Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   1/17/2024

Alright, I will call you out one by one and just say here if you're here.

Lee Kondor?

All right.

This is something we do at the first organizational meeting of the year.

Lee has been serving as the chair of the committee.

You were appointed by Albemarle County.

Donna, you were appointed by the MPO.

Donna has been serving as the vice chair.

The appointment is for a year.

Typically, the chair is invited to be the liaison between the Citizens Technical Advisory Committee and the MPO Policy Board.

And then the vice chair is invited to the MPO Technical Committee meetings.

You're not required to attend, but you are invited.

So with that, it's probably good to have one officer from different types of appointments.

But with that, you all are welcome to nominate an officer, probably starting with the chair.

There's another officer positioned here.

Is there a second?

So the motion was by Marty, seconded by Patrick.

Do you name the minutes?

I'll nominate it.

OK. Can we get a gavel?

We have one.

We have one.

All right, next word of business is, oh, sorry.

I move to approve that.

Is there a second?

Second.

Second.

All in favor of approving the minutes from the January and March 23rd meetings, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Yeah, maybe before we get into this a little bit, we have a couple of people who are newish and brand new.

So maybe if you all want to, maybe we can just take a second to introduce ourselves and let our new and newish folks know where you're coming from.

And also, we have a new TJPDC staff liaison.

Sure.

So hi, everyone.

My name is Curtis Scarpignato.

I am a planner here at the TJPDC.

I have been here for a year now, and I assist with our rural transportation program, our city streets and roads for all program, and now also this, amongst other things.

Marty Meth, I represent Albemarle County.

Donna Chen, I work at Canvo.

I've been on here as long as Marty, I think.

I'm Nathan Moore, I'm the brand new one that she was mentioning.

I am the new rep from the Albemarle County County Commission.

Hi, Stuart Gardner, MPO,

I'm Greg Weaver, Charlottesville.

Well, our new year is off to a great start.

Alright, so the first thing we're going to talk about is, it's been a little while since we've met, we've been doing a lot of work on the Long Range Transportation Plan, and so maybe before, unfortunately I didn't really think to do an intro slide, but this looks really complicated and maybe I'll take a step back before we get into the nuts and bolts of this.

But basically one of the things that MPOs are required to do are to develop, basically identify transportation improvement priorities for the urbanized areas.

So our urbanized area for the Charlottesville-Albemarle-Limpio includes the City of Charlottesville and basically the urban ring

That is not really a ring.

It basically, it's kind of like a T shape for Albemarle County following the 29 corridor and following the 64 corridor.

So it goes from Crozet along 64 out east to basically the Albemarle County line and then south not quite to North Garden.

So I think we determined that Dr.

Hose is not within the MPO boundaries in case you're wondering.

But just a little bit north of that, up the 29 corridor to the Greene County boundaries.

So those are the MPO boundaries.

So what we have been working through with our MPO is first identifying what the transportation needs are in the region and so you all may recall that we had gone through a public survey and we had identified some goals and we asked for feedback like which of these goals are the most important to you and we asked a series of trade-offs and really what we are trying to get at is

What value should we be considering when we prioritize what the transportation needs are?

So our goal is to start by identifying the transportation needs and then determine where do we have projects that we've already been queuing up that can meet those needs.

So starting with the transportation needs helps us identify which of the projects are candidates to be in that high priority list of projects that we will want to pursue.

And so there are two things that are going to happen.

First of all, we're going to have this prioritized list of needs.

We're going to match that against projects that we've already identified to help us determine which projects we need to be prioritizing as far as our funding requests and implementation efforts over the next five to six years.

And then the other thing this is going to help us do is identify where there are needs that we maybe haven't queued up a project for yet that we need to focus some additional attention on to do studies.

Starting with the needs assessment is a little bit of a different process, and it's been a little bit more complex than we initially anticipated, so it's taken us a little bit of time to do this, but we have completed the processing of the data.

So what we did as far as identifying the needs is we identified the goals that we wanted to consider for our transportation system.

So you can see over here on this table.

And I can't move my cursor.

Oh, there it is.

It's on my screen.

On the left-hand side, it says prioritization category.

Those align with the goals.

So we basically said our goal for our transportation system is that we want it to be safe.

We want to increase multimodal accessibility, meaning we want to make sure that people can get around the area.

using the mode that is most convenient for them.

We want to consider efficiency and economic development.

So that was mostly looking at the congestion and travel time reliability.

We wanted to consider how transportation improvements will support land use initiatives by the local governments.

And then we also wanted to consider the environmental impacts of our transportation projects.

So those were our goals.

And then we identified these evaluation metrics that we would be able to pull data from to help us get a sense of where there were needs associated with these goals.

I'm not going to go through these in very great detail, but

We looked at, we tried to take a multimodal lens through all of these.

So wherever there was an opportunity to consider transit, bicycle and pedestrian, and roadway safety, or roadway conditions, we tried to factor all of those in to make sure that we were considering true multimodal movement throughout the region.

And we developed a couple of, we identified a few metrics for each of these categories.

