Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority Meeting   5/28/2026

That's what it is.

Because I forwarded the invite to you.

I guess you forwarded the invite, okay.

Sorry.

We're down in Chapel Hill for the conference, so I know that the other folks are gonna hop on, so we'll give them a minute or two.

Natalie, it's still early enough in the trip that if you took me out with a crowbar, I think I could join you.

Interesting.

Okay, yeah.

We actually just came from, so for those of you who don't know, it's a Chamber of Commerce, like city to city

And so they're coming to Charlottesville in September and there's been activities to learn about different things that they're working on, like planning a design and they have a tech hub and parking regulations and stuff.

We actually just came from their transit office and learned about their bus system and how it is paid for 60% by the university and other fun things.

Anne, are you also down in Chapel Hill?

This is Anne.

I am not in Chapel Hill.

Unexpected.

I hope you've got good weather.

It actually has been lovely.

It didn't look like it was going to be lovely weather, and it's been beautiful.

It's rained every day, but the weather's been beautiful.

I did.

Thanks for noticing, Mike.

I appreciate it.

You know, casually.

Does everybody know where you got married?

I don't think so.

I got married at Main Street Station in Richmond, everyone.

So a true transit girlie through and through, I suppose, but couldn't resist.

I literally just saw them down in the lobby.

So I'm also glad that we're going here first, because we're learning a lot about how to do this kind of visit.

They've done it several times before.

So when they come back, we're going to be able to

to give them a good show.

Also, that means some of you are going to have to prepare a slideshow to FYI.

Natalie, you said you're in Austin?

Chapel Hill.

Chapel Hill.

I was thinking Austin because we've got Scott with us.

Oh nice.

Yeah there's been a lot of people here like mentioning, oh I went here for grad school or I knew someone and my partner went here for grad school so we've spent some time here but definitely different vibe for those visits.

All right.

It's 5.04.

Let's get started.

Let me pull up the agenda.

Yes.

And I can go ahead and do that right now.

Counselor Oschrin?

Here.

Councilor Fleisher?

Here.

And Supervisor Duncan sent us an email and let us know that she could not make it.

All right, we just got a message from Jessica that she is under Tonya's name.

So Tonya is really Jessica today.

OK, great.

Thank you.

And then do I have to read this?

I can read it for us.

Let me pull it up.

Because this is a fully virtual meeting, we have to read the electronic meeting notice to be in compliance with the electronic meeting policy.

Notice of electronic meeting.

This meeting of the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transit Authority is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia subsection C 2.2-3708.3, which allows a public body to hold all virtual public meetings.

The meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public.

The method for holding this meeting shall not change unless a new meeting notice is provided.

Should the electronic transmission fail, you may reach out to the TJPDC at lshannonatTJPDC.org.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice at the TJPDC offices, to the media, website posting, and via the agenda.

The meeting is held pursuant to the remote electronic participation and all virtual meeting policy as adopted by the CARTA board on May 22, 2025.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Introductions and Announcements.

I guess we all kind of know each other, but there are some names that are backwards.

So I think we probably should go around and say who we are.

Natalie Oschrin, City of Charlottesville.

One of the gens?

I'll go with the real gen first.

So I'm Jennifer DeBruhl.

Great, thanks.

Other Jen?

I will be the other Jen.

So I'm actually Emma Stockton, and somehow Scott has my name.

So Emma Stockton, a transportation planner with Cambridge Systematics and on the study team.

Thanks.

Oh, sure.

Thank you, Grant.

Okay, sorry.

Hey, Jen Fleisher, City of Charlottesville, also a Tar Heel.

Hello, Mike Murphy.

Oh, OK.

I am so sorry, Mr. Pruitt.

Go ahead.

Mike Pruitt, Albemarle County supervisor.

And unfortunately, I'm a dookie.

So sorry for all you people who are in Chapel Hill presently.

I'm Katie Miller.

I'm a program manager with DRPT.

Hi, everyone.

Jason Espin.

I think both of us almost already went.

Oh, great.

They're switched back.

Have you already gone?

Yeah.

No, it's okay.

Our real names are on here now.

Lucinda Shannon with the TJPDC.

Gotcha.

All right, Tonya, let's bump to you.

This is the real Tonya Swartzendruber.

I'm the planning manager for the Albemarle County transportation and long range planning teams.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Jessica Dimmick, Principal Transportation Planner with Albemarle County.

Good afternoon.

This is David Blount.

Thanks, David.

I'm trying to, there it is.

There we go.

Here, let me turn my camera on.

Ann Wall, I serve as Deputy County Executive for Albemarle County, and I am also a Tar Heel.

All right, we've got a healthy distribution of folks.

Yeah.

In person.

So into any further detail about that?

Did I freeze?

Okay.

The hotel was been bad.

I'm going to switch to a hotspot, which means I might lose you all for a second, but I will be right back.

Just in case.

Sorry about that.

It's been, if you don't touch your computer, it'll kick you off.

Okay.

Are we back?

Awesome.

I appreciate your patience.

So we've got a special meeting on June 5th to get more in depth with DRPT.

It will be in person, so we look forward to seeing everybody there.

I also have spotty internet, so that's why I'm turning my video off.

Yeah, so the new director of DRPT, Maria Zimmerman, is going to be here to visit us in person, which is really exciting.

And we'll have two presentations, one by DRPT about future funding, and one from the Central Virginia Regional Transportation Authority director,

who will be talking about how they started their authority, also be able to answer questions.

Okay, great.

So June 5th from two to four.

Any other announcements?

Do we have a mechanism for reading or introducing documents into the record?

I guess reading into the record anything we say is read into the record because there's a literal thing.

I just want to save future generations the pain of FOIAing it.

We don't often receive constituent feedback as members of the transit authority.

Yesterday, the directors, so the voting council members, got an email from the public, again, a very unusual thing, with some surprisingly thoughtful feedback on CARTA's work that I would like to have just introduced into the record for this meeting.

So that others can see it.

Thanks, Mike.

OK, great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I agree.

I do want to note that it is the end of Bike Month this weekend.

That does not mean the end of bikes, just the end of the Bike Month celebrations.

If you're able to join on the 31st, there's a 10 o'clock celebratory bike ride followed by a 12 p.m. gathering at Random Row that is going to be a fundraiser.

So please join for any and all of that.

