Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   1/20/2021

and I'm reading our statement.

The governor has declared a state of emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the nature of this declared emergency makes it impracticable or unsafe for the Charlottesville Albemarle MPO, sorry, Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee to assemble in a single location.

This meeting and the required public hearings will be held utilizing electronic virtual communication with the Zoom software application

in accordance with virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01 of the Virginia State Budget, HB 29, as effective April 24th, 2020.

The meeting will be recorded and made available to the public at our website.

All right.

So that's the statement.

And I'm going to go through our attendance list.

So just say here if you are here.

Practice unmuting yourselves.

All right.

Daniel Bailey is our newest member, taking over for Tim Keller, but I don't see him here.

He'll probably be joining us for our next meeting because he just got appointed to CTAC.

Thanks Donna.

Gary Heaton?

Gary, are you here?

No.

All right.

That's attendance.

Cool.

Call an order at 705 it seems and manager of the public.

Okay.

Sounds good.

All right.

Well, I believe we can move into our first agenda item, which is approval of the draft minutes from September and also November 2020.

So last year's last two meetings.

Does anyone have any concerns or questions before we move to vote on these?

Great.

Anyone second?

Second.

Cool.

Well, it looks like we're ready to vote then.

So, anyone have any kind of, do you want to say vote yes?

How do you want to handle this again?

So we can try it just asking everyone to say that they're in favor or against.

But if it seems like we're not sure what people are saying, then we'll go person by person.

All right.

So anyone, we could just vote aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Cool.

Any nays?

And I am too.

I was sent out to the meeting.

Sounds good.

I abstained from November as well.

I wasn't here for that, but September, yes.

It does.

And I just wanted to note that Chip has just joined us.

So if we could give him a minute right now just to chat with the group.

I never know which way to look on these things.

I look at the pictures, but my camera's over there.

Yeah, I know.

I do want to hang around.

This will be my last meeting, and I've really enjoyed, of course, working with everybody and all the CTAC members before.

I'm hoping, I mean,

You know, if you haven't seen it already, boy, this is a great way to kind of go out.

Our region did really well with SMART SCALE this year.

$117 million worth of improvements have been recommended.

So it's a big, big time.

You take that along with the money that was committed to the Route 29 projects,

I mean, we're about half a billion dollars worth of projects.

since the beginning of SMART SCALE.

So I'm really good.

I'm gonna hang around so that, you know, perhaps we can talk about that.

If there are any questions, there were some real surprises.

I'll be honest, I think I have said it to you all.

I said it at meetings as recently as Monday that I felt there was absolutely no way to Fontaine and

and 250 bypass project would be awarded and we would be considering that for a future project.

Boy was I wrong.

So it ranked high up there.

It has been recommended for funding.

So it, you know,

There's very little chance that it will not get through the full approval process and approved by the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

So I do think your work is cut out for you and helping to come up with projects and deciding which of those should be helping the policy board decide which of those should be priority projects.

to spend a good bit of citizen engagement on.

I've got the list in front of me.

I've always kind of recommended that the first place to start would be the projects that didn't get recommended.

One of those, especially the representatives from Albemarle County, you may be familiar with the 29 and Frays Mill Road.

It was a proposed R cut.

Very controversial with some of the neighborhoods around it.

That was not recommended for funding.

Another big project I was sorry to see was not recommended was the Hillsdale South, which would have connected

Hillsdale from hydraulic to the 250 bypass that was also not recommended for funding so you know there's a couple of ideas that you all may start talking about

and consider to put forward for projects for the next round where the applications will be due not this August but next August.

So anyway, it's been a pleasure.

Well, smooth sailings to you, sir.

All right, sounds good.

So you should see the amendment to the Transportation Improvement Program.

And this is one amendment.

It's an increase in cost.

It's for the Route 20 Belmont Bridge replacement.

And they're increasing the cost from $25.187 million to

31.1 million.

The new tip block is on the screen and then the old tip block is here.

This project has already been advertised, so we really need the policy board to approve it.

And I'm asking that you recommend that the policy board approve the amendment.

I don't know.

Like I'll give my answer and if Chuck wants to jump in or Chip and correct me if I'm wrong.

I think that with COVID, a lot of the materials for construction have been limited and the supply chain is limited.

And so cost of construction is going up all over the place.

We'll have to find out.

I know that another project that's not in the TIP is increasing the construction cost increase for that.

Lucinda, I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but I do know that this was a project funded prior to SMART SCALE, so I don't think that any additional funding going to this project will take away from any of the other projects that had been submitted.

The other thing I'm thinking is that, as you all know, there's the new gas tax that has been implemented within the Commonwealth

A lot of additional revenue has been generated with that and that is in fact one of the reasons we received more projects than we anticipated for our region.

Culpeper district received an additional 80 plus million dollars than what had been originally estimated for our district.

Yeah, in the tech meeting, Chuck indicated that this money was coming from the state and other sources and it didn't seem like there was going to be a transfer.

So it's out to bid right now.

I imagine it would start in the spring.

I don't know.

Any other questions for Lucinda?

Great, we're willing to bring this for a vote.

Anyone second that?

Second it.

Great.

All right, so let's vote.

For the recommendation of this tip adjustment, everyone can just say aye and listen.

We'll go to nays next.

So if you vote yes, please say aye.

Thank you.

Anyone say no or nay?

I'm going to say nay.

All right.

Well, it looks like the yeses have it.

Do we want to take a comment from Joe on this?

Sure.

And thanks Joe for that.

I am trying to find the agenda.

I have too many screens.

If you guys saw how many screens you think I was in the matrix as the architect.

I have six in here.

Okay, cool.

All right.

I think we just got through that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let me pull up that memo.

So you should see a memo saying the topic setting performance targets.

In our last meeting, we had some presentations from OP, and we had a discussion about the performance targets that the MPO needs to set for the state for their performance measurement program.

And after some consideration and discussion,

The staff decided to recommend that the MPO adopt the state targets.

We don't really have a lot of mechanism for changing the performance measures.

And we thought that it was better to just go with what the state is having because they have more control over the outcomes of the performance of the assets being measured.

The one thing that was brought up in the tech committee is that the, so in the memo, I have first two tables are the recommended targets and the targets that we would report to the state are the very last column, the CA-MPO targets for 2021.

So the one thing that was brought up in the tech committee meeting is that the safety performance targets is the,

MPO area projected trend is very different from the state target and we had a lengthy discussion about this in the tech committee meeting and I don't know if Chuck is on the meeting tonight but

The trend is going up.

So it looks like we have a decrease, our trend is decreasing.

But actually, if you look at the five-year indicator, it will be going up according to the data.

And also, if you look at the number of fatalities, like the actual number of data that's being measured, you know, like 898 deaths

If there's one more or less death, it's not going to change that trend that much, that target.

But with seven deaths, if it changes by one or two, it's going to make a much larger percentage increase.

