Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   3/15/2023

Can we add that back?

Because right now there's no real place for the committee to talk about things that they've heard from their constituents or things that we want to bring up.

Well, yeah, I think you got that, Ryan, just like as of like the final 10 minutes of every meeting, just sort of half like matters from the committee.

Yeah.

And maybe that there's nothing but at least some opportunity to say, hey, I've heard this, can we talk about this next meeting?

I can go ahead and share my screen.

So I think the biggest thing that we're going to be talking about is we do want to spend some time talking about the website.

We did make some updates to the website and I am going to, sorry guys.

I'll dim the lights so you all can see a little bit, but the biggest thing that we wanted to do was just share some of the stakeholder discussion group feedback, and I realize that you all got that document with very short notice, so we're not really asking for any final feedback, but mostly just to report back what we heard and give Lee and Patrick a chance to also share some of their takeaways from that discussion, but

As you all know, we conducted some stakeholder discussion groups to get an initial round of feedback about the draft goals and objectives that we had developed for the long range transportation plan.

So we held three different discussion group meetings.

We held one with the business community.

We held one with the public safety personnel.

And then we held one with what we considered community partners.

So these were kind of the both community activist groups and also some of the

what we had kind of been calling equity priority groups, just because each of those lists were kind of short on their own, so we combined those into one group.

We started off the meetings, we provided a little bit of background about the purpose of the Moving Toward 2050 Long Range Transportation Plan, described the planning process, and reviewed how their feedback would be used.

So what we told them is that we would get some feedback from them with their initial responses to the draft goals and objectives, and we would use that to inform how we would be presenting information to the larger public when we got to those stages of the public engagement.

We would use that to make changes and adjustments to the goals and objective language, add or remove goals or objectives, or recategorize the goals and objectives.

And so when we got to the point where we started going through the goals and objectives themselves, I really turned it over to the consultants to let them facilitate that discussion in order to provide an opportunity for more, I guess, just comfortable opportunities for feedback.

I didn't want to kind of influence the discussion to the extent possible so that the consultants facilitated that discussion.

So these were the original draft goals that we developed, safety, environment, equity and accessibility, land use and economic development, and efficiency.

So one of the things that we talked about as we were going through some of the public feedback that we received, and I apologize, Marty, I don't think that this, I added this one later.

Yeah, but we wanted to kind of better capture how these really important concepts of climate action and equity were being considered throughout the evaluation of the different goals and objectives.

So we had started by integrating some language around trying to reduce vehicle emissions and trying to fit these equity considerations into some of those goals and objectives.

But really what happened with the climate action and the equity objectives specifically is that they really were kind of integrated within these other goals and objectives.

So the recommendation that we're making is to sort of take this climate action and equity lens approach where we're saying that we are going to use this as a lens to evaluate the other goals and objectives.

And we are going to say, is there a climate action or equity component to this that we need to capture and factor into the analysis?

And so those were going to be kind of like all encompassing.

We're not going to call those out specifically within the goals and objectives necessarily, but we're going to say that

We want to filter the other goals and objectives language through these lenses first.

We're kind of discussing metaphors.

You can think of it as like a pair of glasses.

Both microscopes and telescopes both have two sets of languages.

If any of these metaphors resonate well with you, we can talk about updating this very basic image into something else.

But the idea was that that's going to help how we focus the conversations.

So I want to emphasize that because otherwise it gets a little bit uncomfortable that you're going to see that the word equity is crossed out in a couple of places.

So based on the feedback that we had, we did make some recommendations.

Those were included in the memo.

So I can go through those recommended changes, but I want you all to know that we'll come back and talk about these in more detail, knowing that you haven't had a lot of time to review those.

So one of the things we talked about related to safety is the goal of reducing the frequency and severity of crashes.

I'm really focusing on the fact that maybe it's not necessarily a bad thing if we don't reduce the frequency because what's really most important to us related to safety is that we're reducing the harm that is caused to people.

in these accidents.

