Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   11/17/2021

I don't see Daniel.

Donna Chen?

Gary Heaton?

Gary, I might not have updated this.

I need to update the information.

Sounds good.

And I think next would be the emergency statement.

We do.

This meeting of the Citizen Transportation Advisory Committee is being held pursuant to the Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3708.2, which allows a public body to hold electronic meetings when the locality in which it is located has declared a local state of emergency, and the catastrophic nature of the emergency makes it impracticable or unsafe to assemble a quorum in a single location.

And the purpose of the meeting is to provide for the discharge of its lawful purposes, duties, and responsibilities.

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

There will be an opportunity for public comment during that portion of the agenda.

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

The meeting minutes will reflect the nature of the emergency that the meeting was held by electronic communication means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

Thank you, Sandy.

All right, next is matters for the public.

Not sure if I see anyone here.

Does anyone recognize any names that are not part of our committee?

I don't think so either.

All right, so no matter from the public in that case.

And so moving on then to a draft of the meeting minutes.

Have you guys had a chance to review the meeting minutes?

Yeah, I was gonna, for the second meeting in a row, it seems to say that I wasn't there when I was.

Oh yeah, then there's no X against your name.

Yeah.

So we might want to have that updated.

Was anyone else possibly miss?

If not, we might want to add that into the notes.

There was one other thing that I had a question on, Sandy, or if anyone can recollect this.

We were talking about the possible Pedman Bike Bridge from the River Park down in southern Charlottesville.

We were talking about different communities to include.

I didn't see any note about the local, it's not coming to my mind right now, but it's that it's not weaver.

It's something textile related.

The woolen mills.

Yeah, I just want to make sure that was noted as a potential stakeholder that we want to include.

I didn't see that when I scanned through it.

We did include that in our like future discussion.

So it was definitely involved, but we can add a note.

Let's see.

We can add a note under that number six that you're talking about having a representative from the woolen mills community on the stakeholder committee was recommended.

You got that Gretchen?

I do.

Thank you both.

Any other thoughts before we motion to approve?

Okay, Travis's attendance and also that one small note about Willam Mills then.

Do I hear a motion to approve?

Take it Lee, any one second?

Second.

Got a second.

So does anyone want to say nay?

We could just skip it if you guys like.

Anyone against or anyone, everyone in favor?

Yes.

Cool, I did it the opposite way.

It looks like we have it then, there's no nays.

Sandy.

All right, cool.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you.

So meetings are approved.

The next one is with Chuck.

All right.

Let's see here.

I want to share my screen real quick here now.

Let's see.

All right.

Does everybody see my screen?

Yes.

All right.

Okay, we're coming up on round five of SMART SCALE.

And it seems like every round we make some tweak to the process and the scoring.

So I'm gonna go through some of the changes they're looking at doing this time, mainly in the environmental for the environmental factor and the land use.

The land use is the biggest one of the two.

I'm gonna go through both of them with you guys.

All right, next slide.

Like I said, we're talking about environmental has two components on air quality, energy component, and then a natural and cultural resources impact component.

And then land uses, it has two components, but they're really one component.

We just, we look at two different things, but they're the same thing.

We just look at two different aspects of it.

So the next slide.

Okay, for history of the environmental, first round, we had projects that in SMART SCALE got all their points from environmental.

So we definitely made some changes after round one to correct that.

We really didn't make anything in round two.

In round three, for round three and four, we made some changes and we're just modifying those changes this round.

We converted the E2 to a negative number where that's trying to measure the impact area.

And it's gonna be subtracted from the improvements that you're gonna get from the air quality component.

And it actually could be a negative number to your overall score too.

Okay, the next slide.

So the E1 it's basically it's measuring the change in round three to four was a hundred percent but it's measuring it's trying to measure the amount of non-SOV users that the project's going to attract to the area so it's by doing by how it does that it's going to look at diverting them from the

VMTs that are on the roadway now.

So it also gives a energy component for the type of fleet makeup.

And that's something they're actually changing this time because they're not gonna have that this time.

So they're taking that out.

And then it gives points for freight.

If you increase the delay or reduce the delay, you're improving the freight travel through the corridor.

So you're getting some credit for that

Improvement.

And then, like I said, for the environmental impacts, those are captured in the cost.

Next, these are the factor areas that we score applications on.

And you get a certain point for these various types of improvements that you might be including in your project.

And those are used to in E1

and those are multiplied by the amount of non-SOV vehicles that they basically take off the network and then that total is summed and it's added to the freight.

The freight is basically, like I said, it's looking at the percentage of heavy vehicles multiplied by the

increased delay or the reduced delay.

So you're getting a number there and depending on what the factor is, it's one here, but one of the things we're looking at changing is changing that to account for the amount of increase in the amount of decrease in the delay.

So we'll see that coming up.

Next.

Okay, so we looked at eight different scenarios, really six different scenarios, and then seven and eight are just combinations of some of the other ones.

