Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   3/20/2024

I live in Albemarle County.

I've been here since 1982.

I live in the Forest Lakes area.

We need any more information or?

I'm glad I'm right.

Okay, very good.

Oh, are you Peter?

But just for the new folks including myself.

That's alright.

Too much.

So we start with Jose and then... Do you want to lead off?

I'm Lori Jean Talun.

I am the Regional Housing and Community Development Grants Manager here.

Christine Jacobs, Executive Director here.

I'm Nathan Moore.

I'm on the Omaha County Planning Commission.

I'm Jeff Ball.

And we'll just move briefly to those on Zoom.

If you would just introduce yourself.

We'll start with Ethan.

I think Ethan had to step away for a moment.

Oh, thank you.

You're right that that's in the chat.

Yeah, hey, I'm Alan Simpson.

I'm with EPRPC based out of Charlottesville.

I'm down in Richmond, though.

It's my first time joining one of these meetings, so I'm happy to be here.

We've been helping the TJPDC with the long-range transportation plan, and that's what I'll be talking about today.

Can I speak now if I have a public matter?

I live over on Glennone Avenue in Belmont, which connects to Ix Park.

And every Saturday morning, the traffic on Blenheim on the 600 block is atrocious and dangerous.

There is no sidewalks at all on Blenheim.

And so there's often like families and people walking down the street while cars are driving, sometimes at 35, 40 miles an hour down the street into the parking lot of X.

Well, they have been, at least from what I've read, I've been making an effort to try to fill in sidewalk gaps.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I guess there's potential of safe streets for all kind of projects, but yeah, I think the city can probably run with this more than the MPO can.

Anything else?

If not, then we'll move on to approval of the minutes from the last meeting.

I don't see where you are here for that.

They looked okay to me, but does anyone have any changes that they've made?

I need a couple of minutes for the client to say what he wants to share.

Thank you.

Yeah, okay.

Well, I'm glad we have another two or three minutes.

And also, so hopefully, we have a second.

It will be seconded.

All in favor signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Motion carries.

Smart scale alternatives.

So you say Chuck is going to be late, so we're going to move on to moving towards 2050.

Yep, let me share my screen here and make sure everything's working properly.

All right.

All right.

Well, thanks for having me.

Again, my name is Alan.

I'm with EPRPC based out of Charlottesville.

And we have been working with the TJPDC to get the long range transportation plan done.

And what I'm going to do today is

Present feedback that we've heard over the last month from a series of stakeholder meetings as well as an open house event we had earlier this month.

And I'm going to present the latest list of infrastructure priority projects.

So yeah, the goal of this is just to kind of share what we've heard so far and share the latest list of projects with you all.

and in your packets you should have a list of those projects and a list of brief descriptions of each project.

The descriptions are not going to be on the slides so just refer to that packet if you need more information about each project.

And you might note, when you look in your packet, the list of projects and the descriptions, it's not in the same order as this presentation.

I apologize for that.

That was taken from one of the posters from the open house event.

So these projects, when I get to them, they're not in any particular order.

They're not organized by priority or anything.

But yeah, so I'll get into it now.

So

If the PowerPoint goes, there we go.

So our agenda today is to talk about stakeholder meeting and open house, an update on the priority projects, give you a summary of the feedback that we heard from those events and open it up for questions and discussion if there are any questions.

So

We had three stakeholder meetings this month.

Starting on the first, we had a business stakeholder meeting, we had a public safety stakeholder meeting, and a community partners stakeholder meeting.

Each meeting had four attendees, and we had attendees from a range of organizations around Albemarle and Charlottesville, from the county, UVA, Visit Charlottesville, Blue Ridge Health Department,

Albemarle County Police and Fire, CAT, Southern Environmental Law Center, Three Knots Trail, Piedmont Environmental Council and the CAA.

And so we had four attendees each for those meetings.

They were about an hour and a half long each.

And we presented the list of priority projects to them.

And we're looking for their feedback.

And on Thursday, March 7th, we had an open house event at TJPDC lobby.

We had nine attendees to that one and we received one comment card.

So the objective of the stakeholder meeting in the open house, we were aiming to validate the proposed list of priority projects, engage general agreement with the plan's recommendations thus far.

We asked stakeholders to give feedback on how they would prioritize the proposed projects to influence the constrained list.

We have our own

priority level set to each project that we came up with through a data analysis process where basically we analyzed the whole the road network of the MPO and we applied different metrics to it.

I'm not sure this has been talked about in previous meetings since I haven't been there before but basically EPR did data analysis on the MPO's road network

We looked at things like pedestrian safety, bike and walk access, crashes, congestion, and basically put all that data together, made a map of the MPO's road network, and each road segment was graded from high to low need, basically what needs to be improved on each road segment.

Each project that I'm going to go through, the first line is going to say what we determined or what the process determined the priority level to be.

And then we wanted to see how, if there was agreement with that, if there was disagreement, because it's not, it's just one part of the puzzle.

We don't want to, that doesn't speak to the, that's not the last word on the priority for each project.

So just want to preface that.

And then we were also looking for details.

So

Any comments that help to guide the project details and form VDOT designs to feed into funding applications.

Some of these projects are in, they're kind of vague or they might not have any specific recommendations that we just want to get feedback that would help influence that.

So just a quick recap of the priority project identification process.

Again, if this has already been discussed in previous meetings, I apologize.

I just wanted to kind of give a primer.

So we came up with a list of candidate projects based on improvements identified through previous planning efforts.

So small area plans, corridor studies, transit strategic plans, regional plans, and project pipeline and STAR studies.

And let's see, priority projects were identified based on locally identified priority improvements.

And then the needs identification process that I just mentioned, the kind of data intensive process that we undertook.

So we looked to see what projects were out there that have been proposed or in early stages or, you know, just are out there have been recently committed.

And then we looked at the road network and the priority by priority level and look to see what projects are already

in place that will address those needs and which ones are the highest priority based on those metrics that I mentioned.

