MPO Policy Board Meeting   9/28/2022

Good morning and good afternoon.

Good afternoon everyone.

I call the Wednesday, September 28th for an NPO policy board meeting to order and I will be to do the roll call because I stole Sandy's list of people.

She said we had text now so let's go through the list.

Supervisor Mallard

Mr. Williams.

Oh, OK. Not quite there yet.

And I've got Mr. Duran.

Mr. Proctor, is Chuck Lewis standing in?

I was just going to say, okay, now this is Mr. Barnum standing in.

All right, very good.

Roll call is complete.

Sandy, anything else I have to do there?

So the next item, matters from the public.

We will limit three minutes per speaker.

We welcome anyone who would like to come forward and give a comment today.

Anyone here in the room or online, let me give a comment.

Seeing none, we will close matters from the public and move to item number three.

Sandy, you're going to take this through.

Well, my excuse.

Go ahead with the acceptance of the agenda.

We do need to approve the agenda that's in front of us.

Are there any changes to the agenda?

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

We need to approve the 7th of July

Second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion to approve the August 26-22 special meeting minutes.

Second.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Thank you very much.

All right, you have been right along.

We're already way ahead of schedule.

Chairs, Chairs of the MPO.

Can you all hear me okay?

Sounds like I'm really loud though.

I'm going to turn my volume down a little bit.

Okay, great.

You have a memo and a proposed policy in your packet today that's really necessitated

by some changes that were made at the General Assembly with regard to remote participation in public meetings by members of the public body and also for holding all virtual meetings.

Those changes were made and are effective as of just under a month ago on September 1st.

So the policy that you have before you for consideration really would replace

Policy that you had previously adopted to address both of those issues that I mentioned.

The policy has a policy statement, which are basically reiterating some provisions that are contained in the code.

And then there are separate sections, one for the remote participation by individual members.

and the second section for all virtual meetings.

You will find that the first section on remote participation is what you've been doing under the past couple of years when you had virtual meetings during the COVID emergency declaration.

If a member wishes to participate remotely, they have to make a notification to the chair, to the staff,

There has to be a quorum physically assembled in person in order to allow the

You have to have a policy in place, which you did.

And then there are four reasons by which you can state that you would like to participate remotely.

All of those are the same under the new provisions of the code.

They are unlimited with the exception of personal matters, which can only be used two times or 25% of meetings, whichever is greater.

What's gonna be new to you is for the provisions related to the all virtual meetings.

And here what we tried to do was really just encompass those items which are enumerated in the state code for situations where you would have an all virtual meeting.

I think that you will also find that those items you were doing during COVID in terms of providing access to the public

providing an opportunity for public comment.

There is a limitation on the number of virtual, all virtual meetings that the MPO and its committees could have.

And similar to the remote participation is limited to two times per year, 25% of meetings, whichever is greater.

And you cannot have two meetings consecutively that would be all virtual meetings.

That is a quick rundown.

Julia DeRocha, aye.

Yes, please.

I move the approval of the remote participation in the motion of the policy.

That's just described.

OK. Any further discussion?

All right.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

That almost ends it up.

All right, our next item on the agenda, number five, fiscal year 23 unified planning and work program amendments.

I know it has not been very long since you all approved the FY 23 unified planning and work

There have already been some changes, so we wanted to go ahead and make sure that those were effective and that we could identify any work programs updated and so we can start programming importantly and also billing accordingly to the body that has been adjusted.

So there are two main points of our, well really three main points of adjustment, but two adjustments on the amount.

The first is that we ended up getting more funding allocated for the MPO through the FHWA PL side of the funding that we had originally anticipated when the estimates were developed.

And so our PL funding that was allocated for FY 23, so this new funding that came on board was a little bit, I think it was around 40, this is really small, $47,000.

That was in addition to what we had anticipated.

And then the other thing that changed is that we had anticipated rolling over about $26,000 from our FY22 FTA contract.

What happens with the FTA contract is that the contract period lasts beyond the fiscal year.

So what happened is that we were actually able to spend out a little bit more on the FY22

of June of the fiscal year.

And so we have anticipated about $26,000 and some change being programmed for FY23 from the FY22 contract.

And that amount was reduced to $25,488 based on actual expenditures.

So those were the two areas where there was an actual amount that was adjusted that we needed to revise in the work program.

The third thing that happened is that

The rollover from the FY22 FTA side was originally all programs would be the FPOs portion of the match for the government study.

Based on the way that the government study was funded through DRPT though, they do not require that we separate out that match as a separate sort of funding allotment.

So what we're doing is we're still getting that amount of funding, but we're going to use it mostly to support our staff's support of the program.

So it's not going to be pulled out of this effort.

As a result, DRPT has requested that we send down the FY22 contract in full before we start billing to the FY23 contract.

They want us to spend full money before we spend to pay money and make sure that we're only working within one contract at a time.

So instead of having all of this rollover funding from FY22, the FTA FY22 rollover in one sub task in the unified planning work program, we distributed it out among all three of those tasks, administrative tasks, the long-term and short-term planning tasks, so that we could kind of build evenly among all of those tasks in proportion to the amount of funding that came from each of those in order to build down that FY22 contract first.

So this shows the updated table in the UTWC and then the next table here shows the adjustment amounts based on where we programmed the funding.

So the additional $47,319 can be put in the on-call services category because we had that unanticipated funding that we would have for the MPA staff.

We didn't have a designated program already in mind with the

on call services, which serves kind of as a holding place until we figure out what it is that we really want to do with this company.

So we may come back again at some point and ask for another revision if we determine that there's an opportunity to program this plan.

So the only category that was really impacted is this past two long-run transportation planning because we reduced the transit government spending contribution by $1,174

and then we increased the on-call services by $47,319, which gives a net change and that line item of $46,145.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

I know this is something that everybody is looking for.

We, I know at the last meeting we talked a little bit about establishing a working group and so I'm working with the localities to determine who those additional members of the working group is, who that would be putting out the offsets from the MGA cycles.