But what they settled on was option two, which is looking at changing how those numbers are categorized that I went through before with that table, where they're looking at the different categories

non-SOV users.

Currently, they basically sum the total number of non-SOVs and then times it by each one of those factors and then sum that number.

What they're doing now is they're going to, for sidewalks, they're only going to multiply that factor by the amount of people that would be non-SOV users that would be using the sidewalk versus

So you're basically we're double counting it before so this would better normalize that process so that we get a more precise calculation and the freight is separate and freight is measured in a different unit than SOVs so the way they're weighting it is one of the things they're changing to instead of adding them together and

Then normalizing it, they're gonna normalize them separately and then add them together at a 50-50 split.

Five is, this is our first attempt to look at CO2 offsets.

And this is a methodology we're gonna try to implement this round to try to capture some of that.

Cause it's not really a good tool to do that with right now.

And then like I said, eight, what we found is that

by combining the two, because one of them has better freight, is sort of tendency to give you a better freight score.

And the other ones tend to give you a better SOV score, non SOV score.

Chuck, I'm not sure if it's the best time to ask, but I know before you, if you go back to the slide, the previous slide,

The points were divvied up between the kind of multimodal and free categories, 8.5 and 1.5 multiplied by NS of E users.

And I know in the new, the new changes are going to like a 50%, 50% weighting.

I'll show you that revised table when we get to it.

Yep.

What we're gonna do is,

So today though, you can't really say there's like a percentage weighting to each one.

Okay.

Cause I've got a slide that shows that.

All right.

Okay.

Currently all the points are totaled multiplied by the S non SOV users.

And like I said, that causes, you're getting double counting on the, or you're getting more S, non-SOV users points than you would actually get.

And then the SOVs and the freight components, they're not in the same unit.

So when you add them together, you're not adding apples to apples.

So that was one of the issues that they were trying to resolve.

And then the other thing that the special...

The special accommodation points, they were gonna basically eliminate that totally because it's not really giving you any credit for non-SOV or freight.

It's just another way, another part of the vehicle fleet.

So adding a charging station out there is not necessarily gonna encourage people not to drive.

It just gives those hybrid vehicles a place to park where they can charge their vehicles.

So they felt that that wasn't something that

was encouraging non-SOV users.

So basically here's how we're doing it now.

And this is where we can get into the points.

The current E1 is what we're using now.

And then the proposed is E2.

And you can see where in this example, they basically have total of 59 non-SOV trips.

And you're times it, multiplying that by

each one of these factors, which is giving you an overly large number for the non-SOV points.

And this proposal is basically going to only multiply it by the number of points that a number of increased users at that particular item generates.

So that's more reflective of the accuracy of the data that we're getting.

And then you get the,

Total non-SUV, add those up and you get that total of 100.

And then that's normalized.

So instead of normalizing it before, you would add these two together and then you would normalize the total 3,900 to get your final E1 score.

This one, you're normalizing this component of the score and then you're gonna normalize this freight component of the score

And then you're going to add those two together at a 50-50 split.

So, so it sounds like there was essentially no percentage weighting between the two before you just added up the total numbers.

Yep.

The 442 plus 3515.

Okay.

So I just really want to know if the changing of the 50%, 50% weighting was seen as like increasing the freight component or decreasing it, but it sounds like it's really

Yeah, it was just added together and then they normalized it.

So this is actually doing a better job trying to capture actually what we're trying to capture within the same units instead of having it be totally different and then trying to normalize it later.

All right.

The next slide.

Like I said, we don't have a tool to do greenhouse gas emissions.

So we're doing a pilot study and it's supposed to wrap up this summer or next summer.

And hopefully we'll have a better way to calculate CO2 emissions.

So, I mean, that's the part that we're working on with option five.

So this is our attempt to try to come up with a way to capture that is option five.

So this will be another,

That other component.

That was the first one was option two.

This would be option five.

We basically are using some of the existing data that we have from E1 for the non-SOV users, the hours of delay from the C2 calculation.

Trip links are based on the National Household Survey average numbers.

and the SMART SCALE segment links based on the C1, C2 data set.

And then we're using a standard conversion from miles per gallon and CO2 per gallon to get your CO2 quantity that we're gonna use for the offset.

All right, here's basically the data that we're using to do the calculations

and where we're pulling it from.

For the pedestrian, we're using the 0.67 miles, which is the average from the National Household Survey, Travel Survey, and same for bicyclists, that's 3.54.

Those are both from that survey.

And then the trip lengths, those are multiplied by the trip length, the transit trips are multiplied by the trip lengths that are calculated based on your segment lengths.

And then these are all summed and then

Does that make sense?

Any questions on that?

So for the fray component, they're basically looking at it similarly.

They've got to take the freight numbers and convert it from person hours of delay to vehicle hours of delay so we can get the freight number, heavy vehicle hourly delay.