So safety, we looked both at roadway safety and bicycle and pedestrian safety.

The multimodal accessibility was a little bit of a more complex process to assess, but we basically developed this measure called potential for accessibility improvement.

And this is basically identifying where there is, how the current condition of the travel mode compares against an ideal condition for that travel mode.

So for example, how many jobs can somebody reach currently by bike compared to how many could they reach currently if the level of travel stress

to travel through that same pathway was reduced significantly.

And that gave us a sense of they could reach this many more jobs, which created this potential for accessibility improvement metrics.

So this is measuring where is our opportunity to increase access to jobs.

For the efficiency and economic development, we were really looking at congestion and travel time reliability.

How congested are the roads?

Are they exceeding capacity?

We did include a measure initially for the transit on-time performance and just had some trouble getting the data formatted in the way we could utilize it.

So we may go back and consider it, but it is a pretty low

Pretty low weighting overall, and it's not likely to impact the score, but that might be something to go back and do as time permits.

And then the land use coordination is measuring how many destinations could be pulled together with a transportation improvement.

So this would prioritize places where there's already a density of development and a high level of attraction.

So places like the growth areas where you want to have strong walkability and transit access.

So we have all these performance measures.

The public engagement that we did included asking the public for feedback just on where are their transportation needs based on the map.

We haven't completely pulled that into our analysis yet, but it also gave us an opportunity to sort of weight goals.

And so as we were developing these measures, we had developed three different weighting scenarios.

One is accessibility focused, so focusing on getting the most people to the most places as conveniently as possible.

The second weighting scenario was a balance scenario.

So if you just look at all these goal categories, it's basically assigning equal value to safety, accessibility,

efficiency and land use coordination.

And then this last one was mobility focus, which prioritize getting people places quickly.

So this one, basically the main difference between these is the trade-off between the accessibility measures and how much weight we put on the efficiency measures.

That's really the difference between accessibility focus and mobility focus.

And so what we heard based on the feedback that we got from the survey is the strongest desire of the community was really about improving accessibility and improving access to different travel modes.

So we use that public feedback to inform which of the waiting scenarios we move forward with.

So all of the needs that were evaluated basically were we took each of these individual factors

We scored all of those.

We assigned the weighting factor based on the weighting scenario that we identified, and we used that to map all the needs.

You all have a link to all this data, so if you really like the data, and if you really like GIS especially, I included the shapefiles in the folder, you're welcome to go in and look at this in more detail.

But just for a little bit of a preview, I think the highest scoring need, there was only one that we used a seven point scale, so one to seven.

So if something was between a six and a seven, the aggregated score weighting all of those together, it would have been a high priority need.

or a very high, high, medium, high.

So nothing scored, the highest score project was a 5.07, I think just over a five.

So we don't have anything that scored higher aggregated than this medium high priority needs.

So we'll recontextualize how we present this, but just in terms of our scoring system.

This is where the scores sort of let us with the data analysis.

I'm going to go through this, a couple of caveats.

First of all, this is just what the data is telling us.

So we need to vet this against what we also heard for the public feedback and make sure we do a little review to make sure that if something was scored with a high accessibility need or a high safety need that that actually intuitively makes some sense based on what we know about the area.

But it doesn't mean that if a need doesn't show up there, it's not a need.

It just means it's not a need that the data analysis identified.

And this just helps us give us information that we might miss if we just use our own personal knowledge.

So the highest priority need is the section of Route 29 from Greenbrier Drive to 250.

There are some projects that are

have been identified in that general area but probably will continue to see needs on 29 because it's just a complicated corridor and there's a lot of pressure on 29.

Medium priority needs, you start seeing it expand out from the city center a little bit.

So we have more projects along the 29 corridor.

You start seeing several projects pop up along Fifth Street, which I don't think was very surprising.

Raya Road at Fashion Square Mall popped up.

I'll give you just a second to look at this if you want to.

And then we go down to the next tier, the medium load priority needs.

Again, still quite a bit in the hydraulic 29 area a little bit further north on 29 and then we start seeing some some needs along the 250 corridor and Pan Tops.

Additional needs out on Bryant Road.

We start seeing some needs around barracks and Emmett Street and Ivy.

You're aware that the county did, about a year and a half ago, a traffic corridor study of O'Brien.

It didn't factor into the data analysis.

What we did, though, is that, you know, the next step of this is that we're going to confirm the needs, the transportation needs, and then we're going to use that to map that against the projects.

There are a whole bunch of projects identified in the Colorado study, and then there were metrics associated with accidents and that.

So you have a lot of data.

What this process helps us do, though, is it helps us use a data-driven approach, which is one of the requirements for long-range transportation plans, to assess a large area because we can't do a corridor study on every road within the MPO.

So this gives us a way to assess this on the big picture.

But when it comes to actually prioritizing the projects,

It might be that a project that isn't as high of a priority based on the need might be a higher priority for other reasons.

So this is part of the conversation, but this isn't going to define what our transportation priorities are.

It's helping inform the discussion to identify our transportation priorities.

