Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   9/20/2023

I think we actually have 13 on the committee.

So, and Nicholas is on online, but I think we're not quite at work.

There are 12 people who are, there's one they don't see, but I think they found 24.

I guess we'll start with Paris from the public.

I don't know whether it's part of the public here or we're actually still here and they're having online meetings so I guess we'll move on past that.

So I am going to preface this by telling you all that this beautiful presentation was actually completed by the consultants, but they kind of have to let me take advantage of it.

So basically, we are really close to wrapping up our first phase of the public engagement for the Long Range Transportation Plan.

So I wanted to come back and report out to you all to let you know what we have completed and where we are as far as meeting our goals.

I will say I have one more community advisory committee to attend and Albemarle coming up in PMPOPS, which has some pretty interesting and unique transportation challenges.

But other than PMPOPS, where we've

That is basically what we were planning to do as far as the first week of public engagement.

And this will just let you know a little bit about what we've done, what kind of responses we've achieved, what we're going to do with the information, and what the next steps are.

We do not have the analysis completed yet.

We're working on that.

We do have some preliminary findings that we can figure out.

what it is that we're going to talk about today, go back and revisit our engagement goals, look at what might have contributed to some of the engagement outcomes that we've seen, what are the variables and considerations that might have impacted our engagement, review what it is that we actually did, outline what's going to go into the report, and then review some initial findings and talk about next steps.

So first of all, in terms of our engagement goals, you'll remember that we came to this committee and we said, what would successful engagement look like?

And so we said things like, we want to make sure that our engagement is representative of the community.

We want the engagement to be meaningful and to be clear about how that engagement is informing our transportation plan development.

And then we also set some goals around kind of the level of responsiveness we wanted that would define what a successful outreach effort would be.

And just as a recap, our goals for this phase of public engagement

was to basically prioritize and determine what our priority goals were and then to identify travel needs.

So where we were going, what we're doing is we're trying to hear what the feedback was and what kind of goals that was related to, like whether it was accessibility or safety or efficiency, et cetera.

And then we're really trying to hear from the public where are the travel needs.

Alright, so just like any public engagement effort, this one is not going to be perfect.

in terms of being perfectly representative.

There are ways that you can get perfectly representative samples and things like that.

Donna probably can speak to that, but it's very expensive.

So we acknowledge that this is not going to be a perfectly representative sample of the information, but we did try very hard to make sure that we were being thoughtful about how we were conducting our engagement.

So a few things that we've identified as being potential biases or limitations in the information that we collect.

First of all, this type of project, especially at this phase, is very, very difficult to get engagement on because we are asking people for feedback on a very large area, but we're asking for feedback on a very conceptual level.

People are much more likely to respond when you say,

We're going to do this or this.

Which opinion do you have?

And then they start thinking about how is this going to affect me personally.

So we're not at that stage yet where people are really kind of understanding what's going to happen.

So this is just harder to engage people.

There's a lot of information and education that's required in order to get meaningful feedback.

And it's just not going to resonate as personally with people.

So it's a challenge going into it from the very beginning.

The other thing that's happening is, I don't know if you all have seen this, there are a lot of surveys of all engagement that's happening right now, just in the transportation realm.

We just completed a transit vision plan.

Both of the localities have either recently completed a comprehensive plan or in the process of completing a comprehensive plan.

Charlottesville has been doing some engagement with their zoning ordinance.

There's a transit strategic plan that's being developed.

And so we're competing and that's not even naming all of them.

So we're competing with all of those other efforts and there's also just

There's such a thing as survey fatigue.

There's such a thing as people just maybe saying, well, I've already given my feedback.

Why do I want to keep giving my feedback?

Not necessarily understanding that these are all feeding us different issues.

So that's also a challenge.

And then, like I said earlier, this is a technical and data-driven process.

And so it just takes a lot of effort and time to get people engaged in it.

So we understand that all up front.

This is what we did do, though.

All right, so you'll recall maybe in February, we started with having these stakeholder groups sort of give feedback on what our draft goals and objectives were, and that feedback helped inform the final goals and objectives language that we developed.

So we started in November, and these stakeholder groups were represented as different, I guess that's the right word, like different, like,

like community representatives.

So we had a business community, we had a meeting with public safety officials, and then we also had a meeting that was focused on like other community organizations.

That's where we brought in a lot of people like PHA and workforce development and things like that.

People who work with different groups representing a variety of demographic interests.

We picked off the major public engagement efforts to sort of get the feedback on the rules of objectives and to help us identify traveling into the space that we're wrapping up right now.

We picked this off in late June.

We started with a virtual public meeting that was intended to be more information sharing.

And then we did a open house event, which was intended sort of to start the collection of information from the public.

And then we did a variety of public intercepts.

So we sat up at the transit center two days and collected information, just talked to people there and said, hey, what would you do if you could improve the transportation system?

What are some of your biggest challenges?

Where do you try to go that you have trouble getting to?

Is the transportation system working for you?

Just having conversations if you didn't do that.

We went to the center of Belvidere,

We went to a couple of events.

We went to both localities, national and white alley events, gender community events, where we talked to quite a few people with theirs.

So those kinds of things were out in the community.

