Citizens Transportation Advisory Committee (2013-2026) Meeting   7/17/2024

Peter, if you can hear us, we know you're there.

We don't have a forum, however, so we won't be voting on anything.

Since we can't approve, well, are there any matters from the public?

I don't see anybody from the public here, nobody online, so

and we'll pass approval of minutes since we can't do that.

And since Chuck joined us, we'll proceed.

All right, I'm gonna try to share my screen.

Search clown, what might be the crime here today?

I'm just trying to get the right screen to advance the slides.

I'm going to show you the stuff from the Ivy Road study as well as we have the SMART SCALE material that we can review at the end if we have time.

If you have any questions, just let me know and I can stop and we can talk about whatever you want to talk about.

All right, like I said, the Ivy Road, the CA-MPO projects and the Albemarle County projects.

These applications are in and we're finalizing the cost estimates.

So those will be, once those are done, we'll be actually submitting the submit button for those working with the localities and doing that.

All right, pipeline.

This is one of the study,

tools we use to do studies.

Basically, prior to SMART SCALE every year, we looked at the VTRANS

Long Range Plan, which is basically our state highway plan.

And we look at the needs that are the top tier, tier one or tier two, and we work with the localities on identifying of those, which ones they want to study for upcoming projects for SMART SCALE.

So that's available if you want to see it, but basically it identifies different needs that are on a quarter, multimodal, bike ped, transit, high crash locations, congestion areas, a whole menagerie of things.

We can talk about it more as we move through, but those are identified and then we

The study, we coordinate the study to focus on addressing those need items.

Any questions about that?

All right, so far, we've had two rounds of pipeline studies.

In the first round, we studied the 250 corridor in Pantops, which is at some of the applications for this round, as well as the Louisa Road, Milton Road intersections out in Shadwell.

This round we looked at the Ivy Road corridor and the barracks corridor.

Okay, here's the map of the Ivy Road corridor.

This is the limits of the study.

And these are the V-Trans needs that were identified for these roadways in this area.

And this is what we're trying to address with this study.

As you can see, we've got bicycle, capacity preservations, congestion mitigation, as well as transit access, equity, emphasis areas, and transportation demand management.

Safety.

These are the crash locations.

The left dots are the severe and fatality crashes that were on the corridor.

Two of them were on on the bypass and the rest of them were on the, well there's three, and there's one on to the east of on Ivy Road.

The rest of them were all severe injury crashes.

And then the right slide is just

All of the injury crashes, the injury crashes are broken down into four categories from a fatality all the way to non-visible injury.

Yes.

And is it attributed to some, or is that what the study's going to look at?

Well, as part of the study, we'll look at what the attributing factors are, what type of crash it is, whether it's day or night, what the weather conditions are, pavement conditions are.

evaluate all of those different variables when we do the analysis.

These are the level service for the no-build, future no-build condition.

As you can see, many of the side streets start to have failing levels of service because of the volumes of traffic on the main line.

The table on the left is a signalized intersection and the table on the right is the two-way stop control intersections.

But as you can see, most of the east-west movements are level service A, and you're starting to see the failing level service D's and S's on the minor side streets.

Canterbury, for signals, Canterbury is the signal that

is the worst because that's where the Garth Road, old Garth Road comes underneath the railroad and comes into the intersection opposite Canterbury.

So that's why it has a failing level service because it is going to implode in the future because of the sheer volume of traffic that wants to go westbound at that intersection from the bypass.

The study, we identified four basically segments of road and we grouped those recommended improvements into four different categories or areas.

We looked at the western portion, which is from Boars Head West.

Then we looked at Boars Head

East, and then we looked at the eastern section, which is basically east of the bypass.

So these are the packages that we looked at at the west end.

This is package one.

It includes the right-in, right-out left-in at Edmond Drive, which is there at the, it's the old entrance to Boar's Head, and then Farmington,

We're recommending a roundabout.

I know there's a railroad crossing there, but I think we can, it'll still work.

We may have to look at how we can control the left turns, eastbound left turns and the westbound right turns so that the roundabout will still function if there's a train on the tracks.

We also looked at Boxwood Estate Road, converting it to a right in, right out.

because you can make the U-turns at the roundabout, and then a right in, right out, left in at Edmonds Center.

We also included a frontage extension of the parallel road on the north side, all the way over to connect to Boxwood Estates, so they can still get access to the Boars Head intersection.

And then we had a raised median on the west end,

through that section of the corridor, and they were posing a roundabout at Boars Head.

The roundabout at Boars Head seemed to get a lot of consensus and a lot of acceptance amongst all the stakeholders, as well as it got pretty high acceptance from the

3.61 from the public.

So we felt that was a good alternative for that location.

Any questions about that?

That's just one.

We have another section for this recommendation for this one that they looked at.

The figure there is on a scale of one to five as far as support from the public.

To connect those businesses, there's part of a

Yes.

Okay, all right, thank you.

All right, this is some of the other options we looked at for this corridor.

We had a green T at Edmond Drive.

We had the write-in, write-out only at Edmond Center.

