Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   5/18/2022

This meeting of the Citizen and Transportation Advisory Committee is being held pursuant to code of Virginia 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 impractical 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 as accessible to the public.

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

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

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

You're mute.

Yes, sir.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Tristan Fessel, Stuart Gardner.

Here.

Daniel Bailey, Lucas Beane.

Present.

Hey Ryan, I keep muting you because there's feedback when you're not muted.

Thank you, Sandy.

I got to remember that.

Mr.

Chair, yes, we do have a new CTAC member.

In fact, we have two new members.

The PDC staff was notified of a new member after your packet was

So now, so I would like to introduce to you and to the committee, Mr. Ethan Heil and also Mr. Greg Weaver, and I'll let them introduce themselves.

They have a variety of background and experience, and I think there'll be a value to the committee.

Sure thing.

Thanks, Ryan.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be joining.

Sounds like the very last virtual meeting, but I don't know how much background is helpful, but my interest is driven by being a transit commuter and bike pedestrian first type of traveler around the city.

I work at the University of Virginia in the Office for Sustainability.

And yeah, happy to share more if you have questions, but just generally happy to have this opportunity.

Everyone, my name is Greg Weaver.

He, him pronouns.

I was a UTS driver when I was attending university here a while back.

So it was my first interest in transit.

But, and I also got to study abroad in Tokyo and like experience like living in a city with great transit.

Flash forward to kind of

Now, I organized with the local Democratic Socialist America chapter and got into eco socialism and like its intersection of climate justice and transit.

And, you know, I think that Charlottesville has a lot of potential to become, you know, to have transformational changes done to its transit system.

And that's why I was interested in joining you also.

Thank you Ethan and Greg for being willing to serve and welcome to our committee.

Next item of business is approval of the minutes.

I guess before we ask for a motion to approve, are there any known corrections that need to be made?

All right.

It has been moved and seconded.

Looks unanimous to me, so minutes are passed.

Okay, next item on the... You muted yourself.

with the City of Charlottesville and Mr. Gabe Daley with the County of Albemarle.

They are here to discuss their programs respectively.

This is an informational item for the committee.

In time, you will find that this presentation will work well or go in tandem with the update of the

Long-Range Plan, which is scheduled for next fiscal year.

Thank you.

So I'm Susan Elliott.

I am the Crime Protection Program Manager for the City of Charlotte as well.

Sure, thank you.

Hey, Gabe Daley, Climate Protection Program Manager for the County of Albemarle.

And my mic was unmuted, so I'm sorry if I was contributing any background noise.

OK, so Gabe and I both have a couple of slide decks to kind of walk you guys through what our different climate programs have been working on.

Where we are within our climate action plan development is slightly different.

So I'm going to give you guys first

introduction to our kind of policy directive backing for what we do within our program.

Our program's been around for a number of years and so we are regular, every year we're delivering on actions that help support the community reducing emissions as well as we are in the process right now of developing our climate action plan.

So we got started this process before or at the beginning of when COVID came in.

We got paused in the middle of it and we have just

started in 2022 restarting a lot of that process.

So I'm going to share with you guys some slides that were put together for an April city council work session on the climate action plan.

They are preliminary content.

We will put that together specifically for that council meeting.

And there is opportunity for feedback on that through a survey that we have open through the end of this week.

If you guys are so inclined to want to do that, I'll reference that later.

but also then as we go into questions and discussion you know if you guys do have any feedback or thoughts on things from your perspective that would be useful to you know you want to have us thinking about as we move from this preliminary content into a draft I'm very open to kind of hearing anything and everything on that so and additionally like Ryan mentioned with the long-range transportation plan process coming up

The coordination and kind of bringing these conversations together between our climate programs and then what's happening at the MPO level, that hasn't really happened that much in the past.

They've kind of been running in parallel where there's kind of mutual awareness, but there hasn't really been direct engagement in conversation.

So I'm particularly excited to be here today because it's a great first conversation on that.

And, you know, I hope that what we've got put together for you guys is a good introduction to the work that we do.

And then we can keep the conversation going beyond just tonight.

All right, so with that, I will go ahead and share my screen.

Are you guys able to see that, the slide first?

Perfect, all right.

So we have branded our process for putting together our climate action plan and start us by acting on climate together.

This is also going to be the branding that we're gonna be using going forward for the city's climate program.

A lot of that is a reflection, as you'll see later, that a large percentage of where our emissions come from

as well as where that type of actions are that are needed in Charlottesville are located within that community side.

So while there are a lot of things that government can do to kind of set the stage or to help people move forward and launch into it, it really does need to be a community effort where there's different actors who are taking leadership roles, there's different segments of the community that may need to be engaged differently or more so depending on where and how that fits within the overall makeup of things.

But it really is an effort of acting on climate together as a whole.

So the city first established its climate protection program back in 2007 following the 2006 U.S. Mayor's Climate Protection Agreement.

I am the third person who's in the program coordinator manager role.

We have also echoed these commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a series of different comprehensive plans that the city has adopted.

and it was also in the city council's vision for 2025 which when that was adopted in 2009 was really far away and that is now three years away which is kind of freaky to see those numbers come up close.

Back in 2017, the city made a new commitment, a renewed its commitment to climate through the Global Covenant of Mayors commitment.

What this commitment did was while the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement was heavily focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions,

The global covenant marriage commitment at that point was acknowledging that climate change is happening.

And so the climate commitments at that point were both on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to then lessen those effects of climate change, but also recognize that we need to start looking at climate adaptation.

And so what that commitment does is it lays out those two tracks of climate efforts.

There's three stages for each of those.

And so on the greenhouse gas reduction one, which is one primarily that we're going to be talking about tonight, or I will be talking about tonight at least, is looking at updating and then maintaining an updated greenhouse gas emission inventory, adopting a new greenhouse gas reduction goal based on what the science was at that time, and then to develop a climate action plan to reach those emission reductions.

either in parallel or in sequence.

We originally meant to do this in sequence because we got paused during COVID.

We're now doing them in parallel.

We are also going through right now the first two steps for developing a climate adaptation plan.

And so in the fall, we completed the part of identifying the top climate hazards for Charlottesville, which are extreme heat, increased intensity of precipitation and flooding, and then changing seasonal patterns.

And then we are going to be wrapping up our climate vulnerability assessment piece.

There will be some public workshops at the beginning of June on that front.

So that's another thing if you guys are interested in that topic to keep an eye out for.

And then this coming fiscal year, we will build upon that to develop our climate adaptation plan.

So looking at just that greenhouse gas reduction side and how do we reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

What our goals were that we adopted through following with the covenant mayor's commitment is to reduce our citywide greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2030.

That is from a 2011 baseline.

And then to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

In terms of on an annual basis what the city's climate program does, it does a wide variety of things.

There's kind of a list of stuff on the left.

That's a couple of examples of the types of activities that we do to try to support the community, but also to help move our organization forward in terms of like our own organizational footprint.

Where a lot of this goes in terms of on the community side is we're looking at ways that we can make sure that services and resources are available to the community.

that they're accessible, that they're affordable, and that there's awareness in the community that these exist, but also what are the benefits, not just environmentally, but also to our community or to individuals and their households for actually taking these climate actions.

A lot of times the benefits will also be referred to as co-benefits, which I kind of find that term a little bit interesting because I think sometimes the main drivers for why people want to go forward with something

Some of those other drivers are not just co, but their primary benefits that are right up there in part for why people want to take action or what those motivations are that enable them to be able to do something different than they have been doing before.

In terms of our admissions outcomes and how that has looked in our progress of getting, approaching over to 2030, we have in 2019 data, a 30% reduction from our 2011 baseline.

So our overall goal by 2030 is to get a 45% reduction, so that's about a 20-year timeline.

We're about halfway through that timeline, and we are two-thirds of the way through that reduction, so that's good news.

The other side of that, though, means that there's still a lot of work to do.

In that kind of analogy, people talk about you have your low-hanging fruit, and then you've got the rest of the tree.

The low-hanging fruit is the stuff that's been done first.