Albemarle County has also asked us to attend all of the community advisory committee meetings.

We worked with Sara, thank you for your lead, with CRHA, because we worked with them and were able to attend a couple of meetings with their organization.

So all in all, once we're done with all of this, we're going to be able to document 15 or 16 different unique efforts to actually be out in the community and have conversations.

And that includes the survey as well.

So the survey is one, then there are another, like 14 or 15.

In addition to that though, you know, to try to bolster the representation and the information that we're collecting, we also are pulling data from the public engagement I've heard that started the Trans Division Plan that was completed last year and then those localities comprehensive plans.

There's public engagement that was documented and so we're pulling all of that in as well because we think that altogether that creates a more

So, oh, I didn't end all of this, so I might have already gotten everything that we need to go to.

Oh, and we shared information on social media.

We were not able to get to UVA to actually do anything on campus, but they did send the survey out, so we were basically able to give students an opportunity.

Alright, so what the consultants are working on now is an engagement report that's just going to summarize all of the efforts that have been completed to date and what we did to collect this information and then they're also analyzing the data and so basically they've already started

I'm reviewing the public comments that we received and coding those to see what are the general trends, what are people talking about, so we can start pulling data from that.

And then there are also going to be mapping comments.

So if somebody said in a public meeting or at the transition or something like, I really want to get to this spot.

I really would like to be able to take transit against this target on 29.

We were able to basically, we're going to be mapping those so we can create a heat map of where people are complimenting them.

They have transportation system needs that aren't being done or have a suggestion for an improvement, et cetera.

And then the report will sort of summarize not only what we heard, but how that information is going to be incorporated into our next steps in terms of media evaluation or project selection.

So this is going to be both a standalone report and will also help inform this section of the law range transportation plan when we start looking towards it.

And one of our goals for this is to make it clear that all the people that took the time to respond to a survey or to talk to us, to be able to show that that information mattered and has been incorporated and used in that plan.

So these are some of the things

First of all, we've been talking about developing these performance measures to start identifying our priority travel needs.

Remember, the first thing we're going to do is look at where do we have travel needs in the community that we need to find a solution for.

So we're going to analyze the data, and the public feedback is going to help us weight how much each of those performance measures should count towards prioritizing those needs based on the data evaluation.

So if we hear a lot of feedback about safety and maybe a little bit less information about congestion, we're going to weight safety higher than congestion when we start analyzing those performance measures, that kind of thing.

And so the second thing that we're going to use these for is not just weighting the travel needs, but then helping us to actually prioritize projects once we get to that phase.

The next thing that this is going to do is this is going to be an actual other layer of data evaluation.

So we're going to do this data analysis, but we're also going to be looking at what the public feedbacks said directly.

And so if there's alignment between what the data analysis tells us and what the public tells us as to where we need, that's going to be a really good indicator that that's probably something that we want to look at to see if we have a project that will need that feedback.

It will also help us know what kinds of projects people want.

So for example, if we're talking about congestion, and this was one of the trade-off questions that we were asking in the survey, if we're talking about congestion, would you rather we do some sort of roadway improvement, so maybe we make a intersection, improve the operations of an intersection, we could talk about expanding capacity on the highway, or we could talk about

are multi-modal projects that would solve that congestion concern.

And so that helps us start determining what kinds of projects would be appropriate based on the community we have.

And the other thing it lets us do is it helps us start identifying where there are gap needs.

So we're going to map where people identify needs and where they're being placed on the data against projects that have been developed where different initiatives

If there's something that's highlighted that doesn't have a project that overlaps with it, let's not let us know.

This is something we need to pay attention to and maybe something we need to start planning for.

So that's how we are going to use all of this data.

Now, I'm going to go through some initial findings, and this is just based on a preliminary review, so this is very, very helpful.

And it does not include everything.

So the consultative that we've worked with basically identified is that we're reviewing all of the public comments that these were the themes that set out.

Safety, efficiency, connections, multi-modal projects or improvements, land use, economy, and then they have another category which like you know sometimes we're talking to people who would say something like

I talked to one of the bus drivers who was like, I really think we need a union.

And so that might not help in some of those categories.

But it's still a valid transportation concern.

So the engagement report is going to go through these in more detail.

And it will also help tie these back to what it means in terms of our performance measures and our goals.

You'll see that they realize that a lot of the comments that were categorized as other were related to environmental concerns, and then a lot of the comments that they categorized under connections would be linked to equity and accessibility.

And then also, as you can imagine, a lot of the comments on this one category.

Alright, so these are the trends based on the public comments, not based on the MetroQuest survey.

So you can see that the highest number of responses here were the multi-modal themes.

And so one of the things that we're going to do is break out what multi-modal means like transit versus

The consultants did, at least for the time being, include sidewalks largely in this connections category.

So connections are largely talking about sidewalk connections and really trying to connect things.

One of the comments I heard was, you know, the bus stops don't make sense based on where the crosswalks and sidewalks are.

So that would be a connection.

One of the things I thought was a little bit interesting is that in terms of the engagement that we heard,

seem to be at less emphasis on safety overall.

And some of the comments we've heard is that, well, we feel like everybody's talking about safety.