We still had the raised median over a portion of it, and then we had the Boers Head roundabout.

that was the main for that intersection that was the main option that we got acceptance on from most of the stakeholders and we got a lot of support for it so but this is another alternative I will say that there's not a lot of needs out at this end once you go west of Boars Head so the these improvements would probably

That one is, but from Boershead, the west of Boershead, most of the improvements that we were proposing are more mid to long-term improvements because there's not a lot of demand for them at this time.

Okay, for the mid section, we had a focus group as part of the, we had a stakeholders group and then we had a focus group.

When we brought the recommendations to the focus group, they wanted to whittle them down to this group of projects as the package that they wanted to present to the public.

I have, the next slide will show some of the other options that we considered and we put out to the public, but this is the,

their preferred package and as you can see we have a roundabout at Boar's Head we have the raised median between Boar's Head and Canterbury we have a roundabout at Old Garth Canterbury and then we have a triangle about there was a study that was previously done and it looked at

A circular, not a circular road, but a triangle which was made up of one-way roads in that little triangle part north of the railroad tracks and Ivy Road that was part of Old ID Garth and the ramp coming off the bypass.

on the north side.

That was, had a lot of support also.

There was channel-wise right turn lane to the westbound on-ramp off of Old Ivy, extension of the southbound, northbound and southbound D-cell and A-cell lanes for the ramps on the north side, and then a shared use path along the south side of Old Ivy Road, basically from Garth Road,

Intersection all the way to the Old Ivy 250 intersection to the east.

And then a one-way westbound raised curb basically so we could put a sidewalk underneath that underpass on the east end.

I have a question on this package.

So the acceleration lanes on the 29 North, there's actually two of them in real life.

There's the one that's got the blue square looking at it.

So you kind of come on from old Ivy.

And then there's the one where you turn from Ivy into a whole kind of like, you know, 270 and then come on under the bridge.

No.

One of the, we looked at a couple of different options.

There wasn't a lot of support to extend those ramps on the south side.

Long term, we could possibly improve those ramps, but we'd have to widen the, lengthen the bridges across 250 past, which is, right now it's not economically feasible.

Right.

And we did look at that and one of the options that we didn't get brought forward was to extend those loop ramps further to the south so you have a longer distance for the A cell and D cell.

South of the onto the bypass.

But the folks from the university, which owns the property on the east side, and the folks from the Canterbury development on the west side, they were adamantly against moving that forward.

So here's some of the other options we looked at.

This is the long term solution we looked at.

And this is where basically we're rebuilding the bridge as well as

To rebuild the bridge across 250, across the bypass, the railroad bridge is integrated into the 250 bridge.

So we have to replace both of them.

And to do that, we have to double track the railroad because we can't close the railroad.

So that's going to be a very expensive project.

And so we did look at it long term, and this would actually

Extend those ramps underneath the bridges and make them work like they should work and give you adequate a-cell and d-cell and also provides roundabouts at both the ramp terminals on 215.

And as part of that, we felt that we'd probably look at having to

At some point, we're going to need the six lane bypass, probably from Barracks Road southward, just because of the sheer capacity constraints that we're starting to experience.

What's your criteria for capacity constraints?

What do you use for capacity?

You could do it.

Right now we're seeing the issues with the ramps backing up and right now sometimes the ramp from the interstate backs up all the way almost to this intersection.

There's a different

Modeling in the past has shown that this section is going to carry upwards of 70 to 80,000 vehicle trips a day.

I think the Southern piece between Fontaine and the interstate was looking at, we were looking at over a hundred thousand vehicle trips a day in the future.

The newer models aren't projecting as much volume.

But if we start getting to those volumes, we're going to have to start looking at adding some additional capacity to the roadway.

What we're trying to do for the most part is preserving what we've got out there as long as we can until we reach that breakdown point for the actual facility.

because you've got weaving that occurs between the ramps on and off ramps between here and Ivy Road and Leonard Sandridge and the bypass and Barracks Road and the bypass we're already seeing the northbound movements at Barracks Road break down and start to back out and we're just going to that's going to still become more prevalent as we move forward into the future because of all the

Chuck, I've got a question that's related.

It's not on your maps here, but since you brought up traffic being backed up all the way from 64 up to this intersection, I think it might be kind of relevant.

But as you're going south on 29 headed toward I-64, there are a ton of rear-end engagements there.

people trying to get into that new left turn lanes and the traffic just back up for literally miles and it's because people cruise along at 60 miles an hour that all of a sudden traffic has stopped.

That's one of the locations we're going to look at.

Next year, we're going to relook at that interchange.

We looked at it in the first round of SMART SCALE, that interchange as well as Fontaine, and we didn't get the project funded.

So we went back and broke it down into pieces, and we funded pieces of the project or pieces of a solution to try to address the immediate needs.

And then those are what was built in round

Yeah, well, I'm glad you say so, and that's why I brought up the signage to give us an interim solution, you know, something with a sensor that could be like, slow down, traffic stop ahead.

This is for safety purposes.

Graphic Engineering is aware of that, and I'm not sure what they're doing at this point.

I know they're aware of it.

All right.

Then we had some eastern solutions at east of the bypass.

This is like the corridor between the interchange and Old Ivy Underpass.

We looked at some possible roundabouts at these locations, as well as a raised median for access management along the corridor.

Those score okay, pretty much in the middle.

but those are something, again, these aren't really extremely high priority needs.

