Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   5/17/2023

Yes, sir, Ms. Kondor.

We have Mr. Chapman Munn and Ms. Sarah Medley.

All right, matters from the public.

I presume we have no members of the public anywhere on the line-up.

Okay, matters from the committee.

I don't think anybody on the committee wants to bring up this time.

We'll have a second enchanter later, but it's not okay to draw on to a few minutes.

It looks like we have a few minutes.

Just a point of clarification.

You don't actually have quorum here, I don't think, because I think it's based on the total committee membership versus the number of appointed committee members.

So we can't actually vote on anything tonight, but we can still go through our meeting information.

There are 13 members of the committee, and Mr. Garber does not count towards quorum since he is not attending in person.

Yeah, but we can still go through all the information.

All right, so let me go ahead and share my screen.

So first of all, welcome to our new CTAC members, and thank you all for being here tonight.

I'm just going to go through really

High level overview of what the unified planning work program is and talk about what it is that we are going to be planning to do with it in our next fiscal year.

Ryan, would you mind minimizing that preview?

So the unified planning work program comes because we receive, in order to administer our MPO, we receive money from two different federal sources primarily that funds our coordinated transportation and programming within the MPO.

We are a federally mandated agency.

And so our funding comes from FHWA and FTA.

This is based on the census-designated urbanized areas, which have to be, once they reach a certain population density and they meet the $50,000 or 50,000 person threshold, we are required to establish an MPO.

So we received 80% of funding to administer MPO from the Federal Highway Administration and the Federal Transit Administration.

And then we get 10% contributions from our state agencies.

So that is VDOT, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

They each contribute 10%, and then we contribute the additional 10% from our local match sources.

One of the conditions or one of the requirements for MPOs that receive this federal funding is that each year we must submit a unified planning work program, which indicates what tasks we are undertaking with the federal funding that we're receiving.

So we do this annually and we get a new budget each year based on, it's a formula funding.

Basically our state has a lot of discretionary or discretion about how that formula funding is determined, but it's formula funding based on our population.

For this past fiscal year, we actually, I think this is the wrong fiscal year, but I'll go on to the next one.

But basically we get a budget allocation each fiscal year.

from each of those agencies, and then we also have to program any rollover funding that we may not have used from previous funding years.

Funding does not automatically roll over if it is not spent within a federal fiscal year.

So if we know that we are not going to spend down our entire budget, we have to actively request to roll that funding into the next fiscal year.

Otherwise, we just lose that funding.

And we can't do anything with it.

For the FHWA side, there are different rules for it.

If we do not use our entire budget, it will passively roll over in two years.

So if we do not spend all of the funding that we received or were allocated for this fiscal year, it will roll over and we won't have it available in fiscal year 24, but it would become available to us in fiscal year 25.

Otherwise, we have the opportunity to de-obligate funds if we anticipate that we are not going to spend our entire budget in this fiscal year and actively roll it over into the next fiscal year.

It's probably way more information than you all need, but I want you to understand that because when we start looking at what the funding sources are, you'll see that it is broken up into the funding that is allocated directly for the fiscal year, the passive rollover, which is funding that was left over that we did not spend in fiscal year 22, and then the active rollover funding

from fiscal year 23 that we requested to be rolled over from this current fiscal year into next fiscal year.

And then we're not doing that with the FTA because the rollover rules are different for the FTA, so we're just using our annual budget for the FTA.

And so the total amount that we have to program tasks within the MPO is $516,000.

This VDOT line item right there is intended to indicate the state's investment that supports their staff's coordination and activities and support of our region and our MPO.

But that line item does not actually come through our budget.

Yes.

These are larger numbers than we're used to seeing.

Can you give, Kyla, on the spot, what our general animal monitoring looks like?

So in years past, before we started having this rollover that started accumulating, we would be looking at an annual budget of approximately $320,000.

What happened with this most recent sort of round of, well, the previous round of allocations in fiscal year 23 was that there was additional funding that was allocated to our MPS.

That number has gone up a little bit from that baseline, but the typical amount would be that line item for fiscal year PL funding of $257,000 and then the FTA 24

I guess it's kind of important that since we're trying to do the

Yeah, it's given us some opportunities to use consultants that we wouldn't normally be able to sort of utilize in some of our planning.

One quick question.

Can you check the rollover funds?

It depends.

For FTA, the answer is yes.

But I think what you're asking, Nicholas, if I'm understanding, is if you don't use your passive rollover, your active rollover in the next fiscal year, does it remain available?

Yeah.

OK. Once you roll over the funds, you have to indicate that the funding source is a rollover funding, but then it becomes part of your annual budget.

So again, our annual budget becomes that $387,000 instead of the $257,000.

This is our annual budget.

I don't think that there's a maximum amount.

I mean, just our budget, I guess.

I guess if we wanted to put all of our resources to one thing or two things, we could.

But we have a number of things that are pretty standard that are required.

I will say that it does have to be used for planning, so we couldn't take this funding necessarily and put it towards like an infrastructure improvement.

It is intended to be for the purposes of planning.

All right, so this is really the content.

This is the majority of the content in the Unified Planning Work Program.

