Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   7/19/2023

Mark Ball asked for matters from the public of America, in terms of some of its... Well actually everybody in this room is in that room.

There's the University of the Public.

Do you have any comments that you'd like to make?

It's the time for comments from the public.

All right.

Let's see.

Okay, that's napping at time.

So I'm not starting in the right place.

I just came out this afternoon from the APA Virginia Conference, so I'm a little less organized than I would like to be.

I apologize for that.

We can talk about some general updates for the plan as well.

I wanted to go through where we are in terms of public engagement, but now kind of what we've done so far and the process of doing, and then also give you a sneak peek of what we're planning and who we're hearing from so far and what our next steps are going to be.

First of all, there's a little bit of background, but mainly for the 2050 plan is the NPI's Long Range Transportation Plan.

So every five years, we are going to be able to make sure that it gives us a good opportunity to identify what our priorities are going to be for the next five years.

We use a plan in 120 years in this particular region we use a plan in 120 years which means that we are considering what transportation needs might be over the next 25 years in terms of identifying our system improvements.

So that's what we call on the plan moving toward 2050 because we're really looking at a plan in horizon year 2050 and thinking about what are the next steps we need to do to maintain our network through that consistent network needs are going to be through that plan in horizon date.

So we started with a strategy called having some stakeholder committees with different community organizations.

And as part of those meetings, we had 25 participants over the course of three different group discussions.

These meetings were really trying to get feedback from different perspectives on the overall goals and objectives.

And so we were able to incorporate that feedback and make changes to the goals and objectives and our exploration framework based on the feedback that they provided.

So, from the top of my head, there was an objective sandwich and now we've been moving towards, well, 2050, to turn to community engagement.

So, most of us are going to talk about what the goals and objectives should be, and how

And the second thing we're really hoping to get at this phase of public engagement is feedback on what kind of transportation there are, are people identifying problems and seeing needs, and

And then we're also going to use the feedback on how the goals and objectives are relative to each other in order to incorporate that into our data analysis.

So the first thing we're looking for is what our system needs.

This phrase is going to help us determine those.

We moved from the site where we're committing meetings to starting to collect some of this public feedback.

We started in June with, we launched a survey in mid-June through Metro's request, and then we held two events.

We held a online informational order, and we held an open house, and as you can see, a ton of this was fairly modest to happen for those.

One of the goals with doing the virtual informational webinar video is that we wanted to have a recording that had a pretty condensed overview of the plan for anybody who wanted that information.

And so that plan is going to happen.

That informational webinar is available on our website to view and is intended to be a resource for anybody who may want to use it to provide some

also was pretty modest as far as attendance, we had six attendees, it was a 10th of an evening as far as weather, and I think, you know, getting from other public engagement efforts is one, there's a lot of public engagement that's happening right now, and to most of the organizations I know that are doing public engagement are seeing pretty good turnouts at these types of events, so I think, you know, all of course we would have lots of

So this is not necessarily surprising.

So I hope this is going to be a little bit with the MetroQuest survey.

When I prepared the survey, we had 121 responses and over 500 back comments.

At this point, we currently have 143, I think, responses and over 600 back comments.

So we are getting a little bit of feedback.

So that's what we're working on right now is continuing to work to identify those opportunities to get that feedback from the public.

We are next week going to be tabling at the downtown transit center.

In a couple of days, I think it's Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, we'll be there to catch people who are in transit, get some feedback from them.

We reached out to the center that held it here, and so we're going to be working with them.

They have a table set up in our atrium and we'll be able to talk to people there about their transportation system needs.

I'm sure some of our convention and visitors here asked us to speak at one of their board meetings and then we've been collaborating with Omaha County about doing some transportation plan overviews and updates at their community advisory committee meetings that will probably be later in the fall though.

I've certainly been in touch with Brandon, I don't have his last name in front of me, at CRHA, so we're going to attend some of the CRHA meetings and talk to residents there about their experience with transportation, suggestions that they have, and I have some tentative opportunities to table at UVA with students, and there are a couple of events that we're exploring if we can do some outreach with them.

I think this is just one of the key elements of the project that we've made.

So far, we're certainly going to continue to explore other opportunities specifically to get into different parts of the region.

And additionally, I'll receive some communication with me about some of these outreach efforts that also went to all of the city's neighborhood association points of contact, so that was looked at for 200 people, just general

The contacts that we've had from other planning efforts and stakeholder groups and things like that.