The other thing that this isn't going to do is it's not necessarily going to tell us what is the right solution at each of these locations.

It's gonna tell us there's something going on at this location,

So it's a little bit more, I think you're, I don't know, not taking it into account enough and somehow having this needs, I can't just tell.

But there was so much effort done in that study.

We got public input already.

We're just not there yet.

What this is helping us do is it's helping us understand how important is Rio compared to Fifth Street or compared to other issues on 29.

It's helping us sort of put it into context.

But that's not to say that we're going to disregard the work that's done.

So again, this is the data analysis part of this.

This is only one factor that we're considering.

It's not the only factor.

We're going to have to have lots of conversations.

There's going to be a lot of these types of discussions.

So the question might be, Marty, is if doing several projects on that Rio Road corridor is an identified priority for Albemarle County,

We need to make sure that that's going to be prioritized in this long-range transportation plan.

So there are some lower priority needs as well in the green.

The idea is that this helps give us, sort of start whittling down our candidate project list.

I think we probably have over 150 projects that come from like corridor studies, et cetera.

So we need a way to start narrowing this down in order to prioritize maybe our top 30 to 40 projects.

And so the idea is that this can help us inform which of those 150 projects maybe are the right ones to start with.

and then figuring out what other projects maybe need to be added into the mix as well.

So again,

There's a table that is included in that SharePoint Drive folder as well.

So if this is interesting to you, these maps from the PowerPoint are there.

If you're a data person and want to go in and look at the GIS shapefiles, those are available as well.

But there's also the table.

So if you want to go in and look at it and say, why is this section on Preston Avenue?

What is contributing to that score?

You can look at that table and it will show you where is it getting the score from and what it is.

giving it that high score that's pulling it up to that like medium or or why isn't it a higher priority need?

You can kind of look at that.

This is not a perfect process.

We're using data that is available publicly.

We're doing the best we can to use the information we have and painting in very broad strokes.

But it does help inform a conversation for the region.

No.

That, yeah, so that is actually defined from the statewide transportation plan, V-Trans, easing their

They use, it's proprietary so we don't know exactly what it is.

But it's basically they have like walk scores, transit scores, bike scores.

And it's an assessment of like the, it includes like several different factors like the sidewalk network, the like proximity to destinations like schools and grocery shopping, restaurants, things like that.

And so anything that has a score,

whatever that score is based on, a 50 or higher is considered somewhat walkable.

Yeah.

If you like to spend time in D-trans, it has like the factors that they list, but I'll go into that.

We will be, so our next steps with this,

And again, we're probably going to start at the high priority needs, review our candidate projects, go down the list kind of, but I fully anticipate that there will be projects that are indicated as these lower priority needs that are also going to be picked in because they might be priorities for additional reasons.

Like if something has a really, really, really high safety need, even if it doesn't have any other improvements or any other

You know, needs associated with it.

That's probably something we still want to make sure we are eligible to move forward with.

What I failed to mention is that the primary reason that we need to identify these projects in the long-range transportation plan is that being indicated in the plan is the first step for these projects to be eligible for most of the state funding programs.

So you have to demonstrate the project is consistent with your long-range transportation plan before you can apply for funding.

So our next steps are, if you have comments, Marty, if you want to officially provide feedback or comments, we'll certainly be collecting public feedback as we work through this process.

And then, like I said, we're going to be determining our candidate projects,

and then getting some public feedback on what projects, maybe what the public like to see that we're not including or which other projects that we do identify.

Do we need to make sure stay on the list or should we remove completely from the list of, you know, maybe the public, maybe there's an older study that was done and the public would prefer a different solution than when we've already identified.

And that might be something that we

The term that we need additional study on.

So that's going to happen between February and March.

And then the goal will be to have a pretty close to final draft of the plan in April.

The SharePoint file, it is linked off of your agenda.

So if you go to the agenda, I forget what it says on the agenda.

Yeah.

Under item number three, there's like a link that says on the needs prioritization process that links to a folder.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yep.

Sandy, I have a question.

Public input today, they start what you said about it.

Where did you get that?

We got that from the survey.

Our staff did, I think, do you remember how many it was?

Was it 16, 14, 16?

Somewhere between 14 and 16 public engagement check-ins with the public.

And that total would be about 600.

inputs.

OK. Yeah.

Yeah.

No.

Our feedback with them was basically to help us vet the language associated with the goals.

I see.

Yeah.

So we are going to go back to the stakeholders, those same stakeholders again.

in February to talk about the findings and get their feedback, but we're going to do more general public engagement as well.

Yeah.

There weren't any means or identified as high priority that you were going to be able to calculate them.

Yeah, it's not really that we're going to like recalculate them.

It's that we're

When we develop this for the public, we'll probably just have high, medium, and low categories.

So we'll probably combine the medium and the medium-high, and the medium priority needs a high priority.

These will be medium, and then anything else that we add will be low priority.

We also have a process, though, to

So this helps us identify our potential candidate projects, but we also have a process to prioritize the projects themselves because one of the important factors for how feasible it is to implement projects is going to be the project cost.

