this presentation is more on the capital side of things where passengers are moving from being pedestrians or in a different mode onto the bus to show up in our ridership numbers.

So over the last, since last May, we've been talking about bus stops, including an inventory of CAT.

When I showed up, we didn't have a way to know from

My desk is a transit planner.

What's on the ground across the system?

So this was really an initiative to be able to reference any given stop in our system from a desktop and also to begin to think about what our criteria are for new amenities when we are upgrading stops or talking about new stops.

So today, one of the foundations of those goals and scopes started with ADA compliance.

In 2024, there was a revision

of the federal level technical requirements for ADA accessibility at bus stops which means that now if we touch a bus stop with an upgrade in any manner we also have to bring it up to ADA compliance if it's not already ADA compliant so understanding clearly whether our bus stops are currently ADA compliant is an important step in understanding

where we can put additional amenities at a lower cost and where it's going to be a larger project that requires concrete for.

We also want to think about ridership experience and that's where we wanted to record status quo of amenities present at stops.

Those are including shelters, benches, trash, lighting, and a few others.

And then in that system-wide assessment, we wanted to make sure we're capturing county and city jurisdictions and shared stops with other routes, other

So to start the inventory, we already had a data layer from 2023.

The city had an ADA transition plan surveyor come out, PIM.

They did capture bus stops as part of the other ADA stuff that they were capturing.

And that was a point in time accuracy to 2023.

So when I picked that up in 2025, there were several bus stops that had had changes made in the previous two years.

So 2025 inventory fieldwork was really to bring that up to standard in 2025.

And then looking at 2026 and beyond, we are discussing the procedural data management of how we will keep that accurate as we put resources into upgrading stops, creating new stops, or there's damage coming from outside.

Car accidents and things like that at stops so that we make sure it maintains accuracy and we can still reference it as needed.

So when we talk about data collected, I'm out there in my vest.

This is what I'm looking at at the bus stop.

You might see a bench in the shelter.

I'd ask the answer yes, no, whether we have those.

We may or may not have lighting at stops.

I'm actually looking at the ground material of what passengers are standing on when they're waiting for the bus and what they're loading from.

The condition of the bus stop sign,

It's also the number that our systems use in GTFS to show real-time arrival in the app.

And if you're on the web, that number is going to show up.

In the app, it doesn't show up, but on the web version of EKSpy does.

We may or may not have trash cans.

It's actually a pretty contentious amenity.

And then we have some other design elements, including the ADA compliance of the landing pad itself, connectivity from that landing pad to the pedestrian access route is another proactive requirement.

We might also look at curb management, like interaction with bike lane, whether there's adjacent parking or sufficient no-parking signs that the bus can actually serve the stop, and where that bus is pausing when they're serving the stop.

Are they in a travel lane and is the only lane going that direction?

Is it a bus-only lane that they're pulling over into and having to merge back into traffic?

Those are other things we wanted to understand at the glance.

So quick reminder system overview.

Garland already went over this.

We have 12 fixed routes.

We have 316 bus stops, 317 once the Verve construction is completed.

There's one that's currently closed there.

44 of those stops have shelters.

That's something that we actually already knew as of the 2023 report.

Everything else you'll see in this presentation is new information from the report in the last year.

So one of those things being the maintenance of bus stop IDs.

Those are those unique identification numbers.

Within our system, we had 47 missing and nine damaged.

And that is something that we have internal capacity to update.

Our maintenance staff are able to reattach those designs and we're able to print those in-house.

So that's one of the first steps that we can address coming out of this inventory is going ahead and getting this in place so that any rider at any stop in the system can know where they are and can be able to use it as a reference for real-time arrival.

We can also talk about highest amenity.

So at those 44 stops that have shelters, that's the biggest, best thing that we've got out there.

We have a further 58 stops that have a full-size bench that CAT's provided at that location.

A further 33 stops that have a non-CAT bench that we wouldn't replace if it were damaged.

Maybe a wood bench, it might be a private entities bench that's a different style than we use.

Or a small SIM two-seater bench that is a CAT bench.

We also have 148, the majority of our system, that are just assigned on a sidewalk on the side of the road, which is still a step above those 33 stops that we have, which are waiting area and grass or roadside and out that's drain access route.

And that gets us to our 316 total.

We also have a couple of layers of ADA accessibility that I'll go through briefly.

Stick with me.

This is just for the landing pad.

So there are a couple of criteria specific to the landing pad, whether that's ADA accessible.

33 of our stops are.

There are 11 that have changed since PEMF's survey that we would need an additional surveyor.