No one else has any last call for announcements?

All right, moving on to acceptance of the agenda.

Oh, great.

Okay.

Any nays?

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it.

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Aye Any nays?

Great.

No abstentions.

The motion passes.

And now we're going to open to matters from the public.

Is there any public on here who would like to speak?

Please raise your hand.

Is there anyone in the waiting room?

We have three attendees, not in a waiting room, but since this is set up as a webinar, like you all are set up as panelists and then we have others who can dial in.

Okay.

Last call for public comments.

All right.

Thank you.

And I'll cover this one for Lucinda as well.

So annually, the remote participation policy to have the eligibility to host virtual meetings or to participate in a meeting from a virtual location, the board has to approve every year the remote participation policy.

So that's what this item is that's on your agenda this evening.

A couple highlights that are in there.

An in-person forum has to be formed if this is to be a hybrid meeting.

So if someone wanted to dial in but the meeting is hosted in person, you would have to have an in-person forum to be able to vote them in.

All virtual meetings cannot be held consecutively or more than half of the meetings during every year if you opt to host any of them all virtually.

and anyone who dials into a meeting virtually.

Again, if it's like a hybrid style meeting, they have to keep their camera on and actually physically be heard during voting items on the agenda.

Great, thank you.

Were there any adjustments from the last one?

Okay, great.

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

There's only three of us, so I think we can skip my next two questions.

The motion passes.

Great.

Thanks, team.

We are rolling right along.

There's always more than one Jen in the crowd.

Absolutely.

So it's a pleasure to be here this evening.

I'm going to go ahead and share my screen.

Sorry, I have two screens and it's

It flipped between the two of them, so sorry if I'm not looking right at you.

So when we came to your board meeting back in March, we kind of laid the foundation of where we were with the study and talked a little bit about methodology.

Tonight, I'm excited that we're coming back to you to give you an update on where we are with preliminary results and get your input and feedback as we advance to the next phases of the study.

So with that, I'm just going to give you a quick refresher of what we talked about last time.

This project is really kind of the next logical step in the Regional Transit Vision Plan, where we had a number of services and improvements that were identified, both constrained financially and unconstrained, lots of other plans.

We've gone through those

already in an effort to where we will ultimately end up is with an implementation plan that's going to give you kind of a glimpse into what you can do based on the cost of those services in short, medium, and long-term timelines.

Just as a refresher, we looked at over 20 different plans, pulled together over 100 different individual project recommendations.

to start kind of narrowing down the services and doing the prioritization.

And then last time, two months ago, we talked a lot about what kinds of concepts we should be capturing in our prioritization criteria.

So we talked about growing ridership, we talked about increasing frequency and expanding transit and how we can measure those either as an increase in intensity of service or an increase in footprint of

geography that we're covering with our services.

And we talked a little bit about different ways to measure those.

And all of those measurements, we're looking at how many people were able to serve and how many people have access, whether that's access to increased frequency of service or access to transit service across the week based on where they live and where they would travel to.

So with that, I'm gonna hand it over and I'm very grateful we have the online meeting format tonight because I'm able to lean into our technical experts who are not named Jen, but are named Emma and Scott, both Tar Heels.

All right.

Thanks, Jen.

So since last time we presented this work, we've been working on developing a Excel-based tool to create this sort of initial prioritized list of projects and of routes and services.

So the

The next tool that we've ended up using is an Excel-based tool that is very easy to adjust and use in the future, too.

So I just wanted to mention that.

So the first step in creating the tool is, as Jen mentioned, we had a huge list of different service improvements, and we quickly realized a lot of them overlapped, some of them contradicted each other, so we needed to develop a sort of consolidated list

And so the way that we ended up doing that was consolidating those service improvements into routes and services.

And so you can see here that included 13 CAT fixed routes, seven Jaunt fixed routes, and then also CAT and Jaunt microtransit and on-demand services.

And so that's what we ended up prioritizing.

Also, as Jen mentioned, we wanted to still be tracking the increasing intensity and footprint.

But as you can imagine, since we consolidated these different service improvements, some of these routes or services ended up being mixed because it had both service improvements that, you know, focused on frequency or coverage.

Next slide, please.

So

We then looked at and determined what prioritization factors to focus on when prioritizing the routes and services.

You can see the list here of some of what's included and is built into the tool.

And these are all, this is a tool that's based on

geographies.

And so for most of these, it's a quarter mile buffer from the route stops.

And so you can see most of this is pulled from sources like the American Community Survey, like things like age and poverty and minority populations.

That would be the

It was under 200% or so twice the federal rural poverty line, which varies by household size and composition.

Oops, we're frozen.

I'll just kind of flag, there's some of these numbers here can be modified in the tool.

Great.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So once we had those

factors determined.

We also needed to determine the weights.

So you can see on the right that table shows the sort of different factors that we went with.

But again, the tool has many other factors included.

And so those could be adjusted.

The weights are also very easy to adjust.

So we went with, as our default, weights

So a weight of one for all of them except for percent of population below 200% poverty, percent minority population, and population per square mile.

We doubled the weights for each of those.

And so to then do the scoring, each route or service was scored based on 14 of these metrics.

Each one was given a score of one to five based on percentile breaks.

compared to the other routes.

The routes fall relative to the other routes in the study area.

And then the overall score was weighted as the weighted sum of those individual metric scores.

Next slide, Jen.

And just to sort of dive a little bit deeper into activity centers,

We used the OpenStreetMap to get the points of interest for medical senior centers and schools in retail.

And you can see this sort of different subcategories that are included in each of those.

But we did want to flag, we do know that there's the Albemarle Comprehensive Plan Activity Centers and Employment Centers that were created with that plan.

If I could interrupt you real quick.

I did a Google about OpenStreetMap because that was not a resource I was familiar with.

Sure.

I would say OpenStreetMap is really, really similar to Wikipedia in that it is an online resource that is editable by anybody with a computer.

It has geographic data, everything from roads to locations of schools and hospitals, parks, really anything you can imagine.

It is actually the data layer that sits underneath a lot of the online mapping tools that people will be familiar with, like Google maps, Apple maps, et cetera.

It is open source and, you know, available to everyone free of charge.

We really like to use it for transit planning because it tends to be very, very up to date, especially in areas with higher population levels.

And it gives us a little bit more insight into just the number of jobs and the number of households.