The MPO Tech committee felt like they could recommend going with the state targets for this, but there was a discussion and it's just a suggestion from the staff and I'm perfectly happy if you want to do something different than what is recommended.

I do have the tables, the table three and four are alternatives and I just filled them in with the trends.

May I make a comment here, please?

Can you all hear me?

I'm just wondering whether this way, for instance, the number of fatalities is just giving total.

In reality, planning any project or looking at the maintenance of a particular facility, something that is important is the number of fatalities involving trucks

with regards to ordinary passenger cars.

From this performance target here, there is nothing that tells me about the difference of the involvement of trucks with respect to other types of vehicles.

I imagine that VDOT does have that information.

Yeah, thanks.

So there would be no difference between the MPO that we have and the state targets?

Which of the tables reflects that?

Yeah, it's the first two.

Yes, so there would be no financial ramifications.

If we set our own targets and we did not meet the target, we wouldn't be penalized.

However MPO staff would have to explain to MPO and FTA why we didn't meet our targets and what we were going to do in order to meet the targets.

And that's where I kind of

realized that it was better to stay with the state targets because the only things that we could really do to meet those targets and make a substantial change would be in our prioritization of our transportation projects in the long-range transportation plan and also in our prioritization of our SMART SCALE applications.

The state has a lot more

like say in what projects they're going to fund and select for funding.

In some cases, we seem to be doing better than our targets, much better than our targets.

Now we're dropping down again.

And why does that make sense?

If we're doing much better, why don't we hold to the higher targets?

Yeah, that was my exact question when I started on this whole quest of

kind of learning more about the targets and the performance measures.

So there's actually in your packet, I think Jessica included it, there's an overview of the performance measures and safety targets.

And that kind of goes into more depth about how they were created and how they work.

So,

This system comes from the federal government and then it goes through the state and it's tailored to a system.

Well, it's made so that the state and MPO work together on the targets.

So the MPO is kind of working with the state and the state's taking the lead and saying, these are the targets that we want to meet and reach.

and the MPO is supporting that.

So it just kind of the way the system works, we don't really have any like way to substantially influence the outcomes.

It's more in the state system.

So it's better for us to just go with the state system.

However, if you want to make a recommendation to adjust your own targets, we can do that.

I think if you chose to set your own targets and make the fatalities lower and kind of aim towards less fatalities and accidents,

That would be kind of a gesture and kind of a statement, which would be fine.

So I had a question as I get with fatalities that, you know, one or two fatalities can totally change everything.

But I was asking, I was going to ask about the, on this slide, we're looking at now that top box with the person miles traveled that are reliable.

And that also seemed like one where our actual is well above the state targets.

I know why

because of Northern Virginia.

And I'm not sure.

if there is a reason why we would expect our areas targets to predict that they are lower.

I think another thing is that these, what this is measuring here is the trend of how the data's moving, but when the state looks and sets their targets, they're also looking at the projects that they're planning to fund and implement in the upcoming years.

And just on that one, I guess I'd ask the follow-up question.

So like on that first one, the person miles traveled on the interstate, then it looks like the NBO's current target is 99%.

Yeah, so the MPO did decide to change some of the targets two years ago.

That one was changed two years ago.

And because there was a construction project that was going to, that we thought was going to make it more favorable, you know, increase the reliability.

I don't think that that, but maybe it did happen.

I don't know.

So that's not in the picture anymore.

If I could check on, for me it was really helpful some stuff that Chuck said at our MPO tech meeting and Chuck I saw that you jumped on the call so if I'm misrepresenting what you said please jump in.

But Chuck said something like these targets are a really useful exercise for us to understand our performance, but they are not goal setting.

So we can, they are projections.

So we should treat whatever we're looking at as projections based on data and not our goals.

So if we see things like the percent change in fatalities, our target is an increase.

We can confidently say that that's not our goal.

That's just the projection.

So just putting that in your minds that when you vote to make your recommendation for these things, you're not saying that these are the goals of the MPO.

These are the projections of the MPO based on the data.

So I think that that kind of, I don't know, it relaxes me thinking about what the recommendation would be.

No, that's a great question.

And it's really completely a separate process.

That would be our long range transportation planning process.

Like Lucinda was saying about prioritizing our projects.

That's where we prioritize our projects and our projects are prioritized based on whatever criteria are most important to us and in our region.

So if safety is our most important thing, that's how we're going to prioritize our projects.

We're going to say that the projects that improve safety the most are expected to improve safety the most.

but we also measure it against some of these targets.

The projects done in the past, I guess is my question.

This system was implemented a few years ago and it was right around the time that our long range transportation plan was being updated.

So I think it was a part of it, but I think that our next update in the future can include more of it and the state

does and the localities also prioritize safety as the first goal for their funding selections.

So like us, they're also very concerned about that.

And I think that the penalties are the highest if the safety goals are not met through the federal system.

So that would be something and also we're going to be setting the safety targets every year.

The asset and system condition targets are measured every four years.

with the two year adjustment.

But the safety performance targets are set every year.

So this is something that we can discuss in our committees and kind of as a group together as a community.

And, you know, it's a really good opportunity for us to have awareness of it and awareness of the trends.

And then, you know, kind of have discussions about it.

But as far as reporting to the state,

You know, this is kind of a state request.

It's their system.

I have a quick question.

So here, it seems like, you know, the state targets are probably average across the state.

And of course, that includes many different kinds of land use areas.

Like you mentioned, for example, for the reliability measure, you know, Charlottesville is not Northern Virginia.

Here we're saying that our current target for travel time reliability index is 1.2 and the actual was 1.15, but we're setting our target at 1.56.

It seems sort of strange to take the state average of something that does not describe the local condition.

I would think it's the same for the safety performance targets.

We're a town that has, for example, higher bicycle use share than the state average and probably more pedestrians because of how dense it is in the center part of Charlottesville compared to other places.

I see that for the number of non-motorized fatalities serious injuries it looks like we just took the CA-MPO projected trend since that was a number but for the other ones we're adopting the state it's just sort of it seems kind of arbitrary that we're taking these numbers and if the exercise is somewhat arbitrary like we just take the state average and apply it towards the local targets then it's sort of working against the goal of working with the state to set these targets I mean I don't understand

Especially for the safety targets.

Since we had the recession back in the late, like 2008, 2009, we've seen it, we saw a downward trend.

through like 2014 through 2015.

And we're starting to see that trend start to rise up.

And the way the data is calculated, it's based on a five-year running average.

And the average for us is still trending downward, even though the data points are going upward at the last several, last few years.

So the downward trend part hasn't hasn't flushed itself out, so to speak.

And what we're going to see probably either next year or the following year, it will see a big jump upwards in the trend.

And that's just the way the data is showing.

This chart here doesn't show that, but if you look at the actual

Sorry, I understand what you're saying about the trend lines.

And of course the trends will change in 2020 because COVID impacted travel in very unexpected ways.

You probably will have much more reliable travel times for big chunks of 2020, for example.