So I think we're getting to where we're at.

It just might be that at this early phase, what we're asking people to give us feedback on is pretty conceptual.

And so we certainly have to try to get as much feedback on the system needs as possible, but it might be that this just isn't striking people at this point, regardless of what we start talking about

That's a little bit more concrete.

People might be more interested in providing feedback or have more thoughts as it relates to their experience and what they're having.

Well, I think working with a student, that would be really helpful to create some more stuff here.

Yeah, thank you.

For UVA students, their stakeholder works and that's really helpful to have that perspective because I think, you know, students probably interact with the city in the urban areas in a different way than maybe

So, let's have a little sneak peek over here.

So, those questions are quite lacking, except for all different categories, which are the safety, environmental, and press, multimodal accessibility, and use coordination, and efficiency in economic development.

They can basically get

This model is kind of ideal.

You would have $10.00 to distribute your $10.00 among these.

300% cost per year to distribute across these categories for the distributed events.

percent cost per year to distribute across these categories and how they distribute it. So you can see that the best commodity that is being indicated is safety, quality of the environment, and quality of environmental accessibility. And it's clear that it's going to reduce coordination and the efficiency of economic development scores.

You know, I think that's what I was expecting to hear based on other, based on other planning efforts that have been ongoing from other agencies, like the City of Charlottesville and Baltimore County.

That just seems to be very consistent among all of those, but we are not done with our public engagement yet, and so I'm not to be cautious about sort of

So we're asking people to make choices.

And what we try to do when creating these survey questions was to sort of make case for even if there's trade-offs.

And so we're having people tell us which one and which direction we should go with these.

So what kind of modes should we be investing in in the region?

So the process between prioritizing verbal improvements and incorporating bicycle power and transit projects as opportunities versus prioritizing multimodal improvement.

And we can see that the outcomes of this are very

And then I tried to think about how that was interesting, which was, is it more hard to focus on class, to just have more access to community destinations that maybe aren't necessarily associated with employment?

So places like schools and grocery stores, cars, which obviously do employ people, but that are not the accessibility needs are more hard for you to have access to places where you work or places where you need to go in the community for non-work purposes.

And it's the same thing if you have a slight indication that it's maybe slightly more important to have access to jobs around the planet.

You can see that this one is fairly evenly distributed with the highest number of people certainly responding.

In the middle of the show, you're going to say, okay, if it's access to jobs versus access to job destinations, I can interpret that, but I think they're both really important.

So this last question was really about capturing people's preferences as far as a climate action related to the transportation system.

So in order to achieve our climate action goals, is it more important to reduce congestion, or is it more important to pursue active and public transportation options?

And similar to that first question, there's a fairly strong indication that

It's important to make active public transportation

So here's the deal, here's the deal.

We're going to make this conversation interesting because there's a strong purpose for people who, people who are saying, we've made sure that we have to invest in these resources as much as we really want to invest in public transportation options and active transportation.

There's a feeling we could have more of our comments there from other transit riders, but we're going to work to capture some more of those users next week.

There's a lot of other types that we're considering, like using a mobility device, those kinds of things.

So scooter, I don't think we've had any scooters yet.

We've had a few Asian or Asian American respondents select that as an option.

So I would say we need to do a little bit of work to

We have Spanish materials on our website.

We did not have any Spanish speakers come, but that's something that we're about to discuss.

We have a standard for our region and hopefully we can continue to work to better engage those communities as we sort of

You know, he was invited to like, stakeholder discussion groups and those kinds of things, so explicitly I thought that we had some other contacts and I tried to reach out and work with those groups, but I didn't know if I was specifically about that.

One other thing, these two slides that we just looked at, it would be helpful to see them like versus the overall demographics and.

We probably need a little more diverse perspective.

We'll see if there are other types of engagement with those communities.

We still have a high number of people at the age of 24 hours or so, but we have a pretty good spot for people between the ages of 25 and 65 and over.

So that's looking a little bit more diverse.

This is very evenly divided.

So we're about to continue to reach out to our groups.

Are there any questions or comments on this?

The other thing I want to do is just journal briefly.

That is not what I wanted to pull up.

I don't know what's happening.

I can't hear you from here.

But I can't hear you.

Is it better?