And we can get down to a level of detail about what types of medical facilities are available, what types of retail are available.

Good point, Natalie.

OK, next slide, Jen.

And so we just also wanted to point out in the scoring, there are, like I mentioned, the tool is very adaptable.

There are also many different ways of scoring these metrics, and you can

One way is normalizing them.

Scott will get more into this in the sensitivity analyses that we did.

But you can just be looking at the raw counts of the people that are within those buffers.

But you can also do things like normalize per route mile, per square mile, per household, things like that.

So I wanted to flag that as well as an option.

All right.

Thanks so much, Emma.

I will warn you that this is a little bit mathy.

It's okay.

I actually went to NC State for undergrad, so I understand math under the Chapel Hill folks.

But our goal here was not to create a box that is the internal workings are invisible and an answer just gets spat out like the Oracle at Delphi and lo and behold, these are the routes that are the best.

And I made a lot of references to things that we can adjust.

And so the tool is designed to let you decide what factors are most important in analysis.

It allows you to control for different factors, such as the length of the route.

We can have a route that covers a large geographic area, but it's really long, and so it might have additional cost to operate.

And so the tool is designed to allow the user to adjust whichever parameters that are most important to the analysis that is taking place.

Emma showed you the original weighting that we had, and that has what we'll call a double weight on population density, which is just sort of a core transit planning factor, as well as the two, what we'll call Title VI metrics, income and minority status.

But we also have in there a lot of other factors that can be weighted either more or less as this desire to match community needs, community values, et cetera.

Of the 28 or so routes that we analyzed, you can see the rough distribution here.

On the left-hand side, we have the rank with duplicate numbers for ties and the right-hand side, the overall score relative to each other.

We've highlighted some information here just about which agency generally the route falls into.

Not saying that this is the agency would necessarily operate it, but the routes that are being modified, these are the current operating agencies.

We've noted what type of improvement it is, whether it's an improvement in intensity, an improvement in footprint, or in some cases both depending on the project type.

And the sort of first thing I'd like to take away from this rather than trying to dive down into any level is that there's a pretty good mix of different types of routes here, right?

We've got improvement types are pretty well distributed throughout the rankings as are the geographic areas.

I will note that the frequency increases tended to float towards the top.

And in general, we've got a good mix across different route types.

And so we'll dive into a little bit more detail with these results.

But again, these are preliminary results and we can very easily tweak the model to reflect any changes that we need to.

Let's move to the next slide.

This is a map of all of the routes.

In blue, we show the top 10 routes.

In green, all of the other routes.

We've got two levels of detail here on the right-hand side, which is zoomed into Charlottesville.

Again, showing a pretty good geographic distribution of where the highly rated routes lie relative to each other.

Next slide.

Zooming in here on the top 10 routes, I'll just kind of set up what Emma referred to as a sensitivity analysis.

Again, we selected some initial values for how the model works, but I'll kind of step through a couple of changes to those weights and illustrate how those changed the rankings of the routes.

Here, the first, the number one route here is this Buckingham Connect route.

This has a really large geographic area.

It extends pretty far across the study region.

It does have a lot of connections to density areas as well as areas in need of, areas that are highly weighted for equity issues.

We also have two routes that are a lot more urban in nature, the trolley alignment and route seven.

I'll note that these top three routes, one is intensity, one is mixed and one is footprint.

So again, having a really good mix of route types here, as well as having frequency based improvements floating towards the top.

Because something like Buckingham, which has a density of 29 people per square mile, but then as it gets towards town, the density of the route increases.

So what are the markers of where that density is?

Great question.

So the density is calculated as the area about exactly one quarter mile away from the stop.

We're using the census block groups and then taking just the slice of the block group that falls into that quarter mile buffer around the stops as the area that we're analyzing distance.

And so you're absolutely right.

Depending on how you plan these routes out, if you were to put comparatively more stops

In rural areas, your overall density would fall.

If you were to put comparatively more stops in denser urban areas, your overall density would go up.

It kind of depends on what your goals are in the project.

You can also use the tool to look at total population, which would naturally weight a lot more towards the denser areas.

And one of our sensitivity analyses reweights towards

route miles, right, which is going to say a longer route costs more to run and therefore will score a little bit lower than a route that is shorter but has comparatively higher density along it.

Absolutely.

I think the next slide actually shows the breakdown of the scoring components.

Oh, nope.

Sorry.

Can we go one more?

Oh, you know what?

Is it hidden, Jen?

I've got a hidden slide in here.

I sabotaged my current cell.

So I hid this slide because it has even more numbers on it and folks tend to

get bored with the numbers.

But basically what I think this slide Jen is looking for shows is, and which is included in the report, is the rankings for each component.

And so I believe the Jaunt route scores really highly on the equity components and less highly on the density components, whereas some of these other routes score really highly on the density components rather than the equity components.

Yeah, that would be interesting to see.

Yeah.

No problem.

And Natalie, I'm happy to share.

I think we've shared the tool with you already and I'm happy to step through it in the level of detail.

Yeah, let's just toss it up on the screen real quick.

Wow, let's see.

All right.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

So looking at, I understand that this is probably really, really zoomed in, but, uh, the Jaunt Buckingham Connect, which is sort of halfway down here on this list, um, scores reasonably well on actually this one, the Jaunt one score is sort of moderately across all of them.

So it's sort of a,

medium performer across all of the categories.

And you can see some examples of other routes that score really low in some areas and really high in other areas.

For example, the Jaunt, Stanardsville route is really well situated with respect to retail and schools, less so with the Title VI designations.

And then contrast that with like the CAT Route 7, which is

Scores pretty high on the zero-par households, the poverty, the minority population, and a little bit lower on population density and older populations.

So the goal of this was to design a system that didn't just elevate one type of route, but kind of looked at a lot of different data categories.

And so these are the one through five based on one as low as percentile and five as high as percentile.

Exactly.

So, sorry.

Nope.

I took statistics in 2006.

So just back to Buckingham Connect.

And you've zoomed in on exactly the, you know, one of the interesting things that can happen here, right?

If you have a route that connects, you know, that has a lot of stops in urban area and then travels a really long way and has just a couple of stops in a low density area, it'll do exactly what you're focusing it on, right?

It will look more like an urban route and you'll be like, oh, this is a relatively dense route.