So these might be something that might be more of a midterm or longer solution for this portion of the corridor.

Next steps, what we're doing, we're finalizing the preferred alternative or waiting, coordinating that with the county.

They're supposed to be sending us some information

and then we can start finalizing what the preferred alternative is going to be and how we're going to package it up because of the changes in SmartScale this round.

For MPOs, they have to submit either interchange projects or they have to submit entire study packages.

Well, we don't wanna fund this entire study package, so we're trying to figure out way to break this study into manageable chunks that the MPO may be eligible to submit for SMART SCALE.

And that's pretty much what we're working through right now.

So once we get that done, we'll be putting together the report and then it will go out for review and then we'll be wrapping the study up.

Any questions?

Yeah, I have one more question, if I might.

It sort of sounds silly a little bit, but why this project?

How does this qualify?

We have so many road issues

We've got other cognitive studies.

Where I live, we did a cognitive study.

How does this qualify versus the other needs in the county?

How do you figure that out?

We look at those.

Next round, we're probably gonna go back to 29 because it's got some of the highest crash locations in the whole county.

mainly like Greenbrier and Woodbrooke.

Those are two of the highest crash locations and they haven't been studied since we did the Solutions 29 package of projects.

I was waiting for those to get flushed out and it's been probably close to 10 years since those were done.

So we're going to go back and start looking at that corridor for more improvement projects.

But we'll go back, look at the data and see what the next high priorities locations are and then we'll coordinate those efforts with

Hillsdale, right.

It just depends on what's the priority for the locality.

I mean, we've gotten, we did the roundabout, but that was not part of the study.

And then we did last round, I think they submitted Belvedere and it was funded.

So it's going to be moving forward.

They're submitting the roundabout at Hillsdale.

and Old Brook Road.

We'll see how it does in the mix of the applications.

So as they move up the list, they'll submit those applications.

We typically don't submit whole corridor studies because of the cost.

Benefit is too low for it to justify, to rank very high and get funded.

Hey Marty, the pipeline studies have to qualify and be trans.

They have to meet certain levels of be trans needs in order for them to be eligible to be studied through the pipeline.

So that's the first step.

Yeah, so the Office of Intermodal Planning and Investment determines what the priorities are based on the identified statewide priorities that the CTB votes on.

So it's not something that's submitted by the localities or by the regions.

That comes from the state they identify with.

So it's based on congestion reduction, capacity, safety, those kinds of things that there's, you know, we could look at

In our activity terms, you can see what the needs are, but those are all identified at the state level.

And also every year we go through, or every two years before SMART SCALE, we go through and look at the high crash locations and we'll develop some material that we present to the county to make, to identify if there's any of those locations that they want us to look at and study and prepare for SMART SCALE.

Peter, go ahead.

Yes, so Chuck, this may be premature at this early stage, and I know there's no public transportation in that area today, but with the additional student housing that's going in there by JPJ, there is certainly a fair amount of walking done that could be expanded.

I guess maybe UTS runs out to University Village,

Well as part of the project we are looking at a shared use path along Old Ivy Road.

There's been a lot of discussions with the county staff and the stakeholders group on what to include.

CAT and Jaunt were invited to the meetings but they opted not to participate.

We try to include transit.

Transit was one of the items that was identified as a need in this area but we didn't get any commitment from them to look at that for this corridor although there could be some needs coming in the future especially as you go out

the bypass towards White Gables.

You got Farmington out there.

You've got the Birdwood.

We're sort of waiting on some of that because we don't know what's going to be the outcome of the three notch trail study to know what the alignment of that might be.

And we're not really doing anything with the bridge.

When we do the roundabout project, we will look at that area.

at Canterbury and where Old Garth comes through.

And we will include some facilities along that in that area.

It's just what the destinations are.

Yeah.

And I mean, the Three Notch Trail is a intriguing project, but

That's not going to meet the needs of people who live at University Village, who want to get to the Foods and All Nation shopping center.

They're not going to go all the way out of their way to that trail to just walk a mile up the road.

So I hear how that could be relevant, but I don't think it's going to be, at first glance, a major impact on needs for bike ped.

And I don't want to speak, well, just because Cat and Jaunt doesn't show up,

doesn't mean the community doesn't think this is important consideration.

They have a habit of not showing up and just they're understaffed, overworked, and don't seem to have time for these types of things.

We've had that experience too many times.

Yeah, no, I know most of the studies, it's not a problem.

We did in this and we did get interest from the county and a lot of discussion from the county.

We're not really doing anything to the bridge on 250, so we weren't really looking at bike pads necessarily on 250.

And they opted to put the trail on Old Ivy Road versus

Ivy Road, just because it was easier to do and there was possible right away along that corridor to place it.

I know when we look at those longer term improvements along Ivy Road, especially at Colonnades and some of those are still freed and reed, we'll basically be including pedestrian accommodations and bicycles and we can consider that at that time.

All right.

So we've got three applications for the MPO.

Well, four, but there's two of them are similar.

One of them is for the Fifth Street interchange.

The second one was the Pantops pipeline study from last round that wasn't funded.

So they're going to submit those scenarios as one application.

And then we had the two by pipe barracks road projects, one for

Barracks Road from the whole corridor from Georgetown all the way to Emmett Street, and then the section from the interchange, including the interchange to Emmett Street.