You know, we want to, you know, ideally we would implement the most effective projects for the region that help us meet our goals.

But there also is like a level of pragmatism to this.

Well, we are going to reapply for another RAISE grant, but we can talk about that a little bit.

Yeah.

So he says like in order to apply for state funding that you have to like identify a need and this would be like the need identification.

Is there like a rubric in the state funding that you have to identify a high like

That's how you made it.

No, it basically needs to be an identified project in your long range transportation plan.

So historically, there's a little bit of a shock because historically, we haven't had programs like SMART SCALE that are competitive programs.

So SMART SCALE kind of changes some things for us a little bit.

But typically, what has happened is that there's a forecasted revenue projection on how much funding that you're going to have.

And you basically identify the project saying, we think we're going to have

$50 million on average each year to implement projects, and these are our highest priority projects.

So we're not really gonna go that route, because now it's competitive, and we could have $100 million come into our region every two years if we pick the right projects that were effective at SMART SCALE.

So it's really about helping us identify which projects are gonna be most competitive for which sort of funding programs.

There's a lot of it.

But making sure that anything that we potentially might want to develop into an application is listed.

Yeah.

So regarding the bridge, well, do you have any other questions about the long range transportation plan?

Okay.

So, Stuart, feel free to help me out here because I know you've been following the CTP discussion.

So there are a bunch of changes made to the SMART SCALE program based on a lot of meetings that the Commonwealth Transportation Board had between basically all of last year, I don't know, when they started April, March, I don't know.

And they voted on some things in December, and then they changed their vote on some things yesterday.

But I think we're done now.

A couple of things that came out of the CTB meeting that are going to affect how projects are evaluated through SMART SCALE is, first of all, they were using a current day congestion factor to determine the congestion benefits of projects.

They voted to, well, the recommendation was to use a 10-year.

congestion factor and they compromised and approved a seven year future congestion factor.

So the idea there is that it takes a year for the funding to get approved and then it gets added to the end of VDOT six year improvement program.

So seven years from the time you apply for a project is basically when a project typically is scheduled to start.

So that's why they went with seven.

They changed the way economic development benefits are scored.

That's not really clear how that's going to be impactful, but I think some of the concerns are that they're focusing more on the types of projects that's gonna give more emphasis to the types of projects that are being marketed by local governments.

And one of the concerns, again, Stuart, jump in if you want to, is that this is going to encourage the development of greenfield sites

and maybe incentivize transportation improvements that contribute more to sprawling versus that are transportation efficient.

Is that fair?

Yeah.

And then probably most importantly related to the bridge is they changed the high priority program eligibility.

And the reason that that is important is because MPOs and PDCs and transit agencies are not eligible to submit projects.

through the smaller district grant program.

We can only submit projects for application through the high priority program.

And so, when they change this definition, we'll talk about this for a second, in a second, it means the MPO is no longer eligible for the Matthew Ravenna River Bridge as a SMART SCALE application.

A locality can through the district grant program, but the MPO is not an eligible applicant at this point.

That said, we're still going to apply for a federal raise grant to do the preliminary engineering for the raise grant and we're hopeful that either through further refining the cost estimate for that project that maybe that starts to make sense for Albemarle County to prepare and submit the application or we could also go back at that point if we are successful and apply for another federal grant.

or the bridge itself.

So we're still pursuing it.

It's just not as clear of a path forward.

The efforts to change the application limits failed.

So we will still have the same number of applications that we had previously.

And then there was this back and forth about the land use factor waiting.

So the staff that was involved with this had recommended basically

instead of having land use as a standalone scoring factor to convert it to a multiplier.

And then in December, the Commonwealth Transportation Board members decided that they just didn't want to consider land use at all and voted to just take it out completely.

And so that was the case until at the last meeting yesterday, they decided to vote on it again and edit back into the multiplier.

So the way that the land use score is going to work is that

You know, it used to be, I think, for our area, we are the MPO areas and it's land use area, type B.

So land use was, I think, 15%.

So a percentage of that 15% got reallocated to a combination of, I believe it was congestion and accessibility for our area.

kind of programmed it differently in other areas.

So then what happens is that this land use score, you're still going to get a benefit score for land use, but instead of having that be a percentage of your score, that's going to be converted to a multiplier.

So if you have the highest land use score in the category, basically your score is going to be determined in safety, congestion, accessibility, economic development, environment, and then your score will double and everything else

It gets multiplied by a factor based on what the highest score in that category was.

So you get a little bit of a boost for land use if you get a high land use score.

But what this is doing is it's not funding projects that only got a land use score but didn't get benefit points in any of the other scoring criteria.

It's the opposite.

So Type A is like the most urban.

It's like Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.

Basically, Type B is Richmond, Charlottesville, and Fredericksburg.

And then C is Lynchburg and I don't know what other.

I'm not really as clear of what the difference is between C and D. C is rural and D is really rural.

It had a huge impact on the bike and ped projects.

Yeah, I think it went down to

Oh gosh, I want to say that there, I don't know, it went down to like maybe a dozen projects that would have been funded in the previous round under the scoring criteria from, I don't remember what it was, maybe like 50 or 60.