Well, it's not across the whole route.

There's a lot of closed door service where it's traveling a really long way.

And for that reason, this right now is population density per square mile, right, for those quarter mile areas.

We also have built into the tool a way to look at it per route mile, which is relative to the amount of service that is provided.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you.

Lucinda said that they're measuring only around the stop, not the whole route, which makes sense if you have a remote densely populated area that travels through a bunch of rural

The density will be calculated at places where the people are.

Yeah.

And I'll throw another way that this pops up is when we look at on-demand services, right?

On-demand services serve these really large geographic areas.

And since for those, the population density, there are no stops.

So it's the population density of the whole region.

All of those routes score really poorly on population density because they're serving a big area, but they have a different job to do.

And so when you're comparing any, you know, two of these, any four of these, you want to think about what are the characteristics that I'm actually trying to compare to each other and I comparing routes that, you know, it makes sense to compare these numbers for.

So the metrics are important.

Does anyone else have any questions?

Just, I know you've got more to do.

I just have interrupted a couple of times and wondered if anyone else had any followups to the interruptions or thoughts of their own so far.

All right, let's keep it rolling.

Awesome.

So this is just a really quick slide to show, again, referencing the footprint-based improvements, the kind of mixed-based improvements and the intensity-based improvements.

The average score you can see here, the mixed improvements, is a little bit higher than the footprint and the intensity.

That makes a lot of sense.

It kind of includes the best qualities of both.

There are more footprint

projects in the scoring tool and likewise the majority of the vehicle route miles calculated is the number of trips times the length of the trips.

There's kind of more service is proposed in those mixed routes.

So the purpose of this is not to show as many numbers as possible, but really just to show this is how we included that footprint versus intensity based analysis into the tool is kind of a back check to make sure that when we evaluate these tools, we're coming out with routes that are prioritized across all these project types.

And we're not just saying all the intensity based projects float to the top and all the footprint ones float to the bottom.

So this sensitivity analysis is what happens when we reweight the tool.

You can see on the right hand side, we have the original weight and maintains the original order.

And then under updated weight, what happens when we recalculate based on a change.

And you can see in this case, doubling the population density weight doesn't move that jaunt route, right?

That is still being exposed to a number that it scores pretty well in.

But some of these other routes start to decrease

in their relative scoring.

Again, the scores are relative to each other, not in an absolute sense.

So Route 5 goes down from position number 9 to number 13.

Routes 9 and 10 also decrease.

To me, this is saying that when you are looking at population density, the slightly more suburban, not the rural routes, but the suburban routes suffer relatively compared to the routes that have most of their stops in more dense areas.

But if we change the weighting again instead of emphasizing population density, but instead go to normalizing by route miles instead of square miles, so along the full route, not just the areas around the stops, the opposite happens.

These routes, the jaunt routes that have a lot, lot longer running way fall a lot further down.

The Buckingham route goes from 1st place to 9th place.

The Stanardsville route goes from 4th place to 13th place.

Just to clarify, the changes that you're applying are you're keeping the same data but updating the weight changes.

That's right.

All of the versions of the routes that are staying the same.

What's changing are two things.

One, the first sensitivity analysis applied more weight.

So we say population density is more important relative to the first run of the model.

Great.

And so these are just two examples of kind of the tweaks that we can make.

We can also, as I noted earlier, we've got some variables that aren't being used right now at all.

And likewise, we can change between different versions of variables.

So moving between 100% and 200% of the poverty line, changing the age range from 65 to 75 to 85, just depending on what you were trying to evaluate.

Thanks.

So that

brings us to, and Scott kind of summed this up already, we have the ability within the tool that has been developed to make some adjustments to align the tool with CARTA's vision and policy perspective.

So based on these metrics that we talked about and the ability to change the weighting, we're just throwing it out there that if there's something that you want us to adjust or

run differently, we're able to do that.

Are you asking for...

I'm asking for like thoughts and feedback and I will put one caveat on it is we do have, you know, to get everything finished by September, which is, you know, is the timeline for the study, we do have to kind of

wrap this piece up so that we can start putting together the implementation plan, which is what I'll talk about next before we wrap up.

So we have the ability to test some different things.

I want to manage expectations around.

We can test different things, but we don't really have

Quick question.

Is there any

I mean, consideration almost sounds too pointed, but is there any consideration to the fact that currently CARTA's maximum possible governmental reach is inconsistent with parts of the current service area, right?

Natalie's nodding.

I think we're all kind of looking at the curiosity of the prioritization of the Buckingham route.

and the curiosity I'm hinging in on is even at the zenith of our authority, Buckingham is not in CARTA's potential jurisdiction.

We can add Green, we can add Louisa, we can add Nelson, we can't add Buckingham.

As an authority member.

It is not, so this analysis is purely geographic.

It does not have any embedded policy elements to it.

I would say if a route is not feasible from a policy perspective, then, you know, the first, one of the first things, switches in the tool is consider route.

So I'll just, I'll follow on what, what Scott said.

I mean,

We had very similar conversations within the consultant team and with the study team about policy questions like that.

And I think we have the ability, like Scott said, to turn things off or rule out certain alternatives.

But the base that we were given to work with was the Regional Transit Vision Plan, which included that as a

At the end of the day everything is a construction of people.

We are almost certainly going to ask the General Assembly for some expanded authority.

We are certainly going to ask the General Assembly for some expanded authority related to the authority.

And so very realistically, we could also change our footprint.

I'm just, I was thinking about that.

I should also just, you know, people's

Positions and beliefs are always informed by where they're sitting.

It is not lost on me that the improved intensity on the Buckingham route specifically benefits my constituents more than anyone in the room.

Representing the Scottsville district, which includes Pantops and Scottsville and

So I'll give you something for consideration.

And I will say this comes not so much from a technical perspective in developing a prioritization model, but experience working for the Commonwealth on things like smart scale and being a board member.

This is a tool and we can use data and statistics to slice and dice a project list in a lot of different ways.

But at the end of the day, a policy body, a board has to make decisions that fit your policy perspective.

And so in the case of SmartScale with Commonwealth Transportation Board, there's a technical recommendation based on the scoring that's outlined in board policy for those projects.

But at the end of the day, the board chooses

what gets funded and what doesn't.

And it's informed by that scoring, but it's not driven solely by that scoring.