And I understand that there are trend lines and that's how these targets are projected.

So my question is, what is the purpose of setting the local targets

As part of the regulations, as the federal government is part of the regulations, the MPO have to set targets as well as the state.

The way we don't necessarily roll up what the MPOs propose in the state targets

We go with whatever the trends are showing statewide.

And we assess impacts from the federal government based on the state numbers, not the MPO numbers.

So it doesn't really affect the MPO other than it shows you where you're trending.

And if you want to pursue something, and we do,

Our numbers are low and we pursue most of our projects that we well pretty much all the projects that we pursue have a high safety component and we're trying to address most of those needs.

The system reliability is that one's a little bit harder to do because a lot of times you're going to have to do capacity improvements to address some of those needs and we haven't really done those in a long time in this region.

So I don't see that happening, but we do look at the operation perspective and try to provide as much operational benefit as we can, as well as diversion to other modes.

And that's what the MPO, their policy and their processes is trying to facilitate that shift as opposed to putting more roads out there, which hopefully eventually it'll start to reflect more in the data.

Donna, did that help you?

Yeah, I think it's more clear.

So for example, let's just say for the safety performance targets, instead of setting them at the state target, we just went with the CA-MPO projected trend.

How would that come back and hurt the MPO?

Well, it's just a matter of justifying it with data.

Other than the data that we've sent as part of the workbook, unless the MPO is going to collect their own data and do that piece of it,

So it says right here, Campo projected trend 2021 is negative 4.3% for a percentage change in fatalities.

Right.

I mean, it can be.

The issue is going to be is how do you support that other than this data?

I feel like you need more than this data to support that.

We're going to show how your projects that you're selecting and pursuing are going to support that trend.

If you adopt the state targets, we have that supporting data already.

If you want to do your own targets, then you have to come up with what you're going to do to justify

This downward trend from a project, what projects you're going to pursue and how you're going to continue to pursue that.

Yes.

For the state, there are ramifications.

That's why they give us a two year, we can reset it every two years to adjust it so that we can try to keep track.

But if we consistently don't meet targets, like for safety, they could basically say, you need to take all of your federal dollars and put it on addressing safety needs and you need to show us how you're doing it.

So if we're aggressive or let's say, you know, we wanted to have higher level targets, we might shoot ourselves in the foot.

Okay.

So the MPO would not be judged at that level?

So I guess to boil it down, it seems like if we go to the state targets, the main value of this whole exercise is basically just to compare how we're doing against the statewide average rather than it actually reflecting like the goals of our NPO.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, hopefully with the next update for the long range plan, we can take a deeper dive because these came out about the same time we adopted the last long range plan.

So we weren't able to really mill them into the process developing the long range plan.

The MPO did have a process.

And they've had one for several years where they set up goals.

prioritized and evaluated all the projects based on a prioritization system that they had developed.

And that's one of the things that they actually got national accolades for about doing that.

And they did it through a federal grant program initially like 10 years ago.

So I think this round, given this information, I think we can do a lot better

So a quick question.

Just one more comment.

So my concern is if we set the local targets at the state average, knowing that for the majority of the safety performance targets, our trends would be to beat the state targets anyway.

So let's say we set it at 3.2% and then we actually see a decrease as it's shown on the first line of that safety performance target.

So on paper, it's going to look like we did great in terms of maintaining our goal of

keeping fatalities under 3.2% increase but in reality right like if the projected trend is

You know, true, taking our own local data, we may actually be inadvertently increasing the number of local fatalities that would be more context specific to this community.

So like, it's going to look like we did good on paper, but like in reality, that's not good considering the local context.

I guess that's my concern.

So I had the exact same concern.

And I've done a lot of research and discussion meetings on this because I thought, well, we should keep our standards high.

We have high scores right now.

We have good trends.

Why would we set our goals lower?

However, this is an exercise to meet a federal requirement.

That's why we're setting these targets because it's required by the federal government

and the funding and the selection of transportation projects goes through the state.

So there is not a lot that the MPO is going to do to change the outcomes.

It's all kind of in the state's hands.

They have control over

Most of it.

So the two things that we can do are our selection of our SMART SCALE projects that we apply to the state for and our prioritization and our long range transportation plan.

However, it's not going to make that much of an impact in these annual trends.

So it just seemed like it was better to go along with the state

It's a state system and also if we choose our own targets, we have to come up with a plan to make changes of how we're going to meet those targets.

So Lucinda and Chuck, I think the question was more, where are we going to see these targets and our performance outcomes again?

Are we only going to see them when we revise this in four years or does the state use it for anything else in determining how funding is allocated or anything like that?

Like when is it used again?

Yeah, it's related.

Yep.

So the asset and system condition targets are done every, the MPO has to update them every four years.

There's an opportunity to make adjustments every two years.

If the state chooses to make adjustments, the MPO can also make adjustments.

So we will see those every four, possibly two years.

And then the safety and performance targets are every year the MPO will be asked to update their targets.

We have a workbook which is on our website, and I can pull it up if you guys want to see it now, that just shows the trend and the data.

So one last point, sorry, discussion's going on a bit.

It also, I guess, seems like you're saying for these particular targets, they're set at the state level, it's tough for the MPO to do much to change them.

So this might not be the best kind of exercise for the MPO to set its own targets that it really wants to work towards meeting.

Is there like a separate process, I guess, part of the long range plan where the MPO

Yeah, so the long-range transportation plan is where we would be able to do that.

The MPO and the community will do public outreach and the community will

decide on the goals and how to prioritize the transportation projects and needs within the long range transportation plan.

And then those go into the TIP, which is what we just amended.

And then that will go to the state and the state will put that in their state plan.

So that is where the MPO is able to have some kind of control over the outcomes

and then also in the selection of our SMART SCALE projects.

So we do both of those SMART SCALE projects and the long range transportation plan in coordination with the state.

And I believe, I mean, I can't speak for the community at this point, but it's the staff's intention and I believe VDOT's intention as well when we redo our long range transportation plan to use these targets as a measurement and, you know,

work towards reaching them and having them be better.

So I mean, the long range transportation plan will have a lot of community input.

I feel like if we ever reference this document

Yeah, I was gonna say that, I mean, I've heard that through many of the meetings about how we can use this data and that's been

process that we want to try to strive to do is to see, track the trends and look at the projects that we're doing and see, make sure that they're going to be, continue to address the trends in the way we want them addressed.

And that's what we, from my perspective, when working with the localities in the NPO, I try to

make sure that we're looking at the projects that are gonna have the best safety benefit and include all of the impacts that it'll have on all the different modes.

So it's just not vehicle, measured by vehicle.

It's looking at how the pedestrians are crossing the street and maneuvering through an intersection and bicyclists.

And those are gonna keep the trends in the direction we want them to go.

And that's coordination between this committee, the other committees in the MPO, and the MPO and the adjacent localities that make up the MPO.