So I'll be going through those.

This is the concept for the interchange at Fifth Street.

We're looking at a conversion to a DDI.

We've completed the interchange

Analysis Report, it's in for review to Central Office and FHWA.

So once we get that finalized, we'll be complete with a study.

But basically we're looking at the DDI conversion and we're also installing a shared use path from the

Trail project that was funded last round which you can see on the far right side of the screen that little purple ties into the green dots which is the trailhead from the trail project that was funded last round and then it's going to run all the way to the west other end and tie into there's an existing sidewalk at that

Private entrance that's right there that we're going to tie into.

On the west side, we're actually adding a bike lane for a portion just to merge the bicyclists off the shared use path because there's not a shared use path further than that in with the flow of traffic so that they can actually share the road.

And we'll sign it appropriately.

There are signs shown, but they're not really visible in this because they weren't yellow.

The yellow didn't show up on the slide.

The next is the Pantops project.

This is Rolkin, what we're proposing there.

And this is they're doing crosswalks on across 250 and Rolkin and on both sides of the road.

We're also putting a sidewalk along 250 on the south side, all the way to State Farm, which is currently not a gap right now in that facility.

The other part of that project is the intersection at the east end.

This is out at Peter Jefferson Parkway intersection.

We're converting it to what we call a through cut, which basically doesn't allow the through movement, but allows the left turns in and out.

So that's what it's being converted to.

We're also closing the crossover that's mid-block between here and

Westminster Canterbury where there's a signal that would go to the hotel because it has access to the signal also because there were some crashes that were starting to show up there.

This project also includes a 80 car park and ride line or 50 space park and ride line excuse me.

We've also included as part of that is bus circulating the

So they would come in.

They can make the left off Peter Jefferson Parkway, come in off of 250 and then circulate around and come back to Glen and Worky and come back out and make the right to go into 250, go into town where they can make the left out.

They wanted to go back to the interstate.

And this was something, like I said, this was developed as part of the pipeline study last round.

And this was actually recommended, scored well enough to be on the initial recommendation for funding last round of SMART SCALE, but the county opted to switch this project with, or the MPO switched this project with the District Avenue Roundabout Project.

So we're hoping that this one scores as well as it did last round.

Any questions?

All right.

Okay, now we go to Barracks Road.

This is the county's, actual county's portion of the Barracks Road project, which basically converts the existing intersection in Georgetown to a roundabout, and then compresses, closes the median between Georgetown and the bypass, and

adds a shared use path along that south side that was given up by the center median.

We're also actually improving the crosswalks on the, I mean the ADA ramps on the north side.

We're also including a bike, a bus pad.

on the, where the existing bus sign, stop is on the south side.

And we're also putting a pad in on the, on Georgetown Road where the existing bus stop is so they can put a, county can put a shelter there in the future.

Project includes crosswalks.

We're also actually putting raised crosswalks in what would be putting some kind of active pedestrian

Crossing facilities there like rapid flashing beacons.

Those will be looked at and determined at a later time if the project's funded.

We're also including a crosswalk at the interchange.

This one, because it's got to be a standalone project, we added a right turn lane on the eastbound approach to the bypass because that was something that was called out in a previous study and was also recommended from this study as an alternative.

to address it as a standalone project.

And we do include a crosswalk at that intersection on the west side of the bypass to connect to the existing sidewalk on the north side, which goes into the city.

So the shared use path would end at this point.

Just a quick one, because I know this, in some of the studies I was looking at,

This is one of the MPO projects.

They're also submitting the whole corridor, but there's a little bit of differentiation between this one and the last one that I showed you.

Between Bennington Road and the bypass, there's a different lane configuration there so that they can both stand alone as separate applications.

This is the MPO's application for the interchange with the shared use path that runs to the east.

Like I said, we're able to reduce the width underneath the bridge to a single eastbound lane and that gives us the capacity underneath the bridge to extend the shared use path underneath the bridge so we can run it all the way through the corridor.

Again, we're providing crosswalks on both sides of the roundabouts, on the exterior of the interchange, so you can cross from one side to the other side.

At Melmont, we're actually rebuilding that intersection, which currently is kind of skewed and it doesn't meet ADA requirements.

Correct.

How is that?

At the roundabouts, we're either going to have hawk signals or rapid flashing beacons.

And for Millmont, they've had, it's a signalized intersection.

Is that a general standard for roundabouts?

They're putting a lot of roundabouts.

Just recently updated the standards.

So we're basically going to have active pedestrian controls at all of those crosswalks at the roundabouts.

We're not sure what those are going to be yet.

It's either going to be

Rapid Flashing Beacons, or Hawk Signals, but we're not positive which one it's going to be.

They will have to yield at those locations and stop for the pedestrians.

So hopefully it's not a lot of people making those maneuvers.

On the one-

I'm not sure what's on the plans for that intersection, whether they're putting rapid flashing beacons up or not.

Are they?

I couldn't remember if you went to that meeting.

I wasn't at that meeting, so I don't recall what was in that one.

But I know that some of the rules have changed, like in the last year.

OK. And a quick question on the shared-use path.

I think you said this real quick.

So it is going to be separated from the road.

10 feet.