And then we also

are the partners of Recurring Our Consultant to support the LRTP.

So we are still in process.

But tonight what we're going to talk about is our overall approach to the Laramie Transportation Plan to get feedback from you all on what we're doing and hopefully build consensus and get support for moving forward with the process that we've been developing.

Keep in mind, what was our question?

Keep in mind that all of this is in platform, so we are very responsible

So first of all, for those of you that are new, I probably shouldn't have put this on the slide, and in fact forgot to use that, but the reason we do a long range transportation plan is because we are federally mandated to do a long range transportation plan for support.

We use a growth projection or a growth horizon, a new horizon, up to 2050.

So it's considered a long-range transportation plan.

But really, the really big emphasis that we're going to be focusing on as part of this is that we're going to develop a constrained budget for what we anticipate from neighborhood needs to be

over the next five years and we will identify a short list of projects that we think need to be prioritized for funding within the next five years.

We do these plans every five years to different expense and so we'll have an opportunity to reevaluate in the next five years whether we have the same priorities or different priorities before we establish the list of projects that we want to make sure that we're pursuing.

There are three standing committees.

if you count the policy board of the committee, so there's a policy board of the two advisory committees.

So each of them has a different designated role as part of this process.

You all have a policy board of the steering committee, so ultimately you determine which projects need to be different, what are the highest needs, and you're going to provide the general oversight and direction as to how we approach this process.

We're going to solely be responsible for improving the final effort.

But there are two advisory committees that will support you.

There's the MPA Technical Committee, which is mostly made up of the jurisdictional and state agency staff, as well as the departmental staff for the service providers, like John's as well.

So they are going to be providing for the staff level technical input.

And the CTAC is the Citizen Transportation Advisory.

So they're going to help us develop our public participation strategies, help us make sure that we are considering how citizens are going to engage in this planning process and also help be a conduit to bring citizen-level recommendations into the process considerations.

And then what we talked about last month was establishing this MCO tech going through it.

So transportation is important because it's taking you from one place to another place or helping you connect different

So we thought it was going to be really important to make sure that this plan was connecting well with other initiatives that are happening in those localities.

And the same with the climate action goals that you all have all identified as priorities.

Things like making sure that we are supporting inclusive outreach opportunities for the populations that have been designated as being required, but also

So this MPO tech work group will be the regular MPO tech committee plus some of these other staff members at the state agency or local level.

There we go.

So this is our alert if you've read back for 2050.

So we're going to be working through each of these little tags and they'll help us kind of have an idea of where we are on our overall development of the long range tradition plan.

In your packet, you have a DM chart.

If you're like me, the DM chart may or may not be helpful to you.

DM charts are not my favorite, but they're individual.

We're going to have to get this plan approved by May of 2024.

So we have almost two years to work through this and so we wanted to be really thoughtful about how we're going to start that work there at that time of year.

So what I'm going to ask when we get done with this is if you have any feedback on the overall process and then I'm going to ask you all to approve the

So let's just start going through the general process.

These first three items, and these are generally going to fall away out of the fan document itself, but these first three items are read by the classified as information gathering tasks.

We're taking information that has already been developed and we're really trying to simplify it.

So we're going to be looking at demographics and land use trends.

We're going to look at the existence of operations, and then we're going to be pulling in other plans and studies to help us understand how this long-range transportation plan is going to fit into all of the other planning efforts that have been going on in the intermediary between when the previous long-range transportation plan was developed and this long-range transportation plan.

We're going to do as much of this effort as possible, but we probably will be doing this on an ongoing basis, at least for the first several months of this project, as information becomes available.

The demographic analysis of our conversation this afternoon, I think we're going to be using a five-year community survey estimate.

Yeah, the love of Cooper data, I don't, by my understanding is that that's not going to be available at as great of a scale as we need it to be in order for it to be affordable.

We're really looking for things to be at the block level and block group level.

Yeah.

Any other questions on that?

So we can use the goals that were built in 2045 and be inclined to help them as a starting point for what it is overall that we want to improve related to our expectations with them.

Based on some of the globally identified and the federally identified priorities, the recommendation that came from our staff that also seemed to be confirmed within the attack and CTAP meetings

is that we probably want to do some recategorization of those 2045 baseline rules in order to better reflect those priorities.

The next step after we identify those goals and objectives is that we're going to take that information

and then we're going to apply it to how the existing system is operating and we're going to start overtaking these.

So some of you may recall that we applied for a grant in the Office of Environmental Safety and Investment to do a grip and accessibility planning study to help us develop this prioritization process.

So we've been working with them to identify the performance measures that we can use to evaluate the overall system and help us determine

where the system operations are most efficient.

So really we're looking at where is there congestion, where are there significant safety concerns, where is there a lack of accessibility, specifically accessibility to different roads for people from underserved communities, those kinds of things.

And that's gonna help us identify where the strongest needs are.

From there, in a perfect world, our technical needs would lead us to determine where we need to do some additional studies or evaluations to determine what those improvements are.

So after we get through this first cycle of doing the needs prioritization, that should help us inform where we would do additional studies to help us identify the most effective improvements that we want to pursue.

And that will help create this kind of pipeline of identifying the problem

working to develop the solutions and then prioritizing the solutions that we have developed.

In this first round though, because we have been so successful with getting our projects funded, we're probably not going to be able to apply that as fluently as we would like to, but we do have a pretty significant list of projects that have already been developed.

And there will be other projects that are relatively straightforward that can resolve some of these

some of these high knee areas.

And so we're going to just kind of work through that as part of this first cycle, understanding that this is going to set up a process that we'll be able to hopefully move through a little bit more effectively once we get through this first order transition period.

The recommendation that we discussed with the office is that

we focus on first group resolving existing system needs.

There are a couple of different approaches.

We could use the model, apply the birth projections using the model and look at what is the system going to look like in our 2050 planning year horizon and sort of prioritize our needs based on those future projections.