And then that's multiplied by the truck percentage.

And then we're converting it using this equation to get the amount of CO2 offset for based on freight.

All right, any questions on that?

So you're basically looking at the different categories, times it by the trip length and number of users to get your VMT,

and then your segments are basically whatever your segment is summed for those two different items, park and ride lot and the bus and then you're adding those up and then you're multiplying it through the equation to get your non-SOV CO2 offset and then the freight is basically your delay times your persons per vehicle

times your truck percentage, and that's going to give you your truck delay reduction.

And then that's multiplied through the equation to get your freight CO2 offset.

Chuck, I have a question.

Assuming SOV is single occupancy vehicle, what about

CO2 offset for single occupancy vehicles.

How we're doing this is we're basically, when we build a sidewalk, we're taking vehicles off the road.

Yeah we're just looking at when they do this the congestion

Calculation, they look at what the improvements are, and if you're adding sidewalk, you're gonna reduce the volume on that roadway by a certain amount to provide for the pedestrians that are gonna be using that corridor within that quarter mile radius of that facility.

So it's not looking at all the VMT on the road, just what you might take off that's within that distance.

Just quick question based off of Travis.

That might be what you just said.

But so if you're adding a lane, for example, and a sidewalk, so you're technically adding more cars, it's not counting that addition of the extra cars that's not being captured in any way.

Yeah, and I agree.

But we don't have a lot of tools to use.

And we're looking at what this portion of it's going to do.

And that's why we're looking at that study to come up with a tool that's actually going to give us a better idea of how to measure greenhouse gas emissions.

But you're right.

If you're adding a lane, you're going to basically increase the amount of CO2 by

induced demand or diversion or whatever you want to call it.

And Chuck, I'm just going to quickly ask, you mentioned the statewide greenhouse gas pilot.

I know they're doing two parts.

One is the statewide look, and then another one is like the specific project pilot.

I think so, but I'm not positive.

I'm not really sure.

Gotcha.

Okay.

Thanks.

So any other questions about that?

I mean, this is our way to try to capture it because before we weren't capturing it all.

So this is just another way to try to get a grasp on what those numbers might be.

And hopefully we'll get more stuff and we can include those for the next round after round five, for round six.

once we have a better tool to use to calculate what that might be.

All right, so basically, option eight is putting these two together.

We did look at modifications to option two to look at the magnitude of the freight item, and that's where you're looking at

You're scaling the multiplier depending on the amount of delay increase or delay reduction.

But like I said, option two skews towards freight and option five skews towards non-SOVs.

So it's basically, if we can combine the two, we're gonna get a better,

A better way, a more accurate way to do it.

It's not the best, but it's more accurate than what we were using before.

So this is the part down here on the left, lower left corner is the really the change right there is you've got zero to two,

If your delay is that button up, you get a 0.5 multiplier instead of the 1.

And if it's 2 to 100, you get a 1.

And if it's over 100 delay reduction, you're going to get 2 to the freight number.

And that's basically the change.

And then, like I said, they're doing a 50-50 split.

for the modification when they add it together with E2.

Any questions about that?

I was trying to unmute myself.

Oh, sorry.

I don't know.

That's the range they looked at and they went to use.

I would really like to know because I'm just concerned that most of these numbers that they're using that it's just

I don't know the basis, let me put it this way, that I don't know the basis of them using those numbers.

Because if you change those numbers slightly, it can make a significant difference to the different projects.

So I would like to know how the process that was used to select them, that's all.

For the delay reduction numbers?

Yes.

Okay.

I'll follow up with the OIP folks and see if I can track that down on where they came up with those ranges.

I mean, a 200 point reduction in delay is significant.

Yeah, that's a lot.

Person hours of delay, that's a lot of delay, the reduction.

Most of it's going to basically be within that middle range.

So they possibly could refine it more.

I don't know.

But we can I can ask that question.

Part of what we're doing here is they want to get feedback.

They're going to bring this back to the CTB in December.

And they want to have comments back in so that we can they can make some tweaks if they need to.

We've already given them a bunch.

They've already made a bunch of tweaks already.

So

But more is a better, is a good thing.

So, okay.

Now get into some of the results for the E1 measure.

Basically, this is the list of the projects from round four in the Culpeper District.

It really didn't change anything for most of the projects in the district.

You had a little bit up in the northern part where this project went out and this project went in.

But

On the whole, it didn't really affect many of the, there wasn't a lot of movement.

Both these projects, I think Emmett Street was on the bubble.

So Covington's Corner is out in the middle of nowhere and there's not a lot of, the volumes are pretty low there.

So you're not going to see a lot of benefit from, and it's not a signal or anything.

So 20 and 522 is a signalized intersection that's getting converted to a roundabout.

So by allowing the traffic to move freer through that intersection, you are going to see some improvements and some reduction in delay.

All right, E2.