And I think, I can't remember what the setback is, whether it's six feet.

But the whole point of this was to try to, especially on the west end, was try to not impact those properties on the south side.

And by narrowing the road and reducing the median width on that west side, we were able to accommodate that shared use path without impacting those properties.

and let's see one more slide here for this one.

This is the alternative that the counties are the MPOs going to when they submit the whole corridor package.

This is the alternative for that west side between Bennington Road and the interchange what it's going to look like as with the narrow area to the west and the

median and the Georgetown Interchange, intersection improvements.

But this is the only part that is different between the last two sketches that I showed you.

And I can go back and show you that slide.

Let me go back two spots.

So instead of, you'll have this instead of this right here.

Can you still see the slides?

You won't have this right turn lane and the median wide median.

You'll have the narrower median here and then you'll have the roundabout here.

So it's just between this intersection here at Bennington Road and the interchange changes.

And this is what the change looks like.

But the rest of it is all the same.

All right, that's all the MPO applications.

This is the Albemarle County applications.

We can go through those real quick.

They're submitting for Old Trail and 250 West at Western Albemarle High School.

The Rio Road, a roundabout that we talked about a little while ago.

I'll show you that.

Obviously the Barracks Road, which we just saw.

And then they're submitting Plank Road.

And that was another location that shows up as a tier one need in V-Trans.

that traffic engineer did a study on, but the county is gonna submit that as one of their applications to address the safety issues down there.

So, okay, here's the old trail roundabout concept.

And this includes a shared use path.

Well, there's sidewalk along old trail right now.

They're gonna tie into that.

And there's an old broken up shared use path

that runs east along the north side of 250 all the way to the middle school, which is right there in the northeast quadrant.

And then they're going to put a crosswalk in.

And actually, this is the older sketch.

There's another crosswalk across the entrance to Western Albemarle High School to a sidewalk that's proposed on the west side of the entrance road that the school system is going to put in in the near future.

So this was submitted last round.

It was also recommendation from the county study that they did for the Crozet area.

One of the things I noticed when I was doing the updated analysis is that in the design year, which is like 2054, the volumes on 250 get to the point where we probably need to look at widening 250.

It's widened just to the west of here, but this section starts, the volume starts to get so high that the road starts to break down, and the queues start to get really long at the intersections.

Any questions about this one?

All right.

Okay, this is the peanut that's on Ryder Road.

This is the final version of it that I came up with.

You can see Pillsdale's to the north.

You've got, what is that?

Old Brook is the road south to the right.

And the other one is Huntington, I think.

And then you've got the Old Brook Road to the north on the east side that goes through that townhouse complex.

It does include a shared use path all the way around.

It basically, once you get away from the intersection, it splits and puts ramps down so the bicyclists can go out on the bike lanes on hydraulic or on Riot Road and on Hillsdale.

But it basically can get around the intersection if they don't want to drive through roundabouts.

And again, we will be putting controls at these crosswalks.

We're just not sure what those are going to be.

Probably on Hillsdale, on Rio Road, it could be hawk signals, but on the single lane approaches, it's probably just going to be rapid flashing beacons.

Sorry, I'm just getting oriented here.

Yeah, that sounds good.

I got there, I got there.

That's the one.

The red line is the right-of-way line that we would need.

The blue line, or the violet or purple line, whatever you want to call it, is the utility easement.

We didn't have time to get that moved, and we're going to try to avoid taking the house at all possible, but we need some additional right-of-way and construction easements to actually build this project.

Anyway, and then the church there has also been doing a lot of expansion of Intel operation at the school.

The yellow is just the striped out area.

So the green looks like it goes partway to the entrance.

So it's possible that we could shorten it enough to allow for the left in, but not the left out.

Yeah, well, they may have to invest in a new entrance to there.

Well, you've seen those.

Like I said, this is the preliminary concept plan.

If it gets recommended for funding and moves forward, we'll have to work through some of those details during the design phase.

I think the stormwater management pond that they showed right there in front of the church, I think it's underground, so that's not going to be something you're going to be able to see.

All right, any more questions?

All right, last one is Plank Road.

Like I said, this is south of Charlottesville on 29 at 692.

This is a location where we have seen a lot of crashes.

North-south, that road in the middle.

Basically, there's a lot of industry on it.

There's a fire station on the south side, so we're going to work with the fire station to make sure they can get across there without having to go make the right and then make the U-turn to come back.

They need to go straight across, so we'll work with them on that median to make sure that they can cross it.

But basically, we're converting these three crossovers to restricted crossing U-turns.

So you would not be able to go straight across.

Traffic Engineering did this study this year or last year.

and the recent recently they did this one and then the and they presented it to the county and the county decided they wanted to submit it so as a smart scale application so we refined it a little bit and especially on the northern end I think the right turn lane between Plank Road on the northbound side which is to the right

gets extended all the way back to accommodate U-turn traffic at that south end U-turn movement.

And I think they're extending the box culvert right there that's under the road.

And how do you prevent someone from cutting across?

There's a raised median across the middle.

So they have to drive over a curb.

We would basically, the center one, like I said, we're going to work with the fire department to come up with something that they could cross, but it wouldn't be something that normal vehicles could cross.

You guys got any questions for me?

The deadline for submission is August 1st, so like in two weeks.