Okay, can you hear me now?

Okay.

I'm just interested in the distribution of racism.

The distribution of racism

Okay, I believe you said you don't have the data for that.

Okay, I'm sorry, don't worry.

I can't hear.

It's all mucky when you say something and I can't hear anything.

I can't understand what you're saying.

There's so much background noise.

So we went through the process of intermodal planning and investment to basically develop a GIS analysis for all of that data.

A lot of them are kind of what showed up here.

So we're looking at for the safety, we are looking at the PSI intersections, potential for safety improvement,

Potential of safety improvements is basically a measure that VDOT uses to identify whether there are opportunities to make improvements and maybe quantify to some extent how impactful those improvements would be.

So that's based on usually the most recent five years.

So we're using PSI for safety and then for the BEC-PED safety measures we're using the pedestrian safety action plan.

So VDOT has also developed a set of high priority corridors for pedestrian improvements which are based not just on where they're going to happen

Maybe some latent demand for improvements, whether the infrastructure itself prevents people from being able to travel, but where there are opportunities for connections between the types of destinations that people may want to walk to.

So it looks at things like the density and activity centers and things like that.

Social safety.

There's an accessibility reason in this measure that the consultants developed called a potential for accessibility improvement.

So comparing the existing condition across several measures.

So we were very intentional about wanting to make sure we're including different modes of transportation to the extent possible.

So we're looking at comparing the existing condition in each of the travel modes to an idealized set of conditions.

And this is like geospatial statistics and a lot of complicated analysis tools that I don't know.

Do you remember what it's called?

So, specifically what we need to know how to do is the ability to show how much improvement and access could be made by comparing the existing conditions to an ideal set of conditions.

So, places where there's a lot of opportunity for improvement would get a higher score.

For congestion,

As of transit, they are using basically on-time performance information.

So comparing either on-time performance to what their goals are or comparing on-time performance to the previous year's on-time performance.

So to try to capture, and try to capture some more things to what congestion we capture, but it helps

So those are, the incremental measure is not being evaluated until we get to the project evaluation stage.

So that's not necessarily being considered at this point.

And then the congestion.

No, why did I talk about congestion?

What's the other one?

One of these is being captured with law scores.

And I think that's also where we're going in sort of

because there's going to be an application between the lock scores and what the future land use or future growth looks like.

So places where there's an opportunity, places that have a lot of lock scores are places where there's already a lot of places that people can get through walking or biking or riding transit, those kinds of things.

So there's other places where there is opportunity for

So that's what I was going to get to.

Are they going to build out a web-based tool that allows people in the public to weight these measures and then generate these as a tool of life?

It's not necessarily an incredibly straightforward process, but I think we're trying to generally understand what the priorities of the community are in order to determine how to equate

The efficiency piece also has an impact not just on land use but on congestion mitigation or potentially on safety if you're creating more connected, safer, more efficient trails, bicycle improvements, those kinds of things.

There's a confluence of which factor that should actually be weighted towards, but this will give us a general sense of how to weigh each of those measures

I'll just mention a little quickly, if you don't mind, I wanted to just show you all on the website.

We have put onto a story map, so if you go to the website,

I'd eventually have you associate information about the public meetings.

Instead of having the information about the meeting, we've posted the meeting materials up there.

So if you want to receive the meeting materials, if you want to look at the recording or anything like that, you can pop on there.

It has all the meeting materials that have been developed.

This is in two different places.

So right now there's a story map that we've developed to show all the maps and other

We want this to be a tool that we build on throughout the plan.

And so if there's somebody who wants to look at the maps and look at the data, this is a really good opportunity for you to explore that.

So we have all of the maps that you see behind you that we sort of have available for the open houses are now in the sort of map format on here.

You can click through if you want to zoom in and look at things.

You can certainly explore these.

And we're going to continue to build a story map as we go through the analysis.

So when we analyze the data, when we map all the comments, we're going to be plugging this into the story map to help sort of create an unusual story.

And it's a crazy idea.

Sandy, I wanted to ask you this earlier, but I didn't see any definition of practice in that chart you have where you see the number of practice.

I'm watching the definition of a practice there.

Is severity taken into consideration?

The crash is fine.

Marjan Ellis versus property damage only, kind of everything is kind of slow with the property damage being sort of the baseline and everything else is multiplied.

One appropriate turnabout.