And then any needs that weren't addressed by a committed or recently implemented project or one of the priority projects we're going to go through, we indicated those as planning priorities.

So those are things that we need to look at over the next several years.

So we started with what's out there already and these priority projects are going to be

Things that need to get done in the immediate future in the next few years.

Next slide, there we go.

So here's the list of projects.

Again, you should have it in your packet.

And I'm going to go through them one by one and just talk about the feedback that we heard from each project.

So each slide is going to have a vicinity map that shows the location of each project.

It's going to show the priority level that was identified in our prioritization process.

And then it's going to show what feedback we heard from stakeholders and if applicable, the open house.

So, again, so you'll see when I go through these, the needs prioritization process.

There were some that were

You'll see quite a few that actually said low priority.

That's just relative to the entire road network.

So we have a handful that were high priority, a couple of medium priority, and a few that were identified as low priority, which doesn't mean they're not important, but just relative to the entire road network, they were mentioned as low.

So I just want to preface it with that.

So I'm going to start going through the projects now.

So the first one is the I-64 and Fifth Street interchange improvement.

The prioritization process found that as a low need, relatively speaking.

In some of these meetings, we didn't hear much feedback about some of the projects.

Some groups felt more strongly than others.

So you'll see NA a few times here.

But public stakeholders graded this as a high priority.

Community partners, it was a low priority, so they agreed with the rating that we had.

So this project general comments there were it would improve pedestrian and bicyclist safety at this interchange and enhance access to outdoor recreation at Biscuit Run Partners in the future.

We heard comments that a transportation hub is needed here.

We had one stakeholder who was against the idea of a diverting diamond design here.

And we had a comment that the entire corridor needs to be addressed and not just this interchange.

So that's the feedback we heard in the stakeholder meetings on this project.

If anyone has questions as I'm going through, please feel free.

I'm going to move on through and we can discuss at the end if there are no questions as I go through.

So the Rio Road peanut shaped roundabout and shared use path.

So that's here, the intersection of Rio and Hillsdale and Old Brook Road and Northfield Road.

We identify that as a high slash medium priority based on the metrics that we looked at.

and that was the public safety stakeholders interestingly didn't have a lot to say about that one they were they didn't find a high priority but the community partners definitely did and so the business stakeholder group didn't really give us a priority level on that one but they did feel that speed was a concern on this corridor and that there's a need for safety improvements our community partners were very concerned about safety concerns and deaths at this intersection and a lot of issues with biking safely along the riot road corridor

Interestingly, the public safety stakeholders didn't feel that there were many issues here, I guess, compared to other parts of the road network.

Yeah, it is interesting.

I mean, it's a small sample of a four-person stakeholder group, but I guess to them, maybe it's not something that they

that they used often or weren't that familiar with.

But yeah, I agree.

It definitely seems like a problem area.

Airport Road in 29, so intersection improvements there identified as relatively speaking a low priority.

Business stakeholders said that was a high priority.

The other two groups didn't have a lot to say in terms of the priority level.

They agreed with what we had in general.

So general comments, I think a lot of us know it's difficult to cross 29 as a pedestrian under current conditions and

With density increasing there in the future with more development and that's going to become even more important.

So just a general support for improvements at this intersection.

Our public safety stakeholders prefer to see things like stoplight timing improvements, sidewalks and crosswalks rather than a big capital investment like a roundabout.

So that's something to consider.

The Ivy Road corridor, this is a long stretch and the overall need was low for our prioritization process, excuse me, but the stakeholder groups thought this was a much higher priority in general.

Business stakeholder groups were kind of looking at it from a business standpoint, or we asked them to, so they said it would be essential for tourism coming in and out of the city and fit the county there.

Our public safety stakeholders, especially fire and rescue,

mentioned flooding and congestion issues along this route.

And our community partners were definitely interested in a shared use path along Old Ivy Road to improve walkability.

The US 250 corridor out in Crozet, we're looking at where 250 passes by Henley Middle and Brownsville Elementary.

Our public safety stakeholders thought this was a high priority.

They definitely thought it was a higher priority than what was identified in the data gathering process.

Pedestrian access at Brownsville Elementary and Henley Middle was cited as a challenge.

They're saying that sidewalk access on nearby roads is inconsistent.

They stop and start kind of random places, not so easy to get to on foot.

There was mention of a potential roundabout design.

There was some concern that that could be confusing for bus pickup and drop off.

Avon Street extended in Mill Creek Drive.

Intersection improvements identified there.

That one didn't get a lot of feedback in terms of the priority level from our stakeholder groups.

They generally agree that it wasn't the highest priority.

Mentioned that it could be a good place for a roundabout and the business stakeholders felt that it could be a good future thoroughfare for Biscuit Run Park.

For the Old Lynchburg Road shared use path, again,

This one didn't get a ton of feedback.

Low priority in general from our identification process, but still something that needs to get done.

representative from CAT cited a need for a light or a roundabout at this intersection, which is kind of related, but we're looking at a shared use path here more than anything else.

Berkmar Drive shared use path.

This one, no strong opinions really.

It wasn't the highest priority out of what we showed everyone.

and the Eastern Avenue connection out in Crozet.

This is going to extend to Eastern Avenue to 250.

It doesn't have an identified need because the road doesn't exist yet, and we're looking at the existing road network when we did that process.

So there was no need identified with it.

In general, people agreed that it's something that should happen, but not a high priority.

Sorry.

Yeah, it's interesting to see the different responses from different groups for sure, but stakeholder groups didn't have a lot to say about that one.

So for the Barracks Road corridor, that one, the needs identification process didn't identify it as the highest priority, but it definitely was

something that the stakeholder groups thought should be higher.

So high, medium priority.

It's a high priority area for pedestrian and bicyclist safety as well as traffic congestion.

This intersection here, Ridge, McIntire, West Main, South Water Street.

We identified that one as a medium priority.

The business stakeholders agreed it was general agreement with that priority level.

Comments on that one were that it's unsafe,

for visitors and residents alike.

Equity needs to be consideration with these improvements.