And so this is a tool and it's intended to be your tool to tell a story of what this region can do with different levels of investment into the future through transit.

And so I think we can, from a technical perspective,

Do whatever you want to do with the model to demonstrate that.

But at the end of the day, it's a policy decision as to what ends up in a funding scenario and what doesn't for a implementation scenario that doesn't.

So I've got some questions about the, like, it's what we do with this info, right?

Oh, Jen, sorry.

I didn't see your hand.

Sure.

OK, yeah, OK, the I had the Buckingham question, too, so I guess we will have to decide whether the stats say that we can go through with it and we can from ultimately a funding or

Service perspective, you know, Buckingham wasn't part of the CARTA initial outreach, I don't think so.

Also, do we know anything about that engagement from other stakeholders and Buckingham?

I'm uncertain.

But Mike, your stats are correct from the health perspective as well.

So certainly servicing.

I am also biased and thinking about servicing Buckingham.

That said, for the for the keeping the density and normalizing as it is by square miles, I would I think we've already decided the 60-40 piece.

And if I'm understanding how this thing is working correctly, though, I am a Tar Heelscott.

Sorry.

The I would say that

If we should keep it how it is, because we already made that 60-40 decision, and if we change it, it will kind of undo it from methodology versus us explicitly choosing to put our thumb on a scale.

Yeah, attack it from, you know, in an intentional way with a different proportion.

So

My vote would be that we keep it as it is in both population density and square miles.

The 60-40 thing doesn't really show up as a weight in changing the score.

It's rather something we looked at in retrospect to make sure that our results were not too heavily swayed towards intensity or footprints.

The majority of the

Proposed changes to service affect both.

And so, you know, our goal is to have an output that was really balanced between the two.

We can change between square miles or between route miles.

You know, my recommendation would be, for the purposes of a report, to probably leave it about where it is.

but for the purposes of the ongoing prioritization efforts or to be able to speak to folks and say look these are how these two things you know square up against each other then I would you know compare you know individual pairs of routes or small handfuls how handfuls of routes and at that time I had more sense to kind of tweak the evaluation methodology but this is something that we'll leave

It's a tool.

It can be left with default settings or it can be tweaked and you can enter into analysis paralysis as well.

Thanks.

Did the tool and the output come first or the route adjustments come first?

Great question.

Okay.

I've got a protocol question for whoever knows the bylaws.

By heart.

Mike, I saw you on mute.

The voting members are not as, we have a lot of strengths.

We're not technical experts in this field.

Do we,

I don't know if we allow conversation from everyone on this call or does it have to just stick to the voting members?

I would say that's up to your discretion as chair for how you'd like to chair the meeting.

I was going to say the exact same thing.

I don't think there's anything formally preventing us.

Yeah.

Before we hear what other Mike has to say, if other Mike wants to speak, I want to know, have the transit agencies seen this before or are they seeing it in this packet for the first time?

It's the latter.

I'll speak for CAT.

I'm seeing this for the first time.

So it's being able to digest what's here.

I was trying to, you know,

You've created a model where you can slice and dice this, which is wonderful.

So you can add weights to whatever you want to particularly emphasize, which makes perfect sense.

It's just a matter of what's going through my mind is what is the focus from the CARTA board?

Do they want to focus in on the 60-40 split of

Expanding coverage or frequency.

So what is your, what is the goal that you're trying to reach?

Because then this too can help you kind of put that in place.

Can I try and express a very like big picture, almost like so philosophical, it's nebulous goal of what I'm trying to reach?

Does it got to sound?

I think we need to provide a transit experience that people in a really broad area fundamentally believe in, like in a deep kind of way.

I grew up in Mountain, South Carolina, and the also confusingly called the CAT bus, but the Clemson University Transit System actually served a huge geographic area.

And my mom would commute to get her teaching certificate 40 miles away regularly using a extension line of that regional transit system run through the university.

And you would see the cat bus going through these small towns and you fundamentally believed in it.

Like, oh, that's a reliable product.

If and when I need to use it.

And so I think that is the objective for me.

Yeah, you're talking about would-be writers instead of captive audience writers, which this list makes a captive audience.

This is a needs-based list from, you know, influenced by Title VI.

A would-be writer wants the product to be highly performing.

So that can't be built into the, or isn't currently built in this beyond the kind of facility activity center representation.

So it is a little tricky to answer that, Garland, but I think we've, you know, the 60-40s represented because we got there.

I might say a couple of things.

I mean, nobody's more surprised than me to see Buckingham at the top of the list.

So like, you know, I'm in, like there's some, some foundation for that.

But I would say

That there is a question to be asked about the difference between transit dependence and what I'll call a choice rider, which is something that Councillor Fleisher is alluding to as well.

Although I would say

that giving the heavier weight to population per square mile is the proxy for bringing in choice riders.

That is the way in which you're accomplishing that goal and potentially emphasizing that 60-40 that this board had already talked about in a prior meeting.

As for the other things that are sampled here, there's a way in which you might interpret

a lot of these items as oversampling the concept of poverty and so it's good that you didn't double up on both poverty and zero vehicle and all of that thing as far as waiting goes.

I will say at least at first blush

The age and medical I might have weighted a little bit more than where they are and I don't know if I'd have done all of these as one two or some variation some are one and a half or whatever you know I'm not scared to split the baby sometimes but I think the question

Mike, I want to thank you for that because I think one of the things that is hard for us who are, like I said, enthusiasts, but not experts, to know is what are the implications of these different levers?

And so, as you mentioned, the population is an implication towards choice riders.

So what are the kind of second factor things that are harder for us to understand?

I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't know enough to

to make any important decision at this point because of what all the different pieces could mean.

So can I interject for one second?

So I appreciate in the model how we looked at population and the way we've looked at population.

But I would also caution this group to say that just because an area is very dense, we also need to pay attention to whether these people have cars or not.

I know Mike potentially wanted to

didn't necessarily want to give that the same weight, but if you're talking about an area where you have a high, a large density of people, but they don't have cars themselves, they are transit dependent riders, even though you may not consider them to be, because how else are they getting around?

and a functioning, reliable transportation system that is frequent is how they're going to move large masses, which is why CAT is in the business of being an urban style transit system.

We are supposed to move

I want to make sure that we don't just discard that component because you want to build the mass in a city.

That's what cities are designed to do.