So it was pretty significant.

One of the concerns though was managing VDOT's capacity because basically they were saying that we are getting a lot of projects that are funded through this high priority program that are actually really small projects.

And so, um,

They were having to manage a higher volume of projects and were just running into capacity constraints.

I think there's also a bit of how you define certain transportation.

There was a really interesting discussion at the end of one of the meetings about what makes something a transportation trip versus a recreation trip.

I don't know if you really have a lot of time and want to listen to any of these discussions.

There were some interesting ones.

So then the other thing that happened as far as this is that they defined not just where projects had to be located for

for them to qualify for the high priority project or the high priority program funding.

So if you recall SMART SCALE, there are two funding buckets.

One is the big statewide bucket and that's really intended to fund these like bigger statewide significant regionally significant projects.

And then there's the district grant program.

So every VDOT district gets allocated a certain amount of funding and those are intended to

from the more locally significant projects and so there's this effort to basically define what should be considered a regionally or statewide significant project not just where the project had to be located and so they came up with this definition and one of the really disappointing things is that

When they were talking about bridges, they initially had new bridges as its own category and did not specify that a new bridge had to include vehicular access.

So when they ran all of these scenarios based on the previous round of SMART SCALE with the new scoring metrics,

The Ravanda River Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge actually would have been funded.

It was very competitive.

Just add motorcycles to it.

Yeah.

So anyway, I think there is a path forward, but it's just not as clear and direct as it used to be.

So really what they're trying to do with the high priority program is find new roads.

So if there's a new alignment or if you're adding lanes, things like that.

New capacity projects are eligible.

Projects at interchanges are eligible.

And then they really tried to say if there were like transit projects or freight projects, they needed to be larger scale.

And then they also added, based on feedback, this entire corridor improvement.

So there are projects like the hydraulic area where we applied for a grade separated interchange project.

and it just wasn't going to be competitive because it's an expensive project, $120 million.

It's just going to be hard to be competitive through something like SMART SCALE.

And so basically this is saying, okay, if we have a series of projects that are defined through one of these studies that VDOT supports and grouped together can provide significant improvements in an area, then as long as you submit all of those preferred projects as one project bundle,

You can submit that as a high priority project.

But the caveat is you have to submit all of them together as one project.

So those are the projects that define what the MPO is going to be eligible to submit in SMART SCALE.

Getting into our potential MPO projects, that kind of whittles our list down pretty significantly.

So the projects that we have identified that the MPO could be eligible to submit

would be an interchange improvement project at I-64 and Fifth Street.

So this was part of the Fifth Street corridor study that was completed I think in 2021.

The study did indicate that there was a need for more basically study or analysis to determine this, but very tentatively suggested that a diverging diamond would be the appropriate, would probably be the appropriate improvement at that interchange.

The Hillsdale South Extension, this was a project, we can talk about these in more detail in a minute.

The Hillsdale South Extension was a project, basically if you recall Hillsdale over where the, not Wegmans, Whole Foods is, they're putting the, yeah, they're putting, got to get my grocery store straight.

They did those improvements of hydraulic.

They're putting a roundabout there.

So this would be intended basically coming from that roundabout to provide an extension all the way along Hillsdale to connect directly to 250.

And then it would remove some of those interchanges between 250 and 29.

and redirect vehicles that want to make those movements through that local road network.

This was identified as part of our Solutions 29 hydraulic study, but what we found out is that there's an additional level of review that is now required for this project, and so we wouldn't be able to prepare this project in time.

For this round of SMART SCALE, it could be something that we keep on the list for future effort though.

And then we had two projects, bundles that were identified in round five of SMART SCALE.

And so again, based on that definition of entire corridor improvements, as long as we submit these as project bundles, we could submit those as projects.

Yeah, it's because basically VDOT has some new requirements that require an additional level of review and analysis.

That's just going to take too long to complete.

I won't say that.

Yeah.

So but we can we can leave this on the list and, you know, consider it for next round, just knowing that we need to start a little bit earlier on that one.

And then VDOT is also currently working on two pipeline projects, and it's not clear right now if either there would be an eligible project that as a standalone project that comes out of these, there's one at US 250 and Bear's Road.

And then there's another one at Ivy Road that includes the 250 interchange.

The Ivy Road probably you Albemarle folks can talk about is a pretty complex area.

And so I think that one, it sounds like it's just going to take longer to figure out.

So that was probably not likely to be ready for at least an entire corridor set of corridor recommendations to be submitted.

I mean, 250 is actually part of my daily commute.

Yeah.

I will.

Yes, I do.

Yeah, yeah.

So we can get

We can go through these in a little more detail.

I think you all have some slides that were in your packets if you look through them.

But do you want me to talk through each of these projects briefly?

Just quickly?

Okay, so the I-64 5th Street interchange improvement, basically the goals of this were to, it's one of the top 100 PSI, potential for safety improvement locations, so there's a safety concern there, it's starting to, this is very jargony, the eastbound ramp is performing at a level of service F in the afternoon, so basically there's a capacity issue, the volume is exceeding capacity,

It gets backed up, we all experience that.