This area serves a lot of people living in low-income housing.

One stakeholder mentioned the need to implement the Ridge-McEntire streetscapes plan.

Another comment we got was someone suggested closing off South Street to vehicle traffic, but there were some concerns that access to Midway Manor would be impacted if that were to happen.

So definitely something that was agreed upon

Medium priority.

The Ryer Road corridor improvements there between Huntington Road and Greenbrier Terrace.

That's one that was flagged as a medium priority and the business stakeholders felt it should be a little bit higher, but they didn't have a lot of details on that one.

They just said that seems more important to us.

For the Fifth Street multimodal improvements,

You'll see three need categories there.

That's because when the data analysis process looked at each individual road segment.

So there were some road segments that were high need based on congestion, public safety, excuse me, pedestrian safety, that kind of thing.

And some were less so, but in general, it's a high priority corridor.

Business stakeholders definitely agreed.

The other groups didn't have a lot of feedback on that one, but

Comment that, you know, the multimodal improvements are important, but it needs to happen in conjunction with improvements to the entire corridor as a whole.

Our representative from CAT said that they would like to see a bus lane on this corridor, especially going south.

For Preston Avenue multimodal improvements, that's one that was identified as a high medium need, depending on the road segments, overall high need.

There was agreement with that from the stakeholder groups, at least the business stakeholder groups,

Just to comment that the 10th Street intersection is confusing.

The Hillsdale South extension, that one was identified as a high need.

And there was agreement from that from the business stakeholders.

You're seeing a lot of NAs on this list.

Some of these groups, we honestly ran out of time to talk about everything.

And we, at a certain point, we had to ask, you know, take a look through the list if there's anything that jumps out at you or that you want to discuss.

before our meeting's over, we'll do that.

So some groups didn't get through the entire list in the meeting, and we didn't hear much feedback from them afterwards.

So there were some projects that didn't get a lot of feedback, but didn't have any other comments on that one, just some agreement that that is a high need.

And Peter Jefferson Parkway and Rolkin Road access management and pedestrian improvements.

That was a medium need from the prioritization process.

The business stakeholder group thought it would be a higher priority.

In general, there weren't a lot of comments, just something that needs to happen.

And finally, I think this is the last one, the Ravana River bicycle and pedestrian bridge between Pantops and Woolen Mills.

That one was identified as a medium need, basically based on the congestion at Free Bridge.

And this is something that was suggested as a way to improve multimodal connectivity.

in that area, and hopefully relieve some congestion in that way, but also just a way to connect those two areas.

Didn't have a lot of comments on this one.

Not a lot of disagreement, but not a lot of strong opinions.

So other feedback that we received, just to share it, we did get one comment card from the Open House event.

So that comment said that the city's plans for West Main Street are an interim stage, but there's no long-term project identified in the long-range plan.

And they would like to see vision projects that are more visionary.

I believe you all have the vision list in your packet as well.

That's for long-term, long-range projects, not the ones that we're identifying as priority projects for the immediate future.

On the project website, we received a couple of comments.

A comment that the draft priority list lacks detail on the planning priorities, which I mentioned earlier, which are needs that aren't being met by any project that's out there right now.

So they're interested in learning a little bit more about those, and they would like to see them studied very soon.

We did get a comment about the 2050 level of service, which is one of the metrics that we used

in our needs identification process.

This comment, they were saying that it wasn't a great way of representing conditions in urban areas, which is just a fair point.

I will say that the process that we went through to identify needs in the road network, congestion wasn't the biggest component.

It was actually one of the smallest components because the goal of this plan

The focus is more on pedestrian safety, safety in general, and accessibility, multimodal accessibility over congestion.

So level of service, we included that as one of the considerations, but it wasn't the most important consideration.

And then there was just a comment about appreciating the forum to talk about this thing.

The next steps.

So we're going to finalize the priority list using stakeholder and public feedback, develop implementation strategies, review of the final plan, and then the long range transportation plan will be adopted in May.

So moving right along there.

So that's, yeah, that's the feedback of what we heard.

Excuse me, that's a summary of the feedback that we heard in the past month.

Happy to answer any questions or if anyone wanted to talk about any projects in particular.

Yeah, and so the priority level that I mentioned, that's just from that data intensive process that we did where we looked at the road network.

And then we also made a heat map of public comments

And then how are you going to use the public, the stakeholder prioritization in the next round?

That's a good question.

Yeah, I think it's the way that we think of it is, is one small piece of a very large puzzle, right?

This was 30 days of engaging stakeholder committees.

It's not comprehensive and it's not,

you know, representative of the community, like you said, how many people compared Jose and filled out a survey.

You know, I think it's important to note as a part of our process, but I don't think it determines the priority level.

I think it's interesting that some of the things on the priority list are already approved projects, like

Fifth Street extended and Old Lynchburg Road, I mean there's already a project put in around that intersection I believe and of course VDOT selected Barracks Road as one of their things to focus on for round six

SMART SCALE funding, perhaps a bit too ambitious in what they've got envisioned, but at the very least, making the off-ramp, the eastbound off-ramp off of the bypass to prepare for two lanes wide instead of one would certainly mitigate most of the problems there.

Yeah, it's interesting,

that those projects, even if they're in planning stages now, in an application stage now, it's really important that they show up in the long-range transportation plan, should they not be funded.

I think the Barracks Road gets all the way up to Georgetown Road here.

Yeah, and the only other thing I'll say is there were a couple of instances where we did run out of time to talk about everything.

And we made sure to, you know, let everyone know if they did have further comments to, you know, shoot us an email or leave a comment.

We didn't receive any further feedback.

But yeah, there were a couple of meetings where we

Okay.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's a lot to do.

All right.

Any other comments?

If not, I guess we'll move on to the Unified Planning and Work Program unless Chuck is available.

Yes, he is available.

Go ahead.

I don't have them opened up and you guys have it there.

It'd be easier on the bandwidth to do it this way.

Good evening.

Good evening, everyone.

I'm sorry I'm late.