So, it's not necessarily about reducing the number of crashes related to safety.

It's about reducing the impact of the harm to people through these crashes.

So, we're talking about reducing the frequency of serious injury and fatal crashes, which is a little bit more consistent with the federal performance targets and the goals that are evaluated there.

And then there was a lot of discussion about the use of the term alternative modes of transportation.

So we made some adjustments throughout to not use alternative modes of transportation.

The concern is that that made active transportation or transit or other multimodal transportation feel inferior to vehicles.

So we changed the language where

It seems appropriate to improve the comfort and safety for users of the multimodal transportation system, which still has a little bit more emphasis on the non-single occupancy vehicle users, but does include all types of transportation modes as well.

For the environment, this is where we

kind of started deleting some of these objectives that were redundant because they were covered under other goals and objectives categories, so increase the use of alternative modes of transportation.

We're already talking about doing that through our emphasis on the multimodal network throughout the goals and objectives, so it felt a little bit redundant to also include it here.

and then we're talking about reducing vehicle emissions.

We're really not evaluating that explicitly as part of our process.

We are trying to do things like improving opportunities for active transportation or better transit operations and things like that.

So we do want to reduce vehicle emissions, but we're not doing that in and of itself.

through any of our specific objectives.

Yeah, that is not explicitly something that we're measuring.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It could be about like actually where you're building the infrastructure so for example if you're going to put something in an area that has you know some sort of environmental you know species or some sort of like sensitive wetland area or something like that it's also about really making sure that we're protecting those environmental features as well.

Yeah and that actually is integrated into this environmental category so that that's also where that equity lens comes into play because what what we're doing is we're giving an additional priority for any of those communities that that would be more significantly impacted because there's some indication of you know an equity consideration yeah

We are, though.

We're just doing that throughout.

So like, for example, in the safety, we're improving the comfort and safety for users of the multimodal system.

We want to make it more comfortable for people to use a range of options.

When we get to the accessibility, for example, we want to increase mode choice for all users.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I appreciate that explanation.

I certainly didn't pick that up reading the document.

Sure.

I mean, that's kind of, it wasn't put in the document.

I would suggest that you probably do do that because I saw equity struck.

So yeah, it is, it is mentioned in the document.

It is not necessarily emphasized in the document because it's like within the paragraph.

It wasn't like,

Necessarily, we don't have a good graphic.

We don't have good language around that yet.

So we'll be working on developing that.

I appreciate what you're emphasizing.

I think those can be stored.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's a pretty big change.

Yes.

But like my beautiful fit.

Yeah, we'll figure out how to package that somehow.

I mean, we do recognize that this is not necessarily ready to go for the public at large to sort of digest and understand that.

So we probably need to develop some sort of graphic or chart or something that makes this very, very clear.

Yeah.

And it will probably be better than that Venn diagram, but.

Oh yeah.

That's some advanced PowerPoint graphic skills right there.

So again, the equity and accessibility, that was another place where we felt like we could kind of remove that emphasis on the equity because we want to emphasize it throughout.

So improve access.

And then there was a lot of feedback about this.

People really didn't like the focus on jobs and opportunities.

And I think you all had provided that as well.

So we had these conversations about, do we like this as like two important community destinations?

And really, it's just that we want people to be able to access whatever it is that they

need or want to access throughout the region.

So we just kind of took off.

It doesn't matter what your access, we just want your access to be better by having more mode choice.

And again, we took out that measure that was specifically related to improving that specifically for the underserved populations, because we wanted to make sure that, again, that same very similar language was popping up in multiple places.

The land use and economic development.

There was also some feedback in the discussion group about not really liking the emphasis on economic development, but I think it's important to include because it is also one of the goals of the federal performance system considerations, and it's also considered in SMART SCALE, so I don't think we want to delete economic development completely.