So when we're looking at what do we need to do to reach our 2030 goal, that remaining 15% reduction, there's definitely a lot of work that needs to happen.

But then we're also looking ahead to 2050 and how do we get out to that carbon neutrality place.

One of the things in that pie chart that is unlabeled off to the side, that is pretty much the proportional makeup of where our emissions are coming from for every given year.

So as we started off with our 2011 one, as we're shrinking, it's the size of that pie is getting smaller.

But that proportional breakdown is what we've seen pretty exactly every single year that we're going.

And so what that means when you're looking at it is if you look at that green, blue, and yellow, that is where about 90% of our emissions are coming from, is from those three different areas within our community.

Overall within that pie, 95% of that is within the community and only 5% of that is from our municipal operations.

That also means that 95% is outside of direct control of the government usually.

So we really do need that community involvement, that participation from within the private sector in terms of how do we move forward on these pieces.

The three big wedges I spoke about, that's from our residential buildings,

So anything to power, light, heat, cool, all of that is within that residential sphere.

Commercial and then transportation.

And these are all off from each other in percentages by about one to two percentage points.

So they're roughly each about 30% of what that overall pie is of where we're seeing our emissions.

And then there's about 5% that's coming from our waste.

When we calculate greenhouse gas emissions, there are established protocols that communities follow across the country, across the world.

It enables us to be able, when we talk about what our emissions are, there's an apples to apples comparison across communities.

There's assurances that things are being measured and calculated in a consistent manner.

And it also includes what are the types of data that are required to be in there.

But also, what are those sources that are valid, acceptable, reliable data sources for that?

When you look at that, basically, you have your activity data.

So how much of something are you doing?

And then what is that energy or that fuel source that you are using to accomplish that activity?

And then it looks at that.

So if you're looking at just that activity and you're saying, well, how do we reduce our emissions?

If you can do less of whatever that activity is.

So energy efficiency tends to come up.

If you have your computer, makeup numbers, let's say, for the course of this presentation, I'm going to need 100 kilowatt hours.

Well, if I get a more efficient computer and I can do that in 50 kilowatt hours, I'm getting the same productive use of it, but I'm cutting that amount of activity by half of that energy use, which then is reducing those associated emissions that go with it.

The other way of looking at it, if you're looking at, well, what is that energy source that you're using or that fuel source?

You're looking at, well, how carbon intense is that?

So let's say in my backyard, I had a little coal-fired electric plant, and I'm using that to power my computer.

And instead, I then switch that over to renewable energy, something from solar power.

All of a sudden, my emissions have dropped.

My head didn't change anything with my computer.

When we get into transportation, we have a bit of a data barrier on that because we have imperfect access to exactly how much fuel vehicles are using to travel around our town.

What we do have for our data sources comes from the VDOT count on vehicle miles traveled within the city.

They then break that out by

different groupings of classes of vehicles and so then that is paired with national data in terms of what is for those class types of vehicles what is that fuel efficiency for so like what are your miles per gallon that you get for that and then what is that sort of market breakdown of how many of each of those classes of vehicles like passenger sedans for example what percentage of those are gasoline versus diesel

You then run all those numbers together, and that's how we end up calculating what those emissions are that we're seeing in our transportation sector.

When VDOT does these counts, they do not care where that vehicle came from.

They care that that vehicle is driving on your road.

So if we've seen the data counts, there were buses that drove X amount of miles.

We do not know if that is a Greyhound bus, if that is a University Transit Service bus, if that is a CAT bus, if that was a school bus,

If that is somebody who's doing the bus version of van life who bought an old bus and converted it into a mobile home for themselves and they're tooling around town, we don't know.

All we know is that there was a bus that drove X number of miles that VDOT put into their accounts for it.

And so when we're then talking about what are different strategies, and I'm bringing up this level of detail because it goes to what are strategies to reduce emissions.

At that point, we don't know if it's a commuter.

We don't know if it's a tourist who's passing through.

We don't know if it's someone who lives in the city and is traveling in the city or if it's from an Albemarle County.

We don't know if it's someone's there for work purposes or leisure or you know, they're going to the hospital.

Like we don't have any sort of sense getting it behind that data of what those uses are.

So when we're then thinking of who do we need to engage?

What are the types of strategies or avenues we need to be pursuing to try to

understand what barriers are to people to use different types of vehicles or get something more efficient or change different vehicle modes.

There's really kind of this sense where I'm one sense from like an urban planning perspective, from understanding travel patterns.

We understand a lot of this context, but we can't do a direct think and saying which of those patterns is contributing exactly which part of these emissions that we're getting when we're calculating our profile.

So when we do start looking at those reduction strategies for emissions that are transportation related, there's two different kind of buckets, I call them buckets at least, of stopping emissions from going up into the air.

The two examples I gave you before, only I was talking about computer before, is that energy or that fuel use reduction side.

And then there's ideas like, well, what if we can change our fuel source so that the fuel that we're using is less carbon intensive?

So over on what's on the left of the screen, that energy and fuel use piece, that's where we're looking at those efficiency standards.

So for whatever your vehicle is, whether it's a bus, whether it's a little motorcycle, a personal vehicle, how efficient is it at using fuel to do what it needs to do?

You can also look at things like your habits.

If you can start to daisy chain your errands or you're looking at your driving style, some styles of driving use a lot more fuel than others do.

So looking at, well, are there just behavioral changes that we can encourage for people that would then reduce that amount of number of miles that are being driven on our roads?

When you start looking at how we have built out our different transportation networks, so what's that connectivity?

And so this, I think, concept, I think there might be some more opportunities for with newer developments over in the county side, but definitely as the city is talking about wanting to densify, if it's looking at

wanting to do the mode shift and so looking at what are alternative options for bike head type connections for things, where can those be put in that we can increase that connectivity, which then means that to get from point A to point B, which might be a quarter of a mile if the crow flies, but if you have to drive up and around in a loop, suddenly if you can make that connectivity there, you can reduce that amount of miles that are needed to travel that distance.

Connected in with IDS and activity is also that colocation.

So it's starting to look at your land use and your zoning and how does that pair with what your transportation system is.

Are we forcing people that if they're here in order to get to whatever type of destination, they have to go here?

And that's the only option.

Or are there things like, well, if I'm going here, there's also those things that are co-located.

Or maybe it's right around the corner and I can just take a walk up the street to get that corner store rather than having to go and drive up 29, for example.

And then this idea of also with transit, which can be a mode change for people.

It also goes into what are those different vehicle efficiencies that they're using.

On the fuel switching side, again, mode change, so switching over to walking and biking, what can you do that reduces that amount of carbon intensity?

Or for example, the city's transit, we're working with them, but they have just launched a alternative fuel study that is looking at

What are the operational potentials for compressed natural gas, battery electric buses, or hydrogen fuel cells?

And so that's looking at within that bus transportation side, what are those different fuels that are lower carbon intensity than diesel, which is what they're currently using, that are operational that could be used.

And so those are examples of some of the alternative fuels besides gasoline and diesel for that.

People like to talk about e-bikes and scooters or EV autonomous vehicles in sitting in this realm and depending on how they're deployed, how they're utilized, where and how they fit within mission strategies can kind of vary with that.

One of the things in terms of just behavioral things and making whatever strategies actually work for people, e-bikes and e-scooters are particularly interesting with Charlottesville because of the topography that we have.

and so that idea that you can get around town and get up those hills without showing up with a nice sheen of sweat all over you particularly if people are looking at doing that for commuting or you know they're going out for a nice dinner or something like that it opens up a different sort of threshold level for people than if they have to do their own pedal power for things so some of the technologies even though e-bikes do use energy it's not just you know people power so there is some emissions or energy source that's needed for it

It could also present one of those opportunities where because it's removing other barriers or has other co-benefits associated with it, it becomes a more available and accessible strategy than a non-electric bike for that.

One of the other things that's going back into that land use sort of connection, there is also the idea that the most efficient miles when you don't have to travel and across all the sectors that people have been looking at the last two years of COVID and how all of our daily patterns have changed.

There's been a lot of changes in what people have seen in the different numbers.