And this is where we identify what tasks we're planning to undertake for the year and how much of our budget is being allocated to each of these tasks.

And I don't necessarily want to go through all of this detail by detail, but just to highlight a few things.

The task one administration, that's a lot of our standing requirements just to run meetings and do our invoicing and meet our reporting requirements.

The Task 2 is where we do a lot of our more long-term or identified priority projects.

So this is where we are allocating funding for the Long Range Transportation Plan.

We have a line item here for Comprehensive Safety Action Plan.

This is additional support from our NPO program to support the Safe Streets and Roads for All grants that we received.

So we tried to really maximize the resources that we could use from the grant funding that we were awarded by building as much of our staff activities into our existing work programs.

And then there are a couple of other programs in here that I can highlight.

One of the things we're hoping to complete this fiscal year is to develop an on-call consultant program.

So that would be that we will pre-procure consultants that can provide different planning and types of technical services that'd be available for the TJPDC and the MPO staff to utilize, but also for locality staff to utilize as well, which helps expedite project planning and delivery.

And then there's a boundary analysis that we'll need to complete based on updates to the urbanized areas based on the census data.

It looks like we probably won't need to do a whole lot with that.

We weren't sure when we started building this out, but we just got the information very late on what those updated urbanized areas are looking like.

And then in the short range, a lot of this is also ongoing standard tasks.

So the projects underneath these might look a little bit different, but we go through a pretty similar process.

One of those is the transportation improvement program, which we'll talk about in a minute.

And then the other really big one is SMART SCALE and grant support.

So SMART SCALE is the biggest state transportation grant funding source, and we have to submit competitive applications every two years for that.

So we spend a lot of time developing those applications and identifying those projects.

There was one adjustment that we made just FYI, since you are one of the committees that we report this to or that we report on as being stakeholders and reviewing this process.

And that's that for this comprehensive safety action plan item we did, we are going to be requesting an amendment from what was presented from the policy board when they approved the final one.

And that's because when we

When we scoped the final grant agreement for the Safe Streets and Roads for All, VDOT had requested that we identify some resources for them to be able to engage in the process as well.

So we have reallocated $13,000 from our staff's expenses in the Safe Streets and Roads for All grant, and we have increased the budget and the work program to account for

The MPO's staff involvement in that to offset that adjustment.

That's the Unified Planning Work Program.

Yeah basically so the we have a lot of discussion on what we can request but ultimately it's actually up to the governor to approve any changes in the MPO boundary so the requirement is that all of the census decimated urban areas that meet those thresholds have to be contained within the MPO boundary and in our case they already are we weren't sure if we would expect necessarily expansions and the eligible urbanized areas but

Did you, like, did any urban area turn into rural, right?

Yeah, so based on the previous 2010, since the urbanized areas, the southern portion of Greene County actually could have been eligible to, we could have expanded the MPO boundary and there were other reasons why they chose not to or decided that that wasn't something that needed to be pursued at that time.

That area no longer,

Yeah.

Yeah, but they're based on the national performance measure.

So these are things that we're required to adopt either four years or two years or annually.

They specify those.

But it includes fatalities, both based on fatality rates and on

and total number of fatalities and injuries.

Those are the safety targets.

Those are the ones we do annually.

We actually have to report on travel time reliability for trucks, travel time reliability.

Try to think what the other ones are off the top of my head.

We do not report on air quality though, because we are not in any on the pavement area.

Well, we do, they're just not incredibly meaningful because the state is evaluated on whether or not they are meeting their targets, but MPOs are not evaluated on whether or not we are meeting locally identified targets.

Any other questions?

All right.

Those of you that are new to CTAC picked a really exciting evening to come because this can be a really challenging document to read through and even after being here for several years, it's still something that we are consistently working to understand and communicate more effectively.

So the Transportation Improvement Program is really a funding allocation program that shows how high priority projects that have been, where funding has been allocated for them are going to be implemented.

So it's really a spending schedule of how federal dollars are going to be spent on the transportation projects that have been awarded funding.

It is a four-year spending program.

It's updated every three years.

The anticipated expenditures are either provided by our Department of Transportation or VDOT agencies, or they are provided by specific transit agencies.

So that's Jaunt and the Charlottesville area transit.

Those are the ones that receive federal funding.

And the reason that they are reporting those to us instead of going through a state agency is because they receive funding directly from FTA.

Well, no, that's not really true, but they do receive federal funding and they are basically managing their programs and their funding requests versus the state having more of a top-down approach when it comes to the roadway improvements.

So this is part of an overall planning process.

There is formula funding, as I mentioned previously.

So the transit agencies in our areas are getting formula funding based on their populations from federal transit agencies.

So this project development process does not apply to those formula funding types of considerations.

But for the rest of these, the federal funding that is identified comes through a process before it gets to the transportation improvement program.

So priority projects are going to be identified through some sort of plan or study like the long range transportation plan.

In order to implement the projects, we're going to be submitting funding requests to see determine what we can be awarded funding for.

Those funding requests, the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which is the state's governing body regarding transportation funding expenditures and allocations, they determine potentially what is going to be awarded funding in what's called the six-year improvement program.