But I think what we're really talking about is that running the model is pretty,

It's pretty, I guess, a commercial of a process and it's not something that we can deal in-house, do in-house.

And so this is also an opportunity for us to focus on rent moves current, existing, knowing that those are probably going to be compounded in the future.

And it just makes those a little bit more evident.

The only thing that this does is it allows us to consider when we are developing different solutions that could be applied to resolve these problems.

It will allow us to then consider the future system performance when we are determining what is the right solution to enact at these hiding areas.

Does that make some of us out there?

And you may want to come back to some of these later and that's fine.

So the needs you're going to start with are in terms of this, from a current perspective.

Yeah, we'll talk about the performance, but we wanted to make sure we're being really thoughtful about to include multi-modal considerations.

And then what I'm talking about prioritizing the needs is we're not talking about projects.

We have a list of existing projects that we'll start pulling those into.

The needs assessment is really just evaluating the performance of the system.

And then what we'll end up doing is we're going to overlay the projects that we've already identified against where the system needs are.

So these are really two different steps.

So we're looking at what are the biggest problems, then we're looking at how do we want to resolve some of these problems.

So like I said, the additional studies might need to be there to help us with what solutions might be in place, but some of them might also be really straightforward, you know, where we know that there's a bicycle network that we want to fill,

You know, maybe we need to do some operational work with that intersection or something like that.

Some of these will be relatively straightforward.

And so we'll start, we'll start with the information that we already have and pretty easily develop.

So as I mentioned, the system means we're really looking at what can we measure on some wide levels.

That's going to be things like congestion, that's going to be things like safety, and that's going to be things like accessibility in the cities.

When we start talking about the project coordination process though, we can start pulling in some of these factors that are going to be a little bit more specific to the projects that are going to be able to be implemented.

So that's what we're going to pull in some of these environmental considerations like limiting the impacts on some of the different environmental and historic resources, coordinating with land use and economic development, and also coordinating with system preservation factors.

So looking at

where there might be a deteriorating bridge or some sort of maintenance or something like that.

And so if there's an opportunity to align a project where we know that there's already a need for some sort of significant maintenance or system preservation investment, that might be somewhere where we want to increase the priority of that project based on knowing that there's going to need to be some group of people.

Questions on that?

Yes.

So the second one, the last one, coordination of links, is that where the strategic plan impacts the city and county and the comp plan elements would be their first

Okay, I believe so, yeah.

That's the conversation I had this afternoon.

Yeah, if that's what you all want.

I should say ultimately you all are going to that's the direction you're going to go.

All right, so then after we get through that we're going to have our we're going to apply for this harmonization process to the needs.

We're going to identify our our potential projects and that's going to help us get us to a point where we have a shorter list where we can start really pulling in like the cost and benefits and

and things like that and start understanding how these fit in with the types of resources to fund these projects that we believe will be available.

So this is where we get into developing our constrained budget, basically determining what funding programs are going to be available that make sense for each of these projects and really sort of creating a car short

I'll also mention that one of the challenges with developing these implementation strategies is just that the funding environment has changed pretty significantly and is still changing and processing them.

There are a lot of places that are really looking beyond the more traditional funding mechanisms in order to find other ways that they can implement some of these projects.

So I think at least this part will be really open about

things like how to coordinate with private developers or consider other opportunities to generate revenues beyond kind of the standard smart scale revenue sharing, transportation alternatives kind of things.

So we'll have a conversation about that, but ultimately this is really intended to give us a framework for what can we reasonably expect to implement over the next five years.

And then the final step is going to be to finalize the priorities.

Hopefully, if we do the rest of this well, that's going to be a relatively straightforward process by the time we get to that point.

But I expect there will be lots of iterations of all of these steps along the way.

Any other questions or comments?

All right.

When we're looking at the needs and talk about operational stuff, we're going to look at potentially what infrastructure is in place to help with technology to improve our system.

So is that a system need or would that maybe go along in the project or organization once we identify where the needs are?

If it wasn't there, I think we'd be doing that.

I think the issue is there's gaps where we don't have or don't have access to.

Okay.

Maybe that's an overarching, a bigger question, but

We're looking at where fiber is and using resource sharing agreements.

Okay.

So there are places where you need, by the way,

Yes, I just need to know where it is.

That was kind of your question.

If we've got gaps, and I think as a department, we can easily identify where the gaps are at.

We know where they're at.

Because it helps, I mean, it helps a lot from somebody being able to sit in our racing center and change the timing of a signal, as opposed to having to call someone to go out to a signal to plug into it, to change your timing, to dial into it, to a modem,

Yeah, I will say the biggest thing, we'll talk about that a little bit, but I'm going to go down there.

In the previous plan, we've had more of these operations and maintenance, but it wasn't really me performing the project coordination.

So maybe, I mean, we can have a conversation about whether we need to add that back in.

I guess one of my questions might be as far as how we identify the

That's a good question.

I don't know.

I do want to ask for a general note

Yeah, I have some more information I can get if you'd like to hear that first.

Okay, sure.

So the first thing we talked about was really defining

I don't want to say that these are our goals, but these are our overall goal categories that we're going to start with just to start considering how important all of these different system factors are compared to one another.

So the 2045 plan goals are listed here.

Accessibility and mobility, safety, economic development, land use, congestion, environment, community, operations, and maintenance.

What we did is we went through this benchmarking exercise where we looked at our plan

My suggestion is that we don't significantly change the 2045 thing, but we better re-categorize it a little bit in order to better reflect sort of the direction that we've been going in since the last thing was updated.

So related to safety, again, these are sort of the final statements about what our goals are, but just to give us general categories that we think we need to make sure that we're addressing.

The safety goals, we'll look at both the vehicular safety and then in order to also make sure that we are supporting some of those equity considerations, also pulling out safety provisables and pedestrian separately.

So there'll be two different safety factors that are evaluated, vehicular safety,

and then specifically for right back safety, or right and pedestrian safety.