But in Charlottesville, the considerations around economic development seems to be more focused around sort of

to a similar extent as a land use coordination.

It's not so much when we talk about the economic development, it feels like it's the focus seems to be a little bit more on getting people to their work and jobs and not necessarily on things like managing freight and getting freight access to important destinations.

So I think it makes sense to leave these groups together, at least from my perspective.

We did want to better clarify there was a lot of confusion around the land use and economic development and what this was really trying to communicate.

So I think we're able to better capture that we want to align transportation system improvements with the local land use goals.

So to make sure that where the localities have identified that they want their growth areas to be, that we are considering transportation solutions that will support those development decisions.

I'm not unclear what that really means in terms of land use goals because land use has a very specific meaning around it.

It has to do with consolidating and so I don't know, I wouldn't know how to translate that into anything.

I see the objective goal there.

Really what we're trying to measure here is how to, yeah, this is just a tricky one to communicate all around.

So if you all have thoughts or ideas, that's certainly helpful.

What we're really trying to communicate here is that the localities have identified where they want to have these high density mixed use areas, where they want there to be growth and where they want people to be able to travel efficiently within those areas and want to concentrate development in certain areas.

So this is really about how do we prioritize or how do we evaluate transportation solutions that will help make those dense areas better connected so that those things that are all within the growth area can be accessed easily from other places within those growth areas.

Land use is a local decision.

So we are not suggesting where the growth area should be.

We just want to make sure that we are considering transportation solutions that support the identified land use growth decisions that the localities make.

Isn't that, well that's really done in the sense, there it's actually done in the sense of maybe equity and through the lens of equity because when you're doing land use, you want to make sure people have access to transportation and also in terms of the environmental impact.

I wonder if you really need this.

I agree.

I think it's important to keep because there is a connection between transportation supporting land use and land use from transportation needs.

But I do think that's a pretty broad statement there.

When you started explaining about these activity centers, the density centers that you're talking about, the light bulb clicked for me.

That's what you're saying.

I wonder if there's some way you can be, I mean,

Well, yeah, that's helpful.

This has been like one that's been hard to communicate succinctly.

It almost feels like the access is present and this is just future outlook for where you'll need access.

There could be a component to that.

There could be a component.

There's also components where there's like, you know, maybe a school next to, you know, there's a school that maybe there's a gap between a neighborhood and a school that isn't there.

Yeah, so the difference between the accessibility and the land use is probably the accessibility is trying to help people get to like help people improve how many places they can get within a certain period of time.

So it's focused on how people are traveling versus the land use, which is really talking about how are the destination points connected.

So they are very similar.

I agree.

This is this has been very confusing to try to explain.

Sandy and also Michael, is multimodal infrastructure, is that part of VDOT's language now in terms of this?

And so in land use, for instance, now VDOT has a substantial setting in what happens with development at an intersection or even on a stretch of road with deceleration lanes, sight lines, and so on.

Does that also apply

to a long-time old.

That's my question in terms of, you've got this nice development to put in something here and here, but there's nothing in between.

And so that perhaps what this could lead to would be language.

where if the city or the county had a grant, they would go to the developer and say, you will not get your permit unless we see this type of infrastructure, just as you would the highway.

You would have it with a multimodal.

And as an example, in the city, the city's going through a

affordable housing advocates, but I think it counts a victory because part of that is developers are given incentives to do undermarketed units.

And so in this way, land use, again, a local matter, you're not telling people what to do with your land, but if they're going to do what they're allowed to do,

To a certain extent, Michael, I don't know or Chuck, I don't know if you heard the question and feel free to jump in if you have better things to say about this than what I'm about to say.

But I would say the opportunity for VDOT to require transportation improvements as part of a development is pretty limited to the direct impacts of what that site is going to do.

So if there's like a gap half a mile away between a new development and a grocery store or shopping center or something like that,

That's not necessarily within VDOT's purview or the locality's purview necessarily to be able to require that.