Yeah.

Does that answer your question, Nicholas?

You're muted.

You're so good.

All right.

Do you want me to keep going over there, please?

Yeah.

Yeah?

Okay.

I'm going to do one of those big postcards.

It's just intended to sort of

All right, so I wanted to give you all a very good, condensed presentation on this.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board sends in their way, so they have had three meetings now that have focused

That's both the process of applying for SMART SCALE as well as potentially the types of projects that are being funded through SMART SCALE.

So SMART SCALE is the state program to apply for transportation funding for projects that are part to the region.

There are two, well, I have this a little bit later.

I don't think you can catch it either.

The CTB presentation is perfect.

So if you have a SMART SCALE, or you don't know as much as you wish you knew about SMART SCALE, I would recommend 100%.

It's history, why it was developed, what it was trying to accomplish.

And on an expert on SMART SCALE, I am not the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff that is charged with implementing the program.

They have done a much more comprehensive job covering this information.

I am following it.

I am considering what the impacts of the program might look like for our region.

But anything I say is going to be much better explained by the CTB meetings.

You just have to be willing to sit through a longer explanation for it.

So SMART SCALE is a mini program that is used to fund transportation projects throughout our state, especially larger projects.

It's a competitive process, so every entity that is eligible prepares the applications with the support of states, VDOT staff usually, or consultants.

I just wanted to take sort of the political aspect out of funding transportation projects.

Projects are scoring, there's a number of scoring factors that have been developed by I guess both state legislation as well as the Commonwealth Transportation Board and that score is considered against the overall

After every single role of SMART SCALE, there's an evaluation process that occurs.

So we just completed a graph of those projects were approved for funding I think in May or June by the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

So now we're starting to look at a review of the program and seeing what kind of feedback they're getting, what's working, what's not working, and considering adjustments to the program.

Two different kinds of adjustments that we're considering.

One of them is to address some of the procedural concerns related to just the implementation of the program.

It's taking a lot of staff time.

There's a lot of projects that aren't getting funded.

There's a lot of work that's going in to prepare applications for projects that aren't getting funded.

There's a lot more being

We talked a little bit about project funding outcomes and evaluated whether or not the right types of projects are getting funded and other types of projects that are getting funded meeting the overall goals of the SMART SCALE program.

So those are kind of two different discussions.

I want to say that I did watch and took pretty good notes on the May and June meeting.

There was a Smart Scale retreat that was held today.

I was joined back from the conference today.

I will not stop through that meeting.

I glanced over the slides.

I listened to a couple hours of it on my drive back.

But I also have to say this is an ongoing discussion.

No decisions have been made yet.

But there are some fairly significant changes that are being proposed.

Just to give you a little bit of context so you can kind of understand what some of the recommendations that they're talking about might mean.

Every region, every area, every locality in the area is divided into a different area type than SMART SCALE.

And depending on which area type you're in, that determines how much of your score is derived

So product benefits are received based on safety, congestion, accessibility, land use, economic development, and environment.

The Type A land use are the areas that have really high densities.

That's Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, you can see that on the map.

The Type B projects are maybe the smaller urban areas, so that Charlottesville, Albemarle, and MPO is a Type B land use type in terms of SMART SCALE.

And for the rest of the Culpeper construction district, the rest of the district outside the MPO area is Type C, and then Type D is the more rural areas.

So MPOs, PDCs, planning district commissions, regional bodies, transit agencies are not eligible applicants through the district grant program.

The localities are eligible to submit applications that address a need that is identified in the Statewide Transportation Plan, which is known as V-Trans.

It has to meet, so those ways are defined as either a safety need, UDA stands for Urban Development Area, so it's a need in a defined growth area that has been established by the locality, it's along a corridor of statewide significance, or it's in a regional network, so the effort is encountered

The project grant program means that there's funding that is allocated to each of the VDOT construction districts and then projects that are eligible for that district grant program are competing just with other projects within that construction district.

So each of them has a certain part of money and projects

This high priority program is a high priority program.

So the high priority program is basically funding that allocated across the state.

And the rest of us who are not localities are able to submit applications through the high priority program and the high priority program only.

And the types of projects that are eligible for the high priority program are related to statewide significance and regional network projects.

Regional networks are defined basically by, it's basically defined by V-Trans, but it's based on the MPO area.