The recommendation is that instead of lumping accessibility and vulnerability together and then community and nature together, we pair equity and accessibility together to better reflect the sort of priority that we want to see focused on these equity considerations.

as well as also holding environmental considerations out separately since those have been identified as very significant poverty in our MCO areas.

So for the equity and accessibility, we're really looking at improving access to jobs and activity centers for users by all modes.

And then to capture that equity component, we're going to basically do an analysis of who has, how many people have access to each and each of those transportation to these defined activities

when we get into more detail.

But then to help us address that equity component, we'll also do a comparison against how many of the people in those areas that are representing underserved populations have access.

So there's a weighting factor against what the disproportionate amount is for underserved communities

After talking to MPA Tech, we pulled out the mobility and system efficiency separately.

So if you recall in 2045, this was really just called congestion and this was really about minimizing or reducing congestion.

The MPA Tech conversation pointed us in the direction where it really was the congestion relief that was really all that stuff.

So there's a lot of congestion

So really our priorities are trying to encourage people to use different modes of transportation, not necessarily expanding the capacity of existing roads, although I think we still want to look at where we can make operations improvements where we can.

But you know, we don't want to go onto this planet and say we're going to build a lot of roads that infrastructure doesn't fit.

We really want to encourage the shift to other modes whenever it's feasible.

And so this is really looking at increasing the efficiency, so how can we make those intersection operations treatment or reduce the intelligent transportation systems, things like that, to improve operations and then also increase the system reliability.

Coordination of economic development and land use, that's really just about making sure that we have some sort of consideration for where the transportation infrastructure is going.

related to where the population growth and economic development areas have been indicated.

And then as far as the environment, we're still working on how to measure some of these.

Some of these are really here to manage them better.

The smart scale approach is once you have identified recruitment, is there any sort of environmental historic or culturally significant action?

We do really want to make sure that we are speaking to the current action goals though, the emissions reduction goals that have been identified by our group of localities.

So we're still working out the methodology to do that, but we're going to find some ways to incorporate that.

And then we also want to make sure that we're committing sustainable transportation through that.

So looking at what kinds of resiliency considerations can we

make sure that we are bringing into any improvements that are considered.

And then the system preservation has really been defined as maybe a coordination factor.

So it's not necessarily going to be used to score a project, but it might be used to give a project a little bit of a higher coordination if there's an identified system preservation need for that.

Any feedback on the goal?

I have a really basic question.

I'm sorry.

One is basic.

The system you're referring to, presumably the network of roads, capital civilization, bridges, and is it

It would be a beat up on roads and so forth?

It would be off publicly owned roads.

Yeah.

So really what happened with the short list, I'm just not sure what happened there.

Really what this project for this project organization is really used for is to support applications for any assessment project.

Yeah, I think theoretically it'll be identified through the same process, but if there are things that aren't identified on this process that aren't, that's a conversation we'll need to have.

But ultimately, you all are going to approve the projects that show up on this list.

And I will say that we have, the city of Charlottesville as well as the county of Albemarle has staff that have been participating in developing these

I'll pull up out of time.

Questions?

I don't know how granular you are yet, but in order for prioritization to be used,

Yeah, so again, so the way this is going to work is we'll prioritize the system needs, then we'll go back and look at what are the projects that we already have in place.

We'll start there.

And then, like I said, what's going to happen is there might be a really high need that's identified because maybe we bet, we resolve all the high needs that were identified before we're doing this well.

So there might be a really high need that we identify that we don't really have a great solution for.

And so that's going to point us in the direction of saying we really need to do something.

We don't know what to do.

We're working on developing that, that's what we're doing.

We don't really have that in place, just under development.

And several on the line will need to resolve the challenge always about, are we talking about frequent stuff or are we talking about city streets, walkable, contact sensitive stuff?

Yeah, and what we're going to do is we're going to take you to general categories and one of the first things we're going to do is go out to the public and say,

How important are these goals compared to each other?

I don't know how exactly we're going to ask that question, but that's really the goal of the public participation is to help inform us.

And then come back to you and say, based on the public impact, this is what we're hearing about the relative importance of each of these goals.

What kind of weight should we get to this kind of project or this kind of need over another kind of project or another kind of need?

And so you'll be able to say, you know what, we really only want to consider congestion

at like 10% of what we consider the rest of this.

We really think that safety needs to be 30% of the conversation or whatever your policies are.

You'll be informing the relative importance of the two of you based on the public feedback.

Any other questions or comments or feedback about these overall categories?

All right.

So given a little bit more detail, I wasn't planning on going into this in a lot of detail, but if you have questions, I'm certainly happy to tell you about the projects I know.

So far, through working with the consultants in the Office of Intermittal Community Assessment, we've really been focusing on different priority needs and how we're going to measure those.

We are just now starting to move forward towards the project prioritization metrics that were already used, but those aren't as well determined.

So there were a couple of things that I just want you all to know when we started this process with the OIP consultants.

And that's that they have some guidelines or framework for what they base the development of this process on.

The first is that they want to use publicly available data or data that's specific to the MPO because what they're trying to do is build their capacity to help other MPOs and other localities with this planning process.

So anything

that they do, they want to make sure other areas or other localities or other CEOs will potentially be able to do something similar.

The very first thing they did with us was go through an internal capacity evaluation.

And so they're based in the methodology on the existing staff and technology that's available to us based on what our skills and abilities are.

And then there's a really strong focus on developing a process

So while they will use the data that they're pulling and developing to help us understand what, you know, putting this information together, what kind of outcomes are going to be, this is really going to be something that potentially could be applicable in future plans.

They're going to give us a tool.

So talking about the needs prioritization, I don't necessarily need to get into specifics with this, but they're using the potential for safety improvements, which is basically a finesse developed through a VDOT statewide safety action plan.

So they're pulling that information from VDOT.

We'll identify the top segment and the sections of the Charlottesville and Albemarle separately and then we'll combine all of those.

There's been some discussion about whether we actually want to weight those by the equivalent property image only.