But you also need a really functioning transportation system to move them in a very efficient way.

Great.

Thanks, Garland.

Can I ask, Jaunt folks, being that you were surprised by the Buckingham of it all, what's the demand like on that route currently?

Does that existing service fill up quickly?

Yeah, so right now, Buckingham partners with Jaunt strictly on Connect, so they don't have any service just within circulating in Buckingham.

They're trying to get people

In and out of the urban core of Charlottesville and Albemarle for the purposes of accessing medical and employment.

And we're running up two buses each day in the morning and in the evening and

They're relatively well utilized because people are riding basically a full hour for free in extraordinarily costly commutes and they can't easily access employment opportunities like there are at, let's say, UVA Medical Center in Dilwin.

And so actually there's other people who are

Living in the same place, we want to go to Lynchburg as well, but that's not what we do.

The thing that surprised me about that is kind of, is there a growth potential for that route?

And there's a couple of factors there.

Scott's not on right now, but I know that Scott and Kendall have some access to some statistics about where UVA employees work.

And let's be clear that most of the boarding and alighting in these long haul routes that are bringing people in to work in Charlottesville and Albemarle, which is the importance of those routes,

You know, where they live.

And so I'm more aware of a demand for a huge number of people that are living in Western Goochland and even like Glenn Allen and Short Pump who still want to commute in and are looking for a jaunt bus to do that rather than could we have a third bus each day for Buckingham.

And

I'm also being very practical and realistic about, Buckingham is not gonna, even if we got more state money, Buckingham's not gonna have more match money.

And that is the brass tax of it all.

There are localities that I can go to and get the match money when there is money in a demonstration grant or in additional 5311 funds.

And Buckingham is not that locality.

And so that's the part that makes it less practical to me.

So there are other things on the list that are actually going to be funded as demonstration grants because there is high need and a community will to pay for it.

And one of those examples is represented in a funky way here as

I actually off of that had a, and I'm sorry I can't see faces because I have a little picture in picture and it's just showing the slideshow.

But I've been thinking even before Mike brought this up and I think he really kind of put a good point on this.

I'm not clear how the analysis is or if it is like accounting for catchment, right?

Like my understanding is that you're looking at a quarter mile square foot radius around the location.

And so like I

I can answer that question directly.

Yeah, that's just based on the census.

So it's residents within a quarter mile as the crow flies radius around stops.

Mr. Pruitt, can I just add one thing to your point here?

Just to say that while this is less true of what Garland does in the urban context, you know, that quarter mile making sense, understand that when we establish a route from Lovingston or Dilwin or Louisa or even Crozet,

People are not coming from a quarter mile away to get on those commuter routes.

Right.

They're like asking their friend to drive them to the kiss and ride point.

Yeah.

And even within urban locations, right?

Like just as an example, you know,

I'm doing the political thing.

I'm looking at routes that are in my district.

But if folks want to look at Route 3 with me while I'm talking.

So Route 3 and Route 2 are both very similar in how they serve my district, except they go a different way on the fork.

One goes up 5th Street, the other goes up Avon.

Avon is a very middle class and suburban neighborhood.

and Fifth Street has a lot of high density homes that are actually I think a little more than a quarter mile walking distance from the stop.

But I guarantee you like the folks who are living, like these are some of the poorest neighborhoods in my district off of Fifth Street and I guarantee you people are walking more than a quarter mile to the bus stop.

There's a few moving parts here.

One of them is population density is a metric that gives you an idea of the

Urban Form or Suburban Form or Rural Form around a stop.

It is not an estimate of the number of people who will ride the service.

It is not a model that predicts ridership or any of those other factors.

Can I say it in a different way?

I would say that what he's really trying to figure out, what everybody's really trying to figure out is

What route and how many people have access to this particular route?

The other fork that I was kind of wanted to be a little more pointed on is to just kind of concur with Mike's point of I'm not really clear how you're envisioning or suggesting footprint improvements because it seems like there's a lot of path dependence by analyzing existing routes

Well, that is a good question.

I'm paying attention to time and we're bumping up.

No, it's okay.

We're bumping.

This is all good.

We're bumping up on when we're supposed to move to the next section, but I just checked.

And for round table updates, Scott is not here.

So we're going to reclaim his time to put it to this discussion.

But we still have slides to go through about the routes and more details for that.

And some of them are new.

And so I would love to move on to

going through those and finding out

But they're great questions.

And I just want to go back and reflect on there's nothing in there new

In terms of routing and where those routes go, everything is coming out of either the regional transit vision plan that was adopted by, I think Taylor correct me if I'm wrong, but CJPDC in 2022, and then the service plans by Jaunt and CAT, and then looking at the comprehensive plans for Albemarle and Charlottesville.

So the only thing that is new in there is trying to consolidate because

When you look at about 20 different plans, each one of those recommendations is slightly different in each different plan that has been made.

So there, we had to make some assumptions and we had to, because you're looking at geography and some of those routes, like there's the same alignment, the geography doesn't change, the stop locations don't change, then they don't change in this analysis tool.

So that's really what the consolidation was about.

And this study effort is not redefining where those lines are.

I understand.

It may be helpful for me to touch on the next slide, because I think it'll start pulling some of the pieces together.

Mike Murphy mentioned Buckingham and local funding and match.

And that's something that we've talked about internally.

And so the next step in the study is to start developing an implementation plan.

And that is focused on the prioritized list, but it's not limited to these 20 whatever, however many we ended up with.

28 services that we identified.

We have the benefit of all of those studies and those different service type recommendations that we can lean into in trying to phase implementation over time.

But to do that, we've got to do a few things.

We've got to look at

what the operating costs would be for each of those service options and also looking at the capital cost associated with those service options whether that's infrastructure like bus stop improvements or accessibility or if it's fleet so buses and other resources so that work is ongoing and it's been ongoing in parallel to the prioritization work

To Mike's point about match, we also have to look at the funding side and come up with potential funding scenarios.

We've been doing that in concert with the working group that's comprised of TJPDC, the city and the county to give us an anticipated funding level.

So if it's, and I will say that what we're working with based on that working group is local funding that's limited to Albemarle and Charlottesville.

So when you start looking at things that go beyond that like Buckingham that doesn't have a potential funding source, it's hard to slot that in an implementation plan if you don't have a match identified.