I had to drive back from the MPO offices this evening, so it was a trek to get back here and still make it in time, so.

Yeah, we are.

I can pull it up online and share it because I've joined the meeting from my computer.

I can get started on Barracks Road.

We just received the public feedback back last week from the public survey so what I tried to do was look at what we had proposed and based on the public feedback and in discussions with the staff and the MPO and the county staff I had basically pulled out the preferred solutions that had the most public

Byan, and consolidated them into one slide deck for all the various locations.

I'm not gonna go through all of the various alternatives, but I'm just gonna present this and give you the information on how well these did from the public survey standpoint.

All right, next slide.

Okay, this is the first portion and this is the western section from the interchange west to Georgetown Road.

And this is also the location that the county is looking to submit for their SMART SCALE application this round.

It includes a roundabout conversion at Georgetown Road.

with crosswalks on all four approaches.

It also has an access management component along Georgetown Road that basically closes the median and narrows it to four feet and shifts the eastbound lanes to the median.

You'll have an offset probably four feet because you're basically going to shift the road over approximately 12 feet and that's going to give us 12 feet of space to put in a buffer and a shared eight foot shared use path.

So we're trying to do that so we don't impact the right-of-way.

A lot of those houses along that frontage are real close to the road, and they're set down from the road.

So if we have to go wider and get right-of-way, we're going to impact a lot of residencies along that road, and we're trying to limit that as much as possible.

The next slide is how these fared from a public survey application.

Okay.

Georgetown basically had 1400 responses and we had 66 other respondents were in favor of the roundabout at Georgetown Road.

Of the 1,400 respondents, we had 618 written comments that were also included.

And a lot of those were negative.

But if you look at the percentage, it correlates based on the number of written comments to the percentage of negative people that were opposed to the project.

Can I ask a question?

Sure.

I'm curious, do you have a general sense of how people are responding to roundabouts generally?

I mean, are people, is this standard?

Basically, I'm kind of wondering, are they against a roundabout here or is it people are just against roundabouts?

Well, I think in this case, most of the people were for this roundabout.

Typically what we're seeing across the district is they tend to favor them, but they're usually at both ends of the spectrum.

They either really like them or they really hate them.

And there's not many in the middle, but in this case, we've got significantly more that favor this location.

That's part of what I was asked.

Like I said, the ones we've run, we just had a survey up in the town of Culpeper and most of those came up, they were like

like I said you had about the same number that were for it as were against it so it wasn't this split like you've got here and then I had some up in the town of Warrenton where I had one location where they were supporting it but all the other locations they were against it so it's not consistent but then I have another one we did the pipeline studies last year

For the last round of SMART SCALE up in the town of Warrenton, we had three locations that were proposing roundabouts, and those were all highly supported.

But again, there's not a lot in the middle.

It's usually at the

and they're either really supporting or they're really against it.

So I was, this one is, and when we get to the ones at the interchange where we can see the difference, but this one, I'm really surprised that we got this much support because typically they are split more.

For the access management portion, again, that one was pretty well supported too, 56% in favor of it.

Again, we still have a lot of negatives regarding, but it's a low number of 223 written comments versus 800 responses for their whole survey.

So it's significantly lower number of people actually providing written comments.

Next.

Okay, this is the interchange.

I will show you the data for each of the roundabouts, but basically we're looking at roundabouts at both interchanges and also a shared use path that runs through the roundabout.

By using roundabouts, it actually allows us to reduce the section underneath the bridge from four lane to a three lane.

and allows from the space to put the shared use path under there because there's not as much volume on that eastbound direction.

And it's also not as impacted at the roundabout because you don't have a lot of people making U-turns on the eastern side.

Next.

And this is how this, yes.

The Eastbound, if you look at how it operates, you've got people coming from Georgetown.

Most of those people are going on to 250 bypass in the morning.

The return trip is coming down the Northbound ramp and making the left-hand turn to go Westbound.

It's basically because we that's how we review these.

We analyze them based on the peak volumes in the morning and the peak volumes in the in the p.m. and then we massage them to give us the optimum solution without creating these big roundups.

I will say on these

The concepts are a little bit deceptive.

There's going to be significant right away impacts with these.

Especially on the west side, the one quadrant has, that's where the retaining wall is and we're probably going to take that, we will take that retaining wall down and we will probably impact that first property.

We may impact the second property to build this.

Also, we haven't actually done some of the

performance metrics on this to check fastest path and some of those metrics which we'll do when we've refined them before the SMART SCALE application in August.

So that's just to let you know that these are just for initial impact on the concept versus what the total impacts of the project is going to be.

The other thing it's not showing, there's currently sidewalk on the north side, which isn't shown on this.

We're going to retain that sidewalk all the way on the corridor because it runs the full length of the corridor.

Yeah.

Again, these were supported not quite as well as Georgetown with 51% for the west side one and 55% for the east roundabout.

But again, you've got a lot of negative comments, but it's only the people that are basically against the project for the most part.

This is another thing that scored fairly well.

We don't necessarily need it with this application, but it was one of the things that was ranked really high in the public feedback.

So we wanted to include it.

Currently, the queue backs out onto the bypass in the PM, and this would resolve that issue.

Just as commentary, that's one piece of feedback that MPO Tech gave

that if this element is actually not helping with the operations, perhaps removing it can help with the benefit cost analysis that goes into it.

And we can come back and put that in if we start to see the queuing start to back up again.

But I'm hoping that the roundabouts analysis is not showing that that's going to be a factor in the design here.

So I think we should be all right.

And this scored really well.

Like I said, this was 62% were in support of it.

So that's why it kept it in.

And there were some negative, but not as much as we've been seeing with the roundabouts.

Any questions about this one?

The next portion is basically extending the shared east path from the interchange into the city.

They currently have two projects at Emmett and Barracks where they're running shared east path along Emmett Street from the south up to the intersection and then they're running shared east path east on Barracks up the hill.

So this will basically connect with what they're already proposing to do.

And this was well supported too.