And then projects that are awarded funding through the six-year improvement program will filter down and start showing up on the tip when it's time to start allocating the funding.

So projects are going to show up in the six-year improvement program starting six years out, and the tip only goes out four years.

So as those projects move through that pipeline, they'll start filtering through and showing up on our transportation improvement program.

This tends to be a pretty technical document, so I'm going to go through maybe how to look at this.

but also not actually expecting necessarily that there's not typically expected a lot of feedback on the specific sort of funding amounts in this program, but it does give us a way to monitor how funding is being spent on projects in our region.

So there are two types of projects, what we call tip boxes, two different types of tables that you'll see in the tip related to the highway projects.

There are projects that are regionally significant, so these are projects that are a high priority to the region, and those are going to have their own tip box that shows the project name and how much funding is being allocated and in which for school years.

And then there are projects that are known as group projects.

And those are projects that maybe they don't have regional significance or maybe funding for specific projects isn't necessarily identified upfront, but they go into a pot of money that can be used for more general categories like bridge rehab and replacement or road paving or those kinds of things.

So this shows the two different types of boxes.

So you'll see up here, this first project is a regionally significant project.

So the project description shows the funding source.

So in this case, that little hashtag right there means state of good repair.

That's the funding program that allocated funding to those.

And then there's a short project description that explains where the project is and what it's for.

You can see that right there.

And then you can see that there are the fiscal year allocations are outlined below as well as the total cost.

However, the project at the bottom doesn't have a lot of that information at the top because this is a group project.

So this means that this is the general box for projects for funding that is allocated towards general maintenance and preventative maintenance and system preservation.

The reason we might want to have certain projects that are indicated as regionally significant projects is because maybe these are really important and we want to make sure we're sort of monitoring the progress on these projects.

However, if there needs to be any adjustments to any of the funding in any of these regionally significant projects,

There's an administrative process that we have to go through to adjust or amend funding amounts of these.

And so that creates, that just creates a potential barrier that we have to cross in order to be able to keep moving projects forward.

And that's the advantage of having problems group because what this means is that there's more flexibility for the state agencies to move project or move funding from one project to another without having to go through an administrative process.

So if we're not changing the total funding within these boxes within these group projects we don't have to even if the funding is being reallocated between the projects we don't have to do that but if we're adding more funding or taking more funding away from any of these boxes we have to go through an amendment process.

All right, so that's the roadway side.

So on the transit side, it also gets a little bit more complicated.

There are a lot of set types of project funding sources.

They all have these numbers and those relate to the federal code that indicates what kind of funding or what those funding sources are designated for.

Includes mobility management programming.

So those are the programs that are intended to support mobility for people who are elderly or have disabilities in our region.

And these are projected budgets because these are budgets that are being prepared by the transit agencies.

So they have specific formula funding that they can anticipate every year, but they may not know exactly how much funding they may be awarded through a discretionary grant.

So this is a projected estimate, and then they may need to come back and ask for adjustments or revisions if those budgets changed from what was estimated.

So these look a little bit different.

There are no grouped projects for the transit agencies.

Instead, they are typically shown using the federal funding source code over here, and then the classification or the type of

the type of service or expenditure that funding has been allocated to.

So in this top box, here's an example from Jaunt because Jaunt serves in both urban and rural areas.

They have two different funding sources for the same type of expenditure.

So that's operating assistance.

They receive both 53-7 urbanized area funding and 53-11 rural area funding to pay for their operating assistance.

And then down here at the bottom is another example.

from the Charlottesville Area Transit.

All of these have the same federal funding source of 5339 that is designated for bus and bus facilities, but they're using it on different types of expenditures.

So rolling stock expansion, so they're adding more vessels to their fleet, rolling stock replacement, they're replacing buses that have met their lifetime limits and need to be replaced, and then passenger shelters.

So any questions on the tip?

No?

All right.

So why am I telling you all about the tip?

That's because part of what we are required to do is to allow for public feedback and engagement to inform the adoption of the new tip every three years.

So we have held a 30-day comment period.

And then at the MPM meeting next week, we will be holding a required public hearing on the tip.

So we have gone through that process and we have informed you all on the tip and how to read it and what the information is there.

It sounded like in the beginning.

that the estimates for the cost either come from transit agencies or VDOT.

And so is that pretty much split where like the first couple of years you showed us those are provided by the VDOT and now it's the agency.

But the transit agencies,

So this funding right here, like 5307, 5311, that is based on their, the formula funding is for the federal funding is based on like their urbanized area or their ridership area.

So it's based on just

For some of these I think we have very highly

With the route 28 bridge replacement and additional capacity example you showed us, is that a project that the MPO or member agency came up with?

In fact, it goes the other way around.

The TIPs make up the STIP, STIP is the State by Transportation Improvement Program, and then they also add the rural areas to the STIP.

So, but in this particular case, I don't, so this might predate me a little bit.

This is the state of good repair funding.

I believe at one point, this was actually something that localities were applying for directly for funding.

But I know this one did not specifically come through the MPO.

And I don't believe that MPO, as far as I'm aware, has facilitated a state of good repair.