After that, we will evaluate them and go through and score them over the next five months.

And then they will be presenting them to the CTB in January.

The recommended list, priority list of how they all scored.

and then in the spring the CTB will talk to the different localities and their constituents to see which projects they want to fund out of the list based on the priorities and then they will adopt the as part of the six-year plan adoption for next year they will be projects that are will be funded will be adopted into the six-year plan.

Well, they got to go through all of them.

We've got 25 projects just in our district.

Richmond has over 100.

So typically we get between 300 and 400 applications every round of SMART SCALE.

So it's a big undertaking to go through and score them in the various scoring categories.

Fortunately, we don't have a lot of economic development this time since they took that out.

So that reduces a lot of the workload on us at the front, at the

as part of the next step.

And L&D is doing all the cost estimating and the sketches.

So from that perspective, the validation goes pretty quickly for us.

It typically is around a third.

We had 36 applications last round.

I think we got 12 funded.

So we typically, we did pretty good.

We usually most of our projects score in the top 50% across the state.

So we, and that's what I strive to do with our applications.

We're not always that way.

We've had projects that come in the bottom of the pile.

And I typically don't want to have those.

Right.

Right.

Hey, Chuck, most of these had sidewalks and shared use paths as part of them.

Is there a philosophy or guidelines?

Is the goal to fill gaps or just place those where you anticipate people

Would you use them?

How do you incorporate those sidewalks?

We work with the localities.

Part of our guide is to provide accommodations for bikes and pedestrians with every project.

So we look at the project and then work with the county on what, look at their plans.

We look at their bike ped plans.

We try to identify where the greatest needs are.

and include those facilities to help fill out their network with our project.

There are some projects that we do in the past.

We don't have any of this.

Well, we have one this round that's just a shared use path.

and it's in the town of Culpeper.

It runs basically like four blocks long, but it does include road improvements and a bus stop.

So, I mean, it just depends on the project and what the county's looking for.

Like on Barracks Road, we're putting in the shared use path on Old Ivy Road.

That's just along Barracks, yeah, Old Ivy Road.

So that's something that we work with them on identifying the location and the right,

We put the shared use path on the south side of the road.

We were able to put that in there at a reasonable accommodation to address a need that they have.

Got it.

Any further questions for Chuck?

Okay, well, I guess we'll move on to additional matters from the committee and the public.

I, at some point in the future, would love to hear about the NEVE, which is the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure,

She, Erin Beltz, spoke at the policy board and mainly appears back.

At some point last year, so that's something that, you know, they can grab a meeting link and send that out to you.

But there's also the cleaning facilities, the Virginia cleaning facilities.

Well, I'd like to make an observation.

I haven't served on this committee for a while.

Our committee includes the name or the word advisory and in truth do we get much chance to actually offer our advice.

We get a lot of information and that's fine but as far as actually influencing anything

I don't know, I feel somehow that we don't really do too much of that.

I don't know how the rest of you feel on that.

I guess some of you are too new to know the difference yet, but I'd just like to say, Marty and I serve on

CAC, which is the Community Advisory Committee.

And like this committee, of course, we don't have any power to do anything.

We merely offer advice, but we do influence.

Yeah, we do have some influence here.

Most of the things we're looking at, like tonight, are gun deals, right?

I mean, we can't affect what anything is.

Personally, I have tried.

I mean, I'll share with you what I know about the project at Rhode Island Hillsdale and Old Brook, for example.

There was a corridor study that Marty mentioned that the county funded, and we hired

a line grade to do a quarter study on Rye Road, not quite to 20, East Rye Road, not quite to 10 miles east of Ann to

Actually, John Ward Parkway had been continuing on old East Royal Road all the way to the city line.

And it was a very elaborate aspirational kind of thing with, you know, tree-lined streets and fancy medians and all kinds of things.

And one of the things was this peanut-shaped roundabout

and interestingly, one of the few things that it did advise different was the roundabout at East Royal and John Warren Barclay.

Kind of took a different approach to that, but the county didn't, the student budget didn't want to rock the boat, so they basically overruled that part and

and then since to have the project with the green tea and Belvedere which was part of the study but

I offered a couple alternatives at the time, and the line of grading pretty much dismissed them, and so I presented them again to the county, and Anthony got both, and I specifically talked to Sean Nelson, who's the

Culpepper, District Engineer, and he was kind of dubious that the green, or that the peanut shaped braggart would get followed because it's too expensive, because he's more or less involved in that, and what I had suggested, the simplest thing was

We reconfigure traffic lights.

The accidents at those intersections are because you have two intersections about 200 feet apart and the traffic lights change at the same time.

So what you have is somebody goes through the first light that they get to on Rio earlier, sailing along, lights yellow, and they get through the yellow light, first yellow light again.

The next light is three seconds away.

By the time that three seconds goes, that light's red.

They just keep going.

And I walk along there, so I see it all the time.

And most of the time, fortunately, because there's all been accidents, but there have been a couple fatalities there because of that.

So I suggest you go for

less than half a million dollars you could reconfigure the traffic lights and just change the signals if they don't they change sequentially instead of simultaneously

and, you know, Chuck couldn't attest to that.

Their signal engineer looked at it and didn't understand my timing chart.