But if you don't need to travel for something, you're not using any energy to get there.

So you're not doing the admission fees.

That's where in part that idea of daisy chaining your trip starts to come in, where maybe there's certain length of the trip that you can then avoid having to do.

At the bottom, that idea is starting to look at the three different areas of connectivity, that co-location density idea.

I got this from a project that someone had done over at UVA, where typically to walk a mile, it's 20 minutes.

And so the idea was, well, if you look at how you're organizing, what sort of access and how you're building out your urban landscape around the idea of a circle with a five minute walk radius.

You can't reach too many things if you're starting off at Darden and you're trying just to walk for about five minutes or so, or you want to do the whole circle and do your 10 minutes.

The middle one is looking right at the downtown mall where you've got the art center, all of that.

There's quite a few destinations that it's easy to get to there within five minutes or less.

And then the one on the far right is actually Washington, DC, where I zoomed it out for all of Logan Circle.

As you can see, there's a lot of different land uses, the number of buildings.

If you're looking at having a residential or commercial interspersed, if you're thinking about where you're going to run your transit lines, where there's the most opportunity for people to use it, but then also as your transit is going through, there's maximizing the number of destinations that you have on your transit line.

How we're doing this co-location, how we're doing our density and our build-out really does affect what those opportunities are of what transportation systems offer, but also like how much can then get leveraged around this public infrastructure system that are being put out there.

A couple of the other things beyond just leveraging development investment around our transportation system.

There's also the idea of our alternative transportation of networks equally supported.

And so I put a couple of considerations to try to illustrate what I mean by that.

On the left, I put some questions that relate to the infrastructure.

Like, does it exist if you don't want to be in a vehicle driving?

Is there any other options even out there for you?

Is it safe for you to use?

Is it comfortable?

And all that goes into the infrastructure.

On the other side, after you build something, there's questions of, well, what are the operations and maintenance to support that?

Are there access hours that meet what our community needs?

Or are those then becoming barriers?

How is it maintained?

We know one of the things that comes up a lot on the bicycle and pedestrian side of conversations is when we have snowstorms.

There's an effort within the snowstorm and within X number of hours afterwards to make sure that the vehicle lanes are cleared.

And some of that is because of emergency vehicle needs and access around that.

but then it can be weeks later and you know snow that got plowed up and then got compressed into ice is still sitting there in the bike lane or I had the experience I took the bus because I didn't want to drive and the bus dropped me off at my bus stop and I had basically two travel lanes of foot and a half deep solidified melted refrozen snow to then try to get to the curb and it literally dropped me off in Middle Street because that's the only place they could drop me off

And I was like, all right, so now where do I go?

How do I do this?

And so that's one of those considerations that when you're looking at different travel notes, if you want that to be a reliable, consistent thing that people don't keep the convenience of a car, that they can actually use these other transportation systems and modes consistently and reliably, we have to think through all these other pieces of it.

How often are those disruptions, how quickly can disruptions be overcome or not?

So then going into our preliminary content for the Climate Action Plan, there's a couple of pieces that, and as I said, these slides are in our survey for feedback, very open hearing feedback from you all tonight as well.

In terms of what we're thinking about for guidelines for implementation, with our plan, we're looking at keeping it at a strategic level,

And then with key actions that would be completed within the next three to five years.

In order to achieve those, we're going to have to then go into program design and looking at how do we do implementation?

How do we do community engagement?

What does that look like to roll these pieces out?

And so this slide here is looking at what are those guidelines to help direct how we prioritize or where within our community we focus.

So making sure it's effective or as much as we can, effective, affordable, equitable, and inclusive.

prioritizing actions that increase financial stability of households and businesses.

Looking at one that if there's a resilience and adaptation benefit associated with it, that would get a higher priority or focus.

Things that are impactful and attainable for both owner-occupied and rental properties.

I haven't rerun the numbers since the most recent census, but Charlottesville used to have about a 60% rental rate.

So it's a big portion of what we have within our community.

Looking at prioritizing to make things available for low income and mid income but don't necessarily have expendable income to invest in new technologies if that's needed or upgrades to properties.

Looking at front loading reduction, so getting as much reductions as quickly as we can.

And then looking at things, resources and programs to address racial inequities and drive outcomes in that area.

Specifically in our transportation sector,

Again, this is how we've got them broken out to about 30% of our overall profile.

We've decided these out by the strategies, which can remain flexible as new opportunities and alliances, things like that move forward.

But these key actions is we're aiming for these or thinking about how can we achieve these within three to five years.

Sometimes for these, the three to five year timeline is the first step because it's something that we recognize is going to take 15, 20, 30 years to accomplish.

But we know if we don't get started in the next three to five years, we're just going to keep pushing that timeline out.

So what are the things that then we need to be doing within the next three to five years to make these move forward?

A couple of the things on this site, you guys might hear the long range transportation plan coming up and thinking about that.

The idea of how do we create walkable, bikable, transit-served neighborhoods.

Looking at transit demand management planning, not just around vehicles, but looking at how do these different layers of our transportation system intersect and how can we plan or intentionally try to leverage and have them complement each other.

Looking at having well-connected networks, shared use paths, bike lanes, trails.

And so if you think about some of the long-range trails that go up 29, or do you have the potential out to crochet, things like that.

Those end up if they're paved and designed in the right way, they can be commuter things, they can be recreational things.

There's a whole bunch of different uses for those.

But if we think of them as like, it's just something for someone to do when they have a couple hours here or there, then we're not necessarily looking at prioritizing or designing them in a way that we can then leverage them also as transportation options.

So looking at the use of high efficiency vehicles,

Some of that is vehicle standards that are not within the city's control, but we can put in letters of support and things for different levels of government for that.

Looking at different financial incentives, electric vehicles are getting close to being on par with costs for a brand new other car.

I know not everybody, including myself, can just go out and buy a brand new car.

But when we are looking at 60% rental rate, renters don't have the option to install their own charging infrastructure.

We're looking at then these new cars starting to be bought like people can buy them, but then they're starting to hit the resale market as we're looking at the next 10, 20, 30 years.

There's a bit of that chicken and the egg, how if people can't charge a vehicle, they're not going to want to purchase it.

And so as that market shift happens and manufacturers have lots of different commitments out of how many vehicles they want, and they're looking at starting to really switch over to producing electric vehicles, we also have to be looking at what are those options then for people to be able to purchase those and have them be sold.

Additionally, the operations and maintenance for electric vehicles and the cost of the electricity compared to gasoline or diesel is also much more affordable.

So there's a variety of different things that go along with the EVs once they get to the point that they're filtering down through the different markets to then become accessible to people.

But we need to make sure that that infrastructure is there so that people can actually fuel them too.

So that also gets this next strategy on developing community electric vehicle charging network.

So we're looking at both the infrastructure to support it, but also the vehicle side of it.

And then just looking at, well, what are these alternative travel behaviors?

You know, what are the other options that they need there for how people can choose what they do and have options out, but then also are there kind of cultural shifts or experiences.

In terms of on our municipal side, so this is when we're looking at our own

fleet vehicle that the city owns and operates.

A lot of this is going to look very similar in terms of the types of things I spoke about before.

The difference is that we own these vehicles.

We have a lot more operational control, whereas when we're looking at the community, it's a lot of more opening up access pathways and encouraging people because we don't have that direct authoritative control that we do within our own choices.

And so these are the pieces of the first two, I think, that we're working on with transit right now.

I've been looking over at the school bus for the third one, having a green plate policy that looks across the rest of our mobile assets for things.

And then again, like that whole question of it's not just about the vehicles, it's also like, how do you then support the vehicle to make sure that they run?

There we go.

I don't know, Ryan, if you want to have Gabe do his presentation before we go into this.

But at this point, those are the comments I have prepared.

The last little plug-in I'm also going to make for you guys is we announce through our climate action news flashes when we have our surveys open, when we have workshops coming up, when we have drafts for plans to review, when we have different crowdsource activities, any of that stuff.

So if you go to Charlottesville.gov slash notify me,

If you scroll down into the news slash section, find climate action, you can go ahead and sign up.