So it's almost like maybe they didn't feel like they wanted to prioritize safety because I feel like that's already being addressed.

I don't know.

I mean, it's interesting because when people are talking to you, they feel like they need to explain why they're prioritizing certain things.

And we don't necessarily know that based on the survey.

But I thought that was pretty, I thought

One thing I thought was really interesting was when we were at the transit center, a lot of the people that would talk about the transit center felt like the efficiency needed to be at 30 high for Oregon.

So they were kind of thinking of efficiency maybe a little bit differently than I would.

That's why I was thinking about being at the other efficiency there.

I wonder if the commandos would be efficient for them.

So that was an interesting observation, but there's probably a stronger

So that was the public comment themes from this effort with our Moving Tour 2050 plan.

And so if we look at what we heard from the other plans, when we look at it, and we did just screen for the transportation related comments and the comprehensive plans.

So this is that point and just general comments and the comprehensive plans.

So if you look at Albemarle County's public feedback from their comprehensive plan, you'll see that the highest number of comments that they received fell into this land use category, which I thought was pretty interesting.

But again, we have more screening for transportation specific comments.

And maybe to that point, when we look at the Charlottesville point,

So to clarify, did you show this and then someone checked what they liked or checked more than one of the ones they liked?

Yeah, these are from, I don't remember the Albemarle plan, how they organized their data specifically, but Charlottesville had categorized, if I recall correctly, had already categorized their

But again my question is did people, were people presented with these?

No.

Okay so this this is to take their comment and then turn it into a box.

Yeah they just said whatever they wanted and we sorted it later.

yeah and so then for the regional transit vision survey and of course this makes up the highest number of responses on the multi-modal things as well and so this also helps to sort of identify or helps

cover our basis as there had been a lot of engagement around transit previously that we might have lost some of those respondents in terms of our efforts.

This helped us make sure that we were capturing what was important related to transit service in the area.

And so this next section is just gonna talk about, so that was all just the public feedback from our non-survey efforts.

And so this next section is just going to cover what we're seeing from the survey on our initial review.

All right.

So this is the other thing that I thought was really interesting is when you look at the survey, the highest priority that, and pretty strong, is pretty consistent from the amendment we launched with safety, as far as which of the priorities we're asking them, which of these priorities, how would you, how much weight would you get to each priority?

The clear front runner here is safety followed by the environment.

334, if I will.

Just to say the number of people we have heard from so far, we've been in front of at some level through all of these efforts.

Our goal with this committee was to set that at 0.5% of the total population, which would be just under 700.

We've talked to just under 600 right now, if I get over 600 with the PAN-POP survey, so we're not quite there yet, but keep in mind that we'll have additional engagement once we get to the project selection.

In terms of the trade-offs that we're asking,

We were asking people basically which statement do you agree with or if you have to choose between these two, which one would you choose and how strongly do you feel about it?

So we were asking people what would you prioritize, roadway improvements or improvements for multi-middle improvements and there was a pretty clear indication that a majority of people strongly preferred for multi-middle improvements and for roadway improvements.

This next question asks which was more important in terms of access.

Is it more important to prioritize getting to jobs or is it more important to prioritize getting to community destinations that aren't necessarily related to work?

And now I think that there's some overlap.

People work at a grocery store, so, you know, there is some overlap, but sort of understanding what's important to people.

And this one, I think, was pretty interesting because most people kind of fell into the middle, meaning that probably they're both pretty important because I need to get the doctor and I need to get some kind of job and I don't really want to have to choose one of those over the other.

And then this last question was about as far as what should we prioritize as far as maybe trying to achieve our climate mitigation goals for the region.

Should we prioritize reducing congestion on roadways or should we prioritize active public transportation?

I just want to say to this committee,

I think it is interesting knowing that you were almost, I agree with you, to expect that, especially from the city, which is where a lot of your responses came from.

Yeah, so the Northern OCC, this is the last time I'm talking about how they really wanted to focus on, like, what they wanted was, how do we make 29, how do we connect the community despite 29?

Like, how can we create, like, more of a community between both sides of 29?

Yeah, that, in terms of multimodal, was really what's missing there.

Yeah.

You wouldn't expect somebody to, you know, commute to

although some do, certainly, but most don't but getting across the street or getting around the traffic patterns through the development on the west side there at the airport route it's all roundabout, it's very slick but if I had to walk around up in there for any period of time you know

I'm sure you all know this.

I want to say I'll just give a quick round of applause to our county because I was at their meeting earlier and I think it sounds like they're going to be launching their microtransits that covers that area and we're talking about it on our paper 30th so that will hopefully help resolve a lot of those challenges for some of the people.

And so this is just like an initial map that shows what kinds of comments they got and where it is.

It probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now until we dig into it a little bit but

You'll see in terms of especially transit improvement locations that people responded to on the Metro Press.

Again, this doesn't include the locations that we've heard of in the comments yet.

But you'll see there are a lot along 29.

And then the rest of it is more centralized a little bit on the city and out towards Hersey.

And then in terms of bicycle and pedestrian improvement locations, you know, a lot in the city, a lot increasing.

And then, you know, there's kind of exactly what you were talking about, after I got kind of in the 29, well, in the 29 area, largely.