Concerns about pedestrian accommodations, concerns about bike ped access across the bridge at that interchange.

There was a corridor study that recommended doing some additional analysis but indicated that a diverging diamond is probably going to be the preferred alternative and VDOT already reached out to the MPO in I think around November or December of last year and just asked if we were

at least willing to consider this project.

So VDOT is already working on this study, so we will be able to move forward with a recommended alternative for that project.

If you're really interested in the street conditions, this shows where the level of service, the yellow and orange mean that it's starting to get backed up, the volume is exceeding the capacity.

And then this is a heat map that shows the bubbles of where the

crashes are occurring along the 5th Street corridor.

Yeah, so, yeah, so probably, probably that's important to be good for it as an application.

That makes sense.

So it could just be cross-jurisdictional issues.

5th Street Station, that road that goes by itself, has by walk and by lane because that's the new infrastructure.

The problem is the interchange.

And that's what the diverging guidelines.

That was the counties.

I think the other part is if you look at 5th street extended all these sort of housing developments on the east end windows really

When those get proposed and then eventually approved and then built, you know, they can proffer affordable housing, they can proffer this and that, but the county is somewhat limited.

You can't say like, all right, to build the Sunset Avenue housing, you're going to have to build a sidewalk all the way up to the interstate.

Unfortunately.

And you can't condition them to do sidewalks past their property line.

I think the development that did provide some proffer to do some of this development, that actually is part of what went into that hubs and trail project that the MPO submitted to build a connection basically to Biscuit Run Park up to Wegmans.

So I mean, there was some of that in place.

But I think, unfortunately, the limitations of what the infrastructure is able to support at the time of the development

It could be a consideration, I suppose, that the localities could consider whether or not they want to approve the development.

But that's the kind of choice that they're weighing.

Like, do we want to approve the development knowing that we won't have the infrastructure?

Or do we know that's going to take the infrastructure a while to catch up to the development?

I'm not mistaken.

Any other questions on this project?

Bank until they get a couple of profits so they can build a sidewalk from, of course you have a series of developments.

Oh, I've been on the commission since April.

I don't know the answer to that.

I think typically the profit would be like, we're going to build a sidewalk along this road.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

I can tell you from the cities, from maybe on the bank image,

Really hard to do.

We're doing something like that in Stripling Avenue.

But it's hard to, it's a capacity issue, first of all.

Usually, there's also a limitation on when you have to spend it within a certain period of time.

Well that's strictly exactly the same, we're going to put up 127 units there, but no improved infrastructure for the people and the cars going to and from there.

How does that make sense at all?

I think they gave $2.9 million for sidewalk improvements for stripling.

The Peter Jefferson Parkway and Rokin Road Pipeline projects.

So these were developed through the pipeline project for around five.

Both of the projects were submitted separately at that point by the TJPDC, but in order for it to meet that criteria for the MPO to be eligible to submit it, they would have to be submitted as one application, both of those combined.

So this table down here shows where they got the project scores.

So you can see that there were some land use scores, but they also had specifically the Peter Jefferson Parkway project.

Also had a good amount of benefit points that were derived from economic development and environmental factors.

And that was largely because it included a park and ride flat.

So this set of projects, I will go to this one.

So this is basically adding a

like elongating the right turn lane on Peter Jefferson Parkway to try to avoid the queues.

It's removing the through cut traffic.

So you can't go straight through this intersection anymore.

You can turn right or left, but you can't go straight through to try to minimize the traffic movements.

It's closing a median crossing right here.

I forget what that route is.

And then it's adding the park and ride lot with the capacity for 50 projects or 50 projects, 50 cars.

There were some concerns.

This parcel has changed ownership with less Minister Canterbury, but I think the city staff at least is tentatively still comfortable supporting it moving forward and working with that property owner for any concerns related to the development.

And then the second project that would be included in this project is a little bit further west at Rokin Road.

So basically you'd be adding some pedestrian crossings at three of these intersections.

This is Rolkin Road and Richmond Road or 250.

So you'd be adding this intersection across Rolkin Road or this pedestrian crossing across Rolkin Road right here across 250 and then at the northern quadrant of Rolkin Road.

Where's Rolkin?

It's striping crosswalks.

It's also adding a pedestrian island, mid-walk, and then it's also extending the sidewalk for the stretch of the, for the road.

And so it'd be those two projects.

And so previously,

They will have transit access there.

I don't know if, that doesn't necessarily mean that transit would stop there, at least not right now, but I think one thing to remember there is there's also the new micro CAT service, right?

That's operating on Pamtops, so people could come into town from out of the area, park there, and then access micro CAT, or get on another bus route.

I mean, I don't know what the breakdown is.

I can go back and look at that application.

Yeah, it's all in a public corridor.

I can see if anybody wants to be able to access this information.

I suspect a lot of it is right away, though.

Yeah.

And utility pools.

Yeah.

But yeah, we have a cost breakdown.