Okay, go ahead.

I have a quick question.

Not all of them.

It's like the hydraulic road 29 Old Lynchburg.

Because it is Culpeper district.

Oh, okay.

The Culpeper district runs from,

Fauquier County, 66 in the north to Albemarle County.

Yeah, we've got Louisa County, Fluvanna, Orange, Culpeper, Green, Madison, Fauquier, Rappahannock, Albemarle.

Yep.

All right.

E2 measures basically your cultural resources impacts.

And basically this is how it's run now.

You have the project, they'll buffer it with a quarter mile buffer, and then they'll look at what the impacts are on these cultural resources and determine how many acres of each cultural resource that they're impacting.

And then those are totaled up.

And then whatever type of environmental document is deemed appropriate for that project, they assign a percentage to that.

And then that is multiplied by that acreage to give you what your environmental document acreage is.

And then as long as that doesn't exceed the acreage of the project, that's the acres that are used for this analysis.

All right.

Basically, this is the purpose of this revision is to just really look at the quarter mile buffer.

And because you've got some projects where you're not having any impacts outside of the existing right of way or the roadway.

So why are we going out a quarter mile to look at buffer when you're not having any impacts beyond what's already in the right of way?

And then the other item was currently we

pulled the environmental files from environmental division.

And we basically use those now and they update those environmental update those databases that we may not have the most current data.

So we're basically gonna have environmental division provide us those layers directly for this analysis.

And supposed to us using the layers that

We may get, we'll get from them, but we don't know how old they are.

So everything else is gonna basically stay the same.

So for the tiering, we're looking at 30 foot buffer for projects that are tier one, which are, I'll get into that.

I'll have a table which shows the tiering for the different types of projects.

Eighth mile for tier two and a quarter mile for tier three.

And most of our projects are tier one projects.

And I'll show you that in the next slide.

This is the tiering criteria for the different types of projects.

Like I said, construction of a shared use paths tier one project.

You get into tier two or your improvements to park and ride freight improvement, rail improvements, inner city passenger rail stations and station improvements, new park and ride lot,

Then you get into the tier threes where you're doing manage lanes, doing major widening projects, new bridges, those kind of new interchange.

These are your tier three projects.

Any questions on that?

Does seem like if you have station improvements that are totally within the existing developed area of a

Okay.

I mean, we can add those can be part of the discussion.

Like I said, most of them, we were looking at were minimal impact projects.

I mean, you will have right away impacts on some of these projects, but they'll be minimal.

Right, mine all is just to say that it seemed like there may be some like station improvements that are totally within the existing impacted area.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

So this does allow for in gone case by case to tweak that?

This is just the general list.

If we have a specific case, we'll look at what the impacts are and then make that determination.

All right, here's the results of the tier two.

That's pretty much it.

This was the funding break line.

As you can see over here is

how much it went up and down in the rankings in the district.

But as you can see, most of them didn't change any.

So this really doesn't have a major impact on most of our projects.

You do see some changes down here and a few up here.

But for the most part, there wasn't a lot of changes at all.

Any questions about that?

Land use is made up of two components.

You've got the L1, which is your transportation efficiency land use.

And L2 is the increase in that number.

And they looked at a 10 year horizon year.

So that's what we've been using for our analysis purposes.

But the main,

Critical thing about this is both of them, we're trying to look at what's a reasonable walking distance.

So basically in other words, higher density of population and employment in an area, it's more likely that people will use other modes of travel as opposed to using single occupancy vehicles.

So it's geared towards having land use rules and practices that encourage that

Any questions about that?

Okay, basically right now, land use factor is only applicable in area types A and B.

It's not applicable in like area type C and D. And what we found is this has created a significant imbalance, especially in like

the town of Warrenton and the town of Culpeper where you have urbanized areas similar to what you have in Charlottesville, but they're not getting the credit for having those land use decisions.

So this is basically trying to figure out how we can include that for those area types.

And here's a map that shows the different area types.

As you can see,

A is mainly the Hampton Roads, Northern Virginia area.

B is the Charlottesville MPO, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and then Roanoke Salem MPO area.

Okay, for this one, we looked at varying the radius that they account for the data from, because right now it's three miles.

So they looked at varying that number.

Obviously we're talking about adding C and D to that scenario.

And then what's the weighting factor percentage that we were trying to achieve here at the bottom.

Scenario six,

was basically is the one preferred scenario.

So I'm gonna go through basically the criteria that we got to get to that.

As you can see the weighting adjustment, most of area types A and B, they got almost half of their points from land use where C and D get most of their points from safety.

But in those urbanized areas in the rural area, they're not able to get any points here.

And that puts them at a significant disadvantage.

Yeah, this is the percent of the land use.

No, this is not in the right order, I don't think.

Okay, this is the benefit score.

This is where the project got its benefit score.

Yeah.

So it's not the weighting, it's where they got their benefit score.