They call them travel markets, but it's basically based on needs specific to each MPO area.

So, the intention of the high priority program is to be able to provide more resources for bigger projects that maybe have more significance to the state.

What some of the concerns are, so I don't have all of that kind of information that I can get at the end.

I hope this doesn't get too technical unless you all have specific questions.

A couple of the concerns that have been expressed are being evaluated as part of this review of SMART SCALE.

The first is that there's a perception that smaller projects are being funded

Other kids have the answer that smaller projects, maybe less expensive projects, projects under $10 million tend to be more competitive for SMART SCALE.

They have a lower cost and maybe even a cost to benefit value has tended to be a little bit higher.

Those are the projects everybody has sort of started because those are the projects they believe will be more competitive.

And so we're so concerned that these aren't necessarily the highest priority projects for the regions, but regions are just the main projects.

They're the ones that will get funded and they want to make sure that they're bringing resources into their regions.

So that's one issue.

Another issue is the concern, there was a lot of discussion today especially, the concern that especially about high priority program funds, which are intended to be funding these projects that should be having more significant impacts on the overall statewide and regional transportation systems, that a lot of that funding is being, is going to bike ped improvement projects,

And so the concern is that these projects may or may not actually be having those significant benefits, but these are small, high-pet projects, and those will tend to be more successful than small, high-weight projects in terms of what the success rate is between projects that are paid for and projects that are funded.

So the concern about small projects being funded through the high-priority program is specifically like pet projects being funded through the high-priority program.

There's also a discussion about the land use factor.

So currently, if you go back to this map, you can see that land use is its own scoring category.

And what they found when they did an analysis is that for small projects, and especially for small pet projects, a large portion of their score was coming from that land use score.

I think with the small blackhead projects, 74% of the benefit for those projects is being derived from the land use category.

And so there was also a lot of discussion about how the land use score was really driving what projects were getting funded to an extent that maybe it was having a bigger impact

The final point that I'll mention to you is that they also have been talking about not

Where a project has to be in terms of being able to meet a need on a corridor statewide significance or a regional network, but what types of projects are those really intended to fund?

So if a project needs a V-trans identifying need on a corridor statewide significance or a regional network need,

about actually defining what a high priority project should be, and that would include things like a new roadway capacity project, a change to an interchange, managed lanes, but new transit, loss or stations, and I think that was specific to rail, I don't know if you recall, Michael, it was rail or if it was also the stations.

And I think there was another one today,

So based on some of those discussions and considerations, based on the feedback that the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment staff received to manage this program, there are a couple of recommendations

There's a lot of stuff going on with this, but this is what I pulled from the Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting today.

So, they want to consider not just existing condition, but future congestion issues.

They want to address what types of projects are eligible through the high priority program.

And they want to eliminate the state statute

And what they want to do is they want to eliminate, not eliminate land use as a sporting category, but eliminate it from a self-contained sport and instead use the land use to be a magnifier or magnifier for benefits that a project is receiving in the safety and congestion categories.

So if you've got a land use sport, what happens is that you get to have

A land use factor.

One of the examples of the projects that were received through Round 5 through this staff recommended scenario is that it reduced the number of small projects by 46% to 57% and it reduced the bike and ped principal projects by 75%.

So there were 13 projects that were funded.

I don't recall, or I think it was just because I haven't had a chance to look into it in depth,

It does have this impact of funding slightly bigger projects.

You can see that the project, the total cost of funded projects, if these changes were in place for round five, the average cost of the projects would have jumped from $15.1 million to almost $22 million, and a total of 39 projects would have been removed from project applications.

That recommended scenario was put forward for consideration by the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

They have not made any decisions, I believe, as I recall.

There's a town hall that will be visiting us in September, and then there's a town hall that I believe is scheduled for either October or November.

But the reason I notice that is because this could potentially change which types of projects the MPO would be eligible to submit.

And so as far as

It sounds like if you're a BiCAD advocate or you care about reducing vehicles

and I'm wondering like who is staff?

Because it's certainly not, if they're getting a ton of bike head projects from all these places, what are their goals?

Because they're obviously not adhering to like the cities and presumably the people who live in those cities who want these projects done.

What's the CTV means?

So even though it's a remote-grade project, the remote-grade project is the primary principal type, and it incorporates multi-modal improvements.