We had 75% for the portion that basically runs out to the Ravenna Trail and then the Ravenna Trail to the Emmett Street, it was 72%.

But even here, we do have some negative comments, but they're not very many.

And that's pretty much it.

For the applications, we're looking at three.

The MPO is gonna submit, the county is gonna submit the western portion and the MPO is gonna submit the eastern portion, the interchange and the shared use path.

And also the entire package is a separate application for SMART SCALE this round.

So we're working with them to put those applications together.

I'm working with the consultant to refine a lot of that material we have to do

Interchange Modification Report.

And we're in the process of working on that right now.

We've got the framework document that we're getting signed, and then we'll be compiling the information for the report.

But we need the framework document as part of the pre-application, which is due April 1st.

Yeah, I have a question, Chuck.

On the slide with the two ramp-abouts, would it be feasible for the shared-use path to go underneath the two ramps instead of being at grade?

It's sort of awkward the way it is there.

You've got right-angle turns, which are difficult for bicycles, plus you've got

All the traffic on the ramps moving fairly quickly which doesn't bode well for great crossings.

What possible and

Yes and no.

I mean, a lot of things are possible.

Feasible?

Possibly, probably not because we're trying to get these funded and adding culverts or some sort of structure to allow for the shared use path underneath those ramps might be infeasible to actually fund the project.

Basically addressing some of the congestion and safety issues at this location.

There are some, but they're not tremendous.

Okay, one other question.

Yes, and we don't want to make the U-turn at the interchange.

We'll have to have that discussion about how we're going to do that moving forward because we're splitting up the projects, but we haven't had that discussion yet.

Okay.

I mean, two of the streets do go up there and there is some interconnection.

Okay.

All right.

I actually had a follow up about where the shared use path crosses.

The two rams, yeah, like using the mechanism for allowing those shared, like the bikes to cross the road there.

Well we'll put in at both of those locations we will be putting in some sort of like probably rapid flashing beacons at this point.

I know at the one at Georgetown Road we had a big discussions about those at the MPO Tech and they were asking about raised crosswalks and rapid flashing beacons on those too.

They've changed the requirements for roundabouts so they're more stringent than it used to be so we're going to be looking at all those

Okay, I'm checking that this may be more detailed than you are ready for, but what about the transit that runs up that corridor right now?

We weren't adding pull-outs.

If there's signs there, we'll maintain them.

We haven't really gotten any feedback from the CAT on what they wanted to do, if they wanted to provide anything regarding those stops or anything within the project.

I mean, typically we have, we can add stuff, but we didn't get any feedback from them to add stuff.

Can you say anything about the right-of-way impacts on that south side?

You know we had a lot of discussions at MPO Tech about possibly how we can do because they even asked about a mid-block crossing and some other stuff which we can't do because the speed limit's 45 miles an hour so on the corridor it may be something we could phase in if we get these projects once these projects are in we could come out and do a speed study of the corridor and then at that point we could

Justify possibly putting in a mid-block crossing.

But there is right-of-way impact, especially on the south side.

Some of those houses are less than 15 feet from the road.

And they're also, the grade from the road is much higher than the houses, so they set down.

So if we have to get any right-of-way on that side, it's going to impact basically

I mean, those houses might be total takes.

So we're trying to minimize that as much as possible.

That's why we're shifting everything to the north.

I know the house on the corner at the interchange is gonna be impacted.

I actually have talked to this, the couple that lives there and we've had several projects that we've looked at for that.

Even one of the alternatives provided a right turn lane and that's gonna would impact that property also.

So we don't have a lot of solutions that do not impact that property, or we don't have any that won't impact it.

So there are significant right-of-way impacts, but we're trying to keep them limited at the intersections where possible.

I will say for the roundabout, like I said, we're going to impact

All basically the right of way in all four quadrants to actually build those and put in the shared use path and the sidewalks and all that stuff.

It's just part of what we're going to have to do to actually make it work.

But hopefully we can do other things on the corridor to lessen the impacts overall.

Great.

The next one I have is just the slides that are the projects that the MPO is going to submit.

You can go down a couple of slides once you start the presentation.

Okay, they're submitting four applications.

Like I said before, this is the first one.

This is the Divergent Diamond.

that we're recommending.

Right now we're getting ready to go out for public survey on this one.

We've got the survey built.

We're putting together the web page and uploading the material to that and once that's done we'll be pushing it probably next week to get public input.

We've got

for alternatives a no build on minimum build with basically just improve some of the ramps on the adding turn lanes on the westbound or southbound westbound on ramp and the eastbound

Northbound to eastbound on-ramp and widen the off-ramp off of 64 in the eastbound direction.

But the other thing it would be would be to shift some of the structure around on top of the bridge to provide six-foot sidewalks on both sides.

Currently you've got a median with left turn lanes and a six-foot sidewalk on one side and

two or three foot curve on the other side.

So what we're going to do is shift everything over so we can get the sidewalk on both sides for the non-DDI alternatives.

We also are looking at a SPUI, which is a single point urban diamond interchange.

Popular they they work very well, but they're real expensive and in this case We'd have to replace the entire structure with this one with a divert DDI we can We're looking to preserve the structure by moving the travel lanes to the outside You don't need the left turn lanes at the ramp terminals like you do for traditional diamond so that gives us room to run the shared use path down the middle of the of the

Bridge across the interchange.

And so we can accommodate the plans for the county to put the shared use path along this corridor.

And we're gonna extend the shared use path north to the Holiday Inn entrance and south around to Pine Crest.

Whereas there's already a sidewalk there now and there's a proposal to extend shared use path up to that point.

And this provides good levels of service and addresses all of our impacts.

It reduces the crashes because you're reducing the number of conflicting movements to just two for the most part at the crossover intersections.

They work very well.

We were really successful with the one we did in Zion's Crossroads.

And I think the one at exit 124, 250 is actually becoming very well used and popular also.

No?

Alright, the next projects that the MPO is going to submit are the Rolkin Road and Peter Jefferson Parkway intersection projects.