And hopefully we can, as part of the long-range plan update, we can tease out these methods for identifying and evaluating projects

Mr. Stewart, you know, when I think of a projected trend, I think that's kind of the what's going to happen, the baseline, the do-nothing scenario.

And I think if we have a target that's above that, that almost sends the wrong message.

where I can understand if we had a target that was below the trend, we would need to justify what are we doing to somehow affect the do nothing scenario, the trend line.

But where we have, you know, I think what concerns a lot of people in this group without having said it yet is, you know, under safety performance targets, that second row, we're basically saying we're okay with the number higher than the projected trend line.

And why would we be okay with that?

I can understand if our target was below that, we would need to say, all right, we're going to do projects one, two, and three to really drive that number down.

I think that there's been a lot of good discussion and some good questions.

We are a little over 10 minutes over our allotted time for this agenda item.

Perhaps it might be time for someone to make a motion.

So are we looking for a recommendation for this to move forward?

Can I make a comment before I make a motion, please?

I just want to know what facility does the MPO have to extract own data?

Because the data is available, but it needs money and personnel for that data to be extracted.

I'd like to hand that question off to Sandy.

Sandy, are you

I'm sorry, you broke up just a little bit.

What capacity does the PDC have to extract data?

Yes, I said what capacity does FPU have?

Yeah, we have the same access to data that, I mean, we would get it through VDOT or one of the modeling companies that they have a contract with, we have the same access to the data that they would have.

We don't have transportation modelers or statisticians or anybody like that on our staff that would be able to do any additional statistical analysis beyond

What the state has done at this point.

But in this case, I cannot see how we can get individual MPOs information.

The data is available, but it's not available to those who are making the projection.

We do have the data and it is on our website.

I'm going to share it with you.

The state provides us with the data.

So we have this workbook here.

that has all of the data for our MPO.

And so this, we have two workbooks.

One is for the safety targets and the other one is for the performance targets.

And so, you know, you can see here they have the charts with the trends and they have some graphs and then it's broken up into the MPO regular

But the problem here is that I don't see how you can just use a trend line to predict, because for instance, the serious accidents that we are looking at.

If at a particular year, we find out that a particular location because of an intersection is much higher, you'll find that if you do something to reduce the crisis from that particular intersection,

The translates will reduce considerably, but if you don't do anything, it may increase.

So I don't see anything in the input here because apparently I don't know anything about what you do and how you get to the long-range planning, because projects, different types of projects have impacts on all of them.

Safety.

Okay.

They do it for our district.

They do.

Yeah, they do.

That's Charles Proctor, who's on the call.

He works with us.

And, you know, each

Virginia is broken up into different districts.

Well, which means that data is there and it can be analyzed.

Well, the workbook represents the analysis that

They do in central office for all the MPOs and for the state across the entire state.

And these are basically what we're showing in the charts up there, where the data points are showing.

And as you can see, the fatalities, the last three years, it's been pretty flat.

The serious injuries, as you can see, it's starting to trend upward.

So if you take a minus 16% trend, the next round, the trend line's probably going to start to rise up.

And that's what I was trying to say before.

What we're seeing, even with COVID, over the state, we've seen an increase in crashes, serious injury and fatal crashes, over what we saw last year prior to COVID.

which was about a 5% increase over what we saw last year.

Yes, but what I'm saying, I'm sorry, I don't want to extend this, but what I'm saying, if for instance, take the last plan, if during that period, two major projects are approved and constructed with impact safety, it will not continue to rise.

It may significantly drop, or we're showing the average line now going down.

You're correct.

And even the effects of the project, you're not going to see them right away.

You won't see the reflects until three or four years out.

This is true.

On the trends itself.

And that's why I'm saying is we want to try to pursue the projects that are going to address the issues.

But I mean, what these

numbers say for us for the MPO it it doesn't really have any weight or other than being something that we're having to check off to address the federal regulations it doesn't have any impact on what we do as an MPO that's the first situation now and i'm hoping that that and we we do we look at and we evaluate the projects and we pursue projects that are

We're going to address these needs in most of our applications that we're submitting for funding.

We look at where we're having the hotspots throughout the district, and those are the ones we present to the localities to see if they want to pursue those locations to make those improvements.

And some of them we get funded, some of them don't.

This year we were able to, fortunately, we were able to get a number of projects funded, so moving forward.

Even if we get it funded now, it's going to be five or six years before they're completed.

Yes, it does now.

So at this point, we are more than 20 minutes over.

I'm saying this to everybody.

So you can choose to either make a motion and vote, or you do not need to vote.

We can gather up all of your thoughts over the course of this agenda item and bring it to the policy board as a summary.

I'm willing to make a motion to just accept the state targets.

because there really isn't any real alternative to that.

We might as well just do it.

All right, so it looks like a second.

So we're ready to then vote.

Yay.

Yay.

I'll abstain from voting.

I still don't fully understand.

I'll abstain for the same reason.

Yeah, I think I'm gonna abstain.

Alright, four abstains.

Okay, well, I say yay.

Joseph?

Abstained.

And Ada?

That's Nicholas.

Nicholas, thank you.

I would vote for, after the explanation, I would vote yes.

Oh, he's in favor, okay, thank you.

And Lee?

Yes.

Cool.

Marty?

Yes.

You're?

Thank you.

And Patrick?

Yes.

And Donna?

Abstain.

Thank you.

Lucas?

Abstain.

Joseph, I think we got you, right?

Yeah, abstain.

Thank you, sir.

And Stuart?

Yes.

Thank you.

I would like to make a suggestion that maybe in the minutes of something we should state that maybe these graphs should be presented in another way that reflects what is happening in our district because as I said it does not reflect what is happening in our district at all.

If the data is there, I think we should be reaching that type of analysis just at the state level.

I would make that recommendation.

All right, so it looks like we should be able to move to the fifth item here is Unified Planning of Work Program.

Yep, I am going to, let's see, share my screen with you now.

So we're just playing

All kinds of crush your fingers and hope it works games to make sure the technology is working.

So first of all, I apologize for not getting this out to you ahead of time.

Jessica is going to email this out to you all.

What I want to make sure that you all know, first and foremost, is that we're not asking for any decisions tonight.

This is just to start a discussion.

As many of you know, every fiscal year we are required to submit a unified planning work program which basically outlines how we are going to spend the federal planning money that is given to us for the MPO operations.

In terms of supporting transportation planning throughout the region, specifically through the MPI boundaries.

So we wanted to start early having a discussion with you all and developing the work program.

One of the things we learned from some of the changes that VDOT has made as far as their invoice and record keeping protocol, as well as

This has been the first year that I've put together a work program and we have a lot of new staff is that we're really going to be able to serve our MPO area better if we simplify and streamline the number of projects that we put into the work program.

So there are several things that we're required to do.

We talked about the tip, we talked about

the performance targets and the safety targets.

Those are things that we have to do.

We have to staff committees.

We have to, you know, communicate with other jurisdictions to coordinate with them.