That's an example of how transportation planning can affect land use because, say, take an example of US-250 East of Charlottesville.

If that road were improved,

much more development to go there.

That road is what, in its present condition, is what's limiting development.

So if you wanted development there, then it's a cart before the horse kind of thing.

If you first improve the road, which is what the neighborhood associations are insisting on, then it'll support more development.

Likewise, it tends to be in the city.

If people are concerned about traffic impacts, if you first improve the road,

Maybe that's a place for this to go.

And again, Lee's amplification of that was, okay, you've got this rural area.

Here's how you're going to fix it if you want to fix it.

I would try to do an urban setting

You create a significant infrastructure to multi-modal infrastructure to use that designation to connect designated rural areas, mixed-use areas, schools, and other community resources.

Do you know, what was it originally?

Integrate transportation system, okay, it wasn't any clearer originally.

So what you're doing is providing, I think, providing only lower infrastructure to connect us to maybe growth areas, mixed use areas, and new community resources.

Rather than what you said, the connection is what I thought you were emphasizing,

I mean that's... No, that's helpful.

That's helpful to hear.

Go ahead.

I just want to say that maybe I'm moving far ahead of what you hear now, but I understand that this is a planning thing.

In fact, a long range planning, but I'm just wondering, particularly in highways, because now we are talking of an integrated system where you are talking of mass transit and highways.

I'm just wondering whether, particularly in the highway system,

There will be something that will be involved in the evaluation that will take into consideration capacity throughput and level of service.

Yeah, that's in the efficiency category, which is at the end of this.

So we just haven't gotten there yet, but we will.

Yeah.

All right, so we'll take another, we'll make another attempt at this one, it sounds like, but I appreciate that, Marty.

Maybe we'll focus, maybe we can work the word connectivity within the identified growth areas or something along those lines might be more clear.

All right, efficiency.

Yay, we made it.

So this is where we're really looking at trying to look at where there are some capacity limitations and figuring out what opportunities there might be to improve the capacity.

One of the things we did was we moved this fill bicycle and pedestrian connectivity gaps.

That was originally part of the, I believe it was, yeah.

It was part of the land use and economic development so we moved that to the efficiency just because that is a way for the bicycle and pedestrian networks to be efficient is to be complete and not to have network gaps.

I think there's an argument for it to go in either place but this felt like it more comprehensively indicated that we were trying to take this full system multimodal approach across the board with all of these different criteria.

So we're looking at opportunities to improve the roadway system reliability through operational improvements and then also to increase system capacity at identified bottlenecks and then maintaining the existing system in a state of good repair.

This is not something that we're actually going to be measuring just because it's not actually something that the MPO prioritizes.

That's prioritized at the state level, but it still felt like it was important to talk about being good stewards of our existing transportation system.

So those are kind of the reasons we made some of these adjustments from what we had originally.

Well, as I'm actually moving out here to Sandy,

I guess the consultant's taking the notes, but I mean, they did an excellent job of summarizing the discussion.

I mean, having sat through the one with the business community, I felt that they captured everything.

I mean, I have my own notes and I compared it, and I didn't see that they missed anything.

Yeah, I would second that.

The meeting I attended was the

The facilitator there almost got bowled over trying to get through all five or six or seven.

Basically what we talked about was safety, accessibility, and efficiency.

And particularly seeing these notes on those, I recognized every one of them.

I'm sure some of them were repeated and some of the other

out of our meeting and I will also say just impressionistically I was mulled over myself.

Everybody at the safety meeting was at the operational level and so it was a very frank and nuts and bolts kind

I have a question.

Perhaps this is covered

alternatives for folks in rural areas and my thought and that is like hopefully like with changes in like zoning and what have you these high growth areas become more affordable so the people who have been pushed out in the city can maybe come back but say there's still going to be plenty of people living in rural areas and right now like they only have

The only way to get around is to use cars or to get on a bike on a road with a car and that presents particular safety challenges, right?