So basically, this would provide like patches where there is a serious injury or mortality will be scored much higher.

then crashes that have minor injury or are properly damaged.

There's some discussion about whether or not to actually get you an accurate idea of where the severity is.

There's even one fatality that's going to make that one location a really, really high priority.

And that may not really inform the overall severity of how the inverse of intersection is because that fatality is kind of a outlier.

from the normal.

So there's some discussion about that, but we'll have it weighted somehow to measure the severity and frequency of crashes, those intersections.

And then they're developing a kind of technical process to evaluate whether a bicycle will be able to crash hot spots by basically identifying where are there places where there's a high concentration of bicycle and pedestrian-involved crashes within a

will be defined as your traffic area.

So we'll evaluate safety for both the sort of motor vehicle side and the bicycle and pedestrian crash side.

F&E and accessibility, they are using national accessibility evaluation data set, which evaluates access to jobs and expertise centers.

And so, like I said earlier, it's basically going to go through this process where

where it identifies the number of workers who can reach an activity center within a designated time period by a different mode, so people can, this many people can walk to a specified activity center in 45 minutes, this many people can get there to buy a transit, this many people can get there by bicycle, et cetera.

And then they're going to weight that and get the total number of workers with access by the population of the potential workers in each block.

So that gives us that accessibility or that equity

considerations that we can sort of determine, not just who has access, but what kind of equity consideration do we need to get to where there might be an equity concern about who wants to throw our data.

And then mobility is kind of a combination of a couple of different ones.

So there is the child's equity debt, which is basically the ratio of how much longer it takes to get to an explanation during rush hour compared to how

takes you to get there when there's no rush hour.

Travel time reliability, which is basically saying if it's really, really important for me to be able to work 95% of the time, I need to, this is the amount of time I need to get myself to get there.

And then there's the level of travel time reliability, which is basically saying this is what percentage of the time it takes me longer, a really long time compared to the average amount of time for each of those conditions

So that's really measuring the congestion and the system-wise considerations.

So those are the three factors that we're going to be using for that it's recommended to use to really identify where there are deficiencies in the system.

And then when we start talking about the privatization, we'll be able to use some of those same types of considerations to say like, this is how significant the need is, let's evaluate this based on

you know, what our priorities are for our selected projects.

You know, there's high congestioning, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we want to build more capacity.

It could be that we want to expand multi-modal facilities and that sort of thing like that.

Any questions, Mona?

So the performance touches that we've been talking about with the project prioritization as the

using current and donated future landings by the nation, so there would be a higher priority for projects that support land use goals for things like mixed use or designated growth areas and things like that, the environmental macro.

So one problem I have is we have a tech work group.

So several times pepper throughout here is economic development and land use.

Would it be like a sort of interactive, like a whole sort of document that tracks this at the time?

Yeah, it's similar to the quality requirements for the comprehensive science where it has to be reviewed every five years.

The extent of what changes in the five years can vary a little bit.

Yeah, and that's because we want to consider any improvements now that we have to define this plan.

It's going to take us two, three, four, five years to get funded, and then it's going to take another four, five, six years before those projects.

So we do need to sort of plan for the, you know, consider the agency meetings, but also make sure that any improvements that we end up implementing consider what the future impacts are going to, or what the future environment of that system is going to be about.

This little plan is a good idea.

Well, it really depends on how effective we are at identifying projects that get funded.

implementing some of the high priority projects, I would say.

Most of this information comes from the state, and I can't speak to how often these grants are updated.

I think it's updated every two years.

Well, I'll learn a lot through this platform, I'm sure.

Do you want me to talk about the general public participation plan draft first, or do you want to?

Give me any other feedback about that overall scope and approach.

So one of the things we're trying to do tonight is to give you a chance to just vote in hopefully a confirmation or with any specified changes that you'd like to see to the scope.

But I can certainly go through the draft public engagement plan just knowing that that is also subject to change once we get consulting on board to help us sort of develop those strategies.

So again, we'll use consultants pretty significantly to help us form the process.

But I want to make sure that it's really clear that our staff is planning to really be the ones doing all of the engagement.

And so the consultants are really acting to give us advice and feedback and tell us what has worked or what has been effective to help guide us.

But we'll all be open to matters.

The overall goals for our public engagement related to the plan is, you know, first of all, we want to make sure that we're complying with all of the required public engagement programs that have been identified, such as our title sites, which is making sure that we're reaching out to all of those that are everywhere, who are our titles and communities, women in English speaking, low income minorities.

This is it?

That's it, okay.

And then making sure that we are also

And then because so much of this time does have these really technical components, we also want to be really thoughtful that we are asking for public engagement at points in this planning process that are going to be able to be meaningfully informed by those who participate.

And then we want to make sure that we're even ready

So again, this is just a draft at this point with some additional slides, but there will need to be a project website that will be established and that will sort of be a different house for all of the information related to the plan.

So we'll have all of our meeting schedules, summaries and meeting minutes of appropriate depending on the nature of the meeting, any mass that we develop, any surveys that are going to be available for the public, and then any draft materials that were developed as part of this process.

You know, there could be some technical events that are developed that explain methodology or summarize the project organization process, things like that.

So all of the information will be developed on that project website.

Really we see where, I guess I should say I don't want to say anybody else's name.

There's really like four key points where it would make sense to really induce a really substantive public outreach.

So the first is the goals planning phase.

This gives us an opportunity to introduce the project to the public.

It will give the public an opportunity to help inform the relative importance of the goals and objectives compared to each other.

And this also builds some excitement around the plan that can help inform

So at this point, we would want to include some sort of survey, probably online in the paper, an open house or an in-person opportunity for people to learn more about this, as well as an online webinar.

And then also really working to identify some of these community intercept opportunities.

So that's where we're going to the farmers markets or the festivals or those kinds of places to try

I know that this is happening.

We have an opportunity to have some really simple opportunities for them to inform the process that is going to be too time-extensive and we're catching somebody at one of these events.