So you can see that and that.

And then this here is the difference between

the weighting percentages that we use for determining what their score is and where they actually got their points from.

So this shows you the difference between those two.

And as you can see, the green is where you're over producing points and the red is where you're under producing points.

So you can see that land uses has a significant impact in these areas and

Safety has a significant impact in here, but like I said, they're not getting anything really much for economic development and very not much for safety.

So those are really where they're not doing as well.

So what we wanna try to do is correct for some of this.

So this is what they propose for the changes.

Basically, they're taking 5% from accessibility

for area type B and moving it into land use.

They're taking 10% from area type accessibility and area type C and moving it to land use.

And they're taking 5% in area type D from accessibility and five from economic development, putting it in land use.

And then what they did is they reran the numbers.

And this is the benefits where the benefit scores come with those changes.

And the differences are the differences down here.

So any questions about that?

And it's just a way to try to address this imbalance that we've seen

So Chuck, do we think that in those categories with C and D that this will help balance it so they'll get more projects?

Well, I'm gonna show you what the results are of that.

And this will, in those urbanized areas, you'll see, I'll go to that slide and show you.

Okay, here's the results.

of the change.

And basically you see these four projects here are out in the current situation and they're in the new situation.

These three projects are in and they're actually gonna go out.

Two of these projects are in the

Fifth Street Hub is on the south end of Fifth Street, right at the county line.

Emmett Street Multimodal Project is right on Emmett Street, right there by Barracks Road Shopping Center.

And Covington's Corner is up in Fauquier County, up north.

So that was on it.

But the three that got added, well, four that got added, Lee's Mill is an intersection improvement in northern, right in Opal.

on the northern end of Opel.

But the other three projects, two of them are in the town of Warrenton, and one of them is in the town of Culpeper.

And these are major in their dense urban area, and they had no way to get these funded.

And this will give them some leg up.

I will couch this in one thing.

We got an additional $105 million of revenue this time.

So we were able to fund a significantly new number of projects, which we normally wouldn't get now or in the future.

So keep that in mind.

We got a lot of projects funded.

So any questions about that?

And we've got one more slide.

OK.

So on the Vera Wallo and Roebling, that piece, I'm looking at the SMART SCALE score and how that one seemed to score so lowlaid in comparison to the ones that were out.

Is that just based on funding, budget?

Well, I mean, right now it's a 0.46, but if we, I don't have the new numbers listed here.

These scores that are listed here are the actual scores in the original applications, not the revised scores.

I was going to put the revised scores, but I didn't have time to actually

pull the data in because it's not easily listed in there together.

It's true though under SMART SCALE that some projects with lower scores ended up getting funded ahead of ones with higher scores because of

Yeah, I mean, and here, when I get to the next slide, I'll show you some examples of that.

All right, this is a combination of all, both the environmental and the land use.

And if you see these projects that are down here in this light color green on the left side,

Those are other projects that were funded this round that when we went back afterwards and work with the CTB member, we were able to get those projects funded.

Just to let you guys know that what we analyzed was just the original funding scenario, not the final funding scenario.

So during their,

Looks like that Hillsdale South Extension had a hope in one of those scenarios that you showed earlier.

Well, some of it's got to do with how some of the other projects did.

So it, yeah.

In this one, it didn't do as well.

As you can see, the scores, it's about the same, so it didn't really change that much.

It went down a little bit.

Just seeing some of these other ones went up.

And the reason it did well, I think if you look at the different scenario that it was in, yeah, you're still talking three mile radius.

No, this is one mile radius.

Like I said initially, we do this, we go through and critique the process every round and to see how we can make improvements to it to fix loopholes or improprieties that show up like that first round when we had projects that were getting all their points from environmental and they were getting selected for funding and they didn't have any benefit from any other category.

And so we've in round two, we change that right away.

So we do make tweaks every round.

And they vary from round to round.

Chuck, just to clarify, the Commonwealth Transportation Board is accepting comments on this process through December 3rd.

Okay, yeah, if you put it in the chat, if you can send your comments to their website, they will, Brooke will collect them and

I can do it then.

Great.

Yeah.

Hi, thank you.

So I just wanted to update you guys on the two transit projects that we have that we're conducting this year.

The Albemarle Transit Expansion Study and the Regional Transit Vision Study.

So they're both DRPT grants that are funded by the localities and like it's a 50-50 match so it's funded by the localities and DRPT.

The Albemarle Transit Expansion Study started in the spring of 2021 and it goes until the spring of 2022.

It's looking at the Pantox, Monticello, and 29 North areas.

And it's a short-term project to expand transportation in the short term to those areas about public transit.

It's already conducted a transit propensity and land use analysis, which is available on the website.

And I'll put links to the two project websites in the chat.

And all of this information is there as well.

They've conducted a couple public and stakeholder meetings and they've developed draft scenarios for each of the three study areas.