And then this is pretty interesting, too.

There probably won't be a lot.

And then in terms of roadway improvement locations,

A lot of these, I mean I'm sure these follow some words and I'm not able to identify all of those words, but you know, you can see that there are clear areas where people like the IV corridor area maybe where it's buried up in there.

Yeah, everybody's like, text this one now.

Probably, yeah.

you know, coming in and out from your class.

So we'll get into this sort of and pull this out and make it make a little more sense that you could see that, you know, there are a couple of areas that people are very frustrated with that are pretty good.

And then these were the safety improvements and

I think one thing that would be really interesting is just to kind of compare and contrast if these line up with the original improvement.

It looks like I see some more where these just sort of go back and forth between those.

All right, so I'm going to share the demographic information that we collected from the MetroQuest survey, and I just want to highlight that this is

And I don't think we are not going to necessarily be able to recreate this for all of our survey responses.

What happened is that we started out thinking maybe we would be asking for demographic data as we were out in the community.

And it just kind of became a time limitation and just sort of the responses we were getting initially when we were trying to do that, it seemed like that was kind of off-putting for people.

and then about what we did to try to make our responses a little bit more of a person's ability.

Sorry, I completely skipped talking about this.

I'm sure that this is probably not a surprise to you all, but about 66% of the survey responses primarily drive away and then there's a mixture of IP and walking and carpool learning that kind of made up the other sector and then it's kind of a mixture of people who kind of do

some other things like Uber or maybe they rely on getting a ride from friends or something like that.

Predominantly we are from wider population, people, as far as the demographic, this second section right here, this 14% was actually the preferred answer category.

So there might be a little bit of limitation as far as

And one of the things that could have limited this as well is that we also gave people an opportunity to put their email address in if they wanted to receive more information.

So I could have done that if people wanted to put their email address in, they might not have wanted to also share them about their information.

It was all optional to share them.

So we had a small amount of black or African American respondents, a small amount of Hispanic,

or Latino, but not a lot of diversity that we can focus or acknowledge here.

We had a fairly wide spread of age groups.

You can see that's 18 to 24.

Age range is the smallest range right here compared to reproductive.

People are okay trying their age, I guess, I don't know how to put it that way then, or their age range compared to some of the other information.

So 11%, 25 to 34, the biggest cohort was 35 to 44, and then a fairly even distribution for the rest of it between the 55 to 64, 65 and older, and 45 to 54.

And then the household income also skewed towards the

So this 9% right here starts at the $50,000, the $75,000, so we didn't get a lot of survey respondents that were less than $50,000.

So what we did to kind of improve the diversity of our respondents was based on some of the public intercepts that we did.

We went specifically to the transit center, which tends to have a more, captures demographics that weren't represented in the primary.

There's more of a potential to capture lower income households or people.

And also there was a higher minority population at the transit center.

So we did get that feedback.

And then we also worked with CRAJ, which supports lower income families and households.

And so we were able to have some really good conversations with a couple of those communities for that effort.

And we also attended the national night alley events.

So that was a big community event.

There was a pretty wide variety as far as the types of events that we had.

But in Albemarle County, they were kind enough to allow us to join them.

And their national night alley event was actually one of our staff members, Jordan Lipski.

Here they actually went to a couple of lower income neighborhoods where there was a higher than average

primary.

That's who Albemarle has targeted as one who did their outreach with the National Night Out.

So that's who we talked to in terms of, for example, Albemarle and the National Night Out.

And then, as I want to mention that many organizations that represent some of these populations like PHA and workforce development, and I'm just not going to remember everybody off the top of my head right now,

We're going to work on how to maybe represent these grasses a little bit so that these aren't just going to report into the cultural group of those grasses and say, well, this is not a very proper sensitive of the public at large, but also acknowledging that there's just limitations in what we're going to be able to exhibit.

And then to their identity, this gives you a little bit more bail, but they're

It was a reasonable split I guess between female and male and then we did have a couple people respond if they were non-conforming or non-binary but this 8% is pretty much the answer.

And the reason we asked this question was just to maybe confirm or verify or understand if these weren't getting their representation that they were responding.

So our next steps is we're processing a little of this data and information and working to translate this into meaningful feedback in terms of guiding us on what our transportation priorities need to be.

And then we're going to also be working on mapping the candidate projects.

So those are all projects that have been previously identified through planning efforts like corridor studies, small area plans, et cetera.

And then we're going to start kind of mapping these together.

Where's our arrowhead for where we need?

Where's our project that we've already identified?

And that's going to help us narrow down the list on which projects we want to start.

All right, and so maybe if you all just want to have a little bit of a discussion about this, these are some questions that we threw out with our MPI technical committee.

The first question is, is there anything in the initial results that you've seen here today that would surprise you?

And then we're kind of talking about the program cons and maybe taking all of these unique engagement efforts and combining them into one big data set to analyze, or maybe looking at each difference separately.

Thanks for attending, Sandy.

Sandy, can I ask a question here?

There is a pie chart which shows that 66% of responders preferred not to answer.

I've forgotten what the... Yeah, do you know which one we're looking at?

Sorry?

Yes, I think it's this one.