You can choose to get a push notification when we publish something, either to your email, to a text message on your phone and SMS, or you can sign up for both of those if you really want to make sure you don't miss anything from us.

But please do that.

It's the best way to keep in touch with us.

And I know it works when we have new things rolling out.

If you want to know more about our climate programs, that's the URL on the bottom right of the screen, charlesa.gov slash climate

And if you specifically want to know about our climate planning process, I'll put this in the chat, but it's just charlesville.gov slash climate plan.

Sure.

Yeah, I'll jump in.

Thank you, Susan.

And you laid such good groundwork in terms of a lot of the general ideas that I would have wanted to share as well, that I'm going to go through mine a little bit faster and build on some things that Susan shared in terms of general concepts, and then also give you a few specifics about Albemarle County and what we've been up to.

But I'll move through mine a little bit.

Alrighty, can you see my full screen?

So...

I'm going to cover just three main areas.

So the county adopted a climate action plan in 2020, and I'll share just a little bit of broad overview of that with a few highlights with respect to transportation actions and strategies that we have in the county's climate action plan.

And then I wanted to draw some connections between some of the actions that we have outlined in the plan itself to just thinking more broadly about transportation in the community.

And like I said, Susan offered a lot there.

So I'm just gonna tease out a few further ideas to build on what she said.

Lastly, I'll mention a little bit about what we're doing with our local government operations ending on a similar note to where Susan just ended.

So the County Board of Supervisors adopted a climate action plan, kind of a phase one climate action plan in October 2020.

And I like the point that Susan you made about the, you know, not necessarily seeing kind of

things like health and well-being, the local economy, healthy local natural environment, equity and inclusion in the community as co-benefits, but seeing those as really integral to the work that we're doing.

And so that's more and more how we're seeing the local climate work that we do is very much intersecting those key themes.

The plan lays out two targets that are almost identical to what the cities are.

We just have a different baseline year of 2008 because that was the, until 2018, 2008 had been the most recent year for quite a while that the county had done a greenhouse gas emission inventory.

So our interim target is to reduce emissions by 45% from 2008 levels by 2030 and to achieve zero net emissions by 2050.

I just want to give a simple kind of graph just to give a sense of where the county is in terms of our calculations.

So we did inventories in the 2000s, the last one being 2008, and then our most recent greenhouse gas inventory is for 2018.

We're working on putting together numbers for 2020 this year and there's always, some of you might know this, there's always about a two-year lag between when we can report greenhouse gas inventories and the year the data is relevant for.

That has to do with when some of the data that we use is made available by state and federal governments to make the calculations.

But this here shows kind of the pathway of emissions up to 2018 and then an idealized reduction line in the dashed line to hopefully meet our targets.

We've had a slight reduction in emissions in the county, at least as far as what we've calculated between 2008 and 2018.

But as you can see, we need a steeper curve or steeper downward trajectory going forward to meet those targets.

The Climate Action Plan is divided into five main sections.

It has 31 strategies and 135 actions or action areas within it.

Starting in the top right, tonight's topic and kind of moving clockwise, we have transportation and land use.

We have chapters both on renewable energy sourcing at a large scale and renewable energy within buildings.

as well as energy efficiency in our building stock.

And then we have a chapter on landscape, natural resources and agriculture, some of which is looking at ways that we can help conserve and protect natural land in the county to continue the carbon sequestration that's currently going on in a lot of our rural areas.

And we have actions within the realm of sustainable materials management.

So a lot of those are looking at recycling and composting and making those kinds of services more accessible to residents.

So within transportation, we have eight distinct strategies with 34 actions and those eight strategies roughly fall into six main areas.

So similar to some of the ones that Susan just talked about in terms of the city's draft upcoming plan, we have a number of actions that look at

We have actions that look at land use planning, setting up, hopefully, community development well to be able to make it possible for folks to shift mode and do different kinds of fuel switching.

So electric vehicle incentives as well as the charging infrastructure that the community is going to need for that.

We have a number of actions around public transit and a lot of those involve coordinating with the city since it's one community here that the transit is serving.

We also have actions that focus on the county vehicle fleet and our employee travel.

And then we have a couple of actions that look at education and how we can try to bring more education to schools in the county around these kinds of topics and also to community members.

One of the things that I like to mention lately when I've talked to different folks is that there's kind of like a number of different action areas or kind of focal areas of what an action looks like in our climate action plan.

It's almost like what the verbs are.

So you'll see, if you read through the plan, you'll see the verbs like promote, encourage.

On the one hand, you'll see educate.

Then in the middle, you'll see verbs like incentivize or remove barriers, reduce disincentives.

And then you'll see language like update the comprehension.

That was kind of moving in reverse order, but we have actions that focus on policymaking.

We have some actions that look at county programs and services like recycling and composting, incentives for behavior change, and again removing disincentives.

There's some actions where we'll probably bring those into the legislative agenda.

I saw a really great comment in the chat about updating building codes to require charging stations at new developments, a really awesome idea, something that we want to be prioritizing in our

There might be a question there around whether we have enabling authority to do that.

And so if we don't, that is something where we would want that to be part of our legislative agenda, where we go to the state and say, hey, you know, please allow counties and municipalities in Virginia to be able to do this.

So those are kind of some of the different areas that we have in terms of where we're aiming to take action from kind of the spectrum of policymaking to education and promoting awareness.

So that's the climate action plan.

And I wanted to just tease out a few further themes around transportation in the community.

These are all going to fortuitously build on some of what Susan already mentioned, which is great.

I'll start with the county's pie chart.

This is of our 2018 greenhouse gas emission inventory.

and the county is similar in some respects to the city but also different in some ways so one of the differences is we have emissions associated with agriculture that the city does not but you'll see also we have a much larger share of the pie that is transportation emissions so 52% for us and that makes sense when you think about the county being a large much larger geographic area

where a lot of folks are maybe driving from rural areas or for trips that are passing through the county or coming into the county from elsewhere, going from the county, originating and heading elsewhere.

It's a larger geography to cover.

So it makes sense that our transportation emissions would be higher, which is different than what you often see for cities where building emissions taken together are the larger amount.

Just to drill into an aspect of the transportation emissions or a couple aspects I think are interesting.

This chart was in the growth management background report that my colleagues in community development prepared for our comprehensive plan update that has been launched.

And there's a few things that I thought were really interesting about this chart that they had in their report.

One of them on the left, you can see, this is a chart of work commutes.

You can see three quarters of folks driving alone.

So that's interesting, significant information.

I thought it was interesting too.

This is not the main point that I wanted to call out, but I thought it was interesting.

This is from the American Community Survey 2015 to 2019 averages.

So at that point, eight and a half percent of folks are working from home.

Of course that spiked during COVID and maybe, you know, we know that there's been drop off of that as people are returning to the office, but maybe there will be less of a drop off and it won't go back down to that level, maybe plateau at something a bit higher than that.

So that can help with transportation emissions.

But what I'm really interested in highlighting is the three numbers in the middle, which are all very small.

And I think they're probably smaller than all of us would like them to see or would like to see them.

So that brings a question to my mind, which is how can growth management, land use decisions, and long range transportation planning like what the

PDC and the MPO are about to get going with, how can those things help us increase the percentages of transit, walking, and biking?

And behind that question is how can that type of planning and those decisions help make it more possible for folks to choose those alternative modes?

How can we, as Susan said, remove barriers?

So this is a little finger painting on the next three slides.

I just wanted to kind of put out a few ideas.

Some of them correspond with what Susan said, and maybe you'll introduce a couple of additional concepts.

Since you all are on the Transportation Advisory Committee for the MPO, you're probably familiar with this term that's

come into Vogue complete streets, which is the idea of a street that has really good infrastructure that allows for basically anyone in any mode to make their way down that street.

So there is space for cars.

There's also dedicated space for transit.

If there are transit stops and routes along that street, there's dedicated space that is safe and comfortable for cyclists and for pedestrians, often with barriers between that and vehicular traffic.

The image on the right is not of Charlottesville or Albemarle.

It's more of a kind of idealized image of a complete street.