I don't have that capacity to look at the slope and grade of those stops in order to determine if they're ADA accessible.

But other than that measurement, they are meeting standards for ADA accessibility.

And then 272 really have one or more criteria that they're not meeting for ADA accessibility.

In a lot of cases, that's the depth needed for a landing pad, you need an eight foot depth.

So if you've got a sidewalk, you're not getting that eight foot depth.

In addition to the landing path, there are separate criteria for a shelter.

Of our 44 shelters, 30 are ADA accessible, with 14 having an issue which may be access to the pedestrian access route from the shelter itself or lack of clear space inside of the shelter for a wheelchair to stay.

And then when you kind of layer those two Venn diagrams over each other, the whole system ADA flexibility is the 31 that are, 11 that we need a survey for that slip grade, and then two and a half and four where we could see some of the events.

Another fun amenity to talk about that actually came up a lot more than I anticipated when I started this project is trash cans, because trash cans are our amenity that require more regular maintenance than any other thing that we could put out on the street.

So we need to have somebody serving those trash cans.

This inventory is the first step in understanding exactly which stops have that resource available to them.

The next step is who's serving those, because I actually don't know if I stand here today.

I can't tell you.

It might be UVA and it might be cat hustlers in some small cases.

It might be city public service.

It might be a private entity that has a trash can near enough to a bus stop that we're counting it as a bus stop trash can, but where they serve it on their own grounds.

72 locations that we're going to track down.

Now, when we talk about amenities and criteria, we're speaking both about new stops and about upgrades.

So on the left here, you'll see the new proposed 2A-2B route.

On the southbound side of Avon, we currently have no stops.

So that's enough for new stops that we've been discussing in some of the projects that I've been working on.

And those stops have no existing ridership.

So when we talk about criteria, they may need a bit of a different framework for how we consider what amenities to put in place.

Then when we're talking about upgrading existing stops, which you see on the right side, where we have years of data about ridership, about frequency, things like that, what routes are already serving them.

I'll actually provide an update that I heard yesterday that the three stops on Commonwealth are currently under construction as of Monday.

So that's the county working on those and collaborating with CAT.

Okay, so when we talk about amenities criteria, we're talking about shelter, bench, trash can, lighting, and then kind of some things that should be the baseline for all stops.

The shelter is the only amenity that we currently have an existing standard set that's in the TSP service design standards.

And it says that

In the city, if there's more than 50 average daily boardings, we should probably try to put a shelter there.

In the county, if there's more than 35 average daily boardings, we should try to put a shelter there.

That's still constrained by right-of-way, engraving slope, and all those things that Garland mentioned with Belmont Park.

But that's kind of the standard of where we'd like to see it.

We could also extrapolate a ridership standard and apply it for benches.

We look at benchmarks of other systems like GRTC and see like about seven average daily boardings as being a standard for having a bench.

And again, size bench and

Where it's located in relation to the stop is going to be contingent on site restrictions like right of way.

In the city, that's going to be a big challenge for us, especially in the county.

It's going to come into play with VDOT permits.

For trash cans, like I mentioned earlier, it's really contingent on jurisdiction and maintenance agreement between those different employees who might be servicing them.

I just had a conversation about the Family Health ones and said we need to figure out who's going to serve them if we're putting trash cans in on those stops.

For CAT lighting, what we have available to us internally really is just lighting of the bus stop sign.

It's not solid lighting of the stop itself and illuminating the riders.

So one of the recommendations coming out of this project is that we do an additional project to do a more holistic lighting review of transportation sites in the city and county with our respective public works.

And then at all stops, we could expect to see signage indicating a bus ID.

We can talk about showing routes served, potentially whether the stop is a snow route.

We had this experience back in February where a lot of our routes weren't able to be cleared.

So we had priority routes that were served earlier in the snow removal process.

Access to a system map or how to access real-time information and other information online.

So moving forward from today, just to give you a sense of where we are in the scope of this project.

We had a base of inventory.

which had data collection.

We're now in the validation process.

We're going through and making sure that everything is reflected in a GIS data layer that will be on our open public data dashboard for the city, open data portal.

We're also simultaneously talking about amenities, including this CARTA presentation where we're open to feedback from you all and guidance there.

which we'll use to develop our guidelines.

We'll then combine the inventory and the criteria to create a recommendation of prioritized upgrades and to program those for both upgrading existing stops and to incorporate in our design and construction of new stops.

And then the additional things that have kind of been illuminated through this process are needing to develop a process to filter additional requests that come through.