Yeah, so that will be covered a little bit in the accessibility, but also part of the reason that we're not focusing on the rural areas is because the MPO is defined as the urbanized area.

So there are parts of it that are more rural than others in characteristics.

You know, our MPO does go quite a ways outside of the urbanized areas, but that's why we're not really talking about how to get people from, you know,

But there was a lot of discussion about connectivity between, more than only between Crozet and Charlottesville.

Yeah.

I was going to ask about the safety, just to go back.

So I'll sort of mimey and bring through getting people's opinions.

I think a lot of people take that bicycle.

I felt they were somewhat dangerous.

I'm going to get killed here.

But are there other things that safety has, and particularly because there aren't very good cares for them on the road.

And a lot of people are considering the hikers not following traffic rules.

And I wonder how that fits in to what we're doing here.

And I was going to say, in one person brought up, I think in Denmark, the way they have to set up

They have the bike lane, car parking, and then the major transportation lanes.

I don't know specifically, Marty, that we're going to get into that level of detail in this plan specifically, but we are also doing the Safe Streets from Roads for All plan, which is going to look at multi-modal system considerations.

And I think as we

You know, what we're really trying to do with the long range transportation plan is take a high level look at what our priorities need to be, and then we'll start working to develop solutions.

So I think it's probably going to be, as we start working through, what is the right solution to some of these system deficiencies that we've identified as really high priorities?

As we go through this, and that's why there's not much that happened,

But as we talk about multi-modal, we're talking about bikes in there.

I think the way it works is we're going to say we need to improve that there's a multimodal system need here we need to figure out how we can get bikes safe safely from you know along this corridor between this point and this point and then we're going to look and say is that by creating a shared use path is that by creating a bike lane we're going to start having conversations about what the potential solutions might be

And then we can talk about what is going to be the best solution that we can implement for those.

And I do want to say anything, Michael, from VDOT's perspective on how y'all are kind of approaching this.

Maybe they will be added some day, I don't know.

It's a way to go from point A to point B.

We can do it either on the road network or we can do it on a trail network.

The trails don't necessarily have to follow the roadways.

So there's a lot of flexibility when you get to some of these other modes about where they go.

Traditionally, we run them along the roadways because that's how we've done it.

But there's a lot of trail systems out there that are off-road.

may be more beneficial and provide the same use for bicyclists and pedestrians.

And it would possibly be safer for them because they're not having to mix with the vehicle traffic that's traveling up and down the road.

So those are some of the things that we'd have to evaluate.

The big thing about this is

As part of the long range plan, we're going to identify where the critical needs are and then how we solve those needs is the next step.

So let's get through the process and identify where the issues are and then we can work on studying what the best solution is to address that need.

I can see though,

People look at the lens of environmental impact and say we need to have bias and push it beyond maybe what's reasonable in terms of safety or other issues or in terms of living.

It's not so clear to me that just saying that somehow I don't have a good sense of the process.

You're not advocacy.

Yeah, like Sandy said, this is identifying where the needs are.

and prioritizing those needs.

Then after we've got that list of needs, then we would basically start working on how we're going to solve those needs or what solutions we're going to use to address those needs.

And that's more getting at what you're talking about.

Thank you, Chuck.

Two other advantages to trail development, and I'm speaking in the city now because that's where I live.

Almost all of the trails in the city go along waterways.

So from an end user standpoint, you have the advantage of a couple million years of evolution taking care of all the hills.

from a cost basis, I know there is acquisition of right-of-way issues right now, both in the city and the county, but bike lanes in the traffic lane have heavily not specced to me in terms of depth of roadbed, depth of pavement, and so on.

You could build a very good bike lane along a creek somewhere

or a multimodal that would have culverts in all the right places, proper grading and everything else, maybe a nice piece of structure that would have not much more than a suburban driveway spec.