We have the primary mode of transportation, I think, and 66%.

This is different.

It's difficult for me to see.

The 66% are the number of respondents that drive alone.

Oh, drive alone, okay, okay.

Well, that strikes me a lot.

Is that an indication of, because we are talking about providing mass transit, is there an indication that the community in general prefer to drive alone regardless of what happens?

And we are forcing to push mass transit into their systems.

Yeah, this question asks what their current primary mode of transportation is, but based on what we saw with how many respondents also really supported active and public transportation and multimodal options,

I think what I would, how I would interpret this is this is how people get around right now.

Yeah, that's what I might think too, is that the preference for mobile and mobile and kind of prioritizing that over anything else like

So it's sort of like your long-range transportation plan isn't really going to focus on congestion and intersection improvement and that sort of thing because everybody wants connectivity of the bike trails and the sidewalks and mass transit so

That's sort of, interestingly, what SMART SCALE is seeking to deal with some of this at the moment, which is weird.

It's really interesting to see what the final conclusions are.

Sandy, to your question of, well, there's somebody over here that's really going to save me.

There's somebody over here that's really transit.

That's one of the things I think you should do is this, or to Lee's point, what's actually happening.

So a current traffic pass where you have this many people driving, a cab is doing this many passenger miles or whatever.

And then that would help.

or wherever the variables are.

Plus, I think it will also help, because I'm going to bring this up, is with this, although you hear the goal, in the science community, this is almost just saying they know it.

It's not that they work.

They're doing it statistically.

But the statistics are what happens every week.

If you go out on a walk, that's everybody in the community doing the thing their way.

And so then, you can put weight where it's not that any of these other things aren't important.

But it's also a distribution, right, like the feedback that you got is the conservative feedback and then you went to all the different organizations that are

Just looking at the financial respondent values, you know, are different than most of the survey responses that we got.

So you have a broader spectrum of responses.

And I'd say that doing the caveat of, you know, measuring what we have now, that's not what people want.

That's why everybody's not for multi-modal.

That was an option.

They do that, but it's not.

Or it ties to safety too.

I mean, what I think of why I personally and totally don't use the multi-modal as much is I would want more of that, but also it's a safety issue for me.

Getting on my bike around Charlottesville, for example.

I'm just going to ask, with the sample size, if there was a number of respondents for the other two surveys, the one that was like the Charlottesville, you know, like, do you know?

I don't know what the sample size is for that other public feedback.

I know that all in, I think we probably had over an additional, like, 1,100 comments, so it is part of it.

That was how there were almost zero economic comments.

Of course people liked Jobs using public transit.

I mean, duh.

But so I'm seeing that there are no specific comments about the economy.

Yeah, I think the challenging thing about economic development is that it's really important to the governing bodies, and they also ultimately are going to select their products from this.

But I would say that from the public's perspective, what they think about in terms of what might support economic development, they just might not be thinking about it in that terms.

They might be thinking,

In Supervising Galloway, one of the meetings where we were talking about this was talking about how the land use coordination piece is really important to economic development because if you have a walkable neighborhood where people can live and go to their coffee shop or their restaurant, maybe have some of their services, get their hair cut, you know, those kinds of things all in one place, that's going to support the vitality of those economic development businesses.

but I don't know that that average person responding to that would be thinking of that as an economic development or an economic benefit for transportation so I think those are some of the things that we'll just have to kind of work through and there is going to be have to be some sort of like qualitative evaluations of just decision making and this information isn't going to be directly into this is how we prioritize it but it will inform the decision makers to know what's important to the community.

It looks like the income levels, it was so high, like so much to the high income levels.

Are you going to be able to break it down to see like by income level what the priorities were?

Is that possible?

It potentially could be possible.

I don't know that we were planning specifically to do that in terms of what that means in terms of power prediction, but if it's something you're interested in seeing, that's something we could

It's like more than half of it was, I think, how much was it?

Like two thirds was over the median income in Charlottesville.

Yeah, and part of it is also that this included Albemarle as well, which has a higher median income, but I don't know.

I mean, these are pretty typical results when you have a web-based survey.

So I think it's a good idea what you guys are doing for supplementing and incorporating the results into the data to be considered.

But there's not enough systematic demographic information in here for us to say, let's weight the sample according to what the distribution of the demographics are in the population.

So you just kind of have to take it and fix it up.

Just kind of be aware of it, that it's a limitation of the information that we have.

I'm done looking at the results.

I mean, it's just something we're kind of trying to evaluate here.

I think the MPA and technical committee thought it might be interesting to combine everything until one day.

I thought it sounds like you all are kind of saying that same thing since maybe the results from any individual effort are kind of skewed.

Maybe it makes sense.

Well, a lot of the public feedback was just a general conversation.

Not necessarily replicating the survey.

It was like, if you were in charge of the transportation system, what would be the first thing that you would fix?

Or what's the first thing?

Yeah, it's basically just an additional.

I'm not a data person, but I think public consolidating might be better because you just kind of need clarity and direction.

And so what do you hear when you say each engagement effort?

This doesn't include the ones that are like the county outreach versus the city.

But I think actually the fact that those two places have very different priorities speaks to the fact that residents in those areas have different priorities.