So requests for bus upgrades in the city and in the county

There are also inquiries about additional amenities.

Early on in this process, I got a question from our own Parks and Rec department about where we should place trees around the campus and the city.

That's something that we don't know.

We don't have a standard for it.

Requests for new bus stops and then also trying to sync that programming of the amenities that we say we want to prioritize and put in with other projects like street scape designs, repavings, and VDOT projects when we're already breaking ground.

And these are some of the questions that might come up in that process to filter.

Is it in the New York County?

Are we requiring some construction work because we have to bring standards up to ADA requirements?

And is there sufficient right of way to do that?

When we talk about bus stop signage, here are a couple of examples from other systems where we are looking at route information.

They actually have braille bus stop information and stop IDs shown in a slightly different way than CAT system.

We could also consider snow route real-time arrival just as an information check.

And then the holistic lighting assessment that I mentioned in an earlier slide with Public Works and VDOT could be an additional detract.

Right?

Before we move on to questions, because this is great, and I know we're chatting much.

And there's no fault of anybody who got a little behind the schedule.

Is that impossible?

Is that not possible?

I personally have to go, but it's fine because it's recorded and I can always go back.

It's fine.

Yeah.

Are there any objections?

I'm at my advisory committee meeting at 1130.

So maybe if I could be the first.

Okay.

We don't need a vote.

Thank you so much for all of that info.

There is an appendix slide in the note.

Alright, we'll start with questions.

I have a couple.

One, are there, I don't know who has control over this, but the types of benches?

So Garland may know something from before my time.

For the shelter, all of the benches that are compatible with the shelter are the unbacked ones.

And I think that they do all have those handles in the middle.

And you don't want the one in the middle of the shelter?

No.

They are, and by design, they actually, the companies actually put that bar in it.

It used to be called a bum-bum.

That's what it was called all the time ago.

But that was just telling, to me, they, they phrase it now as a, an A, for me, you know,

So security design statements, some shelters only have naming bars.

We could go to that, but then you don't have places for folks to sit.

And then my other question is, do you have data on, I'm sure you probably do, on

Yeah so that's part of our APC data which is on the rider dash or the open data dashboard and I'm happy to send a link out through the TJPDC.

More of a comment.

Well, actually, you might have already looked at this, but specifically regarding ADA accessibility.

I'd be interested in seeing like coordinating with Mike and his team, like you have what bus stops are not ADA accessible.

It'd be interesting to overlay the ADA paratransit origins and destinations and see if there are any hotspots of paratransit riders and maybe they live somewhere, they can't get to the bus stop or the bus stop's not ADA accessible and they would take fixed route if it was, but they take ADA paratransit instead because it's not.

How do we prioritize what to do?

Are you going to put the light, the sign, the ADA, the thing, and do it bus stop by bus stop?

Yeah, I think the existing condition is very ad hoc.

So it's very much, there's been a request from the staff or there's an existing project.

The county came to me a couple of weeks ago about a project that they're doing and there's a bus stop near it.

So can we go ahead and upgrade the bus stop while we're at it?

That's a little bit of a programming order of things.

I think as if we can sync it with other projects, especially if it can increase our capacity, we only have one project manager who does bus stops and we'll also be working on this giant maintenance facility project.

So as much as we can streamline that and make it easier to do more,

In terms of which other stops we'd start with, we already have several programs, so we're gonna continue to follow through on those.

And then the addition of the amenity criteria with the stops that say they have more than seven daily boardings, actually boardings, and they don't currently have a bench, and they have clear right-of-way that we could add a bench and we could add the necessary ADA depth to have the landing pad.

But the major point is,

Like you saw, there's 160 stops that already have sidewalk where we just need to add a depth.

There's a further 33, where there's not even a pedestrian access route.

So it's not just a matter of putting a landing pad in.

We'd also have to have a crosswalk or some other connection to an existing route in order to do anything.

So the difficulty here of what I'm trying to display in this presentation is that it's not a matter of putting a bench in where there's not a bench.

It's also needing to at least meet the ADA requirements in addition to any other amenities that we want to put in.

So a little bit of that prioritization is going to be an analysis of how difficult it is and if there are any other projects we can synergize with to provide that in order to get to a level of amenities.

documentation and have a conversation about, yeah, where in some cases I think UTS has the ability to move faster on some of those construction projects, especially around grounds.

Yeah, a great example would be central grounds garage rather than industry across from the contemplative commons.

We just put in a shelter

I was thinking, even along the lines of you had said you receive all this information for more amenities.