So yeah, that's worth making sure, even if it's in the back of your mind and not in the text, to bring that along as you speak with the jurisdictions here as well.

Next slide, I think it is.

Improved Roadway System Reliability.

Is it reliability or is it efficiency?

Did we talk about this, Curtis?

Sandy, I remember, and reliability in the way you were using it or are using it is

I'm not going to be sitting there for three and a half hours.

It usually takes you an hour a day even if it's congested.

Yeah, this was one.

I don't remember if this was one that we talked about specifically if we wanted to use reliability.

There are technical terms for some of these, and then there are layman's terms for some of these.

I was going to say, reliability has a statistical definition.

It's basically variance, right?

Whereas the efficiency is the mean, is the average.

Yeah, where it makes progress.

That's the federal heavy definition.

So it could also be efficiency.

That would probably also make sense.

I think reliability is based on system efficiency and also maybe safety.

Those might be the two.

Yeah, OK, cool.

Any other feedback or thoughts?

High level or in the weeds either way?

Well, I think, I don't know, Ryan, I can stop sharing my screen if you want to.

Do you have the website ready to pull up or do you want me to do that?

We just wanted to let you know that we're still working on the website.

We have a couple more things to do, but we've incorporated a lot of your feedback into it.

I don't know if any of you all had a chance to look at it before tonight.

Alright, so we go down to our fancy little logo here and get a visit plan page.

So we adjusted some of the language a little bit.

We added some pictures.

We broke up the text.

The content is still largely the same, but we did add the sign about how can we reduce the climate change impacts of the transportation system.

So made sure that we are capturing that.

Let's see, added some little logos.

broke this up a little bit, tried to like emphasize those main areas.

So we'll have to obviously update this language once we finalize the goals and objectives, but we'll do that.

It looks a little bit better on a not pink screen.

No, these are not the official official colors, unfortunately.

So these like, why is it important?

But that way, when you go to the page, you can kind of just scan through it if you

Don't want to engage that in that much detail.

And then we added some links to some other documents.

We still need to work on the project timeline.

And we're having another meeting with our consultant to get this updated or our web manager to get this updated.

But just wanted to let you all know that we're getting pretty close to wanting to post some of these process documents up for the public.

And as we get ready for the for the phase of like the broad public engagement, we'll start posting information up here.

So we're

Do you want me to keep going, Lee?

I don't remember what's next.

So let me stop sharing because that's not the right thing.

All right, so the first one I wanted to let you know about is that we, this is a very busy page, so I apologize for that, but

As you all know, we had applied for the Ravana River Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge in round five of SMART SCALE and it was not awarded.

So for those of you that are not familiar with this project, we've been putting a lot of effort into

Creating a connection across the Ravana River between the Woolen Mills portion, actually both in Albemarle County, but the Woolen Mills area right here and then the Pantops area right here behind.

This is what used to be the State Farm building.

So this has been an identified need.

The MPO has done a lot of work to sort of identify the general idea, go through and work with VDOT to do a feasibility study, identify a preferred alignment, and then submit the application.

What happened when we submitted the application, as you all may recall, is that it's in a sensitive area.

It's crossing a river.

They're going to have to do some borings into the into a mid-river sediment island.

There were a lot of unknowns about exactly what the ground was going to look like in order to determine what kind of engineering structures were going to have to be placed and what it was going to take to put the piers in, those kinds of things.

So there was a really high contingency factor.

And then what happened is that we started with a base cost of $18 million for the project.

There's a 60% contingency that was added to the construction phase of the project.

And then there's an additional inflation escalation that's added on top of the base cost plus the contingency.

And so what happened is that this project escalated to $42 million when we submitted the grant application.

And so even though the SMART SCALE scoring process acknowledged that there were really high benefits to this project, the final cost that was associated was too high for this to be competitive.

So what we did was the project was pretty much already scoped out.