And at this moment, they're gathering input on those draft scenarios.

The scenarios are on their website and through a survey.

And the survey will be closed next week.

So it'll be right around Thanksgiving.

So we encourage you to go to the website and look at the scenarios and please give us feedback via the survey.

You can also email me if you have comments outside of the survey.

And then

We will be gathering, the study project group will be gathering all of those comments on three different scenarios for those three different areas, developing final recommendations, and then working to hopefully develop a plan to implement some of those scenarios that were selected by the community.

The second study that we're doing is the Regional Transit Vision Plan, and this is a longer-term study.

It goes through 2024, and it's looking at transit through the entire region of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, so that includes the rural counties as well as Charlottesville and Albemarle.

It started as well as the first project in the spring of 2021, and it's going to end in the summer of 2022.

It also has completed the transit propensity and land use analysis.

Those are available on the website.

It also has conducted several public and stakeholder meetings.

The next public meeting is tomorrow night at 6.30 PM on Zoom.

And I am hoping that some of you will come and share your opinions with us during that meeting and also invite other people you think might be interested as well.

There's also a survey on the website asking about your vision for transit in the future for the entire region.

And this is like, be creative, think big picture.

So anything, stream big.

and share with us your visions for transit all the way out until 2045.

And after that, the study team will start drafting alternatives and then present those alternatives and the vision that we've gathered from the community so far.

And we'll present those drafts and have more stakeholder and public input and then make a plan recommendation

and gather more stakeholder input and then have a final report for that transit vision for the future of transit in our area.

So I'll just put the links in the comment period.

I encourage you to participate in the surveys and the public meeting tomorrow night.

Great.

Lucinda, have you thought about, we have a car risk study in our area, right?

Our car risk, traffic car risk study.

And we've had,

On-site meetings, we've got a tent out at different sites.

That would be wonderful.

We don't have it in the budget to do that at the moment, but we definitely have been sending information to our stakeholder groups and encouraging them to not only participate themselves, but

Reach out to their networks and we're working very closely with the three transit providers, CAT, Jaunt, and UTS, the University Transit System, and they have had their drivers handing out flyers that we've developed on both of these settings and ways to participate and posted them at the transit center and on the buses.

I have not gone to the library.

I just came from a meeting earlier today, working with the health and transportation group.

Albemarle County has posted that on their e-newsletter, posted about these, several of their e-newsletters, and we're really relying

Any other comments or questions?

Great.

Well, thank you.

Moving to the next step would be the staff updates.

Just real briefly, I wanted to let you all know that we just finalized the appointments of all of the different representative groups, the individuals that would represent each of those groups to the committee.

We have our first committee meeting that will be scheduled for November 30th.

There are some of you that will be represented there, whether it's representing CTAC or the Planning Commission for your localities.

I'm working on getting a website set up that will have all of the information.

It is updated.

We haven't quite figured out where we're going to post the meeting information, but I'll put that in the chat so you can follow that process as well.

It does have a placeholder where there's a meeting date and time, but we don't have that actual meeting information posted yet.

So we'll be starting that process hopefully meeting monthly for at least three or four, maybe five meetings with that stakeholder advisory committee, depending on whether or not we need two meetings or one meeting to get through certain conversations and work through priorities to help determine the projects to choose.

For the other SMART SCALE projects that we will be developing, we're really going to start tackling those in more depth starting in January

I'll be working with the localities and with VDOT to develop an outreach plan for the District Avenue roundabout which will have some impacts on a couple properties so we want to make sure that we're providing good outreach and engagement with those who will potentially be affected and then we'll meet with

the localities to develop a better concept for the Avine Road multimodal improvements that they want to include in the application as well as for the Fifth Street intersection improvement and multimodal improvements and so we'll have those meetings with the localities to get a better idea and then we'll reconvene those working groups that had been involved as part of that plan as well to review that feedback and get some

Some input from them prior to developing those applications.

We are planning, some of you may recall that last year or last cycle, we did a big public workshop to go through all of the projects, so we will plan to do that again to cover all the projects that will be submitted within the MPO area to include projects submitted by

the MPO, the PDC, as well as Albemarle and Charlottesville.

So we'll also be planning on doing that once we have the baseline for what we're planning to submit worked out with all of those.

Sandy, I'm a little unclear a little bit.

So go back to your first statement about different committees.

I missed the last meeting.

The only committee that we're actually appointing people to right now is a stakeholder advisory committee to help us develop the actual application for the Ravenna River Bridge, bike ped bridge crossing.

Okay, thank you.

Great.

All right.

Thank you.

Yeah, I'll be quick about this.

We wrapped up our second round of stakeholder group meetings with the Albemarle County and

the residency on the projects in the Elmore County area which is basically the Pantops corridor from Hanson's Road out to the interchange and then the intersections out there at Shadwell, 22 and 250 and North Milton Road and 250.