We want to, you know, hearing what you all said, public outreach was really important.

We want to make sure that we do that well and support this committee as well as our other MPO committees.

So those are all things that are just going to be kind of standard in all of the work programs.

And then we have some additional ability to do projects outside of those specific have to do items that will support work for transportation planning in the region.

This fiscal year, we are launching the Route 29 North Corridor study that's in both the MPO work program for fiscal year 21 as well as the rural work program.

So in order to make sure that that project is completed, we'll need to continue that into fiscal year 22.

So that's going to be one of our larger projects that will

need a good amount of staff resources.

We've also been talking about, as you all are aware, of expanding the SMART SCALE public engagement process and project selection process.

And so we're going to be committing quite a bit of resources to that too.

In addition to those two items, we are also recommending that the MPO use a consultant to

to do a strategic plan for the MPO.

And we think this is really important, especially as we prepare for potentially a redistricting of the MPO boundaries so that we can define really what the purpose of the MPO is as far as who does the MPO consider to be its clients?

Who are we working for?

Is that county staff?

Is it public officials?

Is it citizens?

To really define who it is that we need to be

making sure that we're engaging and who our stakeholders are and to really make sure that that's clarified as well as defining, better defining our committee structure and the roles and responsibilities of each of the committees.

We think this will set us up really well as we prepare for or just redistricting to be really well organized, have a clear sense of purpose, you know, just be able to

Better define and be more intentional about the work that we undertake.

All of that being accounted for, we still have a little bit of unallocated resource.

And that's what we really want to talk to you all about.

First of all, if there's any sort of concern about that other work that I just mentioned, specifically a strategic plan, you know, that's certainly on the table and we can talk about it.

But we also do have a little bit of additional resources.

We think we can do one more project pretty well.

And so, Jessica, Lucinda and I brainstormed.

We had a couple of ideas.

You all might have others as well, but we just wanted to get some feedback from you all on what you think would be the best use of the MPA staff and time that would be of interest and would benefit the community.

So we first started off with looking at a couple of different categories.

We started with policy research, which is sort of where the transportation funding analysis started.

So we could do something.

Some ideas that we had under a policy topic would be to look at some case studies in depth on successful public-private partnerships where we could leverage private investment into transportation infrastructure to try to

find ways to fund bigger projects, best practices for supporting climate action plans, and then studying how this rise in telework that we're seeing kind of as a result of the pandemic that we expect will continue to impact

sort of commuting patterns and how people get to work and how people work, how those might impact ongoing travel demands and travel behavior.

Those are a couple of ideas we had kind of in that policy research category.

Then we have a bike ped sort of overall topic, nothing super specific as far as

sub-topics for that, but that's something that we have continued to support and could very easily come up with a project.

Another phase of some sort of equity work, this one was the one that seemed to have the most interest from the MPO tech committee.

And then Lucinda especially has been doing a lot of research into understanding some of the safety and I think this probably relates to equity as well.

One idea we had was to spend a little bit of time and effort understanding the relationship between safety outcomes and the impacts or

are correlations between who's getting hurt, where they're getting hurt and who those populations of people that are likely to experience negative safety impacts.

What are those demographics and how does that impact specifically historically underserved communities?

So those are a couple of places to start.

Really, we want to hear, you know, this is just a time for you guys to share your ideas.

Are any of these interesting to you?

Do you have other suggestions?

Oh, I would like, I'll throw the first.

I'd like to,

Yes.

Public transportation may be saying it better.

In particular, the county has been pushing on affordable housing and spreading it throughout the county.

Part of making that work, for example, is to have transportation available for people who may not have cars.

Then there's also aging in place.

of which I'm one.

So that too, it would be helpful to have bus transportation.

I know the bus transportation in my neighborhood, a bus sort of runs once every hour and is very limited.

If you wanted to get around the county,

It's very hard.

So I'd like to see really a look at how we can expand the bus transportation.

Now I know this Jaunt had briefed us and I think briefed CTAC about non-fixed routes.

That might be part of it.

That's maybe a little bit more pie in the sky.

But at least with the buses that we have, I think we could do more.

Maybe we could buy different size buses to expand the availability of buses over time.

If I could go ahead just real quickly, I think it's later on the agenda, if I'm not mistaken, I don't have it up in front of me.

Our area is the recipient of currently CAT, Charlottesville Area Transit, has a consultant that's looking at the actual bus routes to redesign their entire system.

At the same time, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District is the recipient of two other transit planning grants.

One is for a regional visioning process, which, Marnie, it sounds like just what you're talking about is a complete

Upper level view of what's needed, where it's needed, and what is the best method to fill the need.

That particular study won't say that a bus

A 40-foot bus has to run down Elm Street, but it'll pick a neighborhood and determine the economic status and the work and where people travel to and from from that neighborhood and determine this is a neighborhood we need to run through and others that are not.

We have been awarded that project and Jessica is working on kicking that off right now.

We also received funding at the same time for a project that we're managing for Albemarle County that will look at the specific routes and on North 29, on Pantops,

and running to Monticello.

Those were three identified areas that may be the outcome could be expansion of CAT, it could be an expansion service by Jaunt, or it could be some type of on-demand service.

So I don't want to discourage your recommendation, but there's going to be a tremendous amount of work in the next 18 months

So, but the only thing I would say is if you've got three separate projects, maybe it pays for the MPO to somehow draw them all together so that we have a more, not have each one in its own little pipeline.

They should be feeding each other.

The other thing I'm going to say is just one last thing, then I'll let somebody else speak, is that

I'm very sensitive of the fact that the county, Albemarle County, where I live, has been pushing on a lot of rentals and affordable housing.

And so when these studies are taking place, are they taking into account the number of projects that are in place?

You muted yourself, Marty.

Yeah, I got it.

I'm sorry.

So my question is that, did you hear the beginning that these have to be, these three projects shouldn't be silos.

They have to somehow be integrated.

That I didn't get from what you said Chip.

And the other thing is that are we taking into account all the project

Yes, we'll look at land use both current density and projected future density in the visioning process.

The answer to your first question is while they're all three separate projects with separate

Scopes of work, what we're looking to do is to hire the same consultant to do all three so that we have that commonality of what you're saying so that one person can see from all three different projects.

OK. OK, thank you.

Sandy, I wanted to propose one idea, ride sharing economy, some kind of consideration or possible study to consider around.

I've seen other communities have places in which people who are looking to hail an Uber or a Lyft or whatever, some communities come up with ways to encompass that within the design of their streets and the shape of how their communities look.

Yeah, yeah.

There's different ways, right?

Like you could have like a taxi cab stand or you could have it for ride shares or anything kind of like that.

If it's something of demand or something of interest to you all, you think it would be useful.

Yeah, this is Stuart.

I think it's great that we're thinking to focus a little bit.

We cover a lot of topics and I think it's great if we highlight a few that this group is gonna champion.