So the RAISE discretionary grant program, it was formerly, I don't remember what any of these acronyms stand for, but BUILD or TIGER, you might have heard, you might have heard of these grant programs, but they're large federal grant programs.

They're highly competitive.

They cover all modes of transportation.

and they include both funding for both planning and implementation.

So there was a little bit of additional funding that was added to these programs through the bipartisan infrastructure law.

So in FY23, yeah, there was $115 million that was designated for planning grants and out of a total of $775 million.

Because we are just doing the preliminary engineering, even though it's considered an engineering phase, according to the RAISE notice of funding opportunity, anything that goes up to the right-of-way acquisition phase is considered planning.

So we applied for a planning grant to complete the pre-construction activities.

This is the merit criteria that the RAISE grant uses to evaluate projects.

So there are eight merit criteria, safety, environmental sustainability, quality of life, mobility and community connectivity, economic competitiveness and opportunity, state of good repair, partnership and collaboration, and innovation.

And basically we have to create an application and set to explain this is why our project aligns well with these criteria.

Projects are scored on each of the merit criteria.

They'll be given a high, medium, low, or non-responsive score.

And then based on how well they score in each of those eight categories, they'll be signed an overall rating.

So the highly recommended category gives us the best chance of having our project considered for funding.

We needed high scores and six criteria and no non-responsive scores.

I believe that this project has the opportunity to score well in at least six of these criteria, probably just six, they're probably not more than that, but so this does align very well with the RAISE grant criteria and we're hopeful that it will be a competitive application.

There's another analysis, so the best projects get forwarded to be considered

and additional rounds of evaluation.

But the challenge is that even though the project or the application may be strong, it's a discretionary grant program and they're trying to fund a diversity of applications.

So they're looking at different modes, they're looking at different states, they're looking at a good mix of urban versus rural.

So even if it's a good application, we may not get funded because it's not the right type of application.

So what we included in the project scope was to complete the preliminary engineering.

You can see a list.

Those are some of the tasks that will be completed.

TJPDC staff will be the project sponsor and fiscal agent.

And then we were really excited to be able to collaborate with VDOT.

who agreed to administer the technical aspects of the project.

So Michael and I worked really hard on the application and VDOT made sure that we provided a lot of the information and had all of that accurate.

So what ends up happening is that if we are successful, VDOT will take the lead on doing all the things that VDOT does in order to prepare a project that would potentially go to the right of way in construction phases.

So then we know that

If we are successful in receiving this funding, we'll get the information we need and VDOT, this will all comply with VDOT's requirements to develop the project and that we'll be ready to continue to move through their pipeline.

The total funding that we ended up requesting is just a little over $3 million, and we'll find out at the end of June.

Like I said, even the program is very highly competitive.

If we're not successful this round, you know, what they told us in one of the webinars is that sometimes it takes several rounds for good applications to be funded, and they do offer debriefs for all applications.

Any questions on the RAISE grant?

And I would sincerely like to thank VDOT and especially Michael for all the coordination.

Quick question.

Yeah.

But it will include... Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

It would get you to the right-of-way phase.

Yeah.

Then you'd have to obtain the right-of-way.

There's usually some engineering that happens after the right-of-way phase, the environmental documentation.

Yeah, that's one potential option.

It could be SMART SCALE.

It could be we go back for a RAISE grant for implementation too.

I prefer it to be a SMART SCALE application but we'll see.

Well, this is for a RAISE grant.

So for a RAISE grant, that actually does not factor in.

What's the timeline of SMART SCALE?

So, yeah, so we'll see.

First, we have to see if we get funded and then there's going to be some lead time before the funding is made available.

Probably, not the next round, round six, but probably round seven.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I doubt that that would be the MPO because unless I am wrong, I think that that is for like actual installation of the charging infrastructures that you're understanding.

But if you have that email and you want to forward it to me, I'll take a look.