That said, that's just for the specific project.

But if we had a project that the MPO did apply for, like, for example, Solutions 29, we're doing a lot of improvements along 29.

We have the hydraulic road.

The way it would work is that the funding is not identified through the TIP.

We are agreeing to the expenditure of the funding or approving the expenditure of funds that have already been awarded to high priority projects.

The awarding of the projects happens in the six-year improvement program.

And that's when we find out or determine when our projects that we have applied for funding for, which of those are recommended or approved to actually have funding allocated.

I think that's a big issue.

I think what you will see that happens, for example, we didn't put it on your agenda because I didn't realize that maybe you guys would want to have some of these conversations, but what's happening for the existing transportation improvement program, so we're about to adopt a new one, but we have an existing one, is that there are some amendments that are being requested to some of our

project funding and that's because there is additional funding because projects have gone over budget and so either that funding has already been spent or they've identified unallocated funding that they need to direct to different projects and so there is like some of that funding.

I'd say probably by the time you get to the to this point there's a better hold or a better understanding of what the inflationary impacts are going to be but I think you know

We never really know.

I think also anything like we read the public hearing on the poll ever, VDOT staff, they're beginning to take plans a lot for those contingencies and their selection.

And so even in the SMART SCALE, there's a possibility that a full SMART SCALE funding will be reduced in order for them to come up with a reserve to account for some of these overcomes that are coming all over the project.

So there might be less

I completely hear what you just said.

I think I understand that.

For our staff, with something this technical, it's always very interesting

the requirement of the public hearing and the public comment and yet we very much as staff respect the fact that part of that is the transparency and it's making sure that the public has access to that information if they want to ask questions about it and give input.

Any other questions?

I know it's kind of grayed out, but basically as far as the projects, there are, it looks like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine regionally significant projects that are identified, and then there are five groupings, and then we have the transit agencies.

So a couple of other just interesting things to note about the tip is we have to include the current performance targets that were adopted in the tip.

So if you want to look at this, you're welcome to to find those in the document.

We do have a background section that is based on the previously identified goals in the long range transportation plan, because this is intended to be the implementation, one of the implementation tools or programs from our long range transportation plan.

I'll talk about that.

So yeah, maybe I should start with what SMART SCALE is and then we can get into the specific project.

So SMART SCALE is the Virginia's process for identifying and selecting transportation projects for funding.

I don't know how much awareness you all have about this, but what happened prior to this is there were a lot of like political influences into projects that were being funded.

There were projects that were being funded at very high levels that weren't actually resulting in

good projects being implemented, and so there was this desire throughout the state to take a more performance-based and objective approach to funding projects, and so they developed SMART SCALE.

This is really the opportunity for big transportation projects to receive funding within our region.

We are able to submit applications every two years.

So currently, based on the previous funding rounds, the MPO is eligible to submit up to four projects.

We haven't even really completed round five of SMART SCALE yet because the actual projects that were submitted in the previous rounds have been scored and evaluated.

And there are recommended funding scenarios that have been produced based on those

Based on those project scores, the Commonwealth Transportation Board has not actually approved those funding allocations yet.

So we're not technically wrapped up for round five, but we like to be prepared.

So we're preparing for round six.

So all that to say that there's always an update in the program requirements and eligibility between the rounds.

So we're basing a lot of our preparation, assuming that there will be some consistency from the previous round, but also understanding that there could be some revisions as well.

So currently we are able to submit up to four projects, but we'll see when they update the program guidelines, whether or not we remain eligible to submit four projects.

There are also eligibility requirements.

This is specific for MPOs.

Localities are also eligible to submit projects and they have some additional eligibility for different kinds of projects, but for the MPO as a regional body, our requirements are that

Any project that we submit through SMART SCALE has to meet a need that's identified through the state's transportation plan.

That's what V-Trans is, is the state's transportation plan.

And then we are eligible to submit projects that either meet a need along a corridor statewide significance, so that's like US 29, 250, 64, those types of corridors, or is within the regional network.

And the regional network is defined in VTRAN, so typically it's like the MPO areas.

So there are a lot of good projects in the area that we would like to see funded, but in order for the MPOs to be the applicant, we have to make sure that the project will first meet those criteria.

So what we do each year is we start identifying potential projects that we might want to move forward and so this is also part of that overall planning process to go from identifying our high priority needs and something like the long-range transportation plan

applying for funding through something like SMART SCALE.

Hopefully, having projects identified as being a high enough priority and scoring well enough to be recommended for funding through the CTP, then it would show up on the six-year improvement program so that it could be added to the TIP later.

So we've already started looking at what our potential slate of projects could be for the next round of SMART SCALE.

What we have looked for is because we are finishing up our long-range transport or because we are about to adapt the new long-range transportation plan next year, we kind of have worked through a lot of the high priority projects that are identified in our existing long-range transportation plan.

But typically we want to be submitting applications that are based on the high priority needs that are identified through that plan or some other significant plan.

So this is the slate of projects that we have in our pipeline that have some level of development that have had some technical review and that have also had or will have some level of public engagement.

that may be good candidates to move forward in the next round.