I would say,

If we can open the aperture a little bit regarding bike and ped and maybe think about, to your point, best practices around more livable cities, which would include bike and ped and maybe we change the way we look at our streets a little bit.

There's lots of good models throughout the world about cities that have kind of transitioned into a different model.

Yeah, that's what I'll have a very strong transportation connection.

to maybe examine the feasibility of, you know, in the long-term adopting something like a Vision Zero plan for the region, safety metrics.

I know there are lots of other regions around the country that have done this, you know, what does the pace of those plans look like?

Great.

Any other thoughts?

It seems like we're all kind of like talking around it, but it really seems like equity is on the forefront of all of our minds when we're talking about buses and making cities livable and bikeable and walkable.

Sure, yeah.

Great.

Thank you.

Thanks, Sandy.

Good.

So I'm going to share my screen.

So the MPO did a bike and pedestrian count this last fall.

I can't remember how much I've talked to you guys about this before, but to give a little background,

The PDC has historically done bike and pedestrian counts every other year in the fall and spring.

They haven't been done for about four years, and when I went back and looked at the data previous, there were a lot of discrepancies in how and where the data was collected previously, so it wasn't very

I worked with the City of the County and UVA representatives on our bike and ped committee to figure out a better focus for the bike and pedestrian count and what we came up with was shifting away from this like broad regional bike and ped count and towards a focus on

before and after data for locations that we're about to see investment in bike and ped infrastructure.

So that committee came up with 10 locations where we were gonna count.

And these places were either going to have bike and ped investment in the near future, or they had recently had bike and ped investment.

And we decided to also include those in this count because we felt that the after data alone would still be really helpful for the localities to learn from.

So what we did was I came up with a brand new count sheet and we had volunteers go out and count at each of these locations at morning and evening peak travel periods.

So from 7 to 9 a.m. in the morning and from 4 to 6 p.m. And they were all counting in the last two weeks of October.

So they were all done in this short period of time.

So people counted bikes, they counted pedestrians.

And before they did this, they had a one-on-one tutorial with me where I gave them like very clear definitions of what constituted a bike, what was a pedestrian, how are you counting multiple people riding like a tandem bike or anything like that.

And they also collected demographic data.

And this demographic data is of course a little bit subjective because how can you tell if someone is a woman riding by on a bike,

or not, you make your best guess.

And what I told people was, if you're more than 50% sure that that's a woman, go ahead and make the tally mark.

Same thing for our under 16 category.

Same thing for our non-white category.

Same thing for our physical disability category.

And we also counted people wearing helmets.

And we counted people riding the wrong way.

So typically, if you're riding a bike, you're supposed to be riding in the same direction as traffic on the roadway.

and people wrong way riding would be riding against traffic.

And we also counted the number of bikes that were motorized that you could tell.

There's a lot of electric bikes out there on the market that you can barely tell that they're electric.

So if they could tell, they were counted as motorized.

This is the summary sheet, but we also have the data broken down even more

to even more detailed for each location.

So this is broken down.

We had our volunteers break down the bicycles and pedestrians based on how they were entering the intersection, how they were entering the location.

Were they coming from the North?

Were they coming from the South?

This gives us really detailed information about direction of travel.

And they counted by 15 minute increment.

So that's why it's broken down into many, many rows here.

The demographic data is not broken down by bikes or peds.

It's all aggregated together.

That's one thing that I've heard when I've presented this data to other groups that they would have liked to see that data, the demographic data broken down.

And that's something that we could do in the future.

But I think that as it is, it's still really helpful for getting a sense of who is traveling through that intersection or traveling through that location.

And it kept the count sheet as simple as possible for our volunteers.

So all of this data, the grand totals as well as all the intersection or location specific data, that is all available on our website.

We have a new bike and pedestrian transportation planning page.

So you can go there, you can look at this data.

The localities have it and we will be counting these same locations again in the spring.

so that we have some more data over time and hopefully we'll be including at least a little bit of funding for this in our work plan for next year so we can continue to get this data over time that'll be useful to the localities.

I was struck a little bit by the sort of the big differences between let's say Monticello and Fifth.

I work on JW Parkway and Rio.

I mean there's some that are 200, there's one that's

400, and what accounts is that?

Is that work or do you have any sense of why there's such a big discrepancy of difference?

Yeah, the daily totals.

Yeah, so keep in mind the daily totals are just a snapshot.

They're just, you know, a four hour collection, not necessarily even on the same day.

There are weather issues that might have accounted for it, but you're also going to see major differences just because of, partly because of the bike and pedestrian infrastructure that's there and the population in that area and the destinations in the area if there's a lot of attractions for people biking and walking.

I don't think that the daily totals are really the thing to focus on.

No, that's a great question and I think it's a great thing to add to future counts.

While I did change a lot of things from previous counts, I was still kind of sticking to best practices for counts and best practices are still limited by, you know, the commute focus.

So that's why there's that peak travel stuff.

One thing we're talking about is looking at, let's see, so Riverview Park is one of these locations.

It's at the very top.

We were really surprised to look at the demographics comparing Riverview Park to, so Riverview Park is a beautiful place to bike and walk.

It's really safe because it's completely separated from any motor vehicle traffic.

But if you look at the demographics compared to something like

I think Emmett and Angus.

That's a really busy intersection.

You have to cross a lot of motor vehicle lanes to access a bus stop.

The reason we counted there is because there's recently been put in a shared use path down the median.

And there were people who were using it.

But if you go to that particular location, we also saw that people weren't using that path.

They were still crossing ramps on and off the bypass to walk along the sidewalk.

We were just surprised, I think, at seeing that there were so many, there were a lot of children, relatively, a lot of children at the Emmett and Angus location.

and we just didn't see you know quite as many at Riverview Park which I think was just a really big surprise for me.

Any other questions?

Okay so that data is available you can take a look at it.

So the other thing, Chip kind of stole all my thunder here.

So this is, I'm changing my video.

This is a quick overview of the two DRPT grants that TJPDC recently received.

So the first one is for a Charlottesville and Albemarle Regional Transit Vision Plan.

And the purpose of that plan is for local leaders, transit agencies, and a wide variety of stakeholders to collaboratively develop a clear vision for the future of transit in our region.

The work will result in a Charlottesville Area Transit Vision Plan document that will identify goals, objectives, strategies, and time-specific recommendations.

The recommendations contained within the plan will be developed for short-term, long-term, and extended long-term timeframes with a horizon year of 2050.

The way we wrote the application for this grant was to kind of copy what has been done in Richmond.

They did a similar vision plan about a year ago or so.

So you can always take a look at that if you wanted to see clearer what we were hoping to get out of this vision plan.

The budget for this project is $350,000.

$175,000 or half of that is coming in grant funds and then the other remaining half will be local match split between Albemarle County and City of Charlottesville.

The timeline for this project is about 18 months.

So as soon as the agreements are signed to June 30th or the end of the next fiscal year.