I think we sent out the press release to you about the Safe Streets and Roads for All Discretionary Grant program, but this is one that you all will also be hearing a lot about because we just found out that we were awarded just $857,000, which includes a 20% match by the localities for just under $1.1 million to develop multi-jurisdictional comprehensive safety action plans for our region.

So this is a grant that was established by the bipartisan infrastructure law as well that allocated between five and six billion dollars over the next five years, so a billion dollars per year for five years, specifically focusing on reversing the trend that we're seeing right now of the increase in roadway dust and serious injuries.

There were two tracks for the grant programs planning and implementation, but in order to apply or be eligible for implementation grants, you first had to have a qualifying comprehensive safety action plan in place.

None of the localities in our region had a comprehensive safety action plan, so we were able to work with all six of the jurisdictions throughout the region and all of them agreed to participate and provide the match.

The comprehensive safety action plan components include these eight different factors that are required to be considered.

So there has to be a commitment from your leadership to identify and set some of these performance metrics around safety.

So some of these, you might hear of these zero vision plans where localities are saying basically,

Any serious injury or roadway death rate that's above zero is something that is not acceptable and we want to do everything we can until we reach zero or else seriously reduce what the serious injury and crash rates are from what they are currently.

There's going to be the development of an oversight group.

We're going to be working with VDOT and some of the funding programs that they have to also do a comprehensive safety data analysis that will be incorporated into the development of the safety action plan.

It has to include substantive stakeholder engagement.

which also informs this next requirement which is that the process has to be inclusive and representative.

It will include not just looking at infrastructure but also looking at how enforcement and potentially policies and processes that are implemented impact safety outcomes as well as looking at public education and information sharing efforts.

And then from this, each locality will identify their priorities for projects and strategies that they are willing to support in order to reduce crash outcomes.

So this is a full

Sure, some of them might be grants for infrastructure, but some of them might also be looking at, you know, what are some of the public information safety, what are some changes, and how we enforce some of the safety laws.

And who do you find as localities?

I know this is still...

So all of those are their transportation departments that are going to contribute to people, or how is that going to work?

We will have to develop stakeholder groups.

We'll probably have a tier, we'll probably have a big stakeholder group, and then we'll probably have individual stakeholders that we

work with at each of the localities as well.

Well, we're having the kickoff meetings with the USDOT already.

So I think they're trying to be as expeditious and flexible at making that funding available, but once probably within the next month or two is when the funding will be available.

So this just shows some of the benefits.

It's going to give us better information about crash locations and what the contributing factors are.

It's multimodal in nature, so we're looking at safety for all types of users.

It will help us do some relationship building among stakeholders.

In addition to the planning, people that are normally involved in these discussions will also be engaging

with the health department, with the public safety personnel, maybe with some of the school systems, you know, we'll need to work with our localities to really figure out who the stakeholders are that need to be part of the discussion.

But, you know, all of these entities are working on safety from a different perspective and trying to bring all of them together, I think is a really good opportunity for this.

and then what will also help us create a pipeline of projects that we can continue to find opportunities to implement either through SMART SCALE or some of the other state programs or even the federal programs as long as those are available.

It was a multi-jurisdictional application so I think I already covered that.

So one of the other benefits is that it will also support information sharing

between the localities, not just among the different stakeholders at the localities.

And then the TJPDC already has these different committees that are set up through the MPO and through the Rural Transportation Program that can support the ongoing monitoring and reporting functions.

So the total project funding was just under $1.1 million.

Nearly half of that is scope to go towards a stakeholder and public engagement.

And like I said, we're working with VDOT on the data collection and the crash analysis.

So any other questions on this project?

So to Stuart's point, anyone from the board here have any comments?

Oh, we forgot to introduce you to Otto Curtis in the midst of things.

Curtis is our new transportation planner that started.

How long ago, Curtis?

About a month ago.

Sorry, we were a little preoccupied at the beginning with trying to get the technology going.