I think I wonder if you will mention that maybe that project didn't, you might not want to pursue it this time around.

It ended up being part of those who,

I don't know, and from a standpoint of intersection congestion, it's not warranted for that.

I mean, that intersection is no more busy than the one at Commonwealth that is blocked, not the West or any others.

It was really part of the .9 hydraulic road improvements

which proved funding already was going to change the intersection such that you could no longer turn left from high volume road onto 29.

so what that meant then is if you were say westbound on a hydraulic road and you wanted to turn left and go southbound toward Charlottesville you wouldn't be able to do that so the this district avenue rounded off was a way to effectively make a huge

was a very expensive way to make a U-turn.

And I guess, you know, all I'm under is considerations aside.

I mean, first of all, there's not a lot of traffic that wants to do that.

There's very few cars in any red light cycle that actually turn left there.

Because if you're, I mean, because hydraulic road,

ends at 250.

So if you, so you got both divisions involved, but why would somebody be going westbound to hydraulic road and want to turn left in the first place?

So if you were on, let's say you came down Hillsdale to hydraulic and you wanted to go

into the city you'd be farther ahead of the turn left on the hydraulic go up 250 and then 250 exit and head south and if you happen to get onto the hydraulic road somehow between Hillsdale and 29 how hard is it to just turn right because that's a continuous right turn there's you don't even have to stop because it's it's always

You always have a green light, actually.

Go up to the next intersection, make a U-turn there.

And then you're already going 29 ahead of yourself.

So I guess, you know, does that really need a $20 million fix?

Yeah, I think what I could say is we haven't made any decisions about what we would be pursuing or not pursuing.

It is an eligible project and it has been identified as a high priority need for both localities and previous rounds.

So I think one of the things that we had discussed was whether or not it might be beneficial for Albemarle County to submit it if they were still interested in it because one of the

One of the things is that there are two different sources of funding for SMART SCALE.

One of them is the high priority fund and we are only eligible to compete for funding through the high priority fund and so we are

So we are competing against other projects throughout the entire state and there's more money in this high priority fund but it's also more competitive versus the localities which are eligible for the high priority funds but also for specific funding sources that are dedicated for each of the Culpeper construction districts

So if Albemarle County had submitted this project in the previous round, it actually scored well enough that it would have received funding if it was eligible to receive funding through the Culpeper District grant fund.

That was submitted by the TJPDC.

The ones that are grayed out.

So maybe I'm sorry.

Do you want to go ahead and ask your question, Ethan, or do you want me to explain this list real quickly?

OK. Yeah.

So the projects that are in black are projects that probably still have continued interest in being pursued.

They're eligible, but they may need some additional

They may need some additional support to look at the scope and determine if there are revisions that are made.

So one of them is the District Avenue project that we were just talking about.

The other one is a Fifth Street project that we looked at basically at Fifth Street and the entrance into the Leggman's area of Fifth Street.

The street station, yeah.

That project did not score very well, but it was also a project that included a shared use path on both sides of the road, some intersection improvements and things like that.

So those are projects that we might want to look at and look at the scope and determine if we might want to continue to review those and revise those in order to make a more competitive application in future round.

This one in green right here is a project that actually scored pretty well in the previous round.

This is looking at some pedestrian improvements and pan tops to facilitate pedestrian crossing at US 250 and Rilkin Road and also extend the sidewalk from, I think it's on the south side of 250 from Rilkin Road to State Farm.

So that one scored fairly well in the previous round, but we're not sure whether or not that that's something that is a high enough priority to submit in the previous rounds.

The ones that are grayed out are projects that would be eligible to resubmit, but we don't know that they would be feasible at this point to resubmit at this point without some additional discussions.

For the Ravenna River Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge, which is a pedestrian bridge that was proposed between the Woolen Mills area

in Charlottesville and then the south of Charlottesville and then on the other side to Pan Tops near the State Farm facility.

We have submitted the RAISE grant application to do the preliminary engineering work.

What happened with that one is that there were a lot of unknown risks that escalated the cost pretty significantly.

So we're applying for grant funding to see if we can do that preliminary engineering work upfront and get a more

A precise cost estimate before we consider that.

We'll find out at the end of June if that project is going to be awarded.

And if not, we might have some additional conversations about what the future for Ayurveda river bike coverage would look like.

Yeah.

So based on that and probably

with LRTP, you might separately anticipate different rankings that might come through the SMART SCALE application.

How do you choose that?

So for example, it's really interesting to be at that high level of this hydraulic rail project where you think it might be a good project.

I think that's probably one of the things we're going to have to work through as far as our methodology for the long-range transportation plan but I kind of envisioning happening is that we're going to identify our high priorities then there's going to be a one of the things that we're required to do a private long-range transportation plan is to develop our high priority list based on a constrained budget so that's realistically what do we think could be funded so there is sort of this element of screening projects for potential feasibility

With SMART SCALE it's a little bit more complicated because it's not like necessarily we haven't identified a pool of funding that we can kind of like you know we have our set budget and we can choose like what we put in our grocery bag you know we have to sort of identify what might be competitive for different sources of funding so it could be that we identify a project

That's a really high priority need, but it might be really expensive, or we might or it might not align very well with a grant program or funding opportunity.