But that's one concept that has been useful in forming our work thinking about our transportation related actions in the County's Climate Action Plan.

and then also thinking about you know ways where again kind of those thinking about barriers and how often we dedicate an incredible amount of real estate to parking and you might go you know shopping on a weekend and even if the store seems really busy the parking lot has like double the amount of spaces as what you would need for the cars that are actually there

So thinking about you know how much real estate do we offer to cars even if it's unused and can some of that be shifted over to you know supporting the infrastructure needed for good quality transit, bike, pedestrian use.

Something else that's interesting, Susan talked about kind of co-location and land use planning.

I pulled a couple, these are just screenshots that I pulled from the county's most recent 2015 comprehensive plan that just illustrate ways of thinking about development.

And so the image on the right, the black and white image on the top shows kind of like segregated uses.

And also if you look really closely, you'll notice that

The roads don't connect, so it's kind of difficult to walk and run an errand.

You'd have to get into your car, get on the wired street, whereas you have much more kind of mixed use and interconnectivity in the lower left portion of that chart.

And then same point, I won't spend

Time on this one, but the colorful illustration in the bottom left is basically the same thing that Susan showed with actual Google satellite images, that notion of the quarter mile radius and having there be accessibility to a variety of different types of needs on foot or on bike.

And then lastly, a concept that I think is interesting that is connected to this that I first learned about when reading the county's 2015 comprehensive plan is this idea of human scale roads and developments.

So this is more an illustration of buildings, more so than roads.

But I tell you what, my first time making my way up

on a bike and on transit to the intersection around 250, 29 and hydraulic.

Wow, is that not human scale roads and developments.

So that's a kind of an interesting concept that I've kept in mind over the last few years and in the thinking around what we could envision and hopefully work towards.

So local government operations at the county.

There's another piece I haven't talked about as much in the last few slides, which is the importance of electric vehicle infrastructure.

You could say that's perhaps even more important in the county because of how large we are geographically with the large rural area.

You know, it's unlikely that we would ever have a transit service that could serve all areas of the county.

So we may need to rely more on the transition to personal electric vehicles.

than the city might have to.

The county has been trying to lead in that regard.

You might have seen the newish one year old electric vehicle charging stations that are available for the public use at the county's county office building, of course, in the city of Charlottesville.

And I wanted to show the chart just because I've noticed through casual observation, I've seen the it seems like there's more and more cars using those.

which has been nice to see.

Initially the first month or two they were often sparsely populated and more and more lately I've seen that they're in use that many if not all the spaces are filled up so I asked my department director if I could see the chart of actual usage and you can see definite increase in

the energy use which correlates with the number of cars actually charging there.

So, you know, that's one small step that the county is taking.

There's a lot more work to do, of course, in terms of having robust charging infrastructure throughout the community to facilitate folks making the choice for electric vehicles.

But this is one effort that's nice to see the usage increasing for those available stations.

We're also engaged in an effort to create green fleet policies and procedures.

That was one of the actions that Susan had in the kind of city's local government sustainability.

So we're looking at setting targets for fleet electrification or efficiency if in the case of some vehicles where the technology is not there yet.

So generally thinking about emergency response vehicles where either the technology is not quite there or at the moment it's cost prohibitive to get like an electric fire truck.

but looking at setting targets there.

Also right sizing the fleet and vehicles and so that's thinking about both the number of vehicles that we keep at the county particularly in the pool of vehicles that different staff can use kind of reassessing do we actually need all the vehicles that we have or can we reduce some or not replace as

vehicles reach the end of their life and then also right sizing the vehicles themselves which I'll come back to in a minute and we're also partnering with schools to look at a transition to an electric school bus fleet which has some really important health and well-being and equity implications too.

I recently read a study that suggested and I apologize for not having a citation here for that but I read a study suggesting that a lot of the

kind of conventional air pollution emissions from school buses are often most intense inside the school bus.

So certainly not good for the kids who are riding those.

I'll close by saying that we have an upcoming event called the Fleet of the Future, right-sized and electrified.

It'll be a workshop and community demonstration of some different types of electric vehicles.

The first couple hours, three to five, will be a workshop for staff, and then we're inviting anyone from the community to come and check out the vehicles from 5 to 6 p.m.

And I'll see if the little graphic will work over the screen share.

But what we're going to do at this event is, so we're not just showing like electric vehicles writ large, personal vehicles, but the ones that you see flashing by.

We're showing vehicles that are a little bit more related to kind of work task related vehicles that groundskeepers and landscape crews might be using, especially in county

and Citi Parks.

The Citi, I should say, and UVA are co-sponsoring the event with us.

So, wanting to bring staff out, you know, who are engaged in landscape management, parks management, and folks to look at, well, what kind of vehicle might be appropriate and actually most useful for the kind of work you're doing.

UVA has been in a transition to a lot of these vehicles and the fleet manager there has been quite excited both about what they've been able to bring and about reports from his own staff.

In terms of their experience.

So we're excited about it.

And there's relevance to the private sector in terms of private landscaping businesses.

So with that, I will end.

Oh, sorry, this is Nick here.

Yes, please.

First of all, let me congratulate both the city and the county for the effort they're putting on on this issue.

But one thing neither of you have said anything about is the coordination or collaboration between the county and the city.

What happens in the county would affect the city and what happens in the city would affect the county.

So I think that would be required here would be rough, serious coordination between the two entities.

For instance, if the trend lines that you have now with the target dates are very similar,

But if, for instance, as you go along the years, you find out that the city, the trend line is fitting the expectation of the city.

And in Albemarle County, it's not fitting at all.

Do you do anything about that?

And how do you do that?

So I'll

I'll just kind of follow order of presenters to this.

There are different efforts that are happening in the background around coordination of staff to staff level on those fronts.

One of the things that we started about, this is 2018, so about four years ago, is an umbrella effort that we call Climate Action Together, where the sustainability climate staff from the city, county, and UVA regularly meet and we do information exchange, we coordinate on community engagement type work,

and what we've found through this experience is that it's been also a really good way for us to phrase I want to say is keep tabs which kind of means more like we're like watching each other which isn't quite what I mean but being able to like you know get a little insight into like what's happening in each other's organizations and then bring those conversations into our organizations if there seems like there's opportunities to collaborate.

One of the challenges I think, and I feel like this might be true for the county as well as the city, is that often in terms of the land use planning, the transportation planning, there are other departments and other staff members who that is their primary focus of their work.

And so one of the things that's coming out of the development of these climate planning processes is actually opening up those conversations.

And so starting to have more of that dialogue to see how these pieces stick together and then

being able to bring that into the peer-to-peer conversations amongst the transportation, land use planning folks across our organizations in a longer climate side.

But then also, you know, how does that fit within like what the MPO is doing in the long range transportation plan piece?

And so those conversations, I think, I guess in answer to your question, it is something that people think about.

I don't think there's a clear

I don't want to answer exactly how to coordinate and resolve it, but I feel like we're starting to get the right institutional alignments in place that are starting to foster more of those conversations that then can start bringing those pieces together going forward.

And then I think, actually, and sorry, one last thing, Gabe, real quick.

In terms of the transportation demand management plan idea,

There is a recognition that needs to be done regionally.

It wouldn't make sense to look at it just within the city borders because there is so much travel that goes back and forth and as Gabe said, it's one joint transit system that serves the whole community even though it spreads across jurisdictions.

So there are also some of those elements that just by the nature of how the planning process happens that I think will foster some of that collaboration or communication.

I'm done now.

Yeah, no, I agree with everything Susan said.

All I would add is that it's kind of, you know, Susan and I check in with each other on a regular basis.

And like Susan said, it's kind of like a many-to-many relationship of us connecting with our colleagues in other departments and then those folks being in communication with each other.

So I think part of it is this, part of our, each of our jobs is like a networking role as much as it is a program management role and helping to connect those dots.

And I think that this kind of event, I certainly see as part of that work, right?

Because you all are on a citizen advisory committee for the MPO, which is an organization that's looking at the overall area.

So I hope that there's some benefit there.