That's amazing how I have an idea of those together.

So there's not a lot of land development happening within the City of Charlottesville.

We can just combine them for areas.

They need different things in terms of facial regions, right?

Yeah.

Thank you all.

Are there any comments or questions?

So I haven't really, I know I've given you all a really brief summary of those changes to SMART SCALE but I know you all had a lot of questions and people felt very strongly about this so I decided to spend a little time on going through those changes a little bit more meaningfully and then talking about what the next steps in this process might be and hearing what thoughts or feedback you all had.

So I'm going to try to

Keep this still pretty high level but happy to dig into any details.

So if you're on familiar smart scale, this is a major funding program to implement major infrastructure improvements.

So this could be like redesigning an intersection, but it's also could be something like building a new bridge.

So

There are other funding programs for things like maintenance, highway safety improvements, things like that, state of good repair, the major repair bridge that's maybe reaching us where we need maintenance.

Those are all different funding programs, so this is really for major changes or new work-like capacity projects.

There are two funding programs related to SMART SCALE.

One of them is a district grant program,

So each of, the state of Virginia is divided up into construction districts through VDOT and each of those construction districts is allocated a certain amount of money and that's how the district, that money is through the district grant program.

And so the district grant program is intended to fund smaller locally significant projects and so localities are the only applicants that are eligible to submit funding requests through the district grant program.

And then the high priority program, there's funding allocated statewide.

And that is intended to fund these larger projects that are what they consider to have regional or statewide significance.

And so that is competitive statewide.

And then in addition to local governments, that's where regional entities like MPOs and PECs are also able to submit applications through those.

And then there are a few additional types of projects that are eligible to receive funding through the district grant program.

So both programs can submit projects that meet any state-defined need on the corridor statewide significance.

So in our area that would be I-64 and 250.

They're kind of considered probably the same corridor.

And then 29 are the corridor to statewide significance in our areas or a regional network.

and the regional network is defined as a statewide plan and it's largely based on MPO areas and they have a map that basically says these are the regional network eligible projects.

So MPO's, CDC's, regional bodies can submit projects to those as well as localities can submit projects that meet those needs and then in addition localities can submit another couple types of projects.

So anything that's a safety improvement defined by the state

or an improvement to what's called urban development areas, which are the locality defined urban areas.

So those are the two funding programs, district grant program, high priority program.

And then the other thing to know about SMART SCALE is that they do something similar to what we've been talking about with the long range transportation plan.

Basically when you submit a project through SMART SCALE,

It is going to be evaluated on the types of benefits that it is demonstrating in these scoring categories.

Safety, congestion, accessibility, land use, economic development, and the environment.

And then how much each of these different scoring criteria are weighted in terms of getting your project benefit score varies depending on what type of area you're in.

So the Charlottesville, Albemarle, MPO area is this purple area right here.

It is considered land use can be.

That means that it's an urban area, but there are more urban areas that are established for the purposes of SMART SCALE, mostly Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.

And then everything in our construction district

outside, within our region, outside of the MPO areas, area type C. So you can see that the weighting for these different scoring measures are different for those two.

So what happened is that in February, Secretary Miller, the Secretary of Transportation, basically charged the Office of Intermittable Planning and Investment staff with their comprehensive review of the SMART SCALE program.

And so they're going back and looking at, are the outcomes of this program aligning with what was established in the state code when we established this program or meeting our goals?

And then also, are we finding the right projects or are there project biases?

Are there any sort of biases in the projects?

There was a CTE meeting today that I wasn't able to attend, so this is obviously what happened previously, issues that had been identified up through last month's freshman year.

So there were concerns about the quality of applications related to SMART SCALE, the amount of administrative burden that the VDOT staff experienced by trying to support the development of applications and also the delivery or the actual construction of projects that were funded, and then there was a desire that the

evaluation criteria that were based on current traffic and economic development trends and there was a discussion about whether they should be using 10-year forecasted or projected information in terms of determining project benefits to have this be a more forward-looking process.

There were concerns about process sizes and specifically that applicants were submitting projects because they thought they would be successful and not because they were actually

And then there was a lot of discussion about the lame scoring factor because this one scoring factor had kind of an outsized impact on determining which types of projects are being selected.

And then finally there was a concern that was identified about how the actual funding allocation process

was not actually supporting the highest priority of a significant project.

So those were some of the findings that they're addressing in what they're discussing as far as changes to the SMART SCALE program.

So the first thing is related to the application quality and administrative burden and project delivery.

And so related to the application quality, what the Office of Intermittal Planning and Investment staff found when they reviewed this is that

50% of the applications in the previous most recent round were not completely ready, but it's how they were submitted.

So there was information that the VDOT staff was working on to collect from the localities that wasn't ready to be submitted when the project was submitted.

They found that an increased number of applications did not actually translate into a higher success rate for application communities.

and what was happening is that VDOT staff were supporting the development of a large number of applications that were never realistically going to be funded projects.

There was a lot of expense on unsuccessful projects.

The other thing that I thought was interesting is that the actual amount of funding from the SMART SCALE program, which was originally, I think it was implemented initially in 2017,

So since 2017, the amount of funding that has been allocated to the SCART SCALE program has increased by 50%.