So one of the things I talked about in the meeting today is probably about 50% of the highway principal improvement type also incorporates

Those were some projects that were BIPED projects that would potentially still meet this definition.

So if we look at our previous applications that we had submitted just to get an idea of this, those that were BIPED projects were actually considered as the principal improvement type a new capacity project because it was a new bridge that was going over

In terms of the types of projects that we have in our queue until we develop our new long-range transportation plan and potentially identify a new slate of candidate projects, we don't have a whole lot that would meet this definition.

The only thing we're talking about is potentially reducing the number of applications that each entity can submit.

I don't know that that's reflected

It was UDA, is that correct?

You said you didn't want to get in the weeds, but could you unpack that a little?

And what's prompting the question is that the city is interested in embarking on a pretty extensive upzoning.

And how that shakes out remains to be seen.

But at maybe its fullest potential,

It's not like everybody's living without each other.

Yeah, so you just say urban development areas are specifically identified areas in locality that are intended to accommodate high growth.

So when you start out, they were based on if you have a certain amount of population growth between 10-year censuses, you were required to identify areas that help urban development areas in order to accommodate the growth.

The development area needs are based on what the locality identifies as the urban development needs when they establish the urban development area.

But in terms of evaluating the needs, only localities are eligible to submit projects of that type anyway.

In my opinion, for projects, the more benefit scores, depending on what exactly that looks like, that would probably impact maybe your land use scores, because it would talk about, you know, there's an area that has more efficient land development, and so that could impact your land use score, that could also potentially impact your economic developments, if that's attracting more economic development, so I think a little bit of a direct impact, because the UDA being designated as a UDA doesn't give you a score,

The CTB will.

They're open meetings so there are opportunities to provide comments.

And we'll gather this to show that this is happening.

Okay, well we're going to move on to the next one.

Sure, I can do that.

Thank you.

It looks great in a preview video there Michael.

So the funding programs will at least start from

Did you email it?

I don't have to bring up the website.

It would be helpful to share this.

I won't go full screen.

Maybe that will be what it says.

That's a lot of the funding.

It's funded in the even years.

We're trying to work with the project pipeline process to get a little jumpstart on these applications that we'll get a patient here and start next spring.

The funding pipeline is an effort to take projects and develop those with offset plans and estimates.

We'll have a period that will start next year by starting growth

So we're working on four projects in our district.

The other two that are here in our area are Ferricks Road and PI Ward.

And when this process works, there's really three phases, and we're in phase one now, which is really a broad

We're also looking at multi-metal solutions in these project areas as well.

The Phase 1 is really sort of the potentially viable alternative, if you will, and taking those potentially viable and taking them through a process where we further refine them into public input and some design work was taken to be

And then next year, early next year, we'll be working on developing those things from preferred alternatives through to actual SMART SCALE applications.

We're going to put in much more detailed concept plans and estimates and schedules so the projects can be adequately funded.

We talked a lot about the values and what things get picked.

This is a bit agnostic.

We're looking at both the ramps as well as the main line of the street for safety and pedestrian issues.

The reason I hide the red is the way these can get picked.

Is there a state to using all of your data sources similar to the stuff that you see

The IAC corridor is a much bigger area that we're talking about.

We're talking about the start of the Ednham Drive where the Boers area is.

We turn it back along 250 up to Alderman in the city.

Some of you all know that we studied solutions for this triangle shaped area developed at a low cost, triangle about

This particular one is more focused on the core, where obviously some of the triangle concepts would be revisited.

But the area, the state has been identified as like high priorities, again around the interchange and some of the congestion and traffic issues and how they are not polite.

But as a result, some of the

Then during our studies we'll be looking more at the traffic issues along the 250 corridor, but the community has really made a, you know, a need to look at the multimodal and the soft pole and ivy as well.

Of course, those things start to tie at each other with rare bridges that are substandard and constrained, and I think multimodal is more of a challenge in that area too.

So one of the

Just real quickly, the people we're working with, obviously, are key stakeholders.

City of Charlottesville, Albemarle, UVA, transit agencies, Sandy here at the NPO, as well as a lot of the people in our sections who are subject area experts.

I am for and am very proud for what we're doing right now.

Again, we're in this data collection phase.

But also, I want to just highlight on multi-modal thing.

Obviously, very early, we all know that that's got a lot of challenges for multi-modal.