Okay, and this is a timeline just for the very next few steps for the Transit Vision Plan project.

So we're currently here.

We're working on signing the agreements and getting the MOUs taken care of with the city and the county.

And we are finalizing our scope of work for this project and sending it out as part of our RFP to DRPT's bench contracting firms.

In February, hopefully, I know people keep telling me I'm being optimistic, but I'm going to continue to be optimistic.

We will have a selection committee in place who will review the proposals and select a consulting team, hopefully by the end of February.

And in March, the real work will begin.

So the Regional Transit Partnership

We'll be serving as the advisory group and they will meet with the consulting team to approve another final scope of work.

So this is a scope of work that the consultants create out of the one we put in the RFP.

It's like the final thing.

That's the work that they're actually going to do and that work would begin in March.

So the second project that we have is the Admiral County Transit Expansion Feasibility Study and Implementation Plan.

So this is a feasibility study and implementation plan for expanded transit service to population and employment centers within Admiral County, particularly the Pantops area, Monticello, and along Route 29 North.

So this feasibility study is supposed to innovative transit options to include on-demand service that emphasize accessibility and responsiveness to customer needs should be investigated alongside traditional fixed route options.

The budget for this project is just over $106,000.

Half of that is coming from DRPT and the other half is coming from Albemarle County as a local match.

The timeline for this project is just under 12 months, so once we get the agreement signed up until December 31st of this year, the reason that we have such a tight timeline for this one is because the implementation plan, which is like the second product that's going to be created from this project, we want that in hand so that

Whichever organization is going to be actually running the service can apply for funding for the next fiscal year and they need to do that in January or February.

Okay, and then lastly, looking at the timeline again just for the next few steps, we're in the process of signing agreements and MOUs.

We are finishing up the scope and sending that off as part of our RFP.

We will in February have our selection committee put together and that's mostly going to be Albemarle County folks and we will review proposals and select a consulting team.

and in March, that advisory group will be set.

It'll be appointed by Abner Rock County and I'll be working on that project in project management and we'll actually get started with the work.

The advisory group will meet with the consulting team to approve the scope and begin work.

Great question.

I think we are thinking beyond just fixed route.

No, I mean just plain commuter automobiles.

Yes, this is public transit.

That's what I wanted to clarify.

The other thing I was going to mention is, you know, Albemarle County, we have a traffic, just for your information, a traffic corridor study that's going on on Rio.

Okay, that might be helpful.

to look at that, that's gonna look at, it's more traffic oriented, it's automobile, but it's gonna look at sidewalks and biking paths as well.

Yeah, and I think that all that the consulting team, especially the one working on the transit vision plan will be very well informed about all of the ongoing transportation studies.

This looks like really exciting.

I had, I guess, like two questions.

For the vision plan for Charlottesville and Albemarle, I was interested in what you guys were looking for in local leaders, like who would that entail?

So you're referring to local leaders who would be on the advisory group.

Is that right?

Yeah, so those people are mostly going to be the people who are already on the regional transit partnership.

So that's an existing group of transit leaders and elected officials from both Amarillo County and City of Charlottesville who have been, you know, working together to think about transit for a couple of years now.

And that's going to be our advisory group.

They have meetings every month.

Those meetings will be a time for us to discuss all of the ongoing work with the vision plan.

And those meetings are open to the public.

Thank you.

Oh, no, don't let me do the thing.

I forget.

Sorry, can you clarify the question a little bit?

Yeah, so I think that that wording

in particular came from Albemarle County.

But I want to clarify that it's not necessarily a focus on innovative transit.

It's not a focus on on-demand.

It's not a preference for on-demand service over fixed route.

It is just included as a very clear way to indicate that we are interested in investigating the feasibility of it.

All right.

Yes, I had, these are definitional again.

Question about the, you said transit leaders and elected officials.

I know what an elected official is, but I don't know what a transit leader is.

So I'm particularly thinking of Garland Williams, who is the director of CAT, and Karen Davis, who is the new director of Jaunt.

Yeah.

And then the other definition is stakeholder.

You're meeting with stakeholders.

Yeah so stakeholders I think that we are going to have to do a lot of work with the consultants to identify a lot of stakeholders but initially we're going to start with the regional transit partnership and the people who regularly attend those meetings and then we're going to broaden the stakeholder group from there to try to include folks I can think of off the top of my head are

Jessica, if I can too, just because I've been working with this group way, way longer than this.

Also included, we've got the director of the University Transit System, which is, of course, a very big component of this.

We also have at the table the director of Albemarle County School Bus System.

Of course, CAT manages the Charlottesville School Bus System.

And we're not

Nowhere because there is a very clear separation for student transportation and non, but still there could be some overlap, especially when you're talking about to KTAC and other types of educational transportation or extracurricular activity transportation for students.

So there may be some opportunities there.

The other thing for the regional visioning plan

Jaunt, of course, represents to the areas outside of Charlottesville and Albemarle.

Okay, thank you.

Is there any opportunity for some type of citizen engagement where you have some open forums?

The people working on the vision plan, I mean, we'll have our consulting team.

The consulting team will be employees of a consulting firm, and they will do their work behind closed doors.

OK. Yep.

Would you think about establishing sort of a citizens

Yeah, I mean, initially, and Chip, you can jump into, because this is, you know, partly your vision for this vision plan.

Initially, I would think the citizens should be encouraged to come to our regional transit partnership meetings and offer their input there as well as at the public engagement sessions and online and the interactive website.

But like I said, I will be making updates to this group.

We'll be making updates to MPO Tech and to the policy board, I'm sure.

So it's going to come up in a bunch of public meetings.

But I definitely want to note that I'm hearing your suggestion about

I would doubt that that you would see any additional like appointing group or a formal group.

What I think you will see a lot of

is Jessica or the consultants and others coming to existing groups.

So Albemarle County has community, I think they're called community action committees or something like that.

Yeah, we'll come present to them or we'll come and present at the senior center or we'll come present somewhere else.

Managing one advisory committee is probably more than a full-time job.

If we started doing more, I think we would eat up our resources very quickly.

OK, that's great.

Chip would say a city neighborhood association

To them, let me, we just received, I gotta brag a little bit, Nick Morrison, one of our staff members just completed a small area plan in Fifeville and we presented to the City Planning Commission last week or the week before and got rave reviews for the public engagement

I say all of that because Nick and the group he was working with from Fifeville coined the phrase of front porch meetings.

And he would go and present on a Sunday afternoon to about four neighbors, you know, drinking tea on the front porch or the kitchen table.

That resulted in some of the best comments that we received for the whole plan.

Cool.

Thanks.

Well, if people do have additional questions or comments, again, you can always email me.

I'm going to try to switch my screen.

Still the vision plan.

Chuck, I'm putting you on notice.

I'm about to ask for your input here.

So as I think Chip talked about earlier in our meeting, we had a lot of success with this round of SMART SCALE.

This is a list of projects that have been funded.