It was basically just a timing chart, but I offered to explain it to them, but they weren't interested.

So, well, then the other alternative is to just close off the whole book road.

I mean, the

and it's there it's really the west the east side of Old Brook Road is an entrance to the uh what now is Grant Ridge apartment complex and there's other entrances and that one could easily be rerouted and and just cul-de-sac'd out at that point uh and Old Brook Road from the other direction uh would be connected over to Northfield which then you only have

One intersection instead of two intersections with succession, which would still cost much less than RAPPA.

But interestingly, the county's position on it was that they expected VDOT to offer alternatives

and VDOT was well we don't do that they have to suggest the alternatives and so there was kind of a stalemate there and I talked to Kevin McDermott about it and he was favorable to it but it wasn't a decision it was Jessica

Hersh-Ballering, and she didn't choose to offer any alternatives as I suggested.

So nothing happened.

And that's fine.

I just... At the end of the day, I just wonder is how much... What is our point in existence?

What do we really accomplish?

or what can we accomplish as our committee here.

That's just sort of a question.

I'm one of the new ones you mentioned.

I just joined this committee in January as a rep for the planning commission.

As far as boards and committees I've served on, and this is no dispersion to anybody here,

It does feel like we basically just get staff reports and then ask questions.

And I don't know if that's normal.

I don't know if that's just because this is the things of the SMART SCALE cycle that we're in, or if there's more substantive feedback and, you know, advice, advising at other cycles of that, other parts of that cycle, right?

So I don't have a conclusion on that because I haven't been through multiple cycles of SMART SCALE yet.

And I know some of the problems, I didn't know the details of suggestions you've made, but I know all those projects, obviously.

I think it is interesting.

There was a couple of meetings ago, there was a whole thing of using data and like, you know, looking at crash data and speed data and stuff that kind of pops up all hotspots where there needs to be attention, where there needs to be studies.

That's great, and it does sort of beg a little bit of a question.

It's like, what are we doing?

We've got computer skills where to do it, standards to do studies on where to do it, standards to move the stuff to the SMART SCALE, and then workers to put the stuff in.

It's like, I mean, we can come here and ask questions, and it's great to know what's going on.

And I can tell my friends, oh, hey, you made the burning diamond, maybe, if money comes through.

assessment of the situation and yeah I assure you that you know this is really no exception.

I mean we have the long-range transportation plan and we as individuals could submit

I just went in with any other person from the public that made suggestions.

I think the day won out and I think that it probably didn't really change anything.

Yeah, I know it's happened for several years.

I've been on this committee even before I was on this committee in trying to offer alternatives to some of the VDOT plans is that

VDOT has a stable of consulting engineering firms that they deal with and they're mostly from the Newport News area or Northern Virginia or Richmond, generally not from the land here, and those consultants come and they

$50,000 or $100,000 to withdraw the plan, and that's a neat plan.

They don't go off 10 plans, they just go off one.

And there's problems back and forth with VDOT during that change, but we don't get involved with that plan.

We get involved after they've finalized their plan with VDOT, and here it is.

It's a say to complete.

And like District Avenue, there was actually not much choice.

I went to the public hearing on that and whether or not to cut off the road in the south.

so that the consultants actually left as an open question you know what people prefer but for the most part you don't get much close and so I just you know food for thought I don't know that anything's got to change but

yeah i i just wonder at times how much advising we actually get from one study if i think about is from that and let's look at the chart and the next meeting and review it and then see what seems what should be what isn't what is

identified as the advisory, what isn't, and look at the role of what's not.

That might be a useful thing.

We have had some healthy debates here as recently as the SMART SCALE.

You know, a lot of us were a little bit surprised and shocked at the proposed changes to SMART SCALE and some of us presented a policy war and, you know, they

Thank you, but no.

And that's fine.

Advice is advice.

I can take my advice.

And I think the weird here is citizen models, transportation experts, even though many of us maybe are transportation experts.

And I think it's kind of, you know, what was presented tonight, it all to me seemed like, okay, if there was something in there that

It seemed offensive transportation-wise.

I would have spoken up about it.

Is there something that could happen?

Probably not, but at least I could give my opinion and advice and say, all right, we're taking this to the next policy board as an organization.

It's kind of like it's on us if we're worked up about something then we have to escalate it.

Well that's one point and with regard to the Ivy Road study, I mean there was a presentation on that and it was opportunities to submit public comments and I did and I looked over and actually

I didn't really have anything to disagree with about that.

I mean, it was actually the easy plan.

I mean, I wouldn't agree with that.

My only suggestion was, you know, if you get to the point where you're starting to talk six lanes on the bypass, are you now at the point where maybe you want to just bypass the whole track like they did in Lynchville?

I mean, Lynchburg used to be like Charlottesville.

I mean, I could go through the little town to the north and then the whole way through Lynchburg, 20 million traffic lights.

And then at some point, they built this fantastic bypass and went around the whole town.

Didn't quite finish it.

I mean, it could go far south, but the,

you know that's been proposed for Charlottesville a couple of different times that never gets anywhere but you know you're starting to talk about

that have been made hundreds of millions of dollars on trying to, I mean, can you imagine what that would cost to tear that bridge out, the Ivy Road Bridge, and incorporate the railroad tracks into it?