These were submitted last round in SMART SCALE and they did really well.

Actually, Peter Jefferson Parkway was one of the recommended projects to be funded

and the CTB where they switched the funding for that one over to District Avenue because they felt that was more of a critical need than the other one was here.

But basically this is the concept that we used last round.

We're providing crosswalks at Rolkin Road and we're providing adding a sidewalk on the south side of 250 from Rolkin down to State Farm Boulevard.

And the next slide is the other portion.

This is Peter Jefferson Parkway.

What we're going to do is we're going to close the one crossover just to the west that provides one of the accesses to the Holiday Inn and the businesses over here and make it a right in right out to improve the safety.

We're adding a right turn lane at Rolkin on the eastbound direction and we're converting the

intersection to a through cut, which basically allows the left turns in and the left turns out, but it doesn't allow the through movement across between Peter Jefferson Parkway and Glenorchy.

We're also adding a park and ride lot for a 50 space park and ride lot with a bus loop, which would allow for commuter buses to come in, pick up people and go out and either go to the interstate or go back towards Charlottesville.

That's it for this one.

Any questions?

And we already talked about Barracks Road.

The last two other applications are the Barracks Road applications.

So that's the four applications that the MPO is going to be submitting this round.

This one is just the interchange improvements and the stuff to the east.

All right.

Thank you all.

All right.

Okay, I guess we'll move on to the Unified Planning Work Program.

Yes, I have the pleasure of explaining the UPWP as we call it.

I think a lot of you are familiar with this, but I'm going to go ahead and do high level just to orient us to make sure we're all on the same page.

So we have to submit an annual unified planning and work program.

It's a draft of all the activities that the MPO will do throughout the fiscal year.

It is presented to MPO Tech and CTAC and the MPO Policy Board, solid in its draft form first so that they can provide direction.

Then we bring it to you all in Tempe O Tech to give feedback and then it goes back to the policy board for a final vote in April.

It needs to be submitted to the feds by early in May.

I might keep it just in this view, which isn't ideal, but we can all skip, right?

The purpose of the WP is to identify all of the transportation planning activities that the MPO staff will do.

Federal law does require that we address eight basic components that are listed here.

Don't need to read those to you.

That's standard across all MPO and TPO, Transportation Planning Organizations.

But additionally, the CA-MPO had identified over time

Other priorities that they wanted to make sure that they were also considering in their planning processes and that's related to things like enhanced transit, greater mobility for seniors and folks with disabilities, things like that.

It's really expanding upon those eight core needs and getting a little bit more regionalized and local to what are, you know, what does our community want and what kind of planning activity should we undergo that still meet the federal requirements.

I mean, certainly like the six requirements and all of that were still required to follow up, but I don't think we were in addition with these priorities.

I would hope so, but sometimes if it's not stated, particularly in this world right now, where the pushback against DEI equity work is rampant and powerful and effective and organized and scary, sometimes it helps actually put stuff in there.

Well, the Long Range Transportation Plan will have those priorities set in the Long Range Transportation Plan, but these have been ongoing.

So that's certainly something we should look at, readdressing and saying, do these continue to be additional priorities, or do they want to be revisited?

They have not been revisited in the last two or three months than I have been.

The funding that the MPO receives is from two federal agencies.

The first one is FHWA, Federal Highways Administration, and that is administered through VDOT.

And then we also receive Federal Transit Administration funding, and that is administered through DRPT.

All of our funding made that an 80-10-10 split, 80% federal, 10% state, 10% local match.

We get that local match from our local governments through their per capita membership dues that they pay to the TJPDC.

Additionally, VDOT receives state planning funds from FHWA.

We call those SPR funds, State Planning and Research.

Those are not funds that actually come through the TJPDC or the MPO.

They go directly to VDOT but are to support the planning efforts within the district.

This is going to be really tiny on that screen, but I believe, was this, I can't remember if this was in the packet or not.

I think it was sent out.

And if not, we're all sent, we can send any of these presentations after the fact to the Zoom.

So here is a snapshot of all the funding that we're going to receive with all of these acronyms.

So the very top row is our FHWA funding for FY25.

The next row down you'll see is FY23 passive rollover.

FHWA does allow MPOs to roll over money from year to year in two different ways, whether it's active, which means you explicitly state we want to take this much money from this annual funding and put it into next year, or passive rollover, which is anything that is not spent, automatically rolls over two years after the fact.

So we do have some passive rollover that we did not spend that'll add to our total funding.

We then also have FTA DRPT funding.

Right now, that's a planning amount that they're giving us, but it has not yet been confirmed by FTA, so that could change between now and April adoption.

You'll see the total line in yellow at the bottom.

That's the total amount of funding for us to program, just over $453,000.

We're going to get much smaller as we go because there's a lot more detail as I go.

So basically we split the tasks into three different items.

The first one is administration, and that's for the standard items that occurred year to year, staffing committees, making sure we're reporting on all of our compliance, all of our reporting, invoicing, things like that, general information sharing of these websites, that type of stuff.

This year is slightly higher than last year, and that is primarily due to staff transitions that we're going to have,

Frostrain that we're going to be doing to make sure that we have multiple staff members that understand all of the processes of the committees rather than just one so that when we have a turnover we have to then retrain up which happens at all.

The second task is the long-range planning.

The major buckets within this for this upcoming fiscal year will be to support the Comprehensive Safety Action Plan

There's $50,000 allocated to that.

That's particularly to support Charlottesville and Albemarle and to help them identify projects for implementation to be able to apply for Safe Streets and Roads for All implementation funding.

The second line item there is property management study.

This is a direction of the policy board.

Through a lot of the long range transportation plan, we heard a lot about reducing cars in the urban area and having strategies long term for how we are going to get a more walkable, bikeable community and how we are going to do things like road diets, but we have to do something with those coming in from outside of the urban area.

So this would be the beginnings of a study.

That amount certainly would not be enough to complete it, but it's something we can launch within a year and then program additional funding into the next year.