So the real heavy lift in the implementation plan is figuring out what those funding pieces look like and how they apply, whether it's, you know,

Like Mike said, demonstration funding or it's those traditional types of funding or any potential new regional funding.

It's kind of figuring out how you leverage all of those pieces to come up with a package of projects for a certain timeframe, which we would look at over a five to 10 year horizon.

So like I mentioned earlier, we're gonna give you kind of a picture and I wrote it down

I've already done earlier, but we're really trying to tell a story.

Like what does this level of investment get and get that so you can get that community buy-in into the future on investing in transit in the region.

So you've got a list and it's a pretty finite list now, especially if you look at that 10 lines or 10 route strategies.

But the next phase of the study is going to take that and it's going to move those pieces in different directions.

So that informs it, but based on what types of funding level or funding sources and funding levels, they'll vary where those priorities kind of fall out in a multi-phase implementation plan.

Jen is fine.

Can I be the real Jen now?

You are definitely the real Jen.

We'll pass the gens.

where do we ask those questions or you're saying it's too late to ask they're already done so those assumptions have been made i mean we can if you have specific questions about them and scott are you

We can definitely answer those questions, yeah.

We just, in the interest of,

of everyone's time tonight knowing that we had already had a big deck.

Fantastic.

So then my funded question is adjacent to what you have here, which is if we secure, and I'll call it regional sources of revenue for Albemarle and Charlottesville, I'll call that the region,

But the city has already made a commitment in our general fund for some of these prioritization projects.

Is the assumption that the CARTA funds

Do these routes in the city reallocate its general fund commitments elsewhere or does the city funding continue and CARTA dollars that would have gone to those routes goes to services that aren't funded?

Do we have any of that kind of thinking?

Oh, Mike's looking at me strangely.

Okay, good.

So at this point, we're working with staff on a funding target.

We're not getting into what you might be putting in your capital improvement program.

So we're trying to kind of try to stay out of the kind of the moving target of maybe what's going on right now in your budget process.

And just looking at these and the funding, the different buckets of funding that we could utilize and where the best places would be to utilize them in this very theoretical implementation plan.

So ultimately,

Yeah, maybe just something we want to think about, you know, it would apply to the county as well.

Yeah, that would be, you know, I think earlier on when we first started talking about Buckingham, you know, there was kind of that policy question about, you know, is CARTA as a board going to, you know, fund things outside of the CARTA footprint?

I think there's a number, just like you pointed out with like swapping local for regional, like I think there's a number of those policy type questions that as, aside from this study, as

As this board continues its work and you talk to Chuck Parsons from CVTA and you talk to other regional authorities, they'll tell you that those bodies went through the same kind of policy questions of like, what are our funding parameters beyond a project list?

It's like, how are we going to financially, what are our rules of engagement gonna be?

And so those are good questions.

Having been part of the setup of CVTA, those are very good questions to ask him in your meeting next week.

There is.

So just again, summarizing the next steps, we're working to wrap up this service improvement list.

I will say it will stay a little fluid.

We do have a public survey component.

We're working to develop that survey with kind of this prioritized list of service improvements with the intent of getting that public input this summer to help us refine the prioritized list and the implementation plan, develop that implementation plan, at least a first cut of it for July,

and then be able to refine that implementation plan and come back to you with a draft report towards the end of August meeting that September target that we have to help inform your legislative agenda preparation for next year.

So that's the last thing that we had tonight.

So I have a question, which is, did you get what you needed from us?

I think so.

Absolutely.

I'm realizing I never gave a very concrete answer to the very concrete question that was asked to us as directors.

So just I think the baseline set that you gave as opposed to the two alternatives controlling differently for population and square miles, I think I

I have a preference toward the baseline, as Jen also expressed personally.

And I think there is an ongoing policy question about serving outside of our own footprint.

jurisdictions, but I said very early on in this process, and this is something that other Albemarle supervisors have talked about pretty openly, I think politically, strategically, on getting a successful authority is going to involve trying to expand our political scope of influence for the authority, and part of that is going to involve demonstrating success

So, I mean, to kind of telegraph what I think that looks like strategically, improving the quality of rural routes, it makes it easier for those localities, the ones that are already allowed to decide to participate in the authority, the ones that aren't currently allowed, it makes it easier for them to be okay with the idea that we might ask for expanded authority to include them in a future opportunity.

I do think that the, Supervisor Pruitt, to your point, I think the implementation plan is going to help you tell a story because that's going to be more meaningful than what these one-line descriptions look like in a prioritization chart because that's going to get more into this is what this means.

It means increasing the frequency on this route from this to that and this is the cost and this is how we pay for it.

It's going to

I'm sorry to continue to hold the talking stick but I actually have a quick question for Mike.

I think it's very realistic, again, telegraphing political strategy with our neighbors, right?

I'm thinking of like, at some point we will want people to join in a transit authority that has revenue power.

That is going to be the long-term goal, right?

Which realistically means getting their board of supervisors to agree to some kind of tax that is going to face their representatives, or their constituents, right?

Like some kind of fuels tax in Buckingham.

One day to support an improvement that will already have been extended to them.

I know a lot of Jaunt's footprint area is statutorily required.

I don't think how far it goes is, though.

I think it's just you are statutorily required.

You are doing your services to meet the statutory ADA requirement to provide a paratransit alternative.

And I don't think that would apply to something like the Buckingham route.

Am I right on that?

Can something like the part of every part of that route that goes past the James potentially be held as a bargaining chip or not without violating the law?

There are many things wrapped into what you say.

So Jaunt has done the ADA paratransit.

or CAT in collaboration with CAT via contract since 1987.

And it only happens in the urban ring.

It happens within three quarters of a mile of every place there's a CAT bus stop.

Everywhere else, it's true.

that a number of people may experience the same disabilities that would make them eligible, but there is no need for them to be found eligible because there's no other provider accessing the 5307 urban dollars.

As far as Jaunt's structural responsibilities, it is to Charlottesville and Albemarle as majority shareholders, actual owners, very similar to how it's basically the same public service corporation concept as GRTC.

And then you've got

Green and Buckingham, who are not owners, but by service, Louisa, Floanna and Nelson, who actually own shares, but half as many as the city and Albemarle do.

So that's the construct.

Five people who actually have voting power and privilege and two people who buy in.