It is public, well,

These have been tentatively funded.

There is one more step in order for them to get officially funded.

Yeah, these were the projects that were from the 36 submitted projects across the district.

These are the 20 projects that were recommended for, that's basically scored the highest in the evaluation process

and we're recommending to the Commonwealth Transportation Board for consideration for funding for this round of SMART SCALE and that process will be taking up over the next several months with them through discussions with our CTB members and if

Then basically in June, they would approve the six-year plan and whatever project, these projects will be on that six-year plan.

And like I said, we're going through right now and we're scheduling meetings with the CTB members over the period of the next month.

And we'll be sitting down with Allison Detente, who is our representative, to go through these and

see if there's anything that she wants to change.

There is some outstanding balances, I think, in the district grant program.

These were funded out of two pots of money.

There's a statewide pot of money and a district grant pot of money.

With the omnious bill that was passed a year or two ago, that funding was just

identified and added to the budget.

So we actually got an additional $87 million in funding for this particular round of SMART SCALE, which allowed us to fund much more projects than we normally get.

Yeah.

Chuck.

Could we get a copy of the remaining 16 and how they scored?

It is available on the SMART SCALE website.

I can get it.

So that's the process for this moving forward.

So these basically are the ones you think will most likely get approval, this first page, just to repeat and be sure.

My understanding is yes.

I mean, like I said, this is what was submitted.

At the CTB meeting, it's the first time I'd seen the list as well.

So normally the process is,

We work with the CTB member and then they decide which projects they want to fund.

So if a locality doesn't want to fund a project, say they submitted two projects and they want to fund the other project, there is the ability, she has the ability to switch some of those out if she wants to.

I know last round the city of Charlottesville had both, let's see,

And they chose to actually Preston Grady scored higher, but they actually funded Ridge Cherry Intersection improvements over Preston Grady.

That was something we asked the city which one they preferred to fund.

Since it didn't, from our standpoint, it didn't matter.

They chose to fund Cherry Ridge Street over Preston Grady.

And then the other thing is, if there's other projects that we could possibly fund, or we may shift some projects around, working with the localities and the CTB member, I don't think that's gonna happen this time because

Just one item, just to draw to your attention, number one,

Because it's number one, the Hydraulic Road in 29 was the highest scoring project in the Culpeper District, which we're very, very happy to see.

The other thing, just as a reminder, because I know you all, many of you have seen this already,

It is not a $5.7 million project.

That was the funding request we made because there was already a budget for that project of $18 million.

So this is actually a $23 million project.

It was only $5.7 million requested.

And that holds true for the Albemarle County projects.

I think they actually put in a million dollars on every one of their projects.

If we were interested in checking out, say, for instance, the Hydraulic Road 29 project that went through, I saw a number of options that were being proposed, I guess it was a year ago almost now.

Can we see what the end result of what was likely to be approved somewhere?

I have that information.

Yeah, I was wondering what of the options?

I think I remember seeing like several, like

from like a bike path on, like what was that?

I wasn't sure if that was on the public portal or not, but I'll check it out.

Well, what I'm saying is I think it's on the, it should be part of the material that we actually had as part of meeting minutes, and it should be on the places of the hydraulic solution 29 portal.

Great.

The only other thing I wanted to comment on is because of the way the funding was structured, we may be able to accelerate some of these projects.

I'm not sure.

We're not at that stage yet.

But some of the funding comes online next year.

So I'm not sure how that's going to play into programming these projects.

And this is a lot of projects to program.

So there is one more item I had under staff updates.

And even though we are well over, I'd like to discuss it just because it seems relevant.

So Marty reached out to me and made the suggestion that CTAC consider moving from meetings every other month, which, so you guys know, is the same schedule for MPO Tech

So moving from every other month to every month, just because there seems to be quite a bit of great discussion among this group and a lot of topics that you want to cover.

It is not built into our work program for this fiscal year to transition to meetings every month, but it's something that we could consider for our work program for next year, which begins in July.

So I just wanted to fill out the rest of the group.

How do you guys feel about potentially moving these to monthly meetings?

I'm very much in favor of the monthly meetings and

And what do we be looking at this?

So this fiscal year ends on June 30th, 2021.

And the next fiscal year starts on July 1st of this calendar year.

So that's when we could potentially look at moving to monthly meetings.

This is all up for debate.

So I think that an hour goes really, really quickly.

I would be a bit hesitant to try to get everyone together, especially considering I'm very hopeful that we'll move to in-person meetings again in this calendar year.

I chair a community advisory council in the county.

and it's a month, it's one and a half hours usually is what we have.

I think that's an appropriate time.

We meet months a month and really we end up meeting maybe 11 months, 11 meetings out of the year.

It's usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas we somehow combine one and have one meeting in that timeframe, November, December.

I think I found that meeting every two months I lose track of what's going on.

It reminds me, I think

I'm gonna be the dissenting voice here and say that I think the every other month format may work better for us who have like trouble basically securing a late night slot like this.

I would much rather move to a two hour every other month so that if I'm making childcare plans so that I can come to a meeting once eventually when they're in person that it's not as frequent but I can certainly make my babysitter stay longer that's much easier.

The other thing is that there's the criteria within the membership that if you miss so many meetings per year, there's a maximum number of meetings you can miss.

Yeah, we've been pretty lenient about it and haven't kept particularly close track on that, but yeah, it would be something to revisit.

Yes.

And you could amend the, because I think it's a notice to your appointing body.

And Chip, maybe you could help me out.

Nope.

For me, really, I would prefer we meet every other month and increasing the time to two hours.

I've already hit two hours today with every other month.

Jessica, could we perhaps bring this up next time for a vote?

Yeah, actually, and Chip, I'm going to let you again.

And on the legality of this, can I send out a poll by email for people about how they feel about this?

And we can put it on the agenda next month, but we'll at least have a little bit, we'll have some numbers to back up our ideas.

Okay.

Perfect.

That's what I will do.

Chip, Sandy, Lucinda, I think this is pretty typical.

We often see something from the tip.

We have a lot of, you know, pretty, we have business for the MPO.

So if it is, then we can meet every other month for two hours.

It's just that we are making it official.

I would say that for seven years,

Well, we haven't talked about it for the full seven years, but the safety and performance measures always end up in extended discussion.

It's a very confusing issue.

It always runs long.

If that's not on the agenda, it normally runs pretty smoothly and timely.

Occasionally, the TIP amendments

One thing might be helpful, Jessica, to sort of list maybe some of the things that are coming up as we think about it.

We talked about looking over the smart scale projects.

Each one of those could take a meeting and I think it'd be a better float and try to push them all in in a two hour period and get tired after a while, get bleary-eyed after a while, I do at least.

Well, unless people had any other comments, I'll hand it back to you, Tristan.

All right, I think we're ready to close out the meeting.

Is that right?

Yes.

All right, great.

I don't see anybody else joining, so the matters of the public is moot.

So I think we're ready to close.