Anybody watch that Parks and North Creek episode where Ron Swanson fixes the pothole?

So then there was this other set of projects over in Shadwell and the MPO could be eligible to some of these projects but we're probably not going to recommend that because the benefits were really low.

It's not likely to be competitive.

So while it's eligible and while there are some high safety needs, it's just not very likely to score well through SMART SCALE, but we can walk through those.

So again, we would have to submit this as a bundle to project.

And Lee, I know you also had another idea for this area, but the first project would be

What's called a displaced left turn so one of the issues here is that Louisa Road comes onto 250 here at this kind of weird angle and so one of the goals would be to basically close You wouldn't be able to make a left turn onto Louisa Road from the eastbound travel along 250 so they would close that and you would have to go through this intersection and

and make a U-turn and come back and turn up that way.

So that was the recommendation for that particular intersection.

So people could figure them out if we have enough of them.

And then there's a roundabout that was proposed at the intersection at North Milton Road.

Well, yeah, when I close it, and note that this has a new bridge, too.

Oh.

So instead of lying Louise and Ronan Milton Road,

So you see where Milton Road used to be, moved somewhat to the west, have a single roundabout, completely eliminate the intersection at the present intersection of Louisa Road and US 250.

So now you have one intersection instead of two, you completely get rid of the traffic signal and it worked much better.

And actually cost less than what VDOT proposed.

The terrain is perfect for crossing the railroad there.

The road is 20 feet higher than the railroad tracks.

You go right over it.

And actually that roundabout is bigger, about 170 foot diameter instead of 150.

That would solve the whole problem.

I'm not sure that VDOT will agree with your cost estimate.

The beauty of it is, once you have a new bridge in there, the road that connects to the roundabout from the north uses an existing right-of-way, so there's no, the right-of-way impact is minimal, even though you're moving roads around, because the school owns the land that's between where the road is now and where it's moving, so basically the county already owns the land.

Well, I don't know what you'd do with the no man's land in between sell it to the farmer there that owns the land now or whatever, but between the quarry and the farmer, it's just brush land now.

Nobody's using it for anything.

We're probably not going to recommend this project move forward.

I sent that design to Sean, but I never heard that.

I like it.

And so then we have the two pipeline studies, and I don't have any specific recommendations.

I can say, though, that this is the map of the area that is part of the pipeline study for the Barracks Road and that the V-Trans needs, so V-Trans is the statewide transportation plan, and basically to be eligible for SMART SCALE, the projects you propose have to meet a stated need in V-Trans.

And so the V-Trans needs that could be addressed along Barracks Road

our safety concerns, bicycle pedestrian accessibility and transit accessibility.

That's for the barracks road pipeline study.

And then for the Ivy road pipeline study, the V-Trans needs, it's a much bigger area.

It's a much more complex, I guess, community engagement process.

There's a lot more active development in that area, I guess.

And there are just some really challenging conditions for that area that they're trying to work with.

So there are a lot of projects that are coming up around that area.

How do the new projects play into the needs in terms of the factors?

Do you project out and say they're going to build 300 more apartments in the next five years?

You know, that's how the state determines their needs.

So I'm not sure if they factor in those pipeline developments as part of their needs assessment.

That doesn't apply necessarily to...

I mean, it could.

I don't know.

But that is related to how they evaluate the benefit scores for specific project applications that are submitted, which isn't necessarily the same thing that they're using to identify the needs.

Yeah.

Ideally, there would be a relationship between them.

Yeah.

That said, I am not on staff with the Office of Intermittal Planning and Investment and not spent enough time on the plan to know that offhand, but we should be able to find that out.

It probably at least plays a role in the congestion mitigation type of thing.

So Hillsdale South Extension, again, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this, but basically the goal, the main benefits that were identified when we submitted this previously were really the congestion mitigation.

And that's because we would be moving the traffic off of 29 and 250.

Better connectivity.

You can see this got a very high release or so.

We wouldn't have that benefit.

So this is something we can certainly keep on the queue for consideration in the future rounds.

And then this is what it would look like.

So this is the Whole Foods.

There will be a new

There will be a new roundabout right there.

You'd be able to come down to 250.

Cars that wanted to go from 250 making the move down to 29 would basically go through one of these local road networks.

And then these ramps between 250 and 29 would be closed.

So basically,

This is what we're recommending basically because this is what's left that is likely to be feasible to move forward and is likely to score well enough to, you know, at least stand a chance of getting funded.

So it would be the interchange improvement at I-64 and Fifth Street, the Peter Jefferson Parkway and Rokin Road improvements.

And then if we're able to get projects identified on time, projects either for the whole corridor or for a

Yeah, I mean, we can keep it on.

We're eligible to submit it.

I think what, I mean, kind of the feedback I'm hearing is that we just don't know if it's worth the staff.

like effort to submit it.

I think that's really what I'm hearing.

We're eligible to submit it, though.

Well, I don't know, Lee, because of the requirement associated with it has to be a preferred

Even though it fixes two intersections that are displaced from each other.