Maybe I might respond kind of a long way, just expanding on the different categories of waiting.

You know, like, any ideas about waiting.

I'd say it depends on, it could align very closely with SMART SCALE.

It depends kind of on how the community chooses to prioritize those.

So we'll be going through a public engagement process to, and we'll talk about that in a minute, to kind of determine like, like how do we assess what the community's priorities are?

Then ultimately that would go to the policy board to say, yes, we want to use this weighting system and it may align with SMART SCALE or

Yeah, yeah.

You know, something that has come up very clearly as a distinction is that it's one tool that is used, that is not the only tool that has to be vetted against, you know, the qualitative analysis and what the, you know, the needs that arise from the top and then comparing that to what this toy painting is spitting out.

And so the SMART SCALE is a spatial application.

We have a little map that we draw.

It's kind of a lot.

It's kind of not that much more sophisticated.

I mean, it is technology-wise, but to me, I feel like... Yeah, and what I would also say about the SMART SCALE application is you are uploading the project information.

You are not like making your case.

You're not making an argument.

Well I just wanted to come back to you all because I think at the last meeting we talked a little bit about the draft goals and objectives and got some feedback and that was a really helpful conversation so we made some edits to the language on the goals and objectives and for those of you that I knew I'm sorry that I didn't think to put like the overview slide first but I just want to highlight the adjustments that were made and then we'll go to the overview slide that shows like the whole framework

But a couple of things that have been adjusted since we've met previously is that the first thing we did was add quality of life as another lens.

So one of the things we talked about is that we have all these goals and objectives, and there were pretty consistent types of objectives that were showing up under all the goals.

And they were related to things like climate action and equity.

So we thought, instead of trying to,

continue to put the same language or similar language under all these goals and objectives.

Let's just pull that out and highlight how important those are and sort of indicate that these are the initial framework that we are using to look through in order to evaluate our goals and objectives.

So we started out with climate action and equity as our lenses.

And then as we had additional discussions, we went back and added this third lens of quality of life.

So the importance of the transportation system is to improve the quality of life for the people who need to use it.

The second thing we did based on some of the feedback that we received in this meeting was we really had a conversation about what does economic development mean in terms of transportation in this region.

So there was some, it sounded like some concern about coordinating this economic development consideration along with the land use considerations.

They didn't feel necessarily that those were important to group together or

or maybe didn't align with what it is that we were trying to capture when we were talking about the land use goal.

And one thing that I will mention is that economic development and land use coordination are both indicated as either national goals or state goals that we need to consider.

So I think it's important that we do demonstrate that we are trying to capture how important those are.

But in looking at what the national goals were related to

to economic development.

That was really around freight movement.

And so then we thought that maybe it might make more sense to group the economic development goals with efficiency.

So that's what we're really talking about.

How can we improve operations of the systems to move different types of modes of transportation through those systems?

We changed the language around the Land Use Goal because that continued to be something that seemed to be unclear so we revised that language to state that the Land Use Goal was to connect community destinations in a manner that aligns with local growth management priorities to emphasize that

The localities are determining what the growth management should look like, but also that the purpose of the land use language is to create connections between different types of places.

And then, since we combined efficiency and economic development, we updated that goal language to emphasize both moving people and goods, as well as maintaining that it was related to the multi-metal transportation system.

So with all of our visions, we developed this little chart to kind of share the relationship between all of these things.

So the lenses are where we start and basically the lenses are informing sort of how we're considering all the goals and objectives.

So the lenses are

For the most part, each of the lenses is pointing to most of the goals.

And then the other thing that we thought that it was going to be important to highlight was that we really wanted to minimize the redundancy and the objectives that were listed.

So we didn't want to continue to list similar objectives under different goals.

But

There is some subjectivity in terms of where you put the objectives as far as the goals because things like improving operational efficiency, for example, will have climate impacts as well as also having efficiency impacts.

So this chart is really intended to show how the objectives aren't necessarily just supporting one goal, but might actually be good indicators of whether or not we are achieving multiple goals.

So this is intended to provide like a better sort of understanding of the relationship between all of these.

Sounds good to me.

Definitely fine tuning the things.

So that's good feedback to hear because the next thing we're going to talk about is what public engagement is going to look like.

So we're going to start doing a pretty big push.

So now that we've kind of finalized the goals and objective language, we're going to start moving to our first phase of really a substantive community-wide public engagement.

So there are a couple of goals that we've identified as far as what we're trying to accomplish during this first initial phase.

The first is that we want people to be aware of the moving toward 2050 long-range transportation plan.

The second one is that we want to provide information and educate people on what this plan is, what its purpose is, why it's important, and hopefully that helps encourage people to be participating.

And then we want to start getting feedback from the public.

So we want feedback to inform how important are those different goals compared to each other so we can start developing our weighting system to evaluate what our system priority needs are.

And then we also want to collect information from the public on where they see the biggest transportation needs.

So that's what Christine was talking about.

We're going to use this data-driven process to say, based on the data and based on how we're weighing these different goals and objectives, this is what the data tells us the needs are.