I mean, that's a hundred million dollars before you think about it.

And, you know, you can get into that kind of money now, or if you,

You're required to have a technical advisor.

This region said it was important to get that citizen engagement.

And so they decided they wanted to have this recurring citizen committee in order to make sure that we are information sharing, that we are getting feedback in a sustained way.

We have had as staff in the last 10 years, many conversations about outside of the long range transportation plan,

How will we continue to engage that committee?

Because that is really where the majority of that advice comes in, is what metrics are we using and what percentage threshold.

Like that's where you guys were able to do a lot of that debate that you were talking about.

It's then in those off cycles where we are not right up against a SMART SCALE application, we're right up against a long-range transportation plan.

where it's then we're gonna be sharing the types of information that we're sharing with the policy board and the MPO tech committee in order to continue to do the work plan.

And so it is, I mean, I appreciate the comments that you're making and I appreciate the comments that you've said because it's not always clear because there is no code dictating this is what you're supposed to be doing with your citizen advisory board the way it does for MPO tech.

So I appreciate this conversation because we certainly, especially when you have staff transitions,

then articulating the purpose of that body and what it is that, where's the value add both for the MPO policy board, but also for the citizens that are giving them their time to come to these meetings.

I think what's also unique about CTAC in our region, which is not the same as CTAC in many other places, because we happen to have a lot of people that have expertise.

Normally it is a group of citizens that just have some interest in transportation.

It's not engineers and professors of transportation

folks that work for the research council and planning commissioners.

And so we do have a level of expertise that wants to engage in a little bit different of a way than the average citizen would want to engage in the projects.

So that's just something to note that we're very fortunate that our citizen advisory committee has so much technical expertise, but most CTACs, when they say, well, we've had designed drawings presented by our citizen committee, they're like,

Honestly, what do you mean?

You've had drawings submitted by your citizens.

Do you guys even look at those?

You have to have an interest.

But I'll say I do appreciate being able to be a bridge, so to speak, to plan a question.

And to get around that.

But no, I mean, to have the clearly laid out and have the opportunity to ask some questions about this conversation.

Go back next Tuesday and tell the planet folks what's up.

I think kind of similar, I've been a part of like strategic planning or advisory groups on a number of boards over the years, different non-profit organizations and stuff.

And when there's like that sort of messy middle of strategic planning, there's a lot of engagement, a lot of like feedback and input.

And then when it's sort of said, it's just sort of like, here's what we're up to, that sound okay?

yeah all right well that's fine i i just just wanted to vander a little bit i guess it is but um but yeah something to keep in mind is i one time um it must have been several years ago uh she's now a supervisor but Ann Malek i think was on the CTAC and she was uh

I made a comment at one of the policy board meetings that, you know, they were perhaps a little more engaged than then and now, or something like that, that she felt that CTAC was perhaps had been more effective in her day than it had become.

Well, I can also say that

Virginia compared to a lot of other states is a little bit unique in terms of how they do their prophecies.

So the competitive process to apply for funding through SMART SCALE removes a lot of the decision-making that happens where MPOs in other states might have real on-the-ground decisions about how funding is spent within their area.

So I think that creates another challenge in terms of how much autonomy and decision-making an MPO has, which also trickles down to

And that's a good point.

Even the policy board actually has the power to make decisions.

At the end of the day, how much power does it really have?

You've got the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

At the end of the day, it's all what they call shots of where the money goes.

They make the rules and they, you know, do a lot of that.

It's also a challenge that there seems, and it's a good thing, that there are so many outreach groups and conversions of this group for everything you can imagine.

I can't remember the last time we had a citizen come and then bring a topic because there's so many places that you can raise an issue but like I don't know if anyone's ever come in to talk about bicycles or sidewalks or shared use or you know just a citizen outside of this group and that may be because there are so many places now to online you can do it so like how do you make sure to stay relevant

But I would think that the citizens wouldn't come here.

We just need to be more disruptive is what I'm hearing.

Send us what your message is.

And as the liaison,

Well, I don't mean, as you recall, we did have the floor, and actually vote on that.

We'll leave the room at 250, but they just killed that project, so we really didn't get to go anywhere with it anyway.

I did bring it up in the policy board,

Yeah, that was the case where, you know, if VDOT comes up with what I think is a bad design, I will jump on the dance.

That's all they do for you, though.

Yeah.

No other comments or questions?

Thank you everyone.

Oh yes, the next meeting is September 8th.

Is it when?

One last time.

September 18th.

18th, okay.

Thank you Chuck.

Okay.

Yeah, that's next to the bio, usually before the recording.

And then there might be a small unit that has come back on the market.

I think that's a fine ride.

Okay.

Thank you, sir.

And I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

The e-mail group decided that it's going to be good.

and CTAC invitation.

So you have membership here.

This is like the email that's been sent to the community health.

Entries to CTAC and maybe an extra people on it.

It's supposed to make it better.

And we're going to get out from the roundabout and see if it's going to be as fast as it will be.

I'll put it here in just like a little I won't even put anything else so you'll know

and then just CBN Road

Oh, okay.

Thanks.

Let me start with the county, and then if they say that's all we've done, everybody has a program, and the county views the public's needs.

It just bypasses us, is what I'm saying.