I do really like what you're saying about what's the value proposition to these rural jurisdictions to make them think that they ought to one day become a part of CARTA.

I thought the question you might ask is who's the most likely and willing partner in that and I would say

That tracks with my expectations of those boards.

Yeah, because so much of our discussion has been centered on that Buckingham route, which is at the top of the list.

And so it's kind of such an, it gets to serve as such a fun proxy for how we're thinking about these issues.

So I guess I was thinking of it as,

what how free are we in our toolbox for what strategies we can have with negotiating because at some point if you're going to ask someone to buy in uh buy into the transit authority there needs to be the counterfactual and i was i i was thinking and i you didn't answer this directly but i think the answer is yes

Would it be legally permissible to say, ah, well, in the future, buying in is going to be contingent for the retention of certain services?

Before you move on, I've got one quick question is if we agree to

carry on as is.

Not necessarily.

I think it's got to line up with funding and it gets back to Mike's earlier question about match.

Okay, thanks.

Great.

I will drop my email in the chat for the board members and absolutely welcome any questions.

Follow up with you quickly.

And with that, we have what we need to continue to go.

And, you know, we have the ability to tinker and make changes.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, can I make a suggestion that any questions be sent to

Taylor on our team and we'll compile them all together and send them to the consulting team so that both the questions and the answers to all questions can be shared with the full board.

Even better.

All right, great.

Thanks, and thanks, Taylor, for being volatile.

You're going to get those emails.

I'm here to serve.

OK, thank you so much, everyone.

Let's move on to the roundtable.

Transit agency updates.

Sure.

It'll be quick.

I just wanted to let everybody know that our

Our transition plan is actually actively working, so our stations for charging are being implemented as we speak.

They're about 85% done.

Hopefully within the next two to three weeks, there'll be 100%.

We're just waiting from our side of the house.

We're waiting on Dominion to actually finish their part.

There's no timeline on there, but we do have good news in the fact that Dominion was actually on property two days ago to actually mark where they want our consultants to start the trenching for them.

So that's good news, an active piece and I don't know what happened but we actually got some pressure put on them and they've been really responsive in the last couple weeks so that's really good news.

And the last piece is our buses, our two battery electric buses.

have been built.

They're actually on property at Gillick.

They're waiting on seats.

The technology is going in this week, and they should probably be ready for their testing, and then the road trip from California to here in the next week and a half.

So very good news.

Great, and thank you.

They've got it marked out.

They've got a pretty detailed schedule.

Thank you.

We can't pin them down.

We've tried, trust me.

We've put all the pressure on, no we possibly can.

But the transformer they need to install, it's on their timeline.

We're trying to get them to do it before the hurricane season starts, but it's probably in another month and a half.

So that is what we've reiterated to them, that they need to have that done before that.

And they've kind of committed to try to get that done.

But if they hit hurricane season, then it'll slow down for ours.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Anyone have any questions?

All right.

Yeah, thanks.

If you're looking around town, you may notice that the first of our new buses with new branding are driving around and I'm biased, but I think they look fantastic and we're pretty excited about it.

Since the last time I was with you all, I went and attended and officiated at my first bus rodeo and was an officiant for the wheelchair securement event.

So that was pretty exciting experience for me and looking forward to our drivers participating next year.

I guess Jaunt has a long history in participating at the state and national level.

but have not done so for about five years.

So hopefully bringing that back next year.

Most of us were at an informative Virginia Transit Association Conference last week.

And I would be congratulating Scott and the folks at Afton Express who collaborated on a award-winning event

program at the conference, but we have nobody from UVA here to say congratulations to.

Our five-year budgets went into Katy Miller today for the capital side, so we're one day ahead of time and we've projected out what our needs are on the capital side during that period.

And we're pretty level, with the exception of the spike that you get when you put in scheduling software every four or five years.

As I mentioned briefly earlier, in the DRPT proposed six-year improvement plan, we are looking forward to adding three projects through demonstration grant in the next year that in collaboration with the PDC staff, we've identified as the most requested needs.

And that will allow us to add midday service for Louisa County from the Urban Core, midday service for Fluvanna County, same idea.

and to create an actual fixed route connect service for Greene County, which also has the potential to service some places in Northern Albemarle County for fixed route commuter service that have not previously been serviced by the current model, which is pretty exciting as well.

I am going to be sending out in about two weeks some word to people including folks on this call that I'm fortunate enough to be traveling with my family for a few weeks to celebrate that my youngest is graduating high school and I see counselor Fleisher's already given me some advice as somebody who knows about Amsterdam and that is one of our stops but my CFO Missy will be serving as the acting

That's it.

Amazing.

Have an excellent and safe trip.

I have a question not directly related to your report out, Mike, but to one of the questions I might pose about the route prioritization.

If you don't mind, it might save us an email.

But what is the

What's the frequency or the right, but really I think I'm asking what's the ridership on the 29 connect?

Or is it, you know, is it popular?

Great question.

Yeah, you know,

both of those Albemarle connect routes Crozet and 29 are experiencing a lot of growth and actually the one thing I didn't say is next Wednesday I'm presenting to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and that's one of my talking points.

And we have heard anecdotal feedback at our board meetings that the 29 North needs an additional bus, that it's really full.

And I've talked with Jason about that.

We've done some analysis and it is true that there have been maybe a handful, half dozen times where we've been above the seated capacity of the bus.

However, I think that public perception of full sometimes relates more to like, am I sharing a seat or is it uncomfortable that like it's so many people?

The fact is they are quite full and near capacity often, but they're not over capacity.

And so I don't know that for the number of times that we've gone over seated capacity that we need to add a bus just yet.

The thing that is interesting

about us getting the demonstration grant for Greene County is that with a stop or two in Albemarle County we might provide relief to the 29 North route as well with people who are getting on those stops and maybe add something interesting along the way like

UVA North Research Park, which has never been incorporated since we have stopped traditionally at the airport, you know, as far as northernmost boundaries.

And, of course, as you're aware, the county has an awful lot of

Thank you.

That helps.

Great.

Thanks.

Well, we

Found some time.

Before we adjourn, I was wondering if, this is a little off script, but if anyone else has any updates that they would like to share, different from announcements, but relevant to transit.

Jinx.

I'm going to count Jen as a motion and Mike as a second.

All in favor, say aye.

All right, have a good evening, everybody.