And I might actually turn that question around a little bit over to the committee, beyond things that we can put in our climate action plans where we say,

Let me take a shot at that.

Traffic congestion is one.

We recently, the MPO looked at the intersection of US-29 and Hydraulic Road, and basically the whole section of 29 from say Greenbrier to US-250.

Presently, it takes about five minutes for a vehicle to get

from say Greenbrier Drive to US 250, even longer during peak hours.

I, for example, made a suggestion that would change that 36,000 vehicles a day would only take one minute instead of five minutes.

That's 2,400 vehicle hours per day, which a vehicle hour is

at least a gallon of gas probably more.

So yeah, traffic congestion can make a big dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

Thanks, Susan.

Maybe it's okay if I ask your turnaround question with another question, just because I'm curious and I am new to this group.

I'm curious, are there ways to measure or are there metrics around connectivity?

That's one of the things that stuck out to me the most, I think, from your two presentations is that the biggest contribution between the two municipalities is

Transportation, and if you kind of like zoom in a little bit, it's single occupancy trips.

It seems like one of the better ways to get around that is through connectivity.

So like better grid connections, but also ped and bike connectivity.

Are there ways to measure that?

There's also walkability and bikeability scores that communities can have.

I'm not familiar enough with them to drill in and tell you exactly how they're calculated or what that kind of minimal geographic space is of like that minimal unit they can go down to.

I was part of a different presentation as part of Virginia Equity Clinic for local government employees that we had our final things last week.

And somebody was speaking about a parks planning thing at the county and looking at either putting it in Dardan Tau or putting it down at Biscuit Run.

And one of the items that came up in reference to comparing the two places was the relative walkability scores between the two.

And it was really interesting for me to hear because Dardan Tau had a higher walkability score than the Biscuit Run area, which that didn't really surprise me based on what I know of those two areas.

So you have to cross US 20, which is a pretty big road.

There's not a lot of supportive infrastructure there for pedestrians to get across.

And then you get put on a kind of long, windy road that you then turn to then go up another road.

to get through the Darden child's heart.

And if you're going back the other way into the neighborhood, as soon as you cross that street, you're going up a really, really big hill.

And it was interesting kind of thinking through like how walkable really is that area.

And so in that, and I'm sharing this as an example that your question, there are ways of measuring those.

But I think getting into really like how narrow of a scope is that walkability score centered on.

And then

looking practically at you know each of the kind of areas of like well is that taking into account topography you know or is like us 20 is that how does that factor into that walkability score was that walkability score they're really looking at the neighborhood but not that ease of access between the neighborhood and then the park access areas so there are ways to do that but i think it's

It is a good first start with those measurements, but then getting a little bit more into our local site specific for site planning and transportation planning would definitely be needed on top of that.

Not specifically, although I jotted it down as something to look into further.

Thanks for bringing that up, Ethan.

Yeah, I don't have more kind of specific information to answer tonight.

Although I think the PDC has a bike and pedestrian plan, which I looked at.

And Sandy, if you want to say something about that, I'll just say that there are some great maps that show current connectivity and then future planned pathways that are in dashed lines.

Yeah, I mean, that's basically the extent of the bike cut plan.

And we did use that as, you know, when we were identifying some of these feasibility studies to look at, you know, what came out of what ended up being the Ravana River bike cut bridge application that started off with that bike cut plan, looking at that network gap and, you know, understanding that the river was a barrier in the network and wanted to try to bridge that.

That's an example of that.

I was going to say, I don't know, Ruth may actually be able to respond to that.

I'm not sure because there are some GIS tools or maybe Chuck might have some additional insight.

Yeah, I think that the one map which the county and the city and the MPO are trying to work on is some of that GIS-based

Information so that we could use it for doing this kind of analysis, but we are not there yet.

So hopefully that's something we can work together on flushing out and then start to pursuing some of this because it at least gives people choices on the types of modes they want to use so that you can possibly get them out of their cars and not necessarily have to deal with

The congestion that we've got on the roadways if we can get people to do other modes.

So that's a first step.

I didn't really answer the question, but at least we're starting to work on the tools.

And this is a lot of good conversations.

And I think we need to definitely pursue it because I know in the past how we've scaled some of this when we looked at projects.

It's whether there were facilities there and one of the project would include bike and ped, it would get points for those types of items, but it wasn't really a good analysis of the effects of that improvement.

Thanks.

One question I had was, what is the city and county's plan to get off natural gas and using renewable energy instead?

If EVs are great, we can have all EVs in the world.

But if we're using natural gas to power them, it's kind of a moot point.

And again, I think to go with that, I just read an article that there's potentially an applicant for a big solar farm in the county.

I don't know.

Give your aware of that, but I think it just came out for 138 megawatt capacity, which would be awesome.

Yeah, thanks for mentioning that.

Really good point.

One, and you may already know this, what's helpful about EVs and electrification generally, like in homes and businesses in terms of appliances, is that there are some automatic savings just by the energy efficiency of electric.

motors compared to on-site fossil combustion.

And there's that kind of over time benefit, whereas the grid gets cleaner.

So there's some things where the grid is getting cleaner outside of our control.

But in terms of specifically your question, we're working right now in the county on

creating some solar policy language that we can put in the comprehensive plan update and then have that hopefully transfer into the zoning ordinance update where we can clarify what the county would like to see in terms of utility scale solar here towards meeting our goals with respect to that section of our climate action plan.

And then also kind of how we want to see it done.

So we obviously would like to not see large forested land deforested for solar energy.

Where would we like to try to prioritize projects?

Can we work with utility developers to put native plants that are going to support pollinators in between the panels rather than turf grass that needs to be mowed, for example?

So we're working on some kind of policy language to help us hopefully guide where we would like to see solar development go in the county, but we definitely have goals, broadly speaking, in the climate action plan to advance the provision of solar energy from our area.

I haven't heard specifically about that development application.

I know that there are

A couple of projects that I believe were approved last year and are probably somewhere in the realm of initial development stages.

One of them is going to be on the top of the cap of the old Ivy landfill.

And then I think there's a couple of different layers and Gabe touched on them, so I may end up repeating myself a little bit.

In terms of looking at something that's electric powered, and I think this is what Stuart and I just put into the chat with it.

So within the city, at least, we are completely within Dominion Energy's electric territory.

So they are the single electric utility supplier for anything within the city.

The county has a couple of different co-ops as well as Dominion that provides electricity to it.

Under the Virginia Clean Economy Act that got passed, I think it was last year, I'm getting my different COVID General Assembly years mixed up, there's a commitment or requirement that Dominion have all of its electricity be clean energy by 2045.

And so if we're looking at changing our transportation fuels over to electric and it's coming off of the grid, as Dominion moves in that direction, those emissions will be getting reduced and coming down.

When we look over at our buildings, what we're seeing within that sense is that from that 60% roughly within the city that is commercial and residential.

I haven't looked at this slide within the last month, so I may be a little off on my numbers here, but I believe it's about a third of the emissions from that are coming from our natural gas usage.

And so when we're looking at that and the fact that Charlottesville Gas is a municipally owned utility by the city of Charlottesville,

It also opens up some interesting questions within how we approach our climate action plan.

There are things like such as renewable natural gas.

There's also a lot of research looking at hydrogen and how does that fit within the gas pipeline.

Both of those are evolving markets or not existent in our area for hydrogen, for example, right now.

If we do look at the renewable natural gas, there's a very high price point in terms of purchasing that.

And that entire supply right now is either going towards industry or out to California, because regulatorily there, they're required to have it.

So part of the cost increase on that mark for ET and renewable natural gas is in part a demand supply issue.

Some of it is just

So if you're taking out that idea of like when we switch to a renewable gas alternative that isn't going over to the electric then you're left with that part of well what do we do on our energy demand side or once the carbon's up in the air how can we pull it down and so those are the two kind of pieces that are being discussed within the city

and also we're getting comments from community members of how they would like to see the city move forward on that.

And we are going to have some pieces of that.

We're definitely getting comments and dialogue as part of our climate action plan process.

So there will be some content in our job climate action plan.

But we're not expecting there to be a single clear answer that's going to be able to be produced in the next couple of months.