The feedback we got from Businessmen's Transportation Advisory Committee was really helpful.

They felt like it would be really beneficial to have it really clearly

So based on all of this whole study and work that we do at Friends, we will then take all of this back

and we'll input it into sort of this prioritization waiting system that we're developing with the consultants.

And that will give us a first draft of regimen five where the priorities are.

So I think we will probably want to do some review of that by our technical committee and that MPO tech working group to really look at are there any gaps based on

sort of just their understanding of where the needs are in the community that will help us use a little bit of a ground truth and whether or not the process that we use actually captures all of the needs that they are aware of.

So it's really important to have that diverse stakeholder group.

And then we can put that out to the public comment for them to provide feedback on.

And what will likely happen is that there will be other things that the public

that are not identified as part of just running this prioritization process.

So we'll be able to take that from right publicly that we're going to bring it back to you and hopefully we'll be able to build consensus around sort of where we believe the highest needs are.

So the next step is going to be that project prioritization.

So after we identify those themes, we'll look at the identified improvements that we hope are available to apply to those highly areas.

We'll be able to go through a project ranking process relative to the project cost.

We can start running these scenarios through the travel demand model to estimate what the potential impacts could be from the different types of projects.

And then we can take all that information out to the public again and say, based on what we've heard, these are some of the recommendations that we think will be most effective at resolving the highest needs on our transportation system.

Tell us what you think.

And we'll do another kind of large push for public engagement during that phase.

And then we'll bring all that back to you, and then you'll help inform us on, you know, how we, you know, select the projects from that list.

Maybe we remove some, maybe we add some, you know, we'll start refining the projects from there, but we'll work through that process.

And then by the time we get to the final plan, hopefully we have

Any other feedback or questions?

I didn't see any mention of environmental justice in J-pop relations.

I think that executive order is still in effect already.

What we will need to do is we'll need to sort of do a review of these other projects we have identified and kind of overlay those against the population, you know, or something like that just to help us give us a double check on.

It could almost be part of your environmental scan.

Sure.

It could be a big old flaw I mentioned, so.

That is really helpful.

One, I hope that the consultants will be able to make sure that we consider that space.

Does that mean PGA is also income-related?

So, for instance, necessarily persons with poverty or that kind of thing, it's people who are full of poverty and all those kinds of things, which can affect them sometimes when they're victimized.

Sure.

So one recommendation, so the long-range transportation plan, in Albemarle we have citizen

I'm one of those supervisors, I don't know if you would agree or not, but I would think that that's a great place in public outreach where you, you know, when you talk about a little bit of pop-ups or trying to get input, these are citizens that are really engaged month in, month out, and what pressing issues define their area is.

Like Mr. Condor is on my private CAC, he's on CAC.

They could be a great place where you go get some elevated

localized information from a community that I think could inform the bigger system and that they will in turn fill out and help advertise and push public engagement to whatever other mediums you're going to have.

I would agree.

I think there are three times the number of people present beyond the members of the committee.

That would be helpful.

I've never come into it like that, right, in terms of the recent works of commissions by the Fed committee.

I mean, Kevin, he's subjected to these issues, so I think he would agree that these are folks that never do questions about transportation.

Today's meeting is going to have a little bit different level of understanding and they have, well these folks on my CAC have started to ask, how does the long-term vision come to be?

So just the education about the plan, which I would imagine is part of your public engagement anyway.

I mean, why should this matter to me?

and I think they're very receptive to homework.

So that's sort of heavy text stuff in the background, all those things that could be supplied ahead of time.

People will come in the door much more prepared than just, then you won't have to do absolutely everything that you have to do.

So you're going to the public for goal setting.

I mean, I guess you're essentially going to accept comment on the needs for prioritization.

I think the goal setting, what I hope is that the goal setting will be able to really start the land contact list and the development communications plan.

So the needs for prioritization

Not necessarily.

I don't think it would be necessary to go back out to the public at that point, but we can certainly make sure that we are communicating with the people that we have established communications with proactively that the teams have been identified and have an open comment period for people to comment.

Yeah, the goal setting I have rolling out on

We might have to adjust the time a little bit in January, so it would last at least a big push for about two months.

So you're at the point where you'd like us to sign off and say, yep, good plan.

Yup, good plan.

I'll second that for further discussion.

All right, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Thanks.

So from our part, would it be fair to direct the staff conversation about or direct any of that CDC coordination to the people in the state of Louisville?

And that was it on the bill.

All right, so we'll move to item six, staff updates.

The first bullet, safe streets and roads for all grant applications.

Yeah, I think that's pretty short.

I think you have some awareness of it.

But the safe streets and roads for all discretionary grant program was established in the back of our state in the first row.

It establishes between $5 and $6 billion in the next five years to find projects with the goal of preventing roadway deaths in the area.

There are two types of grants that meet the platform for this discretionary grant program.

The first is a thinning grant to develop a comprehensive safety action plan.

And then the second one would be implementations that implement some of the strategies that are identified in a qualifying program for a safety action plan.

None of the localities within the College of Understone Fin District Commission region have a qualified comprehensive safety action plan in place.

So we have developed a multi-intersectional application

Based on the safe streets and roads for all discretionary grant programs, there are eight components that are required for a safety action plan to comply with the qualifying criteria.

There has to be a leadership commitment from the local governing board basically saying that we want to adopt really substantive goals towards reducing and eliminating road-based injuries.

There has to be ongoing oversight and implementation and monitoring of the implementation of the strategies identified in the plan.

It involves a comprehensive safety data analysis, substance of public engagement.

There are equity considerations, so we need to make sure that we develop a plan that is inclusive of representative processes.

And then there has to be an evaluation and prioritization of not just

in frequent projects, not just on the ground, like the infrastructure in frequent projects, but also looking at the processes and policies that are in place.

So things like, how do we enforce traffic regulation?

Are there design guidelines, things like that, that we also need to consider that might also contribute to some of the safety outcomes, those kinds of things.