So we basically wrapped those up.

We gave them some, we provided them some preliminary recommendations

ideas more or less.

And now we're gonna go through and do the in-depth alternatives analysis, as well as putting stuff together for a future public meeting, which we were planning probably for January sometime.

And that's where we're at with those.

They've developed a website and it's at, I can put it in the chat, baprojectpipeline.org.

This is the website for the entire program and each project has its own page.

So we will be updating that with material as it becomes available.

We're also putting together a district website that's going to have this project specific to our district in them.

Lou's working on that now.

So we should have that up by next week sometime.

And it'll have

on the presentations from all of the kickoff meetings for all of the pipeline projects we have in the district.

Yeah, just a matter of clarification.

We have a roundabout that's been funded at John Warner and Rio.

How do you define that?

That was a smart scale application from last round.

Yes.

It's a funded project.

And I've seen the plan for the Rio study or the Rio Road study.

And they're looking at shifting that location further to the north into that green area there near Dunlora.

We'll see how that goes.

That'll have to go, since that's a funded project, that's not something that we're gonna reevaluate.

It would have to go in to the SMART SCALE working group to review the changes that they're proposing to see if it still meets the criteria.

And if there's additional funding resources that are needed, those might be the responsibility of the county.

So that's how that plays out.

And I know they're looking at submitting another project from that study.

They're looking at possibly Belvedere connection as a SMART SCALE application for this round and talking with the county, but we'll see.

We're waiting on their consultant, the county's consultant to actually provide us more material so we have something else to look at because we haven't received anything else since we got the initial material

Well, we may move forward with the project as it is, because we don't have any other information.

I'd have to look at the schedule since it was just funded last round.

I wouldn't say it would start any time in the next year or so.

We would start working on the PE.

I know we're looking at accelerating projects because

If the county wanted to accelerate it, what did I have to do?

If we're accelerating it, I'd have to look and see.

We're looking at manpower and

what our resources are and we're focusing on, I know we're looking at the two projects up on 66 as accelerating those, but I don't, I'd have to go back and look and see if this was one of the ones that we were looking to accelerate.

I appreciate that.

That would be helpful.

We usually try to reach out to the locality to see if they want to accelerate it.

Like I said, it all depends on manpower.

We've got some political pressure from Fauquier County.

And I know those projects got pushed forward because it's on the interstate at the 1766 intersection.

We've got a lot of issues up there.

So that one got moved up to the front.

Now the rest of them, I know we're looking at Hillsdale or hydraulic 29 projects as a bundle.

So that's going to go to design build and they're going to have the public hearing on it in the spring.

Hold on one second, let me see if I can pull up the email.

We have a quarterly meeting and we usually post all the projects and it also shows the schedule.

So let me pull it up and see if I can find it real quick.

Thanks, Chuck.

While we wait for that, we can move into the future discussions topics time frame.

I'll just mention that I reached out to Tim Padolino from Albemarle County and also Chris Jensen with City Parks and Rec on the Ravenna Trail Gap.

This is related to the Ravenna River crossing, but there's a gap in the Ravenna

Ravana Trail from Woollen Mills up to Riverview Park.

And part of, well, right now, the only way you can get from one to the other is to walk down the middle of East Market Street and up Riverview Drive or whatever it is.

But,

So they had some interesting comments about that.

Most of that falls in the city's bailiwick.

And I guess at some point they're considering approaching property owners because there's no good way to widen East Market Street.

There's no sidewalks, there's no room for sidewalks, there's just

The terrain and everything makes it impossible to do anything much there.

So pretty much their only alternative is to go up along the riverbank, which would be through private property.

So they're looking at the possibility of seeing how the residents there feel about that, whether they'd be willing to either grant right away or at least

Consider, you know, selling right away for a reasonable amount to extend the trail.

But I think that's one of the key pieces to wherever that bridge winds up so that it's consistent so that you have access to woolen mills and also city to Charlottesville and points north via the Rivanna Trail.

Well, I think it would be worthwhile.

Makes sense.

Thanks for raising that, Lee.

Something that I'm hearing a lot about recently, and I'm not sure if this is the venue for it, but I was just curious about if there's anything we have insight on, is the strip between Best Buy all the way up into near Trader Joe's.

I'm sure you guys are aware of it.

If you ever drive on 29, is that the backup into the road from Cane's?

Is there anything that is being done about that from our perspective?

I just want to know if there's anything going on with that.

I know we have a sign up that

Blinks saying don't get into the road, but is there anything else that's being done to forward prepare for that that's being discussed by the MPO?

Any planning?

Yeah, I think that might be a private property capacity issue.

I don't know, Chuck.

It's an ongoing issue, but we didn't really discuss it per se.

I mean, we were mainly focused on the intersections, not necessarily those commercial access points.

I mean, the problem is they only have that entrance and no other way to go anywhere else.