I was just gonna say that pretty much when you're looking at any of the options, you're looking at different fuel sources, or you're looking at then how to get carbon out of the air and back down and pull it out of the air, you're looking at annual ongoing costs that are going to be marked up.

Whereas if you do something like an energy efficiency investment,

or some other conversion like that, you do it once and you pay for it once, but you no longer are using that amount of energy in perpetuity, basically.

The other tricky piece that's also out there is what I mentioned with our transit system and the alternative fuel study.

And so what that then says about the technology, University Transit at UVA just put out a press release that they're going to be getting for all electric battery buses.

their bus route system is much tighter in terms of where it goes than what the city's transit is and so there are some different constraints that they're looking at and trying to figure out within the structure what the city's transit service is if you know there's interest in that going further and more so into the county as well what does that mean in terms of what technologies can be there and so there may potentially on the horizon be a question of

trying to foresee how quickly technology will change where we'll be at a point where we either decide to stay with diesel and wait for battery electrics to get to the point that they meet all of our operational needs or do we want to switch to a lower carbon fuel like CNG which then has an investment cost that's going to take X number of years to get the return on and a lot of other development associated with it and

Hope that battery electric doesn't suddenly become the viable thing before we reach that return period.

Real quick, I was just going to drop in the chat to Karim's kind of the beginning of your question.

The organization LEAP that kind of came out of a collaboration between city and county a number of years ago, and we partner with them on a lot of things.

They're currently doing a campaign called Solarize Virginia, which is to help folks get signed up for

on-site building rooftop solar.

Thank you.

I have a question named for Gabe Principally.

You had highlighted transportation, walking, and

Biking is an area of focus.

You had drawn a red box around those three in your presentation.

We have limited resources on how we can get there.

And I wonder whether walking and biking is really not a good investment in this area for the following reasons.

I love walking.

I love walking and biking paths, and I use them all the time.

But when you think about

going to work every day when it's hot, we're gonna get in hot weather, when I'm shopping, all of those things may or may not be appropriate or useful, and particularly in the county.

Because as you know, Gabe, we've got a lot of buildings growing up that don't have good either walkability and even transferability transportation

Indices, if you look at public ground roads, I'm sure you're familiar with that, the buildings going up there.

So I wonder, I sort of would like to get your reaction.

Public transportation, public transit, EDs, yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a really good question.

So I think, and I did highlight in that section, those three, right, public transit, biking and walking, all three of which were very low.

I think transit was maybe two and a half percent, biking was similar, walking was pretty low.

So yeah, you know, the biking and walking for certain kinds of regular commutes or trips

For some folks in the county, and particularly folks living in the rural area, probably not a viable option.

At the same time, I definitely think there are gains that we can make.

And there's ways in which those are not necessarily mutually exclusive, the walking, biking, and transit.

Just to give you a personal example, I, early in living in the community, I currently live in the city, but early in living in the community, I was trying to get somewhere by bus up to a shopping center in kind of near 29 Hydraulic.

and I took the bus up to get there and it was you know reasonably decent in terms of length and I didn't realize that it wasn't a two-way system and there was like a loop and that I would have to get across 29 which I pretty quickly realized was not possible or safe and in order to to get back or do something different so I think part of it to your point about emphasizing the public transit is

There's a way in which they can go together and enhance each other.

So maybe, you know, yeah, for a lot of folks, maybe most folks in the county, they're not going to walk to work unless they get lucky and live right next to where they work.

Maybe for some folks, if we can really put some intention into increasing connectivity, a biking route would, especially paired with an e-bike where there's a lot less effort involved, that could help them get to work longer than what someone might want to cycle by themselves.

but with the electric assist I could see that being possible and then there's this way in which they can also like help each other so if we can increase the connectivity for transit and biking and walking together it can make the transit more viable if someone right can get from their house more easily to the bus route in both directions or back from the bus when they're coming the other direction at the end of the day

I have one follow-on comment and then I have one more question if I might real quickly for you and maybe for Susan as well.

My comment is you've talked about people working but the county has a fair amount of people who are retired

So they're unlikely, I would think, they're more likely to use their cars and hopefully ultimately public transportation, but less likely to use bikes to go shopping, to do the routine mundane things.

So I think I really have to think through where we're gonna put the money in terms of making an investment to get the biggest bang in the shortest amount of time.

Which brings me to my other comment.

I looked at your chart, your first chart deal with greenhouse gases.

That curve was not going down to 2045.

It looked to me like it was gonna end up at 2070 or 60.

I mean, I just thrived all day.

And we didn't see a curve, Susan, from Charlottesville.

So do you all also have a curve?

So one question is, do you think you can be able to bend the curve?

So certainly we hope that we can bend the curve and that's part of what the climate action plan is intended to do.

So one piece of that kind of elbow where there was some reduction from 2008 to 2018, that was before the county was doing climate action.

altogether.

So that was basically benefiting riding the coattails of more regional changes, national changes in fuel economy standards for cars, and also some regional transition in the electricity generation fuel mix.

So we benefited from that.

And then we have our climate action plan now, which has these additional strategies and actions for us as a locality and community with the city of Charlottesville.

So I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna actually try to tackle some of your comments there about the focus on the walking, biking, and transit dynamic, as well as the questions around the curve.

I think one of the things that often when we end up in conversations around different travel modes is that it's very easy to become focused on one travel mode as being the travel mode for the entire trip journey.

And I think it's more, I find it more useful to get down into the specifics and start thinking about specific scales of locations.

So if I'm going to try to get from Charlottesville to Scottsville, I'm not going to be walking that.

I'm just not going to be.

That's not practical for any reason if there was a walking trail the whole way.

But if you think about, for example, where Stonefield is, where you've got hydraulic and 29 there.

Stonefield's in the county.

You've got a residential neighborhood right across hydraulic from it that's in the city.

Stonefield's mixed use.

That was part of the zoning requirement for it.

You're going to have a mix of residential and commercial there.

But the way that the developers ended up building it is they built the commercial part as one story building.

And then across their major street and over and down the ways, those are the areas that are the residential, which are just coming in now.

If you think about instead, if that was zoned and built in a way where it's kind of more like a downtown sort of field, typical street scape, not just sort of downtown, but general downtown.

You got your first, maybe second street commercial, and then you've got a story or two that's residential above it.

Some of those units might be things for seniors, but all of a sudden you're putting your residence right where you then are co-located with different restaurants, supermarkets, maybe corner stores, things like that that they're going to.

And so all that walkability that Stonefield Shopping commercial area has is now also getting leveraged for that residential commercial intersection type piece.

Definitely making sure that the whole Stonefield development, including the residential stuff that's getting built now and I think is in future phases,

That puts them close by, but you still have to get through all the residential areas to then cross whatever that, I can't remember the name of the street, the one that connected onto Costco to then get to the commercial destination.

And so that's where I was thinking about in the scale of, are we trying to make things more walkable?

Some of it really goes to like getting down to that specific level of not thinking across like the entire county distance, but just that one development.

How can we maximize the walkability within that area?

to then make these trips better and easier for people.

Or if you think about that entire residential neighborhood that's directly across the Stonefield, but you have to cross Hydraulics.

How do those residents get over there?

And that's a very short distance, but Hydraulics is not an easy road to cross unless it's like the middle of the night and there's nobody driving.

Even then there's a lot of cars still.

It's not that great.

Like, I don't know, I mean, maybe somebody isn't gonna go from, you know, up near like the Four Seasons neighborhood or, you know, north of Greenbrier to walk down to the Trader Joe's, but that neighborhood immediately across the street.

How can we increase that walkability?

You know, where Kroger's across 29 from that neighborhood.

You know, how do we get down in these kind of more smaller areas to then look at how do we increase these pieces of it?

The other part is if you're talking about with transit,

Most people don't have a transit stop directly outside Front Door.

So there is some way you're going to have to walk or bike or something to get to the transit.

And then once they get off transit, they're going to have to also do some other way to get where they're going.

And so that also plays into that idea of getting into that more specific on how are we building out walkability and bikeability on how can people get to those locations.