That one would probably, not definitely depending on our hires, but could potentially be a consultant supported study.

The next one is funding to support the ongoing work towards a regional transit authority.

We do receive a little bit of money from City of Charlottesville

Albemarle County to staff the regional transit partnership.

But there is a lot of momentum to continuing to seek an authority and potentially additional revenue from the state level to support that.

So that will staff that.

Travel demand bottle update that's required.

We are at the point where that needs to occur.

And then the next one is, this one is interesting, is pedestrian navigation of innovative intersections.

A lot of times in all of these transportation planning processes, all of the innovative intersections, the most questions, comments, and feedback are about how will pedestrians and bicyclists navigate this.

And so this would be a resource guide looking at all of the research that's already out there, looking at all of the best practices, making sure that we as staff understand all of the FHWA and FTA

Requirements for these, this would likely be a standalone research project with a resource guide that comes out of it.

And then the last one is on-call services and contingency.

That is to continue to develop an on-call consulting program that our local governments could use for professional services.

And then contingency is setting some funding aside and something comes up that we just want to make sure that there's funding there for us to do other than policy board directs.

And then the third major task is short-range planning.

And those are all of the requirements.

So that's maintaining the transportation improvement program, that's SMART SCALE developments and grant applications, regional transit partnership, TDM and bike head support.

A lot of times we'll get customer local governments to support their initiatives that would fall in that bucket.

developing the required performance targets, CTAC, public outreach, and Title VI.

So those things are standard year over year within the UPW.

Any questions?

And then I am not gonna go through this in any great level of detail, but I then broke it down by individual task by funding source in case you were very curious, just to be as transparent as possible of how we intend to spend that for

$400 and some thousand dollars as staff in the next year.

That's test one, test two, and test three.

And then finally the next steps for the UPWP.

A draft, as I told you, was already presented to the Policy Board.

It's coming to you all in MPO Tech.

A final draft will be delivered to you all in April.

You have the draft already, so if you have any feedback on that draft, whether it's the narrative, the descriptions of activities, the funding sources, we're happy to receive those.

But then we do ask in April that both MPO Tech and CTEC make a recommendation to the Policy Board to approve that UPWP plan.

It will be approved hopefully by them in April and submitted in early May to our funders.

I have a comment.

I'm happy to see that the safety, I'm happy to hear that you've taken a lot of feedback from people who want to close down straight to cars and

Carte, something that having been on this committee for about a year now, something that's been tough for me honestly is that I think a lot of the things that we look at, SMART SCALE, long-run transportation plan, but I think it's really baked in to incorporate that

A visionary approach, in my opinion, to transforming our networks away from cartoons.

It's like adding things and making things and transforming groups to make it safer.

However, it's not thinking about, okay, closing streets.

If we close these streets, we have to develop these streets in other particular ways, which I, and I think a lot of

folks who you've heard feedback from in regards to cars, kind of think along those lines.

I'm not sure, I guess that's kind of a general comment.

I'd like to think, be more visionary about that.

I mean, it's in particular, you know, not just a safety issue, but it's going to make the biggest impact on climate change.

So the more we force people essentially and what's really it's forcing but really we change habits to get people on the bus and get people walking and on bikes the greater impact we're actually going to have overall and something that we actually need to do as a society and yeah I guess that's it.

I can lead back on that.

So I build transportation planning software.

I've got planning tools running all over the country now.

And typically, bike and pen is a measure, one of 20, but it's never a measure that is heavily weighted.

But it's also very community-focused.

Like Texas, we have a tool running in Texas.

They have an 8,000-mile bicycle trail system, or VTT, that they put together.

And so we built them a tool, and the whole purpose of the tool is to take their stiff projects

would possibly touch this network so we could make some type of improvement.

And typically those are like probably pretty small, but like quite depends on it.

I want to sidetrack the statement by that support.

Things you're saying very much in your big interest.

I hear from people is how we just design

and so still adding a sidewalk and a bike lane doesn't affect the issue that cars drive too fast in America and very much the car community that to me is one of the scariest things in my home golf site.

So where does that live?

Does that live at all in this being new to CTAC and knowing that there are a lot of players in transportation

More of where some of, not working around the margins, but actually affecting significant change and being thoughtful in my sense from, and I don't mean to pick on anybody, particularly our VDOT employees here, but my sense is that the VDOT is mandated by U.S. stock

and their main role is to get cars far past and in long distances, which they do very well.

You can get a long distance really quickly in America and not a whole lot else is really prioritized, but we're also hearing.

So where does that live in the planning process?

We want to fundamentally slow cars down and make not just an add on to a road,

I mean it lives in getting feedback from places like CTAC and MPO Tech and the policy board to direct that level of planning.

You know I think and I can't speak for Chuck and I'm not going to put Chuck on the spot

You know, and I'm not a transportation planner, so I'm going to be very transparent about that.

I was fired here not to do transportation planning.

But it's certainly a common theme throughout the feedback we hear and it's actually a common theme in a lot of the discussions we do have with VDOT is making sure we are accommodating multimodal.

You know in a lot of places it's easy to say we can close this road and make it like that friendly and a lot of places we still have to accommodate a lot of vehicles coming in from outside of the city and so there have to be strategies for what are we doing if we don't want those vehicles

on small urban streets, what are we doing with them instead?

And are we creating a robust regional transit system?

Are we doing a robust park and ride?

Are we doing robust parking outside of the urban area and then keeping people on transit?

I would love to think that this is a group that can be the kind of thing that, as I read it and I heard the person who suggested I apply for this position, it's about getting constituent feedback to the policy makers.

and because I just like I know I'm learning a lot I put a lot more time into it and I figured maybe I'm in step two out of two thousand now instead of step one but I do know a lot of people and I hear a lot of feedback and I want to bring that to the table and I really very much support that kind of thinking

And, you know, I mean, I'm a nonvoting member of the regional transit partnership right now.

And, you know, when we talk about a big transit plan or a maybe more realistic transit plan, I'm like, hell, what do you mean more realistic?