I know we've looked at this a couple of times about possibly having a

Connection in the rear to connect a lot of those properties so that they wouldn't necessarily have to use 29 as their only means of ingress and egress.

But it's gonna cost boatloads of money to do it.

I was just interested because it's probably gonna turn into a,

More of a health hazard at some point, not just food.

But I mean, if you go back to some of the stuff we looked at previously in some of the earlier studies for H-250, I know they were looking at possibly an underpass with a parallel road on that side that and they wouldn't all those businesses would have access off that roadway as opposed to off of to off of twenty nine.

Awesome.

Thank you, Sandy.

Is there anything else before we are you?

I go up a lot of times towards Cantop, I think it's 250 going over to Free Bridge and there's always a backup around rush hour and I'm actually during the daytime as well.

We just redid the signal timings I think earlier this year.

We've got an intersection project at Route 20 and 250.

We're looking at where there's no median in there, the area where there's no median.

We're looking at closing that median up to the Hansen's Road.

And then the current pipeline project is looking at the from Hansen's Road all the way out to the interstate.

That corridor has been an issue for a long time.

And it's not necessarily anything that we can do.

The real bottleneck is at those two intersections on either side of the river.

And we're looking to fix the one on the county side, but the city hasn't really pursued anything on the city portion of it.

I wasn't hearing round three.

Okay.

Were they submitting a project for, the MPO actually did the study and they looked at improvements along that whole section of road and widening, not necessarily widening the bridge, but

Removing the sidewalk from the bridge to provide an additional travel lane across the bridge and putting the bike pedestrian facility adjacent to the bridge.

But that hasn't been pursued since then.

So other than that, that's pretty much where I'm at.

I mean, we're trying to work with the city on the signal at High Street, but we're not

High Street, the west side is the city and that's High Street.

And like I said, Stony Point Road where 20 comes in, that's what we're, we're going to rebuild that intersection and reconfigure it and add pedestrian facilities.

How would we as a group get that area readdressed again back up to the MPO?

The process to focus on that area?

Well, it would really be the LRTP would be the first place to make sure that those were, I mean, I guess the goal would be to identify those as part of the constraint list of projects we would want to prioritize.

But if there was

I'm not familiar with the study that was completed, Chuck, but I mean, is that study still relevant at this point?

I mean, we looked at a whole lot of scenarios.

We looked at the river crossing at Riverside Park.

We looked at several scenarios at Free Bridge.

We looked at, oh geez,

I mean, at one point we even looked at that Connector Road, Eastern Connector was a part of it, but we ended up, that one got ruled out pretty quickly.

So most of the improvements focused on the 250 corridor.

And then I think I, alternative I, and I think alternative F, one of them had improvements at each intersection.

And then the other one had improvements on the corridor, which included widening, not widening the corridor, but adding a additional lane across the bridge by taking the sidewalks off and putting the pedestrian facilities separate.

And then you could extend a six lane section all the way through both intersections and terminate it before you got very farther along beyond that point, just so that you could

Better get better operations through that corridor.

And I don't, we'd have to go back and pull the study.

I don't remember off the top of my head what the different options are, but those were two of the ones that there were preferred solutions that were pushed forward.

I don't recall.

So what's happening, I mean, just to give you just an actual commuter.

When I have to go through that, I cut through

residential streets now to get around most of that, which is not a good thing to do.

And I think more people start to, I see people doing that right now.

So I think really, I don't know if that's, is that a criteria, Chuck?

I mean, we can look at it.

And we know that happens.

And we I know with hydraulic and 29, we looked at the whole network because you've got a large network of roads that people could use to make the maneuvers that we were eliminating at that intersection.

But with regards to what they do.

Naturally, we don't really look at that closely because we don't have data that's O&D data that maps your trip to know that people are cutting through a neighborhood or not.

And we've done it on some roads where we'll basically set up license plate readers at both ends to see who's going through and

sort of as a general comment I would say that now with the GPS systems that I can even send you an article about it if you want that sort of says that people that it's hard to predict where the traffic is going and I've actually heard our board one of the board supervisors in Albemarle sort of actually comment that she was surprised that people are going on residential streets and I as I said I go on residential streets

And you would think that would be something that VDOT ought to consider doing on a more routine basis when we have bottlenecks, traffic bottlenecks, particularly at rush hours, lunch hours, you know, in that area.

I mean, we look at that data, Streetlight is one of the tools that we use and it uses GPS data from your cell phone.

Thanks, Marty.

Maybe people just aren't as savvy as you finding alternatives.

Alright, so I think if there's nothing else for future discussion topics, I think we're ready for matters of the public and I do not see anyone new.

Someone could correct me on that.

Great, if not, I think we can wrap it up.

Anything else before we adjourn?

All right, I think we can call it then, 828 then.

Thanks, everyone.

See you all in two months.

I'll do my information to Sandy on the project and send it to you all.

OK.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.