Then based on what the public is going to be able to tell us, they're going to start putting comments on a map and we're going to start seeing where does the public see that their needs.

And that's going to help us determine where there might be alignment between those two or where there might need to be some further scrutiny to determine what's going on in these areas and why are they different than each other.

So that's the general process that we're going through.

That's what we're trying to accomplish in this first phase of public engagement.

The general schedule is that we are going to tentatively schedule the kickoff meetings for mid-June, a little bit late mid-June.

And we're going to pair that with the MetroQuest survey.

We'll go through that in a minute.

And then we're going to be reaching out to our stakeholder committees.

We're going to be reaching out to our networks of homeowners associations.

We're going to be reaching out to all of the committee members to help us get the word out.

Our staff will be available to attend meetings at the request of different organizations.

We'll be tabling at high traffic locations and we're really just going to try to get out into the community and give as many people as possible opportunities to be aware of and engage in the plan.

Our first really big

Really big tool to collect a lot of information is going to be this MetroQuest survey.

So do you guys want to go through that now, or do you want to go through the next slide and then come back to look through it?

All right.

So here's the Metro Cross Survey.

So this is a survey platform that we have access to through VDOT.

And I don't know if I can make the sticker then.

Yeah, there we go.

That's a little bit better.

So a couple things to know about Metrocrest is that the number of screens that you go through is pre-established, so we don't really have the opportunity to change the number of screens, but we can change what goes on each of the screens.

So we spent some time trying to develop the welcome page just to help people understand why we're doing this.

One of the things that was a little bit difficult is that we know that there are some really important, there's a lot of concern around things like safety, climate action, equity, and those aren't necessarily going to be indicated that we're seeing those as priorities when you go through the survey question.

And so I was imagining that if we don't proactively discuss that we already acknowledge that this is important, we're going to get a lot of comments about climate action.

So what we did was we developed this statement up front to make sure that it's clear that we know that these things are so important that we're assuming that they're going to be built into what is evaluated in this process.

So the first screen is a welcome screen.

The second question is really what we're going to start using to help weight the goals and objectives.

So we have this welcome screen that comes up, we go to the next tab, and it's basically just asking people to say you have 100% of your budget, how much of that budget do you want to allocate in each of these different goal categories?

You click on the little icon here and it gives you a definition of what that goal is.

So, you know,

We tried to make it as simple and as straightforward as possible for people to have the information they need to be able to answer this question.

This third screen was the one that we added because we thought that this might be helpful to help us better sort of start analyzing the objectives and weight the objectives against each other.

So we have these three trade-offs that we're asking people to make.

So for this first one, what I was trying to do was sort of make the logical argument for why you would prioritize either one of these.

I want to indicate, first of all, that I know that this community cares a lot about multi-modal transportation.

So I think we're anticipating that we know where we expect this to go, but this will really help us confirm how much weight to put on different kinds of improvements as we go through the evaluation.

The second one was about access.

So one of the things that we heard when we talked to the stakeholder groups is the importance of not just looking at access to jobs, but actually looking at access to the community.

What we don't know, though, is that relative to each other is one more important than the other.

And so this is intended to help us with answering that question.

And then the last tab is really intended to help us understand what are the priorities when it comes to the types of projects that we should be developing in the pipeline.

So there's this trade off that we have to consider between whether or not we might want to improve the efficiency of the overall network.

So do we make it easier for people to get through certain areas?

Might also make it safer if we're doing things like offsets or

implementing certain types of operational tools, but that may also reduce access and may make it a little bit more confusing or difficult for people to access destinations.

So this really helps us understand where is the community as far as their comfort level with considering different types of improvements for roadway projects specifically.

Sure.

OK, that's helpful.

Yeah, we're like industrial reduction.

I think you probably have to give an example.

Okay.

Because when they think accessibility, they can think anything from like accessibility, if they're familiar with that language, or I don't know what, like accessibility versus mobility is kind of a transportation niche for accessibility.

No, that's good.

I think this looks really good.

Did you all do the MetroQuest survey for the Woolen Mill Special Bridge?

Yeah, I took that.

That was really, really well done.

My question is, like, you mentioned the ability for people, I mean, getting to the interactive map, like, can they drop in on the area?

But does that integrate?

Like you already answered the customer, right?

Yeah, we can download all of this data and put it on a map.

In fact, that's one of the things that we specifically have discussed with the consultants that are trying to help us is that they'll do that analysis.

So what we can't do that was asked at the technical committee meeting was you can't like draw a line if you're saying like, I want a bike path from here to here.

You can't draw that line, but you can drop a comment and say, I want a bike path between these two locations.

Based on the feedback we've gotten from the consultants and their experience with other long-range transportation plans, the first couple questions are interesting and you'll get some interesting feedback, but this is really where they anticipate that we will get the most useful and insightful comments.

And then the last question is just to wrap up questions.

Part of these are questions that we are asking people to take either to

You know, maintain engagement through the rest of the question, like type your email address, but also we're trying to make sure that the survey is representative of the community and we're also will want to be able to report back on, you know, any sort of titles, considerations.