Well, is there any way we can at least recommend that VDOT look at it again, maybe in a second?

is ask the policy board to make that request to VDOT if you wanted to do that.

And then it would be up to the policy board to have VDOT.

I have a question.

So like with the I-64 history project, like, so let's say you add that to your TIP in the difference world into the STIM, then let's say VDOT selects that project

Would they be responsible for putting it out to bid and letting it or does that come back to the MPO?

Yeah, so basically, unless the project is in the city, VDOT administers the vast majority of the projects and they will administer all of the projects that the MPO submits.

We don't do that.

Even some of the projects in the city, I think VDOT could

if it is a regionally significant project that would, yeah, that there would be support for it.

One of the things you mentioned, some other grants,

How does that fit into the mix?

Yeah, so I mean, there's all of these federal discretionary grants, those have their own sets of criteria for what types of projects are eligible, what those projects are evaluated against.

So it would really be up to, it could be the MPO, but more likely in a lot of those cases, it would be the locality to determine, do they have projects they want to move forward that align with the goals of those discretionary grants?

And can they prepare the applications?

That's what we're doing with the Romano River Bridge Project.

It aligns really well with the RAISE grant criteria.

We have a competitive application, so it's worth pursuing through a non-traditional channel.

It's just that those are going to be really competitive programs.

versus the other state programs though that we can be discussing are, you know, there's not just SMART SCALE.

One of the benefits for SMART SCALE is that there's no local match requirement for it.

So you can do bigger projects.

The funding part is a little bit bigger.

And there are these sort of checks and balances to try to at least consider distribution of funds statewide.

But there are other funding programs in the state too.

One of them is revenue sharing.

Those are 50-50 matches, so the locality has to put up at least 50% of the project cost.

There are also limitations, though, to how much funding localities can receive each round, all projects in, and how much funding a project can receive in total from revenue sharing.

and then there's also transportation alternatives.

Transportation alternatives is an 80-20 match.

So the state, I think that's actually federal funding, but you'd get 80% of the project funded, locality pays 20%.

I mean, VDOT is the, I guess that's a gold trickle agent, yeah.

Thank you.

The original what?

Well, the first step is to do the, you mean through the VDOT pipeline project?

Basically, they are in a state, they've done the first level of like

existing conditions assessment so they've collected the data and they've done the first round of public feedback so right now they're in the process of developing the different alternatives so they're going to determine what are the needs what types of crashes are occurring at different places and what are what is like the possible universe of projects that could resolve those concerns.

And then they'll do another round of public feedback on what those alternatives are.

Some of the locations could have one alternative.

Some of them could have three different cost points for those.

And then based on that feedback, they'll make the recommendation on the alternatives that are most likely to probably be competitive with the SMART SCALE program.

Right, so that's it for SMART SCALE, so that's next.

That's it, right?

Yeah.

I guess I can give you a very quick update.

So we had a regional safety summit with some elected officials and professional staff from all of the jurisdictions in the TJPDC, including those in the NPO.

And we are going to be going to the boards of supervisors and the city council in the coming month to request their support for a letter of commitment to reducing serious injuries and fatalities on the roadway network.

And also just so that we have their commitment to engaging in this planning process over the next two or so years.

So that's where we are currently.

I have a question.

If you want to like formulate as CTAC, ask the policy board too.

Is there a down?

What would the downside be?

Because I have no skin.

I don't know anything about that intersection.

So like, I would be in favor of just doing it if there's no downside.

Well, I mean, if there's a desire to vote on it, we can certainly do that.

What I probably would do is I'll just send out an email to the policy board and say, here, please consider this at your next meeting.

And either they will or they won't.

I proposed an alternative design for the pedestrian bridge and I had one member who liked the idea and the other four didn't, so that was the end of that.

So I will make him aware of it.

I don't know whether we voting as a group and saying, yeah, you ought to look at this would have any more impact than me just submitting it personally.

Well, you're doing it on behalf of the group, basically.

Well, yeah, I mean, whether that carries any more weight with them or not, I don't know.

But if you all think you want to vote on it, we can do that.

I move that we vote on it.

All right, well then, is there a second?

Second.

No, you're only voting on voting on it.

Maybe you should recommend that.

All in favor of voting on it.

All right.

Looks like that carries.

So then a prospective motion would be to vote on recommending that the policy board at least consider that alternative design.

Yes they had, which you would do.

Right, right.

I mean, I've already, I'll second that.

All right.

So all in favor of CTAC recommending that alternative?

Looks like we care is okay.

Public input has weighed more than what was considered to mind.

Fair enough.

Well, thank you.

I just do those things for the fun of it.

VDOT will spend $100,000 for the consultant to come up with what they did.

It's expensive.

That said though, the efforts that the CTP has recently gone through to make changes to SMART SCALE is intended to provide better support for those larger scale projects.

Right, so there's nothing else on the agenda then other than matters.

Yes, the vacancies on

I think we have two.

About one of the newest members of city council has kind of put transportation from the center.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

The only, we just have two Albemarle County appointments that we're working on filling.

Yeah.

But you all did a great job of showing up today, so thank you.

You too.