They're very limited sidewalks that are out there today.

So it's going to be a real challenge, and it's going to be something we're trying to figure out how best to beat that one.

It's very auto-dominated now.

It doesn't seem to really, its connections into the city are really destinations at least beyond the study area we're looking at.

So it's important to try to figure out where are people really trying to go.

I don't know if we're going to be talking about one in Canton, but at least Eric Road, downtown, and getting a better understanding of what are the plans and concepts that UVA and the city have developed

Especially the ones outside of the corridor or the subject area we're looking at.

Important to try to figure out what do you all want us to connect to.

And then the last part of this is something that we kind of call them five paths because the corridor is very long and linear and there's really only a ton of different ways you can get through it.

You can either go north of the whole island, you can go south of the whole island, you can go north of the railroad, you can go south of the railroad or south of 250.

And I think we're really going to try to hone in

I think a lot of ideas that people have had in the past as we look at physical constraints throughout the portal or closely opportunities and trying to find ways to create multi-portal passage through this area as well as always in the transportation needs that are there.

Right now we're getting ready to start a public survey similar to what Sandy is doing with the following transportation plan.

who are working closely with the county to try to work for a focus group that will represent important neighborhoods and businesses along this corridor.

The triangle about the process, so there's a lot of public comment about that, and it's important to make sure that we're, well there'll be general public input into this process too, but to be able to have people who are directly affected by the project

Make sure that we're getting, like we've been getting in phase one, we'll be getting the different problems correct while we understand what the problems are out there.

And then as we start to develop solutions, try to avoid things that are going to be significant impacts to individual ones, we'll try to find ways to work through the solutions.

I think at the end of the day, we will try to find a project that is viable, that can be, within the phase three, we can really try to engineer a solution for a potential SMART SCALE or maybe even SMART SCALE projects in that area.

How much money do you see in projects where you all rush?

So are the planning efforts going right now?

No, the projects.

So we don't even have projects per se right now, right?

We're just trying to frame the problem.

That will then lead to solutions.

How did you end up at those two projects?

They showed the high priorities in the community.

Any other questions?

Yeah, so these can be pretty brief updates.

But we were not awarded the race grant for the Romana River classical and pedestrian.

but when we were voted in Virginia we knew it was going to be a very competitive project.

I think three of the four projects that were voted were in areas of historically disadvantaged communities or persistent poverty and the equity considerations, the environmental justice initiatives was a big factor under this administration and

So we are going to take advantage of the opportunity to debrief to get feedback on the proposal to determine whether or not it performed well and whether or not it may be worth reconsidering but really we'll be having a discussion with the MPO committees and the policy board to determine what the next steps might be if there's interest in continuing to pursue

for federal funding if there's interest in continuing to pursue the project.

You know, maybe at this point or whether or not we want to focus on the other opportunities at this point, we'll be having those conversations.

But I think our immediate next step will be to get some feedback on the application itself.

I think that we would take that direction from probably the policy board.

So if there was an inclination that they were supportive of moving in that direction, that's certainly something we could pursue.

The final estimate, once you add in all the contingencies and the

Any other questions on the RAISE grant?

More info.

TBD.

As a reminder, this is to develop a multi-jurisdictional comprehensive safety action plan for all the jurisdictions within the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

We have support from all six of our local jurisdictions that contributed to the match.

We are actively in the process of selecting the consultant teams that we will work with.

We probably anticipate that project.

We stated that we will make a decision of the consultant team by the first week of August, and then we'll be able to move towards getting under contract and hopefully kicking off that project in September.

Just as a reminder, this is

Using, creating a comprehensive strategy that covers a number of different, they call them the four E's, engineering, I can't think of anything else, education, and there's another E, that I'm blanking on right now, but today I'll take that for that approach to addressing safety, so not just looking at the infrastructure improvements, but also looking at how we can

use a comprehensive set of tools to address those.

I just want to know what's the best way for us to voice an opinion.

To the transportation part, I think there are ways to go.

I think this is something you have to feel very strongly about.

Probably the more influential voices will be from the elected officials.

and make sure that they are aware that citizens are also paying attention.

People will be taking our direction from the policy board if they want us to develop any formal comments or provide more information to them.

But I think, you know, I'm certainly trying to make sure that all the staff somewhere in all of the localities so they can also be having those discussions.

Probably, I mean,