I mean, if this is the need, you know, let's go advocate for it.

I think the grassroots demand is there, but the money isn't there, right?

The money isn't adding six lanes to 66, so 40,000 more Teslas can go up and down.

And it's a choice.

We do have choices, you know?

Well, that kind of thing speaks to what Lee was saying about, why don't you just pick on those two roundabouts?

And yeah, it is up to where it begins.

So we need to advocate at the city and county level to get more state dollars and more transportation.

I will say we do get a lot of money with the omnius bill and that's basically a tax on gas.

We get a large portion of it because our interstate segments through the district are smaller so we get a significant amount of money in the smart scale pool to fund projects with.

This last round between round five and round six of smart scale, they made some significant changes to that.

how we're scoring applications that make it more difficult for bike ped projects to get funded because they took out the land use used to be a factor area it still is a factor area but used to be standalone now it's just a multiplier to the other factor areas so over the last five rounds it's I've seen significant

A lot of projects, bike ped projects that were funded solely with land use as part of their score.

So, yeah, it's, and I, we do look at bike and ped, pedestrian facilities, not as much as we do for, I typically don't look at congestion at all.

I focus solely on safety, whether it's pedestrian or vehicle.

I look at the PSI, the potential for safety improvement data every year.

We look at it pretty intensely and identify the areas that where we're seeing the most crashes.

And we come up with multimodal solutions to address those locations.

I don't think we'll ever get more capacity projects, at least in this area, just because we don't have the capacity issues that they have in Northern Virginia or some of the larger urban areas where the commuter population is crazy.

We don't have that here.

We do have commuters, and I agree that we need to figure out how we're going to deal with those.

I've been working with MCO for 20 years in my current position.

So I've seen a lot of emphasis on trying to look at how we can solve the problem.

But there has to be some mechanism that's going to basically tell people they need to park outside.

It's to where they don't want to drive their car in.

And there's not really been a consensus on how to do that.

So I don't know what the answer is to that.

And that's something that we've looked at park and ride lots.

I mean, some of the previous board members wanted to analyze that.

So we have that capability to do that.

It's just that we haven't got a lot of guidance on how to go about what they want to do.

We did propose a park and ride lot

out on the east end at Pantops.

And that will allow for commuters to actually park there and get on the bus and ride into town.

We have looked at some of those in other areas, but there's not been a real push to support those kinds of projects.

Any guidance you could provide the policy board in that direction would be, I think,

When I started with VDOT, bike and pedestrians were still an amenity that the localities had to pay for if they wanted to include it in a project.

So I've been around for a long time and I've seen the changes that come about and we basically and I promote pedestrian and bicyclist accommodations on every project more so than just accommodations which is what the current regulations

State.

So we want to try to get facilities in there because we don't get them in there there's less likely that people are going to start to use them and I can't build enough improvements to address the vehicle constraints.

I think we definitely need to promote bike and pedestrian accommodations as much as possible because those are to give people alternatives as to how they want to commute around the area and it's just more

support at the board level, the more those are likely to advance.

Okay.

I'll get off my soapbox, but just to give you VDOT's perspective on this from a planning perspective, there's not a lot of tools for doing the analysis and we still promote them as much as possible using GIS to identify where the gaps are.

And we talk about it with the

bike and pedestrian groups to try to promote those projects.

We've looked at a couple, the Ravana Bridge was one of them, the Charities Path that we were proposing on Route 20 South.

We got Avon Street funded last round in the city and the county.

We've done, we submitted the road diet south of Olensburg Road on

Fifth Street last round, it just didn't get funded because there's not enough benefit that shows up in the scoring methodology for SMART SCALE.

So, I mean, we are going after, we got the trail projects funded for the

They're at Fifth Street Station, the Biscuit Run Trail connection from the new shopping center up to Wegmans and over to Fifth Street Station Parkway.

So we are pursuing them and we're trying to get them

move forward and into the process as much as possible.

I mean, I had several projects across the district funded for shared use paths last round.

So, and we're funding submitting more with, from the various localities every year, every round.

It seems like regional transit would be a really good way to increase that, to like have more buses and things coming from Crozet, from Rutgers Bell to here.

We're having a big look, yes, with TJPDC last year.

completed regional train-the-vision plan, this year the regional train-the-governance study, and then RTP directed staff to, within the next four months, bring forth a lot.

It's really going to be about funding.

I think there's consensus around the desire.

I think it's about

I just think the time is now, though, because it's come, you know, with the Blue River Health District's public health priorities include better public transit because of the need to be able to get healthy, not just your doctorate, but recreation opportunities and everything like that, and that if you don't have them, it's not, you know, there's a public safety problem.

And from the environmental standpoint, which is very strong in this community, there's so many different areas where it keeps popping up.

And I'm involved in the aging community and have eight dimensions of aging.

We think transportation is one of the three biggest issues to focus on because that's what we heard informally from our surveys.

It's everywhere you look, it's come up.

So it's feel like the iron top.

I mean, that's how I use it.

Yeah, I know.

That's actually where I was going.

with that, there's consensus and a good opportunity where we'll try to do it and just see how it's easier said than done.

I just think there's a lot of public will.

All right.

Well, with that, we're pretty much ready to wrap here.

As a staff update, staff didn't submit Ray's grant, just over $3.3 million for the Rybana bike beverage, preliminary engineering.

I should mention about the next meeting.

Ordinarily, our meetings are on the odd months of the year.

However, because of the necessity of reviewing the long-range transportation plan, we need to meet in April instead of May.

And I think it will be instead of, we won't then have a May meeting.

So, April 17th, then?

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I mean, from your perspective, sort of, but I think it's important that it exists.

I don't know.

that somebody had this thirst together.

There's a well that we're saving up.

In good ways. 10 miles.

Oh my god.

Yeah, I don't get the same impression.

We will be back soon.

Thank you.

So we'll see you guys next year, y'all.

and the service provider at the agency of the student.

Mike, I need you to talk to us.

It came back.

I'm sick of you.

Oh, yeah.