Well, you were talking about you might expect to go one way or the other.

Do you plan on doing a filter and weighting based on

You're reaching out to HOA's, HOA, the type of people who live in HOA's, and if you are raising out to certain groups you might over-represent, is there a way to parse that?

There is a way to like, I mean, we get all this data so we can do like a cross tab analysis.

So it's something we could potentially, I don't know that we were necessarily anticipating that, but that might be a good, at least like analysis or evaluation to do to determine whether or not there are significant differences and priorities based on, you know, income level.

I should also say that while we're reaching out to HOAs, we also plan to do things like table at the, like the transit center and go to different,

Yeah, I think we need to make a list of who we need to like do more specific outreach to.

We did, yeah, we did reach out to people like the International Rescue Committee, Sembereira.

So, I mean, we're trying to, like it's specifically underrepresented and underserved communities.

Thank you for that.

Yeah, so the process is that we have equity considerations built in.

Equity is probably the easiest one.

We have equity considerations built in as far as the metrics that we're actually using that are connected to all of those objectives.

So for example, for each set of objectives, we're either looking at multimodal access or we're also looking at things like

How would this project improve accessibility?

And then how would it improve accessibility for these equity emphasis areas that have been identified?

So we're trying to incorporate that into the actual metrics.

It's just that it was getting really repetitive to repeat that under each one.

The climate action is a little bit more challenging because

We're not able to actually measure things like carbon reduction that is being reduced by specific projects, but we can say whether or not a project is supporting overall like efforts to reduce reliance on single occupancy vehicles.

So if it's multimodal or if it's reducing congestion or

Those kinds of things.

So that one is kind of, if you look at that, if you look at that objectives map, we're not going to have a specific data source that's capturing that, but we can also sort of use that to sort of weight how we want to weight like multimodal projects differently than roadway projects, for example.

It's clearly laid out.

That's what I was trying to start doing with that line map.

Sure.

I haven't thought about story map for that specific purpose.

May I ask a general question here?

Unfortunately I don't hear everything that's being spoken, so if this has been discussed, forgive me.

I have not seen anything in the plan itself that takes into consideration new technology.

How are you planning to take the impact of new technology?

Simple thing like a self driving vehicles, how it would affect demand and that type of thing.

Do you think that it is necessary to include that now or is it later?

Because I think it's an important factor.

I think the way you're going to see that show up, probably the way they've addressed this in the past is that these are emerging issues that we'll continue to monitor and be prepared and adjust for.

But I don't know that we're going to necessarily expect any recommendations to be out.

to be made regarding those technologies.

The long range transportation plan is really considering system operations 27 years out.

That's when you start talking about 2050, we're looking at, if we're going to make improvements to our transportation system, let's consider what the potential future of the roadway operations and the multimodal operations are gonna look like in the year 2050, but it's not necessarily, and we're using that sort of to say, you know,

As we identify our projects and as we prioritize our projects, what kinds of projects should we implement that won't only meet the needs that we have now, but will also help meet the needs 27 years from now?

Just a quick question for the time.

Sorry.

Well, and the time gets updated every five years.

Accessibility could also be broken by credit.

It could be limiting left-terms and right-terms.

It's how easy is it now to access that shopping center?

Yeah, but how do I interpret it?

And maybe I won't, but I mean, what that says to me is,

Would you accept a little more congestion in the traffic in order to allow time for pedestrian bus blocks and fewer lanes, which contributes congestion to allow for bike lanes?

The most classic example is actually the thing about a bus system.

So like the more stops a bus has, the slower it's going to be.

But that means you're going to be closer to a bus stop.

Yeah.

My thought when I was referring to it is just, are you willing to make it more challenging to access places if it makes it safer and faster for you to move through the transportation system as a whole?

So that could be buses, that could also be roadways, and it could also be multi, it could be any of those things.

So maybe

Maybe we don't need this question.

I guess that's one thing we could talk about.

I actually think that that particular question may be really hard to do out of context.

Just from when I teach this lecture on accessibility versus mobility, we talk about how depending on the type of roadway, they have different objectives.

Roadways like highways are designed for mobility, and they shouldn't really have accessibility.

It's totally unsafe.

It's unnecessary.

Well, other places like your neighborhood streets were 100% for accessibility and mobility is not even a concern.

So I think when you take those concepts outside of the context of the road, it doesn't really make much sense.

I'll be thinking of something like 29, kind of a disaster in terms of both, right?

Or somebody else may be thinking of a different example in their head.

Sure.

There's so many interpretations.

OK, maybe we'll determine whether or not we need to ask another question.

That was one of those that we have to use this number of screens.

So what might be on this next screen?

No, we could only have two trade-off questions.

It will be around the same time that we'll do those kickoff meetings.

So thank you.

That was a really helpful discussion.

And we had some really good feedback on the survey.

So thank you guys for doing that.

And then as we already talked about, the information will be used to help us identify the system priorities.

All right.

Let's see.

Before I go to any additional matter from the public or any additional matter from the committee or anything else you're wondering, if not, I'm going to go to matters from the public, which I suspect is still a matter of anything.

All right.

Thank you all.