So there's been more funding that's been allocated to it, but the staff has remained the same after that.

And so what they're running into is that there's just staff and faculty shortage.

And so when they're talking about, one of the things they're talking about is looking at the project size.

But one of the reasons that they're concerned about the project size is because they're smaller or less expensive projects and we have more money.

This is all working together to basically just overlay the impact that we have back to, not just for the applications, but also to actually support the delivery or construction of an inventory of these projects.

So one of the things that the Commonwealth Transportation Board is, at least at this point, is considering is reducing the application cap.

So currently we're able, each entity in our region is eligible to submit applications for applications, and they are recommending that we reduce the number of applications to two.

So it's like four parts, you get that for two, that for two years.

So we talked about this, the small projects, and why that's a significant concern for the Office of Environmental Planning and Investment.

So when they reviewed the overall success rate of different projects, what they found is that small projects tend to be more successful than larger projects.

This is what a larger project is, less than $2 million.

So you can see that a larger number or percentages of small projects or funding compared to larger projects, 51% versus 19%.

And it's specifically that small, bi-disciplinary projects are more successful than small, hybrid projects.

So 59% success rate versus 47% success rate.

And then a specific concern,

Is that the percentage of the high priority program funding, so remember that's the program funding that is intended to support those regional or statewide significant projects.

The percentage of that high priority program funding that has allocated small projects tripled between rounds three and four, from 8% to 24%.

There's a higher number of the funding that have been kind of set aside for these really

based upon the process size of the personal projects.

So the contributing factors to the small project bias are the infinite land use score, the types of high priority program, the types of projects that are eligible for funding through that high priority program, which is a larger funding program that's competitive statewide.

And so looking at the land use score, what they found is that the percentage of the overall benefit score

So depending on what the SMART SCALE score was, basically 49% of projects that were funded, projects that were funded on average received 49% of their benefit points, almost half their benefit points from that one, from just the latest category.

And then the smaller the project size, the greater the percentage of the project score comes from the Landry score factor.

So they compare large projects over 10 million to projects less than 10 million and compare different sizes of projects.

And as the projects get smaller, the higher the amount of points came from the Landry score.

and then 74% of the benefits for bicycle and pedestrian projects that were funded came from a land-use sporting factor compared to 37% for adult projects.

And so there are a couple of concerns that have been discussed about this observation.

The first is that the land-use sport currently captures where projects are located, but not necessarily what the expected outcomes are.

And then the other concern is that projects that have high land use scores may not have a lot of benefits that are being demonstrated in other categories that are scored for factors.

So it might have a little high land use score but it may not have a high safety score or a high accessibility score or it may not have any points of any other categories at all of them.

And so what, this is going to be a little bit challenging to explain, I think, but what the Commonwealth Transportation Board is considering based on the opposite than a right-of-way investment recommendation is to continue to use land use as a potential benefit for projects.

But instead of giving a standard one for land use, we will convert that to a multiplier.

And so what that means is that

In SMART SCALE, everything is normalized against the highest scored projects for that round.

So what that means is that you would calculate the land use benefit the same way.

But instead of just getting a score, so say your land use benefit is 10, you wouldn't just get like an additional 10 points for your project score.

Instead, what would happen is that that would be set aside and used as a multiplier.

So they would calculate all the other benefits that you're getting in safety and accessibility and economic development.

And then at the end, they would go back and look at your normalized land use score.

So if the highest score in your project got a, received a land use score of 100, and your project received a land use score of 10, your project is demonstrating 10% of the benefits of the highest score of the highest score project

You would get basically a multiplier benefit of 10% over to the other product scores.

So if your product scored, I don't know, like, I don't know, a seven, you would get like an extra 10% boost based on that land use multiplier impact, 7.7.

And so the idea is that this still gives projects the benefits of the land use, but it requires that projects are demonstrating

And then related to the high-priority project definition

So the current policy only defines where a project has to be located or what kind of need it has to meet in order to be eligible for funding through the High Priority Program.

So it has to meet a need on a corridor statewide significance or regional network.

But the policy does not specify the types of projects that are eligible for funding.

And so one of the things that the Commonwealth Transportation Board is considering right now is limiting the types of projects that can be funded through that high priority program that MPOs and PDCs can apply for.

Localities can still apply for any of those smaller projects that they could apply for previously.

This would limit what types of projects MPOs could apply for though.

So they had initially sort of developed these first six

criteria that they were considering, which is the new capacity highway, managed lanes, those are HOV or HMT lanes, that kind of thing, newer and improved interchanges, not intersections, and then newer and improved passenger rail stations, freight rail improvements, and fixed-gate transit.

At the CTV policy board meeting today, they did indicate that they were adding these last two, the transit,

So these would be that MPO would be limited to who would only be able to submit projects that met one of those criteria.

yeah yeah yeah in fact they did um they did confirm that in the meeting today but that would still be an eligible project and just just in case we went to a library or a river or a river at some point yeah they still really limit like smaller quality like that which is so amazing

Right, yeah and so to I think lead to your point earlier this isn't

There's not a technical handle yet, so I don't know exactly what that is.

It's probably going to be like a public highway.