And then basically you have to do a comprehensive prioritization of all the strategies that are identified as part of that safety action plan development,

and then there has to be ongoing monitoring reporting on the outcomes from the implementation after that safety action plan is adopted.

So these are just some of the benefits that we identified that are part of the, that would, that the comprehensive safety action plan would help us fulfill.

First of all, we are going to be collecting data system

contributing to serious crashes throughout the region.

The kind of standard process that we go through with these corridor studies, which small area plans, is really looking at a really location specific needs and improvements.

And so this is going to help us identify those recurring systemic issues that are contributing to crashes.

Consider safety for all users who roadway, bike head, transit users,

and it also considers safety for users of all birth types.

There are a lot of opportunities for us to build relationships among stakeholders that are not always engaged in this planning process.

So part of this is that we want to start working with law enforcement, with public safety personnel, those kinds of things, the health department, maybe the Department of Motor Vehicles,

So it gives us a chance to bring all of these stakeholders together in one place to start some larger conversations around safety.

Helps us approach safety from multiple perspectives, so not just on the ground improvements, but also looking at how can we do better public education or how can we consider how the policies that we have adopted in our region might be contributing to the safety of our citizens.

But it also creates a pipeline of identified projects that we can potentially use to apply for funding through some of these existing programs or new programs.

Once we have the safety action plan in place, the quality will be eligible to then apply for implementation funding for some of these identified projects, so through Germany's revenue stream, but it also helps to identify projects that may be appropriate for other projects

So, the final application that we submitted was supported by all six jurisdictions in the region.

The total grant on how requested was just under $1.1 million, you know, and half of that is designated, or we expect when we're towards public engagement, it's still a draft form, but that was in the scope.

We had reached out to VDOT to not have an equal improvement program for a leader.

and VDOT is going to provide a lot of the background data collection and crash analysis.

So this part is going to be done regardless of whether we are successful in receiving the grants.

So we're really looking forward to being able to provide that level of information to all the localities in our region.

The TJPEC will administer the grant and then we will also provide aqua by monitoring and reporting through our existing program.

So through that VDOT and rural transportation program, we'll make sure that localities are able to meet

The regional approach to data collection analysis is supported by VDAD and then each locality is going to basically have their own defined set of safety action plan priorities and strategies based on this.

So instead of scrutinizing enforcement, so is that part of the data analysis?

Oh, it could be.

I mean, I don't want to presume that any of this will or will not rise to the level.

I think enforcement might be one of the strategies.

Yeah, I think just to build on that, I mean one thing that would be important is, I mean, so many opportunities that you could get where everybody wants to go down, but they're not always the best thing you can ask for in some parts.

So, you know, if we're going to educate on, you know, what minor things are going to improve, we should also consider improving public population.

That would be designed to really fit in with public population.

I think she's standing on the left stand that's standing on the one right now.

And they did, because they had kind of a, I won't call it rainbow, it's not really that, but they had sort of an outside group.

And they did on that, they did one roundabout, and the president got really excited.

And now they're putting them in about the sixth one, you know, so all of a sudden just funding came flying through for them to

We can all keep our fingers crossed.

We don't actually know when we'll hear about them.

Raelle, is that your name?

Yeah, thanks, yeah.

Thanks for a lot of your time tonight.

We have two transit studies that we're currently working on.

The first one is the vision study, which we're starting to back up and working on the final report.

We closed the public engagement period a few weeks ago, and I was really happy with our results from the last survey.

We had over 50% were minorities and over 50% were lower income.

So that was really satisfying for us.

And the

The vision study will be presented in the final draft of it and will be presented to the RTT meeting on October 27th.

And then the governance study has just started up.

We're recruiting a steering committee, which will be two representatives from each jurisdiction.

One will be an elected official and one will be a staff member.

and we're also willing to have a staff representative from Albemarle and Charlottesville instead running the project and then ensuring that they are getting the kind of the project.

And that's all I have.

Questions?

Yes, I'm here.

So I just have a couple of quick updates for RideShare.

We are participating in the statewide initiative through DRPT with Discover Transit, mostly promoting the Afton Express, which helps ferry commuters over from the Shenandoah Valley to the Charlottesville, Albemarle area on four morning routes and four evening routes.

It also happened to coincide with the one year anniversary of the launch of the Acton Express.

So that service began officially on September 1, so we have been promoting Discover Transit as well as celebrating that particular milestone all month.

We've had a few different outreach opportunities both at UVA and at some of the stops across the mountain and we'll be having our final celebration tomorrow morning at the Waynesboro Park and Ride lot with a radio remote with some breakfast and coffee and some giveaways and information.

We certainly welcome any of our funding partners or any of the public to come and visit us tomorrow morning from 6 to 10 at the Waynesboro Park and Ride lot.

Looking forward, as we're closing out the month of September and moving into October, also with DRPT we will be promoting Rideshare Month through the month of October.

We have always done either a Rideshare Week or Rideshare Month promotion, but this year it is going as a statewide initiative as well.

So we will be promoting the benefits of carpooling and vanpooling, listing what those opportunities are, as well as promoting our ride matching system that also offers rewards for those who log trips as well.

And of course, always promoting guaranteed ride home as one of the best advantages to taking alternative transportation in the area.

So that's pretty much all we've got going on with Rideshare.

So that'll take us to number seven, our roundtable updates.

We'll go to members if that's all right.

Let's go to the order I have in front of you, Mr. Reed.

Thanks for coming.

Just a couple quick things.

We're almost finishing up our alternative fuel study.

We're trying to determine what kind of propulsion mechanism for our vehicles.

We're looking at hydrogen fuel cells, electric, and CNG.

We have an advisory committee of community stakeholders, including the chambering

We have some funding challenges as it relates to federal funding.

I think the only thing I might mention is if you are aware that we're starting to bring onboard better powered buses.

So we'll be getting our first delivery of four buses next summer.

And then the following summer we'll be getting four more.

So we're just slowly converting the fleet over.