My mom is not going to be comfortable on a two wheel bike.

She would love it if there was an electric three-wheel trike sort of thing that she'd be like, I'm super stable.

I don't have to worry about hills.

This is great.

She would do that.

I will never get her on a two-wheel bike.

No way.

No way, no how.

But then again, you're starting to think about, well, what does that then look like in terms of infrastructure?

If we have wide enough separated bike lanes, if we have shared use paths that are paved that you could then have that sort of vehicle stuff on there, it starts to open up possibilities for people to do things differently than they do now.

But if you're still in that neighborhood across from hydraulics and you can't get across hydraulics safely, it doesn't matter how walkable Stonefield is, people are going to drive across hydraulics to get there.

And so there's a lot of this dynamic where it's not just one mode as the only mode for the entire travel trip.

And I think that's important to keep in these conversations.

And I think it very easily gets lost.

And it goes back to also Ethan's question before about metrics.

You know, how do we measure this?

You know, it's not just the walkability.

It's not just the bikeability.

It's not just the transit access.

It's how do those pieces intersect together?

Or if you're looking at, you know, having commuters or having a broader regional piece and coming in, I think it's one of the parts that I didn't mention before, but ties into the idea of the five minute walk.

Where do you put your parking so that people can park once and then they're in the area where it's walkable for them to get around?

um versus that you know they have to go in what I call babysit your car where okay parks I do my thing okay wait no I need to move my car again okay wait no I have to go get my car and move it again you know like what how can we make it so that there's areas that intentionally people can drive to stop and then do whatever they're doing without having to constantly manage having that vehicle where it goes um so that that's kind of my thoughts on that that other piece and I bring that up because it's not just a rural urban question it is also within our more dense urban areas that

our city county right up next to each other type of areas where that question comes into play.

In terms of the curve, I have not actually that chart I showed you, I have not put that into a graph to see how that number is going down and what sort of a bend of that curve we have or not.

I think everything that Dave said is that's part of why we do a climate action plan is to say, well, where are the directions we need to go?

How did those numbers bend?

and then having those periodic check-ins to keep looking back at that graph or that chart and saying how much is it, how far are we on target and then it starts to look at those bigger investment questions especially as we start getting closer to our carbon neutrality goals and UVA is facing this as well because they are aiming for carbon neutral by 2030 not 2050 and then being fossil fuel free by 2050 and so these questions of as you start to

Look at how much you need to bend that curve.

You know, is it stuff that, I use the example of renewable natural gas.

Well, if each unit of renewable natural gas is let's say 10 times more expensive than a non-renewable unit, at what point does that price point and that additional cost become worth it to then make that curve bend?

You know, or starting to look at, well, what would the, if that's one way to get the curve to bend into this dollar amount.

What are alternatives?

What are things that go on the energy efficiency side, which is usually much cheaper than any of the other options, in part because you pay once and then you're done.

But it starts to put out that question of how do we evaluate options in comparison to each other to make that curve bend, that it brings more contextual information into how we achieve these goals.

I would say one other thing, Susan, I deliberately try to stay away from the city because of the arguments that you make.

But I would say defense of the county, the county is now putting together, I think Sandy probably can help me with the right terminology, a microtransit experiments where essentially they're gonna have transit on demand.

So one of the areas is up 29 is one area.

I think the other is in Pan Top, Sandy,

So that'll be interesting to see.

And that's where I think most of the money should be going.

That was really my emphasis more than anything else.

So thank you.

Well, and one thing I am really curious to see how the microtransit study goes.

Back when CAT was redoing its route realignments about 10 years ago, one of the pieces that was proposed by consultants at the time was to do the transit on demand.

And they got a

So I'm really, when I heard that the study is going on with microtransit, I was like, Ooh, really curious to see how it goes this time.

Sorry, I'll try to make this quick.

And first of all, I should have led with this, but thanks, Gabe and Susan, for presenting this and really diving into the intricacies and complexities of how this is all connected and laying it out for us.

One more quick comment.

There was a report released in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a couple years ago that suggested for transportation applications, CNG could be not necessarily any better than diesel in terms of greenhouse gas reductions or potentially worse.

So one quick comment.

And then my final question is, Susan, you mentioned that there's a fugitive emissions section in your pie chart.

Does that include natural fugitive, natural gas emissions or not?

Yeah, so one of the things that I've seen when people calculate emissions from natural gas, like looking at transit, for example,

is the difference of if they're calculating the emissions from what is then getting burned by the bus right there, or if they're taking in the whole, what's called wheels to wealth.

So including the extraction from the ground and emissions that come out of that.

So I'm wondering if the report you read, if that's part of the difference in this difference of numbers.

So the way that the fugitive emissions get calculated, there's a kind of industry fugitive emissions percentage.

And so we take the total amount of natural gas that is consumed within a year within the city of Charlottesville boundaries and we multiply that by that percentage.

And that's where that fugitive emissions is.

I know from conversations we've had with our natural gas utility just recently, there'll be comparisons and like looking at Boston's one place where there have been different reports and findings of how kind of leaky their overall gas pipe system is across the city.

The Charlottesville GAS actually started upgrading its types very intentionally and methodically years back.

And so the type of type material, and I'm getting out of my depth here, so I can't answer any type of questions.

I'm probably speaking a little, a little fudgy in terms of the details already.

But what I took away from the conversation is that different type material will be more leaky than others.

And the one that is the most concerned, we have a very small portion of.

And then for the rest of the PIPE system, there were intentional efforts to get it so that we don't have the same weak issues as what Boston and Richmond or other places have.

So going back to your question on that fugitive emissions percentage, because that is kind of a, it's an average from within the industry, that may not, that's not like a specific measurement

That is innate directly to here where someone's gone and measured all of our different parts of our type system within the city.

So I just want to note that that number, a lot of people sometimes in calculating emissions, that level of precision and where exactly it comes from.

And something like Dave and I spoke about before is what data sources are available.

Our transportation data is on VDOT counts.

Like there's some fudge factor in there because that's the level of granularity we're able to get to.

Okay, if there are no further questions, I want to thank Gabe and Susan.

Excellent presentations and did a great job fielding the questions.

Great work and I hope it continues to succeed.

Sure, Mr.

Chair.

Thank you, sir.

I'll be pretty terse in the interest of time.

Just wanted to highlight that the NPO Policy Board will be approving or considering approval of the draft FY 23 unified planning work program.

You all saw a draft version of it in your meeting packet.

The MPO will also be looking to endorse two resolutions for SMART SCALE.

You all may be familiar with the four projects that the MPO will be submitting and also the four PDC projects, which are in Albemarle County.

So the policy board will be considering those two resolutions

at their upcoming meeting.

And then also in a future meeting, and thanks to Sandy for spearheading this, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the MPO Policy Board will be giving a presentation on that.

So just stay tuned for those items, the Policy Board.

The draft FY23 UPWP, as you saw, was included in your packet.

Real quickly, some of the items in there, the development of the 2050 LRTP, SMART SCALE, TIP development, the Regional Transit Governance Study, one map as Mr. Chuck Proctor,

alluded to earlier, and then MPO boundary analysis.

So those are some of the things that are in the FY 23 UPWP for next fiscal year.

And then lastly, return to in-person meetings.

So right now you all have been meeting virtually due to COVID and some of the policies set forth by the city of Charlottesville.

At your July meeting, the plan is to have you all return back to the PDC office for your meetings.

There still will be some type of hybrid option where you can attend virtually, but as committee members, you're encouraged to be here in person.

Hey Ryan, just to clarify, the remote participation policy that you all adopted does require you to be present in person unless you meet the exceptions, if you have a health

There does have to be an in-person forum

So in order to have the meeting and the in-person quorum would have to vote to allow you to participate electronically.

So if you are able to attend in person, you need to plan to attend in person.

All right, thank you, Sandy.

Mr.

Okay, I guess we'll check and see if there's any last minute comments from first anybody on the CTAC or any members of the public who might be attending.

If so, raise your hand.

Going, going, gone.

All right, well then we are adjourned.

Thank you for

Thank you all, everyone.