Yeah, I know.

But any things like the

If it meets this definition and the locality wants to do that, we can kind of heal the deal, I guess.

So yeah, so I got to move this one from the like I'm not sure list to the, yes that's sort of a qualified list today when I'm on the new list, but basically I looked back through all of the project applications that were submitted by our entire MPO areas that include Albemarle and Charlottesville

The MPO and the PDC together submitted a total of either 26 or 28 projects.

I forget which one.

And so out of those 26 or 28 projects, the only ones that would meet that definition currently are these seven, maybe eight projects.

I'm not sure about this one at the bottom because it was

not specifically an improvement to the interchange but was fixing some weaving patterns related to the interchange so I'm not sure if that one would qualify.

So we're not, the MPO was the submitting entity for these projects that got funded so the good news is that MPO is already submitting the types of projects that maybe the CTB thinks we should be submitting but

It's a very small portion of the project that we submitted applications for as well.

And so this last one is a little bit technical, but basically there are these funding steps that you'll hear about in every single funding round.

And one of the concerns is that there are projects that are being funded through the high priority program in some districts that are scoring lower than projects in other districts.

And the reason is because of the steps you go to, it's a fun project.

So the first thing that happens is that all projects, regardless of whether it's eligible for funding through the district grant program or high priority program are just sorted by, they're sorted into their construction districts.

And then they're sorted by the project score.

And so what happens is that the district grant program funding for projects that are eligible for district grant program funding are funded first.

And then in the second funding step, they always said all projects that would have been funded if they were eligible for district grant program funding will get funded.

And I never really understood what that meant.

And then it's not until the third step that you actually allocate the high priority program funding on a statewide basis.

So the good news for you all is that I do understand what that second funding sounds like.

So the first thing that happens is basically, this is just hypothetical, everything is sorted into the construction district and will look something like this.

So the projects that have the expocited are the ones that are just eligible for the district grant program.

The projects in this column are just eligible for the highway head priority program funding.

Basically, depending on how much funding is available, these will get sorted and you start with the project that receives the highest score and you go down to the list until there's no money left in the district grant program.

And so in this case, just hypothetically, the lowest score funded project through the district grant program is going to be this West Lane shared use path and it has a score of 6.4.

So in the second funding step, what happens is everything is still being considered within the construction district.

But basically, it's a project that is only eligible for the high priority program scores higher than the lowest scoring funded program through the district grant program.

So if it scores higher than that 6.4 and is only eligible for the high priority program, that will be funded in that step two.

And so what happens is that since this is the step two,

is basing all of the funding through the high priority program initially on the lowest scoring funded project that is determined for each construction district.

If your construction district has a really high, it's really competitive and you have really high scores, what that means is that you might have a project that's only eligible for HPP that scores like 10 or 11, but because you're in a more competitive project,

Whatever, a more competitive district, your project isn't getting funded whereas high priority program funds are being given to a region that has lower scoring projects overall.

So what they're talking about doing right now is eliminating that step two and so you go straight from sorting everything by construction district to sorting everything statewide.

I think the reason that they probably implemented this step two is to get some reasonable insurance that each locality will be competitive and be able to receive some of this high-priority program funding for these really important projects.

We were just thinking if they were saying that dividing by the cause

$10 million over the cost.

I want to find $10 million divided by the cost.

It is unfair to higher-five or higher-cost projects, which is what they're supposedly trying to encourage, instead of using like a project cost $40 million.

and it had a score of X, a raw score of X, then the final score would be X divided by 4.

Instead of using

Thank you for coming sit down somewhere and playing an assessment, yeah.

It seems he's working at cross-purpose when they say that a low-cost project is going to score way high because if you take like the 3MTFL here, the $400,000 cost, and you divide it by 4, it multiplies the score by 2.5.

So that's going to score really well, even if they're not so greatly priced.

Yeah, it's all about the benefits for the value, so I think some of that is intentional, but you'll see that this is before the meeting today, so I haven't factored, this doesn't consider the changes that they made that were reviewed today, but basically, when they looked at what the overall outcomes were of all these combined impacts statewide, what they saw is that the number of funded bicycle and pedestrian projects was reduced from 15 to 13.

There was one highway project that was added, and then the transit, you know, this is a small sample, so I started to know what the overall impact would be to transit, but transit projects aren't really utilizing SMART SCALE very robustly right now, regardless.

But what they also found is that the project size increased.

So, you know, there's one more highway project, but it would probably be different types of highway projects, but there's more of it.

So CTB, they had a meeting today.

Like I said, that's in the review.

They have a comment portal that's been established.

So this is also currently under development right now.

And there are opportunities to provide feedback

But I know you all have a lot of questions and felt very strongly about some of these changes so I wanted to come back and give you a more inclusive opportunity for discussion.

What was the...

I just have a question.

On local government large projects, there's no large projects here by trade.

No, actually, all city businesses or whatever.

It would have to, so it could have been systemic, it could have been like, you know, we want to develop our vibes throughout the city or something like that.

The VDOT now has a new multi-use sales option for this model, so that's why I thought I'd have a fun time to get a good example to say.

I think there's one, I don't think there are any comments from the public, but there's still a lot of questions.