But there's a lot of changes that need to be made to support

The different technologies.

So we're studying that currently for the mill on the site, which is reflecting the expectation.

Near Barrett's Road, we have a study underway to see what we need to do immediately to prepare for next summer.

And we, you know, for a period of time, we have to have both systems, both healing systems, you know, the duality behind it and figure out how to make it all work on the same site, which is quite the jigsaw puzzle.

Do you have any space on your rooftops to burn the solar to fuel your charging station at the Belmont Transco site?

Yeah, so we're, it's interesting that you should ask about this because we just got out of a meeting where we're talking about, we already have solar on the motor drivers but we want to keep pushing that and so right now for us to do roof by roof is super expensive so we're trying to put together a power purchase agreement where we both process rooftops

And so we're just in that process now where we're trying to find the, get the vendor set up for the PDA and then figure out all the configuration and how much power that will generate.

So we're, it's actually a much larger effort that we're going to really try to make better usage of our loose in general.

Thank you.

So, a couple of things I just want to bring to everyone's attention.

One, we are completing our

We are halfway through our feasibility study also for alternative fuel.

We will be setting up some biweekly meetings starting probably next week to complete the second round, which we are doing more engagement with the fuel providers, the electricity providers, Dominion and others.

We're also looking at

Potentially adding CNG vehicles into the mix.

Our initial study looks at how many EV vehicles can we add to the fleet.

That's part of our study.

So we already make the assumption that we're going to add some level of EV to our fleet makeup.

At some point in time, we need to figure out what makes sense now and then in the future.

As the technology gets better, of course, we'll be able to add more

infrastructure around the city and the county and then build out our EV model more aggressively.

Final thing that I kind of want to bring everybody's attention to is we are required to do a transit strategic plan.

It's different this year than our normal TDP.

Council has before them at the next council meeting on the third an ordinance that we put into

supplying our money for that.

After that, we'll be going out for an RFP to hire a consultant to complete the required transit strategic plan by December 31st of 2023.

Thank you, sir.

Questions on the schedule?

No, not at this time.

Thank you, sir.

I see Mr. Proctor there.

I'll go to this bar first, and you guys can jump in if you both want to talk, obviously.

So I would just say that we are wrapping up the validation period for smart scale applications.

We're wrapping up the information to be a part of the application.

It's an important process to wrap up towards the end of the year and we'll know who's successful for the next year.

It's been a big push for them all.

Thank you, sir.

I'll share a couple of quick things.

So for one, we are preparing a submission for a Pre-Connected Communities grant.

It's going to evaluate the 29 corridor from essentially a hydraulic road up to right down the river.

We have been in discussions with the city, Mr. Frias, because some of those connections obviously need made to Charlottesville, South and Greenbrier on that one side.

And then if anyone is not aware yet, we did receive the successful funding for the RAINS grant for the Three Notch Trail in Albemarle County, a little over $2 million

to identify the alignment and some conceptual designs and priorities from Afton, the Afton Tunnel up in Nelson County, all the way through Albemarle County to the city of Charlottesville.

Thank you.

I will say this, we have several interviews this week and next week for the transportation planner.

So we are very hopeful that this round will get us.

I'll start with Mr. Nelson and Ms. Londry.

So, I don't know if you all saw, we had the detour set up for the 251 roundabout.

Just build that roundabout up at one half.

That was finished two days earlier, so that's a good thing.

We have had some complications on that project with trucks coming down the mountain.

A very high rate of speed going through the intersection.

Had a couple of close calls there multiple times.

So we're adding a truck arrest system

What is it?

So it's essentially a spy kit that will, if the truck is coming down the mountain and there's lots of breaks, it's a place for it to get off safely and not continue down.

No, that's a big part of the reason.

Yeah, I mean, they're losing brains.

So we're looking at other means to help our workforce be safe, like if there's a vehicle coming down the mountain at a high rate of speed to kind of alert the work zone to let them know to get out of the way.

So we're having, we've had 45 close calls there through construction.

Yeah.

And if it wasn't for the flaggers having air horns, for one, it probably would have been a pretty disastrous situation.

It's going to be a ramp with...

Apple Razz that will slow the truck down as it goes through.

So I mean, we're actively working through the design part of that now.

You guys don't have mountains out here.

And on that project, both at the DEI, we should be wrapping all that up by the first quarter of 2023.

So that's moving along.

Thank you all for that meeting that we had, for that hydraulic bundle.

I was at the CTB meeting last week.

We did a presentation regarding that.

I believe it's going through well.

The CTB will vote on it next month.

I think the project will continue moving forward.

And once we get that approval, with that additional funding, we're going to release the RFP Drug Care Contract on board here

The only thing that I'll add, the 12 smart scope projects in this region are 12 out of 400 states.

So the work is, you know, pretty large scale, they're scored and ready by January.

And of course, we come right on the heels of that with the revenue sharing and transportation alternatives application cycles.

We're beginning to make writing for that.

There is a grant opportunity available for our smaller non MPO area localities.

That's transportation alternatives in particular as allocations are done by population level.

And so that smallest group of 5,000 and below is a difficult one to get applications in for a new one for our counties.

We've had our CTV has hosted a fall open house to allow localities, the public in general, to come in and provide feedback.

The last few years we haven't had that.

We've done that required spring public hearing, but with COVID, it isn't required.

Some people have an opportunity to install.

So we wanted to let you know that.

The DDI out at 250 in the interstate, the way that it's been managed from, I mean, I think people were expecting it to be a nightmare to get through there.

It really has to work on a pan top.

So with the exception of one or two days that are typically crash related, not construction related.

And I will report on, I don't think I mentioned this before, but we did have our Rider Road corridor study presented to the board.

That was June, July.

I don't know if it was mentioned that year, but that was from the city line all the way up to about putt-putt over by the fraction square miles.

Over the whole corridor study, it's done in two phases, the east side and the west side, identified the level

some that are in for sparks.

The next meeting is December 7th.