I'm assuming a lot from riders as well.

And if a light goes out of that sock, how does the rider know as well once you make this decision?

Great.

Thank you.

Anybody else in the room?

The question that I believe I've asked our staff, but it would be a good answer for everybody is, what is the, you know, we've heard as soon as you touch something, ADA, everything they go, goes applied, you gotta do it all.

Is there a level of improvement that does count before the something, like adding a sign?

Yeah.

Yeah, I can find the exact language and I can share that out via the same dashboard.

Yes.

Yes, you're really constrained to repairing or replacing

So I don't have much to update.

I already said the one thing I was going to say.

The biggest update from the university's perspective is now we're in our third week of the Purple Line.

We did one presentation last month, so that can solve

And that was part of the capital project of all the renovations there.

But all of those cost figures that you guys just recently shared, I would say that one is probably it's kind of hard to fill out the costs, but that is probably about $100,000 for the sidewalk dimensions.

So that is the first time we've done pretty extensive service down Fontaine.

So any questions for me?

And of course, if you remember also from our presentation, I think by the next meeting, we'll be in our recess mode because we kind of really slowed down until May and August.

So we're obviously about a little over halfway through the spring semester, turn in or burn in.

Oh, the other update is we're doing our passenger survey that is kicking off on Monday.

We mostly do that through QR codes on our vehicles.

They see that.

We email to those who are UVA affiliated, but for anyone else that's just on a bus, they'll see a QR code.

That survey's gonna run from the 30th until April the 19th.

That's part of our annual process.

Just gonna engage on what do you wanna see in terms of amenities, services, improvements, et cetera.

Questions for me?

A week from today will be the John Ford meeting and shareholder meeting.

Just remember, structurally, the city and county are ordering shares at Jaunt.

One of the things that will be voted on is the approval of the excess capital strategy.

We try to be great stewards of the public dollar and when there are dollars remaining when we audit our fiscal year and return them to the jurisdictions.

And we will be asking the shareholders to endorse the return of $470,000 to Albemarle County and $225,000 to Charles.

Supervisor Pruitt and

Albemarle is the largest investor in Jaunt.

And as of today, you will have only two of your four board seats filled.

I've talked to the clerk.

You don't have applications.

I would ask that you encourage your colleagues to maybe stimulate one of your constituents to think about a public service.

And if you have questions about what that service looks like as a Jaunt board member,

Happy to go have coffee with any person you identify to help them think about that sentence.

We have, about a month from today, new buses hitting the road and some new branding elements.

We're excited about that.

On April 14th, we will start our pilot in Green County where we will implement microtransit tunnel and

We will do all the scheduling for ADA routers in Charlottesville and Albemarle on that platform as well, but have not yet provided access to the lead app.

And so if you re-count it, we'll be doing fully the microtransit system where you can put garage on the app in our zone.

And in the city and counting for ADA, we'll try and realize the benefits of optimized scheduling practices.

And the last thing, we'll be giving an invite to our end of the 50-year celebration.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

One other thing is that we were fortunate enough to get under the wire here and make it so we were able to order our next two battery engine vehicles.

That PO went out two weeks ago.

So we're projecting the timeline.

We're very successful in the field right now.

The construction date up.

They may have two slots.

Those slots in earlier.

It's normally a 20 to 24 month wait.

We may be able to get it in in about 15 months.

So that will be wonderful to do.

So we'll get the first two on site and then

which will be a few months later.

We'll be accepting any other discussion about the continuing vote out.

That's more discussion at the council level.

And then what is our continued role to stop, make up the plan for an request for William D. before we are completed.

Great.

Just a general question for the board seats.

Do you know if they are general counties?

At your discretion, to a point, four of the 14 seats on the regular Jaunt board are designated for Omaha counties for the board to appoint.

And right now, you have Jacob Thummer, who's your CFO, in one of those seats.

Before we adjourn, are there any questions from any of the previous presentations that you didn't get to that anyone would like to ask?

I will just voice for the group for consideration.

We talked several times

I'd say the word casual process.

We are going to re-evaluate this, but it is currently a process that has a single deliverable and fixed time with feedback.

It did immediately strike me, oh, we're doing viscous development inside the house here.

We are pitching a future study.

And that raised a red flag for me.

Knowing this board has expressed some consternation we've heard about at the beginning, the incredible abundance of funding, or not funding, sorry, planning that we have done on this problem, to launch off a new plan.

And I would just raise for this board that contained within that was essentially a pitch for a future implementation setting, because it is not as scheduled

All right, we're adjourned.